From the earliest days of the church the Bible has been a battleground. The question has never been whether the Scriptures were believed, rather, the question has always been how the Scriptures have been believed and how they have been enacted. The issue is interpretation: who controls it, who decides it, and who adjudicates what’s in bounds and what’s not.
Call me a nerd if you like, but this past August, my end-of-summer treat to myself was to sit in on the three week intensive course in New Testament Greek that the seminary offers to incoming students. People who know me and my love of language and languages predicted “You’ll get hooked.” And they were right.
The Gospel according to John begins with a mystery, but it is a mystery that is wholly different from the Whodunnits on the back wall of the bookshop. The mystery that begins the Gospel cannot be solved, cannot be explained away. It can only be unapologetically presented and then unabashedly proclaimed.
Church historian Mark Noll noted in America’s God that prior to the Civil War belief in the Bible’s support for the institution of slavery so thoroughly dominated American Christianity that Christian abolitionists necessarily relied on ethical arguments against slavery that were independent of scripture.
What does a Christian theology of sexuality look like if we begin—as did St Paul and arguably Jesus as well—with an ideal of celibacy? The first major change from our common cultural way of understanding sexuality is that if celibacy is the ideal, than an argument must be made for any and all kinds of sexual relationships. They cannot simply be assumed.
Christian logic on sexuality—not necessarily practice, but logic—must begin with celibacy. Furthermore, I will argue that a theology of sexuality that begins with celibacy remaining more contiguous with first century thought presents a stronger argument in support of same-sex marriage than those that pass over celibacy in silence.
Mary prophesies that reversal is characteristic of divine intervention in human affairs, that God’s concern is for the lowly and despised. She celebrates God’s power to act on behalf of those marginalized and ostracized to the extent of casting the mighty down from their thrones. Why don’t we encounter this powerful message in our central liturgies?
Good business, and good economy, is always about good relationships, not about money, or the “mammon god.” Good economy is always about trusting relationships. In Jesus’ parable, the asset manager who loses out is the one who was afraid, so afraid that he was unable to take the risk of economic relationship.
We do not understand what the Bible is apart from its being woven up from and into the fabric of the Church, nor can we interpret it apart from a location within the life and activity of the Church. That being said, what guidelines can be found to clarify things a bit? Well, I think the Diocese of New York teaching document Let the Reader Understand is excellent.
Talking with preaching colleagues and with lay people about the parables we’ve heard in church these past few months, I’ve noticed how hard it is to break our habit of interpreting rich landlords, slave owners, kings, and fathers in Jesus’ storytelling as stand-ins for God, even though these authority figures in the parables consistently act foolishly, arbitrarily, or dangerously toward people who are dependent on them for wellbeing.