Catholic Lectionary Reading
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Excerpt:
Luke 9: 51-62. "When the days drew near for Jesus to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?" But he turned and rebuked them. And they went on to another village."
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"Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?"
The "capital crime" that provokes James and John's murderous intent is the Samaritan refusal to welcome Yeshua.
Imagine The Nativity Narrative if Joseph, repeatedly tinformed "there's no room in the inn" were to utter, "Lord, do you want me to bid fire come down from heaven and consume the burghers of Bethlehem?"
It is unthinkable that "the baby Jesus" could be born into a world where his guardian beseeches God to torch his hometown.
But, when "the baby" becomes "a man," it is time to "get down to business. And "business as usual" impels us to the contemplation of "righteous slaughter" as our divinely-ordained "responsibility" to kill "infidels."
It is a hard truth that people who consider themselves "closest to The Light" take advantage of that presumed closeness to justify their own murderous rage.
By identifying themselves with "The Will of God," "The Righteous" presume they are agents of Divinity and participating in indistinguishable alliance with his "smiting hand."
From the beginning of scriptural time, a bedrock belief of "The Righteous" is that Justice requires punishment and that the worst crimes can only righted by capital punishment.
The Law of the Talion -- infused with vengeance, vindication and (eponymous) retalitation -- compels people, particularly those who see themselves as "righteous," to champion God as the ultimate dealer in torture and slaughter.
Unlike the old chestnut, "The devil made me do it," the constant (if unspoken) refrain of "the unimpeachably good" -- is that "God made me do it; I am but His humble servant." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Savonarola
Fundamentalists across the Abrahamic spectrum - Jihadists, Zionists, Armageddon Cheerleaders - drape themselves in the mantle of Deity, and thus "invested" with inerrancy, transform God into a hateful errand boy - a personal "gofer."
Jesuit Tom Weston observed: “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.”
With good reason, Pascal noted that “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Although Pascal is most often represented as a mathematician, physicist and philosopher, he was, at bottom, a passionate Christian, inspired by unusual ardor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal
Aflame with that ardor, Blaise was well-situated to see religious passion burning out of control.
Although Pascal is most often represented as a mathematician, physicist and philosopher, he was, at bottom, a passionate Christian, inspired by unusual ardor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal
Aflame with that ardor, Blaise was well-situated to see religious passion burning out of control.
This lockstep process of unconscious "self-divinization" (whereby "Christians," presumably "one" with Deity, demand retaliation and vengeance) is the same projected egocentrism that characterizes fundamentalism in every religious climate.
Despite professions of patriotic orthodoxy, American conservatives are more accurately characterized as American Taliban. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGAvwSp86hY
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A gear shift...
In "Mere Christianity," C.S. Lewis makes a mistake common among old-school scholars who - despite the intellectual rigor they brought to academic discipline -- were unable to believe that The Bible, particularly The New Testament, could be anything but the inerrant Word of God.
Said Lewis: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Despite Lewis' illustrious professorship at Cambridge, he labored under the burden of 2000 years' mandatory acceptance of Scripture as the infallible Word of God.
Throughout most of those millennia, the "reverent study of scripture" was the incandescent, all-consuming focus of scholarly pursuit. (Harvard, for example, was founded as a Christian seminary.)
During the first 1500 years of the Christian era, it was essentially impossible to question "the chain of apostolic authority." (Ironically, the "chain" itself is in serious doubt. http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Avignon_Papacy.html)
If one did question apostolic authority, s/he would be tortured - and not infrequently, immolated.
To ask a question "outside the box" was as preposterous as doubting Aristotle's supposedly "complete" treatment of Natural History, a presumption so deeply ingrained in the Western psyche that the thought of rational, scientific investigation was risible folly until Copernicus, da Vinci, Bruno and Boethius took a closer look and -- aided by technology (lenses in particular) -- started to "see" what was "really there" beyond the unthinking presumption of vested authority.
Although my favorite book is Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" - http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.toc.html - what occurred between Galileo and Church "authorities" is such an embarrassing impeachment of orthodoxy that The Vatican itself now blushes.
The details of this sordid affair will stop committed apologists dead in their tracks.
Not only is this history appalling, it reveals the inevitable shortcoming of orthodox absolutism.
Even so, and despite the passage of centuries, all things change, including The Vatican. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1997272_1997273_1997285,00.html
Even so, and despite the passage of centuries, all things change, including The Vatican. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1997272_1997273_1997285,00.html
Speaking of centuries...
Only in the 1800s did scholars turn disinterested eyes toward Scripture, and it was not until the middle of the 20th century that secular scholars took up the task.
I understand that "faith has eyes of its own" and that it is appropriate for The Religious Imagination to embroider the meaning of Scripture. (Einstein is rightly famous for saying "Imagination is more important than knowledge." But he did not say -- as many self-professed "Christians" do -- that "knowledge is unimportant.")
Just as the earth moves 'round the sun -- Eppur si muove! -- the religious imagination must range over the full spectrum of Scripture - not only its text, but its context and exegetical expansion.
Any text without a context is a pretext and far too many "Christians" are eager to use scripture as a method of incarceration rather than means of liberation.
Blessedly, the great Maimonides -- 12th century rabbi, physician and scholar -- reminds us to "accept the truth from whatever source it comes."
Moshe ben Maimon went on to say: "There is one [disease] which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape. This disease varies in degree in different men ... I refer to this: that every person thinks his mind ... more clever and more learned than it is ... I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person ... They ... express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other sciences about which they know nothing ... If met with applause ... so does the disease itself become aggravated." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Maimonides
We now know that the words Jesus actually spoke are most faithfully rendered in the parables and that "moral laundry lists" and other matter-of-fact statements are unusually prone to scribal distillation, adjustment and interpolation.
Notably, the unifying message of most parables is that human standards of justice are not God's standards.
Indeed, relative to the gushing beneficence of God, most Christians -- among them "the most righteous" -- are stingy about giving-and-forgiving and therefore deeply disturbed that God constantly rewards "the prodigal." http://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2011/03/why-jesus-parables-stand-out/
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If readers are prepared to risk an end to faith in "inerrant scripture," UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Bart Ehrman (a former Evangelical seminarian) dissects the multifactorial development of Christian scripture, and in the process sets forth good reasons for no longer pretending "infallibility." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman
In essence, Ehrman liberates the religious imagination to explore-and-value meaning more than punctiliousness.
Pope Francis, kissing the feet of Islamic boys and girls
Galileo and the Aristotelian Cardinals:A Study of Suppression
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www.scienceforpeople.com/Essays/Aristotle.htmYour course of study here will be much more rigorous. So, if you wish ..... After centuries of suppression, rational, scientific thinking slowly began to reassert itself.