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The “death-drive” of critical Biblical Studies

Biblical Studies, at least in its critical form, has a death-drive. Let me explain. On the one hand, there are those who study the Bible academically “for the church” (but as I discussed in my last post, the church is declining, at least in North America and Europe). Their goal is to preserve the relevance of biblical studies for religious reasons. If they were successful in their mission, not only would interest in the Bible spread but more importantly Christianity would. For many Catholic and Evangelical scholars, the study of the Bible is part of the mission. Globally, they might be a success, but not in North America and Europe, which is my focus here.

On the other side, you have critical scholars who hope to deconstruct the Bible’s meaning and message. While they may not be aware of it, there’s an attempt to demystify the Bible which means to normalize it. Once it’s normalized, its significance will fade. As its significance fades, fewer people from future generations will be interested in studying it, especially in a professional capacity. College and university administrations will find little reason to fund biblical studies because, well, why? They want their schools to be attractive and this means highlighting the programs that are en vogue.

And these two poles need each other. As much as critical scholarship may despise Evangelicalism’s biblicism, there’s little relevance to critical scholarship without Evangelicalism’s biblicism to deconstruct. Be honest: as much as I respect and admire Bart D. Ehrman‘s scholarship, does it mean anything without fundamentalism and Evangelicalism? Will there be a place for future Ehrman-types in a post-Christian America in say 2040 or 2050? Without the Green Family, the Museum of the Bible, Evangelical voters, etc., there’s an argument to be made that the Bible does’t mean much anymore. Paradoxically, some of the more toxic means of preserving the Bible’s cultural relevancy simultaneously keep critical scholars in the news.

(And in some sense, we might say that Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are feeder programs for critical scholarship. Our current selves reacting to our past selves. While I know of no such poll, I wish there was data on how many members of the Society of Biblical Literature entered biblical studies because they had religious questions they needed addressed. Even if their current study of the Bible is for purely professional reasons, I doubt they found their way to an academic study of the Bible primarily because they had interesting historical, literary, linguistic, etc., questions divorced of any religious/spiritual curiosity.)

Let me provide an analogy. My friend, the religion scholar James McGrath, alongside Charles G. Häberl, published an English translation of the Mandaean Book of John back in 2020. Objectively, this is a great scholarly accomplishment. Will this text receive wide-spread, long-term attention. Unlikely. Why? Because there are probably no more than 100,000 Mandaeans globally and Mandaeanism is a dying religion. Most of them won’t be reading English-language scholarship on their religion, if they’re reading any scholarship on their religion at all. The broader public may be curious about Mandaeans for a moment but only for a moment. For this reason, few people will pursue advanced degrees in “Mandaean studies” (presuming any such program exists even now). There are a handful of scholars globally who are experts on Mandaeanism at the moment, and I don’t foresee their ranks growing.

Why do I mention the plight of Mandaeanism? Christianity’s global population sits at more than 2 billion. This is comparing apples to something even less apple-like than oranges. But biblical scholarship is centered in North America and Europe. In North America and Europe, Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, seems to have entered an irreversible decline. Without something to deconstruct, there won’t be many jobs for critical biblical scholars of the future.

Of course, there are mainline Christians who want to show that you can be scholarly, and secular, and pluralistic, and value the role of the Bible within “communities of faith” while also being Christian. But this middle ground, even as I try to stand here with all its complications, lacks population and influence. We want our cake and we want to eat it too. Reality seems to favor polarization and extremes at the moment. Trying to reconcile critical scholarship with an active Christianity bores many. Drama sells!

And this makes sense. When your Christianity lacks an oppositional stance to culture, future generations can’t see why dedicating themselves to something like the study of the Bible or ordination in ministry is important. Yes, Jesus said to choose between God and Money, but it appears that I don’t have to do this. Yes, Jesus said to put our treasure in heaven rather than on the earth, but it appears I can have treasure in both places. Why dedicate myself to the study of Scripture, theology, sacraments, etc., when I can be “just as Christian” working for a Fortune 500 company. We’ve demythologized ourselves to death, and I’m not saying it was wrong to do this. But it is to say that there is cause-and-effect. We’re so much a part of culture that there’s no reason to dedicate ourselves to Christianity and the institution of “the Church”. (I can hear the screams of Kierkegaard, Wesley, and others as they realize that “western culture” and Christianity are beginning to return to this synthesis even as “western culture” distances itself from Christianity!)

This isn’t to say that Catholic and Evangelical culture is otherworldly; it’s to say Catholic and Evangelical culture does a better job of presenting itself as such so that people may be just as materialistic, just as this-worldly as we mainliners, but they don’t think of themselves this way. They still have a sense of mission. They still see themselves as outsiders who must “save” what is “lost”. (And if I learned anything from Harvey Whitehouse’s dense book The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity, it’s that people often bond closer to each other when their subculture is demanding and entry and preservation is difficult, even traumatic—think fraternity hazings or joining the Marines.) If you’re a young Evangelical, there’s a better chance that you’ll see a reason for dedicating yourself to professional ministry than if you’re a young mainliner. And the statistics support this, I think. In the interview that Tripp Fuller did with Ryan Burge that I mentioned in my last post, Burge pointed out that all of the largest, still growing seminaries are Evangelical save Duke Divinity (see around 13:00-50:00-ish for that discussion).

Screen shot from Fuller’s YouTube video linked above

This may be good news for critical biblical studies, even if it makes critical biblical scholars cringe. But it’s temporary, I think. Even as Evangelicals have a sense of mission, even as it may draw them closer together, and even as it serves to feed their academic institutions, their numbers will continue to decline unless for some reason “the great de-churching” reverses. This seems unlikely. Millennials are secular by greater numbers and even as they age and have children, they’re not returning. This seems to be the probable trajectory for Gen Z as well. Many who left Evangelicalism did so because of how Evangelicals treat LGBTQIA+ people and because of the nature of their involvement in politics (see the PRRI graphic below). These things don’t appear to be bugs in the Evangelical system but instead features. Therefore, while Evangelicals will outlast the mainline, this doesn’t mean they won’t fade as well.

If the Bible isn’t the sacred text of our culture, even a sacred text that we pretend to read, what takes its place? What provides us with unifying language and symbols? What provides us with something to deconstruct and reject as we grow older? Maybe nothing. Maybe STEM textbooks will be peak literacy! But I digress. Returning to my main point: those of us participating in the project of critical scholarship on the Bible since the 19th century have collectively begun to accomplish what we set out to do: we’ve naturalized the Bible. This is likely a good thing considering how the Bible has been (ab)used throughout history. But we appear to have been telling people that our own irrelevancy is a goal. And maybe it has been. If it has been, we need to be ready for the closing of our departments. We should expect fewer students to show interest in our programs and our scholarship. We shouldn’t be surprised as our publishers close up shop. It was the inevitable consequence of our collective demythologizing project. It was the predetermined end of our death-drive.

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The Fading Bible of Dying Churches

This week, I was talking to a clergy friend. I mentioned to them that over the past few years I’ve faced an existential crisis. When I teach my biblical studies courses, I have acute sense that I’m introducing my students to an increasingly irrelevant cultural artifact. I don’t feel this way when I teach my theory of religion course, “Religion in Global Context”. I don’t feel this way when I teach my course “Religion in the United States”. But when I teach my introductions to the Bible, something feels strange.

Image: “Old Bibles” from Henry Hartley’s blog

Sometimes it’s the subtle emotional and mental tug of war that I must do with my student’s attention. Sometimes it feels like they’re just not interested. And while I know that some “edu-influencers” out there might suggest that the problem lies in my pedagogy, I reject that notion. I know I’m an engaging and creative teacher. I know that I’m good at keeping student’s attention, even in an age where TikTok, Snapchat, and other forms of social media, along with the constant demand of the smartphones in their pockets (which is where they’re at, even if school policy says otherwise), compete with me. When “Religion in Global Context” and “Religion in the United States” students are asked to stick with me as we wade into some deep concepts, they’re usually willing to trust me. They appear willing and eager to learn.

This is true of more than 50% of my biblical studies students as well. I don’t want to be dramatic. I don’t want to paint a picture of classes filled with disengaged teens. That’s not the case at all. But when I do struggle to keep them with me, when I do struggle to hold their attention, when I do receive the occasional, sharp and targeted question, “Why do I have to learn this? Why does this matter?” it’s always when teaching the Bible.

My clergy friend faces something similar. They’re working in the world of mainline Christianity. If you haven’t paid attention, while Christianity’s influence is fading in the United States, the mainline leads the way. My friend is working on the ship as it sinks. This doesn’t mean that the work they’re doing is irrelevant but it can be hard to know that you’re providing end-of-life care for an institution you love. For example, the political scientist Ryan Burge told Tripp Fuller on a recent episode of “Homebrewed Christianity” that 52% of PC (USA) ministers are retired. That’s a dead-man-walking denomination. The Episcopal Church, for whom I work indirectly, is “dead” by 2040 (or 2050?), which doesn’t mean that there actually will be zero Episcopalians in a decade and a half…but there won’t be many.

(This change has been coming for a long time. I’ve been listening to “Emerged: An Oral History of the Emerging Church Movement” created Tripp Fuller and Tony Jones. It reminds me of why I was interested in the “emerging church” in my 20s. I knew then that the choice was between a dying church or a remade one. John Piper’s “Farewell Rob Bell” tweet may as well have said “farewell Millennials and Gen Z”. I tried to make it work in evangelicalism once I saw the emerging movement fading as quickly as it had risen, but I couldn’t do it.)

As someone who works with adolescents, I see the decline in religiosity before many others see it, which in the United States means mostly a decline in established Christianity. Ryan Burge shared some statistics recently on the decline in church attendance among high school seniors from 1995-2022, and it’s a steep drop! In 1995, only 15% of high school seniors said that they never attend church. It’s 30% now. In 1995, 32% attended weekly. It’s 22% now. Secularization has won the day, for better or worse. Returning to Burge’s research, Gen Z is 48-49% atheist/agnostic/non-affiliated. Now, about 31% of Gen Z are “Nones,” or non-affiliated. They may be “spiritual but not religious” (see Burge’s graphic below) so this doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned ideas about “god” or “the afterlife” completely; it means they’re not accepting wholesale packaged doctrine. It means they’re not interested in doing what I did as a kid: spending two or three days a week at a local church.

I’ve created my biblical studies course with this in mind. I don’t presume biblical literacy from my students. My classes are academic in nature but I begin with the basics (“Genesis 1:1 means book-chapter-verse” level basics). I try to provide space for personal engagement without being confessional. While I work for a school affiliated with the Episcopal Church, we accept students from a wide-variety of religious traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Jewish, Muslim—I’ve taught them all. And many students from these traditions have taken my classes on the Bible. Often, they seem to be more engaged than my Christian students. As the old saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt”. The other private Christian schools in the greater San Antonio area are confessional in nature. Many of these schools wouldn’t admit students who come from non-Christian families. I’m confident that in those mostly Catholic and Evangelical settings, engagement with the Bible is stronger but that’s because I was raised and became an adult within these biblicist subcultures, so I know what role the Bible plays. This doesn’t mean that I think the Bible is taken more seriously in those contexts. It can be a bit of a good luck charm; it can be studied through the lens of apologetics where you begin with the answer and work back to the question. But it’s more important to those students because of biblicism than it is to most of my students who better represent the generational trends we see nationally.

There’s panic because of this cultural paradigm shift. Gallup reports that fewer Americans see the Bible as the literal “Word of God”. Christianity Today reports, many Americans have stopped reading their Bibles. Organizations like “The Gospel Coalition” that are built on biblicism speak of a “Bible Literacy Crisis!” The pope of the SBC, Al Mohler, wrote about this “scandal” several years ago. As important as the Bible has been within American culture, “the time they are a-changin” as Bob Dylan sings. I don’t think a reversal of trends is in the forecast though.

As our society becomes more culturally secular, and more pluralistic, I wonder what it means to teach the Bible to high school students, even from the perspective that I teach it. (And yes, I can hear some say that maybe I need to shift to a more confessional, more theological approach…but I can’t do that in good faith nor does it make practical sense when most of my Christian students are Roman Catholic and I’m not. It wouldn’t solve anything.) My field of study has been dying. There are fewer jobs in academic biblical studies. The Annual Report of the Society of Biblical Studies shows that while there are more members than there were in 2000, we have likely peaked and I’m skeptical that we’ll see a rebound (see the graphic below from the Annual Report). I’ve encouraged fellow members of SBL to consider teaching high school but I know that this likely doesn’t mean teaching the Bible but rather teaching history or social studies using the skills your education gave you.

In my eight years as a high school teacher, I’ve encouraged many students to minor in religion; I’ve hoped that more would major in it (since I see religious studies and philosophy as very employable majors). But I’ve encouraged only one student to consider theological/biblical studies and that’s because they were interested in being both clergy and an academic. I suppose that they could survive with two skis but not with one! I can’t encourage working for only a dying church or only a dying field of academics but maybe they can piece the two together for good life working for both?

When I teach my students to question how people use the word “religion,” or about comparative religion, or about how the Supreme Court interprets the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, or about how Mormonism and Pentecostalism arose in the American context, I sense the immediate relevancy. When I teach them about the Bible, there are moments—moments when I read their reflections and see them truly wrestling with the nature of the Bible, and how it’s read, and how it’s been interpreted, and how it’s been applied—that I see they’re learning something and that they’re critically thinking which is my goal as an educator. But as I’ve been saying, there’s the lingering sense that I’m teaching them something they’ll never revisit in adulthood. Why? Because they won’t be reading the Bible and they may not be attending church anymore. Is this good or bad for the future of our society? I don’t know. Has Bible reading and church attendance made Americans better people, better neighbors? Does secularism lead to healthier societies or more sickly ones? I don’t know. But I do know we’re in the middle of a massive cultural shift—one that’s been going on since before I was born in 1982—and we’re just beginning to see what this shift means but not clearly enough to truly know what a future of biblical illiteracy and American secularism entails.

(Final note: yes, Christian Nationalism has been loud. But it appears most Americans reject it or are skeptical of it. This doesn’t mean that the Christian Nationalist philosophy can’t win the day but that’s a different discussion altogether. And I would choose most forms of secularism over Christian Nationalism all day, every day.)

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Holy Envy: Sikh Langar

Langar of the Sikh Dharamsal of San Antonio

I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others back in 2021. It continues to shape how I understand my own engagement with people of different religious persuasions. I don’t participate in interfaith dialogue and community building with the goal of erasing differences or pretending that we’re all the same. I think we can celebrate many of our differences and also that we can remain in disagreement without being hostile or disagreeable. When we celebrate differences, this is what Brown Taylor means by “holy envy”. It when you see something offered by another religious tradition and you think something like, “That’s beautiful. I wish my tradition had that.”

Whenever I bring my students to our nearby gurdwara, our Sikh hosts welcome my students into a langar. Harvard University’s Pluralism Project summarizes the point of the langar this way:

Langar is the communal meal shared by Sikhs and all visitors to the gurdwara. Since the founding of the Sikh community, langar has come to be an important part of Sikh religious life. After the service, no Sikh will leave without partaking of langar. For Sikhs, eating together in this way is expressive of the equality and oneness of all humankind. At the same time, it strengthens the Sikh sense of community. Visitors and guests are readily and warmly included in the great hospitality of the Sikh tradition. In visiting a gurdwara one will always be offered the sweet prashad which is distributed in the sanctuary as the “grace” of the guru. And in visiting at the time of a service, one will be offered the entire langar meal.

“Langar: The Communal Meal”

They’ve told me that serving food to me and my students is a blessing for them. There’s no doubt that it’s a blessing on us as well. The food is delicious and the hospitality unmatched.

In Amritsar, Punjab, there’s a building known as “Harmandir Sahib” or more broadly as “the Golden Temple”. It’s a point of pilgrimage for many Sikhs but more relevant to this post, the langar there serves 100,000 people per day (not a typo). This video by vlogger Khalid Al Ameri provides a good overview of what happens there: “Inside the Gold Temple”. Gurdwaras around the world welcome people to the langar, whether you’re Sikh or not. Sikhs have told me that wherever I go in the world, if I’m hungry, lost, in danger, or there’s been some sort of disaster, all I need to do is look for the gurdwara.

The communal meal is beautiful. My own tradition has Eucharist (or Mass, or Communion, or the Lord’s Supper) which has its own food-as-sacrament beauty but entering a langar is unique. Once a student of mine asked if the Sikh communal meal was like what early Christians celebrated, and as far as I can tell this seems to be the case, except when it was abused like it appears to have been by the Corinthian Christians. Since we Christians have ritualized and sacramentalized our meal to the point where it hardly can be called a meal, I envy what Sikhism has. I’m sure it’s not perfect. I’m sure there are Sikhs who can tell stories about how this or that went wrong in this or that langar. But the tradition has centralized something beautiful in its pragmatism, community building, and hospitality that many communities of my coreligionists lack.

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Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud and Reading the Gospels

I don’t know how other private high school teachers approach teaching the Bible to their students but since I work at a college preparatory school sponsored by the Episcopal Church, I introduce them to the best of scholarship available to us. For example, this means that my students encounter the Synoptic Problem. They come to see the similarities and differences between the accounts of the different canonical Gospels (and they do read some non-canonical Gospels as well). For some of my students, there’s an indifference to what they’re learning. For others, there’s a sense of adventure while being simultaneously overwhelmed because they’ve never studied the Bible before taking my class. (Often this is the case for students who aren’t raised by Christians.) For others, there’s an excitement, possibly because they’re being given a space to read the Bible critically without judgment, some for the first time. (Now, “critically” doesn’t mean disparaging the text but instead reading it thoughtfully: not taking the claims of the text at face value but instead putting in the intellectual work required to determine how I understand and how I receive what I’m reading.) For others, my class can lead to a bit of an existential crisis.

Now, I see my role as primarily that of an academic guide to the text. I don’t favor any particular confessional approach. I don’t try to pursued my students of the truthfulness of the text’s claims. I don’t try to convert or proselytize my students. When I’m asked what my religion is (because sometimes my approach makes them wonder), I’m honest that I’m a Christian because I don’t want to feign objectivity even if methodologically I try to be as objective as possible. Since I’m a Christian who has been studying the Bible academically for a couple of decades, and since I’ve found a way to find peace between my own religious commitments and the demands of scholarship, I’ll talk to students who want to think through how what they’re learning might impact their faith. And here I want to share one of two examples I use for students who wonder how I remain Christian while reading the Bible critically. I’ll discuss one here and one in a future post.

Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud via Wikimedia Commons

First, I share Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud (above). This 19th century oil painting provides me with a perfect visual for how I read the Bible, academically and religiously, often simultaneously. In this painting, five rabbis are reading the Talmud. They’re debating its meaning with some intensity. The fifth rabbi listens in from behind the group. This depicts one of the beauties of the Jewish tradition: internal debate about the meaning of sacred texts isn’t a bug but a feature. Christianity hasn’t done as well in this regard. Our obsession with orthodoxy versus heresy has killed much of our theological creativity.

Personally, when I read the Gospels, specifically, this image comes to my mind. As I told a student recently who’s troubled by the reality that non-canonical Gospels exist and that the depiction of Jesus differs between Gospels, I see myself in this picture. As I reflected on this further with a friend who I was talking to yesterday, I see myself as the man in the back listening to the debate. And I imagine the four rabbis as representing how I see the four evangelists. Who is Jesus? These four accounts present different pictures. I’m invited to listen, to ponder, and to decide for myself.

Now, as I told my student last week: this puts more responsibility on us. We can settle for a shallow “Bible-in-a-year” approach to reading the text that checks a box but never stops to truly wrestle with what we’re reading because we may care more that we’re reading than that we’re understanding and interpreting what we’re reading. But if we care to interpret and understand, this takes work. We must listen intently. We must hear the different presentations and then we must decide what we’re going to do with them. I understand why someone would want to outsource this responsibility to their clergy. I understand why someone might prefer to encounter the Gospels primarily through the filter of sermons and liturgy. That’s a legitimate approach. But if you take the challenge of reading—really reading—then you inherit the responsibility as well.

Again, this can be seen as a negative thing. Who wants the responsibility of sorting out who Jesus was and is for themselves? That may feel high stakes. But for others, like me, and I hope for many of my Christian students, this is an invitation to truly encounter what the Gospels are within their canonical setting: four sages exploring the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth.

(What about the non canonical Gospels? How does this fit my analogy? Well, I read those too. I find them fascinating. But on historical grounds even more so than theological grounds, I find their lateness less interesting and inviting. Note: I think even the Gospel of Thomas is a later second century text that derives from the canonical Gospels, as has been argued by scholars like Mark Goodacre and Simon Gathercole. It’s fascinating. Other noncanonical Gospels provide me with comfort knowing that Christians have been wrestling with who Jesus was and is to them from the earliest generations, and that sometimes their understanding of Jesus clashed with what they found in what became the canonized Gospels, but I find them less compelling. Maybe this means the concept of canonization has a greater pull on me than it should.)

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A Short Note on David Bentley Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse

David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief

(Amazon; Bookshop)

I’d say that at this point in my life, my favorite contemporary theologian must be David Bentley Hart. He won me over a couple of years ago with his exploration of Christian Universalism/Universal Reconciliation, That All Shall Be Saved. Recently, I read his short history of Christianity, The Story of Christianity. This week, I finished Tradition and Apocalypse.

Hart’s two interlocutors are Catholic theologians: John Henry Newman (see his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine) and Maurice Blondel (see his Histoire et Dogme). Both, in their own way, argue that the Catholic tradition is the natural unfolding of history. Hart questions this in light of the findings of critical historiography and a basic philosophy of history that questions, for example, that there’s anything more natural about the development of say imperial Christianity post-Constantine than there was say the varieties of gnosticism (so-called). As historians know, causality is as the historian see, interprets, and narrates it. It’s not at all clear from the historian’s perspective that Catholic Christianity had to win the day (where it did).

But Hart doesn’t want to give in to a nihilistic historicism where there’s no direction of history or force moving things in any direction: he is an Orthodox Christian theologian, after all! Admittedly, the deconstruction of Catholic claims that history has been leading, inevitably, to their tradition is the easier task; the constructive argument that Christian tradition is indeed going somewhere, though somewhere we only see “through a glass, darkly” (ala St. Paul), is more difficult. That’s where apocalypse enters the title.

Each version of the Christian tradition points back and tries to understand the apocalyptic act of God in Christ, and the seeds of that events meaning reside in the varieties of Christian tradition, but for Hart the fullness of what the Christian tradition has been pointing toward can’t be revealed until we reach the final apocalyptic horizon, when once again God in Christ completes his intended project.

If I were to summarize this book, I’d say it’s subtext has to do with the relationship between faith and epistemology. Tradition is a vehicle of faith but to equate faith in a living God with faith in a tradition is a categorical error; and to equate faith—fidelity!—to knowledge (as we traditionally understand “knowledge”) is to undermine faith.

As someone who teaches comparative religion, and who identifies as a Christian but who has had his Christianity shaped by reading the writings of and about other religious traditions, I especially appreciated Hart’s suggestion that this apocalyptic horizon of which he speaks must be not only the end of all Christian traditions but the end of all traditions, and that at the end there may have been realities recognized by other traditions (he talks mostly about Vedantic philosophy) that proved to have had insights into reality that the various Christianities missed.

This book is for those who (1) have hope in some redemptive eschatological end; who (2) are comfortable living in their tradition with an open rather than closed hand; and who (3) want to place an emphasis on living by faithfulness to what you sense has been revealed/experienced rather than by rigid, confessional dogmatism and defensive apologetics. If that’s not you, this probably won’t be as enjoyable a read as it was for me but I believe there are many Christians who will be encouraged by Hart’s essay.

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Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (August 13th, 2023)

Delivered at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit:

  1. Introductory Exposition of Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

Let me confess, our Old Testament reading from the Book of Genesis struck me as peculiar when I first read it. I’ll tell you why momentarily but first, let’s review the broader narrative of which this excerpt is but a part. The main character is the Patriarch Joseph, the son of Jacob, grandson of Isaac, and great-grandson of Abraham. This is the one that Orthodox Christians call “Righteous Joseph the Fair,” because, in spite of all that was done to him, he sought justice and redemption in the end. For those who don’t know the whole story, it begins with the horror of a brother being sold into slavery by his ten older brothers. This action was fueled by jealousy, as Joseph was the favorite child of his father, Jacob. The brothers had considered killing Joseph but one among them, Judah, convinces the others to sell him to some Midian slave traders instead. Then the brothers take Joseph’s fancy coat, a gift from his father, cover it in the blood of an animal, and tell their father that Joseph had been tragically mauled to death in the wilderness.

This narrative becomes roller coaster-esque. Joseph is sold to an affluent Egyptian man named Potiphar. He becomes the lead slave in Potiphar’s household but then, according to the Book of Genesis, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him and when she fails because of Joseph’s moral strength, she frames him for sexual assault. Joseph is sent to an Egyptian prison but due to a divine gift he received—the ability to interpret dreams—he is freed, eventually, when he happens to be imprisoned with Pharoah’s exiled cup-bearer who remembers him one day when the restored cup-bearer hears that Pharoah has had a troubling dream. This cup-bearer recommends Joseph to Pharaoh; Joseph successfully interprets Pharaoh’s dream, warning him that after seven years of agricultural plenty, there will be seven years of famine. Joseph is appointed to oversee Egypt’s preparation for the years of famine—a famine that leads Joseph’s brothers to Egypt begging for food. Joseph tests his brothers, who don’t recognize him, to see if they’ve changed, and when he is confident that they have, he reveals his identity, welcomes his family—including his elderly father—to Egypt, and as fairy tales end, “they live happily ever after”. 

But our liturgy stops at Genesis 37:28, which read, “When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.” This is why I found our stopping point peculiar: it ends with one of the ugliest parts of the story as Joseph is being trafficked to Egypt.

  1. The Middle of the Story

It’s clear that the compilers of our liturgy recognized that this was less than edifying. How would preachers preach this passage to congregations on a Sunday? It’s a downer. So, you’ll notice that the accompanying psalm previews the aforementioned happy ending when it says:

Then he [God] called for a famine in the land 

       and destroyed the supply of bread.

17 He sent a man before them, 

       Joseph, who was sold as a slave.

18 They bruised his feet in fetters; 

       his neck they put in an iron collar.

19 Until his prediction came to pass, 

       the word of the Lord tested him.

20 The king sent and released him; 

       the ruler of the peoples set him free.

21 He set him as a master over his household,

       as a ruler over all his possessions,

22 To instruct his princes according to his will

       and to teach his elders wisdom.

Whew! Don’t worry, our liturgy tells us, it’ll all work out in the end! The inclusion of the psalm provides a theological interpretation of the narrative that is meant to console us: the famine was the work of a sovereign God who had plans to protect his chosen people, using Joseph’s suffering redemptively for the good of his family. This echoes the words of Joseph in Genesis 50:20, which reads, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” But maybe we should ignore the psalm for a moment, and maybe I shouldn’t have fast-forwarded to the end of Joseph’s story.

Let me suggest that sometimes stopping in the middle of a biblical narrative, as our reading from Genesis did, invites us to hear the story afresh. Let me suggest that it’s dangerous for us to become too comfortable with the Bible, especially when we’ve become accustomed to hearing the same stories for years. Let me suggest that the saying “familiarity breeds contempt” is wise and true. Let me suggest that sometimes we need to stop in the middle of a story because that’s how real life is often experienced. Sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of our own story, when life is its ugliest, and we have no way of knowing whether or not things will be alright in the end. And yet, whether we sense God or not, the power of being in the middle of the story is that our God is as present there as he is at the end of the story. We may want to skip to the ending but the ending doesn’t make any sense without the middle.

I see this every spring when I walk my students through the Passion Narratives in the Gospels, where Jesus is arrested, brutally beaten, and abused in numerous ways, only to be crucified by the Roman state—which, by the way, was one of the most shameful and dehumanizing ways to die. As I point out how the disciples respond, like the two disciples walking to Emmaus who say of Jesus in Luke 24:21, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” and I try to help my students understand that for all intents and purposes, according to the criteria of the day, Jesus was a failed and false messiah because messiahs don’t get crucified, many of my more biblically literature students want to jump quickly to “Yes, but, he comes back from the dead.” And while this is correct, it misses the point. The Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all dedicate much of their narrative about Jesus to explaining and detailing Jesus’ suffering and death. They could’ve written, “Yes, Jesus died by crucifixion, and it was sad and all, but enough with that—let’s move to the real good news!” But they didn’t because Jesus’ resurrection is given meaning because of his crucifixion.

This is why our liturgical calendar makes us stop at Good Friday, asking us to feel what that day represents in and of itself. Then we’re to sit through the silence of Holy Saturday. Only then does Easter Sunday feel triumphant.

Unfortunately, we Christians often act like my students: we want to jump to the triumphalistic parts. We want to hear how Job receives back double from God after his time of tribulation. We want to hear how Joseph rises to power after being dragged into prison. We want to hear that Jesus calms the storms that appear to threaten the lives of the disciples. But for the Bible to pack its intended punch, I contend, we must wade through chapter after chapter of Job’s friends telling him that he must deserve what he’s experiencing; and we must sit with Joseph in prison, feeling that sense of abandonment; and we must be with Christ as he hangs from his cross, rejected by Heaven and Earth alike. This is where Scripture meets most of our actual lives.

  1. The Ending is Not Yet

So, while I was initially perplexed by how the excerpt from Genesis 37 ended, now I’m grateful that it ended there because it provides me the opportunity to remind us that in this narrative, two decades pass between Joseph’s enslavement and his reunion with his family. Two decades! Don’t get me wrong, I want to believe with the great theologian Julian of Norwich that Christ told her, “It behooved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” And I do hope that the quote derived from the Brazilian writer Fernando Sabino is true when he wrote, “…everything works out in the end. If it didn’t, it’s because it hasn’t come to the end yet.” And I’m what you might call an “eschatological optimist,” which is to say I’m not always optimistic about the present but I believe (on my best days) and hope (every day) that our Creator has a plan for how to end our collective story so that every injustice is rectified and every suffering rewarded. But the ending is not yet, and that’s ok. It’s ok to be in the middle of your story, not knowing what will happen next, not sure if you’ve been abandoned by God and humans, like Christ on the cross crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s ok to be in the part of the story where we left Joseph: when you can’t pretend to know that it’ll all work out and it’s ok to feel those emotions without feigning confidence. It’s my conviction that, like Joseph, we are as loved in our times of abandonment and doubt as we are in our times of triumph. We may feel distant from God. We may feel lost. And if that’s you, that’s ok. You’re allowed to be in that part of your story. You’re allowed to be unsure. You’re allowed to have doubts, just as I’m sure Joseph would’ve felt as he was being dragged to Egypt. I want to encourage you with the claim that if you’re in the middle of your story, God hasn’t forgotten you but I won’t guilt you if you feel like life has left you exiled far away from home. The end of our stories don’t make any sense without the middle, so if you feel like your life has stopped in the middle of your story, I hope that today’s excerpt from the Book of Genesis can serve as a reminder that sometimes that’s just where we are, and it’s ok, and you’re loved. Amen

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Sikh philosophy, Christian history, generational differences, and the meaning of birth

Sometimes I finish a book and either because the book is a bit older, or I can’t find the words for an adequate review, or because I feel a bit too busy to write something blog post worthy, I’ll opt to leave a shorter blurb and rating on Goodreads. Recently, I’ve finished the following books that won’t get a review here but will get something there:

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Sermon for Evensong, Trinity Sunday (June 4th, 2023)

Delivered at St. Thomas Episcopal Church and School:

I. Introduction

According to the fourth-century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, the doctrine of the Trinity was the trending topic of his day. He claimed that everywhere you went, people were sharing their theological opinions: whether you were asking for change at the market, inquiring about the quality of the bread being sold, or visiting a bathhouse, you would run into someone who wanted to share their personal theology with you (Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiriti Sancti). In other words, “doctrine” or Christian “teaching” was akin to what we see regarding politics and sports in our society today. It’s what animated people! Can you imagine the equivalent of an ESPN, CNN, or Fox News that is dedicated to Christian theology? Or people arguing about the Trinity, en masse, on Twitter as they argue about politics and sports. I can’t. (And maybe that’s a good thing!)

Today, for better or worse, only some Christians want to discuss the Trinity. I can’t say that I blame the rest. Throughout the history of Christianity, one of the quickest paths to being labeled heretical by your fellow Christians has been to try to explain the Trinity in a way that they find unsatisfactory. It seems that every analogy and metaphor—from three-leaf clovers to water in the form of a liquid, a solid (ice), and a gas (steam)—can lead to accusations that you’ve misunderstood one of the central teachings of Christianity. For this reason, many have found comfort in side-stepping discussions about the nature of the Trinity by using the one phrase that can provide an escape from complex theological debates: “It’s a mystery!” And this isn’t wrong. In some sense, it’s wise. Christian theology is often at its healthiest when Christians admit that the Christian God is “ineffable” (a fancy way of saying that our God is beyond our ability to describe with human language). But I’m not in a position to avoid talking about the nature of the Trinity tonight. After all, it’s Trinity Sunday! 

So, I want to emphasize the value of the doctrine of the Trinity with regard to how it shapes us as individuals seeking personal, individual spiritual nourishment within a diverse, pluralistic community, like St. Thomas. Our goal can’t be to revisit the philosophical, theological, and metaphysical arguments that led to the present shape of the doctrine—after all, it took many of the most prominent minds of Christendom several centuries to iron out the specifics. Instead, we’re going to skip directly to the practical implications of Trinitarianism. 

II. The Trinity as Unity-in-Diversity

We must begin with the earliest Trinitarian language which is found in the texts of the Christian New Testament. While attempting to maintain fidelity to the Jewish theology they inherited, the earliest Christians spoke of the Creator God in a unique way. There was a recognition that the Creator God had been experienced afresh with the appearance of Jesus. For example, as we sampled in our excerpt from the Gospel of John (16:12-15), the Gospels report that Jesus’ followers were invited into a dynamic relationship between the Father, Son, and Spirit. As a whole, John’s Gospel claims that Jesus Christ prayed to and spoke about God the Father, that God the Father spoke to and about the Son, and that the Holy Spirit was actively sent from the Father to the Son, but also that the Son promised that he would send the Spirit who would draw Jesus’ followers into the divine life. As their Lord and Christ, Jesus spoke of the divine nature in such a way that the earliest Christians understood as revelatory what he had said regarding the nature of God, but also it seems to have aligned with their own experience of God in Christ and through the Spirit.

III. Experiencing God through the Son and the Spirit

Our other reading from the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (5:1-5) sketches the Christian experience of the Trinity as the One who saves us. Paul wrote:

“Therefore, being justified (or made right) by [Christ’s] faithfulness, we have peace toward God through our Lord Jesus Christ whom also we have access into this grace in which we stand and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. But not this only, but also we boast in afflictions, having known that afflictions produce steadfastness; and steadfastness, character; and character, hope; and hope does not humiliate because of the love of God that has been poured in our hearts through the Holy Spirit—the one gifted to you!”

Paul’s audience had collectively experienced reconciliation and peace with their Creator, God the Father, and they were growing together as a community through their collective struggles, into a fuller understanding of God’s love. This peace and reconciliation had been experienced through the crucified and resurrected Son, Jesus Christ. The shared, internal confirmation of this reality was actualized by the Spirit. Notice how Paul presents the experience of God: with regard to the peace we find with God, the touchpoint—if I can use that word—is the Son. The Son is the one by whom we find peace, but we don’t experience peace with the Son alone. You can’t separate your experience of Jesus from your experience of God the Father. Jesus provides us with the human face that helps us see the invisible God. Similarly, the love we experience is the love of God the Father, but the touchpoint is the Spirit. When we consider the whole testimony of Scripture, we know God the Father is Love and loves us by sending the Son (1 John 4:16; John 3:16) and that the Son has loved us, even commanding that we love each other as he has loved us (John 15:12). But here Paul says that this love is something we can experience, we can know, we can feel because of the Spirit’s work in us. The Spirit is the divine touchpoint for experiencing the love of the Father and Son.

IV. Embracing Diversity and Plurality within the Trinity

As you know, I’m a Social and Religious Studies Instructor at TMI Episcopal. In this capacity, I teach courses on comparative religion. One component of these courses is that I lead field trips to various sacred sites in San Antonio. While visiting other religious communities and listening to the various presenters as they teach my students about their beliefs and practices, I often experience what the theologian and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor calls a “holy envy,” where you see something in another religion that you respect, or maybe even wish was part of your own religion. These encounters make me rethink my own Christianity anew. For example, when I take students to the local Hindu temple in Helotes, they see a variety of murtis or images of the various Hindu gods. This may seem to be an aspect of Hindu belief and practice of which Christians should be critical. But when you talk to Hindus about the various murti, many will explain that each murti is analogous to how multiple TV channels can show the same event. Let’s take the State of the Union address, for example. Everyone who watches it wants to hear what the sitting President has to say, but everyone approaches it through the means that are most natural to them. This means some will watch on ABC, others on CNN, others on Fox News, etc. Same event; different platforms. Similarly, for many Hindus, the divine is one—similar to what Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe—but how you access the divine is multifaceted and people are invited to approach the divine from where they are through the murti that most resonates with them. Each murti or god is a different channel emphasizing a different aspect of the one and same divine reality.

Christians sit at an interesting place within the schema of the world’s religions. Like our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we place a strong emphasis on the oneness of God but unlike our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we want to emphasize internal diversity and plurality-in-oneness. In some sense, this connects us with our Hindu neighbors, though, unlike our Hindu neighbors, we place greater emphasis on the unity of God. But what’s important for my current point is that we can learn to think of the Trinity with the help of our Hindu neighbors. We speak of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. Whatever worship we give one, we give the Trinity, ultimately. But the plurality-in-oneness gives our minds more ways to perceive our God and to be open to our God based on our present needs, past experiences, and the state of our mind and heart.  

For the individual who needs a majestic deity who provides assurance that in the chaos of this life, there is a sovereign One above it all, holding it all together, guiding everything towards its ultimate purpose, the Father is our divine touchpoint. For the one who asks the question (that the musician Joan Osborne asks, “What if God was one of us?” What if God participated in this “workshop, of filthy creation”— to take a visual from Mary Shelley—the Son is our divine touchpoint, sharing in our human frailty, but also showing us the way as humans to be the imago Dei (image of God) that we were created to be. For the one who needs a sense of presence, of experience, an assurance that we’re not alone in this world, the Spirit is our touchpoint, bringing us into the divine life. But in all these ways that we can experience God, we experience the Trinity holistically, through each touchpoint. We experience the one Creator God who is Trinity but we experience the Trinity as we need it at that moment wherever we are in our life through the Person that acts as our touchpoint. 

This is depicted beautifully in the cover art by Kelly Lattimore found on your handout. If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s an opening at the table. The Trinity sits for a shared meal but the internal divine nature isn’t closed off to us; there’s an opening for us to join. You’ll see that we’re invited to experience the Triune love of God. It may be that you find that invitation is made possible through reflection primarily on the Father, or on the Son, or on the Spirit, but however you approach you get the whole Trinity. And when one Person of the Trinity interacts with us, we get the whole Trinity. As the fourth-century Bishop and theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo, wrote (Letter 11.2), “For the union of Persons in the Trinity is in the Catholic faith set forth and believed, and by a few holy and blessed ones understood, to be so inseparable, that whatever is done by the Trinity must be regarded as being done by the Father, and by the Son, and by the Holy Spirit together; and that nothing is done by the Father which is, not also done by the Son and by the Holy Spirit; and nothing done by the Holy Spirit which is not also done by the Father and by the Son; and nothing done by the Son which is not also done by the Father and by the Holy Spirit.”

Now, if the language of Father, Son, and Spirit creates a hurdle, our Triune God goes beyond language. (Remember, God is ultimately ineffable!) As the 14th-century English theologian and mystic, Julian of Norwich reminds us, and as Kelli Lattimore has depicted it, we are free to think of God through feminine language as well, if the masculine language is prohibitive or feminine language more inviting (since language is but an arrow pointing to God, not God in God’s self). In her book, Revelations of Divine Love (LIX), Julian points out to the reader that “we receive our being,” our very existence, from God through Christ just as we receive our existence through our mothers. Therefore, God, and Christ, are Mothers to us. The Triune God self-reveals as who and what you need. Julian says that God says to us, as an invitation, “I am the power and the Goodness of the Father, I am the Wisdom of the Mother, I am the Light and the Grace which is blessed love, I am the Trinity, I am the Unity, I am the supreme Goodness of all kind of things, I am the One who makes you love, I am the One who makes you desire, I am the never-ending fulfillment of all true desires.” And this is what I want you to remember on this Trinity Sunday: Christianity has long taught that we share one God, Creator of us all, and this unifies the Church and potentially humanity but this one God is internally pluralistic, relational, Trinitarian. And the Trinity’s plurality meets our human plurality so that in all our difference—even in our differences of language and imagination—we can find God as unified individuals. We don’t have to become homogenous to experience God as Christians; our God can meet all of us at different points simultaneously, as we see here in this setting tonight. And you—especially you—are invited to approach this God just as you are.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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A Short Note on Jay L. Garfield’s Losing Ourselves

Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self (Princeton, 2021).

(Amazon; Bookshop)

Jay L. Garfield does for the Buddhist concept of anattā /anātman, what Robert Wright did for Buddhist meditation and mindfulness practices: he provides scientific and philosophical justification for their value to an audience that might be hesitant to embrace the metaphysics of Buddhism. For those unfamiliar with anattā /anātman, its a Buddhist doctrine that teaches there’s no essential “I” underneath my physicality, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, or even consciousness. Instead, “I” am the culmination of these realities; their intersection, if you will. Buddhists call them “Skandhas” or “Aggregates” or “Heaps” that together make “me”. Buddhists reject the idea, encapsulated in the Indian concept of the “Atman” which has parallels to the “soul” of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism’s “Atman” is the “real me” underneath it all. You could change my body, thoughts, feelings, etc., but those aren’t the “real me”. The “real me” is the Atman that holds it all together. Buddhist say “no,” there’s no “Atman” (hence, “anatman” or “no-Atman”) underneath it all. What makes “me” who “I” am are all these realities. For those familiar with Greek philosophy, which posits an underlying “essence” that shouldn’t change (e.g. humanness) and “accidents” that do change (e.g. gender, eye-color, weight, height) from human to human, in a way Buddhism teaches we are our collective “accidents” and that’s what we must embrace when we speak of “I”.

Garfield is a philosopher, so he runs through a wide-array of philosophical arguments for why this Buddhist concept is closer to the best philosophy than say Descartes’ dualism or other approaches to the mind-body problem that seem to depict a little “me” controlling my body from inside my brain. Similarly, modern neuroscience appears to be leaning in a direction that leads some to reject the concept of a static, essential “me” underneath it all. Instead, most neuroscientists appear to argue for an understanding of consciousness and explain our mind-body relationship in such a way that the Buddha would approve.

For Garfield, this doesn’t mean there’s no “me” but instead of a “self” he prefers the word “person,” with a person being what Buddhist understand when they see the Skandhas intersecting together. And Garfield argues that there are ethical implications to seeing ourselves (for lack of a better word) as “persons,” interconnected and dependent upon the environment in which we live and the relationships that shape us, over against a “self” that somehow transcends our material and relational realities. This work is very thought-provoking, easy to read, clear in its arguments, and challenging in its conclusions. I highly recommend!

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Gen Z, social media, and mental health

Recently it dawned on me that in a few short years I’ll be teaching so-called “Generation Alpha” (we’ve got to get better named for the post-Millennials!) but for now, my concern remains “Gen Z”. If you parent and/or work with Gen Z-ers (c. 1994/96-2010/12), I have a couple of podcast episodes worth listening to:

The argument that there’s not just correlation between smartphone and social media use and mental health but causation, and negative causation at that, seems to be strengthening.

On a slightly related note, I deleted my Twitter account today, probably for the last time. I did it back in 2016 and I don’t know why I rebooted it. It’s truly a terrible platform. If, like me, you keep your account private, then there’s almost nothing “social” about it.