Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, Part 4
June 22, 2024 § Leave a comment
Thou shalt not covet.
On the face of it, this commandment seems to prohibit inner desire for something that is not yours. But that connotation breaks radically from all the other commandments with its focus on the inner life. The other commandments, and indeed all of Torah, quite consistently and definitely focus on the outer life. Sin in biblical religion is about action, not thought; it’s about what you do, not how you feel.
When Jesus said, Whoever looks at a woman with lust in his heart commits adultery with her, he was giving us a radical innovation of biblical moral faith. The Essenes were the first to go there in their rules and writings some time after 165 BCE, but Jesus took it to a new level. We have retrojected his moral sensibilities back onto Hebrew scripture and onto this commandment in particular.
If this commandment is about outward action, not inward feeling, then it prohibits actions that would deliver on these desires. That is, the tenth commandment prohibits swindling; it prohibits stealing by deceit. (Outright theft is covered by Thou shalt not steal.) It’s a “white collar crime” rather than burglary or robbery. Specifically, the tenth commandment prohibits latifundia, loan-sharking that uses debt as a weapon with which to seize other people’s property unlawfully.
This commandment lies behind Isaiah’s famous oracle in Isaiah 5:8: “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left alone in the midst of the land! The Lord of Hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitant.”
Note that, in this context, coveting a wife or servant is not about lust, it’s about property. If your debt is deep enough, you have to hand over people in your family or household as debt slaves, who will pay off your debt with their labor as a kind of indentured servant. The maximum term of service is seven years, according to Deuteronomy. But in the meantime, and assuming your creditor follows Torah in this manner, he has your unpaid labor at his disposal.
Ever since Ronald Reagan repealed our usury laws and allowed banks to charge more or less whatever interest they wanted, banks and other lenders have become legalized loan sharks. Now our entire economy is in violation of the tenth commandment, but the coveters are not people, but corporations in their status as legal persons. Note that in Torah, and in the gospel of Jesus, it is illegal to charge interest on a loan at all.
Louisiana’s ruling elites are probably pretty focused on the wives and maidservants, and on coveting as lusting, given how obsessed some conservative Christians are with sex. But they will be teaching the kids in the schoolrooms they bedeck with their posters a false understanding of this commandment and failing to teach them about God’s good news for the poor, which Jesus proclaimed, namely, that we shall do whatever we can to keep people free in Christ from debt, starting with “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, Part 3
June 22, 2024 § Leave a comment
Thou shalt not take the name of Elohim Yahweh in vain.
Taking God’s name in vain means violating an oath in which one has invoked Elohim Yahweh’s judgment as the guarantor of one’s oath. Well, a lot of us, maybe most of us, swear quite a lot. I do myself; not good, I admit. But I have never taken the name Elohim Yahweh in vain. But naturally, we expand and generalize this commandment to include any name of God, hewing to the spirit of the law rather than the letter.
However, most of our cursing is really a form of expletive; it’s a sharp verbal exclamation point that carries and amplifies our reaction to an experience. I’s not part of a formal oath. This expletive kind of swearing is not technically “covered” by this commandment, which is about formally swearing to something and then breaking your oath.
This exactly describes the actions of Louisiana’s ruling elites with this law. They have sworn an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States, and have invoked God as the guarantor of their oath under penalty of God’s judgment by saying, “so help me God.” And now they have deliberately violated their oath by violating the constitution’s first amendment. They obviously plan to take this to the Supreme Court, where they expect the conservative majority will say that, actually, it’s not a violation of the first amendment, after all. Until then, though, and on its face, they have with their actions taken the Lord’s name in vain as oath-breakers and can expect the judgment of the God whom they have invoked.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, Part 2
June 22, 2024 § Leave a comment
Thou shalt not make for yourself a graven image
I grew up with a painting of Jesus on the wall that made him look vaguely like Charlton Heston. Such paintings bedecked the walls of lots of people back then; maybe they still do. The Roman church and its believers have for millennia put crucifixes on the walls of their churches, buildings, and homes, not to mention the vast quantity of other sacred art portraying Jesus, the saints, even God the Father. I saw Michelangelo’s Pieta when it was in New York when I was a teenager and even as a teenager, I felt its power. It is a magnificent piece of art. It also violates the second commandment.
If we assume, as the ruling elites of Louisiana do, that God himself (sic) wrote the ten commandments, then he understood himself to be pure spirit, which could not be represented by any outward form, which then would tend to attract worship in his stead, as the golden calf famously did in the Bible’s case study of the matter in Exodus 32. God wanted his followers to worship him in spirit and in truth, not in outward forms. This is the very foundation of the Quaker approach to worship.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments
June 22, 2024 § 1 Comment
The governor of Louisiana has recently signed a bill that requires public schools to display a large poster of the ten commandments in each classroom. This is unconstitutional behavior, but it is also ignorant, sloppy, and disingenuous, maybe even deceitful, theology. I won’t talk about how this seems to violate the first amendment of the US constitution’s establishment clause. Rather, I want to address the way we violate the commandments themselves and the bad theology behind these violations, which makes the people who wrote, passed, and signed this law immoral according to their own professed faith.
The vast majority of modern-day Christians violate the first two commandments. We often violate the third. And we usually misunderstand the tenth commandment and ignore the way Jesus interpreted it. Louisiana’s ruling elites are either ignorant of the meaning of the ten commandments, or ignore-ant of their meaning.
In the next few posts, I want to explain what I mean.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Traditional Christianity inherently violates the first commandment. Traditional Christianity places Jesus Christ before the Father in every way that matters. Christians look to Christ for their salvation from sin, which is their understanding of the purpose of their religion; his sacrifice on the cross is what saves them and he even plays a role as a judge, though his Father is presumably the chief justice. Christians pray in Jesus’ name, even though Jesus himself prayed directly to his Father—“Our father who art in heaven.” The paragraph about Jesus in all the creeds, Nicene, Apostolic, and Athanasian, is far longer than those for the Father and the Holy Spirit, and its theology is central to the creed as a whole.
Christian theology’s solution to this problem is the theology of the trinity. In my opinion, with this theology we project a meaning out of the theological dissonance created by holding two opposing ideas and commitments of faith in one’s mind at the same time: that there are three Powers in heaven, but really, there is only one. (By “theological dissonance,” I mean the combination of cognitive and moral dissonance). I consider the arguments for why the trinity is truth quite tortured. I feel that the only real solution for this dissonance is to fall back on faith and let reason be.
Now I’m not saying that Jesus Christ is not God, nor that the triune God is not real, nor that Friends should not worship a triune God. Some religious temperaments do not need a coherent and sensible theology to know religious fulfillment. Some traditions of religious faith and practice can deliver on their promises without a reasonable theology. And just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean that the Trinity doesn’t work for others or, more importantly, that it isn’t the religious truth.
But traditional conservative Christian evangelicalism does, in fact, need a coherent theology; it’s all about what you believe. And I’m saying that trinitarian Christianity isn’t monotheism, however clever your argument is. Three persons but one God—how does that work? This is why the rabbis at the Council of Jamnia in 84 CE declared Christianity a heresy: there can only be one Power in heaven.
More importantly for an examination of Louisiana’s new law, on the face of it, traditional Christianity puts Christ before his Father in every way that really matters, even though Jesus himself did exactly the opposite—and that violates the first commandment.
Through the Flaming Sword 