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Ever since Ronald Reagan repealed our usury laws and allowed banks to charge more or less whatever interest they wanted, banks and other lenders have become legalized loan sharks.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.
Are We A Chosen People?
June 9, 2024 § 2 Comments
In the elder days, Friends would sometimes refer to themselves as a “peculiar people.” By “peculiar” they did not mean that they were odd, though they were odd, and I think they knew they were odd. Rather, they meant that they were a a distinct people, a chosen people; they had been gathered by Christ as a people of God for a purpose.
This identity as a chosen people appears in the passage in the gospel of John from which we get our name as the Religious Society of Friends:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. (John 15:12–17)
Integral to the identity that we claim with our name from this passage are five things:
- The commandment of love—“Love one another.”
- Direct and intimate communion with the spirit of the Christ—“You are my friends.”
- The promise of (continuing) revelation—“I have made known to you everything . . .” And
- Being chosen—“I chose you.”
- For a purpose: a mission as a called people of God—“Go and bear fruit.”
Pondering this passage today in meeting for worship raised some queries:
- Do we see ourselves as a chosen/called people of God?
- If so, what is our mission?
- Are we bearing fruit that will last?
Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 2
June 4, 2024 § 4 Comments
Casting out the spirit
Jesus’ answer to the problem of society’s possession by a violent and oppressive spirit is not to assault the man who is possessed, but to drive out the spirit that possesses him. To do this, he forces it to declare its name, its true-name, if you will—what it really is.
What is our Legion’s name?
I woke up a few mornings ago with a name in my mind: Teufelvolksbefolgengeist (pronounced toy’-full-folks-be-foal’-gen-gicest). (I love the German language for its capacity for creating compound nouns that say something concisely that you couldn’t say any other way, like zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.*) I translate teufelvolksbefolgengeist as the devil-spirit-whom-the-people-follow, whom they adhere to and obey.
The key to driving out this unclean spirit is not to attack the possessee, but the possessor, the teufelvolksbefolgengeist, the spirit that has infected our society. How do you do that?
First, we meet it with the truth of its name. This movement is following and obeying a spirit we have seen before. It animated Nazi Germany and reemerged in Soviet-occupied East Germany; it animated Stalin’s Russia. It’s an addiction to power and money, a love affair with the Satan, the father of lies, and with Mammon, the love of ill-gotten gain.
Second, we minister to the fears, trauma, and resentments that are the movement’s wellspring. Only by addressing the problems that the movement’s people face can we unbind them from their pain. Only communities can restore what they have lost—hope, a sense of belonging, of being seen and being known, and security, both material and spiritual. This calls governments, civic institutions, and the church to step up.
Third, we meet its most dangerous elements and their assaults with moral aikido, using their own energy and direction to disarm them and throw down their spirit, the way Jesus did repeatedly to his opponents. The way, for instance, that he caught out the scribes who tried to trap him into saying Jews shouldn’t pay the Roman tax: when you render unto God what is God’s, there’s nothing left for Caesar. For us, this means the law and the courts. And against the white Christian nationalists who are prominent in this movement (as “Christians” have always been in such movements), it means we prophetically uncover how they violate God’s laws with their words and deeds; specifically, in some cases, for instance, how they have broken their oaths of office, in which they had invoked God’s attention and judgment with the words at the end of their oath: “so help me God.”
Fourth, we meet the worst of them with humor and ridicule. Like Mel Brooks’s The Producers and the opening monologues of our late-night hosts. With political cartoons and video mash-ups of these possessed folks revealing their possessed selves, like John Oliver does in his show.
And fifth, we love. We call to their true selves. We answer that of God within them, that spirit within them that seeks truth, peace, wholeness, and love. I’m not talking about a feeling here, which we are just not going to feel. At least I’m not going to feel it, unless, perhaps, I get to know one of these folks personally. I’m talking about biblical love, which is something we do, not necessarily something we feel. With this love, we remember that we are dealing with a spirit, not just with a person; that these people are children of God, just like we are, that there is that of God within them, somewhere; that some trauma or pain lies behind their fear, their anger, their despair; that we must go high when they go low and remain faithful to our own moral compass.
To return to mythology and monsters for a moment, I take heart from a truth that guides the faithful fellowship of the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: evil always overreaches and it does not expect others to make the sacrifices that it would never make itself. Sauron never expects the good guys to destroy the ring; he expects them to use it. In the chapter in the The Fellowship of the Ring titled “The Council of Elrond,” Gandalf says something that has always stuck in my mind: “[Sauron] weighs all things to a nicety on the scales of his malice.” Meaning, evil assumes that everybody else is malicious, too. But we aren’t.
* I studied German for two years in college and still retain a surprising amount of that knowledge, considering. But I think this word teufelvolksbefolgengeist came into my mind because I’ve been watching Amazon Prime’s TV series Grimm, in which each episode features a monster from fairy tales or mythology, a la the work of the brothers Grimm; they all have German compound-noun names. I have long been fascinated by the monsters in mythology and folklore, and have always loved a good monster story. Grimm is pretty good in this regard.
Note that the Grimm brothers did not just collect these stories, they studied them, and developed a vocabulary for categorizing them according to repeating themes and structures. Their approach was soon applied to the stories in the Bible, especially those in Christian scripture, giving birth to what is now called form criticism, which names various kinds of gospel story according to their theme, purpose, and structure. The brothers Grimm are the progenitors of one of the main disciplines in Bible criticism.
Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 1
June 4, 2024 § 1 Comment
Spirit-possession in America
America has become like the town of Gerasa in the gospel of Mark (5:1–20 and parallels in Matthew 8 and Luke 8): we have a man with an evil spirit who roams the dead places in our society crying out blasphemies and repeatedly escaping from those who would bind him.
Now it would be easy to conclude that I’m talking about Donald Trump, and yes, he fits the description. But, like the Gerasene demoniac, this spirit possesses not just one person; it is legion. Mark tells us the demoniac kept cutting himself with stones. Stoning was the prescribed punishment for blasphemy, among other crimes. This story is a metaphor for a society insanely attacking itself.
In the story, Jesus does not address himself to the man, but rather to the spirit. He asks: “What is your name?” “Legion,” answers the spirit, referring obviously, to the Roman military occupation/possession of Gerasa, of Palestine, of the known world, an unclean presence of violence and oppression in society. This explains why Gerasene society is attacking itself: some folks are okay with the occupation; some want to fight against it. Insurrections were so persistent and frequent in this region of the Near East that Rome posted a legion there to put them down.
When Jesus drives the unclean spirit Legion into the sea (an obvious reference to Roman expulsion), it/they enter a herd of pigs. “Legion” is a collective spiritual entity who, when seen through prophetic eyes, manifests through individuals.
The quasi-fascist takeover of the Republican party and other once-conservative institutions in America is our modern-day Legion. And like the story in the gospels, our Legion is a spiritual problem. The fear that animates the movement, the hate that darkens it, the crudeness, cravenness, and cruelty that characterizes the movement, all are spiritual conditions that reflect a corruption of character in the individuals who comprise it.
But like Legion, the movement is not just personal and individual in its characters, but also social, inter-personal, and trans-personal in its collective character. The individuals are in personal moral and spiritual crisis, especially in the the root meaning of that word in Greek—krisis means judgment in Greek. But the body politic is sick, also, and not just the body politic, but also the body civic, and even the body of Christ.
There is in the collective, in our contemporary white Christian nationalist movement, a momentum. Momentum is defined in physics as mass times velocity; velocity is defined as speed with direction. A movement in its spiritual dimension has mass, it has its people and their words and actions. It also has speed, it is on the move. And it has direction, it is moving toward something; the people that are its mass are trying to achieve something with their words and their actions.
This momentum is spiritual in character. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It is trans-personal. That is, it is transcendental, it transcends the wills of its constituent members; it has a mob psychology. It can induce people to do things they would not otherwise do, as it did in Nazi Germany.
Its power is fear. It’s lever is loss and resentment. Its weight is the promise of release from fear and the hope of recovering what has been lost.
But what to do? In my next post, I name this spirit and offer some ways to cast it out from us.
Spiritwind Hurricane
May 28, 2024 § 1 Comment
A Metaphor for the Gathered Meeting
The gathered meeting is like a hurricane of peace that has formed as a swirling pattern of astral spirit-breath-wind that has gathered over the sea of Light around the eye of our deepening silence. Okay, maybe “hurricane of peace” is an oxymoron. But let’s ride the paradox a little further.
Hurricanes form when an area of low pressure moves across warm ocean water. Air moves into the partial vacuum of the low pressure zone, picks up warm air full of moisture from the ocean, and rises; this draws in more air behind it, catching up more moisture. The air rises and cools, the water vapor precipitates forming clouds and then thunderstorms form, releasing even more heat into the storm through the condensation. And ultimately, a hurricane is on the move.
I cannot help but think of Genesis 1:2: “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” But this should read “the spirit-breath-wind of God” because the words for all three are the same in both Hebrew and Greek.
Think of the “waters” as George Fox’s ocean of light, as a medium for the gathered meeting. We can think of the “low pressure zone” of the meeting in worship as what early Friends called the silence of all flesh, the deepening and centering of the worshipping community. Into that spiritual opening rise the prayers and spiritual yearnings of the worshippers, spiritual vapors drawn from the ocean of light by prayer and meditation, by love, attention, and desire. The updraft draws up with it the love, attention, and desires of other worshippers.
Some of this uplifting might ride on Spirit-led vocal ministry.
All of this spiritual energy is rising toward “heaven,” toward the undefinable and indescribable “space” in which spirit dwells. And then, at some point, something precipitates out, perhaps, especially in meetings for business, from some vocal ministry. Of, if not, then from some collective still small voice, some transcendent small signal among the worshippers.
And the spirit-hurricane of peace has formed, its swirling curls of spiritual energy gathering the meeting into a vortex of unity, presence, and joy, with the well of living water (John 4:10) in its eye.
In our time of trial
May 16, 2024 § Leave a comment
This has nothing to do with Quakerism, but I am so taken with it that I want to share it with somebody.
I’ve been reading William Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” an (extremely) long poetic autobiography, so excellent in its self-exploration and commentary on so many things. This is from Book Seventh: Residence in London, in which the young Wordsworth comes to the big city from his idyllic home in the Lake Country not far from the geographic fountainhead of Quakerism, and after finishing college at Cambridge.
My title: In our time of trial (pun intended)
Pass we from entertainments, that are such
Professedly, to others titled higher,
Yet, in the estimate of youth at least,
More near akin to those than names imply,—
I mean the brawls of lawyers in their courts
Before the ermined judge, or that great state
Where senators, tongue-favoured men, perform,
Admired and envied. Oh! the beating heart
When one among the prime of these rose up,—
One, of whose name from childhood, we had heard
Familiarly, a household term, like those,
The Bedfords, Glosters, Salsburys, of old,
Whom the fifth Harry talks of. Silence I hush!
This is no trifler, no short-flighted wit,
No stammerer of a minute, painfully
Delivered. No! the Orator hath yoked
The Hours, like young Aurora, to his ear:
Thrice welcome Presence! how can patience e’er
Grow weary of attending on a track
That kindles with such glory! All are charmed,
Astonished; like a hero in romance,
He winds away his never-ending horn;
Words follow words, sense seems to follow sense:
What memory and what logic! till the strain
Transcendent, superhuman as it seemed,
Grows tedious even in a young man’s ear.
Friends Journal article: Speaking to Our Members’ Conditions
May 14, 2024 § 1 Comment
A Friends Journal article
My article on membership in the May issue of Friends Journal is currently featured on FJ's website:Speaking to Our Members’ Conditions: Giving Us Back to Ourselves.
You can also view a video FJ’s editor Martin Kelley recorded of his interview with me about the article here.
Through the Flaming Sword 