Friday, October 23, 2015

I don't want to say "There is no such thing as the devil," but...

I've apparently been very motivated theologically lately.


The character called "the adversary/the accuser" ("ha-satan," not capitalized and not a proper noun) doesn't show up until Chronicles, which were written after the conquest of Babylon by the Medes and the Persians.

Which resulted in the introduction of Zoroastrianism to Judaism.
Prior to that, Judaism was strictly and utterly monotheistic.
Meaning they treated God as the only force in the universe.
EVERYTHING, good and bad, was attributed to God.
A key doctrine of Zoroastrianism is that the universe is held in constant tension between two equal and opposing forces, one good and one evil.

The introduction of this doctrine influenced monotheistic Judaism to adopt the idea of an opposite-yet-not-equal number for YHWH/Adonai.

Compare 1 and 2 Samuel/1 and 2 Kings with accounts of the exact same events in 1 and 2 Chronicles.

2 Samuel 24 vs. 1 Chronicles 21 is a good example of this.

"Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, 'Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.' So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, 'Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.'"
-2 Samuel 24:1-2

"Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. So David said to Joab and the commanders of the troops, “Go and count the Israelites from Beersheba to Dan. Then report back to me so that I may know how many there are.” So the king said to Joab and the army commanders with him, 'Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.'"
-1 Chronicles 21:1-2

Events attributed to God in the former writings are attributed to "the accuser/adversary" in the latter.
Apparently, it was only the need for a named spiritual bogeyman upon which to cast all blame which created the tradition of capitalizing "ha-satan."

As well as the tradition of assuming that the serpent in the Genesis creation myth is also "ha-satan," even though there is zero evidence that "the serpent" was given any such negative deification until after the Persian conquest.
Moses made a statue of a bronze snake in Numbers (in response to an invasion of venomous snakes which like everything else pre-Zoroastrian Judaism is attributed to God), and none of the Hebrews are recorded crying "Ha-Satan is here!" or referencing the story recorded in Genesis at all in response to the real snakes or the bronze snake.

Even the accounts of Jesus interacting with "the devil" (in Matthew "ha-satan," in Luke "diabolos," Greek for "slanderer") are from JEWISH sources, who had inherited the centuries-old Zoroastrian-influenced Judaism.

And notice the lack of Jesus-adversary interactions in Mark and John, especially the latter, who in every other way devoted his account to the deeper truths of Christ's life and ministry.


The tradition of treating "ha-satan" as a proper noun was in full force by the time the English language rolled around and needed translations of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.

So it's no surprise that Jesus' rebuke of Peter in Matthew 16:23 / Mark 8:33 is read as "Get behind me, Prince of Darkness/King of Hell/Supreme Demon!" instead of "Get behind me, adversary! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Merely human concerns.
Not hellish concerns, not demonic concerns, not even overtly malicious concerns.
Decide for yourself which interpretation makes more sense.


And this doesn't even get into the fact that there are MEN referred to as "ha-satan" in the Old Testament as well.
Hadad the Edomite in 1 Kings 11:14 and Rezon the Syrian in 1 Kings 11:23 are just a few examples.


We keep ourselves in the dark age of enforced ignorance as long as we continue to pass on cultural myopia, blind adherence to tradition, and refusal to examine the texts we hold sacred with their original writers and readers in mind.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Sunday School for Introverts

For once, I'm posting more questions than opinions.
So bear with me.


As my wife and I have been trying to get back into regular church attendance, and have had vastly different experiences at the same churches, I've become more aware of just how anti-introvert/anti-social anxiety the typical Sunday School class is.

Especially for anyone not raised in church.

The pressure to pray aloud usually means the prayer will be the most forced and rushed affair ever.

The pressure to read Scripture aloud tends to lead to completely ignoring the meaning of the text in an effort to get out of the spotlight as quickly as possible.

And then there's the pressure to take part in the class discussion.
A discussion which, depending upon the individuals in the class, can go into spiritual deep water (meaning, tons of theological jargon and assumption that everyone is deeply familiar with the minutiae of Scripture) within seconds.
And which requires that each person interrupt someone else just to contribute.

All of these contribute to an environment which leaves introverts and/or the socially anxious huddled in the corner waiting for the ordeal to end so they can vanish into the crowd for the main church service......at least until "Pass the Peace," in which tons of strangers invade their personal space again and again and make them want to run screaming from the room, but that's for another discussion.

The above are all impressions and experiences conveyed to me over the years by my wife, who is very much an introvert, and generally suffers from a large degree of social anxiety in everyday situations, which is ramped up in church services, in large part due to the above and due to her not attending church regularly until adulthood.

Being an extrovert who doesn't tend to feel socially anxious, and having been raised in church, I never noticed these issues until my wife and I got married and started looking for a church to call home together.

The three sources of anxiety for my wife seem to eliminate the entirety of every Sunday School class I've ever been in (group prayer, group Scripture reading, and group discussion), so it seems that an entirely new set of activities would be required, unless the peer pressure inherent in the three could be lessened.

How do we minimize and eventually eliminate the above peer pressures, which seem so ingrained in American mainline church practices, so that we can create an environment which does not alienate introverts and those who suffer from social anxiety (a specification I make because extroverts can suffer from it as well)?

I just don't see how it could be done, aside from the class leader doing the praying and the reading and making a lecture of it instead of a discussion.
But we already have that in the form of the pastor's sermon during the regular service.

Should we just recommend that introverted/socially anxious churchgoers avoid small-group meetings and stick to the main church service?

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

This Might Be a Sermon Someday...

Why do church people assume that everything recorded as the spoken words of Jesus were meant to be taken as stand-alone, pithy sayings?

That's what PROVERBS is for!

Aside from the Sermon on the Mount (which only occurs in that form in Matthew's account of Jesus' life, but that's a different discussion), Jesus is seen constantly speaking in CONVERSATION, answering specific questions or rebuking/encouraging specific acts of his disciples or others.

For example, John 14:6 - "Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'"
Why is it the traditional practice to not mention those first two words when quoting this verse?
Because we might actually need to read the whole chapter, and thus find out what specific QUESTION he was ANSWERING?
That we might need to read the whole conversation, instead of taking a single sentence out of context to justify whatever whenever?

It was in fact a very specific question.
14:5 - "Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?'"

Which of course was the result of another statement of Jesus', which has also been stripped of its conversational context and thrown around to justify a whole lot of random dogma and doctrines over the centuries.
14:1-4 - “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

This little chunk of text has been misinterpreted to mean:
"I'm going to Heaven, and you'll be coming with me!"
And of course the 14:6 verse has been chained to that interpretation as well to lock Christ down into the us vs. them Greco-Roman version of Christianity which post-dates Christ and everything else included in the Bible by centuries.
The word "house" here is the exact same word Christ uses when running the money-changers out of the temple (John 2:16 - "To those who sold doves he said, 'Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!'"), yet no one interprets that verse to mean some existential point about the afterlife.

When we only grind individual verses into our children's heads instead of encouraging them to read the surrounding text, examine the person or persons believed to have been responsible for writing the particular book included in the Bible, and so on and so forth in exploring the context, we reduce them to spiritual parrots, or worse, set them up to be platitude-spewing hypocrites later in life.

Especially when we take a one-to-one approach in justifying dogma and doctrine and public policy with verses of scripture.
Which of course is the time-honored tradition of American evangelical leaders, just as it was with European Roman Catholic leaders, just as it is with Middle Eastern Fundamentalist Muslim leaders.

In the words of Dr. Donald A. Carson:
"A text without a context is just a pretext for a proof-text."