Judaism and the Mystical Christ, Ch. 2: The Bible and Communication Theory

Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "Judaism and the Mystical Christ".  I have created a blog entry containing the table of contents linking to each article which may be accessed here:
 
Table of Contents

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The Bible and Communication Theory
In my last post, I explored the topic of what is called a paradigm shift, and mentioned that I had experienced a few of these myself.  The overarching theme of this series has to do with how gaining a perspective on Judaism reshapes the way we perceive the meaning of the Bible, Jesus, and faith itself, and leads us towards what I will call "Mystical Christ".

But before I begin to explore these ideas I would like to address the elephant in the room - namely, the way that we read the Bible.  It has become a very popular notion within Western Christianity that the Bible functions in a way that is very similar to a gavel - one slams down a Bible verse taken out of context and then triumphantly shouts "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it!"  Case closed.  The one who struck the gavel now expects their "opponent" to walk away in shame while they may now hold their head high.

This attitude and behavior is usually the result of being steeped within a culture that teaches that the Bible is "inerrant".  But there are a few problems with this starting point - the first of which, I'd like to point out, does not require that we reject the term "inerrant" when describing the Bible.  It has to do with a theory for how communication works.

J.L. Austin was a British philosopher of language who lived in the mid 1900's, and whom developed a theory of speech acts.  The theory states that when a "speech act" occurs, there are multiple things happening simultaneously.  The first part of a "speech act" is referred to as a locution, and this is the "material" of the act.  It could be a physical and audible utterance of words, a writing of some sort, or some form of art (such as a painting or play).

But for this locution to be a speech act, it requires a bit more.  First of all, it cannot be a speech act if there is no audience.  But secondly, there must be some meaning which the locutor intended to convey to his or her audience.  This intended meaning is the second part of the speech act, and is referred to as the interlocution.  But interlocution is a bit more than the intended meaning - because in order for a speech act to be considered successful, we must endeavor to ascertain whether the meaning intended by the locutor is the same meaning that was perceived by the audience - so the interlocution is not only the intended meaning but it is also the perceived meaning, and these may not always match up.

The final part of a speech act is called the perlocution.  The perlocution is also broken up into two parts, as in the case of the interlocution - it is both the desired effect or result of the speech act, and the actual effect or result of the speech act.  So for us to deem a speech act to be successful, we ought to try to match up the locutor's desired effect with the actual effect it had on the audience.

One of the common fault lines where a speech act breaks down and fails to be successful is when it is "taken out of context".  Let me give you an example: let's say that I dramatically blurt out with a tone of despair "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"  The locution is not merely the collection of words, but it is also the mannerism in which I said these things - my dramatic tone of despair.  Without this context, one might miss the point and incorrectly perceive the interlocution, as well as failing to perform the correct perlocution.  But the problem of correctly perceiving interlocution and applying perlocution does not end there - we should also ask where and when I made this speech.  

Let me give you a few examples where the context completely changes both the interlocution and the perlocution of the statement I mentioned.

In the first example, I'd like you to imagine that I have been having dinner with my wife and some good friends at my house, and we have been having a very enjoyable time.  At some point during the evening, I ask for the salt to be passed to me.  When it arrives, I turn the salt shaker over only to discover that no salt comes out.  This is the lead up to my dramatic exclamation of despair: "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"

With this setup, one might guess that my tone of dramatic despair is hyperbolic and meant to be humorous. Thus, my interlocution - or intended meaning - could be a joke, meant to result in a multifaceted perlocution.  If the result of my utterance is for everyone at the table to laugh, and for my wife to refill the salt shaker, this actual result is very likely a good match for my desired result.

Now, before I move on to my second example, I'd like my readers to imagine that one of the people at the table decided to quote my exact words on Twitter or Facebook without any of the setup.  How likely do you think it would be that the online audience would perceive the correct interlocution and perlocution?

In my second example, let's say that we place my words in a completely different context: I have been participating in a Bible study group that has just been studying and discussing Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount", and after discussing Matthew 5:13 where Jesus says that his disciples are "the salt of the earth" for a bit, we begin to discuss how so many people who claim to be Christians do not resemble the things Jesus mentions in the rest of his sermon.  It is within this context that I then dramatically blurted out "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?"  Within this new context, do you think that I am hoping that everyone in the room will laugh, and then someone will run home to grab a salt shaker and bring it back to me?

In addition to the context in which the locution occurs, we might also want to pay attention to the context of the locutor - the character we are able to know about the person who spoke.  In the example I gave of the dinner party where I dramatically and despairingly uttered "where has all the salt gone?  Is there any salt left in this world?", those who know me (perhaps even just from one dinner) might have perceived that I have a certain sense of humor, and this context might have given them more of a foundation on which to build the assumption that I was being hyperbolic in an attempt to cause laughter.

Another example of how context changes meaning - I'd like you to consider the following conversation:

Jane: Would you like some coffee?
John: That would keep me awake.

Do we know at this point whether John wants coffee?  The answer is that we don't, because this conversation is too ambiguous.  Even if we had access to John's tone of voice and facial expressions when he answered, it would still be very difficult.  However, if we knew whether this conversation occurred in the morning or in the evening, this context would give us a fairly accurate idea of whether John actually wanted coffee or not (keep in mind there could be other factors, i.e.: is this in the evening, and John and Jane are on a road trip and need to stay awake?).

In the case of the Bible - if we wish to ascertain the interlocution and perceive the desired perlocution of a writer such as Paul, we might want to pay careful attention to his other writings so that we do not make a judgment call on one statement that contradicts a large portion of his other writings - to do this would be to completely ignore the context of his character.  But we also need to know as much as we can about Paul's Jewishness, as well as the history of the time period he lived in, and the common traits of the environments of the various places his audiences resided in.  Because without this context, we may have completely missed the desired interlocution and perlocution and substituted our own.

One final and very simple illustration might help drive the point about the importance of context home.  In the parable of "The Good Samaritan", Jesus says that "a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho" (Lk. 10:30).  With our modern context and the access we have to maps with north being located "up" and south being "down", we might assume that Jericho was located to the south of Jerusalem.  But one look at a map challenges this:

Now what do we do with this challenge to our assumptions?  One option might be to declare the mapmaker a heretic who has challenged the integrity of God's Word™ and is denying the authority of the scriptures (hey, the Church did this to Galileo and Copernicus).  We might demand that people ignore such maps and draw maps placing Jericho to the south of Jerusalem.  Another option would be to say that Jesus was ignorant, and thus was wrong.  Another might be to say that Jesus never said this, but rather it was Luke who was ignorant and wrong.  And yet another option might be to say that either Jesus or Luke were trying to deceive us.  Or, we could attempt to place ourselves within the historical context and realize that because they did not have the access to maps in this period that we do, and because Jerusalem was at a higher elevation than Jericho and thus the experience of walking from Jerusalem to Jericho was a journey down a very long hill, the assumed meaning of down in that culture had more to do with elevation than with geography.

It is for this reason that I will be attempting to enlist the help of Jewish thought throughout this series - because I believe that without understanding Jewish thought, we cannot help but misunderstand the Bible.  Westerners - thinking through a very Western lens - cannot possibly understand the very Jewish and Eastern Jesus if we do not attempt to immerse ourselves within their thinking.  The modern Western versions of Christianity have all too often suffered from the arrogance of thinking that they hold a monopoly on truth and do not have to listen to any outsiders.  And when we do this, we forget how our traditions have grown out of much older traditions.  As the English writer Aldous Huxley once put it:

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim insofar as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness.

The Finger is not the Moon

I have written before on why I reject the idea of "inerrancy" (see here, here, and here), so I am not going to rehash this debate again here.  But I would like to try once again to offer an alternative vision for the purpose of the Bible. 

I believe that we are meant to see an overarching story within the Bible - an ongoing narrative the leads up to the person of Jesus.  But it doesn't even stop there!  I believe it continues on in the narrative of the "body of Christ" - the church!  We are meant to carry on the story! 

So for me, I believe that if we take any section of the Bible and treat it like a "stopping point", we have made an idol out of that scripture.  Consider the Bible as if it were a telescope - the point is not the telescope itself, but what it enables us to see!  If we revere the telescope too much, we will completely miss the point!  I believe that "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" is essentially holding a telescope up to our eye while covering the end with our hand - at that point, you're really just making up fantasies about the heavens in your own head.

This idea is very similar to something the Buddha said: 

[M]y teaching is a method to experience reality, and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. An intelligent person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon. My teaching is a means of practice, not something to hold onto or worship. Only a fool would continue to carry his raft around after he had already used it to reach the other shore, the shore of liberation.

If we do not open ourselves up to the various possibilities of what the symbolic language of the Bible is pointing to, it is like worshiping the finger that is pointing to the moon.

I think it helps to understand that all our words are symbols.  Louis Chauvet describes the meaning of symbol in "Symbol and Sacrament" as follows:

If one construed it transitively, one would translate it, according to the context, as "gather together", "hold in common", or "exchange". The substantive symbole designates the joint at the elbow or knee and, more generally, the whole idea of conjunction, reunion, contract, or pact. The ancient symbolon is precisely an object cut in two, one part of which is retained by each partner in a contract. Each half evidently has no value in itself and thus could imaginatively signify anything; its symbolic power is due only to its connection with the other half. It (can thus be described) as an agreement between the two partners which establishes the symbol; it is the expression of a social pact based on mutual recognition and, hence, is a mediator of identity.

The idea that the words we use are always inadequate for describing the reality they symbolize is even a concept many scientists have grasped - as is illustrated by the following quote by Sir James Hopwood Jeans (known for the Rayleigh-Jeans Law):

The essential fact is simply that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical pictures. Most scientists would agree that they are nothing more than pictures - fictions, if you like, if by fiction you mean that science is not yet in contact with ultimate reality. Many would hold that, from the broad philosophical standpoint, the outstanding achievement of twentieth-century physics is not the theory of relativity with its welding together of space and time, or the theory of quanta with its present apparent negation of the laws of causation, or the dissection of the atom with the resultant discovery that things are not what they seem; it is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with ultimate reality.

To apply this to the Bible, I would like my audience to consider that the Bible may function as a scatter plot pointing off into infinity.  A scatter plot is a tool that enables us to see how many samples of data over time show a trend that is occurring:

To use another, similar analogy, if you have seen the movie "Gravity", there is a scene where Sandra Bullock's character is trying to reach a space station.  Before firing thrusters, she lines up her cross-hairs with the tiny speck that she sees of the space station in the distance.  She does this very carefully - making sure to get the sights lined up perfectly before firing her thrusters.  And yet, when she is close to the space station, she ends up having to jump out of the ship's side door and do some tricky maneuvers in order to get to the station because her course was not perfect.  I believe that what many people do with the Bible is like sailing right on past the space station while insisting that your course was perfect and therefore while it may look like the space-station is over there, that's just Satan lying to us!  This displays a remarkable arrogance!

As I spoke of in the last section, I believe that God may be described best in various terms of infinity.  And thus, logically we may conclude that any single description which tries to solidify the infinite concepts of God into a solid form will ultimately fail.  This is why I believe that over the course of the narrative of the Bible, we will see a trend developing that points off into infinity, much like a scatter plot.  But if we take one of those points of data and solidify it into a definitive concept, we couldn't possibly understand the path of the trend.  Or, if we point the line of the scatter plot trend in the wrong direction (as in, we take "the wrathful God of the Old Testament" as our defining image rather than the God Jesus shows us who loves enemies perfectly), we have also missed the trend of the scatter plot.

To say this is not to say that the Old Testament passages have no value or do not help us to see God!  Rather, we must understand that God is present within the Old Testament, but as God is infinite, these old understandings had to be transcended - and we see these understandings continually being transcended, just as we are called today to transcend old, limiting understandings of the infinite.  I believe this attitude of recognizing the finitude of our current understanding in order to transcend it is what Paul was speaking of in I Corinthians 3:18:

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise.

Paul recognized that "for now we see in a mirror dimly" (I Cor. 13:12), and that God - being infinite - was fully outside any man's ability to grasp truth.  And so in order to continually grow closer one must become "foolish" in the eyes of the world, in order to, paradoxically, become wise.

This attitude of continually transcending our limited understanding transforms the language of the Bible from a dead, rigid form of stone into living, breathing truth.  And for those who have been trained their whole life to be dogmatic, while treating the Bible in this way may be difficult, I would like to remind you that Abraham negotiated with God (Gen. 18:23-33), Jacob wrestled with God before he was blessed by Him (Gen. 32:22-31), Moses negotiated with God more than once (see Ex. 3:12-16 and Num. 11 for two examples), the Psalms and Lamentations are full of pleading and even accusation against God (shocking!), and even Jesus is said to have plead with God to change the course he was on.  

I think that the Jewish attitude towards the Bible is much healthier than "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" - recognizing how various figures in the Bible negotiated with God as I've just mentioned, they seemed to understand that the Bible is up for interpretation and that newer understandings may trump older ones.  We'll get into that a bit more as this series progresses, but for now I'd like to share a story from the Talmud.  The Talmud is a very interesting collection of commentaries on the Torah, and is revered by modern Jews as being a work every Jew should study.  And what's interesting about it is that the Talmud doesn't hide disagreement, but preserves it - often polar opposite views of a passage or idea are kept side by side.  And there is one beautiful story that demonstrates perfectly how the Jewish view of the Bible flies in the face of "Sola Scriptura inerrancy" - the story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven, which I will retell in my own way.  

The story goes that Rabbi Eliezer had a disagreement with a group of other scholars over whether an oven was pure or impure.  Rabbi Eliezer brought the other scholars all sorts of proofs to his point of view, but they still disagreed.  At one point during the disagreement, Eliezer said "if the law is as I say, let the river prove me right!"  Instantly, the river reversed its course.

But one of the other scholars said "one cannot prove a matter of Torah by the flow of water!"

So Eliezer said "if the law is as I say, may the walls of the study hall prove me right!"  Instantly, the walls of the study hall began to cave in, but one of the other rabbis, Rabbi Joshua, stood up and rebuked them: "if Torah scholars are debating a point of Jewish law, what are your qualifications to intervene?"  The story goes that the walls, in respect to Rabbi Joshua, did not cave in, but in respect towards Rabbi Eliezer they remained at a permanent slant afterwards.

So Rabbi Eliezer tried once more: "if the law is as I say, may Heaven prove me right!"  A booming voice filled the room and reverberated around them all: "why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer?  Don't you know he's always right?"  But once again, Rabbi Joshua stood up and intervened, saying "the Torah is not in Heaven!"

We might fail to follow the logic here, given the Christian over-reverence of the Bible that turns it into an idol.  But Jews interpret Deuteronomy 30:11-14 to mean that Torah was given to us so that we could interpret it.  In other words, the popular understanding of this tale from the Talmud is that Rabbi Joshua was rebuking God for not allowing them to do the job He'd given them to do!  Note how Jesus actually supports this idea when he tells his disciples in Matthew 18:18 that "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven" - in Jewish terminology, when a Rabbi "binds" something, he is declaring it forbidden by his interpretation of the law, and when he "looses" something he is declaring it allowed.  So here, Jesus is giving us permission to interpret!

The story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven goes on from there to arrive at a conclusion many "Sola Scriptura inerrantists" might find shocking - Rabbi Nathan is said to have experienced a vision wherein he meets the prophet Elijah, and at one point Nathan asks how God reacted at the moment that Rabbi Joshua rebuked Heaven.  Elijah responds: "God laughed and said 'my children have bested me!  Haha, my children have bested me!'"  

This picture of a God delighted with His children for exercising their wits and even disagreeing with their Heavenly Father is altogether foreign from many forms of Christianity, sadly.  We cower in fear underneath a tyrannical Molech that we've slapped Christian branding over.  But the God of Judaism wants us to negotiate with Him.  This God wants us to think for ourselves!  This God wants us to cry out for justice - because it is at this moment that He can invite us to join him in the cause!

Dr. Ismar Schorsch, the sixth chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, put it this way:

[I]n Judaism precisely because the Torah is revered as divine, it becomes susceptible to unending interpretation. It would be a denigration of God's word to saddle it with just a single meaning. In contrast to human speech, which carries a finite range of meanings, the language of God was deemed to be endowed with an infinity of meanings. This theology freed the Rabbis to do midrash, creating the anomaly of a canon without closure. The vessels kept changing their contents. New challenges elicited new insights into a text inviolable only on the surface.

If we can just remember that the words we use for Theology are not what they represent, but are symbols for what we are speaking of - like a finger pointing to the moon - we can ease so much tension.  And then we may not feel the need to demonize those who use different words.  If we could just remember that the point is not the words themselves, but the way of life that these words are supposed to lead to - maybe we'd stop judging people by what words they use but put emphasis on conduct instead.  Because the point is not words or "beliefs" - as James 1:27 points out:

Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

And later on in James 3:13, the author writes:

Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom.

George MacDonald - a member of the Inklings whom C.S. Lewis called his "master" - picked up on this principle and wrote in one of his "Unspoken Sermons" titled "The Truth in Jesus":

Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by; and that which the man I mean lives by, is the love of God, and obedience to his law, so far as he has recognized it. [...] What a man believes, is the thing he does.

In "Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian", Dr. Paul Knitter writes about this attitude of allowing words to be symbols that point to a way of life:

[I]f a new interpretation of – that is, new words for – a traditional Christian belief enables people to live their lives according to the spirit of the Gospel, it’s probably a faithful “reinterpretation” or a valid new understanding of that belief, no matter how different the words may be. In theological jargon, right acting (called “orthopraxis”) is more important than, though it is dependent on, right believing (“ orthodoxy”). Or in contemporary jargon, walking the talk is more important than talking the talk. So, if the new “talk” enables us to keep walking, it’s probably okay. It’s probably “orthodox.”

To illustrate even further how the Bible is not "The Truth" but functions as a finger pointing to the moon, I'd like to consider the words of Jesus in John 5:39:

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.

We see here that Jesus himself challenged an idolatrous relationship with the Bible, but tells us that the Bible functions as a finger pointing to the moon.  As George MacDonald - who is credited with the conversion of C.S. Lewis - puts it:

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

This idea is further reiterated by authors John Kronen and Eric Reitan in "God's Final Victory":

[W]e think that the way in which Scripture contributes to the formation of doctrine is far more complex than the 'plain sense' view would have us believe.  The whole text must be read in light of what is central, namely Christ, and in light of the theological tradition that has struggled, and continues to struggle, to integrate the experience of the Christian community and its members as they have endeavoured to live out their understanding of what it means to be the body of Christ.  Reading the text in the light of these things requires a practice of receiving inherited theological conclusions with respect and honour; but it also requires critical engagement with that inheritance.

Even Augustine saw that we must identify the guiding principles of Scripture which take precedence over the peripherals:

But any who understand a passage in the scriptures to mean something which the writer did not mean are mistaken . . . but all the same . . . if they are mistaken in a judgment which is intended to build up love . . . they are mistaken in the same sort of way as people who go astray off the road, but still proceed by rough paths to the same place as the road was taking them. God spoke the true word, in spite of the reader’s error.

Here we see that Augustine paid careful attention to the priority of love - as both Jesus and Paul said that the principles of Scripture are summed up in love (see Mt. 22:36-40 and Gal. 5:14).  If the thought of prioritizing principles in the Scriptures that take precedence over peripherals makes you uncomfortable, I'd like you to understand that you do this as well even if you're unconscious of this.  It's highly likely that if you're reading this post in 2015, you prioritize monogamy over the passages within Scripture that seem to support polygamy, you don't support slavery (even though Scripture seems to be ok with it), and if a male joins your church you probably don't take him into a back room and have him pull his pants down so that you can make sure he's circumcised before allowing him to join.

If you're still not sold on this attitude towards the Bible, I'd like to come at this from one more angle before we break.

Paradox
One of the ways that the Bible - and not just the Bible, but all Eastern religions - hints at a "truth beyond words" is through the use of paradox.  To illustrate how a paradox works, I'd like you to examine a famous illustration called "My Wife and My Mother-in-law":

You've probably seen this before, and the question that is asked is: do you see the back of a beautiful young woman's head or the side of an old woman's face?  And the answer is: it depends on how you're looking!  It's actually both.  Now we could say "well, it's supposed to be one or the other" and then explain how one view must be the correct one - but that wouldn't do the illustration justice!  Because the illustration is meant to illustrate a profound truth - that the mother-in-law has characteristics very much like the daughter, and the daughter has characteristics very much like the mother-in-law!  Or to put it another way - one can see the daughter in the mother-in-law and the mother-in-law in the daughter!

Now what many theologians all too often do is very much like insisting that the illustration above must be either the daughter or the mother-in law.  And so they'll often try to pretend that Biblical evidence doesn't exist - much like if we were to erase a few lines from the drawing above (maybe the red part) and then insist that it is only the daughter.  But what if the only way to communicate the profound mysteries of spiritual truth were to use two seemingly opposing ideas (a paradox)?

There are many paradoxes within the Bible, but I am going to focus on one very important one - a paradox that is foundational for "Mystical Christianity".  It is the paradox of kenosis and God's sovereignty.  

I argued in the first "chess move" of my series on Hell that verses like Job 42:2, Psalm 135:6, Isaiah 14:24-27, Daniel 4:35, Matthew 19:26, Romans 11:36, and Ephesians 1:11 imply that in the end, God gets everything God wants - or in other words, God is sovereign.  Another way of saying this is that God is omnipotent - this is a popular way of putting it in theological terms.

But an interesting paradox presents itself when you consider that Jesus is, as Colossians 1:15 puts it: "the image of the invisible God."  Because we know that Jesus emptied himself, as Philippians 2:7 puts it.  The Greek word used in this verse is kenosis, and it implies a self-emptying.  The passage in Philippians goes on to explain that because Jesus humbled himself, he was exalted - which matches quite well with Jesus' saying that "whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted." (Mt. 23:12 and Lk. 14:11).

If Jesus is indeed "the image of the invisible God", then would this imply that God's nature is a self-emptying one as well?  Many theologians have concluded that the answer to this is: yes!  And this presents us with a profound mystery - because in God we see power in a way of being that looks to us like weakness!

If this sounds like nonsense, then I suggest you re-examine Paul's words in 2 Cor. 12:10 - he implies that Christians are to emulate this strength through weakness!

Let's come at this from another angle - I John 4:8 and 16 tell us that God is love.  If you have a hard time with this idea, I'd ask you to read another post I wrote titled: "Yes, God Really IS Love!"  But if this is true, then I believe that, logically, when we read Paul's wonderful poetry on the nature of love in I Corinthians 13, we can take this as a description of God's character - in other words, wherever it says "love", we can substitute the word "God".  And if we do this, we find a profound paradox - because God does not demand His own way (verse 5 in NLT, or as the NASB puts it: "love does not seek its own"), and yet God never fails! (I Cor. 13:8)

Somehow - though it may make no sense to human logic - though God does not force His way into being or coerce others to do His will, God still gets everything God wants in the end!  And as Christians who are to be followers of Jesus, I believe that if we align ourselves with this way of being - by taking on the nature of a servant and gaining through losing (Phil. 3:7-8) - we will have aligned ourselves with the will of God and will receive the inheritance of the kingdom of God (Col. 3:23-24) - which is the realm in which, as the Lord's Prayer puts it (Mt. 6:10), God's will is done.  Through kenosis - the self-emptying nature of love - we may become conquerors (Rom. 8:37) - just as Jesus conquered through emptying himself even to the point of death!

To see the truth in the Bible, we cannot deny one side of the many paradoxes it contains - but rather we must see the "radical middle" - the truth that is communicated in between the two seemingly opposing ideas.

There is another Buddhist story that illustrates what I've been trying to get at.  The story goes that a young, single father had a son whom he loved more than anything else in the world.  One day, while he was away, some plunderers came to the father's village and burnt most of it down - including the father's house.  When the father returned, he could not find his son, and mistook one of the burnt corpses for his son's body.  He was completely devastated, and during his mourning he had the body cremated and the ashes put into a silk bag that he kept with himself at all times.  But what he didn't know was that his son was alive - he had been kidnapped by the plunderers!  

Later on, the boy managed to escape and returned home to his father.  But the door of the house was locked, and so the boy knocked.  "Who is it?" the father asked.  "It's me, your son!"  The father had been sitting in the room weeping while holding the bag of ashes, and he said "you wicked boy!  How could you play such a horrible trick on a heartbroken father - go away!"  The boy continued to knock and cry and plead to be let in, but the father continued to rebuke him until finally the son left and never returned.

In "No Death, No Fear", Thich Nhat Hanh tells this story and concludes with this thought:

The Buddha said that if you get caught in one idea and consider it to be “the truth,” then you miss the chance to know the truth. Even if the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will refuse to open your mind. So if you are committed to an idea about truth or to an idea about the conditions necessary for your happiness, be careful. 

Likewise, the medieval German mystic Meister Ekhart once said:

If you want to get at the kernel of something, you must first break the shell. Only then can you enjoy its true benefits. Symbols of reality are not the same as reality itself, so they must be destroyed. Then you will come closer and closer to what truly is. When you finally reach the One, there your soul must remain.

Next Chapter: What is Christian Mysticism?

What "The Jew in the Lotus" Can Teach Christianity

I just finished reading a book called "The Jew in the Lotus", which is the true story of a group of Jews - coming from Orthodox, Reformed, and secular, as well as JUBU (Jewish-Buddhist) traditions - who go to visit the Dalai Lama, as told by Jewish poet Rodger Kamenetz.  The Dalai Lama was interested in learning how Judaism survived in exile for so many centuries, considering that Tibetan Buddhism was now in a similar position after their own holocaust and exile at the hands of the Chinese. It is so interesting to see how, throughout the story, the various Jewish figures in the story learn more about their own tradition through the experience - not only because they are now seeing Judaism through each others' eyes, but through Tibetan Buddhist eyes as well. The author, a secular Jew, comes out of the experience with a deep appreciation for the mystical side of Judaism - which he had never known anything about. And it is incredible to see how accurately he pinpoints a diagnosis of the problems with his own religion - he spends much of the book questioning why so many Jews were leaving their faith for Buddhism in the 60's and 70's, and why Judaism has not survived well in America.

One of the more interesting points in the book for me involved the discussion - prior to meeting the Dalai Lama - of what to call him.  The conventional way to address the Dalai Lama is "His Holiness".  And while some of the members of the group were fine with this, others were uncomfortable with this form of address - they were concerned with "being halakhically correct" (conforming to Jewish law).

The group asks Karma Gelek, the Secretary of Cultural and Religious Affairs, what he thought, and he admitted that there were other titles for the Dalai Lama, but said "if you could say His Holiness, that would be the usual way."

Kamenetz writes:

It wasn’t so much words as their historical resonances. How could Karma Gelek ever understand how Jews felt about “His Holiness,” or the association Jews would make immediately with the pope and from there to the long history of persecution, proselytization, inquisition, and martyrdom? How to explain the peculiar tang of a title like kap gun once it got translated to “saving leader”? When Zalman heard it, he immediately asked, “Are there other forms, not weighted with salvation?” To a Jew living in a Christian world, this was a perfectly understandable reference, but in the ears of a Buddhist monk, Zalman’s question must have sounded puzzling.

However, Karma Gelek did notice the various reactions and retreated on the “His Holiness” front, observing quietly, “If you would say rinpoche, nothing’s wrong.” (Rinpoche, which means precious one, is a general honorific for tulkus.)

But it was too late. Now Zalman Schachter was hot on the case, taking up Blu’s cause as his own—driven too by his curiosity and loving to explain Jews, Judaism, and himself to Karma Gelek, “We would like to say a word in honor—it’s not that we don’t want to honor—it’s like saying we understand, we honor you as a source of teaching and blessing for your adherents. Could we say, great teacher?”

By now, Karma Gelek had become totally flexible. “Yes, yes,” he said, barely audibly.

But Lieberman and Sautman objected. “That’s too low.”

So Zalman raised the ante, “How about illustrious teacher?”

Unfortunately, “illustrious teacher” was not a traditional Tibetan phrase. “Jewel of wisdom” was offered by Michael Sautman, but finally Karma Gelek ended the discussion when he observed that all such names were very formal and that “His Holiness usually doesn’t like formal things.”

I took a walk with Yitz Greenberg after the meeting with Karma Gelek broke. We walked for a while in silence. Something about the whole focus on this tiny point bothered me. It reminded me very strongly of what I didn’t much like about religious Judaism, an obsessive, niggling quality. Or as a young woman learning about Jewish culture had told me once, to her, Judaism is an old man saying no. With Jews so divided into factions, and some of the factions so self-preoccupied and self-obsessed with tiny points of practice and law, how could we reach out to other groups?

I knew that in some ways that same intensity about language was also what I relished and delighted in, in both Jewish religion and the Jewish mind. It had delighted me that morning with Moshe’s and Zalman’s midrash. But when the guidance system failed, Jewish verbal intensity seemed to nosedive, spiraling down into smaller and smaller circles.

Rodger Kamenetz

I loved getting this little glimpse into the paradox of Kamentz' struggle, because in so many ways it mirrors my own.  I love exploring the sacred language of the Bible, and discussing the finer points of language and meaning - but this can so often devolve into obsessive and petty arguments that either seem to have absolutely no relevence to life, or seem to ignore how certain points of view are causing real damage to people (the LGBT issue is a perfect example). 

But what's so fascinating about the story is that as it proceeds, the dialogue with the Dalai Lama ends up helping this diverse group of Jews to learn more about their own religion.  Through seeing their religion through the Dalai Lama's eyes, as well as learning about Buddhism, they end up learning more about the beauty of their own tradition then they ever imagined.

Kamenetz writes about how one of the Rabbis - Rabbi Yitz Greenberg - processed this phenomena:

“All religions,” he said, “not just Judaism, are now being placed in a new situation. At first I thought the culture was forcing us. But I’ve come to believe this pluralism is God’s will. Can you learn to propagate your religion without using stereotypes and negative images of the other? If we can’t, all religions will go down the tubes - and good riddance - because we’re a source of hatred and demolition of other people.”

One thing Yitz had done was demolish my own prejudices about Orthodoxy, at least his brand of it. His Judaism was not an old man saying no, but rather an extremely intelligent and very real engagement with contemporary life.

Other, more fundamentalist Jews, as well as Christians and Muslims, resist pluralism as yet another seduction of contemporary life to be shunned. They view themselves as pious keepers of the faith in a world of sinful secularists.

By contrast, Rabbi Greenberg was finding true piety in dialogue. He told me that afternoon at Thekchen Choeling, “Dialogue is an opportunity to learn the uniqueness and power of the other and then see if I can now reframe my own religion to respect that power, to stop using negative reasons why I’m Jewish. It leaves me no choice but to be a Jew for positive reasons.” Pluralism challenges Jews to discard old stereotypes about themselves and about others.

Later on, Kamenetz says that "[h]is experience was that dialogue with other religions could be deeply clarifying of his own."  (This is an experience I share.) 

It is so fascinating to me that the generous spirit of the Dalai Lama - who invited these Jews to come share their "secret" with the Tibetans - is what opened them up to looking at their own religion with fresh eyes - as if seeing it for the first time. 

After their visit, Kamenetz undertook a quest to give "exit interviews" to Jews who had left the faith for Buddhism.  The insights he gains from this are invaluable in many ways.  He found that many of them were frustrated with the rigid adherence to tradition that was so irrelevant to their current context.  Kamenetz writes of how, after the Holocaust, Orthodox Jews became very suspicious of outside culture and in many ways contributed to a protective withdrawal from the world.  They pushed for a very strict, legalistic form of Judaism that claimed to be the only true form of Judaism (sound familiar, Christians?).
Kamenetz relays a fascinating illustration from one of the Rabbis, Zalman Schachter:

“We’re invested in a tradition so we have a continuity. The best people to invest in tradition are conservative. But the best people to spend it are those willing to take a risk.

“Our treasures - what a fantastic bank account we have grown. The past and the tradition have a vote but can’t have a veto, because we are in unprecedented conditions. Now there’s an understanding emerging that we are an organic part of all species, that religions are the organs of humanity.”

Later, he writes:

Jewish Buddhists felt that the bank account of Judaism had been empty for them when they came to make a withdrawal, whereas they had found real spiritual wealth in Buddhism.

When Kamenetz conducted his "exit interviews", one of the things he found was that most often, they'd never even heard of the teachings of Kabbalah (a mystical tradition of Judaism), which interestingly enough seemed to be the area that the Dalai Lama was most interested in.  Kamenetz speaks of mysticism being a "back door" that was kept secret in Judaism, having been viewed negatively by the status quo of Judaism.  There was a scorn towards Kabbalah because it rejected a literalistic and legalistic attitude towards their scriptures and as a result was seen as very eccentric (hmm, that sounds so familiar to me...).  Meanwhile for Buddhism, mysticism was their front entrance.  Kamenetz writes of the result for these Jews who had left their background for Buddhism:

With their own esoteric teachings inaccessible, most JUBUs grew up with a Judaism heavy on ethnic pride, obsessive about preserving itself, about maintaining Jewish identity at all costs. And Jewish pride, Jewish chauvinism, Jewish particularism - the idea that we are special, a chosen people - seems to contradict the very universalistic prophetic messages Judaism also teaches. Perhaps they wouldn’t put it this way, but if examined closely, it appears that some JUBUs left Judaism because of their Jewish ideals.

On the other side of this problem, Kamenetz sees that "the Reform Jewish strategy pretty much succeeded in assimilating Jews into American life. When JUBUs spoke against Jewish particularism, one could feel that Reform Judaism had succeeded all too well. An ethical ideal of universal justice, freed from the particulars of ritual, left many Jews free to leave the fold. We could be secular, or Buddhist, and still feel connected to these universal values."
In one particular exit interview, Thubten Chodron said, regarding "the Old Testament God", that she "didn’t like his personality. He was vengeful, he had qualities I wouldn’t want to develop, that my parents taught me were wrong. Harming others because they harm the people that you like. Smiting others because they criticize you or worship somebody else. When you’re a kid on the playground, because somebody plays with somebody else, that doesn’t give you the reason to jump in and assault. This kind of jealous, vengeful God - I can’t worship that. I can’t see that as holy, I don’t want to become like that.”

Kamenetz says:

I tried to suggest that “people evolve different conceptions of God” and wondered if “the God and Judaism you rejected is one most Jews would reject also, if it isn’t a very unsophisticated child’s view of Judaism. As we mature, we realize that concepts of God as father, king, or ruler are baby steps toward some greater understanding.”

Chodron answered, “Then they should teach that to people. If there are wider notions of God, that’s what they should teach to the children - not that God is up there watching you and you be good or you’ll get punished.”

Kamenetz diagnoses the problems of his own religion with an ingenious precision, and his diagnosis sounds so similar to the problems I see in Christianity today:

I began to suspect that Jewish identity, as it has evolved in the West today, could be a real barrier to encountering the depths of Judaism. In other words, being Jewish could keep you from being a Jew.

[...]

But after talking to Pemo, Chodron, and Alex Berzin, I was also convinced there was a more fundamental problem: a defensive attitude. Young Jews growing up in America are intellectually curious and they demand a more open-minded approach to spirituality. The questions about God that Chodron had asked should have been answered - I gathered that instead they were ignored or suppressed.

The challenge that the Dalai Lama offered these visiting Jews was to make Judaism more beneficial instead of asking Jews to hold on to tradition out of guilt. Kamenetz writes:

One of the members of the party - Professor Nathan Katz - stated the lesson the Dalai Lama had taught them in terms of communicating the beauty the Jewish traditions had to offer, rather than teaching their people to be on guard all the time - "If you have nothing to offer them, there’s no sense holding on to them. And if you have something to offer them, there’s no reason for them to leave."

In today's religious climate in the West - with millions of the younger generation leaving the church (this has been dubbed the "rise of the nones" - I've written about this here and here, and see this recent article from the Pew Research Center), and with the pluralism that cannot be hid from in the face of the internet age - Christianity could learn much from this story. I highly recommend this book to anyone of any religious background - it is about finding yourself through open and generous dialogue, and that is an important lesson to learn.

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 23: Death

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

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The Death of the Domination System
In the last post, we explored how Jesus' answer to the question of resisting the Domination System was through a complete rejection of its methods of violence - through non-violent resistance.

But to truly understand how we can even be capable of resisting this System, we must understand that Jesus' ultimate answer on how to resist the Domination System was to die to it.  Paul understood this, and wrote in Colossians 2:20 that we must die "with Christ to the elementary principles of the world" and cease to live by its decrees.  And Jesus said we must deny ourselves and take up our cross to follow Him (Mt. 16:24, Lk. 9:23), as well as losing our life for His sake in order to find it (Mt. 16:25, Lk. 9:24).  In the second verse of these passages, when Jesus says that those who seek to save their life will lose it, the original language uses the Greek word peripoiein to speak of making secure.  This literally refers to setting out a boundary or property lines.  And Jesus is saying that by creating walls around ourselves for protection, we are actually shutting ourselves off from life!

By dying to the power of the Domination System, we refuse to give it any hold in our lives - the System loses its power when it ceases to have anything to offer us.  Until we do this, no matter what state we are in - whether it be plenty or want - we will continue to be under the power of the Domination System.  If we have much wealth, our wealth will dominate us as we seek to protect it.  And if we have little wealth, our longing for wealth will dominate us.  Walter Wink illustrates this in "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination":

Those born to privilege and wealth may miss life by having been installed at the center of a universe revolving around their own desires. Others, born to merciless poverty and the contempt of the ruling class, may miss life by never feeling really human at all. If the advantaged must die to their egocentricity, the underprivileged must die to their hopelessness, fatalism, and acquiescence in their own despoiling.  Rationalists may need to die to idolatry of the mind; dominating personalities to their power; proud achievers to their accomplishments.

By taking up the cross freely, Jesus and his followers deny the power behind empire’s most potent threat, turning it from an instrument of domination into an instrument of liberation.  Only by facing this great fear does one overcome all terror.

The death we must experience is a total death - both of our grasping desires, and of the illegitimate authority the Domination System claims over us.  The first could be called a death of the privatized ego, and the second a death of the superego.  Without a death of the superego, the death of the privatized ego may simply mask the fact that we are a cog in the wheel of the Domination System - the false self that is imposed on us by the Powers.

In Galatians 2:19-20, Paul actually uses the word translated to the Latin "ego" for "I" throughout the passage, so that it could be translated like so:

For through the Law my ego died to the Law, so that I might live to God.  My ego has been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer my ego who lives, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

This shows that in order to live in Christ, we must no longer identify ourselves through ego of any form, but must identify ourselves through the self-emptying True Self that is Christ - the outward focus of unconditional love which empties itself as a servant (Phil. 2:7).

Philippians 2:6-8 shows us that subjugation to Jesus the king means the end of all subjugation - all forms of domination must go!  Christ does not make all things subject to himself through coercion, but through service, and when they fall under his dominion they enter into this same mode of service.

We must even be freed from the superego of religiosity - for so often the outward focus of legalism hides our own insistence on my will (rather than thy will), which only results in a subconscious condemnation.  And legalism distorts the goodness of God's creation.

But the wisdom of God which was made flesh in Jesus must even be made known to the church and the authorities of the heavenly realms (see Eph. 3:10).  As Jesus shows us in Matthew 21:31, sometimes the sinners enter the kingdom before the piously religious.

This shows us that to understand grace, we must actually face our own evil - so much religious thought holds that the true religious experience involves being identified as good by virtue of belonging to the right side.  But this ends up feeding into the scapegoating mechanism as we then find ourselves in need of an outlet for our repressed feelings of fear, anger, greed, lust, and hatred.  But by experiencing the release that comes from knowing we are sinners but are still accepted by God’s unconditional love, we are freed to pour out this same love and acceptance into the world without fear.

The ego which must die is so beautifully explained by Thomas Merton's concept of "False Self", which appears in "New Seeds of Contemplation".  Merton describes the False Self as that which occurs when we turn everything inward in service to ourselves. We make an idol out of ourselves, and then we believe we can find fulfillment through things - creating an idol out of the good things God has created. This does not render them evil - they are still good because God created them that way. But in our misuse of the good gifts God has given us, we pervert them. We also have a tendency - when we do this - to identify ourselves through those idols. We define ourselves by what we wear, what we listen to, or a set of opinions (such as a political identity). We are not those things, though we pretend that we are for a time. That is why Merton calls it a "False Self" - it is nothing, but we treat it like it's something.  Merton describes this concept a bit more in these passages:

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love— outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between "things" and "God" as if God were another "thing" and as if His creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God. This is an entirely new perspective which many sincerely moral and ascetic minds fail utterly to see. There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him. The obstacle is in our "self", that is to say in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will. It is when we refer all things to this outward and false "self" that we alienate ourselves from reality and from God. It is then the false self that is our god, and we love everything for the sake of this self. We use all things, so to speak, for the worship of this idol which is our imaginary self. In so doing we pervert and corrupt things, or rather we turn our relationship to them into a corrupt and sinful relationship. We do not thereby make them evil, but we use them to increase our attachment to our illusory self.

Later on, Merton writes about the contrasting "True Self".  The "True Self" is what God always intended us to be - we were created in His image, and He is a giver and a creator. This is what unconditional love is - it's an outward focus, rather than an inward focus. And when we focus the gifts God has given us outward, then we will be engaging our "True Self".  Merton writes:

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.

Love is my true identity.  Selflessness is my true self.  Love is my true character.  Love is my name.

If, therefore, I do anything or think anything of say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or joy.

If we die to this False Self, the promise of the Gospel of Jesus is that we will be resurrected into new life - and this very event mocks the Domination System itself!  The point of Jesus' resurrection was not merely that a miracle happened - it was that it symbolized the complete defeat of the Domination System in a way that invalidated its power!  Brian McLaren writes in "Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World":

The scandal of Easter was not simply that a supernatural event occurred. Minds in the ancient world weren't divided by the rigid natural-supernatural dualism that forms modern minds. In those days miracles were notable not for defying the laws of nature (a concept that was unknown until recent centuries), but for conveying an unexpected meaning or message through an unusual or unexplainable medium. What was the scandalous meaning conveyed by the resurrection of Jesus?

It was not simply that a dead man was raised. It was who the raised man was. Someone rejected, mocked, condemned, and executed by both the political and religious establishments was raised. A convicted outlaw, troublemaker, and rabble rouser was raised. A condemned blasphemer and lawbreaker was raised. A nonviolent nonconformist who included the outcasts - and therefore became an outcast - was raised. What does that mean about the authoritative institutions that condemned him? What does that mean about his nonconformist message and nonviolent ways?

Belief in the resurrection is a complete denial of the only power the Domination System ever had - and this is the way to overcome all fear, and thus free us to love our enemies without ceasing.

It's time for another break, and in the next post we will explore the antithesis to the Accuser - the Advocate.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?