Category Archives: Theology

Just what is the Bible and how do we use it?

A recent post by Doug Kings  has stirred things up at the  BOFI (Book of Faith Initiative).  BOFI  is an ELCA effort at energizing Bible study, but Kings, a Chicago pastor, is skeptical.

The church does indeed have a Bible problem but it’s not people’s ignorance about it. The question is whether the church can let the Bible be what it is: the collected thoughts of a particular ancient people, containing their prejudices and ignorance but also some genuinely profound insight into living with God and with one another in our paradoxical world of beauty and pain, purpose and confusion.

The sexuality task force, with commendable candor, admitted the ELCA lacks a basic consensus on how to read the Bible. Without such a consensus, we will continue to flail about, squabbling among ourselves, uncertain of our mission. How the Bible should be read today is not obvious.

As one who has taught adult Bible education in my own parish for a number of years, I share Kings’ critique of the church’s ambivalent attitude towards the institution of scripture.  Kings suggests the ELCA seminaries teach the historical critical method, but whisper on the way out, but don’t tell anyone.  The “Word of God” is understood as the “words of God” without correction.

I belong to a men’s group at my present parish consisting of retired, mostly professional men with long histories in the church.  Nearly a quarter are retired clergy.  Yet, I bite my tongue at the misconceptions: John the apostle was the same person as John the evangelist; the same for Matthew; 2nd Peter’s comment about the transfiguration proves that it was a historical event (after all, Peter was there!); the consistency of the synoptics proves their truth.  And these all just at yesterday’s meeting!

Yet, I challenge only selectively.

Wellhausen, the 19th century scholar most associated with the Documentary Hypothesis (JEPD) and the historical critical method, supposedly stopped teaching it near the end of his career because it didn’t lift up the faith of his students but actually detracted from it.  He didn’t reject the accuracy of the approach but the utility of it.  So too is the church’s ambivalence and my silence in the face of the misconceptions of my men’s group. 

Kings suggests that we simply need to be honest about what the Bible is and especially what it is not:

Modern scholarship has actually discovered a great deal about the Bible but much of it is ignored because it doesn’t tell us what we want to hear. Modern biblical study’s totally unsurprising conclusion is that the Bible is theology, through and through. Thus, it isn’t history, biology, geology, astronomy, economics, political science, psychology or any of the other contemporary subjects which so fascinate us and about which we have so many questions. For answers to them, we must look elsewhere.

He is right, of course, but the difficulty lies in challenging inbred assumptions without seeming to question faith.

Just a Little Time


From The Union for Reform Judaism, “Ten Minutes of Torah”

This week’s parashah opens with detailed guidelines regarding the holiness of priests and sacrifices. The text places the emphasis on avoiding the desecration of sacred space by insuring the sacredness of the people and offerings entering that space (Leviticus 21:1–22:23). Later, the discussion shifts from the sacredness of space to the sacredness of time (Leviticus 23:1–44).

It is this shift from space to time that separated the Jewish community of the Bible from the other communities in which they communed. It is easy to place a fence around sacred spaces and wall them off from the infectious impurity of the outside world. It is much more challenging to wall off time and set it aside as sacred. This, I believe, is the greatest gift that Judaism brings to the world of religion.

While the focus in Leviticus may be on the priestly obligations during these sacred moments, in a world where we are a “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6) the obligations and opportunities fall to us. In Leviticus 23, we are all included in the Revelation about these sacred days. Each day brings its own special collection of tasks and benefits. Each day becomes an obligation for every Jew.

Here is the entry way into Jewish life for the post-Exodus Jew. On a regular cycle, we are asked to come into the presence of God and share of our world. Through the sacrifice of goods and, especially, time, we are taught to give—and give freely. It is through this sacred giving that we establish a sacred community in this world. Today, in a world where time is a very precious commodity, how much more important is the opportunity to give of that which is most precious to us for the service of God.

Maybe that is the truest test of our understanding of this parashah today. If we are truly engaged in the give and take with God and the divine relationship is central in our lives, then setting aside precious time for sacred relationship is the pathway to that goal. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel knew this best when he wrote his book, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

Time is most precious, in many cases more important than money. Often it is easier to write the check than volunteer the time. Maybe our portion, like the prophets of old, simply asks us to give a little time for sacred causes. As Torah teaches, “it is not in the heavens . . .” (Deuteronomy 30:12). Time is in our hands.

Rabbi David A. Lipper is spiritual leader of Temple Israel in Akron, Ohio and is an avid student of Torah.

It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is?

Bono – Guest Op-Ed piece in NY Times

I AM in Midtown Manhattan, where drivers still play their car horns as if they were musical instruments and shouting in restaurants is sport.
I am a long way from the warm breeze of voices I heard a week ago on Easter Sunday.

“Glorify your name,” the island women sang, as they swayed in a cut sandstone church. I was overwhelmed by a riot of color, an emotional swell that carried me to sea.

Christianity, it turns out, has a rhythm — and it crescendos this time of year. The rumba of Carnival gives way to the slow march of Lent, then to the staccato hymnals of the Easter parade. From revelry to reverie. After 40 days in the desert, sort of …

Carnival — rock stars are good at that.

“Carne” is flesh; “Carne-val,” its goodbye party. I’ve been to many. Brazilians say they’ve done it longest; they certainly do it best. You can’t help but contract the fever. You’ve got no choice but to join the ravers as they swell up the streets bursting like the banks of a river in a flood of fun set to rhythm. This is a Joy that cannot be conjured. This is life force. This is the heart full and spilling over with gratitude. The choice is yours …

It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up … self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.

Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.

It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.

Last Sunday, the choirmaster was jumping out of his skin … stormy then still, playful then tender, on the most upright of pianos and melodies. He sang his invocations in a beautiful oaken tenor with a freckle-faced boy at his side playing conga and tambourine as if it was a full drum kit. The parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.

I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”

Well, yes. It is us.

Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates … the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. We used to say that all we wanted for the rest of the world was what we had for ourselves. Then we found out that if every living soul on the planet had a fridge and a house and an S.U.V., we would choke on our own exhaust.

Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us.

A few weeks ago I was in Washington when news arrived of proposed cuts to the president’s aid budget. People said that it was going to be hard to fulfill promises to those who live in dire circumstances such a long way away when there is so much hardship in the United States. And there is.

But I read recently that Americans are taking up public service in greater numbers because they are short on money to give. And, following a successful bipartisan Senate vote, word is that Congress will restore the money that had been cut from the aid budget — a refusal to abandon those who would pay such a high price for a crisis not of their making. In the roughest of times, people show who they are.

Your soul.

So much of the discussion today is about value, not values. Aid well spent can be an example of both, values and value for money. Providing AIDS medication to just under four million people, putting in place modest measures to improve maternal health, eradicating killer pests like malaria and rotoviruses — all these provide a leg up on the climb to self-sufficiency, all these can help us make friends in a world quick to enmity. It’s not alms, it’s investment. It’s not charity, it’s justice.

Strangely, as we file out of the small stone church into the cruel sun, I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way.

Not all soul music comes from the church.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times. Click here for the NY Times link.