• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

Not religious, not spiritual, not atheist—what’s left?

By Kate Blanchard, Religion Dispatches

I could very much relate to the recent NPR story about a Christian minister losing her faith. Like her, I once counted myself among the über-faithful but then “fell away” in my twenties. Despite marrying a clergyman and spending lots of time in theological school, I never made it back to the one true way.

But there is a major difference in my story and this minister’s story, which is that she has embraced the name “atheist,” while I cannot bring myself to do so.

This reluctance is not because I have anything obvious to lose. Being an atheist would not cause any new familial strife; and unlike the pastorate, my career does not demand any particular religious orthodoxy. The major issue for me is an aversion to militant secularism, akin to some people’s aversion to “organized religion.” The new atheism, of the sort that has celebrities, conventions, media outlets, or protest marches, is not simply about doubting the existence of traditional deities. It is more often about intellectual elitism, and sometimes even outright racism toward people whom Christopher Hitchens referred to as “semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions.” Orthodox secularism, it seems, is about feeling superior to those poor, deluded souls who still cling to religion—that weird little psycho-social appendix left over from some earlier stage in human evolution.

Other common categories don’t seem to fit well either. The ever-popular “spiritual but not religious” implies a particular type of interior life—one grounded in emotion and experience more than cognition. A Jewish friend of mine calls herself “religious but not spiritual,” but this doesn’t seem to work as well in a Protestant framework, where individual faith is emphasized over ethnicity or outward traditions. The “Emerging Church” is a possible refuge, but it still strikes me as vaguely imperialistic; and try as I might, I simply don’t see myself among the so-called “rise of the nones.” 

Thus, for folks who are unorthodox but aren’t atheists, who care about metaphysics but who aren’t mystics, perhaps the good old-fashioned term “heretic” will satisfy. The kind of heresy I’m talking about here is what Thomas Aquinas defined as “restricting belief to certain points of Christ’s doctrine [as determined by the Roman Catholic hierarchy] selected and fashioned at pleasure.” (I would question only the implication that heretics are unique in “selecting and fashioning” their beliefs “at pleasure.”)

I find this name appealing for multiple reasons, not least of which is that it allows me to claim some connection to Christianity. The more I’ve learned about the history of Christianity, the more I’ve come to accept its ongoing diversity. The earliest Christians, as evidenced by both the New Testament and ancient theological writings, did not agree on the nature of Jesus or his work. In the fourth and later centuries, Christians made valiant (if misguided) attempts to unify their beliefs and practices by stamping out what they saw as errors; but Jesus people haven’t agreed since then either, despite centuries of the religious elite claiming otherwise.

Embracing heresy is a way of asserting my place—however tenuous—in this ancient tradition, while acknowledging that most of what I think and do will not pass creedal litmus tests. In a religion of more than two billion adherents, this is hardly a surprise.

I also like “heretic” because it is different, at least in my mind, than secularism, atheism, or “none.” Heresy implies not rejection of or indifference toward religion and its objects, but rather curiosity and engagement. Just because I can’t see or make sense of God doesn’t mean I don’t want to, or that I hate believers; on the contrary, I respect—with fear and trembling—the powerful role that religious experience plays in the lives most humans. Heresy demands a particular religious vocabulary, though it also allows for unabashed syncretism (call it a salad bar if you must). I can be what one of my students called a “Chreaster” who looks to the Daodejing for wisdom, who reads my child Bible stories but also Zen parables, a biography of Muhammad, and Greek myths.

Yes, acknowledging our heresy might be just the thing for non-religious non-atheists. It’s certainly better than opting out altogether, ceding the sacred turf to those lucky enough to have found answers to all their questions. Indeed, we may even be doing them a favor. After all, where would orthodoxy be without heresy to remind it of what it’s not?

Religion Dispatches May 10, 2012

*************************

Kate Blanchard is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Alma College in central Michigan. She is the author of The Protestant Ethic or The Spirit of Capitalism: Christians, Freedom, and Free Markets (Cascade 2010).

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Catherine Schmidt, Georgia State University

This is part III of a IV part series exploring popular culture depictions of Mary Magdalene.  In part I, we looked at a brief history of pre-Vatican II portrayals of Mary.  Part II discussed the history of Vatican II in relation to Mary and how the change in Church thinking did little to how Mary was portrayed in popular culture as seen in Lady Gaga’s music video “Judas.”  Part III will build on the post-Vatican II portrayals with the musical film Jesus Christ Superstar. 

In stark contrast to DeMille’s and Lady Gaga’s Mary is the Mary that is portrayed in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical turned film Jesus Christ Superstar.  Unlike the other two Marys discussed, Webber and Rice’s Mary is not dressed in elaborate costumes.  As well, she is without makeup and her hair is plain.  The one similarity in dress is the jewelry she wears.  In Jesus Christ Superstar, the only differentiating feature from Mary to the other women is that she has both a necklace and earrings on during her two most prominent songs.  Another stark difference is that this Mary is actually more conservatively dressed compared to the other women in the cast.  Where some women are dressed showing plenty of skin (as can be expected for a film made in the 1970s), Mary is dressed in a long tunic.  However, just because she is dressed more conservatively—a term I will use loosely since Mary’s dress is low-cut—does not mean her character is no longer part of the ancient “mud-slinging job.” 

Jesus Christ Superstar was first produced as an album in 1970 just after the Second Vatican Council.  One year later it came to Broadway and received a great reception.  In 1973 it was made into a film and, thus, allowed more than just those able to make it to either New York or London (where it was also now being performed) to see the production.[1]  The musical continues to be produced all over the world and the film has been re-adapted two times, with a third scheduled for release in 2014.[2]  Though the writing of the musical comes at the heels of Vatican II, Webber and Rice apparently did not get the memo about Mary.  Once again, Mary is confused with other women in the Bible and she is still represented as a prostitute.  During the song “What’s the Buzz” Mary starts to wash Jesus’ head and feet with oils.  Then, Judas interrupts the song with his own titled “Strange Thing Mystifying.”  He does not explicitly call Mary a prostitute, but it can been easily inferred when Judas sings “…a man like you can waste his time on women of her kind…” and later “it’s not that I object to her profession, but she doesn’t fit in well with what you teach and say.”  Jesus responds by defending Mary and verbally throws stones at Judas.  He screams/sings “If your slate is clean, then you can throw stones.   If your slate is not, then leave her alone!”  In this one scene, Mary has been combined with three different women in the New Testament, none of which are actually Mary Magdalene.  Mary washing Jesus occurs a second time (possibly to mirror the two separate times different women anoint Jesus’ feet in the New Testament) during her song “Everything’s Alright.”  In this song, Mary tries to calm and seduce Jesus.  Her hands are strategically placed throughout the song to show the intimacy she has for Jesus.  Yet again, Judas interrupts Mary anointing Jesus arguing that the money used for the ointment could have been used to feed the poor (a scene lifted straight from John 12:1-8, except that the Mary in these verses was actually Mary of Bethany and not Mary Magdalene). 

In Mary’s most famous song in the musical, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” the audience learns more about her past.  Unlike The King of Kings in which Judas was her best client or “Judas” in which she is in love with Judas, in Jesus Christ Superstar Mary is in love with Jesus himself.  She laments “I don’t know how to take this.   I don’t see why he moves me.   He’s a man.  He’s just a man.   And I’ve had so many men before in very many ways.   He’s just one more.”  Later in the song she admits that she would not know how to respond if he loved her back.  She would be “lost,” “frightened,” and she would “turn [her] head” despite that she “want[s] him so” and “love[s] him so.”  It has been argued that this song is “no distanced reverence for a demi-god but rather a distressed, emotional entanglement with a fellow human-being.”[3]  By having Mary love Jesus as any woman may love a man, the story becomes more relatable to the audience.  Add Judas, who believes they are wrong for each other and should not be seen together, and it becomes a soap opera of biblical times. 

DeMille was not the only director that looked at popular Christian art and legends for inspiration.  Webber and Rice relied heavily on “conflated and erroneous biblical interpretations,” as well as prevalent art and legends.[4]  In fact, the scene of the last supper, the disciples and Jesus make a point of copying the body positions in Leonardo Di Vinci’s famous masterpiece.  The art that is imitated into the film reinforces the concepts they depict to the audience and, unfortunately, many in the audience believe the images are accurate and not fabrications of the artists’ minds.  If Mary is continually portrayed as a prostitute, audiences will believe she was one, even if academia states otherwise.  Film, especially, has great power in reinforcing the pre-conceived notions of Mary’s image.  As well, what the audience sees in film (especially if the same image is repeated in different films) often over-shadows people’s own interpretations of people and events represented in a film.[5] 

The ending to Jesus Christ Superstar is quite unsettling.  After the death of Jesus, there is no resurrection scene.  The movie ends with the cast packing up the set and loading onto the bus the movie opened with.  With no resurrection scene, Mary is unable to be the first to see the risen Jesus, and thus, unable to be the first to spread the message of his resurrection.  The only Mary the audience is aware of in this musical/film is that of a prostitute in love with Jesus.  

Bart Ehrman argues that because Mary was the first to witness and proclaim the resurrection, she started Christianity.  He stated that if the resurrection did historically happen[6], Mary is far more important than how she is depicted currently (and historically).  His argument is based on the idea that: 

The Christian religion is founded on the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead.  And it appears virtually certain that it was Mary Magdalene of all people, an otherwise unknown Galilean Jewish woman of means, who first propounded this belief.  It is not at all farfetched to claim that Mary was the founder of Christianity.[7]

Had it not been for Mary, Christianity may never have started, according to this argument.  Christianity needed someone to announce that Jesus had risen.  And since she was the first to make such an announcement, Mary started Christianity.[8]  By omitting this scene in Jesus Christ Superstar, Mary’s importance vanishes, and she is just another woman around Jesus. 

We will finish this series with Part IV of that will discuss The Da Vinci Code and concluding remarks.  According toThe Da Vinci Code, Mary knew how to love Jesus.

 ***************

Author’s Bio

Catherine Schmidt is an associate editor of Religion Nerd.  Catherine earned her BA in Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2005) and her MA in Religious Studies at Georgia State University (2012).  She has presented her work at academic conferences in the local, regional, and national level.  Catherine’s interest range include: religion and popular culture, women and religion, Mary Magdalene, and early Christian history.  She hopes in the future to pursue her PhD where she can combine her many interests. 

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Mary E. Hunt, Religion Dispatches

When it comes to the Vatican’s crackdown on women religious, I believe it’s time to declare that for the purpose of this struggle: we are all nuns.

The mandate by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to reform the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) via the appointment of an Archbishop Delegate to bring the nuns back in line—below and behind the bishops—has outraged those who respect its rich legacy.

If you can spell Catholic, you are probably asking: how dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world? How dare the very men who preside over a Church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?

While this story is focused on nuns, it doesn’t stop there. Flowery medieval rhetoric by the Vatican about the nuns’ “special place in the Church,” and the fiction that religious women have “full participation in all aspects of the Church’s life” (while ordination is still for men only—come on!) make the dictum especially pernicious. 

But it’s really about all of the laity, especially women, who see the world in terms of needs we can fulfill, not power we can hold; of radical equality, not hierarchy; of the many, not the few.

Delicate Souls

So, what happened?

Apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back was the collaboration of the Catholic social justice lobby NETWORK, founded forty years ago by 47 nuns from two dozen communities, and the Catholic Hospital Association in supporting the Obama health care plan.

More progressive feminist Catholics, myself included, rued the fact that the plan did not cover the full spectrum of reproductive health care—including abortion. Nevertheless, the pragmatic nuns offered bona fide Catholic support for the proposal as written, over and against the US bishops who, to this writing, continue to oppose the legislation because it includes coverage for contraception without enough exemptions to satisfy them.

The fact that President Barack Obama and members of Congress took the nuns to be normatively Catholic—or at least as Catholic as the bishops—was just more than the delicate souls in Rome could stand.

This latest mandate to reform the LCWR—indeed to put it out of business—has been in the works for years. In a process that began in 2008, the “doctrinal assessment,” as it is known, was aimed at investigating the “serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life.” In the face of wars in several parts of the world, ecological crises throughout the planet, and severe economic injustice, it is morally embarrassing that the Vatican chooses to spend its time on such trivia. But given that the result is aimed at some of the very people whose lives are dedicated to peace making, Earth enhancement, and economic sharing, it is worth clarifying what is at stake.

The crux of the matter, as it were, is that most of the nuns, like many Catholics, have matured beyond the Vatican’s imaginings. The notion that postmodern Catholics assent to “the doctrine of the faith that has been revealed by God in Jesus Christ, presented in written form in the divinely inspired Scriptures, and handed on in the Apostolic Tradition under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium,” (or, simply, the fathers know best) is simply ludicrous. As one observer asked me, “What Bible do they read?”

The truth is, most Catholics no longer look to Rome for guidance on our personal lives, or anyone else’s. Nor do we live within the narrow confines of a cultic Christianity, or, as women, accept male leadership and priestly ministry as if theirs were God-given and ours were not. We appreciate the complexity of these matters and strive to create forums in which to listen, discuss, discern, and pray.

In short, our ways of being are as different from the Vatican’s as are our views.

The Vatican knows this, is not pleased, but can’t do much about it. It is trying to put LCWR in the untenable position of having its every conference, publication, and public utterance subject to episcopal veto. The real aim, in my reading of the situation, is to replace LCWR with the Council of Major Superiors of Women (CMSW), a group of conservative, habit-wearing, bishop-obeying nuns that Rome has been cultivating all along. That group’s blueprint for religious life is expressed in The Foundations of Religious Life: Revisiting the Vision, a volume that reads like Vatican officials wrote it. Perhaps they did. Although what is more disturbing is that the Vatican has set women up against one another. Conservative women religious collaborated on the Apostolic Visitation and will be appointed to the Archbishop Delegate’s Advisory Team.

The effort to rein in LCWR is meant as much to scare the rest of us into line as to corral the nuns. I can say with confidence that it won’t work.

Roman Catholic Church history is unfolding before our eyes. The difference these days is that tactics Rome employs are transparent. Just as Archbishop William E. Lori was recently rewarded for his work on contraception and “religious liberty” by being named bishop of Baltimore (and will likely become a cardinal soon) we can predict that Archbishop Delegate Peter Sartain of Seattle who is doing this work on behalf of Rome has already had his head measured for a new hat.

Catholics schooled in the ways of justice—largely by the nuns—recoil at the power play this mandate represents. Three things are especially repugnant. First, there is no real discussion. The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal William Levada asserts that “the first step in the implementation of the findings” is a personal meeting “in a spirit of mutual respect and collaboration.” This is rather fanciful since the LCWR leaders who received the document were not at all sure it was coming. They went to Rome with the intention of engaging in dialogue, not being presented with a fait accompli. 

Second, this move seems like an effort to cut off the head of lay people in the Church, beginning with the nuns. The Vatican acknowledges, “the influence the LCWR exercises on religious Congregations in other parts of the world.” Add to that its political influence in the US and the hydra that is LCWR was ripe for beheading.

I insist on the larger lay component of this chapter in church history because groups like Women-Church Convergence and Catholic Organizations for Renewal represent far more progressive theo-politics than LCWR. Because those groups and others like them are canonically independent of the Vatican they simply can’t be touched, but they are no less Catholic. LCWR was punished for associating with such groups, including Women’s Ordination Conference, New Ways Ministry, and others of “radical feminism” of my intimate acquaintance. Efforts to squelch LCWR are simultaneously efforts to discredit those groups.

And finally, there’s the current “war on women,” with Catholic bishops leading the charge. In the U.S., it is manifest in the skirmishes around reproductive rights. Young and poor women suffer greatly, but all women are implicated in these policy conflicts. Around the world, we find the Vatican successfully making alliances with other religious fundamentalists to prevent UN-based consensus on women’s reproductive health care. Casualties are many among poor and young women, the very ones the nuns would protect. So it is no surprise that the same bellicose ways operate within the kyriarchal church itself.

The question is how to stop the cycle of violence, how to refuse to cooperate in structures that oppress, how to “engage impasse” as some of the most creative nuns have tried to do.

LCWR will find its way with a great deal of support and solidarity from the rest of us lay Catholics and those clergymen who are able to distance themselves from the hierarchy. Likewise if the Apostolic Visitation results are similar to the LCWR debacle, I predict that the individual communities will also figure out strategies for moving forward.

I am less sure that the Vatican will recover.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Catherine Schmidt, Georgia State University

In part one of this series, we looked at how Mary Magdalene was depicted in popular culture prior to Vatican II. This second installment will discuss both the history of Vatican II in relation to Mary and Lady Gaga’s interpretation of Mary in her music video for her son “Judas”. 

In the 1960s the Catholic Church held a council to essentially modernize the Catholic Church. This was the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II. One of the many things done was the changing of the suggested readings for Mary’s saint day. No longer did the readings include the Biblical verses that Pope Gregory I attributed to Mary, making her a prostitute in the eyes of the church. The verses suggested would now be verses to highlight her greatest biblical achievement: being the first to see the resurrected Jesus. After almost fourteen hundred years, Mary would no longer be thought of as a prostitute, sinner, or repentant whore, right? Unfortunately, not quite. Just because her designation on a calendar was changed by the Catholic Church, it did not change fourteen hundred years of thinking.  Due to all the depictions of Mary as a prostitute in pieces of art, theater, novels, sermons, and film, the “error was so firmly entrenched in Western thought”[1] and it would take more than an official change in Catholic Church thinking to change Mary’s reputation.  According to some scholars, even after Vatican II, many Catholics were unaware, until The Da Vinci Code in 2003, that Mary was not a prostitute. Since American popular culture continued to portray her as such, the views of her stayed the same in the public eye.[2] Even after the novel and film The Da Vinci Code, Mary continues to be portrayed as a prostitute. Mary’s depiction in The Da Vinci Code will be discussed in Part 4 of this series. 

On May 5, 2011, popular culture icon Lady Gaga released the music video for her song “Judas” from her album Born this Way. In the music video, Lady Gaga plays the role of a modern day Mary who is a member of a motorcycle gang. Though Lady Gaga states she is a Catholic, the way she represents Mary both lyrically and visually in the video shows that she does not pay close attention to scripture. As with pre-Vatican II artistic renderings, Lady Gaga’s Mary is still portrayed as a “fame hooker, prostitute, [and] wench.”[3] Though unlike The King of Kings (see Part 1 of 4) in which Judas is only Mary’s favorite client, the lyrics and music video for the song argue that Mary was in love with Judas with the chorus repeating the line “I’m in love with Judas, Judas!” 

Throughout the music video, Lady Gaga’s Mary is dressed very provocatively, which can be expected from something produced by Lady Gaga.  Her Mary goes through several different costume changes.  There are three interesting outfits that I will comment on.  The first is the very first image we see of Lady Gaga as Mary.  In the opening scene of the video, Mary is riding on the back of a motorcycle holding on to Jesus.  While the other disciples have their names written on the back of their leather jackets, the viewer knows this is Jesus because of his crown of golden thorns he is wearing.  The visual is reinforced with the lyrics “a king with no crown, king with no crown.”  Mary, likewise, has a crown but it is made of jewels.  Here, Lady Gaga is suggesting that Mary is Jesus’ queen. The second interesting outfit is from one of the many dancing scenes in the video. The outfit is a red bikini (the bikini not being the unusual aspect of a Lady Gaga video) with gold crosses on the breasts. Attached to the lower portion of the bikini is a train. This train brings back images of Mary’s cape from the opening scenes in The King of Kings. In an online article responding to the music video, Ed Masley stated: 

This isn’t the first time an artist has turned to the Bible for metaphors, of course.  But [Lady] Gaga dances in her underwear, so it probably seems more sacrilegious than when someone like Bob Dylan does it, even though the central theme of both the lyrics and the video is humanity’s inner struggle to choose virtue over vice, as represented here by Jesus over Judas.[4] 

Lady Gaga’s last outfit of the video has her dressed in a large, elaborate white gown.  She is again suggesting that Mary is the bride of Jesus by wearing what looks like a wedding dress.  As well, Lady Gaga, like Pope Gregory I, combines the many women of the New Testament in her music video into one Mary.  Song lyrics include “I wash his feet with my hair if he needs” and there is a scene where Mary washes Jesus’ feet—as well as Judas’ which is unique to Lady Gaga.  Something that is not depicted incorrectly in The King of Kings, but is in this music video, is Mary being stoned at the very end of the video (in reference to the unnamed sinful woman that Jesus saves from being stoned.  In Gaga’s video, Jesus does not arrive in time to save this woman).  

It is as if Vatican II never happened in Lady Gaga’s world.  Mary is still confused with other women in the New Testament.  To go even further, Lady Gaga’s Mary, unlike many other depictions of Mary, is not the repentant sinner.  At one point in the song she sings “in the most Biblical sense, I am beyond repentance.  Fame hooker, prostitute, wench” and while “Jesus is [her] virtue.  Judas is the demon [she] clings to.”  Mary has not been freed of her demons by Jesus nor is she remorseful of her past.  Lady Gaga’s video/lyrical depiction of Mary consequently allows the misrepresentation and “mud-slinging job” to live on for another generation. Yet another generation, even after the Catholic Church no longer supports the same opinion officially, sees Mary portrayed this way and believes it is true. “Seeing engages us in the activity of the transmission of knowledge. Knowledge is power. Images have power, and an essential part of that power is their ability to communicate authority and reality.”[5]  Since the Mary in Lady Gaga’s video is what audiences expect Mary to be (that is confused with other women in the New Testament, and not dressed in a bikini) it becomes their reality of what Mary should be. 

Lady Gaga’s representation of Mary is not that of a powerful woman. The video suggests that her stamp in history is that of a whore in love with both Jesus and Judas. Varying interpretations of Mary are not only due to Pope Gregory I’s sermon, but also the lack of canonical information on her. Ingrid Maisch argued that many interpreters of Mary are “eager to describe her significance, but they believe that the New Testament evidence yields too little information; hence the evidence is ‘enhanced’ by making the connection to other women…The confused picture is ‘used’ as a means of pursuing various ends.”[6] Mary continues to be marginalized and demeaned even forty-two years after Vatican II. 

Stay tuned for Part 3 of the 4 part article that will build even further the myth of Mary’s reputation. Jesus Christ Superstar will be discussed that adds an extra element of Mary’s sexual love of Jesus.

****************

Author’s Bio

Catherine Schmidt is an associate editor of Religion Nerd.  Catherine earned her BA in Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2005) and her MA in Religious Studies at Georgia State University (2012).  She has presented her work at academic conferences in the local, regional, and national level.  Catherine’s interest range include: religion and popular culture, women and religion, Mary Magdalene, and early Christian history.  She hopes in the future to pursue her PhD where she can combine her many interests. 

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

One of the dangers in reporting on the Republican presidential primaries, and now the looming presidential election season, is that national issues and agendas drown out any real connection to more local issues and concerns. I was reminded of this again last week as I drove through heavily wooded back roads of Alabama, and saw signage on trees relating to the primary election they held in back mid-March. Over and over again, I saw the name: Roy Moore. 

It was a familiar name but it took a moment to recall why. Roy Moore was elected as the Alabama State Supreme Court Justice in 2000. He infamously arranged to have a two-ton granite display of the Ten Commandments placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building the next year. He did this in the middle of the night on July 31, 2001, without consulting the other Supreme Court justices. Moore was ordered by a US District Court to remove the monument and refused to do so. His eight colleagues overruled him, and the Ten Commandments monument was removed from the rotunda and taken on a nationwide fund-raising tour. Meanwhile, Alabama’s Judicial Ethics panel voted unanimously to remove Moore from his position on November 13, 2003. 

Moore ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for state governor in 2006, losing by a 2 to 1 majority to the incumbent governor, Bob Riley. He tried again in 2010, but came in fourth with only 19% of the Republican vote. In 2011, Moore formed an exploratory committee to consider a run for the White House, but decided the odds were long, even by his risk taker’s standards. 

And now Moore is back, running for his old job as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. And while he has promised not to try to restore the monument, his views on the very tenuous separation between the Christian religion and the southern states is very clear. 

This time, Moore won his bid, and so now he will be on the ballot as the Republican candidate for State Supreme Court Justice in November. Moore has indicated that he does not wish to pick this fight a second time, and that the centerpiece of his understanding of judicial responsibility is how to adjudicate fairly and efficiently in a time of massive cuts in state spending in all social sectors, but especially for courts and policing. 

Fair enough, but his re-election website  tells a very different story, a story that makes the Ten Commandments monument, the subsequent debate it generated, and his eventual dismissal all central to his entire judicial philosophy. Moore’s own providential career, as he suggests quite clearly, has always hinged on the Ten Commandments. As the six-and-one-half minute video on his website makes clear, when God brought his future wife into his life in 1985, and shortly after they married, she was given the responsibility for decorating their new home. She placed a copy of the Ten Commandments prominently on the wall of that home. 

Later, when Moore took up his duties as Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice, he elected to bring that wall hanging into his courthouse. That decision prompted an immediate push-back from the ACLU, and the video suggests that this was what inspired Moore to up the ante by placing a much larger display in the rotunda in a manner that would be literally impossible to miss. His martyrdom to the cause of an inseparable church and state serves, he suggests, as “a reminder of our nation’s Godly heritage,” as well as of “the divine foundation of this nation.” Moore himself points to the real unity of his judicial career as a “long battle to recognize the sovereignty of God,” and to call the country back to its true identity as “one nation under God.” It is striking that the very next phrase of that pledge of allegiance—”indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”—is omitted from the video on his website. 

It really almost has to be that way. For Roy Moore is divisive, intentionally so. And he speaks far more of God and religious rights than he does of liberty and justice for the non-Christian citizens in our midst. That seems a distinctly backward set of priorities for the chief justice in any state to possess in the twenty-first century. 

Make no mistake about this; this is a big election with real legal and cultural and religious consequence. And it serves as a reminder of why we need to pay attention to more than just the presidential entries on the ballots, come November.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Catherine Schmidt, Georgia State University 

There is something about Mary…Magdalene that is.  She is one of the few New Testament women (or even characters for that matter) that continues to fascinate the public; and yet, we know so very little about her.  Because we know so little, it leads some people to create stories of what they think she was like.  Depending on the time and place, she is different things for different people.  Sometimes she is a repentant whore while other times she is the lover—or even wife—of Jesus Christ.  

Many of these depictions of Mary Magdalene actually diminish her memory.  Mary, according to leading feminist scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether, was an unfortunate recipient of a “mud-slinging job” in order for her authority to be questioned by the early Catholic Church.[1]  The Catholic Church could then use Mary as an excuse to keep women from power.  The American popular culture takes this marginalization and runs with it.  Numerous forms of popular media portray Mary in a diminished role and so it is harder to correct the minds of the public.  

According to Richard Santana and Gregory Erickson, America is a “biblical” culture that does not actually read the Bible.  They argued that American popular culture and popular religion have been heavily influenced and impacted by religiously themed books—as well as anything else visual.[2]  This article is part of a four part series that will examine how Mary’s role is diminished within popular culture through her sexuality, and how that image then affects women’s role in Christianity.  

Part I will discuss pre-Vatican II portrayals as demonstrated in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent film The King of Kings, part II will provide background to post-Vatican II depictions using Lady Gaga’s 2011 music video for her song “Judas” as an example.  Part III will expand further on Mary’s reputation with Norman Jewison’s 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar based on the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and, lastly, part IV will conclude the series with Ron Howard’s 2006 film The Da Vinci Code based on Dan Brown’s book by the same name. 

As briefly discussed above, according to Ruether, women in Christianity, not just Mary, were marginalized in order for their power to be removed.  She argued: 

Occasionally a woman in the tradition stands out as so powerful and so central that she can neither be silenced or sanitized.  Here the patriarchal censure introduces what might be called a “mud-slinging job” to displace them from authority and dignity…The Christian tradition marginalized Mary Magdalene by turning her into a repentant prostitute, thus marginalizing her from her position as leading female apostle and first witness of the resurrection, commissioned to bring the good news back to the male disciples who had fled the scene and were trembling in the upper room.[3]

Diminishing Mary’s role allowed men to have complete control over the Catholic Church as well as over women.  Women were not allowed to hold a position that would have her above a man.  The Catholic Church, to this day, does not allow the ordination of women based primarily on the belief that Jesus’ disciples were all men.[4]  It is interesting to note, however, that several non-canonical gospels show that Jesus possibly had female disciples.  If women in the canonical gospels were portrayed as weak and unbelieving sinners, then the Catholic Church (i.e. men) could treat all women as such.  Even after other non-canonical texts have been found to show that women were not always seen as frail, doubting, and adulterous and previous distortions of Mary’s image by the Catholic Church reversed, Mary has continued to be portrayed by popular media in a way that marginalizes her.  

There has been some popular media, such as the book and movie The Da Vinci Code, that attempts to correct the idea that Mary was just a prostitute, but even when she is not portrayed as such, the way she is portrayed still marginalizes her, just in a different way. This will be discussed in the fourth installment of the article.  These alternative portrayals of Mary are deemed inaccurate and unorthodox by those in power within the Catholic Church, and thus, the misinterpretation of Mary as a prostitute or sinful woman is harder to prove erroneous in the minds of the public, both Christian and non-Christian.  

If one of the most important woman in Christianity can be made weak and unimportant, then women can continue to be oppressed, and verses such as 1 Timothy 2:12 (which states that women must be silent in the church) can continue to be used as basis to keep women out of power.  James Carroll argued that the early Church Fathers wanted to “disempower the figure of Mary Magdalene, so that her succeeding sisters in the church would not compete with men for power” and had “the impulse to discredit women generally.  This was most efficiently done by reducing them to their sexuality.”[5]  Reducing Mary to her sexuality affected not only her memory, but how women have been treated throughout Christian history.           

When Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings was released in 1927, it was not the first time in the short history of filmmaking that Mary was depicted on the silver screen.  The King of Kings was the ninth movie to portray Mary, however, this movie continues, even to this day, to be “one of the most popular and influential movies ever made” due to its continued popularity worldwide.[6]  At the very beginning of the silent film, there is a short note from DeMille stating: “He Himself, commanded that His message be carried to the uttermost parts of the earth.  May this portrayal play a reverent part in the spirit of that great command.”  From this statement it is clear that DeMille wanted to make a film about the story of Jesus in order to, at some level, evangelize.  However, that does not mean that the film was completely accurate.  DeMille liberally quotes the Bible throughout the film.  Bible verses are out of order, out of context, paraphrased, and said by people who did not actually say them.  As well, DeMille added material to what is not found in the canonical gospels.  It has been argued that DeMille did this for two reasons: “to make money and to make the narrative about Jesus work on the screen.  In doing so, DeMille made Jesus interesting and thereby distorted the original gospel narratives, voiding the rhetorical and theological purposes of the gospel accounts of Jesus.”[7]  And of course, if the biography of Jesus is uninteresting based solely on the canonical gospels, Mary’s would be even less interesting.  “The sparse information in the New Testament about Mary of Magdala is not adequate for a biography, and thus not for a biographical novel either.  Anyone who attempts the latter therefore has recourse to legends and creative fantasies.”[8]  How would one depict a woman who, according to the gospel of Luke, had seven demons cast out of her?  By making her a prostitute and associating the seven demons with the seven deadly sins, according to DeMille.  

When it was first shown in theaters, the movie was praised for accurately portraying the story of Jesus.  According to Diane Apostolos-Cappadona: 

The seeing of this film had an indelible impact on the minds of thousands of young people who saw it throughout the 1920s and 1930s.  Ask them to describe Mary Magdalene, and see if you don’t recognize Jacqueline Logan—bad girl turned saint!  After all, seeing is believing.[9]

Since the film, like many others, relied heavily on previous depictions of Jesus and Mary in art, which often had her wearing little-to-no clothing with ornate jewelry and extravagant hairstyles,[10]  DeMille’s Mary was what the audience expected. 

In The King of Kings, there are three scenes in which Mary is prominent that I will focus on.  The first scene is the opening scene of the movie, which opens up at the elaborate home of Mary.  She is cast as a successful prostitute surrounded by what appear to be important people of the community; this is affirmed when she, later in the scene, asks for her zebras that were gifts from a Nubian King.  She has multiple servants that will do whatever she commands, including one that keeps her cool her with a large, feathered fan.  She is surrounded by musicians, exotic animals, and food to show off her opulence.  Mary is dressed in an outfit which for the 1920s was very provocative and revealing.  One could argue that this outfit could rival only Princess Leia in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi.  As if the gold bra were not enough, Mary sports heavy makeup, has her hair braided elaborately, and wears much jewelry to drive home the point to the 1920s audience that she is a woman of sin.  The viewer learns that Mary’s favorite customer, Judas, has been missing for several days.  Mary demands to know where he is (and who his new lover is) and learns that he is with “a Carpenter from Nazareth.”  She decides to go to this carpenter and bring her best client back.  In a sign of her great importance, she goes off in a Zebra-drawn chariot.  At this point the scene cuts to Jesus performing miracles and the twelve disciples, along with Jesus’ mother Mary, are introduced.  Mary the Mother is dressed in polar opposite of what Mary Magdalene is dressed in.  Jesus’ mother is literally dressed from head to toe in cloth.  Women in this film are dressed either as Mary Magdalene at the beginning scene—as a prostitute—or like Mary the Mother—as a virginal woman.  This portrays to the audience that women can be only whores or virgins with no middle ground.  

Mary arrives at the home Jesus is in with an air of prominence around her.  She commands beggars away and requires her servants to lay a carpet down on the ground so that she does not have to walk in the dirt.  She enters the home and sees her former client Judas, now one of the twelve disciples.  Mary struts over to Jesus with the intention of demanding Judas to return to her, but as soon as she looks into the eyes of Jesus she is transformed from prostitute to penitent sinner.  She becomes very aware that what she had been doing was against everything Jesus teaches.  Jesus then casts out seven demons from Mary, which DeMille chooses to be the seven deadly sins (he even modifies a Bible verse to make it seem like the demons cast out of her were the seven deadly sins).  Once the demons are cast out of Mary, she looks down on herself and is ashamed.  She covers herself up with her cape.  After this scene, she dresses in a manner similar to Mary the Mother.  This again signals to the audience that women are either virginal or prostitutes, with no other options.  

The final scene of importance that includes Mary, is the second to last scene in the film.  This is the resurrection scene and the only color scene in an otherwise black and white film.  Here Jesus first appears to Mary and commands her to tell the others that he has risen.  It is unclear from the next scene if Mary is actually successful in doing as commanded.  Ten of the now eleven disciples are in a room looking sad and forlorn (Thomas enters the room only after Jesus has appeared).  Had Mary been successful, would not the disciples be waiting in anticipation for Jesus to come back?  Or, did they not believe her because she was a mere woman? 

Viewers saw the way DeMille depicted Mary as real or true due to her being depicted as they believed she should be.  Jacqueline Logan as Mary confirmed what the audience already thought Mary should look and act like from church sermons, Bible studies, and Sunday school.[11] DeMille himself was heavily influenced by the pictures in his family Bible, illustrated by James Tissot (1836-1902), as well as the Biblical art of GustaveDoré (1832-83).[12]  These depictions show Mary as a prostitute.  As it is well-known, however, Mary as a prostitute did not start with these nineteenth-century artists.  In a 591 sermon, Pope Gregory I combined Mary Magdalene, several unnamed women, and Mary of Bethany (who washed Jesus’ feet) and stated that all the women were actually just one: Mary Magdalene.  By doing such an act, Mary’s greatest claim to fame (according to the canonical gospels) of being the first to witness and announce the resurrection is changed to her repenting her sexual and/or evil ways.[13]  Mary was then, for more than a millennium after Pope Gregory I’s sermon, “unjustly condemned for something she never did, and denied her rightful place in Church history, while Paul has been exonerated for his own sins and held up as a model for all.”[14]  Mary goes from a faithful follower and supporter of Jesus who is worthy enough to be the first to see him risen to repentant whore and is condemned for that.  Yet Paul, a male, who admits to persecuting and killing Christians, is considered an exemplary Christian.  Pope Gregory I’s sermon was the “mud-slinging job” Ruether is alluding to.  By combining the women, “whether intentionally or not, he changed the Christian world’s attitude toward Mary Magdalene, women, and sexuality for centuries to come.”[15]  From that point on, Mary would be defined by her sexuality, and not for being an important disciple (and if one takes into account the non-canonical texts she was also a confidant of Jesus) that was the first to see Christ’s resurrection.[16]  The audience of The King of Kings will likely remember the opening scene Mary over the closing scene Mary because that is the Mary they have been raised to know because of Pope Gregory I’s “mud-slinging job.” 

We will continue to build on the myth of Mary’s reputation in the next segment and see how early film depictions of Mary—such as The King of Kings—contributed to how she has been  perceived in subsequent portrayals.

************************

Author’s Bio

Catherine Schmidt is an associate editor of Religion Nerd.  Catherine earned her BA in Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2005) and her MA in Religious Studies at Georgia State University (2012).  She has presented her work at academic conferences in the local, regional, and national level.  Catherine’s interest range include: religion and popular culture, women and religion, Mary Magdalene, and early Christian history.  She hopes in the future to pursue her PhD where she can combine her many interests. 

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Huff Post

One of the least remarked aspects of the early Christian reporting of Jesus’s death by crucifixion is the following:

Jesus let out a great cry and expired. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom Seeing this, the centurion who was standing near him when he expired said “Truly, this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15: 37-39)

Make no mistake about the implications here: a Roman soldier presiding over this ghastly execution was converted to the correct view about Jesus by observing the way he died, not by seeing him raised from death. There was something about the death of Jesus that was unique, and even revelatory, according to Mark.

That was not Paul’s view of the matter, by all accounts. The epistolary Apostle goes so far as to say that if Jesus were not raised from death, then the Christian faith is literally nothing more than a vanity.

If there is no rising of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching has been vain and your faith has been vain. (First Corinthians 15: 13-14)

The consensus view is that Paul’s letters were written in the mid-to late 50s, whereas Mark’s Gospel was written right around 70 C.E., after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by centurions very much like the one he describes observing Jesus’s death.

Some important implications of this dating are the following. It could be the case that Mark was responding directly to Paul’s claims in this letter. It could be the case that he had never heard Paul speak, nor ever read this letter. It could be the case that Mark was responding to the kind of beliefs articulated by Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, whether Paul was the original author of such views or simply one especially vocal proponent of them.

What is not in doubt is that the death of Jesus on a Roman cross represented a scandal with which all of his early followers had to deal. They dealt with it in many ways. We are witnessing a very significant fault-line here within the foundational texts of the New Testament, a fault-line that calls into question both the nature of Jesus’s death and its ultimate meaning. It’s a major theological parting of the ways, a parting easy to miss because it’s all contained in the same Scripture, point for point and book for book.

Let’s call it the parting of the ways between Good Friday Christianity and the Easter Sunday version.

Other Gospel writers tried to split the difference between these two versions, the one emphasizing the revelatory power of Jesus’s death versus the other emphasizing the revelatory power of being raised from death. According to Matthew, a number of “saints” were raised from their graves in the same moment that the Temple curtain split and Jesus expired; it was the vision of tombs opening that caused the centurion to draw his dramatic conclusion abut Jesus (Matthew 27: 52-54). According to Luke, when the centurion saw Jesus breath his last, he concluded that the Roman authorities had made a mistake: “Surely this man was innocent!” (Luke 23:47), he says.

Because of all this confusion over the details of Jesus’s dying and rising, it is worth taking a closer look at Mark’s brand of Good Friday Christianity. It presents us with a shattering vision, in every way.

It all began in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the night when Jesus’s ministry begins to come unraveled. We are told that Judas had decided to betray his teacher, and Jesus clearly has some sense of this as well. He prays to God, reminding his heavenly father than anything is possible to God, even delivering him from the coming trial. He begs to be so delivered; he is not. Instead, the disciples he asked to stand guard and stand their ground fail him. First they fall asleep, three times; later they flee. Jesus, suddenly powerless, is swallowed up by an imposing crowd and spirited away. His disciples will not see him again.

Jesus was tortured physically and emotionally, humiliated in a way that far exceeds the merits of the case or the normal practices of Roman centurions in their provinces. Mark spares no detail, no matter how horrible. Utterly abandoned and alone, Jesus is even mocked by the two men who were crucified alongside of him; this is another of those details that is easy to miss, but horrible to imagine. (Luke could not stomach this; in his version, one man mocks Jesus, whereas the other defends him, and Jesus promises that they will meet later in paradise, Luke 23: 43). Jesus’s final words are a quotation from Psalm 22, one of David’s purest anguish-songs: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15: 15:34). Then he expired (Luke couldn’t bear this detail either; in his version, Jesus’s last words are “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” Luke 23: 46).

Mark makes a point of telling us that Jesus’s disciples failed him repeatedly in the end, and failed even to be present at his death. This is shocking. Only some women who had followed him from the Galilee remained: Mary Magdalene, his mother Mary (she is called “the mother of James and Joses,” but since Mark earlier tells us that these were names of two of Jesus’ brothers, Mark 6:3, this seems like a coded reference to Jesus’s own mother), and Salome. These three women stand with Jesus until the end, then presumably also witnessed the centurion’s conversion to the correct view of things.

They also saw an unknown man who was favorably disposed to Jesus’s teaching, Joseph of Arimathea, take responsibility for Jesus’s corpse, and arrange for it to be buried in a nearby grave. That is why it was these three women who returned to that gravesite the next day to dress out Jesus’s body properly, as they had not had time to do the day before, in the whirl of violent Roman events.

That is when they find the stone at the mouth of the cave rolled away, and a mysterious man inside who informs them that “he is not here,” but rather has gone on ahead of them, returning to Galilee. They are ordered to return with this amazing news to the disciples, and especially to Peter, “but they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16: 8).

That is how Mark’s Gospel originally ended; all of the most ancient manuscripts end there. It isn’t the case that Mark doesn’t know of Jesus’s rising; in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus himself predicted it three times. Mark knows of the rising, but Mark does not want to show it to us. That’s Easter Sunday Christianity, not the Good Friday version. Mark’s Gospel is designed as a tragedy, and it ends as one.

(By the way, when Paul reminds his audience in Corinth that he has reported what was reported to him, he makes no mention of these three women. According to Paul, Jesus appeared after his rising to Peter, then to the twelve [whether this included Judas is not clear], then to five hundred people all at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and then in the end, to Paul himself on the Damascus road, First Corinthians 15:3-8).

Of course the main question is, Why? Mark’s Jesus expires with that question on his lips. Why would Mark tell the story this way? Who is he trying to convince? And how could he think this brutal story would be convincing to anyone?

There are several answers to this question, but the first one Mark answers pretty clearly in the passage with which I began. Mark thinks this way of telling Jesus’s story, the Good Friday version, will be convincing to Romans. The centurion who witnessed Jesus’s death did not need to see his rising to be convinced. Jesus’ death convinced him. The Roman audience Mark had in mind was schooled on Greek tragedy, and was very familiar with the idea that certain kinds of outrageous suffering can actually be redeeming. Salvation, in these peoples’s view, was through suffering, not from it.

Jesus’s unique suffering is what Mark urges us to consider, and never to forget.

If you tell the story of Good Friday merely as a prelude to Easter morning, then it is impossible to feel its raw power. Mark takes us as close to catastrophe and the heart of human suffering as a writer can go. Mark leaves us there, insists that we look more closely at the details of the thing. Really he is trying to make us feel it, ever and anew. That seems to be what the yearly commemoration of Jesus’s dying meant to Mark and his followers. And clearly, his Gospel is also a warning to anyone who confidently concludes that martyrdom is the surest path for the follower of Jesus to secure salvation. It was not easy for Jesus, Mark insists; it will be not any easier for you. All of Jesus’s disciples failed him in the end, every one. Romanticizing death, whether Jesus’ or his followers’, is the most tragic mistake the Christian community can make, in Mark’s judgment.

Good Friday Christianity was one important aspect of the early Christian movement, and it remains an important undercurrent in many more contemporary representations of Christian witness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke in these tragic tones when imprisoned by the Nazis; he wrote some remarkable letters in the Good Friday spirit before he was killed in prison. Dr. Martin Luthe King Jr. Preached a remarkable sermon in the spirit of Good Friday the night before he was assassinated. Cornel West, echoing his amanuensis, has made Good Friday Christianity, spiced with a liberal dose of his tragicomic blues sensibility, the very centerpiece of an activist, Afro-American Gospel. Such a liturgical sense of the Gospel’s tragic heart is alive and well in the Greek church, these days more than most.

Good Friday is celebrated — or rather, commemorated — in somber ritual tones in churches the world over, for the western churches it takes place this week, and for the eastern churches on the next. Mark is its premier evangelist. On Good Friday, if on any day, it is Mark’s shattered and shattering Gospel that demands close Christian attention, before we move up and away from it to the joyous epiphany of Sunday morning. Good Friday Christianity puts the agony in the ecstasy, insisting that there is no other way.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Louis A. Ruprecht, Religion Dispatches

On November 2, 1984, Velma Barfield became the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962, and the first to be executed in the State of North Carolina after the nationwide moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976. She was 52 years old.

For those of us who had worked on her clemency petition, it was a devastating blow. Then-Governor Jim Hunt was running for a seat in the US Senate against arch-conservative Jesse Helms. Inexplicably, Barfield’s clemency hearing had been scheduled just six days prior to the election. Helms made it a campaign issue, of course, suggesting that, were the Governor to grant Barfield clemency, then his true liberal stripes would be clear to everyone.

By contrast, even the staff at the Women’s Prison in Raleigh had written in support of Barfield’s petition; her work in counseling and religious instruction behind bars even earned her praise from the likes of Billy Graham. Everyone agreed there was no stronger clemency case on death row in the state.

But the governor’s peremptory meeting with those who presented the clemency petition lasted little more than half an hour, and it was clear to us that his mind was already made up.

The Barfield execution came back to life in the following spring, in the form of a letter from an eloquent if quirky citizen of the State of North Carolina; one who was opposed to the death penalty for religious reasons. He had calculated the approximate cost of executing Velma Barfield—not just the lethal injection, but the years of legal wrangling as well. According to his calculations, and given the current population of the state, exactly one cent of his own tax payment had been used to execute Velma Barfield—so he enclosed a check to the North Carolina State Tax Commissioner for 1984, in which he had withheld that suspect penny.

As you might imagine, the state took a different view, taking issue especially with this self-imposed tax break. Their point was that you do not get to pick and choose which state services you are willing to pay for, not even for religious reasons.

Especially not for religious reasons, since there are so very many of them.

The cash-strapped State of North Carolina spent a lot more than one cent to get that penny back. As they should have done, though this citizen’s symbolic point had been made quite eloquently by then.

No Picking and Choosing

I have returned many times to that story as I have listened to Catholic churches, Catholic institutions from hospitals to universities, and two Catholic presidential candidates all insist on what that poor guy from North Carolina was asking for: a religious exemption from paying for state services to which he was opposed on moral and religious grounds.

The state’s answer was simple in the spring of 1985: you don’t get to pick and choose the services you pay for, regardless of the reason.

This case raises an issue of considerably sharper interest, I think, given the Catholic Church’s consistent opposition to the death penalty, to preemptive wars (especially those conducted primarily through interdiction), to abortion, and now, we are told, to contraception.

So why has there never been a similar stink about Catholic exemptions from death penalty provisions? Why no such tax withholding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And why is the state bending over backwards to accommodate these religious sentiments about contraception, rather than some others?

One explanation might be historical: what a difference a generation makes. After thirty years of hammering away at the need for the secular state to accommodate religious objections to virtually every damn thing it does, the state is backpedaling and the Church is on the offensive. From 1979 to 2012, politicized Christianity isn’t just taking its place at the table, it’s trying to rewrite the menu. Anti-feminism has loomed large in that effort.

Clerical Hysteria

Which brings me to a second explanation, one that is not historical so much as it is hysterical. I mean that quite literally.

Hysteria is a term that derives from the Greek word for the uterus, and this is indeed a battle over women’s uteruses: over what goes in them and what stays out. The death penalty and international warfare simply do not energize the sex-obsessed American electorate the way that women’s sexual autonomy does.

What is the problem with contraception? It enables women to be sexually active without paying the price, as it were; the massive biological and sociological and personal costs that may come with unwanted pregnancy and bringing such pregnancies to term.

The end of the sexual act is procreation, from the Catholic perspective; sexual pleasure or expressions of love and affection are not legitimate ends if they are detached from the procreative intention. Contraception enacts that detachment. Moreover, by separating the sexual act from the intention of conception, contraception encourages women’s sexual promiscuity—so goes the Catholic thinking.

Rush Limbaugh’s tirade to this effect, for all of its bile, well describes what is at stake in this debate, for some people. The fact that men’s sexual promiscuity does not register as a concern of equal standing for such persons is itself quite telling.

To my eye, the most significant thing that has happened between 1979 and 2012 has been the significant and at times studied erosion of feminist achievements in mandatory, state-sanctioned equality. I’m talking about the basics here, the principal First and Second Wave achievements:

political equality, symbolized by a woman’s right to vote and to hold political office; and

economic equality, symbolized by the ideal, if not the reality, of equal pay for equal work.

But when the sexual equality of men and women is at issue—not sexual sameness, let’s be clear about that, just sexual equality—then the howling starts, and churches start withholding their money and support.

The debate is, in this sense, hysterical. And there’s a pretty simple solution to it. If you want to run as a Catholic hospital or a Catholic university and not offer the full array of health care services to women as mandated by the state, then don’t implicate yourself in any federal or state funding. Not one penny.

All the World a Stage

Now, I admit that this argument must seem overdrawn at first glance. There seems to be a fundamental difference between a citizen and/or organization withholding taxes for state services with which they do not wish to be identified, and a citizen and/or organization being asked to provide those services themselves.

The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by people. Catholic institutions are claiming an exemption from the obligation to provide such services because they are religiously opposed to them. They are engaging in a selective opt-out, just like the guy from North Carolina.

I am not convinced that any of the charities, hospitals or universities involved in this debate are truly independent religious institutions that receive no federal dollars. An institution’s tax exempt status alone casts that into grave doubt. And these institutions seem not to recognize that one way for the state to insist on its way, and for them to gain their administrative freedom, would be to abrogate that curious tax exemption for an institution as wealthy as the Catholic Church in a time of real fiscal crisis. But clearly, this would lend itself to the very Big Brother vision of the federal government that created this controversy in the first place.

Instead, President Obama, ever the patient compromiser, attempted to create a new distinction, one of limited practical usefulness but great symbolic value, suggesting that insurance providers would be paying for these services, not the institutions themselves.

And that is when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sensing weakness, intensified its position, indicating that it is not just opposed to being asked to pay for such services, but that any of the Catholics for whom they speak would be asked to provide them. This is fascinating; the Catholic Bishops now appear to be claiming the right to opt out of anyprograms with which they disagree. Here is their response to the president’s proposed compromise, in their words:

[this] continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions.

It’s not just about the money; it’s about Big Brother. And so:

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government.

So the problem is not with government per se, just with the president. This is why it is so rhetorically critical for them to refer to “Obamacare” rather than the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” thereby conveniently forgetting that this was a law passed by the Legislative branch of the US Government, not an Executive Order.

Now, it is perfectly within the Bishops’ rights to petition the US Congress to change a law, or even to vacate it and to start over, as it is their right to question the constitutionality of a law in the courts.

But that is why I began with the story from North Carolina. The question that should be asked is why the US Catholic Bishops are exerting so much energy and money and time on the matter of contraception, with no similarly public cries of outrage against the death penalty, state-sponsored torture, or the two preemptive wars in which the U.S. has involved itself for fully a decade.

Clearly there is a lot more to this debate than the First Amendment. It has to do with one of the most powerful patriarchal religious organizations in the world—be sure to recall that the bishops are all men, every last one of them—placing itself squarely in opposition to women’s sexual equality and autonomy.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Nerd

“TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The death toll from severe storms that punished five Southern U.S. states has jumped to 269.” 

This is the opening statement from Weather.com‘s article, “Tornadoes Cut Path of Destruction,” which documented the devastating tornadoes that hit Alabama on April 27^th, 2011. 

The article itself did not surprise me… but the comments from the website’s respondents most certainly did. What I found most intriguing was the theological language being used on this modern media site, one explaining scientifically natural weather phenomena and includes no reference to any theological agenda.  Here are just a few examples:

God loves us so much and He is trying to get our attention one more time before He judges the earth. He wants us to live and not die. Wake up, people.

I pray God’s protection during this difficult time. May He give us His peace, comfort, and strength.  Romans 12  

Many such comments were directed towards those affected by the storms, letting them know that people were praying for them and the affected region. However, there were a few indicating that those people spared from the wrath of the storms felt that God had spared them for a reason. Other remarks used thick theological language indicating that these disasters are signs from God, of the ‘End times,’ and have been sent by God to call Americans to repentance. 

Representing another audience entirely, some challenged these theodicies. Theodicies offer religious justification and explanation for why evil (deadly tornadoes) exists in the world: if God is all knowing (knows that innocents are being killed), all powerful (has the power to intervene to protect said innocents), and is all good (loves his human creations), then why doesn’t he intervene and stop such disasters, which often happen to good, God-fearing folk? Of course, some commentators anticipated this tough theological problem, and either worked to resolve it, or berate those who might raise it in the first place, insisting that:  

God is the only reason more weren’t killed.  Be thankful it wasn’t your family. 

Don’t get upset people. Just pray for this very lost person! 

I wonder if that was what the people thought when Noah built the ark?  I believe!:  D and I am so glad he is preparing a place for me.. Sure don’t want that smoking place, do you? 

Yes, hopefully [people] like you, low life ass crack scum, will go first……I’ll pray for that. 

Wake up in hell and I think u will change your mind. 

Dear Lord, Please bless the people who walk with the breath you gave them and down you with it in the same. These people need a guiding light as they have become lost in their path. Please protect their families as they are lead into Hell by the sinners of the lands. In your name we pray, Amen.

God does exist. He wants America to repent of their sins and turn to Him. John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” 

Satan has turned many against God, including many of the posters on here. Questioning the existence of God is EXACTLY what Satan wants you to do…Satan …causes all the bad in the world, not God. Stop blaming the one who gave you life and put the blame where it really belongs!

These responses seem to be drawing on various starting assumptions about the nature of God: 

• God does exist and He is using natural disasters to chastise certain people so they will repent and return to God;
• God is the source and catalyst of natural disasters, but is also the reason more people were saved;
• God is sending these disasters as signs of the ‘End times’;
• Satan (the originator of evil) challenged God’s authority and now stalks weak humans attempting to destroy their faith in God; those who pose non-religious explanations for such events are themselves lost sinners in the grip of Satan and are headed for Hell unless they repent and believe.

The source of my wonder here is the eagerness to assign these natural disasters to an all-loving supreme being, the loathing directed at nonbelievers, and the medium through which these ideas are being conveyed. While these views are as old as monotheistic belief itself, what I find surprising is the social platform through which commentators offer such a stark and uncompromising theology… The Weather Channel.

Weather Religion?  

The connection between religion and weather is actually not as unusual as it may appear at first glance.  Many of the earliest theorists have argued that the origin of religion lies in its relationship with the natural world. Max Muller, a 19^th century German linguist and one of the “founding fathers” of the comparative religion, argued that, “all religions, primitive or otherwise… have their origins in the personification of natural forces and objects and the ‘myths’ that arise from these personifications.” 

This view, Naturism, holds that, 

humans gain a sense of the divine from natural phenomena: sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, thunder and lightning, storms, the seasons, animals, and plants. Faced with such an inspiring, mysterious, frightening, and awesome natural world, humans endowed nature with supernatural qualities. (Rodney Stark, 24-5) 

Some scholars have supported sociological, anthropological, and psychological analysis of what they claim is the human creation of the supernatural and religious, via the personification of natural phenomena. Other scholars, however, have advocated for a view of ‘religion’ as a separate category all together. For these scholars, religion is separate, and human experience of the sacred is a ‘real’ experience, and not merely a byproduct of language, social construction, human anxieties, or psychological dysfunction. 

Mircea Eliade, an adamant supporter of the categorical separation of religion from other disciplines and oft labeled ‘high priest’ of the ‘history of religion’ model mentioned above, opens his hallmark work, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, by praising the work of a German scholar by the name of Rudolf Otto: 

Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience… Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood what the ‘living God’ meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers- of Erasmus, for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in divine wrath. (8-9) 

Otto rejected the idea that the ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ is necessarily moral or rational.  For Otto, the ‘numen’, the ‘holy’ minus moral and rational aspects, is awe-inspiring, mysterious, terrifying and ‘wholly other.’ Due to the ‘wholly otherness” of Otto’s ‘numen,’ all language falls short to accurately express it in its totality.  

Despite the limitations of language, humankind has borrowed the imagery it has used to describe the most mysterious, terrifying, and ‘wholly other’ phenomenon humans have encountered—nature.  Otto’s description of the divine as terrifying and ‘wholly other’ and Muller’s view of religions as originating in the personification of natural forces, although hardly comforting, do seem to find some resonance in the Hebrew Bible’s description of the holy and powerful god of the Hebrews, Yahweh. 

The Jewish Weather-deity? 

Walter Gerhardt Jr. in his article, “The Hebrew/Israelite Weather-Deity,” presents a persuasive argument that the Hebrew God “is expressed in Biblical literature as an “allegorized idiom” of the weather phenomena” (130).  According to Gerhardt, the Hebrew God, known as YHWH, “is the personification of environmental forces and energies of weather indigenous to the Sinai/Edom and Syro-Palestinian geographic locales” and is often described using “the precipitive elements of the rainstorm” (130). Gerhardt presents Moses’ encounter with the deity on the holy mountain as an excellent example of this, emphasizing the dense cloud shrouding the mountain (133). Gerhardt highlights how YHWH thunders from heaven and “scatters lightning” (138). 

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible, known the TaNaKh to Jews and the Old Testament to Christians, is chock-full of disastrous natural events as well as sometimes contradictory explanations for them. One need look no further than Genesis to find stories where natural disasters are being attributed to the God: Noah and the flood, the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, are two of the most commonly referenced events. In Exodus, Moses encounters God via a startling viewing of a burning bush, represents Him before the Egyptian pharaoh, witnesses ten horrific plagues used to motivate the pharaoh to relent, experiences the parting of the ‘Red Sea’ which in turn “saves” the Hebrew slaves but wipes out pharaoh’s army, and negotiates the terms of the covenant with the Hebrew deity while on a holy mountain surrounded by a lightning storm. 

Luther’s God of Lightning 

The Hebrew Bible, noted above, is not just a sacred text for Jews but for Christians.  Christianity, historically, grew out of an apocalyptic and messianic sect of Judaism in the 1^st century, Common Era. The earliest followers of Jesus believed him to be the ‘messiah,’ a long anticipated political and religious savior meant to overthrow the Romans and restore the ancient kingdom of Israel. These earliest followers came to this conclusion about Jesus’ identity by finding what they interpreted to be prophetic statements in the Hebrew Scriptures. Early Christianity inherited the Hebrew Scriptures and added their own writings about Jesus and the early church to them to make their own Bible. So, it is worth asking whether the weather-deity of the Hebrew Bible persisted as Christianity developed out of Judaism. 

Christians inherited not only the scriptures of early Judaism but also many of the theodicies buried in the scriptures themselves which give various justifications for why ‘evil’ exists.  The book of Job itself provides numerous explanations, though none are conclusive, as to why disaster had befallen Job and his family, although the text states that Job was blameless in the sight of God.  The book of Job ends with the Hebrew God appearing to Job in a whirlwind, another destructive weather-related phenomenon. 

Such stories have not been lost on prominent Christian theologians, such as the architect of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. Luther suggested that his own entrance into monastic life was driven by a terrifying experience he had during a violent thunderstorm. Protestant Christianity has been deeply marked by Luther’s description of how the Christian God used nature to His own ends. As Craig Martin writes on Luther’s perspective in an article titled “The Ends of Weather: Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology” found in The Journal of the History of Philosophy: 

… He also interpreted “fruitful weather” as proof of God’s love for humanity.63 Thus, in the Sermons on Luke 21, while rare events were ominous or apocalyptic, fair weather might signal God’s protection.”(275) 

Many Protestant Christians today, especially those of an Evangelical nature, like many Christians found in the South Eastern United States, still hold to this correlation between nature disasters and God’s will.

Evangelical Christians in the South

According to a survey given by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, regarding the “most religious states” in the U.S. (based on four criteria: “the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God”), Southern States consistently lead the states in self-claimed religiosity.  According to their data: 

“More than eight-in-ten people in Mississippi (82%) say religion is very important in their lives… In some other Southern states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina, at least seven-in-ten people say religion is very important in their lives.”  

The U.S. Religious Landscape survey, also from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, estimates that 50% of the U.S.’s Evangelical Protestant Christian population lives in the Southeastern region of the country.  

Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestant Christians make up 49% of Alabama’s state population (the national average is 26%).  Mainline Protestants represent 15%, historically black Protestants make up 18% and Catholics only make up 6% of the states’ population (while nationally they represent 24% of the population).  Jews, Orthodox and other Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, separately, at most, represent 1% of the state’s population.  A group labeled “unaffiliated” make up 8% of the state’s population. 

An article in the Christian Century titled “Most don’t blame God for disasters,” presents the following statics based on a poll by Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service after the devastating earthquakes and tsunami in Japan: 

“Nearly six in ten evangelicals (59 percent) believe that God can use natural disasters to send messages—nearly twice the number of Catholics (31 percent) or mainline Protestants (34 percent) who so believe. Evangelicals (53 percent) are also more than twice as likely as the one in five Catholics or mainline Protestants to believe that God punishes nations for the sins of some citizens.”(14)

Why the Weather Channel?

Now, the most compelling question of all… why the Weather Channel.com?  Why are these comments showing up in an unlikely platform?  Why did these respondents feel the need to post such overtly religious comments on such a seemingly “secular” website?

 The reasons may be multifold. The Weather Channel’s website specifically does NOT offer theological reflections on natural events. While science is often credited with telling us how the world works, religion has often presented us with reasons, adequate or inadequate, for why the world works as it does. The desire of respondents to find meaning, and not just logistical analysis of how weather works, may be why they felt the need to provide meaning to these disasters. 

However, while the Weather Channel does not specifically offer theological explanations for natural disasters, this doesn’t mean that the site doesn’t attempt to capitalize off of the deep-seated desires of the population to feel “in control” over weather events. 

Monitoring the conditions which might lead to dangerous weather does not equate to controlling the weather but scientific analysis and advanced technological weather-monitoring equipment which result in weather ‘forecasting,’ may be feeding the same desires for control that religions have often offered to the population. 

Nicole Fleetwood, in her article “Failing Narratives, Initiating Technologies: Hurricane Katrina and the Production of a Weather Media Event”, explains how some viewers may be turning to various technologies to feel in control, which I would argue is one of the desirable characteristics institutionalized religion offers:

“On some level, meteorological technologies give the power to predict the future. We are able to witness the storm as weather media event from its inception as tropical storm to its naming to its levels of categorization to its arrival. The detailed sophistication afforded the viewer promises to lower our risk by increasing preparedness. Marita Sturken argues that computer visualization technologies, such as Doppler radar, ‘are used to convey the sense that weather-tracking technologies can actually help to control the weather itself.’” (772) 

Perhaps the reason the Weather Channel’s website has become a platform for commentators to process grief, send condolences and prayers, and work through theological concerns is due to the fact that the meteorological technologies, like religious and spiritual theodicies, provide some sense of control and order in times of chaos.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Joe Winkler, Huff Post

With a deep sadness in my heart, I write of the recently deceased Christian theologian John Hick. I feel utterly unqualified to provide a proper eulogy, or even the requisite encomium for one of the 20th centuries most important religious thinkers. Given his impact on my religious personality and thought I can only express my immense gratitude towards this insightful thinker. Hick, in his books, interviews, articles and essays, not only clarified numerous theological issues including pluralism, eschatology and the truth of scripture, all in the light of modern thinking, but just the way he thought, his methodology: infused with generosity, reason, and a fullness of spirit continues to serve as a model. He taught instead of preached; he lived his life according to a well thought out system of principles, and worked hard to heal the wounds from a breakdown in interfaith communications. Hick freed so many of us from the chains of our dogma to embrace our fellow human beings.

I first stumbled upon Hick, as I floundered, drowning in a sea of swirling existential, philosophical and theological questions that grew from the intersection of a rigorous Judaic studies program coupled with an entrenchment in the leftist leaning, atheistic bent of a strongly liberal literary education. I began to doubt some of the deepest religious certainties of my life. I found little to bridge the gaps between a world suffused with the divine, and the literary world, disenchanted, drained of any trace of transcendence. I sought, in vain, answers from past theologians, regardless of religion, but found little resolution or solace in these writers. Then I found Hick. Hick wrote with a complete transparency as to his methods and assumptions, which allows you to follow the process of his prodigious thought as he struggled with his own religious belief. He sought to merge the never-ending questioning of philosophy with the religious assumptions of theology, an endeavor, in my opinion, in which he achieved important results. Though a consummate academic, Hick shunned dense, prohibitive prose and sought instead to write with clarity on the most complex topics including a trenchant and persistent analysis of theodicy. He did not write from the perch of a sermon, nor did he write from the defensiveness of an apologetic. He simply wrote from a dedicated personal vision, a well thought out sysem that attempted to account for both the aspirations and ambivalence of religion. Hick never shunned controversy, instead he hewed to the truth, regardless of the consequences, unafraid to say, “Even Jesus was fallible.”

Hick, a prolific writer, wrote on immortality, the metaphors of religion, faith and doubt, eschatology, but importantly for me, he wrote extensively on one of the essential problems of religious belief today, the problem of choice. The more I read and experienced, the further I empathized with the lives of other people. I grew more compelled by new and different truths. As another prominent religious thinker, Charles Taylor writes, we live in an era in which religion presents itself as much of a choice as either another religion, or atheism. We no longer feel compelled by the fear of hell, but by the fear of a meaningless existence. Consequently, we are faced with the question of the mutually exclusive truths of particular religions. We all know, intuitively, that each religion must view itself as the true religion, otherwise, it undermines its ability to perpetuate itself. However, in our age of exploration, where every lifestyle presents itself to us as, in the words of Wiliam James, “live options,” we must reconcile the conflicting claims of each religion. Hick, with eloquence and elegance achieves this goal. I hesitate to quote a writer as such great length, but his words speak better of him than anything I could write. Here Hick elucidates his vision of a the need for a pluralistic view of religion:

“Now given that the large majority of human beings are born and live, and always have lived, outside Christianity, does it make sense to think that it is God’s will that ‘Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does his successive journeys run’? … There are saints and sinners in more or less equal proportion within each of the great world faiths.

So I believe we have radically to rethink our understanding of the place of Christianity in the global religious picture. And we have to face the fact that it is one path amongst others, and then reform our belief-system to be compatible with this. This is the big new challenge that theologians and church leaders have yet to face. We have to become consciously what are called religious pluralists… Finally, this is not going to happen from the top down. Change comes from the grassroots. Many of us have friends of other faiths whom we greatly admire. We simply don’t believe that they are religiously disadvantaged, even though our official theologies imply that they must be. And in the end reality will inevitably prevail over traditional dogma — at least for all who are not encased in the impenetrable armour of a rigid fundamentalism. Why does all this matter? We only have to look at the state of the world to see why. The Catholic theologian Hans Kung has said that there will never be peace between the nations until there is peace between the religions. And I would add that there will never be genuine peace between the religions until each comes to recognise the equal validity of the others. Let us all do in our time what we can to bring this about.”

He walked a fine line between embracing the divine in life along with feeling guided by the plain, sensical skepticism we carry around because of life. He saw both sides, but still managed to live a religiously committed, humanistic, sensitive, rationally driven life. His example itself lent viability and relevancy to religion today.

To end on a more playful note, for Hick displayed a healthy sense of playfulness and humor, I recall one small story that makes me smile. Once I began reading Hick, I sought out one of the books he edited entitled “The Existence of God” to which he contributed an introduction and an essay. I searched for the book, to no avail, and I felt compelled to find it without the help of the Internet. Then, one day, traveling in Nowhere, Connecticut, on a camping trip I found a book sale filling a whole parking lot. There, hidden amongst thrown out books of yore, I found his book, beaten up, battered, cost: 50 cents. I brought it back to the woods and sat there reading his introduction in which he proceeds to tear to shreds the whole pretense of proving God through rational means, a slightly curious way to open up a book on the existence of God. But for me, therein lied the greatness of John Hick. Never what you expected, but always what you wanted. Thank you, John Hick. You are loved.

Follow Joe Winkler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/josephwinkler

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Kate Daley-Bailey

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (the Gospel of Luke 10:25-37) is probably one of the best- known parables from the Christian New Testament.  In the U.S. the phrase ‘good Samaritan’ is commonly understood to describe someone who has gone out of their way to help another.  This phrase has been thoroughly secularized and one need not be a Christian to know its meaning.  You voluntarily carry your elderly neighbor’s groceries… you are a ‘good Samaritan.’ You clean up someone else’s litter on the side walk… you are a ‘good Samaritan.’

In the second grade, I was recognized as the most conscientious student in the class… and you guessed it… I was awarded a certificate for being a ‘good Samaritan.’ But wait… who exactly are the Samaritans and why did my second grade teacher think I was a particularly ‘good’ one?

Who are the Samaritans?

Stephen L. Harris in his text, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, describes the Samaritans of first century Roman occupied Judea as a sect of Jewish people who “recognized only the Mosaic Torah, but not the prophets or other biblical writings, as binding Scripture (67).”  

According to Harris, there was a great deal of animosity between the Samaritans and other Jewish groups due to the Samaritan’s acceptance of only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as scripture.  Not only did the Samaritan scripture differ from that of the standard Jewish version but the Samaritans also embraced Mount Gerizim, rather than Mount Zion, as God’s holy place.  

During Jesus’ time, the Samaritan Jewish identity was hotly contested… so much so that “Jews in Judea regarded the Samaritans as an alien people who practiced a false version of the Jewish religion (67).”  Harris also notes that according to some biblical verses (such as 2 Kings 17) the Samaritans were viewed as the descendants of “Mesopotamians whom Assyrian conquerors settled in the area during the eight century B.C.E.- and therefore not ‘authentic’ Jews (67).”  Harris states that this description of the Samaritans’ origin, although historically inaccurate, was a widely held belief among the various Jewish sects in Judea during the first century CE. 

Jesus and His Historical Context:

Historically speaking, Jesus was a Jew.  He had Jewish parents, went to the Jerusalem Temple, knew Jewish scripture and often quoted from them, and celebrated Jewish holidays such as Passover.  The name Jesus is actually the Greek version of his Hebrew name—a variation on the name Joshua.  The majority of Jesus’ followers, according to the four gospels of the New Testament, are patently Jewish.  I am illustrating this point because there is a tendency among some Christians to see Jesus as outside of his Jewish context and thereby miss the impact that many of his actions and sayings would have had on his primarily Jewish audience.

The Parable:

According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is approached by a Torah scholar (a man very learned in Jewish law) and asked what he must do to inherent eternal life.  Jesus returns his question with another question: “What is written in the law?  What do you read there?”  The scholar quotes from the written Torah: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus affirms the man’s answer but before he leaves he wants Jesus to clarify who his neighbor is… who does this category include?  Instead of directly answering the man, Jesus tells him a parable, a common didactic literary tool used by Jewish teachers to have listeners work through their own questions.  The parable illustrated is the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which reads as follows:

30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.  33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.  34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.  Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

After telling the parable, Jesus turns back to the man and asks “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”  (New Revised Standard Version, 1989)

Unpacking the Parable:

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho, in Jesus’ time, was a notoriously dangerous stretch of road.  Particularly hazardous because bandits would often lie in wait for travelers.  The unfortunate man in Jesus’ parable fell victim to a band of robbers and they striped him, beat him and went away leaving him half-dead.  The injured man is anonymous. The parable presents three new characters: a priest, a Levite, and finally a Samaritan.  According to Brad Young’s book The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation, the priest and Levite both “serve religious functions in the temple” and did not “follow the oral interpretation of the Torah” which means they were probably associated with a particular group of Jews in the first century known as the Sadducees (106).  These Sadducees were very concerned with ritual purity and followed the written Torah injunction (Lev. 21:1) that they not touch a dead body which was understood as ritually contaminating.  The priest and Levite’s actions were dictated by their strict interpretation of ritual purity laws.  If the man is dead, then they risk ritual contamination by touching a corpse.

Relationship to the Law

According to the Law, what is one required to do?  Some Jewish groups like the Sadducees accepted only the written Law and read these texts literally.  The Samaritans, who as we previously discussed, were often viewed as enemies of the Jews, ironically shared one characteristic with the Sadducees… they too only accepted the written Law.  Both groups rejected the oral Law.  According to Harris, the Pharisees “accepted not only the written Law contained in the Mosaic Torah but also a parallel oral law (65).  Harris explains this oral law as “intended to extend the laws of Temple purity to virtually every aspect of life” (65).  So this parable not only suggests that Jesus viewed even one’s enemies as one’s neighbors but also shows his affinity with the Pharisee’s reverence for both the written and oral Law.  The oral law, accepted by the Pharisees, prioritized the preservation of life over ritual purity.  Therefore, if there had been a Pharisee in this parable, we can guess what, given his view of Jewish law, he would have done in this circumstance… he would have done as the Samaritan did.

What is so shocking about this parable?

The audience listening to Jesus were Jews, as he himself was, and the man to whom Jesus was speaking directly was not only a Jew but he was very well versed in Jewish law.  It is likely that Jesus’ audience had heard a teaching like this before and were merely waiting for Jesus to fill in the details.  This might have been akin to hearing the opening lines of a joke you have told a number of times… only to find out that the person telling the joke had modified it.  The audience probably nodded their heads in agreement and gave each other knowing smiles as Jesus began the parable… of yes… the infamous road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the callousness of the priest and the Levite, and then the… what?  Jesus’ followers probably expected the champion of the story to be a Pharisee… after all… this group of Jews were required to follow the oral as well as the written law.  But Jesus changes the pattern and chooses a very unlikely candidate as his hero… a Samaritan.

Why did Jesus tell a Parable about a ‘Good’ Samaritan?

We have briefly touched on Jesus’ historical context and noted the significant historical tensions between Samaritans and other Jews living in Judea during Jesus’ time.  We might not be shocked to find Jesus, as a first century Jew in Judea, telling a story about a Samaritan to his predominately Jewish audience.  What is shocking is that Jesus makes the Samaritan the champion of his parable!  Not only were Samaritans seen as enemies of the Jews, they also followed the written Law (albeit a distinct version of it) and were not beholden to the oral Law. The Samaritan was not fulfilling a requirement placed on him by oral or written Law and given his status as outsider was probably risking his own life helping the anonymous man laying half-dead on the side of the road.

The Torah scholar to whom Jesus directs his parable is now asked which of the three characters in the parable “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers” and the scholar responds knowingly to Jesus’ question… “the one who showed him mercy.”  Keep in mind that this Torah scholar knows both the written and oral Law and appears to be in line with the Pharisaic view of the law.  He too may have expected the hero in Jesus’ parable to be a Pharisee if not Pharisee like.  He might have expected the man to act due to his lawful obligation.  Here, in this instance, the Torah scholar is the champion because he understands the underlying meaning of the cryptic parable.  The Torah scholar did not answer Jesus’ question by saying ‘the Samaritan.’ He defines the man by his actions and not is social, cultural, or religious status.

After telling the parable, Jesus turns back to the man and asks “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Bulletin

In my two previous Bulletin posts, I discussed the efforts of prominent Nazi intellectuals (such as Gerhard Kittel and Alfred Rosenberg) who, during the 1930s, worked to buttress the German Reich through the appropriation of Christian symbols, images, and narratives. It is worth noting that Rosenberg and Kittel offered competing presentations of a Nazi Jesus and a Nazi Christianity, each of which was intended to unify the German churches and people. For Kittel, this meant the wholesale separation of Judaism and Christianity in hopes of persuading fellow Nazis that the Christian narrative was ideologically compatible with larger Nazi social projects. For Rosenberg, it meant reclaiming the image of Jesus as an Aryan warrior-chief in the age-old battle against Judaism. This present post looks at yet another attempted Nazi Christianity, so-called “Positive Christianity” in the discourse of the NSDAP (The National Socialist German Worker’s Party).

The term ‘positive Christianity,’ a vague type of non-denominationalism not beholden to any particular religious institution, makes an appearance in the 25 points of the NSDAP (set forth in 1920 by the founding party members). Point 24 is brief but significant, considering that the Nazi party is so often cast as monolithically anti-Christian. These points demonstrate an attempt to present a systematic worldview to the German population. Point 24 distances Positive Christianity from the denominational conflicts (and institutional oversight) of the day and binds it to a nationalistic rhetoric which links Christian morality with the Germanic race:

24. We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility. (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/1708-ps.asp)

This somewhat amorphous sense of religious community was defined primarily by its struggle against the perceived threat that German Jews were said to represent, and its concurrent desire to protect “the moral senses of the Germanic Race.” It resisted any absolute expression of institutional form… or rather had too many institutions vying to represent it. In the nascent years of the NSDAP, the party offered a synthesis of various Christian ideologies, nationalistic loyalties, and racial/cultural investments, and honed in on the characteristics and beliefs which many at the time shared, such as a belief that Jesus was not Jewish, a desire to define Christianity in opposition to Judaism, a hope for a unified and empowered Germany, and an antagonism towards Capitalism, liberalism, Marxism, and secularism.

Also referred to as ‘Practical Christianity’ or ‘Active Christianity,’ this protean tradition was meant to supersede the denominational strife in Germany and unite German Christians under one banner- the Reich. Hitler repeatedly stated that to get bogged down in theological details was political suicide and would only help Germany’s true enemy- the Jew. In Mein Kampf, he writes that Jesus as a critic of Judaism who “drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God” and was “nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews.” In a 1939 speech in Munich, Hitler claimed that the party was itself more Christian in deed than their Christian critics. According to his reasoning, National Socialist Germany programs were Christian in that they “cloth the poor and feed the poor.”

For example, the Winter Relief Program (Winterhilfswerk), while not an innovation of the Nazi Party, quickly became an institutionalized part of its public outreach. With unemployment and poverty high, this program clothed, warmed (via coal and fire wood), fed, and employed many destitute Germans (in the winter months) from 1933 until the regime’s demise in 1945. Public funding of this program was ‘voluntary,’ although intimidation and shaming tactics were utilized to bolster funds. The program was also local in nature… meant to be reminiscent of the Germanic clan ideal. According to Thomas E. de Witt’s article, “The Struggle Against Hunger and Cold”: Winter Relief in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, the first winter program received support from 1.5 million volunteers. For Hitler, the purpose of the Winter Relief Program was to create solidarity between fellow Germans as well as assist the needy, and it appealed to many German Christians who saw it as their duty as Christians and Germans to help their fellow man.

How could such a program, which appeared to engender a type of Christian brotherhood, be driven by such a ruthless regime? The answer rests in the concept of categories: for these Nazi Christians, Jews and other ‘deviant’ groups were not categorized by the Nazis as ‘brothers.’ Even Jewish coverts to Christianity were seen as problematic because for the Nazis being Jewish, just like being German, was about blood not about religious choice.

What is unclear is precisely how much social and ideological force Nazi Christianity, as opposed to welfare programs like that discussed above, actually exerted. Susannah Heschel’s book, Aryan Jesus, describes the anti-Semitism in the German churches as “the glue that united the otherwise warring factions” (7). She argues that Nazi ideology represented “a colonization of Christian theology,” one which utilized Christian anti-Semitism for its own purposes (8). Luther had already planted anti-Jewish ‘seeds’ in the church… the economic and social repercussions of the Versailles treaty simply cultivated the growth of anti-liberal, anti-Jewish, German nationalism. Thus, racializing processes had been set in place centuries before the Nazis came to power, and some scholars have suggested that it was not merely coincidence that Kristallnacht fell on Martin Luther’s birthday.

*********************

More of Kate’s work can be read on Religion Bulletin

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Kate Daley-Bailey

My family’s religious affiliation is best described as ‘recovering Catholic.’ While we often say this in jest, I find it compelling that although we may be disillusioned with the papal abuses, restrictive doctrines on women in the priesthood, birth control methods, and various other concerns, my family members who have broken with the church still often identify as Catholic.  I think of my Catholicism like some Jews describe their Judaism. Judaism is often described as a religion and a culture… and while many people associate Judaism with the purely religious aspects, Jews who no longer practice the religious prescriptions of their religion may still identify as Jewish.  My family often gravitates toward other Catholics, recovering or those still within the Church.  We might be done with the Catholic Church but we refuse to give up Catholicism.

My sisters were both raised in Catholic schools and our family was greatly involved in our local Catholic Church.  My father had actually broken off his engagement with my mother to become a priest.  His stint in seminary was short and soon he realized he could be a good Catholic, be married, and have children.  He later became a federal prosecutor and worked tirelessly to cleanse the judicial system of corrupt judges.  He took my sisters to mass every morning before school.  The local nuns and priests were much like an extended family to us. When our family went to see Star Wars, we had a least one nun in tow.  My father spent hours debating philosophy with the parish priests, gave a great deal of his salary to the Catholic Church, and he truly believed in the letter of the law, which often frustrated my mother who is more pragmatic in nature.  My family sometimes jokes that he was an uber-Catholic… or as the comedian Jim Gaffigan calls it ‘a shi’ite Catholic.’ Along with this rigid and yet often compassionate view of the world came a somewhat simplistic theodicy: God was good, God demanded that you be good, and God rewarded and protected you if you were good.

This theodicy pretty much held… that is until my father died tragically in a plane crash and my mother was left to raise three young girls (14, 10, and 4) on her own.  I believe many of my father’s Catholic friends who had subscribed to a similar theodicy were very shaken by my father’s untimely death.  My mother is a petite, beautiful, unassuming woman… but she is tough as nails underneath.  She had to be to survive the financial and emotional fallout which crashed down upon her after my father’s death.  Much of the community rose to the occasion. We were inundated with condolences and letters of support.  My mother once told me that so many people had showed up to the funeral that people were standing in the back of the church… all waiting to pay their respect to my father.

My sisters’ reactions were understandable… their anger and grief engendered within them a rebellion.  The theodicy of ‘If you are good, God will protect you” was shattered and there was no way to put it back together.  Over the years, both of my sisters (although no longer officially part of the Catholic Church) in some ways still identify with Catholicism.  My oldest sister, an artist, fills her home with various shrines to saints and ancestors and saints’ images manifest in almost all of her artwork.  She is extremely compassionate and careful… something that comes across in her work.  Everything she touches becomes beautiful and magical.  Much of her work (which involves tedious bead work and hours of prepping materials and the construction of the designs themselves) conjures up a world in which the theodicy mentioned above is alive… there is much light and much darkness but goodness always prevails.  There is still wonder in her world… and still hope despite the darkness.

My other sister internalized much of the trauma of my father’s death.  Her anger manifested itself in detachment: For many years she was not really ‘there.’  Her return to the world has been painful for her… but this all the more highlights her tenacious will to see goodness in the world.  She constantly invests in her betterment… physically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually.  Her practice is not dogmatic or burdensome… but rather focused on pragmatism and meaning.  In her practice, I see great empathy for others who are withdrawn as she once was.  

My mother perhaps represents all of these qualities… a combination of the recovering Catholic ethos and the pragmatic practice of betterment and compassion.  Her grievances against the church are justifiable and her critiques of the Church are often linked to the hypocrisy she sees in the men who run the Church in the name of God, who do not know the suffering of a widow, have never had to soothe a grieving child, or feed, cloth, and house her children without an income.  My family is still recovering… and in some ways we are still Catholic. We do not tithe, go to confession, or care what the Pope says… we are not part of the Catholic Church but we refuse to give up the part of ourselves that is Catholic.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Greg Carey, Huff Post Religion

This is the first installment of a three-part series.

We’ve survived Harold Camping. We survived Y2K, albeit with less distress than our ancestors survived Y1K. The world has survived end-time predictors as diverse as Billy Graham, William Miller and Jonathan Edwards. Now we face the purported final year of the Mayan Calendar.

Nevertheless, most Christian bookstores devote entire sections to the sort of “Bible Prophecy” literature that uses the Book of Revelation, among other biblical literature, to tell us that we are currently living in the last days.

Here’s the truth: no academic interpreter of Revelation understands the book as a roadmap for the future, much less as telling contemporary Christians that these are the last days. Instead, scholars understand that Revelation originally spoke to the conditions of its own time and place. It offered a specific group of first century Christians not only hope for the future but also an interpretation — a “revelation” — of the world they inhabited. In other words, the best way to understand Revelation does not require an official Dick Tracy Apocalyptic Decoder Ring. We best understand Revelation when we read it like any other ancient text, in its own historical and cultural context.

What makes biblical scholars so certain that Revelation does not provide a roadmap for the future? Two basic considerations lead us to this conclusion.

First, the book itself insists that it’s addressed to a specific group of churches to speak to their own circumstances. Let’s begin with Revelation’s introductory words (my translation, with notes):

A revelation (Greek: apokalypsis) of [or from] Jesus Christ, which God gave by means of him to show his [God's? Christ's?] slaves the things that must happen soon, and he [God? Christ?] made it known by sending his angel to his slave John, who testified to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, everything he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud and blessed are those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep the things that are written in it, for the time is near. John, to the seven churches that are in Asia…

Working back, we observe several things. First, Revelation is addressed to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia. We’d locate them in western Turkey today. Identified in chapters two and three, these churches inhabited some of the major cities in the Roman Empire, including Ephesus, a top five city of the day. Second, Revelation’s author John describes the vision as speaking to things that must happen “soon” for “the time is near.” This is no minor point, nor is it to be spiritualized to mean something other than what it says. At several points Revelation reminds those ancient Christians to expect their redemption to come “soon” (1:1, 3, 19; 3:11; 22:7, 12, 20). Revelation was written not to tell us what to expect in our future but to give ancient Christians hope for dealing with their own. While modern interpreters disagree on many points, almost all agree on the basic historical circumstances addressed by Revelation.

(We’ll address Revelation’s message to those ancient believers in our next post.)

Second, we know a lot about the kind of literature Revelation represents. Revelation is an apocalypse, a form of literature with which biblical scholars have grown quite familiar. Indeed, Revelation constitutes the first book that calls itself an apocalypse. (The Greek word apokalypsisstands as the book’s very first word.)

Between the third century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., Judaism and Christianity produced several great literary apocalypses, along with a host of related literature. See my book “Ultimate Things” for an introduction to this literature or my entry, “Apocalypses,” in the new “Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible.”) All of these books share some distinctive features. They all relate a vision experienced by a single visionary. The visionary receives instruction and guidance from a heavenly being, usually an angel. And the vision reveals either otherworldly affairs or the resolution of history. Readers encounter what’s going on in heaven, the arrival of the messiah, and the final judgment, among other topics. Striking images that require imaginative interpretation are common to all these works. Revelation provides a classic example of an apocalypse, as it includes every one of these features.

The Protestant Bible includes only two apocalypses, Daniel and Revelation. However, the Ethiopian Orthodox canon includes 1 Enoch, perhaps the greatest of the literary apocalypses. The New Testament epistle of Jude alludes to 1 Enoch on two occasions, and at least 11 copies or fragments of 1 Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Several important Jewish apocalypses date from about the time of Revelation’s composition, including 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, 3 Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham. Within decades of Revelation’s composition several other Christian appeared, including the Shepherd of Hermas, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Peter.

Sharing many common traits, these literary apocalypses show us that the apocalypses represent a developing literary tradition, a form of ancient theology expressed in poetic symbols and sequences. If someone were to stand up in church and read a passage from 4 Ezra or Hermas, nearly everyone would assume the text was from Revelation.

On the second night I had a dream: I saw rising from the sea an eagle that had twelve feathered wings and three heads (2 Esdras 11:1, New Revised Standard Version).

The sun began to shine a bit and suddenly I saw an enormous wild beast, something like a sea monster, with fiery locusts spewing from its mouth (Hermas 23:6, trans. Bart Ehrman).

The apocalypses teach us that Revelation describes a moment of acute crisis for its own religious community, those seven churches in Asia. Like the other apocalypses, it critiques current events, even major political and cultural developments, from a divine perspective. And like the other apocalypses, it calls its ancient audience to rigorous, even dangerous, levels of faithfulness under challenging circumstances.

Revelation does not predict events in 2012 or some other future date; it spoke to our ancient ancestors in the faith, who had enough challenges of their own.

In future posts we will explore both the circumstances of Revelation’s composition and the lifestyle to which it called its audience.

******************************

Article written and published at Huffington Post by Greg Carey.

Greg Carey is Professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary (PA). His most recent book, Sinners: Jesus and His Earliest Followers, pursues the role of transgression in early Christian identity. His Ultimate Things: An Introduction to Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature provides a widely used textbook for courses on apocalyptic literature. His research interests include apocalyptic literature, the Gospel of Luke, and literary and rhetorical interpretation of the New Testament, and he has appeared on the PBS, BBC, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic Channel. A layperson, Greg serves as Scholar in Residence at Lancaster’s Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Kenny Smith, Emory University  

Atheist bloggers turned out in force for a record-setting $180,000 in donations for  Doctors Without Borders, to which some Christians replied “thank God!”  Not bad for a widely distrusted minority (a new study suggests that many people have more faith in the ethics of rapists!)  While fighting Christianity, Atheists wonder whether they should be fighting Wiccans and Neo-Pagans as well. They are, after all, religious.

In Santa Monica, CA., where a lottery determined who would have access to “vandal-proof, cage-like areas surrounded by chain-link fencing” in which to place their public holiday displays, Atheists won 18 of 21 such spaces, with just two going to a coalition of churches, and one to a Jewish group.  

In New Jersey, American Atheists billboards suggest that “free thinkers’ can be found in every family, if we only bother to look.  Conservative Catholics have responded with an “adopt an atheist” campaign aimed at helping those suffering from atheism to “recover their inner [and no doubt Catholic] self.” 

 The Evangelical group, American Family Association, released its long awaited list of merchants said to be friendly to and hostile to Christianity. “The litmus test is whether retailers use ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ in their ads. The latter is considered offensive because it takes away the focus on Jesus…”  For some potentially real Christmas warfare, visit the South and North Korea’s DMZ, with its three steel Christmas trees, “adorned with lights and topped with crosses,” and surrounded by barbed-wire.   

In Long Island, New York, two high school students were suspended for “Tebowing” in the halls, deemed a safety hazard. 

In Omaha, Nebraska, Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups are coming together to form a 35-acre “tri-faith” campus.  

Lowe’s has removed its commercial spots from TLC’s “All American Muslim” after complaints by Christian anti-Muslim groups such as the Florida Family Association,  and a petition drive to smack down the retailing giant has already begun.  

For those weary of waiting for an image of Jesus to miraculously appear in their morning toast, $31.95 buys you a Jesus Toaster at Burnt Impressions.com, which turns out miracles on demand. “Press a button and save a couple of souls, Jesus!” Don’t wait, though, they’re selling 50-100 daily while supplies last.   

Some have tried to understand Newt Gingrich’s “war on Sharia,” his experimentation with various Christianities, and his Dickensian view of the poor.  For the first time in American history, voters in Republican presidential primaries may have to choose between two non-Protestant candidates, a Mormon (Romney) and a Catholic (Gingrich, assuming this lasts through the primaries).  

A Canadian judge has ruled that smoking marijuana is not a religious act, even if participants understand their practices in explicitly religious terms, for instance, as partaking of the “tree of life… to share a collective consciousness, which is an aspect of God… a common belief in countless mystical traditions.”

There’s a new Jedi Order in town, and their website offers links to a host of other Jedi communities and resources. More, the Jedi are showing up in larger numbers and in more places.  In the Czech Republic, for instance, where nearly half of the country’s 10.5 million residents are not affiliated with religion, some 15,000 have listed their religion as “Jedi Knight.” 

We all know there are UFO-based religious movements, but is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence itself a religion? Michael Crichton apparently thought so.   

The Church of Scientology recently celebrated “Human Rights Day” (the 63^rd anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights) “with seminars, rallies, concerts, round tables, forums and festivals… and more than 80 human rights walks in 26 countries…”  

Physicists say they are “hot on the trail” of the elusive (and some say non-existent) “God particle” (otherwise known as the Higgs Boson), which would allow cosmologists to explain why mass occurs in the universe, apparently an important variable.  

In what promises to make Egypt an international party Mecca, newly elected legislators have ruled that tourists must observe a “sin free” lifestyle during their stay: no alcohol, no bikinis, no men and women swimming together. Good times!

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Heather Abraham

“Christmas Under Siege”, “War on Christmas”, “Defend Christmas“, “Stealing Christmas”, and “Somewhere Jesus is Weeping“, are just some of the provocative catch phrases that rear their ugly heads in the weeks leading up to the annual Christmas holiday season.  

For some, Bill O’Reilly, the late Jerry Falwell, and Sean Hannity to name a few, the use of terms such as Seasons Greetings or Happy Holidays are seen as an attempt to censor the religious aspects of the most celebrated of American holidays.  The annual first amendment battles involving government entities (public schools, capitals, courthouses…) displaying nativity scenes, are often described as dangerous liberal conspiracies hostile to the majority Christian population.  

In the last decade, mega retailers such as Walmart, Gap, Target, Sears, Home Depot, and Best Buy have come under attack by Christian organizations offended that these corporate giants prefer to use inclusive holiday language in their advertisements.  Others have organized boycotts of retailers who have had the audacity to recognize non-Christian holidays such as Kwanzaa or Hanukkah.  

In an attempt to counterattack these imaginary conspirators, the faith-based group Liberty Counsel continues their eight-year campaign against retailers who dare to use outrageously anti-Christian phrasing in their commercials and ads.  The wicked usage, by some retailers, of Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings has inspired the creation of a “Naughty and Nice” list and campaign organized by Liberty Counsel for those who are “Friends of Christmas.”  

We are continuing our eighth annual “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign,” pledging to be a “Friend” to those entities that recognize Christmas and a “Foe” to the Christmas censors.  We have just released an updated “Naughty and Nice” list, which catalogs retailers who either censor (“naughty”) or recognize (“nice”) Christmas. The list is compiled from information gathered by consumers and is updated whenever new information is received. Please print out the list and use it to decide which stores to patronize during the Christmas shopping season.  The list has been very influential in motivating retailers to acknowledge Christmas. So far this year, Best Buy has embraced Christmas and switched to the nice list, and Dick’s Sporting Goods has promised to change and include Christmas in their advertising. Liberty Counsel was the first organization to launch the “Naughty and Nice” list a number of years ago and since then other organizations have promoted similar programs.  We encourage you to report the naughty and the nice stores by sending an email to Liberty@LC.org and we also encourage shoppers to compliment the nice stores and tell the naughty ones that you will shop elsewhere.

Thankfully, this “you’re either with us or against us” attitude is not universally embraced by American Christians.  In an article entitled Rethinking Naughty and Nice, Tim Hoiland (a self- identified Christian) argues that the Liberty Counsel campaign “is a distraction at best, and destructive at worst.”  For Hoiland, the “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign” is 

a distraction in that the real threat to Christmas is not that secular entities and non-Christian individuals prefer to use other, more inclusive terms for a season that does in fact include various holidays (Christian and otherwise), but that Christians have often and in many ways failed to embody the true meaning and the message of the season.

And, Hoiland insists, “it serves to further cement us in cycles of consumerism, which leads to all sorts of injustice.”        

As Christian groups continue to disagree on the “War on Christmas” issue, a recent survey by LifeWay Research, a Christian organization, may shed some light on this manufactured crisis that continues to capture so many headlines.  As reported in the USA Today article, For Many, Jesus isn’t the Reason for the Season, 74% of those polled ‘”told LifeWay many of the things they enjoy this season “have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus,”‘ and only 37% reported including Jesus in their Christmas celebrations.  

LifeWay’s survey is illuminating when you take into consideration the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)  which reported that 76% of Americans self identify as Christian.  In other words, out of the more than 173,000,000 Christians in America (ARIS), only 37% (LifeWay) include Jesus in their Christmas festivities.  In 2005, Jerry Falwell claimed “secularists” “hate Christ” and want to “steal Christmas from America,” and yet the ARIS and LifeWay surveys reveal a story about the “War on Christmas” much different than the narrative told by Liberty Counsel and America’s fear mongering shock jocks.  It seems to me that IF there is a threat to Christmas, it is an intimate one.  So, what do you think?  Are Christians taking Christ out of Christmas?

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Kate Daley-Bailey

“Marley was dead: to be begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” (Dickens 45)

Thus begins perhaps one of Charles Dickens’ most popular works. One need not be an avid reader of Victorian literature or an English major to be struck by this short story (total, its length is less than 100 pages). Even if you never sat down and read A Christmas Carol, if you live in the U.S. or Britain, you probably know the major components of the story: an elderly miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, undergoes visitation from a series of ghosts, each attempting to woo or terrify Ebenezer to reform. Who could forget Scrooge’s kind hearted clerk Bob Crachit, or his crippled and beloved son, Tiny Tim, who, despite his hardship, proclaims “God bless us, everyone!”? Among the plethora of versions of the Carol are Disney’s latest version starring Jim Carey, a modern remake starring Bill Murray called Scrooged, and, one of my personal favorites, A Muppets’ Christmas Carol. This is not even to mention the numerous black and white versions gracing TV screens every December. Upon my reading of the classic this Christmas, I was intrigued by something I had never noticed on previous readings: a woodcut image gracing the pages across from the description of Marley’s ghost. The title of the woodcut, done by John Leech, is Ghosts of DepartedUsurers. This image title haunted me because, despite the popularity of the term during Dickens’ time, one hardly ever hears the term “usurer” today. Albeit the infrequency of the use of the term today, the concepts behind “usury” are at the heart of what plagues our modern economies and religious lives. Here is the description which provided the inspiration for the woodcut mentioned above:

“The air filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free.” (65)

The description of Marley’s Ghost is even more harrowing:

“The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” (57)

The spiritual burdens these spirits are bound by are symbols of their greed… and they appear to represent a particular type of sin greatly condemned throughout Christian history (that is until today), usury.

As mentioned earlier, “usury” as a term, is hardly a household name anymore and yet postmodern culture is greatly plagued by its effects. The term itself has developed a long history, especially among the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Interestingly, Islam still vehemently opposes “usury” and has developed special banking principals to guide devout Muslims. Like other ancient concepts, the word “usury” has been defined differently by various scholars and theologians. Usury, in its most common use today stands for “interest.” Could it truly be the case that earning interest could make someone culpable of a grievous sin in the eyes of the Christian Church? Yes and no.

For thousands of years, the Christian Church has identified “usury” as a sin… however various theologians and scholars living within these thousands of years disagreed over exactly what “usury” was and was not. A brief exploration of the term “usury” (and its multiple manifestations) may lead us to a better understanding of what was actually being prohibited by various religious communities, especially Christian ones.

In his book, Usury, Interest, and The Reformation, Eric Kerridge, gives us some insight into the intricate and sometime tedious art of trying to pin down a definition of “usury”:

“Usury or fenory is the taking of payment over and above the amount lent merely and solely in return for a secured loan.”(5)

Kerridge presents the definition explicated by the famed church father, Thomas Aquinas, to further clarify the concept of “usury”:

“To take money as the price of money lent, that is to take usury…the price for use, that is called usury.” (5)

Given this definition of “usury”, it seems that any interest on a loan is usury and therefore a sin in the Christian church. Aquinas bases his condemnation of “usury” in Biblical and Classical texts. For example, Aquinas’ view was in part dictated by Aristotle’s remarks on money:  “Aristotle… comments that money was not intended for this, but for buying and selling; usury merely produced money out of money, and so of all the ways to wealth was the most unnatural.” (15)

If one was not convinced by Aristotle’s argument against “usury”, one could always look to the multiple Biblical injunctions against “usury”:

“If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.” (New International Bible, Exodus 22:25)

“Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit.” (Leviticus 25:36-37)

“Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the LORD your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess.” (Deuteronomy 23:19-20)

“Who lends money to the poor without interest; who does not accept a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken.” (Psalm 15:5)

“He lends at interest and takes a profit. Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head.”(Ezekiel 18:13)

One might have noted that these injunctions are all found in the Hebrew Bible (which Christians refer to as the Old Testament). Another point to note is that these Biblical injunctions against interest apply only to taking interest from fellow Israelites (Jews), not other communities. Christianity, originally being a sect within Judaism, inherited these laws against taking interest but encountered a new dilemma due to the nature of the Christian community. Judaism fostered an exclusive religious and ethnic communal identity: there were Jews, those bound by the Covenant with the Hebrew god, and there were Gentiles, everyone else. Christianity, whose growth and strength depended on proselytizing to outsiders, viewed all outsiders as potential converts and thereby, potentially part of a worldwide community. The various Biblical laws mentioned above were ironically the very laws that allowed Jews to play the role of lender to European Christian communities (seen as Gentiles) and also the very same laws that prohibited Christians from playing any role but that of the borrower. The Christian New Testament is less lucid regarding the stipulations on lending and borrowing. Most theologians point to Jesus’ words as documented in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 6:35, “Lend, hoping for nothing again” as spiritual justification for legalized lending, although each may interpret these words differently. Some readers may interpret these words to mean that lending is allowed as long as no interest is charged. Others view these words as encouraging investment and others may read this passage as authorizing lending without any expectation of the principal being returned.

Unfortunately for Jewish communities in Europe and England, the livelihood that lending to non-Jews brought, also evoked a deep-seated hatred for the Jews among borrowing Christians:

“Not being Christians, they were debarred from the public exercise of lawful trades and occupations, but where allowed to practice them within their own community, which needed rabbis, physicians, surgeons, lawyers, butchers, bakers, and so on. Thus, while by no means all Jews were usurers, all lived by usury directly or indirectly, so the stigma attaching to usurers was extended to the Jews as a whole, and heightened by the general dislike of foreigners and foreign ways and beliefs.” (Kerridge 20)

In England, the words “Jew” and “usurer” became synonymous and one need only look to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, to see how Jews were often portrayed by Christian communities. From this vantage point it is easy, although disheartening, to see how easily the Christian condemnation of “usury”, meant originally to dissuade Christians from taking advantage of the poor, became a tool of propaganda used against Jewish communities. Dickens’ himself, although never naming Scrooge or Marley as “Jews” did include the Jewish villain stereotype, embodied in the infamous character Fagin, within his novel, Oliver Twist, referring to him many times simply as “the Jew”. However, there has been some mention of Dickens attempting to de-emphasize Fagin’s Jewish identity in later editions of the novel.

Kerridge notes that over time there are more distinctions made between “usury” and “interest”. For one thing, some writers commented that “interest” was not “usury” if it was charged as a penalty for not paying back the principal on an agreed date. Another distinction, albeit a rather murky one, is that “interest” requires that the lender or investor must share the risks of the business with the borrower or partner. The various terms linked with the concept of “usury”, such as “ochre”, “fenory”, etc., each had slightly different meanings and were often used interchangeably, making any definitive statement on the issue difficult. John Calvin, another significant Christian theologian, made a distinction between various kinds of loans and distinguished between who one could lend to based on the borrower’s economic status:

“Humanist that he was, Calvin knew there were two Hebrew words translated as “usury.” One, neshek, meant “to bite”; the other, tarbit, meant “to take legitimate increase.” Based on these distinctions, Calvin argued that only “biting” loans were forbidden. Thus, one could lend at interest to business people who would make a profit using the money. To the working poor one could lend without interest, but expect the loan to be repaid. To the impoverished one should give without expecting repayment.” Jones, Norman. “Usury”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. February 10, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/jones.usury

Calvin also notes that the Latins (Romans) viewed “usura” as honorable but detested “fenory”, which he describes along with others (such as P. Melanchthon) as the “biting” kind of loan mentioned above. Cato, according to Calvin, put “fenory” on the same level as murder and described those who practiced it as those who “suck the blood out of others”(from J. Calvin, Commentarii in Librum Psalmorum, Amersterdam, 1567, p. 47, translated by Eric Kerridge). These biting and blood sucking allusions link to the negative caricatures used to demonize Jews such as the bizarre charge brought against Jews in England and Europe referred to as “blood libel”, which according to the Internet Medieval Sourcebook was the belief that some Christians held that Jews used the blood of a Christian child to make Passover matzohs.

According to Joseph Shatzmiller in his book Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society, not only was “usury” considered a sin and a crime throughout Christian history, according to the Council of Vienne (1311-1312), it made one a heretic and made Christians and Jews vulnerable to church inquisitors (46). Despite the declaration of such councils against “usury”, many European governments had, by the 14^th century, gained from the well-entrenched credit system and profited from the Jewish moneylenders’ activities. The more criminalized lending became, the more reticent lenders and borrowers were of admitting their involvement. Lenders and borrowers had to depend on unwritten agreements, interest percentages were not documented, and payment, nonpayment and indebtedness sometimes led to violence. In his book, Shatzmiller also notes that during the Black Death of 1348-1349:

“many believed that the Jews created the pestilence, and as a result Jewish quarters were attacked by fear-stricken crowds. But even in these circumstances the populace was intent on destroying notarial records and other evidence of indebtedness, as Pope Clement IV noted in a bull of 2 October 1348” (49).

The major thinkers of the Protestant Reformation (Luther, Zwigli, Calvin, etc.) were particularly critical of what they saw as the Catholic Church’s abuses of the poor. They, like their predecessors, did not approve of “usury”, although their definitions of what “usury” entailed differed. Martin Luther, often depicted as the “father of the Protestant Reformation”, critiqued any enrichment which came at one’s neighbor’s loss:

“That is the deepest depth of greed, that just looks upon a neighbour’s want and need as an opportunity not to help him but to enrich oneself and become wealthy through one’s neighbour’s loss. Those who do that are all daylight robbers, thieves, and ockerers.” (36-37)

Although there is much argument over the terminology used and what limits should be placed on lending, perhaps Luther’s condemnation can shed some light on exactly what was at the heart of the issue—how one dealt with others, especially those less fortunate than oneself. Perhaps the condemnation of “usury” was not all about how much money was gained but rather how much money was gained on the backs of others. The sin of “usury” might be that it sees other people as a means to end, instead of an end in and of themselves. “Usury”, in this sense, is predatory and pitiless… it not only makes the borrower destitute financially but it also makes the lender destitute in spirit. Think back to the description of Scrooge, Marley and the other “usurer ghosts” depicted in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Take the passage where Marley explains why he is fettered:

“I made the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard, I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it… My spirit never walked beyond our counting house- mark me!- in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me.” (61)

When Scrooge exclaims that Marley was always a good man of business, Marley remarks:

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business…” (62-63)

While many Christians may be reticent to abandon “usury” in the strictest sense, perhaps words such as those from the Church fathers and, in this case, Dickens, may make us think twice about what is, as Christians, truly “our business” in this world.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Rachel Wheeler, Religion In American History

About a dozen years ago, I found myself on a college campus in Portland, Oregon, listening to a talk by a man who billed himself as the “mad, vegetarian cowboy.” Howard Lyman was the founder of an organization called “Voices for a Viable Future,” and that day, as I’m sure he did at hundreds of other public appearances, he told the story of how he had grown up on a cattle ranch in Montana in the 1950s. It was a small operation, but one that had sustained the family for several generations. Then he went off to ag-school at a time when “better living through chemistry” was embraced by agricultural scientists. He came back to the farm with the zeal of the convert. He told his father he wanted to make the ranch bigger and better. They bought up more acres, and started on the path to modern, chemically intensive, factory farming and feed-lot ranching.

• Share this on Facebook
• Email this to a friend?
• Share this on Reddit
• Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon
• Tweet This!
• Send this page to Print Friendly
• Digg this!
• Email this via Gmail

By Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Bulletin

On June 1^st, 1933, New Testament Professor and Christian theologian, Dr. Gerhard Kittel (picture to the left) delivered a speech entitled Die Judenfrage, “The Jewish Question,” which was later published in a 78 page booklet. In Die Judenfrage, Kittel advocated that German Jews be demoted to “guest status” in Germany, a position which was attacked by more right-leaning Nazi groups insisting upon forced exile or worse. In reaching his conclusion, Kittel considered three other potential answers to the Jewish question commonly debated at the time: extermination (which he dismissed as impractical and, in later editions, “un-Christian”), a separate Jewish state in the Middle East (which he declined for various logistical reasons, such as hostilities from displaced Arabs), and assimilation (which he argued was actually part of the problem, since mixed marriages between Jews and Christians in Germany resulted in the spread of secular liberalism in Germany).

In May of 1945, Kittel was arrested by French authorities, imprisoned for 17 months, dismissed from his academic position and refused his pension. In his own defense, Kittel claimed to be a “good” Nazi, having joined the party only one month before delivering Die Judenfrage. He insisted that he was attempting to work within Nazi institutions to steer the discourse on racial issues away from “vulgar racism” and provide a moral Christian stance for dealing with the Jews in Germany. Kittel also enumerated fourteen acts of kindness towards individual Jews in his own defense, such as dedicating one of his books to Issar Israel Kahan, his deceased Hebrew teacher, and intervening with the Gestapo in Vienna so that Jewish Christians in the ghetto could receive devotions. The only moral (and possibly legal) mistake Kittel admitted was being duped by the Nazi Party and Hitler himself, which he referred to as the “most bitter deception” of his life.

Although Kittel’s relationship with historical Judaism and German Jews was complex, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he willingly aided and abetted the Nazi movement. His father was a specialist in the Old Testament, and Kittel himself knew biblical, rabbinic, and modern Hebrew, worked with Jewish scholars, and even supported the publication of critical editions of rabbinic texts. However, after his 1933 speech, Kittel lost many admirers and some of his scholarly peers viewed his ideological turn with skepticism and disappointment. In light of Die Judenfrage, some of his earlier writings, while (incredibly) not seen as especially anti-Semitic at the time, come into sharp relief, such as Jesus und Die Juden, published in 1926 and describing modern assimilated Jews as “people who have lost their souls- and all that remains of them is the outward hulls of a human being foreign to us.”  In 1943, Kittel worked with Eugene Fischer (a Nazi scholar involved in race science) on “hooked nosed” terra cotta figurines unearthed in Trier which he saw as evidence of Jewish racial traits.

He taught college courses on the Jewish question and recommended barring Jews from professional work and education (e.g., in the picture to the left, SA soldiers link hands preventing  Jews from entering the University in Vienna in 1938, where Kittel would soon serve as chair). He continued to write publicly on Talmudic justifications for violence towards non-Jews even after 1943 when he admits to knowing about Jews being murdered in Russia (published, for instance, in Goebbel’s Anti-judische Aktion). Kittel wrote more articles for Walter Frank’s National Institute for History of the New Germany (which was meant to highlight German scholarship and was constructed by order of Hitler himself) than any other contributor including Frank himself, and was one of the Institute’s fifteen original members. Kittel praised the Institute for its “service” as a “weapon in the fight against Jewry.” The 1936 opening of a special section of the Institute (dedicated especially to the Jewish question) was attended by Rudolf Hess and heralded by the Volkische Beobachter (the Nazi party’s newspaper).

With such complexities in mind, scholars of religion face important questions as to how Kittel’s scholarship should be regarded and (perhaps most crucially) whether it ought to be used at all. Although Kittel never supported extermination of the Jews, and never, as did other Nazi Christian groups like the Deutsche Christen, suggested that Jesus was anything but Jewish in blood and culture, or sought the removal of the Old Testament from the Christian Bible, his ideological work is imbricated with Nazi politics. Kittel, for instance, commonly referred to assimilated German Jews as “refuse,” a poison and corruption which “eats at the marrow of a Volk.” It is therefore worth inquiring as to the relationship between his politics and his scholarly work.

Take, for example, Kittel’s Greek New Testament Dictionary/Lexicon (Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, or NWNT) which includes contributions from a wide range of scholars in Greek, Hebrew, and Biblical Studies, and the academic importance of which transcends the war years. The editor’s preface to the 1963/4 English translation (written by G. W. Bromiley) described it as “not only a reference work or a starting-point for further research, but also as a formative contribution to theology.” Kittel’s role as editor and contributor of the first three volumes of the NWNT may not, at first glance, appear to be problematic, but it is worth noting that the first volume was published in 1933, the same year that Kittel proposed his solution to the “Jewish Question” in Die Judenfrage. Kittel edited the first three volumes of the NWNT from 1933-1938, though volumes four through ten were published under different editorial direction. An English translation of the first volume was published in 1963/4 and reprinted in 1993. The English translator, Bromiley, in his 1963/4 preface states that the “ultimate worth” of Kittel’s NWNT ‘lies in its fundamental orientation and its objective findings.” The 10 volume English translation was finished in 1976.

In Kittel’s preface to the first volume, he credits the contributors for their expertise and hard work, such as Walter Grundmann and Georg Bertram. Grundmann joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and from 1939-1943 headed the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Bertram presided over this same Institute in 1943 and in 1944 described the war as the “world conflict with Jewry for which all the powers of the German soul have to be mobilized.” Kittel’s volumes are still used in seminaries today without any mention of the contributors’ involvement in the Nazi order.