Mike Bird says pastors like me need to teach our young people historical criticism.  Mike is a New Testament scholar and he's not alone.  The brilliant preacher Barbara Brown Taylor has made the same point.

Historical Criticism is the science of reading texts in light of their historic, cultural context. Take the statement "I'll knock you up in the morning."  Is it offensive or risque?  Actually it depends on where the sentence was uttered. In the UK it simply means to "wake you up."  In the U.S. the statement implies more than a rap on the door and a cheery "good morning."

 To read the bible historically means that we can't take sentences from the Bible and pretend that they are truths independent of time and place.  So, for instance, when Jesus says that he is the son of man, we might take it at face value and say, "Jesus is affirming his full humanity, the fact that he is human just like us."  But taken historically we would see that when Jesus uttered the phrase "Son of Man" he was referring to a figure in the book of Daniel, a figure who is no mere mortal but an exalted figure divine or almost divine.  I mention this because sometime historical criticism is perceived to take away the divine in the Bible and substitute naturalistic historic anti-supernatural readings for true Christianity.  That is not so.  There's more to historical criticism, there are many branches and if you take it up at even an amateur level you get to learn some really cool German words.

I have no problem with historical criticism but I do have a problem teaching it.  I've tried often and never been successful.  Occasionally I've had adult classes become enthusiastic about particular instances of historical criticism but most young people seem not to have a context that allows for appreciation.  How different from my day!  When I was a youth we hungered for historical criticism!  NOT.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazi's, he wrote many letters that were later published as Letters and Papers from Prison.  In some of these letters he advanced an idea that he called "religionless Christianity."

The idea has taken on several lives of its own, thanks in part to the fact that Bonhoeffer isn't clear as to what he means by the term and he was executed before the end of World War 2.  Some have taken his thought in the direction of Christian atheism, others have believed that he was looking ahead to a time like our own when religious institutions would diminish and Christians would have to do without institutional church structures to remain followers of Christ.

In The Politics of Redemption, Adam Kotsko advances an intriguing thesis regarding what Bonhoeffer means.  Kotsko writes that Bonhoeffer's definition of religion is "idiosyncratic and narrow" and in a counter-intuitive sense for most of us.  On the basis of the rest of his prison writings, Kotsko makes the claim that Bonhoeffer uses the term "religion" to refer to individualism and metaphysics.

In terms of individualistic accounts of salvation Bonhoeffer writes: "Hasn't the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all?"  Obviously Bonhoeffer doesn't traffic in the same circles I do (I know plenty of people who think individualistically about salvation) but I resonate with his point.  The idea of salvation as a transaction between an individual and God (who is also an individual) is an idea that I find difficult to hold onto in light of the story of Jesus and the church.  Salvation brings us into new relationships with God and with others.

As to metaphysics, Bonhoeffer goes on to write about "the world beyond."  Bonhoeffer wants a world focused faith:  "What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world.  I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic, pietistic ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the  incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ."

So in Bonhoeffer's religion, individuals are saved from the world in favor of the beyond.  As Kostko puts it: "it seems fair to characterize [religion] as essentially the drama of the soul with its God, a drama for which everything else falls into indifference."

Kotsko goes on to show how this explains Bonhoeffer's critiques of both Bultmann and Barth.  Bultmann is too concerned with the individual soul of the believer.  Barth is too caught up in God as an individual.  But that is for another post (God willing).

If Kotsko is right then the last thing that Bonhoeffer sees is Christianity becoming individuals practicing their faith apart from a community.  Instead, Bonhoeffer is calling for people to practice faith in community (which is different from individuals attending a church service).  And Bonhoeffer's practice is concerned with people in this world and the world itself.  Oddly enough, Bonhoeffer's "religionless" has much in common with "religion" according to the book of James:  "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

Discipleship is difficult, agape love near impossible, but Jesus says that human love is enough.  It's not the highest form of love or the best possible way but that's ok because beyond our love and beyond ourselves is the one that God raised from the dead: Jesus Christ.  The love of God is evident in Jesus, his life, his death and his refusal to give up on us.  Love is enough because the God of love is enough. 

Before the printing press and copy machine everything was copied by hand.  In the middle ages, this work was done by monks, sitting in silence in rooms with clear glass windows known as scriptoriums.  In his delightful book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt includes this humorous but true anecdote on how business was conducted there:

"The monastery was a place of rules, but in the scriptorium there were rules within rules....Absolute silence reigned....An elaborate gestural language was invented in order to facilitate such requests as were permitted. If a scribe wanted to consult a psalter, he made the general sign for a book--extending his hands and running over imaginary pages--and then, by putting his hands on his head in the shape of a crown, the specific sign for the psalms of King David.  If we was asking for a pagan book, he began, after making the general signs [for book], to scratch behind his ear, like a dog scratching his fleas.  And if he wished to have what the Church regarded as a particularly offensive or dangerous pagan book, he could put two fingers into his mouth, as if he were gagging."

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.  Norton, 2011.  pp.43-44

The politics of palm sunday

Palm Sunday and
Jesus enters the city
A hot bed of religious fervour and zealous passion
Some wanted him dead
Some wanted him to take up arms against the oppressor
Some simply wanted a son
alive
once the shouting was over
Jesus what if you were mis-
under-
misquoted, stood?
shot with words
manipu
lated,
riddled with emotion
domesticated,
to a dominant agenda
Jesus give me the courage to keep saying yes
to your call
and your Kingdom
no matter how many people shout
wave, holler

Big Elk Lake, Siskyou County, California