March 29, 2009

Glynn Cardy

Lent 5

The truth of the founding parable of the Hebrew nation was their yearning not to be slaves. As the story goes the Hebrews were a servile class in the Egyptian empire until a leader emerged to galvanise that yearning and head their protest. With pluckiness, divine feats, and tenacity the Israelites led by Moses exited Egypt, allegedly walked through the Red Sea, and embarked on a circuitous route towards Canaan where they would eventually kill the locals and reign supreme. How much of the Exodus is fact and how much is fiction is difficult to tell, and is actually unimportant. What is important are the values, remembered in the ritualised history of both the Passover and the Last Supper - values of risk, rebellion, and freedom that the parable extols.

In the course of time the observance of the laws developed by the Hebrew community led to a new kind of slavery – enslavement to the written word of the law as interpreted by an ecclesiastical elite. At least that’s how the early Christians saw it. They saw their Jewish faith as largely bound to the letter rather than the spirit of the Law, and wanted to break free of it. The New Testament writers portray Jesus in conflict with the scribes and Pharisees over the issue of allegiance to a strict legal observance. Jesus, time and time, is said to break the rules – rules that kept men and women apart, healthy and sick people apart, Jewish and non-Jewish people apart. It seemed that Jesus’ relationship with God was one that required scant attention to rules.

Paul the paramount author of the New Testament - though someone who had never met Jesus - battled hard to uphold a freedom of spirit from the constraints of the Jewish Law. He urged, for example, his Galatian converts not to revert back to their previous religious ways but to ‘stand fast in the liberty wherein Christ has made us free’ [Gal 5:1]. They were to stand fast in the truth of their experience of God and of God’s grace, to risk the wrath of those who didn’t understand and were offended by their actions, to rebel against leaders who wanted to take them back, and to live lives free of imposed rules being guided instead by the Spirit within.

One way to understand the resurrection is with the motif of freedom. Jesus was a free man. Free in his mind and spirit. Those affronted by freedom killed him. The resurrection celebrates that freedom actually can’t be killed. When freedom is repressed it goes underground only to emerge later in the lives and actions of others. The Spirit of freedom is more powerful than all the machinations and weapons of human control and repression. That’s the Easter hope.

As the Exodus led in time to an institutional religion with rules and regulations so the praxis of Jesus and the preaching of Paul led in time to an institutionalised religion of power, control, and a surfeit of rules. Once again the God of freedom had been bound. It was an Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, in the 16th century who broke free of that religion and suggested that access to God is possible without ecclesiastical brokers and their boundaries. Yet that freedom too was curtailed in time but another form of bondage – enslavement to the written word of the Bible.

For most of history human freedom has been regarded in the Christian world as dangerous, an open door to civil unrest, rebellion, and social chaos. It was firmly believed that people were not meant to be free. Rather they were created to be subject to authority – subject to God the Supreme Ruler in the heavens, subject to the King who ruled under God on earth, and subject to the position in life that this God had allotted to them. People were not even meant to be free to have their own thoughts, let alone express them. They were instead expected to think the thoughts prescribed by God through the Bible, and interpreted by God’s ecclesiastical ‘servants’.

Freedom of thought and speech is still today looked upon with suspicion and often antagonism by many political and religious authorities. Consider for example the attempts of some countries to control the Internet. Yet the freedom of people to think for themselves, and publicly express those thoughts, was a necessary prelude to the opening up of the modern world and led to a whole series of emancipations.

First there came freedom from absolute monarchy. Following the bloody French step by step across the Western world the absolute rule of hereditary monarchs has been replaced by democratic self-rule. Very few Western Christians, if any, would condemn democracy today, yet before the eighteenth century Christianity was wedded to the upholding of royal authority and even spoke of the ‘divine right of kings’. It was believed that God ordained the power structures in society and any attempt to overthrow them was regarded as a direct assault on the ‘will of God’.

Secondly there came the affirmation of basic human rights. Up until that time the emphasis had been almost entirely on the duties and responsibilities owed to ‘your betters’. People had never been taught to believe they had any rights by virtue of being human. So gradually over the last two centuries there has come the abolition of slavery, the rejection of racism, the emancipation of women, and the acceptance of gay and lesbian people. All these wonderful and hard fought for changes pitted their proponents against the entrenched dogmas of conventional Christianity. These emancipations - and many are still a work in progress - have been made possible only because at the same time as the movements of democracy and human rights there has been a steady erosion of the unwavering belief in a supernatural Supreme Being whose revealed will was not to be questioned.

This is the third emancipation movement. It is the rebellion against the notion of a Being who dwells above and beyond the earth, who directs the affairs of earthlings through vassals, and who dictatorially imposes His will. This god in all the monotheistic religions has been male, sovereign [which is code for ‘unaccountable’], paternalistic, and, on a good day, benevolent. This god, not surprisingly, is usually portrayed as a king or parent, and humanity as subjects or children. With the rise of democracy the king metaphor has waned. The parent metaphor with ‘Father God’ is still alive and well. The problem with the metaphor is that the children never grow up. They never reach adulthood. They are always meant to be dependent, to trust and obey. They are meant to take instructions, do them, and in the doing be happy. Finding their own way through life, making their own decisions and mistakes, and discovering their own happiness and spiritual well-being is seen at best as disobedient and at worst destructively corrosive of morality, tradition, and society.

Yet despite the conservative squawks, belief in a supreme unaccountable God-father has in the Western world largely broken down. It has broken down due to the historical-critical approach to sacred writings. It has broken down because we have learnt to ask questions and expect a response. It has broken down because we’ve learnt that such a god has been used by leaders and institutions who want to preserve their power. Freedom has always been feared and hated by those with a strong desire to control others.

Freedom from the commanding voice of an exterior Supreme Being is even more important now that we realise that what our forbears took to be the divine voice, either in the Bible or in the church, turns out to be simply the voice of other humans like ourselves. When persons are elected as popes, bishops, or ordained as clergy, they remain as human and fallible as they were before. All church edicts and decisions are of human origin and open to error.

Since the revolution initiated with the 19th century historical-critical method of understanding the Bible we are now able to go further than those pioneers and declare that the Bible also can err, and frequently does, for it was composed by humans. Inspiring though it is in many parts, the Bible also transmits the errors and prejudices of those who wrote it. As Lloyd Geering says, “In the light of these discoveries… to retain the traditional view of the Bible’s authority and inerrancy is to fall into the practice of idolatry.” [1]

The human origin of what was long taken to be divine does not prevent us from learning much of value from it, just as we still value the advice of our parents and teachers even after we have reached adulthood and learned to live independently of them. Why a Supreme unaccountable Being is dangerous is that it adds to purely human words a dimension of absolute authority that they don’t warrant. The continuing adoration of such a Being enables people to unconsciously project their own beliefs on to a divine authority and then attempt to impose those beliefs on others, in the firm conviction that in doing so they are simply obeying the divine will. It is delusional and dangerous.

In Jeremiah 31:33 it is written, “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days… I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” The future of religion will not be found not in written exterior Laws imposed on people, but in finding the essence of truth within oneself. The future of religion will not be found in having an elevated unaccountable God-father, but in finding the essence of accountable authority within oneself. The future of religion will not be found in an immortal invisible god-only-wise, but in finding the God who is indivisible from humanity and whose spirit calls us into finding our freedom and our truth, and critiques it.


Note: a significant part of this sermon is an adaptation of the ideas of Professor Lloyd Geering as found in his book ‘Christianity Without God’. The ‘God’ referred to in the title is the Supreme unaccountable Being I refer to, rather than an understanding of God whose locus is with humanity.

[1] Geering, L. Christianity Without God Wellington : Bridget Williams Books, 2002, p. 137