Smart people saying smart things

Last updated on: March 5, 2012 at 1:03 pm by Fred Clark

Smart people saying smart things 2012-03-05T13:03:11-05:00 Fred Clark

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Lisa Sharon Harper: “Black Evangelicals, White Evangelicals and Franklin Graham’s Repentance“

I sat down for a pleasant meal in the home of two great friends — one of them a white evangelical faith leader deeply committed to social justice. Well into the evening’s conversation —when we’d dropped all our pretenses and our exchanges moved well past mealtime niceties — one friend asked me something that caught me entirely off guard.

“Do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian?” he said.

I was dumbstruck. I had never heard anyone actually ask that question before.

“Yes,” I replied. “What would make you doubt that?”

As he explained, it became clear: My friend wasn’t sure whether Dr. King was a Christian because King’s Christianity didn’t look like my friend’s Christianity.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: “All about Eve: The Christian roots of the GOP war on women“

This attack on women is, and I am grieved to say it, driven by a particular Christian theological perspective that denigrates women and holds them responsible for sin, particularly sexual sin.

GOP politics today is, in fact, all about Eve.

The GOP war on women will continue precisely because of the conservative Christian theology that drives wedge politics in a campaign season has a fundamental contempt for women and their equal dignity and worth. As the Southern Baptist Convention voted in 1984, “[M]an was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.” In conservative Christian eyes, women are the evil temptresses, the sinner “Eves” who lead the gullible Adams astray, especially sexually. Therefore they are “first” in sin, i.e. it’s women’s fault that men get kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

There are “softer” forms of this view of women as sexual temptresses, as in John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter on women, where Mary is the “new Eve.” Women’s “femininity” earns them love, but the implication is clearly only if they stay “Mary,” the good mother, and don’t wander over into the independence of “Eve.” Eve, of course, is the sexual face of women in these theological perspectives. The message is “good women” don’t do that. …

… Women are not, as a matter of fact, second in the order of creation, and first in the order of sin. Women were created by God, in Genesis, equal in dignity to the Creator. (Gen. 1:27) And women are not, by virtue of being sexual beings, evil temptresses. Human sexuality is another gift of the Creator, who called what had been created good.

Jo Hilder: “Good Girls Never Change the World“

While some may choose to see both Esther and Abigail as examples of wives who “respected” their husbands in a submissive or even passive sense, I see both of them as examples of strong, wise women who knew how to manage difficult and seemingly impassable situations to theirs and others advantages. Neither woman was the slightest bit interested in appeasing the tender emotions of their husbands, nor in pandering to his arbitrary power-mongering or self-centredness. Their “respect” was seemingly quite self-serving in fact, and given only to protect their loved ones and all they valued from the worst of the buffoons they were partnered with. It was not for the sake of obedience to God and the sanctity of their marriages they deferred to these men – it was for the sake of the things they held dearest – their households, and their people. Their respect was not about love, loyalty or devotion – it was about rebalancing an arbitrary inequality of power.

Steven James: “Stop sugarcoating the Bible“ (via)

The Bible is a gritty book. Very raw. Very real. It deals with people just like us, just as needy and screwed up as we are, encountering a God who would rather die than spend eternity without them.

Yet despite that, it seems like Christians are uncomfortable with how earthy the Bible really is. They feel the need to tidy up God.

For example, look in any modern translation of Isaiah 64:6, and you’ll find that, to a holy God, even our most righteous acts are like “filthy rags.” The original language doesn’t say “filthy rags”; it says “menstrual rags.” But that sounds a little too crass, so let’s just call them filthy instead.

And let’s not talk so much about Jesus being naked on the cross, and let’s pretend Paul said that he considered his good deeds “a pile of garbage” in Philippians 3:8 rather than a pile of crap, as the Greek would more accurately be translated.

Mike Lux: “What Bible Is Santorum Reading?“

Jesus talks about mercy to those in trouble in 24 verses of the Gospels, tells people not to judge in 34 verses, tells people to love and forgive even their enemies in 53 verses, tells people to love their neighbors as themselves and treat others as they would want to be treated in 19 verses, and specifically tells people to help the poor and/or spurn riches and the wealthy in 128 verses.

That is a lot of verses, 258 by my count, where Rick Santorum’s savior and George W. Bush’s favorite philosopher sounds like a tried and true, solid to the core, far-out, lefty liberal. And all those where Jesus sounds like a conservative? I couldn’t find a single one. He never once condemns abortion, even though it was very common in ancient times. He never speaks against homosexuality, even though the ancient Greeks before him and the Romans living in those times openly practiced and celebrated it. He called on the Romans and the Jewish establishment to treat the poor better, not condemn an adulteress to death, and to take the moneychangers out of the temple, but he never once asked the Romans to lower their taxes or lessen their regulations on over-burdened businesses. He never celebrated the greatness of the invisible hand of the market, and never discussed the virtues of selfishness, as conservatives today are so fond of doing.

The anti-immigrant conservative has to ignore Leviticus, which says: “Don’t mistreat any foreigners who live in your land. Instead treat them as well as you treat citizens and love them as much as you love yourself.” The pro-death penalty conservative has to ignore Jesus who told the Pharisees that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. The anti-labor conservatives have to not worry about Jesus’ brother James (the undisputed first leader of the early Christian church according to most historians) saying “Now an answer for the rich. Start crying, weep for the miseries coming to you … Laborers plowed your field and you cheated them: listen to the wages you kept back, they are calling out: realize the cries of the workers have reached the ears of the Lord.” Conservative anti-class warriors have to pretend that Jesus’ mother Mary never said about her son: “The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.” Conservatives like Mitt Romney who say the housing market has to hit bottom need to avoid thinking about Jesus very first sermon, where he called for a year where all debts would be forgiven. And the anti-welfare conservatives? You guys are in big trouble, as verse after verse condemns you. The one time Jesus specifically talks about how the last judgment will go down, he says, “All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate them one from another as the shepherds separates sheep from goats.” Who gets to go to Heaven in this story? The nations and people who fed the hungry and welcomed the stranger. The ones who didn’t go straight to Hell.

These are not isolated verses: there are thousands of examples of them, and they are in every book in the Bible.

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