What Are You Reading and Why?

From Marcion on, the church has wrestled with the concept of G-d that emerges from the Jewish-Christian scriptures:  the vengeful/violent G-d and the peace-committed vulnerable G-d.  Crossan focuses the issue well:  the story of Noah and the story of Abraham represent the two models given as G-d’s solution to a rebellious creation.  In the Noachic solution, G-d destroys the empire; G-d’s solution is to kill everyone except the family of Noah (p 64).  But the Noachic solution doesn’t work and so a new divine solution appears in Genesis 12;  the covenant of love that will invite all to the new family of faith.  Noah exterminates, Abraham converts.’  The solution of extermination by force and violence, and the Abrahamic solution of conversion to justice and peace, are never reconciled anywhere in the biblical tradition.  They are together from one end of it to the other.  Do we take them both and worship a G-d of both violence and nonviolence, or must we choose between them and recognize that the Bible proposes the radicality of a nonviolent G-d struggling with the normalcy of a violent civilization?’ (p 88)

The difference is underscored even more in the biblical hospitality eschatology:  the Noachic solution ends in a cannibalistic feast (Rev 19:17-21), the Abrahamic solution ends with a reconciling and peaceable society of food and grace.  Crossan chooses not the violence but the non-violent G-d revealed by Jesus.

 A crucial contribution to hermeneutical faithfulness.

The concept of “empire” has emerged as a crucial key in interpreting biblical stuff, and Horsley is one of the most insightful writers in this area.  Jesus and Empire documents how practises and effects of Roman imperialism decisively shaped the conditions of life in Galilee and Jerusalem.  These included the global subjugation of people, the emperor cult for theology, the need for feeding large unproductive segments of the population (“bread and circuses”), military violence as a control mechanism (eg crucifixion as intimidation, slaughter and mass enslavement, display of Roman army standards), indirect rule through client kings and religious priests (the threefold level of oppressive taxation in the Jewish territories: tribute to Romans, taxes to Herod, offerings and levies to the temple state).

Against this, “Jesus launched a mission not only to heal the debilitating effects of Roman military violence and economic exploitation, but   revitalize and rebuild the people’s cultural spirit and communal vitality….  In his offering the kingdom of G-d to the poor, hungry and despairing people, Jesus instilled hope in a seemingly hopeless situation, through his renewal of covenantal community, calling the people to common cooperative action to arrest the disintegration of their communities” (pp 126,127).

Horsley ends his book with a comparison of the Christian Empire and the American Empire, and the latter resembles the Roman Empire.  “Paul was building an international anti-imperial movement of an alternative society based in local communities” (p 133).

It is tempting to read the New Testament, especially the stories of Jesus, as  nice little reflections on spiritual concerns—how to get along with our neighbours, how to live respectable lives of non-threatening piety. Oakman presents the culture Jesus lived in, an agrarian, a marginalized life, of peasant economics and values. But Oakman’s approach is wider than simply casting Jesus as a peasant; Jesus’ ideology is quite worldly’ (p 3).  Ancient economics is deeply implicated in ancient politics, so Jesus’ peasant aims were both profoundly political and entirely social, which helps explain why first century scribes recorded sayings and memories of a crucified, illiterate peasant with such care and diligence.

Oakman focuses on debt as one of the keys to understanding Jesus’ concerns.  When debtors defaulted, sale of assets (land), imprisonment or slavery were the usual consequences.  Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness, the abolition of debt, was a subversive revolutionary agenda (p 39); Jesus’ vision of liberation coming with the reign of G-d attacked the principle elements of the Roman order in Galilee.  G-d’s rule was a power opposed to the social order established by Rome; Jesus spoke on behalf of a politics of liberation and compassion, not of the issues of debts and defaulting.

The two most gripping sections of Oakman’s writing are his discussion of the Lord’s Prayer (the concept of debt) and the story of the “Foolish Samaritan” that sees the story as more than simply a model for good behaviour; G-d’s reign is “revealed in the wilds of bandits and inns….  The Samaritan indebts himself and the injured Jerusamelite into the power of the innkeeper” (p 179), giving the innkeeper (a notoriously bad lot by peasant standards) a blank cheque.

Bering is a well-educated sexologist who has written about a huge variety of sexual classifications. Most of these classifications were completely unknown to me. There are a huge number of “philes” that are not in common usage, but are used by people studying human sexuality. He does a good job of working the issue of normal with these classifications and then asking the question about how we are to judge people with these kinds of deviances.

—Bernie Turner is a retired pastor living in McMinnville, OR

Nugent’s book is of special interest because it feeds into my current writing project, namely: “The Politics of the Nonviolent God” —one that might be seen as a sequel to Nugent’s Politics of Yahweh and to Yoder’s The Politics of [the Nonviolent] Jesus. My line of reasoning is that if Jesus was the fullest revelation of God (Yahweh) available to us, and if Jesus was nonviolent, then the God whom Jesus worshipped is nonviolent. Yet Yoder’s God is a “Warrior God,” and Nugent’s work is a thoroughgoing affirmation of Yoder’s Warrior God!

Herein lies the spiritual and ethical challenge for all of us: As long as we believe that Ultimate Power (our God, the God of Jesus of Nazareth) is characterized by violence, by the Warrior, then we as followers of Jesus, as pacifists, as citizens of a global humanity, will consciously or subconsciously support the instruments of violence as a necessarily essential part of our political institutions. But we now know (beyond the aid of the biblical canon) — that unless we learn to live together without violence, we will be destroyed by Violence.

—Ray Gingerich is professor emeritus of theology and ethics, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA

This novel set in England is the story of a man who lived an unremarkable life. Harold and his wife Maureen had established a life and a routine which did not include exchange of warmth and affection.

Early in his retirement he received a letter which changed his life and his routine. It was a letter which told him that Queenie was near death in a nursing home in the north of England. Harold lived in the south of England. Queenie and Harold had both been employed by a company whose boss was a tyrant.

He wrote a letter to Queenie and went out the door of his home to post the letter. On the way to post the letter he met a young woman who told him how an act of kindness had given life to her grandmother. This conversation led him to think he had to do more than post a letter. He knew he had to visit Queenie.

This is a fascinating story of a woman who was the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father. She was born and raised in New York, but growing up she never felt that she belonged. Her parents were very sophisticated people. Her father was a famous professor at Columbia and recognized around the world for his scholarship. She found her “place” as an actress. For several years now she has been doing a one-person performance of her own story. She has discovered that many young people struggle with the same issues she experienced. She and her family visited Lebanon many times where there was a large family of her mother’s. She ultimately came to feel at home in Beirut as much or more than she felt in New York.

I found this book particularly interesting because of our current political situation. How she found her “place” was truly remarkable. Most of us have engaged in a search for place but without the tensions she experienced. Her courage and determination in finding her path is inspiring.

—Bernie Turner, retired pastor, McMinnville, OR

Some books are inspirational; others are fun, yet others provide valuable information. Few books have the capacity to impact our very perception of reality. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is just such a book. I especially appreciated the opening and closing sections of the book. In the former, the author offers a rather protracted “parable” concerning the stark differences between seeing a forest from above, as the locus of commercial possibilities, and seeing a forest from its very midst, as the locus of an irreducibly complex web. In the closing section, Scott leads us through an epistemological reflection on the Greek concept of metis (μῆτις) (cunningness or wisdom, craft, skill) as a form of knowledge that is not replaceable by scientific knowledge. I found this reflection in particular to be eye-opening in areas as diverse as language instruction, politics, education, even parenting!

“The problem… is that certain practical choices cannot, ‘even in principle, be adequately captured in a system of universal rules’.” (p. 322). Anyone who has been a teacher or reared a child knows this all too well!

—Pedro Sandin, Brevard, NC

I read Walter J. Miller’s first book, A Canticle for Liebowitz, when I was about 12 years old. It’s the pilgrimage adventures of 17-year-old novice, Brother Frances Gerard, who is on silent retreat in the radiated desert of the American southwest in the middle of the 26th century. This summer I found a hardback of Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman for $1.50. Apparently, Miller had written two books in his life: The Canticle, published in 1959, and Saint Leibowitz, published nearly 40 years later.

Both are one epic science fiction story about the church of Rome (or New Rome), a community of Benedictine monks, and the ruling Empire after the catastrophic event of the Flame Deluge (nuclear holocaust). In the second, Brother Blacktooth St. George at Leibowitz Abbey is having a crisis of vocation:

“Blacktooth remembered clearly the first time he had asked to be released from his final vows as a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz. … It was the third year of Blacktooth’s work (assigned to him by Dom Jarad himself) of translating all seven volumes of the Venerable Boedullus’ Liber Originum, that scholarly but highly speculative attempt to reconstruct from the evidence of later events a plausible history of the darkest of all centuries, the twenty-first—of translating it from the old monastic author’s quaint Neo-Latin into the most improbable of languages, Brother Blacktooth’s own native tongue, the Grasshopper dialect of Plains Nomadic, for which not even a suitable phonetic alphabet existed prior to the conquests (3174 and 3175 A.D.) of Hannegan II in what had once been called Texas.”

In the past ten or so years the concept of “empire” has emerged as a hermeneutical key to biblical texts. Our scriptural texts were written, edited and shaped by a people living in and under the great empires of history: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Vocabulary that was political has by out time become domesticated and lost the shock value that the Hebrew and early Christian communities experienced. For example, the titles we use for Jesus (Saviour, Lord) were the official titles of the Roman Caesar. “Empire” refers to the massive concentration of power which “permeates all aspects of life . . .. Empire seeks to extend control as far as possible; not only geographically, politically and economically . . . but also intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, culturally and religiously . . . with top down control. . . to domesticate Christ and anything else that poses a challenge to its power.” Being the Church seeks to identify the concepts of “empire” as embedded in current history and values, and what this entails for daily faithful living. Essays by contributors examine these ramifications, e.g., a theology of the cross rather than prosperity theology, the need for the church to concentrate on community rather than on power. The essays reflect the basic orientation of the contributors who are Lutheran, and whose theology of the cross articulates and focuses well the message of the biblical text.

—Vern Ratzlaff, pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada