Category Archives: bible

Quotations of scripture and commentary

Jacque Ellul and the Prophetic Function

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Thanks for the response to my posting re Jacques Ellul. I owe this to one of my
new friends in the blog-o-sphere who re-posted the matter.

Let me tell you a little more about Ellul. I’ve seen him described as a
“Christian anarchist” and I can understand that though I disagree. I feel he
merely served a prophetic function in our Christian culture and any prophet who
follows his calling it is always “anarchic” to the existing religious/spiritual
status quo.  If he was an anarchist of any kind then so am I but I firmly
renounce any such accusation—I believe too strongly in purpose in life and
feel that mature faith will always cling to hope and will always offer
purposeful behavior even when things appear the most dire.  I passionately
believe that there is “method to our madness” that divinity doeth shape
our ends, rough-hew them how we may.”  (Shakespeare)

I think Ellul was one of the most powerful voices in the 20th century in
religion though he does not get a lot of attention. Though I think The Judgment of Jonah was the most powerful of his books but I also highly recommend The Ethics of Freedom.

I would like to close with another quotation from Judgment, “From the moment faith develops in us, we must be permeated by the conviction that  that if grace is conferred on us it is primarily for others.  It is never for our own personal satisfaction.”

Jacque Ellul critique of the church

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Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a French philosopher and law professor who wrote also extensively in the areas of religion and sociology. His most important book was The Technological Society in which he argued that the rise of industry had created a “technological society” which had more or less destroyed the soul of man. His thesis was that as mankind adjusted to machine age he did so with such success that he was basically nothing more than “The Hollow Men” noted by T. S. Eliot.

But my favorite of his books is an exegesis of the book of Jonah, entitled, The Judgment of Jonah. The preface to this book, by Geoffrey Bromiley, describes the book as a “Christological commentary.” I would describe it also as a hard-hitting indictment of Christianity and the church. He argues that faith has succumbed to the pressures of the age and has become merely a sociological phenomenon, that faith is basically the function of indoctrination. He argues that the truth of the Bible is for the needy, the spiritually needy, who do not have comfort from the accoutrements of civilization. For example, he notes, “God always takes seriously the cry of a man in distress, of suffering man, of man face to face with death. What, perhaps, he does not take so seriously is the cold, calculated, rational decision of the man who weighs the odds and condescendingly accepts the hypothesis of God.” He writes that mankind “has the pretension that he can solve his own problems” and consequently has invented technology, the state, society, money, and the state. And I would add “religion” to the list.

God responds not to our better feelings, but to the desperate cry of the man who has no other help but God. God responds just because man is in trouble and has nowhere to turn.

…when man has somewhere to turn he does not pray to God and God does not come to him. As long as man can invent hopes and methods, he naturally suffers from the pretension that he can solve his own problems.

 

Shakespeare and hypocrisy

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I love Shakespeare with a passion. He is perhaps the greatest gift that the gods have offered us to date, with due respect to the holy men and women who have also graced our lives.

He was a very spiritual man and thus had a critical eye re “spirituality” and astutely took we “spiritual sorts” to task for our innate tendency to be hypocritical and insincere.

For example, in King Richard III the King confesses:

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol’n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

And then my favorite observation on this note was: With devotions visage and pious action, we do sugar o’er the devil himself. (Hamlet)

And I close with one of my favorite lines from Goethe’s Faust: They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.

Macbeth and self-control

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One of my favorite lines from Shakespeare comes from Macbeth. Caithness said of Macbeth, “He cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.” “Distempered” meant swollen or even, in the context, “fat.” Caithness was noting that Macbeth lacked self-control, that his “cause” (or will) was so enlarged that it could not be contained by the “belt of rule.” The image is that of a corpulent man who cannot fit his belt around his middle.

It makes me think of Proverbs 25:28, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.”

SEX!

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Well, I thought that would get your attention!

Actually, all I have to offer is a bunch of random quotes about sexuality that have stuck in my mind over the years.

One of my favorites is from Woody Allen, “Of course sex is dirty. If you do it right.” Recently I read a line from Mary Karr when she was describing her failing marriage, “Any sex that took place was of the calf-roping kind.” And I love H. L. Mencken’s pithy observation, “The trouble with abstinence is its over emphasis of sex.” Shakespeare in Othello described a copulating couple as “making the beast with two backs.” And then there is the beautifully worded phrase from the Old Testament, “the way of a man with a maiden.”

Much to do about nothing

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I have looked for years for this version of the 11th verse from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. It is translated by Witter Bynner:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness;
Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.

Written in the 6th century b.c., this marvelous wisdom has volumes to speak to us, though these “volumes” are qualitative, not quantitative. It is only in our emptiness that we find our fullness, in our nothingness that we find our somethingness, in our death that we find our life.  And this death can take place long before the death of our body.

Nikos Kazantzakis

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Nikos Kazantzakis was the author of The Last Temptation of Christ, Zorba the Greek, and (my favorite) the autobiographical Report to Greco.  There are so many literary treasures in Greco that I do not know where to start.  But my favorite theme of his is the role of language in quelling the beasts in the human heart.  For example, he describes the alphabet as, “26 toy soldiers that guard the rim of the abyss”.  (That is my paraphrasing.)  Here he is noting that the advent of language, individually and as a species, is a huge step in developing an identity which then separates us from the beasts of the field.

I’d like to share a note of his from the preface of Report to Greco:

THREE KINDS OF SOULS, THREE PRAYERS:

1. I am a bow in your hands, Lord.  Draw me, lest I rot.

2. Do not overdraw me, Lord.  I shall break.

3. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break?

 

 

The Law of Attraction

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I was channel-surfing last night and I happened by Joel Osteen. He always gets my attention as he is so unusual looking. On this particular “drive-by” he was discoursing re the power of the words, “I am.” He developed the point that whatever you complete the sentence, “I am….” with is what you get. He developed this point very well, noting for example that if you say, “I am a louse” then probably you are going to be a louse. If you say,“I am stupid”, then probably you are going to be stupid. Now in the time I was there he did not reference Rhonda Byrne’s book, The Secret, which described this truth as “The Law of Attraction”—whatever you put out there with your words is what you will attract. And this “Law of Attraction” is being popularized by many of our contemporary self-help, New Age, spokespersons.

This “Law” can be described as simplistic but I don’t totally dismiss it. I too believe that it is with our words that we create our world and with obsessive self-talk perpetuate it. And I’m very pleased to see someone in Osteen’s position promulgating a message like this. I just hope it is taught to the kiddies in Sunday School as that is when it needs to be learned.

Osteen’s sermon was a simple self-help spiel and I was impressed with what I heard. I’m pleased to see an evangelical preacher preaching a message of self-empowerment. And he didn’t trot out that “hell fire and damnation” stuff either.

Anti-intellectualism and anti-science: Keep ’em on the reservation.

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Karl Gilberson has another post in the Huffington Post in which he, an evangelical himself, addresses the issue of anti-intellectual, anti-science stances taken by the evangelical movement. He attributes this issue to driving away the youth from evangelical churches and cites statistics to prove his point. And his position brings to my mind the work of Richard Hofstadtner on anti-intellectualism in American history (Anti-intellectualism in American Life), a tendency which Hofstadtner links with religious and political conservatism.

Some Christians feel that God wants them to turn their brains off and not think critically. Their stance reveals a perception of God who wants to be merely adored and worshipped, who will, after “the end of the world “comes will get his jollies from having all his believers fawn over him for eternity. And “eternity” in this mind set is a quantitative term, not qualitative. In other words, it will go on and on and on forever! AND, of course, meanwhile those “non-believers” will be roasting in hell for the same “eternity.” Why is it so important for Christians to have and to maintain this perspective? (There are some revisionist interpretations of hell in evangelical circles and they are not appreciated. That is putting it mildly.)

A key issue here is the very nature of identity. People who subscribe to this world view reflect a very rigid view of themselves; for, as we see God so do we see ourselves and the rest of the world. This is just another variation of my oft-used bromide, “What we see is what we are.” This static view of the world was reality at one point in the past and still is in many cultures. And that “static world” created static identities. But reality has evolved so far beyond that limited grasp of the world.

Identity…and the rest of the world we perceive…is ephemeral. When this understanding comes to an individual whose grasp of the world is otherwise, it is admittedly disturbing and potentially catastrophic. That is why conservative believers cling so desperately to their static world-view, their static identity, and amuse themselves with mindless repetition of dogma. I must insist, however, they could “let go” of their dogma and discover that their “dogma” would still be valid, though in a radically different way. The “letter of the law” would then give way to “the spirit of the law”. When identity has been transformed, worship of “god” becomes worship of “God.”

But I must offer a caveat to any True Believer (see Eric Hoffer) who might have stumbled upon my musings— “You had better keep your kids on the reservation! Yes, home-school ‘em and try to keep them out of college. And if you let them go to college, make sure it is some diploma-mill where their belief system will not be challenged.”

Emptiness and religion

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I’m sure you have noted that my posts have a heavy emphasis on Eastern religious, Zen-themes, emptiness and “such.”  This is the result of, first of all, the alienation that has been my blessing/curse all of my life.  Second, it reflects the extensive reading I have done in world religions and philosophy.  These two considerations have left we with strong convictions (i.e. a “bias”) toward the notion that this world is ephemeral and that reality lies beneath the surface of day to day life….or “out there” or “beyond the grasp of cognition” or however you wish to put it.  And to “find it”, you have to “lose” your own grasp of reality or, in the words of Jesus, you have to lose your life to find it.

Western Christian culture often fails to consider that Christianity itself is an Eastern religion that has been dragged kicking and screaming to the West.  And we have done a thorough job on westernizing this spiritual tradition, i.e. reducing it to dogma and mindless ritual.

I’d like to share with you two different translations of one of Lao Tzu‘s verses relevant to the subject of emptiness:

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use

 

Thirty spokes are united around the hub of a wheel,
but the usefulness of the wheel
depends on the space where nothing exists.
Clay is molded into a vessel,
but the usefulness of the vessel
depends on the space where nothing exists.
Doors and windows are cut out of the walls of a house,
and the usefulness of the house
depends on the space where nothing exists.

Therefore take advantage of what exists,
and use what does not exist.