Category Archives: biblical interpretation

Anabaptist-Mennonite, Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Anabaptist-Mennonite writing, Bible, biblical interpretation, Faith, God, Peace, Suffering, Teachings of Jesus, Theodicy, violence of God

The God of Joshua and Jesus, by Ted Grimsrud

December 18, 2023 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests Leave a comment

One of the more challenging passages in the Bible is the story told in the book of Joshua. God’s chosen people enter the “promised land,” meet with opposition from the nations living there, and proceed—with God’s direction and often miraculous support—to kill or drive out the previous inhabitants. The book ends with a celebration that now the Hebrew people are in the Land, poised to live happily ever after.

Probably the most difficult aspect of the story to stomach is the explicit command that comes several times from God to the Hebrews to kill every man, woman, and child as part of the conquest. This element of the story is horrifying, even more so in light of the afterlife of the story where it has been used in later times to justify what are said to be parallel conquests—such as the conquest of Native Americans and native southern Africans. I wonder as a Christian pacifist what to do with this story. But, really, even for Christians who are not pacifists, how could any moral person want to confess belief in such a genocidal God—or accept as scripture a book that includes such a story?

Exhortation not history

I want to see if we can find meaning in the story that will help us put it in perspective and protect us from uses that find in the story support for our violence. More than defending Joshua per se, I want to defend the larger biblical story of which it is a part—an essential story for faith-based peacemakers. So, the first step for me is to recognize the type of literature, in a general sense, that Joshua is. I will call it “exhortation,” not “history.” It was an account likely written many years later than the events that inspired it may have happened. It was shaped in order to offer exhortation to its readers and hearers to seek faithfully to embody the teaching of Torah. I do not think it was meant to tell the people precisely what happened in the Joshua years.

I would characterize the Joshua story, then, as a kind of parable, a story (mostly if not totally fictional) that makes a point. To see the Joshua story as kind of a parable does not take away the troubling elements of the story—however, I think such a view changes what is at stake for we who believe in the Bible. What is at stake for us, most of all, is to try to discern the lesson the story is meant to make—not to feel bound to believe that the details are factual. Thus, for one thing, believing the Joshua story conveys important truths does not require us to accept its portrayal of God (or of the vicious character of the “conquest” of the promised land) as normative for us.

In what follows, I will not work at discerning what it is that we should make of the still present problem of why the Hebrews would have told a story with such problematic details about their tradition and their God. Such reflections are important, but they are beyond what I am able to articulate right now. Rather, I want to focus on what I understand to be the ethical, political, and theological concerns of the parable. Especially, I want to focus on the place of the Joshua story in the larger story the Bible presents us with. How does the Joshua story contribute to the Big Story that culminates in the life and teaching of the later “Joshua” (that is, Jesus)?

A political agenda

My Old Testament professor Millard Lind, in a class I took from him on based on his book, Yahweh is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel, gave a useful framework for me to think about Joshua and other stories of divinely initiated violence. Lind focused on the understanding of politics in the Old Testament. He suggested that what was most interesting and revolutionary in ancient Israel was its attempt to create an alternative to the coercive, hierarchical politics of the empires and nations of the world, an alternative to what he called “power politics.”

We may think about the main elements of the Old Testament through this alternative politics lens: Creation and fall, the exodus and Torah (including the Ten Commandments, Torah’s spirit of empowerment, the concern for vulnerable people in the community, the sense of being over against Egypt, and the Sabbath regulations [day of rest, forgiveness of debts, anti-centralization and social stratification, and the jubilee provisions concerning land ownership]). Then we may think of Joshua, the Judges, the turn toward kingship, the prophets’ critique, and the impact of exile. Finally, we may turn to the New Testament picture of Jesus in the gospels and the apostolic witness in Paul and Revelation. All of these materials may be helpfully understood as presenting an alternative political orientation to the power politics of the nations.

Let’s focus on the Joshua story—the so-called “Conquest.” On the one hand, in this story we may see an emphasis on what Lind called “theo-politics” over against state-politics or power-politics. “Theo-politics” is a useful term for categorizing the alternative politics of the Bible. In the Joshua story, following on the heels of the exodus and Torah-revelation in the wilderness, we see a de-centering of human power structures. We also see that sustaining the Hebrews’ status in the land will be based on their faithfulness (or not) to Torah. So, in this story we have a reiteration of the countercultural politics introduced with the exodus.

On the other hand, in the Joshua story we also come face to face with overwhelming violence and its celebration. The Hebrews in the story may have been marginalized and recently liberated slaves and the “Canaanites” in the story may have mainly been kings and oppressors (see Norman Gottwald’s account in his famous book, The Tribes of Yahweh). Yet the story that was written and then retold became a story that kings and oppressors could and did use to justify their conquests during the era of Christendom—an utterly devastating story.

Reading Joshua as part of the bigger story

How do we understand the Joshua account to fit with the bigger biblical narrative? We may think in terms of something like what Walter Brueggemann has called the Bible’s “primal narrative”—the core story of God’s liberating acts that is repeatedly recounted throughout the Bible. We may read the primal narrative with what we could call a “theo-politics” lens. We start with God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah when they are first called to something new—their descendants will “bless all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3). This promise may be seen as the core element of the biblical story (I develop this point in my book, God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes).

What follows in the story is the path, at times quite tortured, that God’s people take in trying to carry out the vocation implied in that promise. In the Christian Bible, this path leads ultimately to the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22 where the nations are healed by the leaves from the tree of life.

Abraham and Sarah’s immediate descendants face various adventures that culminate, by the end of Genesis, with them in Egypt. The settling in Egypt turns ominous in the book of Exodus. The Hebrews are enslaved. They have multiplied far beyond Abraham’s clan and have little sense of identity. They cry out, God hears, Moses arises, and they are delivered (without any generals or a king!). After their deliverance, God gives the people Torah as a gift to guide their common life as a counterculture in contrast with the ways of empire. Torah details a just and peaceable society with decentralized power and a sense of the value of each person (which involves a special focus on protecting the well-being of marginalized people in the community).

We are given the sense that to live out Torah, the people need a particular place where human flourishing may be embodied and practiced in the flesh in order to lead to the promised blessing. However, we are also given the sense that the only way to imagine such an embodiment of Torah would be in a territoried community, a geographical region with boundaries and sovereignty as a people. However, also, from the start we get the sense that this existence in a territoried community is contingent upon faithfully embodying Torah—the landedness is meant to serve the vocation, not to be an end in itself.

As it turns out, to be established in a particular land will require violence. People will be displaced, and the community will need coercive force to maintain its borders. There seems no way to have landedness (at least to the degree it requires sovereignty and boundaries) without also having violence. This seems the case even if from the story of the exodus it is clear that this necessary violence is not meant to be the monopoly of a centralized human power structure. Instead, at the beginning the necessary violence comes in the form of God’s direct intervention.

So, when Joshua leads the Hebrews into the promised land, the land of Canaan, inevitable violence takes place—on a large scale, as the story is told. The story makes it clear that this violence is God’s. At most, the human role is secondary. The on-going human leadership in the community is not based on gathered military might but on faithfulness to God’s commands.

The growing problem with territorial sovereignty

In Joshua as the people enter the land, in Judges as the people settle and establish their on-going community, and in the first part of 1 Samuel, the violence to maintain territorial sovereignty remains ad hoc and does not lead to permanent structures of power: no standing army, no collection of generals, no human king. However, the tension and sense of insecurity without such structures prove to be intolerable for Israel’s elders. These elders (and note in 1 Samuel 8 that the initial call for a king is not a popular demand from “the people” but a demand from the elite, the “elders”) make a decisive move to restructure Israel’s politics to “be like the nations.” According to the story, the main representative of God among the people, Samuel, argues vehemently against this restructuring, but he is ultimately told to accept it by God.

There is, earlier in the story, a brief account of how human kingship might work in harmony with Torah—Deuteronomy 17:14-20. This kind of king would be subordinate to Torah and would refuse to centralize military power and wealth in his and his main supporters’ hands.

As the story continues, though, it becomes clear early on that neither Samuel’s warnings nor the strictures from Deuteronomy 17 would be heeded. Kingship in Israel and Judah does indeed lead to centralized power, wealth accumulation in the hands of the few, disenfranchisement for the many, and a militarized society. The prophets make it clear that the on-going departure from Torah would have terrible consequences. And when their warnings are borne out, their words were remembered and provided a theological rationale for continued faith.

The disasters that befell Judah (destruction of kingdom and temple) did not mean God’s failure but vindicated God’s warnings. Because the long-forgotten books of the law were found during Josiah’s ill-fated kingship, the people had resources to sustain their sense of identity and the sense of the promise given to Abraham and Sarah. As a consequence of the failures and, at the same time, due to the sustenance of the core vision, the community was able to respond to the disasters with creativity and resilience. As it turned out, the loss of territory opens the possibility to revisit the initial tension between a community established with decentralized power dynamics and the need for territorial sovereignty. This time, the community was able move toward the decentralized power side of the tension instead of the territorial sovereignty side.

Beginning with Jeremiah 29 there is an embrace (or at least an explicit acknowledgement) of a vision to carry on the promise where scattered faith communities would “seek the peace of the city where they found themselves” rather than to hark back to a vision of a territorial kingdom as the necessary center for peoplehood sustenance and the vocation to bless the families of the earth. Though the story line that follows continues to be centered in the “holy land” with its rebuilt temple, it evinces little hope for re-establishing a territorial kingdom as the condition for the sustenance of the peoplehood. Though little noted in the biblical texts, the Judaism of this time continued to spread and solidified its existence as a scattered peoplehood outside of the “promised land.”

The politics of the second Joshua

When we get to the story of Jesus, we are introduced to a political vision that takes non-territoriality for granted. Jesus shares with his namesake, Joshua, a message that God saves (the meaning of the name). He brings a message about the kingdom of God and is ultimately seen to be a royal, messianic figure. But his message repudiates the coercion and centralization of power politics that a territorial kingdom requires. In that sense, he becomes a kind of anti-Joshua.

Jesus’s community embodied a politics of servanthood not domination, free forgiveness not the centralized control of access to God, and non-possessiveness not accumulated wealth. He set his notion of God’s rule over against the Pharisaic purity project, the centralized Temple, and brutal Roman hegemony. Rather than the eradication of the impure Other that we see in Joshua, with Jesus, we see him healing the impure. Rather than the sense that God intervenes violently on behalf of the promise that we see in Joshua, with Jesus we learn that God’s intervention on behalf of the promise is decidedly and necessarily nonviolent. Victory through self-giving love replaces victory through violent conquest. With Jesus, the promise does not need a state with justifiable violence that requires defending boundaries. In fact, what we learn from the second Joshua is that such a state is most likely to be hostile toward God—and in fact such a state (Rome) does execute God’s true human emissary. We must note, too, that Jesus seems to believe that this vision was present in his tradition from the start: “I came to fulfill Torah, not abolish it.”

The biblical story concludes in Revelation with New Jerusalem, established not through the sword but through the self-giving witness of the Lamb and his followers. Babylon is overthrown by this witness, and the result is the healing of the nations, even the healing of kings of the earth. Politics are utterly transformed.

The role of the Joshua story

The Joshua story is crucial. It shows that territorial sovereignty is not possible without violence. As we read the trajectory of the biblical story, we get the sense that what Joshua sets up is a kind of experiment. Will it be possible to embody Torah in concrete life through controlling a particular territory that might be administered in just and peaceable ways? Doing so could indeed serve as a means to bless all the earth’s families. That Israel could envision a blessing through territoriality is seen in the vision recorded twice, in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4: People from all the earth come to Israel to beat their swords into plowshares and learn the ways of peace.

As the story proceeds, though, we see that the very means to establish Israel in the land carried with them the seeds of failure. Indeed, the land could not be secured without violence—and once the land is secured, the dynamics of violence do not disappear. The initial tension between a decentralized theo-politics on the one hand and territorial sovereignty on the other hand came to be resolved on the side of territoriality. That is, Israel could not be sustained apart from the centralized authority of kingship and its attendant power politics.

However, as Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8 warn, such a politics of domination cannot help but undermine Torah. Such a politics cannot help but be corrupt and violate the very conditions of existence in the promised land—as the story tells us. In the end, after the Babylonian conquest, Israel again is presented with the tension between territoriality and theo-politics. This time, in tentative ways, the tension is resolved more on the side of theo-politics. Certainly, the strand of the biblical tradition that culminates in the ministry of Jesus clearly resolves the tension in this way.

When we reread Joshua in the light of these later developments, we will recognize that the violence there is stylized and exaggerated. In exaggerating that violence, Joshua helps show the inevitability of power politics being a dead end and the impossibility of the promise being channeled through the state. Joshua itself points toward countercultural politics by helping to clear away the illusion that theo-politics ultimately could find expression in a territorial kingdom.

“Biblical politics”

The story the Bible tells, then, becomes a story pointing toward a kind of countercultural politics—decentering the state (rejecting empire and the coercive maintenance of geographical boundaries) and advocating organizing for shalom apart from the state through decentralized communities of faith that are open to all comers.

“Biblical politics” is revolutionary in its own way. But it does not underwrite a focus on directly overthrowing the state and doing without any human authority—though even more certainly the Bible strongly repudiates the kind of obeisance toward the state all too characteristic of post-Constantine Christianity. The state, it seems, can be seen most of all in the biblical story as simply existing, for better and for worse. It should not set the agenda in either a positive or negative way for peace people. Theo-politics is about peace work is all its forms, generally independent of territorial kingdoms or modern nation-states. There can be some common ground; more often there will be tension and even conflict between peace people and the nations.

The main point, though, is to work for human flourishing in local communities and global connections of resistance wherever they may be enhanced. Perhaps this will lead to a whole new global order (we may hope; the current order is doomed). More importantly, is the much more modest affirmation of such work as the only way to embrace life in healthy and sustainable ways—or at least it’s the best we can hope to do.

—Ted Grimsrud, Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Senior Professor of Peace Theology at Eastern Mennonite University and was a pastor for ten years. He has written numerous books, including God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes, revised edition (Cascadia, 2011) and, most recently, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation (Cascade Books, 2022). He blogs at Thinking Pacifism, where this essay was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Bible, biblical interpretation

Protect Her from the Chaos

November 1, 2020 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests Leave a comment

It has been increasingly painful to watch my granddaughter, old enough to take so much in but too young to talk, use hands to communicate. Whenever she sees something to interact with, she waves. This includes cars and trucks but increasingly settles on people. And above all other children. Yet when she sees children, COVID-19 distances her. So she will wave and wave. Once when her grandma took her to a playground and her waving to potential playmates failed, she burst into tears. Her hands speak her longing. And highlight the distances traumatizing our world these days.

Those hands yearning take me back to books I encountered as a 1980s seminary student but which had been released around the time I was born: Principalities and Powers by G. B. Caird (1956); and Christ and the Powers, by Hendrikus Berkhof (1953). I’d not heard of either before.

But given how regularly the Apostle Paul’s references to them in letters to the Romans, Ephesians, Colossians were cited in church when I was growing up, I had heard ceaselessly about the principalities and powers. My vague sense was that they were satanic forces of evil, fearsome but not in ways hugely pertinent to my youthful realities.

Caird’s and Berkhof’s were the first treatments of the powers that made me come alive. Both wrestle with whether Paul ultimately believes literally in angelic or demonic powers and both shift at least some emphasis to what Berkhof calls “structures of earthy existence.” Here the focus starts to fall on the patterns and systems that make up our cultural, political, social, legal, military realms, and more.

It is no accident that Caird and Berkhof were writing in the aftermath of a planet and countries and cultures devastated by world wars. Their books were released in the decade after World War 2, a decade which also saw the Korean War, the Cold War, and so many more occasions for thinking through the powers.

Particularly Berkhof taught me to see such structures as both evil and good. Particularly Berkhof feels to me alive in spirit today, addressing the core realities we are at this moment living through as he tells us that the structures are evil. They are evil because they demand loyalties only God deserves, as when a nation commands us to pledge allegiance in ways that clash with obeying God.

As a Mennonite raised to believe in two main realms, one the world’s, one God’s, and to be loyal to God’s when they clash, I practically drank in this view with my mother’s milk. This is why when I turned draft age during the Vietnam War, I registered as a conscientious objector loyal to God rather than then-President Nixon and the military he commanded.

But that is not the end of the story Berkhof tells us about the powers. For Berkhof the powers are also good. Commenting on Paul’s conclusion in Colossians 1:15-17 that Christ “is before all things, and in him all things hold together,” Berkhof says that “Diverse human traditions, the course of earthly life as conditioned by the heavenly bodies, morality, fixed religious and ethical rules, the administration of justice and the ordering of the state—all these can be tyrants over our life, but in themselves they are not. . . ; they are the dikes with which God encircles His good creation, to keep it in His fellowship and protect it from chaos. . . .”

And that takes me back to my granddaughter’s longing hand. For that hand to touch other hands, it needs powers that protect her from the chaos.

On the nights when it looked like U.S. powers were on the cusp of unleashing direct military intervention against protestors for racial justice, some among the military powers I would still register conscientious objection to rose against such domination. Here and there in politics and government as some leaders show us what demonic idolizing of the powers looks like, others, often humbler in ego and role, protect us from chaos.

I pray that in the days ahead and for years to come many hands, seen and unseen, will build dikes against chaos and clasp my granddaughter’s outstretched hand.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Until recently, when Mennonite World Review was merged into Anabaptist World, he wrote “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Bible, biblical interpretation, communities of discernment, discernment, discernment amid differences, human finitude

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 3: From Position Statements to Communities of Discernment

August 26, 2015 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests 12 Comments

I don’t know how to reweave an unraveling church if we don’t do it together. Precisely the inability to do it together is a key source of unraveling. Can we do it together?

In “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling,” I introduced a six-part series on ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling. Here in Part 3 I home in on whether we can, in fact, do the reweaving together. I actually don’t know—if anything our ability to work together seems to be declining. So in this post I proceed with no assurance that we can do this even as I ponder how, particularly through functioning in communities of discernment, we might take steps in that direction if so inclined.

From Position Statements to Communities of Discernment

Battle. Win-lose. If we differ, my position should defeat yours.

What if instead we moved from position statements to communities of discernment? Let me test steps and possible outcomes of such a move:

A first step is to take seriously that we all know only in part, as if through a mirror dimly, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians. Then, face to face with God, we will know fully. But now we get some things right—and some wrong. If our main approach to Christian faithfulness is to determine what’s right, then champion it as the position all should hold, we bypass the getting-things-wrong part.

If we accept that we know only in part, we may consider a second step: recognizing that the fullest knowing we can experience now flows from seeking truth together. This is what Jesus invites in Matthew 18, as he promises that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is with us.

Jesus also empowers us to take a third step. That’s to trust that when we gather in his name we form communities of discernment through which in what we bind or loose on earth we are seeking to implement what is bound or loosed in heaven, in God’s realm. We dare not do this frivolously. Just verses earlier Jesus has warned that better to drown than cause one who believes in him to stumble. Still amid ways we can misuse this amazing power, we are to help each other discern what to bind or loose.

Yet how far from knowing how to do this we are, as increasingly we even accuse each other of wrongly binding or loosing. We take stumbling seriously—except that the cause of stumbling is not I but always you.

Is there a step beyond this impasse? Acts 2 offers a possibility. Long before, humans in their pride had tried as one people speaking one language to build a tower to the heavens—but God had scattered them into many peoples babbling countless dialects. Now God’s Spirit falls as tongues of fire on Jesus’ first disciples, and they speak “in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” This astonishes their audience from many nations, because when these Galileans speak, “we hear, each of us, in our own native language.”

Not through human effort but through the Spirit’s power unleashed in the emerging church, Babel comes undone. Here we glimpse a fourth step, which is to trust that still today the Holy Spirit can empower us to speak and hear across the isolating languages our opposing viewpoints become. We won’t become communities of discernment unless when polarized we invite the Spirit to interpret for us. When faced with your seemingly misguided views I need the Spirit to help me hear your language.

If the Spirit interprets us to each other, then maybe we can begin to understand how to take a fifth step, which is to celebrate that in Christ dividing walls of hostility have been torn down. In Ephesians 2, the Apostle Paul celebrates that Christ is our peace. Drawing perhaps on a hymn that had celebrated Christ as unifier of the fragmented universe itself, Paul celebrates miracle: that primal division, a Berlin Wall between Jews once thought to be God’s people and Gentiles once understood not to be has tumbled.

Might that miracle, the reconciling peace of Christ who invites us to love the viewpoint enemies we turn each other into, destroy our walls today? I’m actually not sure. We battle even over whether walls should be demolished, if so how and in whose favor. In the years since I first began to develop the material in this post, theological warfare rather than peacemaking seems to be intensifying. But let me fallibly ponder what might happen if, when we gather around Scripture in the presence of the Spirit, we wrestled with divisive issues as communities discerning what to bind and loose today.

One key thing I suspect we’d wrestle with is the relationship between specific Bible texts and biblical themes or trajectories.

Take slavery, no longer, I hope, divisive, so maybe permitting calm learnings. How could Christians for most of Christian history support slavery? Because specific texts seemed to. But texts gain meaning within larger paradigms or worldviews that have come to be experienced as the common sense of the day.

For centuries worldviews that treated slavery as just the acceptable way things were coexisted peacefully with texts that seemed likewise to assume slavery as normal. Then abolitionists drawing on broader scriptural themes of justice and equality shattered the slavery-is-acceptable paradigm. That’s why we don’t view biblical admonitions for slaves to obey their masters as validating slavery today. Specific texts do matter—and so do the trajectories that sometimes help us interpret given texts anew.

Cut to that battle-surrounded word homosexuality and such successors as LGBTQ. Among reasons we’re at each other’s throats in this area of discernment is a clash over whether to prioritize specific texts many understand to condemn same-sex relationships or such classic scriptural themes as God’s love for the stranger, alien, slave, outcast of a given era or context. Some believe that unless the specific texts bind us, we evade God’s call to costly righteousness. Or they may point more broadly to the primal order of creation as being union of man and woman.

Others wonder whether Jesus wants to surprise us today by turning those we marginalize into heroes, as he did the Good Samaritan or the woman who wept on his feet, frequently turning upside-down expectations of who belonged among God’s people. This reversal was then extended as some of the early Christians, such as Peter in Acts 10-11, came to see Gentiles as belonging among God’s people. Previously Gentiles had been deemed unclean but now, as Peter is told in a vision, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Whatever our overarching paradigm ends up being, it will guide our giving greater or lesser weight to given scriptures even as careful study of and wrestling with specific texts continues to be essential.

Maybe we should try a cooler topic, though it was once white hot and still is for some: the role of women in the church. When I was growing up, I understood specific texts to make matters clear: women are to be silent in the church. Hence women can’t be pastors.

But by the 1995 Confession of Faith in Mennonite Perspective, the Mennonite church was teaching that all leadership offices are open to women. After generations of agonizing discernment, many had shifted to a paradigm in which, for example, Jesus’ empowerment of women took priority. Now texts that seemed to forbid women pastors were understood as tied to specific New Testament circumstances. Yet others of us believe that in loosening the ties that bound us to literal application of specific texts we’ve taken a broad path leading not to righteousness but to destruction.

Then let’s ponder peace and war and the implications in such a setting as Eastern Mennonite Seminary, both Mennonite and ecumenical. Roughly half of our students are Mennonite and perhaps mostly believe Christian participation in war goes against Jesus’ teachings and his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) call to love enemies, to do good to those who persecute us. But half are from other denominations and may believe the Bible makes space for some just wars to be fought precisely to free the captives and liberate the oppressed, as Jesus preached in his Luke 4 “inaugural address.”

Across our traditions, we take specific texts with implications for war and peace seriously. But which ones we treat as literal guides to daily decisions or as dreams of what may yet be in the already-but-not-yet of the kingdom of God depends on the broader paradigm within which we approach them.

Does this cover the issues for discernment? Not remotely. We need to discern whether the Bible offers explicit or at least thematic guidance on abortion. The death penalty. Gun control. Care for the earth. Global warming. Whether God is biased toward the poor or if not how we honor biblical warnings that the mighty will be brought low. Whether government is part of the problem or the solution in caring for “the least of these.” Whether to be Christian is to prophetically challenge capitalism, constructively embrace it, or both.

Is the point that any view is as good as another? No. It’s that when we see only in part we need to wrestle things out together. If I’m too quick to focus on specific texts when the debates rage, you need to remind me of classic themes of Scripture that could complexify my engagement with such texts. If I’m too quick to ride on viewpoints above the fray, I need you to call me down into the muck and sometimes God-ordained suffering the specifics call for. To wrestle it out together is to become the communities of discernment Jesus invites us to embody.

At EMS we already teach discernment, which threads its way through our curriculum. Yet at EMS and in many congregational and denominational contexts we can more proactively name the importance and nature of discernment and the need to train each other in the discernment process.

This is ever more crucial in a church and culture addicted to offering position papers even when what will truly bless us is the reconciling peace of Christ. That blessing can come as walls of hostility are replaced by bringing our warring views to Scripture in the presence of the Spirit who empowers us to understand each other’s foreign languages. Then truly we might be within range of learning how redemptively to bind or to loose without causing each other to stumble.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in an August 2012 EMS convocation presentation and provided some of the seeds for the seven-part series of summer 2015 posts overviewed in “Blogging Toward Kansas City, Part 1: Introduction.”

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Bible, biblical interpretation, communities of discernment

Hope as Church Unravels? Part 2: A Bible as Big as the Universe

August 22, 2015 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests 6 Comments

So much is unraveling, yet there is also so much potential for reweaving, movingly life-giving, to take place. When we engage it as the living Word of God, the Bible is key to our reweavings.

In “Hope as Church Unravels? Part 1, The Unraveling,” I introduce a six-part series on ways the church, denominations, concepts and patterns of ministry, theological training are unraveling. Here in Part 2 indeed I seek a living Bible large enough to provide resources for reweaving what is coming apart.

A Bible as Big as the Universe

I was raised a missionary kid in Cuba and Mexico as steeped in the Bible as I can imagine being. On top of Bible-saturated church activities, our family added biblical devotions. And readings of a verse by every family member before eating while food smelled heavenly nearly killed us, because there were nine children. I read the Bible through by age nine.

By age 12 I was entering an agnosticism that would persist into young adulthood. The gaps between how I experienced life and what my church taught the Bible meant had stirred wrestlings with whether God existed and Jesus was alive.

Around then I encountered The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, and its wardrobe which behind the coats delivered you into the land of Narnia. I was soon ablaze with love: for Narnia; for main characters Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy; for the great lion Aslan, Lewis’s version of Jesus; for the feeling that it all hung together, meant something, was going someplace wonderful even amid and often because of battles and betrayals and deaths topped off by Aslan’s resurrection after the White Witch slaughtered him.

The Bible didn’t do that for me. Narnia did. However, if fifty years later the Bible hasn’t become Narnia for me it does, as I’ll soon elaborate, send its own shivers up my spine. Within the Bible unfolds the story of God, of Jesus, of the Abrahams and Sarahs called beyond their old lives; of disciples struggling to recognize one walking beside them after dying; of a eunuch and an apostle called Philip drawn strangely and wonderfully together by the Holy Spirit; of Jesus as the vine on which we’re branches; and the story, if we enter it, of every last one of us.

Entering a living Bible as big as the universe is important for many reasons.

First, we all live by a master story, a story within which our values, motivations, goals, and views of what’s real and true are shaped. Currently it’s hard to know what the U.S. master story is, as financial, political, moral, security, environmental, climatological crises, and so many more complicate the American Dream.

The dream is fading quickly amid pleas for the 99% not to be dominated and exploited by the 1%, for recognition that “Black lives matter,” for a transcendence of the political and cultural and church battles that are so often causing us to do so little as injustices mount, infrastructure crumbles, and the planet heats—setting record after record after record as droughts deepen, species go extinct, and the human race itself hovers on the brink,

When human master stories unravel, we need the Bible’s master story. To step as if through a wardrobe into its world is to find a Bible full of the failed master stories that betray us. Then it tells us that if we enter God’s and ultimately Jesus’ story, we’ll grasp that even failure, as human master stories label it, can become success—as in the gospel down becomes up, enemies are loved, justice flows to widows who cry out, the lowly are raised, the least of these are cherished, the earth which is the Lord’s is wrapped in tender care instead of exploited and ravaged nearly to death, the cross as death symbol in the Roman Empire’s master story becomes life symbol in the Christian master story.

Second, the Bible is bigger than our conflicts. Like Narnians, we too are riven by battles, including maybe most frighteningly seeing different understandings across religions and within Christianity as our good battling their evil. And how we view the Bible becomes one more thing to fight about.

But my marriage, of all things, has invited me to grasp that the Bible is big enough to nurture multiple perspectives and needs. Precisely as I was for a time rejecting the Bible, the girl who was to become my wife Joan was finding Bible and faith meaning little.

During her teens, however, Gerry Keener, a Mennonite student at Houghton College, led a Campus Life club at which through life-changing Scripture study Joan grasped the possibility of a more intimate relationship with God through Christ. This new awareness that Scripture could mean something now led to Joan’s passionate involvement in the charismatic movement, within which the Holy Spirit deepened her study of the Bible as God’s living Word.

We met at Eastern Mennonite University at the peak of my agnostic phase and her charismatic one. Two-plus years later we were married. A doomed effort to blend oil and water, thought friends. But through studying at EMU and then Eastern Baptist (now Palmer) Theological Seminary, I learned forms of Bible study that allowed me to ask the hardest questions, trust that the Bible was big enough for them, and try the adventure of following the Jesus the Bible reveals.

Meanwhile Joan continued to cherish charismatic teachings that God and the Bible could so vitally shape daily life. But as crises were met with “Pray harder,” Joan also concluded aspects of charismatic interpretation as she had been taught it made the Bible too small.

Together we came to believe that the Mennonite church I was raised in and to which Gerry had introduced Joan offered resources for our different, shifting, yet mutually enriching journeys with Scripture. We came to cherish the Anabaptist-Mennonite understanding that through our individual lenses we see biblical truth only in part. This is why, as Jesus in Matthew 18 invites us to do, we discern Scripture together in light of Jesus’ teachings and under guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This emphasis on opening Scripture communally in congregations, faith traditions, and even the church worldwide inspires me as I think, for instance, of all the traditions or absence thereof present at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. Each tradition emphasizes different things. Sometimes they reach conflicting conclusions, as when Mennonites at EMS see adult baptism and Methodists infant baptism as what the Bible’s master story invites. So to say the Bible is bigger than our conflicts is not to say it ends them.

But the Bible itself, like the church worldwide today, is full of traditions and teachings jostling. The Bible overflows with anecdotes of biblical characters themselves in conflict over how to understand God’s story. The Bible is bigger than our conflicts because we dare trust that if we take any of our varied and even warring viewpoints into the Bible, we can’t destroy its master story. Even if we battle within and about it, it will drag us ever deeper into its own world, in which God’s tale is told within and through diversities and tensions and varying emphases in all its raw and ragged glory.

This leads naturally to a third reason to enter and read the Bible together: The Bible forms us both through our submission to and our tussling with it. The Bible invites our humility before its truths larger than our understandings. The Bible is also strong enough to give back treasure when we tussle with it. Jacob wrestled with God to become Israel. We can likewise wrest divine blessings from challenging the Bible with our deepest doubts, struggles, questions.

My Old Testament seminary professor at Eastern Baptist, the late Tom McDaniel, taught that yes, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. . .” (2 Tim. 3:14-17 NRSV). But that doesn’t mean the people of the Bible always grasp how God means to speak. So McDaniel taught that the Bible corrects us by showing how people get God wrong as well as how we get God right.

Thus McDaniel would say we have to tussle with the Old Testament book of Joshua’s accounts of slaughters in the name of God of enemy men, women, and babies. Even amid such cruelties God can speak, as the Israelites sometimes grasp that God is teaching them to be less brutal than surrounding peoples. Yet when we interpret Joshua through such biblical themes as God’s steadfast mercy and love and Jesus’ invitation to love enemies, McDaniel would say Joshua shows us that to fully hear God speak, people need to grow in understanding.

A fourth reason to enter and read the Bible together is that it inexhaustibly feeds our hearts, minds, and souls. Agree or disagree with it, fight or submit to it, be angered or comforted by it, the Bible, in all its poems and psalms, its dialogues and diatribes, its doctrines and dictates, its stories and sermons, never runs out of ways to form us. I don’t mean we should worship the Bible. But the Bible does invite us to worship the one it reveals, the Lord of Hosts, the God who in Jesus set up his tent among us, whom John calls the Word made flesh. The Bible invites us through meeting millennia of God’s people at their finest and frailest to be formed as people of the Bible ourselves.

We’re so tempted to shrink the Bible to our pet ideas, blindnesses, and battles. Yet as we read it both individually and together, it can nurture a Michael, a Joan, or billions of us, whatever our beliefs, doubts, questions, or callings. Nothing we take to it will prove too large for this Bible as big as the universe, a Bible big enough to help us reweave all unravelings.

Though not speaking here officially on behalf of EMS, Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post has roots in the MC USA “Purposeful Plan” (particularly related to “Christian Community”), presentations and sermons at the Mennonite Church USA Pittsburgh 2011 assembly, at EMS convocation in August 2011, and in multiple congregations. It was first published in The Mennonite.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, biblical interpretation, economic justice, Teachings of Jesus

Thy Will Be Done on Earth, by Duane Beachey

July 16, 2015 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests 3 Comments

“I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope.” [Religion] ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.” —Jeb Bush in response to Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment

“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” —Psalm 24:1

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” —Jesus

Some Christians are dismayed that Pope Francis is offering his views on finance and the environment. They suggest the Pope should stick to spiritual concerns and leave economics to people who understand finance—in other words, the people with the money. But if the people with the money can be trusted to shape good economic policies, shouldn’t we be able to critique the results of those policies?

As the Pope has noted, the results are abysmal. The world is seeing huge disparity between the very wealthy and the other 90% or 99%. Even if you accept that a capitalist, free market system should provide equal opportunities not equal results, don’t the numbers tell us whether our economy is structured to benefit everyone or primarily the top 1%?

When God looks at all the inequity in the world, with some having great wealth while some live in abject poverty, does that express God’s will on earth? Does anyone think it will be that way in heaven? So while we pray that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven, clearly that is not what is happening.

The Christian family includes widely differing beliefs and doctrines, but we all pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” How many of us ask what that looks like? Jesus declares that the kingdom is here—among us or within us (Luke 17:21). So wherever God’s will is being done on earth, isn’t that a sign of God’s reign? Isn’t God present wherever the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, the sick healed, and wars end?

The economic system we have created is purposely stacked in favor of those with the money. Capital is purposely favored over labor as demonstrated by the fact that income from labor is taxed at twice the rate of income from capital. Warren Buffet says repeatedly he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretaries. Some of the largest corporations pay no income tax because of loopholes they have lobbied for. Corporations are structured to have greater power than labor. All of this is deliberately designed to tilt the field.

Although a growing number of Christians across the political and theological spectrum are taking seriously the scriptural concern for the poor, I am baffled at how many Christians, often leaning conservative, have come to embrace a political party with the economic philosophy of the “robber barons.” Lower taxes on the wealthy, no regulations, “right to work” laws, a desire to cut spending for the poor and for children. These policies primarily benefit those with the power and wealth. This is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, an avowed atheist who despised the poor and honored the rich—pretty much the mirror opposite of Jesus—but who has been a hero of Paul Ryan, the Republican budget writer.

The real irony of how U.S. politics and religion have intersected is that to a large degree those who take the name of Christ most insistently, and those who claim to take the Bible most seriously are the very ones championing a politics with little concern for the “least of these.” Theirs is not a political agenda that is good news to the poor, that aims to feed the hungry, release the prisoner, heal the sick, and proclaim a message of peace to the world.

Indeed most liberal secularists and atheists embrace a politics and an economic philosophy more geared to the vision of the Lord’s Prayer: “ Thy will be done on earth.” Jesus said, “Truly the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the reign of God ahead of you.” (Matt 21:31)

If we begin with a belief that the earth is the Lord’s, that all we have belongs to God and we are his stewards, then this is the main question we as God’s people need to ask: How does God want his resources used? If we pray that God’s will be done on earth, how can we dedicate ourselves to that vision for the earth? Specifically how can we structure an economic system that advances the common good?

Why is economic disparity not a significant moral issue across the whole church? The economic world we have created hardly looks like God’s will being done on earth. Through the Law and the Prophets and on through the teachings of Jesus, God is clearly concerned about how we, individuals and nations, take care of the poor, the widows, the fatherless, the sick, and the aliens.

And beyond the weakest members, God is concerned about workers and the wages they are paid. The Bible addresses those who hold back on workers’ wages or as Malachi 3:5 lists, “those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, (emph. added) along with oppressing widows, orphans, and aliens. (See also Lev. 19:13, Deut. 24:14, Jer. 22:13, and James 5:4.)

Jesus condemns those who carefully tithe everything, but forget the more important matters of justice and mercy and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23). He condemns those who offer long pious prayers and then swallow up or foreclose on the houses of widows (Mark 12:40). I’m sure this was all legal. Laws are usually made by those with money. But legal or not, Jesus is clear that it wasn’t and isn’t right.

During the recent financial crisis billions were spent to bail out banks, but most of the homeowners who lost their homes weren’t bailed out. If people losing their homes doesn’t look like God’s will being done on earth, God’s people should be pleading their case in the courts and in the congress. Amos 5: 12 (NIV) says, “There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.” Verse 15 adds, “Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts.” Isaiah 1:17 says, “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”

Do you know what the very next verse is—verse 18? It’s a verse well-known to anyone who has sat through a revival meeting. You probably know it by heart: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” This great call for repentance is a call to repent of not doing right, not seeking justice, not defending the oppressed, or taking up the case of the fatherless, or pleading the case of the widow in court. And you probably thought it was a call to repent from drinking and sex.

To those who say the Pope should stick to spiritual matters, both Isaiah 1 and Amos 5 and Jesus and 1 John 4, tell us God despises all our religious observances and worship songs and offerings while we are ignoring the needs of the poor. The prophet Amos tells us, “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.” And on the end of that same verse—verse 23 he paints a wonderful picture of what God’s will being done on earth looks like. “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! Justice for the poor is a far greater priority to God than all our worship.

“No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. (Isaiah 58:6, New Living Translation)

Duane Beachey, Isom, Kentucky, is a Mennonite pastor pastoring two small Presbyterian churches in Appalachia. He and his wife, Gloria spent over eight years with Mennonite Central Committee in Appalachia and stayed to pastor. Duane is the author of Reading the Bible as if Jesus Mattered (Cascadia Publishing House, 2014). Duane has spent most of his life working in low income housing ministries.

Author’s note: I’m interested in starting a conversation to develop a theology that challenges Christians including Christian business people to making just economic structures central to how they live out their faith. Also to envision economic ideas and models that benefit everyone and not just those at the top. I welcome input for this vision.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, biblical interpretation, communities of discernment, discernment amid differences, Hans-Georg Gadamer, human finitude, loving enemies, loving viewpoint enemies

Blogging Toward Kansas City, Part 4: “Painholders”

June 22, 2015 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests 2 Comments

At a difficult discernment meeting a participant was wracked by the realization that no matter the decision made, it would hurt persons dearly loved. That took me back: I’ll never forget that evening of listening to the leaders I came to call “painholders.” So often they found themselves seeking to hold the pain of persons who in being true to themselves wounded others even as others likewise wounded them.

“Painholders on Holy Ground” is Part 4 of “Blogging Toward Kansas City” because it foregrounds the riddle of how we proceed when any path anyone can conceptualize inflicts pain on someone. I wish we could solve the riddle even though clearly I haven’t managed this.

My perspective is shaped by and addresses particularly my denomination, Mennonite Church USA. However, just as I was preparing to launch this post, I saw word of overlapping developments in a conference of the United Methodist Church, to which a significant number of students at the seminary I lead belong. UMC faces its own complex and often pain-wracked discernment process. This is an equal-opportunity journey of pain and painholding for many denominations and faith communities.

I know the solution is eluding me because precisely persons I’d wish to have felt heard and honored in this article have told me they disagree with my approach to “painholders.” They want to be released to get on with the journey as they see it. They don’t want to be made to feel that their quest to be faithful in ways with which others disagree is itself somehow problematic.

John Troyer, the current leader of the EVANA Network, one of the entities wishing for space to leave at least some aspects of Mennonite Church USA, has observed that those of us who call for unity are sometimes guilty of character assassination. As I’ve mentioned to Troyer in personal conversation, I don’t wish to contribute to labeling that stings; the opposite was my hope in writing on painholders. Yet as I told Troyer, I do recognize that, paradoxically, even the dream of unity can be experienced as an assault by those who feel coerced into betraying their own consciences if they agree to remain in fellowship.

I also take to heart that some who read the original version of “Painholders” thought I was too hard on Franconia Mennonite Conference when highlighting several FMC excommunications and my personal connections to them. I do find myself wanting to be more gentle in this introduction. These are my people. We often ask too much of our own people, whose connections with our wounds are sometimes particularly easy to trace or confront, whether fairly or not.

I think (still journeying!) what I end up believing is this: a.) I bore appropriate testimony to the trauma excommunication inflicts; and b.) I can wound in the act of naming ways I perceive wounding to have been done.

I remain troubled by excommunication as a way of doing church. I find myself unable to make peace with it, deep though its roots in the Anabaptist-Mennonite commitment to faithfulness do go. The trauma seems so much greater than the justifications.

Yet I also recognize that all of us struggle to find our way through ambiguities and perplexities and actions that can seem so right at one time and so wrong later. So I want not to cast the stone quite as hard now as I did during my 2013 writing of “Painholders.”

The need for gentleness struck me, for example, when after he wrote an article calling us beyond division, former FMC leader James M. Lapp was invited “to practice what he preaches and return to the people of Germantown and apologize for excommunicating them.” This was his moving response, which in turn conveys the healing grace offered by “the pastor at Germantown”:

I appreciate the concern of this letter. I have grieved deeply about my involvement in this action by our conference. I did not believe in 1997, nor do I believe now, that it is necessary to divide over this issue. The article was intended to make that point. I confessed my regrets about my involvement in this action to the pastor at Germantown, and she extended grace to me. I have spoken to conference leaders about my desire to seek healing between the Germantown congregation and our conference. Sometimes leaders need to act on behalf of the people or organization they serve, even if it is contrary to their convictions or preferences. I am now largely retired and freed from such institutional constraints. But I respect those who carry such responsibilities and the challenges they face. They need our prayers, understanding and grace.

I would wish for “painholding” to be an activity that spans the spectrum of theological and biblical understandings rather than becoming one more source of polarization. I see hints in Lapp’s comments and elsewhere that others are dreaming toward overlapping visions, as in the case of pastors in Lancaster Mennonite Conference who say that if they’re “anti-anything, it’s walking away from each other.” So I’ll share the vision one more time—but amid recognition of its imperfections and that the riddle is far from solved.

Painholders on Holy Ground: The Riddle of the Open Closed to the Closed and the Closed Closed to the Open

In our Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition we have followed Jesus—and evicted whoever gets it wrong. A denominational body excommunicated my father’s parents for starting a Sunday school. My aunt tells of that 1930s “chilly morning when the little Bishop with the cold sharp eyes came driving up our lane in his box-like Model-T . . . to tell my parents [they] . . . were going to be put out” (Evelyn King Mumaw, The Merging, DreamSeeker Books, 2000, 184-185).

In the 1990s the same denominational body excommunicated for its stand on homosexuality a congregation I had pastored in the 1980s. My father’s family would have approved.

It seems Mennonites were ahead of the times. Today literal and verbal bombs maim bodies and spirits. Across church, culture, politics, faith traditions, and world, chasms open. We fight about how Scripture is to be interpreted including how literally, sexuality, abortion, evolution, gun rights, climate change, whether government is problem or solution, and so much more. We battle not only over how to bridge differences but even over whether to bridge them.

As one who feels in my bones the wounds centuries of splitting have inflicted, I dream of better. I dream of what might happen if more of us became painholders on holy ground.

But to set the stage for painholders, let me a.) probe the riddle lurking when we try to bridge divisions, b.) introduce communities of discernment as a way forward, and c.) highlight the need for heroes able to hold the pain involved.

The Riddle

I crashed into the riddle when studying discussions of delegates who excommunicated my former congregation. In my dissertation research, I drew on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer to look for evidence of success or failure in the delegate conversations. Based on the essential ingredient of conversational success I saw in Gadamer’s thought—openness to grow when faced with the other’s understandings—I found mostly failure. And I spied the riddle:

Gadamer’s prejudice toward openness . . . seems to place problematic limits on precisely the unfettered conversations it means to encourage. It leaves inadequate room for conversation partners who believe the essential integrity of their prejudice will be violated by any compromise. . . . They hold the stance precisely because it is the one “right” stance required for them to be true to their community and their understanding of its doctrines; how then can they allow their stance to be enlarged? Meanwhile it seems Gadamer cannot accept their closure without violating the non-negotiable openness on which his conversation depends. (Fractured Dance: Gadamer and a Mennonite Conflict Over Homosexuality, Pandora Press U.S., 2001, 172-173)

With Gadamer, I conclude true conversation requires genuine openness to the other. I’m inspired by the Apostle Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13 conviction that now we know only in part. Hence we’ll want to allow our partial understandings to grow. And growth involves openness to views other than the one we start out holding.

But “the open” find it hard to be open to “the closed.” And “the closed” see it as violating their stand to be open to “the open.” So I can preach till blue in the face (and my face is often blue) that Christians will be open to treasures in perspectives other than our own. Yet the “closed” will hear me as imposing an openness that closes them out, as demanding they play a game rigged against them. Should they in turn insist our divisions can heal only if I yield to their One True Truth, I’ll likewise experience the game as rigged. That’s the riddle.

From Battle to Communities of Discernment

Can we solve the riddle? If we could do it easily, we’d not lob more missiles by the hour. Yet I dream of painholders helping us try.

Their work is rooted in our moving from battling each other to collaborating in discernment. Among Christians, I’d define discernment as involving the community of believers gathered in Jesus’ name around Scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit to let God show us the way through the urgent, complicated, and often divisive issues of a given time and place.

The Jesus of Matthew 18:18-20 inspires this vision for becoming communities of discernment. When two or three gather in his name, Matthew’s Jesus promises to be present. Jesus also amazingly says that what we bind or loose on earth is bound or loosed in heaven.

What if Jesus is giving us the holy and agonizing mandate properly to discern in our given settings how God is inviting us to think and speak and live?

If so, openness is involved—but it’s an openness to Scripture and Spirit. The call is not simply to be open to each other’s fallible human opinions but also together to tussle with something from Beyond.

Amid such grappling, just maybe “the open” can begin to see some “closed” views as valuable commitments to faithful hearings of Scripture and Spirit. And just maybe “the closed” can see some “open” views as not only misguided efforts to dilute the faith but as likewise flowing from Scripture and Spirit.

Painholders on Holy Ground

But this is difficult, complicated, agonizing work. That’s why we need the painholders.

I met them one evening over supper at a retreat. Because they help lead congregational groupings geographically near each other, they not only confer regularly but are sometimes drawn into the same dynamics. My fallible impression is that they might themselves tend toward different sides of some divides.

Yet both are passionately committed to something larger than position-imposing/defending. Both love the people in their charge, whatever their views. Both root for a church grander than whatever slivers manage to remain connected if in any disagreement one side must be victorious or both must split so each may go its “faithful” way.

When divisions come, these painholders resist widening them. Instead they walk lovingly into the torment, with a courage that evokes Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego preferring life in the fiery furnace to giving up faithfulness to God. They absorb the pain. They absorb. And absorb still more as they nurture not splitting but discernment.

Ceaselessly they roam among their shouting, suffering people. Relentlessly they invite the open to see in “the closed” not only blind rigidities or legalisms but a faithfulness the open ought also be open to. Endlessly they invite “the closed” to be open to the possibility that in “the open” there may be faithfulness and not only error.

The results are rarely clear-cut; we live in the mess of our times. But what I glimpsed that night at supper, as they told of pain they sought to hold and not heighten, was the hope of the church. I saw that they walk on holy ground. The ground is holy because God, as the lyrics of Arna Czarnikow remind us, “walks the dark hills” even of our peaks and valleys of hate. So the painholders look for God’s spoor even in the desolate deserts of division.

Instead of only imposing their theological biases—though like all of us they have them—they invite worshiping the God of the burning bush. They invite taking off our shoes before the God who is God beyond our human names for and understandings of God. You can see the cost in their faces. Still, Gethsemane in their bones, they hold the pain.

I dream of such painholders as models. I dream of them as offering templates for living the gospel in that far-off land whose outskirts the better angels of my splitting-prone ancestors invite us to enter: God’s country. In this country we love enemies, heap blessings on those who persecute us, send forgiveness seventy times seven down like waters on those who have offended us, at last pluck from our own eye the redwood log so we can see how tiny is the speck in the other’s eye.

As a seminary dean, I dream of seminaries, denominations, and congregations coming to see painholders as the heroes of our time. I dream of teaching our students, congregants, each other that in our day painholding is a calling of callings. And I dream of painholders in turn showing us how at least to take another step toward solving the riddle of the open closed to the closed and the closed closed to the open.

—Michael A. King is Dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, which he is helping shape as a discernment training center; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This post was first published in The Mennonite, February 2014.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, biblical interpretation, discernment, discernment amid differences, evolution, Hans-Georg Gadamer, hermeneutics, human finitude, LGBTQ, same-sex relationships, sexuality

Blogging Toward Kansas City, Part 3: “On Not Knowing”

June 20, 2015 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests Leave a comment

Watching my grandchildren get to know God’s great world is one of the most magical things I’ve ever experienced. I’ll never forget my infant grandson crawling on a dock by the Olympia waterfront tracing and retracing with a tiny index finger a knot he spied in the wood.

Or my granddaughter at a similar age, not yet able to talk but saying so much with her gestures and face, slamming shut my unacceptable book choices (she knows what she wants read and reaches down for another option from the book pile if I choose wrong) before agreeing Richard Scarry’s book on rabbits was worth her time. On one page in the middle of rabbits a yellow bird shines out. I had earlier pointed the bird out to her. Now I asked her, “Where’s the bird? Can you show me the bird?” Tiny index finger headed toward the yellow. Miracle.

These two know so little. And yet as minute by minute they take in more and more, they’re touching so much grandeur. I want to learn from them. I want to learn how to do less seeing the world only through the fog of what I already know. I want with my mental index finger to do more tracing with awe the knots and birds I’ve barely begun to understand.

That’s why I include the column below, “On Not Knowing the Truth Before We Find It,” as Part 3 of “Blogging Toward Kansas City.” Though written in 1995, it touches on several factors still affecting my thinking and connects for me as well with the fresh new lessons my grandchildren are teaching me.

Ohe factor is the focus on finitude, on how much we can’t know and the consequent humility and need for each other this calls us to.

I wrote this column in the latter stages of completing a PhD in rhetoric and communication at Temple University, where I was exposed to and influenced by the thought of Hans Georg-Gadamer. His project was philosophical hermeneutics or, to put it more simply, the process of how we come to understand something.

Gadamer was convinced that for finite humans there could be no universal, God’s-eye-view, because, as I quoted in Fractured Dance, “One perspective darkens another. A universal perspective comprising everything is a contradiction in itself which at most the metaphysical concept of God could assume” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1997, 95-96, in Fractured Dance: Gadamer and a Mennonite Conflict Over Homosexuality, 2001, 270).

Repeatedly I found in Gadamer’s thought echoes of the Apostle Paul, particularly 1 Corinthians 13 in which Paul highlights faith, hope, and love as the greatest of these—and points to the boundaries of human understanding. We see the limits especially in that ageless verse 12 reference to our seeing now as if in a mirror, darkly, because we will only be able to see in full—or, as Gadamer might put it, as if through God’s eyes—then, face to face with God.

If this is so, then how profoundly we need each others’ partial glimpses of truth. How truly we need to journey toward understanding anything together—amid and toward faith and hope and above all love. Otherwise we lock ourselves into that tiny slice of truth which is all any given person can individually grasp.

Researching and reporting the story I tell in Fractured Dance—of what befell Germantown Mennonite Church, the congregation I had pastored eight years before, including when I wrote Part 2 of “Journeying Toward Kansas City”, also affected my thinking. I felt that my own understanding of how to proceed while pastoring at Germantown looked ever more fallible in hindsight.

And I concluded that a great tragedy of the process that culminated in Germantown’s excommunication was how little evidence, as Gadamerian researcher, I could find that participants (including me as delegate in addition to researcher) in the discernment truly understood—or even sought to understand—each other across our differences. Great trauma ensued for many, the wounds still often raw to this day. This intensified my aching for approaches that honor the finitude of all positions taken in relation to a divisive issue, draw us toward affirming commonalities even amid differences, and jointly put our index fingers on the knot whorls and golden birds of God’s universe.

A second reason I include the column is that it seems to me to take us at least a step or two beyond the stereotype (and sometimes reality) that highlighting how little we can fully know of God’s truth in this life is more a progressive than a traditionalist move. The column gives us respite from our apparent current impasse in any quest to understand sexuality together by gnawing at a different riddle: amid various understandings of how the earth and life came to be, might views grounded in evolution or intelligent design generate some common ground for mutual learning?

I realize divisions in this area at times remain as fierce as ever. Yet sometimes instead of declaring war, adherents of various views actually work with each other. My favorite example of this is in a “Statement on Creation and Natural Science” prepared by science professors at my own alma mater and current employer, Eastern Mennonite University. The statement carefully notes various ways of understanding creation. Yet precisely because it does not impose stark either/or choices it leaves me with a sense of the wonders of God’s handiwork far grander than if I were told either affirm God’s creative work in precisely these ways or choose evolution and nary the twain shall meet.

Perhaps some would assess that the statement does favor the progressive over the traditional in acknowledging the factors a theory of evolution foregrounds. Yet on the other hand ardent materialists would likely flinch from the powerful foregrounding, throughout the statement, of God’s creative work. For me, at least, all positions touched on contribute to an outcome far more magnificent than if perspectives were primarily placed in combat.

I see perhaps less rather than more evidence that this type of magnificence emerging from pooling our finite understandings is emerging in relation to sexuality. There we do seem caught more in battle than in a project of thinking and praying and discerning together in which all perspectives contribute to a breadth and depth of understanding grander than any of us alone could achieve. There we do seem to be doing more knowing the truth before we find it than actually seeking it in the whorls and birds. Still I dream toward the type of approach the EMU statement on creation exemplifies. I worked at this in editing the 2007 volume Stumbling Toward a Genuine Conversation on Homosexuality, and I see it in embryonic form in the 1995 remarks below.

On Not Knowing the Truth Before We Find It

The conference speaker’s proposal startled his audience. There at a Temple University rhetoric conference, John Campbell told fellow secular scholars that if they really believed what they claimed to believe, they’d want both creationism and evolutionism taught in public schools.

Many of Campbell’s listeners were academics whose project is to show how scientific thought isn’t based entirely on facts but includes the same forms of argumentation we all use when we try to convince someone our view is right. One way we persuade another, for example, is through choosing appealing words.

This is why the labels in the abortion debate have changed over the years. People are no longer anti-abortion but pro-life, because who wants to be against life? People are no longer pro-abortion but pro-choice, because who doesn’t want freedom to choose? Even if there are unchanging facts hiding under each label, the way we view these facts changes according to which name we use for them.

Campbell’s own project has been to show that Charles Darwin was aware of this power of the right words to make one view of the facts seem more persuasive than another. That’s why Darwin chose the label “natural selection” to describe his theory of evolution.

What Campbell stressed at the conference was that based on the facts he had observed, Darwin could as reasonably have chosen the phrase intelligent design. Natural selection isn’t itself a scientific fact. It’s a name intended to make persuasive Darwin’s view that something is in charge, but it’s nature rather than God. If Darwin had been comfortable including God, he could have been true to what he was seeing by describing it as the result of intelligent design.

The scholars squirmed. Many agreed with Campbell’s understanding of science. They agreed that science is made up as much of subjective interpretations of what humans observe as of provable facts. They agreed that to apply this reasoning to evolution was to conclude evolution was only one of several ways of interpreting the evidence. But they sure didn’t like the notion that this meant creationism should be taught as a legitimate alternate view of the evidence.

At least some of these academics, whose lifework has been to show how you can’t be sure of anything, had no interest in holding lightly to evolution. When push came to shove, they were fundamentalist evolutionists. Evolution was just plain the way it had to have happened, and that was that. Period.

But as discussion of Campbell’s proposal continued, it became clear that one reason the scholars were fundamentalists was fear of other fundamentalists.

Campbell had argued that public schools waste the energy of millions of Christian parents and students by trying to cram evolution down their throats. Such schools convince Christians you just can’t reason with secular humanists, so you have to fight them tooth and nail. Campbell dreamed of the creativity that would be released if schools instead aimed to teach the facts without the labels—then invited students across America to wrestle together with what theory best made sense of the facts.

The scholars liked this vision. But they couldn’t buy it, they said, because Christians wouldn’t genuinely search for the best theory. Instead they’d take over the school boards and the schools. They’d cram six-day creation down everybody’s throats, whether this fit the facts or not. “You just can’t reason with Christians,” the scholars said.

As I listened to the scholars and thought about Christians, I concluded each had a point about the other. Whether fundamentalist evolutionists or creationists, we’re so sure we know our destination before we start the voyage you wonder why we bother to travel at all.

I wished, that day, that with Job we’d all hear God thunder, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? . . . Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding” (Job 38:1-4). I wished that with Job we’d realize how often we utter what we do not know (42:3). Then we could begin the adventure of journeying toward truth without knowing it before we find it.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview and Co; dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This column was first published in Christian Living, September 1995. King is grateful to the late editor David E. Hostetler for being willing to support this type of writing in the original Christian Living Kingsview columns.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, biblical interpretation, communities of discernment, discernment amid differences, faithful dissent, LGBTQ, Mennonite Church USA, same-sex relationships

Blogging Toward Kansas City, Part 1: Introduction

June 14, 2015 Kingsview & Co posts from Michael A. King and guests 10 Comments

Recently both Ron Sider and Tony Campolo have been commenting on LGBTQ relationships. They hold opposing views. Nothing unusual about that these days—but their lives have long intertwined and only recently did Campolo announce he no longer shared Sider’s perspectives. Both were professors at Eastern Baptist (now Palmer) Theological Seminary in the 1980s, when I was drawn there partly because of them (and became Ron’s student assistant and later co-author of a book on preaching).

When Campolo announced his change of views, he said, “Rest assured I have already heard—and in some cases made—every kind of biblical argument against gay marriage, including those of Dr. Ronald Sider, my esteemed friend and colleague at Eastern University.”

Meanwhile Sider has been articulating his understanding that on the one hand a church too often homophobic needs to be clearer than it has been that welcome is extended to anyone who is “an openly gay, celibate Christian.” On the other hand, Sider underscores this foundational understanding: “the Bible affirms the goodness and beauty of sexual intercourse—and everywhere, without exception, it is sexual intercourse between a man and a woman committed to each other for life.”

I think of these colleagues, leaders, mentors reaching such different conclusions. I think of circles of loved ones, including my own, in which the Campolo/Sider differences are woven into the very fabric of souls and relationships. God’s gracious arms reach out to welcome those of us who identify as LGBTQ and seek profoundly committed relationships within which to love and be loved, say some members of the circle. Yes, and I join you in extending that embrace, say other members. No, says a different member, sometimes a parent, sometimes a child, sometimes a sibling, sometimes a dear friend. That’s a false grace, an erosion of faithfulness to the Bible; if I support you in cheap grace, I’ve failed truly to love you.

It’s because I think of these faces and relationships, so dear and yet so torn, that I can find no other approach for myself than to yearn for a community that tries for the miracle of embracing us all, in all our oppositions, in all our alienations. I ache for a community that asks us to live in the pain of holding dear even the other I believe so wrong.

How we address these matters has long been crucial for Mennonite Church USA, the denomination to which I belong, which has in recent decades joined many other denominations and faith communities in struggling to discern, amid deep divisions, how to view same-sex relationships. A number of times, particularly since the early 1980s, MC USA or its predecessor denominations have reached high-voltage junctures.

Now we’re approaching another one: “Kansas City 2015,” a biennual convention of Mennonite Church USA, its opening worship slated for the last night of this month and key discussions of sexuality resolutions scheduled for July 2. At Kansas City the stakes may be historically high as some would wish for full and unambiguous inclusion of persons who identify as LGBTQ, others want MC USA to maintain a traditional position reserving marriage and full expressions of sexuality for men and women, and some speak of a “forebearance” in which we agree to walk patiently with those holding views with which we disagree.

The fact that I’ll be among writers providing Mennonite World Review with a blog post on Kansas City 2015 got me thinking about “Purdue 87″—the last time I reported on a denominational assembly. I wondered what I would learn from reviewing my impressions 28 years ago in preparation for this 2015 reporting. I was struck, to use an unoriginal line, by how much has changed and how much has remained the same—including in relation to LGBTQ relationships.

So I want to draw on the angle of vision shaped in me through being a reporter on and delegate at Purdue 87. I also want to test the perspectives I’ll be taking to Kansas City, because some of them may be wearing out. It’s not clear to me, for instance, that the dream I’ve articulated above, of somehow including all in the MC USA wing of the body of Christ, whether straight or LGBTQ, whether or not we agree, will survive developments that may lie ahead.

To work at such testing, let me first say more about the potential cross-connections between Purdue 87 and Kansas City 2015. Then I’ll overview the seven-part series of “Blogging Toward Kansas City” posts through which I envision working at the testing.

Many of us expect Kansas City 2015 to be a difficult convention. Blogging for The Mennonite, pastor Jessica Schrock Ringenberg has said that “I am dreading convention” and that even though she normally loves conventions, “this year I have a pit in my stomach that makes me feel sick every time I even think about it. ” This, she explains, is because so many of us are confronted with how we answer “The Question” amid awareness that the stakes are high and depending on setting any answer can get us in trouble.

Meanwhile Purdue 87, held at Purdue University in Indiana, has become famous (or infamous) in Mennonite circles for its adoption of what was to become known as the “Purdue statement.” This was when two denominations, the (Old) Mennonite Church (MC) and the General Conference Mennonite Church (GC) were still years from finalizing their merger and reconfiguration into Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada. Thus the GCs, still holding separate assemblies, had the prior year adopted their own similar statement in Saskatoon. The overlapping statements were thereafter often referred to as “Purdue/Saskatoon” and continue to be referenced in MC USA’s current membership guidelines.

There was plenty to confront at Purdue. The July 28, 1987 issue of the Gospel Herald reported that this is what happened when the delegate sessions turned toward consideration of sexuality: “Ushers had to turn people away at the doors . . . as debate got underway on the final report of the Human Sexuality in the Christian Life Committee.”

The report highlighted that on these matters “Mennonites express considerable diversity and can’t agree on what the Bible teaches. . . .” It explained that by a large majority delegates approved the Purdue statement, which both affirmed that full expressions of sexuality are reserved for heterosexual marriage and articulated a covenant “to study the Bible together on the subject and to dialogue with each other.”

The full text of the Purdue statement actually said much more about dialogue:

We covenant with each other to mutually bear the burden of remaining in loving dialogue with each other in the body of Christ, recognizing that we are all sinners in need of God’s grace and that the Holy Spirit may lead us to further truth and repentance. We promise compassion and prayer for each other that distrustful, broken, and sinful relationships may experience God’s healing.

We covenant with each other to take part in the ongoing search for discernment and for openness to each other. As a part of the nurture of individuals and congregations we will promote congregational study of the complex issues of sexuality, through Bible study and the use of materials such as Human Sexuality in the Christian Life.

The Gospel Herald summary of those paragraphs entirely through the word dialogue points to the possibility that delegates may not have grasped, as was exemplified in To Continue the Dialogue, edited by C. Norman Kraus (Pandora Press U.S., 2001), just how momentous, complicated, and contentious the covenant to dialogue would prove to be. For long years and through many interpretive permutations the church wrestled with what it had committed itself to. Was it to continue conversing about how to care for each other even as the reserving of marriage for a man and a woman was non-negotiable? Or was there readiness to allow the Holy Spirit to shed further light on how holy sexuality might come to be viewed as extending to same-sex relationships?

The report on sexuality ended with these words, in parentheses: “(Gay and lesbian Mennonites in attendance at Purdue 87, through a statement they issued later, said they felt ‘rejected’ by the action.)”

A number of thoughts emerge as I ponder what happened at Purdue 87 combined with Ringenberg’s dread (along with countless more, I’d guess) of Kansas City.

(1) A first thought is that we might want to be sobered. Again and again Mennonites have sought paths for putting divisions over sexuality to rest. Yet as Ringenberg’s comments highlight, no such destination seems in view. Whatever resolutions are adopted or rejected at Kansas City, it may be instructive to ponder to what extent the Purdue delegates could have forecast developments they wittingly and perhaps mostly unwittingly contributed to.

(2) As one whose own belief in my ability to see the future has been chastened, I want to underscore being much more uncertain than I once was that I grasp which choices will yield which results 28 years from now.

(3) In the aftermath of Purdue it has long seemed to me that there will be no putting behind us divisions over sexuality unless we find some clean, clear, genuine way to live with diversity of understandings. I see no way forward that fails to provide for what I’d call “faithful dissent” or some call “variance”—a term not yet common in 1987 but now pulled to the forefront by the reality that any effort to forestall variance has ultimately only energized it.

In relation to sexuality, Mennonites faithfully seeking to submit to Scripture, God, the teachings of Jesus, and the sanctity of conscience continue to reach different conclusions. And far from shrinking through the passing of time, through efforts to finalize sexuality-related discernment, or through the hope that just one more statement will permit us to move on to other things, the differences have widened year after year. If Kansas City 2015 doesn’t provide in some way for variance, I expect the struggles that led to the Purdue statement and then were fed by decades of conversation over what Purdue (and Saskatoon) really meant will unfold once again.

Simultaneously, I recognize that precisely my conviction that space for faithful dissent is essential for moving beyond the decades of impasse is in the end an ingredient of the impasse. Others believe that a clarity not muddled by the faithful dissenters is key. Thus we find ourselves impaled once more on the horns of the dilemma.

(4) Finally, amid all the pre- and post-merger streams of MC USA have faced during the past generation, here we still are, often saddened if not wiser (that remains to be seen) but still traveling on.

On the one hand, there is plenty to mourn. We’re so at odds that MC USA entities are deciding to leave MC USA and to invest in alternative denominational structures or networks. Total MC USA membership is down by thousands when contrasted with 1987’s comparable statistics.

On the other hand, beyond the dread Ringenberg understandably articulates, I also detect ongoing passion and anticipation. And even dread is a marker of intense investment in the church. Many of my Mennonite colleagues and friends report a sense, which I share, of readiness to trust the Holy Spirit, to let go of dreams that may prove unworkable, to dream new dreams, to contribute to the fresh ways of shaping the body of Christ that may emerge if old ways come undone.

So I believe Purdue 87 is instructive. Looking back may help us understand what we do or don’t want to decide next. Yet precisely because we’ve been at this for decades now, Kansas City and the journey beyond will likely not simply reenact Purdue. Kansas City can take us into new fields and forests and cities and churches of that better country, God’s country of Hebrews 11, awaiting those who by faith leave behind what has been and travel toward “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

As I seek to be a voyager to that better country and to report on it at Kansas City, I want to prepare myself. That takes me back to this “Blogging Toward Kansas City” series, which I conceptualize this way:

Part 1 is this introductory post. Then I envision six more posts, five of them reprints with contemporary introductions of past essays or columns. This one and the last are intended to offer largely new writing.

Part 2 will focus on “Who Are You, My Audience?” my original report on Purdue 87.

Part 3 will reprint “On Not Knowing the Truth Before We Find It.” Here through evolution and “intelligent design” (as framed by lessons from my grandchildren) I explore how, if we truly believe our knowledge is fallible—as I do—we might establish models for pooling our insights to achieve something grander than any of us alone can manage.

Part 4 will feature my article “Painholders on Holy Ground,” in which I ponder the riddle of the “open” being closed to the “closed” and the “closed” being closed to the “open” and wonder if “painholders” offer us hope for a way forward.

Part 5 will reprint “Double Conversion,” in which I draw on the story of Peter and Cornelius and a worship service to yearn for ways we could lay our divisions at the foot of the cross.

Part 6 will offer my recent article on “Honoring Conscience in Plays and Sexuality Wars.” Here, amid rising doubt as to whether we can find reconciliation across such different voices of conscience, I still yearn for the Holy Spirit to offer us a Pentecost miracle.

Part 7 will be my new blog post from Kansas City, “Bending the Curve,” deadline 6:00 p.m., July 1, slated to appear both in Mennonite World Review and here in Kinsgview & Co. I look forward to journeying with you.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC; and author, Fractured Dance: Gadamer and a Mennonite Conflict over Homosexuality (Pandora Press U.S., 2001),

Editor’s note: As was also the case with its prior incarnation, DreamSeeker Magazine, Kingsview & Co is not intended to be mostly about our divisions over same-sex relationships. But for the next few weeks, amid the potential for major developments in my denomination, it often will be.

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A Bible as Big as the Universe

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Painholders on Holy Ground: The Riddle of the Open Closed to the Closed and the Closed Closed to the Open

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From Battle to Communities of Discernment

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On Not Knowing the Truth Before We Find It

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Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests