Justice And Blood

In Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” Jamie Foxx portrays a slave named Django (“The D is silent,” he tells another character) who frees his wife from a sadistic plantation owner. (Spoiler alert!)  In the process he kills every white person on the farm, including the owner’s unarmed sister. Among Django’s victims is Tarantino himself, appearing as a minor character so debased and irredeemably stupid that I’m sure even the Pope would say he deserved to die.

I can’t account for everyone’s reaction to the half-hour of airborne intestines at the end of “Django Unchained.” Priest of God and follower of the Prince of Peace, I was rooting for Django all the way. You know the feeling when the bad guys are getting what they deserve. If filmmakers have done their jobs, few in the audience are hoping the suspects will be read their Miranda rights and given the opportunity to reflect on their poor decisions. Something deep in us aches for instant justice. We want to see righteous vengeance in the flash of steel and gunpowder. We want blood.

If you really want to see a bloody mess, ask screenwriter and director Tarantino to justify Django’s mayhem in the context of the Newtown massacre. In one TV interview in early January, he refused to answer. But a few weeks before, on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he made a useful distinction. The worst moments in “Django Unchained” are depictions of savagery against slaves. They’re not stylized, and Tarantino doesn’t dwell on them. It’s this documentary violence, the vicious reality of slavery, which provokes Django and his friend, played by Christoph Waltz, into an orgy of what Tarantino called “the fun violence.”

Fun violence is the concept I’ve been wrestling with since seeing Tarantino’s entertaining movie (not suitable, in my perhaps too conservative view, for most under 15 or 16). Some think that his movies could inspire real-life attacks by sick people. Others just believe they’re in poor taste. But most critics miss the point, which is that the blood lust is in us already, an integral aspect of our nature. Tarantino is showing us exactly what we’ve come to see, which is also what we came to see when Bruce Willis battled terrorists in "Die Hard" and Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. Fictional violence against the unquestionably evil gives our animal instincts a chance to bubble deliciously to the surface under carefully controlled conditions.

Owning our instincts, including our taste for violence, is vital to our formation as Christians. Especially as we prepare for Lent and Good Friday, it helps us understand how we might have been persuaded to add our voices to those who shouted “Crucify him!” Jesus’s antagonists concocted a narrative about his blasphemy and pretensions to kingship that triggered the audience’s craving for a spectacle of torture and death. During the long era of public executions in the U.S., people also gave themselves permission to enjoy watching someone die.

It’s up to the experts to say what came first, our hunger for righteous payback or for sheer blood, and how they’re intrinsically bound. But understanding how deeply we want vengeance can help us make better decisions about dilemmas in the world and our lives. Do we ever catch ourselves rushing to judgment, deciding too quickly who’s right and wrong so some sentence can be speedily pronounced? We leave behind the vivid colors and moral clarity of a Tarantino movie and rediscover gray areas and stubborn facts. In a complicated world, give me “Django Discerning” on the judicial bench and in corridors of power, hungry for justice but with a lust for due process.

Movie violence can also deepen our understanding of biblical violence – the massacre of the priests of Baal by God’s prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel as depicted in 1 Kings or, as described in Exodus, God’s killing of the Egyptian firstborn to free his people from slavery. In their time, these events were portrayed not as fun but as good violence, leading to righteous worship in 1 Kings and freedom in Exodus. God’s role in bloody biblical acts is a question for another time. But God does say this much to his violence-prone people: “Promote justice. Strive to walk in peace. Vengeance is mine, and never yours.”

This post was first published in the parish newsletter of St. John's Church, the Vaya Con Dios.

Say "Thessalonians" Three Times Really Fast

The 27 books of the New Testament begin with Matthew and end with the Revelation to John. Marcus Borg rearranges them according our best understanding of when in the first century the texts were actually written. He starts with St. Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians (generally understood to be the oldest Christian document) and ends with 2 Peter. Teaching all these books to seventh graders at St. John's, the most radical thing I do is have students read Mark (the earliest gospel) before Matthew.

Things That Were Said Back In Those Days

In response to questions from Paul Brandeis Raushenbush at the Huffington Post about the Bible's teachings on gender and sexual orientation, Sunday school teacher and former President Jimmy Carter gives us some of that old-time historical and cultural criticism:

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews -– everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.

There are some things that were said back in those days –- Paul also said that women should not be adorned, fix up their hair, put on cosmetics, and that every woman who goes in a place of worship should have her head covered. Paul also said that men should not cut their beards and advocated against people getting married, except if they couldn’t control their sexual urges. Those kinds of things applied to the customs of those days. Every worshipper has to decide if and when they want those particular passages to apply to them and their lives....

Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things -– he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies.

I draw the line, maybe arbitrarily, in requiring by law that churches must marry people. I’m a Baptist, and I believe that each congregation is autonomous and can govern its own affairs. So if a local Baptist church wants to accept gay members on an equal basis, which my church does by the way, then that is fine. If a church decides not to, then government laws shouldn’t require them to.

A Tale Of A New Translation

Lifeway bookstores refuse to ban the new, gender-neutral New International Version Bible translation despite denunciations by non-gender neutral Southern Baptists. The most common change, familiar these many years to Episcopalians, who usually hear readings from the NRSV proclaimed in church, is that the English text says "brothers and sisters" when the Greek says ἀδελφός.

The Gospel Truth?

While the four gospels were all written in the first century, the earliest manuscript fragment we have is a bit of John from around 125. My Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt pointed out this post about a purposed fragment of Mark from the first century.

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

The Bible speaks in two languages and a variety of words and ways about love. It can be a muddle, David Lose writes, and perhaps appropriately so:

After all, isn't this mixture of emotions and motivations pretty representative of our experience? We love our partners and our children and our pets and friend and, if we're lucky, our jobs and hobbies and much more, but not all in the same way. And even our love for a single person varies and changes, not just over the years, but over the span of moments, as passion can turn to tenderness, which can turn to a desire to protect and serve, and then turn back to desire, all between the beats of a simultaneously fickle and courageous heart. In light of this, maybe the best we can say is that love in the Bible, like love in our everyday lives, is important, complicated, and at times a bit squishy. That is, it is too powerful and mysterious to be fully defined or grasped by any of us.

So perhaps for now it's enough to recognize that all the different kinds of love we have explored are part and parcel of our life in this world, that God created and blessed them for our nurture, and that behind and beyond all of our expressions of love is God's love for each of us. That's not everything we could say, of course, but I think that if we get that much straight we've probably gotten the heart of what the Bible has to say about love.

I like Gen. 1's Version Better, Anyway

As Rick Warren, Saddleback's energetic pastor, adds the the cause of America's alarming biblical illiteracy to his portfolio, Paul Wallace wonders if influential Christian leaders are contributing to a rise in scientific illiteracy:

I suspect more moderate leaders like Warren have a lot to do with it. Warren’s own views on evolution, while less hysterically expressed than those of [Albert] Mohler and [Ken] Ham, are not finally distinguishable from them. In a 2007 Newsweek debate with Sam Harris, Warren declared, “Do I believe in evolution[?] The answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man... Did God come down and blow in man’s nose? If you believe in God, you don't have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it's fine with me.”

In his opinion on evolution, Warren displays his own considerable scientific illiteracy. That in itself is not too big a deal; one man rejecting evolution is not news. But when that man is Rick Warren, a major Christian figure who has, despite his conservative credentials, pushed the evangelical envelope on a number of environmental and social issues, the rejection carries a lot of freight.

Love. Just Love.

Alex Knapp on the most subversive ideas in the Bible.

The Bible And The Patience Of God

From Kristin M. Swenson, a great primer on modern scholarship's understanding of the Bible and its sources, ending with a reassurance about the sheer mystery of faith:

[T]his information about the Bible is compatible with belief in it. A person can simultaneously accept these truths about the Bible and the Bible as the Word of God. Doing so may require recalibrating assumptions, though, to allow for the possibility that God patiently works through people and time, enjoys a good debate and prefers inviting conversation over issuing absolutes.

Words And The Word

Robyn Henk of St. John's Church:

I’ve been thinking about words lately. I’ve been looking up words like, evangelical, liturgical, orthodox, protestant, emergent… in my Bible. I tried the NLT, NIV, TNIV, NRSV, JB, NKJ, NASV, even The Message – but I couldn’t find any reference to them, let alone any instruction as to which one is the “right way” of practicing our faith.

I did however find a lot of references to the poor, widows, orphans, brokenhearted, captives, lost, oh yes, and “One Body.” I’m beginning to think that maybe were focusing on the wrong words?

The Nephilim Explained?

You don't have to be a Neanderthal to find intriguing correlations between scripture and modern science -- once you're willing to accept that God's normal workday runs a bit longer than ours.

New archaeological finds suggest that human migration from Africa into Mesopotamia and beyond began as long as 127,000 years ago. From DNA evidence, scientists had previously concluded that the exodus started just 60,000 years ago.

Especially interesting is the speculation about where homo sapiens may have encountered and bred with Neanderthals. Nicholas Wade writes in the New York Times:

Jebel Faya is near the Persian Gulf, which is now a shallow sea. But before 8,000 years ago, when the sea level was about 330 feet lower than today, the gulf area was a low-lying plain, with the Euphrates running through it. The region would have been an oasis that served as a refuge during dry periods. Neanderthal sites are known from central Iraq, so perhaps Neanderthals came down the river to the gulf oasis before it was inundated, making it “an interesting candidate for the place of hybridization,” [University of Birmingham archaeologist Jeffrey] Rose said.

A refuge and an oasis fed by the Euphrates, huh? As for hybridization, there's always been that odd passage in Genesis 6:1-4, just before the Noah story:

⁴The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterwards—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

Wikipedia says Neanderthals were a little smaller but built more robustly than homo sapiens. What if thanks to the robustness of oral tradition, stories of their heroic exploits in northern European climes reached all the way to the compilers of Torah?

Ecclesiastes 1:6-7

And so the chill, just winds of politics blow. Last week, Jerry Brown supporter Gloria Allred manufactured a crisis for Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman to try to weaken her standing with Latino voters. Today, misogynist-sounding talk by Brown and his aides could weaken his standing with women.

Republicans should note well, however, that the gist of the inadvertently taped conversation among Brown and his boys is that he may be tougher on public employee unions that Whitman.

God Spelled Backwards

This is just the opening exchange. See who gets the last Word here.

"The Economist" For Christmas, Todd, Please!

Franklin Graham on Sarah Palin's conversation with his father, Billy, yesterday at the great evangelist's home:

She...wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq, Franklin Graham reported.

That's pretty weird, since the Bible doesn't say anything about Israel after about 90 A.D., Iran (unless she means Cyrus the Great's Persia in the sixth century before Christ), or the war in Iraq (though Gen. 3 does suggest that the Garden of Eden was near Baghdad). Wrong briefing book, governor!

There Will Indeed Be False Teachers

David Stokes, an evangelical pastor, columnist, and budding author, on those who abuse scripture for political purposes.

Psalm 109:8

Bible abuse by Obama critics.

The Gospel According To Boaz

Political scientist Cynthia Boaz has always told friends that the U.S. shouldn't consider itself a Christian nation but rather one based on secular, Enlightenment values. But when she applied New Testament teachings to domestic and foreign policy issues, she liked what she discovered.

I don't agree with much of her analysis, especially the canard that the NT proves that Jesus and his followers were socialists. As for foreign policy, imagine a President saying after a brazen attack such as Pearl Harbor or Sept. 11 that we are called to love and forgive our enemy and turn the other cheek, namely Los Angeles or Seattle.

It's important to remember that Jesus's earthly ministry was personal, one-on-one, incarnational. He was most concerned about individual, not corporate, behavior. When tempted with the prospect of wielding earthly, political power, he pointedly declined. He didn't quite say so, but one can easily imagine him believing that if he could persuade people to behave justly and peaceably toward one another in close quarters, then justice and peace would thrive everywhere.

Still, Boaz's essay should be provocative for all Scripture followers, if only as a reminder of how Christian principles can influence and infuse our relationships with those to whom we are closest. Her conclusion:

[H]onest Christians are hard-pressed to deny that the example offered by Jesus' life tells us that if our own spiritual evolution (and frankly, salvation) is a consideration, we have no choice but to not only hold the needs of others in equal stead with our own, but must find ways to share what (oftentimes little) we have in order to fulfill that calling.

So if we concede that the United States is a "Christian nation," it follows that its citizens, as practitioners of the teachings of Jesus, should be: anti-war, anti-gun, anti-death penalty, pro-universal health care, pro-taxes and pro-(democratic) socialism, while also being - to the rest of the world - forgiving, meek, humble, generous and loving of everyone, even perceived enemies.

Attention, Brothers [And Sisters*]

The NIV, the leading Bible translation among U.S. evangelical Christians, is going gender-neutral.

Never Mind, Mordecai

Andrew Sullivan notices Gov. Palin's Esther quote from the Hebrew Testament, noted here Tuesday afternoon.

Politics Or Bible Study? You Decide

Conceding that stepping down as governor entails some risk, Gov. Palin said today, "If I die, I die. So be it."

Heard that before? Just ask Madonna. In Esther 5:16, Esther says as much to Mordecai as she promises to risk her life to save her people.

Came out okay for Esther, by the way.