Re: Culture Wars, Old and New (Was: I Am Homophobic)

Kendall,

that was great.  I've only known the very smallest amount about the way 
the "Bible" was assembled (e.g., the Council of Nicea)  and absolutely 
nothing about the heretics of the first few centuries.  I'll be giving 
your post a closer reading over the weekend, for sure.

Certainly, some things in the "Bible" are "not befitting"!  That is a 
great phrase.  The whole bit might be more palatable (as indeed are the 
personal theologies and acts of *many* Christians of every stripe, I 
should point out) if it hewed to Christ's message of active love.

That is, if one can get past the whole question of the existence of 
evil.  Which I can't.  Regardless, a god who's wrath (and that of His 
followers) is reserved for guys-who-like-guys, to the remarkable 
exclusion of dictators, genocidistas, and those who rip off and penalize 
the poor and imprisoned (2 of J.C.'s fave groups, btw) -- well that sort 
of god really isn't worth the candle, is He?

BTW, Kendall, what are your thoughts on what JC meant when he 
(supposedly) said "no man comes to the Father except by me"?

mbz


On Wednesday, December 5, 2001, at 11:54  PM, Kendall Clark wrote:

>>>>>> "michael" == Michael Zara <[email protected]> writes:
>
>   michael> Better than that, the Bible claims that the Lord supports
>   michael> and demands genocide.  Kill all those Canaanites and take
>   michael> their land.  Right on!  (As long as you don't swish into
>   michael> battle in a 50/50 set of fatigues, that is... ;-)
>
> Heh, right on, Mike!
>
> Yr message gave me a laugh as it's a blast from the past (mine and
> ancient).
>
> Many of the great heresiarchs from the patristic period (the 4 or 500
> years of the Common Era), including very early ones, like Marcion,
> became heresiarchs precisely because (what won out as) the orthodox
> camp insisted on a kind of unity with the Hebrew scriptures, which the
> heresiarchs opposed *precisely* for the reasons you point out here.
>
> In other words, part of the formative period of (what came to be)
> orthodox Christian doctrine was a big fight about which texts -- and
> there were so bloody *many* to choose from (and lots of really
> interesting ones didn't make the cut, like the Gospel of Thomas, which
> has lots of neat stuff about Jesus the Teenager) -- would become
> canonical (which, more often than not, and in *precisely* the same way
> as *our* culture-and-canon wars, were just fights about reading
> strategies and which ones were canonical, which heretical, and the
> like. Every fight about a canon of texts is always already a fight
> about how to read. I wonder if Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner and Maya
> Angelou would (or do) take comfort from knowing (what I bet Morrison
> and Angelou do know) that they are keeping company with the
> communities of writers which produced the Gospels, the Pauline and
> Johannine literatures, and the like?).
>
> Lots of folks thought the depictions of God in the Hebrew scriptures
> was, well, *terrible* and, as Origen put it, "unbefitting". Origen
> picked up Philo's allegorical method for reading texts in large part
> because it gave him a reading strategy by which he could excise or
> ignore or -- as the Francophiles have it these days -- "read
> otherwise" the bits where God is telling his favorite group of Semites
> to kill (utterly) a less favored group of Semites.
>
> Philo through Origen is largely responsible for there being an
> allegorical method of reading texts in Western culture thereafter, all
> because Origen couldn't imagine saying God endorsed, much less
> commanded (what we call) genocide. Origen was one of the first and
> earliest Christian thinkers (and he was *very* early, like 150 years
> after the Easter event) to have a general, normative theological
> principle, which he called "befittingness", what we might call a
> "moral" criterion. That is, you just *don't* attribute things to God
> that, attributed to humans, makes you think they are beastly little
> shits. He works this out in intricate ways and it's all great fun in
> his "On first things" (De principis), for which, for a time, he was a
> kind of semi-heresiarch.
>
> Marcion's solution was a bit different (but still a competing reading
> strategy): rather than taking the unbefitting things the Hebrew
> scriptures attributed of God as *allegorical*, Marcion just decided
> they were talking about some other God (=character) altogether; i.e.,
> he refused to read the two (sets of) texts as a prequel-sequel. In
> other words, it came down to a genre judgment, as these things often
> do. Two sets of texts, two (radically incompatible) patterns of
> actions and properties attributed to two different Gods. Clever. And
> redolent of nothing as much as the recent big fight between a
> first-time African American woman novelist and the literary estate of
> Margaret Mitchell about who represents and what they can say about the
> characters in Gone With the Wind. If they sound like the same
> characters, they may (must?) be. If they sound radically different,
> they can't be.
>
> Marcion was (rather literally) the Toni Morrison of his day (though he
> lost out in the end and it looks like Toni is gonna be okay). That is,
> he had bestsellers of his own, about which many fights were had as to
> the literary (=theological) value, the canonicity, and the like. Just
> like Morrison is taken to be some kind of threat to Shakespeare,
> Marcion was taken to be a threat to the very earliest stratums of the
> (theological) canon of his day. His "The Gospel of the Lord" -- in 21
> chapters, which he "preserved in the original Greek" -- made a bid to
> be canonized, and why not? It contains chunks of thematic and
> narrative overlap with the (eventually) canonized gospels (just as
> Morrison, far from being a threat to Shakespeare, is a competitor only
> in the sense that all fellow-workers and friendly competitors are
> "threats"):
>
>   In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
>   [Pontius Pilatus being the Governor of Judaea,] Jesus came down to
>   Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and was teaching on the sabbath days:
>   and they were astonished at his doctrine: for his word was in
>   authority. And in the synagogue there was a man which had a spirit
>   of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice, Saying,
>   "let us alone ; what have we to do with thee, Jesus? art thou come
>   to destroy us? I know thee who thou art: the Holy One of God." And
>   Jesus rebuked him, saying "Hold thy peace, and come out of him." And
>   when the demon had thrown him into the midst, he came out of him,
>   having done no hurt. And amazement came upon all, and they spake
>   together saying to one another, what is this word? For in authority
>   and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come out. And
>   a rumour of him went out into every place of the country round
>   about, And he arose out of the synagogue, and entered into the house
>   of Simon.
>
> Tertullian wrote books against Marcion's bestseller, criticizing it
> for being "nonliterary" (=heretical). Tertullian was the one who said,
> "credo quia absurdum", i.e,. "I believe *because* it is absurd", or to
> put it geographically, "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem"? Call
> him the William Bennett or Allan Bloom or E.D. Hirsch of his day and
> the picture is complete.
>
> Sorry, but you unwittingly pushed one of my old buttons and the dying
> impulse dies hard! :>
>
> Best,
> Kendall
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