Louisiana’s Ten Commandments

The governor of Louisiana has recently signed a bill that requires public schools to display a large poster of the ten commandments in each classroom. This is unconstitutional behavior, but it is also ignorant, sloppy, and disingenuous, maybe even deceitful, theology. I won’t talk about how this seems to violate the first amendment of the US constitution’s establishment clause. Rather, I want to address the way we violate the commandments themselves and the bad theology behind these violations, which makes the people who wrote, passed, and signed this law immoral according to their own professed faith.

The vast majority of modern-day Christians violate the first two commandments. We often violate the third. And we usually misunderstand the tenth commandment and ignore the way Jesus interpreted it. Louisiana’s ruling elites are either ignorant of the meaning of the ten commandments, or ignore-ant of their meaning.

In the next few posts, I want to explain what I mean. 

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 

Traditional Christianity inherently violates the first commandment. Traditional Christianity places Jesus Christ before the Father in every way that matters. Christians look to Christ for their salvation from sin, which is their understanding of the purpose of their religion; his sacrifice on the cross is what saves them and he even plays a role as a judge, though his Father is presumably the chief justice. Christians pray in Jesus’ name, even though Jesus himself prayed directly to his Father—“Our father who art in heaven.”  The paragraph about Jesus in all the creeds, Nicene, Apostolic, and Athanasian, is far longer than those for the Father and the Holy Spirit, and its theology is central to the creed as a whole.

Christian theology’s solution to this problem is the theology of the trinity. In my opinion, with this theology we project a meaning out of the theological dissonance created by holding two opposing ideas and commitments of faith in one’s mind at the same time: that there are three Powers in heaven, but really, there is only one. (By “theological dissonance,” I mean the combination of cognitive and moral dissonance). I consider the arguments for why the trinity is truth quite tortured. I feel that the only real solution for this dissonance is to fall back on faith and let reason be.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus Christ is not God, nor that the triune God is not real, nor that Friends should not worship a triune God. Some religious temperaments do not need a coherent and sensible theology to know religious fulfillment. Some traditions of religious faith and practice can deliver on their promises without a reasonable theology. And just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean that the Trinity doesn’t work for others or, more importantly, that it isn’t the religious truth.

But traditional conservative Christian evangelicalism does, in fact, need a coherent theology; it’s all about what you believe. And I’m saying that trinitarian Christianity isn’t monotheism, however clever your argument is. Three persons but one God—how does that work? This is why the rabbis at the Council of Jamnia in 84 CE declared Christianity a heresy: there can only be one Power in heaven.

More importantly for an examination of Louisiana’s new law, on the face of it, traditional Christianity puts Christ before his Father in every way that really matters, even though Jesus himself did exactly the opposite—and that violates the first commandment.

Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 2

Casting out the spirit

Jesus’ answer to the problem of society’s possession by a violent and oppressive spirit is not to assault the man who is possessed, but to drive out the spirit that possesses him. To do this, he forces it to declare its name, its true-name, if you will—what it really is.

What is our Legion’s name?

I woke up a few mornings ago with a name in my mind: Teufelvolksbefolgengeist (pronounced toy’-full-folks-be-foal’-gen-gicest). (I love the German language for its capacity for creating compound nouns that say something concisely that you couldn’t say any other way, like zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.*) I translate teufelvolksbefolgengeist as the devil-spirit-whom-the-people-follow, whom they adhere to and obey.

The key to driving out this unclean spirit is not to attack the possessee, but the possessor, the teufelvolksbefolgengeist, the spirit that has infected our society. How do you do that?

First, we meet it with the truth of its name. This movement is following and obeying a spirit we have seen before. It animated Nazi Germany and reemerged in Soviet-occupied East Germany; it animated Stalin’s Russia. It’s an addiction to power and money, a love affair with the Satan, the father of lies, and with Mammon, the love of ill-gotten gain.

Second, we minister to the fears, trauma, and resentments that are the movement’s wellspring. Only by addressing the problems that the movement’s people face can we unbind them from their pain. Only communities can restore what they have lost—hope, a sense of belonging, of being seen and being known, and security, both material and spiritual. This calls governments, civic institutions, and the church to step up.

Third, we meet its most dangerous elements and their assaults with moral aikido, using their own energy and direction to disarm them and throw down their spirit, the way Jesus did repeatedly to his opponents. The way, for instance, that he caught out the scribes who tried to trap him into saying Jews shouldn’t pay the Roman tax: when you render unto God what is God’s, there’s nothing left for Caesar. For us, this means the law and the courts. And against the white Christian nationalists who are prominent in this movement (as “Christians” have always been in such movements), it means we prophetically uncover how they violate God’s laws with their words and deeds; specifically, in some cases, for instance, how they have broken their oaths of office, in which they had invoked God’s attention and judgment with the words at the end of their oath: “so help me God.”

Fourth, we meet the worst of them with humor and ridicule. Like Mel Brooks’s The Producers and the opening monologues of our late-night hosts. With political cartoons and video mash-ups of these possessed folks revealing their possessed selves, like John Oliver does in his show.

And fifth, we love. We call to their true selves. We answer that of God within them, that spirit within them that seeks truth, peace, wholeness, and love. I’m not talking about a feeling here, which we are just not going to feel. At least I’m not going to feel it, unless, perhaps, I get to know one of these folks personally. I’m talking about biblical love, which is something we do, not necessarily something we feel. With this love, we remember that we are dealing with a spirit, not just with a person; that these people are children of God, just like we are, that there is that of God within them, somewhere; that some trauma or pain lies behind their fear, their anger, their despair; that we must go high when they go low and remain faithful to our own moral compass.

To return to mythology and monsters for a moment, I take heart from a truth that guides the faithful fellowship of the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: evil always overreaches and it does not expect others to make the sacrifices that it would never make itself. Sauron never expects the good guys to destroy the ring; he expects them to use it. In the chapter in the The Fellowship of the Ring titled “The Council of Elrond,” Gandalf says something that has always stuck in my mind: “[Sauron] weighs all things to a nicety on the scales of his malice.” Meaning, evil assumes that everybody else is malicious, too. But we aren’t.

* I studied German for two years in college and still retain a surprising amount of that knowledge, considering. But I think this word teufelvolksbefolgengeist came into my mind because I’ve been watching Amazon Prime’s TV series Grimm, in which each episode features a monster from fairy tales or mythology, a la the work of the brothers Grimm; they all have German compound-noun names. I have long been fascinated by the monsters in mythology and folklore, and have always loved a good monster story. Grimm is pretty good in this regard. 

Note that the Grimm brothers did not just collect these stories, they studied them, and developed a vocabulary for categorizing them according to repeating themes and structures. Their approach was soon applied to the stories in the Bible, especially those in Christian scripture, giving birth to what is now called form criticism, which names various kinds of gospel story according to their theme, purpose, and structure. The brothers Grimm are the progenitors of one of the main disciplines in Bible criticism.

Spiritwind Hurricane

A Metaphor for the Gathered Meeting

The gathered meeting is like a hurricane of peace that has formed as a swirling pattern of astral spirit-breath-wind that has gathered over the sea of Light around the eye of our deepening silence. Okay, maybe “hurricane of peace” is an oxymoron. But let’s ride the paradox a little further.

Hurricanes form when an area of low pressure moves across warm ocean water. Air moves into the partial vacuum of the low pressure zone, picks up warm air full of moisture from the ocean, and rises; this draws in more air behind it, catching up more moisture. The air rises and cools, the water vapor precipitates forming clouds and then thunderstorms form, releasing even more heat into the storm through the condensation. And ultimately, a hurricane is on the move.

I cannot help but think of Genesis 1:2: “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” But this should read “the spirit-breath-wind of God” because the words for all three are the same in both Hebrew and Greek.

Think of the “waters” as George Fox’s ocean of light, as a medium for the gathered meeting. We can think of the “low pressure zone” of the meeting in worship as what early Friends called the silence of all flesh, the deepening and centering of the worshipping community. Into that spiritual opening rise the prayers and spiritual yearnings of the worshippers, spiritual vapors drawn from the ocean of light by prayer and meditation, by love, attention, and desire. The updraft draws up with it the love, attention, and desires of other worshippers.

Some of this uplifting might ride on Spirit-led vocal ministry.

All of this spiritual energy is rising toward “heaven,” toward the undefinable and indescribable “space” in which spirit dwells. And then, at some point, something precipitates out, perhaps, especially in meetings for business, from some vocal ministry. Of, if not, then from some collective still small voice, some transcendent small signal among the worshippers.

And the spirit-hurricane of peace has formed, its swirling curls of spiritual energy gathering the meeting into a vortex of unity, presence, and joy, with the well of living water (John 4:10) in its eye.