sustain:if:able kiwi

is God holding a white-y Bible? (chapter three)

This continues a review of Mark Brett’s Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire and the question of whether God’s book, the Bible, really is an instrument that increases the power of white-y/Western cultures. For me, such conversations are essential to whether an emerging church can get beyond a stylistic makeover, and actually be part of a post- world in which the Bible can have a liberating, rather than enslaving, place in the task of being Christian and being church.

Chapter three Ancestors and their gifts. How should Christians relate to indigenous spirituality? How does the Bible shape our understandings of redemption?

Brett suggests Genesis 14:18-22 is a guide: an example in which an indigenous priest names the Creator as God most high (El Elyon), which Abraham assimilates with his reply, honouring Yahweh El Elyon. Brett finds more examples in Deuteronomic theology, an overall strategy “not so much to revoke the previous traditions as to assert a new interpretation of older Israelite identity and law, claiming continuity within change.” (Brett, 50)

Exodus 20.24 encourages worship in every place, 1 Samuel 20:6 indicates worship in various places, yet Deuteronomy 12:5-6 encourages worship at a single site. Since “Deut. 13.2-10 subversively ‘mimics’ Assyrian treaty material” (Brett, 48) then was the book of Deuteronomy written at a much later date, after the Assyrian invasion, as a theology of centralisation within Israel?

“Several studies have pointed out that Exodus 23 envisages the destruction of Indigenous cults only, not the ‘holy war’ on Indigenous peoples that we find in Deut, 20.16-18 …. In other words, there was more that one denomination of Yahwism.” (Brett, 54). What we see is, in the words of Chris Wright a “taking over [of] established culture patterns and then transforming them into vehicles of its own distinctive theology and ethics.” (Brett, 57, citing Wright, God’s land, 156).

Ah. So is colonisation now justified Biblically? Dueteronomy did it, so we can do it: sanctioned by God no less?

Not quite, for the Old Testament mounts sustained resistance against the abuse of centralised power: Naboth in 1 Kings 21:3, the year of liberty in Leviticus 25), which enshrined land in families and Dueteronomy 26:14 separates veneration of ancestors from worship of familial gods, affirming the first, rejecting the second.

In summary, “Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy all pay respect to the ancestors, even though the monotheizing tendency of these books has absorbed the diversity of ancestral religion in very different ways… In short, the biblical ideas of redemption cluster around the restoration of ‘kin and country’, and to suggest as colonizers sometimes did that Indigenous people need to forsake their kin and country in order to be ‘redeemed’, turns this biblical language into nonsense.” (Brett, 59)

For discussion: How important was family and land in your redemption? Have you ever considered worshipping Jesus as your great ancestor?

Links:
For all the posts relating to this book/blog review go here.

is God holding a white-y Bible? (chapter two)

This continues a review of Mark Brett’s Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire and the question of whether God’s book, the Bible, really is an instrument that increases the power of white-y/Western cultures. For me, such conversations are essential to whether an emerging church can get beyond a stylistic makeover, and actually be part of a post- world in which the Bible can have a liberating, rather than enslaving, place in the task of being Christian and being church.

Chapter two Alienating Earth and the Curse of Empires. For Brett “one of the most significant biblical texts in the development of colonialism was Gen. 1.28, a single verse within the Bible’s complex theologies of creation. The divine command in this verse to ‘subdue the earth’ was frequently cited from the seventeenth century onwards both as the reason for imperial expansions and as a warrant for linking the cultivation of land to property rights.” (32)

Yet for Brett, the verse provides no endorsement of colonialism. Reading Genesis 1-11 as narratives, Brett notes that Gen 1:29-30 presumes a context of vegetarianism. In Gen 2, humans are tasked with service and care, rather than with rule and subdue. Then in Gen 9:1, when the vegetarian ideal is replaced, so is the command to “subdue.” Further, in 9:13, humans are offered a covenant of restraint with the earth. Consider also the Babel narrative (Gen 11) which encourages not the superiority of one culture, but of cultural diversity.

A second verse significant in the history of colonisation is the “children of Ham” in Gen 9:20-25. Brett argues that what unites the children of Ham is not in fact an ethnic unity, but a social and economic pattern of life. Ham-ites are city builders (10:8-12), while Shem-ites are rural dwellers. Brett suggests this would help a rural Israel make sense of their oppression as slaves of the city-building Egyptians.”

“Colonizers would be the ones to stand under Noah’s curse, not the Indigenous peoples whose connection with the land was swept aside. Thus it is not just that colonizers of modern history misconstrued these chapters in Genesis to serve their own interests. Rather, they inverted what the editors set out to do, and failed to see that the biblical texts potentially deprived them of legitimacy.” (41)

Brett notes the approaches of St Francis and the Celts toward creation. As Christians, they never read the Bible as giving license for exploitation of indigenous people and planet. Rather, for Brett, modern philosophies have re-configured Biblical texts.

For discussion: How important has “subdue” in Gen 1:28 been in your understanding of Christian faith? Does the notion of a complex of theologies of creation excite you, or freak you?

Links:
For all the posts relating to this book/blog review go here. For a review of a fine book on St Francis, go here.

a narrative approach to a theology of evil

Lots of stories are happy stories. Yet we live in a dark world. Babies get hurt. People grieve. Relationships break. This raises the question as to the presence of evil. Are there bad forces, outside humans, that contribute to human pain and destruction? If so, how should their presence shape human behaviour? Here’s a short story, a dark story, that I wrote for our Grow evening service, trying to get my head around evil and being human. I’m not sure if it works, or if I like it, so I’ll post it here.

The advertising catches your eye. The Bible Horror puppet show. Human puppets performing avant garde interactive theatre.

The voice fades as the final curtain fall begins.

A note of explanation (ie. Biblical shaping). (more…)

a theology for extinct species and cultures

“We lament the “lost civilizations” of past millenia, civilizations we can only partially reconstruct from archaeological remains or in epic movies. But if we take Revelation 21 seriously, they are not “lost” forever! … Think of the prospect! All human culture, language, literature, art, music, science, business, sport, technological achievement – actual and potential – all available to us. All of it with the poison of evil and sin sucked out of it forever.” Chris Wright, The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith, 202-3.

It’s a wonderful passage, which struck me, having been reflecting recently on cultural loss through history.

I then made a mental link with Revelation 5:13-14; when all creatures are singing praise and I ask: does “all” include dinosaurs and extinct species? Might, in the grace of God, the retrieval not just of buried cultures, but also of extinct species, be part of Christian hope?

Christian jihad or what sort of God killed the Canaanites?

So here’s the question? If your neighbours were and I quote from Deuteronomy 12, about to “burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods”, what would you do? Stand by and do nothing? Or take action?

That’s the cold, hard edge of reality being explored in the Old Testament. Consistent appalling behaviour. Do you let it continue? Or should you act forcibly to stop it? It’s not a part of Christianity that we like to talk about much. But it’s in the Bible and raises the question: what sort of God kills the Canaanites?

I’ve just finished reading a short little book by Lois Barrett, The Way God Fights: War and Peace in the Old Testament, which provides a fascinating answer.

She notes the usual Christian response – that God either changes from the Old Testament to the New Testament, or that human understandings of God evolve. The trouble with such an answer is that the God the Warrior is still present in Revelation, as the Bible ends.

So, asks Barrett, how on earth to worship someone who is called both Prince of Peace and God the Warrior? Her answer is Jihad. Carefully framed – that God the Warrior does act in response to injustice. However the emphasis is always on God acting, rather than human acting.

She urges us to be honest about all the Bible. It is often imagined that Israel arriving in Canaan and killed everyone, when in reality, other nations lived on for centuries (see Judges 1:27-36). Equally, in Joshua and Judges, a variety of stories of conquest are present: some see only God winning, some see Israel mopping up, others see Israel actively fighting.

She notes the counter-cultural nature of many of Israel’s actions. At times, Israel deliberately uses “weapons” of peace. One example is the crossing of the Jordan, which draws on war language and war images, yet the people carried no weapons. At other times, Israel refused new war technologies (Joshua destroys the chariots and horses of other countries in Joshua 11:15).

What is interesting is when Barrett places the actions of Israel within their wider cultural context. She notes the use of the “ban” in Ancient Near Eastern cultures. This involved the killing all the soldiers, including the families, of those defeated in war. “The practice seems cruel to us, but it was a way of making sure that soldiers on the winning side did not become rich by taking the possessions of the enemy, or by taking the enemy as slaves. So God was able to use for some good even one of the bloodiest practices of warfare in the ancient Near East.” (25 -26). In other words, killing people immediately was the most humane option available!

She points out that Jihad is based on actions, not on birthright. Thus in the exile Israel, as God’s people experience “holy war” as consequences for their actions. “Any people who did not trust in God would find that God the Warrior sometimes fought against him.” (48). So Jihad is for justice, and is never an excuse for a dominant group to exercise moral cleansing.

It’s a fascinating little book. What do you think? What would you have done if you were Israel and had come across child sacrifice? What approach do you suggest Christians take to the Bible image of God the warrior?

For more: Here’s a sermon I preached on this topic – of the Canaanites in the Old Testament – last year. What I said was heavily shaped by Chris Wright’s Old Testament Ethics for the People of God.