Certainly i don't think Jesus intended us to take this so literally that we (for instance) start asking questions about how the rich man can make himself heard by those in paradise, given the chasm and the presumed distance; it IS a parable!
But it's clearly several things at once, and one of them is a warning. Another has to do with the relationship between Christ and the scriptures, as you point out--and particularly his resurrection.
It's certainly a warning, but I don't think it's clear what the warning is of. I could see why people take it as a warning about the afterlife. I personally take it as a warning about ignoring Jesus and his message. I think that his life was meant to change ours and to point the way, and that we as a species, as societies, and as people will generally be the worse off if we ignore God.
The parable of Dives and Lazarus is an oddling. Most parables are about everyday homespun stuff, that the listeners mi ght have experienced if they were there. A woman makes dough. A shepherd loses a sheep. A man gets beat up by thieves, then another man helps him. A seed grows into a bush. A man has dishonest servants. All experiences the listeners may have had, or known somebody who had, or at least can easily envision it happening.
The Dives and Lazarus story breaks this mold. A communication link opens between worlds, and a discussion takes place between a good place and a bad place. Nobody had seen/heard this sort of thing. It's not based on a familiar, commonplace, ordinary life experience. It's something different, something weird. It's the science fiction of parables.
Should this observation color how we see and discuss this parable?
Certainly. Though I’m blessed if I can see how, exactly.
It reminds me of those rare breakthroughs where Jesus and co. are having an ordinary day and then he says something like “I keep sending you people prophets” or “I saw Satan falling from heaven” or “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw it and was glad.” I imagine everyone stopping to stare at him while he blinks, says “What?” And then “Carry on…”
I'd also agree that the story is strange even by biblical standards, and thanks for the correction about the role of Abraham.
I think the dire warning about wealth is in line with the gospel and - in this instance - hades is being used as an intensifier, drawing an irony out from the extreme income inequalities present in Jesus' time and upending them in a cataclysmic reversal. It seems like a literalization of the "Magnificat." He filled the poor with good things and sends the rich away empty, or even worse.
It's an extreme story but it isn't outside the general punches in Luke's gospel. And Hades is a simple consequence to the way one conducts life.
And there is a despair in the ending, perhaps foreshadowing the resurrection, the way he says "even if someone came back from the dead, these guys wouldn't change" per vs 31.
This seems to continue in the vein that hell isn't punishment, per se. These people had Moses, the prophets, all of it. Even after the resurrection, they still don't get it? I guess it comes as no surprise, at least the text seems to say.
It's certainly a warning, but I don't think it's clear what the warning is of. I could see why people take it as a warning about the afterlife. I personally take it as a warning about ignoring Jesus and his message. I think that his life was meant to change ours and to point the way, and that we as a species, as societies, and as people will generally be the worse off if we ignore God.
Yes. The only reason for telling people stories about the life to come is to affect the way people live their lives in the here and now, by making it clear that the two are linked in some way.
But while it is a warning (to the rich, to those who do not listen to the message), it is also a consolation (to the poor, to those who do listen to the message), that as much as they are tormented in this life, they will find comfort in the next *and* that those who have comfort in this life will find only torment in the next.
Either way, we can't expect the nature of our existence in this life to continue after death. There's only one possible scenario in which things turn out OK for everyone, and that's in world of equality, where no-one suffers because of the inequitable distribution of what we have collectively. If we truly heeded these words, those of us with more would do everything we could to redress the balance in this life, rather than waiting to receive our just deserts in the next.
I like the idea of it being science fiction of its age, but it's a shame the mice don't make it into this version.
I wonder if there's some kind of economics. If one person receives "better," then the other must necessarily receive "worse." And at some point you're getting into fundamental states.
I think I read something once about how some language in the OT is like that, God hates this and loves that because there wasn't really language for degrees of preference. It was binary all or nothing.
So if there's a good place, there must necessarily be a bad place to compliment it. Can we even comprehend "good" without a frame of reference?
Yes, of course we can. Good is a multivalued space, where one good contrasts with another (similar to RGB or CYMK in color spaces). We aren't in a simple bipolar situation, with a single kind of good available to contrast with a single evil.
To come at it a different way, if you were correct and no one could know good without evil, that would mean that before the Fall (angelic or human), God himself couldn't know good, as that's all there would have been at that time. Which is clearly nonsense.
Yes, of course we can. Good is a multivalued space, where one good contrasts with another (similar to RGB or CYMK in color spaces). We aren't in a simple bipolar situation, with a single kind of good available to contrast with a single evil.
To come at it a different way, if you were correct and no one could know good without evil, that would mean that before the Fall (angelic or human), God himself couldn't know good, as that's all there would have been at that time. Which is clearly nonsense.
There's something there. If a dog poos on a rug, it's only bad if there's a human to criticize them. If no human, it's organic material that'll decompose on its own. It takes our judgment to render things good and bad, and in a sense that was the original sin, no?
Sense making is what makes us human, what elevates us above "animals" if anything does. And we make a right mess of it. We like this so we over-cultivate it. We deplore that so we try to exterminate it without noticing it was necessary. We're rather clever, but stupid.
Funny, I work with disabled adults and sometimes I see how close we are to animals. It makes me think better of animals and less of people. To say someone is like a dog isn't an insult when you think dogs - especially when properly taken care of - are actually better than humans in many respects. Though maybe the same is true for us. I'm rather like one myself, for all my cogitation.
I don't know how much pressure to put on these thoughts, but I do think there's something intrinsically evil in the act of this division itself, we setting ourselves up as little mini-gods, one sense of imago dei I suppose. It's one reason I do try to take all the "do not judge" passages rather seriously, thought admittedly current events are truly straining the praxis.
In my experience people are people and nothing like animals. The situations where people behave in a degraded way tend to be those where they are treated in a subhuman way.
When it is said that people are like animals I tend to think that this misrepresents both animals and humans. For one thing there is a huge variety of animals on the planet, what does it even mean to compare individual humans to them?
In my experience people are people and nothing like animals. The situations where people behave in a degraded way tend to be those where they are treated in a subhuman way.
When it is said that people are like animals I tend to think that this misrepresents both animals and humans. For one thing there is a huge variety of animals on the planet, what does it even mean to compare individual humans to them?
We want to stay alive, we have affection for those we deem akin to us. We like food, sleep, and sex at reasonable intervals. We don't like being threatened. We have a deeply ingrained sense of "mine" and get territorial when that gets impinged upon.
I think if you keep pets and interact with them on a regular basis you start to see it, or spend time with humans of lower cognitive function. More "fully functional" humans can build these big cognitive superstructures to try to hide from these realities, but we're not really that different.
I'm not sure it's an insult to compare a human to an animal. Animals don't generally have the abstracted malice to commit acts like genocide against an entire ethnic group, for instance.
I suppose these might be hard things to understand.
I'm not sure it's an insult to compare a human to an animal. Animals don't generally have the abstracted malice to commit acts like genocide against an entire ethnic group, for instance.
I don’t think it’s an insult at all, at least not necessarily, though it can be intended as an insult. Humans are animals; we’re just at the top of the animal pyramid.
I am always struck by the nature of God's judgment, which seems to me to have more in common with the judgment given by a litmus test than that of a judge. You see, Israel is judged by Christ, not because he pronounces a long screed but because they do not accept him. If they had accepted him, history would have been different, and I presume Jerusalem would not have fallen in AD70, for there would not have been a Jewish uprising. If that is how God's nature works, then people are judged by God, in the sense of how they react to his action in their lives, and their response holds them to one side or the other. I sometimes wonder if people choose Hell because to them Heaven feels worse. Who is the judge then? Can we, as good people, accept that some people may choose Hell? Is that not the price of freewill?
I am always struck by the nature of God's judgment, which seems to me to have more in common with the judgment given by a litmus test than that of a judge. You see, Israel is judged by Christ, not because he pronounces a long screed but because they do not accept him. If they had accepted him, history would have been different, and I presume Jerusalem would not have fallen in AD70, for there would not have been a Jewish uprising. If that is how God's nature works, then people are judged by God, in the sense of how they react to his action in their lives, and their response holds them to one side or the other. I sometimes wonder if people choose Hell because to them Heaven feels worse. Who is the judge then? Can we, as good people, accept that some people may choose Hell? Is that not the price of freewill?
"You see, heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in heaven. Singing. Talking to God. Watering pot plants. While Hell, well, that's for people who like the other sorts of things - murder. Pillage. Those... areas" (Archbishop Edmund the Unwilling, persuading a dying baron to leave his lands to the Crown rather than the church so he'd be damned and go to Hell)
I am always struck by the nature of God's judgment, which seems to me to have more in common with the judgment given by a litmus test than that of a judge. You see, Israel is judged by Christ, not because he pronounces a long screed but because they do not accept him. If they had accepted him, history would have been different, and I presume Jerusalem would not have fallen in AD70, for there would not have been a Jewish uprising. If that is how God's nature works, then people are judged by God, in the sense of how they react to his action in their lives, and their response holds them to one side or the other. I sometimes wonder if people choose Hell because to them Heaven feels worse. Who is the judge then? Can we, as good people, accept that some people may choose Hell? Is that not the price of freewill?
Thanks for that provocative post, I've got some thoughts on it!
This is why a lot of modern anarchists look at Christianity and think that it's imperialist propaganda. I'm sure Rome would've loved to have a bunch of pliant little citizens who pay their taxes and don't stick out so much. Just blend in, go native, make homes in Babylon. After a while, you might not even mind it so much! Who cares if the empire is evil? You're not going to get anywhere fighting it.
Of course, at that juncture, we do see where "violent resistance" landed. Jesus was just one cross out of thousands. And most of them didn't rise up, far as the records go. They just stayed nailed. Bird food.
And I can't tell if it's the "raised in the church" or some more thoughtful side of me that tends to sympathize with the "Christian pacifist" argument. Or maybe I'm privileged enough that it wasn't my kid who got shot by the IDF/skewered by a legion's sword, so it's easier for me not to become a radicalized zealot. I've been a marginally secure white guy in the USA, raised by a family with a lot of contact with the military. Quietism is awful convenient when you're a "nice guy" on the inside of the empire.
And yes, the irony of that 2000 year gap blows my mind, but I didn't ask to live in this historical moment.
I can hear voices of folks I know saying that it's antisemitic to blame the Jews for revolting against the Roman occupation. "Oh, it would've gone better for you if you'd just taken that abuse." But then, I wasn't there. Then again, neither were modern Jews. We're all appropriators at this point, putting on ancient costumes and airing grievances on behalf of corpses that - barring some kind of resurrection - disintegrated a long time ago.
So, if "the Jews" erred at that time, it was in fighting to defend God as they understood God - per tradition - to the hilt. And they strove mightily and failed. Christianity was a minority Jewish cult that - tactically speaking - chose pacifism and inclusion, carefully appropriating the better virtues of the empire while refusing to participate in its vices. Paul's arguably divine decision to waive the "circumcision" and "no shellfish" clauses was a masterstroke, even if it erased the influence of traditional Jews for the rest of Christian history.
And it grieves me to this day that we don't have better records of that divorce, because it's the kind of stuff that I find endlessly fascinating.
I read the Tao Te Ching back in college, and after that you can't hear "God Acts" and not chuckle because by that thought, the notion of "action" is silly when applied to something like God. God's will isn't action, anymore than gravity is. If I drop a pencil, that's no an act...it just falls. It's like that, I think. It's like "no-action." There really isn't a good English word for it. It just is, like an overwhelming power.
Does this then sanctify the violence of Rome? Does Rome's rape, pillage, and murder of Jerusalem count as an act of God, echoing how the prophets described Babylon and Assyria centuries before? Were the Jews "asking for it" in modern parlance? Is an empire just another entitled man taking what he will and you're twice-damned, once in the act and again for any act of resistance? "Sorry, you shouldn't have fought back, now you get to be punished for eternity for the crime of being a bad victim."
I think I've heard your argument, @Jengie Jon , for my entire life in various ways. Younger me took it completely. At some point I started hearing rumblings that maybe it was antisemitic, or imperialistic "opiate of the masses" quietism, enabling white supremacy because masters like it when their slaves are submissive and peaceful. As noted, I can certainly find way to question it, even from my own privileged perch. And looking at the world as it stands now, we're seeing a lot of the same arguments about the role of violence in a world of corruption, good vs evil. I'm not competent at violence, but do I damn people of conscience for their outrage? It's an interesting question. This is probably why I tend to say I'm not qualified to judge, even if I think in my heart they're a little off the mark.
Because if a person who errs in trying to good is a little off the mark, what of someone who does not err in trying to do evil? If we hate the Jews for resisting, what do we do with the Romans? Because looking around, at least in America, The Romans Are Us.
[...]
Hoo boy, that was a lot of words. Thanks for putting up with them. I hope that's more coherent than I fear it isn't.
I'm not sure it's an insult to compare a human to an animal. Animals don't generally have the abstracted malice to commit acts like genocide against an entire ethnic group, for instance.
I don’t think it’s an insult at all, at least not necessarily, though it can be intended as an insult. Humans are animals; we’re just at the top of the animal pyramid.
Which pyramid would that be? In terms of our contribution to the planet's ecosystems, I would put us well below the ants and bees. Somewhere near the rats, maybe. And I don't think our ability to conceive of a hell for our own species counts in our favour. I'm fairly confident there is no hell-of-bees or hell-of-ants.
I'm not sure it's an insult to compare a human to an animal. Animals don't generally have the abstracted malice to commit acts like genocide against an entire ethnic group, for instance.
I don’t think it’s an insult at all, at least not necessarily, though it can be intended as an insult. Humans are animals; we’re just at the top of the animal pyramid.
Which pyramid would that be? In terms of our contribution to the planet's ecosystems, I would put us well below the ants and bees. Somewhere near the rats, maybe. And I don't think our ability to conceive of a hell for our own species counts in our favour. I'm fairly confident there is no hell-of-bees or hell-of-ants.
Hell is dark, Hell is deep
Hell is full of mice
Fair enough.
At the top of the predator pyramid, as the ones with the power to let waste to the planet?
A species uniquely qualified to understand the concepts both of progress, and of our own self-destruction. A species noted for our adaptability, that can be counted on to do the right thing, after we've exhausted all possible alternatives…
In some ways...I'm not sure that makes us different. It's just our ability to survive doing things so wrongly for so wrong. Most animals don't have the longevity to put up with so many mistakes. And honestly, I'm not sure most of our ancestors could either.
I've noticed that even our domestic cats are very fight-or-flighty, and part of that comes of living very close to the survival line. I know humans like that too, and I don't criticize them for it, understanding where it comes from. That might be part of what I'm thinking about. I could be a bit like that myself if put under enough pressure.
I am always struck by the nature of God's judgment, which seems to me to have more in common with the judgment given by a litmus test than that of a judge. You see, Israel is judged by Christ, not because he pronounces a long screed but because they do not accept him. If they had accepted him, history would have been different, and I presume Jerusalem would not have fallen in AD70, for there would not have been a Jewish uprising. If that is how God's nature works, then people are judged by God, in the sense of how they react to his action in their lives, and their response holds them to one side or the other. I sometimes wonder if people choose Hell because to them Heaven feels worse. Who is the judge then? Can we, as good people, accept that some people may choose Hell? Is that not the price of freewill?
…
Hoo boy, that was a lot of words. Thanks for putting up with them. I hope that's more coherent than I fear it isn't.
Thanks for the long post, Bullfrog. I've read it a number of times, and I think it is coherent. However…
My understanding is that any argument which amounts to saying that the fall of Jerusalem in AD70, and subsequent historic tribulations, are consequences of God's judgment on Jews for rejecting Christ, is either antisemitic or a source of antisemitism.
I can hear voices of folks I know saying that it's antisemitic to blame the Jews for revolting against the Roman occupation. "Oh, it would've gone better for you if you'd just taken that abuse." But then, I wasn't there. Then again, neither were modern Jews. We're all appropriators at this point, putting on ancient costumes and airing grievances on behalf of corpses that - barring some kind of resurrection - disintegrated a long time ago.
The idea that modern Jews appropriate Jewish history in anything like the way that modern Christians appropriate Jewish history is not a good look.
And there is a more general argument in Christianity about the message of the Bible regarding Jews. The underlying message I often hear is that Christians want to appropriate the God of the Jews for themselves, and to cast the role of Jews in the Bible primarily as serving as characters in an extended series of object lessons for Christians about God's justice and mercy.
Agreed on the first, full stop. I think I was responding to @Jengie Jon and (per PM) I think I was somewhat misreading their post, though they can speak for themself as they wish. I will not speak for or against them, and I expect I was swinging at a straw man I may have incorrectly inferred from their post. If anything I post here alludes to their thinking, let that be coincidental. I type for myself.
Causally, if various Jewish factions had decided to drop their resistance to Roman occupation and cooperated completely with Roman authority, one could imagine an alternate history in which the razing of Jerusalem had never happened, and simultaneously Judaism and Christianity as we understand them would never have existed, since so much of both of our religions are established from that one act of violence, or we'd be wildly different.
That said, I find such a speculative history to be the realm of fantasy. Fascinating to contemplate, but simply impractical. It'd be like imagining an America where Reconstruction succeeded; or even further where slavery was never a thing, or we worked things out honestly with the Native Americans: An integrated society as God may dream.
I think at this point we're all appropriators. We don't live in the world in which these texts were written. Nobody knows who Elijah was, corporeally. Or if he'd even recognize anything he saw when he came back. It would take some explaining, at least! And Jesus Christ? Just explaining cars would be a conversation. The past is a foreign land, the middle east is (for Americans and Europeans) a foreign land. The Bible was written across many historical periods and even the editors were most recently working on it over 1,500 years ago at best. A lot of bloody water has passed under the bridge!
I've had a lot of reflection on Jewish-Christian relations, thanks to having some very prickly Jewish friends of various opinions, prickling in various directions, some at me and some not at me. I don't think I bear any hatred, but my eventual conclusion has been that it is 2000 years past. We don't live in the 1st century anymore. It's a long-past trauma. I could carry more recent grievances against Catholics because I was raised Presbyterian. As I learned reading some history, they were burning our folks at the stake, literally! But that was 500 years ago and at some point you have to realize that the then-perpetrators are now every bit as dead as the victims. I have enough of my own personal pain without picking up pain on behalf of corpses. A woman was shot the other day in Minneapolis and that has more bearing on my life than the martyrdom of Jan Hus, or the death of Simon bar Giora.
If I preach today (which I don't, not being ordained,) I think it's important to look at the types of human behavior in the text, and not to pin that on particular religions or peoples. God knows I see an awful lot of behavior among Christians resembling both the caricatured Pharisees and Sadducees of Scripture and History. And it's ugly. But I think it's unseemly to use it to pick at other people's splinters when we're the ones with the logs. The Bible is for self examination. Whatever was going wrong in first century Israel/Palestine, that was a long time ago in a land far away.
I worship the Triune God in Jesus Christ. I do not worship the context of the first century Roman occupation of Jerusalem and surrounding environs.
If I preach today (which I don't, not being ordained,)
You do not have to be ordained to preach. There are many lay preachers out there even in the Presbyterian denomination. Just saying.
Speak for your own denomination, but please do not speak for others.
In some denominations/churches/traditions, one does generally have to be ordained to preach. As for those Presbyterian folk sometimes informally referred to as “lay pastors” or “commissioned lay pastors,” they are ordained. They are ordained elders who have undertaken specialized training to full a pastoral role.
I think at this point we're all appropriators. We don't live in the world in which these texts were written. Nobody knows who Elijah was, corporeally. Or if he'd even recognize anything he saw when he came back. It would take some explaining, at least! And Jesus Christ? Just explaining cars would be a conversation. The past is a foreign land, the middle east is (for Americans and Europeans) a foreign land. The Bible was written across many historical periods and even the editors were most recently working on it over 1,500 years ago at best. A lot of bloody water has passed under the bridge!
I find the irony of the quote from The Go-Between significant.
In the book's prologue, Leo Colston chances upon a diary from 1900, the year of his thirteenth birthday, and gradually pieces together a memory that he has suppressed.
…
In the epilogue, the older Leo summarises how profoundly the experience has affected him. Forbidding himself to think about the scandal, he had shut down his emotions and imaginative nature, leaving room only for facts. As a result, he never has been able to establish intimate relationships. Now, looking back on the events through the eyes of a mature adult, he feels it is important to return to Brandham some 50 years later in order to tie up loose ends.
The past might feel to us like a foreign country, but it is a land that can continue to shape us in ways we can't, or won't, remember. Kevin Gardner wrote in a revaluation of the work: “Hartley's haunting tale of lost innocence underscores the modern experience of broken time, a paradox in which humanity is alienated from the past, yet not free from it, a past that continues to exist in and to control the subconscious”
I don't think I bear any hatred, but my eventual conclusion has been that it is 2000 years past. We don't live in the 1st century anymore. It's a long-past trauma.
Who for?
I think you're concentrating on the effects that you are able to perceive in your own attitudes to others. In this regard, my own experience is that even stuff that happened just a handful of generations ago in my own family continues to have an effect on my family today, and that this requires significant effort to uncover and interrogate and understand.
But I think the more serious consideration is the people who experienced the trauma, and their descendants, which relates to the issue of transgenerational trauma or historical trauma.
The other side of the coin of wanting the past to stay in the past amounts to telling a people group with a very long history of trauma that it's about time they got over it. And if this is a general principle, we need to know how long ago the trauma of previous generations needs to be before it no longer informs currently living generations. 2000 years? 1000 years? 500 years? 200 years? 100 years? How can any of us say, on behalf of every other people group on the planet, that what happened in the past stays in the past? Who among us can make that calculation of behalf of other people?
There is no arbitrary limit that I can find to the duration of transgenerational trauma or historical trauma.
I worship the Triune God in Jesus Christ. I do not worship the context of the first century Roman occupation of Jerusalem and surrounding environs.
If that were really true, Christians would stop going on about the crucifixion. Detaching a violent historical event from the violent historical context that gave rise to it doesn't look to me like an act of respect or remembrance.
Concerning "significant effort to uncover and interrogate and understand " I have to say that concerning crap that has gone on in my own family back through a couple of generations I have no interest in or intention to do that.
And re "going on about the crucifixion" that definitely doesn't happen from the pulpit of my benign suburban C of E church!
Excellent point, I think I'm responding to what I observe in Christians who try to go straight to the Bible as if 2000 years haven't passed. It's ignorant. I'm also thinking of some and not all Zionists I've had conversations with where if you look at the horrors presently going on in Palestine they'll bring up centuries-old massacres as justification for what Israel is doing. They do not speak for all Zionists, let alone all Jewish folks, but it's an argument I hear enough that it sticks in my head as a case study in wrong. So I feel obliged to address it.
The past has echoes, yes. And trauma can run down generations, yes. But I still think it's unreasonable to speak of centuries-past conflicts as if they had the same salience as present day conflicts. For instance, if I decided to go punch a French Catholic Priest in the face in retaliation for the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, that'd be certifiably deranged, I think.
There comes a time to admit that the past is past. History echoes, certainly, but there's more harm than good in acting like grievances must be carried through to the present. This is why I call it appropriation. I can pick up my historical context. I can also alter it, I can mend it, I can cut things off of it, I can sew things onto it. And what I do with it is my responsibility as a living member of a living religious body.
I'm not a zombie acting on the grievances of my dead ancestors, even if I choose to remember them with a certain respect. I'm a Mayflower descendant, I'm not obliged to defend the pilgrims in all of the things that they did. Some of what they did was indefensible. Best be honest about that.
I'm not telling a person "Get over it." But when I see a tens of thousands of people being killed in a war and I look at it and someone says "well...400 years ago, some of their ancestors murdered some of our ancestors, and that's always how it goes, so we have to do this to make ourselves feel safer!" I might question that. They say "hurt people hurt people" but that doesn't justify domestic violence. Does it? I've seen that one play out. At some point an adult has to take responsibility instead of reflexively acting out their trauma.
There are better ways to work out your trauma than committing war crimes or taking it out on your spouse because someone hurt you and you don't know what to do with the pain.
I wouldn't' say "Get over it!" But I would say that a person has responsibility for how they process their trauma. That much has certainly been outright demanded of me, literally, personally and professionally. My objection to "Get over it!" isn't that it's bad advice, but that it's impossible. What you say is "figure it out, work through it so you don't hurt other people around you." Because the alternative is that you will hurt people and pass the trauma on to another generation.
And that's how you can try not to be another case study in "trauma runs down generations." I think that's fundamentally Christian. Christ showed us ways to break the damned cycle. Let's actually try it for a change instead of wallowing in our tragic backstories, eh?
I certainly carry generational trauma, though my case isn't that heavy. I don't mean to boast like I'm a serious case, but I have felt this struggle and I have watched other people go through it and I have also seen the wreckage when people fail. Why am I wrong to expect people to try?
Far as the cross, I think the cross is one way to understand the choice not to retaliate and to let a conflict end even if it requires sacrifice and loss of self. And sometimes that's the only way forward, to resurrection. So I might think the cross is pretty important, even if my church doesn't harp on it that much.
If I preach today (which I don't, not being ordained,)
You do not have to be ordained to preach. There are many lay preachers out there even in the Presbyterian denomination. Just saying.
Speak for your own denomination, but please do not speak for others.
In some denominations/churches/traditions, one does generally have to be ordained to preach. As for those Presbyterian folk sometimes informally referred to as “lay pastors” or “commissioned lay pastors,” they are ordained. They are ordained elders who have undertaken specialized training to full a pastoral role.
Sorry to have upset you, Nick. Actually, in a sense I now straddle two denominations because I am serving a community church that is made up of both Presbyterian and Lutheran members. We worship in the old Presbyterian church building. Here is what I do know:
In the PC(USA) and other Presbyterian bodies, laypersons may be trained and commissioned to serve as pastors in certain settings.
These Commissioned Ruling Elders (CREs):
Are not ordained ministers
Receive training and approval from their presbytery
May preach, administer sacraments, and perform pastoral duties
Often serve small or rural congregations
This is a formal lay ministry role — not full ordination, but a recognized pastoral function.
Concerning "significant effort to uncover and interrogate and understand " I have to say that concerning crap that has gone on in my own family back through a couple of generations I have no interest in or intention to do that.
And re "going on about the crucifixion" that definitely doesn't happen from the pulpit of my benign suburban C of E church!
I'm reminded that without the Crucifixion, there is no Last Supper, and without the Last Supper, there is no Eucharist. This is how the Church of England describes it:
The Eucharist is at the heart of Christian worship. It is celebrated by Christians around the world as a memorial of the death and resurrection of Jesus, in response to his words at the final meal he shared with his disciples, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the Eucharist, God invites us to his table as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet which he has prepared for people of all nations and cultures.
Outwardly, the Eucharist takes the form of a shared meal of bread and wine, recalling the fact that, at the Last Supper, Jesus associated the breaking of bread and sharing of wine with his own imminent death, giving them special significance.
After his resurrection, the disciples recognised Jesus as he broke bread to share with them. Each time we share the meal Jesus shared with his friends, we remember his offering of himself on the cross, we rejoice in his resurrection from the dead, and look forward to the coming of God’s Kingdom.
I think the number of times the cross or crucifixion are mentioned during such a service depends on which form and prayers, etc, are used.
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But it's clearly several things at once, and one of them is a warning. Another has to do with the relationship between Christ and the scriptures, as you point out--and particularly his resurrection.
The Dives and Lazarus story breaks this mold. A communication link opens between worlds, and a discussion takes place between a good place and a bad place. Nobody had seen/heard this sort of thing. It's not based on a familiar, commonplace, ordinary life experience. It's something different, something weird. It's the science fiction of parables.
Should this observation color how we see and discuss this parable?
It reminds me of those rare breakthroughs where Jesus and co. are having an ordinary day and then he says something like “I keep sending you people prophets” or “I saw Satan falling from heaven” or “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw it and was glad.” I imagine everyone stopping to stare at him while he blinks, says “What?” And then “Carry on…”
I think the dire warning about wealth is in line with the gospel and - in this instance - hades is being used as an intensifier, drawing an irony out from the extreme income inequalities present in Jesus' time and upending them in a cataclysmic reversal. It seems like a literalization of the "Magnificat." He filled the poor with good things and sends the rich away empty, or even worse.
It's an extreme story but it isn't outside the general punches in Luke's gospel. And Hades is a simple consequence to the way one conducts life.
And there is a despair in the ending, perhaps foreshadowing the resurrection, the way he says "even if someone came back from the dead, these guys wouldn't change" per vs 31.
This seems to continue in the vein that hell isn't punishment, per se. These people had Moses, the prophets, all of it. Even after the resurrection, they still don't get it? I guess it comes as no surprise, at least the text seems to say.
Maybe the hope is that there's a heaven at all.
But while it is a warning (to the rich, to those who do not listen to the message), it is also a consolation (to the poor, to those who do listen to the message), that as much as they are tormented in this life, they will find comfort in the next *and* that those who have comfort in this life will find only torment in the next.
Either way, we can't expect the nature of our existence in this life to continue after death. There's only one possible scenario in which things turn out OK for everyone, and that's in world of equality, where no-one suffers because of the inequitable distribution of what we have collectively. If we truly heeded these words, those of us with more would do everything we could to redress the balance in this life, rather than waiting to receive our just deserts in the next.
I like the idea of it being science fiction of its age, but it's a shame the mice don't make it into this version.
I think I read something once about how some language in the OT is like that, God hates this and loves that because there wasn't really language for degrees of preference. It was binary all or nothing.
So if there's a good place, there must necessarily be a bad place to compliment it. Can we even comprehend "good" without a frame of reference?
To come at it a different way, if you were correct and no one could know good without evil, that would mean that before the Fall (angelic or human), God himself couldn't know good, as that's all there would have been at that time. Which is clearly nonsense.
There's something there. If a dog poos on a rug, it's only bad if there's a human to criticize them. If no human, it's organic material that'll decompose on its own. It takes our judgment to render things good and bad, and in a sense that was the original sin, no?
Sense making is what makes us human, what elevates us above "animals" if anything does. And we make a right mess of it. We like this so we over-cultivate it. We deplore that so we try to exterminate it without noticing it was necessary. We're rather clever, but stupid.
Funny, I work with disabled adults and sometimes I see how close we are to animals. It makes me think better of animals and less of people. To say someone is like a dog isn't an insult when you think dogs - especially when properly taken care of - are actually better than humans in many respects. Though maybe the same is true for us. I'm rather like one myself, for all my cogitation.
I don't know how much pressure to put on these thoughts, but I do think there's something intrinsically evil in the act of this division itself, we setting ourselves up as little mini-gods, one sense of imago dei I suppose. It's one reason I do try to take all the "do not judge" passages rather seriously, thought admittedly current events are truly straining the praxis.
If only we could just stop ourselves.
I seem to be on a song-posting kick lately.
If evil exists, it's a pair of train tracks, and the devil is a railroad car...
How the heck do I screw these things up? I think I got it right.
When it is said that people are like animals I tend to think that this misrepresents both animals and humans. For one thing there is a huge variety of animals on the planet, what does it even mean to compare individual humans to them?
We want to stay alive, we have affection for those we deem akin to us. We like food, sleep, and sex at reasonable intervals. We don't like being threatened. We have a deeply ingrained sense of "mine" and get territorial when that gets impinged upon.
I think if you keep pets and interact with them on a regular basis you start to see it, or spend time with humans of lower cognitive function. More "fully functional" humans can build these big cognitive superstructures to try to hide from these realities, but we're not really that different.
I'm not sure it's an insult to compare a human to an animal. Animals don't generally have the abstracted malice to commit acts like genocide against an entire ethnic group, for instance.
I suppose these might be hard things to understand.
Then again, this might be another thread...
"You see, heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in heaven. Singing. Talking to God. Watering pot plants. While Hell, well, that's for people who like the other sorts of things - murder. Pillage. Those... areas" (Archbishop Edmund the Unwilling, persuading a dying baron to leave his lands to the Crown rather than the church so he'd be damned and go to Hell)
Thanks for that provocative post, I've got some thoughts on it!
This is why a lot of modern anarchists look at Christianity and think that it's imperialist propaganda. I'm sure Rome would've loved to have a bunch of pliant little citizens who pay their taxes and don't stick out so much. Just blend in, go native, make homes in Babylon. After a while, you might not even mind it so much! Who cares if the empire is evil? You're not going to get anywhere fighting it.
Of course, at that juncture, we do see where "violent resistance" landed. Jesus was just one cross out of thousands. And most of them didn't rise up, far as the records go. They just stayed nailed. Bird food.
And I can't tell if it's the "raised in the church" or some more thoughtful side of me that tends to sympathize with the "Christian pacifist" argument. Or maybe I'm privileged enough that it wasn't my kid who got shot by the IDF/skewered by a legion's sword, so it's easier for me not to become a radicalized zealot. I've been a marginally secure white guy in the USA, raised by a family with a lot of contact with the military. Quietism is awful convenient when you're a "nice guy" on the inside of the empire.
And yes, the irony of that 2000 year gap blows my mind, but I didn't ask to live in this historical moment.
I can hear voices of folks I know saying that it's antisemitic to blame the Jews for revolting against the Roman occupation. "Oh, it would've gone better for you if you'd just taken that abuse." But then, I wasn't there. Then again, neither were modern Jews. We're all appropriators at this point, putting on ancient costumes and airing grievances on behalf of corpses that - barring some kind of resurrection - disintegrated a long time ago.
So, if "the Jews" erred at that time, it was in fighting to defend God as they understood God - per tradition - to the hilt. And they strove mightily and failed. Christianity was a minority Jewish cult that - tactically speaking - chose pacifism and inclusion, carefully appropriating the better virtues of the empire while refusing to participate in its vices. Paul's arguably divine decision to waive the "circumcision" and "no shellfish" clauses was a masterstroke, even if it erased the influence of traditional Jews for the rest of Christian history.
And it grieves me to this day that we don't have better records of that divorce, because it's the kind of stuff that I find endlessly fascinating.
I read the Tao Te Ching back in college, and after that you can't hear "God Acts" and not chuckle because by that thought, the notion of "action" is silly when applied to something like God. God's will isn't action, anymore than gravity is. If I drop a pencil, that's no an act...it just falls. It's like that, I think. It's like "no-action." There really isn't a good English word for it. It just is, like an overwhelming power.
Does this then sanctify the violence of Rome? Does Rome's rape, pillage, and murder of Jerusalem count as an act of God, echoing how the prophets described Babylon and Assyria centuries before? Were the Jews "asking for it" in modern parlance? Is an empire just another entitled man taking what he will and you're twice-damned, once in the act and again for any act of resistance? "Sorry, you shouldn't have fought back, now you get to be punished for eternity for the crime of being a bad victim."
I think I've heard your argument, @Jengie Jon , for my entire life in various ways. Younger me took it completely. At some point I started hearing rumblings that maybe it was antisemitic, or imperialistic "opiate of the masses" quietism, enabling white supremacy because masters like it when their slaves are submissive and peaceful. As noted, I can certainly find way to question it, even from my own privileged perch. And looking at the world as it stands now, we're seeing a lot of the same arguments about the role of violence in a world of corruption, good vs evil. I'm not competent at violence, but do I damn people of conscience for their outrage? It's an interesting question. This is probably why I tend to say I'm not qualified to judge, even if I think in my heart they're a little off the mark.
Because if a person who errs in trying to good is a little off the mark, what of someone who does not err in trying to do evil? If we hate the Jews for resisting, what do we do with the Romans? Because looking around, at least in America, The Romans Are Us.
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Hoo boy, that was a lot of words. Thanks for putting up with them. I hope that's more coherent than I fear it isn't.
Hell is dark, Hell is deep
Hell is full of mice
At the top of the predator pyramid, as the ones with the power to let waste to the planet?
I've noticed that even our domestic cats are very fight-or-flighty, and part of that comes of living very close to the survival line. I know humans like that too, and I don't criticize them for it, understanding where it comes from. That might be part of what I'm thinking about. I could be a bit like that myself if put under enough pressure.
My understanding is that any argument which amounts to saying that the fall of Jerusalem in AD70, and subsequent historic tribulations, are consequences of God's judgment on Jews for rejecting Christ, is either antisemitic or a source of antisemitism.
The idea that modern Jews appropriate Jewish history in anything like the way that modern Christians appropriate Jewish history is not a good look.
And there is a more general argument in Christianity about the message of the Bible regarding Jews. The underlying message I often hear is that Christians want to appropriate the God of the Jews for themselves, and to cast the role of Jews in the Bible primarily as serving as characters in an extended series of object lessons for Christians about God's justice and mercy.
Agreed on the first, full stop. I think I was responding to @Jengie Jon and (per PM) I think I was somewhat misreading their post, though they can speak for themself as they wish. I will not speak for or against them, and I expect I was swinging at a straw man I may have incorrectly inferred from their post. If anything I post here alludes to their thinking, let that be coincidental. I type for myself.
Causally, if various Jewish factions had decided to drop their resistance to Roman occupation and cooperated completely with Roman authority, one could imagine an alternate history in which the razing of Jerusalem had never happened, and simultaneously Judaism and Christianity as we understand them would never have existed, since so much of both of our religions are established from that one act of violence, or we'd be wildly different.
That said, I find such a speculative history to be the realm of fantasy. Fascinating to contemplate, but simply impractical. It'd be like imagining an America where Reconstruction succeeded; or even further where slavery was never a thing, or we worked things out honestly with the Native Americans: An integrated society as God may dream.
I think at this point we're all appropriators. We don't live in the world in which these texts were written. Nobody knows who Elijah was, corporeally. Or if he'd even recognize anything he saw when he came back. It would take some explaining, at least! And Jesus Christ? Just explaining cars would be a conversation. The past is a foreign land, the middle east is (for Americans and Europeans) a foreign land. The Bible was written across many historical periods and even the editors were most recently working on it over 1,500 years ago at best. A lot of bloody water has passed under the bridge!
I've had a lot of reflection on Jewish-Christian relations, thanks to having some very prickly Jewish friends of various opinions, prickling in various directions, some at me and some not at me. I don't think I bear any hatred, but my eventual conclusion has been that it is 2000 years past. We don't live in the 1st century anymore. It's a long-past trauma. I could carry more recent grievances against Catholics because I was raised Presbyterian. As I learned reading some history, they were burning our folks at the stake, literally! But that was 500 years ago and at some point you have to realize that the then-perpetrators are now every bit as dead as the victims. I have enough of my own personal pain without picking up pain on behalf of corpses. A woman was shot the other day in Minneapolis and that has more bearing on my life than the martyrdom of Jan Hus, or the death of Simon bar Giora.
If I preach today (which I don't, not being ordained,) I think it's important to look at the types of human behavior in the text, and not to pin that on particular religions or peoples. God knows I see an awful lot of behavior among Christians resembling both the caricatured Pharisees and Sadducees of Scripture and History. And it's ugly. But I think it's unseemly to use it to pick at other people's splinters when we're the ones with the logs. The Bible is for self examination. Whatever was going wrong in first century Israel/Palestine, that was a long time ago in a land far away.
I worship the Triune God in Jesus Christ. I do not worship the context of the first century Roman occupation of Jerusalem and surrounding environs.
You said:
You do not have to be ordained to preach. There are many lay preachers out there even in the Presbyterian denomination. Just saying.
In some denominations/churches/traditions, one does generally have to be ordained to preach. As for those Presbyterian folk sometimes informally referred to as “lay pastors” or “commissioned lay pastors,” they are ordained. They are ordained elders who have undertaken specialized training to full a pastoral role.
Who for?
I think you're concentrating on the effects that you are able to perceive in your own attitudes to others. In this regard, my own experience is that even stuff that happened just a handful of generations ago in my own family continues to have an effect on my family today, and that this requires significant effort to uncover and interrogate and understand.
But I think the more serious consideration is the people who experienced the trauma, and their descendants, which relates to the issue of transgenerational trauma or historical trauma.
The other side of the coin of wanting the past to stay in the past amounts to telling a people group with a very long history of trauma that it's about time they got over it. And if this is a general principle, we need to know how long ago the trauma of previous generations needs to be before it no longer informs currently living generations. 2000 years? 1000 years? 500 years? 200 years? 100 years? How can any of us say, on behalf of every other people group on the planet, that what happened in the past stays in the past? Who among us can make that calculation of behalf of other people?
There is no arbitrary limit that I can find to the duration of transgenerational trauma or historical trauma.
If that were really true, Christians would stop going on about the crucifixion. Detaching a violent historical event from the violent historical context that gave rise to it doesn't look to me like an act of respect or remembrance.
And re "going on about the crucifixion" that definitely doesn't happen from the pulpit of my benign suburban C of E church!
This is true, but I'm in a church with a long bullpen, so I am generally not in the practice. I'm aware of the Presby practice.
Also, my present church is Episcopalian. Thanks for the info.
Excellent point, I think I'm responding to what I observe in Christians who try to go straight to the Bible as if 2000 years haven't passed. It's ignorant. I'm also thinking of some and not all Zionists I've had conversations with where if you look at the horrors presently going on in Palestine they'll bring up centuries-old massacres as justification for what Israel is doing. They do not speak for all Zionists, let alone all Jewish folks, but it's an argument I hear enough that it sticks in my head as a case study in wrong. So I feel obliged to address it.
The past has echoes, yes. And trauma can run down generations, yes. But I still think it's unreasonable to speak of centuries-past conflicts as if they had the same salience as present day conflicts. For instance, if I decided to go punch a French Catholic Priest in the face in retaliation for the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, that'd be certifiably deranged, I think.
There comes a time to admit that the past is past. History echoes, certainly, but there's more harm than good in acting like grievances must be carried through to the present. This is why I call it appropriation. I can pick up my historical context. I can also alter it, I can mend it, I can cut things off of it, I can sew things onto it. And what I do with it is my responsibility as a living member of a living religious body.
I'm not a zombie acting on the grievances of my dead ancestors, even if I choose to remember them with a certain respect. I'm a Mayflower descendant, I'm not obliged to defend the pilgrims in all of the things that they did. Some of what they did was indefensible. Best be honest about that.
I'm not telling a person "Get over it." But when I see a tens of thousands of people being killed in a war and I look at it and someone says "well...400 years ago, some of their ancestors murdered some of our ancestors, and that's always how it goes, so we have to do this to make ourselves feel safer!" I might question that. They say "hurt people hurt people" but that doesn't justify domestic violence. Does it? I've seen that one play out. At some point an adult has to take responsibility instead of reflexively acting out their trauma.
There are better ways to work out your trauma than committing war crimes or taking it out on your spouse because someone hurt you and you don't know what to do with the pain.
I wouldn't' say "Get over it!" But I would say that a person has responsibility for how they process their trauma. That much has certainly been outright demanded of me, literally, personally and professionally. My objection to "Get over it!" isn't that it's bad advice, but that it's impossible. What you say is "figure it out, work through it so you don't hurt other people around you." Because the alternative is that you will hurt people and pass the trauma on to another generation.
And that's how you can try not to be another case study in "trauma runs down generations." I think that's fundamentally Christian. Christ showed us ways to break the damned cycle. Let's actually try it for a change instead of wallowing in our tragic backstories, eh?
I certainly carry generational trauma, though my case isn't that heavy. I don't mean to boast like I'm a serious case, but I have felt this struggle and I have watched other people go through it and I have also seen the wreckage when people fail. Why am I wrong to expect people to try?
Far as the cross, I think the cross is one way to understand the choice not to retaliate and to let a conflict end even if it requires sacrifice and loss of self. And sometimes that's the only way forward, to resurrection. So I might think the cross is pretty important, even if my church doesn't harp on it that much.
So much for me not preaching, ha!
Sorry to have upset you, Nick. Actually, in a sense I now straddle two denominations because I am serving a community church that is made up of both Presbyterian and Lutheran members. We worship in the old Presbyterian church building. Here is what I do know:
In the PC(USA) and other Presbyterian bodies, laypersons may be trained and commissioned to serve as pastors in certain settings.
These Commissioned Ruling Elders (CREs):
Are not ordained ministers
Receive training and approval from their presbytery
May preach, administer sacraments, and perform pastoral duties
Often serve small or rural congregations
This is a formal lay ministry role — not full ordination, but a recognized pastoral function.
The Orthodoxen also let the laity preach, although the only layperson I've ever seen do so was a seminarian so there's that.
I think the number of times the cross or crucifixion are mentioned during such a service depends on which form and prayers, etc, are used.