The Existence of Injustice does not Justify Its Existence: A Lesson in Blog Commenting

I've done a bad thing.  I commented on a blog.  Actually, that's not true.  I replied to someone else's comment.  I confess, and I am ashamed.  And now I'm just gonna talk through a bunch of my somewhat unfiltered thoughts about the situation.  Deal with it.  If you have any questions or thoughts at the end, please bring them to light - this is all kinda messy, and I'm sure there's room both to call me out and shore me up.


As a general rule, I do not comment on blogs or articles.  If I agree with the post, well the author has made the point and does not necessarily need my support.  If I disagree, well, the author likely wouldn't have written the post if he/she wasn't somewhat convinced of the opinion, and my little comment will not make any difference.  The one exception I may make is when I find a post or argument (or sometimes even a particular phrase or sentence) actually offensive.  If a remark or argument rises above mere opinion and into something I feel is perpetuating some sort of offense, be it evidence of a systemic injustice or unfair stereotype, I might feel compelled to chime in.


That was not the case this time.  I was simply reading a post from a blog I find agreeable and thought-provoking, and very rarely contains content I find actually offensive.  But then I read some comments...


This post was on a Christian blog, and dealt with the issue of gender roles, and I saw a comment that I felt had rather missed the point.  But what's more, I recognized the commenter.  I've seen his comments before, almost always on posts dealing with gender, and almost always contrary to the author's point of view.  Being a fairly progressive Christian blog, the gender posts lean towards egalitarian ideas, and this commenter is fervently complementarian.  (Please bear in mind, while I am no strict complentarian, I also do not imagine myself some champion of the feminist or egalitarian cause.  I am what I am and that's all that I am, and I prefer not to box myself into movements or labeled ideologies.  Interpret my stance beyond that as you will.)


Anyway, this guy comments frequently, almost any chance he can get to assert his complementarian ideas (and I've got no beef with the views per se).  This particular commenter's tone, though, is particularly condescending.  Particularly holier-than-thou.  Particularly arrogant in the way it comes across.  This is maybe not the way he intends it, but the tone is there nevertheless.  Eventually, the frequency and smug nature of his posts finally reached my limit.  


He seemed to believe that certain institutions have been in place for several millennia, and that this is not to be questioned, for their persistence itself is enough evidence that they are right, so we should accept them.  He wrote, "For centuries, male leadership both in the church and house have never been criticized or questioned until woman's suffrage and the rise of feminism in the 19th and 20th centuries."  Well damn that women's suffrage.  According to this logic, the very existence of injustice justifies its very existence.  And I could not hold my tongue.  Needless to say, he read my reply, but I doubt he actually heard me.  I fought the urge to reply to his reply and failed again.  I thought, "If only I can clarify, maybe he'll see my point this time!"  I should have known better.  No one is really commenting on blogs because they want to be persuaded of anything other than their already entrenched position.  Myself included - I knew that I was right, or I wouldn't have bothered.  


At one point he also wrote about hermeneutics:


"Honest and objective interpretation of Scripture should remain void of personal bias, notion, belief, socio-political stand, and culture. In fact, it should be read and understood within the context of the time and culture at which the author wrote the respective book. Then, rather than dismissing the context it should instead be applied universally to our time and culture as much as feasibly possible."


Is it just me, or is he not basically saying, "We must read the Bible ignoring cultural influences.  Except we must know the cultural influences of the time in which the Bible was written.  Then, we must read the Bible taking into account its original context, and then apply it as though we live in the same context, ignoring any changes that have taken place in the last 2,000 years."  Seriously.  That's a terrible way to do hermeneutics.  


Well, this all happened, and I can't take it back.  Neither of us walks away with any different opinion than we had going in.  I'll still see his smug attitude toward any blog post suggesting that maybe women actually do have something worthwhile to teach us, and should not be prohibited from teaching us simply because their boobs are screwed on a bit too tight.  It is not enough to have a heart and mind devoted to Christ and his ways - one must have the balls and masculine jawline of Christ as well.   


At some point I realized I needed to just stop, look at this blog and these comments, and ask what I've learned from this whole situation.  I've learned that we, as a Church, as the Body of Christ, do a terrible job at teaching any coherent ideas about what hermeneutics are and how we should discuss them.  I think we also do not teach history well - church history, or the history of the world surrounding the church - as many people seem to have awfully diverse ideas about what was going on 2,000 years ago.  (Recent hullabaloo concerning the existence of Adam and Eve offers further evidence of this chasm.)  


We must be able to have respectful, yet frank discussion.  I think one of the most insulting things Christians can do at the end of a debate is to offer their prayers for the other party.  It's like one more shot across the bow saying, "I'm right, and I'll pray blessings upon you so that one day you might be right like me."  I rarely believe that these offerings are sincere.  I sure know I wouldn't mean it.  We should also not assume that other people are stupid just because we disagree with them.  At one point, while noting some key differences between Paul's culture and our own, I suggested that the concept of homosexuality did not exist when Paul was writing.  I was told that the Bible talks about homosexuality several times, and was then told, "Read your Bible :)"  Apparently, after a lengthy discussion about history, hermeneutics, and the Bible, my Bible literacy itself was still in question.  How did all this happen?  And why do I keep going back to check for updates?


Ever since my last post, a little over a week ago, I've found myself very opinionated.  I'll comment on facebook statuses, I'll write my own facebook statuses about articles that I read, I'll reply to tweets about this or that or the other thing.  Maybe it's the recent surge of news coverage of the Republican primary campaigns and I'm all riled up.  Plus, I'm home for the summer and not involved in a very active Christian fellowship to allow for the discussion of these sorts of issues.  And I'm away from the good old UNC campus where I always had both liberal and conservative groups of friends where I could bring up whatever was happening in politics or social issues at the time. Am I just antsy to get back around more people where ideas can flow more freely? 


Whatever the case, I have to also admit that the whole ordeal was still great fun.  Perhaps I should just stay out of it next time.  Isn't that why I have this thing?

Hearts and Minds

I read a fun blog the other day discussing some common cliches in current Christian language.  Things like calling wives “brides,” and saying you’re gonna “love on” people.  I especially liked the one where we praise people by saying they have a “real heart for God.”  The author pointed out that people rarely talk about people who have “a real mind for God.”  After all, isn’t our command to love God with all our hearts and all our minds?  What place is there for intellectualism in modern Christianity?  

Sure, there are divinity schools and seminaries for a higher education approach, but divinity schools do not train pastors in the same way as seminaries, and seminaries run the risk of being hopelessly subjective and biased.  I remember looking around The Ehrman Project website, where several seminary professors refute the opinions of a university professor on various questions surrounding the New Testament and early Christianity.  But I wonder if there isn’t some middle ground, a more reasoned form of faith that can objectively embrace some factual arguments about our texts and history, while not compromising a faith that hold fast to those texts and history nonetheless? 

I remember Donald Miller, in his book Searching for God Knows What, making some really excellent arguments about the way we reduce faith and teaching to elementary formulae, and then talking about Moses and what he wrote in Genesis (or maybe some other book from the pentateuch).  Which was really frustrating because I think it’s generally acknowledged now by many scholars and laymen alike that Moses almost definitely did not write the first five books of the Bible, and even if there is a small outlier of a chance that he did, it’s kinda lazy for a renowned Christian author to casually slip it in like it’s an irrefutable fact.  It’s particularly a shame because it clouds some otherwise excellent points with questionable scholarship.  (I felt the same problem of shoddy scholarship pervading Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis, and I suspect some of his other writings as well.)  

This is approached poorly from the “other side” as well.  In a brief article advertising a new book, Bart Ehrman lists several non-canonical texts from the time the New Testament was being compiled, arguing that they were texts once considered legitimate teaching by real life actual Christians.  He is correct, as he frequently is.  However, he did not address the process by which the New Testament was compiled, any individuals like Eusebius and Athanasius who offered canon lists, or the fact that the books included were considered at the time to be legitimate in their authorship, and representative of a consensus among Christian leaders as to the appropriateness of their content and teachings.  So even though this article is meant as a teaser and advertisement for a book which would surely address these issues more fully, the presentation remains misleading and incomplete, almost certainly intended to make us casual Bible-readers feel bad for not knowing more about these additional sources.  If the Christians at the time of these non-canonical writings knew even then that their authorship was the result of pseudonyms and forgeries and fiction, then surely we should not be made to feel guilty for disregarding them 1700 years later.  

I know these are fairly basic examples, but still I wonder why is it so difficult to find middle ground here?  For people of faith to acknowledge or at least consider realities and facts about the history of their own sacred texts and for scholars to more readily acknowledge that they do not (and cannot) have all the answers?  Why do faith and intellectualism seem at odds with each other so consistently, and how can we create spaces where we can make them compatible?  Is it so much to ask that we love God with all our hearts and minds?

Interpretive Dance

So I was reading My Utmost for His Highest, catching up on a few missed days, and one of Oswald Chambers' writings addressed Matthew 5:39 - the verse that says to turn the other cheek.  Chambers' message was one of exhibiting the Son of God in us, and is well taken.  But seeing that verse considered in a way that did not attempt to assess whether we are to take it literally or metaphorically was refreshing.

You see, it is common to hear Christians (and non-Christians) debating this verse at length - some say it means we should be always be pacifists and never support war, while others argue this is Jesus exaggerating, just kind of joking around, and his point is really more one of our willingness to be pacifists than that we should actually practice the words spoken.  But the rhetorical devices of this specific verse aren't what I want to talk about.

I get confused sometimes by the way we endlessly interpret or resist the interpretation of certain passages and verses, applying hermeneutics here and there to get a message that applies to modern culture, while insisting that some words in the Bible must be taken literally, and to read them any other way is an affront to God.  Some progressive or liberal Bible-readers who might insist that Matthew 5:39 is literal, and cause for us to protest modern warfare might also insist that Romans 1:26-27 or 1 Timothy 2 cannot be taken literally because they show outdated cultural thinking, the evidence of extreme patriarchy - after all, it was nothing but power hungry men who actually wrote these words down - so given the massive strides we've made culturally to establish equality in the eyes of God, women and gay people should be permitted places of authority in churches.

Literal here, hermeneutics there.

Or on the other hand, let's say a more conservative, traditional Bible-reader might see that Romans 1 and 1 Timothy 2 are plain and simple examples of God giving us direct instructions on how our communities should operate.  But when Jesus tells someone he must go sell all of his belongings and that it is easier to fit a camel through a needle than for rich people to enter the Kingdom of Heaven...well, that conservative, traditional Bible-reader can also see how obvious it is that Jesus is just making a joke!  Of course, it's some sort of cultural joke that we don't really understand anymore, but clearly we don't have to sell all of our belongings because isn't that such a funny image Jesus drew?  A camel squeezing through a needle, hahaha!  He was just messing with our heads a bit, making a lesson about how we all have to make sacrifices to follow Him.

So again, literal here, hermeneutics there.

At what point does the inconsistency of our approaches to Scriptural interpretation become hypocrisy?  I'm not making accusations here - I'm sincerely asking.  How do we avoid crossing that line and making ourselves look like Biblically illiterate individualists making the Bible say only what we want it to?  I suggest we start by acknowledging that inconsistency.  I'm sure some would read this and dismiss it, fully confident that when they read the Bible, they always approach it faithfully and prayerfully and that guides them to the right answers.  But when it comes to evangelism, it's not hard for attentive seekers and questioners to poke holes through your arguments if you're not even on the same page as yourself.  So let's take a minute, figure out how we want to read the Bible, and try to stick with it.