A prophetic voice decries Christmas consumption

(cross-posted on [A]mazed and [Be]mused)

Yesterday was one of the biggest shopping extravaganzas of the year. Americans celebrate Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and most of them take the Friday off work, too. En masse, they head to the shopping malls to begin buying, getting, consuming:  spending themselves into massive debt to commemorate the birth of the baby Jesus.



Rev. Billy doesn't like it. Not one little bit!

We're trying to get people to back away from the Walmart; back away from the Target; back away from the Home Depot! … Backing away from the product, slowing down your consumption is a spiritual act. … Stop shopping, children! Amen!

Rev. Billy is a persona created by performance artist and activist Bill Talen. He is featured in a movie, What Would Jesus Buy?, which is produced by Morgan Spurlock (who scored big with Super Size Me).

What Would Jesus Buy? is built around a 2005 documentary of Rev. Billy's activist hi-jinks. The original documentary was made by Rob VanAlkemade, the director of What Would Jesus Buy?. Footage from the original documentary alternates with interviews and commentaries from experts and everyday consumers.

According to SignOnSanDiego, the movie's message makes it a tough sell to potential distributors:

"Major distributors have backed away because Wal-Mart pushes half of their DVDs," VanAlkemade said after a sold-out screening of the movie Sunday at the Silverdocs documentary festival near Washington.

Starbucks — a frequent target of Rev. Billy which got a court order to keep him out of its California stores — pulled out as a sponsor of Silverdocs. The festival is presented by the American Film Institute and the Discovery Channel.

Festival spokeswoman Jody Arlington said Starbucks expressed discomfort with the movie and raised security issues, but it let Silverdocs keep the sponsorship money even as it withdrew its logo. Starbucks Mid-Atlantic manager Carter Bentzel denied the decision was linked to the movie.

This is a good illustration of the potential negative impact when enormous, multinational stores like Walmart control the lion's share of a particular market. So much for supply and demand as the sole regulatory principle of a free market! If Walmart doesn't like your movie, they can pretty much turn the lights out on you.

Rev. Billy comments, "The multinational corporations have got as much control over us as the Roman Catholic Church in the 1300s." Then again, there's always the democratic power of the World Wide Web:

VanAlkemade pledged that the movie will find its way to audiences despite the marketing challenges. … "Maybe someone shot this screening today and we'll see it on YouTube tonight. It's worldwide distribution. It's instantaneous."

How will Christians respond to the movie? I haven't seen it; but as I watched the Youtube clip, I alternated between laughter, cringing, and shouts of "Hallelujah! God bless Rev. Billy!" Christianity Today offers a generally positive take on the movie:

Aside from a few more serious, melancholy scenes, WWJB is more or less a comedy. It's hard not to laugh at the confused faces of holiday shoppers as a robed choir marches through Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria's Secret stores, singing about the impending shopocalypse as hovering security guards call for reinforcements. It's classic agit-prop theater — using humor and stagy gimmicks to shake things up, entertain, and provoke. It's a creative brand of protest, certainly, and according to the choir director (and Rev. Billy's wife) Savitri D, it's a protest grounded in Christian tradition: "Jesus was preaching within a tradition of theater as activism."

… Some critics have noted that the film's playfully sacrilege use of Christian forms and traditions may alienate some audiences. Rev. Billy's character is clearly modeled after a sweaty, breathy, over-the-top southern televangelist (Billy name drops Jimmy Swaggart) who prances around in polyester suits and occasionally "speaks in tongues" or is "slain by the Spirit." Catholics might also take offense at some of Rev. Billy's antics, whether he's in a makeshift confession booth on a city sidewalk (taking "confessions of shopping sins") or "baptizing" a baby outside of a Staples.

Yes, it's condescending. Yes, it cheapens Christianity. But the whole argument of the film is that our commodity culture has already cheapened Christianity.

Aint that the truth! Amen! Amen!

But would it be appropriate if I bought copies of the DVD for everyone I know, as Christmas presents?

Holiness, justice, and same sex marriage

This is a follow-up to the previous post, where I quoted Walter Brueggemann:

Sinai interpretation goes in two directions: holiness and justice.

The prophetic books:

Later in his survey of the Old Testament, Brueggemann points out that this dual emphasis carries over into the prophetic books. For example, Isaiah elevates justice above piety:

"What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?"
says the Lord;
"I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well-fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats. …
Your new moons and your appointed feasts
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them. …
Your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow's cause." (Isaiah 1:11-17¹)

The social justice orientation of the prophets is familiar to us. But Brueggemann points out that the prophet Ezekiel fits into the other category:  he is a "holiness guy".

Ezekiel 8 describes various abominations by which the Temple is desecrated. In reaction, the L_ORD's glory leaves the temple by stages:

Successive steps are marked in His departure; so slowly and reluctantly does the merciful God leave His house. First He leaves the sanctuary (Ezekiel 9:3); He elevates His throne above the threshold of the house (Ezekiel 10:1); leaving the cherubim He sits on the throne (Ezekiel 10:4); He and the cherubim, after standing for a time at the door of the east gate (where was the exit to the lower court of the people), leave the house altogether (Ezekiel 10:18,19), not to return till Ezekiel 43:2.
(Jamieson Fausset Brown commentary)

Brueggemann comments,

In Ezekiel, it's not Israel that goes into exile, it's God, because God can't stay there.

— i.e., in a polluted Temple.

Thus, on the one hand, there is Isaiah's emphasis on social justice; while on the other hand, there is Ezekiel's emphasis on holiness. This is the same duality Brueggemann pointed out in the previous post, with reference to Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

The Gospels:

The same duality then carries over into the New Testament texts:  in particular, the Gospels. Jesus was primarily concerned about justice whereas the Pharisees were primarily concerned about holiness:

And as [Jesus] reclined at table in [Levi's] house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?" And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners." (Mark 2:15-17)

Here we see that Jesus was inclusive (tax collectors and sinners were welcome to join his community) whereas the Pharisees were exclusive:  they maintained a strict separation from tax collectors and sinners in order to avoid contracting uncleanness.

I maintain that the Pharisees are portrayed in a very unsympathetic light in the Gospels. Christians should not assume that we are given a full, unbiased picture; rather, we are shown the worst side of Pharisaic religion.²

Consider this:  the Pharisees' emphasis on separation and purity has a rich pedigree in the Old Testament and the intertestamental texts. For example:

But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food, or with the wine that he drank. …

[Daniel said to the steward] "Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king's food be observed by you, and deal with your servants according to what you see." So he listened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food. So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables. (Daniel 1:8-16)

There are a series of texts like this one in the Old Testament and the intertestamental literature:  i.e., texts in which people of faith refuse to eat certain foods, or otherwise distinguish themselves from the surrounding pagan community.

Thus the Pharisees were not the "bad guys" they are often characterized as from Christian pulpits. They were trying to be faithful to Israel's holiness tradition, as Orthodox Jews are to this day.

Indeed, the Pharisees tried to uphold priestly standards of purity in their everyday lives per Exodus 19:6, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests."

Jesus took the other path:  the path of justice and inclusiveness. He reached out not only to tax collectors and sinners but to lepers, the demon-possessed, Gentiles, Samaritans, women, and (not least!) the poor.

All such individuals were spurned by the Pharisees. For example, women were assumed to be in a state of continual menstrual impurity. Thus Mark 5:25-34 and Luke 7:36-50 are remarkable texts. On both occasions, Jesus allowed a woman to touch him; in Mark 5, it is explicitly a woman with a flow of blood.

Divorce and homosexuality:

Some "liberal" Christians support homosexual rights on the basis of this social justice tradition in the Gospels. This is an issue that cannot finally be resolved, in my opinion. (Though I personally support same sex marriage and other rights for gays and lesbians.)

On the one hand, we have explicit statements condemning homosexual acts — not from Jesus, but from Paul. Thus it is surely a biblical position to argue, from a holiness standpoint, that homosexual acts are not an acceptable practice.

On the other hand, there is Jesus' radical commitment to social justice and inclusiveness. But let's take a step back, to consider the subject of sexual purity more broadly.

Jesus was at his most conservative on the subject of divorce. Scholars believe that Mark 10 preserves the original form of Jesus' saying on divorce. That is, Jesus did not make any exceptions:  divorce was not permitted even in cases of adultery (contra Matthew's version of the same saying).

Arguably, however, Jesus was not concerned about sexual purity per se. When he prohibited divorce, he may have been responding to the vulnerability of women in that society:  women were economically dependent on their husbands. Thus easy access to divorce ("Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" — Mt. 19:3) was terribly harmful to the interests of women.

Jesus never addressed the subject of homosexuality. The subject presumably wasn't being debated among Jews in that era.

But what would Jesus say if he was facing this issue in contemporary society? One cannot assume that Jesus would have sided with the "holiness" impulse instead of supporting justice, mercy, and inclusiveness. That, in effect, is the stand taken by "liberal" Christians like me, who support rights for homosexuals.

Conclusion:

We might summarize the data like this:

Holiness, separation	Justice, inclusiveness
Leviticus	Deuteronomy
Ezekiel	Isaiah
Pharisees	Jesus
some Pauline texts	other Pauline texts

As you can see, Paul is the wild card here. But I won't attempt to analyze the Pauline texts in this post.

Yes, the table represents a simplification of the data. As I indicated in the previous post, Deuteronomy shows some interest in holiness and Leviticus shows some interest in justice. But in terms of emphasis, the table is accurate.

I know evangelical readers insist that there is no necessary conflict between the holiness and justice traditions. But the split between Judaism and Christianity illustrates the powerful centrifugal forces at work here; so does the more recent divide between evangelical Christianity and "liberal" Christianity.

In the previous post, I maintained that the Church must learn to live with this inescapable tension instead of trying to enforce uniformity. Jamie responded:

How, then, would you propose we deal with the issue of homosexual marriage? Surely you can’t support (respect, tolerate) those who oppose these marriages; that would go against your view that such people are propagating an injustice. …

With gay marriage, there can only be one "right" way. It cannot simultaneously, in the same circumstances, be right both to forbid gay marriage and to embrace it. Nor could God simultaneously both approve of and forbid the practice.

Jamie is right when she asserts that same sex marriage is either right or wrong — it can't be both. However, she is wrong to assume that I cannot respect and tolerate the position of Christians like her, who disagree with my conclusions on the issue.

In my view, we cannot finally be certain of the right answer to many of the vexed questions that roil the Church. To quote Brueggemann once again:

[The Bible] invites us to do an interpretation for now, knowing that we’re going to have to go back to Sinai and do it over again and again and again.

Indeed, I think that figuring out obedience is like having a teenager in the house. Having a teenager means, nothing stays settled. You’ve got to do it all over again.

Sometimes we think a certain issue is settled; but then someone goes back to the scriptures and mounts an argument that we hadn't considered before.

Similarly, a change of social context forces us to reconsider issues that we thought were settled. The exile forced Israel to reconceptualize its theology. Likewise, modernity forces the Church to revisit first principles with a fresh perspective.

Every conclusion we reach is provisional. We must therefore respect and tolerate the convictions of those who think differently than us.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

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¹Unless otherwise indicated, scripture is quoted from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.

²After the death of Jesus, the Pharisees became the primary opponents of Christianity. Some of the conflicts of a later era appear to have been inserted into the Gospels anachronistically. For example, John 9:22 — "the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue." Scholars insist that excommunication from the synagogues was not introduced until several decades after the death of Jesus. The point is, these later conflicts colour the presentation of the Pharisees in the Gospels.

The problem with the Ten Commandments

A profound insight into scripture, courtesy of Walter Brueggemann:

What I want you to notice about the Ten Commandments is that it's not very clear what they might mean. If you're a judge in Alabama you like to think you know exactly what they mean. But just think of, for example, the commandment, Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. What does that mean? Well you know Orthodox Jews think it means you can't turn a light on. Etc., etc., etc.

Or Thou shalt not kill. Well of course we all agree on that. Well except maybe capital punishment … maybe war … maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Which led very early to the awareness that the Ten Commandments have to be interpreted and therein lies all the problem. …

The Torah commandments invite interpretation that is disputatious and that ends in pluralism. They didn't all think the same.

Let me give you that specifically. If you read the book of Leviticus (a lot of you have read the book of Leviticus lately? Hello?).

The book of Leviticus has, as its theme in Leviticus 19:2, You shall be holy as I am holy. Holiness, purity, order — these are rough synonyms — serenity …. It's all about right worship. If you read the book of Leviticus it's all about how to have holy priests and holy sacrifices and holy offerings and holy shrines and holy bread and holy festivals and holy everything.

Uncontaminated. This yields a kind of a static notion of worship which arises from Mt. Sinai by people [of sincere faith].

Now if you read the book of Deuteronomy, it has a little bit of this, but not much. Deuteronomy is really about civic justice.

The particular text that I want to refer you to is Deuteronomy 24:17ff. It says that when you harvest the grapes of your vineyard, you're going to miss some — don't go back and pick them up. Leave them for the widow, the orphan, and the illegal immigrant. (A translation of "alien" — those people that didn't belong there.)

[The text says the same thing about harvesting olives and grain.]

Scholars say that this provision is the first social welfare program in the history of the world:  that society is obligated to make provision for people who do not have economic means.

Extraordinary! What an incredible moment of interpretation that is all derivative of the Ten Commandments. I suppose that all comes out of, Thou shalt not covet. If you covet, you're taking stuff when you go back that ought to belong to your neighbors.

Now what I want you to observe about this is the way the Pentateuch works. Sinai interpretation goes in two directions:  holiness and justice.

I have no idea where your congregation is about the gay and lesbian thing in the Church and I don't really want to get into that. Except to observe that Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 are the two texts about homosexuality in the Old Testament. In between, in Leviticus 19, it says (the verse that Jesus quotes), You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

In the current practice of the Church, the holiness tradition is what we have come to call "conservatism". Deuteronomy is into justice; that's sort of what we've come to call "liberalism".

I'm wanting you to see that the Sinai obedience and hope is open to huge interpretive possibility. So what do you hope for? Well I hope for a society that is pure — not all this goofiness.

What do you hope for? I hope for a society in which the poor get their share. …

Scripture is complex and plural and they didn't agree from day one. The extraordinary thing about the Old Testament is that the holiness people were not able to vote the justice people into silence, and the justice people were not able to vote the holiness people into silence. So some committee (some General Assembly) in ancient Israel said, We're going to put all of this in.

What that means is, our deepest obedience cannot be an absolute norm because it must make room for other serious covenant members who are practising a different obedience. …

This part of the Bible does not finally permit us to get it right. It invites us to do an interpretation for now, knowing that we're going to have to go back to Sinai and do it over again and again and again.

Indeed, I think that figuring out obedience is like having a teenager in the house. Having a teenager means, nothing stays settled. You've got to do it all over again. I'm sure that Moses thought he was leading a bunch of teenagers.

The quote is from Brueggeman's lectures on the Old Testament:  specifically, on Exodus (beginning at 12 minutes 30 seconds) and Leviticus (ending at 9 minutes 40 seconds). I have tidied up the language at various points because speech always has patterns that seem odd when reduced to text.

Note that both Leviticus and Deuteronomy include both holiness and justice elements. That's the point Brueggemann is making when he quotes Leviticus 19:18, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Sandwiched between two "holiness" texts (which would rid the community of homosexual practices) is this core "justice" text.

Brueggemann reveals his perspective on scripture when he comments, "Some General Assembly in ancient Israel said, We're going to put all of this in." In Brueggemann's view, the texts kept evolving long after the death of the original author. (This is a consensus opinion among scholars.¹) Brueggemann's point is, the text evolved in this dual direction:  each school of thought made sure its interpretation was represented in successive drafts of the text.

Finally, I should perhaps apologize for the title of this post, which refers to the "problem" with the Ten Commandments. It isn't really a problem except for those who can't cope with the resultant tension.

The tension is permanent and inescapable; God's people must learn to live there, uncomfortable though it may sometimes be. As Brueggemann says, our deepest obedience cannot finally be reduced to an absolute norm; it must make room for other sincere believers who are practising a different obedience.

(Cross-posted on Outside the Box)

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¹For example,scholars maintain that there are three "Isaiahs" represented in the Old Testament book as now stands. Similar arguments are made for certain New Testament passages:  e.g., some scholars (even some evangelical scholars) regard 1Co. 14:33b-36 as an interpolation.