This rambling meditation started out as a comment to a diary and it isn’t anywhere near where I want it to be, so I’m offering it up hoping that perhaps some clarification can be discovered somewhere.
People of The Book
People of The Book is a term used by Muslims to favorably describe their fellow Middle Eastern religionists, Jews and Christians. The term refers to the fact that the heroes of the Old Testament are common to all traditions, as well as to their shared monotheism. This descriptive phrase seemed a good beginning for this meditation on a religious fundamentalism that is sometimes referred to as a “clash of civilizations” but which is, in fact, also a shared tradition among all three Middle Eastern religions. What we in America call Right Wing Christian Fundamentalism is echoed by similar conservative fundamentalisms in Judaism and Islam. These fundamentalisms are the primary cause of the catastrophic situation in Iraq, the broader Middle East and the world at large.
The primary foundation for all three fundamentalisms is the idolatry of the Book which is fostered by a belief that these writings not simply represent but actually are the literal words of God (of course as these words are interpreted by the various leaders of the sect). Rather than read sacred writings in order to attune oneself to the divine, a literalistic fundamentalist (whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew) reads contemporary behavior prescriptions into historically and culturally dependent words. Secondarily, all three fundamentalisms are a reaction to and rejection of The Enlightenment. The very core of these three fundamentalisms is part an attempt to “literalize” an entire religious tradition, and part is a reaction to the very existence of our modern world.
Christians who slavishly treat what they call the “Old” Testament as a set of behavior prescriptions for the modern world are in direct contradiction to the self-described mission of Jesus who came to transcend and affirm the Law. The best way to illuminate this is to compare the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mark with the Gospel of John. (By the way, if anyone is interested in reading a book about the last days of Jesus that isn’t the schlock of Gibson’s movie, read The Last Week, a book about the last week of Jesus based upon a reading of Mark’s gospel. It’s an excellent book, and you’ll notice much of what follows in this paragraph comes from that book). Mark’s Jesus never claims to be God. He asks his followers what they think. And then he asks them to follow him. What does he mean by “follow?” He certainly doesn’t mean to worship, which is what John in his Gospel written a generation later interprets Jesus to mean. When Jesus says to follow, he means to simply act the way he does. Give up wealth and possessions, serve the destitute and unclean, the refuse of society, and demand that the empire and its collaborators serve justice and righteousness. For a fuller take on this see http://rescuejesus.blogspot.com/2006/04/following-jesus-not-worshiping-jesus.html
By the time of the gospel of John Jesus is a god to be worshipped not someone to be followed. If you think about it, it’s more convenient to worship Jesus than to actually follow in his iconoclastic footsteps.
Jesus supported how he acted by interpreting the Tanakh, his sacred writings of the Law and the Prophets, not as an exact blueprint of precise behavioral prescriptions but as a guide to help him find God, whom he called the Father. For Jesus, and for anyone who wants to live spiritually rather than religiously, the way to God can only be achieved by each one of us individually. How we relate to God is simply how we relate to God. We can’t do it by copying someone else’s “way.” For Jesus and other mystics the way to God is direct and experiential, not something mediated. And the way to God for the rest of us who are not Jesus or Paul or Mohammed or Moses is to re-enact the original mystical experience of God. Through reading we must get to the experience of God at the core while at the same time avoiding the easy way out of making the story of that original experience into a fetish or an idol. These writings are only a door to God, not any kind of expression made by God.
For unquestioning “true believers”, the Koran, Tanakh, and the Bible are the literal story of God’s plan for and interaction with humanity. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism believe that the universe is a creature of time as well as space: that God created it with a purpose and that that purpose fulfills itself in a process that began with creation and will end in some future time.
The notion that the universe will end is a speculation based upon human experience of evil. If God created the universe and it is good, then why is there evil in the world? When that evil gets so pronounced, the speculation goes, then God will come back to earth and kill the evildoers for us (we all presume that we’re the good ones) and then everything will be just fine John the Baptist is the most illuminating figure of this kind of speculation on the end with his apocalyptic ranting about wheat, chaff and the threshing floor and fire. For the Baptist the world of Roman hegemony and Judean upper class collaboration was too evil to continue to exist, and he couldn’t wait until God did it in. A lot of right wing religious zealots in America agree with him, although, unlike John the Baptist, they are actually equivalent to the collaborationists.
In the greatest irony of history, the human being Jesus who was transformed into part of a triune deity that sent itself down to earth to save mankind, actually demonstrated with his speech and with his life that God is never coming to eradicate evil for us but rather that God demands that we refuse to submit to it and eradicate it ourselves.
The literalism that saps spiritual truth out of these religious books is best demonstrated by looking at the central story of Judaism: the founding of God’s Chosen People by the exodus from bondage in Egypt and the trek through the wilderness to The Promised Land. To do so, however, requires that we understand a little bit about the religious world of the Ancient Middle East.
Scholars have called the societies of the Ancient Near East that populated the geography now known as Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Iran and Lebanon “cosmological empires.” Babylon, Persia, Egypt of the Pharaohs, all identified themselves as earthly analogs of a cosmic society of divine beings. The gods regulated all aspects of human production and reproduction. Social order was an analog of the society of the gods. In the same manner as humans existed for the pleasure of the gods, so certain segments of society existed for the pleasure of other segments. In a cosmological empire, Mel Brooks had it right; “it’s good to be the king.” The purpose of the king or emperor was to insure that the gods were placated so that crops grew, human and animals reproduced, and water flowed. Eric Voegelin commented that the rise and fall of these cosmological societies had as much meaning as a tree falling in the forest. Each society had its own version of a rite of renewal which is echoed in modern, spiritually denatured New Year’s celebrations.
Some thirty centuries ago a desert dweller in the Middle East, maybe it was Moses talking to a burning bush, made a discovery. God was in fact a god of justice and righteousness, not a god of reproduction human, vegetable or animal. What would such a discovery mean? First of all, it would divide that persons “history” into a before and after. And the before would now be interpreted as the preparation for the after. Second, it meant that their “exodus” from Egypt and its cosmological religion was a spiritual movement from bondage to freedom under Yahweh. Anyone familiar with the story of the exodus thinks of the DeMille version starring Charlton Heston as Moses leading a huge number of Israelite slaves out of Egypt. Such a mass migration is not mentioned anywhere in the historical records of the Egyptians. The actual exodus was likely to have been only a few families who later became the “ancestors” of those who came to occupy Canaan along with its indigenous population. But that exodus became symbolic of the discovery of the new spiritual truth that God is Yahweh, a god of righteousness and justice. But even right at the beginning of this new discovery was an interpretation that defined this as an actual God-inspired and God-directed invasion.
This ambivalence is at the heart of Judaism. Ultra-orthodox Jews believe that the literal exodus and the literal choosing of them by God give them the right to occupy The Promised Land. They don’t see the exodus as the spiritual founding of a people but as a concrete invasion of property. For modern fundamentalists the question is, if God meant for them to occupy all of Judea and Samaria, how can they possibly compromise with Palestinians and give that “promised land” up?
At its experiential core, literalism is the attempt to “save” the spiritual truth that lies at the heart of every religion. Experiences of god are universal to humans. They are intimate, personal, overpowering, and life changing. They are the infusion of God into the world. The crusty old Greeks identified the human soul as the locus of that divine infusion. Religions are attempts to save the truth of that infusion by worshipping the event or person equated with that infusion of the divine into human reality. Invariably these attempts to save experience through literalizing the expression of that experience fail and thus destroy the truth they are attempting to save. The example of how Christianity made Jesus a God to be worshipped rather than as a way to find God will show how this happens.
For Christians, unlike Jews or Muslims who see God’s pivotal revelation in books, the human being Jesus is what Marcus Borg has called “the decisive revelation of God.” In other words, Jesus reveals as much of god as can be shown in a human life or what a life filled with god would look like. Mark’s gospel captures this most closely by his symbol of `the way” and Jesus’ constant invitation to his disciples to follow the way and their almost universal failure to stay on the path. It’s easier to worship Jesus than to live a life equivalent to one the he lived. John’s gospel is the first derailment into the convenience of worship rather than the struggle to follow the way. It is much easier for us to worship the post Easter Jesus as salvation than to follow the pre Easter Jesus on the path of faithfulness to God’s justice and righteousness on this earth that requires us to stand with the social outcasts, poor, and homeless against the “haves” of society who collaborate with imperial domination and against Rome.
When the divine intrudes into our mundane world through the soul of a concrete individual human being that person’s life is transformed. That person lives life differently after this infusion of the divine. Paul’s vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus is one of the most recognizable examples of this process. The spiritual path that those mystics that have revolutionized human history take is to involve others in the world as constituted by their vision. This can’t be done directly because God relates to all of us individually. Jesus is superior to Paul because Jesus attempted to draw others into the world of his vision through parables which while not factually true are spiritually true and enable the listener to find his own path to God while Paul made statements about this new reality that listeners could only accept or reject. That is the salient difference between the spiritual path of Jesus and the religious path that began with Paul and derailed into the edifice that is now Christianity. It’s the difference between the gospels of Mark and Thomas which are about following a path and beginning a search and the gospel of John which is about worshipping.
