I'm finally doing blog entries in sans serif because all my graphic design friends insist it's easier to read on the screen. Here's one I wrote for British Literature I this past fall about Margery Kempe's autobiography and the centrality of guilt in Christian religious constructions.

The Centrality of Guilt in Margery Kempe

In pre-Reformation England, the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in matters of religion was virtually absolute. It was uncommon for anyone to circumvent the authority of the Church and rarer still for a woman to do so publicly. Yet that is just what Christian mystic Margery Kempe apparently did throughout her life, as documented in her autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe. While Kempe describes being accused repeatedly by Church authorities and taken into custody on suspicion of heresy, she managed to successfully defend herself against these accusations. One reason for this was that despite her sometimes theatrical outbursts, Kempe never opposed Church teachings on any major theological point. For this reason The Book of Margery Kempe supplies an understanding of a very orthodox medieval Catholicism, albeit filtered through often drastic forms of expression. A close reading of the first two chapters of Kempe's autobiography depicts in vivid detail what becomes a major theme in the work at large: the centrality of guilt in Kempe's faith and in the Christianity of her day.

The first chapter of The Book of Margery Kempe begins when Kempe—who refers to herself in the third person throughout—is “twenty years of age, somewhat more, [and] married to a worshipful burgess” (532). After illness during pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Kempe experiences a period of extreme instability. The episode, which a contemporary reader might interpret as an acute episode of postpartum depression magnified by poor health, is explained by Kempe in terms of religion, the dominant epistemological framework of her day. Her violent behavior and self-harm are, according to the text, the result of a spiritual assault.

Retracing the narrative to the direct cause of this attack reveals much about Kempe's understanding of herself and her faith. After giving birth, Kempe's health is very poor and she “[despairs] for her life, believing that she might not live” (ibid). She calls a confessor, fearing damnation for some sin about which she has been silent her whole life (the biography never reveals the nature of this sin). She demonstrates here a belief that her thoughts and actions are influenced by evil spirits: ”she was continually hindered by her enemy—the devil—always saying to her while she was in good health that she didn't need to confess but to do penance all by herself alone” (ibid). This passage is also notable for Kempe's designation of counter-orthodox religious ideas as fundamentally evil and even demonically inspired.

When the confessor comes to hear her sin, Kempe's guilt is realized in two conflicting fears, one of the Church's teachings the other in the Church itself. While she fears hell, Kempe is on the other hand equally terrified of her confessor's condemnation. It is her inability to resolve these two conflicting impulses that triggers her psychotic episode: “because of the dread she had of damnation on the one hand, and his sharp reproving of her on the other, this creature when out of her mind and was amazingly disturbed and tormented with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days” (ibid). This passage indicates Kempe's profound sense of religious guilt as a leading factor in her “disturbed and tormented” state. But she experiences this crisis as a demonic one: “And in this time she saw, as she thought, devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire” (ibid).

It is unsurprising that Kempe, operating within this framework, finds relief in a vision of Christ. After months of torment in which she “desired all wickedness, just as the spirits tempted her to say and do . . . our merciful Lord Christ Jesus . . . appeared to his creature who had forsaken him” (532-533). In the wake of this Christophany, Kempe is fully and immediately relieved of demonic oppression. Suddenly, she is “as calm in her wits and reason as she ever was before,” and thereafter “[performs] all her duties wisely and soberly enough” (533).

This passage tells much about Kemp's understanding of herself in the context of her religious beliefs. She is subjected to external influence by both good and evil spiritual forces. The demons' coercion, in fact, is a much more violent influence than Christ's appearance. The spirits assail Kempe in force, “sometimes pawing at her, sometimes threatening her, sometimes pulling her and hauling her about both night and day” (532), whereas Christ appears, speaks a single sentence, and then departs. Despite this, and despite the fact that Kempe seems powerless to resist the demons prior to Christ's appearance, she holds herself responsible for her evil behavior and takes no credit for her recovery.

This attribution of all evil to the self and all good to an external entity is a recurring theme in The Book of Margery Kempe, and it inevitably colors Kempe's understanding of herself and the world around her. That she refers to herself throughout the text as “the creature” is indicative of her disdainful self-image, which becomes increasingly visible in the book's second chapter. Though Kempe is no under demonic assault here, her descriptions of her own actions and motives are unremittingly negative. She dresses vainly, hoping to attract attention to herself, and refuses her husband's attempts to chasten her: “when her husband used to try and speak to her, to urge her to leave her proud ways, she answered sharply and shortly, and said that she was come of worthy kindred—he should never have married her” (534).

Kempe describes her motives in this passage as “pure covetousness . . . pride and vanity” (ibid). These lead her to begin a brewing venture with the motive of maintaining her pride and esteem. Kempe's description of the success and failure of her brewery is ambiguous; the text states that she “was one of the greatest brewers in the town of N. for three or four years until she lost a great deal of money, for she had never had any experience in that business” (ibid).

When her business does begin to fail, another element of Kempe's guilt-driven worldview becomes visible: the belief that her misfortunes are the result of divine judgment. “For when the ale had as fine a head of froth on it as anyone might see, suddenly the froth would go flat, and all the ale was lost . . . Then this creature thought how God had punished her” (ibid). After similar failures in a milling enterprise and her resulting inability to retain servants, Kempe again attributes her hardships to God's wrath: “And then this creature, seeing all these adversities coming on every side, thought they were the scourges of the Lord that would chastise her for her sin” (535).

There is no room in this text for Kempe to celebrate her early success in brewing or even her later decision to do what she believes is right in abandoning it. Again, every action for which Kempe allows herself to take credit is evil, and every good thing she does is attributed to God rather than to her own choice. And these elements of the first two chapters persist throughout the text: Kempe protests sex with her husband, saying “it would be a good thing if by mutual consent they punished and chastised themselves by abstaining from the lust of their bodies” (535). She engages in fasting and various acts of penance throughout the narrative. Her only happiness is in her ecstatic, subtly erotic experience of Christ: “for the joy that she had and the sweetness that she felt in the conversation with our Lord, she was on the point of falling” (544). She is allowed no other satisfaction, be it the simple pleasure of human experience or fulfillment in her accomplishments. Filtered through Kempe's understanding, Christianity takes on an antipathetic, even nihilistic aspect, becoming a worldview that allows no room for good in the individual.

Robert Rusconi writes in Medieval Christianity that “in its effort to establish a clerical hegemony through the systematic application of the sacrament of penance, it may well be that the church achieved greater success in fostering a sense of guilt (especially in women) than in providing a means to deal effectively with that guilt” (Rusconi 225). The overwhelming and central presence of guilt in Margery Kempe's religious experience was not uncommon in late medieval England. The Book of Margery Kempe depicts a theology in which Christ is responsible for all good, man is guilty of all evil, and pleasure is inherently sinful unless it comes from the experience of God. Guilt was a central element in the Christendom of Kempe's time. Though in the intervening centuries it has been tempered with other concepts, it remains a strong force in the faith.

Thoughts: Ben Witherington vs. Bart Ehrman

I just finished reading Bart Ehrman's gripping Jesus, Interrupted, a study of biblical error and a chronicle of the formation of the Bible and the Christian faith. Taken on its own, the book is a profoundly damning review of claims to biblical error; however, in only 300 pages, Ehrman has to condense a whole lot of scholarship, history, and opinion to cover his themes. It serves as a wonderful introduction to the subject of the Bible's composition, but a lot of detail is sacrificed in this succinct account. While the book is pretty convincing in its own right, this lacking detail has sent me looking for more detailed work both supporting and opposing Ehrman's theses.

Most of the direct, opposing responses I've found to the book are, to be frank, idiotic: they're clearly written by inerrantists whose key point of disagreement is not issue with Ehrman's scholarship but offense at his ideas. One evangelical respondent who makes a respectable, scholarly attempt to address Ehrman's book is Ben Witherington, who published six lengthy blog posts analyzing Jesus, Interrupted's claims. Witherington does point out some important mistakes and overreaching on Ehrman's part (as Ehrman himself states, no book is inerrant) but unfortunately glosses over some of the book's significant points.

The Christian orthodoxy has survived by cleverly altering its doctrine to counter new criticism, and Witherington's doctrine of inerrancy is a slippery one. He acknowledges disagreements in the texts and scribal errors in their transmission, but for Witherington, these are not problematic in asserting the Bible's inerrancy. He argues that each work must be understood in its original context and in the way that its genre would have been interpreted by readers of the day. This is a fair argument to an extent, but when Witherington describes the gospels as "portraits, rather than photographs," he takes his reasoning a step too far.

A portrait can be, in a good many cases, a sufficient portrayal of how someone looks; it may even capture an essence of character that few photographs do. However, no artist or art critic would call any portrait "inerrant" or perfect in its accuracy; a portrait is fundamentally a product of the painter's subjective opinion of its subject's appearance. It'ss one thing to say that the gospels are honest, sufficiently reliable accounts of Jesus' character and ministry, and even that these are in fact the accounts God intended us to have. It is another thing entirely to say that they are the inerrant Word of God (which I find to be a disingenuous phrase, as I'll discuss in a later post.)

The difference is blatant in Witherington's analysis of the genealogies in Matthew and Luke. Witherington writes that Matthew "wants to suggest Jesus is the seventh son of a seventh son of David, namely the perfect descendant of David. In other words, the form of the genealogy reflects not just historical but also theological interests." This is clearly the case, but Witherington's understanding of genre allows such lenient treatment of fact that this and Matthew's other drastic editorial decisions pose no threat to his doctrine.

To be fair, Witherington rightly differentiates himself from fundamentalist scholars who hold an ultra-literal view of inerrancy, and he challenges them on unavoidable differences between the biblical accounts (such as the centurion's words at Jesus' death.) but Witherington's looser interpretation of inerrancy doesn't answer these issues; it merely ducks them. It's a view that's much harder to controvert, but in it, the idea of inerrancy loses its meaning. A claim to unquestionable authority should be held to its own standard.

http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2009/04/bart-interrupted-detailed-analysis-of.html

Universalist Themes in Christ's Teachings

Here is a small sample of the some thoughts I've been developing for the past two years or so. I've been planning to write a treatise or book covering this and other subjects and have even begun doing so several times. But it's going to take a lot more time and study to write a book that adequately defends many of these positions, and in the meantime, I thought I'd put some of the basic ideas online for public discussion. After all, if there's any truth to these theories, it was true before I stumbled upon it.

I'm writing tonight about the concept of universalism in the the gospels. Not the "everyone gets saved" kind of universalism, because anyone who's ever read the gospels knows that isn't there, but rather a universalism which posits that people can attain salvation and access God by multiple--even infinite--paths.

A Christian's first reaction is likely that this sort of universalism isn't present in the gopsels either. Of Jesus' countless statements on salvation, a mere two verses form the bedrock of a complex theology on the subject. The first is John 3:16, the most famous verse of the Bible ("that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.") The second, found in John 14:6, is Jesus statement that "I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." In politics, these might be termed "bumper-sticker phrases": short, succinct statements that sound good but mask the deeper complexities of an issue. Beyond these, the Christian theology of salvation comes largely from letters by Paul and James.

This is a drastic oversight on the part of theologeons, as Jesus has plenty more to say on the subject. Contrary to the above statements, Jesus' lengthier teachings on salvation pertain not to acknowledging his divinity but to the cultivation of certain actions and values, values demonstrated by practitioners of many religious faiths: forgiveness, generosity, kindness, humility, pacifism, and the rejection of extreme wealth.

In terms of emphasis theme of forgiveness alone trumps acknowledging Jesus' divinity in his own teachings on salvation. Jesus says that those who forgive will be forgiven (Matthew 5:7) and that each person will be judged by the standard he or she uses to judge others (7:1). In the Lord's Prayer, he asks God to "forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors--" then he interrupts himself, in the middle of the prayer, to emphasize that "if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins" (Matt. 6:12-14.) Nowhere does he stipulate that this forgiveness is only open to those who acknowledge his divinity.

Jesus' longest and most emphatic teaching on heaven and hell (Matt. 25:31-46) describes him returning at the end of the age to “separate the people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (25:32). Here, Jesus states that those who find favor with God are those who have fed the hungry, welcomed strangers, clothed the poor, looked after the sick, and visited those in prison. The "goats" are those who ignored those in need. Mainstream Christian doctrine seems to mandate the presence of a third group: those who fed the hungry and clothed the poor but whose incorrect beliefs keep them out of heaven. This category is conspicuously absent from Jesus' account.

(The other traits I mentioned above, especially rejection of wealth, take up a fair amount of Jesus' focus as well, but I fear this "basic ideas" essay is becoming overlong.)

So how do we recognize these numerous and emphatic passages with the John verses where Jesus talks about being the Way and the necessity of belief? Assuming that these are all statements Jesus actually made (biblical errancy is the subject of a much longer, more studied, more boring essay) and postulating that Jesus' statements are valid to begin with (or this becomes an exercise in futility,) we have to seek an interpretation that balances and fairly represents all the concepts at play.

Since mainstream Christianity has done this dissatisfactoraly, emphasizing a few specific quotations over four books' worth of teachings, I propose a method that calls into question our understanding of the word "believes." What does it mean to believe in someone, and what does it mean to believe in Jesus specifically? The traditional understanding is that belief in Jesus means belief in Jesus' divinity, sacrificial death, and resurrection. But Jesus was talking about salvation long before his death, and "I'm the incarnation of God" comprised only a very small portion of his message. So what would happen if we defined "belief" in Jesus as belief in the worldview he spent 95% of his ministry constructing?

Here's a hypothetical question. We have on one hand a person who has never heard of Karl Marx but who, through indirect exposure to Marx's teachings, has come to assume a philosophy that mirrors Marx's in every meaningful way. On the otherhand is a person who calls himself a Marxist and talks about Marx's writing frequently, but who espouses capitalism, rejects the materialist dialectic, embraces the hierarchy of the traditional family structure, and supports organized religion. Which of these could be more accurately be called a Marxist?

I'm sure you know where I'm going with the example. Here's the parallel: someone, maybe a deist or a Hindu or an agnostic or a UU, who forgives the wrongs done to her, embraces the maxim of "living simply so others may simply live," and invests her life in humanitarian causes that improve the quality of life for disadvantaged people. This person lives the major teachings of Jesus about as well as any can, but--perhaps due to the gross representation of his message by so many Christians--never feels inclined to consider the Christian faith. Contrast this woman with one of those very misrepresentations--a clergyman who uses his station to molest children; a televangelist who exploits gullible people for money; a politician who wields the Bible to defend war, racism, and the concentration of wealth.

Who can more accurately be called a follower of Jesus? I find that it's often not the person bandying his name. And Jesus' own message, taken wholly, vindicates that.

It's funny and sad to me that as exclusive a religion as Christianity descended from one as accomodating as Judaism, which offers the Noahide laws, a specific set of instructions for how people outside the religion can find favor with God. The church understanding of salvation is among the many rigidities the faith has inherited, a product of being intertwined with the state for centuries. Our narrow understanding of Christianity as promising salvation only to those who have been exposed to and acknowledge a certain narrative is the same kind of crowd-control religion that we see in beliefs like the infallibility of the Pope. Those who believe in God need to use their God-given faculties, rather than the artifacts of Roman rule, to inform their opinions about him. God is in everything around us--after all, it's his creation.