Category: News

Apostasy!

On By ErrheartIn Dogma and Religion, News, PersonalLeave a comment

I’ve been thinking about the Christian concept of apostasy lately. Part of that has been because of the recent news about Joshua Harris, former Christian author and megachurch preacher, publicly leaving the faith. The other was because of my yearly visit to my parent’s church, which I make every July to celebrate my mother’s birthday. This was the first time I’d been there since I told my parents I was converting and, as has become usual, it was a bit of the elephant in the room everyone steadfastly refused to acknowledge. Appropriately, the subject in Sunday school was the one sin from which there is no repentance: apostasy.

So, a quick definition. Apostasy, for Christians, is the rejection of faith by a former believer. In the Bible, it’s frequently described as a kind of adultery (Jeremiah 2:1–3; Ezekiel 16), or as a “falling away” (Luke 8:13; 1 Timothy 4:1; Hebrews 3:12). Personally, I like the “falling away” image better, but for me it felt a little like the opposite was happening–losing my belief felt like everything else was falling away, like the structure I had built out of my faith had become unsteady and collapsed.

In Hebrews (6:4-6), it says that “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.” The sin of apostasy as one of insult and desecration is repeated in Hebrews (10:29): “How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot…and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?“

Not all Christian denominations accept that apostasy is irredeemable, but quite a number of them–including, apparently, my parent’s church–do. So imagine my discomfort when, just a few weeks after the painful conversation where I had to admit to them that I no longer believed in Jesus (and hadn’t for quite some time), I was sitting between my mom and dad listening to an earnest young pastor discuss John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Written in the late 1600’s, Pilgrim’s Progress is the story of a dream wherein the main character, Graceless (later renamed Christian) journeys from his hometown of sin and degradation to the beautiful “Celestial City.” It’s a lot to take in, with characters named things like “Mrs. Inconsiderate” and “Mr. Fearing,” and locations like the “Village of Morality” and “The Wicked Gate.”

For some reason, my mom expressed surprised that I had not previously read this page-turner. Anyway, the section they were discussing involved Christian going through seven rooms, each of which represented an aspect of faith. In one room, there was dust all around, stirred up by a man who was urgently sweeping. Only when someone else brought in water did the room get cleaned. I’m not going to go into this here, but you get the point: every room is a metaphor. Fantastic.

Okay, so the room that shined a light on the giant elephant of my Judaism was the one that contained a man in an iron cage. He was, he told Christian, a former believer that had been seduced by all the dirty dirty temptations of a fallen world. Having renounced his belief, he could never, ever get it back.

I’m going to be honest here: the whole idea of nonredeemable apostasy was completely new to me. I had hoped that my parents could find comfort regarding my conversion by praying that it was simply a phase on my way to returning to the Christian fold. Unfortunately, it looks like this isn’t an option for them–unless they choose to diverge from their church (unlikely), they’re going to have to accept that I’m just lost. I’ve already become an apostate, and there’s no going back for me.

From my point of view, it’s a little bit of a relief. This whole dogmatic concept gives me an answer to any attempts to argue with my conversion: sorry, damage is done, nothing I can do! Look, ma, it’s right there in Hebrews.

 

Storing Holiness

On By ErrheartIn Dogma and Religion, NewsLeave a comment

In Jewish tradition,the name of God is sacred and must be treated with reverence in all its forms, which is why strictly observant Jews avoid writing it down lest they then mistreat the item upon which it is written (this is also why you might see even the word god written as “G-d” in some spaces).

When items that contain the name of God have become too worn to be read, are torn, soiled, or otherwise made unusable, they are to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Obviously, it makes much more sense to bury these items together rather than one at a time, so the items are typically stored (according to rabbinic sources “with reverence”) in a special storeroom called a geniza.

The most famous geniza is the massive, two-story silo located in the ancient Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, Egypt. Founded sometime prior to 882 CE, the good people of congregation Ben Ezra apparently tended to let things go. So much so, that they managed to put off cleaning out the geniza for a jaw-dropping 850 years.

Despite having documents that pre-dated the synagogue itself by at least 150 years, including some of the only extant original writing by medieval Torah scholar Maimonides, the geniza remained more or less ignored until the 1800’s. Then came a series of scholars, all of whom had a hand in uncovering the magnificence of the storeroom’s trove.

First among them was Jacob Saphir, a wandering Romanian Jew based in Jerusalem. He was commissioned to go on a fund-raising mission for his community, which brought him (among a host of other countries) to Egypt, where he was the first researcher to realize the significance of the Cairo geniza.

Next were the remarkable Smith sisters, Agnes and Margaret, who between them knew a dozen languages. They recognized that the geniza probably contained untold wonders, but as their focus was elsewhere, they brought the room to the attention of their rabbinic friend, Solomon Schechter. In 1896, Schechter made two trips to the geniza, bringing back more than 100,000 pages of rare manuscripts, including pages of the Book of Ben Sirach in Hebrew. That text had only been known to exist in Greek or Latin previous to this discovery, and another Hebrew version would not be discovered until the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed almost a century later.

Schechter’s work to sort and publicize the documents within the Cairo Geniza revolutionized Jewish scholarship, particularly medieval scholarship. His work was a literal, real-life treasure hunt of absolutely unimaginable proportions.

One modern, sadder version of a geniza making headlines happened in the United States in 2013, when thousands of trash bags mysteriously appeared on a roadside in New Jersey. Found to contain scrolls, prayer books, and other ritual objects, the bags were traced back to a local Jewish community, which had apparently hired a contractor to bury the sacred items. Legal and environmental restrictions stalled the process, and the bags–dubbed “God’s Garbage” by Tablet Magazine–remained in limbo.

The Age of Our Stories

On By ErrheartIn News, StoriesLeave a comment

Storytelling is like the city of London, or Terry Pratchett’s mythical city of Ankh-Mopork. The newest stories we have are built upon untold layers of other stories, piling one on top of each other into the distant past.

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It was this realization that first made me interested in learning about the Bible. I was taking a class on the Romantic poets, and started to realize that all of them leaned heavily on the weight and beauty lent by earlier works. A poem would be pretty by itself, but start to become profound when you learned that one line referred to this medieval epic, and the other made allusion to some ancient myth.

For many of those romantics, the Bible was the ultimate source of inspiration. The richness of ancient storytelling gave a power to their poetry that they could not conjure on their own, and so they would sprinkle in Biblical verses, references to Biblical tales, and wording borrowed directly from the book itself. I started to learn the Bible in order to try to catch all of these references on my own–both in the works of the romantics, but also in literature in general and modern culture at large.

It turns out, I needed to cast a wider net. In a study published in 2016, but newly making the rounds this week, researchers Sara Graca da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani found that the origins of fairy tales go back much farther than originally assumed. Using research methods originally pioneered for biological studies, the team discovered that familiar fairytales in various forms could be traced back to ancient roots, rather than originating in medieval times as previously thought. Many of these tales, it is reasonable to think, could have co-existed with the stories from the Bible.

Would ancient people have recognized the divide we place between fairy tales and sacred stories, or was it all co-mingled? Can we find fairy tale themes in Biblical stories?Why were the stories in the Bible canonized and others with just as much history were not? I’m hoping to delve into those questions in future posts, as I read more about this extremely interesting idea, but if you know some of the answers please get in touch!

 

 

 

 

On Biblical Literacy

On By ErrheartIn News, StoriesLeave a comment

I received an article this week in my inbox dealing with the American president’s tweets supporting teaching Biblical literacy.

My knee jerk reaction was “oh no, something I agree with him on.” I love the idea of teaching Biblical literacy to high-school aged students, and would have jumped on such a class if it was offered in my school. I think most people are lacking in Biblical literacy, especially those who grew up with a Biblically-based faith tradition. I group myself among them. The Bible is an ancient, cobbled together text with roots in a hundred fertile grounds, and it is incredibly difficult (although worthwhile!) to even attempt to understand it.

The problem with these classes, and this is something the linked article brings up, is that people promoting these kinds of classes are rarely teaching a genuine kind of literacy. Instead, the curriculum deals with a narrow presentation of stories that support one particular view of the text–a treatment that does a tremendous disservice both to competing faith traditions, and to the Bible itself.

The thing that lit a spark in me for this subject, the thing that made me want to learn everything I could about the Bible and its origins, as well as the millenia of exegesis and commentary surrounding it, was learning that there is not one but actually two creation stories in Genesis.

If you haven’t read it in a while or if, like me, you grew up with a tradition that only taught the one, let me refresh you. (if you know what I’m talking about, you’ll have to forgive me the recap. I genuinely get excited about this)

So Genesis 1 starts with God on his lonesome, above a formless void. He creates light, then the sky, then the land and the seas, then swarms of living creatures and plants, and so forth until finally, on the sixth day, “God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” It continues “So God created humankind in his image/in the image of God he created them;/ male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26 to 1:27, New Oxford Annotated Bible).

But then, record scratch, in Genesis chapter 2, there’s a whole new version of events. In this one, “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth…then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils.” So we have a different timeline, and a completely different manner of creation. Before, God spoke and it was so. In Genesis 2, God has to form man, and give him breath. We have a more physical picture of God here. Perhaps most importantly, as this is the detail that was stressed in my learning of the story, and the thing that continues to echo today, it is not until Genesis chapter 18 that woman is created. “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” (Notice the depiction of God questioning his own creation). God presents man with all of the beasts of creation (another difference from Genesis 1), before finally putting him to sleep and creating woman from one of the man’s ribs.

That’s the version I learned, the version that was used to teach me why women were subservient to men and why wives had to obey their husbands. Learning there was a second version, a completely different version, was exhilarating to me. This text that I thought I knew–that I thought, frankly, was pretty boring–came alive to me then. How interesting, how complex could my Sunday school discussions have been if this information had been included? How exciting would it be for interested students to learn the challenging and engaging truth behind a book that many of them see as stodgy and monochromatic?

That’s the way Biblical literacy should be taught, but the prospect is scary for people who think that the text will lose meaning if you begin to point out the inconsistencies. The truth is though, something doesn’t last for thousands of years just because nobody noticed its faults. It lasts because generation after generation discover the mystery and the wonder wrapped in and around those perceived mistakes–it lasts because people have engaged with it.