World of Love Sess16 - The Bible in the Age of the Spirit

In both his first and second campaigns (in the Gospel of Mark), Jesus employs the tactics of what we would today call "civil disobedience." The very first public action of his disciples is to break the law (2:23ff.)! Jesus then debates the true intention of the law in the ensuing "trial" (3:3). The same pattern of legal violation and defense occurs again in 7:1ff. The climax to Jesus' practice of symbolic direct action, however, is the parade from the Mount of Olives and the ensuing temple action. ... Thus Mark legitimates not only "classic" civil disobedience -- in which the law is broken because it is unjust, as in the case of the Sabbath -- but militant direct action as well.

The powerful practice of exorcism/direct action must not be exploited by the disciples in order to build their own power base (9:38ff.). Indeed the power is linked to "faith" which means the ability not only to "name" the demons within and without, but to envision a new personhood and a new world free of the structures and patterns of domination... Mark stuck by his belief that true subversive politics was to be found in neither reform nor rebellion. -Ched Myers ¹

Of the older scriptural authority we had learned something in universities and seminaries, it proved alas, of little help in the world we must walk, the fires underfoot. ... Too abstract, too specialized, chary of the times and their questions, a game of artful dodgers and academic isolationists. The method worried the text, held it up like a dead specimen, turned it this way and that in one hand, in the other a dissecting tool. Words, words, words. ... Myers took chances, dared to be passionate or indignant or ironic or loving. He renewed the sap of the text, the zest, the risky start, the hope of finishing. His method makes the Gospel of Mark a veritable tract for the times. ... Iniquitous authority, lawless and spurious, must be cast from its illegitimate throne, justice must be enthroned. This is the work of Jesus. It proceeds in the community of Jesus. -Daniel Berrigan ²

To understand the Bible we have to try to put ourselves into the cultures of the times in order to see through the eyes and experience of the people to whom the writings were directed. There is the barrier of worldviews vastly different from our own.
There is also another, modern kind of barrier. This is the obstacle created by our being rich and powerful, of our unconscious tendency to read the scriptures through the garish lenses we have inherited as members of the world's ruling elite. These illusions distorting the reality of our own real world block our access to the scriptures as well.

The "principalities and powers" of our time, seeking to preserve their wealth, privilege and control, have brain-washed us much as the scribes, lawyers, Pharisees, Herodians and occupying Romans intertwined religion and state mechanisms of control to manipulate and pacify the hungry and helpless Galilean peasants in Jesus' day.

This control was not only ideological. It was institutionalized in rituals of cleansing and rules and regulations governing everyday life, in taxes and in law enforcement agencies.

To read the Bible in the cultural language in which it was written, we have to unlearn a great deal. We have to have our eyes opened, just as Jesus sought to open the eyes of the blind, so we can see his world as it really was, and our own as it is, without filters or blinders.

For us in the modern world, the ability to stand critically outside and to transcend the false pictures we carry within our heads begins with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
Marx demonstrated how we are blinded by the ideologies of the ruling classes, the rich and powerful, the principalities and powers to use the New Testament term. Actually, we should probably say it began with the prophet Amos. Read the book.
We are born into cultures dominated by built-in prejudices which serve the maintenance of unjust structures. These always protect the rich and powerful and make victims to some degree of the poor and weak. We drink in these power-protecting distortions along with mother's milk. Like colored contact lenses, they tint everything we see.

They are semantic filters through which we automatically hear and accept slanted interpretations of the world around us.

Freud, in turn, described how our seeing is distorted by inner needs and compulsions which cause us to live by crippling illusions.

These illusions and distortions prevent our making ourselves present in Mark's time. We can identify neither with the exploiters or exploited.

But there are new ways of reading the Bible which make it possible for us to see much more clearly what was going on then and its relevance to our own situation.
When we pull the scriptures free from the encrusted layers of distorting interpretations and ourselves free from ideologies it again takes on power to liberate us from external and internal oppression.

In this session we will examine one of the most striking and helpful of the current efforts to liberate the real good news of the Bible, Ched Myers' Binding the Strong Man, A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus. After that we will look further at the stages of development and the god-self to see how these mesh with Myers' methodology and conclusions. We will also examine the way they throw additional uniquely useful light on the scriptures.

I read the first third of Myers' book, in manuscript, while in prison. Looking up from the underside of our society, as I was, the Gospel of Mark was opened up with startling freshness and relevance. When the rosy-tinted glasses of our privileged status as ruling class people are shattered, we find it possible to look up from the underworld perspective of the biblical authors. The Gospel of Mark is now seen to expose the deep injustices and structural evils of our day just as Jesus' direct action and civil disobedience did in his.

A main point of contact between Ched Myers' work and the argument of this course is the belief we share that God works only through nonviolent, nonmanipulative love.
Ched Myers does not use nonviolent love as an outside principle which he brings to the Bible and then makes the scriptures fit the presuppositions. Quite the contrary. Myers shows in a marvelously clear way how such a reading reveals Mark’s reason for writing and what his message really was.

Similarly, I do not start from the principle of nonviolent love but rather find it dictated by the very nature of the god-self and stage 6-7 personality and society.

It is this kind of liberation theology which I see being naturally knit to the other elements of a wholistic faith; that is, the new mysticism, the new piety, the priority given to social justice, and the view of individual growth and social transformation by stages described earlier.

A warning: Watch out! This faith, lived consistently, precipitates us into just as radical a discipleship as Mark's Jesus pressed upon his followers.

The Socio-literary Method

Speaking of his methodology, Myers writes:

The reading strategy I propose skirts between the twin errors of contemporary biblical criticism. To port lies the Scylla of historical criticism's dismantling of narrative texts; to the starboard the Charybdis of the new literary criticism which divorces narrative signification from the historical world. ... I insist upon both the literary and the socio-historical integrity of the whole text. I call my approach "socio-literary" in order to distinguish it from three current schools of criticism, each of which I draw from in part but none of which I fully endorse: sociological exegesis, narratology, and materialist criticism... ³

Myers reads Mark as a unified work, one which from beginning to end was designed to tell the story of Jesus in a way which would speak decisively to the crises and temptations Mark's own brother and sister Christians in Galilee some thirty-five years after Jesus' death.

It is not the story of Jesus; no such story exists. It is a story with a purpose, on the basis of which Mark makes his selection of events and sayings from the life of Jesus, and determines the order in which he presents them and the interpretations he gives to them. It is precisely because the book has these urgent contemporary goals that it speaks also so powerfully to us.

This is true in part because we face the same enemies, in slightly different cultural garb, as Jesus did in his day and Mark's house churches in Galilee a generation later.
Or, too often, I fear -- to paraphrase cartoon philosopher Pogo -- when we meet the contemporary enemies of God and humanity we will find that they are also "us."

The next section summarizes some of the points Myers makes which are most relevant to this course. We must necessarily omit the vast amount of supporting data he includes.

Mark's Jesus

According to Myers, Mark apparently lived in Galilee and wrote to the Christian community in that area. He wrote around 69 CE. This was when the Jewish rebellion against Rome (66-70 CE) was rushing toward its disastrous conclusion but before the destruction of the Temple.

Myers' interpretations do not depend on this precise date and place, but as one reads the book with this in mind these parameters come to feel more and more correct.

The small Christian community in Galilee was caught between two millstones. On the one hand was the imperial power of Rome and its Hellenistic and Jewish supporters. On the other side, there were the Jewish rebels who were engaged in the desperate attempt to free Israel from Roman control by force.

The Christians were not supporters of either side. We can imagine how they found themselves persecuted by both the Romans trying to ferret out rebel sympathizers and the Jewish forces who were recruiting freedom fighters in the villages.

We can compare them, perhaps, to a peasant village in El Salvador or Nicaragua trying to survive as government forces sweep over them one week and the opposition soldiers the next.

Or we could remember the Quakers of Boston and New York who refused to support either the British or the colonists in the Revolutionary War. Minutes of one Meeting record the poignant tale of a Friend whose home, business and possessions were confiscated because he refused to pay the war tax.

These two examples help us put ourselves inside the Marcan house churches in Galilee struggling with the same principalities and powers which Jesus had confronted. Their lives and possessions were no doubt often on the line.

This embattled minority had good reason to ask themselves where this kingdom Jesus had promised was? And what was the good news he had promised? When would it materialize and their torment be ended? Such questions, pressed by current suffering, presented a crisis of critical seriousness to the young Christian movement. At issue were the very nature of God, the divine purpose, strategy, and especially for the Christians, the question of who Jesus had been and the way in which he was savior of the world.

If the forces of evil were on the defensive and being defeated, there was little evidence of it around them. If the tiny minority of Christians were not to support either side in this struggle and to remain outsiders what was their socio-political strategy?

Mark sets out to answer those questions the way he understood Jesus had answered them a generation earlier using Jesus' own words and the actions and events of his life.

The pietistic answer many of us learned at mother's knee said that heaven is the reward of faith and justifies all our waiting and suffering. The pietist tends to put Christians in alliance with the ideologies of the rich and powerful. This view has led to quietism in the face of great injustice.

On the other hand, some liberation theologians, who see liberation as primarily political and this-worldly, paint Jesus as a revolutionary who would sympathize today with those who seek the violent overthrow of oppressive governments. The political liberation theologies encourage Christians to support armed revolution involving us in the descending spiral of violence, hate and war breeding war.

Mark was quite clear, according to Myers, that Jesus hadn't favored either of these extremes. Jesus had an agenda which was more political than other-worldly, but it was not that of any of the groups around him. He directly and continuously confronted the religious and political powers which oppressed the poor of his day. His kingdom was not of this world, but in the sense that it is a kingdom of nonviolent love and not because it can be realized only beyond this earth and its people. His kingdom is in no way "of" this alienated, violent world.

Alternative Community

At the same time he was challenging the top leadership of all the power structures around him, Jesus was building with his disciples an alternative community or society, one based upon equality of all persons before God, the shattering of all artificial barriers between human beings, ethnic, racial, sexual, class. It was to be a society based on God's own inner nature of nonviolent, nonmanipulative love expressed through servanthood.

Confrontations with Illegitimate Power

The first time Jesus healed a leper, touching him and declaring him whole, he challenged the power and revenues the Temple system derived from purification rites and priestly prerogative.

The first time Jesus forgave sins, he took to himself a power and authority which directly challenged that of the High Priest and the whole lucrative Temple system.

When Jesus and his disciples threshed out grain on the Sabbath they dared to challenge scribal and Pharisaic domination of biblical interpretation. In speaking with authority Jesus undercut the main control this class of official experts exercised.

He also challenged the system of honor, by which a man's gender and his education or social status placed him above others and defined who he would or would not eat with. Jesus deliberately ate with outcasts.

Each of these acts of resistance attacked directly the Temple system's control of channels of grace. This threatened the system's ability to control its people and to draw from them tax revenues and fees for religious services. It was a system which perpetuated injustice, hunger and the denial of dignity to the ritually unclean, the sick, to women, the poor, the gentile outsider.

This reminds us of the medieval Roman Catholic Church with its control of the channels of grace and through them its leverage on the obedience of the whole populace. Both religious systems were able, when spiritual sanctions failed, to call in the the sword of the State.

The Last Are First

Jesus' direct challenge to the system appears in every chapter of Mark. When this becomes clear then all the seemingly insignificant little incidents take on dramatic detailed meaning. Note the following examples.

Myers points out that when Jesus is on his way to heal the daughter of the powerful synagogue official, Jairus, he breaks the journey to heal a woman. It is not just any woman; it is a woman at absolutely the bottom of the heap. She has four strikes against her. She is a widow, has no man to represent her, is poor and is ritually unclean because of her continual bleeding.

Jesus rejects the priority of Jairus' power and wealth by stopping to heal her. He touches her, denying her ritual uncleanness. He calls her daughter, bringing her into his intimate family.

Those last in power, wealth and prestige are being set in first place and the first are made last. This reversal of the values of society occurs in almost every chapter of the book.

This is followed by a pair of healings of gentiles in chapters 7 and 8. Jesus debates with the Syro-Phoenician woman, concedes her point and heals her daughter. Jesus accepts the aggressive approach of a woman. Here and in the healing of the deaf man of Decapolis Jesus symbolically brings all the rest of the people of the world into full membership in God's kingdom on a basis equal to that of the Jews.

Mark has a fine touch of irony in this latter story. Jesus uses ritually unclean spit as a medium in opening the ears of the deaf gentile.

Myers sums up:

These two pairs of healings demonstrate Mark's mastery in using narrative action to illustrate the ideology of inclusion, which is the cornerstone to the new social order being constructed by Jesus. The social dynamics of status and honor, fundamental in the life of antiquity, have been turned upside down to make way for the outcast Jew and the alien gentile. ⁴

These powers oppressed and starved the people. They did it in the name of God. Abusing people in the name of religion is true blasphemy. Jesus acted in accord with his convictions as to the inner nature of God and God's purposes and strategy. He refused to withdraw from political struggle, and he refused to fight using the world's methods of violence, deception and manipulation. He confronted the religio-political powers relentlessly, day after day, until he was silenced on the cross -- for a time.

Through Jesus' example and the servant discipleship he demanded of his followers, he began the construction of an alternative to the principalities and powers, a new community which would live by the nonviolent love of God within the world.

Modern Relevance of Mark

Over the years after Constantine, as the churches became more and more enmeshed in power politics and war, the scriptures were spiritualized, the political relevance washed out, and salvation became a matter of individuals getting to heaven.

Jesus' agenda is also the church's agenda, Mark was saying. The church's job is to live out God's nonviolent, all-inclusive love and the justice for all implied by it.
This sets the churches in every age against the principalities and powers who are always to some degree denying God's beloved poor the dignity belonging to their humanity.

It is the great service of liberation theology interpretations of the Bible, and especially Myers, that they enable us to again stand in the shoes of the Galilean peasant as Jesus passes through the throng confronting and defying the oppressors.

These few examples of Myers' methodology and interpretation are inadequate. Space does not permit more. I hope these few tidbits will send the reader scurrying to find the book.

Kohlberg and the God-self

How, then, does Ched Myers' socio-literary understanding of the Bible relate to what we've been saying about Kohlberg's stages of development and the god-self? To put it most briefly and directly:

1. The god-self incarnates the most universal and the most compassionate. It always lives and interprets reality in terms of nonviolent love and the equality and ultimate value of all persons. It does not ever live in peace with injustice but it will battle evil only nonviolently.

2. The stages of development help show how it is that the external principalities and powers are able to shape and control each generation to their own self-preservative ends through the sub-selves within us.

The truncated values of the lower stages of development shape the boundaries of the sub-selves which worship and live by the corresponding values of the Beast (to borrow the imagery of the book of Revelation), the social institutions which preserve and protect the oppressive status quo in each time and place.

The sub-selves which are confined to narrow defensive boundaries necessarily color and distort our view of the scriptures.

If we think at stage 4, for instance, parts of the Bible with lower values repel us. We will tend to read the Bible in a way which validates the society our stage 4 self supports and celebrates and which allows us to condemn the enemies of that system.

We will be likely to reject or ignore the story of Elisha's cursing the children so that two bears came running to savage them. Too totally gross!

But at the same time stage 4 has just as much difficulty accepting and living the Sermon on the Mount or Jesus' command to love our enemies. Neither extreme fits the specific boundaries of stage 4.

Yet, interestingly, as we saw in session 5, there are those levels still within even the stage 4 person which are capable of accepting the bears' working "God's punishment" on the children, just as "Christians" sit in the theater and cheer Rambo as he mows down dozens of the enemy.

There is also within each of us a level which understands and resonates with love for the enemy.

Knowing Kohlberg's stages, in short, helps us read our internal workings. They enable us to see and define the different levels of oppressor and violence which still live and are powerful within us when we activate and live within the demonic self-systems organized around those earlier, immature values and the angry rebellious inner children who lived by them.

When we stride through the Bible in the seven league boots of stages 6-7 and study scripture through the spectacles of the god-self, we find an amazingly fresh kind of sorting taking place almost automatically. We somehow are enabled to distinguish the low from the high and the childish from the childlike with amazing accuracy.

When we look at the Gospel of Mark through these spectacles, we will tend to read it much the way Ched Myers does. We will no longer be wearing the tinted spectacles of the individualistic pietist who weeds out or unconsciously passes over the political and confrontational aspects of the Good News. We will be liberated to see why Jesus confronted the authorities relentlessly and why we must also do so in our time.

Kohlberg and the god-self add a special and useful dimension to biblical interpretation. And it is no way contradicts Ched Myers' methodology. Let's look at several examples starting with:

Abraham and Sodom

In the 18th and 19th chapters of Genesis we have the marvelous little tale of Abraham, Lot and the destruction of the wicked city of Sodom.

Like so many of the stories told around the campfires this one grew and was elaborated for generations before it was written down. The original tales very likely took shape in the minds of creative story-tellers who were perhaps inspired by accounts of the destruction of some town by volcanic eruption. We can envision the story-teller, as evening camp was set up in the Dead Sea area, pointing to an oddly shaped hill and adding to the tradition, "See, there is Lot's wife who was disobedient to the Holy One."

Along the way the account picked up more embroidery, becoming for one thing a celebration of Hebrew superiority. It portrays the Moabites and Ammonites as springing from the incestuous union of Lot's daughters with their father. We can almost hear the laughter and jeers of the audience sitting around the fire as their traditional enemies are put down and ridiculed.

In the heart of the story, Abraham negotiates with God to try to save the city of Sodom, in which his nephew Lot and his family live. Lot and Abraham had split up in a dispute over the grazing grounds. In order to make peace, Abraham allowed Lot first choice. He took the best territory, down in the valley. Abraham was left with the poorer hills.

In passing, note that this is one of the moral peaks of the Bible, an instance of unselfish willingness to sacrifice one's own immediate interest for a long-range harmonious relationship. It is also an example of the positive function of a stage 3 (family oriented) morality. Abraham seeks a peaceful settlement because Lot is family. It is a teaching of age-appropriate unselfishness. It is a parable of the way in which the whole world of nations could settle their problems. It is an enduring model of peacemaking, which the Jews of modern Israel have chosen to ignore in relation to the Palestinians.

Abraham negotiates with God to try to get him not to destroy the righteous with the wicked in Sodom. If there are fifty righteous will you spare the city? He works his way gradually down to ten, and persuades a reluctant God that ten would justify sparing the city. Then the messengers of God experience the violent inhospitality of the people of the city. God then concludes that only Lot and his family deserve to be spared and as they flee into the hills he destroys the city. Lot is obedient to the fine print of the agreement, but his wife can't resist looking back and ends up a pillar of salt.

The narrator, besides sinking some barbs into other people of the land, was making an important point. He was saying that evil behavior will be punished and warning his hearers that they should be righteous. This word in Hebrew has broader and deeper connotations than our English cognate. It meant being upright and honest, obedient to the whole Law, including compassion toward the weak, needy and alien among the people. Righteous, in later Judaism, became a term for the saint who is most advanced in faith and all the virtues.

It is worth noting that the sin of the Sodomites was not homosexuality but a betrayal of hospitality; they abused the guests of a citizen.

How do we draw wisdom and guidance for ourselves from this cautionary tale? First, we establish as best we can the intended purpose of the story in its time. Then, we use insights given us by other tools and methodologies. In this case, from Kohlberg's stages, we can see that the tale of Abraham's negotiations with God represents a transition point in faith. It is a departure from a stage 2-3 quid pro quo relationship between humanity and God. It does not yet mark an advance to a stage 4 perspective, but represents a wrestling on the cusp, so to speak. It is a realization by the people that God's way of dealing with humanity is not, as the child put it, "You treat God right and He'll treat you right." God is beginning here to be seen as one who has standards he maintains which are not affected by chosen people status, prayers, sacrifices, or bribes. There are consequences in evil-doing, punishments, which may not come immediately but will come.

What we see here -- and this makes a marvelous sermon -- is Abraham wrestling within himself with two different gods, representing two different stages of morality. Yahweh's voice represents the lower morality: the old demonic deity who becomes angry and acts on his anger and has to be talked out of rash actions. The voice of Abraham represents the higher level god, who at least is interested in sorting out those who deserve punishment from the fairly innocent.

Over the course of the Bible and human history, there are several levels of sophistication in sorting out good and evil. At first, there are evil cities and nations which, if they become bad enough, are punished. The good people and the children suffer right along with the evil-doers.

At the next level, there are good and evil people within nations and cities. While the good may suffer along with the evil theirs is not a personal punishment. The nation is still seen as a kind of corporate personality in which all must suffer together or be blessed together. A partial truth, but demonic in separation from the other side: the equal value and personal responsibility of each individual.

The next level is the realization that there are good and evil in every individual. There are no such things as absolutely evil empires or absolutely evil individuals. Paul makes this point firmly in the opening paragraphs of his letter to the church in Rome. He says categorically that all of us are corrupt and if God dealt with us as he probably should we'd all go down the drain. Judgment is coming, he says, but there is time to repent.

However, and this is the point, each one must repent for his or her own sins.
This eventually produces several vital changes in our view of how God works and makes the divine will effective in history, in our theology of providence. This is dealt with in sessions 17 and 18.

The Children's Teeth on Edge

In the 18th chapter of Ezekiel, a prophet of the time of the exile, we see another example of this inner wrestling between views of God and providence.

Ezekiel is struggling with what appears inescapably to be God's rejection and punishment of his chosen people. In the process, Ezekiel declares a sort of new covenant. Yahweh has been misunderstood:

The Word of the Lord came to me again: "What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the chldren's teeth are set on edge'? As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sins shall die. (18:1-4 RSV)

In other biblical theologies, of course, this problem is solved by noting that while punishment does fall on whole nations, it comes from the natural consequences of their arrogance or aggressiveness and not as a special act of God.

Or else, as in Habakkuk, the prospering of the evil and suffering of the righteous are portrayed as a temporary situation, a time of testing and growth, to come to an end when God comes with full justice and judgment.

Stages and History

The examples given here illustrate an important additional point with regard to Kohlberg's stages. Societies do not move through stages of moral development clearly and neatly anymore than do individuals.

The most retarded we-they moral values continue to exist within modern societies, just as they live within our own sub-selves. The inner demonic self-systems and the external demonic principalities and powers complement and reinforce each other.

The most morally retarded elements generally tend to gradually pass into folk sayings and practices of individuals ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian.") while increasingly the more advanced morality is that which is embodied into law and the normative practices of institutions. This applies, that is, except when a whole society goes through an abrupt moral regression, as in Nazi Germany, Khomeini's Iran, or the Southern Baptist Church under fundamentalist control.

For instance, note the way that the principle of equality before the law and the right of individuals to be considered innocent until proved guilty, continues to gain ground in law, with occasional setbacks.

With Russia, Eastern European nations and South Africa abandoning the death penalty for any crime, the US, England and Japan stand virtually alone among developed nations as allowing executions.

Note how the Rambo mentality still controls the thinking of large numbers of the population, who believe that whole groups of people are guilty enough of crimes that it is moral to kill them. The religious formulation of this vindictive theology is often expressed thus, "Send them off, and let God sort them out." In other words, "We have a right to kill them whether they are individually guilty or not, and God will send them to heaven or hell, as He (sic) pleases."

Being of the priestly class, Ezekiel had a widely varied catalogue of behavior he thought God considered sinful. It is a mixture of some of the most primitive and some of the most advanced of moral principles:

If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right -- if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor's wife or approach a woman in her time of impurity, does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, does not lend at interest or take any increase, withholds his hand from iniquity, executes true justice between man and man, walks in my statutes and is careful to observe my ordinances -- he is righteous, he shall surely live, says the Lord God. (18:5-9 RSV)

This is a good example of how societies tend to be spread across Kohlberg's stages and is why progress is rather to be measured in the actual impact of the higher stages, the long-range trends and the changes in institutions.

Ironically, it is Ezekiel the priest who also transposes the Genesis tale of the destruction of Sodom into a higher moral key:

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me, therefore I removed them, when I saw it. (16:49-50 RSV)

The Conversion of Paul

The book of Acts tells of Saul's persecution of the early Christians. As the story begins we see him holding the cloaks of those who stoned Stephen. He went on from there to make a career of imprisoning and killing Christians.

Here, again, we see a struggle between gods taking place within one individual. The narrow stage 3-4 god of a Jewish national faith gives way to a god who sees all persons as equally beloved children.

Saul struggles fanatically to hold the crumbling walls of his personality boundaries. When they suddenly collapse he is inundated and immobilized entirely. Then, he is astounded to find another, new persona, wider and deeper and higher than the old, already formed and waiting for him. Saul became Paul, an almost entirely different (read "reborn") person.

In a sense we could say that primitive Christianity jumps two stages above the highest cultures around it. This was more than people could assimilate, including Paul. Two thousand years later we are still attempting to live up to this call to universal, caring love. Preachers are still saying that Jesus' command to love one's enemies is ethics of the ultimate kingdom but are really impractical in this present world.

The Golden Rule

Stages of development also illumine the teaching and wisdom sections of the scriptures. Take as just one example Jesus’ teaching we call the Golden Rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you.

This commandment is highly ambiguous. This ambiguity pops right up when we lay it alongside Kohlberg's six stages.

At each stage the Golden Rule turns out to mean something quite different.

I remember asking a class of Kansas 10-year-olds in a summer Bible school to tell me what the Golden Rule means. One boy eagerly volunteered and said, "Do it to others before they get a chance to do it to you." That was indeed his family's belief and practice.

Even where people don't distort the teaching in this way, they still twist it around to fit into the ethics of their clique or culture.

Psychologists would say that to the extent people do not value themselves, have low self-esteem, they will not treat others any better than they do themselves. It does not help to teach the Golden Rule to a sociopath who has been abused out of normal feelings either. He doesn't care how he is treated, doesn't expect good treatment, and won't treat others with kindness or respect. A loner who wants only to be left alone will ignore other people, and in so doing treat them just as he wishes to be treated.

Each of these lives in and acts out of sick, narrow and exclusive sub-selves rather than from the wholeness of the god-self.

Conclusion

Kohlberg taught that we cannot envision clearly a god more than one stage above our operative level. It is certainly just as true that we cannot comprehend a level of faith and morality in the Bible which is higher. And we will be repelled by the morality and values in scripture which are below the highest we seek to live.

Actually, we can envision in our minds a higher god and morality, but we then ignore such a god as irrelevant or rationalize away the higher values, twisting them to fit without friction the mores of those around us we have to live with. We are not likely, then, to read the Bible in the Spirit if we are reading it with a stage 3 sentimentalism or a stage 4 chauvinism.

One has only to recall how the South African whites used the Genesis note on the descendants of Ham, "hewers of wood and drawers of water," to justify keeping blacks in subordination.

But this was also pretty much the way enlightened, law-abiding Romans looked upon the barbarians of subject nations, and tended to be the attitude of the Jewish Hellenistic nobility and the Temple authorities toward the hungry, disease-ridden, uneducated poor of Galilee. Superior to inferior. God-blessed to sin-cursed.

The same kind of we-they division was invoked to make it possible for decent American young men to slaughter Vietnamese. Instead of being fellow human beings they had to be portrayed as commies, gooks, slants, or slopes.

Questions for Thought

Consider or discuss: Look again at Myers' interpretation of Mark. How does this conflict with your image of Jesus? What difference would it make in your behavior as a Christian if you agree with Myers? What would you do differently? What would be different about a church which was founded on this interpretation of Jesus?

Contact the author at: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1988, pages 436,7.
2. ibid., from the Introduction by Daniel Berrigan, pages xxi-xxiii.
3. ibid., page xxviii.
4. ibid., page 205

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