Human Product, Or Divine?

                                                                 Craig Anderson

                                              Brookside Community Church, UCC

I Timothy 2:8-15                                                                                                    January 27, 2002

In a remarkable interview in the Times, Joseph Hough, president of Union Seminary in New York, spoke recently of a “new theology of religions.”  One of the positive outcomes of September 11 is a sincere desire to seek understanding and common ground among the world’s religions.  What Hough contributes to this search is a basis for humility as Christians approach Islam, Hindus Judaism, and as Buddhists encounter Pentacostalism.   In Hough’s view:

            A new theology of religions begins with the recognition that religion is something that we human beings put together in an effort to give cultural form to our faith.  Our faith is a response to the experience of the presence of God.  Religion, our rituals, our music, even our theology, is a human attempt to express what we have experienced.  Since we have only our human language and symbols to use in expressing our faith, religions differ as much as cultures differ.  Therefore, we want to be careful about claiming that one religious form is the only one that is authentic or real.

Hough says a lot in a few words.  Notice that he very carefully does not say that the basis for religion is made up or imagined.  Faith begins with experience: it begins with an encounter with the Divine.  From the beginning of recorded human history, cutting across all cultures and frontiers, human beings have attempted to symbolize and describe their encounters with the holy.  Universally, the holy is perceived to be mysterious and yet real:  a hidden and yet perceptible source of our being.

Buddha gained enlightenment under a tree. 

     Moses met God in a burning bush. 

          Mohammed felt transported from Mecca to Jerusalem. 

                Jesus knew God’s favor emerging from the River Jordan.

            You experience awe on a mountaintop; at the seashore.

      You feel wonder in the presence of death and birth.

             You brim with gratitude for the gift of life. 

And whether one is the Buddha or Jesus, or just an ordinary woman or man who has experienced the extraordinary, the next move is an attempt is to describe that experience, express it, make sense of it.

Joseph Hough would have us appreciate and respect every one of these attempts to convey what an encounter with the Holy is like.  Respect and honor are due, whether the attempts are made by a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Pentacostal believer or a Hindu.  So the first foundation stones for a new theology of religions are regard and respect.

At the same time Joseph Hough would have us acknowledge that the only tools we humans have to construct our expressions of wonder and awe, are human tools: art, music, language, and ritual.  What we have at our disposal are human constructs, plus imagination and creativity, wonderful resources each, but limited finally, limited by time and place, limited by the limits of being human.  We can encounter the Holy, but our music, words, and pictures cannot wholly contain the Holy.  To acknowledge our limits is to lay a second foundation stone for a new theology of religions: humility.

I hope that you are with me so far, because now things get complicated!  Humility and respect are easy, easy to say at least, and certainly worth trying, but Joseph Hough has made a leap in his new theology of religions, that not every one is willing to take. 

If Joseph Hough is right, then we have a way of dealing not only with religious diversity in our world, but also with today’s passage from Timothy.  If not, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask the women to unbraid their hair, remove their jewelry, wear cheaper clothing, and not make a fuss about it.... which means I’d better have another solution right?  Right!

The leap which Hough makes is found in the idea that our “religion, our rituals, our music, even our theology, is a human attempt to express what we have experienced.”  More specifically, the problem lies with the words “human attempt.”  The idea that we “have only our human language and symbols to use in expressing our faith,” sounds obvious, but it is an idea which many would hotly contest.  You’ll see why as I introduce another voice in this conversation.

I was delighted to find Hough’s words, because they resonated so nicely with themes  I encountered last summer in Marcus Borg’s latest book: Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.  Borg suggests that how we understand the Bible depends on how we “see its origin.”  He asks in short, “Does it come from God, or is it a human product?”  See the problem more clearly now?  The judgement whether the Bible is a divine or human product has big consequences.  If scripture is divinely inspired:  then who are we to mess with it; who is anyone to question it; and will the ushers please come forward with baskets to collect the ladies’ jewelry!

Many religions believe that their holy scriptures are divinely inspired, that indeed their scriptures have no human dimension whatsoever, but are rather the verbatim words of their God, faithfully recorded and passed unsullied into human hands.  (Why only words are accorded such privilege, and not to my knowledge art and music, is interesting isn’t it?)  But suppose on the other hand, (and maybe the ushers should hold off for a minute), suppose the Bible and other holy scriptures too, are human attempts to express wonder and awe?  Perhaps then we will be more humble and restrained about how we use them.

This human dimension is what Borg finds in the Bible.  Like Hough he sees religious experience as the starting point: 

The Bible originates in experiences of  the holy, the numinous, the sacred.  These experiences however, go beyond our language, shatter it, and relativize it.  The Bible, therefore, (like everything else expressed in words) is a human construction.  Rather than seeing God as scripture’s ultimate author, I see the Bible as a human response of faith communities to sacred experience.  As such, it contains their stories of God, their perceptions of God’s character, their religious and ethical practices, and their understanding of what faithfulness to God involves.  The Bible tells us about how they saw things, not about how God sees things.

So now before things erupt, back to Timothy, jewelry, and women keeping quiet.  If the Bible is a human response, a human construct with human voices, then we can begin to understand how the New Testament is two-minded about so many subjects, including the status of women in 1^st century Christian communities. 

In one of his most influential letters, Paul shared with the Galatians a remarkable vision of equality and inclusiveness:  “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  1^st Timothy purportedly, is also a letter from Paul.  But many scholars now agree that it was written several decades later.  It is even possible, as Borg argues, that the author was “not a follower of Paul, but a “corrector” seeking to negate the remarkable gender egalitarianism of the early Christian movement.”  Therefore, “when the Bible is seen as a human product, the contrast between Timothy and Galatians requires that we recognize more than one voice in early Christianity speaking about the role of women.”  Our responsibility then, is “to discern which voice to honor.”

It may be easier not to assume such human responsibility.  Easier to decide that God said it and that’s that.  Will the ushers please come forward.  Will my two colleagues please refrain from saying another word.  Will the men please stand to the right ready to speak at the congregational meeting, while the women modestly and silently take their places with Eve and the snake on the left.  It may be easier, but as we have seen, taking the easy way out and giving final authority to texts making absolute and exclusive claims, leads to zealots on Crusades and Jihads pushing sacred scriptures down the profane throats of others, supposedly under divine instruction.

            Not easier, but better I think to assume human responsibility.  Better to recognize the limitations of our language, our art and music, the limitations of our culture, our sensitivity and understanding.  Better to be humble; to avoid claims that God is exclusively on our side.   Better to claim as authentic the religious experiences and expressions of others unlike us. 

In the beginning is divine/human encounter:  what follows is human expression and response.  Surely the Sacred and Holy does not disclose itself, so that we might fight endlessly and ever more violently about our interpretations of that disclosure.  Instead let us seek the ways we have in common to express wonder.  Let us share what may be uniquely ours to enrich others.  Since our capacity for awe never equals what we are in awe of, let us resist claims to ultimacy and absolute truth, remembering that we are trying to give voice to what cannot be spoken and expression to the inexpressible. 

At best, our human forms can only point beyond themselves to mystery.  So let us gather together in awe before that mystery, where there is neither male nor female, Muslim nor Christian, Jew nor Buddhist, and let us offer praise to the Sacred and Holy for our common home and shared existence on planet earth.