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“You will not cross” It sounds like a quote from Lord of the Rings when Gandalf prevents the Balrog (big bad demon monster) from crossing a narrow stone bridge in pursuit of the heros, but it isn’t. It’s from this weeks Old Testament lectionary reading.

At the end of his life, God told Moses that he “will not cross over into it.” “It,” is the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendents. God took Moses up a mountain, and showed him the bountiful land that he was going to give to the new nation of Israel. The land God had promised for hundreds of years;

the land Moses was saved from the Nile river so that he could lead the people to,
the land that Moses stood up to Pharaoh and risked his life to get the people to,
the land that Moses put up with a bunch of ungrateful whining people to get them to, the same people Moses had to plead with God not to destroy,
the land of milk and honey.

The land Moses, “will not cross into.”

So why did God shut Moses out? There are a couple of possible explanations. The first comes just a couple of chapters earlier when God tells Moses,

“This is because both of you (Moses and Aaron) broke faith with me in the presence of the Israelites… and because you did not uphold my holiness among the Israelites. Therefore, you will see the land only from a distance; you will not enter the land I am giving to the people of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 32:51-52)

It appears that God is referring to something Moses and Aaron did while in the desert (Numbers 20:1-13), but the infraction here doesn’t seem to warrant the punishment in light of all that Moses is credited with in chapter 34. It just doesn’t seem to balance out.

It has also been suggested that Moses did not get to enter because he is suffering the same judgement as the rest of the people when they refused to trust God and enter the promised land the first time they had the opportunity. God said “No one from this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your ancestors, except Caleb son of Jephunneh.” (Deuteronomy 1:35) Moses also says “Because of you (the people) the LORD became angry with me also and said, “You shall not enter it, either.”” (v. 37) We may not like that explanation, but it fits with the way things often play out in the Old Testament, leaders can be held responsible for their followers and people can suffer for the choices of their leaders.

I wonder if this is really what this story is about? Is this passage at the end of the story of Moses life about why he gets shut out of the Promised Land? With the emphasis on all of the great things Moses had done and the proclamation that there would never be another prophet as great as him, it seems unlikely that the point here is his failure. On the contrary, Moses accomplished all that God had planned for him. Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe this story can remind us that life is not a goal but an adventure? What a great adventure it was; Moses faced the most powerful leader of his time and said “let my people go,” he stretched his hand out and watched the sea part, he spoke to God and God knew him by name. To be sure there were rough times; the people were always complaining, they didn’t like his wife, they didn’t like the food, and their feet were sore. The path from where we are to where God wants us to be can be long, difficult, uncomfortable, and often thankless, but Moses and the people were led every step of the way by the presence of God. Moses didn’t get to enter the Promised Land, but neither did Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, not the way God intended.

I have often struggled with the feeling that I am working for something that is out of reach, but every now and then God shows me a glimpse of where God is leading me and reminds me that I am never on my own. As long as we walk with God, the Spirit leads us. We mess up and go on a detour now and then, and we may not get to enter the Promised Land, but we get to be part of a great adventure.

God’s people did make it to the Promise Land, just like God promised. Even though Moses didn’t, he got to be a very important part of the adventure. It’s scary sometimes, but I want to be part of God’s adventure called Ecclesiax—how about you?

I wrote out a list of issues that I could think of that exist in Ottawa, that aren’t talked about in the church much, to see if there was anything I could feasible do:

Homelessness, mental illness, systemic poverty, our flawed jail system, immigration issues (like immigrants not being able to get work in their field of expertise, or issues of them being away from their families), or issues in subsidized housing in Ottawa (infestations, or crumbling buildings). 

These are all economic issues, because they require money.    One of the reasons consistently claimed by government that nothing is done about these, is that there isn’t money, and the government would need to raise taxes to address these.  Now, I struggle here, because I want to make the statement of “if the percentage of the portion of Canadians that claim to be Christians were willing to see their taxes raised to try and address these systemic issues…” as if it’s obvious to those that are Christian that we should be willing to do this, but I wonder if there are legitimate reasons that someone would claim that their taxes shouldn’t be raised to improve the jail systems, or address the poor conditions of subsidized housing.  I struggle, because for so long I’ve only ever considered these as political issues, but what if there is another way?

Don Miller made the statement once to the effect of “its not the government failing these people, its the churches failing the people.”  I found this quite a compelling statement.  What if we as the church were willing to do more to help out these various issues, and stop looking to governments to fix them?  Of the critiques of religion by Marx, he had a good answer to why we don’t do more.  The first way we justify not doing more, is that we say “God is Love”, and “God wants us to live justly”, but are never willing to talk about concrete ways to live this out.  There is some legitimacy behind avoiding telling people what to do, because there’s a risk that it may be wrong.  The second way we may justify not doing more, is that we separate our physical lives from our spiritual lives, and suggest that all of those economic imperatives given in the New Testament are exclusively for life in heaven.  I know I do the first one far more than the second, as I believe that Christianity really is intended to have something to say about how I live now. 

So, I’m back with this fear of what to do.  There are so many issues that exist, both locally and globally.  There is far more than any one individual has any hope of doing.  That, and my time is now a little more strapped having a young child around.  I know I have to overcome that fear of doing something wrong.  For so much of my life, I’ve been taught that “God will direct me”, and tell me what to do.  In a sense when I was writing that list, I was hoping for some sort of divine revelation, but like usual it didn’t come.  But, I’m beginning to believe that we have been given the ability to make decisions for ourselves, to have goals and desires.  We have been given the gift of creativity.  If I hope and wait for God to tell me what to do, I’m giving up that gift.  If I choose to do something, I run the risk of doing the wrong thing, but at least I’m trying in some small way to create a better world.

But when I look at that list, I don’t see anything that matches up with my personal passions.  So am I missing something?  Or do I need to give up those passions, so I can live better? 

What are the issues that you see around you?  What are your passions?  How are you bringing these two together to create a better world?

Karl Mannheim expanded on Marx’s definition of an ideology to develop a general theory of the social uses of knowledge.  For Mannheim, ideals are ideas that describe how the world should be.  These ideals can have two different social uses – Revolution or Submission.  Revolutionary use of an ideal becomes physically lived out, typically changing the current order of things.   Submission, is intended to maintain the current social and political structures.  This happens by either distracting or blinding the believers from the present reality where that ideal is not lived out, with the promise of that ideal becoming reality in the future.  Mannheim describes this as an Ideology.

I believe we turn our ideals into ideologies when we only reinforce what we already believe.  By doing this we negate the possibility of change in ourselves.  This change may come if we realize an ideal we have is false, but it also may come when we find a disconnect between what we claim to believe and how we live.  I am complicit with turning Christianity from a Revolutionary faith, into an ideology.  Westphal, in Suspicion and Faith suggests several ways in which this occurs, and one of my worst offenses is that I do this by editing the Bible:  I am willfully ignorant of sections of the Bible,  I avoid reading sections that don’t agree with my theology, or I go to great lengths to try and interpret them in ways that do.   There are sections of the Bible I haven’t read, thinking they are irrelevant, or just never got around to reading.  There are passages that I find either confusing, or I find them offensive to my view of God (God commanding the Isrealites to commit genocide, for example) that I typically stay away from.  Other passages, I will look at and try to understand them in a way that fits my view of God and faith (and sometimes have to jump through some significant mental hoops to do it). 

Can I get beyond these self-imposed limitations on how I read the Bible?  My first thought is that I need to become a biblical scholar, able to analyze the depth of the original meaning in the original language, and understanding the historical context these ideas were presented originally.  While I might find that interesting, that is a significant time commitment to do it well.  More importantly, that is not practical for every Christian – so what is the correct way to learn the “truth” as presented in the Bible?  The current structure of the chruch is that there is one “expert” who get in front of the congregation to preach what the Bible says every week, to tell us what and how to believe.  I know some people who are very happy with not having to do the work for themselves.  I am not.  Perhaps, I just have to accept that this is a journey, where I need to constantly revisit that which I think I know, and allow myself and my beliefs to be edited along the way, all the while facing that which I don’t understand and more importantly, that which I disagree with.  What scares me though, is that there may not be a nice way to understand all these conflicting things – or more specifically that the truth is found in that conflict between the different views and interpretations.

Something I’ve heard suggested recently is the Christianity should be a materialistic religion – in that it should change your material reality, the way you make decisions and live out your life.  Yet, I know I look no different than any of my neighbours or co-workers, some who are Christians, some atheists, and many who don’t follow anything particular.  For a long time I believed all the right things, but in reality I’ve figured out a way to have it change just a little of my material reality, and it’s so little than no-one who knows me would be able to tell. 

For Marx, he took a materialistic view of history.  He was someone who rejected metaphysical ideas, and simply looked at the reality of people’s behaviours.  Don Miller has become  a bit of an evanglist for this type of thinking with his recent A Million Miles…book: ”a character is what he does, not what he thinks”.    Here, Miller is talking about a character in a movie, and how the audience actually perceives and understands the character.  When you look at a movie character, or anyone for that matter, all you can know are their actions.  You aren’t privy to the discussions that go on in the head of that individual as they go about narrating their lives (unless its a bad movie with voice narration).  Marx, took his idea of materialism a little further though, to suggest that a materialistic view of history was one that put economics at the basis.  For Marx, morality, religion, metaphysics, politics, and law all have economic underpinnings.  They are all affected by their specific place and time in history, in the class struggles, in the economic conditions of the rich and the poor.  Part of me looks at that, and immediately compares it to Freud’s view that we are all fundamentally selfish – the rich want to stay rich, and the poor want to be rich.  What I find interesting though, is that Marx thinks that the reason the behaviour has been selfishly motivated is not because we are all fundamentally bad (as Freud would suggest), but because the capitalist structure which we’ve lived in is what makes us do this.  In a world where competition is king, and the winner is the one with the most toys at the end, its hard to really argue against the effects of the structure.  So, is our religion and morality affected by our economic reality we’re living in?  I would be interested to hear a good argument suggesting that they are not, but from what I understand of philosophy, it would be a difficult stance to take to say that our religion and morality are unaffected by the economic structure that we’re living in. 

There’s a story told by the philosopher, Slavoj Zizek:

A man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a grain of seed but a man; however, when his is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling and very scared – there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says the doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?” The Parallax View

So, my religion, my beliefs, and my behaviour are all affected by my economic reality.  Short of becoming an ascetic, and rejecting all property, is there away out of this?  I feel like the man saying “of course I know that economics isn’t the thing I should base my life on, but does everyone else out there know it?”  Is there a way for the church to help us learn to see where our economic reality is affecting our beliefs, and behaviour, and most of all rise above it?  And is it possible for the church to do this honestly, as it will be other people who are struggling with the same problems making the decisions, and giving the sermons, and asking for the tithes and offering?  Does this even matter – should I even worry about the economic underpinnings in my life and my behaviour?  Will any of this change one decision I make?

It would be easy to point to things like “Fair-trade”, and “organic”, and all these nice labels as if they are part of the answers.  What if these labels weren’t even necessary though, and weren’t used to signify privilege, but all products simply were known to be made in factories where people were paid living wages, in safe conditions, with products that weren’t harmful to either the workers, or to the end consumers?  How many Christians buy Apple products, fully knowing all the issues in the Foxconn factory in China?  And, I write this on a piece of electronics that I have no clue what the workers in China experienced – for all I know it was worse, all the while I’m sitting on a piece of furniture, wearing clothes that are equally dubious.  Does Christianity have any role to play in any of this?

In my last post, I mentioned that Marx was influenced by Feuerbach, who in turn was influenced by Hegel’s critiques of God and religion.  Hegel’s analysis of religion led him to conclude that “[God] is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man…”.  Feuerbach took this one step further to conclude that in religion we project in religion only “that which is worthy of adoration.”  So, for Feuerbach, we project what is best about humanity on God. 

I quickly realized that while I don’t necessarily do this to God, I do this to the person of Jesus.  I have been taught that Jesus was a perfect person, had no sin, and I’ve often attributed to him that he never got angry, was always willing to serve others, had perfect patience for everyone he interacted with, and always had time for other people.  I look at myself, and look at my flaws, and then draw the character of Jesus as if he was everything I wish I was.  I’ll bet he was a great guitar player, and was good on a skateboard too.

I think this can get dangerous though, when we start to try and attribute other thoughts and ideas to Jesus.  I was at a lecture on Religious Violence last Friday, and the speaker basically had the conclusion that Jesus was first and foremost a pacifist – he would want us to not go into war, unless it was the last and only option.  This got me thinking, with this opinion, are we just turning Jesus once more into our idealized reflection?  We’re living in a time when there is a lot of violence and war, and much of it seems senseless, so Jesus must be against this, right?  I don’t know what Jesus thought of war – he really tried hard to stay out of political debates, and made an effort to avoid any sort of political statements, so how can I attribute thoughts and beliefs to him as to our current context?  Or, I should say, I need to be careful if I try to attribute political views to him, as applied to our current context.  So, if you hear me say anything during this election time about who Jesus would vote for, or who he would support, please call me on my BS. 

Who would Jesus want you to vote for?  Do you even think he cares?

Marx’s critiques of Christianity seem similar to much of what Freud had to say, but each one’s end goal is radically different (the book has moved on from Freud to Marx, so on I go).  As I’m learning more about his critiques of Christianity and its relation to “the state”, or in a sense the various power structures of the world, it feels like it goes beyond Freud.  Freud was fundamentally interested in the mind of the individual, for people to cast off their neurotic dreams and practices that help them face a miserable world, and learn to live within the crap that is reality.  Freud lived with a “resigned despair” in his view of the world, in the knowledge that we are all selfish individuals if given the choice, but with the right understanding of reality and correctly placed efforts we could maybe make our lives and those of others a little better .  His goal was to take people from a inconsolable misery (hence the neurotic responses to deal with the world), to a general sadness.  Marx on the other hand had grander ambitions with his theories and philosophies.  Marx wanted not just to change people’s belief and interpretation about the world, but ultimately to change behaviour. 

Marx started his criticism of Religion and the state from the work of Feuerbach, who was a philosopher in Germany around the same time as Marx was coming up with his fundamental theories of the State and Religion (I’m going to write on something of Feuerbach’s next, but it’s not necessary for what I’m writing now).  What’s fascinating to me though, was how Marx saw Feuerbach’s work as good, but essentially flawed, or more specifically limited.  To Marx, Feuerbach’s critque was a Bourgeois atheism – it was all metaphysical ideas and thoughts, which had no intention of changing the behaviour of the individual and continued its support of the current power structures in place.  In one of Marx’s written critiques of this he goes on to say “their atheism was more the product of bourgeois Christianity than its enemy.”  Marx’s view of religion was that it was a “desperate response to genuine hopelessness, it is the diabolical creation of unnecessary hopelessness concerning the human social order”.  This could be wrong, but I see his critique suggesting that Feuerbach was not in a place of desperation or hopelessness, so he didn’t need a god in response to that. 

I wonder how much my personal critiques of Christianity comes from a place of bourgois Christianity?  This is something I’ve struggled over: as an overprivalged, well-educated white man, I’m pretty self-reliant.  The power structures (both societal and in the church) are in place to ensure that I am able to continue to provide my needs, and many of my desires.  I know nothing of desperation or hopelessness in an economic sense (and, quite possibly, in any sense).  So, my personal critiques come from a place of analyzing the various metaphysical beliefs, that of God, or Jesus’ virgin birth, or the afterlife, as if I have no need to think of these things since I’m so privaledged now (an oversimplification could be stated as: I don’t need a castle in the sky, becuase I have one here on earth).  So any of my critiques go so far as to question the beliefs, but never so far to try to challenge any structures that are in place.  I’ve never once stood up when I’m asked to do something in a church that Katie would be better at doing and say “why are you asking me, and not her?  Is it becuase I’m a man?”  For all in North America we like to believe that we see men and women as equal, there’s still an underlying sense of sexism (well, many people still see this, with the exception of Marget Wente).  Or, I look at most of the work that I did while I was on the church board, and all I did was to try and further errect the exact same power structures that are in every other church. 

I think its pretty safe to say that Jesus had a fundamentally different view of power and leadership than what Marx did.  But, I know that when I have been in leadership at various relilgious groups, my effort wasn’t to try and change the way people lived.  At most, it was to try and create a “meaningful space where someone could experience God”, but I don’t think this was out of an ambition for change in behaviour, but at it’s most noble was to help people have “personal transformation”, but I also think it was simply to try and increase numbers at the church/group, as if numbers were what mattered most.  But, what would it look like for leaders to have an ambition for people to be fundamentally changed, in how they see the world, and more importantly how they live?  It’s sure as heck easy to say, but what would it look like in real life?