09 April 08 - 03:14
Letter to the Editor
I mentioned last week the letter I wrote to the Editor of Maclean's Magazine for their 31 March cover issue. Of course, they didn't print it, I write too long. It's okay, I preached about the topic on Sunday 6 April, and you can find my further thoughts at my sermon site (http://fairview-united-church-halifax.org/about-us-ministers_sermon.htm), just as soon as I get around to sending it in, which should be soon.
I gotta say, I'm delighted by this wider audience that scholarship about Jesus' life is getting these days. (I guess we can thank the Da Vinci Code for making it all seem so cool.) While the more radical positions are being picked up by the press as something fresh and new, the rest of us who hold more moderate positions have a conversation starter, where we can go a lot further into the conversation than if we could if we'd been the radicals who opened the topic in the first place. Jesus was like that, I think, and he got crucified for it, but his followers came behind him with more moderate positions and started a movement that changed the world.
Here's the letter I wrote, for the record:
As a progressive Christian, I was delighted by Maclean’s balanced coverage of the state of Jesus scholarship (The Jesus Problem, 31 March 2008). When I was at Queen’s Theological College in the mid-90s, our teachers told us that for the past hundred years, modern methods of literary, cultural and sociological analysis had being coming up with this picture of Jesus and his community, and for the past hundred years, teachers told their students, “Whatever you do, don’t tell your churches. You’ll start a riot!”
It’s time to break the silence. Throughout my ten year ministry, I’ve been honest about what I believe with United Church people across the country. While a few have been ready to throw me off a cliff, a lot more are hungry for an understanding of our Christian story that doesn’t require them to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
I can do this with integrity because I believe the claims of Christianity were never meant to be taken literally. When Matthew’s Gospel talks about the Star of Bethlehem, he is following the cultural footsteps of the Roman Empire, where every time a new emperor ascended, astronomers spent years trying to figure out under which star the emperor was born. The Star of Bethlehem is nothing more or less than a statement of faith, that Jesus is a king so much more important than any old Roman emperor that even foreign stargazers ought to have noticed his birth. It was never meant to be historical in the sense that school children recite facts and dates. In fact the whole concept of the objective truth of history belongs to the Enlightenment, and postdates any Biblical texts by at least 1600 years. Before that it was normal practice for historians to adjust the facts to fit the accepted view of the events.
This is where I part company with both literalists and with post-Christians like Gretta Vosper. While I agree with much of her analysis, I think she is caught in an Enlightenment worldview where only objectively true facts have meaning. The literalists have reacted to this challenge by claiming that since their faith has meaning, everything in the Bible must be objectively true. Vosper responds that since the Bible can’t possibly be objectively true, it has little meaning.
But there are other kinds of truth, and the Bible is more like poetry than science. I think the reason why the flawed and non-literal stories in the Bible still have power is because they continue to echo our flawed and non-literal lives. Jesus taught about a God who transcends my mortal existence, who wants justice for the world, and who loves me like a much longed-for child. In a world where marketing spends billions to convince me I’m too fat, too old, and don’t have nearly enough toys to play with the cool kids, Jesus’ teachings are still plenty relevant for me.
The Rev. Heather Fraser, Halifax, NS.
I wish now I'd said something more about the role of religious experience in interpretting the Bible. That is to say, people resort to poetry instead of history to describe religious experience because it's the only kind of language big enough to begin to describe the experience of being in God's presence. I guess you'll have to read the sermon for an expansion of that, because I’m going to bed! 
Blessings, Heather.
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