By Brian Griffith, from his book DIFFERENT VISIONS OF LOVE
My friend Nina is a Muslim woman who taught me a lot. She was a divorced mother who faced some harassment from certain Muslim men, and the way she responded changed my relation to Christianity. She mentioned one day that several men at her mosque were complaining about her. She had noticed these men several times, watching her from the doorway as she prayed in the women’s area. She is, after all, a beautiful woman. But after watching her pray, these men complained to the community elders. They said Nina was inspiring sinful thoughts in their house of prayer.
I asked Nina why she put up with it. Why did she remain in a community where this kind of bigotry seemed to pass for morality? But Nina dismissed those men’s prejudices, and mine, saying such people know nothing of Islam. The women in Muhammad’s family included a trading company manager (Khajida), an army general (Aisha), and a major religious leader (Fatima). What, Nina asked, did self-righteous bigots against women know of the real Islam?
It seems Nina responded to those men differently than I. When they posed as guardians of fundamental Islamic values, Nina did not believe their claims. She felt that she was the real Muslim. I, on the other hand, was ready to believe these men. If they claimed to represent what a Muslim should be, I would probably accept their words as accurate. And this kind of gullibility had plagued me before. While I was a teenage Christian in Texas during the 1960’s, my town had its fair share of bigots, who commonly insisted that their prejudices were fundamental Christian values. And basically, I believed them. I thought, “If you’re the real Christians, then I want none of it”. I accepted their claims to own the Christian heritage, and yielded them the field. What if I responded like Nina?
The Church I Left Behind
At my Southern Methodist church in Corpus Christi, Texas, I liked the Sunday discussion groups far more than worship services. At Sunday school it was socially appropriate to talk about values, beliefs, and the fate of the world. Most people there liked a good earnest argument over what was right or wrong. They were seldom horrified if contradicted, or if a young person like myself grew self-righteous in his opinions. It was a kind of salon of religious and cultural debate. Every community in the world should have something like it.
At Sunday school we discussed how the ancient Jews and early Christians lived, and I assumed that the game was to bring our modern ways into alignment with theirs. The whole notion of judging modern society by a different cultural standard appealed to me. But I didn’t quite see how unusual it was. In our workaday world of White, Protestant Texans, most people felt that the United States was the most developed and civilized nation ever. All foreign countries and all past societies were backward by comparison. Yet every Sunday morning, many millions of these self-confident Americans streamed into their churches, hoping to learn a better way to live. And their chosen teachers in this vital subject were a pack of impoverished villagers from ancient West Asia. A stranger might ask what these Old World peasants had to teach modern Americans. And that, strange as it might seem, was the question we were there to discuss.
When I was about eleven, our pastor told us that Martin Luther King, Jr. had issued a call for Black and White churches across the South to join in a series of civil rights marches. My family plus some others from our church went to the event for our city. The crowd that assembled was small and mostly Black, with a handful of local pastors. We walked for about an hour down the almost empty Sunday morning streets, then went for juice and cookies at a Black Baptist church. It was hot, but we had to wear jackets and ties. I felt awkward, bored, and couldn’t wait to go home. I didn’t quite realize this was a controversial event till later, when another church’s pastor condemned the march. He claimed that Martin Luther King was a man sent by Satan, and we should have nothing to do with his civil rights movement. King, he insisted, was a Communist, and Communists were murderers. They went around ringing people’s doorbells, and chopping their heads off when they answered the door. If we were opposed to head chopping, then we had to stand against Martin Luther King.
Later I went to several evangelical revivals, and found them moving. On two occasions I came forward at the altar call to be saved. At those events, the sermons usually concerned the coming Day of Judgment, with detailed accounts of the horrible punishments awaiting those who did not accept Jesus. The Bible readings might include Revelation 16, in which seven angels of the Lord pour their bowls of wrath upon the Earth. To recall the mood at these events, here is part of that passage:
The second angel poured his bowl on the sea, and it turned to blood like the blood of a corpse; and every living thing in the sea died. The third angel poured his bowl on the rivers and springs, and they turned to blood. Then I heard the angel of the waters say, “Just art thou in these thy judgments, thou Holy One who art and wast; for they shed the blood of thy people and thy prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink. They have their deserts!” And I heard the altar cry, “Yes, Lord God, sovereign over all, true and just are thy judgments!”
The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun; and it was allowed to burn men with its flames. They were fearfully burned; but they only cursed the name of God who had the power to inflict such plagues, and they refused to repent or do him homage. (Revelation 16:3–9)
Basically, the tone of sermons and readings at these revivals was usually stern and threatening. But then at the altar call, the mood and message would change. Especially in the Black churches, the community would break into a joyful celebration. People would jump up, dance, weep and embrace each other. At the time I made no distinction between fundamentalist and evangelical churches. They were all non-Methodist to me. But I saw that those alter-call celebrations were quite different from the judgmental sermons which came before. In the sermons, the usual message was basically “You must obey the Lord’s commands or you will be horribly punished”. But the later part of the service could be like a wedding party, with the celebrants shouting in jubilation “I love you brothers and sisters! I love you forever!” A lot of people, especially Methodists, judged evangelical revivals as mentally primitive. And I always liked theology and ideas, because I like to think. But I never found anything which struck me as more spiritual than people rejoicing in love for each other.
I grew up within sight of the U.S. Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi. Many of my friends’ fathers worked in the ARADMAC facility there, repairing helicopters damaged in the Vietnam War. The helicopters arrived on flatbed trucks, usually with their windows shattered and sides pocked with bullet holes. Then the ARADMAC technicians fixed them up like new. Our Boy Scout troop got a guided tour of the whole operation. When the repaired helicopters returned to Vietnam, many of them resumed patrolling the “free-fire zones”. These were areas of countryside under enemy control, which the choppers patrolled like police cruisers in the sky. At their discretion, the men in these cruisers were free to fire at any human target on the ground below. That was the meaning of “free-fire”.
We talked about this in church. And most members of our congregation felt that waging war in this way was the right thing to do. They felt sure that the free-fire patrols were necessary to defend the Christian way of life. Some thought that Jesus would support the war reluctantly; others were sure he would back it whole hog. In comparing the different messages we drew from Jesus’ words, I grew increasingly astonished.
Clearly there were big differences of opinion among Texan Christians as to what was “fundamental” in our religion. And it seemed to me that a lot of things most Christians believed were not in the Bible at all. I expected to find something in the Bible about the sanctity of private property. But that principle was actually attacked by several prophets and apostles, most of whom displayed extremely outdated views on economics. Many Christians I knew were deeply divided over the morality of contraception and abortion. But as I learned later, the Bible didn’t directly rule on these issues. I had the impression that Christianity was a patriotic religion, but many parts of the Bible seemed to treat devotion to any state as a kind of idolatry. I heard that Christianity upheld traditional family values, but Jesus and his followers sometimes showed contempt for the family as they knew it (as in Matthew 10:37 and 23:9, Mark 3:21 and 3:31-35, or Luke 14:26). Some members of my congregation claimed it was counterproductive to help the needy, since that would only teach them to depend on others. But in the New Testament I noticed only old-fashioned praise for charity. I wondered if the phrase, “the cream always rises to the top” came from the Bible, but I failed to find it.
As an occasionally rebellious teenager, I began to suspect that Jesus would hardly recognize Christianity as we knew it in modern Corpus Christi. I felt sure that some aspects of our religion were true to Jesus’ spirit, but other beliefs had slipped in from other sources, and served totally different values that Jesus would reject. I suppose everybody in my church felt this way to some extent, but that hardly helped us agree on what was fundamental.
The Question of Fundamentals
One possible solution for our confusion was to stick strictly to the Bible. And that, of course, is just what the early Protestants tried to do. They declared that the Bible was their one standard of truth, and basically disqualified all other church traditions which had evolved since the second century, when the Bible’s latest books were written. The Bible, however, is a big book. It covers roughly 2,000 years of history if we just count from Abraham to the book of Revelation. It includes a cast of many thousands or millions of people, most of them caught up in a series of momentous conflicts over what is true, beautiful, and godly. To use this sea of stories as our standard to live by is somewhat like taking a thick tome of American history, claiming that this also is the story of God’s people, and trying to live by its truths. After all, back in the 1800s, American educator Timothy Dwight urged his students to “look into the history of your country [and] you will find scarcely less gracious and wonderful proofs of divine protection and deliverance … than that which was shown to the people of Israel in Egypt.” If Americans followed Dwight’s advice, they would study their record of great historic conflicts between revolutionaries and loyalists, slaveholders and abolitionists, Natives and pioneers, or feminists and their critics. Every word of that record might be literally true — because those voices really spoke. But in order to decide which principles to live by, the readers would have to choose between those voices.
The Bible, of course, has an even greater spectrum of issues, events, and voices than a tome of American history. In Sunday school we just skimmed the surface. I was confused over who spoke for God as we read of Samuel’s protests against tyrannical Israeli kings, the seeming praise for wars of extermination, or the solemn rules for controlling women. We heard stories of slave revolts, female freedom fighters, and prophets denouncing the evils of lending money at interest. Some voices proclaimed the brotherhood of all humanity; while others threatened violence against the mixing of cultures and races. As we discussed these stories, we had to decide which characters to admire or deplore. And often it was hard to decide. At first I didn’t even realize how confused I was. Later I started noting the vast differences in what various Christians claimed was most essential to their faith. Here, for example, are several quotes I recently collected concerning the essentials of this religion:
“The whole center of gravity of Christian faith rests on the fact that Mary conceived and gave birth as a virgin, made fruitful through the operation of the Holy Spirit. Everything that has subsequently been taught and believed about the deliverance from sin and liberation of the human race through the blood of Jesus Christ ‘as the unblemished Lamb of God’ is based on this fact.” — Heinrich Wetzer and Benedikt Welte
“If the scriptures contained … one historical untruth it must forfeit its pretensions in every thing, seeing its pretensions extend to every thing in the book.” — Alexander Carson
“Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.” — Herbert Butterfield
“… what is really involved in God’s prohibition is obedience, the virtue which is, … the mother and guardian of all the virtues …”. — Augustine
“Jesus is precisely the symbol that contradicts the power of domination.” — Hans Küng
“If the Evil one does not exist, then man alone is responsible. Can God have created such a monster? No, he can’t, because he is love and goodness. If there is no Devil, then there is no God.” — Rudolf Graber, Catholic Bishop of Regensburg, Germany
“In the past decade or so right-wing fundamentalist movements around the world have insisted on portraying emancipated women as signifiers of Western decadence or of modern atheist secularism, but they have presented masculine power as the expression of divine power.” — Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Since the various members of my church tended to pick and prioritize different messages from the Bible, it was hard for us to agree on what was Christian. And this sort of disagreement was just what fueled the “fundamentalist” movement, for declaring certain beliefs as the bedrock foundation for any real Christianity. I could sympathize with the desire to identify fundamentals, but our disagreements over what they were tended to drive us apart. I grew angry, and went off to India and Kenya, trying to do something helpful to relieve my guilt. When I came back to North America years later I settled in Canada, where it happens I was born. Like millions of other Protestant splinter groups of one, I was looking for a community I could fully agree with. It was years before Nina helped me see how I let other people own my religion, and define me as an outsider to it. Then it was years more before I rejoined a church, and resumed talking about the Bible with people who were all different from me.
Traditions of Mutual Love and Force-Backed Authority
Another person who helped me reclaim my heritage is Riane Eisler, a Jewish woman who is most famous as author of The Chalice & the Blade. Eisler spent her early years in a genteel Vienna society, just before the Nazi takeover of Austria. When the Gestapo seized her father, Eisler’s mother barged into the Nazis’ jailhouse, and by sheer audacity browbeat them into releasing her husband. The family then fled as refugees to Cuba. Eisler attended a Catholic school in Havana, receiving a full dose of old-fashioned Christian education. Her Cuban neighbors were vibrant, deeply religious people, in a country where corporate corruption and family violence seemed traditional. “I learned,” Eisler wrote later, “that what people consider ‘just the way things are’ is different in different places. And I learned that not every cultural tradition should be preserved”.
Eisler’s somewhat traditional parents taught her to pray every night for all her relatives and friends back in Austria. When she learned what happened to them under the Nazis, she temporarily lost her faith in God.
Years later, in thinking through the seeming wreckage of her world, she felt both re-inspired and newly troubled by the different strands of tradition she found in Jewish history. On one hand stood a great line of prophets and teachers who upheld justice, freedom, and universal compassion as the ultimate concerns of Judaism. For these leaders, the law of life was a law of mutual love. It went roughly like this: As I would not be robbed, so I would not steal. As I would not be killed, so I would not murder. As I would not be punished for the crimes of another, “Fathers shall not be put to death for sins of sons, nor sons for the sins of their fathers” (Deuteronomy 24:16). As I would not be sold into slavery for debt, so Nehemiah said, “Speaking for myself, I and my kinsmen … are advancing them money and corn. Let us give up this taking of persons as pledges for debt” (Nehemiah 5: 10).
Some Jewish leaders extended the law of compassion to all members of their community. Others would extend it to the world:
When an alien settles with you in your land, you shall not oppress him. He shall be treated as a native born among you, and you shall love him as a man like yourself, because you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33–34)
But these were not the only kinds of teaching recorded in the holy books. The Bible also recorded arguments for “traditional” divisions between social groups and the clear ranking of certain people over others. Concerning the “God-given” authority of males over females, some verses instructed fathers to kill disobedient women. According to one tradition cited in Deuteronomy, a girl who fell in love with a boy of her choice (before her father gave her in marriage to the man of his choice) had to be stoned to death for the crime of unauthorized love (22:13–21). Other voices in the Bible claimed that God ordered the extermination of enemy populations, that He required “visiting the guilt of the fathers upon the children” (Exodus 20:5), and even that God upheld blind obedience as the primary tenet of morality. For example, in a passage describing God’s punishment of the Hebrew’s worship for other gods, we are told that Moses instructed the Levites (the priestly class) as follows:
Jehovah the God of Israel says “Get your swords and go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other and kill even your brothers, friends, and neighbors”. So they did, and about three thousand men died that day. Then Moses told the Levites, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, for you obeyed him even though it meant killing your own sons and brothers; now he will give you a great blessing”. (Exodus 32: 27–29)
So in reviewing her history, which was the whole history of the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, Eisler found deep traditions of both real fellowship and fearful cruelty. She grew convinced that chronic cruelty has never been simply “the way it is”, or “God’s will”. Cruelty has always been a human choice. And where cruelty is justified as a moral choice, we have a human invention of what Eisler calls “dominator morality”.
In “dominator ethics” according to Eisler, morality lies in subordinates obeying superiors, and inferiors knowing their assigned places. Such morality requires an imposed order of ranking ― “man over woman, man over man, race over race, and nation over nation, that can only be maintained by inflicting or threatening pain”. All this can appear quite inevitable. If people accept that someone or some group must be on top in every situation, then the main questions are (a) who the top dogs will be, and (b) how their dominance will be enforced. So throughout Western history, Eisler found the same sort of “dominate or be dominated” fear, that drove the Nazis her family fled. She grew convinced that there has always been an alternative to such “realism”. The Bible amply testifies to such an alternative, which Eisler calls “partnership”.
By “partnership”, Eisler means relations of mutual support and mutual gain. In partnership, power is “power with” others, not “power over” them. It is the positive power to nurture and stimulate life rather than the power to control or destroy it. Morality from a partnership view means honoring people as fellow souls, not ranking them as superior or inferior beings. Of course Eisler recognizes that different people have different degrees of influence and ability. There are valid “hierarchies of actualization” in personal growth and accomplishment, which should not be confused with “hierarchies of domination”. Some people in every situation are teachers and leaders, while others are learners and followers. But in a context of partnership, the leaders and teachers try to raise the others to greater selfhood — not to keep them permanently subordinate.
From her studies of history Eisler came to see our whole civilization as caught in a tension between partnership and dominator values. Both kinds of culture and morality competed through the pages of the Bible, as they did in the pages of other history books. Eisler undertook to disentangle the strands of these traditions, to clarify her spiritual choices, and create her own vision to live by:
We need standards for what traditions should be strengthened or left behind. Slavery, serfdom, and public stonings of women once were, and in some places still are, cultural traditions. They are cultural traditions appropriate to maintain dominator relations. So when we look at cultural traditions, the key question is what kind of relations do they maintain? … We should ask if a cultural tradition promotes cruelty and abuse or caring and respect.
Though Eisler was always more concerned with society in general than religion in particular, she felt an inescapable need to confront and reclaim our religious heritage:
Sorting out partnership from dominator teachings in our scriptures is one of the greatest challenges. It isn’t easy. There is much opposition, both inside and outside of us. But if we do nothing, we can’t successfully counter the religious hate-mongering regaining strength today in both East and West. … We need to expose those who use the name of God to perpetrate cruelty, violence and pain. [And] We need to counter those who would indiscriminately discard all religious teachings.
Concerning the Jewish heritage she wrote,
… much in Western Civilization that is humane and just was derived from the teachings of the Hebrew prophets. For example, many of the teachings of Isaiah, from which many of the later teachings of Jesus derived, are designed for a partnership rather than a dominator society. Nonetheless, interlaced with what is humane and uplifting, much of what we find in the Judeo-Christian Bible is a network of myths and laws designed to impose, maintain, and perpetuate a dominator system of social and economic organization.
In the New Testament also Eisler found contrasts between teachings of mutual love, and other words requiring obedience as the primary virtue for inferiors, women, and slaves. With comments inviting further inquiry she said,
[Jesus] rejected the dogma that high-ranking men — in Jesus’ day, priests, nobles, rich men and kings — are the favorites of God. He mingled freely with women, thus openly rejecting the male-supremacist norms of his time. And in sharp contrast to the views of later Christian sages, who actually debated whether woman has an immortal soul, Jesus did not preach the ultimate dominator message: that women are spiritually inferior to men.
I read Eisler’s book The Chalice & the Blade in 1988, after returning from seven years of village development work in Africa and Asia. Her insights helped me make sense of the painful situations I saw in those countries. During my years outside North America I had turned my back on organized Christianity. I saw it as a religion of colonial conquest and racism. When I finally came to reexamine that tradition, I was, like Eisler, both re-inspired and freshly horrified by the history of my faith.
Partnership and Dominator Christianity
In my reading over the next several years I grew increasingly grateful to a third hero of my life, the late Joseph Campbell. Campbell was a lapsed Catholic, who proposed a rather simple explanation for the seeming “double nature” of our religions. In the Bible, he says, we see a series of commandments to love the other as oneself. But the ancient hearers of this message tended to apply this only to the limited circle of “their own people”. Toward those they regarded as outsiders, they often claimed that God required a virtually opposite standard: “You shall put all their males to the sword, but the women … you shall take as booty to yourselves.” (Deuteronomy 20:13–14). Likewise in early Islam, Campbell explains that the world was divided in two — into the realm of Islamic peace where the law of brother love applied, and the realm of war beyond. Perhaps this was the basic double standard: one “law” for insiders, and another for outsiders. The lines of such division appeared quite naturally in the limited horizons of ancient times, when boundaries between families, tribes, “enemies”, and the sexes, seemed God-given. But now, as Campbell argues, we know the world is one seamless circle. Any lines dividing “insiders” from “outsiders” are drawn inside our minds, by ourselves. I believe Jesus knew this 2,000 years ago — not that the world is round, but that we make our own social boundaries and double standards. If the divisions between “us” and “them” are inside our minds or hearts, then perhaps Jesus was dealing with a very personal matter. It was a matter for introspection and, in modern terms, psychology. He was dealing with the boundaries of love in our hearts, or the lines we draw between the loved and the unloved.
Before reading Eisler and Campbell, I used to think of “spiritual growth” as a matter of obeying rules ever more strictly, toward a vanishing point of perfect compliance. And that would be the sort of goal which ancient despotic rulers set for their subjects, while claiming to represent a great monarch in the sky. In that old despotic context, to sin was to disobey an order from above. Some people claimed that Jesus was good because he was sinless, which meant he was a model of absolute obedience to higher authority. The gospels, however, describe Jesus as constantly breaking “religious” rules, much to the alarm of priests and lawyers. Now I could make more sense of Jesus’ contradictory behavior. I think he broke the rules upholding divisions between communities, or between men and women. Instead of defending social barriers between higher and lower, or loved and unloved people, he tried to bridge those boundaries. That may be why he ignored the traditional “religious” barriers between Jews and Samaritans, or the taboos on speaking and eating with women. He ignored the social gulf between masters and subjects, and “polluted himself” by eating with tax collectors or prostitutes. Perhaps, according to Jesus, the greatest fulfillment of God’s law would be to treat them all as insiders of God’s kingdom. That is what a woman called Sister Johanna thinks, as she works modern Bethlehem trying to heal the current divisions between Jews, Christians and Muslims: “Jesus’ message was love without borders. … If you close your heart to even one person, it’s not yet divine love. In the world you are always making a border in the heart.”
In studying church history, I am curious to know how the partnership and dominator varieties of Christianity evolved over time. I want to see how my faith might look without a dominator context. I found many examples of believers who really treated all people as beloved neighbors in God’s kingdom. But probably most Christians in history felt torn between conflicting values. While trying to achieve partnership with those they deemed equals, they felt it necessary to apply other standards toward “outsiders”. Some believers tried to uphold firm divisions between God’s church and profane society. Later clergymen claimed that their church was the only portal to salvation from a world of the damned. Salvation, they insisted, depended on blind obedience to certain church authorities. As various independent teachers offered different messages based on such different assumptions, the institutional church heads often tried to defend God by eliminating or “excommunicating” their spiritual competitors. For a taste of such claims to exclusive ownership of the Gospel, let me quote Tertullian of Carthage, from around the year 200:
Thus, not being [genuine] Christians, they have acquired no right to the Christian Scriptures; and it may be very fairly said to them, “Who are you? When and whence do you come? As you are none of mine, what are you doing on my property? Indeed, Marcion, by what right do you hew my wood? By whose permission, Valentinus, are you diverting my streams? By what power, Apelles, are you removing my landmarks? This is my property. I have long possessed it; I possessed it before you. I hold sure title deeds from the original owners themselves, to whom the estate belonged. I am the heir of the apostles. Just as they disposed of it by their will, and committed it to a trust, and adjured the trustees, even so do I hold it. As for you, they have, it is certain, always held you as disinherited, and rejected you as outsiders, as enemies.
As different visions of Christianity prevailed in different times and places, the history of Christianity grew checkered. And among many voices claiming to be truly Christian, all listeners had to choose what to believe. The competition between radically different visions of the faith could be creative, but it often grew violent in the pursuit of eliminating critics. In our time, what Karen Armstrong calls a “battle for God” has expanded into a momentous debate over which dreams and core values will guide a planetary community. In a world of global corporate agendas and popular fundamentalist “backlash”, people of all religions have had to reexamine which aspects of their heritage are most essential.
This book is part of my own quest to find the heart of the Gospel. I have looked for it both the Bible and in the later history of interaction between different Christians. In the account that follows there is probably not a single original insight. Only in the application of screen of contrast between partnership or dominator values does this book make a contribution to understanding Christian history. I think the faith has always grown through real encounter between people, and its dramatic history since biblical times is no less revealing than the Bible story itself. It seems to me that encounters between different people are always a cause for introspection and self-renewal, and this has always been the main way we meet God. Our encounters with others are “corrupting” or oppressive only where one party sees nothing of God in the other. Even interaction with people of different religions has been mainly a stimulus to awareness. My encounters with Riane Eisler or my Muslim friend Nina did not “compromise” my faith; they re-inspired it. I had to consider that if Muslims and Jews can deal with the dominator side of their traditions and recover their heritage of compassionate partnership, then Christians like myself can do more of the same.