Re: Pastor John Hagee
Date: May 24, 2008 09:46PM
Sigh. You are dead on. Years ago, a professor at one of the seminaries in Berkeley California, told us how we had to watch out for what she called 'Berkeley bias'--that knee jerk condescension in relation to persons who
did not happen share our liberal bias.
W.B Yeats wrote a lovely poem that ends with the refrain,'Walk softly, for you walk on my dreams.'
Ever the more so when people's hearts are concerned.
Peter Brown wrote a book on various theologies of body and sexuality that
existed in the late-classical world, entitled The Body and Society.
At the introduction, of the book, Professor Brown wrote:
"...it would be deeply inhumane to deny that, in these centuries, real men and women faced desperate choices; endured privation and physical pain, courted breakdown and bitter disillusionment, and frequenty experienced themselves and addressed others, with a searing violence of language....The very matter of fact manner in which monastic sources report bloody, botched attempts at self-castration by desperate monks shocks us by its lack of surprise...
'The texts bring us up against pains and sadnesses that lie as close to us as our own flesh. The historian's obligation to the truth forces us to strive to make these texs intelligible, with all the cunning and serenity that would would wish to associate with a living, modern culture.
'But the reader must remain aware that understanding is no substitute for compassion. This book will have failed in its deepest purpose if the elaborate, and strictly necessary, strategies involved in the recovery of a distant age were considered to have explained away, to have diminished or, worse still, to have stared through the brutal cost of commitment in any age, The Early Church included.'
(Peter Brown, Preface, page xvii, The Body and Society:Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 1988)
We have to find a way to respect the risks taken by persons who want to pay the brutal cost of commitment.
At at the same time, we have obligations as citizens of a participatory democracy.
We must, while respecting the sincerity of those persons who have been taken onto a trajectory of commitment, protect our participatory democracy if that trajectory of commitment, however sincere, has as its penultimate goal the subversion of our democracy and demands that elected officials deny their oath of office and place a particular interpretation of Greek Scripture ahead of the US Constitution and the body of Anglo-American common law.
To have the respect I see modelled for us by Peter Brown, and to have it under the pressure of disagreeing with social agendas that are well funded and patronized by powerful persons...that is an achievement that will take a lifetime.
I am not there and have written too many snarky things in my time. I can only hope to remember and quote Professor Brown when, occasionally, I remember to try and become a better person in what time I still have left.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2008 09:55PM by corboy.