Where Were You?

There are millions of words and images everywhere this weekend as we mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, and I hesitate to add more to them but will, in order to ask a question.

Where were you when it happened? My story is unusual because I was on an airplane, flying from Detroit to Indianapolis. The plane did a 180 degree turn and the pilot came on the intercom and told us we were returning to Detroit because of an “air traffic control event” and that all planes were being ordered to the ground. I couldn’t imagine what that could possibly mean and wondered if he was lying to us because there was something seriously wrong with our plane. Before long someone used a cell phone (which, of course, they weren’t supposed to be doing on a plane) and told us that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. I remember someone on the plane angrily saying, “What’s that got to do with Indianapolis.” I wonder if that person remembers saying that. I bet they’d like a “do-over” of that moment. Getting a rental car amid the chaos of the Detroit airport was surreal, and then I still had to drive to Indianapolis. There were bizarre scenes along the way – there were lines at gas stations of people who figured World War III was starting and some gas stations tripled and quadrupled their prices. I also remember pulling off the highway in Anderson, Indiana and passing the “Hoosier Girls” strip club that had a sign out front that said “Pray for America.” I’d never really thought much about the relationship of strip clubs and prayer before that moment. I finally got to Indianapolis eight or nine hours later than I was supposed to, and only then did I see the video of the towers in New York falling and start to really absorb the devastation that had happened. Where were you?

Whither Labor?

Labor Day feels like the inverse of Memorial Day – both holidays mark the change in season more than commemorate anything specific. It’s not like folks stay at home on Labor Day contemplating the legacies of Samuel Gompers or George Meany. People around here head to the lake for one last long weekend because summer is ending and if Labor Day means anything, it means we all get a day off to rest from our labors.

Organized labor as a force is fading fast in our culture. Pay attention to the media and ask how many positive references you hear to labor unions. Unions get the blame for coddled, unproductive workers, high costs and low profits.

On top of that, the new Beloit College Mindset list just came out, the list created annually to capture the worldview of freshman entering college. (The list mostly succeeds in showing the rest of us how old we are.) Number four on this year’s list is: “The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major-league sports.”

That’s not how it used to be.

Sometime around 1970 my father told my brother and me that there was going to be a strike at the Fisher Body II plant by our house. He worked a few miles away at Fisher Body I. We hopped the fence that separated our sub-division from Fisher II and, sure enough, at the appointed hour a hoard of people came streaming out of the factory. A few of them hoisted placards and started picketing. A piece of paper blew across the road to where we were and my brother picked it up. We now had a copy of the lyrics of the union’s marching hymn Solidarity Forever. We joyfully sang along with those on the picket line: When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun, yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, for the union makes us strong….

But it wasn’t all marching and singing. There was definitely violence in the air. I remember someone came barreling into the plant entrance and tried to drive a car through the picket line. The way was blocked and there was a lot of shouting and cussing and rocking and pounding of the car. A stalemate ensued until some plant security officers came out and rescued whoever was trying to get in.

If my memory is correct, the strike at Fisher II was never settled. Not that it mattered in the long run – Fisher Body is long gone, and if the Federal Government hadn’t intervened a few years ago there’s a good possibility that General Motors itself might have gone under. The struggles of Flint, Michigan, where the drama of the strike at Fisher II played out, have been well documented by Michael Moore.

I’ve sometimes ridiculed Michael Moore because he actually grew up in the suburbs while I grew up in the city. Truth be told, though, his father was a blue collar, hourly employee at AC Spark Plug on Flint’s east side. My father was a white collar, salaried GM employee and we lived on the southwest side of town. My father spent his career in “labor relations,” which meant he was locked in a slow dance with the United Auto Workers for about 30 years. The UAW was anathema to him. In my father’s retirement he’s seen benefit after benefit stripped away as GM has struggled financially. Things like pension payments, life insurance policies and health care provisions have all been cut or reduced. In addition, the GM stock he accumulated over the years is now worthless. Ironically, the blue collar UAW retirees have had more of their benefits preserved because of the strength of collective bargaining. Somebody should have started a union for the white collar retirees!

I think about the assumptions labor and management made about the world a generation ago. They assumed they should be in conflict with each other. They assumed unreliable, ugly, gas-guzzling automobiles would always be in demand. They assumed it was okay to spend your life doing mind-numbing work that required few skills and little education. They assumed people worked only for money and didn’t need things like inspiration, hope or beauty in their work lives. They assumed General Motors, the largest corporation in the world in those days, was invulnerable. Neither side thought much about what mutual goals they had. Instead, they fought and fought to beat each other and get a bigger piece of the pie than they had before.

The future, for any company or corporate entity, and for any labor organization, is in cooperation instead of conflict, in inclusiveness instead of exclusiveness. Who can afford the kind of acrimony and combativeness I witnessed as a youth at Fisher II? Go back to the Beloit College list. Only in professional sports, where millionaires bicker with billionaires, can people afford strikes and lock outs. In the real world, happy are the employers who have learned the lessons of the labor movement and come to value the unique contributions every employee brings, who share ownership, who build cultures where everyone is an insider. The future belongs to them.

It Happened Again

For the second time this week, a post of mine is up on ThinkChristian.net

In the meantime, I've been occupied working on a book for Young Life on the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the Castaway Club camp in Minnesota. I've been doing research and interviews, digging through the camp archives and finding things like a list of the camp staff in July of 1978 which had both my wife and college roommate (but not me) on it. The Castaway book won't be done anytime soon, but I wanted you to know I'm not just sitting around writing for other blogs at the expense of my own this week.

Missionaries or Soldiers?

Woke up this morning in Minnesota and just walked in the door tonight after a 15- hour drive to discover an article I wrote for another blog called ThinkChristian was put up today. Interesting to see this at the end of the day and read some initial comments. One I like quite a bit and one made me bristle. If you had read the blog I used to do in Europe you probably recognize the story I used, but I re-purposed it for this blog. I’d love it if you took a look and posted a comment.

Soft Male Beds

A funny thing happened to me this week when I was trying to write a devotional on I Corinthians 6. I read verses 9 and 10. Talk about accidentally falling into something big. I am reminded about how important it is to do the meticulous work of careful translation before opening your mouth on an issue.

Here’s what those verses say in the TNIV, the translation I was reading at the time: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

The phrase “practicing homosexuals” caught my attention. Actually, it was the word “practicing.” In recent years a distinction has been made in some religious circles between those with homosexual orientation and those who engage in homosexual acts. The belief is it is not a sin to be gay as long as you remain celibate. (This line of reasoning acknowledges that homosexuality may be genetic and not a choice after all.) I’m not really interested in commenting here on that school of thought – I’m interested in how the TNIV came up with the phrase “practicing homosexuals.” Surely, I thought, that is a modern notion and not what the ancient text actually says.

So I grabbed half a dozen other Bible translations as well as a Greek Bible and Dictionary to satisfy my curiosity. After reading, all I could say was, “Holy Homophobia!” I wasn’t prepared for the difference between what the Greek text says and how the words are translated.

There are two Greek words at play in verse nine. One is malakoi, translated in the TNIV as “male prostitutes” and the other is arsenekoitai, translated in the TNIV as “practicing homosexuals.”

Here is a list of what I found. First you’ll see the abbreviation of the translation I looked at, then how that translation renders malakoi and next how it renders arsenekoitai.

TNIV / male prostitutes / practicing homosexuals
NRSV / male prostitutes / sodomites
NIV / male prostitutes / homosexual offenders
NASB / effeminate / homosexuals
ESV / men who practice homosexuality*
KJV / effeminate / abusers of themselves with mankind
Actual Greek / soft / male bed

* The ESV has a footnote saying the two Greek terms refer to the passive and active partners in consensual male homosexual acts.

If you wonder how you get from “soft” to “male prostitutes” or “male bed” to “sodomites,” you are not alone. Did I ever stumble onto a hornet’s nest! In the past couple of days I’ve been reading all I can find about these two Greek words and how they have been understood over the years. I’ve read both conservative and liberal arguments and if you want to read those things google “I Corinthians 6:9 translation arguments” and have at it. You can read paragraph after paragraph of speculation about what Paul really meant. My guess is whatever point of view you bring with you into the argument will be the one you leave with. And I feel like the point of view the translators brought with them to the argument was the one they went ahead and translated the verse with. (I find the English Standard Version footnote the most curious example of this.) The translation issues around these two words don’t solve anything – rather, they create all sorts of questions.

There are at least six things to note.

1. Malakoi is used at other times in the New Testament to refer to soft clothing. But Paul certainly couldn’t have had that usage in mind here. He meant soft people. John Wesley thought it meant people who lived in an easy, indolent way. Others sexualize the word. I can see how the King James guys got from soft to “effeminate,” although I wonder what effeminate meant in 1611. (And isn’t that translation offensive to women?) But how do you get from soft (or even effeminate) to “male prostitutes”?

2. Arsenekoitai is a compound word, made up of the Greek words for “male” and “bed.” There is no known usage of it in ancient Greek writings. It appears to be a word coined by Paul and is only used in the Bible here and in a similar list in I Timothy. It is impossible to be certain how to translate the word. Does it mean males who use their beds for illicit purposes? Perhaps it (rather than malakoi) is a reference to the male prostitutes working in the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth. If that’s the case, it could have homosexual overtones, but male prostitutes didn’t exclusively serve male customers. And if it is a reference to male prostitutes, isn’t it then a reference to people who are sexually indiscriminate instead of being sexually responsible? I don’t think all homosexuals are prostitutes any more than I think all heterosexuals are prostitutes.

3. Since we do know arsenekoitai does have the word male in it, if Paul is saying something about homosexuality, lesbians get a free pass.

4. If you are wondering if Paul meant homosexual why he didn’t just use that word, it is because homosexual is a recent term, unknown both in the time the Bible was written and unknown even when the King James Bible was translated. There were other common words for homosexuality at the time of Paul but he doesn’t use them. Why not? There is plenty of speculation on both sides of the issue about Paul’s choice of words but no definitive answer.

5. There are an awful lot of people (again on both sides of the issue) very certain about the meaning of a passage that is fraught with translation difficulty.

6. I can’t imagine what it might feel like for a homosexual person to know these words are unclear and then have them so definitively and negatively translated. Or what it might feel like for a homosexual person who doesn’t know they are unclear to simply read the way most versions of the Bible translate them.

As is often the case, I find the recent translation in The Message by Eugene Peterson helpful. His rendering of I Corinthians 6:9,10 says “Don’t you realize this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom.” I think that captures what Paul had in mind without making translation leaps or stigmatizing people with labels and expresses Paul’s meaning in a way that will get us nodding our heads in agreement instead of getting out our megaphones and yelling at each other. What do you think?

Jim Leyland, Biblical Inerrancy and the Presidential Campaign

I voted for Jim Leyland once. I won’t tell you what the election was, but I was so disgusted with the candidates that I felt on the whole the manager of the Detroit Tigers would do a better job of leadership so I wrote his name in. If you’ve ever listened to Leyland semi-coherently grumble his way through a post-game interview, you understand “politician” is not a word that will ever be used to describe him.

Having said that, I should also admit I have a certain amount of sympathy for those who do choose to seek office because they are put under such an amazing microscope. I wouldn’t want that done to me -- I say stupid stuff all the time I wouldn’t want posted on YouTube.

For example, did you see the video last week of Rick Perry answering a little boy’s question about how old the earth was and then talking about evolution as a theory that has some gaps in it? Part of me said, “Hey, he’s referring to my last blog entry” and part of me wondered what difference his views on evolution could possibly make on his qualifications to be President.

But perhaps you wonder why Perry thinks the way he does. At least part of the answer comes in how he reads and interprets the Bible. This election is unique because there are two bona fide Biblical inerrantists running for President – Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. Inerrancy is the view that the Bible has no errors. I don’t believe this. I believe the Bible is inspired by God and has no errors in the things it was designed to teach – matters of salvation, namely – but that in things it was not designed to teach (like biology or astronomy) the Bible is consistent with the ancient worldviews and understandings of its authors.

It would seem on the surface that someone who holds to inerrancy rejects reason in the name of faith. But there is an irony here, and in reality it is faith that gets rejected for reason in the inerrant world view.

The appeal of inerrancy is that it is black and white. Rationalism and logic triumph over faith, because faith is not black and white at all. Faith is about belief in the mysterious and unseen, and faith has the ability to hold contradictory notions in your head at the same time and know that both are true. Reason says if A is true than B is false, faith says A and B and even C can all be true at the same time.

200 years ago it was easier for people to say “Slavery is endorsed by the Bible” than for people to say, “Even though the Bible has verses that say things about slaves obeying their masters, the writers of the Bible never imagined slavery the way we have it today, and what Jesus said about loving your neighbor as yourself is far more significant.”

30 years ago it was easier for people to say, “Women should be silent in church” than for people to say, “Wait a minute, the same passage also says women should keep their heads covered in church and the guy who wrote all of that actually acknowledged women in leadership in the early church.”

Biblical interpretation is hard work and there often are not clear answers. Why is the church so torn on homosexuality? One reason is that there are legitimate Biblical viewpoints on each side of the argument. But if you are an inerrantist, there is no argument.

Inerrancy offers clear and quick answers. It works for sound bites. But ultimately it reflects an unwillingness to live with contradictions and gray areas. That, it seems to me, does have a lot to do with someone’s approach to being President.

We have an election coming and I find myself less than inspired by the candidates. At the same time we’re late in the baseball season and the Detroit Tigers are in first place. Jim Leyland seems to be pushing all the right buttons and seems smarter than ever. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that if you asked Leyland about Biblical inerrancy, he’d take a drag on one of his ever-present cigarettes and look at you like you were crazy. He could talk about the errors Wilson Betemit makes at third base and why that led him to call Brandon Inge back up from Toledo at what was just the right time, but Biblical inerrancy?

I’m feeling that urge for a write-in vote again.

Adam and Eve and the Nature of Truth

You might find it helpful to look at this link to a recent NPR story about Evangelical scholars questioning the historicity of Adam and Eve before reading my comments below.

I vividly remember being frustrated when I went to seminary 30 years ago when none of my professors would give me a straight answer on the existence of Adam and Eve. After reading the NPR story, I figure if I’d gone to Calvin Seminary, instead of Western Seminary, I might have gotten a straighter answer, but I’m not sure I would have gotten an answer that satisfied me. Besides wondering who was there to write everything down before Adam was created, I just couldn’t get my mind around a few of the facts presented in the first pages of the Bible – like how the world could have days before the creation of the sun, how people could live to be 600 or 700 years old, or how after Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel, Cain fled to the land of Nod where he and his wife had a son named Enoch. Where the heck did Cain’s wife come from? (“No doubt Can’s wife was a daughter of Adam,” a fundamentalist commentary I own says, and besides creeping me out, that explanation also makes me wonder what sort of God creates a world where incest is necessary and how many generations it would take to get the mutations that sort of coupling must have caused out of the human bloodstream. But I digress….)

I doubt any of my professors believed in a literal, historical Adam and Eve. You can draw your own conclusions about why they might be reticent to acknowledge that publicly, but I tend to think they were watching how this issue kept coming up a few miles down the road at Calvin and decided discretion served them better than disclosure. Who wants to upset their conservative wealthy donor base?

Having no donor base to alienate, I can freely say I don’t think we are supposed to understand the first chapters of Genesis literally. I quoted Father Richard Rohr in this blog a while ago saying, “Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.” In the NPR story, Fuzale Rana, the vice president of an organization called Reasons to Believe, is quoted as saying, "I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not."

I disagree with this statement. The presupposition behind it is that literalism is the sole gage of “ultimate truth.” I remember learning the story of the tortoise and the hare in elementary school and knowing the story was true even though there wasn’t a “real” race between a tortoise and a hare that ever happened. As a child I didn’t struggle with needing to know if something was literally true to believe it.

What my professors did teach me in seminary was what to have faith in. I was taught to reject the idea of putting my faith in the Bible and instead to believe in the God the Bible witnessed to, a God too big to ever be completely captured in the words on a page. That’s nuanced thinking, because I was also taught to have a very high view of scripture. I believe everything we need to know about creation, human nature and sin is found in the first chapters of Genesis. And I believe ultimately it doesn’t matter whether or not someone believes if Adam and Eve were historical characters. Except if you believe they were, you wind up saying creepy things like Cain married his sister. Yuck!