Blessed Assurance: Jews, Jesuits, Homosexuals, and Communists Oh My!
Oh yes, and witches.
The 1950's to the 70's were a troubled time. Out beyond the beaches of Key West, Biloxi and Galveston the Commies were setting up on Cuba and spreading their tentacles across Latin America. Back at home the tremors of social change were going to become the earthquake of the civil rights movement. There wouldn't be enough white robes, lynchings, and assassinations to keep the schools from being segregated and African Americans from having the right to vote. Then there were the original "culture wars" with Bill Buckley faced off against Dr. Benjamin Spock. The elite that had run the country was suddenly divided.
In my home town the school district was in a long legal battle over segregation, one that it would decisively loose in 1972. The heartbeat of the Richardson economy was the defense industry, and in homage to our fathers we all wore three piece suits to church. But we were watching the anti-war protests on TV, and hearing the strains of "four dead in Ohio." Nor could the hippies and the psychedelic movement be escaped. The Baptists tried to keep their youth engaged on Friday nights with glow paint, black lights, and sofas while the Methodist youth center featured sing-a-longs to John Denver and rooms dedicated to Dungeons and Dragons. Only those totally disengaged didn't know there were drugs available, both at church and in school. Long hair on boys and short skirts on girls became inevitable.
And, oh yes, Methodism was already declining in membership. From being the largest denomination in the United States in the 1950's it was steadily slipping behind the Southern Baptists.
Then when I was about 15 or 16 someone gave me a Chick publication. I’m not sure whether it was from someone in Young Life, the FCA, or a youth group leader. Maybe all three. Certainly available in the local Christian bookstore run by members of my church.
Amazingly this little tract was about two scholars, Westcott and Hort, who had created the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament and launched the movement to revise God's word.
To understand why this was such a big deal you need to consider the peculiar relationship between Americans and the Bible.
In a “new world" and especially on the frontier the authority of the Bible was almost the last ground upon which Christians could claim a sense of stability and empowerment in their possession. For New World denominations like Methodists and Baptists the reliability of the Bible became the main guarantor that a social order even existed for its far flung readers. With no priests, the barest online of a liturgy, and in many cases a disdain for creeds, God's Word was the tangible sign of God's presence - always found the home altar even among the illiterate.
Out in the deep woods, far from cities or even towns, on the trackless prairies and often surrounded by humans whose ways seemed inscrutable, even barbarian, where could you find a sense that you lived in an ordered world? “This is my Father’s World” with its quasi nature worship, or the poems of Whittier and their gentle pantheism were fine for the mild climate of England or the well-settled Eastern seaboard. Try singing them in the face of prairie fire, blue norther, or tornado. In the face of chaos the Bible promised, and indeed created order. In a world that could turn chaotic in a heartbeat you needed promises to stand on.
And before Westcott and Hort the King James Version of the Bible had been the solid ground on which Southern Christianity could stand. The Yankees and their carpetbaggers could overturn the old social order. The suffragettes and their acolytes could shake the foundations of the family. But the KJV, build on the Textus Receptus, was a rock.
Until Westcott and Hort and those who followed with their hermeneutics and extra-Jesus began chipping away at it, noting that the "received text" wasn't received from Jesus, but from a French humanist name Erasmus.
Well by the 1960's Samuel Gipp, Th.D and Chick Publications weren't having it. They were going to tell the truth about Westcott and Hort. So they accused the scholars of: 1. being products of a Jesuit conspiracy to re-romanize England, 2. being homosexuals, 3. being socialists, pacifists, evolutionists, and communists. 4. and being "spiritualists" who flirted with sorcery and witchcraft. (Don’t search, just check out chick.com and go from there.) Eventually, because they always fall together, "world Jewry" was drawn into the conspiracy.
Westcott and Hort and their critical edition of the New Testament became the sum of all fears. They were simultaneously Jews, Jesuits, Homosexuals, Communists, and Spiritualists/Sorcerers. I only wish I could have led such an active social life.
Of course this would just be a bunch of paranoid craziness if it hadn’t been so widespread in Christian circles. Because finally someone had put a focus to our anxiety that attached it to our deepest source of security: the Bible.
These tracts were enthusiastically circulated among the youth I knew in the 1960’s and 1970’s and later, not least in my UM youth group. And I saw their influence as my own peers going into ministry chose DTS, where Zane Hodges had was trying to reinvigorate the textual debate over Westcott and Hort while maintaining a barely respectable distance from accusations about their motives. (The Hodges thesis had the Textus Receptus transmitted through various theologically pure groups in a chain leading more directly to the Holy Land than through Alexandria.)
In the Methodist circles I ran in I don't recall overtly anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish preaching, although you could sure hear it in the Bible studies, around dinner tables, and in the larger social discourse.
But the United Methodist embrace of the Chick advocated idea of a “gay agenda” was right out in public. The little Chick tract “The Gay Blade” was there, making the rounds of the youth group warning us that we were being seduced into deviant sexual behavior and a "homosexual lifestyle.” Coming from a family with no investment in the KJV, and too focused on the prospects of non-deviant sexual behavior to really notice anything else, all this never bothered me like it does some. but it bothered some people enough to single out homosexuality as the focus of UM debate for decades.
So it is hardly an accident that in these years we saw movements within American evanglicalism that vigorously linked maintaining scriptural authority with the suppression of homosexuality. In the mind of evangelical Christians the rise of the homosexual agenda was the clearest bellwether of the decline of scriptural authority. After all, it began with two supposedly gay men.
Speaking of chains of authorization. It is time to break that link. Neither sexual orientation, nor behavior, nor any of the other supposed imagined sin or social movement is responsible for shifting sands of Biblical translation and exegesis on which Christians try to make their daily walk. The roots are deeper, and may be laid at the feet of Luther and the first Reformers. It is they that decided individual Christians should study the Bible for personal edification. And it was a burgeoning Enlightenment epistemology that told individuals that they could draw their own conclusions with regard to whether what it said was true.
You can't get that genie back in the bottle just by cracking down on one of the endless list of supposed sins that clergy might engage in. You would need a new inquisition and list of questions for boards of ordained ministry as long as the Bible itself.
We (all of us) need to find a coherent, agreed, means of moving from text to conclusion that is neither idiosyncratic nor incoherent, and is more intelligible than our current "majority vote wins" model. That model is a pure product of the Enlightenment. It is inconsistent with the epistemological claims of the current majority and lacking credibility with a large minority of the church.
A good start for thinking about this would be Billy Abraham's Canon and Authority. A good start for enacting it would be to jettison everything in our Discipline arising past that Council of Constantinople as having binding authority on the belief or behavior of any United Methodist.
Breaking news: You might want to check out the book: Holy Love, by Steve Harper - a former leader of the Good News Movement and former professor at Asbury for a personal and scriptural look at same-sex marriage in both scripture and the historical context of the UMC.
The 1950's to the 70's were a troubled time. Out beyond the beaches of Key West, Biloxi and Galveston the Commies were setting up on Cuba and spreading their tentacles across Latin America. Back at home the tremors of social change were going to become the earthquake of the civil rights movement. There wouldn't be enough white robes, lynchings, and assassinations to keep the schools from being segregated and African Americans from having the right to vote. Then there were the original "culture wars" with Bill Buckley faced off against Dr. Benjamin Spock. The elite that had run the country was suddenly divided.
In my home town the school district was in a long legal battle over segregation, one that it would decisively loose in 1972. The heartbeat of the Richardson economy was the defense industry, and in homage to our fathers we all wore three piece suits to church. But we were watching the anti-war protests on TV, and hearing the strains of "four dead in Ohio." Nor could the hippies and the psychedelic movement be escaped. The Baptists tried to keep their youth engaged on Friday nights with glow paint, black lights, and sofas while the Methodist youth center featured sing-a-longs to John Denver and rooms dedicated to Dungeons and Dragons. Only those totally disengaged didn't know there were drugs available, both at church and in school. Long hair on boys and short skirts on girls became inevitable.
And, oh yes, Methodism was already declining in membership. From being the largest denomination in the United States in the 1950's it was steadily slipping behind the Southern Baptists.
Then when I was about 15 or 16 someone gave me a Chick publication. I’m not sure whether it was from someone in Young Life, the FCA, or a youth group leader. Maybe all three. Certainly available in the local Christian bookstore run by members of my church.
Amazingly this little tract was about two scholars, Westcott and Hort, who had created the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament and launched the movement to revise God's word.
To understand why this was such a big deal you need to consider the peculiar relationship between Americans and the Bible.
In a “new world" and especially on the frontier the authority of the Bible was almost the last ground upon which Christians could claim a sense of stability and empowerment in their possession. For New World denominations like Methodists and Baptists the reliability of the Bible became the main guarantor that a social order even existed for its far flung readers. With no priests, the barest online of a liturgy, and in many cases a disdain for creeds, God's Word was the tangible sign of God's presence - always found the home altar even among the illiterate.
Out in the deep woods, far from cities or even towns, on the trackless prairies and often surrounded by humans whose ways seemed inscrutable, even barbarian, where could you find a sense that you lived in an ordered world? “This is my Father’s World” with its quasi nature worship, or the poems of Whittier and their gentle pantheism were fine for the mild climate of England or the well-settled Eastern seaboard. Try singing them in the face of prairie fire, blue norther, or tornado. In the face of chaos the Bible promised, and indeed created order. In a world that could turn chaotic in a heartbeat you needed promises to stand on.
And before Westcott and Hort the King James Version of the Bible had been the solid ground on which Southern Christianity could stand. The Yankees and their carpetbaggers could overturn the old social order. The suffragettes and their acolytes could shake the foundations of the family. But the KJV, build on the Textus Receptus, was a rock.
Until Westcott and Hort and those who followed with their hermeneutics and extra-Jesus began chipping away at it, noting that the "received text" wasn't received from Jesus, but from a French humanist name Erasmus.
Well by the 1960's Samuel Gipp, Th.D and Chick Publications weren't having it. They were going to tell the truth about Westcott and Hort. So they accused the scholars of: 1. being products of a Jesuit conspiracy to re-romanize England, 2. being homosexuals, 3. being socialists, pacifists, evolutionists, and communists. 4. and being "spiritualists" who flirted with sorcery and witchcraft. (Don’t search, just check out chick.com and go from there.) Eventually, because they always fall together, "world Jewry" was drawn into the conspiracy.
Westcott and Hort and their critical edition of the New Testament became the sum of all fears. They were simultaneously Jews, Jesuits, Homosexuals, Communists, and Spiritualists/Sorcerers. I only wish I could have led such an active social life.
Of course this would just be a bunch of paranoid craziness if it hadn’t been so widespread in Christian circles. Because finally someone had put a focus to our anxiety that attached it to our deepest source of security: the Bible.
These tracts were enthusiastically circulated among the youth I knew in the 1960’s and 1970’s and later, not least in my UM youth group. And I saw their influence as my own peers going into ministry chose DTS, where Zane Hodges had was trying to reinvigorate the textual debate over Westcott and Hort while maintaining a barely respectable distance from accusations about their motives. (The Hodges thesis had the Textus Receptus transmitted through various theologically pure groups in a chain leading more directly to the Holy Land than through Alexandria.)
In the Methodist circles I ran in I don't recall overtly anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish preaching, although you could sure hear it in the Bible studies, around dinner tables, and in the larger social discourse.
But the United Methodist embrace of the Chick advocated idea of a “gay agenda” was right out in public. The little Chick tract “The Gay Blade” was there, making the rounds of the youth group warning us that we were being seduced into deviant sexual behavior and a "homosexual lifestyle.” Coming from a family with no investment in the KJV, and too focused on the prospects of non-deviant sexual behavior to really notice anything else, all this never bothered me like it does some. but it bothered some people enough to single out homosexuality as the focus of UM debate for decades.
So it is hardly an accident that in these years we saw movements within American evanglicalism that vigorously linked maintaining scriptural authority with the suppression of homosexuality. In the mind of evangelical Christians the rise of the homosexual agenda was the clearest bellwether of the decline of scriptural authority. After all, it began with two supposedly gay men.
Speaking of chains of authorization. It is time to break that link. Neither sexual orientation, nor behavior, nor any of the other supposed imagined sin or social movement is responsible for shifting sands of Biblical translation and exegesis on which Christians try to make their daily walk. The roots are deeper, and may be laid at the feet of Luther and the first Reformers. It is they that decided individual Christians should study the Bible for personal edification. And it was a burgeoning Enlightenment epistemology that told individuals that they could draw their own conclusions with regard to whether what it said was true.
You can't get that genie back in the bottle just by cracking down on one of the endless list of supposed sins that clergy might engage in. You would need a new inquisition and list of questions for boards of ordained ministry as long as the Bible itself.
We (all of us) need to find a coherent, agreed, means of moving from text to conclusion that is neither idiosyncratic nor incoherent, and is more intelligible than our current "majority vote wins" model. That model is a pure product of the Enlightenment. It is inconsistent with the epistemological claims of the current majority and lacking credibility with a large minority of the church.
A good start for thinking about this would be Billy Abraham's Canon and Authority. A good start for enacting it would be to jettison everything in our Discipline arising past that Council of Constantinople as having binding authority on the belief or behavior of any United Methodist.
Breaking news: You might want to check out the book: Holy Love, by Steve Harper - a former leader of the Good News Movement and former professor at Asbury for a personal and scriptural look at same-sex marriage in both scripture and the historical context of the UMC.
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