mipodcast moments

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As Latter-day Saints focus this year on the New Testament we’ll bring you insights to ponder from past episodes of the Maxwell Institute Podcast, hosted by Blair Hodges. This MIPodcast Moment is from Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish specialist of the New Testament. By reading the New Testament from a Jewish perspective she introduces Christian readers to new and challenging interpretations. Her book is called Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. Listen or read the freshly-created transcript here. BLAIR HODGES: Your book is written on the premise that many current readers of Jesus’s parables have taken away their edge, made them a little more safe. What are some reasons you think some people are prone to domesticate the parables?AMY-JILL LEVINE: There are several.The first is part of general Christian education. Little kids in churches get introduced to parables very early because they can kind of get a basic message out of them, like the prodigal son story means God loves us even if we screw up. Or the Good Samaritan means you help people by the side of the road. Or the mustard seed means God can do great things. All that’s fine. But it’s childish. But if children are taught parables as children’s stories then it’s very hard to make a shift over to say wait a minute, these may be adult stories speaking to adults. If we continue to look at them as children’s stories we will take the simplistic lesson, and we will not take the challenge. That’s part of the problem.Another part of the problem is, I think, that generally people really don’t want to be challenged. We just want to be comforted. We want to walk into a house of worship and be told that everything is okay and that God loves us and we should be inspired and we should be hopeful. That’s all well and good, but I think it’s insufficient. I think if we leave the house of worship feeling complacent and self-satisfied, congratulated for being good people, then that worship has not done its job. I think we should feel invigorated to be better than we already are. The Jewish scripture tells us that we’re made “just a little lower than the angels” . We ought to live up to that.HODGES: So on that point there’s a parable that you talk about, the tax collector and the Pharisee. The Pharisee and the tax collector go to the temple to pray, and the Pharisee says, “I thank you that I’m not a sinner and a terrible person, or even like this here tax collector.” And then the tax collector says, “God have mercy on me, I’m a sinner,” and hits his breast and then it says that one of them returned home justified.The typical reading of that parable would support the point you just made, that we often go to worship to be comforted and to feel good about ourselves but perhaps should also be discomfited. And that’s the typical reading of the tax collector and the Pharisee. But you actually challenge that reading. I want you to talk about that because that’s one of my favorite excerpts of the New Testament and you really turned the tables on me.LEVINE: Well good. Now, I’m not sure I would want to date that Pharisee. But I have no reason to think that he’s lying to God. That would be inopportune for him to do. He’s really a Super-Pharisee. He does more than any Pharisee would be expected to do. Fasting as a form of self-discipline, tithing, everything. He’s really over the top. He’s comparing himself to this tax collector, who I think is really quite humble and quite sincere himself. So the normal message we get in most sermons is “let’s not be sanctimonious like that Pharisee, let’s be humble like the tax collector.”HODGES: And that’s a real problem. It happens—LEVINE: Sure. But as soon as we do that, what are we doing? We’re saying “oh thank you God, I’m not like that Pharisee over there. Wait a minute. Am I a rogue and a sinner?” As soon as we do that the parable immediately traps us.HODGES: That’s what got me. I was like “oh no.”LEVINE: Then it’s more than that. Because Jews have this sense of being part of a community rather than just being individuals. Everybody’s responsible for everybody else. If one person sins, that sin impacts the entire community, if one person does something really fabulous the entire community can benefit from that. Jews will talk about what is sometimes called the “merits of the fathers.” In other words, we may be messing up, but remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? They were really terrific. So for their sake…Well, the Pharisee has more merit than he knows what to do with. He’s got good deeds over the top. The tax collector’s got nothing. So maybe first century Jews might have thought if the tax collector can go home justified, maybe he tapped into that Pharisee’s merit. If I’m a righteous person I don’t want to think that my righteousness somehow benefits somebody else, but that’s the generosity of God who makes the sun shine on the just and the unjust alike. Then, gosh, just when you think you’ve got that rug swept underneath you right at the end, the last line in all English translations I was able to find is, “Therefore, I tell you this man,” referring to the tax collector, “went back to his home justified rather than the other.”HODGES: Rather than. In the King James, “rather” is italicized.LEVINE: Yeah. The Greek term for “rather” is “para,” like parallel or paradox, and it can mean “over against,” but what it also means is “side by side.”HODGES: —and “parable.”LEVINE: Or paradox or parable. You cast two things side by side. I’m wondering if that last line might be “they both went down justified, side-by-side.” I’m distressed by readers that think that somehow God’s mercy is a zero-sum game such that if the tax collector can be justified the Pharisee isn’t. Why wouldn’t God be merciful to somebody who’s doing all the right things? Who goes to the temple and doesn’t ask for a thing, but thanks God that he’s been put in a position where he can do all that stuff?HODGES: Although he does disrespect the—I wrote this in the margin for you —he does diss the tax collector, though, right?LEVINE: That’s right. It turns out at the end the tax collector may well be justified because of the Pharisee’s good deeds, and that’s the last thing the Pharisee wants to know.HODGES: So the joke’s on him.LEVINE: The joke’s on him. The other man gets justified because of his good deeds, too bad!HODGES: I also thought another new Christian reading could be that the Pharisee might also be a type of Christ, in that Christ’s merit is said to cover for the sinner as well. I hadn’t thought of that before I’d read this book. I thought that was an interesting possibility.LEVINE: That’s how the cross works in part, some believe. It’s the fidelity of the Christ that allows the rest of us to tap into that merit, to tap into his good deed. Why wouldn’t it work for the Pharisee as well? It’s just Jesus wanted it to work that way, and the Pharisee didn’t. “MIPodcast Moments” are interesting extracts from the Maxwell Institute Podcast. See our growing list of transcripts here.

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BLAIR HODGES: That takes us to the topic of black theology. In your book Down In the Valley you talk little bit about James Cone, who is a prominent theologian, and you also talked a little bit about Jeremiah Wright. People might remember that name from when Barack Obama was campaigning in the 2008 presidential election. Jeremiah Wright was a pastor that had said things about 9/11 and other things that his political opponents fixated on and exploited a little bit. And I thought your book provides some important context for this. Talk for a minute about Jeremiah Wright and what people might learn about him that they’re not going to get in some simplified coverage on CNN or whatever. ((Ironically, I've since discovered a CNN blog post that had some fairly in-depth analysis of Wright's sermon at the time.—BHodges))JULIUS H. BAILEY: Right, yes, yes, so you may remember back to Jeremiah Wright. Obama attended his church. And in part of a sermon he called America to account for some of the issues we talked about earlier, and he said some things prior to talking about America, but people focused on that clip and said, you know, “he’s disparaging America,” or “he’s not totally pro-America!” But it’s really that dynamic we talked about earlier: How can African Americans—who are clearly a part of American history and part of American culture—be patriotic while still calling out America on their promises if they’re still not living up to them, if the American dream doesn’t seem applicable to African Americans?And so Jeremiah Wright during Obama’s campaign made that statement about America. You mentioned black theology going back to James Cone—and some would argue, back to the slave ships and back to West Africa—this idea of black preachers or religious leaders having a really important role in many African American religious communities of asserting for people, to be the voices of those who don’t have a voice. And so, for Jeremiah Wright there’s this sort of black prophetic tradition of calling America out, that you have a religious responsibility if God’s given you this is podium, to not only advocate for yourself, but to advocate for all of your people. And so for Jeremiah Wright it’s to call America out, it’s “why is America not still living up to the promises of the American dream for many African Americans?”And again people were taken aback. And you sort of see that dynamic—you can imagine as you probably remember back, that during a political campaign you don’t necessarily want to be calling America out on their promises to America. And so you see Obama sort of distance himself from that, which you can see why politically would be the case. But you also sort of see that dynamic, and our dynamic now, where people just take a clip from the sermon—they’re not playing the entire sermon, right? They’re just giving you that clip. And so part of what I try to do is to frame that within the context of James Cone and others, of many black Christians who just continue to struggle.James Cone talks about actually thinking about leaving Christianity because it just seemed like he was so disheartened about the way the white churches were dealing with race relations in the 1960s, he just couldn’t see, “how can I be Christian if it doesn’t have any impact on what’s going to happen for African Americans?” or “how do we address these questions?” So black theology is a way of talking about the ways that Jesus can sort of speak to a liberation theology that can be an empowering thing for African Americans, that Christianity and equality, or Christianity empowerment, is not at odds with an African American experience; it actually speaks to that experience.Christianity has that power, but you also need to call America out, or call whatever context you are in, out. That’s what God’s prophets do in the Bible. They call out people if they’re not living up to what God wants them to do, or giving what God wants for the people. And so you sort of see that trajectory. So Jeremiah Wright clearly is part of that. But I think you also see how those dynamics change; that when you have that kind of forum, you have a twenty-four-hour news cycle, you’re also running for president, how that dynamic is really going to shift. And so people say “Oh, wow this is totally out of context,” and part of what I was trying to do in the book is to say, “wow, that is pretty dramatic, but wow look at what black preachers have been doing for centuries!” Like they’ve always been calling white institutions out, or calling America out if he feels like they’re not living up to what God wants for his people in America.

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An excerpt from the full transcript of the MIPodcast interview with Lauren F. Winner, now available HERE. Lauren F. WinnerBLAIR HODGES: And there are few images or roles for God that I think are pretty widely held by Christians—things like God as 'father,' God as 'shepherd,' God as a 'physician.'LAUREN WINNER: Right.HODGES: But those are kind of the main ones. I think Christianity, in a way, has kind of stopped at those. Why do you think that is? Why pick a few? Why have we kind of stayed at that level?WINNER: Well, I actually don’t think it’s true that Christianity has stopped at those. I think that different historical moments in the life of the church have paid more or less attention to different images and different biblical passages and biblical metaphors. Part of what I loved in doing the research for this book, in Wearing God, I look particularly at six kind of clusters of figurative language from the scriptures for God. And part of what was fascinating was to see that basically all of these images—even though they aren’t images that we pay very much attention to today—that in earlier moments in church history in some Christian communities these were really central images for speaking about God and speaking to God and speaking about our relationship with God.And so I think it’s interesting that different communities in different times and places in the life of the church will focus in on a handful of images. And maybe that’s just human nature, right? Maybe it’s just entirely predictable that a community will home in on few images, and pray with those and preach about those and write those into their hymnody. And of course when you do that, on the one hand those images become more meaningful. They become meaningful precisely because they are invoked and used all the time.But then there’s a less exciting thing that can happen and that is that the images can become kind of rote, you know, and the person praying with those images can become kind of insensible to them and not really ponder what they mean and just sort of use them almost as placeholders. And then you sort of forget about the mysterious abundance that they’re holding the place for.So all of that was a very long way of saying I think that on the one hand, there’s a richness that comes when you live intimately with a few metaphors or descriptions of God but there’s also a danger. And I think it’s very telling that the scriptures include so very many different metaphors for God. I think part of that very abundance in the scriptures is the constant reminder that we really shouldn’t get too comfortable with any one or two or three of these images because none of them will ever capture, you know, the whole of who God is and we shouldn’t restrict… when the scriptures don’t restrict the scriptural imagination to the images then neither really should we in the church restrict our imaginations to, you know, just father, a great physician, and shepherd. “MIPodcast Moments” are transcribed excerpts of interesting extracts from the MIPodcast for your quick consideration. See our growing list of transcripts HERE.

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episode with Julia Watts Belser offers a great primer on Judaism shortly after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE., answering questions like Who were the rabbis, where did they come from, and what are their writings all about? We focus especially on one particular text, the Bavli Ta’anit, which is a tractate on fasting and disasters. The text has surprising things to say about the relationship between one's outward appearance, righteousness, and God's blessings. Blair Hodges: Let's talk about the part of your book where you’re relating stories about women and men with low status who had the ability to do incredible things that the rabbis were expected to do but couldn't. Talk more about how gender and class are represented in the texts.Julia Watts Belser: Sure. The final chapter of my book examines a series of stories that praise the simple piety of the anonymous, humble, holy man and holy woman. The presence of a couple of women here is actually quite significant in rabbinic Judaism. Because we don’t necessarily always see women emerging in quite this light. But these figures often are revealed to be more virtuous and more pious than some of the greatest of the rabbis. So in one instance, an unknown man averts a plague and spares his neighborhood, not because he’s a great scholar of Torah, not because he’s a master of the law, according to the value system of rabbinic Judaism, but because he lends out his hoe and his shovel to the local cemetery. A woman protects her neighbors from a blaze of fire because she shares her oven with her neighbors. It’s a concrete act of communal protection that trumps the efforts of the great sage Rav Huna. In another story, Rava, one of the greatest rabbis of the late Babylonian academy, is utterly crestfallen when he learns that God sends a daily personal missive to the otherwise unknown guy, Abba the Bloodletter. A bloodletter is a healer, he’s a medical practitioner but, let’s be clear, he is not at the top of rabbinic social hierarchy.Hodges: Not a prestigious…bloodletting…not a very prestigious .Belser: Exactly. I mean, he has some prestige, but certainly if the rabbis were doing a sort of ordinary ranking of merits they would place themselves far higher in answer to the question, 'ideally, who’s got favor with God?' Ha, clearly it’s the rabbis! So Abba the Bloodletter gets his correspondence from God on a daily basis and Rava, it turns out, only gets personal connection with God once a year. So Rava is quite distraught about this and he sends out his rabbi minions to discover what Abba’s secret is, and also probably to try and reveal that he’s not actually worthy of divine favor after all. But Rava’s ruse backfires. Despite the rabbi’s terrible behavior, Abba The Bloodletter reveals himself to be a humble, virtuous, pious man. Hospitable, careful, generous, right? And the reader is left to conclude he is in fact, actually far more worthy than the two hapless rabbis in the tale or the illustrious leader of the Babylonian rabbinic academy who sent those other rabbis on the first place.So, in thinking about these type of stories, I appeal to the work of the great historian of late antiquity Peter Brown. He’s talked about this type of tale as a story that dramatizes what he calls “paradoxes of sanctity.” He’s particularly focused on late antique Christian texts, so he emphasizes this type of storytelling appears quite often in Syriac—that is, eastern Christian—sources from around the same time and a relatively similar geographical area. These tales, I think, underscore the idea that holiness and divine favor don’t correlate neatly with social status or with any other external signs or marks of a person’s virtue. In the rabbinic texts, they serve as a powerful and somewhat unsettling reminder that the usual markings of high class—good status, masculinity, learning, elite family background—don’t actually testify to a person’s piety or their character.These teachings are part and parcel of what I see as one of the Bavli Ta’anit's central theological and ethical claims: You can’t actually judge by looking. You can’t make a clear and convincing link between social status and divine favor. Those external signs of success—prosperity and acclaim, right—they don’t actually reveal the inner dimensions of the heart. They don’t tell us much—maybe anything—about the nature of a person’s piety, or the truth of their connection with God.Hodges: So that raises the question, if that’s the case on the individual level—where you can’t tell based on how righteous a person is based on how prosperous they are—how does that correlation play out in that wider covenant narrative that we talked about from Deuteronomy, where God promises rain and abundance when the community is righteous?Belser: I think you’ve just identified the crux of one of the most important—and potentially subversive, right?—dimensions on what’s going on in Bavli Ta’anit. In the biblical book of Deuteronomy we see this very clear notion of covenantal ecology. It’s a claim that God’s favor and God’s rain come in response to good behavior. But Bavli Ta’anit complicates this idea. It doesn’t entirely disown it, but it certainly messes up the neat and tidy assessment that we saw in Deuteronomy. Where Deuteronomy has a strict notion that obedience to God will get you a favorable weather forecast, Bavli Ta’anit is just not so sure.In Bavli Ta’anit we see the idea that virtue and piety might be rewarded. But that “might” is a critical difference than the confidence we saw in Deuteronomy. It might be rewarded. But Bavli Ta’anit also knows that sometimes there is a real disconnect between right action and reward. So I see this as a very theologically significant idea. It’s the recognition that signs of divine favor are not so easy to read after all. The healthy, wealthy, meteorologically well off—these aren’t necessarily the ones who have God’s blessing.And on the communal level as well we see this, too. If you think about the context of Jewish communities in late antiquity where a lot of Jewish history can be told as a series of one disaster after the next you can see how this might be an interesting, important, meaningful, resonant theology, right?—that the external circumstances of a community don’t actually testify, in a conclusive way, to its connection to God.

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Today is Good Friday, when many Christians throughout the world commemorate the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. The New Testament records seven phrases Jesus uttered as he hung on the cross and these 'seven last words' form a central part of Good Friday worship services for Catholics. Jesuit priest James Martin discusses each phrase in his book Seven Last Words: An Invitation to a Deeper Friendship with Jesus. Martin recently talked about his book on the Maxwell Institute Podcast. You might enjoy listening today in preparation for Easter, but if you don't have time to spare here's an excerpt from the interview. ConversationBLAIR HODGES: if there was an overarching theme in Jesus's sayings it's the way that Jesus's sufferings help him to understand us. That became, I think, the keystone of your book that you revisit time and again.is Son of God. And we tend to forget that he was a human being, that he would have gotten sick, you know, he may have sprained an ankle or two, he got headaches, he got tired. He had a body, basically. And more to the point, he grew up in Nazareth. He worked for eighteen years from ages twelve to thirty. I mean he worked, he didn't just sit on his rear end and do nothing and wait for the baptism. He was in a carpenter worship. And that's hard work. We tend to think of it as kind of romantic, you know, he has all of his Sears Craftsman tools you know up on a pegboard somewhere, but you know, he did hard work. The time on the cross really does show us his humanity. He is suffering physically, and I suggest in the book that he's suffering emotionally, too. I mean he's abandoned by his disciples. And he even suffers spiritually. He says 'my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' He feels this distance from the Father. So, what's the point? The point is that when we pray to someone, when we pray to Jesus, we're not praying to someone who doesn't understand us. We're not praying to someone who is far removed from us. We're praying to someone who understand us, not simply because he's God and he understands all things, but because he's a human being and he experienced all these things. He remembers these things. Remember, when he comes back from the resurrection he's bearing the wounds—BH: Right—JM: So, it is that kind of connection to the human Jesus that I find really helpful for me.BH: So if you'll indulge me, there's a really interesting passage in the Book of Mormon that touches on this. It's in a book called Alma (7:11–12) and it hits on this. It says Jesus 'shall go forth'—this is a prophet sort of foretelling the mission of Christ—'And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people. And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people...' And this is the part that always sticks out to me— 'and will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.'JM: That's beautiful. That's beautiful, you know I don't know much about Mormonism, but I agree a hundred percent with what you just read. You know it's interesting, you used the word 'bowels,' you probably know in the Greek world and in the New Testament when we hear the term 'Jesus's heart was moved with pity,' it's his bowels. And so there's a sense that he feels it kind of in his guts—BH: Yeah, deep down—JM: So yeah, and he does take on—it's a really beautiful passage—he does take on our infirmities. Now you can see that in the spiritual way, sort of that, you know, he kind of enters into the world with all of its sinfulness. But in a very homey way, and I say this sometimes to shock people, he got sick!BH: Yeah—JM: He had the flu, he had stomachaches, and then more severely at the crucifixion he suffered intense physical pain. So you know, when people who are struggling or sick, when they pray, I remind them that Jesus understands this, as you say, he took on our infirmities. And so it connects people more with Jesus.

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This MIPodcast Moment is from the transcript of N. T. Wright's interview, now available in full HERE.BLAIR HODGES: So, a minute ago you mentioned the book series you did on the New Testament, the “For Everyone” series— N. T. WrightN. T. WRIGHT: Yes, yes.HODGES: —and as a New Testament scholar, have you received any pushback on the idea of “pop scholarship”—things produced for popular audiences?WRIGHT: I’ve done a lot for popular audiences because I’ve always been working in the church. I’ve been active as a preacher and a teacher and I’ve led Sunday school groups and confirmation classes and done that sort of thing. So, I’ve always been aware there’s a need to translate the big academic stuff into popular mode. And for me the vocational moment—though I didn’t realize it at the time—was when I was quite young and I read C. S. Lewis saying that there ought to be a compulsory exam for clergy or theologians which would be to translate a work of academic theology into a popular idiom. And he said, tellingly, if you can’t do that you either don’t understand it or you don’t believe it—HODGES: Right.WRIGHT: —and I thought, oh my goodness! That’s quite a challenge! So simply as responding to that challenge it’s been fascination. But also because I grew up in a family which didn’t consist of theologians, we were church goes, but nobody was reading academic theology. And both at home when I was growing up and then with my own wife and children, none of whom are theologians, if I would say something at the Sunday lunch table about the sermon that we’d heard that day, and if I started using long words, they would say “Come on, dad! You know we don’t talk that silly language. What do you actually mean? Can you say it plainly?”So, I’ve been on the spot. And I enjoy that. I think that’s exactly right. If we can’t say it straight up, then we haven’t thought it through and we’re fudging with artificial fluffy language. That’s not a healthy way to be. So, I’ve done my best to resist that. And as it happens—very nervously when I was quite a young scholar, like about twenty-five or thirty years ago—I started to think “What I’ve been preaching and teaching on this and that, I wonder if that would make a little book!”And then one of the publishers that I’d had conversations with said to me one day, “Tom, you’ve read this, that, and the other, haven’t you?” It was 1992, when the funny books on Jesus by A. N. Wilson and Barbara Thiering and Jack Spong came out. And I said, “Yeah, I’ve read that.” And he said, “Well, why not just write it up, just four or five chapters, and it’ll be a nice little book just before Christmas.” And I thought, “eh, what?” And then I thought, hey that’d be rather fun! And so I had a go, and in its way—I mean, none of us write bestsellers—but as Christian books go it was, for a week or two, a bestseller. So, okay, maybe I can do this.Then I did some journalism and I was asked to write on various topics to the Church Times in London, and then for one or two of the broadsheets—at the Times and The Guardian and The Independent in London—the regular newspapers, in other words. And I found again, that was fun. I enjoyed doing it. And if you can, and if you’ve got something to say and people say, “hey, that was good, I liked seeing what you did” then you carry on doing it. But I’ve never wanted that to take over from the serious side of my work, which is the big chunky tomes like the we’re talking about here.HODGES: Have you received any pushback from more traditional believers within your own tradition about some of the ways that you try to bring scholarship into the conversation?WRIGHT: Well, in my own tradition, which is the Anglican Church, the Church of England, occasionally people say various things about “Oh, well no, we’re not sure we can cope with this.” But in England particularly, we have—surprisingly considering our heritage—we have a very anti-intellectual culture. A lot of people, including people who would be ashamed not to know the basics of nuclear physics or whatever it might be, they see a book of four or five hundred pages on Jesus or Paul or something, and they say, “Oh, no no…that looks, that looks really… that’s a bit much, I mean uh it’s quite expensive, too, uh I think I’ll go for this little one” and they’ll pick up something sort of eighty pages. And I’m thinking, come on, you know, A, the book doesn’t cost you any more than you would pay for a night out at the theater, probably a lot less actually especially if you live in London. And B, you’re perfectly capable of reading quite serious arguments about other things, why not this?So, I’ve had to push against that, really, the sort of sense that we only want the short popular version, the thing we can read on a Friday evening in the bathtub or whatever, rather than the big serious thing. And so it’s been one of my minor missions in life to encourage people in my tradition that actually they can and should read the bigger things. And I’ve tried to write the bigger things in a way which is enjoyable. You know, I don’t believe in writing stodgy tedious prose if I can help it. “MIPodcast Moments” are transcribed excerpts of interesting extracts from the MIPodcast for your quick consideration. See our growing list of transcripts HERE.

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