I went to the United Methodist church this morning, and the pastor
was talking about the evolution of religion, particularly regarding the
question of what is pleasing to God. She said that life in the early
days of humanity was unpredictable, that people valued fertility in
human and animal reproduction and crops, and that they tried to appease
deities so that things would work out well for them. They sought to
appease deities through animal sacrifice. As people formed cities, they
relied on deities to protect their cities from enemies. At this point
in time, trust in the deities was promoted, and people could express
that trust through praise and worship.
Eventually, there developed the concept of loving God, and that, too,
could be expressed through worship. And there developed the concept of
love for neighbor. The pastor defined love for neighbor as not harming
people, and instead helping people who are in need. The pastor
discussed the prophet Amos, who delivered his prophecies in a time when
Israel was at relative peace and had prosperity, and yet there was a
significant amount of economic inequality. Justice usually favored the
wealthy and well-connected and did not work for the poor and the
vulnerable. Yet, the pastor was saying, many Israelites thought that
they were still good with God because they were offering the right
sacrifices and were worshiping God at festivals. Amos was telling them
that they were wrong: that God wanted for them to love their neighbors.
The pastor was saying that Jesus emphasized a concept that was an
undercurrent in the Hebrew Bible (particularly Wisdom literature, I
think she said): the concept of communion with God—-that God is in our
midst. She also talked about the importance of cultural context: the
way that we please God today may not look entirely like the ways that
people sought to please God in the past. We don’t offer goats anymore,
and, whereas people giving others their cloaks may have made sense in a
past historical context, it does not so much to people in twenty-first
century America, and so we should discuss what love for neighbor means
in our current context. The pastor concluded by asking what God wants
from us, and her answer was “us.”
One can probably question certain evolutionary models of religion.
On the one hand, I would not go so far as to say that there is nothing
to them at all. For example, I do believe that, when it comes to
concern for the vulnerable, Christianity was a step up from Greek and
Roman societies, even though I would not go far as to say that the
Greeks and the Romans lacked ethical consciousness. On the other hand,
we cannot be too rigid when it comes to defining stages of religion, for
there may be exceptions to the rules, or more to the story. Would I be
shocked to learn, for example, that there was ethical consciousness in
primitive societies? Not particularly. People need ethics to live in
harmony and to define what is theirs. Some of this question of
religious evolution may be a matter of what is emphasized: a religion
may promote both ethics and ritual, but which is the more dominant? Throughout history, there have been times when there has been an
emphasis on religious ritual, but there have also been corrective voices
who have advocated a deeper connection with the divine, or ethics and
social justice.
My pastor’s sermon gives me a chance to write about Ahiqar, which I
recently read for my daily quiet time in my Charlesworth
Pseudepigrapha. Ahiqar could date to the seventh to the sixth centuries
B.C.E. On the one hand, Ahiqar affirms that the god Shamash is the
champion of those who have been treated unjustly. On the other hand, in
the story of Ahiqar, we see a disturbing detail. Ahiqar, a wise
adviser to the king, is falsely accused of treason, and he agrees to a
plan from someone he helped in the past. The plan is to kill a slave
and to pretend that the slave is Ahiqar, so that the king will think
that Ahiqar is already dead and thus will not kill him. That is pretty
shocking! There is not much value placed on the life of the slave
there, is there? Scholars disagree about whether the proverbs of Ahiqar
and the story of Ahiqar were separate pieces that were put together, or
if they were intended to be in the same book. In any case, we see in
Ahiqar some ethical considerations, but also some pretty significant
blind spots, or cases in which ethics are not taken far enough. My
question would be: What are our blind spots? What if we do not even
know about them? Sobering thought, isn’t it?
What does this have to do with the pastor’s sermon? Oh, it somewhat
overlaps with the issue of moral evolution. Plus, the pastor this
morning was going into how different themes play out in the Bible and
how the Bible reflects religious evolution, on some level, and I would
say that we see a similar sort of phenomenon in the Bible that we see in
Ahiqar: a concept of justice and love for neighbor, but also times when
many can read pieces of the Bible and think, “What the heck?”
I could go on by asking if I love my neighbor, but I’ll stop here.
I’m sure that I’ll have a chance to wrestle with the question of whether
I love my neighbor in the future!