Moses' Circulating Mode of Power in the Book of Exodus

Moses' Circulating Mode of Power in the Book of Exodus

Rev. Douglas Olds

18 October 2014, Revised 15 December 2014

"It's good to be between a ruined house of bondage and a holy promised land."  --Leonard Cohen

Exodus derives from a record of communicative acts that shape the nation of Israel.  The figure of Moses may have a kernel of historical existence, but his person has been shaped by the writing down and 500 years of redaction of oral traditions, so that the leadership acts of Moses have been shaped by the historical needs of a group of separate tribes to coalesce into a nation, while the nation itself has been influenced by the traditions of Moses’ delivering leadership involved in the narrative. As such, the portrayal of leadership in Exodus is dialectical: its mythic account shapes the history of the people who themselves exert influence on how the text and persons of Exodus evolved through time from an oral tradition into a fixed canonical text by the post-Babylonian exile period, 6th -2nd C BCE. Brevard Childs notes, “the literature formed the identity of the religious community which in turn shaped the literature.”[1]

Leadership modes exemplify what Stortz[2] describes as coercive, charismatic, and coactive powers, to which I add a fourth category , leadership power withdrawal. In the Book of Exodus the leader is Yahweh (LORD) calling forth an oppressed people.  The LORD makes use of a deliverer-leader, Moses. Note how Moses exercises leadership power.  At first, Moses is described as an Egyptian prince who feels the pangs of empathy for the oppressed Hebrew slaves.  As an Egyptian prince, he attempts to exercise hierarchical, coercive power over those slaves, attempting patriarchically to “deliver them” through violence. He murders a violent overseer. (Ex. 2.11). Then he intends to exert more hierarchical authority by settling a Hebrew dispute: 

Ex. 2.13 When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” 14 He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?

Moses’ attempted leadership is not recognized because he has no acknowledged kinship with the Hebrews (though according to the text he has become aware of his Hebrew birth and empathies born of kinship).

Soon Moses flees, the first of his leadership “withdrawals.”  This is an interesting pattern, as first a potential leader tries to exert hierarchical power (power over) the community based on “natural” or in-born authority.  Sooner or later, this kind of coercive power over fails, and the leader flees or withdraws into a wilderness (cf. Nixon’s periodic and strategic withdrawals after defeats).

It is helpful to note that Moses' soul of leadership represents a liminal or mestizo character. He has the psychological affinity for and attitude of Hebrew marginalization, but the training and raising of Egyptian royalty.  God lifts up the liminal or mixed soul for the leadership personality, rather than follows secular leadership paradigm that demonstrates that the leader decisively exemplifies the strength and values of the homogeneous group.  Moses does not represent decisiveness because he is liminally situated between his experience in the values and society of the Egyptian elite, while he empathizes with the injustices experienced by the Hebrews.  His leadership "soul" or psychological actualization demonstrate some cognitive dissonance that is overcome by his calling by God to lead from his compassionate sense, for the benefit of the oppressed. Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer asserts, "the great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there."

Patterns and Trajectory of Power:  engagement and retreat exemplified by Moses

I.                   “Power over” leadership

II.                  Power failure

III.                Strategic withdrawal of leader into wilderness (tsimtsum, see below)

IV.                Spiritual struggle and rebirth (Moses in Midian, Ex. Ch. 3)

V.                  Charismatic call (Ex. 4): Moses is enabled by “Power within.” Yet manifests cognitive dissonance in his soul because of his prior experiences and social relationship.\

VI.                 Power sharing

VII.                 Episodic  (tactical) leadership withdrawals

VIII.               Return with Intercessory power


“Power within” is charismatic power that submits to the true holder of “power over”, that is the LORD.  However, Moses protests that his charismatic power is limited.  Moses asks, perhaps from anxiety, for his “brother” Aaron to serve as mouthpiece. Leadership becomes shared between Moses and Aaron in the struggle with Pharaonic power.  Moses and Aaron’s shared leadership thus becomes a third kind of power, “power with” or coactive power (Stortz 1993) [2]. “Power with” is mutual, reciprocal, involves choices, and involves equality.  Aaron is likewise an etiological figure: he is an individualized mythic figure for the later Aaronid priests who served the Israelite temple.  Note how leadership is shared between Moses and Aaron (and later, the “sister” Miriam.).  The egalitarian, mutual and reciprocal relationship between Moses and Aaron becomes a kind of ideal for the nation-state of Israel that formally invested power with prophet and priest.  Moses is prophet, Aaron is priest.  Leadership power in Exodus is coactive between these two ideal roles in the dialectical formulation of Israel’s history. 

        Intertestamental traditions of the Jews interpreted Ex 2.2 as a statement about the the unusual attractiveness of the baby Moses (Kugel 1998, 527) [7], a fineness of physical form and carriage that carried into adulthood. This physical fineness complements charismatic power and leadership over those people who discerned that Moses was especially favored by God, and they thus responded to him as "intercessory leader" (cf. Barton 2008, ch. 9).  That is, the people were consoled and motivated that the charismatic leader as favored one of God would pray for them.  Moses demonstrates charismatic leadership that even negotiates with God--to change God's intentions toward the people (Ex. 32.14).   This scriptural demonstration of intercessory power may conflict with more (post)modern views of leadership whereby the leader risks and models vulnerability for followers/the people, which is coactive.  Moses' intercessory leadership power with God follows his charismatic endowment and calling.
       
   An Egyptian prince with the schema of privilege and power , Moses was not used to not getting his way.  Frustration may have been a defining characteristic of his soul’s schematic adaptation as he moved into his liminal state of withdrawal to Midian (and later withdrawal for 40 days and nights onto Mount Horeb).  This tendency to meet leadership frustration with withdrawal suggests that Moses promoted episodic leadership vacuums, and consequently chaos might intrude into the Complex Adaptive Systems in which he was involved. The whole of the desert wanderings seem to so testify to this chaotic outbreak in the Exodus people’s encampments.  Moses had the soul for leadership: attractiveness, privileged upbringing, and entitlement to command, and he had survived a liminal and wilderness danger to his being in his own personal flight from Egypt. Moses’s soul was experienced with both wilderness danger and with the uses of charisma (physical and spiritual) to lead a group back into the wilderness.

There is a fourth kind of leadership power in Exodus, the withdrawal or what 16th C Kabbalists termed in Hebrew, tsimtsum.  Moses withdraws first to Midian for reflection, reeducation, and new call, then in Ex. 19 up alone onto Mt. Sinai for 40 days. He withdraws from leadership of the community for charismatic renewal (and eventually for the community’s covenantal renewal). Note what happens to the Exodus community and even Aaron.  The community and the norm-keeping priests need the charismatic leader/prophet to cohere, and they break down in sin in his absence.

Withdrawal of the charismatic/creative leader represents what the Kabbalists discerned in the creative act of God by God’s withdrawal: creative leadership may be effected by withdrawal, so that the community may take on responsibility, maturity, and new roles in the leader’s absence:

Lurianic Kabbala [16th C] propounds a theory of the creation and subsequent degeneration of an equilibrium and a practical method of attempting to restore the original harmony/equilibrium, now radically changed and partially debased in the context of the original perfection of initial state as structured by a divine Center of Value (Scholem 1955/Jacobs 1995, 325).[3]

Borowitz  (1974, 692) notes, “God does not initiate the existence of other things by extending himself. There would be no place for them to be, no area of non-being or partial being in which they might exist. Hence to create, he must first withdraw into himself. God must, so to speak, make himself less than he is so that other things could come into being.”[4]

Creation comes out of this withdrawal (tzimtzum) as from chaos. The equilibrium moves from catastrophe when the divine sparks enter the void, filling the containers which are both autonomous  and new bearers of the sparks of the center of value.  Borowitz’s proposal is that charismatic leaders reduce their radiance and allow new leadership “containers” to take shape under the “example” or paradigm of the center of value exemplified in the charismatic leader.  Tzimtzum thus becomes a method of leadership withdrawal, a mimetic example, and emergence of new leadership forms and system equilibria.  It is consistent with Schneider and Somers (2006, 356) [5] description of CAS [Complex Adaptive Systems] leaders as “tags” and influencers of others outside of constant exertion of power.  Tzimtzum (withdrawal) by leaders allows space for social movements that honor the center of value [God] in novel ways unanticipated by the charismatic or hierarchical leader.  That leader demonstrates confidence in the center of value by allowing these social movements to take shape, carving out a space for the emergence of novelty and adaptation which otherwise would not occur in the presence of command and control compliance. The community may take on responsibility and new roles in the leader’s absence (of course, in Exodus, withdrawal by Moses to Mt. Horeb for 40 days and nights tolerates and stimulates community breakdown, but yet later in Exodus even that community breakdown serves God’s liberating, re-creative purpose).

This dialectical struggle of the now leaderless vessels to restore harmony after the self-willed withdrawal of the Center of Value/divinely-ordained charismatic leader necessitates the development of the changed attitude of maturity. This attitude is sung and played in the tragic narrative of certain Psalms. Often, but not always, this attitude may demonstrate Stoic, maladaptive, or narcissistic tendencies.  If we take this pattern seriously, the follower will struggle to attain a maturity that recognizes the former naïve solipsism and innocent contentment with the center of value as an equilibrium that cannot be recovered.  Rehabilitated growth and adaptation requires living dialectically with both nostalgia and resolve. Mature exercise of power reflects this joy of survival and meaning making even in the face of a tragic, lyrical and blues-filled narrative of irretrievable loss.



NOTES:

[1] The dialectical nature of the Moses’ narrative as it feeds back on national development is a position associated with Brevard Childs. Childs favors a sociological understanding of Moses’ role:

“Especially in such passages as Ex. 20:18–20 and Deut. 19:15ff., that which is being described is not simply a historical event, but rather an etiology for the establishment of something institutional and ongoing. Moses’ role as covenantal mediator in the Sinai tradition has a decided cultic stamp which seems to point to an office within an institution.” --Beegle, D. M. (1992). Moses (Person): Old Testament. In (D. N. Freedman, Ed.)The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, vol 4, p. 910. New York: Doubleday.

[2] Mary Ellen Stortz, Pastor Power. Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1993.

[3] Gershom G. Scholem, 'Isaac Luria and his School', in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London, 1955), 244­86 reprinted in  Jacobs, Louis (ed.). The Jewish Religion : A Companion, Oxford : Oxford University Press. 1995, p. 325-6.

[4] Eugene B. Borowitz. “TZIMTZUM: A Mystic Model for Contemporary Leadership.” Religious Education 69, 1974, pp. 687-700.
[5] Schneider, M. and M. Somers. “Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems: Implications of Complexity Theory for Leadership Research.” Leadership Quarterly 17, 2006, 351-365.
[6] Barton, Ruth Haley. Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry. Intervarsity Press, 2008, ch. 9.
[7] Kugel, James. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as it Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.

Repenting Neoliberalism from the Call of the Accra Confession: A Ministry for Replacing Accumulation with Equality as God’s Will for Human Economies

Repenting Neoliberalism from the Call of the Accra Confession: A Ministry for Replacing Accumulation with Equality as God’s Will for Human Economies

Rev. Douglas Olds

October 16, 2014

The World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) convened in the late 1990s to evaluate the economic situation in Africa and the developing world from a faith and justice perspective. The result of this convention was 2004’s “Accra Confession” (AC).  As a member of WARC, the Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) has publicized the text of AC as a document for congregational study and reflection rather than accepting it as an addition to its formal Confessional, doctrinal heritage.  As such, AC is a work of contextual theology rather than an instrument that is intended as a universalistic presentation of the doctrine of Gospel.

[AC involves] the theological conviction that the economic and environmental injustices of today’s global economy require the Reformed family to respond as a matter of faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Accra Confession calls upon Reformed Christians around the world to engage injustices in the world as an integral part of their churches’ witness and mission.[1]

AC is both a claim to Confessional Status (status confessionis) and a cry of suffering and a call for assistance from Christians in the global south.  As a claim to confessional status, AC links the Gospel to fighting for economic justice.  The PCUSA has mostly rejected that linkage, preferring instead Confessional establishment for traditional Reformed, doctrinal concerns.  That rejection essentializes (dogmatizes) the Gospel as the salvation of souls and is part of an historical and conceptual tension between dogmatism and contextualization in Presbyterianism.  The consensus of the contemporary PCUSA seems to be that since the Gospel essentials are not put at risk by the injustices decried by AC, AC is better read as a cry of pain that should be studied empathetically rather than adopted as a Confession with the duties to mission implied thereto.  The question may be asked, does the AC preserve Reformed and Presbyterian concerns, helping it to articulate Christ relevantly (contextualization)?  Alternatively, as Karl Barth asked in the 1920s, does rather the AC serve the entire church as “watchman” over doctrinal integrity (universalism)?[2]  I suspect, with amendment, AC leads us toward both implications, which would spur mission to incorporate the economic suppositions of the Gospel which reveals the justice of God. Unless and until AC is adopted as a Confession by PCUSA, I read and present it as a cry of pain worthy of Christian compassion, charity, and voluntaristic mission.  Were it formally adopted as a Confession, it would imply Christian duty and repentance.

AC describes Global Southern pain as a crisis, beginning paragraph 8, “The policy of unlimited growth among industrialized countries and the drive for profit of transnational corporations…[continuing para. 9] is directly related to the development of neoliberal economic globalization, which is based on the following beliefs:

• unrestrained competition, consumerism and the unlimited economic growth and accumulation of

wealth are the best for the whole world;

• the ownership of private property has no social obligation;

• capital speculation, liberalization and deregulation of the market, privatization of public utilities and national resources, unrestricted access for foreign investments and imports, lower taxes and the unrestricted movement of capital will achieve wealth for all;

• social obligations, protection of the poor and the weak, trade unions, and relationships between people are subordinate to the processes of economic growth and capital accumulation.”

The first substantive section of the AC is “Reading the Signs of the Times.”  As such, AC contextualizes itself in a doctrine of Creation, starting off (para. 5) with “We have heard that creation continues to groan, in bondage, waiting for its liberation (Rom 8.22).”  Two important theological moves are made by this particular quotation of Scripture. First, it grounds its cry of pain in a doctrine of Creation and liberation, theologically linking liberationist impulses in God’s hearing God’s people’s cry in Egyptian bondage (Exodus)[3] with God the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the universalistic assertion of Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds.  From suffering, God calls out a people, creating anew a nation for mission.  The mission of the people of the Exodus was to be a light to the world from whence the Gospel for all people was delivered.  Doctrinally in the Reformed Church, this linkage of liberation with Creation is traditionally more controversial.  Traditional Reformed concerns proposed that reconciliation effected by the Gospel was particularist (limited Anselmian atonement)[4] so that relationships of natural justice derived from liberationist considerations were deemed especially by doctrinaire traditionalists as the realm and exercise of charity rather than duty.  More recently, the PCUSA Confession of 1967 (C67) has attributed a universalist focus to its doctrine of reconciliation:  “9.07 In Jesus Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself…Therefore, the church calls all people to be reconciled to God and to one another.”[5]  A universalist reading of the Gospel, such as contextualized in C67 9.07, makes reconciliation an obligation.  Obedience becomes duty in 9.03: “Obedience to Jesus Christ alone identifies the one universal church and supplies the continuity of its tradition. This obedience is the ground of the church’s duty and freedom to reform itself in life and doctrine as new occasions, in God's providence, may demand.”  We discern here a tension between obedience and freedom, universalism and context.  Where freedom is discerned, contextualization of suffering engenders a mission to charity.  Where obedience is demanded, duty to universally work for justice follows.

            Hence AC’s opening “Reading the Signs of the Times” concludes with the missionary application of Luke 16.13: “14. We see the dramatic convergence of the economic crisis with the integration of economic globalization and geopolitics backed by neoliberal ideology. This is a global system that defends and protects the interests of the powerful. It affects and captivates us all. Further, in biblical terms such a system of wealth accumulation at the expense of the poor is seen as unfaithful to God and responsible for preventable human suffering and is called Mammon. Jesus has told us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon (Lk 16.13).”[6]

            We must exegete this Lukan passage to unpack the tension between duty and charity of missionary response, obedience and freedom, and universalism and contextualization of the Gospel message at question:

Luke 16.13 Οὐδεὶς οἰκέτης δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν· ἢ γὰρ τὸν ἕνα μισήσει καὶ τὸν ἕτερον ἀγαπήσει, ἢ ἑνὸς ἀνθέξεται καὶ τοῦ ἑτέρου καταφρονήσει. οὐ δύνασθε θεῷ δουλεύειν καὶ μαμωνᾷ.[7]

We note the figurative and emphatic language. Jesus is addressing the οἰκέτης rather than some specific class, such as his disciples, and emphasizes Οὐδεὶς  by placing it primary in his speech act, so we should expect that he is speaking parabolically (exaggeratedly and symbolically). The verb δουλεύειν ends the first phrase, thus is emphatic in its syntax.  Δουλεύειν is the verb for a servant’s task.  It implies an association with a servant’s virtue, which is obedience.  There is a verb in Greek for discipling, μαθητεύειν, that might have been used by Jesus if freedom and initiative were intended.  This text implies obedience and thus duty.   This parable begs the question whether Jesus is speaking contextually or universally.  Emphasizing Οὐδεὶς by placing it primary in his speech act, Jesus clearly is universalizing, though parabolically, obedience for all who are symbolically characterized as οἰκέτης.  The meaning of this word conveys the concept of servant householder, the activities of which were the primary task of traditional economic systems--production for use rather than production for accumulation.[8]  All economic agents in traditional times save the “lords” (κυρίοις) were householders—producers for use of others (and for their own subsistence) rather than producers for accumulation. 

A different economic system is implied by this parable than what is familiar to us now, but from the exegesis suggested, we see that Jesus is universalizing a message for obedience.  The form of the verb δύναται  in the opening phrase as a 3rd person singular heightens the sense that Jesus is delivering a parable about an economic agent, while the verb is repeated in the last phrase as a 2nd person plural δύνασθε.  By this switch of verbal person and number, again we see how Jesus is both speaking parabolically and universally (paraenetically). He extends an illustration in the third person singular to a second person plural application of “ability.”  “You are not able to serve both God and mammon.”   Δύναται can suggest capability and/or possibility.[9]  With the negative particle οὐ as in οὐ δύνασθε there is the message of constrained capability.  As we have seen that this is a parable of servanthood and householding, the constrained capability can be read either as a household’s servant’s lack of free will in matters of householding, or rather a compunction or binding of that will.  I submit that as we read this passage as a parable, there is no suggestion that servants lacks free will in this matter of loving God or mammon, or of serving two masters. Rather, the constrained capability of serving the master  and God economically is one of choice or possibility. The linkage of the main verbs in this passage --Δουλεύειν and Δύναται-- signals the virtue or capacity of servanthood which is the servant’s capability. The two verbs complement the conceptualization (internal grammatical structure) of virtue of taking the servant’s role. There is an expectation that the virtuous servant fulfills the expected task. Jesus parabolically is demonstrating that there is no capability or meaningful possibility to serve two masters, yet there is an expectation of obedience in economic service.  It is clear that Jesus’s parable, without using command or imperative language, has the expectation of obedience to God’s economic justice that accepts our free potentiality to disobey and attempt the alternative: the fruitless service of mammon. This is a parable of duty rather than charity. Moreover, the linkage in the phrase of the AC has framed its call to repentance of the witnessing church in Creation/liberation theology (Rom 8) and in economic duty (Lk 16).  Jesus’ parable of a farmer receiving a windfall harvest and foolishly building bigger barns to retire (Lk 12.13-21) harmonizes with Luke 16 that the householding function is not an accumulative economic system.[9]  By its framing of worldwide economic context by means of Luke 16, AC is requiring the witnessing church to repent of accumulation economics going by the post-colonial name of “neoliberalism.”[10]

We still need to confront the objection that the Gospel is something distinct from the Creation/liberationist impulse and economic duties in Jesus’s parables.  There may be the claim that Gospel is succinctly Paul’s message that he normalizes in 1 Cor 15 1-3.  Paul anathematizes (Gal 1.8-9) alternative or supplemental presentations of the Gospel.  If Reformed Confessions are only legitimated by watchguarding and correcting presentations of the “authentic “gospel of salvation from hell, then AC might fail to update and contextualize that gospel for present day challenges.  AC thus further contextualizes the Gospel and its applicability in God’s covenant with Noah (Gen 9).  While AC does not ask, I believe that adequate study of AC involves considering whether God’s purposes of sharing the Gospel requires adequate resources and education for individuals to receive the message of reconciliation and salvation.  Does a neoliberal globalized economy of differential accumulation that results in 14 million yearly deaths of children from malnutrition and inadequate health care serve this gospel program?

PCUSA has missionary values that share the Gospel through poverty alleviation via its Presbyterian Mission Agency and fairness in food distribution and access as part of its Global Compassion, Peace, and Justice Initiative. In addition to the Scriptural presentation, there is an empirical refutation of accumulationist economics in the limits to growth or steady state perspective of critical economics.[11]  My academic background in critical economics with Herman Daly at the University of Maryland in the 1990s prepared me for empirical and theoretical criticism of the dominant globalizing paradigm of what was then termed the “Washington Consensus.”   My research problem was to convince my peers and advisors that the public good included a very specific program to make sure that financial centralization does no harm to the poor or the environmentally marginalized and instead devotes resources to these populations.  I engaged in research into the mechanisms, actors, and policies of Trade Theory and I began to conclude that Economic Globalization was not an inevitable product of western capitalism, but a concerted technical effort of a coordinated body of institutions and multilateral agreements to promote accumulation by politically powerful and favored parties.  I also concluded that these mechanisms were designed to, and would in effect, serve established concentrated financial power, disestablishing labor unions, off shore jobs, and play national social and environmental regulations off of each other in a “race to the bottom” harmonization of standards as nations competed to attract capital and gain membership into the multilateral economic policy making councils.  Regardless of the effects on my personal economic future, I concluded this move of globalization and capital concentration violated my understanding of political and ethical justification.  Specifically, it failed a Rawlsian test of justice  by not only failing to improve the lot of the socially and environmentally worst off, but in reality very likely would bring about their further marginalization and misery. [12]

 I believe in the 17 years that have followed, observers of good will have seen that reality of what I concluded in 1997 coming true in the form of increased environmental degradation, the increased vulnerability of the poor to environmental degradation, rising economic inequality, decreased labor power as jobs have been shifted off shore according the absolute lowest costs of production, and a general weakening of sovereign states to pursue independent and targeted social, environmental, and economic policy and regulation in the face of concentrating and mobile financial power.

By 2014 more policy actors are cognizant of the excesses of financial globalization. Indeed, since the financial crisis of 2008/9, financial globalization has been rolled back for want of a controlling authority. Domestic central banks are trying to cooperate in order to harmonize a global financial system.  U.S. job offshoring has slowed, though MAI-like provisions are being negotiated anew in the current Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP] and Trade in Services Agreement [TiSA] processes. 

I am mindful that God is radically equalitarian, contrary to the presuppositions and intentions of accumulationist economics. The parable of the vineyard owner (Luke 20.9-13) demonstrates that Jesus sees God not only remunerating all workers equally, but that the workers who worked the longest received their wages last.  Human considerations from the perspective of accumulationist economics are labeled by the Center of Value with the vice of “envy:”

Matthew 20.1 (NRSV) “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; 4 and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. 5 When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. 6 And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ 7 They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ 8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ 9 When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. 10 Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage.c 11 And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12 saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ 13 But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 14 Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ 16 So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

20.15 finishes, ἢ ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου πονηρός ἐστιν ὅτι ἐγὼ ἀγαθός εἰμι; which is literally translated, “or is your eye evil that I am good?”  The Vineyard owner as a proxy for the divine Judge is terming the acquisitive economic agent “evil.” It is his own equalitarian distributions that are in contrast “good.”

Culturally, I have considered AC and the Reformed theological distinctives that contextualize an “economic justice message.”  I continue to ask, Do Presbyterian distinctives or structures have some contribution to make to the rejection of and repentance from neoliberal greed? F-1.0205 of the PCUSA Book of Order captioned, “Christ Is the Foundation of the Church” notes the ecumenical foundation of the gospel which harmonizes with the equalitarian parables noted previously.   Specifically, the PCUSA includes in its great missionary ends the “embrace of men, women, and children of all times, places, races, nations, ages, conditions, and stations in life.”

F-1.0304 The Great Ends of [its] Church include: “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of the truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

F-1.0402 Ecumenicity: “[Central to] the faith of the Reformed tradition…is the affirmation of the majesty, holiness, and providence of God who in Christ and by the power of the Spirit creates, sustains, rules, and redeems the world in the freedom of sovereign righteousness and love.” In this Presbyterian focus on Providence, the worldly fact of inequality and privation needs to be harmonized with God’s sovereignty over differential but just provisioning implied by a political reading of Romans 9:

Rom 9.14 What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! 15 For he says to Moses,    “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,   and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”  16 So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy. 17 For the scripture says to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” 18 So then he has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses.

More theological work is necessary to harmonize Biblical economic principles with the Reformed confessional emphasis on God’s providence.  

Amos 2.6:

“6 This is what the Lord says:

“For three sins of Israel,

even for four, I will not relent.

They sell the innocent for silver,

and the needy for a pair of sandals.” –Amos 2:6 (NIV)

“...selling even the sweepings with the wheat.” Amos 8.6

Amos lived in the 8th C BCE northern kingdom of Israel, its fate according to the prophet was contingent on how it structured provisioning for the poor.  Likewise the fate of all nations that history has extinguished or is currently contingently tolerating?  While charitable ministry and patriotism—especially the jingoism that characterizes much of contemporary American nationalism—have always seemed to me to be in opposition, I am increasingly led to the necessity of ministry, prayer, and critical resistance to injustice as patriotic acts.  By remediating injustice and economic privation, we who claim to be  Christians in America move to prolong the life-giving forces of the planet to prolong life. That must serve the Creator of life. If we circumscribe or inhibit tenure and access to the deprived, we can be sure that God will take away our access to the necessities of life and tenure in the land in due time.  Repenting the neoliberalism that calls forth the cries of anguish from the global south in the AC may very well lead God to repent extinguishing the American national destiny and political experiment. I am not optimistic: history is replete with tragedy, and the contemporary worldly economy seems in the throes of environmental and social dislocation and catastrophe. My optimism, though, is more deeply founded on the confessional extension of the Gospel to considerations of re-creative and salvific justice for all of God’s children.

---

[1] https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/hunger/pdf/accra-confession.pdf accessed 15 October 2014.

[2] Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions. Trans. Darrell L. and Judith J. Guder. Columbia Series in Reformed Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002, pp. ix-x.

[3] See also Mt. 11.28.

[4] Synod of Dort. Barth (2002, p. 216)

[5] http://www.creeds.net/reformed/confess67.pdf accessed 15 October 2014

[6] Also Mt 6.24.

[7] Nestle, E., Nestle, E., Aland, B., Aland, K., Karavidopoulos, J., Martini, C. M., & Metzger, B. M. (1993). The Greek New Testament (27th ed., Lk 16:13). Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.

[8] Householding, reciprocity, and redistribution comprised the scheme of traditional economies prior to the advent of the monolithic, self-regulating market.  Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of our Time. Boston: Beacon, 1944, pp. 52-5.

[9] “Windfall.” Sermon by Douglas Olds, August 4, 2013. http://www.togetherweserve.org/windfall/ accessed on 15 October 2014.

[10] Also known as “University of Chicago Boys” monetarism (ca. 1968-71)

International Monetary Fund/World Bank Structural Adjustment (ca. 1980s)

Globalization and Free Trade (ca. 1990s)

Washington Consensus (ca. 2000s)

Neoliberalism (ca. 2010 ff)

[11]Contemporarily described at http://steadystate.org/ and various linked sites.

[12] The "difference principle" proposes to allocate resources and rights first to those most lacking, then as resources and rights remain available, other populations receive distributions, with the most well off receiving the last distributions. Alternatively, inequality is permitted so long as that inequality helps the least well off.  Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971.

[13] See John Piper’s scriptural list of God’s repentant moves (and God’s refusals to repent) at http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-repentance-of-god accessed 15 October 2014.

Paying Your Vows to the Lord

Paying Your Vows to the Lord

A sermon on Acts 2 and Psalm 116

Rev. Douglas Olds

Church of the Redwoods, Larkspur, CA

4 May 2014

 Acts 2:14a, 36-41

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them,

36 Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah,h this Jesus whom you crucified.”

37 Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers,i what should we do?” 38 Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” 40 And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” 41 So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.

            

Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19

    1      I love the LORD, because he has heard

    my voice and my supplications.

    2      Because he inclined his ear to me,

    therefore I will call on him as long as I live.

    3      The snares of death encompassed me;

    the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;

    I suffered distress and anguish.

    4      Then I called on the name of the LORD:

    “O LORD, I pray, save my life!” …

    12      What shall I return to the LORD

    for all his bounty to me?

    13      I will lift up the cup of salvation

    and call on the name of the LORD,

    14      I will pay my vows to the LORD

    in the presence of all his people.

    15      Precious in the sight of the LORD

    is the death of his faithful ones.

    16      O LORD, I am your servant;

    I am your servant, the child of your serving girl.

    You have loosed my bonds.

    17      I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice

    and call on the name of the LORD.

    18      I will pay my vows to the LORD

    in the presence of all his people,

    19      in the courts of the house of the LORD,

    in your midst, O Jerusalem.

    Praise the LORD!

The novelist Walker Percy in 1971 wrote Love in the Ruins.   One of his characters (p. 320) muses, “Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?”

Our two Scripture readings this morning answer that question—to what the 3000 Jerusalem converts in our Acts text ask Peter and his brothers, “What should we do?” They’ve just been cut to the heart by the recognition of the Holy Spirit which leads them to understand that they’ve participated with the Roman authorities in Jesus’s death.

 The Psalmist in Psalm 116 has undergone perhaps an even more severe psychological experience within the “encompassing snares of death, the pangs of Sheol’s distress and anguish.” In both cases, the holiness of God has altered their outlook on sin and trust, and both Peter and the Psalmist propose repentance—what the Hebrew bible calls Teshuva—for going forward.

Teshuva is a restitution or ritual thanksgiving sacrifice.  As the setting for the later thanksgiving, the Psalmist has “called on the name of the LORD:   

 “O LORD, I pray, save my life!” …

    12      What shall I return to the LORD  for all his bounty to me?”

The question of the Psalmist, “what shall I return to the Lord?” is like the question of the Jewish converts to Peter, “what should we do?”  For the Psalmist, it is to offer a sacrifice in the temple where he “lifts up the cup of salvation” in thanksgiving, while Peter instructs the Jerusalem converts to [Act 2.38] “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him

             Note that for the Psalmist, lifting the cup of salvation is a form of thanksgiving eucharist in a temple setting, while Peter starts with a theme that is not “seeker sensitive” but employs sacramental suasion as well: repent and be baptized.

 The psalmist repents, committing to pay his vows to the Lord.  What does repentance under distress and anxiety look like?  The Jerusalem converts who appeal to Peter and the brothers are counseled to repent and be baptized, to experience the water closing over their heads while calling on the name of the Lord.There’s more to repentant faith than anguish, and that is restitution, Implied by the Psalmist’s question, “What should I return to the Lord?” Going beyond: “What, Peter, should we do?”  Repentance involves not only the anguished crying aloud of the Lord’s name, but the vow of restitution to make amends for one’s sins. 

Luke, who wrote Acts as well as his gospel, earlier tells the story of Zacchaeus,  the short in stature tax collector who hid in a tree in order to see Jesus and was bidden by Jesus to come down and dine.  [Lk 19. 8]  Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” 9 Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house.  For Luke, it is not enough to change one’s mind. For receiving the cup of salvation it is necessary to make a vow for restitution for harms already inflicted. 

[Interpretation:]  "Remorse" is a feeling that the Jerusalemite converts, Zacchaeus, and the Psalmist felt. Remorse is composed of regret, of feelings of failure to act consistently according to one’s moral standards. That feeling is the precursor to repentance. We read in the Psalm and may infer from the Jerusalem converts that  repentance encompasses feelings of being trapped or forlorn, of anguish, and of despair at theirs and our own lost sin­fulness, as well as a feeling of being alienated from God and from our own deepest spiritual foundations,  of having set aside our own inner authenticity and integrity. The Hebrew tradition of the rabbis notes that recognition of sin and remorse, if they are done without desisting from sin and taking vows of restitution,  do not constitute teshuva per se, only its first steps.[1]

Repentance requires restitution for salvation to take hold--for our feelings of remorse to lead to restitution, which requires us in repentance to act on the regret by making vows to “return to the Lord.”  Recognized between the allusions and parallels of our readings, repentance is the preliminary, and baptism is the fulfillment that leads to salvation. After baptism we approach the cup of salvation in communion with an inventory of our repentance, for as Paul notes in 1 Cor  11.29  all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.

            The promise of salvation is for all, but it requires each of us to respond with the active vows of changed life for the promise to have effect.  For if we continue in our old ways of sin,

we will live lives of anxiety not knowing fully if our relationship with God is active.  Covenant life in baptism and communion requires repentant faith.  We are justified by that repentant faith, but we are sanctified by our acts.  The Psalmist recognizes the essential need of making vows and carrying them out for a right and thankful response to the saving actions of God.  

 Ps 116.14:  I will pay my vows to the Lord  in the presence of all his people.  Just as Zacchaeus makes his vow of restitution in public, the Psalmist too notes the public nature of restitution.

           This public nature of the Psalmist’s vows of repentant faith seems to me to require a public purpose.  It is not, I believe, in view of these texts to pursue vows of abstinence from private vice alone, but rather there are both public and private virtues that are to be lived out in the Kingdom of God.  Justice and peace in the land and community must be the object for our vows to the Lord.

      
           [Illustration:] May 31 is the 125^th anniversary of the Johnstown Flood, one of the seminal events of the 19^th Century. It was, according to David McCullough’s history[2] of the event, a signal moment in the development of a public ethic of natural use of land and of class consciousness. 

The body of water that flooded Johnstown, Pennsylvania that day was constrained by a poorly designed,  72 foot high mass of stones and lead rebar and pipe, much of  the rebar having been scavenged over the years and repaired by mud and hay. 

The lake that the poorly engineered dam created was used for a wealthy person’s fishing and hunting resort, which included as members executives in Andrew Carnegie’s and Andrew Mellon’s businesses, including Carnegie himself.  People in Johnstown had been living with the existential threat of a flood for close to 30 years after it was initially constructed, though insiders and outsiders marveled at how sailboats could glide among the Allegheny Mountains in a flooded valley 420 feet above the plain of Johnstown.  At each heavy rainstorm, the mood in the town would approach hysteria, soon to die down as the rains ebbed. 

Yet when the unusually heavy rainstorm on May 31 took hold, the dam burst and the lake flowed forth from the fractured dam with the volume of flow of the Mississippi River, destroying all in its path and killing 2209 people.

            I bring up this event for its lessons and current parallels.First, in the inevitable law suits, the hunting club was revealed to be undercapitalized and paid out no restitution to families for negligence.  Second, after expressing little remorse for his participation in the exclusive club, Andrew Carnegie, the country’s second richest man, by September pledged the second in his soon to be long list of libraries to the reconstructed Johnstown.  Carnegie had only pledged one library heretofore, and that was mostly a political act to support one of his associates.  Carnegie made a move of restitution to the Johnstown community such as we are discussing today.

Third, there developed in jurisprudence afterwards the doctrine of strict liability for unnatural uses of land.  Building a sailboat lake high in the mountains failed Adam Wesley  Powell’s definition of a natural use for land. 

In the Johnstown Flood, we see the beginning of an ethic of restitution by Carnegie while at the same time changing the corporate structuring of limited legal liability.  The men of the corporation were fabulously wealthy, but the corporate entity itself was sheltered from legal liability for the unnatural use of land. 

The fourth thing we learn from the Johnstown Flood and its after effects is that a limited liability corporation protects from public scrutiny the motives and knowledge of its shareholders.

The fifth thing we learn is that an act of God will eventually fulfill the catastrophe which an historical record of possibility the land demonstrates. It takes only eyes and an historical consciousness to see that the valley received 100 year rainfalls (or earthquakes) on the order of every 100 years.  Give nature long enough time, the catastrophe that overtaxes the shoddy and the unwise will materialize.

         
             [Application:] We are seeming now to relearn these lessons about unnatural land use in the case of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster from March 2011.  Questions are being asked how the plant could be designed with suspended spent nuclear fuel pools and built on land given to earthquakes and tsunamis.[3]  

Like the hunting club above Johnstown, the Tokyo Electric Power company appears undercapitalized for the cleanup, and the Japanese government has since passed an expansive State Secrets Bill that muzzles investigative reporting, potentially including the condition of the nuclear reactors and the alleged failure of remediating nuclear waste runoff from the damaged reactors.  The government has moved to make whistleblowing a crime.[4]

Yet, as we’ve learned from Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning, Thomas Drake, and others, sometimes publicizing negligence and criminality is part of a public act of restitution. 

Whistleblowing is an act of confessing that one has been involved in or known of negligence or criminality and then acts to publicize those events in order that they might not happen again.  It means taking a risk and put oneself on the margins of society without the protection of anonymity.We learned from Ellsberg of war crimes in Indochina, from Manning of negligence in the drone strikes that killed innocent bystanders in Pakistan and Yemen. 

In the case of Fukushima, people in Japan and on the West Coast of America are living with the existential threat of catastrophe when a so called act of God might come forth within the parameters of historical probability, say a more localized powerful earthquake or another tsunami.  Living with the threat of a flood of radiation from the damaged power plant is like that of living according to the threats posed by the damaged dam above Johnstown, though perhaps even radically more threatening and unanticipated.

           In these cases, making a vow to the Lord is something we do when our conscience is scarred by complicity, and fulfilling that vow is taking a risk so that the harm is not repeated. 

The Psalmist speaks of making a vow in the presence of the people. The vow is a public act, and thus has some public good associated with it.  For me, the recent turn of the Japanese government to criminalize whistleblowing if it employed against investigations into the case of Fukushima Daiichi’s precarious  and leaking condition, and the recent turn of the Obama administration to criminalize whistleblowing of secret government actions by prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act are troubling.[5]  These prosecutions are troubling inhibitions of the impetus to come clean, to make vows to the Lord in front of all the people that have a public purpose.

[Conclusion:] I believe these texts from our scripture lessons today speak of the necessity to make vows, take risks, go public, and reduce harms by publicizing the operations of the secretive and liable corporate state.  I believe these texts of repentance, remorse, restitution, and public return are to be applied by all Christians toward a political ethic that opposes the criminalization of whistleblowing so that negligence that imposes unnatural uses onto the land and harms onto its people are halted. 

Secrecy that seeks to evade liability and accountability is the exact opposite of paying vows to the Lord in front of all the people, the opposite of repenting in order to be baptized into the peaceable and just kingdom of God. May such secrecy and evasion not be so for you and me. May we live into our baptisms by being people who make the public vow, for bringing in God’s world of peace and justice.  Amen.    

---

[1] Blumenthal, David R. Repentance and Forgiveness. Cross Currents 48 no 1 Spr 1998, p 75-82.

[2] The Johnstown Flood: The Incredible Story behind one of the most Devastating “Natural” Disasters America has Ever Known. New York: Touchstone, 1968.

[3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident/ accessed on 27 April 2014.

[4] http://enenews.com/insiders-state-secrets-bill-meant-to-suppress-fukushima-news-japan-public-stunned-citizens-could-face-years-in-prison-toxic-leaks-into-ocean-seem-unstoppable-must-plug-information-leakage-ins  accessed 27 April 2014.
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/06/obama-abuse-espionage-act-mccarthyism

FESTIVE LOVE

FESTIVE LOVE

A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Don’t look for someone to complete you, look instead for someone you can love completely. 

[Here is the sole lectionary selection from the Song of Songs in the Reformed Christian church calendar.  I invite you to sometime spend 20 minutes to read the full text of the Song of Songs:]

[Song of Songs 2.8-13]

      8 Listen! My beloved!

         Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains,

         bounding over the hills.

      9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.

         Look! There he stands behind our wall,

         gazing through the windows,

         peering through the lattice.

      10 My beloved spoke and said to me,

         “Arise, my darling,

         my beautiful one, come with me.

      11 See! The winter is past;

         the rains are over and gone.

      12 Flowers appear on the earth;

         the season of singing has come,

         the cooing of doves

         is heard in our land.

      13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;

         the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.

         Arise, come, my darling;

         my beautiful one, come with me.”

The Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon) has been a curiosity to Biblical readers for millennia.  There is no direct mention of God (save 8.6), and its unabashed sexuality and forward female voice was elided by the ancient ascetics and later churchmen.  In order to downplay the physicality and bring forward theology, premodern commentators have primarily read the Song as allegory.  That is, the Song of Songs is read as a love poem between Israel’s God and his people, or later, Christ’s love for his church.  

Allegory interprets the physical images of the poem as representing a non-empirical--non-tangible-- reality of the Soul or Heaven.  Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) applied allegory to his interpretation of the Song of Songs “as a certain machine” to elevate the soul to God, finding God where no mention of God exists. In 590, he noted his non-theological bias against human sexuality in the Song when he decreed that married couples who mixed pleasure with procreation “transgressed the law.”  Roland Murphy in The Anchor Bible Dictionary notes, 

[The] traditional interpretation of the Song in the Christian community was motivated by certain ascetic and spiritual views that prevented a proper understanding of the literal historical sense. Yet the Song became one of the most popular books in the Middle Ages, when it was accorded more “commentaries” than any other OT book. In the 12th century alone, there were some thirty commentaries written on the [Song]. Outstanding among these is the work of Bernard of Clairvaux:  Eighty-six sermons delivered over a period of eighteen years, 1135–1153…Bernard had the knack of recognizing the experience of love which is in the Song. He called it “the book of experience” (Sermon 3, 1), and for him the greatest experience is love: “Love is alone sufficient by itself; it pleases by itself, and for its own sake. It is itself a merit, and itself its own recompense. It seeks neither cause, nor consequences, beyond itself. It is its own fruit, its own object and usefulness. I love, because I love; I love, that I may love” (Sermon 83, 4).

As contrasted with an allegorical reading, modern interpreters have tended to recover the Song’s historical sense.  It is read now as a literal poem of sexual expression and longing.  My friend Annette Schellenberg at San Francisco Theological Seminary has proposed that the Song of Songs was a performed drama at ancient Jewish festivals.  Modern commentators differ as to the structure of the poems making up the Song of Songs: who is speaking when and to whom.

However, this literal historical and dramatic approach helps us recover the dialogue of a man and woman with mutual physical desire.  In this recovered historical reading, we may note the Garden metaphors and images, so that God, even if unnamed, might be approving of this mutuality and physical desire for egalitarian closeness that harkens back to the creation of Eden and the male and female Adam and Eve.  Unlike in the rest of the Old Testament where sexuality is linked with the need for posterity and procreation, in both the pre-fall Eden and in the Song of Songs, physical closeness and mutuality between the sexes is idealized.

 The woman’s love is not something to be taken nor even earned—it is given freely, mutually.  It is a message for our current age of taking advantage or commercializing love for sex.

The Song of Songs may indeed be the drama of physical flourishing and mutuality of an idealized community—a lush primeval Garden outfitted by the Creator for the freely chosen enjoyment of its denizens.  If Prof. Schellenberg is correct that this drama was acted out in festivals, it might be seen as a reenactment of this innocent and childlike delight in the Creation where sex is unencumbered by violence, manipulation and one-sidedness.  This innocent and childlike delight in the creation might very well honor the Creator, so we might arrive at a more historical than allegorical theology, a theology that appreciates sexuality as a gift rather than a temptation to sin.

What is the nature of the love relationship in the Song of Songs?  As Murphy noted, ascetic and flesh-denying practices of both Jews and Christians could not endorse the open expression of sexual metaphors, freely given, such as the Song involves.  And yet as Bernard so compellingly noted, God is love and thus clearly community endorsed love is to be discerned in this text canonized by religious communities even as sex- and flesh-denying as the Dead Sea Scrolls fellowship at Qumran.  If the historical is to be preferred to the allegorical (as I think it must), how do we find God in the normative expression of physical love found in the Song of Songs?

Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096–1141), who was an older contemporary of Bernard of Clairvaux, asks that very question in his treatise, “Of the Nature of Love.”  He claims, “There are, then, two streams that issue from the fount of love, cupidity and charity… [L]ove [is]  a single movement of the heart, is of its nature one and single, yet is divided in its act. When it moves inordinately that is, whither it should not it is called cupidity; but, when it is rightly ordered, it is termed charity.” Hugh is making a claim that there is a rightly ordered love act and a wrongly ordered love act.  He is reading the Latin Bible’s uses of the words caritas [Greek: agapē ] and eros.  He is distinguishing the two.

Classical scholars I’ve spoken with tend to deny a distinction between agapē and eros, and I believe that in the pagan literature there might be little distinction.  Socrates in Plato’s Symposium has it that erotic love aids the soul’s ascent toward immortality, and it might be argued by them that Christian love does the same.  Yet the Platonic eros fulfills the self’s desire.

In the moral literature of the Old and New Testaments, the writers are wholly concerned with the practicalities of love of neighbor regardless of the self's desire.  When Christian writers speak of eros I believe they are calling us to acknowledge the excellence or baseness of our love of things and qualities, especially whether it is focused on the self or on others.  Hugh has it that love directed where it should not is cupidity/eros.  Love that is other directed, that does unto others what we would have them do for us, is charity/ agapē.  

Jesus in the Gospel John 13.34 commands his followers: ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους, Love Others.  There is not a sense of desire for qualities or things outside of mere otherness, and this is rather a servant-love.  Charity.

Returning to the Song of Songs, I believe that erotic desire is clearly in view.  But that erotic desire is not a modern eroticism.  There are three aspects to the erotic love of the Song of Songs.  First, it is mutual.  Second, it is other-directed.  Relatedly, it is not narcissistic, which is self-directed and concerned with fulfilling the self's objectives.  Thus I believe the Song's desire is distinct from Platonic eros.  The Song’s desire is a way station in the development of an ethic of agapē.  The love in the Song of Song’s is not what Hugh would call cupidity, a desire for what should not be desired, but rather the desire is for the primeval God-given qualities of the desired lover.  The metaphors of creation and of peaceful and harmonious communal life in the Garden thus locate the desire in God’s peace and wholeness.  Reading the Song of Songs has us meditate on the lovers’ desire for noble qualities in the other, and not on some base qualities or characteristics.

Note, too, there is no sense of that modern affliction, narcissism, in view of the Song of Songs.  At one point, the lover notes  the object of her affection likewise desires her.  But she shows no inordinate thrill at this prospect, other than idealizing the mutuality of desire, clearly a divine norm for love.

So much of modern erotic desire fulfills the narcissist’s craving.  Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism notes that the decline of the 19th C family was associated with disintegration of personality and the desire for constant admiration and commercial demand. The movie Jerry Maguire had the line, “you complete me.”  The erotic desire is on personal fulfillment, akin to the pagan and Platonic ideal of eros. “You complete me” is not in view in the Song of Songs. Seeing myself in the lover's eyes is not in view of the Song of Songs. Concerned with commerce and market relationships of supply and demand, the modern narcissist commercializes sex and derives self-worth from the superordinate wage which supposedly measures social esteem and market demand. The social Darwinist as Don Juan does likewise, deriving self-esteem from money and from a bevy of lovers admiring his sexual "fitness." 

The Song of Songs does not have such commercial or market aspects to sexuality.  The woman is not given in marriage by her parents, but freely chooses her beloved. We indeed encounter an ancient’s understanding of what erotic love is inside a Garden of beauty and sufficiency (which is not to say glut or hoard).  And in that ideal Garden space, love is other directed and mutual.  This is a world in which marriage's highest values are loyalty and care taking, not personal fulfillment or the self's happiness.  Such a love mirrors the divine love, the ideal desire for what is beautiful, elegant, and good. Until we reach that state, Jesus gives us a servant’s task:  ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους, Love Others. Don’t desire your self's physical beauty or attempt to find fulfillment in the other’s desire for you or your work product, but serve others as the Kingdom of God is being made anew in your virtues.

The Love desire in view in the Song of Songs thus might be seen as the highest form of human love, a correction to the pagan sexual desire. It is the love shown by the woman who poured pure nard on Jesus’ feet, unconcerned with its scarcity, unconcerned with its interpretation by onlookers.  It is a lavish and sensual act readied by virtuous servant-love. It brings harmony and solidarity to the family, neighborhood, and nation.
 The Bible has a deep ethic to make love and not war. 

 The Bible is telling us in the Song that when lovers are happy, the community flourishes in the guidance of its God. 

Don’t look for someone to complete you, look instead for someone you can love completely. This is the kind of love in view in the Song of Songs and for the adored in Psalm 45. May we all be privileged to glimpse this festive, selfless love from our lover.  And may we all have the grace to convey it to our lover as well.  AMEN.