[Old time religion]
Dear Fr O’Shea,
When I was in school which wasn’t today nor yesterday we used to hear a lot about the church militant. What became of that? It looks all easy now with no talk about sins or punishment for sins, or fast and abstinence, or hell and purgatory. You’d think that would attract the young crowd to it but instead they don’t give a damn about it. They’ve no respect for it any more the way we had. They never go to Mass and they have no respect for anyone. I think the priests are to blame. I'm always arguing about this with my daughter and she told me to write it out and she’d send it to you. I look forward to your reply. Ed M.
Dear Ed,
Thanks for your letter. You are not the only one who thinks like this. Many people find it hard to see the continuity between the religion of their childhood and present-day approaches. I'm 80 years old – probably not much younger or older than you are – and so I remember the old style very well. I remember sermons on hell that informed us about the temperature at the core of the sun, and assured us that it was the same God who made the sun and who punishes sinners in hell. (They didn’t do the research: it is much hotter at the surface of the sun than at the core.) Most people are happy to say goodbye to that kind of religion, and it always amazes me that more people were not damaged by it. Soon after I joined the Dominicans at the age of 18 I remember reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which has an account of a sermon on hell that he heard as a schoolboy. I wondered at the time why this was regarded as literature, for I had heard an identical sermon during a school retreat just a year or two before. For most people it was imaginative literature, but for me it was solid fact. Ed, for better or worse we are a dwindling minority.
Should I say ‘we’? I'm a priest, so I'm in your line of fire. I must say something to justify the departure from the old terrorist approach to religion.
I frequently recall that the penny Catechism forgot to mention that God loved us. Instead God was presented as a terrorist who punished even minor misdeeds with unimaginable ferocity. Whoever that god was, he was not the Father of Jesus Christ. He had all the worst traits of the God of the Old Testament, and none of the best ones. There is frequent mention in the Old Testament of God’s love for his people: in one Psalm (136) the phrase “his love endures forever” is repeated 26 times. Many verses in the book of Psalms are about God’s love and compassion: “The Lord is kind and full of compassion, / Slow to anger, abounding in love. / How good is the Lord to all, / Compassionate to all his creatures” (Psalm 144). In that respect, some of the Old Testament is immeasurably closer to the spirit of Christ than was the penny Catechism of our youth. We were rule-bound; there were rules about everything. Even the magnetic personality of Jesus was scarcely visible through them. Where there is no shepherd, there have to be a lot of fences.
There is other material in the Old Testament that is harder, if not impossible, for a Christian to relate to. “No sinner is your guest,” the Psalmist informs God (Psalm 5). But Jesus sat down with sinners; see for example Mk 2:16-17: “When the scribes and the Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners? When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” See also Mt 11:19; Lk 7:34.
To deal out vengeance to the nations / And punishment on all the peoples.” Or try this: “Morning by morning I will silence / All the wicked in the land, / Uprooting from the city of the Lord / All who do evil” (Psalm 101). I picked these texts almost at random. The book of psalms is a mixture of heart-warming and spine-chilling material.
Jesus critiqued the Old Testament, rejecting parts of it. “You have heard that it was said, [that is, in the Old Testament scriptures] ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ (Exodus 21:23, 24 and Leviticus 24:20). But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” (Mt 5:38-41) That contraposition (‘You have heard that it was said’ versus ‘But I say to you’) is repeated several times in the same passage: verses 21, 27, 31, 33, 38. The morality that Jesus taught soared miles above the ‘eye for an eye’ morality, which was copied from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. It is able to break the chain of violence, it can turn enemies into friends and make a new thing visible in the world: forgiveness.
I have the impression that many fundamentalist Christians today (and many from the time of our youth) are more at home with the most legalistic parts of the Old Testament than with the New, more at home with law than with love. When Jewish rabbis preach on a text of the Old Testament, they have all the resources of the Talmud beside them: a vast body of commentary, wisdom, and stories from ancient times. But a fundamentalist Christian preacher has nothing but the bare literal text, ripped from its context and tradition, disfigured by an unhistorical and literalist interpretation, and made to serve the preacher’s own purpose. This is not the way to hear the word of God.
Many Christians see the Old and New Testaments lying side by side, possessing equal value and authority. This may be for no better reason than that they are printed side by side between the same covers. But a Christian should see the Old Testament through the lens of the New. Jesus is God’s new Word, God’s new deed. We should interpret the Old Testament through the fact of Jesus, as our tradition teaches us. Then we can read even those chilling passages, but from a different perspective. The ‘enemy’, for example, is not some people or class of people out there, but the messed-up and destructive parts of our own lives. We can see ourselves as the Church Militant, yes, if we want, but let’s be clear that our war is not with our neighbours but with our own worst tendencies.
To finish, Ed, I don’t believe that people can be brow-beaten into faith or terrorised into good behaviour; these measures are counter-productive. The appeal to fear can have immediate and visible effect, but in the long run it only drives people into hiding. The appeal to love may appear less effective, but it alone can draw us out of our isolation, just as the sun draws all the plants into bloom – draws them out of their murky hiding-places in the ground.
Donagh