Spirit of a Liberal

Whew!

There’s a reason I haven’t been blogging. I’ve been busy.  660 double-spaced pages.  173,871 words.  829 endnotes.  But, now the manuscript for Gays in the Pulpit is complete, and I have sent it off to Pilgrim Press, the publisher.  To be sure, there will undoubtedly be further revisions based upon editorial feedback, but I have reached a significant milestone in the process.  I think that the timeline of Pilgrim Press is for a release in the summer/fall of 2013.

In the early-spring of 2011, I thought about using some of the hundreds of Spirit of a Liberal blog posts as the core of a book, but that idea soon morphed into a much broader project.  Rather than just writing about the ELCA decisions of 2009, I would go back to the beginning of LGBT activism within the Lutheran predecessor bodies.  That idea, too, soon mushroomed into a pan-denominational historical retrospective of each of the five principal mainline denominations (United Church of Christ, Episcopal, ELCA, Presbyterian, and Methodist) .  Later, while lunching with early Methodist activist Mark Bowman, he rightly suggested that I was taking on a “huge universe.”

I sent queries to the major denominational publishing houses.  Pilgrim Press of the United Church of Christ expressed interest but said it would be after the first of the year (2012) before they would seriously look at the project.  I started writing anyway, but didn’t get very far before a residential move from Northfield, Minnesota to Arlington Heights, Illinois interrupted the process.  Settled into the Chicago suburbs by October 1, I had forty or fifty pages written by Thanksgiving, and by February Pilgrim Press had accepted the project.

Contacts with leadership of the various gay-advocacy organizations in each denomination resulted in “leads,” and one led to another.  I have benefited from face-to-face interviews with iconic figures in each denomination.  Private collections of early documents have been graciously shared.  Many early pioneers have offered assistance via phone calls and emails.  Still others have fact-checked my writing.

One of my early concerns was that I was an interloper, a straight man writing a gay history, but the support I have received has calmed my apprehensions.  A common refrain has been that these are stories that need to be told.

I have been thinking a lot these days of our lesbian, gay, and bisexual sisters and brothers and supporters who have gone before us to bring us to this time and place. I wish that I knew more of their names. I wish I knew more of their stories.

I have been moved to tears by the poignancy of the stories, and my ongoing worry is that my retelling does them justice.  Conflict and celebration.  Hope in the face of despair.  Struggle for human dignity.  Stay tuned.

When I wrote my historical novel about Paul the apostle (A Wretched Man),  I wrestled with some thorny historical questions, including this one.  Last month, I was asked to read and review Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist.   I once again encountered the question, and I found Ehrman’s answer to be less than convincing.

First, some background.  Paul twice mentioned his role as persecutor but without any details.  As with much of his writing, Paul assumed his listeners already knew the story so he didn’t elaborate.  Paul wrote to the Corinthians,

For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 1 Cor 15:9 (NRSV)

In the most autobiographical of his writings, Paul speaks to the Galatians,

You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. Gal 1:13 (NRSV)

In neither instance, does Paul offer a clue as to what he did, exactly, or why he did it.

Of course, the Acts of the Apostles goes into much greater detail: Jerusalem persecution, stoning of Stephen, sent to Damascus by the High Priest to arrest the followers of Jesus, etc.

The common assumption is that Paul persecuted the early followers of Jesus because they claimed he was the long-expected messiah.  Does that really make sense? Why would such a claim have been offensive to Paul or the Hebrew populace? While that may have been the reason why the Romans and their puppets, the High Priest and his crowd, feared Jesus and caused his execution, that hardly explains why Paul and the populace would have persecuted his followers after his death.

Ehrman initially agrees,

There was nothing blasphemous about calling a Jewish teacher the messiah. That happened on and off throughout the history of Judaism, and it still happens in our day. In itself, the claim that someone is the messiah is not blasphemous or, necessarily, problematic (though it may strike outsiders—and usually does—as a bit crazed).

This statement strikes me as eminently reasonable and debunks the traditional assumption that the early church was persecuted because they claimed Jesus had been the messiah. There has to be more to it.

Ehrman’s response is that the claim that Jesus was the crucified messiah is what greatly offended Paul and the others, because no strain of traditional Jewish messianic expectations suggested a crucified messiah.  While that may well be true, I fail to see the offense.  Here is where I part with Ehrman.  If anything, such a claim would only make its proponents sound even crazier but hardly blasphemous to the point of widespread persecution and arrest.

Back to Stephen.

What did Stephen do or say that caused his arrest and execution?  Why did they “stir up the people against him”?  Because he spoke “blasphemous words against God and Moses,” “against this holy place and the law,” and because he said that Jesus would “destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses handed down.”

No where was there any complaint that he claimed Jesus was the messiah, crucified or not.  The charges against him were that he denied the basic tenets of Hebrew religion … adherence to the law of Moses and temple sacrifice.  In Stephen’s long speech to the Sanhedrin, he concluded,

“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears … You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.”

There could be no greater offense than to question circumcision and failure to keep the law.  Stephen challenged the basic Hebrew self-understanding and thus their standing before God.  To a devout Pharisee, zealous for the law, as Paul claimed to be, this was the crux of the matter.  This would also tie in closely with Paul’s Damascus road experience, in which his life took a 180 degree turn away from zealotry for the law to his law-free gospel message.  Furthermore, it also ties in with the ongoing conflict between Paul and the “mother church” back in Jerusalem over the requirements of circumcision and dietary niceties.

That’s my answer, Professor Ehrman’s opinion notwithstanding, and that was also the answer I proposed in the Wretched Man novel.

In 1620, a group of dissidents departed England aboard the Mayflower for the wilderness that would become Massachusetts and religious liberty.  Their pastor encouraged them to keep their hearts and their minds open to new ways in the new world because God “hath yet more truth and light to break forth out of his holy Word.”

The Pilgrims had been printers and publishers who incurred the wrath of King James the 1st before they left England.  Twenty years after they established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a printing press arrived from England, and the first American religious publication was the “Bay Psalms Book” in 1640.

Of course, the religious progeny of the Pilgrims would become a central feature of American educational and religious life.  Three of their earliest colleges became Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, my alma mater.  When I attended college, the UCC church in the center of Hanover, New Hampshire was known as the “White Church”—not for racial reasons but because it was painted all white.

The UCC and her predecessor church bodies going back to the Pilgrims boast many “firsts”, including a stand against slavery 150 years before the civil war, support for the Boston Tea Party, the first African-American ordained minister, the first female pastor, and the first gay man to be ordained in 1972.

And, the progeny of those original publishers would continue to offer cutting-edge religious publications  through the centuries.  Three centuries after becoming the first religious press in the colonies, The Pilgrim Press would publish the first book of a young, black minister of the south, Martin Luther King, Jr.  The Pilgrim Press, like all religious publishing houses and the publishing industry generally, has cut back in recent years.  Currently, they are only accepting 15-20 manuscripts annually for publishing.

And, I am pleased to announce that my book has been selected by Pilgrim Press for publication next year.  Gays in the Pulpit will be a look back at the historical journey of the mainline churches toward full inclusion of the LGBT community.  The manuscript is about 70% complete.