Lead us not into temptation - Presenting the Issue - Editorial

A fiery televangelist recently testified to an ominous scenario in which God, in the Bible, is alerting faithful Bible readers to the awesome dangers of current and impending world events. Such faith affords what anthropologist Clifford Geertz described as an aura of factuality. "Most everywhere," Geertz observes, "we see religiously charged conceptions of what everything, everywhere is always all about propelling themselves to the center of cultural attention" (AVAILABLE LIGHT, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 172). Such religious conceptions normally help to create meaning and solidarity for people through a shared sense of the general order of existence. Problems arise, however, when mass violence is involved. Geertz warns against "confusing religious contention, which is marked, widespread, and intense enough, with religious fury, which is focused, generally sporadic, and often enough the child of accident" (Ibid., p. 174).

In another context, a colleague once quipped--upon my commenting that in the Middle East acts of violence are not the product of the general population but of the fanatics on each side--"If it weren't for the free-thinkers among us, we'd all be fanatics." If free-thinkers temper religious enthusiasm and help redirect the fury of over-zealous believers, they may well be friends rather than foes of religion. These are the people we need today to help set a new course away from mutual murder to shared goals.

Critical scriptural studies have helped clear the way for thinking freely about religious belief and practice within the various contexts of history and culture. Historian Eugen Weber, in his televised series "The Western Tradition," attributes the roots of the Western Enlightenment in the 18th century to the fact that people began to travel and thereby experience relativism. This may be another word for free-thinking. While the term moral relativism has gotten a bad name among those who claim to possess absolute certainty about an expansive range of moral issues, social and cultural relativists may well be the friends of religion because they recognize realities that tend to escape true believers who see the world only through the particular lens of their own religious tenets. Cultural relativists, on the other hand, enable believers to manage difference because they find commonality with differing religious conceptions on the ground of sharing the quest for meanings within similar but often notably diverse human experiences. Models of reality differ from one culture to another. Critical scriptural studies allow for this encounter without labeling the other(s) as wrong and dangerous. Consciousness of how various biblical authors understood their various worlds may help provide perspective on the way we or others experience ours. Historical consciousness opens awareness not only of how people are the same or similar but also quite different given the modes of relating perceptions with judgments.

Some cases in point may serve to bring home this message. In John's Account of Jesus' Demonstration in the Temple: Violent or Nonviolent? Mark Bredin considers not only what happened but how and why John interprets Jesus' actions as he does. Whatever its actual history, the temple of Jerusalem had become a symbol of oppression in the context of certain First Testament prophets and first-century writers. This perspective on the Temple enables John to characterize Jesus' relation to it and its priests in terms of oppression and Jesus' own sacrificial death. Jesus' recounted actions in the Temple thus serve as a medium for John to propound the belief that Jesus rejected the Temple and effectively rendered it meaningless by his own sacrificial obedience to the will of his Father. John thus reads the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE as inconsequential given the role that Jesus has assumed for the disciples of John, who see Jesus' victimization by violent oppressors as reason enough to espouse a non-violent social ethic.

Philip Esler's study, Social Identity, the Virtues, and the Good Life: A New Approach to Romans 12:1-15:13, provides a fresh critical awareness for understanding Paul's writing in light of recent insights into Hellenistic (Aristotelian) discussions of "ethics." Challenging the received view that Paul is innocent of Hellenistic philosophical discussions of ethics, Esler looks to social identification studies as the basis for examining the in-group ("social identity") norms Paul propounds in Romans. Recent studies of ancient Greek ethics suggest that moderns tend to misconstrue ancient philosophical discussions by reducing them to categories of right and wrong, rather than as norms for "the good life." Reading Romans with a view to in-group norms for the good life, Esler achieves critical insight into Paul's meanings.

In The Purifying Confession of Failings Required by the DIDACHE's Eucharistic Sacrifice, Aaron Milavec studies the notion of holiness and the corresponding confession of failings as key elements in this early document of cultic instruction for the followers of Jesus. The first explicit understanding of the Lord's Supper ("eucharist") as a sacrifice, the DIDACHE also provides the most primitive vision of how the confession of failings comes to be associated with the notion of sacrifice in the eucharist. Milavec identifies a threefold set of data needed for understanding the DIDACHE's eucharistic worship: the association of a festive meal with sacrifice; the verbal confession of failings required for purification; the familial admonitions to holiness of life associated with verbal confession. These together provided the platform for the communal maintenance of cultic purity through supportive judgment and assertive reconciliation.