I am currently in a doctoral program, studying semiotics—cultural symbols—which requires a great deal of reading. Probably the greatest benefit of an education is the wise guide (teacher) who can give a curated tour of the best there is in any given subject, and such is the case with this program. Dr. Leonard Sweet has opened the door to an entire world of scholars and theologians who look beneath the surface of things and reveal mysteries. Now I would like to open that world to you.
Maker, Mender, Minder, Master
What I have been calling quantum thinking, moving from the binary “not this but that” to the quantum “yes this and also that” Sweet entitles “sacred tensions,” in Chapter 14, and Kierkegaard calls paradox the thinker’s passion, and that is the perfect way to begin. Right there in the first paragraph, Sweet writes,
“… creativity is the coupling of disparate realities, the cultivation of opposing relationships between things. The creative person doesn’t work out the opposites, but works through them”
Leonard Sweet, Jesus Imagination, 137.
“Human logic,” Sweet later writes, “demands resolution,” as Sweet acknowledges that our western mindset is particularly binary (p 138). But human logic (and this on the heels of Polanyi convincing us that positivism and objectivism are simply impossible, and the effort leads to nihilism) is only one part of our brain capacity. Fletcher would say, but of course, Primal Intelligence is about intuition and imagination. And Sweet tells us that Jesus offers us revelation through embracing the tension, rather than resolving the tension (b 140).
Jesus Is Present in the In-Between
Along that vein, I appreciated this chapter’s discussion of the liminal, that Jesus occupies every space, making all sacred (p 141). I think I was in my early twenties when my thoughts were arrested by what felt like a magnificent thought. If we are baptized into the Spirit, and we are filled by the Spirit, then there is nothing inside or out that remains untouched or unchanged. We truly are the proverbial bucket in the ocean, saturated with and filled by the Spirit. Chapter 14 draws that imagery farther, for now wherever a believer stands, Christ incarnate, that place is made sacred, while indwelling and outreaching grace spreads.
Stultification
I have also wondered aloud whether the evangelical church has become a totalitarian power. I am modifying that question to wonder whether we have allowed catechisms and traditional teachings to become a stultifying agent to our imaginations. This hearkens back to Chapter 5 of this book, where Ekphrasis is described as “a way of seeing that turns observation into revelation” (p 81). Revelation is viewed, I think, with a certain suspicion in non-continuationist churches. I especially appreciate Sweet’s words, here:
“God gave us revelation to know, reason to grow, and imagination to go. Revelation shows us who God is. Reason helps us understand it. But only imagination moves us forward—into mission, into mystery, into the messy middle where love transfigures the world”
Leonard Sweet, Jesus Imagination 83.
Metaphor of a House
In his preamble, Sweet cautions that “Jesus imagination … remains prone to calcification within rigid doctrinal frameworks that constrain the very creativity and innovation it once sparked” (p xxvii).
I am here to tell you that I know what that calcification is like because I have cracked those petrified branches more than once and caught Sam Hill for it. That is why it is so important to me to find the load-bearing dogma in the theological structure of the church. Doctrines are those inner walls that can get knocked down, or whatnot. But you cannot knock down a dogma, a loadbearing wall, or the roof will crack and eventually cave in (not to mention the upper floors). In fact, dogma can bear more load, even a whole nother tier, if the remodel is built well and the foundation is good.
So many times, doctrines are treated like load-bearing walls, and there are loud shrieks of terror that the whole cathedral will crumble into rubble if someone tries to change the shape of the room—like, say, changing infant baptism into believers’ baptism, or transubstantiation into symbolic presence, or complementarianism into egalitarianism, or a young earth position into an old earth position.
Metaphor for Resilient Minds
Resilient minds are made by tackling puzzles that have already been solved, then matured by being presented with puzzles yet to be deciphered. But we do not do that with the young minds, the young believers, in our churches, typically. Instead, we tell them everything they are to think, believe, and know. Then we dust our hands off and say, “There! You have the whole thing, now! No need to wonder about anything. If it has not already been written, then it remains in the ‘mysterious things of God’ pile. And if you have questions or disagree, it means you have a rebellious spirit, so repent.”
Doctrine as a Hammer
Women, particularly, get a double-wide hammer with cries of a Jezebel spirit and reminders that “God” (I’m using those quotation marks in a Polanyi manner) commands women to be submissive and preferably silent.
That is definitely a doctrine that makes teensy rooms for women to live out their faith in, let alone imagine what the stories of Jesus and women, God and women might have to say. For example, it was really wonderful, reading all the ways to understand Jesus writing in the dust of the temple floor, including a feminist reading (p 182–186). I have imagined that scene, too.
Lesson Written in the Dust of the Temple Court
Picture her terror. Regardless of her age—whether a newlywed whose virginity was doubted, or a married woman who had been caught out in an affair, imagine the shame and horror of this moment, publicly dragged through the crowded streets filled with pilgrims in their festive huts festooned with garlands, dragged through the temple courts teeming with faithful worshippers, dragged by scribes and Pharisees who were considered the most righteous in all Judea.
Think of her being thrust before Jesus, caught in flagrante, her reputation now in shreds, hanging her head in mortification. To these religious authorities the woman’s life was expendable, she meant nothing more to them than a tool to trap Jesus with. When Jesus looked at her, and at her captors, what did he think? What did Jesus see in her heart, and in the hearts of the men standing before him?
I doubt any of them anticipated what Jesus did next.
Jesus’s Finger, the Finger of God
Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground (John 8:6).
I enjoyed thinking about the finger of God writing down the Law on the stone tablets (Exodus 31:18, Deuteronomy 9:10).
But it is the second time God’s disembodied finger writes that really gets me. The second time God’s finger wrote came as a prophetic warning when Daniel was a prophet. A mysterious, disembodied hand materialized during a drunken party, and wrote God’s judgment on the wall before the king the night the Persians overtook the Babylonians.
Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace, next to the lampstand … MENE, TEKEL, AND PARSIN.
MENE: God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end.
TEKEL: you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting;
PERES: your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians
Daniel 5:5, 24-28 NRSVUE (modifications added)
Did Jesus write these three words in the dust of the temple’s floor? MENE, your days are numbered; TEKEL, you have been found wanting; PERES, your power and authority will be taken from you.
But also—and this is of special significance to women—because Jesus was writing in the temple floor’s dust, some think perhaps Jesus was alluding to Moses’s ritual with the water of bitterness that a woman suspected of adultery was made to drink, implying the religious rulers should ask of God and accept God’s judgment (Numbers 5:11-31).
Semiotic Commentary
All the ideas that Sweet brought up, and these ideas that I brought up (I had one or two more, but this post is getting long) could be what Jesus was thinking and doing. But we cannot know because the story does not tell us. However, there is one thing we can be confident of. All eyes were on Jesus’s finger as he wrote, and they were no longer staring with contempt and calculation at the woman they had so callously used.
Just as a bird will feign a broken wing to draw predators away from the nest, so Jesus had drawn attention away from the scribes’ and Pharisees’ captive.
In fact, as Jesus, wrote, their gaze must have turned inward, no longer even aware of those around them so much as the truth within them, the truth of their own sinfulness before God. They had come to Jesus with the Law of Moses forgetting the Torah’s core theology concerning God’s values of justice and righteousness to be written on their own hearts.
Complementarian Theology Quenches the Holy Spirit
It was not until my mid-fifties that I began to understand the calcification of the tiny room my particular denomination expected me to breathe in, and the air had become quite stale. Brains need oxygen.
What would it be like if we gave our young minds the stories of God throughout scripture and asked them to explore? What is this story saying about God? About people? About creation? What if each generation of young minds rewrote their catechism of doctrines from this direction? What if we helped them to discover dogma, then see how they write doctrines in this today time? I would have welcomed that approach as a young woman.
