Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  The final question is whether that Sanction -heavy vision in the book of Deuteronomy actually works in practice as the Deuteronomic tradition seeks to interpret biblical history in terms of blessings and rewards for covenantal fidelity and curses and punishments for covenantal infidelity. Furthermore, does the Bible elsewhere always agree with that Deuteronomic vision of the relationship between God and the world or God and Israel? CHAPTER 6Blessing and CurseYou realize by now the part you played To stultify the Deuteronomist And change the tenor of religious thought. ROBERT FROST , “God to Job,” A Masque of Reason (1945) IN 931 BCE THE united monarchy of David and Solomon split, over the issue of excessive taxation, into the divided monarchy that separated the northern Kingdom of Israel from the southern Kingdom of Judah. When that northern Kingdom was destroyed by the ascendant Assyrian Empire in 722–721 BCE , refugees, fleeing to relative safety in the more isolated south, took with them their own traditions, such as that of the Elohist and the Deuteronomist (recall them from Chapter 4). About one hundred years later, in 621 BCE , the high priest Hilkiah informed King Josiah of Judah that he had found the book of Deuteronomy, which he called the “book of the law,” in the Jerusalem Temple (2 Kings 22:8). Thus began what today is called the Deuteronomic Reform under the slogan “one God in one Temple—at Jerusalem” (note, for example, Deut. 12:13–14). Sanction: Curses over BlessingsWHAT IS MOST STRIKING and even startling about the book of Deuteronomy is how it is dominated by covenant, with covenant dominated by Sanction, and with Sanction dominated by curses over blessings. To put it another way: this book’s God of distributive justice is dominated by its God of retributive justice. Watch, for example, how the book climaxes with this multiple Sanction section in Deuteronomy 27–30. First is a ritual and antiphonal renewal of the covenant to be performed with representatives invoking blessings for fidelity and curses for infidelity to which all the people must answer “Amen”: “When you have crossed over the Jordan, these shall stand on Mount Gerizim for the blessing of the people: Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin. And these shall stand on Mount Ebal for the curse: Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali” (27:12–13). Yet in what follows there is no sixfold invocation of both blessings and curses but only a twelvefold invocation of curses (27:14–36): “‘Cursed be anyone who makes an idol or casts an image, anything abhorrent to the Lord, the work of an artisan, and sets it up in secret.’ All the people shall respond, saying, ‘Amen!’” (27:15); and, “‘Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice.’ All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’” (27:19). Curses predominate over blessings.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The writer to the Hebrews did not seek to avoid the duty of bringing his message, even if it was difficult and the minds of his hearers were slow. He regarded it as his supreme responsibility to pass on the truth he knew. His complaint is that his hearers have been Christians for many years and are still babes no nearer maturity. The contrast between the immature Christian and the child, between milk and solid food, often occurs in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:2; 1 Corinthians 2:6, 3:2, 14:20; Ephesians 4:13ff.). Hebrews says that by now they should be teachers. It is not necessary to take that literally. To say that someone was able to teach was the Greek way of saying that that person had a mature grasp of a subject. The writer says that they still need someone to teach them the simple elements ( stoicheia ) of Christianity . This word has a variety of meanings. In grammar, it means the letters of the alphabet, the A B C; in physics, it means the four basic elements of which the world is composed; in geometry, it means the elements of proof, like the point and the straight line; in philosophy, it means the first elementary principles with which the students begin. It is the sorrow of the writer to the Hebrews that, after many years of Christianity, his people have never got past the basics; they are like children who do not know the difference between right and wrong. Here, he is face to face with a problem which confronts the Church in every generation – that of Christians who refuse to grow up . (1) Christians can refuse to grow up in knowledge. They can be guilty of failure to take the opportunities that broaden horizons and develop ideas. There are people who keep on saying that what was good enough for people in the past is good enough for them. There are Christians in whose faith there has been no development for thirty or forty or fifty or sixty years. There are Christians who have deliberately refused to try to understand the advances that biblical scholarship and theological thought have made. They are grown men and women, and yet they insist on remaining content with the religious development of children. They are like surgeons who refuse to use the new techniques of surgery, refuse to use the new anaesthetics, refuse to use any new equipment and say: ‘What was good enough for Lister in the nineteenth century is good enough for me.’ They are like a physician who refuses to use any of the new drugs and says: ‘What I learned as a student fifty years ago is good enough for me.’

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Many Christians, sustained by prayer, the sacraments, and the fellowship of the church, have given themselves energetically to these and other causes in their own day. Sometimes they have integrated, at least, the doctrine of the incarnation into what they have been attempting. In Jesus, they have said, God came and got his hands dirty in the real world, and we are called to do the same. The movement that called itself “Christian socialism” at the end of the nineteenth century worked on exactly that basis, often with a rich blend of spirituality, sacramental practice, and biblical theology, and with remarkable effect. I think, for instance, of the great biblical scholar and Bishop of Durham Brooke Fosse Westcott, who combined ferociously detailed and exact textual scholarship with zealous commitment to the poorest of the poor in the northeast of England. Many movements of social reform at various points in the nineteenth century bear witness to this spirit, not least of course the pressure that led to the abolition of slavery. And then, around the start of the twentieth century, the movement known as the “social gospel” made its mark, not exactly by ignoring the “cloak” of ancient dogma, but by concentrating instead on the actions of Jesus and the command to his followers to behave in the same way. Matthew 25:31–46 has regularly been highlighted in this connection: “When you did it to one of the least significant of my brothers and sisters here,” declares Jesus about the hungry who need feeding, the prisoners who need visiting, and so on, “you did it to me.” And “When you didn’t do it..., you didn’t do it for me.” The Achilles heel of the “social gospel” movement, however, was that many of its enthusiasts were, like the critical scholars of the time, focusing on the center rather than the edges, and so misreading the center itself. In trying to have a Jesus who cared for the poor without needing to be the incarnate son of God or to die for the sins of the world and be raised bodily thereafter, they falsified (so we could argue) even the bits they were highlighting. The problem with all this, however, is not merely at the level of theory (“How come you’ve taken some bits of the gospel story, but left out other bits?”). The problem is that, a century after the “social gospel” was at its high-water mark, the world, including the Western world, still seems to be a place of great wickedness. Greed and corruption, oppression of the poor, violence and degradation, war and genocide continue unchecked. It isn’t only the Jesus of popular imagination, then, who expected something dramatic to happen and was disappointed. The “social gospel” may have helped to clean up some slums, to reduce working hours for women and children in factories, and so on.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  That, indeed, was the intention. And the churches have, by and large, gone along for the ride. Meanwhile—to continue the picture—the philosophy that had driven God upstairs out of sight, and so produced the modernist “problem of evil,” had also produced a new kind of politics. The democracies that were born at that time were tending, with varied success, toward the same kind of Deism that was all the rage in science; now that God was no longer involved, the world would get on and develop under its own steam. The divine right of kings went out with the guillotine, and the new slogan, vox populi vox Dei (“The voice of the people is the voice of God”), was truncated; God was away with the fairies doing his own thing, and vox pop, by itself, was all that was now needed. Like all new movements, this one called itself “justice” and “freedom,” however many injustices it then colluded with and however many new slaveries it introduced. Our own present rhetoric about democracy and legitimacy, about systems of voting and reforms of institutions, still sloshes around in the muddy waters left behind by the receding tsunami of the eighteenth-century revolutions. We would do better, philosophically speaking, to clear the whole area and rebuild from scratch. Christian Reactions So what has been the Christian reaction to all this? How have those who habitually read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John responded to the challenge of modernity? In very mixed fashion. There have of course been great and powerful moments and movements, from that of William Wilberforce two centuries ago to Desmond Tutu’s two decades ago, and many more besides. There have been great Christian thinkers who have wrestled mightily with the gospel, on the one hand, and the ambiguities of the modern Western world, on the other. William Temple comes to mind, as do Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer continues to stand out as someone who read the Bible quite differently from most of his tradition and had the courage to take it seriously. But by and large the churches have lapsed into one of four (to my mind) unhelpful reactions. The first is to say that all this doesn’t matter, because we’re going to heaven and we’ll leave this old world behind once and for all. That stance, interestingly, became increasingly popular throughout the nineteenth century, when “heaven” became the ultimate home and “resurrection”—with all its political overtones of new creation and new society—was quietly shelved or reduced to the status of an ineffective dogma or even metaphor. I have written about this extensively elsewhere ( Surprised by Hope ), * and I trust it is becoming increasingly clear to people now that such a position simply won’t do.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  34 Later, my room had all the cheeriness of a dungeon and the appeal of a tomb. It was going to be impossible to stay there, but leaving held no attraction for me, either. Running away from home would be anticlimactic after Mexico, and a dull story after my month in the car lot. But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. I had it. The answer came to me with the suddenness of a collision. I would go to work. Mother wouldn't be difficult to convince; after all, in school I was a year ahead of my grade and Mother was a firm believer in self-sufficiency. In fact, she'd be pleased to think that I had that much gumption, that much of her in my character. (She liked to speak of herself as the original “do-it-yourself girl.”) Once I had settled on getting a job, all that remained was to decide which kind of job I was most fitted for. My intellectual pride had kept me from selecting typing, shorthand or filing as subjects in school, so office work was ruled out. War plants and shipyards demanded birth certificates, and mine would reveal me to be fifteen, and ineligible for work. So the well-paying defense jobs were also out. Women had replaced men on the streetcars as conductors and motor-men, and the thought of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark-blue uniform, with a money changer at my belt, caught my fancy. Mother was as easy as I had anticipated. The world was moving so fast, so much money was being made, so many people were dying in Guam, and Germany, that hordes of strangers became good friends overnight. Life was cheap and death entirely free. How could she have the time to think about my academic career? To her question of what I planned to do, I replied that I would get a job on the streetcars. She rejected the proposal with: “They don't accept colored people on the streetcars.” I would like to claim an immediate fury which was followed by the noble determination to break the restricting tradition. But the truth is, my first reaction was one of disappointment. I'd pictured myself, dressed in a neat blue serge suit, my money changer swinging jauntily at my waist, and a cheery smile for the passengers which would make their own work day brighter. From disappointment, I gradually ascended the emotional ladder to haughty indignation, and finally to that state of stubbornness where the mind is locked like the jaws of an enraged bulldog. I would go to work on the streetcars and wear a blue serge suit. Mother gave me her support with one of her usual terse asides, “That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “The voice of critical omniscience wasn’t your strong suit,” said the nose. “Or perhaps, you didn’t believe what you were saying before and that’s where the thesis faltered. After all, if you couldn’t convince yourself, then how could you convince the reader?” “I don’t know,” I said. “The new thematic scaffolding creates a much more sound dialectic,” said the chick. “Great,” I said. “Having said that, we regret to inform you that the departments will no longer be able to fund this project,” said the nose. I was stunned. “What? Why?” “To be frank, with this new infusion of personal thoughts and feelings, it can no longer be considered a scholarly text,” said the nose. “This sort of personalized narrative just isn’t what we do around here.” “The truth is, as readers, we are genuinely glad you’ve pivoted,” said the chick. “Your prior thesis clearly wasn’t working.” “But unfortunately, the departments only receive funding for projects that further scholarship—not hybrids of scholarship and creative writing,” said the nose. What was I going to do for money? How was I going to live? “Can I reapply for it somehow?” I asked. “Unfortunately, we won’t be able to instate it,” said the nose. “Can’t or won’t? Don’t you decide what gets funded?” “To some extent, yes,” said the chick. “But we can’t deviate too much from what the university has traditionally focused on,” said the nose. “We have to retain a tonal continuity.” “So what you’re telling me is that this version is much better than the last version. But you were willing to fund the last version and not this one?” I said. “That’s right,” said the nose. “Well, what if I just go back to the old version? Hammer away on that?” “Unfortunately, that isn’t going to work,” said the chick. “Why?” “We were always skeptical of the original premise of the thesis and now you’ve convinced us that the reasoning was faulty.” “Plus, we want to encourage your creative breakthrough.” “Great,” I said. “We suggest that you seek out a mainstream trade publisher, or reapply to a program with a more creative bent than Southwest State,” said the chick. “But you won’t pay for it?” “No,” they said at the same time.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  He was talking about Booker T. Washington, our “late great leader,” who said we can be as close as the fingers on the hand, etc. … Then he said a few vague things about friendship and the friendship of kindly people to those less fortunate than themselves. With that his voice nearly faded, thin, away. Like a river diminishing to a stream and then to a trickle. But he cleared his throat and said, “Our speaker tonight, who is also our friend, came from Texarkana to deliver the commencement address, but due to the irregularity of the train schedule, he's going to, as they say, ‘speak and run.’” He said that we understood and wanted the man to know that we were most grateful for the time he was able to give us and then something about how we were willing always to adjust to another's program, and without more ado—“I give you Mr. Edward Donleavy.” Not one but two white men came through the door offstage. The shorter one walked to the speaker's platform, and the tall one moved over to the center seat and sat down. But that was our principal's seat, and already occupied. The dislodged gentleman bounced around for a long breath or two before the Baptist minister gave him his chair, then with more dignity than the situation deserved, the minister walked off the stage. Donleavy looked at the audience once (on reflection, I'm sure that he wanted only to reassure himself that we were really there), adjusted his glasses and began to read from a sheaf of papers. He was glad “to be here and to see the work going on just as it was in the other schools.” At the first “Amen” from the audience I willed the offender to immediate death by choking on the word. But Amens and Yes, sir's began to fall around the room like rain through a ragged umbrella. He told us of the wonderful changes we children in Stamps had in store. The Central School (naturally, the white school was Central) had already been granted improvements that would be in use in the fall. A well-known artist was coming from Little Rock to teach art to them. They were going to have the newest microscopes and chemistry equipment for their laboratory. Mr. Donleavy didn't leave us long in the dark over who made these improvements available to Central High. Nor were we to be ignored in the general betterment scheme he had in mind. He said that he had pointed out to people at a very high level that one of the first-line football tacklers at Arkansas Agricultural and Mechanical College had graduated from good old Lafayette County Training School. Here fewer Amen's were heard. Those few that did break through lay dully in the air with the heaviness of habit.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  34 Later, my room had all the cheeriness of a dungeon and the appeal of a tomb. It was going to be impossible to stay there, but leaving held no attraction for me, either. Running away from home would be anticlimactic after Mexico, and a dull story after my month in the car lot. But the need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. I had it. The answer came to me with the suddenness of a collision. I would go to work. Mother wouldn't be difficult to convince; after all, in school I was a year ahead of my grade and Mother was a firm believer in self-sufficiency. In fact, she'd be pleased to think that I had that much gumption, that much of her in my character. (She liked to speak of herself as the original “do-it-yourself girl.”) Once I had settled on getting a job, all that remained was to decide which kind of job I was most fitted for. My intellectual pride had kept me from selecting typing, shorthand or filing as subjects in school, so office work was ruled out. War plants and shipyards demanded birth certificates, and mine would reveal me to be fifteen, and ineligible for work. So the well-paying defense jobs were also out. Women had replaced men on the streetcars as conductors and motor-men, and the thought of sailing up and down the hills of San Francisco in a dark-blue uniform, with a money changer at my belt, caught my fancy. Mother was as easy as I had anticipated. The world was moving so fast, so much money was being made, so many people were dying in Guam, and Germany, that hordes of strangers became good friends overnight. Life was cheap and death entirely free. How could she have the time to think about my academic career? To her question of what I planned to do, I replied that I would get a job on the streetcars. She rejected the proposal with: “They don't accept colored people on the streetcars.” I would like to claim an immediate fury which was followed by the noble determination to break the restricting tradition. But the truth is, my first reaction was one of disappointment. I'd pictured myself, dressed in a neat blue serge suit, my money changer swinging jauntily at my waist, and a cheery smile for the passengers which would make their own work day brighter. From disappointment, I gradually ascended the emotional ladder to haughty indignation, and finally to that state of stubbornness where the mind is locked like the jaws of an enraged bulldog. I would go to work on the streetcars and wear a blue serge suit. Mother gave me her support with one of her usual terse asides, “That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Perhaps the only thing more ironic than the fact that the transgender movement’s “shatter the gender binary” slogan is now being used to enforce a new subversive/conservative gender binary is the fact that the queer/trans community’s growing sense of “oneness” evolved out of a well-meaning attempt to prevent exclusivity. From the outset, many early transgender activists feared that one particular transgender subgroup might come to dominate the transgender community, that they would begin to police the movement’s borders and enforce their own sense of “oneness.” Because the exclusivity of cultural feminism and the mainstream “gay rights” movement seemed to center on disputes over identity—who counts as a “woman” or who is legitimately “gay”—many activists advocated the idea that the transgender coalition should be borderless, one where there was no set criteria for an individual to join. Many also worked to play down or blur the distinctiveness of individual transgender subgroups in order to prevent any kind of hierarchy from developing. The transgender movement, in effect, became an anti-identity movement. In retrospect, I would say that the assumption that distinct identities would automatically lead to exclusivity was entirely misplaced. After all, an identity is merely a label, a descriptive noun to express one particular facet of a person’s experiences. And if we look beyond gender and sexual identity politics, we can find many examples of flexible and fluid identities. For example, if I were to identify myself as a “cat person,” nobody would be outraged or confused if I said I also loved dogs. Further, when I tell people that I’m a “musician,” no one makes unwarranted assumptions about what instruments I play or what styles of music I prefer. Nonpoliticized identities like “musician” and “cat person” allow us to see that the recurring problems in gender and sexual identity politics arise not from identity per se, but rather from opposite-think (e.g., that a cat person cannot be a dog person, and vice versa) and from a sense of “oneness” (e.g., the assumption that all musicians are or should be punk rock guitarists.)

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Unless you say something along these lines, you are likely to be sneered at. You can’t be a serious thinker. The strength of this position is that it really does try, to some extent at least, to pay attention to the bits of the church’s own canon that the church’s own creeds had bypassed. At its best, it produces, as we shall see, a strong “social gospel” agenda in which many of the things the gospels emphasize about Jesus—his care for the poor, the sick, the weak, and so on—are given a new energy that official “orthodoxy” has often strangely failed to supply. Its weakness is that it has neither the will nor the means to integrate that central piece, the why-did-Jesus-live bit, with the outer, creedal questions, the puzzles of Jesus’s birth, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming. Many of us, I guess, have grown up with this liberal reductionism in the air. Books with titles like Jesus Who Became Christ abound. The “Jesus Seminar,” which trumpeted its own “findings” (“Scholars say that…”) while almost all New Testament scholars in America gave it a wide berth, went down very well with Time magazine and with liberal clergy who wanted to believe something like its reductionist teaching in the first place. The idea that Jesus came to teach a new, simple, clear ethic of being nice to people, without any “dogmatic” claims or “supernatural” elements, is so deeply embedded in Western culture that one sometimes despairs, like a gardener faced with ground ivy, of ever uprooting it. To this day there seems a ready market right across the Western world for books that say that Jesus was just a good Jewish boy who would have been horrified to see a “church” set up in his name, who didn’t think of himself as “God” or even the “Son of God,” and who had no intention of dying for anyone’s sins—the church has gotten it all wrong. The authors of such books routinely proclaim themselves “neutral,” “unbiased,” “impartial,” or “independent.” As if. This reductionist project suggests, in other words, that we try the picture the other way around. Instead of privileging the creeds and screening out the middle of the gospels, let’s privilege the middle material of the gospels and screen out all that odd supernatural stuff at either end, the ideas that found their way into the creeds. This position remains hugely popular. As with Richard Dawkins and his ilk, people clearly still want, in fact they rather badly want, to be told that Jesus was just a great teacher, not the divine Savior.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS, a major focus of my trans activism and writing has been the issue of transwoman-inclusion in lesbian and women-only spaces. I first heard of the issue back in 1999, around the time that I was beginning to call myself transgendered—about two years before I began my physical transition. At the time, I was voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on related to trans experiences and issues. As I read, I kept stumbling upon past instances of anti-trans-woman discrimination from within the lesbian and feminist communities. These included derogatory anti-trans-woman remarks by influential feminist thinkers such as Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, and of course Janice Raymond (who, in addition to writing the anti-trans screed The Transsexual Empire, tried to convince the National Center for Health Care Technology to deny transsexuals the right to hormones and surgery); stories about transsexual “witch hunts,” in which committed lesbian-feminists like Sandy Stone and Beth Elliott were publicly outed, debased, and exiled from the lesbian community solely for being transsexual; and of course, transwoman-exclusion policies, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s euphemistically named “womyn-born-womyn-only” policy, which was retroactively instated in the early 1990s after an incident in which a woman named Nancy Burkholder was expelled from the festival when it was discovered that she was trans.2 While I found it disappointing that people who identified as lesbians and as feminists would come down so harshly on another sexual minority, I cannot say that I was really surprised. After all, practically every facet of our society seemed to hate or fear trans people back then, and these incidents seemed more like a symptom of society-wide transphobia rather than something unique or specific to the lesbian community. And as I was giving thought to becoming involved in trans activism myself, there seemed to be plenty of other, more practical and relevant issues for me to take on. But in the years that followed, I experienced a number of changes in my life that would considerably reshape my views on this matter. For one thing, there was my physical transition and the countless social changes I experienced as a result of being perceived as female. But for me, being trans didn’t merely involve learning how to navigate my way through the world as a woman. I have the privilege of being appropriately gendered as female, so in my day-to-day life, when I am forced to come out to someone, nine times out of ten it is not as a transsexual, but as a lesbian. It happens every time somebody asks me if I am seeing someone and I reply, “Actually, I have a wife.” It happens every time Dani and I dare to hold hands or kiss in public. It happens when Dani is not around, but someone assumes that I am a dyke anyway because of the way that I dress, speak, or carry myself.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Of course, I didn’t say a word about Adam. I didn’t want them reprimanding me or giving me any healthy advice. I knew what they would say: I wasn’t supposed to be dating yet. And meeting up with strangers in alleys doesn’t constitute conscious dating. But maybe I didn’t want to be conscious. 13.Later, as I waited for Adam on Ocean Front Walk, near Marina del Rey, where the homeless cleared and the vibration of the boardwalk became more desolate, I was so excited that I was nauseated. The Santa Monica Mountains were covered in fog, so the pink and palm-tree silhouettes of Venice looked like their own island—an old beach scene frozen in time. It was windy out and I was cold, but I felt important—momentous—like I was on a timeless mission. I could be anyone standing by any beach in history, waiting for a lover. I could be Sappho, unafraid of Eros, calling Aphrodite to her shrine. But as soon as I saw him coming, I thought, Oh God no. He sort of looked like his picture, but more the monkey aesthetic than the hot one. Also, he had an additional werewolf essence that the photo had not captured. It wasn’t just his jagged teeth, the scruffy goatee, but something else that was distinctly werewolf. He waved to me, and I waved back, cursing through my teeth, already disappointed. When he crossed the street I tried not to let it show, to be warm, though I wasn’t sure why I cared what he thought. I guess I felt bad about rejecting someone without even knowing him. I felt sort of ashamed that I was judging him for his looks, but with an alley make-out what other attributes could there be? It figured. Of course this werewolf-monkey creature was the best that I could do. He might have been disappointed in what I looked like too, but he didn’t show it. “You’re really cute,” he said, as though assuring both me and himself. “You look a lot younger than forty. A lot younger.” “I’m thirty-eight,” I said. “Not that I don’t like older women. I love older women. You’ve got seasoning. But you look like a young older woman. Or an old younger woman—” “Okay,” I said, relieving him of having to speak. “I got it.” “So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Do you want to stay here and have a drink or do you want to go for a walk?” “Let’s have a drink first,” I said. “God, you’re really cute,” he said. We turned in to a little dive. I ordered myself a vodka tonic. Rarely did I drink liquor anymore but I felt that the situation called for it. I needed to be less lucid than I was. He didn’t offer to pay for my drink. But he got two tequila shots, offering me one, and a Jack and Coke. I declined, laughing.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Another similar use of an ungendered character can be found in Diane DiMassa’s comic strip Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. With its dyke protagonist who confronts expressions of sexism and homophobia with a lethal combination of violence and humor, Hothead became a popular vehicle in the ’90s for expressing the frustration and anger many queer women felt. At one point in the series, Hothead meets her eventual love interest, Daphne. When they are first dating, Daphne mentions, “I’m just low on friends! Mine took off ’cause they couldn’t handle it.” After Hothead asks why, Daphne explains, “I’m in the middle of a large-scale transition. Look at me. ... Do you see? ”12 The fact that this “large-scale transition” is a physical one, and that Daphne follows with, “I’m telling you now so you can do what you gotta do. If you’re gonna fly away I’d rather just get it over with,” DiMassa is clearly leading the audience to believe that Daphne is transsexual. This is further evident in a later episode when Hothead imagines asking, “So Daphne, what’s the story? You gotta dick or pussy or what?”13 While the fact that Daphne has a feminine name, longish hair, breasts, and identifies as a dyke suggests that she is a trans woman, DiMassa never clearly spells it out, opting instead to tease the audience by relegating Daphne to a permanently ungendered state. In 2004, Daphne’s ungendered status slammed up against the political reality of actual trans people when a musical based on Hothead Paisan was to be performed at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Because many people were led to believe that Daphne was transgender—and more specifically, a trans woman—DiMassa received pressure to denounce the festival’s transwoman-exclusion policy. In response, DiMassa published an open letter on her website in July 2004 stating that she supported the transwoman-exclusion policy. In an interview with Bitch magazine around the same time, she said, “Daphne has become sort of a transgender hero character. But I never used that word. I never said which way she was going. I never said if she was MTF or FTM.”14

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  fall. On a single day, he was subjected to 14 turnings of the rope. There were two separate trials conducted by the municipality, April 17 and April 21–23. In the delirious condition, to which his pains reduced him, the unfortunate man made confessions which, later in his sane moments, he recalled as untrue.1205 He even denied that he was a prophet. The impression which this denial made upon such ardent admirers as Landucci, the apothecary, was distressing. Writing April 19,1498, he says:— I was present at the reading of the proceedings against Savonarola, whom we all held to be a prophet. But he said he is no prophet and that his prophecies were not from God. When I heard that, I was seized with wonder and amazement. A deep pain took hold of my soul, when I saw such a splendid edifice fall to the ground, because it was built upon the sorry foundation of a falsehood. I looked for Florence to become a new Jerusalem whose laws and example of a good life—buona vita — would go out for the renovation of the Church, the conversion of infidels and the comfort of the good and I felt the contrary and took for medicine the words, "in thy will, O Lord, are all things placed"—in voluntate tua, Domine, omnia sunt posita. Diary, p. 173. Alexander despatched a commission of his own to conduct the trial anew, Turriano, the Venetian general of the Dominicans and Francesco Romolino, the bishop of Ilerda, afterwards cardinal. Letters from Rome stated that the commission had instructions "to put Savonarola to death, even if he were another John the Baptist." Alexander was quite equal to such a statement. Soon after his arrival in Florence, Romolino announced that a bonfire was impending and that he carried the sentence with him ready, prepared in advance. Fra Domenico bore himself most admirably and persisted in speaking naught but praise of his friend and ecclesiastical superior. Fra Silvestro, yielding to the agonies of the rack, charged his master with all sorts of guilt. Other monks of St. Mark’s wrote to Alexander, making charges against their prior as an impostor. So it often is with those who praise in times of prosperity. To save themselves, they deny and calumniate their benefactors. They received their reward, the papal absolution. The exact charges, upon which Savonarola was condemned to death, are matter of some uncertainty and also matter of indifference, for they were partly trumped up for the occasion. Though no offender against the law of God, he had given offence enough to man. He was accused by the papal commissioners with being a heretic and schismatic. He was no heretic.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This is the point that the four gospels are making, but that the creeds appear completely to ignore and that the Reformers and subsequent “evangelical” movements have likewise normally ignored in their eagerness for “the gospel” of personal salvation. The church has gone on reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but without any clue from those great creedal and Reformed traditions as to what they are actually saying. My case throughout this book, then, is that all four canonical gospels suppose themselves to be telling the story that Paul, in some of his most central and characteristic passages, tells as well: that the story of Jesus is the story of how Israel’s God became king . This is how, in the events concerning Jesus of Nazareth, the God of Israel has become king of the whole world. This is the forgotten story of the gospels. We have not even noticed that this was what they were trying to tell us. As a result, we have all misread them. A sign of how far off-track we are at this point is the natural reaction that many will already have had to the very word “theocracy.” Some readers may, metaphorically or even literally, have put their hands to their mouths in dismay. “We never wanted to hear that ! If it were true that God had become king, what on earth would it mean? The rule of the crazy and corrupt clergy? And surely it isn’t true, anyway—since the world is still in a horrible mess and since indeed Jesus’s followers have contributed to that mess? Wasn’t the kingdom of God something having to do with the end of the world, and since that didn’t happen, aren’t we justified in looking at things very differently? And if in some way we believe that Jesus is exalted or enthroned, surely that is a purely spiritual reality we’re talking about? Doesn’t the Easter hymn say, ‘Now above the sky he’s king / where the angels ever sing / Alleluia’” ? Well, yes, it does. More’s the pity. Actually, when I was Bishop of Durham I used to insist that we change that line to, “Now o’er all the world he’s king / while the angels ever sing / Alleluia.” That’s what the ascension is about. But before we can get to that, we need to take several steps back and look more widely at what people have done with the “middle bits” of the gospels once they have forgotten the story that the evangelists were really trying to tell us.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  (Such people are the target of the warnings in 1 John 4:2–3.) Since for many centuries the main thing people wanted to say about Jesus was that he was fully divine and fully human, it has once more been assumed that this “must have been” what the gospels were “really” trying to say about him. This way of reading the gospels was presented to me in one of the very first tutorials I attended as an Oxford undergraduate. On the reading list there was a book explaining that one could trace, in the gospels, the things Jesus did that demonstrated his divinity and the things he did that demonstrated his humanity. The miracles—especially walking on water, raising the dead, and then being raised himself—showed that “he was God.” But also he was hungry, he wept, and he confessed his own ignorance (in Mark 13:32, which the early church certainly didn’t make up, Jesus declares that he doesn’t know the day or the hour of the cataclysmic events he is predicting). All this, I read, showed that “he was human.” His death, of course, made the latter point all the more starkly. When did people start to talk about Jesus’s “humanity” and “divinity” in this way? Not, I think, in the first century. Don’t misunderstand me. As we shall see, if the question were raised, the New Testament writers would be quite clear that Jesus was indeed fully human and—somehow, strangely, but definitely—truly divine. But that does not seem to be their main point. Even John, who brings his stage-setting prologue to its climax by speaking of the Word becoming flesh, does not make this the main strand in the story he is telling. It is only later, when the church moves out into the wider world of Greek philosophy, that the question gets raised like that, in the abstract. In the middle of the fifth century Chalcedonian Christology declared, in ringing, round, and frankly very paradoxical tones, that Jesus was indeed fully divine and fully human. These abstract categories were in the center of the discussion then, and no mistake. But if you compare Chalcedon with the four gospels, you’ll find that they are very different sorts of documents and that the gospels, though they do indeed have Jesus doing remarkable things, on the one hand, and behaving like an ordinary human being, on the other, do not appear to be written in order to prove that point. Sometimes people will say, making a more personal or pastoral point, that the gospels, in telling the story of Jesus, show us who God really is. That’s a bit more like it. That, in fact, is precisely what John says at the end of his prologue: nobody has ever seen God, but the only son, who is intimately close to the Father, has brought him to light.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Conclusion We should note at this point that the so-called Gnostic gospels, books like the Gospel of Thomas and the rest, are simply in another world. They reject the story of Israel—indeed the idea that there is a “story” within which Jesus’s words and deeds make sense— and avoid any mention of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. This does not mean, as some have suggested, that they are earlier versions, prereflective first attempts at remembering Jesus. It means that they are later, de-Judaized, dehistoricized distortions, offering salvation not for the world, but from the world. They want nothing to do with Jewish-style creational monotheism, in which the world is God’s good creation, needing to be judged and set right. They want nothing to do with Israel as the people who carry God’s rescuing purposes for the world. They want a dehistoricized world, a de-Judaized world, a “spiritual” world rather than the matter-and-spirit world, the heaven-and-earth world, which Israel’s God has made. They are deconstructing Genesis itself. They have no time for the God of the exodus, the God who sets the slaves free and comes to dwell in their midst. Unless we are constantly aware, in reading the gospels, that they are telling the Jesus story in such a way as to bring out the Israel story, we will never hear their proper harmony. This is the first of the speakers in our sound system that we must turn up to its proper volume. The events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, to be sure, burst upon an unready first-century Jewish world, as the evangelists make clear on every page. They are the real fulfillment, even though the people weren’t expecting it. All those parables about the returning master or lord come into their own. There wasn’t a smooth “salvation history” in the sense of a steady crescendo, things getting better and better until the moment arrived. Rather, it was the reverse. Israel was in a mess, and God had to do something radically new. But the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he’d always promised, the thing for which they’d always most deeply hoped and prayed. This is the paradox. It runs right through the New Testament, and especially through the gospels. The story reached its goal, but the story itself was looking in the wrong direction. “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” Instead of declaring that they wanted “no king except God,” as their scriptures might have suggested, the chief priests, Israel’s official representatives, declared that they had “no king except Caesar.” But, as John makes clear, Jesus was indeed their true king, and his crucifixion was the full revelation of what that meant. Paradox upon paradox.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  As I read the gospels and think what the church has done (and hasn’t done) with them, I am reminded of a wonderful scene in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. There, the cynical old court composer Salieri contrasts his own operas, telling and retelling great tales of legendary heroes but through stale and tedious music, with Mozart’s astonishing ability to take characters off the street and create something truly magical. “He has taken ordinary people,” says Salieri, “ordinary people—barbers and chambermaids—and he has made them gods and heroes. I have taken gods and heroes...and made them ordinary.” Making the Gospels Ordinary Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation. It is not easy to escape the trap of “making the gospels ordinary.” There are habits of thought and of the practice of the church (some lectionaries, for instance) that are so ingrained that we don’t realize they’re there. But habits of thought, especially when we are not aware of them, have the capacity to keep us imprisoned in small-minded readings unless we name them, smoke them out of their hiding places, set them aside, and take steps to prevent their return. This chapter is, in one sense, a digression, because in it we turn aside to examine these habits, these patterns of thought and imagination, so that we can at least reduce their powerful influence. Only then can we return to the gospels themselves with some hope of seeing more clearly what they are actually saying. The gospels are telling us that the whole story belongs together: the kingdom and the cross are part of one another (and both, together, are part of the larger whole that includes incarnation, on the one hand, and resurrection, on the other). We have become stuck in habits of thought that pull these apart. Once you lose the kingdom theme, which is central to the gospels, everything else becomes reinterpreted in ways that radically distort, that substitute a subtly different “gospel” message for the one Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are eager to convey.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Let’s sharpen this up by observing an irony that follows directly from this. To this day, whenever people take it upon themselves to explore the divinity of Jesus, there is at the very least a tendency for the theme of God’s kingdom, coming on earth as in heaven, to be quietly lost from view. It is as though a young man spent all his time proving that he really was his father’s son and left no time or energy for working with his father in the family business—which would, actually, be one of the better ways of demonstrating the family likeness. The gospels don’t make that mistake. It is by his inaugurating of God’s kingdom, in his public career and on the cross, that Jesus reveals the father’s glory. More of that anon. But this is a startling preliminary conclusion. It poses several additional questions for us today: about our discipleship, our preaching, our hermeneutics, and even our praying. The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. It would be truly remarkable if one great truth of early Christian faith and life were actually to displace another, to displace it indeed so thoroughly that people forgot it even existed. But that’s what I think has happened. This book is written in the hope of correcting that distortion. The Plot Thickens: Twentieth-Century Scholarly Trends So far I have confined myself to personal observations. But I believe the problem I have highlighted resonates across the whole field of Bible reading, scholarly and popular, in all the different traditions. As an American friend of mine put it, most Western churchgoers treat the gospels as the optional chips and dip at the start of the evening. They are the cocktail nibbles. Only after that do we sit down at table for the red meat of Pauline theology. I suspect—though this would take us too far afield—that this has been the case for much of the past millennium in the West, during the Middle Ages and then during and after the Reformation. That historical story, as I said in the Preface, must wait for another occasion, and probably another writer. I want, for the moment, to concentrate on one enormously influential strand of twentieth-century scholarship that both reflects the problem I am outlining and then solidifies it in the imagination and implicit understanding of the Western church at least. The German Lutheran scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential New Testament scholars. For Bultmann and the generations of scholars and students who have been influenced directly or indirectly by his work, the story of Jesus himself formed no part of “New Testament theology”—it was merely the presupposition for such a thing. All that was needed was the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion; that was enough. Everything else one needed to know was contained not in his teaching or public career, but in the early church’s reflection on the meaning of the cross.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And yet. As we observed in the first part of this book, it simply won’t do to say that the Bible and the creeds can come together in that ultimate, intimate way. The creeds simply do not “let Scripture come to its natural, two-testament expression.” Indeed, for many who have said the creeds down the years, the Old Testament has remained a largely closed book. There are many who would be horrified to have their status as catholic, creedal Christians questioned, but in whose life, worship, teaching, prayer, and Christian thinking the scriptures of Israel play no visible part. The creeds do virtually nothing to challenge this form of truncated, quasi-Marcionite Christianity. (When I say “virtually nothing,” I allow the two exceptions: that calling God the “maker of heaven and earth” at once invokes Genesis 1, for those who have ears to hear; and saying, in the Nicene Creed, that the Holy Spirit “spoke by the prophets” acknowledges—assuming with most that the reference is to the “prophets” of the Old Testament, not the New—that the gift of Pentecost was simply the universalizing of the special inspiration of the ancient biblical writers.) But that is only the start of it. As we saw, directly following from the creeds’ nonmention of the whole story of Israel is the complete absence of anything to do with God’s kingdom. This is fine so long as the creeds are regarded as the key markers in areas where there had been serious controversy. But as soon as they are made the syllabus, the master list of vital topics, there is a major gap. Again, it would, I think, be uncontroversial to propose that the great majority of people in today’s church who consider themselves to be firmly “creedal” Christians, affirming the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, and the second coming, have never imagined for one moment that the gospels are telling the story of how God became king or that the rescuing sovereignty of God is already a reality in the world through the public career, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There is a kingdom-shaped gap at the heart of their implicit story. And the problem with leaving that gap unfilled is that everything else in the story changes its meaning, ever so slightly but significantly. Like somebody who has lost a central piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but is determined to finish the puzzle anyway, other pieces have to be pulled a little out of shape if they are to be made to fit. By themselves, the creeds are fine—excellent, solid, evocative, upbuilding. But if their enthusiasts claim that they teach exactly the same thing as the canon, they have deceived themselves, and the truth is not in them.