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 God Became King (2012)

  Over here to the other side, a very different thing, we have the Jesus whom the canonical gospels actually present, who is the same as the Jesus of the great creeds. My problem with this is that the canonical gospels and the creeds are not in fact presenting the same picture. This, actually, is a question that goes much wider and deeper than we have time to explore in this book, but at the heart of it we could sum up the problem like this. The great creeds, when they refer to Jesus, pass directly from his virgin birth to his suffering and death. The four gospels don’t. Or, to put it the other way around, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all seem to think it’s hugely important that they tell us a great deal about what Jesus did between the time of his birth and the time of his death. In particular, they tell us about what we might call his kingdom-inaugurating work: the deeds and words that declared that God’s kingdom was coming then and there, in some sense or other, on earth as in heaven. They tell us a great deal about that; but the great creeds don’t. Before we examine the great creeds in more detail, let’s remind ourselves of the reason why they came to be formulated in the first place. The early church faced many problems and battles. This is hardly surprising. Jesus himself told his followers it would work out like that. Sometimes it was direct persecution; there were many martyrs in the first three centuries. Sometimes it was internal division, as devout followers of Jesus discovered that other devout followers of Jesus saw things very differently, but held their position equally strongly. There were ongoing debates with Jewish groups and individuals who did not believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah and found themselves in an awkward position vis-à-vis the expanding Christian church, which claimed so much from its Jewish heritage (not least the ancient scriptures) and yet saw so many other things in a very different light and ordered its life accordingly. In particular, there were the great battles with Gnosticism in the second and third centuries, in which Christian teachers like Irenaeus and Tertullian stood firm for belief in God as the good and wise creator, and with Arianism in the fourth and fifth centuries, in which teachers like Athanasius stood firm for belief in Jesus as “being of one substance with the Father.”

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  He stared hard at me and inhaled deeply, then turned and dramatically closed the double doors to the room so we could speak privately. “Here’s the thing,” he said, pausing as if to make an announcement. “I’m not happy with you.” His words hung heavily in the charged air between us. His demeanor was stiff and formal, so unlike his usually bouncy and high-spirited way of moving through his days that I wanted to laugh and say OK, enough of this charade, let’s be friends. But strangely, he didn’t so much as crack a small smile. “I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “We barely communicate and spend zero time together unless the kids are involved. I’m not happy,” he said again. I suggested that was an easy fix and we should try to spend more time together. He let out a deep sigh, shaking his head. “Laura, you don’t get it. If I had to grade our relationship right now, I would give us a C. That’s how bad it is.” I grimaced and tried to joke that I was pretty sure a B was more in order, but I could see his frustration increase with my inability to digest what he was trying to impress upon me. “I don’t have time to deal with this right now. Work is a disaster and I have to get to the office. We need to deal with this, but not now.” With that, he flung the doors of the room open and within moments was gone from the apartment. I sat immobilized at my desk. What he had said to me felt unfair and out of left field. Happy? Who had said anything about our being entitled to happiness all the time? We were busy and didn’t have much time to connect, it was true. But he was suggesting we were at some sort of a crisis and I was perplexed. Our lives felt chaotic – three kids in three different schools, two homes, a business to run – compounded by a busy fall touring colleges with Daisy and helping to care for my normally healthy mother who had slipped weeks earlier, shattering her wrist and kneecap only days after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Why couldn’t he see that we needed to wait until our plates cleared and then hit the reset button? We had frequently discussed that this time in our lives with our kids at home was precious and fleeting and that we would have countless years alone together in the future – why so much rancor about it all of a sudden? As far as I could see, happiness as an overarching goal was momentarily irrelevant. We needed to get through his business plight, my mother’s health crisis, support Daisy through her senior year of high school, and in general live our lives with a little less angst. Happy? How about we strive not to totally fall apart?

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Without that larger picture, the word “teacher” or “teaching” can result in a severely diminished sense of what the gospels are trying to say about Jesus. The notion of “teaching” can easily collapse into the standard popular picture of Jesus as one of the world’s great “religious teachers” alongside Buddha, Muhammad, and so on. In other words, there are some things called “religious truths,” which some great souls have discovered and taught, and Jesus was simply one of those great souls, one of those great teachers. One often meets people who are extremely keen to insist that Jesus’s teaching was “just like” that of Buddha or another great teacher—as though they are perhaps a bit too eager to make sure that the much more specific claim of Jesus, that Israel’s God was launching his project of new creation in and through him, should be set aside and forgotten. Jesus as a “teacher” is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him. Most Christians today would, I suspect, see straight through that reductionism. But would they know what to put in its place? Or would they simply substitute some version of the first answer, that Jesus came to enable us to go to heaven? In the gospels, Jesus is undoubtedly a great moral teacher and exemplar. But he is much, much more. And it is that “much more” that the church has found so hard to grasp and express. Jesus the Moral Exemplar A third standard line people sometimes advance when wondering why the gospels tell their readers about what Jesus did in his public career is to suggest that he was offering an example of how to live. His utter, generous love and his fearless rebuke of wickedness and oppression make a formidable combination, especially when you add in his apparent fondness for parties, on the one hand, and prayer, on the other, and his remarkably shrewd ability to sum up situations, people, and problems in a pithy phrase or to tease out fresh meaning with a neat, telling story. What a man, we say to ourselves. Unlike many moralists then and now, his own life strikingly matched his own stringent teaching. People have sometimes accused Jesus of betraying his own standards (in cursing the fig tree, for example), but most people have accepted the gospels’ portrait of him as embodying that mixture of wisdom, love, holiness, and truth that he was urging as the proper standard for human life. The idea of Jesus as “teacher” is therefore sometimes elaborated further, and Jesus is seen as “moral exemplar.” Jesus came, many have said, to “show us the way,” to “show us how it’s done.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  That’s another story. We got to the end of our hour. It was time to stop. “Well, Tom,” he said, summing it all up. “I think what you’re saying is that I’m insufficiently biblical.” I gasped inside. That was quite an admission. “Yes,” I replied. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.” And if that was true of him, it is true of a great deal of the Western Christian tradition (I can’t speak about Eastern Orthodoxy): Catholic and Protestant, liberal and evangelical, charismatic and contemplative. We use the gospels. We read them aloud in worship. We often preach from them. But have we even begun to hear what they are saying, the whole message, which is so much greater than the sum of the small parts with which we are, on one level, so familiar? I don’t think so. This is the lifetime puzzle. It isn’t just that we’ve all mis read the gospels, though I think that’s broadly true. It is more that we haven’t really read them at all. We have fitted them into the framework of ideas and beliefs that we have acquired from other sources. I want in this book to allow them, as far as I can, to speak for themselves. Not everyone will like the result. Canon and Creed This problem about the puzzling relationship between “the gospel” and “the gospels” is reflected in the equally puzzling relationship between the gospels and the great Christian creeds. A good friend of mine, in a sparkling presentation, once let slip the remarkable line, “The canonical Jesus is, of course, the Christ of the church’s creeds.” In other words, the Jesus we find in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus Christ we confess when we say the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed (properly, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed), or even the so-called Athanasian Creed (a much longer formula that the old Anglican prayer book instructs worshippers to include on special occasions). My friend was distinguishing this supposedly both creedal and canonical Jesus from the reconstructed “Jesus” figures of so much would-be historical scholarship. Over here to one side, he implied, we have that mountain of historical scholarship, with characters such as Schweitzer and Sanders and even N. T. Wright peeping out from under the great pile, offering their various historical reconstructions. Over here to the other side, a very different thing, we have the Jesus whom the canonical gospels actually present, who is the same as the Jesus of the great creeds . My problem with this is that the canonical gospels and the creeds are not in fact presenting the same picture. This, actually, is a question that goes much wider and deeper than we have time to explore in this book, but at the heart of it we could sum up the problem like this. The great creeds, when they refer to Jesus, pass directly from his virgin birth to his suffering and death.

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

  So long as we refuse to accept that “woman” is a holistic concept, one that includes all people who experience themselves as women, our concept of womanhood will remain a mere reflection of our own personal experiences and biases rather than something based in the truly diverse world that surrounds us. 12 Bending Over Backwards: Traditional Sexism and Trans-Woman-Exclusion Policies Prejudice usually can’t survive close contact with the people who are supposed to be so despicable, which is why the propagandists for hate always preach separation. —Patrick Califia 1 Over the last several years, a major focus of my trans activism and writing has been the issue of trans-woman-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 transgender—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, trans-woman-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.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The bare fact of the cross was enough; almost, for some of Bultmann’s followers, more than enough. It would therefore falsify the essence of Christian faith to suppose that the evangelists were telling us about things that actually happened as though those things mattered. It has become an either/or question: either this story is about Jesus, or it is about the early church. A story about Jesus doing something on the sabbath and making a comment about it is thus assumed to reflect not so much an actual incident in the life of Jesus, but a sabbath controversy in the early church (not that we have much other evidence of controversy on this topic). The sound from this speaker has therefore been turned up to deafening point. Some people haven’t been able to hear anything else. Many readers, not least in Britain and America, who were not particularly up on existentialist Lutheranism, but were susceptible to the mood of the times—the “spirit of the age”—found this idea very congenial. Of course Jesus didn’t really walk on water; of course he didn’t really say “I and the Father are one”; of course he didn’t rise bodily from the dead, but what marvelous expressions of early faith! Now how can we, who know these things didn’t happen, express our faith in appropriate terms for today? These prejudgments have simply falsified the entire gospel tradition. This isn’t a matter of “proving” that this or that element in the gospels is in fact historically reliable. History has, in any case, a type of “proof” different from that in many other disciplines. Science studies repeatable phenomena; an experiment can be replicated on the other side of the world. History studies unrepeatable phenomena; you cannot step twice into the same river. “Proof” in history must therefore reside in the balance of probabilities, not in the repeated experiment or the analytical mathematical truth. It’s more a matter of recognizing that the gospels were indeed intended as “biographies” in some sense or other, even though they are biographies that carry all kinds of other stories, as we are seeing in this part of the present book. And my judgment as a historian is that, once we think our way into the world of Jesus’s day, they convey the mood and flavor of the times and of its toweringly central character with remarkable precision.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  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. This isn’t what the four gospels are about. It’s actually closer to Gnosticism.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  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. 3 The Inadequate Answers SO WHAT HAVE THE CHURCHES normally done with the “middle bits,” with the “body” inside the “cloak”? I have on occasion challenged groups of clergy and laity to tell me what they or their congregations might say if asked what “all that stuff in the middle” was about. What was the point, I have asked, of the healings and feastings, the Sermon on the Mount and the controversies with the Pharisees, the stilling of the storm, Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, and so on, and so on—all the mass of rich material that the gospels offer us between Jesus’s birth, or at least his baptism, and his trial and death? Pastors and preachers reading this book might like to consider the question this way. If you asked your congregation about this, what do you think they would say? What, indeed, would your congregation expect you to say the gospels were all about? The responses I have received have been revealing.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But it doesn’t run as smoothly as it did, it’s making odd noises, and he worries that one day it may fall apart altogether. So he takes it to the garage down the road. After a couple of days he goes to speak to the mechanic. “Well,” says the mechanic behind the desk, “this is quite interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of these. There are some genuine 1950s parts in there. Pity someone added those extra washers, though—that wasn’t what the designer intended.” “But,” replies the owner, “is it going to be all right? Will I still be able to drive it?” “And another thing,” continues the mechanic, undaunted. “The tires are the wrong sort for those wheels. They are already quite worn and could get worse. And the cylinders—well, they’re a mess. We’ve been having quite a debate in the garage about whether they will really do the job.” “But where is the car?” asks the owner, getting agitated. “Have you got it going? Can I still drive it?” The mechanic shrugs his shoulders. “Come and see,” he says. They go through to the garage in the back. There is the car, dismantled into a thousand parts, each one carefully labeled and laid out beautifully, artistically even, all over the workroom floor. The owner stares in dismay. “My car!” he shouts. “What have you done to my car?” “Hey, take it easy, man,” replies the head mechanic. “Just look at this. What a great machine. People must have enjoyed this old thing all those years ago. These parts—we’ve all been admiring them. Sure, we’ve cleaned up some of them, and we’ll probably replace some of the others. Enjoy the view! You should be proud.” And the owner, lost for words, shakes his head sorrowfully and walks away. The Whole and the Parts The car is the New Testament. The owner is the “ordinary Christian,” whether in the pulpit or the pew. The mechanics are a certain breed of New Testament scholar. And the sad little story represents the perception of many “ordinary Christians” about the effect of scholarship on their wonderful old text. Some scholars have said it’s unreliable. Some have said people have added bits that shouldn’t be there. Some have said you won’t be able to drive it much longer. But many others have just taken it apart, analyzed it word by word, drawn cunning parallels with other ancient literature, demonstrated its rhetorical skill—and left it in bits all over the floor. To be admired, no doubt. But not to be driven.

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

  Further, as Echols points out, while cultural feminists “used the language of sisterhood, they often assumed a patronizing stance toward those ‘unliberated’ women who were still living in ‘The Man’s’ world.” 5 This exclusionary shift from a movement that sought to benefit all women (i.e., radical feminism) to one that only sought to benefit a select group of women was made possible by cultural feminism’s binary flip and its sense of “oneness.” The queer and transgender movements came into their own in the early 1990s in response to this sort of exclusionary “oneness” that was promoted by cultural feminists and many mainstream gay rights activists. The words “transgender” and “queer” came into vogue during this time as umbrella terms: “Queer” attempted to accommodate lesbians and gays as well as the growing bisexual and transgender movements; and “transgender” was used to promote a coalition of distinct groups (including crossdressers, transsexuals, butch women, femme men, drag performers, intersex people, etc.) that previously believed they had little in common with one another. These alliances were not based on a presumed shared biology or set of beliefs, but on the fact that these different groups faced similar forms of discrimination. In fact, the notion that transgender people “transgress binary gender norms” came about to create a cause for its varied constituents to unite behind, not as a litmus test or a criteria for them to meet. At that time, the idea of “shattering the gender binary” was outward-focused; if we could push our culture to move beyond the idea that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive “opposite sexes,” that would make the lives of all transgender constituent subgroups far easier. Just as cultural feminism’s binary flip fostered that movement’s inward focus on women-only culture and spaces, I believe that the recent rise of subversivism may be an early sign that the more outward-looking, changing-the-world-focused transgender and queer movements of the 1990s are shifting into a more insular and exclusionary queer/trans community, one that favors only a select group of queers and trans folks, rather than all people who fall under those umbrella terms. Indeed, unlike our predecessors in the groups Queer Nation (who held public “kiss-ins” in suburban malls) and Transexual Menace (who staged protests in small Midwestern towns where trans people were murdered), many in the queer/trans community these days often seem more content celebrating our fabulous queer selves or enjoying the safety of our own organizations and events. 6 While there is nothing inherently wrong with creating our own queer/trans spaces and culture, what troubles me is that we are clearly sacrificing diversity in the process. For example, in queer/trans spaces, one rarely sees MTF crossdressers (despite the fact that they make up a large portion of the transgender population) and there are very few trans women. Some might suggest that these groups are choosing not to attend of their own accord, but that only leads to the next question: Why are they choosing not to come?

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But I would rather begin at the beginning, the beginning of Luke’s gospel (not least because Luke, quite wrongly, is often supposed to have been uncritically friendly toward Rome). After his opening chapter, which evokes the opening of 1 Samuel—and thereby already reminds his hearers of the long story that eventually led to Samuel anointing David as king and David defeating the Philistines—Luke begins again, as it were, in chapter 2, by declaring portentously that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered for the purpose of taxation: At that time a decree was issued by Augustus Caesar: a census was to be taken of the whole world…. So everyone set off to be registered, each to their own town. Joseph too, who belonged to the house and family of David, went from the city of Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judaea, David’s city, to be registered with his fiancée Mary, who was pregnant. (2:1–5) A census! Everyone in Palestine knew what that meant. It meant not only that the people were going to have to pay up, but that they were being enlisted as subject members in a kingdom ruled by a foreign power. Not for nothing does Josephus tell those stories about the revolutionary movements that arose spontaneously because of the various censuses the Romans took and about the numerous violent deaths that followed: But a certain Judas, a Gaulanite from a city named Gamala, who had enlisted the aid of Saddok, a Pharisee, threw himself into the cause of rebellion. They said that the assessment [i.e., the census] carried with it a status amounting to downright slavery, no less, and appealed to the nation to make a bid for independence…. They have a passion for liberty that is almost unconquerable, since they are convinced that God alone is their leader and master. They think little of submitting to death in unusual forms and permitting vengeance to fall on kinsmen and friends if only they may avoid calling any man master…. I have no fear that anything reported of them will be considered incredible. The danger is, rather, that report may minimize the indifference with which they accept the grinding misery of pain.* We should also remember that when Luke narrates how the chief priests went to Pilate to bring charges against Jesus, one of the key things they said, untruthfully of course, was that he had been forbidding people to give tribute to Caesar: The whole crowd of them got up and took Jesus to Pilate. They began to accuse him. “We found this fellow,” they said, “deceiving our nation! He was forbidding people to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he is the Messiah—a king!” (23:1–2)

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But—as we can see from some of the extreme manifestations of this phenomenon—it simply won’t do to assume that, because the New Testament contains some quite radical critiques of Caesar’s empire, we can pick them up, as Luther picked up Galatians, and make them serve our particular contemporary agendas, whether American, British, or Continental—not to mention those of the rest of the world (which is often squeezed out of the conversation in another breathtaking act of post-Enlightenment “superiority”: perhaps we’ll get around to thinking about Africa when its countries get around to copying our now rather threadbare political institutions). We owe it to ourselves, to the gospels, to the church, and, not least, to the poor and oppressed in the world not simply to produce a vaguely biblical echo of today’s fashionable left-wing critique, but to read the New Testament afresh and to try to discern the deeper and more powerful pathways it offers through the morass of social and political uncertainty. Perhaps we have been looking for hope in the wrong places. All this is still by way of introduction. We shall shortly return to the four gospels themselves. But before we can do so with any hope of advancing the argument, it will be necessary to spend a few moments longer thinking about the way in which power and empire were thought of within first-century Judaism, not least in contrast to the way the same issues are often addressed today. Power and Empire Within First-Century Judaism As we saw earlier, the Judaism of the postexilic period had quite a well-developed narrative of God and empire. Even though many Jews longed for God to become king in the full, complete way he’d promised, they still believed that in the interim he was in fact already in some sense sovereign over the nations. Yes, he allowed pagan kings to rule; as the creator, he didn’t want his world to collapse into anarchy. But he judged rulers severely, cutting them down to size, as with Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar in the book of Daniel. The Jews assumed, on the basis of their strong creational theology, that the creator had made the world in such a way as to be properly ordered and run by human beings. The Jewish vision of theocracy, of God being in charge, was always one of a rule mediated through his image-bearers, that is, through human beings.

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

  I am not trying to make the case here that MTF spectrum folks are “more oppressed” than cissexual women, as playing the moreoppressed-than-thou card serves no purpose other than narcissism. But I do hope to encourage cissexual women to take a moment to put themselves in our shoes, to consider how patronizing and condescending dismissive quips about “male privilege” would sound to you if you had been forced against your will into boyhood. As someone who spent my childhood desperately wishing that I could be a girl rather than boy, and who as an adult considers it a privilege to finally have the opportunity to live in the world as a woman rather than a man, I find those attempts to undermine trans women’s femaleness by decrying “male privilege” hollow and crass. Having said all that, I will be the first to admit that many MTF spectrum folks seem to be rather oblivious to the impact that traditional sexism has on their lives—both with respect to the male privileges they gain because of it as well as the special social stigma they receive for their feminine transgender expression and/or for choosing to transition to female. Personally, it was only after I began living full-time as a woman, experiencing firsthand all of the inferior and negative assumptions that others projected onto me because of my femaleness, that I began to make a connection between traditional sexism and the discrimination that I faced because of the specific direction of my transition and transgender expression. Only then did I realize how inadequate the transgender movement’s mantra—that we are discriminated against for “transgressing binary gender norms”—is for those of us on the MTF spectrum who primarily grapple with effemimania and trans-misogyny. MTF spectrum folks need feminism in order to make sense out of our lives and to work toward ending our continuing marginalization. Unfortunately, many cissexual feminists seem to fear that MTF spectrum inclusion within feminism might dilute, distract, or undercut a movement that has historically centered itself on the struggles and issues of cissexual women. Typically, such fears arise from the assumption that we cannot work together because we supposedly have different goals, or that we are unable to relate to one another’s experiences. I believe that is a red herring. After all, many lesbian women, who typically do not have to deal with the issue of unwanted pregnancy, work hard for and are committed to protecting the availability of birth control and a woman’s right to choose. Similarly, a woman doesn’t necessarily have to be a survivor of sexual or physical assault herself to do crucial work in a domestic violence shelter or a rape crisis center.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Jesus, for such people, is the miracle man, the supernatural being who came miraculously into the world to save us from our sins. For them, it really would be true that Jesus could have been born of a virgin and died on a cross and done and said nothing whatever in between. The miracle of the birth and the death for sinners—that’s the heart of it, think “orthodox” Christians. (The Apostles’ Creed does not mention the purpose of the death, as does the Nicene Creed—“who for us men, and for our salvation”—but most modern creedal Christians will think of it at this point, and be rightly grateful.) But will they understand the incarnation as God becoming human in order to become king? Will they understand the cross as the means by which God completed his incarnate kingdom work? Pretty certainly not. As I have repeatedly said, it is possible to check all the “orthodox” boxes and still miss the point. Indeed, I sometimes fear that people have been all the more eager to affirm the official doctrines in this truncated sense as a way of carefully avoiding the implications of God’s actually being king on earth as in heaven. Far safer to have a superman Jesus who zooms down into the world to snatch us away from it. He descended into hell. I doubt if most modern Christians give too much thought to this. Those who have known hell in their own lives may sense with gratitude that Jesus came into the worst place imaginable, the place where we sometimes are, to rescue us. The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Traditionally minded Christians will celebrate this gladly. Here’s the great miracle, the supernatural intervention! The tomb was empty, and Jesus, having risen, was taken up into heaven. I suspect that most won’t bother too much about Jesus’s precise location now, “sitting at God’s right hand”; we sense that the idea of God having two hands and Jesus being at one of them is at most a metaphor. For many, though, the ascension itself basically means that Jesus has gone away, leaving us to get on with the task (in the power of the Spirit, of course). It won’t, of itself, conjure up any idea of his present sovereignty over the world. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. Fine, think creedal Christians. Final judgment may be a fearful prospect, but we know that we, having been justified by faith, need fear “no condemnation,” as Paul says (Rom. 8:1). We may have in our minds at this point an image of the great wall of the Sistine Chapel, with the living (that’s the meaning of “quick” here) and the dead summoned to face Jesus and hear their ultimate fate.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  For far too long now Christians have told the story of Jesus as if it hooked up not with the story of Israel, but simply with the story of human sin as in Genesis 3, skipping over the story of Israel altogether. From that point of view, the story of Israel looks like a failed first attempt on God’s part to sort out his world. “Here,” he says, “you can be my people. I’ll rescue you from slavery and give you my law!” But then the people find they can’t keep the law and the story goes from bad to worse. Eventually, God gives up the attempt to make people (specifically, Israel) “better” by having them keep his law and decides on a different strategy, a “Plan B.” This involves sending his son to die and declaring that now the only thing people need to do is to believe in him and his saving death; they won’t have to keep that silly old law after all. This is a gross caricature of the actual biblical story, but it is certainly not a gross caricature of what many Christians have been taught, either explicitly or by implication. At the same time—that is, in the Western world and church of the past two or three centuries—Christians have been aware that the very notion of “God” has been under attack. The Deism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (“There may be a ‘God’ who made the world, but if so, he’s a long way away and doesn’t get involved in our world”) steadily morphed into the explicit atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (“So why bother with the idea of ‘God’ at all?”). This ran in parallel with the historical challenges to Christian origins, noted earlier, in which Jesus was seen as just a first-century Jewish revolutionary, an “apocalypticist,” or a fine teacher of morality. Faced with that double challenge, many Christians believed that they had to undertake a double counterstrategy: to “prove” the “existence of God,” on the one hand, and to “prove” the “divinity of Jesus,” on the other. (I put the word “prove” in quotation marks, because that same historical period saw the rise of a new way of thinking about knowledge itself: either you could “prove” something, almost like a mathematical theorem, or you couldn’t be sure of it. This remains the default position for a good deal of skepticism to this day.) Well, you may say, isn’t that fair enough? If people are going about saying God doesn’t exist, surely Christians have to say that actually he does? And if people are denying the divinity of Jesus, isn’t it the Christian’s job to reaffirm it? Put like that, yes, of course.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But the coming of the kingdom is conspicuously absent not only from the great creeds, but also from “the gospel” as envisaged in the churches of the Reformation. If we want to stick to the great tradition, we should be prepared to take the gospels more seriously. One might even state it as an axiom: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief. But the proper reaction to this, whether it’s in the second century or the twenty-first, ought never to be simply to dismiss the heretical teaching outright and continue as before. The proper reaction is to look carefully to see which flank has been left unguarded, which bit of core teaching has been left out, where the canonical balance has not been maintained. Only then might one set about reincorporating that within a fresh statement of full-blown Christian faith. After all, another axiom might well go like this: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, it will inevitably overinflate other bits of its core teaching to fill the gap. (In other words, leave out the kingdom, and you may end up saying more than is really necessary in your “Christology” about Jesus’s divine/human nature.) That doesn’t mean that the overinflated core teaching is wrong. In the strange providence of God, this might even be seen as a means whereby people have been led to concentrate more intensely on vital areas. But it can only ever be a temporary move. By all means park the New Testament in a safe spot and go for a walk to pick the flowers nearby. But make sure you return to the New Testament when you want to continue your journey. The Hidden Underlying Challenge: Theocracy When we examine the wider movements of thought and culture in the eighteenth century, we find something of enormous significance for understanding why the gospels were being read in the way they were. At the heart of “the Enlightenment” was a resolute determination that “God”—whoever “God” might be—should no longer be allowed to interfere, either directly or through those who claimed to be his spokesmen, in the affairs of this world. Once “man had come of age,” there was no room for theocracy. It was as simple as that. God was pushed upstairs, like the doddering old boss who used to run the company, but has now been superseded. He has, no doubt, a notional place of “honor,” a cozy office where he can sit and imagine he’s still in charge. But nobody is fooled. The new generation is running the business now.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Slowly, I drum my fingers against the iron table and eye his glass, trying to calculate how many sips it will take for it to be emptied. If he takes one sip a minute and there are 25 sips left, I’m looking at half an hour. When he has finally drained his glass, he insists on walking me home. At the corner outside my building, I point and say, “OK, this is me” and he steps forward, puts a hand on my waist, and kisses me more passionately than I ever could have expected from our vanilla conversation. I glance around, mortified to be kissed like this in the middle of the day in a spot where I know so many people, and also perplexed because where did that come from? I’m disappointed in myself as I go inside, having already failed at nailing this new “in and out” policy I came up with a few hours ago. I need to abandon some of my perpetual politeness if I am to continue to speed date. In other words, I need to actually adhere to the speed part and stop being solicitous and attentive when I know I will not see these men again. CHAPTER 23Strut of SuccessI silence the voice that questions why Scott wasn’t honest about his address on his Tinder profile and why he seemed egregiously angry at the woman whose dog approached me during our walk, convincing myself that it will be good to go on a date outside of the city since I’m paranoid about being seen by people I know. Also, he’s a firefighter – a volunteer firefighter with his local fire department – but still, close enough. It is early evening when I pull my car up to a quiet suburban street of boxy low-rise apartment buildings, all of which look identical. Several times I drive to the top of the cul-de-sac and then U-turn before giving up and texting Scott that I am outside but can find neither his building nor a parking space. A few minutes later, I spot him walking on a path, sporty and robust in a T-shirt and gym shorts, making me feel conspicuously overdressed in a short, ruffly navy blue dress belted at the waist and a pair of high-wedge sandals. He comes right to the driver’s side and opens my door, asking if I want him to drive to find a parking spot. I slide out of the car and run around to the other side. He seems put out at having to rescue me. Inside, his apartment is simple and tidy but devoid of character. A jumbo flat screen television is the highlight of the living room, with a few framed photos of him and his daughter scattered around. There are two small bedrooms flanking the main room, and the one that belongs to his daughter is homey and sweet, with stuffed animals on the pink comforter and posters on the wall.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  In addition to apologists, arguing that Jesus really did walk on water and cure the sick, thus demonstrating that he really was divine, the eighteenth century saw great movements of revival, particularly through the Methodist movement led by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. Their theology and their understanding of the gospels are quite different topics upon which I am not qualified to speak. But I suspect that the Wesleyan emphasis on Christian experience, both the “spiritual” experience of knowing the love of God in one’s own heart and life and the “practical” experience of living a holy life for oneself and of working for God’s justice in the world, might well be cited as evidence of a movement in which parts of the church did actually integrate several elements in the gospels, a synthesis that the majority of Western Christians have allowed to fall apart. Even within Methodism itself, however, I do not sense that the fine instincts of the early leaders have led to an enriched, integrated long-term understanding of the church’s central texts, the gospels themselves. What I miss, right across the Western tradition, at least the way it has come through to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is the devastating and challenging message I find in the four gospels: God really has become king—in and through Jesus! A new state of affairs has been brought into existence. A door has been opened that nobody can shut. Jesus is now the world’s rightful Lord, and all other lords are to fall at his feet. This is an eschatological message, not in the trivial sense that it heralds the “end of the world” (whatever that might mean), but in the sense that it is about something that was supposed to happen when Israel’s hopes were fulfilled; and Israel’s hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God’s glory. It is, however, an inaugurated eschatological message, claiming that this “something” has indeed happened in and through Jesus and does not yet look like what people might have imagined. That is the story the gospels are telling. But if this is so—if God has become king of the world, through Jesus—then nobody can stay indifferent. 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.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The second thing that Christians have done is to say, with the neo-Anabaptists, that the church must simply put its own house in order, keep its own nose clean, and live as a beacon of light, but without actually engaging with the world. It must construct a parallel society in which the kingdom values of Jesus are lived out for all to see. Now I’m all for the church cleaning up its act and shining like a light in the world. But the strong sectarian separatism that all this implies seems to pay no attention to the great statements of Jesus’s cosmic lordship in the New Testament, not least to the claim of Matthew 28 that Jesus already possesses all authority on earth as well as in heaven. It is always in danger of dualism, of cutting off the creational branch on which all Christian thinking ought to be sitting. The third and fourth reactions among Christians, which are all too powerful today (particularly in the United States), have simply baptized the right-wing and left-wing politics of a deeply divided society and claimed this or that one as Christian, to be implemented and if possible exported. Listening to the sub-Christian language on display among those exultant at the killing of Osama bin Laden in the early summer of 2011 was an example of the right-wing tendency; anything that advances the worldview of Fox News is assumed to be basically Christian, wise, and automatically justified. But listening to many on the left, I have a similar problem. The left claims the high Christian and moral ground of a concern for the poor and the marginalized, but again this regularly parrots the elements of liberal modernism, not least its new sexual ethic, without any attempt to scale the true heights of the gospel vision in the New Testament. Meanwhile we in the United Kingdom, hearing all this going on from our cousins across the ocean, tend to be grumpy pragmatists. We don’t much care for theory, and we don’t, for the most part, want anything too drastic to disturb our uneasy peace. (It has often been pointed out that, in response to the communist chant, “What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? Now!” the classic English protest movement might be imagined chanting, “What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!”) No, we English mostly just want to get on with our lives, grumble about our politicians but still vote for them, watch some cricket, and go to Choral Evensong now and then when we feel like it.

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

  For example, some queer women’s events and establishments have policies that specifically exclude trans women from attending. Proponents of such policies often claim that they are not transphobic, because they do allow some transgender-identified people to attend (as long as they were “born female”). Thus, rather than calling trans-woman-exclusion policies “transphobic,” it is more accurate to say that they are cissexist, as they refuse to accept transsexual women’s female identities as being as legitimate as those of cissexual women. (Such policies may also be called trans-misogynistic, as they favor FTM spectrum trans people over MTF spectrum folks.) Furthermore, those “female-born” cissexuals (regardless of whether they are transgender-identified) who choose to attend such events can be said to be exercising their cissexual privilege (i.e., they are taking advantage of all of the privileges associated with their female birth sex). Indeed, it is disappointing that most cissexual transgender and queer folks—particularly those who hypocritically accuse transsexuals of trying to attain “passing privilege” by transitioning to our identified sex—have given little to no thought about the countless ways they frequently indulge in their own cissexual privilege. Once we understand cissexual privilege, it becomes evident that many acts of discrimination that have previously been lumped under the term “transphobia” are probably better described in terms of cissexism. Next, I will reconsider a number of such discriminatory acts, focusing on the ways that they are more specifically designed to undermine the legitimacy of trans people’s identified genders rather than targeting trans people for breaking oppositional gender norms. Trans-Exclusion Trans-exclusion is perhaps the most straightforward act of prejudice against transsexuals. Simply stated, trans-exclusion occurs when cissexuals exclude transsexuals from any spaces, organizations, or events designated for the trans person’s identified gender. Trans-exclusion may also include other instances where the trans person’s identified gender is dismissed (for example, when someone insists on calling me a “man,” or purposely uses inappropriate pronouns when addressing me). Considering how big of a social faux pas it is in our culture to misgender someone, and how apologetic people generally become upon finding out that they have made that mistake, it is difficult to view trans-exclusion—i.e., the deliberate misgendering of transsexuals—as anything other than an arrogant attempt to belittle and humiliate trans people. Trans-Objectification The objectification of transsexual bodies is very much intertwined with the cissexual obsession with “passing.”