A Theological Defense of Birthdays (Yes, you heard me)

A birthday party? Really? Just a party celebrating you, when you didn't even do anything to deserve it? You didn't earn a party. Grumble grumble millennials grumble.

You know what else you didn't earn? God's love. Stop being a jackass.

Excuse the harsh language, but the people who go on about that deserve the title. Everyone has at least one friend who enjoys making you feel terrible for liking yourself. They are not being a particularly good friend in that moment. Ever notice how we tell everyone to believe that they are beautiful but the second someone says they are beautiful out loud everyone considers them to be narcissistic? Quite the double-edged sword.

It is okay to celebrate yourself. You are worth it. No, you didn't have to earn it. You are an incredible creation of God in God's image, fearfully and wonderfully made. In fact,

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your words; that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret, 
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
                                     Psalm 139:13-16

You have a birthday because God and your parents co-created and wanted you to be born. That is worth celebrating. God wants you on this earth, so God created you. It is more than okay to recognize that you are a gift to this world; that is how everyone should see themselves. You are a gift God gave to the world. That is something to recognize and to celebrate.

Some people like to say that respect has to be earned. To me, that is horrifying. A person should be respected because they are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. Any person you meet is also created by God and also God's gift to the world and should be treated as such. They have dignity as a loved creation of God and they deserve respect.

Which brings me to the first and most basic of the seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching: the Dignity of the Human Person.
"We believe that every person is precious, that people are more important than things, and that the measure of every institution is whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person." - USCCB "Life and Dignity of the Human Person"
"Human persons are willed by God; they are imprinted with God's image. Their dignity does not come from the work they do, but from the persons they are." - Centesimus Annus

A birthday is a celebration of the person you are, not the work you do. Other people get to tell you they are glad you are. You get to say you are glad you are, and you are happy you have people who want to celebrate with you. Giving thanks to God for creating you is worthy of a party.

Of course, there is the birthday party with an agenda, to show off money and take a vacation from virtue. That is not a celebration that thanks God for creating you and honors your dignity, but a party that tries to prove your earthly importance, influence, and affluence. That is the party our misanthropic friend at the beginning of the post has a basis to criticize.

If, however, you just want to go to your favorite restaurant with your friends or your brother wants to bake you a cake, there is no shame in enjoying yourself. I am here to say that your party pooper needs to re-think their commitment to social justice.

#YesAllWomen, Feminism, and Christianity

A few weeks ago Twitter exploded with #YesAllWomen. If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll try to be brief for all of you who are well-aware. The #NotAllMen was started as a response by men to women discussing the trials of being female in a patriarchal society. Well-meaning, defensive men popped up with “not all of us! Some of us are nice!” To which women said, “Duh. Thanks for once again underestimating our intelligence and making this discussion about you.” While #NotAllMen are misogynists, #YesAllWomen suffer from misogyny. Then, the shooting in California happened and the discussion became so much more than internet comments. And the #YesAllWomen the movement was born, and women all over the world shared their 140-character stories about fear, rape, sexual assault, microaggressions, professional slights, sexualized comments and actions. You can read some great ones here. 

Since Twitter trends of this magnitude make the internet explode, there were blog posts everywhere, and I voraciously read each one. I wrote some of my own #YesAllWomen tweets, which you can read @DeathsharkMcGee. I like to send a few links each week on my parent newsletter, with hot topics in parenting, faith, technology, and/or teenagers. I was looking for something good on #YesAllWomen from a Christian perspective, and all I got was one feminist rant by a Christian and one anti-feminist rant by a Christian. I was looking for, of course, a Christian feminist rant.

Wait! I hear you call – Christian feminist? That’s a thing? I thought all feminists were man-hating atheists! I will admit to you all that in my college conservative phase, I disavowed the word “feminist,” not understanding its true definition. Now I’m trying to make up for my lack of judgment. I am going to posit to you something shocking: that to be a good Christian, you must be a feminist.

Let’s review the definition of feminism, since it seems to have taken on a completely different connotation than its denotation these days:

Feminism: “both a coordinated set of ideas and a practical plan of action, rooted in women’s critical awareness of how a culture controlled in meaning and action by men, for their own advantage, oppresses women and dehumanizes men.” – Joann Wolski Conn

Hopefully, now, the picture of what I am trying to say is taking shape. One of the most paramount fixtures of Christianity and particularly Catholicism (which names herself universal) is community. In the Gospels and in Paul’s writings we are constantly told to take care of the community and that much like the armed forces or poorly designed education legislature, no one is left behind.

• Matthew 25:40 “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” (If you don’t think women count as “the least,” read some more #yesallwomen tweets)
• 1 Corinthians 12:24b-26 “But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” Read the whole passage and tell me not to take care of 50% of our body.
• Galatians 3:26-28 “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
• And as the ever-liturgical musician, I am going to point to the most universal of English-speaking Catholic songs: “One Bread, One Body” which is dripping with communal language.

I have been thinking about this blog post for a long time and avoiding the actual writing, but now I’m glad I waited this long. This past Sunday was Trinity Sunday, where we contemplate the mind-boggling mystery of triune monotheism. Three persons, one God... a community. Yes, even our God is a community in a constant dance visceral love. #YesAllWomen and feminism is not just about women. It’s about being a community of love. If one part suffers, the whole body suffers. And we just witnessed thousands of tweets testifying to the fact that not one part, but half the body is suffering. More than that, if you consider the male and female children of a mother who is not being paid the same wage as her male counterpart. More if you recognize the ugly suffering that causes someone to perpetrate a crime of hate and control, which is what sex crimes are. More when a boy is teased and called a “girl” or a couple of other rude words I will not dignify by typing here. More when a boy is told to “be a man,” and he learned. So yes, the whole body is suffering.

There is more I could say, like if you want to bring up Ephesians 5 I’m going to make you read me the passage again and ask you to tell me how loving and laying down your life for your wife means that you are supposed to own her or the Catechism passage that reads “Man and woman are both with one and the same dignity ‘in the image of God,’” (CCC369) but I’m sure you’re ready to stop reading this and start being a Christian feminist.

Since my initial search, I tried again and found a smidgen more posts about Christianity and #YesAllWomen. They are definitely worth reading. 

• I put this one at the top, because it’s also about the Trinity: #YesAllWomen: Love, and the Destruction of Hierarchies
• Elliot Rodger, #YesAllWomen, and Loving Victims of Hate
• Christian Man Reflects on #YesAllWomen and Male Sexual Entitlement
• incredibly moving: How does the church respond to #Yesallwomen?
• really well-written: #YesAllWomen Should Have the Church on Their Side
• If you’re into complementarian theology: #YesAllWomen: How Complementarian Theology Speaks to the Latest Internet Meme
• #YesAllWomen. The girl who cried wolf and other myths.

And that’s the best from the first two pages of Google. Beyond that, I get nervous. (support net neutrality)

The Higher Critics of the Bible

While I may disagree with Strenski on many points, I must agree with his inclusion of the Higher Critics of the Bible. After learning about them, I can not believe that they have been left out of the study of theory in religion. while they technically predate the study of religion as its own discipline, they influenced all the greats of modern Western religious thought. In the late nineteenth century, the people who began to look at the Bible in a new way were the deists, their critics, and liberal Protestants. Referred to as the Higher Critics, they “all shared the conviction that the Bible could and should be scrutinized like any other piece of literature – in a rational,, empirical, that is to say, naturalistic way, all the while recalling the ‘deist’ sense of human reason as a divine endowment” (Strenski 34). These deists and critics included such names as Jean Bodin, Herbert of Cherbury, John Locke, and David Hume.

My personal favorite of the Higher Critics, William Robertson Smith, believed that the work of the Higher Critics would add to the legitimacy of the Bible. A true Protestant, he thought that anything that added to our understanding of the Bible could only increase the faith. While he knew this might cause some problems for some people, he believed that “In this department of intellectual life science and faith have joined hands. There is no discordance between the religious and scholarly method of study. They lead to the same goal; and the more closely our study fulfils the demands of historical scholarship, the more fully will it correspond with our religious needs” (Smith 1881, p. 27, Strenski 35).

Before the Higher Critics, there was not much focus on the historical side of the Bible. The Higher Critics began to concern themselves with the historical context of the Bible, looking for non-Biblical sources that supported the stories everyone knew so well. This work is the basis for what we now call the search for the “historical Jesus” which still goes on today. This search added four new disciplines to the study of religion: history, philology, text criticism, and hermeneutics. While all valid and (somewhat) interesting, I am only going to discuss hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is “interpreting what the biblical texts meant in their original and present form, and how they should be construed in the future” (Strenski 44). This is where critical biblical interpretation begins to touch theology. Those who study the Bible secularly use hermeneutics to make connections between the text and how religion is practiced. Theologians use hermeneutics to better understand the messages in the Bible.

For over one hundred years the Bible has faced this scrutiny. I am sure that there were murmurs like the Higher Critics before. As a Christian, sometimes the conclusions drawn by people dedicated to the “historical Jesus” can be offensive. The writings of the Jesus Seminar are still debated with opinions ranging from “everything they say is wrong” to “everything they say is right.” It is hard to wade through the technical speak to understand what any of it means to your Christian life. How do we read the Scriptures? Once again, I turn to the lovely indexed Catechism:

While God is the author of the Scriptures, He chose certain men to write His word. They “consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more” (CCC 106). “In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words” (CCC 109). The Second Vatican Council offers these three guidelines: 1. “Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture.”” 2. “Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church.”” 3. “Be attentive to the analogy of faith” (CCC 112, 113, 114). I realize that these guidelines bring up more questions, but if you look up the articles yourself you will find explanations. (I got tired of typing.)

Since we have our own guidelines for study and plenty of theologians for help, is there any merit in studying the Higher Critics? That I leave up to you, reader. If studying what Jesus ate and how that affected His digestion and how that affected what He taught on the Mount is your cup of tea, go right ahead with blessings! That is the door opened for you by the Higher Critics. If you really could give a squirrel’s tail about what Paul made his tents out of, but you really like that love is patient and kind that is fine, too. We each have our gifts that we can contribute to the understanding of Jesus.

Sorry it's been so long since I posted! I'll try not to wait so long before the next.