The Little Friar

Ever since I was at school, the relationship between holiness and love has fascinated me.   Etymologically, holiness means to be "set apart", to create a social and moral separation between the "clean" and the "unclean", between the "holy" and the "profane".   So, typically, we think holiness and love go in two different directions.  Those most concerned with holiness tend to emphasize rules over love; think the biblical Pharisees.  For them, being holy meant withdrawing from sinners, and not  extending love and hospitality toward those one judged to be "unclean". Jesus resolves the tensions by radically rethinking what it means to be holy.  According to Jesus, loving God (the pursuit of holiness) is equated with loving your neighbor (the pursuit of hospitality).  This is illustrated time and again in the gospels where the Pharisees achieve holiness by moral and social exclusion and separation from tax collectors, sinners and...

Several years ago, I taught a class that explored the Theology of Beauty/Ugly.  In it, we explored the complex of issues around the psychology of purity and how that infects (!) our understand and pre-judgments about people.   Let's be honest.  We size up ourselves and others around whether or not they/we are "good enough" in all sorts of situations.  Sometime over the weekend, a friend relayed a story about inviting a woman to church.   Apparently, she had a lot of tattoos.  Because of her tattoos she expressed a worry about coming to our church.  "I couldn't go to there with all my tattoos", she said.  It's the contamination attribution known as similarity again.  If something looks like a contaminant then it's hard to override that appearance-driven judgment.  Even when we know, at a rational level, that appearances are deceiving us.  In my class that semester, I poured lemonade into a sterile bedpan ...

Two stories, same lesson.  First, from this morning's Facebook feed, comes the story of the church in Tennessee who excommunicated (my word, not theirs, though this is practically what they've done) a family who was in support of their (same-sex) married daughter.  The logic of the church:  Sin is sin, and it's so disgusting that we must exorcise it from our midst as God's pure people. Second, also from this morning's Facebook feed, an article written by Thabiti Anyabwile, " The Importance of Your Gag Reflex When Discussing Homosexuality and 'Gay Marriage' ", that attempts, unapologetically, to elicit and then direct feelings of revulsion and disgust toward gay persons.  Now, I don't know either of the parties involved here.  Nor do I know anything about The Gospel Coalition.  But both articles interest me in what they're saying. Since the material on the excommunicating church is scant at the moment, let me deal with the ma...

Today I'd like to think a bit about one of the problems regarding how this contrast is made in Revelation.  Specifically, one of the metaphors used to contrast Babylon and New Jerusalem is a Whore/Bride contrast.  In Revelation, Babylon is cast as a whore: One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters.  With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries." Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness.  There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns.  The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls.  She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries.  The name written ...