I Don't Know

For thirty-some years they came into the university ethics class that I taught, most of them twenty to twenty-two-years-old, honors students mostly. On classroom day one, I always announced as a major objective of mine that they leave the course knowing less than they did at the start. They knew right from wrong. I effectively undermined that knowledge, or as I stated it in class, as another objective, I intentionally muddied what they thought were clear waters. This is one of our larger major problems as citizens of the “developed” world: we know too much. Worse yet, we know that we know it all. We don’t live plagued by uncertainties and doubts. That is very scary. There just is not that much in this world that we can know with certainty. There is not. W. T. Conner was perhaps the greatest Baptist theologian of the 20th Century, at least west of the Mississippi. One of his students related that one day in class, a student asked him for his answer to a particularly difficult and controversial point of theology. Dr. Conner responded, “I don’t know.” Whereupon, the young student began to give a full and clear answer to the class and Dr. Conner. The professor interrupted him with, “Mr. ___, I didn’t say, ‘You don’t know the answer,’ I don’t know the answer.” In her 1994 acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wislawa Szymborska spoke of why she valued that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us and the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, ‘I don’t know’ the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself, ‘I don’t know,’ she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some . . . highschool. . . . I’ve been in church all my life, am an ordained minister, hold three advanced degrees in theology, and have taught theology for thirty-some years, yet I don’t know–about, for instance, “demons,” “evil spirits,” or whatever. I’ve read and heard just about everything others think or know or think they know, and I understand their reasoning. But I don’t know what they are all about. I do know that whatever they are, in the gospel stories, they were the cause of suffering unspeakable. Those possessed by demons did not live a life of comfort and ease. In a core sense of the word, they were dis-eased. What I do know about them is that Jesus had power over them, and had the power and compassion to heal those under the bondage to these dis-eases of the spirit. That only touches the surface of what I don’t know biblically or theologically–my Christian agnosticism.

Mary Magdalene a Prostitute?

I don’t know how we get things so mixed up (so confused, is just another way of saying the same thing). “Fuse” simply means “to blend together into one,” and the prefix, “con,” (a variant of “com”) has as one of its major meanings: “together.” Thus, confuse has come to mean: “ to blend together into one, things that don’t properly fit together.” Why and how is it that we so commonly mix together things that don’t belong together? Again, I don’t know the answer. All I know is that we do it. Just now, I’m talking about the ways we confuse things in the Bible, which, when we do, inevitably makes an unholy mess of our religion: both our thoughts about it and our practice of it. More particularly, just now, I’m considering our confusion of women and the Christian ministry, and later, the confusion of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. First, some terms can stand clarification. What is a preacher, what an apostle, and what a deacon? One of the two primary words from Greek New Testament that we use to translate as preacher literally means, “One who carries a message of good news, one who announces good news.” “Apostle” literally means, “one commissioned and sent to carry an official message.” The Greek word we translate–actually transliterate–as deacon means, ”servant.” Now, to the specific confusions. According to the Bible, Mary of Magdala was the first to see, as well as the first to speak to Jesus after his death, burial and subsequent live appearance. Jesus told her (commissioned) to go (sent) and tell The Eleven (no longer the Twelve, Judas having been lost) that he had been raised and would meet with them. By clear word meaning, this makes Mary Magdalene one of Jesus’ apostles, even though the word itself is not used in the text. She also is, by clear word meaning, a preacher, in fact, the first preacher of the good news of the resurrection of Jesus. She is, as some early Christian writers acknowledged, “the apostle to the apostles,” and, under the direct order (ordination?) of Jesus, she is a Christian preacher. Perhaps Christian women should be holding meetings to consider whether men should be ordained to Christian ministry. After all, the men had run away, defeated, discouraged, and ready to revert to their old life. When Mary related to them the gospel of the resurrection, they were unbelievers; they paid her no mind. Except for subsequent cultural developments, there is no reason that women should not be included in, and ordained to the Christian ministry. Now to deacons. The woman, Phoebe, is identified by Paul as a “deacon.” The Greek words used to identify Phoebe is, in the New Testament, always translated, “deacon.” Except when they refer to her! Although the original text of the Bible calls her deacon, the translators almost universally use “servant” in the Phoebe passage, with no word of explanation for the word change. Clearly, the word does mean servant, but when it refers to men, the translators uniformly transliterate rather than translate the Greek, diakonos, as deacon. Again, cultural developments after the 1st Century seem to have caused Phoebe to be re-designated. Several more reasons could be adduced for routinely including women in Christian ministry, and perhaps on another occasion I will relate those. My more direct interest in this blog is to clear up the long-standing con-fusion of Mary the Magdalene and “prostitute.” Again, for cultural reasons and from an early date, Mary was identified as a converted prostitute. I suggest the best way for you to clear this mix-up is to read each of the New Testament passages that refer to Mary Magdalene by name. Other, unnamed, women often have been identified, by mere assumption, as “Mag” (I play loosely with her name only because I have an aunt named Magdalene, and the family usually calls her, “Mag”). There is no evidence at all that any of these unnamed women actually were Mary.

Me Again Once More

I’ve been retired for eleven months. Major life transition. I had no idea how much “catch-up” there was to be done after decades of more or less benign neglect. I retired May 12, 2006 and was certain I would have everything caught up and organized by July 15. Then I could devote serious time to writing. After July 15, I realized it might take as much as six months. When December came, I was on the verge of despair, but pulled back from that destructive mood. I now realized that I could not define the time required to bring a new order into my life, so I relaxed, decided to “go with the flow.” “Don’t worry, be happy.” However, the eight-ten weeks lapse in blogging nagged at my happiness. Now, neither completely caught up, nor solidly restructured, I do believe I have cleared a path wide enough and smooth enough that I can renew serious blogging. By my retirement anniversary, May 12, I have good reason to believe that I will have successfully made the transition from university professor to professor emeritorious. The continuity between these two parts of the book of my life is that I continue to be “He who provokes thought, who challenges the status quo.” That is about all that I am good for, except maintaining a faithful and richly satisfying relationship with Carol, a love that has been running now ever since the summer of 1950. If you want a challenge, an adventure, try to match that. It is more than worth all the effort.