Heterodox Christians

When we say " I am a liberal", what immediately comes to mind in the Christian circle is that one is referring to someone whose theological position has deviated from orthodoxy, such that the person now does not consider Bible as the authoritative text in matters related to conduct and doctrine. The person may say or write that she considers resurrection of Jesus Christ as figurative, and not literal and so on.

But when we say "I am a liberal" in political discourse, what is being meant is that the person believes in freedom of religion, freedom of speech etc., and that the state ought not to impose what to believe, eat, dress etc. upon citizens.

In this interview of Dr. Hobson by Albert Mohler, Dr. Hobson identifies the two strands and considers the former as bad tradition and the latter as good tradition within Christianity. 

It seems to me that the former way of using the word "liberal" should be discarded. I think this strand should be called "heterodox Christianity" instead of "liberal Christianity"'. "Liberal Christianity" as Dr. Hobson uses should be referred to that version of Christian political thought that advances freedom of religion, freedom of speech etc.

The word "liberal" is from "liberty" which at one point of time began to be considered, and still is, a political virtue alongside fraternity, equality etc. So I believe that it is a mistake to use "liberal" for doctrinal deviation. I think the word "heterodox" is more appropriate for doctrinal deviation.

In Indian tradition, those religious schools or denominations that accept the authority of the Vedas are considered as "orthodox", and those like Buddhism, Jainism, Carvaka ( Pronounced as "charvak" as it is in "charcoal") are considered as "heterodox" because the latter schools do not accept the authority of the Vedas.

I think because of this confusion that the use of the word "liberal'' has caused, many Christians detest liberal version of democracy, without really knowing what liberal democracy is as a political philosophy. However, the other spectrum of liberal democracy is conservative democracy. And in a democratic state like India preference for conservative democracy is to strangulate Christianity because freedom to practice one's religious values is being stifled. And one could get killed for consuming beef because cow is considered sacred by many Hindus, but not so by Christians and Muslims. 

Even in the West where religious diversity is now ever growing, it seems to me that it is liberal democracy and not conservative democracy that has to take deeper roots. But if we think that being a liberal is a bad thing, because it is associated with doctrinal deviation, then it seems to me that evangelical Christians may detest political liberalism though it is something that we need to endorse and work it. Therefore, I want to submit that "heterodox Christians" should be the term employed to refer to those whose theological view has deviated from doctrinal orthodoxy.

Nicholas Wolterstorff's Unconvincing Case for Same Sex Marriage

Wolterstorff is one of my heroes. He is a philosopher, and I am a student of Philosophy; He writes on justice, and my PhD dissertation was on justice; and he is a Christian, and I am a Christian too. I have learned so much of moral and political philosophy from his writings. And when I learned of his support for same-sex marriage within the church, I was so disappointed; and when I listened to his lecture in youtube, I was even more disappointed.  One of the reasons for my disappointment with his lecture was because of the unusual pattern that I observed in his work. I have found his work to be dense. His engagement of Scripture is always rigorous. Yet in the lecture, the usual rigor is missing. It was rather a shallow piece of engagement, an uncharacteristic mark of his scholarship.

Let me summarise his line of reasoning. Is expression of homosexual orientation like kleptomaniac expression of stealing someone's belonging? Well, the issue is not with the orientation; the issue is with the expression. Stealing someone's belonging is wrong; no doubt about that. Is a homosexual practice wrong or right? To figure that out, we have to go to the biblical text. The holiness code of Leviticus contains explicit teaching against same sex practice. But the same chapters also include injunction not to stitch two different fabrics of cloth together. Shortly put, the Old Testament holiness code is not really the proper guideline for the Christians. For this reason, one must go to Romans 1 in the New Testament. However, the text in Romans that speaks of homosexual relation as unnatural refers to the kind of practice that evil people practice; it does not refer to the loving, caring and nurturing kind of relationship that we find today in many same sex couples. Moreover, the church tradition that speaks of procreation as a purpose of marriage does not mean to include procreation as an essential purpose of marriage. After all, couples who are way beyond their fertile age also get married.

Without delving into the text in Romans, let me go elsewhere to argue against same sex marriage within the church. ( My point is not to be extrapolated onto the polity and the law. For that we have to see how Bible interacts with Political Philosophy.) In Genesis, it is said, " For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife." If we take the narrative in Genesis 1 and 2 as God's original intent, what we find is a heterosexual marriage. The text did not say " For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his partner". ( We cannot expect the text to say "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to her partner.) Wolterstorff has written a great deal on the idea of "image of God", drawn from the Genesis text. Now I don't know why he just skipped the creation narrative that speaks of one male and one female and jumped onto some other text. I find this surprising.

If we go to Revelation, we again find this symbol. In Revelation 21, the new Jerusalem is pictured as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband, Jesus Christ. The symbol is not of Jesus uniting with his partner. It was a symbol of the uniting of the bridegroom and the bride, a male and a female. Isn't marriage as God showed John symbolised by the union of a male and a female? Well, in Revelation that is what we find. It is not the image of a male and a male. Given the culture, John might as well have been shown that way. But John was not shown that way. He was shown the Holy City dressed as a bride for her bridegroom.

If the creation narrative and the eschatological narrative show marriage as a union of bridegroom-bride or man-woman, same sex marriage is a distortion of God's intent for marriage. I won't dispute the fact that some same sex couples can be loving  just as some heterosexual couples can be uncaring. But this observation should not distort what the Scripture teaches. The Scripture teaches, as the church has understood throughout her history, that God's intent is for heterosexual marriage; not same sex marriage.

Given that Nick is committed to engaging with the biblical text, I would love to see him engaging the issue from a different perspective.  

Why Congress Lost and BJP Won in Manipur

In the recently held Assembly election in Manipur, INC (Congress) got 28 seats -- three short of a simple majority, and BJP got 21 seats. NPP and NPF got 4 seats each. With crucial support from NPP and NPF and from smaller parties, BJP went on to form the government. From being nowhere five years back, BJP has come up to form the government in 2017. But is the rise of BJP due to the remarkable leadership of Modi or is it due to Congress poor leadership, or both? 

After the election result was announced, Naga People's Front (NPF) immediately announced that it was willing to support any non-Congress party to help form the government. The Congress government led by Ibobi Singh tried to polarise the people as much as he could just before the election. This was preceded by hostile policy towards the Nagas for the last fifteen years. The Nagas dominate in 11 Constituencies ( out of 60), and the only Congress candidate that won convincingly in the Naga dominated area was the Dy Chief Minister Gaikhangam. Given the hostility between the Congress led by Ibobi Singh and the Nagas, it was not surprising that NPF showed its willingness to support any non-Congress party in the state. Congress lost its opportunity to form the government by its repeated hostile policies towards the Nagas though it was just three seats short of simple majority. 

The other aspect, and more important than the rest, why Congress failed was because of corruption by Ibobi Singh. The corruption under Ibobi Singh has reached its height that the Devil's own younger brother might find it difficult to beat Ibobi. There has been no Chief Minister in the history of Manipur who as been as corrupt as Ibobi Singh. Even in 2012 he won only because there was no credible opposition, and this takes us to the third reason. 

Unlike 2012, in 2017 given that the BJP is ruling in New Delhi, people in the state realise that there is another party that can match Ibobi in term of money and muscle power. So people wanted to give chance to another party who might possibly be more honest in term of governance though BJP might be equally corrupt as Congress during election. Had Congress provided an efficient and a transparent government, BJP would not have won this many seats. And unless Congress leaders cease being so corrupt, BJP will displace Congress from one state after another. Time for Congress to wake up! 

Why was Revelation Written Using Symbols?

Somehow somewhere at one point I heard that John wrote Revelation using cryptic symbols in order to avoid detection and persecution by the Roman empire. I was led to believe -- I don't know by whom -- that given the persecution Christian community then was facing, John had to make his message difficult to decipher; and only the faithful could read it and decipher, the rest would get lost with all the symbols and the numbers. I was mistaken.

As Jesus finished speaking to the people about the parable of the sower (Matt 13), his disciples came to ask, " why do you speak to the crowd in parables?" Jesus replied, " The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven is given to you all, but not to them". Then he went on to say, drawing from the book of Isaiah, that he spoke in parables because:

"Though seeing, they do not see;

though hearing, they do not hear or understand..."

"But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear."

"He who has ears, let him hear."

This is to mean that Jesus used parables to draw the attention of the listening believers, while leaving the unbelieving listeners clueless as to what he was saying with the parables.

John also used the phrase " he who has ears, let him hear", drawing from Jesus and from the Old Testament writers like Isaiah and Ezekiel. So just as Jesus' use of parable was to obscure the message from the unbelieving listeners, but open up a very vivid dimension of the message for the believing listeners, John used symbols and numbers to "open the eyes of true believers while leaving the hardened unbelievers in deeper darkness" (Beale & Campbell. Revelation: A Shorter Commentary. 2015. p. 16).

So the cryptic symbols in Revelation is not to obscure the message to the readers, but to obscure the message for the hardened heart. The Pharisees listened to the parables of Jesus one after another, yet most of them failed to KNOW Jesus though they understood the parable in certain sense and plotted to kill Jesus. As parables were to Jesus in his communication -- vivid, clear, contextual; symbols were to John in his communication.