Reading response #1:
In “Revelations of Divine
Love,” early female author Julian assumed that in order to achieve happiness,
she must be like Jesus and with him, which would require the enduring of pain,
suffering, and death. Those assumptions
correlated with a misunderstanding of the message of Jesus, and in her visions,
she heard him lead her from her narrow scope of her understanding to her true
purpose in life—especially at that moment in her life—the seeking of an
all-encompassing joy. Towards the
story’s denouement, she reveals how she felt transformed after she witnessed
his death and his message in an out-of-body experience: she did not want to
look back anymore at her own suffering, nor did she ponder at why she should
have sought pain, but instead, she wondered why she should feel pain at all if
she was looking forward. Indeed, she
mainly believed that looking forward and not backward was the best method for
interpreting Jesus.
Another
facet about Julian’s interpretation of God was that Jesus was the God, and while Christians may think
that this is true, this belief is not accepted by everyone. She made her beliefs clear: everyone who
believed in the message of Jesus, essentially, would be saved, and those who
did not love each other in their Christian community could not be saved; she
qualified Jesus’ original message and assumed that in order to be saved she
must be Christian. This belief was
assimilated by her in accordance to her religious community, though Jesus never
said in order to be saved, his followers must be members of a church. But if God is a merciful God, and the
illiterate who does not know of Jesus’ life does not know a little of who he
was, except whether Jesus’ message is universal, then God would judge that
person based on that person’s devotion.
So, she contradicted herself early on in her essay though she fixes the
fallacy in the denouement.
Christians are informed
of a heaven though Julian says that more than one exists: three exist and one
in particular is for Jesus’s judgment.
In a way, Julian’s first-person, autobiographical narrator elevates
herself to a prophetess though she does not attain that status nor claim
it. Julian revealed that her vision was
not all that different than what Christians knew at the time about the
Gospels. Muslim influence regarding the
nature of heaven on Western culture during her century may have provided a
context for her visions since in the Gospels, Jesus had only mentioned just one
heaven. I believe he would have
mentioned them if he had been spared crucifixion.
In
Julian’s narrative, her community would have been Catholic church goers since
Martin Luther, the theologian who started the Protestant movement, was not born
until 1483 and her essay was written in 1413; Julian may well have been the
first woman in print to not agree wholly with the Catholic church for various
reasons because her life was “recluse” and at odds with the vision everyone had
of a joyful life. Even if it weren’t
true, the Church did not adopt her vision into the Church’s orthodoxy. Julian may have also been wholly against
pagans and their rituals because they did not agree with the message of Christ, or they did not disavow their
paganism since they aspired to mythologies.
After all, Jesus lived in another part of the world.
Since
Julian admitted to not fully understanding the message of Christ, she assumed
that reading the Bible was not important since it was a norm, and priests would
not have read the Bible in any language she would have understood, unless she
knew Latin. Julian may have not been as devout to begin with as she had herself
believed, because when I was young I went to the Jehovah’s Witnesses meetings
and I did not understand everything about the significance of the message Jesus
had for me, yet I thought of myself as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Reading Response #2
The
interpretive community, according to Stanley Fish’s “Vaviorum,” that I belonged
to changed after I wrote the first essay and when I composed the second,
although all along, I knew the Bible contained universal truths: these were
about Jesus’s life. I was informed that
the Holy Bible contained some dubious and “man-made” truths that contradicted
science and my own atheistic beliefs. I
had formed my own opinion without close-reading the Bible about the absence of
God, mainly by adopting the criticism of “The Grand Inquisitor” by T.
Dostoevsky that seemed to say: if Jesus returned, humanity would again not be ready
for someone so pure and good, and (from the entire story of “The Brother’s
Karamazov”) the question of why are some people allowed to live and others to
die? If God did exist and he played a
role that we are all led to believe about him—this divine being that determines
our fate is extremely unfair.
I
was born a Catholic who was baptized in Mexíco though not born there. Part of my upbringing included listening to
the sermons at a Jehovah Witnesses congregation in Ames, Iowa in the U.S., and
during my H.S. years, I joined my mom, step-father, and grandparents, on my
mother’s side, in becoming a Unitarian Universalist: I had all but rejected
some Catholic doctrines, like sayings from Jesus picked up by ear. I had been free up to the point of writing the
first essay for this class. My audience and I shared a humanness that
said a lot about the abovementioned communities that I belonged to (Logic, p.
3, lines 7-8). I believed that the Bible
was a work of literature first and foremost and it can be understood in terms
of narrative theory: the Bible is not a work of revelation (Logic, p. 1, lines
13-14). Some proof of this, according
to my first essay, is in the usage of foreshadowing in the plot. The text was not that holy after all since it
was created by an author who adhered to poetic tradition (Logic, p.2). My interpretive community did not, however,
explain to me that God had spoken to these authors, and I did not read the
Bible as extensively as we did for class.
Like a typical novel that followed forms and that were created to cause
an affect, I still did not understand the Bible possessed forward movement like
a great novel designed to teach by evoking powerful emotions, given my
interpretive community. I knew, after
reading an Exegesis about Chiasmus form, that it is used by the Bible in more
than one way. (Hidden, p. 3, lines 12-22; p. 4, lines 1-3).
My
interpretive community after I wrote the first essay had changed because I had read more from
differing perspectives. Earlier on in
the semester, I was convinced that the Bible was all in a giant “fractal”
structure where an effect that occurred many or a few years ago would manifest
itself later identically though to a different person. Jesus was someone who considered himself to
be part of this fractal view of life, because he saw himself as the next Jewish
Prophet. Jesus gained hypnotic power
over the reader (Logic, p. 2, lines 13-23 and p. 3, lines 1-4). I pondered whether the Bible was narrated by
either a man or a woman, because my community contains many strong women aka.,
my mother, teacher for this course, and classmates (Logic, p. 3, lines
4-5). At that point, I considered the
Bible to be narrated by an individual or individuals who are able to maintain
or create a sense of similar tone and diction (Logic, p. 3, lines 5-6). But I had read, for myself, just the first
two books of the Pentateuch.
My
interpretive community also included computer scientists who are heavily math
oriented, which was why I mentioned the highly symbolic use of certain numbers
that fit into some kind of numerology (Logic, p. 5, lines 11-18; p. 6,
1-8). The Bible’s prophecies and the
interpretation of these prophecies and realization of them suggests there is a
magical, logical and infallible truth to the Bible, though after writing my
second essay about hidden messages in the Bible, but in retrospect, “magical”
is hardly the word I would use (Logic, p. 6, lines 16-17). I had believed that the word of Christ was all
that was to be gained from reading the new testament, but I did not know that
Jesus’s silent action symbolized certain truths hidden in this continuing usage
of his parables (Hidden, p. 4, lines
4-6). My interpretive community were
also aware of certain surprises, such as the crucifixion, death, and
resurrection of Christ (Hidden, p. 5, lines 7-8).
The
importance of reading earlier sections of the Bible in the old testament is
also important. We must know who the
Father is in order to know Jesus (Hidden, p. 5, lines 17-18). Like prior prophets,
Jesus “cared about equality” (Hidden, p. 5, lines 19-21). But in my first essay, perhaps because I was
daunted by the monumental task of reading a large work of literature—the
Bible—I believed, and so did others in the class that Christianity exists in
part to mesmerize and control rather pessimistically (Logic, p. 2, lines 16).
I
seemed to believe that God was this magical being, like in shamanism or other
myths, that God was someone who turned the normal into the supernormal (Logic,
Page 1, lines 1-3). In writing the first
Essay, I also believed that the concept of one God was the result of
anthropomorphism, and that I was skeptical and ironic of “an entity known as
God” (Logic, p. 1, line 3; p. 1, lines 15-16).
I did not believe God authored the scriptures as I had heard from some
people (Logic, p. 2, lines 3-4).
My
essays seem to suggest that my community I belonged to strongly believed Jesus
is humble and a provider to his apostles and the poor (Logic, p. 5, lines
8-10). Not only that but Jesus had led
the ideal life and that when confronted with death, during the falling action
of the Gospel of John, Jesus used hidden meanings and parables in his actions
after his last teaching in the Last Supper (Hidden, p. 1, line 1). After reading about Jesus and prior books in
the Old Testament, the second essay correlates Jesus with the Pentateuch well
(Hidden, p. 1, line 5).
Reading response #3:
Misreading of the Bible in today’s culture
In
postmodern American culture, many people who claim they are Christian have come
to the conclusion that many liberal institutions are incompatible with
Christian beliefs, and liberal institutions such as programs that help mothers,
social security, and universal healthcare should be eliminated. They also disapprove of other liberal ideas,
such as the raising of the minimum wage and tolerance to other religious
beliefs. I believe that when Christians
take a politically conservative position that results in their disapproving of
key liberal ideas that try to recognize the humanity of others and the needs of
others, Christians misinterpret the teaching of Jesus.
Regardless of what interpretive community they
belong to, many of these misinformed Christians who consider themselves
socially conservative do not accept that liberal institutions and liberal
politics have been created so that society could be healthier, better, and less
focused on the the elite at the expense of the poor, as Jesus had been focused
on in his own society. Jesus had
understood humanity’s psyche better than most people, but this does not deter
these misinformed church-goers from spreading lies about the overall importance
of a work ethic. Though true in that Jesus would have wanted
laborers to work hard, these Christians are incorrect in placing blame on and
trying to destroy what they deem a bloated government that Jesus would
disapprove of. Although government looks
bad in the New Testament—the Romans and the Jewish priesthood--Jesus had in
fact wanted to make the ultimate sacrifice.
These Christians do not understand the umbrella of the corrupt Jewish
priesthood at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, and they blame the Roman
provincial manager for sentencing Jesus to death, but it was Jesus who wanted
himself to die for the sins of the many, and he could see no other way than to
face trial. Governments always have
corrupt individuals, and the U.S. is doomed to a similar fate since humans
cannot understand human motivation fully and their desires, nor can they see
eye-to-eye on important matters.
Correcting an inadequate government was not the point of the New
Testament, and in fact Jesus said that his followers should give to Caesar what
is Caesar's and to God what is God's.
This community of
misinterpreters does not support programs like Planned Parenthood, which
provides abortions for young mothers who do not wish to have a baby because the
former views a human being as existing in the womb. If abortion were extremely immoral in the
eyes of God, the sometimes violent God of the Old Testament would have taken
care of these heretics with a plague, or granted them forgiveness through Jesus
(Jesus gave his life to destroy sin).
Although many passages from the Old Testament are violent because of
what God does to humans who disobey him, nowhere in the new testament does it
say a human embryo cannot be aborted even though the practice was not alien to
them during the years of an alive Christ.
In contrast, Jesus cared a lot about women who had hard a difficult
life. He encouraged a woman to listen to
him rather than work too hard, he persuaded the elders not to stone an
adulteress, he had a close friend who was a former prostitute. I believe that although abortion is a
difficult practice for society to tolerate, it is a necessary option for women
who have no means of caring for themselves or a child. Such women who make the decision to abort their
children have God's forgiveness, I believe.
As do other women who “sin” in this way, since Jesus's sacrifice makes
their sins forgiven, as the Christians themselves say. The focus on abortion by Christians, and not
a focus on warfare, where individuals who everyone can agree are actually human
beings, is a sign that there is inconsistency in their beliefs and something
self serving about them. I think that
this inconsistency points to a group of people who want to control women, who
are using the power of the church to promote men's power.
