© 2008, UrbisMedia
When I was in my Jesuit high school were taught to put then letters AMDG on the top of our papers and tests. The letters were for the Latin motto of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus in the 1530s, the Jesuits. The motto, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, means “for the greater glory of God.” According to Loyola, we were supposed to try to do the things we do in a manner that gave glory to God.
Even as a young boy the thought crossed my mind that this was, TF, or Tauri Feculentia. [The stuff that falls out of the back ends of bulls, if you have forgotten your Latin.] Why, my small, but questioning mind, would ask, does God need any more glory? He’s got everything—all the power, knowledge, time, probably the latest iPhone. What the heck does he need from my algebra quiz to glorify Him? Putting AMDG on the top of the page didn’t seem to do much for my lack of Math ability. But why should it even matter to Him; he already knows all the answers.
Well, that’s Iggie Loyola for you. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and, for a time, lived an Augustinian life of dissolution before finding God to glorify. I always preferred Francis Xavier’s motto, Ignem Mittere in Terram, to send fire to the earth, in other words, “do something,” “make your mark.” But then his associate, Iggie, would probably say, “OK, but make sure it glorifies God.” [No, not as a pyromaniac.]
This illustrates the main problem with God, not as glory-hungry deity, but as a concept. He is hard to deal with, although people like Karen Armstrong manage to write entire books about Him. She is the author of The History of God, a well-received and quite interesting book. But it’s not a history of God—it’s a history of what people think about God. One learns a lot about that, but in the last paragraph she writes: “Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation . . . if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.” [New York:Knopf, 1994, P. 399] Sort of back to square one, we might say. Sort of “invent the kind of god you need for the times.” Maybe the god of Abraham, or Mohammad, or St. Paul, or any of them, aren’t quite up to he task, because God did not create us—we created Him—and it doesn’t look we are up to the task.
So if it’s about creating God as one sees fit, I have a few things that have been rattling around in my mind for about a half-century. First, everybody like parables, so let me start with one. I called it “The Tisdale Parable.”
Many who have read the Bible—having seen the movie doesn’t count—must wonder just how literally one can take the world’s most published and quoted book. Consider the fact that the Bible has gone through a lot of translation over the years. First its stories were transmitted through a Hebrew oral tradition, then written in ancient Hebrew, later translated into Greek, then Latin, then King James English (with the thees and thous), and finally into a more contemporary English. Even the people who are quoted in the Bible spoke a variety of languages. For example, Christ spoke Aramaic, a dialect different from Hebrew. We all know that a lot can get lost, misinterpreted, and embellished over time and in translations between languages. Oy Vey!
Not long ago I was innocently washing my car when I was pounced upon by one of those roving evangelicals who wanted to give me a copy of the Bible if I would give her a chance to save my soul.
I tried to fend off my zealous evangelist’s annoying recitations of chapters and verses by posing several questions about the accuracy of scripture. “Even the alphabet of ancient Hebrew could have made a great difference,” I suggested as I soaped down the roof of my car. “What, for example, if the “t” sound in ancient Hebrew was represented by a letter that looked like our letter “g.” This would means that God’s name isn’t really God, but Todd, and we should be saying ‘Todd bless you’, ‘For Todd’s sake’, and ‘Oh my Todd!’.”
“Blasphemy!” she barked, and cited a verse that implied that God (or Todd) would punish me for such an utterance. “Every word in the Bible is true!” she insisted.
“Come one,” I said, resisting an impulse to let the hose spray over in her direction, “do you really believe that Methuselah lived 900 years? Maybe he just felt awful one morning after a night of heavy drinking and said, ‘Boy, I feel 900 years old today’, and just like that it gets into the Bible that he lived three centuries. Just bad reporting.”
“So I take it that you don’t believe in miracles either.” she snapped.
“I’d believe it was a miracle if my car could get through a couple of days without being used as a toilet for half the bird’s in this city,” I replied, scraping a guano deposit off the hood.
“I mean biblical miracles,” she said.
“You mean like the healing of the lepers?” I suggested.
“Yes, how about that one,” she said.
“That one is a good example of mistranslation,” I replied. “Obviously, you are unfamiliar with Prof. Norman Tisdale’s work.”
“Never heard of him,” she scoffed.
“Well, Tisdale, the great scholar of ancient languages, says that ‘leper’ is actually a misinterpretation of the ancient Hebrew for a ‘leaper’. He says that the ‘leapers’ of Biblical times were actually irksome evangelists who hid behind trees and temple columns and leaped out at passersby to startle demons out of them. Since they often waited so long for their victims to appear that they were neglectful in their personal habits, they were called, as the Bible says, ‘unclean’.
“That’s ridiculous,” she snapped. “The Bible says that the ‘leapers’, I mean lepers, were healed, so they must have been ill.”
“Tisdale explains that as well,” I replied. “He says that the word spelled h-e-a-l should properly be translated as h-e-e-l. According to him the ‘leaper’ problem was finally solved in the first century A.D. when a holy man went about teaching people to bend over quickly at the waist when they were about to be pounced upon by a ‘leaper’, at the same time thrusting out one of their legs straight behind them to strike the leaper in the groin with the back of the foot. This karate-like movement was referred to as ‘heeling a leaper’. Over time, and because of mistranslation, it was fashioned into the story of a miracle.”
“I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life!” she growled.
“I’m certain that you have,” I replied, scrubbing more guano off the bumper.
“I suppose your Prof. Tisdale has his own version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.”
“You mean the miracle of the lox and bagels,” I corrected. “Want to hear about it?
“No thank you, I’d rather take a moment of silence to pray for your sick mind and your imperiled soul.”
“I’m for that,” I said, wringing out my chamois, “I might even do a little praying myself.”
She was probably praying that those two gulls circling over my car had diarrhea. When she finished she looked at her watch and exclaimed: “My Lord! I’ve got to go or I’ll miss the Padres game,” and disappeared as quickly as she had arrived.
“Thank Todd,” I murmured, “my prayer has been answered.”
OK, so it’s not a real parable. Does that mean I’m going to Hell?
AMTG
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.15.2008)