Klaatu's Ark

I finally watched the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connoley, and of course GORT.

The allusions to the story of Noah and the ark were explicit, but I wonder how many who are familiar with both stories will really think about both the similarities and differences.

For one thing, it seems that a super-intelligent, powerful alien may well be the closest we can come, in the context of our own worldview, to the ancient views of God that are the heritage not only of ancient Greece, or Rome, or India, but also ancient Israel. The movie's aliens are united, a closer parallel to ancient Israel's stories than ancient Babylon's, for example. But the similarities are there: a paternalistic caretaker, concerned for all creation, who comes to carry out judgment against humanity's ethical failings. And like the theology of the Jewish Scriptures (in contrast with modern Christianity's most common emphases), these matters must be resolved in present history rather than an afterlife, and while the dead do not rise, they do live on through their offspring.

If people really want to see a deity that is like a person but greater, whose mind can be changed, one who (to echo Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) "has need of a space ship", then perhaps astronomy is the best path. But while some who seek God are looking for such a being, others are looking for the One, the "God beyond God".

There are also echoes in The Day The Earth Stood Still of Christian ideas, such as when Klaatu comes down to Earth, taking on human flesh to dwell among us.

So, as a new year begins, both the seeking after God and the denial of the existence of God will continue. But as always, it depends what sort of a God you are looking for or denying. And for those who define God in terms of ultimate transcendence and infinity, by definition such a God will never be "found" but will always be an object of seeking. Perhaps the key difference between worldviews is not whether the quest to know just a little more about the reality that transcends and encompasses us, but whether such knowledge comes via the scientific method, reason, meditation, study of ancient texts or modern ones, or by the wise use of any and all methods at our disposal.

The War on New Year

Apparently the forces of darkness are mounting an attack, this time on the Christian holiday of New Year's Day, which commemorates and worshipfully celebrates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the year in which our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born. In addition to the anticalendricals, it seems that the Chinese, Jews, and Muslims are all opting out and deciding to celebrate other days as their new year. More recently the ranks of these heathen have apparently been joined by the ancient Babylonians. Worse still, countless American companies are yielding to the pressure from these groups, and instructing them to wish people "Happy New Years Day" rather than "Happy New Year's Day".

Truly committed Christians should be listening carefully for the lack of apostrophe and boycott any stores that prove to be committed to this heretical anapostrophism.

Fight the good fight. Make sure that you drink too much champagne on December 31st as midnight approaches, and not on one of the days celebrated by the heathen. Too much is at stake. Imagine the confusion if we had such crowds and brightly lit orbs descending upon Times Square all throughout the year.

Christology and the Brain of Jesus

I have not yet read the book Christology and Science that has made some ripples in the blogosphere lately. I certainly hope to do so in the near future. The subject definitely interests me.

Here are some questions one might ponder about Christology. If one believes that God is omnipresent, then in what sense if any could God be present in Jesus to a greater extent than elsewhere? If one believes Jesus was fully human, then how could he not have a complete human psyche arising from the function of his brain? The latter point, although not couched in the language of modern neuroscience, nevertheless reflects the conviction of those who defined Christian orthodoxy that Jesus had a human soul. But I can't remember the last time I heard someone mention Jesus' brain, and yet I doubt there is anyone reading this who would deny that he had one, although some (modern day Apollinarians), if pressed, might be hard put to explain what it was for).

I know this blog is read by many Christians who embrace the findings of modern science, as well as some who do not. It is also read by some who embrace the findings of modern science but are not Christians. I wonder how people of various viewpoints regard Jesus, in relation to the Biblical evidence, historical considerations, classic orthodoxy, modern questions and the natural sciences.

Please do share your thoughts on this subject, whatever they may be!

Fundamentalism's Cannons vs. the Church's Canon

Reflecting further on the tendency of fundamentalists and inerrantists to flatten the voices of Scripture, to blend them or select from among them in order to reduce them to a single voice, it became apparent to me that the early church chose a different path, consciously trying to avoid this.

Matthew rewrote Mark, adding to, subtracting from, and otherwise modifying Mark's story in numerous ways. Had the church wanted to go the fundamentalist route, there was a clear path to follow: get rid of Mark, and allow Matthew's voice to reign supreme, unchallenged.

By creating a canon that includes both Matthew and Mark, the church chose the path of diversity, development and adaptation rather than the path of fundamentalist uniformity. It has not, of course, consistently been faithful to that choice. But the canon remains as a reminder, once again with a profound irony, that the fundamentalist attempt to commandeer the Bible to eliminate Christian diversity is at odds with the Bible itself.

The Bible: Pure or Special Blend?

I think another aspect typical of inerrantist approaches to the Bible interfered with communication in a recent discussion of the subject of "literalism" in the comments on an earlier post. There I asked about the specific meaning, in context, of Matthew 16:28. One commenter kept trying to turn the discussion onto the breadth of possible meanings of "kingdom of God". Thinking about why this happened, I suspect that this commenter may have been substituting (consciously or unconsciously) Mark's version of this saying, found in Mark 9:1, where it says that some standing there will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God come with power. Matthew's version, on the other hand, specifically mentions the coming of the Son of Man, and is thus less open to interpretation as something other than a reference to the "second coming".

One of the ways literalism/inerrancy keeps its plausibility is by either choosing one version of a saying or story that is multiply attested in the Bible, or by blending several versions of the same story. By doing so, discrepancies and tension seem to disappear. The cost, alas, is that the specific voice of a specific author (in this case Matthew) can scarcely be heard. Instead of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the letters of Paul, and other unique perspectives from early Christianity, inerrantists tend to offer their own "special blend", in which the flavor of one or none of these writings actually comes through clearly.

I invite readers used to reading the Bible in this way to pour themselves a cup of pure Arabica (or some other specific coffee that isn't blended - your choice) and take a specific Gospel and see what it does and doesn't contain, without always bringing in details from other Gospels. Let each voice get a hearing! You'll enjoy more any future blend you make, if you can distinguish the different flavors that contribute to it.

Quote of the Day (Andrew Brown)

"When I became a religious affairs correspondent, and started to meet Christian intellectuals, I came to realise that some at least believed nothing I found abhorrent or ridiculous. They no more take the Bible as a work of history than I do. There were some with whom I could and can talk seriously in the confidence that we understand the world in almost exactly the same light and see it disfigured by the same shadows" (Andrew Brown, "Why I Am Not A Christian").

Latest Dharma Special Access Video

The latest Dharma Special Access video has been posted. They tend to be up only a short while and then disappear again, so LOST fans will want to hurry over there and find out what they have to say about Christian Shepherd's white shoes (and whether inside them he has four toes on each foot).

Inerrancy in Poster Form

Above I offer my understanding of inerrancy's circular logic in poster form.

I apologize if my statements about "literalism" and "inerrancy" are not couched in the language of friendly dialogue that I usually strive for. But the truth is that supporters of these viewpoints bully other Christians, and make them feel as though they are being unfaithful to God, the Bible and the Church by questioning them. I know this from experience - including being on the bullying side in the past, for which I humbly apologize.

The irony is that, while supporters of Biblical inerrancy claim to be defending Biblical authority, in actual fact their viewpoint is such that even evidence from the Bible itself is not allowed to call into question the doctrine of inerrancy. That doctrine, rather than God or the Bible, ends up being their ultimate authority.

Fans on Facebook and Tunes on YouTube

I've created pages for two of my favorite composers on Facebook, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Kurt Magnus Atterberg. If there are fans of Geirr Tveitt numbering in the double digits, and even another fan of Gunnar de Frumerie, I figure I should add these two into the mix.

For those looking for an introduction, you can get exposed to Korngold via YouTube:







And there's a sampling of Atterberg (his Symphony No.8) on there too:





And on YouTube there's still more to be found from both, and others. You can even hear a little Gunnar de Frumerie!

The Bible's Greatest Hits

Some people are fans of a band, while others, when they say they like the band, know only its greatest hits, the songs that make it onto the radio and onto compilation CDs. Those who say they like all of a band's songs, like those who claim that the Bible is inerrant in every detail, only know the songs/passages that made the top 40 countdown.

There are lots of ways of being a "true Genesis fan" (the band, not the book). You may prefer the Peter Gabriel era, or at least view it as most authentic. You may like the Phil Collins era too but think that the attempt to do without him "doesn't count". If you are a true fan, it probably means loving the band's music in spite of rather than because of the track "Who Dunnit?" on the album Abacab.

I think that I can say that I'm a true fan of the Bible. I like some parts better than others, and there are "tracks" on some "albums" that I don't particularly like at all. But I appreciate on the whole the achievement of its authors and their contribution to the history of religion.

Which is better? The unswerving fan of a band's greatest hits, or a broad appreciation that knows all of a band's songs? Which represents a truer appreciation of the Bible? The unswerving allegiance to a few select passages that some have, or the broad but often critical appreciation those have who are familiar with the details of the Bible, and not just a few memory verses?

Here's the song "Who Dunnit?" for those unfamiliar with it. The true fans, of course, know it already...

Limits of Literalism

Literalism as an approach to the Bible has its limits. For most people who claim to practice this approach to the Bible, the limit is really, really badly not wanting the literal meaning of a text to be true. A case in point is Matthew 16:28, which says (NIV):

"I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Most people who allegedly espouse literalism really, really badly want Jesus (and Matthew, and the Bible as a whole) never to be wrong about anything. Especially nothing prefaced with the words "I tell you the truth". And yet, if other versions of this saying can perhaps be interpreted as applying to something else (e.g. the transfiguration, or the Book of Revelation), in the form in which it is found in Matthew's Gospel, this saying has no other more obvious meaning than that some who were alive when Jesus spoke will see his glorious return. The references to the Son of Man's throne and/or kingdom elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew make it hard to take Matthew's version as referring to anything else.

So why are these words not taken literally by so-called literalists? The only answer is that they really, really dislike the literal meaning of the words, and therefore the meaning must be something else.


The good news is that, if one wants so-called literalists to eschew the belief that God will delight in torturing people for eternity (to give but one example), all one has to do is persuade them that that belief is really, really abhorrent. And then it will not matter what the plain meaning of this or that passage in the Bible is, taken literally. They will find another possible meaning, just as they do in the case of Matthew 16:28 - not to mention other passages that are already treated in the same way.

O Holy Night

Here's a video of my son and I performing O Holy Night on Christmas eve:

Latest Science Fiction Episodes

If you've never watched LOST, here's a video that will fill you in on what's happened thus far. Maybe you'll be hooked and want to start watching in Season 5 (and rent or borrow the earlier seasons on DVD or watch them online):



And here's the latest webisode of Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy:



You can apparently only watch the latest (2008) Doctor Who Christmas special online at the BBC website if you are in the UK. If you are outside the UK, then try here.

Incarnation in Luke-Acts and in John?

Today in my Sunday School class, in which we're currently surveying the Gospels as part of the "Jesus" topic of the "When Christians Disagree" series, we reached Luke's two-volume work. Luke's Gospel differs in lots of interesting ways from the others, but its Christology is particularly interesting, since Luke is usually dated to the late first century (it vies with the Gospel of John for last place in the order in which the Gospel are thought to have been written), yet it has the most human depiction of Jesus in the New Testament. It thus illustrates that the development of Christology was not in a straight line, from Mark to John, as it were.

In short, Luke's Gospel does not view Jesus as "God incarnate", but rather as a human being filled and empowered by the Spirit of God, as well as being exalted to heaven after the resurrection. There is no sense that Jesus pre-existed his earthly life, nor that he was the incarnation of a pre-existent divine person who knew all things and was perfect. Rather, we are told that "Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men" (Luke 2:52). If we ask how Jesus performed the miracles he did, we are told it was because he was "filled with the Holy Spirit" (e.g. Luke 4:1, 14).

This apparent contrast with the Gospel of John is shocking, but it is perhaps all the more striking when we note that the Lukan Jesus can be contrasted not only with the Johannine Jesus, but with the claims some made for another character in Luke-Acts. He is the only person in Luke's two volume work said to be viewed by some as the incarnation of one of God's powers. I am referring to Simon Magus, about whom we are told in Acts 8:10 that some claimed "This man is the divine power known as the Great Power."

I suspect that few readers of Luke-Acts notice the contrast with the Gospel of John, since the tendency of most Christians is to read everything else in the New Testament not only through the lens of John's Christology, but through the lens of later Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy. But if we take away those filters, there is simply nothing in Luke-Acts that would lead us to the conclusion that its author viewed Jesus as the incarnation of a pre-existent person.

What happens if we reverse the filters? In other words, what happens if instead of reading the Gospel of Luke through the lens of John, we read the Gospel of John with Luke's portrait in mind, and seek to keep John's Christology in line with Luke's rather than vice versa? In fact, it is possible to understand the Gospel of John as likewise presenting Jesus as a "man of the Spirit", a mystic, or in some such other category.

I've long wanted to do a study comparing the depictions of the Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj with the Johannine Jesus. Al Hallaj was famous for having said "I am the Truth" and having been hung or crucified for it. Al Hallaj's own life, as well as the stories about him, were probably inspired by John's portrait of Jesus, but they nonetheless provide an interesting example of how John can be interpreted.

The story is told of an orthodox Muslim who participated in the execution of Al Hallaj, and subsequently had a dream in which he saw the martyr being welcomed into heaven. Confused by this, the individual asked why this should be so, when Pharaoh claimed to be God and was condemned for it. The answer God is supposed to have given is that Pharaoh thought only of himself and nothing of God, while Al Hallaj thought only of God and nothing of himself. The first person "I" of God was thus understood by the Sufis to represent not an abrogation of divine status, but a removal of the mystic's own ego so that God's own "I" can come through uninterrupted.

If we approach John's depiction of Jesus with this "mystical model" in mind, we can indeed make sense of it along these lines. Jesus is said to "embody" the divine Word (John 1:14), which is probably synonymous to the Spirit descending and remaining on him (John 1:32). Jesus seems to recall not only descending from heaven as the Son of Man, but perhaps also ascending (John 3:13). And even while he speaks at times with a divine "I", he also humbly says that he does nothing of his own authority, that he is a man who heard the truth from God (John 8:40), and refers to the Father as "the only true God" (John 17:3).

If we already had in mind that Jesus is a human being inspired by God's Spirit, a mystic, would the Gospel of John persuade us otherwise? Perhaps what it is most important to note is that there is nothing that is obviously superior, in terms of taking the diverse New Testament writings seriously as authoritative Scripture, about one or the other. This is why the development of and debates about Christology continued for so many centuries, and show no sign of abating today. The New Testament offers many perspectives, and simply by reversing the priority we give to this one or that, we can end up with a very different impression.

Naughty Christians of the Bible

Albert Mohler (HT Shuck and Jive) posted the following in a recent blog entry: "Can a true Christian deny the virgin birth? The answer to that question must be a decisive No. Those who deny the virgin birth reject the authority of Scripture, deny the supernatural birth of the Savior, undermine the very foundations of the Gospel, and have no way of explaining the deity of Christ."

This is wrong on so many levels.

First, it assumes that Scripture speaks with a united voice on subjects such as these, so that, as long as one finds a passage or two that teach something, one can safely ignore other voices. When Paul states that Jesus is "descended from David according to the flesh", he is denying that Jesus was born of a virgin. Being of the royal line "according to the flesh" meant descent on his father's side in that time. Coupled with his complete silence about a miraculous conception, there is no historically informed conclusion to be drawn other than that Paul either did not know about a doctrine about Jesus' "virgin birth", or if he had heard about it, he rejected it (as did many later Jewish Christians, who saw that it created problems for Jesus' descent from David).

The virgin birth is not connected in the Bible with the deity of Christ. In fact, the only Gospel to offer something that could be accurately called a depiction of Christ as divine offers no birth story and no miraculous conception. It seems that here too we find that a historically sensitive reading of the New Testament leaves us forced to conclude that most of its authors denied (in the sense of failed to affirm) this other tenet of Christianity that Mohler considers central.

John Shuck has called for "Naughty Christians" (i.e. those that don't live up to Mohler's standard) to "come out". I am happy to do so, but I want to be clear that I am joining the ranks of a wide range of such "naughty Christians": the authors of all four of the Gospels in the New Testament, the apostle Paul, and many others.

The irony is that, historically speaking, the only Christians who live up to Mohler's standard for what a Christian is are post-Biblical. Which means that Scripture is claimed by him as the ultimate authority, and yet none of its authors were true Christians by his standard.

In the end, the key question "conservative Christians" like Mohler leave unanswered is this: in what sense is the Bible authoritative for them, when so many of its plurality of voices are silenced by them in the process of seeking "what the Bible says" on this or that topic?

On the Trail of NT Wrong: Roundup

My quest for the historical NT Wrong began on a whim, after being surprised how often the subject of NT Wrong's identity came up in conversation with other bibliobloggers. I decided to take some of the extremely implausible theories I'd had fun concocting in my mind and share them with a wider audience. I ignored the very obvious possibility that NT Wrong is a pseudonym for someone who does not already have another blog. It was more fun that way. I also thought about investigating myself, in a fashion that involved a My Own Worst Enemy scenario, but decided the series had gone on long enough. But a sequel is never out of the question (as we know from those instances when it wasn't but should have been).

The candidates for Wrongdom I investigated included Mark Goodacre, Jim West, J. C. Baker, the Emperor Nero (still not quite dead), Nick Cave, the Ecclesiastical Redactor, Chris Tilling, Tom Verenna, James Crossley, The Guild of Biblical Minimalists, Dan Brown, my future self, R. A. Montgomery (in a choose your own adventure blogging scenario that left some readers stranded in the past), with some concluding reflections by Albert Schweitzer. If a sequel is ever in view, I will of course include Michael Halcomb, April DeConick, Ken Schenck and Jessica Simpson, to name a few.

Our Daily Neologism

It is well known to New Testament scholars (and for the most part completely unknown to almost everyone else who prays the Lord's Prayer) that the word translated "daily" is a Greek word the meaning of which is uncertain. It is certainly a strong piece of evidence for the connection between the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that they share this word not otherwise attested.

I found my thoughts turning to this word as I read a passage on neologisms in Jocelyn Small's book Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (p.69). Modern people need to be reminded that there were no dictionaries in the ancient world. There was no place one could turn in order to find out if a word "exists". There were simply sounds that could be used for communication with greater or lesser degrees of clarity and effectiveness.

Was this word coined by an author, perhaps a translator of an Aramaic version of the prayer? Was it a word invented by one of the Synoptic evangelists and copied by the other? Was it a word that was well known in the dialect of a particular area where the Greek form of sayings attributed to Jesus and the prayer life of the earliest Greek-speaking Christian communities took shape? The word could have been widely used in spoken Greek in Galilee, for instance, and neither our lack of written attestation nor the failure of Origen and other readers from other areas to be familiar with it would discount this possibility. But the truth is that we do not know.

Our uncertainty about both the meaning of the word, and its significance for our understanding of the authorship and interrelationship of the Gospels, ought to be more widely known. Instead, we have people uttering a prayer in English that may mean something significantly different than anything Jesus may have taught his disciples to pray, and yet the tradition continues, with most calling it the Lord's Prayer and believing that the meaning it has for them in English is authorized by and derives from Jesus.

It is not surprising that many religious believers are troubled by Biblical scholarship. It can place a profound uncertainty even at the heart of a prayer that gives them daily comfort and confidence. But the problem is not on the side of scholarship, but on the false confidence and deceitful certainty that many popular forms of religion offer to people, instead of offering them the honest truth with all its rough edges and unanswered questions.

Quote of the Day (The Internet Theologian)

"There is one thing in the world I love above all others: accuracy. Particularly, accuracy on the subject of Christianity. For years, I have patrolled the byways of the World Wide Web to correct errors, right wrongs, do battle with ignorance, and make fun of people with bad grammar."

-- Tom Breen (aka "The Internet Theologian") in The Messiah Formerly Known as Jesus: Dispatches from the Intersection of Christianity and Pop Culture

(Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008) p.1.

[This quote could serve as the motto for bibliobloggerdom/theoblogy as a whole, could it not?]

Carol Without Words

"Songs Without Words" are quite common in the classical repertoire. So why am I calling this piece I'm sharing a carol without words? Because it sounds Christmassy to me. And so I share it (in the last hour and a half before it becomes awkwardly late to do so any longer), and invite any who think it should have words to see what they can come up with. It is a midi file to keep it small, created using the software Finale. An actual recording (using a keyboard or piano to create an mp3) would have produced a file rather large and hard to upload from home.

History and the Meaning of Christmas

A historian, examining the information presented to us in ancient sources about the birth and infancy of Jesus, would find little that is of historical value. That he was born is beyond question, if one is indeed persuaded that Jesus existed as a historical figure, but a historian would like to be able to say more, and yet in most cases cannot.

Was Jesus descended from David? The early mention of this fact by Paul suggests that the family had the reputation of descent from David, but anyone who has done family history research will know that such family memories are not always accurate.

Where was Jesus born? Most likely in Nazareth in Galilee. This too provides evidence for Jesus' existence as a historical figure, since it is hard to imagine early Christians inventing "Jesus of Nazareth" from scratch, necessitating that within decades later Christians would have to struggle to place his birth in Bethlehem in accordance with expectation.

Even if one were inclined to trust the New Testament sources, many traditional notions would still need to be discarded. It is unlikely that Luke's reference was to a "commercial inn" rather than to a "guest room" in a house. And the chances that Jesus was born on December 25th are, at best, one in 365. But from a historian's perspective, the conflicting information about the date of the events, the circumstances, Jesus' genealogy, the family's geographical movements, and other important details make the Biblical accounts, for all intents and purposes, historically useless.

It remains true that one can appreciate the stories, whose value as cultural classics is most likely beyond question, and whose theological symbolism remains interesting for those who scratch beneath the surface.

But what of those committed to a critical historical investigation? Is there meaning in history? Is there significance in the birth of the historical figure of Jesus?

I'd like to suggest that there is. The meaning I find in the event, the details of which (apart from the brute fact) are lost in the mists of history, is that we cannot fully guess the significance of the events in which we participate. It seems reasonable to surmise that no one, when Jesus was born, envisaged the world 2,000 years later in which we now find ourselves, filled not only with unimaginable technologies and scientific discoveries, but with people whose worship is focused on Jesus! Even if Jesus' family imagined that perhaps their child might be the Messiah, surely their vision would be, at best, that millenia from then one of their (and his) descendants would still sit on the throne.

Not every choice and action we make will have such significance. But any one of them may. And the significance, eons from now, will surely be nothing we can imagine.

That is a message that profoundly challenges us, as well as offering hope. It is not a message limited to the birth of Jesus. But as this birth has such a prominent place in our time, it is worth allowing this historical message to be heard in, through, and in connection with Christmas.

I'm not sure what I'll do today that will be of such lasting significance, if anything. But I suspect it is more likely to result from spending time with my family than blogging - although you never know. On that note...

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!*

* This Christmas greeting is offered in accordance with the articles of Christmas previously posted. Some restrictions apply. If the merriness resulting from this greeting lasts for more than 8 hours, please consult your physician.

Farandole

Here's the Butler Children's Orchestra performing Farandole by Bizet:

Time Traveller Convention

Students at MIT are the hosts for the time travellers' convention scheduled for May 7th, 2005 10:00 pm EDT. We're looking forward to having seen you there...


This actually comes from a book I've been reading, Philosophy Through Science Fiction by Ryan Nichols, Nicholas D. Smith, and Fred Miller (New York: Routledge, 2009). The publication date presumably provides further confirmation that time travel is possible.

The book is in many ways a standard introduction to philosophy, illustrated with examples from science fiction and incorporating stories and excerpts in that genre. Obviously for a number of subjects in philosophy (from mind to the nature of time to free will to epistemology), sci-fi has explored countless thought experiments that are relevant, and so the combination of the two in a textbook makes good sense. And the book, in addition to covering the standard topics, also addresses "the fetus problem" in the context of personal identity. The problem, in a nutshell, is that a fetus at one point was not capable of psychological states, and yet the "Standard View" of personal identity understands it in terms of psychological continuity. The result seems to be that it is impossible for a person to have once been a fetus! See pp.339-349 for the fascinating discussion of this subject, which is not regularly incorporated into philosophy courses.

Why Geoffrey Sampson is a Christian

Lots of people (including me) have written on why they are or are not a Christian (or something else for that matter). A good friend pointed out to me the (very British) answer to that question offered by Geoffrey Sampson. I share it in the hope that it will be of interest to some readers, and perhaps even worth talking about.

Ongoing Discussion about Homosexuality and Marriage

I thought I'd mention that the discussion of homsexuality, marriage, the Bible and Christianity that began in time immemorial and has continued in various posts (as well as a recent piece I wrote for Religion Dispatches) is currently continuing most actively in the comments section of this post. If you're interested in the topic, I invite you to pay another visit to that post and to consider joining in the conversation!

Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy - Webisode 4

Here's the latest Battlestar Galactica webisode:

School's Out 'Til Summer!

Grades have been submitted. The semester is officially over.

When my colleagues return in the Spring to teach their classes, I will not be among them.

Instead, I'll be playing hooky and taking my band on tour.

Below are some prelimary tour photos:

Band lineups are always changing, and so I invite readers of this blog with an interest in defining the band's future makeup (and with at least a minimimal proficiency with Photoshop) to make modifications and send the "improved" pictures to me. I'll gladly feature them here.

O Come All Ye Faithful

Here are two videos for your enjoyment. The first is "O Come All Ye Faithful" performed by the Butler Children's Orchestra joined by members of The League of Extraordinary Musicians:



The second is the third of the Battlestar Galactica webisodes, "The Face of the Enemy" (HT SF Signal):

The Articles of Christmas

This post provides official notification of my intention, on or immediately prior to the 25th of December 2008, to wish readers of my blog a Merry Christmas. If you are likely to find such expression of Christmas greetings/wishes offensive, you are hereby asked to refrain from reading any and all posts on this blog which may have Christmas, Noel, or other synonymous terminology in the title which may be posted between midnight of December 24th and midnight of December 26th Eastern Standard Time. No responsibility is taken for computers whose clock settings may cause them to view a post in this category outside the specified time frame.

The Christmas wishes to be offered will be in accordance with the official articles of Christmas stipulated below:

The Articles of Christmas

Article I: The use of the expression "Merry Christmas" and its synonyms on this blog (henceforth referred to in this document simply as "Merry Christmas") is not to be construed as a declaration of war, whether real or metaphorical.
Article II: "Merry Christmas" is not to be construed as a form of persecution.
Article III: "Merry Christmas" is not understood to void, invalidate, denigrate, supplant or replace wishes for a happy Kwaanza, festivus for the rest of us, Hanukkah, scary solstice, Newtonmas, or any other celebration currently existing or invented in the future which readers of this blog may celebrate.

Article IV: The Christmas wishes offered on this blog are void where prohibited by law.

Article V: Readers in the UK and multiple various former colonial territories of the British Empire are offered as an alternative "Happy Christmas". This alternative greeting is not to be construed as implying the superiority or inferiority of any specific version of the English language, whether spoken as a living language or extinct.
Article VI: The use of "Merry Christmas" on or around December 25th is not to be understood to imply that the birth of Jesus occurred on or around that date.
Article VII: The use of "Merry Christmas" on or around December 25th is not to be understood as excluding a desire on my part that the Christmases of Eastern Orthodox Christians be merry when celebrated on other dates.
Article VIII: "Merry Christmas" is not to be contrued as an attempt to place an obligation upon readers to be merry on December 25th or any alternative date which they may understand as Christmas.
Article IX: "Merry Christmas" is not to be contrued as a contractual guarantee (or otherwise creating a binding legal agreement between the author of this blog and its readers) that Christmas (on whatever date it is celebrated) will in fact be merry.
Article X: All wishes of "Merry Christmas" offered upon this blog in comments by individuals other than the blog's author, whether addressed to its author or to other readers, are understood to subscribe to these articles unless otherwise specified.

Wanted

I just finished watching the movie Wanted. It is full of violence and vulgarity, and many will love it or hate it for that reason. But beneath the "action flick" surface is an incredibly profound parable, one that parallels a key theme and message of the Matrix films. [WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW, although I will try to be vague!]

The movie is about the feeling many people get of boredom and dissatisfaction with their lives. We long for someone to come along and tell us that we are significant, to redefine how we understand ourselves through just a few words revealing our true identity.

What both the Matrix and Wanted show is that, on the one hand, what is needed in order to save us from a meaningless existence is, above all else, desire and discipline. In all the great hero movies that have even a hint of realism, the main character doesn't just go from ordinary to superhero. There is a need for a "repairman", someone who teaches the individual the discipline needed in order to realize what they - what we - are capable of.

Wanted, like the Matrix films, also highlights a key danger. Those who mediate the message of our potential to change, to be something more, to find meaning, are also capable of manipulating that message and its power to their own ends. Neo discovered that his being "the One" was just another layer of control and manipulation. Wesley discovers that what was allegedly fate was in fact manipulation.

We all want to be significant, but it is only relatively recently that it has become the expectation that we will find that fulfillment from our jobs. Some of us are indeed so fortunate. But in bygone eras, one's farming or cattle herding was simply a means of survival. If someone's words made a huge impact, as for instance the words of Amos did, it wasn't because he was a prophet "for a living" necessarily, but the sense of calling and the willingness to make the time to do something else as well.

The special effects and stunts are impressive, but to get caught up in them would be to miss the central message of the movie. If our lives seem dull, we long for excitement and adventure. Those who live daily on the edge, their lives in danger, regularly wish for "normality". The ability to curve bullets or see life in bullet time won't bring meaning or liberation from being controlled and manipulated. To take control of one's life to the extent that it is possible, and to fill one's life with meaning, it takes understanding, discipline, and committment - among other things.

A message may come to you that changes your life, that makes you aware that there is life-changing power that can improve your life and help you find meaning. But without digging beneath the surface and seeking understanding, and daring to question the uses to which the power of such a message is put, we may not escape manipulation but actually serve it.

"The truth will set you free." It now seems ironic ironic to me how frequently in my more conservative days I felt terrified of changing my mind, of being confronted with arguments that might persuade me to think differently. Seek to add wisdom and understanding to the power, because (as someone else said) "With great power comes great responsibility". Even a positive, life-changing power is not above misuse for selfish ends. Indeed, that sort of life changing experience is particularly open to such abuse, because, as the movie's title hints, it is what is most wanted by so many people.

Like Father, Like Son?

When I was 8 years old, there was no such thing as the internet, at least in anything like the form in which it exists today. It was a few years later that movies like War Games began to feature smart kids with computers dialing in directly to connect to other computers. Those of us who had computers at that time played games we loaded onto our TRS-80 from a cassette player. Some will remember this classic of that bygone era.

My son is now 8, and decided it was time to start blogging - not because I do it, but because he has friends at school who have blogs. His blog is called "Alex's Stuff".

I'm not sure at what age it is appropriate to have one's own blog, or whether there even is such a thing as an "appropriate age".

For the time being, it looks like his blog is going to be an entertaining source of information about age-appropriate online games, funny videos, and other such things.

If you have a child in that age group, perhaps they'd like to pay a visit to Alex's Stuff.

One thing I can say for sure: his father would value feedback on blogging as a passtime for kids. This is one case in which I can't draw on my own experience as a point of reference!

I can also share already a reason I value his blogging. I learned from it that he actually enjoys playing the violin (that's not always what he says when we tell him he needs to practice).

The Letter Kills

I was reminded of Paul's words about the letter killing but the Spirit giving life when I read a quote from Plato's Phaedrus today. In it Socrates says:

You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; It doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.

In a very real sense, the problem with religious fundamentalism is that it wants clear-cut answers from God to every issue we face today, and it turns for answers to a text that only directly answers questions people were asking in the distant past. No matter how many times it is asked about stem cells, for instance, the Bible will only reply with the same words it already contains and has always contained. And this is a more serious problem for fundamentalists since they tend to be unwilling to look elsewhere than in texts for answers.

On the other hand, the act of wrestling with a text, trying to get it to say more than it does, has a long history, particularly within Rabbinic Judaism, and this is a tradition worth continuing. Indeed, Peter Rollins suggests that we should go so far as to refuse a divine intervention to settle a question about the text's meaning, in this wonderful parable (HT Progression of Faith):

And so reading the Bible is valuable not because it gives us all the answers, but because it allows those who talk about it to engage in meaningful, interesting, helpful conversations.

Moreover, to be fair, ancient texts of all sorts can at times seem particular relevant to some issue or other today. The passage from Plato's Phaedrus quoted above is a case in point. Ancient texts can be fascinating and helpful dialogue partners in all sorts of ways. The only problem is in expecting them to behave as though they were living things, able to do more than repeat what they have always said. The letter kills, but the Spirit can breathe life into living, personal interactions and conversations, even ones about those dead letters, in ways that inspire and invigorate and refresh us today.

To end on a lighter note, if you're trying to figure out what translation of the Bible to read, there's a song explaining why it's better in Koine.

Mandaean Research

A student of mine, Keith Lohse, has taken it upon himself, as part of an independent study on the Mandaeans, to blog about the resources currently available on the topic, offering both a convenient collection and some review of the materials. All this will be appearing in the near future at the blog Mandaean Research. Do pay it a visit. If nothing else, it may make Keith feel like his work is of value to others, and he could certainly use the encouragment (since he has a lot to due between now and when grades are due in!)

Mamma Mia

I just watched the movie Mamma Mia, and would basically say many of the same things about it as I did about the most recent Indiana Jones movie. So I'll just point out the differences. Mamma Mia had soundtrack by Abba rather than John Williams, Greeks instead of Russians, and Remington Steele instead of Han Solo. Oh, and I don't think there were any interdimensional beings in Mamma Mia (although given that people kept turning up in 70s clothing towards the end, it was hard to be sure). Otherwise they were basically the same movie, more or less...

Scary Solstice

By accident (I was looking for Christmas music) I came across scary solstice music. Here's a sample:

I'm sharing this mainly because it is so odd that it is interesting, and I suspect it will appeal to at least some readers of this blog (that tiny contingent that recognizes Cthulhu when they see him).

Why not try instead this video of Paganini's "Witches' Dance"? It's not as scary (except for the image and sound being slightly out of sync).

The Fidelity of Christ

I was tempted to give this post a title something like "Nevertheless Even So Yet Again At Least Once More Pistis Christou". But then I thought I might need that title for this post's sequel.

Since there are many readers of this blog whose background is not in Biblical studies, I should say by way of introduction that there is a debate among scholars about whether a phrase used in Paul's letters, usually rendered in English translations as "faith in Christ", might not be better translated as "the faithfulness of Christ" or "the faith of Christ" or something along those lines. The phrase in Greek, πιστις Χριστου (pistis christou), is the two words "faith(fulness)" and "Christ" with the latter in the genitive. It is grammatically possible for the phrase to mean either "faith(fulness) of Christ" or "faith in Christ", and it is partly because grammatical considerations along cannot settle the matter that discussions of the topic have been at once so interesting and so inconclusive.

There have been recent posts on the subject by NT Wrong, Ken Schenck, Mike Aubrey, Doug Chaplin, Loren Rosson, J. K. Gayle and David Ker.

Rather than try to engage the various arguments found in these other blog posts, and most likely do justice to none of them, let me simply present the best short case I can for why I think an understanding of pistis Christou as "the faithfulness of Christ" is not implausible. I am still uncertain as to whether I think it is the best rendering of the phrase.

First, there is a lot of repetition and redundancy if one renders both the expression with the preposition and the expression in the genitive as "faith in Christ". This argument cuts both ways, since the context regularly features "faith in Christ" explicitly, and this context could be appealed to as evidence that the phrase in the genitive is merely a stylistic variation.

Let's consider the classic example in Romans 3:21-26:

But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. (NIV)

It is interesting to note the interpretative decision the New International Version (quoted above) makes regarding another potentially ambiguous genitive in the passage. In good Protestant fashion, the "righteousness of God" is said to explicitly to be "a righteousness from (i.e. imputed to humans by) God" rather than God's own justice/righteousness as a divine attribute. If one thinks the latter might be what Paul had in mind, however, then one can certainly envision Paul talking about God's righteousness being revealed through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. If it is revealed "through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe", there is a redundancy that could have been eliminated by merely having written "the righteousness of God revealed to all who believe in Jesus Christ" using a preposition rather than a genitive.

Earlier in Romans, in 1:17 (which the NIV translates, not unsurprisingly, as "righteousness that is by faith from first to last"), Paul uses a phrase that might be more literally rendered "from faith to faith", and given the range of meanings of pistis the phrase could equally be translated "from (God's/Christ's) faithfulness to (human beings') faith(fulness)".

We are well before the time of Chalcedon and its formulation about Christ's two natures. But is it possible that might have regarded Jesus as the expression of two fidelities: God's faithfulness expressed in sending and not sparing his only Son, and human faithfulness in obedience where Adam had once disobeyed? This would tie in nicely with themes found elsewhere in Paul's writings, such as Philippians 2:6-11 and Romans 5.

There is no doubt that Paul talks about faith in Christ. The question is whether Paul also speaks about the faith(fulness) of Christ. He certainly talks about the significance of Jesus' obedience, so here too there is no doubt that this theme was of some importance to Paul.

Why, then, should this question of translation matter? Ultimately, the one real contribution that it might potentially make is to tell us whether Paul is really as repetitive and redundant in the way he expresses himself as some who are not fans of his writings believe, or whether perhaps, translated differently, some who are not big fans might find themselves appreciating his letters in new ways. Here's how the NIV of the passage quoted above (from Romans 3) might be translated differently:

But now, apart from Torah, God's justice has been made known, a justice to which the Torah and the Prophets testify. God's justice, through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, [comes] to all who believe. For there is no distinction: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him, through his faithfulness, as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did so to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be [both] just and the justifier of those who are of Christ's faithfulness.

It is perhaps the influence of a particular Protestant understanding of the atonement that makes the translation "faithfulness of Christ" seem implausible. Yet although some today emphasize that "Christ did it all" and "All you need to do is believe", Paul's own outlook is very different. He emphasized being in Christ and dying with Christ. Christ's faithfulness, for Paul, wasn't something that merely brought about an objective change in an external state of affairs. As Paul puts it, "one died for all, with the result that all died" (2 Corinthians 5:14). One was faithful so as to bring about the fidelity of many. The notion that Jesus died (or was faithful) instead of us is hard to reconcile with Paul's own statements.

I'm not calling this post "Part 1" but I have a funny feeling there may need to be a "Part 2" at some point in the future...

The Religious Case Against Belief

I just finished reading James P. Carse's book The Religious Case Against Belief (New York: Penguin, 2008). Although there are occasional factual and other details one might quibble over, the major thesis of the book remains intriguing and provocative. In essence, the central thesis of the book is that there is a distinction that can be made between a religion and a belief system, and it is the distinction that, among other things, accounts for the longevity of religions. Indeed, Carse makes longevity part and parcel of his definition of what a religion is.

Early in the book, Carse introduces the notion of a "higher ignorance". There is a natural, naive ignorance that simply doesn't know things. But there is also an awareness of one's own ignorance that can only be achieved (perhaps ironically) through study and learning.

Belief systems can be distinguished from religions precisely by their focus on beliefs, on doctrines and dogmas. Belief systems emerge regularly from and within religious traditions, but they are not simply identical to those traditions. "Belief systems thrive in circumstances of collision. They are energized by their opposites" (p.40). Belief systems are dependent on there being opposing beliefs against which to define themselves. Belief systems also carefully delineate a border at which thinking stops (p.44). We find "true believers" (as Carse calls adherents to belief systems) struggling against a real or imagined other, but ultimately also struggling against the challenge to their beliefs that comes from within. A striking example of this is presented in the case of Luther (pp.48-50), who is understood to have struggled not with the Church or an emperor but more fundamentally with himself. And it is at this point that we can distinguish belief (understood negatively) from knowledge: "The test is rudimentary: if I am a knower, I am open to correction; if I am a believer, I resist it" (p.60).

Carse identifies a "withering irony" in the use of authority by believers. "Authority does not precede its use, but is created by it. It does not present itself spontaneously; it is chosen by those whom it restricts, protects, authenticates and guides...Sacred scriptures are not sacred merely because they are printed on the page; they are thought to be so only when their readers elevate them to that status...Contrary to the popular notion, authority does not come from the top down but from the bottom up...Effective authorities are thoroughly obedient" (pp.96-97).

If these things can be said about the character of belief and belief systems, then what distinguishes religions? Religions are like poetry, Carse claims, and differ from belief systems precisely in their resistance to definition (pp.104-105). The Bible serves a similar function through its diversity, which is a key to its persistent vitality. So too does Jesus (pp.130-131), and quests for Jesus show a similar vitality: "He is both the best known and the least known of all human beings. He is that person about whom the most has been said and about whom we are the most ignorant" (p.131). And thus the vitality of religious traditions and their central figures and texts is precisely that they stimulate conversations about matters of great interest and importance, without ever thereby being exhausted or providing a definitive answer.

Carse offers reflections on death and immortality, interacting with not only the Biblical tradition but also Emily Dickinson. Carse's identification not only of the notion of immortality as inherently absurd, but also of any imagined immortality as inevitably boring, is poignant (see e.g. p.168). Reflections on the nature of evil and goodness, and our inability to define them, are also offered. When he turns to the creation stories and their relationship to the controversies over evolution, his insights are articulated in a striking and helpful way: "Making a protoscientific treatise of this song, thus depriving it of its grand resonance, suggests that a "literalist" reading of the Bible is not reading the Bible at all" (p.192). And as he later writes about such approaches to the Bible more generally, "The Bible...provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation. For this reason, a "literal" reading of the Bible is not a reading at all but an arbitrary choice of one passage over another, and a putting it to use of saying what the reader has already decided it should say (although that is also an interpretation, merely unrecognized as one by the reader)" (p.200).

Carse's exploration suggests an answer to the question of why religious traditions persist: their provision of central texts and/or figures who stimulate but do not exhaust the exploration of important subjects enables the formation of community, in a way that preserves the balance necessary for life between an identity and a permeable boundary to the self. He also explains why belief systems regularly arise out of religions: "Far from providing false or unverifiable answers to our questions, the religions provide no answers at all. On this basis, one explanation for the proliferation of belief systems at the edges of the great religions is that they provide a shield against this absolute openness, a protection in advance against what might lie just beyond the horizon and so far unseen, or even imaginable. Believers, in short, are terrified by genuine expressions of religion, and respond to them by vigorously ignoring them. They take refuge in agreement, solidarity of membership, and the sense that they belong to something that exists independently of their participation in it" (p.210).

Carse ends his book with the recognition that his critique applies to his own statements (p.213). This, far from being a problem, is as it should be. He is not providing a definitive answer but a voice in an ongoing conversation, one that should provoke further discussion and voices that dissent from his view. The last sentence in the book's "Coda" sums it up: "And the more clamorous the response the better" (p.213).

The Only True Flyer

I received a copy of the flyer for The Only True God in Adobe Acrobat format today. Feel free to pass on a copy to the acquisitions person at your university library. The book should be out in just a few months now...

Indiana Jones and the Interdimensional Archaeologists

I just finished watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. On the one hand, the idea of extraterrestrials or interdimensional beings (or angels or deities, for that matter) having come to earth and brought the key elements of civilization and technology with them (whether making fire, irrigation, or velcro) faces a problem akin to that of intelligent design. It is the common reaction "I can't imagine how that came about, so I will posit an external intervention to explain it". Great human creations, whether in art or architecture, science or scripture, usually evoke such a reaction, which is not unlike the reaction some have to the complex creations of biological evolution. But in all these instances, one is simply pushing the problem back without resolving it. If life here was designed, then who designed its designers? If aliens or angels brought technology to humans, who gave it to them?

On the other hand, it was nice to see Indiana Jones make the most important discovery of his life: that eventually the adventure of constantly pressing on into the unknown loses its importance and luster compared to the adventure of getting to know one person deeply, intimately, profoundly. Early in the movie, seeing an aging Indiana Jones reminded me of the embarrassment I felt seeing a comparably aged Lou Gramm and Foreigner singing "Hot Blooded".

Then again, we also witness Henry discover he has a son, to whom he wishes to pass on such wisdom, and yet who takes after him (and to whom his mantle...er, hat...almost passes quite literally).

The "city of gold" turns out to have as its treasure knowledge. Yet that treasure burns up the mind of those who try to absorb its fullness. Is the attempt to pass on our wisdom to the next generation similar? Is it not the case that it takes life experience to come to value knowledge more than gold, and relationships more than adventure? Can such things be taught?

At any rate, there can be no better way of exploring such questions than to the accompaniment of a soundtrack by John Williams?

Digital Commons, Selected Works

Butler University is working on adding Digital Commons (i.e. a central site for access to the research and publications of those at Butler) to its web presence. I've begun setting up a Selected Works page for myself. Have others used this type of web resource before? Have you found it useful? Any suggestions or feedback will be welcome!

Quote of the Day (Catherine Heszer)

"Scholars of classical antiquity have argued that ancient literary composition was essentially an oral process based on one's memory rather than on piles of written notes. What was composed orally was subsequently dictated to a scribe who was the actual writer of the text. Once the author had "published" his work by allowing its reproduction by booksellers and friends, he had lost all influence on its further development. Since no copyright laws existed, the author had no protection against the introduction of changes into his text. In fact, not one authoritative version but many more or less identical versions of each text circulated in antiquity...

The accuracy of the remembered was not particularly important to the authors. Without stenographers or tape recorders accuracy was also impossible to achieve. The gist of what had been said or heard or read was more relevant that the repetition of verbatim statements. Quotations were usually not checked. Ancient authors such as Plutarch streamlined, compressed, and dislocated the material, conflated similar items, and even invented additional examples to support an argument."

-- Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine

(Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001) pp.422-424.

Beautiful Beyond Words

Bad Astronomy has the top ten astronomy images for 2008. Number 4 is aptly described as "beautiful beyond words":



Be sure to go take a look at it at full resolution.

I Love Facebook

I have to say it, even though it may lose me some credibility in the eyes of older academics (although I suspect they already view me with disdain for blogging, so it probably won't matter much, except to solidify their impression).

I love Facebook.

It has allowed me to reconnect with friends from childhood, from college, currently scattered all over the world, people that I long regretted losing touch with. But more than that, it allows them to make the acquaintance of one another. I posted an article from Scientific American, and responses ensued from a current student here at Butler, a friend from South Africa whom I met at college in England, and my best friend from my teenage years. Where else could this happen but on Facebook? When before in the history of humanity were such things possible?

Many have feared the arrival of new technology would diminish personal interaction. But while Facebook is not the same as talking face to face, on the whole technology seems to be keeping people more connected in a world where increased mobility had the potential to break relationships and family connections.

A generation ago, teens went off to college and made a break from their parents, and reinvented themselves, or discovered themselves, or defined themselves in this new setting. Today, they keep in touch regularly with parents. The only clear reason is that it is easier to do so. The phone goes with you wherever you are nowadays. E-mail is instantaneous and convenient. No more letter writing. No more calling and hoping you catch someone in.

Technology is not an unmitigated good, and the uses to which we put it require moral discernment. But while Facebook (and even, dare I say it, blogging) can be negative, like most technologies, they have at the very least great potential for good.

So there you have it. I love Facebook. Use it wisely.

Sacra Scripta

Given my Romanian connections, I had to share this (HT Mark Goodacre):

Sacra Scripta
the new Romanian journal for Biblical Studies

edited by the Centre for Biblical Studies
of Babes Bolyai Universität Cluj-Napoca
Chief editor: Stelian Tofana
Executive editor: Korinna Zamfir
Editorial board: Gjörgy Benyik, Ioan Chirilla, Erik Eynikel, Marius Furtuna, Hans Klein, Lehel Lszai, Ulrich Luz, Sorin Martian, Janos Molnar, Tobias Nicklas, Zoltan Olah, Joseph Verheyden

Two issues of ca 120 pages per year.

Articles are accepted in English, German, French and Italian.
Among the authors of the years 2007/08 were Ioan Chirilla, Walter Dietrich, Marco Frenschkowski, Hans Klein, Johannes Klein, Ulrich Luz, Daniel Mihoc, Vasile Mihoc, David Moessner, Tobias Nicklas, Constantin Oancea, Armand Puig y Tarrech, Stelian Tofana, Gerd Theißen, Michael Tilly, Michael Wolter, Korinna Zamfir

Subcriptions: for two issues 35 € incl. postage (in Europe) (for students 20 €)
Subscribers from Eastern European countries get special prices.
Applications for subscriptions to: Anisoara Taut: anisoara_t@yahoo.com
Bank account: Associatia Diatheke, Banca Transilvania, Sucursala Cluj-Napoca, B-dul Eroilor 36. Please add: For "Sacra Scripta". IBAN: RO11BTRL01304205B80615XX

Please support the emerging Romanian Biblical Scholarship through a subscription for your library!
--

Battlestar Galactica Webisodes 1 and 2

Here are the first and second of the new Battlestar Galactica webisodes:

Sydney Carter

I recently posted an excerpt from "Every Star Shall Sing a Carol" by Sydney Carter. You can listen to the piece online here, and can find sheet music for the melody here.

I also came across a small poem called "Interview" that expresses Carter's outlook:

So what do you believe in?
Nothing fixed or final,
all the while I
travel a miracle. I doubt,
and yet
I walk upon the water

The Latest Dharma Special Access Video

The latest of the Dharma Special Access videos have been made available. In the first, the producers give intentionally ambiguous answers to fans' questions. The only straight answer is when they tell us that the smoke monster existed on the island before the Dharma Initiative got there. There is also another clip from the season premiere. Definitely worth taking a look!

Looking for Goodness

On tonight's Heroes finale, Sylar puts a bunch of the show's "heroes" together in circumstances planned to bring out the worst in them, to see whether they are capable of killing, of being "monsters" like he is. But in fact, as he confronts Angela trying to get at the truth, he almost begs her to persuade him that she is different from him.

Deep down he's not seeking proof that everyone is like him. He's seeking evidence that they aren't.

Many who have the same attitude probably have the same desire, deep down. And yet Sylar fails to do the one thing that he is hoping others will: He never thinks (at least in this episode) to be the goodness he seeks, to let it begin with him. "Be the change you want to see in the world", it is sometimes said. We might add (for Sylar's benefit) "Leave behind the monstrosity that you despise in others, and in yourself. Live the heroism you have come to no longer expect from others, but which nonetheless, deep down, you still hope they'll manifest".

On tonight's season finale of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, we witnessed a person who felt liberated, having once been merely "a cog in a machine", and another "person in the making" being taught that the value of a human being is more than simply their functional value to someone else. When asked why it matters if humans live or die, Ellison claims that human lives are sacred because we are God's creation, we're all God's children.

The scriptwriters seem unaware of the strangeness of Ellison's view that God created everything on earth, and yet his ambivalence about whether this being before him is "a child of God". Perhaps where they are going with this is that the status of "child of God" and "made in the image of God" are ways of talking about our capacity for moral discernment. While we may regularly fail to use it, or ignore it, it may still be the capacity for moral discernment and reflection that sets us apart from other organisms on this planet - and perhaps from our machine creations.

But of course, the top quote from tonight's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is:

"We all know how reliable bloggers are" - John Connor (uttered sarcastically).

Countdown

I've created a countdown timer until the big event: The NT Wrong interview, scheduled for February 1st, 2009.

Gnostic Flow Chart

This semester in my "heresy" class, the relationship between various aeons, archons and entities in various Gnostic texts became confusing, as it often does. I looked into it, but was disappointed to find that there didn't seem to be a flow chart readily available outlining the Gnostic emanations.

Well, one student decided to take matters into her own hands.

This flow chart is an attempt to depict the relationships in the text On The Origin of the World. Let me know what you think of it. If nothing else, we hope to get it put on a T-shirt that could perhaps be used to promote the religion program. The reverse side of the shirt could say something like "And you thought organic chemistry was complicated..."

Around the Blogosphere

Peter Rollins has a challenging story called "The Rapture" that I highly recommend reading. Tony Jones shares a quote on the Newsweek kerfuffle (which I think is now the official way of referring to the recent article on the Bible and gay marriage the the reactions to it). Michael Spencer blogs about an ideal evangelicalism (and has apparently found "The Perfect Church"). Craig Blomberg has a guest post on Debunking Christianity about why he is still a Christian. Opposing Views joins the discussion of whether Jesus was a historical figure. And Michael Halcomb has a blog entry on whether Mary was raped. Shields Up sees problems with the notion of Scripture's "plain meaning". There's now also Bad Archaeology (HT Archaeology Online). Ancient Hebrew Poetry asks if Early Judaism was wrong. Chris Heard has a quote on writing well.

AIG Busted recommends the latest issue of Scientific American be force fed (sorry, he meant recommended for reading) to creationists. John Pieret, Troy Britain and Larry Moran show why this is needed. There's also a new journal that will begin publication next year, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

Sound and Silence looks at Thomas Talbott's The Inescapable Love of God. Pat McCullough reviews Jewish Believers in Jesus. NT Wrong points to When Faith Meets Reason: Religion Scholars Reflect on Their Spiritual Journeys. Unorthodoxology is making sure no one has missed the anarchic Twelve Days of Christmas offered by Straight No Chaser. And there's an interesting post on skepticism in theory and practice (HT Striking Thoughts).

Around the Blogosphere

Matt Montonini has found some free NT Greek classes on YouTube. Kay has a post on the universal good news. Sandwalk shares some statistics on the religious beliefs of scientists (broadly defined). Debunking Christianity shares several links to resources about the Hebrew view of the universe by Dr. Paul Seely. James Getz has shared YouTube videos of the history of Mesopotamia...in Legos! Targuman has more things you can do with Legos. Antiquitopia, Rev's Rumbles and Ancient Hebrew Poetry reflect on recent Catholic pronouncements. And discussion of the Newsweek article (yes, that one) continues. And finally, Metacatholic has thoughts on Johannine polemic.

Passages vs. Principles

I've had an article published in Religion Dispatches. The title is "Passages vs. Principles", and it compares the use of the Bible in current debates about homosexuality to its use in the controversy over slavery. Do take a look, and leave a comment there, here, or both!

The Second Commandment and Biblical Literalism

The second commandment (on the counting of some this is the second part of the first commandment) as found in Exodus 20:4 reads as follows:

"You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

Then you take a look at the bumper of the car of your average person who claims to be a Biblical literalist and see this:

I wonder what a so-called Biblical literalist would say if challenged about this. Perhaps that the symbol doesn't really look like anything that could actually swim? But the verse is pretty clear - don't make any likeness of anything that is in the water under the earth (which of course reflects as well a certain ancient view of the world, but let's not get sidetracked onto that subject).

Perhaps they might point out that elsewhere in the Bible we see evidence that this commandment was not observed strictly. But that just shows the problem with Biblical literalism - there are conflicting statements and inconsistencies in practice.

Perhaps the appropriate thing to do would be to point out the consequences of making such an image. And then, just before going on your way, you might want to let them know that you have no intention of stoning them to death - because you aren't a Biblical literalist...

Recipe for Biblical Literalism

Take one part overly-familiar Bible verses. Repeat these verses over and over again until a thick, opaque layer is formed. Use this layer to cover the remaining 39 parts consisting of Bible verses that do not talk about the same subject as those more familiar verses, verses which seem to disagree with them, as well as verses you don't understand, verses you understand but do not put into practice, and any other verses you could happily live without. Bake until the lower verses are obscured from view.

Avoid stirring and serve.

Around the Blogosphere

At the top of the list must go Mark Goodacre's post about the failure of the sites Early Christian Writings and Early Jewish Writings to rise from the dead. Fortunately the internet archive comes to the rescue, as usual.

Tony Jones, Fred Anderson and Daryll Bock are among those who've reacted (in very different ways) to the Newsweek article on the Bible and gay marriage.

John Pieret looks at the psychology behind Intelligent Design. John Wilkins blogs about finding a god in one's evolutionary soup. New Scientist has a piece on creationism in the Islamic world. Chet Raymo has a post on exotheology.

Homebrewed Christianity has a great Christmas picture and caption. NT Wrong offers updated Christmas carols, while also explaining how a fart joke made it into an English Bible translation. Sound and Silence says so long to Sola Scriptura.

I Want To Believe...and to Doubt

Last night I finally watched X-Files 2: I Want To Believe. Particularly interesting were the issues of faith and doubt, which the two characters have symbolized throughout the series. And the symbolism continued to be explored as we found Mulder and Scully together and yet not married, unable to be together completely in spite of the love they share.

How should faith and doubt relate to one another? I think the ideal would be to have, on the one hand, a doubt that wants to believe, that appreciates what is attractive and desirable in faith, and cannot believe not because of repulsion but because of a demand for evidence that is, in the end, unsatisfied.

On the other hand, we should have a faith that wants to doubt. For so many people of faith, their beliefs are things to be shielded from scrutiny, clung to at all costs. What a fragile faith that is. It is so much freer to have a faith that has come through scrutiny (even if the journey to this place can be very scary). The faith that has survived doubt, the faith that is left even when you try your best to disprove it or explain it away, is a powerful and transformative thing indeed.

I try to hold to both these ideals, but inevitably most of us find that we have a natural penchant for one or the other. But it is genuinely appreciating both that seems to me to be the key.

I want to believe, to affirm; and I want to doubt, to question. And I want to allow the two to not merely co-exist but be married and be all the richer and more well-rounded because of it.

I wonder if that is why Mulder and Scully have a hard time staying together. Scully is capable of skepticism, and yet in the end wants to believe, wants to make room for a wider view of reality if the evidence can stand up to close scrutiny. Mulder, on the other hand, seems to want to believe and be wary of doubt. He invites Scully along, senses he needs her critical eye, and yet he often ignores it. He wants to believe, sometimes so much so that he cannot appreciate what doubt and skepticism have to offer to him.

But if the two can be reconciled, truly collaborate without losing their distinctive perspectives, what a marriage that would be.

Of course, even if they get married, they'll still call each other "Mulder" and "Scully". Faith and critical thinking can perhaps be married, but they may still have trouble with being on an intimate, first-name basis with one another...

Evolution and Creationism Videos

Several interesting videos related to evolution and creationism have appeared. First, from right here in Indiana, the Secular Alliance of Indiana University visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky and made a video about it (HT AIG Busted):

SAIU trip to the Creation Museum from Secular Alliance on Vimeo.

Second, video footage of Richard Dawkins interviewing Father George Coyne, which was omitted from the documentary the former made, can be watched (in 7 parts) on YouTube (HT Darwiniana):

Quote of the Day (Allow Gay Marriage Facebook Group)

"Why can a drunk man and a female exotic dancer get married in ten minutes in Las Vegas (and probably get it annulled within 24 hours), but two men who have been devoted to each other for several years can't?"

-- From the description of the "Allow Gay Marriage" group on Facebook

Most Dangerous Bloggers of 2008

I am grateful to David Ker for the honor of being included on his list of the "Most Dangerous Bloggers of 2008". I also like the particular warning label he chose for me:

I'm not usually in a bad mood, am I? At any rate, I do hope that the rest of what he said is true - that my blog will make people think uncomfortable thoughts and ask uncomfortable questions.

The best part, however, is the photo that shows the danger connected with David Ker's own hippo-themed blog, Lingamish:

Darwin Worship Resource Materials

No, this isn't about resources for the worship of Darwin. Neither the scientific community nor its opponents would have any interest in doing that.

But there are some worship resources related to Darwin that have been made available by the Clergy Letter Project, to help congregations prepare to participate in Evolution Weekend 2009.

2009 marks both the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of Species as well as the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. If your congregation has never participated before, this would be a great year to start! Lots of commemorative events are being planned.

Jon Stewart vs. Mike Huckabee on Gay Marriage

Jon Stewart has a pointed rather than amusing interview of Mike Huckabee on the subject of gay marriage (HT ERV). Here's the URL in case the embedded video below doesn't work. There's also a post on a related subject at Notes From Off Center.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mike Huckabee Pt. 2

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Return to Orality?

Stephen Chrisomalis and Mark Dingemanse both respond to the notion that our society shows evidence of a return to orality. It is certainly far more common now than it was a couple of decades ago for people to listen to a book in the car or on their ipod. But one doesn't have to go back much further than that and weekly radio shows provided a similar sort of aural presentation of narrative. In short, we are certainly witnessing changes in media culture and use, but not in a way that will make it easier to answer questions about orality and the New Testament, of the sort that April DeConick, Mark Goodacre and NT Wrong have been discussing.

Speaking of changing media, Danny Zacharias has a music video on YouTube to help you learn the Greek first declension paradigm.

Every Star Shall Sing A Carol

In my last post I mentioned that Ray Bradbury's "Christus Apollo" is but one of several poems or songs exploring the meaning of Christmas in the context of both Christian theology and the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Another example is Sydney Carter's "Every Star Shall Sing A Carol". Here's an excerpt:

Who can tell what other cradle,
high above the milky way,
still may rock the King of heaven
on another Christmas day?
God above, Man below,
holy is the name I know...

Every star and every planet,
every creature high and low,
come and praise the King of heaven
by whatever name you know.
God above, Man below,
holy is the name I know.

Those interested in this subject may also enjoy reading David Wilkinson's article "Missionaries to Mars?", Gabriel McKee's "Are God and Aliens Compatible?", and Jill Tarter's "SETI and the Religions of Extraterrestrials", among others.

Christus Apollo

As Christmas approaches, and in the heavens exoplanets are glimpsed by telescopes of tremendous power, and carbon dioxide detected in their far off atmospheres, it seems appropriate to draw attention to a less well-known work by science fiction author Ray Bradbury. His sonnet/cantata "Christus Apollo" is but one of several 20th century poems and carols reflecting on the meaning of Christmas (and Christianity more generally) in the context of an age of space exploration that was (and is) just beginning to dawn. Here's an excerpt:

Christ wanders in the Universe
A flesh of stars,
He takes on creature shapes
To suit the mildest elements,
He dresses him in flesh beyond our ken.
There He walks, glides, flies, shambling of strangeness.
Here He walks Men.
Among the ten trillion beams
A billion Bible scrolls are scored
In hieroglyphs among God’s amplitudes of worlds;
In alphabet multitudinous
Tongues which are not quite tongues
Sigh, sibilate, wonder, cry:
As Christ comes manifest from a thunder-crimsoned sky.
He walks upon the molecules of seas
All boiling stews of beast
All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.
There Christ by many names is known.
We call him thus.
They call him otherwise.
His name on any mouth would be a sweet surprise.
He comes with gifts for all,
Here: wine and bread.
There: nameless foods
At breakfasts where the morsels fall from stars
And Last Suppers are doled forth with stuff of dreams.
So sit they there in times before the Man is crucified.
Here He has long been dead.
There He has not yet died.

There's a setting of the words to music by Jerry Goldsmith.

God & Genes x2

SCM Press has made chapters from two books related to religion and science available on their web site:

Keith Ward, Religion and Human Fulfillment, Chapter 1: The God Gene: The Relation of Religion and Altruism

Neil Messer, Selfish Genes and Christian Ethics, Chapter 1: Introduction

The Only True Book Cover Blurbs

The online University of Illinois Press catalog provides the two blurbs from scholars that will appear on the back of my forthcoming book The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context. Here they are:

"This work puts forward a compelling thesis, questioning the default assumption that what separated first-century Jews and Christians was the Christian elevation of Jesus of Nazareth to divine status as equal with YHWH. McGrath shows decisively that this was not so, arguing with clarity and force and engaging the relevant bodies of primary and secondary literature with precision. A significant and useful book."

--Paul J. Griffiths, author of Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity

"If anyone thinks that the concept and definition of 'monotheism' are clear-cut, they need to read this book. Similarly, if you think that the issue of 'early Christian monotheism' or the question of Jesus's status within or in relation to 'early Christian monotheism' (as maintained by the writers of the New Testament) can be neatly resolved in straightforward terms, then McGrath will enable you to make a more informed judgment, and hopefully to reach a more mature view."

--James D. G. Dunn, author of Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry Into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation

I'm grateful to both Jimmy Dunn and Paul Griffiths for their kind words.

One Season Ends, Another Begins

Next Monday the season finales of Chuck, Heroes and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are scheduled. The latter looks particularly intriguing, since it seems from the commercial that a machine will ask whether he is one of God's children. Whatever answer may be given on the show, the fact that the question is being posed is itself worthwhile.

As for the season soon to begin, the new season of LOST, the producers have offered yet another video clip, as well as some unique words that feature in the scripts for the first three episodes of season 5:

From #501:
CL-CLICK. BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP. KNOCKNKNOCKKNOCK! WHAPPP! VVVVVVWWHHHHHEEEEMMMMMM! PLLEPPT-PLEPTT-PLEPTT. BOOOOOOOOOM! BLAAM!!! THUUDDD. CRUUUUUUUUUNCH! PFFT! PFFT! PFFT! SMAAASSHHHH! SHCLICK!!!! CA-CLICK. FOOOMP. SKLIIIIIISH. PING. RAT-A-TAT. BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!!!!

From #502:
BWOOBWOO! TAPTAPTAPTAPTAP. KNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCK. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. SLAMMM! THWACK! KRE-KLACK. BEEEEP... SLAMS. SCRRIIIIIDDDDDDDFLIP!

From #503:
FLAPP-FLAPP-FLAPP. AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!! THRAAAAASH! KAAAAAAAA-THWOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!! CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLACK. CRRRR-ACK!

Clearly it isn't a season to be missed! Don't you particularly want to know who or what is tapping in episode 2? :-)

Sparring with Jesus

At Best Buy yesterday, looking at the Nintendo Wii, one of the salespeople pointed out that in Wii Sports, one of the characters you can box against looks like Jesus. What do you think?

Many Christians, while they might disagree, can at least just barely tolerate the desire (expressed in a particular song) that someone might want to punch St. Paul in the head. But if one says the same thing about Jesus, that will be crossing a line. Yet one reason is presumably precisely a failure to embrace Jesus as fully human. In many people's imagination, if one threw a punch, he would suddenly vanish and reappear three feet to the left, or become incorporeal, or blind his would-be sparring partner with a flash of blinding light.

I am not even slightly interested in punching Jesus. Or Paul, for that matter. But I think a similar attitude pertains for many people when it comes to the words and teaching ascribed to Jesus. One can disagree with Paul, but most people want to believe (as the same song says) that they are following Jesus and doing everything he said.

If you can't or won't go so far as to say you "disagree with Jesus", is there anything about which you would acknowledge that you have a different point of view? I'll leave open whether "Jesus" in this question is the Jesus of historical research, of the Gospels, of the creeds, or whatever. For me, there are plenty of things that could potentially be mentioned, but one that came up in my Sunday school last week may be the best example. In spite of having spent a significant amount of time in a Pentecostal church, and in spite of having at one point had a very Frank Peretti view of the world, I no longer am persuaded that personal supernatural beings like demons exist. A key event that persuaded me was when a colleague at Bible college, who thought he was under "demonic attack", came to understand his experience in psychological terms and found help and healing. Jesus, on the other hand, almost certainly really believed that such beings existed.

This may turn into a discussion of angels and demons, and that's OK. I know there are readers with experience of other cultures where such things are far more taken for granted, and I'd welcome their input. But I also invite other comments on the general theme of this post. What, if anything, do you disagree or have you ever disagreed with Jesus about?

Before concluding, let me make one final point. If one believes that Jesus was human and shared the worldview of his time, then it is simply impossible that anyone today will view the world precisely as Jesus did. And so it seems that in a very real sense, not disagreeing with Jesus is not an option, even for Christians. Following Jesus today cannot mean believing everything Jesus believed and doing everything he did or taught others to do. It can only mean finding core themes and emphases and finding ways of applying them and living them in our very different world.

Quote of the Day (Lisa Miller)

"Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?"

-- Lisa Miller, "Our Mutual Joy", Newsweek Dec 15, 2008 (HT John Shuck)

Science, Idolatry, and Anthropomorphism

Here are two more quotes from Chet Raymo's book When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy:

"If science has given one great gift to the world - greater than the wonders of technology, greater than modern medicine, greater than flights to the moon and planets - it has given us permission not to know everything" (p.63).

"Prescientific people invested every tree, brook, and celestial body with personhood. For all its grandeur and refinement, the modern idea of a transcendent personal deity who acts wilfully in the world is only the final manifestation of ancient animism. For the religious agnostic, this is the ultimate idolatry" (p.103).

What do you think? Obviously a book cannot be summed up in a few quotes. But I've often felt that, on the one hand, the highly anthropomorphic depictions of God one finds in ancient monotheistic religious traditions really are just the various anthropomorphic deities combined into one almighty and all-powerful God. Presumably we are meant to build on and at the same time move beyond such ideas to something better. Yet on the other hand, it is hard for me to imagine setting aside entirely the language of personhood in reference to God, not because I think of God as a person micromanaging events in the universe, but because I think that God is greater than that rather than something less. God is the ultimate transcendence, and speaking about God as "impersonal" seems to represent a reduction, a depiction of God as less than we are.

I've long found Hans Kung's language helpful when he speaks of God as "more than personal". Admittedly, we don't have any idea what that means, but it seems to be pointing in the right direction.

Quote of the Day (Chet Raymo)

"All personal gods are idolatrous, especially any personal god we dignify with a capital G. The great service to humanity of science has been to sweep the anthropomorphic gods away or, at the very least, to show them for what they are, phantoms of the human brain. What we are given in their place is not Truth, but reliable empirical knowledge of the world, tentative and evolving. To be sure, science does not exhaust reality, or even begin to encompass the complexity of our interaction with the world. The religious naturalist seeks a language of spirituality that is consistent with the empirical way of knowing."

-- Chet Raymo, When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist (Notre Dame: Sorin Books, 2008) p.125.

On The Trail Of NT Wrong: This One Goes Up To 11

Jim West has declared the quest finished. Albert Schweitzer has also chimed in:

The study of the Life of NT Wrong has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Wrong, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Blogger and Bishop. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of minimalist doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Wrong advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our blog and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the blogging of the last forty minutes was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our blog, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own blog, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position. [Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical NT Wrong]

The truth is that each of us has indeed found in NT Wrong what we've been looking for. We have looked down the well and seen our own reflection.

Perhaps the question that it is most important to ask is: Who do you say that NT Wrong is? (Mark 8:29, paraphrased)

And so I will leave this thread open for you to post your conclusions and creeds, your beliefs and blog links, about NT Wrong. And I'll conclude with my own statement, not about the blogger of history, but of the Wrong of faith:

I believe in one Wrong, the blogger sarcastic,
purveyor of witticisms and information
Who was begotten, not made,
of one substance with the Guild of Biblical Minimalists.
Together with them and Jim West he is read and enjoyed.
He was born of someone, somewhere
for our amusement and illumination he became blog.
I believe in the communion of bibliobloggers,
and the life of the Biblical Studies Carnival to come.
Amen

Who do you say that NT Wrong is?

Agent Ellison's Ethics

I am getting caught up on two weeks' worth of episodes from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In episode 10 from this season, entitled "Strange Things Happen At The One Two Point", the artificial intelligence known as "Babylon", during a power outage, redirects all power to its systems in order to survive. As a result, a psychologist that had been working with the AI died as air conditioning and other systems were cut. When asked how it felt about the death, Babylon had no answer. It had no concept of "death" - although it did have programming that led it to preserve its own existence, even if it meant tapping other sources of power and thus "breaking the rules".

I liked when agent Ellison pointed out that the programmers and creators had failed to give the AI a code of ethics, had failed to teach it to value human life. And I was disappointed when, given the opportunity to tell what he would teach the machine if he could, Ellison replied "If you want to teach it commands, start with the first ten". It was a clever throw away line, but I fear it represents more than that, the notion (popular in the United States, particularly among people who don't know the contents of the ten commandments) that learning morality means learning the ten commandments.

I disagree. I don't think having a rule to not kill imposed on a person or a society is the same thing as teaching an individual or a group to value human life. And it is the mystery of how we instill that value that remains elusive. For we still understand so relatively little about how the human mind works, how we learn, and how best to teach our values, that it is still far from straightforward to answer the question of how to teach an AI to value human life. We still don't know how to teach that value to human beings effectively and consistently.

It is Terminator 2 that holds out the most hope in this regard, by reversing the order. At the end it suggests that if a machine can come to learn the value of human life, then perhaps so can we. Then again, while this certainly was meant to be hopeful, perhaps it also presents the challenge: so many of us desire to spread a perspective that values human lives, but in seeking to accomplish this aim, we often seem to have no more idea how to go about it, than we would have in trying to teach a machine. That is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces, for unless we can figure it out, then even if our machine creations don't kill us, we human beings may kill one another.

Kevin Padian Video: Investigating Evolution

Blog readers may be interested in the video featuring Kevin Padian: Investigating Evolution, from Grace Cathedral. The link will take you there. For some reason, when I try to embed it, I get a video about Wikipedia instead. So you can take your pick! :-)

On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 9 3/4

We've reached a turning point. On the one hand, there is the entry posted on my blog, claiming to be from my future self. Is it authentic? If so, am I telling the truth, or is this simply an indication that, in the future, I've joined the upper eschelons of the Guild of Biblical Minimalists and am now responsible to guard its secrets and market its wares? If that's the case, will I ever be one of those in the know if I stop my quest? Am I supposed to know better than to take my own advice, and simply make others believe I am following it? Time paradoxes are always a headache when they are in real life rather than on Dr. Who, LOST, Heroes, or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Moreover, Jim West has now posted a photo he claims is of NT Wrong. The individual in the photo is so cleverly disguised that I cannot make it out, but perhaps someone more adept at using Photoshop can help, or perhaps even someone with access to more advanced technologies like Paint.

Fortunately, this is a choose your own adventure blog:

If James McGrath continues his quest to uncover the identity of NT Wrong, click here to go to the blog entry "On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 4,815,162,343"

If James McGrath abandons the quest, switch off your computer and go take a nice long nap.

On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 4,815,162,342

This post is being backdated from the future. By this time, in the year 2038, it has been proven impossible for individuals to travel through time, but transtemporal blogging has been shown viable. Using top secret research about which I can say no more lest I rewrite history more drastically than I already plan to, I am posting this to my earlier self and other bibliobloggers.

Give up the quest for NT Wrong's identity. It will only cause you heartache. You will all spend the next 30 years of your lives on this and be no closer to the truth. You will throw away careers, family, money, and time, and have nothing to show for it. Please take my (I mean, of course, your own) advice on this. You will miss lots of episodes of Heroes and eventually even LOST as you devote increasing amounts of time to this vain project, not to mention time that could have been spent with your family, on research, or in other more useful endeavours.

In particular, make sure you don't miss the 2009 bibliobloggers' dinner in New Orleans. It was (sorry, I mean will be) a hoot!

On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 8

Armed with this new information, I was determined to confront James Crossley at SBL in Boston. I finally tracked him down at the Sheffield reception. After I secretly poisoned his champagne and he was unaffected, he had to admit the truth. Yes, he is indeed descended from two of those resurrected saints of lore. Yes, he is immortal, and one day hopes to visit the Scottish highlands himself. But no, he emphasized, is not NT Wrong. He pointed out to me that he has no motive. He already has a blog, on which he says things which are neither less humorous nor less insightful than those of Wrong. I had to admit that he was, in all likelihood, telling the truth.

This was a setback, but at least I now had another clue. Someone who knows about the secret of the resurrected saints of Barnsley, South Yorkshire is NT Wrong. That limits the number of candidates significantly. For this fact is a secret guarded by an ancient secret society, known in antiquity and throughout the ages by different names. You may know them as the Illuminati, I Cogniscenti, Les Minimiserables, or Monty Python's Flying Circus. Today this secret society is known as...

The Guild of Biblical Minimalists

Having already investigated their janitor, I determined that it was now time to research the upper eschelons of the movement. I must learn more about the so-called "Council of the Five", so many of whom are based at or connected with Sheffield, and who have easy access to Barnsley and can keep a careful eye on its closely-guarded secrets.

(Finally, I should apologize to anyone who drank any of the glasses I poisoned at the Sheffield reception before finally figuring out which was James' glass. I wish you a speedy recovery, or barring that, an honorable burial).

Meanwhile, Chris Tilling has provided a poem to go with our quest.

The Burial of Jesus: Now (Almost) Available Through Eisenbrauns

The book has been listed on Eisenbrauns. It doesn't seem to be completely into the system, but it seems to be possible to order it. Try it and see!

The Burial of Jesus:
History and Faith

by James F. McGrath
BookSurge, 2008
142 pages, English
Paper
ISBN: 9781439210178
Your Price: $12.34
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~MCGBURIAL

On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 7

I admit, for a moment or two I suspected that Roland Boer might have created NT Wrong, Chris Tilling, and Tom Verenna merely with the aim of then proving none of them existed. But such an investigation, I soon realized, could only distract me from the important clue which has very recently been removed from NT Wrong's blog (presumably at the same time at which he changed the photo to allow us a better glimpse of his chin).

What led NT Wrong to state that the resurrected saints mentioned in Matthew 27:52-53 currently live in Barnsley, South Yorkshire? I went to England, to Barnsley, and made inquiries at the local council. A look of terror briefly came over their faces, but they quickly stifled it and denied any knowledge of what I was talking about.

I kept digging - literally as well as metaphorically. Beneath a local church, I found a secret document written in English, but in Mandaic script. It told a fascinating tale of saints, raised to immortality in Jerusalem, who then travelled northward. Their aim was to reach the highlands of Scotland, and there to do battle with one another to the death, with the last remaining immortal getting to sell the rights to their story to Hollywood.

Visiting a local family history center, I looked for any record of newcomers to Barnsley around the year 30 CE, when the resurrected saints would have passed that way. I found a mention of two, with Hebrew-sounding names, who settled in the area around that time. It seems that two of these resurrected, immortal saints settled in Barnsley when the rest continued their journey north. Those same names appeared again and again in the records, eventually acquiring a surname that recalled the fateful moment of their resurrection.

Two names, but no evidence that they had children - until the second half of the 20th century. The names I painstakingly traced through the historical record finally appeared in a parish record. This couple of immortal saints had given birth to a son.

The name in the parish record: James Crossley.

Somewhat Evangelical

That's how I ranked in the quiz that Jim West directed us to. And that sounds about right.

There seems to be an increase in willingness among at least some Evangelicals to be self-critical. And one good but challenging place to start, if you haven't already, is by watching the video excerpt from God on Trial that Fred Anderson shared on his blog:

On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 6

That NT Wrong might be a fictional creation occurred to many. That the same might be true of Chris Tilling will have come as a shock, but in fact a simple search on Yahoo! for "Chrisendom" turns up evidence that it has existed for hundreds of years. But where does the trail to the real individual or individuals behind NT Wrong lead from there?


Who would have a motive to create not one but at least two fictional blog personas? Perhaps someone who wished to show how easy it was to create a religious movement around fictional individuals woven together from pieces of myths and fragments of ancient texts (and/or web sites). But who would desire to do such a thing?


It was only relatively recently that I came into contact with Tom Verenna, an individual with precisely these aims. When his attempts to demonstrate the attractiveness of absolute minimalism regarding Jesus, and show there was no historical Jesus at all, failed to persuade some people (including, more recently, myself), what better course of action would there be than to create fictional persons and then unmask them as fictions, as myths? Note that it was only after I tried to introduce the analogy of inventing a fictional president of the United States into the discussion that NT Wrong claimed to be the president elect.


Those of you who have followed our debates will recall that I have put much emphasis on the existence of an individual in the earliest church known as "James, the brother of the Lord". And so, I can now reveal to you that, had he not been stopped by this blog post, within days, perhaps hours, Tom Verenna was planning to lay claim to being the brother of NT Wrong!


Clearly, the evidence Tom has brought forward regarding Jesus (and the similar case Roland Boer has made regarding NT Wrong) also applies to Tom Verenna himself. I have only interacted with Tom electronically. I have never seen a photo of him. In short, there is no more evidence for his existence than for NT Wrong. Thus, I am forced to conclude that Tom Verenna is simply another layer of false blog identity. There is no historical Tom Verenna. The "Tom" part of the name derives both from the shorter name of Tom Wright, which is alluded to in the "name" NT Wrong. "Tom" also alludes to the Harry Potter novels, where there is a famous Tom Riddle. And what, my friends, is the mystery of the identity of NT Wrong but a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a scrumptious chocolate coating and dipped in sprinkles? The "Verenna" part, while clearly derived first and foremost from the old Sanskrit root varna which in the Rig Veda means "one who claims to be NT Wrong deceitfully". But it also alludes to the way a German might pronounce the names of NT Wright and NT Wrong, as well as Voldemort, which of course immediately brings to mind the more common way of referring to him: "he who must not be named". And the blogging evidence for Tom Verenna's existence is far more scant, and significantly later, than that for NT Wrong himself.


So having found three layers of false identity behind NT Wrong, I am sure you are wondering just how far down the rabbit hole goes. I might have given up at this stage myself, were it not for the fact that three months ago, when my investigations into the identity of NT Wrong took me to a village in England, which revealed something even more shocking.

Before I conclude this post, let me draw attention to the fact that NT Wrong has removed his blog's FAQ tab. I can only presume it is because of the clue it gave, which led me to the revelations I will proffer in the next post in this series...

Quote of the Day (Heinz Pagels)

"The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration."

-- Heinz Pagels, Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985; as quoted by Chet Raymo)

On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 5

In the case of identity of the mysterious NT Wrong, surely Chris Tilling is above suspicion, right? Perhaps when it comes to the question of earlier underlying sources. But when it comes to the identity of the ecclesiastical redactor, the one ultimately responsible for the final form of the NT Wrong blog (which, from the perspective of literary-critical blog-reading, is all that matters), then who else could be at once so ecclesiastical and so redactional as Chris Tilling?

The name of the blog has long puzzled redaction critics, but if one poses that it arose from inept redactional activity, then the puzzle can be given a plausible solution.

The Ur-blogger behind the proto-NT Wrong blog was none other than John Shelby Spong. Chris Tilling came along, eager to stop Spong by promoting his own hero, N. T. Wright. He had to work stealthily, however, since the blog was not his own. In his haste, as he feared his hacking might be discovered, Tilling was not able to replace the last letters of Spong's name with the final letters of Wright's. The result was the clearly composite NT Wrong.

The lack of mention of Zwingli, if perhaps explicable in terms of an attempt by Jim West to disguise his identity, falters on the psychological implausibility of this scenario, for surely Jim West could not blog for more than half a year without mentioning Zwingli. It would have seemed to him like a betrayal. If one posits that all reference to Zwingli was removed by an anti-Westian redactor, then once again Chris Tilling fits the bill.

The truly shocking discovery I made in the course of my investigation is that Chris Tilling is itself a pseudonym. Feeling that his original choice of moniker, "Christ Illing", would connect him too much with the undercurrent of 80s music on the NT Wrong blog (plus he is rather sensitive about his failed career as a Christian rap artist in that period of his life), this self same ecclesiastical redactor simply shifted a letter to produce Chris Tilling.

But if Chris Tilling is a pseudonym, and all we know about him for certain is that he buys people drinks at SBL and eats hats, then who is the real individual behind these multiple layers of masks? That answer will shock you all...

On the Trail of NT Wrong, Part 4

Some have suggested that NT Wrong may be multiple people. He has been identified as a straight white male, and as a black lesbian woman. She has been identified as a scholar of Hebrew Bible, of the New Testament, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or of Monty Python.

Since this puzzle relates to a biblioblog, we should bring the most powerful tools that Biblical studies can offer to bear on the question. When we do so, the solution to the mystery of NT Wrong's identity becomes obvious:

Clearly we are dealing with a blog author who is making use of multiple sources, and whose work in turn has been subjected to redaction.

A case in point:

In a recent post on Nick Cave (in which Cave's music was obviously one source), we can see how an ecclesiastical redactor took the phrases "picks up on a" "number" and "Gnostic motifs" from a Catholic web site, and wove them together, adding the words "and Christian" in order to provide a more orthodox slant. This editor is presumably also responsible for deriving the phrases "more mundane" and "more spirit-filled" from the Confessing Evangelical site.

The possibility that NT Wrong is Nick Cave himself is also a possibility that deserves serious consideration, since it is Cave who is alleged to have woven together the Gnostic and mainstream orthodox Christian material in his songs. But we must still posit an ecclesiastical redactor with Evangelical leanings, since the standpoint NT Wrong is supposed to have would not assume that "Gnostic" and "Christians" are alternative, opposing categories.

The challenge is thus to distinguish source from redaction. And so the key question now becomes: can we identify the ecclasiastical redactor, the ultimate author-editor of the NT Wrong blog?

On The Trail of NT Wrong, Part 3

J. C. Baker has posted twice, on the identity of NT Wrong and more proof that Mark Goodacre is NT Wrong.

A remark made in the context of his posts suggests J. C. is deeply pained by his failure to make the Top 50 Bibliobloggers' list. This leads us to suspect that in fact...J. C. is NT Wrong, and the whole thing was a ploy to achieve the status of legend, creating a fictional persona and then unmasking him as someone else. What genius! Rather than simply begin his own Top 50 list, he starts one under a mysterious pseudonym, and thereby creates both a list and a means to earn the top rank through his pseudo-detective work.

He also found that hardly noticeable search button remarkably fast, didn't he?

More of the genius of NT Wrong can be see in the fact that he is listed as #14 on both the October and November Top 50 lists. The name of the blog symbolizes the fact that the New Testament is wrong, and a classic example is Matthew's claim that he provides three groups of 14 generations in his genealogy of Jesus, whereas in fact he provides two groups of 14 and one of 13. NT Wrong's ranking provides an intertextual echo of Matthew's wrongness. And in the comment that lists him as Bishop of Durham (North Carolina), NT Wrong spells "so" with 6 of the letter "o", alluding to the significance of the number 6 in the Book of Revelation. Moreover, 919 is the area code of Durham, North Carolina, which when satanically inverted looks just like 616, the "other number of the beast" in some versions of Revelation. What an evil mastermind we are dealing with!

Meanwhile, Jim West is denying that he is or has ever been Wrong - precisely what I would expect NT Wrong to say under the circumstances!

On The Trail Of NT Wrong, Part 2

But (as a detective in an Agatha Christie finale might say, having led you to believe that they had identified the murderer by providing motive and opportunity), it turns out that while ETS was on, Mark Goodacre was wandering Boston wearing a cricketing outfit with a piece of celery pinned to the lapel, looking for Peter Davison. (Presumably you've also seen the video on YouTube of what happened when he was at the Cheers bar).

So we turn to our next suspect: Jim West.

Jim is not British, but that provides all the more motive. His sarcasm is grating because he is American. Why not deflect the ire of his blog's readers by uttering his words of wit under a pseudonym with a British accent?

You also presumably noticed the "W" connection here too: Dr. West & Dr. Wrong. And as a Baptist, Jim has always secretly envied bishops. And who more than Jim West would delight in parodying the name N. T. Wright with "NT Wrong"? Can't you just hear his maniacal laughter in the background every time Chris Tilling sees the blog's title and cringes.

But the strongest evidence of all is this: Zwingli is never mentioned on NT Wrong's blog. Not once. Any biblioblogger would be expected at some point to mention Zwingli, if only in passing, would they not? And so clearly this is evidence that NT Wrong is Jim West, trying a little too hard to conceal his identity by avoiding characteristic words and phrases. I'm surprised that that Stephen Carlson didn't pich up on this.

The fact that Jim was not at ETS or SBL does not disprove this theory. His spies are everywhere, and surely must have provided him with regular reports.

Jim West has a motive as well, his blog having been deleted previously (by rampant raging Wrightians, according to one dominant theory). And so it would not be surprising if he were to deflect their schemes away from the blog that bears his name, or at least maximize his chances of having one of his blogs survive their attacks.

I rest my case (again). Jim West has the means, the motive, and the sarcasm to perpetrate this ingenious bit of pseudonymity. Certainly moreso than Steve Young. Jim also has the musical talent and the political experience.

However...

On The Trail Of NT Wrong

I have several theories about the identity of NT Wrong. All of them are bunk. I will post them anyway.

Be that as it may, in the course of my extensive investigations (= reading NT Wrong's blog posts from time to time), I have uncovered a few clues that may help us deduce the true identity of this anonymous biblioblogger-bishop.

Clue #1: NT Wrong is no younger than in his 30s. This can be deduced from the fact that he remembers Magnum P.I. People in their 20s and younger have only seen Tom Selleck in reruns of Friends.

Clue #2: NT Wrong attended ETS this year. This can be deduced from the fact that he just blogged about a post that he is aware included material presented at ETS. I realize this is a shocking revelation, since it probably also suggests he may have a book by Don Carson on his bookshelf as well.

Clue #3: NT Wrong is British. This is not news to anyone, I'm sure, since no one can be that sarcastic and get away with it for an extended period of time unless, when people read their blog posts, they hear them in a British accent. But just to be clear, no one from the United States would believe that the resurrected saints are in Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

If I had to guess the identity of NT Wrong right now, I suppose I'd have to go with...Mark Goodacre. The evidence for this is as follows:

(1) In the list of sources on NT Wrong's blog, Q is absent. None but Mark would dare make such an omission. Indeed, I can't think of an instance when the letter Q has ever appeared on NT Wrong's blog...

(2) Mark Goodacre is the right age to remember Magnum P.I. (he went to the Cheers bar, for crying out loud).

(3) Bishop Wrong shares a common first letter with Dr. Who. Coincidence?

(4) When NT Wrong's blog began, Mark Goodacre's blogging hit an all-time lull. Coincidence? I

(5) Mark's blog has been number three and number two in NT Wrong's Top 50, even though Mark has been a pioneer in the biblioblogging realm. The only explanation is his humility prevents him from giving himself the top spot.

(6) I didn't see Mark at all at SBL, which surely proves that he knew I suspected him and was avoiding me.

(7) Finally, if you paste the head from Mark's home page onto the body at the top of the NT Wrong blog, you will find it fits perfectly.

An 8th point, which is clearly the clincher, is the fact that I have seven arguments, a round Biblical number. I might also add the fact that neither blog is searchable, preventing the sorts of poking around that might prove common authorship. That's the same reason Matthew and Luke didn't put search bars on their Gospels...

I rest my case! Tune in tomorrow to learn why Jim West is really NT Wrong. In the mean time, do go over to Roland Boer's blog and commiserate him for not having cracked the case first.

New Lost Videos Released

The producers of LOST have released three new video clips: two focusing on actresses and their characters, one with a sneak peak of the first episode from the coming season. You definitely want to take a look at this! In the clip, lawyers turn up at Kate's door with a court order asking her to provide a blood sample from her and her son. They are not at liberty to divulge the identity of their client. Kate refuses, and once they are gone, packs a bag, takes Aaron, and goes on the run.

Superior Scribbler Award

I am grateful to John Shuck of Shuck and Jive blog for bestowing upon me a Superior Scribbler Award.

Of course, as with every Bloggy Award, there are A Few Rules. They are, forthwith:

Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.

Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.

Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to this post, which explains The Award.

Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!

Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

In turn, I bestow this honor upon five (biblio)bloggers the quality of whose postings can surely not be open to doubt, since they regularly blog not only about their interests but about their research:

Mark Goodacre of NT Gateway

Ken Schenck of Quadrilateral Thoughts

April DeConick of Forbidden Gospels

James Crossley of Earliest Christian History

Duane Smith of Abnormal Interests

Although there are many more worthy recipients, I am sure that those whom I have awarded will do their part in ensuring that none are overlooked in the end.

We Wish You A Hubble Christmas

The web site for the Hubble telescope (HT IO9) has made holiday cards available that you can download and print for free. Here is a small sample of what's available:

Projecting Hostility

I must admit I am confused by the rants in which Roger Pearse is engaging over on his blog. He began by misconstruing what I said in a blog post of my own. Then, when I repeatedly tried to clarify my meaning (which, to be honest, I don't think was all that unclear to begin with), he has now accused me of "brinking" because I refused to allow him to twist my words and set the terms of the discussion when he had misconstrued my meaning, often in bizarre ways.

I invite all those with skills in dealing with difficult people to try to get Roger to approach this matter fairly and rationally, before he embarrasses himself further by accusing others of the behavior in which he is himself engaging.

The sad irony is that Roger's behavior illustrates my point. Conservative Evangelicals often project a hostility onto others that simply isn't there, and may in fact reflect an assumption that others are as hostile to them as they are, deep down, to others. My initial point was the irony of a more exclusive group calling a more inclusive group "less friendly". I can appreciate a good bit of irony, but things seem to have gotten seriously out of hand at this stage.

Thinking back to my more conservative days, I wonder whether a key reason for maintaining that one is facing hostility even when one isn't has to do with the Bible. The New Testament reflects contexts in which real persecution (arrest, imprisonment, even execution) were part of the church's experience. Might one reason conservative Christians treat the world as hostile in this way, even when they live in a country that safeguards their religious freedom, be that if the world they inhabit doesn't allow for direct application of the New Testament, then they simply don't know how to make sense of their lives? Could it be the desire for a simple hermeneutic (or conversely, fear of a more complex process of interpretation) that is at the heart of this phenomenon?

Revelation vs. 9th Wonders

Tonight's episode of Heroes presented what one might expect to encounter if one had access to the comic books produced by someone who genuinely could see the future. Precise dialogues depicted, word for word, including even the questioning and skepticism of those who participate in them and don't think such things are possible.

In most instances of prophecy and apocalyptic visions, we get symbolism, vague characterizations, and language that is flexible enough that it can be (and has been) applied to, and interpreted as referring to, all sorts of figures, events and regimes down the ages.

This might seem like it is building up to a negative assessment of Biblical and other literature. It isn't. I value the free will that most likely makes impossible such precise predictive prophecy as Daniel at first glance seems to be. But the main point of all this is that books like Revelation are not in the same genre as the 9th Wonders comic books on Heroes. And the sooner those who are obsessed with the Book of Revelation in comic book junkie fashion realize this, the sooner they may begin to hear the book's real challenge for American Christians: is the kingdom we are working to build more like the kingdom of the Lamb, or that of the self-indulgent Babylon and the worship-seeking Beast?

How sadly ironic, if those who think they have the inside track to the future through reading Revelation, play a part in bringing about a future that might have been different, for the better, if they had actually understood the message of Revelation. And how truly disappointing if people spend their time trying to figure out who the antichrist is instead of focusing on avoiding becoming that sort of self-absorbed, worship-seeking person themselves.

I Evolved From Jesus

Jim West seems to think that watching this video will cause me to "abandon my ways":

It certainly has cured me of any desire I might have had to sing to a monkey on TV...

La Multi Ani, Romania!

Today, December 1st 2008, marks the 90th anniversary of the decision by various counties and regions to join and become part of the nation of Romania.

History buffs can see an image of the national assembly resolution online, which 90 years ago created the modern nation.

Happy birthday, Romania! La multi ani!

Even Less Friendly

It seems ironic to me that Roger Pearse has now taken the step of censoring my responses to him, since the discussion began with the topic of being "less friendly". Here's the comment he "unapproved":

“Lynch the Christians”? Why would I want to have myself lynched? Presumably you have brought a great deal of baggage to this subject, and have made some assumptions about where I am coming from. I am sure you will remain persuaded that I am the one projecting, and I’m open to that possibility. But be that as it may, I sincerely doubt that I am the only one.

Your response, I might add, illustrates my point. Criticism is treated as persecution by lots of conservative Christians. I know I viewed it that way in my more conservative days. No one has called for Christians to by lynched in connection with this discussion. In fact, what I pointed out is that a metaphorical “lynching” is more likely from conservative Evangelicals than from SBL, but conservatives regularly project their own hostility onto their opponents. Really, could you have illustrated my point better than in your reply above, which clearly not only misses the point of my initial post, but projects onto me and onto the whole discussion a hostility that I certainly didn’t introduce?

Biblical Studies Carnival XXXVI

The latest Biblical Studies Carnival has been posted by Jim West.

Christmas Card For Bloggers

This was shared by PhDiva (HT Jim Davila):

In case you can't read the caption, it says "Oh, I am so blogging about this".

More on SBL's Alleged Lack Of Friendliness to Evangelicals

In my round-up of SBL blogging, I mentioned the comment that was made by Bill Mounce about SBL, of various organizations he mentioned, being the "least friendly to Evangelicals". My comment was that there is an irony about this, since there are plenty of not only Evangelicals but conservative Evangelicals in SBL, and they present all the time. Yet if one is not the "right sort" of Evangelical, then ETS (for instance) suddenly becomes an unfriendly place. And so I asked what makes SBL "less friendly". Is it the failure to protect conservatives from questions by those who don't share their assumptions? Is it the failure to kick out people who do not accept the Bible as Scripture, or do so but understand it in a different way than conservative Evangelicals? It sounds to me much like the sort of statement some American Christians make about the United States as a "hostile environment" when in fact it provides a remarkable degree of freedom of expression, and protection for that freedom, at the price of allowing one's critics to also have the right to express themselves.

I've tried several times to get my point across to Roger Pearse, who posted a "response" to me and Jim West. I'm not sure why my attempts at communication are failing. Perhaps some kind soul can take a look and see whether he is assuming I meant something other than I intended, or whether I've failed to understand his point, or whether we're both talking past one another.

Quote of the Day (G. E. Lessing)

If God held all truth in his right hand and in his left the everlasting striving after truth, with the risk that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me 'Choose!' in humility I would pick the left hand and say, 'Father grant me that: Absolute truth is for thee alone.'

-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Eine Duplik (1778) in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Paul Rilla (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954-8), vol.8, pp.505ff.

Review of Kostenberger and Swain, Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John's Gospel

Review of Andreas J. Kostenberger and Scott R. Swain, Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John's Gospel (New Studies in Biblical Theology 24; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008).

Since other reviewers have summarized and/or outlined the book, my aim in this review is to engage the content of the book more substantially in detail.

"Anachronism should be avoided" (p.21). These words from by Kostenberger and Swain offer a crucial warning regarding the subject of "the Trinity and the Gospel of John" that is the book's focus. If the authors had heeded their own warning, I suspect that this review would be far more positive.

Kostenberger and Swain engage in a "trinitarian" reading of the Gospel, one that, in essence, interprets the Gospel as though the Nicene and Chalcedonian formulations could be presupposed as the text's background. While such an approach is interesting, it is also strange, precisely because their book is not being written in the fourth century, but rather in the twenty-first. What sense can there be in writing a book that neither engages the distinctive questions of our own time (which are not precisely those of the Nicene fathers), nor seeks to interpret the Gospel first and foremost against the background of its own time? Mention of Philo is minimal, and other texts (like the Testament of Abraham) that might have shed further light on how a key agent of God might be thought to bear the divine name are nowhere mentioned. If discussion of key background material for the Gospel's time and setting of composition are minimal, neither does the book really engage the debates of the pre-Nicene and Nicene era, and the way this Gospel was read and interpreted in that context.

The authors explain that one of their aims is to get beyond the distinction Gabler famously made between Biblical and Dogmatic theology (p.20). Yet no better method is proposed, and so the authors engage in what can only be called a "dogmatic" reading of John, one that assumes rather than demonstrates that the Nicene understanding of God as Trinity (as they themselves understand it) can be presupposed as the background for the Fourth Gospel. But as experts on the history of the Arian controversy will confirm, it is simply impossible to explain the duration and intensity of the debates of the third and fourth centuries if the answers to the questions that were at the heart of those debates had been clearly answered centuries earlier and enshrined in Scripture.

In other words, there is no doubt that it is possible to read the Gospel of John as a "trinitarian" document in the later Nicene sense. Christians have been doing so for many centuries. But Kostenberger and Swain seem to have no interest in asking why such a reading is preferable to others. That this approach became orthodox may be sufficient in some traditions. But if Kostenberger and Swain wish to reflect either a Protestant approach that is willing to re-evaluate doctrine by holding to Scripture as the ultimate authority, then they cannot simply engage in the common practice of reading John through the lens of the Nicene Creed. For Protestants, the evaluation would be expected to run in the other direction. But rather than try to make the case that a Trinitarian reading in the full and precise Nicene sense makes the best sense of this Gospel, instead we get what is at best a reader-response treatment, illustrating how a Protestant who wishes to adhere to Nicene orthodoxy might read (and write about) this Gospel. As a result, some of the most important and most interesting historical questions are not answered, such as how the author of this Gospel could write about Jesus as he does "without any sustained attempt at ajudicating the issue of how the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus can both be called theos" (p.60).

The authors call their approach "confessional criticism" and claim that it respects the "historical and cultural context" while also reading the text "with awe and wonder and with prayerful dependence on 'the Spirit of truth'" (p.23). But merely claiming to do these things - whether being confessional, relying on the Spirit, or respecting the context of the Gospel - is not the same as actually doing them. Given the authors' apparent lack of interest in engaging issues of historical and cultural context in any depth, one gets the sense that they are using a mere rhetorical ploy when they claim to do so. One then wonders whether the same might be true of their claim to treat the text with awe and to rely on the Spirit. Such language seems intended to impress conservative Evangelical readers, and perhaps even make it seem that reviewers who criticize the book are not fighting against men, but against God. But this attempt to shield themselves from criticism will not work, since the book is clearly open to criticism on a number of points, and few Christian reviewers are likely to agree to shift the blame for these shortcomings away from the human authors and onto "the Spirit of truth". It would have been more honest, and more accurate, if they acknowledged that their reliance is most squarely on their presuppositions and those of their faith tradition. They might also have honestly said that they were striving to be open to and guided by the Spirit. But it would not have been at all inappropriately modest for them to acknowledge the possibility that, in their human frailty, they might not have fully attained their expressed aims, whether those of scholarship or of faith.

The extent of the authors' interest in the historical and religious context of the Gospel of John appears to be their reading of Bauckham (with a dash of Hurtado thrown in for good measure). They rely heavily, and uncritically, on Bauckham at all points apart from the one that does not suit their presuppositions, namely Bauckham's conclusion that John son of Zebedee was not the Gospel's author (pp.27,29,31-39). As one might expect under such circumstances, the authors claim, on the basis of Bauckham's notion of "divine identity", that, on the one hand, a plurality within God was an option left open by Jewish monotheism in this time, while on the other hand, no one within Judaism before the rise of Christianity actually explored these possibilities. How likely is it that a concept that does not appear in the text, nor other texts from that time, and was coined relatively recently, will provide the background to and the solution to the perplexities of Johannine Christology? Once again, a lack of familiarity with the relevant background material leads Kostenberger and Swain to make claims such as that "calling Jesus 'God' stretched the boundaries of first-century Jewish monotheism" (p.49). What needs to be explained is why, if one were to replace "Jesus" in the quotation with "Moses" or "an angel" the problem apparently vanished for first-century Jewish monotheists. As I argued in John's Apologetic Christology, and treat in still more detail in my forthcoming book The Only True God, it seems to be the application of such language to Jesus, rather than the language itself more generally considered, that was the crux of the issue for the author of the Fourth Gospel and his opponents.

The claim of Kostenberger and Swain to be reading this Gospel in its canonical context is likewise not without problems that require further discussion and justification. They affirm at one point that, from the perspective of the Gospel of John, "the Jews' monotheism proves to be too rigid to accomodate a plurality of persons within the one Godhead" (p.54). If one reads Deuteronomy or Second Isaiah, for instance, one does not get the impression that these Jewish Scriptures taught that monotheism ought to be flexible. If one is to read "canonically", one must address why the appropriate approach is to let John (and the Nicene Creed) be one's guide to Deuteronomy, rather than vice versa. And if one is to argue that progressive revelation leads one to rethink monotheism in light of the Gospel of John, then it must be explained why the New Testament authors never come right out and say so. Why is there nothing in the New Testament that explicitly calls upon monotheists to rethink and reinterpret monotheism? The possibility that such calls are absent because John did not view Jewish monotheism as too rigid deserves serious consideration.

There are other aspects of their treatment of earlier parts of the canon that may raise eyebrows, as for instance on p.79, where the Jewish religion, called "inferior" because "under it, no one could see God", is denigrated as "Moses' system". It may be that Christians ought to follow Jesus' lead in being open to the possibility that various elements - perhaps even monotheism? - that are expressed in the Jewish Scriptures are merely what "Moses" gave "because of the hardness of your hearts" (Matthew 19:8), but this can scarcely be done in passing, and would certainly lead us quite far from the outlook of the Fourth Gospel. In fact, there is a case to be made that "canonical criticism" ought to mean more than merely reading later parts of the canon back into earlier ones as though things ought to have been clear all along. Yet that often seems to be the outlook of this book (see e.g. p.82).

Nor is the treatment of other parts of the New Testament much better, for instance when the authors claim (p.40) that Christians always viewed Jesus' resurrection and exaltation as conferring on him a status he already had (Phil. 2:6-11, at the very least, is open to other interpretations); or when it is asserted that "The parable of the wicked tenants...makes clear that Jesus was God's Son sent into this world from above" (p.39), which ignores the fact that others are sent in the parable, and the difference between servants and sons is one of relationship to the father, not origin or species. But of course, pressing the parable to such allegorical extremes will inevitably lead to odd conclusions. My point is simply that the authors take things for granted as self evident in parts of the Bible which are not at all self evident, unless one already presupposes that such is the meaning of the texts, and no other meaning is worthy of serious consideration. It is the failure to discuss alternatives that makes the "conclusions" the authors draw seem particularly unpersuasive, since it is easy to continue to hold to one's presuppositions if one never gives other possibilities a careful examination.

It is unclear in what sense and to what extent the authors manage to uphold classic orthodoxy, since the subject of the Trinity as defined in later centuries is in fact given little treatment in its own right, and we learn little about precisely what the term "Trinitarian", when used in something more than its most general sense, means for the authors. Perhaps it is precisely because the authors seem unwilling to take seriously the gap between the ancient context of both the Gospel and the creeds and our own today (a gap which is at the heart of Gabler's classic distinction), that so many aspects of the subject are left unaddressed. For instance, the notion of "persons" as relates to the Trinity (as distinct from the meaning of "persons" in modern English) is never adequately explained or clarified. The authors are concerned to avoid presenting a "social Trinity" which is akin to a "divine committee" (p.174 n.48). Yet it is precisely the language of interpersonal relationships and family that had been at the heart of the "Trinitarian reading" of John throughout the book. And so apart from questions about the authors' exegesis (or eisegesis) with respect to Johannine theology and Christology, we also find that the absence of a philosophical and theological explanation of how the authors understand the doctrine of the Trinity leaves a confusion that transcends matters of exegesis and enters the realm of systematic theology (a distinction the authors eschew to the detriment of the book's clarity). And in one of the few instances, towards the end of the book, when such theological concerns are brought squarely into the picture, they are allowed to overshadow what the Fourth Gospel actually says (see e.g. p.184).

The authors regularly ignore verses that do not fit their presuppositions, while in others they show themselves unwilling to accept and do justice to what might seem to be the plain meaning of the text. For instance, the authors treat John 3:13 as though it says that others ascended but only one descended (p.86). They make no attempt to argue that the usual translations are wrong, and show no awareness that they are stating the opposite of what is found in the Gospel, which is that no one ascended except for the one who (also) descended, the Son of Man. Likewise the depiction of Jesus addressing the Father as "the only true God" is glossed over more than once (e.g. p.57), but we never learn how the authors' Christology and theology makes sense of that verse. And while much is made of Jesus having "life in himself" (5:21), there is no discussion of the significance of the fact that it is said that the Father has given this to the son - except in a footnote (p.90 n.46), where this is applied to the "eternal generation of the son", a concept that can scarcely be said to be found treated explicitly in John's Gospel. Although mention is made of points of contrast between John's Gospel and other parts of the New Testament (see e.g. p.80, or p.174 n.47), ultimately justice is never done to the fact that this could represent either theological development, or a distinctive point of view, on the part of this author, nor is any explanation offered of why this should be the case.

My own understanding of the role of the Biblical scholar is to help readers today to understand the text in its original historical and cultural setting, and often this involves explaining why the Biblical author doesn't say what we might have expected him to, had he written later (e.g. in our own time). This book by Kostenberger and Swain disappoints on both counts. It is simply not enough to write, as they do in a footnote, that "Though John does not 'say' the Spirit is God, he certainly 'shows' that the Spirit is God" (p.135 n.3). Surely, if this Gospel is such a key document in introducing Trinitarianism into the world, it is appropriate to ask why it is so subtle. Why does the doctrine of the later church have to be puzzled out and pieced together from John's Gospel and other sources? Why does John, like the other New Testament authors, never say "Here's how you need to rethink this whole notion of monotheism"? An answer to these questions can perhaps be given, in terms of the historical changes and new issues that intervened between the writing of this Gospel and the formulation of the later creeds. But an unwillingness to speak of development and change in doctrine, with all the complexities that brings into the picture, leaves Kostenberger and Swain with little choice but to simply read their own understanding of Nicene and Chalcedonian doctrine into John. And the result, alas, is a hodge-podge that neither makes sense of the Gospel in its own setting, nor clarifies precisely how it was read by the Nicene Fathers, nor interacts with the precise issues many of us are wrestling with today.

Much more could be said about the book, since having failed to do justice to the aforementioned central issues, the authors nonetheless do not refrain from attempting in a short space to also tackle issues such as missiology, the place of the Holy Spirit (or lack thereof) in other religions, and the filioque clause. Although there are parts of the book that may be genuinely interesting, I cannot think of anything contained in it that cannot be found elsewhere, and what is more, found elsewhere in the context of a treatment that offers (and in some cases melds) more rigorous scholarship, more historical sensitivity, greater clarity of expression, and/or greater humility about our frailties and shortcomings as human interpreters, the latter being the very reason Christians normally emphasize our need to rely on the Spirit.

The book notes early on (p.20) the lack of book-length treatments of the subject of the Trinity in the Gospel of John. Those eager for an adequate book on the subject will, it seems, have longer to wait for a study that does justice to the complexities of the exegetical, theological and historical aspects of the subject.