Pushing the Button vs. Turning the Key: What LOST is about

I could be completely wrong - it is easy to be wrong about LOST, since we're trying to put together a puzzle for which we do not have all the pieces. But I am starting to suspect that I am beginning to know what LOST is about. Not bad, after watching 100 episodes, eh?

Imagine a family of time-travellers, one of whom inadvertently kills his parent before he was born, in an event that also causes his time-travelling grandparents to meet for the first time. The result is a profoundly entangled temporal paradox, an event which, however one tampers with it, the space-time continuum may be in serious trouble.

I wonder if LOST is about a scenario of that sort - not precisely that scenario, but something that poses the same sort of conundrum. The main players in the series (who are frequently not the main characters, as we keep discovering) are trying to disentangle a temporal knot without causing a temporal impossibility that will result in some sort of cataclysm.

What can they do? One option would be to use time travel to try to make sure that the essential events still occur (the grandparents still meet, the parents aren't killed before their child is born) while perhaps also trying in the process to save the lives of those they love.

That's the "pushing the button" approach. Keep the problem at bay, make small changes, unleash the powerful energy a little at a time, every 108 minutes. The universe tends to course correct, but by making small changes, one can steer it slowly but surely towards a different destination.

But there's another approach - one can blow up the hatch, the dam keeping the energy under control, and hope that it makes the whole problem go away without destroying everything. This approach to time travel would go back in time and try to do something so radical that everything resets, with the result that none of the events that caused the temporal paradox ever occurred.

I'm not sure which approach will win out. Daniel Faraday's H-Bomb proposal seems to be aiming for the latter, while Eloise Hawking seems to be trying the former. As always, one can relate this to a broader question about two approaches to social change, to making history. Some believe real change occurs through gradual processes, while others believe it takes dramatic revolutionary intervention.

As I said, only time (lol) will show whether I'm right or wrong. In the mean time, we can only speculate, and enjoy the remarkably innovative, entertaining, and philosophically profound and complex phenomenon known as LOST!

LOST: Constant and Variable

Let me just start this post by saying SPOILER ALERT! I'll be talking about the latest episode, and if you haven't seen it, don't read this until you have.

I thought about calling this post "We're All Special", since it seems that Daniel Faraday has reached the conclusion that it is not only Desmond to whom "the rules do not apply", but all of us can change our destinies. We are "the variables". What remains to be seen is whether and to what extent our attempts to change our destinies can win out against the constants. Life arises from a combination of law and chaos, leaving room for order without absolute fixity.

For a recap of the episode, or just because they are so hilariously entertaining, watch the latest episode of Lost Untangled. I'll discuss the details of the episode (with more significant spoilers as well as some speculation) below that.



The latest episode, "The Variable", has perhaps allowed us to surmise a lot more about what has been going on on LOST than any other episode so far. Why did Charles and Eloise leave the island? Charles was expelled, but he had apparently already been off it. It seems quite likely that the death of their son Daniel may have been a key factor. The major question now is whether they are working based on the belief that "whatever happened, happened", or whether they are trying to change the past (and thus also the future), or whether they are working separately out of different views on this matter.

I think, despite appearances to the contrary, Eloise Hawking was telling the truth when she said that she is indeed trying to help her son. Although Daniel believes that the Oceanic survivors aren't supposed to be in the 1970s, perhaps the reason Eloise works to make sure Desmond goes to the island and pushes the button, and the Oceanic Six return to the island, is a belief that by doing so she can indeed save her son. Note that Eloise gave Daniel the journal - the one with all his notes, the one that will allow the Oceanic survivors to try to implement Daniel's plan even though he died.

This leads me to speculate further about the identity of Jacob - speculation that isn't at all incompatible with some of my previous speculation on the subject. What if Jacob is Daniel Faraday's son, or at least descendant? Perhaps the reason he is in a sort of "limbo" state is that he is doing a "Marty McFly". And perhaps Michael's statements about Walt set the stage for what we're seeing now: we'd do anything to save our children, and what we're witnessing is either collaboration or competition between various individuals determined to save their children: Eloise Hawking, Christian Shepherd, Charles Widmore, Desmond and Penny Hume, and perhaps even Daniel Faraday, the mysterious Jacob, and even Benjamin Linus.

But I think the most important clue we've been given is in Daniel Faraday's behavior. He specifically wanted to take guns and have a gun himself when he went to see his mother. He acted in a threatening way untypical of himself. He knew his mother was on the island among the "hostiles" - when did he find this out? My guess is that Daniel Faraday went to find the "Others" knowing full well what would happen to him, and believing that it was necessary in order to get his mother to act to change what would happen. Perhaps it takes something big to really change the past, or the future. Something the temporal, emotional and/or historical equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.

These are some of my speculations thus far. I still have no idea who Man #2 in the season finale is going to be, but you can click here if you want to see the actor who will play him. Perhaps a younger Frank Lapidus?

Get in the Mood for a Carnival!

The Biblical Studies Carnival #41 will be coming here soon. It isn't too late to submit posts for inclusion. Just make sure they have at least some relation to the academic study of the Bible, or they'll end up in the freak show at the tail end of the carnival...

Many thanks to all those who have submitted posts so far!

Faith in Vane?

The title of this post combines two interests of mine: Biblical studies and bad puns.

It is frequent, in discussions of the resurrection, for those who are persuaded that our beliefs on this topic ought to remain static to appeal to Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 15:17, which says that "if Christ was not raised, your faith is in vain". What makes this interesting, and somewhat ironic, is that, for most contemporary Christians (N. T. Wright and a few of his readers excepted), resurrection is something unique that happened to Jesus. If they are asked about their own hope for an afterlife, they will most likely reply in terms of "going to heaven when I die".

For Paul, however, resurrection was the form that the afterlife would take for everyone. This point is crucial to the logic of his argument in 1 Corinthians 15. Resurrection is to be the hope of all Christians, and so (as Paul himself says) if there is no resurrection, then it is not merely that Christ has not been raised, but "those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost" (v18). Christ is viewed as the firstfruits from the dead, the forerunner who has undergone already what all will one day (v20).

And so the irony is that the verse quoted reflects an argument that most Christians (including conservative, "Bible-believing" ones) do not understand, or if they understand it, they themselves do not find Paul's logic persuasive. And so, while they turn belief in a physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus into a sine qua non of the Christian faith, the whole context of that belief and its implication for Christians in general is changed into something other than what Paul himself seems to have believed. Hence my bad pun about a sort of faith that is in "vane" - itself turned by the winds of time and changing worldview, and yet often without those who adamantly hold to it realizing the shift that has taken place.

What should Christians do about this? One option is that advocated by Wright, namely a return to the early Christian doctrine of the general resurrection. Another (which I discuss in my book The Burial of Jesus) would be to rethink the resurrection of Jesus in relation to what it makes sense, in light of theological, philosophical, scientific and other considerations, to say about the afterlife in general. While some will understandably immediately incline towards the former, there is a very real sense in which Paul's own articulation of his understanding of the resurrection - on the one hand emphasizing (indeed, assuming) that the afterlife is bodily, on the other hand allowing his interaction with other cultural assumptions and schools of thought to shape his thinking about the nature of such bodies - can be said to reflect the latter approach.

Before closing this topic, I ought to mention that a notion not entirely unlike "resurrection" was touched upon on the most recent episode of Dollhouse, in which a dead person's mind was imprinted onto one of the dolls, allowing the woman in question to try to solve her own murder. It isn't the Biblical idea of resurrection, of course, but the show did touch on it, asking what will happen to human societies if science rather than religion becomes the purveyor of eternal life.

Clinging to Faith

Whoever clings to his or her faith shall lose it,
and whoever lets go of his or her faith shall keep it.

[A variation on Luke 17:33]

Biblical Studies Carnival 41

This is just a reminder that this month's Biblical Studies Carnival will be right here on Exploring Our Matrix. Send in the clowns...er, I mean, your submissions for the carnival!

Painful Growth

Growing is painful. No one who is now mature bypassed adolescence, and while we may sometimes feel nostalgia for a time when things were (or I should say seemed) simpler, most of us appreciate the broader and deeper, if more complex and less easily manageable, view of things that comes with growing up.

Today in my Sunday school class, I said a little bit about James Fowler's "stages of faith". Without going into detail here, the main idea is that there are discernable (if not always utterly distinct and separate) stages in our faith development just as in our emotional, psychological and even physical development. This is important, not least because it can help place our questioning about and even in some cases loss of faith in context. Just as the stage of questioning authority and at least a modicum of rebellion is a natural part of adulthood, and need not be permanently destructive if handled wisely and appropriately, so too the loss of an immature faith, or at least questioning of overly simplistic views we had when we were younger, not only need not be the end of faith, but is quite possibly the only route to take on the way to a mature faith.

Biblical studies can be a crucial factor in facilitating getting to the questioning stage from the one before it. It opens up complexities where we thought things were simple, and that's an important role for my field to play. But surely that is not the only role for Biblical scholarship that is in service to or dialogue with the church. And often it seems like we need to offer more assistance to those who have gotten through to the other side of the questioning stage and are ready for their second naiveté. And there are even greater questions for those of us, whether involved in education in general or in a church, who are in a situation that ought to be facilitating the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and psychological development and progress of a variety of individuals who will inevitably be at varied stages in their "walks".

Growth is painful, and it is not surprising that, given the change to do so, many of us resist doubt and questioning, since it will indeed lead to at least discomfort and quite possibly the trauma the mystics referred to as the dark night of the soul. But the only way to reach maturity is through the tunnel. And although it isn't visible from this side, and sometimes isn't visible for a while after entering, the mature - whether emotionally and spiritually - can tell you this: not only is there light at the end of the tunnel, but life is better on the far side of the tunnel. Grown up life, and grown up spirituality, are certainly harder and more challenging that their kindergarten counterparts. But they are also more rewarding.

The Red Pill of Biblical Scholarship

Scotteriology seems to be the latest to join the diablogue about inerrancy and the Bible that has intersected with, branched out from and returned to this blog over the past couple of weeks. The post there uses analogies from The Matrix, which makes it all the more relevant and appropriate as a reflection on what's been going on here.

On a related note, On Journeying With Those In Exile has a post advocating the abandonment of the terminology of "high" and "low" views of Scripture.

Singing In Errancy

A number of blogs have intersected and interacted with the thread on Biblical (in)errancy here on my blog. Now the discussion can be accompanied by your choice of theme song. John Hobbins has the highly amusing details. Any bibliobloggers want to make an attempt at completing the lyrics and recording them?

Review of Young and Stearley, The Bible, Rocks and Time

Saying that The Bible, Rocks and Time: Geological Evidence for the Age of the Earth by Davis A. Young and Ralph F. Stearley (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008) is probably the best book of its kind would not be saying enough, since there really is no other book of its kind: a treatment of the varied and overwhelmingly consistent evidence for the antiquity of our planet, written by Evangelical Christians with the aim of not only making the scientific case for the age of the Earth, but also helping conservative Christian readers navigate the issues of theology and Biblical interpretation that go along with such a conclusion, and all the while pointing out the difficulties and at times dishonesty of the young-earth creationist position. In spite of all the evidence regarding the latter point, Young and Searley manage to treat the arguments of young-earth creationists with a seriousness and fairness that their own arguments are unlikely to receive when the tables are turned. At a whopping 510 pages, I suspect that the average interested layperson may not turn to this volume to help them wrestle with this topic. That is unfortunate, as the survey Young and Stearley offer has both breadth and depth, but neither in excess. At the very least, every academic and public library ought to have a copy of this volume in their collection, so that those who wish to examine this subject may have access to its wealth of information and its judicious treatment of the evidence, all offered with a dose of pastoral concern. I highly recommend this book for any young earth creationist who is open to encountering an opposing viewpoint. I also recommend it for anyone who is unsure what to think about matters of science and creationism and wants more information. The book includes so many helpful pictures and tables that it takes four pages just to list them.

In the preface we learn that the book began to come into existence as a revision to Young's earlier book, Christianity and the Age of the Earth, but by the end it was clear that a new book had come into existence, rather than a mere revision (pp.9-10). There too we encounter a succinct statement about the book's aims and intended audience: "The goal of our book is to convince readers, on both biblical and geological grounds, of the vast antiquity of this amazing planet that is our God-given home. Along the way we point out the flaws of so-called young-Earth creationism...This book is addressed primarily to Christian pastors, theologians, Biblical scholars, students and lay people with some interest in scientific questions..." (p.10). The book's Introduction begins with the historical example of Hugh Miller, a devout Scottish Presbyterian of the 19th century who was so concerned about the spiritual state of his denomination that he joined the evangelical break-away movement that became the Free Church of Scotland (p.20). Miller was persuaded that both the geological evidence and the Bible pointed to an old earth (pp.20-21). Proving to be "a far better geologist than prophet", Miller predicted that the "anti-geologists" of his time would soon be as obsolete as the geocentrists (p.21). Now in the 21st century, Miller's prediction still seems far from the mark, for as Young and Stearley write, "Far too many Christian institutions, including colleges, elementary and secondary schools, theological seminaries, ecclesiastical denominations, and individual congregations, and far too many individual Christians, including pastors, theologians, educated lay people, leaders and students, along with much of the general population, continue to dwell in appalling gross darkness when it comes to knowledge about the composition, structure, processes and history of the planet on which they live. The sad thing is that this ignorance accompanies the confession of evangelicals that the Earth is a creation of the God they worship and serve. Not infrequently the little "knowledge" that evangelicals possess about Earth's history is fiction rather than fact" (pp.21-22).The authors are concerned not only for the accuracy of the knowledge Christians have for its own sake, but also because ignorance about scientific topics and the resultant linking of Christian faith with belief in a young earth makes it all but impossible to share one's Christian faith with the scientifically well-informed (p.23).

The first of the book's four major parts focuses on the history of the subject, from the ancient church's views on the Earth's age, through the assumption down the centuries that fossils and rock stratification might be remnants of the Deluge, to the accumulation of evidence that forced people, whether Christians or not, to reconsider the question. Earliest Christian writings on the topic are placed against the background of Greek thought regarding the Earth's age. Much of the young-earth outlook of the earliest Christians relates to their conviction that the history of the world would involve millenia that parallel the days of creation, with the seventh millenium being one of rest. Also discussed is the ancient assumption that Earth and things we would consider non-living or inanimate were in the past viewed as living or as containing the potential for life. This ancient perspective rendered plausible for a long time the viewpoint that fossils might be artifacts of such properties of Earth, rather than remains of actually-living organisms (pp.48-61). Modern geology is shown to have emerged not because of any desire to depart from earlier flood geology (indeed, there was great resistance and reluctance to shift paradigms) but because of accumulating evidence pointing in that direction. The recognition that certain fossils were to be found in certain strata, and that the strata exhibited regularity over vast stretches of the planet, could not be attributed to the chaotic workings of a global deluge (pp.77-79). A key component was the discovery that processes currently observable - sedimentation, metamorphism and volcanic activity - working over long periods of time, not only could account for the sorts of rocks we actually find, but could account for them better than earlier catastrophic scenarios in most instances.

Perhaps it was because the issues raised by Copernicus and Galileo were fresher in the minds of scientists and theologians alike, but many recognized that, given the rethinking of the motion (or lack thereof) of the Earth and sun that had been required, and of Scriptures that mentioned such movement/non-movement, rethinking texts that seemed to suggest a young earth was not seen as particularly different (see e.g. p.91). The fourth chapter focuses on how the data from geology and Scripture were harmonized during the 19th century. The matter is summed up well on p.120: "A growing number of orthodox evangelical Christian writers, including geologists, preachers, biblical scholars and theologians, accepted and accomodated their thinking to the mounting evidence for terrestrial antiquity...Having been encouraged to look afresh at the Biblical creation accounts, experts in the original languages became persuaded that there is no conflict between the data of nature and the teaching of Scripture." Two major ways of harmonizing the two, the restitution and day-age viewpoints, are then explained, with mention made of some of the conservative Christian adherents thereof.

The final chapter in part one gives a historical overview of developments in the 20th century and up until the present. The chapter begins by noting that, at the start of the 20th century, the earth's antiquity was accepted by most Christian scholars. The original fundamentalists accepted that it did no violence to the text to interpret the Bible's days as ages (pp.132-134). During this period, radioactivity allowed for new perspectives on the age of the Earth, both by offering additional methods of dating, but also by providing a previously unknown source of heat. (The use of radiometric dating methods is a subject to which a full two chapters will be devoted towards the end of the book). Also mentioned in chapter 5 are developments in Biblical studies and theology in this period, including not only higher criticism but examples of a significant number of conservative Evangelicals who held views other than that of a young earth. Of particular importance in this period is our increased understanding of the ancient Near Eastern context of the Genesis creation stories (pp.152-155). Some other key points include the fact that the vast majority of Christian geologists accept the evidence for Earth's antiquity; the presence of very few geologists or astronomers in the various "young Earth" organizations (a high proportion of which are "one-man" operations (p.159). Also emphasized is the fact that the antiquity of the Earth and evolutionary materialism are distinct issues (p.162).

Part two focuses on the Bible, and begins by looking at the Church Fathers' views on the subject. Although they tended to assume a young Earth, this often was due to a less-than-literal approach to the creation days, which were often related to 6,000 years of human history. The fallibility of interpreters of the Bible, both ancient and modern, is emphasized, and if modern exegetes are influenced by a cultural milieu that includes increased (God-created) scientific data, ancient exegetes were no less influenced by their own contexts (p.174). Attacks on scientists are also answered, for instance on p.172 where we read, "The charge that modern natural science is "secular" or based on a non-Christian worldview is overstated and misleading...Christian astronomers, biologists, chemists, cosmologists, geologists, paleontologists, physical anthropologists and physicists are not unwitting dupes who go along blindly with whatever an allegedly atheistic scientific establishment dictates." The authors emphasize their own high view of Scripture as well: "The Bible is not a book of human religious opinion. We believe that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, and is, therefore, normative for our faith and life" (p.175). Their acceptance of the Bible as a "historical book", however, "does not mean that every biblical passage is historical in the same way or even that every biblical passage intends to convey historical information" (p.176). Determining genre is important, although this doesn't resolve the issue of Genesis 1, they say, since it is "a genre in a class by itself, a genre of which we have no other examples" (p.178; here they depend on John Stek). The discussion continues with treatment of Biblical perspicuity and inerrancy, emphasizing that the doctrine of the former does not justify superficial reading, nor can the latter claim be made for a face-value reading of the text in English translation (p.181). Chapter 6 concludes by mentioning the solid dome in Genesis 1, and emphasizing that Biblical inerrancy cannot justify the claim that the sky is solid (p.182). This subject is revisited in chapter 7, in conjunction with the notion of divine accomodation - i.e. that divine revelation did not always provide new scientific and other information not pertinent to the communication of the revealed truths in question.

Chapter 7 explores the Biblical aspects of the question further. The authors emphasize that creation by divine command emphasizes the inevitability of fullfillment, not that the process was instantaneous. Parallels from Ugarit are provided to the seven-day structure in Genesis 1-2 (pp.192-202). "If contemporary Christians are to understand Genesis 1 properly it is imperative that they reject the idea that Genesis 1 is speaking directly to them in the language and concepts of the twenty-first century" (p.203).

Part three is devoted to matters geological. Significant attention is given to responding to flood geology's accusations of modern geology's "uniformitarianism". It is shown that modern geology in no way denies that catastrophes of various sorts produced rocks that currently exist. What is denied is that rocks which show evidence of having been produced by sedimentation over vast amounts of time must nonetheless have been produced by a worldwide flood that seems incapable of having produced rocks with precisely those features found in nature. Attention is also devoted to faunal succession in the geological record, and the fact that these successions were discovered prior to and independently of Darwin's theory of evolution. The failure of the supposed global flood to have mixed even a few of certain modern organisms into particular strata remains unaccounted for in young-Earth "geology". Chapter 9 is dedicated specifically to fossils. Once again, the claim is answered that modern geologists and biologists ignore evidence for traps and animal graveyards - places where many organisms seem to have met an unnatural end. On the contrary, such instances are well documented, and seem to provide evidence of local "traps" rather than of a global flood. In the process, we learn of instances where Whitcomb and Morris took over a description of fossil deposits from a three-page popular article in Compressed Air Magazine rather than from professional literature or their own inspection of the site (p.262). Their being misled by popular rather than expert accounts of fossil and geological data was not a unique occurrence (p.265). The young-Earth creationists cite evidence selectively, mentioning when dinosaur bones were found in a disarrayed "log jam", without mentioning that the bones showed various degrees of erosion, from very little to the presence of bone "pebbles" warn extensively by the elements and most likely transported as well (p.271). All the evidence suggesting local rather than worldwide catastrophes as a factor is likewise ignored in YEC literature.

Chapter 10 concerns the evidence for sedimentation and erosion over long periods of time. The gist of the chapter is summed up well by the penultimate paragraph: "The separate packets of sediment and entombed biota provide numerous clues as to their formation. The packets (formations and their subdivisions) maintain distinctions in grain size, color, texture, physical sedimentary structures, trace fossils, cements and bounding surfaces that relate to clear physical, chemical and ecological parameters under which these rocks formed. To ascribe all the varieties and their circumstances of formation to a catastrophic Flood is to turn such a Flood into a magical device that can accomplish anything that one desires" (p.311). Chapter 11 focuses on the evidence from igneous and metamorphic rocks, about which young-Earth creationists have had relatively little to say. The amount of time required for magma to cool is relevant to estimating the age of the earth based on the study of rocks. Chapter 12 focuses on a case study on the Michigan Basin. The consistency of local flora and fauna preserved in the geological record is once again seen to be at odds with YEC claims about the global Flood having moved and deposited sediment miles thick (p.363). Chapter 13 focuses on the Sierra Nevada. Important evidence of the Earth's antiquity from this case study include an instance in which the YEC position would have us believe that fine grained sediment seven miles deep was deposited in a single year, or even in a couple of millenia - without preserving any fossils of fish or plants (p.378).

Because of YEC claims about alleged problems with radiometric dating, the authors have made their case using other data thus far. Chapters 14-15 are devoted to radiometric dating and explain how it functions and why such methods can indeed give us pertinent and reliable data regarding the Earth's age. One of the most striking points is when young-Earth claims about radioactive decay rates having changed, particularly during the creation week and the Flood, are addressed. Such claims are made in the abstract, without any sign of awareness that radioactive decay involves the emission of radiation/heat, which has observable effects. On the one hand, the alleged faster rates YEC proponents have claimed would have boiled oceans and killed organisms en masse (p.399). On the other hand, there is no evidence even for a much less dramatic but nonetheless significant change in the rate of radioactive decay. Moreover, even in cases where geological changes make precise dating difficult, radiometric evidence often still demonstrates that rocks are ancient, even if we only have a range of possible dates rather than something more precise. The date of meteorites is also relevant, giving us a non-terrestrial sampling that consistently indicates that the solar system is 4.4-4.6 billion years old - no matter what dating method is used (p.417). While YEC claims about factors that could cause inaccuracies in radiometric dating are not themselves false, the scenarios they propose are not compatible with the actual evidence from the rocks themselves (pp.430-443). It is not enough to claim that different magmas could mix to produce a certain result - it must also be noted that the ratios of radiometric isotopes that would be produced by such a scenario are not found in nature (pp.435-6). YECs offer abstract scenarios that cannot do justice to real-world data (p.438).

Part four turns to philosophical considerations. The topic of "uniformitarianism" is addressed in more detail, and committment to beginning with observable phenomena is shown to not be incompatible with openness to the possibility of miracles. Modern geology is more honest than the typical proponent of young-Earth creationism, since modern geology does justice to evidence that suggests catastrophic events as well as evidence that seems compatible only with a scenario involving extensive periods of time (p.466). Where the evidence requires it, geologists are willing to and in fact do accept that a catastrophic event occurred (p.470). Historical evidence shows the willingness of geologists to change their viewpoint when the data requires it. In contrast, young-Earth creationists "have...an a priori committment to a particular way of reading the Bible that straight-jackets them into acceptance of a young Earth. As a result, they cannot really approach rocks empirically because they already "know" in advance what the "answer" is supposed to be. They see only what they want to see...They claim continually to argue from the evidence of nature, but they have repeatedly ignored what is inconvenient for them" (p.472). The only honest course for young-Earth creationists would be to claim that everything was miraculously accomplished and abandon the possibility of historical geology altogether (p.474).

The final chapter considers the relevance of the book's subject to evangelism and apologetics. The book has demonstrated that young-Earth creationist "claims are generally based on incomplete information, wishful thinking, ignorance of real geological situations, selective use of data and faulty reasoning" (p.475). If Christians are to have any hope of reaching out to educated individuals in general and scientists in particular, then the appeal of the authors of this book needs to be taken seriously: "Christian leaders need to flee from promoting scientific nonsense" (p.477). Or as the authors put it a few pages later, ""Proving" the Bible or Christianity with spurious scientific hypotheses does not honor God and can only be injurious to the cause of Christ. We must not defend God's truth by arguing falsehood on its behalf" (p.481). If one cannot find a way to reconcile the tension between the evidence for the Earth's age from nature and what the Bible appears to say, it is better to live with the tension than to pretend to resolve it through falsehood - this is something that is done already with other areas of science, as well as with apparent tensions between texts (pp.488-493).

It is better to honestly admit when one is not an expert in a particular scientific domain (or in Biblical interpretation for that matter). I can recall times in my teenage years when I felt like I was obliged to pull an answer to a question out of thin air, as though such off the cuff, spur of the moment responses would win someone to the Christian faith. At the time, I had encountered young-Earth arguments, and had not taken the time to inquire as to whether that view was in fact the Christian view. I hope that those who are interested in matters to do with creationism, evangelism, apologetics, science, evolution, the age of the Earth and all these related subjects will take the time to read this book. Even if it doesn't entirely persuade you, hopefully it will at the very least open your mind to the possibility that there are other ways of honestly pursuing the call of Christian faith and the vocation of scientific investigation. Young and Stearly thus provide not only a resource for Christians interested in discussing their faith as it intersects with the natural sciences, but also a model for Christians interested in pursuing careers in the sciences who may wonder whether they must choose between their faith and scientific honesty. I heartily recommend this book - all 510 pages of it!

Imperfect World, Imperfect Bible

Eric Reitan was kind enough to engage some of those who commented on a post featuring a quote from him. The discussion has spread to his own blog, and most recently he has offered a lengthy response to one commenter who claimed that an errant Bible would imply a God who is either not omnipotent or not benevolent. But the gist of the argument is powerful in its simplicity: If such logic works in the case of the Scriptures, then the same logic would seem to apply to the world and God as creator thereof.

Does it make any sense to claim simultaneously that God could and did make a perfect Bible using fallible human beings to do so, but could or did not make a perfect world containing fallible human beings?

Watching Jacob Grow Young On LOST

Lately LOST has been creating time loops, and at least since Locke spotted "tall Walt" after having been shot, there were hints that individuals might move around in time.

A recent MAJOR spoiler suggests that some characters who have been in the background all along, but have increasingly come into the foreground in recent episodes, have been acting to try to do something about things that happened in the past - or perhaps are trying to prevent tampering with the past that not only failed to change history, but made things worse in some way. It is not clear who currently believes that the past can be changed, and who doesn't, except for Daniel Faraday, who seemed to change his mind on this subject, at least as far as Desmond is concerned.

At this point I need to issue a "spoiler alert" since what follows includes information about future plot developments, as well as speculation on my part.

I wonder whether we don't catch glimpses of the same person (at different ages) in these pictures below:



Why does Jacob do what he does? To be rescued from the limbo in which he has been trapped. Why does he do so? Because he knows he must, because he meets his son and his grandson before he becomes trapped, and thus knows he must be helped to escape, since if he does not do so and travel back to an earlier time and place, then the things he has already experienced will not have happened, creating a temporal paradox that could destroy the universe. Or perhaps (like Harry Potter summoning a patronus for the first time) he knows he'll succeed because he already encountered himself and or others who travelled through time to bring these things about.

Lest I leave theological questions to the side entirely in this post, these time loops in LOST provide a great opportunity to reflect on one of the theological issues raised by the view of God as fully knowing the future and influencing or even controlling it to bring about his purposes. This results in what I've sometimes called the "bored view of God", in which God spends eternity doing what God always knew God would do, with no surprises, no genuine decisions, and in one sense no freedom, since God will presumably always do what God perfectly foreknew God would do. This is certainly a possible way of thinking about God, but it is important to observe how different it seems from the depiction of God as one that interacts personally with human beings in the Bible and other texts and traditions both within and outside Judaism and Christianity.

From Quote to Comments

A lot of the most fervent action on this blog in recent days has been on a post that offered a quotation from Eric Reitan. Well, Prof. Reitan has been kind enough to stop by and leave a couple of comments on that thread, and his words are worth hearing. So I invite even those who may have read the original post, or have followed the comment thread for a while and then grown weary, to pay it just one more visit.

Inerrancy, Historicity, Maximalism and Minimalism

If one wishes to demonstrate that the Bible does not merely contain some information that is likely to be accurate and of historical value, but that it is inerrant, then one needs to demonstrate not merely that this or that event happened, but they all happened largely as described in the Bible. And that is a daunting task, because it would require not merely expertise about all the relevant Biblical claims, but also information from other historical sources. It is meaningless to discuss an Exodus purported to occur in the Ramessid period, for instance, if we have a significant number of writings from the Egypt of that era, produced not simply under the auspices of Pharaoh but by more ordinary individuals, which cover the sweep of that era and give no indication of being affected by severe personal or communal tragedy.

When it comes to the purported conquest of Canaan, individuals like Bryant Wood have strenuously tried to relocate Ai and redate the fall of Jericho's walls. But even if we grant him the benefit of the doubt, can we find a period of about 100 years during which all the cities said to have been destroyed in the Book of Joshua were in fact destroyed in something like the way that book claims they were?

If not, then historicity is still a possibility - hypothetically speaking, there may have been multiple waves of invasion over multiple generations, for instance. But inerrancy in any meaningful sense is not.

My primary field is New Testament, and so I invite readers with expertise in the Hebrew Bible, archaeology, and the Ancient Near East to discuss the question: Is there any single period of approximately a century during which we find all the relevant cities mentioned in Joshua to have been destroyed in something like the way the Book of Joshua indicates?

Review of Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus From The Church

Review of Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).


Sometimes a book you didn't expect to read, and hadn't even heard of, crosses your path and makes an impact on your life, or at least an impression. Robin R. Meyers' book Saving Jesus from the Church is such a book. What makes it valuable is that Meyers is a Liberal Christian and is unapologetically both, and is concerned to move beyond stating what he as a Liberal Christians doesn't believe, beyond even stating what he does believe and value, to actually proclaiming the Gospel as he understands it. The cover flap provides endorsements from no less voices than Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bill Moyers, John Shelby Spong, Fred B. Craddock, and Diana Butler Bass.

The book is full of so many eloquent and memorable expressions that I could run a series of "Quotes of the Day" for a week and still not be finished. I will try to share at least some of the best ones.

Meyers begins by asking the question at the heart of a recent debate on and around my blog: "Am I a Christian?" The book begins with a nightmare of all the horrific things people have done in the name of Christ, and the refrain that if that's what being a Christian is, then I don't want to be one. By the end of the book, the nightmare will have given way to a dream, the list of offenses and shortcomings to one of powerfully challenging ways of living out Christian discipleship, and a different refrain: If that is a Christian, then I want to be one.

The essence of Meyers' vision is summarized well in the prologue. His is a call, akin to that of the Protestant Reformers, to get back to what Christianity looked like before "the fourth century, when a first-century spiritual insurgency was seduced into marrying its original oppresser." Closely connected with this major shift in the nature of Christianity, as Meyers sees it, is a shift to focus on creeds: "Students who once learned by following the teacher became true believers who confuse certainty with faith...We have a sacred story that has been stolen from us, and in our time the thief is what passes for orthodoxy itself (right belief instead of right worship)" (p.10). The first chapter continues this theme, focusing on Jesus as teacher rather than savior.Here he clarifies his aim: not to offer yet another book on why fundamentalism is wrong, but instead to offer a positive alternative vision of what Christianity is, can be, and should be (pp.13-14). Meyers writes, "Consider this: there is not a single word in [the Sermon on the Mount] about what to believe, only words about what to do. It is a behavioral manifesto, not a propositional one. Yet three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about what to do, only words about what to believe!" (p.14). Meyers also identifies at least one reason why this shift occurred and continues to be so popular: "Christianity as a belief system requires nothing but acquiescence. Christianity as a way of life, as a path to follow, requires a second birth, the conquest of ego, and new eyes with which to see the world. It is no wonder that we have preferred to be saved" (p.15). And so it has become the case that, to many, "Being a disciple today often means little more than believing stuff in order to get stuff" (p.20).

Chapter 2 focuses on faith as "being, not belief". Meyers points out that neither claiming to believe the virgin birth as a sign of one's faith, nor claiming not to believe it as a demonstration of one's critical thinking, necessarily leads to "a changed heart or a self-sacrificing spirit" (p.37). Meyers also has some wise words about wisdom to offer in this chapter, which relate to the subject of inerrancy and the Bible. Meyers' Jesus-centered approach to the Bible translates into the following principle: "when there is a conflict between what the scriptures say in particular and what we have come to expect from the wisdom of Jesus, his wisdom wins. We hold the Bible accountable to the message of Jesus, not Jesus accountable for everything in the Bible" (p.45). In order to put such a principle into practice, of course, it helps to be using historical methods of study. But it isn't necessarily essential. Even if one places the focus on Jesus' teaching as found in the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, the point still stands, even though the sermon quite plainly represents teachings of Jesus redacted, rearranged, organized and interpreted by the Gospel's author. And Meyers is aware of this, pointing out, for instance, that the "parables" of final judgment are found largely in Matthew's Gospel and seem to reflect that author's redactional and compositional activity (p.54).

Lately I've found myself thinking that Jesus' humanitarian emphasis in his saying about the sabbath law could be applied tothe whole Law and indeed the whole Bible: "The Bible was made for human beings, not human beings for the Bible. Therefore a human being is lord of the Bible." Humanitarian concerns (themselves articulated in the Bible) must be allowed to determine and shape our own humane use of the Bible. But I digress...

Chapter 3 focuses on the cross, and notes the tendency of much contemporary Christianity in the direction of docetism. "Yet when Jesus ceases to be human and becomes only Christ the God Man, we can choose to believe it or not to believe it, but we cannot follow. We can admire, but we cannot emulate" (p.71). When we emphasize Jesus' humanity, we pay him a great honor, since his impact on history becomes all the more remarkable (pp.71-72). The chapter touches on, among other things, the relationship between the cross and violence.

Chapter 4 is on Easter as "presence, not proof". As readers have probably had enough discussion of Liberal Christian understandings of Easter in recent weeks, I'll not say more. Chapter 5 is about the concept of original sin, and ends with a call for a new Reformation that restores the notion that creation is blessed and in the process shifts the focus back away from beliefs about Jesus to following Jesus (p.116). Chapter 6, entitled "Christianity as Compassion, not Condemnation", focuses on (among other things) the limitations of words and the danger of our professions of faith, since we are prone to assume that, if we are talking about something all the time, then we must in fact be doing it (pp.117-118). Meyers suggests that, rather than speaking of Jesus as "the Answer", perhaps we ought to think about him as "the Assignment" (p.120). It is in this chapter that he dives into politics. His approach to the subject of homosexuality is remarkably succinct: "Until we have homosexuality all figured out, shouldn't we practice radical hospitality? As long as we see "through a glass darkly," isn't it wise to err on the side of inclusion and compassion, rather than condemnation?" (p.137).

Chapter 7 is about discipleship, which he points out seems to require relatively little sacrifice on the part of most Christians in affluent societies of our time. I will not quote in detail the humorous analogies between the contemporary approach to church attendance and between the dating game on the one hand, and a familiar airline script on the other (pp.141-142). Here the emphasis on practice and obedience rather than doctrine once again comes to the fore. It continues into chapter 8, on justice, where the contemporary Christian silence on the subject of greed, and even at times aberrant encouragement thereof, is shown to be a recent phenomenon. He eloquently points out that many of today's Christians are silent on matters about which Jesus spoke, whereas on matters about which he was silent, they condemn (p.177). The fact that the faith of which Christians have historically spoken was in most instances trust is also mentioned (p.179). When we claim unconditional faith in our own "side" and its "rightness", we in fact are not showing trust but mistrust, in both God and other human beings (pp.179-180). Chapter 9 focuses on the prosperity "Gospel".

Chapter 10, on "Religion as Relationship, not Righteousness", devotes a significant amount of attention to Buber's famous distinction between "I-Thou" and "I-It" relationships. Having earlier mentioned the "airport theology" of Christians who celebrate only, or focus primarily on, Christmas and Easter (he calls it that because it is all about arrival and departure), Meyers here notes the details of Jesus' human life that are omitted from the creeds. Looking at the Apostles' Creed's affirmation that Jesus was "...born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate...", Meyers sums it up well: "The world's greatest life is reduced to a comma" (p.207). By the end of this chapter, Meyers is summing up a powerful vision of a different way of being Christian, focused not on doctrines but on discipleship. "Christianity requires no sacrifice of the intellect; it can withstand any question we dare to ask and any answer we are brave enough, in the service of truth, to answer" (p.218). A concluding epilogue rounds the book off with a dream to replace the nightmare with which it began.

The book is not entirely free from the sorts of moments that are liable to make a Biblical scholar cringe - such as connecting Nineveh with the Arabs, or getting a little too excited about the possible influence of Mithraism on what later Christianity developed into (pp.26, 28). But this is a book by a preacher, and books by conservative preachers are no less prone to get historical details wrong here and there. Whatever minor shortcomings Meyers' book may have, it performs a useful service, since it is not enough to say that Liberal and Progressive Christians are not committed to inerrancy, to exclusivism, to various doctrines and dogmas. We must be for something, just as Jesus was not merely opposed to the Pharisees or to various religious authorities, but was for the outcasts, the marginalized, the "sinners" and the "unclean". What makes this book so valuable is that Meyers is a Liberal Christian with a liberating Gospel to proclaim, and is eager to unleash its power into the world, transforming not merely individual lives but also social structures.

What makes Meyers' vision for Christianity so powerful is that it at once combines an openness to contemporary issues and concerns (including, but by no means limited to, modern science and scholarship) and a rediscovery of the message of Jesus. The latter is there in the Bible, and I suspect that the greatest fear of conservatives is not that people will dissect the Bible and challenge it with the tools of historical critical investigation or other methods of academic investigation. Their fear is that people will read the Bible for themselves and, whether asking critical questions or not, will discover that the voice from its pages that calls to them to follow is not talking about the issues conservatives generally concern themselves with. And so the issue is not whether Meyers' vision is "Liberal" or "Conservative". He is offering a call away from many of the things that both ends of the spectrum share and have confidence in in contemporary society, calling us to follow Jesus with the expectation that our lives will be transformed not by our strongly-held dogmas but by the surrender and self-sacrifice of discipleship.

Biblical Studies Carnival 41

This is just to second Taylor Williams' friendly reminder to submit some of your favourite posts of the month of April to the next Biblical Studies Carnival that will be hosted by yours truly right here at Exploring Our Matrix.

In order to allow me to spread the preparations over a longer period, please nominate some posts today (and tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that…) It’s really easy. You have two options:

1. Send the following information to the following email address: biblical_studies_carnival AT hotmail.com. If you’re not sure whether a post qualifies, send it anyway and then I will decide whether to include it.

• The title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name or pseudonym.
• A short (two or three sentence) summary of the blog post.
• The title and URL of the blog on which it appears (please note if it is a group blog).
• Include “Biblical Studies Carnival 41” in the subject line of your email
• Your own name and email address.

2. Use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival. (This is probably the easier option if you only have one nomination.) Just select “biblical studies carnival” and fill in the rest of the information noted above.

For more information, please see the Biblical Studies Carnival Homepage. Please do spread the word and pass along this reminder to your own blog readers!

Without Fear And Trembling

One of the recent conservative commenters on my blog decided to write to my pastor to make sure that he is aware of the sorts of views I have. He is (he regularly attends my Sunday school class, as well as being someone I've talked to often in other less formal settings). This occurrence got me thinking about the more conservative Christian contexts in which such an intervention might lead to questions, accusations, suspicions, discipline, expulsion, conflict, and who knows what else.

I've been thinking that a good slogan for my Sunday school class might be "Come work out your salvation without fear and trembling." This isn't yet another example of me being "unbiblical". I do think that there is a genuine and appropriate fear and trembling involved in exploring life's most important questions. But that is fear before God and personal acknowledgement of the seriousness of the matter. But too often, one's fear and trembling when "working out their salvation" is fear of recrimination, fear of ostracization, fear of other people and their opinion.

Such concerns often lead doubts to be denied publicly, perhaps even denied to ourselves. In such circumstances, being a Christian often becomes a matter of appearance, of pretending to be more certain than one really is, or simply refusing to ask certain kinds of questions. I often think that, if I had had to work out my salvation while pretending in this way lest I find myself in conflict with those around me, it might well have led to hypocrisy and, in the end, to a loss of faith. For I am persuaded that intellectual and spiritual dishonesty is much more toxic to faith than honest questioning, historical criticism, academic investigation, or anything else that fundamentalists find threatening and at odds with a genuine Christian faith.

We discussed this subject today in my Sunday school class, and I think it was helpful to others present both to be able to acknowledge that they do not have all the answers, and to learn that psychologists like James Fowler have suggested that our being in different places in our spiritual walks or "faith development" is not only inevitable but natural and healthy.

A conservative blog recently described me as "dangerous", and I realized that I should take that as a compliment. Acknowledging the possibility of being a Christian while at the same time engaging in open discussion of ideas, tolerating uncertainty, and anticipating that you might have something to learn from those with whom you disagree, is dangerous to fundamentalism - but not to Christian faith per se. What is dangerous to Christian faith is viewing it as though it were something static, as though the understanding of it one has as a child should remain static throughout life, or that Christianity itself could or should remain static throughout history. But perhaps more dangerous still is the conviction that our own understanding is God's very truth -that cannot but lead to a spiritual pride and arrogance that is incompatible with the Christian faith in general, and with the fallibility of the greatest heroes of the faith as depicted in the Bible in particular.

Around the Blogosphere

There are so many interesting posts today that simply adding them to the "Blogs I've been reading" sidebar will inevitably leave some out. So here are some highlights...

Jeremy Smith asks whether John's Gospel hates on the other Gospels. Mark Goodacre raised the possibility that the centurion's exclamation in Mark's Gospel was sarcastic, to which Josh McManaway adds some further thoughts. John Hobbins explains why no one smiles in the Bible. Douglas Mangum contrasts apologists and Biblical scholars. Chris Tilling quotes Käsemann on harmonization. Anumma asks what things educators hide from students and why. Tony Jones interviewed Bart Ehrman. Matt Page shares a pdf by Ted Baehr of Movieguide about Christ in the Movies. Daniel Kirk is asking what annoys you most about the apostle Paul. Bob Cornwall has a quote from Kurt Aland about the canonization process (as well as another post on that subject). Nijay Gupta draws attention to three books including one in which I've contributed a chapter. Ben Witherington continues his series on Bart Ehrman's latest book. James McGrath is wondering, with this many posts over the past 24 hours, what the size of the next Biblical Studies Carnival will be...

Drew Tatusko blogs about doctrinal whoring. Eric Reitan discusses whether God is a delusion. Gideon Addington asks God to save us from his theologians. Jesus Creed continues to look at how ancient Christians interpreted the Genesis creation stories. Richard Beck explains that there are only 10 kinds of people: those who know binary and those who don't.

The Panda's Thumb explains the real reason biologists laugh at creationists. John Pieret looks at weaknesses in claims about weaknesses. Answers in Genesis BUSTED shares a video about testing evolution.

Finally, Michael Emerson talks about LOST (HT IO9).

Dharma Students Make Learning Ancient Languages Fun

No scholar of the Bible or the ancient world should miss taking a closer look at the blackboard that Jack was erasing in a Dharma Initiative classroom in the most recent episode of LOST. If you haven't seen it yet, it isn't too late to avert your gaze, and most people will probably need to click through to the full-sized image in order to read it anyway. But more about language-learning follows below the image, so please do scroll down!

I'd actually been meaning for several days to post on the subject of why I've tended to find Semitic languages daunting. I generally love languages, and yet every time I'd try to make some progress with Syriac or Arabic, I'd find it a struggle. It took me a long time to figure out why, and I think it was due to a combination of factors, and figuring out the reasons - as well as the availability of new language-learning resources - has certainly helped with making better progress in recent months.

One issue connects up with my current research interest in oral tradition and memory in early Christianity. Memories need to be organized if we want to be able to recall them at will, and we reuse those organizing "cubbyholes" (or topoi) over and over again. For those used to learning modern languages, it is incredibly frustrating to open a Greek textbook and find that the usual order of nominative, accusative, genitive and dative is not used. Fortunately when I learned Greek, the textbook used ordered the cases in the more usual way it is done today. Otherwise, you don't only have to learn the case endings, you have to create a whole new mental framework when you organize the material: you see it on the page, but you cannot slot what you see into the existing cubbyholes without moving them around, and that is a hurdle to remembering. In the case of the Semitic languages, for perfectly legitimate and logical reasons, verb forms are organized beginning with the third person singular and working from there. Since the usual order when learning other languages is to begin with the first person singular, the same problem arises. And so, while it is important to emphasize that the most basic form is the third person singular, simply reversing the order of listing would allow new vocabulary to be slotted to a greater extent into already-existing pigeonholes, rather than having to build new ones.

The fact that vowels are often lacking is another challenge. Perhaps one day those interested in learning Syriac and Aramaic will be able to begin by learning Mandaic, the script of which includes vowels. Until then, having the vowels included and some sort of transliteration to assist one can be invaluable. Of course, we all know that, when a transliteration is provided, students will tend to rely on that, but I'd argue that at the very beginning that is OK. As children we learn to write a language that we already know how to speak and it is much easier. To try to learn a language with only consonants to go on in a textbook is making the process unnecessarily challenging, since once again it diverts from the natural way in which we learned our native tongue, not to mention the ways we may have learned other languages.

It is somewhat ironic that learning Mandarin Chinese might seem less daunting to an English speaker than most Semitic languages, even though Mandarin is tonal. Because the Chinese writing system is not alphabetic, there is no way to make a textbook that does not use English characters (Pinyin) to indicate the pronunciation. To make a language harder to learn simply because it has an alphabet doesn't make much sense.

Being able to hear the language also helps, and many textbooks provide an audio CD to accompany it. Indeed, there are now entirely-audio courses that one can use, whether to help with vocabulary, or in the case of living languages actually learn the basics orally before trying to cope with writing. Again, what makes a language like Hungarian seem less daunting than one like Tamil for a native English speaker trying to learn is not the sounds or the structure or the dissimilarity to English, but the fact that one is written in the same alphabet (with some accents thrown in) while the other is written in a challenging script. Finding some way of making it possible to learn the basics of the language before wrestling with a new script is a no-brainer. And in the case of Hebrew, the modern language is enough like the ancient form (having been revived in the modern era based on ancient Hebrew, rather than continuously evolving over the centuries like Arabic or Greek) that one can find learning the modern language helpful for getting to grips with Biblical Hebrew. So I second Anumma's recommendation to do modern Hebrew first, and highly recommend the Pimsleur language courses (the second level of Hebrew and of Eastern Arabic were recently released, with the third and final on the way). Just pop them in to listen to in the car during your commute. You'll be amazed.

The sign in the Dharma Initiative classroom says that they make learning fun, and that has certainly been shown to be an aid to learning. I started learning a bit of Coptic a while back, but put it on hold because there are other languages that are more pressing. Be that as it may, I think that if we were able to learn an ancient language on an island with mysterious and seemingly miraculous properties, and believed that ancient language was a key to solving those mysteries, we'd learn much faster. I wonder what would happen if a hieroglyphics tutorial were merged with a LOST video game, so that you had to correctly recognize and remember (before a timer runs out) what symbols mean in order to make it through the game. Would students learn better/faster - at least if they were LOST fans?

Biblical Scholars and Personal Religion

It is exciting to learn that a new blog has been created by Alan Lenzi, devoted to the subject of Biblical Scholars and Personal Religion. Take a look!

On an unrelated note, I just can't bring myself to dedicate a post about tonight's episode of LOST [spoilers alert]. Sure, there was significant religious content, both in the reference to God on the chalkboard in the classroom, which Jack was erasing, and the "evangelical" appeal made to Miles by a mysterious group of individuals who may be connected with the Others, or a third group as yet unencountered (but presumably connected with Iliana, the woman who captured Sayid and took him on the plane bound for Guam, who I suspect was employed by Ben). So why no post just about this episode? I guess I just have a soft spot for Ewoks...

Biblical Diversity and Harmonization

James Bradford Pate has written an overview with some analysis and reflections of my own views on this subject. In particular, those who have been engaged in some of the recent conversations on this blog about the Bible, inerrancy, authority and contradictions (and much, much more) may want to pay a visit to James' blog. He also has a recent post on Evangelicalism and the "Triablogue incident".

More of my Articles via Digital Commons

Butler University has obtained permission to make several more of my articles available to read or download from the university web site, via Digital Commons. If you have an interest in the Gospel of John, or in the relationship between the New Testament's Christology and our own, please do take a look. Several of the articles date back to my days as a graduate student, and so you'll be able to catch a glimpse of how my thinking and my scholarship has developed over the past decade or so.

Doubt

We've been talking about faith and doubt on this blog quite a bit lately, and tonight I watched the movie Doubt. Since it is so new I won't say anything that might spoil it for anyone. But I will offer a recommendation to see it if you have any interest in exploring the themes of doubt and certainty.

Easter Sunday School

Yesterday's sermon at my church focused on the ending (or lack thereof) of Mark's Gospel. The pastor compared Mark to a "choose your own adventure" story, particularly when it comes to the ending.

In my Sunday school class, we discussed this as well as another possibility, namely that the original ending of Mark's Gospel could have been lost. Papyrus manuscripts are easily damaged, and most of our ancient manuscripts from this period are significantly damaged. Although we have a great many relatively early manuscripts of the New Testament writings, including some on more durable types of "paper", it is not impossible that the earliest Gospel could have been damaged in some way.

The likelihood that the original ending was lost is increased when we consider that two different scribal traditions, as well as Matthew and Luke who used Mark as a source, felt it necessary to "improve" Mark's ending.

If one considers the different geographical locations for the resurrection appearance stories in Matthew and Luke, it seems impossible to argue for "inerrancy" in any meaningful sense of the term. But if one is asking not about inerrancy but about historicity, then a historian's approach can help us make sense of why Matthew and Luke diverge, with one having the disciples told to go to Galilee while the other has them told to remain in Jerusalem.

In 1 Corinthians 15 we find an example of the sort of tradition about resurrection appearances circulating a decade or more before the Gospel of Mark is thought to have been written. I pointed out that no geographical setting is provided. And thus a plausible explanation for the divergence between Matthew and Luke is that neither had information on the setting of such appearances, and each independently turned the tradition into a narrative, locating it where it seemed to fit, with the resulting tensions when one has copies of both these Gospels.

Towards the end of the class, the pastor brought up the question of whether a rationalistic, post-Enlightenment reading of the text is not alien to the worldview in which these writings were penned. I replied that, on the one hand, he appreciates what reason and science have given to us. On the other hand, the attempt to require the text to provide certainty, or reject it if it fails to do so, is indeed at odds with these stories. Matthew's Gospel has the apostles doubting even after their "encounter" with Jesus. And so the desire for certainty is the desire for something that even the earliest Christians may not have had.

Let me just conclude by emphasizing the difference between uncertainty and what Christians sometimes refer to as "unbelief". The latter represents a refusal to believe something or someone no matter what evidence is presented, and I think it is safe to say that Christians are no less guilty of such an attitude than non-Christians. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is what often happens when you abandon unbelief, when you stop stubbornly assuming that you are always right, and open your views to be challenged (and hopefully in the process improved) by wise advice, by evidence, by reality. The sad part is that unbelief passes for faith in some Christian circles.

Celebrating Easter with the Doubting Disciples

The tradition of viewing Easter as the end of disbelief can be traced back to the New Testament itself, to the Gospel of John, where Thomas, being absent when Jesus appeared to the other disciples, expresses skepticism, only to be confronted by the physical risen Jesus himself. The message of these stories, readers of this Gospel are told, is for those who come along later and do not have the benefit of such physical encounters - it is even more blessed to not see and yet believe.

Yet there is another strand, much more neglected, that also goes back to the New Testament. In the Gospel of Matthew we are told that the disciples travel to Galilee, and when they encounter Jesus we are told that they worshipped him, "but some doubted". This does not seem to simply be a variation on the Thomas story, not only because the setting is different (Galilee rather than Jerusalem) but also because it happens "when they saw him" rather than "because he had not seen him".

If we look more closely, we'll see that the element that leaves room for doubt and at times even acknowledges doubt as a reality or a real possibility predominates in the New Testament:

• Paul describes his own experience as in the same category as that of other apostles, which would suggest that they were all visionary in nature (in 1 Corinthians 15, our earliest account of resurrection appearances; see too Acts' accounts of Paul's Damascus Road experience).


• Mark, our earliest Gospel, ends abruptly with no resurrection appearances at all.


• Matthew says some doubted, as we've already noted.


• Luke and John, written some 50 years after the fact, are the first to introduce a physical element to the encounter with Jesus. Both have Jesus eat in the disciples' presence. Yet both also have Jesus not (or at least not always) look like Jesus. The disciples on the road to Emmaus do not recognize him. The disciples in John 21 might have asked him who he was, but did not.

None of these traditions and narratives can be said to remove doubt. Yet even though they suggest that doubt was not eliminated altogether for those who had the original Easter experiences, some conservative Christians today not only claim a higher degree of certainty than the apostles seem to have had, but make such certainty the standard of their Christian orthodoxy. If the apostles do not meet the criteria of their "fundamentals of the faith", nor do the New Testament authors, then something is terribly wrong with this definition of Christianity.

But it should come as no surprise that some get Easter wrong. The same people generally misunderstand the cross as well. Claiming that God has said sin must be punished and that Jesus was punished in our place, they make two major errors, from a Christian perspective:

• In claiming that God must punish sin and yet he punished the innocent in the place of the guilty, they make God unjust and a liar. For in those passages where it mentions death as a punishment, it says things like "you will surely die" (Genesis 3) or "the soul that sins will die" (Ezekiel). There's no provision for substituting the innocent and allowing the guilty to go free. And so the penal substitution theory of the atonement is not merely unjust, but also unbiblical.


• In claiming that God requires sacrifice, they invert the Scripture quoted by Jesus, which said that God "desired mercy, and not sacrifice". And so in claiming that God requires sacrifice in order to be merciful, they are not merely being unbiblical, but un-Christian.

I fully expect someone to object at this point "But it says in Hebrews..." I would love to know how a point of view that allows an epistle that barely made it into the canon to override the words of Jesus may be called Christian. Intriguingly enough, Hebrews is perhaps the strongest candidate in the New Testament for representing a form of Christianity that didn't believe Jesus underwent a bodily resurrection. It is really hard to fit a return to reclaim a body into Hebrews' view of Jesus dying and then presenting his sacrifice in the heavenly tabernacle.

Be that as it may, the point remains that Easter is not about historical certainty. In Matthew, it even explicitly includes doubt. And by making the day a day for celebrating certainty, we risk losing one of the most important steps that may help us to experience the "resurrection power" that drove early Christianity and has continued to transform lives down the ages.

Death and resurrection is one of Christianity's most powerful metaphors. Paul uses it in Romans 6, when he tells Christians "count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11 NIV). Although elsewhere Paul uses language that might suggest that there is an objective reality to our transfer from one kingdom to another, in fact it is something we have to "reckon", something that we have to take from Christianity's most central symbolic story and make our own.

Talk of being crucified with Christ was no idle image to many early Christians. Surely the very first disciples knew there was a danger that they might share their master's fate. Good Friday (and the Saturday that follows it) reminds us not only of victory through suffering and dying for what one lived for, but also the sense of apparent defeat and the loss of certainty that accompanies it. Yet for those of us who have experienced it, often it is that very sense of having nowhere to hold onto that leads us to die to the world, and until we do so there can be no rebirth.

I wish you a happy Easter. But to get there, you may need to experience the uncertainty the earliest disciples felt. And then, finding no certainty to cling to, may you know the powerful, life-transforming effect of letting go. It is like being reborn, like being raised from death to life.

Dead and Buried

John Shuck has kindly offered a short review of my book, The Burial of Jesus, over on his blog. What more appropriate day could there be for this than today?

When Jesus Said "I Am Divine" And Turned Out To Be An Elephant

Here's Bart Ehrman's return to the Colbert Report (HT Ben Witherington):

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bart Ehrman
colbertnation.com
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Self-Critical Faith

The unexamined faith is not worth having. Religion has had many critics from without, and still does. But one characteristic feature of the Biblical tradition is that it is full of critics from within, those who examine their own tradition and challenge themselves first, and then their contemporaries, to rethink it and to live it differently.

There are those who would like to avoid such critical introspection and self-examination, perhaps at all costs. "Leave us alone", they might say, "we're happy as we are." But just as one might believe oneself happy living in ignorance of one's wife's affair, for example, it can also be argued that the "happiness" in such cases is illusory. One's alleged happiness is maintained at the cost of a failing marriage and a decaying relationship infested with deceit. And presumably, were the wife happy and the relationship healthy, the affair would not be occuring. And so in such cases one is in fact valuing one's own deluded happiness over the happiness and well-being of others.

Be that as it may, if someone else wishes to live in uncritical self-deception (or at least the risk thereof) they are free to do so. I'd prefer to have a healthy marriage, an honest faith, and a critical approach to life. And so, if you'd prefer not to be aware of potential difficulties with Biblical inerrancy, amd historical uncertainties about the stories contained therein, and other things that often get noticed when one examines the Bible critically, then this blog is not for you. You are under no obligation to ask the questions I am asking about my faith, any more than you are obliged to accept my answers. But don't begrudge those of us who do ask them, or who answer them differently than you might.

4QInstruction and Sethian Gnosticism

In a book I'm reading I encountered a quote from a highly fragmentary text from Qumran that is usually known as 4QInstruction. The fragment 4Q417 includes the words "for engraved are the ordinances of God, about all the [iniquities of the] sons of Seth, and a book of memorial is written before him". [The picture on the right is not of 4QInstruction, lest anyone enlarge it and be disappointed - I couldn't find an image of this particular text online].

In later times, including among the Mandaeans but also in texts from Nag Hammadi, certain Gnostics would trace their teaching back to Seth and to wisdom that he inscribed on stele.

There is significant uncertainty about how the fragment mentioned above is to be positioned relative to other fragments that seem to be part of the same work. Also uncertain is whether this is a work of the Qumran sectarians themselves or simply a work that is part of their collection.

Although the idea of a righteous race descended from Seth does not seem to have been at all limited to groups that can be categorized as Gnostics, it is still intriguing that the text from Qumran appears to polemicize against the sons of Seth. And so this is a text that definitely merits further investigation by those interested in tracing the history of the "Sethian" ideas that became part of the heritage of later Mandaeans and other "Gnostics".

Krister Stendahl on Religious Pluralism

The Pluralism Sunday blog has the text of a lecture the late Krister Stendahl gave on the subject of Christianity and religious pluralism. He deals with the standard texts that seem to support exclusivism in a thoughtful and pastoral manner.

Stendahl is famous among New Testament scholars, but for those who may not be familiar with him, he served during his life as (among other things) Lutheran Bishop of Stockholm and a professor at Harvard Divinity School.

Quote of the Day (Eric Reitan)

"[T]he doctrine of biblical inerrancy has the effect of inspiring its adherents to pay more attention to a text than to the neighbors they are called upon to love. Sometimes it even inspires them to plug up their ears with Bible verses, so that they can no longer hear the anguished cries of neighbors whose suffering is brought on by allegiance to the literal sense of those very texts."

-- Eric Reitan, at Religion Dispatches Pulpit

Also at Religion Dispatches is an article about Roger Haight and his views on, among other things, the resurrection. Loren Rosson looks at human nature. Bible Bending shared this video of Stephen Colbert freeing his Jews:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Birkat Hachama - Stephen Frees His Jews
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And Progression of Faith has a video that raises some questions about the way some Christians understand certain doctrines - in a manner that some will probably find amusing, while others may find it offensive. But they are important questions, and ones that need to be thought about:

Maundy Thursday

The service our pastor arranged for Maundy Thursday was powerful and profound. He got members of the congregation to recite (and in some cases they performed) monologues reflecting various participants in the events leading up to the crucifixion: Judas, the high priest's servant, Claudia Procula and Herod. It was interspersed with readings and hymns, we celebrated communion, and near the end the pastor and I performed "Thief" by Third Day.

When it was over, we left (as we had been instructed to) in silence - no hand shaking on the way out, no benediction. Just an invitation to return on Sunday morning and learn - and celebrate - the fact that the part of the story we'd heard was not the story in its entirety.

Judged by the Smoke Monster

In the most recent episode of LOST, as in other earlier ones, we saw the "smoke monster" make someone confront their past, with the aim of bringing about repentance and a change in them.

In my recent visits to Triablogue, it has been somewhat like encountering the smoke monster. I was met over there by views and attitudes that once would have been mine. As I try to extract myself from the attempt at interaction, unsubscribing from the comment updates and so on, I realize that in my late teens and probably into my early twenties, I would have loved to have had a blog like that (blogs didn't exist yet), I would have treated visitors who disagreed with me in much the same way I was treated on Triablogue, and when the visiting scholar or whoever else it was left exasperated, I would have celebrated another "victory".

I don't just wonder how many of the bloggers over there will, a few decades from now, find themselves in my shoes, interacting with younger people who are much like their own former selves. I also wonder what views that I interact with now I may myself hold a few decades from now.

At any rate, I am grateful to the folks at Triablogue for giving me an experience akin to being grabbed by my past and told I had better listen to John Locke. I suppose the question is, what if anything have I learned from this, what can I learn from it? The two main things I'm taking away from this experience are these:

1) Don't forget the way you got to where you are now. It was the reality of the way I saw Christians singing and talking about their experience and their faith that made a powerful impression on me. I don't think that the impression would have been the same if they had seemed as arrogant as I became as a teenage convert, full of enthusiasm. As I look back now, I wonder how I could have missed this, how I could have thought as a young Christian that I know it all and ought to give a confident answer to every question and challenge I was presented with, never admitting "I don't know"? It is important to remember the steps that led us on from various stages of immaturity to various points of increasing maturity, because - this leads on to the second point:

2) Our minds are not changed in single large leaps. It may seem that way at the time, but in fact it is accumulating evidence and considerations over a long time that eventually leads to the dramatic paradigm shift. Without that longer process, the paradigm will rarely shift. And yet we so often engage in conversations (or worse, arguments) expecting that if we can just make our point again, or bring in just one more piece of evidence, our conversation partner (or opponent) will be convinced. But that's not how it works - unless you happen to be there for the paradigm-shift moment.

I've asked before on this blog whether I'd change my past, warn my past self that I would change my mind about many things, and thus not to be dogmatic. Even though I never experienced a LOST-style temporal paradox, in a sense I did warn myself. Others who had passed that way offered advice, which I often failed to heed. And sooner or later we get to offer our later perspective to others, who are where we once were. And then we're judged, and its painful, but it hopefully leads to repentance and a committment to doing something other than simply repeating the cycle as your life goes on. That doesn't mean you won't make mistakes - it just means that you'll try to make new ones rather than simply repeating the same ones over and over again.

Miracles and the Golden Rule: A Christian Approach to History

One doesn't have to be committed in advance to history's inability to deal with miracles in order to begin to realize that one cannot claim that Christianity is grounded purely in history while other traditions are at best shrouded in myth. One simply has to apply the most basic Christian principle to one's investigation of the competing claims. That's what happened in my case. I didn't know that much about historical methodology yet as an undergraduate interested in defending and spreading his faith.

But I did know about fairness, about treating others as you would want them to treat you. The Golden Rule.

And so what does it mean to do history from a Christian perspective? It doesn't mean to allow for miracles in the Biblical stories while assuming that, when the cookies are missing and your child says he or she doesn't know what happened to them, that you're dealing with a lie and theft rather than a miracle. It doesn't mean defending Christian claims to miracles and debunking those of others, nor accepting Biblical claims uncritically in a way you never would if similar claims were made in our time.

It means doing to the claims of others what you would want done to your claims. And perhaps also the reverse: doing to your own claims, views and presuppositions that which you have been willing to do to the claims, views and presuppositions of others.

Once one begins to attempt to examine the evidence not in an unbiased way, but simply fairly, one cannot but acknowledge that there are elements of the Christian tradition which, if they were in your opponent's tradition, you would reject, debunk, discount, and otherwise find unpersuasive or at least not decisive or compelling.

What I find most striking about the recent discussion is that, even though I am a convert to Evangelical Christianity, because I've arrived at "liberal" conclusions about many historical and doctrinal questions, there are attempts being made to shoehorn me into the box of someone who comes at these matters with a liberal set of assumptions. But those are not my assumptions: they are my conclusions, ones that I resisted reaching long after enough evidence had amassed pointing in their direction. I drew them not because I wanted to, not because I had been brought up to, not because I had been influenced or compelled to, but simply because I honestly felt that these conclusions were correct, even though a radical rethinking of my views, and in particular of my understanding of my faith, were necessary as a result.

I cannot help wondering how many of those who are trying to shoehorn me out of the Christian category and into that of liberal Christian-hater, were themselves brought up in conservative Christian contexts, and are struggling to defend their own presuppositions and assumptions with which they were raised.

In other words, I wonder whether the problem with at least some of these self-proclaimed defenders of Christianity is that they have never had a conversion experience, a genuine life-transforming rebirth, and what they are deeply committed to defending is the worldview of their upbringing.

I'm sure that, when it comes down to it, there are people with conversion experiences and people with upbringing on all sides.

But I still maintain that my conclusions were reached starting from a powerful life-transforming born-again experience, a deep desire (which I still have) to take seriously and do justice to what the Bible says, however much it challenges my assumptions and views (even my views about what the Bible is), and a committment to the Golden Rule not merely as inspiration to kindness or fiscal generosity but as a method for treating one's own claims and those of others fairly.

In what sense is the approach I've outlined above, and adopted in my discussions on this blog, anything other than a Christian one? On what basis, if any, might the conservative approach (which I've been criticized for departing from) be judged "more Christian" than this, rather than merely more conservative?

Easter Ehrman

The subject of historical study and methodological naturalism has come up in a recent bloggersation, and since Easter is approaching, I thought I'd share a particularly poignant passage relevant to this issue that I came across in a recent book:

Why was the tomb supposedly empty? I say supposedly because, frankly, I don't know that it was. Our very first reference to Jesus' tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living in a different country who had heard it was empty. How would he know?...Suppose...that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea...and then a couple of Jesus' followers, not among the twelve, decided that night to move the body somewhere more appropriate...But a couple of Roman legionnaires are passing by, and catch these followers carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets. They suspect foul play and confront the followers, who pull their swords as the disciples did in Gethsemane. The soldiers, expert in swordplay, kill them on the spot. They now have three bodies, and no idea where the first one came from. Not knowing what to do with them, they commandeer a cart and take the corpses out to Gehenna, outside town, and dump them. Within three or four days the bodies have deteriorated beyond recognition. Jesus' original tomb is empty, and no one seems to know why.

Is this scenario likely? Not at all. Am I proposing this is what really happened? Absolutely not. Is it more probable that something like this happened than that a miracle happened and Jesus left the tomb to ascend to heaven? Absolutely! From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one..."

The quote is from Bart Ehrman's book Jesus, Interrupted. It reminds me somewhat of the scene in the movie The Messenger in which Satan presents Joan of Arc with all the other possible explanations for the sword she found in a field, and asks her why she chose one particularly improbable one. But it also nicely illustrates the historian's dilemma, namely that all sorts of fairly improbable scenarios are inevitably going to be more likely than an extremely improbable one. That doesn't necessarily mean miracles never happened then or don't happen now - it just means that historical tools are not the way to answer that question.

Lessons in (and from) a One-Room Schoolhouse

I'm happy I was able to join my son on a field trip to 1892, to spend the day at a one-room schoolhouse. It was delightful, but it reminded me of a trip I took when I lived in the UK to a similar historical preservation experience.

At the Beamish open-air museum, we saw tiny houses that miners once inhabited, old fashioned stores with candies and products one would never see in stores today. So much has changed. But nothing prepared me for the shock of visiting the preserved Methodist church from that time.

The church preserved in the museum was just like many and perhaps most churches I'd visited in the present day.

Many people, including a very large number of Christians, approach the Christian faith as though it is a museum curiosity, something interesting and even vitally important to be preserved from the past. For some, it is the whole enterprise that is like this - like an open air museum, one should preserve not just the doctrines but the forms, the church styles and architecture, and the cultural values in which they once flourished and made sense. For others, the faith is more like an object from the past that can be removed from its original setting, and placed in an ultra-modern glass case in a high-tech museum.

For a progressive Christian, Christianity is a living thing. As a result, it may compare to its earlier modes of existence in the way an adult human compares with his or her infancy and childhood. There may, in fact, be none of the same cells whatsoever, and the continuity may be hard to define and yet unmistakable. You may not recognize him/her/it from "baby pictures". That's normal for living things.

Make no mistake. Museums are great at preserving artifacts of the past. But I wouldn't want to live there, in most cases (if you'll excuse the pun). Different venues are usually more appropriate as habitats for the living. Where is your faith most at home? Is it something that you find you need to preserve, with or without the assistance of a taxidermist, or is it something you can allow to roam freely?

A Parable and a Testimony

There was once a rich man, who was very generous. This man who had two sons.

The eldest son had seen his father sometimes forced to do without, even though his land was fruitful and his business prosperous, because he had given away all he had at that moment to those in need. When his father died and left a large sum to him and his brother, he was determined not to find himself in the same situation. He put the inheritance in a secret place, and made his sons and eventually his grandsons keep its location secret. Although wealthy, the eldest son, and eventually his family, lived frugally, often talking about the hidden treasure but neither touching it nor divulging the secret of its location to anyone outside the immediate family.

Eventually, after many generations, a distant descendant of the rich man's eldest son wondered about the stories he had heard of the family treasure. He went to the place where it was supposed to be hidden, but found nothing there, and concluded that his family had been passing on a myth.

The younger son of the rich man had a different perspective. He was impressed by his father's generosity and determined to follow his example. He would regularly go to the secret place where his father's wealth had been left behind for him and his brother, and often found himself puzzled that his brother never seemed to visit the place or use the money. He would take not for himself and his own use, but in order to give freely to those in need in his community. His generosity, like that of his father before him, had a positive impact on the community, and as generations passed, the community prospered as it fostered mutual care and support.

Eventually the descendants of the younger brother fell upon want. They did not turn to the hidden wealth - it had long been given away, and this line of descendants didn't preserve legends of great prosperity their ancestors had in the distant past. Rather, in their present circumstances of difficulty, they were helped by the community that their ancestors and they themselves had helped shape.

- - -

It seems to me that this is much like the divergence between two different approaches to the Christian faith. One sort considers it of crucial importance to believe that people in the past experienced God, that they wrote about their experience and their beliefs without error, and to preserve this from generation to generation. Such individuals often lose their faith, if they go to look and find reasons to doubt the historical veracity of that which they've been passing on.

Another form of Christianity emphasizes having a personal experience of God. For some such Christians, the precision and accuracy of earlier Christians is an interesting and not unimportant question, but neither is it ultimately decisive. Their lives are being transformed in the present, and that is their foundation. Moreover, they have confidence that, just as they are fallible human beings who nonetheless have something important to share, so too the earliest Christians may have written fallibly and yet still have something important to share.

I find it ironic that the reality of my own life-changing experience has been questioned because I don't affirm the absolute accuracy of certain specific beliefs that were defined as crucial by 20th century fundamentalists (using the term in the strict sense), but which we have no reason to think all the earliest Christians considered that important and definitive of Christian identity.

I promised to recount my own testimony, and so here it is, reposted almost but not entirely verbatim from a place where I had it on my old blog (I figure there is no point in typing it again, and I've already spent quite a bit of time on this post):

At age 15, I was at a stage in my life when I had begun thinking about matters of faith. I had been raised Catholic, but had drifted away from attending church with any frequency (and had a tendency to miss religious education classes in the evening because they were on at the same time as Charles in Charge). But I continued to believe in God, and clearly recall debating a friend of mine who didn't believe in God about this subject (when we were both seriously drunk). Anyway, I had spent many years being something of a loner, a nerd, and can't say I was particularly happy - indeed quite the opposite. Once I started high school, however, it had been something of a new start, and since I was also very much involved in music at this point in my life, that helped me make friends and start having something of a different experience, but it didn't eliminate my inner sense of feeling that I hadn't found the meaning of life yet, that something was still missing. It was at this point that I happened to tune to a college radio station during an hour when they broadcast contemporary Christian music. I was struck by the music, because although I believed in God, I didn't find myself able to actually sing about it - it was as though these people had something real that they had experienced and yet I had not. I even tried forming a Christian band with a friend of mine, and when we asked another student, she thought it was weird because, from her perspective, we weren't even Christians. She did, however, invite us to a concert at her church (a Pentecostal church). To make a long story short, we went, and I was very moved by it. I went to the morning service the next day (Sunday), and as so often in stories like this one, I cannot remember what the sermon was about. What I do remember is that, after the service, I called out to God in my heart and said something like "God, I don't know what your way of living is, but mine isn't working, so whatever your way is, I want to try it". At that moment, a sense of peace washed over me.

So there you have it - the experience that started it all. I'll end here, since I'm sure that we'll be talking about this more over coming days. But I will repeat the wise observation of a Lutheran pastor in Latvia, who observed that it is those who've had a genuine religious experience who tend to be less resistant to finding new ways of talking about and expressing it in a new setting, context and language. Or in terms of the parable, the point is not to pass on theories about a treasure, but to put it to use and let it transform lives, even if that means changing the balance (literally or metaphorically), converting into a new currency, and so on.

Classic Liberal?

Is my position that of a "classic liberal"? Certainly not in any strict sense - I'm far too Bultmannian, and probably also too aware of the limits of modernity. But to the extent that anyone who rejects the tenets of classic fundamentalism tends to be labelled as a "liberal", I'm happy to wear the label.

I was asked about this subject over on Triablogue, and here's what I replied:

I sometimes use the term "fundamentalist" but rarely in its classic sense, since the number of people who represent the classic definition and would self-identify as fundamentalist is small, I suspect.

Here's a brief answer to each of your questions:

1) I do not affirm inerrancy. I tried for a long time to force the Bible to fit that mold, then decided that perhaps I should let the Bible shape my doctrine of Scripture rather than vice versa. I have no problem talking about it being "inspired", although I realize that is vague, but one could make a Biblical case for inspiration being a broader phenomenon than the writing of Scripture.

2) Virgin birth? No, because if one cannot harmonize the historical type details in the infancy accounts of Matthew and Luke, why should I take their statements as factual when they make a claim about something fantastic?

3) I don't see Christ's death as making satisfaction or as a penal substitution, but there are other ways of thinking about atonement - some closer to the root meaning of that term - that I'd affirm.

4) I'll defer to my book on the burial of Jesus, which wrestles with that topic in great detail.

5) On the miracles, I'm not sure on what basis I could affirm the nature miracles, such as walking on water. There are far more straightforward explanations for how we got those stories. But I do think that many people experienced various sorts of healing and liberation from "demons" through him and their encounter with him.

Does this make me a "classic liberal"? Quite possibly. But this is how I see the evidence, and my ability or inability to make justifiable claims based on it, at present. I've changed my mind in the past, and am open to being persuaded to do so again...

What about you? Do you accept the classic tenets of fundamentalism? Are you a "classic liberal"? What labels do you wear grudgingly, and which do you embrace? I tend to prefer "progressive" Christian. Of course, one thing that I have that not all "classic liberals" do is an Evangelical conversion experience. Since it seems my account of that experience on this blog is buried unhelpfully in the midst of a lengthy dialogue I had with an atheist, I'll try to devote a post all of its own to it sometime soon.

Triablogue-osphere

There's a response to my critique of Beale's book on inerrancy over at Triablogue. Rather than repost both that post and my comment, I'll reproduce my comment and invite those interested to pay a visit to Triablogue to see the wider context of him quoting me quoting... Here's what I commented there:

Thanks for taking the time to interact with my post on Beale's book. I will let you read about my own conversion experience on my blog if you are interested; the authors that have come to be among my favorites did not achieve that status without a fight against them on my part. And I think this too tells against the "conspiracy theory" and "peer pressure" hypotheses. I attended Evangelical Bible colleges, and it was already in those contexts that I found the Bible itself raising the questions, and at times leading to the answers, that I resisted from "liberals". And you are surely aware that both Robinson and Bultmann can only be generalized as "liberal" if one defines that term to mean "anyone who doesn't adhere consistently to conservative Evangelical conclusions". Bultmann challenged classic Liberalism's assumption that one can merely remove the cultural shell of the first century and take a timeless core of Christianity out from within it, and his existentialist emphasis on personal decision became a key element of modern Evangelicalism. Robinson's conclusions on the date of New Testament writings are more conservative than those of many conservatives. This is one reason why terms like "liberal" and "conservative" are unhelpful: they suggest that there are two opposing views rather than a wide range of partially-overlapping possible positions, as well as the possibility of being more or less conservative on some issues and different on others.

On methodological naturalism, I don't see how historical study can adopt any other approach, any more than criminology can. It will always be theoretically possible that a crime victim died simply because God wanted him dead, but the appropriate response of detectives is to leave the case open. In the same way, it will always be possible that a virgin conceived, but it will never be more likely than that the stories claiming this developed, like comparable stories about other ancient figures, as a way of highlighting the individual's significance. And since historical study deals with probabilities and evidence, to claim that a miracle is "historically likely" misunderstands the method in question.

I do not claim any sort of intellectual superiority. I do claim to have spent many years wrestling with the Bible and to have given these matters a great deal of thought - that's all.

Let me not make this comment any longer, but I will say that when inerrancy is nuanced and qualified as in the Chicago Statement, it is not clear what is in fact being affirmed. The Bible can be approximate and imprecise, and contains different genres - that is certainly true. But why then prejudge which texts represent which genres, and why continue to use "inerrancy" when that gives an impression to laypeople that is different from what adherents to the Chicago Statement mean by it? I think it is to create a sibboleth (sorry, I have trouble pronouncing that word) that will allow seminaries and theological schools to continue to be funded by conservative congregations and individuals, rather than educating them, since education inevitably involves having our assumptions challenged.

Elsewhere around the blogosphere and web: Adam Kotsko points to a piece on peer review. Read the Spirit has a conversation with Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan about First Paul. Mark Goodacre shares a podcast on the Gospel of Mark. April DeConick will be appearing in IMAX - sort of. Ken Schenck is working on a Generous Ecclesiology. Ben Witherington discovered that Satan is on Facebook (as are the passion and Passover).

Also, if you can teach science using stick figures, there's a contest you may be interested in.

Blog Interviewer

There's an interview about my blog at Blog Interviewer. Do take a look, and if it isn't too much trouble, click on the thumbs up. Apparently they give $50 to the top ranking blogger in a given month...

No Transitional Fossils?

HT Ron Britton

Quote of the Day (John Shuck)

"The way of cross is more than the way of resisting social, economic, and political injustices. But...the way of the cross is not less than that. "

-- John Shuck, "The Executed God: A Sermon"

Sunday School Palm Sunday Q&A

Today in my Sunday school class we had a "passion week Q&A", essentially an informal conversation that ranged from the burial of Jesus to donkeys to football stadiums (for comparison to the size of the Jerusalem Temple) to Where's Waldo/Jesus? The conversation will continue next time.

Heaven Has a Hardware Problem

On the last episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, artificial intelligence John Henry noted the wonderful capacity of the human brain to process and store data, and yet its flawed nature inasmuch as there is nowhere to download it all to when one dies. He then goes on to mention that the Bible solves the problem by introducing the concept of heaven, but after considering the computer needed for his own program to run, John Henry realizes that "heaven may have a hardware problem".

The episode as a whole has fascinating and surprising religious themes and other plot developments. And as an added treat, I got to hear the song "Donald Where's Your Trousers" again, after more than a decade since the last time I heard it.

Following the Historical Jesus

What does it mean to be a follower of the historical Jesus? What does it mean, in other words, to be a Christian who takes historical questions and historical methods seriously?

I think it means, among other things, to not simply trust the crowd of other followers around you when it comes to the direction you take. Although you appreciate the community and the support, you are determined to catch a glimpse of Jesus through the crowd. Sometimes you think you spot him up ahead; at other times, you catch a glimpse of him moving in a different direction than the crowd. This can be said of a wider range of Christians, of course, but it ought to be particularly true for those who seek to follow the historical figure of Jesus. Because for you, it means that even Mark, Matthew, Luke, John and Paul are part of the crowd.

Following the historical Jesus means engaging in a quest for knowledge that leads not to certainty but to humility. It also means being convinced that Jesus himself would be pleased both with the quest and with the result.

Following the historical Jesus means knowing that, even if you had a time machine, you could not go back in time to measure the extent of Jesus' halo and assess his "divinity". From our standpoint in history, how much more then is the life we catch glimpses of emphatically a human one? Following the historical Jesus is not about attempting to define Jesus' nature - as though we could. It is about investigating a human life, passionately.

Following the historical Jesus involves creatively retelling his story (as Christians have always done), but in doing so seeking to take historical questions, and historians' answers, seriously. It also means being aware that the ways we arrange those sayings and stories that have a high degree of historical probability is itself a creative act, and not merely an act of discovering the past. And so following the historical Jesus means embracing the tension between the desire to avoid merely making Jesus in our own image, and the knowledge that we are unable to fully avoid imposing either the desires of our hearts or the perspective of our historical and cultural setting upon him.

Perhaps most importantly, following the historical Jesus means making it one's aim to be so spectacularly good that, even though we will also inevitably be spectacularly wrong about various matters of fact, such things will be overlooked and forgiven, if not be our contemporaries, then by history.

Is the historical figure of Jesus important to your Christian faith? If so, what does it mean to you to be his follower?

Quote of the Day (U2)

"Choose your enemies carefully, 'cause they will define you
Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friends"

-- "Cedars of Lebanon", from the U2 album No Line On The Horizon. Lyrics by Bono.

Lost Untangled: Whatever Happened, Happened (April Fool?)

Here's the latest installment of Lost Untangled, entertaining as always.



Perhaps the most interesting clue in tonight's episode [Spoiler Alert] was the reference to Charles and Ellie still being on the island at this stage, among the Others in a leadership position, although Richard Alpert says he doesn't answer to them. I had always assumed that Charles Widmore was behind the Dharma Initative all along, and that is still possible, although perhaps it is more likely that his family is involved (perhaps his "bad twin"?). But even more likely, perhaps, is that Charles Widmore collaborates with the Hanso Foundation and other Dharma Initative sponsors after being tricked into leaving the island, as he seeks to find a way to get it back.

Presumably the temple will do to Ben what it did to Rousseau's companions? I found the reference to a loss of innocence interesting. There have occasionally been hints of "Eden" in discussion of the show, and just recently I found myself wondering whether we have not been given an important clue that Desmond is "Adam", since he's the only character we've encountered running around paradise naked...

April Fools Day at Aisanbrauns

This specialist academic bookseller's April Fools' Day sale is always entertaining for students of the Bible and/or the Ancient Near East. This year is no exception.

XL Biblical Studies Carnival

The latest Biblical Studies Carnival is up at James Gregory's blog. This is not a joke!

The next one will be... HERE, at Exploring Our Matrix! That's not a joke either!

Biblioblog Top 50 - March 2009

The Top 50 Biblioblogs list for this past month has been posted. I came in at number 3 this time.

Evidence for a Semitic Exclave in the Lower Alpine Region

It was some years ago that I learned of research pointing to some remnant of the lost tribes of Israel having settled in the territory of what is now Switzerland. The evidence is both linguistic and cultural. Having left a land flowing with milk and honey, how would they maintain these key components of their traditional diet in their new home? Clearly one option would be to add both ingredients to chocolate. Such a rich recipe would indeed be "good for (bringing about) a shout (of joy)", which in Hebrew is, of course, tob le ron, from which is derived the name Toblerone.



Such evidence is irrefutable evidence in support of the hypothesis of a Semitic exclave in the lower Alpine region.


And so, as they say in Hebrew, "yad sloof lirpa yppah"!

(HT Oliver Stegen)

Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Automated Spell-Checker Technology

Historically, Biblical scholarship entrails note only the stud of periscopes in an attempt to make sense of Pacific passages, butt also the publication of woks of erudition in print formal, in boots printed on pauper and made available through perverts of wars which include suck volumes.

In the contemporary age, however, the spell-checking technology could potentially spell (if you wall excuse the punt) the down fall of traditional pub licking. By auto-making the process where by not only the spelling but also the gram mare of scholarly works are reviewed and reviled, there is a Lear d'Anger that boots and Arctic alls witch cloud heave maid an imported contribution to scholar ship may be turned into an inn coherent mess.

When the Bile move sin to the Pict urn, then hose with personnel faith in Chris may fine the situation particularly problem attic.

Watt may be requited two counter top mope in this direction May bee a return to Earl liar modes of production and distribution of works of Cholera ship, and purr hops Evan the Sue of simple err technology its self.