Biblioblog Top 50 May 2009

The Biblioblog Top 50 for this past month (May 2009) has been posted. I didn't do too badly, and am simply grateful that my status as a biblioblog hasn't been revoked when most of my posts this past month have been about LOST, panentheism, and various other topics that may well be very interesting (I certainly think they are), but are only marginally biblioblogical.

The biblioblog listings are always worth a look, even for those who keep an eye on the biblioblogosphere anyway. I was made aware of a blog I didn't previously know about, run by a Romanian with interests in the Ancient Near East, ancient manuscripts, archaeology and much more. And for those of us who know Romanian, he has several other interesting blogs that are definitely worth a look.

Bine ati venit Theophyle in lista biblioblogurilor!

Quote of the Day (Cheryl Shepherd-Adams)

"The Discovery Institute seems to have given up on the pretense that intelligent design is a scientific enterprise. As in, this pretense is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its Maker. It's a stiff, bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't have nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-pretense!"

-- Cheryl Shepherd-Adams at the Stand Up for REAL Science blog,

echoing the famous Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch.

Review of Philip Clayton, Adventures in the Spirit

Here's a table of contents with links to the recent posts reviewing and interacting with Philip Clayton's book Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action.


Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Adventures in the Spirit: Part Five

The fifth and final part of Philip Clayton's Adventures in the Spirit is entitled "The Theological Adventure Applied". Chapter 15 turns attention from the natural sciences to the social sciences, which also raise challenging and important questions for theology. Psychology and anthropology both focus their attention to a significant degree on human meaning-making activities, and Clayton emphasizes that "The meaning project isn't marginal: it's at the center of our existence" (p.232). Yet the fact that "the construction of meaning is ubiquitous; it plays a role in all that humans do and think" (p.234) is felt to be disturbing by many religious believers, who wish to think of their religious beliefs and worldviews as the result of divine revelation rather than social construction. When the social sciences turn their attention to religious matters, they are felt to be as challenging if not more so than the natural sciences. Yet Clayton sees the insights of the human sciences as no more to be feared than the natural sciences. Embracing insights from these disciplines involves acknowledging that some kinds of God-talk tell us as much if not more about ourselves as/than about God (p.239). But the fact that religions are expressions of the human desire to make sense of our existence does not prove or disprove whether they have valid insights into our existence. To put it another way, social-scientific accounts, like those from the natural sciences, can offer much explanation of our religious behaviors, beliefs and even our conversions, but they do not demonstrate that our deep-seated search for meaning is in vain.

Chapter 16 engages in dialogue with Derrida. Heidegger is also a major dialogue partner, and he is quoted on p.245 as having written that "a faith that does not perpetually expose itself to the possibility of unfaith is no faith but merely a convenience". Much is said that is critical of the reduction in recent decades of "spirituality" to anything and everything humans do seeking personal fulfillment. Having engaged in much discussion of the metaphysical in the chapters that proceeded, Clayton here states that "When it comes to metaphysics, it is important to be minimalists, to import only as much metaphysical superstructure as is necessary. But how much metaphysical superstructure is enough?" (p.250). Some slightly spiritual forms of naturalism (as associated with thinkers such as Willem Drees or Ursula Goodenough) are mentioned (p.250), and the question is asked once again whether religion is fully accounted for by the perspectives of disciplines such as anthropology and psychology. The answer given, once again, is that these disciplines do indeed offer important explanations, yet without "explaining away". A key feature of Clayton's approach to theology is defined in terms of Spirit not being reduced to matter yet being inseparable from it - and in the same way, theology cannot simply "build castles in the air", but must undertake its metaphysical reflections in light of ever-increasing amounts of hard data from the sciences. He refers to this as "the humbling of theology in an age of science" (p.253). Clayton understands Derrida as not opposed to metaphysics, but rather as opposed to the "foreclosure" of metaphysics, which rather must remain forever open to further insights and revisions (pp.253-254).

Chapter 17, the final chapter, is the one in which I seem to have drawn the most asterisks in the margins. The title is "The Many Faces of Integration: Liberal Faith between Church, Academy and World", and it begins with the question of what "the actual mode of religious life" will look like when this model of "theology as adventure" is in fact lived. It takes courage, but is rewarding: "Just as pursuing differences and concerns in personal relationships leads to growth and intimacy, so wrestling with the tough challenges of our age leads to a stronger and more enduring form of faith" (p.256). The desire for integration between Christian heritage and contemporary thought means neither defending one's faith from progress in human knowledge in the sciences and other areas, nor abandoning the tradition altogether, and it is this middle way that is the heritage of liberal Christianity (p.256). Yet liberal Christianity has lost the powerful, prophetic voice it once had in spokespeople like William Sloane Coffin or Martin Luther King. To refind its voice, we must reclaim that center ground that refuses to pose everything in the black and white terms of fundamentalism, but also refuses to lose all sense of conviction by embracing a thoroughgoing relativism.

Clayton's vision is powerful and attractive, and my summary can scarcely do justice to it. Let me allow Clayton's own voice to be heard in his own words (p.263):

This vision for a new liberal theology represents a powerful calling. It takes some courage. It takes a prophetic voice. It takes a hatred of the trivial. It takes a willingness to be hard-nosed. It takes a constant refusal to become self-absorbed. At the heart of this vision lies the contention that liberal approaches to theology, by their very nature, work continually to integrate what humanity knows - our history, our science, our highest moral values, our involvement with political institutions - with the tradition handed down through the centuries.

...To be a liberal Christian is to return continually to the scriptures and traditions in the attempt to understand what are genuinely Christ-like responses. But to be a liberal Christian is not to take the inherited traditions as complete in themselves.

Providing quotations from other liberal Christian voices like Peter Berger or H. Richard Niebuhr, the balance between critical inquiry and passionate faith, skepticism and affirmation, is regarded as "the new liberalism's greatest strength" (p.264). The incarnation, the Wesleyan quadrilateral, and the concept of progressive revelation are also appealed to as models for this integrative approach.

Clayton's book, for those of us who are seeking to think deeply and critically about our own Christian faith and find once again the powerful and transformative voice that liberal Christianity had in the past, is not merely helpful but inspiring. Finding this to be the case in no way requires agreement with every conclusion drawn. It is the approach that is the broad heritage of those forms of Christianity that eschew the oversimplifications of fundamentalism that makes Clayton's approach so important. Because, ultimately, liberal Christian faith is not merely about embracing both Christianity and evolutionary biology, both religion and reason, but about doing so in a way that leads ultimately to proclamation and praxis that challenge injustice and structures of power that oppress, denigrate and mislead. Clayton invites readers to engage with, respond to and ultimately themselves practice and proclaim a Christianity that treats integrating our faith tradition with various areas of human knowledge as but a first step towards integrating human lives across boundaries of race, economic inequity, sexuality, and other divisions that result from oppression and injustice in its varied forms.

What more can I say? At this point what remains to be done is simply to thank Philip Clayton for writing this book, and encourage not only those interested in religion-science dialogue, but anyone interested in liberal Christian theology finding its prophetic voice once again, to read it and join in the conversation, and ultimately the adventure, in which Clayton invites us to participate.

Quote of the Day (Israel Finkelstein)

"[C]ollecting stories is one thing and preserving their older meanings and contexts is another. The underlying idea in many Biblical studies of the conservative camp, that old memories were orally transmitted, unchanged through the centuries, is unrealistic and somewhat naive. Old stories must have absorbed different layers of realities on their way down through the centuries until they were put in writing."

-- Israel Finkelstein, "Digging for the Truth: Archaeology and the Bible" in Brian B. Schmidt (ed.), The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) p.18.

Adventures in the Spirit: Part Four

In Part Four of Adventures in the Spirit, Philip Clayton focuses on one of the toughest theological issues, namely divine action. Abstract discussion of concepts of God are perhaps meaningless, but certainly far less interesting, unless one can give some account of what God does, of what difference the existence of God makes.

Chapter 12 begins by posing the issue sharply: theistic traditions like Christianity and Islam "have traditionally been committed to a robust account of the actions of God" and yet "Physical science, it appears, leaves no place for divine action", with the question being whether there is a conceptual framework that can offer more than either a passive God or one who is responsible for the few remaining "gaps" in what science can currently explain (p.186). But rather than accept a choice between God as only the "Divine Architect" who makes a universe that then runs on its own, and God as "Divine Repairman" who continually acts to fix what he made (presumably imperfectly) the first time around, Clayton suggests that what is needed is a "new theory of causation" that will allow one to speak of both divine causes and scientific explanation, in a way that does not suggest one competes with the other (p.189).

Clayton then goes on to relate the key concept of emergence discussed throughout his book and Aristotle's theory of causes (p.191), as well as quantum mechanics, which turns out to itself be entangled with metaphysical debates about causality (p.193). In introducing psychological causes into the discussion, Clayton emphasizes the potential of persons (and perhaps other complex organisms) to be open to divine influence. More ought to have been said about what forms such influence might take - would it be something imperceptible (and thus perhaps redundant), or might it be expressed more concretely (in a manner in keeping with theistic traditions) in dreams and visions and the like?

In subsequent discussion of this topic in chapter 13, the mind-body analogy will return even more explicitly than it did in chapter 12, in a way that deserves further consideration. Just as a biochemist might study any and every cell in a human body without ever detecting the intents and conscious actions of that human person, it may be that God's own action might be the course the universe is taking, without everything that happens within the divine body expressing God's conscious aims. Indeed, cancer might be a helpful image of evil within such a panentheistic analogy. Evil, like cancer, is part of the life of the body - it is simply a part of that whole that serves its own short-term ends of agrandisement at the expense of the whole.

Returning to Clayton's own treatment of the theme of agency (divine and human), key dialogue partners at this juncture are Whitehead and Schleiermacher. Panentheism changes the nature of the discussion, since "every action, since it takes place "within" the divine, represents an act of God in some sense" (p.211), and "the central insight of panentheism lies in the realization that the whole is not just the sum of all agents but, beyond that, also agent itself" (p.214).

Chapter 14 approaches the subject more specifically from the perspective of Christian theology. The challenge of the problem of evil is raised in a stark and honest fashion, demonstrating a key problem facing those who defend occasional divine intervention: if a human agent was able to lower a drawbridge over a river for an express train to cross, and sometimes chose not to do so, we would hold that person accountable for failing to act (p.218). Clayton chooses to focus on the question of divine action in connection with the life of Jesus. As a bare minimum, a Christian would hold to the "religious genius" view, i.e. the notion that there is a spiritual reality accessible to all, and Jesus knew how to mine its depths, or alternatively, had a particularly good "antenna" (p.222). But such a view does not justify speaking of any sort of divine action in the case of Jesus (p.223). After discussing the resurrection in terms of the disciples living after the pattern they had witnessed in Jesus' own life, Clayton gives an account of divine action in Jesus in terms of process theology: God's action is to lure rather than compel, and when someone such as Jesus aligns his own life with the divine lure, we are dealing simultaneously with divine and human action (pp.224-225). A useful contrast is made with the idea of plenary inspiration, in which human minds were presumably overridden so as to determine the precise words that would be written (p.225). Those who eschew such a view of Scripture presumably ought to be consistent and not make similar claims for divine control in other areas. And in drawing to a close this discussion of what Clayton terms a "kenotic" view, he expresses his inclination to not conclude that God worked physical miracles through Jesus (p.226). Divine action is to be located and experienced in human minds and lives.

Since Clayton has already addressed some of the factors that motivate one to adopt this sort of view rather than a more traditional supernatural, theistic form of Christianity: our scientific knowledge, pluralism and the problem of evil being just three relevant considerations (p.218). But from the other side, there will be those who will ask why anyone should bother clinging to such a highly revised form of Christianity, rather than simply ditching it and starting from scratch. I cannot provide Clayton's own answer yet (although he has a lot to say along these lines in the final part of the book, which will be the subject of the next post in this series). But I can provide my own. I assume it mirrors to at least a limited degree the answer early Christians might have given, since they too would have been asked "Why cling to a revised belief in this Jesus, rather than accepting that he was a failed Messiah and moving on with your lives?" What has made Christianity powerful from its early days and throughout the ages is precisely its act of reinterpretation of traditional categories. Rather than reinterpret Jesus as not the Messiah, early Christians reinterpreted what it means to be the Messiah. And this message has proven to have persistent value in challenging us to forego various forms of domination and to embrace the way of the cross, to not simply assume that our presuppositions are right but to subject them to close scrutiny. Those of us who have had a life-transforming encounter with Christianity wish to do justice to the power of that experience, without denying the complementary power of scientific and other rational ways of knowing.

It is the power of such a self-critical faith, as a natural expression of this core element of Christianity and as applied in recent centuries by the Liberal Protestant tradition, that Clayton will go on to explore further in the final part of his book.

Love Song to the Dark Lord

Jim Getz will be hosting the next Biblical Studies Carnival - do send him your posts! Jim's most recent post shared the following cartoon from David Hayward.

In deciding what to call this post, I opted to allude to the usual English title of the Gita Govinda. Not only did the title seem strangely fitting, but there are surely parallels between the modern devotional practice surrounding coffee and the role of Soma in ancient Vedic religion. I suppose an alternative title might be "coffee bhakti". But of course, the deity to which this post is dedicated has a serious competitor for our devotion once the morning rituals are over - that other dark lord...

The Flesh Became Word

Before the story, there was a human life, interconnected with other human lives.
A human life lived before and with God.
Through him stories were made, and at least some of the stories that came into being came into being in connection with him.
In those stories would be life, and that life would be light for human beings.
Another person, named John, came on the scene.
His story fed into the story we've already mentioned -
For many became inseparable from it -
Although apparently John too gave rise to stories all his own.
But for the early Christians, John's story was not the story.
The true story, that would give light down the ages, was coming into being.
The story is told in the silence,
and the silence has neither understood nor overcome it.
The story was told among those that might have been expected to be receptive,
but they often were not.
But to as many as heard it and believed it,
they found in the stories authority to consider themselves children of God,
children born not merely of human parentage but of the stories.
And the flesh became word, and was published among us,
And we read its glory,
Glory as of the unique Gospel
Full of grace and truth.
From the fullness of that story we have received one sort of grace after another:
The Torah, the story of Moses,
and Jesus' story verbalizing grace and truth.
No one has ever seen God;
The unique story, close to the Father's heart, gives us a glimpse.

Operation Aborted

I've occasionally found myself unable to visit my own blog in recent days, sometimes being met with an "operation aborted" message. I've looked into it and this seems to be caused by the "Followers" gadget that can be added in the side bar. So please do follow this blog, but until such time as Google fixes this problem, the followers will not be listed on the blog's main page itself. Hopefully this will help fix the problem.

Please do let me know if you ever experience any sort of technical issue with the blog. Believe me, this blog is here to be read, not to make reading it unnecessarily difficult, and I will do whatever I can to rectify any problems that are brought to my attention.

Adventures in the Spirit: Part Three

Part Three of Philip Clayton's Adventures in the Spirit is about Panentheism. Chapter 8 offers an introduction to panentheism and the closely related subject of process thought. A cumulative case is made for why panentheism might be adopted as a theological framework rather than classical theism. Clayton realizes that for some the attractiveness of panentheism is self-evident while others fail to see what the attraction is: the former tend to be philosophical theologians rather than systematic or biblical ones (p.120). Some feel that panentheism does less justice to the notion of God interacting with us in a personal way than classic theism does, but Clayton points out that it is not enough to simply express the desire to retain divine personhood, and he will go on to show that panentheism can do justice to God's status as "at least personal" and "more than personal". But in the present context, he emphasizes that the concept of "person" is "not a self-explanatory category" (p.122), and further reflection and exploration is needed no matter which sorts of language are to be applied to God.

Interacting with Spinoza and Hegel (among others), Clayton shows that the notion of God as infinite seems to lead naturally to panentheism, since the truly infinite must include all finite realities within itself (p.126). And yet (in contrast to a quotation from Hartshorne provided on p.119) the "in" of the concept of "everything in God" (panentheism) is to be viewed as a metaphor (p.128), particularly if we wish to use the language of God being in us or in the world, as well as vice versa.

Clayton articulates his view of religious language: "If one is to speak of the divine at all, one must speak analogically - even though all finite, human analogies are inadequate to the infinite God. If one chooses to speak, one will wish to use the best analogies available, while openly acknowledging their limitations" (p.129). He then goes on to expound further on why he believes that concepts such as emergence and panentheism are particularly helpful ones for thinking theologically in relation to our current understanding in the natural sciences and other disciplines. He warns once again, however, against assuming that the notion of the universe as becoming divine and not-yet-divine is the best that can be salvaged from traditional notions of God in light of modern science (pp.131-132). This represents an appropriate caution, firmly rooted in Clayton's understanding of theological language and of the history of theology. All analogies must ultimately be negated when applied to God (p.173), and the contributions of theologians from the past have been found wanting time and time again not only when they have refused to engage contemporary currents of thought and knowledge, but also when they have allowed themselves to be carried uncritically along with them.

Chapter 9 offers a postfoundationalist approach to pneumatology and the language of Spirit. Postfoundationalism, Clayton explains, means the approach to reason that seeks coherence rather than seeking to build the entire edifice of thought on a sure foundation that can be neutrally established (p.134). A key area that requires reconsideration is how to think about Spirit other than in the classic terminology and concepts of substances. Once again, the analogy of mind and body is introduced, with spirit representing an irreducible level and aspect of human existence, but not a separate substance introduced into and distinct from the physical constituents of human persons (p.145). The dual pitfalls Clayton identifies (p.146) are in introducing the language of spirit at too low a level (leading to vitalism or pantheism) or in abstraction from what we know about human persons (leading to dualism). Drawing on the analogy with human bodies, the regularities of the universe can usefully be compared to the autonomic functions of our bodies (p.148). And once again, Clayton warns against simply following the logic of the analogy to its end, leaving room for God (and human persons?) to survive independently of their bodies (p.148). Before concluding this chapter, Clayton relates theology to anthropology, in a manner reminiscent of Peter Berger's treatment of this subject. Theological language points towards transcendence but at the same time tells us much about ourselves and the contexts within which we formulate our theologies (p.155).

Chapter 10 articulates a "trinitarian" process theology. It is not Trinitarian in the sense that it seeks to cohere with the traditional creedal formulations about God as triune, but in the sense that, in contrast to the dipolar theology of much process thought, Clayton is persuaded that theology requires a threefold structure. Helpful and challenging treatments are offered on topics such as God as not "a being", the "God above God", and the economic and immanent Trinity, with some fascinating interaction with Schelling in the process (if you'll excuse the pun). Towards the end of the chapter (cf. p.173), Clayton begins grappling with the Christological questions raised by his theology.

Chapter 11 is the last in part 3, and applies the notion of kenosis to creation. Cosmology is defined as an enterprise that must be scientifically well-informed but which remains inherently metaphysical (p.176). Clayton formulates an "open panentheism" in dialogue with open theism, addressing how each deals with the relationship between divine self-limitation and the problem of evil (p.179). In contrast to many panentheists, Clayton seeks to preserve the traditional doctrine of creation out of nothing (pp.183-4).

Clayton's articulation of his theological conclusions in this section continues to grapple with issues of method as well as with specific outcomes and conclusions. Some will feel that Clayton has gone too far in one direction, while others will claim he hasn't gone far enough. But Clayton's model of seeking to relate Christianity, the natural sciences and philosophical metaphysical questions in a serious and thoughtful way provides an excellent basis for such ongoing discussions.

The two remaining sections of the book will look at divine action and the broader practical application of the approach outlined thus far.

Muslims, Baptists and Sabeans in Sunday School

Today marked the second (and final, although I'm not sure anything in my class is really "final") of my Sunday school classes on Islam. We also touched on a number of key points about Baptist identity, which will make for a nice segue into what happens next: I'm going to take a break from teaching my class for the summer, while our pastor offers a summer Sunday school class on "Being Baptist". I'll be attending his class for its duration, along with as many of the other regular attendees in my own class as wish to.

In today's class, I went over the five pillars of Islam, but also emphasized that doing so no more gives a real sense of what Islam means to its followers, than learning some creeds or even reading the Bible would give an impression of what Christianity is.

One of the class participants had read a book by John Ankerberg which claimed that the Qur'an never uses the word "love". I had my Pocket PC with an English translation of the Qur'an that can be searched, as well as my printed copy of the Yusuf Ali rendering, and so I was able both to point out that this was incorrect. The main point I made in relation to this was that one shouldn't turn to a Christian apologist for one's information about Islam (how many Christians would be happy with the impression of their religion given by an apologist for Islam?).

There was also a question about whether Muslims view Christians (and others) as saved. in response to which I read Surah 2:62's statement (repeated twice more in the Qur'an) on the matter:

Verily, those who have attained to faith [in this divine writ], as well as those who follow the Jewish faith, and the Christians, and the Sabeans - all who believe in God and the Last Day and do righteous deeds - shall have their reward with their Sustainer; and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve.

I resisted the temptation to get sidetracked onto the Sabeans (i.e. the Mandaeans), in spite of my current interest in them. But I was struck this weekend to find in a footnote in the book by Asma Gull Hasan, Red, White, and Muslim: My Story of Belief, which mentioned the Sabeans, said that they might have been followers of St. John, and then went on to claim that they no longer exist!

The Only True God is Coming Soon!

While the estimate that The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context will be available in July has vanished from the publisher's catalogue, Amazon.com now lists the date as May 26th! There may only be a few more days to benefit from the pre-order discount Amazon is offering of 33% off.

It has been good to see interest in the book's subject matter staying alive in the blogosphere. April DeConick recently turned her blog's attention to the angel of the divine name. Jared Calaway blogged about God as the God of the Gods (and who the gods are of whom god is the god). Nick Norelli has reviewed books by Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado on monotheism and Christology. Christology and the Gospels came in as number 6 on Michael Bird's list of the next big things in New Testament studies, although I will be honest, I find Simon Gathercole's arguments for a "high" Christology in the Synoptics underwhelming. Mike Koke discussed monotheism and Christology in the context of the "parting of the ways". Bryan Bibb blogged about teaching the Shema in Hebrew.

Quote of the Day (Marilyn McEntyre)

"The question of which scriptural teachings are “non-negotiable,” and which bear multiple plausible interpretations, continues to divide the church, as it has ever since Peter and Paul debated the circumcision and dietary laws."

-- Marilyn McEntyre, "Dogma and Disagreement", God's politics

Reading Greek, Syriac and Aramaic on a Pocket PC

I am quite sure that the number of people who have a deep desire to be able to read ancient languages on their Pocket PC is small indeed. But the fact that texts that should work are available online might lead one to hope. Yet most of the texts I've tried confront major issues. Aramaic and Syriac texts for Pocket e-Sword simply can't be opened. Greek text files of Josephus and Philo show accented letters as little boxes. Is the problem with my rather antiquated little iPaq? Or is it simply that so few people actually try to use these files that no one has noticed the bugs, or if they've noticed, no one has dealt with them?

I've tried several different programs - Gramcord's Olive Tree software, Pocket e-Sword, Hebrew Reader, Mobipocket reader. But there are still some files that don't open at all, or don't open as anything readable, in any of the programs I've tried.

Suggestions, remedies, and alternatives are welcome!

Spirit Cry review of The Burial of Jesus

Cameron Horsburgh at Spirit Cry has posted a review of my book, The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. Thank you, Cameron!

Adventures in the Spirit: Part Two

Part Two of Philip Clayton's book Adventures in the Spirit focuses on a (perhaps the) key concept for Clayton and many others seeking to relate religion and science, traditional theological concepts such as God and the soul on the one hand and data from physics and biology on the other: Emergence.

Chapter 4 begins by noting that, while it has been common for theologians down the ages to use science to reconceive God, but in fact allowing science to dictate what we do and do not (or can and cannot) say about God is in fact a mistake. It is important to take the scientific perspectives and data completely seriously, but that does not mean treating science as though its results lead without further reflection or consideration to certain theological conclusions (p.64).

Much modern science has proceeded by "reducing" phenomena to its consituent parts, and this has been an extremely successful method in many respects. But there is a growing acknowledgment that there are emergent phenomena, i.e. aspects of complex entities and organisms that are not simply explicable in terms of the behaviors or properties of its building blocks. In other words, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. While this is often defined as a "third way" between materialism and dualism (particularly in the case of human minds, for instance, as being more than brain chemistry but not therefore to be explained by introducing another "spiritual substance" into the equation), Clayton also emphasizes that emergence needs to be understood as an evolutionary phenomenon, as new properties emerge over the course of cosmic, and eventually biological, evolution (p.65). The broader concept of emergence is not itself a scientific theory, but rather an observation about shared features of those points of transition between various levels of reality - for instance, from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, from biology to psychology and anthropology and so on (p.66).

There is a "strong" version of emergence theory, which Clayton himself defends, and which argues that natural history produces new "things" and not merely new properties, and that these new levels of existence can exercise downward causation as causes in their own right (p.73). To give an example, human minds can be regarded as influencing the chemistry of the brain and the behavior of the body, and not merely as resulting from brain and body components.

Chapter 5 begins with the shift from the ancient view of entities as static, with the problem of mind approached "from the top down", to the rise of evolutionary understandings. In a treatment that goes into much more detail than I will attempt to do justice to here, Clayton explains how modern natural science has brought us to the conclusion that the great "philosophers from Plato to Descartes (and many of the religious traditions!) were wrong: there is no absolute dividing line between mind and matter" (p.80). Reductive physicalists, however, are no better, since they simply deal with human cognition and qualia by failing to acknowledge their existence. Emergence does better justice to what we find in nature, allowing that new mental capacities, like new physical ones, can arise as peaks out of (and as a result of) the evolutionary process (pp.80-81). The remainder of the chapter argues that science need not be reductionistic and needs to find ways to study emergent properties scientifically, rather than deny their distinctiveness by assuming that they are fully accounted for simply as the sum of their parts.

In chapter 6, Clayton seeks to construct an apologetic argument that takes scientific naturalism seriously (pp.88-89). One level of emergent reality is that studied by anthropology, and in a statement that echoes themes explored in the final part of the book, Clayton writes: "The construction of meaning is ubiquitous; it plays a role in all that humans do and think...Religion is the attempt to conceive the universe as being humanly significant" (p.92).

In asking how to think theologically and metphysically about science and human existence, Clayton mentions as one option what he calls radically emergent theism. As an example he mentions Samuel Alexander's 1918-1919 Gifford Lectures, published (and in our time available in the public domain) as Space, Time, and Deity. Clayton summarizes Alexander's view as follows: "What humans call "God" is just the emergent property of spirituality in the universe. And "God" is simply the universe becoming aware of itself" (p.95). Since this might seem an extremely appealing option for an emergentist and a panentheist, it seems appropriate to consider the reasons why Clayton rejects this option.

Let me begin by clarifying that Alexander's own view is that the universe is "not yet God" but is evolving into something that has such a quality. And so Clayton is right that Alexander's viewpoint is not theism in any traditional sense (p.95). It is also a fair point that "Alexander's sort of immediate connection between emergent patterns in nature and metaphysics is too direct" (p.95). In essence, such a view says that it is "emergence/evolution all the way up" rather than it being "turtles all the way down", and thus has little explanatory power. I would like, however, to highlight some positive aspects of this sort of approach, as well as pointing out how it is possible to formulate a "radically emergent theism" that avoids one of the key pitfalls or points of criticism with respect to Alexander's articulation thereof.

First, to the extent that theology represents a human attempt to construct meaning that takes seriously our contemporary scientific knowledge, using evolution and emergence as a theological metaphor seems highly appropriate, provided we recognize that God is probably no more truly like an evolving organism than like a watchmaker, or a father, or any other metaphor that has been used by human beings. Moreover, having rejected dualism with respect to the spiritual/mental aspect of human existence, it proves somewhat awkward to account for why a fundamental dualism of substance is posited in the case of God, while maintaining in so many other aspects the analogy between God/universe and the human mind/body. Furthermore, an approach that treats what we call God as the soul of (a classic metaphor) and an emergent phenomenon of the universe seems to fit well with Clayton's argument against reductionism, and allows us to explain how God can be present and yet not detected by human science: the reason is not because there is nothing that corresponds to the features traditionally attributed to souls and/or minds, but because these are not things that can be detected alongside the matter and chemistry of human beings, but are emergent from the relationship thereof. This metaphor allows one to argue that, in a sense, God is as real as you or I - and faces some of the same sorts of skepticism from reductionists.

Nor need one necessarily think of the universe as "evolving into God", or find this metaphor too far removed from theism (or at least from Christian panentheism). One option is to regard our universe as simply a tiny component of the divine being, one of many universes, which can come into and blink out of existence as cells in a human body do, without this undermining the ongoing existence of the human person in question. Indeed, as many process theologians have maintained, it may be that God is eternal and has always been embodied in (or emergent from) some universe/multiverse. If this fails to answer the question of where such an emergent deity first came from, that problem is no more answered by classical theism than by this sort of emergent panentheism. And of course, another alternative is to regard our universe as formed, as it were, in the womb of God (using the imagery popularized in recent times by Jürgen Moltmann, that of the Kabbalistic concept of zimzum or tzimtzum), so that our universe may indeed be evolving, but may be within the matrix of a larger divine reality. But at any rate, there are versions of a "radically emergent theism" that seem to have many of the advantages Clayton looks for in theological models, while not necessarily having the fatal problems he believes they do. And so although Clayton states that "One should resist any straight-line extrapolation from scientific emergence to a metaphysical theory of deity as the sum of all emergent spiritual properties" (p.97), it is unclear that we ought not to at least pursue that line of reasoning as far as it can go, and supplement rather than supplant it with resources from traditional theism.

Other important emphases in this chapter include that God ought not to be conceived as less than personal, and that while making room for religious faith there must also be an appropriate tentativeness and humility about our knowledge and our formulations (pp.98-99).

In chapter 7 there are further considerations of radically emergent theism, and an attempt to articulate a "moderately emergent theism" that does not follow the insight from emergence quite so far. After exploring in brief a number of classic theological topics (such as creation, Christology, pneumatology and eschatology) - topics to some of which he will return in later chapters - Clayton notes that the notion that we owe our existence to something radically different from ourselves is there whether we attribute our origin ultimately to random chance and material forces or to a divine eternal will (p.115). And this is one of the most delightful aspects of Clayton's theological work in this section: his acknowledgment that the theological enterprise does not eliminate the element of mystery from our existence, and the humble acknowledgment that some questions will remain unanswered (at least for the time being) from our standpoint within the midst of the history of humanity, our planet and our universe.

In Part Three, Clayton will explore panentheism. Stay tuned...

Adventures in the Spirit: Part One

In Part One of his book Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action, Philip Clayton explores the methods of philosophy and theology. Chapter 1 is entitled "Critical Faith: Theology in the Midst of the Sciences", and it begins by setting forth the goal of the studies included here, which is "to develop and defend a form of contemporary theology that shares in the adventure of human inquiry across the sciences and philosophy, across the humanities and the world religions, while maintaining contact with the broad tradition of Christian belief and practice" (p.22). He then lays out six major theses as the starting point for all that follows, making for a single page as a power-packed starting point. I will not list all the theses, but they included statements such as "Theologians cannot simply presuppose the truth of the Christian tradition but must be concerned in an ongoing way with the question of the truth of their central assertions" and "Although a deep and genuine engagement with the sciences and philosophy brings with it certain risks, theologians have no choice but to make themselves (and their conclusions) vulnerable in this way" (p.22).

Clayton then proceeds to explain that he is attempting to articulate an approach to theology, and to critical faith, that does not yet exist, but which is necessitated by the current context within which theology is done (p.23). He takes it as an encouraging sign that attacks against such a position come from both sides: conservatives criticizing the embracing of doubt and the revision of traditional theological positions, radical liberals criticizing the preservation of so much from the Christian tradition (p.25). One of the greatest challenges to an honest faith is "to acknowledge the possibility of the impossibility of religious belief" (p.25) - in other words, to accept that even the question of the existence of God must be subjected to scrutiny, and its status as controversial in our time must be acknowledged (p.26).

As an example of this sort of approach, Clayton turns to the writings of Wolfhart Pannenberg (pp.26-29). Pannenberg acknowledges that, if history proves unable to demonstrate the resurrection of Jesus, "faith" cannot do what history cannot. Looking for assistance for those who do not find Pannenberg's historical arguments for the resurrection persuasive, Clayton next turns to Charles Peirce (pp.29--32), advocating his approach to truth as a guide to the theological enterprise. Peirce's view reminded me of John Hick's notion of "eschatological verification" - truth is defined as that which those who investigate a question are ultimately fated to agree upon, but in the mean time, we may be left in the midst of the process of seeking truth, as yet unable to be certain about the outcome of the process. One consequence of understanding the quest for truth - and thus the task of theology - as a process is the inevitablity of the need for ongoing reformation and reformulation of doctrines and theological concepts (p.33). The risk in such an approach is acknowledged, but the alternative represents for Clayton a return to the Dark Ages, an attempt to use the scriptures of one's religious tradition to justify basing theology on "outdated scientific cosmologies and empirically false claims about the world, rather than basing theological reflection on the best available knowledge we have about the universe" (p.35).

Clayton argues (p.36) that this approach is inherently Christian because it takes seriously Jesus' call to serve rather than be served (Mark 9:35):

The theology that exists in the midst of the sciences is a kenotic discipline, from the Greek kenosis, "self-emptying" (see Phil 2:5-8)...We will find that the stance that is most foreign to theology is to "lord it over" others (Mark 10:42) - to stand, as it were, above the fray of the human pursuit of knowledge and to claim for oneself, a mere mortal, that final position of authority that belongs to God alone. Yet is that not precisely what one does when one dismisses the best results of the human pursuit of knowledge from the standpoint of (one's particular understanding of) divine revelation? Far better to have acted in humility and to have claimed less for oneself than one might otherwise have done, leaving it to history and to the progression of knowledge to vindicate, or to falsify, one's own position in the end.

In chapter 2, Clayton compares religious and theological truth, asking what the unique methods of theological inquiry are and how we know what we know about God. In other words, he explicitly raises some of the most challenging questions about the basis of the theological enterprise. After some consideration of the question of how science is defined and what its methods are, Clayton suggests that religious truth should not simply be defined as the opposite of science, however easy it has proved to do so. Examining the nature of science and religion in light of recent studies, Clayton eventually notes the irony that a significant number of contemporary religious believers have significant doubts about the truth claims of their tradition, and thus it may be that many "religious believers may actually evidence a more tentative, hypothetical stance toward their beliefs than many scientists do" (p.47). As the chapter nears its conclusion, Clayton suggests that religion and science have more common ground than has often been acknowledged, but neither are they simply identical in their methods and approaches (pp.49-51).

Chapter 3 turns to a tough question for the contemporary dialogue between religion and science: is it really a "new adventure for theology" or merely an attempt to hijack science in a quest for religion's legitimacy? Unless core religious beliefs are opened to scrutiny as part of the dialogue, the question becomes a legitimate accusation (p.52). The advantage of a critical approach is that, even though there is no guarantee that the results will be true, nevertheless "rational discourse offers our best available means for recognizing and eliminating bias and prejudice and for maximizing the odds of holding true beliefs about the world" (p.53). Using the notion of "traction" to illustrate the importance of seeking to substantiate one's claims, Clayton then describes three possible stages in the dialogue between science and religion. The first stage is "mere dialogue", while the second stage involves a "committment to withdraw those assertions that are counter-indicated by the overall available evidence" (p.54). The third stage is a "most demanding type of science-religion discourse" which "embraces the full intent of the Peircian-Habermasian procedural account of rationality", not merely withdrawing claims that are counter-indicated by the evidence, but actively seeking to maximize traction between religion and science, and seeking those conversations that can lead to this end (p.56). Such a stage-three committment to rationality will require "a religious faith that can co-exist with high levels of uncertainty and openness to change" (p.57), and Tillich is shown to have already anticipated many characteristics of what such a faith would need to look like. The sort of religion that engages science in this way is not that of the private sphere of personal experience and preference, but is in essence metaphysics. "The theology (or metaphysics) that comports with science must be hypothetical, pluralistic, fluid in its use of empirical and conceptual arguments, continually open to revision" (p.61).

Stage three discourse means that "The scientist and the religious believer can share the same motivation: to extend human understanding as far as it will go...If the mystery of reality is infinitely deep, no progression of understanding threatens it" (p.62).

The remainder of the book represents Clayton's own attempt to put his approach into practice, and it is appropriate to emphasize at this stage that, regardless whether one finds this or that individual conclusion in the remainder of the book persuasive, the approach to theology in the present age set forth thus far is provocative, challenging, insightful, and compelling.

Blog posts on parts 2-5 will follow. If you can't wait, Bob Cornwall is already way ahead of me...

LOST: Where To From Here?

Ben Shapiro at Big Hollywood has some interesting philosophical reflections on LOST, coupled with some speculations about what happens next (HT SF Signal).

Islam in Sunday School

Today in my Sunday school class we talked about Islam. In recent weeks, we had turned to the subject of how Christians might/should view other religions, and it was felt that those in the class would benefit from learning more about other religions. It is hard, if not impossible, to discuss how one might view them without knowing something about them, after all! Much of this resulted from one person in the class expressing surprise that I'm pretty sure others felt when they discovered that Muslims believe in the virgin birth but not the divinity of Jesus.

There were other surprises for some today, I'm quite sure. We started off with an activity that I've used in my university classes on Islam. I handed out copies of the Apostles' Creed, and asked everyone to underline those things they thought Muslims would disagree with. (I think the original idea for the activity came from Alfred Guillaume's classic introduction to Islam).

Without in any way negating points about which Christians and Muslims would disagree - such as whether Jesus was crucified - I also sought to counter some stereotypes, and in particular to emphasize that most Christians and most Muslims understand their scriptures as justifying if not encouraging them to live in peace with their neighbors, while for those who desire conflict, verses that might justify violence can be found as easily in the Bible as in the Qur'an, if not more so.

We only managed to touch briefly on the legacy of British colonialism in relation to the Islamic world today, the status of women, and even fundamentals subjects such as the Five Pillars and the Hadith. And so it looks like the overview we began today will continue for at least another week.

LOST: Checkmate

Some excellent reflections on the season 5 finale of LOST have been posted at Entertainment Weekly by Doc Jensen (HT Carmen Andres, who also has posted her own thoughts about the episode). Here's a sample, which represents his own theory about the significance of certain events:

Much of the castaways’ history — including the crash of Oceanic 815 — has been molded and manipulated by the entity that is the Nameless Man In Black, an intricate, divine conspiracy whose ultimate goal was to kill Jacob. That was the significance of Alterna-Locke’s gloating line: “And you have no idea what I’ve gone through to be here.” But what the Adversary didn’t know was that Jacob had been doing some plotting of his own to counter all of his enemy's moves. And in the last moment of the Jacob/Alterna-Locke/Ben showdown, I think what we saw was Alterna-Locke realizing that he’d been checkmated. ''They're coming,'' Jacob sputtered — referring, I believe, to Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the entire quantum leaping cavalry. I think the Adversary completely understood the significance of what Jacob was saying — and it pissed him off big time. Hence, why Alterna-Locke angrily kicked Jacob into the fire. Hence, that scowl on his face. It was the pout of defeat.

You should definitely read the whole thing if you are a fan. How often do you get Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Perry Como pitted against one another to make sense of the religious themes of a science fiction TV show?

I've also found myself wondering if the riddle isn't an explanation of what happened in the season finale. "What lies (i.e. deceives) in the shadow of the statue? That which protects us all": in some way, through its very existence, Jacob's Enemy is crucial to our ongoing existence. Somehow for there to be life and existence, the shadow side (to which the riddle question itself alludes) cannot be eliminated altogether, it must simply be held in check. (For those thinking that "That which protects us all" might be the island, there's a problem: insula is a feminine noun in Latin, while "he/that which" in Richard's answer is ille, the masculine form).

I also remembered John Locke's question to Christian Shepherd (or someone impersonating him) in the cabin. While the claim to be able to speak for Jacob makes me suspect that pseudo-Christian might not be trustworthy, I nonetheless suspect that he was being truthful in saying that John was right about why he was there: Because he had been chosen to be. Jacob's enemy required someone who would believe in his own importance sufficiently to believe he was to lead the island, and believe he must die and be willing to go through with it.

LOST: What Lies in the Shadow of the Season 5 Finale?

Let me say it from the outset: this post will discuss last night's episode, the finale of the penultimate season of LOST. If you don't want to learn what happens in that episode just yet, or you don't want answers to some of the questions viewers of that episode were left with, then read no further. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Let me begin with a translation (kindly provided by Chris Jones) of the answer to the question/riddle "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" The answer was spoken by Richard Alpert and is "Ille qui nos omnes servabit". We all heard that, but those of us who never studied Latin, or didn't catch it, were still left wondering. And so here's the translation: “He who will protect us all.”

But let's back up a bit. The episode began in the shadow of the statue, as it were, just as the Black Rock was drawing near to the island. There on the shore we see Jacob wearing white, speaking to another man wearing black - returning us to the duality of two sides, dark and light, that John Locke spoke of at the beginning of the first season, explaining both Backgammon and the show's underlying mythology. Whether the background is more Zoroastrian (two eternal opposing powers) or Mormon (two siblings, both sons of God, in conflict) we've yet to discover. But I will say this: even though the white hats/shirt vs. black hats/shirt symbolism seems straightforward, that very simplicity leaves me suspicious. As Frank Lapidus said in the episode, those who find they need to emphasize their status as "the good guys" are rarely the good guys. And so, for all Jacob's gentleness, I can't help but wonder if there isn't greater complexity to the show's mythology than "light vs. darkness" might initially suggest.

Jacob, at the start of the episode, is weaving. There are heiroglyphics on the tapestry that I can't help with, but there was also Greek writing. The top line is a quote from the Odyssey: "Soi de theoi tosa doien osa fresi sesi menoinas": "And for thyself, may the gods grant thee all that thy heart desires". The bottom line says "theoi de toi olbia doien": "May the gods give thee blessings".

His weaving is a metaphor. He has apparently been trying to persuade the other man on the island that he is wrong for some time, bringing people to the island who inevitably follow the same path of conflict and destruction. And so Jacob goes out into the world and begins weaving together the lives of various characters we have come to know and love. But to what end? Presumably convinced that this time he can demonstrate what he has failed to in the past. We also learn at the start of the episode that Jacob's interlocutor wants to kill Jacob, and is looking for a loophole. By the end of the episode, in what may be the most shocking moment on LOST so far, he seems to have found it. The "rules" of the "game" they are playing still need to be fully unveiled. Might it be that here we have two opposing forces playing a game, with humanity as the playing pieces?

Tonight we also learned what was in Ilana's box, and that was the "most shocking moment" ever on LOST that I mentioned earlier. In the box was the body of John Locke, which had never left the cargo hold of the plane. Jacob's opponent was impersonating him this whole time. Here too we find a complication of the show's use of religious imagery. It was shocking to discover that the apparent resurrection was a counterfeit. And there was still more religious imagery from the Bible, not only as Ben said that "John" was ushered into Jacob's presence like Moses, but also as Ilana's group carried their box on poles in a manner reminiscent of the ark of the covenant. The idea that God (or Jacob) is weaving the details of our lives towards a greater purpose is one that many today resonate with, but here too we must be wary of assuming we know who the "good guys" are.

We also discovered that whoever Ilana and company were looking for in the cabin, he wasn't there and hadn't been for a long time. They further state that someone else had been using it. Was it Christian Shepherd? Or someone impersonating him? Those are but a few of the questions we were left with after tonight's episode. The most obvious question is what the results of the detonation of the bomb will be. But also unanswered is what happens now that Jacob was stabbed and burned, what the significance of the ring of ash around the cabin was, and the fact that Ilana's group found it had been broken, and what Jacob's (final?) words were (it sounded like he said "Karnak" before adding "They're coming"), and what they meant. Also an important question is the relationship between Jacob's counterpart and the smoke monster. Since the smoke monster takes varied forms, and told Ben to do whatever Locke tells him to, my guess is that perhaps the "other man" at the start of the episode is the smoke monster. Notice how the monster doesn't come to Ben until Locke is out of sight.

The episode ended with a negative, as it were, of the familiar logo: black on white rather than vice versa. Has the polarity between the two opposing forces changes as a result of what has happened so far? We'll find out, presumably, in 2010. In the mean time, I will soon begin blogging my way through the recent book Lost and Philosophy: The Island Has Its Reasons edited by Sharon M. Kaye. I hope that will help provide a tiny bit of relief to those suffering from LOST withdrawal over the coming months.

The Evolution of God

Hachette Book Group would like to offer five copies of Robert Wright's brand new book The Evolution of God to five readers of this blog. I will have copies sent to the first five who either send me an e-mail or leave a comment requesting a copy. I'm afraid that this opportunity is only for blog readers in North America, and that copies of the book cannot be sent to post office boxes.

Here's the publisher's description of the book:

In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.

Nearly a decade in the making, The Evolution of God is a breathtaking re-examination of the past, and a visionary look forward.

Robert Wright is the author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods. He is a contributing editor to the New Republic, Time, and Slate, and he runs http://www.bloggingheads.com/.

The View From Everywhere: Impartiality, Objectivity and Other Ideals

I'm grateful to Pat McCullough for drawing my attention to recent posts on the blog In The Corner With Matt. Among other interesting things, I found a quote from a recent book by Rodney Stark about history and evidence that paralleled some of my own thoughts over the past couple of days.

The "postmodern" challenge against "objectivity" and "impartiality" is helpful inasmuch as it leads us to humbly acknowledge that we have not achieved objectivity or impartiality ourselves. But those who go further, and who denigrate the very notion that it is worth trying to be objective or impartial, go too far, to an extreme that in any other area would be dismissed as ridiculous. Imagine if someone claimed that, because a nation's criminal justice system fails to achieve real justice for all, and because notions of justice differ from country to country, therefore there is no point in having a criminal justice system at all. I doubt many would follow them in calling for the elimination of the police forces and the courts.

When it comes to historical study, we do consistently fail to achieve objectivity. There is no way we can ever view the evidence "from nowhere", much less "from a God's eye perspective". But that no more makes the ideal inappropriate to aim for, than does our failure to love perfectly, or even to attain our precise weight-loss aims. Indeed, that last example has been known to illustrate, in the experience of many, just how dangerous the line of thinking is that says "I failed to achieve my goal, therefore I will stop trying". The quest to attain a goal is often valuable, even if the goal is never in fact obtained.

Certain sorts of "postmodern" thought (usually of a popular rather than a philosophical or methodologically sophisticated sort), by rejecting the value of seeking to have one's views challenged by an "objective reality" (or simply by the perspectives of others on a matter), help to reinforce the very certainties and hegemonies they supposedly wish to undermine. Instead of "certain because it corresponds to evidence", we are left with the feeling of certainty about my own and my group or culture's own narrative and perspective. There is value in challenging the "tyranny" of dominant narratives and perspectives, but an approach to truth that allows each his or her own "truth" in fact does nothing to address the competing truth claims of the tyrannical, of the bigoted, of the torturers. If claims to objectivity have been used to dominate, claims to radical and absolute uncertainty leave only power to decide who wins, and that does not represent progress. Nor does the pop-pomo perspective offer help to those who, inevitably being deluded, might deeply desire to become less so, even if they can never hope to be entirely free from the constraints of that old adage, "to err is human".

The alternative is to quest for absolute truth, or at least for objectivity or impartiality, while humbly acknowledging that our own understanding will inevitably not correspond perfectly to the way things really are (or were, for those of us working in historical studies). If there is no "view from nowhere", and the "view from anywhere" leaves little room for anything other than contentment for each of us in our own isolated ignorance, what we need is the "view from everywhere" - or at least, the view from as many places as possible. It is through the adoption of critical realism, and an openness to hearing the stories and perspectives of others without assuming beforehand either that theirs is good for them and mine is good for me, or that I am right and they are wrong, that will allow us to continue to learn and grow in understanding, while avoiding the shortcomings and pitfalls of the approach characteristic of modernity.

Of course, that's just my perspective on this subject. But past experience leads me to think that it is possible not only to change one's mind, but to learn, by which I mean improving one's knowledge about the way things really are, and not simply adding the delusions of others to one's own collection.

Quote of the Day (Denis Diderot)

“Doubts in the matter of religion, far from being acts of impiety, ought to be seen as good works, when they belong to a man who humbly recognizes his ignorance and is motivated by the fear of displeasing God by the abuse of reason.”

- Denis Diderot, Addition aux Pensées philosophiques, par. 1, in Diderot, Oeuvres Complète (1875), 1:158 (quoted by Philip Clayton).

Around the Blogosphere

There have been some incredibly substantive posts around the blogosphere over the past couple of days. In the domain of New Testament: Loren Rosson has an extensive overview and review of John P. Meier's latest volume on the historical Jesus. Michael Barber considered the historicity of the temple incident. Mike Koke asked about pseudonymous works in the canon. David Ker wrestled with the relationship between history and hagiography. Unorthodoxology reviewed Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted.

Anumma asks whether it is worth scholars' efforts to debunk claims like those made in Angels and Demons, and offers these words of wisdom: "Sadly, it turns out that a decade of graduate work in philological-linguistic biblical studies does not an able marketing executive or a sexy talking head make." Gypsy Scholar looks at Samson as suicide bomber.

On religion and science, Michael Dowd explains why those who debate God's existence misunderstand the meaning of "God". Clashing Culture asks why there is no controversy over "theistic embryology". John Pieret also has some things to say about embryology and creationism.

And yet, if you look at the recent list of the awesomest blogs by the smartest people, most of the aforementioned discussion is not even noticed...

Cafeteria Christianity

A comment on my previous post got me thinking about the image of "cafeteria Christianity" - the idea being of a smorgasbord from which one picks and chooses, which is not in and of itself necessarily a bad thing.

I'd like to explore the metaphor further. All who consider themselves Christians are in the cafeteria. The difference is that some of us enter delighting the buffet, eager to taste new things and help ourselves to a little of this and a little of that, aware that we are not eating absolutely everything that is on the menu. Others simply enter and say "I'll have what he's having" and believe that they are tasting everything, when in fact what their pastor, family, church or denomination is serving is never everything Christianity has to offer, never everything "the Bible says", never everything that Christianity is, was or has been.

Going even further, none of us are eating precisely what - or as - the earliest Christians ate. That's because even when one follows the same recipes, the cafeteria itself has changed. It is also because the claim to maintain earliest Christianity ignores the diversity evidenced in the New Testament. Some items on the menu seem to be mutually exclusive. Christianity's cafeteria has never served only a small range of food items, much less only one.

The benefit of acknowledging the fact that we all are either picking and choosing ourselves, or allowing others to pick and choose for us, is that it allows us to make an informed choice. There is nothing that obligates someone who has been eating the same sort of food all their life to try something new. But for those of us who dare to do so, even (perhaps especially) when we find there are things served in the cafeteria that we do not like, that are not to our taste, we return to those recipes that we personally enjoy and appreciate them in a new way. And sometimes the unfamiliar tastes of that "other stuff" grows on us, and we find that as our lives go on, some foods we enjoyed as children begin to seem bland, while spicier fare that we found unpalatable as children we now relish.

Let me close by noting that the cafeteria is full of people debating the merits of this or that food. But the point of the cafeteria is not simply to stay there, but to feed there and then go forth with fresh strength and energy to do something more useful than simply debate food tastes.

Bon appetit!

[Addendum: I realized after posting this that I hadn't even included the question of other religions in my treatment of this metaphor. Let me just add a few more points. First, being committed to a restaurant doesn't mean you never eat food from anywhere else. Second, the fact that you are eating in a Chinese restaurant doesn't necessarily mean you are eating Chinese food. Third, many recipes, even if genuinely traditionally associated with one particular culture or part of the world, may still be influenced by or require spices from elsewhere.]

Other Religions in Sunday School

Today in my Sunday school class we continued to discuss how we as Christians might, and should, view other religious traditions. To facilitate this, the pastor and I will provide an overview about some major world religions in next week's class.

Providentially or coincidentally, I found that I had taken along as scrap paper some notes from a talk I gave at Butler, as part of a series called "Loving Your Neighbors, Understanding Their Faiths". In it, I presented some Biblical reasons for Christians to expect to find they can learn from other religions.

I began with John 1, which emphasizes that the Word "enlightens every human being coming into the world". That itself should lead us to expect that God is revealed not only in Jesus, or in the Bible, but elsewhere. More than that, the concept of the Word (Logos) is itself an example of something from another religious tradition (Stoic pantheism) that Jews and then Christians found they could utilize in expressing their own faith. After Taoism came up, I also mentioned the fact that, when the Bible was translated into Chinese, the translators rendered John 1:1 as "In the beginning was the Way (Tao)".

Acts 17 is another key text in thinking about this subject. There we see Paul disagreeing with Greek idol-worship, but we also find him depicted in terms echoing the story of Socrates. In Acts 17:28 two Greek sources are quoted: "'For in him we live and move and have our being'. As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'"

Epimenides' poem Cretica is quoted twice in the New Testament. In the poem, Minos addresses Zeus thus:

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one—
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.

The other text quoted in Acts 17 is "We are his offspring" from the Cilician poet Aratus (c. 315-240 BC) in his "Hymn to Zeus". And so clearly the author of Acts did not think that what was said about Zeus could not be applied to God as understood by Christians.

We also touched on Romans 2 and the parable of the sheep and the goats, both of which suggest that it may be more important what we do than the doctrines that we hold. Paul's choice of Abraham as an example of saving faith points in this direction too, since Abraham probably didn't assent to anything in the Nicene Creed beyond "We believe in one God".

So can Christians learn from other religions? Yes, we already have, and there is no reason in principle why Christians today ought to take a more negative view of other religious traditions than the New Testament authors themselves. I hope one day to write a commentary on Romans that will unleash the power of its message for our time, a message that I understand to be addressing an exclusivistic view of salvation that I fear much contemporary Christianity resembles rather than opposes. It is time to reclaim this element of the New Testament message, that "there is no partiality with God", and to affirm with Peter in Acts 10:34-35, "Indeed, whoever fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him in any nation."

Apollos and Oral Tradition

Someone recently suggested to me the relevance of Apollos, as depicted in the story in Acts 18:18-28, to the subject of oral tradition and the spread of information in early Christianity. Here we have an individual who had apparently, on the one hand, been "instructed well" about Jesus and Christianity, and who was able to develop his own understanding and arguments from the Jewish Scriptures, and yet "knew only John's baptism".

Regardless of what the story's historical accuracy might be, we have here a depiction of the spread of early Christianity as it was envisaged (and sometimes idealized) by one particular educated author sometime around the turn of the first-to-second centuries.

Just as manuscripts were copied and recopied to the point where we had multiple similar and yet different copies circulating, so too we ought to expect significantly more variation not only in the stories and sayings passed on and circulated orally, but perhaps also in the forms that Christianity itself took.

Luke often attempts to give the impression that differences were reconciled - whether Paul and the Jerusalem leadership, or Apollos and those who baptize "in the name of Jesus". Unfortunately, he doesn't give us a lot of indication as to the precise viewpoints of various individuals. Certainly it is to be expected that some who heard partial information did in fact later hear more and change their views accordingly, as in the story Luke tells. But given what we know about the capacity of religious beliefs to resist revision even in light of new evidence, we must also envisage that there were people who heard some things, but not everything, and remained persuaded that their view was correct. We ought also to imagine that those who represented those who "knew the whole story" had themselves been selective (all storytellers and historians must be), and perhaps also had added to the story in such a way as to counter other possible interpretations. And we ought to remind ourselves that we do not know whether the information we have in our New Testament sources comes from those "fully in the know", or those who, like Apollos in Acts, formulated their vision of Christianity on the basis of what limited information they had.

Perhaps if we knew more about the historical Apollos, it would help those of us who research the historical Jesus.

See Star Trek!

I saw the new Star Trek movie last night. It is fantastic. I can't imagine (in spite of what some have been saying) that devoted fan of the original series will not love it. Star Trek had parallel universes and alternate time lines built into it all along, and so tinkering with the "canonical history" is less of an issue than in the case of rebooting Battlestar Galactica - or even making a movie that tinkers with Lord of the Rings.

The movie is also accessible to newcomers (although if you want to introduce pre-teen kids to Trek, wait for the movie to be on TV, since there are some scenes/words that are not for that age group). This is not because it has been dumbed down, but simply because it manages to combine classic Star Trek with more modern-looking special effects and equipment than 60s-era Starfleet issue appears to modern viewers, and to tell a compelling story about the characters, taking us into a period before the first episode of classic Trek and give us a chance to know this timeline's version of them. And as we know from that other effort from J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, backstories can be compelling. But the younger versions of the familiar characters really do take seriously the attempt to be those same characters we know and love - and Spock and McCoy are particularly enjoyable to watch if you know the original series.

I won't say more. Just see it. You'll enjoy it.

LOST: Tying the Temporal Knot

I wonder if the hiring of an actor to "play Jacob", like the filming of multiple versions of the final scene from last season's finale, is a ruse, and Jacob is in fact going to turn out to be someone we know well: Jack Shepherd. I wouldn't bet money on it, not by a long shot, but I can certainly see how such a plot development would make sense.

If Jack succeeds in detonating a bomb and preventing the incident that leads to the button and leads to the plane crash and so on, then flight 815 never crashes, Jack never ends up on the island, never gets sent back to the island - and so who detonates the bomb? It would make sense to have Jack end up trapped outside of time and space, caught in a paradox of his own creation, as "Jacob". For all we know, Jack is his nickname and his birth certificate in fact says "Jacob".

Even if that isn't what happens in the final season of LOST, I don't think there is any chance that, if Jack's execution of Faraday's plan is successful, then we'll simply find them landing in LA as they originally planned. History will have been changed, perhaps radically so, and thus we might have to follow the series characters' lives into a history very different from the one we and they have known thus far.

Those looking to disentangle some of what's going on, or just entertainment, should check out the latest LOST Untangled:

Jesus: Name vs. Fingerprints

Kathy Hanson has a guest post at the blog Dream Awakener on the question of whether the way we live, or the things we believe and say, ought to be paramount for Christians.

Her post leads me to reflect on the fact that Jesus, for the most part, particularly in the earliest stories told about him, does not use healing people or exorcisms as an opportunity for doctrinal instruction. He never tells them "four things God wants you to know", never gives them a tract as they depart.

To the extent that Christians are committed to following Jesus' example, we ought to reflect seriously on this point. Perhaps it is not only unnecessary to always explain that one's concern is motivated by Christian faith and to explain that faith. Perhaps, by introducing an ulterior motive, we actually undermine our ability to help people. For in many cases it is entirely possible that what was crucial to setting people free was Jesus' concern for them, his touching of the untouchable. Might it not be that, if we make our touch a stepping stone to preaching or doctrinal instruction, we actually undermine the power that is present when we regard helping someone as an end in itself - and regard that someone as valuable in their own right?

LOST: Pulling Back The Curtain

We're off to see the Wizard...er, I mean Jacob...as LOST moves towards the end of its penultimate season [There are SPOILERS ahead if you have not yet seen the most recent episode to air in the US] Last night's episode "Follow the Leader" saw John Locke leading "his people", the Others, to go see Jacob, and to the surprise of everyone watching, the episode ended with Locke telling Ben he intends to kill Jacob.

We should not forget the earlier allusion to the Wizard of Oz in the episode "The Man Behind The Curtain" - the last, indeed the only, episode in which we caught a glimpse of Jacob.

There seems to be a sense in which LOST is taking us back into the realm of some classic science fiction treatment of religion and the supernatural. I was struck, when re-watching some of the earliest episodes of Star Trek a couple of months ago, that from the outset the show accepted that there were things that classically were thought of as supernatural - ESP, and indeed individuals that become god-like - but assumed there would be some sort of scientific explanation. To allude to a later episode, Apollo and the other Greek gods could have existed - they would just be aliens, with organs to conduct electricity allowing them amazing powers. As the series and its spin-offs progressed, this theme continued: the universe was full of strange and mysterious powers and much that would likely remain unexplained. If there is a point of disconnect between the humanism of someone like Gene Roddenberry and that of someone like James Randi, it seems that the former sought to scientify mythology, while the latter seeks simply to debunk it. And while Randi clearly has done marvellous work in exposing frauds, and persuaded many that psychic powers and the like are not real, there seems to be a deep longing in the human soul for magic, for enchantment. We find it hard to live in a universe that has no hope of being populated by wizards and/or deities.

And so, as John Locke leads his people on a pilgrimage to pull back the curtain, one wonders whether we're witnessing a moment akin to the "Death of God" theology that had its peak around the same time as classic Star Trek. What will we see when the curtain is pulled back? A mere human being, who has been manipulating time - and people - to his own ends? Nothing at all?

The curtain plays an important role in Biblical religion, too. A curtain separates off the holy of holies, where God was thought to dwell, enthroned on the ark of the covenant. If one went in there, or touched the ark, one would surely die. But of course, conquering superpowers did enter and plunder, and unless time-travellers from the island warned them to ship it off to Ethiopia, presumably it was the Babylonians who took the ark, and Israel's theologians had to wrestle with that and make sense of it - as for instance Ezekiel, who places the "true" ark in heaven, with wheels within wheels so that it can follow God's people anywhere.

The curtain has an important symbolic role in the New Testament too, as the outer curtain is torn symbolizing judgment on the temple, and as the author to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus bringing us through the veil into God's presence.

But what will we see behind the veil? The assumption is always that we'll see something that will either awe us or literally blow us away. But there is a fear that many have, that if the curtain is drawn back, we'll find the sanctum sanctorum empty, or find there a man with levers looking rather embarrassed.

It has been a struggle of many religious traditions over the past few centuries (and more) to deal with the apparent disconnect between our desire for deities we can relate to personally, and our desire that the deity with whom we have to do be the ultimate reality. Yet there is a tension there, and it isn't clear that either classic attempts to deal with it - whether classic Christian theism, Gnosticism, or Hinduism, or more modern permutations such as deism or panentheism - have satisfactorily addressed the underlying issue. Theologians for the most part explore the ultimate, but we continue to long for a deity who is basically like us, only stronger, one who can be our friend, and come to our rescue.

When we've met such figures in Star Trek, or the Wizard of Oz, they have been a disappointment. And indeed, Gnosticism arose largely as a result of disappointment with the figure of the Creator as depicted in Scripture.

Without mystery and metaphor, our lives are impoverished. But we shouldn't miss an opportunity to pull back the curtain and look behind it. Because sometimes we find comfort in not knowing what we could know if we put the time and effort into it. Sometimes we'd prefer to live believing in a certain sort of concept of God, because rethinking and revising our most deeply-held beliefs is painful.

What will we find when John Locke "pulls back the curtain", assuming he is able to do so? I don't honestly know. But the Christian Scriptures depict Jesus leading his people through the curtain, into a place that traditionally struck terror into the hearts of those excluded from it.

We should not hesitate to pull back the curtain. If we die, it will have been an opportunity for divine power to be manifested in our time, as in the stories of old. And if there is no lightning bolt, perhaps even nothing visible behind the curtain, or simply a person, then we discover that which many of us find even more terrifying than the numinous mystery of the holy of holies: discovering that our thinking was wrong, and the daunting prospect of rethinking, revising, and rebuilding. In other words, learning. But religion and magic (in the modern sense) have this in common: when the curtain is pulled back, when we are offered explanations as to how what seemed impossible was taking place, we tend to feel like, in gaining knowledge, we've also lost something in the process, the wonder and mystery. And so the challenge is whether we can grow in our understanding of what is going on, without losing the "magic" in the process. Or do we have to choose one or the other?

LOST: The End Is Near

Well, we're getting close to the end of the season, and some pretty remarkable plot developments are carrying us along. It has been said that the finale (to be broadcast next week) will be so game-changing that we'll wonder how the show can continue after it. My guess is that Jack and Eloise and crew will succeed in detonating the bomb, and that's where they'll leave us hanging until the Fall, wondering whether that changed the course of history or not. And since someone will have to detonate the bomb, my guess is that we'll watch Jack "die", and wonder whether in doing so, he changed history and saved his own life in the process.

If we didn't already know that there is an actor who is playing Jacob (although perhaps that is a ruse?), I'd guess that Jack, by dying to reset history, could end up as Jacob, trapped as a result in limbo, neither fully alive nor fully dead. Or, in other words, mostly dead...

For those who only watch the TV episodes and none of the online or other installments and add-ons, you may want to take a look at this...

The Rocks (and Blogs) Cry Out

A while back I shared the first part of this video, showing why "flood geology" is bogus. Here's part two, with more overwhelming scientific data coupled with enjoyable British sarcasm (HT AIG Busted):



Open Parachute blogs about answering the big questions. 3quarksdaily has Philip Kitcher on religion after Darwin. See also Phil Plait on what's been going on with science education in Texas, as well as Friendly Atheist who cover atheist buses and a creationist congressperson in Indiana.

Kevin Edgecomb offers a quote and first impressions of John P. Meier's fourth volume on the historical Jesus. Chris Brady shares some final exam essay questions. Ken Brown offers a quote about the "restless Bible". Blah blah blah offers wise hermeneutical advice from The Year Of Living Biblically. R. O. Flyer explains how to talk to a Liberal. Lots of blogs are mentioning the Antiquary's Shoebox.

Blogging Adventures in the Spirit

Although there are all sorts of spiritual adventures that can involve blogging, I am referring here to Philip Clayton's recent book Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), a copy of which Tripp Fuller kindly provided me with as part of the Transforming Theology Theo-Blogger Consortium.


In the book's prologue, Clayton sets the stage for what follows by highlighting the denial by many that middle ground exists in the interaction of sacred and scientific, of ancient and contemporary (pp.vii-viii). A key aim of the book is to show that the dichotomy between conservative/evangelical and liberal/modernist is a false one, that there are in fact a range of possible views all along the spectrum. We are not forced to choose either to merely preserve or merely dismantle and destroy.

The book itself is unusual, inasmuch as it is a collection of Clayton's earlier writings, dating from 1997-2008, edited by Zachary Simpson, and Simpson, while not unappreciative of Clayton's work, is also himself rather critical - at least, moreso than one might have expected the editor of a volume of this sort to be. The introduction nonetheless provides a helpful overview of what is to follow, contextualizing the book's arguments into the wider range of both Clayton's writings and those of other theologians.

Among the highlights of the introduction are some key terms and ideas which are presented. One major emphasis, which will characterize the book as a whole, is the desire to take completely seriously the data from the natural sciences, even when these require rethinking of traditional theological ideas. This attitude is characterized as "devout uncertainty" (p.4), and represents nothing more than the committment to allow one's views, even deeply cherished theological views, be subjected to rigorous critical inquiry and when it seems necessary to revision. It is this submission of one's views to scrutiny, including that of experts in other fields of knowledge with which coherence is sought, that is the only way to achieve "traction" for one's religious views (p.5). This is perhaps the aspect of Clayton's writing that makes it the most exciting - even if one feels that he, inevitably, doesn't fully achieve his aim, which is this: to not keep any of his beliefs or presuppositions off the table, away from scrutiny and the possibility of rethinking.

Other concepts that will be central to the argument of later chapters (and the book as a whole) are introduced first by the editor, such as emergence, divine action, panentheism, and the notion that God, as greater than any single component of the universe, ought to be conceived of as "at least personal" (p.15, quoting Arthur Peacocke). One potential criticism of Clayton's argument noted by Simpson is that, because of the former's focus on human personal agents as loci for divine activity in the world, his system is open to the charge of being inappropriately anthropocentric (p.17). Be that as it may, one thing that becomes clear as the book progresses is that Clayton is in dialogue not only with natural scientists but with philosophers both ancient and modern, including some who are all-too-infrequent dialogue partners in discussions of contemporary theology or of the relationship between religion and science. Although the book's title focuses on Adventures in the Spirit, the book offers an exciting and stimulating intellectual journey as well - not that "mind" and "spirit" can be separated.

I intend to dedicate a blog post to each major section of the book. Part One is labelled The Methods of Philosophy and Theology. Within it, the first chapter is entitled "Critical Faith: Theology in the Midst of the Sciences". That's where we'll pick up again next time. In the mean time, I will mention that there has been a series about this book on Bob Cornwall's blog, which I've avoided reading thus far, lest I either simply duplicate what was said there, or feel that what was said there was so exhaustive that I might as well forego my own blogging about the book. It even includes video of Clayton himself!

Dream Think Be Do

Thanks to Fred Anderson for making me aware of this great video clip introducing what Progressive Christianity is all about.

Kerala's Christians and their Manuscripts

There's an interesting video on the PBS web site about the Thomas Christians of South India and present-day projects to rediscover and preserve their manuscripts.

Inadvertent Pluralism Sunday School

I must admit I forgot that today was Pluralism Sunday until I read blogs after church. To my relief, my class today ended up speaking about precisely this topic. A thought that has come up in the series about "When Christians Disagree" time and again is that most of would agree that it is OK to agree to disagree about non-essentials. What we really disagree about is what those essentials are. And so, after asking about that and how we figure out what is essential, we found ourselves talking about Christian identity and other religions.

Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof got a mention in my Sunday school class. He was remarkably flexible at times, yet found himself asking how far he can bend before he breaks. Among the subjects we discussed was whether Christian identity is a matter of doctrine, practice or both. I also pointed out that conservative Christians and Muslims would agree over against many liberal Christians in believing in the virgin birth. Some in the class were surprised to learn that Muslims believe in the virgin birth. We also discussed whether it makes sense for Christians to think of Muslims as "worshipping a different God", or whether it makes more sense to acknowledge that the belief in one supreme deity is something held in common, while we disagree about certain doctrines and practices. Over the coming weeks we'll be thinking more about the subject of the relationship between Christianity and other religions, and how Christians might/should view those religious traditions. In the mean time, I got them to take the flaming meteorite test.

Also related to the subject of agreement and disagreement, I recently finished reading Michael Bird and James Crossley's book/conversation How Did Christianity Begin? It is a wonderful book and all authors' contributions are valuable. I will mention (in a "pet peeve" moment) one complaint: Michael Bird really does muddle things in his treatment of the burial of Jesus. Not only do the Gospels' presentations of the burial get run together, but so too do Crossan's view that Jesus was probably not buried at all, and the view defended by Raymond Brown, Byron McCane, Craig Evans and myself, namely that Jesus may have been buried in a tomb reserved for criminals. Having said that, I learned a lot from the book and listening to all four contributors helped me reflect on my own views, biases, presuppositions, assumptions and methods.

Elsewhere around the blogosphere, Theological Scribbles offers (qualified) praise for evangelical pragmatism. Internet Monk has a reflection on God knowing us and recommends Love is an Orientation. Jim Getz will be hosting next month's Biblical studies carnival, and promises it will be mostly harmless - so long and thanks for all the blogging! Hopefully Jim will include something by Michael Carden. Dr. Platypus asks if the blood of Christ can make you sick. John Hobbins discusses Rachel Elior's contrarian thesis about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Drew Tatusko discusses affluence and religiosity (or lack thereof). I wonder as I wander...about the way Christians use "God is good".

What's New In Papyrology highlights the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents: Photographic Archive of Papyri in the Cairo Museum, which includes texts like the Gospel of Peter and 1 Enoch. Also, the latest issue of Oral Tradition is out. Deinde provides convenient assistance with SBL abbreviations.

Jorge Garcia (aka Hurley) saw the Star Trek premiere. I hope to see it once it is in theaters!

Gavotte by Gossec

Here's my son (accompanied by me on short notice) performing F. J. Gossec's Gavotte at a recital this afternoon:

Around the Blogosphere (Biblical Studies Carnival Supplement)

I didn't know what else to call this post, since there was so much in the blogosphere over the past couple of days, and it seemed worth mentioning. This post includes the most recent biblioblog activity, as well as stuff on other topics that the Bible (and thus supplemental in that way) and non-academic posts of interest (and thus supplemental in another way).

But let me begin by highlighting something that I had intended to include in the carnival, but somehow neglected to. Jim Davila kindly reminded me of the discovery that made the news in April, about the discovery of fragments of 2 Enoch in Coptic. More recently he shared an update on Rachel Elior's theory about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

April DeConick has been continuing the series ("Creating Jesus") that was mentioned in the carnival. She is up to post #5, which is beginning to address what the early Christians did when their messianic expectations were not met.

Ephemeral Thoughts has a post on Scripture as inspired, not inerrant. Anumma has a post on essential questions and the Book of Job. Ben Witherington highlights A. N. Wilson's recent return to Christianity. Euangelion has a post about the rule of faith and the unity of Scripture. Phil Sumpter points to free audio and video from Westminster Seminary. Mike Koke asks if there is any room for apologetics, as well as thinking further about hermeneutics of suspicion. Ken Schenck has thoughts on church membership. The Lead looks at those who grew up unreligious and end up in church, and concludes with this great quote:

So we in the Church, in trying to attract and keep members, tell ourselves to act more worldly.

And the non-religious tell themselves to act more religious and provide what religion provides to keep non-religious people non-religious.

What a country!

I also had a much briefer version of my review of Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted published on my college's web site. Jesus Creed also quotes Ehrman on the Bible. Steve Matheson posted on theistic embryology. The Evolution of the Mystery has been blogging both Kaufmann and Dylan.

I've also finally cracked the mystery of NT Wrong's identity. His blogging has been associated with England, Australia, and most recently Los Angeles. There can no longer be any doubt. NT Wrong is surely none other than the elusive... Charles Widmore! On a more serious subject (i.e. the plot of LOST, rather than an anonymous semi-ex-blogger's identity), I think I may have figured out what the temporal paradox is that is at the heart of recent plot developments. What if 1970s Ellie, having realized that she killed her son, briefly finds comfort in the arms of Charles Widmore. As a result, a son is conceived, who will later go by the name Daniel Faraday. And there's the paradox. Unless Eloise sends her son to the island to be shot by her, then he will never exist in the first place. And so the only way to allow him to have his all too short and tragic life is to send him to his early death. What would you do?

Biblical Studies Carnival 41

The answer to life, the universe and everything is, as is well known, 42. And so this Biblical Studies Carnival falls a little bit short. But if you listen to Ottorino Respighi's The Festivals of Rome while exploring it, it will all seem just fine. Is it a carnival? A festival? A circus? You, the reader in the audience, will have to decide.

Let the carnival begin...send in the clowns! What better way to begin a Biblical studies carnival than with a song about body parts in Hebrew? April biblioblogging often begins with April Fools' Day posts, and Eisenbrauns rarely fails to offer gag gifts for ANE geeks that some of us bibliobloggers would really love to own.

We hope that beginning with clowns brought a smile to your face. This month we had some posts on smiling (or the lack thereof) in the Bible: "Why no one smiles in the Bible"by John Hobbins, and "When A Smile May Not Be Just A Smile As Time Goes By" by Duane Smith.

Of course, clowns creep some people out, which may be why some of you aren't smiling. So what should we parade before you, to change the mood and bring in the fear factor for everyone? How about Demons on a Leash: Habakkuk 3:3b-7 , posted at Ancient Hebrew Poetry? In it John continues his series on Habakkuk, as well as addressing our assumptions about the ontology of evil. Alan Lenzi wrote a not-too-scary post on "Sleep Paralysis in Ludlul II 68-72". Also, Andrei Orlov provided a comprehensive listing of references to Lilith within Jewish literature.

(By the way, if this doesn't adequately scare you, come back at the end of the carnival for the freak show).

If the demons get off their leashes, you might suffer like Job. Bob MacDonald has been blogging through translating Job since the time of...well, Job - or at least it seems like it. He also finds himself wondering why Job is seldom references in the New Testament. This month's posts on Job 8 and Job 12 can be found at Sufficiency.

But we'll try to keep the frightening bits, and the suffering, to a minimum from this point on. Relax! The carnival is still here to entertain you. Bring in the animals! We present you with: the 'elephant in the room'!

A number of blogs have touched on the topic of Biblical (in)errancy: I think I may have started it. Doug Mangum touched on the subject more than once, including in response to Peter Enns, whose own interaction with Bruce Waltke made ripples in the blogosphere. Enns posted links to two pdf files representing his and Waltke's views. Acrobat files do the work of acrobats in this carnival. Art Boulet notes some reactions to the dialogue. John Hobbins posted on this topic several times, and also provided the soundtrack to the conversation. Mike DeVries chimed in in response to Scott Bailey, while Alan Lenzi proclaimed an Assyrian inscription inerrant.

Douglas Mangum of Biblia Hebraica also sought to distinguish apologetic biblical interpretation from 1) understanding the Bible, 2) biblical scholarship, and 3) being “critical”.

Aaron Rathburn blogged at Dust and Light about "The Gospel According to Ancient Near Eastern Culture", in a 3-part post He first introduces the key components of the cosmological worldview of the ancient Near East, then turns to places we can see some of these phenomena within the canon itself, before finally turning to the significance and implications of these similarities for a doctrine of Scripture. Definitely a post appropriate for the big tent - er, I mean, under the big dome.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, please turn your eyes towards the trapeeze!

After careful research into what he considers to be conservative evangelical linguistic gymnastics, Duane Smith of Abnormal Interests invented a new name for a method that he feels is prevalent in evangelical interpretation: the “hermeneutic of theologically driven pseudo-linguistic conservation”.


This is a Biblical studies carnival, and so it requires parades.


First, a parade of scholars!

John Anderson, even though gearing up for comps, found the time earlier this month to blog about 15 scholars who have influenced him, as well as to review Kenton L. Sparks, Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible. Art Boulet has been posting a series reviewing Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted. So too has Ben Witherington (Near Emmaus has all the links). Bart has also been on parade himself on the Colbert Report.

A highlight in this month's parade is the amazing hypothetical sleeping scholar. Pat McCullough (not himself the sleeping scholar in question, just to be clear) shared a conversation from a seminar he took on Wisdom and Apocalyptic. It is a thought experiment that helps one think about what has changed in research on apocalyptic literature in the past 50 years or so.

Thanks to Pisteuomen, 68 years' worth of key scholars in the study of Mark's Gospel turned out for this month's parade. And in a blast from the past, Abraham ibn Ezra decided to show up.

Alan Lenzi started a new blog inviting Biblical scholars to present their story of the interaction between their professional interests and their personal religion. Bob Cargill blogged the impressive line-up of scholars at the Duke Conference on Archaeology, Politics, and the Media. And the Biblioblog Top 50 threw pies - I mean, posted pie charts - about who and where in the world bibliobloggers are. The featured biblioblogger for the month was Simon Holloway.

The scholars' parade is followed by a parade...of ancient manuscripts!

Evangelical Textual Criticism announced the cataloguing and photographing of manuscripts in Athens, while Eric Sowell has been blogging about his experiences there. Peter Head had a post on the relationship between textual and literary criticism. Tommy Wasserman blogged about an SBL session focused on James Royse's book Scribal Habits in Early Greek NT Papyri. Barry Bandstra posted on an 8th century Israelite inscription (also at PaleoJudaica). Modern software makes comparing manuscripts easier - while raising new issues as well.

We even had a special guest appearance by a famous Arabic text: Pat McCullough noted that approaches from Biblical studies are overflowing into Qur'anic studies. Hermas and Enoch stopped by to say hello, too, as did some folks from Nag Hammadi.

And of course, all these manuscripts are more interesting if you can read them!

The Floppy Hat posted on Lachish 3 and what it may have to say about literacy in ancient Israel. Ancient Hebrew Poetry tackled The goal of translation according to Jerome Rothenberg, bringing a site on poetics into the discussion of translation. Later in the month, John touched on matters related to gender-sensitive Bible translations.

Mike Aubrey blogs the Greek language, offering musings on verb terminology, a discussion of issues and problems with the way we refer to the various Greek verb forms: Aorist, Present, etc. He also built on a comment, offering a followup post pointing back to A.T. Robertson's discussion of the same subject of verb terminology and an exhortation to teachers to make a change. All the while, Greek words arranged and rearranged their order to keep the parade interesting. Nijay Gupta blogged about verbal aspect in Greek, while Bill Mounce posts each Monday on some aspect (if you'll excuse the pun) of Greek. Rick Brannan has been blogging through the Pastoral Epistles. Chris Smith offered a post wrestling with the question of interchangeability of words on either side of the copula: God Is Love... and Love Is God? In it he discusses 1 John 4:7-8, and quotes John D. Caputo. At the legendary 200th biblioblog, Rodney Thomas touched on Mark 10:18.

Hebrew has not been neglected - not even a construction that is only found roughly 25 times in the Hebrew Bible. G. Brooke Lester (of Anumma fame) weighed the advantages and disadvantages of learning Modern Hebrew before Biblical Hebrew, and found the pros outweigh the cons. Edward Cook asked whether Psalm 83:14 refers to a wheel or a tumbleweed, while Tim Bulkeley explored a possible headland. And if one wants to ponder the "memorial offering" in Acts 10:4, both Greek and Hebrew terms may have light to shed on the matter.

Duane Smith's post on "Why All These Abecedaries From The Royal Palace of Ugarit?" was abnormally interesting. If you know modern Greek, you can benefit from these posts from Ekaterini G. Tsalampouni's Biblical Studies Blog about the Third Prague-Princeton Biennale for Jesus Research. And for those who know French, Michael Langlois let us know that his debate with André Paul on Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (March 10, 2009) on Radio Notre-Dame is available on the radio’s website.

Next up in this parade, the amazing size-changing text performs for your entertainment! Watch it grow, watch it shrink!

Jimmy Doyle looked at the evidence for the longer and shorter text in Luke 22:14-20, as well as posting on the parable in Luke 16:1-14.

We now have two parades interweaving. Let's add a third - the parade of Biblical characters!

This month Paul of Tarsus reviewed Harry Gamble's book about books and readers in the early church. Now there's a sentence you don't read every day! The Paul of Tarsus in question is not the historical figure, but the blog by that name, where Kevin Scull also posted on Pauline Chronology and Gallio: a seemingly inconsequential detail, which in fact gets at the heart of Pauline chronology and scholarly tendency to rely on Acts in working it out. The mysterious author of Hebrews also appeared, and will perform a covenant-making ceremony (or was it a testament?). In other words, Brian Small at Polumeros kai Polutropos blogged about Diatheke in Hebrews 9:16-17. And Finnish- and English-speaking sinners with from Luke's Gospel also dropped in to liven things up. Satan also tried to make an appearance, but Withering Fig stopped him.

Claude Mariottini blogged about Deborah: A Mother in Israel (one of several posts about Deborah). Jeremiah joined us too (taking a break from his starring role in a movie), offering his second lament while Prof. Mariottini discussed an issue of translation in Jeremiah 15:12. James Getz asked some Women Nazirites to join the parade, and engaged in some valuable speculation about them. Chris Heard asked about the object of Potiphar's anger. Ferrell Jenkins blogged about a 42-year-old excavation puzzle featuring Shebna. Even though this is Biblical Studies Carnival 41, I decided to include it. Shebna (aka Shebnayahu) also made a guest appearance at Higgaion.

The New Testament parade participants were pretty diverse, and Mike Koke found himself wondering how we deal with that diversity. Nick Norelli reviewed The New Testament in Antiquity, which seeks to survey the NT while reading it as Scripture and placing it in its cultural context.

Let's let the parade participants take a bow. Indeed, let's make it seven bows, since Claude Mariottini posted on bowing seven times in the Hebrew Bible and in the Amarna Letters.

What's a carnival without a magician? But surely this isn't who you expected to see performing magic at this carnival - unless you're Morton Smith, that is! Helen Ingram (at The Omega Course) provided pictures of ancient Christian art in which Jesus seems to use a magic wand to raise the dead.

Mark Goodacre asks whether our putting the historical Jesus puzzle together might not be hampered by missing pieces, leading to further thoughts on the subject from Loren Rosson III (who I understand is no relation to Ben Witherington III, even though they have the same last name). Chris Zeichmann and James Crossley interacted about the latter's Jesus in an Age of Terror. April DeConick offered some ground rules on turning a Jewish rabbi into God, as well as posts on miracles and historical study. At The Golden Rule there was a response about the irrelevance of distinctions such as orthodoxy and heresy, canonical and extracanonical, when it comes to historical study. Matt Page kept us up-to-date (as always) on Jesus in the movies. And let's have one more post from April DeConick, since this month's biblioblog is dedicated to "posts from April".

Since Good Friday and Easter were celebrated this past month, a spectacular array of bloggers reenacted (or at least posted something about) the crucifixion and resurrection. But that doesn't mean that other parts of the story, such as the baptism or (non-)marriage of Jesus, were entirely neglected.

Good Friday/Crucifixion posts

Near Emmaus offered a round-up of Good Friday posts, kindly saving me the trouble. Nevertheless, deserving separate mention are Mark Goodacre's podcasts (on his podcast blog, Podacre) providing 4-minute treatments of the Passion Narratives,
Jesus’ Trial and Arrest, and his Crucifixion and Burial. See too Jimmy Doyle's post on early depictions of the crucifixion. Darrell Bock was involved in discussions about the Via Dolorosa.

Easter/Resurrection posts

Ken Schenck blogged through Tom Wright's Surprised by Hope.
Jimmy Doyle blogged about the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament.
Jesus Creed connected resurrection and the New Perspective. Michael Gorman blogged about Paul and the resurrection.
Parchment and Pen revisited the question of what happened to the Twelve apostles after Easter. Walter C. Kaisar addressed the time frame of "three days and three nights". Lynn Cohick posted on Ephesians and resurrection while Crypto-Theology posted on resurrection in Corinth.
Progression of Faith reflected on Easter and sacrifice. Adrian Warsfold speculated about the role of dreams in the rise of Easter faith (see also April DeConick's post on historical study and religious experience). Ben Byerly preached on Mark 16, and Bible X had a very brief review of a book about Mark's ending(s). Brian Leport had a Pannenberg moment. There were also my own posts about the doubt of disciples in Matthew, and my Easter Sunday school class.

Of course, there were many more quotations, reflections on and sermons about these topics (and the Saturday in between) than can be included here, a number of which draw on or interact with Biblical scholarship in some way.

Missives from Marx provided an interesting reply when somebody suggested to him that he should reconcile all the contradictions in scripture by applying to them a “hermeneutic of charity.”

And speaking of matters suspicious...what's this? A non-scholarly post has slipped through and is trying to participate in the carnival. It's those trouble-makers Adam and Eve. Uh oh. A man and a woman running around naked? This carnival is no longer child friendly. Parents with young children, please make your way quickly towards the exits! [In fact, a few other posts that were not strictly speaking academic have already slipped through, but most of them have been rounded up and corralled into the sideshow at the end.]

Now that those who are too young to be exposed to such matters have left, J. K. Gayle (at The WOMBman's Bible) can suggest the phallogocentrism of LXX Numbers 5:1-4, and in particular the passage’s keen interest in the "Erect Insertion", inside of which one can find God.

I think we need some commandments to get things back under control. This month Koinonia considered the Ten Commandments in context.


As we draw to a close, let's get apocalyptic. Michael Gorman offers posts on the spirituality of Revelation and a cruciform hermeneutic for reading it. He also explains why Left Behind should be left behind.

Finally, let's end with a bang. Oops, I ordered a cannon, but they sent a canon. At least Mike Heiser and John Hobbins had interesting conversations about it. And if you were lucky, you were listening to the 1812 Overture right about now and didn't need me to provide cannons. If not, perhaps Johnny Cash can help you end this carnival on an appropriately apocalyptic musical note...


Well, the carnival is over folks. Please have a safe trip back to your own blogs.



As is traditional at carnivals, a sideshow is provided for your enjoyment as you make your way towards the exit. Historically, various "freaks" would be on display. And so, rather than spend time writing to those who submitted posts that were not about scholarly study of the Bible, I decided to include them here, for your amusement, entertainment and/or astonishment. If nothing else, the links provided will give bibliobloggers a sense of what else gets submitted to the carnival. I had no idea...

First, we take you through the hall of mirrors - the simplest explanation how so many posts not quite germane to the carnival seem to have been submitted by the same blogger. The author of these posts describes his writing as "compilations of biblical text with exegesis (drawing the meaning out of a text) rather than personal opinion wrapped in biblical reference (as is certainly popular Christian table fare today)." I'll let you be the judge of that. But he's Biblical enough to challenge the teachings of the Word of Faith movement, and some of the posts may be useful to those who teach Biblical studies as illustrations of a particular sort of popular approach to the Bible, and to the "End Times" in particular.
Also in our "freak show": the dentist with body odor. (Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the author of the post is a dentist with a powerful aroma. These were just some of the topics the post was about).
The amazing painted man is definitely worth seeing. He (OK, technically his blog) is painted to resemble St. Peters Basilica and other scenes from Vatican City and Rome. And while those scenes are quite beautiful, they aren't exactly Biblical Studies now are they?
The next post is astounding because, on a blog that did have some posts specifically about passages from the Bible, what was submitted for the carnival was a post about Calvinism. Of course, I suppose some people think Calvinism is Biblical. Presumably this blogger was predestined to submit a less relevant post and end up in the sideshow...
Next up, a purveyor of creative insults. Who else could make even "Mazel Tov!" seem like a curse?
Then we have a woman who is able to pray and meditate...simultaneously!
Finally, we have an impressive juggler.

I hope you found this last section entertaining, and I hope that anyone whose post was included in this last section will (1) appreciate the joke, and (2) consider posting something that is about academic Biblical studies next month and submitting it for next month's carnival. If you are unclear on what is expected for submissions, do visit the Biblical Studies Carnival Home Page.

Do come back next month for the June 2009 Biblical Studies Carnival (featuring posts from May), scheduled to be held at Ketuvim. This will be Carnival XLII, i.e. 42, and so that one we expect will provide the answer to life, the universe, and everything!