Biblioblog Top 273, July 2009

Technically this monthly ranking is called the Biblioblog Top 50, but if you pay a visit, you'll see why I decided to tweak it.

It is great to see that blogging scholars are such a vibrant force, not merely in the blogosphere but also in the academy. The number of bloggers who will also be presenters at the upcoming Society of Biblical Literature conference (recently described by one scholar as 'the "San Diego Comic-Con" of the world of Biblical Scholarship') in New Orleans is impressive. And among them, one in particular stands out: James Crossley will actually be offering a presentation on biblioblogging - or is it rather a performance by his band, N. T. Wrong and the Bibliobloggers?

Three Unspeakable Mysteries in the Blogosphere

Actually, the mysterious "three words" from the Gospel of Thomas have been the subject of much discussion in recent days on the Gospel of Thomas list-serv. But if you came here looking for information on those words, I hope you will not be disappointed by what must seem to you like a bit of bait-and-switch blogging. Instead, I offer three unspeakable blogs, the addresses of which may in fact (according to one hypothesis formulated within the last few seconds) have been what Jesus whispered in Thomas' ear...

The first unspeakable blog had a single unspeakable title with two unspeakable words - until now. Timo S. Paananen kindly stopped by my blog to provide advice about the pronunciation of his blog's title, "Salainen evankelista": is:sɑ-laɪ-ŋɛn ɛ-ʋaŋ-kɛ-lis-tɑ. A somewhat mysterious title is fitting, since his blog is about the Secret Gospel of Mark and in particular the question of whether or not the evidence points to it being a forgery.

The second blog may be unspeakable if you don't know Latin. At Ecce Homo, Mike Whitenton continues the discussion of Paul, Jesus and monotheism, with attention focused on comparing the views of Dunn and McGrath on whether Paul split or expanded the Shema. I'm just honored to be mentioned in the same sentence as my mentor! Monotheism was also the subject of a podcast by Steve Wiggins, who also linked to a post citing Mark Smith on monotheism not being an ancient concept. That post in turn linked to a post about Larry Hurtado's work on the subject, which obviously brings us full circle.

The final blog is unspeakable if you don't get the allusion, or particularly like sausages. Deirdre Good highlighted an unspeakable error (at least from the perspective of this Baptist interested in the Mandaeans!) in the New York Times: the use of a photo of a Mandaean baptism to illustrate a story which mentions being baptized as a Baptist. Then again, I know there are Mandaeans in Texas, and I know that the Texan Baptists tend to do their own thing. Could it be that, rather than this being an error, the Mandaeans are more influential in Texas than I ever imagined? But on a more serious note, the article is in fact about that which Christianity offers being found elsewhere, and so the usage may be intended to illustrate that. But the article is in serious danger of assuming that similar rituals mean the same thing in different religious contexts. Sometimes they do, but not always.

The Gospel of Thomas (in a Coptic recension particularly popular among Texan Baptists) says that where there are three gods, there they are truly blogs. Hopefully this post will have clarified the meaning of that enigmatic saying.

Religulous

I just finished watching Bill Maher's Religulous. Some of it is genuinely skeptical in a good sense, and a lot of it is funny, often in a helpful way. The best conversation partners he had were those who were not dedicated to taking themselves and their beliefs so seriously as to attempt to shield them from criticism or humor. And even some of those he spoke to that did not embrace a questioning attitude nevertheless made a good impression on him through their christlikeness.

But then Maher spoils it, not least by bringing in a bunch of bogus claims about Horus and alleged Egyptian parallels to Jesus. If he hadn't bought into such nonsense so uncritically, he might have had a better conversation with Francis Collins than he actually did.

I suspect that a lot of liberal religious believers will be able to appreciate a number of aspects of Bill Maher's movie. He asks good questions, much of the time. If he would only ask as critical questions about the claims about Horus and the like, as he does of Christianity and other religions, he could perhaps be a genuine open-minded skeptic. His advocacy for humble doubt and willingness to say "I don't know" is commendable - but not applied as evenly to those who support his presupositions as to those who oppose them. And since the whole movie is precisely about religion doing just that, his uncritical acceptance of bogus pseudo-historical claims undermines his message, and serves instead as a warning that we are all prone to claim to be critical, but it is extremely difficult to actually be self-critical, regardless whether you are religious or not.

Quote of the Day (Mark Goodacre)

"The SBL Annual Meeting is truly the "San Diego Comic-Con" of the world of Biblical Scholarship."

-- Mark Goodacre, "SBL Annual Meeting 2009 talk"

First Foray Into Graf: Sabians and Sethians and John the Baptist, Oh My!

A copy of Georg Graf's Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur arrived via inter-library loan in the past couple of days. Today I had my first chance to dive in and do more than just take a passing glance. For those who may be unfamiliar with it, it is a 5-volume bibliographical work that surveys Christian literature in Arabic from antiquity until modern times.

I have long wanted to have the time (not to mention the necessary linguistic proficiencies) to read Christian literature from a part of the world that is arguably culturally and linguistically closer in certain respects to the world of Jesus than to the world of 21st century Americans. But more recently, I've also wanted to do some work tracing the traditions and stories about John the Baptist in Islamic and Christian sources that might either have been drawn on, or themselves have influenced, the Mandaean stories and traditions about John the Baptist.

It was thus rather exciting to find that, in addition to entires for John the Baptist, there are also index entries for other relevant words such as Sabians, Seth and Adam.

I'm looking forward to delving deeper. I'm sure most academics have had the experience of discovering that there is something interesting and/or relevant that we remained unaware of because it is in another language that is not within our range of expertise (Ugaritic, Mandaic, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Latin, insert language here). I'd be very interested in hearing from other scholars who have decided, at some point well after completing their PhD, to learn one or more new languages and dive into some new literature. It's fun and exciting, isn't it?

Donnie Darko

I finally watched Donnie Darko (yes, for the first time) last night. It was mainly because Chris Heard had suggested the label for me. So please use the comments section on this post to discuss all things Darko - and the philosophy of time travel - if you feel strongly about these subjects.

Elsewhere around the blogosphere: The Biblioblog Top 50 pointed out a new blog (don't worry that you can't pronounce the title) on the Secret Gospel of Mark, which looks very interesting. It's certainly off to a good start. And Bob Cargill explains to Fox news where Egypt isn't (hint: it's where the better-informed might look for Iraq).

The Only True God and Element 112

Is The Only True God "Copernicum"? Pay a visit to The Church of Jesus Christ and let me know what you think. I'd much rather my book be "Copernican", personally, but for most authors that's too much to hope for. But I'm willing to settle for "weighty", which Element 112 certainly is. I suspect it is also ephemeral, and that too comes with the territory of publishing! :-)

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, John Hobbins picked up on my mention of reading and hearing papers at SBL. He makes some good points, but as I was particularly interested in exploring a connection between what scholars do at conferences (read and more often listen to papers) and the most common form in which ancient people encountered the writings that are now part of the Bible, namely as read to and heard by them. As scholars reading and writing about the meaning of these texts in a literate context as part of the largely literary enterprise known as "Biblical scholarship", we need to spend more time reflecting on the Biblical literature in precisely the ways John encourages us to critically reflect on our papers and our delivery of them. Surely one can imagine someone sitting in the congregation that first heard the letter to the Hebrews read to them, and feeling that it was a case of TMI - i.e. "too much information". At least the author had a sense of humor about it...

On a related note, if you're looking for an illustration of the way background information, or lack thereof, will aid or prevent appreciation of something, try viewing this trailer in the company of someone who has seen TRON and someone who has not. I suspect that the degrees of interest, appreciation and comprehension will be very different.

On Reading and Hearing Papers at SBL

I will be reading a paper at SBL - and it will be heard by others, I hope. The paper will be about precisely that experience, in a sense - the fact that texts, including texts that contain intertextual echoes about other texts, as well as their prior contact (if any) with the echoed texts themselves, were heard rather than read by most of those who experienced them. I originally left open the precise texts to use as examples to explore the relevance of this oral/aural facet of intertextuality, but I'm presently inclined to focus on some of the YHWH texts echoed in the New Testament and connected with or applied to Jesus. Richard Bauckham mentions these a lot in his recent book Jesus and the God of Israel. I'll be reviewing that book here on the blog very soon, as well.

Several people have mentioned that the program book for the annual meeting is now available online, and so those who are planning to attend can begin checking which interesting papers they will have to miss because of conflicting schedules. And of course, planning for the bibliobloggers' get-together can now begin in earnest!

I'm also excited to see that there will be papers connected with the Mandaeans read at SBL this year. There will also be papers on monotheism and Christology, and perhaps most exciting of all, a new program unit formation session on "Unity and Diversity in Early Jewish Monotheisms"!

On Knowing

I recently watched the movie Knowing, and as someone who combines the roles of New Testament scholar and science fiction fan, it was perhaps inevitable that I'd blog about it. I will be talking about details right up until the movie's ending, and there is a sense in which the most enjoyable thing about Knowing is not knowing, and so I'm issuing an extra special SPOILER ALERT and asking those who have not watched the movie and intend to watch it to turn back now, avert their gaze, or run for their lives.

For those who have seen the movie, they may have already picked up that my statement about "inevitability" is an allusion to a key theme in the movie, the question whether things that happen are random or determined. The movie's answer seems to be the latter, but in a rather strange way. I must say that, although the movie does an excellent job of creating a suspenseful, spooky atmosphere, its attempt to bring closure to the story and offer seeming answers to the questions it raised left me deeply perplexed and unsatisfied.

The movie begins with a troubled girl living 50 years ago. She hears whispers, and they seem to compel her to write numbers, which get put in a time capsule and opened 50 years later, in our time. The numbers, the father of the child who received the girl's "gift from the past" discovers, provide the date, number killed and location of every major disaster that happened between her time and the present. It also predicts a few more, the last apparently being the end of the world.

The "whisper people" apparently turn out to be the "angels" that Ezekiel saw, and the wheels within wheels of their spaceship would have delighted Erich von Daniken. At least the "angels" are not cute - indeed, they are profoundly creepy and disturbing, although apparently benevolent. But therein lies the greatest perplexity in the movie's message. The movie questions but in the end affirms an afterlife, and yet has aliens/angels come to save a couple of children from the imminent end of their world, an action the purpose of which is impossible to fathom - indeed, it seems that the rest of humankind, reunited in the afterlife, is better off than those two who are separated from them and taken to another world. What's the point?

The treatment of determinism is also unsatisfying. Was it foreordained that all but two humans would die in the final catastrophe? Who or what determined these events in such detail, that it is apparently impossible not only to avoid the disasters but also to change the number of those who die? And even if we grant that that is simply the way things are, why do the "whisper people" disturb other human beings down the ages, rather than simply turning up at the end to take away their chosen couple of individuals?

I watched the movie with high expectations - after all, I very much enjoy a TV series that features numbers, questions of free will and determinism, catastrophes, whispers, and religious overtones. But I found that the vision the movie offered of the end of individual lives, the end of all human lives, and the afterlife ultimately unsatisfying in its incoherence. But perhaps there is no way to think about such matters in a way that is coherent and satisfying - and if the movie gets us to think about that, then its production was worthwhile for the questions it raises, not the answers it gives or fails to give.

Do You See The Difference?

Over at Ecce Homo someone asked about the difference between Hurtado and McGrath on Jewish monotheism and early Christology. As I said over there, I'm much more interested in hearing how others perceive the difference than attempting to provide my own answer (which I do, to some extent, in my book).

Those who've read my book and Hurtado's many volumes on the subject, please do chime in, whether over at Ecce Homo, here, or both, and share how you perceive the difference, if any, between our conclusions!

Jim West's Lost Biblical Studies Carnival?

I was under the impression that the next Biblical Studies Carnival was to be hosted by Jim West on his blog. But as I tried to search the internet for his blog or information about the carnival, I found instead some unexpected results. I've decided to post some screenshots so that you can see for yourselves...

But perhaps most striking was that Google not only suggested "total depravity" as an alternative to "Jim West's biblioblog", but directed me to a Wikipedia article!

Presumably this is a result of the fact that Jim West spends so much time commenting on what other bibliobloggers do, total depravity, and Zwingli, that his own identity and the distinctive identity of his biblioblog are in danger of being LOST.

Why LOST's Final Season May Be About Redoing, Not Undoing, The Past

Any attempt to speculate about what will happen on LOST always involves a serious likelihood of being wrong. But I think that the conclusion of the last season involved the creation of a temporal paradox that this season will focus on undoing.

As Jack Shepherd set about trying to put Daniel Faraday's plan into effect, he failed to consider the difference between himself enacting the plan and Daniel enacting the plan. By playing a decisive role in detonating the bomb, Jack created a paradox: by blowing up the pocket of energy that would eventually cause Oceanic 815 to crash, he changed the future. But as things now stand, unless Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on the island, Jack would never get to the island in the past to detonate the bomb and prevent the flight from crashing! And so presumably Jacob (saved from death by the changing of the past) and/or some other force (presumably including Eloise Hawking, time cop) will try to resolve the paradox (and presumably save the universe) by getting Jack and company to go to the island by some other means.

This could be completely wrong, but part of the fun of watching mysteries is trying to solve them before the end, and LOST is very similar in this respect.

DocArtz has posted the Season 6 logo, which is itself intriguing (note the hieroglyphics in the background, the inclusion of so much of the cast from previous seasons, and John Locke facing the other direction):

And of course fans will want to see the Comic Con videos, available on YouTube and elsewhere around the web, if they haven't already.

Subordination to The Only True God

Michael Whitenton seems to have created a stir on his blog by his suggestions about the interpretation of some genitives in 1 Corinthians. He has now posted again at greater length, explaining what he means and why he is persuaded that it is what 1 Corinthians means. If you haven't done so yet, do take a look and see what all the fuss is about - and what role I had in stirring up trouble! :-)

Old Manuscripts, New Methods

If one reads about the story of Tischendorf discovering Codex Sinaiticus, or Lady Drower's work in collecting Mandaean manuscripts, one will encounter descriptions of the same issue that has confronted scholars in all sorts of fields down the ages: persuading individuals to part with manuscripts that are in their possession.

When possible, it is indeed valuable to make a collection of the manuscripts themselves, and ensure their preservation in a safe environment where scholars and researchers can have access to them. But such an approach doesn't always work - anyone who has ever researched their Irish genealogy will know how one such program backfired (if you'll excuse the pun). Important records were gathered in a safe, central location, only to be destroyed by fire.

But it seems to me that it is time to take scholarly study of ancient manuscripts into the 21st century, and this includes both the manuscripts in libraries and the manuscripts that are still in the possession of individuals and groups. But in particular in the case of the latter, however much more valuable it is to have an actual physical manuscript available (the Secret Gospel of Mark serves as a good illustration!), having high quality digital photographs is better than nothing. And the choice should not be between a Mandaean priest having to part with his own copy of a text like Dmuth Kusta, or having a copy made by a scribe, or scholars remaining largely in the dark about the manuscript and its contents. Wherever possible, digital photographs should be made, and then shared.

The project to preserve the Syriac manuscripts that are in the possession of the Marthoma Christians of South India provides a wonderful example of this, as do the increasing number of collections made available through Brigham Young University. The work of Roger Pearse provides a good example of how much a single individual who feels passionately about an issue like this can do to help, both with making images/files available and with translation.

In addition to allowing the content of a manuscript to become accessible even if the owner does not wish to part with the manuscript itself, even when a manuscript does enter the possession of a library, digital photos should be made and made accessible, since the vast majority of researchers interested in any given manuscript will most likely be more interested in reading it than handling it, and being able to do the former without the necessity of also doing the latter makes the researcher's life simpler while also helping to preserve the manuscript.

So by all means let's get actual manuscripts in libraries whenever possible. But let's focus increasing attention as well on getting high quality digital images available to scholars who can make good use of them.

A Call To Follow

A while back I noticed some error messages connected with the "Followers" feature on Blogger. Well, Blogger seems to have fixed the problem, and so I've re-added that gadget to the sidebar.

If you are a regular reader, or a new one who has enjoyed what they've been reading here, please do click on the Followers option, even if you decide to remain anonymous in doing so. In addition to giving me a sense of how many people are reading (and of course, when followers start leaving, it warns me that my posts are becoming uninteresting!), it also provides a convenient way for you as a reader to keep track of what's happening here.

Reading 1 Corinthians in Light of The Only True God

Michael Whitenton has posted on Paul and monotheism at Ecce Homo, on things that struck him reading 1 Corinthians in light of The Only True God. Please pay his blog a visit, and keep the discussion alive, both there and here!

Commentaries on the Gospel of Thomas

Brandon Wason has posted an annotated bibliography of commentaries on the Gospel of Thomas.

Thank you for making this useful resource available!

Michael Dowd on Integrity and Evolutionary Christianity

I just learned of this appearance by Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution! on Ooze TV.

Standing Stones

John Anderson has a post on masseboth (standing stones), which are important archaeological evidence about ancient Israel, and raise interesting questions both about Israelite "monotheism" and aniconism.

Complete with pictures!

Inclusivity and the Bible

Jason Rosenhouse thinks he knows an apt summary of the Bible when he comes across one. And thus he approvingly quotes Cal Thomas, who wrote:

Inclusivity has nothing to do with the foundational truths set forth in Scripture. The church, which belongs to no denomination, but to its Founding Father and His Son, is about exclusivity for those who deny the faith.

Exclusivity and inclusivity can both be found in Scripture, and neither strand can be eliminated simply by pointing out the other. Both are there, and it is precisely this that makes it impossible to simply "believe the Bible".

If those who understand Christianity exclusively can find passages to support their viewpoint, those who are looking for support for being inclusive can find plenty of justification too. The most striking example, to my mind, is to be found in the case of Paul's strong arguments for the inclusion of the Gentiles, those who were previously excluded from the definition of God's people. Cal Thomas further wrote that "The church is inclusive only for those who are adopted by faith into God's family." What he fails to note is how Paul set aside the clear teaching of Scripture in order to welcome new adoptees.

And so the irony is that Cal Thomas condemns a church in his time for doing precisely what Scripture itself says the church did nearly two millenia ago, namely set aside some Scripture in order to apply the principles found in other Scripture, so as to include those formerly excluded.

Those who most adamantly oppose the "church of what's happening now" usually do so because they haven't really understood the "church of what was happening then". They are good at repeating select verses from the Bible, and manage to persuade even many of their opponents that their summaries of "what the Bible says" are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (Rosenhouse is a case in point). But what they've missed is any sense of what the authors of the Scriptures themselves were doing when they rewrote what others before them had written, reinterpreted Scripture, and even appealed to some Scripture in order to argue that other Scripture had now been superceded or simply set aside.

Why should parrotting some of their words be judged more important, or more faithful to their message, than understanding and emulating what they were doing when they wrote those words?

ID & Ego

It has been far too long since I've posted on the subject of intelligent design, but I was inspired by Eric Reitan's recent post to comment on the arena into which ID seems to be turning its attention, namely the soul and mind-body dualism.

The whole method of intelligent design seems to be reducible to a simple two-step procedure:

1) Find something science allegedly cannot explain in principle;

2) Appeal to 'intelligent design' as the one size fits all 'explanation' for the phenomenon in step 1.

When it comes to consciousness, cdesign proponentsists might seem to be on safer terrain than the bacterial flagellum or the immune system, since consciousness represents the 'hard problem' and it is likely to remain a mystery for many years to come.

But in actual fact, intelligent design's approach to this subject rests on a category mistake. To object that, because we do not understand how consciousness arises from brain activity, it therefore cannot be an emergent property of brain activity, is a serious non sequitur. To use an illustration in a domain that would have seemed a few hundred years ago inexplicable, it is in no sense true that, by a careful analysis of my computer's hard drive and processor, it can be shown that Windows Vista does not exist (would that it were so). Vista, like all modern software, provides an experience when it operates that is not exhausted by the description of the binary ons and offs of a chip, but neither can be accounted for apart from the physical operation of a computer. What happens when Vista runs - and all the pain and suffering it causes - is an emergent property of the interaction of hardware and programming. Neither those who approach the mind reductionistically, nor those who assume that new properties require new substances, will be able to do justice to the need for different sorts of description on different levels.

To this it might be useful to add that the 'intelligence' responsible for design is presumably conscious, and thus ID has no explanatory power whatsoever in this arena, since saying consciousness is created by consciousness is not in any sense an explanation, much less a scientific one.

400,000

A very recent visitor was the 400,000th, according to StatCounter.

Thanks for visiting! And thank you to the other 399,999 as well!

Undergradese

As the start of a new semester draws near, professors will find this useful to brush up their language skills in undergradese...

HT Euangelion

Jesus the Mystic in the Gospel of John

Ben Byerly has posted a lengthy quote from my book The Only True God as well as a series of questions, comments, thoughts and reflections. This was sparked in turn by Michael Whitenton's post on amateur vs. professional study of the Bible, in which he noted that I had written something in my book that was relevant to that discussion currently making its way around the biblioblogs.

April DeConick has posted entry #23 in her "Creating Jesus" series, on "ensoulment Christology". In essence what she is suggesting is that the later Apollonarians were quite faithful interpreters of the Christology of the Gospel of John. While this is certainly a possible interpretation of the Gospel, and almost certainly the most popular understanding of John's Christology today in spite of its having been declared heretical over a millenium and a half ago, there is another possible understanding of John's Christology that ought to be given more consideration than it often is: that the Christology of the Gospel of John follows an inspiration model, with Jesus understood as akin to a prophet or mystic. Of course, it will need to be added that the view articulated in this Gospel presents Jesus as being permanently indwelt with the Spirit of God (presumably not yet understood as something or someone other than the Word). But the difference is one of degree or permanence rather than kind.

If there is a key distinction between the two Christological models it is the following. The "ensoulment" viewpoint has a Jesus with no human personality that develops over the course of his life: from conception, we are dealing with a pre-existent person dressed up as a human being. The "inspiration" or "mystical" viewpoint understands Jesus as a human being who so moved his "I" or ego out of the way, that at times he spoke in the divine first person, in a way that prophets have often done. And the matter must be settled not on the basis of the orthodoxy or otherwise of the Christological viewpoint in question (by whatever standard), nor the attractiveness or even the logical coherence of the viewpoint from our standpoint, but by the ability of a given interpretation to do justice to the data of the Gospel of John itself.

The title of my book was derived from the neglected John 17:3, in which Jesus is depicted as referring to the Father as "the only true God", while mentioning himself as the one sent by the only true God. By the time we reach the era of the extracanonical acts of the apostles and martyrs, Jesus is himself referred to as "the only true God", showing evidence of yet another Christological option that was explored by the early Church, that form of modalism that regarded God the Father as the very same "person" that became incarnate, regarding Jesus and the Father as simply "modes" of existence of the same single God.

If there is a verse that should make us revisit "inspirational" understandings of John's Christology, it is perhaps John 8:40, where Jesus is depicted referring to himself as a person who told what he heard from God. Perhaps the time is ripe for a revisiting of John A. T. Robinson's interpretation of John's Christology as he outlined it in The Priority of John.

Returning to where this post began, the interpretative options mentioned above are not ones that are discussed exclusively by academics or lay interpreters of the New Testament. One can find a range of views on the person of Jesus and the interpretation of John's Gospel both among scholars and among laypeople. That a scholar holds a viewpoint doesn't make it correct, and that someone without a PhD holds a viewpoint doesn't make it incorrect. What a rigorous academic approach contributes, even if it is practiced by a well-informed layperson, is an awareness of the relevant evidence beyond the range of ways an English translation of the Bible can be understood, of the history of interpretation of these texts over the centuries in the early church (and beyond), and the brute fact that while some interpretations are simply incompatible with the evidence, a number of different conclusions have been reached by equally intelligent people wrestling to make sense of the same evidence. And so ideally, what anyone, scholar or layperson, should bring to a consideration of such (indeed all!) matters is a combination of relevant information and the humility to recognize that I may be wrong. And what I think most scholars would like to see is not that other interested individuals refrain from commenting on matters in their area of expertise, but that interested parties outside of the academy take the time and effort to inform themselves and think critically about a subject before jumping into the fray.

Continuing Conversation

What are you doing reading this post?! The conversation is currently continuing over at Ecce Homo. Hurry, you don't want to miss it!

Happy Mandaean New Year!

The Mandaeans' calendar is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, but its relevance today is relatively simple. It is the Mandaean new year!

Happy new year to all Mandaeans around the world!

NBC News Archives On Demand

I just received an e-mail informing me about a new online service from NBC News, making its news archives available. The address is http://www.archives.nbclearn.com. It is a subscription service, but one that it may be worthwhile for educators to persuade their institutions to subscribe to if there are enough relevant archives. One can currently sign up for a 30-day free trial. I hope you find something useful!

Gallica

For those who may not have heard of it, I wanted to briefly mention Gallica, a site connected with the Bibliotheque nationale de France. It is a useful site for finding older academic books that have been made available online, on subjects such as the Mandaeans.

Co-moon-ion

I've always lived in a world where going to the moon was possible. I wonder if that more than anything else is responsible for various aspects of the generational differences in worldviews one finds in the world today, or whether such generational divides exist even when nothing quite so earth-shattering (er, I mean, sattelite-visiting) separates the generations.

Irenic Thoughts, The Lead and Ruth Gledhill are among those who have told the story of a historic but previously unknown event that took place on the moon: the celebration of communion by Buzz Aldrin.

Ecce Recensus: The Only True God Persuades A Skeptic

Michael Whitenton has posted a review of my book The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context on his blog Ecce Homo. Since he has encouraged me to respond and turn his blog review into a bloggersation, I'll add a few thoughts.

First, let me say that I'm very grateful for the review, and pleased to learn that keeping the book succinct did not undermine its persuasive power.

Next, I do want to try to offer some clarification in response to this statement: "McGrath points to a few inscriptions found in ancient Palestine that seem to suggest that Jews were worshipping pagan gods alongside the god of Israel at the dawn of the first century CE". What I point to in chapter 2 is evidence that there were a range of forms of acknowledgement of the existence of "other gods", including the acceptance of their relevance within limited domains, as well as their identification with the "only true God" in what might be called "inclusive monotheism" (although Richard Bauckham uses that term to mean something very different, and so I will have to return to this point on a later occasion). Since I emphasize the need to be precise about what we mean by "worship", I am less than thrilled with this characterization of what I said, at least without further clarification. On the one hand, almost all Jews in the period in question would have refrained from offering sacrifice to any deity they understood to be other than YHWH alone. On the other hand, when it came to matters other than animal sacrifice, a range of views seem to have existed within Judaism. The Greek word most frequently translated as "worship" properly means "prostration" before another figure, and on that issue we can find evidence of a range of views and practices.

In his discussion of chapter 3, Michael refers to 3 Enoch (and other Rabbinic sources) as possible counter-evidence to my assertion that mediator figures were not controversial in the New Testament era. 3 Enoch 16 is of course a key text related to Jewish mysticism and the "two powers" heresy, and on p.89 (in the context of my discussion of "two powers") I emphasize the late date of that work, and in particular of the passage in question. And so I think it is fair to summarize my argument as being that mediator figures were not controversial in the New Testament era, but became controversial in at least some circles at some later point. The evidence from 3 Enoch in my view provides supporting evidence rather than evidence to the contrary. I might also add that it seems unlikely that the same exact debate would have continued from New Testament times until 6 or more centuries later, without interruption or significant change!

As for the point that more discussion of primary source material outside of the New Testament could have been provided, I'm sure this is true. I tried to focus the most attention on neglected evidence, such as the statements of non-Jews about Jewish beliefs and practices, and the inscriptional and epigraphic evidence, rather than simply revisiting texts that are well-known, and so inevitably some well-accepted understandings of primary source material were at times assumed rather than defended. Of course, presumably one reason Michael was left with the impression that I did not always cite primary source material when necessary is his aversion to endnotes. While I sympathize with his point about footnotes vs. endnotes, it was primarily the desire to include some lengthy notes (for the sake of those who were interested in certain minute details that would be unlikely to interest most readers) that led to the decision to opt for endnotes. The trouble caused thereby is remedied, in my experience, through the use of a second bookmark. I will gladly send Michael one (or two) if he would find that useful. :-)

Finally, when it comes to the question of the doctrine of the Trinity, I would put my position briefly as follows (and I invite further discussion): I do not think that the New Testament material in any respect made it inevitable that the Nicene Creed's understanding of God as Triune would become the orthodox viewpoint. The main reasons for my thinking this way is my conviction that the debates that led to the Council of Nicaea were focused on answering questions that were not raised (much less answered) in the New Testament period, and the length of time spent trying out various options over the intervening centuries is inexplicable if all Christological questions had already been answered in the New Testament. It seems clear from both the length and the ferocity of the Christological debates of the second, third, and fourth centuries that we are dealing with what Hanson rightly called the search for the Christian doctrine of God, and not merely the defense of something that already existed. But having said this, I do not think that determining what the New Testament says on the matter is the only consideration when asking whether Trinitarianism is a helpful and appropriate theological image. Personally, I find thinking of God in Trinitarian terms particularly helpful in making sense of the notion of God as eternal love, since it is hard to envisage love (or at least, a love that is not egocentrical) without there being more than one person. But ultimately I consider such imagery metaphorical and recall with fondness a question John Macquarrie asked about some of the church's Christological and Trinitarian language, which appropriately burst my theological bubble in my undergraduate days. He rightly asked, with respect to Christian thinking about natures and persons, and terms like enhypostatic and anhypostatic, how any human being could claim to know such things about God.

And so my book is mainly focused on answering historical questions, and if there is a contribution to the tasks of Christian theology and of Jewish-Christian dialogue, it is to emphasize that questions about what we should believe and how we should interact in the present cannot be resolved only by appeal to Scriptural texts. The development of Jewish and Christian monotheism(s), and of the church's Christology, illustrate well that Jewish and Christian doctrines never remained static, and were always formulated in a dialogue between traditions and texts on the one hand, and contemporary issues, needs and concerns on the other. That is how it has always been, and perhaps that is how it should be.

Quote of the Day (Michael Spencer)

"It would seem to me that if evangelicals cannot develop a stronger response and skill at conversation regarding the discoveries of science, we are going to find ourselves so marginalized that whatever we say to ourselves will have little effect on those who are visiting other worlds, other civilizations and reading the story of the universe in DNA and astrophysics"

-- Michael Spencer, "Evangelicals in the Star Trek Universe", Internet Monk

The whole piece is well worth a read, not just for sci-fi fans but also for those interested in the engagement between theology and contemporary science.

A Short Sermon

Asked to share a "short word" in a Romanian church, I decided to offer a short sermon...on the subject of short sermons.

The first (brief) point was that there is a Biblical basis for short sermons. The Sermon on the Mount can be read in less than 10 minutes, and it is perhaps the most influential 'sermon' of all time. Of course, the sermon itself is a literary creation of the Gospel's author, from brief snippets of Jesus' teaching offered on various occasions - reminding us that even short sermons are not remembered in their entirety.

The second point was that the longest sermon mentioned in the Bible does not seem to be given as an example to be followed. In Acts 20:7-12, we read that on one special occasion Paul preached at unusual length. The message of that story is presumably that, if we dare to preach at such length, we must also be prepared to raise from the dead those whose lives are lost as a result! Also worth noting is that nothing is said about the content of the sermon: when we preach long, or lecture long (whether lecturing our students or our children), what they will likely remember about the occasion is what was remembered about Paul's preaching on this occasion: not what was said, but the fact that it was long.

The final point was that as Christians we often substitute a large amount of superficial references to God or Jesus for a smaller number of well-chosen and more profound words and actions. Quality matters more than quantity - that's a short, memorable saying that hearers of this short sermon can take away with them! Indeed, Jesus' own short but influential life is supposed to serve as the paradigm for our own.

A single action that expresses genuine love can say more about one's faith than innumerable Christian T-shirts, bumper stickers, action figures, knick-knacks and bric-a-brac!

Studying the Mandaeans: Sources and Questions

The recent ARAM conference on the Mandaeans in Oxford was a delightful cornucopia of different perspectives and scholarly angles on the Mandaeans, from questions about the origins to their present-day situation, with a number of Mandaeans in attendance as well as scholars interested in their religious tradition, heritage and language.

Mandaism is, I'm quite sure, fascinating to everyone who hears about it. An ancient Gnostic group surviving to the present day, whose texts are written in a dialect of Aramaic - can anyone fail to find them interesting? But there are also a lot of hurdles and challenges, not to mention a number of unanswered questions. I thus thought it would be useful to list some of the major sources in the study of the Mandaeans and their traditions in antiquity, as well as some of the major scholarly needs and puzzles relating to them.

(1) The major texts
The two major religious texts of the Mandaeans are the Ginza Rba (Great Treasure) and the Sidra d-Yahya (Book of John), neither of which exists in a complete English translation. The German translations by Lidzbarski, on the other hand, can be found on Archive.org.

Major need: Someone please translate these into English. Imagine what the situation would be like if there were no English translation of the Nag Hammadi texts, or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course, scholars working specifically on them will work on them in the original languages. But many scholars in other fields (such as New Testament, for instance) may well never have studied Coptic, and yet might benefit from reading or consulting them in translation. And even those who know the relevant languages would find it easier to skim in their native tongue when looking for a particular passage. In addition to the scholarly benefit, having English translations would benefit those Mandaeans living in English-speaking countries, who currently cannot read their own Scriptures.

(2) Worship materials and explanations
I am grouping together here two very different sorts of works. On the one hand, there is an English translation of the Canonical Prayerbook, which contains the 'hymns' used in various liturgies. On the other hand, there have also been translations made of what are often called "esoteric priestly commentaries" which explain and interpret the Mandaean rituals.

Major need: My own conference paper focused attention on the Miriai story in the Book of John in conjunction with passages in priestly sources (the Thousand and Twelve Questions and the Scroll of Exalted Kingship) which provide clues about the historical connection between Mandaeism and Judaism.

(3) Unpublished and unknown texts
There are texts which are known to exist but which are not in any library's collection of Mandaean texts, such as Dmuth Kusta, which I've heard is also beautifully illustrated. There are also texts which have never been shared with anyone outside of the Mandaean priesthood, and there may even be texts the existence of which is still unknown to scholars.

Major need: Copy, transcribe, acquire if possible, publish, photograph, and in any and all ways make available these texts for scholarly study. Imagine what our understanding of early Christianity would be like if some of the New Testament books were still unknown to scholars, only to be found in the private collection of priests. Who knows what is still waiting to be discovered?

(4) Mandaic magical bowls
These have been collected and studied for many years, and are of great interest, in particular when found in archaeological contexts that can be documented. Those found at Nippur, for instance, show that bowls in Mandaic and Aramaic scripts could be found in homes around the same courtyard (as Erica Hunter explained in her conference paper at the ARAM conference).

Major need: Personally, I think an investigation is needed of whether the language of the bowls is the same dialect written in two different scripts, or whether the creators of Aramaic and Mandaic bowls would have seen themselves as speakers of different languages or dialects. The Mandaic script is itself mysterious - there are no instances of its usage for anything other than magical bowls and amulets on the one hand and sacred texts on the other.

(5) Haran Gawaita
Deserving mention on its own, this short and fragmentary text is among the most fascinating texts because of its apparent allusion to a Mandaean migration and because of its reference to a King Ardban or Artapanus.

Major need: Figure out which Ardban is referred to, and whether anything in this work can be confidently corellated with other historical information. Particularly worthy of being explored further is Jorunn Buckley's suggestion (which I made independently here!) that "inner Haran" could perhaps be Wadi Hauran, which would provide a natural link between the Jordan Valley and the historic homeland of the Mandaeans in Mesopotamia in later centuries.

(6) Mentions by others
The non-Mandaean sources which either may or certainly do mention the Mandaeans need further investigation. Among Christian sources important ones include Epiphanius (who refers to a pre-Christian Jewish sect of Nasaraeans) and Theodore bar Koni (the earliest to quote the Ginza, he appears to be reproducing material from an earlier source at this point). There are also many medieval authors writing in Arabic whose mentions of the Mandaeans (or Sabians) are insufficiently known.

Major need: Particularly intriguing are the references in the Qur'an to Sabians (i.e. baptizers), and the mention of Muhammad being accused of being a Sabian. Does this tell us anything about the presence of Mandaeans in Arabia - or rather, about the composition and compilation of the Qur'an in an area where the Mandaeans were known?

--

If there is one thing that makes working in the field of Mandaean scholarship particularly rewarding, it is that there is so much to be done, that one does not need to fight to find some tiny area in which one can make a contribution. Hopefully the recent surge of interest will continue and spread!

In addition to archive.org, a Gnostic church has made some serious academic translations and discussions of Mandaean sources in English available online. This is greatly appreciated. Although the Mandaeans are the only Gnostic group existing from antiquity with continuity, it is great that current wider interest in Gnosticism is translating (if you'll excuse the pun) into genuine interest in the Mandaeans, their history, their writings and their current situation.

Jared Calaway Has Finished With The Only True God

I hope no one is getting tired of these double entendre blog post titles. When I chose the title for the book, I was thinking only of John 17:3 and the relevance of that verse to understanding the Christology of John's Gospel. It didn't even occur to me what potential entertainment value there was in it! :-)

Anyway, Jared Calaway has finished reading my book The Only True God and has posted his initial impressions - in particular highlighting the contrast with Richard Bauckham - on his blog Antiquitopia. Take a look!

Five Primary Sources That SHOULD Influence Richard Bauckham

While I was away a meme has been going around, which in its latest permutation asks Biblical scholars to list 5 primary sources that have influenced them. Ken Brown tagged me, and since most primary sources have already been mentioned, and because I'm reading Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the God of Israel with an aim to reviewing it here, I thought I'd combine the two and offer five primary sources which have influenced me to think differently about monotheism and Christology than Richard Bauckham does.

I begin by noting that the title of Bauckham's book is, inexplicably, Jesus and the God of Israel rather than Jesus as the God of Israel. Bauckham's book focuses on the notion of "divine identity" and repeatedly refers to Jesus' inclusion in that divine identity. What it means for a person to be included in another's identity is never explained, but as many of the sources I mention below make clear, the divine identity as Bauckham defines it is something that God shares with others in Jewish literature from this period. Perhaps a close analogy would be adoption, in which parental/family identity is shared as a new member is incorporated into it. But Bauckham certainly doesn't want to understand Christology in terms of adoption, much less adoptionism. He does clearly want to view Christianity as having done something that is without precedent, and that apologetic aim colors his reading of texts that seem to provide precisely the sorts of precedents that he denies exist.

Here are the five primary texts I've chosen (more could have been mentioned):

1) Philo, Who is Heir of Divine Things? chapter 42 (§ 206)
In this famous instance, Philo wrote that the Word (Logos) is "neither being uncreated as God, nor yet created as you, but being in the midst between these two extremities, like a hostage, as it were, to both parties: a hostage to the Creator, as a pledge and security that the whole race would never fly off and revolt entirely, choosing disorder rather than order; and to the creature, to lead it to entertain a confident hope that the merciful God would not overlook his own work."

We could easily leave matters there. All claims that Jewish thought drew a clear and unambiguous line between the one supreme God and everything else stumbles over this verse, which does not show that there was no sense of God's distinctiveness, but does show that the dividing line was itself the Logos (and other similar concepts), which was inherently a both/and (or neither/nor) concept in this period.

2) Justin Martyr's First Apology ch.6
At one point Justin defends Christian faith against the charge of atheism as follows: "How can they with any justice be called atheists, who reverence and worship the Father of all Righteousness, the Son Who came from the Father and taught us this, the whole Host of Angels and the Prophetical Spirit?"

Justin played a key role in articulating the Church's developing understanding of the Word, and he (perplexingly for most modern readers) mentions in conjunction with (and in between!) his mention of the Father, the Son and the Spirit also the "whole host of angels". Does this not suggest that the distinction Bauckham draws, between personified divine attributes intrinsic to the divine identity, and angelic functionaries subordinate and separate from the divine identity, was lost on one of the better minds of the early post-NT church?

3) Apocalypse of Abraham
Ironically, although he rejects the distinction between function and ontology that has traditionally been made, Bauckham's own discussion of "divine identity" is largely about functions (creation and rule) rather than more obvious characteristics of identity, such as personal name. The irony is that, even more clearly than divine prerogatives and functions, God can be found sharing his own personal name, the tetragrammaton (YHWH), in the literature of this period (not to mention later Rabbinic sources, including 3 Enoch, and Samaritan sources). The angel Yahoel in Apoc. Abr. 10 is a key example of this, and this deserves more attention from Bauckham than he has thus far accorded it.

4) The Similitudes of Enoch
Bauckham refers to the Son of Man in 1 Enoch as "the exception that proves the rule" by exercising divine judgment and receiving worship. It is not clear what Bauckham thinks that phrase means, but (to quote Inigo Mentoya) "I do not think it means what you think it means". An exception that proves the rule means a case where, because of highly unusual circumstances, something happened that would not normally have. Yet Bauckham offers no explanation of what precisely was exceptional or extraordinary in the context, thought and/or composition of the Similitudes. And so rather than offering an exception that proves the rule, he fails to realize that he has offered an example that disproves his rule. The rule, as it happens, had already been disproved centuries earlier by the author of 1 Chronicles 29:20-23, where we are told that Solomon sat on the throne of YHWH and the people worshipped (i.e. prostrated themselves before) God and the king (one verb with two objects).

5) The Book of Revelation
Finally, let me include a New Testament text in this list as well. Bauckham famously claimed that the Book of Revelation makes a point about Christology and monotheism by contrasting the worship of Jesus and God with angels' refusal of worship. This claim runs aground on Revelation 3:9, where it is said that Christians will receive worship.

I've offered five key primary texts here, but I intend to return to a more traditional format review in the coming days. (There have been other blog review series: see Jared Calaway's and Nick Norelli's). I might also mention that my own recent book on monotheism and Christology was completed before Bauckham's book came out, but since his book is a collection of earlier studies, it seems that all the criticisms of Bauckham's conclusions I published in The Only True God continue to apply to Jesus and the God of Israel. Indeed, the texts mentioned above are among those discussed in my book.

I won't tag anyone specific with the meme I mentioned at the beginning, since I don't have time to check who has and has not yet been tagged before. But if you haven't been tagged yet, feel free to keep this meme going!

The Exodus From Egypt and 9/11

The Exodus from Egypt, had it occurred in literal fashion as described in the Bible, would have been (at the very least) ancient Egypt's "September 11th". Even if it did not wipe out every single firstborn child, and the cattle, not to mention Pharaoh's army, even an event that decimated (in the literal or metaphorical sense) these elements of Egyptian society would have been noteworthy, to say the least, not to mention deeply traumatic.

Those who maintain Biblical inerrancy work largely in isolation from the huge enterprise of scholarly investigation of Ancient Egypt. The may dabble looking for evidence to support the Bible's factuality, but more is needed. In the periods during which various scholars have placed the Exodus, such as the Ramessid era, Egyptian people wrote things. Claims to the Bible's precise accuracy do not merely confront absence of evidence for the Exodus in Egyptian sources - we all know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is as though claims were being made thousands of years from now that September 11th 2001 was the date of a major terrorist attack, and yet at the same time having US newspapers from September 12th 2001 and onwards and yet none of them mention anything out of the ordinary.

This is not to suggest that Israel's folkloric tradition about the Exodus has no connection to any historical event. It is often overlooked that Israelites could have experienced being 'slaves of the Egyptians' without ever having left Canaan. A mythologized folktale that combined a memory of liberation from slavery with the classic language of creation by God's splitting of waters to symbolize the creation of a new people might be sufficient to account for what we find in Israel's traditions.

The Only True God in the U.K.

Amazon.co.uk now has The Only True God available for order. It is listed (as of the time of this blog post) as "temporarily out of stock", but presumably those who place an order will be informed of an estimated date for shipping.

Review of Did The Resurrection Happen? A Conversation with Gary Habermas and Antony Flew

Did the Resurrection Happen?: A Conversation With Gary Habermas and Antony Flew, edited by David Baggett (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), offers an excellent presentation of contrasting perspectives on the philosophical aspects of the resurrection, all the more compelling because it takes the form of a dialogue between two philosophers whose different views on the matter are set in the wider context of an ongoing conversation between close friends. While those who have followed the historical investigation of the resurrection will know that there are important issues the volume largely overlooks, a key theme within the book is precisely the need for philosophical as well as historical perspectives on the resurrection, as well as both scientific and philosophical evaluation of recent scientific findings. As someone who has devoted a significant amount of time to though and reflection about historical and theological aspects of the resurrection, I still learned and benefitted from the philosophical discussion recorded in this book.

The book has a somewhat uneven feel, being comprised of a foreword by the Veritas Forum's executive director, an informal debate (or formal discussion) by Flew and Habermas with input from the moderator as well as questions from the audience, a review by Habermas of Flew's recent book, and an introduction as well as an 'assessment' of the Flew-Habermas debate and an appendix by the book's editor.

Key points of important background to the book include the fact that this is the third and final installment in an ongoing conversation between two philosophers who have also become friends, and that while Flew's skepticism about the resurrection has not changed, he recently surprised the world with the announcement that he had come to believe in God. The God whose existence he now accepts is the God posited by Aristotle, and his view is best categorized as Deism.

The discussion between Habermas and Flew does not presuppose inerrancy but approaches the question as a historical one. A set of generally-accepted historical facts is presented, and a key issue in the remainder of the book is whether positing that Jesus was alive after having been dead (1) does best justice to the historical data, and (2) can be a legitimate historical inference.

From a historical perspective there are some issues connected with the 'basic facts' that do not get mentioned or are not done justice to, to the detriment of the philosophical discussion built thereupon. The burial of Jesus is said at one point to be largely irrelevant (pp.28-9), and yet even though there is some some acknowledgment that there is less unanimous agreement that the tomb was found empty after 3 days, the empty tomb is appealed to subsequently without such disclaimers. No awareness is shown of the arguments of Brown, Evans and others that Jesus was dishonorably buried (possible implications of which for our thinking about the resurrection I've explored elsewhere). And much is made of Jesus' brother James having been a skeptic, a common view to be sure, but one that can scarcely be assumed by a historian. The Gospels may depict Jesus' family as unsupportive at times, but we are not told that this attitude persisted until after the crucifixion, and the Gospels themselves depict a divided family ('three against two and two against three') as the norm. The extracanonical portrait of James fasting and anticipating seeing Jesus after the crucifixion also needs to be considered. Given the late date scholars assign to both Luke-Acts and John, a historian might also feel unable to assume either that Paul's experience of seeing Jesus caused his conversion rather than occurring subsequently, just as we would note that any mention of a physical, tangible component is lacking in the earliest accounts of Jesus' post-Easter appearances. The latter point largely undermines the assumption that group visions in early Christianity were of a fundamentally different character than group visions at Lourdes or Fatima (p.125). This is not to say that we know the sorts of experiences in both examples were the same; we simply don't know that they were different. We also have no way of knowing whether anyone present when some early Christians claimed to see Jesus themselves failed to see anything (although the two different accounts of what those with Paul on the Damascus Road did or didn't see or hear in Acts is worth looking at when considering this question).

While there are some historical weaknesses to the book, in terms of the treatment of the philosophical issues, the presentation is top notch. If at times Flew seems to pass up opportunities to respond, this is illustrative of his principled philosophical stance, which feels no need to come up with an extremely probable scenario to explain the rise of Easter faith, since even a relatively unlikely natural scenario is considered more likely than a miraculous one. Interestingly, both sides agree that in most instances a natural explanation is preferable to a miraculous one (see e.g. pp.124,131). The question then becomes whether, if a natural explanation seems to do less justice to the historical data than a supernatural one, one can be justified in concluding that a miracle is the better explanation. Here too both Habermas and Flew seem to agree that believing a miracle occurred may be a perfectly reasonable conclusion for someone with a certain sort of theistic viewpoint, while an atheist may be equally reasonable in considering the evidence less than convincing.

Several times (in the preface as well as on the cover) it is emphasized that the book's conversation aims at elucidation rather than victory (p.9). This makes the tone of Part III seem somewhat out of place. It is for all intents and purposes a philosophical 'altar call' by the book's editor, purportedly addressed to Flew and yet published as a sort of 'open letter'. It is almost as though Baggett does not trust either Flew's demonstrated willingness to 'follow the evidence where it leads', nor the long-term Christian witness of Flew's friend Gary Habermas. This hurried presentation of why Flew 'should become a Christian' reflects an all-too-common 'hard sell' approach to evangelism that often does more harm than good. And some of the silly apologetic arguments that are used are unworthy of inclusion alongside the much more impressive and sophisticated philosophical conversation between Flew and Habermas. A good example is the old canard that the body could have been produced to disprove the resurrection, as though someone's remains would have been recognizable after the period of time that may have passed between the crucifixion and the authorities becoming aware of the Christians' proclamation.

Despite any unevenness, I still highly recommend this book to all those interested in the resurrection from any perspective. For the most part, the book presents in an extremely fair way the basic historical data, which interpretations are so implausible as not to merit serious consideration, and what the key presuppositions are that lead different intelligent people to different conclusions. As such, it helpfully focuses attention on those points where ongoing research, reflection and discussion can most fruitfully take place.

In concluding, it seems to me that a well-informed, intelligent, educated Christian could be perfectly reasonable in believing it more likely than not that Jesus rose from the dead. And the question with which I remain is what role if any such a probabilistic affirmation could possibly have in Christian proclamation. The book's title asks whether the resurrection happened, and more than once it is asserted in the book that if the answer is no then Christianity is false. And the book makes a reasonable (but not totally decisive) case that Christianity could indeed be true in this sense. But I still find myself torn between the Gospel understood as the proclamation of the historical likelihood of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the Christian message as something that can confront and challenge people apart from historical uncertainties. This is the key theological and missiological issue connected with the philosophical issues invesigated in the course of the long-term conversation between Habermas and Flew. Those prepared to grapple with such hard questions will benefit from this volume in all sorts of ways.

God's Just Not That Into You

One of the in-flight movies on the way back from England was He's Just Not That Into You. This post will mention a couple of points made in the course of the movie, and so if you're the sort of person who doesn't want to know even things that happen in the first minute of a movie before seeing it, then consider this a SPOILER ALERT. Nevertheless, this post is not a movie review but a theological reflection on some analogies between popular approaches to religion and points made in the movie about human relationships.

The movie begins with a girl being pushed and called names by a boy in a playground. The girl's mother explains to her that the boy must have done these things because he has a crush on her and likes her. This, it is suggested, is at the root of the attempt women sometimes make later in life to interpret a man's apparent lack of romantic interest, meanness and various things as meaning something other that appears to be the case when the words or actions are taken at face value.

I found myself thinking about the ways in which we think in our youth (and often beyond our younger years) about God and our everyday experiences. If something happens to a religious believer that doesn't immediately make sense in term of being cared for by a loving and all-powerful God, ways are found to explain away the apparent contradiction. God is just testing you or allowing you to be tested. Satan is trying to trip you up because you love God, and/or God loves you, so much. God is showing his great confidence in you because he won't put you through anything you can't handle.

Is there not a profound similarity to the ways we sometimes seek less obvious but more comforting explanations for the behavior of a significant other?

I propose the alternative explanation that "God just isn't that into you" in a somewhat facetious, tongue-in-cheek manner. But in a sense that is what it can feel like when one goes from thinking of God as an anthropomorphic heavenly 'significant other' to acknowledging that the universe and/or God's plan for it may well not revolve around you. The idea that God is not compelling people with important business to nonetheless get in their cars and leave so that you will find a parking spot can be as troubling as the realization that another person's apparent lack of romantic is in fact what it appears to be, rather than merely an indication that the person hides his or her feelings well, or something else of that sort.

God, as depicted in the Bible and many other religious texts, doesn't seem to hide his feelings. To echo a phrase from the movie, in most ancient religious thought 'if a god wants to make a covenant with you, he'll make that clear'. The Bible does not depict a hidden God but a God who reveals himself and often brings swift judgment on the enemies of his chosen ones. Our time, on the other hand, is one in which it is possible to seriously doubt whether any sort of deity exists. But the movie's message, like that of this blog entry, is not to deny that guys or gods exist, but to encourage us to think in a different, more mature manner about who or what they are and how to relate to them.

Of course, at this point the analogy breaks down, since the movie seems to be advising an honest recognition of how men and women relate to one another so as to find someone who is 'into you'. When it comes to relating to God, however, the key is not only to recognize that the universe is not made so as to revolve around you or me (the ultimate Copernica paradigm shift), but also to recognize the pitfalls of applying the analogy of 'personal relationship' to God, and even more so of taking such a metaphor as a literal statement of fact.

What do you think? Have you had experiences which led you to conclude that there is no God, or that God should not be thought of in overly personal terms, or that "he's just not that into you"?

Review of Deepest Differences: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue

Deepest Differences: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue is a transcript (edited and organized to aid readers of the book but otherwise left as it was) of an e-mail exchange between James Sire and Carl Peraino.

The book provides an opportunity to eavesdrop on a conversation between two educated individuals with many shared views and assumptions as well as a great many differences. Rather than offering an opportunity to settle disagreements between Christians and atheists, the book rather provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of worldviews, the character of our assumptions and their openness or otherwise to being called into question, and what is involved in an attempt to dialogue with someone whose assumptions differ from one's own.

It is interesting to note that the dialogue began with Jim quoting an "argument for the existence of God" that ran as follows:

There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Therefore there must be a God.
You either see this one or you don't.

[p.17, quoting Catholic philosophers Peter Kreeft and Ron Tacelli of Boston College]

Jim more than once seemed to Carl to be too willing to appeal to divine inscrutibility. My own impression was similar and yet different. I often felt Jim was insufficiently willing to see the arbitrary point at which inscrutibility was invoked: it was inevitably where his own understanding of Biblical theism ran out of specifics (see pp.127-130). In my own view, just as Jim apologized for engaging in speculation, he ought to have acknowledged that some elements of the Biblical authors' or classic Christian theology's views are equally speclative, speaking with confidence where we today might better humbly acknowledge uncertainty (see pp.61-66).

Jim mentioned at times his confidence in the Bible's essential historicity. Since that never became the focus of the conversation, differing assumptions on this matter were a hurdle which persisted throughout the exchange. But this is simply one facet of what was a conversation between one particular Christian and one particular atheist. Although some will read the book as though spectators at a boxing match, cheering for one side, I expect that many Christians and atheists who read the book will see places where they themselves would have argued the same point differently or even have agreed with their dialogue partner.

A key starting point to the dialogue was the question of the need for a supernatural ground for morality. This was one place where I would have disagreed with both sides. Against Carl, I would have said that morality for reflective humanity is no longer simply a matter of evolution and survival via natural processes. The is/ought problem Jim highlighted is an important one. Yet I disagree with Jim that one can simply resolve the matter by positing God, for two main reasons. First, such a move makes a problematic leap: there is a sense of absolute right and wrong, therefore an entity must exist that justifies such a moral sense. It is interesting that Christians have been known to invoke God as the basis for our moral sense while at the same time claiming our human moral sense is fundamentally skewed. Likewise, Biblical theism cannot justify precisely the kind of absolute morality that Jim claims it can, since the Bible depicts God demanding a child be sacrificed (in a story that makes no sense unless read with the assumption that God could indeed demand such a thing) and the slaughter of every last inhabitant of a city - precisely the sort of thing many Christians appeal to as an example of things that are "always absolutely wrong without exception" only if God exists (pp.57-58).

While reading the exchange I was struck by a paradoxical (at least to my mind) element of the Evangelical worldview. On the one hand, much is made of the inability of any system other than Biblical theism to ground morality. But then, ironically, Evangelicals turn around and respond to questions about moral atheists by asserting that morality is not ultimately what God is interested in when it comes to the salvation of human beings. There is a tension here that often remains unnoticed, whereas it deserves some serious thought and explanation.

In the course of the conversation many interesting questions come up. One example is the question of why God created, and whether, if in the afterlife it will be impossible for anyone to sin, it would not have made more sense for God to have made humans incapable of sin from the outset. Yet such creatures being created at all seems to have nothing desirable about it that might motivate God to create in the first place. Jim, as a conservative Christian, is unwilling to consider other options that are alternatives to both his view and Carl's atheism, namely moderate and liberal Christian views that accept that some elements of the claims of Biblical authors and Christian tradition and theology may need to be rethought, and either revised or repudiated.

I highly recommend this book by Sire and Peraino to anyone who values dialogue with those whose views differ from their own. The book contains a study guide, but I would advise against the use of this volume by Christians or atheists, which might lead to precisely the sort of smug self-congratulatory outlook or opponent-bashing the book eschews. Rather, the book better serves as a starting point for other conversations similar to that between its two authors.

Noi Am Privit Slava Lui (Ioan 1.1-18)

I thought I'd share a sermon I preached recently in a church in Romania. Any resemblance to another sermon I preached recently in English is entirely uncoincidental...

Noi am privit slava Lui

Când am început să mă gândesc la pasajul acesta, Ioan 1:1-18, prologul Evangheliei după Ioan, şi la ceea ce înseamnă când autorul se referă la slava Lui pe care el şi primii creştini au privit-o, mi-am adus aminte despre un eveniment din viaţa unui profesor din secolul al XIX-lea. Lobegott Friedrich Constantine von Tischendorf a fost preocupat toată cariera lui să studieze cât mai multe manuscrise ale Noului Testament, cu scopul de-a recupera cumva forma sa originala. Aşa cum presupun că cei mai multi stiti ca nu mai există originalele cărţilor din Biblie, astfel ca doar prin comparaţia manuscriselor cele mai timpurii putem să realizăm o aproximare a formelor originale ale acestor cărţi. Într-o vizită în Egipt, el a descoperit un manuscris care mai tarziu s-a numit ”Codex Sinaiticus”, un exemplar din secolul al IV-lea al Bibliei în greacă şi astfel unul dintre copiile complete cele mai antice. Tischendorf descrie descoperirea pe care el a făcut-o în felul următor:

Lângă muntele Sinai, in Mănăstirea Sfântei Catarina, am descoperit comoara
tuturor cercetărilor mele. Când am vizitat mănăstirea în luna mai, 1844, am
observat, în mijlocul unei săli mari, un coş enorm plin de foi de pergament. Un
bibliotecar (un om foarte informativ) mi-a spus că deja doua gramezi de hârtii
asemănătoare, foarte uzate şi afectate de trecerea timpului fusesera arse. Ce
surpriză a fost pentru mine când am găsit între aceste hârtii un număr
semnificativ de pagini ale unei copii ale Vechiului Testament în limbă greacă,
care mi se păruse a fi una dintre cele mai antice pe care o văzusem vreodată.
Autorităţiile mănăstirii mi-au dat voie să iau o treime dintre foile de
pergament, sau aproximativ 43 de foi întru-cât ei deja planificasera să le ardă.
Însă nu-i am putut convinge să-mi dea restul. Satisfacţia enormă pe care am
arătat-o i-a făcut suspicioşi şi şi-au dat seamă că manuscrisul ar putea vi
valoros. Am transcris o pagină din cărţile Isaia şi Ieremia şi i-am rugat pe
călugări să păstreze cu grijă oricare asemenea rămăşiţe de manuscrise pe care le
vor găsi de acum încolo.

Intre timp Tischendorf a reuşit să intre în posesiunea manuscrisului, deşi numai dupa 15 ani de zile de atunci. Ceea ce mi se pare cel mai interesant (iar pentru un profesor de Nou Testament aşa cum sunt eu, cel mai ingrozitor lucru) este faptul că acest manuscris al Noului Testament extrem de important aproape că a fost ars, caz în care n-am fi aflat niciodata despre el. Pentru Tischendorf, ca şi pentru alţi experţi în domeniul Noului Testament din vremea lui până în ziua de azi, descoperirea manuscriselor cât mai timpurii este extrem de important, fiind cheia pentru reconstituirea formei “originale” a Noului Testament. Neavând exemplarele originalele, cu cât mai timpurii sunt exemplarele pe care le avem acum, cu atât mai aproape ne apropiem de forma lor originală. Dacă unii dintre dumneavoastră aţi citit o traducere mai veche ale Bibliei, iar apoi aţi citit una mai recentă (fie în limba română, fie în engleză), probabil că aţi observat că există locuri unde unele cuvinte sunt schimbate, unde lipsesc fraze sau altele sunt adăugate, sau alte asemenea schimbări. Motivul schimbărilor sunt tocmai descoperiri ca cea a lui Tischendorf, adică faptul că traducătorii care au lucrat mai recent au avut acces la manuscrise mai antice decât traducătorii care au lucrat acum câteva secole.

Mulţi în vremea lui Tischendorf au avut o altă gândire despre Biblie. Ei au considerat că manuscrisele Bibliei trebuiesc să se conformeze forma aprobată de Împăratul Constantin cu un mileniu şi jumătate înainte. Astfel ei n-au văzut nici o valoare în păstrarea manuscriselor vechi, mai ales manuscrise care erau diferite de versiunea “officială”, în timp ce călugării au făcut o grămada de copii noi ale tipului de manuscris aprobat, care erau bineînţeles într-o condiţie mai bună, fiind noi. Însă ceea ce pentru unii n-a fost decât material folositor pentru aprinderea focului, pentru alţii a fost o evidenţă importanta despre forma originală a Noului Testament şi istoria copierii şi a transmiterii sale. Astăzi când citim Evanghelia după Ioan, citim o traducere ai căroră trăducători au luat în considerare manuscrisul descoperit de Tischendorf cât şi alte manuscrise asemănătoare.

V-am povestit despre experienţa lui Tischendorf pentru că ilustrează cum lucrurile unuia considerate gunoi sunt comoara altuia. Sper că este clar cum considerarea acestui subiect este relevant la interpretarea lui Ioan 1:14. Imediat după ce citim “Cuvântul s-a făcut trup”, citim mai departe că “noi am privit slava Lui”. Însă la ce se referă cuvântul “slava”? Constă oare în ceea ce oameni consideră a fi glorioasă? Sau oare a privi slava lui Dumnezeu în viaţa lui Isus ne cere să gândim altfel despre slavă, despre glorie? Oare ceea ce noi preţuim este despreţuit de Dumnezeu şi ceea ce preţuieşte Dumnezeu noi privim cu despreţ?

Ca să ne pregătească pentru a considera aceste lucruri, Evanghelia după Ioan începe “la început”, cu un ecou din primul capitol din Geneza. Apoi introduce un concept familiar în epoca în care evanghelia a fost scrisă, însă care cere explicaţie şi clarificaţie în vremea noastră. De ce spune Ioan că “La început era Cuvântul”? De ce foloseşte termenul “Cuvânt” şi nu alte termen? De ce se prezintă ca şi când acest lucru ar fi uşor de înţeles? Dacă găsim răspunsul la întrebarea cea din urmă, ne va ajuta să înţelegem ce înseamnă să spunem că “Cuvântul s-a făcut trup” şi de asemenea semnificaţia faptului că, din perspectiva noastra, “trupul s-a făcut cuvinte” - sau altfel zis, faptul că noi privim spre Cuvântul-făcut-trup prin mijlocul unor cuvinte scrise, ca de exemplu cele pe care le-am citit şi pe care le studiem împreună astăzi.

Sensul cuvântul românesc “cuvânt” nu corespunde în mod precis la sensul cuvântului grecesc folosit aici în Evanghelia după Ioan. Cuvânt grecesc respectiv este logos din care se trage cuvântul românesc logică precum şi “-logia” din cuvinte ca biologie sau teologie. Logos se referă nu doar la cuvântul spus ci şi la cuvântul gândit, raţiunea, gândul care există în doar minte. Stoicii (o şcoala filozofică greacă) au folosit termenul ca să desemneze “sufletul lumii” - un principiu pe care ei au crezut că este responsabil pentru ordinea şi organizarea raţională din univers. De la ei alţii au împrumutat termenul, între care filozoful evreu Filon din Alexandria, un contemporan de-al Domnului Isus, care a folosit acest termen şi concept filozofic ca să explice cum un Dumnezeu transcendent şi perfect ar fi putut interacţiona cu lumea creată şi să se facă cunoscut oamenilor. Astfel acest termen, logos, Cuvântul, a fost folosit pentru multe secole, timp în care a ajuns să aibă o adâncime profundă de sens şi de semnificaţie. Iar când autorul acestei Evanghelii a scris că Cuvântul s-a făcut trup în viaţa umană a lui Isus, a vrut să spună ceea ce contemporanii săi ar fi înţeles: Isus este exprimarea într-o viaţă umană a raţiunii şi a sensului existenţei; el este exprimarea într-o viaţă umană a revelaţiei proprii a lui Dumnezeu.

Ceva foarte asemănător se întâmplă atunci când Cuvântul lui Dumnezeu se face trup şi atunci când trupul lui Isus se face cuvinte scrise, ajungând la noi prin mijlocul naraţiunilor şi al învăţăturilor din Evanghelii. Dumnezeu nu vine la noi “vorbiind propria sa limbă” dacă putem să spunem aşa. Dumnezeu nu ne confruntă cu esenţa sa pură, adresându-se omenirii cu provocarea de a înţelege ce este el şi ce înseamnă el – ca şi când am putea noi înţelege infintul cu miinţile noastre finite. Dumnezeu însuşi se apropie de creaţie prin creaţie. Acest principiu de întrupare îndruma creştinismul de-a lungul secoliilor, de exemplu când primii creştini au considerat că răspândirea evangheliei este mai importantă decât păstrarea cuvintelor exacte ale Domnului Isus. Astfel avem Evanghelii scrise în greacă (limba cea mai larg răspândită în partea de est a Imperiului Roman) şi nu în aramaică, limba maternă a lui Isus. Oricând are loc o traducere, se pierde din sens şi se adaugă la sens – motiv pentru care în Italia există un proverb, “un trăducător e un trădător”. Însă creştinismul nu pretinde că există o limbă divină pe care toţi trebuie s-o înveţe dacă vor să aibă de a face cu Dumnezeu. Dimpotrivă, creştinismul spune că Dumnezeu poate, chiar trebuie, să fie întâlnit printr-o viaţă umană, sau prin cuvinte umane.

Un misionar şi autor binecunoscut, Leslie Newbiggin, a scris: “Idea că cineva ar putea separa printr-un proces de distilare o evanghelie pură şi nedenaturată de vreo adaugare culturală este o iluzie. Mai rău, este o negare a evangheliei, pentru că evanghelia are de a face cu cuvântul făcut trup...Totuşi evanghelia, care de la început până la sfârşit este întrupată în forme culturale, pune sub semnul întrebării toate culturile – inclusiv cultura în care a fost întrupată în original”.

Astfel orice formă a creştinismului care pare a se axeze exclusiv pe preservarea sensului vechi, pe păstrarea formelor vechi, a pierdut impulsul spre întrupare şi traducere care a îndrumat misiunea creştină de-a lungul secolelor şi de asemenea a pierdut raţiunea atât a compoziţiei Evanghelilor în greacă, cât şi a traducerii lor în nenumărate limbi (între care şi română). Acest impuls spre întrupare şi traducere este de asemenea o cheie importantă care ne ajută să înţelegem cum Evanghelia după Ioan îl prezintă pe Isus.

Ar fi fost mult mai multe de spus despre acest pasaj din Evanghelie după Ioan, dar nu avem timp. În mod asemănător, la sfârşitul Evangheliei, autorul recunoaşte că s-ar putea umplea toate cărţile din lume cu cuvinte depsre Isus. Astfel ne face conştient de un aspect important al revelaţiei lui Dumnezeu aşa cum se prezintă în această Evanghelie. Dumnezeu fiind infinit întrece ceea ce s-a putut cuprinde în anii vieţii umane a lui Isus, tot aşa cum există mai multe evenimente din viaţa lui Isus decât au putut fi cuprinse in această carte, sau celelalte trei scrise depsre el care sunt incluse în Noul Testament, sau chiar în toate celelalte cărţi pe aceeaşi temă care s-au scris de atunci. Evanghelia după Ioan ne atrage atenţia asupra acestui fapt de două ori aici în prolog. Ne spune că acest Cuvânt este lumina care luminează pe orice om, pe fiecare om. Tot aşa se menţionează cum Cuvântul a fost în lume tot mereu şi înainte de întrupare, care este introdusă abia în versetul 14. Când autorul Evangheliei s-a referit la felulu în care Cuvântul era în lume şi a fost respins, a avut în vedere activitatea Cuvântului lui Dumnezeu prin întreaga istorie şi nu numai în Isus. Pentru autorul Evanghelie după Ioan, ca şi pentru creştini în general, Isus este revelaţia supremă a lui Dumnezeu, dar în nici un caz nu este prezentat ca fiind singura revelaţie a lui Dumnezeu. Dacă unii creştini nu înţeleg aceste lucruri, este (într-un mod ironic) tocmai din cauza riscului pe care Dumnezeu şi-l ia, riscul pe care autorii cărţilor Noului Testament şi-l iau, pentru ca să comunice evanghelia. Evanghelia nu rămâne în contextul său original în primul secol şi în greacă, un context în care înţelegerea sa în mod greşit era mai puţin probabil. În contextul acela însă, era mult mai clar că autorul Evangheliei a fost dispus să se folosească de termeni din alte tradiţii de gândire religioasă ca să-şi exprime propria credinţa.

Astfel ajungem la punctul principal, în miezul prologului: ce înseamnă să “privim slava lui”? Unii cititori ai Evangheliei după Ioan au rămas cu impresia că Isus aproape că nu este uman, că nu atingea pământul când mergea, cu o aureolă care străluceşte în jurul capului său aşa cum găsim în picturi.

Dar de multe ori ceea ce nu se aminteşte în text este la fel de important cu ceea ce se spune. În celelalte trei Evanghelii, se include o naraţiune în care Isus este pe Munte ca Moise (şi cu Moise!) şi hainele lui au strălucit în mod vizibil. Însă Evanghelia după Ioan nu include o asemenea naraţiune, lucru care ne-ar surpinde dacă autorul s-a referit la o strălucire vizibilă atunci când a scris că “am privit slava lui”.

Spre sfârşitul Evangheliei după Ioan gasim scopul cu care a fost scrisă si este exprimat în felul următor: aceste lucruri au fost scrise ca să credeţi că Isus este Cristosul... Tot aşa cum ştim anumite lucruri din surse antice despre Cuvântul sau logos-ul, tot aşa a existat o concepţie despre slava lui Mesia, unsul Domnului. Cele două personaje din Israelul antic care au fost unse cu untdelemn în mod simbolic au fost regele şi marele preot. Dacă un evreu facea referire la “Unsul” la singular, de obicei era vorba despre rege. Era vorba despre aşteptarea ca Dumnezeu să pună din nou un urmaş de al lui David pe tron. Era vorba despre o restaurare a independenţei politice ale poporului. Era vorba despre o restaurare economică naţională. Aceste aşteptări nu erau doar religioase ci şi politice, naţionaliste şi economice.

Este absolut necesar să înţelegem aceste lucruri ca să ne dăm seama cât de ciudată a sunat proclamarea primilor creştini cum că Isus este Mesia în urechilor contemporanilor lor. Imaginaţi-vă un grup care pretinde că preşedintele ţării nu este nici cel ales în ultimile alegeri presidenţiale, nici oponentul său, ci un alt om care nu de mult a fost pedepsit cu moartea fiind considerat un criminal. De obicei, dacă vorbim despre slavă, nu ne referim la aşa ceva. Aşa că fel şi fel de filozofi ar fi putut scrie ceea ce găsim în primele 13 versete din Ioan. Dar asocierea pe care o face Evanghelia între Cuvânt şi trup, sau mai literal carne, era surprinzătoare. Fie în iudaism fie în gândire elenică, termenul carne avea conotaţie de slăbăciune, de ceva departe de perfecţiunea divină. Iar ştiind că autorul a avut în gând carnea unui om crucificat, caracterul şocant al mesajului Evangheliei devine şi mai clar.

Găsim aceleaşi ideei exprimate şi în referirile la înălţarea Fiului Omului. De trei ori în Evanghelia după Ioan, citim că Fiul Omului trebuie să fie înălţat şi pe de o parte, înălţare uneori este un sinonim pentru exaltare. Dar în limba aramaică, acelaşi cuvânt avea şi sensul de a răstigni – a ridica în sens literal pe lemn. Aproape că toţi creştini au vorbit despre răstignirea şi exaltarea lui Isus. Autorul acestei Evanghelii însă a găsit o metodă de a le îmbina într-o singură expresie. Astfel el accentuează paradoxul glorificării lui Isus prin mijlocul crucii.

Oare de ce este important ca noi să înţelegem că slava la care Evanghelia după Ioan se referă nu constă într-o aureolă vizibilă care l-a înconjurat, sau că nu se referă la succesul său? Pentru că dacă nu înţelegem aceste lucruri, este posibil că nu am fost confuntaţi într-adevăr de provocarea crucii, de scandalul unui Mesia care suferă şi moare.

Dificultatea acestor ideii nu este ceva care ne confruntă doar pe noi, privind de la o distanţă istorică semnificativă. Uneori suntem ispitiţi să credem că dacă doar am fi putut călători prin timp, am putea merge în primul secol, l-am vedea pe Isus cu ochii noştri şi nu am mai avea nici o îndoială, am găsi răspunsurile la toate întrebările pe care le avem. A gândi în felul acesta însă trece cu vederea faptul că au fost oameni care l-au văzut pe Isus cu ochii lor, care l-au auzit cu propriile lor urechi şi totuşi n-au crezut. Ca în mai multe cazuri, cei care l-au cunoscut din copilărie nu au privit slava lui. Oamenii din satul său natal l-au desconsiderat, iar familia lui la un moment dat au crezut că şi-a ieşit din miinţi. Astfel a privi slava lui este altceva decât doar să-l priveşti. Faptul că el a părut a fi ordinar în atâtea privinţe i-a prevenit pe unii să vadă în el ceea ce a fost extraordinar.

Astfel că provocarea mesajului creştin este următoarea: Dacă eu l-aş fi văzut în trup, oare aş fi privit slavă sau nu? Aş fi fost eu oare între cei care au cerut un semn? Sau aş fi spus în schimb ca Petru, că deşi nu înţeleg tot ceea ce Isus a spus, recunosc că n-am unde altundeva să mă duc, pentru că recunosc că el are cuvintele vieţii veşnice?

Piedica cea mai mare care ne poate preveni de a privi slava lui este faptul că ceea ce noi oamenii credem că este glorios nu neapărat este privit aşa de Dumnezeu. Pavel a scris că nebunia lui Dumnezeu este mai înţeleaptă decât înţelepciunea omului. Tot aşa ruşinea lui Dumnezeu, dacă putem spune aşa, umilinţa lui Dumnezeu, este mai plină de slavă decât slava umană. Dar este important să înţelegem că slava lui este şi altfel decât slava noastră. Evanghelia ne spune că slava lui Dumnezeu, în primul secol, nu s-a găsit în palatul lui Cezar sau în alte locuri asemănătoare. Slava lui s-a găsit, spre surprinderea tuturor, pe drum spre cruce.

Prologul Evangheliei după Ioan se axează pe Cuvântul făcut trup, Isus Hristos. În scrisorile lui Pavel, citim că acelaşi Duh care a fost în Hristos acum locuieşte în noi şi cum că noi suntem trupul lui Hristos. Aşa că provocarea mesajului Evangheliei după Ioan nu este doar să-l privim pe Isus într-un anumit fel, dintr-o anumită perspectivă, ci să ne aşteptăm ca Dumnezeu să lucreze în şi prin noi în mod asemănător. Şi astăzi oamenii au nevoie să privească slava lui, dar dacă n-o pot vedea într-o oarecare măsură în vieţile noastre, unde o vor putea vedea? Noi ca şi creştini urmăm pe unul respins de lume şi privim slava lui Dumnezeu tocmai acolo. Iar atunci când înţelegem că slava lui Dumnezeu este făcută perfectă prin slăbăciune, lucruri minunate se pot întâmpla.

From The Archives: What Romania Has Taught Me About The Bible

I lived in Romania for three years, have been married to a Romanian for seventeen, and have had a lot of contact with Romania and Romanians. I love the surprised look on people's faces when I tell them that I didn't really understand the New Testament until I lived in Romania.

Romania was part of the Roman Empire at one point, but even had this not been the case, it still would be part of that region stretching along the Eastern Mediterranian, up into the Balkans, over into Turkey and North Africa and other places as well, which share a number of key cultural values in common, such as their honor-shame values systems, the importance of relationships (especially of blood) in all transactions, and many other features. It is cultures such as these that are used by social scientists seeking to understand the related values system of this part of the world in ancient times, including authors such as Bruce Malina and Kenneth Bailey who have sought to apply insights from the study of these cultures directly to issues of New Testament interpretation. No amount of time spent reading such books can substitute for time spent in relevant cultures; on the other hand, Americans and Western Europeans who spend time in such cultures will benefit greatly from these books. Indeed, on more than one occasion I lent Malina's book Windows on the World of Jesus: Time Travel to Ancient Judea to colleagues from the U.S.. England and Wales, suggesting that it could just as easily have been entitled Windows on the World of Romania.

Let me offer just a few examples, including one that relates to my current research. First, I recall vividly a visit by Anthony Thiselton to the campus where I taught in Romania. He had recently published his commentary on The First Epistle to the Corinthians and spoke about those in Corinth who said "I am of Paul" and "I am of Apollos". Thiselton emphasized that this was not merely party politics as we understand it nowadays, but the Roman patronage system. There were a very small number of individuals who had intrinsic power and status, and then others would gain influence by association with such individuals as retainers, like a vine climbing on a tree. It only took a few moments to realize that this was precisely what I had witnessed in the politics of the school I taught at. There were a couple of individuals who had their own churches where they were pastors and had PhDs. Then there were other individuals who associated with them, lacking the degrees and the status of senior pastor, but who became influential through the association. It was illuminating, and if I had had Thiselton's commentary (or heard his talk) earlier, I might have better understood what was going on around me.

I also found myself wondering about the language of 'brothers' in the New Testament. In an American context, we tend to think of such language as egalitarian, and indeed there are uses in the New Testament that might lead one to that very conclusion. Yet in Romania, 'brother' can indicate distance and respect rather than intimacy. This raises the question of whether it is more likely that modern Romanians, with very similar cultural values to those reflected in the New Testament, failed to rise to the challenge of the Bible's counter-cultural teachings, or whether they have indeed understood it and practiced it in the way the early Christians probably did, and it is the Americans and others who have failed to see that the seemingly egalitarian language did not in fact obliterate social differences. I still haven't made up my mind on this particular question, but without this cross-cultural experience, I never would have asked it.

Finally (for this entry, at any rate), I have recently been reading about oral history and rumor transmission. On a recent visit to Romanian relatives in Canada, one of them told me how Tim Hortons coffee had been laced with tobacco to make it more addictive. I immediately spotted it as an unreliable rumor (it had all the signs), as a quick search at Snopes confirmed for me. Romania is a remarkable place when it comes to rumors - perhaps it was the lack of reliable news during the communist era, but the rumor mills seem to work as effectively and as rapidly as ever, in the present as in the past.

An important question that needs to be asked by anyone working on the historical study of Jesus is whether our information constitutes anything other than rumor, or more strictly speaking "legend" (which may be defined as rumor that persists for longer periods - just as we speak of "urban legends" for persistent rumors today). Those seeking a more mundane occurrence behind the miracle stories have long suspected that stories such as that about Jesus walking on the water could have arisen through a misunderstanding of a story about him walking beside the sea (since it is the same preposition in Greek). The version of the story in John chapter 6 lends plausibility to this - the focus there is on the rapid end of the storm and arrival at the other side once they have seen Jesus. But as in all cases of rumor transmission, while it can be asserted that there is often a historical core, studies show clearly that any original piece of reliable information gets obliterated in the transmission process, or at least obscured so badly as to be unrecognizable. The point, in the end, is that rumors circulate and we cannot know what basis, however slim, there may have been in history, or what it may have looked like.

One may think of the allusion in the Book of Revelation to the return of Nero from the dead, the beast whose "deadly wound was healed". Roman authors from this period show just how widely such rumors were believed, and the chaos that ensued. While even today news reporting, official bulletins, television and the internet do not always succeed in stemming the tide of rumors, imagine in the situation in the ancient world where no such 'reliable' sources existed. If at least one New Testament author believed the Nero rumors, why would we expect them to not also provide us similarly rumor-based information elsewhere?

Realizing how unreliable the information that circulates among the populace is - whether the subject is science, politics, religion or coffee - makes me very concerned about the reliability of the New Testament's information - perhaps moreso than any historical critical investigation could. Nevertheless, books such as Allport & Postman's Psychology of Rumor, Vansina's Oral Tradition As History, and DiFonzo's Rumor Psychology: Social And Organizational Approaches, all confirm that oral reporting can at times be verified, but can often obscure the truth rather than inform us about it. One of my current research projects is to identify instances of texts reflecting oral transmission of a common saying and to seek to apply the insiguts of the aforementioned studies, as well as my own experiences.

For Christian faith, questions such as these are profoundly disturbing. It is easy to imagine how a misunderstanding could generate a story such as that of Jesus' empty tomb. The practice of secondary burial was a distinctively Jewish one, and it is possible to imagine how a Gentile Christian pilgrim visiting Jerusalem could have misunderstood about this and sparked off the rumor that eventually became the empty tomb story found in Mark. This is not to suggest that Christian faith in the resurrection was based only on a rumor - Paul had such faith based on visionary and other experiences, and he doesn't mention the empty tomb, and so the rumor - if there was a rumor - might have arisen later. My point is simply that it seems impossible to ever be certain, using the tools of historical study, that something like this scenario (misunderstanding leading to rumor) did not occur. As so often, historical study's most troubling questions for religious believers do not relate to its disproving of things they hold dear, but of its inability to prove those things that are, for many Christians, of central importance - the resurrection and other stories of the miraculous being a case in point.

There And Back Again

This is just a quick post to say that I'm back from the conference about the Mandaeans in Oxford. It was really excellent. Even though the papers reflected many different angles on the Mandaeans - from anthropological perspectives on their current refugee plight to philological considerations about Mandaic magical bowls to mentions of the Mandaeans by Medieval authors writing in Arabic - I assume others felt as I did, that they all were interesting. It was a wonderful opportunity to make the acquaintance of most of the scholars who work on Mandaeism, as well as a number of Mandaeans who themselves attended the conference.

From The Archives: Sola Scriptura?

Although I am a Protestant, I must confess that the idea of 'sola Scriptura', of 'Scripture alone', doesn't work. It could perhaps theoretically work in Islam, where one can (assuming one doesn't take a critical approach to the text) assume the unity of the book as a given. In the case of the Bible, such assumptions are impossible. In order to speak of 'Scripture', one has to accept the authority not only of those Jews and Christians who made the decisions about what books would be included in the canon, but also the authority of those who produced the critical editions of the Hebrew and Greek texts and the judgment of the translators.

In order to treat the Bible as 'inerrant' one has to attribute inerrancy to not only those who made these judgments, but also to the authors (at least while they were writing). But of course, Protestants have a certain aversion to the idea of church leaders who can make infallible pronouncements but the rest of the time are fallible human beings, so this view shouldn't appeal to as many Protestants as it apparently does.

Ultimately, one has to attribute inerrancy to someone or something other than God in order to take this sort of view of Scripture. But the real aim is not to connect ourselves with the inerrancy of God, but to be able to claim the inerrancy of our own views about God, claiming that they are just the teachings of the inerrant Scriptures. Any doctrine that ultimately serves the interests of individuals claiming their own certainty must be criticially evaluated.

"Sola Scriptura" still has a certain potentially valid meaning - one can still value these writings as our earliest Christian sources. But not studying them critically, or pretending they dropped down from heaven in a single package, is not an option. The time has come for us to stop speaking nonsense in the name of God, and to stop quietly tolerating others who do the same. Those whose views are expressed in the public sphere are open to rational discussion and evaluation - whether they are about science, the environment, the Bible, religion or anything else.

From The Archives: Matthew Accuracy

In their book on Rumor Psychology Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia mention the concept of "Matthew Accuracy". Deriving its name from the principle in the Gospel of Matthew that "to the one who has more will be given, but from the one who does not have even the little he has will be taken away", Matthew Accuracy denotes the tendency of truthful rumors to become more truthful, while false rumors tend to become more false (pp.152-4).

If it could be confirmed that this same tendency applies in cultures more closely related to that in which the Gospels were written, I wonder whether this principle might not be useful to historians evaluating the developing Gospel tradition. In essence, might it be arguable that those sayings and stories that tend to become increasingly fantastic and to develop in predictable ways according to the tendencies of the tradition are less likely to be historically accurate, while those that either persist in their essential details or accumulate additional details that seem historically plausible and/or defy the tendencies of the developing tradition are more likely to be historically accurate? I am not suggesting that this is an entirely new idea, but it might be possible, on the basis of research into the psychology of rumor, to turn what may have been a "hunch" for historians up until now into a solid working principle with strong theoretical underpinnings.

From The Archives: God is a Mystery, not an Explanation

The world we live in is full of mysteries. When we envisage the self-replicating molecules that drive life on this planet, we wonder how they could have arisen, and we seek explanations. Likewise with the very fact than anything exists at all, we wonder why there is something rather than nothing.

To say "God did it" is not an explanation. To suggest that an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient being is somehow self explanatory and a way to eliminate mystery is misguided. This doesn't mean that it is inappropriate to talk about God when talking about these mysteries. But God is part of the mystery, and to speak of God is to affirm that beyond these tangible mysteries we perceive there are even greater mysteries regarding which we may not even yet be asking the right questions yet.

You might ask whether or not God was in fact an "explanation" for the ancient Hebrew authors who wrote the Biblical creation stories. To answer that question, we must put ancient Hebrew thought in its context in time and space. Although the Hebrew word olam has evolved to mean 'universe' or 'world', in the Biblical world it still had a meaning more akin to 'age'. There was no single word that referred to everything that exists, because existence was not generally thought of in unitary fashion. The sun, the moon, the earth were, in the wider context, all separate divine entities. In this context, in which other peoples were talking about "deities" in the plural, the Hebrews began to use the plural as an abstract singular noun (as was done in Semitic languages) to refer to "the deity" in the singular. This was an affirmation that all these divine realities (what we would refer to as impersonal "forces of nature") were in fact united in a single "being" that encompassed all of them and of whom all of them were an expression. So, in a sense, all that we mean by "universe" really was encompassed within the Hebrew term elohim, the deity. While I would not go so far as to argue that the ancient Hebrew authors were advocates of panentheism, their worldview can be plotted on a trajectory moving in that direction.

That we are dealing with a trajectory and not an end point is important to note. Some Biblical authors still thought of God fighting with the sea monster to create, as was the norm in the wider Mesopotamian context. The furthest that the Israelites got was to think of all the deities - the storm god, the heavens and mother earth all wrapped into one God in the singular who is responsible for all the things these diverse deities were thought to do - fertility of womb and of soil, creation of life, blessing of households, and so on. But there is still much of the assumptions of pre-scientific polytheism in such a view of God, and it still attributes a personal purpose to forces of nature, to weather, to earthquakes, and so on.

Without the Hebrews' insights into the unity of these divine/natural forces, the rise of modern science might never have been possible. The challenge to the theologian in the modern scientific age is to find ways of embracing science - one of Abraham's children every much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and to find the next spot we can affirm on the trajectory of mystery that begins, but by no means ends, with the writings of the Biblical authors.

From The Archives: The Two Doctors (Arguing With Oneself)

For many fans of Doctor Who, among our favorite episodes are the ones where the Doctor encounters his earlier selves - which inevitably leads to arguments! Although intended primarily for comic value, I presume, there is an important insight in these episodes. If I were to meet an earlier me, I would encounter a person very different from the one I am today, and I can easily imagine arguments ensuing, as I who I am today tried to share what I consider the wisdom of experience with my younger self, and my younger self rebukes me for having gone over to the dark side, from "his" perspective. (Notice how hard it is to speak of such things!)

As I began watching Star Wars - Episode III: Revenge of the Sith again recently, this too gave me pause, as I watched characters discuss evil as a point of view - the importance of point of view is a theme that runs throughout the films. Do I now hold views that I would have considered "evil" earlier in my life, and do I now consider the views of my earlier self "evil"? My hope is that I have discovered, as Luke Skywalker eventually did, a middle way. Just as the attempt of the Jedi to avoid all attachment left one open to temptation to the other extreme of being carried along by one's passions, I hope that I have found a middle ground between fundamentalism and atheism, just as Luke found he could let his concern for his sister enrage him and his compassion for his father stop him from going too far. But I doubt that my younger self would have accepted this argument - I saw everything in black and white, once upon a time, as we all did at some point.

This led me to ask myself what, if anything, I might wish to tell my earlier self? Would I warn "him" against the perils of fundamentalism? As I thought about it, I decided I probably wouldn't. I gained much from that period in my life, and just as I would not go back to tell my childhood self in kindergarten things I would not then be ready to understand, I think I might go back and observe myself, but would try to avoid tinkering. If I had not passed through the fundamentalist phase that followed my experience of being "born again", for all I know I might have no faith today rather than the mature faith that I do. Adolescence is a healthy step on the way to maturity, and it cannot be bypassed.

Thinking further, I decided that this same principle applies to lots of other aspects of my life. There was a time before I really got into "classical" music, and then a time when Shostakovich and Bartok were beyond my range of appreciation. I had to work my way through Rachmaninov and Bruckner first, and had I gone by another path, I might not value the music of Atterberg and Korngold the way that I do.

I personally suspect that time travel is not possible - I am inclined to think that the past is not a static entity that is still 'out there somewhere'. But even if it were, I do not think I would go back and tamper with it. The past is there to be learned from, and there are probably very few instances where we could go back and avoid the mistakes that we have learned from, because mistakes are one of the principal ways in which we learn.

[Since I first posted this, the same question came up for a time-travelling John Locke on LOST]

From The Archives: What's Wrong With Being 'Right'?

For those who are enthusiastic about the voices calling for a return to or preservation of the Christian foundations of our society, you will probably find yourself largely in agreement with the sentiment of another famous politician, who said:

The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality.

Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during recent years.

For those following currents in American religious and political life, the language sounds very familiar, and you may wonder precisely whose words these are. They are the words of Adolf Hitler. This is a quotation from the address he gave after coming to power in Germany (from "My New Order, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-1939", Vol. 1, pp. 871-872, Oxford University Press, London, 1942).

I was tempted to simply leave it at that, without comment. But just to make certain my point is clear, I will say just a few words about it. It is my hope that, by highlighting the similarity between current American voices and that of Hitler, my fellow Americans will understand why the voices on the far-right scare so many of us who do not share their views. Moderate leanings to the left or right are not what I am talking about here, but there are voices that are far to the right of center, and some use that language often without realizing what it means: far in the direction of Hitler, of the Nazis, of fascism. Many in our time lean in that direction, and reflect a view which claims that our heritage (cultural, religious, economic, political, whatever) is the best, and that it is our destiny to be the most powerful nation precisely for this reason. It claims certainty that those who question our cherished values are wrong, and would ideally like to see our laws uphold and enforce these values.

Yet in an American context, to claim that our nation's heritage is simply "Christian" is misleading. The faith of Thomas Jefferson, a Deist, would not be considered acceptable to most of those American Christians today who claim that the founding fathers were Christians. The Bill of Rights guarantees Americans the right to break at least the first two of the Ten Commandments by guaranteeing religious freedom for all.

What is wrong with being on the right? There are voices in our time that seem to be leaning further and further in that direction, even though they would claim to abhor what Hitler did. Yet all it takes for history to repeat itself is a nation leaning in that direction, a leader willing to use the language of Christianity and conservativism to manipulate the populace and exploit their faith and enthusiasm, and a failure to care when those we disagree with are persecuted and punished. The spirit of the far right is absolutely antithetical to the heritage and foundations of American democracy. And it is precisely that democracy that protects Christianity as well as all other religions to present their case, to make their appeal, to urge any and all who will listen to follow their lead and adhere to their values and convictions - whether they are about abortion, social justice, or the editing of Veggie Tales on NBC.

It is only a faith that is insecure that wants to force itself on others through legislation, because of a lack of trust in the persuasive power of the message itself. It is only the faith of the proud that claims absolute certainty, as opposed to humility and absolute trust in God as the only one who truly knows with certainty.

I found a couple more quotes from Hitler that illustrate just how similar the language he used is to that of certain voices in American Christianity today:"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people." (Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933).

In his book Mein Kampf he wrote: ". . . I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."

The founding fathers, despite what is so often claimed, were very careful to point our nation in a direction that could not (at least not legally) be taken in that direction. Much of what we assume to be the case about our "Christian nation" (such as the universal addition of the motto "In God We Trust" and the addition of "under God" to the pledge of allegiance) is shaped by things that were added in the 1950s, and certainly subsequent to the composition of the Constitution. Not only did Thomas Jefferson emphatically argue that American law is NOT based on the Bible [letter to Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814], but in Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, which the U.S. Senate ratified, it emphasizes that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." Fundamentalists claim to believe the whole Bible and take it literally, and yet they ignore whole vast parts of it and impose their own interpretative framework on those verses they quote out of context. They claim to be following in the footsteps of the founding fathers and yet clearly have never read the writings of our nation's early leaders or studied the historical evidence in an appropriate, scholarly manner. This is not to deny the profound influence of Christianity upon all of them in some way, shape or form. It is merely to assert their awareness that as soon as one allows a particular religious tradition to have a unique status, then there will be wrangling over whose version of that tradition is the right one, and the debates will never end.

Returning to our original subject, it is true that once he rose to power Hitler came to oppose Christianity, but it is important to note that this does not suggest that his earlier religious views were simply a charade. His opposition to Christianity results from his conviction that the church was a threat to his power; it is clear, however, that his anti-Semitic views were adopted in close connection with his extreme religious views. Quotes found online illustrate this point and the shift in his views well.

The form of Christianity that he adhered to was known as Positive Christianity, and it essentially remade Jesus in the image of the culture and ideals of Northern Europeans. Now it is inevitably true that people read their own cultural and personal presuppositions and ideals into their Scriptures, and project these values onto God, but some do it more radically than others. American fundamentalist Christianity does this to a lesser extent than Hitler's Positive Christianity, but to a far greater extent than is healthy for the church if it is to have a role in challenging cultural norms with the Gospel. [There was a wonderful illustration of this on the 2006 season premier of Trading Spouses, where an orthodox Jewish mother from Boston changed places with a Pentecostal mother from a small town in the South. The latter viewed the Jewish woman's way of thinking as "un-American", and she assumed that her own traditions were what is meant by Christianity, as did the rest of her family.]

Hitler had been raised a Catholic and viewed himself as such at least until 1941. Lest it be assumed that these views have nothing to do with other branches of Christianity, let's have a few quotes from Martin Luther: "The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows seven times higher than ordinary thieves," and "We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them."

It is because racism, greed, lack of concern for the poor, and countless other values that are at odds with the most basic teachings of Christianity (as of most religions) continue to flourish in our society that I am so passionate about getting good Biblical scholarship to the public and teaching not only religion majors but as many students as possible. There is a wonderful paragraph in LeAnn Snow Flesher's recent book Left Behind?: The Facts Behind the Fiction that puts it beautifully and shows the connection with the topic we've been discussing:

Every fall a new set of students enters my Introduction to the Old Testament course, and invariably, at least one student will come up to me and say, "I really don't need to take this class, I already know the Bible." Having read the Bible is not equal to knowing the Bible. Reading the Bible is essential, of course, but the Bible is a very complex collection of documents from an ancient age and culture. In the United States today, and I dare to say in much of the world, the common method for reading has become one of direct application wherein the reader selects a passage, often at random, reads it through, and immediately sits back to contemplate how the text directly applies to today andto his or her life. This almost magical approach entirely disregards the realities of what the Bible is and what it means to read it with integrity. In the end, this method demonstrates disrespect for Scripture and replaces the authority of the Word with the authority of the reader's time, place, and needs. Scripture verses pulled out of their contexts and strung together can be made to say almost anything. Many bad interpretations have resulted from such a process- some of which have been downright devastating (pp.57-58).

It fascinates me that religion seems to mean two completely opposite things for people in our time. On the one hand, there are the fundamentalists for whom religion is all about certainty, about my own knowledge about God being accurate, about being correct in what one believes/knows. On the other hand, there are those of us who have had a personal spiritual experience of genuinely being born again, and although most of us start out spiritually with a fundamentalist outlooks (just as young children see the world in black-and-white terms), as (or I should say if) we mature we acknowledge that all our words and doctrines are simply pointers to that experience that transcends them, to a God who transcends them. For us, religion is not about our own certainty, but a recognition of our own human limitations, so that we cast ourselves utterly upon God who alone is certain, alone is wise, alone knows, alone is right.

[NOTE: The above post originally appeared as two separate entries here and first appeared as a combined single post here]

The Apocalypse of Eve

Pat McCullough has posted Biblical Studies Carnival 43, in the form of a 'recently discovered text' called "The Apocalypse of Eve". Take a look!

The Church Of Jesus Christ Has Begun Considering The Only True God

I couldn't resist the opportunity to have a blog post with such a striking title. But of course, it is the blog The Church of Jesus Christ that has begun to consider (and blog about) my recent book, The Only True God. Given that the blogger in question goes by the nickname Polycarp, it will be obvious how many potentially striking church history-related headlines I had to pass up...

From The Archives: Things Your Minister Wishes He Or She Could Tell You

There are things your minister, pastor, priest or preacher would love to be able to tell you, but cannot because of concerns about job security. I am not only thinking about the scandalous revelations that occasionally come to light, nor even the relatively minor fact that your pastor sometimes comes to the pulpit the same way all of us come to church at times – feeling less than inspired, having just argued with a spouse, or in some other way or for some other reason less ready than we would like to do what we need to in church – whether preach or simply worship.

Most ministers have had theological training that exposed them to a diverse range of viewpoints. In some very narrow seminaries, it will be reiterated again and again which is the “right” opinion, which is the “sound” theology. Be that as it may, even pastors who studied in fairly conservative schools have wrestled with issues and confronted evidence that many Christians are simply unaware of. I remember when, towards the end of my doctoral studies at the University of Durham in England, I was invited to give a talk on my research at a sixth form study day (i.e. for students doing A Levels in religion, the approximate equivalent of advance placement (AP) exams in the United States). Wanting to have a sense of the appropriate level, I asked for copies of syllabi or exams for religious studies A Levels in the U. K. As I looked them over, it struck me that teenagers in the U. K. who choose to study religion are expected to deal with subject (such as the Synoptic Problem) that many Christians who have attended church for 60 years have never even heard of. Is the relationship between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke really of such little importance for those who (we hope) read them that we can set this issue to one side altogether? No, the reason why the subject is never addressed is that it might make some people uncomfortable to talk about it. Many pastors and preachers will give a wide berth to other issues, such as creation and evolution, to avoid controversy, even though they may feel strongly that fundamentalist approaches are misguided. Why rock the boat? But is lack of controversy really preferable to having well-educated believers? Is preserving one’s job worthwhile if it means leaving fundamentalism to grow and fester?

I reflected on these questions yet again as I read the short book by Rev. Oliver “Buzz” Thomas, 10 Things Your Minister Wants To Tell You (But Can’t Because He Needs The Job). While it is not the case that all the things Thomas mentions are things that all ministers would tell you if they could, I suspect that enough of them are, and if not these things then there are other things that they could tell you were they not afraid that ordinary Christians, rather than welcoming a deeper understanding of the faith, of the Bible, and of Christian history, would complain, argue, and eventually drive the minister out who dared expose them to uncomfortable truths.Although a very short book, it packs a serious punch and reveals more in its 108 pages than many other works of much greater length on more specific subjects. It was particularly refreshing to encounter someone else so adamant about the importance of the fact that the main character in the creation story in Genesis 2 is called “Human” and not “Adam” as though the latter were a name in Hebrew. Although his language at one point seems to leave a door open for “teaching the controversy” (p.9), his approach to most topics is balanced and healthy. His recognition not only of the fact that Jesus gave more than one answer about salvation (p.47), but that Jesus was mistaken about the end of the world and this simply makes him human (p.97), are refreshingly honest but even more than that refreshingly Biblical compared to the selective quote mining of the fundamentalists. And he too emphasizes, as I try to whenever I get the chance, that fundamentalists only claim to take the whole Bible literally and believe it all, but this is far from an accurate representation of what they in reality do and believe (p.101).

Here are a few particularly memorable quotes:

…my old Irish Catholic uncle used to say: “Trying to use the Bible to prove the church wrong is like trying to use the phone book to prove there isn’t a phone company” (p.23)

Authentic religion is not a theology test. It is a love test. (p.41)

God will not be locked into the culture of the first century, whether we like it or not. If God exists, then, he is alive today and is continuing to reveal himself. (p.63)

This may be a useful book for you to read, or to pass on to those who are interested in understanding the Bible better and in a broader way. But certainly the subject of the book is one whose time has come. To paraphrase a famous quote that the book mentions at one point, all that has to happen for fundamentalism to thrive is for those who have actually studied the Bible and understand it in depth and detail to keep silent.

Biblioblog Top 50 - June 2009

The Biblioblog Top 50 list for June 2009 has been posted.