Monthly Archives: May 2010

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 6 June 2010 (Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

1 Kings 17:8-16, (17-24) and Psalm 146 • 1 Kings 17:17-24 and Psalm 30 • Galatians 1:11-24 • Luke 7:11-17

It’s not lost on me that I’m writing about these texts on American Memorial Day; after all, yesterday’s song service led off with a hymn neither to Father nor Son nor Spirit but to Homeland.  Folks are wearing “patriotic colors” today (whatever that phrase means), and if the thunderstorms clear up, the local minor league baseball team is having fireworks after tonight’s game.  The signs are everywhere that today is a holy day.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Memorial Day falls somewhere in the neighborhood of two months after Good Friday, and I’m sure nobody had any conspiratorial motives.  But it’s not lost on me that the ritual language of of this Holy Day resembles so strongly the ritual language of that.  We talk about those who died killing enemies of Empire in the same terms that we used to talk about the One executed by Empire.  And it doesn’t escape me that to that rhetoric the American religion adds the claim that, were it not for the protection of those died in the pursuit of killing the enemies of America, Christianity would not survive, would not be free if it did.  Where the Church calendar remembered saints and martyrs, Memorial Day would have us remember fallen soldiers.

As we read these stories of a God who overcomes even death, may our faithfulness be first and foremost to the God whose Son did in fact die for our freedom, and in the way set forth by Tertullian may we pray for those who govern, not as fearful subjects of tyrants but as resident aliens who nonetheless love and pray for the repentance even of those who think that we owe our existence to their blood sacrifices.

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: Out of respect for Hulu watchers, TiVo devotees, and other folks who didn’t watch the Superbowl-length extravaganza on May 23, I’ve waited until now to start writing about LOST for this blog.  That said, this series of posts is going to begin with the last scene of the last episode of the last season of the show, and I’m going to work elements from the show’s entirety into these posts.

You know what that means, you with the last two episodes sitting on your DVR hard drive: bookmark these posts and come back to them, because I am going to talk about the episodes you haven’t watched yet.

Alright.  Now on with it.

In The Last Battle, the final novel in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Eustace and Jill, along with other characters from Narnia, find themselves locked in an apocalyptic battle for the fate of Narnia.  (I don’t think that’s a spoiler, since the novels are fifty years old, and since the book’s called The Last Battle.)  By circumstances that each of you should read, many of the characters find themselves in a new world, a place where human beings and centaurs alike can run without growing weary, can enjoy the presence of Aslan the Lion uninterrupted, can remain together after experiencing a life that tears people apart from one another.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s corpus, specifically in The Great Divorce, Lewis makes modifications to Dante’s version of Purgatory.  Dante’s vision of Purgatory is a place for those already saved by the grace of Christ, so there’s no sense that people are “working” for their salvation, for God’s favor, or for anything else.  However, because of their choices while living among men, the souls in Purgatory still desire wrongly, be those desires misdirected (such as the prideful man’s desire for his own glory rather than God’s) or out of proportion (such as the lustful man’s desire for women or men, as the case may be, that overcomes his desire for God).  Their term in Purgatory in most cases is not set by judicial fiat but lasts until they want to go to Heaven, which in turn means that their desires have grown strong enough (as in the case of the slothful) or have reoriented themselves (as in the case of the avaricious) to the extent that they can genuinely enjoy Heaven.  Lewis, a Platonist at his core, modifies the picture slightly (influenced, I think, by G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman, but there’s no proving that) in that his Purgatory is also his Hell.  The desire to ascend is, in theory at least, available to all in the “grey city,” but most people in Lewis’s allegory seem perfectly content to dwell eternally with the shadows of real things, while the desire for reality (the signature mark of a Heaven that is reminiscent of Plato’s world-beyond-the-Cave) is relatively rare among the dead.  So, like Shaw’s Heaven, Lewis’s is for those who have decided that they want something more than the shadows of Hell, and Hell is for those who are comfortable living in those same shadows.

I’m sure that by now, the evangelical blogosphere will have commented at some length on the visual elements of that last scene in LOST–the fact that the stained-glass window in the “church” where Jack finally arrives has (among other things–you can find these blogs, I’m sure) a Menorah, a cross, a crescent and star, a Yin-Yang, and other religious symbols, communicating as heavy-handedly as one could imagine that, in this universe, the content of religious traditions is effectively irrelevant.  So I’m not going to start there.  Far more interesting in that last sequence is the marked borrowing from C.S. Lewis, something that certainly does not start with the last episode or even the last season but nonetheless dominates the last fifteen minutes or so of the series.

That the “flash-sideways” world of season six is the afterlife became more than evident in the final episode.  After all, Christian Shephard, Jack’s father who is also dead, tells him he’s died.  In order to account for the presence of people who survived longer than did Jack, Christian tells him that in the place he’s entered, there is no “when,” that people who died long before Jack and people who died long after Jack simply exist there together.  (Granted, the writers could have gotten that from Boethius, but the locution on the show sounded more like Lewis.)  So far, that establishes the Boethian eternity of the place.  But the actual narratives that occur in the “sideways” world point to this afterlife as at least kin to Lewis’s purgatory.

Each of the characters who persisted through all six seasons (along with some others, but not all of them by any means) come into contact with one another, especially those whom they have loved in the world of the living, they become aware that they’ve lived in the world of the island, but some of the characters that the viewer finds familiar do not leave the sideways-world for the final reunion.  As the newly-aware spirit of Hurley has an encounter with the spirit of Ana Lucia, one of the Oceanic 815 survivors who died in the second season, she takes the bribe that Hurley offers to free Desmond, Sayid, and Kate.  When Hurley silently motions his confusion, Desmond says to Hurley that she’s “not ready yet” to join the awakened.  At the door of the “church,” Ben Linus watches the others go in but does not himself enter.  When Hurley invites him, he says that he’s got a few things “to work out” before he can come.  Finally, the characters wandering lost (get it?) in this world seem entirely unaware of their previous existences until near-death experiences, physical contact with others from the island, and other moments bring them to the awareness that here, in this world, they can indeed have what the other world denied them.

If that jumble of character-names baffles you, that means that you’ve not watched the show.  Join Netflix, start with season one (the first five seasons are available both as DVD’s and as Internet feeds), and realize what some of us felt like over the last ten years when people discussed Harry Potter novels!

So where Dante’s purgatorial souls need to cleanse their souls so that they only desire God, and where Lewis’s souls in the “grey city” need to extend their desires outward from shadows to reality, the “sideways” souls in LOST need to let go of those things that kept them from connecting with one another in the land of the living, embracing one another so as to replace obsession with community. Folks rightly point out that this is the communitarian thrust of the show, and the marginalization of particular spiritual traditions in the final scene makes the most sense as the natural outgrowth of a universe in which those traditions no longer serve to connect people, a place where a pretender Catholic priest and a mostly-atheistic physician and various devotees of a magical island are not brought together by those powers that transcend the relationships between people but stand secondary to them.

As a parting thought, I have read some commentators on the Internet who worry that the “sideways” world and its last word in the series threatens to render the comings and goings on the island meaningless.  Once again I’d point to Narnia as the inspiration for that relationship between Island and Purgatory.  When Eustace and Jill and the Calormene warrior pass on to be judged by Aslan, their bliss in the world-after does not mean that all that has happened in Narnia is meaningless; it simply means that all of that, just as all of the realities that define Peter’s and Susan’s and Nathan Gilmour’s world, stand not absolutely but in some sense related to Eternity.  Although LOST (to nobody’s surprise) will not even send Ben Linus to whatever would be the equivalent of Hell in that reality, nonetheless Ben’s delay in entering into communion with those whose communion he needs in that Purgatorial existence seems connected to his ruthless and manipulative treatment of other human beings in his quest to connect himself to the Island and to Jacob, whose only concern for him was to ask the dismissive question, “What about you?”.  Ultimately the souls in the Purgatory of LOST, like the souls in the Purgatory of Dante, must suffer greatly before they realize that there is only one desire worthy of enjoying.  For Dante, following Augustine, only God is to be enjoyed.  For LOST, what leads one out of Purgatory is connections to other people.  Purgatory is… OTHER PEOPLE!

I don’t know how many of these posts I’m going to write, but this one has been fun, so look for more over the course of the summer.  I should point out now that the real LOST bloggers out there have been writing about the show as it took place, that I’m at most a Johnny-come-lately commentator.  Go look at those blogs for a glimpse at just how complex and fun this series has been, and come back here when you’re ready for another dose of LOST-and-theology musing.

I dislike Walden so intensely and thoroughly that I’ve somehow avoided reading Henry David Thoreau’s other great masterwork, the much shorter “Civil Disobedience,” until this year. The joke was on me—this essay is far more readable and less aggravating than its younger sibling, maybe due to its length (it’s about one-twelfth the length of Walden) and maybe due to its relative lack of hypocrisy.

Yes, Walden is the work of an utter hypocrite, a man who rhapsodizes about his life of simplicity, a man who convicts his readers for joining the rat race, for owning more than they need, and so forth. And yet Thoreau seems blissfully unaware that his own lifestyle is made possible by that rat race; he’d have nowhere to live if Emerson didn’t let him squat on the land he bought with all that filthy, corrupting money. (Thoreau also had his laundry sent to his mother and ate a chicken dinner with Emerson each week, although these ugly facts are at least not evident in the text. and can be ignored.)

But “Civil Disobedience” is free from that taint, as far as I know. It is the print record of Thoreau’s putting his principles before his comfort; as such, it is everything his more adamant followers claim Walden to be. It inspired two of the twentieth century’s most enduringly heroic figures, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom took at least as much from Thoreau as they did from the teachings of Christ in formulating their practices of passive resistance. “Civil Disobedience” is, in short, the real classic in terms of social influence—as for the quality of the writing itself, it is neither much better nor much worse than that of Walden.

The enduring legacy of the essay is twofold. First, the essay retains its power to convict the reader, even 162 years after its initial composition. Second, it somehow outlives and outlasts whatever specific social movement it is publicly applied to. You could, presumably, disagree with Gandhi’s political mission and still find a kindred spirit in the Thoreau of “Civil Disobedience.”

For a more recent example, look at the Tea Party movement, which occasionally claims Thoreau as an inspiration. As readers of the blog and listeners of the podcast will already know, I don’t have much faith in this movement, their goals, or their tactics in attaining them. But “Civil Disobedience” is a method more than a coherent political philosophy in itself—and thus it remains far larger than any individual application of its principles.

Incidentally, it seems to me that the Tea Partiers are misguided in applying “Civil Disobedience” to their own political philosophy. Thoreau does begin by trotting out the old gray mare that “That government is best which governs least,” a favorite of libertarians everywhere—but his reasons for opposing the government are 180 degrees from those of the Tea Party. He doesn’t oppose taxes on principles; indeed he says that “If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them” (671). Thoreau’s objections to taxation are not out of principle but out of specific application:

All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. [I suspect the Tea Party quit reading before reaching this last sentence.] But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not to soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

Thoreau’s protest, then, is closer to the religious right’s objection to abortion on one hand and the left’s objection to the United States’ defense budget on the other. It is a protest not against taxes qua taxes but against their use in unjust causes. To the Tea Partiers, I suspect, Thoreau would repeat his mantra from Walden: “Simplify, simplify.” (I can’t hear that admonition without thinking of Coach’s response on Cheers: “Why didn’t he just use one simplify?”)

But the point is not that the Tea Party has Thoreau wrong and I have him right. (For the record, I oppose both abortion and our country’s bloated defense budget, ensuring that both Republicans and Democrats think I’m an idiot.) The point is we’re all a bunch of cowards. For the lesson of “Civil Disobedience” is an existential one, a practical one, not a theoretical one. Thoreau doesn’t seek to tell us what to think or—God help us—whom to vote for; he seeks to tell us what to do about our convictions.

If we truly object to the use to which our tax money is put, he says, we must summon our courage and do something about it. “Oh for a man who is a man,” he bemoans, “and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through!” The issue here is not that the individual can change the world, as certain American optimists have claimed throughout the centuries; rather, appropriate civil disobedience is built on a private mandate:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

One need not own a slave or fight in the wicked Mexican-American War to support these causes; the citizen’s tax money supports these practices. Likewise, a substantial portion of my tax money goes to prop up our bloated military, though as far as I can tell, neither my federal nor my Florida state taxes fund abortions except in the extreme cases of rape and incest.

So what’s an honest man to do? What should I do if I really oppose the War in Iraq, and what should the Tea Party do if they object to taxation on principle? Thoreau’s answer is simple; to use the hoariest of clichés, appropriate in this case, we should put our money where our mouths are. Our votes are not action, he says—“Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail”—and the only protest worth its salt is that which involves a real sacrifice.

I am not sure if the members of the Tea Party have been paying the taxes they so detest, but I know I did (and thoroughly enjoyed my rebate, which could have bought 1/50,000^th of a tank!). And to the extent that any protester against the actions of this government is not willing to withhold their required taxes and go to jail for it, he or she is, best I can tell, a political coward, more tongue than truth, as Shakespeare would put it. Protests against the IRS and against the war are easy because they don’t require much of a sacrifice, beyond squeezing yourself into that Paul Revere costume. But the sort of sacrifice Thoreau suggests is hard; no one, it’s safe to say, wants to go to prison.

The examples of King and Gandhi, however, retain their power because they were willing to suffer all the indignities of State and culture in order to push their reforms through society. So was Thoreau. The rest of us are just bags of hot air, full of ideas with no connection to lived reality.

Who Really Goes to Hell?: The Gospel You’ve Never Heard: What a Protestant Bible written by Jews  says about God’s work through Christ: A book for those in the church and offended by it
By David I. Rudel
188 pp. Biblical Heresy Press. $11.00

First of all, I must start by saying that rarely have I found a book so enamored of subtitles.

Beyond that, I do wish that theology writers for popular audiences would attempt a bit of humility.  The material in this book is not a gospel I’ve never heard; in fact, much like “A New Kind of” this and that, this book sets forth interpretations on things whose influences were easy enough to spot.  Very few thoughts in 2010 are entirely new, never-before-heard, or otherwise paradigm-shifting.  By virtue of the instant digital connections that characterize the publishing and academic worlds in 2010, what new thoughts do happen (and I’m one of those historicists who thinks that nihil sub sole novum gets used far too often to justify intellectual laziness) tend not to happen in popular-press books.  (As a thought experiment, imagine if someone wrote a book on physics claiming to articulate a theory that the world had never seen before.  It would take some gumption to claim that, wouldn’t it?)  I realize that some folks who have never been to seminary or sat in on a Sunday school class taught by a seminary graduate might never have heard this material, but I’d prefer to see theology books (even those with three subtitles) whose titles say what’s inside rather than trying to convince a reader that what’s inside has never been seen before.

Alright.  I feel better now.

Rudel, a mathematician, approaches questions of salvation and judgment in a way that reminds me of that famous ancient lover of mathematics, Plato.  Both writers have a keen eye for the contradictions and sloppy thinking that pervade popular religion.  Both writers force a careful reader to think about and answer hard questions.  And both writers offer answers that are themselves a mix of profound insight and strange misreadings that sometimes provide nice springboards for further thought and other times force that reader to articulate better answers than what are in the text.

All of that said, this is not by any stretch a gospel that I’ve never heard.  N.T. Wright was setting forth a historically-informed reading of canonical text a couple decades before this book hit the presses, and Richard Hays was holding forth on the real ethical weight of the Sermon on the Mount and other New Testament texts when I was still an undergraduate.  The real content of this book is a polemic against a Calvinist-flavored version of evangelicalism, a focused reading of the canonical gospels and some brief forays into Paul and the General Epistles that take the gospel narratives as logically prior to the epistolary discourse.  This is one of the strange features of the book: at various moments Rudel almost seems to imply (though he never directly states it) that the gospels were also in some sense temporally prior to Paul’s letters, an assumption that lets him play Paul against Christ (rather than Paul against Mark or Paul against Luke) as a zero-sum game (36) but which seems to rely on a strange historical assumption.

Rudel’s main hermeneutical move is to draw a sharp distinction between regeneration, which happens here and now; and deliverance, which happens at the Final Judgment (42).  Because I spend my professional time thinking about poetry rather than legal precedents, this strong separation strikes me as neglecting some of the real beauty of the scheme of salvation, and I do think that the New Testament loses something when the Judgment and the indwelling of the Spirit are hermetically sealed realities rather than informing and constituting one another.  Beyond that, the forced separation forces Rudel to make some strange moves when he writes about the book of Romans (58-59) and  about the Eucharist (115).  Rudel cites many texts that support his case (though his decision to use a boldface font for every Scripture citation is a bit hard on the eyes after a while), and his attention to the details of the text serve him well when he writes about the apparent upshot of Jesus’ parables in the context of his larger preaching ministry (119-122) and his account of what constitutes Christ’s obedience that saves sinners (149).

Although his close readings of Scripture are good when they’re good, his take on the Church as it’s existed in the intervening centuries is decidedly more spotty.  As I noted before, Rudel’s concern in his book is to approach the Scriptures with theological “precision” (115) and to counter what he frames as bad propositional/syllogistic frameworks with more adequate ones.  (One moment that amused me, because I do read the Bible as poetic as well as true and probably more true because poetic, is when he initiates an ellipse-filled citation of Galatians with, “Removing some rhetoric…” (139).  As someone who has recently taken on the role of rhetoric scholar, I had to wonder why in the world one would want to remove some rhetoric from Paul!)  Therefore he’s not quite sure what to do with the generations of Christians from Paul’s generation (remember, the gospels are prior to Paul in his reading) roughly to the age of Protestant Orthodoxy.  On one hand he criticizes them for allowing ambiguity to characterize their theology (138), but on the other, he praises them for being “less indoctrinated” (145) than their modern-era counterparts.  He gets much more comfortable with Reformed and Evangelical writings from the last four hundred years, give or take, and some of the amusing moments in the book are  when he attacks evangelicalism in general for using some very distinctively Reformed-Calvinist language, namely propitiation (160) and “alien righteousness” (140).  One doesn’t have to guess too long which sorts of evangelicals Rudel spends his time with.

On balance I think (as I often do) that the strong questions about the canonical gospels, though I have heard them before, are worthwhile as a popular-press introduction to some interesting close-readings of the gospel texts.  Because I’m a Sunday school teacher I imagine many books as potential Sunday school or small group texts, and I think that a strongly educated teacher could use this book on one of those settings profitably.  Perhaps it’s a gospel that those of us who presume to teach have heard, but nonetheless it might be a good locus of conversation for those who have not.

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 30 May 2010 (Trinity Sunday, Year C)

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 and Psalm 8 • Romans 5:1-5 • John 16:12-15

The Trinity still makes me nervous.

I have no trouble confessing that God is Father and Son and Spirit.  I have no trouble singing hymns that affirm the same.  But as I’ve noted before, whenever someone with a seminary education (other than myself, of course–I’m not that much of a cowardly lion) mentions Trinity, more often than not I see a wolf circling.  As far as my daily life goes, I never turn my back on anyone who uses the word “perichoresis” unless doing so means that I can keep my eye on another person who says “modalism.”

When I revisit Proverbs 8, I remember why I ended up doing my first graduate degree in Biblical studies instead of systematic theology.  Here Wisdom, personified, stands opposite of Folly, likewise personified, and both look about the same to the uneducated eye.  (That’s the point of the allegory, best I can tell.)  Christians, and especially those who put together lectionaries, have noticed that Wisdom makes certain claims about herself that resonate with John’s opening poetry and to certain bits of Paul, so it’s come to be part of Christians’ traditional readings for Trinity Sunday, but enough of the original morality-allegory remains to make the self-description far more fun than a discussion of distinction-without-difference.  (For what it’s worth, one should note that Boethius was talking about alteritas/otherness some time around the early sixth century; that’s not to say that Hegel adds nothing to the discussion, but he’s adding to a discussion, not creating dialectics out of thin air.)  What looks basically like Folly when both call out from doorways in the marketplace is actually an ordering principle that was before the formless-and-void earth, whose craft shapes all things that God makes, whose work delights the Almighty.  It’s no wonder that the unassuming Nazarene whose resurrection signals the inbreaking of a new heavens and a new earth made those early Christians think of this bit of wisdom literature.

Although I have a feeling that my Eastern Orthodox brethren and sostren would find it a bit too sociological and not nearly ontological enough, I still like John Howard Yoder‘s take on the Trinity: it’s a tool that the early Church (infused as always with the Spirit) developed so that we could read the gospel of John.  (To be fair, for Yoder, the Scriptures reveal the true character of Being, so his take is roundabout ontological.)  Or, to take the chain of reference in a different direction, it’s one way in which the texts of the Scriptures that the earliest Christians would have agreed to call Scriptures stand to interpret the Christ-event.  Or, if that’s still a bit too historical to fit with some folks’ visions of the Eternal, the Trinity has always been there, but human beings needed some history to figure that out, and the possibility always stands open that someone might articulate “that” a bit better than previous generations had.

I’ve only ever preached the Trinity when the gospel of John came up in the lectionary readings, but when it has I’ve tried to be bold in doing so.  I can only hope that those sermons don’t become fodder for seminarians.  Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Welcome to Season 2.5. The theme music this week is “Rock and Roll Dixie,” from the soundtrack to the video game The Neverhood. We also have a special guest host, Nathan Gilmour’s brother Ryan.

General Introduction
- Welcome to Season 2.5
- David Grubbs, our reporter from the field
- We get the dirt on Nathan
- What’s on the blog?
- Listener feedback

Ryan’s Story
- Mr. Gallops, Talking Horse Comedian
- Second City
- Birds on Life
- The life of a working comedian
- Dog hotel
- Our first bleep

Medieval Comedy
- Where have all the jesters gone?
- The handicapped, the short, and the studied
- Insulting the powerful
- Reading Shakespeare into the Middle Ages
- How universal are jesters?

Vaudeville and Minstrelsy
- American literary humor
- Medicine shows
- The complicated politics of blackface
- Racism and Disney cartoons

- A New Kind of Comedy
- Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor
- Taking comedy personally
- The Second City
- Saturday Night Live

Radio, Television, and the Internet
- Censorship
- Increased sophistication and multiplying clichés
- Why Second City is funnier than Saturday Night Live
- How the Internet changed it all
- We talk about joke stealing for ten minutes
- Faking it
- Effusive praise for Dave Chappelle

Mean and Amoral Comedy
- How prudish is Nathan?
- Why the absurd requires the congruous
- The difference between mean and amoral
- Easy targets
- Please excuse our technical issues
- The Celebrity Roast

What we need to know about comedy
- Mean, mean Grandma Gilmour
- The future of the entertainment industry

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Harrison, Jim. The Farmer’s Daughter. New York: Grove, 2009.

Montgomery, Marion. With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: In Company with Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009.

Otto, Beatrice K. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

Ruhl, Sarah. Dead Man’s Cell Phone. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Embracing Our Questioners by John Castelein

I do like to toot my own tradition’s horn when I can, and The Christian Standard, our weekly publication, last Sunday had this nice little piece by a theology professor in one of our seminaries.  Because of the piece’s brevity and the breadth of its audience it doesn’t dig into any grand theorizing, but one could do worse for a starting point on these questions.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 23 May (Pentecost, Year C)

Acts 2:1-21 or Genesis 11:1-9 • Psalm 104:24-34, 35b • Romans 8:14-17 or Acts 2:1-21 • John 14:8-17, (25-27)

I often tell my Sunday school class that I’m glad that nobody, more than likely, will ever commission me to make a translation of the Bible.  Not only would it be a lengthy endeavor; I would also no doubt make enemies with the body of choices that I would make verse by verse, sticking with traditional readings here and deviating there.  When I came to Genesis 11, for instance, I would almost certainly depart from the tradition of rendering verse one as “all the earth,” preferring “all the land.”  I’d have a perfectly logical reason, of course: if all the earth settled upon the plain of Shinar (v. 2), not only would that depopulate most of the earth, but there would be little need for them to “make a name” for themselves (v. 4).  I realize there is a long and established tradition of seeing these settlers’ motivations as “making a name” in heavenly places by invading whatever corner their tower penetrated, but I’m more inclined to think of this endeavor as an etiology, a story that explains how the Babylonians’ roots go back much farther than Nebuchadnezzar or even Hammurabi.  The way that the Bible tells the story, the superpower that terrorizes Israel more than any superpower before and whose memory is so bitter that the hated Roman Empire gets called Babel in the Apocalypse has roots even more ancient (by a chapter) than Israel’s own.

The impulse to find roots for evil does not stop in those early chapters of Genesis, of course; Jesus in John says that the devil is a liar from the beginning, and English literature would not be nearly as rich without Grendel, whose grand-sire is Cain the kinsman murderer, and Milton’s Satan, whose origin stories themselves fall victim to the web of deceit that surrounds him.  What interests me is that, even in the origin-stories, something like Augustine’s theory of privative evil seems to be operative: a liar is parasitic on the goodness of truthful discourse, and a kinsman-murderer cannot be such unless the loyalty inherent in kinship is already there.  Here, on the plains of Shinar, the impulse to make a name and avoid being scattered does not itself pursue anything but the goods of being-known and security, things that chapters later God promises to Abraham.  But the desire to make a name for one’s self is always at the least suspect in the Bible: Lamech is the paradigm case, the one who sings for himself a curse eleven times as severe as the curse of Cain on anyone who would raise a hand to him.  Babylon is the Lamech of political orders, destroying kingdoms and gods across the fertile crescent, swallowing the mighty Assyrians and subjugating Syria and Judah almost as an afterthought.  And as the final version of the tale of Babel relates, the grand destroyer of rulers and of priests, the model for evil through the New Testament period, does not invent its own evil in the era of Jeremiah and Ezekiel; on the contrary, they are conquerors and fortress-builders from the start, and their murderous desire to make a name and to hold fast when the world would scatter them dates back to primordial moments.

All of this makes the visitation of the Spirit at Pentecost all the more interesting: as any first-semester student of New Testament history knows, the conquests of Alexander some three hundred years before Christ and the adoption of Greek education by the Romans in the ensuing centuries created a situation in which all of the folks gathered there in Jerusalem were likely to have at least a conversational familiarity with Koine Greek, so they could have spoken their own Empire’s lingua franca easily enough.  But the way the Spirit operates is not to consolidate and to assimilate the peoples of the earth but to speak to them in their own languages, so that they could hear not in the tongue of the conqueror but in the words that their hearts speak the glorious news that God had forgiven the city that crucified the Son of God and had extended that forgiveness to any who would repent and believe.  That earliest proclamation, through the power of the Spirit, was a centrifugal motion in the same way that Babel was a centripetal one, going forth to the souls of the nations and establishing Christianity’s strong missionary impulse long before Peter’s grand vision of the formerly-unclean food.

As all of us continue to attempt the making of disciples as we go along, may God deliver us from the temptations of Shinar and enliven our imaginations so that we can see Pentecostal moments before us.

In a recent conversation with fellow Christian Humanist Michial Farmer, I noted a certain paradox about my relationship with Brian McLaren and other public Christian intellectuals who often get labeled “liberal” or “heterodox.”  (This little essay is not about the content of their views, so I’ll leave the scare quotes there for the time being.)  If truth be told, some of the things for which those writers get in the most trouble aren’t things about which I’d take up with “the other side” if the chips were down.  I’m not committed to anything like the strong Wheaton-flavored doctrine of inerrancy, and I’ve known too many women who can preach better than too many men to oppose women’s ordination on principle.  And as folks who have listened to the last few podcasts know, I tend to think about the nature of Scripture differently than do many evangelicals.

All of that said, I still think of myself as differing from self-proclaimed “progressives,” not least because I believe that most important questions demand answers more complex than a one-dimension spectrum.  In other words, if I’m not A, that doesn’t mean I’m B, and most of the time I’m not content to say that I’m somewhere around (A+B)/2 on a number line.  Instead, I think that if the word “liberal” has any content beyond “not us” (and I believe it does), and if “conservative” has a meaning that is not identical with “right wing” (and I think it does), then reality is complex enough to deserve language more complex than one-dimensional comparisons.

All of that setup is simply to say that when we Christians think about intellectual life, we ought to do so in robust, historically-rich terms, allowing Calvin to differ from Luther in ways distinct from how Jack Spong differs from both of them.  We should not forget that there was no singular thing called “the medieval mind,” no monolith that would recognize itself as “the modern era.”  We should attend carefully and respectfully to the texts that shape us and the ones that have not yet shaped us (I’m convinced that the list old books my children’s generation will find most compelling will differ at least to some extent from the list that moved the folks with whom I went to college).  That goes double for those books whose ideas, on first read, strike us as most distasteful.

I’ve told folks before that I teach the books I teach not because they’re right but because they answer interesting questions wrong.  To have the right answers to dull or unimportant questions is not worth much to me as a teacher; the questions that defy the formulae, because they ignore the stock answers entirely or because they call into question the assumptions and ideologies that make the stock answers intelligible, are the questions that remain, for my money, the most worth devoting one’s life to, and neither the platitudes of the Capitalist New Left nor the foot-stamping protests of the fundamentalists (often themselves Capitalists) give me much pause at all for genuine thought.  Give me Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Erasmus and Calvin any day.  Let me dig my teeth into Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor or Homer’s heroes-against-the-gods.  But by no means assume that I’m “one of them” because I want to ask questions not yet entertained by “us.”

My blessing in all of this is that I’ve been a part of a congregation in Athens willing to shake their heads and note that Gilmour is “up to it again” when I entertain readings and theories, and I’ve been a part of college teaching communities eager to hear from folks with strange ideas.  I do not pretend the courage of a Socrates; I don’t know whether I’d drink hemlock for the truth or not, but I doubt it.  What I do know is that, being a part of those communities, at the minimum the duty I owe them is to proceed in my inquiries, whether in the Sunday school classroom or in the college classroom or in the academic conference room, under the assumption that the traditions that define this or that arena of inquiry were there before I got there, and my duty is to pay them due respect, even and especially when I call them into question. That means respecting the culture of a place, all of the complexity that lies just below the surface to be found if one has the patience to weather the first shocks of distaste.  That means attempting to “read” an institution with the same care that one would read a philosophical text.  That means submitting to what I find less than ideal, assuming in the way I carry myself that I must earn rather than seize the right to steer things.

Such is not any sort of heroism, and I am no “organization man” or “quietist” for starting from that point; I only hope that, when I’m the one who has invested my life in the shape of a community, those who come behind will show me the same sort of respect, even and especially when they strive to replace my ways.

So when I teach Sunday school, the folks in my class know that I might reach conclusions that differ from their own, but they know that I’m going to explain those conclusions without insulting those who differ and in terms that are intelligible to the folks gathered.  In my college classes I’m going to serve the institution in the capacities I agreed to when I signed on.  In venues like this I’m going to assume that those with whom I disagree have the best intentions at heart and are at least as literate as I am, and I’m going to present my arguments for readers’ scrutiny rather than assuming that the really bright folks already agree with me and thus don’t need an argument.

Since this has turned into more of a manifesto than an argument, I’ll end with this: every tradition is an argument, and a tradition within which there are no more arguments is a dead tradition.  All that I ask of those who walk alongside me and those who come after me is that we remember that living in a polis requires some politeness, that the stability of such communities, while not the summum bonum of their pursuits, is nonetheless a good that should bear some gravity when on the balance against the impatience of the young.

I have no idea where Gilmour and Grubbs have been–unless the end of the semester came with such a rush of relief that their heads exploded. I’m working on a post about why I’m a coward, politically speaking. In the meantime, please enjoy this article from the New York Review of Books, which goes a long way in explaining why I distrust populism and both conservative and social libertarianism.

I promise that we will get our act together soon, and I apologize for the tumblin’ tumbleweeds that have made up the output of this blog the last few weeks.