Monthly Archives: September 2010

Well, folks, with Michial’s oral comps and other scheduling snags, the Christian Humanist Podcast was reduced to the sad state of relying on Nate Gilmour to deliver a monologue.  If you don’t want to listen to that, we understand, so here are some of what passed for the high points:

General Introduction
- Gilmour gets the episode number wrong (an inauspicious beginning)
- What’s on the Blog
- The email address

Gilmour Pleads for Favors
- Feedback via email
- iTunes store ratings and reviews
- links on your sites, blogs and Facebook feeds

Giving Farmer Props
- Congratulations on passing the comps
- The CHP dissertation completion fantasy league

Not with a Bang but a Whimper
- Another plea for listener feedback
- High hopes for a real episode next Tuesday

Background music for today’s podcast comes from Arlo Guthrie’s classic “Alice’s Restaurant.”

An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible
By Walter Brueggemann.
212 pp. Fortress Press. $22.00.

I first encountered Walter Brueggemann’s project as a senior at Milligan College, but I really became a disciple of Bruggemann’s in 2000 when as a seminarian I read his gigantic 1997 Theology of the Old Testament. Here was a teacher who certainly wore his ideology on his sleeve (no friend of the Enlightenment’s arrogance or the national security state’s duplicity here) and whose attention to relationships between texts still impresses me a decade later.  I’ve since had the privilege of attending a few of his public lectures, and this book continues to remind me why being a disciple of Brueggemann is still the most faithful way to read the Bible that I can figure out.

Brueggemann states in this book’s introduction that, after ten years, he had decided to revisit some of the central ideas of Theology of the Old Testament, and at several points in the book he retracts certain points of technical scholarship (that is to say, stuff that’s so specialized that eight years in English lit have rendered me unable to sustain interest in them), but his more interesting project is to expand significantly on his idea of theology as a dialogical practice.

The idea, although it uses a Hegelian-sounding word, is really just a recognition of the relationships implicit in the Bible: for one, the voice known as YHWH becomes known not by rational deduction but in disruptive, memorable moments of revelation.  Moreover, most of the text of the Bible (with very important exceptions) has to do with YHWH’s relationships with the Abrahamic clan, then with the Hebrews, then with Israel, then with the Church.  The continuities and discontinuities in that succession of relationships is worth thinking on, but the common thread that Brueggemann highlights is that YHWH always and only comes to us in relationship with other entities, and each section of the book treats one large category of those relationships.

After the first introductory section, section two deals with “Israel as YHWH’s Partner.”  Brueggemann breaks up the classical Protestant dualism of works and grace in the opening of this chapter and reminds his reader again and again that it’s simply inadequate to the Old Testament.  Israel’s ethical obligations are real and binding, Brueggemann insists, but those obligations only make sense as responses to entirely gratuitous acts of grace on YHWH’s part (38).  Moreover, Biblical narrative tends to follow a pattern, though not slavishly, that gives the lie to the hermetic separation of grace and obedience.  The steps to that pattern Brueggemann lays out thus (52):

• love for Israel (God’s election of Abram, God’s rescuing Israel from Egypt)
• command to Israel (covenant of circumcision, Torah of Moses, institution of Torah-cultus by Josiah)
• scattering of Israel (era of oppression after the Exodus, Assyrian conquest, Babylonian exile)
• YHWH turns back to Israel (Isaiah 40, restoration of Hosea’s wife and children)
• gathering back to YHWH (rise of Davidic monarchy, return from Babylonian exile)

Brueggemann argues that not only is the overarching narrative of Israel shaped roughly thus; in addition, the Psalms often reflect this narrative sequence.  And beyond that, texts like Job, which treat non-Israel individuals, often follow a similar pattern (59).  And beyond that, oracles against the nations in Isaiah and other prophets, not to mention the primordial story of the tower of Babel, indicate that the same series of relationships governs how the Bible imagines non-Israel nations (134).  And beyond that still, some prophetic oracles, especially those that envision re-enactments of the Exodus plagues, imagines the same series of relationships governing God’s relationship with the whole of creation (149).  To repeat, Brueggemann is not asserting that every section of the Bible adheres in some sort of neo-classical manner to this pattern; instead, what Brueggemann would point out is that the relational moments (oracle and text, revelation and recipient of revelation, witnessing people and witnessed-to nations) in which the faithful always encounter God extends, in the Bible’s imagination, to every relationship that God maintains with every part of creation.

Brueggemann’s point here is that the Bible does have a full and robust sense of providence, but that providence is always in tension with an equally full and an equally robust sense of real and powerful agency on the part of YHWH’s partners.  In other words, although the most frequent and often the most memorable testimonies about God in the Bible are in regard to YHWH’s power, authority, and sovereignty, for Brueggemann (and as I said before, I think of myself as his disciple), when a theological datum arises to disrupt that larger picture, the faithful reader of the Bible must take heed and resist the urge to erect systems that silence the datum.

Datum, of course, is the singular where “data” are plural.  (My own composition students know well that in my classes, even if not on the cable news, “media” and “data” are always plural.)  What Brueggemann means by a theological datum is one of those moments of revelation in which, contrary to the conclusions to which mortals come, God reveals something.  Perhaps it’s that the sins of mortals actually increase divine wrath, indicating that there was less wrath before the sin and more after and that, therefore, something at the core of divine being really does respond to human agency.  At other times a theological datum might be a story in which a mortal’s pleading convinces YHWH to refrain from massive destruction.  At any rate, contrary to some systematic theologies that make a regular practice of dispensing with such moments as “anthropomorphic” or “primitive,” Bruggemann insists that, so long as they share the page with the texts that support systems of theology, they deserve the same sort of weight as those texts bear, even if that means that the text remains paradoxical rather than neatly sorted.

Perhaps it’s the English major that I completed before I started seminary, or perhaps it’s the sense I have that airtight systems of thought, be they materialistic or theistic, tend to miss some important things about real life, but I remain convinced that this absolute devotion to the text as it stands is going to continue to govern my own theology as I go on teaching and preaching.  Brueggemann’s book concludes with his expressing a hope that this sort of reading will inspire “different questions” (176) from the ones that theology has classically inspired.  If my own career as a Christian teacher counts, it’s working already.

General Introduction
- Listener feedback: In which Michial takes offense at compliments
- What’s on the blog?
- A notice about next week

King David
- What picture does the Hebrew Bible give us of monarchy?
- The transition from judges to kings
- God’s rejection of Saul
- Heightism in ancient Israel
- A tale of two Lord’s anointeds
- Bad news for the bearers of bad news
- Kingly duties (haha, he said “doodies”)
- David’s mercenary army
- Zeus and the frogs

Greek Kings
- Smaller kings with less power
- Why was Agamemnon in charge, anyway?
- Does kingship follow religion?

The City That Would Have No King
- Why did the Romans hate kings?
- The real or mythical Tarquins
- Brutus plays dumb
- Night-wandering weasels
- A funny thing happened on the way to the Senate…

A New Kind of Kingship
- The King of the Jews
- On the Jewish Messiah
- Jesus thrown everything off balance
- Christ and politics: A preview of a future episode
- The new spiritual kingship
- Mark Antony and Herod the Great

Medieval Kings
- Charlemagne’s other nickname
- Packing a rod in the Germanic world
- David speaks Old English
- Ring-givers and gold friends
- The Phony King of England
- Who died and made you king?
- We skip the Renaissance

American Rejection of Monarchy
- We just hate George III
- The roots of the revolution
- The Adams/Jefferson mudslinging
- Democracy and American literature
- Ah, but we digress: Colonial myths
- Update: It was Samuel Adams, which is at least less ridiculous: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/37933/

Pop Cultural Kings
- The Sultan of Swat
- Jack Kirby, the King of Comics
- THE KING
- King Richard

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aesop. Fables. Trans. Laura Gibbs. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Beowulf. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Livy, Titus. The Early History of Rome. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. New York: Penguin, 2002.

McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. New York: Penguin, 1982.

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.

—. The Poems. Ed. John Roe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 26 September 2010 (18th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 and Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16 • Amos 6:1a, 4-7 and Psalm 146 • 1 Timothy 6:6-19 • Luke 16:19-31

This week’s readings feature two striking stories that highlight the strange, even paradoxical character of living as God’s people in the world and especially the strange world that arises when holy Scriptures in some sense define one’s life.  On one hand, Jeremiah’s story is one of the supreme examples of what Hebrews 11 holds up, namely faithfulness towards an unseen reality in the face of what’s plainly obvious to everybody.  The brutal reality, of course, chapter 32 lays out in its opening verses: Nebuchadnezzar is in his eighteenth year, and Jerusalem is under siege.  Everybody knows what happens when Nebuchadnezzar comes knocking: as Herodotus notes, in his day Nebuchadnezzar was invincible the same way that Cyrus of Persia would be invincible a generation later: no city can withstand him.  Jerusalem has passed the “if” and is rapidly approaching “when” Jerusalem becomes Babylonia’s latest victim, and YHWH comes to Jeremiah with a bold command: buy land, and keep the paperwork.

The cliches come to mind too readily: buy some of the deck furniture from the Titanic.  Bet heavily on the Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters.  Buy your advance tickets for when the Cubs play in the World Series.  But then again, this is the same YHWH who commanded Hosea to marry a woman of unfaithfulness, who told Joshua to march around Jericho instead of laying siege, who told Moses to face down the god-king of his world’s supreme military power.  Jeremiah has a literary tradition standing toe-to-toe against real and present political reality, and being a prophet, he declares that ultimately the Bible is more real.

Centuries later Jesus tells another story in which the Bible turns out to be more real than what is present and seen.  That the story of Lazarus and Dives has become in many circles a proof-text in arguments against universalism is almost as sad as Genesis 1′s conscription in anti-evolution battles: in each case there’s some really good stuff that gets missed when the text is not doing what the text does best.  The most fascinating thing about this story is not that there is a place in the afterlife with fire and torment; every Parthian Zoroastrian worth his salt believed in that.  What’s fascinating is that the rich man, caring for his own brothers in a way that never would have happened in Dante’s Inferno, begs Abraham to allow him to return to the land of the living, not so that he might escape his doom along with Ebenezer Scrooge, but so that his brothers might see a man returned from the dead, be shocked, and turn their own lives around.  And then the shocker comes.

What’s really astonishing, Abraham seems to imply, is not that the dead might return but that God would speak oracles specifically to human beings just so they could live good lives and avoid your fate.  And so the story closes.  The implications are gigantic: although no Jew of the time would have held Scriptures lightly (certainly not as lightly as many of us moderns do), this passage assigns to them the status of a grand divine scandal, a moment so shocking that anyone with ears to hear should have heard them because of their offense against expectations.

We moderns, thinking that we know so blasted much about “religion,” might see this as a strange move: after all, doesn’t “every religion” have its “holy book” that its adherents read?  The answer is, of course, that in the Roman world of Jesus and Paul and Luke, that simply would not have been the working assumption.  Certainly the Greeks had their beliefs in the vatic character of poetic madness, and Herodotus gives us several instances of divine oracles coming from Delphi to particular kings and luminaries, and many spiritual traditions have books that they read in public ceremonies, but none of those things is quite like the Torah and the prophets.  That the Scriptures issue forth directly from God means that divine contact has become textual, words read not for the sake of educating the people with regards to God but as the vehicle by which God’s own word comes to Israel and by extension to mortals on earth.  If the rich man’s brothers have become so drunk with their own comfort that they do not recognize the very words of God, then not even the dead walking can stir them from that slumber.

We Christians should never forget the oddity of divinely-inspired text, the scandal of particular revelation, or the other particulars that make us distinct from those “religions” that came before.  May God remind us again and again of the glory and the scandal of being People of the Book.

Dante 2010: Purgatorio

Dante 2010: Inferno

Dante 2009: Paradiso

Dante 2009: Purgatorio

Dante 2009: Inferno

Dante 2008: Paradiso

Dante 2008: Purgatorio

Dante 2008: Inferno

I’ve taken longer than I would have liked to finish my Dante posts this year, but I suppose that’s life.  I’m certain I’ll read the Comedy next summer, and when I do, I’m sure I’ll have things to write about then, and perhaps I’ll be a bit closer to speedy about it.

This year what struck me most about the third and most difficult Canticle of the Comedy is just how much of it Dante dedicates to declaring impossible the task of writing poetry about Heaven.  As Dante rises into the heavenly realms, and later as Dante comes to the sphere of fixed stars, and later still as Dante becomes aware of the Empyrean as the full reality of the Heavenly court, and finally as Dante contemplates God’s self, Dante’s own soul changes, allowing him greater and clearer and more profound apprehension of realities beyond the scope of mortal language, but the problem with transcending mortal language is that he’s still got a poem to write, and that just makes the whole enterprise difficult.

When Dante does manage to write some poetry, as usual, the moves that he makes provoke me to thought more than most written texts manage to.  Dante’s basic definition of Paradise, that which makes Heaven Heaven for those in Heaven, is a hierarchical scheme.  At first glance even Dante, imperialist though he is, entertains the question whether those souls who receive a lesser share of divine bliss would be within their right to entertain a bit of resentment.  Beatrice assures him, though, that the hierarchy is not a coercive hierarchy in which the powerful keep down the powerless through violence and fear of violence.  Instead, the souls receive from the bounty of divine love precisely as much of that divine love as they desire, so that the magnitude of desire for God and the share of God’s outpouring are perfectly matched in every case.  So those souls who are theologically and philosophically inclined bask in a great share of divine love, those who ruled with justice with more still, and mystic contemplatives even more.  The schema is not unlike Plato’s ideal city in the Republic: although it seems monstrous at first glance, there is a logic internal to the scheme that is somehow compelling in its own terms.

Part of the Paradiso that always bugged me a bit (you’ll see why in a moment) is the elevation of generals and warriors over theologians in Dante’s scheme.  Although the Dominicans (including Thomas) and Franciscans enjoy eternal contemplation of the Good, the warriors like Orlando and Gottfried and Dante’s own ancestor Cacciguada are even more honored in Heaven.  This year, for the first time, I started to realize that what’s important for Dante is not so much the willingness to kill as the active life–in fact, the progression from the Sun to Mars to Jupiter to Saturn forms a chiasmus of sorts that encompasses active and contemplative Christian pursuits, and all of those take some share of the Kingdom in Dante’s mind.  I also granted for the first time that the Anabaptists’ elevation of martyrs to the exemplars of faithfulness is at least somewhat akin to Dante’s of the warriors.  That’s not to say that they’re identical (I do still think myself a Hauerwasian), but I can appreciate the system a little better now.

Just as Dante’s spherical earth is always the first place I go when people try to tell me that Christopher Columbus regarded the world as round in the face of unanimous flat-earthism, I’ve come to realize that Dante, in a way, has a vision of the cosmos that is not at all geocentric, or at least one in which geocentrism is at most a human construction.  As Dante ascends Jacob’s ladder to the Empyrean, the invisible Heaven only known to mystics here on earth, he looks back at the system of stars and planets and Earth and realizes that, from the perspective of the highest heaven, Earth is a tiny ball, something seemingly insignificant in the grand system.  I realize that he was no Keplerian astronomer, but I do think that this move in the poem at least acknowledges that the mathematical models that governed his own grasp on astronomy was an utterly contingent, human-all-too-human construction, the sort of humility that I have to respect, even when his politics do not admit of that humility.

What impressed me most on this trip through Heaven was Dante’s particular sense of history.  I still think that in significant ways Dante signals the beginning of the Renaissance, not least because of his profound respect for and sophisticated theory of history regarding Imperial Rome.  For Dante, Rome is neither the eternal city (Augustine does not allow that) nor exclusively the Great Babylon of Revelation but something more like the nations that Isaiah and Amos prophesy against in their respective books, and that relativism regarding Rome strikes me as a change from Biblical and even classical treatments of the great city.  The most that can be said for Rome, Dante’s Justinian asserts, is that it was instrumental for God to avenge original sin (Jesus did die on a Roman cross, after all), but there’s no sense that the crucifixion exclusively defines Rome any more than do the glories of the Republic or the promise of the Empire.  Instead, all three realities are present in Dante’s Paradiso, and his hope for a restoration of Empire has little to do with any sort of divine favor posited for the city so much as a pragmatic concern, namely that without an empire, outlaws terrorize the frontiers of cities with nobody there to check them.

I know that this year’s Dante posts have been somewhat scattershot, but I’m thankful that I had another chance to read this wonderful poem.  For the first time this year, I’ll be teaching the Purgatory in Western Literature I this spring, so I’m not done with Dante for the school year just yet.  Just wait–I might just write about the journey again.

General Introduction
- Football season begins
- What’s on the blog?
- An argument about Jaws

Our History with Superheroes
- Crib notes: Only Gilmour was way into comics
- Michial played too many video games
- Marvel vs. DC

Premodern Models of Heroism
- The hero as function of a larger metaphysic
- Greek demigods
- Imperial and national mythology
- A discourse on the supernatural
- The Medieval era crosses the streams
- The virtuous hero

A New Kind of Hero
- Michial prepares a response to the wrong question
- Let’s talk cowboys
- Natty Bumppo rides off into the sunset
- Cowboys as symbols of anarchic freedom
- Abandoning your aristocratic background
- The cowboy code of honor
- Deconstructing the myth

David Rambles
- (GASP)
- The burgeoning market for “yellow literature”
- The birth of Superman/The birth of Lex Luthor
- Science fiction meets detectives

If Anyone Can, the Superman Can!!
- Parsing Nietzsche’s übermensch
- Conflating, then going two-dimensional
- Leopold and Loeb and Raskolnikov
- A response to the Nazis?
- What should the most powerful person on earth do?

The Batman; or, OH, GOOD FUH YOU
- Is Batman a superhero?
- Going dark with the dark knight
- Name that Batman!
- Power vs. time and money
- Adding the pariah superhero

Time to Pick Sides
- Nathan’s bizarre justification of Superman comics
- The tedium of the morally perfect hero
- Breaking the DC false dichotomy
- We choose our favorite X-Men

The Secret Identity
- Protecting loved ones
- Avoiding lawsuits
- Promulgating alienation
- The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro

Subversions
- Watchmen draws out the Nietzschean elements
- Nathan Gilmour, polyanna
- Now we fight about The Incredibles
- Who’s our übermensch?
- With great power comes great responsibility

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Batman Begins. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, and Cillian Murphy. Warner Bros., 2005.

Beowulf. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Confucius. The Analects. Trans. Raymond Dawson. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Penguin, 1986.

—. The Pioneers. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jaramusch. Perf. Johnny Depp. Miramax, 1995.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. David McDuff. New York: Penguin,

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 2003.

High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Perf. Gary Cooper. United Artists, 1952.

The Incredibles. Dir. Brad Bird. Perf. Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, and Jason Lee. Pixar, 2004.

Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Booth. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Jurgens, Dan. The Death of Superman. New York: DC Comics, 1992.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. New York: Norton, 2003.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Dir. Robert Altman. Perf. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Warner Bros., 1971.

Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1997.

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 2008.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. New York: Penguin, 1961.

The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Perf. John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, and Natalie Wood. Warner Bros., 1956.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1950.

Spider-Man. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, and James Franco. Columbia, 2002.

Superman Returns. Dir. Bryan Singer. Perf. Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, and Kevin Spacey. Warner Bros., 2006.

Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris. Warner Bros., 1992.

Vonnegut, Kurt. “Harrison Bergerson.” Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories. New York: Dial Press, 1998. 7-14.

X2. Dir. Bryan Singer. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellan, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. 20^th Century Fox, 2003.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 19 September 2010 (17th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 and Psalm 79:1-9 • Amos 8:4-7 and Psalm 113 • 1 Timothy 2:1-7 • Luke 16:1-13

There’s scriptures I don’t know what to do with, and then there’s scriptures I don’t know what to do with.

Luke 16 is both.

Whether I’m reading English translations or muddling through the Greek, on one reading I think that Jesus is commending those who swindle the powerful to gain favor with the weak, and then on the other I think that Jesus is pointing out the wickedness even of those who are not at the top of the world’s food chain.  The problem, of course, is that the ethical weight assigned to “faithful” and to “dishonest” isn’t entirely clear.  In most situations, be they marital or patriotic or commercial, I would normally think that dishonesty categorically rules out faithfulness.  So obviously when the end of the parable predicts great dishonesty from one who has been marginally dishonest, it’s predicting a bad thing.

But then I get to Luke 16:11, and I have to start over.  There “dishonest wealth” is simply the object of a preposition, a label put on this pile of money that might as well be “your paycheck” or “what you’ve got” for all the clarity it lends the passage.  To be faithful with dishonest wealth seems impossible, but that seems to be precisely what 16:11 is calling for.

Of course, my normal hermeneutical toolbox flew open quickly enough–was Jesus making a nationalist point, that those who are wealthy in an occupied Judea give up their moral right not to be swindled?  Does the wealthy man, who himself must be dishonest, see in the manager some of the ruthlessness that keeps him in the game?  Is this an allegory for pagan learning?  No matter how I try to bend this passage, it keeps on fighting me.  And that makes me realize that, no matter what else I have to say about Luke 16:13, by far the most famous verse in this troubling little passage, I have to admit at the outset that I just don’t have the tools to interpret the parable that leads up to it.  And if nothing else, that should give me pause when I try to pronounce upon it.

I have to admit that, while preparing this post, I did say a small prayer of thanksgiving that this text never came up on a Sunday I was preaching.  I just know I’d try to do a sermon on it, and I have a hunch I would crash and burn in the attempt.

I’ve actually missed two opportunities to talk about Jaws on our podcast.

I realized mere hours after recording our episode on epic movies that, in other contexts, I’d made the argument that the 1975 horror movie ran parallel in significant ways to the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, and of course, when Internet disappeared at Emmanuel College the morning we were supposed to record our episode on horror movies, I missed the opportunity to provide a counterpoint to Michial’s psychoanalytic take on the movie poster.

So that the opportunity is not a permanent loss and because this year is the movie’s 35th anniversary, I figured I’d try out some of the arguments that I was going to make and let the Christian Humanist readers (and my fellow bloggers) have a crack at them.

I have to give credit to Dr. Rod Werline, my thesis advisor from seminary, for starting me on this line of thought.  In an Old Testament Theology class in 2000, he was introducing one of the paper assignments for the class, an essay on Old Testament images and themes in popular culture, and he mentioned Jaws as one of the films that he’d always like to see a paper on.  (I didn’t write the paper, and as far as I remember, nobody in my class did either.)  He read an excerpt from a plot summary he’d found, a passage describing how the movie version (which differed radically, in the face of protests from Peter Benchley, from the novel’s ending), then a summary of the climax of Enuma Elish.  In both cases, the figure in the story who represents the newcomer and the upholder of law faces down a monster from the primordial salt water, destroying the beast from the inside with the power of air.  When he read those passages, everyone in that seminary class had an audible moment of recognition (if you’ve ever been in a classroom where an audible moment of recognition happened, you know what it sounds like), and for the next decade I’ve been thinking on such things.

(I found out this year that Steven Spielberg does not seem to  be aware of his Babylonian parallels; he put the blow-up-the-shark ending in to get the crowd cheering.)

Michial has made his point about the movie poster and the anxieties that it plays into (listen to CHP episode 16.1 if you’ve forgotten), and there’s not much more to say about Bruce, the giant robot shark, that even in 1975 had people wondering about Spielberg’s judgment as a director.  What I’d like to add to the conversation is a look at the epic conventions that make an audience actually care about what’s happening to the people on screen and overcomes, I think, even the Freudian anxiety and the bad special effects to make Jaws a movie worth some genuine thought.

The Pantheon at Amity

I used to think that the first half of Jaws was the worst bit of cinema ever attached to a brilliant second half, and it still might be, but I can see more merit to those opening minutes now than I used to, largely because I’ve paid more attention Babylonian and other literary antecedents to the first half of the shark movie.  The Massachussetts town of Amity (a thinly veiled fictional version of Martha’s Vineyard) is a tourist town, a place where things go well when people are complacent, happy, and eager to spend money.  The mayor of the town and the chamber of commerce know how fragile such an industry is, and in the opening minutes of Jaws, not long after Chief Brody has discovered the mauled corpse of movie-poster-girl, the first clash between the forces that govern Amity arises: on one hand, Brody, the movie’s embodiment of law, wants to shut down the beach, his main aim being the safety of the people and the containment of whatever chaotic force has claimed its first life.  Mayor Vaughn, the figure in the film who represents commerce, pulls rank on the police chief and forbids his using the word “shark” in public appearances.  Already the stage is set for disaster, and whether or not this scene comes faithfully from the novel (no, Dad, I’ve still not read it), the echoes from Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People begin here.  Two conflicting goods, each depending on a very different outcome, are immediately at odds, and the logic is not unlike Pascal’s wager: if the town shuts down and there’s no more shark activity, the loss in tourism money will do great harm to the people who live there.  But if the town does not shut down, and if the shark returns to kill again, then even greater damage will have been done to the town’s money situation, and the leaders of the town will have blood on their hands.  These tensions intensify as Matt Hooper, the representative of Science in the movie’s pantheon, and Captain Quint, the representative of War, enter the story.  Each is convinced that the mayor’s path of inaction is not only dangerous but willfully ignores the evidence that in fact a giant killer shark is in the water, and when the monster from the deep has finally wreaked enough havoc that even Commerce cannot ignore the danger, Brody/Law catches him in a vulnerable moment and convinces him to fund an expedition in which Law, War, and Science will venture forth to battle the force of Chaos in the great sea.

What’s brilliant about the movie is that the veteran Robert Shaw, the very young Richard Dreyfus, and Roy Scheider somewhere in the middle take these archetypal forces of civilization and play them in ways that do not assign random vices to them but really let the character of their position develop in human ways.  The old sailor Quint’s vengeance certainly comes from his encounter with sharks in the waters of the Pacific at the close of World War II, but they also fit the character vices that readers of Homer will recognize as the vices of Ares.  Likewise Matt Hooper’s arrogance and resentment of the older characters is the impetuous impatience of the young (in terms of the history of civilization) cultures of Enlightenment and science.  Finally, Brody’s impatience with Hooper and outright fury with Quint are certainly parts of a character’s personality and connect with his history as a former New York cop but also make perfect sense as the shortcomings of Law personified.

The Clash of Order and Chaos

In the second half of the movie, the camera never does catch sight of any land: there is only the boat and the water, and the visual setting makes perfectly clear that the action is taking place in Chaos’s element.  As Michial and David rightly noted on the podcast, the first full-bodied sighting of the monster happens late in the film, allowing the audience to enjoy the terror of the unseen beast before the sight of Bruce begins to test all of our abilities willfully to suspend our disbelief.  More importantly, the second half allows viewers to watch as the three gods of Amity go through mutual suspicion to a kind of resentment based on each one’s desire to govern the expedition to (after the shark has appeared) an alcohol-lubricated amiability that disintegrates once Chaos resurfaces and destroys (with the help of Quint/War) the only means that the men have to travel with any speed across the surface of the Chaos-monster’s element.  The film is far more self-contained after the boat leaves the land, and the three remaining characters and the monster are all the viewer has to focus on.

This part of the movie progresses from the failure of War’s shark-barrels to do anything significant to the monster; to the monster’s nearly wrecking the boat with sheer pulling power; to Quint’s hubristic act of redlining and blowing out the engine in an attempt to lead the monster back to land; to Hooper’s failed attempt to use the fragile instrument of the physician to destroy the beast in its own element; to Quint’s final destruction; to Brody’s destruction of the beast.  (I would have put in a spoiler alert, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do so for a 35-year-old movie.)  A look at these raw plot details–without John Williams’s pirate-adventure-to-impending-doom soundtrack that is far richer than the two-note anthem that most folks think of when they think of the movie– shows Brody not only as the eventual hero, and the one who comes out as the ordering master of Chaos, but also as someone who overcomes Chaos after Chaos has overcome everything that War and Science could throw against it.

A Babylonian, not a Christian Epic

This epic structure is what makes Jaws such a compelling movie: Law, the force whom Commerce ignores at the outset and whom Science and Law find an irritating hindrance, eventually overcomes Chaos, the force that could not be ignored by Commerce, contained by Science, or conquered by War.  The inclusio structure of the movie is deeply satisfying, and like the gods in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, I come away from the movie somewhat glad that there is a force in the universe powerful enough to combat the primordial destruction that comes from the sea.

But for a Christian Humanist, the story cannot end there.  As emotionally satisfying as the movie stands (we’ve all got a little Babylonian in us), there’s no overarching sense of an order that extends beyond Law’s ability violently to throw down Chaos.  This sort of universe operates within the rules of what John Milbank calls an agnostic metanarrative, a metaphysics that presumes a primordial conflict that goes back as far as the story can go back and does not, in the story’s own terms, ever end.  Such a universe stands in stark contrast to Christian metanarratives which (in most cases) begin with a free and gracious creation and in which evil is not primordial but stands as the ungrateful rebellion of free creatures against a benevolent creator, a rebellion that, like Satan’s in Paradise Lost, founders upon absurdity when it tries to justify itself.  In that sort of universe, heroism (as Milton recognized) consists not in confronting and destroying Chaos but in standing faithful to the good God who gives one being.

That doesn’t negate Jaws as something worth watching, but it should at the least give Christians some pause.  And I am not suggesting, of course, that someone should construct some sort of “Christian Jaws” any more than I would want anyone to write a “Christian Iliad“: both works appeal precisely because they construct and play within coherent universes, and to try to situate the events in a different universe would be to destroy the context that makes them compelling.  I’m not going to play Plato’s Socrates here, suggesting that we excise these stories.  Instead, I would have Christians watch Jaws with an eye to the creativity possible within a different metaphysics and to know that the metaphysics is indeed different.

Music this week is “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?” from Bruce Cockburn’s 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu.

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- All hail Craig Farmer (no relation)
- Old Man Gilmour tells us all to get off his lawn

Friendship in the Ancient World
- Aristotle’s friendship between equals
- Can friendship exist without sexual contact?
- Cicero’s common pursuit of good things

David and Jonathan
- David Grubbs’ personal connection
- Why were David and Jonathan friends at all?
- (LACUNA)
- The “homosexual” reading of David and Jonathan
- (Please pardon our oscillating fan during this segment)
- Exploding the dichotomy of sexual identification
- In which we cast David and Jonathan in a Judd Apatow movie

Christ and His Friends
- Nathan gets technical
- Jesus shakes things up
- A new kind of philia and agape

The Friendship of the Inklings
- Michial admits that he ripped this episode off
- Who were the Inklings?
- The friendship of common interests
- When friendship gets brutal

Michial Extemporizes About Existentialism
- Seeking a jingle for this segment
- The glory of the isolated individual
- Why is hell other people?
- How religion solves the problem
- Buber’s I and Thou, and Marcel’s testimony
- Let’s get linguistic

Literary Friendships
- Jeremy Irons speaks some sense!
- Achilles and Patroclus
- Watson makes Holmes more human
- Tolkien’s interracial friendships
- American literature and friendship
- Ishmael drops Queequeg
- Huck and Jim vs. Marlowe and Lennox

Ephemeral Friendships
- MICHAEL W. SMITH LIED TO US?
- Grubbs invokes Old English (as usual)
- Do you have real friends in high school?
- The we and the that
- (Sorry—I can’t make this edit sound natural. Blame Skype!)

Friends and the Internet
- Michial’s 221 Facebook friends
- No offense if you like The Matrix
- Mutual pursuit of intellectual excellence
- The illusion of mutuality
- Getting rid of Aristotle
- David endorses South Park blanketedly

A Specifically Christian Friendship
- Let’s talk ecclesiology
- Radical inclusivity
- “In Christ There Is No East or West”
- “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
- “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1970.

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Cicero. Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio. Trans. J.G.F. Powell. Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 1991.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 1991.

Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existentialism. Trans. Manya Harari. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1956.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 506-536.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1956.

—. No Exit. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989. 1-46.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

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

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 12 September 2010 (16th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 and Psalm 14 • Exodus 32:7-14 and Psalm 51:1-10 • 1 Timothy 1:12-17 • Luke 15:1-10

I remember being very impressed the first time I heard the claim that prayer was not for the sake of God but for the sake of the mortal praying.  After all, I remember the argument going, God knows all, therefore God knows all of every mortal’s thoughts.  And if God knows all of every mortal’s thoughts, then before the mortal formalizes those thoughts in speech, song, or mental exertion, God already knows.  And if God already knows, then prayer must not be for the sake of informing God but for some other purpose.

Then, of course, my perverse Old Testament professors in college and seminary had me go back and read the Bible.  There I discovered what remains one of my favorite passages in the Bible and my paradigm for prayer, one whose pattern bears out in the Psalms, in the Garden of Gethsemane, even in the book of Job.  When YHWH asks Moses to look away so that he can start blasting things without the guilt that comes from being watched while one blasts things, Moses refuses: he appeals to YHWH’s reputation abroad, he appeals to promises that YHWH has made in publicly available texts; he does not go down the mountain and leave his fellow-Hebrews to get what’s coming to those who cross this hot-nosed deity; he stays and forces YHWH to remember who YHWH can and should be.

To be fair, Moses does not last long as the figure of mercy; when he sees the golden calf festival himself, he goes after his fellow tribesmen with swords and soldiers and the ashes of the burnt idol.  Nonetheless, as a moment of high drama, one would be hard pressed to match Exodus 32.  Like his distant ancestor Abraham interceding in behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses in this passage prays the sort of prayer that makes sense of all those lament Psalms and the strident protests of Job and the cries of the martyrs in Revelation.  Far from being the sort of heavenly dictator who strikes down the impudent, our God, if we believe that the Spirit did indeed inform the gathering and transmission of the Biblical canon, favors such stories.  When our God wants to present a holy book to the peoples of the world, that book will feature Psalms and narratives in which mortals contest God, and the nation and tradition most dear to this God will be Israel, the man and the nation who struggle with God.

When Jesus tells his famous trio of parables about the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, I remember well that the Hebrews were by no means the most prominent people-group of the ancient world: the Hittites and the Egyptians in Moses’s day were the big dogs in the Mediterranean basin, and in Saul’s day it was the Philistines and the Phoenicians.  When the flagging kingdom of Judea became the exiled Jews, and when those Jews split to become the diaspora in Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Palestine, and when the one who would call himself Son of God–and mean it–chose a mixture of Roman collaborators and Jewish nationalists and middle-class fishermen to reconstitute Jacob’s call, I have to think that this peculiar character of YHWH stood on display for the world to see: an almighty whose power lay in the weakness of the faithful, a sovereign whose sovereignty willingly submitted to accountability. This was no factory-standard Marduk or Jupiter or even theos agnostos: this was a God, the true God, who refused and continues to refuse the simple category deus or theos or even god that we mortals construct.  Hallelujah.

May our prayers rise to this strange God, and may the Scriptures continue to remind us of our God’s unfathomable love.