Monthly Archives: February 2011

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 6 March 2011 (Transfiguration Sunday, Year A)

Exodus 24:12-18 • Psalm 2 or Psalm 99 •  Peter 1:16-21 • Matthew 17:1-9

This week’s gospel reading is one of those texts that will tell you what sort of Bible reader you are: one sort of reader will note with the poetry-lover’s relish the grandeur of the vision: Jesus alongside the grand prophets of the Old Testament.  Another might note the ethical force of the final prohibition, the incompleteness of the cosmic Christ until the resurrection enacts God’s final victory over the grave.  Another still might take this story devotionally, wondering what the experience of this sort of vision might have been like compared to the more mundane encounters with God that make up most of our lives.

And then there are the people who ask, “How in the world does Peter know what Moses and Elijah look like?”  That would be my sort of reader.

My good friend Brad Warfield and I used to ask that question of the text as the sort of joke that Christian college students bring to the strange scenes of the Bible, reveling in our cleverness and knowledge of Judaism’s long (if inconsistent) tradition of refusing visual representations of the Bible’s characters.  (Yes, I think I stole this particular observation from Brad.)  Now that I’m a bit older, I realize that the question carries with it all sorts of philosophical and aesthetic weight, as some of the best jokes do, and Peter’s recognition brings light to some Christian realities that otherwise I might never have considered.

When the Transfiguration happens, Peter is at the end of a bad week.  Six days earlier, according to Matthew’s account, Peter has gone from the keeper of the keys of the kingdom to Jesus’s Satan.  Peter has not so much grown horns as taken on the role of Abishai in 2 Samuel, David’s nephew who balks when David forgives the sins of Shimei, a kinsman of Saul who has uttered a curse against David and his household.  In that exchange, Abishai insists that Shimei be put to death for impiety, and David asks rhetorically why the sons of his sister have become satan (adversary, enemy) to him.  In Peter’s case, Peter insists that Jesus stop talking nonsense about the Romans’ killing him, and Jesus (emphatically the new David in Matthew’s version of the story) calls on his own satan (adversary, enemy) to get behind him.

All of that background is to say that Peter, when he sees what transpires atop the mountain, is already extraordinarily aware of his own life’s place in the grand story of God’s saving the world.  After all, he’s already been cast as the King’s nephew and as the keeper of the kingdom’s keys.  When he looks up on the mountain, the geographic setting both of Moses’ receiving the Torah and Elijah’s hearing the “still, small voice” of God, he knows full well, even though he’s never seen a painting of either of the great ones of Israel, that these figures on this mountain cannot be other than the prophets in whose moments God moved to overcome the oppressors of the faithful.

Therefore the voice from the cloud is not merely capping off a good Sunday school lesson with a good reminder to “listen to Jesus” in some general moral sense.  Instead, as Peter realizes that the one who promised the Kingdom to him and the other disciples is now in the bodily company of the great figures of resistance in his own tradition, the voice and the cloud make perfectly clear that in fact the mantle of resistance, the office of leading the people out of the clutches of sin and death as Moses led the people out of the domain of Pharaoh, the duty of one who will resist the Satanic ideologies of first-century Jerusalem the same way that Elijah resisted the Punic concessions of Ahab, now lies with his teacher and friend Jesus.  To put it another way, this voice tells Peter to listen to him, certainly, but perhaps more importantly, the voice confirms that this is the moment in God’s story of saving the world to listen to him.

When the epistle of 2 Peter makes reference to this story, that text does so as a lead-up to one of the more famous affirmations of Scriptural revelation in the New Testament.  While the world is dark, 2 Peter counsels, look for those instances of divine light that God has offered to guide the faithful, namely the prophecies that make up the Holy Scriptures.  Look to the grand struggles of the gods in Moses’s moment and in Elijah’s, and realize that not only Jesus’s moment on the cross but also every faithful follower’s moment is in its own way a contest of gods.  Whether that god be Pharaoh or Ba’al or Death or the seemingly irresistible, inhuman force that confronts the faithful in 2011, Matthew and 2 Peter call on us to expose that would-be deity to the light, to reveal its lies, to rest secure in the grand promises of the one true God, revealed as creating Father and resurrected Son and indwelling Spirit.

When Peter proposes the three tents, one for each of the great prophets, he’s careful to frame

• Jesus Radicals turn to Gregory of Nyssa for a different way to think about “social justice”
• 

Some of our readers might have noticed some changes in the right-hand margin, most notably that we’re now prominently sporting a Christian Century logo.  Since I did not mention this change when it first happened, I should say a bit about the move.

First, readers who know the Century and fear that we’re “going liberal” or something like that need not fear: the editor of the blog list made the decision to make us part of that blog network after taking a look at what we’d already written in our year-long run, and since they’re dedicated as a publication to putting forth a broad picture of Christian intellectual life, they decided that our writing, traditionalist and evangelical though it is, fits their mission.  Furthermore, joining their network required from us a commitment to post once per week (which we do anyway) but no restrictions on our content.  As part of their network, our posts will become part of their aggregate blog feed, and they will be scanning our articles to see whether they want to feature any of our articles on their magazine’s main website.

My own hope in jumping in on their project is that more readers from liberal and post-liberal backgrounds might come over here and jump in on the intelligent discussion and principled disagreement that makes our readers the best on the Internet.  We might just end up teaching one another a thing or two.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 27 February 2011 (Eighth Sunday of Epiphany, Year A)

Isaiah 49:8-16a •Psalm 131 •1 Corinthians 4:1-5 •Matthew 6:24-34

I did not start reading the Bible with any frequency until relatively late in my teen years, something that I’m glad for.  I have the utmost respect and affection for those who attempt to teach children in churches (and once a year, in VBS, I’m one of those people), not least because so much of the Bible is off-limits.  I’ve joked with my own congregation’s children’s minister about publishing Bible coloring books based on such lovely passages as Ezekiel 16 and Revelation 17, and behind the joke lies the working assumption that I  bring with me when I teach the text of the Bible, whether in the college classroom or in congregational settings: the Bible is for grown-ups.

I mention all of that because this week’s Gospel reading is one of those passages that troubled me the most as a teenager.  I knew full well that, when I was a seventeen-year-old,  my own emotional states were not subject to my feeble teenage willpower (I attribute the change in my adult life not to an increase of willpower but a relatively weaker emotional existence), and I worried greatly that my own teenage tomorrow-worries, less about food and clothing than about girls, to be sure, were rendering me unfit to be a Christian.  And then, of course, having just the right amount of teenage self-absorption, I realized that my worrying about my worrying had in effect set up a feedback loop and that I was trapped in worrying about my worrying about my worrying about my worrying about tomorrow, and surely I would not amount to anything as a Christian.  After all, I was worrying, and those who worry must not really have faith.

As it turns out, a bit of attention to lexical matters goes a long way.

As the compilers of the Revised Common Lectionary help us to see by their grouping Matthew 6:24 in with this group of verses, the teaching here is an extension of Jesus’s saying about serving two masters.  And the verb merimnao, the controlling verb of Matthew 6:25 and 27 and 31, can indeed have emotional connotations, but it can also serve as an ethical verb pointing less to a teenager’s chemical feedback that happens when he talks to a girl and more to the disposition that one has to make careful plans based on this rather than that.  Therefore to order one’s life in terms of attaining and keeping money and food and drink and clothes is a sort of servitude to them, and Jesus is expanding on the notion that servants of the LORD by necessity will not also be servants of those things.

Such a reading does not rule out emotional considerations, of course, but it does locate the imperative force of these verses in the large-scale ordering of life rather than becoming one of those “impossible demands” that certain theologies seem to enjoy finding in Jesus’s teachings.  (After all, to declare the demands impossible is to empty them of content in favor of the form “impossible demand.”)  To return to my discussion in previous weeks (and I do apologize that a sick daughter kept me from writing last week) of the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’s vision of the paradigm city, this passage of the Sermon seems once more to assume a prior discussion of cities-on-hills in which one possible motivating spirit of a city might be the scrambling after novelty in consumption, the sort of city that Plato calls Democracy.  The questions in this passage, after all, are not whether one will eat or drink or be clothed but what one shall eat or drink or wear.  To be sure, nobody adds an hour to one’s life by planning such things, and furthermore, those things stand to hold mastery over the soul the same way that one master will not allow another master to give orders.  In the city that Jesus sees when he looks out on the Galilean crowds, the common quest will not be commerce but that wonderful Greek concept dikaiosyne.

Perhaps Jesus asserts that “all these shall be added” (I like the echo of the Joseph narrative in the KJV more than the generic “will be given” of the NRSV) not so much as a precursor to the Prosperity Gospel (which would not have made much sense in an age of persecution) but as a reminder the people gathered on that mountain that a common life ordered in light of dikaiosyne which at once encompasses the modern connotations “righteousness” and “justice”) will, by virtue of the ekklesia‘s place in the Creation of a God who sends rain on the righteous and on the wicked, will find things such as tasty food and good wine bestowed, perhaps even without ordering one’s life in pursuit of rich food and expensive drink.  With its final ironic allusion to the Manna in the wilderness (but with a daily allowance of trouble rather than vittles), this week’s reading leaves the reader and the audience with a picture of a life where existence tends to sustain itself, where justice really could be a reasonable pursuit precisely because there is a God who will take care of the rest, the drink and the clothes… and the trouble.

May we always live in gratitude for the food that comes to those who don’t deserve good things to eat and hope that the days are coming when our daily dole of strife stops, even though we do deserve that.

• Stan Hauerwas on why Church is more truthful than “community” and other tidbits (HT Jeff Wright)
• Robert Woods recounts Russell Kirk’s defense of Giovanni Pico de Mirandola (how’s that for name-dropping?)
• Are you ****ing kidding me? (No, Scot, I don’t accept that rationale.)
• Andrew Webb comments on three kinds of defective sermons.
• C. Michael Patton outlines six self-understandings of orthodoxy.
• Ric Hudgens proposes an interesting way to think about the Church and the World.
• Stan Fish attempts to clarify what he does mean by “academic” as opposed to “political”
• 

In our last podcast, we lingered a bit on the aesthetic quality of the King James Version’s archaic language. There was one point I forgot to mention, though: namely, the way I read the word “thou.”

No one will be surprised to learn that my point in the podcast about the “KJV as the voice of God” is as much a personal confession as it an academic observation. I grew up in a fairly traditional Southern Baptist church, as I’ve mentioned before, and the KJV was the translation I heard from the pulpit and in Sunday School. Thus, when my conscience spoke, it was with God’s “King James voice”: “Thou shalt not!” What’s more, the language of the KJV was also the voice of the Church to God: I can still echo the cadences of a certain elderly deacon who began  his prayers, “We thank Thee, O Lord,” and ended them, “For in Jesus’ Name we do pray, amen!” All the “thees” and “thous” were archaic and so felt very formal, and that made sense to me, because God is God, and I am human. Using “thees” and “thous” helped preserve that sense of ontological difference in my childish mind, reminding me that God is holy and that my proper response to that holiness is reverence.

But then, much later, I learned that I was wrong about “thou.” In fact, “thou” was not more formal than “you”: it was the singular second person pronoun of which “you” was the plural second person pronoun, like the Southern “y’all.” This grammatical difference led to a difference of social usage, in which “you” was the formal form of address and “thou” the informal, intimate form. I imagine this is probably not news to most our readers/listeners. (In fact, I think Michial Farmer mentioned this in one of our music episodes.) Still, it was a revelation to me, particularly in how I read the Psalms: “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee”  (Psalm 73:25).

I should make one thing clear, however: the later significance of “thou” didn’t replace the earlier significance of “thou” — it supplemented it. God did not cease to be God. He did not cease to be king in order to become my best pal. Instead, my experience of “thou” is of being uplifted or drawn into a realm too high for me. Perhaps the best way to express what I mean is to borrow the words of Julian of Norwich, from her Revelation of Divine Love (hint: “worship” means “honor,” and “homely” means “friendly” or “familiar”:

It is the most worship that a solemn King or a great Lord may do a poor servant if he will be homely with him, and specially if he sheweth it himself, of a full true meaning, and with a glad cheer, both privately and in company. Then thinketh this poor creature thus: And what might this noble Lord do of more worship and joy to me than to shew me that am so simple this marvellous homeliness? Soothly it is more joy and pleasance to me than [if] he gave me great gifts and were himself strange in manner. This bodily example was shewed so highly that man’s heart might be ravished and almost forgetting itself for joy of the great homeliness. Thus it fareth with our Lord Jesus and with us. For verily it is the most joy that may be, as to my sight, that He that is highest and mightiest, noblest and worthiest, is lowest and meekest, homeliest and most courteous: and truly and verily this marvellous joy shall be shewn us all when we see Him. (II.VII)

Do not mistake me: I know this isn’t serious exegesis, but instead a meditation on a personal aesthetic experience. In fact, it is an aesthetic experience based on a modified misconception. Still, God used this aesthetic experience to teach me something that is true about Himself and my relationship to Him. This is a point we did not address in talking about the KJV, but one that still should be considered. God’s Word is not so impotent that only the most accurate translations based on the most reliable manuscripts can possibly communicate His message to us. Such translations are priceless gifts of God’s grace to His people, and Bible translators should strive for them. But still God is gracious and His Spirit, ever creative, can enliven even clumsy or mistaken translations to disclose Himself. Our Shepherd seeks His sheep, and He can make Himself heard. If I may borrow Julian’s phrase, this is one of the manifestations of God’s “marvellous homeliness”: that He will speak to us even in and through our weakness. And so God speaks through the Septuagint, for all its emasculated metaphors; and through the Vulgate, though it says Moses had horns; and through the KJV, though we need a dictionary. As the seminary student labors over a knotty passage of Greek or Hebrew, God speaks, even in the tension that lies between discarded possible translations. Even in the fragments of half-remembered phrases from Sunday School long ago, caught up by a penitent conscience and stitched into a patchwork Gospel, God speaks. His Word will not return to Him void.

No, I have no plans to write anything at all about any MTV shows that may or may not still be on that network.  (Having been without cable for nearly five years now, it’s amazing how little I miss it.)  Instead, this little musing comes out of an encounter with a class that I’m teaching this semester, namely Emmanuel College’s capstone course, Senior Seminar.  To give a brief introduction that doesn’t overwhelm the post, Senior Seminar is a class that all students from all majors must take before graduating, and the one-credit-hour course focuses its discussion on the “big questions” of ethics, philosophy, and theology and how they stand to inform the professional lives that the students will enter when they finish college.

That students in such a class get the upper hand on me rhetorically is not unusual: because the point of the class is to reflect on the Christian faith and its interactions with all sorts of academic and professional learning, the conversations necessarily range into areas where I have no real expertise, and if students decide they want to one-up me, they have the tools to do so.

But this episode struck me as different: the students’ working assertion was not mainly that Emmanuel College’s environment stands in stark contrast to that of a public school’s expectations of secularity (a perennial topic in that class, since teacher education is our biggest major) but rather that, in a blanket sense, Emmanuel stands as a “bubble” in contrast to “the real world” presumably constituted by everywhere but Emmanuel College (or at least between places substantially the same as EC and those substantially different).

I started out my side of the dialectic by noting that the power to define “the real world” is not by any means self-evident: after all, one could just as easily interpret the world of paychecks and secularism as a world of “hollow men” (to borrow from T.S. Eliot) as compared to the full-chested human beings (to borrow from C.S. Lewis) of the Church.  Their response was not to argue but to sneer: in their minds, asking who defines “real world” is something akin to denying gravity (whose historical significance most of them probably couldn’t explain, I’m guessing) or calling into question whether in fact people who don’t eat for a while get hungry.

The rhetoric of the “real world,” of course, often travels hand in hand with the argumentum ad puerem.  If you’ve not heard that rhetorical term, it may be because only an annual report from the New England Society in 1912 seems to have used it first.  The usage I’m proposing is thus: an argumentum ad puerem is the sort of assertion that does not contest the content of a claim but rather paints the one making the claim as a mere child, one who would not make such an assertion if only he (or she) would “grow up.”  The reason I bring up (or invent) this phrase is that, in the use of “real world” in this class and in similar situations, the working assumption behind the term’s use seems to be that anyone who would contest the reality of “the real world” simply has been sheltered from “the real world,” for otherwise the claimant would certainly recognize that difference is merely immaturity.

Eventually, as I noted at the outset, I gave in not so much to the strength of my students’ arguments (there wasn’t any argument to oppose, as I can recall) but to mere fatigue: leaving class, I knew that I probably could have continued the exchange but wouldn’t have made much traction.  The way the Gospel of Mark tells it, not even Jesus could do much in the face of sneering, so I let class out, packed up, and started writing this post.

This little ditty is more of an invitation to inquiry than a point of my own: has anyone else encountered the argumentum ad puerem, or is it something that only wannabe Anabaptist English teachers face?  And when you have encountered it, has anyone had any success countering it with reasoned argument, or is it really the sort of unclean spirit that only comes out with prayer?

General Introduction
- Do suits make you smarter?
- Pardon Michial’s head cold
- A plug for the CWC

The History of the King James Version
- And the Bibles that preceded it
- The battle over footnotes
- The Geneva Bible
- A unity text

The KJV’s Influence on English-Language Literature
- Emerson and the prophet books
- Melville’s Shakespearean Bible
- The influence of Pilgrim’s Progress
- Twain eviscerates the Book of Mormon
- Walt Whitman the thundering god
- The KJV and the 19^th-century cult
- Byron’s libertinism and guilt
- The Divine Voice in J.B.

Literalist Translation
- What does it mean, anyway?
- Dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence
- The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the English-Greek code
- Use of older translations
- The lost Revelation
- Explaining the metaphor

The KJV-Only Controversy
- Deconstructing King James inerrancy
- The manuscript view
- A new kind of Gnosticism?
- Jerome’s riot

The Poetic Virtues of the KJV
- A merit beyond the literary
- Self-conscious archaism
- Leaving the poetry intact
- David Grubbs: a man of many machetes
- What do we use the KJV for?
- Reading the Bible

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 2009.

Bunyan, John. Pilgrim’s Progress. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Byron, George Gordon Lord. The Major Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Carson, D.A. The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 1978.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983.

MacLeish, Archibald. J.B. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

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

Newbrough, John B. Oahspe. Seattle: BookSurge, 2009.

Twain, Mark. Roughing It. New York: Penguin, 1981.

White, James R. The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? Bloomington, Minn.: Bethany House, 2009.

Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1996.

• Rita Koganzon critiques the latest developmental category, “emerging adulthood.”
• Stanley Fish laments the apparent demise of the humanities in Obama’s State of the Union speech.
• James Ryerson ponders (and narrates) the course of the philosophical novel.
• Glenn Greenwald throws down the gauntlet: can you spot the Republican?
• Jeffrey Polet wonders what they’re teaching children these days.
• Stephen Steinberg resists bravely the dialectic between culture and economics.
• Anthropologists freak out over the possibility that their discipline might not call itself a science.
• Daniel Mendelsohn doesn’t like Mad Men.
• Fred Sanders is gonna teach y’all how to READ.
• Let’s just agree not to gossip about Glenn Beck.
• 

General Introduction
- New segment: Michial Farmer’s world of women’s fashion
- Thanks for not writing in
- Why Nathan is the left-leaner amongst us
- What’s on the blog?

Aesop Ipsa Loquitur
- Is the country mouse a rube?
- Other Greek notions about the polis
- Plato’s suburban pharmacy
- The importance of human contact

Contrasting the Hebrew Perspective
- Cities and corruption
- Solomon’s urban fervor
- That curséd wilderness
- Garden as Hebraic ideal
- Gilgamesh civilizes the wild man
- Moses goes out beyond the boundary of imagination

The New Testament and the Early Church
- Christ the vagrant
- Equal-opportunity parables
- Augustine and Rome
- The heretical countryside

The Middle Ages and The Renaissance
- Churches and urban centers
- The origins of pagan
- Snookering-slash-correcting the rubes
- Langland gets sympathetic
- A new kind of pastoral
- London as hell

The Romantics
- Hegel and the city
- The Romantics fight back
- The country laborer and the university Marxist
- The rise of industrialization

America!
- The errand to the wilderness
- Puritan commerce
- The early decay of Boston
- Continual westward expansion
- Sister Carrie’s ambiguous ending
- The urban pushback and the abandonment of small towns
- Make the noise stop, please

The Cynical Midcentury
- The suburbs take over the shire
- The American dream gets transplanted
- American re-creation
- The stultifying suburbs
- Farmer on On the Road
- The vanishing rural
- All God’s children are terrible

The Takeaway
- Automobile culture
- But let’s not romanticize
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York: Norton, 1995.

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

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Blake, William. Poetry and Designs. Ed. John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson. New York: Norton, 2007.

Bunker, Nick. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History. New York: Knopf, 2010.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

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

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Felix. Life of Saint Guthlac. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman. Ed. Elizabeth Ann Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2006.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

—. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Picador, 2005.

Sidney, Philip. The Major Works. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Mariner, 2005.

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

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

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 2005.