Monthly Archives: May 2011

In recent months a feature in the New York Times, followed by an announcement by certain alumni of Wheaton College, have drawn attention to student groups at Christian colleges dedicated to advocating in behalf of lesbian, gay, and other such students (covered by the ever-lengthening LGBTQIAW* label) at Christian colleges, in churches, and in other places where traditional expectations of married and celibate life might come into conflict with the expectations of those students to be involved in the life of the communities in ways they’re not now involved. Not long after these developments, Believe Out Loud, an organization advocating for Christian groups to become “open and affirming,” made a bid to advertise on the Sojourners website. While the organization has invited editorials on the topic, they declined to run the advertisement, and the fallout of that initial refusal has been significant infighting among self-identified liberal and progressive Christians.

This little series of posts (I’m planning on three, but there might be more) will not spend much time responding to that particular controversy but will rather attempt to think more deliberately about the rhetoric that folks have deployed when questions of policy (rather than abstract discussions of gender theory and sexual essences) come before congregations, denominations, colleges, and other such communities that claim Christ as their warrant. In this little series I will not spend much time at all contesting the answers that the “sides” (one troubling construct, just to begin) offer but noting the narrow range of possibilities that their questions will allow and attempting to point towards some more interesting and perhaps some more promising questions.

Such, I know, is precisely what many will expect from someone affiliated with the so-called Hauerwasian Mafia, and I don’t expect people who want action to the exclusion of inquiry to be impressed. But I do think that readers of The Christian Humanist tend to be people who at least value inquiry and who, more importantly, can point out my own blind spots so that I can approach this inquiry more truthfully. So over the next couple days, I invite you, the readers, to come aboard and help me to find some better questions to ask in the ongoing struggle over LGBTQIAW*.

I should note, since this line of inquiry is one that tends to invite side-taking and position-staking rather than deliberation and question-asking, that the by-line on each post really does mean that Nathan Gilmour and not anybody else wrote the post.  Michial Farmer’s and David Grubbs’s contributions, should they wish to make them, will appear in the comments on each post.

* Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Interested, Allies, and Whatever letters they’ve added since I started typing this list.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 5 June 2011 (Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A)

Acts 1:6-14 •Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35 •1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 •John 17:1-11

The texts of the New Testament, in addition to all of the other wonderful things they do, teach the reader new ways to read the Old Testament at every turn, making moves that point to what theologians call a sensus plenior, a fuller sense of the text that does not nullify the readings that made sense before the advent of Christ but certainly adds potentially-intelligible readings and opens up possibilities for homiletic and devotional encounters with the text that simply did not exist before Christ and Christ’s resurrection.

The ascension of Christ in the first chapter of Acts has become so familiar and has so often been appropriated by modern missionaries’ readings that some of the echoes from the Old Testament, a set of texts asking questions of the world that sometimes seem quite distant from the modern missionary movement, don’t sound like Old Testament references.  For instance, the famous fourfold witness in Acts 1:8 is not the beginning of a sermon on why people need to give money to missionary agencies; it’s the answer to a question, the question of Israel’s restoration.  And it’s a segue to an answer, one whose question often gets obscured.

In Daniel 7, the prophet has an apocalyptic vision of the Son of Man rising to the Ancient of Days on a cloud.  That brief image gives shape to so much of the New Testament that I won’t even attempt to catalog the echoes here, but the upshot of the image in Daniel is that, when the Son of Man approaches the throne, his mission is to make the case for justice in Heaven and to initiate the end of the age.  When the text of Acts names “a cloud” as Jesus’s vehicle into the sky in Acts 1:9, therefore, the implication is not merely that Jesus is going to a “better place,” as folks say about the dead in funeral homes, but that the age of divine justice, the restoration of Israel, is at hand.  What makes Acts so vastly different from much of the Old Testament is that the disciples of Jesus are not to proclaim this coming justice only to the tribes of Israel but to Samaritans as well, those almost-Jews who stand as a constant reminder of the Babylonian exile; and to the ends of the earth, encompassing all of those people who have been mortal threats to Israel and who might some day become mortal threats again.  Jesus, in telling them to go to the ends of the earth and then rising on a cloud, signals that the restoration of Israel also means that Israel now stretches as far as the earth does, that anyone who hears the testimony of the disciples and repents and lives faithfully to Jesus now stands to be among those called “Israel” in these last days.

Therefore, to paraphrase N.T. Wright, if one seeks first the Kingdom of God and its apocalyptic righteousness, all these things, the modern missionary movement included, will be added.  But in terms of the visual and spoken symbolism of the passage, what we do when we pass the missionary’s hat can’t be other than one of the “things” that come along: the Kingdom is established by the Son of Man and the Ancient of Days.  The job of the witness is not to establish but to seek it.

And that’s precisely what the disciples do at the end of today’s Acts reading: rather than running for consular offices or organizing advocacy groups, they pray.  A Sabbath Day’s journey from that place, they gather and they pray.  Later on they also start new forms of life, gathering for common meals and giving so freely that there is not one needy among them and all sorts of other things, but none of it happens apart from or prior to prayer.

May our own lives as those sent continue under the auspices of dedicated prayer, and may Israel indeed come to the fullness that Christ has promised.

• Going Victorian and Getting Medieval (H/T Chris Armstrong)
• While Emergent continues wax liberal, Missional issues a conservative manifesto.
• A defense of academic specialization in the humanities
• One more take on why the academy is in trouble and what folks should do about it
• A neo-Anabaptist on the core questions on which Hauerwasians and liberal Emergents disagree
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I picked this up over at Homebrewed Christianity (which won’t let me leave comments, Tripp Fuller!) and thought it might be fun over here.  Of course, we’re Christian Humanists, so we’re not limited to that guild that the academy calls the Divinity School–feel free to list books of any sort that seem fitting!

I’ll leave my answers as the first comment; jump in when you can!

Here are the categories:

1. A book you get excited just looking at

2. Your favorite book by your favorite living theologian

3. A classic you can’t leave behind

4. Best book to cross your eyes in 2011

5. Favorite book to give a budding theology nerd

6. A book you can’t wait for!

This happened before. A question: will this “Great Disappointment” have the same long-term repercussions as the first one?

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 29 May 2011 (Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A)

Acts 17:22-31 •Psalm 66:8-20 •1 Peter 3:13-22 •John 14:15-21

I have read enough on the theory of translation (and attempted enough acts of translation myself) that I harbor few illusions about my ability to catch a translator obscuring something really important.  I still get irritated when a translation of the Bible adds significant English nouns that do not correspond to anything in the Greek or Hebrew text (the NIV is especially bad about this), but even in those cases, I can usually see a good reason for such moves, and in those moments my response , usually, is to repeat my usual prayer that God never call me to make a new English translation of the Bible.

So when I approached this week’s readings, and when I was looking at the Greek text after I’d read through the text in NRSV and NET English versions (I’m nowhere near strong enough in my ancient languages to make the Greek my primary text), I was surprised to see that both rendered the Greek noun pistin (which usually gets translated as “faith”) as “assurance” or “proof” in this verse.  A quick check of the lexicon (I still have and use the big monster Danker that I purchased in seminary) told me that this was the only New Testament verse for which that connotation seemed to apply, and I had to pull hard on the reins to keep the translation-conspiracy part of my brain from charging forth into utter silliness.

What saved me from such silliness was knowing a bit of Greek philosophy and remembering that Plato uses this word, pistis in the nominative case, to signify that realm of human statements that stands in contrast to gnosis or true knowledge.  In other words, one more remarkable thing about Paul’s speech to the Athenians, beyond the citations of pagan poets that have impressed generations of missionaries and missional people and people who enjoy other cognates of the Latin missio, is the fact that, here, he anticipates the divisions that Athenian philosophy makes between different kinds of knowledge and locates the relationship between the Christian believer and the reality of God’s work in the realm of historical phenomenon rather than intellectual form, using the vocabulary of Plato’s divided-line allegory in order to make his point.

To put it another way, in a crowd of cultured Athenians, Paul is using not only logic (a known God can have known expectations, therefore worship of a God proclaimed supersedes sacrifice to the unknown god) and poetry (“in him we live and move and have our being”) but also the vocabulary of philosophical theories of knowledge in order to advance his point.  The God whom Paul proclaims and the man (strange to see Paul name Jesus so generically, but there it is in the text) who brings that God’s judgment come clad in the idiom of Athens, and among those who do in fact repent is Dionysius, who until the Renaissance (whose troublesome practices of historical criticism saddled the books with the awful name “Pseudo-Dionysius”) was among the Church’s foremost Platonists.

Certainly the Bible, for the Christian, is first and foremost Holy Scripture, good for instruction and correction and reproof and all those other book-of-Timothy things.  But it’s also a grand story of how the God who first reveals God’s self to tribes of Palestinian farmers later stands astride the mighty Babylonian Empire and declares that the mighty city is just another town under the power of the Almighty.  It’s also a book where the mighty Caesar Augustus is a mere footnote to the real action going on in the provinces, where legions not of Italians but of angels proclaim the birth of the true Lord and Savior.  And it’s a book where the great literary traditions of Athens come together to provide Paul a medium for turning Plato on his head, telling the people who look for God so hard in the realms of the unknown that God has come to give not gnosin but pistin to all of the peoples of the world.

In our own travels, may our proclamation stay true to the Son of the Most High even as the Christ takes on the garb of the city where we reside.

• In which a small college English teacher complains about high school English teachers and R-1 literature professors
• The ritual of meaningless questions and predictable answers
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Revised Common Lectionary page for 22 May 2011 (Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A)

Acts 7:55-60 •Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 •1 Peter 2:2-10 •John 14:1-14

This passage reminds me of two common sorts of Bible-citing Internet personalities.  One likes to post the words of John 14:6 as magic words, the sorts that stop discussion cold.  The other likes to complain that people cite John 14:6 out of context.  I’ve not done the field research, but my hunch is that on the safe side, one could find just this exchange happening about once every three days or so and probably more than that in the weeks since Rob Bell’s book started causing waves.

What makes the gospel of John in general and the Maundy Thursday discourse so difficult, though, is that as a text, John constantly maneuvers the meanings of words, retreating here and flanking there and in general making very difficult the task of pinning their meanings down.  In other words, the impulse to say that a prooftext probably misses the larger conversation that a saying of Jesus responds to is right, but when one makes that move in John, the movement is not from isolated anarchy to situated clarity but from small-scale confusion to larger-scale confusion.  Such should not be too surprising; John is one of the toughest books in the New Testament, much harder than Revelation as far as I’m concerned.

The difficulty here is that the verbs won’t hold still long enough to mean what they normally mean.  The discourse begins with something as simple as “to go”: Jesus first uses it to refer to his fate in conventional travel terms.  Jesus is going somewhere, and his followers kn0w how to get there.  Then, when Thomas (who tends to ask reasonable questions) asks the reasonable question, “Where are you going?” Jesus changes the terms of the discussion: now Jesus is not going anywhere but stands as the way for someone to go to some person, namely the Father.  In the way that a road “goes” but does not “go,” so Jesus stands as the “way” to the Father as well as “life” itself and “truth” that is not a sentence but a person who just washed people’s feet.  Already in six short verses Jesus has implied the answer to a few questions and rendered those questions and more unintelligible.  Then things just get more confusing: the action is no longer going but seeing, and Father no longer names a destination but an object of knowledge, then as soon as that possibility is spoken, an object of sight.  The disciples have known Jesus, so they will know the Father.  But Jesus names that object of sight not as something that they have seen or that they will see but something that, from this point forward, they already have seen.

Now Philip chimes in, asking to see the Father.  And it’s not an unreasonable question, given that Jesus claims that, even though they haven’t left the room, from now on they’ve already seen something.  At this point, were my own feeble mind among those in the room, I wouldn’t even have enough presence of mind to know whether Jesus were speaking controversial words; I just wouldn’t be sure whether they made any sense or not.  Those who know the Thursday discourse in John know that things only get more confusing as the grand storm of prepositions, John 17, approaches.

Such confusion, of course, is not lost on the gospel text: the way John tells the Jesus story, Jesus revolutionizes reality to such an extent that even the laws of grammar seem to break down.  In the centuries to come (and it took about six centuries and not a few ecumenical councils for most Christians to agree how to read the gospel of John), the Church would set down guidelines for which claims flow genuinely from this confusing text and which ones stand as anti-Christian teachings.  But entering into the way that John in particular frames the moment, when the reality of the person Jesus renders linear thought and basic predication impossible, I have to imagine a scene at least as earth-shattering as any of the exorcisms in Mark, the healings in Luke, or the “but I say” sayings in Matthew.  Each of the four gospels shows a Jesus who stands as new wine, and for John, the old wineskin is the framework of language itself.  No wonder the Church started talking about the paradoxes of Trinity in the wake of this text.

Engaging closely with texts like these make me ashamed that, in moments when I was younger, I sometimes played the roles of the Internet Bible-citation-generator.  By the time I got involved, I was more the “show me the context” type, but that’s no better, given the sort of text that John is, than the one-verse wonders who still roam the digital plains.  Now, in my mid-thirties, I’ve taught through the gospel of John in four or five adult Sunday school and Bible study settings, and it still melts my mind when I get to chapter 13.  I’m more convinced than ever that this dizzying text is divine revelation, and I’m more convinced than ever that my job as a teacher is to name and articulate what makes the text dizzying, letting those whom I teach enjoy the text for what it is rather than robbing them of the Job-flavored humility that such a text ought to inspire.

May our talk about God stand unwaveringly on the gift of Scriptural revelation, and may our humility speak truthfully that Scriptural revelation outstrips our capacities to interpret.

• What does the devil look like?
• A message to parents: lighten up, enjoy life, and fire up that in-car DVD player! (link posted and labeled by Gilmour)
• On the bad business sense of closing university philosophy departments to make up for state budget shortfalls
• What we can learn from the Rob Bell unpleasantness.
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