Monthly Archives: July 2011

• The closed-mindedness of liberal academia.
• New York Magazine profiles The King’s College.
• Saying good-bye to John Stott.
• 

General Introduction
-  What’s wrong with the blog?
-  Our shame in the face of The Pietist Schoolman
-  The perils of Internet celebrity
-  Working on our Night Cheese

The History of the Book
-  Should you buy it?
-  What Nathan argues
-  How it got published

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
-  Nested and side narratives
-  Who’s responsible for the Fall?
-  Feminism under the radar
-  Lanyer’s (lack of) influence

The Sequel to Paradise Lost
-  The Temple of Doom?
-  A series of stern lectures
-  Milton vs. Nicene Trinitarian Orthodoxy
-  The creeds and the Scriptures

Theological Dramatics
-  A quick correction
-  The believing writer and the dramatic text
-  The writer within the Body of Christ

Other Sources
-  “The Dream of the Rood”
-  Active martyrdom
-  The lessons of “The Pearl”
-  The heretical Christ stories of recent centuries
-  Taking stock of Dante

The Theologian and the Literary Critic
-  Where do they intersect?
-  The riddle of Stanley Fish
-  Theological implications of literary criticism
-  Can this work outside of New Historicism?
-  The critical mirror

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

“The Dream of the Rood.” The First Poems in English. Ed. Michael Alexander. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Fish, Stanley. How Milton Works. Cambridge: Belknap, 2003.

—. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

—. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Gilmour, Nathan. Theological Dramatics: Two Christological Case Studies. Lambert, 2011.

Lanyer, Aemelia. The Poems of Aemelia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: Harper, 2009.

Mailer, Norman. The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1999.

Marsden, George. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2009.

Pullman, Philip. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.  Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011.

Saramago, José. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. New York: Mariner, 1994.

The outline for Greil Marcus’s approach to analyzing Bob Dylan in his latest book, the aptly titled Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, can be found in two pieces.

The first is a review of the famously messy 1970 album Self Portrait, in which a young Marcus, apparently too stunned to form a proper argument, strings together fifty short observations over twenty pages. Some are fragments of conversations; some are takedowns of the album’s attitude and atmosphere (“I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.”); some are muted appreciations of individual songs (Marcus is fond of “All the Tired Horses,” “Living the Blues,” “Copper Kettle,” and precious little else); and some are lengthy quotations from other people. The point, obviously, is that Self Portrait is such an exquisite and inscrutable train wreck that every approach the listener makes toward it is always already doomed to failure; another must immediately be formulated, though one knows from the outset that it, too, will be discarded–and probably sooner rather than later.

It’s not surprising to see this method of analysis resurface in a piece written for the October 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone, in which a much older Marcus, apparently too stunned to form a proper argument, strings together fifteen quotations over four pages. The subject this time, of course, is the terrorist attacks of September 11, and Bob Dylan is involved only insofar as one quotation comes from his greatest late-period album, Love and Theft, providentially released on that terrible day:

High water rising, rising night and day
All the gold and silver being stolen away
Big Joe Turner looking east and west from the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there

Dylan’s words on “High Water” are pretty close to perfect for the apocalyptic carnival that followed the collapse of the Towers.  The whole of Love and Theft is like that, really: The narrator of “Mississippi” walks calmly past a “sky full of fire / Pain pouring down.” That fire returns with a comic vengeance on the next track, wherein Dylan attends the wedding of a former lover and drunkenly announces that he will “break the roof in–set fire to the place as a parting gift.” Elsewhere, “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” drips with the sort of nonchalant cowboy justice that George W. Bush clearly believed himself to possess in spades:

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again
You do so at the peril of your life
I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound
I’ve seen enough heartache and strife

Not even the 9/11 “Truthers” claim that Dylan orchestrated the attacks to boost his record sales, of course. But I wouldn’t put it past him. I happened to be nineteen when Love and Theft was released, a sophomore in college trying to define himself in an environment in which he was not wholly sure he belonged. I owned several Dylan records already–at the very least I had Another Side of Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited, and I suspect I had Bringing It All Back Home, too–and I was, let’s say, intrigued but not completely sold. The power of Dylan’s music had its locus in the past, and there are very few nineteen-year-old classicists.

Even so, I’d planned on driving that Tuesday the hour to the closest record store to get Love and Theft, and no terrorist attack could stop me. (I chalk this up less to any sort of bravery than to sheer boredom and fear–getting on the road felt better than sitting around talking about the uncertain future.) I had to go even farther than I expected to, to a Target (my sense of irony was not yet fully developed) in a northern Atlanta suburb. I listened to the record twice on the long drive north, and I was hooked. Dylan had become for me the sort of prophet he must have seemed to an earlier generation. But the easy platitudes of “The Times They Are A Changin’” didn’t apply anymore; Dylan had reinvented himself as a prophet of ambivalence and ambiguity–the only sort of prophet a thinking person can accept anymore–as typified by the bickering identical twins on “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” or the winking lasciviousness of “Bye and Bye.” I’m fairly sure I had the album memorized by October.

I bring up this story because it demonstrates, I hope, the degree to which writing about Bob Dylan is akin to shooting at a moving target–and one that mocks you when you miss it. He belongs in the great line of American shape-shifters and self-creators, from Benjamin Franklin to Mark Twain to P.T. Barnum to Dylan’s early idol, Woody Guthrie. Because Dylan steadfastly refuses to stand still–because, furthermore, he quite clearly thinks of himself as a sort of cosmic trickster figure–because his public statements range from the only seemingly helpful to the cryptic and bewildering to the blatantly misleading–Marcus’s approach in this book is a helpful one. His approach is, of course, not an approach at all; these pieces were uncollected and unconnected until now, and they certainly don’t combine into a cohesive, let alone a monolithic, statement about their collective subject. (If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere in Marcus’s catalogue–he is the author of two other books on Dylan, both of which deal with narrower topics in greater detail and neither of which, I’m sad to say, I have read.) One walks away from Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus feeling that one has a better grasp on that its subject but understanding that its subject is in some sense fundamentally not understandable.

Marcus has been generous in the inclusion of what looks like every article he’s ever written that has even a tangential relationship to Dylan. Thus, in addition to his polyvocal take on 9/11, we get reflections on the great folk-music collector Harry Smith, the semi-obscure folk-singer Richard Farina, and of course, The Band, to whom Marcus dedicates several long articles without mentioning Dylan at all. These sidetracks are interesting for several reasons: Besides breaking up the monotony of article after article on the same basic subject, they serve to position Dylan, making it clear–and this is something Dylan fans are sometimes tempted to forget–that Dylan existed alongside other artists, that what he did and does depended and depends on the work of others. (Marcus even makes me want to listen to The Band, a group I’ve never been able to stomach.)

Along the same lines, Marcus occasionally writes about the geography of the music he loves, as when he discovers that he lives in the same Berkeley neighborhood where Harry Smith quite literally moved underground. More to the point, I suppose is “A Trip to Hibbing High,” in which Marcus stands in awe of the palatial public school, interviews Dylan’s aged English teacher, and examines the stage where his high-school band played the talent show. These geographical journeys are more than mere tourism, for to understand an artistic force like Dylan, one must examine the ground from which he grew. Or, as an unnamed woman in the article puts it when someone wonders aloud how someone like Dylan came from a place like Hibbing,

You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d been to Hibbing, you’d know why Bob Dylan came from there. There’s poetry on the walls. Everywhere you look. There are bars where arguments between socialists and the IWW, between Communists and Trotskyists, arguments that started a hundred years ago, are still going on. It’s there–and it was there when Bob Dylan was there.

These remarks are a microcosm of the book as a whole, in that they seek simultaneously to demythologize the Legend of Bob Dylan and to remythologize it, showing the material circumstances that produced him and then endowing those circumstances with their own sort of mystic aura.

As for Marcus’s writing, the book’s chronological structure allows the reader to witness the development of his signature style–what little development there is. Aside from a few early pieces for Creem in which he latches on to that magazine’s famous mescaline verve, Marcus settles into his own voice remarkably early on. Appropriately for a college professor, it’s far more academic and rigorous than the writing of the only two other contenders for the greatest music critic of the rock era, Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau. And yet the writing was always for popular magazines and remains instantly accessible.

All in all, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus might mimic a so-called “beach read” for those readers who, like me, don’t much like to have a good time. The writing is so pleasant that one is apt to forget how Marcus stretches and plays with Dylan’s mythos. The book is essential for fans of its subject, of course, but it’s worth looking into for those who are interested in how good rock writing is supposed to work–or those who are interested in the deconstruction and reconstruction of an American legend.

Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and Waht to Do About it

by Julia Duin

180 pp. Baker Academic, $12.99

What makes books by journalists so fun is that, when they’re actually being journalists rather than amateur psychologists or philosophers, there’s usually no overarching thesis to such a book.  Instead, the news story becomes the paradigm, and chapters can inform one another, contradict one another, and in other ways make such a book a very different sort of read from a tightly-argued academic treatise.  Julia Duin’s Quitting Church is that sort of journalistic book, one moment pointing to Brian McLaren and Mark Driscoll as the hope of American Protestantism because their Sunday services are driven by the big personalities’ (lengthy–in the services Duin visited, both men preached for more than 45 minutes) sermons and the next pointing to American pastors’ tendencies to make themselves the main event on Sunday morning as a prime reason that the faithful are splitting the evangelical scene and going Orthodox or house-church.  In some moments an abandonment of Biblical literacy in the vain pursuit of being “hip” is the main problem with the way that evangelical congregations teach their members, and in others preachers are upbraided for preaching sermons about 1 Kings (which I just did this last Sunday) rather than giving talks about topics that are “relevant.”

The picture that I took away from this interesting and wandering book is one in which consumerism, once a force that drove the growth of denominations, then of post-denominational megachurches, but a force that ultimately does not sustain any form of Christian life for more than a generation or three, is starting to change the shape of Christian life once again.  This time, if Duin is right, the space that megachurches once shared with small congregations is going to be split unevenly between the megachurches (which, in Duin’s reports, were largely religio-entertainment experiences, both in conservative and liberal varieties) and the house church movement (which Duin is careful to describe in its complexity–because of its decentralization, it often lacks good teachers and the ability to check itself when someone with a gift does rise up).  The future is going to be really big or really small, if Duin is right, and in my own estimation, that seems about right.  Even though I’d not heard of Duin until recently, I’d been saying to people for a while that the megachurches were only going to leave room for home-churchers by the time the dust had settled, and it’s vindicating to see that a respected religion journalist came to that conclusion before I did.

Duin is at her most confusing and her most enlightening when it comes to the Charismatic movement.  On one hand, she writes of the Jesus Movement of the seventies, with its outpourings of the Spirit and its lively gatherings, as someone who was there and longs for a return to the same.  On the other, she can turn a journalist’s critical eye on contemporary movements like the Toronto Blessing without flinching.  Again, I took her willingness to hold both in tension as a strong point of the book: Duin is no apologist for everything with the label “Charismatic,” but she also does not hold back from self-identifying as Charismatic and narrating the courses of various church movements in terms of Charismatic expectations.  Realizing how strong Duin’s Charismatic background is in the penultimate chapter made much sense of her criticisms of controlling pastors, strange attitudes towards single people, platitude-riddled sermons, and the exclusion of women from significant spoken ministries in contemporary congregations, and Duin’s own time away from congregational life, which she narrates frankly and without excuses, has a particularly Charismatic shape.  When Duin finally does get to suggestions on “What to Do about It” (as the subtitle promises), her recommendations are local rather than large-scale, pointing to her preferences for house-church democracies over megachurch monarchies, and as someone with some sympathies that direction myself, I found them both humble and thought-provoking.

I’ve said a number of times that my own failures, because I try to confess them as they happen, make me gradually less judgmental.  I used to look around the English department at UGA and wonder when these people were ever going to finish their dissertations.  That’s before I was staring down year four on my own.  If ever I thought that other people weren’t all that great at raising their children, two of my own have cured that in a hurry.  There was a time when I looked down upon those who “bailed out” of congregations when things got rough.  Now, two North Georgia congregations later, I have less of an elevated platform from which to condemn.  The point is that, as I read Julia Duin’s book, I still find myself wondering whether the folks who are leaving traditional congregations might have hung in and worked a bit harder for change from within, but thirty-four years of my own failures keep me from passing judgment.  Instead, I took on Duin’s book in the spirit that it sets forth, that of inquiry rather than of superiority, and for that, it was a good read.

Telling God’s Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation

by John W. Wright

164 pp.  $19.00  IVP Academic

I actually became aware of this book while reading Stan Hauerwas’s Working with Words (which I reviewed here) earlier this summer.  Hauerwas, in an essay on preaching, suggested that the rhetorical character of preaching, its spoken-to-you-right-here character, was a faithful genre for Christian discourse in ways that the academic monologue cannot be.  Then, in a footnote, he suggested this book, and I figured I should check it out.

I should note that, although I preached probably a dozen sermons a year when I was in seminary, I preach only four or five a year now.  In other words, preaching is not my primary public discourse by any means.  (For the sake of comparison, I teach college classes five days a week and lead faculty training sessions eight times a school year in my current professional capacity.)  That said, I’m always interested in preaching  better next time than I did last, and I agree with Hauerwas and with Wright that preaching, because of its particular situation in the life of the Church, the sermon is a moment and constitutes a practice that can shape the Christian imagination even as some in futurist circles decry the genre as obsolete.  Wright in fact names the sermon as the primary site of interpretation (31), taking a stand against theological education that regards academic biblical studies, with its monographs and articles, as the proper place for interpreting text and the sermon as a time merely for “packaging” the work that the academic commentator does.  By taking this stand, Wright articulates a particular theology of the Scriptures, holding that there is certainly a place for books about the gospel of John but that they’re always helpers to the congregation and the preacher rather than standing on their own as logically prior practices.

Much of Wright’s book is dedicated to a theology of the congregation, and his formulae stand in contrast to what he calls the North American narrative, a way of life characterized by individualism, consumerism, and a duality of mind that divides the world between the managerial/objective/scientific and the therapeutic/subjective/spiritual.  Drawing from the hermeneutical work of Gadamer, Wright lays out two visions for the homily, what he calls the comedic and the tragic.  These are not exact analogues of the dramatic genres but instead point to two relationships between sermon and the North American narrative.  The comedic sermon sets forth ways to adjust to the North American Narrative, leaving the basic structures of modern life to stand as given.  There may or may not be jokes, but what a comedic sermon never does is point to the world and say, “Sin.”  Instead, the comedy-sermon suggests small ways that one can relieve the pressure of the objective/material world by means of a temporary retreat into the subjective/spiritual. Wright holds that the comedic sermon has become the norm because of several reasons, among them the removal of preaching from the eucharistic context and its placement in revival and street-preaching scenarios; the personalization (in Wright’s terms, the diminution of the gospel from a cosmic drama) of the Christian message in the course of North American history; and pressures on preachers in a free-market context to please religious “consumers.”

By contrast, the tragic sermon disrupts the order of things by naming the soul-killing nature of the system, letting the people know that the “gods” of the marketplace are only interested in human sacrifice.  The tragic sermon thus sets up a moment for repentance rather than for adjustment-therapy and for affirming one’s place in the system–the idea is to imagine the preacher himself and the folks gathered for worship that they are in fact pilgrims and aliens, that the way the North American Narrative teaches us to imagine the “self” and the self’s “needs” are not philosophically prior to the sinfulness that pervades all historical moments and the vices that give North American life in the twenty-first century its particular flavor.  Because the congregation, as the saved people of God, is already situated within the Biblical narrative when they gather (83), the homily’s role is to remind the congregation that their minds should be renewed in accordance to the forgiveness into which God’s grace has brought them.  The “how-to” section of Wright’s book lays out a rhetoric of the homily based on David Buttrick’s concept of “moves” within the sermon but steers clear of Buttrick’s theological liberalism, which Wright holds as incapable of anything but a comedic sermon and certainly incapable of forming the people called the Church into anything but nice citizens of the liberal state.  This rhetoric of turning, as Wright calls it, starts out describing truthfully (and therefore with some appeal, but not so much that the turn becomes a sucker punch (95)) the vision of human good that governs “normal” life in North America, then moving by means of a transition paragraph into a section that sets forth Biblical alternatives to those visions.  In other words, the tragic sermon becomes a microcosm of the conversion narrative, hence the book’s subtitle.

The last third of the book consists of a discussion of pastoral and congregational practices that go along with the rhetoric of turning, everything from hospitality to Biblical-narrative counseling to congregational Christian education.  Along with the book’s conclusion, which is an extended commentary on Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (the great preacher’s manual of the early Church), this finishing section gives a strong sense of the practices that make something like a sermon of turning intelligible, and together they give a strong sense, once again, of how congregational life and the shape of the sermon inform one another.  Wright warns that too many turning-sermons will wear a congregation out and that the turning-sermon should not be every Sunday’s fare (103), but he never does lay out what the other Sundays’ sermons might sound like.  Perhaps he’s setting up demand for a sequel in that omission, but it does make for a less than satisfying experience when, two-thirds of the way through the book, one realizes that one has been reading about “special occasion” sermons without any sense of how “ordinary sermons” might contrast with them.

Wright’s book therefore is not a comprehensive guide to sermon-writing so much as a theoretical exploration, but that’s precisely the sort of thing that helps many of us, myself included, to think about what the practice of preaching means.  Wright’s greatest contribution, then, is to remind the reader that there can be no truthful “how-to” without a prior ethics of the congregation and that the pastor or the priest or the elders or whoever shapes the imagination of the congregation are doing so at all moments, whether in consistent or in hypocritical ways.  Thus repentance is always a practice, the sermon is one component of that practice, and all such components must always fall under the scrutiny of the theologians (whether pastors or priests or elders) whom the congregation calls “preacher” or “teacher.”

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 24 July 2011 (th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Genesis 29:15-28 and Psalm 105:1-11, 45b or Psalm 128  • 1 Kings 3:5-12 and Psalm 119:129-136  • Romans 8:26-39  • Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

First, for a bit of housekeeping, I’ll be preaching next Sunday, from the 1 Kings text, so next Monday, there likely won’t be a lectionary post.  (I generally use what time I would have used to write here to revise the sermon on those occasions when I preach.)  Lectionary posts will likely ramp up again on August 1, and the subject matter, as always, will be the lectionary text for the Sunday to come.

This is one of those standard Sunday school moments–given the opportunity to ask for what he would receive, good king Solomon asks neither for riches (Midas?) nor for power (Croesus?) but for wisdom, the ability to discern good from evil.

What the Sunday school version tends to leave out is that Solomon asks for things when he does, where he does.  In the course of the narrative, Solomon has already shown himself ruthless enough to be a Palestinian king–after all, he rises to power not because he’s the firstborn son of the king (he’s neither the firstborn nor the eldest left after a series of family feuds that leave the first three sons dead or missing) but because he’s willing and able to conspire, murder, and manipulate himself into power.  The rise of Solomon reads errily like the end of Godfather–as solemn ceremonies proceed, Solomon’s men are assassinating the last obstacles to his uncontested regional power.  And what killing his rivals accomplishes, his first marriage (the first of several hundred, you’ll remember) solidifies as he becomes part of the royal family in Egypt, the region’s true superpower in the tenth century BC.  Moreover, when God approaches him with the offer, he’s offering sacrifices at Gibeon, one of the major regional shrines (often translated “high places” in English Bibles), violating the teaching of Moses that there can be only one true place of worship but certainly following in the footsteps of the regional powers, who sacrificed to gods as the local customs called for.  In other words, Solomon can pull the trigger just as well as anyone in the Bible; there’s no need for him to pray for that sort of wisdom.

Instead, Solomon asks for the ability to discern good from evil, echoing the fateful words that Genesis uses to describe the forbidden fruit.  Whereas the man and the woman (who gets named Eve only after the fall) are commanded not to know such things because God’s immediate presence and verbal command should govern their full existence, Solomon asks for and is granted the ability “to come in and to go out” wisely precisely because God has become mediated and God’s commands textualized.  (Go ahead, Derrida people–take me to task for that distinction.)  It’s here, in the unauthorized shrine, in the wake of his assassinations and his politically-driven intermarriage into Pharaoh’s court, that Solomon asks for discernment.  And here that discernment, because God offered it, stands granted.

Because I’m actually going to preach this text, I know that the setting is going to be crucial for the gospel that comes through here.  Just as in so many other Bible episodes, Solomon’s supernatural gift of wisdom comes not to someone who’s somehow “earned” God’s favor (not that there are too many folks in the Bible who claim to have “earned” God’s favor) but to someone right in the middle of several sorts of sin, the kind of figure who should simply be another Machiavellian villain in the Biblical narrative who’s just as forgettable as any other.  (He later becomes one, but his descent into Pharaoh-existence must stand as terrible rather than simply typical because of this gift.)  By granting Solomon this gift, a discerning spirit that makes him unlike any other, God does not guarantee that Solomon thus will bring his gift to bear for the sake of a godly kingdom, but God does make intelligible the grand tragedy of Israel’s fall that will eventually result in the exile: even though Solomon is granted wisdom from God unmatched among the nations, yet for the sake of anxiety and pride and lust he forsakes that particular calling in favor of becoming just like the rest of the kings of the ancient world, only more so.  This strong echo of the Exodus narrative culminates eventually in Solomon’s forced-labor programs that build up the South at the expense of the North and finds Solomon appointing taskmasters over his own sheep the way that Pharaoh had over Pharaoh’s slaves.  By the time that Rehoboam’s idiocy solidifies Jeroboam’s revolt, the kingdom is already on its way out.

I appreciate that 1 Kings does not try to resolve these tensions, because they’re at the heart of being God’s chosen people, whether Israel or Church.  Paul’s claims that the faithful are dead to sin must stand in tension with James’s calls to ask forgiveness of sins even as a dying believer, and 1 John’s assertion that the one who lives by agape is without sin must stand alongside the same book’s insistence that anyone who claims to be without sin does not walk in the light.  Without both sides of these realities, making impossible neat systems of assertions about the Christian’s soul, much less the nature of reality, the world becomes invisible in its complexity and agony and wonder, and the Bible is too good a gift to allow such things.

May our stories be the truthful ones that the Scriptures encourage, and may we never forget the terrible and wonderful gifts God has given.

• Tripp Fuller cites some Barth, this time on purpose!  I think he’s turning to our side!
• Why Bill Cosby is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of storytelling
• An entirely sensible proposal to re-imagine the church-planting industry
• As it turns out, Oxford atheists still just aren’t as honest as was Nietzsche.
• On the decline of the urban symphony

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  Why one should run Bible class names past a deacon or two

   

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 17 July 2011 (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Genesis 28:10-19a and Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24 •Wisdom of Solomon 12:13, 16-19 or Isaiah 44:6-8 and Psalm 86:11-17 •Romans 8:12-25 •Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

I should probably just stop being a petulant brat (I am in my mid-thirties, after all), but it still bugs me when I hear people (often it’s my own students) refer to the Bible as an instruction manual.  My temptation (to which I fall about half of the time) is to ask the metaphor-abuser at hand whether 2 Samuel 11 is an instruction manual for a good married life, and of course the answer that I get is always something along the lines that the story of David’s adultery, cover-up, murder, and assimilation of Bathsheba into his harem is some sort of negative exemplar. Fair enough.  But stories like the Genesis reading this week seem (to me at least) to lose much of their impact if one approaches them with the aim of finding some sort of direct instruction for the reader.

After all, this is the story of someone who, although three generations into the Abrahamic family drama, still doesn’t have much to go on beyond “respond willingly to the strange voices that come to you.”  A pair of unusual births, a few run-ins with Egyptian monarchs, and some genuinely odd theophany stories are all that Jacob has at this point in the story, a state of affairs that, for most people reading Genesis as the first book of an established canon of Scripture, can only imagine, and then only by negation.  It’s the same kind of imagination needed to read the story in Acts when Peter has his vision of the foods-made-clean and immediately comes to the conclusion that including Gentiles in the Christians’ practice of burial-baptism and in the Christians’ common meals must be the point of the vision.  It’s the same kind of imagination needed to imagine Paul’s thought process in Athens,  In all of these cases, one must imagine a moment, an intellectual and rhetorical context, in which there is no possibility for bad-faith dismissal of the Bible but a genuine vacuum in the spiritual life (but not one that the players could name as a vacuum) where the Bible would be for the reader.

I note all of this because, among other things, the Bible is a collection of texts that has, for all but a few aberrant moments of the history of the Church since the canonization of the New Testament, been an undeniable presence, even when literacy was not common.  I know that a game that Protestants especially like to play is the “that era did not know the Bible” game, but in most cases, practices of public reading make that claim basic nonsense.  People framed the authority of the Bible differently in different ages, and sometimes I personally think that authorities in this or that age could have done a more adequate job of ordering their intellectual and political lives around its testimonies.  But it’s always been there.

And yet what’s always been there consists substantially (not totally) of accounts like Jacob’s here, stories in which YHWH is doing genuinely new things, making moves that would become canon but in their moment cannot but be interruptions, occasions for someone to interpret what in their own moments must be indeterminate.  Reading Jacob’s perfectly sensible reaction to his dream, his building of an altar using his stone-pillow, I can’t help but see anew just how scandalous particularity is: of all the possible reactions to a dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven (I’m going to resist saying a stairway), the one that constitutes the Holy Scriptures is this one.  And the reaction to the execution and resurrection and ascension of Christ that has become canon is the strange ritual of burial-baptism.  And the extension of the ministry of Christ that has become the shape of the Church is the gathering around the table of the new passover, breaking bread and passing a cup.  There’s nothing philosophically necessary or even anthropologically determinative about any of these things, yet they shape us as authority, as Scripture.  Certainly theologians can and should articulate ways in which all of these stories and practices disclose reality that our sinful systems and warped wills would conceal and distort, but the particularity never goes away.  This is no instruction manual for life as a “product” that requires “operation”: this is the tenuous and bold and particular moment when a man acknowledged that God is in this place.

And now, centuries of Bible-reading behind us, our own imaginations must stretch farther than ever to imagine these moments even as we grapple with folks who would regard the particularity of the Bible, whether in matters of revelation-claims or with expectations for the economy of the household or for prophetic critique of those systems that make claims above the household.  We cannot in good faith proceed as if the God revealed in the Scriptures uniquely governs the universe and yet treat the Scriptures themselves as no more than one story among many.  But the Scriptures themselves, the canon that tells stories of life before the canon, will not submit to being  an instruction manual.

May our eyes remain open and our lives remain faithful, and may our readings of Scripture keep open both possibilities.

• The aesthetics of teaching literature at a Christian college
• How think tanks are making journalism harder than it already is
• The rise in Spinoza’s stock value
• Social psychology and why it’s better than economics
• The Catholic social critique of Marshall McLuhan
• Jeff Wright on being a Calvinist and being a Republican
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Revised Common Lectionary Page for 10 July 2011 (Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Genesis 25:19-34 and Psalm 119:105-112 •Isaiah 55:10-13 and Psalm 65:(1-8), 9-13 •Romans 8:1-11 •Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Okay, so I didn’t get the lectionary post online until Wednesday.  I had a busy weekend, alright?

I’ll admit that this story from Genesis bothers me, and I’m bothered because I have a hunch I’m incapable of reading it faithfully.  When I hear that Edom/Esau trades his bekorah (a term that seems to signify ancestral inheritance due to the firstborn within a Semitic family) for a pot of red stew, my own mind immediately starts to form a “principle” that the story must be trying to establish in my mind: deferred gratification, shrewd trading, learning the value of things, or some other good, middle-class lesson.  I’m fairly certain that this story is not merely an “object lesson” for a chapter of Proverbs, but that’s where my mind wants to go.

The facts that should complicate that reading are fairly evident for someone who wants to think about it: the fact of the matter is that Esau is the one who has his facts straight.  After all, the house of Isaac is a nomadic family, one that does not own any land.  In other words, Jacob is offering something (food) for nothing (no land).  Yet Esau becomes angry.

I’m fully aware of the standard scholarly readings of this story, those that render the stew episode and the goat-hair episode as etiological (I’m resisting the temptation to spell it eat-iological) tales about the monarchical-era animosity between the kingdoms of Edom and of Judah.  I don’t think that’s a bad place to start, and I think it’s also a handy thing to know that, by tracing the genetic roots of Israel to a man with the ability to imagine what might come to pass centuries later, in the face of the nomadic Abrahamites and the great Canaanite city-states, Genesis is positioning the Israelites as a nation possessed of special divine favor, even in the foresight of Israel the man.

Those starting-places lead to some interesting theological possibilities if, following the New Testament, one imagines Church as an inclusive prophetic fulfillment of Israel in the secular age.  It’s a reminder that, when we Christians tell the story of the one who fulfills not only Jacob but Moses and Elijah and David as well (if you don’t know who that is, ask your Sunday school teacher), we’re telling a story in which we are the ones given the gift of faithful sight.  As the great prophets remind us, that’s no reason to elevate ourselves above others, but it is an occasion to celebrate and to praise the great God who sustains a world of free human beings and calls to those human beings by the example and the proclamation of the Israel of Jacob’s age or of our own.  Therefore our own virtues, if we be Israel, are not the standard middle-class values of toleration and industry but divine gifts, faith and hope and charity, the fruit not of good, respectable living but of the Spirit.

Even as the Kingdom of God remains unseen and to most unimaginable, may our stories and our lives together be a compelling tale as Jacob’s remains.