I seem to get into some trouble when I ask questions about political matters, but here goes anyway.  I honestly don’t get some of the online reactions to North Carolina’s Amendment 1 and to the recent outburst by Dan Savage at a recent talk to high school journalism students.

No, that’s not entirely true. Let me try again.  I understand both phenomena partially, but the contradictions that arise when I think about either one baffle me.

In one case, I somewhat get the big picture but have no idea why such a tactical error isn’t being blasted, and in the other, I can say perfectly well what’s going on tactically, but I have a hard time saying what the big picture could possibly be.

Neither Bullying nor Nationalism

Thinking about Savage first, I can see why he’s the guest speaker to invite when the topic is bullying: whether it’s people who self-identify as gay or people perceived as “acting gay,” the school actually got that part right.  Not just anyone gets bullied, and facing the actual social contours of bullying is a good move.  On the other hand, perhaps this is just my teenage-in-the-Clinton-years sense of propriety coming out, but there are better and worse ways to counter a culture that ostracizes one group of people.  One way that resonates more with me, and this is coming from someone who came of age before Richard Dawkins became a gigantic celebrity, is to find common ground and try to build on it.  When I try to imagine ways to bring larger, socially dominant groups around to welcoming smaller, socially put-upon groups into the larger picture, I imagine various Cosby-Show and Will-and-Grace scenarios in which storytelling convinces people that, after all, there’s not all that much dividing us after all.

Then there are moves that are, at the least, tactically stupid.  One such move is for the put-upon group to find some other scapegoat, preferably another numerically small group, and make them the focus of one’s own mockery.  That seems to be what Dan Savage picked.

I wouldn’t call his outburst “bullying,” largely because I think that category means something, and not every insult is the same as bullying.  I also wouldn’t deny that there are historical precedents: after all, much of Malcolm X’s pre-conversion rhetoric involved mocking the honkies, getting his audience to see themselves as genuinely superior to the dominant social group.  But in the case of Dan Savage, I don’t see a Malcolm-X-style big picture behind his move; I just see tactical stupidity, the sort of Rush-Limbaugh-style bluster that gets people-who-already-agree to raise a drink but which does so at the expense of potential movement-together, socially speaking.  Neither Rush Limbaugh nor Dan Savage is a bully, because one could skip Savage’s talks or turn off the radio to get rid of Limbaugh.  But to say that either figure is doing good things to help people live peaceably together is an assertion that, to me, given my inability to resolve this contradiction, just ain’t true.

This Is what Democracy Looks Like.  And I Don’t Like it.

The North Carolina situation bears out a contradiction that rises out of the intersection of sexual-identity-politics and political procedure.  Perhaps my own lack of agitation about Amendment 1 is a function of my own naive confidence in actual legislative deliberation, I’ll acknowledge that.  But when I look at the vote that NC voters took on May 8, I see a state’s population asserting that, for the time being, questions of legally-recognized marriage should remain the business of elected legislators rather than judicial fiat.  After all, if the populace of a state can amend a constitutional document in 2012, presumably the same population could pressure lawmakers to call for another vote on another amendment whenever the next cycle of state elections happens.  Thus the proper reaction, I would surmise, would be some sort of educational mobilization, a concerted effort to convince the actual citizens of North Carolina that they should vote differently the next time said cycle cycles.

Instead, for the past several days, I’ve seen hand-wringing, regional Chauvinism, and all the sorts of things that make me think people would rather lose actual legislative battles but strike impressive lament-poses for their digital friends.  (I’ll go ahead and note that, so far, I’ve seen nobody post any material praising the legislation, but that could just indicate that people are more inclined to post online complaints than they are to post online celebrations, politically speaking.)  I’ve seen graphics calling for the repeal of Amendment 1, but I’ve seen little to indicate that anyone has any concrete plans, or even plans to have concrete plans, to articulate some sort of argument to convince the reluctant citizens of North Carolina (or Georgia, for that matter–our amendment happened a few years ago) that such a repeal might happen.

Another admission: I’m basing this off of Facebook chatter that I’ve seen between paper-grading sessions and year-end-assessment-meetings, so there’s no pretense of a representative sample here.  But I do wonder whether all of this really is the jaded partisan hay-making that I fear it might be, or whether there might be something genuinely political on the horizon.

In both of these cases, the reactions I’ve seen, mainly from the right wing in Savage’s case and mainly from the liberals in the case of North Carolina, confirm a fear that I have about online discourse, namely that it’s a pressure-release valve that actually makes people less likely to commit to actual political engagement.  I’d like to think I’m wrong, that there’s a quiet, locally-based network of anti-Joe-Kony people still making plans to travel to the Central African Republic and help in the effort to bring him in (if that’s where he still is).  I’d like to think that there might be a movement afoot among evangelicals to organize anti-bullying events that acknowledge genuine difference in conviction without engaging in the AM-Radio nonsense of a Dan Savage, just to show folks that it can be done.  I’d like to think that there are people in public libraries and coffee shops and public parks and other places where actual North Carolina voters go, getting ready to talk with the folks there, human being to human being, convincing them that political toleration and religious conviction might live harmoniously together.  I’d like to think all of these things, and perhaps I just can’t see them happening because I’ve been so busy.  But I’m not hopeful.

Give me hope, friends.

Faith In Writing: Essays In Honor Of Jack L. Knowles

I’ve now seen photos in which Jack is holding this book, so I can announce it without ruining the surprise.  Since the Table of Contents is not available on amazon.com yet, I figured I’d reproduce it here.  Readers of the Christian Humanist should find at least one name familiar, and those who have ties to east Tennessee might just find several familiar names:

Faith in Writing: Essays in Honor of Jack L. Knowles

Introduction

“The Dream of the Rood”: A Model for Christian Meditation

Patricia Magness

Dante and Desire, or What an Evangelical Youth Group Kid Stands to Learn from a Walk
through Purgatory

Nathan Gilmour

Dancing for Joy

Jeffrey J. Knowles

“Like the Ooze of Oil/ Crushed”: A Christological Clue in Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”

Lee Magness

Journey of the Magi: A Personal Meditation

E. LeRoy Lawson

I Loved My Children’s Bodies

C. Robert Wetzel

Friendship and Beauty in the Midst of the Mundane: Reflections on Crossing to Safety

Philip D. Kenneson

Faith in Writing/Writing in Faith

J. E. Knowles

Alright, I’ll stop being coy: those of you who didn’t go to school at Milligan College or Emmanuel School of Religion (now Emmanuel Christian Seminary) should know that I’m by far the least among these: the other contributors are veteran professors, folks who teach and who have retired as named chairs of theology and humanities, current and former seminary presidents, published novelists, and otherwise very distinguished company.  How I got invited to this party is beyond me.

But listeners to the podcast know that I’m Forrest Gumping it through my academic career, so no surprise there.

Jack Knowles, in whose honor we all wrote, taught the first college class that I ever attended.  (Yes, it was also the first class on my schedule.)  He taught me Virgil and Dante, and he also introduced me to Herodotus and Thucydides and Plato and Aristotle and Calvin.  He was also the first to teach me King Lear and Othello, though certainly he wasn’t the last to teach me better to read those plays.  Knowles remains, in my imagination, the picture of even-handed, responsible learning, and he was one of those who most influenced my own desire to be a specifically Christian intellectual.  I’ve only read my own essay in this collection (I wrote it too), but I have to think that those who taught alongside him likewise value his career.

• When consumerism in education exceeds even Gilmour’s threshold of credulity
• Mark Bauerlein wonders what happens to the novel in the age of consumer divorce
• And in other news, partisan Republicans and Democrats tend towards pathological dishonesty when it comes to political matters.
• Coming soon to a theater nowhere near you… this year’s Job Movies!
• Below Par: The Biblical tragedy comes to an American golf course.
• Confessions of a Teenage Drama King: A high-school-drama spin on the Job story.
• 
• 

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 6 May 2012 (Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B)

Acts 8:26-40  • Psalm 22:25-31  • 1 John 4:7-21  • John 15:1-8

First things first: I apologize for missing several Bible posts in a row.  A streak of busy weekends and bad luck has knocked that part of my week out of whack in the month of April, and all I can say going forward is that I hope I can do better.

Alright.  On with the lectionary reflection.

Folks make much of Jesus’s “I am” statements in John, and rightly so: of the four gospels, John has Jesus talking about himself far more than the other three, and the Greek ego eimi is indeed a customary translation of the “I am” that YHWH speaks in Exodus 3.  What folks sometimes underplay, I think, is the rest of the Old Testament echoes in these famous sayings.  “I am the good shepherd” means a good deal on its own and becomes even more significant in conversation with Psalm 23.  “I am the resurrection” is certainly a doctrinal cornerstone, and it’s also the fulfillment of the grand apocalyptic vision of Daniel 12.  And this week’s reading, “I am the vine,” is a fine viticultural metaphor on its own, but when it comes into relationship with Isaiah 5, the call to abide in the Son becomes even more striking than before.

What Isaiah most readily lends to John is the metaphoric of the fruit.  After all, unlike Paul’s letter to the Galatians, John does not say with any clarity what sorts of fruit a branch attached to his vine might bear.  Isaiah 5:1-7 tells the tale nicely:

    [7] For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry!
(Isaiah 5:7 ESV)

Here the most strident calls of the liberal Protestant (or progressive, if one prefers to call it that) and the most insistent doctrine of the conservative Evangelical come together in one grand prophetic oracle.  (Of course, the Catholics and Orthodox have done a fair job of keeping both in sight these twenty centuries.)  What the LORD requires of mortals and our cities are righteousness and justice, domestic and political shalom.  And the way that Jesus calls us to such things is none other than to abide in the Son.

What’s more, Jesus’s words in this part of his Sermon at the Table (I think I just coined that, and I like it) bring together the faithfulness of the most pious “prayer warrior” with the word-piety of the most fervent Lutheran: whatever we ask of the LORD, we shall receive, so long as we ask while abiding in the word.  In other words, so long as our own desires stand disciplined by the proclamation of the Son, shaping the desires of our hearts to conform to the desires of the Son, in other words if we learn to ask for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in Heaven, we will genuinely see our truest desires playing out in the world.

Now please don’t misunderstand: I would be the last to assert the stupid optimism that frames genuine doctrinal disputes in terms of “misplaced emphasis” or reduces deep-seated historical schism to “religion, not relationship.”  But in the Sermon at the Table, and in the prophetic oracles that it echoes, at the very least we Christians can affirm that the best parts of all of our theologies find their roots in the same Scriptures, which in turn find their authority in the call of God.  That does not finish discussions of historical difference and theological error, but I would hope it could be a starting point.

May our God-talk always strive for true utterance, for the enlivening of the imagination, for charity above all things.

I realize I’m a dinosaur in all sorts of ways, and my paleophilia runs all the way from a preference for epics over novels (though some novels are undeniably good) to a sense that the Enlightenment wrecked some really good medieval philosophy that we’ve only begun to re-ignite in the last century-and-change of Continental philosophy.  On the Internet, of course, one becomes a terrible lizard at a much faster rate than one does in literary circles, and here I got to be a dinosaur without having to work nearly as hard at it.  I prefer Linux machines to Mac toys.  I prefer web-authoring interfaces that let me modify my own html and css and other code.  And I can’t stand Facebook when there are viable alternatives available.

How the Conversation Happened
That last one came into play recently as a really good discussion of seminary education broke out among three of us who were in seminary together about ten years ago.  (One of our professors chimed in as well.)  As often happens when good conversations erupt on FB (it don’t happen often), I was sorry that only the relative handful of people who are on my homies list (I refuse to use FB’s term for Internet contacts) would ever see it, so with the permission of those involved, I brought the conversation over here.

The whole thing started when Wes Jamison, an old and a good friend of mine from the Milligan days, one with whom I fight online as a cat and a dog might fight online, noted that an ethicist was going to be present at an adult-education event and that anybody who didn’t read his book in seminary should ask for a refund.  Now I’ve read my share of books on ethics, and probably a couple other people’s shares as well (I’m that way with mashed potatoes at most family gatherings, too), but I’d never heard of the ethicist, and I had to ask Wes for a brief introduction.

Not long after that, another good friend from the late Clinton era, Rich Voelz, chimed in and noted that he’d never heard of the ethicist either, but his follow-up was more interesting than mine: he wished that our seminary, Emmanuel School of Religion (now Emmanuel Christian Seminary), had required an ethics course for M.Div students.  Wes took that opportunity to start listing all of the classes that he wished were required for M.Div students, courses in preaching and worship-planning and such that were occasionally-offered and sparsely-taken electives at Emmanuel when we were students.  At that point I made the bad joke that in Wes Jamison’s ideal seminary, there would be NO ELECTIVES FOR YOU!  (I’ve never actually seen the Soup-Nazi episode of Seinfeld, but enough people repeat the riff that it occurred to me easily.)

Wes quickly asserted that, structured properly, a curriculum heavy in required pastoral courses would not have to be too bulky to leave room for electives.  His proposal for a core theological education takes its shape from his own experience in lay pastor training:

I think part of my frustration comes from having worked with two regional committees on education for licensed/commissioned lay pastors. In designing a program for folks without access to seminary, it was imperative that we figure out what were the essential tools to put in their hands. We decided in both settings that basic introductions to the Bible, Church History, denominational history/polity, Theology, Ethics, Pastoral Care (another course requirement lacking at ESR), Christian Education, Worship, Preaching, Leadership, and World Reigions, plus more in depth survey courses on First Testament and Second Testament were the absolutely essential tools necessary to equip someone to serve as a pastor. At three hours were course, this whole list would only equal 36 credit hours. An M.Div. is 90 credit hours (at least at ESR), thus leaving 54 open hours for electives. How is that a massive list?

Before I move on from the narratio, I should note that while Wes is far more liberal than I am on questions of federal politics and far more conservative than I am on questions of church politics (most notably our divergent understandings of apostolic succession), he’s a dear brother and someone who will receive the respect due to one’s intellectual friends.  (Sorry–I’m gearing up for end-of-semester project presentations at Emmanuel College, and I’ve got my teacher hat on.)

No Answers but Some Questions for our Readers

I set out at first to articulate a strong systematic response to Wes’s post, but the end of the semester is kicking the systematic responses right out of me.   So in lieu of an essay, I have some questions for our readers:

1. Given recent speculations about the shaky future of Protestant congregations, both evangelical and mainline, should seminaries gear their required core curricula towards traditional, located ordination, or do Phil Clayton’s thoughts on the future of seminary ring truer?
2. Wes’s suggestion involved one semester of general Bible survey plus one or two (I got lost in the arithmetic) courses on Old Testament and New Testament.  (Sorry, Wes.  I can’t call ‘em what you call ‘em.  Just doesn’t ring.)  Are two or three semesters enough to prepare one for a life of interpreting these texts?
3. Would a seminarian’s semesters be better spent digging into really high-level intellectual questions, with the guidance of top-notch academic thinkers?  Or would a seminarian’s semesters be better spent musing on the practical workings of parish ministry with experienced and intellectual practitioners?  I know some of you have already stopped reading to post “Seminary should do both” in the comments, but for the rest of you: what sorts of deliberative/dialectical processes should govern the big-picture priorities of a seminary education?  Or, to put it another way, should the seminary’s big-picture telos be first and foremost the training of a professional class of clergymen, first and foremost the formation of intellects to practice that crazy little thing called theology, or first and foremost something else?
4. To what extent should Biblical languages figure into the required core requirements, and to what extent should Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic and Latin (yes, those are all Biblical languages in their own ways) remain on the menu of electives?
5. Thinking of electives more generally, to what extent should seminary-degree requirements bulk up a core of courses that every M.Div will have taken upon graduation, and to what extent should seminaries allow students to take over the strategy end of things and gear course selection towards the efforts that the student imagines ahead?
6. Which areas of theological study, practical and speculative and historical and whatever else, should a seminary insist upon while a student is in residence, and which areas could a seminary reasonably entrust to the graduates and to their own non-formal study?
7. In what ways and to what extent do these questions translate into the education that Christian liberal arts colleges (like the ones where the three CHP hosts teach) structure their undergraduate degree requirements?

So those are the questions that I’d like some help from our readers to answer.  Dig in, and do try to remain constructive and dialectical rather than eristic and otherwise trollish.

• And in other news, Bart Ehrman discovers that sometimes people write very stupid things on the Internet.
• In praise of first-year comp (I can’t remember if we’ve posted this before, but it’s still interesting.)
• Of adjuncts and unions
• The lost art of asking questions in question-and-answer sessions
• Scot McKnight engages with The Gospel Coalition over the nature of the gospel
• 

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 15 April 2012 (Second Sunday of Easter, Year B)

Acts 4:32-35  • Psalm 133  • 1 John 1:1-2:2  • John 20:19-31

Until I studied rhetoric, I was vaguely fuzzy on what Christian preaching was good for.  My own sense of duty made me think that I should be present when it happened, but since, in my own tradition, the worship service derives its form to some extent from nineteenth-century revival meetings, it seemed somewhat strange that I should be present, week by week, as the call to “return home” was given.  After all, once I’d returned home once, that should be enough, I figured.

Now that I’ve spent a few years intensively studying what rhetoric is for in the ancient conception, and how Christians appropriated that and saw its fulfillment in the life of the Church, I appreciate the sermon, both as I preach ‘em and as I’ve heard ‘em.  The main goal, I realized, is not to get people to “walk the aisle” (no matter what the old-timers who remember fondly their “week-long revival” days say) but to shape the desires.  That’s what Plato got me to see in the Phaedrus, and that’s what Augustine picks up on On Christian Teaching.  The kosmos (in the Johanine sense, not the Carl Sagan sense, but that’s part of the point) constantly works on us, believers and unbelievers alike, drawing us towards certain objects, setting before us relationships among things-in-the-world and suggesting, not always verbally, a picture of how all of those things fit together.  The “world” of nationalism and the “world” of consumerism and the “world” of historical progress all do such work on us, the work that rhetorician James Berlin calls “epistemic” work, the sustained rhetorical suggestion that each “world” and the reality it assumes is in fact what is “natural” and right.  The Christian sermon is one means (not by any stretch the only means) by which God sets forth a counter-rhetoric, situated more successfully or less successfully in the congregation’s historical moment, by which the Spirit (I do take a high view of preaching) reaches out to the gathered congregation and sets forth a new way to “see” reality, a way that de-naturalizes what is fallen and holds forth the hope that God’s forgiveness, through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, does in fact make possible what was impossible in our own sins.

Such is what 1 John does in its opening chapters: through the repetition of the word “proclaim” and its cognates, the text reminds hearers (and readers) that the kosmos is not itself eternal, that God can vanquish and has vanquished the powers that bind, the forces that keep us from eternity.  The words “life” and “fellowship” that 1 John repeats stand as calls out of the death and the isolation that the kosmos constantly threatens, whether through execution or exile, through neglect or the market’s ostracism.  The salvation that Jesus brings is not in an atomistic sense a rescue of the individual believer out of the world but approaches because Jesus died “for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2 ESV).  We can live faithfully because the redeemed life is the true life, the one that does not ignore the metaphysical change which the resurrection hath wrought.  Because the world’s sins are now died-for sins, the world stands open to the work of God, and the Christian’s proclamation is a call to that world: You who were dead, arise!  You who knew no life, be alive!

Such is the work of the Christian sermon: where consumerism cries “scarcity,” Genesis 1 says, “It is good.”  Where nationalism says, “We must destroy our enemies,” the Sermon on the Mount declares that the faithful pray even for those who persecute the faithful.  Where historical progress would have us discard those symbols and stories and teachings that offend this week’s cultural sensibilities, Jude tells us faithfully to hand down what we have received.  The counter-rhetoric of the sermon, in the days of 1 John and in ours, offers an alternative shape to human desire, a way to see that the kosmos would forget, ignore, destroy.  Such is why we preach.

May our words and our works all proclaim the life eternal, and may the ears of those who hear, by grace, stand open.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 1 April 2012 (Palm Sunday, Year B)

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29  • Mark 11:1-11 or John 12:12-16

Palm Sunday is, second only to Ash Wednesday, my favorite bit of practical theology.  On Ash Wednesday, of course, Christians hear read the passage in which Jesus commands the faithful not to go about dirty-faced when the fast.  Then, at the outset of a forty-day fast, we dirty our faces.  The subtlety of the theological move never ceases to amaze me: in a season dedicated to contemplating our own sins, we face the choice of skipping one of the central ceremonies of the Christian year, thus neglecting the assembly of the faithful; or participating, and thus visibly disobeying the ONE THING that we’re told not to do.  Either way, we start out Lent playing from behind.

Likewise with Palm Sunday: on the Sunday before we get the most visitors (excluding on Mother’s Day, but I go to a Southern church), we hear about the moment when the people of Jerusalem were at their most wrong about the Messiah of the LORD.  In Mark’s version, the people call out, not about the coming reign of God, but of the coming kingdom of David.  They welcome not the dying Christ who will forgive his enemies but the great warrior-king, the one who slaughters Moabites by the yard (go back and read the early chapters of 2 Samuel) and makes his name in the world in a long series of definitive military victories against pagan enemies.  In short, when we send our children (does every congregation use the children to bring the palm leaves), we re-enact that moment when Jerusalem sets herself up to turn against the real Jesus.

And that, of course, is the brilliance of the festival.  As the culminating Sunday of Lent, we need moments precisely like this, when we can face honestly the ways that we make God in our own image, call on Jesus to give smiling approval to our worst vices (sometimes over coffee), and anoint as the movement of the Spirit our pet political projects.   The sophisticated point that Palm Sunday makes, when it’s the last Sunday of Lent (which is to say every year), is that the sins that most need forgiven are the ones we don’t have the imagination to name.

And that’s why, year after year and Sunday after Sunday, I keep teaching the Bible whenever people have the patience to let me.  Its narratives and laments and epistles and apocalypses never lose their punch, their ability to reframe the world that I see and to open my eyes to the corners that I’ve tried, wittingly or no, to hide from myself.  If indeed the fool says in his heart that there is no God, then Palm Sunday is dedicated to those fools who say in their hearts (whether their brains can hear or not), “God won’t catch me on this one.”

May Lent reach its peak as we confess those sins of which we’re most proud.

• The Vatican’s recent statement on the practice of theology (HT Fred Sanders)
• David Brooks on the gray tsunami
• A right-wing account of class struggle in contemporary America
• In which Pat Buchanan implicitly compares Rush Limbaugh to Sir Thomas More
• One professor, thousands of students.  What could possibly go wrong?
• 

The Christian Humanist Forum will remain open for business.  However, because Michial and I have been getting dozens of spambot application emails every day (the last time I checked the forum’s website, over two thousand had applied to post on CHF), we will no longer receive forum applications by email.  If you wish to join the forum, fill out the registration page there, then send an email to thechristianhumanist (at) gmail.com with your user name.  We’ll go in manually and add you to the forum.

Thank you, and keep listening and reading!