General Introduction
- The perils of Vacation Bible School
- Introducing our guest
- Listener feedback
- Grubbsy’s new job
The Topic at Hand
- Indiana Jones, of course
- What tools archaeologists actually use
- Other people’s junk
- Archaeology as destructive science
- Slow but steady
The Pre-Archaeological Imagination
- Hebrew slaves and the pyramids
- Anglo-Saxon David and Goliath
- What does archaeology contribute to our sense of history?
- The everyday life of the ancients
The Effect of Archaeological Exploration on Biblical Commentary
- The Enuma Elish and Genesis as polemical text
- The prophets and the cave paintings
- The Bible as sacred texts among texts
- Gilmour goes Calvinist
- Greek philosophers plagiarize the Bible
Christian Biblical Studies and Mainstream Archaeology
- Their rocky relationship
- The argument over the Exodus
- The failures of the Israelites
- The liberal Protestant response
- Polyvocal history
- Reactionary conspiracy theories
- How archaeology helps us read Lewis and Tolkien
Luke’s Particular Dig Site
- Khirbet Qeiyafa
- David and Goliath
- Did David even exist?
- When did Israel become a kingdom?
- The big city on the border
- Naming as interpretation
Hoaxes and False Proofs
- Noah’s Ark
- Filmmakers and archaeologists
- Ancient recycling
- The Naked Archaeologist and the nails
- Joseph Smith’s bad archaeology
- Phony archaeologists as flattering to the profession
- News coverage of the sciences
Our Advice
- Treat archaeology as a tool, not a final answer
- Don’t ignore archaeology
- Recognize that archaeological interpretations frequently change
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.
Calvin, John. Commentary on the Psalms. Trans. David C. Searle. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2009.
Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Dodge, Arthur J. Homer or Moses?: Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture. Philadelphia: Coronet, 1988.
Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Viking, 2003.
Philo. The Works of Philo. Trans. C.D. Yonge. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2005.
General Introduction
- Where’s Michial teach again?
- Stuck in the middle with the soulless Calvinists
- The plan for November
Talking Back, Not Bach
- One hand in the hornet’s nest
- Forgive us, please
- David and Michial hate each other
What Is Emotion, Anyway?
- Good feelings and a warm heart
- The Presence of GodTM
- Biological emotion
- Talkin’ bipolar
- That’s when it hit me: That luv is a verb!
- Emotion as orientation of affection
Calvinism and Emotions
- Why are we so suspicious?
- Calvinist intellectualism
- St. Augustine’s distrust of emotions
- Where the big T fits in
- A New Kind of Schleiermacherian Emotionalism
- Engaging emotion with the Pietists
- Head knowledge and heart knowledge
- Let’s talk Being instead of heart
- Where the Neo-Orthodox get it right
- On desire, in German
- The Calvinist worship service and the redirection of affection
- But who are we to judge?
- And here come the negative emotions!
Emotion in the Psalms
- Psalm 22 and Christ on the cross
- Moving from lowliness to glory
- How much did Christ have in mind?
- How “As the Deer” got it wrong
- The Psalm of Asaph
- From emotion to understanding to emotion
Jesus Is My Boyfriend
- The strange sexual hang-ups of “In the Secret”
- Ah, but we digress: the Song of Solomon
- Parental advisory
Public and Private Worship
- Jesus is my personal boyfriend (in the Middle Ages, anyway)
- Feelin’ Icky (The Book of Margery Kempe Song)
- Are Americans uncomfortable with corporate worship?
- Leaving on the emotion
- Is a Manwich a meal or an hors d’oeuvre?
Closing Thoughts
- Yeah…we don’t like music
- We’re not terribly cuddly
- Eeyore and Tigger
- Worship beyond music
- Waiting for the end of the prayer
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1994.
Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, 1995.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Ed. Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Wetmore, Robert D. Worship the Way It Was Meant to Be: 15 Biblical Principles for Knowing and Loving God. Camp Hill, Penn.: Christian Publications, 2003.
That’s the end of Season 2, folks. We’ve had a great time doing the show, and we’re glad you listen. We explain our summer plans in the show itself. Keep listening, and keep reading!
General Introduction
- So long, Season 2
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog?
- Our summer plans and our love for decimal places
Beginning Apophatically
- Literary criticism vs. critical theory
- The Academy and the newspaper
- The professor and the amateur
- The unconscious and the conscious
- Literary criticism vs. book reviews
- Why age is more than a number
- The bleeding edge of criticism
Auden Makes the Rules
- Historical context
- Overcome evil with good
- Subjectivity
- How to tell if a critic is any good
- Development of taste
- The pleasures of the text
Old Stuff
- The extreme POETIX! of Chuck “Ham-Bone” Aristotle
- Dorothy Sayers’s internalization of Aristotle
- The gaping hole of the Anglo-Saxon period
- Boethius and his epic, tragic harlots
- Philip Sidney to the rescue!
- Milton’s dismissal of fiction
- The Calvinist aesthetic defense of Scripture
The Aesthetes and Decadents
- The critic as artist and the artist as critic
- Creation vs. criticism
- Rules for independent critics
- Why Wilde would like Lester Bangs
- Complicating, not explaining
- What does “art for art’s sake” actually mean?
A New Kind of Criticism
- Connection to the Southern Agrarians
- Reaction to the Old Historicism
- Text as self-contained and unified
- Why the New Critics overreacted
- New Criticism as all-consuming blob
Mythological Criticism
- Deeper into Tolkien
- The Mythography Project
- Finding patterns in mythology
- Frye’s embrace of archetype
- The Gospel’s role in myth criticism
Heroic Criticism and American Studies
- The Heroic Critic as true believer
- Defining the newly emergent America
- Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination
- The difference in seriousness
- Intellectual decline
- [] you, you bourgeoisie pig!
- Defining Americanism(s)
Jiving Criticism and Art
- Why poets can’t write well about poetry
- Historical moments
- The need for critical distance
- A fist-fight breaks out!!
- Artists who do great criticism
- Is this a difference in eras?
- The problem with self-accounts
- Michial prepares for hate mail from creative-writing students
- Does scholarship create better writing?
Getting Personal
- To what extent is our academic output literary criticism?
- Auden makes David self-aware
- Nathan’s Hegelian synthesis
- Michial tries to complicate, not simplify
Post-Theory Criticism
- The Emmanuel Laboratory
- Nathan as the singular Voice of Criticism
- David fights to stay in the middle
- The non-academic return to Auden’s world
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Mariner, 1956.
Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeill. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Two volumes.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco: New World Library, 2008.
Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. 47-59.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor, 1992.
Frazier, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
Frye, Northrop. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.
Jung, Carl. Jung on Mythology. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Two volumes.
Milton, John. Paradise Regained. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 619-669.
Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Three volumes.
Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.
Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: Greenwood, 1979.
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 212-251.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 5-48.
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.
Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1984.
Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Waking Lion, 2008.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 241-297.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin, 1996.
When I was (briefly) a catechumen in the Orthodox Church, one of the big sticking points for me was the concept of apostolic succession. When an Orthodox Christian, reciting the Nicene Creed, says that he or she believes “In one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,” it’s an assertion that really means something—from my understanding, any given Orthodox priest can trace himself back via laying-on of hands to the earliest figures in Christianity. Catholic priests can do the same.
We Protestants don’t have this advantage, something the Reformers were obviously aware of—and yet the confessions that subscribe to the Nicene Creed (including own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America) haven’t excised the “apostolic” any more than they’ve excised the “Catholic”—though they’ve made the capital C lowercase. So what gives?
We get the answer, as we get the answer to so many questions about Protestant practice, from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. He rails against the Catholic Church’s claims of succession, as he rails against many other things that the Catholic Church does, and then he drives the knife in: “the pretence of succession is vain, if posterity does not retain the truth of Christ, which was handed down to them by their fathers, safe and uncorrupted, and continue in it” (IV.ii.2).
The apostolic succession to which Calvin clings, then, is a sort of spiritual succession—hands have not been laid on priests from generation to generation, but it doesn’t matter. Protestants can, by this line of thinking, claim apostolic authority because we believe what the apostles believed. It is for this reason that Calvin (and nearly every conservative Protestant after him) denies the use of what we might call “creative theology”:
[T]he Spirit, promised to us, has not the task of inventing new and unheard revelations, or of forgiving a new kind of doctrine, to lead us away from the received doctrine of the gospel, but of sealing our minds with that very doctrine which is commended by the gospel. (I.ix.1)
Elsewhere, he tells us that “daily oracles are not sent from heaven, for it pleased the Lord to hallow his truth to everlasting remembrance in the Scriptures alone” (I.vii.1). Thus the need for sola scriptura—if we are to be apostolic in the sense that Calvin claims apostolic succession, we can’t have our authority be anything that comes after the Apostles.
Cotton Mather agrees. In his Magnalia Christi Americana, he tells us that while he does not “say, that the Churches of New-England are the most regular that can be; yet I do say, and am sure, that they are very like unto those that were in the first ages of Christianity.” Perfection is not necessary for apostolic succession and authority; one’s doctrine must, however, be as close to that of the Apostles as possible.
Note, though, that this vision of apostolic succession is inherently conservative, inherently against progressivism in theology; Mather says outright that “the first Age was the golden Age; to return unto that, will make a man a Protestant, and, I may add, a Puritan.” I do not believe this is a quirk in Mather’s theology; I think this sort of conservatism is implied in Calvin himself.
It reminds me of a story I heard about Billy Graham, years ago. He was visiting the Soviet Union, I believe, and talking to a liberal Russian priest. The priest didn’t much care for him and accused him of setting Christianity back fifty years. “That’s too bad,” said Graham, “because I wanted to set it back two thousand years.” This is the Protestant attitude toward apostolic authority—we must not move forward from the doctrine of the Apostles.
We can argue a few points here: Number one, the Nicene creed comes along centuries after the Apostles themselves, so the degree to which it adequately represents their viewpoints is debatable. (I’m of the opinion that it sticks very closely to the theology of the New Testament; many of our readers may disagree.) Number two, many generally Protestant and specifically Calvinist doctrines—sola scriptura, double predestination, etc.—are at least arguably sixteenth-century inventions. (I don’t think they are, in the sense that I think they flow naturally from the text of the New Testament, but I also recognize that they are formulated most clearly many centuries after the deaths of the Apostles.)
But let’s leave that sticky debate alone for now and assume, with most of the early figures of Protestantism, that the basics of the Reformed Church (I use the term in its widest possible sense, to cover all the figures of the Reformation and the Anabaptists, too) are more in line with the early Church than the doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church of the era were. What does apostolic succession mean in this context?
When Catholics and Orthodox claim apostolic authority, it is a loose thing—Peter approved of his successor, and so on and so forth, so there’s no demand that the current generation look exactly like the first. Protestant claims at apostolic authority are the exact opposite: We have it because our theology if not our praxis looks just like Peter’s. This is much more constricting and requires a canonization not only of the Bible but of the ecclesiastical practices of the early Church. (My Orthodox friends must be falling out of their chairs laughing, since they too claim to look more or less like the early Church.)
What this means is that liberal Protestantism in almost all its forms—let’s say the major figures are Hegel, Schleiermacher, von Harnock, Ritschl, Bultmann, Tillich, and at least some members of the contemporary Emergent Church—is not Protestant because it jettisons the very basis of Protestant doctrine, this “spiritual” concept of apostolic succession. Creative or progressive theologians typically believe that we should move past not only the Apostles but also Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and yes, Hegel and the rest. It’s not quite right to call them Protestant then, and in fact, this is probably a term that has outlived its usefulness.
To their credit, the Emergent theologians seem largely aware of this problem, which is why most of them have jettisoned the use of the term Protestant in favor of that complicated Emerging/Emergent/Emerged system that I don’t even come close to understanding. Likewise, Brian McLaren’s “new kind of Christianity”—while I don’t believe it is in any sense new—suggests a certain post-Protestant aesthetic.
My question, then, is what progressive theologians (in the nineteenth, twentieth, or 21st centuries) do about that pesky word apostolic in the Nicene Creed. I know that many liberal Christians are not all that interested in creeds, so chucking the whole thing is certainly one option, albeit one that horrifies me. The more cogent option is to perform a Calvin-esque redefinition of apostolic—so what does that look like in a progressive context?
For our next pair of mugs, we’ve chosen another pair of familiar faces: Desiderius Erasmus, the CHP poster boy, and John Calvin, the subject of our second podcast. (Seems so long ago now!) Enjoy!
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