The Text

Pub Theology Recap March 10

Well it was a fun night last night at Right Brain Brewery.

N. showed up with the usual goodies – this time pretzels (some even peanut butter-filled).

Delicious!

Then A. shows up with a heavy pan of Guinness brownies – complete with decorations.  A delightful treat, and it was enjoyed by all.  It said: “Cheers to our ‘soon to be’ PUBlished Theologian!”

I’ve been working on a few writing projects as some of you know, and I had written up a book proposal about Pub Theology, comprised of stories, thoughts and theology through the prism of our regular Thursday gatherings.  I had sent it around a bit to get some feedback, and the consensus I received from Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle and others was that unless you already have a ‘market in hand’ – i.e., tons of readers of your blog (thank you, loyal few), hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers, and a large regular speaking audience, most publishers aren’t willing to take on a relatively unknown.  So with that encouraging start, I sent out my manuscript to a publisher, and a few weeks later got a message back that my proposal had been accepted and they are willing to offer me a book contract!  Very exciting.  No contract has been signed yet, and I’ll wait until then before giving any more details.

In any case, it was a celebratory evening, and the rich Guinness brownies were just right with a cask-poured Black IPA.

The topics:

1.    How can deprivation connect us to God?

2.    Ignatius:  “We must never seek to establish a rule so rigid as to leave no room for exception.” Never?

3.    Does God force people to believe in him?  Or does he let them choose?  Discuss the differences.

4.    “Trust in God could impose an additional burden…”  Could it?  How so?

5.    “If there were no evil, there would be no good, for good is the counterpart of evil.”  Your thoughts?

6.    Who killed Jesus?

7.    If you could ask God one thing, what would it be?

8.  Is the church above the law?

So, we quickly skipped no.1, as it was not a night for deprivation.  On to no.2  After Steve aptly pointed out that Ignatius was breaking his own rule (clever), we reflected on ways in which rules can sometimes get in the way of the thing they set out to address.  We had some good examples, but I’m not sure I’m able to recall them here.

No.3 – Nearly everyone agreed (everyone who holds to a belief in God, at any rate), that God allows us some level of choice in choosing to follow him or choosing to ignore him.  To say that we have no choice, and it is all predetermined, would sort of make a mockery of the whole thing, and remove any kind of responsibility, not to mention any chance of genuine relationship.  That is not to say that God might not already know how things are going to go, but that is different than God making the decision for us.

No.4 – see the following quote:
“… trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but non-believers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit had happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely, because he had to reconcile God’s love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.”

In other words, it is hard to understand sometimes why bad stuff happens when you believe that God is good and he has your best interests at heart.  If you don’t think God is there, you assume bad stuff will happen at some point, but you don’t take it personally.  We noted several instances of where we try to make sense of and draw meaning from tragedies and difficulties, also noting that for many people (even many of us), our faith gives us the strength to get through such situations, even when we don’t understand what God is up to.

no. 5 – we skipped

no.6 – who killed Jesus?  My blog post on this got some conversation going earlier in the week.  I tended to lean toward the creation being responsible for killing Jesus, not the Creator.  Some versions of atonement theory lean toward the latter, but those paint a rather gruesome picture of God, in my opinion.  Someone at the table noted: the Romans killed Jesus, what else is there to talk about?

no.7 – skipped

no.8 – Is the church above the law? We noted that there are instances where the church seems to get special treatment (see Catholic church and pedophilia abuses), and that that is bad stuff and should stop.

We enjoyed a visit from some newcomers – C, P and their son, A, on break from MSU.   K and B made it out, as did S & R, and G & J.  And of course, N., A., and me.  A good night, all around!

Next week: Pub Theology St. Patty’s-style!

Approaching the Table

The Bread and the Wine

A Prayer  from Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

Prayer for Communion

Celebrant:
The table of bread is now to be made ready.
It is the table of company with Jesus,
and all who love him.
It is the table of sharing with the poor of the world,
with whom Jesus identified himself.
It is the table of communion with the earth,
in which Christ became incarnate.
So come to this table,
you who have much faith
and you who would like to have more;
you who have been here often
and you who have not been for a long time;
you who have tried to follow Jesus,
and you who have failed;
come.

It is Christ who invites us to meet him here.

All:
Loving God,
through your goodness
we have this bread and juice to offer,
which has come forth from the earth
and human hands have made.
May we know your presence
in the sharing,
so that we may know your touch
and presence in all things.
We celebrate the life that Jesus has shared
among his community through the centuries,
and shares with us now.
Made one in Christ

and one with each other,
we offer these gifts and with them ourselves,
a single, living, act of praise.

Amen.


Pub Theology Recap Feb 24

Brewing up discussion

A nice night of discussion at Right Brain Brewery, with old and new friends, and a nice pint of Pie Whole – brewed with a whole apple pie from Grand Traverse Pie Company – a nice applely, caramelly, pumpkiny brew.  Discussion was so good, that we only hit the first three of seven topics.  We’ll hold some over for next week.

Topics for the night:

good / bad

amulets

meaning

sasquatch

Longer version:

1.    Ancient proverb:  “Every time something bad happens, something good happens as well.”
Does it?  Why?  What is your experience?

2.    The oldest known Hebrew Bible texts are silver amulets dated to about the mid-seventh century BCE.  Amulets were worn as charms against evil or injury.  Compare to usage(s) of the text today.

3.  “Much desire to seek after God is nothing of the sort.  For instance, to seek God for eternal life is to seek eternal life, while to seek God for a meaningful existence is to seek a meaningful existence.”
What does it mean to truly seek God?


OK so we didn’t really talk about sasquatch.  At least not for long.  🙂  Discussion about good and bad started out with someone noting that he used to think along the lines of the proverb quoted, that bad things were accompanied or followed up by good things.  However, after a series of seemingly senseless tragedies and difficult circumstances, he had moved to a more cynical place, where bad things ‘just happen’, without a deeper purpose or greater good behind them.

I noted that I like to think that a big picture view could step outside the bad things that happen and see them as part of a larger pattern or whole, and that somehow and someway God has purposes in what happens, and that even out of bad can come good.  And this is a perspective that we are not privy to in this life.  But I also noted that I have a very limited amount of what you could call ‘bad experiences’, certainly a lack of tragedies in my life – and that I’m not the best one to talk from experience.

Someone else noted that it is cruel and perhaps an insult to tell someone who is in the midst of a hardship that it is ‘for a purpose’ or that they have to just step back to ‘see the good’.  It’s not an easy thing.

Maybe bad things just are.  We live in a broken world.  Bad things happen.

But I do believe that God often can use hard situations to bring about good things, but I don’t think those bad things happen expressly so that we can experience something good.

Most people felt the old proverb might be true in a very general sense, but certainly not as an axiom of how things always go.

Regarding the ancient superstitious use of texts of the Bible, it was noted that people still have many superstitions, and that we may even (mis)use the Bible that way today.

Regarding the third quote, from Peter Rollins’ book How (Not) to Speak of God, generated some interesting discussion.  Someone asked if we are ever able to pursue God without some selfish or ulterior motive.  Can we pursue God just for God himself?  Or do the benefits – meaning, life, salvation, peace of mind – always blur our motives, or are the motives themselves? Is it wrong to seek God out of selfish motives?  Is this the one place where hedonism is permitted, as no doubt John Piper and others would assert?

It was a nice, low-key evening, and we’ll save the other topics for next time!

A reading from the backside:
“The weakening of God into the world, described in the
Pauline language of emptying (kenosis), is paradigmatically
expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the
birth, but also the death of Jesus.  Kenosis is not a one-time-
only event occurring in the life and death of Jesus but the
ongoing history or tradition inaugurated by this event.  This
process is ‘secularization’, which means not the abandonment
or dissolution of God, but the ‘transcription’ of God into time
and history (the saeculum), thus a successor form of death of God
theology.  Kenosis, as the transcription, translation, or
transmission of God into the world, means establishing the
kingdom of God on earth.

For example, the commonplace complaint that the secular
world has taken the Christ out of Christmas and transcribed it
into “Happy Holidays” is to be viewed as still another success
on Christianity’s part.  For now the Incarnation has been
translated into a popular secular holiday in the West, in which
the spirit of generosity and goodwill among all people prevails.
During the “holidays” this “spirit” of love becomes general
among humankind, which is what in fact this doctrine actually
means: its application in the concrete reality of lived
experience.  The tolerant, nonauthoritarian and pluralistic
democratic societies in the West are the translation into real
political structures of the Christian doctrine of neighbor love.
When the transcendent God is “weakened” – or emptied – into
the world, it assumes the living form of Western cultural life.”
– John Caputo, After the Death of God

Post any of your own thoughts on the evening below!

Pub Theology Recap Feb 17

Despite being displaced from our normal spot on the back pew, we had a good evening of conversation last night.  Over a dozen people, including a couple of new folks, not least of which was my wife Christy.  She made a rare late appearance, bringing sushi no less.

On to the topics:

Is anything really *new*?

progress

change

dualism

explosions

In detail:

1.    Is there anything under the sun whereof it might be said, “This is new.”?

2.    “Society determines what and how we know, and forms us into the kinds of people we are. Thus as members of society we are never truly free, but instead formed into the sort of people power decides we ought to be.”  Fate, Determinism or freedom?

3.    What is progress?

4.    What is the one thing you’d most like to change about the world?

5.    “Religions admittedly appeal, not to conviction as the result of argument, but to belief as demanded by revelation.” Isn’t revelation an argument?

6.    The Buddha: “The mind is everything; what you think you become.”  Think about that.

7.     Does theism necessarily imply dualism?

8. “Religion is most effective where it is least obvious.”  Do you agree?  If so, why?

9. “Religion is the metaphysics of the masses; by all means let them keep it.  Just as they have popular poetry, and the popular wisdom of proverbs, so they must have popular metaphysics too: for mankind absolutely needs an interpretation of life; and this, again, must be suited to popular comprehension.”

10. Scientists discover that the explosion, which, in the Bible signals the divine message, was effectively the visual trace of a terrible catastrophe that destroyed a flourishing alien civilization.   Likely?

11. “When was the last time someone questioned you about your faith? Whereas once the question would have been ‘are you a Christian,’ the phraseology is now more often along the lines of ‘would you call yourself a Christian.’

The first is an objective statement of being, an absolute. The second a subjective assessment – you might not call me that, but that’s what I call myself. Perhaps the move from objective to subjective ontology is part of a wider cultural shift…”

______________
Wow.  That’s a lotta stuff.  Someone was a little over the top in putting this list together.

Given the size of the crowd, we split into a couple of groups, and I was sometimes in on one discussion, sometimes another.  Discussion ranged on what does ‘new’ mean, and does technology count as new?  Obviously when Ecclesiastes was written and Qoheleth was musing on the endless repetition of the old which gets passed off as new, he probably did not envision someone at a pub in 2011 looking up his writings on their digital communication device in another language.  That seems sorta new, or is it merely a repackaging of the old?

For that matter, is technology progress?  Can progress be limited to things that seem to happen ‘out there’ in the culture, things in technology development, methods of science or learning…  Is progress also related to things that happen to a person spiritually, socially, internally?

And speaking of internal development – are we free to develop and grow as individuals, or are we constantly being shaped by the cultural currents in society, by institutions, by ‘the powers that be’?

There was some talk of the Buddha, but I’m not sure that was fit for print here.

Regarding revelation, we pondered the difference between an argument based on reason, science, logic, etc., and that which comes via the divine or even through someone else or through intuition, what we might call revelation.  Is revelation always personal?  Does revelation happen en masse?  How do you know when to listen when someone says, “God told me”?  And what about when we are separated from said revelation by thousands of years and it comes via a canonical tradition which says, ‘This is what God has said.”?   It was noted that people tend to be more and more skeptical of that which comes via revelation, we want cold, hard ‘facts’ which can be positively demonstrated.  Yet is there more to life than ‘the facts’?

Regarding explosions and flourishing alien civilizations, several stories of the ‘paranormal’ were shared, including an out of body experience and a night-sky sighting that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Also noted was the possibility of nano-bots running the universe once we hit ‘the singularity’, or of the world ending in a mess of grey goo, of the fact that nano-bots might be the means by which God brings about the new heavens and the new earth, that we ourselves might be more implicated in the final realization of the kingdom of God than we might think.

All in all, a good night, and the Dark Side chocolate stout was not to be missed.

Theology vs. Science

"Fall of Man" by Hendrik Goltzius

“Set the sails of fear, the winds a-stirring…”
~ Charlie Darwin
by The Low Anthem

If science conflicts with theology, what should give way?

In the past, the church excommunicated the likes of Copernicus and Galileo for their findings which differed with the prevailing theology of the day.  And this was based, it was argued, on Scriptural grounds.  Of course, later the church had to admit it was wrong, and theology had to adapt to science.

This continues to play out today over the issue of creation and evolution.  Are the two ‘theories’ truly at odds?  Could God have been involved in creating over long periods of time through evolution, or does evolution necessarily imply there is no God?  Or perhaps could evolution show that God, and even we ourselves, are different than we’ve thought?

Two religion professors at Calvin College, the Christian Reformed church’s official college, are asking hard questions about evolutionary science and Reformed theology (much of this blogpost comes from Roxanne Van Farowe’s article in the latest issue of The Banner).

Harlow and Schneider

Professors Daniel Harlow (pictured left) and John Schneider (right) of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., published scholarly articles asserting that strong evidence from both biblical studies and science creates conflicts with parts of the historic Reformed confessions and requires theological explanation.

In particular, they question whether Adam and Eve actually existed, whether there was a literal Fall, and whether we need to reinterpret the doctrine of original sin as presented in the Reformed confessions.

The papers were published in The American Scientific Affiliation’s journal Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith.

Harlow wrote that he was exploring from the perspective of mainstream biblical scholarship, which is that “Adam and Eve are strictly literary figures—characters in a divinely inspired story about the imagined past that intends to teach primarily theological, not historical, truths about God, creation, and humanity.”

Harlow also wrote, “Genesis 3, read in its immediate context, does not depict the man and woman’s transgression as an act that infected all subsequent humanity. . . . For teaching about the Fall and original sin, then, we must wait for Paul and the church fathers.”

Schneider wrote that the traditional understanding of the Fall does not fit with current science: “[T]he narrative of human evolution makes it very hard, if not impossible, to maintain [the position that human and demonic creatures are responsible for evil]. For it seems, on this science, that not just natural evils . . . but also the disposition for human moral evils, are practically part of God’s original design.”

It appears the two are coming under some heavy fire, because their teaching conflicts with the historic confessions of the church.

The articles in question were approved by the college, yet college president Gaylen Byker said at a faculty senate meeting that the two professors had violated the Form of Subscription, according to the college’s student newspaper, Chimes. (The Form of Subscription requires Calvin College faculty to teach and write in accordance with Reformed confessions.)

But should theology really trump science?

Calvin physics professor Loren Haarsma co-wrote a book on Christianity and evolution with his wife, Deborah Haarsma. He said that a conversation between academic disciplines about hominid/human evolution is overdue on the campus.

“The fossil evidence does not point to a single pair of ancestors for the human race,” he said. “We feel we have to ask these questions because our study of God’s world has forced us to ask these questions.”

But theologian Al Wolters, a professor emeritus at Calvin’s sister school, Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, does not agree with the two professors’ work.

“The issue of the historical Fall is a cornerstone of Christian beliefs, shared by all major branches of Christendom,” Wolters said. “To openly explain it away as myths and literary devices to square with scientific evidence is a pretty momentous step to take.”

In 1991, synod (the CRC’s annual leadership gathering) had stated that “all theorizing that posits the reality of evolutionary forebears of the human race” was ruled out by Scripture and the confessions.

However, Synod 2010 removed that declaration from its position statement on creation and science.

Here’s what others are saying in reaction:

  • “Let’s be honest here. There are ulterior motives to all the theories, exegetical mythology, and redefinitions. That would be that people want their human reasoning to usurp God. They want to be their own god and determine their own truth. They also want the Bible to be open to reinterpretation because then it will excuse any and all ungodly behavior. People support evolution and strive to make science their “God” because they love themselves and their sin.”
  • “Forget their jobs; they should be excommunicated. Such heresy and conformism to the rhetoric of today’s dogmatic worldly “thinkers” is intolerable. Without an Adam, who needs a second Adam?”
  • “Harlow is making an argument for his position that Adam and Eve were simply literary figures. That is the main point of the article.   Instead of creating humanity “very good” as scripture says, Harlow sees original sin as part of the evolutionary and original genetic make-up of humanity (proto-humanity). It is very different from an Augustinian view.  In Harlow’s view of original sin (quoting and agreeing with others) original sin was something humanity was intrinsically created with but only came to realize later in time after the process of evolution took its effect.”
  • “The point of the article is seen when Harlow clearly says that “In current Christian thinking about Adam and Eve, five basic scenarios are on offer,” and then proceeds to list them. He then says that the last one, the literary theory, is “a view that is largely unknown in evangelical circles,” and then he goes on to explain that theory and the appeal of it.  He does seem to be siding with the literary theory, but the paper is nonetheless clearly presented as one option only out of many acceptable ones.”
  • “How exactly does a literary idea of creation eliminate the possibility of a personal God? And didn’t God not send Jesus until about 2000 years ago? Doesn’t that leave a lot of humanity missing out on a crucial piece of revelation? The Christian faith, after all, is a faith that happened at a certain point in history, with some coming before and some after. How would this view of creation be different?”
  • “It is crucial to read and think about the Bible. But if you take everything at face value, don’t bother applying the considerable resources and discoveries humanity has at its disposal, and refuse to accept things that are nearly irrefutable and that don’t present any sort of danger to the Bible or Christianity, you’re doing a disservice to yourself, all those around you, and God.”

Here is the comment I posted on the article’s page:

  • As a pastor I can understand being held to teach in conformity with the form of subscription, even if I don’t prefer it. But does it really make sense to force professors in the sciences such as the Haarsmas to be bound in their teaching by late-medieval theological documents?Additionally, Wolters’ argument that “the issue of the historical Fall is a cornerstone of Christian beliefs, shared by all major branches of Christendom” is not really an argument that supports that the historical fall actually took place. It merely underlines the fact that it is an historically important doctrine. Just because we’ve always thought “X”, does not provide evidence that “X” is actually the case.Not that I am disagreeing with him, and I know he would say more given the space, I just think we have to use better language than saying, “Well this is just too important to change.”

    People also thought slavery was pretty important (economically) and also thought it was important that the earth was the center of the universe (theologically).

    We’ve since thought otherwise.

What do you think? Post a comment to continue the discussion.

Rain + Crops + X + Food = Joy

“He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” ~Acts 14:17

Paul speaks these words to a crowd that is unfamiliar with the God of Israel.  They are worshipers of the Greco-Roman pantheon, confusing he and Barnabas for Zeus and Hermes.

He attempts to correct their confusion not by denouncing Zeus and Hermes, per se, but by pointing to the natural world, and saying, this is all the result of God.

Van Gogh
Wheat Field in Rain by Van Gogh

Look about you, says Paul, the valleys and plains are fertile.  The rainfall here is fairly abundant.  Those large drops of water are gifts from the heavens, bringing life to the verdant earth, which in turn sprouts crops – grains, vegetables, fruit, which in turn fills your bellies as you sit around fires and tables with those you love.

At those meals, as the shining faces of those you love reflect back to you the very joy you yourself feel, the goodness of life assaults you.  Your heart is filled with joy.

Paul’s declaration of God to these people is based on the natural world.  On the common joyful experience of life shared by all humanity.

Revelation 4:11 puts it this way: “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and for your pleasure they are and were created.”

Perhaps our joy is rooted in God’s joy.  God created the world for his pleasure, and invites us to join him in that.

So Paul says:  rain comes from God.  Rain leads to crops.  Crops lead to food.  All of this fills our hearts with joy.  But how do we get from rain to crops?  And how do we get from crops to food?  What is missing in this equation?

Farming by hand

Work. There are some natural crops that will grow, to be sure, but when the time is taken to consciously plant and tend and harvest – the more fruitful it is for us and others.

And I think it’s understood in what Paul is saying, that work is part of what fills our hearts with joy.

Work and joy? Unfortunately, that is a rare combination today.

When you ask someone what gives them joy, or about what’s great in their lives – too often work is not a part of it.  We sort of ‘put up with work’ so that we can then do the other things we really care about.  By and large work is not what gives us pleasure.

In today’s economic reality, we have separated work and joy.

Wendell Berry, in an essay entitled Economy and Pleasure” notes in regard to God’s delight in creation: “This bountiful and lovely thought that all creatures are pleasing to God – and potentially pleasing, therefore, to us – is unthinkable from the point of view of an economy divorced from pleasure, such as the one we have now, which completely discounts the capacity of people to be affectionate toward what they do and what they use and where they live and the other people and creatures with whom they live.”

Yet Berry notes we are not unfamiliar with pleasure:

“It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, in the fact that we support a great variety of pleasure industries and that these are thriving as never before.  But that would seem only to prove my point.  That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places.

More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure.  More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement.  More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons – why else should we be so eager to escape them?  We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there either. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.”

And Berry, like Paul, encourages us to turn to the natural world:

“Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price?  Where is our sanity but there?  Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world.”

Paul says – this world is filled with evidence of God.  And these good things: rain, crops, food, work – these are evidence of God’s kindness – they give God joy, and in turn ought to give us joy.

And where does our dissatisfaction with work lead us?

“As evidence of the fact that we don’t like work,” Berry says, “we have mechanized and automated and computerized our work.  But what does this do but divide us ever more from our work and our products – and in the process, from one another and the world?”

Berry concludes:  “In the right sort of economy, our pleasure would not be an addition, or by-product or reward, it would be an empowerment of our work and the measure by which we gauge such work.  Pleasure, he says, perfects work.”

Part of the problem is that we associate work with “drudgery”, especially hard work.  And so we attempt to remove drudgery from our lives, and assume that if things are easier, we will be happier.

Wendell Berry gives a personal example:

“I can say, for example, that the tobacco harvest in my home area involves the hardest work that I have done in any quantity.  In most of the years of my life, from early boyhood until now, I have taken part in the tobacco cutting.  This work usually occurs at some time between the last part of August and the first part of October.  Usually the weather is hot and the work is extremely demanding.  Because all of the work still must be done by hand, this event has maintained much of its old character; it is very much the sort of thing the agriculture experts have had in mind when they have talked about freeing people from drudgery.

“That tobacco cutting can be drudgery is obvious.  But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery.  None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear.  Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.

The tobacco cutting is the most protracted social occasion of our year.  Neighbors work together; they are together all day every day for weeks.  The quiet of the work is not interrupted by machine noises, and so there is much talk.  There is talk involved in the management of the work, speculation about the weather, and there is much laughter.  Because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished.  And there are memories.

The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back; my own earliest associations with it occurred over fifty years ago.  And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered.  The cutting is a sort of ritual and remembrance.  Old stories are retold; the dead and the absent are remembered.  Some of the best talk I have ever listened to I have heard during these times, and I am especially moved to think of the care that is sometimes taken to speak well – that is, to speak fittingly – of the dead and the absent.  The conversation, one feels, is ancient.  Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers.  How long it may continue is now an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know.  We only know that while it lasts it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.”

The happiness of farming.  The happiness of work.

Sadly, becoming more and more rare.

And it seems the more and more we’ve come up with processes to mechanize work, the freer we have felt to destroy the world that God created for his pleasure, rather than live in harmony with it.  We now can farm tracts of land that would have been incomprehensible without machines, even if the land is not best suited for it, or a loss of topsoil is the result.  Or we can strip mine in ways that give little thought to what we are doing to the land, or clear cut forests with little thought to the local culture and economy, shipping the ‘resources’ elsewhere, and leaving a wasteland behind.  We use poisons and toxins to make sure the crop is not hindered by insects or disease, forgetting that our “technological fixes” while providing a bumper crop now, undoubtedly involve larger costs later.  Technology is not the problem in and of itself.  It can be a great good.  It is technology without conscience that gets us in trouble.

We need less people to work, because we have replaced them with machines, because we value efficiency over process, because we value the dollar over everything else.  And what has this done but force more and more people from rural life into cities, where there is no such work to be found, yet they continue to go under the myth of ‘progress’ and ‘new opportunities.’  The result is higher unemployment, and higher dissatisfaction with life, and a further distancing ourselves from work that gives us pleasure, and so we come up with whole industries to make us feel better about our lives and forget our misery.  In other words, things that drug us to continue heading in the same miserable direction without once considering what might be the root cause of our unhappiness.

God has created a world for his pleasure, and invites us to join him in the delight.  But when we despise those gifts, when we think we can outsmart God by constant and further industrialization and destruction of the world he has put under our care – and then live for the weekend – I think it seriously hampers our ability to preach a sermon like Paul is preaching  in Acts 14.

We must find our pleasure again in God and in the world he delights in and has put under our care.  That care requires work.

Perhaps most of us are not farmers, yet we can support local farmers who operate with the above mindset, shopping at local farmers markets, we can participate community-supported agriculture.  We can tend our own small gardens and put our hands in the earth.  We can get involved in our local watersheds and rivers, helping protect forests and becoming more conscious of how each activity we engage in impacts the people and world around us.

And we can delight in our own work – whatever it is.  Work that operates in harmony with the world around us, that respects it and seeks to sustain and delight in it, such work must also bring delight and pleasure to the Creator.

The natural environment is not something simply to be used for our own ends.  It is not just something given to us to “grow the economy.”

It is, as Paul reminds us today: a window into the divine, a picture of the wonder of a God who said, and still says of his world today, “It is good.  Very good.”

So good, in fact, that he’s decided not to scrap it.  Maybe it’s time for us to support that decision.

To Kindle or not to Kindle

A review of the digital reader from Amazon.

Well, I am a reader.  You could say an avid reader.  It is, no doubt about it, one of my favorite activities in the world.  A good book, a reference book, a history book, and a cup of coffee and I am in my own world.  Diving into the knowledge, the stories, the history within two covers, printed on paper – a piece of life, captured in words – is a magical experience.  I love books.  But is it the book itself that I love, or the content for which the book is a vehicle?  In ancient times, before the printing press, knowledge and stories were shared orally, then initially printed in the form of cave drawings, early alphabetic attempts, etchings on stone, writing on skins and scrolls…

For the last several hundred years we’ve had books.  A big step forward.  Well now we have not just books, but devices that can contain thousands of ‘e-books’, and the ability to read them in a fashion somewhat similar to an actual book, thanks to e-readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle.  Will it catch on?

It seems at some level is already has.  Thousands of Kindles, Nooks, Sony and other e-readers have been selling.

Yet I resisted this digital phenomenon, citing my love for the book itself and the experience that came with it – it’s own history, former owners, dusty look, leather-bound cover, or crinkled paperback existence.  How could you replace the beauty of a worn-out spine or the smell of a printed page?

But after my recent move, and carry box after box after box of heavy books, and knowing that I would continue to add to this collection – I decided I had to at least give the e-book thing a try.

So about two months ago I broke down and bought a Kindle.  I was worried for the most part about the reading experience.  I knew it would be great to have access to so many books at once, and be able to carry them with me, and be able to highlight, take notes, find definitions of words in a second – but would I actually like to sit down with a digital device and read?  Could this experience really emulate reading an actual book?

KindleThe answer is decidedly yes.  The Kindle arrived, and I had bought the corresponding cover for it – which makes the whole thing look much like a book, and you have to open it like the cover of a book, so there are some nods to the traditional printed counterparts.  After charging it up, and loading a few free books, and buying a couple others, I started to use it.  And I found that not only is it acceptable – I love it!  It is actually easier to read than an actual book, because there are no pages turn.  This means I can read with one hand, or with no hands, I can read while eating and use the side of my hand to ‘turn a page’.  The digital ink technology mimics printed ink, and is no worse for the eyes than reading an actual book.   It turns out that I am more interested in the content of a book than I am in the book itself.  But don’t worry – I am not turning turning my back on my printed pieces.  In fact, I just had some built-in bookshelves put in at my house to house the collection my wife and I have, but the fact is that I can only take so many books with me at a time, and the Kindle ups that amount incredibly.

And of course the fact that there are millions of free e-books in the public domain, including tons of theological and historical texts – not to mention thousands of literary classics – and you really can’t go wrong.  At $139, my Kindle paid for itself an hour after I had it out of the box, downloading plenty of free material, as well as newer books at discounted prices.  I find myself reading more and more these days – and when I’m reading a real book, I actually get nostalgic for my Kindle.

So if you’re also a serious reader, you may want to give an e-reader a second look.  And for my part, the latest incarnation of the Kindle, the Kindle 3 – graphite with 6″ pearl e-ink display, a battery that lasts a month, the ability to hold 3,500 books – is the best of the bunch.

And now, of course, you can subscribe to Pub Theologian on your Kindle and read it anywhere, anytime!

See a review in the London Telegraph of the Kindle.


The Threat of Relevance

Came across these great insights from the late NT scholar Krister Stendahl.  They are too good not to pass along, and articulate exactly why I love to dig into the background and context of the text:

“Many of us read the Bible all on one level.  One reason for this may be that we are somewhat afraid that unless we do this, the word of God is not going to be relevant enough for us.  We do not have enough faith in the word of God really to allow it to speak for itself – so we hang on our own little relevancies, just as apples or other decorations are hung on a Christmas tree.

Actually, there is no greater threat to serious biblical studies than a forced demand for ‘relevance.’  We must have patience and faith enough to listen to and seek out the original’s meaning.  If this is not done, biblical study suffers and may, indeed, come up with false and faulty conclusions and interpretations.

This is a serious point for our topic (the Apostle Paul), because we have gone behind the hermeneutical to the exegetical level – behind today, behind Luther and Calvin, behind Augustine.  We have tried to see an original meaning – albeit an original meaning which proved by interpretation and reinterpretation to be significant at different points in history.  But when is it legitimate to read Paul’s words about justification or about, say, conscience in a truly Pauline mood, a mood which seeks to discover what was in the mind of the author rather than meanings for us today?  As an exegete, as a biblical scholar, I must be primarily concerned with the former question.

But as a theologian and pastor let me point out that we are not supposed continually to play “Bibleland” and dream ourselves back into a sort of Semitic mood.  That is not what God wants us to do.  But, we must first read the Bible to find original meanings and allow those meanings to correct our tendencies to read our own views into the original rather than letting the original stand and speak for itself.  Seek ye first the original meanings – and all these things shall be yours as well….

It is very important, for example, that when Paul speaks about the Jews, he really speaks about Jews, and not simply the fantasy Jews who stand as a symbol or as the prime example of a timeless legalism…

What has happened to Christianity is that instead of having free access to the original, we have lived in a sort of chain reaction – Augustine touching up Paul, and with Pelagius discussing and turning these things around, the medievalists pushing one way or another, and then further reactions, moving away from the original.  We must now take a fresh look at the original and try to make our own translation, learning from the older versions and from the Confessions, to be sure, but translating the text and not the translations.

The original is there, and I have tried to point to it.

The original is there, and to return to it is to be a true son or daughter of the Reformation.”

-=-=-=-
–From Krister Stendahl’s Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Fortress Press, 1977, Kindle Edition).

Great book, by the way, if you want some insight as to how we in the West often misunderstand Paul by reading him through the lens of the Reformation and a Lutheran/Calvinist introspection-obsessed perspective rather than through his first-century Jewish-Hellenistic context.

If you’re interested in these things – finding out more of what the Bible meant then so we can begin to grasp what it means now, and live in the TC area, feel free to join us Tuesday evenings for our Text-in-Depth gatherings.

The Divine Present

Commentary on Torah Portion Sh’mot (Exodus 1:1-6:1) written by Rabbi Marc Wolf, Jewish Theological Seminary.

The past ten years have brought us blogging, Googling, YouTubing, tweeting on Twitter, and updating our Facebook statuses. Each progressive step (if we really want to call it progress) has brought new meaning to here and now. What these technologies have demonstrated is that we have a virtual obsession with being current—with letting people know exactly what we are thinking, doing, or experiencing.

At first, the obsession was casual. We blogged about our lives and posted videos on YouTube, highlighting the trivial and the sublime. We reacted to news stories, ranted about airline service, waxed philosophical about politics, and inspired an audience of millions-and in some cases there actually were millions in the audience. Who didn’t enjoy watching the hit counter exponentially escalating on the video of “Jill and Kevin’s Wedding Entrance” (currently at over 38 million views and definitely not an example of the sublime) or feel provoked to act by “The Girl Effect” as it landed in inboxes and on blog posts? We have been amused, moved, enraged, and entertained as we demonstrated with our comments in online forums.

But our fixation didn’t end there.

As we moved through the decade, we discovered that blogging was too demanding for people with day jobs, so Facebook blossomed and our “friends” found out who we were, what we liked, and how many friends we had in common. We filled the space between blogging and Facebook by tweeting constant notifications of every twist and turn in our daily lives.

What has ultimately emerged as the years and technology progressed over this digital decade is our complete and utter infatuation with the present. We are driven to update, to tweet, to post, to capture this moment. Now. The present.

Interestingly enough, as much as Jewish institutions have benefited from the technological advances of this past decade (you may be hearing this as a JTS podcast), Judaism itself sees the present not as something we can capture at any given moment, but rather as elusive, or better yet, impossible to articulate.

This week, Moses encounters God for the first time after fleeing the oppression and injustice he witnesses at the hand of the Egyptians. Tending the flock of his father-in-law, Moses guides his sheep deep into the wilderness where he experiences a revelation of God in the Burning Bush. He comes to learn that this God of his ancestors has recognized that it is time to redeem the people and bring them to their destined land. When Moses questions whether he is fitting for the task presented to him, God reassures him, insisting that the Divine Presence will be with him (Exod. 3:1–12).

While Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob experienced God in a similar formulaic manner, Moses’s experience differs significantly in the verses that follow.

Moses said to God, “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.” He continued, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you'” (Exod. 3:13–15a).

Moses comes to know God by a completely different name that is unique to his experience. But what is it about this particular appellation? The Torah and rabbinic literature are replete with names for God, but Moses alone comes to know God as Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.

Rabbi Alan Lew, (z”l), understands this moment as teaching us more about Moses than God. It is Moses’s consciousness that defines his relationship with God. His presence of mind at the burning bush inspires his understanding of and relationship to God:

Eventually, Moses will ask God God’s name, and God will reply, Eyeh chasher eyeh, “I Am That I Am,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be” (the tense is not clear), and then later, simply Yud Hey Vov Hey, the verb “to be” in the present tense. The name of God is the only way to express present-tense being in the Hebrew language; you cannot say, “I am tall,” you can only say, “I tall.” Only God can be the absolute present tense; humans can only approach this state. Even when we are present, mindful, flush with our experience, there is still a synapse of milliseconds between the experience itself and the time it takes our nervous system to process it. (One God Clapping, 260)

Moses is truly in this moment. That is why he comes to know God as “The Present.” He is, as Buber would suggest, in an “I and Thou” relationship with God. Present in the present, so to speak. As Rabbi Lew puts it (his passing last year left us wanting more instructing on living this teaching), “we are never really in our experience, just watching a movie of what happened several milliseconds ago, but the closer we get to being present, the closer we get to God.”

Our challenge for the coming decade is to redefine the present not as a time period, but a state of mind, and devote more of our time to updating our mindset rather than our Facebook status.

The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee and Harold (z”l) Hassenfeld.

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