Speaking freely

Torah, Prophets and Scribes

2012-01-29T18:56:00.003-06:00

For a theologian, I'm on a pretty heavy Bible kick lately. Part of which is working in Barth's CD III -- as he says, it'd be nice to be able to rely on Bible folks, but sometimes to do theology we simply have to make our own way as amateurs.

"They were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes." Mk. 1:22

"... a prophet like me from among your own people." Deut. 18:15

Surely, in today's readings, the wisdom of mother church means us to see Jesus in this role. But this promise to Moses is fulfilled in every generation. God's word does not sit idle -- but we fear to hear it directly. We fear the immediate presence of God -- and rightly so! And so God has said, "Fine; here's the deal."

And the deal is that God will use a mouthpiece from then forward. God will speak through a mediator. God will raise up one who will speak for God, an oracle and interpreter, and God's word will come to you from your own mouths.

And so we haven't escaped the presence of God -- just some of the terrifying immediacy. And we haven't really decreased the likelihood of our own death -- but then, God didn't aim to kill us in the first place. And in this way, an individual takes up greater responsibility and risk at God's choice, in order to ensure that the people may not suffer consequences at God's hand without warning. In this way, God ensures that the people will still hear -- whether or not they obey. The redeemed people remain responsible to their covenant master for their actions in the world. The prophet is simply the channel for instruction.

And Mark shows us what the people will come to think of Jesus -- that he is the Mosaic prophet for this generation. One who does not simply tend the flame of the words already given; one who is vested with the divine means of new words. One who gives instruction as Moses did -- but one whose Torah is not adapted Pharisaically from Moses and the earlier prophets.
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Talking About the Past in Greek (and not Latin)

2012-01-26T21:35:00.001-06:00

Some tenses of the Koine indicative are easy and obvious. For example, the present and future work about like you'd expect them to, with one paradigm per tense. The only trick there is teaching passive and middle voices. But when it comes to paradigms for the past tense, things get muddy. Koine Greek has three common paradigms for the past tense: the aorist, the imperfect, and the perfect. And in Greek they are called tenses -- chronoi, "times." The aorist paradigm already carries its Greek name: aoristos, "undefined," as the alpha-privative of horistos, from horos, "boundary marker." It is as simply past as you can get -- and says nothing more definite than the time.

The paradigms we call the imperfect and the perfect suggest more definite things. But tempus imperfectum and tempus perfectum are only the Latin analogues for the Greek tenses. And I've gotten very suspicious, lately, of Latin analogues for Greek concepts. Latin is a different language, with a profoundly different mindset -- far more linear and orderly. What the Latins called the imperfect tense, suggesting incomplete action, the Greeks called the chronos paratatikos, from parateinw, to "stretch out." This is the tense of continuing action, action that happens over time. What the Latins called the perfect tense, suggesting complete action, the Greeks called the chronos parakeimenos, from parakeimai, the passive of paratithemi. This is therefore the tense of things that are given, things that have been set forth in the past and therefore are available in the present. It is also called the enestws suntelikos, which is to say the "completed present" or "present perfect."

When we go back into the Greek grammarians, all the distinctions we'd like to make as English grammarians using Latin categories get fuzzy, and the Greek past is definitely one of those places. I set out to write about these three paradigms as ways of talking about the past, which is how they've been taught to me. As referring to a single past tense, using different aspects. The aorist is a preterite, the simple past; the imperfect is still past action, but has a progressive, iterative, or habitual sense; and the perfect is the case of completed past action with present effects.

And that gets so much more complicated in the history of Western grammarians studying Greek and developing theories about it. Tense, Aktionsart, aspect, all manner of subjective and objective attempts to describe the action of the verb, and then many attempts to simplify and describe those tense meanings from morphology alone. And that all boils down broadly to what I just described as the differences between these paradigms of the Greek past by aspect: the aorist is perfective, the imperfect is imperfective, and the perfect is perfect. Which is not a Greek way of looking at it.
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Teaching Mark as Script -- Scene by Scene

2012-01-24T16:00:00.005-06:00

I've been teaching Koine Greek using a compositional method, and slowly, for a while now. I keep thinking "if I just add this bit of grammar, then we can start reading things." Of course, I've also been borrowing from James Tauber and his primer approach, as well as the simplification I learned from my favorite Hebrew primer, to try and give things that can be read at-level.

But several weeks ago I realized that I am teaching Greek to someone who does oratory already. This gives me an angle! So I've been talking about the oral culture and the ways that Bible "texts" are really scripts. (Thank you, Dave Rhoads and Joanna Dewey!) At which point it became obvious to me that one way to drive interest in translating and learning more grammar was to learn it on the fly translating the simplest oral text I have: the Gospel according to Mark. But not just as a translation exercise -- that's incredibly dull.

To make it better, we're doing two things. First, there's the joy of freely making one's own good English out of good Greek. "I like the way it sounds better this way." I love hearing that! That starts a conversation! And I try to encourage this by refusing to give "normal" church-word glosses for things like hamartia, metanoia, euangelion, etc.... I want common-sense Greek to turn into common-sense English, not "Bible Greek" into "church English" -- because Bible Greek and church English are ways of not thinking about meaning! They're ways of mechanically turning this word into that word. And second, there's the added interest of learning Mark as a prose script -- uncovering the dramatic structure of what Mark is doing for his audience.
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Gender, God, and the Imago Dei

2012-01-17T19:17:00.000-06:00

On Saturday, I had the privilege of attending a friend's ordination. I've been to several ordinations in the past few years, but this one made me happy for more than the usual reasons. And not just because she had a "pick-up" choir and I got there early enough to sing with them. And the liturgy was very well done, with good hymnody and an eclectic setting, and I like that. And it's always nice to see my friends installed in calls near me, especially when they have families to help support. It's especially nice to see friends situated in congregations that affirm and support their calls to ministry.

And did I mention the new pastor is a woman? Do I really have to? Does it matter? For us that isn't the big deal, because we've been ordaining women for decades. But while I'm mentioning things that don't make any difference to the God who calls, let me mention why this ordination made me more than usually happy. The new pastor's partner is also a woman. Their daughter just turned 3 recently -- it's amazing how fast children grow up when you're not looking! Anyhow, the thing that makes me so happy about this ordination is that, in spite of all the trouble some in our church have caused over issues of gender and sexuality, the perfectly ordinary beauty of congregations and pastors coming together goes on, and I love it.

I wanted to share that as background for how far outside of the Evangelical discussions of complementarianism I find myself. My friend Kait has been dealing with recent material from Mark Driscoll and John Piper, and perhaps I don't disagree with it quite as viscerally as she does, but that's only because I'm an INTP. I don't really do visceral.
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Breaking the Fourth Wall: Remodeling

2012-01-17T09:15:00.002-06:00

I hate breaking the "fourth wall" in blog posts. I'd much rather use this space for the real work, and tell you about the blog on separate dedicated pages. And so, usually, when I retool the site, I do it silently. But I've been thinking quite a lot lately about theoblogging and what it is I do here. And a Twitter conversation yesterday between Travis, Jason, Derek, and a few others has pushed me to change some things.

My last retool of the site made it a bit more pretentious than it needs to be. I was too focused on trying to make an impression. I don't need this place to be my resume any more than it naturally is. Read the work, and you'll see -- who I am is what I do. And before the last remodel, this had been very much a "beta site" for working theology. In fact, it never really stopped being that. I've gotten more polished over the years in ways that have nothing to do with posturing before an audience, even though I still have a good bit of polishing yet to do. But the whole point here has always been to let the rough edges show as much as the shiny things.

So I've gone back to that mentality in the hopes that it keeps me a bit more faithful to the calling that I exercise here. This is, as the subtitle says, "a drafting room and workshop for Bible, theology, and philosophy." And I'm damn well going to be honest about it! The narrative CV is still up under "Vita Brevis," but I never liked what I had under "Rationale," no matter how many times I fiddled with it. Always either too boastful or too apologetic. So I got rid of it. In its place is the answer to a simple question, "What Is This Place?"

Also, I've kind of given up on begging for comments. If I say something worth reading and responding to, you're certainly welcome to chat me up in the comments thread. But I have no blessed clue how to write to stimulate conversation here on the blog, and lately, the best feedback I get comes to me completely outside of it. So I've added an invitation at the top, "Ask Me Something!" And maybe you will, and maybe you won't, but my door is open to you.

Abandon creativity and good sense, but stay on message.

2012-01-07T15:50:00.001-06:00

Oh, I don't mean today's politics -- no, I mean Paul. Let's have some words for the wise, shall we, from the first speech to the assembly of God in Corinth, 1:17-2:9

Christ did not send me to baptize. Christ sent me to announce good news -- and not with semantic creativity, so that I do not abandon the cross of Christ. You see, to dying people, the language of the cross is idiocy. But to people who are being rescued -- namely us -- it is the power of God.

So it is written,

“I will destroy the creativity of the creative,
and displace the common sense of the sensible."

Where is the creative one? The writer? The modern conversationalist? Has not God stupefied the world's creativity? Indeed, when by God's creativity the world did not know God through creativity, God condescended to save those who trust -- solely through the idiocy of the announcement.

When Judeans ask for signs, and Hellenes look for creativity, we announce the Christ, crucified. This is a scandal to Judeans, and idiocy to the nations -- but to those who are called, both Judeans and Hellenes, the Christ is God's power and God's creativity. Why? Because God's idiocy is more creative, and God's weakness stronger, than the people.

Look at your call story, siblings. You were not very creative, by the looks of you -- not very capable, not very noble. But God selected the world's idiots to dishonor the creative. And God selected the world's weak to dishonor the strong. And God selected the world's ignoble and contemptible, those who have not, to hinder those who have -- so that no flesh shall boast before God.
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... and a translation of Jn 1:1-18 to go with it.

2012-01-03T09:45:00.000-06:00

In the beginning was Wisdom, and Wisdom lived to God, and Wisdom was divine -- it lived first in relationship to God. Because of it, everything happened; not a single event took place without it. In it is life. Life was the light of humanity; that light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not surpass it.

And there was a person sent from God, and a word for him: Johanan, "God is gracious". This one came to report, to testify about the light so that everyone would trust because of him.

He was not the light; he lived to testify about the light. The true light that lights every person was coming into the world. It was in the world, and the world happened because of it, and the world did not know it. The light came to its own, and its own did not receive it.

It gave the right to become children of God to those who did accept it, to those who trust in his word. These come to be children not because of kinship, flesh, or husband, but because of God.

And Wisdom became flesh and took up residence among us, and we observed its character, the dignity of a father's only kin, fully invested with grace and truth.

John testified about him and shouted, saying "This is the one of whom I said, 'What is coming after me has happened before me'!" and "He was my better," and "From his fullness all of us have thankfully accepted grace," and "Moses was the means by which God gave Torah, but Jesus Christ is the means by which grace and truth happen."

No one had ever seen God; this only son, being in the confidence of the Father, explained him.

The Creation of the World in John 1

2012-01-02T16:15:00.000-06:00

So the more I deal with trinitarian thought, the more I find myself resenting John 1. Not for John's sake, certainly! But I'm convinced we've done a bad job of understanding what's going on there -- partially because of the Latin fathers, but also because we insist on John 1 as a pillar of trinitarian thought. Where else, after all, did we get a "logos Christology"? Five verses: John's creation story. Mark didn't need one. Matthew and Luke chose birth narratives to begin their stories of a Jesus who represents God's saving act. And John -- John chooses to tell the story of the creator God who alone makes sense of the world.

But for all the theology and history of interpretation, we don't read it according to the language that's there in the passage! So I'm taking this post as an opportunity to refactor John's language as a grammar and syntax lesson in Koine Greek. Let us try to hear it as children of a language that the Latins found preposterous, a language where syntax is simple, elements are noted by inflection and augmentation, and pieces can be freely rearranged for emphasis without confusing the audience. A language of poetic rhetoric.

And of course, we start with John 1:1-2:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος· οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν.

The Obedience of Faith?

2011-12-19T16:55:00.006-06:00

What struck me in this week's lectionary readings wasn't the gospel -- the Luke reading for Advent 4B is a bit trite for me, by itself. And as a good Lutheran should, I enjoyed watching God keep the balance in the relationship with David in the Old Testament reading -- even gifts we would give to God, God grants, and not always to us. The hubris of giving what we want, to God -- God gives us, instead, what God wants. And the psalm was a nice reflection on that.

But what struck me most this week belongs instead to that snippet of the very end of Paul's address to the Romans, through which I heard two different Christmas chancel dramas. "The obedience of faith" -- a phrase that encompasses Romans from 1:5 to 16:26. Whether or not Paul wrote this massive single-sentence doxology that appears as our epistolary reading this week, or meant it to appear in this place if he did, the manuscript tradition seems to find it a fitting coda. And the more I listened to the tableaus of Mary and Joseph and Zechariah and Elizabeth, the more I saw in them that "obedience of faith".

But is that what's really going on in our proper texts for this week? The more I look, the less sure I am. But it's certainly a way to cast fresh light on Luke 1.
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An Account of the Divine Logos

2011-12-13T15:55:00.001-06:00

A pretentious title, I know. And a long post to try to do it justice. Fair warning.

For a while now, every time I read someone on the doctrine of the trinity, even Barth, I am bothered. And what bothers me is that we take for granted a very radical statement: the God of the New Testament is the God of the Old Testament. And we take it for granted against its corollary: the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament.

What I'm missing, so often, is the implications of the simple fact that Torah and the prophetic writings were normative scripture for the authors and communities of the New Testament writings. That these people were Judean, and that their trust in God lived in and through Judean stories. And so, before God is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This same God is authentically and faithfully God to an elect people through an entire history from Abraham, before we goyim steal the spotlight. And this same God, and no other, chooses to become incarnate as the Messiah Jesus of Nazareth, in full faithfulness to the people Israel and the entire history from Abraham. Whether or not the people choose to be faithful!

And here's where I tend to lose my Reformed audience: this vast incarnational expansion of God's history of faithfulness in Jesus is perfectly coherent with the original act in which God chose one man, Abraham, to be the people in whom the whole creation would be redeemed.
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Pistachia of Justice

2011-12-08T16:24:00.001-06:00

וְקֹרָ֤א לָהֶם֙ אֵילֵ֣י הַצֶּ֔דֶק מַטַּ֥ע יְהוָ֖ה לְהִתְפָּאֵֽר׃

"That they might be called righteous terebinths, the planting in which the Lord God takes pride." (Is. 61:3)

Righteous pistachia, nut trees of justice. And yet also "righteous pillars," marking out and defining in prominence that place in which the Lord God takes pride. Being the "righteous strength" of that place, because the Lord God is their strength. And that righteous strength has purpose: what had been made into desert and wilderness, the redeemed will restore. God has redeemed the people from exile, and restores them in their land -- God's land, truly -- and theirs is to be a redeeming strength in that land, the responsive echo of God's own redeeming strength. A strength of justice.

And the text could just as well read "oaks" as "terebinths." It would certainly be more familiar to us -- the stately European and American Oaks of our acquaintance certainly speak of strength and prominence, and shade the meaning of `ayil in the text. But you will not find tall, deep-rooted and well-watered temperate-zone oak trees in Palestine. No structural pillars and beams of quartersawn heartwood as in Europe. Oaks in Palestine and the Med are spiny, durable shrubs, evergreen, and good for grazing sheep and goats. They grow among terebinths, equally shrubby nut trees whose sap is a preservative. The mention of these trees speaks automatically of Mamre, where Abram pitched his tent. And yet these specific trees are both `elon, not `ayil. `Ayil speaks to the strength of these trees in their place, as much as to the strength of the ram in the flock and the stag in the herd. To their noteworthy prominence. Of such is the people of God's own redemption, planted in God's own land. Hardy, adaptable, strong, flourishing where we are planted because God has planted us there.
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A Big-Enough Concept of Nature

2011-12-05T20:57:00.002-06:00

Phil Hefner is asking for a concept of nature large enough to encompass both the scientific and the theological epics of creation in their fullness. This is one of the reasons I'm involved with Zygon -- because of Phil and Lea Schweitz, my advisor, for the sake of doing theology as science. It's always a good day when Phil puts his theologian hat back on -- the echoes of Sittler, the more rigorous systematic work, the focus on the doctrine of creation, the precision on theological topics that tends to sit in the background as he talks his way through science.

A big-enough concept of nature. A big enough concept, not only to handle the rigors of our doctrines of God and human being and animal life -- to the extent that we actually have a doctrine of animal life (stay tuned for next term's Advanced Seminar!). A big enough concept also to handle everything we know from the natural and human sciences, even in spite of the naturalistic assumptions and expectations of those sciences. A big enough concept of nature for us as theologians to handle not only scientific knowledge, but also the intersection of technology. And, of course, to still tell the rich stories of creation that belong to our tradition. To speak our epics of creation without self-contradiction.
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Hierophany and Sanctification

2011-12-05T13:45:00.003-06:00

Otto and Eliade: explicable supernaturalism. This is what the study of religion gets you. Or, at least, the study of homo religiosus.

It's been important for me to converse with Otto and Eliade in dealing with Barth -- and it was apparently also important for Panu, my Finnish colleague, to deal with them in dealing with Sittler. Two emphatically preserved ("TÄRKEITÄ!") quotations from The Sacred and the Profane:

"It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu."

"For those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany."

We have here the ganz andere, the totaliter aliter, the sacred as "wholly other." (Which is not, of course, to speak of the ganz Andere as a naming of God.) The hierophany others some worldly object -- even the entire world -- leaving its worldly being intact but surmounting it with a transcendent divine reality. As Eliade will explain, it adds definiteness to an indefinite world. It is not a reality of our choosing, but we know the sacred to be more real than the profane -- which is to say, more real than the world absent this divine presence. And so sanctification orients us in the midst of troubling relativity.
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Publish Glad Tidings: Redemption and Release

2011-11-28T11:23:00.000-06:00

ἐγένετο Ἰωάννης ὁ βαπτίζων ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ καὶ κηρύσσων βάπτισμα μετανοίας εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν. (Mk 1:4)

"And there was John: the one who baptizes in the desert, and who proclaims the baptism of afterthought for the release of failures."

Besides the absurdity of baptism, of flooding, drowning, washing away, of the effusive cleanliness that only massive amounts of water can bring -- besides the absurdity of this taking place in the desert, there is something beautifully stirring about the words of Mark here. Words whose sense is not adequately transmitted to us by the English, "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."

It is said that the origin of the word "metaphysics" was a matter of sequence: having written the physics, the author proceeded to the next book, which came "after the physics." The Greek word metanoia has the same basic feeling, when we grasp it intently. Noesis is simply sensible, perceptive thought. Metanoesis is what happens after you've thought about what has happened -- it is reflective realization. Afterthought in the aftermath. Metanoia is that moment when it dawns upon you what you've done, and how, and the effects of your action sink in to your consciousness. It is regret, even in the face of the best of actions. It is regret because of hamartia, which simply means "missing the mark." What we have done falls short of what we must do, what we should have done, how we should have done it better.
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"These mark the commencement of labor."

2011-11-26T13:57:00.000-06:00

ἀρχὴ ὠδίνων ταῦτα. (Mk 13:9)

Ah, the "little apocalypse." And because of that, how often we sidestep the fact that what Jesus refers to here in Mark is the coming of new life into the world! Now, with the help of skilled obstetrics, we have no reason to expect that the mother will die. But there will certainly be pain -- and in a time without epidurals, let alone all the other things we associate with modern medically-assisted childbirth, that pain could be the end of the world.

And yet, in today's gospel reading, we receive the promise that the righteous rule of God will crown, and be born, and we will live to see it and not die in labor. The days of our travail will be cut short, and we will be rescued from the labor pains. And why have the days of labor been cut short? For the sake of the salvation of God's chosen people. Because God is not in the suffering -- God is in the bringing of new life, and the rescue of the old.

This is why we hope for the advent of our God, in this time of war and death and greed and suffering. And Jesus promises his audience, in every time and place where the story is told, that this lineage, this chosen people of God will not be wiped from the earth before the coming of the kingdom of God -- even if the heavens and the earth should be destroyed, the promise will remain. As for when the labor will begin -- well, you know as well as I do, that that's in God's hands. And so we will watch for it, and endure the time patiently, knowing that when it comes, new life will follow.

And in fact God will expand this chosen people -- this nation whose righteous fruit is the fig, and not the olive. In the sweeping aside of every celestial power that could claim our allegiance, God has also sent witnesses to the ends of the earth, and Paul is one, just as Isaiah was. That new life is new life for us also, because we have been grafted into the fig tree, and await the summer with every Judean, every life that belongs to God's planting in Abraham. We live by the grace and peace that God sends us, the "pure fatherly goodness" Luther declares in the catechism. In everything we are enriched and supported by the providence of God, the evidence of Jesus Christ our Lord. We have no deficit of grace as we gentiles, too, await the coming of that day. Whatever the troubles, and however we misunderstand ourselves in the mean time -- even if the labor pains take us by surprise -- we will be upheld, and in the coming of the kingdom of God, we will find our true life.

"... to imagine a life freed from teleology."

2011-11-25T11:58:00.001-06:00

The title is a quote from Sam Adams' paper at the Theology and Apocalyptic session about Jacob Taubes on Sunday night. It struck me as poetic -- an aphorism worth preserving. This phrase holds the key, for me, to the prior evening's confusion over Mark 13, and whether its language is literal and imminent, or symbolic and deferred -- a false dichotomy. And whether he meant to or not, Sam reveals the missed point nicely. There is always a deep difference between teleology and eschatology -- between perfect ends and terminations. Apocalyptic isn't about perfect ends. It's simply about ends.

And yet we routinely make a teleology out of ultimate eschatology -- the end for which all things are destined. The consummation of all things. Perhaps we should prefer the consommation of all things -- simmering them over heat with acid and egg until the impurities float to the top and the broth becomes clear and concentrated! Even as a joke, it has some scriptural resonance, no?

But, culinary humor aside, I think the teleologizing of the eschaton results from our understanding of the delayed parousia, the end that didn't actually come. The indefinitely postponed end of the world. We talk about "eschatologizing" in this context as though it meant such an indefinite deferment, the transfer of the revolution from time into its ultimate end. And in the process, we make the proximate necessity for rebirth into the ultimate death.

All this, because "the fathers have eaten eschatological grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge," to twist a phrase. And the new phrase deserves the same response as the old: "What do you mean by making this analogy? Because I live, says the Lord YHVH, you will no longer make this analogy. Know that all lives are mine -- the father just as the son -- and only the sinner will die." We understand the generations of the first century to have expected an imminent end -- a judgment and a sorting-out. And yet we believe that they did not receive it. Why? Because we're still here. The universe keeps right on going. Creation continues to exist.

But why should the end of the world be the end of creation? Why should what God has made good, what God continues to supply with infinite providence and grace, be arbitrarily terminated? The semantic confusion here is between world and creation. World, as I have argued before, is about order, and not creation -- kosmos has to do with demiourgia and not ktisis. Worlds rise and fall in creation. The eschaton is always apocalyptic, historical, and local. It is mediate, not ultimate. And in missing this point, what we so often also miss is that eschata are hopeful for the people who desire them! And they are not hopeful as ultimate last resorts, but rather as ends after which just and ordinary life can resume for the people of God.
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Barth's Grenzfälle and Normative Social Ethics

2011-11-19T16:38:00.001-06:00

Oh, the joys of AAR! (And SBL, too.) Synergy of papers coming together from different places. Last night at the Barth Society meeting, we had Matthew Puffer's paper on Barth's ethics of war -- really a paper on the right interpretation of the Grenzfall, both as term and as reality. Which had implications for me in both Jessica DeCou's paper on finding and interrogating "true words" and "natural lights" eschatologically, as well as for this morning's paper in the SBL Pauline section from Judith Gundry on celibacy and suffering in 1 Cor 7.

Now, all of this was deeply conditioned by Nate Kerr's and Peter Kline's provocative and controversial Theology and Apocalyptic paper. So you could say I was already in an eschatological frame of mind for talking about ethics -- which is never a bad thing, for a Barthian. But that delicious piece of Kierkegaardian performative rhetoric deserves justice I can't give it here. So I'm going to play the changes here on the Grenzfall in Barth's ethics, and eschatological situations. As such, what follows is not by any means objectively reportorial -- it's collaborative. It's jazz, to the extent that I can do it in theology.

So: Barthian ethics. Barthian ethics is a pain in the ass, to most ethicists. It has left a wake of confusion through twentieth-century scholarship, even among disciples. Barth simply doesn't do normative social theory. He lets it develop as a consequence of the church's right speech about God. And since dogmatics is the shop where we do maintenance on the church's speech to keep it functioning properly, it is the same place where we calibrate that speech toward just ethical action. To that end, Barth also doesn't do codified sets of rules or formal analysis of cases -- these are prescriptive tools, and they produce generic human commands. We have no moral justification for obeying (and no business proclaiming) human commands -- only the command of God, which is permission to be right creation before the creator. To become what we were made to be, created good. And our sure knowledge of that divine command comes to us strictly because -- to borrow one of Bruce McCormack's favorite tropes from election -- the commanding God and the commanded creature are one in Jesus Christ. The divine command and creaturely obedience coincide in the one creature in history who is both commanding God and obedient creature in action.

So there is one command of God -- we speak as of eternity, in which there is one God. The first key to Puffer's paper is to separate situations from that command. The command of God, in its unity, is not a new command for each situation. It isn't, therefore, an act-deontology, a situation ethic. But if the command of God is one, as God is one, it is salutary to remember that the creation is not one. Situations in time and space and history are irreducibly plural. Since Puffer's paper leans heavily on section 55 in CD III.4, I feel perfectly comfortable saying this on the basis of Barth's subsequent discussion of freedom in limitation. I think it belongs to the spirit, here. God's command is one, but human lives are always parts, each part standing in irreducible distinction from every other similar part in history. My ethical necessity is my own because I am who and what and where and when I am, and I know the things given me to know because of that. Your ethical necessity is always different from mine. And so God speaks the one particular command always to different particular creatures under different situational necessities. (Which is how God has created and provisioned us, and so is good!)
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Doing better on Natural Theology

2011-10-27T13:10:00.005-05:00

Sometimes, watching old posts come up in the stats, I'm pleasantly surprised -- other times, I'm disappointed. And one of those times has to do with the topic of natural theology. There's something better to be said about it than I wound up saying the last time I was pressed on the topic.

Here's the thing: much depends on what you mean by "natural theology." If we mean by this, "theology that proceeds to the knowledge of God without the mediation of religion," we have a problem. How, indeed, would theology proceed naturally to the knowledge of a being revealed in contradistinction to the world of nature? And yet if we mean something else by the term "natural theology," there are ways of accepting the venture as a faithful one. So let us consider what natural theology is.
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On "On the Trinity"

2011-10-25T20:13:00.001-05:00

This is the result of an interesting exercise, in which we summarize big theology books in two pages. Ah, the things we do for coursework -- but it's still good practice. And I'm sure it needs correcting! The quick-and-dirty always does.

Augustine's de Trinitate, written in the early 400's, is clearly intended to emphasize the unity of God. Coming out of the contests of the late 300's, and the aftermath of the production of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed, the text has the air of a preemptive dispute. Augustine remains concerned to describe God in ways that rule out the errors of separation and subordination of persons in the godhead. And yet it is not primarily a polemical text, written to counter opponents. In several places, Augustine does engage in refutation of opinions, and at length. However, the book proceeds under the constantly repeated declaration that he writes in order to explain his best understanding, and invites charitable correction while he warns the reader of misunderstandings along the way.

Augustine introduces “Trinity” as a way of referring to the unity of the persons of God — not as a fourth being in relation to three other beings, but as a name for God representing the unity of Father, Son and Spirit. (Robert Jenson's insistence upon the name of God as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” likewise attempting to express God as the unity of persons, is a modern parallel — though it lacks the singular impact of “Trinity.”) Doctrinally, this is as important a move today as in the wake of the Arian controversies. Augustine moves from a conversation that is principally about three personal beings and their interrelationships — begetting, proceeding, sending — to a conversation about the one God who acts.

Race and Storytelling: Uplift vs. Creation

2011-10-19T10:33:00.002-05:00

Race is a mathematical discontinuity. We have drawn a solution-line for our social equations, and we have an approximation for every point along that line -- but when we get to actually solving the equations for the real world, we find that at every point the value we think there should be ... simply isn't there. Instead, we get this vertical line running from positive to negative infinity, with a white line stretching asymptotically upward toward the "good life," and a black line stretching asymptotically downward toward a bad death.
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Oh, goodie: the Evangelicals talk about the doctrine of God

2011-10-14T11:28:00.000-05:00

Bobby Grow is weighing in on whether or not the doctrine of the trinity is negotiable for the gospel, among Evangelicals. And there's a whole mess of discussion ahead of him, to which my first reaction is shaking my head. But I love a good argument, and I respect Bobby, so I set out to comment. Only I can't write something that fits neatly in the margin, because I find myself coming at the problem from outside the conversation. Too much to explain. So I'll contribute from here, where I can start to do it justice.

First, let's look at what's really going on here.
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Turning the Parable on its Ear

2011-10-13T13:56:00.001-05:00

Thank God for sarcastic Lutherans. Pr. Nadia Bolz-Weber flips the parable of the Prince's Wedding in Matthew 22 on its ear, and beautifully. And having just tried to treat that parable in the set of three a few days back, I find myself to have been insufficiently radical, and insufficiently attentive to context.

You see, put briefly, Nadia points to Jesus as the guest bound hand and foot and ejected from the royal banquet. And this is right! But rather than go her route to getting there (which is certainly good, worth reading, and quite clear about the nature of parables -- but not my style), I will point to Matthew's opening line, which we always mistranslate: "The kingdom of the heavens has been compared to ..." Homoiothe, aorist passive. Quick grammar lesson: Greek verb tenses indicate time and quality. The perfect indicates perfective quality, that an action completed in the past continues to be complete. The imperfect indicates progressive quality, that an action in the past continues beyond the past. But the aorist is aoristos, indefinite, with respect to quality. It simply indicates past action. And so when we say "The kingdom of heaven is compared to" -- much less "is like" -- we really break this sense. For comparison, think of the Sermon on the Mount, in Mt. 5, in which Jesus repeatedly says ekousate hoti errethe, "You have heard that it has been said ..." -- verbs in the aorist active and aorist passive. What comes next? "But I say to you, ..." This simple past-ness is great for contradictions. What if we assume, in every parable like this, that the image is pointedly wrong?
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A Queer Sort of Candidacy Problem

2011-10-11T11:03:00.000-05:00

I haven't been writing about this because I wasn't there. But we're all very clearly still in the fallout of the resolve of this church to ordain LGBTIQ clergy without mandating celibacy. Which somehow has become a fight, from the historically dominant side, about ordaining LGBTIQ folk at all -- as though we'd never done it before! We've had quietly gay pastors for a long time, generations back into our predecessor churches. But these generations of out, proud, and faithful folk today are getting a mixed message, at best.

What happened? (Oh, I don't mean in the big sense -- I'm not qualified to write about that. I just mean last Wednesday.) I've been to quite a few bishop-visitation luncheons here at LSTC, and every year there are some gripes about the candidacy process, and especially placements -- or the lack thereof. And I've heard any number of bishops complain about the model, that they can't just put you where they want to and be done with it. And two years ago, after the rules were changed by the Churchwide Assembly, quite a few of our graduates got shafted simply for being students from the school whose faculty signed their names to arguments in favor of -- I hate the language -- "ordaining practicing homosexuals." Not our language, but certainly the dominant terms of the debate. Some simply got delayed, put on the back burner; some were actually told that this is what was going on; and others simply got raked over the coals of artificial confessional litmus tests that were little more than heresy hunts. "Just give us an excuse." A very good friend of mine got bounced from her process, attributed to a 90 on a school paper, a grade I gave her -- on a paper they had no right to see, let alone use that way, constructive work that was really quite good and a grade that was supposed to reflect that.

That's calmed down, of course -- our straight candidates are much easier to place, now. Not that the system works -- we keep telling students to "trust the process," but at its best, that only ever meant, "don't try to work the system for yourself -- trust us to work the system for you, because we're expected to be manipulating the system to get you placed, but they might smack you down for trying to get your own call." And before 2008-09, maybe that mostly worked (he said generously) -- but with the economic crash and practically nobody retiring, and on top of that the added strain of church-wide synodical conflicts exacerbated by the sexuality resolutions, with congregations leaving, and various synods pushing and pulling in different directions, the church has mostly gone into "putting out fires" mode, and invested heavily in conflict-avoidance. It's like we fought so hard to get the pill swallowed -- and now the body is fighting the medicine, and the doctors are waiting to see what happens. And that seems to be what happened at this bishop-visitation luncheon. The bishops, whose jobs here are always "sell, sell, sell," trying to get candidates to come to their synods, are deep in the numbers game of decline, and the pessimism that goes with it. And with five bishops from conservative synods this time around, it's little surprise that the message wasn't positive. "Wait" -- indefinitely. "Go out and be creative -- figure out how to work while you wait for a call to come through." "Think in terms of dual-vocation -- be a part-time pastor, and a part-time barista."

Now this is general, too -- but the best remarks of all apparently came in response to a question about two of our seniors, out and single, who have been approved, but whose placements are being delayed. (There's a term for that in the process, and I'm missing it, off the top of my head.) The classic "the church moves slowly" line came out. Think how long it took the church to accept women -- and you want calls now? If you want ministry opportunities, you're going to have to get out there and make them -- the "mission developer" answer, basically.
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Expanding the Juridical Parable

2011-10-09T20:02:00.000-05:00

The last three Sundays, we've had three parables told against the senior priests and councillors of the Judean people from Matthew 21 and 22. Mark only gives us the middle one, and when they're spread out like this in the lectionary, we don't get the full thrust of what Matthew does here. So let's have a look at what is really going on in these texts.

As in Mark, we have the Davidic entry into Jerusalem, followed by Jesus clearing out the Temple courts of the merchant apparatus. Very Maccabean, including the Sukkot references in the procession. And with slightly more awareness of these events in Matthew than in Mark, the Judean authorities are more than slightly bothered by the whole arrangement. And they should be -- this series of events implies (and with a certain justice) that they have become as complicit in the Roman occupation as the Temple apparatus had been in the rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, two centuries earlier. And so they come to Jesus the next day and ask, "With what kind of authorization do you do these things, and who gave you that license?" And the implicit answer is that the same eschatological truth present in John's baptism of repentance is present here.

And now come the parables, fleshing out the answer. The core of Matthew's answer remains the same as in Mark: the juridical parable of the vineyard from Isaiah 5. But here it's flanked by two other parables: the simple question about filial obedience, and today's parable about the marriage feast. Let's see how they interact.
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Reformed and Lutheran Heresiology, and via media

2011-10-07T12:32:00.001-05:00

I've been doing a lot of unsuccessful writing lately -- the thoughts are too full of material and not formed enough. It's one of the perils of this half of the term, and my standard pattern for starting any topic. Survey the area, cram in as much information as possible, shake well, let the brain sort it, sift for the patterns that emerge, and chase them down. Build on top of the ones that work.

But with the Kantzer lectures now completed, I've got some extra-curricular thoughts to play with, too. One of the things I like about PTS is that it has both Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger. The trained post-liberal narrative theologian in me leans heavily toward Hunsinger. I have too many arguments with McCormack -- but they're necessary arguments. The man is solid, and solidly different. A post-Arminian Calvinist with good grounding in early Christian thought. A solid diagnostician, but "working the other side of the street" in ways that produce a markedly different system of heresiology from the Lutheran concerns.

And so it's been very interesting to me to hear McCormack articulate a doctrine of God for the Evangelicals. (Overviews of the lectures can be found on the Wheaton Blog.) The whole thing begins and proceeds and ends in heresiology! And it's good diagnosis, even if I wouldn't follow his line to its destination. His critiques are solid, if not exhaustive -- if you want to hold a position somewhere in the vicinity of the arguments, and it's not his, you still have to deal with his critiques. And as a Lutheran, I have to come at the same problems from a different direction, in different terms, even if both of us are working in deeply Barthian veins. Which is to say that I have a lot to learn from him!

But talking about Lutherans and Lutheran positions in this context gets me in trouble, especially since I have a friend who is both Lutheran and one of McCormack's students. It's caused both of us quite a bit of trouble understanding one another. And so I've been looking for a chance to draw out a better explanation of where I'm coming from. You see, McCormack and his students include Lutherans in their readings. Which is great -- I firmly believe that we'd do better with more Reformed thought in our studies. (Which is easy enough to go out and get, in Chicago.) But Bruce's Lutherans just aren't "Lutheran" enough, and why that should be the case is the trouble.
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A Bad Positivism

2011-09-29T10:29:00.002-05:00

So I have two projects this term: Augustine, and the dialectic process from Adorno and Benjamin to Agamben. This post isn't about Gus.

I've been reading through Adorno's lectures on Negative Dialectics -- knowing full well that the book of the same title won't make as much sense until I do -- and it's remarkably enlightening stuff. The key, so far, turns on Hegel's synthetic ideal, that a negation of a negation is a positive. Which is synthesis: the negation of the antithesis by incorporation into the thesis. This is the root of the whole upward progress of history, that ideas grow and advance by incorporating their critiques. The modern ideal of correctibility, which was a Renaissance ideal as well. It is what Hegel means by sublation: the elevation of an idea through the means of its opposition. From positions to positions by means of ultimately temporary negations.

But I do mean that negative dialectics turns on the synthetic ideal -- and turns on it aggressively! "The negation of a negation is a bad positivism." And it does so through what I have to see as deeply connected to the linguistic turn. Saussurean arbitrary signification, even though it nowhere appears -- he gets it through Heidegger and phenomenology. The actual is not rational -- by which we mean that reality does not carry internal meanings. The concept is the negation of the thing -- by which we mean that once we have created a signification, the signifier can no longer be seen for itself. We have given it a meaning. And in so doing we have forgotten that even the thesis, as a posit, is a negation. The rational is not real; the rational supplants the real.
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Pride, Sensuality -- and Faith

2011-09-15T09:49:00.001-05:00

I'm very struck by something I heard in the lecture yesterday, on Reinhold Niebuhr and Augustine on sin. But mostly on Reinie. I had the concept of sin as pride and sin as sensuality from the last time I did deep Niebuhrian study, but I missed the basic "constitutional anxiety" angle. The fact that Niebuhr takes that into the appropriate, as well as the inappropriate, responses to our existential anxiety. The inappropriate enhancement of the self, the inappropriate negation of the self -- and the appropriate respect for the self as creature among creation, before the Creator who is God providing for us and all life. I had not received the positive angle, that constitutional anxiety can lead into creativity and freedom.
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On Distinction Between and Privation of Goods

2011-09-14T11:17:00.000-05:00

So I was assigned Augustine's The City of God against the Pagans, and I'm realizing how true that full title is. Augustine is clearly a Platonist against Platonists. That is to say, he uses the method and metaphysics of classical Greek thought, but rejects its content assertions. Because his physics are certainly not basically different -- he simply adapts them to what he knows as Christian content. I suppose this is little different from Reinhold Niebuhr, who becomes a Liberal against the Liberals. It is sublation, Aufhebung, neutralization by elevation.

And yet the Fathers are our best defense against this fault in ourselves -- and the scriptures, our best defense against its existence in the Fathers.
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As Though It Were Not -- Because God Is

2011-09-11T07:22:00.000-05:00

My job on September 11 of any year is not materially or formally different than my job on any other day of the year -- and neither is yours. Our job is to live and preach the gospel. It, and not world-historical events, dictates reality.

I am not called to follow the Johannine reaction -- to say that world-historical events usher in a new age of the gospel, and even to say that this new age of the gospel is the only true age, and that we are only now fulfilling it. I understand this reaction -- as though their destruction and our survival meant something in the long run. As though massive, world-changing events happened for a reason. But world history has no eschatological significance. We are in it; it happens to us; but it does not constitute any eternal judgment of God, even when it is the terrible consequences of our actions "coming home to roost." It is penultimately real, but ultimately unreal. Even if they are punishments, God walks with us through them. God never leaves. The quintessential attribute of God is fidelity in relationship. Every other attribute, every other name of God, serves this one. Only in this way is God worthy of our proclamation -- because only in this way is God worthy of our trust.

And so my job on this day is to preach first as though this day were not. To do theology first on the presupposition that it is not, and the gospel is. Only then to proceed to speak the gospel to this day, because today simply happens to be as it is. And it certainly is, in all the hominum confusione into which the provision of God always arrives. Because today is a day full of sin, from a history of days full of sin -- like every other day has been, and will be, on the earth. But that is not the truth! The truth is that today is a day full of the glory and justice of God shown in grace, set within a grand history of days full of the gracious glory of God -- like every other day has been, and will be, on the earth.
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Eating and drinking judgment

2011-09-09T08:13:00.002-05:00

In the title link, a well-considered piece of Yoder-Hauerwas active pacifism, Stanley says,

Constituted by the body and blood of Christ we participate in God's Kingdom so that the world may know that we, the church of Jesus Christ, are the end of sacrifice.

This is why, if Christians leave the Eucharistic table ready to kill one another, we not only eat and drink judgment on ourselves, but we rob the world of the witness necessary for the world to know there is an alternative to the sacrifices of war.

This may be the finest interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11:29 I've seen, at least lately. It certainly doesn't serve the immediate context of 1 Cor. 11, but I think it strikes at the heart.

For the sake of having the text in front of us, 1 Corinthians 11:16-34:
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More Koine Pedagogy

2011-09-05T14:41:00.000-05:00

All right, I'm teaching my way through the nominative case still, on the adjective-first trajectory. Which I like, because it lets me teach the 2-1-2 forms, and just say "this is normal masculine, feminine, and neutral declension," all at once, even with the eta/alpha differences. And it lets me break up the "consonant declension" grab-bag into more commonly-used pieces, like the -us/-eia/-u adjective paradigm. I think I'm going to teach the true consonant declensions with their consonant groups, and perhaps introduce more verb cases that way.

So the sequence so far looks like this:
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Loving in the Forgiveness of God

2011-09-02T10:02:00.000-05:00

We seem to be under the misapprehension that Ezekiel's job is a common one. That it is a weight laid upon our shoulders. That when God says "If I tell you, and you don't tell them, and they die, it's your fault," God has in fact already told us using the words of the Bible. And so we come to believe that forgiveness is conditioned on repentance, and repentance is conditioned on doing what the Bible says. How else could we understand the contemporary Christian reaction that confuses conformity to the gospel with heterosexuality and a particular view of marriage? And that's just one example, even if it is awfully popular today. We have become sentinels, yes -- but sentinels against our own people. Sentinels against one another. We have ceased to be a people. Instead, we have become sentinels gathering together to condemn the remnant of Israel, whom we have left, thinking that we can take the name and blessing of Israel with us. And we leave under the assumption that we have been faithful, and that if the faithful separate themselves from impurity, we will be saved. That if we have given the warning, we have no other obligations to our own brothers and sisters. That if we at least tried, we can be done now.

Ah, but we have misunderstood three things here: repentance, prophecy, and the people of God. How? We have forgotten that all three stand under the umbrella of God's forgiveness.
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Taking Up the Cross

2011-08-27T19:22:00.002-05:00

It is not your job to defend Jesus. It is not your job to protect him at all costs -- he is not the President, and you are not the Secret Service. It is not your job to rescue him. It is not your job to keep him from harm. Get behind him, where he can keep you from harm.

It's as though Jesus said to Peter, "If I am the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, let me do my job. Trust me."

You can't get to the cross ahead of Jesus, you can't go there for Jesus, and you can't get in his way. Those are facts: you simply can't. It's not possible. It wasn't even possible for Peter, who was there! And yet Peter is still going to go through all the trouble of sneaking in to the scene of the trial, bluffing his way past guards and people who think he looks familiar, because he has to do something -- or Jesus is going to die! And then the cock crows, and Peter learns what Jesus was trying to tell him in the gospel today: Jesus' life is worthless, if he doesn't do what God does. What's to save? What could we conceivably give Jesus that would make up for his failure here? How could he still be what we hope and confess and know that he is: the Son of the Living God, the Messiah? How could he do what desperately needs to be done?
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Theologians and Philosophers at Play

2011-08-27T13:54:00.002-05:00

... by which I mean, at work in each other's bailiwicks. "Play" in the Heideggerian sense; "games" in the Wittgensteinian sense. What am I talking about? "Analytic Theology." David just posted about Notre Dame's Templeton fellowships and grants under the Analytic Theology Project. Which reminds me just how much I like that particular playground. And yet how oddly I fit into the usual games there.

I've taken to calling myself a "theological diagnostician." Basically for two reasons: I find the description apt to what I do, and it's just unusual enough to be a conversation opener. What I mean is that I use a form of analytic theology within the framework of theological dogmatics. But I keep discovering the ways that this does not make me into an analytic theologian -- because I do not actually do analytic theology. I do theology. But the distinction isn't intuitive -- those two statements suggest that I must therefore do some non-analytic form of theology.
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Thoughts on Koine Pedagogy

2011-08-23T20:42:00.000-05:00

Thought I'd put up some of my meditations on teaching Greek. I've been thinking for quite a while about the fact that we teach ancient languages and modern languages differently. Grammar-Translation vs. Natural Language pedagogy. Obviously, teaching Koine, there's a whole lot of concepts that it's necessary to train into the student -- three sets of declensions, five cases, gender-number-case alignment, verb conjugations, verb tenses, moods, and voices. Not to mention the basics of character and phoneme recognition in a non-Latin alphabet. But the standard approach I see, even in the newer, "glossier" textbooks, is still dumping batches of information on the student and asking them to interpret, but not to use.

I realize that in the seminaries we generally only get one, maybe two terms to teach the language comprehensively -- and the same for Hebrew. And for non-Classics majors in undergrad, two terms is a maximal expectation. And so we cheat. We can either aim for higher usage proficiency or higher concept knowledge, but not both. In other words, full grammar and limited reading competence, or better reading/speaking/listening competence and less grammar. In Bible, this always pushes us toward Grammar-Translation models, where recognition is about all we can achieve in the time given to us. And every New Testament prof is reteaching the basics, come translation time.
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The Shadow of Justice

2011-08-22T10:39:00.001-05:00

Law is the shadow of justice.

This implies two things: justice, and the light of our regard.

Justice is fractal. This means that at every level its principle -- its logos -- is the same. But it also means that justice looks different from different angles and approaches. Justice has many aspects, therefore, and one logic.

Two things may be generated, categorically, from the intersection of our regard with the body of justice. The first is gospel: the proclamation of that form or aspect of justice which we have seen and experienced. The second is law: the shadow cast behind justice by the light.
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Free Will and Sin

2011-08-20T13:59:00.001-05:00

In the conversation that followed the last post, I got a good deal of correction on the nuances of Christian actualist ontology. So part 2 may be coming. And in that fruitful conversation with David, this time about ecclesiology -- which again came down to our choice among pluralisms -- I managed to say something I haven't said before, which I owe to reading more of CD III. And over the last day, including reading Eric Reitan, it's gotten bigger in my mind, to the point where it seems worth hacking out here.

Taken as given: The root of sin is separation from God. The nature of sin is action in separation from God.

Barth speaks about sin as an impossibility, and in connection with his discussion of God as Creator and consequently Lord of creation, it occurs to me that this has radical implications for our talk about sin. In common usage, sin is disobedience to God. But disobedience is possible only to the one who does in fact hear God as Lord. It is the possibility exercised in Jonah. Such disobedience will eventually be reconciled, because the subject is precisely the hearing subject. The word of God follows upon the actions of God, constituting relationship and then faith in relationship. The actions and words of God build the relationship in which obedience is possible -- the sine qua non of obedience.
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Actualist Ontology? (1 of possibly 2)

2011-08-18T17:58:00.001-05:00

I'm wrestling at the moment with something I'm not sure about: "actualist ontology." It came up in the discussion of David Congdon's very interesting proposal on the Evangelical idea. Part of me wants to say, "well, of course, if we're talking about Barth, we mean that theology proceeds from what is (including and especially the content of God's self-revelation and the scriptural witness to same)." Which is, from the analytic philosophy perspective, a very interesting sort of "actualism" -- granting actual existence to things that cannot be epistemologically warranted on empirical grounds. Granting, in fact, a superior epistemological warrant to them, in such a way as to determine the structure of what is empirically observable and readily warranted. Which is not to make any claim, of course, that what is so readily warranted is not in fact actual -- it is simply to exert a structurally interpretive framework for the actuality of the empirically observable.

Now, this is some ways distant from what I hear David actually claiming -- which is more along the lines of Barth's definition of human existence in terms of a history of moral agency. That our being is our doing, which is to say that our existence is constituted by that history of things we have actually done, rather than by that set of possible deeds from which we have chosen, wittingly or unwittingly. It is constituted by the choices to actualize this and not those in given circumstances. But this seems more to be an agentic ontology, than an actualist one. (Stressing the nature of what becomes actual, and the path to actuality, rather than ontological assertion from what is presently actual alone.)

(Obviously I'm open to clarification, here, and I plan on asking for it, but I'm going to at least attempt a first-principles reconstruction from what I do understand so there's something to correct.)
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The Virtue of Humility

2011-08-17T08:25:00.004-05:00

It may be said -- and today's Gospel reading is a magnificent example -- that Matthew is a sustained presentation on the virtue of recognizing Jesus as God's messiah. Knowing who he is. Edgar Krentz suggests that the virtue shown in the trial in the wilderness, greatly expanded by Matthew, and in the entry into Jerusalem is the same: humility, in Greek praütētos. That this is not meekness or lowliness or any other sort of wimpy virtue, but purely and simply that Jesus knows who he is, and who he is not. That he acts only on the basis of his self-recognition as God's messiah, and that passing the trial by Satan in the wilderness is a demonstration of his correct understanding of this identity. Humility in Jesus consists of knowing who he is, and acting like it.

What difference would it make if Jesus was one of the prophets? I've argued before that he is a prophet, in Mark -- that he performs a prophetic role in teaching. And clearly, in Matthew, Jesus also performs this prophetic role in teaching. And what do the prophets do? The prophets are those sent by God to call the people of God to account. To account, not for the letter of the law or for their obedience to teaching, but for the root of the law: for their relationship to God, and their corresponding relationship to one another. A prophet tells the people the uncomfortable truth of where they have gone wrong in their relationship with God and one another as God's peculiar people, and calls them to turn back to God and behave justly toward one another.
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Barthian Exegetical Praxis (aka "Preaching")

2011-08-16T11:21:00.002-05:00

Since about the middle of summer, I've been trying actively to follow and respond to the pericopes of the church year. Now, I wouldn't call most of what I do here "preaching" in the proper sense -- there's too much of instruction in it to be wholly words of life (much less holy words of life). But it is what comes before preaching, as reflection and attempted application practiced upon the texts. And in it I try to do what preaching must do: be of service to the church as it goes about living into and out of the gospel.

As a lay doctoral student I do not belong to the order of the ministry of Word and Sacrament. I rejoice in the service of those who are so ordained, but it is not my calling. As a theologian (even if a journeyman at present), I belong to those who are so called, as much as both I and they belong to the body of the church as organs of it. To the extent that there is a clerical division of labor in the church, it is my job to serve the laity, and to help the clergy serve the laity likewise. Because the "laity" are nothing but the laos theou, and the servants of the people of God are likewise laïkos.

And so when I went about getting seriously into Barth, I discovered that I could not do it without learning something in which I had not yet been trained: preaching. (I thank Gary Dorrien for watering the seed of this realization in me.) Because it is not intuitive, this intentional proclamation of the Word of God for the people of God. It is not, as it appears, a matter of getting up and talking about the Bible. I had been trained in that. I had taken classes in hermeneutics, and exegetical method, and done a good deal of self-study beyond them on that end. And yet the first time I got up to preach, no one was fed. Teaching Bible is not proclamation. (And teaching Bible without proclamation might not even be good teaching!)
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"You are not expected to understand this."

2011-08-15T13:38:00.000-05:00

Some long chain of internet wandering this morning brought up this classic comment by Dennis Ritchie: "You are not expected to understand this." (Follow the link for context, if you get programming; otherwise, you might want to skip most of what follows and just read the end of this post.) Reading dmr's explanation, it reminds me of a great many instances of arcane code in theology. Spots which are hard to believe, until you get down to trying to hack around them, and discover that it is reality which is bent, and the code is just following the hack in the world. Which is just as much as to say that the machine and the language don't line up, like in any paradox. It's not the language's fault. But it's also an indication that the language is built for flaws in a very specific model, and when the model changes, so do the flaws. Old ones disappear -- not always because they've been fixed -- and new ones pop up in unexpected places. New language, new code, is required.
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Arguing with Atheists

2011-08-13T09:24:00.000-05:00

I don't like arguing with atheists, as a matter of course. It's not my job. They aren't my competition, even if they compete with me. It reminds me of growing up around Philadelphia radio, and the lengths to which Howard Stern went to compete with John DeBella. Why? DeBella had something: position. Stern wanted it, but he was "up-and-coming." He'd do anything to get it -- some seriously dirty stuff, too, and nobody who knows Stern's "shock jock" reputation is surprised -- but the major tactic was simply to get DeBella to respond to him. To take him seriously. Because at that point, he'd win: he would have his entrée into the top tier of the industry.

Pop atheism is about cultural cachet. Position. It sells books. It's "number 2 with a bullet," or it would like to be, and number 1 is Christianity. Atheism sells, not by being a position, but by being a negation. Whatever else an atheist will claim, the thing that makes them not simply a non-Christian is the assertion of a particular kind of anti-Christianity -- frequently in the form of refutations of philosophical theism on the basis of Christian doctrinal propositions. An atheist is bound up in the disproof of theistic religion, but not on the design of any other supposedly theistic religion. That abstraction belongs to the Western cultural hegemony of Christianity. Atheism simply cannot hold the top spot -- it would cease to exist. It remains wholly subsidiary to Christianity. But it succeeds by getting Christianity to argue with it on its own terms. It demands response to justify its responsive existence.
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Nomos and Pistis

2011-08-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

With thanks to Adam Braun and Karl Barth, for their assistance so far. This still needs tightening up, which is why it's here. But, because I'm not sure about posting it at all, one exception to my general license: no derivative works. Non-commercial fair-use citation only. Please use the other stuff I've posted on this topic if you want to build; it's all there. Thanks!

"Nomos and Pistis: The Freedom of Trust with Respect to Ways of Life in Romans 5-8"
Matthew A. Frost
The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

Abstract:

In Romans 3:21-26, Paul makes a crucial break in his argument before the Roman audience. With the words CWRIS NOMOU, he sets Christ adjacent to Torah, and fashions divine justice into a space distinct from any given way of life. This follows his exposition in Romans 2, in which Paul fashioned divine judgment according to deeds into a space distinct from any given way of life. Since trust does not negate Torah, or other ways of ethical living, Paul is able to work from these points toward a goal of common ethical life in the Spirit. This is the overarching rhetorical goal of Romans 5-8: leading the mixed Hellenistic Judean and gentile audience from the realm and rule of sin, through the role of Christ in their respective adoptions by God, into the present realm and rule of the Spirit. In this way Paul sets right alignment with God (dikaiosunen) in terms strictly of God's own action, incorporating and transcending differing ways of life by removing that justifying function from the Hellenistic concept of nomos, with its implications of cultural identity, and establishing it strictly on the concept of pistis. This frames Paul's subsequent ethical exhortation.

Two Rules -- a Caveat

2011-08-10T17:22:00.000-05:00

Rule number 1 is:

"If you want to state a given argument, you may, but listen to the answer."

To do otherwise is to demonstrate that you are wasting my time.

Rule number 2 is:

"Don't get cheap."

It won't get you out of the argument you've made, and if persistently deployed, it further cements the opinion that you are wasting my time.

If you violate rule number 2 and aren't being an ass, please follow rule number 1, and try to say something intelligent of your own between instances in which you break rule number 2. This shows me that you are not only capable of learning, but that you are willing to learn. That, I can work with.

When in doubt, I will argue you into the ground, on the basic presumption that you can learn. If you follow rule number 1, and keep arguing, I will be confirmed in this opinion of you. This means that even if you keep violating rule number 2, I will take a certain joy in the event of arguing with you -- because it suggests to me that I may learn something. I will take you at dead earnest, and play the game out as far as rule number 1 allows. I might even start to like you.

All that said, if we keep following this procedure, I'm going to be playing the "rational arguments" game at full strength. If you want to have an engagement on some other basis, just say so, and we'll go play that game instead.

Hip-Deep in Orality: Developing an Exegetical Method

2011-08-08T13:19:00.003-05:00

So I'm hip-deep in Werner Kelber, Walter Ong, and Eric Havelock, all via Joanna Dewey, and remembering classes with David Rhoads, and it puts me in mind to think about how I translate my "author's translation" passages. What's my exegetical method? And the simplest way is to start with how I did Romans, which is how I plan to go forward through the Corinthian letters. But that has its own history, too.

When I ran through Galatians, almost 4 years ago now, I had already done Mark 11-13 for my Masters' thesis, and learned a fair bit about linguistic patterning and structure -- some of which I got from doing all of Matthew with Ed Krentz, but most of which came from being introduced to Paul's letters in whirlwind tour by Dave Rhoads. (If I had to differentiate them: Ed does technical structure in fine and historic detail; Dave does gestalt function built out of the structure.) My thesis in Mark was predicated on the theological import of linguistic structure -- that the pieces we use and how we build the system speak, and speak volumes over above the content of that system. Lexis and taxis respectively, even though I didn't have those terms yet. Structure encodes meaning.
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More Keys to Barth's Creation

2011-08-06T11:44:00.000-05:00

So we've said that Barth's doctrine of creation relies upon a specific, developed understanding of the Word of God (and also on a specific set of scriptural hermeneutics -- which are often more about practice of exegesis than theory), and that it relies upon a specific developed understanding of the doctrine of God. That God, as God, is first of all what God does, but that that is revelation and command in Barth (as opposed to creation in Thomas). And so, when Barth touches down from the heavens to the Earth, beginning logically with creation, what follows is a discussion of this God as creator, and then as reconciler -- but unfortunately not as redeemer, though that was the plan. (Don't complain; when anyone complained that the next bit wasn't out yet, he'd ask if they had finished the rest already. I'm not worried; there's quite enough here -- an embarrassment of riches. It's like complaining about the works that Bach didn't write.)

Anyhow, on to fresh meat. It is self-evident to anyone who has looked that Barth's creation is anthropocentric. It is to the same degree Christocentric, as we are speaking about the divine-human relationship vis-a-vis the creature as creature. But these -centrisms can be mistaken for exclusive concern, which is normally what I hear when someone complains about anthropocentrism or Christocentrism. That Barth is missing the other bits, or not giving them their due, by means of his consistent bias towards man and Christ. There is some truth there; Barth is doing Church Dogmatics from scriptures and tradition composed by human beings. He is doing dogmatics as a diagnostic evaluation of the speech of the church, proceeding from its basis out toward its actions. These are human thoughts, human concerns, human disagreements, human actions. Hence human dogmatics and human ethics. We are not concerned with diagnosing or correcting the thoughts, words, and deeds of any other creature on earth or under heaven. Only ours, but therefore also ours with respect to God and all creation. Because nothing else, save God, is a relevant ethical agent, and the witness we have to God's agency is overwhelmingly concerned with God's agency for specifically human creatures. (The justification for III.2 as theological anthropology, in a nutshell.)
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The Wind and the Sea Obey Him

2011-08-03T23:45:00.001-05:00

What is a miracle, but a demonstration that the Creator is Lord of creation? If you told me it was impossible, what happened here on the Sea of Galilee, I'd agree with you: water does not obey me. Gravity, as I have known ever since I worked in the department where we keep all the light bulbs, is my nemesis. I am stuff, like all this other stuff, and no better or worse. Smarter, more capable, but not ultimately superior to all the matter around me. I am subject to physics. That great big mass of earth below me pulls me down, and the water simply gets out of the way.

Peter is no different. And he worked on the water from the time he was old enough to go out there with his father and brothers and the hired men and get to work. He knows what it's like when this water gets all churned up, when the wind whips it into chop as it comes down off the mountains. It's not enough to keep you from tucking up in the bottom of the boat and getting some rest with the sea anchor out, but it's not nice, and as dark falls, the disciples are still on the water. Obeying physics, while taking advantage of drag and buoyancy to keep from obeying gravity all too well. And one or two at a time, they make sure that nothing bad happens while they're out there, just to keep it that way.
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How not to start your first junior pastorate...

2011-08-01T17:02:00.001-05:00

You don't walk in and assert that people are going to start doing things your way, on the strength of the portion of the congregation that liked you for the job. You don't threaten to break the system because it continues to work the way it has for decades. You don't hold meetings where you voice your opinions to the congregation in a manner antagonistic to the council, the elders, and the senior pastors, accusing and attacking them in their absence. You don't walk into your first call expecting to "win" in some way.

And yet this is exactly what I see from the Tea Party freshmen in Congress, especially as they have involved themselves with the debt-ceiling deal.
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The Argument of Romans 5-8

2011-07-30T13:41:00.001-05:00

Wow, this has been a fruitful month of writing. This is the beginning of a sketch for a paper -- feedback will be appreciated. Otherwise, enjoy!

Following and building upon the work of Stanley Stowers, I see Romans 5-8 as a component of the full diatribe structure of Paul's address to the Romans. Having demonstrated in Romans 1-4 that the justice of God does not depend on God's judgment according to deeds, or therefore upon Torah, but instead upon the trust that stands prior to action, Paul now leads the audience through the relationship between sin and the law. Much of Paul's argument depends on reversing the logical inversion by which Torah as a system of deeds has come to stand prior to the relationship between God and God's people. This has an analogue in the various conceptions of the ordo salutis settled upon in the wake of the post-Reformation period of Protestant orthodoxy. Whether Lutheran, Calvinist or Arminian, these procedural views of salvation inevitably assign repentance, and therefore human right behavior, a crucial role early in the process. However theologically justified in terms of divine, rather than human, action, this has the function of making right behavior a distinguishing mark throughout the process.
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Jacob have I loved, and Esau...

2011-07-29T20:06:00.003-05:00

I would so rather work with the texts that follow this week's ... and they aren't next week's texts, so I get to lean into them just a little.

Jacob is afraid. It would seem that Esau, his brother, is in quite good company -- a company of 400 men. Esau, out in the world, without his birthright, has not done badly for himself. One might say, even, that God has not done badly by Esau, for all that we are tempted to remember the words spoken through the prophet Malachi: "I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau." For Esau, too, is blessed, and has married the daughters of his uncle Ishmael, a man who is likewise blessed by God. Esau's children are the reconciliation of two brothers, the sons of Abraham. And Esau, just like his father-in-law, receives good from God for all he has lost to his brother. And so Jacob will find, waiting for him, the goodness of God -- seen in the generous face of his brother, who has every earthly right to hate him, and no earthly reason to. But Jacob doesn't know this. And so he is afraid. He is afraid that his brother is coming to get him.

You see, God has also provided quite well for Jacob. But reading the story up to this point, we're tempted to say that Jacob has done quite well for himself, mostly at the expense of Laban. A contest of schemes and strategies. But the contest between these men and their households is also a contest between Jacob's God and his ancestral gods. (And obviously, someone hasn't read Malachi -- the takeaway here seems to be "I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Laban.") Jacob, the master strategist, knows how very insecure his world is. He took all that he has from one man; another man could take it all from him, even his life. That man, his brother, has a right by birth to stand exactly where Jacob stands. "There but for the grace of God..."

Keys to Approaching Barth's Doctrine of Creation

2011-07-28T20:38:00.001-05:00

It's becoming increasingly clear to me, at this point, that the dissertation won't just involve Barth -- he's taking over. The topic remains apocalyptic eschatology of creation, which I got from a certain reading of III.1 in the first place. The keys remain 1) theology (including that found in scripture) as oral performative rhetoric; and 2) storytelling as the basis for the given theological approaches of any particular writing. I'm attempting not to fall foul of Derrida here -- I don't intend to read the narrative against its supposed history, but through it as part of the text. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Apocalyptic storytelling appears in our scriptural texts as a result of the situation of the community telling the story, against the situation of the world against them. It is not a product of the comfortable or the assimilating, but of those who refuse to be digested. (Unfortunately it also becomes a tool of those assimilated to power, against those who will not.) It is a means of survival by incisive use of history.

And yet, as I say, Barth is quickly expanding to become the major topic, and this the critical proposal drawn out of his reconstructed work on creation. Reconstructed, on the one hand, to deal better with the Jews who remain Jews as authors and characters in our scriptures, and on the other, to deal better with the Jews who remain Judean and stubbornly resistant to persecution outside of the coming Christian world. From that, to deal better with our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters as people with legitimate claims to the God of our fathers. And so the first key to Barth's doctrine of creation is to understand his scriptural hermeneutic at work, and to determine its extent and relationships of dependency within the whole of CD III. And the second is to examine its impact on the form and content of his pervasive Trinitarian assertions throughout.

Opening Moves and Playing the Game

2011-07-25T20:24:00.003-05:00

After the recent conversation on universalism and eschatology at Two Friars and a Fool, it's interesting to see Richard Beck post an entry about the relevance of opening moves and knowing that you're playing a particular variation.

If you haven't noticed, people disagree a lot about religion. And sometimes those disagreements get nasty. Recently, however, in my discussions with Dr. Kirk about universalism, many have commended us on the civil and curious tone of the conversation. Why has this been the case?

I think it has to do with the fact that we're aware that we are playing different opening moves. Dr. Kirk is playing 1. e4 and I'm playing 1. Nf3. Neither is right or wrong per se. One is more traditional and orthodox. The other is less common and heterodox. Each has strengths. Each has weaknesses. But after the moves have been played we can sit back and enjoy the artistry of how the game unfolds from those starting points. For each chess opening has its own interior logic. And lots of hidden surprises.

In short, it's fun to watch how people play the game. And you learn a lot from watching.

And I think a big part of this logic comes from the implicit observation that he and J. R. D. Kirk are each playing white in different games, and comparing openings rather than playing against each other. But more than that, as someone who talks about "games" and "play" as serious terms for the activity of theology, I love the image and how extensible it is.
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Providential Implications for Natural Law

2011-07-25T13:20:00.002-05:00

All right, following yesterday's meditations on section 56.1 of the Church Dogmatics, linked in the title, I have some meditations on the implications for natural law. (At least in part because I've been reading Biggar's Behaving in Public, and as a result of the recent Barth-Aquinas conversations at PTS.)

So, implications of "the unique opportunity" (and my following thereupon) for natural law:

A) The world is fallen, not just human being.
B) The orders of all things in the world are dis-ordered from the creation-ordering, as the scriptural views of the mountain of the Lord as the peaceable kingdom suggest. (Even if it is simply an attempt at answering the theodicy question.)
C) Providence remains.
D) But providence is not a created remnant of order -- it is a function of God's own ongoing creative and redemptive salvific work. Salvation as salvage.
E) The order in which we find the world is not "natural" as though we meant by that "original to the act of creation." [As my wife asked, yes, even trees are fallen. I don't mind Lewis on this point.] The parts are natural; the order is not.
F) No components of the world are by nature evil or false or wrong. All things in the ongoing creation are essentially good, if existentially disordered.
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The Unique Opportunity

2011-07-24T12:38:00.005-05:00

I've been driven back to CD III.4, section 56, entitled "Freedom in Limitation," by re-reading my old exam work. And fruitfully so, I think, so I'm going to run through my meditations on at least part 1 here: "The Unique Opportunity." This material is the set-up for talking about vocation in the next part.

Our obedience -- even and especially our apostolic obedience -- is conditioned on the restoration of the right ordering of our creaturely being. We are disordered in sin, pieces in the wrong places, functional blocks improperly connected to one another, inputs and outputs not communicating properly.

Barth's strategy is not to take the disorder of the world's order and call it good, let alone to call it God's -- this is the sort of approach that leads to Barth's statement that ethics is sin. No, it is not the order we find in creation-the-noun that shows us the will of God; it is the order we find in creation-the-verb. Creation, the act. The creature who receives the divine command discovers because of it an impossibility -- a flaw with respect to the totalizing orders of the world. A basic contradiction at the heart of reality. And it seems to be this because we participate every day in the demiourgia by which the orders of this world perpetuate themselves. We have been raised in them, and by acting as agents under them we demonstrate that we approve of them -- whether or not we like their consequences! We help to craft and re-craft them.

This is the depravity of the creature -- that we are apparatchiki of the world, shaped by its apparatus. As Billington said, people "not of grand plans, but of a hundred carefully executed details." This is the root cause of the declaration that God came to what was his own, but it did not know him. We belong to the world.
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The Shape and Substance of our Adoption

2011-07-20T09:17:00.000-05:00

Given this coming Sunday's readings, I'm going to play Matthew's scribe: "Every scribe enrolled in the kingdom of the heavens is like a human steward of a house, who puts forth from his stores what is fresh and what has aged; the new along with the esteemed." (13:52) But I'm going to play him as Paul.
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The Weeds and the Wheat

2011-07-19T13:04:00.000-05:00

The lectionary portions from Matthew 13 have been bothering me. Most especially when we try to take the some-and-not-others emphasis that is so profoundly expressed in the glosses of the parables, and assert it upon our world. So here's a counterproposal from last Sunday. It's not a sermon -- it has too much of law in it to be proclamation. But perhaps it may be taken as a prescription for a certain kind of malady.

Why should we take Matthew's explanations at their word? On the other hand, why not? Are the darnels evil? Is God's victory found in their destruction -- that the kingdom of the heavens shall be pure? That only the good and desirable in this life shall enter?

Then boy, are we in trouble!

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Not the post on Bible...

2011-07-15T16:22:00.001-05:00

It may not be clear from the last post, but the goal of this process is a matter of wrestling with Barth and the rest of my necessary knowledge of faith and theology in order to produce something useful. Gaining, on the one hand, a clear grasp of Barth in his own logic, and on the other a clear grasp of the extent of my necessary disagreement with him, in order to have a basis for realigning that in Barth which must be said into an order in which I may say it today.

For quite some time, I feel like I have been implicitly doing what Nigel Biggar suggests he had done in The Hastening That Waits: attempting to say what Barth should have said, as though he did actually say it. That won't fly in my dissertation. Proper exposition, productive disagreement, and clear and explicit adaptation are both more intellectually honest and more likely to do something useful in the field. No place better to start than here.

On the other hand, this also isn't the post on the Judean logic of scripture that was coming next. That is far too long and involuted, and keeps moving as I keep trying to write it again. I've written the blessed thing four times now! I can't keep the edges from curling in and obscuring the axis of the argument. But: Paul's perspective isn't simply of chronological importance; he is irreducibly different in perspective from the gospel writers and what follows them. And the difference is history -- Paul's worldview, the worldview of the Synoptics, and John's worldview are three different things, because of the events they use to interpret the meaning of the promises of God. Very different apocalypticisms.

Anyhow, having this disagreement with Barth has started to boil down to doctrine-of-scripture differences. Not coincidentally, this is what I told my adviser I planned to work on when I entered the program. :) I seem to have simply come at it the long way 'round.

Creation, order, and world -- and far too much reliance on John 1

2011-07-09T18:00:00.002-05:00

It's good to get feedback here. Even and especially when it disagrees with me. I get to iterate over ideas and throw out the ones that don't work. And occasionally, like last week's argument with David over the trinity, it compels me to go back and do my constructive work over again and make it tighter. Unfortunately, I did it offline. Which means now I have to go through and post up the pieces of it that now make sense. Given that the base disagreement seems to have something to do with what Barth says (and therefore what a Barthian can say), I'm starting from the middle, with the rereading of the opening of III.1. And there's some really cool stuff, and some really ugly stuff.

Starting with the cool stuff. Section 40, pp. 16-17 and 19-22, the small print sections. What is the world? kosmos = ktisis + demiourgia. The world as world is ordered creation. And yet eschatology speaks of the katabole kosmou -- the destruction of the world, yes, but more properly its disordering. This is not the undoing of creation; it is the undoing of the ordering by which the creation has become this particular world.

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"Nature itself becomes the theatre of grace"

2011-07-02T21:22:00.000-05:00

"Neither the work of the Son nor that of the Holy Spirit is understandable if we fail to recognize the miraculous element which accompanies these events, or if we try to conjure away the miracle as such. Again this does not mean that God ceases to be true to Himself, the Creator and Lord of this world. But how can the divine work take place, in which God causes His preserving grace to triumph over man's opposition, without a perception by man of the divine opposition as such? How can grace meet him as grace if it simply decks itself out as nature, if nature as such is grace? Grace is the secret behind nature, the hidden meaning of nature. When grace is revealed, nature does not cease to exist. How can it, when God does not cease to be its Creator? But there is in nature more than nature. Nature itself becomes the theatre of grace, and grace is manifested as lordship over nature, and therefore in freedom over against it. And again God is not less but more glorious for us in miracle than elsewhere. Again miracle is simply the revelation of the divine glory otherwise hidden from us, on the strength of which we can believe and honour Him elsewhere as Creator and Lord. Miracle must not be reduced to the level of God's other and general being and action in the world. Its miraculous nature must not be denied. It must be maintained -- even for the sake of the general truth. For it is miracle alone which opens for us the door to the secret that the Creator's saving opposition to us does not confront us only at individual points and moments, but throughout the whole range of our spatio-temporal existence." CD II.1, p. 509 (section 31.2)

Sittler, anyone? I ran across this reference in Matt Rose, Ethics with Barth, and was immediately reminded of another theologian of my acquaintance who says that nature is the theater of grace. Rose's footnote isn't right on the standard page numbering, but Google Books is excellent for tracking down citations that aren't where you've been told they were.

Both Joseph Sittler and Karl Barth before him are using this phrase to answer the question of the relationship between nature and grace -- I need to dig into Essays on Nature and Grace and look for congruencies of thought here. This phrase becomes a key article of Sittler's thought. The phrase isn't new, by any means, but it's not exactly common, either. The thought lines up with Aquinas' treatment of nature and grace, as well. But it struck me to see this phrase in Barth's "hand" as an answer to the problem.

(That's all -- nothing more, for now.)

Why it bugs me, and why I don't think I can use it

2011-07-01T15:58:00.000-05:00

"It" being McCormack's (Levering's (Aquinas')) synthetic suggestion that the moment of divine procession, as the mutual self-creation of the Father and the Son, is simultaneously the creation of the creation as the missional object of the procession of the Son (and Spirit likewise). It's been niggling at the edge of my brain since the first day of lectures, almost two weeks ago, at the Barth conference. Very elegant, useful as a solution to the philosophical objections of theodicy based on choice of this world over some other, perhaps necessary if one wants to fight "voluntarism" and the play of freedom and necessity in the act of creation, as McCormack expressed that he does.

Races I'm not running in.

To begin with, God here is immutable, or not far from it. We have let in only those changes necessary to define the being of God as we have come to understand it, exported them back to the beginning of all that is, and locked them down. This is not what John 1 means to do. This is not the meaning of the identification of the kaine ktisis with the bereshit bara of Genesis. Unless, of course, you take it to be a propositional truth claim rather than story. The truth of story is deeper than the surface of the narrative -- it runs downward to the function of the narrative.

So I have two basic problems, one with the implications for the nature of God, and one with the interaction of this idea with the story-logic of creation narratives. We'll start with the nature of God and work out to narrative.

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Princeton Barth-Aquinas Conference: Recap part 2

2011-06-26T15:39:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like all of my recap of the Barth conference is really going to be retrospective. You can find great overviews of the whole conference covered between Travis' blog and Nathan's blog. Like the first part, I'm going to aim for theological recap with some evaluation.

The second set of speakers on Monday were nominally presenting de trinitate. First up was Guy Mansini, OSB. Fr. Mansini wanted us to be clear at the start about his monastic vocation, perhaps because he wore clerics rather than his Benedictine habit. (The Dominicans in habit were quite self-evidently monastic.) And it was quite relevant for his analysis of humility and obedience in the second person of the trinity. Using the Rule as a means of demonstrating humility and obedience (and creating and enforcing it -- quite a bit of coverage of the function of the Rule as a practical social means), Fr. Mansini approached the question of Christ's subordination to the Father. He opened with a paraphrase of a passage on repentance in Lewis' Mere Christianity:

In fact, it needs to be a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person – and he would not need it. (57)

God can share only what God has, and repentance God has not -- so God needed to take on human nature. The moderns, of course, find Lewis naïve; it is too superficial to say that there is no such thing as divine repentance or divine suffering. [Here, of course, is the debate on impassibility. And perhaps the Fathers are naïve, but perhaps they simply have other epistemological commitments than we do. Augustine is quite sophisticated, as were Plato and Aristotle.] At any rate, Fr. Mansini sets up the typology between a view of God as lacking human nature, and an integral view of the humanity of God. And attempts to stand between them.

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In the meantime, gospel thoughts.

2011-06-26T12:17:00.000-05:00

It looks like all the rest of my conference recap will be retrospective at this point -- getting home and returning to the pile of delayed work always does this. Part 2 is in the pipe, but for the moment, some thoughts on this morning's gospel and the inevitable theme of "welcoming."

Mt 10:40-42, kind of stiffly: "The one accepting/receiving you, accepts/receives me, and the one accepting/receiving me accepts/receives the one having sent me. The one accepting/receiving a prophet for the prophet's name gains the wage of the prophet, and the one accepting/receiving a just (person) for the just (person)'s name gains the wage of the just. And whoever shall draw a draught of cold (water) for one of the least of these merely for the disciple's name, truly I tell you, shall by no means lose the disciple's wage."

What is the onoma? I've translated eis as purpose, such that it is the fact that the person is called what they are called that is the basis for reception and acceptance. But onoma here is not the person's name, as Peter is called Peter and I am called Matthew. It is the person's calling, as the potter is called Potter and the drawer of water is called Wassermann. And for the names which are here -- prophet, just/righteous, disciple -- it would seem that these are also callings. Vocations, names invoked upon us. Vocations, considered in terms of what we therefore do -- the opposite of calling a potter, "Potter." A prophet is called by God, or she is no prophet at all. A just person is just, as we must understand in Christ, because of an external criterion of righteousness. A disciple is so because of the teacher. And correspondingly, these are missions. All right, I admit, I have some trouble with dikaios in this scheme -- but we are called to be it, regardless.

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Princeton Barth-Aquinas Conference: Recap part 1

2011-06-21T20:18:00.003-05:00

I don't tend to do the "event coverage recap" genre here, but I have to deal with my handwritten notes somehow, so here we go. I'm at the Princeton Barth Conference this year, and the topic this year is an ecumenical convergence of Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas. Each day has been divided into two two-lecture sessions: one by a Protestant Barthian, and one by a Catholic Thomist. And honestly, it continues to feel like the Barthians have the home court advantage.

First up, on the nature of God, were Robert Jenson and Richard Schenk, OP. And honestly, Jenson blew me away, so I'm going to spend most of my time on him for this piece. Jenson's has so far been the most on-target of the lectures, in terms of fitting the topic assigned. I had gotten my lectures out of order, and initially expected him on Trinity, but this way we were only subjected to a few recitations of "The name of God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit." It was a seated, profoundly conversational lecture. And conversationally profound, if I can flip that around. Having taken a hiatus from Barth, Jenson had to pick up Barth fresh, and re-learn him. It seems that after a while, Barth doesn't say the same things you remember him saying. And so, with the caveat that "discoursing on God's being is perilous," he dove into CD II.

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Sin, disapproval, and John 20:23

2011-06-20T06:07:00.001-05:00

Reading Drawn to Freedom, I'm struck by the clarity of the understanding of sin. That, and how pale in comparison are those 'sins' which are merely sinful because we disapprove of them. Sin is sin, not because there are rules that oppose a thing, but because it authentically causes misery. It does us harm. It is defined by our painful distance from God. In Paul's terms, it is even personified as that power that rules over us, but from whose service we are liberated into the service of God in Christ under the Spirit.
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The church and the dynamic of salvation, II: mission?

2011-06-19T15:16:00.000-05:00

So, having written the last post, I'm left wondering what it does to mission:

The church has no necessary participation in the economy of salvation. I wish to be clear: the church is not a necessity in the relationship between God and creation. The communion of the people of God is a consequence of salvation. It is a result, by no means an ordained one, and in no way a mediation. It is, on the other hand, a key place in which we act out our being-in-the-dynamic-of-salvation. It is, at its best, the place par excellence of that mode of being, the place designed by and for that mode of being in preference over all others. As such, it is the place of the sacraments. As such, it is the place of the gospel. It is the place in which we participate in God's given means of grace because of salvation already achieved in Christ and being acted out under the Spirit. It is the exemplary realm of ethical being-in-the-world on the basis of being-in-the-dynamic-of-salvation. Or at least, it can be.

Mission is ethical being in the world, being under the command of God and the Spirit of God as a result of salvation. As such, it is also a consequence of salvation -- but I would rank it as prior to the church/communion of the people of God. I want to say that salvation creates missionary obedience creates koinonia partnership.

And yet it is clear from scripture that koinonia may precede conversion -- and that whole communities may become missional as they become aware of their salvation in Christ. I do not say, "as they become saved" -- because that happened already, whether it is acknowledged or not in the present. But as I say that, I'm not sure that the nature of the word koinonia describes what survives the change in intentional community. If the intentionality of the community changes, it then has a new nature as community, and is a new koinonia, a new communion.

The church and the dynamic of salvation

2011-06-18T09:15:00.001-05:00

The church has no necessary participation in the economy of salvation. I wish to be clear: the church is not a necessity in the relationship between God and creation. The communion of the people of God is a consequence of salvation. It is a result, by no means an ordained one, and in no way a mediation. It is, on the other hand, a key place in which we act out our being-in-the-dynamic-of-salvation. It is, at its best, the place par excellence of that mode of being, the place designed by and for that mode of being in preference over all others. As such, it is the place of the sacraments. As such, it is the place of the gospel. It is the place in which we participate in God's given means of grace because of salvation already achieved in Christ and being acted out under the Spirit. It is the exemplary realm of ethical being-in-the-world on the basis of being-in-the-dynamic-of-salvation. Or at least, it can be.

Text as Codec in Oral Culture

2011-06-09T15:08:00.001-05:00

While I do some copy-editing on several essays by Joanna Dewey, I'm struck by the ways that texts actually functioned, and analogies that fit their oral-culture role better than the modern concept of the text. And the one that best appears to me is text-as-codec. An auditory event is recorded, encoded, conveyed, decoded and performed elsewhere as an auditory event. Nobody reads an MP3 file as text, unless they're using it for audio steganography. Likewise with a JPEG file, only for visual images -- those of us who are old enough to remember when mail clients used to accidentally inline the "text" of a JPEG attachment will understand.

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Law and the Purity of the Gospel

2011-05-21T10:32:00.005-05:00

My post about the Augustana and article 7 occasioned the following, rather insightful comment from a man named David:

I'll admit I've only skimmed some of the work you're citing, but has anyone focused in more on the "pure preaching" and "proper administration" aspects? One argument I can see is that the gospel is not preached purely if the law is not also preached purely, and calling something not sin that is sin dilutes the purity of the law.

And that's exactly the place I want to begin, because David put his finger on one of the key complaints about preaching the gospel in its purity, the one that is most often framed in terms of "Gospel Reductionism." It begins with the notion that the gospel requires the law -- that the dialectical relationship between law and gospel is necessary for the existence of the gospel. The second move in the chain is, given the scriptural understanding that the gospel has an essence -- that as Paul says there is one gospel and only one gospel and it is thus-and-such -- that therefore the law has an essence. That therefore the purity of one depends on the purity of the other, and any dilution of one has a direct effect on the other. And so if we water down the law, we cannot be doing justice to the essence of the gospel.

(I might note that the argument rarely runs the other direction -- nobody shouts so loudly when we water down the gospel and deliver full-strength law. They just blame it on the nature of Christianity as a judgmental and condemnatory religion. It's expected.)

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Up next:

2011-05-20T11:02:00.000-05:00

The next post, which I haven't got time for this minute, needs to hit the uses and abuses of law/gospel dialectic and the office of the keys. Here's what I put up on Facebook not too long ago:

The more I go back into 2009 and read up on the reponse to CWA, the more irritated I get at the theology on display. Seriously: the keys may be one of Luther's late-extended marks of the church, but they are not a means of grace.

I've been coming to a realization about forgiveness lately. It isn't an end in itself; it's strategic. It sets the power of sin aside, demonstrating the truth, which is that God has no need to respect our sin as an impediment, as though it could possibly stand in the way of salvation, redemption, and the call to mission. Which are what God *does*, what God *wants to do*. What God wants *us* to do. Binding sins and sinners is not even beside the point; it competes against the point.

Modification to the above: binding sinners is useful as part of the civil order -- I'm not about to argue that Ted Kaczynski, for example, should be free to do as he pleases so long as violence pleases him. But it does not interfere with the progress of the gospel. Nor am I about to argue that he should be removed from Christian community because of his actions, or exempt from Christian care. Which basically writes off the usual uses of that key...

Some of that I've said here already; but the development for the specific theological offense has to come on its own.

What's church? Or: The use and abuse of AC 7 for life

2011-05-20T08:50:00.000-05:00

So I'm spending a lot of time re-reading the late-2009 Lutheran right. As a friend of mine says, the Churchwide Assembly wasn't about theology, so much as emotional processes, and I think he's right, but it produced a whole steaming heap of theology out the other end. And I'm digging through it, and one of the bits that bugs me most is the assertion that the ELCA is no longer a church, because in accepting "Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust" and the ministry recommendations, we violated AC 7.

The claim seems to turn on a reading of the satis est in which conformity to the Bible is the first mark. You can read plenty of Thursday Theology entries on the wrongheadedness of this replacement of "Gospel" with "Bible" over at Crossings, but since this is a place where I do my own work for mostly my own sake, I'm going to take my own run at it. What is the functional ecclesiology of the Augsburg Confession?
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Evangelical Catholicity -- not theirs, and not enough.

2011-05-19T19:09:00.001-05:00

I've avoided calling myself an "Evangelical Catholic" for a while now. Basically since college, when I realized that the ALPB and their periodicals were taking the perfectly good concept and making it the exclusive preserve of the politically reactionary. I don't mean to say "conservative" because I'm not clear that they are in any way actually more conservative and less liberal -- but I've said that already here. But I'm sick of abandoning perfectly good Lutheran identifiers, and along with "confessional," I refuse to give this one up to the right wing any longer.
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Frangible and plastic

2011-05-18T12:09:00.000-05:00

Whiteness is a weird thing to get a hold of. I keep finding myself talking about it in two different ways. On the one hand, it is a profoundly plastic identity, in that the standard of social power and prestige involved shifts constantly as different groups approach it. On the other hand, it is a profoundly frangible identity, in that when you try to grab hold of it as a thing, it instantly shatters into a million other, officially non-white, things. I think the distinction can be made this way: whiteness as an identity is frangible, because it is not actually an identity; whiteness as a position is plastic, because it keeps moving as the landscape of social power changes.

What are theological conservatives conserving?

2011-05-08T19:39:00.000-05:00

Reading a lot of sociology of religion lately -- it's getting awfully hard to put up with the "conservative" and "liberal" labels as frequently applied from the political field to the theological one. The "most theologically conservative" position is not the one which most agrees with a very precise and relatively recent strain of the Fundamentalist lineage. Unless, of course, you're of the Fundamentalist line, in which case you may well be conserving something original to your heritage. If you're Lutheran, holding that point of view is highly theologically liberal of you. By which I mean exactly what the term says: you have applied the label of the Lutheran confessional heritage with a high degree of flexibility, including within that position elements that are not original to it. And in this case, often at the cost of failing to conserve elements native to that tradition, which stand in conflict with the position you hold.

I'm tired of being labeled a theological liberal by Lutherans who claim political conservatism as though it were theological conservatism. For whom the choice of theological novelties leans to the Biblical inerrantist side, rather than the social justice side -- just as liberal, but in the opposite direction! Proper theological conservatism is aware of its sources and their authenticity to a particular claimed tradition. It is a median position -- not to say centrist, but a position in the midst of a field of options. And the options aren't "my way or the wrong way" -- orthodoxy or heresy, as most poignantly put by Neuhaus in recent time -- but rather, my way or someone else's way. Our way or their way, except where we reach points that are common to us in the tradition, but ideally without stigmatizing the other traditions. And, of course, a whole range of new ways as we take up situations not properly considered in the pasts of our traditions.

So, when you claim theological conservatism as your high ground, stop and think: whose traditions are you conserving? Where did you get that idea from? Whose is it, and how did it get to be yours? And if you thump on the "conservatives," don't thump on them for being traditional, or socially and politically conservative -- thump on them for being deeply theologically liberal. Get to the root of the problem first.

Is it really "the Lutheran Ethic"?

2011-05-08T19:15:00.000-05:00

Rule number one of evaluating Lutheran scholars talking about Luther and the confessions: if they don't cite either of them directly by specific writings, chances are they have problems in their grasp of Lutheranism. The Book of Concord is a collection, and no sensible confessional scholar will tell you "The Book of Concord says [x]." (Any more than a serious exegete will tell you "The Bible says [x]," and mean that the thoroughgoing witness of the whole is [x].) Perhaps the Formula says [x], or one of the writings in the BoC says it, but you must be specific! And of specific attention in terms of "what Luther said," watch for people whose major Luther citation method is secondary: Weber, Troeltsch, Fromm ... and one citation from Dillenberger's collection of snippets. I'm sorry, where's the references to Luther's Works?

Kersten's The Lutheran Ethic (1970) isn't serious scholarship by this judgment. And it bugs me! Perhaps it is serious sociology for its time. It looks reasonable by that standard. But it is not reasonable in its grasp of the thing it attempts to measure. The titular "Lutheran ethic" -- more properly "ethos" -- is characterized from the introduction on in terms of 17th-century gnesio-orthodoxy. It holds up Flacius -- or at least his grasp of the utter depravity of man and the destruction of the image of God -- while slamming Calvin. (And not realizing how inconsistent that is!) And then it slams the LCA and ALC as falling into liberal Protestantism because they don't hold to this view of Luther, while pointing up the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods as the conservators of this Lutheran ethic. Pardon me, that means they're heretics, conserving something the Formula steers clear of.

Why am I reading it? Well, for a paper, as with so many books. I read through Wuthnow on the restructuring of American religion, and a recent collection on Lutheranism pointed me to Kersten as a direct approach to sociology of Lutheranism in the US context. Somehow, I have to either get past the fact that Kersten is measuring a highly biased target, or use that to frame how I read him and filter his results for it.

Suffice it to say I don't recommend this book.

"Is it good to be only human?"

2011-05-02T20:24:00.001-05:00

Bill Schweiker asked the question last week in the Advanced Seminar, and I can't help but hear Barth in it. "Is it good to be only human?" And it dovetails with questions that have been foremost on my mind several times in the last few weeks -- about death.

We've been talking about death as "senescence," as an evil of the human design that can be fixed. S. Jay Olshansky showed us very interesting approaches to the problem on the demographic understanding of the mortality curves, and actuarial science. And as far as it goes we have certainly pushed out death as far as possible, and we look to push it out further still. But we've reached the end of the low-hanging fruit! Children in developmentally advantaged areas have profoundly limited mortality, and it drops to the floor as we move through the ages of fertility and reproductive impact, and rises after. And so we push out the rise in mortality as late as possible, and hit the point where we're in linear rise in mortality over age bins, and we see things like dementias that we'd never see before, because death always came before. So we're playing with the nature of the ends of our lives all the time, even as part of "civilization".

But we still die. It is still part of human nature, the essence of our being. We are born and we die. And this is where Schweiker hits me: is it good? Is death a good part of created existence? Or is this something we ought to write out of the code if possible?

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Teachable moments in church history

2011-04-28T11:48:00.003-05:00

It's one thing to suggest that the institutional church is failing. It's another to say that the phenomenon is brand spanking new. More appropriately put, institutional churches are always failing. But that has to do with bureaucratic formal organization. Never be surprised when human ventures in community go "the way of all flesh."

And yet, in the title link, David Housholder is surprised. And it's apparently the end of the world as we know it. This is nothing new for him, and I've commented on it before. But this time he's not talking about denominational churches participating in demographic stagnation. No; this time it's a characteristically American conservative rant about how all of society is on the downward spiral to failure. "The rusting of our major institutions," as he puts it, saying he's "a pessimist about the ability of our major institutions to survive this century." (In spite, of course, of his natural optimism "for the human race and for creation in general.")

And what institution heads the list? The church.

Arguably the most resilient of all institutions (outliving languages and nations, and all ideologies), the church has gone "sideline" in the space of one generation. The church was the only major institution to survive the fall of the Roman Empire. Irrelevant and ignored are the two adjectives that come to mind when I think of the 21st century church.

Virtually no explicit Christian leaders, for the first time in two millennia, are first-team varsity culture-shapers on our planet. We don’t even have an Oprah, let alone a Churchill.

Today’s 15-year-olds to 30-year-olds are ignoring the church in unprecedented droves.

Most denominational organizations are ripped apart by political issues. Christianity is fragmented like never before.

And this, friends, is a teachable moment in church history. Because mister Housholder wasn't paying attention, apparently, when they covered the history sequence in seminary. Or he's willing to act like it for some reason.
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New creation (emphasis)

2011-04-25T09:49:00.003-05:00

Somehow, over the past year, I've fallen into a fairly stable orbit around the doctrine of creation. I didn't plan it, it just has sort of happened. And there's good support for it happening, what with being the Sittler fellow and involved in all these green circles, and the fact that I set out to be in religion and science in the first place, lo these many years ago, and have landed in the Zygon Center. But the key thing for me was doing my Barth exam, and becoming enthralled with CD III.4, and creation ethics.

So right now I'm inching my way through the whole of volume III, and it occurs to me that I hear very little anywhere about III.1. Plenty of work on III.2. Again very little on III.3. And then we come to III.4, with another glut of work (relatively speaking). So part of my summer project (therefore also part of exam/dissertation prep) is reading the whole blessed volume and coming out with a larger thematic sense of it. And let me tell you, even at my during-semester crawl because of everything else that has to get done, III.1 is revelatory. And part of me wonders why this view isn't more represented in the field.

Now, another part of me realizes that Frei and Lindbeck blew out the narrative vein in their own ways, and so there's stereotyped resistance to the thoroughgoing narrative understanding of creation. Die Sage has been taken as its own methodological basis, and after Dibelius and Bultmann and friends (and enemies, for that matter), who can blame them? But I find Hefner's creation exposition reflective, and I've got Reumann on my list. The question is the same one, for me, that I come to when I try to describe my growing theological method as "narrative theology" -- that name is taken, find another one. Theological narratology?

I look up that word, and I find it has the meanings I want already. Or at least to some extent -- I'm not clear that the existing modal/thematic distinction serves, but I can make it work. And of course narratology tends to be structuralist in ways that have to be fixed, but I'm used to that.

Anyways, creation. I'm off track here, and I think I'll get back to this in another post.

Taubes' Paul ... and mine: 2

2011-04-11T12:03:00.002-05:00

Enemies: inimicus or hostis? Private or public enemies? Why in the hell should it make a difference to God? Neither as personal antipathy nor as social group antipathy can Romans 11:28 have any relevance to the relationship of the people before God. I have to disagree with this basic component of the Taubes-Schmitt discussion.

Romans 11:28-32:

Concerning the proclamation, they are inimical because of you, but concerning the election, they are beloved because of the patriarchs, for the graciousness and the calling of God are irrevocable. Indeed, just as you were once unpersuaded with respect to God, and now you have been shown mercy for the sake of these unpersuaded, so also these now have been unpersuaded for the sake of your mercy, so that they too shall receive mercy. For God bound everyone up together in unpersuadedness, in order to show mercy to everyone.

Opposition to the proclamation and mission -- to the drawing in of the goyim across a boundary which could not so easily be transgressed before Christ -- has caused what may well even be a communal antipathy, and enmity between groups, but it is an internal Judean conflict. And despite their enmity, it is not permissible to denigrate and destroy these who are apeithoi when it comes to Jesus as the Christ. The election remains, and there is reason to love them as God loves them, who has elected them in their ancestors, just as you have now been elected and joined to their ancestral line.

Taubes' Paul ... and mine: 1

2011-04-11T11:51:00.003-05:00

I can see how Taubes has little choice in his milieu but to read Paul as a traitor. But I cannot read Paul as anything but a faithful Judean embracing a new situation. This has much to do, in my opinion, with the fact that Paul's language is not so strong as its polemical appropriation and translation by later Christians. For Paul there is no negation of Torah. But there is by the same right no aberrant extension of Torah to contexts in which it is not rightly the consequences of God's relationship. What Taubes had to resolve using Hegelian sublation, in order to avoid the straight destructive transgression of the law, is not in fact a necessary reading of Paul. It need not be resolved, because the situation that caused the reading can be negotiated out of the problem altogether. The Christian polemical reading of Paul as having been a Jew, and converting to Christ, is false.

Taubes, Paul, and apocalyptic

2011-04-11T10:06:00.003-05:00

Reading up on Jacob Taubes in preparation for reading Taubes, in preparation for proposing a paper on Taubes and Paul and apocalyptic. So these are preliminary musings.

Strote's article in Tablet is interesting -- and raises exactly the point at which I wind up disagreeing with Agamben on Romans. Eschatology. Of course, I wind up disagreeing with a large swath of Christianity on eschatology as it is, but doing "Jewish studies" studies and reading Romans from that lens has forced me to discard a lot, in favor of the sense that our eschatology is a tale told, and that the earnest expectation is not what is stated in the tale, but the release that God will give from the bondage of our situation.

I'm not sure I believe in eschatological salvation. You can find my quibbles about heaven and hell back in October or November 2010 somewhere, but destinations are secondary to the plain notion. The saving acts of God happen constantly throughout the life of the endless and expanding relationship between God and creation. And I think we've taken a lot of medieval apocalypticism and turned it into earnest doctrinal expectation, which is a mistake. The judicatory notions that we have granted primacy belong in the tradition, but they do not belong where they are today. Eschatological salvation is a hope for God's good order as the righteous termination of this false and oppressive order. That I can get on board with, because the present order in apocalyptic vision is never something to be celebrated. God's good order breaks in, violates this order and ultimately defeats it -- it belongs to the eschata of evils rather than their teloi. And so it is naturally an end. But it does not therefore belong where we have placed it, at the ultimate end! As a destination after life in all instances, life therefore ruled by all that comes before salvation. This is a mistake. This is how words like eschatological and apocalyptic come to be applied to nuclear holocaust and the like, events devoid of theological content but filled with ultimate human disaster. This is how hope comes to be ultimately escapist, counter to all proper holistic ecology of creation as God's good work and rightful kingdom.

Apocalyptic is an excellent language for hidden transcripts.

I'm obliged to read Paul in ways not necessarily available to Taubes, but certainly influenced by him. Taubes had to take on the Christian Paul, because he was what there was to work with, and to Judaize him even as a radical and rebellious Judean to find any text worth reading. He had to take on a Paul for whom law and faith were antithetical, for whom Christ and the Jews were antithetical, and one is unsurprised that as a German, he chose to do it in the venerable language of Hegel, to use Aufhebung, sublation, the simultaneous annulment and elevated preservation of a thing. The trail he blazed I have seen, though I still have to read the tools he himself constructed for the purpose.

My question, therefore, for Taubes, is about the character of the Pauline eschaton.

Romans, Barth, and universalism

2011-04-09T19:48:00.005-05:00

I have no plans to read Rob Bell. But the good and bad being said about him gives me something I ought to say, which is about universalism. And being me, I have to connect it to Barth and Romans. (What's a dissertation topic for, right?)

I'm about to give a presentation on the doctrine of creation, as story since it's the kind of thing I'm into now. And I've said elsewhere that the doctrine of creation is not a primary evidential claim about God -- it's ascribed to God by faith in response to salvation. This is the sort of thing that faith does, when faced with a God so good and gracious and fundamentally just in ways that blow our judgmental notions of justice out of the water. God's self-revealing, in exactly the saving ways it happens, is the sort of thing that blows open our concept of the world. And we give that world to God, because we have seen past the ways it appears to work, to the real logic. And this is exactly what John 1 says, when it makes Christ the divinely given logos behind all creation. Whoever appears to be in charge, however the game appears to be played, even and especially when it seems like you're losing -- that's not the way it really is. Creation is apocalyptic in this way. It is a radical claim (literally -- radix means root), a counter-factual except by faith. And faith sees that this is how the world actually works out -- Second Isaiah is a fantastic example of this, edited as it is to read Cyrus as the messianic deliverer.

Given this kind of view of God, especially as it works into a history of the expanding peoples of God, of the inclusiveness of God's salvation and adoption (which is always set alongside a limiting, consolidating history -- see Ezra-Nehemiah in contrast to the Ruth narrative, or the Pastorals as contrast to the genuine Paul), how could we tell a story that wasn't in some way universalist? Having ascribed to God the whole of creation, and the genuine and ultimate order underlying all others, how should we tell a story where we then cut out some part of it? Now, apocalyptic gives one answer to the question, since the creation apocalyptic is always told in opposition to an enemy order of the world, one that does not evince God's will and saving regard for God's chosen people. Judgment (God's no) falls upon the oppressing enemy. Judgment falls on the false game. In the prophets, judgment even falls on God's own, when they play the false game, when they are the oppressing enemy. So there's a basis for distinguishing where the "no" of God falls. But is it a basis for division of eschatological salvation? (Whether or not I believe in the idea is another question!)

I want to point to a particular passage in Romans 2 where Paul is talking about the perfect judgment of God. Romans 2:5-11:

In accordance with your hardness and unrepentant mind, you store up for yourself wrath on a day of wrath, and of the revelation of the just judgment of God – the judgment God will give to each according to their deeds. To those who, according to persistence in good deeds, are seeking glory and honor and incorruptibility, God will give eternal life. To those who, out of rivalry, both distrust the truth and assent to injustice, God will give wrath and emotional suffering. Oppression and straitened circumstances for every human life that does evil, to the Judean first and also to the Hellene, but glory and honor and peace to everyone who does good, to the Judean first and also to the Hellene – for there is no partiality with God.

Look at what the blessings are here: eternal life. Glory and honor and peace. And the curses? "Wrath and emotional suffering" -- my translations for orge and thymos. "Oppression and straitened circumstances" -- my translations for thlipsis and stenochoria. Now, it may be obvious that eternal life is an eschatological reward. (It isn't, necessarily, but we'll go with it.) Doxa, time, and eirene are not. Sure, they may apply to the "everlasting reward," but these are gifts of God for good behavior here on Earth. In the same way, there is no pressing reason to see the four words used for the curses, as in any way otherworldly or eschatological. Let's start with wrath -- I won't argue that the original reference for this in Romans is about the wrath of God. And apocalyptic gives us every reason to see God's wrath properly directed here, outside of the antithesis to Paul's mission that is Romans 1:18-32. But it is worked out in this world, not some other. Thymos, which I've glossed as emotional suffering, is a very specifically this-side concern. As for oppression and restriction, apocalyptic gives us every reason to see these as the hope of the people of God, the turning of the tables upon the oppressors, and a hope for the suppression of those who would do harm in this world.

None of these are in any way an eternal punishment of any sort. There is no hell here. And in point of fact, there need be none, since what is being countered here (from 1:18-32) has no eternal dimension either. God hands over the idolatrous sinner to a subordinate authority for punishment, but punishment meet to the temporal nature of the crime, meant to counter the error -- dishonoring what has been falsely honored in place of God. And it is fitting that in no place in Romans is God's judgment of sinful creation any form of eternal condemnation. In fact, in the closest place to that sort of thing, Paul explains what God could do, and in fact does not because of justice -- because of goodness and restraint and patience, not destroying vessels that could have no other purpose but to be destroyed, but honoring them instead. And this is the story of the Gentile converts in the audience, to whom Paul speaks in chapters 9-11 -- they are those about whom 1:18-32 are commonly said, but not by God. They are those whose lives rest in the family tree planted and cultivated by God, whose strength is in the root of Abraham because of Christ. And who were never supposed to wind up there! Who could easily find themselves outside again, standing in the august company of Ishmael and Esau, and whose destiny is with God because God has acted to graft them in.

The next place I have to go after that is always Barth's re-ordering of the "orders of creation." How, in the face of that purity of gospel about the actions of God, can we move to a story that upholds any eternal judgment against our brother or sister? That stands on God's "no" as though it were not in every case a "nevertheless" -- as though it were instead a final word? No; in the face of this God who does this sort of thing by nature and choice, we are obligated to a different sort of worldview. It is in no way unusual to put humanity before God, but it accords well with both Paul and Matthew to place human beings level with one another before God. As high, and only as high, as the least among them. Which is at the same time exactly as exalted as Christ, our brother. There is no room, between "man and fellow-man," for judgment and condemnation -- for elevation and deprecation. Only the goyim believe in such things. (Again, not a terminal judgment, just an observation -- they're mistaken about the ultimate order of things. And Jesus says, don't you make the same mistake. Don't play that game.)

We are level before God in judgment, too, and that is as much an article of faith for Paul's audience as for ours. But the justice of God is revealed adjacent to that judgment. In a space contiguous with that of judgment, a space that does not abolish judgment, but a space that God has chosen as preferable when it comes to dealing with creation in Christ. A space witnessed to by both the law and the prophets. And here's the trick -- this space is not judgment according to deeds, which is our usual justification discussion, but it is also not judgment according to identity. Just as God's perfect judgment has no preferential option for anything but doing the good, God's perfect justice in Christ has no preferential option for anything but trust. It has no room for the presumption that anyone is excluded from that space in Christ. Nor does it have any room for the presumption that anyone is necessarily included in that space!

So: universalism. I can't stand uncritically on the assumption that everyone is automatically in, but I can't countenance the assumption that anyone is necessarily out. And I refuse to let human choice creep in; God made the choice in Christ for the whole of creation. "For" as in "in favor of"; "for" as in "in place of and binding upon." The choice was made while we couldn't choose it. The choice was made while we wouldn't choose it. And that salvation, already accomplished and constantly, inevitably working out, is our epistemology underlying the doctrine of creation. And every person who hears that gospel, and trusts in the God who does this sort of thing by nature and choice, is one more person who sees the kingdom of God as the way things are. In view of this, double predestination is a foolish approach to the world. It takes the unconditional election of God and assumes that it has a dark side. It assumes that God plays the false game with us. Whether or not every universalist perspective is correct, universalism is certainly a more appropriate approach to this new world where God has set salvation in motion in ever-widening paths.

FYI: Reasons for digitizing at 96kHz or above

2011-03-17T11:21:00.004-05:00

Some Archives work intruding -- I do digitization of analog tape recordings for both preservation and use copies. And in the research I've done, few people talk about why sampling frequency needs to go up, and up, and up -- I hear a lot of "96kHz is marketing -- you can't hear sounds up there anyways." And I'm not sure that 192kHz isn't marketing, but having the equipment now, I can tell you why high-frequency digitization is an absolute necessity.

First, a bit about Nyquist-Shannon theory. If the signal you want to faithfully reproduce is at frequency X, you need a sampling frequency of at least 2X to reproduce it. In practice, you actually need headroom over that, especially for dither. So, in your Red Book-standard CD, the audio is 16-bit, 44.1kHz. Now, that specification is the way it is because of older standards of mastering audio recordings, but what it means is that in that 44,100 Hz of headroom, you can reproduce sounds up to 22,050 Hz -- in practice, you only really get good stuff to about 20kHz, but we usually talk about that as the limit of audible frequencies anyways. So you can see that 48kHz (DVD standard) gets you reproduction to just under 24kHz, and 96kHz gets you reproduction to just under 48kHz.

So why do you need all of that range, when the ear picks up on only the stuff between 20-20,000 Hz?

Here's what I've found: basically, even if you can't hear it, it's still there in the analog signal. It doesn't matter, to start with, what frequencies you're dealing with as desirable -- speech voice recordings rarely have anything useful in them above 12.5kHz, for example. The noise runs through a much broader range of frequencies. 44.1 and even 48 don't accurately reproduce anything higher than 24 kHz, and everything above that has artifacts. You wind up with the frequency equivalent of amplitude clipping. It can't be removed, even with hard low-pass filters, and it can't be repaired. Often, we're talking about noise in the HF bands that isn't at audible amplitudes, say around -88dB. And nobody in the analog world would ever worry about that! It had as well not exist, because every component in the chain contributes more noise than that. But digital sampling doesn't care about audibility, it cares about mathematics.

So the moral of the story is, take your initial digitization at high frequency, 96kHz or better, because you need to faithfully reproduce the full noise spectrum to do anything of useful quality with the desired signal. After that, if you're cleaning out the noise, make sure you roll off anything above your Nyquist limit before you downsample, and everything will be great!

What is broken in us, Christ restores

2011-03-13T14:23:00.003-05:00

Lent 1A: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-21; Matthew 4:1-12

All that we have broken, Christ restores. All that is broken in us, because of sin, Christ restores. And he does this because he knows who he is before God -- and in him, before God, we know who we are.

Today's gospel reading brings to mind the Christ hymn of Philippians. "He did not look on equality with God as something to be seized, but being found in the form of a servant, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death." The prototypes didn't have this feature -- Eve could be tricked. Eve could be made to want more, and Adam was right there with her. But of course, all that story explains is that we don't have that feature. Which you know -- it's quite obvious at a casual glance around our world. We don't do humble well, unless there's no other choice. The word has a sour taste to it. Humility is always very close to humiliation. We want better.

But what is broken in us, Christ restores. We wouldn't bear up well under the temptations we see here. My wife and I keep at least two kinds of bread in the house at all times -- a loaf of industrial wheat bread, and a loaf of something better. There are few things as tasty, in my book, as a nice piece of sourdough toast, lightly buttered and spread with peanut butter. My mouth is watering just to think about it! And I get cranky if I fast for 12 hours. In the fullness of time spent fasting, Jesus was pretty hungry. The rocks were looking good right about then. "Solve your own problem -- you have the ability to make that into a boule of sourdough. It would certainly be the most delicious bread for miles around. What are you waiting for?" Maybe that's a little too obvious. "Gee, buddy. You look awful! I'd give you something to eat, but I don't have anything left. Wait -- aren't you the Son of God? Can't you do something about this?"

But this temptation isn't about fixing myself a harmless snack. What is messianic about me fixing my own hunger? Life doesn't just come from food. Our life can't be built on me feeding myself. "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." What is broken in us, Christ restores, and the Word of God feeds 5,000 people from a few loaves and some fish. That's messianic.

As to the second, I haven't jumped off the top of the Capitol building, but I bet it'd be a great stunt. Especially because nobody else knows about the whole angel trick. Wouldn't work for me, obviously, but I have plenty of stories from my time in the hardware store about cavalier attitudes around casually dangerous power equipment. When I was in the Boy Scouts, we took a trip into the mountains to learn climbing and rappelling. Now, heights scare the socks off me, but not everyone feels that way. One kid really liked the rappelling bit, and kept going back up to do it again -- got so comfortable up there he forgot to lock his carabiner. It's a good thing the guide caught it -- that's a hell of a way to come down the mountain, when the rope slips out. But what if you knew someone was going to catch you, no matter what? And this is no mountain out in the backwoods -- this is Jerusalem. This is the Temple. This might be the greatest news story around, and plenty of people to see it. A great way to announce yourself as the messiah, don't you think?

But what's so messianic about self-aggrandizing publicity stunts? The world has more of those than it needs, and without claiming to be shows of God's power. "Do not put the Lord your God to the test." And again, what is broken in us, Christ restores. And when he next comes to the Temple mount, it is with great popular acclamation for healing and preaching and teaching -- with a little hope of insurrection mixed in, to be sure. But what does he do? Jesus walks around with his disciples, and talks to people -- and sure, he gets a little irritated at the merchandising, but even that is an object lesson for his teaching. He goes about doing the kingdom of God in spite of everything. Because the people's hope in him is based on their need for salvation. Because he really does heal our brokenness. That's messianic.

As to the third temptation, just last week we saw Jesus take his disciples to a very high mountaintop. And they fell down in worship at the sight of Jesus transfigured, with Moses and Elijah standing there. I've heard years of Transfiguration sermons that talk about "the mountaintop experience". Today, Jesus says to the tempter, "Away with you, Satan! For it is written, "Worship the Lord your God and serve only Him."" Last week, his disciples said to him, "Hey, let's stay up here, and we'll make booths, and we can just hang out here in the holy." But God had another idea: "This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him." And what is broken in us, Jesus restores: he takes us back down the mountain, back down into the world where it is impossible to believe of ourselves that we're radiant and glowing and cool all by ourselves. Because what's messianic about that? No, Jesus takes us back down into the world, and gets back to work healing our brokenness. Restoring us and raising us to life.

In Jesus Christ, we know who we are. Before God, in Christ, we are people who have no need to artificially multiply our bread -- except to feed our neighbors. People who have no need to "prove" God's great goodness (and our own) -- except by living that goodness toward others. People who have no need to doubt that God will give us all things, and who can therefore go about meeting the world's needs. Christ fulfills in us everything that we lack, and the grace of God overflows from each and every one of us, moving out to restore the whole world.

Whiteness, or "gnōthi seauton"

2011-03-10T11:47:00.003-06:00

Tentative definition:

Whiteness: an attachment to an increasingly ungrounded familiarity with what is "normal" combined with a perverse obsession with the exotic. Either can have positive or negative values attached, but the objects of both remain largely un- or self-defined.

This requires some unpacking.

1) "an attachment to an increasingly ungrounded familiarity with what is 'normal'" -- Whiteness is a phenomenon of cultural normativity. For participants, it is based on a sense of self that has merged with the historically dominant group at some point. The difficulty is that that merger happens with respect to a target that is by nature ambiguous and vaguely defined. In the United States, it is part of a long and continuous chain of assimilation that continues to "move the bar". For groups early in the process, it involves the gradual adaptation and renunciation of cultural practices. The impact of situation-specific pressures and particular cultural values can cause the result to vary widely. Many German groups in America over the period of the two World Wars renounced large swaths of their immigrant culture in favor of Anglo-American cultural norms -- including renouncing the use of the German language in many instances. Other communities chose to remain more isolated and keep more of their cultural heritage -- the Wisconsin and Missouri Lutherans being notable examples. All of them are white Anglo-European Americans today. As the pressure has come off of German identity (with the exception of identification with National Socialism and the Hitler regime -- which remains stigmatized and falls into the second category, obsession with the exotic), white people of German ancestry (to whatever extent traceable) safely have begun re-appropriating token elements of their national-culture-of-origin. Another interesting example is the ongoing negotiation of Jewish identity both toward and away from whiteness in the United States.

In any case, the attachment to what is "normal" tends to stick, even as culture-of-origin practices are re-introduced in the more thoroughly assimilated, and in spite of the retention of "abnormal" particular practices. The constellation of acceptable cultures changes over time, but it is normatively white to engage in re-appropriation of one's "original ethnic identity" -- ethnic rather than racial. Note: The increasing trend of pitching "genetic ancestry testing" toward the U.S. African-American population for the sake of re-appropriating particular continental African (often tribal) cultural affinities doesn't seem to me to conflict with this judgment. The "roots search" of people of African ancestry in the United States has become a very similar process to the ancestry search of "rootless" white people, and the companies that do the work appear to be marketing the same genealogical research technology, with a few new tools, to a new (to them) and reasonably well-integrated "rootless" population on the basis of differentiating their by-now culturally normed blackness. It has become dominant-American-culture acceptable for the same reasons.

But this is what I mean by "increasingly ungrounded familiarity" -- it is as though I transplanted a bare-root plant from its native soil into a completely new environment, and it adapted to that environment, becoming thoroughly rooted there. The cedar growing in the Morton Arboretum is not Lebanese in terms of its environment. A transplanted biome, maintained carefully to preserve the conditions and environment of Lebanon, might grow cedars that resemble the cedars of Lebanon. But you could not transplant the fully-grown Illinois cedar to Lebanon and have it survive, and if you took the zoological specimen and planted it in your Illinois yard, it would also die. (Death is not essential to the analogy; it's just a fact of most fully-grown plants.) What we do instead is to take Illinois-grown cedars and decorate them with reasonably authentic but non-essential components of Lebanon. Non-threatening components that do not change the essential nature of the Illinois plant. These can be discarded at a moment's notice, and the plant remains what it is. It is so profoundly grounded in the "normal" of its actual environment that it can pretend to anything it so desires that does not significantly change that environment, and still remain "normal". Its environment of normalcy will in fact support most changes of that sort. The cedar can forget that it is growing in Illinois, but it retains a profoundly essential attachment to that environment, one that is very difficult to renounce because of its power over the organism's lifestyle.

2) "combined with a perverse obsession with the exotic" -- As I say, this can be positive or negative in value. By "perverse obsession" I mean that the object of focus is not typically taken on its own terms. Exoticism can support a wide variety of means of more-or-less authentically appropriating another culture. Consider Orientalism. I might say that the cultural re-appropriation of ethnic identities by whites is one example of positive-value exoticism -- just exotic enough to differentiate from the Same. Lawrence of Arabia is an extreme example of positive-value exoticism, while remaining a great example of the retention of white privilege and also the limits of tolerable transplant shock in terms of both the white environment and the white specimen. Sexual objectification of black women is also an example of positive-value exoticism -- note that I mean the value assigned to the exotic is positive within a given subjective framework, not that the behavior is. Homophobia, Islamophobia, focused racism (as opposed to the more prevalent generic racism in which every white person participates -- I mean people with expressed antisemitic views, for example) -- these would be major examples of negative-value obsession with the exotic.

To some extent, this is merely the flip-side of having an identity based upon a shifting conglomerate of social normativity. It is attached to a shifting conglomerate of things defined by their difference from the normal. Defined by acceptable or unacceptable difference, and frequently informally ranked as such from "good" to "bad". At the extreme, this can boil down to an absolute expression of one particular as universally normal and the exclusion of all difference -- see "orthodoxy and heresy". This would tend to be the zenith of negative-value exoticism. White supremacy in its stereotypically assertive, focused form, for an example in the whiteness spectrum. (Again, as opposed to the more prevalent generic assumption of white supremacy in which every white person participates because of the trained power dynamics of racist culture.) But the blip in my consciousness when I see a black person, and know that they're a black person and so I should be careful to treat them better because I'm white, is no less exoticism. A behavior-corrective self-conscious obsession with difference is still perverse, and it knows itself to be so!

Pauline tactical ethics: against "them"

2011-03-07T09:17:00.006-06:00

Lately, I hear a lot of "them" ethics going on. "Them" ethics is always a top-down approach: I stand at the top, and those with me, and we look down on "them". This is generally the basis for unilateral actions taken upon "them" as a homogeneous class or group. The species no longer exist; the genre is what we have said it is. And once we've done this, the pious next step seems to be to replace "us vs. them" with "God vs. them" because He's our God. And so God hates fags, Muslims, and all sorts of other things we hate. (The link is hilarious, BTW. Fear not.) And so often I hear this sort of thing translated into "law/gospel" terms, which is patent BS. "Law" is condemning the people God hates right along with God, while "Gospel" is refraining from condemning -- nay, even accepting, if you're a total heretic -- the people God hates. Which those crazy antinomians will tell you is "what Jesus would do". We all know they'll wind up in the lake of fire, and then we'll be laughing at them twice as hard as we are now. Us; them. And God as the gold standard of our judgmental currency.

Of course, Paul does it much better in Romans 1:18-32 than I just did -- there's not a first- or second-person pronoun or conjugation to be had in the whole bit. Pure "God vs. them". And what happened in the audience is what happens to every naive reader of the text -- that pure third-person rhetoric is designed to get mapped into the implicit "us vs. them" of the hearing community. The orator is the focus of "us," saying the words "we" think should be said. Condemning what all right-thinking people should condemn.

But the naive reader of the text doesn't have to listen to "chapter 2" once they finish "chapter 1" -- I've had people tell me that there is absolutely no connection between the two! The audience has no such luck -- they have two choices: either to keep listening, or to walk away, and 1:18-32 isn't setting them up to walk away. (I'll decline to discuss the modern innovation of chapter and verse numbering....) No; you could hear 1:18-32 at a Tea Party rally. But you wouldn't hear chapter 2 there, even though it is designed for just such an audience. And so Paul brings back the second person into the discussion:

"So then you have no excuse, every one of you who judges, because you stand condemned by what you use to condemn the other -- because the judge has the same vices! "Indeed we know that God's judgment on those who do such things is just!" You think so, you who do the same sorts of things you judge? You think you will escape God's judgment? Or do you look down on the richness of God's goodness and restraint and patience, ignoring the fact that that goodness of God draws you toward repentance?"

Quite a smack in the face. But Paul still gives them no opening to walk away. You see, these are the same people who heard 1:1-17, who heard Paul's bona fides and then said, "yeah, that's us" when he called them "all those beloved of God in Rome, called and holy." Who felt Paul's eagerness in sympathy for the mission to proclaim the gospel of God in Christ Jesus -- because they are his people, and they trust this God and this messiah. Put more simply, who recognize Paul as one of their own. People who, hearing from him, understand that he and they form an "us".

1:18-32 reinforces this -- it's the way "them" ethics works. You have a choice. You can be one of "us" or you can be one of "them". The audience wants to stay in the "us" so comfortably established in 1:1-17. And if Paul has done his job right, the terms of the "God vs. them" bit are calculated not to alienate the audience. (And it's a beautifully calculated piece!) The terms of the "God vs. them" bit are exactly the terms used in the community, addressing the "problem" that troubles the community. Here, it's Gentile idolatry as the root of all Gentile sin. But the real ground that makes that work is always prevailing cultural morality. Paul can play on the Gentile idolatry bit because he and his audience claim normative Judaism, and are concerned over the boundaries of self|other as Judeans in the Roman capitol. But that grand theme covers the fact that the question of identity comes down to behaviors. They do [X]. We do not. (Even though we do!) We do [Y]. They do not. (Even though they do!) The closer two cultures get, both in terms of proximity and in terms of real behaviors, the harder that line has to be drawn. The other cannot be allowed to be us. We will even other ourselves, gnaw off our own souls, to get out of the trap.

It's not an easy problem to solve -- especially once God has been dressed in the uniform of our side. But Paul means to solve it, because it stands in the way of Christ. No matter how grand the expansion of the gospel on the outside, if this remains on the inside, it is a whitewashed tomb. And here is where it must become clear that 1:18-32 is not part of the "law/gospel" paradigm. Both the law and the gospel stand opposed to this sort of human judgment, to "them" ethics especially on the part of God's own people.

So Paul employs them in exactly that order: law first, then gospel. But not because law has any innate priority! Only because it is the right tool for this job. Paul has raised the question of just or unjust judgment, and the way to clear the path is to bring in perfectly just judgment as the basis for comparison. In classic Lutheran terms, this is the second use of the law: to convict the believing sinner of their sin. What this means is that 1:18-32, standing as condemned behavior, is not an example of the first use of the law, as a curb for behaviors for the protection of the community. Instead, it is an example of sin -- in this case, the attempt to stand in the place of God. It is a nice bit of irony, that an act of condemnation that uses idolatry and vice as pretexts to condemn a whole group of people is itself vicious and idolatrous.

Nor does Paul let his audience continue to think that they are merely not allowed to do God's work here, and that God upholds condemnations for which they got smacked. No matter whether we may find pieces of Torah that match pieces of 1:18-32, that passage does not represent either the form or the content of God's instruction for God's people. It is not the hearer (let alone the speaker or teacher) of Torah that is just, but the one who does what God instructs. And this has nothing to do with the self|other boundary -- in fact, Paul bypasses obvious external cultural markers to point to "the hidden Judean, whose mind is circumcised by the Spirit, ... whose praise comes not from people but from God." The performance of Torah is not judgment or condemnation, but justice which comes through the Spirit because of Christ. And it is this because this is what God does -- it is justice as modeled on God's justice, rather than judgment modeled on God's judgment. The two are not the same -- judgment that is truly reflective of God's judgment is perfect and equitable, and rewards goodness and truth while punishing rivalry, contention and evil, no matter who does it. (Again, not what is modeled in 1:18-32.) And yet justice as God demonstrates it is that God carves out a space next to Torah, next to instruction and its performance, and makes it a gift in Christ, a gift built upon trust just as the gifts of circumcision and Torah were built upon the trust of Abraham and Moses. Perfect justice acknowledges that in perfect judgment, there is nobody left standing as righteous. And yet perfect justice restores Christ to life, and raises us with him, and gives us life in this space, in the Spirit, that we may live to God and not destroy one another. That is the proclamation of the gospel, and just like the law, it stands against human judgment. The Spirit doesn't go there. Christ doesn't go there. The Father doesn't go there. Don't you, either. Don't give in to "them" ethics. Fight for the sake of your brothers and sisters, all of whom are God's redeemed creation in Christ.

On not being a "good" theo-blogger

2011-03-05T16:54:00.003-06:00

The last post reminds me of how true it is, what I say in the sidebar. This is not a place where, by and large, I put up polished work. It is a place where I put up things that are coming out of my head mostly as I write them, or within a few days. The roughest never get posted -- they're too fragmentary and I like to at least have a complete thought out. The Derrida bit just now is a piece of hashing out for an AAR proposal -- something that would never go in the proposal, let alone the paper, but had to be written, and therefore went on the blog because I had the time.

It strikes me that "good" theo-bloggers don't do this, but I never started this thing to be good at self-publishing. I started it to get a spot where the writing could go other than random scraps of paper or text files. It is, as Hall says, an extension. A place outside my body where a function of my brain can undergo rapid-prototyping. Sometimes what comes out has undergone more development, and looks halfway decent and usable; sometimes it gets better than that. But I'm not aiming for this to be a place where I'm always correct, or always proud of what I have to say or the ways I have of saying it. I'd like it to be a place where I'm always correctable.

Of course, I also don't do a damn thing to improve my audience here. Which doesn't help the correction factor -- many eyes make all bugs shallow -- but it's not like all the stuff here is palatable to a general audience. Meh. It is what it is. It is also what I have been along the way.

"hors-texte," Pharisaism, and moral arguments from scripture

2011-03-05T13:52:00.005-06:00

Alright, let's hack this out:

In On Grammatology, Derrida says "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte", which is often taken in English as "There is nothing outside of the text." Of course, it is also taken that way without most of Grammatology, as well! Spivak understood its implications for "prefaces," as the statement can be read that "there is no preface" -- literally, there is nothing that comes before the text. The preface is a piece of the text. Its story contributes, well or poorly, to the story which it attempts to introduce, but it has no life without that story. The text has no "before," no "outside of the text," nothing that can be taken as superior to the text which is not also itself text, and part of the text. Paul and his Christ live for us because we encounter them in and through the texts of scripture, and through the canon of scripture as a text itself.

The historical quests for Jesus or Paul -- or any other persona of the texts -- set themselves against the text much of the time, as they purpose to judge between bits of text on authenticity criteria that are superior to the texts because they are historically grounded. They intend to use what is before the text to judge the text, just as they would use Rousseau and the living models for his characters to judge his stories about them, And this is precisely the situation in which Derrida says that there is nothing that stands autonomously prior to the text. The factical events of history live only because of the stories that present them. For us who have the text, they are components of its life, and cannot be had without recourse to the text. They are not interpreted without recourse to that text, even though nothing prevents them from being so interpreted but the text itself. No one who had not the text, who had never been touched by the text, would go about tying these facts together in this way and justifying the textual interpretations of them, even if by opposition! So it's a pretty poor way of making conclusions that rely on the text, to attempt explicitly to destroy its integrity in favor of facts interpreted in its light. We wouldn't do that to any other metaphysical system but scripture, unless we intended to destroy it. (Which, now that you mention it, was Lessing's game, and is still the root of modern Biblical scholarship, critical or otherwise: there's a problem that prevents church interpretation, and only church interpretation, from making sense, and I'm piously concerned enough that I'll "help" this discipline of interpretation work on falsified premises so that it believes it cannot work on its original ones -- I'll give it a "historical problem" and watch it fall apart.)

And we have fallen apart! Our historical reclamations have nothing to do with the origins of the texts, and everything to do with falsifying the premises -- falsifying the text itself. Even the Evangelical perspectives that attempt to reject historical critical methods also reject the text itself, in favor of a non-historical and even anti-historical authority the text never had. They have read the text and declared it Qorban, a gift from and a sacrifice before God (as though God wanted it!). All these and more, pre-texts (hors-textes) that have supplanted the text. And I will not tell you that postmodern methods offer anything better -- except a pre-text that demands that the pre-text appear, that demythologizes the pre-text as text in its own right.

We cannot argue with the text, as though it could be made to say what it does not. The text will not be convinced, nor will its inconvenient bits obligingly disappear. We can disagree with the text, but it will not yield. Nor will anyone upholding the moral and ethical normativity of the text yield to the text bent out of shape. But the same fact works in the other direction -- because we have all bent and broken the text into some more or less convenient form of our own. Only the text, fully and consistently read, can stand in identity with the logic of the text. However many ways there are to read the text in full consistency with its own logic, these readings can argue amongst themselves. And they will argue on the basis of pre-texts that submit to the text.

------

That said, on to Pharisaism. Not the Gospel caricature that has come to be the Christian staple definition for the word, as in legalistic piety and pietistic legalism. No, the phenomenon that grew dramatically in the Hasmonean period, and that survived into the Rabbinic period, was about the adaptation of Torah to daily life. Compare this to the Sadducees and other directly Temple-affiliated sects, who could read Torah as it applied directly to the practices of Temple piety. In contrast to the popular idea that the Pharisees believed that the proper performance of the law would bring the Messiah, the Pharisees had nothing to do with literalism, and everything to do with flexibility. The idea of "the proper performance of the law" is a profoundly debatable topic, and Pharisaism is the location of that debate! But it is debatable only and precisely because doing Torah outside of the environment for which the specific bits of Torah were given leaves a lot of open questions. Again, the Sadducees have no such trouble. In the situations where Torah applied, they applied it. The Pharisaic problem is the declaration that Temple piety applies to the whole of life.

How would you act at home if you got the notion that what your boss required of you in the cleanrooms of the microprocessor fabrication plant was of analogous usefulness outside, and indeed in every part of your life? Especially after you and your whole cohort had been fired from that plant, a rival corporation had taken it over, and years later your people staged a coup to retake it? If you lived the rest of your life like people who belong in a microprocessor fabrication cleanroom?

Now, that's a bit pathological-sounding, because nobody (except maybe IBM in the 60s-80s) makes a religion out of manufacturing computer parts. (Okay, maybe Intel now, with their creepy "all together now" bum-BUM-bum-BUM commercials.) But it was never a religion of the Temple, any more than it was a religion of Jerusalem. Those are pathologies, except as synechdoche. Nor is the entirety of Torah reducible to Temple piety. The true point of Pharisaic adaptation of Torah is that the life of the people that befits their standing before God is totally reflective of that being-before-God, and that it is not restricted to any single group or any single place. It is a remarkably useful philosophy for the diaspora, for example. For the Golah, who lived the exile in the absence of the Temple and the Land -- but no less before God. And indeed for Judaism after 70 and the 130s, as well as for Judaism (but not Christianity) after the failure of Julian "the Apostate" in 363.

It is basically a philosophy of the notion that nothing is outside of the text, but that says something Derrida does not. To say what Derrida says, we must understand that it is a philosophy that exempts nothing in the world from the world of the text, that uses the text as the referent by which the world lives. That places no pre-text above the text, or permits a normative authority from beyond the text to determine the text. And at the same time, that adapts the text to the world just as it adapts the world to the text, reading the two things not merely contiguously, but continuously and consistently.

------

All that, and I still haven't said that I find in Pharisaism one of the best interpretive keys for the reading of the text for moral judgments, against the reading of moral judgments into the text. And that remains my project for now.

Why not natural theology?

2011-01-29T15:09:00.010-06:00

[editor's note: hopefully I've done myself and the topic more justice since writing what appears below.]

I don't mean that question the first way you're likely to read it -- I have no intention of passively surrendering to natural theology. Rather, the question put to me as a Barthian is, "Why not natural theology?" And I respect the man that put the question to me -- besides the fact that he's my boss -- because the question bears heavily on what he does for a living: religion and science. But at the same time, I wonder why he needs it. (And for all my respect, I'm going to go unceremoniously about my thought process because it's what this place is for.)

Barth's opposition to natural theology is quite well-known. He told the Gifford Lecture folks "no" repeatedly, and when they insisted, he did natural theology the best service he could: he presented the most solid case for theology based on divine self-revelation possible. He presented it based on the Scots Confession, in two parts: Gotteserkenntnis und Gottesdienst. The knowledge of God, and the service or worship of God. Why is this the best service he could do for natural theology? As he put it, natural theology is always a reaction against revealed theology. The strength of the one is directly related to the strength of the other.

And yet that's only the case for one kind of natural theology -- what I'm calling Protestant natural theology. I'm sure there's a more precise way of putting that, but the natural theology Barth reacts so strongly against is an Enlightenment product, and a break that is only conceivable after the Reformation. One break with the church paves the way for another. On the other side, for Catholics after Aquinas, the words "natural theology" have a different ring to them. They are utterly dependent upon revealed theology because Catholic natural theology describes God's revelation as it remains visible in the natural world, in our senses, etc., after the fall. While the Protestant variety can easily turn against God, the Catholic variety makes no sense without God.

He suggests a third option, philosophical natural theology, but I'm hard-put to see it as a genuine third. It is obviously not Catholic. And perhaps my language of "Protestant" suggests a sort of basic religious outlook, but the best of modern irreligious theology falls after the Reformation, pushing along behind it. It is what Barth opposes - knowledge of God from creation, known cleanly without God's giving Godself to be known. Knowledge of God that can be had, not only without the church's help, but without the consent of the Subject. Objective, naturwissenschaftliche knowledge of a subject that cannot evade detection, a subject naturally epistemologically available because nothing can escape being so. Hubris! (And besides, what a silly place to look for a deity! The only things you'll find there are things that disprove that there is a supernatural being bound within the systems of nature.)

What can be read from the book of nature is not equivalent to what is told by the witness of scripture. We learn a great deal about the ways the systems in which we are embedded function - and the ways they break. But without prior knowledge of the God to whom creation is ascribed, nature speaks no unambiguous word of God to the observer. God is not a component of the systems arrayed about us. As Tillich said, God is source and ground of the figure/structure - present around and within it, but not bound by it. As Barth said (III.1), creation exists separate from God, and this is God's intention, so that God and the creation should be in relationship. But as such, God is rightly hidden from our controlling grasp. Of all the things we can do with our God-given powers and gifts within creation, revealing God is not one of them.

Here is the trouble I see with natural theology: either it cheats, and knows the answer it wants in advance, or it makes a god of nature. (Or of the necessities thereof, the "fingerprints of the creator" ... but so often that, too is cheating.) By cheating, I mean many things -- there's no reason for the Christian God to be its desire, though in the Christian West that is often the model for the shape filled in by natural theology. But any of them are still cheating in the same way that any clean-room reverse-engineering process cheats: we have an objective, someone else's finished product that we desire, and we abstract the relevant attributes of that product because we can study them and know them in advance of our "discovery", and then implement them somewhere else. So deism, among many others. There is an operating assumption there that the truth of a religion can be abstracted from its particulars -- that it can be universalized in ways that allow one to evade the sticky details. The only honest natural theologies of my experience are aboriginal. (I'm not sure that's quite the word I want, but it'll do to convey the idea.)

The thing the Bible has going for it, is the simple fact that it is not self-evident. It cannot be derived from the natural world. Neither, therefore, can it be reduced to the natural world, even if the witnesses it preserves are witnesses to events that happened within creation. This is not to deny that, for the believer, all of creation declares the glory of God and shows itself to be God's handiwork. But it only does this for the believer, for the one to whom God has already been revealed in relationship to that one and all others. This is the result of faith understanding the world. And this changes in no way the basic functions of all the systems in which we are embedded within creation, except that we understand that God is Lord of them. This has always been something we ascribe after the fact -- the doctrine of creation is not derived from observation of the world, followed by a Newtonian insight that God must have made all of this stuff I see. (The Cartesian assertion that the creator is the second most basic logical element of the world, after the self, is no exception!) In the Bible, creation narratives are spread all across the historical development of the theology of the people of God, from the Psalms to the Deuteronomistic History to the intertestamental literature. But inevitably they are later developments, developments that follow the creation of the relationship of the people of God to God by God's great works for them. The people who live into this relationship grow in faith until they see and believe that all things are within the power of God, and declare by faith that all things come from God and return to God.

I'm sure there are responses to this position of mine, and things I haven't covered, and I'd love to hear them, so we can grow from the experience.

Sittler quote for the day

2011-01-22T10:10:00.002-06:00

From 1979, in a speech to members of the Association of Lutheran College Faculties (ALCF):

"Look at Trinity College, Cambridge. What kind of a college is this? It hasn't anything in it, even today, that most of our colleges talk about. Some of the buildings are falling apart, the food is horrible, the faculty not particularly celebrated. Yet, they turn out generation after generation of extraordinarily competent men and women. The students receive one-to-one education, learn to write English with clarity and precision, and read what they're told. That is what a college does: it accomplishes opening outward and unfolding. When we talk about what constitutes the greatness of a college, we ought to think with a certain creative bewilderment of Trinity College, which has nothing which we think we have to have."

Why Sittler and Barth?

2011-01-14T11:21:00.003-06:00

The last post drew comment from my predecessor, who is himself planning an intellectual biography of Joseph Sittler. So I respect him when he says this:

I suspect (although this is just a hunch) that, even though Sittler spoke more or less admirably of Barth when he mentioned him (which was infrequently), the well was poisoned by the mid-century Chicago school environs in which Sittler's theology was incubated. Tillich, Niebuhr, Pauck, Adams, etc. were Sittler's compatriots, and many from that school defined themselves in opposition to Barthian currents. While there are aspects of Sittler that transcend the Chicago-Yale (Barth) divide of the late 20th century, on the whole he would find himself pretty clearly on the Chicago side. This would apply particularly to Sittler's use of historical criticism of biblical texts. I know that Barth's position on HC were complex, but on the whole the late 20th century regarded Barthianism as antagonistic towards the emerging trends in biblical studies.

It's an interesting line of inquiry to push forward the query, as you are doing, as to whether Sittler's own work would cohere with concrete themes from Barth himself (as opposed to "Barthianism"). But my hunch again would be that, for the reasons I've mentioned, Sittler did not immerse himself too deeply in the study of Barth beyond what would have been necessary for him to teach the requisite sections on Barth in his lectures (which are there in the archives). Barth certainly is a non-presence in the bibliographies of Sittler's major works...

But at the same time, I think that misses the point of why I feel compelled by the resonances I find, and the bits and pieces of Barth scattered hither and yon in Sittler. It is kind of my hunch against his at this point, absent a lot of written background sources that we don't have in our collections. I have no intention of declaring Sittler to be a Barthian, exclusive of the various things he obviously is otherwise. But the deeper I get into Barth, below the surface-level "Barthianism" he points out, the more I think declaring Sittler to be a Barthian would miss the point, as so many Barthians do. So what am I doing?

Honestly, some of it is work for my own sake. I saw in Barth, from practically the moment I picked him up, someone whose work could be a model for my own interests. Someone who does Bible for the sake of theology, and theology for the sake of church, and church for the sake of the genuine people involved in it, both pastors and laity. But who does all of those things as parts of a sensible whole, and whose thought was broad and deep and systematic enough to require the whole scope and make it work. I'm an odd duck in the discipline of academic theology, because I spend half of my time in Bible. I'm an odd duck in Bible because I spend all of my time using the critical tools to say theological things. My incoming program advisor said they couldn't make heads or tails of me, because I'm something very old - a Reformation theologian. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do have a hankering for the days when, to be called a theologian, you had to be a Bible scholar. My dream job is Systematic Theology and New Testament, with an option on teaching Greek. But it has always been clear to me that I belong in Theology because I'd have to hack off my right arm to just do Bible scholarship the way it's done. Every textual point I make goes somewhere outside of the text. Barth gives that shape of my brain a solid grounding and direction.

Sittler gives me a way out of Barth, a way beyond him using the same tools. Two points make a line, yes, but given two examples you can begin to make usable abstractions. Most importantly, Sittler gives me a way to stay out of the trap of becoming a Barthian. A way to ask the method questions from enough distance to actually see them, rather than trying to figure out "theological exegesis" by examining Barth's exegetical work, for one example. A place to stand that isn't Barth's, and isn't Sittler's, but is actually mine to do exegesis, theology and ministry from. I doubt that someday someone will have to ask whether I was dependent upon Karl Barth - I can't imagine the evidence will be equivocal. But I pray that nobody will confuse my worldview and his. I, in my Stand, am called and equipped to see and say things neither Barth nor Sittler could have said, because this place and time and circumstance is different from theirs. And Sittler especially, as his own particular brand of constructive theologian, equips me to ask the questions about the world theology addresses here, now, today.

A piece of Sittler's debt to Barth

2011-01-13T09:36:00.003-06:00

As the fellow of the Joseph A. Sittler Archives at LSTC, and a student of Barth theologically, I always have the question before me about how much these two figures go together -- and how much I am making up the connections between the two. Part of this problem is that we have a lot of oral records of Sittler, and not so many written pieces of background on courses and such. But it nags at my consciousness as I work with both of them, how much the one reminds me of the other.

At minimum, it is clear to me that Joseph Sittler was not a Barthian, in any way comparable to Torrance or Gunton; Hauerwas, Yoder, or Lindbeck; .... Not a man that follows the material with whatever exactitude and builds out of it in obvious indebtedness. Not a man on whose lips the name "Barth" is regularly taken. But nonetheless a man in whose remains bits and pieces of Barth pop to the surface, and more importantly a man in whom the methods of Barth's work are more seriously taken than their products. A "constructive theologian" whose work involves a remarkable depth of exegesis, church history and patristics, systematic analysis of doctrines in context, ministry and preaching, the freedom to integrate Luther and Calvin without "dogmatic" adherence to their followers, and the bonus elements of literary and artistic awareness of his surrounding culture, and a mind aware of the advances of science and technology changing the world. A theologian more worried about how what is said is to be said today, and how it is to shape preaching, than the adherence to what has been said in the ways it has been said. And for all that, a man profoundly faithful to the articles of the Christian faith. If that's not the mold of the man Karl Barth, I miss my mark. A far too curious and educated parish pastor who came up to the professorship without leaving the pastorate, driven to do theology, and driven to do it for the life of the church.

And yet this isn't all -- that makes one many things, but the bits of Barth that pop up here and there push the notion of Sittler as a student of Barth flying under the radar.

So, one point found today of the debt Sittler owes to Barth, in the first of his four 1959 lectures in the University District, Seattle, WA: the ecology of human being mirrors III.4 in its construction. The audio can be found here. The lecture opens with an excursus on biblical hermeneutics and the meaning of "the Word of God" -- an excellent choice among prolegomena. The Word of God is what God does, "the saving activity of God." (5:40) "God's self-disclosure as creator and redeemer, that's the heart of it." (6:02) Secondly the words of God given in testimony by the prophets, third the written record of these words, but all inseparable from that first meaning. Fourth, the incarnation (8:00). Then we proceed to Genesis as story. And here we have the key bit in minute 10: "When the Hebrew people wanted to put down the deepest knowledge that they had from God as to who they are, how a man's life is constituted, how he is triply constituted: toward God, toward his fellowmen, toward the world of nature, the Hebrew people ... tell a story." And in minute 12: "No amount of accumulated knowledge will ever make irrelevant what this story is talking about, because this tale is the Word of God saying to a man who he is, how his life is constituted, what is the amplitude of his endowment -- the breath of God, nothing less -- so that if he tries to cheat on his endowment, he calls it frustration; God calls it alienation. So that if he tries to act as if he were something less than he is constituted to be, he will have certain feelings of unfulfillment -- and the scriptures call it sin."

et sanctum nomen eius

2011-01-02T11:58:00.005-06:00

As someone whose birthday is also celebrated as The Name of the Lord -- also properly known as the Circumcision of Our Lord -- I get used to the "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" jokes for the day. But those two variations on the celebration for the day are not euphemistic, even though we might avoid the one for the other. The celebration that includes the words, "And let his name be known in Israel, Yehoshua, son of Joseph, ..." is the one that makes him a son of the covenant by the sign of circumcision. The child is given the name by which he will be called among the people, the name by which they will know him, by which he will know himself, and by which God will know him as His own child. And despite the Maccabean themes of the gospels, this one is not called Nikodemos, the victorious people. He is called Yehoshua, "God saves." This is what the people know, and what he himself knows -- that God saves. This is how Jesus is called among the people, and how God is known in him. This one, given this name, knew that his role was not to rise up and seize the name and power of God. No; being called, "God saves," he became the Isaianic servant, God's servant and the one whose obedience brings God's salvation for God's people.

The death part of atonement theology, and Romans 3

2010-12-01T09:54:00.004-06:00

So last night, in Romans, we were talking about one of the thorniest issues in catechesis -- "why did Jesus have to die?" Also known in theology circles as the Atonement.

I can't take an answer to that question that places it on God. I sketched something during the discussion, and this is it:

Jesus had to die because we had to kill him.

The bastard was right, and we just won't stand for it.

We don't want God's justice; we want our judgment -- and our judgment killed Jesus.

Can protithemi -- "God set him forth as an hilasterion" -- be taken as God's guilt in Jesus' death? I think not. I refuse to translate hilasterion as either "propitiation" or "expiation" because both are non-sensical in the Hellenistic context. They set up a false dilemma in which God must soothe Godself by the death of God's son. I refuse to believe it because it is absurd. Since the context of Romans is Judean, but Pharisaical, I also see no reason to translate it as "mercy seat" in terms of Temple reference. The Pharisaical adaptation of Temple piety to daily life may have some metaphorical meaning for that component of the Holy of Holies, but we don't have it. What is an hilasterion? It is a sign of graciousness, from above, or an offering in return for graciousness, from below. Humans provide them as votives. But God provides this one, as that for which we might set up votive offerings of thanks. And what is God doing in 3:21-26, if we lift our eyes from this word and the mistaken blood-equals-slaughter-of-sacrifice association?

But it is now the case that, aside from Torah, the justice of God is manifest, being attested by Torah and the prophets: the justice of God through the trust of Jesus Christ, coming to all the trusting ones. For there is no distinguishing mark; indeed, all have sinned and are lacking the glory of God. All are being gratuitously justified by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God set him forth as a sign of graciousness through trust in his blood, to indicate God’s justice by the releasing of sins that had already happened, in the self-restraint of God. God set him forth as a sign of graciousness, toward the indication of God’s justice in the present time -- in order to be just, and justifying those who partake of the trust of Jesus.

And this, after 2:1-3:20, in which Paul establishes God's judgment as perfect, equitable, and inescapable upon every living creature, Judean, god-fearing Gentile, and godless Gentile all alike. This is Paul's utter antithesis to the provocation issued in 1:18-32, to partiality that excludes on the basis of human judgment, even human judgment that presumes to use Torah and know the mind of God. We are atoned, if that is the right word, not through God's judgment -- which is far superior to ours in every sense in which we might call for perfect judgment -- but through God's justice, God's tzedakah. Yes, that's the word -- God's righteous gift, given with no intention of entangling in debt, enabling the recipient to stand, as Rambam says in the Mishnah. In Christ we are all named Zedekiah, Tzidki-yahu, God is our Righteousness.

But I haven't answered our question there, have I? Why did Jesus have to die? I still believe my answer, hastily sketched in class. God put him forward, into a situation in which he would likely die, into a situation that would react violently against God's justice shown in him, even knowing that he would die, because God is righteous, and gracious, and eternally holds out hope that it will work differently this time. Because God can afford to lose to our sin, every time, and not actually lose anything. God will always choose to play the game with us, and God will always win, because the result will increase the good for us no matter how much bad there is. (This is because God never plays the game against us.) And so God did the thing right, and Jesus did the thing right, and we who were there at the time did the thing both right and wrong, some in every direction, and Jesus died, because we turned him in, and we stood by, and we schemed to free him in ways that were probably never going to work anyways, and we killed him, and we mourned him, and we did a million other things. And yet God still did the thing right, because death and sin did not win. God raised Jesus, and demonstrated that he is the son of God, and still provided the leverage by which we are freed and saved from our sin, even when after the fact we still did a million other things in every direction in response.

How's that for an atonement theology?

Rethinking the language of Romans

2010-11-18T11:49:00.003-06:00

I have to put this stuff someplace, and here I might just get comment on it: my table of Pauline re-translations.

- euaggelion: proclamation (as of the important one who is coming)
- kerygma: proclamation (of a message)
Note: "gospel" has by now taken on quite a life of its own, and distorts Paul's meaning, so I'm not using it, especially to avoid confusion between "gospel" and "law", as though euaggelion and nomos were in some way opposed. Speaking of which...

- nomos: Torah, instruction, rule -- understood as a guiding social principle or set thereof. Good for what it's good for.
- ergwn nomou: deeds of Torah; Mitzvot, even if it's an anachronism -- urged for conformity, an ethnic marker of full community membership

- kardia: mind
- nous: intellect
- phronema: intention
- syneidesis: self-knowledge, self-witness -- a sort of appeal to the soundness of one who is kalos k'agathos, "of a clean conscience" because not in essential conflict. If your suneidesis bears witness against you, you're engaged in mauvaise foi.

- agathos: good in act (from the surface outward); "what is good"
- kalos: good in essence (from the inside to the surface); "goodness"
- chrestos: good because useful, with a Utilitarian's wet-dream worth of enculturated meanings, like "kindness"

- charis: grace (from above), thanks (from below); not to be confused with epainw, praise (from above).
- eucharistew: I give thanks/praise
- charisma: graciousness (as bestowed from above)
- dwrea: gift
Note: It seems to me to be pointless to put "free" with any of these, since they are terms of social obligation on the one hand, and not purchases on the other. "Free" therefore tends to void exactly what these words presuppose, that a gift produces obligation and responsibility. This is one of the reasons it is wrong to say to your parents that their support is qorban, as though disintermediating God's gifts got you out of obligation instead of placing you in an even greater and more perilous one!

There are more...

What must a theologian say?

2010-11-15T07:26:00.004-06:00

I've been (re-)reading pieces of Barth's 1930s works, the ethical stuff concerning the Kirchenkampf and National Socialism. What I had read, I didn't get the first time through, I think because I hadn't had a reason. Part of which now comes from hearing lectures on Barth's political ethics at AAR, and part from discussing interpretation in the Theology and Apocalyptic group. Speaking as though it were not, or however Barth puts it. With Ben Myers and a few others, we popped out the connection between the Titanic sermon and Theologische Existenz heute!, the idea that the job of the theologian is always to preach the gospel, certainly with the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other, but to preach the gospel and not to proclaim the situation. (Much less to declaim the situation!) The feeling was that this was not quietism, not a game of "pretend nothing is going on," but that it was an active means of addressing the situation by "doing your job." And that's stuck with me for three weeks now, as to how that works -- because my church could use a bit of that!

What must a theologian say, to remain properly existentially situated in her job as a theologian? What can a theologian say, and still do that job? Barth is never proud of us for "doing the impossible," especially when so much of our call from God is possible precisely because it constitutes our existence. Doing what is impossible for us, but possible for God, is one thing; doing what is impossible for us now that we are those God calls, is quite another. Preaching is the former; all manner of sin speaks through the latter.

The "German Christians" voided their theological existence by insisting on a bishop that matched the popular ideal of the Fuehrerprinzip -- or so Barth characterizes the rise of Ludwig Mueller, and the debates over the choice of anyone for the position. The state had a leader, and the church wanted one, too. A real, theological Bishop who could speak for the church, whether they wanted one to align with the state, or to speak out against it. I'm reminded of Jack Preus' (in)famous comment, much as I was reminded when Paull Spring insisted more recently on his own authority as a normative Biblical interpreter -- who really has to be in charge here? And why do we wind up thinking of church leadership like state leadership? (How could we do otherwise, as culturally conditioned by our age?)

In Romans, Paul rhetorically opposed Christ as princeps to the popular model of the Emperor as princeps -- the model of human action, the archon, the first Man. And as with the Kaiserprinzip, so with the Fuehrerprinzip: Barth speaks of One who must be seen as our Leader, framing the active leadership of Christ in the same evental language of the propaganda in which popular leaders emerge from the situation to take charge. But this is 1933, and Barth will not condemn the man or the office of Reichsbischof, much as he believes the decision to be theologically misguided, and whatever his personal misgivings about the profound influence of the Chancellor -- good may still come from the church if it understands its task. TEh! isn't about the form of government, or that the role of Bishop (anti-Catholic polemics aside) is inherently bad, but about thinking theologically about what we do. It was not too late in June 1933, whatever the political machinations of the state, and whatever the form of the life of the church as an institution, for men who belonged to God to act like it.

There is, as Barth says, never any second or third thing next to the gospel. Remarkable affinities with tawḥīd. Our Shahada, if we permitted ourselves to think of submission to God in compatible ways, would insist on Christ because of God, on the gospel because of Christ, because there is nothing next to God. However I might shy from the militarism of such a theme, as both we and our brothers have used it upon others by force (no matter what the words), the inward direction of its truth, that there is no god but God for us, that we have been saved by none but God's messiah, and that we have no business proclaiming anything but the message of that One, is what keeps us from idolatry. It is profoundly important, especially when using "baptized" language, church words, to be careful what exactly we are proclaiming. And whom.

And yet I'm always tempted to make personal commentary on situations (I and not the Lord), to bound off a section of life that belongs to me and say things I'd have to repudiate professionally. Or say things I then have to uphold professionally, at the expense of my theological existence. The notion that prophesis applies to my personal words, to my opinion (since I am a called leader in the church, after all), is one of the most pernicious errors in the church today, and in my own soul, too. "Speaking truth to power." God so help us, white boys just have no place doing it. We are power. We wind up speaking ourselves. We rarely wind up proclaiming the gospel -- we more often wind up doing the wrong sort of impossible thing. Perhaps "speaking the truth in love" is a better model. But the truth can't just be any old thing, and unpopularity of message is no guarantor. It must be a word from God. It must be the Word of God.

This is the danger in talking about the situation -- that we talk about it as sovereign, as though the gospel were not. That we begin to do our jobs by having to ask what the gospel has to say to this situation, with which we are far more familiar. Which is still a better approach than simply to talk about the situation as though we knew already. And yet Barth points us to another approach -- if we speak the gospel, and invest ourselves in knowing it first, we will speak it in all situations. There is an element of aikido in this, of not using the word of God as a tool, but of being in the Word of God as we approach the world and the world approaches us. It is not an attacking way. It responds to the force it receives, ideally without harm to either participant. We don't usually look at Barth this way, especially not since the final moments of many of his personal conflicts with others are so public. Brunner, for example. But the letters reveal a man who would far rather agree with you in public, and discuss with you in private. TEh! is the writing of a man who would be bounced from Bonn for taking exception to a loyalty oath only 16 months later. It should not be read as tolerating the rise of National Socialism, and the Hitler regime, but it should also be understood for its unwillingness to attack means by which God may yet act in the church. That many things change in five years' time, pushes him to say other things in 1938 and beyond.

I find it odd that from this end of time we judge him as having been quiescent about the evil around him, but if I should be judged as "soft" on sin for the sake of retaining the freedom to preach the gospel, I'd take it. (Not that I'm there yet, by any means!) Full-strength gospel opposes all that needs to be opposed.

No heaven for you...

2010-11-01T17:19:00.004-05:00

...is a statement that just won't preach. But it might be a good AAR "hook"...

Reading Barth, specifically CD III.1 (neglected in my prior studies focusing on III.2 and III.4, which I'm very glad to be rectifying since the lacuna was silly anyways), I'm reminded that there's a definite scriptural-contextual sense that Barth seems to shout from the page, that heaven is not where we go when we die. It isn't the afterlife, or something apart from creation. It is part of creation, call it a piece of the "three-story universe," the realm of powers to which human life is subject. God made the heavens and the earth. All your gods are belong to us. The Son of Humanity is going on the clouds, supplanting the alien gods and instituting the age of God's rule of the world. Talk about your regime changes! And perhaps that's where we get the idea that heaven is God's place, but that seems to slide too quickly to heaven being God's natural realm. And God is Lord of Hosts, the heavenly hosts, but angels are creatures, too. Again with the realm of celestial powers. But in the merism of heaven and earth, and therefore all things, human beings are placed on earth and under heaven. Placed within creation.

All right, sure, we don't have the same worldview, the Cosmonauts were quite clear about their disproof of heaven via sub- and orbital flights, and we could get absurd and try to reclaim heaven as a layer of creation, just as we also know from geology that hell is not a layer of creation but still colloquially point downward into the bowels of the earth. But the point was never an empirical-scientific explanation of the world that would indefinitely cohere.

It seems to me too often lost that heaven is a realm of created beings, both good and bad; those that adore God, certainly, as do we at our best, but also those that would oppose God in myriad ways. Michael and Satan; God's Hosts and the Nephilim; etc. That may also have something to do with the redefinition of "center" from the bottom of a pit to the peak of a mountain. Human beings stopped being subject to realms of powers superior to them, higher beings casting both good and bad down the gravity well at them. Modernity placed these sons of men in the heavens. The angels, always figura, became hollow.

It also seems to me too often overlooked that hell is not the place of the damned. Or, that the lower layer of the cosmos is not, at any rate. As Yves Congar points out in Vaste Monde ma Paroisse, Sheol was a place of the undifferentiated dead, where mortal things went following their mortality. Eschatological, yes, but in a system in which we also have a belief in the extension of life through offspring, not the indefinite extension of some immortal aspect of an individualized self. It is eschatologically important that you sire children by your late brother's wife, if he had not, so that he may live. There are indeed notions of the eternal death from which we might be delivered, but everything gets screwy between Hellenistic apologetics and Medieval reward/punishment theory.

μεν: God, who set before the people "life and blessings, death and disadvantages," asked them to choose life so they might live. And yet eschatologically, God preserves the life of the people, for what else is the remnant? Paul seeks to make his own flesh jealous by his mission to the nations, so that they might be saved -- for what is their restoration, but life from the dead?

δε: Besides the life/death dilemma, we have the "contest of two powers" paradigm. This requires a pantheon of some sort, or at the very least, an active henotheism. True modern monotheists have a great deal of trouble with dualism, and even more with the notion of more-than-dualism. It becomes a contest between God and the devil, but where do we see that? We have God's folks vs Baal's folks, God's folks vs idolaters, the people's God vs Pharaoh's gods, the people of God vs the cults of various divinized humans, etc. And out of it all we have the apocalyptic adversarial relationship of the people with God versus the Enemy. We rotate that triangulation, and magically it becomes God versus the Enemy, with the people in the middle. Which may be the root of the wisdom-apocalyptic in Job. Again, war in heaven, or diplomacy at any rate, between powers superior to man, with crap flowing downhill, as well as blessings.

Mix life/death with God/Enemy, et voici où là: le ciel de Dieu et l'enfer du Diable -- heaven and hell become eschatological life with God and eschatological death with Satan. Remove the oppression that grounds the apocalyptic, but not the rhetoric, and place the now-triumphant God in charge of the whole schmear. Et voila: le main droit de Dieu ... et le gauche. And we destroy the Matthean account by misreading. And then we spend centuries working out how to avoid hell and wind up in heaven when we die, and developing myriad complicated systems (and payment schemes) for said task.

Why Lutherans aren't (modern) Evangelicals

2010-10-15T09:47:00.003-05:00

Category error! Teachable moment!

No surprise that Lutherans are bad at "evangelism" when evangelism is defined, not in terms of proclaiming and living the gospel, which we may also be bad at, but in terms of mission to convert. "Seeking and saving the lost" requires a functional definition of who the "lost" are.

Housholder, in the link above, has a problem, and it's a problem of precisely the catechesis he doesn't believe is necessary in today's world. As Kierkegaard also noted, much closer to our time and culture, "the education of nominal Christians" is a perennial problem. Those who think it isn't have a remarkable tendency to be exemplars for that fact. The problem is that we assume that Lutherans mean what Christians mean, and that Christians mean what the dominant cultural assumptions suggest that they do. Which results in the considered opinion that Lutherans have "no functioning eschatology" (by which he means a single violent end-times break with the long-running creation, a "destination" he desires, even though he disavows the "Darby-based dog and pony show" version), and "no theology of mission" (by which he means "we have no idea how to get someone saved"). Housholder goes on to talk about this last point, as though it were separate from the first, but I want to stop here for a moment. They're connected at a very deep level, because the modern Evangelical eschaton drives modern Evangelical mission.

If by eschatology you mean a global/universal endpoint, which we categorize in terms of armed conflict between the forces of the devil and the forces of God, no, we don't. That stuff, which you note Luther engaged in with respect to his own times, is called "apocalyptic" and has nothing to do with the actual future. Don't make the mistake of thinking that Luther believed that Leo X was *the* Antichrist as in the Millenialist/dispensationalist vision of Antichrist's role in the end-times. That is a profoundly literalistic and modern mis-reading of a profoundly classical rhetorical strategy of the faith. Genesis Rabbah engages in the same strategies with respect to Rome, reading Israel's future hope for victory and justice as a subordinated people into an eschatological triumph over the peoples that have subjugated them. Apocalyptic has everything to do with stories of hope. "We will win in the end." God will deliver us from our oppressors. It is entirely appropriate that the 16th-century Evangelical movement in which Luther was involved saw themselves in that way, as very plainly oppressed by the powers of the Roman church with and through its state allies.

It is perverse and offensive for modern, white Evangelicals, belonging to and exercising influence in and upon the dominant imperial government in the world today, to appropriate such rhetoric. It becomes hegemonic, which is what modern Evangelical missions are about. In its worst forms, it says to the oppressed that if they are not on the side of power, they will go to hell, because God is on the side of power. Evangelism driven by such an eschatological vision and dominant worldly power is what supports the "convert the heathens" notion of mission. Everybody must become Christian, and we have either a time limit, or a goal which we are trying to bring about, in the eschaton. It would be equally perverse and offensive for the magisterial Lutheran denominations of the world to uphold.

Housholder goes on to talk about confessionalism, and opposes the catechetical emphasis to the missional one. But before I touch that, I would like to correct a few minor points: 1) the Diet of Augsburg was about uniting the Holy Roman Empire for the sake of fighting the "Turk" -- Muslims were not "unthinkably far away," and 2) there was very clearly a significant amount of "frontier," much of it embattled. We're talking about divided European states under the HRE, each with their own governance and their own ideas about how things should be done, and a whole lot of tension along a whole lot of borders. The Reformation conflicts didn't help matters in Imperial terms. This is important, because Housholder says a lot of different things about 'the Church" and what it was and wasn't doing at the time. Catholics from a whole lot of places were out conquering the world and making it safe for the expansion of the gospel. I'd call that a form of "missional Christianity," even if I don't approve of its motives or methods. In the meantime, reforming German Evangelicals were quite busy with their own battles from underneath the Empire, many of which were concentrated on the home front, and consolidating a solidary and defensible position against overwhelming attacks. So Luther, among many others, and the catechetical enterprise.

Because of these niggling little details, you can see I might disagree with a statement like this: "So the Confessions were written in a time when the main job of the Church was not seen as evangelization or global missions. It was the education of nominal Christians (hence the writing of the iconic and ubiquitous Small Catechism)."

The confessions (including the many that aren't Lutheran) tend to be concerned with defense of a position in difference from the official teaching of Rome and its local enforcers. They aren't about "the main job of the church," nor are the catechisms our primary confessional documents. They stem from a concern on the part of a small-but-growing body of Evangelical theologians for the faith-lives of a small-but-growing body of Evangelical congregations and the souls in them. There was a lot of theological wrangling going on, and as is ever the case, theological wrangling can be dangerous to the people in the congregations, who are often bargaining chips in a battle of theologians' opinions. True then, true now. Catechesis is a pastoral theological concern, and this is emphatically true of Luther's Small Catechism. It is, in its own right, a profoundly important mission of the church. When our position is the teaching and proclaiming of the gospel, one might even dare to call it evangelism.

Oh, but wait, we were talking about the decline of the Lutheran church, I forgot ... he hadn't mentioned it at all until more than halfway down. And proposes that the solution to our problems as Lutherans is Arminianism. No, wait, it's charismatic Pentecostalism. Do I have that right? Our solution to not having a Lutheran theology of missions is not to develop a Lutheran theology of missions? I wonder what the quite large number of active Lutheran missionaries in the world would say about that. But wait, we're not actually talking about world mission as a solution to local church growth, are we? Seriously? Two red herrings? This is about "reaching the next generation"? Well, why didn't you say so from the start! I feel bad about having fallen for the first set of arguments, even though I do enjoy talking about historic Lutheranism and modern Evangelical piety.

A good hortatory reading of Romans 5

2010-10-06T11:48:00.002-05:00

A quick Google will get you some points of view on indicative versus subjunctive for ἔχωμεν and καυχώμεθα in Romans 5. (A good research database will get you better ones, obviously.) From translating it to preach it the first time, to translating Romans 5 in rhetorical and sociological context, I'm obliged to lean to the subjunctive.

Why? What difference does this point of grammar make?

A big one! It was fine for Reformation dogmatics to take Romans as a theological treatise, and therefore to rely on the indicative sense, but Romans isn't a lecture. It is an impassioned position plea intervening in an ethnic dispute. The indicative is fine if you believe Paul is just rehashing common ground for eight chapters, but would you listen to someone recite, or even perform, that much material you already knew? And that's only halfway! Would you listen to her when she got to the point of exhorting you to action at almost twice that length? Would it make any difference who her patron's contacts were in Rome, all the way at the end, if you tuned out before the middle?

If it's persuasive, if the material is innovative and controversial, if Paul is taking a side and making a pitch for his position in the middle of a divided community, there's every reason to see hortatory logic behind chapter 5. Hear this:

"Since we have been made just by faith, let us have peace before God because of our Lord Jesus Christ -- through whom we have access by faith to that grace in which we stand. And let us boast about our hope in the glory of God! More than that -- let us even boast during oppression, seeing that oppression causes patience, and patience, proof, and proof, hope. And hope does not shame us, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts and minds by the spirit of holiness that God gave to us.

For while we were weak -- while it was the right season -- Christ died for the impious. Indeed, it's rare that someone will die for a righteous person. It's conceivable that someone might dare to die for a good person. But God confirms his love for us because while we were sinners, Christ died for us. How much more will we be saved from wrath because of him, since we've been made just right now by his blood? If we were reconciled to God because of the death of his son while we were enemies, how much more will we be saved by his life now that we've been reconciled?

More than that, let us boast in God because of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have received reconciliation right now!"

The key here in most discussions is "let us have peace pros ton theon" If Paul has been sufficiently convincing in chapter 4 about how the divided population is at one in father Abraham because of faith, they therefore have peace with God -- God isn't angry at them. So why would he exhort this? Ah, but what they do not have, as a divided Judean community in Rome, is peace in the sight of God, peace with respect to what is of God, peace because of God, peace in the presence of God. All perfectly good "pros ton theon" translations. And here we have classic cultic language, about access to stand before God, and the Kavod/Shekinah which is God's glory. Nothing but God's presence makes the Judean people special; nothing else is worthy ground for boasting. Circumcision, Kashrut, Sabbath observance, none of it means anything without God's dwelling in the community. If these things, under the slogan of observing the rules, have become destructive of that community, have become grounds for injustice within the community -- then Paul must oppose them while upholding a higher standard. If they are now reconciled with God, they must yet become reconciled with their neighbors.

Thlipsis. Oppression. Here we must understand context. The diaspora Judean community in Rome is under terrible pressure. Those who could be identified as Judeans were expelled under Claudius, an edict which has only just been lifted by Nero. Those who could pass for citizens were able to continue to be the faithful in Rome, but only by careful conformity with Roman culture. Do you conform? Do you support your brothers and sisters in secret? Do you make lifestyle choices in solidarity and receive the penalty with them? How black do you dare to be? How white do you dare to be? You're all poor, under the heel of the Roman patronage system. It keeps you down. While the authorities respect your existence as an ancient people with a law and a god, they're not interested in you being anything but Roman. You have peace, at the cost of your ethnicity. For Rome, it's easy: exert pressure, and watch the population split into "good Judeans" and "bad Judeans". The good ones get to keep their god and their law, and gain civilization.

And so the community becomes self-oppressing in both directions. The line imposed from outside combines with the `am/goy line that converts are in the process of crossing, that selectively permeable differentiation of self from other that is supposed to keep the community safe. It twists it. And the community commits hysteron-proteron, and starts boasting about the effects as though they were causes. Sacraments as though they commanded God's action. Works as though they achieved God's favor. The law and its commandments as though they constituted the covenant. A people that belongs to God because it is marked, not that is marked because it belongs to God. The distinctiveness becomes a thing in itself, the thing that constitutes faithfulness. And the other side, if it cannot have the marks, has holiness against the marks, holiness without marks, a piety which gets harder and harder to differentiate from that other culture. And where has the community's community gone, when both sides can be convinced to boast in divisiveness?

I see every reason, on this view, to read Romans as a position piece, an exhortation of self-motivated community in the midst of externally-imposed division. A call for unity, but not the unity imposed upon them from above, a unity which weeds out the faithful. A call for unity from below, unity from within, a lifestyle just as self-marking and self-evident as circumcision and kashrut, but expressed in ethical actions as God's community. A counter-culture that accommodates difference and therefore takes away Rome's ability to divide-and-conquer.

(Yeah, that's awfully positive, but I do things like this when I'm assimilating a position.)

Romans as written to diaspora Judean ethnoi

2010-09-29T10:50:00.003-05:00

The more I read my commentaries, the less satisfied I am with them. Not Jewett, really, or Deibler's Semantic and Structural Analysis, but Esler and Witherington and socio-rhetorical analysis that proceeds on the notion of Christianity being a live -- if nascent -- option in the field at the time. Jews and Gentiles and a presumption of conflict with "Jewish opponents." To riff on Jay, "Did'jou know Paul was a Jew?" (NSFW) Of course they do, but much depends on how you take that "was," what you think Paul was doing as an apostle, and how you construct his world. So I've gone off looking for things that make sense in post-Neusner studies.

What I've got is the notion that we're not talking Judaism and Christianity at least until the 2nd century, not clearly until the 4th century; that if we're talking about Rome, we're talking about a diasporan identity filiated toward Jerusalem/Judea but referring to Hasmonean rather than Herodian Second Temple Judaism; that "Judean" is the correct translation of Ioudaioi, and that it's an ethnos -- Paul isn't talking about religio or cultic matters, but about ethnic Judean identity, its nature and its effects.

Remember above all things that ethnicity is not a matter of "race" or genetics. Being racially semitic (which is itself another topic for debate) is not the criterion for being ethnically Judean. There is no essential conflict between the dominant sense that Romans is addressing a gentile audience, and that it is addressing a Judean one. They need not be two separate groups -- many things resolve when you consider that we have a letter directed toward a single audience of highly-Judaically-socialized citizens. Plus, given that Paul is soliciting for mission support to the West, I see no reason (yet) that references to the nations should not be proselytic reminders to a Judean community, an internally-universalist pitch much like Rahner makes for anonymous Christianity.

On this line of thought, Romans is an argument about the Judean identity crisis in a diasporan community in which those who could be identified as Judean were expelled under Claudius, and only those who could "pass" were able to remain and take up the identity of Judean ethnic community. Those whose unmutilated penises could pass for citizens' at the baths, and who weren't so picky about what they could eat. You can imagine there were problems with the idea of ethnic solidarity! But there always are, in a community where some can pass as white, and others cannot. Incidental to the letter, this provides a measure of much-needed sympathy for the demonized "Judaizers" -- those who would compel the gentile converts to engage in *all* of the indices of Judean ethnicity, not just all the ones that were convenient to them as citizens of empire. Much as we're inclined to say about Christianity in the American empire, "Judaism" wasn't just an ancient, respectable moral philosophy with its God and set of rules, though it was attractive in Rome for those aspects. It was a culture, a way of life, and one that had a funny relationship to the authorities of the world. It could tolerate them, but it could not ascribe to them the authority they wanted. It had, at times, to be counter-culture. And when and where it had to, were serious questions! (Sounds familiar, but that's for after the exegesis.)

Anthony Smith (The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986, cited in Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Indentity in Greek Antiquity, 1997, p. 25) gives six characteristics for an ethnic group:
1) An ethnonym, a unified name by which the group is known
2) A common myth of descent
3) A shared history
4) A distinctive shared culture
5) A specific territorial association
6) A sense of communal solidarity

Jonathan Hall, dealing with ancient Greek ethnoi, finds 2 and 5 to be the most crucial, and with respect to Judeans as an ethnos in the Hellenistic environment, I would say that 1, 2, and 5 are reasonably incontestable. 1: The ethnonym says a lot about who they take themselves to be -- the gentilic "Judean" of the Hasmonean dynasty rather than the semitic "Israel" of the later Bar Kokhba revolt. 2: The common descent -- to which Paul appeals -- is Abrahamic. Mythos is important here -- while there may be a hierarchy prioritizing normative genetic descent, just as with the Aharonic, Zadokite, and Davidic lines, especially in the Hellenism of the diaspora we're talking about conversion as adoption into the family. Fictive kinship, as David Rhoads has said about the baptismal system. If Jesus is "the offspring," as Paul claims, this is an Abrahamic claim to Judean ethnicity through Jesus. 5: The specific territory the Judeans call their own is Judea, most specifically Jerusalem. It is well-attested that the diasporan communities, while having no such strong desire for return as we see in some contemporary forms, were quite willing to "send home" tribute/offerings to Jerusalem. (This bothered some emperors and governors more than others.) Paul's mention of the Jerusalem offering need not be a questionable pitch to get money from the Romans, but might be a proof of alignment in both ethos and pathos.

The trouble is that 1, 2 and 5 constitute the object of struggle. The battlegrounds are 3, 4 and 6. I've already touched on solidarity, and to some degree on distinctive shared culture as well. The degree of sharing, and what must be shared (the difference between a criterion of ethnicity and an index of it), are a real problem, and possibly the whole point of the "Jerusalem conference" of Galatians and Acts. (The perennial question of "What is a Jew?") Shared history becomes a real problem, as the marked Judeans have a very different near-term history than the converts (expulsion and persecution), and claim to embodying the longer-term history to which the converts have joined themselves.

I think this has solid claim to a thick interpretation of Romans, and one that can build out usefully into divided Christian contexts. But it's early yet, and I'm still learning. Maybe tomorrow will break it in half...though I don't think so, based on the research so far.

Meditation on Dives and the gospel

2010-09-27T11:35:00.005-05:00

I cannot abide sermons in which both we and God lose. Which is to say, sermons in which there is no gospel. Which is always a shame when the exegesis is so evidently excellent!

The connections between Luke 16:19-31 and Amos 6 are quite well made, for which we may thank the wisdom of mother church (and her modern descendents maintaining the RCL). The call in both texts is not against leisure and wealth, let alone in favor of poverty, but against failure in the burden of hospitality. Other-concern. In the social locations, both texts set the notion of God-given benefits against the impiety of the recipients. We might say, "the burden of charity," but I was reminded this morning that we clearly misconceive charity. It follows the power gradients, and becomes down-reach. Giving downward with one hand, while pushing downward with the other. Or, as bad, while pulling upward hegemonically. Charity becomes the creation and maintenance of social obligations to the self, to the upper classes, and to the dominant cultural system. Not for nothing do we translate Kultur as "civilisation" in Freud.

It is worth noting the law implications of the parables and Paul, in which God becomes the owner, and we the recipients of charity. The pervasive notion of human misappropriation follows these accusations of impiety-by-failure-of-hospitality. (There has to be a German word for that...)

This morning, I was reminded of the necessity of the concept of dignitas implicit in caritas, the worth of the other levelled with that of the self, or raised higher in illustrative compensation. Which was a damn good point! I received into my understanding a new way in which we lose.

But what I didn't receive, in such an otherwise well-crafted message, was how God wins. No usus evangelium; no evident dependency of the usi legis upon the gospel. (Which may just make it typically Lutheran in ethos, but it shouldn't be!) Just "Go forth and do otherwise."

So where is the gospel in Dives? It is undeniably a law text, spoken to Pharisees who are "lovers of money," and the point in 16:16-17 must be taken as principle for illustration, that no matter how much people crowd their own way into the Kingdom of God (proper middle voice), the law and the prophets remain in effect. And in that light, we see Dives attempting to crowd his own way in to "the bosom of Abraham" after the fact, and failing that, attempting to push his family in with fear of hell.

Which won't work. And still we haven't gotten at God's opus proprium.

Let's advance in the same text, as Jesus turns from the Pharisees to his disciples. They get instruction, and what's the response? "Increase our faith!" And we get an excursus on the value of following up on your obligations: "Does he have gratitude for the servant, that he did what had been commanded? No. So also you, when you shall have done all that had been commanded of you, say: "We are useless servants; what we were obligated to do, we did.""

What can we say, then, of an hypothetically pious Dives? Only that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Speaking, of course, of piety as considered in terms of social obligations and deeds. As with Euthyphro, civil piety isn't enough to appease the gods. It's not wrong; the law and prophets don't disappear, including Amos and Jesus-of-the-parables. God still wants justice, and thinks of it in terms of hospitality and charity. But we remain obliged to say 1) it's not enough, and 2) increase our faith!

We remain obliged to say that the solution remains with God. We do work which God desires, and we do it insufficiently at best, but Christ is our righteousness. And the gospel, as it so often is, is where we least expect it: in the Psalm. 1 Timothy for the day is no help. It commands what we might also be led to command from the other two readings. But Ps 146 has it right: The lord may not praise the servant for doing what was obligatory, but the servant will praise the Lord, because:

"Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; the LORD loves the righteous.
The LORD watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin."

We have been baptized into the service of a God who does all this, who has done all this, who will always do all this. Who keeps faith forever. A Lord who promises, and fulfills. A Lord whose grace is for his servants, not because of their works, but because they belong to God. Who executes the justice in which we are called to participate. A Lord whose good graces cannot be coerced, but can always be beseeched, and will always be received. A Lord in whose Kingdom we live, not because we are worthy, but because Christ is worthy.

So do worry about the practice of your piety, but not for the sake of your soul. You rest in the bosom of Abraham for Christ's sake already, though by the grace of God you may not arrive there today. God deals justly with you, and gives you faith. Strengthen yourself in the grace of God freely given, which enables you to go forth and do likewise.