Avdat

Geneva tops Wittenburg

Good news on the pigskin front. Union Seminary is the Luther Bowl XLIV Champions! I don't know which one of my classmates is going to Disney World, but man, does he or she deserve it, after putting a serious beat down on those crypto-Eutychian cannibals!

Don't tread on me and all that yada yada

I watched some history made last night. No, not the Bama-LSU game, the House vote on health care reform. I did catch some of the football game too, but for sheer entertainment purposes, watching the House debate won hands down. My nine-year-old would watched a bit with me, and he could always identify the Republican members of Congress because they sounded so angry. In a sense I can't begrudge them anger. Having preached for 14 years I know what it's like to be condemned to making arguments that you are sure will fall on deaf ears.

What I can begrudge them are the sheer incoherence of their arguments:

"This is a government takeover of our health care system!"

• Um, no, it's not. If you have private insurance and you like it, you get to keep it.

"This plan cuts Medicare!"

• Well now, Medicare IS a takeover of the health care system, at least for Senior Citizens. If you're against "gubmunt run health care," then you shouldn't be fighting Medicare cuts. You should be fighting to kill Medicare.

"This plans FORCES you to buy health insurance whether you want it or not!"

• Pardon me if I don't pick up my pitchfork and march on Washington about this one. The government already forces me to buy auto insurance if I want to drive. My seminary forces me to buy health insurance as a condition of my enrollment. People should carry health insurance instead of parachuting into an ER when they get sick and letting me pick up the tab with higher premiums on my policy. It's a matter of personal responsibility. And if you can't afford it, you'll be subsidized, which is more efficient than the current system.

"This plan fosters government dependency. Why, I used to be a judge and I had to send away too many boys born to welfare queens who got paid by the gubmunt to have babies."

• Not a direct quote, but pretty close. Some Congressman from Texas. Please see the above comments about personal responsibility.

"We're going broke!"

• Ahem, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House bill will reduce the deficit over the next ten years.

"Pelosi bill, Pelosi bill, Pelosi bill!"

• Yes, some people don't like strong women from the Left Coast, but really, can't we do better than ad hominem attacks? Besides, the House-approved bill is a bi-partisan bill. That's right. One GOP lawmaker voted for it. Only one, but it counts.

I think that when all is said and done, the Republicans were opposed to this bill, not because it might fail, but because it might succeed. Tactically, they want to deny the President a legislative victory. Strategically, even if the government can solve problems, they don't want it to. You see this dynamic in spades with global warming. That kind of ideological rigidity gives birth to the kind of angry, non-sensical ranting we saw on the House floor yesterday. I have no use for it, nor do most people. It's taking longer than we thought, but the reform movement continues to jump every legislative hurdle. I remain confident that it'll happen, and years from now, everybody will wonder what all the pitchfork-brandishing was about.

You Tube Friday

For some reason I woke up with this song in my head. I blame Lee, who posted another great 70s paean to "base injustice done to my Love" last Friday. And while I hate to go all fanboy homer on you, I do have to say that Steve Perry's vocal range is, like, dizzying, and that everything they put out after 1980 was crap. Including Escape.

Change we can believe in, BSG edition

Should the Colonials have backed the Zarek coup?

Frak yeah!

Because Tom Zarek would have known better than to think that this planet is habitable.

I preach sermons

While Pastor Janet is at Iona, I pinch hit for her at The Gayton Kirk this morning. Version 1.0 of this sermon is still up at The Ivy Bush.

What the Shortest Verse in the Bible Means

November 1, 2009/Year B, All Saints

Isaiah 25: 6-9; John 11: 32-45

    The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35, a friend to every memory-challenged child who ever darkened the door of a Sunday School classroom. Alas, the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible changed the tense, from “Jesus wept,” to “Jesus began to weep,” and doubled the length of the verse. What will the kids do now?
    A better question is, “What are those tears for?” Take a look at this interpretation of the raising of Lazarus by the Dutch master Rembrandt. What does his body language, left hand raised, right hand gathering his robe into a fist at his hip, say about Jesus’s mood?
    I showed this etching to the congregation I served in North Carolina, and asked them that same question. One of our teenagers said that she thought Jesus was “coppin’ an attitude” in this work of art. That seemed to resonate with the adults on hand that evening, no doubt because they’d seen that kind of body language before, from their own teenagers. That “talk to the hand” pose.
    Interestingly, “coppin’ an attitude” may come closer to the original Greek than the English translation you just heard. In English we read that Jesus was “deeply moved” at the sight of the mourners and “greatly disturbed” as he approached Lazarus’s tomb. But the Greek for “greatly disturbed” really conveys anger and displeasure. As a verb it can mean to scold or rebuke. Occasionally the word is used to describe the snort of a horse who doesn’t like the feel of the bit in its mouth. “Jesus snorted,” an even more memorable sentence than “Jesus wept!”

Irritated

Reading this Ross Douthat column on Rome's latest overture to disaffected Anglicans makes me wanna go all Barthian-existentialist on the man. "No, Sir! Christianity's most enduring and impressive foe is Christ. Not Islam."

Return of the one state solution?

Back when I read Counterpunch, I became a fan of a one state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It seemed the only way to honor the legitimate religious and historical claims of both parties to the land and its sacred sites.

But I soured on it because some of its advocates sounded frankly anti-Semitic. Plus, given the fact that peaceful and prosperous Canada and Belgium have nearly split recently along ethnic and linguistic lines, putting Israelis and Palestinians together in one, happy, multi-ethnic nation-state seemed like a pipe dream.

But I wonder if a two state solution is any more realistic. I think that there are something like 150,000 Israelis living in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It took the TVA forty years to move only a third of that number for the lakes that they created. Moving that number of people seems like an impossible task, especially given the trauma Israelis experienced over evacuating the paltry sum of settlers from Gaza a few years ago.

Not to be trivial, but this stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminds me of season three of Battlestar Galactica. After the attacks and the failed experiment on New Caprica, each side has perpetrated so much evil on the other that reconciliation seems impossible. But given the fact that the  Cylon-Human offspring Hera lives, and that Baltar's sleeping his way through the female Cylon skin jobs, and that the mysterious final five may well be lurking in the fleet, each side's dream of getting shed of the other looks increasingly unlikely.

That's where Israelis and Palestinians are, locked in a death grip that neither party can disengage from. The Cylons and the humans managed to turn that death grip into an embrace. It's easy to do that with a TV show. But as hard as it would be to do in the real world of the Holy Land, it may be the only viable option.

You Tube Friday: baiting Pat Buchanan edition

If you choose me to be your token white friend, what I can bring to this relationship is extensive experience in New Balance running shoes. Plus, I will be your Dungeon Master. (HT)

An amazing blog post about a heretofore completely unexamined topic: the death of Constantinan Christianity

Yesterday's post got me thinking. When was the last time a Protestant theologian appeared on the cover of Time magazine? The answer is Martin Luther, on March 24, 1967. Heh.

There's been plenty of popes on the cover since then, but not all recent popes could be called intellectuals. And there have been plenty of Protestant religious leaders on the cover of Time since then, including Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and Rick Warren, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that none of these men are intellectuals.

Now I suppose that the RO analysis of this long absence would be along the lines of, "Great! It's about time the Church's best and brightest quit whoring for secular accolades. Let's hope that the next generation of best and brightest Christians takes it to the next level and gets tortured to death at Gitmo. Like Origen and Irenaeus. Then we'll be cooking with gas!"

Like I said in yesterday's post, setting out to get your mug on Time magazine may entail a certain psychological imbalance that inevitably results in sexual or financial misconduct, or substance abuse. Maybe it's for their own good that today's Protestant intellectuals toil in obscurity.

There is, however, another consideration. Perhaps the fact that a dead German theologian appearing on the cover of Time less than a year after the infamous Death of God cover signals the death of top-shelf Protestant thought. Maybe our long absence is less due to disentangling ourselves from the world, and more due to the fact that our intellectual output isn't all that impressive. Into the vacuum has stepped religious leaders with ecclesiastical and political heft.

Put differently, "the death of Constantinianism" really means the death of high level Protestant intellectual engagement with the secular. In practical terms, it means that the face of public Christianity is not Niebuhr, Barth and Tillich, but Warren, Robertson and Swaggart. I can't see how this state of affairs is as full of wondrous opportunities as the RO luminaries say it is.

Sinful theologians

Two weeks ago, which is, like, ten-thousand years in blog time, Halden observed that even skirt-chasing, hard-drinking, bourgeois theologians sometimes speak the truth in spite of themselves--like Caiaphas did. Adam Kotsko retorted that theologians, as a class, are no more sinful than the laity, and further, theologians should be evaluated solely on their intellectual prowess and ability to critique the church's preaching and discipline.

Hmm...

The problem with the people on Halden's book shelf is not that they're theologians. It's that they're famous. It's hard enough to keep your head about you when you're a lowly community college professor whose students have a crush on you. It's even harder when you wind up on the cover of Time magazine. The material with which theologians work doesn't exempt them from the same temptations that politicians or movie stars face, but it may provide them with a little more immunity. With the exception of Paul Newman, I can't think of an actor who died happily married. Famous theologians probably handle the ego inflating aspects of their profession better than other professionals do.

I wonder if the time and effort it takes to be first rate in any field almost inevitably results in an interior imbalance that breeds bad behavior. Is there only so much heart and soul and brain power to go around, and if true greatness demands it all, then maybe there's not enough left to cultivate a healthy marriage, or habits of hospitality? Then again, there are plenty of non-achievers out there who are also womanizers, crack heads, or emotionally abuse their children. What's their excuse?

It seems like there's a general agreement in the comments that there's a gap between church and academy; the only disagreement is, Whose fault is it? Ivory tower, whoremongering intellectuals; or the materialistic, vapid laity?

On the one hand, I'm not sure we need to assign blame. It's fine with me if the sermons I hear don't sound like papers presented at an AAR meeting; in fact, I would prefer that they not, and I would frankly dread membership in a congregation that resembled an AAR event in any way, shape or form. At the same time, somebody needs to be doing theology at a highly refined and rather inaccessible level of learning that may or may not trickle down over a long period of time in the "dumbed down" mode of sermons and curricula.

Put differently, my brother-in-law and his wife are both civil engineers. I don't need to know the ins and outs of statics and dynamics in order to enjoy living and working a building that can stand up straight and not fall down. But there had better be somebody out there who does know that stuff backwards and forwards. I'd like to be one of those people one day in the field of the history of doctrine.

I'm going back and forth on Adam's fear of

a kind of “Donatism for theologians” that would amount to little more than an ad hominem argument — by and large, theologians are perfectly capable of carrying out their theological duties while committing adultery or skipping church.

If one criterion of a theologian's competence is critique of the church's preaching and discipline, isn't the trade-off a willingness to be subject to the church's preaching and discipline? It's the principle of "The measure you give will be the measure you get," and "Those who teach will be judged with greater strictness." If the theologian's task is to convey knowledge of ideas to students, then I suppose that Adam's right, but if the theologian's task is to form students as Christians, then it seems like there'd be much less tolerance for slippage between words and deeds.

To put it differently again, I am not sure if an adulterous theologian is like an MD who smokes (incongruous, but not so much as to stop me from being his patient), or an attorney who embezzles (who should be disbarred).

In the end though, I keep going back to my own experience with a seminary professor who later left the seminary because of accusations of some type of sexual misconduct (not with me, I should be clear). I wouldn't trade what I learned from him for all the tea in China. Whatever he did or didn't do doesn't invalidate the wisdom he gave me, even though the incongruity was especially high, given that he was in the pastoral theology department. Furthermore, hardly anybody who taught me left  academic life for such reasons, and I suspect it's not just because they were never caught.