Avdat

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.

Unitive subconscious anxiety experience

I dreamed that I was at the restaurant where I wait tables, only the plates in my hand were full of German verbs like vergessen (to forget) and verlieren (to lose).

Adventures auf Deutsch

There's little time to spare for blogging while I complete a crash course in reading German. I can't say anything wittier about the language than Mark Twain did in The Awful German Language, but to tell the truth I don't hate German as much as Twain did. There's something pleasantly challenging about decoding a sentence like this one, on pp. 229 of Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge:

Dieses 1816 zuerst erschienene, spaeter laufend ergaenzte, 1838 ins Deutsche uebersetzte Buch hatte einen groBen Einfluss auf die Psychiatrie ausgeuebt.

Germans have "these", "those," and "which," and while they use commas more than English-speakers, they don't use any of these handy-dandy devices when they need them, like the above sentence which begins with a really long adjectival phrase. Literally translated, it is, as best I can tell:

This 1816 first appeared, later continuously supplemented to, 1838 into German translated book had a great influence on psychiatry exerted.

If you want to understand German, think of Yoda. Basically, Yoda speaks English with German word order.

As I said, "Pleasantly challenging." Runners (the good ones, anyway) know about anaerobic threshold, the point where lactate acid builds up in your body, and you experience pain. Improving your anaerobic threshold is key to improving your time. Now I don't bother with this much because I'm a lazy runner. I can pile on miles pretty easily, but making myself run faster is like pulling teeth. But learning German is my intellectual anaerobic threshold workout. It's difficult, but not impossible, and when I'm finally able to read some dead German theologian's horrible syntax, complete with passive perfect voice, and stemwinding adjectival phrases auf Deutsch, then I will feel a great sense of accomplishment!

And you're thinking the same thing you think when you're stopped in traffic one weekend, waiting for people in their 40s to trot across the street at a 15 minute mile, +6 hour marathon pace: Why is he doing that to himself?

In which I hop off the cultural-linguistic bus

We've read the first half of Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is for my class on the attributes of God. Among other things it makes an argument that, by now, we're all familiar with: exclusively masculine language for God underwrites patriarchal social structures, and finding new, faithful ways of naming the Deity is an integral part of liberating women from oppression.

I have never found this argument all that convincing. As far as dismantling the patriarchy goes, balancing feminine and neuter metaphors with masculine ones seems like an interesting sidebar at best. The sharp tip of the spear, however, would seem to be vigorously enforcing anti-discrimination laws. Or enacting universal health care.

I don't think that women run meetings these days because, back in the 60s and 70s, people stopped calling Chairmen "Chairmen," and started calling them "Chairs" or "Chairpersons." I think that some women managed to put themselves in the position of running meetings, enough so that calling them "Chairman" began to sound strange.

Inclusive language is a shibboleth. It doesn't change society. It is a shorthand way of identifying a group of people with a shared set of political commitments that one hopes will change society.

Now I'm only halfway through Johnson's book, but she doesn't strike me as a kind of Wittgensteinian--Lindbeckian--Radical Orthodoxy-Postliberal kind of theologian. She's genus Liberal, species Feminist Liberation. And yet Feminist Liberals and Postliberals--many of whom can be notoriously non-Feminist (especially in the secular political sense)--do seem to share the conviction that language does not merely describe a world; it creates a world.

I used to believe that, but I no longer do. 15 years of tinkering with liturgy and writing sermons has shown me that there is a big world out there that decisively impinges on whatever kind of reality the Church tries to create in a service of Word and Sacrament. I don't think that you reform the Church or change the world by re-describing or re-imagining either. I think you need to change the world and reform the Church, and the words you use to describe it will follow.

It's starting to occur to me that my dissatisfaction with postliberalism isn't limited to the quietistic streak that some of the younger members of the movement display. I have methodological problems with it as well. That said, Liberalism, "submitting all truth claims to the bar of reason or experience," as Gary Dorrien puts it, also seems problematic.

I suppose it's good that I didn't wind up at a place like Duke. I would really be kicking against the pricks there.

I am having a really hard time taking the temperature of a place like Union-PSCE. As a PhD student I don't attend very many classes, or interact with a broad cross-section of the student body. Moreover, as a Church History student, I spend most of my time reading people who are neither liberal, postliberal, fundamentalist or conservative. I think the best category to put them in is "strange." Augustine. Columbanus. The Puritans.

What I'm trying to say is that it's nice to be back at school but not "in a school," so to speak.

The trouble with God blogging

My professor was saying that a key component of a graduate level education is learning how to analyze and critique arguments. But once you're awarded your PhD, you are expected to put the gloves back on, so to speak, and imply critiques in your own arguments rather than baring your fangs, either in print or at some conference.

I was thinking that this explains my general dissatisfaction with religious blogging. Blogs, given their spontaneity, brevity, anonymity, and lack of editorial oversight, are by nature a sucker-punching medium, more so than a "Come, let us reason together" medium. When you add blogging's built in bias toward polemic to the fact that a lot of religious bloggers are also grad students, you get a mode of discourse that's as far away from "speaking the truth in love" as you can get. It strikes me that much of what passes for sophisticated theological anaylsis in the blogosphere is actually quite infantile. The lack of charity indicates immaturity more so than courageous, uncompromising truth spoken to power, or whatever.

But strangely, this doesn't bother me at all when it comes to political blogs. Matthew Yglesias can say that the people who blog at The Corner are idiots, and I don't blink an eye. And I think there's more to it than the fact that I happen to agree with Yglesias. But am I right to hold religious discourse to a higher standard?

Stimulating

This Washington Post article outlines liberal concerns about Obama's stimulus package. Some fear is that the plan isn't bold enough. There is relatively little money for mass transit and green energy vis a vis the tax cuts.

I'm not that troubled by this. Obama ran his campaign like it was a marathon, not a sprint. There was a lot of panic along the way, as Hillary dug into Obama's lead with the 3:00 AM ad, and in September when the Republicans went wild over Sarah Palin. Obama seemed slow to respond. But his pace was just right. In that WaPo article his officials argue that there will be other chances to put the economy on a greener, healthier, long term footing. I expect he's right. For all the hype about the first hundred days, the Presidency is a marathon too, especially when trying to dig oneself out of the crater in which we find ourselves.

The Republicans have attacked the plan around the edges--the Medicaid money for family planning,re-doing the sod on the National Mall--but the bulk of the plan is aid to states and infrastructure repair. This is stuff that simply has to be done. You can't let interstate highway bridges just keep on collapsing like that one in the Twin Cities. And I don't think you can tighten Medicaid eligibility requirements right when literally tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs and their insurance on a daily basis. It's a completely cynical posture, to say that you're against wasteful government spending, and then force the states--whom your small government, federalist vision ostensibly lauds--to do the dirty work for you by scrubbing the Medicaid rolls, laying off teachers and closing prisons.

They're betting that it's 1993, and the country is still basking in the afterglow of its Reagan-inspired rightward lurch. I think that the country is experiencing a serious hangover from our Second Gilded Age, and is open to a firmer hand on the wheel. At least these party line votes will give voters a clear idea whom to blame and praise next time around.

Pick my dissertation

Ok, so I'm getting this PhD in Church History, see? And I'm wanting to get it in early medieval history, because Europe needs to be re-evangelized, because Rome is falling apart and because there are all these barbarians on the move in western Europe, and in some ways this is reminiscent of the missional challenge the Church faces in the post-modern West. (But don't tell any historians I said that! They hate it, hate it with a purple passion when people value history for something other than its own sake!)

Ok, so I found this sermon by this guy named Martin of Braga. And it's all about why Christians should not cling to various pagan practices. And I'm loving this sermon because it's a window into how ordinary people lived their lives, how they used religion to manage the exigencies of life, and how official Christianity was trying to control the flourishing of heterodox, syncretistic Christianities, especially in the countryside.

And I write this paper on it. And dude, I like, got an A! And I'm thinking, this is going to be the focus of my dissertation. I am so ahead of the game!

And then...

I read this book for my January term class called Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul A.D. 481-751. OK, I read it in that time-honored, grad student, time crunch way. I read the first sentence of every paragraph. But please don't tell any honest-to-goodness historians!

And that guy says...

There was no paganism in early medieval Gaul. The society was Christianized from top to bottom. And all those sermons and penitentials dealing with paganism were just monks dutifully copying stuff down from time out of mind. Had nothing to do with real life.

Durnit.

Well, better to learn that you're full of crap now than when you're defending your dissertation.

So, Gentle Reader, what do you want to know about the early Medieval Church? I need a dissertation topic.

There stands ever-cherished N.C. State

State Fans Nation wades into the Free Expression Tunnel kerfuffle. The comment thread is a mostly  intelligent and wide-ranging conversation on free speech, political correctness and, interestingly, campus beautification.

A little background: a railroad track bisects the N.C. State campus. There are three pedestrian tunnels that go underneath the tracks, and one, the Free Expression Tunnel, is available for spray-painting, to minimize illegal graffiti elsewhere on campus.  After the November elections, four students painted slogans threatening the life of President-elect Obama. The University whitewashed the tunnel (which, if I recall correctly, they also habitually do in the run-up to Parent's weekend), and University Police contacted the Secret Service. They investigated, but as far as I know, no charges were filed. Now the University system is considering whether to adopt a system-wide hate speech policy. The NAACP wants the students expelled, and diversity training mandated for incoming freshmen.

I don't think that inciting violence is protected speech, although the lack of charges indicates that the offensive graffiti wasn't a serious bid to inflict bodily harm on the President-elect. It was four bozos who shot their mouths off, and between the social opprobrium they've experienced on campus (Judging by the comment thread at State Fans Nation, N.C. State is a different place than it was 20 years ago),
and federal agents picking apart their hard drives, they have surely been taught a lesson.

I'm agnostic about expulsion, and I think that a hate speech policy is going to be awfully difficult to implement fairly. The laws of the state already outlaw communicating threats. Diversity training, however, is probably a good idea, if for no other reason than to save dumb people from the consequences of their own stupidity.

One commenter argued that the Free Expression Tunnel is an eyesore, and is less a forum for free speech than it is the one and only tool for the TKEs to round up enough guys during rush to have a decent pledge class (my paraphrase). They ought to get rid of the thing as the first step in beautifying the campus.

It's true. N.C. State is not all that easy on the eyes. The dormitories of west campus, where I lived for two years, exude all the collegiate charm of a Soviet apartment complex. I wound up my time at State in a central campus high rise that might have looked great in the opening credits of Good Times. State's most famous architectural landmark is Harrelson Hall which can only be described as a three story hat box on stilts. It oozes that gee whiz ugliness of the worst that post war architects managed to come up with. I spent a lot of time in the fluorescent glow of its windowless, warren-like rooms. State's Centennial Campus is only marginally better--it reeks of the soulless sterility of a suburban office park.

Abolishing the Free Expression Tunnel would only disburse the graffiti throughout the campus. They should keep it; people need to maintain a strong stomach that goes with tolerating free speech, and bozos who do what those four did last November need to be prepared for just about everyone, including federal agents, to come down on them in a counter-exercise of free speech.

But what to do to beautify the campus? It's amazing, really, that a university with an architecture and design school and a college of agriculture and life sciences can have a mishmash of uninspiring, if not downright ugly buildings, and pedestrian landscaping. Why can't more of the campus look like the view from the 1911 building?

Part of the problem is that N.C. State is on the edge of a city. It's not downtown, in which case no one would give a second thought to aesthetics. I mean, no one says VCU or Georgia State are ugly campuses, even though they are, because no one expects them to be beautiful. N.C. State is close to Pullen Park, and has enough green space to raise expectations.

But it sits astride a railroad track, for God's sake. That automatically limits you. And since it's not nestled in a forest like Duke, or in a small town like Chapel Hill, it winds up looking like what it is--that part of the city that got build in the 50s and 60s. Nasty.

Part of fixing up N.C. State has to do with fixing up Hillsborough Street which is really looking dumpy. I was last there in February, and while I didn't get mugged or propositioned, I didn't, you know, feel like throwing on ye old letter jacket and having a pint with me chums either. I was too busy trying not to trip over slabs of concrete sidewalk that looked like tectonic plates riding over each other.

One of my classmates here at Union-PSCE is convinced that the looks of the buildings tell you something about the values of the institution. He came here not only because, for a seminary, Union-PSCE has a sizable collection, but also because the library is drop-dead gorgeous. In a recession it's going to be a hard sell to ask for money for pretty stuff, beyond what you need for operating expenses, but the University really needs to start making the case to the legislature that if you want to be a top-flight research University, you can't look like a forlorn K-Mart shopping center. And the City of Raleigh needs to do its part as well.

Could Joe Montana beat up Warren Moon? and other theological debates

Megan McArdle defines the phrase winning the cocktail party.

Because I'm headed back to seminary I'm wondering if the rule holds for the classroom as well as the cocktail party.  In other words, despite the presence of so many women in the ranks of clergy and future clergy, does the typical classroom still resemble a pissing contest between the Evangelical Conservatives, the Radically Orthodox, the Future Chaplains, and the Peace and Justice Liberals, or is there any collaboration, consensus-seeking, etc, etc?

I'm wondering what Camassia and Jennifer think, since they have two X chromosomes, and could win an argument with any pretentious male seminarian with one half of their brains tied behind their backs.

High Inquisitors

Mrs. Avdat makes a good point.  Isn't hiring a woman who's not fluent in American Sign Language to lead the NC School of the Deaf a little like appointing Dolores Umbridge to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts?

Plus, she likes to quash student protests!