I wasn't expecting that

"The Parliament of the World's Religions is coming to Australia! It will be held in Melbourne 3-9 December under the theme 'Make a World of Difference: Hearing each other, Healing the earth'."

I did a double-take, then read that paragraph again. Then I pinched myself, metaphorically. I wasn't reading that on some pink-hued New Agey website - full of ads for Theosophy and crystals - but the staid print magazine of one of Australia's more conservative, mainline churches. I started the article all over again.

The writer had embraced the event wholeheartedly.

"I came away from the training day for presenters and the first official pre-Parliament event really appreciating the engagement with persons who follow different faiths but are linked by the common value of compassion."

Excuse me, I thought I knew this church. There are people of "old school" persuasion therein who aren't convinced they should pray alongside Methodists. You stay away for a fleeting decade or two and, lo and behold, a generation rises up that knows not Moses.

Using my finely tuned BS detector, honed on back issues of another denomination's (using that term loosely) magazines and news releases, I went back in with a cynical eye. The September issue of the aforesaid magazine is clearly intended to soften up anticipated resistance from the old confessional warriors. I can't wait to read the letters to the editor in October! "How far have we departed (cough, hack) from our pure gospel witness!"

I have some sympathy with these aging fossils and their younger fundagelical kin. Let's be clear, Methodists are indisputably strange (though not as strange, of course, as Presbyterians.) But the Parliament is more than pretending to be civil to heretics like these benighted pseudo-Protestants : dear lord, the Dalai Lama will be there!

But yes, my heart is indeed strangely (to overuse the term) warmed by this unexpected openness. I recollect a sermon that raised my blood pressure not all that many years ago when the imported Aussie pastor berated the Kiwi pew-warmers for not feeling righteously indignant when they passed the Lower Hutt Christian Science Reading Room. Verily, if one was wearing sandals one should feel impelled to shake the very dust off! (I wonder what Lionel will make of this article?) And now, here we are, finding it possible to participate in a Parliament of World Religions?

It gives my cynicism a welcome kick in the teeth. I just hope the editor is braced for the Barossa backlash...

Gender blender?

Inclusive language, is it of the devil? The subject riles many a NASB devotee or KJV recidivist, what with all this pandering to the ladies. More surprising is the disdain inclusive language bibles generate among the good and the great, including such luminaries as Bob Price and - the most widely read biblioblogger in the known multiverse - Jim West.

Here's Jim in a recent entry: the silly debate about gender and language is the biggest waste of time since Red Riding Hood argued with the wolf. If a translation sets out to adjust the text simply for modern tastes and sensibilities, it isn’t worth a pot. If it says ‘he’ translate ‘he’ and let the exegetes worry about whether or not it’s generic for ‘humankind’ or gender specific. (source)

Jim West's blog deservedly outranks everyone else because he writes like a real person, puts on few airs and graces (except for an insufferable tendency to link to foreign language sources without warning), suffers from no false modesty, and his writing style has an "edginess" to it that slaps you around sufficiently to grab your attention. But he's dead wrong on this one.

If you attend a liturgical church, one which follows the lectionary cycle, you know that the main exposure congregants get to "the Word" is in the hearing thereof. Forget all the puff and faddle about devotional reading in the home: 90 plus percent of bible exposure is on Sunday morning via the readings.

This needn't be a particularly bad thing. This is the way it's always been, reaching back to the synagogue and beyond. In "bible times" books - and especially scriptures - were written to be shared by reading aloud. The scrolls, codices and whatnot were way beyond the means of your average person in the pews, who couldn't read them even if they had a shekel to spare.

So, what's this got to do with Red Riding Hood? Just this. Gender specific language in the context of liturgical use does alienate more than half those sitting in the pews. Week after week women get the message: they're peripheral. Liturgical use is different from that of tendentious scholarly exegetes; it is primarily pastoral. Which is why the NRSV is the best choice for most lectionary readings (don't get me started on the ESV!)

In fact, I'd recommend any serious bible reader get a hold of something called The Inclusive Bible,a radical Catholic translation that claims with some justification to be "the first egalitarian translation." If you want strict correspondence to the original languages, then it won't be your choice. But if you have a pastoral concern to speak (or be spoken to) in a way that is congruent with life in the twenty-first century, you couldn't do better. And hey, it reads as well as the NRSV - sometimes even better.

No argument from me on two matters in the West post, however. The NIV is rubbish, and the REB is an under-appreciated (even if a little dated) triumph of the translator's art.

Mindless in Missouri

Don't get me wrong, I have a grudging admiration for Martin Luther, more-so having recently read psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's biography - an oldie but goodie first published in 1959 - Young Man Luther. No doubt about it, Anfechtung has a lot to answer for!

But these two pictures are nothing but jaw-dropping in their Lutherolatry. I mean, c'mon guys, talk about putting someone on a pedestal! The first is apparently arranged to exhibit the excellencies of Concordia's ESV Study Bible being released about now. Weighty. Authoritative. I mean who would argue with a glowering visage like that!

The second is the somewhat unimaginative but phallic cover of the initial volume in the Concordia edition of Luther's works. The reformer protectively holds a bible while gazing upward. It begs for a caption: Nein Katie, you must stay up in the loft, these chocolates are mine, all mine!

You'll need to click on the photos to appreciate the utter horror of it all in larger form. Mercifully, both publications come from the whinging Misery Synod, famous for its wooden literalism, rather than any responsible Lutheran body, but still... this is verging on cultic.

Rodney vs the Reprobates

Rodney Stark is author of The Rise of Christianity, a volume with a good deal to recommend itself - at least from the perspective of the church history paper I took a year or so back. Stark is a sociologist with a fascinating reconstruction to offer on how early church growth reached warp drive so quickly in the first centuries CE.without the aid of either WGN or a Branding Task Force.

Stark's subsequent books have been tilted in an ideological direction, something bemoaned here once before. The Stark truth is that Christianity turned out to be the best thing since sliced bread. No wait, that's a bit redundant... sliced bread owes its genius to Christianity (or something like that.)
Wicked rationalist Richard Carrier is calling his bluff. Stark would have us believe that the scientific weltanschauung could only arise in the Christian West. This is just bad history, according to Carrier, in two podcasts for the Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour. This is an amusing excursus, if you're moderately geekish or into ancient history.

Okay, so you have to be a bit patient while Carrier and his affable host "Dan the Demented" indulge in a spot of intellectual banter on famous-but-forgotten Greeks and Romans, but perseverance will reward with some weirdly fascinating historical stuff (did you know that Luther is said to have had a copy of Josephus with no references to Christ?)
Sorry Rodney, but I think you're toast.

And Matthew begat Josh

I've just had one of those "duh!" moments. You know, when something completely obvious finally penetrates through your thick skull.

How many times have I read through (or skipped over - it's not exactly riveting) the alleged genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. These passages have proven to be a minefield of bad exegesis over the centuries. The two disagree, and given that there's supposed to be no genetic contribution to Jesus from Joseph's side anyway, the whole purpose seems a bit irrelevant.

Of course there are the Josh McDowell types, eager to race in and explain it all away, but then they would, wouldn't they? Working back from the conclusion to fiddle with the evidence till it fits... not a good look.

Then a light snapped on, courtesy of Julie Galambusch. In her book The Reluctant Parting she writes:

Matthew begins his gospel with a rather quaint nod to tradition: a genealogy of Jesus modeled on the "begats" of the Hebrew Bible. Matt. 1:2-16 is based loosely on 1 Chron. 3:1-3, but with the generations juggled in order to divide Jewish history into three distinct, fourteen-generation epochs... Matthew seeks to demonstrate numerologically (a practice called gematria in Hebrew) that the moment for the messiah's birth has arrived.

That's it - gematria! Forget all the tortuous apologetic drivel from McDowell, and even much of the painstaking eisegesis in the commentaries, we're talking numerology. Matthew wasn't completely incompetent after all, nor was he trying to be dishonest by the standards of his time. As a Jewish scribe he is doing something quite predictable, and something McDowell himself would understand in the event that he had a moment of honest clarity: he's fiddling with the numbers to make them say what he needs them to say - but (as I'm sure they'd both assure us) all in a good cause.

Lutheran Ethics, Abortion and George Tiller

As a person with a Lutheran background (somewhat convoluted and sidetracked admittedly, as most people who read this blog know) I found a recent university course on Christian ethics moderately distasteful in its carelessly assumed Calvinism. I prefer progressive Catholic teaching on ethics by far, and am especially impressed by the work of Daniel Maguire (not top of the bishops' hit parade by any stretch!) Maguire's A Moral Creed for All Christiansis worth a truckload of Reformed gnat-straining.

A specifically Lutheran approach to ethics, however, is hard to pin down. It's not the same as our Calvinist brethren, and often woefully negligent in specifics. I found this article by Ed Knudson, an ELCA pastor, fascinating because he actually tackles the ethical question, and in the difficult context of the recent murder of George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions. Tiller was also a practicing Lutheran. Knudson goes as far as implying that he was a martyr.

I'm not sure how to evaluate Knudson's article. It needs time to "settle," and deserves a second (and third) reading before leaping to conclusions. Reservations? You bet. But definitely food for thought (and grist for fundagelical outrage, no doubt.)

Related Link: Online Journal of Public Theology.

Hans Kung on Beginnings

Hans Kung is a brilliant scholar and among the most perceptive voices in Christendom. Reading his Christianity: Essence, History & Future (2004) is to subject oneself to a well-deserved slapping about the chops for intellectual laziness and historical ignorance from a writer whose rigor rises far above those charges. Mea culpa! Non-Catholics in particular should probably read Kung to get a flavor of the best-case-scenario for the church-to-come, both post-Ratzinger and post-Calvinist. Kung is a prophet ahead of his time.

Having said that, The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religionis a disappointment. Kung is outside his field, and doggy-paddling beyond his depth, a keen amateur out for a romp. Intelligent and articulate? That goes without saying. Convincing and authoritative? No. A good editor might pare the material down to a salvagable level by dumping a good third of the text, but even then I have my doubts. This book, unlike his others, is likely to date quickly. John Haught is the better communicator on the fault line between religion and science