Wise Words on Wiseacres

Augustine of Hippo may have had a hugely inflated reputation (for which James O'Donnell's biography is an excellent corrective), but occasionally he wrote something which is indeed worth repeating.

Now, it is a disgraceful thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of holy scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

... Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon holy scripture for proof, and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

Thus was it always so...

From Augustine's The Literal Meaning of Genesis.

"So Amazing a Blasphemy"

It's an unremarkable verse in most English translations. Here's Jeremiah 20:7 in the ESV.

O LORD, you have enticed me,
and I was enticed:
you have overpowered me,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all day long;
everyone mocks me.

Pretty innocuous and quite suitable for pious reading aloud in a family devotion. James Crenshaw in his book A Whirlpool of Torment, however, offers these eye-opening comments on that verse.

"In the quotation from Jer. 20:7 above, Jeremiah accuses God of rape. This is no trivial accusation, nor is it uttered in a flippant manner. The words are carefully chosen to cover the act of seduction and accompanying violence."

Elsewhere, Crenshaw provides the following translation of the first part of v.7:

You have seduced me, YHWH, and I have been raped;
You have seized me and prevailed.

It's a disturbing image, and although I'd been aware of it for some time, it was brought back to me again reading, of all things, Mary Doria Russell's sci-fi novel Children of God, where the leading character mulls over God's "silent, brutal indifference."

"You seduced me, Lord, and I let You," he read in Jeremiah, weeping... "You raped me, and I have become the object of derision."

We like to claim many comforting images of God: father, lover, friend, law-giver, creator, sustainer, provider, to name but a few. But homosexual rapist? Shades of Father Zeus and hapless Ganymede?

Harold Bloom, in Ruin the Sacred Truths, offers a similar translation to Crenshaw's, then adds:

"This is so extraordinary a trope, and so amazing a blasphemy, that I wonder always why there is not more than perfunctory commentary upon it."

The domesticated God and the domesticated Bible are a comfortable illusion. Occasionally - but only very occasionally - the wild nature of both escapes the ecclesiastical cage and leaves us slack-jawed.

A New Botschaft Gottes

Could the new Conservative Bible Project really be this bad?

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

Uh?

The snip is in turn snipped from a rant by Atheist evangelist P. Z. Myers. Even if he was only half right (and that would be to underestimate him) the prospect of this bunch of Conservapædia nutcases producing something tarted up as scripture is truly disturbing. A quick check of the relevant website reveals that P. Z. is probably understating the perversity of the project. Just check those ten criteria!

Happily (or perhaps unhappily), we can judge what might be by a proposed translation of Mark by these unnamed scholars. The end result will surely be as worthy as the 1940 Die Botschaft Gottes (The Message of God), an "Aryan" New Testament produced by Nazi theologians.

Battle of the Evangelical Bibles

Is that a howling sound coming from the publishers of the ESV; the sound of a carnivore about to descend, all teeth and claws, on its hapless prey? Perhaps so. The gibbering hordes at Crossway seem to have decided (given the evidence over on Cyberbrethren) that this is a Pepsi moment. Galvanized by the move to dump the NIV and TNIV and replace them both with something new in 2011, they have apparently decided that now is the time, and Coke will topple.

The great evil of the impending NIV is, naturally, "the trap of gender inclusivity and neutrality that plagues much of modern Protestantism and Christianity." Oh dear lord, not gender inclusivity and neutrality! What to do? Let's tweak the 1952 RSV! "And it was so."

No denying that the NIV brand is a bit shopworn, or that the TNIV went down like a lead balloon among its natural constituency. No denying that the ESV brand has an appeal to conservative Christians. So, who knows, maybe the ESV will topple the NIV from its throne. We won't have long to wait, the bull-roaring season ends and the Big Fight commences in 2011, be sure to grab your NRSV, a large bag of popcorn, and a good seat, this one is unlikely to be an early KO.

Oh WOW, I can be a Biblical Archaeologist!

Hold me down Abigail, I want to transfer from Otago to LU! Why? Because Living University is offering a... wait a minute, the palpitations will go away shortly... a - you won't believe this - genuine Certificate in Biblical Archaeology!

What do you mean, you haven't heard of Living University? It's licensed to dole out things like these in North Carolina. Accredited? Well, no, but hey, does it matter? I mean this is a Certificate in Biblical Archaeology. So what if they run their university out of the back of their church headquarters? Which church? We're talking major league here, the Living Church of God! They must have a membership of around, uh, 6000. Impressive huh!

No indication of who is teaching these courses that I can see, but the LU faculty are all brilliant. I mean, Dr Roderick C. Meredith, what more can one say!

"This certificate normally requires one academic year (two semesters) to complete on a part-time basis." Kewl! And that includes a trip to the Levant... "This course [THL 479] consists of supervised excavation at an archaeological site in the Levant. Experience is in all facets of archaeological work including excavating, sifting, surveying, washing and reading pottery, and the process of computerized finds registration. Upon completion, students should be able to explain the major elements of the archaeological methods and analysis used on the site."

Can you hand me that atlas please Abi, I think the Levant is somewhere near Pitcairn Island...

Mindless in Missouri II

Good news, the LCMS doesn't demand that its two point five million members affirm that the earth is only 6000 years old. Of course, some faithful members are beside themselves at the thought that it doesn't, but Herr Pastor McCain sets that straight in a recent posting.

I confess, I thought they did, silly me. After all, Concordia Publishing House (CPH) still had Alfred Rehwinkel's hilarious book The Flood on their catalog last time I checked.

But McCain, true to the LCMS predilection for uncompromising clarity, spells out what LCMS does teach:

The Synod has affirmed the belief, therefore, based on Scripture’s account of creation in the book of Genesis and other clear passages of Scripture, that “God by the almighty power of His Word created all things in six days by a series of creative acts,” that “Adam and Eve were real, historical human beings, the first two people in the world,” and that “we must confess what St. Paul says in Romans 5:12″ about the origin of sin through Adam as described in Genesis 3 (1967 Synodical Resolution 2-31). The Synod has also, therefore, stated that it rejects “all those world views, philosophical theories, exegetical interpretations and other hypotheses which pervert these biblical teachings and thus obscure the Gospel” (1967 Synodical Resolution 2-31).

At the same time, the Synod firmly believes that there can be no actual contradiction between genuine scientific truth and the Bible.

I hope that clears it up. Adam and his lady wife were real people - with or without belly buttons. There was no naughtiness in the multiverse before Adam (not sure why Adam, when it was Eve who chowed down on the pendulous passionfruit first, but I digress...) But - and here we may be grateful to Pastor McCain for his enlightened statement - there is no contradiction between science and scripture... as the latter, quite rightly, trumps the former every time.

See, isn't the truth wonderful!

Time to take Dawkins seriously

It's getting wearisome listening to theologians whining about how Richard Dawkins doesn't engage with them in his critique of religion. Again and again they accuse Dawkins of being ignorant of the mega-minds of Christian belief, and taking cheap shots at fundamentalism.

John Haught, who is an otherwise fine writer and a thinker I deeply respect, even suggests that Dawkins should engage with Karl Barth. I'm not sure what he was smoking when he made that suggestion, as Haught is a Catholic with about as much in common with Reformed theology as Barack Obama has with the NRA. But let's take the suggestion seriously for a moment.

Dawkins addresses a general audience of educated folk. He is not talking to theologians. Theologians, on the other hand, talk to themselves. Rarely does one come down from the mountain to talk to the mixed multitude in the pews, let alone society at large. Ask ten worshipers at random on an average Sunday morning to explain Barth's theology... (no, "eat my shorts" is not an acceptable response.)

So why, if theological literacy is so woefully absent from the churches, would anyone expect Dawkins to waste his energy debating the intricate fantasies that obsess a tiny minority? Dawkins is certainly confronting the fundamentalist demons, but it is precisely that segment of Christendom that makes the noise.

Does that mean that those of us outside the walls of fundagelicalism can breathe easy? Consider this quote from The Greatest Show on Earth (his latest book):

"To return to the enlightened... theologians, it would be nice if they'd put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely 'symbolic' meaning, perhaps something to do with 'original sin', or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that?" (p.7-8)

The man has a point. And it's not only the pew potatoes who are treated this way. Dawkins could be describing a thousand theology courses at institutions of higher learning. Confronted with this reality, who in hades would want to shadow-box with Barth (or Tillich, or Bultmann for that matter.)

Theology has to "do a Dawkins" itself if it is to have any counter-punch. It has to talk in plain English (or German, French, Swahili) to non-specialists, not sit in a corner and mumble to itself. It has to (and here's the challenge) make reasonable sense. The only people who seem to try that trick with any panache are the apologists, and a sadder lot of misfits would be hard to find anywhere.

The ludicrous nature of the problem came home to me at Xmas a couple of years back when a colleague, an intelligent, motivated young woman, gave me a gift-wrapped copy of The God Delusion as holiday reading (I wasn't about to tell her that I already had a copy, had read it, and actually agreed with a lot of what was in it.) She, knowing that I was doing a theology degree, simply assumed I wouldn't have encountered anything like that before. It is people like her that mark a seismic shift in society, and bleating about how Dawkins (or Hitchins) won't be sidetracked into arcane debates makes about as much sense as the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand.