Monday, July 27, 2015

On Being Informed by Reasonable Inquiry Into the Bible and the Christian Tradition


 
The general, modest goal of studying the Bible and the Christian tradition is to know more about them than before.

The specific goals for those of us with a personal commitment to the gospel of God in Christ is to allow God to use that encounter to inform and transform our lives, our relationships, our culture, and our national policies.

The value will be relative to our investment in time, in thoughtful consideration, and - for those “in the game” - in personal application of lessons learned (complete with resulting feedback from family, friends, employers, and, if you jam up the works of the Powers That Be, the government! :-) )

That commitment can range from, say, an hour a week to getting a Ph.D. in biblical studies and devoting your professional life some specific area of inquiry (e.g., the historical Jesus, Gnosticism, the Johannine literature, the Apostle Paul, the development of the canon, etc.).

But even an hour a week will be rewarded. The interpretation of the Bible is too important to be delegated in to to the professionals!

The presumption of the following is that you have (ideally) a good translation of the Bible, preferably with study resources and / or access to online resources via the internet.

My preferred source is the Oxford Study Bible (New Revised Standard Version), which tends to be a bit more liberal and captures a bit more of the underlying genres (e.g., poetry, psalms). My secondary favorite is the conservative New International Version, which is a bit more literal (even “wooden”) in its translation but still very accurate in its rendering of the text into English. Comparing the two side-by-side will give you two good translations from differing perspectives that may give you greater insight into issues regarding the original Hebrew or Greek text being translated. Or you can learn Hebrew and / or Greek and make your own translation.

That’s a case where I’m quite willing to delegate to the professionals. :-)

I’ve not really studied Catholic Bibles (which include material from the intertestamental period relegated in Protestant study Bibles to the Apocrypha) but I know some good translations with study resources are authorized by the Church and other very good non-authorized versions are available in Catholic format.

Step One: Consider and critically question the assumptions and perspective you bring to your study such that your awareness can be confirmed or challenged by your study. Being challenged is a good thing: if we never read anything in the Bible or the Christian tradition that challenged us there would really be no reason to read it at all beyond academic curiosity. This prior understanding (e.g., the Bible is infallible and inerrant, the Bible is a fairy tale, or anything in between) we bring to our study is our key to the scriptures and the tradition and our consciously considering our prior understanding is the first step in distancing ourselves from it such that it may be challenged  by the various texts themselves.

Step Two: If your pre-understanding is the key to the lock, the lock itself is the Bible and the tradition. And that lock has two parts. The first part, the easy part, is the content of the particular aspect of the Bible or the Christian tradition you are studying. What is the passage saying? If you are reading it in English translation, this part is no different than it is for any other book you read in English, whether the NRSV Bible, William Shakespeare, or H. P. Lovecraft.

Step Three: The second part of the lock is the not so easy part. What is the context of what you’re reading? You can spend ten minutes examining that… or, if you’re a professional biblical scholar or historian, you’re entire career. Before losing hope remember: since the Reformation opened up access to the Bible in the language of the people (e.g., the King James Bible, Luther’s German Bible, etc.), ordinary people have read the Bible in its normal, literary context (e.g., what comes before and after the text being studied) and in its canonical context (e.g., what does this passage mean in the context of II Corinthians, in the context of the writings of Paul, in the context of the New Testament, and in the context of the Bible as a whole - same  as one would read a passage of Henry V in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare) and have understood its message adequately. And, for those who are committed to accepting the Bible as an authority for their beliefs and ethics, one should also read it in the context of their community of interpretation: the contemporary Christian community.

The first link, below, is a very good introduction to understanding the Bible and the Christian tradition beyond just the literary context and the canonical context to the many other contexts (such as the historical-critical). It begins with an example of the analysis of Joseph story in the Old Testament.

The second link is to a more general  list  of online study resources regarding the Bible and the Christian tradition.

What Is the Historical-Critical Method?

On Being Informed by Reasonable Inquiry Into the Bible and the Christian Tradition (Resources)


This article dedicated to my own, personal, “Introduction to the New Testament,” the late Fr. Hubert L. Flesher who was, aside from everything else, an extraordinary teacher of Scripture.

On Being Informed by Reasonable Inquiry Into the Bible and the Christian Tradition (Resources)

For Protestant Christians

Bible


Christian Tradition


Reason


Additional Resources for Roman Catholic Christians


Friday, July 24, 2015

REGARDING THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD OVER ALL CREATION

 
God in Christ’s sovereignty extends over all Creation and God’s Law is that which Christians know as the Gospel of Jesus Christ and which others may know through other names, religious or secular. God’s sovereignty and legal jurisdiction no more stop at the frontier of Christian institutions, no matter how venerable and worthy of praise, then the laws of matter and energy stops at the frontiers of the American Institute of Physics.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

REGARDING SALVATION THROUGH GOD IN CHRIST ALONE

God revealed in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is necessary and sufficient for salvation.

 And while the core story is told in the mythological terms of ancient Palestine, it bespeaks a contest with Death encountered as an existential threat to human meaning, value, and purpose. A contest that is won through God in Christ’s absorbing the onslaught of Death and rising victorious from it. The other forms of contesting the threat of Death, most notably through wielding power, escapism, or appeasement are all variations of human sacrifice as well as tacit acknowledgement of Death’s mastery. And that is why participating in the reality of God in Christ is NECESSARY.

 If that sounds radical, than the SUFFICIENCY of God in Jesus Christ for salvation is more so.

 Salvation is NOT to be found in God in Jesus Christ AND some pious nonsense about the inerrancy of the Bible. Salvation is NOT to be found in God in Jesus Christ AND the acceptance of an infallible Church.

 And salvation is not to be found by God in Jesus Christ AND an exclusive interpretation of such salvation within the confines of Christianity.

 There is NO REASON IN PRINCIPLE why a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Marxist, an atheist, a humanist OR ANY OTHER religion or ideology cannot avail themselves of salvation through God in Christ EVEN IF they do not conceptualize such salvation in Christian terms.

 To be blunt: a Christian of ANY variety has no advantage over other Christians nor over Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics or atheists simply because they speak in the Christian language.

 Christians speaking in that language have used it as a club to beat others, both figuratively and literally, in a way that suggests they are very far from genuine encounter with God in Christ.

 And others, not knowing Christ BY NAME, nonetheless evidence a freedom to love that, by my reckoning, can ONLY come through an encounter, an acceptance, and a sharing of that reality that I know through God in Christ as authoritatively (though not inerrantly) witnessed to in the Bible and faithfully (though not infallibly) witnessed to in the broad center of the Christian tradition.

 The gospel of God in Christ is capable of expression in ANY culture, whether it be the ancient cultures of the Middle East or the post-Enlightenment, secular cultures of the 21st century West.


For the gospel of God in Christ is radically free and not hostage to any historically conditioned worldview, ideology, or system of ethics - not even Christian worldviews or ethics of a particular period.

REGARDING TWO PRIMARY MODES OF CHRISTIAN POLITICAL ACTION

If the Bible and two-thousand years of Christian tradition teach us anything they teach that there IS no universal Christian way of living one’s life or structuring one’s society and that God in Christ’s ultimate judgment regarding any SPECIFIC action or event is not within the realm of human knowledge, even divinely inspired human knowledge.

One should pray with all one’s heart, soul, and mind to DO the will of God, but it is not in our capacity to KNOW the will of God and anyone who tells us otherwise is a charlatan.

But if one takes an expansive view of politics to include ALL action, private or public, that affects society then there are two MODES of action that, it seems to me, are appropriate in every age and every culture.

The first mode involves working WITHIN the existing structures of one’s society and culture - a society and culture that the principles of Creation and Fall describe as essentially good yet thoroughly corrupted by Sin.

These principles should empower us to work to PRESERVE such good as such fallen entities retain through defending them and working to change them from within.

The second mode involves preaching and resistance  AGAINST the existing structures of one’s society and culture when they become overwhelmed by corruption from Sin.

The two modes are not, in principle, opposed to each other though, in extreme circumstances such as the Holocaust, they may be mutually exclusive of  the other.

Political action, whether within one’s family, one’s nation, or one’s culture by way of EITHER of these modes necessitates the inevitable compromise of one’s personal virtue through working within environments that are systemically corrupt and sinful because the Bible teaches that ALL people  and movements and institutions and societies are systemically corrupt and sinful.

And the gospel frees us from a morbid or even vain preoccupation with our own personal moral purity.

REGARDING THE ATONEMENT & THE INCARNATION

Humanity has one and only one enemy: Death. Death personified is biological death as the primary metaphor for the existential threat to all human meaning, value, and purpose. Unlike the biological death we encounter on the last day of our life, Death is aggressive throughout all human personal and corporate life and, by extension, throughout all living things. There are as many messengers and anticipations of Death as there are sufferings, tragedies, illnesses, famines, wars, failures, disappointments, treachery, and broken relationships in life.

The Atonement of God in Christ can be thought of as an ironic combat between God in Christ and Death where the aggression of Death in all its fury is absorbed in the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ and yet, in its moment of victory, God resurrects or transcends Death’s power over Jesus Christ in the Resurrection and, in the process, disarms Death such that Death becomes mere death and humanity is set free from that involuntary servitude to Death known as Sin. All human history before Christ is an anticipation of that clash and all human history following is the further illumination of the significance of that clash.

The Incarnation, on the other hand, evokes God in Christ’s explicit intervention in human affairs in Jesus of Nazareth as well as the implicit agitations of God in Christ throughout every single human experience throughout time: in the beginning, in a good Creation, to the pivot point of history in the Resurrection as a recapitulation of the goodness of Creation even in the midst of a corrupt human history seemingly inextricably bound to Sin and Death, and at the end of history where God in Christ’s rule will finally be uncontested.

REGARDING THE GOSPEL AS METAPHOR AND MYTH

I believe in salvation through God in Christ and I accept the Enlightenment worldview, or at least the natural science aspects of it, as not only the "best in class" worldview across history to date but as the ONLY worldview an intellectually honest Christian can hold in this day and age.

This means, among other things, that when I talk about God I am speaking in metaphor.

And when I talk about God fully entering the human condition in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ I am speaking in myth.

And those erring Christian brethren who would ask if I can even BE a Christian if I believe God is "just" a metaphor or the Passion of Christ is "just" a myth betray their own modernist, scientism that comprehends neither the meaning of metaphor nor the meaning of myth nor understand the participation of metaphor and myth in reality.

Reactionary fundamentalist or conservative Catholic resistance is no return to a more ancient and allegedly pure and Godly worldview but a modernist corruption of the gospel in its own right, justified by pillaging bits and pieces of the Bible and Christian tradition while ignoring the totality of the biblical witness to the Gospel of Christ to achieve specific, ideological ends most often having to deal with the desire to control and, indeed, dominate others and society.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Percy the Beagle: March 24th, 2001 to July 16th, 2015



Percy the Beagle

March 24th, 2001 (his adoption date minus one year) – July 16th, 2015


PERCY THE BEAGLE STATUS UPDATE: Sadly I must report that Percy died, apparently in his sleep, sometime between 11 AM and 1PM today. 

Yesterday morning he was in obvious distress, having problems moving, disinterested in food – generally down. Later, when I got home from work, he went out and tried to crap twice. I took him to the vet thinking he had a blockage and mentally prepared to euthanize him. The vet checked him out (non-invasive, except for a finger up his butt) and reported no obvious signs of either a colon blockage or large urinary bladder tumor. Temperature was good, color was good, heart rate good, no sound of fluid in his chest cavity. There had been no blockage as far as she could tell in the anus but there was some blood and she determined that he had gastroenteritis. He has had that before and I concurred we should try treating that before euthanizing him. Got two pills of Flagyl into him last night and one this morning before work. Got the call from Chester around one and, coming home, confirmed that he was not breathing and rigor mortis had begun to set in. With Chester's help, we got him to the vet and stopped at Roosevelt's on Chelsea Ave. on the way home and had something akin to a modest wake. I restricted myself to Stewart's Root Beer. J Percy will be cremated and I will scatter the ashes in a secure, undisclosed city cemetery of some renown that quite certainly would disapprove. But it's where my late  dachshund went so it seems appropriate. It's where I'd like my ashes to go if there's anyone who takes a somewhat casual view of rules.

I cannot sum up what life with Percy was like. He was as good a dog as a bad dog could be and was a complete pacifist. The only thing he did to make my life easier – taking leave without my needing to intervene – more than makes up for the rest. His entire life he did things that could have gotten him killed and Wright's Animal Hospital was amazed that he had lived as long as he did considering the two untreated cancers.

I don't know how it was from Percy's perspective as he slowly declined and his final decline was precipitous – two days ago he was howling for some desired food or another. Which he, of course, got.

Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage, the ways we love and hate and procreate -- all of it. Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals, only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How then, to explain old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from the end, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia? I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what's gone is gone. 
Thanks to everyone who followed Percy's story and sent their prayers and good wishes.

He spent the last year and a half in hospice and it was the best period of his life, for him and for me.

There is certainly a degree of selfishness in our love for our pets – and that's okay.

In our dogs, we see ourselves. Dogs exhibit almost all of our emotions; if you think a dog cannot register envy or pity or pride or melancholia, you have never lived with one for any length of time. What dogs lack is our ability to dissimulate. They wear their emotions nakedly, and so, in watching them, we see ourselves as we would be if we were stripped of posture and pretense. Their innocence is enormously appealing. When we watch a dog progress from puppyhood to old age, we are watching our own lives in microcosm. Our dogs become old, frail, crotchety and vulnerable, just as Grandma did, just as we surely will, come the day. When we grieve for them, we grieve for ourselves.

If you're a dog or cat owner, please, please, don't deny yourself the pleasure of living with your friend in their elder years.
  

Bill B


Sunday, July 12, 2015

DONALD TRUMP: SUPERCHARGED EGO, RESIDENT EVIL GENIUS OR BOTH?

Look at the political activity of Donald Trump over the course of his life.

The most "economical" explanation is that it is best explained by a) a firm commitment to and confidence in the promotion of Donald Trump as a brand accompanied by a generous helping of "moral flexibility" as the anti-hero protagonist of "Thank You For Smoking" puts it.

The more "expensive" explanation is that Donald Trump is a close  friend of the Clintons who has supported both Democrats and Republicans with large contributions who wants to ensure that Hillary Clinton is elected president because of him and that she damn well remembers that while she's in office.

And, when you think about it, why can't both be true?

Consider this.

POINT ONE
There are restrictions (less since Citizen's United) on the use of one's money to influence a presidential election.

But there are NO restrictions on how much money one may spend on RUNNING for president.

"The money for campaigns for federal office comes from four broad categories of sources: (1) small individual contributors (individuals who contribute $200 or less), (2) large individual contributors (individuals who contribute more than $200), (3) political action committees, and (4) self-financing (the candidate's own money). "
"Campaign finance in the United States" (Wikipedia)

POINT TWO
The heart and soul, the BASE, of the modern Republican Party is that line of Republicans that came from Lee Atwater's pursuit of the Southern Strategy in 1968 in which angry, white, largely Southern, racist, Democrats / "Dixiecrats"  were courted following following the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. Lee Atwater, late Republican political strategist, explained how that worked.

"Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.""
("Lee Atwater," Wikipedia Article)

POINT THREE
There are two broad strategies for winning  the presidency. The more traditional one involves giving your strongly partisan base much of what they want while still gaining enough moderates  and independents to win  the center.  The newer, more radical approach engineered by Karl Rove as the guiding force for George W. Bush's presidential campaign involves energizing the  base with red meat and to hell with the center and the moderates.

THE THESIS
Donald Trump is making a bold investment. HE'S INVESTING HIS RESOURCES TO ACQUIRE THE  REPUBLICAN BASE.

It's going to cost a lot, as he keeps saying. His inflammatory remarks are costing him major business relationships (and pretty much a total loss of good will from Mexico and just about ANYONE who identifies as Hispanic).

But, as of mid-July 2015, he is tied with Republican establishment front-runner Jeb Bush and will certainly qualify to  be in the top ten tier of Republican candidates in the FOX News debates.

Beyond that, while the other candidates have to work furiously to gain funding accountable to campaign funding requirements, Trump is BURYING their commercials by playing the media for free, omnipresent visibility by playing the media news cycle like it's a grand piano.

And Trump's strategy - if it IS a strategy - is brilliant: HE IS DROPPING THE RACIST, CODED LANGUAGE REGARDING "STATES RIGHTS," "FORCED BUSING," "VOTER FRAUD," ETC. AND COMMUNICATING THIS RACISM TO  THE REPUBLICAN BASE PURE, FULL  STRENGTH, EN CLAIR.

And what can the Republican Party and other Republican candidates do?

They CAN'T outright condemn him without offending the base of the contemporary Republican Party.

They must resort to euphemisms about the tone of his message or his choice of language or his hyperbole or his flair for showmanship or some other nonsense that explicitly puts some distance between them and Trump while implicitly concurring with his message: the Good Cop, Bad Cop approach.

And if the party manages to get  him dropped from the debates and get one  of their own, electable candidates nominated?

That's no problem for Donald Trump, who has already hinted that a third party run is not out of the question.

In 2004, Karl Rove "swiftboated" John Kerry by turning his greatest strength, his integrity and status as a war hero into a liability.

And so "swiftboating" has become a buzzword for the political judo of taking an adversaries greatest strength and turning it against them.

And that's what Donald Trump has done to  the Republican Party: taken the strength of their racist base, carefully cultivated over almost half a century of being fed red meat racism by FOX News, social conservative preachers, call-in radio shows, and the coded language needed to make this stuff sound reasonable and acceptable (with some TRUE conservative libertarian or conservative think tanks thrown in) AND MADE  THAT BASE A LIABILITY.

It's a liability on the one hand as it exposes the racism BEHIND the code and, on the other, that it shows that the party no longer owns  the base but rather  THE BASE NOW OWNS THE PARTY.

AND  TRUMP IS MAKING A PLAY TO OWN THE BASE THAT OWNS THE PARTY.

Sounds a bit like the One Ring in Tolkien's Middle Earth fantasy, doesn't it? :-)

AND WHAT DOES TRUMP GET OUT OF THIS?
If nothing else, I would  think he gets a Clinton in the White House who owes him a big favor or three.

A 13 year old kid has a few items on his shopping list

  A 13 year old kid has a few items on his shopping list: Beer ❌ Cigarettes ❌ Racy Magazines ❌ Lottery Tickets ❌ Gun — No Problem! Another ...