MetaCatholic

Eddie has tagged me with a meme of his own devising. The rules appear simple: name your impossible dream, and then tag some more folk.

Oh, dear, I mean I am so full of impossible dreams, from scoring a hat-trick for England – preferably against Germany, through to fronting a sell-out indie concert at Wembley. But deep down, I still nurture that desire to write the book that turns Pauline scholarship on its head, and becomes the book that everyone simply has to refer to. It carries on the back endorsements like “This is the book I wish I’d had the imagination, courage, and depth of understanding to write” from scholars as diverse as Dale Martin and Tom Wright. The biggest snag is I have absolutely no idea what such a book could contain.

I tag John Hobbins, ElShaddai Edwards, Peter Kirk and Iyov.

written by doug

Time for a quick round as May hits the mid-point (where is this year going?). Here are just a small sample of the things catching my eye in one way or another.

Duane Smith comments on a letter by Einstein, in which the twentieth century’s most iconic brainbox says “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses” Duane’s post is worth a read, not least in the context of those who try to make more than they should of Einstein’s famous dismissal of quantum theory: “God does not play dice with the universe”. Of course, some will no doubt misuse both of these quotations in exactly the way Duane argues we should not. One modern trend he and I would alike deplore is the substitution of celebrity endorsement for rational argument.

I’ve been fascinated, although I’m no Hebraist, by the discussion on creation as Hobbins and Heard weigh into a bloke I’d never heard of, John Walton. Walton’s arguments look awfully like special pleading to me, and I find it hard to believe he is in no way motivated by the desire to get a fundamentalist view of the Bible off the hook of modern science.

Mark Goodacre kicked off a bit of a stir on orality, and has revisited the topic here and here (although this permalink may not be working properly).  April deConick has joined in twice, and Loren Rosson has also commented. See also Judy Redman’s comments. I offer a couple of tangential notes. First, while I’m broadly in sympathy with Mark’s point, I think the difference between the way we experience orality and the way they did back then is akin to the differences between postmodern and premodern approaches to, say, narrative truth. We have lost our innocence. Secondly, I wonder how much the existence for Jews and Christians of holy writings impacts orality. Would it have been possible to develop a doctrine of holy scripture in a literary culture? I suspect not. But what does the principled reverence given to forms of writing say about the conception of orality? Thirdly, I note the irony that orality is growing in post-modernity, while one of the deconstructive foundations put in place by Derrida is the turn away from privileging speech. We are, I think, deeply ambivalent about our assessment of orality.

I know it will confirm all David Ker’s prejudices, but Justin Lewis-Anthony has uncovered a marvellous quotation from David Hockney. Also on the humour front, Michael Kruse has a whole range of answers to the question why the chicken crossed the road.

On the uncomfortable humour front, Jon Birch makes a telling point.

written by doug

I really don’t know what to do with Lingamish’s meme on weird worship songs, despite being tagged. His meme has also resulted in a mix of responses. I shall widen the mix simply by rambling.

I have been scathing about songs on plenty of occasions before, but I should note that weirdness has been with us for a long time. I am not remotely sure why Peter Kirk thinks Psalm 150 is weird, but I quite agree with him that Psalm 137: 9 is weird. What an extraordinary way to climax a song.

May God get really riled,
And just bash your child (oh yeah)
Your babies bash
Their little heads dash
A great bloody splash
Against the rock
(Rock of ages, do-be-do-be-do)
Your children’s brains
Like autumn rains
Cover stones with stains
Yes! Their skulls are gored
As we rejoice in the Lord
As we praise his name,
As we praise his name.

Well, that’s not quite what it says, but it certainly brings out the weirdness. I’m not sure even the worst of modern songs can quite compete (Oh, yes they can), and I’m not sure I know enough to pick five. I may, in some people’s eyes be cheating by choosing some that have been around for 25 years or so (Peter Kirk will tell me that is so last century) but I am going to start with one of the older ones.

I have never understood why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to sing “Jesus, take me as I am, I can come no other way” Ooh, missus. How naïve do you have to be not to spot such an unfortunate double entendre a mile away? It sounds like Mills and Boon gone mad.

I have ranted before, and will take the opportunity to rant again about Filled with compassion. I really do not know (whatever the supposed allusions) how anyone can seriously sing:

From every nation we shall be gathered
Millions redeemed shall be Jesus’ reward
Then He will turn and say to His Father
Truly my suffering was worth it all.

The picture of Jesus waiting around to see if the church evangelized enough people before deciding Calvary might just have been worth it is truly bizarre.

Then there are songs which mangle their metaphors unfortunately. (Yes, I know that’s nearly all of them). One I find particularly unfortunate is Jesus, melt my cold heart. It piles one metaphor on another without regarding how they (don’t) work together. Linguistically, I find the ways in which songs use metaphors are often weird. 

Jesus, melt my cold heart,
Break my stony emotions,
Cos I’ve been playing with the waves
When I should be swimming in the ocean.
Take me deeper, show me more.
It’s all or nothing …

You sort of get where it’s coming from, but I’m afraid I find myself why emotions are stony? And do you really enjoy playing with waves if you’ve got a cold heart of stony emotions? Surely the image is one of carefree childhood. And if God doesn’t want me to be a carefree child, why does he want me to be a fish?

Finally, I wonder at the weirdness of treating worship as a human experience. So many songs are fixated with “my” feelings, creating a kind of emotional dissonance between what I sing I’m feeling, and what I’m feeling (which is often “this is crap”), but they mistake this “what am I feeling, what am I doing” expression of attitudes for worship. So, for example, Vargeson’s song, Almighty God:  “in my worship, I want to meet with you”. Huh? If you’re worshipping, you are meeting God. If you’re worshipping, you’re not fixated on what you want. “In my worship I want” is that extraordinarily weird thing: a liturgical oxymoron: eis-stacy rather than ecstasy.

Update: I was so weirded out, I forgot to tag anyone. I’ll take a rain check on that, since plenty of people are getting tagged already.

written by doug

Sometimes I wonder at a certain Christian mentality. The often stimulating After Existentialism, Light, for once, I think, gets it wrong in this post on why people leave the Church.

InsideCatholic recently did an interesting survey of the reasons Catholics (and, for that matter, Christians in general) leave the Church by asking several prominent Catholics (bishops, professors, lay authors, etc.) for their opinion on the reasons and solutions.

Kevin is far from alone in what I see as the main mistake here, rather I often hear many others doing precisely the same thing. But what distinguished Christians think might be beside the point. The problem is, the bishop he quotes gives a Christian and theological explanation. It shows no sign that the bishop has actually asked anyone who has left the church why they have done so, or that, if he has asked them, he has listened to them. Yet surely, asking leavers is the first and most obvious step towards an answer. There might then be room for some very interesting sociological and theological reflections on why people do so, that is not simply taking their answers at face value, but does involve accounting for those face value answers coherently and honestly. Empirical research is not heretical, although its rarity might make you think it was.

My own experience of asking that question suggests that the answers are quite diverse, sometimes profound, and often very mundane and practical. “I moved house” seems to influence both those coming back to church and those leaving it. Individualist conceptions of faith and cultural patterns of habitual behaviour means that they often don’t see that leaving church as any loss of faith, and that, catholic orthodoxy aside, it genuinely may not. Sometimes faith has comparatively little to do with church attendance, and conversely, leaving church has little to do with loss of faith.

Then again, I can think of some who might leave church because they simply can’t relate to a church which has bishops who actually talk about “modern man”.

written by doug

Two pieces of paper have passed my desk recently (the second coming today). The first reminded us all of the importance of bats as a protected species. Even if they were filling the church with their droppings, you could do nothing to get rid of them, but simply cover your furniture and floors with dust sheets when the church wasn’t in use. Any high level work in a church needed you to swear that there was no evidence of bat activity before you would be allowed to mend the hole in the roof.

The second piece of paper I saw today was advice on bats and rabies. A few years ago someone in Scotland caught rabies from a bat and died. The leaflet wanted to reassure us that while a significant proportion of bats (perhaps 20%) were carrying rabies, it did not easily jump between species. However, we were strongly advised to wear gloves if handling a bat. If a bat flies into your home, you are allowed to take it outside, but you should wear gloves to do. If it nests in your church, you may not even disturb it.

So there you have it. In the name of conservation you must permit a rabies carrying species to take over and dictate the use of your church. Stuff the idea of pleasant user-friendly surroundings, and stuff the health and safety of the people. Diseased flying rodents must be protected.

They call this nature-loving. I call it unnatural.

written by doug

It seems to me that all too often, conservative and liberal share the same assumption in talking about the gospels. Early writings are held to carry a higher degree of historicity. Today Dan Wallace offered an initial post on the modern history of critical appraisal and dating of John. The idea that John was of little or no historical use certainly grew strongly in parallel with movements to date it late into the second century. Wallace relates how manuscript dating put paid to that, since we have a fragment of John earlier than the mid-second century, and possibly considerably earlier, as many readers will know. I don’t know where he will go with this idea, but there are hints that just as arguing for its lateness went hand in hand with doubting its historical value, so arguing for its early composition will strengthen its historical value.

In the same way Markan priority is often equated (perhaps subconsciously) with Markan historicity. Part of the mania for Q seem likewise concerned with constructing an earlier and more reliable (and more reliable because earlier?) source than the Synoptics. Likewise, and in face of some of the pained arguments, whether Thomas can be dated to the first century is a different question from whether it gets us any closer to the historical Jesus.

On the one hand the idea that early is more likely to carry historical memory is a reasonable starting assumption with which to explore the evidence, but it can’t overrule the character of the evidence: rather the evidence must be allowed to challenge the assumption. Luke, for example, makes an explicit claim that he has done detailed research and an implicit claim that he has found other earlier accounts (Matthew and Mark) unsatisfactory. The more we recognize Mark’s theological agenda, the less we can use the criterion of embarrassment to argue for the certain historicity of, say, the disciples’ thickness.

The fourth gospel is problematic – both assessing it in itself, and considering it in relationship to the synoptics, and in the face of such a complex work, its probable first century dating can say little enough about its historicity.

written by doug

Actually, my title for this post may be misleading, since I don’t actually know for certain what Chris Dillow’s views are, except that they’re usually worth engaging with. But this post is a refreshing change from the usual contributions on both sides of the debate. There are a whole raft of arguments that are not normally considered when the question is asked, because too many people are following well-worn scripts.

One question that, to my mind, is often overlooked, is why women should have to consider an invasive procedure on their body (chemical or surgical), just because men are unwilling to wear a rubber. There are, I think, occasions when a “woman’s right to choose” is used to excuse a man’s responsibility for where and how he sticks his dick. And how feminist is that?!

written by doug

It’s nearly all foucaulting French!

written by doug

It is, I suspect, almost impossible not to be either tempted by postmodernism if you inhabit Western culture. We are, loosely, shaped by late or post- modernity. But my recent conversation with Stephen has left me surprised that my resistance to it has strengthened rather than diminished over the years.

I think there are two reasons. The first is that I struggle, as I struggled with relativism beforehand, to see any way around the paradox at the heart of the post-modern vision. The rejection of meta-narratives grows out of a meta-narrative. And if the truth of “it depends where you stand” depends on where you stand, then sometimes (at least) it’s not true. Of course, it is always uttered as the truth that doesn’t depend on where you stand. I sometimes feel that postmodernists miss this paradox much as the author of Titus seems to miss Epimenides’. (See Titus 1:12)

I have been attracted to post-modernism’s ability to encourage us to notice the unheard voices of the minorities in history and the present. On the other hand, I am unconvinced by the unrelenting post-modern meta-narrative which interprets all lost voices as those marginalized or suppressed by the people with power. Sometimes ideas die out because they’re bad. Sometimes communities die out because they’re unhealthy and dysfunctional. And there are myriad other explanations, which do not necessarily compete, but may complement each other. It is another curious paradox that so many disparate groups, culturally and historically simultaneously have their diversity noticed and celebrated, while their disappearance is described by the same unified and overarching story of power.

I do think post-modernism chastens us moderns, though I suspect in a hundred years time we will see it as late modern rather than postmodern. I don’t think it has sufficient coherence to stand on its own feet, but is a symbiotic parasite with the preceding modern culture, through which relationship both can benefit. The paradoxes at its heart, however, seem to me to be inherently unstable.

That’s just from where I stand.

written by doug

People who would sell or buy something like this.

(Please tell me Jim is still alive: I suddenly seem to have started channelling his spirit)

written by doug