refractions

Change of Address with a book review

2011-11-08T20:48:00.000Z

For whatever reason, Blogger and I don't seem to be getting on as well as I thought we might. I find myself hankering after WordPress, and wanting to get back to more regular, and I hope more content-full, blogging.

I have therefore decided to move over to WordPress.com, and you can find me at http://dougchaplin.wordpress.com/

To celebrate with one of the sorts of posts I used to write more of, I have posted a review and reflection on Dale Martin's interesting little book Pedagogy of the Bible.

Oops. Too busy for a travel journal

2011-11-01T04:42:00.001Z

The programme of this study tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories has got busier and busier, and the conversations and encounters more challenging. In particular my mind is still reeling from being shown round an area of a settlement in East Jerusalem by a long-time resident in danger of displacement, limping on crutches from what he said was a private security guard’s (hired by the settlers) bullet wound, and then hearing a long and passionate apologia from a leading settler blaming the whole problem on the past and present leftist governments of Israel. Quite unexpectedly (understatement) the settler was the first person I’ve heard describe the security wall as “apartheid”.

Maybe you see why my brain is spinning.

Then again most of my readers seem less interested in these real-life descriptions than in theoretical argument, so I doubt the rest of the travel journal will be missed.

Free time and lectures (Israel / Palestine Study Tour day 5)

2011-10-29T21:04:00.001+01:00

It was nice to have a free morning today. I used some of the free time to get up the Mount of Olives early, but half regretted my decision to walk. I had forgotten how steep the climb was, and, in fact, how up and down the walk round the northern wall of the city was.

The view, however, is well worth it. Jerusalem is a city that draws the heart, and this view encapsulates more of its pull than any other. It also underlines something of the way in which it draws the heart of three faiths into at best an unstable and unresolved tension, at worst major and mortal conflict. That, or course, is the main reason for this group being the interfaith mix it is, and why we are meeting people of very different ethnicities, beliefs and backgrounds while here.

Today we had two talks with question sessions, and a time to reflect together on how we were finding the experiences.

Our first talk came from a Muslim Palestinian scholar. Dr Mustafa Abu Sway is Professor of Philosophy and Islamic Studies at Al-Quds University. He spoke to us with remarkable dispassion. One argument he made was that at different times in history, Jerusalem has been under Jewish control, Christian control and Muslim control. History ebbs and flows, and it is impossible to absolutise any one period into a right in perpetuity.

He also offered some statistics, which I have not had time to fully record or check out. He did, however, point out that in comments about treatment of Palestinians, he only ever used official Israeli Government statistics to avoid any argument over whose statistics were more accurate. On those figures, he said, only 12% of the tax Palestinian people paid went back on public services for Palestinians. He offered further figures and examples illustrating his claim that Palestinians were discriminated against. I note, however, that unlike many anti-Zionists (and possible anti-Semites) he didn’t accuse the state of apartheid policies. However he did make a plausible and careful case that the implementation of basic social policy is structurally discriminatory. It was not clear in any of this whether he would live happily either in or side by side with a non-discriminatory Israel, although he said nothing to suggest he would not, and interacted as warmly and positively with our Jewish members as with any of us.

The second of the days speakers was a Jewish scholar, Dr Alick Isaacs, the author of a book I have added to my reading list, A Prophetic Peace. He stimulated some of the most passionate discussion so far, not least because he was offering arguments none of us had really heard before. At the risk of gross simplification, he argues that liberal secular solutions are not enough, because they will never persuade the most passionately religious to accept them. Further, the exclusion of religion from peace settlements will ensure the most a settlement can achieve is a truce, not peace, because such a settlement has failed to address some of the root causes of the problem. He also insisted that the Temple Mount couldn’t be a later add-on to an agreed settlement, but had to be addressed as part of any future peace: disagreement about this piece of real estate was not an option, but the heart of the conflict.

He then described some of his work with a range of voices on the Jewish side to explore what peace means, and how far people are motivated by their faith to envisage peace, and work for it. He has managed to draw both left-wing chatterati and the settler religious right into the same dialogue about what peace might look like from within the Jewish tradition. He sees the key to this lying in the way in which Jewish thought has embraced argument without resolution: rabbi X says A , rabbi Y says B, to which rabbi Z added C. None of these arguments reach a decision, but hold the different viewpoints together in co-existence. Perhaps a peace that could accept that in politics as well as theological discussion might offer a way forward. He didn’t say whether any politician might find that practical, nor whether he expected the Palestinians to sit around waiting for a Jewish solution. However, he is clearly trying to break longstanding logjams with an innovative and different way forward.

It would be possible to launch into question and critique quite readily, and we certainly didn’t hold back on the questions tonight. As always, I am aware that I am listening to people advocating a view in ways they hope will appeal to me. And all our speakers have been engaging. However, from the point of view of these journal entry posts (mainly for my own benefit, dear reader) I just want to summarise some main points of material I know I will be following up and digesting for some time to come.

Experience is odd. (Israel / Palestine Study Tour Day 4)

2011-10-28T14:55:00.001+01:00

Today’s is a short blog, because it has been a different kind of day. Now that we’re in Jerusalem for several days we’re being given a little space.

This morning’s main agenda were visits to the Holy Sepulchre, when (out of the blue) the Greek Patriarch turned up in considerable procession for something – possibly a family conversion / baptism looking at some of those trailing behind his magnificence. It’s quite easy to see how bishops get a sense of self-importance. The other main focus was the Western Wall. (It being Friday, the Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount was closed to non-Muslims, although our Muslim members went to join Friday prayers.

I was surprised (again) by the unexpected randomness of spiritual and emotional experiences in this place. Today (and entirely unlike the previous time I visited, I had a powerful and tangible sense of historical placedness / God / immanence (hard to pin down) both at the Stone of Unction (the site where Orthodox tradition says Jesus’ body was prepared for burial, and at the Western Wall. Last time both those left me untouched emotionally. This time I had a moment of feeling overwhelmed in each place.

Then again, experience anyway, but especially in this place, is a funny old thing. The first site where I ever had a sense of “this is where the Bible happened” was the Church of the Beatitudes. I think the “event” it commemorates is Matthew’s literary construction, yet that was the place I had the experience.

I’m now off to get ready for tonight: joining first in a synagogue service, and then going to share hospitality afterwards.

Israel / Palestine Study Tour, Day 3

2011-10-27T22:10:00.001+01:00

Today has been an interesting mixture. We began with a visit to Capernaum. I always feel that this is one of the more likely identifications, and the evidence for a first century house, expanded in stages, with a later church does support the tradition of this being Peter’s house. Even if not, there are real first century streets exposed to daylight from excavation, and more than most places, one can say with a fair degree of certainty and precision, “Jesus woz here!”

From Capernaum we travelled to Nazareth, visiting both the Orthodox Church of St Gabriel and Mary’s Well (the eastern version of the site of the Annunciation) and the RC Basilica. Both are splendid but very different buildings, and both resonate with me.

So far, so Christian pilgrimagey. After that things took a different turn. After all, the primary purpose of this trip is listening to the different voices and stories of the peoples of this land.

We observed prayers (the Muslim members of our group participating) at the White Mosque in Nazareth. This is the oldest, and in many ways the most integrated of Nazareth’s mosques. After prayers were finished, we received hospitality and a otur of the mosque together with a resume of its history. I was intrigued to learn the way they tell the story of 1948. The hereditary leader of the mosque community was also Mayor of Nazareth. He used his influence to first calm things down, and then went out and met the IDF forces to assure them Nazareth would offer no resistance, but co-operate. As a result Nazareth suffered no damage, nor were its citizens made refugees.

I’m not sure what other stories might be told of this, but this in itself is an interesting telling of the history. I am aware that the mosque leaders wanted to portray themselves to a mixed group such as ours as reasonable. Every voice we have so far heard has wanted to commend their own position to us, and I don;t know enough to read between all the lines. On the other hand, I heard a Jew saying that he had been introduced to the mosque leadership by a catholic bishop. This mosque seems to pride itself on getting on with life and maintaining the best relationships it can with other groups in the community. There was enough evidence in banners around a town square, that other groups of Muslims were less conciliatory, and angry that Christians had stopped development of a mosque in close proximity to the Basilica.

On the way down the hill to lunch some of us stopped to say the Angelus at the Basilica. Where else is that more natural a prayer?

Following lunch we travelled to the village of Kafr Qara to hear a talk from the Qadi (islamic Judge) for that district, as he explained how Sharia law worked in Israel, where it is allowed to work for Family Law, and how they tried to dovetail it into the provisions of the civil code. It sits alongside the Bet Din, and also church courts, in being recognised as having a role to play. Qadi Iyad Zahalka suggested that this was one area where Israel had something to teach Europe and the West about recognising ways in which religious teachings can adjudicate things for their adherents within the framework of Civil Law, and with the Civil Supreme Court still acting as the final Court of Appeal. Much of this was explored in question and answer afterwards. Listening to aspects of Sharia described by one who has to apply it gives a rather different picture to that of the UK Press. It was just as interesting, however, hearing him speak so positively about the Israeli constitution, and the role of Civil Law.

In the evening we arrived in Jerusalem to meet for supper in a Jewish home and hear short stories from several young adults, Palestinian and Jewish, about the programmes they had been on through the Intereligious Co-ordinating Council in Israel (ICCI). They had been encouraged to get to know, and trust each other to the point where they could tell each other how they saw things, felt things, understood things, told their stories of how things got to be this way. These young adults (all in their 20s) talked both about what had worked, and what hadn’t, in these programmes. For example, one group, committed to continuing to meet together, had fallen apart under the pressure of hard realities when its Jewish Israeli members were called up as reservists expecting a new conflict. Nonetheless, for a number of young people, the programmes were generating fresh understandings and some real friendships across the great divides of their diverse religious, cultural and ethnic identities.

All in all another day with a great deal to take in, and, following the example of the Maiden of Nazareth, to ponder the meaning of these things in our hearts.

Israel / Palestine Study tour, Day 2

2011-10-26T21:43:00.001+01:00

A very brief report towards the end of the second day of this tour with FODIP. The morning was spent learning about the life of Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam (as I mentioned yesterday). This is an impressive commitment to sharing life between faiths / ethnicities / nationalities across the divide that has torn this narrow strip of land apart. It’s clearly neither a panacea for all Israel or Palestine’s ills, nor without its problems.

However, the village is growing, engaged in significant education work, and offering what Pope John Paul II called a sign of contradiction to the overarching narrative of hostility and hopelessness.

One feature of the village is “the House of Silence”– a space to be apart and quiet in reflection, meditation or silent prayer. Precisely because of its common nature in a community which embraces three faiths and none (or as their leader put it, some of our members have faith in peace, or in humanity) the house is a venue for silent prayer or thoughts only, not a place for words. Our Muslim brothers and sisters said midday prayers outside, respecting the silence of the building space, while both Jew and Christian were able to offer their silent intention at the same time. I found it a moving experience.

In the afternoon we went on to the Sindyanna Visitor Centre in Kufr Manda in Galilee. There we heard about their work as a women-led non-profit that tries to strengthen the economy of the Arab-Palestinian population in general and to enhance the empowerment of Arab women in particular.

We also had a talk from Fuad Farah, a senior lay member of the Greek Orthodox community in Nazareth, who has written a history of Christianity in Palestine. From what he said, I would have some questions about the relationship of his narrative to other ways of telling some of that history, but he offered a reflection on today which was not only in favour of a two-state solution, but also expressed some anxiety about the Islamisation of Palestinian identity and its implication for a future Palestinian state.

Interestingly, he also stressed that while he saw any such solution as being based on the 1967 borders, he thought based on left some wriggle room for some give and take in relation to a limited amount of land on either side.

What he didn’t mention was Jerusalem. Given his anger at his Church hierarchy – unlike Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans they have never had a Palestinian / Israeli Arab bishop – over a long history of selling off local Christian property in Jerusalem to Jews, I suspect he might find Jerusalem a more difficult question to deal with emotionally as well as practically. But some of his anger was simply due to being governed by autocratic and non-representative foreigners.

The day ended with an almost endless meal (it turned out that what we thought was the meal was just the starter) as a sample of Druse hospitality. We may find out more about their community in the morning, although the last time I listened to a Druse trying to explain their faith and identity I ended up far more confused than I started. Then it will be travelling through the day and ending up rather late (possibly too late in the day to blog) at Jerusalem.

Israel / Palestine Study Tour, day 1

2011-10-25T21:57:00.001+01:00

I seem to have been travelling for a very long time. But our first overnight stay is at the only intentional Jewish / Arab community in Israel, Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam. I discover that we are a group mainly of Christians and Muslims, with one Rabbi travelling with us from England, and another local Jewish educationalist accompanying us here.

Main reception – the only area with Wi-Fi – has closed for the night (the village guest house is a grouping of separate rooms with chalets) so I’m sitting outside well within Wi-Fi range, but aware of what sound like some very active bats in the trees above my head.

I’m not sure how often I will get the chance to blog, but when I can I want (as much for my own sake as anything else) to note some impressions as I go.

The group as a whole are happy for me to photograph and video stuff as we go along, and I hope I might get some of them talking to camera as well about impressions. I’m not sure how much of this might end up editable into YouTube reflections after I return.

Tomorrow we spend some time learning about the history and life of this unusual experiment for inter-religious and (because this seems to be mainly secular) inter-racial peace, before visiting the oft-forgotten fourth religious grouping of Israel-Palestine, the Druse.

More updates as and when for those who are interested.

Why does Blogger hate paragraphs?

2011-10-24T18:48:00.001+01:00

I like a lot of what Google do, and I’m certainly not blaming Blogger for my haphazard and desultory blogging. (I think I’m still recovering from having over-blogged myself for two years as Clayboy!)

But …

Perhaps WordPress has spoilt me, or perhaps I’m hopelessly geeky about well-formed HTML, but every time I post something to this blog, some corner of my soul self-flagellates for the heinous sin of misusing the paragraph code.

I couldn’t work out why some posts were coming out oddly laid out until I noticed that Blogger strips out paragraph codes – even hand-coded ones in Blogger’s own HTML tab – and replaces them with two line breaks, so that the whole post lacks some rather basic semantic mark-up. This rather misses the point of how HTML should be written, and I’m amazed Blogger does it.

I have no idea how much time I shall have to blog, or what internet access over the next few days, though I hope to be able to post some stuff from Israel and the West Bank, but when I return I shall have to give some thought about how long I can stand writing paragraphs that aren’t.

Getting the media

2011-10-22T22:34:00.001+01:00

One of the joys of my sabbatical is that I’m not reading the Church Times for three months. Apart from anything it stops me reading or thinking about job ads. But I have missed something good, so thanks to Thinking Anglicans for the hat-tip. This article by George Pitcher is well worth some thought and follow-up.

Here’s a sample:

the right-wing media (hat-tip Enoch Powell) have long banged on that civil unrest would be sparked by our growing Muslim population. But, when the riots happened in August, the only audible Muslim contribution came from a man who had lost his son to the violence, heroically calling for peace.

I encourage you to read the lot.

Creation is not a theory

2011-10-13T13:03:00.000+01:00

This film looks to be an interesting documentary. I wasn’t aware Kentucky was such a stupid state, however, as to legislate for the impossible.

Kentucky law now requires educators teach "the theory of creation as presented in the Bible" and "read such passages in the Bible as are deemed necessary for instruction on the theory of creation."

But the Bible doesn’t present a theory of creation. It contains stories about creation, it includes poetry celebrating creation, it asserts the beneficent and providential majesty of the Creator, and tells many stories of his intimate and fractious involvement with what he has made.

But it nowhere has a theory of creation.

Creation is not a theory; it is a way of narrating and asserting the graceful and God-given nature of the cosmos and our existence in it. Creation is doctrine for how to live, and poetry to celebrate what it means to be alive. It is description of how we believe the world to be, and prescription for how we should live in it.

And you can believe this cosmos is creation while also accepting the evidence that the cosmos is getting on for some 14 billion, the earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, species evolving over many millions of years, and the scientific theories that seem to offer more-or-less successful and coherent interpretations and explanations of that evidence.

It is only those misguided enough to think "creation" is a competing theory who have real problems with that.

The reality (realities?) of New Testament lay ministry

2011-10-06T00:10:00.001+01:00

I've been listening to some conversations about what we might broadly call "lay ministry". This tends to be a Protestant term, and Catholicism (outside discussion of ordinary and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist) is more likely to talk about a "lay apostolate". (Gross generalization alert!) The former term tends to focus on "inside the church" and the latter on "in the world". The former in particular might be held by some to be an oxymoron, depending on what you mean by "minister" and "lay"!

I came across an interesting example today. A bishop (who shall remain nameless) said:

I think that "every member ministry" (which I take to be what is meant by "the ministry of all") is a decidedly dodgy concept which we all used to believe in and which may have done untold damage to our understanding of church and mission. Thank God we are now commonly using the term "discipleship".

Now I sort of know what he means. He can appeal to Paul's words to the Romans:

We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. (Rom 12:6-8

Here "ministry" (διακονία) seems to have some kind of technical meaning of (social?) service, rather than a generic meaning of "action for / to others in God's name / service". Certainly this is what the later developed office of deacon pointed to. "Every member ministry" in that light is simply a mischaracterization.

On the other hand, the bishop has to deal with the fact that (as far as I am aware) the term "disciple" (μαθητής) occurs nowhere outside the gospels and Acts. Luke's writing certainly allows us to smuggle it in as a term for "Christian", but its absence from the letters should at least caution us about assuming it is in some way the best or most appropriate term. If "disciples" reflects (and the point is up for grabs) the Jewish "talmidim" then it would be a more limited term.

It would seem to me that there is no particular term in the New Testament which designates a role for all believers in such a way that we can – without significant problems – base a theology of universal ministry on it. There are, however, a variety of terms for specific ministries which remain unclear how permanent, functional or widespread they were.

We're used to hearing (often in overstated cases) that there is no one NT practice or theory of "ordained ministry". But it would seem to me to be even more true of "lay ministry".

Is Reader a cooler name than lay minister?

2011-10-03T20:52:00.001+01:00

Those familiar with lay ministry and lay training in the Church of England may know that many dioceses have begun to replace the term "Reader" (meaning lay preacher etc) with the phrase "Licensed Lay Minister", quite often "Licensed Lay Minister (Reader)".

One of the reasons for this change was the sense among many Readers that they found the language always needed explaining. No doubt, also, did Richard Dawkins' title when he was Reader in Zoology at Oxford before he became Professor for the Public ~~Misunderstanding of Religion~~ Understanding of Science.

There is a certain irony in this. We live in a media world, self-consciously theorising about its own mediation and remediation. In such a world (and media and cultural studies are arguably on their way to becoming the hegemonic discipline, the new prom queen of the sciences) everything is a text.

Whatever else we train these lay theologians for in this brave new world, it will be the twin disciplines of reading Scripture and reading culture well, and bringing them into some kind of dialogue that is more than playing with the latter to drive a deconstructive coach and horses through the aporia of the former (or vice versa if you wish).

Reader suddenly sounds an awfully fashionable emphasis on the role of the interpreter. It's a funny time to be trying to get rid of it, eh?

A liberal future for a conservative past?

2011-10-03T20:29:00.001+01:00

James McGrath points to a HuffPo article by John Shore arguing that:

It is inevitable that Christians who would now be described as "liberal" will be the overwhelming majority of Christians in America.

I suspect that the evidence is, well, not really very evident.

Today most people have in their lives, and deeply care for, at least one person who is no closer to being a Protestant Christian than I am to being French Canadian. Today everyone is related to, shares a neighborhood with, works with, or goes to school with someone who is gay, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, Mormon, Unitarian Universalism, Wiccan, Native American, Shinto, Baha'i, Rastafarian, Cao Dai, Tenrikyo, agnostic, atheist, or any combination thereof.

But for the first few centuries when the contours of Christian theology and ethics were being mapped, people lived with a similar diversity, even if they conceptualised it differently and without the rhetoric of pluralism, post-colonialism or post-modernity. Most non-Western Christianity is conservative, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and at least in the first two of those places they live their lives in close proximity to those who believe differently in one significant way or another, sometimes as minorities, sometimes majorities. The other is often the enemy making conservative boundaries more important. It is hardly possible to ignore the role Islamic ethics plays in the construction of anti-gay Nigerian rhetoric. Christianity cannot afford to be seen as less manly, or less moral, than its main competitor for power and allegiance.

There doesn't seem to me to be any inevitability in this picture.

It so happens that I think the questions modern and post-modern Christians are facing are real ones, and that a retreat to pre-modernity is ultimately illusory and self-defeating. I'm not always convinced the traditional liberal answers are any more persuasive than the conservative ones, but I think that a resolute refusal to duck the question is a highly commendable liberal virtue. I also think that refusing to surrender the heart of the tradition easily is a commendable conservative one.

I question, however, whether the liberals are just as wedded to yesterday's questions as the conservatives are to yesterday's answers. Whatever the future of Christianity looks like, I suspect we haven't seen it, or if seen it, not fully recognised it yet.

No rational argument could persuade me of God

2011-09-24T23:47:00.000+01:00

I confess that I'm a fan of the Beeb's five minute web interviews. The one with Phillip Pullman is a particularly good one.

I should declare myself here: I really enjoyed the first two books of "His Dark Materials" trilogy; I felt the third disappeared up its own arse, despite some excellent sequences, including the final separation of Will and Lyra.

It is, though, at the very least interesting that Pullman's integrity in this interview both compels him to say that he is technically agnostic, while emotionally atheist. The recognition that he cannot simply be converted rationally, but emotionally and experientially is interesting. I see it as the insight of a storyteller. An author instinctively knows that their characters are not simply a matter of rational plotting but that they have a life of their own.

I wonder if that isn't a metaphor for how we might experience God

The unexpected pleasure of an old Torah scroll

2011-09-21T22:02:00.001+01:00

I enjoyed a really informative meeting and time-generous hospitality today at the Board of Deputies of British Jews. I’m still reflecting on what I’ve learned from both that meeting and an equally profitable conversation yesterday with the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. I hope to post some reflections in due course.

One of the unexpected highlights today was this wonderful scroll. Now incomplete, originally a sefer Torah (a scroll of the Torah prepared for use in public worship, kept in the ark, and written with a careful and traditional calligraphy on parchment – this one on goatskin) this scroll seems to come from Bohemia and roughly the middle of the 18th century. It will be presented to a new school as an educational treasure. What a fortunate school.

Those who know any Hebrew will recognise this as the beginning of Genesis.

Beautiful.

A conversion testimony makes an odd college course

2011-09-20T21:46:00.001+01:00

One of two projects I’m pursuing while on sabbatical is trying to gain a better understanding of Jewishness in today’s world. A key focus for such a large topic is how media images of the situation in Israel and Palestine impact (or don’t impact) the daily experience of being Jewish in the UK.

I expect I’ll be blogging a bit more about that, although I also expect to have some conversations with people in confidence rather than for publicising.

This project means I’m looking out for a range of material and representations of both Jewish life and identity, and of Israeli politics, across a fairly diverse spectrum of opinion.

In connection with that I was intrigued to notice that the first hit when I searched iTunesU for “Judaism” were videos of an introductory lecture series at a evangelical Bible College in Iowa. That’s disappointing, I think, not to get a Jewish view getting priority, although perhaps reflects the nature of where courses on Judaism get run. The lecturer was one Steve Herzig, who seems also to be the North American Field Director for the Friends of Israel. According to what he says in the first of the videos, he comes from an Orthodox family, although he doesn’t specify how observant they were.

But what rather stunned me was this statement. (I’ve transcribed as accurately as I can, but if you want to check it out for yourself, then it’s about 5 mins 20 secs into the video.

Judaism concerns itself with doing, as opposed to Christianity. One of the things that separates Bible-believing Christians from Jewish people is this disconnect, where Christianity talks about your personal belief, your relationship with God, your – ah, ah – the idea that we can do nothing to earn favour or merit with God, that he does it all – we must trust in him. Judaism teaches the opposite. Judaism teaches that we must do. We have laws to follow, we must demonstrate our faith.

In a way, of course, this is very little different from converts to evangelical faith from Catholicism, or a fairly low-key Anglicanism, to mention just two examples. When I hear those testimonies, I don’t much recognise the faith they have left behind for “real Christianity”. I don’t particularly recognise the diverse richness of Judaism in in this description.

Nor, I think, would the New Testament authors take kindly to this late modern construction of an individualised Reformation trope. James would throw a fit, and I don’t think the Paul who urged his Philippian congregation to work out their salvation in fear and trembling would be very impressed either.

Converts are very rarely the best people to describe what they left behind. Where he’s on factual ground, Herzig seems to have helpful material to impart. Ok. But on theological grounds I’d be a lot more worried. His being a convert makes this sound a lot more authoritative than it would be otherwise. “I’ve been both, and I’m a position to know the difference.”

(I hope amongst my conversations to be talking to a Christian convert to Judaism – something I find theologically and psychologically difficult to get my head round – but I will be surprised if I end up taking their description of Christianity as fully accurate.)

The distinction between Christian orthodoxy and Jewish orthopraxy is to my mind quite a dubious one even when nuanced as rather more than “faith” and “works”. When it becomes a (very modern evangelical) “personal relationship with God” versus the need “to demonstrate our faith” by observance, as far as I can see it does justice neither to Christianity nor to Judaism.

And when I think of the anger that not observing certain of “God’s laws” arouses across most of the evangelical spectrum, I suspect the rhetoric of “faith alone” is disguising a deep Christian attachment to certain boundary-marking laws. The social conservatism of evangelical political practice is a very clear piece of evidence that “faith alone” might get you a theoretical salvation from God, but it won’t necessarily get you membership of a conservative evangelical church.

Is there a text in this church?

2011-09-15T12:10:00.001+01:00

One of a long list of books I want to get round to reading, but haven’t yet, is Stanley Fish’s Is there a text in this class? The title comes from a student’s question: she was enquiring whether there was a set book which had to be read. It’s a good jumping off point, though, for asking whether reader response theories treat a text in such multiple and different ways that the idea of a text dissolves entirely into an open and expanding collection of competing readings.

Such a view stands at one end of a spectrum of approaches to the place of Scripture, and the ways Christians think about it. At the other is the claim that there can only be one meaning, for by definition Scripture is inspired, infallible, and perspicuous.

Eddie Arthur frames some of this helpfully by referring to an earlier post of mine, a sparkling one by the Archdruid, and a detailed argument by Andrew Wilson.

I don’t myself think my previous post was directly on this topic, but I must learn to express myself more clearly. Nonetheless, the point I was making there against an over-emphasis on the original autographs, does also apply in some ways here. It is, I think, a simple one: whatever Christians say theologically about Scripture being “the word of God” should take proper account of what sort of book / collection of books it is / they are.

Whether anything else I say follows from that as much as I think it does, that is a kind of axiom or guiding principle I think worth holding to (and I shall probably come back to it in a subsequent post).

The question implied in my uncertainty whether to use a plural or a singular is a good starting point. Scripture is a community collection, with some books argued about over a long period and others almost unanimously and ubiquitously accepted. The texts exist as Scripture for a community that has collected them and accepted them as Scripture. There is a symbiotic relationship between community and text. You can (at least in part) define the Church as the community which reads these books (pick your canon list) as Scripture, and you can (at least in part) define Scripture as the books which the Church reads in order to go on being the Church.

I think that has several implications for the argument over polysemy. Whatever individual readings are proposed, there is always a communal, creedal, reading which continues to be developed and handed on. The growth of tradition comes from the incorporation of new individual readings within the communal one. The fracturing of the Christian community comes when that process fails to one degree or another.

The balance of various readings within or alongside the corporate one allows polysemy and an agreed (argued over?) inter-subjective meaning to exist alongside each other. In a similar way earlier tradition codified readings as literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. St Thomas Aquinas was quite clear that you could never propose something with one of the other three meanings which was not taught somewhere in the canon as its literal meaning. Yet (in theory) the system balanced a central meaning and a polysemic playfulness.

The second thing about the collection is that different versions of a story are told next to each other. Some of this is inherited from the Hebrew texts. I’m not just thinking about the seams of prior editing discovered (for example) in the Joseph cycle, but things like the story of Samuel and Kings retold with added priests and Levites in Chronicles. Some is fresh to the Christian gospels, where (again for example) Jesus’ “cleansing” of the temple is narrated on three different occasions in three (four) different accounts. The documents testify to retold, updated and differently narrated stories, and the canon collects them side by side in a way which problematizes any simple single meaning.

Again, the collection presents itself as a twofold collection, implicitly acknowledging more than two-thirds of it is inherited from a community that continues to interpret that two-thirds quite differently in many ways. The New Testament contains some of the debates which stress that while many of the older books are held in common with Judaism, the meaning of those books is contested. The division of the Christian canon into Old and New Testaments both acknowledges a contested polysemy, and proposes a core christological interpretative story.

What is the literal meaning of “the young woman - ha'almah” (הָעַלְמָה) in Isaiah 7:14? For the first evangelist it is the meaning he finds christologically in the Greek text “the virgin – he parthenos” (ἡ παρθένος). (BTW, take a look at this post on Better Bibles which is relevant to this point.) Canon bakes polysemy into the text, christology and creed draw a core meaning out of it.

Like Eddie, I want to steer a course between core reading and multiple readings. However, I want to argue that the nature of the text itself invites us to do both, but in the company of the reading community, not alone.

Time to stop saying “Arab Spring”?

2011-09-10T10:44:00.001+01:00

I have more questions than answers, but it seems to me that last night’s mob attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo is worth a reflection. I think the BBC are right to make it their top story, and slightly odd for the Guardian and Telegraph (to take two contrasting papers) to drop it down below the fold to third item. (As accessed at 10.10am BST.) Unsurprisingly it is the top story for the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and Al Jazeera.

Perhaps the most chilling comment is the one reported by the BBC’s Bethany Bell:

I spoke to one of them and she said, "We've been brought up to hate Israel but now we can express this openly. Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, no Egyptian blood will go unavenged."

I have been very sceptical of the”Arab Spring” label attached to various movements, but especially the Egyptian uprising. The road from dictatorship to whatever will emerge is far from certain, and likely to be unstable for many years. The Haaretz story locates the storming of the Israeli embassy in a broader account of protest.

One banner in Cairo read, "Egyptians, come out of your homes, Tantawi is Mubarak."
Demonstrators in Cairo also converged on the state TV building, a central courthouse and the Interior Ministry, a hated symbol of abuses by police and security forces under Mubarak. Protesters covered one of the ministry's gates with graffiti and tore off parts of the large ministry seal.
Protests also took place in Alexandria, Suez and several other cities.

There is some reason to think that, even without obvious and overt Islamism involved (and the extent of Islamist involvement in the various revolutionary movements remains unclear, although it’s certainly there) a new and aggressively anti-Israeli sentiment is a likely outcome of the Egyptian uprising.

The media labelling of this as part of a new “Arab spring” is looking like an increasingly misplaced sound-bite to describe something that may lead to a more destabilised Middle East, an upsurge in revolutionary Islamist influence, and an increasingly threatened Israel.

And I have no idea what it will do for minority and beleaguered Christian communities across the region who so often get overlooked in any reporting of the majority story. But I doubt if any of them, either, are likely to see this as springtime.

Casting out stupidity – Homeopathic A & E

2011-09-08T21:26:00.001+01:00

Scott Bailey, in his crusade to find and mock the more bizarre manifestations of Christian weirdness on the web, has today found a site that would be sad if it wasn’t trying to sell things, in a strange crossover of homeopathy and a demon obsessed Pentecostalism.

Homeopathy, of course, is weird enough on its own, as this wonderful Mitchell and Webb sketch reminds us.

What colour was the car?

Enjoy!

Defending translation (or the Bible is not the Quran)

2011-09-06T11:24:00.001+01:00

Larry Hurtado started something off with his post on the importance of languages for scholarly work. He’s since followed it up with clarification and elaboration, in the light of what looks to me like a deliberate misunderstanding made to score points for a right-on post-colonialism (or possibly it’s all a tongue-in-cheek – I say not which cheek – satire). There’s also been some good discussion in the B-Greek forum.

The case Hurtado cites is appalling to the point of being unbelievable:

In one case, the examiner suspected that the student didn’t know koine Greek very well. So he put a Greek NT on the table and asked the student to read out and translate a passage (one directly involved in the thesis). The student couldn’t even pronounce the Greek and couldn’t translate it.

It’s not just that the student didn’t deserve a PhD, but that the institution should be pursuing competency proceedings against the supervisor (and perhaps the student should be considering legal ones).

However, you can read all that debate for yourself. I want to muse on one of the comments made on the B-Greek forum (no aspersions on the theology or seriousness of the commenter are intended – I’m just using this as a springboard):

One thing that stands out in Islam is that they do not approve of the use of translations. Would that we did the same in the Church.

That’s simply not going to happen, and it won’t happen because Christianity is not Islam, despite the best efforts of conservative and fundamentalist Protestants to treat the text of Scripture as if it were the Quran. By that, I mean any attempt to locate some special level of infallibility or plenary verbal inspiration in the words of the original autographs.

It’s not just that the original autographs don’t exist, and are in any case a theoretical construct for a rather complex tradition of authoring. It’s that the nature of the foundation Christian texts point in a different direction.

Typically, the NT authors quote from a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and may well share the belief attested in the Letter of Aristeas that such translation was itself specially inspired by God. Indeed, (what became) the majority Church seems from very early days, to have so valued translated retellings of the words of the Founder that they saw no special reason to preserve the original Aramaic except in a handful of cases. (It is interesting to speculate to what extent the Christian espousal of the Greek Scriptures drove a nascent Rabbinic Judaism back to the Hebrew alone.)

Translation is embedded in the Christian Scriptures to such an extent that there is no form of Christianity which does not depend on it. The words spoken by the incarnate Word are only given to us in human translation. And they’re often translated or transmitted or interpreted differently between the earliest sources for them.

None of that excuses a scholar engaging with the original languages of the texts of which they purport to be a scholar. That’s one of the fundamental rules of the academic game.

It does, however, suggest that the tendency in Protestantism to venerate the original language autographs of the text in good Islamic style is one which is refuted by the nature of the New Testament texts themselves.

Something Google could improve?

2011-08-31T23:24:00.001+01:00

I was trying to set up my Gmail account for my sabbatical. The idea was that I would send an auto-reply directing people elsewhere, and then delete the incoming email. I have other email addresses for personal use.

This is pure self-defence. Otherwise I would return from sabbatical leave to at least 3,000 emails (going on a typical week). That's just not workable, and neither is checking work emails on sabbatical.

I have, however, run into a snag. If I set up a filter to delete emails, Gmail automatically bypasses the inbox. The same happens if I set up a forwarder to delete them in another account. And if I bypass the inbox, then Gmail doesn't send an auto-response.

So I have a choice. Either I can tell people I haven't got their emails and delete them manually, or I can set things up so I don't get their emails but not tell anyone I haven't got them.

Why, dear folks at Mountain View, can't I have the option to delete and email after sending and auto-response? That would seem to be more useful to many people.

Or is there a way of doing it I have been too stupid to discover?

Divine trickery and the Scripture versus Church dichotomy

2011-08-29T12:34:00.001+01:00

John Anderson has been reviewing a book called God Behaving Badly. The last of his review series has links to previous posts, and here I want to muse a little more about the conversation we were having over there. (It’s also worth drawing your attention in this context to this post by Daniel Kirk on reconceptualising theology.)

It seems to me relatively clear that the books which we include in the canon of Scripture (whichever mainstream canon we’re talking about) together form a sprawling patchwork of authors, stories and ideas. The communities which read those books as Scripture, and the individuals who belong to them, all have what we might call a credal strategy for organising the material.

One example might be the texts I was discussing yesterday, about what the wise interpreter should teach as the core of Torah, or the hermeneutical key for reading the whole. But we all, I think, have our more or less coherent beliefs (at least they seem coherent to us our our communities), which inform how we read the texts and which texts we privilege as our organising core, and which we relegate to our reading periphery.

Even those who, like John, maintain that they belong to a sola scriptura trajectory are not autonomous readers. The activity of reading Scripture as Scripture is testimony to standing in a reading and believing tradition – the community which identifies these books as sacred writings. The very act of so identifying some books and not others is evidence of a systematizing (not necessarily systematic) reading of them.

That community is (or those communities are) shaped by its reading of these books, yet also used its core credal competences to recognise which books should be read in this way. Its selection of them depends on the way they are being read. Creed and scripture, coherent theologising and particularising exegesis, do not stand in an either-or relationship, but a both-and conversation. Canon yokes them together.

John has specialised in texts which portray YHWH as a trickster. Those are texts which tend to be side-lined in much mainstream thinking and traditional theologies, and therefore many of us don’t spend so much time thinking about them. However, those of us in liturgical lectionary-following churches are more likely to read them regularly than those who simply revisit their favourite selections.

There are a variety of ways of making sense of them and I make no pretence to the same expertise as John in doing so. As part of the scriptural narrative of the revelatory relationship between God and God’s people they bear their own witness to the ways in which that relationship has sometimes been experienced very ambivalently. They serve as reminders of the mystery of God that is beyond our grasp, the idea CS Lewis regularly returns to in his Narnia stories that “Aslan is not a tame lion”.

Perhaps they remind us of our own delight in trickery stories, especially when justice is achieved as the hero tricks the opponent into contributing to their own downfall. This tradition is as old, it seems, as storytelling itself. The divine trickster tradition gets reused in this way in some patristic and mediaeval retellings of the gospel. God baits the hook of the Son’s divine nature with the flesh of Jesus’ humanity, and when Satan swallows this tempting prey in the jaws of death, he is caught and destroyed by the uncontainable life disguised within. It is hard not to take some literary pleasure in this conceit.

But the credal tradition subordinates them to the core narrative, which is that God is ultimately to be trusted, and repays that trust. It may look as if he has deceived his servants into suffering and death, but the truer, fuller story is a faithful vindication of their faithfulness. “In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died … in the time of their visitation they will shine forth” (Wis 3:2,7 NRSV). The story of faithfulness as redemptive, Christ’s to God and God’s to Christ, is the core of any coherent Christian narrative.

I don’t myself see how we can read any individual texts within the canon without also having some kind of more-or-less coherent narrative about which texts are core and which periphery. The times in which God may seem to trick us, hide from us, and so on somehow need to be co-ordinated with that central story of trust.

I don’t see that as a prioritising of theology over Scripture. I see it as a conversation. In that conversation it doesn’t seem to me to make sense to argue about the primacy of the text. The whole conversation is about how one text relates to another, or how any individual text should be read. That’s ultimately what the credal tradition is continuing to do. The difficult texts are not, I think, thereby side-lined in the process, but rather assigned, perhaps, the role of grit in the oyster. Grit is not a pearl, but in the long story of agitation and disturbance, the oyster may yet produce one.

How unique is Jesus’ summary of the Law?

2011-08-28T19:29:00.001+01:00

Sometimes pondering the differences between our gospel accounts can raise some interesting questions. I’ve been musing over what is often called our Lord’s summary of the Law.

In Mark’s version (12:28-34 — followed by Matthew in more compressed format) Jesus answers a scribe by yoking together the Shema (Deut 6:4) with the command to love one’s neighbour from Leviticus (Lev 19:18). In Luke’s version this account is missing. Instead, an enquiring Torah expert, after Jesus turns his own question back on him, is the person who comes up with the combination.

I’m quite a fan of the criterion of historical plausibility, and both of these versions are, at their core, plausible as bedrock Jesus tradition. They both encapsulate halakhic disputation over which commandments provide the hermeneutical key to the Torah, and in Luke’s version, what the definition of neighbour is, so that one knows when one is keeping the law. It is easy to see them belonging to Jesus’ ministry, and rather harder to imagine a convincing alternative origin. Jesus is presented as a wise and demanding teacher of Torah.

But the two together pose something of a conundrum. Is the combination of these two laws sufficiently widespread that both Jesus and Luke’s Torah-expert would alike argue for it, and others might also? Or does Luke assume that his reader (well, listener) will instantly know that this combination of laws is the work of Jesus, and realise therefore that the legal expert is quoting Jesus’ own words at him? Luke gives no overt indication that such is the case.

Taking the two stories together we are presented with a conundrum. Either this combination was so common it might reasonably be quoted by anyone in halakhic discussion, or it was so rare that those Christians first hearing it will have automatically associated it with Jesus.

I can see no way of resolving that question, given the patchiness of our sources for early Judaism. If I were to guess, however, then the way in which Luke uses Matthew’s language of a test (rather out of context in Luke’s narrative) just inclines me to suspect that Luke is portraying the expert as deliberately quoting a piece of teaching Jesus was famous for.

What does anyone else think?

Liturgy doesn’t mean “work of the people”

2011-08-20T17:47:00.001+01:00

There are certain trigger phrases which turn my bullshit detectors to maximum sensitivity. One of those phrases, sadly overused in preaching and teaching, is “What this word literally means, if you look at the Greek / Hebrew, is …” Almost certainly, what follows that phrase is a good example of the etymological fallacy, the idea that you can get the meaning of a word from its historical linguistic roots. (Did you know that the etymological fallacy has its own Facebook page? Bizarre.) The meaning of a word, however, always comes from its use. The definition of liturgy as “work of the people” is a good example. It is not what the word liturgy means, nor probably what it ever meant. It is astonishing then, how widespread this fallacious etymological meaning has become.

Here’s an Anglican cathedral site: “The liturgy of the Church is the ministry of all the baptised. The Greek word "liturgy" literally means "the work of the people."
Here’s a Ukrainian Orthodox one: “Liturgy means "work of the people". What happens when we shirk this work?”
Here’s a Mennonite one: “The early church fathers even described their worship services by using the Greek word liturgy, which means: ‘the work of the people’.”
Based on such views, Wikipedia offers a particularly weird definition: “Liturgy is either the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to its particular traditions (corresponding to ritual) or a more precise term that distinguishes between those religious groups who believe their ritual requires the "people" to do the "work" of responding to the priest, and those who do not (hence leitourgia = work of the people).

I could go on multiplying examples, but these will suffice to show how like a meme this definition is. In the wider Hellenistic culture in which the Greek Scriptures were penned, the word liturgy (λειτουργία) continued to have its older Greek meaning of a public service performed by private citizens at their own expense, as well as public service more generally.

In the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, the word group is characteristically used of priestly service, and Luke can use it in this way of Zechariah: “When his time of service (λειτουργίας) was ended, he went to his home. (Luke 1:23 NRSV) Luke can also use it (in participle form) for Christian worship (While they were worshipping the Lord – Acts 13:2 NRSV – Λειτουργούντων δὲ αὐτῶν τῷ κυρίῳ ). Paul can use it to describe the tax-collectors of Rome as public servants (Rom 13:6 in the conventional interpretation of that verse), to describe himself as a priestly minister making an offering of the Gentiles (Rom 15:16), and to describe the collection as an act of public benefaction (Rom 15:27), a liturgy that would be recognisable as such across the wider culture.

These examples show that in its early use, the “liturgy” word group embraces the standard range of meanings of the day. While they appear different, I tend to assume there is some overlap. Most acts of public service would have involved dedication to a deity, and acts of worship paid to deities tended to cost something whether in the provision of the sacrifice, the building of a shrine, or the maintenance of the cult. Precisely what is being talked about as “liturgy” can only be established by the context, which is exactly how words work.

“Liturgy” is one of a range of words for worship which enter Christian vocabulary from the Greek Bible and the wider Hellenistic culture, and it goes on to develop its own specific Christian meanings, especially in connection with the Eucharist. It carries no connotation from its etymology about who is performing the liturgy. It probably does bear with it some connotation of costly service or sacrifice, although how long it keeps that for is open to question.

The word “liturgy” contributes nothing to arguments about clericalism in worship, or lay participation. Reflection on its origins may, however, say something about service, cost and sacrifice to those who expect worship to entertain them.

Trojan Update: you’ll love this link

2011-08-17T21:35:00.000+01:00

By way of welcome to this blog, a cautionary tale:–

The modern day Mycenaean cyber-warriors devised a cunning plan to get into Troy. They sent the Trojans an email with a website address linked from the words “You’ll love this great plan to get rid of the Greeks”. When King Priam logged on, a lovely simple cartoon animation of a wooden horse began playing in the web browser. Unknown to Priam, as the cartoon played, a deadly virus was taking down Troy’s online defences and overriding all the security systems, CCTV and time locks on the city gates.

Before he died the priest Laocoon – picking up this activity on his smartphone – bewailed the fact that no-one listened to him.

He had distinctly warned the king to beware of Geeks bearing GIFs.