"Wherever God shows up one of two things happens; salvation or judgment."
Discuss
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
More inconsistency in the pro-choice camp.
H/T Neil and Wintery Knight
From Life Site News.com
By Kathleen Gilbert and John Jalsevac
OWOSSO, Michigan, September 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An elderly pro-life activist was shot multiple times and killed this morning in front of Owosso High School in Michigan while he was peacefully protesting abortion with a sign depicting a baby and the word "Life," according to local police cited in the Flint Journal newspaper.
Locals say that the victim, James Pouillon of Owosso, was well-known in the area for his pro-life activities. Columnist Doug Powers wrote on his blog that Pouillon, called “the abortion sign guy" by Owosso locals, was known for standing on street corners holding up signs with pictures of aborted children.
Pastor Matt Trehella of Missionaries to the Preborn said today that Pouillon had joined his organization for a few stops of a pro-life tour less than a month ago. "Jim was a selfless, soft-spoken, kind-hearted man. All who knew him, knew this," he said. "Please pray for Jim's family."
Trehella said that Pouillon was an elderly man who needed constant use of an oxygen machine.
Troy Newman, the President of Operation Rescue (OR), said that Pouillon was a friend of OR. "We are stunned by Jim's murder," he said. "We extend our condolences to the family and share in their grief over his loss. His life was characterized by his love and concern of the vulnerable, and he will be greatly missed.
"We denounce this senseless act of violence in the strongest terms, and pray that this murderer will be swiftly brought to justice."
Reports indicate that a second individual was shot and killed in a different area of the city earlier in the day, and the two shootings are believed to be related, according to Shiawassee County sheriff George Braidwood. According to M-live.com, the second victim has now been identified as Mike Fuoss, 61, the owner of a local gravel pit. Fuoss was found dead in his office.
Police have confirmed that a suspect - a 33-year-old Owosso man - was taken into custody at the suspect's home shortly after the 7:30 a.m. shooting. After being taken into custody he confessed to the second killing as well. Fuoss knew the suspected killer, according to police, and it is so far unknown if Pouillon did as well. The motive for either of the killings is not yet known.
However, Police Chief Michael Compeau said that Pouillon appeared to be a target. "I would speculate it was ... intended," Compeau said, according to the Associated Press. "He was out protesting right across the street from the high school ... and there (were) multiple people around there and that person was targeted."
A black car was parked near the scene of the shooting, where a portable oxygen tank lay in a front yard next to a large sign with the word "Life" and an image of a baby.
In the wake of the tragedy, Fr. Pavone of Priests for Life told LifeSiteNews.com that he hoped to see "a strong expression of indignation from the pro-abortion community, just like there was a strong expression of indignation from the pro-life community at the killing of Dr. Tiller."
Secondly, Fr. Pavone called for "a renewal of unity within the pro-life community, coming to one another's assistance supporting one another, and by no means allowing fear or intimidation to have any role in our lives, but rather to move forward in peaceful organized ways to stand against this evil of abortion."
Compare and contrast:
However, within minutes after news broke that Wichita’s late-term abortionist George Tiller was shot and killed on a Sunday morning while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church, dozens of nationwide pro-life leaders and organizations immediately poured out condemnations against the violence.
Operation Rescue, which had spearheaded peaceful protests of Tiller’s business for several years, was among the first to denounce the “vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning,” adding that they were offering prayers for Tiller’s family.
Interestingly a Google search turned up not one mention of this is any major news organization, not even Fox.
Hypocrisy, you decide.
From Life Site News.com
By Kathleen Gilbert and John Jalsevac
OWOSSO, Michigan, September 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An elderly pro-life activist was shot multiple times and killed this morning in front of Owosso High School in Michigan while he was peacefully protesting abortion with a sign depicting a baby and the word "Life," according to local police cited in the Flint Journal newspaper.
Locals say that the victim, James Pouillon of Owosso, was well-known in the area for his pro-life activities. Columnist Doug Powers wrote on his blog that Pouillon, called “the abortion sign guy" by Owosso locals, was known for standing on street corners holding up signs with pictures of aborted children.
Pastor Matt Trehella of Missionaries to the Preborn said today that Pouillon had joined his organization for a few stops of a pro-life tour less than a month ago. "Jim was a selfless, soft-spoken, kind-hearted man. All who knew him, knew this," he said. "Please pray for Jim's family."
Trehella said that Pouillon was an elderly man who needed constant use of an oxygen machine.
Troy Newman, the President of Operation Rescue (OR), said that Pouillon was a friend of OR. "We are stunned by Jim's murder," he said. "We extend our condolences to the family and share in their grief over his loss. His life was characterized by his love and concern of the vulnerable, and he will be greatly missed.
"We denounce this senseless act of violence in the strongest terms, and pray that this murderer will be swiftly brought to justice."
Reports indicate that a second individual was shot and killed in a different area of the city earlier in the day, and the two shootings are believed to be related, according to Shiawassee County sheriff George Braidwood. According to M-live.com, the second victim has now been identified as Mike Fuoss, 61, the owner of a local gravel pit. Fuoss was found dead in his office.
Police have confirmed that a suspect - a 33-year-old Owosso man - was taken into custody at the suspect's home shortly after the 7:30 a.m. shooting. After being taken into custody he confessed to the second killing as well. Fuoss knew the suspected killer, according to police, and it is so far unknown if Pouillon did as well. The motive for either of the killings is not yet known.
However, Police Chief Michael Compeau said that Pouillon appeared to be a target. "I would speculate it was ... intended," Compeau said, according to the Associated Press. "He was out protesting right across the street from the high school ... and there (were) multiple people around there and that person was targeted."
A black car was parked near the scene of the shooting, where a portable oxygen tank lay in a front yard next to a large sign with the word "Life" and an image of a baby.
In the wake of the tragedy, Fr. Pavone of Priests for Life told LifeSiteNews.com that he hoped to see "a strong expression of indignation from the pro-abortion community, just like there was a strong expression of indignation from the pro-life community at the killing of Dr. Tiller."
Secondly, Fr. Pavone called for "a renewal of unity within the pro-life community, coming to one another's assistance supporting one another, and by no means allowing fear or intimidation to have any role in our lives, but rather to move forward in peaceful organized ways to stand against this evil of abortion."
Compare and contrast:
However, within minutes after news broke that Wichita’s late-term abortionist George Tiller was shot and killed on a Sunday morning while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church, dozens of nationwide pro-life leaders and organizations immediately poured out condemnations against the violence.
Operation Rescue, which had spearheaded peaceful protests of Tiller’s business for several years, was among the first to denounce the “vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning,” adding that they were offering prayers for Tiller’s family.
Interestingly a Google search turned up not one mention of this is any major news organization, not even Fox.
Hypocrisy, you decide.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Since Dan is impatient.
For anyone who has followed Dan over the recent past,(phrase removed to avoid further offense to Dan). I have asked Dan repeatedly why he refuses to listen to the clear teaching of Jesus on this subject. He finally addressed my question in the thread between he and Bubba. His response is, in essence, that one cannot forgive a wrong done to someone else. I beg to differ. In support of my position I offer the following scripture in numerous translations.
Mathew 6:14-15
NASB
14"(S)For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.15"But (T)if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.
The Message
14-15"In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can't get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God's part.
KJV
14For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
15But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
ESV
14(AA) For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15(AB) but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
NKJV
14 “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
ASV
14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Young’s Literal Translation
14`For, if ye may forgive men their trespasses He also will forgive you -- your Father who [is] in the heavens;
15but if ye may not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
The reason I choose this passage is very simple. Dan has repeatedly used the Sermon on the Mount as a piece of scripture which he believes is accurately presented. It would seem that this would give credibility to this particular scripture as an accurate representation of the words of Jesus.
I am intentionally limiting this to this one topic, I'm sure it will go elsewhere.
Mathew 6:14-15
NASB
14"(S)For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.15"But (T)if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.
The Message
14-15"In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can't get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God's part.
KJV
14For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:
15But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
ESV
14(AA) For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15(AB) but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
NKJV
14 “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
ASV
14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Young’s Literal Translation
14`For, if ye may forgive men their trespasses He also will forgive you -- your Father who [is] in the heavens;
15but if ye may not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
The reason I choose this passage is very simple. Dan has repeatedly used the Sermon on the Mount as a piece of scripture which he believes is accurately presented. It would seem that this would give credibility to this particular scripture as an accurate representation of the words of Jesus.
I am intentionally limiting this to this one topic, I'm sure it will go elsewhere.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
How refreshing it is to see how tolerant and fair the Left is.
http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2009/08/bloggingheads-tv-and-me
'nuff said.
'nuff said.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
More words of wisdom from a PCUSA pastor
A bit of background for this one. John Shuck has posted a series that he calls A New Reformation. It seems as though his intent is to posit a "New Reformation" based on the work of such scholars as Spong, Funk and others. This is one of the series.
I am enjoying this series on A New Reformation. Here is my pal, Bishop John Shelby Spong. I like him. I don't like him because he ticks off the fundies, but I have to say, that is an added bonus.
The good bishop nailed these theses to the internet over ten years ago. They are a bit dated and actually familiar-sounding now. They are more fully outlined in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.
They are posted all over the web. Here is an accompanying article that goes with them in The 4th R. Like Holy Writ, they have slight variations from place to place. Here is a version I found on the website of St. Peter's Church, Nottingham.
1. Theism as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes the divinity of Christ, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behaviour for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated for ever from the behaviour-control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behaviour.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
I am enjoying this series on A New Reformation. Here is my pal, Bishop John Shelby Spong. I like him. I don't like him because he ticks off the fundies, but I have to say, that is an added bonus.
The good bishop nailed these theses to the internet over ten years ago. They are a bit dated and actually familiar-sounding now. They are more fully outlined in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.
They are posted all over the web. Here is an accompanying article that goes with them in The 4th R. Like Holy Writ, they have slight variations from place to place. Here is a version I found on the website of St. Peter's Church, Nottingham.
1. Theism as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes the divinity of Christ, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behaviour for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated for ever from the behaviour-control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behaviour.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
One more PCUSA pastor.
heology
1. The universe has meaning and human life has purpose. Human beings are meaning-finding and purpose-finding machines. I'm actually pretty sure we could not even experience a meaningless universe, or go through our lives seeing them as literally meaningless. The question is what meaning? My society, in aggregate, gives one answer. Pillage the world, hurt your enemies, dull your mind and then you die. That is the default. What I call "God" embodies another way.
2. The doctrine of special creation has been magnified by the discoveries of the scope of the earth in time and space as well as the history and functions of life. Our cosmos, drawn within the lines of the limits of our imagination, is always revealed to be shocking and amazing to each successive generation. I take this as evidence that it came to be through forces and mechanisms that will eternally be outside our understanding. That's pretty damn special. And here we are, apparently able to appreciate this cosmos more than any living creature.
3. Death is natural. So is rape. So is war. To say that death is the enemy is to say something that is true for every person who grieves. Everything we say in the face of death is simply intended to blunt its edge as it cuts us to our core. Is this a punishment for sin? (The "wages" of sin?) If we see sin, in part, as enmeshment in an eternally unsatisfactory world full of pain and suffering and want an injustice, then yes, I think one could say that. What the world pays everyone, for all of their efforts, in the end, is death. This is natural, but it is also tragic, and we seek for things that we hope will transcend our deaths.
4. The Bible is full of instances where God is demonstrated to be unpredictable. Job puts to rest the idea that the righteous are protected from suffering and Jesus and the prophets reverse this entirely, saying that the righteous are promised suffering in a world gone wrong. So will we find an algorithm to determine when, where and how God will intervene? Can we find the on-switch for God's action in our lives? Of course not. No one ever will, and looking will always be fruitless. But is the guy who attributes overcoming addiction to the intervention of God a lunatic or a liar? Possibly neither. If God has no impact on our lives whatsoever apart from our conscious volition, then we need to retire theology forever and find something else to talk about.
5. Prayer is a broad term for a technology of spiritual practice. It is a technique, and a vague one at that. A huge weakness of Protestantism is the loss of the monastic tradition and the majority of ancient spiritual practices that have sustained Christians for millennia. We need to reach back for the broad array of practices that we have forgotten, and build new practices as we find we have needs in a world that is unlike any in the past. If people choose to ask God to intervene, then what good is it to stop them or put them down? I've had a few experiences myself where coincidence and bias don't seem to quite cut it. It just saddens me that our rich heritage of spiritual practice has been reduced to a laundry list whispered to God.
Christology
6. I think that Jesus Christ changes everything. Jesus is an eternal, ineffible and incomprehensible paradox that as Christians we are to embody, even without really understanding most of the time what it is we're getting ourselves into. Would we dare do so if we really understood? Would we line up to be crucified the way we line up to shake the preacher's hand after the sermon? Doubt it. I do not think we should ever surrender a transformative mystery we are called to live into for the sake of a comprehensible, domesticated, just-another-teacher.
7. Jesus Christ was never, is never, and will never be credible. Jesus Christ is crazy. You know that concept of what your life means, what makes you valuable and good, what you are called to do, and who you are? Jesus shatters that. Then he shatters it again. Pontious Pilate was credible. The Sanhedrin was credible. The credible people are the ones who killed Jesus. It was his followers who had no credibility. We frame these truths in myth because there is nothing else in the human toolbox that is anywhere near equal to the task.
8. Heather Reichgott challenged me here, and I'll go halfway. I think that acknowledging Jesus as coming from Mary's sexuality, at least in part, is important. It also is interesting that men were not involved at all except as a foster parent. I still don't like the virgin birth because I believe it does denigrate sexuality as a dirty thing that cannot really have touched Jesus. If Jesus is human, then he had to come from the same messy, fun stuff we all came from - or as I see it, no deal.
9. Its the classic neon sign, flashing in the urban night; the roadside sign in hand-painted letters on a country road: Jesus Saves. If this is not true, then we quit now and find something that will actually help us become whole. Historically, we've called that "Saving" atonement, something Jesus did at a particular time and place in the past, has done throughout the history of the cosmos from beginning to end, past and future, and seeks to get us to participate in with every moment of your life and mine. For me, penal sub atonement doesn't come anywhere near to covering that.
10. The resurrected Jesus teleports around and passes through crowds, appears and disappears. Clearly the resurrected Jesus, even in a very literalistic reading of the Gospels, was not just Jesus' same body walking around with the same properties other bodies have. The resurrection is a thing, at its core, that we cannot understand fully. We are just like the first disciples and apostles - Paul in particular. The resurrection is something we experience, something we participate in, with our whole lives. Even if a modern nurse could step out of a time machine and do a full physical exam of the risen Jesus, I don't think the resurrection would be affected one bit. If it would be, then it is not the resurrection depicted in the Gospels.
11. Apocalyptic elements have not been part of the main "Christian agenda" for a while now. Well, I guess there's "Jesus is coming, look busy" type evangelism, or fear-of-Hell evangelism, but a lot of even conservative evangelical types look down on this as simply leveraging self-preservation to get people into the pews. I'm fine with tossing that part out. To lose all of the apocalyptic, though, would mean we also have to lose, say, the thoughts and words of Martin Luther King Jr. I am not willing to "expunge" that. When, mere days from his assassination, MLK says he has seen the promised land, he is talking apocalypse. He is talking about the turning of time, the bending of the arc of the universe. Who cares about Jesus floating in the sky and pointing at us in judgement at the end of history like a work of Baroque art? When I read MLK's words, I shiver in my bones, because I know the apocalypse is coming.
God's Domain according to Jesus
12. The Gospels are chock-full of Jesus' suspicion of the essential character of neighbors. It is not about trusting your neighbor, it is about loving your neighbor even when s/he is a certified asshole to you all day long. Even given the guarantee that you will be hurt by others, you are never to hurt in return. That is not a trust ethic, that is a nonviolent ethic. The domain of God is ruled by one who gave up all the trappings of power that we expect and was tortured and executed at our hands. Think of any human government, ever. The domain of God is not that.
13. Jesus urges his followers to celebrate life as though they had just discovered a cache of coins in a field or been invited to a state banquet. They are urged not to worry about the future but to be present to the beauty of the moment. They are exhorted not to hold onto their lives but to lose their lives, and in losing them, they find them at last.
14. For Jesus, God's domain is a realm without social boundaries. In that realm there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, homosexual nor heterosexual, friend nor enemy, liberal nor conservative, insider nor outsider, rich nor poor, less nor more abled, gendered nor transgendered...
15. For Jesus, God's domain has no brokers, no mediators between human beings and divinity. There is a state of atonement, when separations fall, even separations between us and God. In the end, we are all in God. We are Christ's body in the perfected sense of God's purpose culminated.
16. For Jesus, the rites of entry into the domain of God are open to all regardless of the things that separate us from each other in other domains. If you can have water dumped on your head, you are in. If you eat bread (or another fruit of the earth for those allergic to wheat or something) then you are in. And now you have to deal with, as family, everyone else who has water dumped on them and who eats food. Good luck :)
17. In the kingdom, forgiveness is reciprocal: individuals can have it only if they practice it. Forgiveness is the hallmark of restorative justice, in contrast to retributive justice.
18. The kingdom is a journey without end: one arrives only by departing. It is therefore a perpetual odyssey. Exile and homecoming are the true conditions of authentic existence.
The canon
19. The canon is the collection of writings that have, historically, connected people with God and helped them grown in wisdom and understanding. Throughout history, the Church has made use of other writings, words and practices which are not found in the "canon" of the Bible, and the Church will continue to do this. It is right and good to do this, and we should just be honest about it. "Canon" means "we consistently, across time and space, find a way to God there".
20. We do not use the Bible as a rule-book. If we did, the result would be hysterical. The Bible is not intended to be a rulebook, in my opinion. If you go looking for rules, best of luck. If you go, however, looking for identity - now there's something you might find.
The language of faith
21. In continually articulating who we are and what we are about, we should continue to use the full breadth of human written expression found in the Bible - paradox, hyperbole, exaggeration, metaphor, simile, aphorism, epistle, narrative, poem, song, allegory, folktale, martyr cycle, instruction, debate, drama, liturgy and so on, as well as the fuller variety of human expression including music, visual arts, and dance which go beyond a literal text and express meaning in new ways. Our language should be as limitless as creation.
1. The universe has meaning and human life has purpose. Human beings are meaning-finding and purpose-finding machines. I'm actually pretty sure we could not even experience a meaningless universe, or go through our lives seeing them as literally meaningless. The question is what meaning? My society, in aggregate, gives one answer. Pillage the world, hurt your enemies, dull your mind and then you die. That is the default. What I call "God" embodies another way.
2. The doctrine of special creation has been magnified by the discoveries of the scope of the earth in time and space as well as the history and functions of life. Our cosmos, drawn within the lines of the limits of our imagination, is always revealed to be shocking and amazing to each successive generation. I take this as evidence that it came to be through forces and mechanisms that will eternally be outside our understanding. That's pretty damn special. And here we are, apparently able to appreciate this cosmos more than any living creature.
3. Death is natural. So is rape. So is war. To say that death is the enemy is to say something that is true for every person who grieves. Everything we say in the face of death is simply intended to blunt its edge as it cuts us to our core. Is this a punishment for sin? (The "wages" of sin?) If we see sin, in part, as enmeshment in an eternally unsatisfactory world full of pain and suffering and want an injustice, then yes, I think one could say that. What the world pays everyone, for all of their efforts, in the end, is death. This is natural, but it is also tragic, and we seek for things that we hope will transcend our deaths.
4. The Bible is full of instances where God is demonstrated to be unpredictable. Job puts to rest the idea that the righteous are protected from suffering and Jesus and the prophets reverse this entirely, saying that the righteous are promised suffering in a world gone wrong. So will we find an algorithm to determine when, where and how God will intervene? Can we find the on-switch for God's action in our lives? Of course not. No one ever will, and looking will always be fruitless. But is the guy who attributes overcoming addiction to the intervention of God a lunatic or a liar? Possibly neither. If God has no impact on our lives whatsoever apart from our conscious volition, then we need to retire theology forever and find something else to talk about.
5. Prayer is a broad term for a technology of spiritual practice. It is a technique, and a vague one at that. A huge weakness of Protestantism is the loss of the monastic tradition and the majority of ancient spiritual practices that have sustained Christians for millennia. We need to reach back for the broad array of practices that we have forgotten, and build new practices as we find we have needs in a world that is unlike any in the past. If people choose to ask God to intervene, then what good is it to stop them or put them down? I've had a few experiences myself where coincidence and bias don't seem to quite cut it. It just saddens me that our rich heritage of spiritual practice has been reduced to a laundry list whispered to God.
Christology
6. I think that Jesus Christ changes everything. Jesus is an eternal, ineffible and incomprehensible paradox that as Christians we are to embody, even without really understanding most of the time what it is we're getting ourselves into. Would we dare do so if we really understood? Would we line up to be crucified the way we line up to shake the preacher's hand after the sermon? Doubt it. I do not think we should ever surrender a transformative mystery we are called to live into for the sake of a comprehensible, domesticated, just-another-teacher.
7. Jesus Christ was never, is never, and will never be credible. Jesus Christ is crazy. You know that concept of what your life means, what makes you valuable and good, what you are called to do, and who you are? Jesus shatters that. Then he shatters it again. Pontious Pilate was credible. The Sanhedrin was credible. The credible people are the ones who killed Jesus. It was his followers who had no credibility. We frame these truths in myth because there is nothing else in the human toolbox that is anywhere near equal to the task.
8. Heather Reichgott challenged me here, and I'll go halfway. I think that acknowledging Jesus as coming from Mary's sexuality, at least in part, is important. It also is interesting that men were not involved at all except as a foster parent. I still don't like the virgin birth because I believe it does denigrate sexuality as a dirty thing that cannot really have touched Jesus. If Jesus is human, then he had to come from the same messy, fun stuff we all came from - or as I see it, no deal.
9. Its the classic neon sign, flashing in the urban night; the roadside sign in hand-painted letters on a country road: Jesus Saves. If this is not true, then we quit now and find something that will actually help us become whole. Historically, we've called that "Saving" atonement, something Jesus did at a particular time and place in the past, has done throughout the history of the cosmos from beginning to end, past and future, and seeks to get us to participate in with every moment of your life and mine. For me, penal sub atonement doesn't come anywhere near to covering that.
10. The resurrected Jesus teleports around and passes through crowds, appears and disappears. Clearly the resurrected Jesus, even in a very literalistic reading of the Gospels, was not just Jesus' same body walking around with the same properties other bodies have. The resurrection is a thing, at its core, that we cannot understand fully. We are just like the first disciples and apostles - Paul in particular. The resurrection is something we experience, something we participate in, with our whole lives. Even if a modern nurse could step out of a time machine and do a full physical exam of the risen Jesus, I don't think the resurrection would be affected one bit. If it would be, then it is not the resurrection depicted in the Gospels.
11. Apocalyptic elements have not been part of the main "Christian agenda" for a while now. Well, I guess there's "Jesus is coming, look busy" type evangelism, or fear-of-Hell evangelism, but a lot of even conservative evangelical types look down on this as simply leveraging self-preservation to get people into the pews. I'm fine with tossing that part out. To lose all of the apocalyptic, though, would mean we also have to lose, say, the thoughts and words of Martin Luther King Jr. I am not willing to "expunge" that. When, mere days from his assassination, MLK says he has seen the promised land, he is talking apocalypse. He is talking about the turning of time, the bending of the arc of the universe. Who cares about Jesus floating in the sky and pointing at us in judgement at the end of history like a work of Baroque art? When I read MLK's words, I shiver in my bones, because I know the apocalypse is coming.
God's Domain according to Jesus
12. The Gospels are chock-full of Jesus' suspicion of the essential character of neighbors. It is not about trusting your neighbor, it is about loving your neighbor even when s/he is a certified asshole to you all day long. Even given the guarantee that you will be hurt by others, you are never to hurt in return. That is not a trust ethic, that is a nonviolent ethic. The domain of God is ruled by one who gave up all the trappings of power that we expect and was tortured and executed at our hands. Think of any human government, ever. The domain of God is not that.
13. Jesus urges his followers to celebrate life as though they had just discovered a cache of coins in a field or been invited to a state banquet. They are urged not to worry about the future but to be present to the beauty of the moment. They are exhorted not to hold onto their lives but to lose their lives, and in losing them, they find them at last.
14. For Jesus, God's domain is a realm without social boundaries. In that realm there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, homosexual nor heterosexual, friend nor enemy, liberal nor conservative, insider nor outsider, rich nor poor, less nor more abled, gendered nor transgendered...
15. For Jesus, God's domain has no brokers, no mediators between human beings and divinity. There is a state of atonement, when separations fall, even separations between us and God. In the end, we are all in God. We are Christ's body in the perfected sense of God's purpose culminated.
16. For Jesus, the rites of entry into the domain of God are open to all regardless of the things that separate us from each other in other domains. If you can have water dumped on your head, you are in. If you eat bread (or another fruit of the earth for those allergic to wheat or something) then you are in. And now you have to deal with, as family, everyone else who has water dumped on them and who eats food. Good luck :)
17. In the kingdom, forgiveness is reciprocal: individuals can have it only if they practice it. Forgiveness is the hallmark of restorative justice, in contrast to retributive justice.
18. The kingdom is a journey without end: one arrives only by departing. It is therefore a perpetual odyssey. Exile and homecoming are the true conditions of authentic existence.
The canon
19. The canon is the collection of writings that have, historically, connected people with God and helped them grown in wisdom and understanding. Throughout history, the Church has made use of other writings, words and practices which are not found in the "canon" of the Bible, and the Church will continue to do this. It is right and good to do this, and we should just be honest about it. "Canon" means "we consistently, across time and space, find a way to God there".
20. We do not use the Bible as a rule-book. If we did, the result would be hysterical. The Bible is not intended to be a rulebook, in my opinion. If you go looking for rules, best of luck. If you go, however, looking for identity - now there's something you might find.
The language of faith
21. In continually articulating who we are and what we are about, we should continue to use the full breadth of human written expression found in the Bible - paradox, hyperbole, exaggeration, metaphor, simile, aphorism, epistle, narrative, poem, song, allegory, folktale, martyr cycle, instruction, debate, drama, liturgy and so on, as well as the fuller variety of human expression including music, visual arts, and dance which go beyond a literal text and express meaning in new ways. Our language should be as limitless as creation.
This is the view of someone who is appearantly an ordained PCUSA pastor
Members of the Committee,
It is a Christian obligation to acknowledge, affirm, welcome and create an environment in which the love between two persons, regardless of sexual identity or preference, is fully invited and held to a high standard of mutual obligation between partners. I believe this because those who have struggled within the closet often cannot receive the love of God and proclaim it until they emerge as the person that God has intended them to be.
The closet is not a euphemistic metaphor to which we can casually refer in some derogatory or humorous manner. The closet is a prison cell that society has constructed for those who are not heterosexual. Yet as the witness of countless persons who have struggled within the closet and emerged alive attests, it was Christ who released their soul from captivity, and it was only out of the closet that Christ could fully be received. For it is the emergence of the person from out of the closet that attests to the power of the Gospel to liberate the lonely, the oppressed, the outcast and the sinner to a new life in Christ irrespective of sexual identity.
Christian theology needs to be tempered with a pragmatic realism that understands one consistent feature in the map of Christian history: Its functional social mutability. How Christian theology and Scripture functions among people is constrained by the cultural boundaries a given society constructs. In this regard the notion of sin is a socially constructed understanding of Biblical rules and mandates for conduct. What we truly believe to be absolute sin today is not the same as it was ages ago, regardless in some cases of what Scripture actually says. The meaning of Scripture mutates with each culture and civilization as different peoples construct different meanings of the text to communicate and reveal the risen Christ in their midst.
Many who claim authoritative interpretations of Scripture maintain that women ought not hold offices of teaching men theology or holding any position of authority over men in the church or in the home. Women are commanded by God to inhabit specific social roles. The social equality of women in the West is a recent development after centuries of what we now assert were poor interpretations of the role of women as revealed in Scripture. That women have a vital function in the ministry and can indeed hold offices of authority over men in theological matters is far more normative than ever and will continue to be more normative with succeeding generations. This is certainly the case within the PCUSA. The same discussions about the role of women, slaves and people of color have taken place within the PCUSA as we are now discussing concerning homosexuality. We need to observe this from a rational perspective lest we fold into some irrational progressivism where we simply assume that our age is more enlightened than previous ages.
One reading is to assert what Paul or Jesus would have said in our current context. Such assertions inevitably take the shape of whoever is doing the arguing for a given position. As one assertion runs, Paul would have not supported even benevolent slavery today. However it is quite clear from the text that benevolent slavery was something he with Jesus most likely accepted. Such a supposed trajectory does not change the fact that there is good reason to believe that Paul supported an owner’s authority over a slave who works for no wage at all other than a forced exchange of shelter and food. This sort of authoritarian situation does not justify benevolence no matter how familial it is rendered. Most sovereign states have laws that are binding to prevent this sort of economic exchange. Yet many Christian traditions, PCUSA notwithstanding, would oppose a repeal of slavery laws or the equal treatment of women or people of other races on moral grounds rooted in Scripture – the same Scripture that once justified slavery. This is reasoned through how a particular social structure mediates what it believes to be the revealed Word in Scripture for them at a given moment in time.
The point is that we make assumptions on how we read these texts based on variability of contextual matters. I have been on several sides of the debate regarding those in relationships other than traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships and the turning point was not in how I understood sin, but in how I understood love and what healthy and up-building relatedness looks like. Our society and psychology mediate our relatedness to God in often intractable ways. We can only relate to God through the media of our experience with the world. If we regulate behaviors in ways that reinforce disordered relationships between non-heterosexuals such as forbidding marriage among other things, our systems of purity and social constructs function as media that will inevitably reinforce disordered relationships with God, or altogether kill off any such possibility. Sin as something prohibitive of behavior is not the issue as much as what kind of relationships serve to mediate the ability of one to receive what is good from God and what relationships fail in that capacity. The assertion that all same gendered relationships are inherently disordered is at stake.
Can a non-heterosexual couple receive the love of Christ in their relationship more fully than outside that relationship? The evidence from same-gender relationships tells us that we should affirm this claim and reject that same-gender relationships are inherently disordered. It is clear that any form of slavery is unjust and ultimately dehumanizing; and women in places of theological and Biblical authority over men is up-building and not destructive to the church. Likewise we are obligated to affirm where the love of Christ is being revealed, experienced, expressed and witnessed among those who happen to have found Him in a place that the church currently rejects as legitimate. Not to respond to this revelation of Christ is to grieve the same Spirit that gives life to the church universal.
Andrew Tatusko, M.Div., Th.M.
Duncansville, Pa.
It is a Christian obligation to acknowledge, affirm, welcome and create an environment in which the love between two persons, regardless of sexual identity or preference, is fully invited and held to a high standard of mutual obligation between partners. I believe this because those who have struggled within the closet often cannot receive the love of God and proclaim it until they emerge as the person that God has intended them to be.
The closet is not a euphemistic metaphor to which we can casually refer in some derogatory or humorous manner. The closet is a prison cell that society has constructed for those who are not heterosexual. Yet as the witness of countless persons who have struggled within the closet and emerged alive attests, it was Christ who released their soul from captivity, and it was only out of the closet that Christ could fully be received. For it is the emergence of the person from out of the closet that attests to the power of the Gospel to liberate the lonely, the oppressed, the outcast and the sinner to a new life in Christ irrespective of sexual identity.
Christian theology needs to be tempered with a pragmatic realism that understands one consistent feature in the map of Christian history: Its functional social mutability. How Christian theology and Scripture functions among people is constrained by the cultural boundaries a given society constructs. In this regard the notion of sin is a socially constructed understanding of Biblical rules and mandates for conduct. What we truly believe to be absolute sin today is not the same as it was ages ago, regardless in some cases of what Scripture actually says. The meaning of Scripture mutates with each culture and civilization as different peoples construct different meanings of the text to communicate and reveal the risen Christ in their midst.
Many who claim authoritative interpretations of Scripture maintain that women ought not hold offices of teaching men theology or holding any position of authority over men in the church or in the home. Women are commanded by God to inhabit specific social roles. The social equality of women in the West is a recent development after centuries of what we now assert were poor interpretations of the role of women as revealed in Scripture. That women have a vital function in the ministry and can indeed hold offices of authority over men in theological matters is far more normative than ever and will continue to be more normative with succeeding generations. This is certainly the case within the PCUSA. The same discussions about the role of women, slaves and people of color have taken place within the PCUSA as we are now discussing concerning homosexuality. We need to observe this from a rational perspective lest we fold into some irrational progressivism where we simply assume that our age is more enlightened than previous ages.
One reading is to assert what Paul or Jesus would have said in our current context. Such assertions inevitably take the shape of whoever is doing the arguing for a given position. As one assertion runs, Paul would have not supported even benevolent slavery today. However it is quite clear from the text that benevolent slavery was something he with Jesus most likely accepted. Such a supposed trajectory does not change the fact that there is good reason to believe that Paul supported an owner’s authority over a slave who works for no wage at all other than a forced exchange of shelter and food. This sort of authoritarian situation does not justify benevolence no matter how familial it is rendered. Most sovereign states have laws that are binding to prevent this sort of economic exchange. Yet many Christian traditions, PCUSA notwithstanding, would oppose a repeal of slavery laws or the equal treatment of women or people of other races on moral grounds rooted in Scripture – the same Scripture that once justified slavery. This is reasoned through how a particular social structure mediates what it believes to be the revealed Word in Scripture for them at a given moment in time.
The point is that we make assumptions on how we read these texts based on variability of contextual matters. I have been on several sides of the debate regarding those in relationships other than traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships and the turning point was not in how I understood sin, but in how I understood love and what healthy and up-building relatedness looks like. Our society and psychology mediate our relatedness to God in often intractable ways. We can only relate to God through the media of our experience with the world. If we regulate behaviors in ways that reinforce disordered relationships between non-heterosexuals such as forbidding marriage among other things, our systems of purity and social constructs function as media that will inevitably reinforce disordered relationships with God, or altogether kill off any such possibility. Sin as something prohibitive of behavior is not the issue as much as what kind of relationships serve to mediate the ability of one to receive what is good from God and what relationships fail in that capacity. The assertion that all same gendered relationships are inherently disordered is at stake.
Can a non-heterosexual couple receive the love of Christ in their relationship more fully than outside that relationship? The evidence from same-gender relationships tells us that we should affirm this claim and reject that same-gender relationships are inherently disordered. It is clear that any form of slavery is unjust and ultimately dehumanizing; and women in places of theological and Biblical authority over men is up-building and not destructive to the church. Likewise we are obligated to affirm where the love of Christ is being revealed, experienced, expressed and witnessed among those who happen to have found Him in a place that the church currently rejects as legitimate. Not to respond to this revelation of Christ is to grieve the same Spirit that gives life to the church universal.
Andrew Tatusko, M.Div., Th.M.
Duncansville, Pa.
More awesomeness from P-BO, and open letter to el Presidente.
An Open Letter to President Obama Regarding the Appointment of Science Advisor John Holdren
Dear President Obama,
I note with dismay your appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Although Dr. Holdren’s experience in academia and administration may be adequate, his publicly expressed views regarding population control disqualify him from holding office.
I will set aside objections to Dr. Holdren’s scientific competence. Despite his strong scientific credentials, he advanced theories in the 1970’s and 1980’s that have become the paradigm of ideologically motivated junk science. He and his collaborators (such as co-author Paul Ehrlich) predicted world-wide famine as a consequence of over-population by the late 20th century, and they advocated radical coercive public policies to avert catastrophe. These predictions were explicit, public, and were published under professional imprimatur. Obviously, the predictions were wrong. Dr.Holdren’s predictions are an exemplar of scientific incompetence.
But it is the spectre of Dr. Holdren’s competence, not his incompetence, that concerns me. In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women — particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth — could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into drinking water or in food.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.
Although Dr. Holdren recently has asserted that he does not support coercive measures to reduce population, he has continued to champion population control ‘science’ and he includes his book “Ecoscience” prominently on his CV, without disclaimer.
In other words, Dr. Holdren dissembles. He insists, despite the record, that he no longer believes what he 'didn’t believe' then. Evidently you accept his denial. As you are, Mr. President, a man of good will, inclined to see the best in people, you may have misunderstood Dr. Holdren’s ideology. It has a history that runs from early 20th century eugenics to the German T4 program to the modern population control movement and eco-fundamentalism. It is a view of man as pestilence. No one who holds that view, or has held that view, or who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of that view, should be in a position of influence in our government.
There is a deep and disturbing irony in your appointment of Dr. Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The irony, sir, is this: Dr. Holdren endorsed the serious consideration of radical measures — including involuntary sterilization and abortion — to cull mankind. And he was not an equal-opportunity culler. He betrayed a particular animus to children conceived of third world parentage to young mothers of limited means. He asserted that they were a burden that we dare not bear — for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the Earth. He implored us to ensure that these children were never given life.
He meant you.
Sincerely,
Michael Egnor, M.D.
Dear President Obama,
I note with dismay your appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Although Dr. Holdren’s experience in academia and administration may be adequate, his publicly expressed views regarding population control disqualify him from holding office.
I will set aside objections to Dr. Holdren’s scientific competence. Despite his strong scientific credentials, he advanced theories in the 1970’s and 1980’s that have become the paradigm of ideologically motivated junk science. He and his collaborators (such as co-author Paul Ehrlich) predicted world-wide famine as a consequence of over-population by the late 20th century, and they advocated radical coercive public policies to avert catastrophe. These predictions were explicit, public, and were published under professional imprimatur. Obviously, the predictions were wrong. Dr.Holdren’s predictions are an exemplar of scientific incompetence.
But it is the spectre of Dr. Holdren’s competence, not his incompetence, that concerns me. In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women — particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth — could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into drinking water or in food.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.
Although Dr. Holdren recently has asserted that he does not support coercive measures to reduce population, he has continued to champion population control ‘science’ and he includes his book “Ecoscience” prominently on his CV, without disclaimer.
In other words, Dr. Holdren dissembles. He insists, despite the record, that he no longer believes what he 'didn’t believe' then. Evidently you accept his denial. As you are, Mr. President, a man of good will, inclined to see the best in people, you may have misunderstood Dr. Holdren’s ideology. It has a history that runs from early 20th century eugenics to the German T4 program to the modern population control movement and eco-fundamentalism. It is a view of man as pestilence. No one who holds that view, or has held that view, or who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of that view, should be in a position of influence in our government.
There is a deep and disturbing irony in your appointment of Dr. Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The irony, sir, is this: Dr. Holdren endorsed the serious consideration of radical measures — including involuntary sterilization and abortion — to cull mankind. And he was not an equal-opportunity culler. He betrayed a particular animus to children conceived of third world parentage to young mothers of limited means. He asserted that they were a burden that we dare not bear — for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the Earth. He implored us to ensure that these children were never given life.
He meant you.
Sincerely,
Michael Egnor, M.D.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Orality
Dan,
In response to your comment earlier, I am pasting an essay from Dr. Greg Boyd that addresses the issue if oral tradition (not exhaustively). I would urge you to check out his research, if you are interested in a more up to date perspective on transmission of the Bible
One of the standard tests historians put to ancient documents to assess their veracity is self-consistency. Generally speaking, fabricated accounts tend to include more inconsistencies than truthful accounts. Hence, the absence of inner contradictions contributes to a positive estimation of the document’s historical veracity. In the case of the four Gospels, we must ask this question not only in relation to each individual Gospel but, perhaps even more significantly, of the Gospels’ relationship with one another, for they each purport to tell essentially the same story.
Now, it is frequently alleged that, as a matter of fact, the Gospels contain contradictions within themselves and with one another. It is not my goal in this essay to address these particular allegations. This has already been carried out by a number of very capable scholars (1). My goal in this essay is more general. What I’ll rather attempt to do is demonstrate that the apparent contradictions within and between the Gospels becomes inconsequential to our assessment of their veracity once they are understood as written versions of oral recitations of an oral tradition and thus interpreted within what’s called an “oral register” (against the background of an oral culture). To the contrary, the level of variation in and between the Gospels is precisely what we should expect given that these works are intended to be oral recitations of an oral tradition. (I want to acknowledge that I am immensely indebted to my good friend Paul Eddy whose incredible research uncovered what I’m about to share regarding oral traditions. For a full account of this research, see Eddy, Boyd The Jesus Legend (Baker, 2007).
The Discrepancies Within and Between the Gospels. No informed person denies that there are apparent contradictions within and between the four Gospels. These apparent conflicts can be grouped into four general categories:
1) Instances of apparently mutually exclusive reports. For example, did Jesus tell his disciples to take a staff and sandals as Mark reports (Mk 6:8-9), or not to take them, as Matthew reports (Matt 10:9-10)?
2) Instances within a Gospel where it appears that one historical event has been recorded as two separate events. (These are called ‘doublets”). Perhaps the most famous example of this is the two differing accounts of Jesus supernaturally feeding the multitudes (e.g. Mark 6:33-44 and 8:1-9). Many critical scholars argue these two stories are actually two varying accounts of the same story.
3) Unexplainable omissions or additions within parallel passages. For example, Mark and Luke record Jesus giving an unqualified prohibition against divorce (Mark’s [10:11-12; Luke 16:18) while Matthew adds an exception clause ( Matthew’s 5:32; 19:9).
4) Chronological conflicts. For example, the episode of Jesus cursing the fig-tree and teaching his disciples it’s lesson occurs over two-days in Mark (Mk 11:12-14, 20-25) while Matthew collapses this into one instantaneous event (Mt 21:18-22).
The question is, do conflicts such as these constitute “contradictions” that should undermine our assessment of the historical veracity of these works or can most of these sorts of conflicts be plausibly shown to merely apparent? In other words, can these apparent contradictions be harmonized? While I will not here attempt such harmonizations, as I said above, I offer five broad considerations that I believe render an affirmative answer to these questions more likely than not.
A Change in Attitude. First, it’s important to note that none of these apparent conflicts have been discovered recently. To the contrary, thinkers have known about since the second century and have offered ways of resolving them (2). Clearly, therefore, the insistence on the part of many contemporary New Testament critics, including all legendary-Jesus theorists, that these conflicts are irresolvable and thus undermine the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels is not rooted in any newly discovered facts. Nor is it rooted in any new evidence demonstrating that the proposed ways of harmonizing these conflicts are all implausible. Rather, this insistence is rooted in a relatively new attitude many scholars bring to the data.
More specifically, proposed ways of reconciling conflicts within and between the Gospels have become implausible to many contemporary scholars not necessarily because they are inherently so, but because the naturalistic worldview that has been embraced by these modern scholars renders them so. That is, because the Gospels contain miracles, which the naturalistic worldview disallows, these scholars bring to these works a skeptical attitude that renders attempts to resolve their apparent contradictions superfluous.
To come at this from a slightly different direction, one only attempts to resolve contradictions within and between documents if they believe it’s at least possible the works in question are generally trustworthy. If one rather has already concluded that a set of documents are not generally trustworthy, then the appearance of contradictions simply confirms what one assumes they already knew: namely, that the documents in question are not reliable. Indeed, in the case of the Gospels, many critics assume that attempts to reconcile apparent conflicts is always theologically motivated (viz. trying to defend a conception of biblical inspiration), and thus cannot be judged as representing good, historical-critical scholarship.
The prejudicial nature of this skeptical stance is shown in the fact that, from a strictly historiographical perspective, the apparent conflicts between the Gospels is completely normal. Rarely in history do we find multiple witnesses to an event that do not contain apparent contradictions. As Gilbert Garraghan explains in his Guide to Historical Method, “almost any critical history that discusses the evidence for important statements will furnish examples of discrepant or contradictory accounts and the attempts which are made to reconcile them (3).
From discrepant reports of Alexander the Great by Arrian and Plutarch to the differing accounts of Hannibal crossing the Alps by Livy and Polybius all the way up to conflicts between reports found every week in our various news magazines, discrepancies are the norm – which means attempts at harmonization accounts must be the rule as we try to discern “what actually happened.” Because of this, the standard historiographical assumption is that conflicting data that is purportedly historical deserves to be read as sympathetically as possible, with attempts to harmonize the conflicting data carried out before one dismisses the data as unreliable on the basis of these apparent conflicts. The only apparent reason legendary-Jesus theorist don’t extend this same courtesy to the Gospels is because they have already decided – for metaphysical, not historiographical, reasons – that the Gospels aren’t trustworthy. And this, I argue, is prejudicial.
The Fragmentary Nature of Oral Recitations. Second, it’s vital we remember that the Gospels were written in the context of an orally dominated culture in which written played a minor role. In contexts like this, traditions are passed on orally typically through the medium of an oral performer reciting some aspect of the oral tradition before a community of listeners. The Gospels must be understood as written versions of an oral recitation.
Now, if searching for ways of harmonizing apparently conflicting accounts is generally warranted when trying to discern “what actually happened,” it is all the more so when one is dealing with apparent conflicts between written oral recitations, such as the Gospels. Recent orality studies have demonstrated that oral recitations, whether written or not, always presuppose a much broader tradition that is well-known to the listening audience. This broader tradition forms what has been called the “mental text” of the community, and it forms the assumed context within which all shared episodes of the oral tradition, written or performed, make sense.
For this reason, oral performances, whether written out or not, employ a good deal of “metonymy,” which is “a mode of signification wherein a part stands for the whole” (4). Hence, most of what is intended to be communicated by tradents (oral performers) within the community is not explicitly stated in any given oral or written performance. They typically “[record] the relevant facts very partially… relying on a background of memory and witnesses” (5). And in light of these considerations we must conclude we will always misunderstand works written with an oral register if we treat them as if they were modern, autonomous, self-sufficient works.
Rosalind Thomas makes this point well when he notes that ancient documents “presuppose knowledge which is simply remembered and not written down.” Far from being autonomous works, as texts with literate registers tend to be, ancient works “cannot perform their task without backing from non-written communication.” Hence, she concludes,
It becomes difficult to separate oral and written modes in any meaningful sense except in the most basic one (i.e., what was written down and what was not). It is surely only our modern confidence in and obsession with the written text which see documents as entirely self-sufficient” (6).
The implications of these observations are significant when it comes to assessing the apparent conflicts within and between the Gospels. It means that to treat these works responsibly we have to try to imagine the broader tradition the audience and author shared and within which the individual, fragmentary, elliptical accounts were originally understood. And this means we have to try to imagine a broader oral context within which the apparent conflicts between accounts can be harmonized. In this light, we must conclude that the refusal of skeptical scholars to acknowledge the legitimacy of attempting to harmonize the Gospel accounts is not only prejudicial; it is fundamentally opposed to the very nature of the Gospel texts themselves.
These observations of course don’t imply that we can simply assume that if we had access to the broader oral tradition of the early Christians all apparent conflicts would be resolved. From a strictly historiographical perspective, we have to concede that it’s possible that various traditions gradually modified their contents in the course of transmission in ways that simply contradict other traditions, even by ancient oral standards. But it does imply that modern scholars shouldn’t assume that what appears to us to be a contradiction wouldn’t be reconciled if we had access to the broader oral traditions the written Gospels draw on and feed back into. And, therefore, it implies we shouldn’t dismiss plausible proposals as to how apparent conflicts might be harmonized by appealing to the broader, presupposed, oral tradition shared by the Gospel’s original audience. To the contrary, as we’ve said, to read the Gospels non-anachronistically, we have to try to imagine this broader shared background.
On Remembering Things, Not Words. Third, orality studies have consistently demonstrated that focus of memory in oral traditions is generally on things, not words. As we’ve said, oral performers are typically given significant leeway in how they retell a story, so long as they convey the essence of the story accurately. This means that we can expect to find the essential voice of Jesus in the early Church’s oral tradition, but we cannot suppose early Christians would have been invested in preserving the exact words of Jesus. It also suggests that we are completely missing the mark if we suppose there to be any genuine conflict between the different ways the Gospels record Jesus’ teachings and/or the events of Jesus life. Modern, literate minded people might find a contradiction between one Gospel author recording Jesus telling his disciples to wear sandals (Mk 6:9) while the others have him forbidding them (Mt 10: 10; Lk 10:4), but its very unlikely any ancient person would have been concerned in the least with such a variance in detail. For the essential point of Jesus’ teaching is the same in all three accounts – namely, the disciples were to trust God for their provisions while doing missionary work (7)
Schematic Wholes Over Discrete Facts. Fourth, and closely related to this, we now know that oral traditions typically place far more emphasis on schematic wholes than on details. (8) Rudolf Bultmann and most other early form critics assumed that oral traditions could only pass on small units of tradition, not extended narratives. But they had it exactly wrong. Generally speaking, explicit and implicit extended narratives functioning as integrated schematic complexes are precisely the sorts of things that are viewed as most essential to oral traditions. What is not so essential is the precise way events are ordered and remembered in any given oral performance.
A. Sowayan’s insightful study of Arabic historical narrative in the oral mode is instructive at this point. Sowayan demonstrated that orally transmitted narratives are designed as suwalif – meaning, literally, “ to have happened in the past.” In sharp contrast to the widespread assumption of western scholars in the past that oral traditions tend to lack genuine historical interest, Sowayan has shown that the traditional narratives he studied were centered on “historical events and biographical or social circumstances connected with the immediate, or remote, past” (9). Yet, he has also demonstrated that the order in which events are presented in any given oral performance has more to do with the “process of remembering” on the part of the performer than it does with the order in which events actually took place. “[A]s one remembers” he says, , “one narrates” (10). “Once the narrative begins,” he adds, “it can be developed in any of several possible directions, depending upon the performance context” (11).
Sowayan fleshes out the nature of these historical, oral recitations when he continues;
…a long narrative is a cluster of smaller narratives which are imbedded and interlinked with each other. The swarming of the various narratives to the narrator’s mind as he starts, and the disentanglement of the various episodes as they come in the way of one another and crowd in [into?] his breast . . . can be likened to the flocking of thirsty camels to the drinking-trough . . . . At times, stories come in the way of one another and the narrator may find himself compelled to suspend an ongoing story in the middle to tell a different one . . . . This is because narratives are plentiful and interconnected (12).
Numerous orality studies have found a similar pattern in a wide variety of cultural settings (13). Unless they are familiar with it, this sort of non-linear, creative flexibility in how material is presented may strike literary minded people as involving historical inaccuracies and contradictions. But, as a matter of fact, such a conclusion would merely evidence how thoroughly these modern people had misunderstood the nature of oral performances in orally-dominated cultures.
It is no accident that the Gospels each exhibit this interesting balance between essential fixity and creative flexibility. As oral tradents, the Gospel authors freely rearrange events and sayings. They sometimes seem to collate and/or divide up events (as we earlier noted Matthew doing with Mark’s version of the fig-tree cursing). At times they seem to intentionally do this for topical reasons. But, for all we know, at other times they may do so simply because this is how the material presented itself to them as they were composing their oral recitation. In any event, by the standards of orally dominated cultures, the fact that the way events and sayings are ordered is markedly different in each Gospel does not constitute a contradiction by the stands appropriate to oral traditions and does not in the least compromise the genuineness of the historical interest or capabilities of the Gospel authors. To think otherwise, as many legendary-Jesus theorists do, is to think anachronistically.
.
Jesus as an Itinerant Preacher. A fifth and final implication of orality studies for our understanding of apparent conflicts within and between the Gospels centers on the itinerate ministry of Jesus himself. Because the modern critical study of the Gospels has been driven by a literary paradigm, insufficient attention has been paid to the realities and constraints that would have characterized Jesus’ traveling ministry an orally dominated culture (14). Only recently have a few modern scholars begun to seriously work through the implications of the fact that Jesus’ ministry would have of necessity been characterized by multiple oral performances of the same – or at least very similar – material.
Werner Kelber hits the mark when he notes that “…reiteration and variation of words and stories must be assumed for Jesus’ own proclamation. Multiple, variable renditions, while observable in tradition, are highly plausible in Jesus own oral performance” (15). N.T. Wright notes the “enormous implications… this [observation] has for synoptic criticism” when he argues that “[w]ithin the peasant oral culture of his day, Jesus must have left behind him, not one or two isolated traditions, but a veritable mare’s nest of anecdotes, and also of sentences, aphorisms, rhythmic sayings, memorable stories with local variations, [etc.]” (16).
This implies that, in all likelihood, many of the variations of Jesus’ teachings found in the Gospels – variations that modern literate minded scholars tend to explain by appealing to the different redactional purposes of each individual author — are probably better explained simply as oral variations performed by Jesus himself (17). This also likely explains the “doublets” found in the Gospels. An itinerate preacher like Jesus would have said and done very similar things in different locations at different times. To reject such an explanation, as many skeptical scholars do, is to “simply have no historical imagination for what an itinerant ministry, within a peasant culture, would look like” (18).
To conclude, it is clear that by the standards of a literary paradigm, the Gospels indeed contain “contradictions.” What we have been arguing, however, is that evaluating them by these modern standards is anachronistic. Judged by the conventions and constraints of their own orally-dominated cultural context and read sympathetically with an imaginative appreciation for the broad oral tradition they were written to express and feed back into, the Gospels are shown to exhibit the sort of broad internal consistency that suggests that the authors both intended to faithfulyl record the essential aspects of Jesus’ life and that they were successful at doing so.
———————–
(1) See, for example, C. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1987) 113-52; S. L. Bridge, Getting the Gospels: Understanding the New Testament Accounts of Jesus’ Life (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004); and R. H. Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996) parts I - II.
(2) See R. M. Grant, The Earliest Lives of Jesus (New York: Harper, 1961).
(3) G. Garraghan, A Guide to Historical Method (New York: Fordham, 1946) 314. See also J. Topolski, Methodology of History (Warsaw: PWN – Polish Scientific Publishers, 1976) 471-3.
(4) J. M. Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) 7.
(5) R. Thomas, Literacy and Orality, in Ancient Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 76-7.
(6) Ancient documents “presuppose knowledge which is simply remembered and not written down.” Far from being autonomous works, as texts with literate registers tend to be, ancient works “cannot perform their task without backing from non-written communication.” Hence, she concludes, “ It becomes difficult to separate oral and written modes in any meaningful sense except in the most basic one (i.e., what was written down and what was not). It is surely only our modern confidence in and obsession with the written text which see documents as entirely self-sufficient.” Thomas, Literacy and Orality, 76.
(7) A point Augustine recognized in his harmony long ago; see Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts, 26-8.
(8) For a clear explication of this phenomenon drawn from contemporary Malay culture see A. Sweeney, A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley; University of California Pressm 1987), esp. 8-12, 272, 297-8, 305.
(9) S. A. Sowayan, The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative: An Ethnographic and Linguistic Analysis (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992) 19.
(10) Ibid., 22.
(11) Op. cit.
(12) Ibid., 23.
(13) See, for example, Robin Law’s study within the Yoruba. “How Truly Traditional is Our Traditional History? The Case of Samuel Johnson and the Recording of Yoruba Oral Tradition.” History in Africa 11 (1984) 198.
(14) A point forcefully made by Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress) 170-1.
(15) Kelber, “Jesus and Tradition: Words in Time, Words in Space,” Semeia 65 (1994), 146.
(16) Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 170.
(17) Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 170, see also 632-3.
(18) Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 171.
In response to your comment earlier, I am pasting an essay from Dr. Greg Boyd that addresses the issue if oral tradition (not exhaustively). I would urge you to check out his research, if you are interested in a more up to date perspective on transmission of the Bible
One of the standard tests historians put to ancient documents to assess their veracity is self-consistency. Generally speaking, fabricated accounts tend to include more inconsistencies than truthful accounts. Hence, the absence of inner contradictions contributes to a positive estimation of the document’s historical veracity. In the case of the four Gospels, we must ask this question not only in relation to each individual Gospel but, perhaps even more significantly, of the Gospels’ relationship with one another, for they each purport to tell essentially the same story.
Now, it is frequently alleged that, as a matter of fact, the Gospels contain contradictions within themselves and with one another. It is not my goal in this essay to address these particular allegations. This has already been carried out by a number of very capable scholars (1). My goal in this essay is more general. What I’ll rather attempt to do is demonstrate that the apparent contradictions within and between the Gospels becomes inconsequential to our assessment of their veracity once they are understood as written versions of oral recitations of an oral tradition and thus interpreted within what’s called an “oral register” (against the background of an oral culture). To the contrary, the level of variation in and between the Gospels is precisely what we should expect given that these works are intended to be oral recitations of an oral tradition. (I want to acknowledge that I am immensely indebted to my good friend Paul Eddy whose incredible research uncovered what I’m about to share regarding oral traditions. For a full account of this research, see Eddy, Boyd The Jesus Legend (Baker, 2007).
The Discrepancies Within and Between the Gospels. No informed person denies that there are apparent contradictions within and between the four Gospels. These apparent conflicts can be grouped into four general categories:
1) Instances of apparently mutually exclusive reports. For example, did Jesus tell his disciples to take a staff and sandals as Mark reports (Mk 6:8-9), or not to take them, as Matthew reports (Matt 10:9-10)?
2) Instances within a Gospel where it appears that one historical event has been recorded as two separate events. (These are called ‘doublets”). Perhaps the most famous example of this is the two differing accounts of Jesus supernaturally feeding the multitudes (e.g. Mark 6:33-44 and 8:1-9). Many critical scholars argue these two stories are actually two varying accounts of the same story.
3) Unexplainable omissions or additions within parallel passages. For example, Mark and Luke record Jesus giving an unqualified prohibition against divorce (Mark’s [10:11-12; Luke 16:18) while Matthew adds an exception clause ( Matthew’s 5:32; 19:9).
4) Chronological conflicts. For example, the episode of Jesus cursing the fig-tree and teaching his disciples it’s lesson occurs over two-days in Mark (Mk 11:12-14, 20-25) while Matthew collapses this into one instantaneous event (Mt 21:18-22).
The question is, do conflicts such as these constitute “contradictions” that should undermine our assessment of the historical veracity of these works or can most of these sorts of conflicts be plausibly shown to merely apparent? In other words, can these apparent contradictions be harmonized? While I will not here attempt such harmonizations, as I said above, I offer five broad considerations that I believe render an affirmative answer to these questions more likely than not.
A Change in Attitude. First, it’s important to note that none of these apparent conflicts have been discovered recently. To the contrary, thinkers have known about since the second century and have offered ways of resolving them (2). Clearly, therefore, the insistence on the part of many contemporary New Testament critics, including all legendary-Jesus theorists, that these conflicts are irresolvable and thus undermine the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels is not rooted in any newly discovered facts. Nor is it rooted in any new evidence demonstrating that the proposed ways of harmonizing these conflicts are all implausible. Rather, this insistence is rooted in a relatively new attitude many scholars bring to the data.
More specifically, proposed ways of reconciling conflicts within and between the Gospels have become implausible to many contemporary scholars not necessarily because they are inherently so, but because the naturalistic worldview that has been embraced by these modern scholars renders them so. That is, because the Gospels contain miracles, which the naturalistic worldview disallows, these scholars bring to these works a skeptical attitude that renders attempts to resolve their apparent contradictions superfluous.
To come at this from a slightly different direction, one only attempts to resolve contradictions within and between documents if they believe it’s at least possible the works in question are generally trustworthy. If one rather has already concluded that a set of documents are not generally trustworthy, then the appearance of contradictions simply confirms what one assumes they already knew: namely, that the documents in question are not reliable. Indeed, in the case of the Gospels, many critics assume that attempts to reconcile apparent conflicts is always theologically motivated (viz. trying to defend a conception of biblical inspiration), and thus cannot be judged as representing good, historical-critical scholarship.
The prejudicial nature of this skeptical stance is shown in the fact that, from a strictly historiographical perspective, the apparent conflicts between the Gospels is completely normal. Rarely in history do we find multiple witnesses to an event that do not contain apparent contradictions. As Gilbert Garraghan explains in his Guide to Historical Method, “almost any critical history that discusses the evidence for important statements will furnish examples of discrepant or contradictory accounts and the attempts which are made to reconcile them (3).
From discrepant reports of Alexander the Great by Arrian and Plutarch to the differing accounts of Hannibal crossing the Alps by Livy and Polybius all the way up to conflicts between reports found every week in our various news magazines, discrepancies are the norm – which means attempts at harmonization accounts must be the rule as we try to discern “what actually happened.” Because of this, the standard historiographical assumption is that conflicting data that is purportedly historical deserves to be read as sympathetically as possible, with attempts to harmonize the conflicting data carried out before one dismisses the data as unreliable on the basis of these apparent conflicts. The only apparent reason legendary-Jesus theorist don’t extend this same courtesy to the Gospels is because they have already decided – for metaphysical, not historiographical, reasons – that the Gospels aren’t trustworthy. And this, I argue, is prejudicial.
The Fragmentary Nature of Oral Recitations. Second, it’s vital we remember that the Gospels were written in the context of an orally dominated culture in which written played a minor role. In contexts like this, traditions are passed on orally typically through the medium of an oral performer reciting some aspect of the oral tradition before a community of listeners. The Gospels must be understood as written versions of an oral recitation.
Now, if searching for ways of harmonizing apparently conflicting accounts is generally warranted when trying to discern “what actually happened,” it is all the more so when one is dealing with apparent conflicts between written oral recitations, such as the Gospels. Recent orality studies have demonstrated that oral recitations, whether written or not, always presuppose a much broader tradition that is well-known to the listening audience. This broader tradition forms what has been called the “mental text” of the community, and it forms the assumed context within which all shared episodes of the oral tradition, written or performed, make sense.
For this reason, oral performances, whether written out or not, employ a good deal of “metonymy,” which is “a mode of signification wherein a part stands for the whole” (4). Hence, most of what is intended to be communicated by tradents (oral performers) within the community is not explicitly stated in any given oral or written performance. They typically “[record] the relevant facts very partially… relying on a background of memory and witnesses” (5). And in light of these considerations we must conclude we will always misunderstand works written with an oral register if we treat them as if they were modern, autonomous, self-sufficient works.
Rosalind Thomas makes this point well when he notes that ancient documents “presuppose knowledge which is simply remembered and not written down.” Far from being autonomous works, as texts with literate registers tend to be, ancient works “cannot perform their task without backing from non-written communication.” Hence, she concludes,
It becomes difficult to separate oral and written modes in any meaningful sense except in the most basic one (i.e., what was written down and what was not). It is surely only our modern confidence in and obsession with the written text which see documents as entirely self-sufficient” (6).
The implications of these observations are significant when it comes to assessing the apparent conflicts within and between the Gospels. It means that to treat these works responsibly we have to try to imagine the broader tradition the audience and author shared and within which the individual, fragmentary, elliptical accounts were originally understood. And this means we have to try to imagine a broader oral context within which the apparent conflicts between accounts can be harmonized. In this light, we must conclude that the refusal of skeptical scholars to acknowledge the legitimacy of attempting to harmonize the Gospel accounts is not only prejudicial; it is fundamentally opposed to the very nature of the Gospel texts themselves.
These observations of course don’t imply that we can simply assume that if we had access to the broader oral tradition of the early Christians all apparent conflicts would be resolved. From a strictly historiographical perspective, we have to concede that it’s possible that various traditions gradually modified their contents in the course of transmission in ways that simply contradict other traditions, even by ancient oral standards. But it does imply that modern scholars shouldn’t assume that what appears to us to be a contradiction wouldn’t be reconciled if we had access to the broader oral traditions the written Gospels draw on and feed back into. And, therefore, it implies we shouldn’t dismiss plausible proposals as to how apparent conflicts might be harmonized by appealing to the broader, presupposed, oral tradition shared by the Gospel’s original audience. To the contrary, as we’ve said, to read the Gospels non-anachronistically, we have to try to imagine this broader shared background.
On Remembering Things, Not Words. Third, orality studies have consistently demonstrated that focus of memory in oral traditions is generally on things, not words. As we’ve said, oral performers are typically given significant leeway in how they retell a story, so long as they convey the essence of the story accurately. This means that we can expect to find the essential voice of Jesus in the early Church’s oral tradition, but we cannot suppose early Christians would have been invested in preserving the exact words of Jesus. It also suggests that we are completely missing the mark if we suppose there to be any genuine conflict between the different ways the Gospels record Jesus’ teachings and/or the events of Jesus life. Modern, literate minded people might find a contradiction between one Gospel author recording Jesus telling his disciples to wear sandals (Mk 6:9) while the others have him forbidding them (Mt 10: 10; Lk 10:4), but its very unlikely any ancient person would have been concerned in the least with such a variance in detail. For the essential point of Jesus’ teaching is the same in all three accounts – namely, the disciples were to trust God for their provisions while doing missionary work (7)
Schematic Wholes Over Discrete Facts. Fourth, and closely related to this, we now know that oral traditions typically place far more emphasis on schematic wholes than on details. (8) Rudolf Bultmann and most other early form critics assumed that oral traditions could only pass on small units of tradition, not extended narratives. But they had it exactly wrong. Generally speaking, explicit and implicit extended narratives functioning as integrated schematic complexes are precisely the sorts of things that are viewed as most essential to oral traditions. What is not so essential is the precise way events are ordered and remembered in any given oral performance.
A. Sowayan’s insightful study of Arabic historical narrative in the oral mode is instructive at this point. Sowayan demonstrated that orally transmitted narratives are designed as suwalif – meaning, literally, “ to have happened in the past.” In sharp contrast to the widespread assumption of western scholars in the past that oral traditions tend to lack genuine historical interest, Sowayan has shown that the traditional narratives he studied were centered on “historical events and biographical or social circumstances connected with the immediate, or remote, past” (9). Yet, he has also demonstrated that the order in which events are presented in any given oral performance has more to do with the “process of remembering” on the part of the performer than it does with the order in which events actually took place. “[A]s one remembers” he says, , “one narrates” (10). “Once the narrative begins,” he adds, “it can be developed in any of several possible directions, depending upon the performance context” (11).
Sowayan fleshes out the nature of these historical, oral recitations when he continues;
…a long narrative is a cluster of smaller narratives which are imbedded and interlinked with each other. The swarming of the various narratives to the narrator’s mind as he starts, and the disentanglement of the various episodes as they come in the way of one another and crowd in [into?] his breast . . . can be likened to the flocking of thirsty camels to the drinking-trough . . . . At times, stories come in the way of one another and the narrator may find himself compelled to suspend an ongoing story in the middle to tell a different one . . . . This is because narratives are plentiful and interconnected (12).
Numerous orality studies have found a similar pattern in a wide variety of cultural settings (13). Unless they are familiar with it, this sort of non-linear, creative flexibility in how material is presented may strike literary minded people as involving historical inaccuracies and contradictions. But, as a matter of fact, such a conclusion would merely evidence how thoroughly these modern people had misunderstood the nature of oral performances in orally-dominated cultures.
It is no accident that the Gospels each exhibit this interesting balance between essential fixity and creative flexibility. As oral tradents, the Gospel authors freely rearrange events and sayings. They sometimes seem to collate and/or divide up events (as we earlier noted Matthew doing with Mark’s version of the fig-tree cursing). At times they seem to intentionally do this for topical reasons. But, for all we know, at other times they may do so simply because this is how the material presented itself to them as they were composing their oral recitation. In any event, by the standards of orally dominated cultures, the fact that the way events and sayings are ordered is markedly different in each Gospel does not constitute a contradiction by the stands appropriate to oral traditions and does not in the least compromise the genuineness of the historical interest or capabilities of the Gospel authors. To think otherwise, as many legendary-Jesus theorists do, is to think anachronistically.
.
Jesus as an Itinerant Preacher. A fifth and final implication of orality studies for our understanding of apparent conflicts within and between the Gospels centers on the itinerate ministry of Jesus himself. Because the modern critical study of the Gospels has been driven by a literary paradigm, insufficient attention has been paid to the realities and constraints that would have characterized Jesus’ traveling ministry an orally dominated culture (14). Only recently have a few modern scholars begun to seriously work through the implications of the fact that Jesus’ ministry would have of necessity been characterized by multiple oral performances of the same – or at least very similar – material.
Werner Kelber hits the mark when he notes that “…reiteration and variation of words and stories must be assumed for Jesus’ own proclamation. Multiple, variable renditions, while observable in tradition, are highly plausible in Jesus own oral performance” (15). N.T. Wright notes the “enormous implications… this [observation] has for synoptic criticism” when he argues that “[w]ithin the peasant oral culture of his day, Jesus must have left behind him, not one or two isolated traditions, but a veritable mare’s nest of anecdotes, and also of sentences, aphorisms, rhythmic sayings, memorable stories with local variations, [etc.]” (16).
This implies that, in all likelihood, many of the variations of Jesus’ teachings found in the Gospels – variations that modern literate minded scholars tend to explain by appealing to the different redactional purposes of each individual author — are probably better explained simply as oral variations performed by Jesus himself (17). This also likely explains the “doublets” found in the Gospels. An itinerate preacher like Jesus would have said and done very similar things in different locations at different times. To reject such an explanation, as many skeptical scholars do, is to “simply have no historical imagination for what an itinerant ministry, within a peasant culture, would look like” (18).
To conclude, it is clear that by the standards of a literary paradigm, the Gospels indeed contain “contradictions.” What we have been arguing, however, is that evaluating them by these modern standards is anachronistic. Judged by the conventions and constraints of their own orally-dominated cultural context and read sympathetically with an imaginative appreciation for the broad oral tradition they were written to express and feed back into, the Gospels are shown to exhibit the sort of broad internal consistency that suggests that the authors both intended to faithfulyl record the essential aspects of Jesus’ life and that they were successful at doing so.
———————–
(1) See, for example, C. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1987) 113-52; S. L. Bridge, Getting the Gospels: Understanding the New Testament Accounts of Jesus’ Life (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004); and R. H. Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996) parts I - II.
(2) See R. M. Grant, The Earliest Lives of Jesus (New York: Harper, 1961).
(3) G. Garraghan, A Guide to Historical Method (New York: Fordham, 1946) 314. See also J. Topolski, Methodology of History (Warsaw: PWN – Polish Scientific Publishers, 1976) 471-3.
(4) J. M. Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) 7.
(5) R. Thomas, Literacy and Orality, in Ancient Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 76-7.
(6) Ancient documents “presuppose knowledge which is simply remembered and not written down.” Far from being autonomous works, as texts with literate registers tend to be, ancient works “cannot perform their task without backing from non-written communication.” Hence, she concludes, “ It becomes difficult to separate oral and written modes in any meaningful sense except in the most basic one (i.e., what was written down and what was not). It is surely only our modern confidence in and obsession with the written text which see documents as entirely self-sufficient.” Thomas, Literacy and Orality, 76.
(7) A point Augustine recognized in his harmony long ago; see Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts, 26-8.
(8) For a clear explication of this phenomenon drawn from contemporary Malay culture see A. Sweeney, A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley; University of California Pressm 1987), esp. 8-12, 272, 297-8, 305.
(9) S. A. Sowayan, The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative: An Ethnographic and Linguistic Analysis (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992) 19.
(10) Ibid., 22.
(11) Op. cit.
(12) Ibid., 23.
(13) See, for example, Robin Law’s study within the Yoruba. “How Truly Traditional is Our Traditional History? The Case of Samuel Johnson and the Recording of Yoruba Oral Tradition.” History in Africa 11 (1984) 198.
(14) A point forcefully made by Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress) 170-1.
(15) Kelber, “Jesus and Tradition: Words in Time, Words in Space,” Semeia 65 (1994), 146.
(16) Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 170.
(17) Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 170, see also 632-3.
(18) Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 171.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Stuff You Find
As I was going through some of my dad's papers the other day I came across a letter he sent to a client in 1979. It truly provided some much needed hilarity. I thought I would post it here for fun.
Dear Bob,
I know you are always looking for sound opportunities for investment.
I don't know if you would be interested in this, but I thought I would mention it to you because it could be a real "sleeper" in making a lot of money with very little investment.
A group of us are considering investing in a large cat ranch near Nogales City, Mexico. It is our purpose to start rather small, with about one million cats. Each cat averages about twelve kittens per year; each skin to be sold $.20 for the white ones and up to $.40 for the black. This will give us twelve million cat skins per year to sell at an average price of around$.32, making our revenue about three million dollars a year. This really averages out to ten thousand dollars a day excluding Sundays and holidays.
A good Mexican cat man can skin about 50 cats per day at a wage of $2.15 a day. It only takes 663 men to operate the ranch, so the net profit would be over eight thousand two hundred dollars per day.
Now the cats would be fed on rats exclusively. Rats multiply four times as fast as cats. We would start a rat ranch adjacent to our cat farm. If we start with a million rats we will have four rats per cat each day. The rats will be fed on the carcasses of the cats that we skin. This will give each cat a quarter of a cat. You can see by this that the buisness is a clean operation-self supporting and really automatic througout. The cats will eat the rats, and the rats will eat the cats, we get the skins.
Let me know if you are interested, as you can imagine, I am rather particular who I want to get into this, and want the fewest investors possible.
May I hear from you soon?
Yours truly,
Hope this is good for some laughs.
Dear Bob,
I know you are always looking for sound opportunities for investment.
I don't know if you would be interested in this, but I thought I would mention it to you because it could be a real "sleeper" in making a lot of money with very little investment.
A group of us are considering investing in a large cat ranch near Nogales City, Mexico. It is our purpose to start rather small, with about one million cats. Each cat averages about twelve kittens per year; each skin to be sold $.20 for the white ones and up to $.40 for the black. This will give us twelve million cat skins per year to sell at an average price of around$.32, making our revenue about three million dollars a year. This really averages out to ten thousand dollars a day excluding Sundays and holidays.
A good Mexican cat man can skin about 50 cats per day at a wage of $2.15 a day. It only takes 663 men to operate the ranch, so the net profit would be over eight thousand two hundred dollars per day.
Now the cats would be fed on rats exclusively. Rats multiply four times as fast as cats. We would start a rat ranch adjacent to our cat farm. If we start with a million rats we will have four rats per cat each day. The rats will be fed on the carcasses of the cats that we skin. This will give each cat a quarter of a cat. You can see by this that the buisness is a clean operation-self supporting and really automatic througout. The cats will eat the rats, and the rats will eat the cats, we get the skins.
Let me know if you are interested, as you can imagine, I am rather particular who I want to get into this, and want the fewest investors possible.
May I hear from you soon?
Yours truly,
Hope this is good for some laughs.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Bubba v. Dan
Over at Marshall's Dan and Bubba have been involved in a protracted dialogue. In it Bubba has asked Dan a series of questions, it seems as though Dan has not answered. It is my hope to provide a place for Bubba to restate his questions and hope that Dan will respond. I believe that one thing that caused some confusion was the number of different topics, it is my hope that this will avoid that. I would like to see some sort of agreement on some ground rules to keep things focused, and I would like (read will delete) comments from anyone other than Dan and Bubba.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
In essentials unity...
Over at Marshall Art's Dan asked a good question, to which I responded. To avoid going off topic I'm going to copy them here as a platform for future discussion if anyone is inclined.
Dan's question is as follows
And so, my question to you, Craig, is what do we do when two Christians disagree about an action? Do we disfellowship? Do we call names? Do we demonize? Or, do we live under God's grace, saying with Paul, "Who am I to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and stand he will, for the Lord is able to make him stand."
My response was.
As to your second question, that is the crux of the matter isn't it. The answer is long, complicated and playing out in a number of denominations ("mine" included) across the country. I'll try for a short version so as not to go too far astray, and we can continue elsewhere if you want. Here goes.
If the basic nature of the disagreement is rooted in authority of scripture (as I believe this to be) then at some point is would be appropriate to go so far as to disassociate (officially) from a part of the Church. I'm not sure name calling and demonizing (not that anyone on your side would stoop so low) is productive, but at some point it is possible for a doctrine or teaching to go beyond the bounds of Christianity into heresy territory. So I think that it would be possible to label someone a heretic without it being considered simply name calling. So, I guess my answer would be maybe.
Any thoughts?
Dan's question is as follows
And so, my question to you, Craig, is what do we do when two Christians disagree about an action? Do we disfellowship? Do we call names? Do we demonize? Or, do we live under God's grace, saying with Paul, "Who am I to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and stand he will, for the Lord is able to make him stand."
My response was.
As to your second question, that is the crux of the matter isn't it. The answer is long, complicated and playing out in a number of denominations ("mine" included) across the country. I'll try for a short version so as not to go too far astray, and we can continue elsewhere if you want. Here goes.
If the basic nature of the disagreement is rooted in authority of scripture (as I believe this to be) then at some point is would be appropriate to go so far as to disassociate (officially) from a part of the Church. I'm not sure name calling and demonizing (not that anyone on your side would stoop so low) is productive, but at some point it is possible for a doctrine or teaching to go beyond the bounds of Christianity into heresy territory. So I think that it would be possible to label someone a heretic without it being considered simply name calling. So, I guess my answer would be maybe.
Any thoughts?
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