Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for July 2017

Cosmic Remarriage: A Sermon by Chris Borah with some Reflection

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Below, you’ll find the audio to a sermon by one Chris Borah:

16 July Cosmic Remarriage by Chris Borah

It’s worth a listen. 

Here some brief festoonings and trains of thought brought up by his sermon (they may be of interest or help even if you don’t listen:

  1. Personal: I don’t ever have a cadence when I’m speaking, I try to change my cadence and pronunciation as I go to see what sound better to me. Chris apparently doesn’t do that. It’s a better option.
  2. Personal: I have a really high stress tolerance but also a really long term sense of threat detection. This makes me anxious more than is helpful or virtuous. This sermon as a good challenge to that. 
  3. Theological: And Chris never mentioned this explicitly, but he named two sides of an important issue. “Don’t be anxious” (Matthew 6:19-34). But also, Chris said that real life is lived around the table, and to have food at the table, you’ve got to sow, reap, and store into barns even though the birds don’t. And so there is an unrighteous and idolatrous way to worry over tomorrow, over your food, your both, and you life. But there is also a way to “fear always” (Proverbs 28:14) that is good. As an aside, the ESV translates that as “fear the LORD,” but the word for Lord isn’t there. The passage either means, “anxiously fears w/respect to not wanting to sin” or “anxiously fears w/respect to potential calamity of any sort,” but both in such a way that leads to getting things done. The hardened heart in Scripture is a disorder that always leads toward the worst possible outcome on the present course. Tension is the wrong word, as different kinds of anxiety exist and the Bible multiplies the species of various traits and habits. 
  4. Dendrological: Chris said that there is something more true about seeing trees as Ents and Dryads than there is to seeing them as inert statues of slowly growing wood or pre-furniture. Interestingly, the materialistic practice of those crazy scientists has found that trees and other plants do communicate. My high school English teacher speculated that this was true and hypothesized that they used electrical impulses in soil and pheromones. Both are accurate. Also see: The Hidden Life of Trees.
  5. Theological: I’m of the opinion that God created chaos and that it’s good and must be balanced with order (if you ask me to define these, expect a great deal of incoherence). A good article about Genesis’ teaching about this is Did God create chaos? Unresolved tension in Genesis 1:1-2 by Robin Routlege. This has led me to all sorts of fruitful reflections upon what it means to be human, even before the fall. For instance, negotiating chaos and order is necessary in a garden and even more necessary if you leave the garden to subdue the rest of the earth. 

 

Genesis 1-2 and Man as Artist

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One of the ideas that emerges from the first two chapters of Genesis is the distinction between creation and cultivation, nature and art, or even chaos and order.

For instance, when God makes the world it is a chaotic emptiness (Genesis 1:1-2), but through the next several verses, he organizes it into a series of useful categories. Then he makes humanity, explaining that not only would they reproduce and eat, like the other creatures, but that they would be blessed, take dominion, and bear the image of God. So man is to subdue (or cultivate in context) the created world.

In Genesis 2, while the timeline is intentionally obscured (man is made before the plants, Genesis 2:4-5), the same distinction is further articulated. There is the wild world, but man is placed in a garden planted by God. And so there is nature (that which is) and art (that which is skillfully designed), creation/culture. The idea of subduing/having dominion over the created world is more fully defined in Genesis 2: name the animals, don’t eat poison fruit, eat fruit that gives life, protect the garden, tend the garden, control your body (it’s made of earth, you know), and so-on. In other words, man is to be an artist who makes culture out of creation or art out of nature.

Aristotle’s used the word techne to describe know-how. Later Latin writers translated the word ars. We now use the word art. For Aristotle, art was a virtue of the mind. And I think our tendency to reduce art to the fine arts has led us to undervalue the fact that any human skill that can be acquired through practice is art: mathematics, grammar, cooking, gardening, shepherding, the scientific method, communication, and so-on.

Aristotle’s understanding of art is helpful for seeing what Genesis is getting at, even though Genesis doesn’t use his terminology. Part of our quest for meaning in a world that sometimes seems repetitive and meaningless is acquiring the skills necessary to cultivate the world around us into something beyond what it is. Trees can become parts of a garden, rocks can become a wall, gold can become food containers, currency, or circuits.

Of course, Scripture warns against wrong ways to cultivate creation  (Gen 11:1-9). If you try to unite heaven to earth yourself, you’ll end up utterly confused (which is bad from a personal experience perspective, but good from a necessary moral lesson perspective). I suspect that you’ll find the wrong ways to cultivate insofar as they do lead to confusion which forces different modes of cooperation and thought.

The Imaginary Amendment

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Last election season as morally and emotionally exhausting for many.

I thought it was pretty funny.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the whole thing was that in the space of about one year, the notion of purely open borders or even more to the point, the notion that the whole planet had a right to live within the boundaries of the United States of America became a frequent implication of talking points on the right and left.

I was even more intrigued by Bernie Sanders’ claim that such an idea was ludicrous. Steve Sailer recounts it here:

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States….

Ezra Klein: But it would make…

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me…

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.

The article cited above is pretty good. In it, the idea “that American citizens should get no say in who gets to move to America because huddled masses of non-Americans possess civil rights to immigrate” is called the “zeroth amendment.” It’s a clever name.

I mean, it may turn out that groups who wish to freely associate are wrong to exclude anybody ever, but few college safe space groups wish to be as open to outsiders as members of such groups wish for American borders to be.

Science “Disproves” the Bible Again

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In a goofy clickbait article, Ian Johnston claims that (btw, it’s helpful to use webarchive to link articles like this so that they don’t get ad revenue):

Independent Article very bad.PNG

The argument goes:

  1. The Bible reported that the Israelites were supposed to annihilate the Canaanites.
  2.  If true, “the Canaanites could not have directly contributed genetically to present-day populations.”
  3. Canaanite DNA has been in the Lebanese population.
  4. Therefore, the Bible is false.

Hilariously, the author points out that:

While the Bible says they were wiped out by the Israelites under Joshua in the land of Canaan, later passages suggest there were at least a few survivors. Some Biblical scholars have argued the passages are hyperbole, but the genetic research would appear to indicate the slaughter was much less extensive than described.

“The text uses hyperbole…but science says that the text is exaggerating.”

Religious people of all stripes will stop hating scientists or their goofy popularizers in famous online blogs when they stop being disingenuous blobs. I have nothing against disingenuous blobs. It’s an honest living, after all. I’m merely pointing out that others do.

As an aside, the Biblical text explicitly acknowledges that the Canaanites were not destroyed or driven out, implying without scholarly citation, that the Biblical authors engaged in hyperbole:

Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Acco, or the inhabitants of Sidon or of Ahlab or of Achzib or of Helbah or of Aphik or of Rehob, so the Asherites lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land, for they did not drive them out.
(Judges 1:31-32 ESV)

Concluding Thought

The article has some cool information about the discovery of Phoenician DNA among the Lebanese. What is curious to me is that I’ve been under the impression that the Levant was full of the descendants of the Phoenicians for nearly a decade.

The only word for this: heh

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Here is what happens when you believe that ultimate reality is class-conflict between men and women:

You have to subvert truth to believe that worldview because it is observably true that cooperation between the sexes makes new humans.

You have to subvert goodness to believe that worldview because one must assume that any apparent good is a tool of oppression.

You have to subvert beauty to believe that worldview because while beauty transcends sexuality, it is utterly inseparable from it. If sexual dimorphism is a good, then beauty supports that good, which is really a non-good, because the truth is that the sexes necessarily in conflict rather than harmony.

In other words, believe in modern egalitarianism long enough and all art will look this way. As Camille Paglia said, “If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts. (Sexual Personae, 38)” What she’s getting at is that there is some conflict that is part of the relationship between men and women, but civilization is the result of working together. She’s criticizing the unreasonable rejection of the patriarchy by people who stand under the waterfall of benefits it bestows.

It reminds me of the story of Noah and his sons:

Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said,“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” (Genesis 9:20-25 ESV)

Ham makes a mockery of his father’s apparent flaw despite having not only his biological origin from him, but also his salvation from the catastrophic evil of fallen humanity and God’s destruction thereof with the waters of chaos. Feminists, it would seem, have so thoroughly done the same that they cannot even discern, let alone create beauty.

A similar pattern has occurred in Baptist church culture.  Baptists have so critiqued the “father” of church tradition that they’ve been rejected as a competent voice within Christianity and they have very little stable culture within which to help people follow Jesus from one town to the next. They frequently exist within the same chaos of Ham’s descendants, except without all the explicit idolatry.

The Mindset of the Spirit and the Mindset of the Flesh

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Since becoming a teacher, I’ve been utterly intrigued by Carol Dweck’s concept of mindset. What’s interested me most is where the idea appears in Scripture. The most obvious part of the Bible is in Romans 8:

5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.[1]

The more literal translation of “to set the mind on the Spirit” is “the mindset of the Spirit,” or perhaps “the mentality/outlook of the Spirit.” The concept is something like, “the way of managing one’s mind which starts with “setting the mind on the things from the Spirit” from verse six. In other words, it’s the total of beliefs, attitudes, and thought processes that a Christian uses to be transformed by the renewal of the mind (Romans 12:1-2).

But what is this mindset? What are the beliefs, attitudes, and thought processes that Paul means? And beyond that, what are the beliefs, attitudes, and thought processes provided by the Holy Spirit outside of Paul’s immediate reference? I propose a three-step way forward:

  1. Look at what Paul says in Romans pertaining to thoughts, the Spirit, and the flesh/sin.
  2. Look at what Paul says in the rest of his letters.
  3. Look at what the rest of the Bible says that fits the conceptual framework of a mindset that comes from God’s Spirit.
  4. Forth Bonus Step: Look at what nature can tell us about a good mindset from philosophical reflection and scientific experimentation. This would still be, insofar as it was not sinful, a mindset of the Spirit, who was over the face of the deep when nature was created.

Below are some of the contrasts yielded by this approach. Some elements of contrast indicate the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. But others indicate where you might be in the process of having your mind renewed:

Mindset/mentality of the Spirit Mindset/mentality of the Flesh
1.      Regarding God as ultimate reality.

2.      Treating Jesus as the supreme revelation of knowledge about God.

3.      Hearing and doing the commands of Jesus.

4.      Regarding the Bible as a repository of genuine knowledge about God and wisdom for life.

5.      The Abel ethic.

6.      Growth mindset.

7.      God saves you from sin.

8.      You cooperate by faith, hope, and love.

9.      Reverence for divine law.

10.  Creative dominion in the face of chaotic circumstances.

11.  The wise man in Proverbs

 1.      Regarding creation as ultimate reality

2.      Treating anything as supreme to Jesus w/respect to revelation.

3. Hearing and ignoring the commands of Jesus.

4.      Ignoring the Bible in your quest for genuine knowledge about God and wisdom for life.

5.      The Cain ethic.

6.      Static mindset.

7.      Something else/nothing saves you.

8.      You either exercise virtue on your own or not at all.

9.      Hostility to divine law.

10.  Resentment, hatred, and retreat in the face of chaotic circumstances.

11.  The fool in Proverbs.

References

[1] Catholic Biblical Association (Great Britain), The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (New York: National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, 1994), Ro 8:5–8.