Geoff's Miscellany

One of my favorite songs is by mewithoutYou.

It's part of a concept album about a train wreck from which several animals escaped. This particular song is about the Elephant, who in a previous song, you discover, caused the crash so her friends could escape. The song has several layers of intertextuality. For instance, the title is reminiscent of "God in the Dock" by C.S. Lewis and the Elephant is a sort of savior figure in the song. In real life, in the 1910s, an Elephant was hanged in Erwin Tennessee. And the chaplain has a brief line during his prayer/address to the people wherein he notes his Berkleyianism.

One of the questions I've always had is this: How does what the Bible teaches relate to the world outside of the text? Obviously, two true descriptions on one topic much coincide in some way. But if the Bible is unclear on a topic, can a field of inquiry into the same topic bring clarity to the topic, and thus to the Biblical text?

This question has an obvious answer to many people. The problem is that it is treated precisely as obvious.

If you want to read the whole list, find it here.

I just wanted to comment on his list because part of blogging is forcing yourself to write and part putting your thoughts upon the internet so that other people can ignore them.

Ephesians by Markus Barth. Barth was an outstanding lecturer in Basel. He was even a greater writer. Just read what he has to say about marriage in Ephesians 5 and see if you don’t agree.

So, I’ve always wanted a garage and due to some Deus Ex Machina in the history of my life, a local microbiologist with whom I am acquainted found work doing coral reef research in a far away land. So, my wife and I were offered the house for rent at a ridiculously low fee, probably lower than anything even remotely this size in town. In fact, apartment prices have been driven up very high since we moved out of the rather modestly sized apartment. If we were to get the next size down from our old apartment, it would be $100 dollars more than our previous place. This might sound cheap to some, but with local economics in mind, it’s exorbitant. I wonder if the oil field has driven up rental prices? Anyhow, back to the post. We live in the house and it has a garage (it also came with my friend’s children’s dog because it couldn’t go with them). The sad thing about this is that it was filled with a great deal of his things. He told me I could use all of it, and that with the exception of a select few items that, if upon inspection something turned out to be worthless, it could be throw away (they had to move suddenly).

I was typing an article in wordpress, which is usually a mistake, but I figured that I had quite a bit of battery life on my laptop. I had saved the draft several times and watched it autosave several times as well. Suddenly, with about 80% power, my laptop just shut off. The batter entirely discharged instantly and it won't turn on even when plugged in. Thankfully I just built a desktop. I bought the parts for the desktop and a new smaller laptop because I'm about to go back to school and needed a more powerful pc and a less heavy and less worn out laptop. The weird thing is that on my desktop the draft for wordpress is not available. It's like my browser was just going through the motions without actually sending any data to the wordpress servers. So the whole post is gone unless by some form of magic it is still in the ram on my apparently defunct laptop that I really hope is still under warranty.

And you, who at one point were, in terms relating to the mind, alienated [from God's people] and enemies [of God] by evil works, but now he has reconciled you in the body of his flesh through the death to present you holy and blameless before him, if indeed you remain in the faith, firmly rooted and steadfast and do not shift away from the hope of the gospel of which you have heard, which was proclaimed to all creation which is under the sky (heaven), of which I myself, Paul, became a representative (servant). Colossians 1:21-23 (my translation)

In an old post here, I wrote about Coheed and Cambria's retelling of the Joker/Batman mythos. The lead singer of that band is Claudio Sanchez and he's at it again. He wrote this song:

This time the song is about Freddy Krueger. He wrote the song from Krueger's perspective. In the Coheed song about Batman, the Joker is still awful, but he has a level of self-reflection that allows him to critique Batman on a psychological level. In this case they rewrite Krueger as a misunderstood guy who has a crush on Nancy (the female protagonist in the first film). His obsession with her leads to poorly conceived flirting tactics that, in a creepily realistic way, lead to violent attempts to garner her attention with Krueger's ability to confront people's souls and endanger their bodily health in a realm of dreams.

In 2009, back when I thought I had a future in Biblical Studies, I bought and read Douglas Campbell's tome of interminable length, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: 2009) I was impressed by his breadth of reading as well as his depth of thinking. He spent a great deal of time explaining various difficulties concerning what he terms justification theory. Those problems alone apparently required over 100 pages of end notes. The problems are enumerated on pages 168-172. He outlines his understanding of the common Christian understanding of Salvation (Justification Theory) and the problems with it on pages 28-29.

This has been a weird summer for me for several reasons. The first is that it is the first Summer since I became a teacher when I am not working several days a week. It is also the Summer during which I take an extremely difficult version of Calculus in order to prepare for an Engineering program I start in the Fall. The point is that I’ve had plenty of time to revisit books I bought while in seminary but never finished. It’s been good to read Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, and Barth. Reading these guys got me to thinking, though. In seminary strange things can happen.

This summer I've been preparing a curriculum on the whole Bible. This is slow going, but it is worth it in many ways. One of which is that I have gotten to read a great deal of books on the history and theology of Paul that I had never gotten around to starting.

Two of them have really stuck out to me:

1. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003
2. Cassirer, H. W. Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 1988.

Now, in general I think that the Biblical authors, Paul included, need to be read on their own terms. This means that they need to be read first as ancient Mediterranean Jewish persons. Secondly, in the New Testament, they need to be read as people who purport to be representatives of the gospel of Jesus. In other words, they must be read as preachers or theologians.