Geoff's Miscellany

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.

The Ignored Anselm
When I was seminary I read a few books whose authors seemed to take great joy in hating on St. Anselm. I don't remember what they were at this point, but it still struck me as weird. He would be dismissed as somebody who was overly philosophical, he would be lampooned as having come up with a silly proof for God's existence, or he would be criticized for foisting his medieval economics upon the gospel in Cur Deus Homo. I'm not sure that any of this criticism was warranted. I've been rereading Anselm and found his work to be quite edifying.

Nick posted about the Body of Christ. His chief insight, which is true, is that Jesus himself, though head of the church, is a member of the church. This is because the head is a member of the body. It reminded me of how a man I work with prays. He prays, "In the name of our older brother, Jesus." Sometimes people mention to me that that find this unusual. So I point them to these passages (ESV today, didn't feel like translating this morning):

When you read the Bible you really do find a great deal of really, really weird stuff. Interestingly, I find weird stuff in almost everything I read whether fiction or non-fiction. For instance, the Pythagorean Theorem is super weird. It is a proven and easily provable theorem, I came up with a proof for it in high school (that's not impressive, it had been used before) and came up with several others as a math teacher (again, upon searching all had been previously discovered). Nevertheless, it is weird. You wouldn't intuit it by looking at a right triangle, yet it works. When I'm reading about other cultures, I regularly learn incredibly weird things. Reading about ancient history is a good way to find weird stuff. Reading in the sciences, several weird things appear. In many ways, nature is precisely counter intuitive. So, if there is a God and this God created nature and left us revelation of the path to true felicity, one might expect to find, in that revelation, a bit of weirdness. This is especially to be expected if this revelation was made to ancient peoples who possessed a mythological worldview and entertained several superstitions about the way(s) of divinity. Not only so, but the culture of the Biblical world is just different from ours, as are their idioms, expressions, and social habits. That being said, a great deal of Christians hear things like, "the Bible is a perfect revelation from God" and thus read the Bible expecting to find something that confirms their own bizarre notions of perfection. I would submit that the Bible is precisely inspired to have certain difficulties, to make a perfect system of theology impossible, and to require tremendous humility to understand because its purpose is ultimately to guide communities of people who dedicate their lives to God's kingdom revealed in Jesus Christ. Indeed, prior to the time of Christ, the purpose of the Old Testament was, once again, meant to provide light to communities of people who dedicated themselves to YHWH, not to be immediately understandable and easily resolvable in its difficulties (Proverbs 1:1-7).

One of the key issues for understanding the New Testament is understanding how ancient family/lineage functioned in storytelling, rhetoric, and perception of individual worth. There are several great books about this topic and a great deal can be gleaned from simply reading the New Testament and documents from the era carefully. David deSilva's introduction to the New Testament covers this issue in the most succinct fashion I have found. This paragraph, for instance, summarizes several of the issues quite well:

I’ve been reading the Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels Malina and Pilch. On page 360, in an entry on fasting, they note concerning Jesus, “…he was not what modern authors call an apocalyptic preacher.” Essentially, the authors base this claim on the following evidence:

1. Gospel traditions indicate that Jesus did not fast during his ministry.
2. Said traditions are clearly accurate because later members of the Jesus movement did fast. Thus they recorded Jesus' abstinence from fasting despite their own practice.
3. Apocalyptic preachers had a tendency to fast in protest of the evil in the world.
4. Jesus, having not been much of a faster, did not protest the evil in the world.
   Therefore, Jesus was not an apocalyptic preacher.

Anyhow, I just thought that was a weird notion. Earlier in the book the authors essentially argued that Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom was not “eschatology” but rather “nextology.” They claim this on this basis: Israelite peasants did not think about the far future, but only about what was just about to happen. Aside from being a neologism that is so stupid that I cringed when I read it, the application of the term is also stupid. Here’s why, the authors claim that thinking that Jesus had a world-changing judgment from God in mind is a 19^th century idea, rather than an ancient Jewish one. But Luke’s gospel, which is connected to Acts, pretty clearly connects a future judgment of the living and the dead with the teachings of Jesus or at least with the teachings of his disciples.

In the first few paragraphs of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (and in his other works of logic and rhetoric), he makes the point that the work of rhetoric is to persuade and that the work of dialectic is to find the real or apparent syllogism. Both are to be used in the service of truth, but one lends itself more specifically to sophistry. Rhetoric can be very dangerous because it can have the air of careful research and argument but actually be a way to make ugly, evil, and false things appealing. Similarly, rhetoric can be embarrassing. If you think you have the truth but you’ve only used rhetoric to defend it precisely because that is how you were convinced and then somebody comes along with the dialectic prepared (knowledge and valid syllogisms), then you can truly look like a fool. Similarly, if you are socially or rhetorically inept and you bring the dialectic (and even the truth) to a rhetoric fight, a crowd of people can easily be persuaded to ignore or be bored by careful argument. The point being that anybody needs both. Scientists need both just as much as engineers, salesmen, and evangelists. That being said, I want to use something Edward Feser said that made me think about this distinction. Namely that there are times when the rhetoric trumps the dialectic purely for social purposes. When I was younger and somebody made fun of me in the slightest way, I would try to explain as carefully as I could why that person was wrong. Needless to say, I had a very difficult time making friends until high school when I learned to banter. Similarly, Christians who care about evangelism ought to avail themselves of the rhetoric/dialectic distinction. There are times when somebody is just trying to make you look stupid and utilizing dialectic to explain their error will simply lead to being ignored. At those moments, use rhetoric in return..not vitriol, but winsome repartee. But other times when somebody with honest questions or dishonest attempts to stump you comes with rhetoric and you actually know their argument because you listen well then you can appropriately tear things down and rebuild with the dialectic (or if they’re a jerk and you really have the skill, bury them in the dialectic). I’m not advocating being malicious, I’m saying that speech seasoned with salt is always gracious even when it’s sharp.