Out to Lunch

I'll be away for a week or two.

Don't do anything fun while I'm gone, 'k?

Update: I'm back.

(So among all those people who share my warped idea of fun, let there be much rejoicing.)

So... close...

Barring any legal hijinks by the Republicans, it looks like the Democrats are going to pick up both the House and the Senate.

w00t?

As far as I can tell, CNN has the best online coverage of the election results. They're also carrying some interesting exit poll data. For example, here's a snippet from their U.S. HOUSE SOUTH EXIT POLL:

VOTE BY RELIGION

	Democrat	Republican
Protestant (70%)	42%	57%

VOTE BY RELIGION AMONG WHITES

	Democrat	Republican
White Protestants (54%)	32%	66%

BORN-AGAIN OR EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN?

	Democrat	Republican
Yes (49%)	41%	58%

WHITE EVANGELICAL/BORN-AGAIN?

	Democrat	Republican
Yes (35%)	28%	71%

Well allrighty.

Vote.

Unless you're stupid. Then stay home.

Bonus election day link! Leonard Pitts Jr. sums up my opinion about the Democratic Party.

Richard Beck's Universalism posts

In Christian theology, Universalism is the idea that all people will be saved.

I had been considering a couple of posts about universalism, but lo and behold, Dr. Richard Beck has already done a brief series on why he's a universalist. I'll start by linking you there, and maybe later I'll have some things to add.

Why I am a Universalist

I think my favorite post in the bunch is this one, which juxtaposes Universalism, Calvinism and Arminianism. An excerpt:

Talbott in Universal Salvation? asks us to consider three theological propositions:

1. God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally in the sense that he sincerely wills or desires the redemption of each one of them.

2. Because no one can finally defeat God’s redemptive love or resist it forever, God will triumph in the end and successfully accomplish the redemption of everyone whose redemption he sincerely wills or desires.

3. Some human sinners will never be redeemed but will instead be separated from God forever.

First, it should be noted that significant Biblical support could be cited for each proposition. All are supported by the biblical witness.

However, and here's the rub, Talbott points out that these propositions are logically inconsistent. That is, a Christian cannot, logically, endorse all three propositions. Look back over the propositions and mull them over. You'll see he has a point.

Confession 2

Background:
Sometimes, crafty church gnomes place blatantly partisan literature in our church foyer. The latest brochure was a glossy little voting guide, but the local, jingoistic, "christian" "newspaper" makes regular appearances as well.

Confession:
When nobody's looking, I extract the newspapers from the foyer, and add them to a neat little stack in the utility closet.

Underhanded, I know, but I figure this causes fewer problems than demanding equal space for a stack of Planned Parenthood brochures.

Engaging the Text

A series of posts on what the biblical text might have to say about the morality of homoerotic behavior.

(Note: This post is a trailhead. None of these posts are new, but a trailhead post makes it easy to add a link to the series in my sidebar.)

• Overview


• Sodom and Gomorrah


• An Interlude


• The Vice Lists


• Paul's Theology in Romans


• Stuff about God


• What Romans 1 Says about God


• Ethics and Romans 1

Hm. Now that I look at it, I skipped the holiness codes in Leviticus. Ok, give me a minute ... ah, here we go:

Also, remember that you're not allowed to wear the devil's own fabric, polyester. Maybe because it's fire-retardant? I dunno.

Hope

"Odd," I thought. "I wasn't expecting this feeling."

But there it was anyhow, in the middle of an otherwise uninspiring paragraph about feminisim, atonement, and Jesus.

I had been meandering through a book my sister gave me for my birthday, trying to nudge the scattered bits of my feminism into something coherent, toting my theological briefcase, very businesslike, and then this old friend recognized me, leapt on me, overwhelmed me with an embrace that was more than half wrestling hold.

"Wow," I thought. "I remember this feeling."

It feels like hope, but it's not quiet, or rosy.

Instead, it's a firework that hits me in the eyes and the gut at the same time, occupying my mind's eye so fully that, for a long ecstatic moment, I'm blind to everything but that one unavoidable future, largely featuring the triumph of laughter, full of mountains, of warm days smelling like watermelon and feeling like river water, chilly days feeling like friends and smelling like warm coffee, everything limned in golden joy.

And although the feeling quickly fades, for the moment I am convinced. There really is hope for the world, and there really is power in the cross of Christ. It is a power we can trust and admire: not the power to live perfectly, or the power to appease a transcendent, merciless, bloodthirsty God, but the deep affection that seems to be the only way to transform hatred without fostering hatred, to eradicate violence without using force, and to grant joyful life despite the power of death.

Happy birthday to me!

In keeping with my longstanding tradition of throwing birthday parties for myself: today is my birthday! Happy birthday to me!


Here's a fun game: If you want to get me a gift, don't buy anything ... just copy the internet address from your browser and paste it into a comment. So, for example, you could put your favorite book from Amazon.com, or maybe your favorite video from YouTube. After you submit the comment, I'll put a picture of your gift at the bottom of this post.

Fun!

Happy birthday to me!

(from Crystal)


(from Colby)


(from Jeff)


(from The Cute One)


(from Connor)


(from Scoots)


(from Stu. NSFW!)


(from Sandy)


(from Jessica)


(from Casey)

Great Britain held hostage by ... Harding?

OK, I feel bad about all this off-site linking - it makes me feel like a lazy blogger - but you ACU and Harding folks shouldn't miss this one. It seems that Harding's new missions globe has ... um ... misplaced Great Britain by a few thousand miles.


No wonder those Brits are post-Christian! We obviously can't find them so that they can be re-evangelized!

Click the image to visit the Lame-O Weblog of Mark Elrod, who teaches at Harding.

And speaking of Mark Elrod, does anybody know an ACU professor who has a blog, much less a blog as interesting as Elrod's?

Update:

Mark reports that Great Britain has been returned to its rightful place. Whew. That was fixed rather quickly, though. I wonder ... how easy is it to move those continents around?

Also, Colby suggests reading the blog of (ACU Associate Professor) Richard Beck.

Two wars

As I was walking down the hall this morning, I suddenly realized: During the first four years of the Bush presidency, the United States invaded not one, but two sovereign nations and initiated two wars.

Two wars in four years.

And instead of ousting the people responsible, we voted to give them another four years. More than 40,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq alone.


I think I'll go be sick now.

Church of Christ vs Episcopal Church

Connor has attended both, and provides you with this deep and meaningful analysis.

Praying:
CoC - Kneel if you want to be stared at.
EC - Kneel or die.

Go, read, now!

Update: It would help if I actually put the link in...

Class update

OK, Connor requested a class update, so here it is.

We've spent the last three weeks talking about Genesis 1-3, and what it may or may not have to do with gender roles. I mean, we still haven't taken the five minutes we would need to define the terms "sex" and "gender", and consequently, people frequently say interesting things like, "Yes, I think Adam and Eve probably had sex ... um ... gender."

But moving on...

Like I said before, the class is tag-team-taught by Shane and another guy (Damon). After being in the class for several weeks, I can say that they've done a pretty good job of picking a direction and sticking with it. If I've understood their approach correctly, they're basically trying do apologetics for the creation narratives.

Shane has a sort of literary approach to the text, where you classify its genre and then you only listen to the messages you would expect to hear coming out of that genre. Damon has a sort of Rabbinical approach to the text, which means you try to tease out a lot of allegory and hidden meaning. But basically, both of them are doing a lot of work trying to get the students to interpret Genesis in a new way, and then, kind of parenthetically, following that up by arguing that Genesis talks about identity but not so much about gender roles.

I think this approach is pretty good. It makes the class of mostly college students stretch a little bit, and tweak their hermeneutic, and even reconsider their gender biases, but it doesn't require them to do anything terribly scary or off-putting. All in all, I think the students are going to come out of this class with a better way of reading the first 3 chapters of Genesis, and a little more play in their ideas about gender.

But I do think the teachers are a little reluctant to address certain issues, including

• What modern psychology says about gender


• What feminists say about gender


• The church's sins against women


• Why homosexuality is a gender issue

Maybe we'll get to these as we go along. At any rate, I'm hoping that before we get out of Genesis, we at least look at Jacob and Esau.

Gender and Creation Myths

OK, since a lot of you seem to be interested in gender and Genesis and all that, let's continue our discussion with a new post. There seem to be several questions that people are interested in answering, which I will summarize as follows:

• Are there biologically-determined traits that occur more frequently in either sex? And if there are, can we distinguish them from other traits? And if we can, what should we do with this information?


• Are there socially benefical roles for the sexes? That is, does a society gain significant benefits from encouraging women to behave a certain way and men a different way? And if so, are there also significant harms?


• Are there divinely ordained roles for the sexes? That is, are there ways that God says women should be, and other ways that God says men should be? And if so, what are they, and how did we find out about them?


• What should we expect to learn from the creation stories in Genesis?

OK, so the fourth one we haven't talked about much, and it really kind of folds into the third one, but hey, this is my post, so I can be as sloppy as I want!

My opinion:

When we read the creation stories in Genesis, we should not expect them to be literally true. Instead, we should expect them to provide a broad metaphor that will help us understand ourselves.

Missteps in Iraq

Well, this makes things a little clearer.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

Extemporaneous gender

Gosh, I suck at public speaking.

We're having a class at church on Wednesday nights: "Gender and the Kingdom of God". Sounds promising, right? Except that nobody really knows what they mean by "gender".

For maybe 30 years, the word "gender" has been used to denote the socially constructed part of a person's sexual identity. But most folks in the church aren't quite caught up on the latest thinking about gender. So our class starts its discussion of Genesis 1 and 2 by trying to divide the imago dei into "masculine" traits and "feminine" traits. This riles me up a bit, so I try to push people into defining their terms. I ask, "Who says?" Who says "nurturing" is feminine, while "powerful" is masculine?

The answer I want to hear has something to do with society or culture, but that answer is not forthcoming. So, nervous and agitated, I try to explain how sex and gender are different, and why the distinction is important. But what actually comes out sounds like five minutes of:

Bla bla bla nurturing bla gay men bla bla.

Did I mention I suck at public speaking?

Anyhow, I think my points are both important and simple, so I'm going to try again, and I'm going to limit myself to three sentences.

Here goes.

People like what they like, whether it's football or knitting, and attaching gender stereotypes to these preferences muddies our vision when we're trying to tackle the world's big problems: things like hunger, global warming, domestic abuse, and even terrorism.

But what's worse than gender stereotyping is looking to the Bible for support for our stereotypes, implying that we're not just failing our society when we refuse the roles of warrior male or submissive female, we're also rebelling against God's Will for all men and women.

If we fail to recognize that gender is socially constructed, and if we then fail to condemn the gender stereotypes in Genesis 2 as the rhetorical posturing of a patriarchal society, we will be bound to repeat the sinful patterns of bigotry, violence and self-hatred that have marred the church for generations.

There.

Does that make sense?

Blogger Beta

My blog is now part of the blogger beta. It looks a little different, and in the sidebar I've added a "News" section that contains interesting articles that are coming through my feed reader.

Let me know if anything's acting weird; I'll report it.

Response: Hart's Comments on Theodicy

(I'm pulling these comments up into posts because I think the articles and issues mentioned deserve posts of their own.)

Crystal links us to an article on theodicy by David B. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian. It's an excellent article, and eloquently communicates the problems implicit in certain Christian responses to evil:

"these attempts can span almost the entire spectrum of religious sensibility: they can be cold with Stoical austerity, moist with lachrymose piety, wanly roseate with sickly metaphysical optimism."

But Hart's understanding of how the world works is apparently quite different from mine. He talks about creation's fallen state, but this is a problem for me: how can we accept evolutionary theory and also accept the idea that creation was once perfect and then became corrupted?

Similarly, his discussion of Aquinas makes it clear that he thinks there are spiritual beings pushing and pulling on the visible world, and as I've said earlier, this doesn't work for me.

The theodicy i'm hoping to end up with will probably rest some of its weight on the panentheistic idea that God is present in all creation, and so fully rejoices in the good, and fully suffers in the evil, but for one reason or another, doesn't personally act on the world. (Instead, God's agency seems to be expressed through people, and most perfectly in Jesus.)

But coming from the tradition I come from, first I have to deal with the Bible. The modern/premodern move is mostly an attempt to salvage the Biblical text by translating it into terms that I (and maybe a few other materialists) can accept; to understand what seem to be blatant falsehoods as mere differences in language.

ABC = FOX?

Update: Here's a little more about the docudrama.
ThinkProgress
Media Matters
Congressional Quarterly

Update:
Letter from Clinton lawyer

Response: That Samaritan woman

The quote at the end of my previous post comes from a story in John, wherein Jesus talks with a Samaritan woman and teaches her a little about the nature of God's spirit. In the course of the discussion about this story, Scoots said that when the Samaritan woman brings up a religious argument, she is attempting to "distract Jesus from prying into her sketchy personal life".

While Scoots seems to come to excellent conclusions about the point of the story, I disagree with his characterization of the Samaritan woman, and think it is worth providing an alternative reading.

First, notice that the woman's long list of husbands actually shows her not to be a promiscuous woman, but a victim. As far as I know, a woman couldn't divorce a man, so either she had been divorced by all these men, or they had died, or some of both. And as a result, the Samaritan woman was probably living in the next best arrangement she could manage, given her culture and history of husbands. Sure, she might be changing the subject out of shame, but it's just as likely she's changing the subject because dead or deadbeat husbands aren't particularly pleasant to talk about.

Second, it's worthwhile to observe that the discussion Jesus has with the woman parallels the conversation he has with the highly educated Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3. As Thomas Robinson, minister for the Manhattan Church of Christ, writes in "A Community Without Barriers":

Here, Jesus spoke with the Samaritan woman in exactly the same manner as he spoke with Nicodemus. He showed the same degree of seriousness, the same concern to lead both to deeper insights, and the same perception as to where they each were in their own spiritual development ... to this Samaritan woman, Jesus chose to begin to reveal the reality of the Spirit, which even Jesus’ closest disciples did not fully understand until years later.

And furthermore,

In the Gospel of John, it is to this Samaritan woman that Jesus chose first to affirm his identity as Messiah. He found in her an openness and a level of understanding that suggested that such a revelation to her could be fruitful. She in turn led others of her town to listen to Jesus and to come to believe in him as the Christ. Thus, remarkably, the Gospel of John suggests that the first real community of believers in Jesus was among the Samaritans, led to their own personal faith (though they were reluctant to admit it) by this Samaritan woman (John 4:39-42)

A bit of a quandary

Ok, now I've got my butt in a crack.

I still think it's useful to recognize that the Bible was written in premodern language by premodern people. In fact, I suspect that we're liable to get ourselves into lots of trouble if we don't make this distinction when we interpret. But I'm still a little bit dubious about how the premodern/modern lens will actually affect how we read the text.

Because Randy's mentioned Ephesians 6, let's use that as our first example. Maybe it will help if we start by pretending that we've just picked up some Ancient text and started reading it.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

OK, so the author starts talking about the devil and spiritual forces of evil, and immediately my brain starts sending up flares. "Danger!" it says. "Premodern language is being used here!" The author continues with his metaphor, recommending that his readers adopt defenses such as righteousness, truth, peace and faith against these supernatural attacks. Hugs, kisses, end of Ephesians, hooray.

Now how should I interpret this passage?

As a hair-splitting modern person, I think I should go about it by dividing the "truth" of the passage into two distinct parts. The first is the author's worldview, in which spiritual forces manipulate people and everyday events. The second is the author's statement, which is couched in the language of his worldview.

Now honestly, I'm very reluctant to try to evaluate the truth of a person's worldview. I can see some value to thinking of things in terms of spirits and spiritual realms, and it's not like empirical evidence can prove or disprove the existence of spirits. But the "spiritual realms" worldview is not my worldview. And so before I evaluate the point that the author is trying to make, I am obligated to translate it into language that is compatible with my worldview. In this case, I would be obligated to translate the author's supernatural language into something a little more helpful for my modern sensibilities; perhaps I would translate his "spiritual realms" language into a description of the shadowy regions of the human psyche.

As a result, I would then be able to get some benefit from the text: instead of trying to make myself believe that we are constantly manipulated by spirits, I can go ahead to what I think is the author's real point: that we should adopt virtues as means to produce goodness in ourselves, despite the ways in which we sometimes tend toward evil.

Put another way, I can treat the author's language about evil spirits as metaphor, and then try to apply or interpret the metaphor.

OK, great! So when I run into stuff about spirits manipulating the world, I'll just kind of gloss over that as a premodern metaphor, and try and translate the ideas into modern language.

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

Wha?

Thanks a lot, Apostle John. Now what am I supposed to do with that?