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March 31, 2004

Mark 8

Filed under: Bible study — Camassia @ 4:59 pm

We begin with another loaves-and-fishes story. It’s similar to the one in Mark 6, but this time Jesus provides a bit of analysis:

Now the disciples had forgotten to bring any bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. 15And he cautioned them, saying, ‘Watch out—beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.’ 16They said to one another, ‘It is because we have no bread.’ 17And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them, ‘Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember? 19When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ 20‘And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ And they said to him, ‘Seven.’ 21Then he said to them, ‘Do you not yet understand?’

On the one hand, his rebuke seems straightforward: the disciples say they’re out of bread, but Jesus reminds them that they’re actually never out of bread, thanks to God’s abundance. Since Jesus was just talking about “the yeast of Pharisees and the yeast of Herod,” however, there’s a strong suggestion that he’s urging his followers toward a metaphorical interpretation. “Yeast” elsewhere in the Gospels refers to the growth of the Kingdom from small beginnings, and the warning about others’ yeasts suggests that evil can grow likewise.

Why is Jesus so specific about the numbers? The thing that sticks out to me about them is that in the second instance, Jesus fed a smaller crowd with more loaves, and yet there was less left over. This suggests that either five loaves ultimately yields more bread than seven, or that the second crowd was hungrier. The former fact seems in keeping with the whole “the smaller and humbler the beginning, the bigger it gets” theme that I’ve mentioned already. The latter may point out that Jesus’ crowds are getting smaller, as we go barrelling toward the night where even his apostles leave him, and yet their hunger for the bread of life is greater. This is, however, all in the category of “wild-ass guess,” so I’d be curious to know what scholars have made of this.

This sense of urgency grows at the end of the chapter, when Peter first suggests that Jesus is the Messiah, and Jesus starts talking about how he will be crucified. Peter rebukes him for saying this (in typical apostle fashion, he instantly squanders whatever points he gained for correctly identifying Jesus), leading Jesus to give his famous “what profit to gain the world and lose your soul” speech (actually rendered “lose their life” in this translation).

I also notice that twice in this chapter Jesus refers negatively to “this generation” — “this adulterous and sinful generation,” he calls them at one point. It seems to go with the temporal attitude of God that I mentioned in my last post; talking about “this generation” implies that other generations might be different. One can imagine this was another one of those lines that spoke to the frustrated evangelists in the early church, trying to preach against the seemingly insurmoutable pagan dominance of their age. They had to trust that, like yeast and mustard seeds, the Word would grow, if not in this generation then those to follow.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God!

Filed under: Theology (other) — Camassia @ 10:58 am

When I blogged Mark 7 I purposely hadn’t looked at GG’s posts on it yet. He points out some further weirdness with the first story, and makes this observation about the second:

How uncharacteristic of Jesus! We have instances in the Hebrew Bible of God changing His mind, as in the negotiations for any righteous men in Sodom. And here, we have Jesus changing His mind, as well. Says Mark, copied by Matthew, ignored by Luke and John.

Why the Jahwist author of the Hebrew Bible and the author of Mark need to anthropomorphize God, we don’t know. Jesus came precisely because we cannot bargain with God.

I made this same point some months ago to Telford. He had sent me the first chapter of his book-in-progress about the Lord’s Prayer, because it includes me and the arguments we used to have about the character of God. Telford, in the chapter, said that if I think God would better do things differently I should pray to him to do so, and gave both the story from Mark and GG’s example of Sodom as models.

But, I said, how is that supposed to work? How can I expect God to change his mind? Presumably, God knows better than I do; he’s perfect, and he doesn’t change. Why should he listen to me?
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March 30, 2004

Mark 7

Filed under: Bible study — Camassia @ 6:36 pm

This is a very vexing chapter, if you’re trying to figure the relationship between Jesus and the God of the Old Testament. It defies both those who make the one to be a seamless fulfillment of the other, and those who try to completely separate them.

In the first story some Pharisees criticize Jesus and his followers for eating without ritually washing first. Jesus replies:

‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, “Honor your father and your mother”; and, “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban” (that is, an offering to God)— then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.’

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’

The weird thing about this is that Jesus quotes Mosaic law to undermine Mosaic law. “Honor thy father and mother” is credited as the Word of God, but the food taboos of Leviticus are treated as mere human tradition. But in the Old Testament as we have it, at least, all that law appears as a lump, delivered by God from Mt. Sinai. Jesus seems to be implying, though he does not actually say so, that the true Word ends at the end of Exodus.

And then in the next story, Jesus is approached by a Gentile woman who wants him to exorcise a demon from her daughter. Jesus resists: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” The woman gives the rather humiliating response that even dogs get the crumbs once in a while, so Jesus tells her her daughter is cured.

This is a strong indication that Jesus comes from the Jewish God: Jews are literally higher up the food chain than Gentiles. How this coexists with such little respect for what was already enshrined in the Jewish Torah remains mysterious.

This does, at least, help me understand one little mystery: why Christians have for so long elevated the Ten Commandments above all the other laws of Moses. As I’ve said before, the Noachide laws were actually the only ones that are supposed to apply to the whole world, and the early church seemed to follow this lead in Acts 15. But in this passage, and more conspicuously in Matthew 19:16-20 and elsewhere, Jesus quotes the Decalogue approvingly as God’s word. For us “dogs” trying to figure out what the hell is going on here, it’s a place to start.

March 29, 2004

Naked is a state of mind

Filed under: Books — Camassia @ 2:48 pm

The other day I was talking to my mother about the subject of her dissertation, adolescents’ reading. One point she emphasizes in her research is how the reader is an active agent in reading — he forms the message he gets from the book by how he reads it.

When I think back on my own teenage reading, the most glaring example of that was Orwell’s 1984. I read it when I was about 12, and read it several times over in quick succession. My mother couldn’t figure this out, because the book was so painfully depressing to her.

But actually, I only read the last third — about Winston’s imprisonment and brainwashing — the first time I read the book. Later I just read the first two-thirds, about his life and his affair with Julia, repeatedly. When you do that, it becomes a very different book. I understood that Orwell was making a political commentary about communism and totalitarianism, but I really read it as a kind of rescue fantasy.

It’s not hard for me to see why I identified with Winston and his world when I was in middle school. My middle school wasn’t particularly authoritarian, but it was more the peer environment that alienated me — the conformity, the mistrust, the nosing into your business, the feeling that so much of it was fake. Like Winston, I felt the artificiality of it all but didn’t know what to do about it. So imagine one day somebody passes you a note saying “I love you.” You meet in secret and since you’re outside the rules of society already, there’s no reason not to be totally honest.

The way that Winston and Julia join with no courtship and no preamble oddly appealed to me. At that age, people were starting to flirt and “go steady”, and yet that seemed like a game also. I was extremely ambivalent about what a girl was expected to act like. 1984 showed a romance that was completely outside those social rituals, that was all about human connection and had nothing to do with reputation or self-protection. It was the kind of relationship I wanted to have, more than the models that were generally presented to me.

Although I never thought of it this way before, I can see how I’ve followed that model in the last couple years. When I first wrote to Telford in the summer of ’02, I’d been suffering an increasing feeling like I had in middle school — of alienation from others, and the feeling I had to be false to get along. Writing to him, and then going to church and started this blog, were efforts to carve out that space of honest communication I needed so badly.

On the other hand, I can see how the novel’s template was also limited. Even cutting off the last section, it was not a very hopeful story. Winston’s and Julia’s relationship didn’t really have a future; they were unlikely to ever marry, have children, or do anything except go on in secrecy. They would have to overthrow the whole system to do that. It says something about me at the time that I didn’t really notice or care, I was so entranced by the simple idea of escape.

There was also an appealing simplicity about relationships in 1984. There are the “real” people you can be yourself around, and there are the fakes who buy into Party propaganda. Julia can just sort of intuit which is which; she knows Winston is “not one of them” before she even knows his name, and she’s apparently done the same with many men before him. (Though her instincts turn out to be wrong in one glaring case.) That sort of sharp division of the good guys from the phonies is pretty popular with teenagers; I gather Catcher in the Rye appeals to the same feeling, though I haven’t read it.

For me, transcending the blueprint from the book has been the hard part. The bold moves of reaching out to people were a bit intimidating, but I knew how to do them. Widening the space of trust, changing my relationship to the world rather than just carving out a refuge from it, was what I didn’t know how to do. I remember when I went to church with Telford he was frustrated with how I kept meeting friendly people there but for one reason or another wouldn’t pursue relationships with them. I particularly recall a conversation that went something like this:

Me: I don’t know what to do when I run into a theological disagreement with somebody. Like last week I bumped into G. after the sermon about substitutional atonement, and he asked, “So did that make sense to you?” I didn’t want to start a huge debate about the problems I have with subtitutional atonement, but I also didn’t want to lie to him. It makes it hard to talk with him.

Telford: Well, you don’t have to talk about that stuff with everybody you meet.

Me: What else am I going to talk about?

Telford: Just make small talk.

Me: I’m no good at small talk. And anyway, I could do that anywhere else in L.A. — at work, in clubs, at the golf course, whatever. I didn’t come all the way to this church to make small talk!

That shows how much I wanted church to be different from society at large — about real connection, not social ritual. I’ve never found a church that was really as subversive as I’d like it to be, but I’ve also realized that I was being too absolutist in my dealings with people. I thought I had a Julia-like instinct for people I could connect with and people I couldn’t. Sometimes, as with Telford, a bond really does happen with practically no pretense or preamble. But I’ve also realized that just because getting to know somebody takes work or yields only an incomplete understanding doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. People often surprise me. And perhaps realizing that is how I can ultimately get out of Big Brother’s world.

March 27, 2004

Tongues of flame

Filed under: Orthopraxis — Camassia @ 3:26 pm

Gossip is one sin that I never gave much thought to before. I was never especially attracted to it — I’m generally the last to know what’s going on — so I guess I regarded it mainly as a temptation for other people.

The subject came up in Bible study a couple weeks ago because we were reading James 3, which condemns gossip and slander in no uncertain terms. We discussed it from the point of view of how harmful words can be to the person spoken to or about. That passage always makes me think about my job, and the responsibility upon journalists as “speakers” about other people, in a sense.

But I was thinking about the subject a little differently last night when I was listened to a drive-time show on a local rock station. Apparently Sting revealed that he and his wife of umpteen years “swing”, and he’s been known to cruise sex clubs for other interested parties. This brought on a lot of discussion between the two DJs and various callers, nearly all of it negative.

This was one of those moments — I seem to have been having a lot of them lately — when I realize how much being immersed in Christianity has changed my perspective. A year or two ago, I would have listened to this and not thought much about it. Celebrities put themselves out there, and if they talk about their private lives, the thinking goes, it’s fair game. But this time the gossiping, backbiting, judgmental tone of the whole thing really bothered me. Not because I felt sorry for Sting, who probably doesn’t care, and not because I approve of swinging. Just because there seemed to be something wrong with the rest of us in that we do this for fun. I wouldn’t put it quite as harshly as James with tongues “set on fire by hell,” but still, it seemed so not in the Spirit of love.

It’s occurred to me since then that one reason people reacted so strongly to my recent opinion that churches should teach sexual morality, is that often sexual norms are enforced in this way: through scandal and public condemnation. Done that way, the complexities of human relationships tend to disappear under legalism and simplistic bromides: “It breaks the eighth commandment!” “Marriage is about monogamy!” etc. It’s not surprising that many liberal Christians would rather go to the opposite extreme and never criticize anybody’s sexual habits at all.

But it seems to me this would be a good occasion to cultivate the art of “fraternal correcton,” as Catholics call it. If a friend, relative or fellow churchgoer were doing this sort of thing I don’t think it would be out of line to have a discussion about the possible dangers, the meaning of marriage, what such behavior says about their attitudes toward themselves and whoever they pick up, and so on. The “fraternal” part of this is the key, I think — it implies that this happens within the context of a generally friendly relationship. If you don’t have and won’t cultivate a relationship with somebody, I don’t see what’s to be gained by throwing rocks from afar.

It’s true that sometimes people (especially famous people) deliberately provoke this by saying controversial things in hopes of getting attention. I don’t see why we should take the bait, though. Seems to me that if somebody blurts out an awkward fact about their sex life in a public forum, publicly it might be best to treat it like a belch at a dinner party, and let it pass.

March 25, 2004

The cold became a flu…

Filed under: Miscellaneous — Camassia @ 5:57 pm

… and I’m still recovering from it, but I’m feeling a lot more alive. (Thanks for asking, Allen.)

One plan that the illness derailed was that I was going to start up the Mark blogging again. I had just about given up on it, as my co-bloggers had fallen off and various other things had intervened. But I saw my new acquaintance GG, who has a blog devoted to reading through the Episcopal lectionary, came up to where I left off last weekend, at the beginning of chapter 7. I thought, hey, maybe that would be a good time to hop back on, but then I got sick. Now he’s well into chapter 8, though today’s reading is naturally devoted to the Annunciation. However, I might try to catch up with him by blogging 7 all at once. His discipline should be a model for me — even while I was doing Mark, I was incredibly flaky about it!

Meanwhile, rilina had an interesting reaction to part of the Hauerwas lecture that I blogged last week.

March 22, 2004

Please stand by

Filed under: Miscellaneous — Camassia @ 9:58 am

Have come down with a nasty cold, hence my rude disappearance. I will be back once my brain has returned from its leave of absence.

March 18, 2004

Carrot and stick

Filed under: Religion and sex — Camassia @ 6:28 pm

Jennifer, in a post she has now taken down, linked back to this lecture on abortion by Stanley Hauerwas. I finally got around to reading the whole thing, which seemed overdue since I’ve heard so much about Hauerwas and have heard him quoted so often (evidently, he’s a very quotable guy). Anyway, it was about what I expected — provocative, uncompromising, not entirely convincing, but very interesting.

He quotes at length from a sermon about how the church should care for women with troublesome pregnancies, and gives examples:

Let me tell you two stories about what it is like when the church takes this responsibility seriously. The first is a story that Will Willimon, the Dean of Duke University Chapel, tells about a black church. In this church, when a teen-ager has a baby that she cannot care for, the church baptizes the baby and gives him/her to an older couple in the church that has the time and wisdom to raise the child. That way, says the pastor, the couple can raise the teen-age mother along with the baby. ‘That,’ the pastor says, ‘is how we do it.’”

“The second story involves something that happened to Deborah Campbell. A member of her church, a divorced woman, became pregnant, and the father dropped out of the picture. The woman decided to keep the child. But as the pregnancy progressed and began to show, she became upset because she felt she could not go to church anymore. After all, here she was, a Sunday School teacher, unmarried and pregnant. So she called Deborah. Deborah told her to come to church and sit in the pew with the Campbell family, and, no matter how the church reacted, the family would support her. Well, the church rallied around when the woman’s doctor told her at her six-month checkup that she owed him the remaining balance of fifteen hundred dollars by the next month; otherwise, he would not deliver the baby. The church held a baby shower and raised the money. When the time came for her to deliver, Deborah was her labor coach. When the woman’s mother refused to come and help after the baby was born, the church brought food and helped clean her house while she recovered from the birth. Now the woman’s little girl is the child of the parish.”

It all sounds very Christian to me, but I couldn’t help wondering how many people would complain that churches behaving in such a way would be rewarding premarital sex. Or, following the types of arguments you hear on Marriage Debate, negating the need for fathers. Recently the former proprietress of that blog was quoted as saying, “every child has a birthright to know and be raised by their mother and their father.”

Hauerwas doesn’t directly address this question, but it sounds like he doesn’t agree. For one thing, he doesn’t think anybody has inalienable rights. (I’m not gonna touch that one right now.) But more importantly, he doesn’t buy the importance of biological kinship:

We, as church, are ready to be challenged by the other. This has to do with the fact that in the church, every adult, whether single or married, is called to be parent. All Christian adults have a parental responsibility because of baptism. Biology does not make parents in the church. Baptism does. Baptism makes all adult Christians parents and gives them the obligation to help introduce these children to the Gospel. Listen to the baptismal vows; in them the whole church promises to be parent. In this regard the church reinvents the family.

In a way, the comparison is not entirely fair, because Gallagher is talking about secular laws and Hauerwas strictly about the church. But it sounds like underlying this is a disagreement about the nature of men. Eve, in more places than I’m going to bother linking to now, has argued that men are not going to interested in husbandhood and fatherhood unless they feel there’s something unique and necessary about it — something only a man can do. Men today, she says, are getting the message that they’re superfluous.

Hauerwas is a lot less sympathetic:

One of the good things about the church’s understanding of marriage is that it helps us to get a handle on making men take responsibility for their progeny. It is a great challenge for any society to get its men to take up this responsibility. As far as today’s church is concerned, we must start condemning male promiscuity. … Until we speak clearly on male promiscuity, we will simply continue to make the problems of teen-age pregnancy and abortion female problems. Males have to be put in their place.

It seems like Eve is offering the carrot, and Hauerwas the stick. Is men’s responsibility problem that they think too much of themselves, or too little? I have to admit I’ve always been faintly creeped out by Eve’s line of thinking, because it brings up that insecurity that tends to keep women at a permanent disadvantage. Men are more willing and able to walk out on families, so they have to be given extra incentives to stay, like more power and more flattery. On the other hand, Hauerwas’ position is based entirely on religion: men should give themselves because all Christians should give themselves, without selfish motives. It doesn’t really fit in a culture based on enlightened self-interest, as Hauerwas seems to well know.

Anyway, I don’t have the solution to this, and I certainly don’t know the Mind of Man. But it’s interesting to see two pro-life, pro-marriage Christians coming at it from such different angles.

March 15, 2004

Stuff I didn’t realize was controversial

Filed under: Ecclesiology — Camassia @ 1:10 pm

Every time my church does communion, the pastor delivers a recap of the Last Supper. When he gets to the bread-breaking part, he illustratively breaks up the bread with his hands and then drops it on the plate to be eaten by the communicants.

I always thought this was just a bit of show-and-tell, but apparently it means he’s caved in to Calvinists:

The Calvinists deny that Christ’s body is present in the Lord’s Supper. In their view you simply eat bread and drink wine. The communion is in your heart not at the altar. To show that they did not believe that Christ’s body was present in the Sacrament the Calvinist pastors would hold up the bread and break it. They taught their people that the sacramental bread could not be the body of Christ since, “Not a bone of his was broken.” “You can’t break Christ’s body,” they said, “but look, we can certainly break the bread. So this is our way, by our practice, of showing that the bread is not the body.”

When Kaiser Wilhelm had legislated the Union church he also insisted that pastors break the bread during the consecration. The Lutherans refused. Some where jailed for there practice to NOT break the bread. Some Lutheran ministers lost their positions for this witness, some where banished. Others, like the French Huguenots and the English Puritans before them, left Germany so to be able to practice their faith as they would choose. …

In the 21st century, especially among the Lutherans whose heritage is that of oppression under the Prussian Union (of which the LCMS numbers itself), if a Lutheran pastor breaks the bread while consecrating it that doesn’t necessarily make him a Calvinist and he isn’t thereby denying the faith. What he is doing however, is demonstrating that he is unaware of history. And he is introducing a custom against which his forefathers were willing to sacrifice, suffer and even die.

I can understand the sacrifice and suffering against such an egregious intrusion of the state into church affairs, but I don’t really get going through that much over the liturgical issue per se. It seems almost to be saying that the Calvinists were right, and the breaking somehow does demonstrate that the bread couldn’t really be Christ’s body.

I’m not up on the arguments over the Lord’s Supper (to me, it’s one of the least interesting major theological disputes). But did advocates of the Real Presence ever claim that the bread altered to the point where it couldn’t be broken? Or that it somehow actually acquired bones that could be broken? Or were the Calvinists just arguing that, if it didn’t turn into a literal human body, it couldn’t be made of Jesus-stuff at all? If somebody knows more about this, I’m all ears …

(Link via Bill Cork.)

March 10, 2004

Atonement and victory

Filed under: Christology — Camassia @ 2:38 pm

Peter writes that the Passion movie reminds him of the discussion he had with me about a year ago about the theology of the crucifixion. Actually, I was thinking the same thing, and it’s interesting to compare myself then with now. After that discussion I basically dropped the subject and didn’t think about it a whole lot. So it’s interesting to see how my thinking has moved, even though it’s been largely subconscious.

Part of what was different about me then was I kind of understood the relationship between God and human as a giant omnipotent being over a helpless insect. Although Christians see God as sovereign, of course, I hadn’t quite realized how exalted they see humanity as becoming: to reign with God in the kingdom of heaven, beneath him but also alongside him. The omnipotence thing is still a big problem for me, but it does explain a bit why God is going at this interactively rather than by fiat. I mentioned in a comment to this post that I had warmed to the idea of “God became man so that man could become divine.” Back when Telford first told me that line, on Palm Sunday last year, I didn’t understand what he was talking about, because the whole “man becoming divine” thing hadn’t quite reached me yet.

I also mentioned that I hated substitional atonement theory, which was the main point of contention back then. When I think about it now, though, I see the theory as not so much bad as incomplete. Peter referred to it then as if it were the lone Christian theory before these newfangled interpretations came along, but actually it originated with Calvin. And it really only makes sense in the Calvinist universe, which it’s odd that so many non-Calvinists have adopted it.
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