A Dyslexic Reading of Isaiah 2:4:

The Letter T
on
a
Shopping
Bag?

"[He] hammers words into plowshares."

(He has to spell it out for us?)

The Wright stuff I left behind . . .

N. T. Wright
Christianity Today

Over 15 years ago, back when I was striving hard to become a scholar in religious studies, I grew interested in the writings of N. T. Wright, and I met him at the 1999 SBL/AAR Conference, where I gave three ground-breaking presentations but garnered no interviews. Within three months of that conference, I was walking a couple of kilometers four times a day to teach English conversation in a language institute in Daegu. I was lucky. I had a job.

Yesterday, I encountered an article by Jason Byassee, "Surprised by N.T. Wright" (Christianity Today, April 8, 2014), that called forth memories I'd forgotten of Wright's attraction as a scholar:

Wright's goal in his teaching and writing is to massively revise the way Christianity has been articulated for generations. Christian faith, for Wright, is not about going to heaven when you die. It is not about the triumph of grace over the law of the Old Testament. He says its key doctrine is not justification by grace alone, the cornerstone for the Protestant Reformers. The church has misread Paul so severely, it seems, that no one fully understood the gospel from the time of the apostle to the time a certain British scholar started reading Paul in Greek in graduate school.

In short, Wright was a pot-stirrer, an iconoclast, a trouble-maker . . . except that he presented a novel conservative reading through his radical approach, so his writings offered a bracing challenge to things I had previously learned, whether liberal or conservative.

But I've left that scholarly realm behind, for life is full of surprises . . .

Noaks Ark?

I happened yesterday to be reading Peter Chattaway's article "The Genesis of 'Noah'" (Christianity Today, March 27, 2014), which delves into film interpretations of the Noah story prior to the Aronofsky version currently showing, when I noticed this poster from publicity for the 1928 Hollywood version directed by the Hungarian director Michael Curtiz:

Something didn't look quite right, I thought, and after a puzzled minute or two, I realized the poster reads "Noaks Ark." I laughed at the mistake, but then wondered if it was a mistake. Googling "Noaks Ark," I found the following 'Nordic' poster written in Swedish:

Someone at Christianity Today found the same poster and clipped away the wording along the bottom but failed to notice that the poster reads "Noaks Ark," so I was still right about there being a mistake.

Actually, this Swedish version of the name in the film title is closer to the Hebrew (נֹחַ, Noach), whereas the English version follows the Greek Septuagint (Νωε, Noe), or perhaps the Latin Vulgate (Noe), so one could argue that "Noah" is the actual mistake.

I'd like to see this Aronofsky film . . . maybe also that 1928 version as well . . . and I now realize I ought to have worked in a Noah allusion in my novella, maybe in the "Cursed Canoe" passage . . .

Scriptural Minefields for Journalists . . .

David Brooks
NYT

In an otherwise exemplary column, "Religion and Inequality" (International Herald Tribune (Global Edition of the New York Times), page 9a-c, June 15-16, 2013), David Brooks writes:

In Corinthians, Jesus tells the crowds, "Not many of you were wise by worldly standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."

Just for the record, that's Paul (not Jesus) writing (not speaking, except maybe to an amanuensis) in I Corinthians 1:26-27 (not just "Corinthians" -- and it's from the New International Version). Also, Paul is not addressing a crowd, but rather, the Church at Corinth. As I expected upon reading this misattribution by Brooks, there were a lot of sarcastic responses throughout the Internet, which I see no need to post here. If only Brooks believed in the verbal plenary inspiration of the Bible and could argue like Ken Ham that "Jesus wrote ALL of the Bible":

"Jesus, the Creator, is the Word. The Bible is the written Word. Every word in the Bible is really the Word of the Creator -- Jesus Christ"

An excuse, perhaps problematic in its own right, but an excuse. Brooks, however, doesn't share that theology -- not by a long shot -- so he doesn't have this way out, and he has since 'corrected' the attribution:

In I Corinthians, Paul tells the crowds, "Not many of you were wise by worldly standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."

Brooks needs to let those crowds disperse, too, but he was at least forthright:

The column . . . incorrectly described a passage from I Corinthians that ends with the statement, "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." It was written by Paul, not spoken by Jesus.

Right, but not written to crowds, though possibly to a crowded Corinthian church . . .

On NOT channeling 'unclean' spirits . . .

International Authors
Carter Kaplan

My cyber-friend Carter Kaplan, editor and publisher of International Authors, recently asked me to prepare and offer a portion for the Introduction to the literary anthology Emanations III:

[I]f you would like to contribute to the collaborative Introduction, please send me your clever, urbane, and/or satirical thoughts on subjects including New Age culture, cheesy mysticism, optimism, cults, delusional metaphysics, flying saucer abduction, store front churches, channeling unclean spirits and the Gods of ancient civilizations, and the spectacle of uninformed people making up cheesy spiritual (or political or critical) beliefs out of whole cloth as they go along . . . .

I couldn't let pass the opportunity to comment on the great unwashed spirits, so I sent him the following:

On channeling unclean spirits, we need to know the rules, and where better to look than Leviticus 10:10? Which sayeth: "You are to distinguish between the holy (A) and the common (B), and between the unclean (C) and the clean (D)." This statement, an oblique imperative, actually, compels us to make distinctions, but a careful reading is required here, for the sentence is not only a chiasm of the structure A = D and B = C. it is also an example of Hebrew parallelism A <--> B = C <--> D. Chiastically, the holy and the unclean are opposites, given that one must distinguish between the holy and the common, for the holy is clean, whereas the common is unclean. In terms of parallelism, however, the holy and the unclean have similar characteristics, for the unclean parallels the holy. What the holy and the unclean primarily share as characteristics -- or so we can see from various scriptural passages -- is their powerful dynamism as invasive forces and their intrinsic danger to human beings. Just as we cannot survive an intimate encounter with the holy, so we cannot survive an intimate encounter with the unclean. Channeling unclean spirits is thus a deadly thing to do . . . but so is channeling holy spirits! Best to avoid channeling anything at all . . .

Strictly speaking, Leviticus 10:10 is a bit more complicated than what I've delineated above, for the holy isn't exactly clean, nor is the common inherently unclean, but that's another level of analysis, though any reader with interest can check out this pdf document of an article I co-wrote on the holy and the unclean in Mark's gospel.

Anyway, I'm curious to see what Carter does with my offering as he integrates it with the offerings of others . . .

Bestseller in Norway: The Book!

Bibelen
Det Norske Teatret
Per Maning, Det Norske Teatret/Associated Press

The caption to the above photo tells us that "[t]his undated photo provided by Oslo theater Det Norske Teatret (The Norwegian Theater) shows actors rehearsing a scene from Bibelen, a six-hour play based on a nontraditional interpretation of the Bible." Not especially surprising, a nontraditional interpretation in a secular society such as Norway's, but the accompanying article, "In print and on stage, the Bible makes surprise comeback in secular Norway" (The Washington Post, Associated Press, June 6, 2013), reports on a recent, remarkable development:

It may sound like an unlikely No. 1 best-seller for any country, but in Norway -- one of the most secular nations in an increasingly godless Europe -- the runaway popularity of the Bible has caught the country by surprise. The Scriptures, in a new Norwegian language version, even outpaced Fifty Shades of Grey to become Norway's best-selling book.

Why this sudden interest within a 'godless' European country?

Anne Veiteberg, publishing director of Norway's Bible Society, said that increased immigration also probably has been a factor.

More than 258,000 immigrants have settled in the country during the last six years alone, adding diversity of race and religion. The Church of Norway estimates that around 60 percent of immigrants are Christian, while the rest are Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu.

"Now that we're exposed to other faiths, Norwegians have gotten more interested in their own faith," Veiteberg said.

I think we can speculate a bit at this point. The 40 percent non-Christian immigrants are mostly Muslim, I'd bet, for I doubt there are many Buddhists or Hindus. Moreover, the Christian immigrants probably are not reading the Bible in Norwegian. That means that the new Norwegian translation is being read by Norwegians, who are buying it at a bestseller rate. Why? I suspect that the Norwegians, confronted by large numbers of Muslims in Norway, are reacting against what is perceived as the challenge posed by Islam -- especially the threat posed by Islamism -- and are, in a sense, showing that Norwegians have their own religious identity, a Christian one grounded in the Bible.

This doesn't mean that the Norwegians are about to become Bible-Thumpers, rather that they -- even as a secular nation -- want to reaffirm their own religious identity in the face of an assertive, if related, foreign religion.

The 'Bad' in the Good Book . . .

Eric A. Seibert
Ah, the Good Book . . .
"When she was good, she was very good indeed,
but when she was bad she was horrid."
- H. W. Longfellow

Messiah College

Professor Eric Seibert may soon be getting into hot water with fellow evangelicals for his views on scripture, but he raises some issues in his book The Violence of Scripture that press for resolution, as we see in this statement, "When the 'Good Book' is Bad: Challenging the Bible's Violent Portrayals of God" posted on the blog Patheos - Peter Enns: Rethinking Biblical Christianity:

The basic premise of my recent book, The Violence of Scripture, is quite simple: the Bible should never be used to harm others. One might imagine such a "profound" truth to be self-evident and hardly worthy of a book length treatment. But the sad reality is that the "good book" has been bad news for far too many people . . . . Most Christians would attribute this misuse of the Bible to faulty interpretations and misguided interpreters . . . . [U]nfortunately, the problem runs deeper than this . . . . right through the pages of Scripture itself . . . . [N]ot everything in the "good book" is either good, or good for us. I realize this may sound blasphemous to some people . . . . When the Church grandly proclaims the Bible to be the Word of God, it gives the impression that the words of Scripture are above critique and beyond reproach . . . . But this way of reading the Bible is problematic . . . . At times the Bible endorses values we should reject, praises acts we must condemn, and portrays God in ways we cannot accept . . . . Unfortunately, the Church does not often help us know what to do when we encounter problems in Scripture . . . . If we feel compelled to accept what we read at face value, and are forbidden from asking honest questions about the troublesome texts we encounter, we run the risk of using the Bible in ways that may harm others . . . . [I]f we embrace the many positive portrayals of violence in the text . . . , we may find ourselves approving of certain acts of violence and war . . . [I]f we are going to keep the Bible from harming others, we need to learn to have problems with it. We need to protest what is objectionable and condemn what is immoral. Otherwise, we run the risk of perpetuating the violent legacy of Scripture by making the "good book" behave in very bad ways.

Any readers who regularly visit this blog will quickly grasp why I've posted this excerpt on biblically sanctioned violence. I often post on Islamist violence, and I read posts by other bloggers on such violence, but I've also occasionally posted on violence in the Bible, and in reading some blogs by other bloggers who've dealt with the same issue, I've seen a distinction made between Islam and Christianity on violence, namely, that the Muslim scripture explicitly prescribes violence, whereas the Christian scripture merely describes it.

Such a resolution, however, is not quite so easy as that, for some biblical passages specifically command violence, even sacred violence, against enemies. Many Christians argue that these commands were limited to specific circumstances in the distant past and offer no model for the Church, which is commanded to be a peacemaker. Fair enough . . . but what do such commands tell us about the Christian God? That He ordered men to commit immoral acts of genocide, or at least of murder? Can such commands be justified? Are they consistent with a proper conception of God?

Professor Seibert has raised such questions -- not only in the post summarized, but also in two more, here and here -- and our critical, questioning era demands an answer, if only to suggest some way for Muslims to deal with violence in their scripture.

But not only for that . . .

"Memory as Performance" - An Old, First Draft of an Old, Neglected Article . . .

Neon Church

Justin Alley

I'm resurrecting several old articles in the hope of publishing them now, some of them from several years ago. The passage below is the introduction to an article titled "Memory as Performance: Toward a Biblical Soteriology of Remembering." I wrote it about ten years ago when I had 'tenure' and access to a theology library, just slightly prior to the time when that particular university decided that foreigners couldn't have tenure in Korean universities -- which I never believed and which doesn't appear to have been true -- and relabled me as a "Visiting Professor" on temporary contract. I put the article aside, partly from being shot off the course of my career trajectory, partly from lack of time to pursue the project, partly from je ne sais quoi . . . Anyway, here's the introduction to that nearly forty-page paper:

The exponential growth of information that characterizes the modern and inchoate postmodern ages has placed an enormous burden upon memory, whether individual or cultural.[2] Indeed, the emerging postmodern age stems in part from the breakdown of memory's integrative function,[3] for postmodernism's explicitly declared mistrust of metanarratives partially derives from recognizing that finite memory’s necessary selectiveness excludes an ever-vaster temporal landscape of events, perspectives, values, practices, and narratives. Postmodernists therefore reject metanarratives such as those propounded by Marxists, positivists, free-market liberals, and Christians and embrace instead a multifold particularity of experience. We see a material analogy to this in postmodern architecture, which often picks and chooses randomly from various architectural styles -- both past and present -- in its constructions. We thus would not find ourselves at all surprised if confronted by a Gothic church with glaring neon images flashing religious icons from recesses in the walls where traditional Gothic windows would originally have displayed their stained glass beauty. Postmodernism, then, employs allusion where previous epochs (including the modernist one) would have attempted to achieve integration. Yet, allusion itself relies upon memory -- even if merely of discrete memories linked at random. Such discrete memories, moreover, presuppose a memory of narratives within which each has an integrated sense borrowed even in its postmodern negation. Despite the burden placed on memory by the exponential growth of information, despite postmodernism's distrust of memory's integrative function, we confront the ineluctability of memory. Yet, how should we understand a Christian Biblical soteriology[4] of memory?[5] I suggest that we note two corresponding aspects of remembering as "doing": 1) memory as actively remembering the inauguration of the covenant through a symbolic re-enacting of the original covenantal institution as though one were reliving a personally experienced event; and 2) memory as actively remembering the covenant itself through the lived enacting of the covenantal principles in one's daily actions.[6] This article will present a number of Biblical passages relevant to memory in order to examine the evidence that these two aspects of remembering mutually characterize a Christian Biblical soteriology of remembering.

Here are the footnotes to this introduction, which start with footnote 2 because footnote 1 belongs with a quote that goes with the article's title:

[2] This is the case not only despite new technologies of information processing, transmission, and storage but especially because of them. See Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulterellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999): "In der westlichen Zivilisation verschärft sich das Problem des kulturellen Gedächtnisses unter den Druck der neuen Medien, die zugleich unvorstellbare Speicherkapazitäten freisetzen und Information in immer schnelleren Rhythmen zirkulieren lassen. Immer dichtere Kommunikationsnetze vergellschaften entfernteste Regionen. Radio und Fernsehen schicken ihre Programme pausenlos und gedankenschnell über Satelliten um den Globus. Die Speicherkapazität neuer Datenträger und Archive sprengt die Konturen eines kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Die Bilderflut des Fernsehens macht die Schrift als zentrales Gedächtnis-Medien obsolet; neue Speicher- und Informationstechnologien basieren auf einer anderen Art von Schrift, nämlich der digitalen, die in ihrer flüssigen Gestalt nichts mehr zu tun hat mit dem alten Gestus des Einschreibens. Diese Schrift läßt keinen trennscharfen Unterschied mehr zu zwischen Erinnern und Vergessen" (213-214). Translation: "In western civilization, the problem of cultural memory is growing ever sharper under the pressure of new media that simultaneously create unimaginable storage capacities and allow information to circulate in ever faster rhythms. An ever tighter communication net draws distant regions into society. Radio and television send their programs without pause and as quick as thought by satellite around the globe. The storage capacity of new databases and archives explodes the contours of cultural memory. The flood of images from television make writing as the central medium of memory obsolete; new storage- and information-technologies base themselves on a different manner of writing, namely, the digital, which in its fluid form has nothing more to do with the old gesture of inscribing. This writing no longer allows a sharp distinction between remembering and forgetting." Assmann here apparently means cultural remembering and forgetting, not personal remembering and forgetting.

[3] In fact, an earlier breakup of "comprehensive social memory," as Danièle Hervieu-Léger notes, "came with the emergence and historical development of modernity," itself as "[t]he affirmation of the autonomous individual, the advance of rationalization breaking up the 'sacred canopies,' and the process of institutional differentiation denote the end of societies based upon memory," in Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 127. However, Hervieu-Léger also notes the more recent loss of memory that Assmann analyzes, and she points to much the same reason for this loss, i.e., overabundance of information: "The complexity of the world shown in the vast incoherent mass of available information is decreasingly amenable to being ordered in the more or less impromptu way that collective memory was able to achieve by finding explanatory links," 128. The growth of the internet is exacerbating this overabundance and constructing an informational ediface that evermore resembles that seductive and baffling labyrinth of an endless library described by Jorge Luis Borges in his story "The Library of Babel" (see the fine anthology of several of Borges's short stories: Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (Norton, 1988), edited by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates).

[4] Some would question the possibility of a Biblical soteriology (or theology) of anything since the Bible is a collection of various documents written at various times by various individuals. This misses two points: 1) these documents were written within a religious tradition in communication with itself over the same central religious experiences and issues, and 2) the historical process of the early Common Era that resulted in the Bible as the Christian canon has conferred upon the Church the privilege of interpreting for itself what this self-communication means to say. In other words, the method should not be one of simply adding up what the individual texts state as an expression of what the individual authors meant but one of working toward a more unified Biblical soteriology by looking at the texts within the context of the canon as a whole as interpreted by the Church. For the purposes of this article, I will be working within the general framework of what is known as canon criticism, an interpretive approach in which "exegesis endeavors to determine what a given passage means not only in the immediate context of its date, authorship and setting but in the wider context of the canon in which it was ultimately incorporated" (Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 99a). Further on the issue of the canon, see Luke Timothy Johnson's "Epilogue: The New Testament as the Church's Book," in The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 595–619.

[5] Memory as cultural artefact has been the subject of analysis by cultural theorists. Aside, from Assmann, mentioned above, many others have addressed this issue. For instance, Harold Weinrich, Sprache in Texten (Stuttgart: 1976), pp. 291-294, analyzes two metaphors of memory: "Gedächtnis-Magazin" ("Memory-Storehouse") and "Tafel der Erinnering" ("Table of Recollection"). The former is a spatial metaphor, the latter more of a visual one. Both, however, are purely mental and mostly static. My suggestion in this paper is that the Biblical tradition presents a yet another understanding of memory in addition to storehouse and table. In the Bible, "to remember" very often means "to do." Thus, to remember God's covenant means to fulfill God's covenant. This does not rule out other meanings of memory -- memory as table emerges in a few places -- but the understanding of memory as action is pervasive in the Bible.

[6] This conceptualization of memory has a secular counterpart in that "to remember" can also mean to "to do." For example, the imperatival expression "Remember your promise!" means far more than simply to recall it intellectually; it implicitly means "Keep your promise!" Thus, the present article does not intend to draw a pragmatic-linguistics distinction between Biblical and secular expressions of remembering but, rather, to focus upon a neglected aspect of the Biblical understanding of remembering -- and which may also be neglected in its secular counterpart. Of course, the Biblical sense of remembering has a powerful soteriological significance lacking in its secular counterpart.

Such is the project upon which I labored, a hard labor cut short by a miscarriage of justice -- one might well call it the literary equivalent of a partial birth abortion! Actually, though, I did finish a draft of the projected article before the university terminated my tenure and put me on temporary contract, and I now hope to polish this article and send it off for publication somewhere or other. I confess that the writing sounds so much better than anything I could attempt today -- I can't even recall how I managed to write it, though I suppose that I still had hopes of a career in religious studies back then, and thus had the motivation to push myself beyond my usual intellectual limitations.

Wish me luck . . .

Free Expression: Rage, Respect, Reading, and Rights

Muslim Rage?
Daily Beast

That image above comes from the cover of this week's Newsweek, or so the internet informs me, for my hard copy has a cover image of a Myanmar Punk, replete with colorful Mohawk haircut! But inside the magazine that arrived by Korea's postal service is the same article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, though I have yet to read it because I'm preoccupied with thinking.

I'm thinking about hypocrisy.

My mind turned to cases of this deceptive gesture toward virtue as I was reading the words of one Muslim protester outside the American Embassy in Cairo, who said:

We never insult any prophet -- not Moses, not Jesus -- so why can't we demand that Muhammad be respected? (David D. Kirkpatrick, "Cultural Clash Fuels Muslims Angry at Online Video," NYT, September 16, 2012)

Never? Really never?

But in a collection of Hadith by Sahih Bukhari (Volume 4, Book 55, Number 657), Abu Huraira reports Muhammad foretelling that when Isa (Jesus) returns, "he will break the cross," which means that Isa (Jesus) will personally destroy Christianity. From a Christian perspective, that's certainly an insult to Jesus, for it has him destroying what Christians hold as their faith's most crucial symbol for depicting the manner in which Jesus became the sacrifice for sins.

And what about this kind of behavior?

A Muslim imam called Abu Islam took part in a protest in Cairo and destroyed a Bible, as reported by Mary Abdelmassih in "Muslim Cleric Tears Bible At Protest Outside the US Embassy in Cairo" (Assyrian International News Agency, September 14, 2012)?

He starts tearing the bible and throwing the leaves towards the mob, amid chants of Allahu Akbar and . . . saying: "To all the cross worshippers around the world we will not keep quiet . Today, we tore it." [Also,] a man in blue beside him burns the bible raising it for everyone to see.

This desecration of Christian scripture would surely constitute an insult to various prophets, or such would be the view of Christians -- derogatorily called "cross worshippers" by the imam -- and note that this same imam added these words, "Next time I will urinate on it [i.e., the Bible]," thereby compounding the insult.

So much for Islam's reputed respect toward what Muslims call a "prophetic" religion. Now what about Islam's treatment of a non-Christian religion, say, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas?

Was that respectful? Or is respect due only to Islam's sacred symbols?

The list of insults and destructive violence could extend to accounts of Muslim attacks against various religions, with the list going on and on . . .

Of course, these insults and attacks are solely the actions of a tiny minority of Islamists who claim to represent Islamic orthodoxy and cite authoritative texts as proof but are rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, who regularly oppose the Islamists in peaceful counterprotests aimed at demonstrating that Islam actually is a religion of peace, as everyone says.

Be that as it may, my view, as readers already know, is that speech -- even insulting speech, whether uttered by Muslim or non-Muslim -- must be protected speech, so I agree with the author of The Satanic Verses, the controversial Salman Rushdie, who lives under a fatwa of death and whose position on free expression is reported by Michiko Kakutani in "Rushdie Relives Difficult Years Spent in Hiding" (NYT, September 17, 2012):

Gradually, . . . he came to see that "the violence and menace of the response" to his novel "was a terrorist act that had to be confronted," and that he "wanted the world's leaders to defend his right to be a troublemaker."

It was about more than his book. It was about "the era of fear and self-censorship that the fatwa [against Satanic Verses] had brought into being." It was about standing up for literature, which "encouraged understanding, sympathy and identification with people not like oneself," at a time when "the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war."

He was fighting, he realized, for "freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art" of storytelling, "of which he was privileged to be a practitioner."

Like Rushdie under a death threat but regaining his nerve, we simply must raise and protect our free, unintimidated voices.

Contagious Holiness in the Old Testament?

Amazon Books

Rudolf Otto's book on The Idea of the Holy is worth a close reading, but you'll need to go to Amazon to click on it. I don't recall if Otto analyzes the contagiousness of holiness in the Old Testament, but he does investigate other aspects, such as the danger posed by the holy's powerful dynamism, a related aspect.

I start my intensive writing course today, so I don't have as much time as I'd like to have, and thus didn't find a specific Old Testament passage that I was looking for on the holy's contagiousness, but I found a few useful verses on the transmissibility of holiness.

There is, for instance, Exodus 29:37 (referring to the altar):

Seven days thou dost make atonement for the altar, and hast sanctified it, and the altar hath been most holy; all that is coming against the altar is holy. (Young's Literal Translation)

A bit further is found Exodus 30:29 (referring to effect of holy anointing oil on the tent of meeting, the ark of the testimony, the table and all its vessels, the candlestick and its vessels, the altar of perfume, the altar of burnt-offering and all its vessels, and the laver and its base):

And thou hast sanctified them, and they have been most holy; all that is coming against them is holy; (Young's Literal Translation)

In the biblical book that follows is found Leviticus 6:18 (referring to the food of fire offerings):

Every male among the sons of Aaron doth eat it -- a statute age-during to your generations, out of the fire-offerings of Jehovah: all that cometh against them is holy. (Young's Literal Translation)

In all three of these, the expression "to come against" means "to come into contact with." Much further along -- and perhaps less clear -- is found Ezekiel 44:19 (referring to sacred garments):

And in their going forth unto the outer court -- unto the outer court unto the people -- they strip off their garments, in which they are ministering, and have placed them in the holy chambers, and have put on other garments; and they do not sanctify the people in their own garments. (Young's Literal Translation)

The implication seems to be that if the sacred garments were worn by the priests while they are ministering to the people, the people who come into contact with the priests will become holy, or so other translations say, but I recognize that the translation here is not so clear. By the way, note verse 23, merely four lines further along:

And My people they direct between holy and common, and between unclean and clean they cause them to discern.

This verse is nearly identical to Leviticus 10:10, which we looked at yesterday. Anyway, these verses, or at least three of them, show that the idea of contagious holiness is not foreign to the Old Testament.

I'll continue looking for the passage that I was thinking of but couldn't find today.

Leviticus 10:10 - Parallelism or Chiasm?

The Common?

Free Dictionary Online

The Bible-study class that I've been attending has just finished analyzing the book of Hebrews, and we'll be taking a two-month break before starting up again on some new topic. I've suggested that we study the impurity system of the Old Testament because it stands in the background of the New Testament and needs to be thoroughly understood.

I believe I've previously called attention to verse 10 of Leviticus 10, but let's start here anyway, for it 'explains' why the Mosaic Covenant sets forth all sorts of rules, namely:

so as to make a separation
between the holy (qodesh) and the common (chol), and
between the unclean (tame') and the pure (tahowr);

I've borrowed this verse from Young's Literal Translation (YLT), available at the Blue Letter Bible site.

One question that arises is how to understand the structure of this verse: does the structure exhibit parallelism or chiasm?

Normally, the arrangement of a verse this way in the Hebrew Bible manifests parallelism, and this sort of structure is so common, it's called "Hebrew Parallelism." That would therefore be a good first guess.

Against parallelism, however, would be the fact that "the holy" (qodesh) and "the unclean" (tame') are opposites. That might seem the case with "the common" (chol) and "the pure" (tahowr) as well. And since the holy and the pure seem linked conceptually, and the unclean and the common also, then we might want to read this structure as a chiasm.

But not so fast!

If we know a bit more about these categories, then we realize that the holy and the unclean are both dynamic forces in the Hebrew Bible and that the common in its fundamental state is pure, so there seems to be some parallelism after all.

I therefore suggest that this verse is intended to be read as exhibiting both parallelism and chiasm, but we'll need to look into this issue some more another time, so let's just keep it in mind for now.

Arrived: Bodies of God!

Cambridge University Press

My copy of Benjamin Sommer's Bodies of God book has arrived, a text whose review I noted in a recent blog entry. I don't recall if I quoted any of the words from the Cambridge University Press advertising copy (though I think not), but here they are in full:

Sommer utilizes a lost ancient Near Eastern perception of divinity according to which a god has more than one body and fluid, unbounded selves. Though the dominant strains of biblical religion rejected it, a monotheistic version of this theological intuition is found in some biblical texts. Later Jewish and Christian thinkers inherited this ancient way of thinking; ideas such as the sefirot in Kabbalah and the trinity in Christianity represent a late version of this theology. This book forces us to rethink the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, as this notion of divine fluidity is found in both polytheistic cultures (Babylonia, Assyria, Canaan) and monotheistic ones (biblical religion, Jewish mysticism, Christianity), whereas it is absent in some polytheistic cultures (classical Greece). The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel has important repercussions not only for biblical scholarship and comparative religion but for Jewish-Christian dialogue.

I'll be reading Sommer's book in the near future and blogging when I have something to say, but today, I can only note that Ben has mentioned me in his "Acknowledgements" as one one of the many people with whom be talked, conversations that in my case took place in Jerusalem more than ten years ago when I spent a year there as a Golda Meir Fellow (aka Lady Davis Fellow) at Hebrew University (Mt. Scopus Campus):

While writing this book, I have benefitted from conversations with many friends and colleagues . . . . Useful feedback came from . . . H. Jeffrey Hodges . . . . (Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, New York: Cambridge University Press, March 2011, page xiv)

That's me . . . despite the "-rey" ending. Everyone makes this mistake, so I'm fighting a losing battle over the spelling of my name. Moreover, Ben is being excessively generous. I didn't contribute much, barely enough to mention. But I appreciate Ben's words -- as well as the recommendation that he wrote for me back around 2001 when I was still vainly striving to make my scholarly way in religious studies. I had hoped to contribute to Jewish-Christian dialogue of the sort alluded to in the advertising copy above.

My aim these days is to be a competent teacher, editor, and blogger as well as wise old man. On that last goal, I'm at least halfway there -- my students consider me old!

A Calvinist Reading of Romans 1:19-32?

Skull Galaxy
Weird Creation as Intelligent Design?

(Wikipedia)

Some weeks ago, I questioned a Calvinist reading of Romans 1:19-20:

I don't see that this passage in Romans provides strong evidence for the Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) view. Look again at Romans chapter 1, verse 20, quoting this time from the Morphological Greek New Testament (though it looks to be identical this time to the Textus Receptus):

τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα καθορᾶται ἥ τε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἀναπολογήτους.

I'll just borrow a translation from the New King James Version:

For since the creation of the world His invisible [attributes] are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

As I noted above, the translation of "καθορᾶται" in verse 20 reads "are clearly seen." The Greek verb comes from καθοράω and means "to see thoroughly, perceive clearly, understand." The sense of this verb seems to run counter to the Reformed view of "total depravity" since it appears to insist that human beings can infer the invisible attributes of God from the visible creation, and this human capacity for natural theology is precisely what leaves human beings "without excuse."

Whether or not Paul is right about this human capacity, his argument seems to assume that humans have the ability even in their sinful state, and that doesn't appear to be consistent with Reformed views on "total depravity."

My interlocutor, Professor Adolfo García de la Sienra, responded:

You cannot interpret Romans 1:20 leaving aside the next verse, 1:21, where it is said that "their foolish hearts were darkened". The whole passage seems to describe the condition of the human race which, at the beginning, had the capability to find God in creation.

I've only now had some time to reply to the professor's remark. The verse that he cites occurs within a longer passage that speaks of God allowing human beings to descend into reprobation. It does not seem to refer to a one-time event, such as the Fall, but to a process of darkening described in verses 21 through 32. But even this darkening of the heart, i.e., the understanding, does not extinguish knowledge of God, notes Paul, nor even of God's judgment concerning their sin, for verse 32 points out:

Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

The word Greek term here for "knowing" (ἐπιγινώσκω, epiginōskō) means not only "to know" but even "to become thoroughly acquainted with, to know thoroughly." The tense of the Greek is "second aorist active participle," which I suppose could be translated as "having known," as in Young's Literal Translation, but the other eleven translations offered by the Blue Letter Bible prefer "knowing" or "know." Even the YLT, however, presupposes that those whose hearts were darkened had known of God's judgment, and given that verses 21-32 describe a process that does not seem relegated to a one-time event, then I would read this process as one that every individual might undergo.

Moreover, even if individuals "did not like (cf. οὐ, ou + δοκιμάζω, dokimazō) to retain God in [their] knowledge" (verse 28), this translation seems to imply a choice in the matter, a point that the other eleven translations offered seem to agree upon.

The natural man can therefore gaze at the form of the galaxy in the image above and see the hand of God forming a cosmic man, for the skull and brain are already visible! Okay, just kidding about the specifics there. But I would like to note that Christianity has from its inception argued for a natural theology and has developed this form of theology rather highly. Modern theologians such as William Lane Craig engage in such theological reasoning as evidence for God's existence, pointing to the so-called "fine-tuning" of the universe's fundamental constants as suggesting an intelligence designing the world. Whatever one might think of the particular arguments, the presupposition seems to be that Christianity can defend God's existence on the basis of evidence interpreted by reason and that the non-Christians are capable of following such reasoning.

I suppose that some Calvinists would disagree . . .

Not the Bible's Authorized 'Virgin' . . .

Wicked Bible

(New York Times)

Be wary next time you pore over your King James Bible. You might be reading Exodus 20:14 in a rare copy of the 1631 Wicked Bible:

. . . a version . . . in which the unfortunate printer Robert Barker and his associate, Martin Lucas, left a "not" out of the commandment against committing adultery; both were fined. Barker was later put into debtors' prison, where he ultimately died.

If that's the punishment for inadvertently advocating adultery, imagine the consequences of actually carrying out that unfortunate commandment, verse 14 in the image above, which looks like it says, "Thou fhalt commit adultery," but that would be senseless. It really says, "Thou shalt commit adultery."

I'd heard of this Bible version, but I'd never seen the verse before a New York Times article by Edward Rothstein, "400 Years Old and Ageless" (September 29, 2011), brought the passage directly to my attention. Imagine the havoc that might have been wreaked if this particular version had not been caught in time and had thus caught on, say in America, which was being populated by English settlers around that time.

Actually, things likely wouldn't have turned out much different since that same verse in the correct version -- the one with "not" -- has been honored more in the breach than the observance.

There are other interesting "Bible Errata," the most theologically worrisome being the 1611 "Judas Bible," which confuses the antagonist for the protagonist in Matthew 24:36 by having Judas -- rather than Jesus -- advise the disciples, "Sit ye here while I go yonder and pray," leaving readers to wonder if the prayer also switches things around: "Not thy will, but mine be done"?

I don't, however, think the printers were that confused!

Fallenness in a Darwinian World?

St. Augustine

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

(Wikipedia)

The painting above dates to 1480 and is said to depict St. Augustine at prayer, though his eyes are open. They are, however, directed upward, as though contemplating spiritual realities. This saint, however, also observed earthly realities, such as the radical evil of human beings, which he thought due to the enslavement of the human will by our sinful nature, which he argued was biologically inherited from Adam and Eve, who had fallen from innocence into evil by their violation of God's command not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

My cyberfriend Bill Vallicella has been blogging on human evil, as I noted in a recent blog entry of my own -- "Fallenness as the Human Condition" -- on an article about "original sin" in the journal First Things:

I'm indebted to my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, for the link to the First Things article. Bill has been discussing several of the logical conundrums confronting those who take original sin seriously, and he would be well worth reading on the subject, though I've had too little time lately to do so myself, being immersed in teaching and editing.

I emailed Bill to let him know of my implicit 'hat tip' to him, and in noting an intriguing argument presented in the First Things article, I posed a query:

I liked the interesting argument that the consequences of belief and nonbelief in original sin are both bad and thus evidence of our fallen natures. But I do wonder what either original sin or fallenness mean in a Darwinian world . . .

Bill has since responded to my query with another blog post, titled "Original Sin in a Darwinian World." I cannot do justice to his argument by a summary, so I urge interested readers to go directly to his own post, but I can indicate some of his argument as it relates to my query.

Bill rejects Augustine's view that guilt is inherited, so he absolves us of any guilt due to inheritance, what he calls "originated original sin" (following Kant), basing his view on our moral intuition that we are only morally culpable for actions or inactions over which we have control, i.e., libertarian freedom. In place of Augustine's view, Bill offers what he calls "originating original sin" (again following Kant), by which he means that the fact of our evil actions or inactions can be understood as due to our fallenness -- and Bill cites Kant explicitly on this point -- "as though the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." This distinction is presented in more detail in Bill's post on Kant's distinction "between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum)."

Bill also rejects a literal reading of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, for he takes seriously the evidence for evolution. Hence his response to my query radically reinterprets the meaning of the Biblical account, and he follows Kant in this:

Man enjoys dual citzenship. As a physical being, and thus as an animal, he he is a member of the phenomenal world, the world of space-time-matter. In this realm determinism reigns: everything that happens is necessitated by the laws of nature plus the initial conditions. But man knows himself to be morally responsible, and so knows himself to be libertarianly free. Since everything phenomenal is determined, and nothing free, man as moral agent is a noumenal being who 'stands apart from the causal nexus.'

Kant sees with blinding clarity that nothing imputable to an agent can be caused by factors external to the agent: only that which the agent does or leaves undone freely and by his own agency is imputable to the agent. It follows that sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited: there is no originated original sin. For what is inherited is caused to be by factors external to the agent. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is not inherited] is true. But the predisposition to moral evil is nonetheless innate in the sense that it is not conditioned by events in time. It is logically prior to every action of the agent in the time-order.

How is the predisposition imputable? It is imputable because it is the result of a free noumenal choice. And so there is originating original sin. Each of us by an atemporal noumenal choice is the origin of the radical evil which is at the root of each specific evil act. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is imputable] is true.

If I understand Bill, then our fallenness, which follows from original sin, is to be understood as a state into which we have fallen due to an originating original sin that each one of us commits by acting (or 'inacting') wrongly at some first time in our lives, an action (or inaction) over which we had free control.

If I have understood Bill correctly, this seems to leave open a question that still requires an answer: Why do we, in our original innocence and freedom, choose evil? Admittedly, the same question can also be posed about the traditional story of Adam and Eve.

"Total Depravity" and Romans 1:20

Adolfo García de la Sienra

(Image from Metanexus Institute)

I have had a LinkedIn site for about a year now because an old Baylor friend wanted to link to me, but I did little with it until recently, when I began filling in my page with a few details, including my publications.

I decided to fill it in with more details only after I received a link request from Adolfo García de la Sienra, professor of philosophy and economic theory at Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. I'm not sure why he wanted a link . . . though I might have had contact with him several years ago when I was doing some research concerning John Milton's views on divine grace and human free will, for his name is somehow familiar to me.

Anyway, I had a bit of time to spare when I received his link request, so I took a look at his paper on "Christian Faith as Trust" (Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010) and noticed that in one of his quotes from the Greek New Testament, he'd left off a verb. I therefore sent him a note on that and asked a few questions:

I read your article "Christian Faith as Trust" a few moments ago. Interesting, if a bit over my head. I happened to notice that your quote of Romans 1:19 on page 15B was missing the Greek verb "ἐφανέρωσεν" (showed [aorist]). This verb, by the way, is aorist.

The translation is not greatly affected, though I would use past (made it plain) rather than present perfect (has made it plain). Here are verses 19-20:

1:19 διότι τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ φανερόν ἐστιν ἐν αὐτοῖς ὁ γὰρ θεὸς αὐτοῖς ἐφανέρωσεν

1:20 τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα καθορᾶται ἥ τε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἀναπολογήτους.

I have a question, however. The translation of "καθορᾶται" in verse 20 is given as "have been clearly seen" in your paper, but this is a present tense and should read "are clearly seen." Does this affect your argument, which seems to depend upon God's eternal power and divine nature to have been "originally visible, manifest and evident to all men" (emphasis mine)? The verb "καθορᾶται" would seem to imply that God's eternal power and divine nature are currently "visible, manifest and evident to all men."

I hope that this email is of some use.

I received an answer fairly quickly:

Your translation makes sense to me and I will certainly take it into account in my Spanish translation of the paper. The point is that God's eternal power and divine nature "are there" to be seen by men. The problem is that men can't see it due to a corruption of their spirit caused by sin. This is what Reformed theology calls "total depravity" (an inappropriate term for a clear concept). Spiritual regeneration removes this incapacity.

I understand his point. However, I don't see that this passage in Romans provides strong evidence for the Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) view. Look again at Romans chapter 1, verse 20, quoting this time from the Morphological Greek New Testament (though it looks to be identical this time to the Textus Receptus):

τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα καθορᾶται ἥ τε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἀναπολογήτους.

I'll just borrow a translation from the New King James Version:

For since the creation of the world His invisible [attributes] are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

As I noted above, the translation of "καθορᾶται" in verse 20 reads "are clearly seen." The Greek verb comes from καθοράω and means "to see thoroughly, perceive clearly, understand." The sense of this verb seems to run counter to the Reformed view of "total depravity" since it appears to insist that human beings can infer the invisible attributes of God from the visible creation, and this human capacity for natural theology is precisely what leaves human beings "without excuse."

Whether or not Paul is right about this human capacity, his argument seems to assume that humans have the ability even in their sinful state, and that doesn't appear to be consistent with Reformed views on "total depravity."

But I'm no expert, and Professor Adolfo García de la Sienra may very well have an answer.

Robert Spencer Implying a Treasonous Obama?

President Obama

9/11 Memorial Service in NYC

(Image from US Embassy, Seoul, Korea)

I learn a lot about radical Islam from reading Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch, but I'm careful to remain my own man and keep my own counsel. I therefore read the posts on his site with a critical eye, especially when I come across a blog entry such as this recent one (September 12, 2011) by Mr. Spencer:

Obama reads Biblical passage at 9/11 ceremonies implying that 9/11 was an act of God

Obama reads Psalm 46, including verse 8: "Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has wrought desolations in the earth."

The only people who think that 9/11 was an act of the Supreme Being wreaking desolations on the earth are . . . Islamic jihadists.

So why did Barack Obama pick this psalm out of 150 psalms, and out of innumerable appropriate Biblical passages, to read at the 9/11 ceremonies? 9/11, after all, was a day when there were indeed wrought desolations on the earth. Did Obama really mean to say that God did it, that it was an act of divine judgment, rather than a monstrous and unmitigated evil?

Or is this just another one of those funny coincidences, of which there are so very, very many when it comes to Barack Obama and his remarkable, unqualified and obvious affinity for Islam? 

In taking verse 8 of Psalm 46 as a reference to the destruction of September 11, 2001, Mr. Spencer has allowed his distaste for President Obama to cloud his better judgment. Here is what the President actually said in quoting the entirety of the scriptural passage:

Remarks by the President at the September 11th 10th Anniversary Commemoration

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore, we will not fear,
even though the earth be removed,
and though the mountains be carried
into the midst of the sea.
Though its waters roar and be troubled,
though the mountains shake
with its swelling,
there's a river
whose streams shall make glad
the City of God,
the holy place of the Tabernacle
of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her.
She shall not be moved.
God shall help her
just at the break of dawn.
The nations raged,
the kingdoms were moved.
He uttered his voice.
The earth melted.
The Lord of Hosts is with us.
The God of Jacob is our refuge.
Come behold the works of the Lord
who has made desolations in the Earth.
He makes wars cease
to the ends of the Earth.
He breaks the bough
and cuts the spear in two.
He burns the chariot in fire.
Be still and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations.
I will be exalted in the Earths.
The Lord of Hosts is with us.
The God of Jacob is our refuge. 

If we read the above passage carefully, we see that the only lines that might refer to the destruction of 9/11 are the following ones, and these clearly present God as a place of safety in troubled times when the earth is unstable and even the heights are brought down to the level of the seas:

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore, we will not fear,
even though the earth be removed,
and though the mountains be carried
into the midst of the sea. 

This upheaval described above can be read as destruction by enemies, and therefore as a parallel to the 9/11 attacks, but the terrible destruction is countered in the verses that follow below by gladdening streams of water, a metaphor for God's blessing upon his people in a time of trouble, which can be applied to mean blessings upon America by drawing upon long-held traditions about America as a shining city on a hill, a new Jerusalem:

[T]here's a river
whose streams shall make glad
the City of God,
the holy place of the Tabernacle
of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her.
She shall not be moved.
God shall help her
just at the break of dawn.

In the verse that Mr. Spencer objects to, which follows in the verses below, President Obama is much more likely referring to God's assistance on America's side in defeating Al-Qaeda, for the term "nations" is used scripturally to refer to enemies, such as Al-Qaeda, which is indeed a multinational terrorist group:

The nations raged,
the kingdoms were moved.
He uttered his voice.
The earth melted.
The Lord of Hosts is with us.
The God of Jacob is our refuge.
Come behold the works of the Lord
who has made desolations in the Earth. 

In the context of this psalm, the Lord's desolation would far more likely be wrought upon America's enemies than upon America herself, for the God of Jacob could hardly be a refuge for Americans if He is attacking the United States. President Obama could more plausibly be accused of jingoism than treason in quoting this psalm, but I'll give him a pass on both. He's simply drawing upon scripture to offer comfort by reaching to metaphors of divine blessing upon those who have suffered from the 9/11 attacks. Here's the video of the entire ceremony (27:24), which includes Obama's recitation of scripture (starting at about 9 minutes).

The problem raised for Mr. Spencer is that his unlikely scriptural reading here in this psalm calls into question his general ability to provide sound hermeneutics of scripture, whether the Bible or the Qur'an. I don't think him incapable of a proper interpretation, for he's an intelligent and well-educated man, but I do think that his 'distastes' can cloud his judgment, so I advise a degree of caution in accepting his views.

In short, learn from him, but think for yourself, which is good advice in general.

James V. Schall on Islam's 'Fragility'

James V. Schall

(Image from Georgetown University)

The Jesuit political philosopher James V. Schall has a recent short, reflective essay "On the Fragility of Islam" published at The Catholic Thing (August 23, 2011). In our time of aggressive Islamism, such a title is surprising, but perhaps it shouldn't be. Aggressiveness is often a cover for uncertainty, for lack of confidence. But why does Schall consider Islam "fragile"? Not out of ignorance, certainly. Schall first notes Islam's military success, its rapid spread through warfare from Arabia to "North Africa, the Mediterranean islands, much of Spain, the Balkans, the Near East, the vast land area from southern Russia to India and Afghanistan and even parts of China." Islam dominates in these places, as Schall notes with especial reference to formerly Christian territory, and appears powerful:

The Muslim conversion of former Christian lands seems to be permanent. What few Christians are left in these lands are second-class citizens. They are under severe pressure to convert or emigrate. Many forces within Islam desire a complete enclosure of Islam that would exclude any foreign power or religion. The Muslim world is divided into the area of peace and the area of war; the latter is what Islam does not yet control.

Given Islam's power, why does Schall consider Islam weak?

So with this background, why talk of the "fragility" of Islam? This instability arises from the status of the text of the Koran as an historical document. The Koran is said to have been dictated directly in Arabic by Allah. It has, as it were, no prehistory, even though it did not come into existence until a century or so after Mohammed.

Scholars, mostly German, have been working quietly for many decades to produce a critical edition of the Koran that takes into consideration the "pre-history" of the Koran. Due to the Muslim belief that any effort to question the Koran's text is blasphemy, the enterprise is fraught with personal risk to the researchers. The idea that the text cannot be investigated, of course, only feeds suspicion that even Muslims worry about its integrity . . . .

The fragility of Islam, as I see it, lies in a sudden realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran. Is it what it claims to be? Islam is weak militarily. It is strong in social cohesion, often using severe moral and physical sanctions. But the grounding and unity of its basic document are highly suspect. Once this becomes clear, Islam may be as fragile as communism.

Schall's argument reminds me somewhat of the secularization thesis, the long-held view that the secular forces of Modernity would undermine religious belief through critical thought, among other things. Outside of Europe, that hasn't quite happened yet, and Europe itself seems to be gravitating back toward religion, either through the growth of Islam there or in reaction to that growth among Europeans now becoming more aware of the Christian element of Western identity.

Moreover, if one compares Islam's textual situation with Christianity's, one sees that Christian fundamentalism, with its emphatic declaration of Biblical inerrancy, is partly a reaction to Modernity, especially to the threat of the scholarly world's modern approach to Biblical criticism, characterized by a hermeneutic of suspicion bent on demonstrating the incoherence of the text through focus upon inconcinnities that imply textual development reflecting theological struggles among early Christian communities rather than a divinely inspired textual revelation of theological truth at the outset, e.g., high Christology is seen as a late development of theological reflection rather than an early consequence of divine revelation. Christianity, in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms, has not fallen into theological ruin at such Biblical criticism.

But Schall might have a point. The Qur'an holds a uniquely central place in Islam, roughly analogous to the position of Christ in Christianity, and it is Allah's only verbal communication with mankind that has remained uncorrupted by those who have received it and is therefore as inerrant today as it was when the angel Gabriel dictated it directly to Muhammad. If critical hermeneutics applied to the Qur'an demonstrates that the text developed over time, i.e., that it drew upon previous scriptures and was rewritten in the decades following Muhammad's death, then Islam could suffer a critical shock, particularly if the very early Qur'anic texts found in the attic of an old mosque in Yemen should turn out to have significant textual variants.

But I don't think that a deconstruction of the Qur'anic text will happen without a fight, and not a purely academic one, at that.

Professor Ann Yong-geun on Western Prejudice Against Dog Meat

Ann Yong-geun

Public Face of Dog Meat Advocates

(Image from Korea Herald)

Professor Ann Yong-geun, faculty member in the Department of Food and Nutrition at Chung Cheong College and president of The Korean Society of Food and Nutrition, has an article in Tuesday's Korea Herald responding to a column written by Stephen Bant, a Western expat living in Korea who argues against the consumption of dog meat.

Professor Ann, who has previously "written six theses, two books and one comic book related to dog meat," counters that "It is a part of Korea's culture." He characterizes "criticism of Korea's long tradition of eating dog meat" as "absurd" and concludes his fascinating list of ten ridiculous Western beliefs about dogs by offering an unnumbered eleventh point, his revelation of the real, fundamental cultural reason that Westerners are prejudiced against eating dog meat:

The reason Westerners do not [eat] dog meat is not because they love dogs, but because eating dog meat is forbidden in the Bible.

The Middle East, where the events of the Bible take place, is largely desert. Corpses buried in the sand in the region were easily uncovered by the wind, exposing them for dogs to eat. Hence, eating dog is forbidden, as dogs are considered filthy and wicked animals.

According to Hosea chapter 13, First Kings chapter 14, 16, Second Kings chapter 9, and Jeremiah chapter 15, dogs eat humans. According to First Kings chapter 21, 22, the St. Luke chapter 16 dogs lick human blood. According to the Book of Exodus chapter 22, dead animals are to be fed to dogs. According to the Epistle of St. Paul chapter 3, the Book of Psalms chapter 22, and the Book of the Apocalypse of St. John chapter 22, dogs are as wicked as wicked men.

According to Leviticus chapter 11, eating dog is forbidden, as a dog is a wicked being.

According to the sayings of the Lord, man becomes as filthy and wicked as a dog if man treats it as a human-being.

Professor Ann Yong-geun demonstrates unusual hermeneutic skill in revealing the underlying reason why Westerners don't eat dog meat. He really ought to write up an entire article providing complete scriptural quotes with his expert exegesis and publish it in a scholarly journal on scriptural interpretation.

I'd do so myself, but he has precedence on this issue. I might, however, employ a similar hermeneutic to explain why Westerners don't eat pig meat, and I feel confident that Professor Ann won't mind if I borrow his wording above to offer a parallel cultural argument on this other Western culinary prejudice:

The reason Westerners do not eat pig meat is not because they love pigs, but because eating pig meat is forbidden in the Bible.

The Middle East, where the events of the Bible take place, is largely desert. Corpses buried in the sand in the region were easily uncovered by the wind, exposing them for pigs to eat. Hence, eating pig is forbidden, as pigs are considered filthy and wicked animals.

According to Leviticus 11:7 and Deuteronomy 14:8, pig meat is unclean. According to Isaiah 65:4 and 66:17, eating pig meat is an abomination.

Proverbs 11:22 compares a pig to a loose woman.

Isaiah 66:3 warns against offering pig blood as a sacrifice to the Lord.

Matthew 7:6 warns of the ingratitude of pigs.

Matthew 8, Mark 5, and Luke 8 all tell a story of pigs possessed by demons.

Luke 15 tells the story of a man who descended even below the level of pigs.

According to the sayings of the Lord, man becomes as filthy and wicked as a pig if man treats it as a human-being.

I can hardly wait to work this interpretation into a longer article and submit it for publication in a reputable journal! I feel confident that I can show definitively why Westerners don't eat pig meat. It's against the Bible!

Concerning such a culinary prejudice, I'll have to deal with Mark 7:19 and Acts 10:9-16, but based on what I've already learned from Professor Ann Yong-geun, I feel certain that I have acquired sufficient hermeneutic skills to do so.

At any rate, I believe that I've adequately demonstrated that Westerners don't eat pig meat for the same reason that they don't eat dog meat, i.e., scripture forbids it!

These two related prejudices no doubt also explain the origin of that typical German term of abuse: "Schweinhund!"

Brian Small Comments on Hebrews 9:14-17

Brian Small

(Image from Polumeros kai Polutropos)

In a recent post, "Hebrews 9:14-17 on Covenant and Testament," I commented on the word diathēkē (διαθήκη), translated as "testament" in the old King James Version:

The word for "testament" in the original Greek is diathēkē (διαθήκη), which has a double meaning that might be significant, i.e., "testament" in the legal sense of a will and "covenant" in the legal sense of a contract, if I might be allowed to distinguish the two meanings in this way.

I note this because verse 16 states that "where a testament [is], there must also of necessity be the death of the testator." The author of Hebrews applies this to Christ, whose 'last will and testament' (διαθήκη) is effected by his death.

The old diathēkē (διαθήκη), however, is put into effect by God, who assuredly does not die. The term here therefore cannot mean 'last will and testament,' but "covenant" in the sense of "compact" or "contract."

I received a comment from Brian Small on this post:

Actually, this is a highly controverted passage. Many scholars interpret διαθηκη as "covenant" as you do, but many others take it to mean "testament" or "will" in this context. Personally, I think that the author is using a word-play on διαθηκη, as does Attridge. God does not die, but Jesus as the mediator of the new covenant/testament dies instead.

My first thought was that I had been misunderstood:

Actually, I'm also using it as a wordplay -- as "covenant" for the old arrangement and as "testament" for the new.

At least, I am putting forth this suggestion.

But after more reflection, I wonder if Mr. Small meant that the wordplay "covenant/testament" applies to both the old diathēkē (διαθήκη) and the new diathēkē (διαθήκη). I had applied the wordplay differently, "covenant" to the old and "testament" to the new. Perhaps Mr. Small means that Jesus was considered 'retroactively' to have died for the old covenant as well, but in doing so gathered in to the "testament" that is new all of those covered by the old covenant, such that it can be thought of as a "testament" as well.

I'm not quite sure that this logic works, but I'm also not sure that I've understood Mr. Small's point, so I'll perhaps need to inquire.

He has an interesting and useful website on Hebrews, by the way, titled "Polumeros kai Polutropos: A Resource Blog on the Book of Hebrews," which might be helpful to my investigations into this epistle.

Mr. Small also happens to be a doctoral student at my old alma matar, Baylor University, a good school that is getting even better.