Recently read

Over the weekend, I read Women and Power by Mary Beard. I saw it at the local used bookstore (Fair Trade Books) and grabbed it on Friday. It's a short little book, barely 100 pages with the appendix. Unfortunately, it's not one that you can easily extract short little thoughts from, so you won't see any snippets here. But, do take the time to read it. Highly recommended!

Going back to last month, on the way to the atla conference in Vancouver, I read The Battle for Bonhoeffer. I saw it a the AAR/SBL conference last November and begged a copy from Andrew Knapp, the acquisitions editor (and former Eisenbrauns employee). Again, it doesn't lend itself to extracts—or maybe the fact that I was on a plane made me less willing to extract! At any rate, here's what I told Andrew about the book in an email thanking him for it:

It’s a great book! Very balanced. I guess I must have been living in a bubble, because I wasn’t aware of the pre-Metaxus use of Bonhoeffer by the right-wing. I just remember that when I first became a Christian back in 1972, I was warned to stay away from him—which of course means I read him and loved him. I assumed that was the default position of most conservative Evangelicals.

Those of you who have followed this blog over the years might remember that I extracted from Ethics as I was reading it. You can see all the posts here.

Speaking of Bonhoeffer, I finally completed my set last month, taking advantage of the atla conference discount. So now I have a complete set of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works in English, even the index volume! Now, to find the time to read them all. . .

On the return flight from atla, I read Christians in Caesar’s Household: The Emperors’ Slaves in the Makings of Christianity, the first book in the series Inventing Christianity. It's a good book, but I think he's a bit pessimistic about the number of Christian convert's in the imperial household. That being said, it is a healthy corrective to the habit of too many in finding converts on every grave marker. He looks at the grave inscriptions that are considered "Christian" and points out the flawed logic behind that identification. A must-read if you are specializing in early Christian history.

Right now, as you know from the recent posts, I'm working my way through The Unfavored. And I'm also reading New Testament Christological Hymns, another book I picked up at AAR/SBL last year. You will (hopefully) see extracts here after I finish The Unfavored. I have other books at various stages of being read, but those the two I'm really reading. Well, the books I'm editing, too, of course. Some of those end up being extracted on this site, too.

Unintended (and unexpected) side effects

Von Rad and Arnold argue that Joseph’s long procedure, which is certainly open to various interpretations, could have served two concerns—to see whether the brothers have truly changed and to reveal the fate of those who were dear to Joseph’s heart: Benjamin and Jacob. On an existential level it could also testify to the complexities of forgiveness and reconciliation. Such situations are not resolved lightly, and they are not cheap. They require a certain change, which at least on the part of a perpetrator often requires the ability to see things from the perspective of the wronged party.

It should be noted, however, that one cannot be sure about Joseph’s attitudes with respect to the trial that he initiated. In the end, the procedure which the brothers undergo impacts also Joseph himself. Even he is caught in the interwoven web of actions that test one’s relationship to the chosen.—The Unfavored, page 38

Watch the boundaries!

[T]hese final words of Joseph do not seem to be adding a new reason for his self-control. Rather, they seem to be summing up what he has already said and what is in line with the characterization of the narrator in Gen 39:1–6—that is, Joseph’s success in Potiphar’s house is directly related to YHWH’s blessing. Joseph’s sin against God can be seen, then, as a move in the same direction as a betrayal of Potiphar: overstepping Potiphar’s instructions would transgress also God’s commands.

This insight is both in line with Joseph’s own deference to God as the sole source of dreams and their interpretation, and more embedded in the story as such—both of which might hint at something that Joseph’s attitude displays in these chapters about the topic of chosenness. They signify that an important part in the life of the chosen is to recognize that in order to rule, one needs to accept a certain level of subordination. Joseph is the second-in-command both in Potiphar’s house and in Pharaoh’s court, and in both cases a few things are excluded from his oversight. The power of the chosen is thus not limitless. It has certain boundaries, which should be respected.—The Unfavored, pages 35–36

A tendency toward evil?

One extension of this topic might be the unlikely occurrence involving the Ishmaelites in the course of [Genesis] ch. 37. It is interesting that both Esau’s and Joseph’s brothers’ moment of hatred and murderous intent is accompanied in the story by the appearance of Ishmael’s descendants (Gen 28:9; 37:25, 28; 39:1). At the time that they contemplate getting rid of the favored one, the unchosen brothers unite with the unchosen descendants, emphasizing perhaps the negative tendency that unchosenness entails.—The Unfavored, page 18 n. 7

A psalm for today

Psa. 94:4    They spew arrogant words;

all the evildoers are bragging.

⁵ They crush your own people, LORD!

They abuse your very own possession.

⁶ They kill widows and immigrants;

they murder orphans,

⁷ saying all the while,

“The LORD can’t see it;

Jacob’s God doesn’t know

what’s going on!”

Psa. 94:8    You ignorant people better learn quickly.

You fools—

when will you get some sense?

⁹ The one who made the ear,

can’t he hear?

The one who formed the eye,

can’t he see?

¹⁰ The one who disciplines nations,

can’t he punish?

The one who teaches humans,

doesn’t he know?^f

¹¹ The LORD does indeed

know human thoughts,

knows that they are nothing

but a puff of air.

Psa. 94:16    Who will stand up for me

against the wicked?

Who will help me against evildoers?

Psa. 94:20    Can a wicked ruler be your ally;

one who wreaks havoc

by means of the law?

²¹ The wicked gang up

against the lives of the righteous.

They condemn innocent blood.

²² But the LORD is my fortress;

my God is my rock of refuge.

²³ He will repay them

for their wickedness,

completely destroy them

because of their evil.

Yes, the LORD our God

will completely destroy them.

<idle musing>
Let those who have ears to hear. . .
</idle musing>

On its head

The one [Joseph] to whom the siblings were not able to speak a peaceful word (Gen 37:4) was later sent to inquire about their peace (Gen 37:14).—The Unfavored, page 17 n. 3

For those who have ears to hear!

Finally, for James, several things characterize those whose behavior is not consistent with that of someone who is a disciple of Jesus. They let themselves be seduced by and conform themselves to the values of a society that is not compatible with the values proclaimed by the royal law (that is, of the kingdom), the prophets, and Jesus; they neither enter into solidarity with the needy nor control their tongue. For James, their faith is empty, therefore it does not save them (2:14).—"Don’t Conform Yourselves to the Values of the Empire," by Elsa Tamez (trans. Kevin Johnson) in Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett, forthcoming

Mercy triumphs!

The story of salvation begins entirely with God and his gracious action. But then the assumption is that, given this rebirth and empowerment, a person shall live wholeheartedly according to God’s will. Sanctification is inseparable from salvation. When people instead choose the idols of worldly power and wealth, or even nation or family over God, they reveal their doubleminded hesitation, and for that they receive judgment. In this economy, judgment is not the shock. Rather, God’s responsiveness to his people’s attempts at single-minded worship, mercy, and repentance is astounding. Perfection is not expected, but the letter depicts deep frustration over the audience’s willful lack of growth. Their covenant adultery has James upset and concerned, because the only outcome for such duplicity is judgment and destruction. But praise be to God, “mercy triumphs over judgment.”—"Salvation in James: Saved by Gift to Become Merciful," by Mariam Kamell Kovalishyn in Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett, forthcoming

You gotta serve somebody

If there truly are two ways of being as James depicts in 1:13–18, then one obeys either the law of sin and death or the word of truth that gives freedom. Obedience is a given; James only questions what one obeys; and so, like a forgetful person who fails to realize her nature has been gifted a transformation but continues in her prior patterns, those who continue to act according to their natural desires deceive themselves about the law they obey, and thereby bring forth death in themselves.—"Salvation in James: Saved by Gift to Become Merciful," by Mariam Kamell Kovalishyn in Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett, forthcoming

It ought not to be so!

The Epistle of James, like the synoptic Jesus, sets out to unmask the strategies of those who claim to be religious and yet act out of narrow self-interest (Jas 1:26–27). In so doing, the author exposes the exploitive strategies of the rich and powerful and reveals the plight of the poor. The world, now as then, is divided sharply into rich and poor nations, and all nations are also divided into rich and poor. In the poor nations, the poverty is pitiful, and in the struggle for survival the poor, wherever they are, cannot win. Meanwhile the rich live in wasteful luxury, obscuring reality while justifying the inequality into which people are born and from which they cannot escape. In this situation the James of the epistle says, “My brothers and sisters, it ought not to be so!”—John Painter in Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett, forthcoming

It's in our nature

Just read a very interesting post on the pervasiveness of smart phones and why we are so easily addicted to them. Here's an extract, but do read the whole thing here (HT: Galli Report).

The technology has now become ubiquitous, and students are no different from anyone else in their addiction to smartphones. The underlying question is, why were we all so vulnerable to smartphone addiction when the gadgets arrived on the scene? The answer lies in our nature.

College students are a symbol of the larger society. This is so because, contrary to what some of the evidence suggests, college students are human, and, as such, share our basic moral and spiritual make-up. It might be tempting to think technology has changed this basic human nature. It has not.

Technology amplifies, but does not alter, who we are. We are creatures with a deep and abiding desire to avoid the real. We seek to escape awareness of ourselves and of God through distraction and denial, a point Pascal made centuries ago when he famously pointed out that all the trouble in the world stems from people’s inability to sit quietly in their rooms alone. Not much has changed.

.&thinsp. .

The common root of every instance of denial and pernicious distraction is not technology, but the inner fear of seeing ourselves as we actually are. We much prefer to see ourselves as we imagine we are. When others refuse to play along, that fear can easily become anger at them for exposing our game. The quest to leave our vices behind and achieve the peace that can only come from living with integrity demands that we do the opposite, that we face our shortcomings squarely, even if that means enduring some temporary discomfort. Too many of us remain stuck in the grip of our vices simply because we have developed the reflexive and automatic habit of avoiding knowledge of them. A quick reach into the pocket or a quick scroll with the thumb is all that is required.

<idle musing>
Ouch! But he's correct. Our society's drug of choice right now the smart phone, which is becoming smarter all the time (while we become dumber!). As a small voice of protest, I changed my email signature on my phone from "Sent from my [insert name of brand here]" to "Sent from my not-so-smart phone." Ok, it's a dumb protest, but maybe, just maybe I'm protesting because I know I'm more addicted than I'd like to admit.

What about you?

Just an
<idle musing>

Is it just a symbol?

For the majority, one suspects, of ‘practising’ Christians — and what does ‘practising’ entail in this context? — the Crucifixion remains an unexamined inheritance, a symbolic marker, of familiar but vestigial recognitions. This marker is revered and invoked in conventional idiom and gestures. Its concrete status, the enormity of suffering and injustice it incarnates, would appear to have faded from felt immediacy.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 381

Drink the hemlock

Every time a community attempts, by censorship, ostracism or killing to silence a moral-intellectual outsider within its walls, to gag or efface his intolerable queries, it lives a Socratic hour. But concomitantly, the thinker, the scientist, the artist, the ironist or satirist who presses in extremis his deconstructive doubts, who sets his addiction to what he takes to be the truth above the inherited beliefs and compromises essential to the continuance of the city, repeats the Socratic provocation. Consciously or not, whether on a secular level (that of a Karl Kraus) or on a religious-philosophic level (that of a Simone Weil), the ‘No-sayer’ to injustice, to human greed and stupidity, is not only risking but soliciting a Socratic destiny.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 378

A higher loyalty

The ‘patriotism’ of the truth—seeker is antithetical to Rousseau’s civic option. The sole citizenship of the cleric is that of a critical humanism. He knows not only that nationalism is a sort of madness, a virulent infection edging the species towards mutual massacre. He knows that it signifies an abstention from free and clear thought and from the disinterested pursuit of justice. The man or woman at home in the text is, by definition, a conscientious objector to the vulgar mystique of the flag and the anthem, to the sleep of reason which proclaims ‘my country, right or wrong’, to the pathos and eloquence of collective mendacities on which the nation- state - be it a mass-consumer mercantile technocracy or a totalitarian oligarchy — builds its power and aggressions. The locus of truth is always extraterritorial; its diffusion is made clandestine by the barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 322

Moribund

The choice is not a comfortable one. But perhaps the concept of choice is itself a fallacy. As I have implied throughout, the intellectual, the inebriate of thought is, like the artist or philosopher, though to a lesser degree, born and not made (nascitur non fit, as every schoolboy used to know). He has no choice except to be himself or to betray himself. If ‘happiness’ in the definitions central to the theory and practice of ‘the American way of life’ seems to him the greater good, if he does not suspect ‘happiness’ in almost any guise of being the despotism of the ordinary, he is in the wrong business. They order these matters better in the world of the despot, Artists, thinkers, writers receive the unwavering tribute of political scrutiny and repression. The KGB and the serious writer are in total accord when both know, when both act on the knowledge that a sonnet (Pasternak simply citing the first line of a Shakespeare sonnet in the venomous presence of Zhdanov), a novel, a scene from a play can be the power-house of human affairs, that there is nothing more charged with the detonators of dreams and action than the word, particularly the word known by heart. (It is striking and perfectly consequent that America, the final archive, should also be the land whose schooling has all but eradicated memorization. In the microfiche, the poem lies embalmed; recited inwardly, it is terribly alive.) The scholar in the Soviet Union understands precisely what the KGB censor is after when he seizes and minutely scans his article on Hegel. It is in such articles, in the debates they unleash, that lie the motor forces of social crisis.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 302

Spotless worship

The immediately preceding theme is pure and spotless worship (H, 1:27). At first sight, due to the terminology a modern reader might think that the perfection of worship is the correct praise of God through song and the sincerity of heart in dedicating worship to God, and perhaps we could also add the absence of evil thoughts, especially at the moral level. The author, however, sees that part as one side of the coin, an incomplete part that loses its significance without the other part: the concrete proof of love to the needier neighbor.—Elsa Tamez in Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett, forthcoming

The giving God

The epistle [of James] begins with the vision of how a believer’s life should progress: The audience members should rejoice as they face trials because of what they know, which is that God is at work in perfecting them through these times. In order to gain this perspective, however, the believer is cautioned to turn in faith to God, because God will give what is needed for one to have that correct perspective. Here James’s utter trust in God’s good and generous nature makes its first appearance: “ask of the giving God [tou didontos theou]” who gives “to all generously and without finding fault, and it will be given to him/her” (Jas 1:5). James places the present participle between the article and noun rather than after the pair, placing the emphasis on the participle (“giving”) as God’s nature, not merely an action that God does. It becomes, as it were, almost a title describing God’s character: “the giving God” rather than simply “the God who gives,” although translationally the latter works better. It is God’s character to give—and to give to all (pasin)—as James counters any preconceived notion that God gives only to those who have some special reason for receiving (Vlachos 2013, 25). To drive this point home, James then uses both a positive and negative description, “singly” or “generously” (aplōs) and “without finding fault” (mē oneidizontos); the repetition provides rhetorical emphasis. God’s inherent nature as generous should not be questioned: he is unstinting in his very nature.—"Salvation in James: Saved by Gift to Become Merciful," by Mariam Kamell Kovalishyn in Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett, forthcoming

Surprising reversal!

What one has, then [in James], is a description of Jesus as the reigning Lord, who is glorious. He is the one who is coming, and his coming is as eschatological Judge. This contrasts with the Father who is described more mildly. The Father is jealous, indeed, but ready to receive the repentant and always prepared to send good and only good to his people. This is not an absolute contrast, but it is a surprising reversal of what one might expect from typical readings of the Christian Scriptures.—Peter H. Davids in Reading the Epistle of James: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Darian R. Lockett, forthcoming

Conference!

I'm at the atla conference in Vancouver through Saturday AM. I may or may not be posting until then... meanwhile, I have a few hours to walk around. Seems like a beautiful town!

Our national myth

The American Adam is not an innocent — far from it. But he is a corrector of errors. He has, after its brief and creative role in the New England temper, all but abandoned even the metaphor of original sin. The notion that the human condition is, ontologically, one of ‘dis-grace’, that cruelty and social injustice are not mechanical defects but ‘primaries’ or ‘elementals’ in history, will seem to him defeatist mysticism. No less so the hunch that there are between tragic historicism, between the concept of ‘fallen man’ and the generation of the unageing monuments of intellect and of art, instrumental affinities. It may be that these monuments, born of autistic vision, are counterstatements to a world felt, known to be ‘fallen’. There is in eminent art and thought a manichaean rebellion. ‘A truth,’ taught Alain, the French maitre de pensée (itself a phrase significantly untranslatable), ‘is the refusal of a body.’ There can be no didactic sophistry more un-American, no ideal more alien to the pragmatic immanence of ‘the pursuit of happiness’.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 298

Is the price too high?

Civilization, in the elevated and formal sense, does not guarantee civility, does not inhibit social violence and waste. No mob, no storm-troop has ever hesitated to come down the Rue Descartes. It is from exquisite Renaissance loggias that totalitarian hooligans proclaim their will. Great metaphysicians can become rectors of ancient universities in, at least, the early days of the Reich. Indeed, the relations between evaluative appreciation of serious music, the fine arts, serious literature on the one hand and political behaviour on the other are so oblique that they invite the suspicion that high culture, far from arresting barbarism, can give to barbarism a peculiar zest and veneer. American thinkers on the theory and practice of culture have long sensed this paradox. The price which the Athenian oligarchy, the Florentine city-regime, the France of Louis XIV or the Germany of Heidegger and Furtwangler have paid for their aesthetic-intellectual brilliance is too steep. The sacrifice of social justice, of distributive equity of sheer decency of political usage implicit in this price is simply too great. If a choice must be made, let humane mediocrity prevail. Feeling the manifest force of this line of insight, having articulated this force within its own expressive means, the American cultural establishment is sceptical of itself and apologetic towards the community at large. This self-doubt and defensiveness have produced a subtle range of attitudes all the way from mandarin withdrawal to public penitence.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 295–96

Pseudo-literacy and the U.S. school

One cannot, beyond a severely limited and superficial degree, inject sensibility and intellectual rigour into the mass of society. One can, instead, trivialize, water down, package mundanely, the cultural values and products towards which the common man is being directed. The specific result is the disaster of pseudo-literacy and pseudo-numeracy in the American high school and in much of what passes for so-called ‘higher education’. The scale and reach of this disaster have become a commonplace of desperate or resigned commentary. The predigested trivia, the prolix and pompous didacticism, the sheer dishonesty of presentation which characterize the curriculum, the teaching, the administrative politics of daily life in the high school, in the junior college, in the open—admission ‘university’ (how drastically America has devalued this proud term), constitute the fundamental scandal in American culture. A fair measure of what is taught, be it in mathematics, be it in history, be it in foreign languages, indeed with regard to native speech, is, in the words of the President of Johns Hopkins, ‘worse than nothing’. It has produced what he calls ‘America’s international illiteracy’ or what Quentin Anderson entitles ‘the awful state of intellectual affairs in this country’.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 293–94

Living a lie

The adoption, on a continental scale, of an eschatology of monetary-material success represents a radical cut in regard to the Periclean—Florentine typology of social meaning. The central and categorical imperative that to make money is not only the customary and socially most useful way in which a man can spend his earthly life — an imperative for which there is, certainly, precedent in the European mercantile and pre—capitalist ethos — is one thing. The eloquent conviction that to make money is also the most interesting thing he can do, is quite another. And it is precisely this conviction which is singularly American (the only culture, correlatively, in which the beggar carries no aura of sanctity or prophecy). The consequences are, literally, incommensurable. The ascription of monetary worth defines and democratizes every aspect of professional status. The lower-paid — the teacher, the artist out of the limelight, the scholar — are the object of subtle courtesies of condescension not, or not primarily, because of their failure to earn well, but because this failure makes them less interesting to the body politic. They are more or less massively, more or less consciously patronized, because the ‘claims of the ideal’ (Ibsen’s expression) are, in the American grain, those of material progress and recompense. Fortuna is fortune. That there should be Halls of Fame for baseball-players but few complete editions of classic American authors; that an American university of accredited standing should, very recently, have dismissed thirty tenured teachers on the grounds of utmost fiscal crisis while flying its football squads to Hawaii for a single game; that the athlete and the broker, the plumber and the pop-star, should earn far more than the pedagogue — these are facts of life for which we can cite parallels in other societies, even in Pericleian Athens or the Florence of Galileo. What we cannot parallel is the American resolve to proclaim and to institutionalize the valuations which underlie such facts. It is the sovereign candour of American philistinism which numbs a European sensibility; it is the frank and sometimes sophisticated articulation of a fundamentally, of an ontologically immanent economy of human purpose. That just this ‘immanence’ and ravenous appetite for material reward is inherent in the vast majority of the human species; that we are a poor beast compounded of banality and greed; that it is not the spiky fruits of the spirit but creature comforts we lunge for — all this looks more than likely. The current ‘Americanization’ of much of the globe, the modulation from the sacramental to the cargo-cult whether it be in the jungles of New Guinea or the hamburger—joints, laundromats and supermarkets of Europe, points to this conclusion. It may be that America has quite simply been more truthful about human nature than any previous society. If this is so, it will have been the evasion of such truth, the imposition of arbitrary dreams and ideals from above, which has made possible the high places and moments of civilization. Civilization will have endured after Pericles by virtue, to quote Ibsen again, of a ‘life-lie’. Russian or European power relations and institutions have laboured to enforce this ‘lie’. America has exposed it or, pragmatically, passed it by. The difference is profound.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 289–90

Is there such a thing as American culture?

This, then, is my surmise: the dominant apparatus of American high culture is that of custody. The institutions of learning and of the arts constitute the great archive, inventory, catalogue, storehouse, rummage-room of western civilization. American curators purchase, restore, exhibit the arts of Europe. American editors and bibliographers annotate, emend, collate, the European classics and the moderns. American musicians perform, Often incomparably, the music which has poured out of Europe from Guillaume de Machaut to Mahler and Stravinsky. Together, curators, restorers, librarians, thesis writers, performing artists in America underwrite, reinsure the imperiled products of the ancient Mediterranean and the European spirit. America is, on a scale of unprecedented energy and munificence, the Alexandria, the Byzantium of the ‘middle kingdom’ (that proud Chinese term) of thought and of art which was Europe, and which may be Europe still.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 281–82

<idle musing>
Fascinating idea—and probably true. I can't think of a single original (nontechnology) idea that has sprung from the United States.
</idle musing>

The U.S. and self-perception

In short: the Puritan programme of a break with the ‘corrupt ancientness’ and hereditary taint of European history, the great hunger of successive waves of immigrants for a new dispensation free of the terrors and injustice which had marked their communal past, have played a central role in the American imagination and in the rhetoric of American identity. But they do not afford the actual products of American culture a calendar of Arcadian youth, a time of special grace. On the contrary. American culture has stood, from its outset, on giant shoulders. Behind Puritan style lay the sinew of English Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean prose. Behind the foundation of American universities lay the experience of Oxford and Cambridge, Aristotelian logic and the mathematics of Galileo and Newton. British empiricism and the world of the philosophes underwrite the Jeffersonian vision of an American enlightenment. Goethe stands behind Emerson as Shakespeare and Milton do behind Melville. It may be, as D. H. Lawrence found, that American culture is ‘very old’ precisely because it has been heir to so much. The New England divines would concur. By the early eighteenth century, William Cowper testified to ‘God’s withdrawal’ from a new world whose conditions of spirit and civil practice were no better than in the old. The idiom of his testimony was that of Jeremiah and the Cataline orations, of Juvenal and the Aesopian satirists of the European reformation.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 270

Veneer

I was cleaning up some files on my computer today and ran across this. I discovered I had originally posted it in November 2006, but it bears reposting, even though I might word it differently in places if I wrote it today:

<idle musing>
Veneer is a handy thing. You overlay a thin layer of an expensive wood over cheap wood and it looks good. Nobody suspects that the underlying wood is just particle board. No one that is, until you try to put a load on the shelf and it breaks.

It can be the same with people.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend time with someone I hadn’t seen for a while. Others had told me how much this person had changed and how much they had grown in Christ. I was excited to see it; I always like to see what God does in a person.

At first it seemed that it was true. The person acted the part of a Christian; the vocabulary was Evangelical, God was part of the discussion. But, then came a time of pressure. Pop! The shelf cracked and the particle board of old unredeemed self shown through.

Does it have to be that way? Do we have to go through life play-acting? Recent events raise this question even more starkly. Is Christianity just a sop thrown to give us hope after death, while we struggle and fail here on earth? Is there no victory over sin? Does the enemy of our souls have the upper hand?

Scripture says, “No!” Emphatically. Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, was able to say, “I have overcome the world!” Note the tense, not I will, not I am, but I have (perfect, active, indicative in the Greek). Paul was able to say, in Romans 8, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (present active indicative in the Greek). John, in I John says, “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.”

So, why the disconnect? Why don’t people seem to be experiencing this in their daily lives?

Well, there can be any number of reasons, but I submit that the main one is that most Christians have never really died to self. Evangelical Christianity is big on justification, but short on sanctification. We want big numbers, and frankly, death isn’t a good calling card if you are looking for a large following: “Hi, Jesus loves you and wants to put you to death!” But, that is exactly what Jesus calls us to, “Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 16.24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23, 14.27 (RSV)

Paul develops the theme even more in Romans 6. According to Paul, we died with Christ in baptism and now we are alive in Christ. But, it is in Christ, not in self. As long as we function in self, we function in sin. As long as we seek what we want, when we want it, we are dead to Christ and alive to the world. As long as we live in Christ, we are dead to self and the world. It’s too simple—maybe that’s the problem. We want to make it harder; we want to do it.

The reformation happened almost 500 hundred years ago. Its basic truth was sola gratia, all God and not man. Why is it that we are now trying to do it ourselves? Sola Gratia means just that, by grace alone, or does Galatians 3 not ring true anymore?

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so many things in vain? —if it really is in vain. Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?

</idle musing>

The source of the law

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code. It is the modulation from one to the other, as commentary and commentary on commentary seek to hammer it out, which is one of the centres of The Trial (kabbalistic geometries know of ordered constructs with several centres). Set beside Kafka’s readings of Kafka, ours are, unavoidably, feeble.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 241

Live as guests

To be a guest among other men is a possibility. All of us, I firmly believe are guests of the planet, of its ecology. We did not make our world, we were thrown into it. We are born without knowing why. We haven’t planned it. We are trustees of a dwindling space for survival. We had better learn very quickly that we are guests, or there will be not much left to live in.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 237

Textuality

Those who have produced canonic texts and textualities by which they organize their politics — be they the Koran, the Scriptures, the Kapital — are not everywhere. And there are many cultures that have, until now, refused textuality, and which are now paying a bitter price for what may be a perfectly natural condition of their being.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 236

In praise of the liberal arts

There's a marvelous blog called Bob on Books that I read regularly. Normally he reviews books—a wide variety of books, but mainly Christian ones. But sometimes he offers musings on other things. Today is one of those days. Here's an excerpt, but please take the extra couple of minutes to read the whole thing—and maybe even add him to your daily reading!

A good liberal education helps people explore all these questions, and consider whether the answers of others address the questions of the day. I wonder sometimes whether the effort to eradicate what was once a staple of education is a recognition of the dangerous character of such an education. It fosters the asking of hard questions of oneself and one’s society. Questions people ask. Questions cogs do not ask.

I asked the question of how long it would take for people to wake up to what they’ve missed or lost. I suspect some never do, the amusements and distractions of life precluding such awakenings. Others get twenty years into a career only to discover that they have no clue why they are doing what they do other than that it pays well.

It ain't easy!

It would be fantastically arrogant to suppose that we know that we have evolved into a kind of creature that likes living with those that smell different, look different, sound different. Sit in a railway carriage or bus in a land where you don’t speak a single word of the language. Have you ever noticed the panic that starts growing in your civilized soul, the sense that something is hideously wrong, that your very identity may soon be torn apart? It could be that autonomy is the natural form of the social unit, and that those who would thrust others together may be doing so in the name of a transcendent vision of justice, hope, human fairness, but that they may also be hurrying something very complicated. We don’t know. Human beings do tend to be with their own. Not all. Not the exceptional. But most human beings.

We’re speaking across a statistical mean, but it is a very massive one. Environment is heredity, and heredity is environment. That which you are born into — the privileges, the luck or the misfortune — is both heredity and environment. They cannot be separated. Cautionary rhetoric occludes this complicated recognition of interaction. The dialectic, the osmotic, which relate the mutations conceivable or feasible in this interaction, are radically beyond our understanding.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 235

And Freud comes crashing down

First published in 1966, Das Dritte Reich des Traums is a neglected classic. In it, Charlotte Beradt summarizes her analyses of some three hundred dreams recounted to her in Berlin 1933–34, That the images, symbols, fantasms which crowd these dreams should so obviously mirror the political changes taking place in Berlin at the time, is not surprising. What is of the very first importance, however, is the degree of depth to which external history penetrates into the subconscious and unconscious. It does not take long to discover that patients dreaming of the loss of limbs or of the atrophy of arms or legs are not displaying symptoms of a Freudian castration—complex but, more simply and terribly, revealing the terrors inflicted on them by the new rules demanding the Hitler-salute in public, professional and even familial usage.

Am I mistaken in feeling that this finding, even by itself, presents a fundamental challenge to the psychoanalytic model of dreams and their interpretation?—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 222–23

On Dreams

Our knowledge of dreams and of dreaming, the material which constitutes the history of human dreams, are wholly inseparable from the linguistic medium. (I leave to one side the epistemologically teasing possibility that a mute or deaf-mute dreamer can somehow provide a pictorial or gestural mimesis of his dreams.) Dreams are told, recorded, interpreted in language. The phenomenology of dreaming is imbedded in the evolution and structures of language. A theory of dreams is also a linguistics or, at the very least, a poetics. No account of any human dream, whether provided by the dreamer himself, by a secondary source or by the dream-interpreter, is linguistically innocent or value-free. The account of the dream, which is the sum total of our evidence, will be subject to exactly the same constraints and historical determinants in respect of style, narrative convention, idiom, syntax, connotation, as any other speech act in the relevant language, historical epoch and milieu. Dreams were no less splintered at Babel than were the tongues of men.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 217

Do you?

It is a confident guess that despite the Enlightenment and positivism, that despite modern agnosticism and Freud, a great majority of mankind—even in so-called ‘advanced’ and technological societies—continues to attach prophetic, oracular values to its dreams.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 214

A change in dream interpretation

In psychoanalysis, on the contrary, dreams feed not on prophecy but on remembrance. The semiological vector points not to the future but to the past. The dynamics of opacity are not those of the unknown but of the suppressed.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 214

Tread carefully!

Any poetic, philosophic, rhetorical pronouncement worth taking seriously will compact its executive means and meanings. It will resist, it will frustrate to the greatest possible degree, the dissociative, the deconstructive agencies of paraphrase and translation. A major text exposes pitilessly the necessary innocence and arbitrariness of the translator’s assumption that meaning is some sort of ‘packageable content’ and not an energy irreducible to any other medium. Language is, therefore, the adversary of translation. Thus there is more than cautionary allegory in the prohibition which numerous cultures have set against the translation of their sacred texts.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 195

Good news

Ted Gossard over at Jesus Community has a good exhortation that I needed to hear today. After quoting Phil 4:4–9 and some comments, he closes with this:

Sometimes Christians along with others see it as their moral duty to focus on all that’s wrong, the mess of the world with the goal of exposing and rooting it out, or at least taking a stand against it. There is surely a time to speak and a time to keep silent (Ecclesiastes 3:7b). But one can become completely absorbed in that, totally occupied with it, so that there’s no time to do what we’re called to do in the passage above. I liked what I heard Dallas Willard say online in a talk, that only after one has worked hard all day, and is collapsing should they turn their attention to the news. That might be an overstatement to make a point. It’s not like we’re to ignore what’s unpleasant. But neither should that be our focus. Instead we’re to concentrate on what’s uplifting and helpful to us. Then hopefully that same spirit and practice can help others as we continue to be helped. In and through Jesus.

Do read the whole thing, though.

A matter of perspective

The extinction of a language however remote, however immune to historical-material success or diffusion, is the death of a unique world—view, of a genre of remembrance, of present being and of futurity. A truly dead language is irreplaceable. It closes that which Kierkegaard bade us keep open if our humanity was to evolve: ‘the wounds of possibility’. Such closure may, for late twentieth-century mass-media and mass-market technocracy, be a triumph. It may facilitate the imperium of the fast-food chain and the news-satellite. For the lessening chances of the human spirit, it is destructive.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 150–51

The tragedy of the tragic

Absolute tragedy is very rare. It is a piece of dramatic literature (or art or music) founded rigorously on the postulate that human life is a fatality. It proclaims axiomatically that it is best not to be born or, failing that, to die young. An absolutely tragic model of the condition of men and women views these men and women as unwanted intruders on creation, as beings destined to undergo unmerited, incomprehensible, arbitrary suffering and defeat. Original sin, be it Adamic or Promethean, is not a tragic category. It is charged with possibilities both of motivation and of eventual redemption. In the absolutely tragic, it is the crime of man that he is, that he exists. His naked presence and identity are transgressions. The absolutely tragic is, therefore, a negative ontology. Our century has given to this abstract paradox a tangible enactment. During the Holocaust, the Gypsy or the Jew had very precisely committed the crime of being. That crime attached by definition to the fact of birth. Thus even the unborn had to be hounded to extinction. To come into the world was to come into torture and death.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 129

The strains of translation

For it is in and through the process of translation that a language is made eminently self-aware. Translation constrains it to formal and diachronic introspection, to an explicit investment and enlargement of its historical, colloquial and metaphorical instruments. Simultaneously, translation puts a language under pressure of its limitation. It will solicit modes of perception and designation which that language had left underdeveloped, or had altogether discarded. An act of translation draws up a balance-sheet, as it were, for the target-language.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 94

Were you there?

‘Who is it that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?’ I am unable to account wholly rationally for the ways of the man or woman who put the question and who asks me where I was when ‘the morning stars sang together’ or whether ‘the rain hath a father?’

Perhaps this is as it should be. It is the Hebrew Bible, of all books, which most questions man.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 87

The pervasiveness of biblical themes

How naked would be the walls of our museums stripped of the works of art which illustrate, interpret or refer to biblical themes. How much silence there would be in our western music, from Gregorian chant to Bach, from Handel to Stravinsky and Britten if we excised settings of biblical texts, dramatizations and motifs. The same is true of western literature. Our poetry, drama, fiction would be unrecognizable if we omitted the continuous presence of the Bible. Nor is there any categorical way of delineating that presence. It extends from the immense volume of biblical paraphrase to the most tangential or covert of allusions.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 82

Let the mystery remain!

But the possible confusion and, in our present climate of approved sentiment, the inevitable embarrassment which must accompany any public avowal of mystery, seems to me preferable to the slippery evasions and conceptual deficits in contemporary hermeneutics and criticism.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 38

Sitz im leben matters

We must read as if the temporal and executive setting of a text does matter. The historical surroundings, the cultural and formal circumstances, the biological stratum, what we can construe or conjecture of an author’s intentions, constitute vulnerable aids. We know that they ought to be stringently ironized and examined for what there is in them of subjective hazard. They matter none the less. They enrich the levels of awareness and enjoyment; they generate constraints on the complacencies and licence of interpretative anarchy.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 34

Complexity of meaning

We must read as if the text before us had meaning. This will be a single meaning if the text is a serious one, if it makes us answerable to its force of life. It will not be a meaning or figura (structure, complex) of meanings isolated from the transformative and reinterpretative pressures of historical and cultural change. It will not be a meaning arrived at by any determinant or automatic process of cumulation and consensus. The true understanding(s) of the text or music or painting may, during a briefer or longer time-spell, be in the custody of a few, indeed of one witness and respondent. Above all, the meaning striven towards will never be one which exegesis, commentary, translation, paraphrase, psycho-analytic or sociological decoding, can ever exhaust, can ever define as total. Only weak poems can be exhaustively interpreted of understood. Only in trivial or opportunistic texts is the sum of significance that of the parts.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 34

The Ontology of Literary Criticism

The poem comes before the commentary. The poem is first not only temporally. It is not a pre-text, an occasion for subsequent exegetic or metamorphic treatment. Its priority is one of essence, of ontological need and self-sufficiency. Even the greatest critique or commentary, be it that of a writer or painter or composer on his own work, is accidental (the cardinal Aristotelian distinction). It is dependent, secondary, contingent. The poem embodies and bodies forth through a singular enactment its own raison d’étre. The secondary text does not contain an imperative of being. Again the Aristotelian and Thomist differentiations between essence and accident are clarifying. The poem is; the commentary signifies.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 32

The hermeneutic circle

Unlike criticism and aesthetic valuation, which are always synchronic (Aristotle’s ‘Oedipus’ is not negated or made obsolete by Holderlin’s, Hoderlin’s is neither improved nor cancelled out by Freud’s), the process of textual interpretation is cumulative. Our readings become better informed, evidence progresses, substantiation grows. Ideally—though not, to be sure, in actual practice—the corpus of lexical knowledge, of grammatical analysis, of semantic and contextual matter, of historical and biographical fact, will finally suffice to arrive at a demonstrable determination of what the passage means. This determination need not claim exhaustiveness; it will know itself to be susceptible to amendment, to revision, even to rejection as fresh knowledge becomes available, as linguistic or stylistic insights are sharpened. But at any given point in the long history of disciplined understanding, a decision as to the better reading, as to the more plausible paraphrase, as to the more reasonable grasp of the author’s purpose, will be a rational and demonstrable one. At the end of the philological road, now or tomorrow, there is a best reading, there is a meaning or constellation of meanings to be perceived, analysed and chosen over others. In its authentic sense, philology is, indeed, the working passage, via the arts of scrupulous observance and trust (philein) from the uncertainties of the Word to the stability of the Logos.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 27–28

Willful blindness

We realize, more or less clearly, the degree to which literate ‘common sense’, the acceptable limits of debate, the transmission of the generally agreed syllabus of major texts and works of art and of music, is an ideological process, a reflection of power-relations within a culture and society. The literate person is one who concurs with the reflexes of approval and aesthetic enjoyment which have been suggested and exemplified to him by the dominant legacy. But we dismiss such worries. We accept as inevitable and as adequate the merely statistical weight of ‘institutional consensus’, of common-sense authority. How else could we marshal our cultural choices and be at home in our pleasures?—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 26

Hermeneutics of reading

The act and art of serious reading comport two principal motions of spirit: that of interpretation (hermeneutics) and that of valuation (criticism, aesthetic judgement). The two are strictly inseparable. To interpret is to judge. No decipherment, however philological, however textual in the most technical sense, is value-free. Correspondingly, no critical assessment, no aesthetic commentary is not, at the same time, interpretative. The very word ‘interpretation’, encompassing as it does concepts of explication, of translation and of enactment (as in the interpretation of a dramatic part or musical score), tells us of this manifold interplay.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 25

A great emptiness

The alternatives are not reassuring: vulgarization and loud vacancies of intellect on the one hand, and the retreat of literature into museum cabinets on the other. The tawdry ‘plot outline’ or ‘predigested and trivialized version of the classic on the one hand, and the illegible variorum on the other. Literacy must strive to regain the middle ground. If it fails to do so, if une lecture bien faite becomes a dated artifice, a great emptiness will enter our lives.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 19

Schools

Schooling today, notably in the United States, is planned amnesia.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 15

Remember when?

The atrophy of memory is the commanding trait in mid and later twientieth-century education and culture. The great majority of us can no longer identify, let alone quote, even the central biblical or classical passages which not only are the underlying script of western literature (from Caxton to Robert Lowell, poetry in English has carried inside it the implicit echo of previous poetry), but have been the alphabet of our laws and public institutions. The most elementary allusions to Greek mythology, to the Old and the New Testament, to the classics, to ancient and to European history, have become hermetic. Short bits of text now lead precarious lives on great stilts of footnotes.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 14–15

The primacy of experience—or is it bankruptcy?

Current literacies are diffuse and irreverent. It is no longer a natural motion to turn to a book for oracular guidance. We distrust auctoritas—the commanding script or scripture, the core of the authoritarian in classical authorship—precisely because of immutability. We did not write the book. Even in our most intense penetrative encounter with it is experience at second hand. This is the crux. The legacy of romanticism is one of strenuous solipsism of the development of self out of immediacy. A single credo of vitalist spontaneity leads from Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ outweighs the dusty sum of libraries to the slogan of radical students at the University of Frankfurt in 1968: ‘Let there be no more quotations.’ In both cases the polemic is that of the ‘life of life’ against the ‘life of the letter’, of the primacy of personal experience against the derivativeness of even the most deeply felt of literary emotions. To us, the phrase ‘the book of life’ is a sophistic antinomy or cliché. To Luther, who used it at a decisive point in his version of Revelation and, one suspects, to Chardin’s reader, it was a concrete verity.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 11–12

<idle musing>
And we are the poorer for it. We cast aside thousands of years of aggregate experience as recorded, however imperfectly and stumblingly, in books, scrolls, or tablets for the sake of our tiny little microsecond of experience. And then we wonder why things go awry? Fools we are! Why reinvent the wheel all the time; we might just as well be illiterate. Ah, but we are! We may know how to read, but we haven't a clue on what to read or how to read well. We skim and call it reading. We rarely actually read, but when we do, we call it "close reading" or "deep reading" so that people will think some amazing thing is happening. Our predecessors would laugh at us. Hopefully, if we have successors (which is looking less and less likely with each rise in temperature), they too will laugh at us. Heaven knows we deserve it!
</idle musing>

Do you read with a pencil in hand?

But the principal truth is this: latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply. The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 8

<idle musing>
The person who loaned me this book always has a pencil behind his ear. Me, I always have a pen attached to the collar of my t-shirt—yes, always.
</idle musing>

Printing errors!

He who passes over printing errors without correcting them is no mere philistine: he is a perjurer of spirit and sense. It may well be that in a secular culture the best way to define a condition of grace is to say that it is one in which one leaves uncorrected neither literal nor substantive errata in the texts one reads and hands on to those who come after us.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 7

Reading well

To read well is to answer the text, to be answerable to the text, ‘answerability’ comprising the crucial elements of response and of responsibility. To read well is to enter into answerable reciprocity with the book being read; it is to embark on total exchange (‘ripe for commerce’ says Geoffrey Hill). The dual compaction of light on the page and on the reader’s cheek enacts Chardin’s perception of the primal fact: to read well is to be read by that which we read. It is to be answerable to it. The obsolete word ‘responsion’, signifying, as it still does at Oxford, the process of examination and reply, may be used to shorthand the several and complex stages of active reading inherent in the quill.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 6

The call of unread books

Even the most obsessed of bookmen can read only a minute fraction of the world’s totality of texts. He is no true reader, no philosophe lisant, who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library or of Widener asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection). Every authentic reader, in the sense of Chardin’s delineation, carries within him a nagging weight of omission, of the shelves he has hurried past, of the books whose spine his fingers have brushed across in blind haste.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 3–4

How about you? What's your fitness level?

Bicycling Magazine has a new article out about fitness and longevity. In it they link to a fun site, World FitnessLevel that estimates your fitness level and fitness age based on some questions. They also are conducting a study, so you can answer a long list of questions if you wish.

So, given that I ride (indoors in the winter) three times a week and walk three to six plus miles a day with a resting heart rate of about 45 (national average for my age is 72), they say my fitness age is:

What about you? How are you doing?

The enduring power of writing

Marble crumbles, bronze decays, but written words—seemingly the most fragile of media—survive.—No Passion Spent, page 3

Propaganda for whom?

Historiography in Israel was driven by the covenant, not by the king. In the rest of the ancient Near East, historiography had the function of promoting and legitimating the king. Divine sponsorship of the king was revealed in the activities of the gods in the human world, and historiography gave voice to that reality. Israelite historiography was more often negative toward the king and focused on divine faithfulness to the covenant (its blessings and curses). Historiography gave voice to that reality as it offered a divinely revealed interpretation of Yahweh’s activities.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 315

<idle musing>
That's the final excerpt from this book. I hope you enjoyed it. Personally, I think it is a vast improvement over the (already very good) previous edition. Monday we start an older book that a friend loaned me about two years back that I finally got around to reading recently. I think you'll enjoy it. It's a bit of a change of pace: George Steiner, No Passion Spent. It's a collection of his essays on literary criticism and other such things.
</idle musing>

The supernatural is real…

As many haye commented, necromancy was not forbidden in Israel on the premise that it did not work but because its efficacy was recognized and deemed illicit and contradictory to normative Yahwistic theology.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 306

Job and his friends

The procedure that Job’s friends were suggesting, rather than advising discovery divination, urges Job to appease God through a procedure of blanket confession, thus more in line with Shurpu than with Murshili’s procedure, though all show the importance of appeasement. In this aspect Job’s friends were representatives of a revered ancient Near Eastern wisdom tradition and also, unbeknown to them, the representatives for the case that the adversary was pressing. That is, if they had persuaded Job to follow their advice and make a blanket confession just to appease Deity and be restored to favor, the adversary’s contention would have been confirmed: righteousness was not the issue, only reward. Instead, the integrity that Job maintained (Job 27:1—6) was one that insisted that his righteous standing be considered rather than just his favor restored. If this interpretation is accurate, the book of Job argues pointedly against the theodicy philosophies in the ancient world and represents an Israelite modification. This modification, rather than offering a revised theodicy, seeks to reinterpret the justice of God from something that may be debated to something that is a given. In Yahweh’s speech it is not his justice that is defended but his wisdom. The inference to be drawn from this is that if it is determined that God is wise, then it can be accepted that he is just, even if not all the information to evaluate his justice is available.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 288

Let's drop this silly Christian stuff and go back to pure paganism!

Those of you who want to get back to the pure paganism of the pre-Christian world need to remember this about the gods:

The minds of the gods were not easily penetrated.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 287

<idle musing>
If you really want to get back to "pure" paganism, you need to drop those silly Christian ideas about justice. If you've been following this series at all, you have seen how the gods can be very capricious—and you certainly don't want to disagree with them! Unless of course you want to end up like Odysseus and wander for 10 years, lost at sea. Or, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, fighting the bull of heaven. They won, but I doubt you would! And Enkidu ended up dying for their crimes.

No, pure paganism isn't bothered by the stupid, petty things that Christianity is. Power is what's important and of course using that power! And, of course staying on the good side of the gods! And, as the myths and history both show, that's a tough one. Search the stars, search the entrails, watch the flight of birds, watch for strange portents. our out libations before drinking or eating. Keep you personal god happy! And watch out for the other person who might just have a more powerful personal god than you do!

Me, I'll stick to Christianity. I might not comprehend all that God is doing, but I know he isn't capricious and his love conquers all evil—even the evil inside me!
</idle musing>

How do I get out of this mess?

Since the ancients typically believed that their suffering was the result of the god’s anger, they naturally sought to appease that anger. Appeasement could theoretically be accomplished by the identification of the offense and the offering of an appropriate sacrifice. A clear example of this procedure is found in the Hittite Plague Prayers of Murshili II. In response to the severe plague that decimated his kingdom over several decades, he asked the gods the reason for the disastrous conditions. The results of divinations eventually allowed him to identify offenses both in the cultic realm and in treaty violations by his father. His plea to the gods shows the appeasement mentality. “If the servant has incurred a guilt, but confesses his guilt to his master, his master may do with him as he likes. But because he has confessed..., his master’s heart is satisfied, and he will not punish that servant. I have now confessed ... the sin; ... restitution has been made twenty fold.... If you demand additional restitution from me, just tell me about it in a dream, and I will give it.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 287

And what does the LORD require of you?

[E]vil was associated with demons rather than with other gods. The gods could be vengeful or malicious (e.g., Ishtar’s response to Gilgamesh’s rejection of her, Erra’s destructive behavior), but the gods were not generally characterized in that way. The gods were interested in justice being maintained in the human realm, but they were not necessarily committed to doing justice themselves. Even so, the retribution principle goes beyond a god doing justice, because it also involves how righteous and wicked behavior that merits the deity’s response is defined. For the gods of the ancient Near East, social order was important, but human ethical or moral goodness was not as highly valued by the deity as cultic conscientiousness.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 286

<idle musing>
Pretty stark contrast to Micah 6:8: "He has shown you, O human, what is good. And what does LORD require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your god." But, it would seem that many who even bother to think about a god and what that god might require of them haven't moved beyond the do ut des (I give in order that you give) principle. In other words, I can do whatever ethically, but if I tick the correct boxes by giving money to the right things, or saying the correct things, nothing bad can happen to me and the god(s) will be fine with me.

I think we see that behavior among some christians, whether on the right or left, who will accept the shortcomings (sins isn't too strong a word here) of their favored candidate—as long as they say the correct things and do certain ritual things that fulfill whatever unwritten or written laws govern the subcommunity to which they belong. Or at least that's the only way I can figure that a certain occupant of a white house in Washington, DC, can continue to be morally corrupt in every imaginable way and still maintain a support base among a large group of christians.
</idle musing>

Divine right of kings

In Mesopotamia there was significantly more fretting about this [discerning the will of the gods] and more effort extended into the enterprise of learning the will of the gods. The gravity of the concern and the angst that surrounded it are reflected in the prominence of divination in the court and in the reports of the king’s advisors as they attempted to help him discern the will of the gods. If kings lost touch with deity, divine sponsorship could be forfeit and divine authority withdrawn. This system was governed by an agreement that existed between the king and the sponsoring god(s)—a kingship covenant of sorts.

He's not a tame lion

Passive deductive divination does not intrinsically imply beliefs about deity that are contrary_to Israelite theology. Communication by means of celestial or terrestrial omens is not beneath Yahweh's dignity, nor do the Israelites assume the existence of other gods or powers. But, of course, the system does not stop there. Mesopotamians also believed that rituals and incantations could reverse signs. This moves from the realm of knowledge being communicated to power being exercised. Here is where the theology breaks down and the differences emerge.

In passive deductive divination, then, the semiotic and hermeneutical principles mirror what we found for extispicy, and they provide the most likely explanation for why these divinatory practices were forbidden in lsrael. Yahweh could speak (inspired divination), he could choose (provoked simple binary deductive divination), but he did not ”write" his messages in the entrails of animals or in the movement of the heavenly bodies (provoked nonbinary or complex binary deductive divination, nonprovoked deductive divination). Israel believed that they could gain information about divine activity just as their ancient Near Eastern compatriots did, but the list of divinatory means they acknowledged semiotically/hermeneutically acceptable was much more limited.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 249

Look out! Here it comes! (Maybe)

Thus the king would also be careful to heed the warnings that divination offered. But just as a positive omen would not be understood as a guarantee of success, so a negative omen could often be reversed. “The gods send the signs; but what these signs announce is not unavoidable fate. A sign in a Babylonian text is not an absolute cause of a coming event, but a warning. By appropriate actions one can prevent the predicted event from _ happening. The idea of determinism is not inherent in this concept of sign.” [Hunger and Pingree, Astral Science, 5] Consequently, the evidence suggests that the function of divination was to provide divine endorsement or Warning concerning an action that the king had already undertaken or was contemplating in order to assure the king of the continuing support by the deity.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 245

Look around you

Divination produced the only divine revelation known in the ancient Near East. Through its mechanisms, the ancients believed not that they could know deity but that they could get a glimpse of the designs and will of deity. “The signs did not cause the future—the gods did—but they revealed what was to come, and the gods left them everywhere.” [Van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks, 89]—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 243

Read those entrails!

Deductive divination is no less initiated [than prophecy, etc.] from the divine realm, but its revelation is communicated through events and phenomena that can be observed. Note that in Israelite thinking that which is in the category of inspired divination is allowed—God speaks, but that which is in the category of deductive divination is forbidden—Yahweh does not write that way (e.g., on entrails). The latter type of divination is found in Mesopotamia as early as the third millennium.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 224

Imperialism takes many forms

It is clear, then, that sensitivity to the poetics of ancient historiography complicates both critical scholars’ dismissal of the validity of biblical historiography and confessional scholars’ apologetic approaches and doctrinal convictions. Critical scholarship needs to rethink its imperialistic and anachronistic imposition of modern standards and values on ancient texts. Confessional scholars need to rethink precisely what constitutes the truth of the text that they seek to defend in light of the text's own poetics and perspectives. In this light N. Winther-Nielsen sounds the death knell for the popular activities of proving and disproving the Bible that have prevailed in academia since the Enlightenment. "All current and past history writing will call on our hermeneutical trust, and the days of confessionalist, positivist, or minimalist absolute ’proof' are gone forever. [N. Winther-Nielsen, "Fact, Fiction, and Language Use" in Windows into Old Testament History]

No amount of empirical information is able to accomplish that end. The extent to which deity is involved in events or outcomes can never be either verified or falsified empirically. Our dogged empiricism betrays us. The texts offer a different sort of testimony that we must respect.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 209

How you read counts

We cannot read the Hebrew Bible as it it were journalistic or academic history such as might be written today. Such reading would compromise the intentions, presuppositions, values, and poetics of the literature and its authors. When we critique the literature, we should critique it in terms of its own guiding criteria rather than expecting it to reflect our own and dismissing it when it does not. When we critique the literature in terms of its emphasis on outcomes rather than events and precise details, it may help us to understand some of what may be considered the foibles of an author like the Chronicler, who, for instance, may have had neither the means nor the inclination to investigate the factual accuracy of some of his sources’ details. The precision of the numbers, for instance, is insignificant—though the general nature of the quantification is not without importance. The integrity of the text is linked to its interpretation of the outcome.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 208

Who is talking to whom?

Ancient Near Eastern historiography desired to reveal the king to the people and to the deity. Israelite historiography desired to reveal the Deity to the king and the people. Here we have an important reversal similar to that which has been noted in other chapters. In Israel the historiography purports to be communication from the Deity, whereas in the ancient Near East the royal inscriptions serve as communication to the deity. Consequently, the audience is neither future kings nor the gods——it is the people of the covenant: ”Then you will know that l, Yahweh, am God——there is no other.”—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 207

Facts? Who needs 'em?

The historiography of the ancient Near East, whether represented in royal inscriptions or chronicles, king lists or annals, has by all accounts a polemical agenda that is intended to reinforce the royal political ideology. As in the campaign speeches of our day, facts can be useful, but they are not central or essential. The intention of the preserved records is to serve not the reader but the king. The recorder is trying to provide answers to the question: “Why should you consider this king to be a good and successful king?” In most cases it cannot be determined whether concealment and/or disinformation are part of the strategy, but negative information is uniformly lacking. We do receive negative assessments of some kings, but, as we might expect, they come from later dynasties seeking to enhance their own reputations.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 203

Who needs historians anyway?

Not all cultures think about history the same way. In the ancient world it is difficult to find anyone who could legitimately be identified as a historian or journalist. Their cognitive environment had no need of such professions. In the ancient Near East visible events on earth were reflections of the activity of the gods. Consequently, rather than providing journalists who could seek out eyewitnesses, they needed experts who could interpret what deity was communicating through events (priests and palace officials) and those who could be part of building the documentation that would serve to elevate and legitimize the king (public relations departments for the palace).—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 196

Why humanity?

The roles assigned to humans bind them together in their common plight and bind them to the gods in servitude. Egyptian sources offer no explanation for the creation of humans. Sumerian and Akkadian sources consistently portray people as having been created to do the work of the gods—work that is es sential for the continuing existence of the gods, and work that the gods have tired of doing for themselves.

Enki and Ninmah: servants of the gods: “The corvée of the gods has been forced on it.”

KAR 4: “The corvée of the gods will be their corvée: They will fix the boundaries of the fields once and for all, and take in their hands hoes and baskets, to benefit the House of the great gods.”

Atrahasis: “Let him bear the yoke, the task of Enlil,let man assume the drudgery of god.”

Enuma Elish: To bear the gods’ burden that those may rest.“

In Israel people also believed that they had been created to serve God. The difference was that they saw humanity as having been given a priestly role in sacred space rather than as slave labor to meet the needs of deity. God planted the garden to provide food for people rather than people providing food for the gods.The explanation offered in KAR 4 shows that the priestly role of people was included in the profile, but still in terms of providing sustenance for the gods. The shared cognitive environment is evident in that all across the ancient world there was interest in exploring the divine component of humankind and the ontological relationship between the human and the divine. In Mesopotamia the cosmos functions for the gods and in relation to them. People are an afterthought, seen as just another part of the cosmos that helps the gods function. In Israel the cosmos functions for people and in relationship to them. God does not need the cosmos, but has determined to dwell in it, making it sacred space; it functions for people.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages 186–87

A different point of view

Every account of human origins seeks to address similar archetypal issues. They mirror what we already found in our discussion of cosmology—the accounts focus on functional issues rather than material ones. Order is established through identity. This may sound like an unusual statement to make since all of these accounts make specific references to the materials used for the creation of humans. But the materials mentioned serve to address archetypal issues (connectivity, relationships, roles) rather than to penetrate material ontology (let alone chemical composition). This is not to say that the ancients were speaking metaphorically rather than literally for this goes far beyond a literary or rhetorical device. The accounts address the topic by using archetypes, which express the most important realities in this cognitive environment. Materials are mentioned for their archetypal significance, not for their physical significance. Blood and flesh of the deity signify connection to deity. Clay or dust signifies connection to the land. The connections described by these archetypes offer information concerning the ancient corporate self-understanding.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 180

Just good managers

In the discussion of cosmology, it is important to observe that the control attributes are not initially set up, established, or invented by the gods. Rather, creation is the process of operating within the parameters of these control attributes, or even manipulating or assigning them. In Enuma Elish Marduk is said to “make his control attributes” (ubašimu parṣišu). This is the only occurrence of parsu as the object of one of the verbs of creation. The parallel in the previous phrase (“rites”) suggests, however, that it should be understood as referring to the control attributes of ritual procedures rather than of the cosmos. The control attributes are carried, gathered, exercised, held in the hand, granted, and organized by the gods, but not initiated by them.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 163

Does it exist?

As I noted when discussing the origins of the gods, in the ancient world something came into existence when it was separated out as a distinct entity, given a function, and given a name. For purposes of discussion I will label this approach to ontology as “function oriented.” This is in stark contrast to modern ontology, which is much more interested in what might be called the structure or substance of objects along with their physical properties. In modern popular thinking (as opposed to technical philosophical discussion), the existence of the world is perceived in physical, material terms. For discussion I will designate this approach to ontology as “substance oriented." In the ancient Near East, something did not necessarily exist just because it happened to occupy space. Tobin captures this distinction between a material definition of the cosmos and a functional one based on order. “When the Egyptians contemplated the created universe through their myths and rituals, they would have been aware that the world around them was not simply a collection of material things. The universe was for them an awesome system of living divine beings. . . . Egyptian creation myth emphasized the fact that there was order and continuity in all things and thus gave the optimistic assurance that the natural, social, and political order would remain stable and secure.”(Tobin, OEAE 2:471).—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages 148–49

Job's sufferings

One final consideration in this category that highlights a difference between Israel and the rest of the ancient Near East concerns the issue of disinterested righteousness. If ethical behavior has an exterior foundation, a person behaves ethically because of the consequences—rewards or punishments—that are built into the system, whether by society or by the gods. This is the “Great Symbiosis” that we have identified. Disinterested righteousness is precisely the opposite of the Great Symbiosis. The adversary’s question in Job asked whether Job served God for nothing. Though ]ob’s friends encourage him to take the Mesopotamian path of appeasement (confess anything to restore favor with deity), Job maintains his integrity (see his conclusion in Job 27:2–6); demonstrating that he did possess an abstract interiorized standard of righteousness apart from a system of consequences.

None of the Mesopotamian literature that deals with the pious sufferer shows this dimension of thinking. These individuals can only claim that they have done everything they know to do in terms of ritual and ethical responsibility. They have no basis to proclaim their innocence, only their ignorance and confusion. They make no attempt to call deity into legal disputation—they only plead for mercy. The book of Job therefore stands as stark testimony to the differences in perception between Israel and the ancient Near East as it seeks to demonstrate that there is such a thing as disinterested righteousness.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages 119, 126–27

Stop blaming the pedestrian or bicyclist!

Just read this about a bike/truck collision. I think the author is right on the money. Here's an excerpt:

News stories about drivers who hit cyclists often implicitly absolve the driver and blame the victim. First, there’s almost always a lack of agency coupled with the passive voice: it’s never “a driver hit a cyclist.” Instead, it’s usually something like “a cyclist was hit by a car.” (Yet you never read about how a shooting victim “collided with a bullet.” Go figure.) Then there’s generally some insinuation that it must have been the victim’s fault, often along the lines of “It’s unclear whether the victim was wearing a helmet.”

and a bit later on:

the story quoted above is under 200 words long. There’s not a single mention of the motorist; instead, the victims were “struck by a pickup truck,” as though it were somehow self-driving. The account also contains no fewer than five mentions of the word “helmet,” yet it doesn’t remind people to drive more carefully or cite relevant motor vehicle code, not even once. The helmet exhortation is especially vexing since the little girl only sustained minor injuries. So, what, are we supposed to believe that if she’d been wearing a helmet the driver wouldn’t have hit her in the first place? Or are we supposed to think a child’s bicycle helmet offers meaningful protection against a Tacoma and that the real mitigating factor isn’t the luck that just happened to be on her side?

It’s almost like, in our bizarre logistical and ethical framework, dying while wearing a helmet is preferable to surviving without one. (emphasis added)

Sabbath

In the ancient Near East the divine rest is achieved in part by the gods’ creation of people to work in their place and on their behalf. A. Millard recognized that the biblical viewpoint represented a stark contrast to this picture in that in the Old Testament the people work for their own benefit and provision rather than to meet the needs of God or to do his work for him. They are commanded to participate in the rest of God on the Sabbath, not to imitate it per se, but to keep it in order to recognize his work of bringing and maintaining order. His control is represented in his rest and is recognized by yielding for the day their own attempts to provide for themselves.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 124

Gods? What gods?

The first commandment is not just promoting monolatry; it is getting at metaphysical structures another way. Although it does not say explicitly that no other gods exist, it does remove them from the presence of Yahweh. (The Hebrew preposition "before” used in this verse generally refers to location when it has a person as its object. Therefore we should understand it to say "there will not be for you other gods in my presence.”) lf Yahweh does not share power, authority, or jurisdiction with them, they are not gods in any meaningful sense of the word. The first commandment does not insist that the other gods are nonexistent but that they are powerless; it disenfranchises them. It does not simply say that they should not be worshiped; it leaves them with no status worthy of worship.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 120

On the Song of Songs

If two allegorizers [of the Song of Songs] ever agree on the interpretation of a verse, it is only because one has copied from the other—Othmar Keel, Song of Songs, Continental Commentaries, p. 8