So it appears that in a great many Christian circles, Feminism
is one of those trigger words that immediately evokes suspicion or dislike. Do you think this is true? Why do you think that is? Myself, I belong to a Mennonite tradition which thrives on this kind of thing. Our lead pastor was a woman and our associate pastor was a woman. And we held church meetings to discuss how better to elevate the roles of the marginalized, the oppressed, or bring those on the periphery into the center in terms of the functions and responsibilities of the body of Christ (such as children, women, minorities, and the mentally or physically challenged)–or to use some biblical metaphors, to bring down the high and lift up the low; to make the first last and the last first; to shame the ways of the world. But it occurs to me that my regular situation is probably rather drastically different than many other Christian environments. So what about you and your congregation? How do you understand, feel about, or deal with Feminism
? Do you speak about it in hushed whispers? Do you stand boldly against it? Is it simply absent from any church context, whether pastoral sermon or scriptural teaching? Does the topic only come up when discussing Paul’s words on the silencing of women?
As a prelude to this post, please watch Walter Brueggemann on the Bible.
While I appreciate the influence Brueggemann has had in and on scholarship, I am not a fan. In fact, my own Old Testament theology is directly antithetical to his own. However, there are three things Brueggemann says in that video that I strongly appreciate. The quotes below, elaborated by my own commentary, represent a recent revelatory breakthrough. This post is deeply personal and may turn out to be the most important thing I have to say on this blog all year. I know there are multitudes out there, both those with faith and those without, who have very real issues with the biblical texts and with the God therein. I hope that the following analysis will deal with some of these tough questions and issues and will prove as liberating for them as it has for me.
The God of the Bible is deeply implicated in, uh, in this inheritance of violence.
Walter Brueggemann in video above
First is the recognition that the God of the OT (and even the NT—the “God of Love” that is so frequently identified in the NT is just as vividly present in the OT and the “God of Judgment” so frequently identified in the OT is just as vividly present in the NT—but we are speaking of the Hebrew scriptures at the moment) sometimes stands condemned according to modern moral judgment. Held up to the lens of the way we think about and understand ourselves and our world, YHWH has been blood-thirsty, violent, and oppressive, and has committed heinous and grotesque atrocities. But it will not do for us who face this reality and dislike it to therefore deny it or try to cover it over with clever scholarship or smooth-sounding apologetics (and vice versa)—to lie for God as Job says in accusation of his “pious” friends. No, to do so would either be to deny our own world-view and cut ourselves off from the present (and therefore to either become enemies of the present or lose all ability to communicate with it) or to hijack the past and reshape it in the image of ourselves. And this is based on the second vital recognition:
The big revelatory moments before Jesus and Jesus and after Jesus are characteristically departures from what has been taken for granted.
Walter Brueggemann in video above
The God of ancient Israel thought and operated (and the people who wrote of him thought and operated) in a way that is very different from how we think and operate today. And that is precisely why we face this conflict of interest in which the very God we would turn to for a moral compass in our lives appears sometimes to be an abomination of it instead—because we have radically departed from the way things used to be and gone in new and different directions. Moral and ethical perspectives that were taken for granted or even heartily supported thousands of years ago are either no longer operative or adamantly opposed today. But the texts we are reading were not written today, they were written thousands of years ago outside of our perspectives and without foundation in our values. There is a rift between ourselves and the characters in the scriptures—including YHWH himself in those scriptures—that crosses every field of our existence from language to culture to politics to philosophy to religion. That rift exists not because we have necessarily veered away from what the God of those scriptures would have of us (although we do!), but because humanity’s world-views, perspectives, values, and judgments have changed rather drastically over time while the scriptures have retained a great deal of their original perspectives, values, world-views, and judgments. In other words, we have moved so much faster and further than our scriptures that it has come to the point where the very scriptures we turn to are alien and oppositional to us. This, of course, is not a new phenomena—it has been happening for a long time—as long as the scriptures have preserved the integrity of their viewpoints and perspectives in the midst of human change. Yet amidst these competing claims, we need to be aware of the third vital component that Brueggemann draws our attention to:
Our faith is requiring us to move in a new direction . . . Eventually, those departures can only be explained by the movement of God’s spirit, far beyond all that we can ask or think or imagine.
Walter Brueggemann in video above
This is where the rubber hits the road. The texts are bound to particular perspectives and cultures and understandings (that we don’t share). In much the same sense, so are we in that we have changed and moved in directions for specific historical reasons and we cannot change the past. But the Spirit is not so bound. The Spirit of God is not imprisoned inside an ancient text with foreign values and alien perspectives, nor defined and developed by the progression of time and change as we are. Rather, the Spirit is separate from and moves through and within history (or “above the waters” as we read in Genesis). It is active in all modes and forms that human society undergoes. And it can act in different times in different ways to direct creation at that point in history. Our texts tell us about the Spirit’s work in particular moments in the distant past, but it is not a complete record of the Spirit’s work and it does not mean that whatever way the Spirit worked then must be the way it will work now. Behold, YHWH does a new thing! Something our mothers and fathers, our grandmothers and grandfathers never saw and never knew! Something that contradicts what they thought or knew in their lifetimes—something that can even contradict what people in scripture saw and knew in theirs.
This is not itself a new idea for those of us who call ourselves Christians. Indeed, we claim that YHWH did something new in Christ—something no one before could have understood—something no one before could have participated in. A new covenant, a new kingship, a new Jerusalem, a new heavens and a new earth. And it is astonishing! It is astonishing, for instance, that women should be so abused and dehumanized in the ancient world and in our ancient scriptures and by our own ancient God within the ancient scriptures of the ancient world. And it is astonishing that the Spirit should bring us to a place outside the scriptures and outside that world where we can stand up for the dignity of women and fight against the silencing of their voices and work to release them from the shackles of male possession, dominance, and control. It is not biblical, but it is the Spirit of God active and alive in our history outside and beyond the biblical text.
The biblical God, confined to the texts, may sometimes appear vile to us looking in from outside that frame, but the extra-biblical God, the God who exists outside the frame of scripture and who cannot be contained by any text, surpasses such judgments just as he surpasses the texts and just as he surpasses ourselves. To say that the biblical God is misogynistic or any other number of modern judgments is not only short-sighted, since it pigeonholes God within a singular historical expression (the ancient text’s), it is anachronistic since it judges the biblical God as if he were acting within our perspectives, cultures, world-views, and values while denying him that very participation (since the biblical world is not our own). For us to adequately assess the biblical God, we have to enter the Biblical world in which he is operating, not pass judgment from outside. Would an ancient Babylonian or an ancient Egyptian or other ancient peoples have judged the Jewish God in the way we are tempted to do? Most likely not. Many things we would take strong moral issue with would be considered bizarre and laughed at in the biblical world within which the biblical God is operating. But when we look at the extra-biblical God, we see he is working to free womankind and to elevate this other whole of the divine image to her proper position. The God who in the scriptures did not condemn, but in fact supported and upheld human slavery as any good God would in the ancient world is the God who today has shattered the acceptance of human slavery amidst vast quarters of the world. The God who in the scriptures commanded the slaughtering of innocents and the extermination of peoples as any good God would in the ancient world is the God who later raised a son, Yeshua, Prince of Peace, to teach us the way of self-sacrifice and love toward our enemies instead of violence and slaughter. The God who in the scriptures supported and even initiated Jewish holocausts (Assyria, Babylon, and Rome) as any good God would in the ancient world who was wrathful against a people is the God who has since sought an end to all holocausts and has no continuance with Nazi Germany. It’s all about perspective. When we are reading the biblical texts, the God therein is operating according to a different perspective than our own. Realizing this will mean we are careful not to read our own contexts into those texts or into the God operating within them.
Below, I rank the Pink Floyd studio albums (not counting The Division Bell, The Final Cut, or soundtracks) and place them in one of four categories from best to worst. Oh My God
represents the best of the best, the cream of the crop, what is or should be considered among the greatest albums of all time. Kick Ass
is for creative genius and musical brilliance with some imperfections. Not Too Shabby
contains albums with a mix of songs ranging from pretty good to totally forgettable. What The Fuck?
is for albums that tried hard, but failed big. Selections will then be explained briefly.
- Oh My God: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here
- Kick Ass: Saucerful of Secrets, Meddle, Ummagumma, The Wall
- Not Too Shabby: Atom Heart Mother, A Momentary Lapse of Reason
- What the Fuck?: Animals
Oh My God
Piper and Dark Side need no explanation. The music on Wish is just as good as Dark Side, perhaps even better, but doesn’t cohere as a whole as well as Dark Side.
Kick Ass
Saucerful contains one major flop (See-Saw) and its version of Set The Controls is not as good as Ummagumma’s, but the rest of the songs are sonic gold. Meddle, unfortunately, suffers from several songs that just aren’t up to snuff (San Tropez and Seamus). What it lacks, however, is more than made up for by One of These Days and Echoes, which are, in my opinion, the best songs ever created by Pink Floyd, period. Ummagumma is Pink Floyd at their most avant-garde, experimental peak. The live tracks are as good if not better than the album versions and the studio tracks break musical conventions in a way that is intellectually and affectively stimulating, but not always accessible. The Wall is simply incredible. The music is beautiful and the artistry masterful. Unfortunately, it is stretched out too much, changes styles too frequently, and therefore never reaches a tight cohesiveness or is able to really get going and build up to something more than the sum of its parts.
Not Too Shabby
The first track of Atom Heart, a 24 minute, six part suite of music, is really good and so is Summer ‘68, but the rest is mediocre filler. Pink Floyd made a jarring departure from their usual quality of sound and artistry for unsophisticated ‘80s pop rock in Lapse of Reason (an appropriate title). And yet for what it is, it’s not that bad, especially compared to music in the same vein elsewhere.
What The Fuck?
Pink Floyd flunked out on Animals, which has only one descent song (Sheep). Pigs (Three Different Ones) is listenable thanks to its political angst and groovy chorus, but the rest of the album is worthless. Ha ha, charade it is.
It is clear that when responding properly, humans accept what God says or does. They then transmit this content into, or actualize it in, their own existence and, hence, carry on God’s own work and word. Rather than doing what God does not do, they continue God’s own work by actualizing it. The actualization of God’s own work in the world is both the matrix of and the criterion for the Old Testament’s ethos.
Rolf Knierim, On the Task of Old Testament Theology
, Reading the Hebrew Bible for a New Millenium: Form, Concept and Theological Perspective, p.32
The Yahwist considers human history as fallen out of paradise, the earthly sphere of the order of creation. In this consideration, paradise apparently means more than only the beginning of human history. It is the mirror of true reality, the reality of creation in view of which human history is evaluated. . . . Paradise may be lost as history. However, it is not lost as the constant reminder of the true place to which history belongs–creation–nor as the reminder of the fact that history is removed from creation, and not creation from history.
Rolf Knierim, The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Methods, and Cases, p. 206
Today, the California Supreme Court hears arguments by both sides on the constitutional or non-constitutional nature of Prop 8. It may take some time before we hear the official judgment, however. As a Christian, I cannot easily condone homosexual union, but this is not a question of Christian faith, this is a question of natural liberty. Are we or should we be free to follow our personal convictions and beliefs in terms of matrimonial union or should our choices rather be coerced and controlled by outside forces such as government or majority opinion? As a Christian, I love this land, because it allows me the right to follow my religious convictions and belief instead of being coerced and controlled by someone else’s, and so I cannot but stand alongside the homosexual community in one accord and say yes, they should not be coerced or controlled and denied the ability to follow their beliefs and convictions either–even if I may disagree with those convictions or beliefs as a Christian. This is a unique opportunity for our country to either officially affirm or officially deny the nature of the liberties and freedoms protected and affirmed by our Constitution. It was only 40 years ago that black and white couples challenged laws in this country saying they could not marry and the uniquely historical Constitution of these United States is what ended the oppression, segregation, and racial bigotry of those who fought to deny blacks and whites the freedom to marry each other. May our Constitution, by God’s grace and mercy, once again shine brightly in this land today in the California courts.
LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!
Reign of Malevolence is making its latest experimental soundscape freely available for your download or streaming pleasure. I borrow from the religious language of death and resurrection to create a dark ambient/atmospheric song that communicates liberation from the evils that oppress and threaten to destroy humanity. Hopefully, you will hear the voice of God commanding you to sleep no more
and arise
from the dust
of dehumanization, injustice, or whatever dark forces you face in your life.
-R-O-M-All Who Sleep In Dust (Shall Arise) (48Hz, 160bit, OGG)
It is inevitable when dealing with biblical texts due to their complete otherness to our time, our culture, our experience, our world-views, our perspectives, our languages, and our thought-forms, that we will resort to anachronistic, incorrect, confusing, or reductionistic terms. Some, however, are more annoying than others. My ire is currently inflamed by the literary phrase final form.
The noun isn’t too shabby in and of itself, but it obviously requires a discerning adjective that can describe it appropriately according to our particular subject-matter. Unfortunately final
just doesn’t cut it. Final
? Where in the world can someone get final
from? The biblical texts have no final
form to speak of. From our current times until as far back as we can trace them, the biblical texts witness pluriform, variegated, and diverse composition.
In former centuries, the modus operandi was to designate the Masoretic Text as representative of the final
form on the assumption that the LXX was a later offshoot and corruption of a base text better represented by the Masoretic (never mind, of course, that there is actually no Masoretic Text but many Masoretic Texts which differ from each other in significant ways, particularly in their vowel usage and systems, and that we have somewhat arbitrarily chosen the Leningrad Codex to stand as THE Masoretic Text). We now know, however, that this is not the case–that both text-types existed side-by-side in the ancient world, both were used by believing Jews, both were considered inspired and authoritative, both have corruptions in them, both have unique or new readings in them, and both preserve readings in different places that are probably more representative of an earlier original than the other. The question today is not which text better represents the original, but whether there is even an original that we can point to and whether it may not be better to speak of competing originals. The Dead Sea Scrolls (despite all the hype promulgated by the almost exact consonantal equivalence of the Masoretic
Isaiah to the Great Isaiah Scroll) show us something we should have known long before–that the biblical texts before and even after Yeshua’s time were not static in form or content, but were very much in flux. We see this even in the forms of the biblical texts themselves that we’ve always been looking at regardless of any other considerations. An intertextual investigation within the pages of a printed edition of a canon anywhere in the world shows one biblical text borrowing from another, changing it, and re-using it in its own way. The classic Christian awareness of this situation is as old as the demonstration of different gospels instead of a single gospel. The Syriac church actually combined them into a single gospel called the Diatesseron in order to deal with this textual diversity. I have put together a short and far from incomplete list of some places where it appears that, at least according to the strictures of Modern times, one Old Testament
biblical text might be said to plagiarize another: Old Testament Plagiarism.
The printing press is to a large extent to blame for this irritating orientation toward the final
form of a text. Unlike ancient Israelites, we think in terms of books
which are static things and usually have an Aristotelian plot and character structure. We (usually) don’t have to worry about going into the store and buying a book which differs in significant detail from the one of the same title we’ve read, borrowed, or heard about. Books even (usually) have the same author or authors who are clearly identified. We’re used to things like this. And when we approach the biblical texts, we bring these understandings, perceptions, and preconditions to those texts and view them as books with final forms when, in fact, they are neither.
Biblical texts are better thought of as repository material. They functioned in no way as Sola Scriptura would have them function–as some authoritative or final structure or system which is absolute, unalterable, or against which all else is measured–but rather like various textual pieces which were put into a box at different times by different people and withdrawn by different people at different times, and which were sometimes changed or altered before being put back in the box. And it cannot be said that this metaphoric box always contained the same general textual material. Some may have put Torah material into it. Some may have taken it out. Some may have put in Enoch material. Some may have taken it out. Some may have put Enoch-like material in it. Some may have taken it out. Some may have put in Torah-like material. Some may have taken it out. The box has looked very different throughout the centuries and has had various or even competing material in it even within the same time periods and geographic areas. We are late coming to this situation and have ourselves participated by putting limits on what goes in or comes out of the box and what that material looks like inside it. And yet what makes our limits final
? Though some people attempt to override the historical situation through reliance upon the idea of canon,
they fail to realize that canon
itself is part of that historic participation. Pray tell which canon you refer to when you say canon
? There is no canon
even today, but many canons,
each of which exists because of the different limits even we have placed upon the textual material. To say canon
is really only to refer to the metaphoric box—it says nothing about the contents within.
What I think does a better job of describing this situation are adjectives like redacted
or composite.
Thus we can talk about the redacted whole
and define exactly what whole we are referring to and why it is a whole. Or we can talk about the composite form
and then specify what form we are looking at and why that form. This way we are also more aware of and honest about our own subjective part in approaching and making sense of biblical texts instead of falling into an anachronism that views the texts in ways outlined above or so that we guard against a retreat into a Positivism (such as that necessary even of Sola Scriptura) which believes the texts themselves have a form that is somehow complete outside of our own influence, interaction, and decision. Of course, it would also be advantageous to stop referring to certain biblical texts as book of…
or the bible
(and using an uppercase B in either case).
Old Testament Theology, for Walther Eichrodt, was an attempt to use historical-critical investigation to:
- locate some kind of underlying, all-encompassing theological unity in the Old Testament
- which could then be shown to have continuance into and throughout the New Testament (being ultimately encompassed by Christ himself).
Vital to this enterprise was not allowing dogmatic theology to impose it’s own commitments, ideas, or principles on the process from outside. Dogmatic theology was thus held apart from (but not necessarily separated from) Old Testament Theology. Eichrodt discusses in one place part of this caution thusly:
One thing, however, must be guarded against [in doing OT Theology] and that is any arrangement of the whole body of material [within the OT that one is sifting through for a unity] which derives not from the laws of its own nature but from some dogmatic scheme. It is impossible to use a system which has been developed on a basis quite different from that of the realm of OT thought to arrive at the OT belief about God. All that results is a grave danger of intruding alien ideas and of barring the way to understanding.
The irony of Eichrodt’s situation is that his search for a theological unity within the body of the Old Testament is a system entirely foreign to the OT (in the canon of your choice) or in the changing and pluriform ancient Israelite religion until the assimilation of Hellenism (which took place after the Hebrew/Aramaic scriptures were already written). It is itself a dogma that can only intrude on the texts and bar the way to their understanding. The OT texts themselves know of no such theological “unity” (see Rejecting Job parts 1 and 2 for an example of an OT text that directly contradicts the concept of God’s justice in other OT texts). Indeed, the Old Testament as a canon is a historically variegated and arbitrary entity. And some texts don’t even have anything to do with theology (Esther). But the basic, foundational problem is that theology itself is actually an anachronism when it comes to the Old Testament. Ancient Israelites did not do “theology” (until they began redefining it according to Hellenism). Theology is what Greek philosophers did.
It seems to me that Eichrodt’s caution quoted above is entirely appropriate, just not the method he believed could accomplish it. If we are going to do an “Old Testament Theology,” we don’t necessarily have to abandon the quest for a “theology,” but we do need to redefine what we are doing under that title. In that case, an Old Testament Theology might look entirely different than what we would normally think of as “theology,” but that also means we are probably closer to our goal than otherwise.
Back in the day, a friend and I got together to form a band and make some joyful noise to the Lord. We called ourselves Squish and The Masticating Chicken. Christian music would never be the same. Lovers of CCM (Crappy Christian Music) flocked to our door. Check out our breakthrough, signature sound: Cacophonous Worship (Squish is on geet and myself, The Masticating Chicken, on vocals).
It is no longer valid to ask for a unity or consensus in biblical studies. The only unity or consensus that was possible in the past was built upon and inextricably tied to things such as Positivism, Elitism, Colonialism, Imperialism, Ethnocentrism, Romanticism, or Sexism, which are no longer acceptable or valid bases. The essential prerogative of biblical studies must now be to ask for and seek a multidisciplinary enterprise and a pluralistic awareness.
