Carpe Cakem!

Over the past weekend my wife and I saw the film An Education. I really enjoyed it, though in hindsight I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s just because the acting was so good! (The lead is up for a Oscar, and rightfully so.)

It’s about a young British girl in the early 1960’s, in her last year of high school, who has an affair with a rich, older con-man. It turns out it’s based almost entirely on a true story (very few details changed) and makes for an interesting read. Here.

As a parent (and soon to be parent of young adults), I think the thing that struck me the most was her parent’s attitude about the whole thing.

Was Simon a con-man? Well, he was a liar and a thief who used charm as his jemmy to break into my parents’ house and steal their most treasured possession, which was me. Of course Oxford, and time, would have stolen me away eventually, but Simon made it happen almost overnight. Until our “engagement”, I’d thought my parents were ignorant about many things (fashion, for instance, and existentialism, and why Jane Austen was better than Georgette Heyer) but I accepted their moral authority unquestioningly. So when they casually dropped the educational evangelism they’d sold me for 18 years and told me I should skip Oxford to marry Simon, I thought, “I’m never going to take your advice about anything ever again.” And when he turned out to be married, it was as if, tacitly, they concurred.

God help me not drop the ball on teaching my children what’s truly important. Too easy to do though.

I’m reposting this here because it’s a nice concise handy reference on gnosticism, which is alive and well all over the place.

John Z posted originally posted this at the BHT regarding a new book by Tom Hall.

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The key elements of gnostic thought Hall identifies are:

• Christian tradition is viewed as basically untrustworthy.
• Traditional Christianity fails the theodicy test. [Why does evil exist?]
• Christian eschatology is implausible.
• The core of the faith is worth saving.
• Christianity needs a top-down revision not small corrections.
• There is a hunger for more spiritual interpretation of Scripture.
• Conviction that there is a profound difference between ordinary church people and those who deeply understand the spiritual truth of Christianity.

Apparently Hall spends a lot of time examining the theology of Marcus Borg. [Scott] McKnight summarizes thus:

1. For Borg, humanity is saved by knowledge.
2. For Borg, there is a focus on the spiritual inner self, the divine spark within.
3. For Borg, there is an antipathy toward incarnation and embodiment. [Extensive discussion.]
4. For Borg, there is an emphasis on present spiritual reality rather than eschatological hope, on the God of timeless truth rather than the God who will bring history to consummation.

However, I think the post ends well with this:

Thus, he sees Borg as a combination of three features:

The piety of orthodoxy
The honest intellectual inquiry of liberalism
The spirituality of gnosticism.

Tom Long says Borg’s Jesus is too much like Marcus Borg himself.

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A LOT of books on Jesus reimagine Jesus to look a lot like the author, whether he’s a hippy, a UFC fighter, a pastor, an eastern self-help guru, or what have you.

While all the children were napping this past President’s day…

Fr. Michael Petty, St. Peter’s Anglican Church

In my attempt to devour everything Girard in our local library, I picked up a book called “Violent Origins”, edited by Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly. It is not a typical book, but rather edited transcriptions of talks given at a 1983 conference. Girard contributes one essay on scapegoating and participates in the back-and-forth panel talk.

The editor also describes another person who was invited along this way: “We are also privileged to have the commentary of the working anthropologist, Renato Rosaldo, which gives the impressions of an “outsider”.

In the transcription of the panel discussion, Rosaldo tries to argue that the idea of “guilt” is a Western idea that doesn’t apply in other cultures. He uses an earlier example of a tribe of headhunters who go out of their way to symbolically portray their victim as non-human before murdering them. Girard argues with him that this is a blatantly obvious case of mental gymnastics to try and gloss over their own guilt.

I can’t reproduce the argument here (it’s long and is mixed in with other topics), but when reading it, I was astounded at Rosaldo’s reasoning. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up!

No, I’m not going to grapple with this at all. Sorry. I’m just going to dismiss it.

“How can you stand next to the truth and not see it?”

It doesn’t matter how clever your language, denying the existence of conscience works about as well as denying that your head is mounted on top of your shoulders.

Riffing off a conversation with a pastor friend of his, the frequently-very-wise Seth Godin posted this yesterday:

“I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.” Yes, don’t we believe this? But most spiritual work is just that: work. Hard work.

Godin seems to keep his personal faith intentionally vague. I’m not sure if he’s aware of these church leadership social dynamics or not.

Blessed is the man (or woman) who can serve in this capacity without ending up in a padded room. Somewhere in here, reform is needed, eh?

The one thing the Bible is not is what it is so often thought to be – a theological outline with proof texts attached.

Asked to define neighbor, Jesus told a story (Luke 10:25-27). Likewise, Jesus’ aphoristic command “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32) shows that he believed that truth can be embodied in concrete examples or images as well as in moral propositions.

-Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature, p.9

Ryken’s book starts out well, but after a couple chapters I couldn’t continue. It’s all good information and his examples are clear, but the thing is just so darn boring I couldn’t stand it! 200 pages could have been condensed into a 20 page essay and nothing would be lost.

I think I’m going to skip it and move on to the (more highly recommended by folks I know) The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter.

I must admit, I’ve really been diggin’ Girard lately. I was excited to discover The Raven Foundation, a group of folks doing pretty much the same thing and (more importantly!) figuring out how to apply it.

From a recent blog post over there by Adam Ericksen, here is an interesting take on Obama’s recent State of the Union address (emphasis mine):

The political rancor in Washington is obvious to anyone who watched last night’s speech. And yet there were moments of unity. Obama talked mostly about the economic crisis and America’s historically tenacious desire to overcome similar obstacles. He mentioned that other nations, such as Japan and Germany, are working hard to overcome economic disaster. The President claimed, “China’s not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany’s not waiting. India’s not waiting. These countries aren’t playing for second place. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.”

That was one of the few times Republicans and Democrats united in applause. But please notice, the unity that momentarily washed away the mimetic conflicts was based on a common enemy: those other countries that are beating us.

This is a negative, false unity that is very dangerous because it is mimetic; it cannot be controlled. The unity we find in the division and rivalry with other countries actually reinforces our own divisions and rivalries.

Darn straight.

The Bible (and the God of the Bible) often get tomatoes thrown at them for seeming to legitimize slavery.

Never mind the fact that Christians have been at the forefront of the abolition of slavery throughout history, it is true that the Bible does not go out of it’s way to condemn slavery at every possible turn.

Why? Whole books have been written on this topic, but here I think Fearsome at the BHT gives the best simple answer I’ve ever heard:

I think that if anyone had come up to Jesus and asked him about slavery, he would have said something along the lines, “Moses wrote the laws concerning slaves because your hearts were hard.” So in other words, the slavery laws in the OT are like the divorce laws–they are the regulation of a common evil in order to mitigate its effects.

Earlier interest in magic might have been of a more religious or spiritual nature, but the renewal of interest in it near the enlightenment was rather different. It’s aims were often the same as science.

Even the late medieval and early modern panics over witches did not generally involve actual belief in magic; the fear, rather, was a diabolism, murder, and demonic illusion. It seems perfectly obvious to me, though, that in the post-Christian era something more like real magical thinking has come back into vogue, albeit with a modern inflection. I am not speaking of popular interest in astrology, Wicca, runes, mystical crystals, or any other New Age twaddle of that sort; these things are always with us, in one form or another.

I am speaking rather of the way in which, in modern society, technology and science (both practical and theoretical) are often treated as exercises of special knowledge and special power that should be isolated from too confining an association with any old habitual pieties regarding human nature or moral truth (these being, after all, mere matters of personal preference).

That is, we often approach modern science as if it were magic, with the sort of moral credulity that takes it as given that power is evidence of permissibility. Of course, our magic – unlike that of our ancestors – actually works. But it is no less superstitious of us than it was of them to think that the power to do something is equivalent to the knowledge of what it is one is doing, or of whether one should do it, or of whether there are other, more comprehensive truths to which power ought to be willing to yield primacy. We seem on occasion, at least a good number of us, to have embraced (often with a shocking dogmatism) the sterile superstition that mastery over the hidden causes of things is the whole truth, while at the same time pursuing that mastery by purely material means. -David Bently Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, p.233

Our magic works, but our understanding of the underlying mechanism does not mean that manipulating has no moral implications. Think genetic engineering, selective abortion, or eugenics. Just because we understand something about DNA does not mean that it’s OK to manipulate it now. Morals surrounding that mechanism do not dissolve when the mechanism is revealed. A psychologist who studies the brain may be able to come to a reasonably accurate electro-chemical understanding of lust. This does not grant him a license to lust. As Hart says above, we are operating off that “mastery over the hidden causes of tings is the whole truth”.

When the righteous triumph, there is great glory, but when the wicked rise, people hide themselves.

Proverbs 28:12 (ESV)

Here, Leithart makes a great observation about this verse:

When the wicked achieve primacy (are raised up on high, as stars in the heavens), then it is dangerous for glory to be seen.  Men go into hiding.  This is an important dynamic of political history.  Wicked rulers suppress talent and energy by pushing men into hiding.  They may hope to achieve glory, but they achieve the opposite – a drain of glory.

Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, they both promised a glorious empire, a crowning human achievement. What happened? The righteous, along with most of the smart folks went into hiding – smacked down by the oppression. Instead of a glorious state they get a big disappointment. The same thing will happen again.