Dr. Platypus

Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.”

“Ow,” Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about.

(H/T: Joe Carter)

David Ker is uncomfortable with the passages in the Old Testament that seem to revel in thoughts (and actions) of vengeance against one’s enemies. So am I—and it would be deeply troubling to meet someone who wasn’t. There are some awfully graphic, bloodthirsty places in Scripture. David notes in particular a couple of psalms. Psalm 63:9-10 says:

But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
they shall be given over to the power of the sword,
they shall be prey for jackals.

Perhaps most famously, Psalm 137 ends with these blood-curdling words:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!

What is a believer to do with this sort of material? David suggests, and I think he is right, that verses like this may need to be omitted from the public reading of Scripture if there isn’t going to be an opportunity for a teacher or preacher to set them in some kind of context. Some of the people who show up at public worship have little or no framework for understanding such texts. Reading an unbowdlerized version of Psalm 137 with “little ones” present may prove problematic—especially if those little ones are paying attention, love to ask questions, and don’t have a parent with formal theological or biblical training!

Even so, there must be some forum in which these words are brought to the surface of our Christian consciousness and owned as Holy Scripture. As John Hobbins reminds us, latching only onto the parts of the Bible that suit us was precisely the heresy of Marcion. We can’t ultimately “fix” these texts by sweeping them away, and in fact these texts have played an important, positive role in the history of Christian spirituality.

In Chanting the Psalms, Cynthia Bourgeault observes that the vengeance passages in the Psalter have an important purpose in contemplative prayer. In that setting, the Psalter’s “shadow material” makes it possible to talk about the darkness humans carry with them and provides a means of letting go of it. She states,

What I believe happens when we introduce the psalms into our consciousness—and even more so into our unconscious—through the practice of contemplative psalmody is that they begin to create a safe spiritual container for recognizing and processing those dark shadows within ourselves, those places we’d prefer not to think about. There are times in the spiritual journey when anger is a very real part of our live, just as jealousy, abandonment, helplessness, rage, and terror are. All of these emotions are in us, and they’re all in the psalms. Perhaps we’re not terribly pleased with ourselves when we find ourselves praying, “Destroy all those who oppress me, O Lord,” but most of us have felt that way. (43)

In other words, the vengeance passages confront us with the darkness in our own souls so we can deal with it in a spiritually healthy way. (I have discussed Bourgeault’s “therapeutic” approach to the psalms elsewhere, and the remainder of this post is mostly a re-post of that material.)

In the past, I have found Bourgeault’s approach to be a helpful jumping-off point for teaching mature Christians about the imprecatory psalms. The key for me is to identify accurately the “enemy” one is asking God to destroy. Relying on the traditional triad, “the world,” “the flesh,” and “the devil,” I tend to see three possible ways to redeem these psalms for Christian use:

• The Psalms as Vehicles for Emotional Catharsis (the enemy = the world). This is the model Bourgeault develops. By means of this sort of reading, I confess that I have real enemies, flesh and blood people who delight in doing me wrong. My feelings for them are not entirely Christlike, and I need to own up to that fact and seek God’s transformation.
• The Psalms as Vehicles for Self-Mortification (the enemy = the flesh). Bourgeault alludes briefly to this model at the end of the chapter, where someone explains understanding these psalms as prayers for God to destroy in oneself those sinful attitudes that prevent spiritual growth and holiness. This reading allows me the opportunity to admit that I am often my own worst enemy. I need God’s refining fire to do away with those parts of me that are at cross-purposes with God’s will.
• The Psalms as Vehicles for Spiritual Warfare (the enemy = the devil). I believe this was also suggested by the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who of course understood themselves to be “soldiers of Christ” doing battle with the forces of evil in the wilderness. This reading recognizes that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces that must be brought into subjection to the will of God.

Similar approaches can help us with some of the other vengeance passages in the Old Testament. This material is difficult, to be sure. But they remain a part of the Bible for both Jews and Christians. Therefore it is important for us to find ways to navigate their turbulent content and come out for the better on the other side of them.

I’m always getting files at work in DOCX format. For those of you who aren’t tech-savvy, DOCX format is something Microsoft invented to force everyone to upgrade their Microsoft Office Suite to add a bunch of features they don’t really need. Instead, I use Zamzar. It quickly converts DOCX into plain old DOC, which lets me get on with my work. It is also useful for other kinds of file conversions: images, video, music, etc., although I’ve never had occasion to use it for those purposes.

You can sign up for paid service, which gives you faster service, online storage, and no ads, but what they offer for free is sufficient for my needs.

The latest post by Peter Enns explores the connection between Adam’s story and the story of Israel, and in the process explains where Cain got his wife:

Look at it this way. The word “adam” is ambiguous in Genesis. Every commentator notes that sometimes “adam” represents humanity (so I will use the lower case); other times it is the name “Adam” (upper case) representing one man. What does this back and forth mean? It means that Adam is a special subset of adam.

The character “Adam” is the focus of the story because he is the part of “adam” that God is really interested in. There is “adam” outside of Eden (in Nod), but inside of Eden, which is God’s focus, there is only “Adam”—the one with which he has a unique relationship.

The question in Genesis is whether “Adam” will be obedient to “the law” and stay in Eden, thus continuing this special relationship, or join the other “adam” outside in “exile.” This is the same question with Israel: after being “created” by God, will they obey and remain in the land, or disobey and be exiled?

I’m still perturbed, however, that nobody ever  seems to worry about where Seth got his wife!

The fifty-first Biblical Studies Carnival is now posted at Anumma, the blog of G. Brooke Lester. It’s a keeper!

Scot McKnight has a nice piece about the ancient ecumenical Creeds and their place in (Protestant, evangelical, paleo-orthodox and/or emerging) Christianity. He takes a middle road—which obviously gets bonus points from me—between those who would dismiss the Creeds as irrelevant and those who would invest them with the same degree of authority as the Bible. To the first point, Scot writes,

I should note clearly hear that I will happily recite the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds.  I agree with paleo-orthodoxy that these Creeds reflect important, basic truths about God and Christ.  I also agree that these Creeds establish a pattern for the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel.   The Creeds emphasize the basic Biblical themes of creation, Trinity, incarnation, resurrection and redemption, and proclaim in particular the events of the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.  This is the Gospel that the Church has always proclaimed and always must proclaim, for the Gospel fundamentally is rooted in God’s Trinitarian person and in these kerygmatic events.  The Gospel is the “faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 1:3), which does not change.

He then, however, notes three areas of concern with the ways some believers handle the Creeds:

But paleo-orthodoxy, it seems to me, understands the Creeds to have a greater authority than that of faithfully reflecting a pattern for Gospel proclamation.    For paleo-orthodoxy, the ecumenical Creeds are authoritative for doctrine and theology because they are part of the “history of the Holy Spirit.”  To be sure, the Creeds for the paleo-orthodox are subsidiary authorities to scripture, but nevertheless they are in some sense binding authorities.  In principle, for the paleo-orthodox, the Creeds are reformable in accordance with scripture.  In practice, however, the Creeds for them are functionally infallible (or so it seems to me, and to some other observers such as Roger Olson, who writes to this effect in his book Reformed and Always Reforming).

I find this notion troubling, for several reasons:  (1) it functionally compromises the Reformational principles of sola scriptura (though it formally maintains that principle) and of the priesthood of all believers; (2) it is highly selective – indeed arbitrary – about which parts of the “history of the Holy Spirit” are authoritative; and (3) it leaves unmanageable ambiguities about the status of some creedal statements.

The remainder of the post provides examples of Scot ’s reasons.

Walter Russell Mead explains why:

To mistake an ideology or a social model for the transcendent and always surprising (and irritating!) Kingdom of God is, technically speaking, the sin of idolatry.  It is to worship the work of our own hands.  What makes it worse is that to some degree in the mainline churches we have replaced faith in the scripturally based and historically rooted doctrines and values of the Christian heritage with faith in progressive social thought….

I want to be clear here.  Liberal mainline Protestantism is not just a ghastly mistake and a return to literalism and fundamentalism is not the way out of the current impasse. The great historical riches and insights of the mainline denominations are more important than ever today.  The liberal, questing spirit that refuses to take ancient truths for granted and that challenges historic orthodoxies in the light of lived experience has a vital and necessary place in the life of the church.  It’s important that the mainline churches halt their disintegration and decline and regain the strength to play their role in the American religious system.  I am not writing all these terrible things about bishops because I want them to fail.  God has work for the mainline church to do, and God’s work in the world will suffer if we fail.

But the Blue Beast cannot save American society and it cannot save the mainline church.  Until we come to terms with these truths and start living them we can neither help ourselves nor do much to help anybody else.

(And in case you were wondering, conservative politics isn’t the gospel, either.)

(H/T: JesusCreed)

Commenter Peter Kirkpatrick has shared the following poem/meditation based on something I mentioned in my inaugural post at this blog: when the first platypus specimens arrived in England, scientists there thought the creature was some sort of hoax. Nothing like that could actually exist in nature! It laid leathery eggs like a reptile, it had the bill and webbed feet of a duck, and it was covered with fur and suckled its young. Thanks, Peter!

1799.
A specimen platypus
lands in the probing hands
of a British scientist.

Webbed foot, duck’s bill, mammal’s body?
Not possible.
So begins the autopsy;
searching for telltale stitches.

Today,
if I were stitching together
a platypus heaven,
I’d start by remaking the Sahara,
gloriously golf course greened,
lavish storehouse for continents.

I’d design a slumless Calcutta,
watch her children play without care,
her men give an honest day’s work in return
for a day’s justice and dignity.

I’d recreate countless lost species of animal.
Whales would spout water,
splash flukes with impunity.
The dodo would no longer be food for a cliché.

I’d make every man a hero,
every little girl a beautiful princess.

I’d add one last thing.
A museum of relics (lest we forget):
an assault rifle,
a hospice bed,
a divorce certificate…

I’m beginning to see
why it’s so hard to believe.

Why do so many people who have an unwavering faith in the Bible do such stupid things with it? That’s not quite the way David Ker puts the question, but he is struggling with how to teach people to do better. His thoughts are worth a read. He begins,

This is my fourth year teaching exegesis to Mozambican Bible college students. I walk a fine line between getting the students to interpret the Scriptures properly on one hand and to not apply it incorrectly on the other. It is a given among my students that the Bible is God’s Word. It is inspired. All of it is profitable. Every passage and verse has wisdom and application for us today. But this high regard for the Bible frequently leads to nonsense and often downright heresy. That’s because, simply put, not everything in the Bible is applicable to us today.

He makes some interesting suggestions about improving the soundness of one’s exegesis, which will no doubt be more compelling for people of some theological persuasions than for others.