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September 30, 2005

Board

I spent most of the day in meetings of the Anglican Theological Review Board of Directors (and the meeting continues tomorrow). For every hour that my other editorial boards devote to meetings, ATR devotes five or six.

Toward late morning, though, I snuck out of the Editorial Committee meeting to preside at St. Jerome’s Day mass. It all went fine, and I’ll tuck the sermon into the Extended section. Then I tried to get away for a few hours with Pippa, but the afternoon meeting ran longer than I’d hoped. I fixed dinner and set her up with Ghostbusters.

Now I’ll try to get some sleep before tomorrow’s meeting (preceded by eight-o’clock-on-Saturday-morning mass. . .).

Be it granted that Jerome was an irascible cuss, vain and difficult, poisonous in his rhetoric and with a skewed perspective on women. As difficult and cranky as Jerome surely was, I wonder whether our image of him has not been amplified by a tendency in the church, especially (I think) the modern church, to undervalue learning in favor of more democratic characteristics of its leaders. To put it another way: one of the characteristics that makes Jerome offend at least some of his readers was that he was brilliant, a Christian intellectual who actually cared ardently about the truth that had laid hold of him.

That truth, however, calls for all of us to exercise our capacities to the utmost – even when that causes us stress and pain, even when we’re working with fewer intellectual gifts than St. Jerome.The Law of the Lord may revive the soul, and the decrees of the Lord may make wise the simple – but they avail nothing for people who refuse to learn them. Scripture may be useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and for training in righteousness, but presumably Scripture serves those purposes best when people actually read it.

Indeed, we honor the Lord who is the way, and the truth, and the life, when we apply our strongest efforts to understanding all that we can, as thoroughly as we can. we have been entrusted with leadership in the community of people whose souls we comfort and counsel, whose prospect of eternity takes a shape affected by our ministries of preaching, of pastoral care. We ought no more presume that we’ll be effective ministers of the Gospel just because of our hearts are in the right place than we would trust a physician who skipped her anatomy classes during med school, just because she’s a companionable, attractive neighbor. Our ministry isn’t brain surgery, isn’t rocket science – but Scripture reminds us that the God who calls us to ministry in the church calls us to stretch, to extend our faculties.

The God who calls us away from our cubicles and countertops, from our fields and fishnets, calls us not to rest content with warm-hearted mediocrity in serving God. If you are capable of analyzing a sales contract, of organizing and managing a birthday party for a dozen pre-teens, if you can debate the caliber of a Supreme Court nominee or assess the strengths and weaknesses of a recent movie, you can set those talents to work towards a richer, fuller appreciation of the Bible, and of the truths that our teachers have inferred from the Bible. Spiritual laziness substitutes passive cheeriness for diligent study and squanders the opportunity to multiply your talents; that would really tick Jerome off. Come, rather, and meet Jerome on his terms, learn from him, and offer these weeks and years in order to prepare a room in which Jesus may meet you, may open your mind to understand the Scriptures, so that you and everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

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September 29, 2005

Where The Buffalo Jerome

Right now, I’m pondering tomorrow morning’s sermon for the Feast of St. Jerome (2 Tim 3:14-17/Ps 19:7-11/Luke 24:44-48), readying a shopping list for the grocery store, appreciating Pippa’s independence and creative activity, imagining a plan for dinner, and trying to shake a headache.

So if I seem short-tempered, please be a little more patient with me. I apologize in advance.

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September 28, 2005

PodBible

Tim of SansBlogue is working on a hands-down obvious winner of an idea: a podcast audio Bible. I hope they make it available without the devotional questions (plenty of listeners might want an audio Bible without devotional aids, or without these particular devotional aids). It’s happening, it’s all happening, and I just wonder where they’ll put the scattered pieces together first.

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September 27, 2005

Beginnings

Today was the first session of Early Church History, my fall term required course at Seabury; it’s a small class this year, so we’ll operate it as a more of a seminar, which’ll be good. Much as I delight in lecturing, there’s a special joy in a discussion wherein participants can follow their interests and their own reasoning to get at a finer understanding of the issues we’re studying. The class showed a ripple of enthusiastic approval when I indicated that we had commissioned audiotexts of some of the primary source materials for the term; Trevor and I had known this was a winner, but have been having a hard time setting it up.

A week from tomorrow the biweekly Introduction to Christianity course begins in earnest (we had an organizational meeting last week). I’ll be teaching five sessions that draw on these chapters from St. Luke’s Guide to the Faith, the Church, and the Parish; I have an audio version of the first chapter posted at the Disseminary site (subject to slight enhancements shortly intro and outro added), and will add the subsequent chapters as soon as I can.

I have my copy of Andrew Huff and the Pool of Lost Souls — do you? (I’d propose an audio read-along of this, but I honestly can’t imagine when I’d have the time. Plus, I’d mangle all those Anglo-tongue-defying names.)

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September 26, 2005

Connect the Dots

Chris is cooking with propane these days, laying out the background for his tour de force dissection of New Age “spirituality”; once he fills in the details, the lurid story will set straight one side of the complex story of theological pornography of which The da Vinci Code (still selling in hardcover!) and Left Behind (of which the debunker nonpareil is the Slacktivist) [are examples] (added after Chris charitably completed the sentence I originally left fragmentary).

When people substitute wish-fulfillment for critical thinking, fantasy for imagination, self-validation for disciplined inquiry, you get the sort of tissue-paper-thin spiritual expression that ornaments current best-seller lists, talk-show platitudes, and church mediocracy. “Wouldn’t it be cool if?” modulates into, “As we all know. . .” without argument or examination.

Rock on, Chris and Fred, let ’er rip.

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Feature Request

When you look at the information for a given selection, iTunes should be able to tell you whether it’s part of any playlists — lest one delete a song that one has incorporated into a playlist for some memorable person or purpose.

Posted by AKMA at 09:49 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 25, 2005

On Communion

“The decisive passages in the New Testament do not say: One theology, one right, one opinion on all matters public and private, and one kind of conduct. Instead they say: one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of us all (Ephesians 4:4ff; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Romans 12:5); various gifts – one Spirit, various offices – one Lord, various powers – one God (1 Corinthians 12:4ff). The point is not ‘unanimity in Spirit’ [‘einigkeit in Geist’], but the ‘unity of the Spirit’ [‘einheit des Geistes’], as Luther puts it in his exposition of Ephesians 4:3; this means the objective principle sovereignly establishes unity, unites the plurality of persons into a single collective person [Gesamtperson] without obliterating either their singularity or the community of persons. Rather, unity of spirit, community of spirit, and plurality of spirit are intrinsically linked to each other through their subject matter.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Communio Sanctorum, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens.

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Au Revoir, Boston

We’re closing up our Cambridge staging area, and preparing to ship out from Logan “We Scorn Wifi-Using Travelers” Airport. Assuming all goes well, I’ll be back at the Evanston Base in the evening.

We had a spectacular time; I wish everyone could have gotten together to meet the Koslows, the deVillas, the Berkman and OpenCola and general Joey-and-Wendy social tribe. We wee especially tickled to spend a fair amount of time with Ethan and Rachel; a predictable convergence of interests combined with harmonious temperaments to make for animated and engaging conversation. We’re hoping to connect with them again sometime, perhaps when we visit Marlboro [Ethan’s Flickr photos put mine to shame — thank heaven there are other digital photographers out there to fill in what I fumble!]. And, sorry to have missed the other Bostonian bloggers — we love visiting with you, but Margaret and I really appreciated the extra time spent just with each other.

[Later: Back home safely, exhausted, wrung out.]

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September 24, 2005

Wife and Husband

The evening has come and gone; the ketubah is signed, the glass smashed, the champagne toasted, the disco medley played, and the guests exhausted. These guests, anyway.

The wedding service itself blended Judaic and Filipino customs seamlessly; Rachel was terrific, and everyone did just what they were supposed to. The sermon seems to have gone pretty well, so I’ll add it in the extended entry below.

The part everyone’s interested in, though, is did Joey play the accordion at his own wedding? The answer is, emphatically, Yes.

Joey was great, and the dance floor filled as he roared through “Old Time Rock’n’Roll” and his classic interpretation of “Born to Be Wild” (with Wendy on vocals). The accordion so captivated the pulses of all present that even a grouchy old curmudgeon was dragged onto the parquet by some lovely blithe spirit.
A splendid time was most assuredly had by all.

[Later: Margaret stipulates that I must note that I myself was indeed dancing — the “curmudgeon” described above — and the photographic evidence is available at the Flickr page to which I link here and above.]

“The Internet is what brings us together, tonight.”

The next time somebody tells you that technology will destroy our civilization because nobody actually talks to other people any more, remind them about this evening. Although Joey and Wendy didn’t exactly meet online, the Internet played a vital role, several vital roles, in bringing this holy occasion about. I became acquainted with Joey online; Wendy was working at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the three of us converged on the same place at the same moment as part of a conference on blogging. If – as we are taught – marriages are determined in heaven before we are born, then God has been clearly been an early adopter of cutting-edge social software, for which we all have much reason to give thanks over and above the expected celebration of a marriage.

Indeed, there’s a lot that’s “over and above,” a lot that’s excessive about this service. We surround the relatively simple human gesture of two people getting together with a remarkable assortment of elaborate ceremonies. After all, you don’t need a huppah to move in together; you don’t need candles to register your names with City Hall. Any old pop singer can marry any her childhood boyfriend with the approval of a bureaucrat, and fifty-five hours later she can unmarry him. No ninongs, no ninangs, no veil, no ketubah, no big deal.

It will not be so with us. Tonight, we indulge a proclivity toward excess; we ritualize extravagance. Tonight we observe the extraordinary ceremonies of two somewhat different families’ traditions, we multiply them by each another, because the excess in our behavior signifies something greater, something grander, than a pop tart’s legalized dalliance or a paper-pusher’s authenticating stamp. Mere change-of-address forms and legalities fall far short of substantiating the promises that Joey and Wendy have made before us here. This is a love that exemplifies the words from the Song of Solomon:

Tonight, Wendy and Joey bind their lives together with a bond stronger than the human will, strong even as death itself, trusting that the God who chose them for one another will sustain their love through storm and danger, through tedium and trial.

Their love, their covenant exceeds the bounds that a mortal vocabulary can define. So when we gather tonight, we express this pledge, this risk, with fire, we enact it with cord and veil, we celebrate it with ceremony and prayer. For in the presence of the offer and acceptance of utmost intimacy, we recognize a power in whose image we are made, we recognize the invitation that blesses us without coercion, we recognize the love that possesses us in our offering, sparks from a very flame of the Lord, a burning ring of fire from a holy mountain.

Through the loosely-joined connections of technological acquaintance, God has wrought the tightest and most glorious of unities. Tonight our extravagant celebration, feasting, music and dance, will light the heavens with our joy and thanksgiving for these our friends, our children, the newest and most wonderful wife and husband you could find anywhere – on the earth or online.

With joy in our hearts, we pray that God bless you, Joey and Wendy, and may you flourish in peace, joy, and prosperity forever.

Posted by AKMA at 11:16 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Step Back, Reassess

One excellent function of wedding rehearsals lies in their capacity to make visible what had lain merely implicit, and to bring to shared awareness what had not yet been come together except in the imagination of the planners. Or, more prosaically, to remind the preacher that he simply had not reckoned on how things would be going at the part of the wedding with which his name is associated.

So the preacher has gone back to the drawing board (or “the writing desk,” or “the keyboard and printer”) and refactored the homily for tonight. Luckily, the occasion will be so delightful, so wondrous that no one will be thinking hard about the homily, and a splendid time will be had by all without interference from this corner. (As soon as Joey and Wendy give their OK, I’ll post it here — if Ethan hasn’t already transcribed it on IRC).

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September 23, 2005

Go, Sox!

Arriving in Boston for the wedding this afternoon. Since I may not have a chance to post anything, I’ll point to the snazzy way I devised for all you Theology-Card-Game downloaders to play with more than two players.

Do those theology professors have wild pastimes, or what?

[Later: Arrived safely, settling in for a rest before rehearsing.]

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September 22, 2005

Now I Am A Procrastinator

Today my Seabury-Orientation schedule abates a bit; I only have one event scheduled, which is a Very Good Thing because I need to finish (that’s “finish,” as in “get more than just an opening idea for”) the sermon homily one-liner for Joey and Wendy’s wedding.

Since there’s a very significant task at hand, with an unforgiving deadline, I’m actually accomplishing a number of other things instead of tackling the immediate obligation. For instance, Trevor figured out what he wanted to do with the Disseminary site, and I’ve been filling in little details or adding posts here and there. I’ve been pumping out the last chapters of the Theological Outlines project (I note with interest that Hall referes to Calvinism as a “heresy”; now, that’d stir the pot at a meeting of mixed-theology Anglican conservatives) — I think I can get the last three chapters published today.

I’ve been thinking more about the iPod Nano, since I’ve had the opportunity to heft, to admire, to explore one. I think this model may be the watershed for digital music, along the lines of what I speculated before. I mean, yes, the present version scratches too easily and costs too much for the big breakthrough, but if you let the price drift down to where it’ll be in a few months, this unit betokens the time when people will not say, “Do I want to bring along my iPod?” but “Which iPod do I want to bring? The hip-hop iPod, the gospel iPod, or the audiobook iPod?”

And once we get to that point, all sorts of consequences follow. I’d spell out some of them, except I have to work on the sermon. . . .

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September 21, 2005

Reciprocity

Jeneane cordially picked up my suggestion from yesterday and prolonged International David Weinberger Day with her supportive linkage — it’s the least I can do, to point out that this is also International Blog like a PR Writer Week.

This coming weekend will, of course, be a national holiday in the Philippines, Canada, and the USA as Joey and Wendy get married, and the week after is Halley’s Healthy Heart Week.

Keep your calendars open; someone else will surely step up after that.

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September 20, 2005

International David Weinberger Day

Today Pippa and I heard David Weinberger’s commentary on All Things Considered (she came running downstairs and said, “Dad, David Weinberger was just on the radio!” I, thankfully, had already been listening) (no link yet). And he was renewed for another year of fellowhood at the Berkman Center (along with David Isenberg). Then, too, he’s releasing a new issue of his online newsletter with no recycled content. Tasty, minty fresh, and provocative — a trifecta of Weinbergerian wisdom!

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September 19, 2005

Arrrr! Don't Ye Be Forgettin' This, Ye Rascals

It be that time of yearrr again!

Posted by AKMA at 09:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Letter From The Gulf Coast

One of my friends from a long time ago made her way down to the coast of Mississippi, and she wrote me last night with the following report from David Knight’s base of operations:

I got back home yesterday evening after spending a week at the Episcopal Disaster Relief Center at Coast Episcopal School in Long Beach/Pass Christian. I only got to speak a sentence or two to David Knight. I just hope that you will continue to tell people in your blog about the phenomenal thing that is happening there.

The medical team from Duke Hospital was seeing hundreds of people a day, including some minor surgeries — in a gymnasium with parts of three walls blown out. Dozens of volunteers were sleeping on cots and air mattresses in classrooms while other classrooms were set up as distribution centers for food, clothing, and supplies. Priests and volunteers are coming in from all over the country; trucks full of donations are arriving almost more quickly than volunteers can unload them. Within a week the grounds of the school are going to be completely transformed into a “relief city” with tents and trailers for the clinic and relief distribution while the gym is being repaired and equipped to become a “feeding station” to provide hot meals for three months or more. I have never been prouder of my diocese as it steps in to do what needs to be done and I have never been prouder of my fellow Mississippians. Never have I seen race be less of an issue as I have in the last week. The refrain I heard over and over again was “we’ll get through this.” Tired, dazed people who have lost much, if not everything, they owned are treating one another with respect and kindness and gently ironic but not cynical good humor. I have seen the power of the church at its best and I am deeply humbled by the experience. The Spirit is most truly working at Coast Episcopal.

I am not surprised to hear such good things about work in which my friend David is involved, and I’m joyous to hear that Holly could lend her efforts to the work of protecting and sustaining our storm-tossed neighbors. Please continue to support the ministries down in Mississippi and Louisiana — as the initial wave of generosity recedes, our determination to share becomes all the more important.

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September 18, 2005

On Hermeneutics and Disagreement, Part Four

Most of what I’ve said so far has emphasized problems in interpretation, impediments to the Spirit and to harmony; in this last session, I’d like to emphasize the ways we can move toward agreement and articulate reassons for endorsing particular interpretations.

Much of what I will suggest here touches on topics that we’ve discussed before, in different ways. I’ve emphasized, several times, the importance of being able to give reasons for one’s interpretive claims. Here we’ll describe different sorts of these good reasons.

Some good reasons derive from basics about communication. That’s one reason the literal sense (in its full, rich, texture) plays a paramount role. Theories that involve elaborate substitution-codes and conspiratorial deception fail a test of basic communication; they’re tremendously improbable, from the perspective I commend to you (I prescind from ruling them out absolutely, since I may always be wrong — but so far as I can tell, they lack even a shadow of the tremendous compensatory rationale that would be requisite to balance out their comprehensive non-literality). For us to make a persuasive text about how best to interpret a biblical text, we ought to be able to make a case that our claim fits a plausible reading of the Hebrew or Greek itself; the stronger that case, the better.

Some good reasons derive from the unique authority that Scripture holds within the Christian tradition. For instance, I short-changed you when I alluded to Augustine before — when he says, “What more liberal and more fruitful provision could God have made in regard to the Sacred Scriptures than that the same words might be understood in several senses?” he actually appends a codicil: “the same words might be understood in several senses, all of which are sanctioned by the concurring testimony of other passages equally divine.” This coheres with Augustine’s well-known comfort with interpretive plurality earlier in de Doctrina, where he says, “If. . . [someone] draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious. . .” (I.36.40). Augustine reasons that wherever one runs into confusion about what a passage means, one should look to the concurring testimony of other passages (III.28.39), much as Aquinas points out that “. . .nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense” (Summa I q. 1 a. 10, invoking both the concurrent testimony of Scripture and the literal sense!).

The Anglican tradition includes some specific hermeneutical advice as well. Article XX instructs that “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” The force of “repugnant” might be clearer, but it seems unlikely that it simply means “contradictory” (thought the Latin text does give contradicat here), since the Anglican tradition has typically not been shy about acknowledging the places where Scripture seems to give two opposite versions of a point; rather, I take it more narrowly in the sense that one portion of Scripture can’t be used to negate another. (Chris Seitz has an essay on just this subject, on which I can’t put my hand right now, but as I recall, he not surprisingly construed “repugnancy” in a more restrictive sense than I). At any rate, the point clearly holds that the Anglican tradition weighs in on not being able airily to dismiss the bits that aren’t amenable to our own argument — to say the least.

We agreed that points of orientation on which the church had attained effective unanimity (or near unanimity), such as the Creeds, definitions, and conciliar canons, bore an interpretive authority concomitant with their generality. [Note: I am not suggesting that the Creeds are optional; I’m adopting this way of saying it exactly so as to avoid needing to debate the point. Even people who want to call the Creeds into question must admit that the Creeds’ doctrinal force has been acknowledged at a tremendously high degree of assent, so I don’t need to deal with an argument about just who does and who doesn’t believe what about the Creeds.] An interpretation that presumes to set aside a creedal formulation on the basis of a hunch or a gut feeling, or even on the basis of “no intelligent person could possibly believe that now,” counts for little over against the preponderance of the Church’s wisdom.

What more? Well, prominently, the accumulated interpretive wisdom of hundreds of years of saints who have gone before. In the session, which was taking place at the same time as the hearings relative to John Roberts’s nomination to be Chief Justice, we talked a lot about stare decisis, the force of precedent and interpretive tradition. While we cannot preclude the possibility that the saints have erred, we likewise can’t rule out the possibility that we’re mistaken, and we ought not presume to a certainty that obliges us to suppress the testimony of our forebears in the faith as credulous buffoons. We may place distinct value on guidance from the conciliar church, from particularly Anglican divines, from scholars whose grasp of technical interpretive questions warrants our respectful attention.

Most particularly, it seems to me, we should attend to the traditions of shared worship as recorded for us in the Book of Common Prayer. This criterion is complicated for us by the path onto which the American church seems headed, where the creditable diversity in congregations issues in an increasing number of divergent, arguably incompatible, authorized expressions. I’m not against “diversity” — but I do regard a tradition that depends, to a great extent, on common prayer as endangered by so great a proliferation of forms of worship that the modifier “common” may no longer plausibly apply. That concern bear particular weight at a time when matters of doctrine are called into question; if we codify our doctrinal divergences into the very language of our prayer, we may simply have enacted the dissolution of the “shared” part of our heritage.

So we can draw on vast realms of evaluative criteria in proposing and justifying our biblical interpretations, and any interpretation worth our attention really ought to be able to make a case that appeals to a good many of these. In all this, though, we should remember to keep our eyes on the reasons, not on shorthands or slogans, not on flat assertions or free-floating assurances, not on the names of exegetical heroes or villains. If we share with one another our reasoning, and not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, but regard others as better than ourselves — in so doing, we’ll demonstrate our willingness for the Spirit to heal our divisions, we will have offered our very best wisdom to illumine others, and we can await with confidence the divine resolution of temporal confusion.

Posted by AKMA at 07:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

On Hermeneutics and Disagreement, Part Three

The first parts of my talk with Northern Indiana involved the premise that we do what we can to facilitate the Spirit’s work of bringing clarity where confusion besets the church, and that difference in interpretation doesn’t necessarily constitute a problem. “What more liberal and more fruitful provision could God have made in regard to the Sacred Scriptures than that the same words might be understood in several senses?” (Augustine, dDC III.27.38)

The third premise I suggested entailed recognizing that the literal sense of Scripture doesn’t solve our interpretive problems. That’s not to say it’s unimportant or bad; it just doesn’t resolve existing conflicts over interpretation. The literal sense functions most powerfully exactly where we don’t need it in a conflict: where we don’t even consider the possibility of a different interpretation. I coast to a rest when I observe a rectangular octagonal red sign (and you probably do too, unless you’re a practitioner of the Texas Rolling Stop), I don’t hesitate to ponder the various possible senses of the literal imperative to stop. If we experienced an active division, though, about how to behave at red-signed intersections, simply saying that the sign literally means “stop” wouldn’t advance anyone’s understanding of the problem. Put it this way: it’s entirely possible for people who agree about the literal sense of a passage to disagree about what follows from it, and it’s often quite possible for intelligent people of good conscience to disagree about the literal sense itself. If we identify a conflict in which one group avowedly rests its position solely (probably even “principally”) on a non-literal interpretation of Scripture I’ll gladly line up with people who ask that they justify their claims with appeal to the literal sense — but I’m not holding my breath.

Moreover, “the literal sense” can’t be reduced to just one thing. The church’s teachers recognized long ago the necessity of distinguishing the literal, grammatical sense — the sort of technical-literal sense, where words just flat-out mean what they mean — and a more general literal sense, where an expression that [obviously] functions figuratively is construed as a figure (in their terminology, a sensus literalis duplex). When Jesus says, “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” we need not reckon that the statement implies an actual specific person’s transit from one city toward another (though that’s literally what it means). Now, we can often find ambiguities and quibbles in the grammatical sense; these supply commentaries and text critics with ample material. The even greater difficulty comes when we try to pin down the more expansive literal sense, the difficulty signaled by my bracketed use of “obviously” in the previous sentence. That which seems obvious to one interpreter doesn’t always seem obvious to another (the doctors caution against a literality that leads to heresy, as Arius’s case illustrates; they used Wycliffe and Hus as examples of the problems that arose from sticking solely to the literal sense) — which engenders interpretive conflict, which is the topic of the whole discussion.

The church, even at the medieval height of figurative, spiritual interpretation, has upheld the importance of the literal sense as an indispensable reference point for interpretation. The medieval church, though, saw that the literal sense itself signified multivalent-ly; it can’t serve as a fixed point for interpretive navigation, but must always be checked against complicating contextual indicators. And once you introduce those complicating contextual factors, the “literal sense” — essential though it be — can’t function simply as the arbitrator of interpretive divergence. As I’ve suggested repeatedly in the course of these remarks, we need to give reasons for thinking that X or Y is the literal sense, and it’s our reasons that contribute to clarifying (if not finally resolving, since once again, that’s the work of the Spirit) our disagreements. And we contribute to the Spirit’s work by making our reasons explicit, and by refraining from clouding the issue with impertinent or tractionless claims.

Again I emphasize that this doesn’t depreciate Scripture, truth, or the literal sense; it simply points to the true dimensions of the problem we’re working through.

All of this points, hard, toward the vitally important final part of my presentation, on criteria. I’ll try to write that up after church.

Posted by AKMA at 09:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Congratulations

To two of my wonderful students, Hope and (Louisianan) Andrew, married yesterday afternoon in the company of numerous bloggers! A lovely service, a delightful reception, and a bishop’s blessing — surely signs of great things to come.

Posted by AKMA at 07:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 17, 2005

On Hermeneutics and Disagreement, Part Two

I started out my talk with Northern Indiana by stressing the importance of everyone doing what we can to make the circumstances favorable for the Spirit to clarify what we ought to think by way of divergent biblical interpretations. If we begin with a determination to win, we foreclose the possibility that the Spirit is up to something for which we’re unprepared — and since we’re asking our neighbors to recognize that they’re in error, it behooves us to acknowledge that possibility for ourselves. That’s not because the truth is a matter of indifference, but precisely because the truth is greater than our determinations. In the words of Pope Paul that I’ve quoted before, “Truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”

So, point one: we do best to make room for the Spirit’s power to convince by forgoing flat claims about the Bible, asserting unverifiable justifications (whether in the name of the Spirit or of one’s feelings), recognizing that we all are subject to error, offering clearly-articulated reasons rather than just name-dropping, and by showing respect to our colleagues.

Point two: Difference is not the problem. Divergent interpretations are part of God’s generous provision for a varied humanity. That does not mean that anything goes, that all are equal, that differences don’t matter (I remember emphasizing with particular vigor the pain that claims about theological particulars “not mattering” give me). First of all, we need to recognize that difference has always inhabited biblical interpretation, and for generations the doctors of the church were entirely comfortable with that. [Added later: Hans Dieter Betz and W.D. Davies and Ulrich Luz and A.J. Levine disagree about how best to interpret Matthew, but the church doesn’t call a conference to cope with that.] Difference won’t go away, and we shouldn’t want it to. Rather, we need to distinguish between differences that contribute to the harmony of truth (on one hand — not that truth itself is plural, but that the unity of truth is constituted by harmoniously-ordered differences), and differences that disrupt, deflect, distract from the truth (on the other). In other words, we need to make clear how the different elements of the truth hang together — and why certain claims don’t belong to the truth.

The “difference is okay” point coheres with the point about “no flat claims” point, as both of them drive people who care about one another to give reasons for their interpretive proposals.

Posted by AKMA at 09:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

We Interrupt This Disquisition

Tom has extended experience with FEMA, in Florida, last year. So whereas my outrage at the media reports (NPR, Washington Post) describing the National Guard’s ice-hearted disregard for the chaotic, befouled, dangerous misery of the evacuees in the Ernest Morial Convention Center derives from a fundamental sense of human decency — Tom speaks from the bitter aftertaste of his own sips of the poisonous draught force-fed the desperate residents of New Orleans.

Micahel Chertoff, August 31: “I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don’t have food and water.”

Michael Brown September 2 [?]: “I think it was yesterday morning when we first found out about [the Conference Center]. We were just as surprised as everybody else. We didn't know that the city had used that as a staging area.”

Oh, and this.

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September 16, 2005

On Hermeneutics and Disagreement, Part One

A lot of what I said last Wednesday drew on arguments I’ve made before in more technical, less theological language. I didn’t come up with a whole new outlook for the occasion. Roughly summarizing, this is the first part of what I said.

I don’t want to persuade anybody of any particular biblical interpretation today. In fact, for today’s purposes, I want to strengthen even those interpretations with which I disagree, because my assignment is not to arm-twist anyone into thinking this or that, but to help clarify the grounds on which we can exercise our best interpretive judgment.

I try to frame the task this way: How can we best cooperate with the work of the Spirit? We know that he Spirit can accomplish whatever God wills; we can’t stop God. But we may, and sometimes do, resist and impede the Spirit rather than cooperating with the Spirit, and today I want to help us dedicate our energies toward cooperating and not resisting.

How do we resist the Spirit’s work of reconciliation? Oftentimes we resist the Spirit by making flat absolute claims about what something means. We may be right, of course — I’m not suggesting that you aren’t right; I’m pointing out that simply saying “I’m right and you aren’t” (however true the claim may be) doesn’t advance the discussion, doesn’t give our sisters and brothers any particular reason to assent. The claim, “This means X” short-circuits an opportunity to learn; the claim, “The reason I say ‘This means X’ is that [da da da da da da da]” gives us something to work with, helps us to see the basis for an interpretive claim. When we dig our heels in and say only, “I’m right and that ends it,” we give the Spirit less to work with in convincing our interlocutors that they should change their minds.

We impede the Spirit by introducing claims that others can’t examine or test. When we say, “The Spirit is doing a new thing here,” well, who’s to say? People over here think so, people over there don’t. That’s not evidence in an argument, it’s another flat claim — but it raises the stakes by introducing the idea that some people recognize the Spirit at work where other benighted souls don’t. In the context of a discussion, an exploration of how we should interpret the Bible, I find such claims insulting and presumptuous.

We impede the Spirit if we admit of no possibility that we may be wrong. I frequently cite Article 19 of the Articles of Religion: “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred: so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” If the Church is susceptible to error even in matters of the faith, then all the more each of us must be ready to consider the possibility that our favored interpretation may be erroneous. I’m not saying anyone specific is wrong; I’m simply saying that if we refuse to admit the possibility that we’re as fallible as the Churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, that we give the Holy Spirit less to work with.

This is a hard one: if we simply pick interpreters based on their proposing readings that throw the names of our favored interpreters at one another, we aren’t advancing the work of the Spirit. We can help others understand our arguments if we explain the basis of what we propose, and we can strengthen those claims by associating them with recognizable authorities — but our authorities aren’t intrinsically more authoritative than their authorities (they don’t deliberately seek out inferior scholars, or less admirable theologians; once we get past the initial invocation of reputable witnesses, we need to let go (respectfully) of them. The game of “my hero is a greater scholar than your scholar” doesn’t facilitate the Spirit’s mission of bringing us to the mind of Christ. Yes, you have favorite expert interpreters who propound good arguments for your position, but we have favorite expert interpreters who propound good arguments for our position. There’s no disinterested point from which to ascertain that one person’s favorite has formed a stronger argument than another’s (if we could tell, we wouldn’t opt for the weaker side).[*]

Finally, I suggest that we impede the work of the Spirit when we ascribe others’ positions to motives less worthy than our own. When we arrive at our interpretations on the basis of high-minded, objective reflection, and explain our neighbors’ interpretations as the ideologically-determined, morally-compromised (or “bigoted”) capitulation to mortal frailty, we give these neighbors no reason to see matters any other way. We can make room for the Spirit by accounting our adversaries every bit as intelligent and clear-sighted as we, or we can resist the Spirit by abusing and insulting our sisters and brothers.

I’ll continue tomorrow (before or after Hope and Andrew’s wedding. This is just one part of the broader case I made to my hosts in Northern Indiana.

[*Later: I remember now that at this point, we had the occasion to emphasize that expert scholarly opinion can certainly shed precious light on interpretive truth, but it can’t claim to determine interpretive truth. For one thing, the best conclusions of interpreters keep changing — and the conclusion that seems not to have changed for so long as to constitute a fixed point of orientation may be the premise most likely to be changed, refined, reversed tomorrow. Further, the whole industrial structure of biblical scholarship depends on lack of consensus — we can practically guarantee that there’s hardly any interpretation so bizarre that some credentialed biblical scholar hasn’t propounded it. There are defensible (if tenuous) biblical reasons for any of the biblical interpretations prominent enough to trouble the church. Most important, though, the Spirit about whom I’m making so big a deal here doesn’t depend on technical expertise or academic credentials. The people of God have been interpreting Scripture wisely and truly (and sometimes unwisely and falsely) for centuries before the advent of what counts nowadays as academic expertise — and any account of interpretive truth must take into account, or more precisely depends for its credibility on, the saints who have handed along to us the Scriptures and the interpretive traditions in which we stand.]

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September 15, 2005

Rebuffering

I really wiped myself out yesterday — more of an outlay of energy than I had guessed — and I spent today mostly gathering myself to re-enter life at school, doing errands with the inimitable Pip, and taking a very restorative nap.

One odd element of today was the arrival of my copy of the French collection of interpretive essays that includes a piece I wrote about a year and a half ago. It had been translated, of course, but also re-titled (I thought I’d provided a snappy title that would do as well in French as in English, so that was a bit of a disappointment) and re-edited for structure! I didn’t see any major disruption of my argument, but until it sank home I was staring blankly at the first few pages asking myself, “I didn’t write it that way, did I?” I also had a hard time reading the French and figuring out whether the translator had made me sound more like myself or him — but it’s been so long since I wrote any extended prose in French that there’s not really a “myself” to have a particular style.

The nap was really good, though.

I’ll try to cobble together a condensed version of my South Bend talk tomorrow. That’ll be a good discipline, plus it will enable me to avoid working on the wedding disquisition sermon homily aphorism.

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September 14, 2005

How Many? When?

Today involved several surprises. The first was that I was still in bed at 6:27 AM, when I thought I had set the alarm for 6:00 (I had started the radio a few minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off; the alarm was set to “radio”; hence, there was no change to hear when alarm-time came). Not a big deal — I hustled through my shower, gathered my notes and supplies, and sprinted to the car.

The second was that I hadn’t put my clergy collar on. Luckily, I noticed before I had driven more than a few blocks.

The third was that three times as many people showed up for clergy day as I had been told to hope for (four times as many as I8’d been told to expect). That sorta shot my “small seminar-like discussion” premise to pieces. (I’m leaving out the cavernous pothole I hit on Lake Shore Drive. That was the next surprise, but really, I should have expected potholes on Lake Shore.)

The fourth was that once I got rolling, I had way more material to work with than I had time to squeeze it into. I was surprised; Jane was not.

The fifth was that the whole day went much better than I expected (especially better than I expected when I saw how many more people showed up than I was prepared for). They had invited me down to talk about Biblical Hermeneutics in light to present ecclesiastical stresses, so I tried to talk about how we all might think through our disagreements in ways that made room for the Holy Spirit most easily to bring about clarity and reconciliation. That entails acknowledging that difference in interpretation is not an intrinsic problem, and if we talk as though difference were intrinsically problematic, we impede the work of reconciliation. Second, I urged us not to just invoke the name of an admired authority figure who says what we like; that amounts only to choosing up dodge ball teams, not really to giving reasons for our hope. There are card-carrying experts who propose all sorts of silly ideas about the New Testament; invoking the name of an author whose work you like doesn’t advance a mutual exploration of contested ideas. Third, I proposed that patience — uncomfortable though it be — provides us the surest way of ascertaining the Spirit’s guidance. (Bishop Little threw me a hanging curve on that one by referring to the Nicene Creed; that gave me the chance to point out that the creed we call Nicene wasn’t simply the product of the first Ecumenical Council, but it preceded a widespread relapse into Arianism, all of which provoked an extended process of deliberation and negotiation at the end of which the church devised the Nicene-Constantipolitan Creed. Plenty of ardent defenders of Nicene theology died before they had the chance to see their arguments vindicated. Patience.)

Then we had a mass (worship often stirs in me the spirit of Ernie Banks, so that I want to burst out “Let’s pray two!”) and ate a delicious lunch that actually included a tasty vegetarian chili.

After lunch, I grasped the nettle and argued that “the literal sense” or “the plain sense” doesn’t solve hermeneutical problems. Partly, that’s an empirical observation. If we’ve gotten into an argument about things, it’s hardly ever because someone hadn’t noticed what certain expressions literally (or “plainly”) mean. It’s also partly a historical argument, since people like Thomas Aquinas argued that “the literal sense” itself engendered multiple meanings. The Doctors of the pre-Reformation Church generally saw multiplicity in interpretation as a good thing, and many taught that “the literal sense” was at least duple, if not multiply various. It’s perfectly fine to regard something as the literal meaning of a text, but our job in controversy is to explain why we regard it as the literal sense. I had a bunch more to say, too, but Pippa’s about to get out of choir and I have to hurry away.

But the big surprise was that it all went so very well, thanks to the patient and charitable participation of fifty or so wonderful Northern Indiana church leaders. Thanks!

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Briefly

• Doesn’t FEMA have two fundamentally different (if not outright antithetical) missions: to maintain a constant, static bureaucracy for overseeing resources (on one hand) and generating a rapid-response, adaptive, improvisational team of disaster-relief specialists (on the other)?

• I’m on the road today, leading a Clergy Day in Northern Indiana (on which more later). I miss Day Two of the Faculty Marathon at Seabury, but also miss Pippa today.

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September 13, 2005

Not a Nightmare

This morning, I awoke this way:

I had been approaching a coffeeshop on Nantucket (none the I know specifically, though I would have placed it on upper Broad Street, near the Bookworks), when four women walked up, and I could hear them singing “We,” from the Roches’ first album. I looked more closely, and realized that two of the four were Maggie and Terre. I nodded and said something like “Thanks, that’s a favorite of mine,” and opened the door for them.

I ordered a cup of coffee and a bagel, and noticed that Suzzy Roche was working at the coffee bar. I walked away from the counter with an espresso cup, which I would never have asked for since I’m not an espresso drinker. Odder still, I think the cup had tea in it.

The Roches all started to sing again, and this time Suzzy sang her part, only for some reason she wasn’t having a good voice day, so she sang her part into a glass (!?).

Everyone laughed. I woke up.

Then I showered, walked the dog, and headed to Day One of Seabury’s traditional two-full-day faculty meeting.

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September 12, 2005

Canine Ingenuity

This morning, I was struck yet again with how absurdly foolish our small Bichon Frisé can be. On our morning walk, she cowered submissively for the half block as a Doberman approached, then barked and leaped at the Doberman as it walked past us. I apologized — the Doberman could have swallowed Bea whole without even noticing. Then, as if to adjust her standards, she tried to pounce on the next dog we saw, a miniature poodle that walked by us (again after crouching in submission). The poodle was actually Bea’s size, but the poodle was behaving herself.

With all this manifestation of her diminished capacity, I reflected that she had no problem at all with what seemed to me an impressively abstract problem. When she’s on the leash, whenever we pass a tree, street sign, lamp post, or whatever, she always walks on the same side as I do.

The leash hangs behind her head, so she doesn’t have visual stimulation telling her she’s tied to me. I’ve never scolded her or deliberately given training relative to tree navigation. The concept of “connectedness” is pretty fluid and elusive. Yet even though she would walk out in front of a moving car, though she would challenge a Doberman, though she treats her red doggie toy as a great threat to family security, yet she understands not to try to walk around the opposite side of a tree when she’s on a leash. Strange dog.

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September 11, 2005

Aftermath and Rhetoric

I’ve marveled a couple of times at how the rhetoric of emergency response has descended to the hideously banal. Why, for just one instance, didn’t Michael Brown say, “Maybe I screwed things up at first; someone’ll track