Author: AKMA

I’ve fallen behind my posting Pippa art; she’s been drawing cartoons such as this one, but also has begun experimenting with oils and mixed media. I’ll have more to post in a few days, as she gives me permission.

She has a canvas up in the Seabury community exhibition, and will be showing a ceramic piece in the Evanston Young Artists exhibition, in the home-schooled students’ area — but now she’s busy watching Attack of the Clones (she thinks that the closing wedding scene should have had me edited in as the officiant at the marriage of Anakin and Padme, though she points out that “Dad would forbid it” [the wedding]).

It will take a long time for Margaret to forgive Micah for instroducing our family to “Pants Wars,” the foolish game of substituting the word “pants” for some other word in the dialogue of the Star Wars movies. It gets pretty stupid, pretty rapidly.

I located this site with examples, to call to Pippa’s attention; she responded by scouting out this site. I don’t understand using “pants” as a verb — maybe I missed that page of the lexicon.)

Beginning a couple of decades ago or so, a particular group of theologians bestirred themselves to recognize that an arid concentration on propositions and abstractions did much less to enhance our understanding of God than it desiccated people’s interest in the whole topic. They pressed the case for “narrative theology,” which takes manifold forms depending on whose understanding of “narrative” and “theology” we’re adopting — but which typically focuses on the extent to which our knowledge of God involves extension in time, in a way that narrative captures more adequately than propositions.

Around the same time, politicians showed increasing awareness that a well-publicized anecdote (however embellished and fictionalized) sways the polls more than a carefully-reasoned policy document. Legislative hearings and executive speeches piled up one heart-wrenching anecdote after another in support of initiatives that would have been much less popular had they been debated as matters of statistics, rights, and responsibilities.

Comparable patterns of debate have emerged in the Anglican Communion’s contortions over sexuality and its appropriate expression. The parties involved have done a certain amount of theological reasoning, and have buttressed their arguments by copious examples of how harshly their adversaries have treated kind, pious disciples, or of how wonderfully the church flourishes when their way prevails, or of their sides’ martyrs, orr the other side’s tyrants.

The Windsor Report took sides on this issue: it specifically indicated dissatisfaction with the paucity of theological reasoning that the Episcopal Church’s leadership had advanced in support of the changes in church life that it proposes. Not everyone agrees that the Episcopal leadership lacks theological backing, but it’s obvious that they haven’t satisfied the Communion outside North America. I haven’t seen the Episcopal Church’s spokespeople redoubling their efforts to address this explicit perceived lack, but the stories keep coming.

Everyone will continue to say a lot about most aspects of this situation, but I want to make a single point at this juncture: “Narrative theology” is not the same thing as “telling affecting stories.” The narrative dimension of theological truth may involve many different things, but it still involves questions of truth that engage more than simply the heart-rending experiences of the aggrieved. Whatever we say about theological truth, we need to connect those claims with the truth that the church has received over the centuries, with Scripture, in a way that constitutes a satisfactorily reasonable argument. Windsor says ECUSA has not done that. Telling more stories not only will not answer Windsor’s point, but will convey disrespect for the very specific point that the Report makes.

Since the Number of the Beast is obviously important, and since we now have a degree of uncertainty about whether that number is 666 or 616, what shall we do?

We could just split the difference: The Number of the Beast is 641. Of course, we don’t have any text that says it’s 641, so we’d be likely to be wrong either way. But whichever number turned out to be right, we’d be equally wrong.

Or we could note the margin of error in our Bibles. If we opt for 666, we could note “(with a 7.5% margin of error)”; if 616, “an 8.1% margin.”

At least, as David reckons, the forces of evil may have been diminished by fifty.

Before I followed Maggi’s link to Rachelle’s blog, I’d have thought that I was opposed to over-structuring theological education — but some of Rachelle’s commentors leave me in the dust.

Margaret and I have home-schooled the three kids we raised, partly on the basis of our commitment to their very distinct patterns of learning and interest, partly out of frustrating experiences in our own educational history, and partly from the conviction that they would learn well on their own terms, at their own time, what they really wanted to learn (and wouldn’t learn well what we tried to induce them to learn on our terms, at a time we chose). Our experience as learners, and our experience as home-school parents (“un-school” parents, to be more exact), places me squarely on the un-structured side of the discussion with Maggi and Rachelle and others. I wish there were some way I could choose to home-school the seminarians at Seabury.

If one were not going to junk the whole notion of “classes” and “degrees” (and I’m not unsympathetic with the temptation to dispence with them), I’d probably suggest that each area of the curriculum, or each professor, schedule one series of lectures to introduce the areas for which she or he is responsible. After that, students would have the responsibility of pursuing such independent studies and organizing such seminars in consultation with the relevant faculty as would prepare the students for their various ministries.

Seabury’s reviewing and revising its curriculum in conjunction with our upcoming shift to semesters; I’ll be pushing gently for as few requirements as possible, and as many electives as possible. Maybe one way to administer such a program, given Seabury’s student population and the size of the faculty, would be to allot each full-time faculty member one required course, two elective courses, and one advanced seminar each year. That would entail radically re-envisioning some areas of the curriculum (that operate with a fairly rigid sequence of required courses), but a more open curriculum would facilitate our cooperation with other seminaries (students often transfer into Seabury with credits that don’t match our curriculum at all), would benefit students by treating them as real adult learners, and would offer faculty the opportunity to teach students who’ve chosen to learn in a given area.

In most respects, I’m with Doc on education: The more formalized the process, the less education is happening, and the more we’re selling short our birthright of curiosity and ingenuity in order to cash in the mess of pottage of quantifiable outcomes. (Sorry for the brutally mixed metaphor.)

With Carl Kassel as resident announcer; Don LaFontaine (“The Voice of God”) as a guest; and Gail, an employee of the San Diego Library system who records the announcements on their phone answering system, as a contestant — Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me had a full week of voice-over specialists. That made me think — and those of you who’ve heard me, check in — I could do that job. Unfortunately for Pippa and Margaret, I’ve been demonstrating my voiceover talent all morning.

“In a world with frozen waffles, would anyone like some breakfast?” “A fluffy white dog. . . An innocent young girl. . . Going out for an ordinary walk. . . .”

Kendall Harmon cites a paper by Aidan Nichols at Anglican-Use.org. It’s a forty-page PDF entitled “A Personal View of Anglican Uniatism,” and it’s well worth general attention. Nichols is a thoughtful and articulate Roman Catholic critic of Anglicanism, so he’s Roman-er than I’d be — but it’s a pragmatic, subtle piece on what the future might look like for Anglican-Use Roman Catholics.

My Ken Paul Beard/Creative Communists t-shirt arrived yesterday, and I wore it today. Margaret observed that it typified my t-shirt repertoire, since almost no one would understand it.

(I think she’s a little too harsh on my t-shirts; I do wear my Apple Store t-shirts occasionally, and my Duke basketball t-shirts are pretty intelligible. My ŒùŒôŒöŒó t-shirt, however, stumps some people, as does my ŒºŒøŒ?ŒøŒ? Œ±Œ?Œ±ŒªœÖŒµ Œ±œÖœÑŒøŒ? shirt. And my SPU shirts. The “Uncle Sam [Seabury]” and Enmegabowh t-shirts are self-explanatory around campus. So I’m only partly unintelligible.)

I asked Si to take my picture, and it became clear that Pippa wanted to share the spotlight — entirely plausibly, especially since her t-shirt today bore a parallel theme.

A couple of readers prodded me to comment on the thrilling — ahem — revelation that the notorious “number of the beast” in Revelation 13:18 might actually not be 666 (thus putting a crimp in the Omen movie franchise), but 616. This makes the news because a few years ago, one of Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri turned up with the number 616, and it’s taken a long time for this bit of text-critical esoterica to catch the attention of mainstream media (go figure!) — which seem to have noticed only when MTV figured out that this news had implications for heavy metal bands.

The textual variant here isn’t news; we already knew that Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (codex “C”) reads “616,” and Irenaeus shows knowledge of that variation in Against Heresies (Stephen Carlson cites the passage here). If you own a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, you should find a mark in the apparatus that cites this variant. Indeed, this particular papyrus was published in 1999. The fragment in question merits attention because it makes the earliest direct attestation for this variant; the Oxyrhynchus people seem to be dating P.Oxy. LXVI 4499 as later third/early fourth century. That’s after Irenaeus, who died around 202, but well before fifth-century Ephraemi.

It’s hard to displace the fairly strong evidence for 666, but this bit of papyrus strengthens the case that St. John may have ascribed the number 616 to the beast — whatever that number turns out to mean.

Margaret won’t let go of an intriguing topic. She notes that Media Matters has taken up the question of Abu Faraj al-Libbi’s grade inflation; CNN has finally noticed that it’s a problem; and the Christian Science Monitor acknowledges the confusion. Atrios put it best, though: “ Apparently, he just said he was ‘Third in Command’ to impress the ladies. . . .”

Sorry for the delay — it’s been an intense week.

What I was thinking about the Baptist excommunication controversy was this: Public debates about religious groups frequently ignore the most decisive features of such communities, and frequently assess them as though they were voluntary associations of any familiar civic kind. Hence, some portion (not all) of the brouhaha about the unfortunate congregation in North Carolina teems with the outrage we would appropriately feel if some ostensibly apolitical entity had purged its ranks of Jews. [I should add: “And of course, no one has attempted the genocidal exttermination of Democrats.”]

But that superficial outrage is surely groundless; if voting for John Kerry is incompatible with the discipline of a given congregation, that congregation must be free to say so. The pastor did not, after all, clap Kerry voters into leg irons or confiscate their property — he said they could not be part of that congregation. Since the Democratic platform included some claims (about abortion, sexuality, and so on) that a Christian group can intelligibly deem incompatible with the faith, I’d say that — at first blush — the pastor was on firmer ground than his critics. Churches don’t owe Caesar neutrality at the cost of muting the Gospel.

Ah, but things are more complicated than that. After all, there’s established case law to the effect that if a tax-exempt religious group uses its place in the community to effect particular electoral results, they lose their tax-exempt standing. Now, I don’t suppose that’s the worst thing that can happen to a church (not really up there with “take up your cross and follow me”), but it’s a nuisance and puts a crimp in the budget. (If they’re going to play Caesar’s political game, they must pay Caesar’s tax.) If East Waynesborough Baptist Church figured that the gospel was at stake, why I’d positively commend them for forgoing their tax advantage in order to remain true to the church’s moral teaching.

On the third hand, though, there’s an ironic catch. If I recall correctly from the Baptist students who have labored so hard to teach me the truth about church polity and the state, one of the founding principles of the baptist movement involved the believer’s freedom on conscience (vividly expressed in Thomas Helwys’s A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (8-meg downloadable PDF of scanned pages here; why hasn’t anyone transcribed and marked it up in HTML?). Having experienced the tyranny of imposed profession of belief, the baptist movement stood squarely for the uncoerced freedom of the individual conscience. To the extent that the pastor in question intended to sway his flock toward unanimous support of George W. Bush, he came awfully close to aligning himself with the early persecutors of baptists, over against the earliest baptists themselves.

All that being said, the pastor in question seems to have handled the situation badly; his most eloquent defenders offer a much more precisely-framed theological case than he seems to have done, and his assailants justly call him to task for expressing so unalloyed a partisan sentiment. The controversy illustrates yet again that church leaders need the skill of careful and measured communication more perhaps than any other — and they run into all kinds of trouble when they say important things in careless ways.

I have a second consecutive all-day faculty meeting, so I won’t be free to blog right away, but in response to Tripp and some email correspondents, I’ll think of something to say about the Baptist brouhaha, later in the day. . . .

[Later: I meant to say, “tomorrow, after I get through the faculty meeting and work out tomorrow morning’s sermon.”]