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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.”]

While I’ve been concentrating on other obligations, various ructions have caught fire concerning links and ranking. I haven’t wrestled with this topic before, but sooner or later I may as well step in it.

So, relative to blogrolls, I’ve got one, and I’ll keep it — not out of any militancy or point-making, but because Margaret uses it to navigate to recently-updated blogs from people she knows. I hardly ever look at it at all, so I’m very slow to make changes to it (I usually change it only when Margaret has reminded me that someone’s address has changed, or that there’s someone whose blog she wants to keep up with). I go to other blogs mostly from my bookmarks.

I see interesting arguments for and against having blogrolls, but none seems more immediate than the pragmatic criterion. There’s something blank about a blogroll link (as opposed to a topical, direct link). To draw on my favorite overburdened terminology, a blogroll link signifies a lot less; a link that persists on every page, regardless of context, and that points to an index paged rather than a particular post, lacks the rich texture of a topical link. Add the occasional social pressure for reciprocity, add the awareness that search bots index and rank links, and you can see reasonable grounds for opting out of the whole blogroll matter. As I say, I wouldn’t miss mine if it were gone; when blogrolling.com goes down for a while (and my bogroll blogroll vanishes), I don’t even notice.

On the other hand, blogrolls do serve some useful purposes. Mine provides Margaret with information about which of her favorite sites has been updated recently. They might direct first-time visitors to other sites they haven’t seen yet (the most frequent defense of blogrolls). In that the blogroll typically combines more-familiar, more-prominent names with less-familiar, less-well-known names, blogrolls can serve a leveling function; through my blogroll, only one degree separates Dave Winer from Reverend Ref — the keynoter, bon vivant, and inventor of blogging from a parish priest in rural Montana. Few if any other sites mediate that connection.

Moreover, a blogroll attests to a set of affiliations — the convergence of particular circles of acquaintance. (Research project: find a threshold of common links that productively marks out “communities of online discourse,” particularly tightly-joined small pieces whose link patterns suggests a neighborhood hangout where denizens share conversation, interests, and demonstrated commitment to mutual attention.) Those links don’t reflect such patterns infallibily, but as a rough guide, they’re a lot better than a wet finger in the wind. When we attest to such social loyalties, we re-bind our attention to one another, and that’s not an empty gesture. (It may be a nearly empty gesture, it’s a highly ambiguous gesture, but it’s not entirely empty.) If I were to advance a reason other than Margaret’s convenience for me to keep a blogroll, it would be the community-signaling aspect of a blogroll (which I exemplify only very imperfectly).

Now, once you have an advanced network of links, you won’t be able to stop people from compiling and analyzing the patterns; no way. That information is too richly interesting, too easily available, for motivated geeks to ignore. One of the most obvious interesting things to do with that data would be ranking blogs by a nuanced algorithm for authority; hence, we see bloggers fretting about their Technorati authority or their Google PageRank. We can opt out of contributing to that system by banishing blogrolls (or, I suppose, ultimately by not linking to other bloggers), but there’s no escape from being linked-to short of trying to keep all bots at bay.

So I don’t so much see any of the AOTechnorati100 or PageRank, best-of lists, annual awards, whatever, as a problem for Blogaria as I see them as a predictable concomitant of measurably-linked human interactions. They bother me precisely to the extent that I pay attention to all the politicking, begging, exulting and weeping — that is, “not much.” It’s pretty much the same with these barometric representations of popularity as with pay-for-blogging: some folks won’t be changed by the recognition, some will, some are only in it to gratify their narcissism, and some stand for a popularity-neutral policy of saying what they want to. If we take away commercial (or attention-economic) motivators, a certain constituency of bloggers would find some other way to clutch the spotlight. Even ranking engines, though, serve the useful function of signaling that someone else’s blog interests a lot of other people, whether I’ve heard of it or not.

I don’t blame anyone for resisting the star-maker machinery behind the popular blog. I don’t feel guilt-stricken about keeping a blogroll. I’m not wounded that I’ll never win an award or make the Top XXX list. If by a weird quirk of voting or categorization (“New category: Best Theological/Technological Blog by an Episcopal Priest Named ‘AKMA’ ”), I did win something, I might well be tickled. I’m very impressed at how rigorously my neighbors are thinking through the complexities of these phenomena, but I don’t have enough time, energy, or indignation to lend to a movement for or against.

(Oh, and I don’t have any non-obvious nominees for Dave’s list. Does the world need my testimony to affirm that the names you already know are famous, got there first, wrote the software, and supply the capital? I know, respect, and like the bearers of the names of those who show up in everyone else’s ballots — but so do many other people, and my word can’t possibly matter much in ascertaining who should be recognized.)

It seems as though flickr’s been down all day, but no-one’s said anything about it on the flickr blog. . . .

[Later: It’s 9:53, and flickr’s back!]