A Guy in the Pew

Ross Douthat has an interesting column in the New York Times today that discusses our divided faith world views: Many Americans still take everything: They accept the New Testament as factual, believe God came in the flesh, and endorse the creeds that explain how and why that happened. And then alongside traditional Christians, there are observant Jews and Muslims who believe the same God revealed himself directly in some other historical and binding form. But this biblical world picture is increasingly losing market share to what you might call the spiritual world picture, which keeps the theological outlines suggested by the manger scene — the divine is active in human affairs, every person is precious in God’s sight — but doesn’t sweat the details.        This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretist...

What if Jesus ran for President? Here is the attack ad we would face. Hat tip to Zack at Revolution in Jesus .

In his wonderful series on homosexuality in the Bible, Father Doug Chaplin reaches the critical reference to Romans 1:18-32. I really urge you to read the whole post--it has many themes that are well worth thinking about. But here are some highlights to whet your appetite: I think Romans is written to a very specific situation in Rome, where there are significant divisions between Jew and Gentile Christians. I think Paul both wants to secure a welcome for himself as a character some saw as divisive, and to encourage them to mend the breach. In the opening chapters he is keen to get both sides to agree that in fact all, Gentile and Jew alike, have sinned. He first expounds a common view of Gentile sinfulness from a Jewish perspective, then a typical Gentile criticism of Jewish hypocrisy. Both of these are examples of a rhetorical device – speech-in-character (prosopopeia). They serve to get heads nodding in agreement first on one side, then on the other, until both have been led togethe...

Doug Chaplin has continued his exploration of the Scriptures and Homosexuality. His latest post discusses 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and 1 Timothy 1:8-11, both of which seem to include "sodomites" in a list of sins. Here are highlights from Doug's excellent analysis: Here are 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and 1 Timothy 1:8-11 from the NRSV. Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately. This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers, fornicators, sodomites, slave traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. (1 Timothy 1:8-11) Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves...

One of the "blogging Bishops" at Lambeth, Bishop Alan Wilson of Buckingham, has a great post today about what Anglicans think about the authority of the Bible: I have not met anyone here of whom it would be true to say simply that they do not believe in the Authority of Scripture. How we believe in what kind of authority are other questions. Here are some indications of the ways a group of us form five continents, in Indaba, saw our distinctively Anglican use of the Bible. How are we, as Anglicans, “formed by Scrpture?” The Word of God is a person, not a text. In Islam, for example, the Qu’ran is a privileged untransalteable text. For Christians Scrupture has authority as it is interprteed and applied, not as a simple absolute. We are very resistant to idolatry; idolatry of the book, idolatry of reason, idolatry of tradition. All three are resources for the Spirit, not totems or weapons against other children of God. We need to interpret the Scriptures through the icon of Chr...

Martin Marty has a "Sightings" column on the ordination of women. The post focuses less on the merits of the ordination of women than on the argument that Cathoic doctrine is unchangeable: Whether Catholics should change and begin ordination of women is their business, not mine, at least not here and today, though outcomes of Catholic debates do have huge "public religion" consequences. I can only testify to the manifest blessings so many churches, like my own (ELCA), have received during the past half-century from the ministry of women-ordained. My business instead picks up on Egan's closing paragraph, where he argues against Sr. Butler's reversion to and repetition of the claim that Rome does not change. He orthodoxly celebrates the constancy of teachings from Rome. But: "New questions arise, and new horizons open, cultures themselves are transformed, and the fund of human knowledge changes." His article has no room to provide chapter and verse ...

Doug Chaplin is beginning a very thoughtful exploration of what the Bible has to say about homosexuality. He begins with the really tough stuff in Leviticus. The result so far is a very thoughtful explanation of issues that need addressing. As yet, Doug reaches no conclusions. Here are some highlights: The two texts I want to address in this post are among them. (And yes, dear reader, I know there are other texts, but one post at a time, please!) You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. (Leviticus 18:22) If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13) . . . At one level, it seems to me that we can have some agreement about these texts themselves. They say pretty much the same thing, although the second elaborates and adds the punishment. . . . Moving beyond that to further interpretation is far from straightforward, however. At the most basic...

Another gem from Father Tobias Haller: Scripture is the inspired Word of God, but it is always written in a human tongue. People do not speak God’s language, or have God’s knowledge, so God, when speaking to people through inspiration, must employ the human language of the culture and time of the one inspired, in order to impart any knowledge at all. God always “talks down” to us, and our finite human capacity always limits how well we understand the infinite God, and express that understanding. One cannot put the ocean in a bottle; and new wineskins must be used for new wine. As Jesus himself would later say, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:12-13) The inspired recipients of God’s word in Genesis believed the sky to consist of a dome, in which the sun, moon, and stars were set, and which had windows to admit the rain stored in the pool of waters above. God, of course, kn...

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a must-read story of how bibicla scholar April DeConick debunked a view of the Gospel of Judas announced with great fanfair by National Geographic at a press conference attended by Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels: When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world — with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. "In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal," read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it "a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history." A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic's cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel's history, behind only a documentary on September 11. . . . One of the seven million people who watched the National G...

Well this is provocative. Razib of Gene Expression has decided to examine a variety of data about various religious denominations to see if there is any relationship between the views on bibical literalism of each denomination and factors such as IQ scores and education. Here is the chart on education, using the demographic data from The Pew Religion Survey : Razib notes that the R2 goes up to 0.81 (the measure of the fit of the curve, and thus the correlation) if you exclude Roman Catholics. Razib does not think that education necessarily "causes" a reduced beleif in bibical literalism. Instead, her thinks that a different dynamic-focused on the education of the clergy, is at play: What I think is going on is simply what we might term the Wisdom of the Crowds ; people conform to the social and religious group which they identify with. Biblical literalism flourishes because most people trust pastors and parents who preach it. Similarly, a more metaphorical reading flourishes ...

Recently, the Rev'd Geoffrey M. St.J. Hoare, Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Atlanta, caused quite a furor in the conservative blogosphere by one line in his Easter sermon : We don’t have to understand the stories as factual accounts of anything in order to grasp the truth that God’s grace changes everything. Recently, my new friend Dan Porter (who has a decidely orthodox view of the resurrection by the way) came to the Rector's defense in the form of a letter to the rector himself. It is a wonderful post and well worth a full read, but here are some highlights: I am 65 years old. For most of my adult life I have wrestled with what to believe about the resurrection—in a factual sense. At times, during those many years, I have closely identified with scholars such as John Dominic Crossan and many others in the Jesus Seminar. Some such as Crossan and Marcus Borg have argued that Jesus was not even buried in a tomb. Certainly, there is a good measure of historical plausi...

Professor McGrath has a very interesting post on his website about the Sadducees. He thinks they have gotten a bad rap: We only know about the Sadducees from their critics (or at the very least those who disagreed with them): Josephus is probably the least negative source, then there are the New Testament and Rabbinic literature, both of which are polemical. It is interesting to note that the Sadducees' views, as described by Josephus, are similar to those held by the more progressive Christians of our time: a denial of "fate" (i.e. determinism), of supernatural beings such as angels, and the afterlife . It may seem ironic that the most progressive voices today sound like the most conservative from Jesus' time. But being "progressive" doesn't mean adopting the newest ideas. If it did, fundamentalism is relatively new, and so we'd all be clamouring to hop on that bandwagon. But in fact, being progressive means being willing to change and listen, even ...

Well this is a very cool resource. Bible Geocoding offers lots of very interesting resources, including the use of Google Earth to offer a wealth of geographical information about every place mentioned in the Bible. You can look at the entire Bible as a whole or look at places identified in individual books. Check it out here . Hat tip to Think Christian .

Father Stephen is a former Episcopal priest who now serves as an Orthodox priest. He is both small caps orthodox and large caps Orthodox in his theology. He has a very interesting perspective on biblical literalism: The Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, are frequently misread (from a classical Christian point of view) in a literal manner, on the simple evidence that the New Testament does not read the Old Testament in such a manner. Rather, as is clearly taught by Christ Himself, the Old Testament is “re-read” from a Christological point-of-view. Thus Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale is read by the Church as Christ in Hades. The first Adam in the Garden is but a shadow and antitype of the Second Adam - the One who truly fulfills existence in the “image and likeness” of God. The Passover and the deliverance from Egypt are read as icons of the true Passover, Christ’s Pascha and the deliverance of all creation from its bondage to death and decay. Such a list could be l...

Eric Von Salzen has a wonderful post on hard Scriptual lessons on the Agnlican Centrist blog (which is now a group blog). It is well worth a full read, but here are some highlights: There are a lot of these hard lessons, particularly in the Old Testament, such as God banning Moses from entering the Promised Land because he didn’t do the water-from-the-rock trick the right way; King Saul losing God’s favor because he failed to kill all the Amalekites after defeating them in battle; and Psalm 137, which begins with that poignant lament, “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps”, and ends in a hateful fantasy of revenge against the Babylonians: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” But the quintessential hard lesson for me is Abraham’s (almost) sacrifice of Isaac. Every year in Education for Ministry, I look forward, with interest and a little trepidation, t...

Professor James McGrath, offers some very provocative thoughts about how we think about God in the modern world. He points out that the Bible itself displayes a shift in thinking about God (from a polytheistic worldview to a monothesitic one), and asks whether it makes sense to freeze our view of god to the understanding of the ancient peoples who authored the Bible: In the Bible, studied critically, we can see some steps in the process of the shift from a polytheistic view, which personified the forces of nature, to a monotheistic (or proto-monotheistic) one that explained these various forces of nature in terms of a single personified agent behind them. We see the results of this as the Biblical authors rewrote the traditional flood story in light of their revised thinking about God, and the result is perplexing yet represents progress in perceiving an underlying unity to all things and helping to get us to the scientific approach that built upon this foundation. They had no other w...

My priest, Nicholas Knisley was a physicist and astronomer before becoming a priest. He is teaching a college level "Physics for Poets" at the Cathedral that aims to examine the philisophical and theological implications for what we are learning. Yesterday's lesson was on Galileo (which I missed due to a family commitment--sorry Nicholas), and in preparin for the class Nicholas clearly did some deep thinking. He posted the result of his thinking on his blog: One of the things that leads some to argue that Galileo was the founder of the modern scientific method was his insistence that reason must be always compared to observation. Reason, by itself was not the final arbiter of a dispute. It was his insistence on this point that was the core of his break from the teleological thinking of Aristotle. It was also the core of the objection that the Catholic Church had to his writing. (Or so some have argued...) I wonder if we might gain by making a similar requirement for th...

Dr. James McGrath has an excellent post today about the dangers of "taking things on faith:" In student papers, I regularly read that things are supposed to be 'taken on faith'. In terms of what they mean by this, there is simply no such teaching in the Bible. Neither is what they are proposing a good idea. The closest one might get to it is the story of Thomas in the Gospel of John. There, however, he gets to see, and his skepticism is not particularly surprising given what he was being asked to believe. Those who believe without seeing are said to be blessed, but they are not expected to simply believe a story someone tells them. They are expected to experience Christ's life-changing power and perhaps also miraculous healings and exorcisms. There is no expectation that people will simply believe things in the absence of evidence. The failure of Jesus' contemporaries to believe he was the Messiah is not about belief in the absence of evidence. It is about wha...

Professor James McGrath makes an excellent point about the dangers of bibical literalism to faith: Personally, I am fundamentally (if you'll excuse the pun) convinced that there are no genuine Biblical literalists in the world today - not even Ned Flanders on the Simpsons, who on the brillian episode "Hurricane Neddy" famously claimed "I've done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff". No one believes in the dome. No one believes that 14=13, that pi equals precisely 3, and so on. But to acknowledge that interpretation is always a factor does not seem black and white enough to some, and certainly isn't a good advertising strategy, and so claims of being a Biblical literalist continue to be made, in spite of their inaccuracy and (in at least some cases) dishonesty (since I assume some of those using such rhetoric know enough about the Bible that they ought to know better). My strongest reason for opposing these misleadi...

I just stumbled onto the blog of Dr. James F. McGrath , assistant professor of religion at Butler University, who seems to be a kindred spirit--a Christian who embraces science, and rejects creationism and intelligent design. And like me, his is fascinated by the implications of evolution on our own conceptions of God. He has two very interesting posts that note the use of plural in the creation account of Genesis 1: when God says that let us make man in our own image, who is he talking to. McGrath has an interesting answer: The plural used at a decisive moment in the creation account in Genesis 1 has puzzled commentators for millenia. I learned today of a striking suggestion made in Thomas Friedman's Commentary on the Torah. Who were the most recently mentioned characters in the story immediately before the plural? The animals! It is thus possible to suggest that God addresses the animals and involves already-existing life in the creative process (just as the sea and land were in...