Who Is My Neighbor?

The lawyer asked Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus responds, “What is written in the law?” The lawyer replies, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus tells him that this is right, and that he should do so. The lawyer then asks, as many have before and since, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the familiar Parable of the Good Samaritan, an answer that is both oblique and perfectly clear.

This is my take on the lesson.

The lawyer’s first question was excellent, as it engaged Jesus directly with the core of his message. His second question, however, was self-serving and inappropriate. We take Jesus’s parable as if it was an answer to that second question, and allow this to confuse us. I believe Jesus is actually giving his answer to the first question, the right question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Let me first back up a step, and ask, ”What is eternal life?” For many, it is is singing with the angel choir for all eternity in the great by-and-by. It’s a pleasant thought, and if it is so, I hope they have use for an enthusiastic tenor. But my concern is what eternal life means for me now, in the present, in this mortal life. I believe it means living life in communion with the eternal God.

In the parable, the Samaritan accepts a surprisingly broad definition of “neighbor,” and so makes a choice to live in communion with God, to see a broken, naked man through God’s eyes as his neighbor, rather than as a personification of an ethnic group that despises his. He makes a choice for eternal life in this life. 

And what then of the priest and the Levite who didn’t help? They made a choice too. They made a choice to not to live in communion with God in the moment, not to see that broken, naked man through God’s eyes, even though they shared with him a Jewish identity. Isn’t that choice, the choice not to live in communion with God, even for a moment, the definition of sin?

The Better Part

This article originally appeared as a Faithoughts in the Faith Lutheran Church of Homewood's newsletter of July 31, 2025.

This thought is based on Luke 10:38-42, Jesus’s visit to Martha and Mary, the Gospel lesson for July 20th.

Jesus visits the sisters Martha and Mary. Mary joins the conversation with Jesus, leaving Martha to contend with the burdens of hospitality for herself. Martha becomes exasperated, and asks Jesus to send Mary back to help. Jesus declines, “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

This is my take on the lesson.

Roman-era Jewish society was strongly patriachal, which is to say, a society controlled by men. The status of women was scarcely better than lifestock. A woman without a male protector — usually a father or husband — was in danger of being taken by whoever wanted her. She was under her protector’s control, with no agency of her own. 

There are those who think that if the Bible, and especially the New Testament, describes a particular social arrangement as common among the Jews, it affirms it. In particular, the cultures (Jewish, Roman, and Greek) that Jesus addressed directly were in varying degrees patriachal. Many American Christian Churches have a strong pro-patriarchy message. But Jesus was not sent into the world to condemn or affirm it, but to save it, and saving it requires changing it. I read this lesson as an anti-patriachy proof text.

Martha in this text appears as someone reconciled to the role assigned to her by the patriachal system in which she lives. The system requires her to provide food and drink for her guests, and prevents her from joining in their conversation. Mary breaks from patriarchal expectations and joins the conversation around Jesus. Martha, in her exasperation breaking slightly from the “speak only when spoken to” expectation of those lower in caste in any social system, asks Jesus be the patriachy’s enforcer, denying Mary her agency, sending her back to the kitchen. Jesus refuses, granting Mary the right to her own agency. “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” 

How different the words and actions of Jesus are from those of many who claim to speak in his name! 

Entitlement

St. Paul writes, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” [Rom 7:19, NRSV]. This familiar tension is sometimes represented in popular culture through the image of two tiny angels, one God's, one Satan's, whispering into the opposite ears of a conflicted soul. God's angel calls us to do what we should do, to act accordingly to God's will. Satan's angel is too wise to call us to act according to Satan's will, but instead preys on our sense of entitlement, our self-serving belief that we deserve the things that we want, and that we should have them despite the consequences. Satan's angel does not have our best interest at heart.

We do not often have angels whispering into our ears, but there are many voices in our culture telling us that we are entitled to this, or deserve that. Articles have been written about how the language of advertising has shifted from need, to want, to deserve. The science of persuasion has found our sense of entitlement to be the weakest part of our defenses.

I find it disconcerting when someone says that I'm entitled to something, and am immediately skeptical. I've internalized the language of our confessions, know that I am a sinner, and that the wages of sin are death. That's all I'm entitled to. That's all any of us are entitled to. Remember this when someone tries to appeal to your sense of entitlement. Don't live in fear, though. It is our good fortune to know that our judge is also our savior, who we know loves us, and will judge us on the basis of his love for us, not on the basis of our sin. As Jesus has loved us, we should love one another.

America, the Beautiful

 A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited our daughter’s family. Along the way, we saw farms and forests, rolling plains and majestic mountains, corn fields and cattle ranches, grain elevators and stockyards. 

In Colorado, we visited Paint Mines, a natural wonder that I’d never heard of before. You might google it, and look at the photographs. It is a place of stunning beauty, comprising multi-colored layers of clays that have eroded into canyons with fantastical spires, caves, and other formations. As we were leaving the Paint Mines, in the afterglow of encountering this majestic beauty, we saw a pickup truck, decorated with decals unambiguously proclaiming the white supremacist beliefs of its owner. The conversation changed.

America is a beautiful, and complex place. As we walked through Paint Mines, we encountered many other groups of visitors. They all appeared perfectly civil, and the closest thing to anti-social behavior we observed were people climbing on the formations in defiance of the signs and potential for damage, in search of the perfect selfie. Most of the groups were white, but there were groups of Hispanic visitors and at least one African-American couple. Except for that truck, there was no visible indication of racial animosity. But the truck was undeniable witness to the animosity held by some.

The extent to which white supremacist views have become normalized over the past few years shocks me. Perhaps they were kept in check by the World War II generation, who understood Nazism as politicized white supremacy and wouldn’t abide it. I remember the sense of shock when KKK leaflets began to appear in local south-side communities a half-dozen years ago. Now, such things hardly raise an eyebrow. I believe we have a particular responsibility to stand against the rising public manifestations of white supremacy. 

Our faith calls us to believe in “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and that “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” We remember the story of Acts 8, that the first Gentile convert to Christianity was a black man. Black lives matter.

One in Six

I write an occasional article for my congregation's weekly news email. Here's today's:

On World Refugee Day this past June 20th, the ELCA tweeted this message from the Lutheran World Federation: “At the end of World War II, 1 in 6 Lutherans were refugees.” It's a statistic intended to strip away the veil that divides us from today's refugees.

Those Lutheran refugees were among the ethnic Germans expelled from East Prussia, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia under the Potsdam Agreement. These were areas from which the Nazis had intended to expel Slavic people, creating “Lebensraum” (“Room to live”) for their own. The one-in-six statistic cannot help but also remind us of the fraught history of Lutheranism in Nazi Germany, and of the complicity of many German Lutherans, and of the active participation in the Nazi movement of more than a few Lutherans.

As Lutheran Christians, we prefer to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the other saints of the Confessing Church, who opposed the Nazis at grave personal risk and sacrifice. But the sad truth is that the anti-Semitism that Hitler tapped into was latent in Luther's later writings, and so was in the Lutheranism of his day. We have unclean hands as a denomination, but have tried mightily in the years since to redeem ourselves from the sins of that era. We have told ourselves, with a conviction that comes from never having been tested, “It could not happen here,” and joined others in saying “Never again.”

Our test has come. There are concentration camps in our country today, where people demonized by our country's political discourse are imprisoned. It is happening again. It is happening here.

And if today's camps are not the industrial death camps of the Third Reich, they are places where basic sanitation is neglected, and where people are crowded into pens with too little water, too little shelter, and too much heat. They are places where death is invited and places where death comes.

And we, as American Lutherans, must speak. “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:34, NRSV)

“The Bishop's Cross”

Former readers of Lutheran Surrealism may remember Wendy Hoke, a.k.a. “WW.” She is in the process of writing a book describing her experience of sexual abuse, of the silence of those who knew, and of her subsequent healing. It promises to be a powerful book, of interest to many. For more information, please consult her site on Publishizer, and consider supporting her work.

In as much as the rhetorical question has been asked...

Yes, I do care.

A World Passing Away

One of my early memories is wandering around the Haverford Township Library. In those dark, dusty stacks, I found and read a biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Sun Yat-Sen, and Ed Jablonski's then recent history of the B-17. My grandfather Swartz had a bookshelf behind his easy chair, where I found and read Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny." I can remember it as if it were yesterday, but it's been a half-century.

And it's not as if there weren't books at my parent's house, there were plenty. Part of their allowance to me was a book a month. By the time I was 10, I had a complete set of the Hardy Boys, and had moved on to natural histories. They were great, but not enough. I read.

And then, as I oriented myself in life, there were and are the great stacks of Wells, Altgeld, Eckhart, Regenstein, and Crerar, and their seldom visited archives, in which I found the copies of Mathematische Annalen that contained Richard von Mises's original, flawed definition of randomness.

But life doesn't end at thirty. My wife and I recently downsized, moving from the five bedroom house in which we raised our kids to the two bedroom condo we hope to spend the next twenty years or so. I've had to cut down to 75 linear feet of shelf space, about 60% of what we had in the old house, not counting the boxes in the basement that date from my undergraduate years. It's been a hard cull, and it's not entirely done. Almost all of the paperbacks are gone, along with most of the cookbooks. Goodbye, Bernard Cornwell; goodbye, W.E.B. Griffin; goodbye, Frugal Gourmet. I knew you well. Thank you.

Harder culls lie are ahead.

In my office at work, I have about 100 linear feet of shelf space, and these aren't trade books. They're Elsevier, North Holland, Springer-Verlag, including many hard cover mathematical texts set by hand in the era before Donald Knuth and computerized typesetting. Fifty dollars an inch, conservatively valued. It sounds crazy, but a couple hundred dollars a month over the course of more than thirty years of faculty life adds up. I set no records. There is not so much sticker shock as resignation. I expect to retire in a decade, give or take, and that 175 total linear feet will have to culled down to the 75 feet I have here. The rest will be divided into two parts, the marketable to be sold at O'Gara and Wilson Booksellers in the traditional UC faculty capitulation, the rest to be simply given away, stacked if need be on the radiators of Ryerson Hall for those who will have them.

But what of the next decade? Even if my acquisitions have slowed down from six inches a month to three, that's another three feet a year, another thirty feet over that last working decade. Or is it?

I think it is not. I love paper books. I love their heft, their feel. But I've been slowly moving from preferring digital editions only if they're cheap, to preferring digital editions. Old eyes prefer larger type, and old shoulders prefer a lighter backpack. And digital books don't face that hard, hard cull, which grows closer with each passing day.

I don't think that books are passing away, but I do think that paper books are passing away. Today's libraries are morgues, and today's librarians know it. They're preparing for a very different world. And with great reluctance, so I am. The world of bound, physical books is passing away. Look at it, love it, and ultimately, remember it, for our successors will not. Their world is still being borne.

Peace

A Lutheran's Prayer on the Election of a Pope

Dear Lord, For your servant Francis, That through the continued development of the values by which he has ordered his life, He might become a symbol of the unity of your church, and not of its divisions. Amen

Robert Bakker on Science and Religion

Noted in passing: Slashdot: Dr. Robert Bakker Answers Your Questions About Science and Religion.

To Whom Do We Pray?

I'm co-leading an adult group through “Unbinding Your Heart,” a book/process that focusses on evangelism and prayer. This morning, I encountered an arresting line in the book, “What's at the heart of life with God? A powerful relationship between each one of us and the Trinity.” The heart of our life with God is our relationship with an abstract theological construct? That's not the way people work. It struck me as an awkward, peculiarly mainline Protestant way of talking. And then, perhaps exceeding the author's attempt at elegant variation, a fruitful one.

To whom do we pray? Evangelicals pray directly to Jesus, who is to them the person of God. Catholics (at least, according my Lutheran catechetical instruction) pray to a favorite saint, as an intercessor between them and an God. Jews and Muslims pray directly to the one God, who Christians equate to the Father/Creator person of the Trinity. But for mainline Protestants, it's not so clear that there's such a consensus. My intuition is that they're lead in prayer to Jesus when they're very young, but that they don't often build a sense of a personal relationship. As they enter the teen years, when relationships with authority figures of all sorts are often strained, and reinforced by catechetical experiences that tend to be academic and theological, they drift into addressing such prayers as they offer to a de-personalized God, which mostly equates to the Father. Then, in late middle age, as what their life will be becomes more and more a function of the choices they've made than the choices they'll make, they rediscover Jesus in prayer.

Contemporary mainline Protestants often struggle with prayer. We sometimes seem to face a chasm between the prayer life we know, which may be infrequent and unsatisfying, and the vibrant life of prayer that we feel we should have, and which we sometimes witness (with both discomfort and envy) in our evangelical friends. How can we get from here to there? If we try to jump the chasm, will we fail the trial of faith?

One strategy is to enter into prayer through a conscious discipline. Pray a Psalm. Structure prayers as if they were Psalms, following a formula such as “adoration, supplication, thanksgiving, intercession, confession.” I think that this a productive strategy, and I'd like to build upon it by suggesting a supplementary discipline, inspired by that awkward notion of our relationship with the Trinity as the heart of our life with God. Let me suggest praying in turn to each of the persons of the Trinity. I think if we took this seriously, these prayers would be different. Our prayers to the Father might emphasize adoration, supplication, and thanksgiving. Our prayers to Jesus might emphasize confession and intercession. And our prayers to the Spirit? They would emphasize our desire to follow God's will, and for us and others to be inspired in love to do the work he's set out for us.

The advantage of being smaller in scope is that this kind of prayer would encourage us to go deeper. The advantage of rotation is that it gives our entire prayer life (if not each prayer individually) the breadth of the formulas. And it makes the point, the heart of our life with God isn't our relationship with the Trinity as an abstract theological construct, it is our relationship with the persons of the Trinity: with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. Now and forever, Amen.

Peace

“I stole it, fair and square.”

Over on Kirby's blog, I suggested a motto for life's winners, “I stole it, fair and square.” I even went so far as to suggest that this might be a way we can think about own salvation, a notion that Brother John objected to: How can we steal a gift? It is a fair question.

We play by multiple sets of rules. Our most fundamental moral choice is not whether or not to follow the law, but rather, which law to follow. Will we follow God's law, or man's law? Will we follow the rule of our community, or will it take a second place to our rule of self-interest and pride?

Life's winners are often perceived by life's losers as having cheated, whereas they perceive themselves as victors by merit. One set of laws broken, another upheld. The motto captures this tension, “fair and square” by my laws, but “stolen” by yours, but also, It's mine, and I'm not giving it back.

So it is with our salvation. Under the old covenant, our obligation was to follow God's law, a law we've often subordinated to our own law of self-interest and pride. The old covenant offered ways to repair the relationship broken by our rebellion: repentance, sacrifice. Yet if we're honest with ourselves, we know that our rebellions are many, and our efforts at repair are selective, few, and perfunctory. So the old covenant condemns us, and if we seek salvation in it, we deceive ourselves. It is not by our merit that we receive salvation, but only by Jesus's free gift. In receiving his gift and making it ours, we break the old rules by which we are condemned, and hold onto the new rules by which we are saved.

Salvation is mine, and I'm not giving it back. I stole it, fair and square.

Peace

Requiem

Last Wednesday, late afternoon, my wife got the call. Her father's number, but not his voice, “Are you Karen's daughter?” Yes. “Well, I'm very sorry to tell you, but she's died.” My wife had spoken with her just the evening before: small talk, without foreshadowing.

We were on next available flight. Her father had been swept into Texas's adult protective services. We'd spend the next three days canceling inessential services at their house, and getting him released to my wife's custody. We flew back with him on Sunday, and had him admitted to a trusted assisted living facility nearby. He's only asked a couple of times about his wife, who he loved and protected fiercely for fifty years. In the last few years, their roles had reversed, and she'd become his caretaker and his protector, a constant companion as he slid unsteadily into dementia. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease, which stole him from her, and her from him.

Karen lived big in her own way. She was passionate about country music and line dancing. She was a constant ambassador for a lifestyle and a set of values that often left me feeling like an anthropologist in my own country, perplexed but curious, “What are the natives doing?”

They grew up Protestant, conventional and unfervent in their faith. They were not church people when I knew them, yet they raised daughters who are rocks in their congregations, one Lutheran, one Catholic. Her funeral will take place in the context of a Catholic mass, courtesy of her son-in-law the deacon. He'll become a de facto member of our faith community, and again be receiving the body and blood of our Savior, as he did in his youth, as if the intervening decades of love and loss were but a dream. And the Bible that has rested on his nightstand since his confirmation rests beside him still, dog-eared and tattered, next to a photo of him and his vibrant wife, who now rests in peace.

Peace

Images of Creation

I have a new blog up that I'm going to use for my astronomical hobby. If you're interested, please visit Images of Creation.

Leviticus 19:1-18

This Sunday's lectionary readings were from Proper 25 of the Year A Revised Common Lectionary. They included a brief reading from Leviticus, intended (as the Old Testament readings usually are) to support the Gospel reading. The reading was discontinuous: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18. I'd like to consider the whole, and then the envelope.

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:

Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy. You shall each revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the LORD your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the LORD your God.

When you offer a sacrifice of well-being to the LORD, offer it in such a way that it is acceptable on your behalf. It shall be eaten on the same day you offer it, or on the next day; and anything left over until the third day shall be consumed in fire. If it is eaten at all on the third day, it is an abomination; it will not be acceptable. All who eat it shall be subject to punishment, because they have profaned what is holy to the LORD; and any such person shall be cut off from the people.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:1–18 NRSV)

In the first place, I'd like to characterize the reading. This is, it seems to me, a freer rendering of the ten commandments, with more by way of illustration.

But it seems to me that this is a surprisingly important passage, especially for being in a book that is so seldom read. I'll start by picking a view things out.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19:9–10 NRSV)

Here we have, of course, the scriptural warrant for the tradition of not gleaning the field, which was so important in the story of Ruth. But I think this is reflected in the social criticism of the OWS movement: the sin of Wall Street isn't that they're rich, it's that they take everything, when the law obligates them to leave enough for the poor and the alien.

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. (Leviticus 19:13 NRSV)

Here, we have the scriptural warrant for the tradition that a laborer should be paid before sundown, which figured in the Matthew 22 reading from a couple of weeks ago, and the subject of the preceding post.

I thought the following passage was especially relevant to our present, troubled times:

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor (Leviticus 19:15 NRSV)

I believe this can be read as a criticism of central tendencies of the Democratic and Republican Parties respectively. Is there perhaps wisdom enough in this passage to pull us through? I wonder.

Finally, I'd like to note a strong parallel between the reading as it appeared in the lectionary, and Jesus's words from the Gospel. First, Leviticus:

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:

Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:1–2, 15-18 NRSV)

Next, Matthew:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34–40 NRSV)

Note how Jesus's epitome of the law parallels the beginning, and even more explicitly, the end of Leviticus reading. This lead me to ask the question: was it an idiom of oriental thought to refer to an entirety obliquely by mentioning it's beginning and the end? It took a couple of hours for the answer to occur to me, in the writings of John of Patmos:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. (Revelation 1:8 NRSV)

And so, I invite a more diligent, more prayerful contemplation of Leviticus 19:1-18, for upon them hang all the law and the prophets.

Peace

The Role of the Rich

Matthew, in material unique to him, tells a parable known as “the Workers in the Vineyard,” but it's actually about the owner of the vineyard:

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:1–16 NRSV)

Why does the owner of the vineyard go out to the market at noon, at three, and again, finally, at five? Does he expect that their work will provide as much value to him as that of the men he hired early in the morning? Of course not. For he is not hiring men, early or late, for the value they can provide to him. He is hiring men out of his abundance for the value he can provide to them, a wage sufficient for the day in return for honorable service. He understands the responsibility of the rich in society: it is neither to hoard wealth, nor to dissipate it, but instead to use it purposefully to advance the health of society.

Let us consider our society today, a society beset with sustained high unemployment. We hear from the voices privilege that the problems our our society are due to to the poor. It is the poor who don't contribute enough. Yet the poor still seek work, and if they don't find it, it's not because God has not provided. It is because those he's entrusted with wealth have nurtured the delusion that their wealth is a reward for their own merit, and its sole purpose is their self-indulgence. The problem we have today isn't that the poor aren't working, it's that the rich aren't hiring. It's that the rich that aren't doing their job.

Let us pray:

Dear Lord, Heal our society. Call the rich to their duty, or give us new rich who will do it in their stead. In Jesus's name we pray. Amen.

Peace

A New Dark Ages

These thoughts were inspired by a conversation over at John Hanson's blog, De Gustibus, we all need something, and I'd like to acknowledge my double debt to Brother John, not only for initiating and hosting that conversation, but also for a gentle and generous comment here that agitated me to write again.

Robert Maynard Hutchins coined the notion of “The Great Conversation,” which is defined as, “a characterization of references and allusions made by authors in the Western canon to the works of their predecessors.” This notion became, in due course, the seminal idea upon which Hutchins and others ultimate built “The Great Books.” The question as it came up on De Gustibus considered the status of religion in the Great Conversation, and the sense that religion is being relegated to a marginal and mostly honorary role in that Conversation. I think this is an important question, but it is not today's question. Today's question regards the health of the Great Conversation itself.

I'll begin by illustrating and expanding a bit on Hutchins' idea. Melville's novel, “Moby Dick,” is built upon references to the Old Testament, from the first sentence, “Call me Ishmael,” to the last, “It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Here we see a pattern of references he could assume would be meaningful to his readers. References which would enable him to say less, but mean more. His novel does not stand alone, but it builds on that which came before, and indeed, I suspect that more people today associate the name “Ahab” with the Great White Whale than with Jezebel or Elijah. Melville entered the conversation.

At this point, I'd like leverage this example into three related digressions:

1. If “Moby Dick” is a part of the Great Conversation by dint of its references to the Bible, doesn't this mean that the Bible is also a part of the Great Conversation? Yes. Isn't this obvious? It certainly was to the authors of “the Great Books,” who in their introduction made the point that they didn't include the Bible in their collection simply because they expected any of its readers to already have multiple copies. Indeed, if we remember that the Bible is not a book, but a collection of books, we can already see the Great Conversation at work within the Bible, as one book quotes another.
2. Hey, isn't the Great Conversation supposed to be about the Western canon? The Bible is a lot of things, but it is mostly written from the very different perspective of oriental culture. The first thing you have to understand about Western culture is its acquisitive nature. We claim the Bible. You don't like it? We don't care.
3. What about other cultures? Don't they have conversations too? Isn't it both arrogant and limiting to focus on the Western canon? Alright then. The second thing you have to understand about Western culture is that it is arrogant. But yes, it is limiting, which is both good and bad. What gets sometimes gets lost in the “Dead White Male Lit” vs. “World Lit” debate is a willingness to acknowledge what both sides have right. There is a distinctive Western conversation (nods to the right), but it is itself in conversation with other culture's conversations (nods to the left). The Bible, one of the foundational documents of the Western canon, is very much a case-in-point, but hardly a unique one. I'll cite Hesse's “Siddartha”, Achebe's “Things Fall Apart,” and the cinematic conversation between Kurosawa and Leone.

But now we get to the question. What is the health of the Great Conversation today? How might we assess it?

This is a critical time for the Great Conversation. Even in the early 50's, Hutchins wrote about how then-recent events had challenged (but in his estimation, unsuccessfully) foundational values of Western culture. And perhaps it was revulsion to Hitler's racial interpretation of Nietzsche's elitist notion of Übermensch that lead Mortimer Adler to push the egalitarian notion that the best education for the best is the best education for all. And the Great Books grew out of this, as an explicit attempt to make the Great Conversation accessible to all. These challenges, while they have not yet overwhelmed us, remain unabated. And all the while, technology has been producing profound changes in the nature of publishing, driving down costs and increasing bandwidth, to the point where anyone with access to a public library, a Google account, and an axe to grind, can set up shop and hope to reach billions. The absence of a public library notwithstanding, this blog itself is a case-in-point.

My thesis is that the Great Conversation has all but collapsed. As more and more people have entered in, and as time-to-publication has fallen from years to milli-seconds, the Great Conversation has pivoted. We no longer consider so much the great minds of the past, nor do we hope to engage the great minds of the future. We write for today's comments, which after a week's time will live forever unread on Google: cache without value.

My thesis is that these are the New Dark Ages: that we've walled ourselves off from the past and future of the Great Conversation, in favor of more vigorous but ultimately ephemeral chatter. We know more facts, but possess less understanding, less wisdom. We are trapped in the ignorance of now.

But I see hope. Whether through nature, or through God, our excesses are inevitably corrected. Difficult times, which is simply another way of saying times that involve changes we don't understand, are times when we're compelled to look beyond us. And we face difficult times, perhaps difficult enough to tear us away from our inward gaze. If not now, soon.

Peace

Is Death a Social Construct?

Over on Kirby's blog, G. M. Palmer posted a link to Easter, a remarkable poem by Jill Alexander Essbaum. Kirby felt the poem was “very secular.” This seemed to deeply miss the point of Essbaum's poetry, which struck me as a poignant reflection on a central paradox of Easter.

As Christians, we celebrate Easter as Christ's victory over death. We declare death vanquished. Yet we know, God's victory over death is ultimate, not present. Death surrounds us, and our own mortality presses in. We proclaim victory in defeat; we celebrate in despair. The ones we love pass on, and the threads that tie us to this life grow weaker, while the threads that pull us to, and we believe through, death grow stronger.

Why? JH has lamented the lack of the surreal over on Lutheran Surrealism. Let's have some here.

Is death a social construct? I'm thinking, yes.

Peace

Authority — a draft

It's been a long time since I've felt as though I had anything to say here, which I regret. The following is a lightly edited comment that I made on Kirby's blog, which I believe is worthy of further development.

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Kirby,

The question of authority is something I wanted to take up, and run with a bit.

Sounds like a plan...

If I might anticipate your thoughts a bit, let me start by positing that divine authority, and only divine authority, will not fail. Note that for atheists, this reduces to the simpler premise that all authority fails.

A corollary, which requires the additional premise that we are not gods, is that all human authority fails. This is one of the foundations of Nuremberg prosecution: as all human authority fails, you can't evade personal responsibility for your own actions via appeal to authority. You are responsible for the choices you make in the authorities you follow.

A core problem for those of us who accept the theological premise “God is,” and therefore believe that there is an infallible authority, is in discerning and interpreting that authority. For some, this question is mooted by God himself by direct revelation, but very few have been given the gift of standing with unshod feet before a bush that burns but is not consumed. For the rest of us, it is not so easy, and the very real phenomenon of false prophesy means that we can't simply take the word of those who claim the gift of direct revelation. Even the disciples doubted. We're again confronted with the premise that all human authority fails, and that prophets are human.

Turn now to scripture. Scripture has passed through human hands, and it is established beyond all doubt that the transmission of scripture, while remarkably good, has been less than perfect. Fundamentalists will cite 2 Timothy 3:16-17, All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. (NRSV) as an internal proof text for scriptural infallibility, but this is a weak argument. Fallible sources often claim infallibility, but all human authority fails. In any event, it is very far from clear that the intended meaning of θεόπνευστος — God breathed — is anything like what fundamentalists mean when they use the word “inspired.” Ironically, they're not being literal enough in their reading of a central proof text.

The existence of variant texts is certainly clearer to us than it was to the reformers, who were inspired by finally having direct access to imperfect, but original language, texts, and so were in a position to call into question readings of the Vulgate, and arguments for the infallibility of the RCC hierarchy that had been built upon them.

So I see the claim of “scriptural infallibility” as well as “papal infallibility” as theological versions of the Nuremberg defense, resting on the same error. Human authority cannot be trusted blindly, since all human authority fails.

What then? Do I deny all human authority, or claim exemption from its demands upon me? By no means. We all depend on authority, and are subject to its demands. I am no exception. But we cannot use authority to evade personal responsibility, and therefore authority must be tested. And indeed, for this, I can cite scripture as well, for it often speaks of testing by both God and man to ascertaining righteousness, faithfulness, apostolic authority, etc.

Returning again to scripture, we might ask what its uses are. If we test it against the claims of 2 Timothy 3:16, useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, it passes, albeit with a few caveats. If we test it as a source of scientific knowledge, it often fails. It is our personal responsibility if we ignore the results of those testings, both where it succeeds and where it fails.

Peace

Political Correctness in the New Testament

In a comment on Kirby's blog, I noted that “political correctness” is nothing more or less than the notion that our words and deeds should conform to our beliefs. As I've thought about this subsequently, it occurred to me that while "political correctness" in its current meaning dates to the 70's, and the conservative backlash to a few minutes after that, that the underlying idea is sound, and that I've encountered it in sources of far greater antiquity.

So I invite you to consider the first commandment,

Exodus 20:7 (RSV) You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.

and with it, the following exegesis by Jesus of Nazereth:

Matthew 6:9 (RSV) Pray then like this: Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

Consider that first petition, “Hallowed be thy name.” This is often misunderstood. Jesus is not asking that God's name be holy, for God's name is holy. Jesus is asking that God grant us that we conform our words and attitudes to our belief in the holiness of our Lord God, and the sanctity of his name. Is this not political correctness? Of course it is. Yet many of the same conservatives who bristle at “political correctness” pray this prayer every day without a twinge of irony.

And I believe it is worth considering what the first commandment was intended to proscribe. I do not believe it was the “God damns” that have been largely replaced in modern invective by more offensive speech. After all, “God damn” is formally a prayer. A flawed, self-centered prayer, but a prayer never the less. No, I believe that the usage was the casual elaboration of “I promise…” to “With God as my witness, I promise… .” For indeed, we may well find that God is a witness against us. Indeed, there's evidence to this in Jeremiah:

Jeremiah 5:1–2 (RSV)  Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth; that I may pardon her. Though they say, “As the LORD lives,” yet they swear falsely.

And this leads us to a second commentary on the first commandment, which shares much with Jesus's, in the Epistle of James:

James 5:12 (RSV) But above all, my brethren, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, that you may not fall under condemnation.

And while James is placid and magisterial, Paul of Tarsus knows how difficult this really is,

Romans 7:15 (RSV) I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

It is not easy to set aside traditional patterns of language and attitude to account for a new truths, for habituation has a powerful hold on us. This difficulty accounts for much of the strident attitude by modern advocates of political correctness. Self policing our words and deeds is hard, as we undermine ourselves thoughtlessly and continuously. Paul was right, and we need to pray.

May our words and deeds conform to our beliefs. Amen.

Peace