Quote of the Day: Michael Craft on Good Christian Manhood

Kathy Escobar has a good post, Ex-Good-Christian-Women, in which she talks about the burden Christian women carry of having to meet (presumably certain evangelical) expectations of what it means to be a good Christian woman.  Kathy then asks if men have similarly been burdened by false ideas of good Christian manhood.  In response to this question, Michael Craft says the following (and I have edited what he said in minor ways):

“Hmm…false idea of what it means to be a Christian man. I’m going to have to blog about that. You hit a large nerve on that one! I stopped going to men’s meetings because I tired of the Christian man ideal that would be taught. I never felt valued as a man and went away feeling discouraged and condemned. Almost every men’s group I attended taught that you MUST be the spiritual leader in the family (I believed in a shared responsibility).  It always seemed to be our fault in our marriages because we sucked at being a good enough husband.  If I would actually share something honestly about a problem I was having, I would be treated like a child that needed disciplining. I learned quickly NOT to EVER share AGAIN.  Too many insecure pompous men trying to show off their peacock feathers of macho spirituality with their inane advice! In my ministry to recovering addicts, I come alongside them in the ditch with them and relate to my fellow strugglers.  I don’t give them the ‘You must victorious, brother. You must be an overcomer. You have to be the head and not the tail’ garbage that Ive heard over and over. I share my weaknesses and love them through their situation. I refuse to act above others. I easily could have been a addict if God hadn’t intervened years ago. I know now that I was going against the flow of popular Christian thought and paid a heavy price.  I’m out of the mainstream church and viewed as a rebel but I see more of God out here in the wide spaces of the ‘frontier’ than in the ‘city’ of the institutional church. Thank you once again my dear friend and mentor in our wild living in the faith. You have once again lifted a discouraged heart!”

I’m looking forward to Michael’s post on this topic.  Here’s the web site for his ministry.

The John Edwards Trial; Everything Must Go

Here are two thoughts:

1.  People will probably disagree with me on this, but I was moved by how John Edwards daughter (Cate) and his parents stood by him throughout his trial, and how he said after the mistrial that God is not through with him yet and he still has good that he can do.  Although he did rotten things, the fact that his family stood by him shows that he has some decency within him, for he apparently has a strong relationship with some in his family, who have not given up on him.  I hope that he has learned from his misdeeds and will use his second chance rightly.

2.  I watched a movie last night with my Mom and her husband, Everything Must Go, starring Will Ferrell.  You can read about it here.  I enjoyed it because Will Ferrell plays a likable, approachable, quiet, socially-awkward guy who’s dealing with his own brokenness, and who receives healing through his relationships with others.  He does the same in another movie that I like, Stranger Than Fiction.

Cure?

At church this morning, the pastor read to us from Eugene Petersen’s rendition of Romans 8 in The Message.  You can read it here.  The following passage especially stood out to me:

“The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.”

I appreciated the statement that the law was a Band-Aid on sin rather than a healing of it.  I realize that I’m looking at the Torah here from a Christian perspective, but the law does appear to me to be a way to help the Israelites to adapt to the reality of sin: to offer certain sacrifices on account of sin, to establish penalties that punish sins, etc.  But does that cure sin?  Not really.  It seeks to atone for sins temporarily or to restrain them, but that’s not a deep cure.

I guess where I struggle is that I’m doubtful that Christianity is much better.  The way New Covenant advocates talk, we don’t have to redouble our efforts, for the Holy Spirit within Christians makes obedience to God a whole lot easier, or more natural to them.  Maybe that’s true for a lot of Christians, but it’s far from true for all of them.  Why else do Christians blab on about how they’re not perfect, but forgiven?

Moreover, I can ask God for help on a daily basis to, say, help me to keep my resentment in check, or my shortness of temper in check, and God seems to do so (according to my experience and my interpretation of it, for what that’s worth).  But I hardly feel “cured”.  “But that’s because you don’t believe, James”, one can say.  Well, even in times when I did believe, I didn’t feel “cured”.

Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family 13

In my latest reading of It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, Rick Santorum talked about education.  I’ll use as my starting-point something that Santorum says on page 386 as he defends homeschooling against the charge that homeschooled kids are deprived of socialization opportunities:

“By asking the right question, we can see that when it comes to socialization, mass education is really the aberration, not homeschooling.  Never before in human history have a majority of children spent at least half their waking hours in the presence of 25 to 35 unrelated children of exactly the same age (and usually the same socioeconomic status), with only one adult to keep order and provide basic mentoring.  Never before and never again after their years of mass education will any person live and work in such a radically narrow, age-segregated environment.  It’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.  In a home school, by contrast, children interact in a rich and complex way with adults and children of other ages all the time.  In general, they are better-adjusted, more at ease with adults, more capable of conversation, more able to notice when a younger child needs help or comfort, and in general a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers.”

I appreciated this passage because I’ve long had issues with the elitism of some public school professionals, who have the audacity to criticize homeschooling, when public schools are far from perfect.  I’m not suggesting that Santorum is against public school teachers, for he talks about good teachers who actually want to work with parents to help kids get a better education.  My experience has been that this sort of concern spans the political spectrum among teachers, for I once had a liberal social studies teacher who said that any parent was welcome to come to his class to observe, no questions asked.  But I still have issues with how some public school teachers and professionals act so high and mighty.

At the same time, I think that public schools are important, for they bring different people together (to some extent).  I fear that an emphasis on private schools and homeschooling could result in right-wing fundamentalists indoctrinating their kids to hate and to fear people and ideas that run contrary to right-wing fundamentalist beliefs.  I acknowledge the value of many of Santorum’s arguments: that there are parochial schools that are more diverse than public schools, that the poor should have a chance to receive a good education, that homeschooling allows for parents to spend more time with their children, that homeschooled kids perform well on tests, etc.  But I still have my concerns.  I’m not suggesting that people should not be right-wing fundamentalists, but I think that it’s important for them to be around people who are different from them, so that diverse people can learn to get along with each other and to respect one another, notwithstanding their different beliefs.

My Posts that Talk about Kathryn Joosten

Actress Kathryn Joosten has passed on due to lung cancer at age 72.  I know her as Mrs. Landingham on The West Wing, as one of the manifestations of God on Joan of Arcadia, and as Mrs. McCluskey on Desperate Housewives.  It’s ironic that she has passed on, since her character on Desperate Housewives also passed on in the final episode of the show.

I’d like to share some posts that I wrote that discuss Kathryn Joosten’s moments in television:

The West Wing:  Bartlett’s Jobian Rant.

Joan of Arcadia: A Disappointing God in Joan of Arcadia.

Desperate Housewives:  Alone No More; Caught Up on Brothers and Sisters (Sort of); God of Borg; and The Desperate Housewives Finale.

R.I.P. Kathryn Joosten.

Quote of the Day: Volnaiksra on Trying to Smooth Over the Bible’s Hard Passages

On his blog, The Dubious Disciple, Lee Harmon has a book review of Paul Copan’s book, Is God a Moral Monster?  Lee was not particularly convinced by Copan’s attempt to smooth over some of the troubling passages of the Bible, such as the Israelite conquest of Canaan, which entailed (in some parts of the Bible) Israel being commanded by God to kill every man, woman, and child among the Canaanites.

Volnaiksra left the following comment under Lee’s post (and you can read Volnaiksra’s blog here):

“It’s always a little bit heartbreaking when apologists try to take the super-positive message of modern of Christianity (God is love; you’re his treasured creature; the Christian God is above all human pettiness and can be trusted to give us peace and justice; Christianity is all good news, etc.) and transpose it back onto the Bible.

“The backpeddling and philosophical gymnastics they need to employ to twist the Bible’s assorted nastiness into something that approximates holiness are so athletic and creative that you kind of want to root for them. And when they finally exclaim triumphantly ‘see? The Bible is wonderful!’ from atop the arguments they’ve lovingly constructed, you almost don’t have the heart to point out that they’re standing on a tangled web of sticky-tape, plastic and holes that’s about to collapse into a sorry mess.

“Once, while [perusing] the religion section of my local bookstore, I came across a book called something like ‘The Problem verses’. The mission of the book was to try and catalog, and briefly explain, all those tricky passages of the Bible that seemed offensive, unfair, or cruel. I guess it was meant as a reference for newcomers to the Bible who were a bit alarmed by what they saw in it, and was intended to help them see those verses in a more palatable light.

“It was one of the thickest books I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and was a good 50% thicker than the Bible itself. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family 12

In my latest reading of It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, Rick Santorum continued to talk about how the entertainment media’s focus on illicit sex and violence could harm kids.  He commended companies (such as Wal-Mart) that try to clean up the culture for kids, lamented that piracy enables children to see rotten movies, presented public policy proposals for dealing with the culture (which sometimes entailed censorship of such things as pornography, since Santorum believes that the First Amendment is primarily about protecting political speech and not smut, but his proposals mostly related to the government making it easier for private interests to clean up the entertainment media for children, without necessarily banning mature movies for adults), exhorted families to monitor what their kids watched and to turn off the TV and tell their kids stories, and affirmed that schools should teach values.

What I want to highlight here, however, is something that Santorum says on pages 357-358:

“In addition to the usual checklist of learning skills, sciences, and humanities, the orientation of education toward truth should include moral truth as well.  I know this will strike some readers as either dangerous or impossible for a public school system in a pluralistic democracy, but that’s because we all tend to focus on a few highly contentious areas of morality in our culture, mostly revolving around human life and sexuality.  But what about honesty and loyalty?  What about self-control and self-sacrifice?  Aren’t these true values that we can agree to teach our children as being part of an objective moral reality?”

I appreciate Santorum’s willingness here to search for common moral ground rather than obsessing over controversial issues.  I guess my question is this: Don’t schools teach morality already?  Good behavior in the classroom is necessary for the class to run smoothly, after all!  There are right-wingers who have criticized situational-ethics exercises in the classroom as an attack on morality being absolute, but, heck, acknowledging that there are gray areas and difficult dilemmas does not nullify morality as a whole, or the truth that it is wrong to be inconsiderate of others and to hurt them.  Santorum will be criticizing “value-free” education that promotes tolerance, for he mentions that on page 358, but I have not yet read his specific criticisms.  But I don’t think that the current educational system is completely “value-free”.  Tolerance, after all, is a value, as long as we’re not tolerating acts that directly hurt others.

UPDATE: On pages 388-389, Santorum acknowledges that liberals are committed to certain correct values (i.e., equality) and states that “tolerance, properly understood” should be taught.

Psalm 79

For my weekly quiet time this week, I will blog about Psalm 79 and its interpreters.  I have four items.

1.  Psalm 79:1 says in the King James Version: “O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps.”  For the Hebrew word for “heaps” in this verse (iyim), the Septuagint has the Greek word oporophulakion.  Oporophulakion is a combination of two words: opora, which means “fruit”, and phulakion, which has to do with guarding.  The Liddell-Scott lexicon on my BibleWorks translates oporophulakion, however, as a “hut for a garden-watcher”, which it appears to mean in the LXX for Isaiah 1:8 and Isaiah 24:20.  Perhaps the word came to have that meaning because people would set up huts to monitor the fruit that was growing in gardens.

Why does the LXX use oporophulakion for iyim (or variations of that)?  The Hebrew word is used four times in the Hebrew Bible (see here), and, three of those times (Psalm 79:1; Micah 1:6; 3:12), the Septuagint translates it as oporophulakion.  (For Jeremiah 26:18, the LXX translates it as abaton, which often means “desolate”.)  Why oporophulakion?  I am not entirely sure.  Perhaps it’s because Micah 1:6 also talks about vineyards, and so the translators assumed that i has to do with fruit.  This topic deserves more study on my part.

What have interpreters who have used the Septuagint done with oporophulakion, as they have sought to interpret its significance within Psalm 79?  Theodore of Mopsuestia simply says that Jerusalem will be beaten up so badly that it will become reduced to something like a hut for a garden-watcher.  Augustine, however, highlights the significance of the fruity element of the word.  According to Augustine, Psalm 79 is about the persecution and martyrdom of Christians, and the word oporophulakion in Psalm 79:1 is communicating that the souls of the Christian martyrs were like sweet apples to God.

2.  Psalm 79:3 states (in the KJV): “Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and [there was] none to bury [them].”  The commentaries I read talked about the importance in the Hebrew Bible of burying the dead, even the dead of one’s enemies.  For example, the Canaanite kings whom the Israelites conquered were buried (Joshua 10:27), as was the evil son of Ahab (II Kings 9:25-26).  In addition, Deuteronomy 21:23 mandates that a criminal who is hanged be removed from the tree and buried.

Marvin Tate states that “throughout the ancient Near East, the bodies of the conquered dead were dishonored by being left as carrion (cf. Deut. 21:23; Isa 14:18-19)”, and the Intervarsity Press Bible Background Commentary refers to first millennium B.C.E. Assyrian records in which Ashurbanipal talked about throwing the corpses of his enemies into the streets and dragging them around.  The commentary states that burial of the dead was believed to guarantee the departed one a peaceful and restful afterlife.  When the dead were not buried, they were restless, and that’s why ruthless conquerors refrained from burying the conquered dead.

Did the Israelites’ burial of their enemies stem from a humanitarian impulse, a belief that they should love even their enemies?  Perhaps, for the burial of the dead was believed to help the dead out, by helping them to have a restful afterlife.  And yet, the motive may simply have been to cleanse the holy land of Israel from corpse impurity, for corpses in the Hebrew Bible were thought to defile.  That’s why Ezekiel 39:11-12 says that the corpses of Israel’s enemy Gog will be buried: they were defiling the land of Israel.  And you will notice that, when the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible bury an enemy or an evil person—-such as the Canaanite kings, the son of Ahab, and the hanging criminal—-this occurs in the land of Israel.  The aim in burying the dead was probably to ensure that the corpses did not defile the holy land; and yet, in the process, the dead were helped out because burial allowed them to have a peaceful afterlife.

3.  On a related note, Psalm 79:11 asks God to spare the “sons of death”.  Who are the sons of death?  One interpretation is that these are people who are condemned to die, and that the Psalmist is asking God to intervene so that their lives might be spared.  The Septuagint, however, understands the phrase to refer to the sons of those who have been slain.  I do not see an explicit belief in the afterlife in Psalm 79.  Technically-speaking, I suppose that one can walk away from Psalm 79 concluding that it offers no hope regarding the slain Israelites who were deprived of a restful afterlife because their bodies were not buried, and that its main concern is people in this life, as it hopes that more people will not die, or that the offspring of the dead will be cared for.  But why limit God and the extent of his deliverance?

4.  But not only is God able to deliver one from death; God can also free people from the guilt of their sin.  Psalm 79:2 states: “The dead bodies of thy servants have they given [to be] meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth.”  This puzzled the Jewish commentator Rashi because he wondered why the Israelites are called God’s servants and saints, when they were being punished for their gross sins.  Rashi’s conclusion is that the wicked Israelite is reckoned as pious after he is punished.  The Psalmist acknowledges in Psalm 79:8 that the Israelites have sinned, that they have “former iniquities”.  But, somehow, the Israelites are still considered to be God’s servants and saints.

This interpretation intrigued me because of debates concerning the identity of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53.  Many Jews have said that the Servant is Israel, whereas many Christians have maintained that the Servant is Jesus.  Against the “Israel” interpretation, many Christians have asked if Israel fits the description of the Servant, who is described as innocent.  After all, does not God in Isaiah and throughout the Hebrew Bible portray Israel as guilty, not as innocent?  I think that a Jewish interpreter can respond, however, that God reckoned Israel to be innocent after she paid the penalty for her sins (and Isaiah 40:2 asserts that Israel received double for her sins).

Quote of the Day: Carson T. Clark on Christian Apologetics

In a recent post, moderate blogger Carson T. Clark characterizes a lot of Christian apologetics as follows:

“Generally speaking I can’t stand the self-assuredness, snooty condescension, intellectual pride, defensive posturing, offensive aggression, judgmental tenor, graceless attitude, petty one-upmanship, scriptural proof-texting, oversimplistic assertions, binary categorizations, rhetorical strategies, academic format, absence an any true personal transparency (about doubt, frustration, confusion, etc.), unwillingness to acknowledge sound points made by the ‘opponent,’ refusal to admit ignorance (or a sheer lack of expertise) in certain areas, and just plain stupid arguments that I’ve typically heard espoused in this field. All of which is why I’ve tended to avoid christian apologetics like the plague.”

Carson goes on to say that a recent talk by Tim Keller (which Carson posts) has given him hope about Christian apologetics.  Whether you have the same positive impression, you can judge for yourself.  I watched the video earlier today, and there were things that I liked and disliked.  But I loved Carson’s characterization of much of Christian apologetics.

Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family 11

In my latest reading of It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, Rick Santorum criticizes the violence and illicit sex (without consequences) in the stories that come out of the entertainment media, and he urges conservatives to enter the media to create stories that are more realistic.  Santorum also talks about meeting Fred Rogers, whom he says (like many say) was “the same in person as he was on TV.”  What I particularly liked was Santorum’s discussion of art on page 327:

“I cannot pretend to fathom the mind of a true artist.  I cannot play an instrument; I can barely draw a circle; I don’t even take good photos.  How cultural artifacts are created is a great mystery to me.  And from what I understand, it is often a mystery to the artists as well.  I have often been told that the layers of meaning in a particular artwork such as a song or a film often are revealed to the artist himself only long after the work is complete.  Its shaping and forming influence is often subliminal, and therefore all the more powerful in the long run.”

This may be relevant to a question in biblical studies and interpretation: Should we just go with what the original author meant when writing a passage, or can the passage have a life of its own, conveying meanings that were not apparent to the original author?  And, if the latter is the case, what are the controls against eisegesis—-people reading into passages whatever they want?

But Santorum appears to acknowledge the artist’s intention even behind things that were not apparent to the artist when he was crafting his work.  What is the subliminal influence that Santorum mentions?  Is it something in the artist’s sub-conscious that comes out in the artist’s creation, yet is not immediately apparent to the artist?

Or can the artist see different ways to interpret his work after its completion, even ways that he did not envision when creating it?  These ways may not do violence to the work, but they are legitimate ways to make sense of the work of art that’s there.