Actors’ Sacrifices; Two Views on Forgiveness

I have two thoughts for today:

1.  Yesterday, I watched an excellent documentary called The Captains, in which William Shatner of Star Trek fame interviewed other actors who played captains on a Star Trek show or movie (Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, and Chris Pine), as well as shared his own reflections about Star Trek.

What particularly stood out to me in the documentary were comments by Scott Bakula and Kate Mulgrew, both of whom I love as actors.  Scott Bakula was saying that working on Quantum Leap essentially cost him his marriage, since he was working 12-hour days (at least), with rarely a day off.  Because he was a fairly new actor and thus did not have the leverage to negotiate his hours, he showed up when he was needed.  Kate Mulgrew of Star Trek: Voyager said that she was a single mother during the Voyager days, and she did not get to see her kids that much on account of her long workdays.  To this day, she said, her kids are not interested in the show—-they do not want to watch it—-for they resent how it took their mother away from them.  I can’t imagine not wanting to watch Star Trek: Voyager, but, of course, I enjoy it from a distance, without being exposed to all that it took to make it, or how that affected other people.

2.  Rachel Held Evans has a post, Ask a Seventh-Day Adventist.  As I discuss the issues of forgiveness and salvation in the comments section with Delina Pryce McPhaull and Nicholas, I am seeing more clearly the type of Christianity that I had growing up, and how that contrasts with the sort of Christianity that I encountered among evangelicals.

The type of Christianity that I had growing up (in Armstrongism) went like this: I accept Christ as my personal savior and my past sins are forgiven.  But I need to continue to ask God for forgiveness to keep my slate clean, and God forgives me continually on the basis of what Christ did on the cross.  But asking God for forgiveness is not enough for me to be forgiven on a continual basis, for I also need to repent (i.e., try not to do the sin anymore) and forgive others.

The sort of Christianity that I encountered among evangelicals went like this: I accept Christ as my personal savior and God then regards me as righteous and as a child of God, even though I still have imperfections.  I confess my sins to God, ask God for forgiveness, repent, and forgive others, not to keep my slate clean, for it’s already clean in God’s sight after I accept Christ.  Rather, I do these things to enrich my relationship with God and perhaps even to make myself feel better.

These are my impressions.  I can’t be absolute here, for I think that there were some elements of the second view in my religious upbringing.  But there was enough of the first view swimming around in my mind that, when I was in an evangelical small group and heard the leader say that one did not have to repent of every sin to be saved, I was shocked.

The Griesbach Hypothesis and Goulder’s View on Q

I started Mark Goodacre’s The Case Against Q.  Many scholars believe in Markan Priority and Q.  Markan Priority states that the Gospel of Mark came first and that the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke used Mark’s Gospel as a source.  But there are things (particularly sayings) that the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke have in common, which are not in the Gospel of Mark.  According to many scholars, Matthew and Luke are getting that stuff from a source called “Q”.

I first learned about Q in an undergraduate New Testament class.  Students acted as if the concept of a Q source challenged their faith, perhaps because it was totally new to them, or they thought that Matthew and Luke drawing from a Q source would contradict their Gospels being records of their eyewitness testimony to Jesus (even though Luke explicitly says in his prologue that he’s drawing from sources).  As I think about how I will teach certain religion classes once I get a teaching position, I envision myself telling my students about Q in an Intro to New Testament course.  But I’d also like to communicate to my students that Q is not the only game in town when it comes to New Testament scholarship.  Consequently, I decided to read Goodacre’s book in order to see what a case against Q looks like.

In my reading so far, Goodacre has referred to two challenges against the existence of a Q source.  First, there is the Griesbach Hypothesis, which states “that Matthew’s is the first Gospel, that Luke used Matthew and that Mark used them both” (page 10).  The late William Farmer was a major proponent of this view, and Mark’s motive under this hypothesis is sometimes held to be an attempt to unify “within the collective consciousness of the church the diverse and sometimes diverging accounts of Matthew and Luke” (page 29).  There is no Markan Priority in this view, nor is there a Q, for the commonalities between Matthew and Luke that are absent from Mark are attributed to Luke using Matthew as a source, not to a Q source.

Second, there is the idea that Matthew used Mark and other sources, while creating some sayings of Jesus, and that Luke then used Matthew and Mark.  A major proponent of this view is Michael Goulder.  Unlike the Griesbach Hypothesis, this particular view holds to Markan Priority, the notion that Mark’s Gospel came first.  But it does not believe in Q because the commonalities between Matthew and Luke that are not in Mark are attributed to Luke using Matthew as a source.  Goodacre supports a modified version of this view, one that does not ascribe to Matthew as much of a creative role.

Goodacre spends pages defending Markan Priority because he thinks that scholarship tends to lump Markan Priority together with Q, when there are scholars who believe in Markan Priority while not accepting the existence of Q.  Goodacre wants to look at Q on its own merits or lack thereof, apart from the question of Markan Priority, and so he affirms and defends his support for Markan Priority at the outset.

I’ll stop here.  There’s more in what I have read in this book so far than what I have covered in this blog post—-such as the question of how we can tell that one source is using another one, rather than vice versa.  I may get into that issue in coming posts.

On Biases and “True Scholarship”

There is a good exchange of ideas under Nick Norelli’s post, The Idol of Scholarship and Academic Naivety.

G. Kyle Essary writes:

“It’s common to hear now:

“‘I used to be a poor, dumb fundamentalist like many of you. I was a ‘true believer’ and even served in a church, but now I have studied the facts without any bias. Now, I only read the best scholarship and only interact with respected scholarly work.’

“Isn’t this fundamentalism? We have a fundamental set of beliefs about history, metaphysics, etc. and all other arguments are excluded by definition. In fact, they are not only excluded, but ridiculed.

“I studied at a school that only valued ‘true academic scholarship,’ and the mere mention of an evangelical received scorn and comments about how we should strive to avoid fundamentalists in our research efforts. We were also scorned from reading classical scholarship. In fact, the rule was that anything over 80 years old could not be cited in a paper to support our point, unless we were citing it as a piece of historical perspective. We were encouraged to interact with the ‘real movers and shakers’ who were turning the entire paradigm of Christianity upside down.

“If you mentioned Bruce Waltke with a Ph.D. from Harvard and a Th.D. from DTS then you were a fundy and should be reading better works. Yet if you mentioned John Shelby Spong who only has an M.Div., then you were ‘on the leading edge of theological thought.’ It wasn’t the credentials or the ideas that mattered as much as falling into a certain paradigm. Thankfully, at the evangelical school I later attended, we studied a broader spectrum including radicals, moderates and conservatives.”

And Nick responds:

“You hit the nail on the head. I’ve mentioned in a couple of reviews of Andreas Kösternberger’s books how impressed I am with the breadth of his reading and interaction, which is quite common for conservative evangelicals, yet surprisingly uncommon for their counterparts to the left. Confessing scholarship is written off and ridiculed as ‘apologetics’ while skeptical scholarship is ‘critical’ even when it shows little evidence of critical thinking!”

I can identify with parts of this.  There is a sense in which conservative evangelical students are talked down to at non-evangelical universities, and evangelical scholarship is suspected.  I often heard the “I used to be a right-wing evangelical, but I outgrew that stage” testimony at schools that I attended.  Moreover, a professor once told me that I should be careful when reading F.F. Bruce on account of Bruce’s evangelical bias.  And yet, it’s interesting that this same professor recommended N.T. Wright to a student, while he rebuked me for citing Bishop Spong in a paper (since Spong is a popularizer).  But different people have different experiences.

I can also see Nick’s point that evangelical scholarship interacts with a broad range of books and biblical scholarship.  I think that about Ben Witherington’s scholarly works, which I have started to read lately.  I believe that it’s important to read broadly precisely because scholars have bias.  A minimalist scholar may mention a detail that a maximalist scholar may leave out, and vice-versa.  For me personally, however, I try not to approach the Bible when doing scholarship with the presupposition that it is inerrant (on the one hand) or always flawed and historically inaccurate (on the other hand).  In my opinion, it’s important to try to be open-minded (not that I succeed at this).

Beggars

As I read more of Joseph Telushkin’s A Code of Jewish Ethics, Volume 2: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself, I thought about charitable giving to beggars and how I have handled it in the past.  Telushkin told two stories that caught my eye.

One story was about how Rabbi Shmuley Boteach gave a dollar to a beggar, even though Rabbi Boteach suspected that the beggar might use that money for alcohol.  Rabbi Boteach told the beggar to use the money for something good, and Rabbi Boteach said that the beggar was too smart to spend the money on alcohol.  When the beggar left and Rabbi Boteach’s family asked why Rabbi Boteach gave money to the beggar, when the beggar was obviously going to spend it on booze, Rabbi Boteach responded that he had compassion on the man because the man had been reduced to begging, and that he was attempting to respect the beggar’s dignity by talking to him as a person.

Another story was about a rabbi who was collecting money to buy wood for the poor so that they could be warm during the winter.  When the rabbi came to a rich guy’s house, he made his request to the rich guy—-and he made the request quite lengthy—-while they were both standing in the cold right outside of the rich guy’s door.  The rabbi’s purpose in doing this was so that the rich guy could see what it is like to be cold, and thus the rich guy would give more so that the poor could keep warm during the winter.

When I lived in Boston, New York, and Cincinnati, I came across beggars.  Many times, I’ve ignored them.  Many times, I’ve given them a little money so that they’d get off my case.  Sometimes, I would add to my giving a little sermon to the beggar about how he should be looking for work and not spending money on alcohol.  Many times, I’ve bought beggars a meal.  In doing so, either I order it myself, or I watch the beggar order it, making sure that my money is being used for food rather than booze.  And then there have been times when I have bought the beggar lunch and sat down to eat with him.

I probably sound insufferable.  I mean, if I were reduced to begging, I wouldn’t want someone giving me a little sermon about how I should work and not drink alcohol.  I wouldn’t want someone monitoring me to see that I bought food rather than booze, as if I were some kind of criminal.  Probably the best thing that I did was eat with the beggars and talk with them like people rather than as objects of my magnanimity.  My problem with that, however, was that then some of them would try to hustle me for more money.

I remember when I was walking with a friend one snowy Thanksgiving, and my friend bought a newspaper from a homeless person.  I scoffed at what my friend was doing, but my friend replied, “Look, that guy was standing in that blizzard!”  The lesson that I learned from that is that, whether a beggar is from the “worthy” poor or the “unworthy” poor, he still does not deserve to be standing in the cold.

I’ve appreciated some of the lessons that I’ve learned from beggars: about trusting in God to meet one’s daily needs (as beggars, of course, wonder where their next meal will come from, and one of them told me that God provided), and about what it’s like to be homeless and to try to find work.  One time, I gave a beggar money to buy a sandwich.  I asked him what kind he wanted, and he replied that he desired a large sandwich.  So I have him money for a large sandwich, and he requested a small sandwich while pocketing the rest of the money, right in front of me!  At the time, I was upset that he saw me as a chump, even though I didn’t say anything at the time.  Nowadays, I don’t blame him for trying to save money and to make it go further.  I try to do that myself.

Being a Guest; Visiting the Sick; the Shomer

In my latest reading of Joseph Telushkin’s A Code of Jewish Ethics, Volume 2: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself, Telushkin talks about such issues as what to do when you are a guest, what to say when you visit a sick person, and death.

For the first issue, being a guest, some stuff on page 58 was especially meaningful to me.  Telushkin says that we should not have an exaggerated sensitivity that leads us to say that we’re not hungry when we really are, something that many of us do because we don’t want to appear as if we came just for the food.  Telushkin cites Kallah Rabbati 9.  Telushkin also says that, if we are reserved, we should take special care to be sociable—-to listen to the people who have invited us and to talk with them, beyond giving them one-word answers.  Telushkin tells a story about a rabbi and a friend who ate with a talkative woman, and the friend focused on studying his holy book while ignoring the woman who invited him.  The rabbi told him that he basically stole the meal from the woman, since she invited him expecting for him to converse with her.

On visiting the sick, we are to say a prayer for the person when we get to the sick person’s room.  We are also to try to talk with the person about things other than his illness (which is not an iron-clad rule, but rather it’s an acknowledgement that many sick people would like to think about things other than their sickness, every once in a while).  One point that Telushkin made was that people at hospitals and nursing homes tend to enter people’s rooms without permission, something they would not dream of doing were it somebody’s house.  This stood out to me because I used to work at a nursing home, and, as I look back, I probably should have knocked at the residents’ door more and asked them if they wanted company, rather than just plowing into the room and talking with them (as much as they appreciated my visits).

Regarding death, Telushkin talks about a shomer, someone who takes care of a dying person.  According to Telushkin, the shomer is exempt from positive commandments, such as the commands about prayer and tefillin.  Telushkin cites Babylonian Talmud Berachot 18a.

Newt Gingrich’s Saving Lives & Saving Money 8

In my latest reading of Saving Lives & Saving Money: Transforming Health and Healthcare, Newt talks about the importance of increased government spending on scientific research.  In some cases, this would be to combat diseases, such as Diabetes and Alzheimer’s.  In some cases, it would be to promote national pride, as the space program does.  While Newt acknowledges that he wants for the country to spend more money on scientific research, he believes that doing so will save the country money in the long run, since Diabetes takes a toll on America’s health care system.  I’m cool with this argument, but I wonder how America could do this and cut taxes at the same time, which I say in light of Newt’s tax cut proposals.

I liked what Newt said on page 182 about education:

“…we teach these subjects as facts to be memorized rather than a great adventure of discovery to be pursued.  Teaching, memorizing, and testing are all familiar words.  But we must return the words wonder, adventure, and discovery to our schools.  We should not center on education, but on learning.  We should go beyond force-feeding numbers and theories to a level of true discovery where a child wonders what the answers are and goes in search of them for the pure excitement of it.”

I was one time working with a program that tutored at-risk youth, and I remarked that I could understand why the youths were so bored with what they were learning in school, for I was bored with that stuff and was happy to be in college where I could pursue my interests and take the courses that I wanted.  My supervisor responded that my opportunities to do so in college were my reward for doing well in the boring subjects in junior high and high school.  I think that it’s important for students to learn subjects that may not necessarily interest them.  At the same time, I believe that schools should encourage students to pursue their interests, and that opportunities to do so should not be limited to the gifted and talented or to those who go on to college.

A No-Strings-Attached Friendship

Under Rachel Held Evans’ post, Better conversations between churched and un-churched Christians, Lynn makes an excellent comment:

“There was a time when I wouldn’t have believed it wasn’t possible for people on either side of this divide to avoid hurting each other, but then I met this family at the last church I went to. For almost a year, they patiently let me ask honest and definitely heretical questions in the small group they ran. And when I decided that I needed to leave because I just didn’t believe what the church and its denomination believed, they didn’t beat down my door and demand I come back. After a while, I just started getting e-mails – ‘We haven’t seen you around, and we miss you. How about coffee this week?’ ‘Do you have dinner plans for Friday?’ ‘So we’re having a family movie night. Interested?’

“And the crazy thing is that they actually just wanted to get together – without questioning my theology or my decision to stop attending church. They’ve never used it as an excuse to ask me how my ‘walk with the Lord’ is going.

“I still think this kind of friendship is very rare, but it’s good to be reminded that other Christians can totally surprise you. Little by little, it chips away at my cynicism.”

I agree with Lynn that this kind of no-strings-attached friendship is rare (including in terms of how I live my own life), but it’s beautiful when it does happen.  I also appreciate Lynn’s comment because it reminds me of how many Christians handle a person who leaves the church or who has not shown up to church or a small group for a while.  They either ignore the person altogether and don’t call or write, as if the person doesn’t exist or matter, or they pressure the person to come back, whether that person wants to do so or not.  But I think that Lynn did well to present a third way: offer a no-strings-attached friendship.  

Does Popularity Mean Quality?

People often tell me that, if I write quality posts, then people will flock to my blog.  My question is this: Does popularity mean quality?  I’m not asking this out of an attitude of self-pity, for my blogs have been doing quite well lately, in terms of how many views I am getting, or (in the case of my WordPress blog) people choosing to following me.  I just find that there are times when I can be on somebody else’s blog, and a comment there really resonates with me, even though no one else has clicked “like” on it.  And I find that there are posts that I write that are especially meaningful to me, yet they are not necessarily as popular as my posts that are not as meaningful to me.

“Ideological Voters Are Easy to Manipulate”

The Atlantic had an interesting article recently entitled Ideological Voters Are Easy to Manipulate.  Its argument is that ideologues can be manipulated to passionately support a candidate—-even one for whom they have misgivings—-through rhetoric or controversies.  For example, many conservatives have been tepid about Mitt Romney, but now there’s a good chance that they will rally behind him due to that lady on CNN saying that Ann Romney has never held a real job, which many have construed as an attack on stay-at-home mothers.

I have to confess that this was true of me back when I was a right-winger.  For example, in 1992, I had misgivings about George H.W. Bush because he raised taxes, talked about a new world order, appointed a pro-choicer to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, and had a head of the National Endowment for the Arts who tolerated funding smut with our tax dollars.

But did it take a great deal of effort to win me over to George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election?  No.  Bush and Quayle tossed out some Republican red meat blasting Bill Clinton as a tax-and-spend liberal.  Pat Buchanan at the 1992 convention gave me some more red meat by blasting Hillary and Al Gore.  Dan Quayle stood up for family values and attacked Hollywood and Murphy Brown.  Was there substance to any of this?  Well, I suppose that it was legitimate for Dan Quayle to raise the issue of single parenting and whether that was best for children (and I will not comment on whether he was right or wrong in his assessment).  But, seriously, was Bush planning to do something about single parenting were he to be re-elected as President?  The Republicans were simply tossing out the usual rhetoric that the right-wing base loves.  And controversies encouraged the right-wing base to increase its opposition to those it considered to be elites (i.e., Hollywood, the media, Democratic politicians, etc.), while standing with someone professing to be its guy, even if he wasn’t fully.

Am I the same way now that I’m more on the Left?  Not as much, I don’t think.  I’m at the point where I’m not overly interested in what a politician says.  I’m interested in what a politician does.  And, in my opinion, Barack Obama has shown his commitment to health care reform and to student loan reform through his deeds.  Is he perfect in the area of taking action rather than just talking?  No.  But politics is a matter of selecting among the choices that are presented to us.

“So How Was Your Easter…Really?” My Responses

In this post, I’ll be using as a lauch-pad Rachel Held Evans’ recent post, So how was your Easter…really?   I’ll quote Rachel’s post, then I’ll discuss how her thoughts resonate or don’t resonate with my own experience of Easter this year.

“I had my moments of faith: at the little Catholic church down the road on Good Friday, pressing my forehead into the wooden cross at the front of the sanctuary and silently praying, ‘God, I don’t understand this, but I believe, and I am thankful.’”

I went to a Catholic service with my Mom and her husband on Saturday night.  Were there elements of the service that I could believe or identify with spiritually?  Well, one piece of the liturgy talked about restoring fallen people to innocence.  I do not know if the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 is historical—-certainly many scientists and historians do not think so!  But I cannot escape the fact that the world is imperfect, and that includes me.  We have all done things that we shouldn’t, and we crave wholeness, or innocence. 

I felt a little put-off by the part of the service in which we were asking saints to intercede for us before God.  For one, after watching the depiction of St. Cyril of Alexandria in the movie Agora last week, I have my doubts that all of the saints were really that saintly!  Second, as a Protestant, I have a hard time talking to anyone in prayer except for God, plus I am leery about praying to any intercessor except for Jesus Christ.  But, as I thought some more, I could appreciate the ritual of talking to the saints of the past.  Many of us want people to pray for us.  We ask for other Christians to pray for us and to show us that they care.  What’s wrong, then, with thinking that our Christian family goes back many centuries, and that saints in the past pray for us?  I’m not sure if I buy that, but I can understand how such a concept would give Catholics a feeling of connection.

There was a baptism at the Catholic church, and the initiate was asked if he renounced Satan with all of his lies.  I wondered if I did so.  Christianity essentially portrays sexual desire (“lusting after a woman”) as adultery of the heart, but I have a hard time renouncing that.  It just seems unnatural to ask any man to do so!  But does Satan lie to me?  When I am taught to look to people and things for my sense of self-worth, is that not a lie of Satan?  When I am tempted to disregard the dignity of others, am I not being accosted by one of Satan’s lies?

“I had my moments of doubt: in the evangelical church of my childhood on Easter morning, struggling to listen to the familiar resurrection story that suddenly strikes me as a rather inventive way to escape our fear of death.”

I especially felt this way at the Catholic service: I wondered if Jesus truly rose from the dead, or if that were merely one religious story amidst a host of religious stories that are in the world—-many of which Christians would consider untrue because they fall outside of Christianity.  I decided to just kick back and observe what other people believe, and I found that I was especially moved by the music of the service—-how it was loud and powerful, and thereby majestic.

My Mom has struggled with Christianity, and, after the service, she remarked that she believes that something happened on Easter morning to give people hope.  To that, I say “Why not?”  I believe that there are things that occur in all sorts of religions or in life that give people hope—-hope that the future will be brighter, or that they can have a new beginning.  It’s even built into nature, as spring follows winter.  Perhaps that sort of event occurred for the early Christians.

“I had my moments of connection: holding hands with my neighbors during the Lord’s prayer, sharing a meal with family, watching the lady in the wheelchair in the pew in front of me pull herself up, determined to stand through ‘Christ the Lord Has Risen Today,’ seeing fellow Christians raise their hands in joy.”

I especially felt connected during the passing-of-the-peace part of the Catholic service.  I often dread that part of the service.  In fact, I was thinking of staying home specifically to avoid that part of the service!  I fear being ignored, or extending my hand at the wrong time and getting rebuffed.  But the people at the Catholic service were friendly, and so I felt connected.

“I had my moments of disconnect: sitting out the Eucharist because I’m not Catholic, hearing the gospel reduced to salvation from hell, welcomes that felt patronizing from people who have been praying that I come to my senses and go back to believing, behaving, and voting just like them.”

Probably the only time I felt this was when the priest was saying that Christ brings forgiveness to believers.  I thought, “What about everyone else?”  And what about someone like me, who is not even sure what he believes?