Six Beatitudes for Exegetes: Cribbed from Beverly Gaventa's lecture this morning....

Blessed are the visionary (those who look at the text)
Blessed are the eavesdroppers (those who pay attention to what people say, and how they say it)
Blessed are the readers for they will have words for the Word
Blessed are the day dreamers (they take the time to wonder imaginatively about the text)
Blessed are the lovers of God, His people and His Scripture, for their risk will be repaid.
Blessed are those who trust that scripture speaks, for they shall hear.

As elated as I was to see Led Zeppelin on stage together again, I must say, it's not Zeppelin without Bonzo. His son is good, but has nowhere near the feel of his father. Bonzo had funk and soul, and you can't mimic that with technical ability alone. So let's all take a moment to appreciate his greatness in memoriam.

E.B. White on Thoreau's Walden,

"I was glad to learn from one of the notes that Thoreau was thirty-six years old before he discovered that he was tying his shoes with a granny knot. A man must take courage from something these days, while tying his shoes, and that is as buoyant a thought as any."

-----E.B. White, from "Writings from the New Yorker: 1927-1976"

Radiohead recently posted a number of live tracks via webcast. They can all be found on youtube now. This is "Headmaster's Ritual" by the Smiths. They also cover Bjork and New Order/Joy Division, as well as playing a couple of their own tunes.

""Justice is turned back,
and righteousness stands at a
distance;
for truth stumbles in the public square,
and uprightness cannot enter.
Truth is lacking,
and whoever turns from evil is despoiled.

The LORD saw it, and it displeased Him
that there was no justice.
He saw that there was no one,
and was appalled that there was no
one to intervene."

-----Isaiah 58:14-16 NRSV

We recently had a discussion in class regarding sanctification. Drawing three distinctions between Natural Theology (we have the power in Christ to do the good now and are made perfect through our works), Reformed theology (we are hopeless sinners, but we can limpingly progress toward our final destination in the power of the Holy Spirit, and should make some effort to that effect, though perfection is only an eschatalogical category) and Evangelical theology (we're only counted righteous when God looks at Christ---the imitation of Christ takes sort of a backseat to spreading the gospel---and perfection or improvement is only an eternal reality). I'm sure these lines get blurred because people are hardly uniform in their beliefs, but we tried to differentiate them to focus on their difference.

Then I came across this quotation from Calvin.

“But no one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength to press on with due eagerness, and weakness so weighs down the greater number that, with wavering and limping and even creeping along the ground, they move at a feeble rate. Let each one of us, then, proceed according to the measure of his puny capacity and set out upon the journey we have begun. No one shall set out so inauspiciously as not daily to make some headway, though it be slight. Therefore, let us not cease so to act that we may make some unceasing progress in the way of the Lord. And let us not despair at the slightness of our success; for even though attainment may not correspond to desire, when today outstrips yesterday the effort is not lost. Only let us look toward our mark with sincere simplicity and aspire to our goal; not fondly flattering ourselves, nor excusing our own evil deeds, but with continuous effort striving toward this end: that we may surpass ourselves in goodness until we attain to goodness itself. It is this, indeed, which through the whole course of life we seek and follow. But we shall attain it only when we have cast off the weakness of the body, and are received into full fellowship with him.”

- John Calvin [1509-1564]
Institutes of the Christian Religion, McNeill and Battles, eds., p. 689

I'm curious to hear from some of the natural theologians out there as to whether they would agree with these distinctions or not, and I'd also like to know how they would characterize the process of sanctification.

Until this morning I had no idea that "wintry mix" was an actual category of weather. I thought the phrase was just a catch-all for rain mixed with snow. I suppose in some sense that is true, that it really does practically function as a catch-all for the nightly news, but when I stepped out this morning and noticed that what I thought was rain was actually really tiny bits of ice (not hail, not snow, not sleet, not slush) I realized that maybe I was standing in "wintry mix". Oh the joys of all the new east coast experiences.....

Here's what Wikipedia has to say: "Wintry showers is a somewhat informal meteorological term, used primarily in the United Kingdom, to refer to various mixtures of rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow. Professional meteorologists tend to shy away from using the term under any circumstances, but radio and television weather reporters use it regularly, the same way wintry mix is used in the United States. Though no "official" criteria exist for the term, it is not used when any accumulation of snow on the ground takes place. It is often used when the temperature of the ground surface is above 0°C, preventing accumulation from occurring even if the air temperature is marginally below 0°C; but even then the falling precipitation must generally be something other than consisting exclusively of snow."

I just watched a really interesting movie on Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher/sociologist operating with a sort of Marxist/Lacanian method. While perhaps ultimately frustrating, his work seems to serve as an helpful analysis of why we philosophize, ie. what it means for us to say such-and-such. I won't attempt to define him anymore broadly than that in a blog post, but suffice it to say, he's quite interesting and you should check out Zizek! the movie. There's also a helpful write up in Books & Culture if you want an introduction from a Christian perspective to his work. Here is a quote from that review that I liked:

"For this "fighting atheist" it is not, of course, so much the truth of what Christians believe but the world-altering power of the Christian imagination that attracts him. What Zizek sees is precisely what the comfortable Western Church might be most in need of recovering: an appreciation for the explosive nature of the Christian Gospel and how it calls forth an alternative or counter way of life to the standard operating procedures of the world." -----Ashley Woodiwiss

"It was always assumed that the classics were a good line of work for me because I had a decent voice and the right nose. But anybody who comes from an essentially cynical European society is going to be bewitched by the sheer enthusiasm of the New World. And in America, the articulate use of language is often regarded with suspicion. Especially in the West. Look at the president. He could talk like an educated New Englander if he chose to. Instead, he holds his hands like a man who swings an ax. Bush understands, very astutely, that many of the people who are going to vote for him would regard him less highly if he knew how to put words together. He would no longer be one of them. In Europe, the tradition is one of oratory. But in America, a man's man is never spendthrift with words....this, of course, is much more appealing in the movies than it is in politics."

-----Daniel Day Lewis, from his interview in this week's NYT Magazine

I don't know if you've been following the latest kerfuffle over Antony Flew's recent conversion to Aristotelean Deism or not, but you might want to check out Mark Oppenheimer's Article in last Sunday's NYT Magazine. Then, after reading that, you can bip-on-over to Victor Reppert's blog to see Varghese's Letter to the Editor of the NYT in response. You can also read more at Richard Carrier's blog

It appears there's a tug of war going on over this poor old atheist who changed his mind, or lost it. It all seems very sad to me.

I love the Irish. They have great ale, good cheese and onion slices. We went to the city this weekend and had beers at McSorley's, my favorite American ale house. Mmmm.

In other news, the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy gave a joint interview recently. I haven't been able to find footage of it, but you can read a transcript (not sure if it's the whole thing) here, and the photo has the most Norman Rockwell-ish light I've seen in some time.

Ginger graciously offered a couple tickets to the Pumpkin's show in Philadelphia last night. It was great. I drove down with a buddy from Princeton and we sat in the 7th row. Good times. Click on the images for larger files.

Fall is officially here! These are the trees right behind our apartment.

It's reading week here at Princeton. For some that means it's Fall break. For me it means sitting in the library doing exegetical work on 1 Thessalonians 4:4. I'm looking at the Greek word "skeuos" (skoo-Os), which can mean alternately: vessel, body, member, or wife. It sounds boring right? Well, I'm loving it. You'd think, oh tedium, but I spent six hours in the library reading a bunch of Greek and looking at commentaries yesterday and I didn't even realize that it was time to go until the librarian kicked me out. I love this life.

Here's a photo of Jack and I walking along the river behind our apartment.

p.s. Old man winter is just around the corner. I can feel him in my bones.....

Friends, this is one of my favorite charities. Go to Todd's Page for more info on the help they need.

Some of you have been asking what it's like here at Princeton Seminary. I think this quotation from Richard of St. Victor about sums it up. It might shock you to learn that Princeton is very much about the development of piety. This is an excerpt from one of my assigned readings.

"It is vain that we grow in riches of divine knowledge unless by them the fire of love is increased in us. For love arising from knowledge and knowledge coming from love must always grow in us, each ministering to the increase of the other by mutual growth, and love and knowledge developing in turn."

-----Richard of St. Victor, from "Selections for Contemplation"

"Kant's critique of the classical proofs for the existence of God may be more of an asset to theology than has often been recognized. For it permits theology to turn its attention from strong rational proofs, on the model of basic science, to a softer rationality that views transcendent knowledge as reliable though mutable. This broader view of reason may help theology reclaim its distinctive vision of knowledge of God that aims to form and transform believers whose trust in divine judgment and mercy is nurtured through scripture, creed and worship. The fragility of that trust reminds Christians of the need for prayer [among other things] to prepare properly for knowing God." (parenthetical comment, mine)

-----Ellen Charry, from "By The Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine"

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

-----Joan Didion, "The White Album"

What's your narrative?

"O Lord, let Thy mercy be upon us
Who have hoped in thee.
O Lord, in Thee have I hoped;
May I never be confounded."

-----Augustine/Ambrose, late 4th century, baptismal hymn "Te Deum"

"Knowing God rightly, in, through, and as Jesus Christ, believers can confidently 'seek the things that are above' (3:1). Knowing the good news of salvation (indicative mode), believers are to live a life clothed with love (imperative mode; 3:14). The command follows the proclamation of the good news as a consequence and never as a condition. This order is not reversible. Reverse it, and the gospel is turned into a new law."

-----Andrew Purves, from his brief commentary on Colossians in the "Spiritual Formation Bible"

"We must...go deeper than the half-twilight that has fallen over our culture at the end of the modern age. The lack of purpose, meaning, and pattern, which all our study of the natural world and society and the human psyche proclaim, should have made evident to this age that we cannot find life-giving truth and meaning by examining again and again nature, society, and the human psyche. The only hope is in the sacred, which comes to us so gently in Jesus and the holy things of God, lovingly shared by faithful people."

-----Diogenes Allen, from "Steps Along the Way"

Here's an interesting interview with Dave Bazan, of Pedro The Lion fame. I wrote an article on him some time ago you can find it here and I think I pretty much got the story straight.

I like what he has to say about creativity and apologetics in the context of art ,for the Christian.

Earlier this year, the head of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, announced that he'd re-entered communion with the Roman Catholic church.

For many Protestant Evangelicals, this move was tantamount to apostasy, and the uproar over this guy has, at times, been deafening.

This morning an acquaintance forwarded to me an interview with Beckwith where Beckwith talks about some of the reasons he went back to the Church of Rome after so many years away.

It's worth looking at, and I welcome a good discussion around the issues he brings up. Of particular interest to me is his discussion of Justification and his argument regarding the early Church Fathers.

I love Radiohead, and I wish they'd harken back to being a pop/rock band. I love the experimenal stuff too, but unrealeased tracks like this make me long for the Bends days. . .Enjoy it.

excerpts from this week's New Yorker....

Anthony Lane on Nicolas Sarkozy: "Awaiting your hero for more than two hours is no hardship to the faithful; standing for two hours without earplugs, however, while the cream of soft Euro-rock is hosed into your consciousness, is another matter."

Norman Mailer on losing his memory as he gets older: "It's awful--I'm absolutely without detail memory now. I keep referring to one metaphor: an old man who's still steering a course is analogous to the captain of an old freighter that may or may not make it to port. You keep throwing ballast overboard. So the hearing goes. The eyesight. The knees. This goes. That goes. ...For a novelist, you really have to retain a memory of how things felt even if you're not reporting them directly. My memory for detals of where something took place, when it happened, is very spotty. What I will remember is the emotional tone of a meeting. Facts you can always lookup somewhere."

And Here is an article worth reading about the growing hysteria over people of faith. I just heard that the new Rush album is all about how bad Christians are for the world. Neil Peart needs to stop reading Hume.

Wikipedia. . .democracy in action or Colbert's "truthiness" in action? Both?

For those of you not in the know, Wikipedia generates encyclopedic definitions by way of general consensus. That is, what passes for truth on Wikipedia is none other than the overwhelming opinions of the majority of people who decide to care enough to write and critique the work of others. . . on Wikipedia.

At first blush this sounds like a wonderful idea. Give everyone a shot at defining a topic, and let the rest of the world critique them and argue over what they've said. History, no longer written only by the winner, but also informed by the perspective of the loser! A chance for egalitarian thinking writ large!

Yes. Yes. But wait, how much does the general populace acting as a collective really know anyway? Who's version of the truth are we willing to accept? My experience has been that true democracy of thought often means settling for the lowest common denominator. I think I'm more of an advocate of the free play of the minds of experts than I am the petty infighting of the masses.

Nevertheless, however you come down, Wikipedia raises some interesting questions about the nature of truth, the usefulness of experts in a given field, and the general veracity of a mob.

A few questions that come to mind for me: 1) Is truth nothing more than the consensus of the majority? 2) Is the communication of actual events corrupted more or less with this type of format... as opposed to an encyclopedia of the past? 3) If power was a complaint with regard to the veracity of past texts, what does it say about Wikipedia that Colbert can have all his fans go onto Wikipedia and literally change the definition for a given topic to something completely fallacious?

this is too funny.

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”

-----Albert Einstein

My new personal goal is to read (in this order) Robert Fagles' translations of Homer's Odessey and Virgil's Aeneid and then move onto Dorothy Sayer's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Anyone interested in joining me for some discussion around these three books and how each successive one builds on the other?

McLuhan vs. Mailer

Check out this google video with McLuhan and Mailer. Good stuff, especially watching it 40 years later! Who wins in hindsight?

"Around 1965, I went to church and heard a priest describe Vietnam as a holy war. That's when I walked out. Something told me he's dead wrong."

-----Martin Scorsese, from Rolling Stone interview (40th Anniversary edition)

Why we continue to ascribe God's name to ventures that run counter to His explicitly stated desires is beyond me. I wonder how many others have shut the door on God for similar reasons?

"It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy."

-----Czeslaw Milosz, from "The Captive Mind"

"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though , but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathesome, an insect on a dead thing."

-----David Foster Wallace, from the essay "Consider The Lobster" in "Consider The Lobster"

"We come here from Georgia. Our family did. Horse and wagon. I pretty much know that for a fact. I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain ain't so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth can't compete. But I don't believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talking about. I've heard it compared to the rock--maybe in the bible--and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe."

-----Cormac McCarthy, "No Country for Old Men" (Sherriff Bell monologue)


"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped and shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

-----Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

-----W.H. Auden

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

-----Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech in Washington, April 16, 1953

"I ask you! [Lewis] put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning, and said he was 'going short for Lent.'"

-----J.R.R. Tolkien forcefully responding to an article in the Daily Telegraph that characterized his friend C.S. Lewis as the "ascetic Mr. Lewis."

"I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God's existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existant address. Mind you I don't think so--the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so. However, there is nothing to do but to peg away. One falls so often that it hardly seems worth while picking oneself up and going through the farce of starting over again as if you could ever hope to walk. Still, this seeming absurdity is the only sensible thing I do, so I must continue it."

-----C.S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, (24 December 1930)

"To interpret the Bible truly, then, we must do more than string together individual propositions like beads on a string. This takes us only as far as fortune cookie theology, to a practice of breaking open Scripture in order to find the message contained within. What gets lost in propositionalist interpretation are the circumstances of the statement, its poetic and affective elements, and even, then, a dimension of its truth. We do less than justice to Scripture if we preach and teach only its propositional content. Information alone is insufficient for spirital formation. We need to get beyond 'cheap innerancy,' beyond ascribing accolades to the Bible to understanding what the Bible is actually saying, beyond professing biblical truth to practicing it."

-----Kevin J. Vanhoozer, from "Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture and Hermeneutics" in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (March 2005)

Three cheers for the new democratic congress signing off on unprecedented debt relief and benefits packages for Africa. You can read about it here. Finally someone is funding Bush's commitment!

The tremulous scrupulosity of those who are obsessed with pleasures they love and fear narrows their souls and makes it impossible for them to get away from their own flesh. They have tried to become spiritual by worrying about the flesh, and as a result they are haunted by it. They have ended in the flesh because they began in it, and the fruit of their anxious asceticism is that they "use things not," but do so as if they used them.

In their very self-denial they defile themselves with what they pretend to avoid. They do not have the pleasure they seek, but they taste the bitter discouragement, the feeling of guilt which they would like to escape. This is not the way of the spirit. For when our intention is directed to God, our very use of material things sanctifies both them and us, provided we use them without selfishness or presumption, glad to receive them from Him who loves us and whose love is all we desire."

-----Thomas Merton, "No Man Is An Island"

According to the "Which Big Lebowski character are you?" quiz:

Why don't you check it out? Or we cut off your Johnson!