Not-so New Proclamation

I've been meaning, with the aid of the current New Proclamation volume, to continue with some lectionary thoughts. To be honest, that project is in abeyance until we're free from the influence of Timothy Mulder's anemic contributions, which expire as Advent turns to Epiphany on January 3. I'm hoping for better things from Kim Beckmann, but time will tell.

It takes a while for a reformed (that's "reformed" with a "small r", brethren) fundy to get to grips with mainline homiletics. Instead of stringing together context-free Bible verses to "prove" something, the lectionary approach seeks to - usually - expand on a particular passage and somehow hook it in to the everyday reality of the captive audience in the pews. The result is almost always woefully patronising and facile.

Some months ago I decided to subscribe to a podcast of sermons delivered weekly in the chapel of one America's great seminaries. The idea was to hear some outstanding examples of the preacher's craft. Week by week the denomination's brightest and best are wheeled in to provide high-calibre exemplars that the nation's future pastors can learn from.

It was barely worth the effort. Some of these same people, teaching in front of a class, might well inspire and ignite their students' interest. Put them in a pulpit though, and it's a different story. It's not that the preachers are completely inept, one suspects, but that the "genre" itself is bankrupt of relevance in the modern world.

Once the local pastor, priest, minister, vicar or reverend was perhaps the best educated person in the community. That world has now gone, unless you live in an isolated village in Fiji. Nor do we still live in that world where getting together on Sunday after church was among the social highlights of the week, particularly for house-bound women who found a sense of community in the church, and temporary escape from the demands of home and hearth, despite the stifling patriarchy.

So why do people still troop in through the doors on Sunday mornings? Well, the reality is that fewer and fewer of them do. Rather than miffed preachers railing against laziness and bemoaning the awfulness of it all, maybe it might help to shelve the homiletics approach and rethink the whole enterprise from the ground up.

Summer Reading #4

As far as anyone can tell, the first Christians used the Greek Septuagint (LXX) as their default scripture, along with variants, and not the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT). Paul quotes the LXX - or at least refers to it, which is truly remarkable if he really did study at Jerusalem under Gamaliel, as was later claimed. Which raises the question, why are almost all modern Christian translations of the "Old Testament" based on the MT?

There are English versions of the LXX available, including the excellent NETS version, but that is very much targeted at an academic readership. The last popular non-Hebrew-based OT translation was probably Monsignor Ronald Knox's, based on the Latin Vulgate, and dating back to 1955.

When another monsignor, Nicholas King, a Jesuit scholar based at Oxford, released his New Testament translation in 2004, it was well reviewed, but didn't seem to make much of a splash. He has since followed up (in 2008) with the first instalment of the Old Testament, the Wisdom literature. But the difference was that King went back to the LXX, crafting a readable and intelligent alternative to almost everything else currently available.

King's volume on the Wisdom literature includes not only Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), but Wisdom and ben Sira (or Ecclesiasticus) from the expanded canon most familiar to Catholics. Although this is volume 3 in the series - the others are the Pentateuch, Historical Books and Prophets - it is the first of the four to appear in print.

Here's a sample from ben Sira 38.

1. Honour the doctors, with appropriate honours, for their services; for the Lord created them also.
2. For medicine comes from the Most High, and the healer will receive a gift from the king.
3. The doctor's science will make them hold their heads up high, and they will be admired among the great.
4. The Lord created medicines from the earth, and a prudent person will not be irked by them.

(One wonders how much agony people would have been spared if that passage had appeared in the canon of those sects which disdain the use of "medical science"!)

Sourcing a copy might not be easy. It doesn't seem to appear on Amazon, and your run-of-the-mill Christian bookstore is unlikely to be even aware of it. The publisher's page might be a reasonable place to start.

I'm still exploring the text, but like what I've seen so far, and much prefer it to NETS. The footnotes are brief, helpful and pertinent. The Septuagint is the original scripture of the early church, and as such deserves a far greater profile than it currently has.

Schaeffer excerpt - try before you buy

There's an article length excerpt from Frank Schaeffer's Patience With God over at Religion Dispatches (click here). It isn't the bit I'd have chosen, but it's still pretty good. Enjoy!

Summer Reading #3

Frank Schaeffer

Patience with God: Faith for People Who Dont Like Religion (or Atheism)

This has got to be my number one book recommendation for 2009. Frank Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer, the high-profile evangelical writer and thinker (using that last term loosely) of the 1970s. Frank - who embarked down the same path in his earlier years - has since walked away from that kind of religion. In fact, he's denounced it.

But Schaeffer isn't an atheist either, and has no kind words for Hitchins or Dawkins (though he does have a few for Dennett.) In this unusual and quite personal book he steers a middle path between what he regards as fundamentalisms at both extremes. Does he bring it off? Absolutely!

Each chapter begins with a brief quote from Kierkegaard. Well, that's unusual for a start. But if you think you're in for a philosophical treatise that will have you nodding off before bedtime, think again. This is a wonderfully readable book, rich with personal anecdotes.

Words were invented by people to describe what they perceive to be "true" from what amounts to an ant's roadside eye-view of passing cosmic traffic. (p.8)

Even Mr. Big himself, big in the Church's history - St. Augustine - promoted what today's fundamentalists would denounce as a "relativistic" approach to the Scriptures. (p.21)

Bill Maher gets trounced in chapter 2. Dawkins is slapped silly in chapter 3 (which includes the wonderful tale of "the gospel walnut"). I tiptoed through this chapter, being a bit of an admirer of Dawkins, but the points were fairly made. Chapter 4 - once you're into it - includes a few pertinent comments on the pitfalls of Calvinism; so that deserved a standing ovation all by itself! Then Schaeffer slugs two of the big names in contemporary philosophy and ethics, Peter Singer and Richard Rorty. Normal, balanced folk may never have heard of these two, but out in the academy they're big-time. And then, as he continually does, Schaeffer brings us back to the real world and his infant granddaughter Lucy, who serves as a kind of lodestone throughout the account.

Chapter 5 engages with Daniel Dennett. Schaeffer admires Dennett, and explains why - and where he takes leave from Dennett's position.

Chapter 6 blasts Christopher Hitchins; a disection that's almost painful to witness, but you just can't put the book down...

Chapter 7 moves on to evangelical icons like Rick Warren and C.S. Lewis. Oh no, not C.S. Lewis!

Never mind that Lewis had had several weird sexual relationships, including one with a married woman, or that he was a drunk. How many evangelicals got to teach at Oxford or give lectures on the BBC? Lewis played for our team. (p.93)

Which brings up an interesting point: The curious parasitic habit of evangelicals borrowing intellectual (or artistic) respectability from Christians who were never and never would have been American-style evangelicals - for instance, from Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. These authors (all of whom are studied at Wheaton and some of whose papers are enshrined there) would have shot themselves rather than be condemned to attend, let alone teach at, Wheaton College or any other evangelical/fundamentalist backwater institution like it. (p.93-94)

Preach it brother!

Personality cults with no accountability and no tradition and no structure to fall back on when the "Dear Leader" dies, or is found to have "fallen" - whatever - are no better than the men and women they're built on. The "something bigger" you though you joined just turns out to be some smooth-talking guy named Rick, or maybe Frankin Graham (p.95)

If that's not enough to leave you breathless, chapter eight lays into the rapture nutcases, LaHaye, Lindsey et al.

If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchins, I'd pick Hitchins in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn't try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine. (p.109)

And be warned, he doesn't have much that's nice to say about the book of Revelation. There's also a wonderful sideswipe at evangelical paranoia.

And that's just Part 1 of the book.

(To be continued...)

You know you want one #1

Something to wear to Christmas Day services at your local Presbyterian or Reformed church. Pin on a bit of mistletoe for added effect (optional.)

A Hard Act to Follow

This thing has dominated the talk radio station I have tuned in on the car radio all day. People in distant places on the planet (like Texas) have emailed me local versions of the story.

St Matthew-in-the-City is Auckland's cutting-edge progressive congregation. Well, as cutting-edge as an Anglican church can be. I've sat in the pews there a few times to hear visiting speakers like John Shelby Spong. The building itself is rather beautiful in an Anglican kind of way. SMITC fills the niche that a progressive UU congregation might play in an American city.

If Glynn Cardy wanted to raise debate with a provocative billboard, he's certainly succeeded. Amazing how radio hosts who have zero knowledge on a subject can bluff their way through with trite observations. The callers have been no better. One guy who "serves" (i.e. lights candles and similar tasks) at Christchurch Cathedral called in to express his disquiet. When asked whether he was talking about his affiliation to the Anglican cathedral (as opposed to the Catholic one) he didn't seem completely sure. A trainee minister in the Anglican church followed. He kept referring to the virgin birth as the "immaculate conception," which is just plain ignorant (as any good Catholic will swiftly point out.)

The Xmas kitsch story - the grand amalgam of Matthew and Luke's divergent narratives into a tinsel-wrapped nativity scene - has never jingled my bells to any great extent. Advent is the most thoroughly compromised of the seasons on the Christian calendar. If Cardy was trying to send-up the seasonal mythology for a higher purpose though, this had to be a horrible miscalculation.

Walk into SMITC and you'll see what I mean. What's the purpose of rattling the cage of passers-by who are Catholic, Baptist or nothing-in-particular when, on the inside you'll find stained glass, altars, pews, and assorted high-church paraphernalia to comfort the committed clientele? Wouldn't it be a bolder move to pin the stupid thing up on the altar? Instead, just look at the graphic SMITC is using to promote its Xmas services.

Putting the cat among the Xmas chickens isn't what I object to. The more cats the merrier! But this billboard - created by an advertising agency - is not just needlessly offensive, it's plain crass. And it certainly doesn't do what it sets out to do - which is direct people to think about the meaning behind the story. It invites a knee-jerk reaction, not considered debate.

A definite "fail."

Another reason to boycott Gloria Jean's

This story has already featured on Jim West's blog, so it's probably well known to many readers here already.

I'm not sure about other parts of the planet, but in New Zealand and Australia Gloria Jean's operates the coffee franchise inside Borders stores, as well as a raft of stand-alone cafes. I've patronized the ones in Melbourne and Auckland - but that was before I learned of the Hillsong connection. Yes, I know I've ranted about this before, but the thought of 10% of my bill funding bad religion... thanks but no thanks.

The key quote comes at the end of this report: Peter Irvine jointly owns the Gloria Jean’s cafe chain with Hillsong board member Nabi Saleh.