PonderousWORDS

What Mystery Is This?

2011-09-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

I've little time to write, but when the inspiration is perceived I cannot refuse composition.

I am agnostic. That designation, of course, fails to fully describe me. But it is a sufficient signifier to act as a referent for my metaphysical assent. Why is it then that, despite my inability to believe fully, I have of late felt an overwhelming presence of grace, of gratitude, of compassion, of love? I find myself weeping, sometimes uncontrollably, at even a hint of beauty or humility that happens upon me.

Beyond that, there is a deep, dark cloud of righteousness that hovers over me, obscuring even, at times, my eyes. I cannot escape it. (I know this sentence makes little sense. I am describing the affective, not the cognitive.)

Who will deliver me from God? I am terrified. In fact, I am so overcome by it even now that I cannot write more. It's too much.

Weeping

2010-11-16T03:00:00.000-08:00

I am so very foolish- For ever thinking that I knew something. For thinking that I was righteous. For thinking that I was above reproach. For thinking that I understood people, friends and family alike and my relationship to them. For thinking that being correct comes before humility and compassion. For thinking that success would come to me by virtue of my genetic qualities and not diligent work. For not honoring the love given to me. For turning my nose up at what I saw as weaknesses in others. For not sensing my own blindness. For speaking about that which I had little to no knowledge of. For feeling entitled to attention from my community. For so much more that I will not even be aware of until I have suffered its consequences.

Have mercy on me, God of mercy.

Thoughts anterior to Hellenic language training

2010-11-10T04:01:00.000-08:00

I still have an hour before my Wednesday/Friday Readings in Biblical Greek course begins this morning. 8am courses are just the worse. No philosophical explication necessary. Next semester, I have no courses beginning before 9:30am and only 3 courses during the traditional semester (thanks to a J-term course in Romans with the popular NT scholar, Michael Raymond Brown). Thank Gaia and Sophia!
Other than that, I'll be taking Matthew with the magnificent and world-famous Luke Timothy Johnson, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians Greek Exegesis with Steven Kraftchick (who also happens to be the MTS program director), and Womanist Theology and Narrative Identity with the Ricoeurian and poststructuralist scholar, Andrea White. If you know me . . . or have ever spoken to me for that matter . . . then you must know how these classes are absolutely perfect for me. I could not be more enthused.
I don't suppose I have much more to say. My life has been so voraciously consumed by the insatiable beast of academe for the past couple months that I've had little time to do or meditate on anything extraneous to it. Tomorrow I'm flying home to be in a good friend's wedding. Perhaps events at the bachelor party will resuscitate my floundering social life. [laughs to himself because he is in a public place]

Euphoria and assuagement

2010-08-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

I am now a research assistant for Dr. Carl Holladay, Charles Howard Candler Professor of New Testament; Co-Director of the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University.

Woot!

the Apocalypse of May

2010-07-15T23:11:00.001-07:00

After I exsanguinated you,
Your shell rose up and crushed my soul,
My infidelity was your cue,
To turn an embrace into a suffocating squeeze,
Leaving my bones to suffer in the merciless summer sun.

And my palms and fingers are now rotting off,
Not a game to play since the apocalypse of May,
Had I my feet to bring me to the keys,
Yet I would refrain,
Your mad rant dancing in my ears,
"I'll always be above you, I'll always be above you."

Landlocked Blues

2010-06-02T23:36:00.000-07:00

If you walk away I'll walk away
first tell me which road you will take
I don't want to risk our paths crossing someday
so you walk that way I'll walk this way

and the future hangs over our heads
and it moves with each current event
until it falls all around like a cold steady rain
just stay in when it's lookin' this way

and the moon's laying low in the sky
forcing everything metal to shine
and the sidewalk holds diamonds like a jewelry store case
they argue "walk this way," "no walk this way"

and Laura's asleep in my bed
as I'm leaving she wakes up and says
"I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave
baby don't go away, come here"

and there's kids playing guns in the street
and one's pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up I say:
"Enough is enough,
If you walk away I'll walk away."
(and he shot me dead)

I found a liquid cure
for my landlocked blues
it will pass away
like a slow parade
it's leaving but I don't know how soon

and the world's got me dizzy again
you'd think after 22 years I'd be used to the spin
and it only feels worse when I stay in one place
so I'm always pacing around or walking away
I keep drinking the ink from my pen
and I'm balancing history books up on my head
but it all boils down to one quotable phrase
"If you love something give it away"
A good woman will pick you apart
a box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended, and you may be afraid
but don't walk away, don't walk away

We made love on the living room floor
with the noise in the background from a televised war
And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say
"If we walk away, they’ll walk away"
But greed is a bottomless pit
And our freedom's a joke we're just taking a piss
And the whole world must watch the sad comic display
If you're still free start runnin' away
'cause we're comin' for ya!

I've grown tired of holding this pose
I feel more like a stranger each time I come home
So I'm making a deal with the devils of fame
Sayin' let me walk away, please
You'll be free child once you have died
from the shackles of language and measurable time
And then we can trade places, play musical graves
till then walk away walk away walk away walk away
So I'm up at dawn, putting on my shoes
I just want to make a clean escape
I'm leaving but I don't know where to
I know I'm leaving but I don't know where to

-Bright Eyes

A day in the Galilee

2009-09-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

One thing is for sure, and that is that Capernaum is a small and inconspicuous place, especially for the origins of an entirely new faith. Visiting the ancient village and then discussing Jesus’ teachings helped me to make what I think is an important connection. Jesus’ teachings represented and were intentionally a reversal of traditional social values in his day. He emphasized this reversal in his avoidance of the larger towns and cities in the Galilee. A significant religious movement would be expected to begin in a politically significant place, like Tiberias or Sepphoris. Of course, Jesus may have been conducting his ministry in a subtle way so as to avoid disproportionate imperial attention. However, it is just as likely that he meant to “say something” through his attention to the small villages and hamlets of northern Israel.

I think it's also important that I say this. I spent much of the day prior to our time at the Jordan River wondering how I might feel as I abstained from being baptized, or more accurately, from re-enacting my baptism. My reason for abstaining in the first place is multi-faceted, but is ultimately theological in scope. I have no problem with commemorating an important religious event. Memory is, of course, integral to the life of a community. And although the Bible seems to mandate one baptism, I’m sure the ontological legitimacy of the event (whatever that might be) is not hampered by re-enactment. No, my reason has to do with what is an emerging and simultaneously strong element of my identity. I am, insofar as cosmological conviction is concerned, a non-theist. I do not, at present, believe in the existence of a supernatural being or beings. Neither do I imagine the divine to be some sort of “ground of all Being” or “No-thing” as Paul Tillich suggested. I simply do not hold to the conviction that such forces or entities are foundational to reality. Therefore, by abstaining from baptism I felt, in a way, spiritually strong. Despite a waning desire to participate in the life of the church, I conducted myself in a manner faithful to what I feel that I know. And for this, I have no apology.

fede di origine

2009-07-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving for the UK in two days. Apart from my obvious excitement to see my one true love again, my enthusiasm has a religious flavor. Yes, I mean a trip to Scotland, England, and Italy will be historically enlightening with regard to my 'faith of origin'. But I am also quite sure that it promises something a bit deeper than educational reflection. Walking where the church patriarchs and leaders of classical and medieval Europe made monumental contributions to the development of Christianity, seeing the places where these men and women made courageous (and often fatal) stands for what they believed in, and, no less, visiting the locations of grotesque and horrific acts that were committed in the name of κυριος και σωτηρας should, I hope, give me greater affirmation for my desire to promote collaboration and peace among religious traditions and ethnic groups. I imagine that it will also deeply re-impress upon me a feeling of godlessness and mistrust in any conceptions regarding the supernatural.
But other than that, I hope to be very much surprised. Whatever mystical feeling, rational sentiment, or conglomeration of the two comes my way, I hope to embrace it with open arms and be willing to preserve it for future reflection. A wise woman once told me that international travel changes everything about you, not least your cosmology. In preparation of this (if that is even possible), I am conditioning myself to let the waters of Derrida's neologism, diffèrance, to wash over me in waves of cultural ineptitude on my part and objectively decentralized significance on the part of the visit. In short, I cannot wait. However, there are two more sleeps between me and my journey.

Thing am I, No?

2009-06-26T22:26:00.001-07:00

Let us examine the beauty of no-thingness together
See how it is so richly empty of everything
Watch it slide and spin serenely into immobility
Hear it sing its hymns of silence from peaks of formless mountains
And place your fleshy pink hands on its massively minuscule corpus

It is celestial and uninterrupted space
For the forming of that which is
And if it Were, then we would not Be
For our being is birthed from the no-thing all around and within
And we swim in it until the drowning that all thing-ness things endure

Cosmic journey through the void
How many of us do not even see it?

my favorite excerpt from Waking Life

2009-05-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

If we're looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological -- development of the cities -- and cultural, which is human expression.

Now, what you've seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time scales that are involved here -- two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it -- you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. You're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation.

The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, noncompetitive grouping. Okay, independent from the external.

And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until we reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human? human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space.

And the manifestations of this neo-human-type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It's sterile. It's efficient, okay? And its manifestations of those social adaptations. We're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, okay? Uh, war, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These will be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. And that is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice.

Eat this Book

2009-04-30T17:04:00.000-07:00

In the beginning: A song about Jesus,

Felt boards, Moses, plagues and Sinai,

Children's church, costumes, Israel is a stage,

Sunday school lessons and a sponge for a brain,

Then came the questions- what is the Book is saying?

Metaphor, story, history, fact?

Narrative, allusion, typology, interpretive act?

Did the patriarchs live? Did the chabod come down?

Is the Torah composite or God's great monolith?

Read the Bible again for the first time,

Took Borg's advice, devoured Crossan once more,

Beat Empire with God,

Beat God with Dawkins,

Beat the Bible with Source, Form, Redaction, History,

Literary- modern, postmodern, post-structural, post-colonial, post-everything,

Beat myself over the head with Spinoza, Reimarus, Strauss, Schliermacher, Schweitzer, Wellhausen, Kasemann, this man and that man,

When will this end?

Niebuhr made me doubt, Barth made me hope,

Tillich gave me the courage to be and Moltmann gave me all,

Commentaries, dictionaries and lexicons,

Excursus, prolegomena, hermeneutic,

Waddell's Spirit gave way to Fiorenza's suspicion and Bultmann's doubt,

And in the end that's all I could ever hope to have,

No more song, only text,

Only confusion, and a mind that never rests.

An Excursus over iced cofee

2009-03-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

I'm the most thoughtful in two places- Lake Hollingsworth (especially when running it) and Mitchells. I'm downtown in that familiar coffeehouse today, at the same wooden table where I usually find myself seated. Iced coffee (house blend), book (The Memoirs of God), and of course, Macbook (surrendering my auditory canal and tympanic membrane to Colour Revolt) . And while I enjoy all of these trappings, they are just that. I am encumbered by their demands for my attention and feel fettered by the cognitive engagement they drain from my frontal cortex. If I had any strength of will, I would make my own thoughts and voice louder than the waves of light and sound that they emit without repentance. This is so much easier though. It helps me sneak back further and deeper into the cave of individualism, where I don't have to look anyone in the face, speak to anyone, feign interest, or pretend that I'm not bothered by Romanticism and the illegitimate children of postmodernity.
[Excursus- Today's college student is a paradox. She is realistic about her limitations, yet dares to dream of apocalyptic utopia. He doesn't believe in the devil, but believes that God loves him. She acknowledges the fact of natural selection, but will never abandon her pre-Enlightenment belief in love and hope as cosmic forces. I can't stomach any of that. The post-structuralists tell us that either/or is a false question, that your reality is as veritable as mine. I would agree to the extent that our realities are for the most part optical delusions. Yes, delusions. Illusion is acceptable and inevitable. But unless people recognizes the illusion, their worldview is absolutely and entirely misled and deformed.]
I would rather be running. There, all of my dormant frustration can be transferred into kinetic energy. There, I am impervious. Life's discomforts are no longer threatening, even to this chemically-imbalanced freak. I embrace the cold wind, the beating heat of solar radiation, the pain caused by the slow and steady build-up of lactic acid in my calves, the insects making their way into my outer ear and mouth, humidity and precipitation. I "feel" alive.
But . . . when it's all said and done, nothing has really improved. So, back to the books, the coffee, the music, the blogs that serve as a receptacle for mental vomit. Life is rather monotonous, isn't it?

IIIII

2008-11-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

I see you coming to life,
In strange ways,
Inverted,
Ilks outward as if you don't mind,
Inwardly pining for what's already yours.

touching Heaven

2008-08-05T22:26:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was minding my own business at a Starbucks in Lakeland (Lake Miriam) when I was approached by a homeless man who just began to talk to me. He said that he hoped I didn't mind if he spoke with me, that he was lonely and sometimes just needed to talk to someone. So I asked him to sit with down with me at my table and I began to listen to his story . . . a pitifully tragic story of repeated failure and defeat, of loneliness and dejection. From the heavy smell of alcohol emanating from his breath (along with all sorts of other scents), I could deduce that he had tried to numb the lifetime of pain that he had endured and was taking nearly two hours to tell me about. More than once he stopped and wept . . . a pathetic man in a pathetic condition. In fact, if this man had lived in first-century Palestine, he would be called cursed and not only avoided by choice but it would be a legal mandate to stay abreadth of his uncleanness. The poor and destitute were counted as nothing and had no place in society. So it is no difficult thing to understand that Jesus (who might very well have been a student of the great Pharisee Hillel) faced certain shame and ostracization for ministering to (touching) the shameful and ostracized ones in Galilee. He even proclaimed the cultural blasphemy that these unclean wretches were the greatest of the blessed membes of the Kingdom of Heaven. Obviously he wasn't speaking literally . . . these people would never enter into any real palatial inheritance. He was making an important societal metaphor concerning priority: how can a nation stand before its God or even stand at all if it forgets and even curses its less fortunate and destitute?So I put forth the same question in our context: How can we stand before God or even exist as a community of faith if we don't take the time to touch and declare blessed the cursed of our community?

Inadequate

2008-07-12T19:17:00.000-07:00

As of late, I have felt very inadequate. It goes like this: As I venture further into my passion for biblical history and scholarship, I realize how much I don't know and how much so many people in the field do know. Simultaneously, I am feeling more and more disconnected from the call to ordained ministry. Don't get me wrong, I still feel a deep desire to minister to people and help them, but my emotional connection to the ministry itself is waning. . .quickly. Therefore, inadequacy sums it up. And I'm not going to attach some cheesy/tired platitude about God being adequate or sufficient when I'm not. It's true, I'm sure. . .but truthfully, at the moment, I don't feel it.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls

2008-07-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

I often wonder how God thinks and feels. Is He one to experience human emotion, or are our anthropopathisms a mere grasp at the unnamed and immeasurable emotions of the One? What can be said of a being or force that at once feels and acts for, towards, and because of a countless quantity of life-forms in Its own universe or creation? Obviously, we could never fully comprehend what He perceives or how He gauges existence (I use "He" because it is traditional). But I am confident that at times, He and I are one in thought or feeling. For a moment, His sympathy transcends His own transcendence, and we are one in the immanence of Suchness; and through that, I am able to, if but for a fleeting moment, know a bit of the "more than Presence" that I claim to serve. And of course, if I were to give more of myself, I might encounter more of these bittersweet jots of "it all". I imagine, then, that knowing or "having relationship with" God has very little to do with acquiescing to a system of soteriological dogma or practice (in other words, it's not about believing certain things to be factually true or behaving a certain way). This relationship is absolutely defined by acknowledging the Eternal, and consciously interacting with Him whose throne is in Heaven. We can learn the way of that celestial home, and with the Spirit, make it a reality here for the generations that come after us. That is the only Heaven we will ever know. . .

I am feeling. . .

2008-06-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

SUBVERSIVE!

non-violent

impassioned

yes, that's the rub. . .

Can You Feel It?

2008-06-15T19:23:00.000-07:00

They say change is coming.

I think they're correct.

But what can humanity accomplish that is truly new?

Can we make something authentically original?

"What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
'Look! This is something new'?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow."
-Ecclesiastes 1.9-11

The Spirit creates ex-nihilo.

The Spirit is doing-saying-making something(or all things) NEW.

"In the last days
the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established
as chief among the mountains;
it will be raised above the hills,
and peoples will stream to it.
Many nations will come and say,
'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.'
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He will judge between many peoples
and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
Every man will sit under his own vine
and under his own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the LORD Almighty has spoken."
-Micah 4:1-4

A Grief Neglected

2008-06-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

"What is mourning, and how do we mourn? Is mourning the reverse side of love, and is its pain the mirror-writing of Love's delight? The greater the love, the deeper the grief; the more unreserved the surrender, the more inconsolable the loss. Those who have given themselves utterly in love for someone else die themselves in the pains of grief, and are born again so that life can be given to them afresh, and so that they can again find the will to live."

-Jurgen Moltmann

I am struck by the phenomenon of human grief. When we lose somebody dear to us, and the mourning process commences in us, it seems as if life has halted for a time: consistent deep sadness, loss of interest in the world around us, insurmountable depression, inhibition of activity, etc. The fact that this is a natural occurrence is in remarkable contrast to the usual resilience of the human species. Behaviors emerge in us that would be cause for clinical diagnosis were they not solely present during a period of mourning. This is generally accepted; and in a strange but hardly morbid way, it is rather beautiful.

What is grotesquely morbid, however, is our modern era's narcissistic suppression of the mourning process. Sure, individuals are often left alone to their emotional grief when they desire to be without company, but consolation and solidarity as practiced by a caring community is snubbed as antiquated or out-dated. Sadly, many are also fearful of the mourning environment. . . that somehow they might contract the negative feelings in that atmosphere like one would a bacterial infection. But that is precisely the purpose of such involvement, to adopt the feelings of the grieved individual or groups and aid in the healing that must occur.

I commend those in the Christian Church who still feel that it is the Body of Christ's responsibility to be the healing balm for the wounded spirit in their community. We are the parakletos, commissioned by the Spirit to participate in the divine solidarity with those who suffer and mourn. They need us and count on us to be the sacred agents of life and love and empathy. How dare we abandon them?

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."

A New Game or As It Has Always Been

2008-06-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

Fast on thy feet and quick as the meadow's hare,
Where dost the sinewy calf take thee?
For indeed with the strength of will and complexion in thine Estate,
What will keep thee from conquering the greater Dominion of Man?

Oh, but far be it from thee to take All with a sweeping gesture,
Or to harbor Them under thy wing as a hen,
It be far simpler still to pluck Him one by one,
And leave Adam's Seed dazed and stripped of all he was confident;

Alas, wilt none of Man tame the tempest that is thine essence,
Without murdering the spirit's luster and leaving only shell intact?
Behold, even now It does approach with haste!
Run! Quickly!

Thou hast escaped with fervor that which you have hunted,
Indeed the Predator has become the Prey,
But what is this?
A new Game for thy fancy?
A new day to frolic about the meadow of love.

Full Bellies

2008-06-09T18:37:00.000-07:00

Recently, many of my friends have been voicing their disappointment in themselves for their lack of "desperation" and "hunger" for God. They say that they want to be "on fire" or "thirsty" for the Spirit, but that they can't muster the necessary effort or take the time to attain this state of desire. Their quagmire is a trifle mis-guided to me (although, I must admit, not unfamiliar). I submit that they (and myself) are not wanting or desirous because they are already satisfied spiritually. If we can agree that most everything that is temporal and physical is simultaneously spiritual, I can proceed to make my case. We spend most every moment of our waking hours attempting to appease those elements of existence that can never be quieted: basic physical and emotional needs. Guess what? We are splendidly successful! This process repeats itself until exhaustion forces us to our beds. That, brothers and sisters, is entirely natural. Our ancestral predecessors did it until their dying day and so shall we. Rest easy.
. . .wait. . .
There's something missing. A lingering, pestering thought in the back of our minds reminds us that somewhere, someone said that there was more to all of this. We, North Americans, probably think of the Bible. And yes! EVERY last one of its authors was absolutely convinced that the Spirit could be reached at a deeper level of consciousness. This was most often accomplished by practicing some sort of asceticism or devoting extraordinary attention to the over-used anthropomorphism, voice of God. They gave up their lives: social, marital, familial, etc. And their words mean so much to us for a reason, and not just that they might be from God. It's because in a profound, metaphorical sense, they were from a different world. Often we are reading the words of an un-liked, impoverished, persecuted, and ostracized man who was speaking to an equally un-liked and usually rebellious group of people. . .yes, I mean a Jewish prophet. Also, many of us have been moved by the words of early Christian writers, whose lives were characterized by mysticism or shaped by a monastic lifestyle. The same is true for them. They wrote from a different world. We gain from them, but. . .
Until we enter their world, we will be unable to attain their desire or their "hunger". I believe that most of us will be content to ride this mental roller-coaster for the rest of our lives, believing the lie fed to us from birth. . .from pulpits. . .from friends. . .that we can exist in our comfortable world and, at the same time, have as powerful a spiritual life as those men and women before us, of whom we read and have our inspiration.

Unfortunate.

Oddly enough, I have found a deep hunger from an unexpected source. It's not what you might think. Ask me about it and I'll share.

Love's Paradox

2008-06-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

There is nothing between us, my Love, save for distance that shall be traversed in due course and time whose grey beard betrays his soon departure.

What delight awaits when we winged creatures of affection, caught up in the heated current of rapturous embrace, are reunited again in each other's everlasting arms?

Will we away ourselves on a draft of wind to a nest of love, or is it our fate to fly higher still to the sun's golden beams, only to fall just as swiftly and drown in Neptune's current?

I think nothing of it at all, for what does it matter: heighth or depth, home or vagabond?
I soar at the thought of you alone, I fall through this very earth to hades when you are absent;
I am lost without a dwelling place in the kingdom of your heart, and I am at home in your arms.

Cosmology

2008-06-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

Ah, the Evangelical worldview. I have recently become rather intimately acquainted with this peculiar manner of thought in the most uncomfortable fashion. After posting a note on Facebook that was primarily concerned with how theological development has dramatically altered the New Testament's portrayal of the person of Jesus of Nazareth over many centuries, I expected some productive discourse on history and theology and the like. What I did not at all expect was a grotesque display of dogmatic yelling from what I will refer to as the "Bible-believing peanut gallery". On more than one occasion I was condemned to hell for my heresy and once witnessed the "casting pearls before swine" teaching used as an allegory. . .guess who the pig was?
Now, I would completely understand contemptuous anger if I had renounced my faith and called Christianity a hoax. But that was not what I accomplished in publishing that note. In fact, my note was a mere echo of a dialogue that has been going on for a very long time. Most scholars do not hold to the antiquated and indeed unnecessary doctrine of biblical inerrancy. . .however, that very idea (along with infallibility, an idea connoting some sort of supreme trustworthiness) is integral to the suvival of "Bible-believing" Evangelical Christians. For them, believing their interpretation of the Christian Bible (which is entirely ignorant of its historical context and makes every effort to incorporate those scriptures into its neat, comfortable paradigm) is the one and only manner of participation in salvation. They have what Marcus Borg calls a conscious literalism, in which they continually put a spin on their interpretation that will satisfy (it satisfies them. . .not the thinking person) the obvious historical and scientific problems with inerrancy.
So, certain people chose to ignore the more-or-less scholarly nature (I make no pretense of great knowledge. . .I call it scholarly because it appeals to the scholarly conscious) of my note and mounted a counter-attack to what they believed to be not only an attack on their faith, but on the Bible itslef!
This led me to several conclusions. Primarily, evangelical Christianity is exclusive toward other ideologies. This is of course the case with many religions, but what is unbearable for me is the hatred that accompanied many of the comments. Christianity is supposed to be a faith of love! Oh well, I imagine that I should have expected as much.
Something else I perceived was the complete and unabating ignorance of scholarship existing outside tired and re-affirmed orthodox Christian apologetics. These people thought that they were providing sound arguments, but their thoughts were confined to English translations of the biblical text. . .except for C.S. Lewis, this was all they quoted from. That, my friends, is circular logic. . .No! It's worse! It is using ancient biblical text (which was primarily concerned with metaphorical truth, not factual truth when composed so long ago) to support the validity of the factuality of that very same text! How incredibly provincial!
Also, there was such blatant hyprocrisy to be found. Concern for my spiritual well-being and this "dark path" that I have wandered onto was the focus of many comments. . .but there was no patience. . .no careful explanation to augment sincere worry. These "voices of concern" were alongside scathing denouncements and self-righteous pontification.
I cannot help but believe that the evangelical tradition is more dangerous than I have previously perceived it. What does that mean for me? I grew up in that mess. . .