Rob Bell just in Time

There is a nice new piece in Time magazine that I have been helping with for some time on Rob Bell written by David van Biema, one of the very best writers on religion in America. Here is the link---The Pastor's No Square. Unfortunately much of the analysis of Bell that I offered is deleted from the final version of the article, but you will get the gist of the matter.

BW3

Podcast on the Christian and his Intellectual Life

There is a new Christian studies center being launched at my son's alma mater, the University of Kentucky and the center has a website and is putting up inaugural podcasts. One of them involved an interview with me. You will find the teaser here below if you click on the link, and that will lead you to the fuller version at the new website. Enjoy.

jhhunter.podbean.com

If the link doesn't work for you, you know what to do. Paste it into the browser and this should take you to podbean where you will find it, old bean.

BW3

Tis the Season to be Jolly, with Humor for Pun and Profit

* Police were called to a daycare where a three-year-old was resisting a

rest.

* Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all

right now.

* The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference.

* To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

* When fish are in schools they sometimes take debate.

* The short fortune teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at

large.

* A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

* Thieves who steal corn from a garden could be charged with stalking.

* We'll never run out of math teachers because they always multiply.

* When the smog lifts in Los Angeles , U C L A.

* The math professor went crazy with the blackboard. He did a number on
it.

* The professor discovered that her theory of earthquakes was on shaky
ground.

* The dead batteries were given out free of charge.

* I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

* If you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.

* A dentist and a manicurist fought tooth and nail.

* A bicycle can't stand alone; it is two tired.

* Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

* A backward poet writes inverse.

* In a democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism, it's your
Count that votes.

* A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.

* If you don't pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.

* With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.

* Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I'll show you A -flat
miner.

* When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

* The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

* A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France , resulted in Linoleum
Blownapart.

* You are stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.

* He broke into song because he couldn't find the key.

* A calendar's days are numbered.

* A lot of money is tainted: 'Taint yours, and 'taint mine.

* A boiled egg is hard to beat.

* He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

* A plateau is a high form of flattery.

* Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

* When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

* When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she'd dye.

* Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.

* Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.

* Acupuncture: a jab well done

Ministry-- the Vocation with Greatest Job Satisfaction?

In a recent Special Report issue, America by the Numbers, some very revealing things came to light. The portion of the report which most interested me was the chart on the happiest people by job. 67% of all ministers say they are very happy on and with their jobs. The next happiest are firefighters, followed by Reservation and ticket agents and then architects. But back to clergy. They are clear examples that money does not make you happy. Of the some 37,820 clergy in America, the median salary is $39,680.

Most of these live in urban areas, but then so do most Americans-- out of 303 million people, 242 million Americans live in a city or a suburb, and 141 million work outside the home (in two parent families 64% have both parents working outside the home). Equally amazing of these 141 million who work outside the home 107 million of them drive to work alone-- incredibly wasteful. On an average morning some 70 million leave for work between 6:30 and 8:30 in the morning. The cities with the worst traffic (and so the longest commute time) are L.A. and San Diego in the west, and D.C. in the East (Boston and N.Y. are well behind-- in D.C. it takes an hour to get to work on average. In N.Y. and Boston, 46 minutes. On average Americans waste 38 hours a year and 26 gallons of gas per person sitting in traffic.

One of the most surprising statistics are about children and school. Every morning 55 million kids go to school. And 86% of them go to public schools. Only 7.7 million kids go to private schools, and there are 28,384 of them in the U.S. Some 6 million kids are not enrolled-- by which is meant they are either too young or they are home schooled, or they dropped out.

The analysis of married couples is especially interesting. 31.4 million couples have no children at home, whilst 24.2 million have children under 18 at home.

Where's the money? Well, average income has grown some 26.5% since 1980, but this really is not actually an increase for most. For 99% of tax payers the income has been nearly flat. In 2005 the top .o1% consisted of 14,588 tax payers making more than $9.6 million a year. Yet this .01% control some 5% of the nation's total wealth. The merely rich, which amounts to 1% of all tax payers make about 1.1 million a year.


How do we spend our free time and money? The statistics don't lie. We spend a lot more of it on entertainment than on charitable works. Every single day of the year Americans buy an average of 7,500 Samsung LCD TVs (and we average watching about 2 hours and 35 minutes of TV a day). In fact, we have more TVs in homes than people (2.73 per households compared to 2.6 persons per household). We buy about 4 million movie tickets a day. There are some 1 million 650 thousand DVD rentals from Netflix a day. We buy some 1,683,835 songs a day online. Today 71% of Americans have an internet connection. On average we spend one hour seven minutes online at home and 2 hours 36 minutes at work.

I wish I could say we are more fit now than when I was a child, but the truth is just the opposite. We spent $4.9 billion on fitness equipment last year, and another 17.4 billion on fitness clubs (there are 29,357 in the U.S), but guess what? On an average day, 83% of all Americans do not exercising at all. 20% of all Gold's gym members have not darken the doors of the place in the last four months, on average.

As for our eating habits-- be prepared to wince. In the U.S. we have 612,020 fast food cooks and only 392,850 farmers! Americans spend some $390 billion in restaurants in a year, but only 364 billion in grocery stores. 66% of us are overweight or obese, including 17% of our children. Every single day on average we buy: 1) 443,500 large fries at Burger King; 2) 93,000 jars of Ragu tomato sauce; 3) 58.8 million eggs; 4) 201,720 jars of Hellman's mayonaise; 5) 160,968 bottles of Absolut vodka; 6) 978,030 bags of Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn. None of which is good for us. I could go on.

What all this means for doctors and ministers is that we shall not soon be out of work-- there are too many unhealthy people-- physically, emotionally, spiritually out there in the U.S., and the number is growing.

SETTLED

Clodhoppers and sodbusters

Creeping across the plains,

Finding their own domain,

Wanderlust finally waned,

Settled.

Thrill seekers and risk takers

Pushing the envelope

Racing up the slope

Until they couldn't cope

Settled.

Mate seekers and date seekers

Combing the internet

Deciding to hedge their bets

Tired of not finding yet

Settled.

Politicos and Pac Men

Always testing the wind

Always prepared to bend

Whatever it takes to win

Settled.

Lawyers and Litigants

Suing to get their way

Heedless of what they pay

Until the judgment day

Settled.

Sports stars and movie stars

Shining in media’s light

Getting their image right

Stylin’ both day and night

Settled.

Teachers and preachers

Thinking they know it all

Ignoring verity’s call

Pushed up against the wall

Settled.

Pastors and ministers

Envisioning great success

Placing themselves under stress

Never confront or confess

Settled.

‘Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.’

BW3-- 12-4-07

The Bible Experience-- a Great Christmas Gift

I got home from the SBL to find waiting for me this huge box from Zondervan. Christmas came quite early. Perhaps you are not much into audio books. Perhaps you do not spend a lot of time riding in a car, and would rather here music anyway on such trips. But I have to tell you that you need to make an exception, and to help this along you can actually choose the all MP3 version of the entire Bible rather than the CDs of the whole set. Why? Because this is the best audio Bible of all time. When I was at the SBL meeting in SBL I watched the trailers for the Bible Experience and was very moved. To the left here is what you will find on the Zondervan web sight if you Google it, and I would encourage you to go and watch the samples.

This project is remarkable in many ways. In the first place, for the first time we have a modern inclusive language translation (the TNIV) dramatically read verbatim from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. This along makes it a worthwhile project as it is so easy to listen to and easier to comprehend than many translations.

Secondly, these dramatic readers are not just any readers. Some of them are some of the great African American actors of our time, and they definitely know how to bring the text to life--- Samuel L. Jackson, Blair Underwood, Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Cuba Gooding Jr., Angela Bassett, Alfre Woodard, Cicely Tyson, Levar Burton (the star of that great classic 'Roots' ) and so many others, including many African American ministers who have 'preacher voice'. I have to say hearing Blair Underwood as Jesus, and Samuel L. Jackson as the voice of God in the NT is pretty compelling stuff.


Thirdly, this production comes with sound effects and music. The theme for the Bible Experience sounds rather like the Hans Zimmer theme for Gladiator-- it is stirring and gets the blood pumping. You will hear snatches of this right along throughout the readings. You will also hear the ocean, sea gulls, crowds, various noises as well along the way to add a little color and flavor in the background of the reading. Mostly this works, though sometimes it is a little distracting. And in some places one could have wanted some music, where there was none. It is hard sometimes to figure why one might have music in some of these segments, but not in others. One of the interesting features is that often rather than have just one person reading a particular book the actors will trade off and male and female voices will trade off. This works quite well. There is also the interesting feature that God speaks directly (and this entails at various points not reading the phrase 'says/ declares the Lord', understandably).

The box set of the whole Bible has a few drawbacks. The CDs come in sleeves rather than jewel cases, so if you want to take a particular disc and listen to it in the car, you have to bring a spare case with you. The set as a whole is so large that it will not conveniently fit into a car's central CD container, but this is a minor complaint.

I will also tell you that the doing of this project clearly had a dramatic effect on some of the readers. Some of them, like Denzel Washington, were already Christians, but some who were not were enormously moved by doing this. God's Word comes alive! As Levar Burton says-- "there is no rattling off the Bible". Once you get caught up in its dramatic reading, you find yourself swept up and carried along to places you did not expect to go. The trailer of Blair Underwood reading the lines of Jesus in the Gospels is itself worth having.

So, are you looking for a gift that keeps on giving? A gift that could save some souls, without being confrontational? A gift that makes the Word come alive? This is the Christmas gift for you. The MP3 version of the complete Bible is a very reason $50.00 or so, depending on who you order it from. The full version of all the CDs is closer to $80.00, but heck this is way better than spending such money on a couple of Xbox games or controllers.

Be a blessing this Christmas--- give the Bible Experience. You won't regret it :)

Did Christ Come to Please Himself?

In the Advent season above all seasons, we need to know the character of our God and of his Christ well, so we can understand why God sent forth his only begotten Son-- namely because he loved the world and wanted to save it (John 3.16). Thus we must return once more to the discussion of God's motivations for what God does on this earth.

In our recent discussion of whether God is a self-centered being whose prime motivation for doing anything is self-glorification, too little time was given to the discussion of the Pauline view of Christ. Let us be clear that Paul most certainly views Christ as God. He says this very plainly in Rom. 9.5, where in a doxology only appropriate to God, he speaks of 'Messiah..., who is God over all, blessed forever, amen." This same view of Christ can be found in various other places including in the Christological hymns in Phil. 2.5-11 or in Col. 1, for example. This is not really a point of debate for Paul, but notice how especially the term Christ crops up in all such discussions about his being divine.

This brings us to an important, but often overlooked, verse in Rom. 15. Paul is discussing the other-directed character that Christians should manifest, and he says in verse two: "each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. " Paul then points to Christ as the example to follow in this other directedness and says "for even Christ did not please himself, but as it is written 'the insults of those which insult you, have fallen on me." Now this is an important text in itself to show the other-regarding and other-directed character and nature of Christ and his ministry, and it could be reinforced by numerous other texts.

For example, Phil. 2.5-11 is clear enough that the Son of God stripped himself of his divine prerogatives, or perhaps better said, did not take advantage of them (a more literal rendering) when he took on the form of a human being, indeed a servant amongst human beings. This is of course the direct opposite of self-glorification on any normal reading of this text. We could as well point to 2 Cor.8.9-- "for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who being rich, for you impoverished himself, so that, being poor, you might become rich." What is this text really about? The context does not suggest it is about actual money, as if this verse could be used to support a perverse prosperity Gospel. What riches did Christ set aside? Presumably this is referring to the same thing we find in Phil. 2.5-11. Christ set aside his glory, humbled himself, took on the inglorious state of being a servant of human beings, and so redeemed us.

Let me be clear here. I do indeed think that what Christ did redounded to his glory, and we should praise him for it. These texts have nothing to do with an anthropologically centered religion of human self-worship.

My concern is what these texts tell us about the divine Son of God's motivations and character in becoming human, becoming a servant of humans, dying for the sake of redeeming humans and the like. If Christ is the very exegesis of the Father and the Father's character, what these sorts of stories make clear is that not only does God not want us to be self-centered beings, God is also relational, other directed and loving and not a self-centered being.

Were this not the case, we might well expect odes in the Bible explaining how the Father loves himself, and the Son loves himself, and the Spirit loves himself, and so on. In fact, we find nothing really like this in the Bible. Not only is the Trinity in itself other-directed (so we hear about the Father's love for the Son and so on), so the Trinity as a whole is other-directed in its love for humankind. Furthermore, the motivation for loving the world of human beings is not, in the first instance so God may praise himself in a bolder way. Rather it is our job to praise and glorify God for what he does for us.

When we hear in the Bible that God is love we should pay close attention (1 John 4). Notice the use of the noun-- when we say God is righteous, God is holy, God is just, God is glorious, these are adjectives and attributes, but something more fundamental is being claimed when a noun like agape is used. Notice the text of 1 John 4 does not merely say God is loving, (though that is true as well), but by saying God is love the author is saying that God is by very nature other directed. Notice the way the exhortation works there-- "he who says he loves God and hates his brother/sister is a liar" Why? Because the lack of other directed love means the very love which God has and expresses is not in such a person, for God is [this very sort of other-directed] love. This is why the author of 1 John 4 is able to say that when you are loving in this other directed way you are 'born of God' which is to say reflecting the very image and character of God.

What then are texts like Isaiah 48.9-11 all about? On a superficial reading of a English translation of this marvelous Hebrew poetry, and in a modern individualistic setting, it is easy to misunderstand this material. My suggestion would be that you should never read a text like this without reading it in its own immediate context. And what the context of Isaiah 40-48 tells us is that God is all about redeeming his people, rescuing them from exile, and so on, because he loves his people, and has made promises to them.

But here is where the matter becomes complex. Precisely because God has made promises to redeem his people, God's reputation, or as Isaiah calls it, God's very name or name sake, is at stake in the way God relates to Israel. Is. 48.9-11 comes precisely at a juncture when God says that he must act in the way he does to vindicate his own name, which is to say to vindicate the promises he has made. Notice especially the rhetorical question in 48.11-- "for why should my name be profaned?" And of course God is especially concerned with his name not being profaned by his own people! Thus we hear about how stubborn and stiff necked Israel has been (vs. 4), and so he says he restrains his anger, so that his people will not curse, but rather praise him "for the sake of my praise'). By rights, God's people should praise him, but in fact when God chastens them this often leads to curses rather than praising.

Why then does Is. 48.9 say 'for my own sake, for my own sake, I do it'? This sounds quite self-referential doesn't it? But in fact this is another way of God saying-- 'for my name's sake' which is to say 'for my reputation's sake'. Why is that reputation on the line in how God treats Israel? Because of course God has made promises to Israel, even when it behaves badly, so if God chastens them like a silversmith burning up tainted silver, there will be no one to praise God left if his people are all incinerated by God's wrath. And God will have appeared to renege on his promises.

Finally God says "for my glory I will not give to another." Now this has nothing whatsoever to do with some metaphysical issue (i.e. God is glory personified, we are not). It has to do with God not giving his praise to someone else, or better said, God not extracting praise from some other people.

This is the very reason why Jacob/Israel is addressed in the tones it is in Is. 48.10ff. They need to get back to praising God and glorifying God as they did when they were behaving appropriately. Otherwise God's reputation is profaned 'amongst the heathen' where they are in exile.

This entire discourse will be totally misconstrued if it is taken out of the honor and shame context in which it operates. By this I mean God must defend his honor, or else his name is shamed. Part of that is that God's people should and indeed must praise their God and so uphold the honor of their Maker. The language in Is. 48 is almost entirely honor shame language. Why does God not simply eliminate his stiff-necked people? Because not only is that against the loving character of God, he promised to do otherwise. The primary issue here is the integrity of God's character and reputation, it is not a discussion about God's propensity to glorify himself, praise himself, or love himself, much less about how God does everything he does for his own benefit and pleasure and adulation.

I don't ask those out there in the blogosphere to take my word on this. Go and read some good commentaries on Isaiah by legitimate scholars who know the honor and shame cultures of the Ancient Near East, and know how this sort of language functions in such cultures. It is not sufficient to rely on old texts or textbooks on systematic theology whether by the Spurgeons or Owens or the like of this world, or by John Wesley for that matter. These men were not experts in ancient near-eastern culture, and they did not know how the language of honor and glory functioned in such cultures.

A good place to start would be to read two recent more conservative but well informed commentaries on Isaiah--- say Brevard Childs' on the one hand and John Oswalt's on the other. When you do that, you will discover that 'a text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean', and always there is the every present danger of reading one's own theology into the text, especially if the only commentaries one reads on the matter are those of ancient systematic theologians, or even worse, you read no sources other than an ancient English translation of the Bible.

Enough Said.

Demonizing Judas-- the Gospel of Judas Revisited

Doubtless you will remember the great fanfare with which the Gospel of Judas (see the picture on the left) was unveiled. Hailed as a new window into the historical Judas and his relationship with Jesus, the translators and commentators informed us that in this document we have a kinder gentler Judas who really didn't deserve all those centuries of criticism as the ultimate betrayer of all time.

One of the problems with the media frenzy approach to unveiling things like this is that of course careful scholarly analysis of any ancient document takes time. Knee jerk reactions are usually just that. Enough time has passed now that the dubious claims of scholars like Marvin Meyer, Karen King, and Elaine Pagels about this document have begun not only to be challenged but to be refuted in detail. One such attempt at refutation has come from a scholar at Rice University in Houston, Dr. April Deconick, who has now written a book entitled "The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really says". Here is the link to the op-ed piece about this book in the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/opinion/01deconink.html?em&ex=1196744400&en=4988336f250f7758&ei=5087

Here is some of what Dr. Deconick claims:

"Several of the translation choices made by the society's scholars fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field. For example, in one instance the National Geographic transcription refers to Judas as a "daimon," which the society's experts have translated as "spirit." Actually, the universally accepted word for "spirit" is "pneuma " — in Gnostic literature "daimon" is always taken to mean "demon."

Likewise, Judas is not set apart "for" the holy generation, as the National Geographic translation says, he is separated "from" it. He does not receive the mysteries of the kingdom because "it is possible for him to go there." He receives them because Jesus tells him that he can't go there, and Jesus doesn't want Judas to betray him out of ignorance. Jesus wants him informed, so that the demonic Judas can suffer all that he deserves.

Perhaps the most egregious mistake I found was a single alteration made to the original Coptic. According to the National Geographic translation, Judas's ascent to the holy generation would be cursed. But it's clear from the transcription that the scholars altered the Coptic original, which eliminated a negative from the original sentence. In fact, the original states that Judas will "not ascend to the holy generation." To its credit, National Geographic has acknowledged this mistake, albeit far too late to change the public misconception.

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the "Thirteenth." In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal." (extracted from the NY Times article).

Now I am not competent to assess Dr. Deconick's reassessment of how the original Coptic should be translated, but I can say this--National Geographic has already admitted an egregious error was made in the translation, making the text say JUST THE OPPOSITE of what it actually said about Judas being included in a holy or elect group. Furthermore, I can say that Dr. Deconick is right that the word 'daimon', whether in Coptic, or in Greek normally, if not almost always, has a pejorative sense in Christian texts. It does not have the neutral sense of 'spirit' but means demon. For example, we find this meaning in 1 Cor. 10.21 where the word refers to the pagan deities in a pejorative context.

Why were some of these errors made in the translation? Dr. Deconick goes on to suggest that part of the problem was the desire of National Geographic to have an exclusive, and so they made scholars sign a non-disclosure statement. In other words, the translation was not adequately peer reviewed by the scholarly community. In fact, the dice was pretty loaded to begin with, to be honest. By this I mean very few conservative scholars (Craig Evans would be an exception) were invited to participate in the process of the unveiling of this document. And even when they participated, National Geographic was determined to make as much hay as it could out of this 'revelation', even if later scholarly criticism was to show that the exaggerated initial claims were out of all proportion to the actual content, much less the merits of the document itself.

As many of us have been saying for some time, the author or authors of this document were not Christians at all. They were anti-Christians, and they had a very serious ax to grind against orthodox Christians and their faith, including having a major problem with the idea that Jesus' death atoned for the sins of the world. More to the point, and more importantly, this document is far too late to add any new historical information at all about the historical Jesus or the historical Judas, and the obvious bias of the document would have ruled it out from doing so even it was a century older than in fact it is.

It is time to stop talking about 'lost Christianities'. For one things, scholars have known about the Gnostics, the Ebionites, the Marcionites and others for centuries. Neither Gnosticism nor Marcion's movement has any serious historical claims to have begun during the time that the original eyewitnesses and apostles of Jesus lived. Indeed, there is no good historical evidence either existed before the second century A.D. And it is especially unhelpful to call something a form of early Christianity which is in fact antithetical to the claims made about Jesus and his movement by our earliest and best sources for the study of early Christianity-- the documents that ended up in the New Testament. If one is 'Christian' the other is not, or else the law of non-contradiction must be deemed to have ceased to function in the discussion of earliest Christianity.

As for the Gospel of Judas, my friend Amy Jill Levine at Vanderbilt is absolutely right-- the Gospel of Judas, like the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip are interesting but they tell us nothing whatsoever about the historical Jesus and his earliest followers, and they never did. They do tell us about some of the forms of reaction to orthodox Christianity in the second through fifth centuries of church history. As such they are important for the study of the post-apostolic period of church history. They are not important for the study of the New Testament era itself.

The Film that Cried 'Beowulf'

Robert Zemeckis is a fine director of films, but even he must have thought he had bitten off more than he could chew by attempting to do a 3-D film which is mostly CG and part real actors blended together, using a dark Scandanavian legend as its script.

'Beowulf' is an olde Englishe heroic poem that dates probably around the 8th or 9th century dealing with 6th century events, legends, myths, though the oldest manuscript dates to about 1010. Many of those of us who were college English majors had to read this thing in the ancient script. Here is the first page of the oldest copy of the poem to the left here. Good luck, as it looks like the runes from a Tolkien manuscript. Which brings up an important point. A good deal of Tolkien's ideas for his enormous brooding myth came from Norse and Swedish mythology. Both Tolkien and Lewis were profoundly interested in that material, and discussed it at Inkling's meetings in the Bird and Babe pub in Oxford. After having an impressive version of Tolkien's masterpiece, could Beowulf also be translated effectively to the big screen?
Well the answer is both yes---- and no, as we shall see in a moment.

But for those of you who didn't have the pleasure of deciphering olde Englishe, here is a brief plot summary. Beowulf is a hero of a tribe called the Geats (Scandanavians who migrated to eastern England), and he shows up in Denmark to slay the monsters plaguing a group of lusty Danes who have been terrorized by a monster named Grendel (not to be confused with Gretel). Grendel it seems attacks a Danish meade hall named Heorot, killing a few people and otherwise putting a damper on celebrating in the meade hall (not a good thing during those long gray winter months in Dane land). Along comes Beowulf, slays Grendel, but the problem doesn't stop because there is Grendel's mother, and she is right royally ticked off. (Did I mention she's a seductive water demon played by Angelina Jolie). He has to deal with her, and then finally with a dragon in which battle he is mortally wounded.

No happy ending here, but then remember 'Hamlet' was also a play about brooding and troublesome Danes, some of whom have death wishes. It does appear that some of the characters in this story were real historical Scandanavian persons (for instance the Danish king, played by Anthony Hopkins, whom Beowulf comes to help), but one must remember this is a drinking song poem, and is surely mostly fiction.

But what about the movie itself. Surprisingly, since there is considerable violence in this film, it still gets a PG 13 rating. And though the movie aspires to be like an epic telling of a tale, it clocks in at a mere 1 hour and and 54 minutes-- think Beowulf Lite, less filling, tastes great. Let me say firstly that the 3D effect is indeed eye-popping. One finds one's self ducking swords and other flying objects from time to time that keep leaping off the screen at you. And in the acting department, Hopkins is still Hopkins, but this is not Oscar material here. Ray Winstone plays Beowulf, though only from the neck up. And the rest of the cast can only be called less than great Danes. This movie tends to show why the Dark Ages were labeled that-- the sky is dark, people and monsters can be brutal, and what could be worse than running out of meade and not being able to party? The meade hall scenes seem like something straight out of a frat movie, and the singing is just as bad. If Zemeckis is trying to convince us of the barbaric character of the age, he succeeded.

But what is interesting in this film is the distinction made between a hero, like Beowulf and 'the God Jesus Christ'. At one juncture in the film the Danish king is ask, after a raid by Grendel, if they should pray to and invoke 'the new Roman god Christ'. No, says the king, we don't need a savior god, we need a hero. There is one other slam at Christianity in this film. Looking back wistfully at the deeds of Beowulf as now past, one character bemoans that all the heroes are dead, and we are left only with the weeping martyrs of Christendom, which are seen as no substitute for heroes.

Now what is interesting about these observations, is while it is indeed based in some things going on in the original poem, they play very well today in western culture, a culture which exults heroes in the form of National Guard ads before the movie about service at home and abroad, has TV shows about 'Heroes', makes Marvel comic movies about heroes, and so on. Heroes with strength and courage, but also feet of clay are much preferred to a sinless savior who dies so that we might live differently than we do. We don't want to live differently. We want to party down, and then have a hero rescue us when we go too far.

But as Zemeckis so aptly portrays things-- Beowulf, hero though he may be, becomes an ongoing part of the problem, when he is seduced by Grendel's mom, and produces yet another monster which plagues the land. Heroes, as it turns out, cannot escape their fallen desires and lusts, and so while they can stop the bleeding for a while, they cannot save us from our darker natures and worst selves and are no final solution to the things that bewitch, bother, and bewilder us. This portrayal of Beowulf makes Oedipus Rex look appealing, almost.

As you will have gathered, I don't think this is a great film, but it is in small ways thought provoking, and certainly it makes for remarkable viewing with the 3 D effect. I certainly wouldn't take my children to this movie. It is too dark, and violent, and disturbing in various ways. But Zemeckis is to be applauded for the attempt to make a film in which hero worship is both portrayed, and unmasked in various ways. This is a film with which Freud and Jung would have had a field day.

Red Sox Nation Celebrates a Championship

There are gravestones in New England which have as their epitaphs-- 'he didn't live long enough to see the Red Sox win the World Series'. Until 2004, there were few who could even vaguely recall the last World Series championship-- that one won in 1918 with the help of some pitcher named Babe Ruth. It has been said of late that now that the Red Sox have won twice in a four year span, that the basic fatalism (some would call it Calvinism) of the region has taken a serious hit. New Englanders hardly know what to do with themselves in view of the Red Sox, the Patriots, and the resurgent Celtics, not to mention Boston College. It is indeed interesting how the psyche of a region becomes so linked to the fortunes of a favorite team, and that is especially so when one is thinking about the long on again, off again courtship between the Red Sox and New England, which more recently has become a consummated marriage that involves delirious bliss just now.

Some of you have wanted to know what some of my other passions in life are (other than my faith and Biblical studies) and certainly the Red Sox are one of them, ever since I went to Boston to go to seminary in the early 70s, and married a New England gal. Though I am from N.C., my favorite big city is Boston (second choices, Charlotte or Chapel Hill). This summer I got to go back and had a great seat in dear Fenway to see 'the olde towne team'. You will notice the pictures posted here. I even took the tour of the Park and stood on top of the Green Monster watching Manny Ramirez shag some fly balls off the wall. 1975 was when I plighted my troth to this team. That season was incredible, and the World Series was even better-- if Luis Tiant could just have pitched one more game. The 1986 World Series was more difficult to swallow. Watching a young Roger Clemens sitting praying in the dugout in Game 6 for three final outs in Shea Stadium which never came (due in part to a certain ball going through Bill Buckner's legs-- but he made far more good plays than bad that season). Nothing however could ever compare to the last four games the Red Sox played in 2004 vs. the Yankees to take the pennant, when they came back from the dead and won the pennant at Yankee Stadium--- sweet! Curt Shilling and his bloody sock will always be embedded in my brain, as will his giving all the glory to the Lord thereafter. No wonder several million showed up for the parade after the 2004 Series.

So, enjoy the pictures, and here's another litttle bit of who I am. If you are wondering why I also pull for the Braves, you must remember: 1) I'm so old that the Braves were still in Boston when I was born; 2) the Braves were the only team in the south when I was growing up, and I sure did love Major League Baseball-- still do :) It's the most American of all games, the national past time, and certainly a game that has consumed a lot of my past time as well.

Mission: Hong Kong

This will be mostly a photo essay of my time in Hong Kong. I went to give lectures on my Revelation commentary at the end of August on the occasion of its translation into Mandarin, and expected a few hundred people to show up. 8,000 tickets disappeared in no time flat. Christianity is flourishing in both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. I have one former Asbury student Jessie Ng who with her husband has founded 14 churches in Manchuria, and another who has founded a rescue colony on one of the small islands of Hong Kong (there are some 200 islands there) to rehabiliate children 13-23 after rescuing them from the drug and sex trades. It is a remarkable ministry and remarkably successful, as it involves teaching them the Bible, teaching them basic education, teaching them to work, to cook, to play together, and basically everything. I am very proud of my students. Many of these teens, rescued out of the sex trade have AIDS including the beautiful girl in red.

You will also see some aerial and land shots of various places in Hong Kong, some of the wonderful Chinese food, and my hosts for the lectures.

The Qumran Exhibit at the SBL in San Diego

The week before Thanksgiving every year, the Society of Biblical Literature holds its annual meeting. This year the meeting was in beautiful San Diego (normal daily temps raise from 53 to 68 or so F.)

One of the special features of this meeting was that we were able to go to the Natural History Museum and see the exhibit of several of the manuscript fragments from Qumran, including the oldest copy we have the Ten Commandments in Hebrew (the text from Deuteronomy), the oldest copy we have of any of the psalms, and piece d' resistance the Copper Scroll from Jordan. The Copper Scroll is in fact a treasure list, referring to various sites in and around Jerusalem where gold or something else was supposedly buried.

The Copper Scroll (known as 3Q15 because it was found in cave 3 at the Dead Sea in 1952) is without question one of the most debated of all the scrolls. Does it refer to a real or imaginary treasure list? Whose list was this? In 1960 dollars, it was estimated that this list refers to over 1 million dollars worth of treasure. Who could have had that much loot, and were there really any Essenes or Qumranites who had that kind of resources? Probably not. The Copper Scroll is a rarity because it is actually provenanced, by which I mean it was actually found in situ by an archaeologist, so we know exactly where it came from. What we do not know is what it's purpose or significance was. Perhaps the most plausible suggestion is that it refers to treasure actually in the Temple, and where it was to be hidden should there be an attack on the Temple, or less probably, where it actually was hidden when the seige of Jerusalem took place in the late 60s A.D.

I have posted here a picture of the Copper Scroll (upper right hand corner of this blog post) along side a nice aerial shot of the Dead Sea region which there was a picture of at the San Diego museum. The two satellite shots included here to give some perspective were also displayed at the exhibit.


One of the questions I get asked more than any other as a scholar of the NT period is-- What do the Qumran scrolls have to do with the NT, or how do they help us understand the NT? A few main points can be made.

Firstly, there are no NT documents of any kind found at Qumran, nor any evidence whatsoever that Jesus or his followers had any direct connection with this community. While this is a negative result of the consensus of careful scholarship, it is an important one.

Secondly, this community seems to have been a base camp for a group of Jewish sectarians known as the Essenes, an eschatological and sometimes ascetical group of early Jews. The community seems to have been founded by the Teacher of Righteousness in the second century B.C. as a split off from overly-Hellenized Judaism during the Hasmonean period. The Essenes seem to have felt that the priesthood during the Hasmonean (and Maccabean) eras was hopelessly corrupt, that the priesthoood and Temple under construction by Herod and his successors was also corrupt, and that God was going to intervene to cleanse the land and set things right, perhaps soon. In other words, this group was eschatological in character, and in this respect they were like the Jesus movement, and also like John the Baptist's movement.

Thirdly, it has often been speculated, and I am inclined to think it is right, that John the Baptizer may have at one time been a part of the Essene community at Qumran. Why do many NT scholars think so? For one thing, John is all about a water ritual, which we call baptism, and one thing we know both from the texts at Qumran, from the archaeology, and from Josephus is that these folks had all sorts of water purification rituals. At the exhibit in San Diego there was a virtual tour of Qumran and a lengthy presentation of the water channels, mikvehs or ritual baths, and other related matters. Clearly, water was a precious, much preserved, channeled, and much used commodity at Qumran. For another thing, look at the initial location of John the Baptizer. He was a 'voice crying: in the wilderness make straight a highway for our God'. Now what is interesting about John's being introduced in our earliest Gospel using this verse from Isaiah (see Mk. 1) is that this was one of the theme verses for the Qumran community at the Dead Sea, indeed it may have been the verse they used to describe why they were there and what there role was-- to be a prophetic voice calling lost Israel away from its corruption, both in the Temple and elsewhere. Thirdly, there is of course the asceticism of John, which is much like what we know of the regimen at Qumran. Fourthly, there was John's critique of the Herods, which eventually cost him his head.

Thus, while the Qumran materials do not tell us anything directly about Jesus and his followers in all likelihood, they may well help us understand John the Baptizer better. Of course textually speaking the real value of the Qumran scrolls is that they give us the earliest copies of many Biblical manuscripts, and have helped us with getting much closer to the Biblical originals of many OT documents. For example, the Isaiah scroll from Qumran, one of the largest and most complete scrolls from there, provides us with a text of that prophetic book which is literally hundreds of years earlier than the Hebrew text of the Masoretes from the early Middle Ages. It is interesting, and some would say inexplicable, why Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, has not done a more thorough revision of its text of Isaiah on the basis of this much earlier manuscript. But that is a story for another day.

In the end, I tell my students that the fascinating materials at Qumran remind us that eschatology was in the air in Jesus' day, and there were great expectations on the part of many that something big was going to happen-- maybe even a cosmic apocalyptic battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. In such an ethos, Jesus' coming and saying the Kingdom of God was at hand was like throwing a stick of dynamite into an already burning building. It is no wonder there were such intension and passionate responses, both positive and negative to the ministry of Jesus with that sort of message.

"For God so loved Himself?" Is God a Narcissist?

I was recently reading through the proofs of a new book on New Testament Theology, and it was stated that the most basic theme or thesis of NT theology is --'God magnifying himself through Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit'.

There were various nuances and amplifications to the discussion, but the more one read, the more it appeared clear that God was being presented as a self-centered, self-referential being, whose basic motivation for what he does, including his motivation for saving people, is so that he might receive more glory. Even the sending of the Son and the work of the Spirit is said to be but a means to an end of God's self-adulation and praise.

What's wrong with this picture? How about the basic understanding of God's essential and moral character?

For instance, suppose this thesis stated above is true-- would we not expect John 3.16 to read "for God so loved himself that he gave his only begotten Son..."?

Or again if this thesis is true, would we not expect Phil. 2.5-11 to read differently when it speaks about Christ emptying himself? If the Son is the very image and has the same character as the Father, wouldn't we expect this text to say--'who being in very nature God, devised a plan to glorify himself through his incarnation' if God really is so self-referential? In other words I am arguing Christ, the perfect image of God's character, reveals that God's character is essentially other directed self-sacrificial love. God loves people, not merely as means to his own ends, but as ends in themselves.

Or take Heb. 12.2-- we are told that Jesus died for our sins, not 'for the glory set before him', and in view of how this would improve his honor rating but rather 'for the joy set before him'. That is, he despised the shame of dying on the cross, which death was the least self-glorifying thing he could do, because he knew of how it would benefit his people thereafter, and he took joy in that fact.

Or re-read Hosea 11 where God explains that his love for his people is not at all like the fickle, self-seeking love of mere human beings. But rather God keeps loving his children, whether they praise or love or worship him or not.

Let me be clear that of course the Bible says it is our obligation to love, praise, and worship God, but this is a very different matter from the suggestion that God worships himself, is deeply worried about whether he has enough glory or not, and his deepest motivation for doing anything on earth is so that he can up his own glory quotient, or magnify and praise himself.

If we go back to the Garden of Eden story, one immediately notices that it is the Fall and sin which turned Adam and Eve into self-aware, self-centered, self-protecting beings. This is not how God had created them. Rather, he had created them in the divine image, and that divine image involves other directed, other centered love and relating. It follows from this that not the fallen narcissistic tendencies we manifest reflect what God is really like, but rather other directed, self-giving loving tendency.

I like the remark of Victor Furnish that God's love is not like a heat-seeking missile attracted to something inherently attractive in this or that person. Rather God's other-directed love bestows worth, honor, even glory. Notice exactly what Psalm 8.5 says--God has made us but a little less than God (or another reading would be, 'than the angels') and crowned human beings with glory and honor. Apparently this does not subtract from God's glory (see vs. 1) but simply adds to it. God it would appear is not merely a glory grabber, but rather a glory giver.

I suppose we should not be surprised that in a culture and age of narcissism, we would recreate God in our own self-centered image, but it is surprising when we find orthodox Christians, and even careful scholars doing this.

A VOTERS GUIDE FOR THINKING EVANGELICALS—ONE YEAR OUT

I am off to the National SBL meeting (Society of Biblical Literature), and whilst I am away I thought I would leave this for you to bat around. I shall return to the blogosphere next week.

A lot of heat, and very little light is about to be shed in the next twelve months when it comes to political races, and we have already seen some truly surprising things happen-- like Pat Robertson endorsing Rudy Guliani! Surely the eschaton is at hand.

I have no idea how the national races will turn out, but we have just had our gubernatorial (that’s an election where you vote for Goober :) contest among others in Kentucky, and the Republicans were thoroughly beaten in most of the races. At least from this vantage point, this outcome gives us an opportunity to reassess the whole issue of Christian aligning themselves with a particular political party, rather than evaluating candidates on an issue by issue, or candidate by candidate basis. We ought to be evaluating each candidate on their own merits, not on the basis of their current party affiliation. This of course requires more thought, instead of just pushing the straight party ticket button in the polling booth. Christians should be good citizens and be more thoughtful about who they vote for. They shouldn’t just listen to this or that Evangelical leader’s endorsements, even if it is someone like James Dobson or Pat Robertson who have considerable political clout.

In this particular post I want to suggest a series of steps Evangelicals should take in approaching next November’s elections. Some have to do with basic Christian obligation as a citizen of this country who appreciates the freedom and democracy we have, and then some of them have to do with critical thinking about issues and candidates.

1) DO YOUR HOMEWORK—There is really no excuse for laziness when it comes to being an informed voter, especially when we now have such a wealth of information online, and through other viable sources of news about candidates. Do not use the ‘cop out’ of ‘they’re all just the same’, or ‘no politicians are trustworthy’ or ‘I don’t have time for this’. If you have time to enjoy the freedoms you have in this country, then you certainly have time to become an informed voter. Period.

2) PLAN ON VOTING, EVEN IF YOU ARE FRUSTRATED—The percentage of Christians who could vote but don’t is high, much too high, and the end result of such bad behavior is that we often get exactly what we’ve voted for--- Nothing! Or at least, nothing good. Do not let the fact that at this juncture there may seem to be no obvious candidate for a conservative Christian to vote for, for this office or that, deter you. There is better and there is worse, and you’d better figure out which is which, or what we will get is worse. This is particularly an urgent matter since in the last eight years things have certainly gotten worse economically and it terms of our relationships both with our allies and enemies. The politics of fear is trumping the politics of faith and sound reasoning repeatedly, and this leads to disastrous results in the long run for our country.

3) DO NOT BE A ONE ISSUE VOTER-- However passionate you may be about a particular issue, lets say abortion, you should never, never vote for someone simply on the basis of a single ethical issue. Never. Did, I mention not ever. Why not? Because there are a plethora of inter-related important issues that affect our lives, and our Christian existence, and if you privilege only one such issue, you are likely to make a mistake in evaluating candidates. It is fine to allow a stance on one issue to be the tipping point such that you favor candidate A over candidate B, when otherwise it’s pretty much of a wash, but there should be no shibboleth. One illustration will have to do. In a crucial election during the time of the cold war, and with heightened tensions with Cuba. Kennedy ran vs. Nixon. Many people did not vote for Kennedy, simply because he was a Catholic, and we had not had a Catholic President previously. There were even stupid and ill-considered inflammatory remarks made about how if Kennedy got elected, the country would be subject to the influence of the Pope in some objectionable ways. Thank goodness such benighted ideas did not determine the outcome of the election. Kennedy was the right man at the time, and he helped diffuse the Cuban missile crisis. We need to learn some lessons from the political past lest we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

From here on, in this post, I will be talking about matters that pertain to critical thinking on the issues.

4) THINK ABOUT HOW MUCH CHARACTER SHOULD WEIGH IN WHO YOU VOTE FOR---

Life is complex, and so are ethical issues. One of the things you need to decide is whether it is more important to you what kind of person you vote for, in terms of character, or what the stances are of the person you are voting for. Sometimes we have elected well-meaning good Christian folks who couldn’t govern their way out of a paper bag. Sometimes we have elected very effective politicians, who nevertheless raised some issues for us because of their stances on particular issues. In a perfect world we could wish for candidates who are both skilled as public servants and have impeccable character. Unfortunately, this all too often not the case, especially because of the way our political process now works with PAC money and lobbyists and numerous other unhealthy factors determining who actually can be viable candidates for a major office. In the situation we are in, how much should the candidate’s agreement with me on my list of hot button issues weigh in my decision? How much should their apparent character weigh? What do you do if it’s hard to tell? These are important questions. Personally I would rather have a politician skilled in the art of compromise (which is of the essence of modern democracy and policy making) who is of generally good character, but with whom I may disagree with on this issue or another, than a devout but unexperienced and unskilled Christian person. Let me use an analogy. Would you rather have a surgeon operating on you in a life threatening situation who is a devout Christian, but not all that skillful and experienced in getting the job done right, or would you rather have a surgeon who has an impeccable record in regard to doing his job well, a stellar record of good outcomes when he applied his skills but whom you had some ethical disagreements? I personally would want surgeon B, if there had to be a choice.

5) PRIORITIZE WHAT YOU IN GOOD CONSCIENCE THINK ARE THE MOST CRUCIAL ISSUES—AND EVALUATE THE CANDIDATES ON

THE BASIS OF THOSE PRIORITIES.---

Obviously, this list of vital issues is a moving target which will change in some cases, as our country’s situation changes. I wouldn’t think anyone would be weighing where the current crop of candidates stand on the Spanish-American war many moons ago! I would strongly urge Evangelicals not to limit their list to just personal ethical issues, such as matters of sexual ethics, abortion, and the like. These are very important, but as thinking Evangelicals you also need to weigh where candidates stand on various aspects of foreign policy—the trade deficit, the war in Iraq, or economic relationships with China and other third world countries, the position of the candidate on Darfur, the issue of nuclear regulation (in North Korea, Iran etc.), our relationship with crucial Moslem countries where we have a stake but are not embroiled in military action currently—Turkey, Pakistan, etc. In other words, we need to be global Christians, and think globally, especially if our first commitment is, as it should be, to the worldwide body of Christ and the worldwide spread of the Gospel.

6) BE SMART ENOUGH TO SEE WHEN A CANDIDATE IS NOT BEING HONEST OR FORTH-RIGHT ABOUT HIS OR HER VIEWS

Obfuscation and fuzziness has of course become a political art form, and sometimes this is because the potential emperor has no clothes, or hasn’t thought through the issues themselves. The last thing we need o our current situation is politicians who make it up as they go along, or show signs of constantly shifting their views, depending on which way the political wind blows. A good example of the latter would be stances taken on the gay marriage issue. Thus far, the only Democratic candidate for President that I have personally heard repeatedly say he is opposed to changing the current legal definition of marriage is John Edwards. Others have flip-flopped back and forth, depending on the audience. This may be a telltale sign of a lack of conviction on the matter, a very important criteria for evaluating candidates. Are they consistent in their views, unless they receive new information which legitimately leads to saying ‘I was wrong, and have changed my mind on that issue’?

7) DON’T JUST VOTE ON GUT INSTINCT. THINK, EVALUATE, DISCUSS, PRAY BEFORE PULLING THE LEVER.

I wish I could tell you that the above outlined process of discernment was easy, but it is not. And there will be ambiguities, and you will have to make some judgment calls. You have to accept that you may well make some mistakes, and all the more is this likely to be the case when there is no clear front-runner that an Evangelical Christian of any stripe might think was someone one ought obviously to vote for.

Over the course of the coming twelve months, pay attention to the ads, watch a few of the debates, read up on the candidates web sites, watch the primaries, and be prepared. It would be a great tragedy if only a minority of Christians voted in the next election who are eligible, and the country continued its downward slide as a result. The old saying ‘you get what you pay for’ could be changed to ‘you get what you do or don’t vote for’. Remember the old adage—all it takes for something bad to happen, or continue happening, is for good people to stand idly by and let that transpire.

THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT SORROW (for Joni)

That winsome melancholy

Always became you,

Or you became it

Three shades of blue

‘Don’t interrupt the sorrow’

You once admonished

But when joy peaked through clouds

You were astonished.

Why must we major

In such minor keys,

As if it were the blues

That liberates and frees?

However genuine sadness

It isn’t the last word,

Life is not all suffering,

Nor is it all absurd.

No pit is so deep,

That love’s not deeper still

Emptiness fills no cavities

Pain never will.

Melancholy makes you heavy

It tends to weigh you down,

It has specific gravity

But is it so profound?

Or is it feeling’s counterpart

To the human fall,

‘Omnia anima triste’,

Happens to us all.

In the end a choice is made,

By each and every life,

To savor life’s inherent scent

Or focus on the strife.

The sorrow is interrupted

By resurrection fact

And God imparts to human hearts

The impact of that act.

God's yes to life

Is louder than death's knell

He's enacted triumph

Tracing tragedy's limits well.

Nov. 12, 2007

Roman Catholic Women to be Ordained as Priests--- in St. Louis Synagogue!

O.K., I didn't see this one coming. I knew about the Womenpriests movement, a small number of Catholic women who have either ordained themselves or gotten themselves ordained (about 100 of them now worldwide, 37 in the U.S.), and I knew that the Pope had banned the first seven of these ordinands from the Catholic Church several years ago, but none sense (by which I do not mean 'nun sense' :). These women are tired of waiting for the Catholic Church to recognize the call of God on their lives and their gifts and graces. The article in the NY Times this morning tells us of two more '60 something' Catholic women pursuing ordination in a city that is a Catholic stronghold-- St. Louis. Here is the link----

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11catholic.html?th&emc=th

What is unique and remarkable about this story is that these women sought out a female Jewish rabbi in a Reform synagogue for permission to have their ordination service in their sacred building, and the rabbi said yes. She knew the cost, and the cost is the severing of the good ecumenical relations she had had with the local Catholic Church heretofore. Yet in some ways this was a very appropriate place for such an ordination to transpire, since these womens' vision of ministry is right out of the Hebrew Bible-- they want to be priests, offering the sacrifice, in this case the sacrifice of the mass. Not surprisingly when Rabbi Susan Talve informed the Catholic office of ecumenical relations of this, she was told that it was unacceptable and violated Catholic theology and praxis.

What do I think about this? Well, several things. Firstly, I think it would have been better and wiser for these women to seek ordination through an appropriate channel such as one of the many Protestant denominations that ordain women. But I suspect they did not see this as an option since they are Catholic through and through.

The problem in this case, in my view, is actually generated by the Catholic theology of Christian ministry, which I find inconsistent with what the NT says about ministers. If one has an overwhelmingly OT vision of ministry, informed largely by Leviticus, then it is understandable that one would argue-- 'ministry involves priesthood, in the OT only men could be priests, ergo, no women can be ordained to such a post'. I understand this logic perfectly well, my problem is that it is a logic grounded in the old covenant, and not in the new covenant where we have a very different vision and praxis of ministry.

For one thing, in the NT ministers are not priests offering sacrifices, and they are not called priests. The only priesthood in the NT is the high priesthood of Christ in heaven (see Hebrews) which is said to eclipse and make obsolescent all OT priesthoods, including the Levitical one. It is hard to escape that this is the core message of the discourse found in Heb. 3-10. The only other priesthood mentioned in the NT is the priesthood of all believers (see 1 Peter), and I do mean all believers. What Peter is talking about there is that all Christians have an obligation to intercede for others and to offer true worship to God, and as Paul was to say, to present themselves as living sacrifices to God (Rom. 12). What Peter is not talking about is a class of clergy between Christ the high priest and us, the laity. In fact the whole clergy--laity distinction is not found in the NT. The LAOS is the whole people of God, whether they are ministers or not. There is a sense then in which we are all laity, and we are all priests. What the NT does not authorize is a new class of priests, much less an all male priesthood to lead the Christian flocks.

In the NT, what determines who can minister is whether one is called, gifted and graced to do some ministerial task, and whether the church has recognized those gifts in the person or not, and so laid hands on them. Mainly the NT talks about elders and deacons, and it certainly talks about female deacons, for example Phoebe in Rom. 16. It also talks about women prophetesses, and women apostles, but that is a story for another day. So, part of the problem here in my view is a failure of the Catholic Church to have an adequately New Testamental theology of ministry.

Read the story, and see what you think. I must admit that my heart is mostly on the side of these women, though I wish they had pursued ordination through more legitimate channels.

------

In a related story, authorization has been given from the Vatican for priests to celebrate the Tridentine Latin Mass once more, something that caused various French Catholics priests to lose their orders after Vatican II because they refused to stop using this ritual. This of course demonstrates that the Vatican is perfectly capable of changing its praxis, and the way the Mass is celebrated, if it wants to do so. The link for the story is below. What is of interest to me is that in a post-modern situation, the Catholic authorities have recognized the interest in and love for more 'mystery' in worship especially among the young, and presumably this is one reason why this practice has again been authorized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/us/10latin.html?th&emc=th