3/28/2008

I was going to buy this book eventually anyway

But now I have even more reason to, given what it is apparently costing its author, Peter Enns, Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Hermeneutics at Westminster Theological Seminary, for having written it. Visit the stuff of earth and Faith and Theology and MetaCatholic to learn more about this developing academic outrage. And be sure to visit Prof. Enns' own weblog at a time to tear down / A Time to Build Up. A book with consequences like these has got to be worth reading, whether you end up agreeing with it or not.

Enns Insp and Inc

Available at Amazon. Updated links to reviews of Enns' Inspiration and Incarnation and related information are being collected by Brandon Withrow.

2/20/2008

Honoring Dr Jim West


Somebody ought to be keeping track of the outpouring of support for Jim West since his hugely popular blog's untimely demise. Might as well be me. Here's what I've seen so far . . .

2/18/2008

What the . . . ?

I came across this news item thanks to epiScope (look for it there below the fold). According to Bakersfield CA's KERO 23 News (ABC),

In December 2007, numerous churches within the San Joaquin Archdiocese voted to leave the national church after a gay bishop was appointed.

Tuesday night, Bishop John-Davis Scofield from the San Joaquin Diocese told the congregation at St. Luke's that the church has not shut its doors on everyone, just those involved in ministry who don't live according to their interpretation of scripture.

“If there is someone of a homosexual orientation that wants to come to church, our doors are wide open,” said Schofield. “I would hope they would want to come. I would hope they would want to hear the word of God and that it would have a profound effect on them” [emphasis mine].

And here I was under the impression that -- according to traditional Episcopalian teaching -- every baptized Christian is a minister of the Gospel . . .

Q. Who are the ministers of the Church?
A. The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.

Q. What is the ministry of the laity?
A. The ministry of lay persons is to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ's work of reconcilation in the world; and to take their place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church. (BCP 855)

. . . which has its biblical basis in (inter alia) 1 Peter 4.9-10:

Use hospitality one to another without grudging. As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. (KJV)

What grounds, then, are there to exclude homosexual persons from the ministry of the diaconate, priesthood, and episcopate, while accepting them into the ministry of the laity?! Hmmmmmmm? ( . . . unless you don't really think of the laity as having any function within the Body of Christ worth calling a ministry.)

Why would "they" want to come to a church like that? How does this invite "them" in the door? How "welcome" would you feel? (It's enough to make Jesus say "Grrrrr!")

2/13/2008

New and noteworthy reviews from the RBL

Emmanuel Friedheim, Rabbinisme et Paganisme en Palestine romaine: Étude historique des Realia talmudiques (Ier-IVème siècles), reviewed by Sabrina Inowlocki.

Melody Knowles, Esther Menn, John Pawlikowski, and Timothy Sandoval (eds.), Contesting Texts: Jews and Christians in Conversation about the Bible, reviewed by Ithamar Gruenwald.

Amy-Jill Levine, ed., with Maria Mayo Robbins, A Feminist Companion to the New Testament Apocrypha, reviewed by James Elliott.

Edmondo F. Lupieri (tr. Maria Poggi Johnson and Adam Kamesar), A Commentary on the Apocalypse of John, reviewed by Tobias Nicklas.

George W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity, reviewed by Tony Costa.

Stanley E. Porter (ed.), The Messiah in the Old and New Testaments, reviewed by Michael F Bird and by James Hamilton Charlesworth.

2/03/2008

The Yes We Can song

I saw this on Metacatholic: a music video by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am incorporating the speech Barack Obama gave after the New Hampshire primary. I'd never even thought about posting video before, but seeing this one there prompted me to take the time to figure out how to put it up here.

Here is the music video . . .



. . . and here is the speech that inspired it . . .



For more information about the music video, click the arrow next to About This Video at YouTube. And if you're so inclined, please do visit the official Obama '08 website, here or (for Nebraskans, since the first ever Nebraska Democratic Caucus is coming up this next weekend!) here.

And, given the continuing circulation of some pretty creepy, mean-spirited chain emails, I'd like to recommend visiting Christianity Today's Q & A with Barack Obama, FactCheck.org's enlightening discussion of emails sliming Obama, and the collection of busted Obama urban legends at Snopes.com, as well.

1/20/2008

Are Mormons Christians?

I get asked this a lot (but not by Mormons). My first short answer is: "Yes and no; it depends on who's answering the question". If you belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, you'll say yes. If you're a Nicene Christian, you'll say no. That's because for Nicene Christians ( = anyone who traces their ecclesial tradition back through the Council of Nicea in 325 AD) trinitarianism is an essential component of true Christian faith; without it, you're not really a Christian. But if you're a Mormon, trinitarianism is not an essential component of true Christian faith; instead, it's where (in part) Nicene Christianity went wrong.

Oh, but you're not asking a Mormon or a Nicene Christian, you're asking me . . . in my capacity as a teacher of religious studies in a secular academic institution. In that case, my second short answer would be: "Well, what do you think? And why?" . . . in which case, we'd probably end up in the vicinity of the first answer, eventually.

But my third short answer, when finally cornered like a hunted beast, would be . . . "Yes" -- even though I also happen to be a Nicene Christian. Why? Because, by regarding trinitarianism as an (if not the) essential component of true Christian faith, Nicene Christians define what it is to be Christian in a way that by definition excludes non-trinitarian forms of Christianity.

Gnostic Christians in antiquity were riding in pretty much the same boat that Mormon Christians are today, it seems to me (though it was probably a good bit bigger, and the "orthodox" boat a good bit smaller, than today). In fact, whenever we study Gnostic Christian texts in my courses, it's my Mormon students who tend to resonate with them on a personal level, because some things in them dovetail nicely with Mormon doctrines in ways that they don't for students with other faith commitments. As a scholar of religion, I don't see any reason whatever to deny the label "Christian" to various Gnostic or Mormon groups that clearly regard(ed) themselves as Christians; the deciding factor in favor of calling them Christians is that some form of belief about Jesus of Nazareth is essential to them as religious persuasions.

On the other hand, as a Nicene Christian, I do find it jarring to accept ancient Gnostics and contemporary Mormons as fellow Christians. Instead, personally, I do want to tend to classify them (in a knee-jerk kind of way) as non-Christians, which means that I would rather identify Gnosticism and Mormonism as world religions, alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, etc., and (yes) Christianity. Nevertheless, even in Nicene Christian contexts (e.g., in church), I also do tend to speak (in spite of myself) (when the subject comes up) of Mormon Christians and Gnostic Christians in much the same way as I would Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians.

(I seem to recall that Old Uncle Walt [Whitman] wrote an impressive couple of lines somewhere celebrating inconsistency.)

Professionally (as a religion scholar), my final answer is that of course they're Christians . . . although (as a religion teacher) I'd rather help you figure out how to answer the question for yourself instead of getting an answer from me. Confessionally (as a Nicene Christian), my answer has to be: "I'm not so sure" . . . the very same answer I'd have to give, by the way, regarding some forms of (so-called) Christian fundamentalism, though for different reasons. But that "I'm not so sure" is not the same thing as a (properly Nicene?) "No". Unlike such a "No", it's an answer that refuses to let the last word be already said, an answer that's only on the way there (wherever "there" is), still in the middle of things, one that has yet to arrive. I'm still asking the question myself, even though I've already answered it (in a way, however, that I find to some extent questionable).

1/14/2008

A religious studies course for public schools

Dr. Jim West thinks that "Bible courses in public schools simply are improper" and that "the same would be true" for public schools "to offer Qur'an courses or the like". I'll have to beg to differ with him on this issue, since I am in fact teaching a course in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for high school students here in the grandly conservative state of Nebraska. The focus of the course is on comparing how Jews, Christians, and Muslims read their own and each others' scriptures, by engaging students in discussion of close readings of selected passages from the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur'an in English translation. Of course, I do happen to be employed as a lecturer in Classics and Religious Studies at UN-L, and I am trained in historical studies in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Virginia, and the course is part of UN-L's "Advanced Scholars" program, which means it's for college credit, so maybe it doesn't really fit Dr. Jim's criteria for a public school Bible/Qur'an/the like course. But they are high school students, and we're not in church (or synagogue) (or mosque).

There . . . now I'm not sure whether I've challenged Dr. Jim West, or buddied up to him, but either way, this should make my blog more popular, right? (I learned this from Nick Norelli.)

And then, of course, there's that old saying,"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach", to which Woody Allen famously added, "And those who can't teach, teach gym" . . . or is that "Jim"?

Now I've done it . . .