are literary motifs true?

In a podcast about Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Mark Goodacre (Professor of Religion, Duke University) asks the question: Was it really “on the Damascus Road?” He discusses how the author of Luke/Acts regularly uses the theme of travel on roads to bring up key events; the story of the good Samaritan who met his fellow man while on the road, the disciples being told of Jesus’ resurrection while they were on the road to Emmaus, and the Ethiopian eunuch meeting Phillip while travelling.

While hypothesizing about a literary motif, Goodacre notes that he is not saying that Luke was “making it all up out of whole cloth”, but rather that he seems to have crafted his stories around this motif of travelling. Perhaps Luke was a traveller himself and events often happened to him while on the road. Or maybe he saw the Christian walk as a journey and so describes events through that theme in his narratives, similar to the way he used the term “The Way” in describing Christianity.

Ultimately it shouldn’t matter where the event took place, and the story makes clear that an important event took place in Paul’s life wherever the locale. A progressive Christian who views the stories with the possibility of allegory can take home the message that Paul experienced a conversion just as can the literalist/inerrantist who believes the story is a verbatim, eyewitness account of the events. It doesn’t matter whether Paul being on a road at the time was a literary motif used by Luke, does it?

What can a literalist/inerrantist make of this literary motif? That since the disciples of Jesus were a travelling bunch it would be natural for key events to take place while on the road? That God supernaturally caused these key events to take place in a way that would ultimately form a literary motif? That there really is no literary motif, because Luke describes plenty of other events that do not take place on roads? That the Greek word for roads could really mean “place,” and therefore…

I don’t know if a classic conservative inerrantist could listen to this podcast and appreciate the inquiry Goodacre is making. Now no doubt Goodacre’s theory of literary motif is debatable even by a person who would allow for Luke to be creating a literary motif. It is just a theory which attempts to provide insight into the material. But isn’t a person better off if they can consider all the options available? Does the conservative approach really allow for intellectual freedom if one cannot consider certain options of a text? Is an appreciation for a certain richness in the texts lost? Is that what it means to be a slave to Christ, to shut off part of your mind and refrain from asking certain questions? That is how I felt when I started asking crazy questions about the bible.

At the end of the day, either a progressive or a conservative Christian should be able to take away the central tenet of the story, that Paul experienced a conversion. But wait, was it really a conversion? That is Goodacre’s second question. Listen to the podcast to find out! It is only about 12 minutes long. :^)

demanding conclusions

Shroud of Turin

In discussing what makes the bible special, Josh McDowell makes the claim that “although [the bible] was composed by men, its unity reveals the hand of the Almighty.” He writes about how the bible was composed across millennia, continents, and cultures by people of diverse backgrounds.

To make his point that this is a sign of the miraculous, he suggests this challenge:

“Find ten people from your local area having similar backgrounds, who speak the same language, and all are from basically the same culture. Then separate them and ask them to write their opinion on only one controversial subject, such as the meaning of life.”

When they have finished, compare the conclusions of these ten writers. Do they agree with each other? Of course not. But the Bible did not consist of merely ten authors, but forty. It was not written in one generation, but over a period of 1,500 years; not by authors with the same education, culture and language, but with vastly different education, many different cultures, from three continents and three different languages, and finally not just one subject but hundreds.”

I suggest this alternate scenario:

Find ten people who speak the same language and are all from basically the same culture. Ensure they all grew up in the same local church and assent to its basic creeds. Ask them to write their opinion on a particular controversial subject.

When you read these compositions, compare them to your own opinion about that subject. If a paper does not reflect your opinion, throw it in the trash. Then study the remaining documents . If you find any inconsistencies that can be changed with simple modifications to the text, go ahead and do so. Also feel free to make slight revisions for clarity if the writer’s opinion could potentially be construed as disagreeing with your belief.

Do they agree with each other? Of course they do! Do all four validate the initially held premise? Could it be said that the core message of the documents is unchanged despite any minor variations between the papers?

Now let’s see what McDowell concludes about the unity of the biblical texts:

“There is complete harmony, which cannot be explained by coincidence or collusion. The unity of the Bible is a strong argument in favor of its divine inspiration. The unity of the Scriptures is only one reason among many which supports the Bible’s claim to be the divine Word of God.”

McDowell is creating a false dilemma in claiming this type of unity for the bible. The only reason a skeptic would reject this view of biblical unity in the first place is because there are apologists making the claim. Is the evidence as strong as McDowell would make it out to be? And if the evidence is not that strong, should it be held onto so tightly as incontrovertible truth? Or can it be held to simply as humble faith, something a person believes while admitting the evidence for the belief is incomplete?

There are many Christians who view the bible as inspired and essential without accepting the assumptions that go into McDowell’s defense of scripture. The evidence he presents does not demand the verdict he wants it to, rather it is the apologist himself asserting the verdict while expecting people to accept his evidence at face value. People who find faith from the words of the bible should be working to get people to dig deeper than that, not to persuade them to accept evidence which has been tailored to fit the author’s initial assumptions.

saving darwin

Picked up this book at the library, Saving Darwin, How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, by Karl Giberson, after searching the card catalog on the words, “christian” and “evolution.” I ended up very impressed with it.

I’ll admit I find studying Christianity fascinating, enjoying learning about it in ways I wasn’t able to before, ways which would have been too unorthodox to consider. And I am past feeling a need to prove or disprove anything, it is great just to learn.

So authors like Giberson interest me in the way they work their faith around issues like evolution without falling prey to the false dichotomy that says one has to believe in a 6,000 year old earth in order to be a Christian. While my church did not make young earth creationism a statement of faith, in practice it was encouraged and is what the majority believed. The power of peer pressure and social influence can easily become the tyranny of the majority, and I always felt out of place believing in an old earth and evolution.

Giberson’s book focuses a lot on the history of fundamentalism and how creationism came to be incorporated in that particular and peculiar variety of beliefs. Which I like, because I am a history nut, and because I really, really don’t like fundamentalism. This book covers the ground between the extremes of theistic creationism and atheistic evolutionary theory. Evolution and belief in God do not need to be mutually exclusive, and there is a lot of room to work the middle ground. And the book does not hold back from criticism directed towards both those views.

It turns out that evangelicalism and fundamentalism were not always inexorably linked to creationism as they can seem to be today. According to the author the idea was asserted later by others (in particular 7th Day Adventists) and was eventually grafted into fundamentalist dogma.

Giberson discusses an early famous (infamous?) series of essays titled The Fundamentals:

What was remarkable about these discussions of evolution, however, was the almost total absence of the six-day creationist viewpoint. Leading “fundamentalist” thinkers spoke approvingly of progressive creationism, historical linkages between species, and an ancient earth.
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Clearly, even leaders concerned with defining and protecting the fundamentals of Christianity shared no consensus on what Christians should think about evolution.

Critiques of this middle ground abound. Jerry Coyne, author of the book, Why Evolution is True, offers a review of the book (warning, it’s long). In reviewing this book and another on the same topic by Ken Miller, Coyne states:

“Both of their books are worth reading… yet in the end they fail to achieve their longed-for union between faith and evolution. And they fail for the same reason that people always fail: a true harmony between science and religion requires either doing away with most people’s religion and replacing it with a watered-down deism, or polluting science with unnecessary, untestable, and unreasonable spiritual claims.”

I can see where Coyne is coming from and why he draws those conclusions. I think his work on presenting the evidence for evolution is important, and I think Giberson’s book in helping Christians view that evidence is important as well. But presenting evidence for evolution wrapped in an atheistic package is not going to be palatable for young earth creationists, and I don’t think it is necessary. I guess Coyne doesn’t feel a dichotomy between science and religion is a false one any more than Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis does. But I am grateful for those seeking common ground in the middle. Even where I don’t agree with them I feel they are trying to reconcile people to more reasonable beliefs one way or another.

For further reading, Giberson’s own brief response to Coyne’s analyses can be read here. Mystery Seeker provides a thoughtful analysis of Coyne’s perspective. And Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine interviewed Giberson, the videos can be viewed viewed here. Giberson described his interaction with Michael Shermer very positively. I find Michael Shermer to be a fantastic interviewer. Here he conducts an amazing interview at the Creation Museum.

And no, I haven’t read all those articles in their entirety or watched the videos!

bread and wine

He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters.
Matthew 12:25

Years ago my wife and I attended a wedding of Catholic friends of ours. We were cautioned ahead of time by our friend that communion would be offered only to Catholics, she wanted to make sure we knew that ahead of time and would not be offended. So we remained seated in our pew with a number of other a-Catholics during communion. I remember feeling a bit put off, not by our friends choice to be Catholic but by a church that would practice exclusivity to the degree that we as True Believing Christians would not be able to join them in communion.

We didn’t practice communion that way at our old evangelical church. Well not until a few years ago anyway. At some point the invitation to communion was changed to include a phrase to the effect of, “As this communion meal is for those who believe in Jesus Christ and have given their lives to him, we ask that those who do not share our faith refrain from partaking…” Or something like that. I didn’t like when that change was made, always felt uncomfortable thinking of how it would make people feel, and didn’t like the division it communicated. Did God need to have his holiness defended that way? Would we be in danger of giving false assurance to those not saved? I’m sure there were reasons, at that point I was not engaged in a way to try to learn what they were or to try to resolve them.

I was reminded of all this when we were at the service last night of the new evangelical church we have been visiting. I had taken communion there previously once, the invitation was about shared community and I felt OK about that. But last night the invitation specifically excluded those who did not “believe in Jesus as Lord.” So I stayed in my seat. I didn’t really mind, to be honest it protected me from struggling with hypocrisy, after all, why would I partake in communion if that is not what I believed?

It was harder for my wife than for me, highlighting again that I don’t believe all the same things I used to. And I was made more aware of the church as a social institution that is not only about joining in a certain set of beliefs but also about enforcing them. And the rules at the heart of evangelical Christianity speak of exclusivity by design, and a message of bringing people into that exclusivity, not opening the doors to join with others inclusively. That’s fine with me, I don’t need to be making the rules. But it leaves me wanting to say, “That’s fine, I know where I’m not wanted.”

existential crises

I guess the good part about suffering through relational crises as my beliefs have changed is that they have overshadowed any existential crisis I might have experienced during the past year. Gotta look on the bright side. I wonder if those will come to the surface at some point.

Orwell’s rules for English

Lorena left this comment on the post about William Lobdell’s book:

“In writing school I was taught that that’s the way to write [with simple language]. That there is no need to puff up the writing with long, obscure words to get your message across.”

I drafted the post below over five months ago and never posted it, so this is a good opportunity. It confirms what Lorena said.

For those of you who write… These rules have been helpful to me. They are found near the end of this essay, “Politics and the English Language“, by George Orwell in 1946. I use item 3 regularly for sentences and paragraphs as well. I probably break most of them most of the time…

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.
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I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.

a kind of a cancer

But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. James 1:6

I was looking at a map for a project at work yesterday and the name of a small town caught my eye. I had once had a business appointment there at the office of a woman running her own business. I got to chat with her a bit during several visits; she was under a lot of stress, her little boy was dying of cancer. As I recall, he had been in remission after undergoing chemotherapy and then the cancer came back. So infinitely sad, my heart still aches to remember.

She was a Christian and held out hope for God’s healing. But it was more than that, she was confident God was going to heal her child. She had been sold on a certain theology in which it is necessary to have full confidence in prayer for the requests to be answered. In fact, she had staked a lot in taking her boy to a healing service by a visiting evangelist who preached that message. Some of you may recognize that theology. The evangelist was the one and only Benny Hinn. I had not heard of him or the theology at the time. It was something that didn’t sound right, but what can you say to a mother whose boy is dying of cancer?

I recently read about the problems perpetrated by men like Hinn in William Lobdell’s book, Losing My Religion. An article he wrote on Hinn made it into the book (a lot of the book is from previously published articles). He writes about how despite investigations of people of like Hinn, despite revelations of misdeeds, corruption, and fraud, people still flock to hear them and give them money, holding out hope for miracles. Truly sickening.

“Sitting cross-legged in front of a big-screen TV, the 11-year-old squints through Coke-bottle glasses at a Miracle Crusade video made more than two years ago in which he starred as a boy who miraculously recovered from blindness. “I liked it at first because I thought I was being healed,” says William in the living room of his aunt and uncle’s home. On the screen, Hinn bends down to William, his hands on the child’s face. “Look at these tears,” says Hinn, peering into the child’s eyes. “William, baby, can you see me?”

Before more than 15,000 people in a Las Vegas arena, William nods. In a small voice, the boy says: “As soon as God healed me, I could see better.” Hinn, an arm wrapped around William, tells the audience that God has told him to pay the child’s medical expenses and education. People weep. Today William is still legally blind and says his sight never improved, and that his onstage comments were wishful thinking.

The woman’s little boy passed away not much later. I still think of them from time to time. I hope her difficult life was not made harsher through the experience of that “healing” ministry. I hope that it did not rob her of any comfort she and her husband and their boy had in his last days. I hope they have made peace with their God, and somehow found comfort in the midst of their tragedy.

Sitting back in his chair, Hinn shakes his head over how tough his job has become. He says being a pastor in the healing ministry is a profession he would never choose for himself, but he is called to it by God. “It’s not been a pleasant life,” Hinn says. “[People] think we’re in it for the money. They think that God doesn’t really heal, so these guys are just fooling the world. I’d be a fool to be in this for the money. If I did not believe God healed, I’d quit tomorrow and go get a job.”

the devil in dover

“I don’t live in such a world. I look at my father and wonder how many other Americans are like him. Why are we so divided?

In Dover, those on the side of the truth weren’t the ones marching under a banner of biblical fundamentalism and traditional values. “You can’t lie for Jesus,” I remind my father. No, the ones on the side of truth were the eleven parents who stood up to their local school board and said teaching their children about religion was their right, and not the job of the educational system.

But my father has closed his eyes to such a worldview. Rather, he wraps himself in his religion, retreating into a cacoon of denial. To him, the only thing that matters is whether I believe, whether I am saved.”

This book has a lot going for it. Lauri Lebo is a reporter from York, Pennsylvania, near the town of Dover where the trial concerning teaching Intelligent Design in public schools took place. The book details the content of the trial well and in riviting fashion. I am reminded of how important these issues are, how important it is to take civil liberties seriously, and how admirable it is when individuals take a stand when push comes to shove. The book is very well written, but has a couple of particular strengths.

The story is very much about the author’s personal experience through the trial, autobiographical as well as documentary. Lebo worked through the issues deeply herself, and built real relationships with the people involved, both the plaintiffs and defendants. Lebo’s relationship with her father, a fundamentalist Christian, is central to the story in the way it was strained as she attempted to talk with him about the trial, as the above paragraphs show.

As a journalist, Lebo also writes about the challenges of the profession, walking the line between “fair and balanced” reporting, and reporting that deals honestly with the events. I highly recommend this book; to learn about the issues involved, but even more so to learn about the way personal relationships are strained by politics and beliefs, and the ways one person worked through them.

To read a real review (which prompted me to read the book), check out the Spanish Inquistor’s review HERE. But don’t check it out if you would not like to see the blasphemous and topless logo on his site.

“I thought about calling my father. I’d fought with him almost every day of the trial. I’d wanted him to condemn, as a Christian, what seemed obvious to me to be deception. But he refused. I’d grow angry and hang up on him. The next day, I’d pick up the phone and try again. How do I explain to my faither why this was so moving? How do I tell him we shouldn’t be afraid of this? How can I describe what I witnessed?

I wanted him to know the parents’ stories: Cyndi Sneath, who testified that she might not have a fancy education, but her eight-year-old son, Griffin, dreams of being an astronaut; of Bryan and Christy Rehm, who teach Bible school and sing in their church choir, but who are called atheists by their neghbors; and of Fred Callahan, a gentle, reserved man dismissed as intolerant. “What am I supposed to tolerate? he asked. “The small encroachment of my first Amendment rights? Well, I’m not going to.”

I wanted my father to understand Steve Harvey, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys and a dutiful Catholic who says we can only try to believe in God. On the morning of that last day of trial, he nervously paced around the block, smoking cigarettes and praying “our Fathers.”

Surely if my father were here, I thought, I could convince him. But not wanted to risk a fight, I ddint’ reach for the phone. I thought there would be plenty of time to make my father understand.

Now, sitting in the Chinese restaurant, my father watching me from across the table, I realize that he never will.”

losing my religion

I had changed in another way. I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded in logic and reason, requires a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. I used to think that you simply made a decision: to believe in Jesus or not. Collect the facts and then decide for yourself. But it’s not that simple. Faith is something that is triggered deep within your soul — influenced by upbringing, family, friends, experiences, and desires. It’s not like registering to vote.
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Christians often talk to those who have fallen away from the faith as if they had made a choice to turn away from God. But as deeply as I missed my faith, as hard as I tried to keep it, my head could not command my gut. I know now that it was wishful thinking, not truth. I just didn’t believe in God anymore, despite my best attempts to hold on to my beliefs. Faith can’t be willed into existence. There’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

- from William Lobdell’s book, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace.

supernatural beliefs

When I was an older teenager, a Christian friend told me about some miraculous way in which all the characters of the Hebrew alphabet could be combined three-dimensionally to form an image of a flame. This was said to be an evidence of the supernatural origin of the Hebrew script, imparted by God to his chosen people. This was someone I looked up to a lot, and I was coming to believe much of what he told me about God and the spiritual / spirit-filled world.

This Hebrew character thing didn’t convince me that Christianity was true, nor was it presented that way. But at the same time, because I was coming to believe a lot of things I had not believed previously, I was willing to believe this to be true as well. And I certainly did ascribe to it some sort of supernatural miraculous nature.

I find it strange now that I believed it at face value. To this day I have never seen this alleged image. The story I believed was based on hearsay from someone I trusted, not knowing where they obtained their information from. I don’t doubt this person believed what he said, but looking back I realize he was not a very discerning person in general, at least in certain areas. Who knows, maybe he just misheard something.

Another reason I find it strange is that something like that would enhance my perception of the validity of Christianity. While it didn’t make me become a Christian, it did add some weight to the whole package of supernatural beliefs. If God were to give letters to his people, wouldn’t it seem fitting that it would be in an amazing supernatural way which would not be discovered until later times? Well, actually yes, that would be amazing!

But call me a skeptic, I don’t have any reason to find that story to be true today. It is unsubstantiated information. And also it is very easy for me to believe an artist could manipulate Hebrew characters into the shape of a flame. Or something like that. Believing it was supernatural was naive at best. Not that it couldn’t be supernatural, but I think the evidence would need to be more compelling to believe it to be true. I’ll write it off as the foolishness of youth, but this kind of thinking had deeper implications as my belief set changed into Christian faith. The way I evaluate information has changed a lot since I was a teenager.

For an “alternate” perspective on the origin of the Hebrew alphabet, click HERE. It seems to likely have been derived from Phoenician script, though that doesn’t disprove the miracle flame image theory! Does anyone else out there remember any strange beliefs they once held?