In a bit of a brain daze today with regard to the dissertation, so I'm going to finish up a couple of older papers as articles and send them off to journals. "The Odes of Solomon: From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism" is pretty straightforward and needing little editing, comparatively, before sending it off. Mercifully, the journal I'm sending this off to is not too fussy about form and style. For the second article, right now still rather ponderously titled "The Fittingness of 'Fittingness': Comparing Rahner’s The Trinity and Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae on the Necessity of the Second Person Becoming Incarnate" is not so lucky: the journal I've picked out for this one is quite nit-picky about the format of submissions. At least, it's nit-picky in the way that the Chicago Manual of Style is nit-picky: I just wasn't a Chicago disciple when I wrote the original version of the thing, but the dissertation has been quite a tutorial in the system. So anyway, this seemed a good way to turn a brain fart of a day into something productive. I want to put out my article on the apostle Thomas in John 20, too, but I think two proofings is about all I can conjure up in one day.

Heading down for my long-delayed "Christmas" to visit my sister and her family tomorrow, and such other family as can be rallied. She gets some babysitting services from me for the girls while Leslie and Jim head off to a Bulls game on Saturday, and I get my cuteness fix for the month. I just discovered yesterday while talking to her that she has been asked to be the godmother for Nate, and so that'll be sort of fun to be godparents to our nephew together.

Five new junior faculty positions have been listed on the American Academy of Religion website, including an ecclesiology position at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., and a history of modern Christianity position in a Religious Studies program at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The latter is a newish school, but one that very much wants to grow into a serious research institution and only has a 2/2 teaching load. So these are among new positions to think about. But the core of my prep work on the application process is (mercifully!) done and so I won't have to spend nearly so much time on all of this as I have the last few weeks.

Yesterday was the first session of this year's meetings of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, with Professor William Kurz, S.J., one of our senior biblical scholars, speaking on "Mary: Woman and Mother in God's Saving New Testament Plan," which was a theological and canon-critical reading of Mary in the New Testament, built off of, but not limited to, a historical-critical approach to the New Testament, in the manner described in his and Luke Timothy Johnson's The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation. This was a look at a forthcoming article that provoked some interesting discussion afterward, mostly on the Jewish lines typical of the Seminar, such as looking at the imagery tying Mary to the Ark of the Covenant/Mercy Seat. One thing that grabbed my attention was his addressing Luke's repeated meditations on the theme of Mary "pondering in her heart" the events of Jesus' conception, birth and life. He speculated this repeated theme as being an indication that Luke bears a Marian-inspired theology of the Incarnation, or a Marian tradition of interpretation. This was an idea I'd never heard before, particularly in contrast to the ancient tradition of Luke as an interpreter of Paul, and so I thought it would be interesting to re-read Luke with that question in mind and to see if it seems to work.

Talking with him afterward, he mentioned that he had written me a very strong letter of recommendation, reporting my gifts and reputation as a teacher as unique among graduate students. That was kind of flooring to hear words so generous, and I couldn't help but be incredibly gratified. So I certainly hope that that could help me get over the "paper hump" and to the first-stage interviews at the American Academy of Religion in Chicago next month.

itihasa drew my attention to a New York Times article with her blurb: A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. The discussion on her post consisted of a lot of *facepalm* kinds of comments, and no little laughter. While there were a number of people excited to read some actual scholarship on the artifact, most were commenting on the awful yellow journalism of the article itself. The fact that I see so much of this sort of thing in the Times makes me both annoyed and a bit frightened, as I commented:

"NEWLY DISCOVERED ARTIFACT ADDS NEW NUANCES TO SCHOLARLY EXAMINATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE CONTEXT OF SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM"

or

"NEWLY DISCOVERED ARTIFACT THREATENS TO DESTROY CHRISTIANITY"

Every new artifact or text seems to get the second treatment – some folks here cited The Gospel of Judas as the last time we were treated to this noise – because it seems that in the mind of the unimaginative news editor, only the latter option can possibly be newsworthy. Whether this reflects a lack of depth in understanding subtleties of historical research or whether it indicates a certain longing deep in the hearts of the newspaper's staff is ambiguous.

The fact that I so consistently see headlines like this in the New York Times in my field makes me suspect that it isn't as far removed from the National Inquirer as it would like to imagine. That makes me more than a bit worried when I think to read the Times seriously in all the fields I'm not a specialist in. Would that they had the imagination to hire someone with a theological degree who could recognize the difference between those offering serious and modest scholarly comment and those engaging in self-promotion or hucksterism. I'm amazed that they can have the quality of someone like Peter Steinfels on their staff and at the same time print such hokum in what could have been a serious article.

I wonder if I ought to convert that into a Letter to the Editor. The question would be whether to significantly tame it down or whether to really try to shame them into some sort of self-awareness: the latter is more effective, in a sense, but has a slim chance of succeeding if the target is convinced of their all-knowingness because, hey – they work for the Times.

We'll have to see if this thing gets the full treatment: specials on the Discovery and History Channels and the like. If so, it might earn a chapter in that book I'd like to write someday: The Total, Complete, and Final Destruction of Christianity: A History

Easter was full of the best sorts of celebration again this year. Well, the Mass could have been more engaging – the homilist didn't do much for me, despite his attempts and the music was all Daniel Shulte stuff that also had no attraction for me – but the gathering at Dan and Amy's with Mike and Donna as well as aorlov was the sort of pure pleasure that I always find in these kinds of gatherings of friends. I was the last to arrive and, after a bit of futile knocking at the front door, found everyone in the back yard, sitting in the sunlight around the table on the shoveled-off deck from our 16-inch Spring Surprise the other night, with everyone bundled in their coats and the kids playing in a bit of a "maze" Dan had shoveled out in the backyard.

I thought the outdoor gathering was a bit crazed at first, but as long as the sun was on us, sitting there wasn't too bad at all, although I noticed that the conversation drifted toward stories of Andrei's service in the Soviet Army and other Russian themes, so there might be some connection there.... When the sun got behind the garage, though, and left us in shadow, we all packed up the hors d'oeuvres all at once and moved into the kitchen. The standard two-shift evening commenced, of the kids eating and getting put down before the adults gathered around the table for our own feast, with lamb and a marinaded chicken, a yummy rice dish whose name I disremember, broccoli and much wine with a new bottle of sherry afterwards, as well as raiding the candy dish.

Andrei shared a far more detailed version of the story of how, after his time in the Soviet army, he had been reading religion in the bowels of Moscow University and had ended up heading off to Soviet Mongolia to join a Tibetan monastery there, and that it was in his time there, observing their practices and sinking into their beliefs that he really discovered and embraced Russian Orthodoxy. We also celebrated the news that he had been asked to write the Hermeneia commentary on 2 Enoch, which will be an important feather in his cap as he's already applying for early tenure. There was other shop talk, like about the concept of "fittingness" in Anselm's Why Did God Become Human?, which both Dan and I are teaching this semester, and talk of politics, like hashing out the merits of Obama's speech last week and my contention that the biggest thing about it, which hasn't been commented upon at all, as far as I could see, is that it actually marks a break with the stance on racism that the New Left took in 1968 after leaving King behind and which has been more-or-less the Democratic orthodoxy ever since. There was also some talk about the significance of Buckley and explanation of his role in American political history and culture for Andrei, and just the fun verbal play among everyone. The best of times: intimate friendship, thoughtful conversation with a great variety of perspectives, and good food and drink.

Ten years ago, on the 12th of April, Easter was celebrated on a balcony of the four-star Abou Nawas Sfax Hotel (now called the Mercure Sfax), quarters our host Muhammad was graciously providing for us, in downtown Sfax in Tunisia, overlooking the harbour and the Mediterranean. This Easter saw Erik, Hugh and I perhaps being the only Christians, for all we knew, in what used to be the Christian stronghold of Roman Africa. Following African Christian tradition dating from the ancient Church, Erik and I elected Hugh to be Bishop of Sfax by acclamation (subject to Vatican approval, of course, which we had no time to apply for), and had a service on the balcony with my prayer book and some bread and wine ordered up from room service. We sang, prayed, read lessons, and remembered Christ in bread and wine. It was one of the more memorable Easter services ever, and to his death I always hailed Hugh as Bishop of Sfax.

It was interesting to trip across this AP article today, and to read it in light of a long conversation I had with Fortunate Ojiako at the picnic on Saturday. He spoke, somewhat in complaint, of the Western tendency to dismiss the African perspective, particularly African metaphysics, which he said is distinct from that of the West, even when operating in their Western Christian context. The African experience, he said, is one of a directly-perceived interaction with the spiritual world, to which Western perspectives have been blinded by materialist philosophies or anemic, self-absorbed spiritualities. So he spoke about the confrontation between Christian prayer and native magic as a constant and dynamic clash of power that was quite visible. It was so much more like some of the Jewish perspectives that I'm used to from the first century, and I just tried to ask as many questions as I could.

So it struck me what an example of Western tendencies this AP article was, in its implicit assumptions that religion was expressive of mere "belief" that had nothing to do with objective reality, and that it was the Western concept of "culture" that was paramount and unquestioned. The article never considers the kind of African perspective Fortunate reported to me, whether Christian or animist, and only quotes those who buy into the Western concept of culture, where the implied African duty is simply to preserve their society and artifacts according these philosophical assumptions. Without our conversation, I would have never noticed anything near like the conflict of perspectives that this article represents, other than the ones it chooses to select and judge on the writers own, undeclared terms.

Christianity Vs. the Old Gods of Nigeria
Sep 4, 1:19 PM (ET)

By DULUE MBACHU

ACHINA, Nigeria (AP) - Born to a family of traditional priests, Ibe Nwigwe converted to Christianity as a boy. Under the sway of born-again fervor as a man, he gathered the paraphernalia of ancestral worship - a centuries-old stool, a metal staff with a wooden handle and the carved figure of a god - and burned them as his pastor watched.

"I had experienced a series of misfortunes and my pastor told me it was because I had not completely broken the covenant with my ancestral idols," the 52-year-old Nwigwe said of the bonfire three years ago. "Now that I have done that, I hope I will be truly liberated."

( Read more... )

As my friend aorlov just informed us:

Нашёл кстати тут интересную страницу с работами Margaret Barker в электронной форме:

http://www.margaretbarker.com/

Today featured – along with repenting my criminal behaviour – an unusually early meeting of our ongoing Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, one of the chief gems of my time here at Marquette. (Usually we meet in the late afternoon, which is much happier for my late-night schedule.) There are so many people here involved at some level with this "cutting edge" field of research today, by which I particularly mean this first century world and mindset where Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism have not yet settled as two separate and new religions that both arose from Second Temple Judaism. We used to describe Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism, but we are more coming to realize that it's more accurate to describe Second Temple Judaism (the Judaism of Jesus) as something very distinct which came to an end with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of God by the Romans in 70 AD. With the destruction of the Temple came the destruction of the common worship location of those Jews who believed in Jesus as the Messiah/Christ and those who rejected identifying Jesus so.

As friend and professor Andrei Orlov (with his journal, which I suspect is a rich Russian Orthodox resource, at aorlov) put it in his announcement to us,

In their lecture on Wednesday, February 14, 10 am, (AMU 252) , a Jewish scholar Dr. HINDY NAJMAN (University of Toronto) and a Catholic scholar Dr. ROBIN DARLING YOUNG (University of Notre Dame) will talk about their work on the commentary on 4 Ezra, forthcoming in the new Walter de Gruyter commentary series. One of the issues that Dr. Najman and Dr. Young will be discussing during their lecture is the question of the fruitful dialogue between Jewish and Christian scholars working on an important messianic text. As you know, 4 Ezra is one of the Jewish texts which gives the description of the messianic figure of the Son of Man.

We had a pretty good crowd, including people from all the disciplines, even a few contemporary/Systematics folks like me. I had only read 4 Ezra once myself, for Andrei's seminar on Apocalyptic Literature in Fall 2004, while I was dealing with all the infection fallout from my surgery. I was rather distracted and sick, and so a review last night was useful. It's an interesting text, from around the year 100 AD, and used by both Christians and Jews in various forms over the centuries, and it is certainly understandable that its passage in Chapter 13 on the Son was able to catch Christian attention. For those who've never heard of it, here's what seems to be (in my hasty once-over) a reasonable introduction to the text by a Cambridge doctoral student.

It was interesting. Some of it too specialized for me to follow all its details without more reading or immediate familiarity with the text, but it was another one of those opportunities to just learn by hearing two leading scholars simply talk their speciality. In particular, it seemed to illustrate that "state of flux" of the first century, as though the author were trying to write so that the text could be acceptable by both Jews who were followers of Jesus and those who were not. It comes in that time of fading opportunity, before the new Judaism of the Rabbis defined itself as not Christian, and Christianity among the Gentiles alienated itself from its Jewish roots and members.

Beliefs
Lessons for Living Found in Views of the Last Judgment
By PETER STEINFELS
The New York Times
January 20, 2007

“Eschatology” is not exactly your everyday word. If you had read every word of this newspaper every day for the last five years, you would have encountered it fewer than 20 times. Half those times were somehow referring to fundamentalist religious beliefs about the final battles between good and evil, the coming of Jesus (or other messianic figures), the Last Judgment and the eternal assignment of the saved and the damned to heaven or to hell.

Defined as “beliefs about the ultimate future,” eschatology is very real for biblical literalists, even if they have never heard of the word. It inspires, for example, the complicated scripts and detailed timetables featured in the best-selling “Left Behind” series of novels. Liberal believers may also ponder questions of personal life after death, but many are inclined to shrug off as striking but disconcerting poetry the cosmic end-times dramas that capture the fundamentalist imagination.

Not Jürgen Moltmann. For four decades he has been influencing Christian theology in radical directions with his conviction that eschatology is central to understanding God, humanity and all the basic teaching of his faith. An emeritus professor of theology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, he will be a featured lecturer next week at a conference titled “God’s Unfinished Future: Why It Matters Now,” sponsored by the Trinity Institute of Trinity Church on Wall Street in Manhattan.

Professor Moltmann, 80, grew up in a secular German family and was captured as a young soldier in World War II. Shaken by the deeds of his own country, he converted to Christianity while a prisoner of war in Belgium and England.

In the 1960s, his “Theology of Hope,” subtitled “On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology,” became one of the most widely translated and read theological works, stirring enthusiastic responses among Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, and among religious radicals in the developing world as well as dissident Marxists in Eastern Europe.

At the core of this theology were the principles that human consciousness is not shaped only by the past and present but also by anticipation of the future, that biblical revelation is centered on God’s promises, and that hope for the future does not rest on extrapolations of past or present trends but on something truly beyond them, namely those divine promises.

( Read more... )

Well, my presentation at the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism this afternoon turned out to be, by such standards, a fairly rip-roaring success. For a Friday afternoon – at 4:15pm, no less – we had a rather astonishing turnout. The Seminar tends to average about a dozen people a session, with nine or fifteen both being unsurprising. Our biggest blow-out was probably around 30. We had 18 or 20 today, with three of my own undergrads being intrigued enough to jump into the deep end of a campus theological discussion and attend. (They'd be three that I'd suspect: clearly interested in theology or philosophy, and displaying plenty of evidence in class of eager and critical minds.) There was a mix of the grad students and faculty that I'd normally expect, and a few faces that I didn't recognize, which was also unusual.

I read my presentation on the Jewish mystical background to the Prologue of the Gospel of John – an expanded version of my doctoral exam question on the material – with as much verve and life that I could give to it, and then it flowed into a strong give-and-take discussion with the crowd as well as I could hope for. I honestly think that this material on the Jewish background to Christian theology of God, particularly the Jewish mystical material and Jewish Logos theology that pre-dates such Christian efforts, has been perhaps the most revolutionary and illuminating material that I've encountered during my doctoral work. And, in fact, there are so many people doing work here that touches on that material, that I'd hazard a guess and estimate that we might be the strongest institution on the planet for such work. Andrei Orlov and Fr. Bill Kurz, S.J., in particular, really got going in the discussion today, with a variety of occasional input then coming from the rest of the floor, but which seemed to be grabbing the attention of everyone there.

I was asked some sufficiently serious questions by faculty members to reassure me that I was not being handled (entirely, at least) with kid gloves, even though biblical studies is not my field.  In fact, I addressed that at one point during the discussion, on my suspicion that the breakthrough insights we've been achieving with this Jewish-Christian work is going to have to be dealt with by systematicians in some way: that it will affect how we articulate our Trinitarian and Christological theologies today, and that I want to be in on that project.  That provoked some further discussion on the methodological overlap between our areas, and the consequences of the shift in biblical methodologies today, particularly in their moving away from the heritage of Bultmann and that lot.   Exciting!  I am curious, though, to find out how my undergrads made it through the material, whether they were able to keep up with enough of it to enjoy the bulk of it or not. Anyway, I got great feedback from people I trust to criticize me when I need it, so that was a happy way to end the week.

But then! Dan, Mike and I retired to Mike's place to join Donna (and Renée and Zeke) and Amy (and Anna and Owen), and Amy's high school friend Janna who was visiting with her daughter Madison. Outrageously hot chili was consumed and a rapt crowd stared, unbreathing, through the electrifying scenes of the two-hour season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, breaking into rushed, over-loud conversation during each commercial break. Mike wonder plaintively why it was that if television that was this good can be produced, it is so rare that it actually is produced. And the epic continues....

|
Today was a quiet day, mostly working lots of small jobs that needed to be taken care of. Weird. I just watched my computer clock go from 1:59:59 AM to 3:00:00 AM. A high-class clock, my computer is.

Anyway. Yesterday was much more noteworthy. I had a long phone conversation with Jen Staff née Sushinsky for the first time in a good while. I had been wondering whether after her wedding she felt comfortable staying in touch. I wasn't going to push it, since I know that sometimes friendships just cannot survive new structures or forms, so I was quite pleased when I got an email from her Thursday giving me a heads-up that she was going to be trying to get a hold of me. We'd gotten in the "tradition" the last few years of having a particularly long catch-up conversation when she was traveling for work (recruiting graduating seniors for a post-graduate service project) in Texas: driving the hours and hours between universities was always a good time for extended phone calls. She had some specific thoughts at one point about the acoustic versus the electronic versions of "Springtime of Tomorrow," and razzed me by very matter-of-factly telling me that she got to have her say in any of "her" songs.

Hearing the details of the wedding was fun, along with its inevitable attendant disasters. Folkheads: you remember Kim Hess? One of Steve's apprentices? She did the music for Jen, and apparently did what she has done a number of times before: changed the program on the spot without asking. So imagine Jen's anger/dismay to find that Kim had decided she had a better idea for the bride's processional than the one Jen wanted! (Fortunately for her, she'd been paid in advance.) Bizarre. Other than that, the hitches seemed minor.

Lots of other catch-up stuff was discussed. For a few of you Domers who knew her I guess the only other major "news" item that might be of interest as to what she's doing is that she'll be leaving her position so as to return to school full-time during the next school year. She's been working on a Master's in Social Work at the University of Chicago part-time and she and TJ decided that it would be better to get it done than to be as over-extended for a few more years as she is nowadays.

Markus Wriedt's party took up the rest of the night. It turns out he had rented out something of a pub/banquet room at the County Clare (open bar, with its unlimited Guinness and cocktails) for the to-do. Jeff Wilcox was there, which was a pleasant surprise: I hadn't seen him back in town to check in with his dissertation director since early last fall, I think. He's teaching some classes at Calvin, so that was an opportunity to compare notes about teaching undergrads while writing the dissertation. After about 20 minutes or half an hour of people arriving, Markus thanked everyone for coming out to see him off, but also quickly threw attention and public acclaim over to Aaron Smith, who had passed his Doctoral Qualifying Exams with that morning's Oral. So there were toasts for Aaron as further excuses to set to.

I got some good feedback during the evening from Mike and Dan about my presentation the night before and a few further ideas about how to run with The Odes of Solomon essay, particularly in some debate with the guys about how I was incorporating the material from the songs of the book of Revelation. Donna made a point of harrying us a bit teasingly when we three ended up talking away amongst ourselves, and I did want to actually spend a little time with Markus himself, so we took her point with a laugh and shuffled ourselves out into the group again. When I ended up talking with Aaron, it was interesting comparing notes with him from my own DQE. It sounds like he got a bit more hassled about a few messy minor details (French place names collapsing into each other and the like) which would be a hard way to have to begin. Del Colle was leafing through a book while others questioned him, as he did with me, which Aaron likewise found incredibly distracting and intimidating. I doubt Del Colle had any idea: I might mention it to him sometime. Still, now that I think about, it is a really clever "interrogation" technique: maybe he knows exactly what he's doing at that! I talked with him and Dawn about a number of things through the evening, with Dawn and I getting particularly lost in film and writing talk as the night drew to a close after about five hours of drinks. I, of course, had thought we were going to be in the restaurant proper, so I'd not eaten dinner: I tried not to do anything conspicuous, like eat 20 hors d'oeuvres, and just grabbed a late meal at George Webb's on the way back to the apartment.

Thursday night feels like the end of the week this semester, the way the schedule works out. An interesting week.

• The presentation of what I currently have in my essay "The Odes of Solomon: From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism" when fairly well tonight. The attendance at the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism was a bit smaller than I had hoped after the huge turnout the last two sessions, but I suppose those were flukes. I got some great feedback and questions afterward, especially from our own Prof. Fr. Alexander Golitzin. Mike Harris did me the very great favour of taking two pages of notes on the comments, which are full of good references and ideas on where to go from here as I expand the essay's inquiry into the merkabah side of things.

• I listened to Blonde On Blonde for the first time in two years today. It was a sacramental-level experience in songwriting.

• I think I've got my mojo on inside-out: this week got me two ex-girlfriends calling up and a spontaneous dinner out from one of the coolest girls in Milwaukee. All married.

• Got a funny call from Kevin Fleming vacationing with the family down in Grand Cayman. I charged him a $5000 fee for a particularly killer piece of recruitment consultation that I gave him for an LLC he's thinking of starting up with some guy he talked with during his Entrepreneur's dinner at the White House the other week.

• I found an out-of-print book I needed for my dissertation at a book sale today for only $1. I ordered it used from Amazon for $13 two days ago.

• Capping it off with a big bash at the County Clare tomorrow night for Markus Wriedt before he heads home for Germany. I think his six-weeks-per-semester stay at Marquette is the perfect length: his presence is always a social event in itself. And having one of your professors being one of Germany's greatest food critics (just on the side!) is a pretty fine thing in itself: the payoffs are exquisite!

Well, I've been trying to do a little more work on my bibliography for Fr. Fahey, but I wasn't able to get to it until after midnight when I broke for dinner after spending all day working on an old essay. My Fall '04 paper for Andrei Orlov, which really happened in February '05 because I was so sick from surgical complications, is now beginning its transmogrification into a paper that (I hope!) I'll be presenting at the national conference of the Society for Biblical Literature (as per my March 1st entry). As I wrote there, the abstract for the paper currently reads:

The Odes of Solomon are generally categorized among the early Jewish-Christian writings of Christian apocrypha. They are a lyrics-book of early Christian worship and praise songs, and give us a glimpse into the earliest stages of both Christian worship and developing Christian understandings about the recent advent of the Messiah. As a matter of genre, they are easily discussed in terms of liturgical texts, poetry, musical lyrics, and the like. This examination reveals that the Odes are filled with the themes of apocalyptic literature, despite the fact that they are almost never identified as apocalyptic in scholarship. Beyond that, this study of motifs within the text reveals that the Odes are best understood as a transitional text from apocalypticism to merkabah mysticism, as the apocalyptic content of the Odes merges into the other genre. This study then not only provides a new and more clear reading of the Odes themselves, but also contributes to an understanding of the relationship between apocalyptic literature and merkabah mysticism.

I am finally scheduled to present it to the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism on Thursday at 6pm, which will likely make it interfere with Dan's desire to have me go hear some editor named Goldberg from National Review speak at 7:00, which would definitely interfere with my original plan to go hear an historian from Yale give the Casper Lecture “Thinking it Through: Chinese and Catholics in the 17th Century” at 7:30.

Could I ask for more drama?

Anyway, I was working on that most of my waking moments today, including designing handouts for the audience on Thursday so that they would have my killer chart of evidence from my essay in hand, along with all the citations I make from the book of Revelation and the various Odes of Solomon. (Revelation provides parallel texts in the form of worship songs embedded in the book.) I figured such a handout would make the presentation much more successful. So I missed phone calls from Angie Brunner-DeWeese, Mom, and Dan, all of whom certainly deserved better. (Mom, I think I do have a schedule conflict and things for this weekend might not work out after all: I might have to postpone until your next weekend off.) (Yes, my Mom reads my LiveJournal: isn't she hip?)

Well, today I finally joined my first professional society. And the funny thing was, it was the Society of Biblical Literature!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What, no one gets it?

The thing is, biblical studies is not my specialty. My background is historical, and I had long intended to do a degree in historical theology before ending up in Systematics, which you might call "current" or "contemporary" theology, or some call it "constructive theology." So the fact that I joined the SBL is kinda like if I were a doctor, specializing in neurosurgery, and the first professional group I joined was tbe one the OB/GYN docs join. It's just kinda odd. But then, my writing career has been kind of odd, with the things I'm crafting for publication being all over the map, including biblical and historical. The areas I really don't head into are moral theology/ethics, or liturgical theology.

The reason I've gone off and done this is that Andrei Orlov, my wunderkind friend who was hired right back by Marquette upon his graduation the other year and who taught me Apocalyptic Literature--and who I also just discovered is hereabouts as aorlov--has been very eager for me to present the paper I wrote for him to the SBL. What's particularly exciting on the professional level is that he wants me to do this at the big national meeting, and not the more local regional one. I discovered that I had to join the Society, though, and so that's what provoked this move on my part. I'm in the process of rewriting the thing, and I understand quite a bit more about where he wanted me to take the essay since I did my Biblical area Doctoral Qualifying Exam under him on the Jewish mystical roots to the Prologue to the Gospel of John. The new, tweaked paper's abstract that I submitted reads:

The Odes of Solomon: From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism

The Odes of Solomon are generally categorized among the early Jewish-Christian writings of Christian apocrypha. They are a lyrics-book of early Christian worship and praise songs, and give us a glimpse into the earliest stages of both Christian worship and developing Christian understandings about the recent advent of the Messiah. As a matter of genre, they are easily discussed in terms of liturgical texts, poetry, musical lyrics, and the like. This examination reveals that the Odes are filled with the themes of apocalyptic literature, despite the fact that they are almost never identified as apocalyptic in scholarship. Beyond that, this study of motifs within the text reveals that the Odes are best understood as a transitional text from apocalypticism to merkabah mysticism, as the apocalyptic content of the Odes merges into the other genre. This study then not only provides a new and more clear reading of the Odes themselves, but also contributes to an understanding of the relationship between apocalyptic literature and merkabah mysticism.

It's exciting to be a little more up on this material now, and to get--which I didn't, really, at the time--why he was so excited about my paper. As it turns out, showing a literary connection between these two areas, if that is indeed what I have done, may indeed be something of a discovery. It would be a sort of "missing link" kind of discovery, showing that even after nearly a century of possessing this text, its significance in the literary and spiritual evolution of these genres had been overlooked. I'll be reading it soon to our own regular Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, and I'm excited to see what the historians and biblical scholars do to it. I've been in love with the Odes since I discovered them in all their primitive, profound glory as an undergraduate. The chance that I might make a significant contribution to their understanding is really something I'd be proud of.

Ode 19

1. A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord's kindness.
2. The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;
3. Because His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.
4. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.
5. Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who have received it are in the perfection of the right hand.
6. The womb of the Virgin took it, and she received conception and gave birth.
7. So the Virgin became a mother with great mercies.
8. And she labored and bore the Son but without pain, because it did not occur without purpose.
9. And she did not require a midwife, because He caused her to give life.
10. She brought forth like a strong man with desire, and she bore according to the manifestation, and she acquired according to the Great Power.
11. And she loved with redemption, and guarded with kindness, and declared with grandeur.
Hallelujah.

The cool thing about having moved to the Ardmore is having Mike Harris as my building's live-in manager. Mike is one of my frequent classmates, being a Patristics scholar, so we've been in all of Michel Barnes' stuff together, and we're part of Barnes' movie posse. One cool aspect of Mike living in the building is when he's doing the evening rounds that he or his wife Donna have to do, if Donna's already gone to bed, Mike will swing by for a bit of late-night conversation. I miss that aspect of living in a dorm in college where you could leave your door open and people would just drop by your room. I think that that easy social contact is the best part of being an undergraduate. So tonight talk ranged all over the place from the place of comic books in the arts to the U.S. foreign policy of the last 25 years; from metanarratives in Christian historiography (the hot topic of the Directed Readings Mike and Dan are doing with Barnes this fall--so jealous!) to teaching in Religious Studies programs as opposed to Theology ones--all good fun, while drinking cold drinks and trying to wait out the heat of the last few days.

I've begun moving beyond the Ethics topic for my exams--the one on religious discourse in the public sphere--and am going to my second "hardest" ("hard" in this case meaning the one that I think I have the least background in) which is my Biblical question on the Prologue to the Gospel of John. Now, frankly, I think that the Prologue is the most radical thing ever written by a human being. Bar none. And the most important thing. And if you read it in Greek, it's even more electrifying, because if you know the "loadedness" of the words John is using, it's all the more radical. (I can remember reading it in my Greek class my 2nd Senior year of undergrad, and an agnostic philosopher who was taking the course reading the passage--after the end of the session, he was standing outside, trembling as he tried to smoke, whispering "Oh, Fuck! Oh, Fuck!" over and over to himself. When I ran into him again years later in his doctoral studies, he had become a Christian, so I guess I saw the start of that.) Now, although the terminology is in Greek, and is loaded with Hellenistic conceptual content, I've decided to go a different tack and study the Prologue in the light of Jewish mystical and apocalyptic influences behind the text. Now this is much more theoretical: when I try to figure what Jewish concepts, texts, or stories might have been "behind" the casting of John's language in a Greek mode, I can't offer direct, conclusive proof for anything. What I can do is to try to see what ideas or narratives might "line up" with what John is saying. For example, when John describes Jesus as being the Logos--the "Word"--of God, what Jewish concept, like "Name," might lie in the back of John's thinking? So I'm looking for harmonies and continuities, rather than making conclusive arguments.

It should be fun: a lot more has been written on the Greek stuff, and this is a fairly new area of research, so it's a bigger opportunity for me to work on this angle under the guidance of a scholar of Apocalyptic Literature like my friend André Orlov, who hatched up the idea with me. Today I picked up with a book I read and reviewed for André's seminar last fall, The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology by Jarl Fossum, the essays in which I thought split pretty evenly: half were brilliant and half were loopy. Good fun. I hope that I can move faster with this than I did with the Ethics stuff: that was all new, and if I can't do better in these areas where I've actually done work, then things are going to get hair-raising for the exams.

Had a good evening hanging with Bob Foster tonight, who was in for his fortnightly foray from Rochester. That sentence had entirely too many Fs. My apologies. Having had a more-or-less unobserved birthday on Monday (but freaking cool seminars with Coffey and Barnes, reading Coffey's notable "The Whole Rahner on the Supernatural Existential" article), tonight made up for that with a long relaxed dinner out in the dark wood paneling of Turner's downtown, over Bourbon Chicken for Bob and a London Broil for me. There was lots of conversation on Bob and Karmen's still fairly-new role as parents of Logan, and my doctoral question that I plotted out this afternoon with Andrei Orlov about Jewish mystical and apocalyptic influences in the Prologue to John's gospel. I also got to give Evangelical Bob the low-down on this new Pope guy.

We moved back to my apartment and watched Grand Canyon, having spectacularly failed to find that movie last month when Bob swung by for an evening. I had seen it when it came out, and remembered virtually nothing of it other than it was Kasdan in high form. It was at times probing to look back those 15 years and have the movie ask me: "Did you notice the world had changed? Why did you accept it?" To know America and its violence 15 years beyond the situation of the film gave it an accusing weight beyond what it likely had at the time. I don't think I saw half of what was there when I originally saw it. Anyway, it was one when we finished and Bob had to dash, but it was a good night: just the right amount of really enjoying a friend that I don't get to see that often to make it really celebratory for me in its own quiet way.

Still trying to finish up the work from last semester, but since my ability to sleep is still being messed with by my need to exercise my intestines, I'm finding that I tend to stare at my computer in a vegetative state far more than I would like. I've got about half of my "The Odes of Solomon: Apocalyptic Literature?" paper completed, where I'm trying to discuss how I've found that these end-of-the-first-century song lyrics that are very joyous and praising of the recent advent of the Messiah are also highly coloured with an apocalyptic world-view, not so much in an end-of-the-world kind of way, although there's bits of that, but even moreso in the kind of transformational spirituality that characterized a lot of apocalypses. My point in all the jazz is to show that if we can relate the Odes to this other genre of literature, our reading of the Odes themselves will become much more nuanced.

Once done with that (I'm shooting for the weekend), I owe Barnes a detailed commentary on a Holy Spirit passage, which I haven't picked out yet, although I'm inclined to play with something in Origen's work. I've never done one of these "dense readings" for Barnes, so I'm not sure how long that will take. And in the meantime, I'm sitting in on two seminars as I mentioned before, which I've neglected to summarize thus far. 'Cause I'm braindead and never thought of it.

Man, what I'd give for a night's uninterrupted sleep. I've not had one in six months now. I guess it's like being a new parent. Except without a baby. No, I'm the baby. Crap.

In better news, I applied today for the sublease of the apartment in the Ardmore that I want: that would get me in this summer, now that the Abbottsford is being converted to undergrad housing. It would be great to get back to a one-bedroom: having everything jammed in an efficiency--with no ability to have public and private space--has been like living in a storage closet the last 2 1/2 years. I'm ready for a bit more space, even if it's just a bit.

I feel good.

I mean that in a number of ways. The health stuff is going well: turns out that my body made a major leap forward in adjust to my summer's surgeries and the reason why I was in so much agony through December was that I was spending all my time overdosing on my medications. I'm taking half of what I was taking, and now I feel good.

The wedding went off magnificently. The Folk Choir sang the program Kevin and I had cooked up, and I defy you to find better music for a wedding anywhere. The bride glowed. The groom was deeply moved. Paul Doyle was charming as the presider, Michael Wurtz was brilliant, funny, and penetrating as the homilist, and Ted Hesburgh granted the ceremony all the depth of his years and prestige. And I even got to catch him (with grace and aplomb--so as the congregation may not have even noticed) as he tripped over Frannie's dress, so the Best Man turned out to be useful beyond managing not to lose the rings.

The reception was a helluva party, and I got to talk to lots of people--more than I'd hoped for--although I didn't get enough time just to hang with J.P.. Jen Sushinsky and I had great fun, though, after J.P. had had to cut out, just sitting in a corner and having a long talk, with lots of catching up and laughing. The thing that you miss most about an ex-girlfriend like that is the friendship: even though we talk every few months, it's just not the same as being able to enjoy one another's company over a period of time. After she took off to get to her homework assignment before leaving on a retreat she was leading in the morning, I had a chance to enjoy a bit more of Kevin, Henri and McGlinn playing with the band, to counsel an old friend of Kevin's who had a meltdown seeing Kevin and Frannie achieve what she was not achieving in her relationship (and, being always modest and careful when giving advice, I found myself telling her to break up with the boyfriend and to move out of town--gulp!), and then moving on to the post-reception party over at Leahy's at the Morris Inn. There while we were talking, I had the strange moment of Kathy Turner finally realizing where she knew me from, after I'd thought she'd recognized me the week before while we were in Wyoming. She had, but she just couldn't remember quite how she knew me from Notre Dame....

The next day, with emotions running all over the place, I went with Kevin and Frannie to Chicago where we stayed in the luxurious Sutton Place Hotel and ended the night by closing down the Signature Room atop the John Hancock building, over rich food and wine, and the most relaxed and powerful conversation in three weeks of being together. After dropping them off at Midway the next day, returning the rental car to O'Hare and crashing at my sister's where there was much hanging out with cute nieces, I was able to relax fully myself in the knowledge that Kev and Frannie were finally really on their way, and I felt good.

Coming back to Marquette has meant a lot of organizational running around these first few days, trying to line up an apartment for next year, applying for financial aid for next year, figuring out how to register for this semester while not taking classes anymore, and that sort of thing. Only now am I really getting into the paper-writing that I have left over from December, but I'm much more "up" for it now, and am not too worried. Professor Barnes is emailing me and asking if I'm going to sit in on his Augustine seminar, and so that seems a good sign. I'm also sitting in on--and giving more priority to--David Coffey's "Nouvelle theologie" seminar, which I think will help fill yet another major gap in my knowledge. And I came home to a small stack of back comics that I'd ordered--New Titans issues from '87-'89--which have been great fun in late hours over the last few days, as I got to see where the story went after I stopped reading so that I could afford to go to college. I've been collecting favourite books from my childhood, buying a lot of them used on Amazon, and it was very entertaining to revisit these stories as well. Now I'll go back to re-reading The Dragon Reborn for my leisure reading, after spending proper time on John J. Collin's The Apocalyptic Imagination and the like. But all of it--the reading, being back at school, getting into a research groove again--just feels good.

Looking out my window now at the finally-plowed street, and all the white, and having a room with heat and food to eat, all of it just makes me feel grateful for how blessed I am. The only dark spot is that Dad's in a lot of pain right now having had most of his colon removed on Thursday, and I can't get over to the V.A. Hospital in Iowa City to see him, not that he wants us there right now, preferring to do this part alone. But since I know that the surgery came just as he seemed to be moving into likely colon cancer, I can't help but be thankful for this, too, despite his current pain, since I know that this will likely give him lots of years with his granddaughters and the rest of us. So all in all, it's true, right now: I feel good.

Today's work in the Holy Spirit seminar was on "Consort Pneumatology," portraying the Holy Spirit in terms where the major relationship image or metaphor is male-female. We looked at a few texts, but spent the bulk of our time playing with the 19th song in the Odes of Solomon. These are a collection of early Christian hymns, generally thought to date from the end of the first century, although some scholars are now arguing for a later date. I like the early idea better, myself, just because as one friend put it, "If this is really early--first or second generation Christians--then these are really beautiful songs; if it's later, then I'm not sure what to think of these people." That is, given other sub-Christian gnostic cults that grew up later, one might be inclined to think that some of the language here came out of some of those theologies, which tend to be very hostile to humanity and full of very strange mythologies. To put it as simply as I can, once the crazies showed up on the scene, these kind of lyrics couldn't have really appeared among Christians because they would have been taken in very different ways than in a Christian understanding. But as just straight early Christian songs, these are amazing.

The 19th has been my favourite ever since I first read it as an undergraduate, sitting at the Founders Library Main Information Desk, eyes going wide and smile growing huge at the fabulous imagery.

1. A cup of milk was offered to me
And I drank it with the sweetness of the Lord's kindness.
2. The Son is the cup,
And he who is milked is the Father;
And she who milked him is the Holy Spirit;
3. Because his breasts were full,
And it was undesirable that his milk
should be spilt without purpose,
4. The Holy Spirit opened her womb
And mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father,
5. And gave the mixture to the world without their knowing.
And those who take [it] are in the perfection of the right hand.
6. The womb of the Virgin caught [it]
And she received conception and gave birth.
7. And the Virgin became a mother through great mercy.
8. And she laboured and bore a son without suffering pain,
Because it did not happen without purpose.
9. And she did not require a midwife
Because he delivered her.
10. As a man she bore by will,
And she bore with display,
11. And acquired [her son] with great power.
And she loved [him] with redemption,
And guarded [him] with kindness,
And showed [him] with greatness.

This last week's topic was the book of Daniel in the Old Testament. Daniel is distinct for being the only apocalyptic work in the Hebrew Bible. What really got me thinking with regard to it was the implications of Daniel--as just one very clear example--for our ideas of revelation, or even more specifically, for the aspect of revelation we mean when we talk about the Bible being "inspired."

Daniel is a very late book. It seems to consist of two halves that were composed by different people in different times. It's also a book written in two or three languages, depending on the version of the book you use, and--confusingly--these don't line up with the two halves that I just mentioned. You have the adventures of a figure named Daniel (pretty legendary and not historical), a Jewish wise man, living in the midst of Babylon during the exile, showing how you can accomodate yourself to these Gentiles by being a faithful Jew. The second part is instead entirely hostile to Gentiles, and instead of a wise Daniel who interprets the king's dreams, Daniel is now the dreamer, dreaming prophetic dreams that outline the course of history. The dream prophecies are largely written after-the-fact, outlining the previous regimes the Jews have lived through, except where he leaps beyond history to look at an apocalyptic end to history, and gives a real prophecy of a time and place where the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man are revealed and rule.

These motifs of the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man, who later Christian readers will read as God the Father and Jesus the Son, also seem to clearly depend on motifs we find in the sacred literature of the cultures around the Jews hundreds of years earlier, of El, the father of the gods, and Baal his kingly son. This is all out of memory by the time Daniel is composed and edited together, and has now become Jewish by being "baptised," as it were, and adapted to Jewish perspective. The writer of Daniel doesn't see himself as using pagan stories--we do, centuries later, by lining up our archaeologial discoveries--he knows he is using Jewish stories.

For someone who would want to see the revelation of God as something totally distinct and removed from everything else in the world, particularly from other religions, this would be a lot of difficult information to swallow, and indeed you can find lots of people who will go to great lengths to make the problems go away. But instead, we can see a process of revelation that is human, contextualized, and progressive. While you do indeed have dynamic moments of God "breaking through" in the lives of people, what is more normal--and probably, in the long run, more effective--is a long period of the Spirit messing with our concepts, suggesting to us the truths of God in our poetry, our mythology, our songs, stories, and laws. Even a motif shared by several of the religions surrounding the Jews--against whom the Jews still needed to be distinct, however long it took them to become so--can become a fertile piece of revelation once it has entered into the common mind of the people and now provides a context for God to do something more direct and dynamic. That's what I meant when I said that the slow, broad, "general" revelation was, in a sense, more effective: it really brings an entire culture to a common point. It is usually really only then and there that God can do the more shocking and provocative actions in history that we remember so well. People ask why Jesus, if he is God in history, appeared when and where he did--why not now, for example? Or to the Chinese or someone else? But that's exactly why God needed the Jews and needed the processes of human culture: for it was only in a Jewish context that the event of Christ could be understood. Anywhere and anywhen else, it would have been strange magic or myth, a dynamic instance of power, but it could not have been understood. And it was imperative for this event to have any lasting impact in the history of the world that it immediately begin to be understood. Here, by being found on the long messy path of revelation in history and culture, the real revelation had a "vocabulary" and "grammar" by which it could be understood.

Whew! This is all getting away from me! But it certainly didn't help that my medications were making me incredibly tired over the last week. Last week saw a number of different articles and readings taking us into the roots of apocalyptic literature, centering around such figures as the "Son of Man" and "Baal" as precursors for taking us into the Enoch tradition, which seems to be the roots of this type of writing. "Son of Man" might be familiar as a title Jesus uses to refer to himself: it's tied to the figure of the "Son of Man" who appears with "the Ancient of Days" in the vision recounted in the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Scriptures. "Baal" might be recognized also from the Hebrew writings as the name of a god whose worship was strongly opposed by the Jewish prophets, most memorably by Elijah.

What's kind of fascinating is the way the two seem to be kind of related in ancient literature: that the Son of Man and Baal both appear as lesser figures next to an ultimate figure, the Son of Man to the Ancient of Days, and Baal to El, his father in the Ugaritic pantheon of gods. It highlights the "messiness" or the slow character of the process of revelation. If God is revealing himself to humanity, it has been through a long processes of cultural apprehension, as opposed to one quick "download" of information, the way some people seem to express it at times, as though the Bible fell out of the sky and was picked up and understood as the blueprints of the universe. The truth is that instead you see the Jews not becoming immediate rabid monotheists at Sinai, and that is the end of the story. Instead, their history reveals a long, slow, organic evolution of having to come out of paganism, even if some far-seeing individuals, the prophets, were trying to guide them in the right direction. Their paganism slowly morphs into an understanding of One God, but along the way they use a lot of their pagan-influenced culture to arrive at this point as their stories become the give-and-take of their reasoning and educational process. If the Son of Man owes some of his form in Jewish writing to Baal worship, that doesn't seem to be so scandalous. All along the way, Jewish and Christian thought would benefit from the surrounding culture, taking and adapting any insights to the truth that they could find, whether coming from Greek philosophy, or Celtic nature-worship, or the insights of contemporary physics.

Later in the week, the early chapters of Ezekiel were important for us as a prelude to the later development of apocalyptic literature: Ezekiel has a vision of angels, of God and of a Heavenly Temple--not the Temple in Jerusalem where he was a priest--that seems to set the stage for the style and method of later apocalyptic writing, where the literature's point seems to be to use the idea of a vision (whether real or simply literary) to describe in cosmic terms some truth that is important to understand about a crisis here on an earthly level.

Just coming in from Mass where Fr. Joe Mueller, SJ preached a helluva good sermon on all the money texts that were the readings today. The intertwining themes of honesty and community, both in our mundane economic dealings, as well as in our more important spiritual and relational lives was highlighted nicely. This, he argues, is the point of Jesus' "If you're untrustworthy with small matters, who will trust you with greater ones?"--not that Jesus was terribly concerned about people moving up to higher-level jobs.

Hmmm. I think I'm going to do this differently. Instead of trying to squeeze article titles into the subject heading, I'll just note what class I'm talking about and keep that kind of information in the the body of the text, where it fits more easily.

For Andrei's class this week, I read an introductory chapter in the main textbook that he's using, and we had a few articles on the side. Mostly, we were trying to get into "the state of the question" this week, where "the question" in this case is the entire field. The readings were really kind of exciting, even being just for that: this is such a comparatively young field. things had been written on apocalyptic literature over the last century, and even some in the 19th century during that explosion of academic exploration, but it seems that the field really took off in the last 20 years. The first chapter of John J. Collins' The Apocalyptic Imagination, "The Apocalyptic Genre," began our initiation to one of the two big current schools of thought regarding apocalyptic: that it is best understood in terms of genre, as being best conceived as a literary form. ( Read more... )