GAHP 3, Wherein MOTORBIKES DON'T FLY!...

"'I had a dream about a motorbike,' said Harry, remembering suddenly. 'It was flying.' Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry, his face like a gigantic beetroot with a moustache, 'MOTORBIKES DON'T FLY!'"
(Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone, 24).

Except, it turns out, that they do. In Jo Rowling's world of wizards and muggles motorbikes do, in fact, fly (though in flagrant violation of Ministry of Magic laws concerning the enchantment of muggle artifacts, cf. the Weasley's flying Ford Anglia). What is more, Vernon Dursley knows that they fly, or at least that they very well might fly if a wizard got hold of one. Vernon Dursley knows about the wizarding world. He knows that it exists, he knows that Harry's parents were wizards, he knows about Albus Dumbledore, and he also knows by now that Harry is a wizard too. Why, then, does he continually close his eyes to the relentless truth that magic is a part of the fabric of reality in his world?

One of my good friends is an honest to goodness magician. It's what he does for a living. He makes tables fly and women vanish and he can change an ace of spades into a jack of diamonds. His name is Derek and he is the person, more than anyone else, who has helped me to see the danger and horror of that accompanies the death of the imagination. He helped me to understand how to look at the world with a greater sense of wonder. He showed me that above all we choose to see wonder, we choose to experience magic in our lives. I have no interest in knowing how it is that Derek makes things fly. People who need to know a magician's tricks have completely failed to understand what it is that magicians do. They don't understand that knowing won't make it more magical. The magic, the wonder, is in the choosing. We experience the magical and miraculous when we adjust the way that we see the world.

It was Chesterton who said "the world will not perish due to a lack of wonders, but due to a lack of wonder." All of the great accomplishments of civilizations, all of the glory and wonder of creation, and all of the art and literature the world has to offer, every miracle ever performed, are so much nonsense and waste in the hands of a person who is unwilling to see them. The same is true of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is Vernon Dursley's great sin. He has no interest in living a life of wonder. He chooses to live a mundane life.

GAHP 2, Wherein We Meet Albus Dumbledore...

"Nothing like this man had ever been seen in Privet Drive."
(Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 12).

Jo Rowling has explicitly stated that Dumbledore was never intended as a "Christ" figure. I can't see why anybody would ever have thought him one, but it's always good to get such things out of the way.

What Dumbledore is, is a wizard. He is, I would say, the wizard. Though it may be the case that "everything from his name to his boots was unwelcome" in Privet Drive, it is equally true that "everything from his name to his boots" epitomize what a good wizard can be. Though one might fixate upon Dumbledore's great moments of power and authority (and there are indeed many) in trying to understand the character, all that we need as readers is found on the 12th page of The Philosopher's Stone. Dumbledore is a kind, whimsical, joy filled man. He knows laughter, but he also knows pain (the broken nose, we will finally learn, tells us this). He is a man of great depth, but he does not take his own depth too seriously. What a wonderful way to live.

One of my friends once said that though Socrates and Jesus never met, they would have been great friends if they had. I would suggest the same thing about Jesus and Dumbledore. Though the Gospels never tell us that Jesus laughed I have always imagined him as a man who could live honestly in both despair and joy. He could eat and drink and enjoy all that life offers in one moment, and in the next he could lift the suffering and self-tortured up out of their mire.

There are a great many things that can be said about Jesus, and I think that all of the true things we can say are very good, but my favorite thing about Jesus is what a wonderful human being he was. In much the same way that Dumbledore is the wizard, Jesus was (and is) the human.

Not surprisingly Jesus is also, like Dumbledore, seldom welcome in the bourgeois world that we inhabit. But, again like Dumbledore, he is here nevertheless.

Wise Justice...

Fred Clark has another great post over on Slacktivist (even if the title is a little bit on the nose). He questions, once again, the Bush administration's so-called "just war" in Iraq and the potential for a just war against Iran. Bush and co. have consistently claimed that the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq were and are just. The reasons that I've heard usually have something to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction (or WMD-related weaponish-type kinds of programs) or the tyranny and aggression of Sadam Hussein's totalitarian regime. Fred rightly notes that even if Bush's claims about WMDs or Hussein's tyranny are accurate (and we know now that the former claims were certainly not accurate by any stretch of the imagination), these still do not qualify for the traditional definition of a "just war."*

One of the real troubles in attempting to wage a just war is that you need to be able to determine the potential damage the aggressor may cause, the likelihood of being able to avert that potential damage, and the possibility a war might actually cause more suffering than it averts. When determining whether or not a war is just you need a very important faculty. You need wisdom.

One of the kids in my youth group back in Regina once asked me about the difference between wisdom and intelligence. I gave the fairly pat answer that wisdom is the ability to apply intelligence correctly. He didn't buy it, and rightly so. A better understanding of wisdom is found in the biblical Proverbs. Wisdom in Proverbs is a moral faculty. It is the ability to make not only good decisions, but right decisions.

The unjust invasion of Iraq is not only an intellectual failure (though it is that), it is first and foremost a moral failure. It is unwise and therefore unjust. George Bush has always been something of an enigma to me. On television he sounds, to be frank, like a bumbling idiot. But I don't believe that a truly stupid person could be a governor and then a president. I do, however, believe that a fool could do those things. What the war in Iraq, and current American foreign policy in general, demonstrates is not that Bush and Cheney and their advisers are stupid. It demonstrates that they are fools.

*I'm pretty sure that his Catholic definition for a just war is actually Thomas Aquinas' definition, but I don't have any of Thomas' works close at hand so I can't be positive.

Redemption, Dependence and Question Number 11...

When I first conceived of the previous post, 10 Questions, one of the questions that I was planning to use was, Who is your favorite obscure bluegrass/gospel musician? For some reason I just forgot to include the question. The answer is Derek Webb. A little while ago I decided to stick one of Webb's songs on a mix CD. I hadn't listened to that song or any of Webb's solo music for a long time and I started jonesing for some more Webb. Consequently I've been listening to Webb's first solo effort, She Must and Shall Go Free, while driving to and from work.

There are very few musicians, particularly musicians who have come up through and become famous in the Contemporary Christian Music industry, who have the ability to create deeply meaningful lyrical creations. Derek Webb is one of those few. Listening to a Derek Webb song is a lot like reading Bonhoeffer or Barth or Grentz or Chesterton, but with a catchy guitar lick in the background.

My favorite song on She Must and Shall Go Free (for the time being) is called Nothing (Without You). Check out the lyrics:

I’ve got the dress, i’ve got the ring
i’ve got a song that i can sing
i’ve got the bread, i’ve got the wine
but i’ve got the life i’ve left behind
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

i’ve got the law on my heart
i’ve got your love tearing me apart
i’ve got a vow that i can’t keep
but i’ve got your promise getting me to sleep
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

i’ve got your works, i’ve got my faith
i’ve got all the wine that you can make
i am the kiss of your betrayer
but i’ve got your grace on every layer
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

(bridge)
‘cause you see it’s all just a show
you either hate it or you don’t
and only time will tell the difference
if you get it clearly or with interference

i’ve got the race, got the election
but win or lose, i’ve got protection
i found a lobbyist in the devil
but i got salvation in a rebel
i’ve got everything, but i’ve got nothing
without you

What Webb understands about Christianity, and what he communicates so powerfully with all of those familiar inconsistencies that often devour our lives, is that the redemption promised in the Scriptures absolutely requires dependence. By this I mean to say that I cannot redeem myself.

In the letters of Paul the English word redemption is a translation of the Greek apolutrosis (anybody have a good Greek font that works in Blogger?). What many people don't know is that the origins of the word are found in the slave trade of Jesus' day. At that point in history slavery was simply a cultural fact. Slaves were everywhere. Anybody could become a slave if his or her life just took the wrong turn.* But any slave could be freed if his or her life just took the right turn. The act of freeing a slave generally involved purchasing the slave (you really can't free what you don't own), and that is where the word apolutrosis comes from. It means the act of buying back, or redeeming, a slave. This is the concept that Paul is co-opting in Ephesians 1:7 when he says that in Christ we have "redemption through his blood." He is saying that we were captive, held in slavery, and have now been redeemed, purchased and set free. The cost of this freedom was the life of Jesus. This is why I can't redeem myself. I just don't have the requisite capital.

When Derek Webb sings "I've got everything, but I've got nothing without you," this is, I think, what he is trying to say. He is saying that the brokenness of the world, the brokenness in my heart and my life, cannot be healed by my efforts or yours. The redemption, the release from slavery, is dependent upon Christ. I am, and must continually remain, dependent upon Christ.

*For an entertaining (albeit horribly violent) look at pre-Christian culture, including the practice of slavery, check out HBO's hit-series Rome.

10 Questions...

Every once in a while I get an email (usually from my lovely wife) that asks a bunch of fun little questions (my favorite food, etc.). I tend to find such quizzes silly and I always wish I was as witty and quick as my friends who twist every one of their answers into some hilarious (though often crass) pun. What I really don't like about these emails is that the questions are rather mundane and don't really tell you much about a person. I have decided, therefore, to create my very own 10 question quiz designed to tell you something about me. I'm not emailing this to anyone, but my readers are welcome to publish their own answers to these 10 questions (or any 10 questions really) on their own blogs or in the comments. Off we go.

1. Who is your favorite existentialist philosopher?

Soren Kierkegaard. I should provide the caveat that I haven't read an awful lot of what people call existentialist philosophy, but I've read Kierkegaard and he is often considered the father (or perhaps grand-father) of all existentialist philosophy. Nietzsche gets similar credit at times, but I've read him too and tend to think he's something of an evil bastard, so Kierkegaard wins. For the record I've also read some Heidegger and like most people I'm just proud to have understood most of the sentences.

2. What is your favorite literary guilty pleasure?

Harry Potter. I know these books are intended as children's literature, but I love them. These are some of my very favorite books in recent years and the fact that they're a little cotton-candy just makes them more fun to read again and again. I also tend to think that Rowling hits some pretty deep and important themes in her work. See my GAHP post below.

3. What is your favorite Clint Eastwood movie?

Unforgiven. This is, quite simply, the ultimate western.

4. Who is your favorite Harry Potter character?

Neville Longbottom. If I ever get to posting more of my GAHP series you'll get to know why. If not it will remain a mystery forever.

5. What are your hobbies?

I like to cook, I like to read and I like to write. For the time being these are all hobbies, though if I have my way they will all, someday, be things I get paid to do.

6. What is the best book you've read recently?

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I'm actually still reading this book and I simply can't put into words what a wonderful writer Dillard is. This book is pure brilliance and everyone should read it.

7. What is your favorite blog?

Slacktivist. I've plugged Fred Clark's blog quite a few times before and I'm sure I'll do it quite a few times in the future. He is a magnificent op-ed writer, a very talented amateur theologian and his brilliant and scathing critiques of pre-millenial dispensationalism and the Left Behind books should be mandatory reading at every Bible College in North America.

8. What is the worst book you've ever read?

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. This book was awful. The prose was awful, the plot was awful, the characters were awful, and the pseudo-history was simply laughable. Though I am against all book burning in principle this literary turd may just be exception-worthy.

9. Who is your favorite British Science-Fiction author/humorist?

Douglas Adams. Everybody should read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and the Dirk Gently series. If you haven't read them yet go out and read them now. I have only one warning: read these books alone. If you don't you'll feel like a tool for inexplicably laughing out loud every ten minutes or so.

10. Who is your favorite person in the world?

My wife, Jinny. She is beautiful, loving, brilliant, fun, kind, responsible and (not at all surprisingly) a damn good mommy. I should note that my little boy, Liam, runs an unbelievably tight second to his mommy in this race.

Drumroll Please...

It is my great pleasure and honor to finally announce the birth of our first child, our new son Liam Milton Toffelmire. Sorry but no pics right now, I'm a tool and forgot the camera at the hospital. Liam was born at 4:30pm, August 13th by emergency c-section. He and Jinny are both doing wonderfully now, though Liam had a bit of a rough start. He coded in the operating room and spent the first hour or so of his life with a tube down his throat. He's doing great now and shows all the signs of a happy, alert little baby. He's even starting to breastfeed pretty well. Incidentally the pregnancy, imminent birth and last minute renos on the house (which were because of the imminent birth) are the reasons I've been away from blogging for so long. I'll probably be off for a little longer, but I'll try to keep Liam updates coming. Cheers all.

Update: I've uploaded a whole bunch of pictures to our family blog. Check out the link on my sidebar.

The Gospel According to Harry Potter

I know of no story that has been so publicly denigrated in recent years by the Christian right than J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. By "recent years" I suppose I mean in the past decade. Here at the end of the series it seems like most of the seriously negative publicity has died off. That being said I know that in an awful lot of Christian circles (including my own church at times) Rowling's books are considered a mere half-step above the work of Anton Lavey. This is, of course, because Harry Potter is a wizard. But what people continually fail to understand is that the magic of Harry Potter has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of witchcraft condemned by the Bible. Rowling's magic is, in my mind, a metaphor for mystery, for all that is wondrous and glorious in the world and yet remains beyond our rational understanding. And what is more, the themes of Rowling's books are deeply Christian. Her explorations of exclusion, racism, chosen-ness, grace, love, courage, heroism and redemption are almost all cribbed straight from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Which leads me to today's post. Welcome to the first installment of The Gospel According to Harry Potter.*

Wherein we meet Vernon Dursley, aka the world's biggest jerk...

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much." (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 7).

Normal. It is the overcoming drive towards normalcy, the status quo, the mundane, the ordinary and everyday, that drives the social movement we call conservatism. Due to a relatively strange confluence of historical, social and political factors we live in an age in which Christianity is considered a conservative religion. But it hasn't always been that way. There was a day when Jesus and his followers were considered threats to the status quo, rebels and renegades who consistently stood against the injustice of the established order. But the world doesn't see us that way anymore. Now the world sees us as a great pack of Vernon Dursleys.

Vernon, or Uncle Dursley as he will soon come to be known, is a ridiculous, absurdity of a man. He is self-righteous, he is blustering, he is pompous, he is in short, a jerk. Imagine Polonius adjusted for inflation and driving an Audi through the streets of London. At every turn Dursley seeks to do only one thing: maintain the status of his family. And this is where our lesson about Christianity and conservatism takes shape.

As the name implies conservatism is an attempt to maintain an existing situation. The general tendency of truly conservative Christianity (I'm speaking more of socially conservative Christianity, but similar critiques could be leveled at some brands of theological conservatism) is to maintain the status of Christianity within our society. Unfortunately that's not how Jesus himself approached the world. Read the Gospel of Luke in particular. In Luke Jesus stands in the tradition of the great 8th century prophets, condemning injustice, lifting up the poor and the downtrodden, and basically just scaring the piss out of the political and religious establishment.

One of the great dichotomies that Rowling will set up for us throughout the Potter series is between the Dursleys of the world and the Potters of the world. It is, in my mind, very much akin to the synoptics' dichotomy between the pharisees and Jesus. One of the many questions we must ask ourselves as Christians is whether we are on the side of the established order or the side of the weak and the downtrodden. The fact of the matter is that we were never called to be the dominant religion of the world and we were never called to maintain our own wealth, power and influence. We were called to serve, to sacrifice and to die. Perhaps James the brother of Jesus said it best.

"This is pure and undefiled religion in the sight of [our] God and Father, to visit orphans and widows in their distress, [and] to keep oneself unstained by the world." James 1:27


*I originally intended to make this a weekly series, but what with Liam's arrival and my more and more pressing need to finish my actual work (aka my thesis) the series is likely to be a little hit and miss to start with. Hopefully there's more to come.

12:36 AM...

Last night at 11:30 or so I was in a parking lot that was completely full. I'm sure if you're imagining the lot in your mind's eye you are seeing it properly. It is enormous. It caters to a strip-mall that contains several small retail stores, four restaurants, a multiplex theater...and one other store. On any other day one would assume that at 11:30 on a Friday night the hundreds upon hundreds of cars in this parking lot would belong to customers of the theater and the restaurants. I'm only guessing, but last night I'd be surprised if more than 15% of the cars in that parking lot belonged to patrons of any but one store. That store, that one other store, is Chapters. Of course it is.

Last night at 11:30 I went to Chapters in south Calgary to pick up my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.* I was there a full half-hour before the book went on sale. Jinny and I had long-ago pre-purchased our copy, so I went to the pre-purchase line to get my bracelet and then they sent me to the queue to pick up my book. It took me a little while to find the end of the queue. It snaked down the main aisle, through the magazine section, and then in and out of every row of books in the children's section. That's where the end of the line was when I got there. Thirty minutes later when they finally started giving people books I was right around the middle of the line. I have no idea how many people there were, but lets just say lots. By "lots" I mean hundreds and not dozens. And this is to say nothing of the many, many people who had not pre-purchased the book and were waiting in a different line to buy their copy that night. While I was in line I heard more than a couple of people express shock and amazement, and even some amusement, at the fact that so many people had come to a store in the middle of the night just to pick up a book.

Why is it that people in our culture believe that this kind of attention is perfectly reasonable for a club or a new movie, but ridiculous for a book? Say what you want about Rowling's books, but they have done one wonderful and incredible thing for an entire generation (or two, or three)...they have elevated reading. This isn't to say that kids didn't read in my day, but they sure as hell didn't stand in line for an hour at midnight to pick up a book. Harry Potter is a massive, almost overwhelming, cultural phenomenon. In my mind that's a good thing.

I got my copy at 12:36 AM and was reading about thirty minutes later. And for the record, the first 17 chapters are fantastic.

*This is normally where I'd insert a hyperlink to Amazon or HP.com or something, but today there will be no hyperlinks. Logging on to Blogger to post is the very most I'm willing to do online until I've finished reading the book on the off chance that some bastard out there is posting spoilers where I might read them. Such people should be drawn and quartered.

Busy, Busy...

Sorry for the lax blogging, as the title of this post suggests, I've been busy. I've also been tired. I've also been on holidays. Consequently my poor little blog has suffered terribly. I suspect my readers have therefore been spared considerable suffering, but since this blog is really here to give outlet to my personal opinions and to help me practice writing well (something I think we can all agree I need rather badly), I don't really care about that. I have nothing at all to say, so I thought I'd participate in Jon's little iPod game for fun. Here's today's random 10:

1. Going Down/Love in an Elevator - Aerosmith
2. Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones
3. #41 - Dave Matthews Band
4. Under Pressure - Queen
5. My Favorite Mistake - Sheryl Crow
6. Suspicion - Okay, I have no idea who wrote or performed this song, and I've never heard it before. I had no idea it was in my iTunes or where it came from.
7. The Luxury - The Tragically Hip
8. Driving South - Jimi Hendrix
9. Glad All Over - The Beatles
10. Traveling With the Experience - Jimi Hendrix

Setting aside the Suspicion thing (where the hell did that song come from??), I must say that my list kicks Jon's list's ass. Can I say "Jon's list's" and not cause people to fall into a grammatical coma? But really, the Stones, the Beatles, DMB, Queen, Hendrix...my taste rules. Even Sheryl Crow and Aerosmith are legitimate picks I think. And just in case you think I got random lucky, here's the top ten from my 25 Most Played:

1. Stone Cold Crazy - Queen
2. Don't Panic - Coldplay
3. The Hounds of Winter - Sting
4. One of These Things First - Nick Drake
5. Hurts to Love - The Philosopher Kings
6. Caring is Creepy - The Shins
7. The Only Living Boy in New York - Simon & Garfunkel
8. Fields of Gold - Sting
9. Shape of My Heart - Sting
10. T.N.T. - AC/DC

Not bad at all if I do say so. Though I'm not sure how T.N.T. made #10. It's a good rock anthem, like all AC/DC, but I don't remember listening to it on my iPod...well, ever now that I think of it. Odd.

There you go, some more random nonsense to tide you all over until my next brilliant post. Cheers.

In Print...

It is official, something I wrote has been published...in print...in an actual book. How did this happen you ask? Well it helps that it's not my book and that I had no idea that the book was being released until about a month ago.

A couple of years ago I was doing a google search on one of my professors, a gentleman named Mabiala Kenzo. He is a brilliant theologian who specializes in narrative theology, post-colonialism, and the works of Paul Ricoeur. One of the sites that I found was A New Kind of Conversation. The site was essentially a kind of blog where a group of theologians, philosophers, counselors and writers (including well-known author Brian McLaren) were interacting with questions about the relationship between post-modernism and the Christian faith (particularly evangelical Christianity). The really cool bit about this was that every post had an open comments section where anybody could interact with what these authors had posted. Like all blogs the unregulated posting sometimes wandered pretty far off-topic, but there was also a lot of insightful and interesting interaction as well.

So the long and the short of it is that I contributed a number of comments to the discussion and about a month ago I got an email from the book's publisher asking for my home address so that they could send me a free copy of the finished book. It arrived today and it looks like all of my comments were included (woohoo!). I did get siced by the editors in one post, but it was just for using "dunno" instead of "don't know."

You can check out the full conversation on the web site or buy the book in your local book store or on amazon. Why buy the book when I can read it online for free, you ask? The joy of the book is that the original posts and subsequent comments have been edited and organized into a much more coherent whole. The book also includes some very helpful sidebars and definitions to some of the more technical language that's being used.

So there you are, a little bit of shameless self-promotion. Setting that aside it really is a good book and some of the essays and comments are very worth the $20 or whatever it costs in stores. I leave you with the bibliographic info.

Penner, Myron Bradley and Hunter Barnes ed. A New Kind of Conversation: Blogging Toward a Postmodern Faith. Paternoster: Colorado Springs, 2007.

Brevard Childs...

Brevard Childs died on Saturday. For those of you who don't know of him, he was one of the great biblical scholars of the 20th century. He was a pioneer in the fields of Biblical Theology and Canonical Criticism and a long-time professor at Yale Divinity School. You can find the full obituary here. May his memory be for a blessing.

The Tale...

There is no H in the standard western musical scale. There are only 7 notes, which we we name with the first 7 letters of the alphabet, A to G. I don't remember where I heard it, and I don't remember who said it, but a well known thinker once said that because of the finite number of available notes, scales and keys the world would soon run out of original music. That was a couple hundred years ago. What this thinker failed to take into account was the near infinite potential for new combinations of and variations on old themes.

There are also only a finite number of tales in the world. I don't know how many there are, but it is a finite number. Every story you've ever heard, like every song you've ever heard, is a variation on a theme. It is an author riffing on a scale. Some people find this troubling, even disquieting. I do not. I love it. I love that I can see an author taking a well known tale, a cultural pillar, and interact with it, caressing it, re-telling it in a way that makes us perk up our ears again.

I watched El Laberinto del fauno (English title Pan's Labyrinth) tonight, and that is exactly what Guillermo del Toro does in this wonderful film. Not only does del Toro weave his own fantastic vision in and out of an ancient tale, he weaves it in and out of The Tale. I call it The Tale because it is, I believe, the most important tale that the world has ever known. We have known this tale for as long as tales have been told (it is found in the Ba'al cycles and the OT) and in many different cultures (Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian, etc.). It is the tale of the innocent suffering servant. It is the tale of one who is prepared to sacrifice his or her own blood in order to stave off the darkness, in order to drive away the night once again. This is The Tale that strikes at the very heart of our fear and our hope. It has been told a thousand times, ten thousand times, ten thousand times ten thousand times. It is a tale that God himself once told. It is the tale, of course, of Christ. If you'd like to see this tale told again in a wildly creative, disturbing and beautiful way please watch El Laberinto del fauno. That, my friends, is how stories should be told.

Degrees...

We are each, so I am told, separated from every single other person on Earth by no more than 7 degrees. By how many degrees, I wonder, are we separated from the lives we might have lived and the people we might have been.

A couple of days ago Jinny and I got in touch with an old friend from high-school and college named Kerry (via facebook of course). For whatever reason this set me to reminiscing this evening. I met Kerry in high-school while I was involved with a youth program called Bible Quizzing. Bible Quizzing is exactly what it sounds like, a youth program based on Bible memorization and competition. It is every bit as hip as...well, as the word hip I guess. Nevertheless it was a formidable force for good in my life and I am deeply grateful that God nudged my path in that direction. I was involved with Quizzing from the beginning of the 7th grade until one year after I graduated from high-school (one year, incidentally, longer than most people are generally allowed to keep participating). In my second to last year the strangest, and in retrospect most wonderful, thing happened. Three of my friends who had always kind of looked down on Quizzing decided to join up.

Trevor, Trevor and Jon were all my age and the four of us were very nearly the oldest group of teens in our entire district (which was and is made up of all of the Christian and Missionary Alliance churches in Saskatchewan and Manitoba). We were a ridiculous lot to be sure. It is important to note that my friends did not join up due to a sense of confederacy or brotherhood. They joined for the same reason that teen-aged boys do everything. They wanted to meet girls. And they did. Which is actually the point of this story.

Trevor S. met nobody, he ended up marrying somebody from our church. Good guy but not a factor in this particular story (sorry Trev). Trev P. and Jon, however, both met girls. Trevor met Kerry and Jon met Carrissa. Trevor and Kerry dated for years and that Kerry is the same as the Kerry I started this post with. She's a wonderful woman who has always made me laugh and pushed me to be a better Christian than is my wont. She is, in fact, almost directly responsible for my current theology of Scripture and my leanings towards post-evangelical/post-liberal theology (but that's a story for another day). Jon and Carrissa have now been married for about the same amount of time as me and Jinny. Through our newfound friendships with Kerry and Carrissa my friends and I met John (aka Potsy). John became (and remains) one of my very best friends and stood up for me at my wedding (and I for him at his, and both of us together for Scott at his).

That was a long paragraph with a lot of names in it. Very few people who read this blog know or care about any of those people (my friends don't really read my blog, they've had enough years of my BS already). The thing that I want to emphasize is that the simple decision that Trevor, Trevor and Jon made to join Quizzing had a profound effect on my life (and on theirs as well, but that's a good deal less important to me). Indeed without that decision I doubt very much that I would be married to Jinny today. The existential moment when I decided to actively pursue Jin was the direct result of some good old fashioned teen dating drama involving people I knew only because of that Quizzing decision. That existential moment, just in case any of you are curious, occurred on the toilet as all good existential moments do.

And so I wonder by how many degrees I am separated from the me that I might have been. What might that me be like? Without Jinny I have some suspicions that he'd be something of an annoying, selfish bastard. Even more than the me that I am is I mean (how's that for an unnavigable sentence?). Every moment of our lives we step into a new room with new doors. Each door we walk through leads to another room with one less door. Most people are relatively comfortable with this concept because it implies that we all choose our own fate. What we forget is that each door we walk through limits not only our own future choices, but the future choices of every other person in the world, regardless of the number of degrees of separation.

My life, your life, Trevor's and Trevor's and Jon's and John's and Kerry's and Carrissa's lives and all of the other lives of all the other people you know and don't know are connected. Meta-data, intertextuality, chaos theory, call it whatever the hell you like, we touch each other. We are determined by each other. And we are determined by God. By how many degrees am I separated from my theoretical spacial/temporal other self? I have no idea but I thank God for each and every one them.

Silly Usage...

I was going to call this post "Useless Words" or "Silly Words" but at the end of the day words can't actually be useless (agreed upon usage is all that meaning really is anyways), and I'm not sure it's fair to call any given word silly. It isn't the word's fault that people don't know how to use it consistently. That being said the phenomenon I'm thinking about is real. There are a great many words in the English language that are no longer sensible in their popular usage. I'm not one of those people who thinks languages should be static, unchanging, immovable. On the contrary I think the evolutionary nature of language is what makes it so fun and fascinating. What annoys me is people who say that a word means one thing but use it as though it means something else. I'm going to pick on two particular words today. I'm not going to pick on any particular person or publication, this is a general observation on my part. If you think I'm wrong or being overly general, feel free to disagree in the comments.

Scientist. I'm sick to death of the ubiquitous "scientists say" or "according to leading scientists" that we hear on television and read in newspapers. If I were to ask the average writer who uses this word what he or she means, my guess is that I would hear something about observable, empirical, reproducible evidence, about unbiased research and perhaps even something about facts or truth. All of those things are well and good so far as they go. I'll set aside in depth comments about competing epistemological points of view and the role of scientific method in the search for truth. My real complaint today is that when news outlets (and people in general for that matter) talk about scientists they are not referring to people who observe the world in a particular way and then comment on those observations (which is what scientists do). The rhetorical subtext of the common use of the word "scientist" is far more closely related to older uses of the word "priest." That is, it refers to a gatekeeper at the fortress of truth. Instead of being just a person using particular methodology a scientist is now someone who holds facts in his or her hands and dispenses them to us mere mortals who can never understand the universe in a meaningful way. I wonder if we wouldn't be better off scrapping "scientist" and speak of people who do research according to scientific methodology as physicists, chemists, sociologists, biologists, etc.

Literally. This one annoys me far more than "scientist." That's mostly because when people use it they often mean exactly the opposite of what the word means. Just this evening I heard a woman say that her friend had a baby who's head was flat, "literally like a wall." How can a boy's head be literally like a wall? Was it made of rock or brick? What this woman meant, of course, was that the child's head is similar to a wall, in that it is decidedly flat in much the same way as a wall. This use of "literal" and "literally" is particularly dangerous when people read the Bible (and other sacred texts I'm sure). People who insist on the literal truth of the Bible don't really mean to say that every single word in the Bible contains only denotative (and not connotative) value. That would be ridiculous. Take the simple example of Jesus' words concerning the person with a plank in his or her eye attempting to remove a grain of dust from the eye of another. How can these words possibly be literal? No person could ever place an actual plank into his or her eye. It is a metaphor and must be read metaphorically. Somewhat might object and say that so called "biblical literalists" only mean that the Bible should be taken at face value. If someone can tell me what "face value" is, precisely, then perhaps we can have a conversation about that. All I know is that nobody can read the whole Bible literally.

But it's late now, and scientists say that a person should try to get at least 8 hours of sleep. Plus I'm so tired I could sleep like the dead...literally.

Triumph or Triumphalism...

I play electric guitar in the band at my church. Yeah, I know, it kicks ass, but let's set that aside for a moment shall we? Just a little while ago our worship pastor introduced a new song to the congregation called My Savior Lives by the Desperation Band out of New Life Church. It's got this great little riff right at the beginning that I get to play very loud and very distorted, which is a lot of fun for me. The first time I really thought about the words of the song, however, I realized both the danger and the beauty available in the simple lyrics. I'll quote the meat here.

Our God will reign forever, and all the world will know his name.
Victory forever, is the song of the Redeemed.

I know that my Redeemer lives, and now I stand on what he did. My savior, my savior lives.
Everyday a brand new chance to say, Jesus you are the only way. My savior, my savior lives.

The king has come from heaven, and darkness trembles at his name.
Victory forever, is the song of the Redeemed.

Like all modern worship music the actual song goes on a good deal longer but it pretty much just repeats the above over and over again. As I'm sure you've noticed the theological...well I was going to say crux but I suppose that wouldn't be quite accurate. The theological key to this song is the resurrection. Though I tend to harp on the vital importance of the Cross in Christian theology, the empty tomb cannot be minimized. It is central to the Christology and to the anthropology of our faith. The most notable biblical argument concerning resurrection is of course Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15. This passage is also the inspiration for My Savior Lives (check out vv. 1-2). It's a beautiful passage about hope, meaning, drive, and finally triumph. When Paul co-opts Hosea 13:14 and turns it on its head saying "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" (15:55 NASB) he reaches down to us struggling with our most basic fears and pulls us up out of the darkness to stand alongside Christ. Triumph is a wonderful thing, and as Christians we must embrace it.

But there is danger here. The danger is that we begin to sacrifice real triumph, the power and victory of the Cross and the empty tomb, for the emptiness of Christian triumphalism. What's the difference? Triumph is about grace and the gift of new life offered to all of humanity through Christ (1 Cor. 15:22). Triumphalism is about winning, about pushing an earthly agenda, a political agenda, a social agenda that raises up "Christians" while pushing down everyone else. I put the quotation marks around Christian in that sentence because this brand of church-ianity reminds me an awful lot of some things Jesus said about the Pharisees in Matthew 23.

When we sing songs like My Savior Lives we have an opportunity. We can set aside the temptation to think in terms of earthly victory, of political agendas, of the kinds of victory that can be measured in dollars or votes or asses in the pew. We can move beyond triumphalism. We can live instead in the hope and grace of triumph, knowing that we serve a God who wants more than anything that death might die.

Thoughts About Thinking About Faith...

I ran across the following quote via Steven Harris who gets it from this interview with a gentleman named Liam Goligher.

Liam is concerned that the works of these theologians [advocates of the New Perspective on Paul, e.g. NT Wright] are overly complex, and that it seems it simply isn’t possible to popularise their teaching. To him, theology should be capable of a simple explanation that even a child can understand, whilst, of course, it can also be explored and discussed at much greater levels of complexity.

I don't know this man, and have no idea about what his credentials may or may not be (though I did see at another site that he uses the title Dr.). That being said this sentence is absurd and dangerous.

It's absurd because theology has always been difficult and complex. The writings of the OT prophets and poets, the theology of James and Paul and Peter and the author of Hebrews, the teachings of Christ himself...they're all complex. There is a reason why there is so much disagreement concerning the teachings of Scripture. Those teachings are sometimes very dense and require prolonged analysis and consideration, and developing a systematic theology from the Bible necessarily involves some intellectual heavy lifting.

It's dangerous because it suggests that anyone speaking in complex sentences and using polysyllabic words is somehow a less able or devout Christian. NT Wright is a great man, a great thinker and as far as I can tell a great Christian. He even writes some great devotional material that I think more Christians should read. Goligher's opinions above don't make me second guess Wright's faith or theology, they only make me think that Goligher is in over his head when he's reading Wright's academic works.

There are a great many academics in the world who believe that complex discussion about hermeneutics, the Historical Jesus, the Historical Paul, textual criticism, literary theory, etc., is important and are also devout Christians. This world doesn't need fewer people critically engaging complex issues, it needs more. This isn't intellectual snobbery. I don't think that you need to read Greek and Hebrew in order to be a thoughtful Christian, but being able to read ancient languages and complex theology doesn't preclude faith either.

Having faith like a child isn't the same thing as thinking like one.

Mishmash...

Sorry for the sparse blogging lately. I've been both busy and preoccupied with other things. Nothing in particular to say today so I figured I'd just put together a little of this and that from the blogosphere.

Consequently I am flying the face of number 2 on John Lyons' list of the 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging. This is actually one of the things I disagree with on John's list. I rather like blogs that serve primarily as collating services for some topic or another. Paleojudaica is, of course, my favorite of these. Getting caught up on everything in the news that is even vaguely associated with early Judaism is generally as simple as clicking on to Davila's site.

For those of you who don't wander about on Slacktivist regularly, shame on you. But for now just check out his last couple of posts on the roles and rights of women around the world. Make sure you follow the link to Joss Whedon's post on this topic as well, and make note of his points concerning the soon-to-be-released Captivity. And while you're over on Slack don't forget to read Fred's second footnote on his most recent post. I would like to know precisely what precipitated the second encounter with Bishop Tutu.

Finally, I want to weigh in very briefly on Simcha Jacobivici and his "documentary" The Lost Tomb of Jesus. If you want the whole lowdown on this film I strongly suggest that you go over to Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway Blog and read everything that you find on the Talpiot Tomb, it's all here. The article I want to mention, however, I ran across via Jim West's blog (another blog worth daily reading). The Canadian Jewish News gives a report about Jacobivici's film and the resulting controversy, asking him questions about the rather harsh backlash that the film has received. Jacobivici seems to key in on people who take issue with his film on religious grounds, playing the Search for the Truth trump card on these objections. "What I am doing is reporting objectively about an archaeological discovery," he says. Later in the article he summarily dismisses the objections of archaeologists by saying "I’ve noticed that archeology is not a science. It’s a body of knowledge" (can somebody explain to me what the hell that means?!). What both he and the CJN completely fail to mention is that more or less the entire scholarly community, including theologians, archaeologists, philologists, paleographers, historians and biblical scholars have explored the possibility that the Talpiot Tomb belonged to Jesus of Nazareth is highly unlikely. There are serious scholars (e.g. James Tabor) who do buy that the tomb does contain the remains of Jesus, but so far as I know not many (readers should feel free to correct me on this). It's not that I think Jacobivici is ridiculous because of what he believes, but the fact that he dismisses the scholarly community on this subject by citing his journalism credentials just annoys me.

So, there it is. An avalanche of meaningless junk. Cheers all.

Better Men (and Women) or Willful Ignorance...

I'm reading some more of the platonic Dialogues again right now, partly because Socrates is good fun and partly because I really need to return Mike's books to him and this is one of the ones I borrowed around (cough, cough) two years ago. Anyhoo, I came across a wonderful little quote. The parenthetical (and women) is my editorial nod towards inclusiveness.

Socrates: I think so too, Meno. I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs both in word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men (and women), braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.
-Plato, Meno, 86b (trans. G.M.A. Grube; Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1981).

Ignorance is a fact of life. Willful ignorance is a sin.

Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner...

I've been listening to a lot of Sting lately. For whatever reason over the past few years popular music has become less and less interesting to me. There are still a few bands here and there that I love, bands that speak to me, but they are few and far between. Among them, however, there is Sting. There are two songs in particular that have reached me in a powerful way. It isn't that I resonate with either of them. I don't. They have nothing to do with my life. But they are wonderful stories and there are very few things in life that I like more than a wonderful story.

I Hung My Head is the story of a man who accidentally shoots and kills a stranger. Not surprisingly this song was also performed by Johnny Cash on his American IV album. Though at first glance the song is apparently about death it is really about regret and the powerlessness of much of our lives. It is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful drama and I love hearing it over and over again. It is also written in 9/8 time. Ya, you heard me.

I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying is the story of a man who's wife has left him. Never have I experienced a song that walks the fine line between sadness and hope so well. And the truly great joy of this song is the perfect marriage between the tone of the music and the one of the lyrics. So few major recording artists truly have the ability to marry a complex emotion like loss with a musical score, but Sting does it marvelously here. The movement from a major to a minor progression in the chorus following verse 3 hits me particularly hard.

This may seem like an odd post for me (though those who know me well know that I love music), but I'm going somewhere with this. It would appear that a lot of people I know are tired and sad right now. I understand, I'm just coming out of a pretty deep valley myself. These songs helped me because they are so deeply human. They touched me with both sadness and the promise of hope. In the spirit of hope then, I leave you with a line from I'm So Happy.

I saw that friend of mine, he said,
you look different somehow
I said, everybody's got to leave the darkness sometime.

Visceral...

Jinny and I had a nice little date night tonight. A pleasant walk, some ice-cream from the local shop (a wonderful woman who sells right out of her house) and a movie. The movie was Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a near-future drama/action film (generally called sci-fi, but the label doesn't fit here in my opinion). The premise of the film is that in the year 2027 no children have been born on the whole planet for about 18 years. In Cuaron's vision of the future the political and social strife present today in much of the developed and developing world has been drastically exacerbated by the progressive realization that this is the last generation of humans the world will ever see.

The film has received mixed reviews and I know people who have loved it and hated it. I don't know that I loved it, but I do think it was very good and occasionally brilliant. What this film provides better than anything is an immediate and visceral experience of political and cultural conflict. All of this comes to a head in the climactic confrontation between government and rebel forces. That sentence may sound cliche, and certainly a plot line like this in the hands of a lesser director could have been badly botched, but in this case I really felt that this moment allowed us as viewers to experience what it might mean to be on either side of a violent ideological conflict. There's also a fantastic moment where we glimpse the great wonder and the great absurdity bound up in being human, but I won't spoil that bit (it was my favorite part of the film). This one is definitely worth a try.