BHT Josh on the exegesis industry
No matter how trivial, simple, and painless a saying of Jesus might be, there is always someone out there with a complicated theological justification for why we should do the exact opposite of what Jesus said.
Boar’s Head Tavern, 2
I’ll write another post, if for no other reason than that my blog has more than 5 readers for the moment, and it will soon pass.
I should disclose to anyone who cares that I was recently for some time a BHT fellow and asked to be removed because I clearly hadn’t contributed anything to the conversation (indeed, hadn’t posted in a while.) Gratitude to Michael Spencer for allowing me to be a part of a group who are in some ways out of my league.
I meant the post to be constructive; I hope it came across that way. But when I said the BHT fellows are “…still busy working out what exactly IS the Christian revelation..” that could sound like they’re over there noodling over whether Jesus rose from the tomb or not. Far from it. But they are over there trying to decide what baptism means and what it does — over and over. This is an important conversation, in some setting.
Josh: Of course everyone BHT is not clergy.
Steve: Thanks for asking. Jesus is Who has been revealed, and the means is the text of the New Testament. I realize that leaves all kinds of questions if one is interested in them, and for the most part I am not.
Jeremiah: Exactly. If this: “…a venue not affiliated with a church or a denominational structure in which Christians of drastically different confessional backgrounds can discuss their differences…” (bold mine) is the intent of the bar, then it is indeed accomplished. So maybe that’s it: in the end it is for the BHT to say what it intends to be, and it might be me who simply never got it.
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Intended constructive criticism either works or it usually devolves. Either the target gets it or not — “Oh. Yeah, good point…”. It strikes home, it rings true. If you have to reiterate, clarify, and amplify, and it turns into a debate with the person you were trying to switch a little light bulb for, you either were just off base or the time wasn’t right.
If my observation hasn’t seemed by now to be useful, it won’t be. I appreciate the responses. And I promise I won’t just sit over here in the dark taking shots at you guys. Believe it or not, I remain a BHT fan and avid lurker.
Boar’s Head Tavern
One of my favorite sites is the Boar’s Head Tavern. But I think it does not accomplish what it sets out to be, which is a modern day Inklings, because it is so much Inside Baseball.
The Inklings, on any given day, would have been overhead talking about stuff that an educated, literate pagan would have been interested in: books, stories, words, the nature of the universe, worldviews. All from a Christian viewpoint, certainly, but these topics would interest you and draw you in whether you had ever made a Christian commitment or not. They were applying the Christian revelation to the big wide cosmos. (Also, the Inklings were committed to creating new literary work.)
BHT, in contrast, tries to make it into this zone but keeps getting mired in talk that sounds like lunch at a clergy convention. If you’ve never made a Christian commitment, you have no interest at all in centuries-old debates about the nature of the Real Presence, the role of baptism, what differentiates one denomination from the rest (yuk), the latest strain of Calvinism, the latest fad in reaction to Calvinism, the latest salvo in the Christian blog wars, the newest flavor of emerging church, etc. The BHT fellows – bright and good, all — are still busy working out what exactly IS the Christian revelation. All from the perspective of professional clergy, who desperately need a Christian revelation for themselves and for their sheep. (And don’t we all.)
I’m not saying these things aren’t important — they are. In certain settings. They simply constitute a conversation which is narrow and even cloistered — and prolegomena. It’s hard to apply the Christian revelation to the big wide cosmos when you aren’t sure what it is.
I need to be fair and say this is not black and white. But if the Inklings type of talk was Broad and the opposite is Narrow, then the Inklings were about 80% Broad, 20% Narrow, while the BHT is the reverse.
I’m not sure that’s the mix they wanted.
Saving Dogma
Magnificent post from Joel at the BHT.
“Forget the checklists. Dogma doesn’t get us in.
Dogma keep us away from the ditches. They are the chewed up skid marks along grassy shoulders and rubber- and blood-smeared concrete medians that mark places of past carnage. Dogma aren’t bad–they are truly beneficial to us as signs of where to steer away from danger–but we make a fundamental mistake when we make them the road itself. We make “right beliefs” the Sacraments of the Church. We actually do believe in the Real Presence…the Real Presence of Saving Dogma. Christ-likeness and holy living thus is mediated by our faculty of understanding and whatever native power our conceptual thinking may have. But even if correct, when I treat my doctrine as icons (I can redescribe the process of transposing the gospel to the register of dogma as this: the veneration of my ideas), even right belief about X becomes a barrier to knowing only Christ and him crucified. We make these logismoi the essence of the gospel kerygma and our spiritual life rather than the disciplined take-up-your-cross life Jesus embodied and taught, that the apostles continually call us to in the NT, and that the early Church fathers emphasized. What difference does my assent to Romans 1-11 and Galatians 1-5:12 make if Romans 12-16 and Galatians 5:13-6 isn’t the real fruit in my actions, passions, and will?
We are trying to understand God and figure out how he does what he does. We accept these logismoi as profitable substitutes to the life of prayer. And we convince ourselves that this is Christ-honoring because it has the appearance of piety. Instead of doing love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, etc., i.e., walking by the Spirit, we think and analyze doctrine. If my thoughts about the truth of the atonement are of special concern to me, I must be exhibiting righteousness, right? So we convince ourselves that discernment is beneficial therapy for our souls. But it is nothing of the kind. It is talking about the cure rather than taking the medicine. Analysis and discernment is pseudo-therapeutic because it is content to read the prescription on the bottle rather than ingest its contents.
Safe Killing and Liberated Sex Objects
Thank God other people have said something. I didn’t want to be the first to react. I think that maybe Sharon doesn’t realize just how empty the word “safe” sounds to most of us when applied to “abortion.” Abortion kills the fetus and violently disrupts the natural pregnancy process. In other words, it injures the mother. Something that involves killing and injury isn’t particularly “safe.” The way I see it, always prefacing “abortion” with “safe” isn’t descriptive; it’s subversive. It’s attempt to a priori set certain boundaries to the discussion and compel us all to think a certain way about abortion that is at least amicable to the “yes” party. But the whole ethic and, dare I say it, metaphysic I subscribe to positively demands that I not use the word “safe” to describe “abortion,” any more than I think there is a “safe” way to practice bulemia.There’s also something inconsistent with how things turned out about saying that the sexual liberation of women was “threatening” to men. The language is saturated with the imagery of the oppressed women not only liberating themselves, but turning the very tables on their oppressors. However, that’s not how the reality rolls. “Intimidating” is the last word a typical man would use to describe a woman who satisfies his sexual desires without any expectation that he care about the spiritual, emotional, financial, or physical well-being of her and her offspring. Reproductive “control” (again, a term implying things about reproduction that I simply don’t believe) has not produced a generation of self-confident, free, self-governed women liberated from social demands and expectations. It created a generation of women who have to tart themselves up by 8 and start putting out by 13 in order to gain acceptance. Perhaps woman’s former role as home-maker and child-bearer was demeaning and enslaving, but the new role as spiritless sex-toy surely is not exalting. Shockingly, one cannot abolish social norms. One can only institute new ones.
“Ministry of discernment”: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature
A poster at the Boar’s Head Tavern wonders about the “ministry of discernment”, which is a euphemism for heresy hobbyists, which is actually a euphemism for “gossip and slander.”
“Ministry of discernment”? There is no such thing. It’s a hobby, somebody made it up. You can’t take a gift mentioned in the NT in the context of local church life, abstract it out of its context, give it your own definition, dub yourself one of the gifted, go off on your own, start a website or anewsletter, and think you’re exercising the grand charism.
If you can’t overcome your propensity to quarrel you just baptise it. Just like in software design: whatever is dysfunctional just needs a function dreamed up for it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
