German Christians Encouraged by Government Minister to Participate More in Politics

(Thanks to sometime commenter L for this story.)

Wow, has Germany come full circle?  Here’s a story about the German Education Minister encouraging German Christians to keep on engaging actively with society and politics.  “Without Christians, Germany wouldn’t be what it is.”  And lest any of you think that’s  a slam, she seems to mean post-Nazi Germany, which is a pretty impressive place (despite all my moaning).  (Besides, as a lecture in Jesus in the Gospels revealed further to me today, the Nazis were far outside the mainstream of Christianity – they were basically a cult, in so far as they were “Christian” at all, that argued that Jesus was not Jewish and called for drastic reevaluation of the Old and New Testaments along racial lines.)

The Simpsons on Grad Students

My brother just forwarded me the link to this 19-second video, and I had to post it.

Teaching is Fun

A girl came up to me after class and said: “Sorry that this is kind of off-topic, but I don’t know anything about religion.  What’s the Holy Spirit?”  What a question!  So gratifying to be asked, but hard to answer.  Here’s my rambling attempt:

• the third person of the trinity
• “I’ve heard him called the “shy” member of the trinity”
• “I’m tempted to define him as the Person that’s not God the Father or Jesus”
• told her the story of Pentecost – probably TMI
• not present in the OT, and believers back then knew God but didn’t have the Holy Spirit.  One difference that Jesus made is that Christians today have the Holy Spirit in their hearts.
• maybe it’s fair to say he’s the presence of God down here, in the “realm of becoming” (which we learned about this week).

I enjoyed this discussion section so much, which was all about the subjects lectured on by our guest lecturer, the Trinitarian Controversy (featuring Arius) and the Christological Controversy (with Cyril and Nestorius).  This lecturer, one of the new assistant profs in my department, managed to make a subject that’s always bored me seem fun and not too hard and relevant.  The students responded really well, and I had the best discussion sections this week that I’ve ever had.   I’m almost tempted to wish that I did something in the line of Judeo-Christianity or philosophy (not really) … you can have discussions about history and ANE religion, but you have to know a lot before you do so – and I’ve never succeeded in getting my undergrads to that point.

I’m realizing this semester how rewarding teaching can be when your goal isn’t to expend as little time or emotional energy as possible.  It’s so annoying when students seem sullen and unengaged, but such a shot in the arm when they respond.

Go scholars!

I learned two encouraging things last Friday in the class I’m TA’ing this semester on Jesus and the Gospels.

Given that I had spent the morning practically trying to convince my undergrads that not all the details of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke could both be true (or at least asking them to tell me *how* for example Jesus could have been both presented as a newborn in the Temple and on the run from Herod, to Egypt), this was a welcome change.

The professor told the story of how one of the many apparent discrepancies between John and the Synoptic Gospels was resolved by a secular academic.  They Synoptics record that Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples before he died, while in John he dies on the Friday before Passover (which was the following Shabbat).  How could both be true?  Well, some French scholar postulated that different groups within Judaism celebrated Judaism at different times — which is definitely true for the Essenes, for example – and so at least some scholars say that the chronology of both John and the Synoptics is acceptable. The Prof actually came out and said, “so scholars aren’t always showing that the different Gospels are incompatible – sometimes they help to harmonize the Gospels, too.”  At this I wanted to cheer.

There was another interesting tidbit: the prof reads the references to Thomas, Peter, and the disciple “whom Jesus loved” in the book of John as responses to what was going on in their respective communities in the early church at the time John was written.  So he thinks the post-resurrection story about the beloved disciple outrunning Peter to the tomb but waiting and letting Peter go in first (Jn. 20: 1-10) has an anti-Gnostic, anti-Gospel of Thomas message: if a follower of Jesus understands the truth before the others, his job is not to treat the latter as second-class Christians, but to wait for them – to serve the community as a whole instead of clinging to membership in the elite.

I wish all apparent discrepancies between the Gospels could be harmonized like the Passover story above.  I’ve arrived at the point, though, where instead of clinging to far-fetched solutions at all costs, I’m willing to admit that some things didn’t actually happen.  It’s kind of scary – but I hope ultimately God-honoring.

wise words

“Unless you’re cool in the Lord, you’re always going to be in competition.”

What Dad told me yesterday after I moaned to him about going to a party where I felt uncool and uninteresting, drab and plain white bread.  Repressed, perpetually single white bread — with braces.

Oh, and then last night, I was out with a doctor friend and some friends from her research fellowship program, all of whom are married doctors about my age or a several years older.  After I finished telling them what I study, one of them asked me in a kindly voice, “Are you an undergrad?”  WTF!  We all either laughed it off or played it as a compliment, but I saw it as a judgment on my general lack of polish (and braces), and nothing to do with the smoothness of my complexion.

Sometimes I feel like grad school is a never-ending competition to see who’s smartest, who’s making the fastest progress (now that most of my acquaintances are candidates, unlike me), who’s got an in with profs, who’s wittiest, and, around certain people, who knows the most about obscure arts and culture.

I really don’t know if the people who seem to “beat” me are also competing, or if the competition is all the creation of my tormented, insecure mind.  (Probably somewhere in between.)  I just know that this is one rat race I want to get the hell out of.

Thank goodness for Paul, that trembling, suffering, shat-upon apostle, who decided to know nothing but Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

“Where is the one who is wise?  Where is the  scribe?  Where is the debater of this age?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the follow of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.  He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.  Therefore, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (I Cor. 20-31)

considerate undergrad

I asked this undergrad girl on the quad today where the Flynn building is.  She said “Hi, I’m Alex,” and walked out of her way so she could point it out to me.  I’m choosing to look at this as a good omen for fall TA’ing.

a match made in …

Gosh, I wish I knew someone else that loves both Depeche Mode and True Blood as much as I do, so that we could revel in this clip together.  I’ll just have to put it out there into the ether.   It shows highlights from the season finale with the song “Corrupt” in the background, interspersed with shots of DM in the studio.  David Gahan even looks kind of like a vampire when he sings.

Coming out as a True Blood fan (to people besides my jaded grad student friends) is something I was too ashamed to do until now, because the show is chock full of evil.  It’s like sin made flesh.  It’s like seeing the great whore of Babylon in action, complete with murderous blood drinking.  It makes Sex and the City look tame.

But I love it!  I think for some of the same reasons that I love Depeche Mode, with their themes of blasphemy,  domination, obsession, sado-masochism, fetishes, flies on windshields, suffering, moral corruption, nihilistic pleasure that leads to spiritual death, etc.  This stuff is entertaining. It’s technicolor.  It’s not subtle.  And in both universes, there’s still an awareness of right and wrong, black and white.  (E.g., I’m not current on the 2nd season of True Blood, but the fact that Sookie sort of fazed Marianne at one point and had a white light sparkling out of her hands seems significant – is she some kind of angel?)  I’m reminded of one of my favorite DM lines, from “Strangelove”: “I give in / to sin / because I like to practise what I preach.” Yes, evil is presented as a temptation, but at least there’s the admission that there is such a thing, and that it’s dangerous.  That’s actually more satisfying to me than a bunch of moral jelly fish engaging in similar activities (minus the biting) and justifying it by saying things like “it’s complicated” or “it is what it is.”

see me try to read

Hoping for a spiritual/intellectual shot in the arm, I opened Terry Eagleton’s Ideology, and was not disappointed.  He’s such a good writer.  Life seems so much more bearable today. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction portending the riches within:

A poem by Thom Gunn speaks of a German conscript in the Second World War who risked his life helping Jews to escape the fate in store for them at the hands of the Nazis:

I know he had unusual eyes,

Whose power no orders could determine,

Not to mistake the men he saw,

As others did, for gods or vermin.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.  One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons — reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival.  It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by and will occasionally die for.  If Gunn’s conscript escaped the ideological conditioning of his fellows, how did he come to do so?  Did he act as he did in the name of an alternative, more clement ideology, or just because he had a realistic view of the nature of things?  Did his unusual eyes appreciate men and women for what they were, or were his perceptions in some sense as much biased as those of his comrades, but in a way we happen to approve rather condemn? Was the soldier acting against his own interests, or in the name of some deeper interest?  Is ideology just a “mistake,” or has it a more complex, elusive character? (p. xiii)

budding RC wannabe

I’ll say it again – the scourge of modern life is too much choice.  The scourge of my life anyway.

In the midst of a really cheesy theological horror flick (the only kind of horror I like) that I’m watching primarily because it stars the über-fox Ben Cross, the thought flashed into my mind for the first time that I wish I was Catholic.  Not because I think Catholic doctrine or practice is truer than Protestant, but because the Catholic church seems like a good church for bad Christians, for people who don’t really get it, for weaklings who f–k up all the time and shouldn’t be in charge of navigating their own lives.  Like me.  It’s especially attractive now that I’ve decided to leave my current church, which combines the style of Willow creek with the friendliness of the frozen chosen.  I’m not too optimistic about finding a replacement – and hence wish that I could just turn off my preferences and roll unthinkingly down a groove that’s been carved out by centuries of accumulated tradition.

Of course, the irony is that for a Protestant to convert to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy *merely* because they offer a comforting lack of choice and the appearance of greater solidity, is in my opinion in itself an act of autonomous, consumeristic choice.

Language Contact

In the German Elle that I brought back with me, I see two pages side by side that are a great example of the place of English in German society – and how easy it is even for fluent speakers to misunderstand a foreign language / culture.

On the right, we see an ad for a product entirely in English.  It’s very common for German ads to use  English  product names (e.g. Loreal’s “Made for me Naturals”) or slogans (e.g.”Everywhere at Home” for Schneiders of Salzburg, both examples taken from this magazine).  But this is the first ad I’ve ever seen entirely in English, picturing an American icon and commemorating an American achievement, the walk on the moon.  This is for a German public! Why would non-Americans, unless they were space enthusiasts, care about wearing the same watch (Omega Speedmaster) that Neil Armstrong wore on the moon on July 20, 1969?

And on the left there’s an article about a new service in New York (which seems to be the most happenin’ city on the planet in German eyes) called Wing Women, which provides shy single men with women who will accompany them to bars and other social spaces, help them get a conversation started with an attractive woman, and then discreetly withdraw once it seems like they can take it from there. The phrase wing woman is of course a variation on “wing man,” which originally referred to a pilot who supports another by flying beside him and a little behind. I think the German authors of this article must have scratched their heads and asked “why is this business called Wing Women?” and, not knowing the English idiom, come up with their own explanation.   Namely, these women are called Wing Women because “in a metaphorical sense they lend wings, by smoothing the way of self-conscious single men to their dream woman (my translation from German).”