Faith and Historical Criticism: An Uneasy Dualism?

I came across a critical summary by Gerhard F. Hasel of the Biblical Theology movement (active in the mid-20th century), and was surprised to see that in many places he could be describing positions I have quietly, half-consciously, come to over the past three or four years. His criticisms of the movement hit close to home.

The issue of the adequacy of biblical interpretation within the framework of the historical – critical method remained unresolved. The theologians of the biblical theology movement remained with both feet planted in the historical – critical method. They affirmed the modern world view with its secular understanding of the spatiotemporal world process, i.e., the world of history and of nature.

…the liberal understanding of the movement of history along general historicist lines was not radically questioned. Onto the contemporary scientific understanding of both nature and history, theologians of the biblical theology movement attempted to graft the biblical understanding of God as Creator and Lord who is dynamically active in the process of history (G E Wright).

This meshing of a “secular” or “atheistic” (A Schlatter) historical – critical method and a naturalistic – evolutionary world view with the God of the Bible who gives meaning and coherence to this world in his personal acts in history was “at best only an uneasy dualism” (Gilkey, 91).

I’m so grateful for my education at Westminster Theological Seminary and am an enthusiastic proponent of the incarnational approach to Scripture (as mediated by Pete Enns’s Old Testament Introduction class and encapsulated recently in his book Inspiration and Incarnation), but sometimes I wonder if it’s led me to the place I’m in now. As an aspiring scholar (in Assyriology, not Biblical Studies), I find myself reluctant to accept extra-”ordinary means” as explanations for how the Bible or events in redemptive history came about, and yet I certainly don’t want to get to the place where I deny God’s miraculous power. Am I on the way to becoming a full-fledged Troeltsch-ian? Where do I draw the line?

Tudor Redux

I thought my capacity to be entertained by Elizabethan-era historical fiction, TV and movies was bottomless, but apparently it’s not. I rented The Tudors (the new Showtime series starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and couldn’t even make it through one episode without surfing the internet. Considering how much good stuff has already been done, makers of period pieces ought to stop recycling the same tired old lore over and over again, and either 1) come up with a take that’s thoughtful and artistically original (trying for historical accuracy and cultural believability might help with that) or 2) move on and pick another period of history to mine. Someone should make a movie about Oliver Cromwell. Or Saladin.

By the way, did anyone else notice and find bizarre the anti-Spanish and -Catholic bias that characterized the recent Cate Blanchett vehicle (Elizabeth: The Golden Age)? Philip II’s bowleggedness, the Spanish ambassador’s grotesque ugliness, the contrast between Roman Catholic fanaticism and Protestant enlightenment, that choice shot of a golden, popish-looking cross sinking from the wreck of the Armada….

If you like period pieces, don’t waste your time on the recent Tudor crap.

In stead of:                            Watch:

The Other Boleyn Girl            Anne of the Thousand Days

The Tudors                            Six Wives of Henry VIII (Masterpiece Theater)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age    Elizabeth R (Masterpiece Theater)

Race and Politics

It’s kind of hard to keep your finger on the pulse of pop culture when NPR is your only source of news, so I barely knew anything about Michelle Obama, or perceptions of her, until I heard this really interesting NPR essay.

Wow, I see what people mean when they say that America is a country of polar opposites. (I wonder if this is particularly true of the US, or if it seems that way in every society, kind of like George Eliot’s famous pier glass optical illusion?) On the one hand, blacks are thought to have a corner on cool. Viz. the advent in white, privileged, hyper-educated circles of what a friend calls “coolspeak” – a specimen of which I recently came across on Facebook: “but don’t matter how much stank face you make, everyone is still sayin it! ooooooooooooh SNAP!” This was written by a white Harvard student.

On the other, I agree with the commentator that there’s a deep-seated, (sometimes) unarticulated fear of blacks among whites in the States – or at least, of those that seem uninhibited and passionate about their ethnic and cultural identity. I remember when Angela Davis came to my college campus to speak for MLK day, I – I’m ashamed to say it – joined my fellow College Republicans in protesting her presence, even though I barely knew anything about her. I remember how our chapter president bragged that he’d gotten a 20-year-old picture of Davis with an afro for the flyer advertising our protest. At the time, this didn’t bother me.

Internet Pros and Cons

This morning I was thinking that, for all my reservations about the digitilization of everything, it has made studying a foreign language a lot easier. In high school and college, German and modern Hebrew media were much harder to come by. I might spend $15 on a CD I wasn’t even that crazy about just so that I could hear someone using Hebrew besides my teacher. If I wanted to watch German TV in high school, I had to be home at 2:30 on Thursdays in order to catch the German news program on the cable channel that specialized in foreign languages. In college there were language labs open to students with access to a variety of media and learning aids, but few people were motivated enough to go unless there was an assignment.

Fast forward to today, where I have online access to:

- German print media
- German TV
- German radio, which can be downloaded onto an ipod and listened to whenever, wherever. Deutsche Welle news podcasts on Itunes are even categorized according to interest – you can get podcasts for example that focus on America, or are “spoken slowly” for German learners.
- a phonetics website where you can click on a sound and, not only hear a German pronouncing it, but see how it’s formed on an animated diagram of the articulatory anatomy.
- through Worldcat, I can find out which of my favorite authors have been translated into German and what the German titles of their books are; then request them through Inter-Library Loan.

And this is only what I’ve been doing in the past few days.

I came home just now from an ipod-fueled walk, though, and read “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly. For a second I thought this article was going to explain the apparent tanking of my memory that happened about the time I entered grad school, and supply the missing link between where I should be as a scholar-in-training and where I actually am. No such luck.

It didn’t focus on the issue I’ve been wrestling with most regarding the relationship between technology and cognition, but it was still pretty interesting – and ominous. The author’s thesis is that the internet is hurting people’s ability to think and read deeply.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

I wonder what “Daily Life in Ancient America” museum exhibits will consist of thousands of years hence – laptops?

Two quotes from the founders of Google:

The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter. For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.
Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.

And the author’s response:

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.

And his quotation of an essay by playwright Richard Foreman:

I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

I guess one benefit to writing papers and studying for exams is the assurance that one is still capable of reading whole books and concentrating for longish periods of time. But I wouldn’t be surprised if current technology has affected the attention spans even of people who research and write for their jobs. It’s manifested in other ways, e.g. in how we carry on social conversations and how we spend our leisure time.

Well, I’m off to go read The Magic Mountain. I will finish the 716-page monster!

German is Beautiful (when spoken well)

After 6 weeks of languishing in a mire of post-semester apathy, I’ve decided to get serious about the fact that I’m going to be taking PhD-level classes in Germany IN GERMAN in just a few months. I want to start working on German now, little and often, so that I don’t have a nervous breakdown once get there.

In that spirit, here’s a quote from Diction for Singers (Wall et al):

Many people unfamiliar with the German language consider it a dark, gutteral language because of the presence of several sounds and speech patterns foreign to American English. In reality, the majority of German vowels and consonants are clear and forward, promoting good vocalism.

Technological Overkill

I LOATHE the new changes to our university’s webmail, especially the autofill for the addressee.  I won’t go into why they suck because technology is boring; suffice it to say that the computer’s attempts to do stuff for the user only make things more complicated.