Scot McKnight: October 2008 Archives

Kathleen Norris tells her story, inAcedia & Me: Marriage, Monks and the Writer's Life, of how she became a poet during her college days at Bennington. It was a teacher who told her she had what it takes.

Any Kathleen Norris readers out there? What do you think of her works? What do you think of her story of rediscovering faith? (By the way, her story here reminded me of those mentioned in Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy, as told in the fine work of Timothy Larsen, who walked away and then came back to the faith.)

This chp tells the depressing story of some poets who could not find peace, and Norris winds in and out of her discovery of her gift for writing her own loss of faith, her marriage, and her move to South Dakota -- where she began to discover her faith again.

In college she "came to believe that outgrowing a religious faith was something I needed to do in order to become a writer" (50). That is, "To challenge authority, convention, and traditional religion: that was the poet's calling." She also learned that depression was the proper mood for writing poetry.

She and her husband then moved from NY to SD: "The people I encountered every day were not other writers but farmers and ranchers, and something of their deep respect for God, the land, and the weather began to rub off on me" (52). She occasionally attended her grandmother's Presbyterian church, discovered a Benedictine abbey in the area, was advised to read Hans Kung or Flannery O'Connor -- she chose Flannery.

Both Norris and her husband were poets and how they learned to live together -- she going to bed early and arising early and he staying up late and rising late.

Acedia doesn't really come up in this chp much -- one might guess that she is here connecting acedia to depression, the depression that poets know.

Our post today is written by Mary Veeneman, a member of our BTS department here at North Park. Her chp focuses on the 3d chp of Race: A Theological Account. She's got some good questions at the end.

Recently, I attended a panel on politics and voting in light of the upcoming election at North Park. The panel involved three faculty members from three different departments: Philosophy, Biblical and Theological Studies and Political Science. All three faculty members discussed grappling with the issue of how one should vote as a Christian given that the two major presidential candidates can be seen as each advocating policies that are very much in concert with the values of the Christian faith and policies that ultimately oppose the values held by the Christian faith.

Of course, it is nearly impossible to discuss the current election without getting to the issue of race, and it certainly came up in the course of this discussion, though perhaps in a somewhat unexpected way. One member of the panel mentioned Rev. Jeremiah Wright and questioned the judgment of anyone who would be closely connected to him. Another member of the panel made a claim which was likely seen as very provocative by most of the people present. He argued that Rev. Wright likely reads the Bible in a manner much closer to the way in which Jesus read it than the dominant white evangelical culture does.

Underlying this claim is a central component of Catholic Social Thought often referred to as the preferential option for the poor. This is the idea that because the original audience of the New Testament was an oppressed and often poor people, the poor and oppressed in the contemporary world have an advantage in biblical interpretation in that their social status is somewhat similar to that of the original audience. As a result, the Catholic Social tradition has called on the faithful to take very seriously the way in which the poor and oppressed read the Bible.

I bring up this instance not to weigh in on the claim made by the panel member. Certainly Rev. Wright has been controversial and I have no desire to ignite a discussion about him here. What I found interesting about this exchange is that it reinforces in different ways some of the same claims made by J. Kameron Carter in the third chapter of Race: A Theological Account, titled, “Historicizing Race.”

In this chapter of the book, Carter discusses the work of Albert J. Raboteau, whose most well-known work is Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South’. Raboteau, a scholar who researches American Religious History, has taught at Princeton University since 1982. Carter, in this chapter seeks to trace a development in Raboteau’s thought from Slave Religion, which he published in 1978 to An Unbroken Circle (1997) and finally to some lectures he gave in 2003. In tracing this progression, Carter is attempting to examine the relationship between faith and history in Raboteau’s thought. During the twenty-five years between Slave Religion and the aforementioned lectures, Raboteau’s position on the relationship between faith and history develops from his initial view that sees faith only vaguely touching history, where faith is essentially beyond history or any kind of historical analysis. Later, Raboteau will argue that history can challenge faith and help faith to appreciate both that which is unique in the faith and that which is particular to the faith.

Of course, history has another role for Raboteau and this is the role that Carter notes is particularly central to his own arguments. Raboteau discusses the tradition-making activity of history. This is the activity of locating the members of a particular group or country within that group or country’s history. In this way, then, Carter says, “history does the work of identity formation” (145). Through history, he says, we read ourselves “dramatically” as “participants in a drama” (145). American history has failed to include African Americans in the drama of American history in any way other than as simply a problem for the narrative, according to Raboteau, and Carter adds that religious faith and Christian faith in particular has not improved upon this situation. In fact, he argues that both history and Christianity have promoted a religious myth of whiteness. This is particularly the case when Christianity is tied to and is used to support nationalism.

Question: In your learning of American (or your country's) history, how much focus was there on ethnic minorities or marginalized people? Were the voices of such persons muted? valued?

Some people argue that the slaves and slave children essentially gave in to their masters in taking up Christianity. Carter argues that a more compelling case can be made for the realization, on the part of the slaves and their descendants, that “American manifest destiny” (147) was based on problematic historical foundations. It understood America as the New Israel and equated the migration of Europeans to North America as an escape from Egyptian bondage into the Promised Land. In other words, Americans were understanding the move of their ancestors to North America and then the move west across the continent as the same as the move of the people of Israel from Egypt into Canaan.

Of course, the slaves did not read the movement of their ancestors from Africa to North America in the same way. America, in their eyes, was not Israel but was Egypt. American slaves appropriated the story of the people of Israel in Egypt to understand their own plight. Carter quotes Paul Gilroy who paraphrases historian Vincent Harding in making a point that is particularly apt: “It is an abiding and tragic irony of our national history that white America’s claim to be a New Israel has been constantly denied by Old Israel still enslaved in her midst” (147).

The question Carter asks in reflecting upon this is, “What kind of consciousness (and unconsciousness) is at work? These differences of interpretation ‘result from the fact that history has served in the past and still serves today to establish and legitimate the identities of various communities...’” (147).

To return to the earlier anecdote, the panelist who made the claim about Rev. Wright’s reading of the Bible further argued that there are things in scripture that people who come from a privileged group (whether racial, economic or otherwise) will have a very difficult time seeing. His point seems to be that it is far too easy to pass through a passage of scripture, thinking that we know what it is about when we may have missed the main point altogether. This is exactly what happens with nationalistic readings of scripture that support what Carter has called the “religious myth of whiteness.”

The questions I want to leave you with are:
1. How are some of our contemporary readings of scripture supporting this religious myth of whiteness?
2. What are other ways in which we read scripture too quickly and miss the underlying truths? These could be instances in which our initial read is not wrong per se, but has missed something important along the way.

I'm holding in my hands at this very moment the original German edition of Gerhard Kittel's famous Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. I've got volume 4. The foreword, written by Kittel himself, is preceded by a page of German theologians, collaborators in the 4th volume of TDNT, who were killed in WWII as soldiers of Hitler's merciless campaigns. Kittel ends in Greek: "To whom be the glory forever!" Kittel's foreword speaks of the blood offering of those who died.

The story doesn't end there, of course. Gerhard Kittel was given a brilliant expose in the relatively unknown book that once shook me up for weeks: Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch
. In the 4th volume of TDNT Kittel expresses his gratitude that he could get the volume in print -- and it was about the time the Nazis were breathing down the neck of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and banned him from any further writing. He eventually was hung in Flossenburg; Kittel lived on. Kittel, Ericksen clearly shows, should not be scapegoated (even if Kittel must be used judiciously and critically) but Kittel spent, beginning suddenly in 1933, a dozen years on the Judenfrage and he framed foundations for virulent anti-Semitism that led some to the Holocaust. Ericksen: "He swam in the Nazi stream, though he may have preferred a different stroke" (74). The volumes, in other words, were sanctioned by those who banned Bonhoeffer.

Why bring this up? Kittel swam in a stream that goes back to Kant. It was Kant, you will remember, who clearly and heinously articulated white supremacy in racialized tones. Africans, American Indians, Asians each were races, rotting was a term Kant used, and the whites were in the stream of teleological perfection of an ethico-civil state. The danger was the Jews who were a contagion and intermarriage was the fear. All of this is sketched in chp 2 of J. Kameron Carter's must-read Race: A Theological Account.

Perhaps we need to be reminded of this: Kant explained both Paul and Jesus as framing a religion well outside the Jewish boundaries. Fundamentally, Jesus' religion was a universal religion, one that moved beyond Judaism by grasping Greek wisdom and perfecting it, that would lead to the ethico-civil state and Paul was one who broke free from the YHWH God of Israel and moved outside the covenant connection of the Old Testament. For Kant the "race question" was tied up with the "Jewish question." For Kant Jesus ceased to be Jewish.

When I began postgraduate work in the 70s, the Jewishness question -- of Jesus, Paul and the first Christians -- was coming into its own. The affirmation of Jesus' Jewishness is a major step in the right direction of affirming race and undoing racism. The major books of my PhD days were Strack and Billerbeck as well as W.D. Davies Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. Before I had begun my doctoral work E.P. Sanders wrote a book that changed NT scholarship more than any book in the last fifty years: Paul and Palestinian Judaism. It called into question the lack of Jewishness in Christian understandings of Paul. This is standard fare today, of course. But we must not forget that 75 years ago there were reputable scholars asking if Jesus was a Jew.

Anyone who wonders if Christian theology is implicated in racism needs to be aware of this brief and inadequate sketch.

How many times have you asked or been asked this question: How can I learn about the Dead Sea Scrolls in a way that I can understand what is going on? Books about the DSS tend to be very academic and for specialists, so I was pumped when I saw this book: my colleague and friend, Joel Willitts, has a new book: The Dead Sea Scrolls.

The first thing to say is that an introduction that lay folks can read needs to be brief: a 400 page introduction won't fit the bill. Joel's book is 32 pages -- glossy, colored, and filled with pictures and maps and graphs.

The second thing is that it's got to have prose that keeps our attention: this book does that.

Third: it's got to have good pictures and good maps and good graphs. This book's got them.

If you need a brief, readable and illustrated introduction, this book is it.

Gospeling, gospeling, gospeling ... that's what Paul does. And today we look at his great address on the Areopagus in Athens:

Acts 17:16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) 19 So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

Acts 17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’

29 Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Acts 17:32 When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” 33 At that point Paul left them. 34 But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Paul's gospeling involved: Jesus and the resurrection and the Gentile philosophers think he is talking about foreign gods (revealing, in part, how Paul spoke of Jesus in exalted terms).

Paul's gospeling involved "touchstones": he started where the audience was. What those gods were pointing at Paul knew: the one God created it all, this one God made all humans to search for God and is not far from any of us -- in fact, we dwell in God -- but idols are not God.

Paul's gospeling involved the call to repentance in light of God's judgment. And the Judge will be Jesus Christ.