Article on the Gospel of Judas

This article, “The Betrayal of Judas,” from the Chronicle of Higher Education, recounts the multi-decade history of the Gospel of Judas, including its abuse for commercial, televised success.

A few points of my own:

1. It’s not uncommon for these texts to take years to get to any kind of public view. The same happened with the Nag Hammadi texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Mar Saba Clementine. The article does it justice: reassembling the text is a long task, coupled with the rendering of ink smudges into transcripts into translations into commentary into scholarly article into National Geographic special. It does take decades.
2. This article makes as good a plot as the new Indiana Jones movies. But without the sword fights. So far.
3. Bart Ehrman seems to love controversy for its own sake.
4. Elaine Pagels would do well to get out of the spotlight and back into her scholarship.
5. Kathleen McVey, a beloved seminary professor of mine, had this to say about Pagels’s Gnosticism work. I’m glad to find this review in digital form rather than an nth-generation xerox.
6. The Gospel of Judas, like most Gnostic texts, is stridently anti-Jew. In its theology, Ialdaboth (a faux-Hebrew term, soundalike to ‘Yahweh”) is the creator sub-deity and is also a deluded and evil underling. To this theology, Jesus came to rescue the Jews from the worship of the evil God of Israel and to the true, ineffable God.

Blogging God is Not Great, day 2

To the previous post in the series. To the next post in the series.

A second pass through Chapter 1: Putting it Mildly

On ambivalence:

Pages 6-7 mention some typical sins of religions (Inquisitions, genocide, manipulative piety), contrasted with harmless, faithless lunches with friends and trips to museums. No mention is made of Western Christendom’s contrary offerings to civilization (hospitals and universities), nor is mention made of horrors not done in the name of God.

Understandably, the sins of religions are committed in the name of holiness and worthy of condemnation. But can we not admit that all humanity, both faithful and faithless, are a corpus permixtum with an ambivalent morality?

“Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them” (7).

Perhaps it’s early in the book to challenge, but: what caused religion to put away the “intelligible or noble or inspiring?” when did this happen? is it irreversible? It seems unfair to dismiss Bonhoeffer as holding only a “nebulous humanism.” If we say this for his anti-Nazi efforts, should we say the same for Martin Luther King, Jr. (anti-racism), Mohandas Gandhi (anti-imperial), Desmond Tutu (anti-apartheid), or John Paul II (anti-communist)?

Presumably, Hitchens will confront this later.

On randomness:

“Now at last you can be properly humble in the face of your maker, which turns out not to be a ‘who,’ but a process of mutation with rather more random elements than our vanity might wish” (9).

In computer science and in statistics, random algorithms and random samples are reliable ways to arrive at solutions. I don’t have it handy, but Don Knuth is more optimistic about applying random methods to Biblical study and perhaps theology. Randomness isn’t as terrifying as many religious would make it, but there’s not much literature to back that up.

On the misquotation of Marx (“Religion is the opiate of the people.”):

“Those who have believed what the priests and rabbis and imams tell them about what the unbelievers think and about how they think, will find further such surprises as we go along” (10).

Definitely agreed. Many sermons I’ve heard set up straw-men and caricatures (including some of my own) for parody over against the reasonableness of faith. A commitment to honest dialog gets us all out of the trenches.

On Postmodernity:

“And I am content to think that some contradictions will remain contradictory, some problems will never be resolved by the mammalian equipment of the human cerebral cortex, and some things are indefinitely unknowable” (10).

I presume he refers to Heisenberg’s Uncertainity Principle and Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, pillars of modern physics and mathematics (and by extension postmodern thought). I’m pleased to see this appeal, as Hitchens is clearly in the camp of modern science and postmodern philosophy as many critics remain bound by Newtonian mechanics, modern philosophy and Enlightenment optimism.

We’ll see what sources he draws on later. I’ve been pleased by how much he appeals to mystery and contradiction in the appeal of nature. It’s a draw for me as well.

On Janus:

He references Philip Larkin’s poem Churchgoing. Larkin refers to the churchbuilding he visits as “this special shell” and Hitchens applies it to all religion: church, mosque, synagogue, temple are all dumb idols. So be it, but why take off your shoes, cover your head or engage in other pious etiquette? Presumably, he would also kiss the Pope’s ring when in Rome or take up snakes when in Appalachia, as a sign of courtesy. Why show courtesy in person and be an iconoclast in print?

Conclusions thus far:

Christopher Hitchens’s first chapter shows him to be a powerful rhetoritican, in the best sense. There’s a number of places where I find him unfair but a similar number of where I find myself sympathetic and in agreement. Whether in agreement or not, I find him never afraid to use a flyswatter where an atom bomb will do.

Blogging “God is not Great”

I have an unhealthy fascination with Christopher Hitchens and his arguments. His debates, his articles, his anthologies keep me coming back. Although he and I have obvious disagreements, I’ve been captivated by his style. Hopefully my disagreements with him are with his actual professions and not with a caricature of his professions. So, I’ve decided to read God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and to blog my experiences with the book and my running responses and commentary.

Over the course of the next month, I’m hoping to take the book, one unmeasured portion at a time. At nineteen chapters, it will be quickly paced, not leaving much time to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.” However, I’m hoping to be quote-heavy and leave lots of references for me to come back to over time.

Please note that I am not attempting to raise a formal refutation or argument against Hitchens’s claims. There are a number of places where he and I are in agreement but a great many more where we do not. One would be in error to find more here than personal notes and evaluation of a book that has a place in an important and ongoing conversation.

All of these posts will be given to the God is Not Great category for my own reference.

Chapter 1: Putting it Mildly

Hitchens’s opening anecdote on Mrs. Jean Watts encapsulates my own interest in his writing. Mrs. Watts was his grade-school teacher in Dartmoor, England, sometime in the late 1950s. He identifies right away the “national authority [that] supervised the teaching of religion (This, along with daily prayer services, was compulsoary and enforced by the state.) (2)”

Of course, he refers to “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law” in the UK, Anglicanism. As a clergyman of the Anglican Communion, I see right away his focus on the church of which I am a member, the Protestant confession that I share, the Christian creed which I hold dear.

Toward the end of the chapter, Hitchens says, “My particular atheism is a Protestant atheism” (11). However, he has been clear about this since page one. A cursory glance at the proper nouns gives away that he is interested largely with Christianity in the West. He names, for example: Blaise Pascal, C. S. Lewis, Moses, Saul of Tarsus, Church of Rome, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Augustine, Aquinas, Newman. All of these names have significant place within Christianity.

In one place he notes that “serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by” (5) a list of five authors. Two of them were heavily influence by the Church of England, William Shakespeare and George Eliot (she attended the Church of England most of her life although rejecting its teaching). Two others were Russian Orthodox , Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I know very little about Friedrich Schiller so I make no claim on his beliefs, but four out of five isn’t bad.

Two questions come up for me here. First, why value Shakespeare and Schiller over Moses and Paul? I can’t see particular reasons to prefer one over the other. The choice appears arbitrary, but he may return to this later.

Second, when picking alternatives to religious approaches to “serious ethical dilemmas,” why pick a strong majority of writers influenced by religious approaches and cultures? It would seem that his point would be made more strongly by choosing more clearly non-religious writers.

Even when concerning science, philosophy and literature, Hitchens names Marx, Hegel, Crick, Dawkins, Hawking, Freud and Orwell. All of these are figures of Western European thought. It would seem that Americans and non-Westerners have no place in the discussion.

There are a few references outside Christianity and Western Europe. These include: Maimonides, an ashram in India, Koranic and Talmudic thought, “Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations” (13). Still, the bulk of his concern is quite narrowly focused on Western Protestantism and intellectual traditions.

His claim, “Religion poisons everything” (13, emphasis his) is the closing remark of the first chapter. Perhaps a better claim would be that “the Protestant Reformed religion as by law established poisons everything in Western Europe.”

As an aside, the problem of the establishment of religion began to be addressed in the American experiment, for which he has no interest. In many places, establishment of religion has had critics since the Enlightenment and twentieth-century trends in, say, the Church in Wales demonstrate that the day of establishment is already passing. Many Christians and other religious recognize the dangers of the establishment that victimized him and others as a child and agree that it has had many poisonous effects.

Thankfully, he does pose “Four Irreducible Objections to Religious Faith” (4) which are quite substantive:

1. “It wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos”
2. “because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism”
3. “it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression”
4. “it is ultimately grounded on with-thinking”

The charges are serious and not frivolous, but will wait for the next post. To the next in the series.

Radiohead’s Nude remixed on a ZX Spectrum

Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any) by James Houston

Scottish art student James Houston has re-mixed Radiohead’s “Nude” from their new album In Rainbows. This unusual production mixes together just about everything I love: free use of music, loose copyright restrictions and creative use of computers.

I especially get nostalgic seeing a ZX Spectrum directing the show, as I cut my teeth partially on the American version of the Spectrum. I remember putting a program cassette into the tape player, hitting play and then waiting five minutes for the program to load.

So, there’s and Epson printer on percussion, a Sinclair computer directing the lead and set of hard drives working as a jerry-built speaker system for vocals. A very impressive, very nerdy effort–I love it!

3 Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
praise him with the harp and lyre,

4 praise him with tambourine and dancing,
praise him with the strings and flute,

5 praise him with the clash of cymbals,
praise him with resounding cymbals.

6 Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD.

Praise him with the ZX Spectrum,
Praise him with the Epson printer.

Let everything that has bits praise the Lord!

Dancing Matt

I got this from a colleague in ministry today and thought I would post this rather than another item that I’ll sit on for a few days:

Ah, the catholicity of dance. I wonder if Matt will come teach our church his style of liturgical dance?

Christians crazy-go-nuts with Wordle

Wordle is an application to create tag clouds. The clouds show, proportional to size, the frequency of words in a text. It’s not a bad way to get the gist of what a text is all about. Commonly used on blogs to get the sense of what the whole blog is about, Wordle is getting used with arbitrary texts and, especially, Christian texts.

The ESV Bible blog has wordled the ESV Bible. (Both New Testament and complete Bible texts.)

Another blog carried wordles of individual books of the Bible.

On Wordle is Luther’s 95 Theses.

On Wordle is Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

On Wordle is also John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Someone has also done a lovely wordle of the Psalms in Hebrew. (See above.)

By the by, the largest words in Hebrew above are “LORD,” “God,” “eternal,” “my soul,” “all,” and “not.”

FISA news roundup

Last week the House voted on H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. It passed by wide margin. Here is the roll call so you can see how your Representative voted. Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter voted Nay: thank you!

As FISA has been coming up in the Senate, there’s been a ton of writing on it. I use this blog in part as an “outboard brain” to help me organize information so I can find it easily later. So, here’s the roundup of Senate FISA news as it has come my way:

Dow Jones News reports on the nature of the compromise FISA bill and the significant differences from the bill earlier this year (Thu., June 19):

As a result of the deal, legislation will come forward Friday in the House and as soon as next week in the Senate to reauthorize the government’s surveillance program. The legislation will, in effect, replace the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law established in the 1970s to permit the government to engage in surveillance.

Democrats have insisted the judicial review included in the agreement is better than nothing, and does not equate to automatic legal immunity for the phone companies.

After House passage, the eminently reputable blog Crooks and Liars asks for Obama to speak out and speculates on his silence (Fri., June 20). Salon’s Glenn Greenwald indicates Obama’s support for the compromise House bill (Sat., June 21):

What really rubbed me the wrong way was how Obama in his statement says essentially trust me with these powers, I’ll use them responsibly.

Nope.

This week, Senator Russ Feingold was interviewed by Democracy Now (Tue., June 24). He describes his intent to resis the bill and then goes beyond this to expressing desire to censure the president. One site points to MAPLight’s information linking Verizon, Sprint and AT&T contributions to congressional Democrats who changed their votes.

Glenn Greenwald reports on the Senate FISA vote, including video of Senator Feingold’s speech. Blue Hampshire has video of Senator Dodd’s speech, with transcript here. From his remarks:

Warrantless spying threatens to undermine our democratic society, unless legislation brings it under control. In other words, the power to invade privacy must be used sparingly, guarded jealously, and shared equally between the branches of government.

Last but not least, Wired Magazine carries a blog entry that alleges the Senate FISA bill as redefining the term “Weapon of Mass Destruction.”  Apparently the new definition adds incendiary devices to the list, as well as being loose on the meaning of “a significant number of people.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is working against the compromise FISA bill (June 24).

Barack Obama is caught on video saying that serving justice to the illegal actions of telephone companies is less important than security needs. It’s all for your protection. The above Huffington Post link reports he has a nuanced position, as he “has expressed reservations with the compromise (and supports an amendment stripping immunity from its language), he nevertheless said he would support the bill.”

Blue Hampshire conjectures that fighting FISA can help restrain the administration and thus prevent war in Iran (Fri., June 27).

The original AT&T whistleblower has some things to say about FISA in this Wired article. He has good points buried in rhetorical language on coups and Nuremberg, but it’s good none the less.

Alan Turing and GAFCON

(Please see the followup post here.)

Monday, June 23 would have been the 96th birthday of Alan Turing, the father of computer science. Turing laid the theoretical foundations of what is possible for computers and what is impossible. He was exploring the boundaries of computation in the 1930s and 1940s, before the computers themselves had even been built.

During World War II, Alan Turing developed new methods of cryptanalysis that were the foundation for the “bombe,” a code-breaking machine. These machines could decode German communications, giving the Allies great advantage.

Although his mathematical work won World War II and established the computer science agenda of the next century, no good deed went unpunished for Alan Turing. Unfortunately, Turing was homosexual in the UK at a time when being homosexual was a crime.

Found guily in court in 1952, his sentence was court-ordered hormone injections, designed to reduce libido. In 1954, he was found dead in his home, having committed suicide. The method: eating a poisoned apple, after the fashion of Snow White, one of his favorite childhood stories. (A more detailed biography at Wikipedia.)

Fifty-four years later, the Anglican Communion is still embroiled in the debate over homosexuality. Gathered in Jerusalem, a group called GAFCON cannot agree whether or not homosexuality should be criminalized. This article of Riazat Butt gives some insight to the conversation:

It was clear [Archbishops Akinola and Orombi] failed to grasp how homophobic rhetoric from the pulpit led to violence and intimidation, as described by Colin Coward from Changing Attitudes. Still no condemnation was forthcoming. As a follow-up I asked whether the lack of condemnation meant they condoned torture of homosexuals. It took the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, to articulate opposition to all acts of violence towards all people. The Africans didn’t even nod in agreement.

Their muteness – either because they did not understand the question or did not understand why they had to issue a condemnation – is a harrowing glimpse of a dogmatic and draconian narrative that has not been explored thoroughly; least of all, it seems, by those who have allied themselves with the populous Anglican churches in Africa.

Failure to condemn acts of torture is inhumane, incredible and unchristian. Three characteristics that no Anglican movement should be proud of.

A thanks to Archbishop Peter Jensen this week, for calling African bishops to press their governments for decriminalizing homosexuality and to condemn all such violence. Prayers for GAFCON and Lambeth, that such criminalization is bad, as Butt suggests, bad for humanity, bad for faith and bad for Christian witness, regardless of theological stances on sexuality.

How different the West might have been had it had Alan Turing for the past fifty four years! Driven to suicide by his own homeland, that homeland’s established church has a lot to answer for in its theology. I could only guess what he would have dreamed had he actually benefited from the technology he invented and from the freedom he ensured. May we as a church, for his sake, be willing to repent.

Bishop N. T. Wright, blog reader

This post refers to this one from last week.

Once I heard about Bishop Wright appearing on the Colbert Report, I nearly wet myself instantly. The news came to me via this Titus One Nine post. While I enjoy Kendall Harmon’s selection of news, descending into the comments can be at one’s own risk. The blog’s managers (“elves”) keep things generally civil and on-topic, but there are a good many comments written with a keyboard dipped in acid.

To my surprise, there’s a follow-up article on Titus One Nine, written by Bishop Wright himself. In it, he responds, by handle, to several of the comments regarding his appearance on the Colbert Report! You never know who’s reading…

It’s good to see:

1. Steven Colbert explaining his role on the show to his guests. He’s a hospitable guy.
2. Any bishop responding civilly to criticism.
3. Any bishop or scholar keeping up with blogs in their area.
4. Any scholar to respond to all reactions to his or her work, not just with other scholars.
5. A bishop as significant as N. T. Wright condescending to us mere blogging mortals for the same.

In his response, Bishop Wright wrote, “My aim is to expound the New Testament and get its message into the bloodstream of the church and out in the mission of the kingdom.” His book, his TV appearance and his gracious handling of blog comments all further this aim.

(This story is also picked up at Think Christian.)

Bishop N. T. Wright on the Colbert Report

It’s true. Watch it here. Watch it now. Also guest-starring Cookie Monster. The good bishop appears around th 10-minute mark if you want to skip ahead to that part.

It’s a part of his touring for Surprised by Hope. There’s not much new if you’re familiar with Wright’s work but it’s still fun to watch.

In looking into this I discovered Father Richard John Neuhaus and Bishop Wright are having a feud centered around this book. It’s published in the last few issues of First Things. Here’s Neuhaus’s first article and here’s Wright’s response.