Theoblogian

Courageous Nonviolence

Charlie Trimm — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 05:51:00 PST

The latest issue of CT (Dec 2007) includes an interesting article by Ron Sider on one way to "do" nonviolence. He begins the article by discussing the massive bloodshed in the past 100 hundred years, but then also telling about the various nonviolent movements that have seen success (Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Solidarity in Poland, peaceful overthrow of dictator of Philippines). He advocates the sending out of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who go into war torn areas and help to restore peace. These kind of teams have been going out for at least a decade, and one team member was killed in Iraq in 2005 after he was kidnapped by insurgants. This is an interesting idea, and perhaps it will actually work. But one discontinuity that came to mind seems to be a serious one. The nonviolent movements which have worked (assuming they actually did work in the manner he describes them, of course) were from the inside. These teams are people from the outside. Now this might not make a difference, but it seems that the key to the nonviolent movements is that they were on the inside and were able to lead others into their own worldview. Can an outsider change the way people think about these issues? Possible, but considerably less likely, it seems to me. I don't have any constructive advice to offer in Sider's place, but I'm just skeptical about his idea.
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Help with the ice and snow

Charlie Trimm — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:24:00 PST

We had terrible ice here this morning in Chicago, and when we got to church (Crossroads Community Church) someone came out to meet us at our car, warned us about how slick it was, and then gave his arm to Mariah to help her to the door while I carried Eily. They were doing this with everyone and even having some people get out right next to the door and then parking their cars for them. I thought that this was a great way to show love to the people as well as to visitors. I remember reading about a church in the NW that had their junior high kids escort people into the building with giant golf umbrellas whenever it rained: not only did people not get wet, but it gave the JH kids a way to get to know people. I just thought that we should highlight some of the great things churches do.

We visited a church while we were still looking for a church in which the pastor made a side comment about how the regular members need to park in the back of the parking lot and sit in the front so that it makes a statement that we love visitors. Another good idea!

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Does the Bible Justify Violence?

Charlie Trimm — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:23:00 PST

This short book is a modified version of the SBL Presidential address in 2002 and presents some interesting thoughts on violence and the OT. While it cannot go into much detail (only thirty pages long), he does a good job surveying the evidence, showing briefly how other views are deficient and then presenting his own view.

His view is that we need to sideline the violent parts of the OT. Not all of the Bible is an ethical model for us today, and so we should follow the texts on love for neighbor rather than warfare. Of course, it is somewhat difficult to follow this line of thinking if one believes in inspiration. But even if we ignore inspiration, there are still problems. The main issue is why we should highlight the love commands and ignore the war commands. Why not the other way around? The source of authority is no longer the text, but what we think should be emphasized.

Here is his final conclusion:

"The Bible has contributed to violence in the world precisely because it has been taken to confer a degree of certitude that transcends human discussion and argumentation. Perhaps the most constructive thing a biblical critic can do toward lessening the contribution of the Bible to violence in the world is to show that such certitude is an illusion." (32-33)]]>

Engaging Scripture

Charlie Trimm — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:53:00 PST

For anyone interested in the theological interpretatin of Scripture or just in thinking about how we read Scripture, Stephen Fowl's Engaging Scripture is a helpful place to begin (although sadly, it is not a cheap book). While I do not agree with much of what he writes, he does raise some good questions along the way that we need to interact with. Here are some of the points that I think are interesting and that are important to the book.

1. Is our interpretation determined, undetermined, or underdetermined? The first choice is what is familiar in conservative circles and evangelicalism, while the middle choice is where postmodern lands. The last choice is Fowl's attempt to moderate the two: while there is more than simply one meaning, there can be wrong meanings as well. The text leads the interpreter to a variety of meanings.

2. Fowl recognizes that we can easily use the Bible to support our sin, as has often happened throughout history. I think that this trait is especially present in the theo interp idea (although not towards sin, but towards are preconceived ideas), because theological presuppositions are to be embraced before interpretation, not ignored. Fowl's guard against this is for the reader to always assume they are being sinful and to seek to be vigilant in their reading, looking for holes. The community is to play a large role in this process.

3. The Spirit is an important part of interpretation. He gives a controversial example by going to Acts 10-15 and examining how the Spirit works there. The Spirit works in the lives of various Gentiles, which shows that God has now accepted Gentiles. But they would not have known that unless someone (Peter at first) had actually come to interact with them. Fowl applies this to homosexuals today: since the church has so little contact with homosexuals, there is no way to see if the Spirit is working in their lives.

4. He is intrigued with the mention of stealing in the midst of a series of thoughts about talking. His idea is that the members of the church still shared their goods with each other to some degree, so that the stealing was a "minor" stealing but was from each other. This signals a breakdown in communication among the community, as they would not talk to each other about what was happening with the stolen goods. He gives the example of a shared refrigerator, where the line between borrowing and stealing is very fine and where disagreements can ruin friendships. One of the points of the chapter is that the church needs to be more open with each other on a broader variety of topics. Appealing to Bonhoffer, he says that there are some things that should be kept to oneself, but that we need to think more about being in community to a greater degree.
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Postmodern Biblical Theology

Charlie Trimm — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:51:00 PST

I came across this quote the other day while doing research for another topic. This quotation is fascinating for its honesty. Apparently, Clines used to be an evangelical scholar.

"I want to propose a model for biblical interpretation that accepts the realities of our pluralist context... First comes the recognition that texts do not have determinate meanings... The second axis for my framework is provided by the idea of interpretative communities... There is no objective standard by which we can know whether one interpretation or other is right; we can only tell whether it has been accepted... There are no determinate meanings and there are no universally agreed upon legitimate interpretations.

What are biblical scholars then to be doing with themselves?... Biblical interpretators have to give up the goal of determinate and universally acceptable interpretations, and devote themselves to interpretations they can sell--in whatever mode is called for by the communities they choose to serve. I call this "customised" interpretation."

The quote is by David Clines, "Possibilities and Priorities of Biblical Interpretation in an International Perspective" Biblical Interpretation 1:1 (1993) 67-87. I found the quotation given in Craig Bartholomew "Postmodernity and Biblical Interpretation" in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, ed Kevin Vanhoozer, page 605.

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Theological Interpretation of Scripture

Charlie Trimm — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:47:00 PST

The second session I went to at SBL was dramatically different from the first. This was the “Theological Hermeneutics of Christian Scripture.” The specific topic under discussion was “Christ in/and the Old Testament”. It was moderated by Christopher Seitz and consisted of ten minute presentation by Kathryn Greene-Mccreight (St John's Episcopal Church), Robert Wall (Seattle Pacific University), John Goldingay (Fuller Theological Seminary), Christopher Wright (Langham Partnership International), and Murray Rae (University of Otago) followed by forty five minutes of discussion. In my opinion the presentations themselves were not that interesting, as the panelists simply repeated key basic ideas from their work, and ten minutes was not enough time to give much that was interesting. But when the questions started coming in the discussion became much more interesting. There was a fairly strong divide on the panel between those more in tune with theological interpretation of Scripture (Seitz, Greene-Mccreight, Wall, and Rae) and those opposed (Goldingay and Wright).

There seemed to be two main issues getting discussed. One was a metaphor that had been made by Wright in his presentation. He said that when he was on a train to Edinburgh, he was heading towards Edinburgh but the scenery was not Edinburgh. Similarly, while the OT is christotelic, heading towards Christ, Christ is not found in every OT text. When one looks back, the scenery makes sense as going towards Edinburgh, but that is only a small glimpse and only in hindsight. In response, Murray noted that the voice of Jesus is waiting for us Edinburgh and we shouldn’t be too concerned about the scenery, and Greene-Mccreight said that we are in Edinburgh, not on the train anymore. Wright later said that we need to read the OT not just in light of the Gospel but also in light of Revelation: The first advent is not the end of the story. So, in a sense, (my spin here) we are in not Edinburgh yet, but we passed a key via point on the way to Edinburgh. There was discussion about how to preach OT stories, with Goldingay and Wright wanting us to focus on what God was saying through those texts to the Israelites, while the other panelist wanted to see more of a Christocentric perspective. Wright noted that Luke 24 says that Jesus began with the Scriptures, not himself, when he talked with his disciples.

The other major topic was the role of the rule of faith. Goldingay bluntly stated that “the rule of faith is a disaster”. No beating around the bush here! He didn’t explicate much what he meant, but it seems that he didn’t want later meaings being read as the meaning of the earlier text. He explicitly said he wanted to stay with the meaning/significance bifurcation, not what the text means today. Seitz said that we should get rid of the terminology of the rule of faith since all it does is cause confusion and that in his ears the rule of faith does not mean creed. Greene-Mccreight said that the rule of faith was useful for ruling out false interpretations like Mormonism, which is a mistake (after saying this she apparently realized she was at SBL and one does not say things like this at SBL and so backtracked a little bit to tone down her rejection of Mormonism). All in all, this was a fascinating discussion and I only wish that all the SBL sessions could be so interesting.

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Allegory and the Ban

Charlie Trimm — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 07:22:00 PST

The third and fifth papers of the SBL war session were not as helpful, so I will not discuss them here, but I will talk about the fourth. This was entitled “Allegorical Interpretation of the Ban and the Plain Sense of the Text: Reading the Herem Law for Ethics” and given by Jerome Creach. He sought to read the herem laws theologically, i.e., through a theological lens. He ended up following Moberly’s reading of the herem laws, who read them in light of the Shema. Moberly argues that the herem laws were metaphorical laws to show how one is to love Yahweh with all of one’s heart. These nations are not the actual nations, but are representative for various internal evil tendencies. The Rahab and Gibeonite stories are indicative of this, as they are not exterminated. The other panelists were not impressed with Creach, and all of them said that we should not try to play exegetical games with the text, but instead recognize its inherent violence and deal with them as they are. Deal with them for most of the panelists mean reject the text. ]]>

Scarcity and War

Charlie Trimm — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 07:18:00 PST

The second paper at the SBL war session was by Hector Avalos, a secular humanist who is also a professor of religious studies (at Iowa State University). He argued against two current approaches to religious violence. One is essentialism (as Ellens had just argued for). This view says that religion in its pure form is not violent, but only a deviant or fundamentalist form. Avalos argued against it by saying that the “true view” is unverifiable and a faith based view, so it is not acceptable. This desire for verifiability was the key weapon in his arsenal and got used on a variety of occasions, showing that he was apparently a logical positivist: the only things that exist are those that can be proved by reason. The other view to explain religious violence is anti-colonialism: the colonized are fighting back against those who colonized them. But Avalos pointed out that Islam colonized the west before the west colonized Islam, and hence this colonial explanation does not work in all cases. So Avalos’ proposal is scarcity: all conflict is caused by scarcity of something. This is certainly nothing new and fairly obviously explains most wars. But his contribution is to use the idea to explain religious conflict: religion creates scarcities and hence creates war. It creates scarcities in the following ways: Scripture (not all writing is inspired), sacred space (one geographical location more important because of religious reason), election (one group or person more special), and salvation (not all are saved). Or for another way of looking at it, verifiability is scarce, so violence is resorted to in order to determine solution. He then discussed five ways to deal with violent ancient texts: accept, reject, relativize, reinterpret, and allegorize. He rejects all of these because they are unverifiable and not subject to reason. His solution? Make the scarce plentiful: give everyone water, for example. He did not explain how this would work in religion, but presumably it would mean that we should make plentiful the scarce by removing any kind of scarcity: either make all divine (make all ground sacred, make everyone saved, make every writing inspired) or remove the idea of religion altogether, which is the route he has taken personally. During the question and answer time he said that verifiability is the key: if the problem is water shortage, we can verify that there is a water shortage. But if it is salvation, we cannot verify that, so we might be fighting over something that does not exist. One question posed to him he did not answer well: what if there is a scarcity that should be present, such as the scarcity of A’s in a class? Should the teacher just give all A’s? He simply said that the teacher would need to discuss that with his student, a virtual non-answer. ]]>

The Psychology of War

Charlie Trimm — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:22:00 PST

The third conference I attended was SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), which meets concurrently with AAR (American Academy of Religion). This is a very broad ranging conference with thousands of people attending from a variety of religions, primarily Christian but also Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu, with a few atheists thrown in for good measure. There are such sessions as Buddhist Philosophy Group, African Biblical Hermeneutics, Greek Bible, LGBT/Queer Hermeneutics, Q, Mormon Studies Consultation, Book of Acts, Use of Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation, and Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible: Inter-Species Sex and Other Relations.

The first session I went to was Warfare in Ancient Israel. My introduction to SBL was immediate as the first speaker got up and almost immediately said just war was inhuman, monstrous, and satanic and that Yahweh was psychotic because he acted in the human realm on the belief that it was the battle ground of a cosmic struggle against an evil god, a cosmic struggle which actually does not exist. The second speaker then got up and started talking about how monotheism is inherently violent and the only way past it is to reject it, which led him to secular humanism. Welcome to SBL!

The first speaker, J. Harold Ellens, argued strongly against any idea of just war theory and rejected the biblical god. What was needed was a new conception of God, as the loving and nonviolent god. The biblical model of war is “obscene”. One point he made was that war works best when it dehumanizes the enemy, such as the derogatory nicknames given to the enemy (Japs, Huns, etc.). When this kind of dehumanizing is removed, war is then less effective. His solution? National models that absorb insults instead of using violence, and more statesmen than politicians. But when nations do have to go to war as a necessary evil, then they need to be on a crusade. They should seek to terminate oppression, and as Clausewitz said war is only ethical when it is total war and the very will to fight of the enemy is targeted. Ellens gave several commendable examples, one of which is Sherman’s march to the sea. As one of the questions afterwards noted, there is quite the contrast between the beginning and end of this presentation by Ellens.

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The Collapse of the Just War Theory in the Twentieth Century

Charlie Trimm — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:09:00 PST

The one paper from ETS which I am going to write about was certainly not the best paper which I heard, but it is the most relevant to my research. The paper was given by Craig Carter and was entitled "The Collapse of the Just War Theory in the Twentieth Century". His main point was that the wars of the past 100 years have shown that just war rules cannot be put into practice. It is not that they are mistaken and can be tweaked, or that people are sinful and sinned, but that the rules themselves are self-contradictory and simply cannot be followed, even by a theoretically perfect person. Just war theory always ends up excusing murder. Carter claimed that the fire-bombing and A-bomb of WW2 were a time of transition for the west. They had the option of losing or sinking to the level of the Nazis ethically, and they chose the latter. This choice led to a subsequent devaluing of human life, as exemplified by the increase of abortion in later years and other assaults on human life. He gave the intriguing parallel scenario: if Hitler had developed the A-bomb and dropped it on London, we would call him a butcher for it. But we do not have the same reaction when the West dropped an A-bomb on Japan.

He said that in order for him to follow a just war theory, the following two criteria would need to be met:
1. Differentiate between two kinds of killing.
2. Must be able to put theory into practice

Also, the following would need to happen.
1. Education in church on just war and just war principles.
2. Ban certain weapons (chemical, nuclear) which cannot discriminate between civilian and military targets
3. Decide when surrender is appropriate
4. Conditional patriotism
5. Absolute prohibition of murder
6. Reject consequencalist thinking

The questions followed two lines of thought. The first had to do with the hypothetical situation of Hitler. He was pushed on whether these two situations (Hitler on London and US on Japan) were the same ethically. He said yes. Then he was questioned whether motive had any role: wouldn't Hitler be more wrong because he sought to kill while the US sought to save lives? He said no, while motives are important, both acts as acts are equally wrong.
The second line of questioning had to do with a parallel situation: If people run stop signs, should we be ban those too? He simply didn't get the question, and so there was little interaction with it. I think that actually a better parallel would be that since people run stop signs driving is inherently unsafe and so we should ban driving.
The one major problem I have with the presentation is the one problem I have with any pacifist position I have encountered so far: love for neighbor. What do I do when my neighbor is being oppressed or a genocide is being committed next door?
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