MetaCatholic

I’ve found blogging (well, life really, but don’t talk to me about life, me with a pain in all the diodes down my left side — AKA and IRL a trapped nerve in my shoulder) a real struggle for energy and ideas over the last few days, so it’s an encouragement to get any kind of praise or recognition. That means I’m really cheered as well as honoured to have been inoculated by James McGrath with another meme, this time for excellence in blogging.

As he observes, however, if this meme runs its course “you then pass it on to ten other blogs, and so on until the word “excellent” in reference to blogs eventually loses all meaning.” So for all I know, he was running out of blogs to infect! As Dash says in The Incredibles “When everyone’s special, no-one is”.(Actually, mocking aside, I am genuinely flattered to be named in such august company.)

The real problem is picking ten blogs to tag in turn as most excellent and bodacious ones. Do I name ones that haven’t been named? Or can I name some of James’ for example? There don’t seem to be any rules. So here are mine. I will name a personal top ten, whether someone else has named them or not. And on another day I might well have come up with a different list, ‘cos you’re all special to me really. But if you’re on the list below (in no particular order), consider yourselves most excellent, and well tagged.

• Mark Goodacre for being consistently useful, always reasonable, and getting me blogging in the first place.
• Dave Walker for making me laugh
• Ben Myers for nearly making me like Milton but being far sounder on everything else
• James McGrath for most of his posts except memes like this and waffle about Lost.
• John Hobbins for teaching me more about the Hebrew Bible than I ever thought I wanted to know
• David Ker for being amiably off-the-wall on the Bible
• April DeConick for guiding me into the maze of alternative scripture
• Alan Wilson for a consistently stimulating, amusing and gently prophetic pastoralia.
• Chris Heard for combining shrewd reflection with sci-fi and comic fanboy enthusiasm
• The dynamic duo (and making my last entry a shared award is almost cheating) of biblioblogdom’s double act, the Laurel and Hardy, the Bonnie and Clyde, the Bultmann and Wright of blogging: West and Tilling.

John Hobbins has encouraged me to comment on his responses to a Bible meme he really doesn’t like. His three responses are here, here and here, getting progressively more focussed onto the relationship between the covenants and their respective scriptural testimonies. He blames Peter Kirk for what he calls an “appallingly superficial” meme. If he read here more assiduously, he would have seen that I’d tagged him more than a week earlier with the same meme, and the prophetic comment “I tag John Hobbins (who will probably dislike some of these questions even more than I do)” Anyway, enough with the introductory waffle and down to the meat.

John’s starting place is not, I think, quite the same as mine. His favoured Bible translation (at least for the purposes of this meme) is, he claims (with reading age qualifications), the NJPSV. But this – quite reasonable and unexceptionally for a Jewish translation – is not a Bible in Christian terms, rather it is a part Bible. This is related to why questions two and eight are so annoying:

2. [Do you prefer the] Old or New Testament?

8. [Do you prefer] Moses or Paul?

John rephrases the questions as follows:

2. In what sense is the Old Testament abrogated by the New, and in what sense is it not? (The main subject of his second post)

8. In what sense does Paul set the law of Moses aside, and in what sense does he retain it? (The subject of his third post)

This is in line, I think, with the way John selects his favoured translation as one which contains the Hebrew Scriptures only, but it is also in line with the phrasing of the question. The discussion continues from the starting point of two separate things, Old and New, Moses and Paul — the latter contrast surely driven by a Lutheran (and somewhat mistaken in its reading of Paul) contrast between Law and Gospel. This is, I think, misleading. The Old and New Testaments are not opposed in this way; neither are Moses and Paul. In a sense (although this is not exact) the New Testament is opposed to Mishnah and Talmud as a commentary on the Scriptures and a guide to reading them rightly. It is in a unity with the Old Testament, not a disjunction. Paul is, even when he disputed the role and place of Torah, an interpreter of Moses, not an opponent. I start my thinking from the base in this historical perspective, that the New Testament begins life as the interpretation of the Scriptures. Formally and liturgically there are significant differences in the status of New Testament and Talmud. Practically the differences are far fewer.

In this context it is not only that word “or” that points to a false antithesis, but also words from the Christian tradition like “abrogate” and “set aside”. A promise that has been kept is not set aside, but after it has been kept it functions differently. A signpost that leads you to a destination is not abrogated when you get there, but you no longer look for it in the same way.

In some ways I can find myself agreeing with both Michael Bird’s as well as John’s rewritten summary of Paul. It is a question of perspective. When Paul is faced with those who oppose Torah to Messiah, he is derogatory indeed, because Torah taken like this is dragged away from the service of God and ultimately an idol — one that carries its own curse against the idolaters and those who disobey God. When, however, he is talking to his converts, or thinking out loud to himself, or praising God, Torah is refracted through Christ in whose shape it is formed and truly represents the wisdom of God.

(Oh yes, and I’ve oversimplified as well.)

I see that, faute de mieux, Tyler Williams (whom we welcome back after a blogging hiatus) has declared my unofficial December carnival to be the official one for that month. I am honoured to have my warblings so accounted among the canon, and, indeed, have now felt obliged to put my name forward for an official entry.

But it has made me muse on the whole process of canonisation. My posting wasn’t written as a carnival, so I felt free to ignore whole swathes of stuff. Yet it did much of the same thing, and freely borrowed from the format (in so far as there is one). It drew quite heavy traffic, and got linked to widely in the way that carnivals do, as one post spoke to another and cyberspace was filled with the knowledge of the blog. It functioned as a carnival, despite its lack of an imprimatur.

It seems to me that the set of circumstances leading to this has been almost entirely haphazard. I can’t help feeling that we tend to resist the idea of any such coincidental chains of occurrences when it comes to the process of forming the scriptural canon. Nonetheless the way books drifted in and out of favour suggest that it was hardly organised. Perhaps we need to ask why Christians generally tend not to like the idea of God working with haphazard and random means.