MetaCatholic

Comedy superhero films just don’t seem to work. But will this be an exception? The signs look good.

I received a letter today from a man who has published his own book on the gospels and wanted me to buy it at a bargain price for my students. He has a website about the book. It doesn’t give that much information, except that as far as the synoptic gospels go, it is a popularised presentation of Michael Goulder’s work. As far as the fourth gospel goes he appears to think Paul is the beloved disciple. He appears to be a terribly nice man, who has absolutely no idea how scholarship has moved on since he listened to Goulder’s lectures in the 1960s and 1970s, and who has his own somewhat unusual ideas as well. He describes himself as broad and liberal. Given that he solicits endorsements from Jack Spong and Don Cupitt I suspect “liberal” may be putting it mildly. I can’t see myself ending up in a hurry to buy and assess this book.

The school opposite me is shut because a minority of teachers still belong to a union led by a left-wing militant loony. Christine Blower gets the support of people who believe it or not, still call each other “comrade.”  The NUT’s members probably ought to be known as NUTters, not least because they have been quite content to let a handful of militants run their union, and paid no attention to what was going on. The problem with the NUT is that it really wants to run schools for the benefit of teachers – children are well down the list. That’s why Blower can say that she sees this strike as a mark of respect to her dead predecessor. It’s not about the kids’ education at all.

Give us a new domain name.

Although in yesterday’s post I deliberately (for the sake of concentrating on one point at a time) bracketed out the gendered language of the song “Father God…”. I was not at all surprised that the women commenting on it nonetheless zeroed straight in on the phrase “I am your son, I am adopted in your family”.

Most of the web discussions I’ve come across about gendered language seem to focus on Bible translation. While discussion of gendered language in liturgy and song covers much of the same ground, it is somewhat different in the immediacy of its in-(or ex-)clusiveness. That is, hearing the scriptures say: “so you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir, by God’s own act” (Gal 4:7 NJB) is different from singing as one’s own phrase “I am your son”.

As a question of translation, there are serious interpretative judgements to be made. The overall context of Galatians suggests that Paul saw this as an inclusive use of “son”, so it is quite reasonable to do as the NRSV does and translate as “child”. Equally, because the language is dealing with concepts of relationships as they were conceived in a very particular culture, and the metaphor of inheritance in that culture, one could make a case for maintaining the strong point inherent in describing women as “sons” at that time and in that text. Either way, in reading and hearing the scriptures, we are more aware that they are ancient writings in need of translation and interpretation.

It is, I think, different in the language of prayer and worship. Surely the whole point is that we need to learn ways of speaking to God out of our lives and our culture, and not simply put on the linguistic dress of a past age. I have got used to the fact that I say words that would sound hopelessly sexist today when I’m using the 1662 BCP. (I’d rather not use it all, but am not quite brave, powerful or autocratic enough to ban it completely.) But I am aware that in using it I am drawing on the linguistic and theological mindset of past centuries. But contemporary English is significantly different. Faced with a particularly stubborn congregation who didn’t see the point of changing our liturgical language, I invited my “fellow men” to stand. The men stood, the women remained seated. I asked them how it was possible for them to go on insisting that in the phrase “sinned against you and our fellow men” they really meant women as well.

Older hymns and prayers can often be adapted. Sometimes one is faced with the decision whether a hymn will lose its integrity or meaning if so adapted. Then we must ask whether we sing it as a period piece, or cease using it entirely. But there should be no excuse for contemporary songs and prayers being so full of inappropriately and outmodedly gendered language that people feel unable to use them. Ironically some of the more egregious offenders are more recent (the last half-century) where liturgy and worship has taken a turn towards the human, our world and our relationship to God. Older material focussed much more on the praises of God, and less on human feeling and attitude. Consequently it avoided many of these problems.

Our so-called worship songs might generally benefit from more of a focus on God and less on “God and me” feelings. This is one specific area where they might benefit most strongly. But the more a song presents itself as contemporary, the more the patriarchal linguistic associations of past phrases will stand out like a sore thumb, and the same words that were unexceptional in the poetry and prose of past centuries, will sound exceptional and excluding.

Michael Bird posts today a video of what he says “is in my top three favourite worship songs”. It’s almost exactly the opposite of what I think, since this song always makes me grit my teeth. At least, the lyrics do; I rather like the melody. This put me to wondering whether this is taste or theology, or something in between. Here are the main reasons I dislike it:

• “Father God”. This is an expression I always find odd, but can never quite say why. It’s certainly not one that has been common in the liturgical tradition. I know a lot of people use it in extempore prayer, but then again a lot of people say “really would just” also. I think part of my objection is that it seems to treat “God” as a name, or makes Father sound like an honorific. (Consider the ways we might use Father + another noun in any other context in the English language.)
• “the knowledge of your Parenthood”. I have real problems with the register of “parenthood”. It seems to belong on forms, or discussions of family planning. Who actually uses this term with the connotation of a close relationship? “Hey Mum, your parenthood’s amazing!” I just don’t think so.
• It doesn’t fit everyone. How many people actually do go around wondering how they managed to exist before they became a Christian? And what are those who’ve been Christian all their lives supposed to do with this line?
• “I am your son, I am adopted in your family”. Leaving aside the interesting question of gendered language, at one level this is an unexceptional statement. At another I have problems with it as an assertion in a song that makes no mention of either the Son or the Spirit. Conceiving the relationship between myself and God as Father-son, without relating it (however lightly) to the Father-Son relationship I share in through the Spirit of adoption, is something I find problematic.

So are these questions just unimportant ones of personal taste, or does this song raise theological ones about its usage?

As many readers may know, I’m thinking over switching to a Mac, and am quite likely to once I’ve organised the pennies. But I was browsing their refurbished iMacs on the store (which does look a bit like a sell off of inventory at the moment, and was completely baffled at their pricing.

For £949 you can get a refurb of the current 24″ 2.4Ghz aluminium iMac. That’s not too bad a price. But spend £10 more, and a whopping £959 will buy you … the previous generation of 24″ white plastic iMac with OS X Tiger, iLife 06, half the graphics power and a slower processor.

Are they serious?

As Andrew Sullivan so aptly points out to this anti-Chinese protestor …

Er …

Nathan Stitt points to a book that also comes as a free PDF and e-book. It’s on that hardy old perennial of the identity of the author of the fourth gospel. I’m never quite sure why that should excite more interest than the identity of the authors of any of the other three. Nor do I think it makes much difference if any to the significant questions of interpretation. But since Nathan described this book as making the case for Lazarus as “the beloved disciple” and the author of the gospel, I thought it would be worth a quick look (and a quick look is all I have given it). I’m afraid I find myself completely disagreeing with Nathan over the value of this book.

I should begin by coming clean about my own views. While I think John 21:24 identifies the beloved disciple as the key tradent for the gospel’s traditions, I think that is some step away from claiming him to be the author. I should also say that I regard the appellation “beloved disciple” as an implicit polemical claim to the superiority of the Johannine version of Christianity, especially vis-à-vis James and the Jerusalem church. (See here and here for a couple of previous posts that touch on this conjectural sectarianism.) I do not regard the term as part of a straightforward historical puzzle, so I’m not part of the natural audience for this book.

I must confess also, that without Nathan’s post, I would have written this book off if I had simply stumbled across it. Lots of underlining, shouty bold type, copious quotes from the KJV and the note that “References to the Greek text are from the Interlinear Greek-English New Testament, © 1981 by Baker Book House”: these things all conspire to prejudice me.

The problem is, the book’s arguments rather confirm all my prejudices. A large part of the book is devoted to arguments why the apostle John couldn’t have written the gospel. These include such gems as saying that if he had done, he would have included incidents like the transfiguration to which he was an eyewitness. Since John’s gospel noticeably omits the transfiguration, it can’t have been written by one who was there. This is not the world’s most impressive argument.

Mr Phillips (our author) also seems to be in two minds:

As stated earlier, the writer of this Gospel always described himself with phrases that avoided directly disclosing his identity. When one takes note of this, then mere dogmatic assertions regarding this author’s identity are likely to seem less convincing than they might have otherwise – since his identity is the very thing that God saw fit to have him conceal. (p7 pdf version)

He has a view of inspiration that makes him believe that the author concealed his identity as a matter of divine prompting. It leads me to wonder why, if God wanted the author’s identity concealed, Phillips is trying so hard to reveal it. The logic escapes me.

For a book which makes much of appealing to the Bible alone, it is surprising that the disciple whom Jesus loved is with no argument identified as the anonymous other disciple of John 18:15-16. It’s by no means an unreasonable or unusual conjecture (and I’m inclined to agree with it), but it’s far from certain fact. The beloved disciple is anonymous. The disciple with Peter is anonymous. Therefore they are the same person. The logic doesn’t quite work. You know you’re facing a dodgy argument when completely specious appeal is made to the Greek cribbed from an interlinear: ” The literal Greek says: “the other disciple” (Jn. 18:15) and “the disciple other” (Jn.18:16).” Yeah, that really proves the identification.

This is worth noting, since the author tries to build on it. His later argument (pp17-18) seems to have three elements:

• The other gospels never mention a particular disciple whom Jesus loves
• The other gospels specifically don’t mention him when we know he was present, like at Peter’s denial.
• The other gospels do mention John the son of Zebedee.

From these elements Phillips concludes that this somehow proves John is not the beloved disciple, and therefore not the author of the gospel. It is hard to take such fallacious reasoning seriously: it conflates the phrases “the other disciple” and  “the one whom Jesus loved” into a discrete identity, and assumes that this person can’t be someone referred to in another way in the Synoptics. Similar and equally fallacious arguments follow. They are predicated on a jigsaw-puzzle approach to the gospels, which assumes that we are dealing with identical literary material, describing exactly the same events, with the same intent, and that what we need to do is put them together. This, in my view, completely misses the point.

The idea that the gospels are a jigsaw puzzle to be pieced together continues even more bizarrely with arguments about the Last Supper which totally ignore the significant differences between the Synoptic and Johannine narratives. So he takes Mark 14:18-20: “And when they had taken their places and were eating, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.”  They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another, “Surely, not I?”  He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the bowl with me.” He comments that the phrase “one of the twelve” must imply others present, because when Jesus addresses them directly in John 6:70, he says “you, the twelve”. This not only ignores the parallels in Mark between “one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me” and “one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the bowl with me” but also ignores the way that Matthew edits this linguistic awkwardness out. (Luke does something else again.)

While it is historically likely that others, such as the women who travelled with Jesus, were present at the Last Supper, the gospel accounts imply a meal only with the twelve. While the fourth gospel’s narrative is different yet again, the foot-washing narrative does appear to make most narrative and dramatic sense if only the twelve are present. Phillips’ desire to smuggle others in, of course, is that it is essential to his argument that Lazarus is the beloved disciple. If the Last Supper is limited to the twelve, then Lazarus can’t possibly be he.

His next argument shows the danger of the person who thinks “the Bible alone” obviates the need for scholarship. The KJV is alone among English translations in taking John 13:2 καὶ δείπνου γινομένου as “And supper being ended”. This suits Phillips’ argument, for it allows him to reconcile the eucharistic picture of the synoptic tradition with the non-eucharistic picture of the fourth gospel, and keep putting that jigsaw together. But unfortunately he reveals his ignorance:

[Various Bible versions translate this verse differently because of conflicting interpretations of the Greek word tenses involved. However, the study of things like word tenses can often end up with us having to choose between the opposing opinions of Greek scholars. So instead, let’s look again to the Bible to learn what it can teach us.] (p 25)

We don’t have to choose between different interpretations of the Greek “word tenses”, because we can always just read the Bible! (And Jesus said unto them: you have heard it was said in the aorist, but I speak unto you in the present.) “Ended” does strike me as the least likely interpretation. Most translations settle for “during supper” or something similar. I would be more inclined to take it along the lines of “When it was supper time…”. It seems to me, again, that the foot-washing makes most sense as an action that precedes eating. (John 13:4 poses a hint of a problem for this, but need not be taken to imply a meal already in progress.)

The argument continues in like vein. And there are some right doozies in there, like the argument that Lazarus as the fourth evangelist paid particular attention to the linen cloths that had wrapped Jesus’ body, because he remembered what it was like to wake up wearing your burial shroud! Buried in this inanity are the two reasonable arguments for identifying Lazarus and the beloved disciple.

1. Lazarus is particularly introduced through the phrasing of Mary and Martha’s message (John 11:3): “κύριε, ἴδε ὃν φιλεῖς ἀσθενεῖ – Lord, he whom you love is ill”. How significant this is will depend in part on whether you think φιλέω and αγαπάω are synonymous. It is always the latter verb in references to the disciple whom Jesus loved. John 11:5 is yet another argument for thinking the only difference is stylistic: “ἠγάπα δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς τὴν Μάρθαν καὶ τὴν ἀδελφὴν αὐτῆς καὶ τὸν Λάζαρον.” (cf also John 11:36)
2. References to the disciple whom Jesus loved only begin to occur after the raising of Lazarus has introduced the character precisely as someone whom Jesus loves. This does seem to me to disregard the paucity of references: John 13:23, John 19:26, John 20:2, John 21:7,20. There simply aren’t enough references, either to the character, or to specific disciples to say whether the character is only introduced half-way through, though it offers support to the argument from how Lazarus is introduced.

For me, unfortunately, Phillips has so many daft arguments that stronger ones take on the overall inanity of the rest. There is half a case to be made that Lazarus is the beloved disciple within the narrative of the gospel. But when it is presented by so many specious arguments, it is hard to take seriously. It is important, thought, to bracket this from any question of authorship. Luke’s account of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42) calls the historicity of Lazarus into question, as does the way in which his resuscitation becomes in the fourth gospel the motivation for the crucifixion, and makes him also a target for execution (John 12:10). When one moves beyond identifying Lazarus with the beloved disciple to identifying him as the fourth evangelist, that becomes a serious question mark.

It is hard, in short,  to see that the argument is strong enough to overturn the early tradition that associates the fourth gospel with John the Apostle, even if this seems to be confused in the memory with John the elder. For Phillips, any argument from tradition is as suspect as one from the Greek. Catholic tradition and grammatical knowledge alike detract from sola scriptura. But it should not be so for the rest of us. It is possible that early church tradition relies as much on plausible deduction as we do, but it is not unreasonable to see some strength to this particular tradition. It is also hard to imagine that as unknown a figure as Lazarus should appear to be a rival for Peter in some circles, which seems to be the implication of the narrative.

I must conclude that the beloved disciple remains an enigmatic character in the fourth gospel, but seeing the appellation as the way in which the community of John the elder has characterised John son of Zebedee their founding apostle seems still to make the best sense of both tradition and narrative.

Both Jim West and Claude Mariottini link to the same review of Expelled. Both seem persuaded by the fundamental fallacy of the film, that there is a politically correct liberal conspiracy at the heart of a politico-media-scientific America, which is pro-gay, pro-abortion and anti-God. They seem to think that when the reviewer says “Evolution is another one of those one-sided debates” where “Christian” voices are stifled, he does, in Jim’s words “have a point”.

Er no, guys, he doesn’t. People’s stands on abortion, gay rights and God (funny how those get so regularly lumped together) are about doing theology, philosophy and ethics. Evolution is about science. They may not (and should not) exist in separate intellectual boxes, but they are separate things. The problem with “Intelligent design”  (ID) is that it is (bad) theology masquerading as science.

At the heart of the scientific methodology is the idea of exploring and testing possible mechanistic explanations of observable physical reality in the light of all the available evidence. The most astonishing current example of this is the building of the large hadron collider just coming on line. Fundamentally, millions of pounds have been poured into this project so that experiments can be carried out to see if current physical theories are wrong. That is how science proceeds, and one can hardly call it arrogant, or see what on earth it has to do with some atheist gay agenda. By contrast, ID sets out to prove that there is no explanation, and then say “see, that means God exists”.

Poor theology and apologetics has had a long history of looking for things that can’t be explained as proof of God. Unfortunately, science has had an uncanny knack of coming up with explanations. The current poster-child of the ID movement seems to be the bacterial flagellum and its “irreducible complexity”. There is good reason to think that this fence too is falling to an evolutionary explanation. The “God of the gaps” is scientifically and theologically unsustainable. Buying into ID is to buy into a pseudo-science that is being continuously discredited.

There are legitimate questions to be raised about the practice of science. Is it limited by ideas of “acceptable” areas of research? (There’s no doubt that the makers of this film would like to so limit it.) Is it limited by the economics and politics of funding bids and providers? I would judge that it is. But so is every human endeavour likewise limited, and theology has been no exception, especially when it comes to acceptable areas of research.

Siding with people who defend God by bad arguments means that you are always in danger of seeing your faith fail when the bad arguments are exposed for the fallacies they are. ID and its friends pose very little danger to science. They are, however, a profound threat to sustainable and reasonable faith. I do not see liberalism as some big bad wolf out there waiting to devour little red riding believer. But for those who do, I strongly advise against getting into bed with a roaring lion. Your enemy’s enemy is not necessarily your friend.