James F. McGrath

I had the wonderful opportunity last night to hear Joan Baez live in our little town. Yes, Joan Baez of anti-war, hippie-days, protest, and beautiful love fame. And she was beautiful. The place, Charlottesville’s Pavilion on the downtown mall was packed. Lots of gray heads in the crowd but not all, and everyone seemed to be loving the show. Just as in those fresh days from decades ago, Baez continues to sing out injustice, the challenge and responsibility to be decent in a world bent on bending goodness into greed and simple pleasure into perversity. Her hair was cropped close, she wore shorts and a v-neck, and sang with the pure tone I associate with her ’60s and ’70s tunes.

Baez’s passion for the same good things that she championed long ago and the enthusiasm with which the audience embraced her brought to mind the prophet Ezekiel. The prophetic parallels are obvious, of course – the unapologetic railing against wrongdoing, taking to task the rich and powerful who misdirect their authority, injustices that mess with the order of the world.

But what really got me was this: in the biblical book of Ezekiel, the prophet is a lyrical poet to whom people listen with great pleasure. “So beautifully he speaks,” you can imagine them saying to one another – an audience of educated Judeans in exile in Babylon. Indeed, the literature is amazing, exquisite, especially evident in the Hebrew and with some knowledge of the bzillion of cross-references and wordplays that he uses. But the message?: devastating. Really. And some of it is cringe-worthy sadistic-sounding pornography.

So with Baez – the songs, gorgeous! The message – oh, my God. My God. “People say to each other, ‘let’s go hear Ezekiel,’” God tells the prophet, “And they will come to you in crowds, whole throngs of them to listen. But finally to them you are just a singer of silly songs with a sweet voice who plays skillfully. They hear your words but will not change” (Ezek 33:30-32).

Here we are well in to the 21^st century, still facing the inhumanity of deportation, the persistence of sexual abuse, the misapplication of power or downright lies masquerading as justice that we did decades ago. Baez sang those songs many years ago. We smiled and sang along. She sang them last night, and we smiled and sang along. “Such a lovely tone, really beautiful,” I said to my husband over the ballad of a woman who gives her body to the judge to free her father whom she discovers was hung nonetheless.

A question that’s been nagging away at me lately is how it is that people who have striven mightily against the wrongs of the world endure? How do they keep needling for rightness, for wisdom, sustainability, moderation in material things, and humility? How, when we the rest of us persist in abuse and destruction? I’d really like to ask. And what of Ezekiel? We don’t for certain what happened to the prickly priest-prophet. He probably died in Babylon. We do know that he continued to prophesy after the destruction that he had so vigorously warned was coming – the defeat of Judah, fall of Jerusalem, and destruction of the temple there.

Ezekiel’s message changed after that event, after Ezekiel learned that Jerusalem had fallen (Ezek 33:21). It became softer, more hopeful. It included more restoration and less judgment language. But not entirely, and not because the people were suddenly transformed into righteous individuals. Rather, Ezekiel tells that what restoration they might experience is the product of a God with a reputation to maintain – a reputation for justice, yes, but also with the power and goodness to make well. The book of Ezekiel concludes with details for a restored people, land, and temple. Much as it sounds like a solid blueprint for practical application, the details transcend the ordinary. From the temple itself, the text tells, water will flow in four rivers from the temple, water that grows as it runs. Not only that, but the water will refresh what was foul so that it is filled with flashing fish. It will be full of life itself. Along the banks, trees will grow heavy with fruit for food, and their leaves, the text tells, will be for healing. (Ezek 47:1-12).

Baez concluded the concert with “Gracias a la Vida.” Thanks to Life.

The post Joan Baez and Ezekiel appeared first on Kristin Swenson.

Creationists most powerful weapon is their ability to catch you off guard with their unbelievably stupid answers to questions, and here’s a beautiful example. Someone tries to get creationists to explain how they reconcile deep space with a young earth.

I would like to discuss what appears to be a major body of evidence against young earth creationism – astrophysics.

The distances to a large number of astronomical objects have been measured by a variety of methods. Astrophysicists consider the distances to galaxies to be of the order of millions of light years, and the majority of stars within the Milky Way to be up to 100,000 light years away. If this were true, and given the invariance of the speed of light, clearly YEC is false (irrespective of the status of evolution).

Just as one example, a cepheid variable star in the galaxy M81 was observed by the Hubble telescope and measured at about 11 million light years away. See here: http://outreach.atnf…e_cepheids.html

So what is the YEC position in regard to this. Is it:

a ) The speed of light is not invariant, or

b ) All of the objects observed by astronomers, from stars to galaxies to quasars, do in fact exist within 6000 light years of Earth?

I read that, and thought, I know! I know! It’s c) they’re distant, but the light was created en route! I’m so smart.

And so wrong. Surprise! Here’s the answer one creationist gave.

If it takes 11 million years to travel to earth, how can i see it now? I’m only 20.

If it takes 11 million years to travel to earth then the viewer would need to be 11 million years old.

Aaaaaand…we’re done here. I’m gonna go close my eyes and rest a bit.

On Sunday, 16 June, the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels is to feature in a special programme on BBC Radio 3. Presented by award-winning children's author David Almond, the programme will investigate the significance of the Gospels, exploring its creation, the journeys made by the book, and the cultural and religious landscape...

Science Daily is running a story on research done utilizing x-ray technology to gain more insight into the feather pattern and structure of Archaeopteryx.  They write:

The first complete chemical analysis of feathers from Archaeopteryx, a famous fossil linking dinosaurs and birds, reveals that the feathers of this early bird were patterned - light in colour, with a dark edge and tip to the feather ­­- rather than all black, as previously thought. The findings came from X-ray experiments undertaken by a team from the University of Manchester, working with colleagues at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The scientists were able to find chemical traces of the original 'dinobird' and dilute traces of plumage pigments in the 150 million-year-old fossil.

It is amazing that this is even possible, given the age of the specimens. Neat.

Over at Mark Goodacre's blog, he asks for a bit of input about online resources for teaching Mark. After commenting there, I thought I'd expand my suggestions here.


One of the points that I try to make in Jesus among Friends and Enemies (eds. Hurtado and Keith) is that as the plot of Mark unfolds, the Jewish leadership is revealed as adversaries of Jesus. This much is old hat. But if one looks more closely, these supposed "enemies" are narrated as asking questions about Jesus' peculiarities. I.e. it is not necessary to read these early exchanges as charged with animosity. As these "controversies" escalate, it is Jesus who provokes the conflict.

Here is an excerpt from my chapter, titled "The Jewish Leaders":

Mark introduces the Jewish leaders to readers with a story about Jesus at home, eating with tax-collectors and sinners. We are told that ―scribes of the Pharisees‖ question  Jesus‘s disciples about his dinner company. The implication here is that, compared with other rabbis, Jesus might be less attentive to dietary purity (Mark 2:15–17).
…
It is also noteworthy, at this early stage in the narrative, that there is no apparent hostility between these leaders and Jesus. We are simply told that they have asked Jesus a question. Jesus answers by comparing himself to a physician who comes not for the healthy but for the sick. The story-teller gives us no indication that these Jewish leaders were unsatisfied with the answer. … [To answer questions about fasting] Jesus answers again with an analogy. He compares his ministry with a wedding party and himself with the groom (i.e. the guest of honor who requires celebrating). The story-teller includes two other analogies to justify the actions of his disciples (2:21–22). Again, Mark gives no indication of hostility…. 

From the Pharisees‘ perspective (one might imagine), Jesus‘s claim to be master of the Sabbath would have seemed outlandish. The Pharisees begin an argument concerning sabbatical law (this was a common argument if rabbinic literature is any indication) and they end up with a statement tantamount to megalomania! Who was this backwater revivalist to associate himself with King David? 

In Mark 3:1–2 Jesus enters a synagogue (a local place of study and worship) and ―a man was there who had a withered hand. And they [presumably the Pharisees] watched him, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him.‖ According to the story-teller, the key divide between the Jewish leaders and Jesus involves sabbatical interpretation. Jesus then instigates an even bigger argument: 

And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ―Come here.‖ And he said to them, ―Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?‖ But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, ―Stretch out your hand.‖ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, [about] how to destroy him. -Mark 3:3–6

 This is a crucial turn in Mark‘s plot and characterization. The Jewish leaders are shown to be quietly observing Jesus‘s behavior and wary of his sabbatical antics. In contrast, Jesus is shown to be intentionally provocative. He begins the argument and publicly heals (recall Jesus‘s medical analogy in 2:17) a man with a ―withered‖ hand to provoke the Jewish leaders.

Notice that Mark‘s portrait is not of a passive, live-and-let-live Jesus who was simply minding his own business. By publicly healing on the Sabbath, and starting the argument in the synagogue, Jesus is picking a fight. Indeed, we are explicitly told that he is angry. 

When teaching students, it might be helpful to ask a few close-reading questions like: what sort of tone do you imagine? Why? What in the narrative suggests hostility?

I think it is also helpful to explain how such conflicts have bled into Jewish-Xn relations over the centuries. Questions like: if you traced your spiritual and physical ancestry to the Pharisees, how might you read these exchanges differently.

So a question to my readers: when reading Mark's narrative, do you imagine a hostile Jesus?

-anthony

Turkey in 10 Days
1. General Remarks
2. What to Bring
3. Day 1: Traveling There
4. Day 2: Troy
5. Day 3: Pergamum, Thyatira, Philadelphia, Sardis, Smyrna 
6. Day 4: Ephesus and Laodicea
7. Day 5: Colossae and Perga
8. Day 6: Galatia: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra
9. Day 7: Derbe and Tarsus

10. Day 8: Cappadocia and Nicaea
Thursday was mostly a travel day.  Having gone as far east in Turkey as we would go, we would spend most of Thursday on a bee-line toward Istanbul that went straight through the capital of Ankara.  It was also the closest we would come to ground zero of ancient Hittite country (Hattusa, now Boğazkale).  The Hittites were at their peak around the time of Abraham (see Genesis 23).

Cappadocia
Cappadocia is mentioned in 1 Peter 1:1 as one of its destinations, including several other places we had already visited (Asia, Galatia).  But for Christians, probably the most significant aspect of the region is the fact that the Cappadocian fathers were centered here: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa his brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus.

Cappadocian cave houses

Everyone assumes that we get the Trinity from the Bible, but I don't think Christians realize how much of what we believe about Jesus was a matter of serious debate in the 300s.  Both sides claimed to have Scripture on their side and there were a number of decades where the Trinity as we know it wasn't winning.

The Cappadocians went philosophical because biblical debates had reached a stalemate. The Cappadocians were the ones that worked out the "one substance, three persons" that would become part of the Nicene Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381. (By engaging philosophy and the Greek liberal arts, they also helped Christianity become a premier religion :-)

After breakfast on Thursday, we made our way to Göreme, which is super-easy to find from Nevshehir.  Just east of town is where Christians carved monasteries and churches out of the relatively soft rock that once upon a time had been formed by lava.  Earlier volcano activity had left "fairy chimneys" all over the place.  This is the general area where Star Wars filmed Tatooine.

Cappadocia

Here, not only in times of persecution but for centuries, Christians had monasteries and churches inside the fairy chimneys.  It's 15 lira to get into the "open air museum."

Cappadocian monastery

The 11th century art in the churches in these "chimneys" was exquisite, especially in the "Dark Church."    This cave church is an extra 8 lira but definitely worth it--the best part of the entire site for me.  For the record, I didn't take this photo:

Dark Church at Cappadocia

We had pretty much finished walking around the main site before the bulk of the tour buses arrived. We didn't go to  the "Buckle Church," about 50 meters down the hill (the ticket to the open air museum gets you in there also).  We heard it was fabulous.

Travel
To get back toward Istanbul, we decided first to take 300 west to Aksaray (about 70 kilometers) in order to get on the larger highway 750.  If you've paid attention to the road numbers, both of these are familiar.  300 goes all the way to Izmir near Ephesus.  750 goes south down to Tarsus.

But our goal was to take 750 north through Ankara, which soon joins up with the superhighway 0-4.  0-4 goes all the way to Istanbul, but our sights were set on Nicaea.  It's about 540 kilometers from Aksaray to the environs of a town called Sakarya.  It's near this city, only about 150 kilometers shy of Istanbul itself, that you finally turn south on 650.  Take that about 50 kilometers until you can turn west onto 150 around Mekece.  That will take you to Iznik, which is modern day Nicaea.

Nicaea
After that much travel, it's nice to settle into a hotel.  There is a string of hotels along Lake Iznik.  You can get to the lake easily simply by following the ruins of the medieval city wall, which you will hit eventually if you just keep driving through town from any direction.  650 itself actually goes straight to the lake.

Lake Iznik at Nicaea

Ross was now an expert at negotiating hotel rates, and we could have had our pick of a half dozen.  He got one of the best down to 120 lira a room.  Its proprietor was also a pro--a worthy adversary.

A central road led from the lake to the main road through Iznik, a road that runs roughly parallel to the lake shore.  We decided to walk there for a change.  We found the mosque created out of the church that housed the seventh ecumenical council of 787, where Christians decided it was okay to use icons, images and art of saints.

Nicaean church now mosque

It doesn't seem like we know exactly where the Council of Nicaea was originally held, where the Trinity was first decided (325).  But I wouldn't be surprised if a later church was built on a significant earlier site.

Some more lovely baklava and we walked back to our hotel. In the morning we would return to Istanbul.

I picked up a fascinating book a few weeks ago – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy (Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary) . This is the first of a five volume set brought to my attention through a post on Pete Enns’s blog with, as usual for him, a nice pithy title Learn about the Cultural [...]

The book of Job is my favorite in the Old Testament. It is brutally honest. It provides no easy answers. It concludes, leaving us with life as unfathomable mystery and that we cannot possibly understand it. It admits that even though there may be meaning, we aren’t privy to it. This is life as I experience it.

The crucifixion illustrates this even more graphically. Looking back, Paul says that God emptied himself of himself and became a man. As a human being, God experiences the absence of God. God has forsaken himself. Jesus, not only God as a human being, but Jesus as a human being, actually a human being, experiences the apparent meaninglessness of life accompanied by the forsakenness of God. Jesus, fully God and fully man, both conjoined together experience the very real absence of God.

This is the Jesus I identify with because it is the fullest identification with and liberation of humanity.

First, let me commend the Southern Baptist Convention for passing resolutions this week to raise awareness regarding the complexities of mental illness and to call on pastors and church leaders to enact better policies related to child abuse. There is still much to be done on both of these fronts, particularly in regard to the troubling support of Sovereign Grace Ministries by some SBC leaders in spite of the organization’s apparent systemic sex abuse cover-up. But these seem to be good steps made in good faith which I trust will be followed by concrete actions within individual church communities.  I’m sure it can be frustrating for folks who spend days at such conventions working and praying through these resolutions to face criticism afterward, so I want to say at the outset that I trust these decisions are made with the best of intentions. 

That said, I think members of the SBC made a serious error in judgment this week by passing a resolution to officially condemn the leadership of Boy Scouts of America for their recent decision to accept openly gay boys into membership.  While stopping short of recommending that Southern Baptists drop ties with the Scouts, the SBC encouraged churches that choose to sever the relationship to expand their Royal Ambassador ministry, a Southern Baptist version of the Boy Scouts that would presumably ban gay participants. 

[You can read the full resolution here.] 

I’m thankful that the SBC recognized the autonomy of its individual churches in making decisions on this matter. (This is what makes them Baptist, and it’s a good thing!) My comments should therefore be read as something of a plea to the members of churches from a variety of denominations who will, in the months to come, make decisions about whether to stop sponsoring Boy Scout troops as a result of the organization’s policies. I speak not as a Southern Baptist or a “gay activist,” but as a fellow Christian concerned about our witness to the world and our care for the most marginalized among us. 

While the resolution expresses “love in Christ for all young people regardless of their perceived sexual orientation,” its condemnation of the Scouts only serves to further alienate those outside the Church from the gospel and to perpetuate the already dysfunctional and unhealthy culture of secrecy, fear, and shame within the conservative evangelical church as it relates to homosexuality. 

The fact is, boy scouts are already forbidden from engaging in sexual activity—heterosexual or homosexual—and so the change in policy simply addresses sexual orientation. In other words, being attracted to the same sex does not automatically disqualify a boy from becoming a scout. 

Is this really a move to condemn? Would a Southern Baptist Church forbid a child from attending Sunday School based solely on his or her sexual orientation? Even among those who count homosexual behavior as a sin, there is usually at least some room in the fellowship for people attracted to the same sex. So why hold the Boy Scouts to more legalistic standards than many SBC churches? This resolution goes beyond the typical condemnation by the SBC of homosexual behavior to condemn homosexual orientation.

It also raises some important questions: Does the SBC plan to disassociate from any group that might have gay members? Will Alcoholics Anonymous be banned from meeting in the church basement because some of its members might be gay? Will children be asked about their sexual orientation or the sexual orientation of their parents before being enrolled in Vacation Bible School? Will churches drop all partnerships with community nonprofits that don't discriminate based on race, gender, or sexual orientation? 

What disassociation from the Scouts would communicate to a community, (perhaps inadvertently), is that people with same-sex attraction are under no circumstances welcome in a Southern Baptist church, even if it’s through a separate community organization like the Boy Scouts. Churches that choose to break from the Scouts simply because there may be gay boys among them will send a clear message to their respective communities that LGBT folks—even teenagers— are not welcome anywhere near their churches; the doors are officially closed to them. 

If that’s the message you want your church to send, then send it. But if it’s not, please reconsider embracing this resolution or disassociating from the Scouts. 

Furthermore, what all of this communicates to kids already in the church is that if they find themselves attracted to the same sex, (or in falling in any way outside sexual “norms”), they better keep their attractions, thoughts, and feelings a secret or else they will be ostracized, maybe even kicked out. 

In response to the Scouts’ decision, the SBC has been promoting its Royal Ambassadors program, a sort of Christianized version of the Boy Scouts that provides the classic “retreat” option for those interested in “protecting” their families from the outside world.  But what happens to the kid in Royal Ambassadors who is gay? What happens to the boy who finally musters the courage to tell his parents or a trusted church leader he is attracted to other guys? Will he be kicked out of Royal Ambassadors? Will he be kicked out of the church? 

I once met a young man at a Christian college who told me that to be gay in a Southern Baptist Church is like living every day in hell. He told me he woke up every morning and went to bed every night with a heavy, palpable fear in his chest. He was burdened by the shame of carrying around a secret he knew he could never tell anyone. As a kid, he was teased by the other boys, and little was done to stop it. The church, he said, was the worst place in the world to be gay, the last place he would ever choose to come out. As soon as he got the chance, he ran as far away from that unreachable white steeple as his legs would carry him. The fact that he remains a committed follower of Jesus, despite the hateful response he has received from many Christians because of his sexuality, astounds and challenges me. 

His is not an unusual story. 

It’s the story of thousands of young people who are both Christian and gay. They are told they have to choose between the two, and when they can’t, they often leave the church or, tragically, choose to leave this earth for good. We cannot continue down this path. It has created too many atheists, too many grave markers, too many grieving families, too many broken hearts.

Our churches should be the safest places in which to come out, not the most dangerous. 

My guess is that most Southern Baptists would agree with me. My guess is that most just haven’t thought through the implications of this resolution, the implications of potentially disassociating from the Boy Scout troops in their community, or the implications of consistently fighting this culture war against homosexuality. 

So if your church is in the process of making such a decision, I encourage you think about it, pray about it, talk with your fellow church members about it, and talk with your gay friends, neighbors, and relatives about it. I also recommend checking out the book Torn by Justin Lee, a young man who was raised in a Southern Baptist church and who is gay. 

Regardless of where one stands on the politics of gay marriage, or even the morality of same sex relationships, the message that a person has to become straight before becoming a part of the Kingdom is dangerous, untrue, and contrary to the Gospel. 

When God wrapped himself in flesh, strapped on sandals, and set up his tabernacle among us, he made a beeline for the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the despised, the sinners, the misfits, and the minorities. He ate with them and drank with them, and despite warnings from the religious leaders, he made them his disciples and friends.  

(And before someone jumps in with a friendly reminder that Jesus told those he healed to “go and sin no more,” let’s remember that no one actually went and sinned no more—not the first disciples, not us, not anybody. We aren't welcomed into the Kingdom on account of our worthiness, but on account of Christ’s worthiness.)

When we demand that people conform to a list of requirements before welcoming them into our churches we effectively “shut the door to the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces,” just as Jesus warned against. 

In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if what makes the Gospel offensive is not who it keeps out, but who it lets in.   Samaritans. Gentiles. Women. Tax collectors. Prostitutes. The poor. The merciful. Peacemakers. Drunks. Addicts. The sick. The uneducated. The persecuted. Slaves. Prisoners. The naked. The hungry. The marginalized. The troublemakers. The oppressed. The misfits. The powerless. Children. A self-important, undisciplined cynic like me.  An ethnic and sexual minority who, though the BIble forbade him from even entering a temple on account of his sexuality, turned to Philip and said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?”  

Though Philip's mind may have raced - "you're a Gentile! you're a eunuch! you know very little about Jesus! - he responded only by following the Ethiopian eunuch to the water and baptizing him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

Look, here is water: The Church is water. The whole world is water. 

What will we let stand in the way? 

Love need not agree or understand or have it all figured out. 

But love always opens the door. 

I pray my brothers and sisters in the Southern Baptist Church will not shut it in any more faces. 

###

Be sure to check out Torn: Rescuing Christians From the Gays vs. Christians Debate by Justin Lee. You can also check out his Web site here. 

If you are a Christian and gay, check out the Gay Christian Network.  

And for scout troops looking for a new home, The United Methodist Church has opened its doors to those dropped by SBC churches. 

See also:  

How to Win a Culture War and Lose a Generation

"All right then, I'll go to hell" 

Is abolition biblical? 

 

(Post by Seth M. Rodriquez)

The excavation season is upon us (as has been made clear through the recent roundup posts here, here and here), so our photo of the week is a picture of some early excavations at a well known site.  Can you guess which site it is?


Here are a series of hints for you:

• This photograph was taken sometime between 1928 and 1946.
• This dig was carried out by John Garstang.
• The Arabic name for this site is Tell el-Qedah.
• A row of matching pillars was found only a few yards away.
• The valley in the background is the Huleh Valley.
• This building was later fully excavated by Yigael Yadin, and eventually was moved to a different place on the tell by Amnon Ben-Tor.

The answer to our riddle (and a picture of the whole structure) can be found here.

During a sounding at this site in 1928, Garstang found one of the rows of pillars in a Israelite tripartite pillared building.  This type of structure was common in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. and has been found at Megiddo, Hazor, Beersheba, and elsewhere in Palestine.  The function of these buildings has been debated, with some scholars interpreting them as stables and others interpreting them as storehouses.  The last I checked, the proponents of the "stable" interpretation had the upper hand ... but the readers of this blog are welcome to start the debate again in the comments section.

And for all of you who are in the field this summer ... Happy Digging!  May you be as fortunate as Garstang was in his brief sounding at Tell el-Qedah in 1928.

This photo and about 600 others are available in Volume 1 of the American Colony and Eric Matson Collection, and can be purchased here for $20 (plus free shipping). Additional images of this site can be seen here on BiblePlaces.com.  Additional images of the Huleh Valley in the 1800s and early 1900s can be seen here on LifeintheHolyLand.com.

There are Christians in the world who choose not to drink alcohol for a variety of reasons. I understand and respect that. And then there are those who think that Christians shouldn't drink because they claim it is a sin.

One of the more difficult passages for those in the second group is Jesus turning water into wine in John 2. The thought of the Messiah using his powers to provide an intoxicating beverage just doesn't sit well with them. Often they will refer to it as "new wine" by which they mean alcohol free.

The video clip below was sent to me by a friend. I am not sure who the speaker is, but he can sure preach. Too bad his facts are wrong.






Again, I respect that he doesn't want to drink alcohol. But calling it a sin (something the Bible doesn't do) and suggesting that Jesus made non-alcoholic wine is just plain wrong. There are several ways that I could answer him, but I will use just one passage.

In Deuteronomy 14:22-27 some regulations for tithing are laid out. In 14:23 the reader is told to use their tithe (watch this now) to buy grain and new wine to drink where the Lord commands. Now it is true that the Hebrew  word in 14:23 means "new wine" or "fresh wine." It is a rarely used word for wine and carries with it connotations of ritual. But that doesn't necessarily mean non-alcoholic wine. One problem that has to be taken into consideration here is how would one keep grape juice from spoiling in the heat of Palestine? Certainly some portion of grape juice was probably drank when it was first squeezed and thus non-fermented. But without refrigeration and stabilizers the process of fermentation would begin to settle in on its own. Grape juice will either ferment or spoil. Thus the ancients had to make wine to keep it from becoming vinegar.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that new wine in 14:23 does refer to unfermented drink. What then are we to make of what we are told about the tithe in 14:26? There we read that if you are too far from the temple to enjoy your tithes you are to go out and buy "wine and strong drink" and to "rejoice in the presence of the Lord." In this case there is no getting around it. The word for "strong drink" is the same one used in Gen 9:21 to describe what Noah drank when he got drunk. And both words for wine and strong drink are used in 1 Sam 1:15 when Eli thinks Hannah is drunk. So while I am not suggesting the author of Deuteronomy is telling us to use our tithes to get drunk (something Bible does condemn) I am saying that we are told to spend our tithe money on a good bottle of wine and/or beer or even scotch and enjoy it in the presence of God.

So if the preacher above doesn't want to drink that is his choice.But he should not suggest that Jesus never drank or that he only made non-alcoholic wine. Equating Jesus with a bartender seems to be an attempt to not just marginalize those who drink but also those who serve drinks. But the gospels I read seem to locate Jesus frequently in the presence of bartenders.

For myself, I think I will use some of my tithe money!

Shively, Elizabeth E. Apocalyptic Imagination in the Gospel of Mark: The Literary and Theological Role of Mark 3:22- 30. BNZW 189. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. 295 p.  $140.00 Link.

Elizabeth Shively is a lecturer in New Testament at University of St Andrews.  Her book Apocalyptic Imagination in the Gospel of Mark is a light revision of her 2009 Ph.D. Emory University dissertation written under the guidance of Luke Timothy Johnson.

The basic thesis of the study is that Mark 3:22-30 functions as a programmatic statement for the Gospel of Mark. Three short parables and logion are placed together in order to construct the symbolic world which shapes the Gospel of Mark on both a literary and theological level. Shively understands parables of the Kingdom / House Divided and the Strong Man as apocalyptic discourse which is used to answer the question of the source of Jesus’ authority to cast out demons, but also to interpret Jesus for a new community of believers who are suffering.  For Shively, Mark 3:22-30 is “cluster of apocalyptic topoi” that Mark expands to “reveal a word of cosmic conflict manifest in Jesus’ ministry” (p. 5).

Shively points out that most scholars who work on parables do not work with these three short sayings, despite the fact that Mark specifically calls them parables in 3:23. The reason for this is that most monographs on parables have defined the genre in a way which rules out these sayings.  By taking this pericope as a programmatic statement for the gospel of Mark, Shively hopes to read Mark as a coherent, unified narrative within its own symbolic world.  That world is “Jewish apocalyptic thought” as expressed in parabolic forms. By constructing this paragraph has he has, Mark is “describing Jesus’ ministry as ‘more than a rescue operation,’” Jesus is beginning the “reconstructive work of the Kingdom of God” (p. 82).

While the Gospel of Mark is obviously not apocalyptic in terms of genre, Mark is an “apocalyptic thinker.” Following Luke Timothy Johnson’s definition of symbolic worlds, she points out that symbols are “social structures in which people live” (p. 29). Clusters of symbols help people to understand the world and communicate that understanding to others who share these symbols. Like most modern scholars who work on symbols and metaphors, she stands on the foundation of Lakoff and Johnson Metaphors We Live By, applying their insights to the apocalyptic worldview of first century Judaism. Figurative language appears in this pericope to “stage a cosmic drama” (p.81).

Shively explains that apocalyptic symbols have two dimensions. There is a vertical dimension to this literate in which cosmic forces are involved in earth. This may take the form of angels and demons active in the world, for example. The horizontal dimension is a movement toward an imminent eschatological salvation. The righteous are undergoing persecution and look forward to God breaking into history to liberate them from their oppressors. This description of apocalyptic thinking is clear from texts that are considered apocalyptic by genre; Shively argues in this book that Mark reflects that thinking in his Gospel and uses it to shape his theological interpretation of Jesus’ ministry.

By way of method, Shively reads Mark 3:22-30 both “inner-textually” and intertextually.  By inner-textually she means the “story world of Mark.”  This means that she will pay attention to the Gospel of Mark as a whole, examining the rhetoric, plot, and characters of the book in order to trace the author’s interests.  The second chapter of this book places this pericope in the overall context of the gospel by examining how it functions rhetorically at the beginning of the Gospel, and her fifth chapter  examines the larger context of the Gospel, primarily the Gerasene Demoniac (5:1-20) and the apocalyptic speech (13:5-37).

By intertextual, she intends to read the Gospel of Mark in the light of textual traditions outside of the Gospel. Following on Richard Hays, she proposes to hear echoes of the Hebrew Bible in Mark 3:22-30. She acknowledges that intertextual elements do not only exist in quotes of allusions, but also in the form of metaphors and symbols in Jewish apocalyptic thought (p. 36). She says that “we cannot understand Mark’s intertextuality simply by looking at discrete OT citations and allusions” because Mark is “weaving citations, allusions and themes” in order to “awaken the reader’s memory” (261).  (I made this point in my own dissertation on Jesus’s use of eschatological banquet traditions from the Hebrew Bible.) Since Mark wrote as an “apocalyptic thinker” he does not have to consciously cite a text from the Hebrew Bible.  He may use a well-known metaphor from apocalyptic literature without having a specific text in mind.  On the other hand, he may have a cluster of texts in mind rather than a single context.

I find this to be very helpful and interesting, but in practice there is not much which can be described as intertextual with respect to the Hebrew Bible in Mark 3:22-30.  She does comment on the potential allusion to Isaiah 49:24-26 in Mark 3:27.  Several commentaries have noticed this allusion, although there are only a few words shared by both texts.  In LXX Isa 49:24 the strong one is a “giant” (γίγαντος), and he is captured (αἰχμαλωτεύω), not bound (δέω) and plundered (διαρπάζω) as in Mark 3:27.  The word λαμβάνω is repeated in Isa 49:24-26 several times but does not appear in Mark 3:27. At best, this is an “echo” of Isa 49:24-26 and might be better described as an allusion to the tradition that the Lord is the ultimate Strong One who rescues his people from their enemies.

The key word in Mark 3:27 for Shively is ἰσχυρός.  In Isa 49:26 it is the Lord who is the “strong one” who will end the exile for Judah by destroying the strong nations.  In Mark 3:27, Jesus is stronger than the “strong man” (Satan) and is presently binding him in order to inaugurate the Kingdom. Mark “recontextualizes Israel’s captivity and rescue using apocalyptic topoi” (p. 74).

A second stage of the intertextual method in this book is a comparison to other Jewish apocalyptic literature.  This is the subject of chapter 3. She begins by offering a brief orientation to seven apocalyptic texts she has chosen to compare to Mark 3: 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, The War Scroll (1QM), Melchizedek (11QMelch), and Testament of Solomon.  Shively then uses Daniel as a “template” for apocalyptic thinking and develops three themes from the book: persecution of the righteous, the activity of heavenly beings, and God’s protection through a future judgment. These three themes are key elements of apocalyptic thinking in Daniel and Shively demonstrates that they are found in each of the apocalyptic books chosen for comparison. This section is well-documented and the she makes the case that apocalyptic thinking from Daniel onward does in fact include these three areas.

I like how this chapter is designed, but I wonder if the results would differ if she had chosen another set of examples from Jewish apocalyptic literature. For example, she does not use her template on 4 Ezra or 2 Baruch, two books written after the fall of Jerusalem, perhaps only two decades after Mark was written. It is likely that the three elements of her template are present there, although the “coming judgment” may look different than Mark’s Kingdom of God. I am thinking specifically about 4 Ezra 9:22 where the “rescue” at the time of judgment concerns only a very tiny remnant which survives the final judgment. By broadening the database, perhaps the template would look different.

When she applies her observations to Mark 3:22-30, Shively finds that there is a “shared symbolic world” (p. 147-52).  In Jesus’ ministry there is a persecution (by the human scribes or the demons), and Jesus is actively opposing these demonic forces by casting them out. Finally, he announces that the strong man has been bound and that those who oppose him will be judged guilty in the coming judgment (Mark 3:28-29).

Shively applies the findings of the study to Mark’s Gospel. Chapter 5 examines two examples of “power” in Mark’s apocalyptic thinking in the context of a story and a speech. The story Shively selects is Mark 5:1-20, the Gerasene Demon.  In this exorcism story, Mark “engages in apocalyptic discourse directly reminiscent of Mark 3:22-30” (p. 183). An evil spirit is oppressing a human and Jesus appears to judge that demon. The result of this demonstration of the power of God is that the man proclaims what God has done throughout the Gentile region.  Later in the book Shively suggests that the response of the man “becomes Mark’s Great commission” (p.250). The Olivet Discourse (Mark 13:5-37) concludes with a parable of a householder, reminiscent of the Strong Man parable in Mark 3:27. Shively states that the Mark’s apocalyptic discourse is “persuasive rhetoric” which seeks to persuade the followers of Jesus that righteous suffering is God’s will, they ought to act self-sacrificially (like Jesus) in anticipation of a final judgment on the world (p. 218).  God’s power is acting through Jesus to overcome the strong man already, but Mark’s audience is told to look forward to the decisive return of the Son of Man.

The nature of the power which overcomes the strong man is developed in chapter 6.  Shively examines Mark 8:27-10:45 as a unit, beginning with the confession of Peter and ending with the “ransom for many” logion. In this section Jesus subverts expectations by describing the “things of God” as his coming suffering. Jesus demonstrates the power of God which overcomes the strongman by suffering. Those who suffer manifest the power of God, even in death.  This is the point of the empty tomb account (Mark 16:1-8).  Through the resurrection Jesus asserts his power over the strong man.

Conclusion. Elizabeth Shively has made a significant contribution to the study of Mark’s gospel by suggesting Mark 3:22-30 as a programmatic statement which reflects Mark’s apocalyptic thinking. While not an apocalyptic writer, Mark reflects the sort of thinking which was common in the first century in order to communicate his interpretation of the life and ministry of Jesus as the “stronger man” who overcomes the power of Satan and enables his followers to understand their own struggle against the powers of darkness as they look forward to the return of the Son of Man to render final judgment.

Thanks to de Gruyter for kindly providing me with a review copy of this book. This did not influence my thoughts regarding the work.

Dear god!

Have you lost the will

to hold this world

together?

My god!  My god!

Please watch the sky!

It has gotten away from you,

off its leash,

running madly,

dashing forward and backward,

slobbering its rabid saliva

into our mouths,

and when it runs through our veins,

they decay,

and we fall.

Darling god!

Watch the mountains!

They have heaved themselves

from their crates, enormous,

thundering across the heads of

spouse valleys,

and the ocean sees,

pulls in on itself,

and prepares to launch an attack.

My god!

Where are you hiding?

Where have you gone?

Why do you let the earth

break into a million pieces?

Why do you watch it slip

out of orbit?

You rock it back and forth in your arms,

like a dead child,

whom you refuse to believe

has died.

Tagged: poem, poetry

“NFL Players Launch Pride Shirts” reads a headline on Joe.My.God:

The NFL Players Association has launched a line of gay pride shirts on their website. All proceeds from the shirts will go to Athlete Ally, the anti-homophobia in sports organization founded by Hudson Taylor.

Wait … founded by who?

You have to understand that Hudson Taylor is a famous name in evangelical circles.

Hudson Taylor is a huge hero, in other words, among the very sort of people most likely to take sanctimonious offense at the NFLPA’s new line of gay pride shirts.

Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) was one of the great heroes of the modern missionary movement. If you grew up in the American evangelical subculture, you likely read one of the many children’s biographies written about him. You probably even watched the 1981 Ken Anderson movie in Sunday school or youth group. (That entire movie is now on YouTube.)

Hudson Taylor was a British Christian missionary to China and founder of the interdenominational China Inland Mission, which wound up sending more than 800 missionaries, building 125 schools and establishing 300 local churches or “stations.”

Taylor adopted Chinese dress and Chinese culture while serving as a missionary. That was somewhat controversial — an early challenge to more colonial models of missiology. Taylor wasn’t looking to produce good colonial subjects. He was trying to tell people about Jesus, and Jesus never dressed like a proper Victorian gentleman either.

Taylor and his mission agency also campaigned against the opium trade — during a time when his country was fighting wars in order to force China to import more of the drug.

Taylor’s devotion and the scale of his work in China made him world-famous during his lifetime and he remains a cherished icon and inspiration for mission-minded evangelical Protestants.

All of which is to say that the name “Hudson Taylor” is familiar.

It’s not surprising to run across that name in a sentence such as, “Evangelist Billy Graham wrote the foreword to the biography Hudson Taylor: A Man in Christ.”

But it is a bit surprising to run across it in a sentence such as, “All proceeds from the shirts will go to Athlete Ally, the anti-homophobia in sports organization founded by Hudson Taylor.”

I’m happy to discover that this Hudson Taylor was, in fact, named after that Hudson Taylor. The founder of Athlete Ally is, in fact, the great-great-great grandson of the pioneering missionary.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“This is about how we treat one another,” says Taylor the wrestling coach and three-time NCAA All-American. “When we diminish others, we only diminish ourselves.”

Athlete Ally’s website says Taylor founded the group to:

… confront a side of sports that no athlete should be proud of: sports marginalize LGBT athletes, coaches and others through systemic homophobia and transphobia. Hudson decided that he could no longer watch from the sidelines as his athletic culture isolated and segregated LGBT athletes and betrayed the integrity and diversity at the heart of athletics.

When Hudson wore an LGBT equality sticker from the Human Rights Campaign on his wrestling headgear, he encountered criticism from his peers, but received positive attention from the media. Following his presence in the media, Hudson received hundreds of emails from parents and closeted athletes. This experience inspired him to found this non-for-profit organization, with the mission of educating, encouraging and empowering straight athlete allies to combat homophobia and transphobia in sports.

Given the choice between standing with the powerful and the popular or standing with the marginalized and the outcast, Hudson Taylor made the right choice.

I think his great-great-great grandfather would be very proud of him.

On June 2nd, Peter Heck, a social studies teacher at Eastern High School in Greentown, Indiana, gave a controversial commencement speech at the school’s graduation ceremony. Among other things, he made several comments about female students’ future responsibilities regarding work and family:

Ladies, I challenge you to a life of rebellion. To recognize that your body is a temple that is deserving of honor, not indiscretion. I challenge you to be women of virtue, finding beauty not in how many unprincipled men you can attract, but rather finding beauty in modesty and self-respect. I challenge you to devote yourself to family, to your children.

If you choose to have a career, God’s blessings upon you, but I challenge you to recognize what the world scoffs at… that your greatest role of your life will be that of wife and mother. That the greatest impact you will ever contribute to our world is a loving and devoted investment into the lives of your precious children. To solve the problems plaguing our society, we don’t need more women as CEOs, we need more women as invested mothers.

That excerpt comes from his website, which, if you visit, shows you this pop-up:

The link leads to a portion of his speech. It’s interesting that he doesn’t offer the speech in its entirety on his own website. One would think that printing the whole speech, with full context, would be beneficial to Heck in refuting the “irresponsible reporting,” but I digress…

Several news outlets featured students talking about Heck’s inherent sexism and discouragement of female students. One of them quoted a student saying, “It jumped out at me that he said [the female graduates] shouldn’t pursue a professional career.”

Huffington Post puts this speech in a broader context:

Heck’s comments come on the heels of the rising popularity of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” message and a Pew report stating that the number of working mother breadwinners has increased. Now women are the primary financial providers in 40 percent of households with children.

This isn’t the first time Heck has expressed disdain for shifting gender dynamics. In a blog post from July 2012 in the wake of the Aurora shooting, Heck described the present day as “an age where we too often yield to the idiotic sniveling of modern feminism that suggests there is no place in our enlightened society for men to act as ‘protectors’ of women.”

I could elaborate on the problems with the excerpt from Heck’s speech line-by-line, but instead I will only comment on a couple that jumped out at me. The major point of contention was his comment about how a woman’s “greatest role… will be that of wife and mother,” amplifying a traditional stereotype. He also dismisses and discourages women who have no desire to marry or have children and discounts those whose goals may include becoming a high-level executive. Young women about to enter adulthood should be encouraged to pursue the lives that they feel will bring them the most joy and fulfillment whether that be as a wife and mother and/or a CEO.

Second, I noted the absence of sex-positivity. He told the women not to use their body for “indiscretion” and not attracting “unprincipled men.” This was a commencement speech, not church, and Heck shouldn’t have commented on this at all. A woman has the right to use her body as she pleases and should not be shamed for the number or kind of men (or women, for that matter) she chooses to be with. I wonder what his thoughts are on lesbian marriage, single-motherhood, trans women, those who do not fit neatly into the gender binary, and asexuality.

For more examples of Heck’s worldview that will likely result in you shaking your head in frustration, you only need to peruse his website for a few minutes. Not only does he express his outmoded views on women and relationships, but he also misinforms on science and atheism. He has a couple dozen videos that are real gems, like “Wrong Way Atheist” where he compares atheism to driving the wrong way on a one-way street. It’s a bad idea, he admits, to follow everyone else if they jumped off a cliff… but when it comes to religion, he says next, it makes logical sense:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also, “Burying Evolution in Info” is a three-minute video where he gives an inaccurate description of what “evolutionists” think while again using several logical fallacies.

His website has recently been revamped, but his Facebook page still has posts up from his old site showcasing his point-of-view.

Also, worth noting: he is a proponent of the Bible Literacy Project whose mission it is to “a encourage and facilitate the academic study of the Bible in public schools.”

I thought the big church/state graduation issue this year was administrators needing to green-light students’ speeches before they get onstage. Maybe they need to start doing that for faculty speakers as well.

(Thanks to Josh for the link!)

We recently looked at Rep. Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn., and his biblically illiterate perversion of Mark 14:7, in which Jesus is quoted as saying, “For you always have the poor with you.”

Fincher misquoted that passage, twisting it into its opposite. And he did so because he was up to the very same thing that Judas was up to when he received that rebuke from Jesus — stealing from the treasury. Fincher, it turns out, has collected millions of dollars in agricultural subsidies, and to ensure that he keeps getting such generous handouts at the taxpayers’ expense, Fincher is trying to cut $21 billion from food aid for poor people so that the money can be used to boost farm subsidies for people such as, well, him.

In discussing all of that I neglected to mention that this passage from the Gospels wasn’t the only Bible verse Fincher wrenched out of context and twisted into an unrecognizable, ungodly mess.

Fincher did the same thing to 2 Thessalonians 3:10:

For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.

Stephen Fincher seems to be confused about several things. He’s confused about how SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or “food stamps” — actually works, who it helps, and why they need that help. And he’s terribly, terribly confused about the context and the meaning of this passage from the New Testament and how it has been understood by centuries of Christian teaching.

Fincher seemed to be invoking this Bible verse for the same nasty reason that other far-right Republicans — such as Rep. Michele Bachmann — have done so. That is, he seems to think it’s a condemnation of those lazy poors — the “takers” and parasites mooching off the Randian makers.

Fincher was arguing that food stamps are an illegitimate hand-out to the undeserving, lazy poor. That’s the only way to make sense of his equating SNAP beneficiaries with “anyone unwilling to work.”

That’s obscene. First of all, the gentleman from Tennessee seems completely ignorant about the undisputed facts of our ongoing employment crisis. As of April (the most recent figures available) there were 3.1 job-seekers for every job opening, yet Fincher can’t imagine any reason for anyone in America to be unemployed other than that they are “unwilling to work.”

And what about the children who make up 45 percent of all SNAP beneficiaries? Does Fincher really think these children ought to be forced to work by the threat of starvation? Or what about the 40 percent of SNAP beneficiaries who are employed? It’s obviously unfair to accuse those people of being “unwilling to work” because they’re working — working for far less than a livable wage, for less than half of what Fincher himself pocketed in agricultural subsidies last year.

If 2 Thessalonians 3:10 meant anything like what Fincher is pretending it means, then it still would not apply to the millions of Americans who depend on SNAP to feed their families.

But 2 Thessalonians 3:10 does not mean anything like what Fincher is pretending it means.

As Candace Chellew-Hodge notes, this epistle was written to a particular congregation in a particular time and place. Read the surrounding verses for a bit more context. “Paul” — or whoever wrote 2 Thessalonians — isn’t writing about idleness due to laziness, but due to apocalyptic fervor. “Because many of the members of this sect believed that Jesus’ return was imminent, they stopped working,” Chellew-Hodge writes. “They figured why work when Jesus would be back at any moment to sweep us all into heaven?”

Keep in mind that this was a first-century Christian community, still in the early “All who believed were together and had all things in common” phase of the young church. A bunch of commies, basically. So “Paul” is insisting that anyone who wants in on the “to each according to his needs”  aspect of the early church also has to keep up their end of the bargain as far as “from each according to his ability.”

Fincher isn’t citing this verse to mean what the author of 2 Thessalonians meant. Rep. Fincher’s point, rather, is to argue that “work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’” That’s a paraphrase, not a direct quotation.

Well, actually it is a direct quotation, but not from Stephen Fincher. It’s a quotation from the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union.

The key point for both Fincher and for his fellow-travelers in Stalin’s USSR is that “work is a duty.”

But Fincher doesn’t understand what that means either. He doesn’t understand that if employment is a duty, then employment must also be a right.

It cannot be otherwise. Just as rights entail responsibilities, so too do responsibilities entail rights. It makes no sense to say that people have a duty to work unless they also have a right to work. John Paul II echoed more than a century of Catholic social teaching when he argued this in his papal encyclical Laborem Exercens:

We must first direct our attention to a fundamental issue: the question of finding work, or, in other words, the issue of suitable employment for all who are capable of it. The opposite of a just and right situation in this field is unemployment, that is to say the lack of work for those who are capable of it.

“The lack of work for those who are capable of it,” JP2 said, was a denial of their basic human right to work and a denial of their intrinsic human dignity.

To believe that people have a duty to work, but no basic right to have work, leads to injustice and absurdity. So let me repeat here about Rep. Stephen Fincher what I wrote earlier about Rep. Bachmann when she misquoted 2 Thessalonians 3:10 back in 2011:

… If Fincher was arguing that every American capable of working has a responsibility to work without also arguing that every such person has the right to a job — a guaranteed right to a job, right now — then that would make him a monstrous, illogical imbecile intent on cruelly punishing the jobless with contradictory obligations and prohibitions. That would make him a horrible, ignorant, despicable failure of a human being.

So, obviously, that can’t be what he meant. Right?

 

 

by Kate Daley-Bailey

In their latest book, Ancient and Modern Religion and Politics: Negotiating Transitive Spaces and Hybrid Identities, Carolyn M. Jones Medine and John Randolph LeBlanc explore Indian politician and psychologist Ashis Nandy’s rendering of storytelling as a modality which allows us “to rename ourselves and our realities” (39). According to this rendering, story has the potential to contest ‘history’ for it contains ‘history’ “while being open to invention” (39). While the meaning of terms such as narrative (meta and otherwise), history, story, discourse, and myth, are consistently debated in academic circles, the distinction marked here is one where ‘history’ is imagined as a type of dominant super-narrative which subsumes difference, claims to reflect cosmic or ‘natural’ structures, and names itself as the great arbiter of reality and universal truth.

‘Story’ in this estimation, can be read as a discourse that is provincial (reflecting local and individual values), recognized only within a context of one among many, and makes no claims to a decontextualized, universalized meaning. Given this taxonomy, a discourse’s status (as either ‘history’ or ‘story’) is not fixed. Should a ‘story,’ localized and limited, suddenly be heralded as the exclusive arbiter of meaning and take on all the trappings of a universal ‘history’… then the ‘story’ has become a ‘history.’ The reverse is also possible, should a discourse be recognized as merely a provincial ‘story’ masquerading as a ‘history,’ said discourse loses much of its authority and power.

Despite the drawbacks such a demotion would mean for a ‘history’ become ‘story,’ especially with recourse to overt power, its status as ‘story’ opens up a type of subversive power, the power of the underestimated. The selfsame demoted estimation the term ‘story’ has acquired today (at best, local and limited, and a worst, a false or outdated vision of reality) might prove to be its most powerful asset in challenging metanarratives. Branded as if, anything, a mere benign entity which endures in cultures for purely aesthetic or entertainment purposes… a communal or individual ‘story’ (the provincial) has the potential to disrupt ‘histories’ (the so called ‘universal’) which consistently dwarf and marginalize it.

World Religions Textbook as Metanarrative

Medine and LeBlanc note that the ability of ‘stories’ to seat conflicting and contradicting representations side by side without having to reconcile them allows, in the nomenclature of Said, for a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of ‘history’ and of the master narrative, which can undercut and extend the proscribed meanings of afore mentioned histories and master narratives. In this regard, perhaps the undoing or at least the challenge to ‘history’ and master narratives lies not entirely outside their structures but rather somewhere within them. Somewhere in the cracks, folds, and peripheries of the master narratives themselves lies the secret to their undoing, or at least the potential for the divestment of these narratives of their privileged status.

The World Religions textbook provides an excellent case in point. Despite the negative press the World Religions paradigm has received recently, and with good reason, many World Religions textbooks can be instrumental in assisting students to think critically about traditional narratives and the politics of religion, just probably not in a way envisioned by the authors of said textbooks. As noted by Steven Ramey in his article “Critiquing Borders: Teaching About Religions in a Postcolonial World”, these textbooks often present romanticized representations of religions, following traditional scripts dictated by the elite to privilege certain members of the community and ignore others. In a word, these textbooks are unwittingly political. And they offer students an excellent example of the power and limits of a metanarrative, a ‘history.’ If a chapter on the history of Buddhism is read as what Buddhism truly is… then this chapter functions as a ‘history’ of Buddhism. It has taken on the role of dominant super-narrative which subsumes difference, claims to reflect cosmic or ‘natural’ structures, and names itself as the great arbiter of reality and universal truth (for the tradition of Buddhism, that is).

Used uncritically and without conflicting ‘stories,’ this metanarrative acts as just another political tool of indoctrination. However, using the same text as a site for critical discourse alongside various ‘stories’ (think conflicting localized representations of a tradition in the form of video clips, fiction, and more specialized and contextualized examples of Buddhism as practiced all over the world) which destabilize and disrupt the metanarrative of the text, students can learn to critically engage these discourses. The ‘stories,’ the cracks, folds, and peripheries exist partially within the metanarrative (the ‘history) but they are not restricted by its boundaries. These stories have become multi-narratives… hybrid narratives which are not fully outside the context of the metanarrative and not fully inside it either.

A Bit of Both but Fully Neither

These ‘stories’ (communal and individual) touch the master narrative (in Nandy’s context this is the West) to some extent and yet they remain outside said narrative (and are thereby not subject to the rules of the hegemonic metanarrative). These ‘stories’ liminal nature and their capacity to represent conflicting vantage points without ceding to the desire to be subsumed into a universal whole (a ‘history’ or metanarrative) grant them a certain freedom, the freedom of acknowledging multiplicity, the freedom from the constant need to reify status and authority, freedoms not often afforded to master narratives. So, oddly, our tendency to valorize ‘history’ or metanarratives and to dismiss the power of ‘story’ opens up a theoretical space for multinarratives to covertly work at the edge of culture to potentially subvert or at least complexify, for better or worse, the metanarratives in play. That is, until they become metanarratives in their own right.

Katherine Daley-Bailey received her A.B. (2001) and M.A. (2004) degrees in Religion from the University of Georgia. She is currently teaching part-time at the University of Georgia. Daley-Bailey’s primary research interests are Religion, Literature, and the Arts, Theory and Methods, and Religion in Popular Culture. A regular contributor to the online magazine, Religion Nerd, she is currently working on her own column for the magazine, ‘The Sacred and the Strange,” which highlights the sometimes paradoxical nature of religious matters. In 2007, Kate co-authored a chapter titled ”Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying: Freedom in Confined Spaces” with Dr. Carolyn Jones Medine, a professor at the University of Georgia.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” – John 1:1, ESV

The Bible is not the “Word of God.” It is inspired by the Holy Spirit. It contains words of God. It even talks about the Word of God… but it is still not THE Word of God. The Word of God is actually Jesus Christ. Not the words of Jesus, but Christ himself. This little misunderstanding has created a whole heap of confusion about the point Christianity and how we are to use Scripture in our lives.

While I would like to claim I am being brave with this topic, I was actually inspired by Zack Hunt’s recent article, The Bible Isn’t Perfect And It Says So Itself. As he has opened the Pandora’s box for discussion, I felt compelled to chime in. My contribution to is not to question the inerrancy of Scripture, which I believe, but define differently from most, but rather it’s place in the mental, spiritual, and religious life of Christians.

The limitations of Bible worship

The perception of Scripture as an exhaustive divine legal tome from God has led to all kinds of insanity. Some people think anything is “OK” if they find a verse to defend it. Other people think they can’t do anything until they find a verse giving them permission. Throughout our history, people have used Bible verses and twisted logic to defend slavery, segregation, witch burnings, and all sorts of discrimination and persecution.

Related: What Does Micah 6:8 Really Mean? by Dominique Gillard

On the flip side, I have known many sad souls who can’t buy a car or take a job without finding a Bible verse to tell them they are “OK.” As if thinking for themselves will immediately lead them to the gates of Hell. They are nearly paralyzed, incapable of growing or developing and live in abject fear of the world around them.

Yes, these are both extreme examples, but they illustrate the limitations of thinking of the Bible as the end-all-be-all of Christian thinking. At some point, we all have to use our own judgment. So just what should the Bible be used for? Scripture is a tool for our development and our growth It is not a divine legal document for us to justify ourselves or condemn others.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. – 2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV

Scripture doesn’t tell us everything we need, it tells us only what we need

Do you have a favorite quote? I have many quotes I love. I collect quotes! Many of us have favorite quotes and expressions we treasure. We treasure them because one ounce of wisdom can be used over and over in our lives in many applications. It is so easy to understand this concept until you attach the word “Bible” to it. For some reason, at that point we decide to be like annoying school children literally applying everything, “But teacher! You never said I COULDN’T eat my glue.”

Christ spoke in parables which are infinite in application and deep in meaning. His life was an example of ultimate selfless love which this world still needs so desperately. I think our misuse of Scripture represents our discontentment with what Christ really gave us. Just as the disciples thought Christ would be a national military leader who would free Israel from Rome, so do we still wish Christ told us everything about everything. Instead, he said “love one another as I have loved you,” (John 13:34) and we have been confused and frustrated ever since.

I believe there is divine wisdom in how little Christ actually said. This is because all the secrets of the Universe are useless without love, yet love reveals all the secrets of Universe. Christ didn’t tell us everything we needed, he told us only what we needed. Because if we obey the short obvious commands of loving each other and loving our neighbor, then everything else begins to become clear.

When the Word of God became flesh

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life…” – John 14:6a, ESV

In the time Jesus Christ became flesh, the Greek philosophers had a concept of “Logos.” This concept represented the “ultimate truth” of the world. When John says “in the beginning was the Word,” which is translated from the Greek word “Logos,” he is identifying Christ as that “ultimate truth” or meaning which underlies all Creation. Our faith isn’t built around the words of Scripture, or even the words of Christ, but rather the entire existence and being of Christ.

Also by Yaholo: Five Reasons Christian Parents “Lose” Their Children

The idea of the “Word” or “Logos” is that all of creation breathes a message. All the Universe is a testament to a truth. Everything has a point, a purpose, and a function. This concept, referred to by the Greeks as “Logos,” was the term Christ himself choose as the best representation of how to explain his being to us.

Scripture points us to God, but God is not confined to Scripture

All of Scriptures help give us an anchor, a strong footing to begin our journey with God. However, God is too big to be contained in the Bible. Christ is too vast to be exhausted in text. Scriptures points us in the right direction, but the best of faith is what we discover as we live what little we already know.

Christ is not just a historical figure we read about. He is a living Word that we meet in the faces of one another. He is the truth, the way, the life that we discover as we take our small steps of faith. He is the new humanity waiting for us when we cast aside our hate, our fear, and our hostility to our fellow man. The Word of God is discovered through obedience, not meer study. That is why it is so important for Christ to be known as the Word of God, not Scripture.

—
Yaholo Hoyt is a practical mystic, a passionate writer, a paltry poet, and an old-school Jesus freak. You can find him at http://yaholo.net or read his blog at http://practicalchristianmysticism.blogspot.com

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Cindy Jacobs…

The insane lady who insanely claims she can pray away insanity, has also claimed to do the same miracles as Jesus; has given us the most insane and ignorant explanation of Occupy Wall Street ever; has called on Christians to use their super-duper magic to literally take control over the weather, claimed to have reversed a hysterectomy by prayer, and claimed to have feed three thousand people with just three loaves of bread and still have bread left over! She has also claimed to have revived people from the dead: On an absolutely disgusting display during the August 6th edition of her show God Knows, the self-proclaimed “respected prophet” channeled her supernatural powers live on air to revive a dead child, claiming to have done so in the past as well.

I grew up in charismatic Christian circles: I’ve seen me some stupid in my lifetime! But this? This may be one of the stupidest, most rambling, idiotic things I have ever heard a “preacher” teach in my lifetime:

“Dr.” Jacobs… or perhaps we should address her by the full academic title she has actually earned: Cindy.

“The Law of Double Reference” is a blank check. In the text it describes an actual physical being, but I need some sort of bullshit entity to peddle my bullshit, ergo = Leviathan Spirit!

I can do this too! Looking back and having regrets is bad: The Pillar of Salt Spirit!

I do have to tip my hat and say to Cindy “Well played.” Once you drop the “Law of Double Reference” bomb you can make the text say anything you want it to say… which is exactly what Cindy does.

Though, “The Law of Double Reference” does sound a lot like “The Law of Attraction”…. I wonder if any of these charlatans could actually articulate the denotative meaning of the word “Law” in scientific terms?

I want to write something witty and entertaining here, but my brain is breaking at the thought that Jacobs is teaching this stupidity in a school!!!

People are paying money to ‘learn’ this shit?!?!?!?!?

In a “school”?!?!?!

Mel White’s personal story, shared in his Stranger At The Gate, is a powerful narrative about a gay man’s attempt to rid himself of gayness.  Of course, there is no such thing as ex-gay.  ”Gay therapy” never works, despite claims to the contrary.

White has written a new book addressing the important issue of how Christians address various Biblical texts.  The book is titled What The Bible Says – And Doesn’t Say – About Homosexuality.  It is a very unfortunate title for several reasons.

First, there is no “The” Bible.  What Christians have is a manuscript tradition.  We have many manuscripts for the New Testament, not that many for the Old Testament.  Thousands of decisions go into the process of publishing a Bible so not surprisingly we have lots of lots of Bibles and we could have oodles more.

Regardless of what manuscripts we decide to use to come up with a particular Bible, the thing  all Bibles have in common is none of them can say anything.  Bibles don’t talk.

Put any Bible in a room, any version will do, and listen one second or listen for eternity and you will not hear the Bible speak.  Go on, try it.

Didn’t hear anything, did you?  Not even the hallowed King James Bible can speak.

So a second reason Mel White’s book title is unfortunate is that it diminishes the roles of interpretation and translation.  We have manuscripts that have to be interpreted and translated, both of which are complicated tasks.

Most of us have had just enough foreign language training to be dangerous.  We studied our vocab cards and got the impression one word in one language means another thing in another language, and that correct translations could be produced.  After all, our Foreign Language teacher graded our translations, giving us the impression there was only one correct translation. Languages, however, are  simply not that simple.

Christian churches are interpretive communities.  Always have been, and always will be.  The “God said it (via the Bible), that settles it” bumper sticker is a heresy.

Finally, White’s title which uses “homosexuality” excluding transgender, bi-sexual, intersexed, etc. plays into the binary construct of heterosexual/homosexual which fundamentalists want to use. The world is not  binary.  White’s title marginalizes other sexual and gender minorities.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its title.  And, I do not want to diminish the many important contributions Mel White has made to GLBT issues.  I am grateful for any and all contributions to equality and justice.  So my advice is to buy White’s book.  Learn from it.  Be amazed by his life and courage.

Part VI

Parthian rule in the region ended in the year 227, roughly at the same time that the Mishnah was edited in Israel. The Babylonian Talmud, therefore, was developed under Sassanian rule, the successor to Parthian rule. During the Hellenistic period, there were considerable attempts to Hellenize the area. Both the Aramean nation, a pagan group, and the Jews were set against the Hellenizing forces. Ctesiphon, the seat of the Sassanian rulers, was not Hellenized.

The Sassanians dominated the city of Ctesiphon until the Moslem Conquest. Thus the Jews lived under the Sassanian Empire, which ruled over Iraq and Iran as we know them today from Iraq. (Some would even include Iraq of the Talmudic period as part of Iran, as it was dominated by Persian forces.)

The society was a highly developed one. In the year 200 the exilarchate came into effect. It was a form of self-government under which Jews were dealt with as a community. The exilarch collected taxes, controlled the system of justice, and regulated all of the Jews’ activities.

The exilarch, known in Hebrew as the Resh Galuta, had a complex relationship with the rabbis. At this time, the Mishnah had already reached the region. A whole class of rabbis was spreading rabbinic Judaism. While mention is made of some elements of oral law in the Prophets and other books, it is unclear what the state of the oral law was in Biblical times; however, it is clear that the biblical Judaism that had once existed was, at this time, becoming “rabbinicized.”

By the year 200, the rabbis were a major force. Twice a year, a study event called the “yarchei kallah” was held, extending an entire month. Babylonian agricultural activity was regulated by seasons, and irrigation came from the rivers. Talmudic law pertains to water rights and distribution, swamps and land, clearly dealing with questions prevalent in Babylonia at the time.

Jews entered all professions; they dealt in international trade and were tenant farmers on the land of rich Jews and non-Jews. It is clear that Jews interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors, based on mentions made of Babylonian superstitions and culture. However, Jews were the main population in the Babylonian area. Estimates of the Jewish population are as high as a million and a half.

A balance of power existed between the exilarch and the rabbis. The rabbis provided the judges who were appointed by the exilarch. Often the exilarch and rabbis disagreed on how far to bend politically and religiously toward the Sassanian rulers. Some rabbis were close with the Sassanian rulers, such as Shmuel and Shapur I, known as Shvur Malkah in the Talmud (not to be confused with Shapur II and Shapur III).

Still More Graffiti in Dura Europos (3rd century CE) 

Part I, Kilroy Was Here!
Part 2, Azzanathkona is coming!
 
In The Temple of the Palmyran Gods 


This famous fresco from the north wall of the front room (pronaos) of the Temple of the Palmyran Gods was painted ca. 239 CE.  It shows Julius Terentius, the tribune of the XXth Palmyrans, a cohort of mounted archers, offering incense to the statues of three Palmyran gods, all dressed in Roman military costumes -- Aglibol, Iarhibol, and Arsu (upper left); and to the gads, the protective goddesses of the cities of Palmyra and Dura-Europos (seated, lower left).  Red flames  rise from the golden incense burner. A standard bearer, facing Terentius,  holds the regiment's colours: the banner is red, with a yellow border and fringes below; on top of the pole is a golden ring or crown. Behind Terentius stand some of his troops raising their right hands in prayer, their left hands on the hilts of their swords.

Although  almost always shown alone -- as if it were a modern, framed painting in a museum -- this wonderful fresco was not alone on the north wall.  Much the larger portion of the wall, in fact, was filled with other paintings and graffiti -- making up a strange, mixed bag of images and texts, both formal and informal.  Early in the twentieth century, the excavators somehow lost track of most of the other frescos from the north wall -- and all the graffiti; the originals went walkabout and no one knows what happened to them  (the Terentius fresco survived, having been sent to Yale University).  Happily, a drawing of the wall still exists -- which gives a radically diverse impression of daily worship among those natives and foreigners, soldiers and civilians, who lived, traded, and fought in Dura.

But, first, where are we exactly?

Upper left circle: Temple of Palmyran Gods

The Temple of the Palmyran Gods  was built in the northwest corner of the city (red circle, upper left) early in the first half of the first century CE, when the Parthians still ruled Dura-Europos.  The Romans took over in 165/6 CE but, although control of the city changed hands, Dura was never converted into a Roman city. Documents continued to indicate a polyglot mix of people living in this frontier town, including local families descending from the original Macedonian settlers, all sorts of Greeks, Syrians, Iranians, Mesopotamians, Christians and Jews (perhaps from Babylonia), with the later addition of Roman army veterans to boot.  Around 210 CE, the Roman army walled off the whole north-west sector of Dura and turned it into a military camp (roughly the area shown on the map, above).  It's unclear if civilians still had access to the temple after this time or if it was now visited only by soldiers, such as Terentius and his lot. 


The temple's plan (left) is typical of temples in the region, with rooms built around a courtyard. The inner sanctum (naos - room B on the plan, left) and front room (pronaos - room A) -- were built against the western ramparts of the city wall.  The other rooms around the courtyard were used for worship, as banqueting halls, or to house the priests of the temple. Judging from a graffiti on the east wall of the pronaos, these  priests came from local families. These same local families worshipped in the temple and paid for much of its adornment with wall paintings through the second century CE.  

Terentius in Context 

Drawing of scenes on the north wall of the pronaos

Recently, Professor Maura Heyn, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, set out to understand the bigger picture of gods and worshippers in the temple by studying all the differents pieces and parts of the north wall and its surroundings in the pronaos.  The result of her work is 'The Terentius Frieze in Context'*  (and that study is the basis of this post).  As the drawing, above, makes clear, the soldiers, gods, and gads of the Terentius panel fill only about one-third of the wall.

So it's time to examine the whole wall.

The scene closest to Terentius and his troops shows a young lad carrying a platter with food to an over-large goddess, with the halo of divinity, who reclines on a thick couch of plump cushions.  To her left is a completely separate scene, only partially preserved, with four men making offerings on altars and incense burners.   Below the four men is a row of separate pictures (from left to right): a man dressed very like Terentius, so perhaps he's another Roman officer, and a gowned woman thought to be the goddess Atargatis; next, a bearded man dressed in a cloak and a goddess (halo!); then, some animals -- a sheep or goat and a gazelle; and more figures, one of whom is the god Herakles with his club and lion skin.  Although a bit crowded and uneven in their frames, the wall boasts a panorama of professionally-painted images, most probably of gods and goddesses worshipped in this part of the temple.  So far, so normal.

The surprises are below, above, and even superimposed right on top of the paintings.  First, as Prof. Heyn tells us:

Underneath these diverse scenes were painted the letters of the Greek alphabet. This seemingly random addition probably had religious connotations and may have been apotropaic [that is, to ward off evil].  Abecedaria, or alphabet inscriptions, are surprisingly numerous in Dura-Europos. Both Greek and Latin abecedaria have been found in houses, public structures, and in other sanctuaries in the city, most notably the Christian House Church and the Temple of Azzanathkona....

Scribble, scribble, scribble

And so we return, willy nilly, to our subject of graffiti.  The temple walls were literally covered with a multitude of scratched inscriptions and amateur drawings. Particularly thick on the western portion of the north wall, there are also many graffiti on the other walls of the front room and even within the inner sanctum.  Most are written in Greek, and a few in Aramaic.

A long  Aramaic graffiti (left), scrawled just to the left of the fresco was probably written by two different Palmyrans serving in the Roman army.  More graffiti continues down and around this text with many other names and remembrance inscriptions, really rather like an early version of Facebook: 

 May Maliku the son of Wahballat be remembered before Iarhibol and [Aglibol] and Resu ...

... and made this good memorial and reward for them in fixing the painting

...the son of Baba, the son of ....

Wahballat before [the god] Iarhibol 

May Ayeb be remembered

Someone also thanked the gods for having answered his prayers for more animals (could he have written it while gazing at the sheep/goat and gazelle on the fresco?).  Still others scrawled their names within the paintings: on top of the panel of the four sacrificing men in the upper register, Taimarsu, engraver(?), the son of Taime wrote his name and trade; and Konon Nikostratou was there, leaving his name in Greek near the head of the soldier in the lower left-hand corner, repeating it twice to make sure everyone saw it.

I don't mean to sound facetious. It is hard for us today to take such scribblings seriously.  In fact, the excavators originally assumed that the graffiti meant that the temple was derelict and almost abandoned at this time.  But it wasn't.  Several more graffiti scratched on the panels to the left of the Terentius painting give the dates 158 CE and 165/66 CE, so it's quite clear that, when the Terentius fresco was painted (ca. 239 CE), the adjacent scenes were already covered with graffiti.

Why place the scene of a very important officer in the corner of a wall covered in graffiti?  If the location had bothered Terentius, he could have chosen a completely empty wall (there were several available).  But he didn't: he was honoured in the corner of a wall that was filled with scenes in different sizes, and of different subjects, as well covered with an awful lot of graffiti.  

He doesn't seem to have minded graffiti. 

In fact, his fresco went right over some earlier graffiti (left).  The artist-in-charge didn't even bother to smooth away the human figure (of a fighter?) scratched into the plaster of the wall: it still underlies the image of the very gad or Fortune of Dura!  It seems certain that Terentius (and his men) did not view the graffiti as we do -- as disfigurement, even as vandalism -- but rather as a different kind of contribution to the life of temple walls.  In short, as Dr Heyn concludes,

The adornment of the walls does not conform to the conventional idea of what is aesthetically pleasing; it results from a system in which all types of mural markings could function as votive offerings. 

'Terentius in Context' leaves no doubt that those who scrawled graffiti in this temple,  --  like those who wrote on the walls of the synagogue (Part I) and in Azzanathkona's temple (Part 2) -- were also active worshippers.  No less than the individuals painted in the Terentius fresco, they shared in a continual presence within the sacred space. The decoration of the walls was changing and changeable.  Professionally painted scenes, such as that of Terentius and his troops, were placed next to scenes covered with graffiti, even scratched on top of and underneath the paintings themselves. Paintings were not ornamental; they were votive, and so too were the graffiti:

It is more than likely that the graffiti functioned in the same way as the paintings, particularly those graffiti that recorded the name of the worshipper or the name of a god or both.  The graffiti scratched throughout the painted decoration were not disfiguring and did not detract from the desirability of location, because they were also votive.

Graffiti was everywhere at Dura-Europos ... in every part of the town, in public and in private places,  in sanctuaries, in the fortifications, on gates, in shops, and houses.  

Next post: leaving your mark in private homes.


* In (L.R. Brody and G. L. Hoffman, eds.) Dura Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, Boston, 2011, 55-67. I am most grateful to the author for sending me a copy of her paper.

Sources are those listed in Parts 1 and 2.

Illustrations

Top:  Julius Terentius fresco.  Photo credit: University of Leicester.

Upper left:  Magnetometry survey superimposed on the plan of the military base.  After 'The Roman Military at Dura'; website of University of Leicester.

Middle left: Plan showing location of naos (A), pronaos (B), Temple of the Palmyrene Gods. After Downey, Mesopotamian Religious Architecture. Via M. Heyn, 'Terrentius in Context', Fig. 13.1 .

Centre:  Drawing of scenes on the north wall of the pronaos.  After Franz Cumont, Fouilles de Doura-
Europos (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1926), plate XLIX.  Via M. Heyn, 'Terrentius in Context', Fig. 13.5. 

Below left: Aramaic graffiti.  From  L. Dirven, The Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos, 1999, 307-8.

Bottom left: Graffito underlying the wall painting of Julius Terentius performing a sacrifice (detail, pl. 1931.386). (photograph by Jessica Smolinski, Documentation Photographer, Yale University Art Gallery).  Via  M. Heyn, 'Terrentius in Context', Fig. 13.9.
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At this year's International SBL, I am participating in the Gospel of Mark section along with Thomas Boomershine, Eve-Marie Becker, Jeremy Punt and Elizabeth Struthers-Malbon.  The theme of the session is "Communication, Pedagogy, and the Gospel of Mark".  My contribution is a discussion of "Blogs, Pods, Websites and Mark: How the Internet Affects the Teaching of Mark's Gospel" and I am working on my paper at the moment.

Since my paper focuses on the roles played by the internet and the blogs in the teaching of Mark, I would love to get some input from the blogging community on this one.  My problem is that I am fine talking about the generalities, and I have a good general sweep through.  However, when it comes down to using good, precise examples, I realize how few actual blog posts I can remember.  I can remember most of my own, but I really don't want this paper to be about me!

So I would like to ask my fellow bloggers if they have any ideas on this topic and, in particular, if they have any specific blog posts and series of posts that they think impact on this topic of teaching, researching and communicating Mark via the internet.  Many thanks in advance.  If you blog about this, please could you add a comment below too so that I don't miss anything good?  Thanks.

Here's my abstract so that you can get an idea of the lines along which my project is moving:

Teaching Mark's Gospel in the internet age presents multiple challenges and opportunities. The difficulty for most instructors is that they are digital immigrants, trained to access Mark in linear fashion in printed Greek New Testaments, Synopses of the Gospels and Biblical Translations, while their students are all digital natives, whose first access to the text may be via phone, tablet and laptop, with many navigational possibilities and different layers. So too with so-called secondary literature, the contemporary student is as likely to access Youtube, iTunes U and the blogosphere as they are the dusty articles and dated monographs that we love.

But to embrace the new opportunities provided by the internet encourages instructors to rethink their approach to Mark in several ways: (1) The informal, often colloquial nature of blog posts can make the scholarship far more accessible to students, as well as encouraging them to try their hand at blogging about Mark themselves; (2) Podcasts make access to scholarship for blind and visually impaired students more straightforward and they enable all students to study away from the desk; (3) Websites that use dynamic ways of representing the Gospels and Gospel scholarship open up new avenues for both instructors and their students. Examples (good and bad) of the these phenomena in the teaching of Mark illustrate how to get the best out of digital Mark and digital Marcan scholarship.

As promised, I have posted the pdf of my New Testament Studies essay on my personal webpage:

http://www.anthonyledonne.com/Essays.html

I first started thinking about this text (or at least seriously so) about four years ago. I was living in the Sacramento area at the time when I got a call from Dr. Chris Keith. Chris and I had met once before but I didn't like him very much. You really can't trust an American who doesn't follow baseball. After all, besides baseball, there is really no good reason to be an American.

Chris asked me if I could take his place at the annual Pepperdine Bible Lectures. His paper "Sinners in the Hands of a Deadly God" had been accepted for that conference, but he couldn't attend.  Chris had recently been invited to Heidelberg to accept the Templeton Award for Theological Promise for his monograph: The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus. When 10K of award money is on the line with another 10K in travel and honoraria cash, one tends to be motivated to change one's schedule (or so I am told).  Now that knew that Chris didn't follow baseball and that he was rich, I really didn't like him at all.

But I am generous beyond measure - really, a pushover. So I agreed to take on his paper topic, complete with his proposed title. It might have helped if he had started writing the thing so I didn't have to start from scratch. Fortuitously, I found my own reading of the text.

-anthony

WHY SUPERSESSIONISM IS PROBLEMATIC AND A HERESY

Image taken from Seattle Pacific University

Today, I would like to take the time to discuss my view of Romans 11, and the problem with historic approaches that I shall briefly allude to. The most infamous of approaches to Romans 9-11 is the allegorical reading of Romans 9-11. The Allegorical approach to reading Scripture has its strengths but when it come to these passages, its limits are exposed. Augustine of Hippo was one of the first Christians to apply this technique to these 3 chapters, and in the process, theological determinism was given birth. The debate starts with Romans 9:13, the oft quoted verse by Augustinians and Calvinists, “I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau.” In the context of the chapter, God’s election, God choosing special people over others, starts inside a woman’s womb, Rebecca, Isaac’s wife, the daughter-in-law and relative of Abraham. Reading Romans 9:10-13 by privileging a Greek/Gentile literary reading strategy over and above unique revelation from YHWH (the Hebrew Bible)is problematic; it is a practical way in which supersessionism, the idea that Gentile-lead Christianity overtakes Judaism as the household of God, manifests itself. Augustine, and those who claim to be his heirs in Protestantism, the Reformed tradition with modern-day neo-Calvinists and the like do not in fact practice “Sola Scriptura” as they claim, or using Scripture to interpret Scripture first, but rather tradition and individualism to do so.

The implications from this interpretation are this: Jacob is the elect chosen before the creation, and Esau, in this ALLEGORY, is the reprobate, chosen by God before creation. Just when does God choose them to their fates, before or after the fall? Well that’s up to debate between our theological determinist friends. I’ll let them sort that out.

So, if we go by just the Reformation tradition, and its own standard of Sola Scriptura, there is conflict in the popular, predestination, individual election reading of Romans 9-11. The subsequent debate of Arminians proposing “corporate election” as opposed to “individual election” misses the point of my criticism. This isn’t about the nature of election; in the Hebrew Bible, there is both. This is about interpretation of Scripture, and the relationship of our Messianic Pharisee friend Paul’s writings with that of the canon. Using the Hebrew Bible/First Testament to understand the New/Second (biblical scholars call this practice intertextuality) is an important part in understanding God’s mission of to the world through God’s Son Jesus the Anointed One, and the Holy Spirit.

Supersessionism and its fellow heretical teaching, that of Marcionism (the belief that there is 2 God in the Christian canon, an evil violent God in the “Old” and a “peaceful”, loving God in the “New.” What perpetuates supersessionism is well meaning pastors and professors continually essentializing Judaism as a warmongering religion of revenge. Have you ever heard or read someone say that “the Jews were waiting for a violent messiah to overtake their enemies”? The idea that God evolved (that being God’s character) from violent to non-violent being taught by white Emergent Church leaders is just another form of this supersessionism, with a nice, smiling face. Amy Jill-Levine points out, for example, that the oft-cited Psalm of Solomon chapter 17, where Israel’s Messiah is supposed to have a “blitzkrieg” versus the Gentiles, verses often times get ignored. The nations are destroyed by “the words from his mouth.” Does this sound familiar? This is exactly the same concept that the author of Revelation says about Jesus, that a sword will come from Christ’s mouth in chapter 19, verse 15.

The example of Psalm of Solomon compared to Revelation is an example of just how dependent on Israel’s story Jewish and Gentile Christians alike really are. “Spiritualizing” Israel’s historic encounter with the One, True God is a supersessionist anti-Judaic practice. Let’s go back to Romans 9-11. It is my belief that the apostle Paul is utterly, hopelessly reliant on the words of the prophets, and in Romans, this is no different. Romans 9:10-13 cannot be understood apart from the stories of Jacob and Esau as well as Israel’s concrete relationship with Edom, the nation that descended from Esau. Malachi 1 for example addresses Israel implicitly as Jacob, and Edom (explicitly) as Esau:

“I have loved you,” says [YHWH].

“But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?”
“Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the Lord. “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his hill country into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.” Edom may say, “Though we have been crushed, we will rebuild the ruins.” But this is what the Lord Almighty says: “They may build, but I will demolish. They will be called the Wicked Land, a people always under the wrath of the Lord. You will see it with your own eyes and say, ‘Great is the Lord—even beyond the borders of Israel!’

Throughout the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, if you pay attention to the details, Edom has a special place in God’s plan. Edom is a stand-in for the rest of us Gentiles and our stories. In Deuteronomy 23, YHWH orders the Israelites: “Do not despise an Edomite, for the Edomites are related to you. Do not despise an Egyptian, because you resided as foreigners in their country.” In the time of Solomon’s reign, as punishment, YHWH raised up opposition, from guess where? Edom! So just as the Gentiles have historically been resistant to YHWH, so has Edom rebelled against the reign of Israel.

Fast forward to Romans 11, Israel’s story is one where the descendents of Abraham lived in a cycle of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, and then exile and return. God is given credit with liberating the Israelites and Judeans time and time again with judges and kings, and even after God sends God’s people into exile, God makes a way for them to return, and even choose the empire that allows them to do so according to Ezra and Chronicles. Just as the imagery in Romans 9 about stressing God’s sovereign freedom and love, so is the image of God as a gardner, engrafting the Gentiles in to the roots and branches of Israel. Much like the author of Hebrews, Paul is arguing that the Gentiles have been included fully in the new plan. This is what makes the New Covenant better than the “old”: more people for God to call beloved. The election and call to service to YHWH as well as the gift of the Promise (which includes the Law) is irrevocable (Romans 11:28). The problem with supersessionism is that it is first and foremost, a rejection of God’s plan that includes the strategy of engraftment. Understanding our Gentile place is crucial part of understanding the mission of YHWH, the Word that YHWH sent went to Israel and Judah first, and then the Gentiles.

The Resurrection faith in Yeshua the Messiah does not permit us to ask, “who will go to heaven?” or “who will go down to the abyss?” (Romans 10:5-7). These questions are not what the covenantal relationship between God and humanity is about. The specific details of the afterlife are for God to know, and God is God’s own mystery and power decides alone (Romans 11:25-36). When it comes to living in fellowship with Jews, Jewish and Gentile Christians exist as a testimony that Israel’s covenant has been opened up, that God has reconciled Jew and Gentile.

“But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept.”- Genesis 33:4 (NIV)

How ancient Jewish letter-writing shaped the New Testament

Even readers conversant with the Bible are sometimes a bit disconcerted to be reminded that the New Testament is primarily a collection of letters. The seven undisputed letters of Paul—Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon—set a pattern followed not only by his own disciples but also by other early Christian teachers who adopted the epistolary genre for instructing the churches. The result: of twenty-seven New Testament “books,” twenty-two belong to the epistolary genre.

This was not news to me when, more than fifty years ago, I began serious study of the Bible in seminary. I still recall, however, what seemed like a flash of revelatory insight when I learned how the discovery of hundreds of ancient letters among the papyri recovered from the trash heaps of the Nile valley had impacted our understanding of the New Testament. These were informal, private letters, written by everyday people in everyday language. They had many similarities, especially in vocabulary, with New Testament letters. Features previously thought to be distinctively biblical were now seen to belong to typical informal letter writing. Like many others, I had become accustomed to reading Paul’s (and other New Testament) letters as theological treatises, essays on Christian doctrine cast more-or-less incidentally in the form of letters addressed to particular churches. The New Testament letters seemed to stand out from both classical Greek and ordinary conversation of our own times. The contrast seemed appropriate—after all, they were in the Bible and were supposed to sound biblical and religious, different from ordinary letters and conversation.

On the basis of these new discoveries, scholars such as Adolf Deissmann argued for a sharp distinction between formal epistles and real letters. Formal epistles were literary texts, treatises for a general readership, analogous to the epistles of Cicero, Seneca, or Pliny. Real letters were informal, occasional, addressed to particular individuals or groups, and written neither in the stilted classical style nor in a special biblical Greek but in the ordinary koine represented by the papyri. Deissmann provided hundreds of examples, presented his case with clarity, erudition, and passion, and convinced two generations of New Testament scholars to read early Christian letters against the background of ordinary Greco-Roman letters. No one doubts that this was a great contribution to New Testament studies.

It was also an overreaction from which biblical research has not yet recovered. In the last twenty-five years, it has become clear to many that the distinction between formal epistle and informal letter was oversimplified. It neglected the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures used in early Christianity, and mistakenly caused Paul’s letters to be classified among the informal, private, non-literary letters found in the papyri. Paul’s letters have a quasi-official character not found in the informal letters. He writes as an apostle. He addresses communities, not individuals, and expects his letters to be read aloud to assembled congregations. His letters (with the exception of Philemon) are far longer than the papyrus examples. Their content includes argumentative and expository development, including rhetorical features not found in private correspondence. A number of vigorous studies in the latter half of the twentieth century contributed to a new and more informed reading of New Testament letters (e.g., Robert Funk, Abraham Malherbe, Hans Dieter Betz, and their students). But New Testament letters continued to be evaluated almost entirely within the context of Greco-Roman epistolography. Jewish letters were mostly given minimal attention.

Enter Lutz Doering. A native of Germany, Doering studied theology and Jewish Studies at Erlangen, Jerusalem, and Heidelberg, and then continued his research at Göttingen (Dr. theol. 1998). He taught at Göttingen, Jena, and King’s College London before assuming his present post at Durham in 2009. Doering has researched and published on ancient Jewish epistolography since his years at Jena (1999-2003). The present volume integrates his previous work, while comprehensively extending it to become the most thorough treatment of the topic available. To be sure, Doering had predecessors, whose work he builds upon and with whom he regularly enters into constructive dialogue. But this monograph is at present the definitive work, and it gives promise of remaining such for some time to come.

The book argues that ancient Jewish letter writing contributes to our understanding of early Christian epistolography in at least three areas. First, there are the formal elements adopted and adapted by Christian authors, primarily the introductory and final greetings, and, to a lesser extent, the transitional passages immediately following the prescript and preceding the final salutation. Another contribution to our understanding can be found in the “quasi-official” text-pragmatic use of letters in addressing communities rather than individuals. Doering finally points us to the references to group identity, cohesion, and the common sacred history that binds together readers with each other and with the writer, facilitating the letter as a means of maintaining the network of communities.

Doering presents ancient Jewish letters as a fascinating and varied object of study in their own right, of value to anyone interested in the history, culture, and religious life of antiquity. The major part of the book is an exposition of the history of ancient Jewish letter writing that covers documentary letters such as those recovered from Masada and the Bar Kokhba letters from the war of 132–136 CE, the letters embedded in the texts of Jewish Scriptures, literary letters in the Dead Sea Scrolls, letters in the non-canonical pseudepigraphical corpus such as the Letter of Aristeas, the letters found in the multivolume productions of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, and letters belonging to the corpus of early rabbinic writings. Doering’s monograph constitutes a standalone history of the subject, valuable in itself as a contribution to the portrayal of communication in antiquity and to the history of ancient Judaism. For most of its intended readers, however, the monograph provides both data and rationale for reconsidering the influence of Jewish epistolography on the formative stages of the early Christian epistolary tradition. Reading these pages and rehearsing what one knows of the Jewish Scriptures in light of them, it begins to dawn upon the modern reader that Paul, for instance, could have had a flexible view of what a letter is as the point of departure for formulating his own letters. This view is not limited to his own experience of the Greco-Roman letter form but informed by the Bible he knew so well.

Paul’s letters are not simply a Christianized form of regulatory Jewish letters sent to synagogues, in Doering’s view. He does show that the traditional view has not sufficiently taken Jewish epistolography into account. This may be illustrated by a key sample from this comprehensive discussion, dealing with the structure of the prescript. For more than a generation, major New Testament scholars have argued or assumed that the distinctively Pauline “Paul to B, grace (charis) to you and peace,” is his variation on the standard Hellenistic “A to B, greetings (chairein).” Many have contended that Paul’s charis is his modification of the typical chairein, substituting a key term of Christian and Pauline theology for the colorless Hellenistic greeting. Doering, however, shows that the traditional view tends to disregard the Jewish letters in which “mercy and peace” were already joined in epistolary greetings. The Pauline form, he argues, is better explained in reference to the tradition of Jewish letters.

Specialists may find emphases and interpretations with which they would not agree; non-experts such as myself will find Doering’s monograph informative and horizon-expanding. Naturally, the mass of material dealt with does not allow detailed consideration of every letter. But time and again the discussion provides, almost incidentally, illustrations of the depth of engagement with primary texts and thorough, critical evaluation of secondary studies. Although I have read fairly widely and deeply in this field for decades, working through these historical chapters afforded illuminating and genre-stretching surprises. For instance, like all students of the Bible, I was aware that the both the Masoretic text and the Septuagint contained imbedded letters. I was nonetheless pleasantly surprised to learn that there are no less than seventy-nine references to letters in the Septuagint and edified by perusing the three-page chart that lists, categorizes, and describes each one. Though I knew that writing had existed in Israel from its beginnings, I had never noticed that letter writing appeared in the biblical story line only with the monarchy, the earliest biblical letter being David’s note to Joab containing Uriah’s death-warrant, carried by his own hand (2 Samuel 11:14–15). I was intrigued by the discussion of 2 Maccabees suggesting that the initial embedded letters make it possible to see the whole document as an extensive letter, and that the colophon of the Old Greek version of Esther (Additions to Esther F 11)  presents the whole book as a Purim letter.

There is much to be learned from this book; readers can only be grateful, even if the gift is not uncritically received. We can no longer ignore or minimize the influence that Jewish letters may have played on the formation of the core documents of the Christian faith.

[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

We asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

Tropes are a funny thing. To some extent, knowing and expecting what’s going to happen next in a story – anticipating a particular structure and story elements – is why we’re drawn to specific genres and sub-genres. Many romance readers are looking for boy meets girl, boy loses girl (or girl loses boy) but they happily (and sexily) get together at the end. Hard SF readers may be reading for a Big Idea and exploring how it changes our society, but be less interested in the characters moving that big idea around on the stage. Urban Fantasy readers may be looking for tough – but vulnerable! – heroines put into paranormal situations that may seem harrowing, but all work out at the end. And in Epic Fantasy, many still expect the White Hats (Stark white!) to Save the World.

There is a benefit to this kind of comfort reading. It lets us take solace in predictable stories in an unpredictable world. Humans strive to make sense of a senseless world. When we’re stressed, in particular, we tend to see patterns in events, white noise, and coincidences where, in fact, there are none. It’s a human thing. We are hungry for meaning. We want to believe that the hardships we endure are leading up to some greater purpose, and stories help us put those events into a narrative that makes sense; it gives us hope that we haven’t suffered for nothing.

Where tropes fall down, of course, is when we make a steady diet of the same old stories with the same old patterns. Because as much as I love stories, as somebody with a day job in marketing and advertising, I also recognize how much stories affect our view of the world. Storytelling is the primary way we impart information to one another about the past. Ever sat through a boring history class where the prof recited names and dates and your eyes glazed over – until they fashioned it as a story about how so-and-so tried to poison the king because of an age-old slight, and got her cousin the Duke to help, because he was a notorious philanderer that the King was blackmailing? When we frame information as a story – in classes, in lectures – our audience is more likely to retain it. The best public speakers know that long after you’ve forgotten the boring graph they slapped up onto the screen, you’ll remember the story about how they convinced their sister she was a unicorn once…

That’s why storytelling is one of the most powerful forms of rewriting history and imparting information. Want to convince people that women are crazy hysterics? Make women crazy hysterics in all the stories and movies, and have them severely punished for their transgressions. Want to convince an audience that the majority of folks in the world are white, and white people are the only ones with agency? Make movies and tv shows and books full of white people doing things, while non-white characters take up secondary, “assistant”-type roles. You might not think you’re affected by that one ad about how $5 pizza makes you happy, but after absorbing hundreds of ads about happy-making pizza, you’re highly likely to develop a subconscious feeling of delight at the prospect of buying a pizza. And lo, you will buy more of it.

So when people tell me, “I’m writing a fantasy book all about men who save the world, and they’re all blond,” I’m like, well, that’s nice, but maybe you should think about how your one work is being viewed within the context of the hundreds of other books exactly like yours. Are you perpetuating a view of the world that you really want to perpetuate? Do you have a heroine who’s raped in order to propel her to take action on the battlefield? Is your one black character a magical wizard who’s only there to give your white character some special powers, and then dies? Do you have one gay character, best friend of your hero, who… dies? What are you saying about the world when you do this? Are you adding to a poisonous narrative?

There are other tropes, perhaps, that are not quite so damaging as these. There’s the “good folks triumph against all odds” expectation, and all the tropes of the hero’s journey – the “special” circumstances of the “chosen one’s” birth, the denial of the journey, acceptance, leaving home, descent to the underworld, etc. I wouldn’t say that these particular expectations or tropes are inherently dangerous, except insofar as they perpetuate the “blood will tell” narrative- they’re just woefully boring. Few stories can pull of a hero’s journey today in a new and interesting way. Much of the popularity of George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie is their subversion of expected tropes – the wrong people die, the wrong people have sex/get married, the heroes aren’t actually heroic. Then you have folks like Jeff VanderMeer, N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, and Saladin Ahmed, who are skilled at taking readers to places they truly have never been before. I think readers are hungry for change in a way that some publishers haven’t quite figured out how to market yet. You can only rewrite Lord of the Rings so often before readers get exhausted with it.

As a reader and writer, I know I’ve had enough of the same old stories. If I can guess what’s going to happen in a book in the first chapter, what’s the fun in that? If I want to turn off my brain, I have reality TV. If I want to be challenged, if I want to go somewhere I’ve never been, I turn to fiction. There are all sorts of writers doing exciting things in genre, who may be overlooked for one reason or another -folks like Zachary Jernigan, Karen Lord, Genevieve Valentine, Lauren Beukes and Ian Tregillis. If we want new and exciting stories, though, we have to seek out and support writers like these.

By far the most overdone trope in fantasy, where I do most of my work, is the idea of the Chosen One fulfilling a Prophecy that will end the rule of the Evil Overlord(s). It’s such a pernicious trope that it’s even part of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek universe now, with James T. Kirk becoming a 23rd century Luke Skywalker: he has a miraculous birth, Captain Pike is his Obi-Wan, new Spock his Han Solo and old Spock his Yoda. We can thank George Lucas for this, of course; since 1977, it’s been the default plot for most mainstream fantasy and SF. And while it’s based on legitimate scholarship (hell, it’s the story of both Jesus and King Arthur), it’s not the only story out there. Yet you wouldn’t know that from a casual perusal of the genre.

The most useful tropes are the ones that allow the author to sketch things for the reader without spending a lot of time on details. We all understand that faster-than-light movement, time travel, and artificial gravity are unlikely, if not impossible, concepts. Yet we’re willing to accept them in the service of a good story, and because of that, we don’t need them described in detail. I should say that such sketching is only fair if it gets you to something substantial; if it’s simply because the writer’s lazy or uninformed, it’s cheating.

The most damaging tropes, again in my experience, are the ones based around gender assumptions. My real peeve is the Ass-Kicking Sprite, in which a tiny, conventionally sexy female character manages to break all the laws of the physical world to defeat (usually male) adversaries in hand to hand combat. She often wears a skimpy outfit, and almost never loses her sex appeal for male readers/viewers/gamers (its apotheosis is the vile movie Sucker Punch). This has nothing to do with female empowerment and everything to do with creators throwing a theoretical bone (no pun intended) to the female audience while still pandering to men. Or rather, boys.

I have serious problems with some of the tropes we apply to Strong Women Characters™. Not only does the genre tend to present a very narrow definition of what it means to be a strong woman, but so often being a Strong Woman Character™ requires that the character be broken, typically by sexual violence. Either rape was used to transform her into a “strong” character, or else she has to be raped further on in her storyline (presumably to keep her from getting too strong). Seanan McGuire had a great blog post about this a while back, it can be found here.

I’m also rather tired of love triangles that drag on and on. And on. I understand the tension those triangles create, and how writers can use them to help keep their audience invested. But I’ve gotten bored of this particular trope. Speaking from personal experience, making a choice and starting a relationship in no way eliminates the potential for tension and conflict.

As for the most useful tropes and stereotypes, I think that depends on what you do with them. Any idea can be made new and interesting and thought-provoking again. The author just needs to take the time to think a little deeper.

Although I started out in my teens reading mostly SF, I haven’t read widely in that genre for the past couple of decades, so I’m going to confine my answers to fantasy…

There are tropes that spring to mind when everyone talks of fantasy clichés-the farmboy hero, the Chosen One vs the Dark Lord-but I’m not sure they’re common enough nowadays to count as overused. I think they have this reputation because they were ubiquitous in the 80s, when fantasy really took off as a commercial genre, so everyone who’s been around for a while can remember those books. Either I’m looking in the wrong places, or the epic fantasy of recent years has grown away from those early stereotypes.

Some tropes have stayed the course, on the other hand, but have evolved along the way (at least in the hands of better writers). For example, Scott Lynch takes the classic “thief + fighter” buddy pairing, but makes his fighter Jean Tannen a poetry-lover who needs to wear reading glasses because he’s long-sighted. Well-used, an established trope evokes fond memories of the books you loved when you were younger whilst being entertaining to your older, more sophisticated (and more jaded?) self.

As for “damaging”, there are still a lot of clichés around female characters. My personal bugbear is prostitution (in both written fantasy and other SFF media). It makes sense to have a lot of brothels in a historical setting, or one tightly based on history, i.e. In cultures where women’s chastity is highly valued and/or reliable contraception is rare. What irks me is that the brothel is a common and frankly lazy way to get sex into SFF without all that messy relationship stuff (ugh, girl cooties!), to the point where it’s shoehorned into settings where it makes little sense and, worse still, is glamourised. There’s nothing glamorous about prostitution; for the most part it’s the last resort of women who have no other means of making a living.

The “kickass warrior babe” also troubles me a little. For female readers it might be a wish-fulfillment fantasy-most of us have zero chance of holding our own in a fight, particularly against a bunch of men-but such characters can stray too easily into the “solving everything with violence” trope that’s so ubiquitous in Hollywood. There’s a big difference between “woman who is the equal of her male colleagues” and “female character who’s just a guy with boobs”, but it only takes a bit of bad writing to cross that line in the wrong direction.

Ultimately that’s what separates a trope from a stereotype: the former is a familiar element that say, yes, this is the genre you know and love; the latter is the same thing done badly and without imagination.

One final warning: if you want to research this topic, do not visit TVTropes.org. It’s an evil timesink that will swallow years of your life. (Only half-serious – it’s a brilliant site, but it’ll suck you in like a black hole…)

“Everything is different–yet things haven’t changed.”

You’ve all read this scene: the flying cars of the forever-unattainable future have been achieved a dozen centuries from now. They flit around in streamlined glory, the skies dominated by gridded flocks of them, humming on grav lifters. Some swing up toward floating cities, others speed directly into orbit, where FTL craft no bigger than commuter jets are routinely blinking in and out of existence.

A select few of the longer-ranged commuter airspacecars are piloted by fully sentient anthropomorphic AIs tasked to ferry jaded transhuman travelers to the razor thin, glistening arc of a distant ringworld. But in their hurry to get there, two of the vehicles almost collide. Robot pilot turns to stare at rival robot pilot, and utters the deprecation we are all certainly expecting:

“Yo! Watchit buddy: I’m drivin’ here!”

And the novel/story/scene is not a parody. Not at all.

Sigh. And sigh again.

I suppose honest-to-god space opera is to be afforded these liberties-but that’s probably why I also find it hard to take such far-future adventure romps too seriously. Linguistic, cultural, and social changes often languish unattended in such narratives, or have a pseudo-retro feel (Not sure what I mean? Join me for a drink at the Mos Eisley cantina later on, and I’ll explain.)

This could be a vast topic, so I’ll constrain myself to one category of examples: changes (or not) in language. Now, let me be clear: I am not talking about the most basic “realism” problem of people speaking English 2000+ years in the future. Firstly, they just might be speaking something someone today would recognize. In all major languages (but in English most markedly), core linguistic change has arguably slowed in the last century. I know this may raise some reflex objections along the “+time passed = +language change” proportionality devotees. So here I will put on my Distinguished Professor of English hat to invoke the relevant countervailing thought and examples.

Read prose from Shakespeare’s era, then read Jonathan Swift (A Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels, take your pick). Not much more than a century separates those writings, but Shakespearean English seems, at times, like writings from another world. By contrast, Swift’s style and diction is mostly modern; at worst, it sounds a little affected and archaic.

Now let’s jump a little more than a century onward again; Dickens is writing, and a reasonable early novel in the right time period is Oliver Twist. The change in the foreigness of the texts is markedly less dramatic. Indeed, Dickens is readable without any assistance by the great majority of people-most of whom will find the cultural and social conventions of early Victorian England the greatest source of puzzlement. But the degree of change from Swift, while noticeable, is quite modest.

And a century later? Steinbeck, Hemingway, Heinlein. All paragons of accessibility-and once again, the degree of linguistic change in the intervening century has lessened. And the change is overwhelmingly one of “contemporary usage” (i.e.; vernacular, idiomatic expressions).

Note that this decreasing comparative “percentage of change” is not simply a matter of temporal remove: i.e.; as the creation date of the text draws closer to our own place on the calendar, it “sounds more like us because there’s been less time for change.” That is not wholly untrue, but it is actually the much less significant trend in this example. What is noteworthy is how dramatically (in terms of lexicon, syntax, even fixed grammar and spelling) the English language “modernized” between the time of Shakespeare and Swift. The answer for this lies largely in a field called technological determinism, with which I will not bore anyone (let alone myself). Short version: the profusion of the printed word led to linguistic codification and a “linguistic core” began solidifying. Picking up a novel written only a century after Swift, we can feel how firmly the foundations of English have concretized into the distinctly “modern” diction and manners that we find in Oliver Twist. And the pace of change has only slowed since then, the core now proof against any ready uprooting or even perturbation.

At the same time, the pace and diversity of vernacular and idiomatic change in contemporary English has skyrocketed-particularly with the advent of electronic media (Marshall McLuhan gets to take a bow, here). And this is where my peeve arises.

As is (painfully, I fear) obvious, I taught English at universities for many years. I frequently taught all the books/authors I listed above (and so very many more). And I have observed an unfailing pattern of reader disorientation as one travels across the past 4 centuries of English language literature. The language of Shakespeare-the structure of the language itself, even without the metric forms-is what throws students.

To cite just one example, they lose sight of subject-verb-object linkages because the grammar of the early 17th century often sounds “inverted” (or as some linguists say, “more Germanic”) than contemporary English, where we have largely steamrolled these usages into unused archaicisms. Conversely, the students acclimate fairly readily to vocabulary change-except when it also gets bound into an idiom or apothegm. Here’s an example: “Sirrah, he was hoist by his own petard.” Hoist is not a pulley/winch system, and petard-well, what the hell is that anyway? But once you explain all those unfamiliar words, most students can then unpack the phrase, and their more profound source of disorientation in this example-novel idiomatic constructions-ends quickly.

And so now, back to my peeve in summary form. I can accept that the structure of language-let us say English-might not change much over long periods of time, because we are observing a sharp increase in the codification of structural and grammatical and semantic core of many languages. But idiom, slang, colloquialisms-these increasingly demonstrate all the durability and fixity of mayflies spun from strands of quicksilver. Our high-volume, high-density mediascape ensures that vernacular (like fashion) has an increasingly short half-life, and decays into forgotten forms with startling swiftness.

So I cringe when, in a space opera set thousands of years in the future, where the tools and vehicles and lifestyles are wildly different from our own, and where the dramatic tenor of the narrative is suffused with a seriousness bordering on sturm-und-drang, I encounter dialog such as:

“We were hanging out.” (As in, from a window?)

“And we just sort of hooked up.” (As in, we became unexpectedly linked to each other with carabiner clips?)

“That’s not cool.” (As in, not at a low temperature?)

“It was just a booty-call.” (As in, you were shouting about or at your piratical treasure?)

“You go, girl.” (As in, go where?)

“But that doesn’t do anything for me.” (As in, it fails to perform a task for you?)

“Don’t get me wrong.” (As in, please get/grab me the right way?)

“It’s just that being with someone is such a pain right now.” (As in, the presence of others induces physical discomfort?)

“Yeah, I’m just punching the clock when it comes to relationships.” (As in, I am boxing with a timepiece instead of associating with people?)

“Me, too: I’m just dialing it in.” (As in, I am turning a round indicator knob inward?)

You will forgive the waggishly intentional misreadings, I hope–because it is waggishness with a serious point: if the epoch and the world has changed, so too will the humans in it. Their language will be different in many of its particulars-if for no other reason than their culturescape will be filled with referents that are hugely different from our own. They will not have seen petards, and the notion of telephones may well be archaic, let alone those truly primitive versions that you actually dialed by hand!

Perhaps this failure to adequately chart linguistic change is particularly annoying to me because it is the easiest aspect of cultureshift to negate, or at least disguise. Many better authors have resorted to writing in such far future worlds by employing both a narrative voice, and dialog structure, that is founded upon the “classical linguistic core”: they eschew slang, colloquialisms, and cast a sharp, critical eye upon the durability of any idioms the might employ. This diction does not in any way necessitate or predict stiffness: there are distinctly casual/informal speech patterns that are not subject to the vagaries of time and environment. Examples: “Oh, come now.” “Hell, you know that’s nonsense, don’t you?” “Keep your heads down and keep moving!”

Or (and while I admire this, it also courts a different species of disorientation) an author can “invent” far future idiom, either with a new lexicon and collection of referents, or by repurposing archaicisms, producing a “the old is become new again” vibe that can often work in space operas (yes, the pseudo-retro can work when done right). Michael Flynn’s Spiral Arm series certainly shows this repurposing strategy to great effect.

It is arguably harder to change human interactions-family structure, value systems, commerce, sex, reproduction-without those alterations becoming, in fact, the focus of the novel. To do any less is to leave a contemporary reader hopelessly confused: if the author does not take the (considerable, perhaps commanding) time to define this array of changes, a reader is likely to be lost in a sea of new social realities that are at best the vague and inchoate endgames of trends we can barely envision today. So it is perhaps unavoidable that far future space opera may seem a bit prosaic or provincial in that it often (even usually) elects to retain many of the mores and social structures of the current day: if the dramatic axis of the narrative is action, not social commentary/extrapolation, this is only prudent. (However, I confess that this kind of fiction frequently fails the test of my personal ‘bullshit meter”, as I described in my SF Signal article on writing complicated SF worlds. When a world requires constant suspension of sociopolitical disbelief, it begins to feel like I’m reading a comic book, not a serious novel.)

But if my suspension of disbelief is severely taxed when I encounter a future world where logical sociocultural change is minimal, that capability is shattered beyond repair when humans, millennia hence, begin uttering dialog that is semantically indistinguishable from snippets of conversation I can hear at the mall, in a bar, or on a bus. I’m willing to make a lot a lot of allowances for far future fiction, but that? Can my suspension of disbelief manage to stretch that far?

Yo: fuhgeddaboutit.

My first thought when presented with this topic was to spend my time railing against one of the most potentially narrative-tension-sapping tropes of all time: the Chosen One. But I’m the first to admit many of my favorite stories are, in fact, anchored by Chosen Ones (see Summers, Buffy; also Atreides, Paul), and anyways, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Lately, the SF/F community has been embroiled in a heated debate over its treatment of women on and off the page. While I believe the equitable treatment of authors, editors, and fans of any race/creed/gender/orientation/whatever should be considered prima facie obvious to anyone with two working neurons to rub together – and a moral imperative to boot – I’ll admit said belief lies outside the scope of this-here Mind Meld. But the on-the-page part falls square inside my cross-hairs, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the shot.

One focal point of the discussion is the cover of issue 200 of the SFWA’s Bulletin, which depicts a big-breasted, scantily clad warrior woman straddling a felled beast amidst a frozen landscape while somehow simultaneously suggesting a Whitesnake video might break out at any time. Now, I like cheesy pulp covers as much as the next guy, but even I was faintly embarrassed by what the mailman must think of me when I saw her gazing up at me seductively from my mailbox. Which is to say, I wasn’t surprised some SFWA members took offense.

In issue 202, Mike Resnick expressed puzzlement at the sudden outrage over what he called “…the thousandth painting of an absolutely generic warrior woman.” Which to me seems like irony itself, because I could not have coined a phrase that more aptly conveys why I think this trope should die than Absolutely Generic Warrior Woman.

Here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure the warrior woman trope was borne of the best intentions. The writers who first employed it doubtless intended to subvert the notion of women as damsels in distress, or shrinking violets to be led to fainting couches and/or protected. So they beefed up their roles while winnowing down their clothes. Win-win, right?

Problem is, we’re so far past that now as a society, it reads like bullshit pandering and lazy characterization with a heaping side of fanboy wish fulfillment. It doesn’t empower women in any meaningful way (nor, for the record, were women any author’s to empower); all it does is extend the list of accepted female roles by one. In that sense, it’s not unlike the equally misguided bit of fictional affirmative action, the Magical Negro – which was itself an outgrowth of the patently racist notion of a noble savage. It’s time we acknowledge that “Women are badass!” is just as broad a brush as “Women are fragile!” and start treating our female characters like full-fledged people – maybe even ones who on occasion have the foresight to grab a jacket when felling beasts in frozen climes.

There are a couple tropes that bug me, and a couple that I think are quite underrated.

TROPES THAT I COULD DO WITH LESS OF

• Adventure Story With Rocket Ships – Probably the largest fraction of all science fiction ever written fits into this category or the related categories “Adventure Story with Lasers”, “Adventure Story with Robots”, “Adventure Story with Aliens”, etc.. These are the types of stories where the ‘science fiction’ isn’t really science fiction. The futuristic science (or aliens, or whatever) aren’t there to make intelligent points about the future, realistic predictions of where we might go, critiques of technology, critiques of society, or anything else. The super science is just there so you can have bigger explosions or explosions in space or awesome scenes of killer robots pummeling extra-dimensional aliens with rocket-propelled fists or whatnot.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I like explosions. I LOVE explosions, actually. And giant killer robots? Badass. There’s a certain amount of sheer joy in consuming a well done story of this sort (whether in print or, more often these days, on the screen). But this isn’t the heart of science fiction. This is a veneer of science fiction layered over a very basic action-story core. The bigger, badder explosions can rivet us, but these stories often fail to teach us anything about either the present or the future. I’m sure we’ll keep cranking out more stories like this (especially from Hollywood) but in my mind (unless they do more than just blow shit up) they only barely count as science fiction.

• Outer Space, Not Inner Space – Another thing that bugs me is the preponderance of stories that show that we’ve gone off into space (often interstellar space) but we ourselves haven’t changed. So you’ve got what are effectively the human beings of today (maybe with a few changes) venturing thousands of light years away.

  How likely is that, really? Not at all, if you ask me. Everything we see tells us that there’s going to be heck of a lot more progress in ‘inner space’ sciences (biotech, neurotech, cybernetics) than there will be in space travel. If you look at the last 40 years, we’ve had revolutions in genomics, in computers, now in wearable devices, and incredibly promising research in gene editing and in actually tapping into the human brain – but almost nothing has changed about human space travel.

  Now, I love a good space yarn as much as anyone. And I appreciate that it’s much easier to write about humans-in-space than it is to write about whatever humanity will turn into. But it gives us this very distorted view of what the future looks like, IMHO. And it makes it less and less connected to the progress people actually see happening all around them.

  Not all space opera falls into this, by any means. Greg Egan shows uploads, true post-humans, as the characters in his space stories. Alastair Reynolds shows humanity splintering with the rise of the Conjoiners who augment and interconnect their brains. Paul McCauley shows a humanity that’s genetically tweaking itself as it explores the solar system. Hannu Rajaniemi shows a really stunning vision of radical change in the solar system’s occupants well before we achieve interstellar travel. So you do see this. But it’s the minority in space-based science fiction.

• 50s (or 80s.. or 2010s..) America in Space – The same is true for social, political, and economic structures. A lot of space based stories really just transplant current American culture into some future interplanetary or interstellar civilization. Worse, sometimes they go backwards, projecting futures that are dominated by fairly antiquated social structures that have been undermined by both technology and progress in thought. Emperors in space? Really?

  Again, it’s much easier to simply transpose current humans and current human culture into a world with much advanced technology, but it also strikes me as pretty profoundly lazy. There’s an interplay of technology and society. How would space flight change economics? How would it change politics? Those are actually the really interesting questions – much more interesting than whether your awesome battlefleet can defeat the evil aliens’ awesome battlefleet.

TROPES THAT I’D LOVE TO SEE MORE OF

• Science Fiction That’s Really About the Present – Science fiction can be incredibly powerful and even transformative to society. One of the ways it can do that is to really be about present day or near future issues. That doesn’t mean it has to be set in the present day or even the near future. It could be set centuries or millennia in the future, but still be about some present day issue, and drive change there.

  When I wrote Nexus I knew that I wanted a page turner full of kick-ass conflict that you couldn’t put down. I knew it was going to be a book much more about inner space (tapping into and connecting human minds) than outer space. But I also very intentionally made it a story about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Why? Partially because I saw that as a quite probable way that society would respond to certain new technologies. But also because I wanted to spark thoughts about present-day political issues with readers.

  Lots of other sci-fi does this well. Star Trek, for all that I can knock it as frequently being Baseline Humans in Space (and looking an awful lot like current American society in various ways), also tried repeatedly to tackle social issues, or at least expose viewers to them. And that, IMHO, was one of the greatest values it brought. Novelists who’re writing about climate change and global resource and environmental issues – Tobias Buckell, Paolo Bacigalupi, David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc… – are raising awareness of present day issues. And even if you don’t agree 100% with their take on an issue, they’re at least encouraging people to think about potential problems and solutions. And perhaps they’re encouraging some of their readers to go out and learn more and perhaps even become politically active in some of these areas. The same is true of Cory Doctorow. So many of his books are set five minutes into the future, and he’s constantly tackling the questions of censorship, of privacy, of control and power in society. I’ve got to believe that his books are directly motivating people on political issues that we face in the present.

• Self-Defeating Prophesies – I learned this phrase from David Brin, who talks about “Self-Defeating Prophesies” as one of the most powerful uses of science fiction. We all know about self-fulfilling prophesies of course – this is the opposite. These are books (and movies) that show a negative path society could take, not because it’s inevitable, but as a way to try to prevent that future from coming into being. A lot of the books I talked about in the previous section are in this category.

  I mention this a bit because there’s a recent theme, kicked off by Neal Stephenson, that we should have more positive visions of futures in science fiction. That we’ve gotten too dark and dystopian. Well, I love Neal Stephenson’s books, and I do love hopeful, optimistic science fiction. But I also think there’s a role for bad things happening in science fiction. First, as a novelist, you can’t just write puppies and kittens all day long – your readers would get bored. But more importantly, every positive scientific and technological development has some downside. I’m not saying it’s balanced – on the whole science and technology have been tremendously, overwhelmingly positive. But if you portray only the positive and not the occasional downsides – or the possible really bad scenario – then you’re not giving a realistic portrayal of the future. In Nexus I create what I think is a very positive future, but in the storylines you’re following, terrible things are happening, and they’re happening in part so I can argue that we should try to avoid certain scenarios. Or if you read Brave New World or 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, those books weren’t saying “the future is going to be horrible”. They were saying: Do not let this happen. No matter what you do, don’t let technology and society go down this path.

  And those warnings are powerful and important.

So that’s what I want to see. I want to see more science fiction that makes you think about the present world, that makes you think about the world that’s a few minutes or a few years in the future, and prepares and motivates us to actually fight the problems in our world and to make it a better one.

I’m reluctant to label any trope as overdone because I wouldn’t want to discourage someone from trying to breathe fresh life into the old SF/F standards. There’s nothing new under the sun and anyone who thinks they’ve come up with something original probably just doesn’t know his or her history. I’m also reluctant to label any tropes or stereotypes as “damaging,” even though some may offend people.

I’m actually of two minds on this issue. I dislike sexism and racism as much as anybody. And I don’t want to support bullying in any way. But I think I have I have to defend “bad” behavior, at least in “speech.”

While I fully support the goals of political correctness, and I stand behind the effort to wipe out discrimination, I also believe attempting to eradicate insensitivity, and even cruelty, from what people say and write will result in something just as bad.

We will be forced to say and write meaningless, pre-approved things. Because if we don’t, we will be censored, banned, and ostracized. Not necessarily by some tyrannical government, but by a tyrannical corporation or ourselves.

I believe it’s better to let people say and write what they want, so we can see who they are, than it is to force them into the shadows. Let them say and write what they want and we’ll say and write what we want. If we do it well, hopefully everyone will see we’re right.

This is why I think zombies and robots are some of the most useful tropes in SF/F. People tend to be mindless and unfeeling; changing that is probably too much to hope for, but it’s important to let thinking and feeling people know that they’re not alone.

The world is a bleak place. To say “people don’t live in harmony” is an understatement. Human life has no purpose other than to perpetuate itself. We certainly don’t work together on some grand project. We actually work against each other. Compete. It sets everybody back.

We don’t know why we’re here. We don’t know what it’s all for.

Yet we stagger on. We work because our parts do.

It’s easy to argue that zombies and robots are “overdone.” But that’s like saying that people are overrepresented in fiction. When we hold up a mirror to the audience and show them that they’re robotic or zombie-like, we’re doing something important. We’re being hopeful. That they’ll become human.

Tropes happen.

Not a bad t-shirt slogan, right?

On the back, I’d add: And I like it!

I’d wear this shirt to sci fi conventions, where it would hopefully offend (and, more importantly, fend off) elitists.

When talking tropes, delineating good and bad is A-ok – part of the fun of being a reader amongst readers – so long as no one starts shouting for torches and pitchforks. Any serious talk of retiring overused tropes is utterly absurd. Allow me to demonstrate…

Question: What are the most overdone tropes in sci fi?

Answer: Space. The future. Technology. Aliens.

Boom!

Question: In fantasy?

Answer: Trees. Magic. Monsters.

Double-boom!

See what I mean? Overdone does not equal inferior, and old doesn’t mean broken. It’s all in how you use it.

Really, I’m far more tolerant of tropes than dogma, which really rankles me. And in the writing community, there is a lot of dogma. I consider it reverse censorship, someone aborting things before they even hit the page. “Never write about Venusian ping pong players,” some Procrustean blowhard pronounces, and – WHAM! – whole shelves of potentially riveting stories, novels, and maybe even an epic poem or two die. And really, is that what we, presumably the most demanding fans in terms of imagination and originality, want in a publishing world increasingly driven by marketing and distribution?

Truth be told, I don’t give a rat’s donkey what you write about. Just do it honestly, try your hardest, and find a way to add yourself. As Stephen King says in On Writing, “Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work.” I agree. Whatever you want to write about, write it, but then make it your own. If you really must write about a square-jawed space captain, go for it, but don’t stop there. Flesh him out, make him real, make him yours. Simply plugging in a character type or a plot twist, shrugging your shoulders, and moving on – well, that would be weak and lazy writing, and that’s never good, regardless of genre.

I’m assuming that all writers have read their genre, know its tropes, like some, and dislike others. That’s good and natural. What I dislike and distrust is public “trope shaming,” which generates group-think dogma. Let people write what they want. Even if some trope-mines have been stripped of any visible ore, a truly passionate writer might use his or her enthusiasm and life experiences to chisel away additional layers impenetrable to the rest of us and tap into story gold.

When it comes to potentially damaging conventions, use common sense. It’s pretty easy to avoid demeaning tropes, and unless you have a great reason for including them, you probably should leave them out. This being said, let’s not go instating any zero-tolerance-for-offending-others statutes, shall we? I taught middle school for twenty years, and believe me, no matter what you say, you’re going to end up stepping on somebody’s toes. Speaking as a reader, the last thing I want driving publishing is LOP mentality.

In case you’re not familiar with it, LOP, or Least Offensive Programming, dictated TV networks for decades. The underlying assumption was that people were too lazy to change the channel… unless they found the programming offensive. It was less important to provide great entertainment, the networks reckoned, than it was to provide inoffensive content. The result: timid, forgettable programming. Apply that mentality to publishing, and people won’t just turn the channel. They’ll close the books. All of them. And in this electronic age, that might very well be all she wrote… this time, literally.

The only way to keep storytelling strong is to trust writers. Let them write what they want. They don’t need rules; they need autonomy. If they botch the job by patch-working together a wet quilt of seen-it-all-before conventions or offend you with their use of some demeaning trope, so be it. Don’t buy their next book. Publishing has always been Darwinian. Let’s let evolution run its course though, huh? Let’s trust the individual organisms to grow and change on their own.

I meant to write about tropes here, but somehow I seem to have spun into yet another rant defending individuality. Oh well. There are worse crimes… like telling people what to write and what not to write.

If I do get around to making that Tropes Happen… And I Like It! shirt, maybe I’ll make another to wear on day two of the con…

Keep your dogma on a leash at all times.

Ah, the humble trope. It seems to me, whatever genre you’re reading, watching, listening to, they are impossible to get away from. As readers/consumers, we bemoan them. As writers, we try to avoid/employ them creatively. And yet, if they weren’t there, would we miss them? I suspect we probably would. After all, aren’t they really a part of the fabric, amongst the defining characteristics of a genre? SF and F (man, does that sound like a furniture showroom…) is well known, even celebrated, for its tropes. The villain who’s not really a villain deep down and dies at the moment of his (or her) redemption to prove it; the bounty hunter/pirate/warrior of low morals who really has a heart of gold and shows it by sacrificing substantial material gain for more altruistic/moral enrichment; the mysterious tower; the dark, evil overlord; the magic juju weapon that can only be wielded by the chosen one; the lost kingdom/planet/civilization; the low-born peasant/nobody/outcast who is destined/prophesied to be ‘the one’, the king, the saviour of the universe yaddah, yaddah…

These are all classic tropes, and they’ve spawned some classic characters and stories, so I have to question: are such genre tropes really so heinous? In striving to eschew them, are we failing to embrace what is intrinsically great and reassuring familiar about works of this genre? On the other hand, if we’re doled trope after trope, do we risk stagnation and our beloved SF and F stories becoming hackneyed and predictable? For me, the answer falls somewhere between the two. Done well, I think tropes are perfectly fine and good. The less obvious the better. When it’s rammed down your throat, it feels like you’re watching the equivalent of SF/F paint by numbers. You can literally sit down with a check list of the above tropes and tick them off one by one.

I sat down to re-watch Willow a few weeks ago. Now this film is 25 years ago and about as riddled with fantasy tropes as a fantasy film could be: the prophecy child who will save the kingdom; the rogue with a heart of gold; the unlikely hero; the turncoat villain who chooses love over tyranny; the evil queen etc, etc. Sure, I was watching it through rose-tinted nostalgia spectacles, but I was cheering for every cheesy, trope-filled moment. I didn’t care; I just wanted to be taken on a great adventure where good triumphs in the end. And that’s even though I knew good was going to triumph. The classic stories, the ones that people remember, are based on formula. They have certain defining characteristics demonstrated by the tropes therein.

I read a lot of backlash in the social media for George RR Martin last week when the ‘Rains of Castamere’ episode from Game of Thrones aired in the US and UK. A Song of Ice and Fire has more than its fair share of fantasy tropes, albeit seen through the somewhat grubby lens the author provides, but it really seeks to debunk and subvert them at any given opportunity. Fans were unhappy, I mean a serious outpouring of emotional outrage, with what was essentially the massacre (literally, as it turned out) of the ‘hero’s journey’, one of the most overused fantasy tropes in the genre. It defied expectation, but, for these fans, not in a good way. On the other hand, I read (and shared) a lot of opinions expressing how much they enjoyed the episode, how refreshing and shocking it was. For me, it revived a season that was rapidly slipping into disappointing water-treading. However, if all of the heroes in this epic saga fail to triumph and all of Westeros is consumed by endless winter and the White Walkers, I think I might be asking for my money back (figuratively speaking).

I have to say, I think by far and away the most overdone trope in SF/F is the one of the low-born peasant/exile who goes on to become the ultimate saviour. This has been done to death, and I suppose there is a risk that it’s damaging the genre in the form of all the carbon copies of it from the great many lesser emulators of the classic stories/characters mentioned earlier. But without it, without them, we are going on a journey without a road map, for that’s what tropes really are and do – they tell us where we are and what we are doing. By playing with the expectation inevtiably bound up in all well-used tropes, an author/filmmaker can subvert, challenge and reinvigorate; but by being slavish to them, we risk lesser emulation, stagnation, which, I suppose, ultimately leads to death (of the genre, not the reader/viewer I hasten to add!).

In short, any trope can be useful if understood what effects it has on the reader/viewer and as long as it is deployed usefully/creativity. The flip side of that is if tropes are used badly, unimaginatively with the largest cookie cutter the writer /filmmaker can find then they’re all dangerous. They’ll wear away at the fabric of the genre, creating a sort of perverse entropy that by seeking to enhance through emulation ends up eroding. So tropes, like any blaster or broadsword, should be understood and above all else, wielded with care and attention.

The easy answer to the overdone trope question is the theme that lies at the heart of countless SFF novels: the seemingly ordinary person who discovers they are special. Not only special, but powerful, whether by magic, psychic talents, spaceship piloting skills, royal ancestry, what have you. But you know what? One person’s overdone trope makes for another’s favorite read. It’s easy for veteran readers to roll their eyes and moan over themes they’ve read a thousand times before, but I think veterans sometimes forget that new generations of fans are coming fresh to the scene. Remember how powerful the “ordinary kid becomes special” trope was the very first time you read it? New fans are having that experience right now, exploring questions of power and responsibility and sacrifice through novels influenced by our current culture (as opposed to the culture of the world when veteran readers were teens), and I’d never want to deny them the experience.

This isn’t to say that tropes can’t be harmful, that they shouldn’t change. Think of the helpless, naive female character whose main purpose was to be rescued by the male hero. Thank goodness, that’s less common now; instead, you’re more likely to find the snarky, badass warrior woman who can rip her enemies’ throats out with a spoon while trading quips with her multiple love interests. Can that feel same-old, same-old after you’ve read a couple dozen such scenes? Sure. But I’ll take a trope that reflects an image of women as competent and powerful over the helpless-wilting-flower trope any day.

Tropes get to be tropes because they have power rooted in our cultural experience. It’s hard to go against cultural conditioning. Even if an author deliberately sets out to subvert one set of tropes, other, more subtle ones can sneak past unnoticed. But I think it’s important for authors to work on being conscious of the tropes they’re using: are they damaging and/or derogatory? Are you using a familiar trope because it’s easy, where the story would be better served if you worked a little harder? Or are you using tropes deliberately to illuminate, to challenge, to speak to readers’ hearts? I say this knowing that I’m far from no expert at it, that I’ve much to learn and a long way to go. But that’s part of the fun and challenge of writing SFF: learning to tell better stories by questioning our own assumptions and experiences, and wondering how the world might be different.

I admit I get impatient when people start complaining about all the tropes in fantasy – the farm boy who turns out to be a king or a great wizard, the Gandalf-like mentor, the struggle against foes both weak and powerful, and finally, the winning of the prize (throne, girl, magical artifact, what have you). Yes, there are plenty of fantasies like that, but also plenty that are not.*

But some of these tropes are better described as mythical elements. The quest. The guide. The journey. The gatekeepers or obstacles. The allies and the trickster. The tests that lead to a final battle (either internal or external) resulting in victory over our enemies and human failings. Most fantasies carry a whiff of this structure. Even the ones described as “turning the tropes on their head” depend on these elements.

It is in our nature as humans to employ the enduring power of myth and what it promises. We live in a world where children are shot in their classrooms, bombs go off at marathons, and soldiers die overseas every day. And yet we are distracted. Our attention for tragedy lasts only a few months, at best. But nevertheless we build stories around them and the stories endure. We attach symbolism to events – assign meaning to random violence. It becomes not the story of two humans, or a thousand, or ten thousand, but the story of all of us.

I’ve always viewed fantasy as the genre that explores humanity with all our capabilities, struggles, cowardice, heroism, evil, and nobility. The quest structure hits something deep inside: our desire face challenges and come out greater – to allow our better qualities to approach the divine. Myths did that in a literal sense, with the gods granting immortality to the deserving. We no longer expect that, but when our hero overcomes his obstacles and achieves his goal, we do enjoy a feeling of satisfaction and righteousness that mirrors our own desire to improve the human situation.

There is another, more cynical way, to view this, and that is the idea that the mythological structure reinforces the status quo. It suggests that those who are in power underwent struggles and proved themselves enough to deserve it – that they are closer to the divine and therefore should not be questioned. This could be considered a conservative element of fantasy. But readers can enjoy the mythological struggle as metaphor without applying the heroic outcome to the modern world: in fact, it is in our nature to constantly question our leaders and the status quo. It could be this very tension between our desire for heroes – to be heroes – and the true nature of the modern world that draws us to fantasy in the first place.

* For example The Whitefire Crossing (Courtney Schafer), Miserere (Teresa Frohock), Scourge of the Betrayer (Jeff Salyards), Death of the Necromancer (Martha Wells), No Return (Zachary Jernigan), most things by Carol Berg . . . I could continue for a long time.

In Australia New Zealand: It started when seven-year-old Alijah got a small cut on the bottom of his foot in December 2012. "Of course we didn’t think it was too serious, it was just a little cut but a couple of days later he started getting symptoms like a stroke on the side of his face," Mr Williams says. "A couple of days later during the night he started to get cramps across his face. His face would contort and he was in a lot of pain." After 24 hours in Auckland’s Starship Children’s hospital, the doctors diagnosed Alijah with tetanus, and he was taken to intensive care. His parents didn’t get him a tetanus shot because they were afraid of vaccines. In California: Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, has claimed the 10th victim in California, in what health officials are calling the worst outbreak in 60 years. Since the beginning of the year, 5,978 confirmed, probable and suspected cases of the disease have been reported in California. All of the deaths occurred in infants under the age of 3 months, says Michael Sicilia, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health. Nine were younger than 8 weeks old, which means they were too young to have been vaccinated against this highly contagious bacterial disease. "This is a preventable disease," says Sicilia, because there is a vaccine for whooping cough to protect those coming in contact with infants, and thereby protect the infants. However, some parents are choosing to not vaccinate their children. In other cases, previously vaccinated children and adults may have lost their immunity because the vaccine has worn off. Ignorance kills, and we’ve got people promoting ignorance. People like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to talk. When he calls you to discuss vaccines, he talks a lot, uninterruptably. He called Keith Kloor after Kloor wrote a story for Discover about RFK Jr.’s keynote...
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H. P. Lovecraft’s contemporary, and sometimes inspiration, Algernon Blackwood has recently come to my attention. Like Lovecraft, Blackwood was an early twentieth-century writer of supernatural tales. Raised with a father of “appallingly narrow religious ideas” Blackwood came to write stories involving strange religious characters and occult themes. I recently read his famous story, “The Willows,” for the first time. The entire premise is built around a sacrifice required by strange gods on an isolated island in the Danube River. Much of Lovecraft’s literature, as is readily apparent, builds on the Old Gods. Lovecraft was an unflinching atheist, but he knew that the divine had the ability to frighten in a way that the purely material often does not.

The early twentieth century exerted an enormous influence on the religious landscape of the modern world. Although my historical specialization is much earlier, it is clear that the events of the First World War forever changed the way that religion was viewed. Historically, those not involved in the fighting of wars had often been insulated from them. With the advent of technology that allowed military devastations to be photographed and swiftly disseminated, people around the world realized what an atrocity war actually is. Not glorious. Not triumphant. And despite the abundance of piety in foxholes, no deities evident anywhere. It is well known that horror of war at least partly led William Jennings Bryan to advocate a more fundamental brand of Christianity to counterbalance the “evils” of evolution that led to such nasty ideas as eugenics and social Darwinism. It is no accident that the Fundamentalist movement began to take hold with the revelations of the First World War.

Ironically, today many use creationism as the excuse to challenge all religion as a misguided set of antiquated principles that have no place in an enlightened world. The sad truth is that those who immediately dismiss religion out of hand don’t realize that the creationist concern arose precisely for the same reason: the horrors that science was unleashing upon regular, simple religious believers. The two viewpoints, however, can live together. Although many of the writers of the early twentieth century had no room for faith in their accounting of reality, they did believe in its effectiveness in creating fiction that had to be taken seriously. Atheists, perhaps, but not angry ones. Perhaps the angry ought to spend some time amid the willows to evaluate more fairly the ambiguous role that religion play has played and continues to play in an uncertain world.

Filed under: Creationism, Deities, Literature, Posts, Religious Violence, Science Tagged: Algernon Blackwood, Fundamentalism, H P Lovecraft, old gods, social Darwinism, The Willows, William Jennings Bryan, World War One