Moral Physics

I note this week two new Heroes of the Book.

Damien Cave of the NY Times reports on Baghdad booksellers Mukdad Ismail and Naim-al-Shatry who own shops on Mutanabi Street. A curfew and bombing that took 26 lives shut them down - for a while. Now that the curfew's lifted, they've both reopened. Mr. Shatry said, "Today I am a king."

Even though there are few customers brave enough to venture out (though if I'd been forced to stay away from my beloved bookshops for a year, I reckon I'd be desperate enough to try), Mr. Ismail says, "I believe in the gradual theory. Everything can't come together at once." Cave observes Mukdad "picked up a black hardcover history of the Kurds, with an attractive photo on the front. Tapping it twice with his right hand, sending dust flying, he kissed the cover and said, "We are happy to be here again with these beautiful books."

Heroes kiss books in hell.

I note in contrast to all would-be theocratists, also according to the Times, Reform Judaism is poised to introduce a new Prayer Book "intended to offer something for everyone - traditionalists, progressives and everyone else - even those who do not believe in God."

When you open the book, reading right to left, there's a prayer in Hebrew, the phonetic version, and a literal translation. On the left, a poetic ode and meditation. It's traditional, gender-neutral, evangelical; there aren't even any rise, stand, sit instructions lest they hinder personal preference. It's as eager to please as a new puppy.

If you're altogether fed up debating whether God's the Father, He and/or She: invent your own language (at college, after we argued what's meant when we say 'it' is raining, i dropped the class), Amber Dance of the Post writes about the "weirdly Babelesque boom of new languages." J.R. Tolkein stared things off: as a hobby, he invented an amalgam of Latin, French and Welsh; then he conceived people to speak it and places for them to live; thus Middle Earth was born.

In the early 20th century, linguists Sapir and Whorf, "proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts: That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them." Today, when a pseudo-need is manufactured daily to create a market niche, it's not surprising "the Web site Langmaker.com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem," (even as native languages die out at a pace of one every two weeks.)

It's when we can barely cope with anything more new, that many turn to the ancient language of Scripture for comfort and stability. Even that refuge, however, can be problematical. Peter Steinfels writes, in reviewing James Kugel's, "How to Read the Bible," the author "propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable - and fundamentally incompatible."

Why? The original translators of the Hebrew, people like Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scroll scribes, the patristic Christians "effectively recast the Bible's meaning in terms that came to dominate the way it was read by both Jews and Christians right up to recent times." Kugel contends "they all converged on four assumptions: that deeper meanings lay behind biblical texts; that the Bible was a book of instruction about the world; that it was somehow seamless and harmonious despite surface conflicts; and, finally, that it was of divine origin."

The historical criticism scholars of the 19th century, through the Jesus Seminar participants today, seek to discard those translations to unearth source materials derived from pre-translated fragments; in the process, Kugel declares they've "let the real Bible elude them." Steinfels adds "modern minds will still seek deeper meanings and still want relevant instructions for living. As for the anicent worry about seamlessness, modern minds, sensitized to multiple perspectives, often find more coherence in contrasting accounts than perfectly harmonized ones." Even if you accept the Bible is a compendium of orally transmitted Godly-inspired accounts of various persons, then the issue of seamlessness recedes anyway just as if you and I were present at a concert and conveyed varied impressions.

Yet I confess I'm of two minds: what archeologists and "historical Jesus," specialists brilliantly uncover provide a bedrock foundation for faith; the knowledge that King David or Jesus actually walked the roads of an excavated town conveys familarity and immanence. On the other hand, I find it's through reading reflections and commentaries, solo and in community, that more personally meaningful revelations surface; those that have been filtered through lives of the interpreters.

In preparation to teach Brueggemann's "Prophetic Imagination," in adult Sunday school, I've been adjunctly reading Podhoretz's "The Prophets." Podhoretz, more known as the political father of contemporary neo-con's, is an amateur Biblical scholar, but one superbly accomplished in bringing a multiplicity of citations to bear. In the section on Hosea, he introduces conflicting views on whether the first three chapters were written by a Hosea I and the last eleven by Hosea II. Issues of authorship are inevitably defined through detailed scientic analysis' of linguistics and grammar.

The non-technical theories are equally if not more fascinating. As Podhoretz writes, Hosea I's "focus on idolatry as against morality places him in the ethos and era of pre-classical prophecy," while "the primacy of the ethical law over the ritual or cultic only becomes a feature of the book [some scholars] say, in Chapters 4 through 11." In other words, could Hosea I be an earlier writer emphasizing ritual obedience when the people were newer to monotheism versus a later writer, in more prosperous Solomonic times, who sought to connect what transpired in worship to the needs of the poor? Would fundamentalism today naturally tilt towards the former while progressives instinctively turn to the latter, in the same way some geneticists argue blue or red-state political leanings are primarily biological?

Brueggemann, according to Wikipedia, is an advocate of a rhetorical criticism that "studies the use of words and phrases to explicate how arguments have been built to drive home a certain point the author or speaker intended to make." Reflecting a greater plurality within contemporary congregations, he wrote in 1995, "An honest facing of pluralism can only be pastorally and usefully engaged by an open-ended adjudication that takes the form of trustful, respectful conversation. While such an approach sounds like relativism, an answerng objectivism is destructive not only of the community but of any chance to receive new truth together."

Had Brueggemann's comments on respectful conversation been taken to heart by our entire parish, especially that "texts are open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," it is more likely than not that a small number of partisans wouldn't have taken the actions that destroyed the church, in their view, in order to save it.

How does their secessionist rallying cry 'Spritual Authority,' affect discernment? Are they advocating obedience to ancient texts that only scholars can authenticate and decipher; to stories orally transmitted and compiled by pre or post-exilic Hebrew editors reflecting different periods and concerns in the progressing history of Israel; or do they more traditionally only rely on the Septuagint Greek or the King James?

At the former Episcopal, now Ugandan, church I once attended, the preferred translation was the New International which draws primarily from the Greek as directed by a committee "united in their committment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God's Word in written form." That literalist approach would not likely predispose a completed version "open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," as much conform to cultural norms of the intended demographic. If the subsequent Bible did not, the final product would not be marketable to the audience for which it was created.

Brueggemann writes, "the collapse of the hegemony of medieval Christianity, hastened by the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the rise of science, produced, as Susan Bordo has made clear, a profound anxiety about certitude." The profound need for certitude is a compelling force as contrasted against the an ever growing plurality in once homogenous churches. The resulting backlast enables and enacts a defense mechanism justified as a faithful reaction against a perceived coercion that reflects the new reality as an intrusion.

An announcment advertising a lecture by Brueggemann at the Mayfield Salisbury Church, in Edinburgh, Scotland, stated "for present-day Christians who find themselves in a bewildering atmosphere of materialism and scientific secularism that puts enormous pressure on their inherited faith." Typical reactions are "to adopt an unquestioning attitude to Scripture which Brueggemann associates with fundamentalism, or to accept the objective, analytical approach, discarding in the text anything that does not yield to a rational understanding of faith and theology. He seems the main object of faith that is grounded in Scripture as the transformation of human life, and this, he thinks, is not achieved by expounding doctrine or ethics or by historical criticism. These do not change people. It is in the telling of stories, in vivid images and analogies, that human imagination is stirred to receive the Word of God in Scripture."

The ad concludes, "at the heart of this is a question about the nature of God - the domesticated God of conventional religion, or the free, unpredictable God who works wonders in the human soul. Faith that is reliant upon the freedom of God against the assumptions of human reason makes things possible that the world defines as impossible, and brings about transformation in the human spirit that strengthens and renews a person's life, moving him on to a deeper, more creative faith."

In the book of Hosea, God equates sin in a personal way with lewdness; in a corporate way with national idolatry; like a Father who looks murderously upon a child when he's disobedient, and lovingly, when she's true; He condemns; He adores - He even argues with Himself and changes His mind repeatedly. This free Creator demonstrates while choices have consequences, they aren't predictable, or dependent on human reason, just as an untamble passion more often than not, rules over logic, in our self-destructive impulsive moods that are later much regretted (as God might have after the Flood when He declared He would never again destroy every living creature).

Eamon Duffy's written a new book, "Marking the Hours," that begins with an exposition on the standard Medieval English prayer book yet hinges on the everyday lives of its readers. While horrified art dealers wail against the desecration of these ancient illuminated tomes through scribblings in the margins (which I admit also makes me cringe), Duffy re-animates the lives of the doodlers. In his review in the Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reports, "One woman, in her marginalia, laments the destruction of a shrine and details the contents of her linen closet."

Duffy, a Cambridge historian, is a grand writer with a marked perspective. He's an advoate of a Tudor top-down Reformation despite the legacy of John Wycliffe and the anti-Rome Lollards, a century before, and evidence the the great majority of the English grassroots laity wholly embraced Protestantism within twenty years of its introduction. Duffy nevertheless claims the Reformation wasn't natural, but aristocratically forced, against an organic Catholicism. It's not surprising, but any less poignant, that the most dramatic marginalia in the book belong to Thomas More in the Tower, who wrote "Gyve me thy grace good lord/To set the world at nought." A prayer book is what it is; it gains vitality through the traces of its owner's life.

I've discovered how to become a guest patron at our local university library (there's an annual fee but it's less than what I would've spent at Borders in a month). On the third floor, where I've yet to observe more than a handful of students, there are stacks of theology, glittering like buried treasure, to tempt willing hearts and minds. I'll be mining the trove for years, hoping to share sparkling trinkets that personally resonate in ripples outward over time as Duffy's marginalia speaks to him and his readers over the centuries (and some of these books haven't been checked out for a hundred years).

My first: the elusive Development of Christian Doctrine by Cardinal Newman. When he wrote it, he said, "I had no sleep for a week, and was fainting away or something like it day after day," no doubt in anticipation of the reaction of disciples like William George Ward who said of his hunger for dogma, "I would like to find a Papal Bull each morning on my breakfast table." Who could resist this?

Newman may be the greatest all-time artiste of rhetorical criticism. This book, unlike books that seek to please everyone, was attacked as too Catholic for the Anglicans and too Anglican for the Catholics. If something is detested by adversaries on either side, it's probably just right. Newman egged them both on by writing, "growth is the only evidence of life," and that the Bible contains, "the main outlines of a great system of dogmas, which remain to be fully developed."

I can hardly wait to unearth how Newman distinguishes legitimate development from corruption. In Colin McGinn's review of Stewart Pinker's new book, "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature." McGinn reports Pinker concludes words like 'going, having, preventing,' are genetic and necessary as survival skills. Pinker relates this to verbs where 'pour,' and 'fill' fulfill the same physics function but imply different meanings from the perspective of the actor, the pourer, and the filled, the container.

McGinn writes, "it just doesn't seem true that everthing nonphysical that we think about is metaphorical; for example, our legal concepts such as 'rights' are surely not all mere metaphors, introduced on the shoulders of the concepts of intuitive physics." I think they are as well. My driving compulsion is to unveil explicit connections between covert or overt language and its derivative destructive consequences, the abridgement of human rights, so that actors appreciate and acknowledge the moral physics of action.

The prophet Hosea II, Podhoretz (rather ironically), and Brueggemann, write of the primacy of morality over ritual. Newman originally railed against the dogmatic corruption of Roman Catholicism, then backtracked to justify his conversion. In the end, it's the Baghdad booksellers, though, that are the steadfast containers, bravely facing death, at the hands of malevolent pourers. Of this, I am always mindful.