Going Post-historical

I note this week a special gift - a new e-mail exchange with friend Bob who wrote to recommend a book of conversation between theologians Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright.

I ask in return, for starters, whether choosing to believe is the same as believing.

Bob responds, "it is easier to choose to believe Jesus is the son of God than search for alternative explanations to historical truth," contrasting this simple certainty to those like Borg (implying myself likewise) who encounter Scripture as: (a) a mix of history remembered and metamorphized; (b) discerned through the lens of personal experience; and (c) reflected through the judgment of mainline scholars.

Bob's declarative statement is authoritative; the a, b, c's are not.

Copping to (b), not (a and c), I spent the week listening to Brian and Dennis Wilson. In the Pacific Ocean Blue liner notes, producer Gregg Jakobson writes, "Dennis was never a long-range thinker. He was the most present person I've ever known. Dennis was so focused on each song that he hardly thought about it as an album."

Minus sharp beginnings and endings, each song bursts abruptly into beautiful harmony, expends itself, and fades, natural as a passing storm at sea.

It's never easy to experience Scripture in a present non-linear fashion (I even own a Bible which re-arranges Books into what's proclaimed to be the logical timeline).

Biblical stories appreciated in themselves, for themselves, lack the narrative of temporal progression, and don't carry for the reader an appeal upon which to plant seeds of authority.

Nietzshe said he could only believe in a god who can dance.

Genesis dances like other Creation myths of the ancient world. This proves it neither true nor false since the ways people imagine what's lost to time may have some bearing on what can be only one original truth.

God's answer to Job when he sought progressive narrative was that he gaze at the heavens and ponder who marked off their dimensions while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy.

Listen to the magic of yet another dancer: "He closed his eyes, and behold, he made a mountain rise, widened the banks of the river, created a forest, made the stars ascend to heaven, erased the clouds, became smaller and smaller, with a head like an ant's egg and very long arms and legs - at his gesture the wind blew through the town square lifting men and women into the sky; while his messengers, old servants in gray frock coats, climbed tall poles hoisting enormous gray sheets from the earth and spreading them out on high becuase their mistress wanted a misty morning."

Whether Job, or Kafka, and stories which have no basis in experience, either your ideas inform the experience of reading, or the experience of reading informs your ideas.

Whether the Bible is history remembered or metamorphized is unimportant when reveling in its beauty and majesty; and the judgment of mainline scholars, though interesting to read when you're in the mood, isn't determinate when all ideas are open doors.

The Spotysyltuckian can't be authoritative when it's about the appreciation of learning external to its relation to a progressive historial sequence which by its nature eliminates any claim to authority.

That may be what divides us, theologically, Bob, but never, as friends.