My Brother's Keeper

וּלְשָׁמְרָֽהּ 

(Gen 2:15)

לשְׁמֹ֕ר

(Gen 3:24)

הֲשֹׁמֵ֥ר

(Gen 4:9)

וְאַתָּ֖ה אֶת־בְּרִיתִ֣י תִשְׁמֹ֑ר 

(Gen 17:9)

I can't count the amount of times I've heard the argument that religion is the cause of the worst kind of hatred and conflict.

The truth is we don't know how to talk about this stuff. We use the word "religion" as a bracket. We juxtapose it with words like "spirituality" or "realism" or "science" or "freedom", not understanding that we limited the meaning of all of them and made them all enemies.

But the Christian message is a message of hope and truth, that there is a God and he cares about his creation. The first "job" that man has in the book of Genesis is to take care of the earth and to take care of each other, to be its "keeper" or "guard" or "watchman". God entrusts us to one another and we really have to look out for one another or this is not going to work. Our "common ground" is not merely that we exist but that our identity is of brothers and sisters with a common "father" who have an absolute responsibility over one another and the earth as a whole. We choose violence but it's against our first call to "keep", "guard", and "watch". God sends His Son when we refuse to be reconciled with God and our greater calling.

The thing is, even if you hate religion and faith and all that, it's your calling to care for one another and this world we live in. I sincerely and respectfully believe that you are mistaken if you slash God out of that view of things, but you know the call and you've felt it whenever you've stood up for someone or tried to build up your community or tried to save the earth. I'd love to talk about God and faith, but if you really won't we can still talk about taking care of one another and this world we live in. We can work towards that.

Blame religion all you want, but every extremist will eventually have to answer for how they betrayed what they said they stood for. Their contradictions will be laid bear and their calloused consciences will eventually be cut.

So right now, when you read about Christians being killed for being Christians, maybe don't section that reality off because they don't share your view of the world. They are human and they are not simply being discriminated against or bullied or economically or socially disadvantaged, as terrible as those things are. They are being murdered and their blood is as valuable as any other person who dies because someone stopped "keeping" or "guarding" or "watching" over one another and started treating them as less than whatever is alive on this earth.

All you have to do is care about this unless you can do more than that, in which case you should.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 

(Gen 2:15 NRS)

He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. 

(Gen 3:24 NRS)

Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?" 

(Gen 4:9 NRS)

God said to Abraham, "As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. 

(Gen 17:9 NRS)

Giving Up

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

 

-1 Corinthians 13:11-13

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food; for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness.

But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.

 -Hebrews 5:12-14

In the last 5 years, I have managed to accomplish most of the cliches typical of someone in their 30's. I finished school, began a long term career, got married, had children, started going to bed earlier, and, of strange importance, started to give up on popular culture. Popular culture is a plastic womb lined in fake fur, an artificial environment that feels more at home to me than the outdoors ever could, all of it mediated through plastics and lighting and wiring and synthesizers and amplification. Nearly all of it are faint echoes spanning decades, though not going back longer than the advent of the recordable or transmittable mediums. Even those works of art that go back even a little further stand at the end of a living chain of development or improvisation or adaptation, squashed dead and crystallized. They are, with little exception, the results of mass media. Nothing was transmitted hand to hand.

Popular culture also has an endless obsession with youth and, as a product of that culture, I am too. It's greatest artists flourish in their middle-to-late twenties. No 16 year old will put a picture up on his wall of Robert Plant in 2014. It has to be 1973, during their legendary Houses of the Holy tour, when Plant was a "golden god", free from any of the depressing worries that plague adults. His young son Karac would not be dead for another 4 years. His current irritation at staving of Led Zeppelin reunions is met with much ire because everyone else wants it to be 1973. He maintains that it is impossible: he wants to live in the present. He's also a 65 year old man.

I noticed the anxiety of aging when my hair began to grey and I began to lose much of it. I felt paranoid at others noticing it. I wanted to hide the bald spot or dye my hair. I didn't see my body teaching me lessons and I felt ashamed. I saw pictures of myself at 18 years old, the only time in my life that I wasn't terribly overweight and my hair was long and black, and I wanted it all back. As my twenties faded I felt uncomfortable when someone 10 years younger than me would discuss music. Art has always meant so much to me but I could no longer stay up to date on everything happening that week. When I worked at a music store I could discuss new music with authority but now I couldn't invest the amount of time and energy needed to keep up.

That image of the 18 year old fades as time brings me farther and farther away. I'm only 33. 

In my 30's I also had older friends. Becoming a co-worker, a husband, and a father put me in their league. I now had more in common with them than I did a 15 year old. These new roles also created a divide among my most immediate peer group. Many remained unmarried and unattached. They looked at "parent-culture" or "divorcee culture" or "homeowners" with contempt. We sold out, paragons of mediocrity, embracing conventions and cliches. Maybe we dreamed of greater things but they were only fantasies. 

I felt that contempt, that divide in myself. Did I have a right to make art and worry about insurance? Could I make music and put my kids to bed? Did I have any right to anger? I've been conflicted. That conflict speaks: "you are too old for this, this is just sad". I tend to agree. I can't stand when older people try to be young, to sing young songs with an old man's voice or hide age. Age can only be hidden poorly. Concealing the marks of time does not make you look young or old, both of which grant a certain grandeur and dignity. They put you in a third category of appearance, where the attention gained is not what was intended.

On my 30th birthday I worried like other 30-year olds do. At 15, a 30 year old is very old. These gaps of time are relative, but I didn't always understand that. When I was 5 years old, I looked at the 13 and 14 year olds on my school as fully formed and intimidating adults. There was a great chasm in my mind, where children stood at one end and everyone over 13 stood at the other. At that time, there wasn't a whole lot of difference in appearance between them and my parents or my aunts and uncles.  

On my 30th birthday my mind turned almost immediately to David Bowie. David Bowie is one of a few artists in popular culture who found relevance in every era he occupied. Let's Dance was a period-appropriate album, danceable New Wave and utterly contemporary. Tonight was pure adult contemporary. He even managed to transform the title track, a cover of one the best songs that came from his collaboration with Iggy Pop on one of Iggy Pop's most important albums, into the kind of palatable banality that was of that time. It's really wonderful. David Bowie also wrote Rebel Rebel. His first breakout single, Space Oddity, capitalized on the "space race" and the obsession with ethereal cosmic frontiers invoked in popular culture, in Looney Tunes and in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was of every era, transmuting disparate elements of the fringe cultures into something common and approachable. Like Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill, dozens of influences played together as though made for one another, even if they weren't. His mind and his craft revolved around two principals: collaboration and synthesis. He collaborated with contemporary artists and thinkers, either by proxy or within his bands, visual artists, and producers. Most importantly, he synthesized all these elements into his voice and movements. Each album, each video, each song were densely packed time capsules. They invited you to read a new book or see a new film or to artistic experimentation.

Wes Anderson is usually derided as being a product of the pretentiousness of twee, hipster culture. He isn't. He's another great collaborator and his work celebrates astute aesthetic synthesis. Each film is an open invitation to more art. He doesn't claim these influences as his own: Stefan Zweig, Satyajit Ray, Louis Malle, the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, Boys Life Magazine, Saturday Night Live...his is an invitation to the blurred boundary between high art and common culture and the way they occasionally flirt with one another, where they attend one another's parties. He doesn't celebrate an artist for their obscurity but for their forgotten accessibility. 

On my 30th birthday my mind turned to David Bowie because at 30 years old he began his "Berlin trilogy", a trio of albums that came from his collaborations with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, as well as Iggy Pop, Robert Fripp, Carlos Alomar, and others. They represent Bowie's greatest artistic achievement. Bowie and Iggy Pop moved to Berlin in an attempt to get off of narcotics. Watching Bowie's degradation between the eras of Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station is depressing. His face thins and his eyes grow more distant. Don Cornelius had to chastise him during a taping of Soul Train where Bowie was under a narcotic haze, reminding him that it wasn't every day that a white artist was invited to the show.The art he was making was great, but it threatened to destroy him.

The three albums - Low, Heroes, and Lodger - are sober and efficient while utterly free, experimental, and, for at least half of each album, pure pop music. He accomplished something impossible: he gave the world Can and Kraftwerk in a way they could understand. He also had very little in common with an artist even 10 years younger than him. He already had a marriage fail. He had already reinvented himself many times. His songs were often abstract and even a little silly early on, but he had also sung about the death of his brother, of existential brokenness, and about those corners of existence closed off to younger people. They wouldn't understand. They couldn't understand. But maybe they'd dance.

Ideally, experience is a reward for aging. Experience is also a frequently forged document. Lesser skills are passed off as something greater and deeper. But there are some experiences you can't fake. You can't fake having been hungry. You can't fake the sudden or tragic death of someone who made you who you are. You can't fake real sacrifice or long hours of work. You can't fake a marriage. Or fatherhood. Or adulthood. Or, most of all, maturity. I admire the Bowie who made Heathen and Reality and who married Iman. I admire the Bowie who repudiated the man who made some of his greatest art without denying the art itself. He didn't just have to grow to become that man. He had to age.

I obsess over age, about how I have spent time and how much I have left. It's not death that scares me. It's wasting time, of wasting art and learning and giving what you've been given and what you've developed towards the common Good.

Book Reflections: Vatican II, the New Theology, and the Search for Meaning in Post-Conciliar Faith Formation

I wrote this back in January on our diocesan "professional page"/social network. Since I'm about to move back to Albany in about a week, I wanted to make sure that this existed someplace else. The audience was other faith formation leaders who work in the diocese. I wanted to give people who do what I do for a living access to some background on the Nouvelle Théologie and it's contributions to the Second Vatican Council and how much it relates to our work.

I think the title is a little pretentious and the tone is too, if not a little distant as well. But I think the info is helpful if you like this kind of thing.

I also really recommend both of these books.

Book Reflections, 1/24/2013: Vatican  II, the New Theology, and the Search for Meaning in Post-Conciliar Faith Formation

Yves Congar, My Journal of the Council, Liturgical Press, 2012 (translated edition)

Jürgen Mettepenningen, . London and New York: T & T Clark (A Continuum Imprint), 2010.

Without question, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was the most significant event within the last century of the Catholic Church's history. It marked a shift in everything from how we worshiped, how we engaged the non-Catholic world, and how we understood ourselves as God's people. Today, faith formation leaders embody the Council's call for greater lay participation in the life and leadership of the Church, as found in the Constitution Lumen Gentium and the Decree Apostolicam Actuositatem.

A number of recent books have evaluated the post-Conciliar landscape as a quest for identity, for example John O' Malley's "What Happened at Vatican II?" and Massimo Faggioli's "Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning". Modern debates on the Council distinguish between what the Council meant and what it actually said. These questions still play out in parishes when the Council is invoked as the reason to do this or that. Some of the great fault lines in the life of the Church today mark the different assessments that people make of the Council and its legacy.

Usually, these debates take into account two different aspects, either the so-called "spirit of the Council" or the documents themselves. But two recently published books give another perspective to the Council, particularly the period that led into the Council. This time period is not incidental. In fact, if there is a hermeneutic to the Council then it must include historical situation surrounding it. That meaning of the Council cannot be reduced to simply "aggiornamento" or simply an opening up the world (as important as that is). Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has noted that any authentic interpretation of Vatican II needs to take into account the two councils that set the stage for it, namely Trent and the first Vatican Council. Clearly there is a bigger story to tell.

Moreover, the Council itself was also the culmination of a century of theological debates. At the time of the convening of the Council, the prominant theological school was Neo-Scholasticism, which built upon the thought and methodology of St. Thomas Aquinas and his later commentators. The scholastic approach of Aquinas was recognized by Pope Leo XIII as normative for the whole Church in his encyclical Aeterni Patris, especially as an antidote to radically secular approaches to philosophy. By the end of the 19th century, however, a revolution had begun in philosophy and the sciences, particularly in the historical sciences. In turn, theologians began to evaluate the Tradition in the context of its sources.

This return to the sources, or ressourcement, slowly began to revolutionize the theological landscape. The Church Fathers of both East and West were re-appropriated into the Tradition. The early liturgies were studied and helped spur a wider Liturgical Movement. Doctrine was studied in terms of their formation over the course of time. The Catholic convert John Henry Newman had already published his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in 1845 and had recast Tradition as a process that finds its root in the apostolic era but not fully-formed, illuminating Jesus' words to his Apostles in John's Gospel, that the Holy Spirit would teach and remind them after the Resurrection (John 14:26). In particular, Biblical studies went through a long and storied struggle as they too appropriated new methodologies to better understand the text.

All of this was not without controversy. Divisions arose within the Protestant traditions when these methodologies were applied to the Bible, with liberal Protestantism siding with the new methods in biblical studies and the biblical fundamentalist movement arising in reaction to the perceived new threat to the inerrant word of God. The Catholic tradition, however, had always embodied the relationship between faith and reason. These controversies occasioned a further self-reflection in the Church with debates that were hardly resolved by the time of the Council. Pius IX issued a Syllabus of Errors to combat many modern philosophical and theological approaches that were incompatible with Church teaching. Pius X later issued a Syllabus of his own, as well as the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which condemned many modern approaches under the umbrella of a movement known as Modernism. Modernism, he wrote, was "the synthesis of all heresies".

This encyclical, along with the Syllabus set a program that ran counter to the ressourcement movement. It is only in the years after the Council that the overarching meaning of those condemnations have become clear. Joseph Ratzinger noted that the proper interpretation of these pronouncements sees that any approach to philosophy and theology that denies any place to God or is hostile to his immediate involvement is untenable to Catholics. In the introduction to his commentary on the Vatican II Constitution Dei Verbum he also notes that many within the Council's administrative leadership were surprised to find that what they had been condemning as "Modernism" was in fact an entirely different theological school than neo-scholasticism and saw itself as being in the service of the Church and not at all opposed to it. As a matter of approach, Councils do not decide in favor of one theological school over an other with regards to approach. Ratzinger's assessment has also been echoed by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, as was as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's document Interpretation of the Bible in the Church as well as the future Pope's own Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini.

Several theologians contributed to this "new theology" or Nouvelle Théologie. Henri De Lubac and his collaborators spearheaded new studies into the Church Fathers, creating a series that reprinted and re-translated their work for modern audiences. Marie-Dominique Chenu wrote of the practical and pastoral dimension to theology. Jean Danielou wrote about the necessity to return to the sources and was critical of Thomism as a solitary approach to theology. Yves Congar, widely considered among the biggest (if not the biggest) influence on the Council Fathers, wrote about the possibility of reform in the Church that did not necessitate schism. He also worked tirelessly in the ecumenical movement at a time when the Church was still struggling with its role in dialogue with other Christians.

Congar was also a theological advisor, or peritus, of the Council, as were several representatives of the Nouvelle Théologie. He also kept a diary from the time of the announcement of the Council that extends past the end of the last session in 1965. His diary gives a unique perspective of the Council on an almost day-to-day level from one its most influential behind the scenes workers. Congar helps construct interventions, study groups, lectures, and even sections of the texts. There is a story that prior to his elevation as pope, John XXIII had read Congar's "True and False Reform in the Church" and mused at the idea that reform was really possible within the Church. Apparently he thought so. Many of the Council Fathers let Congar know that they had been strongly affected by his work, even though Congar is frequently unsure of the value of his presence at the Council.

His diaries also show the radical differences in theological approaches present among the Council Fathers. Within days of Pope John XXIII's legendary opening address at the Council, however, the tide begins to turn towards greater openness and dialogue with the world. Congar recounts the interventions of the Council Fathers during the sessions. Many are tedious (at times worthy of an eye roll or two) but some of them really move the hearts and minds of the other Council Fathers. Many of the influential peritii are stereotyped as modernists by a few influential members, but it's clear that equating their positions to Modernism holds little weight to most of the Council Fathers. The diary is also a veritable "who's who" of the Catholic world of the time. At one point, Congar meets Raymond Brown at a time when his star was still rising within the field of biblical studies. He also records his impressions of Fulton Sheen, which is it once resonant and hilarious, even for his admirers.

Congar recognizes a "spirit of the Council" from the very beginning. It is this "spirit" that will be a point of contention after the Council. The peritii themselves will populate the post-conciliar theological landscape. Names like Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, Edward Schillebeeckx, Henry De Lubac, and Hans Küng are familiar to lay Catholics. Many of them would continue their work in support of a Vatican III, seeking a more radical vision of the Church. Küng in particular saw the documents of the Council as compromises that did not do justice to what he has seen as the real vision of the Council. But Ratzinger, De Lubac, and other like-minded theologians began to feel uncomfortable with certain currents that were making their way through the post-conciliar Church. This vision of the Council was not only superseding the intentions of the Council Fathers, but at times breaking with them entirely. Ratzinger will later note that calls for a Vatican III do not recognize how monumental and even traumatic a Council is in the life of the Church. Councils take several decades before they begin to be understood. In Congar's diaries, Ratzinger is almost always mentioned along with his once close collaborator Karl Rahner. Afterwards, Ratzinger will speak of the parting of ways that he experienced with Rahner and others who he joined in founding the academic journal Concilium (including Küng, Congar, and Schillebeeckx). Ratzinger (who along with De Lubac, Walter Kasper, and Hans Urs Von Balthasar founded an alternate post-conciliar academic journal Communio) felt that their call for a new Council, as well as the themes of their writings, had sailed beyond their original vision of faithful renewal into entirely different waters. This tension is still present in the current theological landscape (for a great review by Fr Robert Barron of Congar's diaries and the Concilium/Communio divine, see here: Yves Congar and the Meaning of Vatican II

Faith formation leaders often feel very far from the world of academic theology but any benefit of the legacy of the Council has to take into account the foundations of the Council. That foundation is simply this: how we think and believe is as important as what we think and what we believe. It is also a reminder that the pastoral dimension of the Church does not exist apart from the theological dimension of the Church. Karl Rahner once wrote that "all theology is pastoral theology". This is very clear when faith formation leaders work with parents. The question is not "What is the Trinity" but rather "How does God's self-revelation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit apply to my daily life and struggles? How do the teachings of the Church help me make sense of who I am and my place in this world? What real hope do I have beyond this life? Is there any life besides this one? How real is it? And what of my loved ones?" The knowledge of the faith makes little sense to most people without the personal dimension. Gaudium et Spes tells us that "the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear." In Christ, we find out who we really are. Dei Verbum speaks of God's revelation to us squarely in terms of "salvation", that is, that God reveals Himself to us in our current troubles and worries precisely to offer a solution to them. Ultimately, that solution is found in God Himself, the Father who lovingly supplies for the needs of His children, the Son who shows us the meaning of life and rescues us from sin and death, the Holy Spirit who teaches and reminds us everything we are so apt to forget while giving us an immanent experience of God's life in the here and now as to prepare for the life to come.

In Christ we are given a real hope and the promise of salvation. His Kingdom is both "at hand" (Mark 1:15) and "does not belong to this world" (John 18:36). It is not enough to tell people about God as though He is merely an object of study. Rather, for the faith to take hold there has to be a concrete encounter with the God who not only cares for us greatly but who is alive and active, who is concerned with all of our problems and wants to share in all of our joys, who rescues us and will never let us go.

Cheating on God: A Brief Note On Violence In The Bible

I'm teaching the 4th class in my Old Testament class tonight. My goal is to cover all of Joshua and Judges and as much of 1 Samuel as I can.

Joshua and Judges are arguably the two most violent books of the whole Bible and usually come up when arguing the place that the Bible has as a central text in informing moral values within western civilization. I remember reading a very graphic comic that Nail Gaiman produced on the most despicable episode from Judges, implying that anyone who uses the Bible to teach morality is out of their minds.

The point of both Joshua and Judges is to show how bad things can get when God is forgotten. The people make up "gods" for themselves. In this context, "gods" refers not only to little sculptures made of clay or metals. The word "gods" means something that you have created for yourself to fulfill your own desires. These "gods" would say what the people wanted to hear because their voices were actually the expressions of the people who made them. These "gods" would encourage people to do what they want already wanted to do because they were thinly veiled projections of the desires of the people.

The result of this way of living was a slow but inevitable collapse of their society. People became more selfish and therefore more violent. Eventually, the people would sense the problem but not its cause. In Judges 10, the people express their frustrations to the God that they abandoned: "We have sinned against you, because we have abandoned our God and have worshiped the Baals [i.e. gods of their own making]" (Judges 10:10). This was a matter of fact, a confession of guilt. But in His response, God does not help them. God's response is classic "Go and cry to the gods whom you have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of distress" (Judges 10:14). If this was put in terms of a relationship, they were admitting to "cheating on" God, but not willing to give up the adulterous relationship. Finally, the people wise up and "put away the foreign gods from among them and worshiped the LORD; and he could no longer bear to see Israel suffer" (Judges 10:16).

Of course, Judges has another 11 chapters that follow and the situation will grow more dire following this brief moment of respite. By the beginning of 1 Samuel, the righteous are a precious few. Judges wants to answer a few key questions: Why do we need a king? How and why did things get so bad for us? What is the purpose of the Law? And perhaps most importantly: Did God do this to us...or did we do this to ourselves? The answer to that last question is complicated. There are three possibilities within the Old Testament: 1) God outright calls for violence 2) God permits violent actions and 3) God outright prohibits violence.

The reality is that all three positions are found within the Old Testament. There are times when God calls for violence. Pacifism was not a national policy for ancient Israel. More importantly, it was definitely not the policy of the nations that surrounded them. The Psalms will sometimes talk about being delivered from "the violent". Violence was only condoned for two reasons: as a penalty for breaking the law (ex: "eye for an eye", Ex 21:24) or for warfare (Deut 20). In the New Testament, Jesus will "finish" these teachings. Matthew 5, Jesus will say: "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile (Mat 5:38-41). Jesus shows us that the principal of the law wasn't penalty or violence, but justice. Jesus extols mercy as the highest expression of love for your neighbor. If that is true, than mercy doesn't abolish justice but fulfills it. In the old covenant, God makes provisions for people to use violence to survive among violent nations. Jesus, on the other hand, makes it possible for His followers to survive in a violent world without turning to violence.

This helps answer why God will permit violent actions that He Himself did not initiate with no obvious penalty. For example, in chapter 2 of First Kings King David commands his son and successor Solomon to pay back all of the men who betrayed him and tried to cause him harm. Kind David is a king of a nation amongst other kings of other nations. He is not outright condemned for acting as other kings act. But it can be argued that David's actions come in the wake of a tailspin to his rule that began when he seduced the wife of his loyal soldier Uriah (2 Samuel 11). Moreover, this episode in First Kings begins a cycle of violence and disobedience that will culminate in two successive exiles of the people of Israel and the collapse of their monarchies. When violence goes unchecked and isn't condemned, then the lives of the violent will inevitably end in violence. The people of Israel remember this principal in their Proverbs when it says: "Do not envy the violent and do not choose any of their ways; for the perverse are an abomination to the LORD, but the upright are in his confidence" (Pro 3:31-32).

Lastly, there are certainly ways that God clearly condemns violence in the Old Testament. Innocent life is protected by the Torah: "You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry" (Ex 22:21-23). The resident alien, the widow, and the orphan stand for all the most vulnerable and unprotected in their own society. These laws protected the vulnerable people among the Israelites from violence and were to a degree extended to all non-threatening nations. When a town was set to be conquered, the people of Israel would first offer terms of peace (Deut 20:10). If they accepted, the people of that town was placed in forced labor. The major exception to this policy were the nations already living in the promised land: the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites (Deut 20:17). They were to be totally annihilated, including women and children.

Those passages of the Torah are more than a little chilling. As a reader living in the 21st century, I would be remiss to read them with a look of self-righteous indignation on my face. The more I reflect on those commands to violence, the more I realize that I am reading them as a product of over 20 centuries of exposure to the Gospels. Even a cursory understanding of the Gospels tells us that Jesus condemned violence and vengeance. If he described violence at all it was either in descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) terms (cf. Matt 10:21f), in a cautionary context (cf. Matt 26:52), as an outright prohibition (Matt 5:38f), or within the narrative of a parable (Luke 10:25ff, 20:9ff). In Matthew 10:34-39, Jesus ambiguously speaks of of his mission not as one of bringing peace, but of bringing a sword, "to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;and one's foes will be members of one's own household" (Matt 10:35-36). It seems clear that the reference is not to actual violence, but the situation of strife that the Christian message can cause within a family if not everyone accepts it. This seems far more realistic than people give it credit for being. If you can think of a family where siblings or parents do not share the same convictions, then it's not hard to imagine conflict arising out of that.

In his 2010 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation "Verbum Domini", Pope Benedict XVI discussed the "'dark' passages of Scripture". I think it's the most useful tool to approaching stories of violence in Scripture.He noted that such stories need to be read within their historical context. Above, I mentioned that that laws regarding warfare or the conduct of a king make sense when you place them within their cultural milieu. The corrective to violence in the Bible is the message of prophets. Pope Benedict XVI notes that "in the Old Testament, the preaching of the prophets vigorously challenged every kind of injustice and violence, whether collective or individual, and thus became God’s way of training his people in preparation for the Gospel."

But above all of that is our need to acknowledge the uneasiness that violent stories in the Bible cause in us. One extreme is to say that stories of violence nullify the worth of the Bible for modern society. For one, so many of those stories are cautionary tales and yield great value if you finish the story. But also, acknowledging the place of the Bible in Western Civilization is simply a matter of fact. Western Civilization is built on not only the Greco-Roman culture but Jewish culture as well. To excise the place of the Biblical tradition from our collective patrimony is an exercise of extreme postmodern narcissism, where all established narratives are nothing more than acts of cultural imperialism. The origins of our laws, our art, our modes of expression, and our ways of thinking are simply unthinkable without this tradition, whether they were formed because of this tradition or in opposition to this tradition. It is among our culture's first great ideas and projects.

Lastly, these stories make us uncomfortable because we have inherited the fruit of this tradition, namely the laws of love, sacrifice, and compassion that are established in the life and teachings of Jesus. Pope Benedict makes this point when he writes that "we should be aware that the correct interpretation of these passages requires a degree of expertise, acquired through a training that interprets the texts in their historical-literary context and within the Christian perspective which has as its ultimate hermeneutical key 'the Gospel and the new commandment of Jesus Christ brought about in the paschal mystery'”. The Gospel established the reprehensibility of violence. We feel uneasy precisely because of the revolution in Jesus' teachings.

If you accept even the broad sketches that make up this story, then this last point is a wondrous thing. God works with His people as a father works with his child. The father speaks to his child in ways that they can understand. A father tolerates certain expressions of immaturity as the children are in the process of growing and learning. A father will speak with language that the children can understand even if there is more to say on a subject. A father acknowledges that a child grows and matures slowly and isn't afraid to challenge them along the way. It would be foolish to expect a father to speak to his adult son or daughter in the same way that he did when they were small children. A father will expect more from a relationship with a grown son or daughter than he did when they were small children. The constant is the relationship.

In Christ, God says something definitive to His children. He acknowledges their often violent past but also instills in them a healthy regret for perpetuating it. When we acknowledge that past, we can learn from it: the pain, the sorrow, the regret. In Christ, our neighbors become our brothers and sisters. To spill their blood is ultimately to spill our own. We cannot go there again.

Eagerly Awaiting: On Prophets, Wonder Workers, and the First Century

This is the first of a two part post. I think the second one will be more interesting, but it needs a little background. This last Sunday, the Church celebrated the Nativity of St John the Baptist. John is one of the most fascinating people in the whole Bible. He's a lot like the Old Testament prophet Samuel in that he stands at a great crossroad in the religious history of the People of God.The book of First Samuel recalls Samuel as both seer and prophet, noting that "Formerly in Israel, anyone who went to inquire of God would say, “Come, let us go to the seer”; for the one who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer" (1 Samuel 9:9). Samuel ushers in the prophetic age, an age that (in the Christian tradition) would end with John the Baptist. The figure that would later be synonymous with the prophets was not Samuel, however, but Elijah the Tishbite (1 Kings 17ff).

This first part will sketch out the role of prophets and "wonder workers" among the people of Israel in the centuries leading into first century, when Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist lived. The second will deal with some really cool stuff in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It's not "cool" cool, but cool for me and maybe even cool for you if you dig this kind of thing. To be honest, this first part is a bit dry. I only included the things that would make the second part easier to read. I didn't make it one big post because, honestly, it would be way longer than it already is. If you walk out with a deeper appreciation for the milieu of the prophets, then that's great. You might even want to skip it if you already know a lot about the prophets. The second part will be more interesting. I hope.

Jesus and John the Baptist were unique not only for what they did and who they were, but also how they stood out from other interesting figures from the 1st century. It can be a surprise to find out that Jesus and John were not the only reputed wonder workers and prophetic figures to appear in the hotbed of Roman-occupied Palestine.

I: On Prophets, Wonder Workers, and the First Century

On Prophets

Prophets had a unique role in Jewish history. In the 8th century before Christ, when the Assyrians occupied the Northern Kingdom of Israel and exiled its inhabitants, prophets were at the ready to warn and to rebuke. The same thing happened in the 6th century BCE when the Babylonians exiled all but the poorest in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Ditto when the Seleucid Empire exercised a political and cultural hegemony of the Jewish people. From the time of Samuel on up, prophets were not hard to find. King Saul twice encounters wandering bands of prophets. Prophets seemed to hover the thrones of the kings of Israel and Judah as a sort of check and balance to their rule. Prophets were a reminder of the ironclad interrelationship of spiritual well-being shared between the ruler and ruled. Like St Augustine, who attributed the fall of Rome to moral and spiritual decay, the prophets warned that the success of the nation depended totally on their relationships to both God and one another.

In the history of the people of Israel, prophets were ubiquitous enough for there to be a need to distinguish between two kinds of them: the true prophet and the false prophet. False prophets were not necessarily charlatans. Deuteronomy acknowledges their capacity to interpret signs with accuracy and predict the future, if only to lead the people away from God (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). The Book of Kings contains a few examples of false prophets: an old prophet in Bethel manipulates a legitimate prophet into disobeying his mission is one episode (1 Kings 13:11-19). In another, the Judahite king Jehoshaphat summoning 400 prophets, all of whom except Micaiah son of Imlah were false (1 Kings 22:1-28). False prophets don't assume an office illegitimately. They are certainly recognized as "prophets", albeit of the false variety.

While living at different times and through different circumstances, the message of the prophets would often return to two common themes: justice and right worship. Justice dealt largely with caring for the weakest in society, typified in the widow and the orphan. This also covered other moral issues as the people were in a binding covenant with God, a covenant that included the acceptance of the Law by all of God's people in perpetuity and was periodically renewed (ex: Deuteronomy 29). The second dealt with right worship, itself an issue of justice because it was included in the law. But beyond that, worship was a "blueprint" of heavenly things. The Temple in Jerusalem corresponded to God's Temple in heaven (ex: Isaiah 6).

A good prophet was not a popular figure. In fact, their authenticity was usually recognized retroactively. A prophet was usually a failure in his own lifetime and they were often killed because of their smoldering unpopularity. Jesus famously rebuked the scribes and Pharisees on this point:

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?" (Matthew 23:29-33)

Prophets were on guard at every major juncture of the history of of the People of God, warning the people and their leaders to change their ways as though they were in a car that was speeding towards a cliff. In time, their wisdom was collected and served as a perpetual reminder for God's people to read the signs of the times and to have the courage to change what needed to be changed.

Prophets and Wonder Workers in the First Century

As is popularly known, the Romans were not popular among the Jewish people, as their long history of self-governance attests. Theirs was not a time of miracles but of lament. The wonders of Moses were part of an ancient history, about as close to them in time as the High Middle Ages are to us in the 21st century. The last public miracle that the people of Israel had experienced collectively was the showdown between the great prophet Elijah and the 450 prophets of the Canaanite god Baal over 800 years before the birth of Christ. This same Elijah was central to the later understanding of the prophet, serving as the model of the divinely inspired wonder-working prophet. The later prophet Malachi, writing around 400 years after Elijah lived and a century after the Babylonian Exile, speaking in God's name declared that "I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes" (Malachi 4:5).

Malachi's prophecy was still buzzing almost 500 years later when the Roman occupation was entering its ninth decade. Like before in their history, the people of Israel were forced again to reevaluate their own identity while in the grip of a foreign power. A Jew living in the first century was aware of two conflicting realities. One was a cultural memory of unified self-governance under the kings David and Solomon some thousand years prior. The other reality was far more grim, that in the thousand years bridging David to their present, the people of Israel had fallen victim to no less than six great kingdoms or empires: Assyrian, Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and now Roman. At each stage, the biblical literature reflects both a deepening desire for deliverance and growing hope for a deliverer. The great prophetic figures were not only heroes from their ancient past, but types to discern God's greater designs in an ever unfolding history.

"I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes" (Malachi 4:5). This was a messianic prophecy. In his book "The One Who Is To Come", New Testament scholar Fr Joseph Fitzmyer traced the development of the idea of the Messiah as it fermented in the centuries leading into the first half of the first century. The understanding that God would deliver His people was personified in the figure of the Messiah. There were many hopes for this Messiah, that he would reestablish the throne of David, that he would conquer oppressors, that he would bring peace and justice to the downtrodden people of Israel. As tensions increased because of the Roman occupation, so did the hope that God would do something to correct this.

Both Josephus and the Talmuds remember a few figures who emerged at this time that seemed to fulfill this hope. Honi the Circle-drawer was a Jewish holy man that lived about 60 years before Christ's birth. He is remembered as having the ability to command the rain in God's name. One rabbinic tradition compared Honi with Elijah, saying that "No man has existed comparable to Elijah and Honi the Circle-drawer causing mankind to serve God" (Vermes, pg 117). A man known as Jesus son of Ananias preached in the streets of Jerusalem in the years leading up to the catastrophic destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, recalling both the prophet Jeremiah's laments against the great city and Jesus' own words (Matthew 23:37-39). Hanina Ben Dosa lived at the same time as Jesus of Nazareth and is later remembered as a healer and miracle worker (Vermes, 99-102).

But the memory of none of them survived with the persistence of Jesus and John. And while these others were not all necessarily messianic figures, they did reflect a desire on the part of God's people for God to act, to right the wrong, to make Himself known again like He did in the past.

"I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes" (Malachi 4:5).

A Bell Still Rings

This might seem cheesy, and not a little romanticized. On the bottom of this post is something you should hear. But first, some context:

Around a year ago or so a tiny gold bell was found while excavating the old city of Jerusalem. This tiny gold bell is 2,000 years old. It was most likely sewn onto the garment of a high official, ringing as they walked. Given the description of the high priestly garments in the book of Exodus, it is certainly possible that it could have belonged to the high priest though there is no way of knowing for sure.

There are obviously no photographs from that time period and little in the way of artwork that would clarify what that world looked like in a unified sense. Archaeology provides "pieces" of that world and we are left to try and visualize it. Both the 1st century Jewish historian Josephus and the four Gospels writers give a clearer vision of what Jerusalem was like in the first century in their writing. But again, the temptation is to see that world as static, almost non-existent.

This tiny little bell also survived from that time, and it still rings. This short sound clip gives you a sense of what that world SOUNDED like, if only for the few moments when someone who was considered important passed you by. It was crafted, found to be useable, sewn onto someone's clothing as a sign of status, and presumably warn regularly. While I doubt that anyone focused on this little golden sphere, its presence nonetheless communicated a sense of awe or indignation, envy or pity, safety or unease. And that bell's sound let someone know that you were coming. If you were in the presence of the person who wore it long enough, you would've learned to ignore it. When someone first encountered the sound, they may have been struck by it's peculiarity. If you were blind, it was as sure a sign of status as sight.

Given his ability to mix with both the respectable and the despised, Jesus was undoubtedly familiar with this sound and what it meant. It may have been a reminder that he had left the rural and rocky Galilee and ascended to the heights of Jerusalem...a move from simplicity into the city. The juxtaposition of the homeless wandering rabbi and high society would have been clear in this simple distinction in dress. The sound of a lifeless gold bell "spoke" of the nature of its wearer, of his wealth and prominence. Upon entering into Jerusalem and being heralded by its shouting crowds as Son of David and the coming King of Israel, Jesus assured the rebuking Pharisees that “if these [crowds] were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40).

I love sound. Sound is more mysterious than sight. Most of the sciences seem to rely more on sight than any other sense, on the ability to observe. Usually, what we hear is treated with a level of suspicion: a testimony or a confession, strange sounds in an empty house, whispering strangers, the hints of unseen activity. There are certain things that, if seen, can move us or shake us up. But they are defined. The things we hear but cannot see force our mind to fill in the images because we can't stand ambiguity.

But our hearing can also make things real. Coupled with sight, it grounds our concepts. Today, most silent films seem to come from a fantasy world because most of us can't relate to soundless image. What we hear is important. I'm sure that part of what makes modern man so suspicious of religion and faith is the fact that they are grounded on testimony, on the things that we have heard from others. St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans that "faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17). Believing what you hear is a gamble because accepting what you have heard as truth depends entirely on how much you trust the person speaking. And even then, questions can linger.

This is a bell from 2,000 years ago that still rings. And here's what it sounds like:

Stephen Hawking on the heavenly fairy tale

I wrote this in May of this year (a couple days before the last post) and then abandoned it. I also stopped writing in general then too. It's been a crazy year, but I hope that tide begins to turn. I added a couple things, but not much. I meant for it to go in a different direction but I'm not really sure what that was anymore! I hope you enjoy it:

Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding,
for her income is better than silver,
and her revenue greater than gold.

She is more precious than jewels,
and nothing you desire can
compare with her...

...The LORD by wisdom founded the earth;
by understanding he established the heavens;
by his knowledge the deeps broke open,
and the clouds drop down the dew.

-Proverbs 3:13-15, 19-20 (NRSV)

It had been almost a year and half before I watched the final episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O' Brien. It sat on my DVR until the day we decided to switch to Verizon Fios from our regular cable provider. In the January of 2010, things didn't look good for Conan. Seven months after inheriting the Tonight Show from Jay Leno, NBC succeeded in an underhanded attempt to wrench the show from Conan and giving it back to Jay. It was an ugly and shameful episode for NBC but Conan emerged with humor and grace.

Now, the whole ordeal is almost forgotten. From our vantage point, Conan made it out okay. But the few weeks where this story was the top news were oddly dramatic and legions of people from a generation that is amidst a long ambivalent drift from traditional television embraced Conan as a folk hero. By a year later he was on back on television with a new show fueled by those same fans whose feelings of that bizarre January still loom, at least if the laughter that Conan gets nowadays when he jokes about it are any indicator.

Conan's final message to the Tonight Show audience was this:

"All I ask of you, especially young people...is one thing. Please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. I'm telling you, amazing things will happen."

I thought a lot about Conan's message this week when I read an interview with physicist and supergenius Stephen Hawking where he refers to the idea of heaven as a "fairy story". And I certainly wasn't the only one who read it.

In the interview he says:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist,"

and:

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Right now, minds both lesser and great are wrestling over what Hawking has said. Hawking's views on the matter have evolved since his book "A Brief History of Time", where he remains open to the idea of a Creator. Last year, there was a stir when his book "The Grand Design" (co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow) was published. In it, the authors present a more thorough presentation of what Hawkings stated above. The idea of God is not necessary in explaining the origins of the universe. Existence is due to chance, not purpose.

There's one serious temptation that comes with hearing something that is as potentially devastating as this, and that's to come out swinging. I know where my place is on the totem pole this of debate. I don't have much to contribute to this conversation by way of astrophysics and even if I did, no one would be listening. People who do have a more thorough understanding of Hawking's position criticize him for his strictly materialistic worldview. I would agree with them.

On the other hand I'm wondering why anyone is surprised that someone who is such an advocate for the scientific method (even to the level of seeming to adopt it as a personal philosophy) would be such a strict materialist. Science is by its nature materialistic. It is also a tool, a methodology employed by as humans in the quest for understanding. As such, however, it also has a personalistic dimension. It is not merely the laying out of data, but requires comprehension and interpretation. Even when things come together 100%, we are the ones making that judgement. In such cases, our minds are striving to cohere with the order of reality. And even through that lens, the understanding is that over the course of trillions of years, out of a universe that emerged by pure chance by a set of predetermined laws, evolved an eye and a mind capable of profound self-reflection, struggling through the question of (or more cynically, creation of) meaning. That evolution happened in a humanistic milieu, from the Greeks to the Middle Ages, from the renaissance to the Enlightenment, from the Industrial Revolution to the Atomic Age and the Space Race, from the Internet and Quantum Physics to beyond. I find it a supreme irony that in the quest for meaning man finds that he is ultimately meaningless. And, if he is not himself imbued with meaning, he is forced to create meaning for fear of losing his mind.

It's interesting that these questions ultimately turn philosophical. That is because they are intimately philosophical. It is no surprise that we find no god peering out from the edge of the universe because truthfully no god can be seen there. It is not a surprise that the idea of a god doesn't balance out in the equation, because no god lives in an equation. I wonder why we feel so proud and so brave for not finding him in certain places without questioning why we expect him to find him in those places to begin with. Is the god we are expecting not to find Ptolemaic? a Copernican? Is he Keplerian? Kantian? Is this god quantifiable? or is this God cosmic? What traces, what evidence would this god leave? What god are we expecting to find before we actually go out searching for him?

It's a very important question. Most often, I'm confused by attacks on religion and belief in God because I don't recognize the "god" that is under attack. The "god" of lesser public debate bears little resemblance to God as He is. The term "God" is itself slippery, evading strict definition. This is because the term for "God" is, in a sense, a catchall. It's a term that makes sense of mystery. But most importantly, it's a term that makes sense of mystery as a presence, not an absence. For religious people, it's not a term used in place of a more rational explanation. It doesn't impose order when no order should be found, just as religion is not the creation of meaning where no inherent meaning exists.

The oldest of the world's religions that are still in existence today all emerged as mankind began to ask deeper questions of its own existence and its place in the cosmos. It not only exists on the same trajectory of the historical search for self-understanding that the sciences are on but is also a perpetual source for renewal and perfection when the entire enterprise veers away from what makes us human: When strict materialism violates our collective conscience because deep down we can sense a "spiritual dimension" to our existence, even if we may be ashamed to say so. Or when rationalism and pragmatism dissuade us from compassion towards others, or in challenging the secular call for compassion when it fails to recognize the historical origins of our sense of obligation to even the least among us, something to prevents any common ground work that tries to make this world better.

While I can't help but appreciate Stephen Hawking's insight on the question of our ultimate origins, I also sense another order at work. It's the same order that guided us over the course of our cultural evolution, stirring us to ask the deepest questions and refusing us satisfaction with simplistic answers. It is also the same order that formalized our sense of compassion, transforming our definition of human greatness. It's not that we wouldn't be where we are today if not for our religious tendencies. That is clear. But those qualities stir us still, and we will never be satisfied with answers that ignore than which gave us the ability to ask those questions to begin with.

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