Jazz and Word

I continue to ponder how Martin Luther King can now be embraced by white conservatives but I think we might find some insight from Vienna and Wittgenstein. He writes “I have wanted to show by means of language-games the vague way in which we use ‘language’, ‘proposition’, ‘sentence’.[1] The public square of language includes common language games that have one group decentering the power position of others.

When we notice the language game of George Wallace and the counter move by Martin Luther King we recognize that the pre-civil rights American language game included explicit expressions of white privilege. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” was the sound byte from Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address.  Martin Luther King on the other hand called to mind a ‘color blind” vision. His I Have a Dream Speech won the language game eventually. One can surmise that for King the shift in the language game from explicit white privilege to colorblind would mean the end of white privilege.

The language game played out like this. Explicit white privilege fell out of acceptable language games in the United States. The language game played out. Explicit white privilege fell out of acceptable language games in the United States. Michelle Alexander describes this in the racialization of the criminal justice system in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  A similar language game takes place in theology outlined in the book Race:A Theological Account by J. Cameron Carter. He makes an important observation of a similar move in European philosophical circles. For the early (1770s) Kant German exceptionalism was explicit but by the time you get to the Critiques it has given way to an implicit white exceptionalism.

“What is important for my argument is that the specific term “race” (Rasse), which Kant consistently applied to the Negroes, Huns, and Hindustanis to explain their origins, has for whites now dropped out.”

J. Kameron Carter. Race: A Theological Account (p. 88). Kindle Edition.

The explicit privilege becomes invisible. Likewise white privilege in the late twentieth century becomes invisible color blind language game. “Rendering race invisible in all of this, Kant calls this not the work of whiteness but the task of the species as such.”

J. Kameron Carter. Race: A Theological Account (p. 89). Kindle Edition.

I am not very good as a blogger. But my students sometimes blog as part of their partial fulfillment of course requirements. So I am posting this short invitations to bloggers with interest in biblical studies. All too often a blog is a public diary of thoughts. Frequently it is one megaphone to a blank expanse. However, my mentor Gardner Campbell told me that the best blog is one that sparks a conversation. The conversation requires that one not only post  her/his reflections but also explore the reflections of others. Biblioblogs is a clearing hose for blog on biblical studies. You might like John Hobbins’  Ancient Hebrew Poetry it has a blend of linguistic analysis and some discussion of the challenges of peace in the Middle East. Tim Bulkely has a more fun blog Sansblogue as well as 5 Minute Bible. I find Stephen L. Cook’s blog Biblische Ausbildung fun despite a name that might seem daunting. So explore, converse and then post your reflections.

This summer I read bell hooks Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom. I was captured by the title. It reminds me of a stream in the Isaiah tradition. This semester the  Hebrew Reading the Book of Isaiah at George W.  Truett  Theological Seminary of Baylor University will examine text that represent an invitation of the readers to transgress the boundaries that the world of Isaiah took for granted.

According to Merriam Webster the verb transgress as an intransitive verb means to violate a command or law or to go beyond a boundary or limit. The verb can also be transitive to go beyond limits or prescribed by and to pass beyond or go over.  This Middle English term is taken from the Middle French transgresser, which is from the Latin transgressus, past participle of transgredi.  Trans+gredi to step. The first known occurrence comes from the 15^th century.

When we consider the priestly prophetic vocation we often focus on how these institutions set boundaries.  However, the task of the priest/prophet includes the trangressive move as much as establishing boundaries. IN fact, one might posit that the boundaries that organize us derive from transgressive acts that were then “normed.”

Julia O’Brien in a provocative way Challenging Prophetic Metaphor invites the reader to think about the transgressive dimension embedded in the prophetic biblical books.

If we go back to the subtitle of Teaching to Transgress we recognize that transgression is part and parcel of freedom practices. We are going to start with an examination of Isaiah 6 and the call of Isaiah.

The new semester begins. This year I am doing some new things. First after reading David Carr’s book on the Formation of the Hebrew Bible I have decided to use Ezra Nehemiah and the formation of the Hebrew Bible in the Persian period as the way into understanding the Pentateuch.Victor Matthews talks about what he calls the Jewish identity movement in the Persian period will be key way for us to get into this topic. I will again have students read Marvin Sweeney’s Tanak: A Theological and Critical Introduction to the Jewish Bible as a way to help us wrestle with the religious identity issues that shaped these texts. We will read the Africana Bible, the Global Bible Commentary, and the Women’s Bible Commentary in order to broaden our horizons.

The second change this year is a new required paper on biblical hermeneutic. During the summer while I was at the Institute of Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University students were required to write two papers: 1) on What is Catholic about my biblical hermeneutics and 2)  What is Black in your biblical hermeneutics? . I am going to ask my European-American Baptist students to write a similar short paper. I am quite nervous about the assignment but I am certain it could be quite helpful.

Now if I can schedule some Skype with some exciting biblical scholars.

The following sermon was delivered at the Paul Powell Chapel of George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University April 24, 2012

This is the last chapel of the 2011-2012 school year.  We say good bye to another group of graduating seniors. This time of year I think back to the events of the last several years.

My find went back to a trip. At Truett we have a tradition of travel seminars. Dr. Gloer and the Wilderness Spirituality trip, Drs. Stroope and Wilhite went to North Africa. This years Drs. Still and Weaver went to discover anew the churches of Paul. But last year, March 2011 I accompanied Dr. Still on the Pilgrimage to Israel.  For a time we were tourist and pilgrims. We went to the Mount of Transfiguration. It was our habit to have someone read the biblical text associated with the location. Someone read the passage let’s say Mark 9:2-13. Peter, James and John were there, as they often are in Mark’s gospel. Peter has the speaking part. NIV reads “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters…” The Mount of Transfiguration is also known as Mount Tabor in northern Israel. That morning the air was clear and crisp I had to borrow gloves from Rosa is was so crisp and cold. You looked out and said WOW. Of course you could have a miracle happen here.

This is an easy one. We couldn’t stay there. We were not able to stay there, we were tourist. We were pilgrims. Even Peter, James and John were not able to stay there.  This bucolic pastoral context was an experience to have but not a place to stay.

Let me frame the issue in musical terms. So that you might understand the musical frame some background might be helpful. I grew up in Dayton Ohio. I was not in the wave of the first integrated schools in Dayton Ohio but it was still new when I went to school.  I went to school in Jefferson Township.  The new racial mix meant a new musical mix as well.  There were three musical communities at Jefferson Township. There was the rock and roll crowd. There were the folk rock peace kids. The black kids in the school were fascinated by the new black station WDAO-FM the home of the emerging soul sound.  I grew up in a household where my mother played jazz every Saturday afternoon when the house cleaning was finished. To this day I associate jazz with a clean house and a relaxed mind.

We first came to Texas in 1983 on sabbatical and permanently in 1990. Texas has broadened my musical tastes. Nonetheless it is with some chagrin that I tell you a secret. You can keep a secret can’t you? I am not going to refer to a song by Nancy Wilson as you might imagine but rather Gretchen Wilson.  I was listening to Gretchen Wilson. Her song “You Don’t Have to Go Home”

Her song describes a bar about closing time 2 a.m. Being a Texas Baptist I have to take her word for it in term of authenticity.

You can walk, you can crawl

You can be carried out by the law

But you will get …. Out of here

I can almost here Jesus saying to Peter, James and John when Peter proposed building the first religious theme park.(see Mark 9) You can’t stay here.

The Jesus entourage moved on. By chapter eleven they made their way to a triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In the same chapter Jesus enters the Temple. In chapter thirteen Jesus leaves the temple.  Once again we see the disciple as foil, the one who sets up a speech by totally misconstruing the situation. Lohmyer in his commentary remarks that the disciple sounds like an enthusiastic tourist. We recognize this as we compare a popular translation and a paraphrase.

The NIV “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”

Petersen The Message “Teacher, look at that stonework! Those buildings!”

Jesus response to the disciple is a question from Jesus. However, we should note that the same group of three that were there at the mount of transfiguration in Mark 9 continues to represent the disciples here at the temple in Mark 13.

We can understand the sense of awe of the disciple. The history of the Temple goes all the way back to the sacrifice of Isaac; the dedication of the Temple by Solomon in 1 Kings 8; the leaving of the divine presence in Ezekiel 9; the rededication of the temple, the abomination of desolation and the rededication of the temple in 167 BCE; 19-20 C.E.  Herod made extensive renovations and additions. Indeed the nameless disciple was an enthusiastic tourist for good reason.

Nonetheless, Petersen makes clear his understanding that Jesus reprimanded the disciple with his replying question. Petersen’s periphrastic rendering of the question is quite provocative.” You’re impressed by this grandiose architecture?”

Well back to the Still pilgrimage to Israel. We made our way to Jerusalem. The bus pulled up the hill into Jerusalem. The hotel was breathtaking and the sense of history was thick in the air. We were there for Shabbat living in a kosher hotel. The City of David, David’s tomb, the old city and the trip to the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Empty Tomb all left us asking as the nameless disciple with a sense of WOW.  Once again we were tourists and pilgrims we could not stay there.

We often read this text as being a historical account that does not describe our life. It is Jesus’ message to those disciples not these disciples. However, this morning I want us to see this address to the disciples as an address to us. The admonitions to those disciples are admonitions we are well to heed.

David Garland in his NIV Application Commentary reminds readers not to approach Mark 13 as if it were a bus schedule but rather appreciate the instruction of Jesus to the disciples. Jesus instructs the disciples that the religious institution, the temple is in the wane. “Jesus tells his followers what must happen before the end comes, but he does not tell them what they long to know—the precise dates and signs.” (508)

“The danger is that we want to be popular and accepted by society.” (Garland 512) We can say about our Baptist heritage. All too often we are the enthusiastic or nostalgic disciples coveting the past glories. Doug Weaver in his book In Search of the New Testament Church: The Baptist Story characterizes the twentieth century as a time when “Baptists an increasingly centralized and efficient denomination.” (146) Our preoccupation with a Baptist past sometimes lures us to stay here and not venture into the Baptist future God prepares for us.

What Jesus might do today is to characterize the debate as idol vs. icon. It is easy to allow our memory to become an idol instead of an icon. The philosophical theologian Jean-Luc Marion argues that an idol is a reflective mirror. It always plays back an image of our selves. Often when we get stuck in the bar, on the mount of transfiguration, in the garden of Gethsemane or even here we exchange the icon of Christ for the idol of Christendom.

I remember an early conversation with Dr. Creech. He told us that things had changed since the time that he was a young seminarian. Seminary was the place a young man went to get a union card. With that card you could receive a call to the FBC, factory Baptist Church. Today seminary is not a factory or franchise on the way to a call.

A friend pastoring in Austin Texas she would present to the graduates on behalf of the church a cross each year on graduation Sunday. So the week before the event she went to the jewelry store to purchase the crosses. The attendant asked her did she want an empty one or one with a little man on it. The attendant reminds us that Catholic tradition of the crucifix depicts Christ’s Passion on the Cross. The Protestant tradition celebrates the resurrection of Christ hence the empty Cross.

Jesus bids us not to stay here. No matter where the here is. As Luther says we must come to the Cross with empty hands.

I can hear Jesus singing low the words of Gretchen Wilson

You can walk, you can crawl

You can be carried out by the law

But you can’t stay here.

Here is the video of Gretchen Wilson performing the song. You Don’t Have to Go Home

This semester in one class we have been reading Genesis through Kings. Another context has focused on the formation of literacy and the formation of the Hebrew Bible. These two contexts came together in an interesting way. The Genesis through Kings class observed that one finds an anti-institutional undercurrent in the text. Judges 9 Jotham’s fable makes clear the problems with a monarchy. However, the editors of the book that eventually became Judges consistently bring the reader back to the phrase “because there was no king in Israel.” Such a reference indicates that there is a lackluster apology for the monarchy in the present form of the book of Judges. Juan Valdez captures some of the sense that every polity found in the Hebrew Bible is de-constructed.

The social and historical background for this de-construction of power seems to be the colonial status of the editors of the Hebrew Bible in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods to some degree but more manifestly in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. This is a fundamental shift in biblical studies in the last fifty years. The mid-twenteth century biblical studies construed the biblical material as the product of a national default with an extended exile. Today the colonial context dominates with a sense of a short monarchial experiment.

Correlation is not always causation but it is interesting that this turn of mind coincides with the declining of Christendom.

We have now read the Book of Isaiah and Jeremiah. However, we have not taken time to ask what is a prophet? What traditions do these books take for granted in their presentations? Some scholars argue that there was a strong connection between the office of the prophet and the office of the king. They welded a bond of competing offices for the leadership of the community. For these scholars the institution of prophecy begins with Samuel and ends with Haggai. However, I think this is too limited a view of the phenomenon we call prophecy.

Prophecy is an expression of mantic wisdom, that is to say it is a special kind of knowledge one receives from religious experience broadly speaking. This understanding is largely formed out of my own form critical training that accented the oral aspect of prophecy. However, new research on literacy may lead us to re-think the institution of prophecy. If literacy is s early as some scholars such a Rollston, Schniedewind and Carr suggest then the distance between prophecy and apocalypticism may not be as large as we thought. For instance Carr argues that we have created a false dichotomy between written and oral. The literary structures of the so-called writing prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the editorial finger prints on the Book of the Twelve may indicate a poet/scribe who stands behind today’s prophetic books.

Philip Davies argues that David like Arthur is an invention to explore the ideas of emerging politics. I have always been interested in Arthur. As a young man when  I read Idylls of the King by Tennyson. The musical and movie “Camelot” based on the Theodore White book Once and Future King.  Cable television has created a program Camelot in the spring of 2011. So I talked with Tom Hanks of Baylor University a Mallory scholar  to get more clarity on the Arthurian story.

He told me that Arthur began in Celtic circles as they were pushed out of Brittany by the Anglo-Saxons. One community of Celtic background remained in Britain and another group in Brittany. The political force came from Eleanor of Aquitaine.  Ambrosius evolved into a character Arthur recounted by Gildas. There are other sources such as Annales Cambriae and Historia Brittorum. Also testify to the tradition.  This last volume was the product of Gregory of Monmouth in his fanciful and imaginative treatment of the Arthurian story. Chretien DeTroyes (1170-1185) presented a French version of the Arthur legend. This material was probably a source for Mallory’s work Mort D’Arthur .  Tennyson’s Idylls of the King ere developed in ideas from Mallory.  Arthur and David share the position as the model king but that is an ambivalent and complex model of power.

I happened upon Google Translate by accident but now it is clear it was a happy accident. Let’s say you are writing an article and you have a foreign language source that you need a rough translation. If you scan the foreign language source as a RTF (rich text format) then you will be able to feed that into the translation window of Google Translate. You are able to do some tweaking of the Google translation on the website.  You must get a good clear scan. However you will want to clean it up, how much will depend on you, in a regular word processor, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, or Open Office.  Some of you will no doubt say this is still cumbersome; however it is much less cumbersome than attaining real fluency in foreign languages.

Age of anxiety is a popular meme. A meme is an idea, belief or belief system or pattern that can be replicated. The word meme derives from the Greek word something imitated. Richard Dawkins the British evolutionary biologist coined the term on his book the Selfish Gene (1976) according to Wikipedia. Memes can be propagated in many ways. Malcolm Gladwell describes connectors, mavens, and sales men and women as vehicles of meme propagation in his book Tipping Point (2000). Today there is also the Internet meme

W.H. Auden, author of The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) coined the phrase according to Wikipedia. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem (1948) inspired a Leonard Bernstein symphony “Age of Anxiety by the same name and a Jerome Robbins ballet (1950). Alan Watts used this concept as the title of the first chapter of his book Wisdom of Insecurity (1951).

Clergy even examine this meme. Nancy E. Petty preached the sermon “The Age of Anxiety” with Matthew 6:24-34 as the text. It is easy to understand the rise of Christianity amidst an age of anxiety.  M. Scott Peck used this meme in his book The Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety.

For some anxiety is a psychological state. For instance Andrea Tone in her book The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers.  American Science in an Age of Anxiety by Jessica Ward,

You can look at this meme form the perspective of political science.  Clarence A. Glasrud The Age of Anxiety published in 1960 by Houghton Mifflin was one of the earliest treatments.  At the turn of the millennium Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter edited a collection of essays on the Age of Anxiety. Zero-Sum Future: American Power in and Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman   another political science approach is found in the work of Jane Parish and Martin Parker edited a collection of essays The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and Human Sciences. Hope in the Age of Anxiety: A Guide to Understanding and Strengthening Out Most Important Virtue by Anthony Scioli and Henry B. Biller, Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism.

In future posts I will investigate what we mean when we say anxiety but for today I want to paraphrase Bowen and Friedman on anxiety. Friedman in his book, published posthumously A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix contends that the age of the quick fix is an expression of anxiety. Hence we might say that the age of the quick fix is also the age of anxiety according to Friedman.  The book was edited by Margaret M. Treadwell and Edward W. Beal of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.

Probably one of the most insightful plays on this “age of anxiety” meme is  a blog post by Michael Jinkins who compares this age to the years before the Protestant Reformation. I will recommend Jinkins’ The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context which frames many of the same issues but form the perspective of the transitions from ecclesiastical life framed by modernity and the emerging post-modern horizons for the church.