Well December has returned, and having called the pope a coward, and attacked all of Christian academia, it’s time to turn to Christmas.
I won’t rant on the phony “War on Christmas” that turns a chi into an x and calls it communism, or on the commercialization of the holiday. I’ll let Linus and Charlie Brown handle that last one.
No, it’s time to turn to the god of the choir directors. Who wants the mysterious, mystical music of Avo Paart or John Taverner? That’s just too freaky. Who wants to be transported to heaven on Christmas? That won’t do at all. Christmas is all about FEELINGS. Warm, fuzzy nostalgic feelings. Like Homer Simpson in the land of chocolate, we want to be transported to a land where all is sweetness, and even the dogs are delicious.
No composer does that better than John Rutter. With David Willcocks, he is responsible for the infamous Carols for Choirs collection used (and cursed) by choirs around the English-speaking world. Almost every half-ways famous Christmas carol in English or at least translated into English has made its way into this book, except, oddly, the Boar’s Head Carol. I guess “sage and rosemar-aye” is not sweet enough.
There is hardly a page in any of these carols or any of the other compositions of this prolific (epidemic might be a better word) composer that are not marked dolce. Whenever forced to sing one of these beasts, I come out of the experience with a massive toothache. I feel like I just ate a bowl of Skittles chased it with red pop and then mainlined a dozen pixie-stix. Rutter Christmas carols are bereft of any uncomfortable theological terms like those in “O Come all ye Faithful”, smelly shepherds (probably slaves) or pagan astrologers from Iran. No exhausted, raven haired, dark-skinned 14 year old girl who just dropped the placenta on pile of straw on a dirt floor. No swarthy-looking Joseph, either.
No, Rutter’s nativity is a pretty Victorian painting with immaculately clean oxen and asses bowing politely to a pinkish baby Jesus attended to by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman in her early 30’s dressed like a medieval queen. All is sweetness and light. Except for the singers, that is.
For those unfortunate enough to sing Rutter, the dolces ring with bitter irony. I think his outer sweetness masks an ancient, deep-seated hostility toward choirs. Maybe he had a particularly nasty choir director as a child, or he was dropped on his head as an infant while his parents were out caroling one Christmas. Whatever the root problem is, John Rutter should seek out a licensed therapist immediately.
With cold, mechanical sadism, Rutter turns simple Christmas carols, psalms and anything else he can get his paws on into the ultimate “gotcha” pieces. The same phrase is never the same way twice. Even if it’s the same words and melody, there is always a dotted note where there wasn’t before, two eighth notes instead of one quarter note, a note the crosses that of another voice part, or two sixteenth notes going down instead of up as it was before. I have heard choristers utter many words whose meanings are the exact opposite of “gloria in excelsis” after botching that third verse for the fifteenth time. And his arrangement of “I Saw Three Ships” always reminds me of the song “Who’s afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” from the Disney short.
At any rate, I’ve been enough of a grinch for now. Merry Christmas to all and to all a Rutter-less night!
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Turducken
This week, the Pope has gone to Turkey. This is supposed to be a momentous occasion. The Roman Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch worshipping together, visiting ancient Ephesos, rebuilding bridges with the Muslim community, picking up where JP2 left off, while standing up for the Christian community in Turkey. But when it came down to it, like that famous frankenbird the Turducken, inside Benedict there lurks a chicken ducking Turkey.
Ratzinger was reviled for years by moderates and liberals inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church as the “inquisitor-general”, the man who was going to take the church back to the dark ages (apparently figuratively, since the “dark ages” produced some of the greatest Christian leaders in history, including the greatest Roman pope, Gregory the Great). He was billed as the fearless, dauntless defender of orthodoxy again the hordes of the dictatorship of relativism. So what happened?
Turkey’s laws anti-religious are so oppressive they would make a Frenchman blush. No seminaries, no religious schools, the Ecumenical Patriarch only recognized as having jurisdiction over about 3,000 people, Orthodox, Kurds, Armenians and other minorities being subject to severe oppression at best and attempted genocide at worst.
So what does Benedict XVI, lion of traditionalism, do when he arrives in Turkey? Wears a simple white suit without a cross as he gets off the plane, doesn’t kiss the ground but does spend the whole time kissing Turkish ass running about like Michael Richards. What kind of Pope is this?
John Paul II was a masterful politician but he did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. When he was in Cuba, he let Castro know how he felt. When he was in Poland he let the commies know how he felt. This outspokenness almost cost him his life, too. But John Paul was under no illusions as to the consequences for speaking out against the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
For all his bluster with a pen and his zeal in battling university professors, Benedict has shown himself a coward on the world stage. Instead of going to Turkey and standing up for the rights of minorities there, and standing to prevent the entry into the European Union of a country that won’t even ADMIT its genocide(s), he reverses his previous opposition to Turkey’s EU bid, makes a few token gestures and leaves, his staff terrified that something bad may happen, even to the point where he leaves his cross in his pocket. That speaks volumes.
“No cross, no crown”; any man who is unwilling to take up the cross is unworthy of wearing the triple tiara. Turducken anyone?
Ratzinger was reviled for years by moderates and liberals inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church as the “inquisitor-general”, the man who was going to take the church back to the dark ages (apparently figuratively, since the “dark ages” produced some of the greatest Christian leaders in history, including the greatest Roman pope, Gregory the Great). He was billed as the fearless, dauntless defender of orthodoxy again the hordes of the dictatorship of relativism. So what happened?
Turkey’s laws anti-religious are so oppressive they would make a Frenchman blush. No seminaries, no religious schools, the Ecumenical Patriarch only recognized as having jurisdiction over about 3,000 people, Orthodox, Kurds, Armenians and other minorities being subject to severe oppression at best and attempted genocide at worst.
So what does Benedict XVI, lion of traditionalism, do when he arrives in Turkey? Wears a simple white suit without a cross as he gets off the plane, doesn’t kiss the ground but does spend the whole time kissing Turkish ass running about like Michael Richards. What kind of Pope is this?
John Paul II was a masterful politician but he did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. When he was in Cuba, he let Castro know how he felt. When he was in Poland he let the commies know how he felt. This outspokenness almost cost him his life, too. But John Paul was under no illusions as to the consequences for speaking out against the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
For all his bluster with a pen and his zeal in battling university professors, Benedict has shown himself a coward on the world stage. Instead of going to Turkey and standing up for the rights of minorities there, and standing to prevent the entry into the European Union of a country that won’t even ADMIT its genocide(s), he reverses his previous opposition to Turkey’s EU bid, makes a few token gestures and leaves, his staff terrified that something bad may happen, even to the point where he leaves his cross in his pocket. That speaks volumes.
“No cross, no crown”; any man who is unwilling to take up the cross is unworthy of wearing the triple tiara. Turducken anyone?
Monday, November 20, 2006
Why can't I be you?
Five hundred years ago, there were things called “renaissance men”. These were people who were multitalented and made contributions to multiple fields of study, or the arts. Erasmus of Rotterdam, for instance, was a theologian, philosopher, teacher, fiction writer, poet, satirist and creator of the first critical edition of the New Testament used for the wave of vernacular Bible translations that surfaced in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. King Henry VIII of England was a monarch, songwriter, theologian and sportsman renowned for his fondness of outdoor and “indoor sport”, particularly of the young, perky redheaded variety (e.g. Ann Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and Catherine Howard, cf. Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleeves).
The ultimate Renaissance man, of course, was Leonardo DaVinci. He was a painter, draftsman, scientist, and inventor, was groundbreaking at all of those areas and even found time to be president of the Priory of Sion and hide all sorts of clues in his works that only conspiracy theorists and hack writers could truly understand. He enjoyed indoor sports as well, but played with a different team, apparently. Could this be the reason why his depictions of the apostle John look so “femme”? Nah.
The renaissance man was possible back then because most modern fields of study were in their infancy at the time, and it was possible to be a jack of all trades and actually master a few of them. Today, it’s different. Everybody has a specialty. We don’t just have Church Historians, Theologians, Biblical Scholars, and Pastoral Scholars we have Early Church Historians, New Testament Scholars, Historical Theologians, pastoral counseling experts, Celtic post-feminist exegetes, early medieval christologists, Tridentine eucharistic theologians, Romans chapter 8 scholars, marital diabetes pastoral studies, early middle Premonstratensian historians, et al.
Or at least that’s they way it seemed to be. But for the past couple decades a plague has been sweeping through divinity schools and departments of religion around the world. No one is content to bloom where they’re planted anymore, no no. Now everybody wants to be the other guy. The biblical scholars want to be historians, the historians want to be theologians, the theologians want to be philosophers, the philosophers want to be politicians, the politicians want to be scientists and the scientists want to be biblical scholars.
This first sprang to my attention in the “historical Jesus” fad of the 1990’s , thankfully now fizzling out. You may recall the Jesus Seminar, a coalition of B-list biblical scholars from such hubs of the intellectual activity such as Oregon State University (home to the fighting beavers, the most vicious aquatic rodents on the planet), led by the late Robert A. Funk, the P.T. Barnum of Biblical Literature. Based on self-fulfilling criteria, this veritable “who’s that?” of New Testament studies, traveled around deciding what Jesus did and didn’t actually say using multi-colored beads (with pretty much everything ending up in the latter category). This traveling circus was designed to a) keep newspapers from laying off their religion writers, b) get book deals and c) help them get tenure at a halfway decent university without having to do any real work.
The Jesus Seminar also marked the birth (or at lest the more rapid spread of) the plague mentioned above. Despite being New Testament scholars, the Jesus seminar claimed that they were actually doing history not biblical criticism. History involves reconstructing the past by letting the sources (written or otherwise) speak for themselves, evaluating them in (what should be) an unbiased way, and following the evidence wherever it leads. What the Jesus seminar did was not that at all. First they came up with a priori assumptions like “Jesus never spoke in apocalyptic terms” and “Jesus never predicted his own death” then crossed out everything Jesus is recorded as saying that didn’t fit the assumptions. They rigged the game so that it would come out the way they wanted. I don’t know that is, but it sure ain’t history.
The Jesus Seminar and the publicity and money it attracted likewise encouraged dozens of otherwise good, responsible scholars to jump in on the act, seducing even august figures such as E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and Hendrikus Boers all hoping to cash in on the hype, despite that fact that their previous work far surpassed anything the Jesus Seminar had or even could do themselves. Even classicist Michael Grant, despite being an actual historian, wrote a historical Jesus book, although he wrote it in 1977 so he could make money off it then and have it already on bookshelves to allow him to cash in on the trend in the 1990’s. There was also the wave of anti-Jesus Seminar biblical scholars who donned historian hats and paraded around pretending they were doing history. N.T. Wright is the best example of this, which is all the sadder because he’s actually a fine New Testament scholar. He went on an extended tour of the U.S. with his friend and fellow Cambridge alum Marcus Borg, easily the least obnoxious member of the Jesus Seminar (although Crossan is more entertaining). They got up in front of starry eyed crowds of Volvo-driving NPR listeners and waxed eloquent about how they, as historians, view Jesus, never letting the fact that they aren’t historians get in the way of collecting thousands of dollars in honorarium (those cottages in the Lake District don’t pay for themselves)
If this plague has been running rampant in Biblical Studies, from where was it contracted? One possible carrier is the discipline of theology which occasionally does have contact with Biblical Studies. In fact, theology has had a chronic case of this disease for centuries, mostly centered on Central Europe and its German-speaking peoples. Despite the efforts of heroic antiseptics such as Karl Barth, German theology has been contaminated for centuries by philosopher-envy. From Melanchton on down through Schleiermacher, Lessing, Bultmann, Moltmann, Ratzinger and the whole gang, there has been there has been a longing, dare I say lust, for philosophers. In these past decades, the prominence of German theology has begun to fade, though, and hope has arisen that this plague of lust could be wiped out by a newer generation of American and British theologians. Enter Stanley Hauerwas.
Hauerwas, like his German predecessors, feels uncomfortable with the Bible. It’s messy, it’s contradictory, it isn’t in German, and it’s hard to understand. Church history is even harder to understand, what with its cast of thousands and all those synods, councils, creeds and whatnot. What a drag! So instead of trying to understand them, Dr. Stanley decides to keep them both at arm’s length and just do his own thing. The only times Stanley gets his Bible and church history books out is when he needs to make himself look pious when people who care about that sort of thing come around. Otherwise, he'll stick to his Aristotle, thank you very much. Aristotle is a much more likable figure than that Jesus or Paul. Aristotle didn’t make as many demands or get angry like they did. Who needs the hassle of having demands being made of us theologically? Or of having to interact with the outside world? Didn’t Jesus say at his ascension, “Go not into the world, but go ye into your churches and build a community of virtue there, and lo, the rest will take care of itself.”
As for the other disciplines of the Christian academy, I could go on and on. There is even a serious field called “Historical Theology” for Pete’s sake!
If people stopped commenting on stuff they knew nothing about, the entire blogsphere would break down, obviously (though that’s maybe not a bad thing). But the reason why the academy has become so specialized is that there is so much in those four disciplines that has been explored and has yet to be explored that it’s impossible for any one person to be competent in all fields at once. But the sum of all these specialized areas ads up to something much greater than the whole, something that is absorbed and processed (hopefully) by pastors and pastors to be, and makes God’s people a better people, a people which a richer understanding of their mission and ministry from the church secretary and the “little old ladies” to the Christmas-Easter attendee. This richer understanding leads to a greater faithfulness in spreading God’s love around the world until Christ returns and we are named his good and faithful servants
The ultimate Renaissance man, of course, was Leonardo DaVinci. He was a painter, draftsman, scientist, and inventor, was groundbreaking at all of those areas and even found time to be president of the Priory of Sion and hide all sorts of clues in his works that only conspiracy theorists and hack writers could truly understand. He enjoyed indoor sports as well, but played with a different team, apparently. Could this be the reason why his depictions of the apostle John look so “femme”? Nah.
The renaissance man was possible back then because most modern fields of study were in their infancy at the time, and it was possible to be a jack of all trades and actually master a few of them. Today, it’s different. Everybody has a specialty. We don’t just have Church Historians, Theologians, Biblical Scholars, and Pastoral Scholars we have Early Church Historians, New Testament Scholars, Historical Theologians, pastoral counseling experts, Celtic post-feminist exegetes, early medieval christologists, Tridentine eucharistic theologians, Romans chapter 8 scholars, marital diabetes pastoral studies, early middle Premonstratensian historians, et al.
Or at least that’s they way it seemed to be. But for the past couple decades a plague has been sweeping through divinity schools and departments of religion around the world. No one is content to bloom where they’re planted anymore, no no. Now everybody wants to be the other guy. The biblical scholars want to be historians, the historians want to be theologians, the theologians want to be philosophers, the philosophers want to be politicians, the politicians want to be scientists and the scientists want to be biblical scholars.
This first sprang to my attention in the “historical Jesus” fad of the 1990’s , thankfully now fizzling out. You may recall the Jesus Seminar, a coalition of B-list biblical scholars from such hubs of the intellectual activity such as Oregon State University (home to the fighting beavers, the most vicious aquatic rodents on the planet), led by the late Robert A. Funk, the P.T. Barnum of Biblical Literature. Based on self-fulfilling criteria, this veritable “who’s that?” of New Testament studies, traveled around deciding what Jesus did and didn’t actually say using multi-colored beads (with pretty much everything ending up in the latter category). This traveling circus was designed to a) keep newspapers from laying off their religion writers, b) get book deals and c) help them get tenure at a halfway decent university without having to do any real work.
The Jesus Seminar also marked the birth (or at lest the more rapid spread of) the plague mentioned above. Despite being New Testament scholars, the Jesus seminar claimed that they were actually doing history not biblical criticism. History involves reconstructing the past by letting the sources (written or otherwise) speak for themselves, evaluating them in (what should be) an unbiased way, and following the evidence wherever it leads. What the Jesus seminar did was not that at all. First they came up with a priori assumptions like “Jesus never spoke in apocalyptic terms” and “Jesus never predicted his own death” then crossed out everything Jesus is recorded as saying that didn’t fit the assumptions. They rigged the game so that it would come out the way they wanted. I don’t know that is, but it sure ain’t history.
The Jesus Seminar and the publicity and money it attracted likewise encouraged dozens of otherwise good, responsible scholars to jump in on the act, seducing even august figures such as E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and Hendrikus Boers all hoping to cash in on the hype, despite that fact that their previous work far surpassed anything the Jesus Seminar had or even could do themselves. Even classicist Michael Grant, despite being an actual historian, wrote a historical Jesus book, although he wrote it in 1977 so he could make money off it then and have it already on bookshelves to allow him to cash in on the trend in the 1990’s. There was also the wave of anti-Jesus Seminar biblical scholars who donned historian hats and paraded around pretending they were doing history. N.T. Wright is the best example of this, which is all the sadder because he’s actually a fine New Testament scholar. He went on an extended tour of the U.S. with his friend and fellow Cambridge alum Marcus Borg, easily the least obnoxious member of the Jesus Seminar (although Crossan is more entertaining). They got up in front of starry eyed crowds of Volvo-driving NPR listeners and waxed eloquent about how they, as historians, view Jesus, never letting the fact that they aren’t historians get in the way of collecting thousands of dollars in honorarium (those cottages in the Lake District don’t pay for themselves)
If this plague has been running rampant in Biblical Studies, from where was it contracted? One possible carrier is the discipline of theology which occasionally does have contact with Biblical Studies. In fact, theology has had a chronic case of this disease for centuries, mostly centered on Central Europe and its German-speaking peoples. Despite the efforts of heroic antiseptics such as Karl Barth, German theology has been contaminated for centuries by philosopher-envy. From Melanchton on down through Schleiermacher, Lessing, Bultmann, Moltmann, Ratzinger and the whole gang, there has been there has been a longing, dare I say lust, for philosophers. In these past decades, the prominence of German theology has begun to fade, though, and hope has arisen that this plague of lust could be wiped out by a newer generation of American and British theologians. Enter Stanley Hauerwas.
Hauerwas, like his German predecessors, feels uncomfortable with the Bible. It’s messy, it’s contradictory, it isn’t in German, and it’s hard to understand. Church history is even harder to understand, what with its cast of thousands and all those synods, councils, creeds and whatnot. What a drag! So instead of trying to understand them, Dr. Stanley decides to keep them both at arm’s length and just do his own thing. The only times Stanley gets his Bible and church history books out is when he needs to make himself look pious when people who care about that sort of thing come around. Otherwise, he'll stick to his Aristotle, thank you very much. Aristotle is a much more likable figure than that Jesus or Paul. Aristotle didn’t make as many demands or get angry like they did. Who needs the hassle of having demands being made of us theologically? Or of having to interact with the outside world? Didn’t Jesus say at his ascension, “Go not into the world, but go ye into your churches and build a community of virtue there, and lo, the rest will take care of itself.”
As for the other disciplines of the Christian academy, I could go on and on. There is even a serious field called “Historical Theology” for Pete’s sake!
If people stopped commenting on stuff they knew nothing about, the entire blogsphere would break down, obviously (though that’s maybe not a bad thing). But the reason why the academy has become so specialized is that there is so much in those four disciplines that has been explored and has yet to be explored that it’s impossible for any one person to be competent in all fields at once. But the sum of all these specialized areas ads up to something much greater than the whole, something that is absorbed and processed (hopefully) by pastors and pastors to be, and makes God’s people a better people, a people which a richer understanding of their mission and ministry from the church secretary and the “little old ladies” to the Christmas-Easter attendee. This richer understanding leads to a greater faithfulness in spreading God’s love around the world until Christ returns and we are named his good and faithful servants
Thursday, November 16, 2006
First Entry
Loads of angry, theological goodness coming to this space soon. Now go suck a summa and leave me alone!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)