Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
NBC's series Revelations is still good, three weeks into it.
Tonight's episode was a little slower at revealing things. There was quite a bit of action, nonetheless. And within it, some good character development.
In an early scene tonight, Dr. Massey's son Hawk is very insistent with his stepdad as to the name he be called by. (A similar conversation had taken place between him and his father last week.) When he is later kidnapped, the kidnappers have a problem with him using his Christian name. This insistence on things having their proper names will likely outweigh Hawk's weakness towards seduction.
Sister Josepha has a conversation about the habit she wears. She says she cannot imagine being without it. Dr. Massey asks her if she would feel like Superman without his cape. She says, "Yes. Like Ken Clark." "You mean Clark Kent," he corrects. This is really funny. Sister Josepha doesn't seem to know the name of a pop culture figure. However Kenneth Clark is a high culture figure who wrote a famous book called The Nude. This whole scene is a play on the idea of revelation. Unveiled, Sister Josepha would feel nude.
The search for the baby Jesus continues. It had seemed that Sister Josepha had concluded that the child they had looked for was a false Christ. Now it may be the true one. Yet the series is familiar enough with the text to know this is problematic. A son of Greek Orthodox parents says in reference to their search for the baby that his parents expect Christ to return on a real cloud and the Antichrist to rise like a beast out of the sea.
A Vatican priest says to "doubt what you hear, trust what you see," the reverse of Biblical wisdom. Martin Luther liked to say that the ear, and not the eye, is the organ of the Christian. While Catholics are portrayed positively, the Vatican at the end of days is portrayed as corrupt and jealous of its power. This seems to be drawn as a parallel with how the high priests and Pharisees were jealous of Jesus at his first coming. That the series presents themes like this covers a multitude of sins. This will probably be more true to the Bible's intent in teaching apocalyptic than any series that would give accurate details of a future military campaign in the Middle East. This show is unusual in emphasizing (so far) biblical themes rather than end-times scenarios.
I am hearing people I know complain that this series does not stick to the text. In one sense I can follow this. But at the same time, when I look at how Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in the New Testament, I think too straigtforward a telling of a story like this would strike me as unlikely. Perhaps even ham-fisted. This series is at least stirring the questions around.
Luther liked to say that God hid himself in his revelation. This is a Biblical idea. Jesus said that he preached in parables in order to hide things from the wise. And even when he explains things, there are a lot of open questions left over. I like the fact that this series is taking the form of an exploration. As events unfold, people have to wrestle with what they mean.
David Seltzer is the writer and executive producer of this series. It is nearly three decades since he first wrote the Omen. The first Omen movie was almost more of an exploration of what it would be like to find that one was the Antichrist. That also made for interesting drama, but the insights were not very applicable. (For most people, anyway!) The current series still relies heavily on suspense. But there is more of an exploration of themes of good and evil, identity, and appearance versus reality. And there is more emphasis on words than I have seen in other Apocalyptically-themed shows.
9:55 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Saturday, April 23rd, 2005
One of my most trusted news sources, the Onion, has a must-read piece titled Papal Election Brings End to Worldwide Unsupervised Catholic Sin Binge. Had I read this earlier, I might have converted to Catholicism for the interregnum.
Hat tip to Bunnie Diehl.
10:38 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Gene Veith spoke at our Southern California Outreach group yesterday. His talk was on the doctrine of vocation, which he wrote about in his book God at Work. We had a good crowd of people, both Lutheran and not. I was sitting next to a non-Lutheran friend, who wrote a note to another of our friends that said "This is great material. The problem is that the Lutherans don't know how to reach the masses." How true.
The question and answer period was really interesting. The quotes are reconstructed from memory. They should be accurate in spirit, and probably reflect actual language used, but may miss some of the details.
"I beg to differ with you, Dr. Veith, about non-Christians having a vocation, as Solomon says that their things will be taken away from them and given to believers."
"There is a sense in which that is true, as without faith, those people remain under the wrath of God, so their work us ultimately futility." The flip side of this had been mentioned by Veith earlier. Their works still served the neighbor. We don't have to know whether the farmer who grew the grain to make our bread was a Christian or not. The bread was still bread either way. Veith also threw in that it would not be a proper following of vocation to take things that belonged to non-Christians on the notion that the Scriptures prophesied that they would belong to us in the end.
"What can we say about the vocation of a prostitute?"
"That raises an important point, the fact that not everything that could be called a job is a true vocation. Leading one's neighbor into sin does not constitute following a vocation." Veith tied this in to acts of love and service for the neighbor.
(This led to some joking around our table of "but I felt loved and served!")
The subject of lawyers came up, and Veith joked that that might be seen in the same light as the vocation of the prostitute. Our lawyer friend Craig Parton, the author of the great introduction to Lutheranism The Defense Never Rests, stood up at that point and countered, "People always say that until they need a lawyer!"
In the midst of the question and answer period, Craig made some very noteworthy points of his own. About how we should put to rest the idea that we will be winning souls through our personal piety rather than a clear defense of the faith, Craig's chief passion. Craig has the ability almost to channel John Warwick Montgomery, under whom he studied, into the room, yet remain himself. He also adds some new theological terms into the language that every systematic theologian must know to remain up-to-date. "Whoopie church" is one such term. (Rhymes with Wookie.) As in "So someone is advertising the latest whoopie church in the area." This is probably any church where style trumps substance, and usually in a contemporary direction. It is probably best used of small churches that follow the church growth methodology in a feverish fashion.
Perhaps Craig's best point was how in Lutheran churches, he was dumbfounded when he discovered how Lutherans, instead of doing evangelism, will form an evangelism committee, and then never talk to people. When he was in Campus Crusade, he did a lot of evangelism, but there was never any need for a committee.
Another question was asked. "What about our soldiers, or members of Al Quaida?"
Veith mentioned how there have been some Christians who thought that being a soldier could never be a legitimate vocation because of the command "Thou Shalt not Kill", just as there were those who thought that no Christian could be a judge because of the injunction to be forgiving. A distinction had to be made between the person acting on his own behalf, in which case killing or being unforgiving was wrong, and the person acting in a role on behalf of the community.
Veith mentioned the fact that Luther was against the Crusades, especially as a religious war. But how Luther had a lot of worthwhile things to say in a treatise called "Whether Soldiers, Too, Can be Saved" (in Luther's Works, volume 46). There was a legitimate Christian vocation of being a soldier and it could be done in love and service to the neighbor.
He also made a point about how the uniform is a clear sign of vocation. This is one thing that makes terrorists suspect on the face of it. A soldier wears a uniform to clearly mark out that his vocation differs from that of a civilian. (The camoflage proves the point all the more. The soldier is willing to be mistaken for bushes or trees, but not a civilian.) But a terrorist, not clearly operating under the authority of a government, does not have a legitimate vocation.
1:43 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Thursday, April 21st, 2005
I watched the second episode of Revelations last night. It looks even more promising than it did the first night. The first night, it had appeared that there was a baby born that was supposed to be Christ. This seemed like an unusual reading of Scripture, because Jesus is already God incarnate. He did not cease to be incarnate after the Ascension. So what would it mean for him to take on another human nature? Would he be two Persons? Now the baby's identity is being questioned, and the possibility raised that the baby is a false messiah. I don't agree with every line of reasoning advanced in this series, but then again, would I expect any character to be infallible? After two episodes, it appears that the writers are more orthodox than some of the characters portrayed. This is a good thing.
I read an online article where the authors of the Left Behind series claim that Revelations is unbiblical based upon seeing only the first episode. Sister Josepha, a nun, is on the search for the baby Jesus. La Haye and Jenkins note that this is unbiblical. Is the search unbiblical? Probably. Is it against the Bible to portray a nun being theologically confused? No! And given that she comes to her senses (Apparently. There are still four episodes left!) in part by the right verses coming to mind makes this a more wholesome portrayal than we might expect.
I also like the way this story teases the viewer. There is a scene where Dr. Massey is on an airplane flight. As turbulence hits, he gets up. Suddenly the whole plane is empty of passengers. It appears that a premillenialist rapture scenario has just taken place. It turns out this is a vision, whose point was elsewhere. Is this a foreshadowing of a future event in the series? I don't know. But it will keep many watching.
After two episodes, all I can say is that this is a very skillfully written drama. I can't say that anything is unbibilical, because the story has not made any solid commitments to how any event would fit into the Bible, or even whether what was seen was necessarily supernatural. The whole story could go anywhere. I think that is the significance of the title. There will be revelations at the end. My pastor shuddered when he heard the series title because we have individuals in our congregation who speak of "the Book of Revelations" in the plural. He figured that the TV writers were likewise misinformed about the book. These days, that is surely possible. But I think we are being treated to something better. I won't be able to say otherwise until the final episode.
5:49 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Monday, April 18th, 2005
I hadn't planned to watch Revelations. But somebody turned it on and persuaded me to watch.
This is better TV than I anticipated. Mostly I want somebody to do something to make the whole Tim LaHaye kind of scenario go away. If it can make people confused so they might read the Bible for themselves, all the better. At least in this story people can say "Wait! That wasn't in there! Oh. They embellished that." The problem with LaHaye is that the stuff IS in there. Only it is given a ham-fisted literal interpretation that does not fit the apocalyptic books of the Old Testament and how their visions meshed with reality.
So far, this series reminds me of the movie Constantine. Where doctrines are not chosen because they are orthodox, but because they have dramatic possibilities. Now I know, this is not a way to carefully handle the Word of God. But I think it actually increases the possibilities that some elements of orthodoxy can make it on TV.
I took an exegesis course on the Book of Revelation at Gordon-Conwell. One conclusion I came to was that as a genre, it is very different from anything we are used to reading. It is not a novel in any sense. So if we are to attempt a direct translation of it to novel or film, we are probably doing it a disservice. For this reason, I think the more imaginative renditions are probably better than the ones that go chapter by chapter. (One thing that is wrong with that is that Revelation is not sequential. So to portray it as a visual sequence may be misleading.)
On the other hand, my prof suggested that we might take the book as a psychology of Church History. In addition to some predictions of future events and commentary on past ones, it gives us a lens through which to view our earthly plight in light of God's ultimate victory. We could use movies that would read our time through that kind of lens. It remains to be seen if the series can manage some of this.
It was interesting watching a discussion among doctors in the hospital of a persistent vegetative state so shortly after the Terry Schiavo case. That added some resonance to the story.
8:08 pm Pacific Standard Time
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In looking up information on the Papal Conclave, I found a couple of interesting sites. One site tells about the whole conclave process, and lists how long some conclaves have taken. Pius XII and John Paul I were elected in one day. John Paul II took two days. The other allows people from many countries to place bets on which cardinal will become pope, and what name he might take.
I wanted to vote for Cardinal Ratzinger. If they would have allowed it, I would have chosen Pius as the name he would assume. Of the choices they allowed, I would have chosen Benedict. Ratzinger becoming Pope Benedict had odds at 16-1, which is much higher than many other cardinals becoming pope at all, irrespective of name. Unfortunately, bets were not taken from the United States because online gambling is illegal. I did not know that, as I had never attempted to do this.
Before the conclave ends, does anyone have a guess?
3:11 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Thursday, April 14th, 2005
Some other Lutheran bloggers (John Halton at Confessing Evangelical and Erich at Beggars All) have had some interesting discussions of branding. I almost always agree with their take on whatever incident got them writing in the first place.
I may have something to add to this discussion. I have a certificate in Digital Arts from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and had to take several classes with a focus on marketing. It gave me a lot of time to think about branding.
But the first thing I learned in the UCI program was the difference between Fine Arts and Graphic Design. I have always liked Art. But in high school, I shied away from a career in that field after a field trip to the Art Institute in Pasadena. Almost all the work had no meaning to it that could be seen on the surface. If you asked "What is it?" you would likely not have an answer even after staring at the piece for a day. Not even a general answer. I found this forbidding. Especially since one's livelihood would rest on being able to assign a value to something that could not be identified. But Graphic Arts was way on the other end of the spectrum. Your message was supposed to be able to be identified by someone who glanced over while driving down the freeway at 70mph. Gone was the wonderful middle area of the Fine Arts of old where you could quickly say "That is a Diana," but spend all kinds of time asking subjective questions of "Why did the sculptor fashion her like that?"
A brand is a technology whereby we communicate a message in almost no time. And TV advertising, even where it does not use brands, tends to use communication techniques that are similarly spare. I have read that there was a revolution in advertising a century ago when an advertiser broke from the pack and made his primary appeal to emotion rather than reason. The ad? A picture of a smiling baby in a high chair. No argument that the product was better for baby. No listing of ingredients. No comparison with a competitor. Just a baby's happiness. Of course there was supposed to be some kind of thought process. The baby is happy because it ate the product. But the advertisers were surprised to find that the ad worked.
Now, do we have a message like that with the Gospel? I think this is the question that we need to ask.
Think of a crucifix. In one sense, it is the heart of the Gospel boiled down. St. Paul spoke of knowing nothing but Christ crucified. That is all we see on a crucifix. Yet if we haven't heard the message, we might not see this in the crucifix. After all, many people have been crucified over the centuries. How do we know who this Man is? We must be told. Yet we don't know how much we would need to tell to make this point. All attempts to exhaustively work out a psychology here must fail. What did the centurion at the cross know? When he said "Surely this man was the Son of God," had he heard Jesus preach before? Or just seen him die? Our Christology tells us that the divinity shone forth through the humanity. At best we can capture this symbolically with a crucifix. But the centurion saw the real thing.
A crucifix is probably the most accurate branding we've ever had.
Yet think of how long we knew of the crucifixion before the doctrine of the Atonement was expressed with the clarity St. Anselm brought to it.
Our denominational labels exist precisely because we felt the need to express more in order to be able to define who we are and how we worship. If the crucifix had been enough, we would not have needed to create such labels. These labels are a strategy to keep church order.
But to think that we can keep this strategy from breaking down is to forget why we had the labels to begin with. There is always more to define. Evil takes new forms. We can agree on the explicit statements of the Book of Concord, and then find that we have a new kind of interpretive battle on another cultural issue. If we could avoid this, surely we could have avoided many of the earlier problems.
And I am further convinced that this is unavoidable because St. Paul faced the same problem. He delivered the Gospel to Galatia, and then said that others came in and preached another Gospel which was no Gospel at all. St. Paul didn't rebrand the message at that point.
Likewise, there are Lutherans out there who are no Lutherans at all. Some of those are in the LCMS and some in the ELCA. It is likely true (Ok. "This is most certainly true" in my mind) that one of these "brands" is more dependable than the other. But for one who is already in a congregation, the "product" (I shudder to use this word. I mean it only analogically as the thing that is "branded") is the thing. If I bought an electric razor to shave with from a company that was later exposed as selling shoddy merchandise, but my razor works, I'm going to keep it. On the other hand, if I get sliced by one sold by a top-notch company, it's going into the trash. Brands in this sense are important to buyers, but not to owners.
Perhaps a computer analogy is more accurate. You own a good computer, but you know that when you get the new update, it might be a really bad one. Some will keep the computer since it works now. Some will look ahead and decide they want to avoid the future hassle.
On the matter of easy communication, maybe we have to face this stuff so that people will ask us what we believe. "Are you the ones who..." "No! That was those people. We believe..." If our message is one that is supposed to be meditated upon, perhaps a theology that can be grasped from a billboard is not to be trusted.
It isn't that I don't see the advantages to quick communication. It is more that I think that our cultural insistence on it tends to distort as much as it clarifies.
2:29 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Tuesday, April 12th, 2005
At church on Tuesday evenings, a small group of us are reading some primary source material for a "Motifs of Christian Thought" class. The motifs so far have been monasticism and mysticism. We have read short texts written by early monastics (such as the rule of St. Benedict and the Athanasius's Life of St. Anthony) and mystics. Tonight we read "The Cloud of Unknowing."
I was struck by the similarity in language between this and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Meditating on the Word." Only the similarity in form only underscores the more the dissimilarity in content.
"The Cloud" suggests that we ascend beyond meditating on our wretchedness, or even Christ's Passion. That is all lower stuff. What is higher is to meditate on God who is Love. And we do this by clearing our minds. If our minds drift to the Passion, we should know that this is a bad thing. While the Passion is a good thing in itself, a tendency to wander into thinking of it while we are trying to enter the Cloud of Unknowing where we meet God face to face is a hindrance. The Word is to be left behind. If we need to meditate on a word, it should be a short word of one syllable so that our rationality does not get in the way.
Bonhoeffer suggests that we meditate on the Word. Take a whole passage and mentally live in it. He told his students that if their minds wandered out to thinking about their neighbor, they should not feel as if this were a bad thing. They should bring their neighbor into the meditation on the passage.
How different in direction. Meditating on the Word brings us to Christ. And Christ may lead us to serve our neighbor in prayer. The Word is not a hindrance to contact with God, and thoughts of the neighbor can be beneficial. The whole hierarchy of lower and higher has been jettisoned.
No wonder I love Bonhoeffer.
Note: I don't love The Cost of Discipleship as a whole. It makes for some confusing reading. I hardly blame Bonhoeffer for writing it, though. There could be times and places where a very different kind of message is called for. And certain of the insights are still brilliant and applicable. His discussion of justification by faith in terms of initial data and answer is intriguing.
I avoided Bonhoeffer for a long time after reading The Cost of Discipleship. And I didn't read it as a Lutheran with a robust conscience, but as a Calvary Chapel youth with a very sensitive one. But later, when I discovered Meditating on the Word, Life Together, Creation and Fall, and some others, I decided that he was a truly great mind.
9:57 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Saturday, April 9th, 2005
John Halton has written a biting analysis of an account of Easter at Saddleback Community Church. He rewrote Acts 2 as it would have been written if Saddleback had been around at the time:
Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” And Peter said to them, "Repent Commit your life to Christ and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ tick a box indicating that you have done so for the forgiveness of your sins to discover God's wonderful purpose for your life, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit a copy of my bestselling book, a New Testament, a worship CD and two helpful tapes on spiritual growth.
If you haven't discovered John's blog, you should. Although there's a decent chance you found your way to this one from his.
4:09 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Monday, April 4th, 2005
As it was for many, for me this past week has been one of looking back on the life of John Paul II. But I have found that my view has been altered by looking at the lives of other popes at the same time.
Over the past week, I have read Thomas Cahill's Pope John XXIII, thumbed through a 1965 Life magazine from the Vatican II, and watched NBC's Time and Again, where they replay old news, in this case, the death of Paul VI and the elections of John Paul I (I had forgotten what he even looked like) and John Paul II.
The media are declaring John Paul II to be an unprecedented figure. I don't mean to diminish the scope of his accomplishments. I am not so frustrated by hearing the man credited as I am by a media which seems to have little sense of history. If you only know one pope's life, then of course it is unprecedented!
John Paul II has been credited with being instrumental in the fall of Communism. Is this major role in standing between East and West truly unprecedented? No. John XXIII is said (by Cahill) to have been instrumental in preventing the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning nuclear. In the case of either pope, it can be argued that he was not the main actor in the situation, but an influence. Given how high the stakes were, a good influence is to be given much credit. But these cases are similar in the kind of position the pope had in them.
John Paul II is also said to have been loved for his openness to a large world beyond the Vatican. While it is true that more popes than not were probably holed up in the Vatican, others were also known for breaking down barriers. Again, John XXIII is a good example. He introduced himself to a delegation of rabbis with the words, "I am Joseph, your brother." And his invitations to Orthodox and Protestant observers to attend Vatican II were surely precedent shattering.
The question that has to be asked is whether John Paul II was following in the footsteps of John XXIII. According to Cahill, the answer is no. Cahill laments how much Vatican II failed to be implemented by John Paul II. Cahill, who is at his best at bringing a reader to deep sympathy with an otherwise unknown or remote figure, slips into a very unsympathetic reading of John Paul II at the end of his book where he speaks of John XXIII's successors. His langauge becomes a bit slanted, and I feel as if it would require a very different biographer to do justice to John Paul II. Still, however, it does offer me a lens through which I know how disappointing John Paul II could have been to many. I am only sorry that the media could not figure out a way to present this side of the story. Although perhaps this would not be the time to do so, when mourning people could be offended. (But the question still comes to mind, "If not now, when?")
If John Paul II did not follow John XXIII in the more expansive direction of Vatican II, his public gestures still seem to take John XXIII as a model.
Now for some less organized tidbits that I ran into over the course of the last week. They are worth listing for their own sake, as I had not run into them before:
10:30 am Pacific Standard Time
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