Christianity Today on Sci-Fi and Salvation

James A. Herrick writes in the latest issue of Christianity Today (vol. 53, no. 2, Feb. 2009) an article titled "Sci-Fi's Brave New World" (pp. 20-25) about "how the genre draws us to its own views of redemption." The argument is essentially that scientific naturalism has stripped the world of myth, meaning, and hope for redemption, and that since humanity cannot survive without these things, science fiction books and movies are re-mythologizing it for a new generation. Science fiction movies are replete with exalted alien intelligences, visions of utopia, and dreams of immortality and transcendence through technology. Some sci-fi movies, like The Matrix and Star Wars, even re-enchant the universe with genuinely supernatural forces. Herrick concludes that "Pop-culture fiction, not academic non-fiction, is now the cutting-edge of public discourse on spirituality."

Although Herrick professes to enjoy the genre, he warns of its dangers. "Many of the most popular narratives bursting with spiritual and worldview implications are more persuasive because they come dressed in the invisibility cloak of 'mere' entertainment," he warns. He suggests that the church must self-consciously and critically respond to the new mythos:

Ignorance is not our predicament, progress is not redemption, the future is not salvation, and space is not our destiny. [...] The biblical account of human origins and purpose, of our predicament as well as our redemption, and of the nature and purpose of the cosmos we inhabit, is emotionally, spiritually, and rationally more satisfying than modern myths featuring aliens, starships, divine evolution, hidden knowledge, and biomechanical post-humanity. [...] Among the myriad redemptive myths displayed before us, it is time to remind ourselves that only one has ever been God's story.

These are questionable statements. The very reason there is a spiritual vacuum in our culture for sci-fi myths to fill is precisely that the old Christian mythos was not "emotionally, spiritually, and rationally" satisfying to many modern people. Christian doctrine does not tell us how we are to proceed in an age of genetic engineering, nuclear power, and cybernetics. Christianity fluorished in the nineteenth century by being united to the mythos of democracy and to the gospel of moral and technological progress. World War II seemed to problematize that marriage, and led to a neo-orthodox reaction that refocused Christians' attention back on the more ancient narrative of Fall, sin, and atonement. Yet the advance of technological progress continues today at a faster pace than ever, and Christianity's mythos seems to be getting left behind in the dust of irrelevance. Perhaps rather than affirming the neo-orthodox divorce from modernity, as Herrick wants us to do, it's time for Christianity and modernity to get back together. Maybe there is room to be both a Christian and a transhumanist.

A Review of Christianity and Secularism by Elgin Hushbeck

Some time ago Henry Neufeld of Energion Publications sent me free copies of two books by Elgin Hushbeck with the understanding that I would review them on my blog. I reviewed Evidence for the Bible (in three parts here, here, and here), but was too busy at the time to read and review Christianity and Secularism. Since I finally have some free time, I was able today to read and ponder it a bit.

It's always hard to review a book by an author with whom you have dramatic ideological differences. There is the desire to be fair, but fairness tends to get lost in the midst of a flurry of objections. That will unfortunately be the case here. Christianity and Secularism is somewhat alarmist, echoing the usual conservative propaganda about how the secularists are using public education to destroy religion and such. As usual in such literature, hard secularism is taken as typical of all secularists (on the "hard" and "soft" distinction, see Wikipedia; for Hushbeck's definition of secularism, see p. 53). Disapproval of Bush's religious statements is attributed to secularism's anti-religious sentiment rather than to the militaristic overtones of words like "crusade" (4). Secularists are said to be a "small minority" using the courts to "force" the rest of society to change its beliefs (12). The Bible and prayer are wrongly said to be "banned from the classroom" and "forbidden" at graduations and sporting events (9). Although Hushbeck commendably says he does not envision a dark secularist conspiracy (8), it is frequently difficult to take such caveats seriously in light of his distorted view of secularity.

One point at which I'd like to specifically take issue with Hushbeck is in his discussion of "separation of church and state." He argues that this is a fairly recent interpretation of the Establishment Clause and that it grows out of the view that religion is "dangerous" (22). Indeed, he suggests that the Court's acceptance of this phrase (originally from Thomas Jefferson) "effectively rewrote the First Amendment" in a way that "would have astonished and angered the Founding Fathers" (19, 21). As evidence of this assertion, he notes that the Founders called for a national day of prayer and Thanksgiving shortly after the First Amendment was ratified (a day that we now celebrate annually as Thanksgiving), and that Washington said prayer and obedience to God is the duty of all nations (20). There is truth in Hushbeck's remarks here, but he does not grasp the whole picture. The Establishment Clause and Jefferson's "wall of separation" slogan were designed to protect evangelical Dissenter minorities from the powerful Anglican bloc that seemed poised to receive state imprimatur. Nowadays it is the evangelical bloc that seems poised to establish itself, and the threatened minorities include atheists, Buddhists, pagans, and a whole range of others that were not really in the Founders' purview. I think the Founders were aware that the dictates of the Constitution would have to be differently interpreted and applied as American culture and demographics changed. We cannot assume that the Constitution can be applied today in exactly the same way that it was applied in the eighteenth century.

I think, also, that Hushbeck takes "separation of church and state" in a stronger sense than intended by most of those who employ the phrase. He seems to imply by it an absolute, hermetic sealing of religion from public discourse, whereas most of us liberals mean by it that legislation should be predicated on public reason rather than religious special pleading, and that government should avoid giving preferential sanction or benefit to religious perspectives and organizations. The call for removal of "under God" from the Pledge is arguably motivated by a desire for fairness to the secularist minority rather than by hostility to religion as Hushbeck assumes. Since Hushbeck sees secularism as a religion, he should be pleased to see it receive the same protection and the same respect that Christianity receives at the government's hand.

Another problem spot in the book came in the interesting chapter on whether Christianity is still relevant. Here Hushbeck argues that since sin is still universal in the modern world, the message of Christ's atonement is still universally relevant (173). He does not contemplate the connection between bloody atonement and animal sacrifice, which is sufficiently alien to most modern people that the need for atonement is difficult to grasp. Nor does he treat the historical linkage of rites like baptism and the Eucharist to their first-century context, in which they were much more at home than they are in our modern world. Elsewhere in the book Hushbeck takes a similarly a-historical approach, arguing that the Bible is perspicuous when verses are read in context (by which he means the context of the rest of the canon rather than of history) and assuming that none of the biblical authors expressed differing theological views (71, 75-6).

I have many other objections to the way that Hushbeck handles issues in this book, including his a priori exclusion of compatibilism from the discussion of free will and determinism (41), his unfair dismissal of religious pluralism (45), his attempt to show that secular scientists are just as dogmatic as religionists (55), his specious argument that a "historical" definition of Christianity will include belief in the Trinity (77), his argument that for God to prove his existence to us would violate our free will (183), and his outrageously misleading caricatures of secular ethical philosophies (174-8). There are also quite a few typos and grammatical errors that escaped the editorial process, one of the more annoying of which for me was the recurring phrase "in specific" (in lieu of "specifically" or "in particular").

On the whole, I must give this book a negative review. I would be remiss, however, if I didn't note that Hushbeck's style is very approachable and conversational, that he could have been a lot more radically wrong than he actually was, that there are some very interesting anecdotes related in the book (eg. 48-9), that there are occasional glimmers of hope (as when he says there is no such thing as a Christian nation; 181), and that the book is really a breeze to read. Pick up Christianity and Secularism if you're looking for an intelligent conservative Christian manifesto against the anti-Christian forces thought to be pervasively at work in our society.

Some Old Art of Mine

I was looking through some old photos I took and drawings I did back when I had more time for that sort of thing, and decided to scan and post a few of my favorites. I'm pretty sure the pencil drawings were based on 'how to draw' books. I had started a couple of my own, one of George Washington and one of Carrie Fisher, but never finished them. Drawing is a very mechanical, left-brained task for me, so it takes forever. My handwriting is horrible, I have no intuitive sense for shape and perspective, and I can't draw a straight line to save my life. It's a miracle these turned out the way they did.

Losing Faith in Earth

This week's premiere of Battlestar Galactica picks up where the last season left off: with the Galactica crew looking out at the devastated landscape of Earth. Over the course of the series, the crew has been following the prophecies of Pythia in the hope of finding the mythical planet of Earth and its thirteenth tribe. In the face of the total annihilation of the twelve colonies and the massacre of billions, this hope is all that has kept the Galactica crew going-- all that has kept them alive. With the discovery that Earth, too, has been devastated by a nuclear war-- and that it was a cylon rather than a human planet, anyway-- that hope is gone. With it goes faith, and in some cases even the will to live. Lieutenant Dualla commits suicide. Admiral Adama tries to do the same. Laura Roslin stops taking her cancer treatments, and burns her copy of the scrolls of Pythia. The crew is despondent; fights break out in the halls, and no one quite seems to know what to do.


Arguably, the Galactica crew would have been better off had it never found earth at all. At least then there would be something to look forward to. A while ago I paid tribute to the delay of the parousia. When Jesus didn't return when he said he would, the early Christians deferred his coming into the indefinite future. I used the term "tribute" in a tongue-in-cheek way at the time, but the truth is that there is something to be said for this sort of delay. Jacques Derrida saw in the Messiah's "always coming, never arriving" a useful metaphor for the structure of human experience. If the "goal" of history were ever to definitively arrive, Derrida argued, we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. We derive the meaning of our existence from our hopes and expectations for the future. When those are lost, something essential of ourselves is lost with them. The Galactica crew has suffered, then, a double blow: not only has the "goal" arrived, but it also wasn't what they were expecting. The messianic structure of their reality has been shattered.


At the end of the episode, a few members of the crew begin to try to grapple with this loss of hope and faith, looking for a way forward. Their efforts will be familiar to anyone who has ever undergone a similar failure of religious belief. Lee Adama tells the Quorum of the Twelve that they are "no longer enslaved by the ramblings of Pythia": they are now free to go where they want to go and be who they want to be. For Lee, however, these words are motivated by necessity rather than conviction. Like many atheists, he is turning lemons into lemonade: the crushing loss of religious faith is interpreted, in retrospect, as liberation. There may be real truth to this interpretation, but it supplants the sense of pain and loss only with time and repetition. Admiral Adama, meanwhile, charts a course for the nearest inhabitable planet. The loss of messianic hope means that a new hope must be constructed, if nothing else than through sheer force of human will. This, too, finds echoes in atheism.

One thing that no one tries to do in the episode is to re-interpret the prophecies or to argue that Earth is still out there. I suspect that we will see this approach in future episodes. This is the way of 2 Peter: the messianic event is deferred into the indefinite future, because the loss of hope is too much to bear. Maybe the crew will even construct new myths to replace the old ones-- turn to new messiahs and new gods.

It should be interesting to see which way-- if any-- wins out in the end.

"Saved through Childbearing": Women and Authority in 1 Timothy 2:11-15

Translation

The NIV translates 1 Timothy 2:11-15 as follows:

11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women will be saved through childbearing–if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

Translators face several difficulties here:

'Quiet' or 'silent'? - The NIV renders en hesuxia as "in quietness" in v. 11 but as "silent" in v. 12. Both options are grammatically and contextually viable.[2]

'Man/woman' or 'husband/wife'? - The words "man" and "woman" can also mean "husband" and "wife". Andros, however, is not used with the definite article as we would expect if v. 12 meant that a wife cannot "have authority over her husband." That andros is indefinite suggests that a woman is not permitted to teach or have authority over any man, regardless of her relationship to him.

'Have authority', 'domineer', or 'wield influence'? - The NIV translates authentein "to have authority." Ann Bowman allows that it might mean "domineer," but prefers "exercise authority."[3] Andrew Perriman's more complete analysis concludes that there are "two closely related meanings." The first is to perpetrate a crime; the second is to actively wield influence over a person or to initiate an action. The passive idea of having authority appears on the whole to be a later development.[4] "To wield influence over" is probably the best rendering.

'Women' or 'She'? - The NIV refers to "women" in v. 15, but the Greek text actually just says "she". This was an interpretive choice made by the translators.

V. 12 a margin note? - The repetition of en hesuxia in vv. 11 and 12 is redundant, and v. 12 is awkwardly constructed. Since the passage also makes sense without v. 12, Perriman concludes that it was added as an afterthought: a "hastily constructed" marginal note that was later inserted into the body of the text. There is, however, no manuscript evidence to support this theory. Moreover, v. 13 reads better as a justification for the submission of women than for their silence, and thus more naturally follows v. 12 than it does v. 11.

Was there conflict at Ephesus? - Some commentators see in vv. 7-10 an indication that a specific kind of conflict is taking place in Ephesus: the men are debating during prayer and the women are being ostentatious. But this inference goes beyond the evidence. These verses may simply be a negative statement of the positive ideal promoted in v. 2: "That we may live quiet lives in all godliness and holiness."

In light of the above discussion, my modified translation of these verses reads as follows:

11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 And I do not permit a woman to teach or to wield influence over a man; she must be in quietness. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But she will be saved through childbearing–if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

Commentary

The directive here does not seem to be situational. The first-person pronoun used in v. 12 ("I do not permit") seems to indicate that the directive here is universal. The justification cited for it is also universal. It consists of an appeal to the created order (man was formed first) and to Eve’s great mistake. Her action in the Garden casts suspicion on all women after her.Thus if women speak or "wield influence" over men the way Eve influenced her husband in the Garden, the consequences might be equally disastrous.[5]

It is very possible that the "she" in v. 15 refers to Eve rather than to women in general (though women in general are no doubt included to some degree in Eve as their archetype). Eve was deceived and became a sinner, but now there is a possibility of salvation for her. After her ejection from the Garden she was cursed with pain in childbearing; now childbearing may become the source of her salvation. If "they" (her children, the women) will continue to learn with love, faith, holiness, and propriety, Eve may be vicariously redeemed.

Obviously this passage is absurdly chauvinistic. It's hard to believe that some maintain inerrancy in the face of such patent nonsense. The redemptive thread here lay in the fact that this passage seems to leave the door open for women to be "saved" from the terrible consequences of Eve's mistake. The epistle is explicit that "she"—whether women or their archetype—will be saved if the women will obey his command to learn in quietness. Surely after almost two millennia of quietness, Woman's redemption is accomplished. Surely we ought no longer to fear that she will be deceived again by Satan and lead men astray. And if we have any further doubts, we may perhaps take some comfort in the fact that the writer of the epistle phrased his edict in the first person: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to wield influence over a man." He did not say that God does not permit these things.

NOTES:

[1] Zane C. Hodges, Arthur L. Farstad, and et al., The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1982), 627.
[2] Except that "silent" is more literally "in silence."
[3] Ann L. Bowman, "Women in Ministry: An Exegetical Study of 1 Timothy 2:11-15," Bibliotheca Sacra 149, no. 2 (1992): 201.
[4] Andrew C. Perriman, "What Eve Did, What Women Shouldn't Do: The Meaning of Authentew in 1 Timothy 2:12," Tyndale Bulletin 44, no. 1 (1993): 138.
[5] The prohibition against women wielding influence should perhaps be understood as a restriction against female overseers. It does not seem meant to restrict women from all church service, since deaconesses seem to be referred to in 1 Timothy 3:11. See Jennifer H. Stiefel, "Women Deacons in 1 Timothy: A Linguistic Look at 'Women Likewise...' (1 Tim 3.11)," New Testament Studies 41, no. Jl (1995).

The Silence of Women Is Golden?: 1 Corinthians 14:34-35

The second passage I would like to address in my series on chauvinistic New Testament passages is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. Here we read,

34Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. 35If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

There is a possibility that this verse is a later interpolation constructed by an author associated with the school that forged the Pastorals, especially since the manuscript evidence is not unanimous as to its placement in the passage.[1] In some very early manuscripts, these verses appear after v. 40. Moreover, as they presently stand in most English Bibles these verses come in the middle of a lengthy discourse about speaking in tongues and prophecy, and interrupt the flow of the passage. The appearance of tais ekklesiais in both 33b and 34a also seems a bit redundant, whereas if vv. 34-35 were omitted entirely then v. 33 would connect smoothly with v. 36: "Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only people it has reached?" V. 36 adds a sarcastic bite to the affirmation in 33b that all Christian churches have orderly services. The two ideas connect perfectly.

It should be emphasized, though, that no manuscript of 1 Corinthians omits these verses entirely, and they ultimately fit with the theme of the rest of the chapter. A more likely explanation for the uncertainty as to placement is that these verses are a marginal gloss added as an afterthought by Paul and only later incorporated into the body of the text.[2]

Another way moderate evangelicals try to get around this passage is by arguing that the Greek particle normally translated "or" at the beginning of v. 36 ("Or did the word of God originate with you?") is actually a disjunctive particle (roughly translating to "What?!").[3] That might mean that vv. 34-35 are a quotation from the Corinthian letter, and v. 36 is Paul's refutation. But this would be an odd place to go on a tangent criticizing the Corinthians' limitations of women's speech, and Paul does not qualify vv. 34-35 as he usually does quotations from the Corinthian letter.

Other scholars have analyzed the passage in its historical context and tried to find some other explanation for what is being said here. After all, since Paul mentions women praying and prophesying in ch. 11, why would he contradict himself here? Jervis thus places the verses in the context of the larger passage: "It limits 'the women' from asking questions of the prophets which disrupt prophetic utterance, therefore it does not censure other types of speech such as prophecy, the interpretation of prophecy, tongues, teaching, and so on."[4] Jervis may be right that not all speech is here condemned, but her interpretation is probably also too loose. Rather than understanding the passage as a condemnation only of disruptive female speech, we should perhaps regard it as a condemnation of all female speech except 'spiritual' speech (hymns, words of instruction, revelations, tongues, and interpretations)—which is to be exercised by "everyone" (see 14:26). Women are only allowed to speak under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and only in their proper turn; at any other time they must remain silent.

As in his instructions concerning head-coverings in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul's commandment here is predicated on Jewish Law ("They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says") and concern for the honor of males ("they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church"). I suggest that the apostle was wrong to feel so chained by Law and honor, and that his allowance that the Holy Spirit may speak through women is a redemptive thread that undermines his teaching in this passage. What man finds disgraceful, the Holy Spirit fills with grace.

NOTES:

[1] See G. W. Trompf, "On Attitudes toward Women in Paul and Paulinist Literature: 1 Corinthians 11:3-16 and Its Context," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 42, Ap (1980): 215.
[2] L. Ann Jervis, "1 Corinthians 14.34-35: A Reconsideration of Paul's Limitation of the Free Speech of Some Corinthian Women," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 58, Jun (1995): 52-53.
[3] Daniel C. Arichea, Jr., "The Silence of Women in the Church: Theology and Translation in 1 Corinthians 14.33b-36," The Bible Translator 46, no. 1 (1995): 109.
[4] Jervis, "1 Corinthians 14.34-35," 51-52.

Head Coverings in 1 Corinthians 11:3-16

This will be the first of three posts on the chauvinistic passages in the New Testament. Some readers may be surprised to find me agreeing with the fundamentalist interpretations of these passages. That is because for the most part I think moderate evangelicals' ways of rationalizing them away are cop-outs. My position is that we should just admit that the New Testament writers were wrong at these points.

The first passage I'd like to address is 1 Corinthians 11:3-16, which is about head coverings. Paul opens this section by saying that Christ is the head of man and man is the head of woman. Whatever else he may be trying to say here, it is clear that he assumes a hierarchy. "Head" language is used of Christ’s authority over the church and over creation in Ephesians (1:10,22; 4:15; 5:23) and in Colossians (1:18; 2:10; 2:19).

The headship hierarchy is used to talk about honor, and particularly about honor as it relates to the issue of wearing head coverings while praying or prophesying in the public assembly.[1] If a man covers his head during these activities, Paul argues, he dishonors both his literal head and his metaphorical head. By contrast, if a woman prophesies with her head uncovered, she similarly dishonors her head.

Modern scholars' attempts to explain this teaching away as a concession to culture have all failed. If Paul were grudgingly conceding to the norm, there would have been no need for such elaborate argument. There is, in any case, no evidence that Corinthian women wore veils in New Testament times,[2] and while it does seem to have been Roman custom for women to wear something on their head (often just headbands or scarves) in public, Bruce W. Winter has shown that these customs were breaking down in Paul's day.[3] Paul's Greek word katakaluptw, moreover, means "thoroughly covered," and could not refer to a token Roman headband. Jewish culture provides a better parallel; as Joachim Jeremias has explained, a Jewess of Jerusalem who went out "without her face being hidden, committed such an offence against good taste that her husband had the right—and indeed the duty—to put her away from him."[4] It is probable that Paul was attempting to enforce Jewish custom in the Corinthian church, over the objections of the Gentile Christians there.

A better attempt to do away with this teaching, that of Gordon D. Fee and W. Gerald Kendrick, focuses particularly on v. 10 where the NIV reads, "For this reason, and because of the angels, a woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head." The phrase translated "have a sign of authority on" (lit. "have authority over") is found over a hundred times elsewhere in Greek literature, and is always used in an active sense to mean "to have authority over" something. It is always used of authority exercised, never of authority submitted to.[5] The word for authority, exousia, is similar to the one used in the Corinthian slogan Paul quotes elsewhere in the letter: "All things are lawful (exestin) for me" (6:12). And in 8:9 he cautions the Corinthians not to let their freedom (exousia) become a stumbling block. In ch. 9 he uses the word repeatedly to show how Christians should give up their rights for the sake of their brothers and sisters. Since that discussion immediately precedes the present passage, it is reasonable to presume that exousia is the Corinthians' own word. They had written to Paul, apparently arguing that women should have freedom to do as they please with their heads. Kendrick thus concludes that in v. 10, Paul is expressing qualified agreement with the Corinthians. A woman should have freedom of choice about what to do with her own head. Nevertheless, for the reasons offered in this passage, Paul thinks that to responsibly use this freedom is to voluntarily cover one's head.

Kendrick and Fee are probably right that Paul is responding to a Corinthian argument that women should have freedom to do as they please with their heads, but the conclusion that he expresses qualified agreement with them finds no support in the text. The reasons Paul gives in vv. 7-9 in fact directly controvert this conclusion: woman was created for man, and "for this reason" "should have [his] authority over her head."

Probably in v. 10 Paul is not expressing agreement—qualified or otherwise—with the Corinthian slogan. Rather, he is appropriating the slogan and changing its meaning. The Corinthians used the slogan "a woman should have authority over her head" to mean that a woman should have the freedom to do as she wishes with her head. Paul uses it to mean that she should have her head covered. While the Greek phrase "to have authority over" is never used in a passive sense in extant ancient literature, it is certainly capable of passive construal. The Greek phrase functions in much the same way as its English counterpart. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the English phrase "to have authority over" will be used in an active sense. But if the phrase were used in a certain context, it would have to be read passively. The same is true of the Greek sentence construction we find in 1 Cor. 11:10. Paul appropriates the Corinthian slogan and uses it in a passive sense, ironically altering its meaning entirely. The phrase as Paul uses it means that a woman should wear a head covering.

Why is a woman to cover her head? Paul's primary appeal is to the created order. Man was created first, and then woman was created for man. It is a woman’s duty to glorify man by covering her head in the assembly. There are also angels involved somehow. Some commentators have suggested that these may be angels who watch over the created order. These angels would be offended if Christians failed to preserve gender distinctions.

It is not until vv. 11-12 that Paul expresses some qualified agreement with the Corinthians. They apparently argued that since gender distinctions are abolished in Christ's new creation, women have freedom to do as they please. In vv. 11-12 Paul admits that the created order is modified in Christ: neither man nor woman is independent of the other; each comes from the other, and both come from God. This concession, however, is short-lived. In v. 13 Paul launches back into a discussion of propriety, hair, and what seems proper or natural. He puts a stop to any further discussion of the topic in v. 16, where he says, "we have no other practice—nor do the churches of God."

It is possible that Paul felt he could make no concession on this point because the Corinthian rebellion against Christian head coverings was part of a larger rebellion, which Paul intended to shut down entirely. Or it could be that he simply felt more strongly that gender divisions should be maintained and that man is the head of woman than that these distinctions are abolished in Christ. Whatever the reason, modern Christians should feel free to grab hold of the redemptive thread in vv. 11-12 and to pull it until the chauvinism of the rest of the passage is unraveled.

NOTES:

[1] This passage does not, as some claim, say that women should wear head coverings at all time. Only during prayer and prophesying are the women to cover themselves.
[2] W. Gerald Kendrick, "Authority, Women, and Angels: Translating 1 Corinthians 11.10," The Bible Translator 46, no. 3 (1995): 337.
[3] See Bruce W. Winter, Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
[4] Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 359-60. It is unlikely that all Jews, particularly those outside Jerusalem, would have been so strict.
[5] Kendrick, "Authority, Women, and Angels: Translating 1 Corinthians 11.10," 338.

Rest in Peace, Ogbu Kalu and Father Neuhaus

The world lost two of its great Christian scholars this week. On January 7, Nigerian Pentecostal scholar Dr. Ogbu Kalu (one of whose books I have reviewed on this blog) passed away suddenly "from complications from pneumonia." Kalu was the leading expert on Pentecostalism in Africa. January 8 saw the passing of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran-turned-Catholic priest, civil rights advocate, pro-life crusader, and wonderful theologian and writer. Neuhaus bequeathed to the world the literary journal First Things, one of the most widely-read academic Christian publications in print today. Both of these men died too young, Kalu at 66 and Neuhaus at 72, but lived full and meaningful lives in the years they had. May they rest in peace.

'Redemptive Threads' in the Bible

One of the interesting things about the chauvinistic passages in the New Testament is that most of them contain 'redemptive threads' that work against the chauvinistic message the apostle is trying to communicate. The most famous of these threads occurs in Ephesians 5:21, where we read that husbands and wives should "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." Even though the passage goes on to say that "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church" and that wives should "submit to their husbands in everything," moderate evangelicals tend to grab hold of the phrase "submit to one another" and tug at it just enough to compromise the integrity of the rest of the passage. Of course, they are afraid to pull this thread too hard, out of fear that the whole shirt might unravel. Nobody likes to lose the use of his favorite shirt because he pulled apart the seams! In contrast to the timid tugging of moderate evangelicals, liberal Protestants are those who have pulled at the redemptive threads long and hard enough to realize that the whole shirt is constructed of such disparate threads, and that it shouldn't be taken too literally as a unity. Some of us have pulled longer and harder than others, and don't have much left of the shirt except a great big pile of threads, some of them of higher quality than the rest.

Everyone must ultimately decide for him or herself which redemptive threads in the Bible to pull, and how hard to pull them. I admit I felt a great sense of loss as I watched my evangelical faith entirely unravel before me. And yet I think it would have been a great act of cowardice to shy away from the pulling, and I have found that the redemptive threads themselves are so precious, especially now freed from their association with threads of lesser value, that I would not trade them for the unity that I lost. Perhaps, with time and help from like-minded people, they can be assembled into a new fabric, more precious and yet humbler than before: a towel to be used in drying the feet of our neighbors rather than a fancy garment to be guarded against worm and moth.

Joseph Priestley, The Ultimate Dabbler

In a recent post In Praise of Amateurs over at Positive Liberty, Jim Babka refers in passing to Joseph Priestley, whom he calls "the ultimate dabbler." I cannot imagine a more apt designation. Few historical figures have been as eclectic as Priestley, who had a finger, it seems, in virtually every field. Among other things, Priestley was a minister, a theologian, a scientist, a historian, a linguist, a rhetorician, a philosopher, an artist, and a political radical.

Priestley's major claim to fame is that he was a co-founder of the Unitarian denomination and a major theological influence on several Founding Fathers (including Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin). If he was a renaissance man, he was also a man of 'renaissance' in the sense of the word that refers to rebirth or revival. He had a powerful concern for personal transformation, as well as for the moral and religious transformation of society. It is here that Priestley's primary significance lay: he became the leader of Rational Dissent, an icon for a generation of Unitarians, and a crusader for religious renaissance in Britain and then America.

His religious contributions, however, do not exhaust his influence. He made contributions to many disciplines, albeit unfortunately in an age in which specialization became increasingly important. His impact in the sciences was therefore wider than it was deep. Nevertheless, Priestley managed to achieve such feats as to discover seven gases, including oxygen, and to invent a machine for the carbonation of beverages. Although neither he nor his friends recognized its importance at the time, Priestley also discovered the inverse-square law of electrostatics. In the field of psychology Priestley defended David Hartley's associationist theory. His mechanistic view of consciousness influenced neuroscientists long after his death. In the field of epistemology Priestley was an ardent and important critic of Scottish Common Sense Realism.

Other work by Priestley includes several scientific and religious histories. He also wrote on the philosophy of history and developed history curricula for educators. In addition to designing curricula he was an extremely important educational philosopher, and advocated among other things education for women.

Priestley's interest in languages and the humanities led him to study ten different languages, including Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic. More importantly, he wrote treatises on oratory, rhetoric, and grammar. His grammar textbook made him, says Schofield, "a major figure in the study of English." In the arts, the first edition of Priestley's treatise on perspective contained the first published announcement of rubber erasers. (Not much of a claim to fame, but I guess you take what you can get.)

Priestley's support of the American and French Revolutions led to his becoming the target of the Birmingham Riots of 1791, in which his home and the Dissenter chapel at which he preached were destroyed. His defense of the "most sacred" right to revolution eventually led to such public animus against his person that he was forced to relocate to the Americas. There he became a mentor to key Fathers of the Republic, including Jefferson and Adams.

Priestley's home shown destroyed after the Birmingham Riots of 1791

One of the more interesting aspects of Priestley's work is the way that his contributions to all of these fields tied together. Due to his study of Hartleyan psychology, for example, Priestley was painfully aware that aged people—not to mention aged societies—don’t like change, and that Britain would not become Unitarian overnight. His was a careful pedagogy that advocated free inquiry and openness to change, without pushing too hard in any obviously heretical directions. Hartleyan psychology also imbued him with an appreciation for the power of habit, and in his sermons he advocated habit-formation as a means of moral transformation. By sampling broadly of many disciplines, then, Priestley was able to achieve a more holistic understanding of human existence and to place the many facets of human knowledge into constructive dialogue with each other. In our age of specialization this sort of consilience is too often lost. That is why, since discovering Priestley, I have made a conscious effort to broaden my horizons and to do some dabbling of my own.

An Analytical Tool for the Study of Book of Mormon Chiasmus

In 2004, Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards published one of the more significant apologetic studies of the Book of Mormon in recent history. Their paper, titled "Does Chiasmus Appear in the Book of Mormon by Chance?" (BYU Studies 43:2, 2004), is a statistical analysis designed to determine whether Book of Mormon chiasmus was intentionally created by the author or is merely a chance occurrence. The paper is designed to rebut the argument of critics like Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe that chiasmus is likely to appear accidentally in any highly repetitive text.

There is definitely room for criticism of the Edwards and Edwards study, but that is not the purpose of this blog post. Rather, my purpose here is to bring to readers' attention the computer program that Edwards and Edwards developed for their study. This tool is available (along with helpful instructions) for download and use by the general public from the BYU Studies website. The function of the program is basically as follows. Say we have a proposed chiasm with five parallel elements, but that there are also other repeated words and phrases in the passage that do not participate in the chiasm. In order to determine the likelihood that a five-element chiasm would appear in the passage by chance, we can randomly rearrange all the repeated elements in the passage a particular number (R) of times and then determine how many of the random rearrangements include five-element chiasms. The result, divided by R, will give us the probability of intentionality (L) for the passage's chiastic structure. If we know the number (N) of opportunities for five-element chiastic structures to appear in the entire Book of Mormon, the program can also calculate the likelihood (P) that such a structure will appear at least once somewhere in the Book of Mormon.

Once you understand the concept, the Edwards and Edwards program is not difficult to use. the hardest part is to determine the values to be inputted. These values must be determined manually. Some time ago I had the pleasure of discussing with Robert Ramsey his proposed chiasm in Helaman 5. (See here for our discussion of it.) In order to illustrate how the Edwards and Edwards method works, I have applied it to the proposed Helaman 5 chiasm. In the image below I have highlighted all major repeated elements in the passage. Some of these are discarded, because they are repeated within the same section. Elements that are repeated within the same section do not "count", as far as the Edwards and Edwards method is concerned. So "the Earth" or "shown unto you", for example, are highlighted but don't get taken into consideration in the statistical analysis. The Edwards and Edwards method also ignores synonymy in favor of objective repetitions, for the reason that objective repetitions are more easily quantifiable.

Here, then, are the inputs that I used:

Chiastic elements: 5
Number of times each chiastic element appears : 3,4,2,2,3
Non-chiastic elements: 3
Number of times each chiastic element appears: 3,2,2
Number of random reorderings: 200000
Number of duplicate levels: 0

For reference, the chiastic elements included in the analysis were "Lamanites", "prison", "forth/slay", "durst not lay their hands upon them", and "burned/fire". The non-chiastic elements included in the analysis were "Nephi and Lehi", "fear", and "encircled about". The program returned the following result:

L = .33203
Margin of error = .00129

In other words, a random rearrangement of the elements in the passage will produce a comparable chiastic structure 33% of the time. That means that there may be an intentional chiasm here, but that from a statistical standpoint it might just be a freak accident. It should also be noted that this is the probability of intentionality within this single "opportunity". (By an "opportunity" I mean any section of text that has at least 5 repeated elements within close proximity of one another. In any text with many repeated elements, the elements might unintentionally have a chiastic ordering.) There are a probably dozens of opportunities in Helaman (the Edwardses estimate 956 such opportunities in the entire Book of Mormon) for an accidental chiasm of this length to emerge. If our L value for one opportunity is 33%, the P value over, say, ten opportunities would be greater than 98%.

That does not necessarily mean that the Helaman 5 chiasm is unintentional. The Edwardses' method takes into account only 4 of 15 of the criteria by which John Welch proposes we evaluate the strength of a chiasm. (They use the quantifiable ones; the rest are subjective). The case for intentionality in Helaman 5 could therefore be strengthened by application of Welch's 11 other criteria. But from a purely statistical standpoint, we are not compelled to accept the intentionality of this structure.