Saturday, October 27, 2012

A Year of Goodreads

         It was almost a year ago that I started using the website GoodReads.com. It's a site that keeps a database of books and lets members record things like marking books they would like to read, recording the date they finish books, rating books, and writing reviews. If your friends use it too, you can each see what others are reading and have discussions about books on the site. I started using it to keep a list of the books I was reading.
         Now, to record a book , to put it on your "selfves" in good read terms, you must assing it to one to three basic catigorys: to-read, currently reading, or read. There is no choice to put thing in a "Read have and then got distracted by another book and abandoned it." I found this bug/feature to be very motivating for me in terms of actually finishing books. (Though it also motivated me to abandod books I suspected I might not finish all the quicker.)
         Before I started using GoodReads I had estimated I finished around 100 books a year, guessing I averaged about 2 a week. This year I've made my goal of finishing 150 books. When my husband saw my goal he said that a goal should be a stretch, not what you were going to do anyway. And he's right that I waiting to see that I was on pace to make that goal before setting it. But I think that for someone with a full time job and something of a life 150 books something of an achiment.
        Finishing more books has changed the impact of my reading on me. It keeps books more distinct in my mind vs. having ideas from different books blend together quickly. I'm more deliberate and aware of what I read and end up gaining a fuller appreciation of what I'm reading about. I look forward to continuing to keep this kind of reading log in the future.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Fifty shades of complementarianism?

When I read Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James I expected from the publicity that it would remind me of Joey Hill, but what really surprised me was how much it reminded me of Grace Livingston Hill. You wouldn't expect to find complementarianism* mixed in a book so full of explicit sex and without other moral concerns a concept so assisted with traditional morals. What was it doing in this secular bestseller? What was it doing taking over the plot?
My theory is that this started out as parody, of twilight and also of the romance in general. It was to be collage of all the silly tropes, mannerisms and cliches that are endemic in modern romance novels. One thing you often see is egalitarian and complementarian elements jumbled together in incongruous ways, or the contradictions between are used to create tension in the body of the book and then magically disappear in the resolution. I think James may have decided that what was causing the incongruities was the complementarian elements per se and strained them all out to put in her parody. Once freed of the egalitarian elements, the complementarian ones cohered and made a compelling story. When James went back to make it a straight romance rather than parody some egalitarian elements were laid back in on the surface but the heart of the story and the relationship portrayed remained complementarian.
I wasn’t going to read Fifty Shades of Grey. Not that I haven’t read and enjoyed erotica before but too much of it’s not be good for me and I’ve been trying to cut down. Then I read this review by Amanda Green indicated the sex wasn’t all that good and it didn’t have anything else going for it so I got to wondering how it had gotten so popular. This article from the Atlantic says the secret is that sex is more experimental varied. But while Fifty Shades of Gray tends toward the eroctica end of the romance spectrum it isn’t towards the extreme end. There are plenty of romances that have more sex, with more, detail, kinkiness. It doesn’t make sense that women who are interested havn’t run into sexer stories before.
I think both the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey and all the incongruous bits of complementarianism that commonly appear in other romance indicate that many women like reading about certain aspects of complementarianism. 


*(complementarianism is the idea that men and women are complementary rather than equivalent, they may be equally important but they cannot be interchanged without adjustment for the different gender. It’s associated with churches that don’t ordain women and the idea that the man should be the head of the household.)
 

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Discards

    Here is a picture of the trash I collected for easier disposal while I was making soup on Saturday. It struck me what a wonderful colorful world God has made. Still lifes of flowers or fruit are beautiful: colors that are distinct but related, the different interrelated shapes, the evocation of pleasing smells and tastes. Looking at my pile of discards I was fascinated to see the same kind of pleasure in it. You never know where delightful things will be just waiting for you to really look at them.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Cost of communication

I was reading my sister’s post on language and it got me thinking about the effort we put into communicating. In contrast to sister’s skill, I always knew I was bad at language. English may be my mother tongue but I still remember problems with English pronunciation in first grade. Occasionally I still have problems though most peoples will hear what they expect to hear and not notice it. At most a few think I have an accent. Required foreign language course always seemed sadistic to me when they penalized beginners for spelling mistakes, as I was always severely behind in English spelling and to this day rely heavily on spell checkers. And as someone with Aspergers just mastering the mechanics of speech and writing didn’t lead to real communication. I was very lucky to be introduced to genre fiction where communication was stripped down to bare essentials, and it’s causes and effects all put down in black and white were I could study it and start to see patterns.
But for someone with Asperger’s syndrome I’ve been able to close a lot of the communication gap from my side, it could have been harder to deal with. Communication always has an internal cost that we pay to move our interior codes to symbols that are recognized by others. For people with a shared language there is not just the fact that they can communicate with each other but that they made an effort to arrive at a communication destination and that destination was the same. For our first language that effort was made mainly before we can remember and driven by instinct and necessity more than choice. But that effort was still there and consumed much mental power for several years of our life.
I would like to be able to speak a second language, and maybe someday I will manage to put in the time and effort to do that. But for now I'm just glad I can speak English, the language of my family, of the place where I was born. I'm glad that the people who move here from other places do generally make the effort to meet me and people like me at the communication destination we have already managed to achieve. Sometimes cherishing the amount of communication we do have allows us to really see things that never quite made it into and generally shared symbol system.
Rosettastone - Brtitish Museum
  Photographer: Nina Aldin Thune
To me there seems to be something elitist in an expectation that people should learn a second language just because. Aware as I am of those of us who cling precariously to the edge of a first language. If a second language is just a generic prerequisites of acceptable status, it's a drain of time and effort that falls most heavily on those that are already most marginal. I also think taking a language course in college just to satisfy the language requirement, surrounded by other people that were also just there to satisfy a language requirement yielded a very porridge return as far as comprehension gained for time and effort expended. The circumstances almost guaranteed that most of us would focus on short term memorization to get artificial test answers rather than working on true comprehension.
           Languages ought to be special valued skills that open up opportunities. And they are best taught in conjunction with the opportunity to explore those new opportunities. A specific language is a specific skill and should have specific goals it can achieve and specific values it brings. Studying a language without being able to envision a use to put it to makes acquiring a language much less motivating. It also makes it less valuable. We ought to value the specialness of knowing two languages rather than wanting make it less meaningful in normality.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

φίλος

Part of why I’ve been away from blogging for awhile is that I just started a Bible study at my church using Living beyond Yourself: Exploring the fruit of the Spirit by Beth Moore. There can be as much as 8 hours of homework a week. But, not only do I enjoy fellowshipping with the other women at my church doing this study, I am also being stretched and seeing some surprising insights. A couple weeks ago we were covering love and looked at ἔρως (eros, romantic love), φίλος (philos, love in friendship) and ἀγάπη (agape, divine love.)
    In eclectic readings that included lots of authors influenced by classical ideas I’d encountered these different greek concepts of love before. Φίλος has alway been especially compelling to me. I’d read descriptions shared interests that created bonds between people. Friends that kept in touch with each other over decades, always invested in each other's challenges and concerns. Freinds that naturally maintained contact through marriages, moves and career changes.
    And these descriptions were compelling because I didn’t have that. Oh there were girls and later women whom I liked and admired who seemed friendly and welcoming towards me. We would meet through mutual involvement in various activities. I could get to hang out with them and discuss the topic that we shared. As I grew more skilled with social interaction we could have wide ranging general interest conversations and exchanges of personal hurts and triumphs. We would do favors for each others and be ready to do more. But though I would have liked a long term bond I never knew quite how to secure it. As soon as the mutual activity would end I would feel the relationship slipping away without that structure to keep us in contact. I wanted to remain friends but had a terrible time with the logistics of staying in touch. I would make intellectual models based on the relationships around me. But they felt so artificial and unnatural to me that I would end up executing them clumsily if at all.
    This has been a hurt in my heart. I could see this wonderful human experience being offered to me but I could never reach out and grab it. Αγάπη I could have as a free gift that I didn’t have to work for, that God offers to all. But my own ineptitude kept at least the highest versions of φίλος beyond my reach and that made it very desirable to me.
    In addtion to covering positive examples of φίλος “Living Beyond Yourself” used Luke 23:12 as an example of φίλος. Pilate and Herod bond over their mutual frustration and disdain for the whole Jesus situation. This, and a couple of other examples give of how φίλος can be used in a negitive light, helped me to see that I had been exalting freindship in a way that overvalued it. That I’d been idealizing it in a way that made it a rival to divine love in my mind. This bible study has made me more content with being who I am and allowed me to focus more great gifts God has given me.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

mini Review: War and World History


      War and World History by Jonathan P. Roth is a audio course of lectures from the Teaching Company. The San Jose State professor takes you from pre-history to modern times in friendly engaging lectures that make it seem like you are part of his college class. It's a little longer than most Great Courses at 4 parts and 48 lectures. But this covers a lot of ground giving both the high points of history and also looking at the detail of the curiosities and controversies.
      Most world histories that I have read seem like unrelated stories just thrown side by side and not coming together until we get to modern times. But this book ties everything together, giving a sense of the world as whole throughout history, showing how developments and technologies traveled between cultures and impacted them similarly or differently. The course examine the causes and consequences of both general trends and regional differences.
      I originally picked this up because I like the history of warfare in particular and , as the title suggests, this course uses war as a unifying theme. However, not only does this work look at how the progress of war and it's aftermath influence wider history, but it looks at how the stresses and progress of wider society influence wars' progress and contribute to the causes of war. The focus is broad enough that, while war is used as unifying perspective, a good general picture of history is given.

I really liked this course and would recommend it to anyone interested in timing their sense of world history together.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Today's Lasangua

My husband and I both think this is my best attempt at creating my own Lasangua recipe yet:
My husband and I both agree that this is my best attemp yet at creating a no tomato lasangua


Fry together
Tbsp veg. Oil
About 2c. Chopped oinions
2 yellow squash
A large zucchini
a cup sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup chopped cellery leaves
Pound hamburger meat
T. Butter+T.flour+bouillon (made into roux)
t. Dried rosemary
t. Salt
t. Time
1/2t. Celery seed
1/2t. Margiorim
1/4t. Dried parsley

When cooked add:
Can of peas
Can of water chestnuts
Half can of cream of mushroom soup


In separate bowl:
Scramble 2 eggs
Add container of ricotta cheese
3T. Chopped cilantro
Parmesan cheese or Italian cheese blend

In baking pan layer:
Meat veg. Sauté
Mozzarella cheese
No boil lasangua noddles
Ricotta mixture

Bake in preheated oven at 325 for one hour.
This is posted from my iPad and I'm havering an extra hard time editing for spelling.


Wednesday, September 5, 2012

How should I continue this blog?


So this summer I committed to doing a blog with at least a post every Wednesday. I only missed one week, which considering How much trouble I used to have with essay deadlines in college I consider pretty good. Now the summer is coming to an end and I have Bible studies starting up again. I’ll probably change my regular posts to a different night as I’m looking forward to a Bible study on Wednesdays. As I consider if and how I'm going to keep up this blog I'm thinking of establishing a theme. So, does anyone have an opinion on what theme I should try?  Some ideas I have had:

  • Book reviews (It would end up being a mix of general interest books and the Science Fiction I like.)
  • Asperger’s Syndrome and my thoughts on my experience with it
  • Original fiction (Could I finish a novel if I disciplined myself to post a chapter a week?)
  • the Bible and my speculations from Bible study and looking at Theology
  • Philosophy and general speculation
Any other Ideas of what it would be interesting to hear from me on? Which of these would you be interested in reading and commenting on? Let me know your vote in the comments.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Memories of St. Nicolas of Myra, Bishop and Martyr

I just finished reading Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, which is an anthology of stories featuring better werewolves and Christmas. So it wasn't required element in the story,many of the stories ended up featuring Santa Claus. What really caught my attention was that, while many of the stories speculated about either the real Santa Claus or where the story Santa Claus to come from, only one story based their version of the story on St. Nicholas of Myra, in fact no other stories even mentioned him at all
I remember as a school child recognizing that the Santa in Santa Claus sounded like it might be part of a saint's name but not being able to figure out which saint was mentioned. Tracing it back only to a figure in Holland’s folk tradition and not to the saint whose saint day is December 6. Growing up in the Protestant home, I remember Santa Claus being treated as a pagan figure and not knowing anything about the bishop and martyr who was steadfast in his faith and a champion of orthodoxy.
It was not until recent years that I finally found out about this figure discovering of that funny floppy pointed hat with a puffball was traditional in the area around Myra and that the red and white Suit was based on bishops liturgical garments. It was only then that I found out about three gold balls he gave as dowries help destitute orphans and about the stores of them saving children's lives
I found this information on the Internet pretty easily once I figured out where to look. I think it says something about America sense of history and about the sense of the roots of their traditions that this information is so little-known. So did you know about Nicholas of Myra? Do you think the internet will help people explore history and tradition or make them even more focused on what’s now?
St. Nicolas

Saturday, September 1, 2012

mini-Review: Why Nations Fail

A while ago I became aware of the idea there was a mystery in economics. This is the way I remember it: For a long time technology would improve but this would just lead to a change in population so that the standard of living remained pretty much the same over millennium. But then, during the industrial revolution something changed and technological changes began to lead to sharp rises in living standards. All the explanations for why Briton in the 18th and 19th century was the turning point, rather than any other place of time in history, seemed unsatisfactory to me. With this intellectual problem came a practical one. For not every place that came in contact with industrialized societies experienced the standard of living gain.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson opened a whole new and promising view point on this for me. Looking at both political and economic processes as they interact with one another, the authors show how societal institutions can self perpetuate in ways that tend either towards wealth or towards poverty. Including how the problems of hanging onto power can pit a ruler’s own economic interests against the general economic interests of society. It looks at who well intentioned efforts to help poor nations can be ineffective or even backfire. It looks at the importance of empowering broad and diverse coalitions and developing stable inclusive political and economic institutions to sustainable economic growth.
The book is written in understandable and engaging style aimed at a lay audience. There are historical and contemporary stories that can tug at your heartstrings for call for cheering. It is a long book; this is a complicated theory and the authors go through lots of different examples to explain the subtleties. There is no quick fix proposed as the problem is not simplified into a one dimensional issue. I would still recommend that every responsible citizen read this book and give consideration to its ideas.

*The review was based on the audio version read by Dan Woren

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Modesty and Mindblindness

A recent blog post by my sister she mentions her natural modesty. It’s made me think of my experience with this. Or rather my non-experience since I don’t really have natural modesty. I’ve got pictures of my wrapping paper clothing stage where I must have been about 6 or 7 and I clearly haven't absorbed which are the critical areas that clothes are supposed to cover. And while some modesty rules got drummed into my head growing up, a few seem to have escaped my attention into adulthood. It was my husband who introduced me to the idea of checking that the neighbors don’t have an unobstructed view through an uncurtained window before changing in front of it.
photo by Marc Falardeau
This is not to say I had a preference for displaying skin. In fact I remember a time as a teenager when I was intrigued by the idea of full face veils and chadors. (In those pre 9/11 days I saw any symbolism as primarily complementarian rather than specifically Islamic.) When I consider things with my reason I definitely don’t have a preference for letting others see my skin and definitely a preference for not using clothing to signal openness, approachableness, or flirtatiousness and the like.
 But you have to be aware of that on going conversation to experience your clothing as communication with another at any particular moment. For me communication is always staticy and intermittent. It’s not something the I expect to happen every time I see someone at a distance or pass someone on the street. Yes, intellectually I’m aware of the possibility of information gathering, but I don’t have that sense of minds in mutual awareness of each other. What other people think does not generally overlap with what my own thoughts and don’t impinge on my feelings outside of my conscious effort for them to do so.
           This mindblindness, as far as automatic perception goes, can be very inconvenient at times when it takes me several extra second at the beginning of conversations to sharpen my attention and sync up to another person’s viewpoint. But it does have its advantages. It may take me awhile to figure out what cloths communicate, but I don’t have involuntary embarrassment about my clothing. If I realize the my shirt has a stain on it or that I’m wearing white sox with an otherwise all black outfit, I can decide to watch out for that the next time I dress and then dismiss the matter from my mind. So for me modesty is not body consciousness but a set of rules that I’ve managed to figure out.

Monday, August 27, 2012

mini-Review Princess of Wands & Queen of Wands


        Princess of Wands and Queen of Wands by John Ringo are the story of an Episcopalian soccer mom who fights demons by the power of her faith. This is a two book (so far) series about the secret Special Circumstance department that keeps modern America safe from and demons that manifest them selves here. It has the smooth writing and good fun of a standard urban fantasy but with more of a sense of realism and with a more original set-up and plot.
        The novels unfold in a way that feels natural but at the same time leads to all sorts of places you couldn’t predict. The premise is presented very convincingly, so it’s to imagine that this could be happening all around us without most people ever noticing. In some ways there were some parts of the fantasy seemed too realistic, and I had a hard time not letting the aspect I didn’t agree with knock me out of the story. The heroin, Barbara Everett, is not very theologically sophisticated but that helps the story move along quickly without getting involved in issues irrelevant to the plot.
        The books certainly go places that something published as Christian Fiction wouldn’t. But the fact that this book is instead sf/fantasy fiction gives it a different writing style, and one that I personally prefer. And while I wouldn’t necessarily endorse many of the answers these books give, they do ask some important questions in an interesting way. I would recommend these book to anyone interested in reading urbane fantasy. 


*this review was based of the final version of Princess of Wands but the e-ARC version of Queen of Wands

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Only Very Superficial People

it is only very superficial people who abject to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvelousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries.

                                 -G. K. Chesterton

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Pair of Political Posts

I’ve mildly enjoyed watching the political arguments this election season. Luckily California isn’t a swing state so I haven't had to endure the commercials, which a definitely think are the worst of it. But I see a couple of different levels of conversation going on. The most obvious is The Wrong side Absolutely must not Win. If you click through and read the article and can’t tell whether it is arguing for Republicans or Democrats, that’s the point. At the level of the political operatives trying to win this election the basic strategy and concerns are pretty much the same, just with different quotes or “issues” used as set decoration. And looking at that level could get pretty depressing.
            But Amazon has come up with a clever map that symbolizes, to me, a deeper level of the conversation. I don’t think this map is a good tool for predicting the coming election or even of the general long term trend. (Afterall, one of the books Amazon considers blue, which happens to be my favorite book of the year, I would consider neutral.) But it does give a qualitative look at people engaging with ideas, not being harassed to dislike the “wrong side.” Whether they are looking at viewpoints they might want to endorse or trying to understand how others think, they are voluntarily putting down money to read about ideas at length. While in the short term sound bites and television commercials will influence elections, I think the long terms trends of people really engaging with ideas will affect the conversations and determine what future television commercial and sound bites are about.

Friday, August 24, 2012

mini-Review The Synoptic Problem by Mark Goodacre


The Synoptic Problem: a Way through the Maze is an introduction to the Synoptic problem from a scholarly point of view. (The synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, have places where they match word for word, indicating that they were copying from each other or from another document.The question is who was copying from whom.) It is written at an accessible level, patiently laying out the details and going over examples. The evidence is evaluated from a secular viewpoint using the standards common in the academic field of New Testament studies.
Goodacre agrees with the academic consensus on Mark being the first Gospel but disagrees on the existence of Q, thinking instead that Luke knows Matthew. This gives the reader a great opportunity to see how academic argument takes place. When Goodacre argues on academic grounds against the academic consensus the reader gets a fascinating look inside what evidence is weighed and how a theory’s momentum effects it’s evaluation. It’s also fascinating to see how the very slender evidence we have is used to make solid assertions and the difficulties of speculative assertions being used as givens in latter argument.
There are many point where I disagree with Goodacre both in general approach and in specific detail due to my different philosophical positions. However, I very much enjoyed this book and all the things it got me thinking about. I would recommend it to anyone interested in academic disputes about the Bible.

This Review was based on the Kindle edition

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

David’s Now and Not Yet Kingdom

"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David; and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end."
            -Luke 1:32-33 (NASB)

in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
            -Hebrews 1:2-3 (NASB)

When I first encountered the already-but-not-yet establishment of Jesus’s kingdom on earth I had a little trouble getting a sense of what that could mean. Then one day I was thinking about the story of King David. Who better to look at as a type of Christ as King then King David. And David had a period of already but not yet kingship. In 1 Samuel 16:12-13 God has Samuel anoint David as king of Israel. But it is not until many stages of life and many years later that David is actually acknowledged King by all Israel in 2 Samuel 5:3-4
        I’m definitely not saying the Jesus’s actives are in any way constrained or foretold by David’s story, but I do think it’s useful to look at this period of David’s life to help my ability to picture possibilities for how this period of Christ’s ministry might look. In fact there are lots of different possibilities that David models as he goes through different stages: total unknown to society, rising star at court, target for royal paranoia, hunted fugitive, leader of a mercenary band, and king of half a kingdom.
David and Saul
    When David was first anointed king he didn’t announce the fact, he didn’t try to start building a power base. In fact he did his current job, and he took opportunities to make the job of the existing power structure easier, soothing King Saul and driving his evil spirit away. (1 Sam 16:21-23) David volunteers to face the problem that no one else is willing to face, but when he goes out to fight Goliath he takes his own weapons and not Saul’s but sticks to the pattern of showing respect for the existing government as legitimate.
    People begin to praise David as one would a conquering King, (see 1 Sam. 18:17 and the comment on it in 1 Sam. 21:11) and Saul becomes jealous. In impulse and trough plots Saul starts trying to Murder David. David escapes again and again (1Sam 18:11, 1 Sam 18:25, 1 Sam 19:1, 1 Sam 19:10, 1 Sam 19:11,15, and 1 Sam 19:20-21) and keeps returning to Saul as a loyal servant. By my count it is only after the seventh time (1 Sam 19:22-23) that David because reluctant to present himself again. After Sauls show himself ready to make an eighth attempt (1 Sam 20:31-33) David flees Saul’s authority. As long as he could David tried to help Saul’s efforts to protect and govern Israel and when that was no longer possible David chose flight over confrontation.
    Even as Saul hunts David in the wilderness and David does nothing more then cut off a corner of his robe When he has Saul in his power. (1 Sam 24:4) David continues to plead humbly with Saul. (1 Sam 24:8-15) David considers that it would be immoral for him or his followers to kill Saul (1 Sam 26:9-11) Even when Saul is eventually killed in battle David mourns for him and executes his killer. (2 Sam 1:11, 16)
    During this whole time God has removed His blessing from Saul and chosen David to be Israel's king. But David does not try to enforce God’s decision in his own strength. Neither does God seem to be in a hurry to dispose of Saul and bring all Israel under His chosen ruler. This helps me to be comfortable with the fact that though the kingdom of God has been initiated, Jesus is waiting to enforce his rule with power.

A Psalm of David.
The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
-Psalm 110:1 (NKJV)


Triumph of David, Nicolas Poussin

Monday, August 20, 2012

there must be harmony

There must be harmony between God and His worshippers; such as God is, must His worship be. … The man who would truly worship God, Would find and know and possess and enjoy God, must be in harmony with Him, must have a capacity for receiving Him.
                        -Andrew Murray

Friday, August 17, 2012

Do we rule out a Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew?

So I’m reading some material about the synoptic problem. One thing I’ve run across is the fragments of patristic commentary on the order and circumstances of the gospels’ composition. particularly I’m thinking about the seeming mention of Mathew being first composed in Hebrew. This seems to be dismissed as obviously wrong in the scholarship I have seen. No one seems to be arguing for it being in Hebrew so the arguments it are not given in detail. The one time it seemed to be address definatly the argument was just that surely if there had been a hebrew Matthew some of it would have survived.
Apostle Matthew
But as far as I know NO Hebrew copy of an Old Testament book has come down to us through christian hands. That is, if it weren’t for jewish copies we would only have today the old testament in Greek, Latin and other gential langueges. You can see in Justin Martyr that the fact that Christians are using a translation is an issue and difference are being debated but Justin defends the translation as legitimate and having the same sort of inspiration and therefore the same authority as the original scriptures.  When Jerome is doing a new Latin translation the question of differences between the greek and hebrew text comes up again. It is debated within the Church and Jerome recommends that concerned Christian leads check with their local Jewish communities to confirm his translations from the Hebrew. I don’t remember him referring to any authority or community within the Church that has a hebrew manuscript or can check Jerome’s translation. Moreover it the story sounds like not only did Jerome have to go to Jews for Hebrew lessons but also for a manuscript to translate from. If already, still within the Roman period, Christians had lost all or most Hebrew copies of the old testament books, whose translation into greek was a live issue , still being debated, that not copies of a single book would have comes down to us?
If Matthew was translated into Greek during the apostolic age, then the translation itself would bear the same authority as the other books being composed originally in Greek during that same time. With no controversy over the translation there would be no motive for non-Hebrew speaking congregations to hold on to a manuscript they couldn’t read. And though we know second hand of Hebrew congregation surviving into the second or third century I’m not aware of us having any documents from them. We know there are a number of significant early Christian documents that have been lost except for quoted fragments or that survive only in translations in other languages than their original composition. Lossing a version in a language that few Christians or no Christin read and for which there was an elegant and complete translation in wide circulation doesn’t seem a stretch to me.
There are other things that might be motives, if not reasons, for dismissing the claim that Matthew was first composed in Hebrew. First of course is that a Hebrew gospel is more likely if it’s fairly early, when the Jesus movement was still centered around Jewish communities. People who would like devalue or discredit its witness would like it to be late and therefore would like it to be originally Greek. Defenders of Christianity would also like it to be Greek because today we are not as comfortable as Christians of the first couple of centuries with the idea that certain translations can be divinely inspired, just as originals were; and if Matthew was originally in Hebrew then we definitely don’t have the original wording. There is also the desire to see the earliest church as primitive. Those who want to snobbishly look down on the disciples or nostalgically romanticize them can want to portray them all as illiterate peasants. The assumption seems to be that classes stick together so that illiteracy is seen as a group phenomenon; also that you can’t really be a peasant without being illiterate. But the Jewish religious tradition valued the reading of the scriptures and reading and studying were already part of the way non priests would participate in religious ritual. After pentecost there would have been hundreds of Jews involved in this new religious movement among whom might have been one who who could compose and write down an account of Jesus’s life.  There is also the modern tendency to assume anything earlier must always be more primitive then something latter and especially that the very beginning of a new thing should be poor quality and unsophisticated. In literature latter writers can build on earlier writers but it isn’t a universal rule. And the early Christians weren’t starting from scratch. there was a rich and varied tradition in the Old Testament to give them inspiration.
There may be arguments against a Hebrew gospel of Matthew that I just haven’t heard. But I’m not convinced that the possibility has really been explored adequately. I’ll be keeping an open mind on this for now.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Pair of Posts 8/16




These posts both had quotes I really liked.

3 Reason Why Nobel Prise Winners are Wrong about Stars Earn Stripes Do they not understand that while war requires only one party, peace requires universal assent?

On Gratitude it's often difficult to see this new scenario through any lens other than that of exclusion and unfairness. Until you step back and realize that all of life is not-having, if you make the choice to view it that way.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The Amateur

A man must lobe a thing very much if he not only practices if without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.
             - G. K. Chesterton

Monday, August 13, 2012

Defining characteristics of God

In response some posts I’ve read lately I’ve been thinking about the definition of God. Not necessarily the personally identity of my God, but what do we mean when we say “The Father is God,” or “Jesus is God,” What are we debating when we ask  “Does God exist?”
One possibility is to include Gods like we see in Greek and Roman Myth. These were beings that were orders of magnitude more powerful than any human of the time. They also seemed mostly unkillable but other than that they were similar in type to humans. But humans today are much more powerful, in certain ways, than the humans of that time. Science fiction has given us the phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There is science fiction speculation, and even occasional scientific speculation, about how we could acquire some of the powers those Gods had. I don’t think the proof of an alien being with powers that were simply greater than we could figure out would convince an atheist to change positions and it is not what the Abrahamic faiths mean by God.
But power is at the heart of the definition of God: not a large but limited amount of power but all-powerful. A lot of implications go with the idea of an all-powerful being. All-knowing seems to go with it pretty naturally. It’s easy to see how an all-powerful being could use that power to obtain any information desired so most people automatically add all-knowing to all-powerful. An implication that has been historically important to the way monotheism developed is that there can only be one all-powerful being. An all-powerful being must have power greater than all other forces in the universe put together. which makes all other being automatically all powerful.
There is another implication that is often skipped as being irrelevant to a specific argument but that I think is vital in making the intuitive jump to conceptualizing what is being discussed when people argue about God. An All-powerful, all-knowing being can’t experience time as we do, in an inexorably moving present always poised between a past that is knowable but unchangeable and a future that in changeable but never truly knowable. God must be able to change and to know everything and therefore must be unconstrained by time as we experience it.
Salvador Dali's Profile of Time photographed by Julo
We usually don’t think time’s workings when we try to reason something out. It is one of those basic thing that you always presuppose out of reflex. But if you try to visualize the working of an all-powerful being on the presupposition of linear time, you are going to find logical contradictions. our only mode of being is as part of time but God’s fundamental mode of being is eternity. It’s hard to wrap your thoughts around the possibility of not being bound by time. So we downplay or leave out this aspect when trying to convey God or argue about God. But God’s eternal nature is actually vital to grasping who God is. It’s important to remind ourselves and others that the certainties that time imposes on us melt away before God’s power.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Unseen doors

Our oldest dog, Ronin, is blind. It developed gradually so that he learned to get along on sound and his memories of how the house is arranged. Recently we had to replace the door to the outside that was broken, and while we were at it we changed which side the door the door opens on. All three dogs are a little confused by this, waiting by the hinge side to be let in or out. But the younger two dogs, when they see the door open, will go to the opening.
But Ronin will sit there, scratching at the hinges, even as the door pushes him over to trap him behind it. Ronin still need lote on calling and sound cues leading him step by step to get him through the opening. They all have a habit of sitting by one side of the door. (Even I find myself reaching for the handle on the wrong side occasionally.) But Ronin also has a mental picture, or a pattern construct, of how the door works. And without the visual input to override it that will take some time for experience to change.
I think we too are often strangely confident about the workings of things we can’t see, especially if we have caught a glimpse of them once. We mentally picture someone we haven't seen in years as they looked when we used to see them every day. We extend out trends indefinitely, as straight lines or smooth curves. Once an image takes hold in our minds it crowds out the idea that time, or circumstances, or a different viewing point, would reveals something unexpected.
In this age when so much can be know we are uncomfortable leaving something terra incognita. Each ‘I don’t know’ seems to call for a conjecture or a hypothesis or proposed solution. But once we’ve filled up all the blank spaces with our guesses, could we get so confident that we end up trapped behind the door scratching at the hinges?
I think this is one of the reasons I am not a Calvinist. They’ve got everything neatly diagrammed out, all the seeming contradictions seemingly ironed out. Everything meets up so that it feels like a complete picture of how salvation, that most important thing in life, works. There can be an unintended impression that humans can explain it all so much more clearly than God did.
But I suspect that God still has a lot of surprises in store for me. I want to leave blank spaces in my picture of the universe, or fill them with multiple contradictory images, so that I am not tempted to confuse the parts I do have information on with the parts I don’t. I like to consider myself as if a blind man, being lead by a God who sees.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Knowing yourself

For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God,
                             - 1 Corinthians 2:11-12 (NASB)

A giddy thought, knowing God the way you know your own thoughts. Even the second hand contact of having received a spirit that knows God that way is exciting. But how well do we really know ourselves? When I looked at this in Greek, trying to puzzle it out with a dictionary and a translation, I noticed that Paul has used two different greek verbs for ‘to know’ in these two verses.
First who but a man’s own spirit can οἶδεν* his thoughts. Here the verb is εἴδω which is a word for knowing the is derived from a word for seeing. Then only God’s Spirit does ἔγνωκεν God’s thoughts. The verb γινώσκω referring more to substantial knowledge.  Then we may εἰδῶμεν what is given us by God. Back to εἴδω.
Of course part of this is that Paul has just been alluding to Isaiah where it talks about whose eye get to see God. So it makes sense to use a word that ties the ideas of seeing and knowing together. But in switching to γινώσκω and then back to εἴδω I think something more might be implied.
Humans don’t really know themselves very well. Even with our own thoughts we may be more aware to the surface appearances and not aware of deeper truths. God isn’t like this. He has true comprehension of truths from foundations to grace notes. The Holy Spirit’s knowledge of God is more intimate than our knowledge of our thoughts and is absent any human self deception. By the Spirit’s power, we can gaze on the incredible gifts God has given us, but we shouldn’t expect to grasp all that they are.

*I don’t know Greek. I’m coping and pasting these from http://greattreasures.org. The form/accent/spelling may not be properly adapted to how I am pulling these out of context. 


image by Giardini Cargale-Vittorio