From Lenin's Tomb by way of Stalin's Moustache: A Christmas Wish

From Lenin's Tomb by way of Stalin's

Moustache:

Rage against X-factor

The Facebook campaign to knock the annual X-Factor schlock from the top of the charts by promoting the Rage Against the Machine song 'Killing in the Name Of' is very close to success, but only by the narrowest margin according to reports. I think it was a success!

Daily Zizek: on the sacredness of questioning

“What is perceived here as the problem is precisely the Christian universalism: what this all-inclusive attitude (recall St. Paul’s famous “There are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks”) involves is a thorough exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other “particularistic” religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon. The Christian motto “All men are brothers,” however, means ALSO that “Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT MEN.” Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the Chosen People and encompassing all of humanity – the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendenti[ous]ly excludes non-believers from the very universality of humankind.”

(Slavoj Žižek, On Belief. Routledge, 2001: 143-144)

HT: Deane Galbraith

BW3 and the deconstruction of Sheffield

James Crossley brought to my attention the Christianity Today article about the whole Sheffield fiasco, highlighting some rather strange remarks by Ben Witherington. The article is really poorly written, with a number of gross inaccuracies, so let us hope that BW3's remarks were also taken completely out of context.

Just to offer some examples: the article insinuates that "evangelically minded" faculty were purposely replaced with non "evangelically minded" scholars. I have no idea what this might look like in real life. My understanding of how the policies work, and I this is sheer conjecture, but when a NT scholar leaves who specializes in Paul, a faculty member with roughly the same specialization is sought. Andrew Lincoln left the department some time ago, and was replaced with another Pauline scholar, and Loveday who left rather recently (2008) and she was not replaced at all. Here is the CT quote:

"Evangelically minded faculty, including Andrew Lincoln and Loveday Alexander, were not replaced with scholars who held similar views."

Now to the BW3 quote:

"Other faculty were "bent on the deconstruction of the Bible, and indeed of their students' faith," according to Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary."

This is a very strange statement that I can't even begin to understand, but let me take a shot at it...so first "evangelically minded" faculty were replaced with "bad" non evangelically minded scholars, then "other" faculty, even worse than the "bad" non evangelical scholars were present who dabbled in the dark arts of deconstruction. Hmm, I am surprised a tornado didn't hit the 11th floor of the Arts tower. The BW3 quote starts with the word bent, which is presumably a pejorative in this context (especially for evangelicals, hence not straight) and then dives into the postmodern word of "deconstruction". Deconstruction is a nice, and less violent, way of saying destroy, so these "other" faculty wanted to destroy the very thing they were employed to study and ultimately their students faith. So the Bibs department is really just another Hogwarts, with faculty dressed in black (I have noticed that James favours the darker hues when it comes to wardrobe) bent on destroying the thing that ought never be named...FAITH.

Oh, I guess I can kind of piece this whole thing together after all.

Or perhaps BW3 was just talking about Stephen Moore's earlier project and the CT writer just assumed that it was a pejorative? I guess then the same thing could be said of Jamey Smith's work on Derrida down at Calvin College in Grand Rapids.

Very strange article indeed.

Remembering the 5th of November

HT: dunedinschool

Is N.T. Wright smacking down Jim West or what?

In a quote from N.T. Wright's short rebuttal to the CT piece that claims he is at fault for the protestant exodus to Rome, Wright has this to say:

"It reminds me of the fine old German NT scholar Heinrich Schlier, who found that the only way to be a Protestant was to be a Bultmannian, so, because he couldn’t take Bultmann, became a Roman Catholic; that was the only other option in his culture. Good luck to him; happily, most of us have plenty of other options."

Now who among us loves Bultmann? Perhaps this is why Jim West has yet to ask N.T. Wright into his heart.