Information Addiction and the Church

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Having commented on this post on the subject of ‘infobesity’ earlier, I thought that I would post my comments here. The following post contains my original comment, followed by some further thoughts on the matter.

Infobesity or a Changing Relationship with Information?

I don’t find the obesity metaphor as helpful as some others seem to. I also find the explanation of regular obesity in this video in terms of overconsumption rather than overload far too simplistic and quite unfair and inaccurate a portrayal of people who struggle with obesity. It seems to me that applying an analogy so drawn to our relationship with information is bound to lead to a failure to reckon with the serious systemic issues and challenges that we face, attributing problems primarily to overconsumption, rather than a transformed relationship with information on many levels.

If we were to redraw the obesity analogy, I believe that we should focus on the broader concept of our culture’s changing relationship with food, rather than simplistically on the idea of getting overweight. Our culture has an overabundance of food, yet our bodies were designed for situations of relative food scarcity, we have an economic system tailored to increase appetite and foods designed to be eaten without filling us up, we have incessant advertising designed to create want, we have an attenuated culture of communal eating, and food production has become a heavily industrialized process. Through the labyrinth of our economic system, our relationship to our food’s origins has become opaque. We have developed an anthropology that leads us to idolize physical health and appearance and people like the obese and smokers have become some of our greatest sinners, and body image has become central to self-worth (sexual self-realization, by contrast, is perhaps the telos of the human being, so pretty much anything goes on that front).

Cooking, while increasingly valued and celebrated as a middle class hobby, does not occupy the same quotidian place in many people’s lives following the advent of ready meals. We have an overreliance upon certain unhealthy foods and ingredients. Food and eating have become increasingly detached from the broader ends and realization of our human nature and the satisfaction of our appetite for beauty, sociality, love, order, worship, etc. We have framed our relationship with food in terms of metaphors, habits, and practices that encourage a binge-purge mentality and approach. With changing family form, many of the traditional forms of initiation into and training within a culture of food, its production and consumption, have been lost, without something clear to take their place. We have demanded certain virtues of our food that are not necessarily virtues at all: readiness, speed, size, efficiency, uniformity, convenience, etc. Obesity is merely one effect among many of this changing relationship with food, a changing relationship that, to some degree or other, and in some manner or other, affects us all. Perhaps our relationship to information has undergone a similar change.

‘Information’ as a Mediator of Relationships

At this point, though, I think that we ought to ask what exactly we mean by ‘information’. I suspect that the term conceals as much as it reveals: I would argue far more even than the word ‘food’. In thinking about my relationship with the Internet, I am not sure that the term ‘information’ really begins to get to grips with most of the reasons why I use it. Much of the time, the Internet can be more akin to a worldwide conversation about the weather than about a place one goes to be informed. It is about feeling ‘connected’: the information that is conveyed isn’t really the point.

Just as food is seriously misunderstood if it is reduced to biological fuel, so communication ‘content’ is seriously misunderstood if it is reduced to ‘information’. Food is a mediator of relationships with our bodies, cultures, communities, families, world, nature, our core values, and our faith. Much of the food that we eat and most of the expectations that we have of it go far beyond what would be expected of something that was no more than biological fuel.

In like manner, ‘information’ is a mediator of relationships with our world, ideas, values, other persons, communities, identities, etc. The real issue is not quantity of information (suggested by terms such as overload or overconsumption), but the shifting way in which our relationships are being mediated in the modern world. For instance, our new forms of communication can lead to a sort of ‘malnutrition’ in our relationships, as touch is depreciated, and sight is overvalued.

Distorted Relationships

One of the problems with modern food culture is that it has tended to peddle a highly distorted vision of the relationships that it mediates, and has ceased to be very effective as a mediator of certain relationships, leaving us with a hunger that cannot easily be satisfied, even with greater consumption. It has framed our relationships in a way that encourages unhealthy and fraught relationships with our bodies and body image. The distortion of the relationships mediated by food, both in vision and in practice, produces symptoms such as obesity, anorexia, bulimia, diet obsessions, binging, body image problems and body dysmorphia, poor nutrition, a loss of communal eating in some contexts, etc.

I believe that similar effects can be seen in the case of the Internet. While the Internet, like things such as the Green Revolution, have led to incredible gains for humankind, and I doubt that (m)any of us would really wish to return to the world that pre-existed them, they have led to a significant change in the way that we relate to our world, our beliefs, our values, and each other. Many of these changes have been quite unhealthy, and we must grapple with the symptoms, seeking to address the problems, without jettisoning the gains.

I believe that we should start by thinking in terms of the nature, purposes, and means of communication and situate our thinking about ‘information’ online in the broader context of our mediated relationships. When was the last time you expressed presence to someone in touch? How does taste mediate your relationship with the world? When was the last time you closed your eyes and just listened to something for an hour? Do you have senses or forms of relationship that you haven’t been developing or feeding? When was the last time you acted offline on something that you heard online? What exactly have you gained from following dozens of blogs, hundreds of tweeters, a thousand Facebook friends, etc.? How has this changed your relationship with others, both enriching and weakening? How has the Internet brought you closer to others, while simultaneously also pulling you apart in other respects? Has the Internet ever served as a fast, convenient, and ready communication substitute for far more socially ‘nutritious’ forms of interactions? When was the last time you decided to call on a friend rather than just e-mailing/texting/chatting to them online? Etc., etc.

The Purpose of Information

Approaching this from another direction, I wonder whether it makes sense to speak about information ‘overconsumption’ or ‘overload’, without first asking the question of what information is for. Speaking about ‘data’ or ‘information’ presents communication content in a latent form, while communication has generally been seen as purposive and directed in character.

Communication is about producing connection between persons, engagement with and understanding of the world and ideas, sharing of knowledge, formation of wisdom, expression of feelings, excitement, evocation, or direction of desire, the production of action by command, exhortation, or persuasion, manifestation of personal and emotional presence, declaration of judgment, the performative creation of new symbolic states of affairs, and the facilitation of decision. I think that the problems that we face lie less at the level of ‘information’ and more at the level of ‘communication’.

The information ecology that we have today, perhaps especially online, increasingly struggles to achieve and hampers the ends of communication in particular contexts. As communication fails to achieve its ends, information reverts to a latent or inchoate state and overwhelms and disorients us. The Internet becomes a hurly-burly of data and information, a babel of conversations vying for our attention, a noise in which we must search for signal. The Internet provides us with a wealth of information, but is less effective at communicating to us in a manner that promotes action, fosters non-anxious decision, deepens wisdom, and encourages a fixed and settled desire. The Internet does not train us in these skills: we must bring them to the Internet.

Unhealthy Relationships with Data

I believe that this is in part a product of the Internet itself, but perhaps more fundamentally attributable to the way that we relate to it. However, the Internet is frequently the objectification of our unhealthy relationship with data (much of the following builds on observations by Edwin Friedman, explored in the post just linked), our forgetfulness of the ends of communication, and our loss of robust and imaginative agency, which is why it can exacerbate the problem.

The effect of an addiction to information and data is a difficulty to desire anything wholeheartedly, to be decisive and resolved, to be unreservedly present to others, to foster the deep passions of the heart over ephemeral feelings, to acquire profound wisdom rather than just technical skills, to arrive at genuine understanding and insight rather than mere awareness of data. Well-communicated information, carefully selected for its relevance, can be tremendously empowering and can help us in these ends. However, not much information falls into this category, only a limited amount is needed, and the more irrelevant or excessive information that we consume, the less equipped we are for robust, determined, committed, wise, understanding, and decisive agency.

At the heart of our problem is our belief that more information is better, our overreliance on the social sciences and constant gathering of data for decision-making, our belief that knowledge of information and technique is the most fundamental basis of competence, and our failure to hold imagination and clearly defined personal agency as the core principles of our engagement with the world.

Information Addicts and the Information Crack House

The person who is addicted to information can’t get the big picture and discern meaning, as they are always frantically caught up in gathering fragmented, contradictory, and uncommunicative information, which leads to a failure of understanding and action. The person who is addicted to information is always second-guessing themselves, doubting their course of action, and losing the power to be decisive. The person who is addicted to information in the form of stimulation (or bombarded with advertising) is likely to become unable to fix their desire wholeheartedly on one thing and pursue it with an undivided mind.

The Internet enables and encourages this addiction in several respects. The Internet can be a crack house for information addicts, where we are surrounded by the substance, the habits, the addicts, and the pushers. On the Internet, information consumption and proliferation is the primary means of connection: if you limit your consumption and pushing of information in order to act, people think that you are dropping out and moving away from them. It is hard to opt out of the habits of the Internet while remaining in it and to set our own limits on our use, as people are constantly using the communication of information to us as a means of connection to us: if we resist we are not appreciated and can become isolated, as other offline means of social communication are less consistently employed (how many personal letters have you handwritten so far this year?). In other words, while there is no reason why the Internet must be a place of atrophying information addiction (perhaps no more than the architecture of the crack house necessarily determines that its residents will be drug users), it has become such a place for many.

Kicking the Information Habit

Breaking with information addiction is in part a matter of highlighting the role played by individual agency over environmental factors. Effective action in the world is a lot less about incessantly tweaked technique or method consistent with ever-accumulating and varying information and data than it is about such skills as the ability to be decisive and to have the nerve and will to stick with the course that you have set. The proliferation of confusing data, which generally focuses on problems that encourage passivity, rather than highlighting the differentiating role that can be played by involved and committed personal agency makes people scared of doing anything. For instance, if you followed all of the Daily Mail’s advice regarding carcinogenic products you would be paranoid and paralyzed. The skill that we most need is that of discerning the information that really matters, the information that guides positive agency, completely ignoring the rest, and putting our best foot forward.

To be a good leader, parent, pastor, you really don’t need the Internet all that much. You don’t need to keep up with all of the journals, conferences, books, blogs, news, tweets, profile updates, online articles, etc. to perform your task well. You really don’t. Trust me, I’ve tried it. In ignoring 99% of it completely you will be much more effective, decisive, committed, understanding, and wise. For that remaining 1% it is an incomparable and immensely valuable resource and medium, but after that it tends to hinder rather than help the communicative ends of information.

Smart Information Gathering

There is a rather misguided idea that has considerable cultural purchase: that the smartest person is the person who has read the most books and other material. In fact, the smartest people are most characterized, not by the large piles of books that they have read, but by their ability to discern the really important information and insights and ignore the rest, to be profoundly shaped and informed by the best forms of information, while being largely indifferent towards everything else. Too many people have read many books, but not enough of the best books, and show the lack.

Like the material on the Internet, 99% of books can be ignored completely with no great loss. Among the remaining 1%, one need not study everything. When you are fairly familiar with a field, for instance, a significant portion of any book on the subject can be skimmed over quickly, as it won’t contain anything new or relevant. In many cases, you will lose time and gain little by reading it. Many books will only have one or two good ideas or insights to pass on, and often even a quick skim-read of a few brief sections suffices to pick these ideas up. By contrast, the books that are most important and formative are worth returning to with considerable frequency. These books should be repeatedly be read in an inefficient and time-intensive manner.

Conclusion

The ends of information and its communication must be paramount in our minds all of the time. When the gathering of information becomes an end in itself, supplanting its communicative and formative purposes we may need radically to reassess our practice. ‘Information’ exists to mediate relationship and connectedness with the world, ourselves, each other, our visions, thoughts, ideas, passions, and feelings. Like a thickening lens, an accumulation of superfluous information can blur beyond recognition what it once brought into focus. It can dull and confuse the action that it once directed and sap the will that it once spurred.

Information must, therefore, be handled with care, moderation, and balance. This is the only way that we can be people who are both communicative and responsive. We need to identify the areas where an unhealthy relationship with information has enervated our action, engagement, and connection, whether by lack of communication, or by an excess of information leading to its breakdown. We also need to assess the ways in which our involvements online have shifted these relationships for good and ill. We need to think more rigorously about how to resist the dangers and temptations of the superfluous information on the Internet, while fully availing ourselves of the online information that is most valuable.

All of the above is especially important for the life and mission of the Church and the Christian. The Internet has the potential greatly to empower us. However, without developing healthy practices, skills, and virtues in relation to it, it will undermine us and blunt our work. A Church driven by constant data-gathering and by information addiction and pushing will both exhibit and encourage paralysis and paranoia. It will be a Church that is unable to make up its mind and take action. It will be a Church lacking determination and resolve. It will be a Church lacking vision and resolve, but driven by the latest faddish technique, business paradigm, or polling data.

I would be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this. To what extent do you share or disagree with the positions expressed above? What are some of the ways that the Internet has shaped your relationship with information? How have you managed to harness the potential of the Internet while minimizing its dangers?

Posted in Culture, Society, The Blogosphere, The Church | 6 Comments

The Fighting Shepherd

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

In the past I have commented on the manner in which our changing social concept of sonship has encouraged a dramatic shift in our understanding of key biblical concepts. Within this post I want to observe another example of a deracinated biblical image which, in losing its biblical connections, has led to a larger shift in some rather important concepts, most particularly the role of Church leadership: the image of the shepherd.

Our image of the shepherd is powerfully shaped by arcadian visions of peaceful harmony with nature, by the eclogues and pastoral poetry of such as Wordsworth or the paintings of Constable or some other English Romantic painter, poetry and art that stands within a tradition of celebrations of rustic idylls that stretches back to Virgil and beyond. The vision of the shepherd that we encounter in the scriptures is, however, one far removed from such bucolic ideals. The biblical shepherd is a brave and strong fighting man, a fact that readily confronts anyone with their eyes open to it.

The biblical image of the shepherd is of a man surrounded by many threats from which he must protect the flock within his charge. He works within a harsh and unforgiving terrain, a place with much barren wilderness, rocky areas, and dangerous mountain valleys and passes, within which he must find water and secure and good pasturage. He faces the threat of bandits, robbers, and thieves, who might kill or steal his flock (John 10:1-4, 8, 10), and of ravenous wild beasts who will prey on the sheep (Ezekiel 34:5, 8; John 10:11-15). Protecting the flock may cost him his life: the good shepherd lays down his life for the sake of the sheep.

Our images of the shepherd focus upon themes of tenderness, compassion, provision, and deep personal care for the sheep. These are undoubtedly prominent biblical images in such places as Psalm 23, Isaiah 40:11, Ezekiel 34, and John 10. However, what is generally forgotten or neglected is that each of these images of tenderness is counterbalanced by images of violent struggle, might, or judgment. The God who carries the lambs in his bosom in Isaiah 40:11 is the same God who has just come with a strong hand and a ruling arm in the previous verse. The God who leads his flock by still waters in Psalm 23:2 is the same God who powerfully protects his sheep in the midst of their enemies, and who has a rod to serve as a weapon by which to protect them.

The theme of the shepherding of Israel is associated with the Exodus, where God shepherds his people by the hand of his servant Moses (Isaiah 63:11). As the shepherd of his people, God strikes those who would steal or destroy them with his might and drives out all of their enemies before them (Psalm 78:52-55, 70-72), finally planting his people in the safe mountain pasturage of Zion (Exodus 15:13, 17).

The theme of the shepherd’s rod as a weapon is important in the book of Exodus. It is with the shepherd’s rod of Moses that God strikes the Egyptians (Exodus 4:20, 7–10) with many blows, until they finally let his flock go. It is with the shepherd’s rod that the sea is parted and later drowns Pharaoh and his warriors.

Far from fitting our common image of the gentle country shepherd boy, the young David was a man who had killed lions and bears as part of his day job (1 Samuel 17:34-36). David is marked out as the new shepherd of Israel by using his shepherd’s sling and bag to crush the head of the great enemy of Israel, much as Moses defeated Pharaoh with his shepherd’s staff. The legend of the former shepherd St Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland with his rod is a further example of the shepherd fulfilling his basic calling in expelling evil by force!

Our forgetfulness of this most prominent dimension of the biblical picture of the shepherd has had a significant effect on our conception of ‘pastoral’ ministry. For us, the pastorate, the role of the Christian leader or shepherd, has been largely reduced to one of gentle care and provision for the flock, a primarily therapeutic and supportive role in relation to the congregation.

However, if the biblical image is correct, not only is a crucial part of the picture missing, but it is on this missing piece that the primary accent of the biblical teaching frequently falls. The biblical shepherd is a mighty and courageous figure, who puts his life on the line for the sheep that he loves and has the strength and pitiless determination to drive off their enemies. The shepherd is a fighter and is marked out for his role by powerfully striking those who would seek to harm the flock. The Christian shepherd’s charge is to be attentive and heedful, guarding against, destroying, or fighting off wolves and other wild beasts, while giving authoritative guidance to and providing sustenance for the Chief Shepherd’s sheep (cf. 1 Peter 5:2-4).

In stark contrast to this biblical vision of pastoral ministry, the prevailing conception within much of the contemporary church is of a rather effete, weak, and non-confrontational pastorate, tolerant, inclusive, and inoffensive, whose role involves little more than playing an almost exclusively nurturing, affirming, and supportive role in relation to a spiritually democratic congregation. The image of the shepherd is purged of any notion of authority, might, leadership, conflict, or violent opposition.

Unsurprisingly, many of the church leaders that we have exhibit precisely the profound weakness, inability to engage in forceful and uncompromising confrontation, and failure to give authoritative direction and leadership that represents the antithesis of the biblical image of the shepherd. The biblical vision of the shepherd loses force, not merely on account of the cultural migration of the image, but also on account of a resistance to the notion of conflict between the Church and the world, of strong leadership, of authoritative dogma, and of the need for especially adversarial skills in our pastors. The image of the Christian shepherd wielding the rod of God as a weapon of judgment against the enemies of Christ’s flock offends many, who are appalled at the presence of imprecatory psalms and prayers in both the Old and New Testaments.

I believe that a recovery of this biblical imagery would lead to very different approaches to ministerial training and selection. It would encourage us to search for candidates who love and care for the people of God, but are not at all afraid of conflict, unprepared to engage in it, or unlikely to emerge victorious from it. It would lead us to favour candidates who follow the biblical pattern of being capable of exercising faithful church discipline for the protection of the flock, without having their hands stayed by pity. It would lead us to favour candidates who recognize the existence of deep opposition with the world, and a constant threat to the Church.

Many of our debates about suitable candidates for shepherding roles within the Church completely neglect the biblical form that such roles take, presuming that the modern therapeutic model of ministry is completely biblical. They fail to attend to the people that God chose for the leadership of his people, mighty and uncompromising men, especially marked by their willingness to exercise lethal force in the spiritual protection of the flock (Moses, the Levites, Phinehas, Samuel, Peter, Paul, etc.). An understanding of the biblical role of the shepherd helps to explain why such persons were especially suited for the role, and why so many of our pastors are not.

Posted in Bible, The Church, Theological | 21 Comments

How To Be More Influential Than Justin Bieber

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

The question of the true nature of influence and how one exerts and measures it is one that has occurred to me at various junctures in the past. I have never made any studied attempt to become either influential or popular (two things that shouldn’t be confused with each other, as I will proceed to argue), but the dynamic underlying them is something that has long fascinated me. I stress that I have no desire to denigrate either of these ends: my reasons against pursuing them has nothing to do with their not being worthwhile to pursue, and everything to do with the fact that my overriding priorities in my online activity to date have been the careful formation of my own mind in conversation and the enjoyment of friendship.

In a recent post, Vicky Beeching raises issues relating to influence and impact on Twitter in particular, and has some very helpful thoughts on the forms of tweeting and interaction best calculated to foster an engaged community of followers. Her post prompted me to revisit the question of influence and to give some more thought to discerning its precise character.

Popularity and Influence

At the very outset we should distinguish between influence and popularity, two things that are frequently confused. Influence is the power to produce a change or effect. Popularity is the state of being widely admired, desired, sought after, or liked. One can be influential without being popular, and extremely popular without being influential.

Justin Bieber has almost 25 million followers on Twitter. His followers are some of most vocal and fanatical tweeters out there. Millions upon millions of dollars are spent on his records, concerts, and merchandise every year. Everything that Justin says is retweeted thousands of times and people are clamouring to touch the hems of his digital garments. While this extreme level of popularity may seem to represent the very zenith of human influence, I want to argue that those who hold such a notion might be mistaken. To do so, we will need to unpack the definition of influence.

First, influence is the power to produce a change or effect. It is not just a matter of having an impact, but about creating an impact. The truly influential person has the power to produce a change or effect that bears the mark of their personal agency.

The true influencer is a cause of something original and new. Many of the most popular persons in society today are largely the effects of existing social processes and forms or of movements that primarily bear the mark of other persons’ agencies. They are bearers of the influence of others, rather than influencers in their own right. Even in talking about the influence of Justin Bieber, we need to distinguish between Justin Bieber the individual and Justin Bieber the phenomenon. The influence of the former is fairly limited. What influence the latter has is in large measure the influence of people behind Justin Bieber the individual – record producers, executive producers, stylists, agents, publicists, advertisers, song writers, advisors, etc. Many people who have been in a similar position have spoken of feelings of powerlessness within the whirlwind of their own publicity, being reduced to mute and malleable channels for other parties’ influence.

Even when speaking about the influence of the Justin Bieber phenomenon, we should recognize that its impact is much of a kind with many previous social phenomena of the same kind. If Justin Bieber did not exist, the music industry would have discovered and produced someone else much the same. It is unlikely that we will be talking about the effect of Justin Bieber upon music in thirty years’ time.

Second, following on closely from the previous point, influence is about controlled and directed impact. The truly influential person has a significant measure of independent and self-conscious control over what they do, think, and say and, through that, also upon others. The influential person is not the juggernaut but the steering wheel, not the immense tanker but the relatively small rudder. The true influencer is known by their capacity to change, set, and hold the course of a movement, or by the fact that a larger development bears the distinct mark of their personal stance and course. A very modest, yet calculated and determined, force, applied at the right place and time can have a far more dramatic long term effect than considerably more powerful forces applied without control. A hundred hands pushing the bow can’t compete with a single hand on the tiller.

Third, a person’s influence can be measured by the long term effects of their actions. If your impact is limited to the impressionable, you aren’t especially influential, nor will you leave much of a legacy. The impressionable are easily influenced, but are exceedingly fickle, so don’t hold onto any influence for long, nor are they very effective at driving a movement against the flow. Once they are no longer subject to the initial force or impact, the impressionable will merely be tossed in another direction by the next movement to arrive. The truly influential person will produce an effect that retains the mark of their personal agency and control many years after they have left the scene. Popularity throws the surface of the waters of the society into a frothing and seething frenzy, but the truly influential person changes the course of the underlying current.

The Three Stages of Influence

I believe that influence can be broken down into three distinct stages.

1. Independent Agency

The influencer is someone who can exercise robust, decisive, determined, and intense independent agency or thought. If you are not a strongly independent, original, and creative thinker and actor you are not really an influencer at all, but a channel for other people’s influence. This exercise of independent agency and thought is the sine qua non of influence. To be an influencer you have to be the first cause of something new. In order to be the first cause of something new, you have to be capable of and profoundly competent in thinking and acting for yourself, confident and assertive in advancing your actions or views, decisive in choosing a course and rejecting others, thick-skinned and strong in standing for a position against resistance, determined in holding to your convictions, decisions, and course without wavering or vacillating, and powerful in driving your point home.

2. Having an Impact

In order to be influential, at some point the influencer has to make an impact upon other persons. An impact can take many forms. It can take the form of extreme popularity, or it can be an impact that passes largely unrecognized, sometimes even by the influencer themselves. It can be a dramatic and forceful shock, or a gentle and gradual effect. The impact is the point when your position or example makes contact with others. It is this stage of the process that is often mistaken for the whole thing, as influence is confounded with immediate visible effect and popularity. In actual fact, while necessary, the impact of the most effective influencers is frequently imperceptible on the surface of a society.

3. Making and Leaving an Impression

An impact by itself is insufficient if it fails to leave an impression. Such an impression occurs when you impact people in a manner that causes them to change, without throwing yourself off course in the process. The truly influential person is able to impress the mark of his or her agency and thought onto the most agentic leaders and deepest thinkers in a society, or able to form strong leaders and profound thinkers that bear that mark. Leaving one’s impress on the putty of the minds and hearts of the impressionable is easy and can appear to be powerful and effective, but it is no less easily erased. Those who can engrave their mark onto minds and wills of granite are those to whom the future belongs.

The effect of true influence is change that outlasts you in the form of a deep and firm impression.

The Nature of Influential Movements

If my theory of influence is on target, here are a few things that should be characteristic of highly influential persons and movements.

1. Rigorous Self-Definition

The influential movement or person is highly independent and determined in their action and thought. They are not merely reacting against some other party, or acting on whim or vague impulse. They know exactly what they stand for and why they do so. They are not blown off course by others, and can hold their nerve even when facing extreme opposition.

2. Prioritization of Vision over Popularity

Perhaps the greatest dimension of this holding of nerve is seen in the refusal to let the discomfort, anger, or resistance of members of one’s following or close contacts distract you from your goal. The influential person or movement will ruthlessly pursue its vision, and won’t abandon its course for the sake of those who complain or seek to be obstructionist.

Jesus should be our example here. Followed by excited crowds, Jesus portrayed his vision in the most uncompromising of terms, in a manner that alienated the vast majority of his hearers. His refusal to sacrifice vision for popularity meant that his teaching left a powerful impression that went far beyond a merely popular but rapidly dissipating impact. If people want to leave your movement because you won’t compromise on your proper mission, let them go: you will be more effective without such deadweight. The person or movement with such nerve will inspire their followers to have the same resolve and determination.

3. Lack of Anxiety about Numbers

If what I have said to this point is correct, then numbers are a poor metric of influence. Provided that you are firmly standing for something and making a deep and lasting impression on some very strong personalities and deep thinkers, wider impact is only of secondary importance. The influential movement will value intense impression over visible impact every time.

4. Playing to Strengths

The influential movement focuses on playing to the strengths of individuals and societies. Populist movements tend to adopt a contrasting approach. While populist movements seek out the most impressionable members of society at those points where they are most vulnerable to manipulation or influence, influential movements seek out the least impressionable members of society. While the most impressionable members of society are ideal for visible impact, it is upon the least impressionable members of society that you can best leave a lasting mark.

Christian evangelism should strive to engage with power at its most pronounced, thought at its most intense, character at its most formed, the passions at their profoundest depths, individuals at their point of greatest strength, and with the most decisive and strong willed actors in society. If you can make an impression at these points, the rest of society will follow, and people will exhibit a far more wholehearted and uncompromising commitment. This, it seems to me, is a pattern that can be witnessed in the early church: your purpose is to reach and to form leaders with convictions and wills of steel.

5. Patience

Communities and persons that adopt this approach, although they may experience success in the short term, are all about winning the long game. There aren’t shortcuts, and routes that promise instant popularity usually do so because they are merely amplifying or tapping into existing trends, rather than starting new ones. Doing things the right way will prove rewarding in the final end, producing a movement that is far more resilient, assertive, and determined. Influence generally grows slowly from small seeds, and the greatest victories usually go to the patient.

Concluding Thoughts

1. We are not all called to be influencers, nor do I believe that ‘influencing’ is the only way to have a positive effect in countless people’s lives. We can, for instance, be connection formers, publicists, people who open themselves up to and who pass on worthy influences, people who create communities within which the influence of other parties can be felt, etc. This demands a certain modesty and humility of us, a recognition that there are worthier voices out there than our own. For instance, the Church might be far better served if fewer authors wrote new books on well-covered ground and instead gave themselves to publicizing or updating the very best of the classic works that have been written on those subjects already. Striving to be a forgotten channel for another’s vision of Jesus is part of what is involved in Christian service. There is no embarrassment in not being an ‘influence’. It is far preferable to be a channel for influences that will stand the test of time than to set oneself up as an influence that will not.

2. The strength of popularity is primarily that of being a channel for worthy influences. Most popular persons are not influencers (in the sense defined above) themselves, but can do untold good through their passing on of key influences to others. Popular persons also form communities and networks within which worthy influences can be discovered and publicized.

3. Many of the greatest influences will not be known until the last day, nor will we have a true measure of the scope of our influence until history is ended. Many of the most influential people of our generation will die unknown, their influence only coming to public fruit many decades hence, by which time many of the persons who enjoy such popularity today will be lost to the anonymity of history. Some of the greatest influences of all are also the most modest and unassuming. The quiet but determined godliness of faithful and prayerful parents like St Monica or Susanna Wesley has exerted a profounder influence on the course of history than many persons who enjoyed unrivalled popularity and public renown in their day. Influence is thus largely something that lies with God, a harvest given after faithful sowing. As we are faithful in our sowing we can leave the increase to him. The warning against premature judgment of influence should also serve as a check against either despair or envy resulting from perceived lack of influence. It also enables us to focus upon being faithful in the here and now.

4. The megachurch vision of Christianity, when it focuses on fame, popularity, and numbers as the supposed metric of influence, must be resisted. Such personality and charisma-driven movements will tend to be shallow in comparison to churches where lines of influence are more opaque, where the key influencers are largely humble and unknown and the channels of their influence are also continually rendering themselves less visible.

5. A movement that seeks genuine influence over popularity will be more open to remaining anonymous. Most profound ideas cannot easily or directly be popularized. They filter down through chains of influence. The most significant influencers may only directly influence a handful of other individuals, but their influence slowly goes through the whole system. There is seldom a direct connection between the most deep thinking of influencers and the masses. Hegel didn’t have to write for the masses to change the world. Some works that could only fully be understood by a handful of persons have made a far greater dent on history than other books read by countless millions. A heavily mediated chain of influences enables a high level of conversation to occur within a community that also engages with people at the popular level. People who seek direct influence in the form of popularity tend to reduce thought to the lowest common denominator of the group, and do not foster the high level of thought that would empower the movement to exert an influence over other leaders.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the above. What are some of the ways that you believe that an influential movement is formed? Would you distinguish between popularity and influence?

Posted in Culture, Society | 7 Comments

Links and Jottings 2

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Having a lot of half-formed thoughts prompted by various articles in my mind at the moment, I thought that I would quickly post a few of them here, along with some interesting links.

1. David Brooks writes about the crisis facing boys in schools:

The education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious. People who don’t fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging and rebelling.

Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys. A decade or so ago, people started writing books and articles on the boy crisis. At the time, the evidence was disputable and some experts pushed back. Since then, the evidence that boys are falling behind has mounted. The case is closed. The numbers for boys get worse and worse.

I commented on this over on the Good Men Project:

It is important to recognize that this should not just be a debate about catering for all children within our education system: it should also be a debate about whether we have an education system that can cater for, nurture, and produce some of the intellectual traits that have proved to be some of the most valuable over the course of human history.

Read the whole, rather lengthy (well, it would be…), comment here.

Perhaps if we had an education system better equipped to form, direct, and recognize the dignity of agentic traits, we would also be better able to produce leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators more committed to the common good and less driven by pure self-interest.

2. On the subject of intellectual strengths that our education systems seem to be rather poor at producing, Elizabeth Scalia comments on our need to get over ourselves, master our feelings, and learn to avoid playing the passive aggressive and tyrannical ‘I’m offended’ game.

Second: a death-grip on an identifier, used in conjunction with feather-ruffled offense-taking, tells me that this person is a passive aggressive — someone so weak that he needs to resort to the tyranny of “shut up” because he cannot trust his ideas or arguments to hold up under debate. Rather than subject himself to a debate he knows he cannot win, he declares himself “offended” and usually demands future silence on the issue and a public “apology” (also tiresome!) that is meant to warn-off others from attempting to address it.

It is certainly a kind of tyranny; increasingly, for me, the boring kind. I don’t remember who said it first but I know someone has said that we can have freedom of speech or we can have freedom from being offended, but we can’t have both.

Timothy Dalrymple writes a very helpful post on the same subject:

The long-term consequence is far worse. While it’s helpful to be aware of the objections of your critics and detractors, it’s not helpful to be paralyzed by them. But the classroom became a place that was littered with landmines, a place where you could not speak freely for fear of reaping the whirlwind. Our social (and national) conversation erodes as we cannot speak clearly to one another, as we exchange sentiment and anger for evidence and argumentation, or — worse — as we hide our beliefs from one another and seal ourselves into hermetic chambers of isolated news and opinion. This is rarely appreciated. There are many causes for the balkanization of our political culture — but political correctness takes a huge share of the blame. We withdraw into our own worlds where we all believe alike and do not offend one another — and soon thereafter we cannot understand one another either, like tribesmen separated by mountain ranges whose languages develop in seclusion until, when the tribes re-establish contact, they cannot understand one another.

And it’s not merely external. We internalize the lengthy list of questions we cannot ask and things we cannot say. Our thoughts become armed against us, and we’re no longer free to think clearly and critically and without inhibition.

“I’m offended.” It’s a dangerous game to play. In the short term you gain a specious “win.” In the long term, you erode the bonds that hold us together. Thanks for that.

This all reminds me of some of Edwin Friedman’s observations on this matter:

The adaptation of groups to their most demanding and dysfunctional members is visible in numerous areas of American society, and the preparedness to engage in appeasement and compromise with those to whom no ground should be given. This can particularly be seen in the activities of those who ‘tyrannize others, especially leaders, with their “sensitivity”’ (71), acting as if they were ‘helplessly violated by another person’s opinion’. Friedman remarks:

It has been my impression that at any gathering, whether it be public or private, those who are quickest to inject words like sensitivity, empathy, consensus, trust, confidentiality, and togetherness into their arguments have perverted these humanitarian words into power tools to get others to adapt to them.

Friedman draws attention to the manner in which this allows the chronically offended reactive members of a population to hijack the agenda of the whole society, as people rally to soothe them, rather than keeping them in line and stopping their invasiveness, a problem that is especially powerful in the context of identity politics.

3. Vicky Beeching interviews Leonard Sweet, about his book Viral: How Social Networking is Poised to Ignite Revival. I haven’t read the book, which looks interesting, although I suspect that I would disagree with it at several points, being much less sanguine than Sweet about the impact of online social networking upon the Church (see my post on the Church and social media for an idea of where I am coming from here), but one thing in particular caught my attention.

Sweet argues that my generation – the Googlers (as distinct from the Gutenbergers, who preceded us) – think in terms of narratives and metaphors (or ‘narraphors’), rather than in terms of explanations and arguments, words designed to make points. Looking at the relevant section of the book, Sweet seems to envisage these narraphors as highly condensed stories that contain in nuce or encapsulate a larger reality. Such narraphors are like the countless competing stories told to us by advertising, compact stories designed to make us feel something, identify with the story or product in some way, or regard the company in a particular light, all with the intention of causing us to act differently as a result.

Sweet really is onto something very helpful here. However, where I find myself parting ways with him is in his treatment of such narraphors as peculiarly isomorphic with the sort of stories that Jesus told. Although Sweet identifies some areas where Googlers are at particular risk of approaching things wrongly, one of the things that I believe he (along with numerous others) fails adequately to recognize is the heterogeneity of our ‘narratives’ and those of Jesus and his day.

Our concepts of narrative are drawn from such things as novels, or from the condensed ‘narraphors’ of adverts and the like. However, these are very recent forms, quite different from the stories of Jesus’ day, and unless we appreciate the differences we are at risk of failing to appreciate the degree to which we are compromised in our starting point when seeking to understand the Scriptures and the practice of Jesus.

Perhaps the first thing to recognize is that Jesus inhabited a thickly ‘storied’ world, within which people cohered within a strong narrative to which all could make appeal, whereas we inhabit a world that has largely lost its story. The ‘narraphors’ to which we are accustomed are more like fragments, pieces of driftwood to which men cast adrift grasp hold after their vessel has broken up. While Jesus and his contemporaries inhabited a story, our stories serve more temporary purposes and do not command the same commitment. Jesus’ world oozed story from every pore – practically ever fine detail in biblical texts seems to be laden with meaning, and does not merely serve the end of historical verisimilitude.

The relationship and tension between society and individual frames narratives and storytelling in several ways. The authorship of ancient (and especially oral) stories is often considerably less ‘individual’ than modern authorship can be, but could often involve the manipulation and retelling of existing stories and appeal to their authority, or communal tellings. The characters in ancient stories tend to be fairly stock, flat, and heavy, whereas our characters tend to be more complex and rounded, with a clearly defined interiority, which ancient characters often seem to lack. To stereotype shamelessly, the ancient character is defined by the external form of his actions and the ‘type’ to which he conforms, while the modern character is defined by his interiority and motivations.

The tension and conflict between individual and society, between the demands of the society and the individuality will of the protagonist, is a common theme of the novel (which had an individual bent from the outset, as Walter Ong and others have recognized). However, this conflict has weakened considerably as social stories and their accompanying roles have thinned, and in many cases faded away completely. While the assault upon such social stories and roles was especially pronounced within Romanticism, by now the war largely appears to have been decided in the individual’s favour.

This victory has led to storytelling and characters ungoverned by external constraints – projections, arbitrary metaphors, autotelic fictions. In place of characters powerfully defined by external types, norms, or roles (‘roles’ are already a falling away from the thicker form of the ‘type’), we have personalities defined by untrammelled self-creation. In place of a world structured and saturated with meaning that claims us, we have a world into which we are free to project whatever personal fiction we desire.

Getting inside the typological consciousness of the Scriptures demands that we be capable of allowing our deepest identity to be defined by a story that situates us within it, to be determinatively spoken before we ever begin to speak. I contend that we postmoderns are probably further from such a consciousness than any generation that preceded us.

4. In a couple of contexts over the last few days, the subject of corporal punishment has come up.

My experience of corporal punishment is a very positive one. I am not one of those who simply believes that it didn’t seriously harm me: I believe that it did me a lot of good. I have a lot to thank my parents for here, as they approached it in a very healthy way. Although I was spanked on many occasions, until the age of about ten, I can never once remember being spanked in anger (and it is the sort of thing that I would remember). My parents committed themselves never to discipline me or my brothers without a calm temper and they really kept to that.

The routine was very clear. They would take me to a private place, explain what they believed that I had done wrong, and give me a chance to explain myself or apologize. After hearing my side out (and you may not be surprised to hear that this generally required considerable patience on their part), they would arrive at a judgment. If the evidence was uncertain, I wouldn’t be punished. If I was spanked, sometimes with a bare hand, sometimes with a wooden spoon, it stung a little at the time, but was never very hard and definitely was nowhere remotely near leaving a mark. After the punishment had taken place, they would often hug me and pray with me.

My most ‘traumatic’ memories of punishment are all of non-physical forms of punishment (in all cases but one, not by my parents). The physical punishment of spanking, as my parents carried it out, had the advantage of being swift, just, with a set procedure and an opportunity to hear all sides of the matter, and being designed to restore relationship as quickly as possible. Indeed, the whole point of the spanking that I received was principally geared towards setting right a broken relationship. It wasn’t primarily about deterrence or mere punishment, and was definitely not about the venting of parental anger at all. The thing that I found difficult about other forms of punishment is that they generally lacked the qualities necessary to restore a highly functional and loving relationship quickly and were far more manipulative and alienating. I wasn’t given a responsible voice in such processes and a sort of running psychological battle between me and the authority figure was established when there was no clear and swift process of reconciliation.

The description of my own experience above is largely an introduction to the question of why corporal punishments, both in society and in the family, are regarded as so cruel and barbaric. All of this ties into Foucauldian points, of course, but I wonder whether this vehement condemnation of physical forms of punishment isn’t in part a means of affirming the goodness of heavily psychological, invasive, and manipulative forms of control and discipline of children and societies. A simplistic bad punishment / good discipline opposition is established and the more black we paint the former term, the more successfully we validate and justify the latter.

I also wonder whether this rejection of corporal punishments doesn’t have something to do with modern liberal squeamishness, our preference for sanitized and veiled forms of coercion, and our reluctance to own our violence. Perhaps it also has something to do with our inability to maintain communities of reconciliation and restoration, driving a preference for long term containment and isolation over public shaming and punishment, and sustaining large proportions of our populations in a sort of exile from which there is no easy return. In many respects such a society of discipline and incarceration, of psychological manipulation and control, is far more barbaric than many of the societies that preceded it.

As Peter Moskos concludes in In Defense of Flogging,

So is flogging still too cruel to contemplate? Perhaps it’s not as crazy as you thought. And even if you’re adamant that flogging is a barbaric, inhumane form of punishment, how can offering criminals the choice of the lash in lieu of incarceration be so bad? If flogging were really worse than prison, nobody would choose it. Of course most people would choose the rattan cane over the prison cell. And that’s my point. Faced with the choice between hard time and the lash, the lash is better. What does that say about prison?

Until we reject the self-justifying myths that we tell ourselves about punishment, and start to own the violence of our system, we may unwittingly continue to act in ways that are considerably less humane than the societies that came before us.

5. In a work recently brought to my attention, The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle advances a position that prompted a little head-scratching on my part. She summarizes in this video:

A number of things struck me about this video; perhaps above all, the breathtakingly careless and undisciplined approach to history. The choice to approach history in terms of 500 year periods is entirely arbitrary. Even as a heuristic division it is not particularly illuminating and practically any other large time interval could produce no less noteworthy events in its support.

However, Tickle does not seem to regard the 500 year intervals (of course, in her application, what constitutes every ‘500 years’ has incredibly floppy parameters) as merely a heuristic division. Rather, this supposed pattern seems to justify our expectation of such a shift today.

One is also astonished by the extreme cultural narcissism and chauvinism of the vision, which seemed to conflate the Western Church with the whole Church. I see no good reason to believe that Western Christianity rather than Asian or African Christianity will be leading the way into the 22nd century. There also seems to be a failure to distinguish current social trends from the distinct development of the Church. Why exactly should we believe that the great developments of the Church within the coming century should primarily involve assimilation to current Western cultural trends on gender and sexuality, politics, and technology? Have we lost the capacity to imagine the possibility that the Church could operate according to a distinct agenda of its own, in dialogue with society, but quite independent of it? The Church Tickle envisages seems to lack any of the contrariness relative to culture that the Church has often manifested when at its strongest. It is a Church going with the cultural flow, rather than leading the way with decisive action arising from a clear sense of its identity and mission; it is a Church fumbling for its lines and taking prompts from the culture that surrounds it.

One of the greatest problems with such an approach is the blinkered pride that it can create. People who believe that they are on the right side of history, that God has underwritten their movement, are frustrating and dangerous. God does shake things up in history, but in ways that show that all of us are on the wrong side of history. We should beware of gerrymandering a supposedly divinely driven historical movement in a manner that just so happens to identify us as its vanguard.

One could also accuse Tickle of rather losing perspective in believing that an ‘emergent church’ movement that finds its chief constituency in hipsters is as world-transforming as she supposes (and not just because the hipsters will move on when it goes mainstream…). Josh Strodtbeck (aka Fearsome Pirate) has some fairly scathing remarks:

1. Any time you talk about what’s happening in “the Church,” and you’re talking about some sliver of Western Protestantism, you are being historically, geographically, and culturally unaware. Most Christians are Catholic. Whatever you think about Catholicism, that’s a numerical fact. Period. Are you changing Catholicism? If the answer is “no,” you’re not a major movement in “the Church.”

2. The Emergent Church is an insignificant movement. Let’s put it this way–Martin Luther changed pretty much everything. To belong to a church in the 21st century is still, to this day, to belong to an organization decisively shaped by the ideas of Luther, whether acceptance, rejection or modification of them. Same with Gregory. You can’t be a Christian today without being fundamentally affected by Gregory’s assertions of papal supremacy, whether you are Catholic, Orthodox, Baptist, or Lutheran. I’m just not seeing that kind of effect happening due to the Emergent movement, because I don’t see them making some kind of fundamentally earth-shaking assertion that hasn’t been made already.

3. There is no such thing as “post-Protestant.” If you are Protestant, the only way to stop being Protestant is to join a communion that either (a) predates the Reformation, (b) split off from a pre-Reformation communion, or (c) isn’t recognizably Christian. If neither (a) nor (b) nor (c) hold, you are a Protestant, like it or not. So you read Aquinas and think he’s smart. BFD, so did John Calvin. Do you think the pope is infallible? No? Hi, you’re a Protestant, welcome to the club you never left.

4. “Gettiing rid of Christian exclusivism” is not new. It’s not unique. It’s called “liberal Protestantism” and is old, boring, and busted. It’s got a really short organizational half-life because people stop waking up early and donating money to a church body if there’s no eternal significance to anything.

5. No one is impressed by you reclaiming bits of liturgy from the 4th century. The vast majority of practicing Christians already do that. Let me bring you down to earth, Emergents. There are about 2,265 million Christians. Over half of them are Catholic. Add in the Orthodox, and you’re up to 62%. Throw in the Lutherans and Anglicans for good measure, and now we’re up to around 70% of Christianity. Really, truly, we think it’s nice that you’ve discovered some value in the heritage your Calvinist and Anabaptist forebears threw out. But the Emergent discovery of the Kyrie is no more revolutionary than some guy in Idaho discovering that rice can be cooked and eaten.

6. If the hipsters really are looking for a church to belong to, though, they should consider Orthodoxy:

We Orthodox were Christians before it was cool. We started following the Apostles’ teachings hardcore before the Bible was even written. Actually, we read the books of the Bible before they were officially published. And not to brag or anything, but we spoke in tongues before it was “a thing.” Stuff like that.

In addition to enjoying long beards, drinking and the occasional cigarette, we are super mellow. This is called being “dispassionate” but you will simply recognize it as being extremely cool…without trying too hard. You know what I mean.

We do enjoy the ringing of Church bells, but we prefer the more organic tone that is produced from hammering a piece of wood – oh, you’ve never heard of that? Check out this track then; it’s so raw, you’ll love it.

We Orthodox don’t need to explore “vintage faith;” we invented vintage faith, but it wasn’t called vintage back then, it was just called “faith.”

Why oh Hipster Christian do you keep on seeing but do not perceive? The Orthodox Church IS the authentic Christian experience. And seriously, you would fit right in (although if you decide to attend long-term, the priest is going to ask you to stop wearing skinny jeans to liturgy – the handlebar moustache can stay, however.)

Oh, and we don’t just drink coffee after liturgy, we drink Turkish coffee. It’s pretty good.

Yes, that’s right, we say call our gatherings “liturgy” instead of “church” and sometimes we use other more obscure terms such as vespers, akathist and orthros. You should come to vespers sometime, Hipster Christian. Then you could hear “Lord I Call” in the eighth tone – oh you haven’t heard of that either….?

Really, you should be Orthodox. Because some day calling your parish a “tribe” and having Sunday meetings at a pub will be completely overdone, yet the Orthodox Church will still be operating in this world as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things. (2 Cor 6:9-10) I think the church you are looking for has been there all along. Ironic, isn’t it?

6. Over on Rachel Held Evans’ blog, Laura Turner posts on the story of the widow’s mite. She makes some good points about how we give and the manner in which it reflects our hearts. However, although it is often read this way, I am not sure that this is the chief import of this narrative. I commented:

In both of the places where this event is recorded (Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4), the event is sandwiched between a description of the scribes as those who ‘devour widows’ houses’ (Mark 12:40; Luke 20:47) and a prophecy of the coming judgment upon and destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

Within this context, the widow appears, less as an example of self-sacrificial giving, and far more as a case of incredible tragedy. Jesus is highlighting the immense human cost of the Jewish leaders’ wickedness and unfaithfulness. The entire widow’s livelihood was invested in a project that, on account of the wickedness of the scribes and other leaders, was destined to divine destruction. The widow is the innocent and sincere victim of a corrupt and evil system, which preyed upon the devout but ignorant poor.

7. Peter Leithart asks, why wrap?

Jacques Godbout (The World of the Gift, 37) asks why we wrap presents only to discard the wrapping. It is a “potlatch” gesture, a gesture of excess, “an utterly gratuitous extra.” Further, “it hides what is in circulation, thus demonstrating that what counts is not the hidden object but the gesture, enhanced by the brilliance of the wrapping and, subsequently, by its squandering, when it disappears at the very moment the gift is received. What has taken so long to prepare is torn up and thrown away.”

He observes that this is the opposite of the purpose of “the tendency . . . to wrap all customer goods in plastic. . . . Here the aim of wrapping is to isolate the produce from the consumer, to ensure that nothing of the producer’s person is transmitted to the customer, not even a virus! As well, this sort of wrapping is not intended to hide anything and is often transparent.”

8. Continuing with his recent theme of gift, Leithart writes for First Things:

Whether Obamacare stands or falls, we need to rethink American health care in a more fundamental way. Jacques Godbout’s analysis of The World of the Gift offers a framework for imagining alternatives. Following Albert Hirschman, Godbout describes three spheres of modern society, characterized by “exit,” “voice,” and “loyalty.” The sphere of “exit” is the market, where relationships are functional, temporary, and contractual. In the market, you can walk away. Politically, people in a democracy want a “voice” at the ballot box, in town meetings, and in other venues of public debate. Families, churches, and neighborhoods are organized around more intimate and more permanent relationships involving personal “loyalty.”

There are serious drawbacks to providing health care exclusively through the market or through the state. Understandably, many Americans have reservations about leaving something as essential to human flourishing as good health to the chance allocations of the market. Doctors know things that butchers or cobblers don’t. Even when he pays for care, a patient is not a customer.

When the state dispenses services, Godbout points out, it “seeks either to supplant the primary networks or to make use of them in order to achieve its objectives.” States “constantly strive to define people’s ‘real’ needs in their stead.” Rather than taking account of individual differences, a bureaucracy “tends to make decisions independent of personal relations and characteristics, on the basis of abstract criteria derived from rights.” Despite rhetoric to the contrary, state-run health care is not public charity or gift-giving. The motives and structure of government services are inevitably and dramatically different from personal giving or charity. With health care, this is a fatal weakness. Impersonal health care is not care.

The alternative is to shift health care as much as possible to the sphere of personal service and interpersonal loyalty.

9. Skinner Layne on the ‘noisome pestilence’.

But there is a far more important truth to comprehend here. Our renunciation of the pursuit of worldly success does not happen in isolation. That alone would also not resolve the pervasive anxieties of our generation. Rather, it comes as a package deal with another kind of renunciation–one that is in fact more difficult, but immediately rewarding: the renunciation of worldly failure.

When we come to understand ourselves in our true state, as Kierkegaard might frame it “alone before God,” we understand the reality of Kipling’s exhortation to “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” The freedom that comes in renunciation, of seeing ourselves alone before God, is the freedom from all of our failures, from beating ourselves up over lost opportunities, shortcomings, and the painful comparisons to the people we follow on Twitter.

10. The Chief Rabbi on the recent circumcision story:

I have argued for some years that an assault on Jewish life always needs justification by the highest source of authority in the culture at any given age. Throughout the Middle Ages the highest authority in Europe was the Church. Hence antisemitism took the form of Christian anti-Judaism.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the nineteenth century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial antisemitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day: the “scientific study of race” and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel. Today we know that both of these were pseudo-sciences, but in their day they were endorsed by some of the leading figures of the age.

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life – on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state – must be cast in the language of human rights. Hence the by-now routine accusation that Israel has committed the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide and crimes against humanity. This is not because the people making these accusations seriously believe them – some do, some don’t. It is because this is the only form in which an assault on Jews can be stated today.

11. Michael Sacasas asks:

If we think of all of the other sorts of critics, it seems reasonable to suppose that they are driven by a love for the objects and practices they criticize. The music critic loves music. The film critic loves film. The food critic loves food. But does the technology critic love technology? Some of the best critics of technology have seemed to love technology not at all. What do we make of that?

12. Joel Garver reviews Christian Smith and N.T. Wright.

13. John H reminded me of this great piece by David Yeago: The Catholic Luther.

14. Matt Colvin on schadenfreude in the song of Deborah and Barak.

15. My favourite new Twitter account – Fake Peter Leithart. Some gems:

Isn’t giftwrapping an “incarnation” of gift-event? A making-visible of mystery which both conceals and reveals? I like shiny paper. Numinous.

Ordered a “beer” then realized with horror that this is idolatry. Nouns begone! Next time, a “beering” in accord with my event-metaphysics.

Sammiches seem pretty Scriptural too: eating a chiasm.

And my favourite:

When thinking about politics in these times, just ask yourself “What Would Yoder Do?” Then add guns. And paedobaptism. You’re all set.

16. Leithart challenges the supposed connection between high church and nominalism.

17. Matthew has some perceptive observations on the sanitation of online personas over on Carpe Cakem! And a follow-up post.

18. Futility Closet has a very helpful diagram for distinguishing between related but commonly confused terms:

19. The Money-Empathy Gap – how money makes us act less human.

20. Very helpful article on the stupidity of computers.

21. Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld was apparently quite an impressive guy.

22. The ontology of Aaron Sorkin. And, while on the subject of Aaron Sorkin, you should watch this:

23. A journey into the world of North Korea:

24. I have been listening to a lot of Jack White’s Blunderbuss over the last week.

25. From Jim West comes this history of art:

26. I now have a Pinterest account.

Posted in Bible, Culture, Ethics, In the News, Just for Fun, Music, On the web, OT, Quotations, The Blogosphere, Theological, Uncategorized, Video | 1 Comment

Very Rough and Rambling Jottings on the Church and Social Media

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Having spent a considerable proportion of my life online, the nature and influence of online media upon our modes of thinking and relating are subjects upon which I have frequently reflected. Within this post I wanted to raise a few discussion points as a conversation starter on the subject of online, and particularly social, media upon Church life and Christian identity. The following are fairly rough and unsystematized thoughts. I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

1.

The Church already has particular established ‘social media’ at the heart of its life. Whatever new social media are introduced, the sufficiency, necessity, centrality, and authority of these particular media must be acknowledged and maintained.

2.

The unusual character of the dominical ‘media’ that form our identity as the Church, whereby Christ communicates himself to us and we communicate ourselves to each other, merits closer attention and reflection. Our primary forms of communication are found in the ritual washing of bodies with water, in a shared eating of bread and drinking of wine, and in the gathered assembly to hear a spoken word. The strangeness of these things should give us occasion for pause.

3.

Against those who would reduce communication merely to the sharing of ideological content, or emotional presence to each other, and instrumentalize bodies and forms of mediation to one or both of these ends, the dominically established forms of communication in the Church render bodies themselves as content of communication, and integral to the enacting of that communication in their wholeness and indivisibility. In the ritual of baptism, our bodies themselves become the site of gift and the inscription of Christ and the community. In baptism we present our bodies as living sacrifices, our bodies have the story of the community enacted upon them, and we are included within a larger ‘body’. In the Eucharist, we symbolically effect our identity as one body and take Christ and his body into our physical bodies in the acts of eating and drinking.

4.

Within these ‘media’, the community recognizes itself – recognizing ourselves and each other – and recognizes its Lord. These are rites of symbolic exchange, within which the community re-members itself. In the preaching of the gospel we see ourselves for what we are, our neighbour for what he is, and we hear the voice of Christ. In the celebration of baptism and the Eucharist we recognize Christ and our inclusion into, continuance and participation within the community of his Life.

Alongside the recognition appropriate to the symbolic media of our identity, there is a communication that occurs. This communication is not primarily a communication of ideas or emotions, but of subjects. Through these ‘means of grace’, Christ is communicated to us, we are given to him, and we are rendered to each other within him.

5.

Both within this recognition and this communication, no division within the being of the human subject is sustained. In baptism, the assembled hearing of the gospel, and the sharing of the Eucharist, our Christian brother or sister is given to us and recognized by us not merely as an intellectual or emotional presence and relation, but also as a bodily presence.

6.

The body is a site of obstinacy and resistance. While it provides us with means of communication, it also renders us the object of the communication of others.

The body resists our desire to autonomy and pure self-determination. While an avatar could in theory be entirely customized to the desires of its owner, our physical bodies are largely unchosen. Even as the site of our speaking, our physical bodies are themselves spoken – spoken by culture, nature, and tradition. Our bodies are the site where subject and object, self and other, internal and external, identity and difference, humanity and world are bound together. The body renders pure self-possession impossible, ensuring that even in our speaking, we are spoken.

A preference for online over offline communication may spring from a desire to be liberated from our bodies as sites of the other’s determination. The body is the primary site of unchosen, given identities. The marginalization of the objectivity of the body in online interactions could in many ways be regarded as a resistance to the role of the other, most particularly the social third party, in the determination of our identities. The online self is primarily a self-created persona, rather than the individuating response to the prior summons of others who first name us. The online self can be a resistance to the determination of being spoken.

7.

Many of the buzz words of the online world are words that refer to the overcoming of the resistance of the body. The world of online interactions is immediate, fluid, frictionless, overcoming all distance or separation.

The body intermediates between us and others. While it facilitates connection, by virtue of its objective character, its resistance to autonomous self-determination, and its rootedness, it also can be felt to obstruct communication, to stand between us and others, preventing us from relating to people immediately and on our own terms. The online persona can be an attempt to dispense with intermediation through the erasure of the body.

The body distinguishes and separates us from others: it sustains distance and alterity. This is most clearly apparent in the case of rootedness and physical separation. The body roots us in a certain location, in one particular place and set of family relationships, rather than any others. The body ruthlessly particularizes our identities and largely in terms of unchosen givens. The online persona is not limited by or bound to locality, but is free to pursue an identity that transcends this.

8.

As such, the online world can facilitate the liberal valorization of individual choice over all else in the determination of identity (the liberalism that I am speaking of here is not something exclusive to those commonly identified by such a name, but is common to people across the contemporary political spectrum). The online self is without location or ancestry. The online self resists being object to any other party that can determine its identity and consequently make claims upon it. For the online self, belonging can never precede or exceed choice.

9.

With its focus upon the ritual articulation of the bodies of worshippers within a new narrative, the ‘communication media’ that Christ established prevent us from reducing Christian community to a purely voluntaristic realm of emotional presence or ideological union, where the Christian might speak before or apart from being spoken. Perhaps our primary concern when engaging with online media should be that the body as this site of resistance, intermediation, and the meeting of objectivity and subjectivity should never be erased.

The body puts us in the hands of others in a manner that online interaction cannot. It renders us vulnerable and empowers others in making claims upon our identities. While it denies us the self-possession that we may so often desire, it can help us to recognize ourselves as the gift of the other and foster a deeper sense of belonging.

11.

One of the things that I have noticed about online media over the years is that they tend to be better at facilitating certain forms of interactions over others. In particular, the Internet can be very good at enabling direct and immediate relationships, bringing two parties into an interaction uninterrupted, troubled by, or directed by any third party. What the Internet tends to be less effective at is the establishment of strongly mediated relationships, within which two parties relate to each other through the visible mediation of a third party or pole. At this point it should be stated that there is always a third party or pole of some sort. However, the Internet tends to weaken this third pole, rendering it invisible, exchangeable, or marginal. Even our access to the Internet tends to create a direct relationship with ourselves and the contents of our screens in a manner that places offline third parties firmly in the background.

Let me clarify what I mean by a ‘third pole’. A third pole can be an individual, a community, a subject of conversation, an institution, a context, an activity, an identity, a relationship, an attachment, an object of desire or worship, a cause, a symbolic or legal order, a narrative, or anything else of such a kind that mediates the relationship between two parties. On the Internet, the third pole of relationships is minimized, the first and second poles being placed in far more direct connection. The third pole is changeable, seldom if ever dominating in the interaction, and completely subject to choice.

12.

This has been brought home to me by how hard it can be to do something with someone online. In doing something with someone else, you are both giving yourself over to some third – in this case an activity – through which mediation you indirectly relate to each other. There is a form of relationship that can arise from such a shared activity that is quite distinct from more immediate and direct forms of relating.

This is not to say that such forms of relationship can’t be formed. Social gaming and hobby sites are two good examples: persons are brought into relationship as they give themselves completely to the performance of a shared activity. Watching DVDs with someone on the other side of the world using Skype screenshare is another form of interaction heavily mediated by a third pole that I have engaged in over the years.

13.

With a weakened third pole, it is difficult truly to belong to another person. Even the examples given above are of fairly weak forms of third poles. When all identities, communities, forms of belonging, and modes of interaction are largely chosen in character, the third pole is reduced to a mere shadow of its regular functioning in human societies and relationships tend to be characterized by a greater susceptibility to the instability of dual polarity.

When you only have two parties in relation, apart from the mediation of a third pole, there is a constant pull in the direction of a loss of differentiation or objectification. I suspect that this is one reason why the Internet can be a place where extreme rudeness and exaggerated forms of intimacy can exist.

When one does not belong to a social third, one’s relationship with other parties is not mediated by such things as reputation, and the presence of the other is not mediated to you by their place within a community and by the objective presence of a body and a face. In such a context it is easy to treat the other in a deeply impersonal, cruel, and rude manner.

On the other hand, for some people the absence of such mediation leads to an exaggerated intimacy. People will reveal things about themselves online that they would never reveal in person and can form far more immediate and intense connections with other persons. I submit that this is largely on account of the removal of intermediation and of the third pole. Without the objectivity of bodies and the mediation of social and other third poles, it is easy to collapse the distance between the other and ourselves, expanding through self-revelation a narcissistic posture, inviting the other party into our love affair with ourselves. The ‘other’ in this scenario is, of course, often little more than an idealistic projection of our own consciousness.

None of this is deny both the possibility and reality of third poles online and of non-narcissistic and non-objectifying relationships. However, it is to point out that the Internet has a peculiar tendency to produce such interactions, a tendency related to its downplaying of the body and the individual’s choice of persona, relationship, and belonging.

14.

This downplaying of the third pole in online interactions contrasts sharply with the way in which the established media of the Christ’s communication mentioned above maintain a strong third pole. The preacher, the baptizer, or the celebrant all serve in the position of the third pole, as do the wide communities with and within which and in relation to which we celebrate. Rather than direct and immediate relationships with God or with each other, our relationships are always mediated by robust third parties. There are always a number of parties to the principal forms of communication media that lie at the heart of the Church’s life.

15.

As we speak of the media by which we are communicated to and by which we communicate to ourselves and to others, we should also speak of the interface with which we do so. The body is not merely a communicative symbol, nor that which is communicated, but is also the interface with which we communicate. 1 Corinthians 12 speaks of the human body – as a metaphor for the Church as the body of Christ – as an ordered interface, a site where functions of seeing, hearing, smelling, and handling are held together in interdependent relationships. Within this interface no one function is abstracted from, divided from, or elevated over all of the others.

In evaluating new media, we need to assess the manner in which they express and value the functions of the divinely created bodily interface.

16.

Our different senses and bodily functions relate us to our world and to each other in different ways. They have inbuilt biases, strengths and weaknesses. An over-dependence upon particular senses and functions to the exclusion of others carries dangers. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? While it is right to challenge the simplistic and fundamentally misleading opposition between embodied (offline) interactions and disembodied (online) interactions, we need to ask more searching questions about the sort of embodiment that our interactions represent.

17.

I believe that the Internet encourages just such an over-reliance upon one sense to the exclusion or neglect of others. The Internet and online media are primarily accessed and experienced through the eye. They are visual, with all of the strengths and weaknesses that this involves.

As I commented in my recent article on pornography and mediation, the West has tended to elevate the sight over other senses and functions within our bodily interface and sensorium.

The eye has particular weaknesses, of which we need to take cognizance. The eye is an organ that lends itself to detached judgment. It primarily relates to the objective aspects of reality and does not lend itself to intersubjectivity as much as the ear. In contrast to the ear, the eye is less intimately related to time. Media that downplay the ear and focus on the eye can encourage spatializing forms of knowledge, forms of thought that lead us to think in terms of our controlling gaze in relation to the object of knowledge, rather than in terms of the object of knowledge as something uncircumscribable by our consciousness, which retreats or arrives in time as a gift.

18.

The Internet and online media empower the ‘specializing’ of life, rendering reality as image under the control of the eye. The Internet gives the eye unprecedented scope and power, enabling us to control, manipulate, and access images on command and at will. The eye is elevated within the sensorium and with the elevation of the eye comes the rendering of all life as image. Reality is engaged with in a matter that is increasingly reduced to the aspect of the image or spectacle.

19.

While empowering us as viewers/voyeurs, social media can train us to project ourselves as images to be viewed, rendering us subject to the judgment of others. The average Facebook profile is a good example of how people project and curate an image of themselves. As the eye dominates our perception of and engagement with reality, reality as Image comes to efface other aspects. We come to realize our identities through the mediation of the Image. The Facebook profile does not merely present an aspect of our identity to others, it comes to mediate our identities to ourselves.

20.

As Neil Postman and others have observed, technology has a tendency to become ‘mythic’, to blend into the background and become invisible to us. Technology can be like a lens through whose mediation we relate to the world. In some respects, the more effective the technology the less visible it is to us. Only when our technology malfunctions, obstructs us, becomes difficult to use, or breaks down – becoming unready-to-hand or even only present-to-hand, to employ Heideggerian categories – can it and our dependency upon it become visible to us. On such unusual moments we can catch a glimpse of the degree to which we have become dependent upon it, and the degree to which it has shaped our understanding.

In a fascinating article, Venkatesh Rao reflects upon the manner in which profound technological change renders itself invisible to us through a ‘manufactured normalcy field’. New technology is related to in terms of elastic metaphors and the extension of existing modes of interaction. Facebook extends the metaphor of the school yearbook. The Internet has extended and developed the metaphor of the text or document. Through these extended metaphors a sense of familiarity, which covers over the fundamental strangeness of the new technologies and their modes of interaction, is maintained. On occasions, such a normalcy field cannot be created or maintained and we have a sense of the profound and threatening strangeness of the new technology.

On account of the mythic character of technology and this manufactured normalcy field, we fail to perceive the scale of the profound changes that are occurring beneath our feet. In assessing the place of online media in our lives as Christians and as the Church, we must learn to step outside of the normalcy field in which we live and appreciate the future in which we live unknowingly in all of its existentially disorienting strangeness, as a place profoundly disturbing and unfamiliar to us.

Rather than assessing new technology in terms of its conformability to a manufactured normalcy field, we must rather assess it in terms of its more objective reconfiguration of our interface with our world and each other, and the modes and contents of our relations. I submit that such an approach will encourage a far less sanguine approach to new technologies and a greater measure of suspicion, even though we might find much within them that is of merit and worthy of use.

21.

As reality is increasingly related to under the aspect of the Image, reality can be effaced by and atrophy beneath an image that takes its place. This simulated reality usurps engagement in actual reality and substitutes for it.

One thing that has struck me over the years is the degree to which the Internet and social media can encourage a quest for ersatz communities, communities that overcome the ‘resistance’ characteristic of actual bodily communities. These communities are communities of extreme emotional connection and intimacy, of complete ideological alignment, where locality is a matter of indifference, and where we don’t have to experience the discomforting mutuality of presence with people who are radically different from us.

It seems to me that the ‘resistance’ of offline communities and bodies is much of the point. The limitations and givenness of the body encourage a focus and attentiveness upon this particular time and place and these particular people. As intermediaries between self and world, our bodies enable a more pronounced bidirectional movement of influence. The rootedness of the body enables us to be confronted and claimed by the other. The body, as the meeting place of objective and subject, self and world, is not merely an interface through which we can control, manipulate, and act upon and towards our world and those within it, but is also a means by which other persons and our world can act upon us. In rendering us more vulnerable it raises the levels of genuine connection that can be achieved.

Without such ‘resistance’ our sense of connection can be enhanced, but what is really achieved may be little more than a shared narcissism, relationships that are seemingly intimate, but which are not truly transformative. It is in the inescapable friction of the body and of offline community that we are more likely to be changed and enriched as persons. For many, the facilitation of frictionless relating online has produced a dissatisfaction with offline communities and relationships and a closing off of the self to the demands and the friction that come with genuine otherness. Frictionless relating is confounded with genuine fellowship.

One of my particular concerns with the celebration of the ‘online church’ is the place of the poor within such a new world. Many of poor are locked out of this world from the very outset. Very few poor people in the world have private access to the Internet. The Internet is not a place where we can fulfil our calling of being present to the poor, and experiencing the resistance inherent in their presence to us.

The online church is peculiarly at risk of cultural narcissism. Sure, we may ‘like’ the latest charitable cause publicized on Facebook, but such actions can serve little greater purpose than that of signalling to ourselves and to others like us our charitable intent, an intent that all too often substitutes for genuine action. The online world can dull a profound existential sense of the friction of reality, a reality that shakes us up and unsettles us, breaking into our narcissistic bubbles and summoning us to actions spurred by a deep realization of the suffering of the other.

22.

Social media does not merely reflect and enhance existing social forms. It can also simulate and replace existing forms. It creates new social forms and facilitates new forms of relationship. It alters the guiding metaphors within which we negotiate our existing relationships and create new ones.

For instance, one of the interesting features of a site such as Facebook is the manner in which it has progressively reconfigured the relationship between public and private. Within the world of Facebook, relationships that were formally negotiated in a public realm are brought into a private one. The subsuming of relationships that were previously more formal and public into the realm of the intimate and private has not been without difficulty, but over the course of Facebook’s history it has increasingly publicized our private identities, and initimatized our more public and formal relationships. This does not merely mirror existing relationships, but transforms them and creates new and unprecedented modes of connection.

Rather than presenting Facebook merely as a mirror or intensification of existing relationships, or even as a tool for enriching them, I believe that we need to appreciate the ways in which Facebook transforms the ecology of our relating, shifting the way that we regard private and public identities, friendship, interaction, etc. The engagements that occur online on sites such as Facebook are real engagements and should not simplistically be opposed to some putative ‘real life’. However, these engagements have new and distinct forms, forms to which we should attend, forms which shape and change our modes of relating.

23.

Recognizing the permeability of offline and online life to each other, we should appreciate that new forms of life online will not leave our offline lives unaffected. Our online modes of interaction and identity are constantly affecting our lives offline and our face-to-face interactions. Facebook’s publicization of our privacy and intimatizing of our more formal and less immediate relationships has changed the way that we relate to work colleagues, fellow students, parents and bosses, and even romantic partners and spouses.

24.

New technologies can dramatically transform our relationship to things that are central to our lives. I have argued this about Scripture and the printing press in the past. While I would significantly alter that particular argument were I to revisit it, I stand by its fundamental point: new ‘technology’ had substantial effects upon our conception of and relationship with the Scriptures. Were you to ask a modern Christian to identify the Scriptures, they would most likely point you to a mass-produced, privately owned, printed and bound Bible, with all books in a set order, with an index, chapters and verses, navigational tools, a book primarily engaged with in the act of private reading. Had you asked the same question several hundred years earlier, you would probably have received a surprisingly different answer. Few people, however, have taken the time to reflect upon what such a change means for our conception of Scripture and engagement with it.

The far-reaching effect of new social media may prove no less dramatic in our generation and may pass just as unnoticed by most. While we may celebrate the new possibilities afforded to us by the new technology, we may fail to appreciate the manner in which it radically shifts our conceptions of such things as community, textuality, relationship, presence, the body, reality, space, and privacy.

25.

We should beware of speaking of social media as if they were homogeneous. Different social media lend themselves to different modes of relating. For instance, a site such as Google+ is primarily characterized by ‘broad networking’, the discussion of ideas, talking about objective things, sharing less personal items, and the formation of large, loose, and less intimate networks. Most of one’s interactions on Google+ can be with complete strangers. It does this very well, but isn’t so effective for close networking, the sharing of personal things and passions, and the formation of intimate friendships and relationships.

In many respects, sites such as Facebook and Pinterest take their starting point in close networking and seek to extend such close networking out into realms where it previously did not exist, intimatizing relationships that would previously have been less personal. Sites such as Twitter and Google+ are more effective in broad networking.

26.

We should beware of falling into the trap of technological determinism. While a ‘technology’ such as a site’s UI will definitely influence the manner in which it is used, it need not determine it. Other factors have an effect here. For instance, the metaphors in terms of which we engage with new technologies can be very powerful. If Facebook had initially been approached under the metaphor of the ‘yellow pages’, rather than the metaphor of the school year-book, one wonders whether it would have been so successful. One of the constant weaknesses of Google is its failure to establish compelling metaphors for its social media (Google Buzz, Google Wave, and Google+ are all examples here).

The seed communities for a social networking site can be particularly influential in determining the shape of its later development. Not only do they have particular influence in setting the key metaphors, they also represent the core community and form of relating to which new users are attracted.

27.

Lest it be thought that I am arguing against the value of online relationships and social media, I should make clear that I greatly appreciate the new possibilities opened up by them, and have benefited immensely from them. I have been a participant in online fora for almost a decade and a half, blogged for nearly ten years, and have used Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Flickr, Google+, and a host of other such sites. I send over fifty e-mails on the average day and follow dozens of RSS feeds.

I have formed quite literally hundreds of friendships and acquaintances online, and many of these friendships have become very important to me. Some have lasted for over a decade. I have met over thirty online friends in person on dozens of occasions. I plan to meet several more this summer alone.

However, despite my appreciation for online media, I have become aware of some of its limitations, unhealthy tendencies, and dangers, and have become more self-conscious and critical in my use of it. I have become more cautious when considering the value of new social media.

28.

There is no reason why we must adopt new media.

This does not mean that we should not adopt new media. However, we should beware of presuming that we have an onus or responsibility to do so. New media brings new potential for good and for ill. Such potential is dangerous unless approached in terms of a clear understanding of our fundamental ends and values. There might be occasions where we come to believe that certain new media do not promote the healthy growth of our communities.

I believe that assessment of new media must begin with an appreciation of the fundamental media and interface established by God – the centrality and authority of the Word and the sacraments, and the primacy of the body, within which God has set each of the members, just as he pleased (1 Corinthians 12:18). The first test that any new technology or medium and our proposed use of them must face is whether they displace the centrality and authority of these appointed media in the life of the Church and the Christian, or the primacy of our created interfaces. The second test that they must face is whether they value and serve the order and balance of the functions and senses of the body, or whether they lead to a schism within our bodies or an unhealthy hierarchy.

As Christians, rather than being driven by new technologies and media, we should pursue technologies and media that serve a theological understanding of the order of the body, and which naturally flow out from the central media of the Church. This should be the driving principle. To be effective in this, it is important to protect the clarity of the rule. For this to be protected, we need to preserve the simplicity of our core engagement. Introducing new technologies into the heart of our worship should be resisted unless the most compelling reasons exist for doing so.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, The Church, The Sacraments, Theological, Worship | 11 Comments

Links and Jottings

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Having not blogged much here for a little while, I thought that I would quickly post a few miscellaneous links and thoughts. I regularly post links in my Delicious account, which is linked in my sidebar (more general and less serious links, photos, and videos can be found on my Tumblr blog, Postcards from the Oubliette).

Luke Bretherton has written a very thoughtful piece on the subject of asylum seekers and the moral status of borders, over on the superb ABC Religion and Ethics site:

My contention is that those who argue for open borders under-value a sense of place and the integrity of the nation as political community, but those who argue for closed borders over-value the nation as political community. Instead, I will suggest we need a way of valuing our particular political community in relation to other nations and ultimately in relation to God, and that such a framework will enable us to make appropriate decisions about how to respect and value existing citizens and fulfil our duty of care to the refugee and vulnerable stranger from outside our country who nevertheless who seek a new life within our country. In summary:

  • those who argue for opening up borders see borders as a filter to keep out the bad and corrupt but at the same time, let in any individual who seeks to live in this land;
  • those who argue for closing our borders see borders as a fence, a system of security and defence that protects and preserves what is inside from what is outside;
  • but I want to argue that borders are a face we turn to the world around us which tells them what kind of country we are and how are want to relate to those around us and whether we are hostile or hospitable.

Matt Colvin has an intriguing exegetical suggestion for the story of the Gibeonites:

 In this instance, I would suggest that Daube has missed one relevant detail that would make the story an even better example of “answering a formalist according to his formalism”: The rulers of Israel say to the congregation, “Let them live, but let them be woodcutters and water carriers for all the congregation, as the rulers had promised them.” Now, this may be a mistranslation. It might be better rendered as, “because the rulers (sc. of Israel) had promised them,” and it might be narrator-speech rather than the words of the Israelite rulers. But is just possible that they are seizing upon the Gibeonites’ ambassadors’ own words: when they presented themselves to Joshua, they twice said, “We are your servants” (9:8,9). Now, this is of course nothing but a bit of humble politeness, akin to Victorian or Georgian Englishmen signing their letters with the valediction, “Very obediently yours” or “Your very humble servant, The Duke of York.” For the recipient of such a letter to insist on being obeyed, or to take possession of the sender as a slave, would be almost comic misinterpretation. But with the Gibeonites, the case is altered. They have lied and deceived and used legal formalism to bind the Israelites au pied de la lettre. They are therefore fair game for such misinterpretation. “Oh, that’s the way it is?” say the Hebrews, “Then you are our servants, since that’s what you said.”

NPR has an article that raises some interesting and potentially troubling issues about sexual consent and dementia:

Many residents who have been diagnosed with dementia rely on family members with power of attorney to make important decisions. Tarzia says that decisions about intimacy shouldn’t rise to that level.

“Sexuality shouldn’t be categorized as a high-stakes decision, like, say, a will or a major financial decision where you really need the capacity to consent to things,” says Tarzia, “We’re saying that sexuality is different and the way to establish consent should be different.”

These decisions don’t come without risks, and Tarzia says it’s important that staff in care facilities be willing to discuss the use of condoms for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. 

This leaves me with several questions. What alternative way of establishing consent is being suggested? More importantly, what happens when a person with a strong moral stance on sexual behaviour begins to lose their mind and later their self-control? Can their former moral standard render future willing sexual behaviour on their part, behaviour they would never have countenanced in their right mind, though quite consistent with the more relaxed sexual norms of wider society, non-consensual? When sexual behaviour is seen to demand a lower level of consent, would this compromise the basis on which you could be prevented from fulfilling one’s current desires on the basis of one’s previously expressed will? At this point it seems to me that a host of other questions about personhood, will, and identity start to surface.

‘Do Pedophiles Deserve Sympathy?’ from CNN raises a host of other troubling moral questions.

Cases of child molestation that involve long strings of victims over the course of years illustrate what can happen when someone gives in to, or outright indulges, his sexual interests, regardless of its potential damage on others. It is those cases that dominate headlines and provoke revulsion toward pedophiles.

But they are rare. An untold number of cases merit sympathy.

The science suggests that they are people who, through no fault of their own, were born with a sex drive that they must continuously resist, without exception, throughout their entire lives. Little if any assistance is ever available for them.

They are often unable to consult mental health professionals (because of mandatory reporting rules); their families will often disown rather than support them; and despite the openness of the Internet, there are few options for coming out and joining communities of other pedophiles for mutual support.

Having encountered thousands of cases, it is my experience that the pedophiles who do go on to become actual child molesters do so when they feel the most desperate. Yet, much of what society does has been to increase rather than decrease their desperation.

It seems to me that the case of the paedophile (someone with a sexual preference for children, not necessarily the same as a child molester, who acts on those preferences) provides us with a perfect test case to discuss the place of the virtue of empathy.

To what extent can we identify with someone who has deep desires that seem repulsive and completely alien to us? To what extent does empathy with such a person compromise our perception of the evil of child abuse? What would empathy in such a situation actually look like? How do we show empathy in a way that is discriminating, and does not justify or lessen evil? To what extent if any should empathy be extended to the person who has abused? Do non-victims have the right to empathize with the abuser at all? Could empathy in such a situation have the negative effect of reducing the high pain tolerance that the paedophile must have relative to the insistence of his desires? What does empathy in such a situation require us to admit about ourselves and our own natures? At what point in the not uncommon victim to victimiser cycle does/should empathy run out?

I think that when talking about empathy we all too often lob ourselves softballs. The case of paedophilia makes the question of empathy far more threatening, challenging, and discomforting, which is exactly what it should be, I feel.

Research suggests that religious belief might shape perception of stimuli.

The Observer seriously misrepresents Rowan Williams, who has a new book coming out soon. More here.

The history of philosophy graphed.

German court outlaws religious circumcision of sons. Putting the huge historical sensitivities raised by this case to one side, in many respects this could be seen as yet another absolutization of the modality of the choice under Western liberalism over that involved in substantial belonging to a tradition, something that I have previously commented on here.

Listening to this right now:

 

I have also been listening to the Welcome Wagon’s new album a lot over the last couple of weeks. Some of you may know that Vito Aiuto is a Presbyterian pastor in New York. There is a very interesting interview with Vito here:

HR: Talk to me a little bit about the nostalgia or irony that shows up in your art. I’m also thinking particularly of the packaging of the debut: incredibly ironic, but somehow endearing, still having a kind of honesty to it. How do you approach that?

VA: There’s an essay by David Foster Wallace called Television and U.S. Fiction. It’s about how he thinks that irony is destroying fiction and has almost destroyed art in the West. It’s decimating it and has made a wreckage of our ability to interact with art. And at the end, he basically says, ‘Well, I think the next thing is going to have to be sincerity.’ And he says that it’s basically going to have to be a sincerity that goes through irony. Because you just can’t do sincerity anymore because it’s already kind of been ruined. So you have to pick the flower up off the floor and do something with it even though it’s been stepped on. You can’t find something that hasn’t been sullied by irony.

So it’s not lost on us that the packaging of the first record is kind of kitschy. But at the same time, for the first record, every single last piece of art on that record actually came from Monique’s grandmother’s house. She was raised in that, and everything on the record, we believe. It’s not like there is anything on that record that I would disown, or even the packaging. Some of it is overtly earnest and even kitschy, but I am pretty much ready to stand by that stuff. I think this is true of a lot of people; I’m really tired of irony. I’m tired of sarcasm. I’m tired of interacting with my friends, where we make fun of each other to show each other that we love each other. I’m totally scarred by that. I’m tired of it and I don’t want to do it. I really just want to make music that’s really honest and is almost embarrassingly sincere.

This is one of the songs from the latest album:

 

Received these in the post this morning:

Posted in Bible, Culture, Ethics, My Reading, OT, Philosophy, Quotations, Theological, What I'm Reading | 2 Comments

Old Blogs

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Back in 2003, I started blogging at 40Bicycles and later also at Sacramental Blog. I have just imported all of my old blog posts into a new WordPress blog, accessible here.

My views have developed considerably since I last blogged there, almost seven years ago. While I stand by much that I wrote, there are several things that I would want to word differently, even more that I would want heavily to nuance, a number that I would substantially alter, and perhaps a few positions that I would completely retract. If you want to know my thoughts on any of my old positions, feel free to ask me.

Posted in Public Service Announcement, The Blogosphere, Theological | 2 Comments

Day Out in York

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Alastair Roberts
Posted in Photos, What I'm Doing | 3 Comments

Sex and Death on the Threshing Floor

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

A friend asked me yesterday about the significant of the threshing floor in Scripture. I briefly sketched a response to his enquiry, but thought that it would be good to fill out this response in the following post. Perhaps some of my readers will be interested in the subject.

Much of the following is highly speculative, and should be taken on board only with considerable caution. In most of the respects that matter, interpreting Scripture is more of an art than a science, so we will need to develop and depend upon an instinct for the text, in communion with the Church’s tradition of engagement, rather than upon some sure technique or method, to settle upon appropriate readings.

Called From the Threshing Floor

In Judges 6:11, we find a scared Gideon threshing wheat in the winepress. In the act of threshing wheat, however, we find Gideon associated with an act that is symbolic of judgment, the role to which God is calling him. God’s judgment involves bringing the nations to his threshing floor, so that they can be threshed by the hooves of his servants. Micah 4:11-13 describes this process:

Now also many nations have gathered against you, who say, “Let her be defiled, and let our eye look upon Zion.” But they do not know the thoughts of the LORD, nor do they understand His counsel; For He will gather them like sheaves to the threshing floor. “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion; for I will make your horn iron, and I will make your hooves bronze; you shall beat in pieces many peoples; I will consecrate their gain to the LORD, and their substance to the Lord of the whole earth.”

Gideon was involved in the process of bread-making, an activity with great biblical significance. The fact that he was threshing in the winepress brings together the themes of bread and wine, which are so central to biblical symbolism. Having threshed and ground the grain, he produced a large sacrifice of unleavened bread for YHWH (Judges 6:19-21).

Gideon asks for a sign from YHWH, to see whether YHWH will indeed save Israel by his hand. He places a fleece on the threshing floor. God’s dew falls on the fleece only, leaving it sodden, while the rest of the threshing floor is left dry. He seeks a second sign. In the second sign the fleece is completely dry, while the surrounding ground of the threshing floor is wet with the dew. Here the fleece might symbolize the acceptable sacrifice of YHWH, while the threshing floor is Israel (James Jordan’s claim). I would suggest that the fleece is the Spirit-blessed leader, typifying Christ. As the anointed leader is wrung out, the whole nation is washed in the same Spirit. The threshing floor here becomes the site of the heavenly dew of blessing.

As already noted, Gideon is in the business of producing bread. In Judges 7:13 this theme comes to the forefront again. As Gideon approached the camp of the Midianites, one of the Midianites recounted a dream to his companion:

And when Gideon had come, there was a man telling a dream to his companion. He said, “I have had a dream: to my surprise, a loaf of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian; it came to a tent and struck it so that it fell and overturned, and the tent collapsed.” Then his companion answered and said, “This is nothing else but the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel! Into his hand God has delivered Midian and the whole camp.”

Through the empowering of the Holy Spirit, Gideon had formed the (barley) firstfruits of Israel into a loaf. The work that began at the threshing floor reached its climax as YHWH established Gideon as the ‘baker’ of a new Israel (much as Joseph took over the role of the baker and cupbearer, providing bread to the nation of Egypt and being the one with the special cup). We will return to these themes later.

Sex on the Threshing Floor

The threshing floor was a place associated with sexual congress, both licit and illicit. In Hosea 9:1, YHWH declares: ‘Do not rejoice, O Israel, with joy like other peoples, For you have played the harlot against your God. You have made love for hire on every threshing floor.’

The reduction of the grain obtained through the threshing process to floor was also associated with sexual imagery. There were two millstones, one on top of another. While the lower of the two stones was especially associated with women and the upper especially associated with men (hence the sexualisation of the shame of Abimelech, whose head is crushed by a woman dropping an upper – male – millstone from atop the walls he was trying to penetrate, a sexualized shame that can be compared to Jael’s spike piercing the skull of Sisera, when all was set up for a rape scene with the roles reversed), both upper and lower millstones were connected with women, as the act of grinding the mill was primarily the task of women.

In Job 31:10 we read, ‘Then let my wife grind for another, and let others bow down over her.’ The woman here seems to be symbolically identified with the lower millstone. The point of the verse is not, as some (perhaps more delicate) translations and interpreters would have it, that Job’s wife should become the slave of another man, but that she should be sexually subject to him, as the lower millstone ‘grinds’ beneath the upper millstone.

The elision of the imagery of using a millstone and being a millstone can also be found in Isaiah 47:1-3, where the virgin daughter of Babylon is to be humiliated:

“Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; Sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans! For you shall no more be called Tender and delicate. Take the millstones, and grind meal: uncover thy locks, make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers. Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen: I will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man.”

Here we see the connection of sexual and millstone imagery once again.

The Go’el and the Grain

An appreciation of the close connection between sexual symbolism and the imagery of grain and the threshing floor will help us as we come to the book of Ruth. The crucial scene in the book of Ruth is that of chapter 3, a passage which is packed with sexual symbolism.

We have already seen that the threshing floor is associated with sexual activity and is the trysting place of lovers and sexual partners. In Ruth 3, Naomi sends Ruth to the threshing floor to meet with Boaz, where he sleeps. An account in which a man drinks and is uncovered might remind us of Genesis 9:21 (Ham and Noah), but perhaps more significantly of Lot and his daughters in Genesis 19:30-38, the event from which the Moabite people came (Ruth is a Moabitess). Ruth’s (righteous) action echoes that of her (unrighteous) ancestress.

A number of commentators observe that the ‘uncovering’ of the ‘feet’ in Ruth 3:7 is language that is euphemistic elsewhere in Scripture. In Deuteronomy 28:57, Isaiah 7:20, and Ezekiel 16:25, ‘feet’ seemingly refer to genitalia (perhaps Exodus 4:25 and Isaiah 6:2 are further examples). The language of ‘covering’ feet can be found in Judges 3:24 and 1 Samuel 24:3, where Eglon and Saul seek privacy to ‘attend to their needs’, as some modern translations render it. While I believe that there is good reason to question whether Ruth actually uncovers Boaz’s genitalia in Ruth 3, we really should not miss the sexual connotations of the language. The threshing floor is the place where the grain is trodden out by the cattle. Ruth uncovers the ‘feet’ of Boaz and lies at them, as if as one to be trodden. While I do not believe that Ruth 3 speaks of sexual intercourse occurring between Boaz and Ruth, the action of Ruth symbolized a sexual relationship with Boaz.

Ruth comes to Boaz at the time of harvest and fertility. Boaz himself is lying at the end of the ‘heap’ of grain. At the conclusion of the scene, Boaz gives Ruth six ephahs of barley (3:15). The visual imagery here is worth noting. Boaz pours his seed into Ruth’s cloak, which she presumably carries in front of her in a manner similar to that of a woman with child. This all occurs at the time of First-fruits, suggesting a promise of more seed and harvest to come. The fact that this whole story is occurring in Bethlehem – the ‘House of Bread’ – might also be worth reflecting upon.

In Song of Solomon 7:2, the waist of the Shulamite is compared to a ‘heap of wheat set about with lilies.’ As I recently commented, ‘The heap of wheat is associated with abundance and with sustenance, with fertility and vitality.’ The seed of the bridegroom given to the bride leads to fruitfulness and life.

The Ox Treading out the Grain

The sexual connotations of the uncovering of the feet may come into sharper focus through a reflection upon the meaning of the threshing floor in the broader symbolism that is opened up in the context of the levirate commandment in Deuteronomy 25.

Immediately preceding the teaching concerning the levirate, we read a commandment that appears peculiarly out of place in its context: ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.’ We have biblical warrant for a symbolic interpretation of this particular verse – ‘Is it oxen God is concerned about? Or does He say it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written…’ (1 Corinthians 9:9b-10a). I would suggest that the meaning becomes clearer as we view the passage through the lens provided to us by the book of Ruth.

The treading out of the grain on the threshing floor refers to the relationship between the go’el or kinsman redeemer and the widow of his near relative, for whom he is raising up seed. The kinsman redeemer is the ox on the threshing floor and the ‘treading’ is the sexual act through which ‘seed’ is produced for the widow and her deceased husband.

In the book of Ruth we see the themes of Deuteronomy 25:4 and those of 25:5-10 closely aligned (not least in bringing the context of the elders at the gate and the context of the threshing floor into close proximity). Ruth is the grain to be ‘trodden’ by Boaz, the ox on the threshing floor, at whose uncovered feet she lies. As the genitalia of the kinsman redeemer symbolically perform the same action of the oxen’s feet on the threshing floor, I believe that we can hear the full euphemistic character of the language of ‘uncovering the feet’, without saying that Boaz’s genitalia were actually uncovered by Ruth. Rather, Ruth enacted the euphemism of the ox treading out the grain, as a symbol of the role that she was calling Boaz to perform for her.

The treading out of the grain yielded both sustenance and seed. The symbolic commandment of Deuteronomy 25:4 teaches that the ox should not be denied his part in the sustenance produced by his labours. In terms of the levirate commandment, the application should be clear: while raising up seed for his brother through sexual relations with his widow (‘treading out the grain’), the ox (‘the kinsman redeemer’) should not be prevented from enjoying the usufruct of the inheritance that he is holding in trust for his future nephew (which equates to his not being ‘muzzled’).

The Removed Sandal

A further fascinating detail of the levirate commandment comes in Deuteronomy 25:8-10, where the one who refuses to play the role of the kinsman redeemer is shamed by the act of removing his sandals. From that point on, he is referred to as ‘the house of him who had his sandal removed.’ While this could merely be regarded as a generic act of shaming, I believe that more is going on here.

If we connect the unmuzzled ox law of Deuteronomy 25:4 with that which follows we can see that: 1) feet are already in view within the passage; 2) the action of the feet is symbolic of the action of the genitals. Connecting this with Ruth 3, even more can be teased out. A contrast and parallel can be drawn between the removal of the sandals of the unwilling kinsman, and the ‘uncovering of the feet’ of the willing kinsman. Both have their feet uncovered, but one is shamed, while the other is blessed.

The ‘feet’ of oxen are worth reflecting on. The distinction between clean and unclean animals lay in their hooves – their possession of sandals (Leviticus 11). The clean animals had cloven hooves that were like sandals protecting them from the cursed earth. As they were not polluted by the cursed earth, they had access to sacred space. Sandals were protection against the cursed earth, but were to be removed in holy places (Exodus 3:5; Joshua 5:15).

I believe that this provides us with an important clue to the significance of both the shameful removal of the sandals of the unwilling kinsman and the uncovering of the feet of the willing go’el. The man with his sandals removed becomes as one of the unclean beasts, without the cloven feet or sandals of the priestly oxen. However, the priestly go’el, whose feet are treading on the undefiled ground of the bride, has his sandals removed and feet uncovered as an act of blessing. As Boaz is ‘treading’ on the holy ground of Ruth, his sandals are appropriately removed.

There might also be sexual imagery at play here again. Through the removal of his sandal, the unwilling kinsman is symbolically castrated, while the willing go’el has his genitals uncovered for sexual intercourse.

Threshing Floor and Temple

The connection between the threshing floor, sex, and holy ground takes on a further dimension through its connection with temple imagery.

In 1 Chronicles 21, David takes a forbidden census of Israel. The Angel of the Lord comes to Jerusalem to destroy it, but in an event that powerfully echoes the Aqedah (Genesis 22), the Angel is instructed to restrain the sword in his hand at the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite (1 Chronicles 21:15-16; cf. Genesis 22:10-12). Both the Aqedah and the staying of the hand of the Angel of the Lord occur at Mount Moriah (Genesis 22:2; 2 Chronicles 3:1). Instead of destroying Jerusalem, the Angel’s sword is sheathed as the threshing floor becomes a site of animal sacrifice.

The Solomonic Temple is later constructed on the site of the threshing floor of Ornan (2 Chronicles 3:1). The threshing floor is the site of judgment and testing, the site of terrifying divine presence, the site of divine provision and deliverance. It is at the threshing floor that wheat is separated from chaff, the latter being prepared for burning, and the wheat gathered in. It is at the threshing floor that the bridegroom meets with the bride and produce seed. The temple is the trysting place of YHWH and his bride, Israel. The threshing floor is worked by God’s priestly oxen, who produce seed for him through their ministry. It is a place where food and seed are produced, and where separation and judgment occurs.

The divine threshing floor is holy ground, a place where sandals are removed. Coming to the threshing floor to meet with her bridegroom, Ruth washes and anoints herself and puts on her best clothes. The parallels with the description of the preparation of the priests for service in the sanctuary in Exodus 40:12-13 should be clear: the threshing floor is holy ground and the one entering it must be washed and prepared for activity within its realm. Like Ruth, we are prepared for activity in God’s threshing floor as we are washed in baptism (Hebrews 10:22), as we put on Christ (Galatians 3:27), and are anointed in the Anointed One (2 Corinthians 1:21).

The Purging of the Floor

Our first introduction to Christ in the New Testament through the testimony of John the Baptist is as the one who winnows at the threshing floor (Matthew 3:11-12):

“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Christ is the one who works the threshing floor, much as he is the one who treads out the grapes and the winepress in Isaiah 63:1-6 and Revelation 14:14-20 (where he also reaps the wheat). In our worship we meet with Christ our kinsman redeemer on the threshing floor where the wheat and the chaff are separated by the Word of God.

Only a fairly dull ear would miss the heavy allusion to Malachi 3:1-3:

“Behold, I send My messenger, and he will prepare the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, He is coming,” Says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness.

The temple of Malachi 3 is replaced with the threshing floor in Matthew 3. Christ, however, is the one who purges both the temple and the nation of Israel. He is the one who separates wheat from chaff, burning the latter and gathering the former.

Given our previous observations about the significance of the removal of sandals, I would be surprised if it were accidental that John the Baptist consistently mentions the fact that he is unworthy to carry or to loose the sandals of Christ (Matthew 3:11; Mark 1:7; Luke 3:16; John 1:27). The impression given is that Christ’s sandals are being removed for some reason. I suggest that this removal of the sandals has to do with Christ’s treading out of the grain in the holy place.

‘For Our Sakes … this is Written’

Paul twice uses the obscure Old Testament law of Deuteronomy 25:4 – ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain’ – to refer to the duty to pay ministers (1 Corinthians 9:9-11; 1 Timothy 5:17-18). At first blush, it seems strange that Paul should regard such a commandment as having such relevance. However, as we understand the manner in which such a commandment was to function, its use begins to make more sense. Such commandments concerning animals (not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, unequally yoking, dietary requirements, etc.) are primarily to be read as symbolic for human beings: the animals themselves aren’t the real point (Paul makes this point in 1 Corinthians 9:9-10).

I have already argued for a connection between this commandment and the practice of the levirate, the levir being the one who ‘treads out the grain’ of his brother’s widow, raising up seed for the dead kinsman. While performing this duty, the near kinsman is entitled to partake of part of the gain of his deceased kinsman’s property, while waiting for his nephew to reach the age where he will inherit.

Paul’s use of this verse to refer to appointed ministers in the church would draw upon this background: priestly workers on the threshing floor are God’s oxen (cf. Leviticus 4:3), and are also tasked with guarding the inheritance and raising up seed for the absent Husband (the priest is aligned with Christ as the husband). While doing so it is right and proper that they should be permitted to receive a reward for their labours – the usufruct of the realm of their labours in the Church.

The idea that Paul might have such a connection in mind might be given further weight by the fact that in 1 Corinthians 9 he immediately goes on to observe: ‘Don’t you know that those who work in the temple get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in what is offered on the altar?’ The connection between the priests and the altar/temple and the oxen on the threshing floor is quite clear in the fact that it was the threshing floor of Ornan that became the site of the temple (although David built an altar there first – 1 Chronicles 21:18) and there is the suggestion that the grain and oxen there were taken out of agricultural use and immediately put to sacrificial use. The priests of the temple correspond to the oxen on the threshing floor that preceded it, and the grain that the unmuzzled oxen partake in corresponds to the sacrifices of the people of God.

The Making of Bread

The story of the Scriptures is a story of the making of bread and wine. The Eucharist – the Marriage Supper of the Lamb – is the event in which the themes of the Scripture arrive at their telos and climax. It is a story which goes through many stages, from planting to harvest, to threshing, to grinding, to baking, to feasting, each with its own symbolism.

The story of the Scriptures is the story of Christ, the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, but overcomes the barrenness of the soil to produce a bountiful harvest. It is the story of the threshing floor on which the barefoot Husband and his priestly oxen thresh the grain. It is the story of the separating of the wheat from the chaff and the falling of judgment upon the wicked, who are burned up or driven away by the wind (Psalm 1:4). It is the story of the grinding of the grain to produce pure flour. It is about the relationship between Christ the Bridegroom and the Church as his fruitful Bride under these images.

Through these processes, the Church is created into an eschatological loaf, through the waters of baptism, the kneading of the Holy Spirit, his purging of the old leaven of wickedness, his presence as the new leaven, and his transforming fire. Our participation in the bread of the Church is a symbol of communion in Christ (1 Corinthians 10:17), a sign that YHWH’s breadmaking work over history is for our sake.

Beneath the entire temple and festival system (and in turn beneath the entire gospel narrative and the life of the Church), lies the agricultural pattern of the field of barley or wheat, the harvest, the work of the threshing floor, the making of bread, etc. When we recognize the connection between the agricultural feasts of Leviticus 23, the redemptive historical festivals of Israel, the events of the Gospels, and the worshipping life of the Church, what might otherwise appear to be weak metaphorical relationships are filled out, revealing in themselves something of the deep grammar of God’s work in history.

Posted in Bible, Deuteronomy, NT, NT Theology, OT, OT Theology, Ruth, The Church, The Sacraments, Theological | 27 Comments

Introduction to Bible Themes for Kids

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

I am loving the following Bible chants for teaching basic biblical-theological structures to kids (all of you adults know the sacrifices of Leviticus, right?):

Ox, Lion, Eagle, Man

Priest, King, Prophet, Man

Moses is an ox; David is a lion; prophets are eagles; Jesus is da man (for little kids, this is best done with hand motions – horns for ox, claws and a growl for lion, wings for eagle, erect posture for man)

When God first made the world, it was formless and void, and through the week of creation, God shaped and filled it.  We chant this basic creation structure:

Formless, Empty, Dark (best chanted quietly with the lights off)

God lights and shapes and fills (flick the lights on when you start this, and start shouting)

At the end of the creation week, God has built His house.  Vertically, it has three stories:

Heaven, Earth, and Sea

On earth, there are also three zones, each of which corresponds to a particular human activity and in each of which we encounter a particular person or type of person:

Garden, Land, & World

Worship, Work, & Witness

Father (God), Brother, Stranger

These can be put together as follows:

Garden is for worship; land is for work; world is for witness

And these three zones also correspond to the three offices of Christ:

Priests keep the garden; Kings rule the land; prophets witness in the world

Read the whole first set here.

Ascension, tribute, peace (a grunt here punctuates the chant nicely) purification, trespass (these work best in the chant if the vowel in “tres” is lengthened)

Each offering has a distinctive rite or purpose.  The entire ascension offering is burned (apart from the skin); the tribute offering is not animal but grain; the peace offering is the one offering that the worshiper eats; the purification rite emphasizes the spreading of blood; and the trespass offering is for “robbing God” or sacrilege, so it involves compensation to God.  These can be summarized in the following Levitical “catechism”:

What is the ascension offering? The whole ascension offering is burned (pronounce “offering” as “off’ring)

What is the tribute offering? The tribute offering is made of grain (slight pause after off’ring)

What is the peace offering? The peace offering is what you eat (slight pause after “peace” and “off’ring”)

What is the purification offering? Purification is done with blood (slight pause after “purification”)

What is the trespass offering? The trespass offering pays God back (slight pause after off’ring)

The second set are here.

Update: Part 3, Part 4

Posted in Bible, OT | 4 Comments