Total Pageviews

Sunday, November 25, 2012

The Miracle of Human Language


Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.  Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:7-9)

     Does a universal grammar, hardwired into the brain, point to a single Designer of that brain?
     Language, argues Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, is an instinct.  At first blush, an assertion like that seems unremarkable.  After all, what could be more human, more a common denominator of the Homo sapiens experience, than our capacity to speak with one another?
     That said, however, we tend to behave as if language is a learned, rather than an instinctual, capacity for humans.  After all, scores upon scores of English teachers have battled the tendency of boorish youth to wantonly split infinitives, even while bemoaning their parents' love of "lite" products and use of imaginary adverbials like "irregardless."  If language is an untaught instinct, then why must so much energy be put into teaching it?
     Pinker's claim not only flies in the face of well-known pedagogical struggles, it calls to task major trends in sociological and academic philosophies.  Pinker asserts that language, in its essence, is a biological (or, more precisely, neurological) device that has evolved as a selected-for trait of the human race.  No anti-absolutist philosophy -- be it post-modernism, social constructionism, or Margaret Meade's anthropological relativism -- can change that meaty fact.  The brain is hardwired for language, and it is hardwired in an absolute way, universal to all cultures, ethnicities, and races.
     That's a bold claim to make in a society that has trouble believing that the brain and the mind are the same thing, and Pinker invests considerable time explaining and defending his thesis.  Several arguments represent the most convincing elements of his Language Is Hardwired argument (these categories are mine rather than Pinker's):
  • Ease of acquisition: Infants absorb and manipulate language with breathtaking speed.  Given very little instruction (what linguists call a "poverty of input"), a child is soon able to manipulate and create an endless number of sentences -- potentially infinite output from finite input, yet another nail in the coffin of classical behaviorism.  After several years of initial mastery, a child does little more than polish the results of language acquisition -- usually a matter of adapting to the irregular forms that violate the base grammar of a tongue (e.g., replacing the logical "Mommy comed home!" with the correct but problematic "Mommy came home.")
  • Ease of codification: Children of language-deprived adult communities -- for example, the deaf children of speaking parents who, without additional input, quickly surpass and improve their parents' halting attempts at sign language, as well as the second-generation speakers of a pidgin who immediately transform it into a more complex creole -- demonstrate that the minds of children are not the proverbial "blank slate," but are instead operating with an instinctive grammar "hard-wired" into their brains.
  • Universality of complexity: Despite the misconceptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academics working for colonial empires, there is no such thing as a "primitive" language, neither in existence now nor found in ancient writings.  Today's most technologically primitive cultures employ grammars that rival the grace, subtlety, and at times gross irregularity of Cicero's Latin and King James's English.  If there ever was a prehistoric "primitive" tongue, its evolution was complete long before ancient man put cuneiform to clay.
  • Universal conformity of grammar: Among disparate languages, words vary greatly; grammar does not.  While cultural relativists offer many claims about concepts that "simply can't be thought" by speakers of different languages, close examination reveals that all examples -- from the mythical nine (or twenty [or forty-four]) words Inuit peoples have for snow, to the Whorfian hoax that Hopi Indians have no concept of time -- are little more than the academic equivalents of urban legends.  True, grammars vary language to language, but they vary in macrological and predictable ways.  Subjects, verbs, and objects jockey for position, but always establish a predictable sequence, and are comfortably comprehensible to humans thanks to their relative proximity.

     The last point above is of the utmost importance to Pinker's thesis, so I will discuss it further.  Hang in there with me as I get all thinkish and complexy and stuff:
      To say that all human grammars have proximate subjects, verbals, and, when needed, objects sounds facile and trite.  It is the very triteness of the assertion that supports Pinker's point that a human grammar is universal.  The brain demands the elements mentioned above, and it further demands that the concepts represented by language carry an element of term proximity for complete comprehensibility.  I can't set a subject pronoun eight phrases away from the verb it brings to life.  I can't list all objects at the end of my conversation, relying on earlier word order to clarify which actions occurred with which verbs.  However, I can easily imagine a grammar -- a nonhuman grammar, "tongues of angels," if you will -- that handles our most common elements differently.  Consider the following human passage:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

     Suppose that I need to translate that passage for the alien Living Beings -- a race of principalities with a brain grammar favoring concrete Actors addressing concrete Recipients, followed immediately by Indirect Recipients, clustering peripheral conjunctives and prepositions (let's call them "itty bits") for convenience before climatically resolving a series of four -- and ONLY four, per Ezekiel 1:4-22 -- ideas, serving up four crucial verbs.  In addition, before the verbs, the Living Beings race must insert a vocative or interjection to establish what mood the coming verbs ought to inspire in the listener; if no mood is intended, a simple one-word blessing of their Hive King is inserted as a placeholder.

God earth darkness Spirit (of God)!  Heaven + earth beginning, form/void - face (of the deep) - face (of the waters). And (4x) the (5x) in (1x).  Ominous!  Created & was without & was upon & moved upon!

     Any protest that a language of that sort is incomprehensible is further evidence of Pinker's point -- the structure is nonhuman.  No human language would cluster ideas into groups of four, extract all verbs for a terminal "action quartet cluster," and establish a hierarchy of concrete nouns while treating all lesser connectors as simply inferential to meaning.  But the language is not illogical -- it's simply nonhuman, following a pattern that doesn't feel like language to your brain or mine.  Is it an issue of complexity?  Not likely.  My alien Living Being rendering of Genesis 1:1-2 is no more complex than any other 4+ idea sentence, such as the one I create below:

Upon learning that the Archduke of the southernmost conquered fiefdoms (whose sister had had a scandalous affair with the red-haired scullery maid's addled cousin) had adopted the religion of the Musselmen, Nikolai foreswore his alliance with the Nordic raiders -- oh may they be forever damned! -- and fell to his knees chanting "Allahu akbar!"

     The sentence is cumbersome, but completely intelligible if you read it slowly.  A human brain has no questions about what Nikolai foreswore, who has red hair, whose knees were being used, who was addled, what was southernmost, and what aspect of the Musselmen was being adopted by the Archduke.  The complexity of the sentence would cause little more than an eye roll in humans; an alien Living Being, however, might very well bleed from all four of its ears when attempting to sort this potpourri of promiscuously intermingled Actors, Recipients, Indirect Recipients, Itty Bits, and Actions.  The sentence simply doesn't conform to the evolved brain structures of the Living Being race, and even a Star Trek universal translator would need a new software suite to do its job.
     So where is the "organ" of language in the human brain?  The answer is: we linguists aren't positive.  We have definite indications of where particular language functions reside, thanks to early studies of brain lesions and their impact on language, and thanks to modern fMRI, PET, and CAT scan techniques that can track brain/blood activity tied to specific language actions.  Language is located in the left hemisphere of the brain, even in most left-handed humans.  The area is known as the perisylvian region of the cortex, and it contains the better-known language spots called Broca's and Wernike's areas.  Stroke damage to Broca's area tends to lead to a breakdown in grammatical flow, although isolated vocabulary words can be uttered to convey meaning, painstakingly.  Stroke damage to Wernike's area tends to have the opposite effect, allowing a flow of flawlessly grammatical nonsense words akin to lines from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  The separate storage of grammatical rules and vocabulary terms is of particular interest when considered in light of Noam Chomsky's hypothesis of a Universal Grammar that is the central processor used to execute language-specific vocabulary terms.
     Also interesting -- and like the above neurolinguistics summary, also in developmental infancy -- are hypotheses tying grammatical performance to genetic triggers.  Ongoing studies of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have revealed evidence of family-based and heritable grammar deficiency -- not the grammar errors haunting the English teachers mentioned above, but core inabilities to grasp language constructs accessible to even the youngest human speakers of language (e.g., the referent of a relative clause).  The hunt is on -- not for any so-called "grammar gene," as simplified mass media reports have put it, but for a sequence of genetic codons that instructs a developing embryo to create specific proteins, which in turn act as building blocks to specific parts of the developing human brain.
     Does the sheer complexity of language and its unlearned neurological basis provide absolute proof for a Designer of brains and tongues?  Obviously not.  What this discussion does provide, however, is one more tool for those arguing against a "complexity arose from chaos" mentality, as well as insights to use in the endless debate against post-modernist relativism.  It's likely we will never find any smoking-gun evidence of a Creator -- for what is faith, except belief despite the absence of absolute evidence?  But consideration of the sheer complexity of all aspects of creation continues to build the confidence of those who have come to accept that there is more to heaven and earth than can be dreamed up in Creator-free philosophies. 

Marana Tha,
Cosmic Parx


Sunday, July 8, 2012

Ignorant Christians & the Texas GOP

In case you missed it, the Texas Republican Party has officially declared their opposition to critical thinking skills.  Their approved 2012 Platform Committee Report, detailing every plank of their political agenda, specifically calls for the prohibition of teaching such skills.

Oh, they later apologized, saying the language got left in the document “by mistake.”  But, hey, let me apply some of my own critical thinking skills to this issue: (a) If it was in the final document, it was in earlier drafts; (b) if it was in earlier drafts, it was written down by an education subcommittee; (c) if it was written down by an education subcommittee, they must have originally considered it a valuable idea, worthy of further discussion; and (d) all 32 platform writers read it through and voted to approve it, signaling that after many, many reviews, the words "[w]e oppose the teaching of ... critical thinking skills" didn't jump out as anything all that objectionable to anyone.

Cosmic, Is This about Christianity?

You wouldn't think so, would you?  I use this blog to record my ramblings about living as a Christian in the modern world, and this month the modern world includes the 2012 Republican Party of Texas Platform Committee Report.  It is, without dispute, a religious document.  The language of its six key planks is liberally seasoned with the terminology of believers: “God” (12 occurrences), “faith” (9), “Judeo-Christian” (5), “church” (4), “religion” (4), “religious” (21), and “biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel” (only 1 use, but it was in a really, really long paragraph).

So I reserve the right to make faith-based observations about government actions, left and right.  If they’re going to try to put my God into their politics, then I’m certainly going to put their politics under my microscope.  Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of Theocracy.  I prefer America.

Okay, Go Back to That Inflammatory Title

Thank you, I’d almost forgotten.  Please notice that I purposely use the word “ignorant” rather than “stupid” in the title of this piece.  That’s because “ignorant” means lacking knowledge or awareness of a subject, while “stupid” means lacking intelligence or common sense.  The first has to do with experience of or access to information.  The second refers to an inability to process that information, accessible or not.  Therefore, if you did not know the difference between “ignorant” and “stupid,” you were simply ignorant of the meaning of ignorance, not stupid about the meaning of ignorance … and now that you know, you are no longer ignorant of “ignorance,” for ignorance is fleeting.  “Stupid” has a longer shelf life.

The desire of the Texas Republicans is to keep American students ignorant of critical thinking skills.  Many party members, it seems, feel that higher level thinking is incompatible with the Christianity they know and love.  And, surprisingly, they are right.  From an education and information standpoint, evangelical Christians are ignorant, uneducated, in many areas.  Those who become less ignorant by means of higher education and critical thinking tend to become less like what Texas Republicans are willing to recognize as Christian.

I’ll let the research assert it for me:
  •  From June 2009 research in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion: “[Our] research shows that college students are more religiously engaged than has traditionally been thought, but that this interest appears to be more broad than deep.”  In other words, students who attended institutions of higher education are moved to investigate religions and faiths outside the experience of their upbringing.
  • From a 2007 Baylor Religion Survey: “I have no doubt that God exists.”  High school graduates: 71% agree.  College graduates: 58% agree.
  • From the 2010 Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey: “Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.”
  • From an article analyzing the Baylor survey: “And all respondents with college educations were less likely to view the Bible as the literal word of God, but Catholics, evangelicals and black Protestants with increased education were more likely to view the Bible as being inspired by God.”

Read that last bullet again, because it explains a lot.  Christians, including evangelicals, who experience a college education actually grow in their faith that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.  What diminishes is their acceptance of it as a 100% historical, scientific, literal text.

And in Republican Texas, that don’t fly.


God Hates Uncritical Thinking

What sins of man elicit the most condemnation from the holy Scriptures?  Turn on your cable channel TeleGospel, and you’re likely to learn it’s homosexuality, abortion, and not donating enough to television ministries.  And not necessarily in that order.  But should you turn to the Bible with that same question and read it for yourself, you’ll get a different picture.  Hundreds and hundreds of verses bemoan foolishness, and whole sections of the Bible (especially the “Wisdom Books”) are dedicating to combating it.  Sometimes “foolishness” in the Bible refers to ignorance; sometimes it refers to stupidity; still other times it’s used as a euphemism for other sins.  But clearly, God is down on dumb.  Even Paul’s celebrated opening to 1 Corinthians, railing against the “wisdom of this world,” is not a condemnation of learning.  It is a rebuke against the internal factions of Christians who were behaving in a manner no better than the fractious world.  It was instruction on how to access the right kind of wisdom, revealed through the cross, the foolishness of God.

As a believer, I begin with the premise that all true wisdom is from God, and that I begin to operate in wisdom when I fear Him.  But that is where the Texas Republican Party and I part ways.  I need the critical thinking skills they would withhold.  I need them to choose well, to argue well, to chasten others well, to rebuke well, to reason well, to maintain well, and even to hand out tasks well.

Arguing.  Choosing.  Chastening.  Rebuking.  Reasoning.  Maintaining.  Delegating.  All seven of those concepts are embodied in a single Hebrew word, yakach, a word so diversely translated in English versions of the Bible that it probably has never come up in one of your local word-study sermons.  Yakach-ing is what Abraham did with Abimelech when reproving him and making him less ignorant about the incident with the well water in Genesis 21.  Isaac yakach-ed in prayer with God when convincing him to reveal the perfect wife for him in Genesis 24.  The judges in Judges "judged" (yakach again) over Israel for many years each.  Job desired to yakach with God and got scolded for it; Isaiah, on the other hand, is directly invited to yakach with the Almighty in his first chapter.

That last one, Isaiah 1:18, intrigues me.  Lkuw-na', wniwakchah, yo'mar YHWH, it reads, “ Come on, let’s jointly yakach, says the I Am.”  But what is yakach?  Translations abound:

NIV: “Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the Lord.
KJV: Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord
CJB: “Come now,” says Adonai, “let’s talk this over together.”
CEV: I, the Lord, invite you to come and talk it over.
Douay-Rheims: And then come, and accuse me, saith the Lord.
ESV: “Come now, let us reason [note: or dispute] together, says the Lord.
New Century: The Lord says, "Come, let us talk about these things."

So, what is yakach?  Is it settling matters?  Disputing?  Reasoning?  Talking over things?  Exchanging accusations?  Yes.  It is all those things and more in Scripture.

Dare I, then, with so many translations out there, attempt to offer one that embodies most of their nuances?  Yeah, I dare.  I suggest yakach be translated “apply critical thinking skills.”  In the majority of its appearances in the Hebrew Scriptures, that translation would serve well.  I admit it isn’t pretty.  It’s just a touch more accurate.

A Plea to GOP Texas

Dear Texpublicans,

Come, let us yakach together about this.  I realize you fear the unchecked spread of thinking and the disease of knowledge, and I respect your right as a sovereign state to oppose pondering matters too deeply.  But I insist on using, and on teaching, the tools and wonders of reason.  The Lord has invited me to reason with Him, as long as I stay rooted in fear of the Lord and His ways.  For you to throw out critical thinking skills – to throw out yakach – is to throw out Aquinas, or Augustine, or Luther, Kierkegaard, Athanasius, Barth, and C.S. Lewis, all of whom were brilliant Christian critical thinkers and some of whom you guys may have even heard about.

Think of it the way the NRA thinks about firearms.  It's not critical thinking skills that kill people.  It's people who kill people, when they misuse those critical thinking skills.  The skills themselves are promoted by the Word of God.

Do you fear your children will lose their faith?  Then I say, teach them critical thinking skills.  Show them reason and enlighten them in the ways of debate and logic.  If you don’t, the world surely will … and not in ways you’ll like, I promise you.  Do you remember that verse in Proverbs 22 about training a child in the way he should go, so that when he is old he will never depart from it?  Now is the time to apply that verse, right at home.

So I correct you, Texas GOP.  The Lord rebukes you through His Word.  But be of good cheer.  As it says in Job 5:17: “Happy is he whom the Lord corrects.”

The word for “corrects” in that verse is yakach.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

Saturday, May 19, 2012

The #1 Threat to Marriage Sanctity

It’s that season again: The hard-core social conservative wing of the Republican party needs to incite its base to action, and there’s no better rallying platform than shared enmity. This political season’s threat of choice is Gay Marriage, a phenomenon which will, we are told, cheapen and demean traditional marriage.

It’s a clever straw man, really. Aside from opposition to abortion, the shared resistance to gay marriage might be the only political plank capable of uniting Mormons, Evangelical Christians, and Roman Catholics. In any other context, these groups demonize one another, declaring eternal hellfire for the other two (or lower levels of heaven in the case of Latter Day Saints). Rallied around a common enemy, however, these three antithetical institutions lock arms as brothers and declare themselves joint heirs of a Christian nation, defending their common morals.

After the rallies, they go back to declaring each other damned. There are limits, you know.

***

FLASHBACK: The morning after gay marriage was legalized in New York State. My parents are at breakfast. He reads the paper. They speak in Spanish. I translate below.

     HIM: Hey, gay marriage got passed yesterday!
     HER: Ah. Is there more milk?
     HIM: There’s a letter saying it cheapens our marriage.
     HER: Really?
     HIM: It’s what the letter says. Does ours feel cheaper this morning?
     HER: It must. It’s right there in the paper.
     HIM: Yeah, they wouldn’t just make that up.
     HER: Of course not, never. So, the milk?
     HIM: Hey, the Bills are getting a new helmet design!

***

I hereby declare: Christian marriage is in danger of being cheapened. In fact, it is in the very process of being cheapened. Not, however, by gay marriage, as those caught up in the politics and machinations of this world would have you think.

The primary and only significant threat to Christian marriage today is Christian divorce.

I had thought to make this blog post about addressing the question of Christian remarriage after divorce, itself a rather controversial issue. But as I researched the topic, I felt myself growing more and more heartsick. Site after site and commentary after commentary, it dawned on me that the only reason there is so much Internet discussion about whether or not Christians can remarry after a divorce is because there is so much Christian divorce. The followers of the very Lord who declared “I hate divorce” (Malachi 2:16) seem to spend an inordinate amount of time arguing what situations make it permissible.

Fact: Marriage is so important to the Almighty, He chose it as the principal metaphor for His own relationship with His people.

Fact: Divorce, with or without remarriage, is rampant through the Body of Christ.

***

On the off chance you think I am overstating the case, let me present this scenario: I walk you up to a group of ten adults. You poll them, and you discover three of those ten have been divorced. Using that information alone, you have no sure way of determining whether I have walked you up to a group of ten born again Christians, or a group of ten non-Christians. Divorce is equally embraced by both groups.

This information comes from a 2008 study by The Barna Group, an evangelical research company based in Ventura, CA. Specifically, they found divorce rates to be:

     All born again Christians:          32%
     All non-born again Christians    33%
     Atheists or Agnostics:                30%

Since the margin of error for the study was +/- 3%, any rating within 6 points of an atheist is pretty much indistinguishable from that atheist. So let’s take heart that we aren’t statistically worse than atheists. No, not worse. We’re exactly the same.

Yay for us.

***

Those who argue the jots and tittles of how, when, and why a Christian can be allowed to divorce are missing the point. The real threat to the sanctity of Christian marriage is the Christian couple.

Those who maneuver and dissect scriptures to reveal exactly how a Christian might be able to remarry after a divorce are also missing the point. The real threat to the sanctity of Christian marriage is the Christian couple.

Those who throw themselves into screaming political battles over the legalization of gay marriage are missing the point. The real threat to the sanctity of Christian marriage is the Christian couple.

***

I spend a good amount of time in my Social Network of choice, Second Life. In my years there, I have met dozens of Christians who are divorced and remarried, and when I get to know them well enough, I take the risk of asking how they reconcile their divorce with the sanctity of Christian marriage. To date, their response has been uniform: Their spouses cheated on them, and therefore they were free to divorce based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:32: “But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.”

I’m going to comment on that. I’ll step past the obvious irony that those quoting the verse to me were using a passage where Jesus was speaking out against excessive divorce and setting it the task of justifying why they did get divorced. Instead, I’ll focus on a subtler assumption that seems to dwell behind their words. That assumption is this: That divorcing due to unfaithfulness is practically required by Jesus in that passage, and if not required, at least shown to be the better path to take.

If that assumption is really there, then I’m compelled to respond to it this way: Stop using a single scripture to justify your flight from marriage, and embrace the whole of Scripture, which has a far different message.

Were you wronged by an adulterous spouse? So was Yahweh, who took Israel as His betrothed, and was cheated on again and again.

Were you furious at that spouse, unable to contain your hurt and your fury over the betrayal? So was Yahweh, Whose bride Israel became like a harlot when seeking other beds, other gods.

Did you cast away that spouse, severing the covenant forever by means of a justifiable divorce? Now you're on your own, for Yahweh did not. Instead, He found a way – built a way at great expense to Himself – to make that covenant eternal.

***

You say your wife has violated the sanctity of the marriage covenant by having an affair? Then instead of using that as your justification for fleeing, man up and show her by your example the path to righteousness again. Says Paul: “How do you know, husband, that you might not save your wife?” (1 Cor. 7:16)

You say your husband has lost his faith and that you shouldn't be unequally yoked? Then instead of using that as your rationale for escape, become a woman whose worth really is beyond rubies and be the presence of Christ in that relationship. Says Peter: “If any husbands do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.” (1 Pet. 3:2)

Christian married couples, your decisions to rationalize flight from your marriage commitment might be technically permissible. There may be exceptions in Scripture that allow you to break ranks and run away. But when you do that, you cheapen the sanctity of marriage. You, Christian divorcer, are the real threat to traditional Christian marriage.

Those who are married need to find every blessing and every prayer available to avoid divorce. Those who have already divorced, be it for a month, a week, or decades, need to find every bit of strength the Holy Spirit gives them to bring those marriages back to covenant status and righteousness, rather than hiding behind the Get Out Of Jail Free cards they claim from Scriptural loopholes.

And those Evangelicals waving signs against gay marriage and expending unbelievable amounts of time and energy in worldly politics need to ask themselves why they are so worked up about how marriage looks in the non-Christian world … given how sad it looks in their own congregations. They need to put down the signs, go back to their flocks, and begin reconciliation from within.

Once the plank is out of the eye of the Body of Christ, there will be plenty of time to pick specks out of other eyeballs.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Run Schools like Business? Okay. You’re Fired.

I’ve never done this before, but I think I’ll make my first blog post that doesn’t explicitly mention Christianity.

Full disclosure: I’m a public school teacher.  Now, let’s proceed.

* * *

I’ve just read another article on how education systems would operate better if they were run like corporations.  “Run school like a business!” has become a knee-jerk rallying cry for reform, and while I know that everything – schools, government, businesses, and American home life – could use plenty of reform, I tire of those who have no idea what they’re saying when they demand schools run like “businesses.”

Listen up, society: I will not run my classroom like a business.  I will not treat your children like products on an assembly line, because I refuse to reject and scrap the ones who are below my standards.  Nor will I treat your children like customers, because I won’t turn away and refuse to do business with the ones I sense are unprofitable to my enterprise.

So feel free to thank me for not running my classroom like a business.  If I did, you might not like the consequences, depending on which business model I chose to emulate:

  • If I ran my classroom like a manufacturing business, I could demand that the more hazardous of your students be delivered to me with detailed Material Safety Data Sheets.
  • If I ran my classroom like an assembly plant, my procurement department would have a list of qualified preferred-vendor parents who would send us only the top quality raw materials for the construction of our products.  Your child might not make that list.
  • If I ran my classroom like a luxury car dealership, I could watch you pull up in your 1998 clunker and determine from your clothes, style of speech, and demeanor that I shouldn’t waste too much time making you one of my preferred customers.
  • If I ran my classroom like an automotive manufacturer, I might issue recalls to have you take your student back to a lower grade for retrofitting.
  • If I ran my classroom like General Electric or Exxon, I’d pay absolutely no federal taxes at the end of my very profitable year of teaching.  In fact, I’d get federal subsidies on top of my untaxed profits.
  • If I ran my classroom like Microsoft, I would stop supporting your student’s knowledge upgrades once I’d found a younger, more promising student to release to the world.
  • If I ran my classroom like a Donald Trump business, I could fail to improve your children, then file for bankruptcy protection against any claims you might have on me, and then start all over again with a clean slate and no penalties.  In fact, as a Trump business, I could do that twice a decade.
  • If I ran my school like a recession-proof, lean, efficient business, I would focus on core competencies and cut all frills.  By “frills,” you think I mean music and art.  But I don’t.  I mean football, basketball, cheerleading, and all other non-core sports nonsense.
  • If I ran my school like a multinational corporation, I would stop working with American children and instead outsource to Asia, where the children are raised to be more compliant, making fewer demands on my limited resources.
  • If I ran my classroom like a customer service call line business, instead of contacting your home with my praise or concerns about your child, I would have you contact my call center in India.  They’d read you pre-prepared trouble shooting scripts on how to ensure your student is operating effectively.
  • If I ran my school like an insurance company, I would not accept your students with preexisting conditions.  If you tried to force me to, I'd run to the Supreme Court to see if they'd have my back against you, and whine a lot if they didn't.
  • If I ran my classroom as a bank runs its loan business, I would ensure that those students who come to me with a lot of ability receive a lot of my investment.  To those with lower ability ratings to their credit, I would give far less.  Perhaps I would even turn them away.

Those who demand schools run like businesses may know even less about business than they do about schooling.  But many of them don’t care.  What many of them are really saying is, “I want a school that runs without tax dollars, where teachers can be fired without cause, where salaries hover barely above minimum wage, and where only what I think is important is allowed to be taught!”

But what do you do, dear customer, the day those schools look at your student and say, “He does not meet our standards, and we don’t want him here”?  What do you do the day they say, “This just isn’t a good fit for us”?

I’ll tell you what you do.  You come to me.  And I will welcome your student with open arms and find a way to work with rejected raw materials.  I will reach into my pocket and finance the pens and notebooks and folders and texts you and your community can’t afford.  I’ll stay up late at night to think up better ways to get an education into his head.  I’ll differentiate.  I’ll customize.  I’ll find a way not to reject him as scrap.

Because I do not run my classroom like a business.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

Sunday, March 18, 2012

How Not to Take the Bible Literally


This post is not for new Christians or young believers.  So if you’re relatively new to the faith, I encourage you to click away right now.  Your time will be better spent reading the First Letter of John rather than reading my musings.  Grab your Bible.  Step away from the computer.  Move along, nothing to see here.

Cosmic Parx waits.

There we go.

This month’s topic is more meat than milk, which isn’t something palatable to those who are experiencing the glory, thrill, shock, and beauty of the Scriptures for the first time.  I would like to use this blog post to explain why you, my fellow Christian believer, do not really take the Bible literally.  Despite all our “God said it / I believe it / That settles it” bumper stickers, it’s critical we understand that we’re not to be literalists in the pure, unqualified sense of that word.  To explain why that’s so, I’ll use the words of Scripture itself.


FOUR REASONS I AM NOT A PURE LITERALIST

Reason 1: I know some Scriptures are metaphors and similes.

Let’s start with the easy stuff.  Among those parts of the Bible I know not to take literally are the parables of Jesus.  I know this not only because of all the similes Jesus employs (“The kingdom of heaven is LIKE …”), but also because of the in-depth interpretations He sometimes gave His disciples (e.g., in Luke 8:11-15 where He decodes the metaphors in the Parable of the Sower).

Some of you might remember the old Life of Brian movie, a slapstick British farce about Jesus’ neighbor Brian who is continuously mistaken for the Messiah throughout his life.  At one point, Brian flees Roman soldiers by blending in among dozens of Judean street preachers.  He launches into a parable and is immediately confronted by a pair of hyper-literalist Jews:

BRIAN: There was this man, and he had two servants.
   ARTHUR: What were they called?
BRIAN: What?
   ARTHUR: What were their names?
BRIAN: I don't know. And he gave them some talents.
   EDDIE: You don't know?!
BRIAN: Well, it doesn't matter!
   ARTHUR: He doesn't know what they were called!
BRIAN: Oh, they were called 'Simon' and 'Adrian'. Now--
   ARTHUR: Oh! You said you didn't know!
BRIAN: It really doesn't matter. The point is there were these two servants--
   ARTHUR: He's making it up as he goes along!

Parables dwell beyond literalism.  Many other parts of Scripture directly inform us that they are symbolic, including the Revelation, the visions of Daniel, and the dreams of Jacob’s son Joseph.  This information led an acquaintance of mine to declare, “I take the Bible’s literal parts literally and its symbolic parts symbolically!”  And that is a fine saying.  If only it were that simple.


Reason 2: I know some Scriptures are hyperbole.

Those who approach the Scriptures with the spirit of enmity are fond of pointing out that the Bible has Jesus telling us to hate our mothers and fathers and to cut off our hands and pluck out our eyes should they cause us to sin.  We defensively protest that those verses don’t mean what they literally say, and the attackers wryly assert, “I’m just telling you what the Bible says.”  And they are right.  They employ the error of  excessive literalism to joust with truth.

How to respond, since we’re the ones who say the Bible is “true”?  Let’s just consider one example, the cutting off of one’s hand when one sins.  Here’s a losing back-and-forth:

XTIAN: But there are other places in the Bible that say not to mutilate yourself!
   JOUSTER: Oh, the Bible has contradictions?
XTIAN: No!  But you use Scripture to interpret Scripture.
   JOUSTER: Really?  Where is that don’t mutilate rule?
XTIAN: Ah!  It’s right in Leviticus 19:28 and Deuteronomy 14:1.
   JOUSTER: Oh!  So those are Old Testament verses that overrule the New Testament one?
XTIAN: They don’t overrule, they help us interpret!
   JOUSTER: I see.  The Old Testament overrules the literal words of the New.
XTIAN: I didn’t say that, you did.
   JOUSTER: So you pick which verse is literal and which verse is figurative?
XTIAN: It’s common sense which verse is literal!
   JOUSTER: Then your common sense carries more authority than the literal words of Jesus?

Yes, ouch.  Never presume that you know the Scriptures better than those who enjoy arguing them with believers.  I guarantee you, the jousters will find the above exchange just as funny as the Life of Brian exchange.

Literalists among us must be willing to cede some interpretational ground to the use of hyperbole – exaggeration that hammers a point home without being literal.  There is a reason Paul recommends that Timothy study to show himself approved.  That’s said about the very Scriptures Timothy has known well since he was on his mother’s knee.  There’s more to understanding than literal absorption and rote memorization.


Reason 3: I know Paul sometimes prefers symbolic interpretations to literal histories

Hyper-literalism takes more of a beating from Paul in other parts of his letters.  There are areas where Paul encourages symbolic interpretations of Old Testament stories originally presented as literal and historical.  In Galatians 4:21, he treats the stories of the sons of Abraham as an out-and-out allegory.  In Ephesians 5:32, he takes no interest in the literal implications of the first man and first woman clinging to one another in monogamous relationship, and decodes the tale as “a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the church ….”  In 1 Corinthians 10, he even allows us a peek at his interpretation style.  Commenting on the complete history of the Jews, he says that all events occurred “as a typikos, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come” (v. 11).  Typikos or typoi – types, figures, symbols, and not, as the RSV mistranslates, "a warning.”  Paul vaults righteously from the literal histories to a symbolic application to Christian spiritual principles.  He says the stories are symbols.

Does this mean Paul didn’t think the texts were literal?  Certainly not.  But it means something even more thought-provoking: that Paul considered the literal far less important.  When it came to the Truth, the symbolic meaning significantly outweighed the disposable literal.  And that should give every mature student of the Bible a reason to pause.


Reason 4: I know some portions of Scripture directly say they are not inspired by God.

Paul does something that hyper-literalists wish he hadn’t.  (And I’m not just saying that.  I’ve heard hyper-literalists say, “I’ve sometimes prayed, Lord, why did you let Paul put that in the infallible Holy Bible?”)  In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul distinguishes between his own commands and those of the Lord, directly saying “The Lord says this and not I …” and then a little later, “I say this, not the Lord …”  He further says that if anyone wishes to argue about the Paul-only commands, that he knows of no other custom.  In other words, he states that customs and culture must be taken into account when weighing some of the things he says.

Furthermore, there are parts of Scripture that we know, and I mean know, come from non-inspired sources.  With great fanfare, the Epistle of Jude quotes from the “Assumption of Moses” and the “Book of Enoch,” two apocryphal texts found unworthy of placement in the Bible’s canon.  Does that make those pieces of apocrypha, rejected as the work of men, into the words of God, since they are now Scripture?  To believe so, we must imagine God looking at man’s creations and saying, “Hey, not bad, wish I’d said that, think I’ll use it.”

What are we to make of that, we who believe that all Scripture is inspired of God and useful for righteousness, as 2 Timothy 3 proclaims?  If we use the scripture-interprets-scripture principle, we have to conclude, “All Scripture is breathed by God … except the parts that aren’t …”  But is that even an option?  Are we thrown into an infinite loop, saying, "I believe these words are God's since they are in the Bible, and the words say that they are not God's, which I have to believe because all words in here are God's."

I hope you weren’t expecting a conclusion to this point.  I still have my pastor working on it.  But I suspect the answer may be found in the debunking of hyper-literalist practices.


WHAT IS MY POINT?

I have one and only one point here today.  Milk is nice for the unweaned babies, but the full discernment of those maturing in the Christian life calls for meat.

The Gospel and its resultant salvation are simple.  Growth in maturity and progress along the path of righteousness are not simple.  If you find yourself coming again and again back to the basics of faith and the foundation you’ve already laid – not as part of your witnessing to the unsaved, but as the nature of your own walk in Christ  –  then I invite you to move beyond the hyper-literalist simplicity of easy answers.

The writer of Hebrews urges us to move beyond first principles and to press on toward perfection (6:1).  That means there are steps beyond salvation.  And while it’s glorious to share discourse in our common salvation, Jude makes it clear (1:3) that there will be times we need to contend for the truth of our faith.  That’s part of growing in our perfection.

Let us grow.  God said it?  Yes, and he says so much more than we imagine.  I believe it?  Yes, and the continuous growth of my faith and knowledge is part of my Christian mission.  That settles it?  Perhaps.  Or, perhaps now we only see dimly, as if through a glass.

Whatever hyper-literalism is, I know it is not Scriptural.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx, who is YoYo Rez

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

PSALM FOR THE INTELLECTUAL

My friend Mike beat me to the punch and posted this on Facebook before I had a chance to post it here :)  Which is sweet, but here it is anyway.  A short one to make up for the last overly long one.

I wrote it as a counter to the disturbing trend of anti-intellectualism one finds among some Evangelical groups in the United States.  May the Lord bless their brains.

***

PSALM OF ONE BORN WITH A WONDERFUL MIND
composed for Marq Twine in 2010 by Yolanda

***

I am born with the mind You gave me,
Intellect,
Insight,
Discernment;
I am born with a love of questions,
Love of the answers revealed.

I am born with the mind You gave me,
A mind others may not understand
Or may distrust
Or may disdain
Or may even mock, to my face or to my back.

***

I hear the things they say, oh Lord:

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,”
People feel free to tell me.
          (But would they tell the athlete to beware his muscle?)

“Don’t overthink things!”
People feel free to say.
          (But would they caution the artist not to over-imagine?)

“You’re off-putting, talking over our heads,”
People quickly warn.
          (But would they tell the singer she is too dauntingly melodic?)

“Nobody likes a smarty pants,”
People condescend.
          (But would they lament the actor who is perfectly in role?)

***

This I pray, with the mind You gave me,
This I say with the mind bestowed:

As the dancer worships you in body,
As the caregiver praises you with heart,
As the soldier serves you with his strength,
Here, oh Lord, am I, the intellectual –
And I, here upon this Earth, I love.
I love!
You, them, and myself.
I love!
With all my mind.
   With all my mind.
      With all this mind You gave me.

- Selah

Thursday, February 23, 2012

GOD, SEX, and EXEGESIS


WARNING: This one is long.  Go get your coffee before starting.  And, special thanks to the Mindsetters group, who inspired me to create most of the material here.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned to a friend that if I ever teach a Bible as Literature course, I’d use the Song of Solomon as my opening unit.

“Oh!” she said.  She looked around to make sure no one was watching and added, “The sex one!”

We giggled because, you know, that’s what we do.  But in the back of my mind, I could hear the protests of centuries of exegetes, insisting she was wrong.

My former pastor, who retired last year, had once sent me on a mission to dig up every possible interpretation of the Song that I could find.  Halfway through the following week, I texted him to whine that it seemed like there was an endless number of interpretations.  He responded that yes, in fact, the Song was probably the second most over-interpreted book in the Bible, right after Revelation.

Pastor was fond of sending me on fact-finding missions in the Scriptures.  I had never heard him call something “over-interpreted” before.  And I realized that was his lesson for that particular mission.

***

Side note: I said “exegetes” above without defining it.  “Exegesis” is the act of critically analyzing and interpreting a text, and it usually refers to Scriptural interpretation.  It’s related to, but distinct from, the term “hermeneutics,” which is an overall approach to or theory of interpretation.  Hermeneutics is the big picture; exegesis is the act of using that theory to understand a specific text.

***

So, why would I want to use Song of Solomon … or Song of Songs, or Canticle of Canticles, or just plain old “Songs”… as the launch of a class on the Bible as Literature?  Easy peasy answer: because how you interpret it depends entirely on your beginning theory of what it must be about.  Is it poetic drama?  Is it metaphoric parable?  Is it encoded allegory?  Is it literal?  Just what world of hermeneutics do we start in to get a decent exegesis?

But notice the mistake I made in that paragraph above.  I’m implying is has to be one of those choices, and not some combination of several of them.  That reveals one of my own biases – that a text has to mean something, some THING, one truth.  Where did I get that idea?  When did I start believing that God couldn’t put layers of meaning and strata of interpretation into a single work?  Have I decided to throw the handcuffs on the Holy Spirit before He’s even begun to open my mind to mysteries of this work?

***

Side note: The Spanish for “handcuffs” is esposas.  That is also the Spanish for “wives.”  That’s funny in and of itself, but it raises in my mind questions about what kind of member of the Bride of Christ I would be if I started handcuffing and limiting the Bridegroom.  The only one to lose out in that scenario would be me.


THE SONG: AN OVERVIEW

Here’s a quick overview of the Song of Solomon for those who need a refresher.  The Song is:
  • a collection of poetic exchanges recording a woman’s romantic and sexual longing for her beloved,
  • the beloved’s longing in return,
  • and a choral group of women who speak intermittently to help with the descriptions and flow of dialog.

The Song follows this general flow:

  1. An immediate expression of the woman’s desire for her beloved, as well as her lament that her brothers have been punishing her by making her work in the vineyard, and are holding her back.
  2. Exchanges between the woman and the beloved, reflecting on how they will make love in the fields.
  3. Extensive back-and-forth praise between the two, primarily focused on their mutual physical attributes.
  4. A dreamlike sequence, in which the woman wanders in longing to find the beloved whom she calls (either literally or symbolically) Solomon.
  5. A full chapter in which the beloved praises the woman’s eyes, hair, teeth, lips, cheeks, neck, breasts, her “mountain of myrrh,” her eyes and hair again, her breasts again, her lips again, the milk under her tongue, the smell of her garments, her paradise of pomegranates …okay, you get the idea.  He’s very into her.  It culminates with each of them eating of the other’s garden.
  6. A second dreamlike sequence, in which the woman feels the beloved even closer this time, nearly in her chambers, but then disappearing again, causing her to wander in search of him once more.  The daughters of Jerusalem weep with her in the search.
  7. She praises his skin, his hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his lips, his hands, his belly, his legs, his whole form, and his throat.
  8. The two come together in the beloved’s garden, with a whole lot more bodily descriptions, primarily featuring commentary on her breasts.  The affair, it seems, is secret – she wishes he were her brother, so that she could publicly show him all her affection without causing suspicion.
  9. True love’s nature is declared in the end – “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.  Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away.”
  10. The brothers of the woman at last officially turn her over to the beloved, along with a huge dowry – the very vineyard she had been working at the beginning.  The lovers unite in that garden.


DIFFICULTIES INTERPRETING THE SONG

I want primarily to focus on three alternatives to interpreting this book’s role in Scripture and its meaning to all generations of Christians.  But first I should spell out the difficulties behind any single hermeneutical approach.

DIFFICULTY #1 – No historical consensus on how to interpret the Song.

As my pastor taught me, the Song is perhaps one of the most diversely interpreted books of the Bible.  Just one example of that: the 12th century theologian Bernard of Clairvaux preached 86 sermons on the first two chapters alone, dying before he could finish his interpretations.  He’s just one exegete.  Multiply that by three thousand years and countless interpreters.  Get the picture?

DIFFICULTY #2 – No similar literary form in Scripture.

In form, the Song is unique within the Holy Scriptures … a dramatic, poetic back and forth exchange among characters, nearly like a play.  This is odd, because Israel seems to have had no tradition of dramas, the way neighboring Assyria or distant Greece had.

To further complicate exegesis, the question of who is speaking which lines in the book is a matter usually solved by different Bible versions assigning the words “Beloved,” “Lover,” and “Daughters of Jerusalem” to the text – designations not found in early manuscripts. Some interpreters protest that those breaks might not have been assigned to the right speakers from time to time.

DIFFICULTY #3 – Embarrassingly candid.

As for its content, the Song is also unique in the canon for its explicit, celebratory descriptions of human love and sexuality.  While much of the rest of Scripture employs modest euphemisms like “he knew his wife,” “he took her to his tent and married her,” “she uncovered his feet,” the Song uses wafer-thin metaphors and explicit poetic similes that leave little to the imagination:

Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.  I said, I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.

Such explicitness (and I didn’t even select any of the meatier similes) probably explains why the Song is rarely seen by preachers as the number one choice for next Sunday’s family sermon.

DIFFICULTY #4 – No explicit theology

If the sex is explicit, the theology is not.  The Song is theologically distinct, as one of only two books in Scripture making absolutely no mention of God (the other is Esther), and making no direct theological claims or expressions.  Further, the Song is never quoted in the New Testament, neither by Jesus nor by the writers of the epistles (another trait Esther shares with the Song).  This leaves us at a loss as to how the Lord or the Apostles might guide us in an interpretation.


SO PICK AN HERMENEUTIC ALREADY!

For dozens upon dozens of exegeses I’ve discovered in my studies of the Song, there do seem to be several general categories into which a majority of interpretations fall.  Remember, this is by no means a complete list; it’s simply the standouts that stick with me.


a. HERMENEUTIC THE FIRST: The Song is an Allegory

An “allegory” is a work of art that can be decoded to reveal a hidden meaning, as long as one has the key to the decoding.  You probably noticed I used the terms “metaphor” and “simile” up above; an allegory is much more than those.  In essence, it’s a huge sequence of carefully ordered metaphors.  In an allegory, every single image is a hidden message for the underlying truth.  If you’ve ever read Pilgrim’s Progress, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Throughout history, this has been the number one way to interpret Song of Songs.  It is, according to this approach, a detailed, secret message about God’s relationship with Israel, or perhaps Christ’s relationship with the church, or perhaps the Trinity’s mystical relationship with the individual believer’s soul, or perhaps a prophecy of the ages through which the church will pass before the second coming of Christ.

Notice that up there: Allegory was the hermeneutic, but each of its different applications was a distinct exegesis.

Whichever scenario is used to decode it, it’s easy to see why the Song As Allegory approach is comfortable for interpreters.  It solves numerous difficulties:
  • It helps explain why a book never mentioning God or the history of Israel could make it into the canon … since, once decoded, the whole book is about God.
  • It helps “denature” (to use one commentator’s term for it) the sexual aspects of the book, since all references to sexual acts and sex organs can now be decoded to something less explicit.
  • It appeals to the “secret message” part of our brain, what I think of as our Inner Gnostic.  After all, once we decode Revelation and number crunch all the weeks of Daniel, we need something to do … and the Song of Solomon can be a playground of super secrets for the decoders among us.

Obviously, that last point wasn’t seriously offered as a benefit of the Song-As-Allegory approach.  In fact, it’s the approach’s key weakness.  Anyone can see anything in an allegory … and the history of interpretation proves that.

I’ll finish off talking about the Song as Allegory by focusing on one image and how it’s been interpreted.  I’ll use the Scriptural author’s favorite: breasts.

In my brief research, I found the lover’s breasts interpreted as:
  • the Old and New Testaments
  • Moses and Aaron
  • the twin precepts of loving God, loving neighbor
  • Baptism and Eucharist
  • the Blood and the Water
  • The Son of God and the Son of Man
  • The two witnesses of Revelation
  • Outer man and Inner man
  • And many more

I only found one ancient commentator who thought that maybe the breasts were …  wait for it … actual breasts.  That was Theodore of Mopsuestia in the late 300’s.  His view that the breasts might be breasts was later rejected as heresy by post-Constantine Roman councils.  Apparently (if you’ll pardon my cheekiness here), while all roads lead to Rome, no boobs can lead there.


b. HERMENEUTIC THE SECOND: The Song is a “Type”

The “Song as Type” approach saves interpreters from the main weakness of the Song as Allegory approach – an excessiveness that leads to Gnostic decoding.

A “typological” hermeneutic would approach the Song as a broad-brushstroke image of the relationship of God and mankind, but it would still retain the view that this is a literal episode from the life of Solomon.

In this interpretative approach, the Song records a real love affair with a real woman.  However, when the reader steps back, he can easily see that the work as a whole encapsulates the love of Christ for the church (or even for the individual soul).  With this view, we’re saved from decoding every single plum, date, raisin, and bounding gazelle in the text.  We retain the intuitive understanding of the historical interpreters – that God would have a deeper theological meaning for the work – but we avoid the jots-and-tittles trap and the pride that comes from personal interpretation and decoding.

Nice, but this approach has its weaknesses, too.  For one thing, in the final chapter, it is the woman, not the beloved, who delivers the final moral of the story, the lesson on love and its jealousy in chapter 8.  In essence, she schools the beloved, something that seems dramatically out of place if the Beloved is, indeed, Christ.

Second, if the Beloved is Christ, he is being shown through Solomon … a king who is the least likely symbol of God’s single-hearted fidelity to His people, especially considering his “sixty queens and eighty concubines and maidens without number”(Sol. 6:8).  It is the woman who is the faithful, pure, untouched one, a garden enclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed (Sol. 4:12).

If the Holy Spirit were inspiring this piece as a typological reflection of God’s love for the church or the individual soul … would it be the woman portrayed as the faithful one who delivers the final lesson on how love works?  Or would the imagery be more as it is in the rest of Scripture: God as the faithful husband whose fickle wife continues to wander away, unfaithful?


HERMENEUTIC THE THIRD: “The Song is Literal”

In hermeneutical history, the approach to the Song that’s least in evidence seems to be accepting it for what it says it is: A celebration of the passionate, human love of two people struggling with the mind-numbing sexual passion they feel for one another, until finally they’re able to consummate their love (after plenty of fantasizing in dreams and attempts to be together).

That was a mouthful.  Go back and read it again.  Slowly.

For some reason, Bible commentators and many contemporary preachers appear to loathe this view.  Even the staunchest literalist seems to find it difficult to take the Song literally, presumably because it’s believed God would never write about dirty acts of sex in the Bible.

But let’s turn off that filter and consider it anyway.  Under this literalist approach, the Song celebrates the passion that grows during the courtship process, and it affirms that the full expression of the love represented is within the bounds of marriage, even though plentiful longing and fantasizing of the sex acts has taken place beforehand.

The exegesis that develops from this hermeneutic shows literal brothers who keep the little sister safe from premature sexual intercourse (and keep the beloved safe, as well, since he, too, is longing to have her).  At the end, she confesses that the brothers were right to keep her passions in check.  Those fantasies were meant to remain in her heart until the time that the vineyards were turned over to the beloved.

She, in turn, shares the book’s message with her lover, now husband – the message that, while it felt as if nothing could control the love they were feeling and the sexual fantasies they shared and entertained, it was right, in the end, to keep the garden enclosed until the proper season.  First they dreamed of sex, talked of it, and longed for it; now, as husband and wife, they see the joy built up by their earlier longing.

This approach has one major difficulty: It has no direct theological message.

Certainly it has plenty of indirect messages … but to accept a literalist approach, one would have to accept that God chose to insert a book in the Bible that does nothing more than celebrate human love and passionate longing for sex, executed properly through courtship and marriage.

Why would God celebrate premarital longing and passion and dreaming of sex … when clearly, lusting in one’s heart is supposed to be wrong?  And why would he inspire a book that seems to have no crisp, clean, neat doctrines to post in our church’s “Summary of Beliefs” page on the Internet?

Questions, questions, questions …

Not all blogs can end with pithy answers.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx