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

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 4:24, he treats the stories of the sons of Abraham as an out-and-out allegory.  In Ephesians 5:31-32, 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

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

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 it 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

The Mother of All Knowledge

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON SIN AND BRAINS

     I’m your kid sister.

     Well, okay, there’s a chance you’re younger than me, so that would make me your older sister.  Either way, we’re family, you and I.

     We have the same mom.

     Well … the same grandmom.

     Okay … the same [great-great + a bunch more greats] grandmom.

     Whatever the numbers, I’m your kid sister.
     I'm reborn.  But the idea of “rebirth” doesn’t make a great deal of sense to us until first we consider what we need to be reborn from.

     And what we need to be reborn from has everything to do with our [great-great + a-bunch-more greats] grandmother.

     Allow me to explain in the form of a story.

PART 1 of 4

     Once upon a time, there was only one Her.

     She was called Ishshah, and she was the woman who was born of no woman.  Her name simply means “the female,” because she was one of a kind, fashioned out of the side of another unique human ... the He, the only He, the DirtMan.
     DirtMan had the breath of The God in him, and no other animal on the face of the Earth had that.  This made DirtMan special, but it also made him alone among the living beings.  That’s why The God made Ishshah … because DirtMan had no companion worthy to stand by his side.

     Ishshah was worthy.  She was made from The God’s breath and from DirtMan’s flesh.  She was perfect.
     And she stayed worthy.  For a time.

* * *

     I interrupt this story for a message about knowledge.

     Me, YoYo Rez, I love knowledge.  I crave it.  I seek it out, I hunt it down, I practically lust after it.  Put a Chocolate Cake in front of me sitting next to a stack of Really Cool Knowledge, and I’d go for the knowledge first.

     And then I’d eat the cake, too, because, hey, who am I kidding?

     But first, I want the knowledge.

     Just like grandmom.

PART 2 of 4

     So Ishshah and her DirtMan lived in the most beautiful of areas on the face of the Earth.  There was one rule for living there – no eating from one Tree in that massive, beautiful garden area.  It was a tree with specific knowledge in it, the knowledge of good and of evil and of the difference between the two.  Every animal lived in the garden land with Ishshah and Dirtman, and even the most ferocious was tamer than Lassie, because DirtMan had been put in charge of them all by The God.
     And the animals knew their place.
     Except for one.
     His name was Nachash.  You pronounced that CH in the middle like a rough H, like you’re clearing your throat, you know?  DirtMan probably gave Nachash that name because it imitated the hissing sound Nachash made when he spoke.  Yes, I said spoke.  A talking animal.  Why not?  DirtMan and Ishshah were talking animals, too, so don’t get so worked up about it.  Stay in the story, would you?
     One day Nachash decided to chat up the human female.  Test out her brains.  Check up on her wits.  I don’t know if he had tested her before.  I don’t know if he had tried to trip up DirtMan prior to this.  All I know about is this one day, the day Nachash held out a little something that the woman couldn’t resist.
     He offered her a taste of knowledge, a peek into the hidden things.

* * *

     Another interruption, if you’ll oblige me.

     It is a long-held tradition of men that the Nachash, the serpent, was Satan himself.  This is not a Biblical assertion.  Instead, it’s an interpretation based on many, many years of really cool artwork and loads of words from outside the Bible.  Yes, it’s true that the book of Revelation, written thousands of years after Genesis, has two lines in it that show the devil in a dragon form and calls him “the old serpent.”  But that’s far from convincing exegesis, considering that: 

1. the Nachash of our story is soon to be cursed to slither on the ground and eat dirt forever, but Satan has no such punishment; we later see Satan freely walking about the court of the heavenly host in the book of Job, legs intact;
   
2. many things and people are called “serpents” throughout the Hebrew scriptures, including Leviathan, violent men, wine, King Ahaz, seraphim, invading armies of the north, and (most often) actual serpents.  The New Testament has its share of serpent comparisons, too – a bad gift for a child when he asks for a fish, the wisdom of disciples when they stay harmless as doves, the Pharisees at their worst, and (interestingly) Christ himself in the third chapter of John;
   
3. ergo, picking a single book's reference to a serpent out of hundreds in Scripture to match up the devil to the creature in Eden is, at best, an act of “eisegesis,” imposing one’s preexisting ideas onto a text … bad hermeneutics, very bad.

     As I mentioned, I really love knowledge.

PART 3 of 4

     The story of our [great-great + a-bunch-more greats] grandmom does not end well.  Ishshah had options.  She could have eaten anything else.  Only one tree was forbidden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Even the one near it, the Tree of Life, had not been explicitly forbidden.  She could have checked in with DirtMan to get his advice.  She could have checked in with The God, who walked daily in their midst.

     But in that instant, she didn’t want Life.
     In that moment, she didn’t turn to man.
     In that hour, she ignored the God option.
     She chose to forget Who made her, for whom she was made, and all good things she already had.  She bought into the deceit of a lower animal, one over whom she and DirtMan had been given dominion.  She ignored the rule, and she chose her path.

     She really lusted after knowledge.

     DirtMan must have, too, because she had no trouble getting him to join in.

     And when The God walked back among them, they came to know more than they had expected.  They all knew punishment.  To the Nachash came the fruits of deceit: eternal enmity with mankind, the eating of dust, the loss of all reason.  To Ishshah came the fruits of untimely lust for knowledge: the sorrow of bearing sons, emptiness and longing after the man she’d been one with, and subjugation to the rule of a husband she had once been equal to.  And DirtMan, to him came the fruits of abandoning his dominion over all creatures, his entrapment to the wiles of those who should have answered to him: toil, thorns, thistles, sweat, and a return to the dirt from which he’d been made.

     The privileged life they’d lived – that all creation had lived – was gone.  Living on this world became … a different sort of living, not the life The God had offered.  And that living would be hard, with scant hope, and few moments of joy.

     That was our grandmother’s legacy.

     She was supposed to be the mother of the most privileged race in the universe.

     Now, those born from her would simply be The Lost.  DirtMan changed her name.  He called her Hawwa, “Mother of the Living.”

     Before their fall, it would have been a title of honor.

     Now, it was a bittersweet reminder of the Tree of Life they’d lost.

* * *

     A final interruption:

     The word Hawwa (or Chavvah in more modernly pronounced Hebrew) mutated over time into the name “Eve.”  Words change, you see.  For example, the recent English slurred-words ginna gohtada used to be pronounced, “going to go to the” – as in “I’m ginna gohtada store now.”  The word Hawwa did that, too, becoming ‘Eua in the ancient Greek, then becoming Eva in the Latin, then becoming Eve in your English Bible.

     Her name is mentioned only 4 times in all of Scripture.

     Despite that, she appears in more artwork than any other woman in history, except for the Virgin Mary.

PART 4 of 4

     Now we enter the story.
     I am your kid sister.

     Or maybe your older sister, I dunno.

     But I do know this: You and I, we are of the flesh of Hawwa, the Ishshah.  That was our first birth.

     Coming up is the season of Christmas, commemorating a very different first birth ... the one that opened the door to our second birth, that amazing moment when the flesh of DirtMan again is filled with the breath of The God.  An internal resurrection.  An infilling by the Spirit Himself (who is, and not incidentally, the Spirit of all knowledge).

     If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should ask yourself this question: Why was Christ born, if He'd only wind up dying?

     We need to consider that carefully.

     We need to ponder it prayerfully.

     I just told you a story about the day we died.  But the gospels tell a fuller story.  They give you the biographical details of Christ's life, yes, but they reveal a secret as well.  They tell you the secret of that other Tree in the garden we lost, the Tree of Life, the one we didn’t eat from.

     That’s a bit of information … a bit of Knowledge … that you need to get before this season ends.

     And let’s face it: You really love knowledge, don’t you?

Marana Tha,

YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx

A Woman's Role in the Church

A discussion of what the “role” of women is in Christian churches often immediately degenerates into a discussion of what women can’t do in churches.  Discussions affirming what we can do are immediately left behind for much more (apparently) interesting and (certainly) contentious issues.

To give myself a fresh perspective, I thought I’d take a look at the question in the affirmative – what role can a woman play in the church?

Not, “What are women banned from doing?”

Not, “What is a woman’s role in marriage?”

I want simply to provide a survey of what Jesus, Paul, and others in the New Testament accepted as proper and praiseworthy behaviors for a woman aiding the spread of the Gospel – a positive approach in a world of compelling negativity.

***

20 ROLES FOR WOMEN

Brought to you by Scripture

1) THE DAUGHTER

First and foremost, women can be among the followers of Jesus, as evidenced during his life and documented throughout the New Testament.  We might take that for granted.  But God grant that no daughter of Eve ever forget the eternal honor we have been gifted.  Being His child is Role One, and in comparison, no other role comes close.

2) THE WITNESS

Women can witness about Christ and his role as Messiah, sometimes bringing whole towns to belief in Him through their words (John 4:39).

3) THE PRAY-ER

Women can join together with men in prayer (Acts 1:14), and they may host such prayer gatherings in their own homes (Acts 12:12)

4) THE PURSE

Woman can be financial supports to ministry, as evidenced in Luke 8:3, where women are lauded for providing the monetary backing that Jesus’ ministry required.

5) THE MODEL

Older women can train younger ones in areas of womenly expertise (Titus 2:3-5)

6) THE DEACON

Women can be part of the diakonia, benefactors/deacons serving churches (Rom 16:1).

7) THE RISK-TAKER

Women can be co-workers who risk their lives for church leadership (Rom. 16:3).

8) THE PRISONER

Women can bear the honor of being imprisoned for the faith (Rom. 16:7).

9) THE TEAMMATE

Women can pair up in teams to work hard for the Gospel (Rom. 16:12).

10) THE SURROGATE

Women can be dear friends and surrogate mothers to church leaders (Rom 16:12-13).

11) THE GUARD

Women can be guards, along with men, against false teachers and false pastors [I like this one, as it’s currently one of my ministries in the Lord] (Rom. 16:17-19)

12) THE CORRECTOR

Women can be part of male-female “doctrinal correction & teaching teams” (for want of a better term) (Acts 18:24).

13) THE MERCHANT

Women can host traveling preachers in their own households (which they can afford because apparently they can also be well-off merchants) (Acts 16:13-15)

14) THE CONTENDER

Women can stand beside church leadership contending for the cause of the Gospel (Phil 4:2-3 … note, as well, that we see another two-woman evangelism team here).

15) THE CHURCH PROPHET

Women may pray and prophesy aloud (1 Cor. 11:5) under the influence of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:17-18).

16) THE HOME PROPHET

Women may prophesy even in the presence of church leadership, should they stop by for a missionary journey or two (Acts 21:9)

17) THE OWNER

They can own the building where the church meets (Colossians 4:15).

18) THE SUMMONER

They can send out delegations from their home churches to summon apostles to bring discipline from afar (1 Cor. 1:11).

19) THE AMBASSADOR

They can head up missionary journeys to established churches and deliver original manuscripts of the Scriptures to people there (okay, so this won’t happen a lot, but it’s pretty cool that Phoebe was used in that way to get the Book of Romans to the church … Rom 16:1-2).

20) THE ELECT

Women can be the “elect ladies” over children of God, and receive epistles directly from apostles -- addressed to the woman, meant for them to share (2 John)

SUMMARY

I compiled that list in my morning Bible time, and it is certainly not a complete collection of the roles a woman of God can play in the church.

As God's adopted daughter, I can do many, many things – host churches in my home, prophesy in services, pray aloud in an orderly manner, deliver Scripture, pair up with men or other women to work for the Gospel, correct brothers doctrinally,  defend against false teachers, support ministries financially from my own funds, serve in the diakonia, summon church leaders to deliver discipline, be imprisoned for my faith.

          With Scripture empowering me to do all that, I have little to say to those who want to go on and on about what women can’t do in a church.  I’ll simply smile at those obsessed with such a topic.

          And then I’ll be sure not to invite them to preach at the church that meets in my house.

Marana tha,

Cosmic

Dear Lord: Thanks for Nothing

We are a world of whiners.

Please note: I didn’t say we just recently became a world of whiners.  In fact, I’m pretty sure we’ve inhabited Whiney World ever since Cain turned all mortally mopey after his second-rate offering was rejected by the Lord.

But I pay special heed to this age’s Poor-Pity-Me factor because (a) I live in this age, and (b) I’m in the U.S., where mega-church Health & Wealthism is seeping its way into the Body of Christ.  Health & Wealthism leads to a sense of entitlement, which in turn leads to an odd, whiney relationship with other human beings, as well as with our Father in Heaven.  Christians begin to reflect a culture of victimhood that smacks of the flesh and the world.

In the U.S., November is the month we set aside to celebrate Thanksgiving.  It commemorates, ironically, the first major harvest meal shared among the Plymouth Puritans and the heathen Wampanoag Indians.  Why do I say “ironically”?  Because these days, Thanksgiving marks the start of High Whining Season among some American Christians – complaints about stores that dare to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas; frothing accusations that schools are giving “winter break” instead of “time off for Jesus’ birthday”;  claims of “persecution” when secular government refuses to use taxpayer money to set up Christmas trees, those eternal symbols of Christ’s birth, as clearly mentioned absolutely nowhere in the Bible.

“What if,” I ask myself this year, “I really give thanks in a Biblical way?  What if I thank God for things that would stun the whiners and arch the eyebrows of Health & Wealthers?  What if I overcome my own selfishness, my own self-centeredness, even my own self-esteem, to thank the Lord for all things, good and bad?”

***

I thank You, Lord, for nothing …

   For refusing to act when I begged You to heal me,

   Since now I see the gift my handicap really is.

I thank You, Lord, for nothing …

   For allowing me to stay in poverty after I graduated college,

   Since that time made me grow, not in a job, but in You.

I thank you, Lord, for nothing …

    For not responding to my lists of wants,

    Instead, refining my understanding of my needs.

I thank You, Lord, for nothing …

    For allowing times of suffering to continue,

    And thus teaching me perseverance I had never known.

I thank You, Lord, for nothing …

    For allowing hardships I caused to remain in my life,

    so that I might learn to thank You in all situations.

I thank You, Lord.  For everything.

***

Some may ask, How is a prayer like that in any way Biblical?

I answer:

• because it gives thanks to God in all things, in all circumstances, which is God’s will for me (Thess. 5:18)
• because it is an act of rejoicing in the midst of my suffering, not despite my suffering, which is what Paul commands (Rom. 5:3)
• because I rejoice that I suffer like Christ and even participate, in some way, in His suffering on the cross (Col. 1:24)
• because I give thanks when reaping the punishment for my own behaviors, glorifying God even from the belly of the fish I deserved to be swallowed by (Jonah 2:10)
• because riches aren’t good for me; daily bread is all I need (Prov. 30:8)
• because I give thanks even if I am unjustly thrown into chains and beaten and starved and harmed by enemies (Acts 16:25) … real persecution, not the pathetic protests of those who writhe oppressed under the weight of the words “Happy Holidays.”

Even in the midst of real, life-threatening persecution, thanks and praise are the only valid responses from a heart born in, grown by, and sustained through the Lord.

All right, all right, I admit that thanking God for good things isn’t a bad idea either.  Thank You for my new car, thank You for my good friends, thank You that I’m in a righteous church that clings to Your Word, thank You that I have been saved by Your Son.  Each and every one of those is a laudable act of gratitude.

But I leave you with this thought.

No one in Scripture is ever warned of the dangers of giving thanks to God during suffering and trials.

The only warning about giving thanks that I’ve found in Scripture targets those with lots of health and plenty of wealth.  Thanksgiving for good things.

 “Thank you, God,” a man once said, “that I don’t blackmail other people.  That I don’t break rules.  That I don’t sleep around.  That I’ve got money to tithe and enough food to turn down during times of fasting.  Thanks that I don’t have it as materially or as spiritually bad as that other guy, right over there, the poor, sorry loser.  Maybe he should learn to name it and claim it, you know, Lord?”

See Luke 18 for a better telling of that tale.

And remember to praise and thank Him, especially in the storms.

Marana tha,

Cosmic