December 2007
33 posts
"Beautiful World"
My my my it’s a beautiful world I like swimming in the sea I like to go out beyond the white breakers Where a man can still be free (or a woman if you are one) I like swimming in the sea. My my my it’s a beautiful world I like drinking Irish tea With a little bit of lapsang souchong I like making my own tea. My my my it’s a beautiful world I like driving in my car Roll the top down sometimes I...
“if anyone thinks that he knows something, he has not yet known as he ought to...”
– Paul (1 Cor 8.2)
“There are places in the heart that do not yet exist but only come into being...”
– Leon Bloy
“To be truly man means to be fully *oneself*. The confirmation is the...”
– Father Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983)
100 Young Americans →
“Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.”
– Earl Warren (1891-1974)
THE HOBBIT!!!!! →
Back in America
Two thoughts, as I’m up way before anyone else in the house (westbound jetlag is the best!): 1. I made a QUICK trip to the British Museum before I left London and saw the Rosetta Stone and the (stolen?) frieze from the Parthenon. Amazing. 2. I know I’m only familiar with a small swath of British culture (namely, the student population in a small Northeastern university town), and I...
PBS Interviewer: Saying that the Bible is the truth, something that was written and gathered together so many years ago -- doesn't that feel a bit archaic to you as a professor, as an academic intellectual thinker? How do you really say that that's the truth?
Alan Jacobs: I think everyone who claims that the Bible is truth lays hold of that claim by faith. But it's no uninformed faith, and it's not faith that is unmarked by reflection and serious intellectual engagement. But it would be dishonest not to say that there is a very strong element of making a commitment to the authority of Scripture and testing it out, seeing how it works. It's not something that very many people would come to automatically or easily. But it is something that's worth a try, is what we would say.
Then there is that task of measuring it, testing it to see if it does answer to your experience and your beliefs, but also, the other side of the coin -- testing your own beliefs and your own experience against what Scripture says.
These are ancient books. They are very old. They come from a very strange culture. It may seem odd to say that books that are so old can be authoritative for us today. But I think one of the things that evangelicals tend to believe, or believe pretty strongly actually is in what G.K. Chesterton called the "democracy of the dead," the idea that we, in the early 21st century Western world, do not have a monopoly on truth.
We're very aware of all the ways in which we have learned things that are unknowable to previous cultures and perhaps even to other cultures that exist today. We're very aware of all the knowledge that we have that our predecessors and that our neighbors in other parts of the world don't have. But it's very hard for most of us to imagine that there may be things that other cultures knew, that other cultures know, and that past cultures knew that we have lost or that we have forgotten.
So it seems to me that there is something very consistent with being a serious intellectual and asking the question, "Do I really know everything? Do people in my time and my place and my culture have a monopoly on the truth? Or might it not be possible that, if I really study carefully these ancient writings, that I may discover that there is a wisdom there that is not accessible to me through any of the means that I normally use to get information in modern America?"
PBS Interviewer: … I'll ask it to you a different way. What I think is really curious is that I think one of the stereotypes about evangelicals is that evangelicals just accept the Bible as truth, and there's no sort of questioning. There's no wrestling that's going on. You're blindly accepting this as truth. You know God is speaking through this book to you. It just seems very simple, and especially the way that reporters talk about it usually is very simple. Talk to me about that intellectual process, and why it might just be really appropriate that someone like you would believe in the Bible.
Alan Jacobs: … It seems to me that the people who are really wrestling with Scripture are the ones who are taking its authority seriously. After all, if you don't believe that the Bible is the word of God, if you believe that these are just historic documents with no particular claim on you or on anybody else, that doesn't lead you to wrestle with anything. You can just dismiss anything in it that you see that strikes you as being alien or that makes you uncomfortable or that you feel that you can't endorse.
So it's quite easy to read a passage of Scripture, decide that it's not something that you buy into, and then put it aside, unless you have a commitment to the authority of that text. If you have that commitment, it actually pressures you. It puts the screws to you. It makes it very hard for you to have a simple response to it.
Jesus talks to a man who is always referred to in the biblical literature as the rich, young ruler. He tells him, "OK, if you want what I'm giving, if you want the kind of life that I have to offer, then take everything that you have, sell it and give it to the poor." And this young man walks away sad, because he had great wealth.
I read that passage, and I have to struggle with that, because I'm thinking, "What is this passage demanding of me?" It says something to me, because I believe that Jesus is the Son of God. I believe that he is my Lord and my Savior. He says something like this. I have to ask myself, "What does it mean for me?" So far, I haven't decided that it means that I have to sell everything I have and give it to the poor, but maybe that's because I'm an inauthentic or disobedient Christian. Maybe I'm not taking my beliefs seriously enough.
So I can say this is the word of God for me. But that that's only the beginning of my problems. That actually doesn't solve problems. That creates a whole set of problems, because I have to work very hard to try to figure out what sort of demand this text is making upon me.
Watch
Top ten of 2007
Well, sort of. I put together a list of favorites that I read in 2007. Some of them—actually most of them, I guess—weren’t published in 2007. Here they are, not in order: 1. Divine Discourse by Nicholas Wolsterstorff 2. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham 3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 4. A Visit to Vanity Fair by Alan Jacobs 5. Seeing the Word by...
Two thoughts for Tuesday
1. I like thinking about how mysterious and powerful eye contact is. Why do I find it easier to maintain with some people than with others? Why do I find it so unsettling when some people don’t offer much of any and others offer too much? Recently a fellow student made a presentation in class, and he kept shifting between looking me in the eye and looking at the professor. I’m not sure...
“… those peculiar people who don’t
kill their babies or their old...”
– Stanley Hauerwas (on how Christians may be identified in an increasingly bleak human future by their not aborting their babies or euthanizing their elderly fathers and mothers)
“…It is pursuing a mirage to look for “spiritual” love as if it...”
– Teresita Scully
Interviewer: What would you say to an Evangelical tempted to become Catholic or Orthodox?
David Lyle Jeffrey: ... A number of Protestants whom I have known who converted to the Catholic Church were positively drawn by a profounder sense of holiness in worship and by the sacraments, yet sometime after arrival found themselves deeply nostalgic for a deeper, richer preaching of the Word. Though such faithful teaching from Scripture is increasingly hard to find anywhere, if it is something your spirit needs, you will find it even less frequently in Catholic churches despite the weakening of expository biblical teaching among Evangelicals. ...
“…our cell phones reassure us by providing constant contact, and we become...”
– Christine Rosen, here (the whole article is well worth reading, especially the conclusion on the distinction between “talk” and “conversation”)
