Because we expect to be looked at, because we have internalized that phenomenon, we have formalized the gaze and created various rituals around it: fashion shows, cheerleading, the Miss America pageant, the elaborate wedding ceremony in which any woman can be Miss America for a day.

At an event that should bring together a community to further its future, the bride as an individual becomes the center of attention. She walks down an aisle while the congregation stands and looks not at the groom but solely and wistfully at her. She lives preparing for this moment by dreaming of it and then, once engaged to be married, obsessing over every detail.

The expectation that women parade under the fixed gaze of many sets of eyes is as old as the world and often captured in Western art. The female nude painted by such artists as Renoir and Rubens expresses a containment of women under a male gaze that assumes passivity and vulnerability.

Queen Vashti in the biblical book of Esther was dethroned for refusing to submit to it.

This is never expected of men.

Rubens – Vénus au miroir, 1616.

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually, it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.

[…]

The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior.

This sort of philosophy does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept… . Rather, it works holistically and pragmatically. It says things like “try thinking of it this way” – or more specifically, “try to ignore futile traditional questions by substituting new and possibly interesting questions.”[4]

For the beginnings of how this can influence how we do conversion, discipleship, and deal with Modernist Christians, see my post on the guilty fabergé eggs.

We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning. All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups, associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by cultural patterns of meaning…

We are part of a larger whole that we can neither forget nor imagine in our own image without paying a high price.

If we are not to have a self that hangs in the void, slowly twisting in the wind, these are issues we cannot ignore.

- Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism
and Commitment in American Life. P. 84

We often stress the the need for community in our religion. I want to spend a little time discussing what this community might look like.

A Brief Excursus on Individualism

One can speak of contemporary Western society as heir to two traditions, the liberal individualist and the communitarian, each of which brings along with it a distinctive set of values. More than anywhere else in the Western world, the American Psyche has been forged in the fires of liberal individualism but tempered with a keen awareness of the importance of community.

We see American Individualism run amok in the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. When it is scaled back from egoism, the individualist tradition elevates the human person above everything and sees the contract as the basis of all social interactions. This tradition promotes such values as personal freedom, self-improvement, privacy, achievement, independence, detachment, and self-interest. Living these values may put people into contact with one another, the central focus is not upon these others, or upon the group as a whole, but upon the rights and needs of the individual separate from their relationship with those others.

There is much more we can say about individualism and more specifically, American Individualism, but our purposes lie elsewhere.

Community

In good communities the members ask not, “What is the minimum my contract requires?” but “What will make this group good?

The notion of community strongly contrasts with the notion of individualism because its emphasis is upon the social nature of humanity. The self, communitarians say, is formed by its relationships, roles, attachments within traditions and institutions. Accordingly, communitarians elevate the group instead of the human individual as the center of society. Its core values are intimacy, benevolence, fellowship, belonging, dependence, social involvement, and the public good.[1]

So, how do we see, how do we describe this community? It is most helpful to talk about two types of community, Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft as they are constructed by Ferdinand Toennies in Community and Society. At first the use of two very similar German words might throw you off, but just think of them as containers for ways of speaking about community.

Gemeinschaft refers to social groups that involve:

relationships encompassing human beings as full personalities rather than single aspects of human beings. These are relationships characterized by high degrees of cohesion, communality, and duration in time. What is essential is the quality of strong cohesiveness of persons to one another and the quality of rooted, persisting collective identity.[2]

Gesellschaft refers to social groups that

engages the individual in only one of the aspects or parts of his or her total being, or at most, only a few aspects. From the individual’s point of view his relationship with other in Gesellschaft is more tenuous, loose, and less deeply rooted in his allegiances or commitments. Gesellschaft is commonly founded around a few specific interests or purposes, whether religious, economic, recreational, or political.[3]

You can think of Gemeinshaft as a tight-knit family whereas Gesellschaft is more akin to working in a factory.

The Community vs. the Individual

One of the classic arguments running through American political and ethical thought is the supposed war of the interests of the individual against those of the community. Working from a post-Enlightenment liberalism, we (as a historical people) have worked hard to protect the interests of the individual (or sub-communities) from the demands of the community. We see this thread running all throughout our laws. We see the dangers of not guarding against this in the pain the Jim-Crow laws inflicted upon the Ante-Bellum Black community. The situation (at least legally) was finally remedied through the Civil Rights movement.

When addressing the tension between individualism and communitarianism, it is helpful to note that in Gesellschaft communities, the individual exists and is important only insofar as the individual is useful to the group. However, in Gemeinschaft communities, on the other hand, a group focus does not necessarily mean that the individual is subsumed underneath the group and that a uniformity of through and practice is necessary. Robert Bellah describes the argumentative nature of good Gemeinschaft communities:

A good community is one in which there is argument, even conflict, about the meaning of shared values and goals, and certainly about how they will be actualized in everyday life.[4]

We may draw a parallel with ancient Rome. Being Roman is not necessarily the wholesale adoption of Roman Reinkultur, or pure culture, which may or may not have actually existed, as much as it was entering into a debate about what Roman Reinkultur consisted.

This is why “Roman identity remained so attractive to those within the empire, yet failed to enchant those beyond it.”[5] Additionally, Romanization did not consist of an adoption of one ideal type, as if there was only one idea and way of being Roman. Rather, there were so many kinds of Romans to become that becoming Roman meant “acquiring a position in the complex of structured differences in which Roman power resided” instead of “becoming more [like] the other inhabitants of the empire.”[6] It is likewise with good community.

Left: Gemeinschaft; Right: The Borg.

Likewise, when we join good communities, our selves don’t melt-away, Borg-style; instead, we become something like the X-men, where we bring our whole selves to the game and we only succeed through contested teamwork.

In sum, while some communities are tyrants lording over their members and must therefore be protected against, not all communities are thus constructed.

In good communities the members ask not, “What is the minimum my contract requires?” but “What will make this group a good group?” The Masses ask not “How can we gain more power?” but “What is good for all of us?”

What are some good communities you’ve been a part of?  What aspects have made them such?

[1] Fergusson, Community, Liberalism, and Christian Ethics,p. 139.

[2] Nisbet and Perrin, Social Bond, 98-99

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bellah, Habits of the Heart. P. 333.

[5] Woolf, Becoming Roman, 98-105.

[6] Ibid., 245 and 242.

The hatred of the Pharisees is so engrained in Western culture that I don’t think it is actually possible to rehabilitate their image.  One of the reasons is that because we see them as Jesus’ enemies, we often recast them in our enemies light.  One of the best examples of this were the Reformers rereading the worst of Catholicism into 2nd Temple Judaism and most notably the Pharisees.

Luckily, we have a whole slew of scholars who, over the last 30 years, have worked to undo these assumptions. (Thank you Stowers, Sanders, and Wright for actually looking at them apart from 2000 years of demonization.)

For an excellent introduction to the topics, see the following post: The “Hypocrisy” of the Pharisees.

Now, how does such a shift change the way we think Jesus interacted with the Pharisees and perhaps more importantly, how does it shift how we deal with our theological opponents?

Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs | Atomic Robo vs. the X-Men in… “The Time Topic” – Self explanatory, meaning, if you don’t get it by the link title, you aren’t into comics or time travel and you should just go ahead and skip it.

On Being a NT Scholar – Larry Hurtado nails it.  It’s tough work being one, and I am just a budding beginner, let alone the Professor of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology at the University of Edinburgh!

Read Secret Empire this week.  Good stuff.

TedWomen conference from Learning to Love by Tiffany Malloy.  My thoughts exactly!

Does Sincere Belief in an Afterlife Entail Religious Zealotry? from Maverick Philosopher by Bill Vallicella.  Still thinking on this one.  I don’t think he gets religion, but most philosophers don’t.

* If everyone means me.

The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks called "facts." But if one clings to the notion of self-subsistent facts, it is easy to start capitalizing the word "truth" and treating it as something identical either with God or with the world as God’s project. Then one will say, for example, that Truth is great, and will prevail.

This conflation is facilitated by confining attention to single sentences as opposed to vocabularies. For we often let the world decide the competition between alternative sentences (e.g., between "Red wins" and "Black wins" or between "The butler did it" and "The doctor did it"). In such cases, it is easy to run together the fact that the world contains the causes of our being justified in holding a belief with the claim that some nonlinguistic state of the world is itself an example of truth, or that some such state "makes a belief true" by "corresponding" to it. But it is not so easy when we turn from individual sentences to vocabularies as wholes.

When we consider examples of alternative language games — the vocabulary of ancient Athenian politics versus Jefferson’s, … the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle … — it is difficult to think of the world as making one of these better than another, of the world as deciding between them.

When the notion of "description of the world" is moved from the level of criterion-governed sentences within language games to language games as wholes, games which we do not choose between by reference to criteria, the idea that the world decides which descriptions are true can no longer be given a clear sense. It becomes hard to think that that vocabulary is somehow already out there in the world, waiting for us to discover it.

Attention (of the sort fostered by intellectual historians like Thomas Kuhn and Quentin Skinner) to the vocabularies in which sentences are formulated, rather than to individual sentences, makes us realize, for example, that the fact that Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle’s does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

The realization that the world does not tell us what language games to play should not, however, lead us to say that a decision about which to play is arbitrary, nor to say that it is the expression of something deep within us.

The moral is not that objective criteria for choice of vocabulary are to be replaced with subjective criteria, reason with will or feeling. It is rather that the notions of criteria and choice (including that of "arbitrary" choice) are no longer in point when it comes to changes from one language game to another. Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.

- Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

—————————————————————————————————————————

The above is what I am wrapping my head around this morning.  I jive with almost all of it.  Of course, the natural point of contention is the second paragraph, where Rorty talks about mistaking the correspondence theory of truth for God’s description of the world.  I think that if we focus on the non-human aspect of God’s language, the paragraph is compatible with a Christian worldview.  But, Rorty if Rorty is attacking the notion that God created the universe, then it is not.  It can be read either way and I choose to read it in such a way that is is compatible with Christianity.

I’d love to get your reactions to the quote.  What he talks about is a game-changer, but one for the better.

1. 
   SoliDeoGloria I’m starting to rethink my postmillennialism. But I think it’s because of my presupposition and disposition to 21st century life. 14 Jul 2010 from Seesmic
2. 
   hankimler @SoliDeoGloria how comes and why? #RethinkingPostmillennialism 14 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck in reply to SoliDeoGloria
3. 
   SoliDeoGloria @hankimler Well I’m having a very hard time finding and believing in an optimistic eschatology (pre-judgment/2nd comng) when I read Apoc Lit 14 Jul 2010 from Seesmic in reply to hankimler
4. 
   pomoeschatology @solideogloria apocalyptic literature isn’t necessarily eschatological 15 Jul 2010 from HootSuite in reply to SoliDeoGloria
5. 
   SoliDeoGloria @pomoeschatology Apocalyptic Literature within the Bible generally points towards eschatology or events leading to it; within reason. 15 Jul 2010 from Seesmic in reply to pomoeschatology
6. 
   thepomoxian Apocalypse acts moreso (as a genre) acts as a reorientation of the now than an explanation of the then. (Thoughts?) 15 Jul 2010 from Seesmic Desktop 2
7. 
   kempisosha @thepomoxian Apocalyptic writing (include Rev.) is primarily intended to shape the way the contemporary readers think about their situation. 15 Jul 2010 from Chrowety in reply to thepomoxian

– this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning. All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups, associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by cultural patterns of meaning…

We are part of a larger whole that we can neither forget nor imagine in our own image without paying a high price.

If we are not to have a self that hangs in the void, slowly twisting in the wind, these are issues we cannot ignore.

- Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism

and Commitment in American Life. P. 84

We need to not just banter about the word Community, we need to fill it with value and meaning.  I hope to sketch out some jelly for this donut in the coming weeks.

But, as I was doing some fact-checking on McLaren’s sections on Romans, I came across this passage on Paul and Original Sin:

While Paul does say that entered the human context through Adam, he does not create or endorse the doctrine of original sin as it came to be known later. 

He did believe, as did every rabbi, that sin was universal and that its existence originated with Adam, but that it is perpetuated by repeated acts, not by seminal transmission.  Since the beginning of time, with few exceptions (e.g., Enoch and Elijah, who were sinless and therefore did not die), each person has become his or her own Adam.

– Calvin Roetzel. The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context.  p. 129

Gotta say that I agree with him.  Incidentally, if you want an excellent overview of Paul’s letters, look no further that Roetzel.  If you want an excellent introduction on Greco-Roman letters (you know, so you understand the genre), pick up Stanley Stower’s Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity.  If you want a reading of Romans free of Augustine and Luther’s psychologizing, then pick up Stower’s A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles.

Oh, and McLaren on Romans?  Not bad on explaining the content, he just has no idea how letter writing worked in Antiquity.

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