Christianity Today has posted a new article, Survey: Frequent Bible Reading Can Turn You Liberal,which details the surprising survey results pertaining to attitudes about consumption, social justice, terrorism, etc.

The article suggests that consistent Bible reading pushes people leftward on some issues. For example:

Some of the most interesting findings relate to moral attitudes. How important is it, the survey asked, to actively seek social and economic justice in order to be a good person? Again, as would be expected, those with more liberal political leanings were more likely to say its very or somewhat important. And those who read the Bible more often were more likely to agree. Indeed, they were almost 35 percent more likely to agree at each point on Baylors five-point scale.

This question (and the conclusions pulled from the survey) highlights yet another reason why I have complained in the past that the conservative and liberal labels are really not helpful. As far as I can tell, most of the debate between the so-called right and left about seeking social and economic justice is rarely over whether people should seek such things but how such things should be sought. This is where the wording of surveys can matter a great deal; inasmuch as the left has largely appropriated the language of “social justice” as connected with governmental intervention, those on the right typically identify this language with such policies and recoil from the terminology. (For another good example of this phenomenon, note the difference in the results of surveys asking about global warming and those asking about climate change.)

But again, it is a total misunderstanding of the debate to suggest that most of the so-called right don’t believe in working for social and economic justice—after all, conservatives give about 30% more to charity than liberals (there are those useless words again). The debate isn’t over whether social/economic justice should be sought; its over the means of that justice (and what such justice looks like). For example, should secular government be the primary agent of social and economic justice or is this justice better performed by private organizations, churches, and individuals? For that matter, should it be an either-or (government vs. private) debate at all? The survey data on this question should be entirely unsurprising anyway. Devout Christians have long been on the forefront of social and economic justice programs—its just that these programs have typically been through the agency of churches and private organizations (note that extra money to charity) rather than through governmental channels.

Without accounting for this part of the debate, it is really hard to determine whether Bible reading pushes people leftward, since someone agreeing that socio-economic justice is important may opposed to using secular government as the instrument, putting that person on the traditional right. It is certainly true that Bible readers could become more liberal, but those are not the only conclusions that could be derived from such a survey. Regular Bible readers may simply be less afraid of (or more willing to use) terminology typically appropriated by liberals, for example. The methodology and assumptions reflected in the writeup of this survey are problematic for these reasons. The point is that, as usual, the issues themselves are more complex than the survey data suggest, while the headlines (shame on you, CT) just flatten things to attract eyeballs.

HT

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1. Reading the Bible On Its Own Terms
2. Why Avoiding “Liberal” Universities, Departments, and Faculty Is Misguided
3. Article on Spanking: ABC News Should Be Embarrassed

I had the opportunity to teach a five-week course of “Introduction to New Testament Literature” at UNC-Chapel Hill this summer, and I took the opportunity to reexamine and revamp a few aspects of how I’ve taught that course (or have seen others teach it) in the past. In addition to a lot of fine-tuning and a few things I didn’t think worked quite as well as they might, I was especially pleased with three primary “innovations” that I tried this summer, which I’ll be blogging about in my next few posts.

The first of these innovations stemmed from my overall dissatisfaction (shared by others ) with the way that the Synoptic Problem tends to be taught in introductory classes, namely that the Synoptic Problem tends to be taught “solution to plight,” leading off with the standard scholarly solution(s) and only later turning to the data to demonstrate the problem to be solved. (For those who are unfamiliar, the “Synoptic Problem” is the scholarly term for the difficulties involved in explaining the similarities and differences among the “Synoptic Gospels”: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.) Typically this amounts to teaching the 2-Source Hypothesis and then explaining why this theory makes the most sense of the Synoptic Problem, which has not yet become a “problem” in the minds of the students.

This solution-to-plight pedagogy amounts to reinforcing the consensus view from generation to generation, inasmuch as the next generation of scholars will have necessarily passed through Intro to NT classes, where their first major academic NT lesson is on the Two-Source Hypothesis for solving the Synoptic Problem, standing in contrast to our responsibility to train students to think critically and creatively through problems we ourselves may not have been able to fully solve (and even some we think we have already solved). As tends to be the case whenever the solution is taught before the problem is recognized, this sort of teaching leads to a weakening of the learners’ critical and creative faculties. Once a plausible solution has been presented (and with some authority, at that), trying to think through the problem is like watching/reading a murder mystery after having the ending spoiled. It’s next to impossible to put the solution one has learned far enough outside one’s head to be able to consider any other possible solutions. Of all people, biblical scholars should be aware of just how embedded a first solution or interpretation (regardless of how wrong!) can get; once a student has been told a given passage means this, that student tends to see only this whenever s/he sees that passage, rarely if ever actually reading the passage itself. (Students in my NT classes regularly express shock that, despite having read a given text numerous times, they didn’t know that was even in there!) Once a given solution is entrenched, it is terribly hard—no matter how good the evidence—to disabuse a person of his/her strongly held (from the very first time s/he learned given information) beliefs.

Given all this, I decided to try an experiment this summer: rather than beginning our studies of the Gospels with the Synoptic Problem, I decided to invert the usual order and start with the Gospels themselves, giving my students the opportunity to grapple with the data and see with the problem before introducing any solutions. To facilitate this, I constructed a few careful assignments to force them to engage with the data firsthand and begin to think through the problem. I also began with an “Introduction to the Gospels” lecture, the last ten minutes or so of which was dedicated to explaining that the first three gospels we would read would share a large amount of material and that we would begin with Mark since it was the shortest, while the other two had more material that Mark didn’t have. But this lecture did not address the dating, chronology, or redaction of the Gospels, as that would only come after going through the Synoptics themselves. So, my schedule looked like this (in the compressed summer format):

(After a few basic background lectures)
The Transmission of the NT & Introduction to the Gospels (w/underlining assignment & reflection paper)
Gospel of Mark
Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Luke
The Synoptic Problem (w/another underlining assignment & reflection paper)
Gospel of John

Ideally I’d like two classes on the Synoptic Problem after going through the Synoptics themselves, but the compressed summer session didn’t allow for that this time. The underlining assignments required both underlining the passages in the standard red, green, yellow, and blue colors as well as a prompt asking the students to write one to two pages reflecting on the possible causes of the agreements and disagreements between the three gospels. As it turns out, I was quite pleased with the results of inverting the schedule. My students began to get restless about the similarities and differences right from the start. This short audio clip from the class meeting on the Gospel of Matthew illustrates how well they were wrestling with the problem before even getting to Luke:

Intro NT Students Wrestling with Synoptic Problem (mp3)

I was obviously pretty excited to hear this level of problem-solving and textual attentiveness among my introductory class. It’s precisely what I was hoping to stimulate by teaching the solutions after introducing the problem. As an added benefit, I think it helped keep the Synoptic Problem from seeming quite so tedious, since the students were invested in the problem by the time I was getting to introduce the various scholarly solutions. This approach did require that I not assign textbook readings for the three Synoptic lectures (thanks to introductory textbooks assuming the Two-Source Hypothesis from the start), but given my predilection for favoring primary text assignments over secondary texts, that wasn’t much of a problem. I did get complaints from a few students who went through the main textbook used for the course after we had gone through the Synoptic Problem lecture: they were disappointed/frustrated by the textbook’s dismissal of all but the Two-Source theory.

At any rate, I think I’ll continue teaching along these lines in the future, beginning by letting students see the Synoptic Problem before I try to explain the Synoptic Solution(s).

Related posts:

1. Paper Accepted for Synoptic Gospels Section at 2010 SBL
2. A Few Notes on Matthew and Luke from My Students

I know I’m a bit late to the party here (teaching a summer course and doing home renovations have had me busy), but Timothy Gombis’ “The Paul We Think We Know” in Christianity Today is worth the read. Gombis does an excellent job highlighting the differences between the popular Evangelical/Protestant images of Paul and the figure who actually graces the pages of the New Testament, starting with an excellent (and brief) explanation of how the traditional narrative of Paul having left behind a legalistic Judaism in converting to a non-legalistic salvation-by-grace Christianity. This is a good primer to the so-called “New Perspective on Paul” that is certainly no longer new among scholars but is still largely unknown in the pews (and many pulpits). Gombis rightly flags moderns for making Paul in our own image, noting,

If we encountered Paul today, we might be disappointed to find someone quite unlike the strong and decisive leader we often imagine. In fact, many of our contemporary churches would hardly consider him a viable pastoral candidate. In this regard, as in so many others, the New Testament evidence resists efforts to re-create Paul in our own image.

Although some may have concerns about whether Gombis’ summary of Paul’s proclamation as centering on the “the Kingdom of God” is historically accurate, I entirely agree with Gombis on this; Paul uses the term enough in the limited material we have and the term “gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον) is itself connected to the concept of the Kingdom. (This is something that always throws my NT students, who are always startled that they actually have no real idea what “gospel” means in the New Testament.)

That said, I do have one significant point of contention with Gombis’ portrayal of “the problem with Judaism”:

“First-century Judaism didn’t have a legalism problem; it had an ethnocentrism problem. The first followers of Jesus were all Jewish, and had difficulty imagining that the God of Israel who sent Jesus Christ as their Savior could possibly save non-Jews without requiring them to convert to Judaism.” (See also Scot McKnight’s affirmation on this point.)

David Miller has already expressed his concerns about this line of thinking in an excellent and lucid post, pointing out,

 It is curious that new perspective scholars in the Dunn / Wright tradition still create a negative picture of Judaism as a foil for early Christianity. …

But of course, we can try not to stereotype ancient Judaism–which leads me to my next point: What was wrong with Jewish ethnocentrism? What is wrong about the people of God thinking they are the people of God? Isn’t that what the Old Testament encourages? Was it even conceivable to think that Israel would be a light to the nations without being distinctive as a people? Would anyone have imagined that God would save all the nations of the earth without their joining the covenant of the people of God? And does Paul ever criticize non-believing Jews for being ethnocentric? (What am I missing?)

Finally, was early Christianity any different? Sure Gentiles were not required to become Jews, but they were required to join ‘the people of God’. I submit that first century Judaism was not any more “ethnocentric” than normative Christianity is.

Miller has summed up one of my main points of frustration with the New Perspective: it quite simply doesn’t go far enough in its reconsideration of Judaism. Having begun by giving Judaism the benefit of the doubt with respect to legalism, will it now be completed by returning to the same nationalist/particular vs. universal paradigm from Protestantism of old? In one sense, I think at least part of this problem stems from the attempt to retain at least some of the trappings of historical Protestant readings in the face of greater awareness of (and sensitivity to) first century Judaism. I think Dunn is especially transparent in his attempts to apply the insights of a New Perspective on Judaism while still trying to hold to traditional Protestant theology (Wright, on the other hand, has been more willing to move away from “justification by faith” as the central element of the gospel, for example). As a result,  as I stated on one my Ph.D. exams (it’s not often one can quote one’s own exams, so I might as well do so here, right?):

Dunn has tried to have his cake and eat it too by accepting Sanders’ depiction of Judaism as non-legalistic but instead depicting Paul’s Jewish opponents as those trying to retain their ethnic distinction through “the works of the Law,” which he interprets as specific sociological “boundary markers.” Thus, instead of Paul opposing Jewish legalists, Dunn has pushed forward Jewish racists/nationalists, against whom Paul asserts his “justification by faith” message, moving towards universal access to God over and against Jewish exclusivism and nationalism.

As Miller rightly shows, this particular/universal dichotomy goes at least as far back as F.C. Baur; there’s not a whole lot “new” about it. And he’s also right that Christianity is no less “particular” or “ethnocentric” than Judaism—the only real differences concerned what actually properly functioned as (to use Dunn’s term) the “boundary markers” separating insiders from outsiders. (See the work of Caroline Johnson Hodge, Paula Fredriksen (PDF), and Denise Kimber Buell, among others.) In my own work, I’ve concluded that Paul was in no way opposed to the special claims of Israel or advocating some sort of universalism over and against Israelite “nationalism.” On the contrary, Paul’s own gospel centered on God’s promises to Israel, with the mission to the Gentiles a necessary component if “all Israel” were to be restored. If I’m right (and I obviously think I am), this invalidates the idea that Paul’s quarrel with Judaizers was over an “ethnocentrism” problem.

Racial and cultural concerns  just so happen to have been a hot issue the last thirty years, with openness and multiculturalism the chief goods of our time, making this an especially convenient reading of Paul today. Gombis is right in his critique, but I submit that his alternative is itself vulnerable to the same critique. The Paul who campaigns against ethnocentrism looks conveniently like just the apostle many would like to see today. This multicultural Paul has been crafted into the image of his modern academic interpreters every bit as much as the Evangelical Paul has been conformed to the image of his Evangelical interpreters.

Lest I take the easy way out and stop short of providing an alternative proposal of my own, I am convinced that Paul did not oppose his Jewish contemporaries because of legalism, self-righteousness, particularity, or ethnocentrism but over the question of how one becomes a righteous person (or rather, a part of a righteous people) who will justly be judged as righteous in the final judgment. He argues that no external law, facts of birth, or ritual practice can reliably be said to truly make a person (or people) righteous. Against this, he points to the power of the Spirit to transform a person from the inside out as the only means of true righteousness, asserting that the death and resurrection of the Messiah have provided for an outpouring of this Spirit for the transformation of his people (and ultimately the world itself). Paul’s thinking was thoroughly apocalyptic—emphasizing God’s righteous judgment—and thoroughly centered on God’s restoration of his people through this transformation by the Spirit. This may not scratch modern itches to the degree that the Evangelical or academic multicultural Pauls do, but I am convinced that it is a more faithful reconstruction of what was truly at root in Paul’s proclamation.

Related posts:

1. Paul’s Conversion or Paul’s Call?
2. Pauline Studies Pet Peeve: Paul Never Says “by Faith Alone”
3. Why Paul Went West

Much to my wife’s chagrin, I enjoy location-based social media like Gowalla and Foursquare, fully participating in the various games nested within these applications. She, on the other hand, finds such things silly, if not a bit creepy. Today she was again poking fun at my effort to procure a low-number “item” on Gowalla, which would replace the same (but much higher-number) item I presently have in my online vault, highlighting the fundamentally worthless nature of said pursuit. At that point, I tried to explain,

“It’s like a scavenger hunt; what do you typically get that has any real value in a scavenger hunt?”

“Glory.”

“Well, it’s basically the same thing here.”

“Yeah, but with the scavenger hunt, you actually have something, you’ve gone and gotten something you can actually hold.”

It was at just this moment that I realized the problem: my wife is quite simply not a digital Platonist, while I am quite happy with the virtual and ideal realm of ones and zeros. She wants the physical representation of scavenger hunt glory, while I’m far more of a practical Platonist in this sense. It’s really the idea of getting the item that matters, not actually getting a tangible item itself. (Yes, I realize that the digital representation is itself not the ideal Dasein either, but it’s closer.) That said, I do agree that once these clever little games actually begin to take time and energy away from more useful exploits, it is not a good thing. (Hence my distaste for things like Farmville—I actually saw a guy at the Apple Store the other day who had brought some food and other items in, set up on a computer, and proceeded to play Farmville from the time I arrived until I left at least an hour later. Fascinating.)

At any rate, I wonder how much the present experience of cyberspace can really be made to tie into Platonic philosophical instruction; at the very least, it seems that it would make a great college course: “Platonism and Cyberspace: Images of the Ideal.”

And yes, I did get the item.

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1. 40 times and Olympic/World Class Speed

Since the class I’m teaching ended today (grades are already done!), I dropped by the Apple Store to tinker a bit with the new machines. I had the opportunity to run a few tests on the new machines including running Geekbench (I also ran it on a few others for baseline comparisons). Geekbench is a fairly straightforward (and unfortunately entirely synthetic) test of processing power and memory speed, though it appears to favor raw clock power a bit more than multi-core processing in its calculations. I was pretty pleased to see the numbers on the new machines, listed below with others I tested for comparison purposes. (Several recent discussions of the Geekbench numbers for the new machines are comparing 64-bit test numbers to 32-bit numbers, which is an apples/oranges situation, so I wanted to use the same measurement across the board).

I also created a new 30 sec. iMovie project and exported that at 720p on the new Mac Mini and compared its encode time with the 17″ Macbook Pro (2.3 GHz Core i7) model nearby performing the same task. The 30 sec. iMovie encode:

Mac Mini (2.5 Core i5  w/ATI GPU): ~45 seconds
17″ Mac Pro (2.3 Core i7 ): ~35 seconds

Actually closer than I’d expected, to be honest. The Mini held up well here.

The Geekbench numbers (all 32-bit):

Mac Mini (2.5 GHz Core i5 w/ATI GPU, 4GB RAM): 6538
Macbook Air (1.7 GHz Core i5, 4GB RAM): 5444
Macbook Pro 13″ (2.7 GHz Core i7, 4GB RAM): 6880
Macbook Pro 15″ (2.3 GHz Core i7, 4GB RAM): 10228
Mac Pro (2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon, 3GB RAM): 8802

Granted, the Geekbench numbers are very processor/memory focused, so the advantages of the machines with discrete graphics are minimized in such a test, but the new machines stack up pretty well overall nonetheless.

I also had the chance to run some Cinebench 11.5 tests (which use real-world applications, as opposed to Geekbench’s synthetic test) on the Mini and two iMac models:

Mini: OpenGL: 24.84 fps; CPU: 2.53 pts.
iMac 27″ (3.1GHz Core i5, 4GB RAM): 43.06 fps; 4.73 pts
iMac 27″ (2.7GHz Core i5, 4GB RAM): 45.59 fps; 4.27pts.

Oddly, the second iMac scored higher on the OpenGL test, despite having the weaker video card. I’m guessing this was due to the higher TurboBoost speeds of the 2.7 Core i5 processor in that machine. The Mini did quite respectably in this test as well, though still only about half the speed of the iMacs in more intensive operations. I’d love to see how the Mini Server, with its quad-core Core i7 would compare in these tests, especially in the OpenGL test.

The Mini didn’t feel quite as snappy as the 17″ or 13″ Macbook Pros when I was running them through tests, but it wasn’t exactly sluggish, either. As might be expected, the SSD-toting Air felt snappier than any of the others, although its raw power still lags behind its bigger brothers.

After seeing these numbers and getting my hands on these machines, I’m likely to switch my current setup (a 15″ Macbook Pro serving as both mobile machine and home hub) to a Mini/Air combo. That’s still not 100% decided, but I’m pretty close to making the switch. These machines finally have enough horsepower to at least make me think about it.

Related posts:

1. Hopes for Mac OS X 10.7

This week’s NPR Religion Podcast featured a piece from “All Things Considered” looking into the debates in Denmark relating to Muslim immigration and religious tolerance. Especially interesting was the observation about changing attitudes to multiculturalism in Europe:

The very concept of multiculturalism is now being called into question in much of Europe. Danish writer and journalist Helle Merete Blix is among those who think it’s failed.

Ms. HELLE MERETE BLIX (Writer/Journalist): “Because multiculturalism does not produce more pluralism. What it produces is parallel societies. It has to be a main culture that you sort of integrate into. And if too many people suddenly speak out they want Shariah law, they do not want democracy, that is a major problem in every European country.”

This reminds me of a talk by Duke English professor Ian Baucom a few years ago in which he observed that multiculturalism, though still all the rage in popular circles, was falling out of favor in academic/intellectual circles. In addition to the “parallel societies” problem, Baucom also pointed out that the fundamental problem with multiculturalism is that it effectively involves various “minority cultures” receiving some sort of approval from a dominant culture or group, with the necessary result being a sort of unintentional ghettoization of these “minority cultures,” marked out as “different” from the mainstream. Morgan Freeman’s comments about “Black History Month” a few years ago center on just this problem—in order to “celebrate” the “other,” one must first make someone into an “other” rather than “one of us”:

The grand irony is that multiculturalism—in large measure a product of western postcolonial guilt—essentially winds up being a new sort of colonialism, in which the dominant culture’s control is exerted in giving approval to those groups it marks out as not a part of itself. (Foucauldians, you may nod knowingly now.) To borrow Edward Said’s terminology, multiculturalism requires “othering” every bit as much as the colonialism it intends to undo; that is, it requires the marking off of various groups as “different” or “other” from “us.” Yes, this is ostensibly to “honor” and “respect” “their culture,” but it also has the pernicious effect of marginalizing and distancing “them” from “us.” Put differently, multiculturalism is in some sense self-refuting, thanks to its reliance upon a dominant culture that ensures all the “others” are respected and given a special place. In his talk, Baucom suggested that it would likely take a couple decades for the academic/intellectual recognition of the flaws of multiculturalism to be felt within popular culture (since what is fashionable among intellectuals typically becomes popularly fashionable after the fact) but that multiculturalism would ultimately wind up a rejected fad.

Given these recent developments in Europe, has that already begun to happen? What then will fill the ideological void in the West?

No related posts.