Brilliant (HT Roger Ebert):

According to WordPress, this is the 500th post on this blog. So in honor of the occasion, here are some fun facts that you will not find on my PhD applications. All of these are true (in a manner of speaking):

• Three different forms of contraception were not enough to prevent my birth.
• I graduated from university while still in the womb.
• I was first published at the age of seven.
• I won a city-wide math award, then never took another math class.
• I spun my car across three lanes of the interstate, and drove away undamaged.
• I’ve jumped over an avalanche, while standing on the edge of a cliff, wearing an 80 pound pack.
• I’ve gone skinny dipping in a glacier lake.
• I’ve walked between a mother bear and her cubs.
• I’ve been to the top of Mt. McKinley.
• I’ve been to 30 states and four countries.
• I’ve ridden on the top of a Jeepney, which nearly drove off a cliff.
• I’ve tramped through a Filipino jungle to meet a chainsaw-wielding stranger.
• I’ve caught a burgler in the act.
• I’ve hosted a terrorism stakeout in my house.
• I’ve disarmed a knife-wielding man.
• I’ve been on television, in the newspaper, and on the radio.
• I’ve eaten butter-flavored ice cream and avocado-flavored Popsicles.
• I’ve seen every episode of every series of Star Trek, been to a convention, and written fan fiction.
• I’ve watched a hockey game from the owner’s suite.
• I moved to Canada to break up with a girl, then married her anyway.
• According to an ancient Mayan prophecy, the world will end on my 10th wedding anniversary.

Today I gave my first undergraduate lecture, to a RELS 101 class of about 120 students. It was 9am so it took them a while to wake up, but by the end (especially after the movie clip) they were asking some excellent questions, and I acutally had to cut them off because time was running out. After the break I’ll post my lecture notes. I didn’t read them, but this is more or less what I said, so all you Hebrew Bible scholars out there can feel free to blast me for my ignorance, and I will surely “repent in dust and ashes”: 

An Introduction to Job 

According to Old Testament scholar Tod Linafelt, the Book of Job is: 

An adventure of theological subversion and theological dialogue, a crack in biblical discourse where life wells up and death infiltrates, a faultline in religious language that runs to the very character of God.¹ 

On the surface, the book seems fairly simple: Job is a good man; God “tests” him with various tragedies; Job passes the test and God restores him. On this reading, Job offers a classic answer to “the Problem of Evil”: Why do bad things happen to good people? Because God is testing us. But under the surface Job is full of tension and ambiguity; much more interested in asking questions than answering them. In fact, the book doesn’t explain suffering at all; it asks what the fact that good people suffer says about God and our relation to him; and Job offers no easy answers to those questions. 

To see this, let’s start by looking at the Prologue. It introduces Job as the ideal righteous man. He is so “blameless and upright” that even God brags about his piety. According to traditional theology, he should therefore be blessed for his goodness. As Deuteronomy 28 puts it: “If you fully obey the LORD your God… you will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock” (28:1, 3-4). And so it is with Job, he has many children and great wealth, thousands of sheep, camels, oxen and donkeys—everything the covenant promised. 

According to traditional theology, that should be the end of the story, but it is just at this point that “the Satan” asks one of the key questions of the book: “Does Job fear God for no reason?” (1:9; החנם) In other words, if being good earns Job blessing, does he really fear God because he loves God or simply for what he gets out of the bargain? This question is less about Job as an individual, whether one particular man has pure motives, as it is about the way God himself orders the world. Does the system of retributive justice—blessing for obedience, cursing for disobedience—itself keep us from loving God for his own sake? Do people in general only “fear God” because we think we get something out of the deal? Is it possible to love God “for no reason”? 

Those are the questions, but does the book answer them? First, Job loses his children and everything he owns, and how does he respond: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away, blessed be the name of the LORD” (1:21). How does that sound to you? Just like the “patient” Job we’ve always heard about, right? But doesn’t it sound a little too patient, a little cliché, like the kind of thing Job might have memorized in Sunday School? Notice how the narrator evaluates this reaction: “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing” (1:22). That’s pretty faint praise, all about what Job didn’t do, nothing about his great faith or patience. And what about the second “test,” when God allows the Satan to afflict Job with a terrible disease on top of everything else. This time Job simply asks a question: “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (2:10). Well, shall we or shall we not? Job doesn’t say, and this time the narrator even more ambiguous in his evaluation: “In all this, Job did not sin with his lips” (2:10). So Job didn’t say anything against God, but perhaps he wanted to?² I know I would. 

Now turn to Job 3: After seven days of mourning in silence in the company of three friends, Job finally speaks his mind, and systematically dismantles his own initial reaction. Before he said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb”; now he “cursed the day of his birth” (3:1). Before he said: “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away”; now he says: “why is light given to those in misery?” (3:20). Before he said: “Blessed be the name of the LORD,” but would he still say the same now? In other words, it is still an open question whether “Job fears God for no reason,” and the rest of the book will explore this question in various ways. 

Job’s three friends—Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar—it turns out, are not at all impressed with Job’s response, and like countless religious folks since then, they jump to defend God and their traditional theology. As Eliphaz puts it: “Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?… We have examined this, and it is true, so hear it and apply it to yourself” (4:7; 5:27). To put that in contemporary terms: “The Bible says it; that settles it. No repent and believe!” But Job knows he is innocent and has been destroyed anyway, so he instead of repenting, he begins to lose hope: “I do not believe [God] would give me a hearing. He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason (חנם). He would not let me regain my breath, but would overwhelm me with misery… It is all the same, that is why I say: ‘He destroys both the blameless and the wicked” (9:16-17, 22). 

Does that surprise you? It doesn’t sound much like the “patient” Job we’ve heard of; it sounds awfully close to blasphemy, and Job’s speeches are full of these sorts of accusations. But so is much of the Hebrew Bible. Abraham, Moses, the complaint Psalms, Lamentations and many of the prophets all accuse God of injustice, of allowing the wicked to prosper while the good are destroyed, of repaying their faithfulness with persecution and death.³ And despite the objections of Job’s friends, these complaints are legitimate. Job is innocent; God himself admits it in the prologue, yet he suffers terribly. Nor is he alone. Abel—the good one—is killed by his brother Cain; Abraham and Sarah were barren despite following God; Joseph went into slavery; David went into exile; the prophets were persecuted; and all Israel repeated their slavery, exile and persecution. Job’s case is not the exception but the rule, it is the pattern experienced by a thousand saints and martyrs from biblical times to the present day: often it is the most faithful who suffer the worst, not for their sins but for their faithfulness. 

That is to say: The Book of Job is less about whether Job is righteous as whether God is. Look back to the Prologue again. Notice how many times the words “bless” and “curse” appear here. Those are the key terms from Deuteronomy’s theology and they are repeated in 1:5, 1:10, 1:11, 1:21, 2:5 and 2:9. But here’s what most English translation don’t tell you: every time blessing or cursing appears in Job 1-2, the author uses the same word: ברך. The strange thing is, ברך normally only means “to bless,” not “to curse,” so where your English translations have Job worrying that his children might “curse” God, a more literal translation would be that they “bless God” (1:5); where the Satan says Job will “curse you to your face,” he actually says Job will “bless you to your face” (1:11; 2:5); and where Job’s wife says “curse God and die,” she actually says “bless God and die” (2:9). This means that every time we come to the word ברך in Job, we have to ask whether it means “to bless” or “to curse,” and the answer isn’t always obvious. 

When the Satan says God “blessed” Job  by giving him children and animals (1:10), no English translations suggest that he means “cursed” here, but maybe they should. After all, what does the blessing of God really mean in this context? Is it not precisely God’s “blessing” that singled Job out for the Satan’s attention, precisely that “blessing” that brought so much tragedy down on him in the first place? And when Job says “blessed be the name of the LORD” does he really mean blessed? The book does not tell us, and the question of what God’s “blessing” really means will run throughout the book, beginning with God’s second conversation with the Satan in 2:1-6. Here God admits that Job “still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him for no reason” (2:3; חנם). There’s that key phrase again: “for no reason.” Remember that in 9:17 Job accuses God of doing precisely that: punishing him “for no reason,” and here God himself admits that is what happened. Thus, Job’s accusations may seem blasphemous, but they do not appear to be wrong. In fact, it is his friends who are mistaken, clinging to their orthodox theology when the proof of its failure is standing right in front of them. 

In contrast to his orthodoxy friends, Job sometimes sounds a lot like a modern atheist: “Will you speak wickedly on God’s behalf? Will you lie for him?” (13:7-8), “a despairing man should have the devotion of his friends, even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty” (6:14). But Job is no atheist; he is angry because he does believe, but refuses to lie on God’s behalf: “See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face” (13:15-16). 

Perhaps that is why, when God finally does respond to Job’s complaints, he does not repeat the accusations of Job’s friends, nor condemn Job for blasphemy. But God doesn’t explain his actions either. This is not about giving a “reason” for suffering; that is the old model of justice—the righteous are blessed because they are righteous, and the wicked suffer because they are wicked—but in his speeches, God completely sets aside that kind of speculation. He implies that both sides of the debate have missed the point. The world, God seems to say, does not revolve around Job and the tragedies he suffers. It is full of more grandeur and beauty than any human can comprehend, and even at its most terrifying it remains in God’s hands. 

That’s not really an answer is it? It doesn’t address Job’s accusations at all, and Job’s suffering remains just as much a mystery as ever. Yet from what we learned in the Prologue, could God have answered differently? If the question the book is asking is: “Does Job fear God for no reason?” then if God gave reasons for his suffering or promised restoration, he would be conceding that it is impossible to do so. And if even Job cannot love God for God’s own sake, what hope do any of us have? 

What about Job’s final response? “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted…. Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (46:1-6) Is Job here admitting that he was wrong to question God? Note that God has nowhere accused Job of sin, and even when Job says “I repent in dust and ashes” the Hebrew word translated “repent” (נחם) doesn’t necessarily mean to be sorry, it can mean simply to change one’s mind.⁴ Some even think Job is being sarcastic. Remember what he had said in chapter 9, that even if God gave him an audience, his own lips would lie on God’s behalf. Do you think that’s what is happening here, or has Job truly come to recognize that his complaints were short-sighted? It seems that even here it is an open question whether Job truly does “fear God for no reason.” And God seems content to leave it an open question. 

In fact, it is Job’ friends that God condemns: “for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (42:7). It seems that God agrees with Job in his rejection of the friends’ advice, but Job’s friends were simply applying the covenant promises given in Deuteronomy. If God really is rejecting their logic, is he not implying that the covenant itself is no guarantee of God’s favor? And doesn’t the history of the Jewish people attests to this? What nation has ever suffered more greatly than the Jews have? Can all of that suffering really be a punishment for their sins? 

I want to show you a clip from a movie. It’s called God on Trial, and it tells a story of a group of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. At this point in the story, the Nazis have held a selection to determine which inmates will be sent to the gas-chambers and which will be allowed to live. None of the prisoners know who has been selected or why, and while they wait to learn who will live and who will die, they follow Job’s lead and hold a trial against God, accusing him of “breaking his covenant with Israel.” The film raises a number of very difficult questions, but here is one clip that is especially relevant to Job [I played 19:03-24:20 from the DVD; that corresponds to more or less the last 3 minutes of this clip, followed by the first 2 minutes of this one]. 

Whose side in that debate did you find yourself identifying with? Those who insisted their suffering must be a punishment, or those who refused to let God off so easily? To me one thing seems unquestionable: the apparently unjust suffering Job experienced was no isolated case; it has been the experience of countless Jews from the Exodus to the Holocaust, and of countless non-Jews as well. If you think you can give a reason to explain that suffering, to “argue on God’s behalf” as Job’s friends attempt to do, I think you have missed the point of the Book of Job. This is the world we live in, a world both of unimaginable beauty and unimaginable evil. Sometimes the wicked do prosper, and sometimes the good are destroyed, whatever Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar or Deuteronomy say. The question is: will we follow God anyway? Not because he blesses us for it, but even if he doesn’t? 

Then there is the conclusion to the book, where God restores double everything Job had. Some people don’t like this ending—it seems like a cop-out, hiding the questions the rest of the book asked under a falsely happy ending. After all, many people suffer without relief, not least in Nazi Germany, so why should Job get everything back the way it was? But does Job get everything back? What about his children. It is all well and good to say that God gave Job new children, but the sons and daughters who died at the beginning of the book are still dead, and no “reason” can be given to explain their loss. Likewise, it is all well and good to say that God brought something good out of the Holocaust, but those who died are still dead and are not here to enjoy it. 

Thus, even Job’s restoration does not answer our questions, but what it does is offer us different way to ask the Satan’s question: Not just will we fear God even if we get nothing out of it, but will God give us nothing in return for our love? The end of Job, ambiguous though it is, offers hope that God’s justice will win out in the end, that those who suffer “for no reason” will not do so forever. In the end there is hope, but it is not a hope that answers all questions; it is a hope that gives us the courage to ask them, not just for the sake of Job’s children, but for the sakes of all those who continue to suffer in this world. As Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann puts it: 

The dramatic power of the book of Job attests to the reality that faith, beyond easy convictions, is a demanding way to live that thrives on candor and requires immense courage.⁵ 

So will we fear God “for no reason”? Will we love God for God’s own sake? To do so requires not only the patience of Job, but also the honesty of Job, the courage of Job, the hope of Job.  

² See Walter Vogels, “Job’s Superficial Faith in His First Reactions to Suffering,” Église et Théologie, 25 (1994): 343-359. 

³ For instance: Genesis 18:25; Exodus 32:11-14; Psalms 13; 22; 39; 44; 55; 60; 69; 74; 79; 88; 109; 139; Lamentations; Jeremiah 12:1-4; 20:7-9, 14-18; Habakkuk 1:2-4, 12-17. 

⁴ For instance, compare Jeremiah 18:7-10; John Hartley, The Book of Job (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 537. 

⁵ Walter Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 302. See also Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 359-403, especially 385-393.

Quoted by Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (pgs. 354-55); I read it in Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament (pg. 403 n. 6):

What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: “Were you here before?”… And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, “For the love of heaven, don’t answer.”

This week’s Christian Carnival is number 300–is it really possible they’ve been doing these for nearly 6 years?–and is hosted at Brain Cramps for God. It includes my post on Stargate, the Christian Story and the Role of Humanity in the Universe.

C.S. Lewis has a great deal to say on the subject of humanity’s role in the universe, especially in chapter 14 of Miracles, some of which I agree with and some of which I remain skeptical about. Here are a couple of excerpts that bear on the conversation in the comments on my last post (once again, apologies for the gendered language):

The doctrine of a universal redemption spreading outwards from the redemption of Man, mythological as it will seem to modern minds, is in reality far more philosophical than any theory which holds that God, having once entered Nature, should leave her, and leave her substantially unchanged, or that the glorification of one creature could be realized without the glorification of the whole system. God never undoes anything but evil, never does good to undo it again. The union between God and Nature in the Person of Christ admits no divorce. He will not go out of Nature again and she must be glorified in all ways which this miraculous union demands. When spring comes it ‘leaves no corner of the land untouched’; even a pebble dropped in a pond sends circles to the margin….

For this reason I do not think it at all likely that there have been (as Alice Meynell suggested in an interesting poem) many Incarnations to redeem many different kinds of creature. One’s sense of style–of the divine idiom–rejects it. The suggestion of mass-production and of waiting queues comes from a level of thought which is here hopelessly inadequate. If other natural creatures than Man have sinned we must believe that they are redeemed: but God’s Incarnation as Man will be one unique act in a drama of total redemption and other species will have witnessed wholly different acts, each equally unique, equally necessary and differently necessary to the whole process, and each (from a certain point of view) justifiably regarded as ‘the great scene’ of the play. (pgs. 199-202)

Part of the Hubble Deep Field; every speck of light here is an entire galaxy. Copyright NASA.

Space is big.  Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Bible includes many claims that are difficult to believe–talking animals, a worldwide flood, divine appearances, and of course the resurrection–but Paul’s claim that “creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God” (Romans 8:18-23) must rank fairly high. Perhaps that made sense to those who believed “the heavens” were a hard dome overhanging the earth, but what about today?

People have always recognized the universe is big, but we now know that “big” does not even come close to doing it justice. In truth, the universe is so unimaginably vast that nothing in our experience can even provide a suitable analogy. You could imagine the whole earth were the size of an atom (but can you really imagine how small an atom is?) and the universe would still be bigger by comparison than anything can see.

Remember the famous image of Earth as a “pale, blue dot”? This picture was only taken from the edge of our own solar system, and our sun is just one of more than a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. How many is a hundred billion? If you started counting stars today, one per second, it would take you three thousand years to finish our one galaxy. Imagine how long it would take to visit all those, much less the uncountable multitudes of other such galaxies that we know must exist. The idea that the inhabitants of this one tiny speck could have a central role in such universe is, on the face of it, patently absurd.

Stargate Universe well illustrates the problem (watch it on Hulu). The show follows a group of people who have been transported to an ancient starship hurtling through the far reaches of the universe, “several billion light years from home.” The ship, called The Destiny, has been travelling faster than light for hundreds of thousands of years to get this far, yet even its fantastically long voyage has only brought the ship through an infinitesimal portion of the universe as a whole. You could imagine its entire journey as a single thread dropped into the Pacific, and you would barely approach the vastness of space though which it has traveled. The point should be clear: humanity could spend millions if not billions of years colonizing the stars, and we would still fall far short of visiting–much less remaking–the whole of creation.

Of course, Paul was certainly not thinking of converting aliens in distant galaxies when he wrote of creation awaiting “the revealing of the children of God,” but that doesn’t really solve the problem of the incarnation in such an unimaginably vast universe. Paul’s point was that God’s coming in Christ–and the gift of God’s spirit–had fundamentally changed the game–the universe as a whole is different this side of the incarnation. That Paul didn’t realize how small a part of the universe the Earth actually occupies doesn’t make his claim any easier to swallow. Whether he realized it or not, there is simply no way we have the ability–in ourselves–to play such a central role in the cosmos.

Then again, the biblical authors were hardly unaware of the absurdity of humanity’s place in the universe, even if they would not have described it in the same terms we do. After all, it wasn’t as though we needed to learn about distant galaxies to realize that, in the grand scheme of things, humanity is a small thing. As the Psalmist put it:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

In other words, the significance of humanity relative to the rest of the cosmos–if we have one–rests not on humanity’s inherent prominence or abilities, but solely on the grace of God. Nor is it so absurd that a small or rare thing could have such significance. Children are common but invaluable; diamonds are valued precisely because they are rare.

On the one hand, if intelligent life is unique to earth after all, then our small size relative to the whole is totally inconsequential. If, on the other hand, humanity is but one among many races of thinking beings spread across the universe, then things are more complicated, but until we actually go out and see for ourselves what those others are like–or if they even exist–we cannot really know whether our religious conceptions will stand up to the encounter, or only be revealed as wild hubris. But we can speculate, and perhaps no mainstream science fiction has gone further with such speculation than the Stargate franchise.

Stargate, admittedly, has not always been friendly to religion. The basic premise is that the ancient gods were actually highly advanced aliens who transplanted humanity across the galaxy (if not the universe). A major theme of the first Stargate series (SG1) was the attempt to free the galaxy from slavery to these “false gods” and their armies of brainwashed followers. Still, the idea that humanity might not be restricted to Earth does suggest a broader significance that is explored in a variety of ways in the first two series. As the story progresses, humans from Earth are indeed instrumental in saving the peoples of several galaxies, human and non-human alike.

As far as Christianity itself is concerned, the previous series have been notably ambivalent, as seen especially in season 3 episode Demons and in the transparent caricatures of fundamentalist Christianity in the season 8 episode Icon and the Origin story-line in the final two seasons. Stargate Universe, however, has so far taken a much more positive approach.

For instance, the two most recent episodes, titled Darkness and Light, include characters praying the 23rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer at key points in the narrative and embody a fairly clear, if symbolic, death and resurrection story-arc. Like Battlestar Galactica (to which it owes a great deal), SGU clearly recognizes that religion will not simply disappear as technology advances and new frontiers are opened, and its effects need not be negative. Also like BSG–and rather unlike previous incarnations of Stargate–our heroes here are broken people, variously prideful, needy or both, and as much in need of enlightenment as they are likely to bring it to the superstitious masses. In other words, they are just like us: clinging to their religious heritage, and interpreting their experiences in its light, no matter how far from home they get, not because they have it all figured out, but because it is the best they know.

The more interesting question is whether their religious conceptions have any merit beyond psychological comfort, and here again SGU is more like BSG than previous incarnations of Stargate. This was particularly seen in the third part of the Pilot, titled Air (spoilers follow). When the ancient ship’s life support system begins to fail, the crew is forced to travel to a desert planet in search of materials necessary to fix it. The episode is positively dripping with Christian imagery, highlighted by several flashbacks of one character’s own history with the Christian church.

First, there is the fact that they must go into the desert–a symbol of death–to seek life, and while there they repeatedly test the sand with a red chemical that looks like blood, each time pouring it out onto the ground. The symbolism later becomes literal as a few of the team give up hope and decide to try a different planet that The Destiny had warned them against. Two people go through, and are never heard from again, but a third is prevented from going when the others shoot him–spilling his blood but ultimately saving his life. At the climax of the episode, another man is on the verge of death when he sees a vision of a crucifix standing over the very spot he had been searching for, then collapses into a dream. He is a teenager, confessing his sin to a priest, who assures him: “We have redemption through his blood.”

If this symbolism were not enough, the episode supplements it with a second set of imagery involving water. They travel to this planet through a portal that looks like a pool of water, and at the end of the episode one character holds the portal open by sticking part of his body into it, knowing it could close at any moment and kill him. He does this to buy his friends enough time to escape themselves, before all three pass through the waters to life. Nor was this act of self-sacrifice the first instance of baptismal imagery in the episode. Dehydrated and dying, the same man who saw the crucifix also meets an apparently sentient whirlwind, which offers him water in the desert, reviving him and revealing the material they need to fix their life support system. Here again is biblical imagery: The whirlwind symbolizes the Spirit of God, which is associated with revelation and new life in a variety of biblical texts. Isaiah speaks of the Spirit bringing forth springs in the desert; John says “the spirit blows where it wills”; God addressed Job from the whirlwind.

In the end, like the rag-tag crew of The Destiny we do not know what sort of beings might live in the far reaches of the universe–was that intelligent whirlwind truly God’s Spirit, or a previously unknown form of embodied life, or perhaps even God working though such an alien being?–but it appears that even out there God’s presence can still be felt, redemption is still on offer, humanity still has a grander Destiny, even if we do not yet know where it is taking us.

This week’s Christian Carnival is hosted at The Bible Archive and include my tongue-in-cheek source critical analysis of The Lord of the Rings.

From Bizarro Comic (HT Chris Brady):

If you don’t follow Charlie Lehardy at AnotherThink, you’re missing out. He may be the most thoughtful writer on my blogroll, and his latest post on the injustice of our culture’s approach to sexual crime is a must-read.

If you enjoyed David Clines’ Winnie the Pooh parody of redaction criticism, you’ll want to check out our friend Mark Shea’s similar treatment of The Lord of the Rings, which Karyn Traphagen dug up somewhere or other:

Experts in source-criticism now know that The Lord of the Rings is a redaction of sources ranging from the Red Book of Westmarch (W) to Elvish Chronicles (E) to Gondorian records (G) to orally transmitted tales of the Rohirrim (R). The conflicting ethnic, social and religious groups which preserved these stories all had their own agendas, as did the “Tolkien” (T) and “Peter Jackson” (PJ) redactors, who are often in conflict with each other as well but whose conflicting accounts of the same events reveals a great deal about the political and religious situations which helped to form our popular notions about Middle Earth and the so-called “War of the Ring.”. Into this mix are also thrown a great deal of folk materials about a supposed magic “ring” and some obscure figures named “Frodo” and “Sam”. In all likelihood, these latter figures are totems meant to personify the popularity of Aragorn with the rural classes.

Because The Lord of the Rings is a composite of sources, we may be quite certain that “Tolkien” (if he ever existed) did not “write” this work in the conventional sense, but that it was assembled over a long period of time by someone else of the same name. We know this because a work of the range, depth, and detail of The Lord of the Rings is far beyond the capacity of any modern expert in source-criticism to ever imagine creating themselves.

Be sure to read the whole thing, but I did want to take issue a comment left on Karyn’s post. Tim criticizes Mark for failing to provide any evidence of “unevenness in the text” such as we find in Genesis. I’m happy to oblige. Mark observes:

[E]ven the T redactor cannot eliminate from the R source the towering Amazon figure of Eowyn, who is recorded as taking up arms the moment the previous king of Rohan, Theoden, is dead. Clearly we are looking at a heavily reworked coup d’etat attempt by the princess of the Rohirrim against Aragorn’s supremacy. Yet this hard kernel of historical fact is cleverly sublimated under folk materials (apparently legends of the obscure figure of “Meriadoc”). Instead of the historical account of her attempt on Aragorn’s throne as it originally stood in R, she is instead depicted as engaging in battle with a mythical “Lord of the Nazgul” (apparently a figure from W sources) and shown fighting on Aragorn’s side. This attempt to sublimate Eowyn does not convince the trained eye of the source-criticism expert, who astutely notes that Eowyn is wounded in battle at the same moment Denethor dies. Obviously, Eowyn and Denethor were in league against Aragorn but were defeated by the latter’s partisans simultaneously

In fact, The Eowyn Problem extends even more deeply than this. T admits that Eowyn married Denethor’s son, Faramir, a detail conveniently repressed by PJ (though hints remain in the deutero-canonical “Director’s Cut”). Both redactors attempt to obscure this with a dubious account of Eowyn’s love for Aragorn, but this can hardly be reconciled with G’s portrayal of Faramir as a loyal steward.  These accounts must derive from distinct strands of the pro-monarchic tradition, and the story of Eowyn and Faramir falling in love in “the houses of healing” is obviously a late attempt at harmonization.

Even more dubious is the account of Eowyn and Faramir willingly leaving Minas Tirith to live in Ithilien. This is an obvious attempt to whitewash their forced exile, unless of course “across the Great River” is simply a euphemism for death.

I received my official GRE scores this week and along with several other bibliobloggers, I was a little disappointed in my Verbal. My scores are still competitive (certainly not poor enough to justify a re-test, especially since I felt very good as I was taking it) but not as high as on my practice tests, which is frustrating.¹ Trying not to be bitter, then, I wanted to offer a few reflections on my test preparation for the sake of those yet to take it. If nothing else, hopefully I can save some other benighted souls the from making the same mistakes I did.

Overall Approach

I actually used three different test prep books–Peterson’s Master the GRE 2010 (by Mark Stewert), Kaplan’s GRE Premier Live Online 2010 Edition (various), and Princeton Review’s Cracking the GRE 2010 Edition (by Doug Pierce)–but I only read the last of these all the way through. I was drawn to Pierce’s book over the others by his cynically defiant tone and straightforward explanations, and found the book both informative and easy to read, though as we’ll see, I don’t agree with all his advice.

As Pierce sees it, the GRE tests little more than your ability to take the GRE. Yes, you need a good vocabulary and some basic math skills, but the multiple choice sections of the test especially rely so much upon misdirection that, according to Pierce, success on the GRE has as much to do with learning how to game the system as it does with your innate verbal or mathematical ability.

After taking it I’m more convinced than ever that he’s right about that, but I’m not sure it is all that helpful to dwell on it. In the end, I tried to take a more optimistic approach. Really, the GRE feels more like a battle than a game, and as a matter of fact come test day I found myself praying for courage more than anything else. Psalm 138 seemed particularly appropriate, and I went in praying that God truly would “make me bold and stout-hearted” (138:3). It was a great help in calming my nerves.

Verbal Section

Like I said, however, while preparing I largely bought into Pierce’s cynical approach, so I spent quite a bit of my time learning his strategies for tackling questions from the side rather than answering them directly. I’m not sure that time was all well spent, however, as much of it is only helpful if, for instance, you do not know the vocabulary being tested. Especially on the Verbal section I did not end up using very much of his advice (then again, perhaps I would have done better if I had. Who can say?), and some of it was downright counter-productive.

For instance, on Reading Comprehension questions he suggests that you only read the first paragraph in full, and just scan the rest to get a rough idea of the contents–then treat the questions like a “treasure hunt,” only reading the specific sections of the text when they are asked about. On the one hand, he is right to urge you not to try and memorize all the details of the passage–it will stay on the screen the whole time you are answering the questions–but the whole “treasure hunt” approach really did not work for me, and I finally abandoned it after several failed sets of practice questions.

Kaplan’s advice at this point was much better. It also suggests that you read the first paragraph most closely and not worry about all the technical details that follow, but it emphasizes reading the whole passage quickly and summarizing its contents for yourself before tackling the questions. This not only makes the broad-level questions a snap (with Pierce’s approach they almost felt like a guessing game), it also makes it much easier to find the details asked about in the specific questions. Using this method I got 7 of 8 Reading Comprehension questions correct without spending an inordinate amount of time on them.

On the other hand, Pierce’s vocabulary “Hit Parade” was very helpful (and inspiring!), and if I were to do the GRE again, I would have studied such vocab lists even more closely than I did. Even if your vocabulary is very good, there are bound to be words you only “sort of know”  on these lists (and on the test) and those are the ones most likely to trip you up. Do not assume that just because you read a lot in regular life that the Verbal section will be easy; that is not generally the case.

In fact, according to ETS’s own numbers, even humanities majors tend to do better on the Quantitative section than the Verbal. The cynic in me thinks that only proves the ineffectiveness of this testing method as a measure of ability, but that attitude won’t help you. Instead take that as motivation not to slouch on the Verbal preparation, no matter how well your practice tests go. Think of the test like a wily enemy that knows you’d beat it in a fair fight, so it deliberately avoids giving you one. Don’t give in.

Quantitative Section

Still, if you’re like me you probably feel more stressed by the Math section, and for that I would definitely recommend Pierce’s treatment. I will not attempt to summarize it for you (I’d probably screw it up), but I will say this: I hadn’t done any serious math since high school (my score on the AP Calculus test fulfilled my college requirement, so I never took math again), and I couldn’t even remember how to do long division, let alone algebra. Pierce got me back up to speed quickly and easily. I don’t recall anything appearing on the test that he did not cover.

Further, his strategies for attacking questions from the side proved much more helpful here than in the Verbal section. Especially useful was the tip to plug in your own numbers for the variables in difficult algebra questions (which, if done correctly, turns them into much simpler arithmetic problems). Sometimes you can also plug in the answer choices for the same effect on non-algebra problems. I only used these methods a few times, but where I did it solved problems that I probably would not have been able to answer quickly enough otherwise.

Writing Section

Pierce’s most helpful advice, however, was on the Writing section. In one sense, this is probably the easiest section for humanities majors (especially those of us with blogs), since we write all the time and the test more or less gives free rein on this section. But you don’t want to take it for granted either–why settle for a 5 if you might be able to get a 6?–and if it’s been a while since you’ve written a five paragraph essay (on a timer) it can take a bit of practice to get back in the habit.

The first thing I would say is that you want to familiarize yourself with the kind of questions they ask (be sure to read through at least a healthy portion of prompts–they are all posted on the ETS website), but don’t waste your time trying to prepare answers to all or even most of them (unless that’s your cup of tea); you’ve got better things to do and you can write an excellent essay without all that. Instead, focus on the structure and general contents that you will need to employ no matter what questions you’re given.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do is prepare a template in advance.  You don’t want to have to waste a bunch of time deciding how to structure your essay (or worse, lapse into writer’s block!) while the clock is running, so if you can memorize a useful but adaptable structural template before you go in, it will make it much easier to jump right into writing, and will also help if you get stuck. This is a lot more important on the Issues essay than the argument essay (where your structure matters less than your effectiveness in dismantling the prompt).

Pierce gives a number of stock templates, but unfortunately (as even he admits) they are exceedingly dull, so you don’t want to follow them mechanically. Just take one or two or (better yet) create your own, and practice using them so that you’ll have something to fall back on if the essay doesn’t come naturally as well as you’d like. For instance, here’s the template I created for the Issues Essay (which you are welcome to borrow, though I’d encourage you to adapt it to your own style). I did not follow it exactly on test day, but it definitely helped me organize my thoughts and helped me do well on the Writing section (5.5 out of 6):

• Introduction: If possible, begin with an illustrative example or relevant quotation (it’s important that the first sentence be as engaging as possible, do not simply restate the prompt); summarize the appeal of the opposing view; state the thesis to be defended.
• Body 1: Acknowledge the strongest argument(s) for the opposition and rebut them using one or more detailed counter-examples drawn from history, literature or current events.
• Body 2: Highlight issues overlooked by the opposing view and explain how they support the thesis, again using specific examples and reasons.
• Body 3: Explain the most important argument or most evocative example in favor of your position, again trying to be as specific as possible.
• Conclusion: Restate the argument and draw one or two further inferences from it, be sure to make the final sentence as engaging as possible (even if by inversion).

Whatever your template, just be sure to practice with it as much as you can. Use it to write several timed essays until it becomes natural enough that you can follow it without being a slave to it. In fact, that’s the advice I would give for the test as a whole: practice, practice, practice. I wish I had done more of that myself, especially on the Verbal section.

Of course, however you structure your essays, you want to fill them with detailed and evocative examples. Be sure to vary your sentence length and vocabulary (don’t keep using the same terms from the prompt again and again), and try to make your language as specific and visual as possible.  I know that seems elementary, but trust me, it’s easy to forget when you are scrambling to write on test day. Just remember that the people marking these things fly though a ton of essays in a very short amount of time so you don’t need to be Shakespeare, but anything you can do to catch their attention will make you stand out.

Conclusion

Probably the most important advice, though, is not to stress yourself out over this. Be sure to get good sleep in the days leading up to it (they say the night before the night before is the most important), and I’d stay away from caffeine on test day; you’ll have enough adrenaline to keep you going without it, and it’ll only make you jittery and need to pee. Make sure you give yourself extra time to get there, you don’t want the added stress of getting caught in traffic and worrying about being late.

Take the GRE seriously and study hard for it, but don’t beat yourself up about it, whether before or after you take it. It is only one aspect of your application and even if you do not do as well as you’d like, it doesn’t prove you’re an idiot–plenty of people have gotten into great programs and excelled in them with less than stellar GRE scores. But it’s not just a hoop to jump through either (or, at least, you shouldn’t treat it as one); it’s a battle you can win.

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¹I actually think my Verbal score is a mistake, though I know how that sounds. According to ETS’s Diagnostic Service, I left the last question on the Verbal Section unanswered, but in fact I finished the section with more than a minute to spare.

What happened was this:  They only give you one minute between sections and I was dying to pee, so when I finished the Verbal section early I chose my last answer and clicked “Next,” but purposely did not click “Confirm”  (as ending the section early doesn’t buy you a longer break; it simply begins it early). I confirmed with the  staff at the testing facility that this was OK to do, and they assured me that the program automatically records your answer for whatever question you are on when time expires, even if you do not click “Next” or “Confirm.” The GRE prep books I have say the same thing, and in fact suggest that if you are running out of time you should click an answer to the final question before trying to solve it, just in case time expires–apparently leaving a question unanswered hurts your score more than a wrong answer does.

After the test was over I was suspicious of my score and so asked another staff member about this issue, and he also assured me that “even if the entire computer crashes before you click Next, it will still give you credit for your answer.” I took his word for it and just figured I’d overestimated how well I’d done, but the diagnostic clearly shows that my final answer was not recorded (it just shows that I spent extra time on the last question), so it appears both the staff and the prep books were wrong on that–and I would urge you not to try the same thing, no matter how badly you need to pee. I emailed ETS about the issue, but I seriously doubt they’re going to help me–I’ll update if they do.

The worst of it, though, is that the next section on the test–the one I was trying so hard not to be late for–turned out to be the unscored “Research” section. And there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

C.S. Lewis in The Grand Miracle (you’ll have to excuse the gendered language):

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books, Thus… if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last think he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said…. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some of the modern books on Platonism…. [F]irsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring then secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. (pg. 122)

Both James and Carmen tagged me for Doug Chaplin’s Ten Random Beliefs Meme (and all three posted excellent lists of their own!). Here are Doug’s rules:

Post a collection of 10 things you believe, ethical, philosophical or theological. You choose how much to connect them or make them coherent: do you want people to know where you belong, or do you want to mix and match to keep them guessing? I encourage you not to aim for a totally coherent credal statement of faith, and I also encourage you to put one or two in about controversial topics.

If you want, tag three other people whose beliefs you think you’d like to read about.

Here goes:

1. I believe God created the universe and everything in it, but neither Genesis nor anything else in the Bible tells us how God did so.
2. I believe the scientific method is the most effective means of overcoming bias and expanding our understanding of the natural world, but it is not foolproof and it does not tell us everything worth knowing.
3. I believe that everything good–and a fair bit that’s evil–begins with love, but all of it points to the God who is love.
4. I believe that representation, not replacement, is the heart of Christian theology, but most Christians seem to disagree. Jesus did not die and rise again so that we would not have to; he died and rose so that we would as well.
5. I believe faith without works is dead, but I have a much easier time with the faith part than the works part. Faith is less about believing the right things, and more about trusting your whole life to the one who gave it to you–which is easier to say than to do.
6. I believe good and evil are objective–that some things are just plain wicked whether anyone recognizes it or not– but whether we can know the right thing to do in any particular situation is an open question.
7. I believe that fundamentalists come in all sorts, and they are all out of their minds, but they are people too. Sanity requires balance and charity, including towards those on the extreme fringes.
8. I believe lives and beliefs are most directly shaped by stories–our own and those of others–, but I don’t think we pay nearly enough attention to the stories we enjoy.
9. I believe free will is the most important gift God has given us, but most of us are too content to go with the flow.
10. I believe we must always accept the possibility that we might be wrong, but that we should not live in fear of it happening.

I tag: Timothy, Richard, Jeremy and anyone else who would like to play.

Daniel and Tonya at Hebrew and Greek Reader are hosting this month’s Biblical Studies Carnival. It includes my Introduction to the Gospel of John, and also what may be the most disturbing picture of “Adam and Eve” that I have ever seen. Seriously, where did you find that, and why–oh, why?!–did you post it?

Be sure to listen to the whole at-bat.

UPDATE: Fixed the link.

From 9. Image copyright Focus Features

Wil McCarthy posted an interesting article today on SciFi Wire asking whether mysticism is replacing science in science fiction. He focuses mostly on 9 and 2012 (though the latter barely seems like science fiction anyway), but the point could easily be made from a host of other recent offerings, especially SciFi’s own Battlestar Galactica. McCarthy seems to think this is a bad thing, and I admit some of his points are good, for instance:

[I]t’s more than a little annoying to see Roland Emmerich [2012] at it again, with bright people like Tim Burton [9] following close behind, pushing the opinion that our civilization went horribly wrong at the Industrial Revolution, and the only way to restore its balance is to retreat all the way to the Middle Ages, or even the Bronze Age.

Science is the cause of all our woes and the solution to none! Only mysticism can save us! Emmerich can’t be dumb enough to believe this himself, or he’d be holed up in a Tibetan monastery, not flitting between luxury homes in L.A., N.Y.C, Stuttgart and London. Bronze-age technology could not feed seven billion people, so who gets to decide who lives and dies?

Of course, he is right that science is not our enemy, but neither is it our savior. For the most part, I welcome this renewed interest in mysticism, and science fiction’s growing recognition that science alone cannot solve all our problems. It was precisely its willingness to engage with such religious ideas that made Battlestar so interesting, and maddening, and continues to add depth to LOST and other recent science fiction. Thus, to me, the “mystical” aspects McCarthy notes in 9 (and to a lesser degree, 2012) make them more appealing rather than less. I want to see a mature science fiction that acknowledges the existence of the soul.

More than this, with many of the commenters over on his article, I have to laugh that McCarthy is bemoaning a shift from science to mysticism in the official magazine of the newly renamed “SyFy” channel, which has itself been steadily replacing its strict science fiction with garbage like Ghost Hunters and low-budget horror films. Seriously?

Religious themes are not the problem, ill-considered dichotomies between “science” and “mysticism” are, whether they appear in the latest blockbuster, or magazine editorials.

Daniel McClellan tagged me with the Bible Movie Meme started by Matt at Broadcast Depth. It asks you to name your three favorite “Bible movies” and one that you would like to see made. The trouble is, like most movies based on books I love, I’ve been disappointed in most of the “Bible movies” I’ve seen.

I was pretty deeply moved by The Passion of the Christ when I first saw it, but now it just seems like a distortion of the gospel, and I’m afraid I’m one of those who finds it subtly anti-Semitic. It’s all in the camera angles and costuming, which badly contrast the noble and powerful Romans with the lowly and conniving Jews (see the left sidebar here to see what I mean, though you can ignore the over-the-top review it accompanies). There are exceptions, of course; a few Jews (mostly women) are noble and kind, and the Roman soldiers who beat Jesus are grotesque, but these are not enough to change the general impression.

There have been a few animated “bible movies” that I’ve enjoyed, including many in the Veggie Tales series, and I seem to remember The Jesus Film as a relatively good, if bland, reenactment of the Gospel of Luke. Still, my favorite films tend to embody biblical themes rather than tell biblical stories. They focus on justice, self-sacrifice and resurrection, and may even include biblical allusions and imagery, but they are not about the Bible. The Shawshank Redemption springs to mind.

That said, the Bible is such a rich source there is plenty there that could make some excellent films. In particular, I’d like to see a good, complex treatment of the Maccabean revolt or the life of David. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE could make a moving tragedy, and the story of Esther an interesting court drama. More than any of those, however, I’ve actually thought quite a bit about how good a story could be told about the Syro-Ephraimite War and the Assyrian conquest of Palestine described, a bit unevenly, in 2 Kings 16-20 and 2 Chronicles 28-32. It boasts better outside support than most such biblical accounts, and is filled with strong drama and deep ambiguities.

As I understand the story (my Hebrew Bible colleagues can correct me), the Northern tribes of Israel (Ephraim) joined forces with the Syrians and other local powers and launched a particularly brutal invasion of the Southern tribes of Judah. The Judean King Ahaz gets desperate and appeals to the newly dominant Assyrian Empire for aid, and they respond by laying waste to the Syro-Ephraimite coalition and making vassals of the whole region. The next King of Israel then conspires with the Egyptians to rebel, gets caught, and Northern Israel is destroyed and deported. Not to be outdone, a few years later Ahaz’s son Hezekiah also conspires with Egypt, and Judah is invaded as well. Egypt, once again, fails to offer sufficient support, the rebellion is crushed, and the Assyrians take every fortified city in Judah except Jerusalem. The brutality of the conquest is well illustrated by a wall relief found in the ruins of the Assyrian capitol (now kept at the British Museum), which depicts the fall of one of those cities: Lachish. You can see some pictures of the relief here.

The details and chronology of what happens next are a bit fuzzy. According to 2 Kings, Hezekiah then agrees to pay tribute, but Sennacherib sends an envoy with a brilliantly insulting demand for surrender, and the prophet Isaiah tells Hezekiah to stop relying on Egypt and trust in God for deliverance. Hezekiah then goes into the Temple to pray and that night a plague of some sort destroys Sennacherib’s army. Sennacharib’s own account, naturally enough, mentions no such slaughter, but does suggest an unexpectedly abrupt end to the campaign, and admits that Jerusalem was not captured. It claims tribute was sent later, after Sennacherib had left.

It’s not clear that you can take any of these accounts entirely at face value, but there’s certainly enough to give fertile ground for a good film (or novel… if only I could write fiction and had a couple years with nothing else to do!). I’d probably tell the story from the perspective of a politically-minded court official who lived through the whole thing as an advisor to both Ahaz and Hezekiah. Perhaps his home was destroyed by the Syro-Ephraimite invasion and he encouraged Ahaz to enlist the Assyrian help in defeating them. I’d have him dismiss Isaiah as a fool and urge Hezekiah to pursue a similar alliance with Egypt, only to see that blow up in his face when Assyria invaded in force. Then, when everything looks dark–for Judah and our hero–I’d give him some heroically self-sacrificial role in Jerusalem’s rescue. Not sure how I’d handle the plague though.

I think it could make an engaging story of political intrigue, compromise and failed hopes, and I’d give it a strong undercurrent of faith and redemption. There are also some interesting things that could be done with the mythology of the warrior god and his Temple, the messianic hopes surrounding Hezekiah (cf. Isaiah 6-7), and much more… I did say I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, didn’t I?

UPDATE: Just realized I forgot to tag anyone! Since I suspect by now most bibliobloggers have already been tagged, I’ll go with non-bibliobloggers Carmen, Ryan, Matt, David Kern and Jeffrey Overstreet. What are your favorite (or least favorite) Bible-based films, and/or what biblical story would you most like to see made into a film and why?

Does it make me insensitive that I find this hilarious?

HT: James McGrath and Scott Bailey, the latter of whom draws out some interesting points about the nature of interpretation.

My GRE is scheduled for tomorrow morning, so hopefully after that I’ll get back to more regular posting. I feel like I have prepared relatively well, though I haven’t gone as far as some. Today I’m reviewing, taking one more practice test, and trying very hard to remember this:

Those who approach the GRE as an obstacle and who rail against the necessity of taking it usually don’t fare as well as those who see the GRE as an opportunity to show off the reading and reasoning skills that graduate schools are looking for. Those who look forward to doing battle with the GRE–or, at least, who enjoy the opportunity to distinguish themselves from the rest of the applicant pack–tend to score better than those who resent or dread it. (from Kaplan’s GRE Primer: Live Online 2010 Edition, pg. 289)