Beyond Comprehension

I like to talk about "what's coming" in terms of near-future technologies, and sometimes my "victims" think I'm nuts.  I don't think so, naturally, and it is postings like the one from CNN concerning the American scientist Ray Kurzweil entitled, "Futurist: We'll someday accept computers as human," that form the basis of my conviction that the world is going to change dramatically and relatively soon.  Medical science will learn how to lengthen our life spans by hundreds of years.  Nanotechnologies will give whole new post-industrial processes as well as products.  There is going to be growing interest in what we might call "spiritual technologies" such as meditation.  It isn't clear how all of this will work out and who will benefit from it, but a new world is coming and fast.

If this subject interests you, I recommend that you spend a few minutes viewing a video Kurzweil put out in 2009 called, "The Singularity of Ray Kurzweil" (here).

Churches remain one of society's institutions most resistant to change.  What is likely to happen is that while Christians continue to fight over how old the Earth is and whether or not there was a "historical Adam," the world will simply leave them in the dust.  The church will become an increasingly small retro curiosity.  How will faith in Christ be expressed in the 22nd century?  Will we make it that far?  These are questions worth pondering.

Recommended Viewing: N. T. Wright

Earlier this year, Dr. N. T. Wright, well-known biblical scholar, delivered a lecture at Calvin College entitled, "How God Became King: Why We've All Misunderstood the Gospels."  The lecture lasts for one hour, and readers can view it (here) and read a brief synopsis of it (here).  Wright does an excellent job of putting the four gospels' portraits of Christ into their original context, and in the process he argues that scholars and church folks of all stripes pretty much miss the original point those portraits.  They fail to see the historical and political realities of the actual Jesus of Nazareth.  Wright is a good public speaker and delivers a persuasive presentation of his views.  It is worth the time.

Jesus' Family - Mark 3:31-35 (xlvi)

Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice

This posting is the 46th in a series (originally written in 1998) looking at the Gospel of Mark from the perspective of a historian. The first posting in this series is (here).

Members of Jesus' family arrived at his home (3:20), but they couldn't get in because of the large crowds. So they sent in word to Jesus that they were there. Jesus took the opportunity to teach the crowd about the meaning of family.

Did this event take place? There's no way of knowing. The whole passage (3:31-35) is vintage Mark. No details. We don't know what happened afterwards. It's hard to believe that Jesus ignored his mother. What did they talk about? How did Mary express her motherly worries? How did Jesus respond? I think that we can take it, on the basis of Mark 3:20, that Jesus' family was deeply concerned about him and may have shared the fear that he'd become mentally unstable. It seems possible that they'd then taken the trouble to visit him. But we've no way of knowing any of this for certain, and it is just as likely that Mark took some fragment of historical memory and wedded it to Jesus' views on the nature of the family.

The interview the author took his data from might have gone like this: Informant, "Not everybody was so fired up about Jesus. Lots of people thought he was a little strange, maybe even mad. The big shot Pharisees thought he'd been possessed by some kind of an evil spirit." Researcher: "How widespread were these feelings?" Informant: "Pretty widespread I'd say. Even his family worried about him. There was that time when they came to see him." Researcher: "What did they say? What happened?" Informant: "I don't really know. Jesus was teaching a bunch of people, and we were kinda surprised that he didn't just get up and go see his mother. I think they did go off and talk awhile. But, I can't remember exactly. I just remember that they came to see him. They probably wanted him to go back to Nazareth and stop stirring things up so much. The Pharisees were gettin' pretty hot about Jesus by then. You should ask Peter about it. If anybody knows, he does."

Crazy Exorcist - Mark 3:20-21(xlv)

Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice

This posting is the 45th in a series (originally written in 1998) looking at the Gospel of Mark from the perspective of a historian. The first posting in this series is (here).

Although we have no dates, it is clear that Mark contains a chronology of events. By the time of this passage (Mark 3:20-21), Jesus' popularity among many was increasing even as the over class was increasingly opposed to him. Jesus' popularity is underscored by the fact that the crowd that assembled at Jesus' home (TEV, RSV, JB, Goodspeed, & AV as a variant reading all state that Jesus "went home") made such great demands that both he and his disciples "had no time to eat." (TEV) Even with the addition of the Twelve as preachers and exorcists, Jesus' popularity had become an even greater burden than before.

Jesus' reputation, however, was a mixed one. There were those who were convinced that Jesus had gone mad. Mark, typically, gives us no details as to what caused them to think this way. Perhaps his teaching was so outlandish that many couldn't accept it. Or, again, it may have been Jesus' penchant for attacking powerful interest groups that caused some to doubt his sanity. In any event, the rumor spread that Jesus had become mentally unbalance until it reached Jesus' family in Nazareth.

It is significant that neither Matthew nor Luke contain this passage. Only Mark reports the impression that Jesus was crazy. His purpose in doing so might have been to reinforce even further the idea that Jesus' divine identity wasn't apparent to those around him. Those who knew Jesus saw him only as a man. I'd like to return to this point in the next posting and speculate on why the author of Mark may have been so insistent that Jesus wasn't obviously anything more than a man.

A Milestone Worth Noting

According to a recent news article (here), the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer appear in a print edition—this for the first time since it was founded in 1768.  As of this month, the Britannica will be available only online.  Evidently, the emergence of online encyclopedias in the early 1990s has driven printed encyclopedias out of business, and the Britannica has managed to survive only because it adapted itself to the virtual world fairly early on.  This is just one more bit of proof that the digital age has become dominant almost in the bat of an eyelash.  The computer has changed everything.  I suppose it is now only a matter of time before I am going to have to give in, buy an iPad, and begin to read books on the thing.  As one who grew up in a different era, the digital age is still a bit strange and at times even off-putting.  There's no way we would want to go back to typewriters, mimeograph machines, and stand-alone libraries, no way in the world.  But, this is a weird age for those of us who grew up without those things, and it is only the tip of the iceberg given all that is coming next in the years to come.

Anyway, I thought you all would want to know that the "real world" Britannica is no more.

The Most Astounding Fact

Quoting from the YouTube blurb accompanying the following clip,"Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked by a reader of TIME magazine, "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?" This is his answer."  A brief comment follows, but watch the clip first.

Something is happening that the bombast of the radical atheists and radical biblical literalists tends to obscure.  There is a spiritual convergence taking place between science and faith.  Some scientists are discovering that their studies lead them to the edges of spirituality.  They may not believe in the personal God of the theistic religions, but they sense the Something that lies within and beyond physical reality.  They are discovering that physical reality is not at all what it seemed to be just decades ago.  They are learning that human life is not just bones and muscles and tissue.  It is also spiritual.  It is defined by the human spirit.  For us as Christians it requires only a small step to see in the human spirit the presence of the Holy Spirit and to believe that just as the atoms within us are part of the Universe so the spirit in us is connected to the Universe and its Creator.  For us, Jesus Christ, is the key instrument—the singlemost important lens—through which we encounter the Spirit, the Universe, and the Creator.  Amen.

A Jewish View of the New Testament

The Presbyterian News Service posted an article entitled, "New book explores a Jewish view of the New Testament," which reports on a newly published book, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, published by Oxford University Press.  I haven't seen the book and can't recommend it, but it sounds like a useful tool for those who want to dig deeper into the original social and cultural setting of the New Testament.  FYI.

Spirit-less Gospel -Mark 3:28-30 (xliv)

Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice

This posting is the 44th in a series (originally written in 1998) looking at the Gospel of Mark from the perspective of a historian. The first posting in this series is (here).

Mark 3:28-30 is a difficult passage. I don't really see the connection between Jesus' parable about Beelzebul and this statement about the Holy Spirit. The author of Luke, evidently, also didn't see any connection because he removed the statement about the Holy Spirit (Luke 12:10) from the story about Beelzebul (11:14-23).

What is striking, however, is how infrequently Mark makes reference to the Holy Spirit. The only time the Holy Spirit is related to Jesus in a clear manner is found in the story of the baptism (Mark 1:8). Mark's parenthetical explanation suggests that Jesus was charging his enemies with attacking the Holy Spirit when they accused him of being him possessed. They were confusing the work of the Holy Spirit with the consequences of demon possession. But the whole thing isn't that clear. After this passage, Mark refers to the Holy Spirit only twice, once in connection with David (12:36) and once in relation to the disciples (13:11). This is in marked contrast to Luke and the Acts, where the Holy Spirit is centrally present. Some commentators consider the Acts to be nothing less than a history of the work of the Holy Spirit. We can only conclude that the Holy Spirit isn't very important in Mark and not very important to understanding the person and work of Jesus.

It's not likely that Mark's lack of interest in the Spirit was coincidental. The author, after all, did explicitly associate the Spirit with Jesus' baptism. It's more likely that a close identification of the Spirit with Jesus was out of keeping with the author's purposes. Such an identification would suggest that Jesus had the very divine properties that the author wanted to keep from being obvious or prominent. The human Jesus, so important to Mark, would have been obscured or even lost.

Actions Not Words - Mark 3:22-30 (xliii)

Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice

This posting is the 43rd in a series (originally written in 1998) looking at the Gospel of Mark from the perspective of a historian. The first posting in this series is (here).

Mark's Jesus was an exorcist and healer. Through the first three chapters of Mark, we learn almost nothing directly about Jesus' teachings. What teaching he does give is in the form of refutations of his doubters and enemies. On a larger scale, there's nothing comparable in Mark to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount or Luke's Sermon on the Plain. Jesus is first and foremost an exorcist and only secondarily a teacher. The passage in Mark 3:22-30 reinforces this emphasis on Jesus the exorcist. So closely is he associated with exorcism, that his enemies charge him with being in league with the devil.

The Good News of Jesus Christ wasn't captured essentially in Jesus' words, then, as it was in his actions. The liberation he brought wasn't so much from ignorance as it was from captivity to evil powers, both human and extra-human. If we assume that the author of Mark based his portrayal on primary oral sources, we can conclude that the thing people most remembered about Jesus wasn't his formal teachings. What they remembered most clearly was the dramatic, liberating way in which he healed the under class. He convinced them that God did love them. Some scholars, at least, argue that Jesus gave his teachings in bits and snatches. He never systematized those teachings. Mark certainly doesn't contradict that opinion.

Learning to Speak Sami

Sami Flag (from Wikipedia)

In a recent AP news article entitled, "In Hebrew's revival, a Nordic people see hope," reporter Daniella Cheslow describes the efforts teachers of the Sami language are making in reviving their native tongue.  The Sami (also know as the Lapp) are an indigenous people living in the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.  Cheslow estimates that there are roughly 80,000 to 100,000 Sami of which only about 30,000 speak a Sami language.  According to the the Wikipedia entry, "Sami people," there are ten distinct Sami languages, all of which are endangered.  Cheslow's article reports on a trip made by Sami language teachers to Israel to study the way in which it maintains the Hebrew language in the face of continuing immigration of new people to Israel.  Israeli teaching methods have been studied by other indigenous peoples seeking to save their languages from a slow extinction, including the Welsh.

While the world is painfully aware of the decline in the bio-diversity of our world, most of us are less aware of the continuing loss of linguistic diversity as well.  It was my privilege to work for a time with Karen churches in northern Thailand.  The Karen in Thailand are facing the same decline in the numbers of ethnic Karen who speak Karen.  Only recently has the Thai government allowed the use of Karen as a language of instruction in public schools where the Karen predominate, and there is immense pressure from the larger society to use Thai as one's first language.  Although they learn Karen at home, fewer and fewer young people can read the language and more and more they speak only Thai.

There is more at stake than the loss of just the language.  Language is a primary carrier of culture, and where a language is dying away it is certain that a culture is dying as well—ways of dressing, eating, and living together in a unique society.  Cultural diversity is important because it maintains the richness of human life.  There are thoughts best thought in Karen just as there are thoughts best thought in Thai.  We learn from our differences, and it is just that much harder for us to learn from each other when yet another language dies.  I remember vividly a gathering of Karen local church leaders discussing the decline of the Karen language at which one older participant spoke to the tragedy saying in effect, "Karen is a gift from God, and if we are to be faithful to God we have to save our language."  Amen.