Anxiety and the Fall

Some years back for a course I was taking in psychiatry we were assigned to regularly visit a local mental hospital. The first and second floors were “day programs” and the third floor was the locked unit, for those not safe enough to be let out. I will never forget the intensity of the cigarette smoke: I’ve since learned that many schizophrenics self-medicate with nicotine. Also unforgettable was the look in the eyes of the many people wandering the bare rooms of the third floor. But for this post, I’d like to talk about what a psychiatrist had on a chalkboard in a side room for a group therapy session. It was a quote from Kierkegaard:

Process-ease and other Linguistic Pet Peeves

I’m not a prescriptivist when it comes to language. That is, when a foreign-speaking missionary comes home from a mission correcting everyone’s grammar, people are correct (imo) to be turned off by it (this usually assumes, as prescriptivists have throughout time, that English should work like Latin, Greek, or some other language). This “correct” English itself would have been considered a bastardization not too terribly long ago. Split infinitives don’t bother me (though I try to really not use them), and I’m even okay with everyone bringing their books. You’ll hear me gleeflully postpositioning prepositions, at least when appropriate to the audience I’m speaking to, and I’ve certainly transitioned to verbing nouns.

But there are some things that I’d like to correct, for reasons other than to preserve grammar.*

Public enemy #1: “Processeez”:

How Old Was Jesus?

Doesn’t everyone know that Jesus was 30 when he started his ministry, and 33 when he was killed? This seems to be common knowledge, right? Well, sort of. But not everyone agrees.

Let’s begin with the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke). The only clear statement concerning Jesus’s age comes from Luke 3:23, which says that Jesus was “about 30 years of age” when he began his ministry, following his baptism by John. This obviously lacks some precision. How old Jesus was when he died is similarly ambiguous. According to the Synoptics, all of the events described in Jesus’ life can easily fit into just one year. When quoting Isaiah, Jesus invokes the “acceptable year of hte Lord” (Lk 4:19), which some Christians interpreted as referring to his single year of ministry. However, there is no attempt to give an accurate chronology of Jesus’ life in these gospels, so we shouldn’t expect precision. For other difficulties regarding the chronology of Jesus’ life, see Mogget’s previous post on Jesus’ birth and death.

The Danger of the [Bracket]

The [bracket] has been the focus of some rather heated debates in the study of religion in recent years, and poses a particular challenge for Latter-day Saints. This debate was typified in a Harvard Divinity Bulletin exchange between Stephen Prothero of Boston University and Robert Orsi (et al.) who was then at Harvard, but has now moved to Northwestern. Prothero criticized Orsi for his methodological choice to “bracket” the truth claims of the religions he studied. He explains, “I have come to believe that the endless bracketing that I have always taken as my charge is viable only as long as our work exists in the splendid isolation of the Ivory Tower. In the rough and tumble of the real world, it is not possible, and likely not desirable.” He described the process of Religious Studies scholars who did not say what they really thought was a “good or a bad thing” as a “cat-and-mouse game.”

A Religious Studies Major at BYU Pt. II

In Pt I we looked at developing a curriculum and focused on “core classes”. That discussion is still on-going. This post will examine the develoment of an Introduction to Religious Studies course (which will be part of the core classes), and a required theories course which majors will take during the Sophomore (and perhaps Junior) year. The issue of language requirements was also raised so let’s toss that into the mix here.

Dei Verbum: The Word of God in Modern Times

Yesterday’s post was on Vatican II as a background to Dei Verbum. Here you will see how the Catholics talk about integrating critical methods with the pastoral mission of the Church. This is a very interesting topic, but I am assured that students at BYU would find this scary and useless (See comment #30) so if you came out of that institution you’ll want to read the rest of this with your eyes closed and the blankets over your head.

Although pretty much all of the documents of Vatican II made extensive use of scripture (the result of the research directed by Divino), the teaching of the Council on scripture is found in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation and called Dei Verbum. This document has six chapters, five of which we’ll cover today.

Vatican II and Modernity

Last time we met, Pius XII had published Divino, and set the Catholics on a glide path for a more productive encounter with modern life. I should emphasize that it’s a Catholic approach to modern life, so you won’t be finding a retreat from Catholic positions on faith and morals. But you will see that they are far more engaged than they had been.

Before we get into Vatican II, there’s one more event I’d like to mention because it gets at the relationship between exegesis and theology. Before Divino, and for quite some time afterward, many Catholic theologians used the Bible as a sourcebook for proof texts to create theologies that were often rather independent of the Bible. In the year preceding Vatican II, Karl Rahner, a theologian, tried to do something about that. His article was called “Exegese and Dogmatik” and it discussed the roles of exegetes and theologians. He used the formal “Ihr” (you) to address the exegetes and the familiar “Du” when speaking to his fellow theologians. To the exegetes he said that they must remember that they are Catholic exegetes, and that they must attend to “the Catholic principles governing the relationship between exegesis and dogmatic theology” and that they needed a more exact knowledge of scholastic theology. To his fellow theologians, however, he wrote:

You know less about exegesis than you should. As as dogmatic theologian you rightly claim to be allowed to engage in the work of exegesis and biblical theology in your own right, and not jsut to accept the results of the exegetical work of the specialist…But then you must perform the work of exegesis in the way that it has to be done today and not in the way you used to do it in the good old days…Your exegesis in dogmatic theology must be convincing also to the specialist in exegesis.

Among Catholics theology tends to be more highly regarded than exegesis. As is often the case, when an exegete must point out that some theological position is based on acontextual or ahistorical readings, or even just plain wrong, folks sometimes think that the exegete is attacking the Church. Rahner’s words came as a bit of a shock, but they were part of what was in the minds of those who worked on issues pertaining to scripture in Vatican II.

A Religious Studies Major at BYU Pt. I

Okay, I know it will probably never happen, but…

The Shift Toward Modernity

Today’s important news is that I ate my first ripe tomato of the 2008 season last night. Now we can get back to the Catholics. When last we left off in this little exercise, Pius X had dealt rather, er…firmly…, with Modernism. In addition to excommunicating many of the Modernists, he condemned much of their thought. He also required the clergy to take an anti-Modernist oath. These folks seem to have complied, but not so enthusiastically, and once Pius X passed away things began to change.

So. Pius X was succeeded by Benedict XV in 1914. Benedict XV had been made an archbishop by Pius X, but he was also the target of a report rendered by one the “vigilance” committees. Under his pontificate, some of the worst excesses of the anti-Modernist movement were ended. Pius XI followed Benedict XV in 1922. His attention was pretty well captured by the need to deal with Fascism and Communism. Mit brennender Sorge called Nazism a new form of paganism and Divini Redemptoris condemned Communism. His successor was Pius XII (1939-1958). When folks discuss the response of Christianity to the Holocaust, it is this gentleman who often comes up at some point in the conversation.

And here we again pick up the story of how Catholics deal with scripture…

The End of Modernism?

When last we met to discuss the world of Catholic Biblical scholarship, Pius X had just excommunicated Alfred Loisy in an effort to suppress Modernism…

What else did Pius X do about Modernism? In addition to excommunicating Loisy, et. al., he called the Catholic faithful to reject Modernism root and branch. The first encyclical published was Lamentabili sane exitu, dated July 3, 1907. It listed 65 propositions, taken mostly from Loisy’s work but also including ideas from Tyrrell and a few others. What follows is from the preamble. Notice the negative evaluation of the idea that Biblical scholarship should go beyond the efforts of the “blessed past,” as also the condemnation of the idea that the doctrines of the Church change and develop:

With truly lamentable results, our age, casting aside all restraint in its search for the ultimate causes of things, frequently pursues novelties so ardently that it rejects the legacy of the human race. Thus it falls into very serious errors, which are even more serious when they concern sacred authority, the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, and the principal mysteries of Faith. The fact that many Catholic writers also go beyond the limits determined by the Fathers and the Church herself is extremely regrettable. In the name of higher knowledge and historical research (they say), they are looking for that progress of dogmas which is, in reality, nothing but the corruption of dogmas.

Then Pius X condemned 65 specific points, a few of which I have reproduced here. It’s pretty safe to say that now, one hundred years later, most of what Pius X condemned is accepted, albeit with some degree of nuance: