Some Personal Updates on Academic Pursuits and Future Projects (10/2014)

Moving fast and steadily towards the end of the year reminds me of all the various projects I have going on. I wanted to depart from my normal topical blogs and share a little about what I am currently working through.

In late August, I attended a conference at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where I presented a paper on analyses of pluralism, exclusivism, and synthesis in virtual world environments (which by that I mean, video games). My hope is to turn this paper into a journal article, and the conference organizers have informed us that Cambridge University Press has expressed interest by inviting those participants at this conference to submit their work for consideration.

At the mid-point of October, I enrolled in one continuing education course on the study of Hinduism through the Oxford Centre of Hindu Studies. The third part of my educational odyssey is to enter a program in Buddhist Studies (I was already accepted into the program through South Wales), but this is at least two years away, depending upon whether I do my PhD work first.

I am still working to get through the final edits on my Bonhoeffer manuscript for publication with Wipf & Stock. Finishing this work has been complicated by work schedules and, quite frankly, a number of irons in the fire, including course work at Towson University, a full-time job, and family obligations. I am hoping to fast-track this, if I haven't already seen some daylight on this, by January 2015, when I should have some more free time.

Another proposal of mine, this time on the problematic criteria of inclusion at Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations memorial, was accepted for a conference on Transnational Holocaust Memory. The conference is at the University of Leeds in January 2015. The paper has already been written, but would require some additional editorial work.

I  recently submitted a proposal for an academic anthology on a topic from the realm of science fiction. The organizer responded that the proposal was "very interesting." And yes, I am being deliberately vague until I feel I can say more.

There are two other conferences for which I have submitted proposals and hope to hear something soon. Both would leverage my interests in Jewish theology and ethics.

At the end of December, I official close the course work portion of the degree work I am doing in Jewish Studies at Towson University. The final option will be thesis work. I am looking forward to this.

Finally, I would also like to present at AAR's annual regional meeting in March since it is at a college campus in my area. Last March, I presented a paper on Bonhoeffer and his ideas on responsible marriage with regard to homosexual ideology. I was hoping to do a follow up to this paper, as the first paper only touched upon responses to the social institution of marriage from his writing. A second paper would look deeper at the issue by suggesting consistent theological themes that support the idea that homosexual marriage is responsible marriage according to Bonhoeffer's corpus of theological writing.

I would admit that I am a very non-traditional student and academic. Without a PhD degree at this point, I am still doing much of what would be expected of a doctoral candidate or post-doctoral student with regard to publishing. I'm sure there are some out there that would find this approach unorthodox, but provided my work speaks for me, I really have no problem fending off this kind of tactical, traditionally ingrained criticism. If at any point, I found myself completely inept or insufficient to do this kind of work in concert with my course work, I think I would pull back. But the level of competition among graduate students and doctoral students requires that individuals publish and immerse themselves in these kinds of opportunities when and where they are available. I have faced rejection, and I'm certain there is more to come, but I strive constantly to put my best effort into everything I do. And as an interfaith theologian, my non-traditional interests in immersive study of traditions other than my own I hope makes me more marketable than a candidate who takes a more traditional path, who may be called to teach a world religions course but cannot honestly say he or she has the acumen to go to a peer conference and speak into one of those traditions on anything other than a basic level. In the end, it is all about credibility.

Romans 5:7 as Responsa to Jewish Perceptions of Martyrdom

I don’t remember ever seeing much attention given to Romans 5:7. I tend to think there are two reasons for this; one is historical and the other practical. From a historical point-of-view, Paul’s line about individuals dying for one another seems to be betrayed in the centuries following him when Christians at various times within the Empire were marched to their deaths.

The willingness of Christians to die for one another was one of the reasons Marcus Aurelius was said to stop his own persecutions. As for us future readers, the idea of dying for one’s faith seems absurd in a time when our world is open to religious pluralism so that when it happens, we are offended and appalled. To be fair to Paul, he did not have either of these contexts.

So the question opens up: to what might have Paul been referring to when he commented about the superior moral character of Christ whose self-sacrifice was so grand? You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. – Romans 5:6-8 These lines break up the theological argument Paul is making about justification by faith and appears as a much more blunt characterization of human beings. It may be a general opinion about the state of humanity. Yet, Paul relates his letter in the context of the Israel and is writing to a community of Christians where Jewish Christians were experiencing prejudice within and persecution without.

For someone like myself who finds value in the historical-critical method, one might reasonably imagine that Paul’s wisdom comes from his years of rabbinic training. So what might have been a rabbinic view on self-sacrifice? Jesus’ death was not only outrageous to many Jews because they could not imagine a dying Messiah, but also because the idea of dying in Judaism to demonstrate one’s faith is contrary to the call to life and self-preservation. Unlike in Christianity, the desire for heaven in Judaism has never been as theologically robust or necessary. Living in the present life was much more an acceptance of Israel’s covenant with God then the promise of the life thereafter. This traditionally has problematized martyrdom in Judaism. While few instances of martyrdom come up, for example in tractate Sanhedrin and the pseudo-canonical Maccabees, these are very much confined. Paul’s rejection of the call to martyrdom stands with these above examples. Only idolatry, sexual sin, and desecration for the sake of desecration of torah were seen as impermissible, so to allow oneself to die instead of violating these precepts was an incredibly pious act. Paul’s placing of Jesus’ crucifixion as an incredibly pious act despite that those hung by a tree were considered criminals, murderers, and heretics must have seemed audacious to Jews trying to read this. The theology of life in Judaism for a people constantly confronted with death was replaced by a theology that started with death to bring about life in another place.

That Jews saw the kingdom of God as a physical kingdom then was not just rampant Messianic hope of physical dominion but also supported their whole theological understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. The promise of a physical messianic reign validated their call to stand in this life. ***This Jewish ethics of survival is important and can be found in a few other places, such as the John 11:50 verse: “You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” (see my previous blog post “His Blood Be Upon Us – An Alternate Reading of Jewish Responsa.”)

How Buddhism Informs one’s Christianity: How to Pray

The quintessential passage on prayer in the Christian tradition can be found in Matthew 6:5-15.

Here Jesus looks out on his followers and says “when you pray…pray like this” and then proceeds to give them the formula for the Our Father (Pater Noster) prayer that so many Christians know.

Growing up as a Roman Catholic and then in my twenties falling in with a nondenominational church in the Protestant tradition, I have had the opportunity to experience two radically different approaches to prayer. My Roman Catholicism made it a token recitation and a mark of being in and a part of the community. My nondenominational church never recited it, said it was meant merely as a model, and encouraged us to avoid such vain repetitions because we should always pray in our own intimate individualistic way to God. What I missed in both of these traditions is not what to pray but how to pray. This is perhaps the most significant blind spot in Christian ecclesiology. And even where we would expect to find answers, teaching one to pray is a foreign notion in scripture. We might look, for example, at Paul and Jesus who assumed that we should know how to pray and appear to be confident in our ability to carry out a proper prayer. And why shouldn’t they be? Both Paul and Jesus were Jews. Prayer was second nature and meant for communal consumption. Most encounters with prayer in the Bible are public. Yes, I know Jesus tells us to pray in private to our heavenly father but in context of Matthew 6 it was a response to situations in which we are tempted to make a show of our prayer. Even the Psalms, which suggest in our modern interpretation some of the more heartfelt and intimate prayers of the earlier writers were actually meant as congregational prayers.

Public or private, however, there is no instruction on how to pray. Through the years I have heard more sermons on what to say and ask for during prayer then I can count. Still, when I was faced with how to pray, the practice always remained left to me, though I admit much of what my community prayed and the words they used found their way into my personal prayers. And so this leads me to the topic of this article. Buddhism with its meditative practices and Christianity with its emphasis on public and private prayer may be worlds apart, but, I would add not incompatible. The notion of meditation, which is the clearing of the mind to focus oneself, seems to me an indispensible component of one’s prayer life. The writer of 2 Corinthians (let’s assume Paul) hints at something like this. The kenotic mind (or the empty mind if I may call it this) is the one that casts down or brings every thought into captivity to obey Christ. Paul seems to be saying that when one finds his mind straying while he is in prayer, he is to take control of those thoughts. (2 Co 10:5) But how? Paul answers : by bringing them into obedience to Christ. How does a thought become obedient to Christ? When I was in a nondenominational church, I often referred to this verse by Paul. In prayer, I would often fall asleep or my mind would stray to the events of the day. I would easily lose focus. My mind was always in motion. And so I applied Paul’s formula. I would invoke the name of Christ to capture those thoughts that easily derailed my concentration, even the ugly ones. I would stand up and walk around, keep my eyes open, everything based upon personal experimentation. But it never quite worked and I always found myself back in the same place.

For the Buddhist, the very act of praying is given as much, if not more attention, then what is being said. Clearing one’s mind during Sādhanā is a discipline that is so integral to the Buddhist frame of mind, that the recitation of the sacred syllable ॐ is often considered an afterthought. Yet, there is something important here, and it communicates that preparation, frame of mind, peace of mind, presence, and one’s physical being are as important if not more than what is being said. We know from the gospels that Jesus had a problem with the amount of words being offered in prayer. This is particularly why he encourages people into their prayer closets, to avoid the temptation to put on a show. I think it is instructive to remember that prayers were not performed silently in the ancient world, and the first intimation of silent prayer does manifest in Christianity until the mid-fourth century when St. Augustine stumbles upon Ambrose praying in silence. That Augustine found this behavior odd at least suggests that even two centuries later many Christians must have been praying out loud. One’s prayer closet was suggested by Jesus not as an act of private prayer where one silently projects his prayers to God, but as a way to protect the genuineness of one’s prayer against the temptations that may come with seeking out favor or public approval. It most likely continued that people were praying out loud and to suggest anything else is a modern interpolation.

One can learn from the practical significance of Buddhist meditation techniques. Breathing, Vajra positioning of the body, visualization, even verbalizations that do not translate into comprehensible language (think of Glossolalia in the Pentecostal tradition) are ways of supporting spiritual worship. All these things may deepen rather than hinder a profound experience of prayer in any tradition.

Jeremiah 1:5 is not a Refutation of Abortion – It is about Working in Clay!

Clay in the potter’s hand...We’ve heard it before…We've sung it. But do we understand what we are affirming?

Modern exegetes like to convince us that this simply describes the act of creation performed in a society where pottery and agriculture were primary forms of commerce. Such an explanation would explain all those farming allusions Jesus makes in his parables, right? After all, if we're not dealing in figurative speech, then the contention that the Judeo-Christian witness has universal application available to all becomes a little narrow. But perhaps it is not correct to assign this to the figurative language bin before we recognize that there was a very real primitive belief in the Near East that man was formed from the earth. We all recognize this in Genesis 1. But what we often fail to recognize is that the Hebrew word selection used is not arbitrary and that when we see similar words find their way into other passages of the Bible, we need take heed. What was the author getting at? Why did he use a word? Was it because only this was available to him? Or was it something more?

Of course there are cases like this: The word dag for fish in Hebrew has no equivalent. Social anthropologists and linguistics believe this is simply because the ancient Jews were not primarily maritime peoples, say, like their cousins the Philistines. But when it comes to sheep, there are multiple words! That’s because the Hebrews were shepherds. When our modern Christian apologists take verses like Jeremiah 1:5 to report how the prophet was alluding to his political mind on anti-abortion, they need to realize that the yasar (יָצַר) the writer uses for the word “form” may very well be connected to the primitive usage of the word. One good reason for this is because we see words like tohu wabohu in Genesis appear in other places in the Bible when the concern is about cosmology. There were certainly other cognates of the word “to make, to form, or to create.” But יָצַר has a distinctive meaning that is often connected to formations of pottery. Go read Jeremiah 18! The clay motif clearly goes back to Adam. God formed Adam from the dirt (adamah/ אדמה). (So the next time someone says their name is dirt, say “why yes, this is true!”) Of course, the authors knew how babies were born.

So to say this baby was formed in clay would have been absurd. I think what Jeremiah is doing here is connecting the concept of birth with the first act of human creation (the forming of Adam from clay). It was a way of seeing oneself in the ebb and flow of sacred history and to affirm that Jeremiah’s generation was connected with Adam’s generation, that God is a faithful God, and continues his work in creation.