Various Updates on Academic Endeavors

I haven't written anything here for a while, but I'm busy as ever and have been writing voraciously. Here's a look at the irons in the fire:

I'm finishing the third semester of graduate program in Jewish Studies, putting the last touches on a paper on the St. Louis affair of 1939, and coming into exam week.

I recently had an article I developed from a paper I presented at Oxford in April accepted to a peer-review journal and I'm planning to incorporate edits very soon.

I've finally hit the figurative "go" button on my Bonhoeffer manuscript. I expect that it will be published by the first quarter of 2014.

I've sent a proposal for a conference in New York and am awaiting feedback. While I wait, I'm in the process of preparing a second proposal for another conference in Europe.

I was recently inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa, an honors leadership fraternity.

I attended AAR/SBL in Baltimore in late November. A very interesting social experiment. But I attended the two Bonhoeffer sections that I wanted to, and was happy to meet a few of the people in personal I had only encountered in their books.

Finally, I'm awaiting word on a major grant that will allow me the opportunity to explore major Holocaust sites in Europe. I'm excited about this opportunity and turned down a trip to Israel in January 2014 in hopes of landing this one.

I have a few entries I'm sitting on that I will eventually finish and post.

Until then...

The Bad Theology of Christian Internet Dating – Or What I Thought About when I Heard a Commercial for Christian Mingle.com and Claims of Divine Providence

Internet dating sites are big business. And if there is a variant offering a pure, wholesome, and morally grounded experience, you can believe there is an entrepreneuring Christian out there who will exploit the opportunity.

Find the one God intended for you. The tag line is catchy and resembles a divine ideology concerning the providence of God and his care for you. In this way, Christian Mingle.com ensures not only that signing up with their service is a biblically based venture, but also that they make a lot of money from it.

But is that tall, dark, and handsome stranger an answer to your prayers, or an answer to their pocketbooks? The question might seem unremarkable given the barrage of media that comes at us, the claims of false advertising, and the competing claims of other contenders in the Internet dating business who all tantalize us with result-driven dating solutions.

I know only one person who tried an Internet dating site, and the result was less than heavenly. But this doesn’t stop the thousands who are doing it. As a theologian, however, the question I have is whether there are problems with Christian mingles.com’s theology. Let’s explore some of the implications of their claims and measure it against a theological critique.

There are some definite problems with this theological stance of Christian mingle, from one of ignorance to downright deception. Let’s begin with the claim that God has a right partner for you. On the surface this sounds great because it draws in people of all persuasions. The psychology of setting up such a site means that not only are your diehard, cross-wearing Christians immediately attracted like moths to the flame, but wayward, nominal, and even those who are teetering on the faith can feel reinvigorated because, despite the name of the forum, it treats no one with any distinction. This open-invitation approach might be good for business (because hey, we all love God, right?) and it certain might spur people forward who have a less-than-moral take on their own faith walk, but in treating all people as one under Christ, there will inevitably be those with varying shades of Christ-likeness who will feel offended, maybe even duped, when Mr. Right tries to get to second-base on the first date! While I’m sure this is a contentious problem for all dating sites, it seems to be even more diabolic when a dater thinks that Christian mingle has her best interest in mind, only to have a date go horribly wrong. Not very “Christian” of them. But hey, are they really their brother’s keeper?

This isn’t even the real issue. From a theological standpoint, Christian mingle.com aims to capitalize on an ideological claim that should give any Christian pause. But using providence as the key to one’s interpretative matrix creates all sorts of funky scenarios in which the providence of God conflicts with other character or faith traits we are supposed to cultivate. For example, if God is a providential entity who foreknows are thoughts, feelings, and life partners, then that also implies that those who came to Christian mingle only to fail miserably or not meet the right person were destined to do so. Conversely, it may imply that if you go out to a secular site and have better luck, this too was in God’s plan. It also may imply that those who come to Christian mingle actually do not trust in God because they are trying to speed the process along themselves, hence not holding onto the truth of God’s divine providence and care for their lives. In fact, this interpretation is closer to the Bible if one recalls the story of Abraham and Sarah, who didn’t trust God so that Ishmael became the bane of Israel’s existence. Christian mingle actually undermines its business model without even knowing it due to a misleading marketing advertisement.

It also creates the problematic claim that everyone who visits the site is destined to find their life partner. This claim isn’t unique to Christianmingle.com, but it does create forced emphasis when it seems that God should be there intervening on your behalf. The problem with this approach is that it creates an all-or-nothing approach that American Protestant Evangelical circles have attached their theological robes to for more than half a century now, i.e., that the nuclear family is a biblical mandate that is completely consistent with the scriptural witness. Of course, there are multiple kinds of marriage throughout the scripture, and I’m sure Christianmingle.com would want to downplay coming to the site to look for one’s concubine if his wife is infertile. But let’s move on.
 
The brilliance is that most lay religious people are theologically inept and so questions like this will not even arise for them. That means that either Christian mingle.com is knowingly deceptive and are willfully reading one side of the scriptures with much more emphasis than accounting for other emphases or they are blissfully ignorant (the blind leading the blind). The next time you hear a commercial that tells you they have God’s plan for your life, be a little suspicious. And if that is not enough, pick up your Bible and consider all the providential commandments God gives to the murder of enemies, the destruction of nation or Paul’s wish that all remained celibate just as he was, and then put those up against all the other statements in the Bible you actually favor to see where you land on the theological carousel!

The Principle of Mesirah: Omerta in the Jewish World and Jesus' Behavior in the Gospels

Concern about turning on fellow countrymen was a fact of Jewish life. After all, as a continually conquered and subjugated people, making nice with the oppressor could easily become a way of life. Conversely, to ignore such realities could cost you your life. Jews throughout time have proven to be good at both, at least under compulsion rather than as a force of habit. Their rebellions and subjugations are well known in the historical annals of planet Earth. From the Assyrians to the Greeks to the Romans to the Christians to the Muslims and beyond, Jews have continually been in a position that is a negotiation between these two poles.

The problem of conspiring with the enemy was often so deep that a word was given against committing such criminal behavior in the Talmud. Mesirah, as it was known, was the act of turning on a fellow Jew, by handing him over to Gentiles. These crimes could be against fellow Jews or against Gentiles, but either way , by those who applied this view, the sinner was looked upon as one who denied identifying features that strengthened the community bond.

A recent article by Joshua Hammerman illustrates the way in which Mesirah in contemporary times has been avoided and by doing so protected pedophiles within the Jewish community who have been given safe harbor at the cost of handing them over to the local authorities.  The Times of Israel reported on a case of such coercion in January 2013. Hammerman lays out the rabbinic origins of the practice, and in one place shows how Rashi applied the principle to Moses after he murdered the Egyptian.

Perhaps the most notorious use of the principle comes from none other than the Jewish ethicist and philosopher Maimonides, who bluntly encouraged the murder of any Jew who would go against his people, regardless of whether a moral transgression had taken place.

Yet there is another reason to give pause as we look at the life of Jesus, the Misith and friend of the Romans. In the gospels, Jesus clearly advocates a non-violent approach to the Roman occupation of his land. And while this alone may have made good strategic sense, for it spared waves of zealous men from death in full-on rebellion, there are other passages where Jesus goes beyond a mere acceptance of the reality of Roman occupation. In Luke 7, Jesus not only interacts kindly and thoughtfully with a Roman soldier but sings his praise as one who has greater faith than his own people! 

The Sermon on the Mount offers the best glimpse of a possible response to Mesirah. Jesus warns that a fellow Jew might drag off another to the Gentile courts for immoral behavior (Matthew 5:26). But rather than rebuke the practice as something that would have clearly been a kind of Mesirah, Jesus’ comments are directed at the victim of Mesirah instead of the perpetrator!  If we see these comments in light of the larger reality of revolution and oppression then the matter-of-fact way in which Jesus is said to deliver this warning begs the question of his revolutionary intent. And it seems that he is almost accepting of the practice as a way of life. In another instance (Matthew 18:15-17), Jesus seems to establish the terms for avoiding Mesirah though there is no condemnation of the practice itself. Unfortunately, this is a difficult verse to establish since it anachronistically speaks of a church that didn’t yet exist and establishes an ecclesiastical order that was most likely written back into the gospels after Jesus. For someone like Paul, however, Mesirah was clearly a transgression and act of treason.

When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers? (1 Corinthians 6:1-2)

In an even stronger condemnation, Paul states Christians are to suffer evil and moral transgressions when it deals with those in the community – a principle obviously derived from a rejection of Mesirah within his own Jewish context, but applied here to the church, Paul’s spiritual Israel.

But brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? (1 Corinthians 6:6-7)

One wonders how Paul might have treated the issue if a member in the church had sexually abused another’s child or murdered one of their own, but let’s move on.

Clearly the reality of Mesirah accomplished what it set out to do:  it challenged communal life by creating internal dissension. Postcolonial theory scholars like Moshe Rosman and Homi Bhadba have recognized this with regard to a methodological-historical approach to Jewish life at all intersections despite the charge of anachronism. Yet Rosman and Bhadba wrestled this insight from its colonial context and showed that while it evolves there this kind of master-servant dynamic is broader bound. To put the community at internal odds with itself is to manage a dangerous game yet at the same time increase the power structure and influence of the oppressor. Jesus’ acceptance of the practice could be seen as an unfortunate nod to its reality. But I want to argue that it could also be that in accepting its reality, there remained a way of working through it, and in doing so,  the cohesion that remained in the community was no longer reliant on numbers but on ideology and identity.  If Jesus believed in his Messianic role then sheer numbers were not as important as God’s self-identifying truth that he saw working through his life.  After all, it would be God who redeemed, and wayward Jews would not escape this reality regardless of where their loyalties. Perhaps this is what Paul also saw in his writing of Romans when he talks of Israel’s ultimate salvation.

Much of what Jesus says however gets lost when we read the Beatitudes as universal principles of conduct rather than responses to the political and social environment in which Jesus remained. The Roman principle of impressment, for example, crops up here as well as the ancient custom of how to receive and accept an insult. But these make no difference if we only read our own situation into Jesus’ world without first understanding the world in which he lived.

I think that Jesus’ bringing up of Jews hauling other Jews off to court was a contentious issue during Jesus’ time, and probably more pertinent to the context of his day than his promulgation of a universal morality being founded upon the ground of ancient Palestine where we imagine Jesus only as an ancient teacher of wisdom detached from his own world. The fact that a possible link to Mesirah is brought up in several places along with Jesus’ rather unique and matter-of-fact response could explain why such instances evoke against Jesus the charge of blasphemy even as it is believed to have been applied to his direct threat to destroy the Temple. The latter charge, in my opinion, has to be contextualized since many Jews had already abandoned the Temple’s centrality (consider Rabbi Zakkai, for example).  This means that the Temple narrative, by and large, depends upon Mesirah, and the state of affairs in which every day Jews interacted. I do believe Jesus saw himself as a messianic figure, but I don’t believe that the Temple is necessarily key to this claim. Jesus may have been radically misunderstood in his take on Mesirah, and this stirred the charges of blasphemy. But, it is in his unique response to Mesirah that Jesus can most clearly be identified as messianic, through which the Temple narrative and other responses spring out, especially if one considers that the “temple of his body” was not a physical structure, nor was it dependent upon physical entities, but upon an ideal of Israel, of the temple, and of himself.

While it might be said that such an interpretation requires a radically re-interpretation of the meaning of physical resurrection, I would only remark that I do not believe that we are confined to only one layer of meaning here. We must remember too, the “temple of his body” quote is a gloss by the gospel’s editor and not part of the narrative flow.

An Interview on Towson University's Graduate Admissions Page

Recently the Office of Communications at Towson University contacted me for an interview about my academic career. They featured the interview on their Graduate Admissions page for the start of the Fall semester this week. I'm sharing it here.
http://grad.towson.edu/news1.asp

Why Heretics are the True Inheritance of God

For those like Bonhoeffer and Barth, the depersonalization of sin was not birthed in the new language of neo-orthodoxy, but might be better rendered as a reaction to existing problems for which resolution seemed out of touch.

One such instance occurs in both Bonhoeffer and Barth, and it has to do with those for whom salvation requires special excesses not deemed fully possible for the normal believer. Those with mental deficiencies or even children, for whom the message of salvation is an impossible quandary, make the formulaic approach to sin an absurdity. These special cases are usually handled with sensitivity, but they have one grand defect: Like those they protect, they take away the universality of the reconciliation act of Christ and parcel it into participatory criteria on the one hand, and a type of universalism on the other hand for those with special conditions. This inequality should be glaring, and indeed, there have been attempts in all mainline denominations to address it adequate, usually placing it at the feet of Christ as an act of grace, that in no way takes away from the grace offered to us. But no matter how you gloss it, the problem remains, and it was Barth and Bonhoeffer with their unfailing respect for the universal consistency of God’s approach to us all, that had them rejecting the biological basis of sin, and instead appeal to a condition of sin that is tied in with all human existence, while at the same time refusing to find its location in the physicality of the person. This is a smart, if not honest, appraisal of the God of the universe. Barth’s famous repartee comes at the expense of Emil Brunner, with whom he battled and denied that the rationality of God’s revelation Brunner claimed was unveiled in the world was enough to support such cases. Bonhoeffer, following, though not acknowledging Barth’s lead, wrote about this question in the Ethics and here too rejected anything that looked like a multi-pronged approach  to the grace of God, where some, because of their natural disadvantages, are simply more privileged to eternal life, then those of us who are not.

Personally, to consider a functional normality as the criteria of free will salvation seems to me an appeal to a mechanistic rationalist’s worldview. In this case, truth is accessible to all, and it’s only a matter of us uncovering it. But like those with mental deficiencies there are other subtle indicators constantly working against us. Those who are by nature skeptical or naïve, though a medical test might not be available, have a natural inclination to dismiss or cling to the herd mentality. In all, everyone has nuanced understandings and acceptances of doctrines of faith, that can only be uncovered once we literally test them. I wonder if a test of faith were administered on paper, how many in the same congregational bodies would answer differently? For conservative evangelicals, it may simply signal there is more work that needs to be done, despite the fact that even where a belief that a greater consistency works, I’ve been in enough conservative churches and bible studies over time, to know that even the most basic understandings of the faith are subject to a wide interpretation. We must accept that as we live with one another, we live with different conceptions of God – right down to our home churches. While many liberal churches (such as my current home) get this and allow for a variety of responses to God, the logical next step is opening this to interpretations of God found in other religions. Heresy is an unavoidable reality, and it’s time that we understand when we disagree we must agree to disagree.

A Photo Reflection on Political Rebellion

August Landmesser was a Hamburg shipyard worker who refused to salute Hitler. Reportedly he was not identified until one of his children saw the photo in a 1991 German newspaper. You can read the full account and the speculations surrounding his reasons for not saluting all over the Internet.

While the photo has nothing to do with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it’s a reminder of what Bonhoeffer did not do that leads me to make a reflection. On June 14, 1940, Bonhoeffer and best friend Eberhard Bethge were in a small café when news of the French surrender to Germany was heard on a public radio. As all were prompted to stand and perform the perfunctory Nazi salute, Bethge hesitated, telling his friend that they should do no such thing. Bonhoeffer responded sternly that it would be foolish to make such a public spectacle of themselves, even if it was right, and that an appropriate time was coming for their resistance.

This is no condemnation of Bonhoeffer’s actions as cowardice, but perhaps a commentary on the terrible penalty that would have been incurred for making such a tremendous statement. Bonhoeffer simply knew that at that time his effectiveness in his present role required the utmost secrecy.

Perhaps there are times when courage is reckless and then there are times when no one else is taking a stand so that one needs to stand. The latter reminds me of the famous photo in Tiananmen Square, when the Chinese student stood in front of the army tanks, or the burning Buddhist monk.

In the Biblical book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand up to the Persian mandate by remaining seated. Imagine someone in the U.S. not standing for the National Anthem as a form of protest! For some diehard patriots whose country can do no wrong, it would be too much to watch!

Individual acts of courage can inspire and agitate the listlessness of the masses. Unfortunately, we do not always have a roadmap or guide to tell us which ones will have the greatest effect, if any.

The Fish and the Coin in the Gospel of Matthew: A Look at the Pericope and Possible Rabbinic Origins

I was recently examining a passage that has always been a curiosity to believers and a fairytale to skeptics. Its single occurrence appears in the gospel of Matthew. In the account, Jesus is questioned regarding his civic duty to pay the Temple tax. In response, Jesus tells Peter to cast a line into the water and from the water emerges a fish with enough coin in its mouth to pay the temple for the both of them.  The passage reads as follows:

 After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?”

 “Yes, he does,” he replied.

When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. “What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”

 “From others,” Peter answered.

“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” – Matthew 17:24-27

R. T. France comments on the passage: “The whole episode is designed not to record a miracle, but to tell us Jesus' attitude towards the payment of religious taxes." But the question of “whose tax” will remain important as we take a closer look.

The story is curious on a number of levels. On the one hand, commentators like Craig L. Blomberg are representative of a body of scholarly conservatives who see the story in terms of Jesus' rejection of Old Testament legalism. For those like Blomberg, the children of the kingdom and their exemption is not about taxes, rather it speaks to the deliberate attempt of Jesus’ to overturn halakha. Blomberg reports "This fits [Jesus’] consistent rejection of Jewish civil and ritual law; believers are now free from the Old Testament requirements."

The challenge here is one presenting the evangelist’s Jesus who is not internally at war with his own ideology. On more than one occasion, he declares that there is a righteousness in keeping Torah or in performing sacred ceremony or ritualism. We hear Jesus tell John that they must “fulfill all righteousness.” We see Jesus read from Torah to initiate his public ministry or tell the blind man to go give the offering of Moses once he is healed. We see Jesus go up to Jerusalem for Passover and find him at the waters on Sukkoth, an important part of the ritual celebration. There is also the Jesus who tells us he has not come to abolish the Torah and that as long as heaven and earth remain, not one jot or tittle will pass from it – those jots and tittles could have something to do with the matres lectionis, could be connected to midrashic statements about the use of vowels that help with the rendering of sounds, which were thought to be in the Oral tradition of Torah but rejected by Karaitic tradition. The Greek uses the words “iota” and “keraia.” Some scholars have suggested that iota may be representative of the Hebrew “yod,” and keraia may represent Greek diacritical marks or the hooks in Hebrew and Aramaic letters. It may even refer to the widely interpreted use of crowns that appear in some Torah scrolls and the Latin Vulgate, of which one Midrash expresses Ezra’s concern in being challenged by Elijah as to their origins. Or more broadly, it could refer to the idea, and a more popular option, that the Law given to Moses comes from God and God will not invalidate his words on any account.

The problem with the story remains the challenge of putting it in its proper context. If Matthew was written in the post-Temple period (after 70 CE), the idea that this is a Jewish temple tax logically means that Jesus’ identification of the children of the kingdom is one that puts those who follow him at odds with those who are non-believing Jews. That is to say, Jesus is making a very strong and deliberate break with his Jewish roots by indicting those Jews involved with the daily routine of the Temple as being those outside the kingdom of God.

But another interpretative possibility should also be considered. If one believes that Matthew is writing in the post-Temple period, he could have very well merged two realities. After the destruction of the Jewish temple, according to those like W. Carter, taxes (Fiscus Judaicus) were paid to Rome. Because Rome was in every sense a true kingdom, having come to dominate the world of its time, the tax was imposed on certain jurisdictions like Jerusalem that, while succumbing to an occupation force, did not itself allow Rome to exercise full power.  Taxes were often imposed on those provinces that did not allow Roman certain jurisdictions. To become a "part" of Rome was to avoid the Roman tax. To have Roman citizenship like Paul was to avoid taxation. In essence, while writing with regard to the temple of Jerusalem, Matthew may actually be thinking of the Fiscus Judaicus that was collected for the Jupiter Temple. This temple was razed in 69 BCE when Vespasian’s army entered Rome only a year before razing the Jerusalem temple. In either case, the argument does not rely upon Matthew reaching back into history and reinterpreting the events, since both events occur before Matthew’s writing, but a question of whether there was a mandatory Temple tax in Jerusalem or whether the monies being collected was actually for the rebuilding of the Jupiter Temple remain the question. More internal evidence from the scriptures finds that on two other occasions, Jesus is directly caught up in opposition to Roman taxes (Matthew 22:21), and in the latter instance (Luke 23:1-4) an accusation of his civil disobedience is used against him at his trial.

While New Testament scholars tend to focus on the affirmative dimension of Jesus’ mentions of kingdom as the spiritual and/or physical reign of Messiah, it may be here in Matthew that the more formal sense of being a part of the physical kingdom of Rome is more appropriate.  Of course, if Matthew is writing before 69 CE, then we are left with the problem of supernaturalism and must consider the charge of vaticinium ex eventu.

So with the interpretative possibilities in front of us for understanding Jesus’ place with the temple tax, what is this strange affair of the fish in the story and can it shed light on the story’s origin?

R. T. France writes, "I have not listed the incident of the coin in the fish's mouth (Mt. 17:27), as there is in fact no miracle recorded there: Jesus' proposal to Peter is not said to have been carried out, and it has been suggested that it was a playful comment, based on a popular story-motif found in both pagan and Jewish sources (Herodotus iii.42, b. Shabbath 119a), and not meant to be taken very seriously."

Shabbath 119a records the story of a Joseph who honors the Sabbath. He goes to a certain gentile who is warned by soothsayers to sell his property before Joseph comes because he apparently was a crafty businessman who was about to buy up his land. After this gentile sells all his land for a precious stone (a story reminiscent of Jesus’ parable one’s passionate desire for heaven), he drops the stone in the water. A fish swallows it up and later at a marketplace is sold to the same Joseph who opens the mouth and reveals the precious stone worth thirteen roomfuls of gold denarii. The moral, according to this tractate, is those who honor the Sabbath, are repaid by the Sabbath. It is in this context that one imagines Jesus’ honoring of the temple tax is that his honor is repaid by the gift of the drachma from the fish.

The challenge of dating Tractate Shabbat is the challenge of dating anything in the Talmud. We do not have enough reliable information. Though there are some that maintain much of the Talmudic tradition is old and passages like this in Mas. Shabbat probably recollect an ancient Jewish parable. Of course, there are many places in the Talmud that cross with the gospels and one finds the retellings of the parables include their own unique conclusions. And the story of fish goes through various incarnations from ancient Greek and Sanskrit literature. But the question of whether this goes back to Jesus or whether the evangelist was familiar with a version of the story and adapted it to Jesus’ situation is a tantalizing one. At best, it proves once again, that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of his time as much as he could be an invention of his biographers’ theological ambitions.

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p. 86 Jesus the Radical: A Portrait of the Man They Crucified"  R. T. France

W. Carter "Paying the Tax to Rome as Subversion Praxis: Matthew 17.24-27," JSNT 76 [1999].