_awakening

Lenten Prayer for the Week.

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in me a new and contrite heart, that I, worthily lamenting my sins and acknowledging my wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

[from Eastertide: Prayers for Lent Through Easter from The Divine Hours by Phillis Tickle, adapted from The Book of Common Prayer]

It Might Get Loud. [Deleted Scenes]

And now for your sonic enjoyment, deleted scenes from It Might Get Loud. In a word, amazing.

More here.

Tom Wright on the Nature of Hell.

Theological musings for your Saturday courtesy of Tom Wright.

[HT: Out of Ur]

No, Over Here!

This just in from Robin Dugall. Just brilliant.

Really?

One of the better searches that has brought someone to this blog:

"Marijuana use in ancient israel"

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

America's Addiction.

Thoughtful and wise words from Parker Palmer:

Money quote: "Violence is what happens any time we violate the integrity of the other."

[HT: Mike Todd]

But is it Scripture?

April DeConick has a fascinating article in the latest edition of BAR, entitled "What's Up with the Gospel of Thomas?" In the article she argues for a measured and careful consideration when it comes to labeling ancient manuscripts as our categories and understanding of ancients texts has changed. Her main argument centers on the labeling of the Gospel of Thomas as a "Gnostic" text, even though it is not display some of the central Gnostic mythologies. Greater care and discernment, and possibly more nuanced categories, are needed.

Here is how she concludes the article:

The type of religiosity found in the Gospel of Thomas is not all that unusual. You can find references to it in Biblical and nonbiblical literature. It is nothing more than an early Christian expression of mysticism that developed out of an earlier, apocalyptically oriented Christianity that wished for the immediate end of the world. When the end didn’t happen, the Christians were forced to rethink and rewrite their cherished apocalyptic teachings...

We can even locate this mystical form of Christianity historically. It is a form that developed in eastern Syria in the late first and early second centuries, a form of Christianity that was an heir to early Jewish mystical traditions and a precursor to later Eastern Orthodoxy. I think that Thomas’s “place” in early Christianity was misidentified originally not because it represents a type of Christianity unfamiliar to the canonical tradition or deviant from it. The Gospel of Thomas was wrongly identified at first because Western theological interests controlled its interpretation within a Western Christian framework that could not explain its unfamiliar, mystical structure. Yet we now know—in part from manuscript discoveries like the Nag Hammadi collection—that there was a multiplicity of groups, beliefs and traditions in the diverse early Christian communities. Scholars who misunderstood the Gospel of Thomas mislabeled it as Gnostic in order to lump it together with other traditions they thought to be strange, heretical and late.

DeConick's point concerning the nature of the Gospel of Thomas resonates farther than merely the labeling of the Gospel of Thomas as "Gnostic." Her point can be applied to other collections of texts that are considered "extra-biblical."

If there is one thing we have learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls it is this. In the late Second Temple Period, there was the presence of other texts, ultimately not included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible, that were embraced as "scriptural" by various Jewish communities, such as various Enochic, Maccabean, and Qumran texts for example. These texts were embraced by their communities as "scriptural" and on par with the later canonized texts. [There are even variant readings of later canonized texts existing side by side, showing that perhaps there was not even an "official" version of these texts in the late Second Temple period. But that is a discussion for another day.]

DeConick's point is well taken. As we begin to uncover and study new textual finds, we need to carefully and judiciously be open to revising our previously held categories and labels. We may also need to entertain the possible notion that the forces involved in the canonization of texts may have had an agenda larger than the collection of so-called approved texts.

Now whether you agree or not with DeConick's assessment on the Gospel of Thomas, the point must not be missed. There were various communities, both Jewish and Christian, who were writing texts, some were embraced as scripture and out of these some were embraced as canonical. In the end, we need a much more nuanced approach when it comes to the labeling of manuscripts we have in our possession.

Classic Peanuts.

[HT: Chris Brady]

Thoughts on Advent.

Fellow sojourner and activist from San Diego, Jason Evans, has posted some excellent reflections on the season of Advent. What I appreciate most about Jason is his passion to explore what it means to live the teachings and mission of Jesus in his community. I highly encourage you to check out his thoughts on Advent as the time approaches.

advent: fourth sunday reflection

advent: second sunday reflection

advent: first sunday reflection

Judaism and the Gospel.

I stumbled across this article from Steve Mason via Bible and Interpretation on the categories of "Judaism" and "gospel." Well worth the time to read in full. Here's a sample:

Methods and Categories: Judaism and Gospel [Steve Mason]

“Remember: You never get too good for the basics.” Some such admonition will be familiar to anyone who has trained in a sport, a musical instrument, or a language. Usually we are attracted to these things because we have seen an expert at work, and we aspire to their fluency and command. We want to be able to deliver a flying side kick at will, or to make any sound we wish on the piano keyboard, or to feel perfectly at ease communicating with locals in a foreign country. But there is always a coach around to insist that you cannot do the spectacular unless you constantly train in the basics: the grammar, the scales, the posture, and flexibility and strengthening. We all expect that we will have to go throughthe basics at the beginning. The hard part is the realization, months or years into training, that we never transcend those basic building blocks of the art: constantly playing the major, minor, and chromatic scales; working endlessly on balance, flexibility, and form; struggling to understand a decidedly un-sexy foreign grammar.

It is much the same with academic work. Professors occasionally complain about having to teach large introductory courses year after year. But our complaints have more do with the “large” part of this, and maybe some frustration at what appears to be declining standards of literacy among new students, than with the prospect of going over the basics again each year. I suspect that many important books and articles have developed from the teaching of introductory courses. It is there that we must come to grips over and over again with the most basic tools and evidence of our disciplines and figure out the most effective ways for new students to understand their importance and learn them thoroughly. It is there that we must handle the most commonsense questions—many of them naïve, yes, but occasionally jolting us out of our entrenched ways of thinking, when a student simply asks why something is claimed to be so. Each year, as we progress with our more specialized research and writing, we return to “the basics” with new eyes, new questions, and new approaches.

Remarkably enough, this constant questioning sometimes exposes weaknesses in the foundations of what we do. This brief essay can do little more than suggest some of these questionable basics, underpinning both our methods and our categories. Hoping not to try the reader’s patience unduly, I’ll focus on two concrete categories, Ioudaismos (usually translated “Judaism”) and euangelion (usually “gospel”), and merely broach some larger issues of method in my conclusion.