Pink-Letter Bibles

My wife has a pink KJV Bible. When you look at it, you think, "Could anything be more pink?" and you think, "No. It surpasses all known degrees of pinkitude." A friend got it for her years ago. My wife dare not take it out in public, because then people will think she's the sort of person who likes very pink KJV Bibles. Be it nature, be it nurture, there seems something counterintuitively wrong about God's revealing His eternal qualities and divine attributes in pink.

Just as my wife is torn by being stereotyped as a pink bible kind of woman, I have some fears of being identified as a red-letter Bible kind of guy. Growing up, I had found a red-letter Bible rather handy as an organizational tool--for instance, if I wanted to find out where in the book of Acts Jesus appeared to Paul, I just looked for the red letters in the book of Acts. You can’t miss it. It's a helpful way of separating dialogue from narrative. I always assumed that the red letters were intended to serve this precise pragmatic function.

Well, that’s not why red-letter Bibles were invented. In 1899, Louis Klopsch read Luke 22:20, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” With the epiphany that all blood is red, he asked himself, “why not a red letter Bible with the red words to be those of our Lord?” and asked Bible scholars to tell him which bits were probably spoken by Jesus. I don’t mean to demean the reverence for Jesus’s words, for His blood shed on the cross. Just like my wife does not mean to demean pink. But I am not a blood-stained letters kind of guy. I’m just there for the organizational color-coding. I have color folders, but that does not mean my red folders symbolize the blood of the parties represented within.

Problematic as the red-letter Bible may be, I think there is some usefulness in experimentation with typesetting, colors, etc. We typically underline passages of Scripture not to say, “Those other parts suck!” but to say, “Hey, think about this,” or “This part is important for some reason—guess why!” I think it’d be pretty nifty if, when printing a passage in the OT that will later show up in the NT, the printer would put the words in a funky font to say, “Hey, pay attention to this part, it shows up later in a different context.” Sure, when you’re reading the NT passage that quotes an OT passage, it’s possible to go back, but how many of us do so? It would interrupt the flow of our reading. So why can’t we have a “Blue-letter OT quotes” edition?

Further, I know most of us like to mark up our own Bibles, but … why not buy Bibles that are already marked up? Just hear me out: the drawback of underlining favorite passages, when we’re left on our own, is that the meditative passages end up rather selective. For instance, a Protestant underlines Ephesians 2:8-9, “for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” A Catholic may underline the very next verse, 2:10, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Different sects within Christianity inevitably have different “top 40 Bible verse hits.” I’ve often found talking with Catholics that they tend to value certain Bible verses that I initially fail to recognize because they’re off my radar, such as I Cor. 3:13. Now, it would perhaps not be a good idea to color-code some passages of Scripture as “Catholic,” some as “Protestant,” some as “Eastern Orthodox,” etc.—it’s not as if one group gets to say, “Ha hah, this verse belongs to me, you cannot have it!”—but it would be very helpful if we at least knew what other groups’ “top 40” verses were. It might cause you to meditate on a verse you wouldn’t have considered otherwise, but which has held special devotional or theological significance in the history of God’s people thousands of years back. It might enable you to recognize Biblical cadences in the speech of denominations you disagree with—even if I do not endorse the phrase “Baptism saves you,” I must grudgingly admit Peter seems to employ it in I Peter 3:21. It also enables a sola scriptura type not to have to sound stupid if someone asks, “But what about I Cor. 3:13?” and have to reply, “Uh … what’s it say?”

Pledge Drive: "Save our Blog!"

(Don't worry, this isn't a post asking for money.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently attended a conference on "community" and have consequently been pondering how to create this amorphous thing we call "community." Since it is easy to cavil at others' failures, it seemed I should instead think about my own. For instance, in the "Links" section of the website for the past seven months, the only links listed have been "google news" and "edit-me." I haven't exactly been an active participant in the on-line community at large. However, by simply learning out how to throw a few links out there, I have been building internet community!

Nevertheless, upon further reflection, I have realized that this step is not enough. There is so much more to do. Over the past weeks, I have felt a burden on my heart, a burning need to do my part for creating community. I have determined that the way to do this is to have people leave more comments.

I know, I know, you're probably thinking, "But Leopold, surely you don't feel responsible when other people don't post comments to your blog!" but you know, I do. It's the Protestant guilt ethic. Sure, I could feel guilty about not leaving comments at other people's blogs, but I just don't. I feel so much more guilty when it is my own blog, so that is where I want to start. I have visited blogs where there is a delightful back and forth between people telling each other they are wrong, but that they love each other, and that they wish they lived in the same town so they could go to a bar and drink some brewskies. I want to help create virtual reality internet brewskies. And so does WibbityWubbity. But the most important ingredient of the virtual reality internet brewskie is you. And everyone you know.

I figure that if Andrew Sullivan has had a pledge drive for money, surely it is not unseemly for us here to have a pledge drive for something as non-materialistic as more comments. Happily, when we shared this desire for community with some of our closest friends, we had an anonymous donor step forward and pledge that for every comment you leave in the coming month, he will leave one as well, essentially doubling your donation! We rely on contributions from viewers like you. Are pseudoprofundities important to you? Do they make you feel loved? If they do, what better way to show your support than leaving a comment and investing in community?

Now, I know what you may be thinking: "You know, I'm kind of like Moses. I'm slow of speech. I can only type by hunt and peck. I've got nothing to say." But remember God's answer: perhaps somewhere in the world you have a brother named Aaron, and maybe he knows how to talk. Why not invite him to a site that you have found richly rewarding and that provides transformative epiphanies on a regular basis? Perhaps you had an argument years ago with Aaron and lost contact. If so, why not just drop him an email? "Dear Aaron, I saw this site and thought of you. P.S.-Sorry about that thing." Before you know it, Aaron tells you that he is sorry about that thing too, and both of you are reconciled to each other and leaving comments. It is moments such as this one that I have just made up that a blogger hopes for.

Maybe you don't want to leave a comment. But if this blog has meant something to you, think of at least sharing it with your friends, so long as you do not reveal Leopoldtulip's secret identity. Due to multinational conglomerations and big corporations such as Starbuck's and Wal-Mart, the ma and pa blogs that used to celebrate academia, Christianity, and weirdness all together, have been virtually destroyed. If you google "WeirdBlogs4Godandsmartypantsstuff," you will find no hits, except possibly this post. This blog is in the world but not of it, wandering ever aimlessly toward a place where weird Christian people can talk about eighteenth-century scholarship. Because I am unaware of any on-line communities to which this blog could actually "belong," I can only achieve eventual cultural dominance slowly, when my message of weirdness is promulgated by individuals like you.

Another thing you might be thinking: "I've tried to leave comments before, but the site keeps trying to force me to sign up with blogspot. I REFUSE to sign up with blogspot! Never!!!!!" Well, that was due to my own blogging inexperience. I have fixed blogspot so you do not have to join. You can even leave comments anonymously.

Perhaps you are also thinking, "You know, there was that one post months ago that I thought of commenting on, and I did not. It is too late. I am powerless in my despair." For those amongst you who regret such lost opportunities, we are initiating our "Adopt a Post" program. Perhaps there is a blog entry that has changed your life in some special way months ago, but it only has 0 comments. Think how psychologically crippling it must be for such a blog entry when it observes nearby blog entries that may have as many as 5 comments. Daily, that blog entry wrestles with self-doubt and the fear of failure: "I once thought I was the perfect combination of whimsy and thought-provokingness, but I have achieved NOTHING!!!" If you don't want that to happen to your favorite blog entry, maybe you should just write a short comment on it now saying, "You have given my life meaning." Because blogspot automatically notifies us when a comment is left, we will make sure that an anonymous donor named either Leopoldtulip or WibbityWubbity will leave a comment as well. This means that your favorite entry will have at least two comments on it and will not see itself in the mirror and think, "I am ugly!" When you adopt a post, we will send you monthly pictures of your entry so you can watch as it grows in age and stature. Simply visit http://pseudoprofundities.blogspot.com/year/month/
insertnameofyouradoptedentry.html, and you can see your entry at any time.

It's important that we don't take for granted our opportunity to leave comments. There was a time that people had to sign up with blogspot in order to leave comments. Further back in history, there were times when people had to die for community. In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira were willing to sell their house and to lose their lives simply to pretend they were serving the community. How much moreso should we be willing actually to serve community by leaving a comment?

The PCUSA and God as Ninja: trinitarian reformulations

The PCUSA (Presbyterian Church USA) has been experimenting with alternative ways of describing the trinity, finding that the traditional terms of "Father" and "Son" carry way too many y-chromosomes and that they need to "expand the church's vocabulary of praise and wonder." I cannot deny that seeing some of the alternative phrases have indeed expanded my vocabulary of wonder and amazement, such as "What the freak?" "did someone say that with a straight face?" etc. To take the most strikingly bad alternative, let's consider, "Mother, Child, Womb." Regardless of where one stands on the "God as mother" front, everyone--even non-Christians--should unite in declaring this trinitarian formula irredeemably stupid. (Later note: for a more sympathetic critique of the document's ideals, see here. For more recreational mockery, see here.)

To beg a rather large question, let's assume for the moment that the traditional trinitarian names oppress women by privileging y chromosomes. It seems understandable that a suggested solution would involve equality in representation, perhaps something like this: 1 Person is female, 1 Person is male, and 1 person is "other." Given that God the Father doesn't have a literal y-chromosome and is abounding in love and mercy (unlike mean paternal disciplinarian types), it makes sense that He'd be the one for the sex change. The Holy Spirit already sounds pretty non-gendered, so logistically, it makes sense for him to be the neutered "it." Finally, given that Jesus has been made the incarnate y-chromosome possessor of the trinity, firstborn among the dead and as far as we can tell still fully man, you'd think he could be the token male thrown into the trinity. No such luck. Christ is the sexless "child," and God is the feminine term "mother." How is this equality? Both femininity and "itness" get privileged over masculinity.

The term "child" is troubling for another reason. Now, I grant that, around 2000 years ago, Jesus was born the divine Christ "child." I'm all for people taking up their oboes and bagpipes to celebrate the fact. But like the saying goes, "The trouble with an incarnate infant divine being is that/eventually, it creates wine from a vat." That is, Jesus grew up and performed miracles. As if that weren't enough, He's omnipotent and omniscient. You put me in a boxing ring with a "child," I can take him. You put me in the ring with a "son," especially if his name is "I can kill you with my pinky," I can run away. Unless he has the power to make the sun and/or me stand still. Jesus is the only begotten Son, not the only begotten kid. Trinitarian reformulations make adult Jesus cry.

And this "womb" thing. Yes, Jesus was born, and yes, there was a womb involved, but it was not the Holy Spirit's womb. It was Mary's. They can publish Heather has two Mommies, but what the heck is up with Jesus has two wombs? It would probably be more accurate to call the Holy Spirit "the Impregnator" than "the Womb," since He was the agent of conception for Mary's womb. Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn't give up on "the Impregnator" idea--kids might really go for it. It has a certain dramatic flair--it sounds a little like "the terminator." I can just imagine the religious rivalry and mockery between schoolchildren--"ha ha, you only have Allah, but we Christians have--the IMPREGNATOR!" ("im-preg-nah-tore," pronounced with a short "a" sound.) After all, there's a lot of talk about the need for women to feel included--why not talk more about kids feeling included, and re-naming the Persons accordingly? There's the Old Testament tradition of God as a "divine warrior." Maybe, "God the Commander, God the Destroyer, and God the all-consuming Fire!" Or maybe God as ninja. That would have been cool and very presbyterian.

Better Community Through Television

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues that America's "social capital" (values arising from social networks which help society run more smoothly and healthily) is radically on the decline. More Americans are "bowling alone," by which Putnam does not mean that individual bowlers take up entire lanes by themselves, occasionally pausing to cry about how they have no friends. Instead, he means that there is a decrease in associational organizations; rather than joining a bowling league to meet like-minded bowling enthusiasts, people instead go bowling with their friends. While you might think that going bowling with friends helps foster community and social ties, it actually leads to the degeneration of society! As a notable example of the value of social capital/associational organizations, Putnam recounts the story of how Andy Boschma, a white 33-year old accountant, donated a kindey to John Lambert, an African-American 64 year old retired employee of the University of Michigan hospital, simply because they got to know each other through a bowling league. Few people have adequately considered that bowling offers a viable means of crossing the racial divide.

This past weekend, I attended a conference on community, with the occasional group angst of "what is a community? Are we being a non-community right now, thus indirectly destroying the social fabric of America? AAARRGGGHHHH!!!!" As we were discussing the Putnam reading, the implicitly very bad activity of "watching television" came up a few times. Now, I admit that I tend to jump on the bandwagon about how bad watching television is, except while I am actually watching it. This post shall be a rare instance in which I'm actively sympathizing with watching tv at a moment in which I am not succumbing to its lure.

In the context of community, one of the very bad things about watching television is that people are "watching television alone" instead of creating social ties with others. This seemed thoroughly pernicious and wicked until I considered that much of my day is spent reading alone--normally, obscure 18th century texts. At least "bowling alone" meant you were presumably bowling with friends and being less hermitlike--when I am "reading alone," the closest moments to community are when one of the cats sit on my lap. What am I supposed to do? Say, "No, no, Pippin, please do not leave! without you, I will be contributing even more to the degeneration of community!" Perhaps interrupt my wife while she's working on her dissertation to say, "Please listen to this obscure 18th century fact, or I will implicitly be capitulating to the badness of social incohesion!"

I then started wondering about the whole "watching television alone" thing. If you think about it, we probably more often "read alone" in the literal sense than we "watch tv alone" in the literal sense. For example, I have some friends who get together weekly to watch Gilmore Girls. This is not mere "watching": during the advertisements, they evaluate what just happened--who's a "good guy" or a "bad guy," whether a character's actions/perspective is "right," etc. My friends evaluate the plot and coherence of the storyline, often prognosticating/imagining what future events will take place. They actually voluntarily perform some of the same activities that take place in a literature classroom. And even if tv gets a "bad wrap" for failing to promote imagination--e.g. that it's "inferior" because we can simply look at a visual image instead of having to imagine it on our own--I would argue that tv series are more likely to promote the "imagination" in the sense of envisioning/prognosticating what will happen next. If you want to find out what happens next in a book, you turn the page; if you want to find out what happens next in the tv series, you might have to wait several weeks, during which you shake your fist at the tv and endlessly consider possibilities. But I digress. The point is that television allows my friends to have a kind of "community" experience--a simultaneous sharing of an experience--that is harder to find in literature. Heck, even the great works of literature that are intended for such a shared experience, e.g. Shakespeare's plays which are meant to be performed for a group, are more often experienced in solitary experiences of reading. And I have to say that advertisements can actually serve an aesthetic purpose. In the 18th century, sometimes people would talk a lot with each other during the performance, so there's little aesthetic experience. When we see plays nowadays, so long as we are not in middle school, we tend not to talk so much during the performance, so our only chance really for "discussing" the work is at intermission (i.e. in the bathroom) or at the end (when we are tired, and there is no mystery of "what will happen next?"). However, the frequency of television advertisements means that viewers don't have to choose between paying attention to the whole episode or discussing it: advertisements provide a natural pause for muting the tv and reflecting/discussing what has taken place so far.

So what happens if you watch Gilmore Girls without friends nearby? Well, there is the internet. I'm not trying to say that the internet provides the valuable "social capital" that interests Putnam, but I am interested in probing what it can provide. After Gilmore Girls (especially the season finale), a lot of fans will go on-line to the WB and post comments. Admittedly, many of them are stupid, incoherent, etc. However, they do enable the individual immediately to share a reaction or experience with a wider community. I know that some Catholics really like a uniform liturgy because they have a greater sense of ecclesial community--that around America and/or the world, the same rituals are being observed, the same words of institution spoken. Now, to secularize this for a moment: Americans do build a strong "sense" of community through simultaneously sharing the same aesthetic/transformative experience at the same time in front of the boob tube. Sure, they're not sacramentally united or incorporated into the same religion or anything--in fact, the very lack of such a religious identity may be why they feel so drawn to identify with fellow television watchers. But it does seem like something's goin on.

Television shows themselves can do more to foster a kind of community and discussion. When I was in Canada, I saw a tv show (I can't remember what it was called). First, it would show sketch comedy: for example, they showed a sketch based upon the idea, "What would you do if, as a college student, you got back from a trip to Africa over the summer only to find out that your mom had just married your best friend, who now wants you to call him "Dad?" It was really funny. But what was particularly interesting is that, after the sketch, three women/hosts sat around and discussed the sketch for a few minutes. One would say, "You just have to tell someone when they're being incredibly stupid (like marrying your best friend from college)," another would say, "So many Canadians have adopted a perspective of non-judgmentalism, you live your life and I'll live mine, that they're afraid of offering advice." They then would refer viewers to the website if they wanted to pursue the discussion. I was simply floored that there would be a show on television that would encourage this level of reflection through sketch comedy.

There are ways of approaching any medium that may make it more beneficial. "Reading alone" is perhaps not so beneficial (especially with young children) without discussing the work together. "Television" itself may not so much the problem as how we use it, and the same goes for advertisements. Besides, you need some topics of conversation once you join a bowling league.

Happy Fathers' Day?

Perhaps I am wrong, but I tend to assume that the type of thing you say to a dad on fathers' day is "ya done good!" or "you are a model to me of good stuff," not (in Calvinesque fashion) "your dad ratings have fallen to record lows." I realize the phrase "fathers' day" may be somewhat ambiguous: "veterans' day" means we honor veterans, but "duck season" means we shoot them. Shoot ducks, I mean, not veterans. Unless we're al qaeda. The point is, "fathers' day" could mean that we're supposed to say fathers are peachy keen, or that we declare "National Hunting Day" on them because they pose a grave threat to humanity and must be stopped no matter what the cost.

I point to this ambiguity in fathers' day as a possible explanation for the following fathers' day cards I found and copied down:

1."Whenever I'm in a tight spot and can't figure out what to do, I always ask myself this question: 'What would Dad do if HE were in this situation?" (Turn over page.) "And then I go watch television."

2."Dad, I feel I've inherited a lot of your qualities, and I just wanted to let you know ... (turn over page.) "I don't hold it against you."

These are "funny," surprisingly original cards, because right when you think they're about to compliment a father, they insult him. "You think I'm going to say something nice, tee hee hee, but instead I'm going to gnaw on your meager remains!" I don't mean to overstress this, but to put it in perspective, imagine giving the following as a mother's day card: "Mom, I want to thank you for all the time you've spent to meet my needs, day in and day out ..." (turn over page.) "like driving me to the day care center!" Ho ho ho, you think it's going to thank mom for all the time she's spent serving her kids despite being a working mom, but really it's suggesting she's abandoned them! How devilishly clever!

Now, I'm not too keen on gender double-standards: Samuel Johnson (writer of the first English dictionary, and person who had the aptly titled "the age of Johnson" named after him) actually argued it was worse for a wife to have adultery than the man. (Apparently, the cohesion of eighteenth century society depended upon knowing that inheritance was not passed down to illegitimate kids; so, if a wife is adulterous, you can't be sure whose kid the inheritance is actually going to, and societal stability collapses. If it is only a husband being adulterous, society can move merrily along.) Even if men may often get the better side of gender double-standards, they don't do too well on the mothers'/fathers' day front. Humorous "Mothers' day" cards may be self-deprecating on the part of the sender, but not, to the best of my knowledge, mother-deprecating. Presumably, there are some fairly bad mothers out there, but we don't usually send them cards announcing the fact. Sure, dads make mistakes, but maybe we can just enumerate them the other 364 days of the year. Now, consider this next card I found:

3."All the other father's day cards I saw were about stuff that didn't seem like you: hunting, fishing, sports, monkeys on the toilet..." (turn over the page) "OK, maybe that last one."

Admittedly, I think monkeys on the toilet are funny. And if someone came up to me and said, "I took this picture of a monkey on a toilet and thought you'd like it," I might be touched. But the card implies that the monkeys on the toilet reminds the sender of his/her dad because 1.his dad spends time on the toilet and 2.he is hairy. Now, I get that dads might need to be told to spend less time watching the TV. TV is a choice. But you know (and this may come as a surprise) dads often need to use the toilet, and some of them have little control over the quantity of hair on their body. And it's not like he's hanging out at a bar. If he is taking a rather long time sealed off in that odoriferous room, he's probably doing something innocuous or possibly even constructive, like expanding his mind by reading The Bathroom Reader or disposing of dangerous toxins. Given the large number of things for dads to feel self-conscious about, the duration of their life spent in the bathroom seems low on the list of priorities. After all, the bathroom is supposed to be a place of safety and security. The bathroom is "base" in the freeze tag game of life. It is not a place to accuse someone of being monkey-like.

I think the impulse to send a toilet abuse card or a television junkie card may arise because people don't know what kind of card to get a dad. Pull out a picture of your dad: does he seem to be saying, "Please oh please give me something sickly sentimental?" Probably not. But I don't know that he's saying, "Bring on the insults! BRING 'EM ON!" either. It seems like there should be a happy medium between drippiness and subtle put-downs.

In this regard, I'm reminded of Shaunti Feldhahn's For Women Only and Emerson Eggerichs's Love and Respect. Both books argue that, while women fundamentally need to hear the message, "I love you," men need to hear, "I respect you." The books suggest that even if culture has accepted that women need to hear that they are unconditionally loved, men need to hear that they are unconditionally respected--lack of respect makes them feel like failures and shut down, while unconditional respect makes them excited and want to be worthy of respect. So, perhaps the reason we don't get the "come hither; bring drippiness" look from our dads is that they instead need to hear that they're respected--which isn't a message conveyed by the three fathers' day cards above. Respect for dads is not very characteristic of society in general; how many truly admirable dads are there on TV? (Veronica Mars is a remarkable exception to this rule: Veronica's dad is one of the most incredible fathers I've seen.) So this fathers' day, do something different: tell your dad you respect him. Or, if you're a father, try to exude less of the "sentimentality is gross" look and more of the "respect is keen" look.

One Tree Hill and George I

With great big bunches of shamefacedness, I admit, I watch One Tree Hill. I was watching Smallville (maybe it was Gilmore Girls) at 8 pm, I didn't want to have to get up from my seat and get back to work, and there it was, all dramatic-like, trying to suck me in at 9 pm. I've got to say, it had a fascinating premise, one with which I consoled myself so I wouldn't feel so dirty or ashamed: two brothers (separated by 3 months), two different mothers. He chooses the "favorite" mother and son, Nathan, and disowns the other mother and son, Lucas. One son is born to a life of privilege, the other has a mom struggling to make ends meet and deals with social stigma. And now ... both of them are on the same basketball team and have to learn how to interact. It raises really interesting questions about nature vs. nurture, family, responsibility, etc.

Well, at some point in the television series--okay, maybe it was from the very first episode--part of the driving force of the series became that their father, Dan, was evil. Every season they'd have to up the ante about just how despicable the guy could be: whereas the first season Dan was just trying to control his favorite son, in the second season he pays a woman to date and then dump his own brother, and then in the third season he actually kills him and blames the murder on someone else. Perhaps in the fourth season he shall be even more evil, perhaps performing a zombie ritual that will force his dead brother to serve him for eternity.

Since I'll have to wait until at least the fall for them to air the zombie episode, I was pleasantly surprised to read about a kind of "bizarro world Dan" who was just as controlling over his son: George I, an 18th century monarch. The following excerpt from J. H. Plumb's The First Four Georges is like something out of One Tree Hill, if Dan Scott had only been made king of England instead of a car salesman. Now, George I was George II's father, and the Princess of Wales was George II's wife, and George I and George II were Hanoverian--George I couldn't really speak English, and George II had a thick accent:

"The Princess of Wales gave birth to a baby boy. The Prince [George II] wished to [choose] its godparents, the King insisted on the protocol, named them himself, and included, again, according to the protocol, his Chamberlain, the Duke of Newcastle, whom the Prince detested. At the ceremony the Prince failed to control his feelings, took Newcastle by the elbow and said, "Rascal, I find you out." Newcastle was easily put in a twitter, and this mark of royal displeasure, combined with the Prince's rather strong accent, put him in such a dither that he thought the Prince had said, "I'll fight you." Appaled and confused he rushed to consult his colleagues .... They advised him to go to the King, so he did, and told him that he had been challenged. The King immediately placed the Prince under what was virtually house arrest--without bothering to ask him for his version of the story.... [George I] also seized their children, secured a decision from the judges that he had the right to control their education, rapped the Prince and Princess over the knucles for visiting their children secretly, and rationed them to one visit a week so long as notice was given to him first" (55-56).

That could basically be the plot for season four of One Tree Hill. Okay, granted, Dan is not king, but he was recently elected mayor, so he's got some power. And Nathan, Dan's favorite son, is married and could get his wife pregnant. (Side note: Nathan's wife wanted to remain a virgin until she was married, which might have been one factor in Nathan's decision to marry her in high school. I think it's pretty daring for a drama to show someone with that degree of respect for virginity and for a story to explore a marriage between high-schoolers.) And season 3 ended on the pregnancy cliff-hanger moment where someone--we think it is a woman--has taken a pregnancy test, and it was positive. One of these possibly pregnant people is Nathan's wife. Dude, I have totally plotted season four of One Tree Hill! Dan is going to get custody of Nathan and Halley's baby because Nathan will have said something like, "Rascal, I've found you out," and someone will mishear it as, "I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die!" and he will claim Halley is an unfit mother because she used to be a rock star. And to add to all of that, Dan's brother (the one he killed) got Lucas's mom pregnant last season, and I betcha Dan's going to try to control that kid too once it's born! Bastard! (I am referring to Dan, not to the illegitimate offspring.)

"Bread, Dammit!" and the justifiability of religious utterance

It’s always nice when a scholar uses a memorable illustration. I was reading Theology and Narrative, where the author Goldberg discusses the justifiability of religious utterances. Goldberg writes, “In the first place, there must be some linguistic convention common to both speaker and hearer alike such that ‘please pass the bread’ counts as a request. That is, were someone to say instead, ‘Bread, dammit!’ his utterance might be considered an order, a command, or a demand that the bread be passed, but it will not normally be justifiably taken as a request for bread because, quite simply, there is no convention in the language to the effect that ‘Bread, dammit!’ is a way of performing the speech-act of requesting.” For some reason, this paragraph has struck me as thoroughly hilarious, and I have been going around the house telling our cat Cricket and/or empty rooms “Bread, dammit!” (Note: as theorized in an earlier post, my usage of “Bread, dammit!” is technically an instance of a pseudoprofanity rather than actual profanity.) I figured, even if I couldn’t say the phrase as a request, at least I could say it as an order, and if I’m going to be ordering something around, it seems better to do it with the cat or with an empty room.

After making this determination, I was disappointed to read further and discover that, “For a request of bread to be in any way justified, there must at the very least be some bread available, someone who wants or needs it, and someone capable of passing it.” I think it’s sad that we live in a world in which we cannot justifiably tell our loved ones “Bread, dammit!” unless we really want bread, and we cannot ever tell our cats “Bread, dammit!” because they lack opposable thumbs and can't pass food. But if you think about the phrase, technically, it’s not ordering the listener to do anything. It could be a cry of despair, like, “Why does bread exist? Ye gods, why?” or, “There’s bread again, I cannot escape its ubiquitous Orwellian presence!” The very absence of context and the phrase’s ambiguity makes the phrase intrinsically funny. Go ahead and see if I’m not right. Find someone special and tell them “Bread, dammit!” and see if you don’t feel better about the world around you ... and maybe even the bread.

Fully Human ... Fully Divine ...

It’s hard to come up with a new heretical teaching. When I first read a Borges short story in which Judas was the good guy, I thought, “This is blasphemous, but original!” Until I saw Jesus Christ, Superstar. And read the Gospel of Judas. We have Last Temptation of Christ, we have The Da Vinci Code, we have Gnostic heresies, but they all start sounding the same. (Mary Magdalene had a special relationship with Jesus? Been there, done that.) Given the bigness of difficulty in coming up with a genuinely, never before thought of, weird heresy about Jesus, it has struck me that an even bigger challenge would be to come up with a new Christological heresy concerning the natures of Christ. I mean, there’s really not much there that you can come up with that hasn’t been tried: He wasn’t fully human! He wasn’t fully divine! The heresy novelty factor is not very high.

So, skimming some of the Gnostic gospels on the web, it strikes me that I have a Christological heresy that may actually be new. (Drumroll, please.) Christ is fully human … fully divine … and fully monkey. See, other heresies fail because they always shortchange one of the natures, so why not just supercharge them by throwin’ in a little monkey action? After all, according to William Lynch in Christ and Apollo, imperfect man "was once, and still is, a bit of a monkey" (97), so should not the perfect God-man be much more than just a bit of a monkey, yea, fully thereso? Now, half the fun of creating your own Christological heresy would surely be in writing your own gospel and pretending that it is thousands of years old and claiming that “the church” represses religious expression. I would like to call my particular religious expression “the Gospel of Bobo,” and I’d like to pretend that a bunch of disenfranchised Gnostics got surly and drunk one night and wrote this. (I have used the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Philip as my model.):

One day, while Jesus was in Judea, he sat down while his disciples were in prayer and began to laugh. “Master, why do you laugh while we offer a prayer to God? Is it not just and right to do?” The Lord replied, “I do not laugh at you, but I laugh because of what I am: the indwelling of the enlightened divine self-generated monkey.” And the disciples became angry and blasphemed in their hearts, but he rebuked them. “Why are you angry? Is it not because you are unlike the monkey? Was not Zaccheus counted more righteous because he climbed the tree, and the snake more wicked because he dwelt in dust? Behold, while the serpent spoke clearly he was all of falsehood, but the monkey who grunts in words of mystery is all of truth.”

And the disciple whom Jesus loved, Mary Magdalene, asked him, “Tell us, are there many monkeys, or only one?” And Jesus answered her, “I tell you, the aeon of the Old World Monkey is rapidly passing away, to be replaced by the great and boundless realm of the New World Monkey. Yet what is ‘the New World Monkey?’ For names given to the worldly are very deceptive. While some have called you ‘Mary,’ because they perceive you only as Mary, I proclaim you ‘Monkey,’ as I see within you a luminous fluffy cloud, and lo, it is anthropoidal.” When the disciples saw Mary thus set apart for glory, they said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? Because, duh, you are not a woman, and I have monkey needs!”

A clarification comment: I realize that some might be scandalized by the last sentence of this entry, so I want to clarify my purposes. In the Gospel of Philip, after Jesus kisses Mary Magdalene on the lips, the disciples get jealous and basically ask him, "What's she got that we haven't got?" and, well, the disciples couldn't be so stupid that they couldn't guess. (Dan Brown certainly did.) My point here is not to play with the idea of a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene so much as to say that the Gospel of Philip includes some incredibly stupid dialogue.