Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Narrative Closure and Jesus

Now that my dissertation is getting into full hobble, I'm working on the "Introduction" in which I attempt to make the mental meanderings of my four chapters be integrated into one seamless whole. My topic engages with issues of narrative "closure" and whether endings actually do cohere (and, implicitly, whether dissertations do). Well, I got to thinking that since I was using the word "closure" so much, it would be nice to know how the word functioned in eighteenth-century writings. So, I decided to use Eighteenth-Century Collections Online to do a word-search on "closure." In this search, I came across the following odd excerpt from John Barnard's A Zeal for Good Works Excited and Directed (1742):

"Would it not look more like the workings of the Spirit of God, upon the Hearts of People, for them, under a deep Concern of Soul for their eternal Salvation, to retire to their secret Devotions, and humble themselves before God, in a Sense of their Sins, and earnestly beg Help from him, that they may be led to a saving Closure with the Lord Jesus Christ, by a true and lively Faith, and to an unfeigned Repentance, and Life of Holiness, and go to their Minister to direct them wherein they need Direction, and improve their most serious Thoughts upon what they shall do to be saved, and immediately set upon the doing of it?" (38)

Now, perhaps your first thought is, "That is a rather long sentence." But the bit I found rather interesting is the phrase, "a saving Closure with the Lord Jesus Christ." Despite how odd the phrase sounds to twenty-first century ears, the phrase did show up a number of times in my search.

My point is not to say, "Ewww, they were weird back then!" It is interesting, however, how rhetoric alters through time. Nowadays, one method people often use to determine whether someone is "really" a Christian is to inquire whether someone is "saved" or if they have a "close, personal relationship with Jesus Christ." I can't help wondering, if we asked an eighteenth-century Christian if they had this "close personal relationship," would their response be, "What the heck are you talking about?" (If they used the word "Heck," of course.) My brow would certainly furrow in puzzlement if they tried to ascertain my spiritual state by querying whether I sought a saving closure with Jesus Christ. Both parties may have established different linguistic norms for describing Christian experience, and these expressions may sound foreign and intuitively "wrong" to Christians from a different era or religious community.

It's also interesting to speculate whether these language norms are being used to express the same "essence" of what it means to be a Christian, or whether using different language modifes our understanding of Christianity. For example, "Close personal relationship" might lead us to thinking of God as warm and fuzzy; at the very least, it emphasizes his immanence more than His transcendence. It focuses on "relationship" rather than, say, a set of beliefs (e.g., believe that Jesus rose from the dead, Romans 10:9). "Close" (in close personal) suggests proximity to God, but "closure" may suggest distancing from sin--it is a definitive break. Or, "closure" may emphasize the sense of completion--the "closure" that comes when one's entire life has been judged. The emphasis becomes on future closure (the end of one's life) rather than a past moment (e.g., "conversion"). To what extent are these two different expressions complementary or contradictory?

Anyway, to be more ecumenical, and so that we don't offend eighteenth-century Christians, perhaps it would be best to just combine the two. Just ask people, "Do you have a close, personal closure with the Lord Jesus Christ?" If they do not immediately respond "yes," you can be sure that they are neither an eighteenth-century Christian nor a twenty-first century one.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Kinda Juvenile Version

This year, my wife and I are doing a “Bible Through the Two Years” program (the wimpy version of the "Bible Through the Year" program). We've been reading the Bible aloud, and so far, we've actually kept up.

Although neither one of us is really familiar with the King James Version (I grew up on the NIV myself), we decided we’d give it a try this time—after all, it’s the Bible they were using in the time periods that we study. Maybe we would now be able to pick up literary allusions we wouldn’t have recognized because of translation differences. We could be devotional and study for our time period at the same time! What could be finer?

The difficulty that I had never really apprehended before is that the King James Version is … well … weird. The language often seems cumbersome and disorienting. And let me tell you, once you’ve read the Book of Romans in the KJV translation, Peter's remark that Paul writes things that are "difficult to understand" suggests Peter must have been reading the KJV!

The difficulty with the KJV is not simply that we might be baffled by an odd translation. The problem is that the translation's language might sound so foreign or carry different connotations that we end up erupting in laughter. Take this KJV selection from Gen. 44:34. "And he [Joseph] took and sent messes unto them from before him: but Benjamin's mess was five times so much as any of theirs." I'm sorry, but the only context in which I hear "messes" in the plural is in scatological contexts. I couldn't prevent a rather disturbing image of paired messes coming to mind, and, like Abraham's wife Sarah, I laughed (Gen. 18:12). I felt dirty afterwards, but that's what happens when a newcomer reads the KJV.

Apparently, however, we were not the only ones who misunderstood Genesis 44. While we were reading the Bible aloud, our cat Pippin was listening. When we heard the sounds of a cat barfing behind us, we briefly noted that it was a highly inappropriate way of responding to God's Word; however, we were comforted with the knowledge that Pippin couldn't have been demon-possessed, as we learned from my Kitty Angels post.

I'm only mentioning Pippin's rather gross actions to bring up (no pun intended) something rather odd we noticed after our Bible reading. Pippin vomited in two different places. Here, however, is the creepy part: the one pile was about five times the size of the other! Or possibly seven times (we didn't have reliable instruments of measurement ... of course, neither did Pippin). It's as if the Bible passage and Pippin's actions were somehow coordinated. I won't go so far as to say the symmetry was "beautiful," but it did seem kind of cool. A little like "found art." Except, you know, only if the art were a fossilized turd. (The 18th century writer Christopher Smart actually describes a fossilized turd in his newspaper The Midwife. But I digress.)

Anyway, I promise that my next blog entry will not be about cat dandruff or cat vomit. Unless y'all want me to. Got to keep my peeps happy!

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

A Sentimental Moment with a Cat

This past weekend, I had an on-campus visit at a college. But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about our cat, Cricket.

The night before my departure, our cat Cricket was cuddling with me. I was thinking, "I'm gonna miss the little guy over the next couple of days. Look how cute he is, as I pet him with wild abandon."

And then ...

I noticed his dandruff.

You see, before the cuddling had commenced, I had just gotten out of the shower. Consequently, my torso was completely shirtless. And as I was petting Cricket, I watched in horror as little flakes of kitty dandruff roved free of their furry moorings and sought to attach themselves to my skin. I suppose it's a little bit of a double-standard, since I am not actually "horrified" when little flakes of my own dandruff are attaching themselves to my skin. Come to think of it, since dandruff is skin, that would be like saying that I'm not horrified when my skin is attached together. I would, of course, be rather horrified if my skin weren't attached to the rest of my skin.

Anyway, the point of this entry wasn't so much to gross people out as to reflect on how a truly poignant moment can be ruined when truth, in all of its matter of fact about dandruff, broke in. And that I really wish there were a way to communicate to cats that they needed to work on the dandruff--cats are very lacking in self-awareness. There used to be those helpful Head & Shoulders commercials with various "friends" dusting off their friends' collars and saying, "Whoa, Nellie! You got some problems!" (Loose quotation.) You can't do that with cats. Or rather, you can do it, but they stare at you blankly. I suppose they are like ancient Israel,

"Though seeing, they do not see;
Though hearing, they do not understand."

And as the proverb goes,

"The leopard cannot change its spots,
Nor can the kitty its seborrheic scurf."