Archive for April, 2009

Now the whole earth had one internet and the same binary code. And as technology progressed they came upon a crash-free, virus-free, stable OS and installed it everywhere. And they said to one another: “Come, let us compose lines of code and Beta test them thoroughly.” And they had computers for networking, and wireless routers for data transmission. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a chat room, with fully functional video conferencing, and let us make a searchable database of screen names for all, otherwise we’ll be scattered abroad and out of touch for minutes (or even days!).” The Lord logged on to see the chat room and the video conferencing function, which programmers had designed. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they are all using ‘C’, this is only the beginning of what they will do; no connections they propose to make will now be impossible for them. Come, let us hack in, and confuse their language there, so that their servers will crash and shut down.” So the Lord crashed their program and they left off building the chat room. Therefore, it was called Techno-Babel because the Lord confused their language and crashed their servers so all were out of touch over the face of all the earth.

0100011101100101011011100110010101110011011001101000010100000110100001010: 11:1-9

I’m not actually opposed to using technology (I even wrote this essay on a computer and you’re probably reading it on one now) and I don’t believe God will really come down to destroy the internet. But, I am opposed to the uncritical use of technology as a medium for communication and I do believe God speaks more in spite of technology than through it. As we continue to press forward into the electronic age, I hope to use the story of Babel as a means of considering the limitations of electronic communication. By keeping the following two thoughts in mind, just maybe we can help prevent our own Techno-Babel: 1) Relationships are necessary for accurate communication; and 2) God is the only medium for real human connection.

1) The value of modern technology in communication is ambiguous. The internet enables people to see and speak to each other instantly across the world; translation programs even enable speaking with people who don’t speak the same language. Cell phones and PDA’s allow people to stay in touch from nearly anywhere in the world and satellite technology may just complete the coverage map. At the same time, NE1 who has ever been in a txt msg fight knows how easily words can be misunderstood. No matter how clear your acronyms, abbreviations, and emoticons may seem to you, sth is 404 n transmission. @TEOTD, each side misses out on body language and facial expressions that are central to communication; a cold stare or a soft touch can say more than a thousand words.

Video conferencing is one of the newer gadgets to remove some of these issues. However, the relationships we develop with people, and not just the ability to see and hear them, are the basis upon which real communication becomes possible. It doesn’t take much effort to prove that miscommunication is quite possible, even likely, between people. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians provides plenty of examples of how people can take a simple idea, turn it into a slogan, and miss out on the whole meaning of the message. It’s like saying ‘All things are lawful for me’ is a justification to do whatever I want (see 1 Cor. 6:12); perhaps a logical conclusion, but certainly not at all what Paul means when he speaks of Christ abolishing the law. The relationships in which words are spoken fill out as much meaning as the words themselves.

I’m certainly not denying the potential for technology to help start or continue relationships; I’ve known plenty of people who met online, and my wife and I used countless hours of Skype video chat when I was 1000 miles away at school. To say that all uses of technology are inherently wrong would even implicitly deny the Bible’s validity; writing itself was at one time a new invention with an ambiguous potential for communication. What I am pointing out is that the written or spoken word has no single or necessary meaning; even the most treasured and beautiful words of scripture can and have been used to do incredible harm to others. The ability to speak instantly with anyone across the globe does not mean that communication is just the touch of a button away. Communication requires far more than the ability to hear and understand words; a whole network of presuppositions and assumptions goes into the way words are comprehended and the assessment or universality of that network is something that technology can’t even begin to address.

To speak to one another in a global society requires human relationships developed over time; nothing can replace the value of physically spending time with another human being. To share thoughts and ideas requires more than a program to map word equivalencies and nuances. The danger we are taught by the story of Babel is that globally unified purposes, actions, and languages aren’t inherently good. Enabling everyone to speak the same language (whether a ‘universal’ English or some totally unforeseen machine language) does not make communication possible across the globe. The kingdom of God stretches over all creation and certainly implies that the whole world is necessarily a part of our human relationships; but developing the ability to see and hear anyone, anywhere, isn’t nearly the same thing as edifying the Body of Christ through deep and challenging relationships.

Transferring data so that information can be rationally accessed is not identical to the life altering power of gospel community. Technology can be a powerful tool for human connection, but it is only a tool. Imagine if God had emailed Moses the Ten Commandments or sent a video series on Jesus instead of sending Him to live among us. The beauty and power of the gospel is that God loved us so much that He entered our world and changed everything. Christian relationships run deeper than broad band connections.

2) If the church ever hopes to be more than just one more sound bite in an ADD world of flashy ads and catchy phrases, it must realize that God is the only mediator for human relationship. Technology only passively facilitates the senses’ involvement in communication; it does not actively enable anything to happen.  Technology allows the thoughts or experiences of an individual to be transmitted into the mind of another, but it does not provide any essential means for interpretation or evaluation. To arrive at the truth of the gospel message and to realize its transformative power, we must rest our hopes on the movement and action of God and not the marketability of our mission slogans or ad campaigns.

If you want to reach someone on the other side of the globe, you have many options. You can pick up a telephone, send an email, find a nice chat room, etc. But when you actually decide to share something of yourself with that person, the transmission of 1’s and 0’s isn’t enough. When you come to know someone by your relationship to God, you are necessarily connected to that person. I don’t mean something happens in a mystically spiritual way that unites ‘life-forces’ or something science-fictional, but I do fully believe that God unites people together in an absolutely real, almost palpable way. God binds us together in all of our relationships and is most fully present in marriage when “the two become one flesh.” The type of connection that unites us as members of the Body of Christ is far more real and far more meaningful than the ability to reproduce sensory data through 1’s and 0’s.

When we sit down and consider how best to “reach” people in the church, the conversation often presumes the need to condense the gospel message or share the church website with people outside the church. Neither practice is inherently wrong, but to think that the truth of the Christian message should be primarily conveyed in a 30 second spiel (or even a 30 minute sermon) is to miss the majority of the biblical witness. Certainly, the Holy Spirit is capable of reaching someone through a 30 second conversation or even just a single word, but to turn that potential into the basis for Christian proclamation is to miss out on God’s abundant gifts to humanity. The church does not construct an intellectual portal into a heavenly realm (or hack into God’s internet servers) to provide mediation between humans and God. The church trains persons to identify the abundance of gifts that God has directly provided for us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church facilitates the development of formative relationships in which we are made members of Christ’s body and enables us, by the power of the Spirit, to see that God is the only One Who actively enables communication of the Word.

To share the Christian message requires God to activate our speech and enable communication. Technology provides an unparalleled medium of communication because it seems to be a more direct and permanent connection with one another than God could ever provide; technology provides instant audio and visual connections from and to nearly anywhere in the world.  However, the problem with Babel was not the inability to speak to one another and share in “the same words”; the problem was that people thought their labor was necessary to stay united. The more time and resources we put into the development of new technologies for sharing the gospel message, the more our attention is diverted from the fact that God has already united us in Jesus Christ.

Instead of finding ways to “reach” people, we should find ways to see what God is doing among us and invite others to share in our life together. We can’t rid ourselves of technology, but we can work to reform its use given a proper understanding of God’s role in the life of the church.  We can work to make God, and not the appeal of a power point slide, the center of our proclamation and worship.

So, the next time you open up an email or chat window, consider what connection you really have with your conversation partner. Are you relying on and trusting more in a computer’s ability to get your message across than in the power of the Spirit through whom we are all connected? Good communication is a tricky business and technology is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to occur. To use technology in the life of the church requires a community of interpretation. To share in the Word of God requires more than a detailed reproduction of sense experience. Just as we must know the voice behind the text-message to avoid misunderstanding, we must know the voice of the One Who spoke creation into being if we really want to share the gospel. As I said before, I doubt God will ever come down to destroy the internet, but I would hope our tendency to embrace technology as the bearer of truth doesn’t force His hand into causing our own Techno-Babel.

Jeremy Wester is a second-year M.Div. student.

A book review of  Jeremy Begbie’s Resounding Truth:  Christian Wisdom in the World of Music

Today we swim in the sounds of music.  Sometimes we are thrown into the deep end involuntarily.  Often we live within it unknowingly.  And every now and then we embrace music for God’s sake.  In the midst of our floating and sputtering, drowning and swimming, Christians should recognize where they are and do something about it.

For those who would like to do something about it, theologian-musician Dr. Jeremy Begbie has provided a combination alarm-and-lifesaver in his Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music.  This text is “not only for the professional theologian but also for anyone who wants to think seriously about music from a Christian perspective” (19).

Ultimately, he hopes to “situate music within a vision of the purposes of a Triune Creator, who in Jesus Christ has embodied and realized his purposes for creation, who now through his Spirit works to bring all things to their intended end, and who invites us, with Christ and in the Spirit, to ‘voice creation’s praise’” (305).

To guide us to a Christian perspective on music (particularly Western tonal music), Begbie must first challenge some of the modern West’s basic assumptions about music.  In his definition, music is actually a set of actions, particularly music-making and music-hearing.  Moreover, music is simultaneously socially and culturally located and  based in the physical order of the world.  This dynamic drives much of the book’s argument.  Although music is made and shaped by humans, music is also based upon God’s created order, and as such music can testify to God, align us with God’s order, and be a part of our Christian vocation.

After considering what little Scripture has to say about music, Begbie turns in Part 2 to the “rich reservoirs of thought” found in historical Christian reflections on music.  He begins with “The Great Tradition” (c. 500 BCE - 1500 AD).  Begbie knows this tradition is flawed, but he doesn’t want its flaws to deafen us from its echoes of the truth.  While it wrongly downplays the physical, the sensual, and the practical, it also stresses (in ways that modernity does not) how music is “grounded firmly in a universal God-given order.”  This tradition rightly saw music “as a means through which we are enabled to live more fully in the world that God has made and with the God who made it” (94).

From here Begbie considers the views of three influential Reformers (Ch 4), J.S. Bach (Ch 5), three musical theologians (Ch 6), and two theological musicians (Ch 7).  These chapters cover an impressive amount of ground. To grossly summarize, these Christians give us hints on how to approach music, which include theological affirmations of the goodness of the physical world (including music), and musical portrayals of Christian themes that communicate in ways that words simply cannot.

Begbie’s crowning achievement, Part 3, offers a Christian perspective on music that draws upon the insights of these earlier chapters.  Chapters 8-10 sketch a doctrine of creation and locate music within that doctrine.  First, he establishes that the cosmos are created by the triune God freely and in love, and this cosmos sings God’s praise.  Humans, as those made in God’s image, are to “extend and elaborate the praise that creation already sings to God,” and this takes place in Christ.  In him “we are to bring creation to be more fully what it was created to be, and in so doing we anticipate the final re-creation of all things” (207).

According to Begbie, how does music fit into this cosmos?  1) Like the cosmic order, the sonic order of music is given to us by God freely and in love; we should be thankful for it.  2) Just as the physical creation is good but is not God, so too is music.6  3) Music can bring God glory by offering “experiences of a fruitful interaction with time,” which God has given to us and which “we inhabit as physical creatures.”7  4) Music is bound to and reflects a sonic order that is both ordered and open.  5) The sonic order is a unity that is also internally diverse, which reflects “the diversity of the [one] world” (235).

How is music a part of our calling to voice creation’s praise?  Music can help us be attentive and responsible to creation.  It is a way for us to develop upon the given order and encourage newness and life.  Music also allows us to partake in God’s healing of creation, in that music can testify to the hope we have in the cross and the final resolution in the eschaton.

Begbie’s last chapter considers music’s “singular powers.”  Most notably, music uniquely draws us into dynamics of tension and resolution, which reflects how the Christian life is marked by both Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and how we must patiently await the ultimate resolution in the eschaton.  Moreover, in music we hear distinct entities (notes) that not only share the same space but enhance one another, which is a great way to imagine how the persons of the Trinity relate, and therefore how Christians hope to relate to God and others.

In sum, Jeremy Begbie has offered a substantial contribution to a Christian wisdom about music.  Drawing upon past Christian insights and the doctrine of creation, he fashions a “Christian ecology” in which he couches a theology of music.  His Christian ecology is impressively Christocentric and attentive to the trajectories of Scripture.  Music in his scheme is part of our human engagement with God’s created, ordered cosmos, and it can be part of our vocation as those who voice creation’s praise.

However, Resounding Truth also raises questions that Begbie could address more explicitly in his next installment.  Theological readers of a postmodern bent in particular would benefit from a more explicit account of his view of natural theology and revelation.  That is, how do Christians come to know what is and is not ‘order,’ ‘good,’ ‘beautiful,’ or ‘true’?  How can we be confident that our judgments are not bent by sin?  Similarly, given that flourishing in Christ should look different from worldly standards of flourishing, then how do we discern the difference and live accordingly?  Begbie assumes that Christians will judge with a redeemed outlook, and we would all benefit from knowing more about how we acquire and evaluate such skills of discernment as redeemed sinners.

Regardless of this lingering question, Begbie’s argument remains robust.  He proves that music can point us to Christ and many truths of the Christian faith that otherwise often perplex us.  He shows that music is a part of how we can faithfully engage creation, encourage one another in Christ, improve our imaginations, and praise God alongside all of creation as we were created to do.  In short, music is a God-given gift within creation that re-sounds God’s truth.  This book exhorts us to receive the gift by hearing it, and to give it back by making joyful sounds of praise.  Christians, do you hear the music, and will you do something about it?

Frank Warren, the keeper of America’s secrets, was on campus last month giving a talk about his immensely popular PostSecret project.  Warren began the project in 2004 by distributing 3,000 postcards asking strangers to share a secret.  The secret could be anything just as long as it was true and had never been shared before.  Warren put his own address on the postcards and left them on park benches and in library books.  Out of the 3,000 distributed cards, Warren got 100 back, which he then used as part of an art exhibit.

To Warren’s surprise, that was not the end of the PostSecret project.  People began sending Warren their own postcards, which he then posted every Sunday on the project’s website.  The project exploded, and Warren now receives 1,000 postcards a week.  The project has now produced four books, an extensive speaking tour, a music video, and a new website that has received well over 200,000,000 hits in the last year and a half (www.postsecretcommunity.com).

The secrets range from the quaint (”Sometimes, secretly, I actually enjoy life.”), to the mildly criminal (”I love the self check-out.  Over the past two years, I have probably saved over $500 by ringing up all my produce as bananas.”), to the heartbreaking (”My mom chose my stepdad over me.”), to the devastating (”Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I’m dead.”).  For some the secrets are a form of entertainment; for others the secrets offer just enough encouragement to get through the day.  Warren’s volunteer work with Hopeline, a national suicide hotline, led him to see suicide as one of the great tragedies of the younger generation.  He sees PostSecret as a contribution to suicide prevention.

Warren’s talk was straightforward.  He told us how the project got started, how it grew, and where it seems to be going.  He showed us the music video (“Dirty Little Secrets” with All American Rejects).  He even showed us some of the “secret secrets,” secrets certain copyright laws would not let him publish.  One of unpublish-able postcards seemed like all the rest, but it had been written on what might have been a Disney coloring book.  One lawyer told Warren, “You print that postcard, and Mickey Mouse will sue your ass.”

Eventually, Warren opened up the floor for audience members to share their secrets.  He knew it would take a few minutes for people to gather the courage, so he told us to turn to the people sitting around us and say hello.  The divinity students in the crowd were a bit confused (doesn’t the peace happen after the confession?), but we did what we were told.  Eventually, one brave woman worked her way to the microphone.  Then a dozen or so others followed.  We learned how one woman lied on her application to get accepted into Duke.  Another said she hated her major.  Another had been sexually abused since she was a child.  As they cried, Warren told them that they are brave and that they are at last free from their burdens.  After the last women revealed her secret, Warren thanked us for coming and closed the evening with a kind of benediction: “Free your secrets, and become who you are.”

Warren’s talk was interesting enough, but I wish it had ended with the “secret secrets.”  The PostSecret project works because it is anonymous.  No names, no faces, no risk.  It can be both entertainment and encouragement at the same time.  The face-to-face divulgence of secrets felt like too much.  Suddenly the people themselves, not just the secrets, were on display, exposed in front of hundreds of people.

As we were walking out of the auditorium, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just gone too far on a first date.  I felt like I was going to have to spend the next month avoiding someone in the halls because there was no way I could be held responsible for what I had just learned.  “Free your secrets, and become who you are.”  What a perfect thing to say when you do not have to see the person the next day, when you do not have to deal with the pain and humiliation those secrets have caused.

I am mostly sympathetic to PostSecret.  I think its popularity is due in part to how most people are unwilling to see things that make them uncomfortable.  The PostSecret website provides just enough space to let people breathe a little.  However, I do not think that that means PostSecret knows what it is doing.  I think it is wrong to stir up peoples’ deepest emotions in such precarious context.  Confession is intimate.  It requires a safe place and trusted people.  An audience of strangers has the potential to leave people naked and alone.  PostSecret is great for what it is: a space to work up the courage to tell the truth.  But I think that when it tries to be more than that, when it tries to be a “community,” it risks causing the damage it claims to be trying to prevent.

Elyse Gustafson is a second year M.Div. student at Duke Divinity School.

Gregory of Nazianzus is my favorite Cappadocian father.  That probably makes me a nerd, but I love Gregory’s brilliant and biting polemical rhetoric.  His thoughts, conclusions, and arguments about the Trinity make my head spin and my imagination take flight.  Most of all, there are ways he seems to be a kindred spirit, of like temperament.  He prefers the quiet, studious life of contemplation and monasticism but was called to the priesthood, and eventually the episcopate, against his will.  Consequently, Gregory’s thoughts on the role of theology in the priesthood are fascinating, particularly in his second oration, “In Defense of his Flight to Pontus.”

In this oration, Gregory explains the reasons he fled from his own ordination, though he eventually let duty compel him to return and took his place in the ranks of the clergy.  In the course of his defense, he lays out his understanding of just what a priest is, and by the time he is done, it’s no wonder why he fled: he describes quite a daunting vocation.

One of the primary images he uses to describe the role of the priest is that of a “doctor of souls.” He admonishes the reader to be careful to understand that to be a doctor of souls is much more difficult than to be one of bodies, for the soul is remarkably more complex than the body.  The stakes are also much higher, for the direction of a person’s soul is of eternal significance, rather than the body, which is only temporal.  He writes, “The guiding of man . . . seems to me in very deed to be the art of arts and science of sciences” (2.16).  One of the reasons for this is simply that people are not usually open about their sins, and the ones who are probably won’t listen to the one who tries to help them.  Moreover, the correction of these sins, once the priest has correctly “diagnosed” them, must be perfectly tailored to the sinner.  There is no one method that will heal every person.  Some need praise, others blame; some need doctrine, others examples; some private admonitions, others public rebuke (2.29-32).  It is important to note that for Gregory, the work of the pastor is always soteriological.  The pastor diagnoses and helps to set the parishioner free from sin, though of course, only Christ has done the saving work.

One of the most important tools the priest has for his or her (for Gregory it was only ‘his’) work, then, is theology.  In fact, Gregory describes the “distribution of the Word” as the most important task of the priest (2.35).  Speaking the Word to the people enabled both the diagnosing and the curing of sin.  Gregory speaks of those who have erred in regard to truth and piety and have not done God’s will.  For many of them, their error is not from a blatant disregard for truth or some deliberate choice but because they simply did not know God’s will.  These people have great zeal but no depth.  Gregory claims that it is the priest’s job to teach the people.  Similarly, it is the priest’s job to contend on God’s behalf against those who “speak unrighteousness against the most High” and oppose sound doctrine (2.41).  Not that God is not capable of defending God’s self, but that the priest ought to contend for God’s name against those who would slander it lest any person be led astray by false doctrine.  Theology was largely for the purpose of fighting heresies, though it was not solely for the purpose of fighting heresies.  Gregory makes it clear that the priest’s job is also to replace these heresies and false ideas with the correct ones (2.14).  In this, theology has a constructive purpose.  The priest preaches the transformative word of God which brings about a change in the people and draws them ever closer to God.

Thus, for Gregory, every priest must be remarkably well trained in theology.  They need to be capable of warding off any potential or actual heresies, of knowing which portions and how much of the Word to distribute to people, of paying attention to the eternal significance of the priest’s position, and of speaking about theology well—no easy task, Gregory assures us.  The priest must first be made pure and clean and draw near to God in order that he or she may then lead others into the presence of God, which is the point.

As an undergraduate, I was a TA for a course titled “Introduction to Theology and Ministry,” which was designed to introduce students to basic theological concepts and the way they are important for ministry.  It was primarily freshmen and sophomores, and the one frustrated phrase I heard repeatedly was “Why do we have to learn all this theology?  I just want to go DO ministry!” At the divinity school, it can seem as though theology’s importance for ministry is a given, but the issue is addressed by so many professors—I have yet to have a class that does not make at least passing reference to this point—that I must wonder if we still fail to understand just how essential this time of theological training is.

I might even challenge Gregory a bit.  He focuses far more in this oration on theology as a fight against the powers of evil than on its positive function.  I might argue, however, that theology is also constructive.  Pastors have a responsibility to preach the gospel, to preach the Word that is Christ and that does transform.  It is a word of hope and of grace, not merely a sword to wield against heretics.  Gregory ultimately returned to his post out of a sense of duty.  I wonder if a better reason could have been that the responsibility doesn’t finally rest with us but on the grace of Christ.

It seems as though a more robust understanding of the pastor’s vocation would go a long way toward reshaping our understanding of what we are doing here with our studies.  Is the pastor just a comforting presence during moments of crisis, the person who speaks some thoughts about living well on Sunday mornings, someone to pray at meals and official occasions?  Or is the pastor one who daily contends with Satan to wrest her parishioners out of his hands, who works toward a specific eschatological goal, who contends against heresies, who preaches the Word of hope that leads to eternal life, who daily tells her people the truth that grace is large, whose job is to “provide the soul with wings, to rescue it from the world and give it to God, and to watch over that which is in His image, if it abides, to take it by the hand, if it is in danger, or restore it, if ruined, to make Christ to dwell in the heart by the Spirit: and, in short, to deify, and bestow heavenly bliss upon, one who belongs to the heavenly host” (2.22)?  If it’s the latter, how important our studies become!  And in this case, it’s no wonder Gregory fled.  In fact, when I think of this responsibility, I consider a flight of my own.

Samantha L. Miller is a first-year M.Div. candidate at Duke Divinity School.

photograph by Jacki Price-Linnartz

Amongst the bare, chill trees

and the sun-speckled slopes

I see my elusive friend,

the white-mottled deer,

who drifts in and out of my view

and graces my days

like the grace-bearing breath

and the mysterious light

of the Spirit who quickens

yet remains beyond grasp.

It has become a powerful Good Friday tradition in many church communities to end the Lenten journey with reflections upon the “seven last words Christ.”  Jesus’ final fragmented statements have offered comfort, challenge, insight, inspiration and hope to weary Holy Week pilgrims nearing their paschal destination, and are considered to be all the more important for having been borne to us upon the winds of Our Savior’s final breaths.

And yet, on this day Jesus is not the only one whose dying speaks.  This is also the day when Sin, in beholding the Crucified One, is confronted by his condemnation.  This is the day Death dies.  And yet, these forces refuse to go silently into the night.  The Old Man hurls protests of His own against the New Humanity that confronts him from the cross.  Many of our churches recognize this voice in their practice of collectively reading the Passion narrative on Palm Sundays.  When the congregation reads together the words of the angry crowd, we participate in giving voice to the “last words of the Old Humanity.”

In his Homiletics, Karl Barth claimed that, “certainly something has to be said about human sins and errors.   Yet it ought to be from the perspective of sin forgiven and error removed.  Sin undoubtedly has to be taken seriously, but forgiveness even more seriously…Sin must be spoken about only as the sin which is taken away by the Lamb of God.”  It is in this Spirit and with this intent that we offer these six meditations on the “Last Words of the Old Humanity,” not to obsess over our brokenness, but rather to more clearly envision the Gospel of this gift of grace granted in the dying of Jesus Christ on this Good Friday.  To Him be the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen.

I. “Away with him!  Release for us Barabbas!” (Luke 23:18) by Carole Baker
II. “But they kept shouting, ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’” (Luke 23:21, ESV) by Tyler Atkinson
III. “Hail, King of the Jews!” (Mark 15:18) by Tyler Garrard
IV. “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross!” (Mark 15:29) by Margaret McWilliams
V. “He saved others; he cannot save himself…He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to.” (Matthew 27:42) by Maria Swearingen
VI. “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come and take him down!” (Mark 15:36) by Matthew Nickoloff

Note: These “last words” are taken from the Synoptic Gospels, and by no means exhaust all of the possible selections.  We envision these reflections as an open invitation for readers to discover other “last words” and to make their own meditations as we together contemplate the paschal mysteries.

I. “Away with him!  Release for us Barabbas!” (Luke 23:18)

by Carole Baker

Peer pressure-it isn’t something we leave behind when we walk across the stage to receive our high school diploma. It may be a phrase adults use with a hint of nostalgia, but even as adults we continue to face it–and give into it– every day. We want, just like we did in high school, to appear relevant and savvy. Maybe it’s less these days about wearing the right clothes, or hanging out at the right Starbucks, but we’re still trying to say the right things, read the right books, drop the right names, etc. It takes more than an informed conscience to resist the crescendo of collective assent. The wave picks us up and before we know it we’re on top, having no where to look but down. Like those swept up by the growing call for the release of Barabbas, rather than the man who had no charge against him, we too would rather embrace camaraderie than jeopardize our good standing among peers. I imagine, however, that though the prevailing voices calling for Barabbas’ release won out, they were not the only voices in the crowd. I imagine Jesus stood there able to hear some voices crying out for him. But who would be so bold, so brave, as to throw themselves against the wave-risking their reputation and possibly even their life?  Who would speak out, not for the self-satisfaction of intellectual dissent, but purely out of the conviction that Christ is who he said he is? Who would love this man so deeply that their desire for self-protection would be consumed by their love of truth? And how on earth could such a love be possible?

We are incapable of resisting the crowd until something bigger takes over us. When this happens it’s nothing short of a miracle–something only God can do. And he did. Indeed, the love that enabled the few voices to cry out for him that day when Christ was handed over is the same love that raised him from the dead. Only this love can overcome the fears that ensure we’re beholden to the crowd. And only this love is big enough to keep us from drowning when the wave of assent comes crashing down as quickly as it was built.

Carole Baker is a Research Associate at Duke Divinity School.

II. “But they kept shouting, ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’” (Luke 23:21, ESV)

by Tyler Atkinson

I am struck by the repetitious nature of the crowd’s cry, “Crucify him!”  It reminds me of a recent trip to Target, in which I heard a young boy screaming to his mother, “Toy, toy, toy!”  The constant screams and roars were agonizing.  Having heard the cries first, upon seeing him I realized the boy was cute and appeared harmless.  How could such a cute child rage with such fury?  While in the checkout line, I responded to my wife with the kind of indignation to which we all can relate: “That boy has not stopped screaming for the last half hour,” which means, “I wish she would take him out of the store!  We’re trying to shop in peace here!”  Only after the damage to the membranes in the ear canal was assured, the mother gave the boy what he wanted.

It is easy to read over the Passion narratives without pausing to dwell on the durative force of the crowd’s cries.  Like the mother in the store, only after the constant screaming of the crowd does Pilate assuage their rage.  When we “enter into the narrative,” we are forced to reckon with the reality that we do not stop screaming until we see Jesus on the cross.  We are like angry children not getting our way, except with all the nastiness that grown-ups are able to muster after years of practice.  But, we are quick to think we are beyond begging to put Jesus on the cross.  Like the little boy, we appear harmless. It is easy for us to cover the nastiness of our sin, especially when we are taking theology classes and preparing for ordination.  We are tempted to abstract our sin to passive rejection rather than the aggressive pursuit of execution.

When we read that the crowds keep on yelling for Pilate to crucify Jesus, we want to progress quickly that we might make it to the resurrection.  Like my agitation at the boy’s screaming and the mother’s not sparing us the racket, it pains us to feel the weight of the yells.  It is hard to picture our selves in the midst of the crowd with our fists in the air and our teeth grinding away, stomping around like an angry three-year-old.  Yet, Luke forces us to dwell there for a moment.  In a world where we so desperately want to be spared the noise of unsatisfied children, we must listen to the constant yells, “Crucify him, crucify him!”  I am thankful for the screaming child in Target, for his temper tantrum was but a smattering of my own scowls at the Son of God; and I am reminded even more of the radical mercy of God in Jesus Christ in converting my “hell no’s” to Pilate’s suggestion to release Jesus into a joyful “yes” to the Gospel.  God’s forgiveness in Jesus has overtaken not only my rejection of the Son of God, but even my plea to execute him on a Roman cross… “Grace that is greater than all my sin!”

-Tyler Atkinson is a second year M.Div. student at Duke Divinity School

III. “Hail, King of the Jews!” (Mark 15:18)

by Tyler Garrard

“Hail, King of the Jews!”  Frederick Buechner says we should translate it, “Head Jew,” just to make sure everybody gets the joke.  The soldier’s cry against Jesus is our cry too.  Embarrassed by his humility, we loudly proclaim him King without ever considering what it meant for him, or for ourselves, to wear such a crown.  For Jesus, to be King meant to subject his body to the will of those who, only a few days before, half-heartedly cheered and placed branches at his feet.  It meant being beaten and whipped.  It meant giving up the existence he knew for one he did not, relinquishing the last breath of a life that had given so much life to others.  It meant death on a cross, abandoned by his friends and his family.  What does it mean for us?

For most, living a cruciform life will never involve bearing the shame Jesus bore.  I would, however, like to think Jesus’ question, “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” means more to us than simply talking about the need for social justice and occasionally purchasing a cup of fairly traded coffee.  But, at the same time, Jesus, the Christ, saves us from this expectation.  He meets us where we are and says, “You do not have to do this.  I have done everything.  My grace is sufficient.  It is finished.”  Those are comforting words that pierce the heart of a broken world where, more often than not, the goal is thought to be to be the best, the brightest, the richest, the smartest.  Christ saves us from this, from ourselves.  He meets us in the midst of great fear and heartache and brokenness, and shows us what it means to be King in the Kingdom of God.   He becomes the King that we do not want to be, the King we cannot be.  Thanks be to God.

Tyler Garrard is a second year M.Div student at Duke Divinity School.

IV. “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross!” (Mark 15:29)

by Margaret McWilliams

Good Friday is a good day for silence.  It’s the day, more than any other on the liturgical calendar, when I want to sit in sackcloth and ash.  The grey smudge imposed upon my forehead six weeks ago won’t quite cut it on this side of Lent.  And this isn’t because I suddenly remember how I didn’t pray enough or give alms or deny myself like a pious devotee.  All those things are true about many of our Lenten experiences.  And those things probably remind us of ways we build “temples” to secure ourselves to keep a safe distance from Jesus.  Lent isn’t about failing or succeeding to keep a kind of New Year’s Resolution.  We know this deep down…even if Easter can get lost in the ecstatic return to old comforts (like eating dessert on a daily basis, which I’m the last person to argue against).

Today isn’t about you or me.  Yet this Lenten journey has been about us in an important way.  We have been preparing for this Passiontide.  Somehow, with sighs too deep for words, the Spirit within us has been forming our hearts to receive a God-forsaken God.  As we reach the cross in Mark’s Gospel, the unbearable blow of divine abandonment courses through Jesus’ veins; yet He is the One whose majesty, according to Karl Barth, is His lowliness.   Perhaps we shake our heads in horror at this whole scene, at the restless groans of God-crucified, hanging beaten and blasphemed, mocked and misunderstood by the flesh of His flesh.  But before Mark lets us bolt for the nearest exit, he reminds us that head-shaking is exactly what the derisive passers-by did at the cross and in David’s lament quoted by our Lord in His darkest hour.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?…All who see me mock at me, they make mouths at me, they shake their heads. Have we no part in today’s taunts and tragedy?  We would shake all the ash off our heads and hate this Jesus who disrupts our temple enterprises, who challenges our idols of security and power.  Friends, Good Friday is good because God doesn’t abandon us to the temples we construct.  Christ Crucified is the temple; He is the shape of our new life together.  God doesn’t seek to destroy us.  He longs to lavish us with the REAL thing, the REAL relationship, which involves REAL flesh-and-blood participation in His hallowed humility.  Have mercy on us, O Lord, in our intemperate love of worldly comfort and impatient longing.  When we are quick to save you and move from the cross in our rush to Easter, we misunderstand your majesty.  Make us temples shaped into your beloved image that our lowliness might be transformed into Yours.  Amen.

Margaret McWilliams is a second year M.Div student at Duke Divinity School.

V. “He saved others; he cannot save himself…He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to.” (Matthew 27:42)

by Maria Swearingen

Deliverance.

Freedom.

Liberation.

Salvation.

These are words we long for.  Even those of us who have never had chains on our hands or whips to our backs.  They are words we believe in.  They are words we profess with zeal.  They are the mortar of our castles, the yeast in our bread, the mission statements of our constitutions and institutions.

We cherish them, feed them, coddle them, adorn them, wave them like palm branches.

But, when DELIVERANCE is raised before us, bound and beaten and whipped, we quietly wonder if it will be strong enough to crawl through our grip of security, of order, of confinement.  We anxiously gawk at it in anticipation waiting for a holy spectacle, hoping that our front row seat near the cross will be worth it this time.  Inwardly, we question what we’ve approved, what we’ve done to this man, but outwardly, we proclaim our consent.

“He saved others; he cannot save himself!.”

Will he save himself?  Was he truly our DELIVERANCE?  Did we strike FREEDOM?  Did we batter LIBERATION?  Did we crucify SALVATION?

“Let God deliver him now.”

Are these words of malice?  Are they words of sorrow?  Are they words of skepticism?  Regardless, when sitting on the pages of our Bibles and our hearts, they are contusive.  They are cutting.  And they are terribly ironic.

Was Jesus delivered on this strange day, where powers and principalities licked their chops and the Holy of Holies bled like me?  Did God deliver this one who knew, like a lover knows the rhythmic breath of her beloved, the One who sent him?

Will he SAVE himself?  Will God DELIVER him?

We are too angry, too bothered, too concerned with our own definitions of those words to even care.  We are too tired, too confused, too afraid to FREE him from our inability to taste the things of God.

We are too blind, too deaf, too slathered in the shades our own constructs to live beyond them.  And this man writhes in anguish as we toss our thoughts, our concerns, our questions his way.

“He trusts in God.”

In God we Trust.  Unless he hangs before us, twisted and torn.  Broken and breathless.  Terrifying and small.

And so our mission statements are leather-bound and pocket-sized…catalogued in the pits of our own making.  Lost to themselves.  Bound by our power to kill FREEDOM.

How shall we be saved when SALVATION is stained with blood?  How shall will be saved when DELIVERANCE is bound by our ropes and nails?

We wait at the foot of the cross.

Maria Swearingen is a second year M.Div at Duke Divinity School.

VI.  ”Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come and take him down!” (Mark 15:36)

by Matthew Nickoloff

Before us, a human being rages against the coming of the night; his primal scream of anguished abandonment and nascent nihilism echoes against the leaden sky.  Death crouches at the door, TS Eliot’s “yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-pains,” preparing him to “prepare a face to meet the faces” he will meet, to lift and “drop a question on your plate,” the final, heart-rending question that secretly lurks within us all:  eloi eloi lemah sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Baffled by the infinite depths of mystery, the crowd responds as only people who have no answer can respond: with hermeneutical explanation.  Such authentic grief, such heart-rending honesty momentarily unmasks the gleeful savagery with which we had so mindlessly suffered our murderous rage.  Such a cry of dereliction exposes all our derelictions as cowardly and empty.  All of our projects and pursuits are revealed as nothingness.  What is this fresh account, this new narration, this strange perspective?  It does not fit into the disciplines we have known, does not readily parse with our scientias, does not submit to the violence of our intellectual rigors!  It must be explained.

We cannot tolerate so intimate an engagement, an appeal over our heads to the God we would rather forget.  And so we follow, with J. Alfred Prufrock, down “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent/To lead you to an overwhelming question:” “perhaps he is calling for Elijah!”  Yes, this strange lunatic stretched before us upon the canvas of the cross, he seems to be contextualizing himself into the Old Testament narrative!  Fascinating!  Let us continue to look upon his pain, his intriguing interpretation of his situation, let us see if Elijah will come!  A fine dissertation topic, a brilliant sermon illustration, a story to tell to the boys down at the bar!  Finally, something real, prophetic, actual!

How often have I stood before the sick and dying during a hospital visit, caught the tears of a suffering loved one, read the account of an injustice or a torture, and sought to fix for myself the dilemma in which I find myself being confronted with that which refuses explanation by offering such “reasons why?”  Do I not, in the process, make a spectacle of the suffering, a fetish of torturous injustice, a project out of paradox?  How deeply I desire for something to happen without the commitment entailed by that happening to enter the happening myself!  Does the mere invocation of a prophet’s name or tradition or subversion serve anything other than to buffer me from the disaster of a direct confrontation with the Living God?   Is it enough to speak of “the poor,” to read “Dr. King,” to look for Elijah in places where I refuse to enter and suffer myself?  Easier to stand back and interpret, to await the spectacle, to speculate as an armchair prophet, and forget the nails and hammer in my hands.

True grief refuses to be contained by the answers of naïve seminarians; as I have too often been forced to learn and accept, my well-intended efforts are not enough.  Christ hangs before us upon the wood of distanced nuances, refusing to be made a spectacle, defying classification, exposing the absurdities of educated explanations.  The cross is the ultimate resistance to all such foolishness, inviting me instead to take the risk of stepping forth from the noisy mob to sit in the ashes, within the echo-chamber of the derelictive cry, to listen to the voice of another, however strange and inexplicable it may seem.  The spectacle of Jesus tears me forth from the spectacle in which I am participating, and bids me come and die, that I might discover with Him, in the depths of His death, the life which lives beyond all explanation.

Matthew Nickoloff is a second year M.Div. student and co-editor of Confessio’s Dispatches from the Front.

Duke Divinity School’s curriculum would be enhanced by adding courses that address the relationship between Christianity and the sciences. If necessary, additional faculty should be hired to teach these courses.

The reasons for doing so are several. The so-called “new atheist” movement, exemplified by figures like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, is misappropriating science to attack religion, and more specifically, Christianity. What is worse, they are finding some public success. And then there are the many strains of the virus called “determinism”-at the levels of the laws of physics, evolutionary biology, genes, or neurochemistry-that have a tendency to leak out of science departments and into the minds of students. That’s not all. The unwillingness on the part of some Christians to acknowledge universal common descent or the old age of the earth and universe is both unfortunate and unnecessary. To blame is a lack of understanding, and the solution is to better educate Christians, a process that begins by educating future church leaders.

Students at Duke Divinity School should be trained to refute arguments of the sort described above. Simple, sound explanations can be given for why the doctrine of determinism is untrue. Likewise, that man descended from apes and that the earth is 4.5 billion years old does not disprove the Bible, contrary to what some Christians think.

But it’s not just that Duke Divinity graduates ought to be prepared to defend Christianity against these scientific attacks; more importantly, they ought to be prepared to offer a scientific offensive in support of Christianity. In short, we should turn the tables. The truth is on our side and therefore we need not hide from science or accept a false dichotomy between faith and reason. Ours is not a small God “of-the-gaps” but a grand God of-the-whole… and then some.

There are all sorts of reasons to think that good science and Christian faith work well together. In physics, for example, “anthropic coincidences” in the fundamental laws of the universe are interpreted by many to suggest that life was somehow “built-in” from the beginning, defying all apparent odds. And, lest we forget, a beginning ex nihilo has essentially been confirmed by the Big Bang theory. Quantum mechanics has dealt a serious blow to scientific determinism. The philosophical necessity to posit our own selfhood, free will, and consciousness, if we are to make any truth claims, is a powerful argument for a reality that is more than purely material. And then there is the issue of the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” as Eugene Wigner famously put it. As for evolutionary biology, students should be taught to distinguish between Darwinism (the well-supported theory of common descent) from what is sometimes called neo-Darwinism (the unsupported metaphysical interpretation of Darwinism holding that evolution undermines all arguments from design and/or that explains away all human behavior, past and present, as the result of evolutionary forces).

Again, it is just here that Christians should learn to turn the tables. Is human love a self-serving illusion handed down to us by evolutionary biology? The same goes for free will, morality, and good and evil. When people clearly understand their options, the Christian account of humanity appears far more reasonable than that of the scientific atheist.</p>

A wonderful argument for the truth of God on the basis of evolutionary biology can be found in Francis Collins’s book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. The former head of the Human Genome Project, Collins discovered in the exquisite design of DNA the unmistakable fingerprint of a Creator. Collins’s atheism suddenly became irrational in light of the evidence, and he accepted Christ as his savior, a story told in his book. It and texts like it should find their way onto the bookshelves of Cokesbury.

On that note, there should also be books that tell the correct history of Christianity’s relationship with the sciences. I say “correct” because the reigning narrative tells of modern science emerging in opposition to the culture of the Christian west, pointing, as always, to the case of Galileo. Needless to say, there is a great deal more to this story. It was no coincidence, for example, that modern science grew out of a Christian world that believed in a God who governed nature with perfect, immutable laws. Stephen Barr’s book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith nicely lays out this history.

Students at Duke Divinity School need to know that modern science, like everything else in the order of creation and the world of ideas, ultimately attests to the truth of God. So let’s study it, talk about it, and use it to our advantage as we go forth and preach the Good News.

In Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, Carolyn Merchant describes the dominant narrative of Western Culture with particular attention to the ways in which it has been historically problematic for the environment, women, Native Americans, and African Americans. In critiquing these narrations of different aspects of the Western world, though she is not operating in a strictly theological framework, Merchant frames her discussion in terms of the Genesis creation/fall narrative in attempt to show how traditional renderings of that story of decline perpetuate the unequal power structures of oppressors and oppressed. Merchant focuses specifically on environmental issues, making important connections between man’s1 dominion over both nature and women, in addition to considering the ways in which science and capitalism have overpowered creation, deteriorating nature rather than improving it by human mastery. Our actions - and, in Merchant’s narration, the actions of white men in particular - have had and will continue to have disastrous consequences. In re-telling the story of Western culture with attention to ways in which it has been unjust, Merchant intends to set her readers on a trajectory in which they can begin to live a new story, namely one of partnership and mutuality, rather than oppressor and oppressed.

In one of Merchant’s more disturbing passages she considers novelist Frank Norris’s metaphorical description of female nature under the domination of the male plow. She writes:

Norris describes the female earth being seduced on a massive scale by thousands of men operating their plows in unison. “Everywhere throughout the great San Joaquin, unseen and unheard, a thousand ploughs upstirred the land, tens of thousands of shears clutched deep into the warm, moist soil.” And he leaves no doubt that the seduction becomes a violent rape, as he writes, ” It was the long stroking caress, vigorous, male, powerful, for which the Earth seemed panting. The heroic embrace of a multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown, warm flesh of the land that quivered responsive and passionate under this rude advance, so robust as to be almost an assault, so violent as to be veritably brutal. (Merchant 125)

Merchant draws our attention to Norris’s description of what resembles the gang-rape of nature, showing how such violence against the natural world is supported and even affirmed in the history of Western culture. Throughout Merchant’s chapter on “Adam as Hero,” she describes how Protestantism in America led to both the capitalist transformation of nature into a commodity to be consumed and the preservationist desires to be good stewards of God’s creation (96-97). In both cases, though, the power of man is glorified as not only capable but destined to subdue the earth.

Thus, to push Merchant’s point about the connection between environmental degradation and patriarchy, one must ask: if such violence against nature is affirmed, if actions “so robust as to be almost an assault” are affirmed towards earth, does it not follow that such overpowering of women is equally imbedded in our culture? This example makes it quite clear, despite arguments to the contrary, that the “care” that some would argue is part of a well-functioning patriarchal construct - i.e. that the powerful men are to take care of the less powerful women - is a myth, for within such a power structure, to care for women inevitably becomes oppressive. This operates on varying levels - not all oppression is overt physical or sexual abuse, for example - but less visible oppression is no less important to the lives of the women subject to it. This is especially relevant to consider within the Christian church, where unequal power relationships are often justified using scripture and tradition, creating environments that are oppressive and potentially dangerous for women, under the guise of Christian piety.

In contrast to the disturbing image discussed above, a helpful, even hopeful image cited by Merchant with respect to nature and the feminine comes from Henry David Thoreau, writing about his bean field:

The earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus…What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. (137)

Thoreau speaks of being “attached” to the earth; he describes a relationship of mutuality. Merchant expands on this concept in her chapter on partnership, writing, “A partnership ethic holds that the greatest good for the human and nonhuman communities is in their mutual living interdependence” (223). Merchant considers partnership both in terms of the environment and in terms of our human relationships. To draw out specifically the importance of a partnership ethic in terms of gendered human relationships, one must consider what mutuality might look like, particularly in heterosexual relationships where patriarchal oppression is most evident.

One of the difficulties faced by feminism is whether or not the tendency towards womens equality sometimes becomes distorted into a move towards matriarchy. In other words, do the oppressed simply try to turn the tables to become the oppressors? In her rendering of the various narratives of Western culture, Merchant discusses feminist narratives that view our current situation as one of decline from a previous matriarchal society, what one might characterize as a feminist Eden. This raises the question, first, as to whether this actually was the case, and second, as to whether this is a desirable and achievable state. Would matriarchy’s subversion of patriarchy create a world of equality? Merchant would likely question such possibilities, expressing concern about the power dichotomies such a way of thinking operates within. She warns against the ways in which binary opposites leave us frozen in non-mutuality. She writes:

Privileging automatically creates a marginalized other. Privileging the central, progressive narrative of Western culture marginalizes other narratives. Privileging modernity’s written tradition marginalizes its binary opposite - indigenous or oral cultures. Yet reversing the hierarchy by privileging the other (indigenous cultures), in its turn marginalizes the first (Western culture). Binary thinking itself sets up the dilemma: nature/culture, white/black, written/oral, male/female, speech/writing. One is central, the other excluded; one is higher, the other lower; one is true, the other false. The pairs can be reversed by raising the opposite. But in either case they are frozen in their new positions. There is no movement, process, or free play across differences. (200)

In this sense, “otherness” can be a very unhelpful way of thinking about things. While it clarifies for us the ways in which one thing - the “other” - is always defined over and against another - the “norm” - it nonetheless is limiting if we stop there, because we continue to think of two competing opposites. Rather, for partnership to be possible, these binaries must be broken down into relationships of mutuality.

Towards the end of the book, Merchant makes explicit some connections between her proposed partnership ethic and narrative. Having attempted to re-narrate the story of Western culture, she considers what sort of new narrative or set of narratives might need to be created. “We internalize narrative as ideology,” she writes, “a story told by people in power. Once we identify ideology as story - powerful and compelling, but still only a story - we realize that by rewriting the story, we can begin to challenge the structures of power. We recognize that all stories can and should be challenged” (241). What Merchant’s book does is challenge the powerful by re-telling their stories, challenging  power structures by naming them for the oppressed who do not have the power to do so themselves. What Reinventing Eden does not do - perhaps intentionally - is put forth details of what continued challenging of the dominant storytellers might look like. “Can we actually step outside the story into which we have been cast as characters,” she asks, “and enter into a story with a different plot?” (241). She notes the reality that one might internalize the same narrative one has sought to identify and break through. Nonetheless, Merchant seems to remain hopeful that, through the process of our lives together, humanity can write a new story. Her own version of the recovery narrative is one in which partnership between supposed binary opposites can be achieved, in which peace and harmony reign and all of creation dwells together in balance and cooperation. For those reading Merchant from a theological point of view, it remains to be discerned whether and how the church might be central to the unfolding story of the movement beyond oppressive structures such as sexism and racism, to lives of peace and wholeness in Christ.

Prejudice is a subtle tyrant. Responsible for racism, sexism, elitism, denominationalism, and a host of other -isms, our prejudice has become quite talented. Like a parasite its best defense is to assure its host of its own nonexistence. Prejudice is quick to bring the prejudice of others to the eyes of its bearer, but it is careful to simultaneously preserve an illusion of self-righteousness for anyone it inhabits. Coming to Duke Divinity School has not erased this weakness in my own life, but now it is starkly different.

Duke stands astride the line that divides “conservatives” and “liberals.” This language is frowned upon at the Divinity School, but we use it anyway. Duke patiently acknowledges the far left while solemnly neglecting the words of the far right. It is a place of moderates, or at least a place that strives to perform in such way that the only term one can use to define its theological orientation is “moderate.” As an indirect result of this orientation, certain groups of people are ostracized. At Duke we prefer to think of it as a type of enlightened ostracism; we justify the way we talk and think about the fringe groups, whether Bible thumping fundamentalists or radical liberals. But in the end it still feels like prejudice.

Coming from Birmingham, AL, I’ve done my best to immerse myself into Duke and the myriad of its complex theologies, social criticisms, political agendas, soteriological concepts, and the notion that evangelism is almost always imperialistic, but when I hear someone laugh or smirk at the mention of Southern Baptists, something inside me wonders if the laughter is justified. Terms such as “evangelicals” receive about as much respect as “fundamentalists,” and we scoff at both, critiquing them for the way in which they strive to preserve faithfulness to something as simple as the Word of God, a book I find myself opening less and less outside the rooms of our Old and New Testament courses. Despite certain theological problems I now have with the Baptist Church, I ironically miss the days when Scripture mattered much more than it now does for me here at seminary.

After a semester at Duke I find myself more Anglican/Catholic than Baptist, but old questions still linger. Many of the situations in which I hear evangelicals criticized are for the mention of topics we do not usually discuss in the halls of Duke. The gross nature of sin, the doctrine of hell, and evangelism probably draw the hottest criticism, at least in the dialogues I have experienced. The last of the three, of course, usually stems from firm convictions regarding the first two. I find myself wondering why these topics, and others like them, tend to merit so much criticism.

Is it acceptable to believe in hell at Duke? Do we ever talk about sin’s gross consequences? Do we believe one should still spread the Gospel? From my limited experiences it certainly seems the case that such thoughts are to be discouraged. Tolerance is the word of the day, but only those who reciprocate tolerance are to be tolerated. Intolerance merits intolerance. As such, anyone professing belief in a hell or the need for evangelism, which presupposes that non-Christians are still in need of Christ, may be appropriately ostracized by an otherwise tolerant community. Regardless of our issues with these topics, what does this say of the Gospel or of the Church? When tolerance becomes a vessel of intolerance it becomes difficult for us to see the Cross. Self-righteousness replaces Christ’s righteousness, we forget to love our enemies, and the ontology of the Christian life disperses to make way for the divisive influence of prejudice.

To be sure, we are living a dream here at Duke Divinity School. This place is a treasure trove of academic, spiritual, and emotional reflection. Couched in the midst of these pleasures I fear that I often forget the work of the Gospel, the same work which brought so many of us to seminary in the first place. As I sit typing this article, missionaries and clergy all over the globe are laying down their comforts, their own dreams, and even their lives for the chance to proclaim the Gospel. They are evangelists from all traditions, backgrounds, and callings. Is it right for us to label those who labor in this work as imperialists or as people who are perpetuating a cycle of domination? Who am I to judge them from my leather-bound, comfy seat at Duke Divinity School?

As scared as I am to confess to you all, I still believe in hell, I believe people are dying in the world having never known Christ, and I believe that to be a bad thing. Does that make me an imperialist? Am I intolerant? I hope not. Christ, I pray not. Are these beliefs tolerated at Duke? Are conservatives to be tolerated at Duke? Tolerance appears too weak a word for Christians; love would prove a stronger bond. There are exceptions for tolerance. There are none for love. Is this not the Gospel, that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son? God does not tolerate us; tolerance is too passive a thing for God. God loves us, so much so that God could not tolerate us as we once were but changed us all into the likeness of His Son. Would we rather love or tolerate at Duke Divinity School? If we still choose tolerance, I fear our prejudice has simply evolved into a state of intolerant tolerance.

Brad Acton, a first-year M.Div. candidate, is Co-President elect of the Divinity Student Council.

John Calvin famously described Scripture as the spectacles by which human beings can properly see God and God’s world. The question then is: what is the vision of Scripture? When we put on these holy glasses, what do we see? And how does this vision shape what we do? Church history is, of course, a veritable jungle of diverse interpretations and manifestations of this vision.

The show’s (incomplete) view of the future is essential for decisions in the present, both for the characters and the viewers. In other words, knowing the future has ethical implications. In this article-the first of two relating to LOST-the broader contours of this narrative structure will be explored from the viewer’s perspective, before I turn to more specific aspects of the plot in my next piece.

Since the end of the third season, the viewer almost always knows a future point beyond the center of the action on the screen. This raises an important question: if the viewer already knows how it will end, why is the show compelling? Why keep watching? The first answer is that, in the show, knowing the future does not make the story utterly deterministic. Though the theme of destiny runs throughout, there is creativity and imagination in the course these destinies take. People end up in the places we knew they were going to be, but not in the ways we expected them to get there.

More significantly, though, the show is compelling because the vision of the future is usually brief or vague, and thus prone to misinterpretation. The future vision is certainly true, but it is fallible because it is incomplete. It is outside of the context - the moments, events, words and actions that precede it and proceed from it - that provides this future moment with its full meaning and significance. In this way, context changes the perception of an event: where one “stands,” spatially-temporally, changes her interpretation of the (albeit incomplete) reality that is observed.

This means that even in knowing the future, we do not know everything - knowing the end does not tell you the whole story. Our vision is still limited, even when we see something that is “true.” Put another way, even what is revealed is in some sense hidden.

Taken further, this means that knowing the future does not necessarily provide the viewer with solid ground for moral decisions in the present. The show may be teasing the viewer with an image or conversation that appears to mean one thing, while in its larger context it means something else. An action may appear horrendous, for example, when taken out of its context, but may, in fact, be more benign. Thus, the viewer cannot come to a final moral judgment about a character until she has seen the whole story.

These insights are not foreign to those who profess a Christian worldview. In the New Testament, the resurrection literally changes everything: Jesus had predicted it before, but the whole context or narrative had not happened yet. Only after the event did the disciples see the significance of his words. Only after touching his wounds do their confessions find their meaning and significance. For only in his resurrection do they understand that Christ is God. To say that Christ is the Son of God before this event, though true, is incomplete because it lacks the context in which this statement makes the most sense.

Furthermore, this insight applies not only to the resurrection, but to the current space Christians occupy: the so-called now and not yet. Christians, through the Holy Spirit, participate now in Christ’s life, even as they await the consummation of Christ’s Kingdom. The Revelation of John concludes with an imaginative vision of the rider on the white horse who is also the crucified lamb, of a new city, streams of life and leaves of healing. This is a vision of the future diametrically opposed to our current circumstances, and yet shapes our actions in those circumstances.

But even here it must be noted that the vision of Revelation is by no means exhaustive in regard to the future, or even completely literal. It is real and true, but it remains a vision that is open to a wide range of interpretations, as its exegetical history indicates. Again, there is limitation and hiddenness in the revelation, which, importantly, does not make the revelation untrue. But it does call for caution in the implementation of the vision.

Here, however, the analogy between LOST’s chronology and the Christian narrative breaks down. In LOST, the viewer must be cautious in moral judgments because the full “revelation” has not happened yet. There is a lack of information - as noted above, the show’s writers may simply be tossing out a teaser. For the Christian narrative, however, the problem is not a lack of data, but sinful human nature, which impairs even the ethical faculties of human beings. Christians are called to live morally, but they must recognize, too, that final judgment belongs to God in Christ. Our moral vision is cloudy at best.

In further opposition to LOST, Christians claim that the fullness of revelation has already occurred in Jesus Christ. In short, Christ is the object of our vision, and is himself the vision. He is how we see, and he shapes what we see. He is the pair of spectacles that let us see how to act. And yet, his vision is not always what we expect. He came in humility, he died on a cross, he left no writing behind. Even as he was revealed, he was hidden, even to those who gazed upon him.

What is needed, then, to discern the revelation of Christ in the midst of its hiddenness? Put simply, the answer is faith (which happens to be another key theme in LOST). Faith is trusting that the things previously foreseen but currently unseen will come true. It means trusting the narrative that began long ago will one day be complete. In short, it means believing that one man, Jesus of Nazareth, was actually raised from the dead, and that this changes everything. It means putting on new glasses, spectacles that can see the impossible.

In my next post, I will explore the analogous counterpart to these “spectacles” on LOST, pointing especially to the Island itself as containing the key for unlocking the complicated mix of competing visions on the show.