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INFP Theologian
Marduk's Cubicle
Posted on November 21, 2017 by Ryan Ellington
When you're a religion major, it's not uncommon to meet some disgruntled freshman, fresh out of his second-semester Old Testament class, railing against whatever it was that his parents raised him to believe, citing disparate factoids that his professor briefly covered, ripped from their context and wielded as shoddy weaponry in their crusade to have cool, edgy new opinions. One such factoid is the Ancient Near Eastern belief in what has come to be called the 'heavenly court' or the 'heavenly council'.
There's an entire chapter devoted to the subject in Peter Enns' enjoyable if gratingly polemical The Bible Tells Me So, in which he goes to great lengths to make the 'court' seem as outlandish as possible, and suggests that its existence in the ancient Jewish imagination means that that most of we think that we know about the Old Testament is basically wrong. He published the aforementioned book pretty fresh off of being terminated from Westminster Theological Seminary because the angry, rich parents of some uppity seminarians complained that his Old Testament classes weren't enough like Sunday School, so his hyperbolic approach may have reactionary.
In any case, the 'heavenly court' is alluded to primarily in 'poetic' sections of scripture, which muddies the water. It is not immediately obvious, for example, whether the imagery used in Psalm 82 should be taken as an affirmation that the 'heavenly council' is a concrete body that actually exists rather than a simply a literary device. Likewise, in 1 Kings 22:19-23, Micaiah alludes viscerally to the heavenly council as he describes a vision given to him by the Lord: The wicked king Ahab has requested his counsel on whether he should go to war with Ramoth-gilead – but not before having his messenger pressure Micaiah for a favorable prophecy. He replies:
"Hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and the whole heavenly host was standing by Him at His right hand and at His left hand. And the Lord said, 'Who will entice Ahab to march up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' So one was saying this and another was saying that.
"Then a spirit came forward, stood before the Lord, and said, 'I will entice him.'
"The Lord asked him, 'How?'
"He said, 'I will go and become a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.'
"Then He said, 'You will certainly entice him and prevail. Go and do that.'
"You see, the Lord has put a lying spirit into the mouth of all these prophets of yours, and the Lord has pronounced disaster against you."
It is unclear, too, from this passage whether the council is a real entity or simply a common Near Eastern trope that YHWH, through the mouth of the prophet, is satirizing. The verbal prophecy is notably acerbic in tone, and was delivered as a response to Ahab's complaints regarding his history of unfavorable prophesies. Adding to the formal ambiguity of the passage is the fact that it is puzzling to contemporary readers. Taken at face value, it not only suggests that there is a council of divines with whom the one God YHWH consults, but that He sometimes permits (even solicits!) them to sabotage individual humans (see also: 1 Sam 19:9-14). There is an inordinate demand, even within more conservative religious communities, for demythologized readings of passages of this sort.
What is not ambiguous is the of the book of Job, wherein the council ("the sons of God") present themselves to YHWH and become spectators of the peculiar exchange between YHWH and Satan. He asks YHWH for permission to torment Job in an effort to incite him to curse YHWH, and permission is granted. He is not, however, given permission to harm Job himself. Later, a similar scene plays out, this time with Satan requesting permission to harm Job himself, again in an effort to incite him to renounce his faith. Again, permission is granted.
It is oft-suggested that the book of Job is ahistorical – that it is chiefly a poem, or a satirical play – and this may be the majority view among modern scholars, but this is an unsatisfactory theory. Although it is true that there is no substantive internal indication that Job is meant to be understood as a tale from history, there is intra-biblical evidence that the man, Job, was a historical figure. Ezekiel 14:15-20, for example, names Noah, Daniel, and Job together in a group.
Now, the reference to Job alone in this prophesy would not by necessity mean that he was a historical figure – the prophets were good rhetoricians (and so is the Holy Spirit) who put the imagery of the Near East to great use in their sermons and prophecies. But it is noteworthy that Ezekiel mentions three men: Noah, Daniel, and Job. Between these three, Daniel is certainly as historical figure, and one can probably expect consistency from Ezekiel here. Which means that, beyond reasonable doubt, it can be assumed that Ezekiel – and thus, probably, all of the ancient Hebrews – believed Job to be a historical figure. And in that case, it is unlikely that an ahistorical tale about a historical figure would be included in the canon (or inspired by the Spirit).
Thus, it can be inferred that the 'heavenly court', a common trope in ancient Near Eastern mythology, is, in fact, a historical body – not simply a bit of familiar mythological imagery that the Old Testament writers put to use for rhetorical purposes. As such, the other mentions of the heavenly council throughout the scriptures, although they occur in a variety of genres and therefore must be examined critically, should be understood to refer accurately to a real entity.
Pagan sources are somewhat varied on precisely how the court worked, but a few things were generally agreed upon: The universe was created by the council of gods, either by cooperation or by competition with one another. The world was divvied up and each god took a territory. Together, they bestow kingship on humans (or take it away), and oversee questions of justice and the miscarriage thereof. They hear oaths, treaties, blessings, and curses. They make divine decrees, declare war, and commission the building of holy temples. In some iterations, the gods in the assembly would make obeisance to a higher god.
In the Hebrew scriptures, the assembly was not a gathering of equals, as YHWH appears to have been the final, and perhaps singular, authority over the other supernatural beings with whom He would gather. The other members of the court, the 'lesser gods' (Ps. 96:4-5; 97:7-9), would carry out the will of YHWH, sometimes, apparently, by influencing humans (1 Kings 22:20-22) Strangely enough, Satan was apparently granted some degree of access to the court (Job 1:6-12; 2:1-7; Zech. 3:1-2), which has led scholars to suggest that the Jews originally envisaged him as a member of the court whose duty was to keep watch over humanity's conduct on earth. However, a lack of slam-dunk intra- or extra-biblical evidence supporting this view makes difficult to demonstrate, so there is little reason to depart from the traditional understanding, best articulated by John, that Satan was an antagonistic figure from 'the beginning' (John 8:44; 1 John 3:8; Rev. 20:2).
What is not clear is the extent to which their subservience to YHWH was willing or coerced. The Qumran sect identified the beings who abided on YHWH's council as 'the holy ones' – a term that shows up often, especially throughout the Psalms and elsewhere. If this is the case, then the heavenly court is presented, it would seem, in a positive light. The 'holy ones' are portrayed worshipping YHWH joyfully and carrying out His will with apparently unadulterated enthusiasm. A cursory reading of the Old Testament suggests that this is unlikely. Of the passages often believed to associate the 'holy ones' with the heavenly court (Dt. 33:2-3; Ps. 68:17; 89:5-8; Zec. 14:5), only Ps. 89:5-8 is demonstrably a reference to the court:
Lord, the heavens praise Your wonders—
Your faithfulness also—
in the assembly of the holy ones.
For who in the skies can compare with the Lord?
Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord?
God is greatly feared in the council of the holy ones,
more awe-inspiring than all who surround Him.
Lord God of Hosts,
who is strong like You, Lord?
Your faithfulness surrounds You.
The rest, with the possible exception of Zechariah 14:5, read rather like references to the people of Israel. Thus, although the 'holy ones' of the council 'greatly feared' the Lord, it cannot be assumed that they treasured His authority or carried out His will with a glad heart, as did the 'holy ones' of Israel (in theory, of course). Given the incongruity between the inherent 'territorialism' of the pagan conceptions of the heavenly court and the unambiguous 'unilateralism' of the Biblical accounts of the court, an interested observer may venture to guess that the arrangement was never to the liking of the 'lesser gods' over whom YHWH presided. So much so, it would seem, that the Babylonian Enuma Elish declares that 'Marduk is supreme in the court of the gods,' not YHWH, and that 'No one among the gods is his equal,' – if he couldn't be 'supreme' at the office, at least he'd brag as though he were at home.
All of which is to say, the existence of the 'heavenly court' doesn't seem to be particularly at odds with a fairly traditional understanding of the God of the Old Testament. It does not, as some have suggested, destabilize the notion that Israel was consistently monotheistic in orientation. At most, it implies a kind of soft Henotheism, but hardly the sort that ought to stir up controversy. A council of 'lesser gods' who serve the unilateral will of YHWH, whose disobediences and rebellions are only possible by His sovereign permission, is no particular challenge to the vision of continuity between the Old-and-New Testament conceptions of the Godhead that have been passed down. The 'heavenly court' poses no challenge to 'the faith once delivered'.
For reference, see:
Min Suc Kee: "The Heavenly Council and its Type-scene." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31, no. 3 (2007)
Clinton E. Arnold. Powers of darkness: principalities & powers in Pauls letters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998.
Gatumu, Kabiro Wa. The Pauline concept of supernatural powers: a reading from the African worldview. Paternoster Biblical Monographs. Milton Keynes , MK: Paternoster, 2008.
Thirty-Three Propositions from Eph. 2:1-10
Posted on October 5, 2017 by Ryan Ellington
Eph. 2:1-10 reads as such:
"And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them."
There are some things to be derived from this passage. These are thirty-three of them:
Paul's readers were previously "dead" in their "trespasses".
Paul's readers were also previously "dead" in their "sins".
They used to "walk" in their "trespasses" and "sins", but not anymore.
When they "walked" in their "trespasses" and "sins", they did so "according to the ways of this world".
When they "walked" in their "trespasses" and "sins", they did so "according to the ruler who exercises authority over the lower heavens".
The "ruler who exercises authority over the lower heavens" is "the spirit now working in the disobedient".
Both Paul and his readers previously lived among "the disobedient".
When they lived among the disobedient, they "in our fleshly desires".
When they were living "in our fleshly desires" among "the disobedient", they "carried out the inclinations of their flesh."
When they were living "in our fleshly desires" among "the disobedient", they also "carried out the inclinations of our … thoughts"
During the time when they lived "in our fleshly desires" among "the disobedient" and carried out the "inclinations" of their "flesh" and "thoughts", they were "children under wrath".
When they were "children under wrath", they were so in the same way "as the others were also".
God is "rich in mercy".
God had "great love" for Paul and his readers.
God "made us alive with the Messiah".
God did this even "though we were dead in trespasses".
The reason that God "made us alive with the Messiah" is "because of His great love that He had for us".
Paul's readers "are saved by Grace".
God raised Jesus "up and seated" Jesus "in the heavens".
God raised us up "together with Christ Jesus" and "seated play the immeasurus in the heavens".
He did this to "display the immeasurable riches of His grace."
The "immeasurable riches of His grace" are displayed "through His kindness to us".
The "immeasurable riches of His grace", which are displayed "through His kindness to us in Christ Jesus" will be displayed "in the coming ages".
Paul's readers are saved by grace "through faith".
To be "saved by grace through faith" is something that "is not from yourselves".
To be "saved by grace through faith" is "God's gift".
Paul's readers are not saved "by/from works".
The "faith" through which Paul's readers are "saved by grace" is not, itself, a work.
Because Paul's readers are "saved by grace through faith", which is "not from yourselves" and "not from works" but is "God's Gift", thus "no one can boast".
Paul and his readers are "God's workmanship".
Paul and his readers were "created in Christ Jesus".
"Good works" is that for which Paul and his readers were "created in Christ Jesus".
The "good works" for which Paul and his readers were "created in Christ Jesus" were "prepared beforehand that we should walk in them".
Most of my posts are extended comedy routines about things I find important, but not this one. I could write for ages about why Eph. 2:1-10 is funny, and important, but today it can speak for itself. Go do some good works that God prepared beforehand.
Aronofsky's Demiurge (A Spoiler-y Reflection on 'Mother!')
Posted on September 18, 2017 by Ryan Ellington
As the credits began to roll, the audience with whom I saw Darren Aronofsky's newest film, Mother!, reacted with hushed groans and awkward laughter. This was not the film anyone expected to see. I freaking loved it.
The trailers were vague, but suggested that the film, which stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as an unnamed couple whose home is gradually invaded by an ever-multiplying family of belligerent troglodytes, was going to be a horror film, or at least a thriller or some sort. And it was, although one so oblique that it hardly counts as a film at face value, let alone a genre film.
My roommate turned to me and barked, "What did you bring me to?" before rubbing his beard pensively and continuing, "I'll be thinking about this movie for a year."
If you've seen, like, anything Darren Aronofsky has released in the last decade or so (and, really, anything he's ever released) it will not be surprising that his new home-invasion thriller is actually a spiritual meditation.
There are, I imagine, plenty of articles that will lay out precisely how each of Mother!'s jarring, phantasmagorical images correspond to this or that passage from the Bible, or the Talmud, or the great works of Hebrew Pseudepigrapha, but I want to zero in on a handful of specifics, and the implications thereof.
There will be spoilers ahead. Actually, all of them. If you have not seen the film and aren't planning on it, I have included a fairly detailed synopsis below. If you have not seen it and plan on seeing it, read no further.
Not unlike his 2014 retelling of the biblical story of Noah and the ark, Mother! is an eco-parable. Rather ingeniously, he dramatizes the biblical story of creation and the Fall – and of multiplying and filling the earth, and, finally, of the flood – from the perspective of Mother(!) Earth.
Jennifer Lawrence is Mother Earth, envisioned here as the nameless bride of a nameless Javier Bardem – a poet, and an illustrious one. They are in the process of rebuilding their house, a beautiful mansion situated on the quiet countryside. It burned down before they met, and our heroine has taken it upon herself to restore it to its former glory.
Soon, a strange man (played by Ed Harris) arrives at their doorstep. He is new in own, and had been under the impression that their idyllic mansion was a Bed & Breakfast. Javier Bardem forgets that hotels exist and invites him to stay the night, much to his young bride's annoyance. Their unexpected visitor manages to traverse one boundary line after another – he smokes in the house, even after the woman of the house requests that he stop, he pries into their personal life in ways that anyone marginally versed in etiquette would know to be inappropriate. And he is sick, quite so: before retreating to bed, Lawrence witnesses her husband assisting their guest as he expels the contents of his stomach into their toilet. In a blink-and-you-miss-it shot, we catch a glimpse of the strange gash in Ed Harris's side.
The next morning, his insufferable wife (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives, also unannounced. Lawrence discovers that while she slept, her husband gave Harris permission to invite his wife to stay with them "for as long as they need". Naturally, she is not pleased, as their guest's wife proves to be even more prying and unsavory than he. More than anything, she presses – and presses some more – as to why the couple does not have children. Noticing Lawrence's reticent body language – as these types always do – she corners her while the men are out exploring and reframes her question: Why doesn't she want to be a mother?
Noticing the terror in her eyes – as these types always do – Pfeiffer realizes that she does want children.
Almost on cue, Harris and Pfeiffer's own children show up uninvited, barging into the house to have a shouting match, which ends with the elder son bludgeoning his younger brother to death in the den before fleeing the scene of the crime.
Bardem leaves Lawrence alone to follow the family to the hospital. A few hours later, he returns alone. Finally, she thinks, things may return to normal.
They won't, of course. Without warning, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer return to the house – with their entire extended family. Our heroine is horrified. Her husband welcomes them with open arms and invites them to make themselves at home. Without mentioning it to her, he had invited the family to hold a funereal gathering in their kitchen.
More friends and family arrive by the minute in full funeral dress, with baked goods wrapped in tin-foil and absolutely no sense of restraint toward their host's property: While Bardem delivers a speech in honor of the deceased son, rowdy guests co-opt the master bedroom to have sex while others dislodge a washroom sink from the wall, breaking the water main and flooding the house. Bardem doesn't mind, but Lawrence finally snaps, expelling the guests from her house in a rush of fury so commanding that even her husband counts the cost and opts against gas-lighting her again.
After the dust settles, they are alone again. Still riding the adrenaline rush of the evening, She breaks again from her passive disposition and challenges him to have sex with her. He obliges, and she conceives.
We jump forward approximately nine months. The house is finally complete, and the baby is almost due. Bardem has finally completed his magnum opus, which he gives to Lawrence to read. "It's perfect," she says, "It's beautiful." His publishers agree. And so do his readers. It sells out nearly immediately.
As she sets the table for dinner one night, there is a knock at the door.
It is a group of devotees. They have come from far and wide to meet the poet. Lawrence asks him to send them away so that they can dine together in peace, to which he agrees. After a few moments, he has not returned. She checks on him to find that the group has multiplied, and he has done nothing to deter them.
Several devotees enter the house through a side door and begin using her appliances. She tries to kick them out, but they inform her that "the poet says that his house is our house." More devotees force their way inside, and his publicist spots her. Gleefully, she clutches Lawrence's face, "It's the inspiration!"
The devotees begin tearing the house apart. One steals the phone while Lawrence tries to call the police. "That's my phone!" She cries. "I have to have something of the poet's!" the devotee snarls back, and then hobbles away.
Police arrive and begin shouting at the guests through a megaphone, followed by a swat team in riot gear. They open fire on the devotees, who scream in terror and become even more destructive as they scramble. The pregnant Lawrence runs for safety, looking for her husband. She happens upon his publicist, who warmly greets her as she fires rounds into the covered heads of several hostages. "Close the door," she says.
The house becomes a war zone – literally. Grenades go off in the corner of the screen, and the house is filled with dust and ashes. A friendly soldier grabs Her and pulls her to safety. As he instructs her the way to the safe zone, his skull breaks apart from the impact of a sniper's bullet. She screams and flees, now bloodied from the commotion, up the stairs, which are lined with guest reaching out their arms in religious devotion to her pregnant stomach. They're awaiting the coming of the child inside her. She begins to go into labor.
At the top of the staircase, she finds her husband. He hugs her and brings her into the master bedroom to have the baby. is born, healthy and strong. Bardem hands him to Her. The commotion in the house has died down. "Send them away," she entreats her much-Beloved husband. "They'll listen to you."
He ignores her, and asks to hold his child. She refuses until he sends them away. "I could not get them to leave even if I tried." He replies, and asks again for his child. "That's not true," She snaps, "And you know it." She holds her ground.
"I do not want them to go." He finally admits.
She clutches her baby desperately while he menacingly scoots his chair closer. "Give me my son." He growls. She doesn't.
Hours pass by, and she has fallen asleep. When she wakes, her baby is gone. Rushing out the bedroom doors, she sees the crowds passing the baby amongst themselves, touching him with their hands, oooh-ing and ahhh-ing. She screams. "They just want to touch him!" Bardem laughs, enraptured at the love that enlivens the crowd.
As they pass the child along to one another, its neck breaks.
Lawrence screams in terror and sprints down the stairs to take back the corpse of her baby. When she arrives, it is on a platter, half-eaten. The devotees have baby in their teeth. She falls over, sobbing uncontrollably. Bardem picks her up. "They killed him!" she cries. "I know," He whispers gently, "But we must find a way to forgive them."
This is the last straw for Mother. Calmly, she lifts herself to her feet, makes her way to the basement, and opens the furnace. Pouring oil all over the floor, she lights a match, and sets the mansion and all of its occupants ablaze.
Except for her husband, who comes out unscathed.
He carries her back up the stairs and into the ruins of their home.
"What are you?" She asks, as she begins to draw her final breaths.
"I am I." He smiles.
"Where are you taking me?"
"To the beginning." He whispers. "We must start over again."
"Why? Why am I not enough for you?" She protests.
"Nothing will ever be enough." He says. "Or else I could not create."
She gives him permission to use what is left of her love for him to create the mansion afresh. It begins to reanimate around them. We watch as the first frames of the film play out before us again – the burnt house becomes new again, and a new woman appears in His bed. The events of the film will play out again, apparently, as they had before the events of the film, perhaps forever.
The subtext is fairly on the nose: We are guests in Mother(!) Earth's house, and She can expel us, infinitely, on loop, if she so desires, as we see in the Bible.
Indeed, the first eleven chapters of Genesis narrate a cyclical expulsion and recreation narrative: In Genesis 1-2, God creates, and in Genesis 3, humanity is expelled from the microcosm of Eden. In Genesis 4, Cain is expelled from 'the land' for Killing his brother. Finally, in Genesis 6, the Earth expels humanity once and for all: God opens the floodgates of heaven, and the world is flooded, killing everyone, save for the 'righteous' family of Noah.
But the 'righteous' ones whom God preserved to create the world afresh are a cancer, too, and Noah's son Ham is expelled from 'the land', and Noah becomes a drunkard, and their descendants build the Tower of Babel in a strange campaign to dethrone the gods. They're expelled, too. Around this point, the reader gets the sense that there's not going to be a version of this that doesn't end in expulsion.
Which leads the reader to pose the question: Why did God create, instead of not create?
And here lies the – perhaps unintentional – subtext beneath the subtext.
Aronofsky's Mother! offers an answer to the reader's question.
Why did God create – why does He invite guests into His home whom He knows will destroy it? Because His appetite for love is insatiable, and they will love Him. 'Mother Earth' is not enough. His capacity is bottomless. He craves the affirmation of His creatures like the Poet craves the admiration of his devotees. He is like an artist who creates from neurosis – to be understood, to be loved, to be wanted by multitudes. Nothing, and no one, is enough.
And so, embedded within Aronofsky's eco-parable is a kind of theo-critique. That is, intentional or not, the message of the film is that 'Father God' puts 'Mother Earth' through endless cycles of abuse to oblige His devotees, ultimately, because He treasures the love that they pour out upon Him.
I remember a dreary Sunday morning, sometime during the latter Bush's Presidency, when I asked my Sunday School teacher if God was lonely, if that was how come He made everything and everybody. She cocked her head and said, "What do you think?" I said, "I think I'd be lonely if it was just me up there in heaven all those years with nothing to do." Another kid chimed in, "That sounds boring." And another, "I'd make everything football. And then it would all be football. Then I'd never be bored, 'cause it would all be football."
One little girl was the theologian of the group, though I am not sure for which religion: She raised her hand and said, "Maybe 'cause he wanted somebody to love Him." The teacher nodded her head and said, "Ahhh," before writing on the board: "GOD CREATED MAN TO HAVE FELLOWSHIP WITH HIM." She went on, "Imagine if you didn't have aaaaaanyone who loved you. You wouldn't be very happy then, would you?" She underlined the sentence that she had written. "God made everyone so that eeeeeeveryone would love Him."
We ohhhh'd in unison. That was the day that I learned that God is a parasite who creates people because He's lonely and wants to be loved. Now, it sounds pathetic when you say it in a sentence, and Mother! will be lambasted by Christian talk show hosts and culture warriors for implying it, but it's probably what most people believe, at least implicitly.
And so, Mother! does not amount to an 'attack on the Christian faith' (as several more uppity critics have have clamored) so much as an ecological critique on what is probably one of our culture's standard assumptions about God. The offense of Mother!'s ending, one hopes, will be jarring enough to shake the public loose of this vision of God as sycophant and God as leech.
Indeed, Bardem's Poet bears no substantive resemblance to the Trinitarian God at the center of the Christian story. He is more like a demiurge, perhaps, even, Marcion's demiurge. He's an antigod, who drinks people dry to satiate what's lacking in Himself, for the love they can give Him, who enlivens worlds to crucify them for His iniquity.
This is as good a starting point as I can think of to introduce people to the God who really did create the world from Love – not Mother Earth's Love, which He takes out on loan, but His own Love, which He pours out, to overlay the vast nothing that covers the face of the deep, to create beings who are not Himself, not to plumb their depths for the Love that they can feed Him, but to spill the Love from His own veins into theirs, to multiply His own contentment into them, to build a cosmos out of people He does not need, with Love He does not lack, to propagate His own joy into creatures He will not forsake.
And, as such, this view of God – the Christian view – changes how we answer the questions that the expulsion narratives in the early chapters of Genesis pose to us. Like Bardem's Poet, He offers His son to be torn apart and devoured by the masses. But the two couldn't be further from each other: The Poet gave His son as a sacrifice to appease his devotees – to wring more affirmation from their weary bodies, to enjoy their awe. The Trinitarian God at the center of the Christian narrative, however, gave up the Son so that He could create the world. The Godhead – Father, Son, and Spirit – knew, like the Poet, that His creatures would destroy each other and destroy His 'house', and more – they would grow so destructive that they would necessitate their own destruction. And so the Godhead – Father, Son, and Spirit – determined together before creation, that the Son would present Himself as a sacrifice to redeem God's creatures. The God whom we meet in Jesus is everything Javier Bardem's demiurge isn't.
Mother! is a better film than Noah, although Noah has better theology. Whereas Noah saw God Batting in Mother Earth's corner against a belligerent Humanity, Mother! breaks 'Father God' and 'Mother Earth' apart without warrant, as though each have conflicting agendas.
Nevertheless, like Noah before it, Mother! proves itself to be a near perfect jumping-off point to share the gospel with filmgoers jostled enough by Aronofsky's provocative suggestions that they are moved to search the scriptures.
Jack and Mr. Rogers vs. Widening Gyre of World History
Posted on September 12, 2017 by Elyse
When asked about an event a long ago in her life, my grandma sometimes shakes her head. "I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning," she'll say (proverbially, of course, because it is a well-documented fact that the lady loves cinnamon toast). Many of her stories are lost to us now. For her, history is difficult to conceptualize. Along with most of my older relatives, she assures me that my own memory will only grow worse. And it's true: my own sense of time actively decays, as evidenced by all of my lost pencils, my surprised delight at family photo albums, and my inability to exactly retrace the routes to my old haunts in the cities where I've lived.
And those are just my own experiences. Learned history is so much more difficult. I loved my 12-credit-hour, 2-semester-long Western Civilization course in my undergrad, which emphasized history and literature from the Romans to the present day. (Nerd alert.) Of course, it's impossible to fit so grandiose a subject as "Western Civilization" into a single course, regardless of copious credit hours; it's impossible to fit it into a single lifetime. Instead, we focused on overarching themes, influential philosophies, and traceable patterns based on events and literature considered important. The pattern that emerged to me, and many others, wasn't exactly optimistic. The sometimes romantic, often nationalistic, and always mystical William Butler Yeats helps me in expressing some kind of philosophy of time in "The Second Coming" where he famously writes,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
History, to post-war Yeats, is a recurring spiral. But that spiral widens like the falcon, furthering itself from order, from the center, from the thing it is. History (not to mention the cosmos), moves toward disintegration rather than order. It does repeat itself, but in ways more mysteriously horrifying than what has come before: a rough beast instead of a holy infant in Bethlehem.
This vast image out of Spiritus Mundi was handed down to me from a very certain time period after a very certain war. This, I learned, was the mood of the twentieth century, creating the Lost Generation (and spiraling into endless other lost generations), strange artistic movements, and a general loss of faith. And who was I to blame my predecessors for the ennui, the alcoholism, all of the broken coping after World War I? Wilfred Owen assures me that if I could see for myself gas in the trenches, "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori." Cause and effect. WWI and modernism. Inevitable. It all fits nicely in the 16-leaf blue book I wrote my exam in.
This simple, entropic vision–my helplessness in Yeats' gyre–is what I believed as I walked out of my Western Civ final. It was hard not to, there in the wake of other rocking classes, in the midst of important people leaving my life, and with a long summer of serving coffee ahead of me. I read books, when I could, with new knowledge of my place in a world I had just discovered. I quietly observed where writers wrote as expected, staying true to their place in the gyre and perpetuating the falling apart of all things. History grew darker, and predictably so. I had no right to feel happy—especially not when insignificantly good things happened—because happiness had no place. It doesn't fit in the gyre.
Of course, that isn't everyone's experience with the very same material: another reason why history is difficult to conceptualize. Just opening Facebook shows me how different people interpret the same stories, arriving at opposing conclusions. Political discourse, academic essays, and even just conversing with others reinforces the same. And I like to think that courses like Western Civilization don't simply exist to crush overly-sensitive wanna-be intellectual types. There's something to be said for the knowing of things, and not all of us walk away with quite the same feeling.
One day in the noisy heat of that summer, I picked up C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy from where I'd left off after one distracted Christmas break. In the spiritual autobiography, Lewis traces the story of his conversion. For him–and probably for all of us, if we can see it–that narrative begins in childhood (probably before) and bleeds over into his adult life. So, begrudgingly, he dedicates a chapter to his own experiences in the Great War: the very same one that I had written about whirling like the lost falcon. And while Lewis' is not the grittily realistic account I anticipated (it actually rings of repression), it stunned me. He, too, had holed up in trenches and lost a generation of peers. He had also seen the unimaginable. Participated in it, even.
But somehow there was goodness. Something good had come out of the Great War and out of the gyre. True, his works are hardly the zeitgeist. But even if it was just Jack Lewis with his myth of a Lion that had carried me through childhood, there was something. And so, I wondered: if one good thing could come out of an event so systemically and deeply horrific, could two good things, or even three good things, come out of the gyre too?
The summer before preschool began, my grandma babysat me in a hedge-enfolded blue cottage at the end of a cul-de-sac. Neither of us recall that time very well anymore, but I do remember sitting at a tiny table with a glass of chocolate milk. As Grandma cut the crust off my peanut butter sandwiches in the kitchen, I was transported to the Land of Make Believe. Admittedly, the puppet Lady Elaine Fairchilde did scare me, but despite my fears, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was there in that cottage, too. Like it had been for my mom as she pretended that the quiet, cardiganed host with his kind attention was her father. Like, I imagine, many of us did.
Fred Rogers, emerging from the context that my Western Civ course told me was full of mistrust of authority, fear of the Other, wartime anxiety, mass media frenzies, and depleting morals, is another anomaly in the gyre. Instead of angry protests, he kindly requested funding from Congress for public television. Instead of inciting fear, he showed children how to learn from the stranger. Instead of telling us how not to feel, he taught us the power of self-control. Instead of buying into the commodification entertainment–the way television began to strip individuality–he saw an opportunity to humanize, to educate, to express.
How Mr. Rogers could exist in the widening trajectory of civilization is, I think, more than mystical.
Jack Lewis and Fred Rogers, like I said before, are hardly the norm. They are marginally known by the masses, celebrated passionately by tiny pockets of society, and not studied nearly as much as they should be. And why should they be, when they represent the opposite of our great historical narratives?
But it's anomalies like these that convince me that my historical constructs aren't necessarily real. Not that these figures have no faults (I'm well aware of Lewis' misogyny–what some, incidentally, dismiss as a product of his times), but they are without some of the common faults of those we hold up as representations of an entire era. Or at least those vices are less evident. Or at least there was some act of grace along the way.
These ought to be remembered as we attempt to contextualize, to educate, to encapsulate. Because, I pray, if the gyre is true, there will at least always be anomalies that point toward the forgotten center. Because whatever my own construct of history, whatever way I make meaning out of the chaos, the Logos is truer and realer and creates more goodness than my tendencies toward oversimplification care to notice.
Said Fred Rogers himself,
A high school student wrote to ask, "What was the greatest event in American history?" I can't say. However, I suspect that like so many "great" events, it was something very simple and very quiet with little or no fanfare (such as someone forgiving someone else for a deep hurt that eventually changed the course of history). The really important "great" things are never center stage of life's dramas; they're always "in the wings." That's why it's so essential for us to be mindful of the humble and the deep rather than the flashy and the superficial.
Humble. Deep. This is the way anomalies appear: a veteran who envisions a faun in the woods, a seminary student fascinated by television, a grandma who doesn't remember her kindnesses, a child born in Bethlehem; I pray, too, a kid who read Narnia, watched Mister Rogers, and cried in her Western Civ class.
I Love Bultmann, and He's Terrible
Posted on August 23, 2017 by Ryan Ellington
Moses Sees the Promised Land from Afar, as in Numbers 27:12, by James Tissot
Rudolf Bultmann is a welcome headache. Drawing a hard distinction between the kerygma – that is, the gospel itself, in its most irreducible form – and the mythic cultural adornments within which it was 'buried' in the scriptures, he pioneered a rather scintillating new movement in the twentieth century.
As young Rudolf saw it, the virgin birth, Resurrection, miracles, etc. were not just primitive oddities emanating from the imaginations of the 'ancient unsophisticates' who saw and spoke with Jesus (and touched him with their hands), but, in fact, are the gospel, given to us in words inexpressible, to be imbibed and believed, transformed by, and saved by, albeit ensconced in the mythic worldview of the Second Temple Jewry, adorned in the language of 'proto-Gnostic redeemer myths' and colored by the flamboyances of the fabled mystery cults. Dizzy yet?
The images by which we receive the gospel are not, themselves, the gospel, he would say. Well, all theology is anthropology, as he'd also say, and Bultmann's hermeneutic of demythologizing says more about the dangers of modernism's presumed objectivity than it does about the New Testament. Scientism makes for bad theology.
I should mention here that I like Bultmann. And I look forward to talking these things over with him. One thing I venture to imagine is that the cavernous futures accompanying kingdom come are filled with theologians who never tire of saying "This is greater than I imagined." So Barth will get his "I told you so," over Harnack, and J. Gresham Machen, probably, will get his "I told you so," over the whole lot of them (or maybe Ratzinger). And somebody will get their "I told you so," over me. I hope it's Chris Thrutchley.
In any case, Bultmann spent his career expositing what he saw as the gospel in the Gospels. That is, a sort of existentialist soteriology in which 'believers' are 'saved,' by faith in Jesus, from something like the existential void, here and now. "The only way to find peace with God, yourself, and others,"he might say,"is through Jesus."
If he sounds like an embodiment of the worst in contemporary 'evangelicalism,' it's because his ideas – at least, their ghosts – have seeped into the thought and writings of their more widely read authors. If your hip, nondenominational pastor has preached a ghastly sermon from Mark 4:35-41 on how Jesus can calm the storms in your heart, blame Bultmann. (And William Barclay).
I should mention again that I like Bultmann. Actually, a lot. As I said earlier, he suffered from captivity to 20th century's native scientism. But I have often wondered what he might do given access to the merciful obfuscations provided by modern quantum physics. Dawkins can shrug it off if he wants, and so can John Shelby Spong, but the days are over when we could pretend we were hot on our way to grasping the secrets of the cosmos. For the moment, at least, quantum physics, for one, has so muddied everything that the universe-slash-multiverse seems more arbitrary than ever.
If course, there seem to be something like laws, some sort of consistency. Mankind is still subject to the whims of 'creation,' but 'the whims of creation' isn't just a figure of speech anymore. Creation really is whimsical. How great and terrible.
I suspect, then, in ages future, that our centuries long sojourn in 'Rationalism' will be a curiosity studied in classrooms, mocked by too-confident students, before they are reminded by their teachers that they, too, hold presuppositions, most of them probably errant, that they assume to be bulletproof. Bultmann was an entrenched genius – both ahead of and indebted to his generation's worst presumptions. Were Bultmann with us now, he might be less inclined to demythologize. After all, gravity ought to crumple us. Time is inexplicably unidirectional. Some of that Interstellar movie was scientifically accurate. Given the whimsy of everything, a virgin birth is pretty pedestrian.
Resurrection, too. It is out of the ordinary, yes. Certainly noteworthy. We should call it a miracle. But it's quite arbitrary to take vivification as a given but revivification as a puerile fantasy. Bultmann erred in assuming that the 'Resurrection' of Jesus meant only an impossible resuscitation. And it did mean that. But the miracle of it was that nobody, not Rome, not hell, not a garden tomb, could keep the incarnate Son from carrying out the redemption He'd colluded with the Father and Spirit to carry out from the foundation of the world.
I'm speaking figuratively here. Of course the dead don't rise, as far as we know, or can know. Of course it's a miracle that one did. But its historicity is no more implausible than abiogenesis itself, which Christians also believe was of divine inauguration. Whether or not Bultmann's kin want to admit it, the floorboards have dropped out from beneath the demand for 'demythologizing' the scriptures – at least, in theory.
Bultmann imagined himself to be an apologist, and he was. And, to a certain extent, he was a good one. Having first encountered his work as a sophomore in college, his 'redeemed existentialism' struck a familiar chord with me. I still remember the days when I wasn't sure why I shouldn't kill myself. I still remember the void. I didn't climb my way out of it. My emotions never started working right, and things never started being okay. I never pulled myself up by my bootstraps. At risk of sounding nauseatingly saccharine: Jesus did that on my behalf. Bultmann, love-struck Modernist that he was, theologically shoddy but hijacked nonetheless by divine mercy, was always eager to insist that Jesus alone, be grace alone, through faith alone, can make your not-okayness strangely livable.
Getting the Egypt out of Israel (and Us)
Posted on July 4, 2017 by Ryan Ellington
The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, by John Martin (1852)
God exists or doesn't, and everything takes shape accordingly. Our expectations should change given the reality of God or lack thereof – and our values.
Of course, most of the folks I know who think there's probably no God also think quite Christianly. One of my best friends in early high school became an atheist after I introduced him to Marilyn Manson. The challenge Marilyn posed to our Bible-Belt Christianity was more than it could bear, and he jumped the boat, though I stayed nominal, for the most part. But damage done is damage done.
After Marilyn and company poked holes through his loosely enculturated religious mores, his politics changed as well. Fifteen-year-olds rarely nurse well-developed political convictions, but the inherited conservatism that he'd brandished uncritically up to that point evaporated and within a few years he was a progressive Democrat with a fairly robust social ethos. It took losing his grandma's religion to come 'round to Christianity's obstinate conviction that the measure of a society is its benevolence toward its poor. Our damnation will be that we churn out 'destitutes,' which Marx understood, and now so does my old friend.
Though I'm not to the left-of-center politically, those who are understand what most of us deny – that no culture that tramples the poor underfoot can be worth its salt; that the best of societies should be on guard for raining sulfur if their political machinations match what the prophet Ezekiel said about Sodom and Gomorrah:
"As I live," declares the Lord God, "Sodom, your sister and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy. Thus they were haughty and committed abominations before Me. Therefore I removed them when I saw it." (Ezek. 16:48-50)
So if, perhaps, their policy proposals are hasty or uncreative, the progressives among us nevertheless have a significant overlap with Christianity's social vision. I don't, of course, mean that political progressivism is somehow synonymous with atheism, because it isn't. It can't be, actually, and I think something closer to the opposite is the case.
There is, rather, something inherently atheistic about most political Conservatism. This is not derogatory, but it is a diagnosis. Much contemporary Conservative thought begins with "There is no thread that runs through humanity, and I owe no one anything." Consequently, underlying much mainstream Conservatism is the notion that the status quo, the power structure, is basically kosher. If God exists, that's not true.
The book of Leviticus, for example, ought to be plenty evidence that, no, things as they are cannot be accepted, embraced, or even escaped – only redeemed. On the other hand, mainstream Liberalism is undergirded by the notion that progress/justice is natural, or somehow self-evident. Moses suggests it's the opposite – namely, that what's common is unclean and we're all guilty, communally, for everything. Justice is unnatural and we're called to it, together.
It is easy to get lost in the weeds as one peruses the strange middle book of the Mosaic saga. The sacrificial system itself is convoluted and many-splendored, and embedded at the halfway point of the Pentateuch – which, more than any other section of scripture, weaves an almost Dostoevskian yarn. The natural assumption to make if you're a disinterested reader with a somewhat-less-than-cursory knowledge of Ancient Near Eastern cultures is that the Hebrew sacrificial system was chiefly an exercise in satiating an irascible deity, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong, though you'd be close. What emerges on a close reading of Leviticus is God's slow struggle to 'desecularize' nomadic Israel's communal life and, gradually, to deEgyptianize the Hebrew consciousness.
All of this sounds rather ethereal, and it is. We are not used to reading what appears to be a laundry list of sacrificial regulations as a slow-burning sacrament whereby Israel translates the holiness of God into day-to-day life and, in doing so, inculturates the humaneness of God. "The idea of sacrifice was not unique to the Hebrews in the ancient world, as animal, grain, and drink offerings were common to the religious cults of Mespoptamia and Syro-Palestine," writes Andrew Hill, "While the parallels between Israelite and ancient Near-Eastern sacrificial practices attest to the universal need for humans to placate the gods, the Hebrew sacrificial system was distinctive in that it was directed toward the goal of personal and community holiness."
If the 'clean' and 'unclean' divide laid out in its pages seem arbitrary, it's because it is. Offerings are made to impute 'cleanness' on things 'unclean,' and to 'sanctify' clean-but-'common' things and impute 'holiness' onto them. If a 'clean' or 'holy' thing makes contact with an 'unclean' thing, – a dead body, for example – it becomes 'polluted' and must begin again. I recall playground games that weren't entirely different. It is tempting to assign moral weight to 'uncleanness,' but you'd only be half-right to do so, because 'sin offerings' are a different animal – pun regrettably intended. They were not, as it is sometimes assumed, a stand in for good character. Curiously, they seem to have done more to shape good character – or, even, to define good character to a people who consciences were being recalibrated – than anything.
They are never prescribed for premeditated wrongs. One could not, for example, set aside a choice animal on Tuesday to sacrifice on Thursday as recompense for his scheduled visit to the whorehouse on Wednesday. There is no sacrifice laid out for those who plan atrocities – which is interesting, because that leaves only 'unintentional sins' to be atoned for by sacrifice. This ought to jostle us at least a little bit, since most of us assume we can't be held accountable for wrongs we didn't even know we were participating in.
What this testifies to is that although the division of 'clean' and 'unclean' foods, and objects, and bodies may be arbitrary, the concrete division between cleanness and uncleanness is not. That is, to be declared 'unclean,' or 'clean,' is a formality to be abided by, but hardly the end-goal in itself. It is an exercise of sorts directed at awakening the Hebrews to something deeper: Namely, that 'uncleanness' is the norm. That long-discarded Augustinian trope, 'inherited guilt,' gets something right – that everything that is, is unacceptable by virtue of being. It is not, in truth, that the neighbor became unclean by waking up with his arms around his wife who died in the night. He was already polluted, because he is himself. We are not made unclean through carousing or debauchery, as though our default mode was 'love thy neighbor.' We are unclean because we are ourselves, and given time we will grow up into the mongrels we were born to be. We rarely sin on purpose, as Leviticus seems to realize, and we don't need to. We victimize because we're ourselves. It's our nature.
'What is man that you are mindful of him?' the eighth Psalm goes. One is rightly confused when, in the middle of a quaint service at cozy bible church, this particular line is preached in such a way as to denigrate mankind, to imply that it is somehow surprising that God is mindful of humanity. We are what He made, after all, and He did not seem displeased at the outset.
The tone with which the verse is read affects the meaning more than one might imagine. If, for example, it were read from the pulpit as 'What is man that You are mindful of him?" then our impression might be that the Psalmist cannot fathom why the God he addresses might treasure a humanity so dingy and commonplace. This is certainly the reading with which I am the most acquainted. If, however, the verse is read as such: "What is man, that You are mindful of him?" – then the meaning changes.
Not, of course, that some new doctrine arrives out of it. It only reinforces what is already well attested throughout the scriptures: We are, somehow, the image of the God who made us, which Jacob took to mean that when we see the face of our neighbors we really see the face of God. Calvinists of old took this to an extreme: We should not depict the Lord in any artwork, they said, not because He isn't worth depicting, but because He has depicted Himself already – inerrantly, we might say, in Jesus of Nazareth, the 'true Human,' the 'firstborn of many brothers' in the 'new Creation,' who is, Himself, the 'radiance of God's glory, and exact representation of His being' – but, also, in humanity at large. To make images of the Godhead is idolatrous, they believed, because it usurps not only the risen Jesus, but also humanity itself as the image we have been given of the Lord.
So when I say that we are polluted because we are ourselves, I do not mean this like the Gnostics mean it. Our body – 'this mortal coil' – is not the problem. Rather, we have bad souls in broken bodies and the product is disastrous. This is not by design; it is devilry. We bear the image of God in ourselves by virtue of existing, and not one inch of us does not exist to glorify the God whose face we see in one another. We are God's glory and joy, overlaid with muck and mire so thick we'd be irredeemable if not for the insanity of the cross. We are exactly as repulsive, as we are, as we would need to be to move God to crucify Godself in a move to redeem what's mad in us. We are precisely the sort of folks who would nail the incarnate Lord to a tree and sell his clothes for petty cash.
And, of course, we are 'society.' The 'institution' is us. We're the stuff 'the System' is made of, and – not unrelated – we're the stuff holocausts are made of. The decent folks down the street are well equipped to transform their city into a quiet dystopia, and, since we're already suspending our disbelief, they already have, and you helped. We are unclean, and we are our cities. And our cities are unclean. And we are unclean, and we are the government, and we are the cops, and we are the prison system. We are the world you ought to expect given the fact of depravity.
Regrettably, white-knuckled denial of this fact is what underpins the better part of Conservative thought today. The norm, the structures, 'the System,' is fine, we are told, and whoever is trampled underfoot ought to reflect on how they went and got themselves underfoot. In any case, they're certainly not entitled to anything like charity, we are told, or if they are, they certainly aren't entitled to mine.
Well, that may be. Assuming, of course, that there is no debtor's thread that runs through the whole of humanity, binding us together and obligating us to see to one another's wounds. If there is no such thread, it is because there is no God – such a thread could not emerge arbitrarily, or even be unfurled at random, suddenly enjoined at the whims of a 'Lawgiver.' If there is a thread of sorts that runs through humanity, indebting each one to her neighbor, demanding kindness, or empathy, or even something so flamboyant as dignity, it can only be that it emerges from the nature of the God upon whom the drama of existence plays out. It must be that, as beings, we participate in Being itself in part by carrying on with one another according to a moral thread that transcends our mores and flows out from the very nature of Being. And we cannot participate in Being if there is no Being in which to participate, nor can we be obliged to anything.
If, however, there is a God, then the thread is real, and I am bound to its demands simply by existing. Not, of course, that someone can be entitled to another's income, or to their space, or property. But the God who 'owns the cattle on a thousand hills' (Ps. 50:10) certainly owns mine, and is free to distribute His property however he pleases. By participating in Being at all, I noose myself to everyone I know and do not know, and so become their debtor, and there is no end in sight – we owe everything, to everyone, forever, not least to work alongside them for their liberation from the cycle of oppression.
A House for My Name by Peter Leithart, 2000, Canon Press
A Survey of the Old Testament by Gleason L. Archer Jr., 1964 (rev. 2007), Moody Publishers
A Survey of the Old Testament by John Walton and Andrew Hill, 1991 (rev. 2009), Zondervan
The Politics of Yahweh: John Howard Yoder, The Old Testament, and the People of God by John C. Nugent, 2011, Wipf and Stock
The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, 2013, Oxford University Press
Originally published at Misfit Theology.
But really, what does it mean to speculate?
Posted on June 21, 2017 by Some Positive Possibilities
It is funny to me how our culture feels about the noun, "speculation," and the verb, "to speculate." It has the same roots as words like, "spectacles, spectacle, spectators, spectacular," etc., which means that it derived from the concept of sight, of seeing something. But if it derived from sight, and we as a culture like to talk about and uphold sight, then how did it come to mean something ungrounded, essentially something you couldn't see? I am pretty sure that this is from modern responses to about two thousand years of philosophical and theological history, in which much of what was practiced was called "speculation" in a positive sense – basically "sight." Sure, it referred to sight of the mind's eye, in many ways. But at the same time, often enough we use and refer to the same kind of sight regularly at least in popular America. Much of American culture is made up of speculations – sights justified because they are the sights of the mind's eye (we make mistakes about these sights, but such sight is still how we justify many beliefs and actions – and even scientific thought is a history of mistakes, hopefully being corrected, but still a history of mistakes – and so is philosophical history).
The elite and some people who pride themselves on their scientific education will probably object to this precisely on the grounds that only the scientific is reliable. But then the grounds of scientific method are non-scientific. In fact, they are speculation. How do we know that nature obeys laws and will continue faithfully to do so? Well, "sight" of the speculative kind, is what justifies such belief – the specific speculative kind which also happens to be extremely unique since most of the 6 billion people on the planet do not share that exact speculation. This is important because people who talk about science in America commonly assume that the bases of science are self-evident – but if they are self-evident why did we not come to them sooner? And why don't most people hold to them regularly today? In fact, they are speculation. They may be good speculation – a lot of medieval speculation was good speculation. But they're still speculations, to be held up or knocked down on those grounds, not as self-evident authorities. It is also the case with the belief that we can consistently and coherently observe, theorize, and experiment in the natural world – this essential belief of modern scientific method is speculation which is not held universally or by the majority in history or the present, and it is not a self-evident authority. It falls or stands on speculative grounds – on the sight of the mind's eye, and our reasoning about such sight.
'Disinformation' and the Death of Romulus
Posted on June 12, 2017 by Ryan Ellington
All is not well as Paul and his cohort Silas write to their converts in Thessalonica. The churches into which they had formed have made quite the impression on their city, which is glorious enough, but the result has been blowback.
If every church is a microcosm, they're a microcosmopolis, where Jew and gentile share bread and wine like brothers, and pool capital like countrymen, entombed beneath the concrete walkways of an empire that does not co-mingle and will not change. Their affront to the norm has not gone unnoticed. The gosh-dang world is upside down.
Neither has it gone unnoticed by the Synagogue leaders who do not appreciate the threat these early Pauline communities pose to the continued livelihood of their faith community. None too pleased to lose a portion of their Jewish attendants and perhaps the bulk of their "God-fearers," – (gentiles drawn to the monotheism of the Jewish religion who had attached themselves to the synagogue worship) – they found these egalitarian cultists troublesome. Worse, "not a few of the leading women," drawn by the teaching of these new missionaries, departed from their assembly. Their influence and financial resources departed with them. The Pauline mission robbed the synagogues of attendants and hegemony, and power, and prestige.
Of course, none of these issues couldn't be resolved with a smear campaign. Paul and his cronies had constructed a message, said the synagogue leaders, that would naturally appeal to 'God-fearing' Gentiles. Like all theological novelties, they went on, it was really a ploy for financial gain. The missionaries who brought the message are, after all, chasing prominence and glory. And they fled the scene once they met opposition – hardly behavior that denotes sincerity.
Well, smear campaigns are never really about misinformation. The particulars of propagandist blather never really have to take root in order to undermine the stability of its target. And the synagogue leaders, having saturated the public square with slanderous accusations, at the very least destabilized what the missionaries had built. Misinformation is an understatement. This was disinformation.
Unsurprisingly, their claims were baseless. In reality, the missionaries had come to teach in Thessalonica on the heels of 'shameful treatment' in Phillipi for having preached the same ingratiating gospel, having stirred up the wrath of some of the same ingrate Synagogue leaders. Someone is incapable of handling resistance, but it isn't the missionaries – who, by the way, the Thessalonians may remember had insisted on working side jobs to support themselves during their stay. In truth, they didn't make any demands on their converts, although they were certainly entitled to. If they'd been thirsty after renown, they would have acted a bit more like their interlocutors.
As the Thessalonians will also remember, they were "gentle among them, like a mother taking care of her own children," or "a father with his children, exhorting each one of them." They had been "holy and righteous and blameless in conduct toward them," and the only explanation was that "being affectionately desirous of the Thessalonians, they were ready to share with them not only the gospel of God but also their own selves, because they had become very dear to them." Having been "torn away" geographically, their hearts remained in Thessalonica. These new believers were their glory and joy.
So there was a different reason behind the opposition they had faced. The clergy isn't what it was. Thoroughly domesticated by an empire that shuns them, this group of foolhardy prigs are the same sort that killed the prophets and crucified the Lord, and in "hindering Paul and Silas from speaking to all the gentiles," they demonstrate their inability to envision gentiles as full participants in the coming kingdom to be established by the Messiah. Synagogues had amassed a large multitude of 'God-fearing' gentiles as partial participants in the life of the community, and they were happy with it that way. Behind their visceral opposition to the missionaries was a Jim Crowesque separate-but-equal-ism in which Greeks and the like, however devout, were best relegated to a second-class citizenship. These punks were at least as reprehensible as the hecklers at Galatia.
In any case, the missionaries had sent Timothy to serve as a temporary overseer, and were delighted to learn that although the new believers in Thessalonica buckled somewhat in response to the onslaught of their antagonists, they weren't 'bewitched' like the Galatians had been.
So, concluding their prayer of exhortation, the missionaries entreat God to reunite them with the churches in Thessalonica, and to knit the new believers together in holy love, and to "establish their hearts blameless in holiness" so that they will be prepared for the return of Christ. They've issued a renewed call for holy living, a warning against disregarding God's call to purity, and a command to remain "in the world." Faithful as the Thessalonian Christians have remained thus far, one wonders why the missionaries thought this necessary.
As it turns out, the Synagogue leaders – horrified at the thought of losing their relative hegemony over Jewish practitioners and Gentile seekers – sought with some success to turn both the city-folk and government against them. Their brutal treatment of Jason and his household, recorded in Acts 17, was hardly an isolated incident:
"Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, "This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ."
And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women. But the synagogue leaders were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd.
And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, "These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus."
And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things. And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go." (Acts 17:1-9)
It would have been tempting for a relatively new Gentile believer to quietly slide back into her old habits to avoid meeting the same fate. Others, rather than buckling under the pressure of religious and governmental opposition, grew zealous to the point of withdrawing altogether from the life of the city. That the missionaries even needed to remind Thessalonian believers to "aspire to live quietly, and mind their own affairs, and work with their hands…so that they may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one," is amusing in hindsight. Timothy had encountered a number of well-intentioned believers who, overestimating the imminence of the second coming, had abandoned their jobs and become dependent, quite gratuitously, on the charity of others.
On top of it all, there was concern about whether those who had died would be included in the messianic kingdom at the coming of Christ. The missionaries typically drew out their instruction over the course of several days and weeks, and the religious elites had successfully driven them from the city before they could properly furnish the imaginations of newly proselytized with an accurate conception of how the resurrection of the Son of God would pave the way for their own resurrection.
Further complicating the matter, the proselytes had likely been connected to a strand of Judaism that placed minimal emphasis on the final Resurrection – or ignored it outright – so that when Paul and Silas were prematurely ejected from Thessalonica, the infant churches were left with an incomplete puzzle of sorts. In general, Palestinian Judaism was 'earthier' than the acutely Hellenized form that flourished in Alexandria and elsewhere, and whose general impulses would have trickled down into the synagogues of Thessalonica.
Hence, the form of Judaism in which the new converts were versed probably emphasized immortality over resurrection and downplayed the messianic hope, at least tacitly, on the grounds that "the dynamic personality of a messiah has no proper place in such a serene, eternally ordered world," to quote the celebrated Jewish historian Salo Baron. Having been convinced by Paul and his team that Jesus was God's messiah, they walked into the new faith carrying over anticipation of a coming "Golden Age, unrivaled in glory, when all peoples would abandon idolatrous practices and join the Jews in the worship of the one God in Jerusalem." Yet untaught regarding the 'final Resurrection,' more than a few among them were concerned about whether those who had died already would be included in the 'Golden Age' established at Christ's return.
As it turns out, they needn't worry. Just as Christ was resurrected from the dead, Paul insists, so also will those who have died be resurrected at His return. In fact, his whole gospel hinges on it. "The Lord Himself will descend from heaven," sooner or later, and "the dead in Christ will rise first." For Paul, this meant the families he'd set ablaze at the height of his career in barbarism, and Stephen, from whose eyes he'd watched the vitality drain with the coats of his murderers strewn across his arms. For myself, it means my grandfather, Homer Chalmus Ellington, and Johnny Cash, to whom I'm supposedly related by marriage. After all this, says Paul, "We who are alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord." The imagery is strikingly reminiscent of a pivotal episode in the second book of Samuel:
"Then all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and said, "Behold, we are your bone and flesh. In times past, when Saul was king over us, it was you who led out and brought in Israel. And the Lord said to you, 'You shall be shepherd over my people Israel, and you shall be leader over Israel'" So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David king over Israel.
David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years. At Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months, and at Jerusalem he reigned over all Israel and Judah thirty-three years.
And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, "You will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off"—thinking, "David cannot come in here." Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David. And David said on that day, "Whoever would strike the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack 'the lame and the blind' who are hated by David's soul." Therefore it is said, "The blind and the lame shall not come into the house."
And David lived in the stronghold and called it the city of David. And David built the city all around from the Millo inward. And David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him.
And Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David, and cedar trees, also carpenters and masons who built David a house. And David knew that the Lord had established him king over Israel, and that He had exalted his kingdom for the sake of His people Israel." (2 Samuel 5:1-12)
That's to say, when the Thessalonian Christians meet Christ in the air, it will be like the tribes of Israel 'meeting' David at Hebron. They will say, "Behold, we are your bone and flesh," and welcome Him back for good – "and so we will always be with the Lord." Soon enough, the fermenting churches will meet their loved ones afresh, and their Savior – no longer as an itinerant healer, but as the promised Messiah – King Jesus, come to take the blood bought world back for Himself.
One couldn't be blamed for missing that emphasis, though. Two millenia after Paul, disinformation abounds – from the press, certainly, and the academy, probably – and, regrettably, the pulpit.
If you grew up Protestant in the United States of America, you might be under the impression that Paul and his colleagues applied for a grant from the Jerusalem council, built a medium-sized rectangular church building with an impressive white steeple, and prepped their converts with the basics of Christian theology to tide them over while they waited out the rapture. This is taught nationwide in pulpits occupied by Spirit-filled ministers with good intentions and poor theology.
In reality, these Pauline communities remade the world. Apparently his exhortation to live quietly and do honest work for honest wages was sufficient to rouse them out of their retreatist stupor because, together with the scattered Church the world over, the Christians in Thessalonica quietly ushered in the death of the old West where 'right' and 'wrong' were functions of power and little else, people were only acknowledged as human insofar as they were useful to the State and properly assimilated into the bloody machinery of imperialism, and the order of the cosmos endorsed a thickly stacked caste system whereby the poor and others were resources to be consumed by the nobility – as labour, or entertainment, or, more commonly, as sexual playthings to be brutalized and drank to exhaustion. It is hard to oversell how Paul's gospel toppled the empire that Aeneas built, but it did exactly that, as generations of his disciples lived together in embodied glory – a communitarian compassion that enfleshed the bones of Moses in their midst. As it turns out, all Christian theology is 'liberation theology' if you understand where we came from and toward what we are continually blooming.
So the churches in Thessalonica were a counterculture, so to speak – one so thoroughly contagious that it spread through the streets of Rome like a ravaging disease and devoured the ethos of strength, of 'manly vitality,' and sowed the egalitarian spirit that continues in each generation to give birth to itself, each time more mature than before.
Depredation was the rule in the world that crucified the Son of God, and the ages were long, the norms static – it was a world that did not change. Armed with the gospel of the crucified God, the scattered church in Rome and abroad broke apart the pavements and tended the Edenic gardens buried well beneath. Consequently, they grew, albeit slowly, into the world that is, and as we, too, see to these gardens, they will grow, perhaps, somehow, into the world to come. And we will meet the Lord in the air, and say "We are your bone and flesh," and we will always be with the Lord, because the Resurrection of His blood bought world cannot be undone.
Trying (Not) to be Jesus for Others: A Remarkable Thing to Consider
Posted on June 9, 2017 by Elyse
Like many of the Christian NF-types I know around my age, I (finally) picked up Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. I'd heard a lot of high praise for this epistolary novel of a dying father writing to his young son. And the more I read (and reread) the final pages, the more I realized I was not disappointed by the hype. We could devote an entire series of blog posts to Robinson's glowing coal of a novel—shining forth, Hopkinesque, with the grandeur of God—and an undergrad course I took actually intended to spend three or four class periods over it. Sadly, that class ran out of time by the end of the year; I suppose I don't have the time to blog all of my thoughts about it, either.
In those last pages, the ones I relish rereading, John Ames imagines his son as an old man. He cherishes the thought of his son filled with wisdom and experiences and evidence of having loved creation. He blesses the body parts that will trouble him in forty or fifty years—the very same parts that trouble Ames as he imparts his novel-length goodbye. "I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years," he writes. "But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction." The gap after this sentence in the book, marking the end of the section of text, literally underscores Ames' impending absence.
Even though this is a passing thought (most of Gilead is, actually), I can't help but find it a "remarkable thing to consider," to use Ames' oft-repeated, almost liturgical, phrase.
I've lived most of my life in a way that encouraged dependence. Maybe it stemmed from sibling interactions or loneliness or grade school expectations or pride. Maybe it's just human depravity. I remember realizing in middle school that while being friends with popular kids was a lost cause, I could easily get other (obviously) lonely people to like me. It became a game in high school. A mode of survival in college. It bled into friendships where I could tell myself I was being loving: listening (a lot), offering advice, giving gifts. And it seemed to start with love.
Soon, the object was not so much loving another person—which involves, of course, another person. The object was myself. Seemingly loving behaviors became vehicles for my feeling affirmed, feeling wanted, feeling needed. None of those feelings are inherently bad, of course. But if, like I did, I preyed on other peoples' loneliness for the sake of my own gratification, then I really couldn't call that love anymore.
And the worst thing for those who squandered their dependence on me: I, like every other human, am imperfect (in case the previous paragraphs of my predatory predilection didn't already make the point). Admitting that sets my teeth on edge almost as much as admitting my mercenary desire to be affirmed. I, even the wizened and bright and compassionate and obviously-humble individual that I am, will let down every single person I happen to come in contact with. I will disappoint. I will say the wrong thing. I will hurt.
I will not be able to provide for their every need. Even on my best day, with the best intentions and all of my resources available, I will be insufficient for even one single human soul.
If only this realization about my own sick self was just one of those cool metaphorical dream sequences in a movie. If only I woke up from it, whistling, and hastily changed my ways. But I think the realest lessons have to come from the realest part of our experience: the part where our hands are lacerated by even the dirt we fall down in, and we can't look away from the fact that it's our own damned fault. Over the course of a couple of months, I saw that I had let people down not just by my absences and mistakes—the ways that were immediately apparent—but because I simply and ravenously encouraged dependence on me.
The dying John Ames rightly admits that he can't bear the burden of years for his son. I think he would have realized that even if he had lived to see his son become an old man himself: he writes only of helping carry, not carrying for him. And so he wisely does not express a desire to somehow absorb his son's struggles, even if it would make Ames feel the essentiality that I crave. And how can he, when he will be gone?
He writes instead of God having "that fatherly satisfaction." And in two sentences, he does what has been so difficult for me: he entrusts someone he cannot help to the care of someone who can. Someone transcendent and sufficient. Someone who provides the only rest for hearts that fundamentally seek an object upon which to heap their dependence. Someone who gives meaning to the term "fatherly" and, in fact, "satisfaction." Someone perfect.
Along with Ames, I must also confess that I can't bear the weight of many years. I can't do it for myself, much less another human. I can't fill those deepest wounds because I'm not meant to be Jesus. (And, sweet freedom, I truly thank God for that.) But because I am meant to be like him, I am not excused from caring for others. The way I imitate him is not by pointing dependent hearts in the direction of myself (the listening, sage, meek, and deeply predatory self). It is by turning my attention, and others', toward the only Person who deserves the fatherly satisfaction of holding all of the aches in our aging bones and aging souls.
A remarkable thing to consider, indeed.
The Omnipresence of Suffering (and the Image of the Bloodied Christ)
Posted on June 1, 2017 by Ryan Ellington
Anonymous Byzantine illustration: The pre-incarnate Christ speaks to Job.
One can rarely be sure how to go about paraphrasing Calvin. He's an almost bottomless pit of nuance – so much so that it's nearly impossible to summarize his thought without burying each sentence in qualifications. There is a tacit existentialism to him – especially in The Institutes – and he's well-pleased when a thought stream grows dizzying and the fragile tensions he has drawn together become insufferable. The result is that Calvinism, in the broadest sense of the term, is a magnet's coil – always, evidently, liable to burst at the seams, and yet, consistently, holding together. It's 'head in the clouds' theology, to paraphrase a much-easier-to-summarize John Piper. The unfavorable appraisals that he has obtained in recent years seem, at best, reductive.
There's a certain poetry to the disfavor into which he has fallen of late. Calvin spent his life swinging at enemies real and imagined. He is, in fact, a prime example of the demonic perils of demanding to be proven right. The man nursed an appetite for vindication. At every turn, his words were twisted by adversaries and misinterpreted by troglodytes. He longed, sometimes violently, to be understood. And now, more than ever, he isn't.
He is know for his rigidity and supposed authoritarian bent. Fair enough. He was insufferably rigid. And rather heavy handed in governing Geneva. These facts are unremarkable. It shouldn't surprise us that a 16th century intellectual was vociferously combative, nor that he ruled his Protestant theocracy with a half-clenched fist of iron. It should astound us that he was as remarkably flexible as he was – both as a theologian and politician. This flexibility makes him a complex read – not that any of his writings are terribly complicated, but his willingness to tease out possibilities and to take his readers along with him as he plumbs the depths of the transcendant beauty at center of the universe makes him an author who defies systematization. It is not that his thoughts are disorderly; they aren't. And yet, no summary of Calvin has ever captured his many-layeredness. His nuances must be felt, not simply assented to. Calvinism is a lived-theology, and, as such, can only really be understood in hindsight, and from the inside.
There are no good theodicies. As Austin Farrer observed half a century ago, nothing in the world can quite make up for the fact that the universe runs on suffering. There are also no pacifists. Not unless we so thoroughly restrict the term as to render it meaningless: Research has suggested that plants can feel pain and think thoughts, recognize relatives, and support one another by sharing photosynthesized sugars through a rather complex entangled-roots system. A rapidly multiplying group of animals have proven to be more nearly 'sentient' than we ever previously imagined. The boundaries between human and beast, and beast and plant are ever-narrowing. And no creature, human or otherwise, can exist without inflicting suffering on other creatures. One is reminded of a Noah and the Whale song:
When the baby's born
Oh, let's turn it to the snow
So that ice will surely grow
Over weak and brittle bones
Oh, let's leave it to the wolves
So their teeth turn it to food
Oh, its flesh keeps them alive
Oh, its death helps life survive
Oh, the world can be kind in its own way
To understate: The classic 'Problem of Evil' is a bit passé. And in light of the sheer brutality of existence, so are theodicies. How can life be meaningful – or, even tolerable – in the face of such horrors? Can anyone stay sane who takes seriously the fact the the world literally runs on the suffering of creatures? It is not simply that unnecessary suffering pervades the goings-on of the current milieu. The ecosystem mainstains itself and adapts as creatures, some microscopic and others magnificent, fight and claw for resources. And there is no rest, no escape route: If creatures did not kill each other on purpose for resources, some would kill others by accident. Larger creatures would still crush smaller creatures by no fault of their own. Sizable creatures would still crush those too small to be seen by the naked eye. And worse yet, if creatures did not kill each other on purpose, even more would die than before. Plants are alive, but herbivores have to eat them. Trees feel the pain of losing bark to hungry herbivores – they emit an ultrasonic noise when feasted upon. Trees scream in horror when predators sink their teeth in and fungi drink them dry from the inside out. And even if plants did not think and feel and scream in pain, there would be unspeakable animal suffering if creatures stopped competing for resources. It is the bloody struggle for survival that guarantees that as few creatures die as is necessary. If they stopped killing each other, there would still be such a scarcity of resources that most of them would starve to death – a worse fate, even, than being mauled. No creature, anywhere, can exist, in any sense, without inflicting senseless suffering on other creatures.
How does one keep from going insane in this world? Interestingly enough, Calvin – who did not have access to the findings of modern science and had not read The Hidden Life of Trees – was remarkably in tune with the absurdity of the universe. I don't, of course, mean that he grasped the particularly sordid depths of animal suffering. And yet, he grasped, long before it had become self-evident, that the world is precisely as fleeting, as cruelly indifferent, you might say, as Solomon had posthumously warned, and Job had (rather repetitively) chronicled. And yet – he was also the man who, long before Edwards, had declared that 'there is not one blade of grass that does not exist for the glory of God.' The world is a horrifying factory of barbarism that somehow, still, is an indefatigable repository of transcendant beauty. If you can accept it, the horrors that travel the veins of everything are a characteristic absurdity, which, though omnipresent, contradict the very fabrics of reality. God is love, and God is the Ground in which we have our being, and yet, to be at all is intolerably painful, and yet, the transcendent beauty at the bottom of everything beckons us onward into the absurdity in pursuit, we hope, of transcendence itself.
And so Calvin eschews theodicy, instead goading his readers on to something less clear and more satisfying. Endlessly qualified and characteristically dizzying, he says to the downtrodden – and, my paraphrase will be unsatisfactory here – 'You will suffer, and often, perhaps unthinkably so, and others will suffer worse, too, unbearably. And God's hand is in it, somehow – like all things, your suffering, seemingly needless, traces back to God's eternal decree. And you have no grounds for protest, because He is the very Ground you stand on. But you can endure it and, by grace, find yourself hammered more nearly into the image of the bloodied Christ.'
from a conversation on Criminal Justice: tone, violence, hermeneutics
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Paul, And The Problem Of Other Christianities
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Bible Commentary for Christian Living


A black cotton t-shirt available in both gents and ladies styles.
The Angel Heart T-Shirt is inspired by Alan Parker's noir masterpiece adaptation of the cult classic novel Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg.
Mickey Rourke starred with Robert De Niro and Charlotte Rampling in the unsettling tale of black magic, devil worship and the eternal price of fame.
Angel Heart tells the story of the search for the mysterious and enigmatic crooner Johnny Favorite.and is the ultimate movie of good and evil.


text:
Places Beyond: The Lost Pieces 4
by Bill Binkelman, Wind and Wire
Rather than dissect the origins of this fine selection of music from Steve Roach (if you're interested, the liner notes goes into vast detail about how/why these qualify as "lost" pieces of music), I'll stick to critiquing this album (especially since my time is so short what with my impending leave of absence). From that standpoint, i.e. the merits of this CD, I can sum it up by saying this would make a great place to start if you have only recently discovered Steve Roach or are unfamiliar with his more recent work (for example, if all you own is DREAMTIME RETURN, DESERT SOLITAIRE, or STORMWARNING). PLACES BEYOND: THE LOST PIECES 4 clearly illustrates how Roach has evolved into the proverbial multi-headed hydra of ambient and electronic music, capable of producing solid work in any one of several subgenres. Completists (you know the type, they have at between ten to twenty Roach albums already) should be forewarned that, while the music on this recording is uniformly excellent, nothing is so dramatically different that it will jolt the synapses of your brain. That notwithstanding, PLACES BEYOND is a damn tasty melange of both floating and beat-driven ambient/electronic music.
"Distant Signals" starts things off with a slice of serene drifting spacemusic, as gentle washes of warm reverberations cruise effortlessly, sometimes ensconced in a soothing layer of subtly retro keyboards (a'la Michael Stearns, but less dramatic). "Trancefusion" visits the throbbing cyber-organic beats of fractal beat EM that Roach explored with Vir Unis on Blood Machine. I particularly like the integration of pleasantly eerie swirling tones that encircle the percolating rhythms, as well the occasional "thump" of a bass note, as if a single cybernetic neuron was firing at random. "Serpent's Birth," another fractal groove piece, manages to instill an earthy sensuality amidst the electronic pulses and crackling textures, probably through the use of percussion that combines fractalism with a quasi-tribal quality. This song gathers a head of steam and cooks up a storm of frenetic energy by the midpoint, only to unwind like an uncoiling serpent of the song's title by the conclusion. All you need to know about "Resolution Point" is how it reminds me of Soma which is one of my favorite ethno-tribal/ambient recordings of all time (also, Byron Metcalf contributes some sound sources to this cut, which should be endorsement enough).
That's details on the first half of the CD, folks. There are four more tracks here, including "Slow Rapture" which will thrill Roach's drone-fans, although I find Steve's other subgenres much more intriguing personally. "Contained... Sustained" while superficially drone-related, is more of a classic spacemusic piece than a pure drone, with its enveloping waves of warm electronic bliss.
Anyway, there ya have it. Steve Roach certainly doesn't need endorsement from me or anyone else at this stage in his career, so you can just imagine how good I consider this album is or I wouldn't even bother reviewing it. By that I mean, most people know how proficient and talented this guy is, so my adding my voice to the chorus underlines how terrific one of his albums must be, and trust me, it is. Again, if you've got most of his output, this may (or may not) be redundant; but if you've only got a handful of this man's work, don't "lose" these pieces!
CD out of stock
2004 Timeroom Editions 14 (CD)
Reviewed by e|i magazine, Synthtopia, Wind and Wire
With this 4th edition of the Lost Pieces series at hand, it's clear more than ever that these unique releases seem to have a curious way of taking on an interconnected life of their own. An undercurrent of congruency between the pieces is consistently apparent in these projects and in this release, even though the pieces were created over a longer span of time and under unique and seemingly disparate situations. As a starting point, I will draw from a large pool of unreleased and lost tracks. It's like shuffling through a large box of puzzle pieces looking for the shapes and colors from which to begin telling a particular story that I'm discovering along the way. It's very much a mosaic, formed out of the richness that each piece or soundworld passage holds on its own. From there the combined resonance of the pieces starts to take over and fully reveals itself as a whole. Making the outcome more than simply a collection of pieces, this kind of process results in a structure, theme, and sonic storyline that could not be arrived at through other routes traveled on a tighter timeframe with specific intentions. -- Steve Roach, November 2004
Distant Signals (1999) -- This piece was originally created during the time of the LIGHT FANTASTIC project. It was eventually released on a Various Artists collection on the Groove label from The Netherlands. Strangely the finished CD had a problem with the duplication master and this track was cut off at mid-point. It's all here now.
Trancefusion (2000) -- I created this piece in the Timeroom around the time of the BLOOD MACHINE release with Vir Unis. It's a weave of fractal grooves, short rhythmic elements blended to create a longer complex rhythmical Structure. It first appeared on the Electric Body video release and on a limited-run compilation CD through Sequences magazine in the UK. Versions were also performed live around this time.
Serpent's Birth (2000) -- Another piece from around the time of BLOOD MACHINE with Vir Unis. We recorded a large collection of pieces that never made it onto the final release because of the time constraints and final shape of the release.
Resolution Point (1999) -- This was a piece recorded especially for a multi-artist compilation titled CONVERGENT EVOLUTION on the now defunct Greenhouse Music label. Part of the hybrid groove was created with some rhythmic source elements from Byron Metcalf.
Calm Before the Storm (2000) -- This was recorded live with Vidna Obmana at his studio in Belgium as we were preparing to perform at the 2000 E-Live Festival in the Netherlands.
Slow Rapture (1997) -- A post THE MAGNIFICENT VOID space piece created for THE AMBIENT ECLIPSE, a multi-artist compilation on the now-expired Mirage label.
Contained... Sustained (1999/2000) -- This is a meld of two desert impressions, the first from around the time of THE AMBIENT EXPANSE and the second part from sometime after CORE.
Light of Day (2001) -- The exact origin of this lost piece is unknown, as it was found unmarked on one of many CD-R spools from over a 4-year period. I have a vague memory of the original space being created around the time of the CORE release, then later expanded upon around the MYSTIC CHORDS & SACRED SPACES project. A few final brush strokes were added just before mastering in October 2004.
1. Distant Signals MP3 7:04
2. Trancefusion MP3 12:57
3. Serpent's Birth MP3 7:49
4. Resolution Point MP3 11:58
5. Calm Before the Storm MP3 10:10
6. Slow Rapture MP3 7:29
7. Contained... Sustained MP3 5:30
8. Light of Day MP3 9:35
2, 3 with Vir Unis; 5 with Vidna Obmana

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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