Friday, August 04, 2023

The Dissolution of the Seminaries

Between 1536 and 1540, Henry VIII dissolved all monasteries, convents, priories, and other religious institutions--about fifteen thousand of them across England and Wales. The act unemployed one out of every fifty persons in the population, not to mention gutting the nation's centers of education (literacy and the arts) and charity (especially healthcare and the support of the poor). What had stood for centuries was pulled down in four years. I am tempted to think of it as a disaster--and especially where libraries were lost. But to peoples long fed up with the hoarded riches and power of the ecclesiastical estates, they had it coming. As Roman Catholic historian David Knowles said, "There were far too many religious houses in existence in view of the widespread decline of the fervent monastic vocation, and that . . . the monks possessed too much of wealth and of the sources of production both for their own well-being and for the material good of the economy." When I look at the news coming out of the seminaries and churches of the West, I wonder if what is going on today is a lot like dissolution. And I wonder, did we have it coming too?

Statistic: Do you happen to be a member of a church or a synagogue? | Statista
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This graph has a tale to tell: the number of people who are members of a church is declining against a rising number of people who aren't members.[1] The loss of a tithing populace affects churches' abilities to support full-time clergy, which changes how the pastoral ministry is done. And that changes seminary enrollment and the seminary system. Fifty seven percent of schools in the Association for Theological Schools (ATS) report declining enrollment. And for those who do enroll, online work and shorter educational times are in demand. People do not want to take on educational debt and especially when they cannot expect to be supported in full-time in ministry. Therefore, the gold-standard three-year Master of Divinity degree is being replaced by one- or two-year Master of Arts degrees. Seminaries are intentionally dissolving themselves of expensive-to-maintain housing, dormitories, and land and embracing online education. I hardly know what to call it, but I can say that the quiet library stacks, the late-night stress in book-crowded carols, and the mental hum of people literally becoming scholars: all that is going. Maybe we did have it coming.

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[1] In their book The Great Dechurching (Zondervan Academic, 2023) authors Michael Graham and Jim Davis say that America is seeing in real time “the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history,” with some 40 million people—1 in 6 Americans—having stopped going to church in the past thirty years. “That’s a lot of people who have changed their rhythms and habits,” Graham said. The losses in church going are greater in number than the people who came to faith during the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and all the Billy Graham crusades combined.

[2] For a bit of extra credit, watch this lecture about the dissolution of the monasteries by Massolit. The name of the lecturer is unlisted.

Friday, March 17, 2023

The BDAG Flâneur: Setting Out

A flâneur \FLAN-uhr\ is an urban stroller, lounger, saunterer, or loafer. The word initially carried the idea of wasting time. But with the rise of especially Parisian urban life, it skipped a step. A flâneur wandered through crowds and streets with a detached but aesthetically attuned observation.[1] Honoré de Balzac described flânerie \FLAN-er-ee\, the verbal form, as "the gastronomy of the eye." Victor Fournel, in Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), said there was nothing lazy in flânerie. It was a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape like "a mobile and passionate photograph" ("un daguerréotype mobile et passioné") of urban experience.

BDAG, unlike a flâneur, cannot walk or observe. It is a book--a lexicon. It is the standard lexicon for scholars interested in the literature of the New Testament. Its full title is A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. It is based in the work of Walter Bauer, but its present revised edition is edited by Frederick William Danker. Put the initials of the two names together and you get BDAG.

If you are a student or scholar in Biblical studies or in the history of Christianity or Second Temple Judaism, you save your pennies to buy this one-thousand-page tome. And you are encouraged to use it. But, at least in my case, I forget to do so. The entries are dense, and I don't have it in electronic form so I have to be with it to use it--no click and it appears a la Logos. Yet, BDAG has been on my mind of late, and I have hit upon an idea.

What if I adopted the relaxed-yet-observant curiosity of the flâneur and go strolling among its pages? Entries would be like stands in a marketplace and shops along a boulevard. What curiosities and sidewalk insights are hidden among its citations? Time, then, to don my shoes, coat, and hat and walk out of doors and into the streets.

*** ***

Α, α, τό first letter of the Gk. alphabet alpha Even at this, the very first entry, there are goods to be had. Already we discover letters used as numbers: α' = 1. β' = 2. Perhaps there was no separate system of counting, though mathematics was already well established in the world. The earliest mathematician is Thales of Miletus in fifth century BCE. But math itself goes much further back into time, to the Babylonians and Sumerians. And before them, to the hunter gatherers of the ancient world as evidence by the marks along the Ishango bone.

Civilizations which use letters as numbers, such as the pre-modern Hebrews, limited themselves greatly, as such systems are not given to advanced arithmatic. What such a scheme is good for, however, is gematria where words mean numbers and numbers words. Gematria is a hot bed for kabbalistic mysticism. It is, therefore, no surprise to discover that alpha and omega signify the beginning and the end and everything in between. "The two came to designate the universe and every kind of divine and superhuman power." The alphabet became a secret bag of spells, a master incantation. To know the true name of anything is to know its secrets and its power, and isn't the alphabet the very storehouse of all true names. It is a metaphysical loom joining life, breath, and sound into a technology of infinite combination.

The last gift of this entry is the first Christian use of alpha in the Sartor Square: a five-line palindrome, rendered in Latin, of five words:

When the five-letter Latin words are read in line order horizontally or vertically or backwards or forwards or bottom to top or top to bottom, they mean, The sower, Arepo, holds or works the wheels with care. Another translation is: He who works the plow sows the seed.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have found Sartor squares all over Europe. The earliest example is from the house of Publius Paquius Proculus at Pompeii. And many have been found in overtly Christian locations. The square is found engraved on the facade of the door in the 752 CE Abbey of St.Peter Ad Oratorium near Capestrano, Italy. It is copied in an 822 Carolingian Bible. And in the 1100s, it was inscribed on the masonry of the Church of St. Laurent near Ardeche, France and in the Keep of the Castle of Loches, France. Locations like these had scholars believing that it was a kind of secret symbol for the Christian community, as its letters can be arranged to spell out Pater Noster. But scholars today believe the square comes from earlier in history and was assumed into Christian praxis. There is nothing distinctively Christian in the anagram itself after all. People have arranged its letters to form many other things, including prayers to Satan and formulas for exorcism.

Ἀβαδδών, ὀ The name of the ruling angel in hell. The relevant material is from Revelation 9.11 "ἔχουσιν ἐπ’ αὐτῶν βασιλέα τὸν ἄγγελον τῆς ἀβύσσου· ὄνομα αὐτῷ Ἑβραϊστὶ Ἀβαδδών καὶ ἐν τῇ Ἑλληνικῇ ὄνομα ἔχει Ἀπολλύων." Abbadon is from the Hebrew, as it says, and Apollyon, the Greek, a derivation, says BDAG, from Apollo, source of plagues. One question I have is about the reference to Psalm 87:11. This presents a mystery to me, as Psalm 87 only has seven verses. Now, the Douay-Rheims (1899) has nineteen verses. So, there must be some kind of text critical thing going on. Yet, Calvin and Matthew Henry only comment on seven, and even Google does not know.

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[1] Lots of stealing from Wikipedia going on in this paragraph.

Monday, March 13, 2023

A quick-and-dirty bibliography on Satan

"The Satan of popular imagination, God’s cosmic archenemy and the source of evil, has a long and complex history. Although scholars typically locate this history within the context of ancient Jewish and Christian imaginations, these origins are complicated by a number of factors. Among these are the various uses of the Hebrew noun satan to describe both earthly and cosmic figures and the multiple aliases referring to God’s cosmic opponent in Jewish and Christian literature, including Belial or Beliar, Mastema, Beelzebul, Lucifer, and the Devil, and others. The roots of the character Satan are typically discussed in relation to the Hebrew Bible, although the image of the cosmic opponent emerges most clearly within the writings of early Judaism, in the literature of the Second Temple period (c. 515 BCE–70 CE). Many scholars associate the emergence of this figure with ancient Near Eastern influence on early Judaism. Others highlight it as a response to the problem of evil; Satan and his retinue effectively distance God from acts difficult to reconcile with beliefs about God’s nature. Still others locate the emergence of Satan and satan figures within the context of social movements, arguing that the character of Satan serves as a tool for constructing communal identity and defining opposition.

"Satan, or the Devil or Beelzebul, as a cosmic opponent also plays an important role within the literature of the emerging Christian movement, especially the New Testament texts. In the Gospels the cosmic battle between God and Satan imagined in early Judaism is interpreted in relation to Jesus, whose defeat of Satan is evidenced through exorcism, healing, and resurrection. Although some interpreters contend that the depiction of Jesus as exorcist reflects the historical Jesus’ understanding of his ministry as the eschatological defeat of Satan, others maintain that Jesus’ conflict with Satan should be viewed in terms of his opposition to the Roman Empire. The question of whether or to what extent references to Satan and evil powers should be read as describing political, social, and other human forces permeates scholarship on Paul and Revelation as well.

"Scholarship on Satan appears in a variety of forms, including wide-ranging treatments of the character of Satan across literary and historical contexts; exegetical examinations of specific texts using the terms satan, Belial, and so on; and discussions of Satan in relation to demons, the problem of evil, serpent imagery, and other elements. Many of the latter are intertwined explicitly with theological concerns and questions." ~ from the Oxford Bibliography

Old Testament Biblical Theology

John Walton on Baker Book House blog: view of the accuser in Job.

John Walton on the “Exegetically Speaking” podcast discussing Isaiah 14 and the fall of Satan.

Michael Heiser. Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness. Lexham Press. 2020.

Archie T. Wright. Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers. Fortress Press. 2022.

  • Transcript of Heiser’s interview with Archie Wright
  • Audio podcast interview with "New Books in Biblical Studies" June 28, 2002 episode 91
  • Presentation on June 27, 2020, as part of a Virtual Conference on the NT in Archaeology and Ancient Judaism
  • Enoch Seminar video discussion/review on Dr. Wright's book. Feb 9, 2023.

Ryan E. Stokes. The Satan: How God's Executioner Became the Enemy. Eerdman's. 2019.

Dr. Miriam Brand on the origin of sin and evil in the Second Temple period

John Day writes on the Serpent in the Garden of Eden and Its Background for The Bible and Interpretation

Political Theology
Adam Kotsko. The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press. 2016.

Bibliographies
Satan” in Oxford Bibliographies

A scholar’s bibliography of the subject in the literature of the last few decades

Monday, January 09, 2023

Comment on AI and Theology

The entry "What CHATGPT Reveals about the Collapse of Political/Corporate Support for Humanities/Higher Education" on the blog CrookedTimber.org caught my eye. The changes every field is going through as algorithms become more and more capable is fascinating, and I was reading the various comments. Then I came across this one from Alex SL:
I am a scientist, but I do not to reject the humanities (or, as we would have said back in Germany, the social sciences) as empty nonsense. I believe they generate knowledge, and knowledge worth having.

However, there is clearly a bit of an issue in the way they are taught. I started getting that impression already in what would here be called high school, when it seemed that language teachers forced us to over-analyse novels and plays in a way that seemed rather implausible. But the real eye-opener was the big plagiarism scandal around German politicians in 2011, when it occurred to me that such a scandal would simply not be possible in the natural sciences full stop.

These were by training all historians, economists, political scientists, etc, whose dissertation process consisted entirely of reading thirty books and then writing the thirty-first on the exact same topic. They took the short-cut of copying and pasting some text from their sources and then cosmetically changing a few words, and that was plagiarism. But if they had rearranged sentences more thoroughly, they would have fairly obtained their degrees, and there would not have been any scandal; and, crucially, the amount of new knowledge generated would have been exactly the same, i.e., zilch, nada, zero.

In science, however, a graduate student would have been expected to generate new data. The problem to watch out for is not plagiarism, but manipulation of data to make them more “interesting”.

To me, that points to the solution. What chatGPT cannot do, what no mind will ever be able to do without going out into the lab or into the field and run its own surveys, digs, and experiments, is generate new insights that aren’t in its training set. Surely that is a thing that is still possible to achieve in economics, archaeology, social sciences, anthropology, linguistics, etc.? And if a field cannot have that hope, then one would really have to have a conversation about whether it is something worth teaching. (Whispering: “theology”.)