Luther and the Evangelicals made excellent use of propaganda. Two examples of this propaganda are woodcuts entitled Two Kinds of Sermons and Christ in the Sheep Shed. Propaganda is not meant in its common negative sense, but in the sense that the woodcuts were effective at communicating the Evangelical’s message. Woodcuts were meant to be hung in public places, such as a tavern. Woodcuts had two primary features, the image and accompanying text. These woodcuts were primarily directed towards illiterate peasants, most of whom would only base their judgment solely off of the image portion of the woodcut. The text below the image was based around one or more Bible verses and was meant to be read out loud to crowds. This only happened on certain occasions, however, most people would have seen it in passing and not during a reading.

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Last week I posted about going to a talk on the Gospel of Judas by Elaine Pagels. It was a fascinating talk on something that I have never read. I have recently started reading The Forbidden Gospels Blog by Dr. April DeConick of Rice University. She has a book that is coming out very soon that contests the meaning of the Gospel of Judas. It makes me want to read the book by Pagels/King and the book by DeConick.

The Forbidden Gospels Blog: The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says

“I didn’t find the sublime Judas, at least not in Coptic. What I found were a series of English translation choices made by the National Geographic team, choices that permitted a different Judas to emerge in the English translation than in the Coptic original. Judas was not only not sublime, he was far more demonic than any Judas I know in any other piece of early Christian literature, Gnostic or otherwise.”

DeConick contends that the Gospel of Judas is not about a “good” Judas, or even a “poor old” Judas. It is a gospel parody about a “demon” Judas written by a particular group of Gnostic Christians known as the Sethians who lived in the second century CE. The purpose of the text was to criticize “mainstream” or apostolic Christianity from the point of view of these Gnostic Christians, especially their doctrine of atonement, their Eucharistic practices, and their creedal faith which they claimed to have inherited from the twelve disciples.

For my American Religious Experience final project, I have the freedom to look outside American religion and to my thesis field, New Testament Studies. I am interested in building a picture of lived religion for early Christianities. I don’t know yet what branch I am going to target - most likely it will be urban Christians. As to what Christianity to look at, I want to go as early as possible, so there would be no established branch that can be distinguished from another.

I need to focus on practices (lived religion) and the common people, not beliefs nor elites. Interesting thing here is the creation of elites from the common people. I think that is what is happening, especially if you define elite as “one with authority or power.” I’ll also try to keep a close eye on the changing roles of women. I preliminary guess is that, like always, they were given newfound power and responsibility at first, and then as the movement crystallized, they were shut out of authority.

As of right now, I am using the following books for the basis of my research.

• Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Wilken
• Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance by Horsley
• Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts by Novak
• Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Corinthians

I plan on focusing on the religious background that the Christians developed out of and look for differences that made them stand out. I will assume for the sake of the paper that everything else was maintained. Even though I have no way of knowing if they dropped certain practices or not, I’ll assume for the preliminary examination that they do. Perhaps in a later project I can look for the differences, say perhaps in another thesis chapter?

Wonders of America is an interesting look at the development of Jewish culture in America through the eyes of religion. In the work, she examines three phases of American Judaism, the immigrants, their children, and the Post-War Jews. Joselit presents a social history of American Judaism that focuses on how rituals were transformed and imbued with contemporary meanings. The story is of a struggle of identify, a conflict between the pressures of community vs. democratization, ritual vs. consumerism, and tradition vs. American culture. The Jewish culture was in a constant dialectic with itself, the drifting interest of the populace was countered by the cultural custodians, resulting in an amalgamation of the two or more views. Interspaced within the narrative were illustrations that illuminated Jaselit’s examples, drawing the reader into the Jewish world more than they would have otherwise.

There were several problems with the book, most of them issues of clarification. Joselit was not careful enough in distinguishing between the various movements within American Judaism, most notably the Reformed and Orthodox movements. Each movement was mentioned in the examples she gives throughout the work, but there was not clarification as to whether or not some examples were a function of Judaism in general or a fun ction of specific ideologies within one of the movements. This could have been alleviated if the chapters were organized with sections dealing with each of the major movements or perhaps if there were clarifying statements that informed the reader about the differences between the movements. As it is, Joselit practically assumes that there was no real difference between Reformed and Orthodox movements as they related to American culture and that is perhaps a bit hasty of a generalization.

Along these same lines, more clarification between trends of the Jewish cultures and the larger American culture as a whole would have been extremely helpful. There was an excellent opportunity to make this work more relevant to the larger picture and to better situate the culture in connecting and differentiating trends in Jewish culture and American culture. How did the subsumption of consumerism in the home compare between Jewish culture and American culture at the time. If Joselit would have made these connections, a better picture of each would have arisen. Granted, this was a social history, so the focus was from the bottom – up, but widening the scope would have helped the work in several ways.

The last problem with The Wonders of America is methodological in nature. It is not clear what method Joselit used in her study. While sources are mentioned and quoted extensively, there are no footnotes and only referenced words are cited by page number and word phrasing in the “Notes” section at the end of the book. This makes double checking her claims a nightmare. For example, on page 182, she cites a study on eating habits of children within several cultures. However, the only references for that page are listed as “clients,” “‘You learned us,’” “Jews put great emphasis,” “the taking of food,” over-protective attitude,” and “preoccupation with food” all direct quotations. Roughly three times the work is needed to track down her citation in this method than if a simple footnoting system was used.

Despite these criticisms, the book remains an interesting account of how Jewish culture adapted to it new and changing situations once it reached the Americas in large numbers. In this regard, the work is valuable in identifying the dialectic with American culture and the self-contained dialectic that shaped American Judaism.

Harry S. Stout, professor of History, Religious, and American Studies at Yale University paints a dramatic picture of George Whitefield in the biography, The Divine Dramatist. It is Stout’s contention that Whitefield was a major catalyst, albeit a somewhat unintentional one, in the formation, or at least the development of several key American attitudes. This goes so far as to call the English Whitefield, one who was never really that interested in politics, an American patriot. While the above is a major thrust of Whitefield’s contribution to America, much of the work centers around Whitefield as a person. Stout shows the how the seeds sown in Whitefield’s youth, the sense of divine greatness in works for the Lord and a love and talent for dramatics, fueled and gave rise to his resounding success. Center to this is an analysis of how the social circumstances and the manipulation of those circumstances by Whitefield lead to his astounding success.

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“Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions”

– Aristotle, Metaphysics, II (III), I.

The problem of Evil is a difficult one. It is the single greatest theoretical problem facing the three monotheistic religions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Each agrees with the following premises: 1) God is all-powerful; 2) God is perfectly good; 3) Evil exists. It does not seem possible that all three can be true at the same time. One or more of the above statements must be false. It simply cannot be true that a Being that wishes there to be no evil (i.e. perfectly good) and has the ability to rid existence of evil (an aspect of being all-powerful) would allow evil to exist (as clearly is the case). This is the Problem of Evil in a nutshell.

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When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up–for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground– then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. (Gen 2.5-8)

I am unconvinced with the literal version of Genesis one and two. There are lots of issues here, none of which I want to explore here in depth, at least in the post. There is no way that the earth was created in six 24-hour periods about six or seven thousand years ago. The empirical evidence simply does not support that conclusion. The particulars do not make sense either. Where did the light come from in Gen 1:3? It was not from Sola, because Sola is formed several days later in Gen 1:14, nor was it from God, because it would have always been there. Then there is the minor issue of there being two creation stories back-to-back. In the first one, man is formed after the plants are brought forth; while in the second, man is crafted before the plants. In addition, in the Gen 2 creation story, the text says that the creation of the heavens and earth only took one day.

There have been many a word typed and shouted in trying to formulate a picture of science that admits a young earth and a consistency between the stories in Genesis one and two. However, I have not heard a version that can successfully do this. What is my larger worry here? That, by maintaining these views, the church is driving people away from the good news of Jesus Christ.

In light of this, the first two stories in Genesis, in the whole Bible are myths and not literal word-for-word accounts of what physically happened. What do I mean by myth? I am not typing of a made up story that are completely false. Instead, I refer to a story, not an historical account, one that is true on one or several levels, even though it is not a historical “video-camera” account of what happened.

Ok, if the two stories are logically inconsistent and, based on the empirical evidence that we have, also not consistent with the leading theories of the origin and development of the universe and earth; then what do we do with them?

As I have stated before, I favor the divine fiat theory. I came across five other views over at Open Source Theology. Here are the five other ways to view this problem: Open Source Theology:: Genesis 1 as “True Myth”.

1. Genesis 1 fits within a literary genre of creation myths, but only Genesis 1 gets the story right.
2. Genesis 1 is a myth that eventually proves to be verifiable as truth.
3. Genesis 1 is a myth whose truth is to be found in the moral and metaphysical lessons it teaches.
4. Genesis 1 is a myth written by God.
5. Genesis 1 is part of an all-encompassing myth created by God that includes not just the Biblical text but also the “real world.”

They discuss these alternatives and talk a lot about the notion of real myth and what that means. I would recommend checking the article out and I hope you either share how you view the creation stories here or over there. I think this issue is of tremendous value and needs to be reconciled with our larger world-views. I maintain that both the earth is as old as it seems and that God inspired a true writing of Genesis one and two. Now, how exactly that works out, I don’t know - but damn I want to know.

LINKS:

• Open Source Theology:: Genesis 1 as “True Myth”.
• Answers in Genesis
• Institute for Creation Research
• Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look

This is cross posted at Theology for the Masses.

Mark Noll’s work, America’s God, was primarily concerned with showing the unique interplay that occurred between American views of religion, political theory, and ideas of knowledge. He was primarily concerned with how the latter two ideas affected the first. The account is distinguished others in that Noll attempted to show 1) how unique and unexpected this development was, and 2) the role that the development of the commonsense theory of knowledge played. Noll focuses on the dominant trends in the above categories, specifically, Protestantism, republicanism, and a commonsense, or intuitional, theory of knowledge. None of these were uniquely American developments. Whether it was Protestantism from Europe, republicanism from France, or notions of commonsense from Scotland ; each was inherited. The combination of these factors resulted in the widespread adoption of Protestantism in America. The adoption of Protestantism reversed fortunes from their decline in influence in the mid to late 1700s to an adoption rate of 85% in 1860. Noll sees Jonathan Edwards as the premier shaper of American Theology. Everyone either utilized or had to respond to his work. The great north/south schism of Evangelicalism in early parts of the 1800’s aided the national rift over slavery and was a contributing factor in America’s decent into civil war. (more…)

Was Augustine’s transition from a libertarian to a determinist?

Abstract:

This post is taken from a paper submitted for my class on the life and works of Augustine. It posits a forum where three people are invited to give their interpretations of Augustine’s works. The papers are then followed up by a discussion on how or if Augustine’s thought developed throught his life.

Henry:

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This paper will seek to plot out the relationship between the will, the salvific process and predestination in Augustine’s letter to Simplician, “De Diversis Quaestionibus Ad Simplicianum :”(I am using the translation by John H. S. Burleigh, Regius that was published in Augustine: Earlier Writings, Volume VI of the Library of Christian Classics, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953. I have taken this translation from “Aggiornamento” on 10/5/2006. From here on out in the paper I will refer to this document as “Letter to Simplician.” )”: . ” The letter was a response to Simplician’s questions on the content of Romans 9.10-29. In Augustine’s exegesis, he wrestled with the question of why Esau was rejected and Jacob was accepted by God. There was a sense that Augustine is troubled by his conclusions; this was evident by his careful back and forth of objections and explanations. While a bit troublesome, it did lead to his final formulation of several important doctrines, or at least laid their foundations. His conclusion changed the way he and as a corollary, the Catholic Church and many of the Reformers, viewed salvation and free will. While his conclusions may have seemed in contrast to some of his earlier works:”(Augustine’s earlier work, On the Free Choice of the Will, suggests a libertarian view of free will that says that in order for there to be true love of God, there must be a choice to love or reject God. When this precept is taken to its conclusion, it excludes a pre-determining of human salvation.)”: , Augustine was committed to discovering the truth, even if it means admitting he was wrong:”(This is evidenced by the very existence of his work, Reconsiderations, where he goes through all of his previous works and makes corrections.)”:. This paper will show how Augustine came to modify his stance on libertarian free will and come to the conclusion that there was a consequence to Adam’s sin, namely that the will was unable to choose God. God selected some to have their wills amended so that they are free to choose him or not; of those enabled few, God had the foreknowledge of who will choose Him and who will not.
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