Been very slow around here lately. I’ve got ultimate three or four times a week now, and I’m being overly social this week. So spring cleaning hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t finished reading Bauckham’s book either. Buckle down!
We all know the mantra “Knowledge is Power”. I was sitting in a “Raw Data on the Web” session at Barcamp in Boston yesterday and it hit me pretty hard. That saying is from a very different time. Knowledge was only available through intense privilege and study. You needed the books to get the knowledge. The books were in universities. They were expensive, heavy, and there were lots of them. You needed someone, librarians and professors, to guide you through the landscape – to find knowledge.
The talk was all about the principle of actually giving some data back to the world. Not just available through searchable databases, or APIs. Often, databases require sign-ups and are hard to search (based on bad or incomplete indexing whether in depth or width). APIs, on the other hand, give other machines the ability to use data, as well as humans the ability to use the data more creativity.
Today, data is the same as knowledge. But data is less and less frequently in expensive and heavy books (unfortunately for theology, that is still true). Data is very much out in the world, statistics, law, archives, all available digitally. The new mantra will be “Data is Power”. As always, universities have been giving away that power. So long as study and research was done by academics in universities, knowledge and data were free to flow – that was the crux of the scientific system. Now there are new power brokers. Corporations. Corporations are never going to give away data. Because they know they are giving away power. Corporations play the game as if it is zero sum, if someone wins, someone else loses. They play not to lose, instead of playing to win.
To build (in principle) proactively, and (computing) to spread the load around so you don’t rely just on servers to do your work for you, you have to give data away. Give other services your raw data, so your servers don’t buckle under the API load. And this was the most impressive move, give the end clients the data to visualize however they please. Our laptops and computers are not thin-clients anymore. They are very, very thick. We are so used to understanding the server-client model as 90% server, 10% client. Intense libraries are pushing it more and more towards the client. But, imagine giving a huge data set to a client, pure raw data. And then have the client do the actual work of aggregating/graphing/visualizing that data – taking the load off your server.
If “Data is Power”, and if data (eventually) becomes accessible to all, and for all, then who are the power brokers? The people who know how to guide you through all the data. The more and more I read about all these fields, economics, theology, computing, and business I realize that the literature is so vast, the approaches so varied, that you need a guide.
The reason all these people are making a living through blogging is because they are giving data away. They realize data is power. They want to empower people. They get paid by being the guide.
This is a re-post of an article I wrote Sept 8, 2008
The Gospel story is so significant because it has real power. When Paul writes in Rom 1.18 that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation he is right on. A story, about what God is going to do, about Jesus and what he did, and about you is God’s power. Why? Because that Story has the ability to change reality here and now. More and more I am realizing that God’s salvation is less and less about the future date in which Jesus will separate goats and sheep. Why is that true? Because the goats and sheep are already manifesting themselves today. We should already know, by our actions, which side we are on. God’s salvation is not an ethereal concept! Go and tell the Jews who walked across dry land fleeing the Egyptians that God’s salvation is a feeling in your heart. They would laugh at you. Tell David who God saved from Saul an seated as the King of Israel about this ethereal salvation. No salvation is to be found today. Today is the day of salvation. We find it when God enters our life and changes us, all the way around, from the power of sin to the power of life.
Lot’s of stories have the ability to change reality here and now. Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech was just a story. But for the tens of thousands of people who heard it that day on the DC mall were struck by it. Most of those people knew they were listening to history. Most of those people took that story and made it their own. That story changed them and the way they looked at the world. This is why Story is powerful. His speech went to war against the prevailing ideas of the time, and won. God’s Gospel is even more powerful because God is behind. In that Story, God is actually going to war.
Why does this happen? Because when what Jesus did on the cross is received by a person, it changes how they think about the world, about God, and even about themselves. When God’s plan for the world is understood by a person, they understand not to abuse the world, that God has not left it, or them, behind – but in fact is working, even now, in them and through them, to redeem it all. And that is valuable to how you are going to see the world, and what you’re going to do in the world. You are then left with the decision to “convert” which really means, to live accordingly with God’s unfolding story. That is surely what the early Christians did. They didn’t stop being Jews and change religions. They were still Jews, they just continued on with what Jesus was doing – since God was clearly working with Jesus. They kept Jesus’ story going.
And when you choose to live according to God’s story you live a certain way. You don’t abuse the world, or others. You end up looking like Jesus. Everything that the Gospel has told you about how God sees the world impacts how you see others and the issues in your day. This is how God’s Story, the Gospel, undermines our worldview. This is how the Church is supposed to look different from the world. Because the Church will have the same worldview, because they have all converted according to the same Story. They don’t buy in to the world’s carnivorous ambition, abusive tendencies, or wasteful ways. They find their joy in what God is doing, what God is redeeming, not what the world is destroying. And they get involved in God’s redeeming work in the world.
This is a re-post of an older article I wrote Sep 1, 2008
I’ve been struggling a bit to figure out exactly how to express this idea about Story. I use a capital ‘S’ to denote the concept of Story, not a particular story or stories. Interrelated to this idea of Story is Symbol. Symbols are attached with a huge meaning, a story. For example 
This piece of art has become a symbol of an entire time period, artistic and cultural shift in the modern western world. If an image is worth a thousand words, a symbol’s worth cannot be counted in words. Another example is the Crucifix. It stands for Jesus’ death, passion, atoning work, and suffering, in addition to his resurrection, ascenscion, an identity for all Christian peoples of all time and worldwide. I could clearly go on. The Crucifx embodies a very specific and solid story, whereas Warhol’s Campbells soup cans is a little more fluid, but still evokes a meaning, especially to those in the art or cultural studies. So why is story important? Because story is a fundamental building block to how we ‘know’ things.
This “theory of knowing” is called epistemology. We’ve interacted with it here on the blog before when talking about the New Atheist movement. Since we live in a largely scientific culture, the preference for “proof of knowing” is empirical. And for a good many things that is entirely appropriate. However, when dealing with people, it largely falls short of being useful. A simple example that is usually trotted out: How do you know your wife loves you? You can’t empirically prove that. Just because she helps out and seems to care for you doesn’t mean there isn’t an ulterior motive (not to get sidetracked). There seems to be a good deal of evidence for our fundamental “knowing” to be related to Story. After all, information has been handed down orally in the form of Story for thousands of years before it was ever even written down, let alone bound in a book, classified into genres, had a table of contents, indexed, a bibliographical outline, or now, searchable. Our language is built to tell stories, because we were making stories and relating in stories before we had our languages.
NT Wright in The New Testament and the People of God offers an amazing defense of these ideas (roughly 150 pages on Story and epistemology), and I think it is useful that we understand them, not only for our reading of Scripture, but even for living. As you’re about to see, you already do this to a degree, and you might not even know it. Wright begins to tell a story about hearing a loud noise while driving his car. The loud noise could legitimately come from several things. It could be a blown out tire, a gun shot, or an explosion. Sure, we could empirically analyze the sound waves as they pass and test that against known noises in these categories – but how long would that actually take? Do we really do that in our lives? No, we have a story, and we stick to it. If the cars handling starts to go – you’re going to think you have a flat. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see the tires, you are responding to a story. Chances are you have a flat, not that someone shot a gun, and your car, for some other unknown reason lost its ability to stay on the road at the same time. Yet, sometimes when we read the Scriptures we act just like that. But, if you were driving through a nice neighborhood, you wouldn’t think it was a gunshot. Even though there is still a likely chance that many people in that neighborhood might own a gun, for sport, or protection. You’re reacting to a story that you believe. It couldn’t possibly be a gunshot, that house I just drove past is worth half a million dollars. But, if your car is fine, and you see a fire truck come blaring down the street – what is the story you are going to tell yourself about the loud noise? Maybe a gas or oil tank exploded nearby. We’re just putting together our experiences with the data we already believe. And yes, believe, not know. Even those who claim to be the ultimate cynics and not believe anything. They are acting on their beliefs, not what they might or might not know. They are reacting to a story that they inherently believe and tell themselves. The new experience (data) might uphold or contradict the Story that they tell themselves.
But we all do this with Story. There are certain events in our lives that create a story for us. And those stories are incredibly powerful – so much so they modify our behavior and decision making years and decades after they happen to us. Imagine a woman who is raped while she is young. That is a powerful and traumatic action that can create a very negative Story around the woman. She can ultimately have strange and erratic behavior that her friends or family cannot understand. All because the rape creates a new Story that re-evaluates her self-worth and sexuality. When I was a child, my father told me a story about his days as a young adult doing drugs. This created a powerful story to me, and he didn’t have to go into great details. I saw the powerful man my father was reacting in ways I’d never seen, or imagined he could, remembering and telling me these stories. I knew, based on what it did to him, that drugs was something I was not interested in. He created a Story around drugs based on his experience that profoundly affected me. I’ve never tried drugs in my entire life. Not because I’m a policeman about it, or not had the opportunity. I was genuinely never interested in it because of Story.
Think about the hardest things you have ever done in your life. Did it create a new meaning, change you down to the core? Where you learned something surprisingly new about yourself or the world that made you a different person? These are the moments that create Story for you. And it is also why they say doing hard things, or hard work, creates character. Character, in the folklore, is just having a robust story in which to understand the world. And, in a way, “religion”, is just that: a Story in which to understand the world. Though “religion” in this case cannot be nicely dissected and separated from every other aspect of our lives, that is only a modern fiction. Science, politics, and religion/philosophy all form a composite picture in which to understand the world. Some try to squeeze others out of the picture completely, but it rarely works in situations with a robust meaning in each position.
Again, why is this idea of Story important? Because the Gospel is a Story. But that is for part two.
I’m working on the research/planning part of a provocative paper for the Dallas One God Conference. I’m sure I’ll get very strange reactions. In the meantime, I just added one of the essays I had to write for the MTS Harvard application. Unforrunately I did not get in. But I still think it is good and worth putting up here
Reading any literary piece is both a science and an art. It requires discipline, as well as creativity. Many of the principles here are applicable to any literature. That goes for holy texts as well. Here we’re looking at the Christian Scriptures. You could easily use this for other religious texts (though for ahistorical works like Buddhism the historical method is far less important). When reading a contemporary novel you won’t recognize that you’re doing these methods – but you really are. On a side note these methods are also exactly why fantasy (Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings) and sci-fi (Battlestar Galactica) is such a ready medium for displaying moral and ethical dilemmas and dramas that challenge us in our life. In short, the method is threefold; history, worldview, and exegesis.
When reading texts about ancient religions in history we need an appropriate historical method. We have to recognize what we are reading was not written with our expectations in mind (When talking about fantasy and sci-fi, as above, our expectations are in mind). We have to start with history. We have to understand (as best we can) the social, cultural, political and religious climates we are dealing with. We do this by reading both insider, and outsider information: that is material written by people about themselves, and material written by others about the people we are studying. Both sides are incredibly valuable, especially when you consider the worldviews of both peoples (presuming they are different, and we’re not talking about a purely sectarian thing). History involves the study of both individuals and people groups. It involves the study of their motivations and goals. This is not to say we are talking about psychology at all. It is a plain thing for a person to reveal their goal and motivation by their actions. Not to mention we have to apply that at the level of a whole (or part of a) cultural people. What is Israels’ motivation? What is Rome’s? To what end? All this requires both disciples, to be understandable in their worldview, and creativity, to be imaginative enough when our authors don’t write out all the steps taken for us. To presume that the writers’ purpose was to lay out, for us, all their logic and steps like a math problem is just that, a presumption. We need to eliminate these common expectations of ours.
There is famous CS Lewis quote (you might have seen it on Vineyard church advertisements:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
This is the epitome of a definition for ‘worldview’. Worldview is assumed. It is the very context of how you look at the world. You look at the world “through” worldview. Worldview is affected by so many different things – even generations within the same country. To imagine that any biblical character has the same worldview as you is, to be kind, absurd. In the many ways I am like my Father, I don’t even have the same worldview as him, and he raised me. There are four elements that make up worldview:
These questions are further broken down:
The answers to these questions are informed, debated, and reformed by the previous praxis, symbols, and stories. Those are the raw materials of answering these questions. What we witness in the New Testament is the ‘debate’. We see Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all using their natural resources; the symbols of the present day, (e.g. a coin with Caesar on it), the biblical stories they have known and reflected on (e.g. the Exodus and entering into rest from Hebrews, Jesus as Moses in the gospels), and their own praxis (e.g. the Last Supper as a Passover meal, transformed with new meaning) to answer these worldview questions. And the answers, based on their life experience with Jesus, and the resurrected Jesus, and the community are very different than any other Jewish sect.
There are so many other peculiarities of worldview, and other specific questions related to the stories and history of Israel that have cropped up in Jewish writings. This is why the Dead Sea Scrolls were such an important find. It gave us so much more information about how the Jewish people of the Second Temple period used their stories, symbols, and practice, to come up with different – but all Jewish – ways to answer these questions.
When reading any literature we have to realize what genre we are reading. Within the Christian cannon there are several genres; mythological narrative, historical narrative, poetry and song, prophetic narrative, and apocalyptic narrative. The entire Bible is not historical narrative, and we cannot do justice to its writers and inspirer to read it all the same way. Furthermore, the questions that are being answered by the writers are the questions based on the worldview. Since your worldview is different – your questions will not be directly found in the text. The Scriptures do not directly address the immediate questions of 21st century Western people. It could not possible do so directly. The more and more we submit ourselves to the Christian worldview the New Testament puts forth (that is, to put down our cross of our own worldview) the more and more we will see answers to the right questions, as we make those questions our own.
To use these three elements appropriately is the goal of study. To not lean on any one, at the loss of another is hard to do. A comprehensive reading of the text in question needs to maximize for these things:
If you can’t fit all the data into your approach and method, then a mistake has been made. If all the data fits, but there is no possible way my conclusions could have been reached by the historical figures (data beyond their knowledge, or language beyond their knowlege) in the way I’ve outlined, then a mistake has been made. If the results of the method do not shed light on any other unilluminated areas, then something has been missed. The best way to accomplish this goal is by starting large and vague.
Take the period of Second Temple Judaism up until Christianity. Examine their worldview and writings. Examine their various answers to the questions. Mark out fixed, but sufficiently vague, points. Take the history in the same manner. Mark out fixed, but sufficiently vague points about kings, client-rulers, their misdeeds, wars, and revolutions. Mark areas before and after the time period you’re studying. Don’t mark your time period! Put down verifiable data that must be started from, and must be met on the end. A good example that must be explained by any Christian origins study is this remarkable statement made:
Eighty and six years have I now served Christ, and he has never done me the least wrong: How then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior? Polycarp 186AD at his martyrdom
Whatever your reconstruction of Jesus and early Christianity, you must explain this fixed point with it, loyalty to Jesus over Caesar in the face of death, and specifically in that manner – King and Savior. That is just one point, there are many others.
Arguments that fail to show any knowledge of the above are lacking when we begin to talk about anything historical or theological in relation to the Scriptures. There is plenty of freedom in devotional writing. But when it comes to theology and history there are certain bars that must be met. Failure to meet them means the idea is dismissed. That is just how the study works. I hope that we can continue to strive to meet the rigors of the study.
It seems in my haste to try and redo the calendar ajax business that so many have tried to do before, I missed what my real purpose is. What I really want is to not forget. All our lives are so busy. I can remember most of what I need to get done, even though I never know what day it is. But then there is that really annoying thing that I never remember, and I wake up from a bad dream in cold sweat wondering – did I do that thing that no one reminds me to do this month? Is my car payment late (since they give you a payment book, instead of sending bills each month)? Did I just double book myself for a weekend a month or two out? When do I need to fill-out that paperwork for school (I hate paperwork)?
I don’t remember!
So maybe what I called YourCal, is really ForgetMeNot. You don’t put your meetings on it, you don’t put your gym schedule on it. You only put what you always forget to remember on it. That has a market. Maybe it will continue to have a calendar, but with less emphasis on it. But it must, as with everything else on the internet, be inter-operable with other services, both push and pull.
With this approach, I can even imagine how a ForgetMeNot for groups would or could work.
Days of wonder spent
Out there killing time
Now this may not leave a mark on me
But I sure as hell was there
Jacob Dylan, The Wallflowers
I was listening to this song Days of Wonder yesterday on the ride back to Boston. I absolutely love this song, and it seems it is written as a sort of traveling/wanderer’s tale. So I would understand that he wouldn’t want to leave a mark on nature. A true appreciation wants to leave it observed but undisturbed, so that others may observe and enjoy it as well. But I can’t believe for a second that he means to say it will not affect him. That is the whole aesthetic and joy of the traveler/wanderer, that nature and his travels mark him, making him different, something that the rest of the world lacks.
I can’t imagine traveling, or even wandering for that matter, and not being touched. Deeply. There was certainly a time in my life which that would be entirely true. I was stone, a stoic, untouchable. But I cannot, anymore, imagine a life in which I am untouched, and what I do is unable to touch everything else. That is what the human life is all about, no?
I really have seven hundred places I could start, but this is closest to the main point I want to talk about:
This true meaning has remained hidden because the Church has trivialised it and the world has rubbished it. The Church has turned Jesus’s Resurrection into a “happy ending” after the dark and messy story of Good Friday, often scaling it down so that “resurrection” becomes a fancy way of saying “He went to Heaven”. Easter then means: “There really is life after death”…
Now, suddenly, the real meaning of Easter comes into view, as well as the real reason why it has been trivialised and sidelined. Easter is about a new creation that has already begun. God is remaking His world, challenging all the other powers that think that is their job. The rich, wise order of creation and its glorious, abundant beauty are reaffirmed on the other side of the thing that always threatens justice and beauty – death. Christianity’s critics have always sneered that nothing has changed. But everything has. The world is a different place.
NT Wright in Times Online
I will be the first to admit that resurrection scares the be-Jesus out of me. I do not, for one second, admit to understand what all the implications are. But I am left with certain facts. Jesus was raised bodily, not to live as he formerly lived, but to live a much more real, full, whole, holy, glorified existence. The existence Paul says we “we will be like him”. He was raised in the middle of history, far before anyone expected the resurrection to happen. After all – the only category anyone in the first century had was that “this must be the end – we just witnessed resurrection”. So, don’t be surprised when that is exactly the attitude they hold about their time.
Resurrection “meant” (in the secondary sense – its implications if you will – beyond the referent that “someone who was dead, coming to bodily life”) that God’s new creation has started. Reading any of the OT passages about resurrection, either the concrete referent of raising to life, or the metaphor about a return from exile (ala Ez 37), and you will find something about a new creation. Those are the facts that I am forced to deal with in my Christian life, and the same ones that the Church at large is forced to deal with.
That very new creation theology, I’ve found is terribly lacking in the greater Church today. The power of resurrection has been sucked out of the word. Not least because the majority of people who are practicing, preaching, and teaching Christianity are now the powerful. They are now the status-quo, the empire. And Jesus challenges the status-quo. If you don’t think resurrection, the new-creation, is a massive challenge:
… is to miss the point, to cut the nerve of the social, cultural and political critique. Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it. The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters, that embodied human beings matter. That is why resurrection has always had an inescapable political meaning; that is why the Saducees in the first century, and the Enlightenment in our own day, have opposed it so strongly. No tyrant is threatened by Jesus going to heaven, leaving his body in a tomb. No governments face the authentic Christian challenge when the church’s social preaching tries to base itself on Jesus’ teaching, detached from the central and energizing fact of his resurrection (or when, for that matter, the resurrection is affirmed simply as an example of a supernatural ‘happy ending’ which guarantees post-mortem bliss).
Saying ‘Jesus has been raised from the dead’ proved to be self-involving in that it gained its meaning within this counter-imperial worldview. The Sadducees were right to regard the doctrine of resurrection, and especially, its announcement in relation to Jesus, as political dynamite.
NT Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, pg 730-1
If you think you’ve got resurrection down pat, think again.
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