Blue Cord

The New York Times reports today that the primates of the Anglican church have given the Episcopal church eight months to ban all same-sex unions.

This is an interesting and unfortunate move for several reasons. For one thing, it changes the idea of what it means to be a member of the Anglican Communion. This is the first time that the primates have dictated to a province what it can and cannot do. When churches in Africa were dealing with the question of polygamous priests, other provinces let them work it out themselves. And in those areas where polygamy is still being practices (despite official claims to the contrary), those churches are being allowed to make the decision on how to proceed by themselves.

It is also telling that this decision focused on same-sex unions. Up until now, the argument has been that it was the consecration of an openly gay man as bishop that caused problems for the communion. After all, they said, a bishop is a bishop for the whole church, and other provinces have to interact with bishops from the US. They had a point about that. But now they are saying that they have the right to dictate our practice on same-sex unions. This is something they have been upset about, but it affects them only in the most minuscule way. It is something that is internal to the Episcopal church. We are not asking them to accept unions performed here, nor are we asking them to perform such unions. But they felt free to legislate on this anyway.

It seems that the Anglican Communion is becoming more of a top down organization, which is what some conservatives have been wanting, except, of course, when the top disagrees with them and tried to get them to change. Then the hierarchy is corrupt, they say. In their view, the Anglican Communion can legislate on internal matters to stop same-sex unions, but they won’t obey the communion when they say that bishops should stop crossing jurisdictions. When tho communion agrees with them, they go along with it, but when it disagrees with their approach, they feel free to ignore them. Of course, there are some liberals who do the same thing. These two are making it very difficult for those of us in the center.

I just came across a new browser called Flock, which bills itself as “the social web browser.” It runs on the Mozilla Gecko engine, so you get the same web standards compliant rendering as you do in Firefox.

What supposedly sets Flock apart is its ability to integrate with blogs. It can publish to most blogging services, including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and MySpace. (This post was blogged from Flock). Blogging is done in a pop-up window, although you can also set it to show the editor at the bottom of the browser (much like the Performancing extension in Firefox). There is integrated support for photo services such as Flickr, and it has a web clipboard that allows you to save text, images, and links for later inclusion in a blog. It has a number of other features of the social web, such as link sharing.

The browser is only at version 0.7 right now and it shows. Although this may someday be a great boon to blogging, right now it is more trouble than it is worth. The text editor requires you to insert a link between pieces of text. If you put the link at the place where you are currently typing, anything you type from that point forward is automatically part of the linked text. This can be fixed through the source editor, but it shouldn’t have to be. The pop-up window is always on top, which makes it hard to see the page below, which is a problem if you are blogging on something in that page.

A number of other problems also make switching to Flock questionable at this point. The bookmark toolbar appears only to accept individual links instead of folders. I like having all of my bookmarks available by group on the toolbar, but this can only be accessed from the Favorites menu. The integrated search feature also works in an odd way. Instead of selecting the engine and then typing your search string, you type the string and then select which engine you want to use from an automatic drop menu. This gets annoying if you are searching for a number of images in a row (for instance), as you have to select Google Image each time you type in new text. Also, because Flock is new, extensions are somewhat scarce, but since it is based on the Mozilla code, most Firefox extensions should be easy to adapt for Flock.

In short, this shows promise, but I am not ready to switch right now. Most of the blogging features are available in Firefox as extensions, and those that aren’t are often easier to do in Firefox without an extension. Some other bloggers out there might want to check this out, but I think I will stick with Firefox for now.

I am currently reading the section on priests in Blenkinsopp’s Sage, Priest, Prophet. Blenkinsopp begins by discussing the derision in which many scholars from the 19th and 20th centuries held the Priestly authors. He provides this wonderful quote from Wellhausen on P:

The Creator of heaven and earth becomes the manager of a petty scheme of salvation; the living God descends from his throne to make way for the law. The law thrusts itself in everywhere; it commands and blocks up access to heaven; it regulates and sets limits to the understanding of the divine working on earth. As far as it can, it takes the soul out of religion and spoils morality. It demands a service of God which, though revealed, may well with truth be called a self-chosen and unnatural one, the sense and use of which are apparent neither to the understanding nor the heart. The labour is done for the sake of the exercise; it does no one any good and rejoices neither God nor man. It has no inner aim after which it spontaneously strives and which it hopes to attain by itself, but only an outward one, namely, the reward attached to it, which might as well be attached to other and possibly even more curious conditions.¹

Blenkinsopp states that “Wellhausen’s indictment of the religion of the priests . . . was widely shared and has often been expressed, though rarely with his eloquent and mordant wit.”² Wellhausen, of course, was highly influenced by Hegel, who saw history proceeding through cycles in which great ideas came to light (e.g., the prophetic religion in Israel) but later atrophied (e.g., the priestly religion in Israel), only to be brought to life again by later thinkers (e.g., Jesus).

Fortunately, this impression of priestly religion has less of a hold on scholarship today, although it continues in some circles and certainly still obtains in popular understanding. I always consider it a success in intro classes when I am able to get the students to see the priestly religion as living and dynamic. It is, after all, the avenue of God’s grace in ancient Israel.

How different Wellhausen’s view is from that of the psalmist, who declared, “Oh, how I love your law!” (Psalm 119:97).

1. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1885; reprint, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 361. [back]
2. Joseph Blenkinsopp, Sage, Priest, Prophet, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 66. [back]

In the Episcopal church today, Exodus 34 was the OT reading. This is the story where Moses comes down from Mt. Sinai with his face doing . . . something. What the issue with his face is is unclear. Traditionally, it has been translated as his face shining, but it is far from clear that this is what is happening. The Hebrew verb is related to the noun for “horn,” which has led some people to read it as Moses’ face growing horns. This was how the Vulgate translated it. If you have ever seen Michelangelo’s Moses from the Church of St. Peter in Chains in Rome (pictured at right), you will notice that he has horns on his head. This is not an uncommon feature when Moses is depicted in art.

In the late 1980s, Marvin Pope had an article in Bible Review where he argued that Moses’ face had developed a leathery, blistered surface from exposure to the glory of God. This would be similar to the effects of prolonged exposure to the sun. This would better explain why the people are afraid of Moses: a shining face is not really frightening, while a horny, blistered face would be. When Moses returned to the tent to see God’s glory, he can remove the veil. His face is toughened, so he can withstand the sight of the glory.

The reading this morning led me to think of other occasions where people’s encounters with God leaves them disfigured in some way. The most obvious example of this is Jacob’s wrestling with God in Genesis 32. God injures Jacob’s hip, which leaves Jacob with a permanent limp. In the NT, Zechariah is struck mute in his encounter with God, while Paul is temporarily blinded. And of course Jesus, who had the ultimate encounter with God, ends up being crucified.

We are very used to focusing on the healing power of God. I think we might do well to rediscover the idea that an encounter with God can leave us disfigured. While many of us long for a vision of God, we should keep in mind that most people in the OT who met God were scared to death and assumed that they were going to die.

Over the past few years, one of the ways that conservative talk show hosts have been attacking the idea of global warming is by claiming that it is a religion.  I was reminded of this on Thursday listening to the Howie Carr show, but I have heard other hosts do it as well.

I don’t want to get into an argument over global warming.  What I have a problem with, however, is these hosts saying that global warming is a religion.  The reason this seems problematic to me is that the view they seem to have of religion is that it is a set of beliefs that someone holds despite all of the evidence to the contrary.  These host all think that there is no evidence for global warming, so when they claim people believe it as a religion, they are implying that holding a religious belief is irrational.

I am surprised that conservative talk show hosts would take this approach, and I am even more surprised that their conservative listeners would let them get away with it.  After all the conventional wisdom is that conservatives are more religious than liberals.  This means that when conservative talk show hosts refer to global warming as a religion, they are in fact insulting the majority of their listeners, who are religious.

This is not limited to secular broadcasters either.  I have heard Christian political talk show hosts make the same claim about evolution, i.e., that it is an irrational system not supported by evidence which people nonetheless believe.  They even call it a religion.  Why would a Christian host define religion in such a way?