Why Parents Should Volunteer At School

Last month I signed up to serve as a parent chaperone on my daughter's class trip to the nearby Discovery Center. I figured I might be the only dad to sign up; it turns out I was the only parent from her class. This means that I was put in charge of four kindergarteners. "In charge" means "try to keep up and make sure none falls from too great a height." 

The class had a "lecture" (I use the term in its elementary sense) on bubbles. Part of the experiential learning that followed included bubble ink. "Have you ever blown bubbles with a straw in your chocolate milk?" was the intro. The idea was to froth up a bowl full of colored water, then press paper on top and make a print. But really, when kindergarteners get license to do what their parents have been telling them for three years not to do at Denny's, they just want to . . . blow bubbles. Lots of them. Until the bowl overflows in a Kilauea of multicolored surface tension. Until this parent, who unwittingly volunteered to "oversee" this activity, found himself spending most of the time sopping rainbow rivulets of water off the table.

The payoff for all that sopping was watching as my wee merry band discovered the Pirate Ship and treasure chest filled with Pirate dress-up costumes. When they had decked themselves out and set their hands to the rigging, I made a serendipitous discovery: A bunch of kindergarteners will focus and stand still for a moment if I ask them to yell, "Aaargh, me hearties!" Instant attention and coordination!

I try not to take many pictures of my children. But when, without prompting, they strike poses on a pirate ship, I cannot resist.

Color, sound, energy: joy!

~ emrys

Plane Old Work

I'm working on a surprise woodworking project. Thanks to my brother Chris, I have beautiful hardwood boards, but they need to be planed to specific thicknesses. This requires a planer.

I am blessed to have a friend who is very generous with her wood shop, and that shop includes a commercial-grade planer. However, the planer is a 1985 model, bought in 1988. Unintended consequences of the generous lending of the planer are much amateur use (like my own) and not a lot of maintenance. Sara and I used this planer to make the strips for our butcher-block counter top five years ago, and found that the blades had dulled in the middle, causing a crown effect on the planed boards. My current project has little tolerance for such irregularities. Upshot: I needed to sharpen the blades.

Thanks again to Chris (who has more experience with shop tools than I), I got schooled in how to remove and replace planer blades. I handed them over to a local guy who sharpens blades (thanks, Larry!), and brought them back for replacement. However, since I want high-quality work out of this planer, I wanted to make sure the blade adjustments were also high-quality. 

How to make sure the knives were set properly? Although the manual had been saved, the knife-setting key had been lost. This tool is used to make sure that the blades stick out just far enough from the cutterhead to cut wood without breaking the blades. Could I get a replacement key?

After some googling and phone calls, I discovered that the company that made this planer was bought out by another, which was then bought out by a third firm. After a chain of transferred phone calls, I got to Steve, who knew exactly how my model of planer worked and how to repair it. Steve told me both that there was no way to get a new key and that newer knife-setting jigs were available. My knowledge of power tools just keeps expanding--of necessity. Thank God for old-school tech support with a lot of experience!

Thus I found myself in the market for magnetic knife-setting jigs:

After a week for delivery and 10 minutes of tutorial on youtube, I set the knives in the cutterhead. So far so good.

Due to the amateur beating this planer took over the last 27 years, other parts of the planer were also out of whack. So, following the instructions in the manual, I manufactured a gage block, found set screws, and stumbled my way around the underbelly of this Rockwell steel beast. The last piece of the puzzle was finding a feeler gage. Thanks to a friend with a full set of automotive tools, I was ready to evaluate gaps of 0.040". After that it was a matter of following directions.

After about 10 hours of labor to make calls, hunt down tools, learn the machine, and make adjustments, the planer performs like gangbusters. See the auspicious spray of fresh shavings from my test runs:

I'll probably only need an hour of work from the planer for my surprise project. But I find it quite satisfying to know that this old beast is back to tip-top performance, and I've learned quite a bit about another niche of woodworking.

Thanks to Bobby and Mike for their continued generosity with the shop!

~ emrys

The Word of Adonai . . . Thanks be to Elohim!

I have an ongoing project to map out the contours of Christian understandings of inspiration of Scripture. The latest cartographic work I consulted was Karin Hedner Zetterholm's Jewish Interpretation of the Bible: Ancient and Contemporary (Fortress Press, 2012). Since Christianity emerged from the womb of Judaism, I thought it wise to survey the field of how our spiritual ancestors viewed the Scriptures.

Zetterholm provides the perfect intro to Jewish biblical interpretation for someone like me. I knew that Jewish religious life centers around interpretation of and obedience to Torah; and I knew that these interpretations in the historical moment of Jesus of Nazareth formed the crucible from which Christianity poured forth. But right about there my knowledge ended.

Zetterholm's book opened up before me both the wide diversity and the common pith of Jewish scriptural interpretation. Along the way, I received helpful insight into the difference between present-day denominations of Judaism (such as Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform). Zetterholm also elucidated in accessible terms the ever-present quandary of Jewish religious life: with so many rabbis interpreting Torah--and disagreeing with one another from the get-go--how does one know whom to follow?

I appreciated the book's ability to handle the wider, more abstract issues at play and then pair them with specific illustrations. The salt of rabbinic examples flavors the text so that I could see the methods of interpretation at work. Zetterholm defines her terms well, and does not assume too much about the scholarly background of the reader. Occasionally I had to check back on the definition of a term--which I positively expect from books of this kind--but not so often that I felt hobbled. And of course the footnotes and bibliography, if I wished to know more, could keep me engaged for a lifetime.

Perhaps most pertinent to my own quest (and therefore most immediately satisfying to read) was Zetterholm's description of how different groups within Judaism have handled Torah as what "the Lord spoke to Moses and said." Rabbinic tradition, which began to coalesce in the same period as Jesus of Nazareth lived, also had to answer whether the voices of the rabbis were inspired by God, and if so, to what degree. (Christians have a parallel, though I think it is rarely named. They must decide which pastor, preacher, or theologian to follow when grappling with difficult texts. Shall I cleave to Calvin? Wesley? Joseph Prince? Joel Osteen? Even those of us who beg for a primitive application of the bible end up following someone else's lead.)

Zetterholm also interprets, in rabbinic terms, the teachings of Jesus and Paul of Tarsus. While skirting the quagmire of theology, the book recognizes that Jesus and Paul both handled Torah in ways that fit within rabbinic traditions. This treatment reminded me, once again, that the means of their interpretation may provide helpful clues to the nature of the faith we see presented in the New Testament. In other words, not only the conclusions of Jesus and Paul but also their interpretive means may be instructive to the Church that reads them.

I don't think that I began Zetterholm's book anticipating a solution to Christianity's dilemmas regarding Scripture. But I certainly didn't receive it. I did receive some comfort in misery, I suppose: In many senses, Jews and Christians sail in the same boat when it comes to the ground of their hermeneutics. On the other hand, I feel challenged: if we, as Christians, believe that Something unique and cosmos-changing happened in Jesus Christ, then does that Something alter how we view written, historical revelation? Ought we to be, in our interpretation of the Scriptures, just another Jewish sect who happens to have a different mechanism of atonement? Or are we set apart somehow, even in this, from Judaism and every other religion?

The quest continues . . .

~ emrys

Small Group Resource: Forge Guide on Mission

Our adult Sunday School class just finished this season's class, using a little small-group resource entitled Mission: Living For the Purposes of God, by Scott Nelson (InterVarsity Press, 2013). It is one of a series of five small-group guides (the others are Community, Power, Vision, and Culture, under the series head Forge Guides for Missional Conversation).

I love the thrust of this little guide, which pushes readers and participants toward discovering how they are called to move into the world for the gospel. It encourages looking outward at what the world needs, what the world is suffering, and how we can articulate a Christian response to that need and suffering. It focuses meditation on a single scripture passage (in the case of this guide, 2 Corinthians 5:11-6:1), making that text the inspiration for six weeks of discussions.

At least it's written for six weeks. The guide assumes that a group will have 90 minutes (at least) during a session, and will be able to move swiftly through questions and readings. Our group usually has about 45 minutes, because of how our Sunday morning routine is timed (or not timed). And because of our personalities and familiarity, we don't work through books like this very quickly. So we took a few months to make it through four sessions in the book.

We all felt challenged by the topic, and certainly informed and better equipped by the conversation that rose out of the book. But a couple of things have led us to choose another resource for our class in the fall. First, our group prefers working out of the bible in a more verse-by-verse fashion. The sparseness of scriptural reading and repetition of similar questions in this guide did not suit the character of our group well. Second, the open-ended, abstract questions did not generate as much discussion as I expected when I (rather excitedly) first discovered these guides. For instance, one challenge from the book is "imagine what it would look like for your whole group to be all three vocations: the community, messenger, and servant of the kingdom of God" (p53). When we encountered questions like this, it took us more time to work through the meaning of the question than to answer it once we (sort of) agreed on what the question was asking. That work might be fruitful, but not on the level intended, I think, by the guide.

Perhaps for a small group bristling with creative energies, who has already decided that it wants to spend extra time and energy on personal mission, this book might be more suited. For us, we will turn to a walk-through guide to the book of Acts published by Zondervan, when we get back together in September.

~ emrys

Abortion and the Apostolate

In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes that in the sequence of those who met the risen Christ, he was one "untimely born" (1Cor15:8). In his monograph from Gorgias Press, Abortion and the Apostolate (2014), Matthew Mitchell tackles this mysterious metaphor. His helpful analysis of the Greek term ektroma (abortion, exposure, unwanted child) and compelling discussion of the text reveals that Paul probably refers here to his unwanted status as an apostle. Mitchell makes a solid case for viewing Paul's calling and ministry as an unwelcome addition to The Twelve Jerusalem apostles.

Mitchell's discussion of the pertinent Corinthian and Galatians texts and their historical context occupies only 63 pages of his 220-page monograph. Most of the remainder deals with a second-level analysis of the work of Pauline scholar F. C. Baur and the academic reception of his work to the present day. Precisely on this issue my interest in Mitchell's work suffers a steep decline. As an exegete, preacher, and pastor, I may have different goals than Mitchell's intended audience ("Pauline specialists, the broader community of biblical scholars, and classicists and ancient historians of the ancient Mediterranean," p. x). Whereas Mitchell's work on the biblical text will certainly inform my handling of it, his lengthy navigation of academic perspectives helped me little. In fact, given the title of his text (and the rear cover, which led me to purchase the book), Mitchell's engagement with scholarly complexities seems more of a digression from what might be more helpful work: instead of what could have been a unified monograph, Mitchell has produced a schizophrenic duograph.

Symptomatic of this split intention are his words on page 211, when the book is nearing its finish: to "begin to explore the connection between the pre-Damascus Paul's zeal and the post-Damascus Paul's mission brings the issue of his attitude toward the Law too much into play if one is interested in discussing his conversion." After pointing, several times over the course of his book, to the tangled knot of Paul's conversion as a crucial problem, Mitchell's dodging of the issue seems strange to me. His bravado and conviction in addressing an even more tangled knot--that of scholars' continued enmeshment with F. C. Baur's work--reveal that Mitchell ought not to fear complex matters. Why dodge the most fascinating issue in current Pauline studies?

As someone who does not frequently read scholarly monographs, I admit the possibility that this category of work has implicit rules or purposes to which I have not been initiated. (As a speculation, perhaps a novel approach not only to the biblical text but also to scholarly history is required of Mitchell's kind of work.) Or, in a turn of ivory tower allegory, I wonder of Mitchell is trying to draw a parallel between Paul as the rejected (but ultimately essential) apostle and Baur as the rejected (but ultimately indispensable) Pauline scholar. This parabolic interpretation of the monograph would certainly fit its tone.

With respect to the pragmatic needs of this reader, however, 160 more pages of work on the relationship between Paul's conversion, his view of the Law, and his rejection as an apostle would have been exciting and helpful. The more I read Paul, and try to use his words to inform our present-day faith, the more I see these issues coming to the fore. To assert, for instance, that Paul's Damascus Road experience allows him to dodge the requirements of an apostle named in Acts 1 is to allow post-resurrection mystical experience to change the direction of the Church. And the fact that Paul's new definition of apostleship is enshrined in scripture adds urgency to the matter. May the risen Christ personally enlist new apostles in every generation, whose calling will redefine long-standing traditions of law and grace? How does Paul's experience and theology, authoritative as it is for so much of the Church, lead us to answer?

These matters unfold from Mitchell's work. I hope that as he begins to publish works for wider audiences we may find him plumbing not only the murky depths of scholarship but also the mysterious depths of scriptural interpretation.

~ emrys

Grudge Match

The cover has the look of a pre-Modern Tyson v. Holyfield poster: the profile of John Calvin, 16th-century Reformer, nose-to-nose with John Wesley's, his younger Anglican counterpart. Calvin vs Wesley: Bringing Belief in Line with Practice (Abingdon Press, 2013), is Professor Don Thorsen's cutting compare-and-contrast between the fathers of Calvinist and Wesleyan streams.

For someone wrestling with the big historico-theological questions, the book provides a solid review of the various themes operating in the thought of Calvin and Wesley. It covers sovereignty, scripture, predestination, grace, salvation, spirituality, the church, and ministry from the perspective of each theologian. Alternating between each Reformer, the book reveals a deep well of research into these writings which have had such an impact on the history of Christian thought. Thorsen's work encourages the reader to reflect with gravity on how one's theology impacts one's Christian practice, and vice versa. No matter the setting, or the heavyweights brought as champions, this reflection always bears good fruit.

I opened this book expecting a neutral theological assessment, but received instead an endorsement of Wesley over Calvin. Once I perceived this bias, the rhythm of the book made more sense. Thorsen's ostensible goal is to help Christians avoid Socrates' "unexamined life," which goal I cherish as well. However, in its concluding remarks the book's attempt at a balanced tone tips openly in the direction hinted at in every chapter: "If you want to become more intentional about conceptualizing your Christian beliefs in ways that fortify--rather than weaken--biblical teachings and your Christian living, then I strongly encourage you to learn about, reflect upon, and then follow Wesley's theology and ministry" (p126). I can only imagine the Genevan Reformer's response to a 21st-century professor suggesting that Calvin's writings "weakened" biblical teachings and Christian living!

An area left unexamined by the book is how the historical circumstances of these two greats may have shaped their systematic (or, in Wesley's case, semi-systematic) theologies. It may have been necessary, for reasons of space, to deal only with their writings, but human authors do not compose in a vacuum of objectivity. I found myself wondering, often, whether a Calvin writing in 17th-century England would have written more like Wesley; or whether a Wesley would have been possible in 16th-century Geneva. Entertaining this question opens the door to the possibility that our theologies--no matter how rigorously derived from the Bible--are conditioned by our circumstances. If this is the case, then I wonder how useful it is to pit one historical figure against another.

In many places, Calvin vs Wesley reveals clearly the similarities between Calvin's and Wesley's thinking. The strength of these similarities suggests to me--who has read some of Calvin but none of Wesley--that much of the contrast between the two is nit-picking in support of a Wesleyan bias. I hold this suspicion lightly; Thorsen's work is thought-provoking, challenging to me as a practitioner of Christian theology, and I am happy to leave a complete assessment to another scholar more familiar with both fathers of Protestantism.

With Thorsen's driving aim for his readers I whole-heartedly agree: Our theology ought to line up with our practice. If we believe in Jesus Christ, we ought to live as if we believe in him; and airtight theological rationalism will not stand in for sincerity of ethics. For helping me to examine this connection in my own life, I am thankful for this book.

And thanks to Ben Shaw, colleague and fellow student of the scriptures, who brought this book to our group of rabbis for study and discussion. I am enriched.

~ emrys

You, Too, Fans

I just finished a massive tome of interviews and photos entitled U2 By U2 (2006). I enjoyed getting such an in-depth chronological look at the growth of U2's music and career as a band. For those will only a passing interest in the Fab Four (who, ultimately, cannot do what they do without a host of others), or for those who are only interested in the music, this book will provide way too much.

But for those of us who like drinking from the fire hose, it's perfect. In the midst of vast amounts of autobiographical data about the band's struggles and relationships, there are little gems of humor, like Edge's assertion that it's never a good idea to let Bono play lead guitar. The book reveals how four awkward Dublin teenagers could become super rock stars and, at the same time, remain four awkward boys trying to figure out how to play together.

When the house was asleep and I couldn't, this book gave me an entree to the dream land of impossible arcs of musicianship, fame, and living poetry. Well worth the read to me, and might well be for you, too.

~ emrys

Dancing with the New Testament

As part of last week's Study Leave I took up Stephen Neill and Tom Wright's The Interpretation of the New Testament: 1861-1986 (Oxford UP: 1988). This thorough review of scholarly work surveys the big names of New Testament criticism, exegesis, and theology from a century which still undergirds so much current thinking. I read with joy and wonder the ability of Neill and Wright to summarize, honor, and criticize--the latter always with the humble reserve of OxBridge scholarly culture--such a vast landscape of literature. I appreciate their honest recognition that the work of New Testament studies brings the persistently human in contact with the persistently divine, so that in spite of the excellent quality of the labors of the Ivory Tower a certain incompleteness always remains. But I am enriched from having received Neill and Wright's engagement, often very personal, with these labors.

At the end of the book--which, we must remember, is a survey rather than a thesis in itself--Wright draws our attention back to the very source of Enlightenment criticism, from which all the scholarship surveyed here grew. The insistence of the Protestant Reformation on the "literal sense of scripture" gave birth to all the critical tools of evaluating the text we have in the Bible. The use of these tools leads us, however, to a realization the Wright describes and which resonates with my own experience: "we find that this literal sense points us beyond itself" (p445).

Throughout the book, Neill and Wright drop hints that historical criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, and the rest of the members of the critical family have not (at least as of 1986) gotten to the matter of Jesus' resurrection, the Easter moment. Questions of "the historical Jesus," raised by all Three Quests (maybe there's a Fourth Quest by now), have only skirted this primary historical criterion of faith. Even the review of E.P. Sanders' novel idea that Paul had a "participationist eschatology" (p427) does not bring up the strange event of Paul's conversion, which hinges on a Resurrected Jesus encountering Paul personally.

I find the academic work described so masterfully in this book profound and greatly helpful in my own vision of what it means to be an interpreter of the New Testament for today. But it seems that this work keeps its distance from the experience to which the New Testament itself testifies: a Resurrected One who speaks with the voice of God to persons in every generation. Perhaps this is a necessary limit of the scholarly task. Perhaps Wright humbly recognizes the proper bounds of this task, when at the very conclusion he seeks to describe New Testament interpretation in the metaphor of music with its melodies and harmonies. Criticism bounded, as it must be by reason, may not be able to grasp the essence of the New Testament, any more than one can grasp why a shift from a major to a minor chord changes the mood of a melody. One may simply require experience and participation to understand. (This is not to cast doubt on whether Neill and Wright have such an experience, but only to recognize that experience may not be welcome in the scholars' colloquy.)

One thing remains, on which this book and I agree: We must continue to grapple with the New Testament, to wrestle with it, to dance with it, to sing its melodies and improvise its harmonies. After all, it is the story of Jesus Christ, and by faith in him it is also our story. I thank God for such a chorus of thinkers who continue to offer us their meditations, that we may be built up and equipped for our good works.

~ emrys

Living Color

Yesterday, April 26th, more than 5,000 people gathered at our local community college-cum-SUNY satellite campus for a fun run called "Color Run." The 5K "race" includes getting sprayed down at half-mile intervals with brightly colored corn starch. By the end of the 3.1 miles, participants have been doused in orange, pink, yellow, green, and blue dye. (The dye works its way out of skin in about a week, and out of blonde hair in a month or so--I'm told.) I call it a "race" because the throngs are so thick that runners can't manage more than a jog, and walkers are really just sauntering. A better way to describe it is a fast parade of people who have finally found an excuse to wear their loudest, most brightly colored ensembles and get messy. Here's a shot back at the first mile:

Sara, Gwendolyn, and Kerri did the Color Run together. Gwendolyn had trained for this over the last few weeks; finishing a three-mile walk on her own feet was an accomplishment. Here is the triumphant trio coming out of the last splash of color (but before the penultimate glitter station):

~ emrys

The Right Questions

I have for some time struggled with the contours of what we Christians call the "inspiration" of the bible--"inspiration" being a term pulled from 2 Timothy 3:16. Though I have been unable for a long time to put words to my quandary, I generally sensed a disconnect between the plain text of the bible and descriptions of the bible, common in the circles I run in, which use words like "inerrant" and "infallible" to describe our sacred texts.

I have found in the writing of James Barr (Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism, Westminster Press, 1983), work which formulates with precision the questions I have done only roughly myself. And, of course, being a Regius Professor at Oxford, Barr has gone much further. In this book he describes in clear and readable detail some of the necessary boundaries and possible horizons of our understanding of scripture.

The book presents a series of lectures, which makes the content at once more accessible and, I think, less deep than I ultimately wish to go. One of the regrettable features of the book is, in spite of its title, that it spends a good deal of time on criticism, a good deal more on canon (especially in critiquing the school of "canonical criticism"), and not nearly enough time on authority. Though I appreciate the precise attention to the landscape of canon and criticism, my present goal is to find a proper understanding of authority.

The authority of the bible is of singular importance to Christians, of course. But as soon as we declare that it has some authority over our lives, questions abound. Particularly poignant to me is how the New Testament, so interested in relating an experience and stunningly uninterested in establishing a new written law, can be seen as an authority for the Church. How can one affirm the authority of a text without somehow diminishing or setting aside the authority of the One to whom it points?

A good beginning. On to the next read.

~ emrys