Race vs. Logos

I’m not interested in race. What’s more, if you yourself are interested in race, I’m probably not much interested in you. You might dream of a pure white America, you might be Ibram Kendi or a BLM fanatic. Either way, I’m not interested. Your discourse is shallow, ultimately lame, and of course your discourse is racist.

What interest me are truth and justice. And liberty. The Christian concepts of truth, justice, and liberty that formed in the West. I want to help keep them alive and develop them, wherever on the globe they appear. These interest me because they serve the Logos--that light best revealed in Christ. 

White people who see and follow that Light interest me as much as Africans or Asians who do. As much, and no more. After all, at present there are tens of millions of white people who revel in darkness, fighting against the Light with a stubbornness one can only call demonic. These tens of millions, what share do I have in their skin color?

If I have a share with anyone, I want it to be with those who recognize and serve the Kingdom announced by our Lord. Many who are Asian, Black, Latino serve this Kingdom, many much better than I have. 

The Kingdom has no room prepared for racism, whether from left or right. Race is a dead end, a trap, the tool of demagogues. As ideology it is destructive, as a lens through which to study humanity it is boring. 

The Logos, quite otherwise, is light and life, ever new. 

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

The Gospel Truth: Michael Pakaluk’s Hermeneutics of Faith

Michael Pakaluk is doing really extraordinary things with the gospels. I predict his translations (of Mark in 2019, and now of John) will only grow in stature over time. He gets right to the marrow, both at the level of English rendition and in terms of his brilliantly subtle approach to the place and uniqueness of each text.

This work is long overdue. After two centuries of scholars laboring under a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” Pakaluk does something like the opposite. He goes straight to what the very earliest records tell us of the gospels, then asks himself the question: “If the early testimonies about the writing of these texts are correct, what might we expect in terms of the kind of text we’d get?” In short, Pakaluk applies what we may call a hermeneutics of trust, or more properly, a hermeneutics of faith. In both Mark and John, this approach ends up bearing much fruit--multiple new insights, multiple questions previous translators never thought to ask.

For years I’ve been waiting for a scholar who took Mark’s widely remarked “roughness” seriously enough to try to render it in English. It matters because Mark’s was the first gospel, the text that established the model for what a gospel was to be. The reeling speed and breathlessness of Mark’s narrative are part of what make it so powerful as witness and account. This narrative speed makes sense given the ancient testimony of how the gospel came to be.

The Apostle Peter, leader of Rome’s Christian community, naturally recounted his experiences to the faithful there. Getting on in years, it was recognized that Peter's memories should be recorded in writing, and Mark was called to transcribe them. That the gospel we have shows all indications of being a spoken narrative, a fact Pakaluk demonstrates at multiple levels, stands as strong evidence it is in fact what it was said to be: Peter’s memoirs.

What we’ve lacked is an English translation that showed sufficient care in rendering just these more spoken aspects of the text. In Pakaluk’s translation, which he titles The Memoirs of St. Peter, we finally have just that. His English Mark is supremely effective as spoken narrative, and follows the tense shifts and quick perspectival shifts of the Greek. The translator lays out these uniquely Markan characteristics in his commentary, and convincingly makes the case that, indeed, they indicate the speech of a witness. In any case, no ancient writer was sufficiently cunning to fake so many natural characteristics of firsthand narrative. The most economical conclusion is likely the true one: this gospel is a transcription from speech, and it is a transcription of the speech of someone who was there when the events happened. Pakaluk's renderings, attentive to the shifts and immediacy of the original, strike like lightning.

With his second translation, Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John, Pakaluk again begins by carefully considering the situation of the gospel’s composition. He knows that both the text itself and the earliest testimony tell us that after his crucifixion Jesus’ mother Mary went to live with John. How then, the scholar wonders, would sharing a house over many years with the Lord’s mother, remembering and recounting His life in company with her, likely shape the evangelist's later portrayal of Jesus? It’s a brilliant thought experiment, and in his introduction and commentary, Pakaluk lays out the possibilities. These, in turn, go a long way toward explaining why the Gospel of John is so strikingly different from the synoptic gospels.

Pakaluk’s actual English translation of John, his word choice and phrasing, are explained in his notes via reference to the Greek. But what is really different here is how sharp and precise, and often poetic, the English is. One feels the pith of debate in these sentences (John tends to record Jesus in dialogue) and one feels it in chiseled, natural English. Why is this so rare in our translations?

Robert Alter wrote somewhere that the problem with the King James Version was that they didn't really know Hebrew, whereas the problem with modern Bible translations is that they don't really know English. The observation is apt.

Modern Bible translators tend to fall into one of two opposing vices. Some seek to render scriptural texts in an English as wooden and unproblematic as a high school textbook. They flatten out the power of the Spirit-inspired writers--whose verbal formulations are often intentionally problematic--even as they smuggle their own theological biases directly into the English phrasing. This latter of course “for clarity’s sake”. (Think of the NIV.)

The other, opposing vice is to believe that the Greek, by virtue of its inherent linguistic difference, conveys things that can’t be conveyed in English. And so, to get to the scriptural meaning, one must create a kind of “Hellenized English”. In this way we end up with translations that are neither really Greek nor English, written in an unwieldy, eccentric new language that often, again, only conveys the translator’s own interpretive claims. (Think David Bentley Hart.)

Pakaluk somehow manages to avoid both vices. Partly, I’m sure, it’s his training as a philosopher, partly it’s his strong literary grasp of English that keeps him on the straight and narrow. He’s done the hard work of finding a native English that grabs the reader even as it conveys what is there in the Greek.

Pakaluk’s Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John, just published this Lent, is a must read for anyone serious about the gospels. More, it's a blessing to have, besieged as we are by cant, ideology, and misguided attempts to make the gospels "accessible".

Eric Mader
Taipei

At Amazon:

Check Pakaluk's Mary’s Voice in the Gospel According to John

Check Pakaluk's The Memoirs of St. Peter

[Note that there is currently an offer
to buy both books together at discount.]

Some deadpan with your coffee? My Idiocy, Ltd. is now in print. Dryest humor in the west.

Missed Message

I dreamt that a young woman with blue hair and blonde eyes was talking to me. The hair was a limpid, bright blue. The blonde of the eyes had a texture like hair, with a slight grain in it, as if composed of tightly packed strands. Awake, I couldn’t remember what she was telling me.

My Substandard Friends

You have to be pretty wimpy to die from a scorpion bite. Ted. You have to be feeble to die from a fall down a short flight of wooden stairs. Andrew. You have to be flimsy stuff to die of hypothermia on an island technically in the tropics. Jared. You have to be lame to drown in a hotel swimming pool. Megan. You have to be a regular hothouse flower to succumb to injuries in a car accident that barely scratched the car. Helmut. You have to be a total loser to get rabies from your little niece’s hamster.

You know who you are.

* * *

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

So They Want to Destroy Churches Because of … SLAVERY?

To listen to our leftists, to hear the open calls to burn churches, to see them now burning Bibles in Portland, it’s clear they blame slavery, if not the whole history of racism, on Christianity. Which is a howler, really. If these people weren’t leftists, we might expect them to have historical evidence for this particular Christian guilt. Sure, they’ve seen Christians negatively portrayed in decades of Hollywood movies, but I’m talking about actual "evidence" here, not cheap postmodern prejudice.

Fact is, our leftists don’t feel they need actual historical evidence. They don’t know the history of slavery, any more than they know how the West overcame slavery. Their narrative is a lie, but they couldn’t care less.

Much that is now written on slavery is historically myopic in the extreme. Weaponized as a matter of course, such writing seeks from the get-go to demonize either the West, or Christians, or both. But like nearly everything that comes from our left, this anti-Christian narrative is a case of sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.

We must always remember: Slavery arose on every continent where agriculture arose. Slavery was in some respects, at least for agriculturally developed societies, a human universal. Humanity--white, brown, black, yellow--enslaved. Slavery was practiced on every major continent for millennia: Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas.

The claim that this or that group now owes “reparations” for slavery is absurd. Slavery was abolished many generations ago. The current demands for reparations are nothing but cynical politicking and race-baiting. Such demands, coupled with the left's anti-Christian narrative, are also deeply ironic.

The first major world civilization to articulate slavery's immorality was Western Christian civilization. As everyone who studies the history knows, if it weren't for Christian abolitionists in Europe, Russia and the Americas, slavery would likely still exist as a global norm.

Further: If it weren't for the "all are one in Christ Jesus” doctrine articulated by the Apostle Paul (in Galatians, one of the earliest New Testament writings) slavery would have remained uncontested in the West too.

It was the encounter with Christ, and the insight that encounter awoke, that allowed humanity to overcome slavery.

Yes, it took our Christian civilization a long time to put that insight into political practice, but again: it was only the West that had such an insight to begin with--namely, that there is a fundamental equality and dignity in all human beings, beyond sex, race, or class.

Attacking Christian culture, effacing or burning churches in revenge for humanity’s collective past practice of slavery, is inane. Again, whether these people know it or not, they’re sawing off the branch they sit on.

Why? If our fellow humans are not inherently precious because created in God’s image, then they are, to borrow a phrase, “just clumps of cells”. We saw this logic played out in the previous century. Every last human is a “clump of cells” expendable in the quest for Utopia. And Utopia will never arrive in history, because, as we Christians know, we are all flawed by sin. Any political order will allow greed, disorder, evil to find an outlet.

How did our lefties manage to miss the 20th century? Every single radical project to remake society ended in horrific suffering. But Utopia is what our left still dreams of. This is why they believe a modern society can survive without police. This is why they believe justice can begin with the burning of churches. It is infantile stuff.

No just society can ever be grounded in such thinking. I suspect most of our lefties secretly know this too, but don’t care. They’re not really interested in justice. They’re interested in revenge, in playing Che Guevara, in throwing dirt at all the Daddies.

Our left has serious, serious Daddy issues. They’re letting a private, extended-teenage rage drive them. It would be laughable if there weren’t so many of these spoiled, pissy kids now rampaging about.

And their leaders! Shame on the attention hound Shaun King; shame on the rabid anti-Western ideologues spouting their lies in our now usurped universities; shame on our illiterate SJWs who gulp down this Kool-Aid.

Sane Americans see your your agenda. You seek revenge for wrongs you yourselves never suffered. You use historical wrongs to raise yourself up, to vent your desire for destruction because "things are not right". What is right for you is whatever allows your ego to assert itself, to gain attention. You have allowed yourselves to fill with hate, as this is the easiest route to self-assertion and "action".

Sane Americans see through you. Many of us pray for your conversion, or that you will begin to see your rage for what it is. Still, sane Americans will not sit by and let you destroy a civilization just because you read 100 pages of Marxist dribble in college and are now using it to throw a hissy fit.

Here is the Apostle Paul, writing one of the texts in that now maligned Bible, writing almost two-thousand years ago on how we are actually united. Search history all you like, you will not find any earlier statement of fundamental human dignity.

In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26-8)

Paul's theological concept of our union in Christ was eventually universalized in the Christian West into what is now the global concept "human rights". For me, as a Christian, the concept remains theological. But for our left? Any notion of "human rights" our left asserts is, unknown to them, ultimately rooted in Christian thought. Thus our left's whole discourse on human rights, especially when it turns to Christianity as somehow the enemy, is deeply incoherent. When forms of slavery reappear, as they well might and as they in fact did under communist regimes in the 20th century, it will be because the concept "human rights" has been cut from its theological root.

It is the encounter with Christ that allowed us to see what unites us. It was this encounter that allowed us to overcome racism, slavery, systemic injustice. Against what unites us, what does our left have? They have hate, race-baiting, division. We must reject them.

Check out my Heretic Days. Writing from the margins of Christianity.

Voice and Noise

Sound affects me. Probably too much. The sound of a person’s voice may either attract or repulse. This has been true as long as I can remember.

It has happened many times, countless times, that what seemed an attractive woman simply opened her mouth … and whatever attraction she held was instantly snuffed. She needn’t even be speaking to me. If she’s with a friend in a cafe, at the next table, I will sometimes have to move seats.

It’s not just the texture or volume of the voice, but the manner of speech: the rhythm, diction, whatnot. All can be fetching or fatal. But mainly it’s the voice itself.

Men’s voices too, and children’s. There are men, if I had to work with them, it would be daily stress. Needless to say, working with a woman whose voice grated would be even worse. Because fact: Women talk more than men.

Among the children I teach there are some that have the loveliest voices. I don’t mean that high-pitched, innocent “child’s voice” either. Actually the opposite. A child’s voice that has timbre, a bit of resonance, is the most beautiful. My student with the fitting name Bella, now ten or so, is a delight to listen to. Her classmate Wesley too.

But also: Regardless of the person I’m with, music that annoys me can completely ruin a meal. The volume doesn’t have to be up. It just has to be trash, and audible.

And especially: Devices that speak, with their canned recorded voices, are anathema. Since they first appeared, I've seen them as a threat, a curse. Worse, there are more such devices every year. Regardless of what they say, whatever the importance of the warning, I want to smash them. And perhaps someday will.

I have never and will never talk with Siri. I’d rather not know the answer. I’d rather get lost.

Siri: that hydra-headed yet ever headless demon from Hell.

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CHAZZED, or: EEJITS IN SEATTLE

Just call us CHAZ
We got the razzle-dazz
And the Raz
Our soy burgers are tops
And there ain’t no cops

With minimum battle
We done took Seattle
Just to shake your rattle
The Mayor she on board
With our kinda horde

Borders they racist
But we got fresh faces
Guarding the perimeter
With the 9 millimeter

You can do your business free
But you gotta pay the fee
Cuz we for Anarchy
For a ten percent cut
We protect your Pizza Hut

We a one-party State
Where the People dictate
And our CHAZ will never die
Till they cut the food supply

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.