Angry Rant

I have a serious problem with people tearing the Bible apart for term papers.

I have a problem with the prerequisite of scholasticism being a complete disregard for intuition, mystery, and the movement of the Spirit.

I have a serious problem with redaction criticism, because it's worth maybe 15% of our time and demands 90.

I have a problem with myself and my peers for sitting in classrooms three days a week thinking we're doing Christianity when we can't name one person living in poverty in our city.

If Jesus were sitting in the circle with us, he'd probably discuss the meaning of the scriptures, sure. He was a Rabbi. But he knew plenty of people who did that all day long, and he had a name for them. Hypocrites.

It seems very presumptuous of us to make claims like "Proverbs perpetuates an evil system of economic inequality," and get standing ovations from each other. And an A. I don't know, that's probably true about Proverbs, in one sense or another. And what we've "discovered" about lots of other books is probably true too, but who f-ing cares if we sit around and discuss it in air conditioned rooms for three years? If we tear apart our own Bible we're giving the world a reason to dismiss us, and if we don't tear it apart we invite them to hate us. I don't know what to do about that, but I'm thinking actually getting out of the classroom and acting more like Jesus is step one.

And yeah, professors, I'm talking to you too. You can lecture on social justice till the cows come home, but I'm sorry, do you have any poor friends?

End angry rant.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Wednesday Refrain

It's Wednesday today, the smack-dab-middle of the week; I didn't sleep again last night. Before the sun was up, my spirit was already bent beneath the weight of the day, like the trees under this new snowfall. A silent bearing, a stark remaining. My work is hard. I'm three years in, but there were three years before that, and four before that. Maybe it's not the duration so much as the intensity, the all-of-me that it requires, the vigilance and the attunement and the background-app-refresh of working with complex ideas day in and day out. Being a theologian means pondering the unknowable yet not turning away, almost as if what can't be known urgently must be known.  And indeed, it must. Or maybe the hard part is not the work itself, but coming to realize that who I am and what I produce is always going to be at the fringes of my profession. It's a reckoning with loneliness, I suppose. To look around and realize the brightest minds in bioethics are always going...
Read more

Finished

Well, you know I'm busy when I forget to blog. On top of being busy, though, I've been thinking about so much lately that it's hard to write about it. I'm kind of ADD about everything. God keeps finding something new to show me every couple hours, before I've digested the last hundred. As I wrote about in my last post, one of the major ways the Lord has been communicating to me lately is through beauty. I would tell you to please go walk to Belmont and stand under the red trees and look up into them and see God, but the truth is that you might not see Him at all. You might just see red leaves. And I would tell you to please get on Spotify and listen to Ronnie Freeman's "Perfect Love" album and hear God. But you might only hear some really cool worship music. I don't know. God has been playing in my life lately with the idea of completion. At the end of my shifts at work, I always grab a case or two of water bottles from the back and set them out fo...
Read more

Least of These

It's 3:30am in Nashville currently, but the Russia Team is in Moscow, where the local time is 12:30pm. I know they are insanely tired and ready to be here, so I've been thinking about them and praying for them a lot today. And updating everyone about which flight they are on, where they are, or how tired they must be :) I haven't done much the past few days, but instead of feeling rested I feel drained. I think it's because I've done too little. I'm not used to being so inactive, but the people here (especially the women) sit at home a ton. Talking, eating, drinking tea, sitting...It's been great for my language progression and relationships, but horrible for my energy level and health. Another reason I'm dragging is because I need the refreshment of talking to someone in full sentences who understands me. Too much is trapped inside my head and heart. And it's no small thing for me, an introvert, to say that :) Tonight I get to Skype with Mom (crossi...
Read more