Committed Critic

This is the transcript of a sermon I preached April 27 at Brookline Church of Christ in Brookline, MA. The text (which I read aloud before the sermon) is Acts 17:16-34.

OUR SOCIETY

Paul’s sermon in Athens is unique in Acts because of how far Paul goes to relate to his Greek audience. Paul is famous for saying (in 1 Cor 9:22) that he became all things to all people in order to save some, and today’s reading is the perfect example of that: Paul would ordinarily quote the OT, but here he’s in Athens, so he quotes a Greek writer instead, to try to tap into a tradition they would listen to. Paul needs to find a place for the God of Israel that’s somehow above the Greek pantheon (of Zeus, Hera, and Athena), so he turns to one of their own altars, which is inscribed, “to an unknown god.”

The word there for unknown is “agnostic,” which I think makes it very easy to connect the story with our society. Americans, on the whole, aren’t particularly atheists or polytheists—so most of us have something in us that insists there is a God, but we don’t tend to buy into stories about different Gods with different personalities. Instead, Americans are likely to sort of half-heartedly buy into the idea of an agnostic God that’s basically like the god the Athenians built the altar for.

I think even a lot of folks who attend church are basically agnostic, which is to say they aren’t particularly confident that God is any one way rather than some other way. My sense is, it’s pretty common for American Christians to stay in the tradition they were raised in, even if they stop believing that the Bible’s description of God is particularly more accurate or more true than any other religion. In others words, if you’re an agnostic who isn’t really sure who God is, but you still want to worship God, then whatever religion is comfortable is probably as good as any other. This actually makes a lot of sense: if you’re convinced that no one religion has a particular monopoly on divine revelation, then it’s not as if you could just keep looking until you found the right one. So you either stay where you are, or else you find a church where you feel comfortable, and you go with it.

PAUL IN ATHENS

But, turning back to Paul, we find that he’s not content to leave the agnostic god unknown. So he says to the Athenians: “What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

Paul gave his sermon in front of a group of philosophers in Athens—some of them were probably careful thinkers, and some of them were probably sloppy, but the important thing is that they wanted to think about who God is. So a big part of what I want to deal with today is the relationship between what we think about God, and what the Bible and the Christian tradition proclaim about God. Paul is going to use people’s ideas about God, and he’s going to say they have some truth, but he’s also going to say that human ideas about God aren’t enough if we don’t also have the proclamation—something that God reveals to us. So even though I can’t prove Christianity, I can say with confidence that Paul is claiming here that God can be known, that agnostic faith is insufficient—for us and for God. My goal here is to get at what that means for us.

If we look at Paul’s short sermon, about half of what he says about God is the things we can’t know, which leaves God still looking pretty agnostic: God doesn’t live in earthly temples, God is not like hand-made idols, and the nations are left groping in the dark trying to find him.

Most of the things that Paul does say about God are very general: God made the earth, made humanity, and appointed the times and places of the course of the nations. So we might say that God is (1) the beginning of all things, and (2) the sustainer of all things—which, interestingly, are two points that the philosophers in the crowd, the Stoics and Epicureans, would have fought over. These are also two points that lots of people in our world disagree about: Did God create the world, or did it come about by chance? Does God work in the world, or are our lives left up to chance? A lot of times, this breaks down to the argument between evangelical Christians and secular humanists, although I’d guess that most everyone has some opinion on the subject. This is a debate now, and it was a debate then, and Paul probably found a lot of allies in the crowd he was preaching to — at least as long as he stayed with the usual philosophical debates that the people in Athens were accustomed to.

But then Paul gets more specific and introduces the God of Israel. This is something the people of Athens weren’t so used to, and it came with a big catch: God wasn’t just an idea to be argued about, but Paul said that God was doing something new in their own time, and making a demand on the people who heard the sermon. God was calling everyone to repent, because soon the world would be judged by Christ. And Paul goes on: we have evidence, he says, that Christ is the one who will judge: because God raised him from the dead.

The Greeks tended to believe that the human soul was immortal, but they were happy to leave the body behind after death. So the Jewish idea of bodily resurrection from the dead — of dead corpses actually climbing up out of their graves — was not plausible or appealing. This may be why Paul says in 1 Corinthians that the cross is foolishness to the Greeks, and it’s certainly why Acts 17:32 says that some of Paul’s audience in Athens scoffed at his sermon. For most of them, the idea of God raising Christ from the dead was ridiculous — not just because of some skepticism about miracles, but because the resurrection didn’t really make sense to them.

What I’m getting at is that there’s a big difference between talking in generalities about the kind of God that philosophers discuss, and talking specifically about the God who reveals himself. There is a big difference between describing how God tends to act, and describing something specific that God has done. And above all, there’s a big difference between describing the kinds of ethical demands that are consistent with a good God, and proclaiming the call for repentance that God is issuing to the world right now.

I want to start with a fairly general point Paul is making here in Acts 17, and then build on it from some of Paul’s letters and the rest of the New Testament. Paul doesn’t say much about Christ here — and in fact he doesn’t even mention him by name — but Jesus is still there at the climax of the message.

So looking at the sermon, Paul claims that he’s going to tell the Athenians who the unknown God is, and it seems to me that he makes three basic points, what we might call the beginning, the middle, and the end: God created the world, God directs the times and places of the nations, and God has appointed Christ to judge the world on the last day. So God is the beginning of all things, and God is the sustainer of all things, but Christ is the end of all things.

NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY

This is where I want break away from Acts for awhile, and consider what it means for Christ to stand at the climax of Paul’s sermon. As a modern person trying to figure out who God is, this is what jumps out at me from the sermon: If Jews from Israel and at least some Greeks from Athens can agree that God created the world, and that God cares for creation, then Christ is the unique and surprising part of the sermon. The outline of the sermon matches Paul’s outline of history: the beginning, the middle, and the end, describe the three parts of God’s work in the world: creation, providence, and judgment. The beginning and the middle of the sermon are points that Paul could expect to find some of the philosophers in the crowd to generally agree with him about, but the mention of Christ at the end is the place where the sermon takes its own turn.

I want to expand a little bit here on who Christ is and what he teaches us, which means I’m going to spread out from our text in Acts, to Paul’s letters and the rest of the NT. One of the most important points of theology, in the NT, is that the God who was unknown to the people of Athens, makes himself known in Jesus Christ.

Some places this is very simple and explicit, like in John, when Jesus says, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” But it goes beyond that. Jesus’ ministry began and ended with the God of Israel, the things God had done for them, and the promises God had made to them.

Part of my goal here is to contrast the God of Israel with the God of the philosophers. But I also have to admit that the Jews who wrote the OT were thinkers too, even if they weren’t exactly philosophers like the Greeks. Depending on how you read it, the OT can look a lot like a book of ideas, written by people who were trying to figure out who God is, a lot like the Greeks were.

Yet at the end of the day, the prophets also have a lot of oracles which simply claim, “Thus says the Lord,” and that kind of revelation is something that goes beyond philosophical arguments. Then we come to the NT, which insists that those oracles and promises are ultimately fulfilled in Christ. That means that if we want to know the unknown God, we have to look at what God has revealed, in both the OT and the NT. The OT tells us how God revealed himself to Israel, and it also tells us the promises God gave to Israel—which are also promises for us. In the NT, we are told how Christ reveals the Father to us more fully, and also how he fulfills the promises God has already given to Israel.

I think the key to NT theology is something that Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:20: “In Christ, every one of God’s promises is a ‘yes’” (NRSV). Paul doesn’t explain exactly what that means, but it becomes pretty clear when we start looking at the NT, and how it explains who Jesus was and what he did. As it turns out, you can pick virtually any major motif or figure from the OT, and there will be a passage somewhere in the NT that explains how it finds its fulfillment in Jesus. And just as before, this is true for beginning, middle, and end, past, present, and future. So looking at the OT, Jesus reenacts the major ways that God delivered Israel in the past, he fills every office of leader that the OT describes for the present, and he fulfills God’s promises to deliver Israel in the future.

In fact, you can basically walk through the OT looking for major themes, and each one of them has a matching NT passage that tells how Christ fulfills it:

• God creates the world? Paul tells us in Colossians that it was through Jesus that all things in heaven and on earth were created.
• Adam’s transgression brings death into the world? Paul tells us that Jesus became the New Adam, overcoming death for us.
• Abraham receives God promise to bless the world through his seed? Paul tells us that his seed was Christ, the blessing to the gentiles.
• God the Divine Warrior battles Pharaoh for the children of Israel? Revelation tells us that Christ will become the divine warrior, when he returns to bring vengeance on the wicked.
• For the first passover, the children of Israel sacrifice a lamb to protect their homes from the angel of death? Paul tells us that Christ is our Passover lamb, who has been sacrificed.
• Moses is sent by God to bring Israel out of Egypt and give them the law on Mount Sinai? In Matthew, Christ is the new Moses, who leads his people out of slavery, stands on the side of a mountain, and delivers a new law.
• In the wilderness, Israel endures 40 years of testing? The Gospels tell us that Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, where he overcame the tests that Satan put before him.
• God sent Manna, the bread of heaven, to feed Israel in the wilderness? In John, Jesus tells us that he is the bread that comes down from heaven to feed God’s people.
• Moses lifts up a bronze serpent in the wilderness to save the people from snakebites? In John, Jesus is the one who is lifted up to give salvation.
• In the tabernacle, the High Priest of Israel makes atonement for the people in the Holy of Holies? Hebrews says that Jesus is our High Priest, who makes atonement with his own blood.
• David served as the anointed king of Israel, whose descendant would be the Messiah who would deliver Israel from its enemies? Jesus is that Messiah, who delivers Israel from their sins.
• Proverbs describes Wisdom as the first creation of God, through which he created the world? John tells us that Christ is the divine word of wisdom, who was already there with God, and through whom the world was created.
• Elijah the great signs prophet uses God’s power to heal and do miracles? Jesus becomes that kind of prophet, also healing and doing miracles.
• Isaiah and the other great preaching prophets proclaim God’s demand for social justice in Israel? Jesus defends the widows, befriends the tax collectors, and preaches the good news to the poor.
• The Suffering servant in Isaiah will take the sins of the people upon himself? 1 Peter tells us how Jesus becomes the suffering servant and submits himself to the crucifixion.
• Jeremiah and Ezekiel describe a new covenant, where God will empower his people through the Holy Spirit? Jesus seals the new covenant with his own blood, and then sends the Spirit as a guide.
• Daniel describes how one like a Son of Man will rise up to rule the nations and bring justice to the earth? Jesus is that Son of Man, who will rule and judge the nations on the last day.
• And finally, the resurrection is described in Daniel, when the righteous people who die will be raised on the last day? Jesus is the Resurrection and the life, the firstfruits from among the dead.

We see a pretty obvious pattern start to show up: like Paul said, the promises of God are “yes” in Christ. These claims are not the arguments of philosophers, even though a lot of thought obviously went in to all these NT passages. These passages are more specific than the generalities that philosophers deal with, and this promise of salvation is more than a person could figure out just by looking at the world.

CONCLUSIONS

So as a theology student, I’m torn: the grad student in me feels most comfortable talking about the philosopher’s God — which I think includes a lot of truth about God, and in fact Paul preaches in Athens that their philosophers have things partly right. The philosopher’s God is very appealing to worship, because he makes sense, and he’s attractive to outsiders when we try to give a defense for the hope we have, like our 1 Peter reading says.

But Paul refuses to stop with the philosopher’s God — it’s too general. For Paul, and throughout the NT, you don’t really know God until you see him as revealed in Jesus Christ. Our groping in the darkness can show us that God created the world, and that he works for the good of humanity, but we must turn to the Old Testament to see how God has actually acted to save his people in the past, and how God has promised to save his people in the future. This kind of salvation is not designed to be inferred by philosophers; instead, it rests on God’s faithfulness to specific promises.

Christ, according to the New Testament, reenacts the saving deeds of God from the past, he takes on the role of the Savior sent from God in the present, and his resurrection gives us assurance of God’s ultimate salvation in the future. As much as we can use philosophy and academic language to describe Jesus—and in fact, that’s my job as a grad student—what’s really important about him is not the ideas about him, but the fact of his life and the reality of what he did, and the hope he offers for what he will do.

Resurrection, for Paul, is not an idea, but an historical event—both when Jesus was raised, and when we will be raised. Repentance is not just an ethical scheme based on theological arguments; instead, it’s a direct warning from God that the world will end at an appointed time, and that we will be judged by Jesus.

So then, the Gospel of Christ is not designed just to be something we find interesting, or something we may wish to hear more about at some point in the future. The people in Athens who say this, that they want to hear more, but not right now, are missing the point if they think that Paul’s ideas are merely something new and interesting that they can think about. At least the ones who scoff show that they’ve understood Paul’s message, and they know they want to reject it. For the rest of us, we might not be convinced at the first hearing, but that shouldn’t lull us into being content in our agnosticism. Hearing the Gospel is meant to push us toward responding.

We can doubt whether the Gospel is true or not — whether or not God really did raise Jesus Christ from the dead — but the NT does everything it can to confute anyone who would claim that the time for repentance simply hasn’t come yet. If there’s one thing we are meant to learn from the New Testament, and all those examples that I listed earlier, it’s that salvation is now, present in Christ. This is why the NT tells us that Jesus is the embodiment of virtually every kind of salvation you can find in the OT and in the Jewish tradition: Salvation belongs to the Lord, and it is revealed in Christ. If you were waiting for salvation — any kind of salvation — there’s nothing else that you’ve been waiting for.

There’s a Rich Mullins song that says, “To say the time is short, just means the time is now.” The Christian claim is that all salvation is present in Jesus Christ, and the implication is that God will no longer overlook ignorance of who God really is. It’s as if God is saying, “If you don’t find salvation in Christ, then you don’t really want what I have to offer anyway.”

So philosophers can spend their time thinking, and create ideas about immortal souls if they want to, but there’s really nothing in our experience that tells us we should expect that. People might see ghosts, or they might have experiences of communicating with the dead — so it’s easy to see why people assume there is something after death, but a lot of us aren’t completely convinced those stories are true, and even if they are, they’re difficult to nail down or understand exactly — they’re not exactly the kind of thing you want to base your hope on. People might have general ideas about spirituality and morality, but those aren’t real reasons for hope. Our experience of the world is ultimately that everyone dies.

The only salvation there is to be had beyond the grave is resurrection in Christ, and we have a real reason to believe it: the tomb was empty, and witnesses saw Jesus show up, talk with them, and eat food. We still might doubt whether those stories is true, or whether something else could have happened to Jesus’ body, but at the end of the day, the Christian Gospel is more than just a philosophical argument — and for me, at least, that makes all the difference. Salvation is not an idea or an inference, but rather a gift that will be given on some real last day, to those who withstand judgment before Christ. This, Paul proclaims, is simply what will happen.

So what we’re faced with is fundamentally different than a set of ideas we need to consider. It’s certainly more than just a theological scheme for us to find interesting, even though the NT is full of fascinating theological ideas. But what we’re faced with is the reality of a judgment, and Paul’s sermon is not just calling us to understand or agree — it’s calling us to act, which means to repent and prepare for a real day that will come, whether we believe it or not.

Most of us here today are already Christians, but I think Paul’s sermon can challenge us to consider whether we’re still worshipping the unknown God they worshipped in Athens, or whether we’re preparing ourselves for a meeting with the living, revealed God of Israel, who we see in Jesus Christ. And as interesting as all this might be, the interesting ideas aren’t really the point. What we’re being called to should probably be the same thing that Paul was calling the Athenians to: not just to understand or believe, but to repent.

I can’t say that I own a lot of Bruce Springsteen music, but I love the tape of his that I have. He’s an excellent lyricist writing from a working class perspective, kind of like Bob Dylan but easier to follow. Plus his music has a ton of energy. Here is the verse of his that most catches my attention these days, from the song “Badlands” (1978):

Workin’ in the fields
till you get your back burned
Workin’ ’neath the wheel
till you get your facts learned
Baby I got my facts
learned real good right now
You better get it straight darling:

Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king
And a king ain’t satisfied
till he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight,
I wanna find out what I got

Well I believe in the love that you gave me
I believe in the faith that could save me
I believe in the hope
and I pray that some day
It may raise me above these badlands…

The best word to describe the tone of the song as a whole (full lyrics here) is probably defiant. The singer seems to have no real expectation that his circumstances will improve, but he’s trying to convince himself (and his lover) that he’s determined to savor life anyway.

I don’t really think Springsteen is trying to be religious in any strong sense of the word, but the allusion to faith, hope, and love is a nice nod to people who know their Bible (1 Cor 13:13). It also highlights how much the idea of hope is wrapped up both in religious faith and in the experience especially of people who live on the border between poor and working class, which Springsteen likes to explore (see his remarkable song The River). It is no great stretch to see commonality between Springsteen’s words here and places in the Gospels that promise reversal of fortunes for the downtrodden (e.g., the beatitudes in Matthew 5 or the Magnificat in Luke 1:46ff).

There’s something here that should challenge religious folks, especially those of us who buy into an apocalyptic worldview where God is supposed to some day put everything right. I don’t know if Springsteen is a Christian, but what’s interesting is that his lyrics here don’t demand any particular religious commitment as the foundation for his hope. And since the situation of the song’s narrator doesn’t seem to offer good earthly reason for hope either, it begs a question: Should we see the song as just reflecting a human tendency to hope for the future whether we have any good reason to or not? And if that’s what humans do, should Christians suspect that our own apocalyptic faith is the same thing, just a groundless hope for a better future?

There’s an assumption in much academic study of religion that religious beliefs and texts arise ultimately from the needs of their adherents and authors, rather than from any explicit kind of divine revelation. That’s not quite to say that people invent their religion out of thin air, but rather that people express hopes or fears that become stories and religious doctrines, which eventually undergird a religion.

I suppose that as a confessing Christian, I’d have to say that this is what the other world religions are in their essence. Certainly God may reveal Godself in different ways to different peoples, but it is difficut (I would argue impossible) to reconcile Christian apocalypticism with the beliefs of religions that make competing claims. So I feel compelled to reject religious pluralism and assume a kind of exclusivism for Christianity. (I’m not a doctrinal purity zealot, but I would argue that some common belief or confession such as “Jesus is Lord” is necessary for Christians.)

The scary thing is that I can’t prove (even to myself) that a developmental process grounded only in wishful thinking isn’t the source of all religions, including mine. And as I’ve suggested here before, the only real reason that I find compelling for holding that Christianity is different is the resurrection of Jesus. This is a strong reason in my view, but it is hardly as thoroughgoing as, say, common Christian claims that the Bible is absolutely perfect and therefore obviously the word of God. Scripture is certainly beautiful, powerful, and brilliant, but its inspiration is impossible to prove even though I believe it, and its supposed perfection is hard to substantiate unless it’s simply assumed and posited at the outset.

Returning to where I started, I love Springsteen’s lyrics, because of their power, their apparent authenticity, and in this case the biblical intertext they play with. I also like that they force me to think critically about my faith, which used to really scare me, but which now just makes me (hopefully) less smug.

A couple of weeks ago, a nearby Massachusetts school district decided to cut off all their high school sports programs, as well as their elementary and middle school art and music classes, because of lack of funding. Parents voted against higher taxes, and so the district did what they apparently had to do.

Meanwhile, the high school across the street from my house is rebuilding a new high school, on the same lot, to replace their current building, which they’ll tear down as soon as this one is done. Funny thing is, the current building was built just 35 years ago to replace an older building, which was where the new one will be now.

This newest building will take two and a half years and will cost about $150 million. The stated reasons for replacement, according to today’s paper: inadequate science labs, poor air circulation, and a lack of natural light. Since they could have just built a new wing of science labs, the last two reasons are apparently the real point. Translation: spoiled teenagers are tired of their ugly school, and their rich parents know how to get their own way.

I don’t really like what’s happening in either place, but I don’t suppose I could do much of anything about either one. Sad thing is, I’m mostly just irritated because I don’t like the noise across the street.

One of my deepest faith commitments is that God wants the church to be a unified Body made up of many different parts. This week’s post is the first section an essay I’ve written on the topic.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Young nor old didn’t make the list in Galatians 3:28, but perhaps it should have, for the sake of today’s American Church.

Our culture has a merked tendency to segregate itself generationally –– toddlers to day care, kids to classrooms, college students to dorms, “real” adults to work, older adults to home alone, everyone watching television or surfing the web to avoid interaction with whoever is around. Cell phones and email have reconnected people in important ways, but they bring their own problems. Churches, opting not to fight the cultural tide, provide Sunday school classes and social activities for every demographic. Generational alienation, not suprisingly, characterizes many churches.

Churches for the Ages

One response to this generational divide is to try to circumvent it. In The Emerging Church, a sort of guidebook for reaching Generation X with the Gospel, Dan Kimball describes a new breed of churches that draw generational lines almost intentionally. While mega-churches find greatest success with Baby Boomers, Kimball suggests strategies for developing new churches to involve and convert Generation-Xers, a group that often struggles to find a place in Boomer churches. Kimball quotes Rick Warren: “No single church can possibly reach everyone. It takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.”

In one sense, Warren’s approach is based on sound enough reasoning: churches want to grow and reach the lost, and congregations often find greater success programming for a particular demographic than integrating many different kinds of people into a single group. Commonalities, after all, bring people together. I myself for two years during seminary participated in a small group of young adults who shared weekly Bible study and Sunday lunch. The fellowship we experienced was powerful and valuable.

I question, however, whether it is the primary fellowship to which God has called the Church.

To be sure, the Warren/Kimball model has proved wildly successful in bringing about church growth and leading countless people to become Christians. Warren argues persuasively in the Purpose-Driven™ Church that churches must determine their purposes and focus their efforts only on meeting those purposes.

For Warren, finding a church’s evangelistic target –– the kind of person a particular church can best reach –– is a key to achieving the purpose of reaching the lost. And of course, evangelism does need to be tailored to its intended audience. However, I will argue that gathering all different kinds of people into one community under the fellowship of the Gospel is also one of our indispensible purposes. If so, churches must not build their programs with such a narrow target in mind.

I suggest that a biblical understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ prohibits us from planning our congregations around reaching particular “target” people. Rather, it requires us to allow the Gospel to bridge differences which normally separate people. Unfortunately, churches in the U.S. are already divided up in every way imaginable –– denominational, generational, social, racial. Most of us attend churches primarily made up of and led by one demographic of people or another. The broad task of overcoming divisions is likely to be painful and protracted, and I am hardly qualified to point the way.

I want to offer a more modest proposal, that we take preliminary steps towards bridging such gaps by crossing generational lines within each congregation to form meaningful cross-generational relationships. This means first that believers will commit themselves to building relationships within existing multi-generational churches rather than following Kimball’s model of starting new congregations tailored to a particular group.

Second, I will suggest a place where such bridging of generations is perhaps most needed. It is, ironically, an area in which well-meaning parents and ministers often intentionally accentuate the division: the relationship of teenagers to the rest of the congregation.

There is more to follow next week, but I would be very interested in whatever thoughts or questions this raises for people.

One of my housemates told me recently that she had a prof who talked about Dead Poets Society, one of my favorite movies, as a great example of moral ambiguity in film. I was watching it this week, so I read an essay on it in the library and thought I’d raise a question for discussion if anyone’s interested. (If you haven’t seen the movie, watch it before you read––it’s a warm and real portrayal of friendship among guys, and it’s kind of inspiring too.)

My question is, should Mr. Keating be viewed as the movie’s hero or its villain?

If you need a quick review of the plot, the movie stars Robin Williams as Mr. Keating, an English teacher at a boys’ prep school in the 1950’s who labors to inspire his students to seize the day, eschewing societal conformity to make their lives extraordinary. In line with this, they organize a club called the Dead Poets Society, whose activities include sneaking out to read poetry together and encouraging each other to “suck the marrow out of life”. Personally, I think that “seize the day” would be a tiresome slogan if it didn’t reflect such an important truth. The fact is, it’s easy to miss out on what we really want because we’re too complacent to take a risk or work hard at something.

So Neil, one of the students, decides he wants to be an actor, even though his unyielding father forbids him to do anything that distracts from getting into Harvard so he can get into medical school. Mr. Keating says otherwise: Neil must convince his father to let him pursue his passion for the stage.

Defying his father instead of reasoning with him, Neil performs in the community theatre anyway, after which his father decides to send him to military school. Neil shoots himself that night.

THE MORAL QUESTION

The final act of the movie is the part where blame gets apportioned. The school’s headmaster (Mr. Nolan), at the request of Neil’s father, conducts a “thorough inquiry” which, not surpisingly, blames Mr. Keating for Neil’s death and gets him dismissed from the school. For director Peter Weir, this is a gross injustice, as Mr. Nolan forces Neil’s fellow students to sign a statement blaming Mr. Keating. In the film’s final scene, several of the students show their gratitude and respect to Mr. Keating though one last defiant, and fairly moving, gesture.

Now, there are four possible culprits for Neil’s suicide: Neil himself, Mr. Keating, Neil’s father, and Mr. Nolan the headmaster.

The movie addresses each in turn:

• Neil is portrayed not as guilty but rather as heroic, for killing himself lest his passion for life be stifled.
• Mr. Keating cannot be guilty because he is the movie’s voice of truth; surely seizing the day must be the right thing to do, so the man who embodies that mantra must be exonerated.
• Neil’s father probably comes off as most at fault for the suicide; his treatment of Neil is stifling throughout the movie, and just before the suicide he goes so far as to mock Neil’s passion with a deep scorn that is difficult to watch.
• And finally, Mr. Nolan receives some implicit blame as the representative of an establishment that demands conformity and affirms people like Neil’s father; mostly though, we hate him for how he treats Mr. Keating after the suicide.

In all this, the movie tries to declare most emphatically that Mr. Keating is not at fault. And it might succeed, except for a key scene that reveals that Mr. Keating knows Neil is lying to his father. Neil tells him that he has spoken to his father, as Mr. Keating suggested, and that his father has agreed to let him perform in the play. But we don’t believe Neil, and neither does Mr. Keating––we can see it in his eyes.

As much as we want Neil to be in the play, I think most grown-ups would agree that it’s irresponsible for a teacher to stand aside and let a 17-year-old defy his father like that, especially when Mr. Keating knows Neil tried out for the play largely as a result of his own influence. That doesn’t make Mr. Keating the one who shot Neil, but it does make him negligent and irresponsible in using his position as teacher. Neil was a minor, and his father’s opinion really did mean more than Mr. Keating’s.

So, to return to my question: granting that all four parties bear some guilt, should Mr. Keating be viewed as the hero or the villain of the movie?

More specifically, I’ll quote the charges that the two villians of the movie level against him. The first is Cameron, the student who rats out Mr. Keating to the administration. One of the other students asks him who the administration is holding responsible for Neil’s death:

Well, Mr. Keating, of course! The “captain” himself! You guys didn’t really think he could avoid responsibility, did you? . . . Mr. Keating put us up to all this crap, didn’t he? If it wasn’t for Mr. Keating, Neil would be cozied up in his room right now, studying his chemistry and dreaming of being called “doctor”.

The second quote is from Mr. Nolan, describing to one of the boys the contents of the statement he is expected to sign incriminating Mr. Keating:

I have here a detailed description of what occured at your meetings. It describes how your teacher, Mr. Keating, encouraged you boys to organize this club, and he used it as a source of inspiration for reckless and self-indulgent behavior. It describes how Mr. Keating, from both in and out of the classroom, encouraged Neil Perry to follow his obsession with acting, when he knew all along it was against the explicit orders of Neil’s parents. It was Mr. Keating’s blatant abuse of his position as teacher that led directly to Neil Perry’s death.

So, even though as moviegoers we hate to admit it, aren’t they basically right?

Note: This is a thorough rewriting of an original post that more harshly criticized Christians who forward conservative emails. I regret the tone (sarcastic and condemning) of the original post, because I ultimately just supported the same kind of tribalism I was trying to attack.

My hope is that this version of the post will give a clear debunking of the supposed Dobson email and will challenge each of us to think about the ideas we adopt; I also hope that I can accomplish this without belittling anyone or pinning narrow-mindedness on a particular group that I tend to disagree with. –SDH, 12-24-07

I got an email forward this past week that I’ve received before:

Subject: Dr. Dobson and CBS Response
Will you please take a minute to read this, please? It’s
really important to our faith.
Thanks,
_____Dr. Dobson & CBS Response

Apparently we are to be allowed to watch TV
programs that use every foul word in the English
language, but not the word “God” It will only
take a minute to read this and see if you think
you should send it out

DR. DOBSON’S PLEA FOR ACTION

CBS discontinued “Touched by an Angel” for using
the word God in every program. Madeline Murray
O’Hare, an atheist, successfully managed to
eliminate the use of Bible reading from public
schools a few years ago.

Now her organization has been granted a federal
hearing on the same subject by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) Washington , DC

Their petition, Number 2493, would ultimately pave
the way to stop the reading of the gospel, our Lord
and Savior, on the airwaves of America

They got 287,000 signatures to back their stand!
If this attempt is successful, all Sunday worship
services being broadcast on the radio or by
television will be stopped. This group is also
campaigning to remove all Christmas programs and
Christmas carols from public schools!

You as a Christian can help!

We are praying for at least 1 million signatures. This would
defeat their effort and show that there are many Christians
alive, well and concerned about our country. As Christians
we must unite on this. Please don’t take this lightly.

We ignored this lady once and lost prayer in our
school and in offices across the nation

Please stand up for your religious freedom and let
your voice be heard. Together we can make a
difference in our country while creating a way for
the lost to know the Lord.

Please press “forward”, and forward this to
everyone that you think should read this.
Now, please sign your name at the bottom ( you
can only add your name after you have pressed the
“Forward”).

Don’t delete any other names, just go to the next
number and type your name and state. Please defeat this
organization and keep the right of our freedom of religion.

REMEMBER: Our country was founded on freedom of religion
and our Constitution is based on the 10 Commandments.

Agree or Delete: Instructions to sign are at the bottom.

PETITION FOR PRESIDENT BUSH

PETITION TO REINSTATE PRAYER IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS:
1.

2,236 people had typed their name into this particular email.

For anyone who doesn’t know, this petition is a hoax. In fact, almost every single thing in it is either fabrication or gross misrepresentation.

To begin with, an internet petition is basically useless, because there’s nothing stopping someone from either (1) making up names (since you can’t check the handwriting) or (2) changing the subject of the petition once everyone’s name is on it. Even assuming an email petition could work, this particular email is basically incoherent. It is written in sloppy prose with numerous mistakes (that James Dobson supposedly penned!), and on the whole it doesn’t make logical sense.

Here are a few of the problems.

1. Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s first and last names are both misspelled in the email.

2. Touched by an Angel ran (according to imdb.com) from 1994 until 2003, which is actually a long run for a tv show. It doesn’t take a conspiracy to get a show cancelled after nine seasons.

3. The email is riddled with grammatical errors, such as the missing period after “God” in the first paragraph.

4. O’Hair apparently did succeed in eliminating Bible reading from public schools in 1963; but calling that just “a few years ago” suggests that this was written up a long time ago.

5. One sentence reads, “Their petition . . . would ultimately pave
the way to stop the reading of the gospel, our Lord and Savior, on the airwaves of America”. So grammatically, in that sentence, “the gospel” is “our Lord and Savior”?

Then, right before the list of names, it says, “PETITION TO REINSTATE PRAYER IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS:”.

Wuh?! The email starts out saying it’s in direct response to the petition to the FCC to ban religious programming on public airwaves. Prayer in public school may be a related topic, but it has nothing to do with the FCC. The body of the email discusses one topic, but then someone seems to have just tacked on a petition for a different topic at the bottom.

Fact checking and the internet

Despite all this, it’s easy to see why people would read the email and assume it was legitimate; most people accept what they hear from people they tend to agree with. (More on this below.)

But, if someone were suspicious, how could they go about checking whether it was true or not?

At this point we’re in luck, because the one part of the email that is accurate is the fcc case number in question. When I first receive this email, I went to fcc.gov and typed “2493″ into the search box there. If you do that, the first result is a link, titled Religious Broadcast Rumor Denied, that explains the hoax. There also are other ways to research the claim:

• If you google “Madalyn Murray O’Hair fcc” (without quotes), the second link explains the hoax.
• If you go to Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s wikipedia page, the bottom of the entry explains the hoax.
• If you google “Madeline Murray O’Hare” (the incorrect spelling found in the email), the top five links all explain the hoax.
• Snopes.com (the urban legends site) has a page on this hoax, which you can find by typing “O’Hair” into their search box.

If you made it to the FCC explanation page (or to an older page with more information at this link), you would find that two guys named Lansman and Milam filed a petition in 1974 to prevent sectarian groups from using a couple of public access stations (which no one watches anyway), and the FCC turned them down in 1975. Turns out their request was unconstituational.

But what you really ought to know is that the FCC, since that time, has received millions of phone calls, form letters, and (more recently) emails from Christians opposing this supposed conspiracy. That means people were typing up chain letters, sticking 10-cent stamps on them, and dropping them in the mail to the FCC before I was born. That’s 33 years of Christians mobilizing in response to a form letter written by a crackpot.

What does it mean?

I think I’ve demonstrated that it’s not difficult for someone to check up on this kind of forward if they have questions about it.

That means that most people who forwarded this email must have assumed it was trustworthy enough that they had no need to check its facts. Moreover, it suggests that when we are presented with a position that we already agree with, we tend to accept uncritically what we’re told; in these kinds of cases we often don’t bother checking up on the facts.

I’m sure there have also been thousands of Christians who have seen this email, assumed it was a hoax, and deleted it. However, there’s good reason to think that those people (along with myself) hear lots of other ideas about religion or politics, in the course of our lives, that we accept uncritically. Personally, I disagree with the viewpoint of this email, and never would have forwarded it, so I can’t claim any real virtue for having tried to debunk it.

What seems to be the case is that many, many people (in this case Christians) will agree to just about anything, as long as they think it’s supported by people they generally agree with. As long as something is an ostensibly (conservative) “Christian” cause, all you have to do is show people where to sign.

My first thought was that this makes Christians look bad, which I’m sure it does.

But on further reflection, the potential consequences are a lot more serious, especially considering that Christian America often directs its efforts toward wielding real political power rather than passing around ineffective petitions. My question, then, is this: In what other areas are Christians liable to join a cause without considering its real implications? Some suggestions:

Evolution: Do most Christians really know anything beyond the basics of evolution (or creationism, for that matter) when they vote for new textbooks?

Abortion: Do most Christians know which groups of people have abortions and why?

Homosexuality: When the question comes up concerning whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt children, do most Christians actually know anything about gay couples, or do they just assume they’re all twisted child-molestors who don’t deserve such a right?

War: If our president sounds Christian (like the fcc email sounds Christian), how many Christians will just assume that he’s supporting a “Christian” cause and go along with it?

I know people can make arguments in favor of the supposed “Christians” stances on all these points. Furthermore, the questions can be flipped around. As someone who grew up in Texas but lives in the Northeast, I have often witnessed blue state folks dismissing the views of conservative Christians as if they are not only wrong but absurd. It’s easy to find, among supposed proponents of free thought, examples of the same kinds of suspicion and disrespect we see reflected in the email forward I’m addressing.

Is it any wonder that our political language is so divisive and that we rely on political might (i.e. getting a majority of the vote) to change policy rather than focusing our efforts on persuading people who disagree with us? I don’t want to trust people to make policy decisions if they support pretty much any initiative that sounds like something they agree with. And yet this seems to be how people work.

God help us.

By Justin D. Burton

NOTE: This is a guest post by my friend Justin, who’s a musicology grad student at Rutgers and one of my favorite people. The topic is still intertextuality, but here it’s between a movie and a TV show. Justin and his wife Kathryn also have a great movie blog. -Scott

In episode FABF06 (‘Margical History Tour’) of The Simpsons, Marge takes her children (and Bart’s friend Milhouse) to the Springfield Public Library to research papers they must write for school, only to find that the library no longer carries books, opting instead for Yu-Gi-Oh! price guides, Everybody Poops: The Video, and newspapers perched atop snoozing bums. Unperturbed, Marge gathers the children around and offers lessons on historical figures to help the children write their papers. After telling of Henry VIII for Milhouse and Sacagawea for Lisa, she turns to Bart.

Marge: What famous historical figure do you want to write about?Bart: I don’t know. Boogeyman.

Marge: C’mon, Bart. We can make this fun. History’s like an amusement park, except instead of rides, you have dates to memorize.

Bart: Mom, everyone who ever lived is boring.

Marge: Boring? Is there anything boring about a bad-ass rocker who lived fast and died young?

Bart: I know there’s a catch, but tell me more.

With that, Marge launches into the story of Mozart, complete with a raucous piano concert, a scene at the Austrian Music Awards, a snippet of Bart/Mozart’s latest opera The Musical Fruit, and Bart/Mozart’s untimely death. The story, as Lisa points out, ‘sounds a lot like the movie Amadeus, which was historically inaccurate.’

The Simpsons is a richly intertextual television show, as it demands its viewers to be conscious of a vast reservoir of popular culture referential material. Often, the point of this intertextuality is to engage and critique the texts to which the show refers. Jonathan Gray, author of Watching with the Simpsons, puts it thusly:

[M]uch of [The Simpsons’s] humor is deeply transitive, pointing outside the borders of The Simpsons to all manner of other genres, texts, and discourses. To laugh at these jokes is frequently to read those other genres, texts, and discourses as much as it is to read The Simpsons. The Simpsons talks about other texts, and if its jokes ‘leak’ out of the program—if we activate them in everyday discussion, if they force a reevaluation of other texts, or if we recall them when watching other texts—then it becomes important for us to study how and with what effect this parody attacks other textual forms and formats: we can no longer focus on The Simpsons alone.

When we find within The Simpsons a lengthy reference to Amadeus, then, we are obligated, as Gray tells us, to study the effect of this parody. What I’d like to do here is talk briefly about why The Simpsons lampoons Amadeus.

Writer Peter Shaffer and director Milós Forman weren’t the first to conceive of Mozart in infantile and savant-like terms. Rather, the stories that fuel the myth of Mozart the eternal child had arisen immediately following his death. Importantly, though, Amadeus, as mass art, was situated in a position that allowed it to crystallize this notion in the public’s consciousness.

By caricaturing Amadeus with its own characters, The Simpsons impoverishes the Mozart myth expounded in Amadeus. In The Simpsons, we are confronted with a rock-star child genius whose musical ability is effortless and punctuated with infantile scatology, a pared-down version of the pared-down story Amadeus offers.

One explanation for The Simpsons’s intertextual tangling with Amadeus is de-mythification. As Roland Barthes explains myth, it is an impoverishment of a meaningful exchange. That is, I may say, ‘Mozart is a genius’ (though it’s not likely that you’ll hear me say that), and the statement is fully of history. That is, the statement involves the contingencies of both ‘genius’ and ‘Mozart,’ as the histories surrounding each word are immediately consultable to better understand the many different aspects of the statement ‘Mozart is a genius.’

When the statement is mythified, however, the statement is distanced from history. As Barthes puts it, the statement ‘leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself…history evaporates, only the letter remains.’ What is important in Barthes’s postulation, however, is that history is not entirely extinguished in the form; rather, it remains available as ‘an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation.’ The statement becomes, then, something of a proof text of itself, to which one might point for salient historical facts or ideas, while disregarding its original multivalence.

Why a statement such as this one is impoverished is a bit tricky to nail down, but one explanation is the fear of the loss of the Great White Man. Since the Enlightenment, our histories have been filled with tales of great individuals who transcend their bodies and their cultures to do great things. With the growing sense of multiculturalism, however, many have noticed that these great transcendent people are always white and always men. As we try to reconfigure our understanding of history, several have balked at the notion and feared that white men are actually becoming the racist target of the rest of the world (see Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind for some nice examples of such a paranoia). If ‘Mozart is a genius’ can be proved by streamlining his history and turning him into a rock-star child genius, then his status becomes much more difficult to assail.

Now, in order to undo myth, Barthes tells us, we must mythify it, in turn. This involves impoverishing a myth. So, while ‘Mozart is a genius’ became impoverished in a myth that became crystallized in Amadeus, this myth is then impoverished in The Simpsons. As it turns out, a funny cartoon challenges to re-think and critically engage the history and person of one of our most revered artists. Not bad for seven hilarious minutes.

-JDB

At least 850 elderly or disabled residents in or around Chalmette, LA still need their houses gutted, so here’s my bid to encourage folks to volunteer. They’re pushing for people to come during one of four “work camp” times:

October 13–23
November 17–27
December 8–18
December 27 –– January 8

The work is difficult but doable and necessary. You can go work for a day or two, or you can stay for a full ten days. I recommend working from late one week through early the next, since they don’t work on Sundays and it’ll give you a break in the middle of your work. Housing is free, and they provide your food for $10 each day.

Hilltop Rescue & Relief is run out the second floor of an elementary school whose first floor was ruined by the flooding and whose students no longer need the classroom space in this decimated town. They have months and months of experience leading groups, and they run their program efficiently: they help you do what you can in the limited time you have to volunteer.

The pile of trash pictured above is what we pulled out of the yellow house behind it in a day and a half of work.

Below is a photo of a room that I worked on for most of a day, taken after I spent two hours throwing out wheelbarrow- and arm-loads of crumbled dry wall which had fallen from the ceiling, along with mattresses, closet doors, and countless clumps of nondescript matter which used to be the contents of an elderly couple’s master bedroom. When I first arrived, I had to climb over stuff to get into the room.

The finished house is gratifying, and it’s an enormous burden off the shoulders of the homeowner:

This is a rare opportunity to do work that solves an actual problem for people who can’t do for themselves, working for an organization that won’t waste your time and efforts. For details, visit the Hilltop website. If you know people who are capable of this kind of work, please consider referring them either to this post or to the Hilltop web site.

Note: Since writing this post, I’ve gone on to do an entire blog on the Dallas Mavericks.

I think I’m finally at peace about the Dallas Mavericks’ season.

If you don’t follow the NBA, you should know that my team made it to the Finals for the first time in its history, won the first two games emphatically, and then lost four in a row (and the series) to Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat.

However, even though I probably won’t lose any more sleep over this (and I have lost sleep since June 20), I want to make a simple request, that anyone out there who enjoys NBA basketball watch 5 youtube clips before we put the 2005-2006 season to bed.

Let me explain.

Ordinarily, only Losers make excuses. But I truly feel that the referees, for two games of the NBA Finals, made enough unfair calls in favor of Miami’s Dwyane Wade that the Mavericks did not get a fair shot at winning the series. Clearly, they could have (and, frankly, should have) overcome the bad officiating, but I feel justified in my complaints because I don’t think Miami could have beat Dallas without it.

Let me give an excerpt from a column by Bill Simmons, a sports writer for espn.com who’s a Celtics fan but likes the way Dallas plays:

In my Finals preview, I wrote that “No team depends on the refs quite like the Heat. When the refs are calling all the bumps on Shaq and protecting Wade on every drive, they’re unstoppable. When they’re calling everything fairly, they’re eminently beatable. If they’re not getting any calls, they’re just about hopeless. I could see the refs swinging two games in Miami’s favor during this series, possibly three. In fact, I’m already depressed about it and the series hasn’t even started yet.” Well, we had our two games — Game 3 (the last five minutes were just obscene) and Game 5 (again, a top-five debacle). And the series isn’t over yet.

[Note: I looked over the play-by-play of game 3, and Simmons must be mistaken. There’s only one foul call in Wade’s favor in that stretch. But game 5 was pretty bad.]

Simmons made those comments after game 5, an overtime thriller featuring 3 lead changes in the last 30 seconds. The last lead change, in favor of Miami, came on two Dwyane Wade free throws due to a questionable foul call against the Mavs’ Dirk Nowitzki after Wade drove, out of control, into the lane and missed a wild shot with 1.9 seconds left and the Mavs leading by 1. The referee who made the call was out of position, and is known for making highly questionable calls in favor of the home team in big games (Miami was at home). If there’s no foul call, the buzzer sounds (barring a miracle) and the Mavs win.

This was an exceedingly frustrating loss for Dallas, and Miami took a 3-2 series lead.

But game 6 was probably worse.

OK, just watch these 5 clips of the Mavericks supposedly fouling Dwyane Wade, and decide if the Mavericks were give a reasonable opportunity to win the game. Whatever you decide, I’ll be satisfied knowing that people saw what really happened.

1: Wade flops on a jump shot

2: Wade throws his shoulder into Devin Harris

3: Marquis Daniels doesn’t even touch Wade

4: Does Daniels push Wade that hard?

5: Wade thows a hard elbow into Dirk

While the third clip is the most blatantly bad foul call, it’s the last clip that’s the most painful. The Mavericks were down by a point with less than 30 seconds left, and the Heat had the ball. Not an enviable position for Dallas. But this happens to good teams all the time. The test is whether they can get a defensive stop and get the ball back with a chance to win.

I don’t think Dallas was given a fair opportunity to defend Wade on that crucial play.

He threw a hard elbow into Dirk’s gut, which should have been an offensive foul against Wade. That would have sent Dirk to the line with 26 seconds left and a chance to hit two free throws and give Dallas the lead. Instead, they called the foul against Dirk, and Wade went to the line for his 18th and 19th free throw attempts of the game. The Heat went on to win the game by 3, which gave them the championship and Wade the MVP trophy.

It often gets said in sports that a true champion will find a way to win, will hit the big shot when it counts. My complaint about the finals is, the Heat didn’t make these big plays any better than the Mavericks did, at least not in games 5 and 6. Both teams hit and missed on big plays. But Wade, in each of these clips from throughout the game, was given free throws that the Mavericks didn’t receive.

Considering three of the Heat wins were decided by 1, 2, and 3 points, I would argue that that matters. It makes me sad that the Mavericks couldn’t pull off the victory anyway. But what made me angry is that I don’t think the Heat could have pulled off the victory either, without the favorable calls.

When you’ve invested a lot in a team, that’s tough to swallow.

For this post, I’m piggy-backing off of an interesting discussion that Brad Brock called my attention to this week. Here’s an excerpt from the blog of Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist:

This will look like a rhetorical question, but it’s not. I’m still trying to figure out how religious people interpret their environment. Here’s something that has always puzzled me.You’ve probably seen the studies showing that the smarter you are, and the more you know, the less likely you are religious. The studies are usually expressed in terms of education. High school dropouts are more religious than people who finished graduate school, etc.

We’re talking averages here. Obviously there are plenty of smart, educated religious people. But on the whole, the more you know, the less likely it is that you will buy into a religion. The correlation is quite striking.

This squares with my own observations. When I encounter extra-smart people who are also religious, I tend to ask a lot of questions trying to find out why. What I have discovered is this: Under my special powers of interrogation, the extra-smart religious people almost always admit (privately) that their religion is more of a choice than a perception. In other words, for the extra-smart, the concept of God exists, and that concept benefits their lives, independent of any literal truth. It’s a lot like being an atheist while keeping the benefits of being religious. That’s exactly the sort of extra-smart solution you would expect from extra-smart people.

My puzzlement is over the question of how the true religious people interpret the fact that the smartest and most educated people in the world are, on average, far less religious. These are the explanations I can think of:

1. There is no correlation between intelligence/education and religion. Where do you get you so-called “facts” cartoon boy?

2. Religion comes from the heart, not the head. I missed the biology class that says the heart is just a blood pump.

3. God doesn’t like intelligent/educated people so he wants fewer of them in heaven.

4. I didn’t know about that intelligence/education/religion correlation. But now that I do, I renounce my religion!

5. What’s an “average”?

Can the believers among you tell me if I left anything off the list?

If you want to look at some of the 495 comments made that day, you can find them here. (Adams also has a follow-up post here.) But I’d like to throw open a question that Adams touches on: How do you, personally, reconcile your Christian beliefs with being an educated critical thinker?

To start the conversation, here’s what I posted after most of the discussion was done:

I think intellectuals resist being lumped in with non-critical thinkers who make silly claims (religious or otherwise) that don’t hold water. I know I do. And it must be admitted that Christians say some pretty silly (and at times even evil) things.For me, though, the strongest argument in favor of Christianity does not start with theological claims but with the life of Jesus. A critical thinker can pick apart a theological argument about Jesus, but to consider that someone would love his enemies, turn the other cheek to those who would kill him, befriend the whores and lepers of society, claiming that they are the ones God wants a relationship with, and be crucified –– that’s enough to undo just about anyone. (And however skeptical you might be about the four gospels, this much of the depiction of Jesus is historically sound, even from a secular standpoint; if he existed at all, he clearly helped the marginalized and died on a cross.)

As an intellectual who is still a believer, I believe that the life Jesus lived undergirds Christian claims that he was the Son of God –– indeed God himself. If God were to become human, I think Jesus is who he would be. That, and the fact that a strong historical argument can be made for the resurrection (as long as you don’t rule it out a priori on naturalistic grounds) are enough to keep me a believer.