A study in causality

The new Jubilee

I've been ruminating on this thought for a while. I think the whole bailout system we've got going is very intriguing.

Remember that one time when God told the Israelites to set up a deal where they didn't plant crops every seventh year? Where they set slaves free every fiftieth year? Where all debts were forgiven in the fiftieth year? This was intended to create an egalitarian society where the rich didn't keep getting richer and the poor didn't keep getting oppressed.

Now thankfully America is really progressive. We're now concerned about corporations that are about to go under. Those poor suffering groups of people who (are depersonalized with the corporation moniker and) spent years in wild speculation but are screwing the economy for everyone and especially the little guy who has no bailout.

In the Jewish model, people forgave people, and there was accountability (when/if jubilee was ever practiced). Now the people forgive pseudo-people through an intermediary that does a poor job of oversight. The problem is, few of the people in charge of corporations today were alive at the last major fall. The people running the spurious financial instruments were primarily young pups.

I understand the "too big to fail" concept. I do not want the economy to tank for years to come. But at the same time, I don't want the corporate memory to be as short as it has been. What if we all learned our lesson? One of the authors I work with, David Cowan, says, "If the bank isn't good enough to stay afloat, let the damn thing fail!" It's hilarious because he said this from the stage at a conservative Christian gathering.

From just about every angle, I think it's wrong to bail out irresponsible corporations. In that really long range way (because the public hasn't had to pay the national debt . . . yet), the middle class and up are financially responsible for the bailout. (Wait, are these loans to corporations "pay as you can"? I hope they all get paid back.) If we let them fail, I'm afraid the poorest people would be hurt the worst. In that sense, I think the bailout might be needed. But from a jubilee perspective, and from a sanity perspective, I'm not a fan.

More heritage

Shortly after I posted on the question of heritage, I was reading NT Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God." His historical coverage of the idea of resurrection helped me immensely. Early in the Hebrew monarchy (and right before), people didn't have a strong idea of individual bodily resurrection. That came more in the Maccabean period and later. The primary idea of resurrection early on was a corporate or national focus. "If we go into exile, God will be faithful to resurrect us" was more the idea. Therefore, the idea of heritage was of paramount importance. Each individual (who definitely didn't conceive of themselves as such) wanted to participate in the age to come by having their seed present through their progeny.

As a product of individualism who is reforming my thinking around resurrection, I don't have a strong drive to bear offspring. I want to love and serve those who have present life around me in order to participate together as individuals in community in the age to come.

I'm actually pretty excited about the idea of having children, but as noted, I don't have a huge drive, given my hope for the future.

Sugar Ray

I had hoped my next post after the dust settled in my life (from the sixteen-page history paper, the five-page Greek paper and final, the incessant work, etc.) would be a follow-up on heritage. That will be the next post after this one. But Sugar Ray is an easy post. Sorry if you had higher hopes for this blog.

Sugar Ray had three extremely popular songs back in the day: "Falls Apart," "Every Morning," and "Someday," all from their "14:59" album. All three had the same characteristic syrupy sweet sound. One could think that was just their sound. I'm listening to the rest of the album for the first time right now, and apart from those three tracks, I hear a metal track, an alternative track, a ska track, and at this moment a strange fusion of funk/hip hop/reggae. (A later edit: now I've heard a Jimmy Buffet/country track, a disco track, and a fun closing calliope track. Yikes. How do they do it?)

I think Sugar Ray was victimized by Top 40. The Top 40 stations snagged the three songs that would get them airplay (making Sugar Ray wealthy in the process), and left the rest of the songs to rot on the album. I feel bad for people who thought they were buying a Top 40 album and were disappointed by diversity. And believe it or not, I feel bad for the people who didn't buy the album, because they aren't Top 40 people.

I actually like some syrup occasionally. Now that I know that I can get some of that along with some impressive diversity all in one album, I might actually listen. 14:59 shows that Sugar Ray can play about any genre, and they can do it well. I think I'm about ten years late getting on this bandwagon, but oh well. I do hear they're going to be releasing an album this summer, if anyone is curious about that.

Wikipedia was my friend in explaining several things. "Fly" was a hit song from their second album, which I had forgotten. Their third album, 14:59, was titled in answer to critics that their fifteen minutes of fame wasn't quite up. Brilliant.

Heritage and seriousness

As I was working on a project where I happened to skim through the book of Ruth, I caught the phrase "Naomi has a son!"

A flood of thoughts crashed through my mind. One is remembering what Ruth did to Boaz to get her way. (He enjoyed it.) Since when is uncovering Boaz's feet (or more to the point, outright seducing him, which is what she actually did) appropriate for God's holy people? Never mind that Ruth was a foreigner. I think the evangelical/fundamentalist church needs to reconsider its pharisaism. The Bible is not "safe for the whole family"! (That's a marketing claim of a local Christian radio station. Ugh.)

Anyway, that wasn't my point. I'm curious about the human drive for heritage. Naomi was pretty bent out of shape because she didn't have a son, and that's why when Ruth bore Obed, all the women celebrated for Naomi. It's perfectly appropriate in my mind to be bent out of shape about losing your husband and two sons, but there's a deeper drive that sought male heirs in ancient near eastern culture. To the Jewish people, if one didn't have a male heir, they were a persona non grata.

What is it that makes us take ourselves so seriously? One could talk about evolutionary drives or God-given instinct to procreate. But why does it become enshrined in social/moral/religious categories? I'm coming from my own cultural context that would be absolutely unthinkable to other cultures. But I find it fascinating that in order to be a person (at least in Naomi's day), one must have a son.

I myself would enjoy having children someday, but it's more because I want to provide a good example of humanity by shaping a wee one from their earliest days. I have absolutely no drive to pass on my genetics. Maybe that's because I'm a diabetic, and I don't want to burden someone else with that.

I guess my question in this is whether my perspective is totally skewed, or whether there's something I should learn from people in the Bible (or even today) who obsess over having their own offspring. (And don't get me wrong: I hurt for people who feel called to have children, but are unable.) Thoughts?

Fun assumptions

Wow, it's been a while. I just ran across a fun quote in my Greek exercises.

[Therefore the Jews said to him,] "Now we know that you have a demon."

I'll be watching carefully for every opportunity to quote Scripture, let me tell you.

The Bible and slavery

I took an American church history class last month, and I've had an idea percolating since then.

What if versejacking was the reason we had good Anglicans and Baptists and Methodists in the South saying that the Bible doesn't have a problem with slavery? They would grab a verse or two to show how slaves were a part of Jewish society in the First Testament, and they would use the verses from Paul to show that slaves are to submit to their masters. This wouldn't have been a monolithic perception. In the early 1800s, people would say that slavery was a necessary evil. By the mid-1800s, they were saying slavery was a positive moral good. American society had a covenant with God to be the best society. Whites were put at the top of the hierarchy to oversee a millennial kingdom of Christ. God in his sovereignty had ordained that Blacks were inferior to the Whites and therefore were slaves. All of this perception was wrapped up in Southern American civil religion. They were trying to maintain order (God-ordained order), while the Northern Progressives saw the millennial reign of Christ coming with the equality that the Declaration of Independence offered. Both sides used the Bible to prop up their cause. However, the Northerners saw in the scriptural metanarrative that all people are equal (okay, all men, not women). The Southerners saw order in a hierarchy brought about by versejacking.

Another interesting point is how religion was meted out to the slave populations. There was always a debate about how much religion slaves should be given. If they were taught to read the Bible, they would get uppity. If they were baptized or educated, the economy would lose the benefits of slaves, because they would start to demand equal rights. Southern slaveholders felt varying levels of compunction toward salvation for slaves. If they weren't human, they didn't need salvation. If they were inferior humans, they might need to get to heaven. They would be given enough religion to "save" them, but not enough to let them feel the egalitarian impulse in Paul: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (TNIV).

One thing the slaveholders never counted on was the fact that Judaism and the Christianity that sprang from it were primarily oral traditions. They kept the Bible and literacy from the slaves, but they didn't count on the narrative element of the faith energizing the slave populations. The slaves were able to tell the story of the exodus as their own story, looking toward heaven as the promised land. It doesn't seem like they held much hope for deliverance in this world. Ironically, the slaveowners held that they were the new Israel in the promised land subjugating the Canaanites and bringing about the reign of Christ. The slaves believed they were Israel waiting to be brought into the promised land and delivered from the tyranny of the Egyptians. America had two groups of people, both claiming to be the same group, one mature, one nascent. The slaves could look at the owners and say, "There's no way they're Israel." The owners didn't really think much about the slaves as long as they kept working, but even if they did. they probably didn't see the slaves grasping the narrative of Israel as their own.

It's very intriguing to me that this historical snapshot shows how different groups used the Bible so differently. And in the justice of history, the group that used the Bible badly had no concept that their slaves were gaining hope from the same Bible. Further, it appears to me that those with literacy and the written word emasculated the storied context of the Bible. The uneducated grasped the story. The story ended up winning (with help from some people who also seemed to grasp a larger story in the Bible, although they did their share of versejacking).