Fruits of our labor.

I was just handed this Bible at work. They've just arrived in our warehouse and are due in stores October 1. I'm really excited about it. (Sorry that you can't see the whole cover. What you're looking at is part of the cover--in dark brown--with a packaging wrap--in tan.)

Inside is a straight-text Bible with cross-references in a center column on each page. Up front is 330 pages of writings from every continent and every century since the advent of the Church. Everyone from Clement and Clairvaux to the lesser-known believers like Yahya ibn 'Adi (10th century Iraq) and John Tulloch (19th century Scotland). These writings follow the Church year, so they have readings for Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. Along with each weeks' readings are full-color pieces of art from around the world--ancient and modern. The hardcover design is great, but I may just get myself a LeatherLike cover: The design is amazing.

I'd love to show it off sometime! Just ask.

Oh, I see!

(Reading Time: 2.5 minutes)

If you've ever read through any of the Gospels, you’ll notice how the Jewish people seem to lack the capacity for spiritual insight. They take most of Jesus’ teachings at face value and fail to grasp his spiritual meaning. It’s really quite frustrating to a modern reader. You just want to shake them sometimes, it seems so obvious. Even Jesus at one point says, “Look beneath the surface so you can judge correctly.”

Their collective shallowness has always baffled me to some degree, but then I read a description of the nature of the Hebrew language (from A General Introduction to the Bible):

“It is a pictorial language, speaking with vivid, bold metaphors which challenge and dramatize the story. The Hebrew language possesses a facility to present ‘pictures’ of the events narrated. ‘The Hebrew thought in pictures, and consequently his nouns are concrete and vivid.”

I began to consider how this language would shape thought. After all, thinking is formed to a large degree by the words available to think with. If this was the case for the Jewish people, then the Hebrew language was more rooted in the visible than in the invisible. Thus, Jewish people spent more time thinking about the physical than the abstract. The author continued, “Always the appeal is to the person in concrete realities of life and not to the abstract or theoretical.”

This helped me to understand a bit more why the Jewish people in Scripture seemed so dull-witted and hard-headed. It doesn’t excuse their unbelief (contrast this with the spiritual eyes of the Roman soldier), but it helps me get into their sandals and feel a bit more charitable toward them. Jesus was challenging the way they thought about the world. He still does.

In keeping with Hebrew’s emphasis on the visible, it assigns a gender to everything. Words aren’t androgynous. “Everything is alive.” As well, “There is no wealth of adjectives.” Hebrew doesn’t spend time describing things, so Jewish people have to find the right images to capture the feel they’re trying to communicate.

This doesn’t mean the seemingly dull-witted Jewish people of Jesus' day lacked imagination. On the contrary, Hebrew was an imagination-rich language because it was so visually oriented. Jewish people simply did not imagine abstract things. “The language shows ‘vast powers of association and, therefore, of imagination.’ Some of this is lost in the English translation, but even so, ‘much of the vivid, concrete, and forthright character of our English Old Testament is really a carrying over into English of something of the genius of the Hebrew tongue.’”

Pick up your Old Testament. Read the Psalms or the Prophets. “Everything is alive.” The power of the picture is undeniable. Use the images to help you remember. But don’t stop with just a picture in your mind. “Look beneath the surface so you can judge correctly.”

He who has eyes to see let him hear

The printing press ushered in a revolution in how we communicate. It made exchanging ideas more a matter of sight (reading) and less a matter of sound (listening). It traded an ear for an eye. Has this handicapped the spoken word as a means for transmitting ideas? It's not that before the printing press we never used our eyes to gather information. It's that the ratios between seeing and hearing changed. With the change, we recalibrate for a new equilibrium.

So then, is this the reason our creative writing professors teach us, "Show, don't tell." Is this why an explanation hits an impasse when we say, "I'm not sure. I'd have to see it to understand what you mean"? Are we unable to listen and understand, or perhap unable to say what we mean?

So then, is the sermon an antiquated means for delivering the Gospel? Sure, we have the capacity to hear, but do we have the brains cultivated to listen and understand? If hearing the Word of God is a blessing, but we’ve handicapped the sense of hearing because we are all eyes, what does that mean for God’s Word? If faith comes by hearing the Word of God, what does a new calibration mean for our faith?

With sight extended beyond hearing, have we stunted our faith? After all, Jesus' said, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." But we say, "I don't know. I'd have to see it first." So then, even while the printing press made the Bible available for all to read, it also shaped our brains by emphasizing sight over hearing, reading over listening. It became a personal activity instead of a communal one. How has this new calibration shaped our faith? Has it bolstered our faith? Has it impeded it?

Notes from Media Lecture

Wheaton professor Read Schuchardt gave a lecture here at work last week. Here's a few notes I took:

Lee seigel: Art of attention v art of distraction

Narcissus perceives himself to be the other. We project ourselves onto God’s person. We create our own imaginary Jesus.

“Be aware of how unaware it’s [the medium] going to try and make you be.”

Hermaphrodite myth

Interface culture – steven Johnson

Predictable v unpredictable: We disengage when we know what will happen next. With 500 channels on TV, we all know what will happen next.

X-files – all about unrequited love. Science and religion.

“Narcissism metastasizes into solipsism. I’m the main character in my own life, and my iPod is the soundtrack.”

"If you don't worship at the altar of the iPhone, it's the best false God available today."

“Cultural heretic”

Literacy promotes deferred gratification and helps you to focus on the other.

And here are two videos of him speaking at Wheaton last spring.

There are a few more clips on YouTube.

Time is money

Cultural texts provide the flesh and bones, as it were, for what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call the “metaphors we live by.” These are metaphors that shape our most basic understanding of the world as we experience it, metaphors that shape our perceptions and our practices without our even noticing them. As Lakoff and Johnson point out, the North American proverbial saying “time is money” is a root metaphor for a fundamental aspect of human experience and suggests that time is a valuable commodity. This metaphor predisposes us to think about everyday life in terms of “spending,” “saving,” or “wasting” time. Once again, we see how culture exerts its hegemonic influence by taking captive our imagination.

from “What is Everyday Theology?” by Kevin Vanhoozer, in Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends.

Following the prophets.

If the prophets of the Bible didn’t understand all of their own prophecies, why do we expect that we’ll understand everything God asks of us? Why does it have to make sense to us before we’ll obey? Or how do we determine when to follow God into something we don’t understand? And how do we know which way that is?

"It's a one-way thing"

Here's some anecdotal conversation about strange relationships created by the medium of television from the perspective of some recent American Idols (via Newsweek).

Hicks: I've had an older couple come up to me and ask me for an autograph and say their phone bill is $400 to $500, voting and texting for Idol. When people say they invest in your career on the show, they invest their time. But they also invest their money. Even younger people come up to me and say, "My cell-phone bill is $200 extra this month."

Sparks: Sometimes people feel like you owe them something. I love meeting them, but sometimes it gets scary when they get angry at you when you make them wait. The Idols all have a different relationship with our fans. They all feel like they know us, because they grew with us on the show. You have to be careful with what you say or how far you let people in.

Archuleta: I don't think they realize it's a one-way thing going on. You're not getting to know them.

Sparks: Do you get people coming up to you and giving you a hug?

Studdard: Yeah.

Sermon tapes

Every technology is a value statement. If that value were put into words we might say we disagree with it, but our choices to use certain technologies betray our biases and values.

With this in mind, I was thinking about sermon tapes. Well, now it’s mostly CDs. Sermons are recorded to CDs, tapes, mp3s, and now even DVDs so they can be distributed to those who couldn’t make it to church. Let me affirm from the outset that these can indeed be valuable for the listeners.

Probably the two most common reasons these listeners don’t get to church are that they’re elderly or they’re incarcerated (to draw no parallels between the two). But even while the pastor is delivering his own message, the sermon tapes themselves are also delivering messages. The messages I can discern are these.

The sermon is the most important event that happens at a church gathering. Most sermon tapes are just that, sermon tapes. They don’t include the music or announcements, baptisms, baby dedications, or the conversations that happen during "fellowship hour." The sermon is really the important thing. Sermon tapes perpetuate this already-held belief, and are not its primary instigator.

The information delivered in the sermon is more important than the gathering itself. Because of the centralization and elevation of the sermon in the church gathering, we church kids have started to believe that it’s the sermon and not the gathering that is essential. Just last Sunday, I showed up late to church. I felt okay about it though because I hadn’t missed the sermon yet—so I wasn’t really missing anything important. But in truth, the presence of the gathered community of believers is probably more transformative for the individual than the sermon is.

The lone believer can grow spiritually with a regular collection of good sermon tapes. Taken to the extreme, some might conclude that they can have all the real benefits of church without actually having to go to church. This is absurd, of course. It’s the commitments to others and responsibilities of real relationships that keep many from following their own sinful desires. You can’t have a relationship with or through a sermon tape.

Now, I’m not saying sermon tapes have no value. Indeed, many will argue that it’s better to have them available than not. It’s better for the elderly and the incarcerated to hear a word from the preacher than not. But these sermon tapes will always bend toward supplanting the power of the gathered church. If we give out the sermon tapes but don't spend just as much time being with the people we give them to, then we fail to grasp what it means to be the Church.

You are better than a sermon tape. You are the medium. What message are you sending?