Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Mark – The Mission of John the Baptist

    The following audio comes from a radio program I recorded in 2003.  The scripture is Mark 1:1-8, especially Mark 1:4.

    {audio}mark_1.mp3{/audio}

  • Mark Introduction

    The attached audio is from an introduction to Mark I presented for a radio program in 2003.

    {audio}mark_intro.mp3{/audio}

  • The Worst Argument for Bailing Out the Auto Industry

    I was thinking of this as I watched a few interviews today. I’m still less than at full speed after being sick in bed early in the week, and I’m spending more time on the couch working on my laptop and less at the desk in my office.

    My first inclination was to cite the argument that we already gave $700 billion to the financial industry, so we should obviously be willing to give $25 or $34 or $xx billion to the auto industry. That suggests that if I stupidly spend a large amount of money on some techie toy I thereby license myself to spend additional money on any other toy I may desire. Why not? I’ve already established the principle, no?

    Of course, since I do think the financial system bailout was a bad idea, and has also failed to bail out the financial system, I obviously would find the argument that we ought to do more of the same unconvincing.

    The auto company executives shouldn’t be too surprised they’re getting more scrutiny either, since many congressmen are quite annoyed at the apparent lack of effect of the original bailout and the fact that they really don’t know just how the money is being used.

    But I actually heard what I think is the worst argument from the mayor of Lansing who was interviewed on MSNBC. He refined the “we already bailed out the financial industry” argument so as to make it much worse when he said that since we had bailed out the financial industry we should be willing to bail out the auto companies where, after all, “real” people make “real” products. (Note that this summary is from memory just after watching the interview.)

    When certain Republicans talked about “real” people during the campaign and suggested that those of us on the other side were less patriotic, less American, or didn’t have values, I found it annoying. I also think it’s counterproductive in politics when you suggest people you ought to try to persuade that they are morally defective. (The left prefers to accuse its enemies of being mentally defective instead.)

    But in this case problems come from two directions. First, some of us “unreal” people out here are customers who buy those cars. And I would note that unlike a certain congressman who was advocating the bail-out this week, but was found to be driving a Honda himself, I do own an American car. And no, I don’t have a couple of foreign cars as well–I only own the one American product.

    But further, this entire distinction between the “real” people who produce “real” products is invalid in an economic sense. Without those “unreal” people on wall street, the auto manufacturers would be unable to gather the capital necessary to invest in those factories and create those jobs. We have this bizarre vocabulary that suggests that the “everyday workers” who man the assembly lines “make cars” but somehow the white collar folks do not.

    But the brains the design the cars, the managers who organize the rather complex manufacturing process, the financiers who pull together the money, and those who distribute them all have a major part to play. The assembly line workers would be unable to build any cars without all those people. That’s not intended as a put-down. They also have their part in the process, and an honorable one it is. But that’s no excuse to pretend that they’re the whole operation.

    The best argument may be the economic risk of letting the industry fail with the resulting dislocation. The problem with this argument is that, if the industry is not doing well now, and if we don’t have an actual plan that is likely to make it better later, all we’ll be doing is delaying the day of reckoning. And sort of like an earthquake fault, the more pressure we allow to build, the worse the crash is once it comes.

    The arguments used to pretend that the U. S. auto industry is really much better than their sales and balance sheets indicate don’t give me any sort of feeling of assurance that the current team is going to fix things. When they are told that they’re failing they point to ratings in automotive magazines and good reviews. But good reviews don’t pay the bills. “Unreal” people like me, who don’t work assembly lines but nonetheless need transportation, pay those bills when we choose an American car.

    Of course there is an alternative. Get those magazines and those reviewers to bail out the industry. Apparently they believe the manufacturers are doing well. On the other hand, I’m betting they got their test and/or review cars free.

  • Stories in a Chronological Context

    Several things over the last couple of weeks have called my attention to time.  My pastor preached about it last week, speaking of times of God’s extended silence.  I lost some of it while being sick this week which always makes me a bit tense.  Then I received a copy of 24/7:  A One Year Chronological Bible, which puts Bible readings into a chronological framework.  (I’ll get around to reviewing the Bible in a later post.)  Finally I was asked about God’s answers to prayer and the frequencies of his miraculous intervention.

    As Christians when we read scripture we need to be aware of these long periods of time.  There are times to lose our sense of times, especially when our liturgy calls us to become more aware of eternity and less aware of the present.  It is rare in my experience that the liturgy is successful in this call, but it is certainly worth it, and should be more frequent.  But the very experience of eternity impinging on our limited, dare I say puny, time requires that we be aware of time.

    Stories, on the other hand, tend naturally to give a false impression of time.  You cannot tell a story of a long period of time whilst truly giving the full impression of the extended time of waiting involved.  Frequently you’ll see phrases like “after a long time” or “after several months” or even “years passed.”  For the reader, whether it is a few days or a few years, they are passed in just a moment.

    Which in the ordinary course of reading a story is a minor issue.  You know that time passed for the characters, and you’re glad you don’t have hundreds of pages narrating when they ate, went to bed, got up, or went to the toilet.

    But when you go to reading scriptural stories, which provide us with an example (1 Corinthians 10:6), you need to think about this.  How long was it between one thing and the next.  Consider for a moment Judges 13:1:

    The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and the LORD gave them into the hand of teh Philistines forty years.  (NRSV)

    Now how do we normally read this story?  Well, when I got it in church, I heard immediately about the arrival of the angel and then we wandered through the story of Samson as one overwhelming chain of miracles.  Of course, with all this miraculous intervention by God, we also shook our heads over Samson’s terrible failures.  How could he, when God was so obviously with him?

    But that view of the story misses two important things.  First, those forty years.  Forty years ago it was 1978, and Jimmy Carter had been president for nearly two years.  Forty years ago I was in college.  Forty years ago the PC was a pretty marginal idea.  Forty years ago there was no internet.  Forty years is a long time, and the Israelites had been under foreign domination for that length of time.

    Second, there’s the lifetime of Samson.  While the story of Samson can be covered in a Sunday School lesson or so, at least as stories are commonly covered in Sunday School, we’re told that Samson judged Israel for 20 years (Judges 16:31).  Twenty years is an awful lot of lifetime in which to hide those miracle stories.  It may be that Samson spent years between those miraculous interventions wondering whether God was going to do things for him.  Yes, we’re told he always had his strength, but it seems to have come into play only rarely.  All things considered, I would guess that Sampson did often long for God’s more direct intervention

    We can apply this principle to the entire Bible story.  I’m frequently asked why God doesn’t act today in the way he acted in Bible times.  Which Bible times?  Do we refer to the hundreds of hears the Israelites spent in slavery in Egypt?  Or perhaps we’re looking for century after century of the divided kingdom.  Maybe instead we should think about the 400 years or so from the time of the return from the exile to the opening pages of the New Testament.  Sure, we have a few interventions under the Maccabbees, but would you really want to suffer what those guys did in order to get a couple of divine interventions?

    My point here is certainly not that we should pray less, or ask less of God, nor is it to cut off hope.  More importantly, I think we need to cut off excuses.  We shouldn’t claim that God is more absent from our lives than he was from the lives of people in “Bible times.”

    Yes, there are moments in time when God’s intervention is pretty frequent, but even then remember that we are being told a few stories that cover a long time.  The book of Acts, for example, relates around 30 years of the history of the early church.  If we spread the number of miracles recorded in Acts over 30 years of the modern church, is it possible that people would complain bitterly about God’s absence?

    Stories are wonderful.  They can be encouraging or instructive.  But in the Bible they form part of a history of how God has intervened.  Understanding how they fit into time can be very important as we try to learn the lessons they offer for our lives.

  • Book: By Schism Rent Asunder

    This is the second book in this series by David Weber.  I reviewed the previous volume, Off Armageddon Reef, here.

    Weber continues the series with more excellent writing.  I think there is nobody in science fiction who can combine exciting characters, excellent military writing, interesting politics, and a plot that keeps you reading like David Weber can. I often find that as series go on my interest drops.  After a time I quit caring what happens next, but that is not true of any of Weber’s series.

    In By Schism Rent Asunder, we get to learn a great deal about the church, its structure, and its scripture.  It’s interesting, and I’m pretty sure intentional, that the various scriptures attributed to the archangels are generally slightly rewritten passages from the Bible or to some extent from other scriptures.

    On the one hand we have religious suppresion and cruelty carried to the maximum degree, then we have a more moderate church.  Yet there remains the question of whether the entire church is based on a lie.  King Cayleb and his Kingdom of Charis have to face these questions along with the much more practical issue of whether they will manage to keep on living while fighting against “God’s church” and its secular power.

    There’s a certain amount of reflection of the reformation period in Europe with elements like excommunication and the interdict brought into play.

    This book is clearly not a conclusion to the story, but it does answer many questions even as it leaves you wondering just what those power sources are under the temple in Zion, and how long can Nimue Alban, also known as Merlin Athrawes manage to remain undetected.

  • Wondering About Executive Pay

    I’ve been fighting a nasty cold this week, and thus blogging and reading less on the internet and watching much more TV than usual. The experience has reinforced my low opinion of the value of television news as information.

    But this really, truly is going to be a short post. I mean it.

    There are lots of good questions regarding the auto industry bailout, such as why we’re willing to bail out the financial industry but not the auto industry. How about doing none of the above?

    But here’s my question. What is sustaining the high rate of executive pay? We have very highly paid executives, making in the millions, riding companies down to failure. It seems to me one could hire a recent business school grad, for example, who would be willing to ride the corporation down in flames for considerably less money. If these guys were that much smarter, i.e. as smart as their pay would suggest, one would think they would have greater success.

    There seems to be something other than the market working here, but I can’t quite see what it is. Perhaps it’s simply a disconnect between the boards that hire the executives and the people who don’t buy the product. But normally that kind of reward should come from some kind of great performance.

    In reality, of course, the amounts of executive pay are just a minor portion of the money that is being poured into bailouts. But the principle, I think, may be much larger. High rewards are being paid for failure. As consumers and as voters, that is something we need to oppose, irrespective of the amounts of money involved.

  • The Jonah Problem Redux

    Bruce Alderman wrote an interesting post today on what has to be somewhere close to my favorite book of the Bible–Jonah.  He referenced an earlier post of mine from my Threads blog, but I’m not really commenting on that part.  I should also note that while I call Jonah somewhere close to my favorite book, that is a comment that causes my students in real life to burst forth with gales of laughter, since I have labeled way too many passages as my favorites.

    But the thing about Jonah is that there are so many different things you can get from it.  One key element is the way in which people get hung up on the miracle of the great fish, even though pretty much nobody would claim that’s the point of the book.  The great fish is largely a literary device to move the character forward.  You have the twist of Jonah heading off to the Spanish coast (to use an anachronistic name) but then winding up closer to Nineveh than when he started.  It’s an interesting note on the idea of running away from God.

    Bruce focuses on the hardship in which God places Jonah.  Often we’re afraid to comment on such things, but is God really being fair here?  He calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, makes him preach this unpopular message, and then turns and makes him into a false prophet.  I’m pretty certain we’re supposed to read that subtext in the story; I doubt a Jewish audience would miss it.

    So you have the intertwining of several messages at this point.  First, there is the message that God cares about people who are not Jews.  If, as is probable, Jonah was written during the time after the exile, this attitude to foreigners may well stand in opposition to the official position reflected in Nehemiah’s activities.

    Second, there is God’s focus on compassion over vengeance or judgment.  No Jew of the period would imagine that Nineveh hadn’t deserved destruction.  (Note also that if the general dating I referenced earlier is correct, Nineveh had already been destroyed at the time the book was written, making it an interesting “what-if” type of story.)

    Finally there’s the notion of the call of God on a person, and just how that may work out for the one who is called.  I wonder if Jews might have seen in this a bit of the impact of their call or chosenness on their own lives.  Being God’s chosen has not always been particularly pleasant for the Jewish people!

    I like to bring up Jonah when talking about spiritual gifts because inevitably someone is bound to comment on how nice it would be to be a prophet.  I have to suggest they think again.  Prophets don’t necessarily live happy lives.

    When teaching about how to study the Bible I use the phrase “the Jonah problem” in another way, however, which focuses on what Jonah does outside the city.  He’s waiting to see what God will do.  His interest is in the destruction of the city–or not.  So he hangs out waiting for God to act, when it turns out that God has already acted, but not in the expected way.  I define this “Jonah problem” as “looking for the wrong miracle.”

    I like to connect Jonah with Jeremiah 18.  Jeremiah is another excellent example of a prophet called into a very unpleasant situation.  He has to live in a city under siege and preach surrender, thus getting all the patriots up in arms against hm.  In Jeremiah 18 God provides him a vision to explain how it is that God can allow Jerusalem to be destroyed when he had earlier made an eternal promise to David.  (See Psalm 89:3-4, for example.)  God makes the claim there that he gets to change his mind.

    What I see in Jeremiah 18 is a fairly clear pointer to God’s major concern in prophecy.  We tend to look at prophecy as a way of learning what is going to happen.  God’s use of prophecy is to change people’s behavior.

    If a parent tells a child that he will not get to watch TV tonight unless he cleans his room, it is not the parent’s intent to inform the child as to what his evening will be like.  Rather, the parent wishes to get the child to clean his room.  If the room is cleaned, nobody becomes annoyed when the child gets his TV time.

    Perhaps we should consider giving God the same latitude.

  • On Bundling Tourist Attractions

    The Christian Post reports that the Cincinnati Zoo was forced to quit bundling its tickets with those to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. This has been blogged to death all around the internet, and I’m going to join in ganging up on the story.

    According to the Creation Museum’s founder, Ken Ham, however, the zoo received hundreds of complaints, many of which were opposed to the faith and ideas that the museum presents.

    “It’s a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith,” Ham said, expressing disappointment in the zoo’s decision but also understanding of its perspective.

    I want to pick on a couple of points in that one.

    First, in calling opponents of this deal “intolerant people” Ken Ham accepts to bizarre modern notion that a lack of endorsement or assistance constitutes intolerance. I don’t regard those who refuse to give money to my church as intolerant. I don’t regard those who refuse to give money to a political candidate they oppose as intolerant. Bundling tickets is sharing value. It’s not intolerant to fail to do so, neither is it intolerant to oppose doing so.

    Second, the problem here is not the Museum sponsor’s “Christian faith.” It’s their completely untenable scientific ideas which their Museum is designed to promote. I’m a Christian. More importantly folks like Dr. Kenneth Miller and Dr. Francis Collins are Christians. It’s not the Christian faith that’s the problem, it’s the particular unscientific views of Answers in Genesis that are the problem.

    The Museum pushes young earth creationism, which requires a wholesale rejection of the bulk of modern science either directly or in its implications. Of course, we don’t see them rejecting all the technology that’s based on atomic theory when they reject radiometric dating. That would be impractical. But it’s implied.

    In bundling tickets, the Cincinnati Zoo was, in my opinion, giving too much tacit recognition to a museum that should be treated as outside the bounds of scientific discourse. There is simply no redeeming value in it at all. Now note that I don’t say it should be closed, or that its sponsors should be imprisoned, but I do say that they should not be treated as scientists engaged in the endeavor of bringing science to the public.

    One of the great negative side-effects of post-modernism has been this idea that all ideas are somehow equal and that we are intolerant if we don’t treat them as such. It goes hand in hand with the view that if we allow the expression of all sides of an issue, giving them equal time, we have somehow properly covered that issue.

    My view, on the contrary, is that ideas have to earn their place at the table. People who espouse unpopular ideas should be prepared to do the work of getting them to that place. The Creation Museum presents propaganda for a viewpoint that has never earned its place at the table, and indeed has repeatedly demonstrated that it doesn’t deserve such a place. An organization that is engaged in science should not even appear to endorse it.

    David at He Lives takes quite a different position than I do. He says:

    Ken Ham’s (silly) creation museum and the Cincinnati Zoo had a joint Christmas promotion—buy a ticket to one, see both. Now that is an odd, strange-bedfellows sort of pairing—but so what? People who wanted to visit both attractions could save a little money, and both places get a piece of the pie, including potential visits to their respective gift shop and restaurant cash cows. A win-win.

    Of course I risk having David tell me I have my “panties were bunched around his eyeballs” as he did of James Leach, but I agree much more with Leach. These are not merely two tourist attractions. I’m betting that neither institution would claim that as their primary purpose. The Creation Museum has as its goal religious proselytization, and the Zoo, one would hope, has an educational purpose.

    I would suggest that this was not the pairing of two tourist attractions, both of which were harmless. I would see it much more as similar to Disney World offering a bundled package with a tour of some whorehouses.

    But I’m sure I’m just over the top. I take both my science and my faith seriously. Because I take my faith seriously, I wouldn’t want my church contributing in any way to the Creation Museum. Because I take science seriously, I don’t want any scientific institution or group to contribute in any way to the Creation Museum.

  • Christian Carnival CCLIII Has Been Posted

    . . . at parables of a prodigal world.  Go and enjoy!

  • Signs and Wondering

    Over the last few weeks I have heard many stories of people who see certain events in their lives as signs of one thing or another. In fact, I could probably say the same thing about just about any period of time during my life. People are constantly seeing signs.

    Of course there is always a problem interpreting the sign. In fact, in the majority of cases, the person who reports something they thought was a sign also say that they are wondering just what the sign means. These signs can be quite simple things, such as meetings that failed, an actual sign seen on the highway when one is thinking of a particular topic, receiving a payment (or not), and so forth.

    I’m reminded of the great scene in the final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia (The Last Battle) in which the ape is trying to convince the donkey to wear a lion skin, which the donkey thinks is a very bad idea. Suddenly there is a thunderclap, which the donkey takes as a sign that he should not wear the skin. The ape, however, is quicker and says that he was about to say that if the donkey should wear the lion skin, Aslan should send a thunderclap.

    Which presents the problem of interpreting signs–they are so tremendously flexible. The most common temptation is to use a sign to justify a decision that we already intended to make. A close second is the use of a sign to convince someone else that God is on our side in an argument.

    Now I don’t have any problem with us using stories to shape the expression of our decisions. I think many people, myself included, need to create some sort of narrative to go with a decision. I also know that it’s a fact that often some event that I regard intellectually as unrelated, nonetheless pushes my mind onto a different track. At the same time I do know that the event is not a good reason for taking a particular course of action.

    Signs can be a great deal of fun if you treat them largely as a stimulus to creative thinking, but they can be very dangerous things if you take them too seriously. As a general rule, the signs are more difficult to interpret than the original data.