Eric The Blue

Books of the Bible: I Corinthians

Corinth was--is--on the narrow isthmus connecting the main part of Greece to the Peloponnese.  It had two busy harbors, one on the Saronian Gulf, to the southeast, the other on the Gulf of Corinth,  to the northwest.  The city had been famous, or notorious, in the time of the great Greek playwrights for the kinds of entertainments favored by sailors on leave; Aristophanes, notes Wayne Meeks, in an introduction to Paul's first letter to the church there, had coined the term korinthiazesthai, "to practice fornication."  It's not just a stray remark, for we may infer from the content of the letter that the church members (as Meeks rather delicately puts it) "suffered some confusion in sexual matters." Paul's effort to straighten them out has in America raised the profile of I Corinthians almost to the level of Leviticus.  Indeed, were the letter any more famous Donald Trump would probably know to say "First Corinthians" instead of "One Corinthians."

It's a little disappointing, therefore, to discover only one mention of homosexuals, and that in a list:

Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

By one reading, this means that Ken Mehlman, manager of George W. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004 and chair of the Republican National Committee from 2005 to 2007, is no worse than a greedy reviler.  To me it seems the case is even weaker if one takes account of the context.  The chapter (sixth) containing the verse quoted above is followed, in the seventh, by a small treatise on marriage and human sexuality.  American culture warriors often place the reviled "gay lifestyle" (of the Devil) against marriage and the family (ordained by God).  That is emphatically not Paul's view:

It is well for a man not to touch a woman.  But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. . . .  I say this by way of concession, not of command.  I wish that all were as I myself am.  But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another.

To the unmarried and the widows I say it is well for them to remain single as I do.  But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry.  For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.

For anyone who may wonder about the source of this rather dim view of matrimonial love, the answer is farther down the page: the second half of the chapter makes plain that Paul's view on these questions derives from his conviction that the Second Coming is "impending" and that "the form of this world is passing away."  It follows that one thing is needful, "undivided devotion to the Lord."  Marriage is a distraction; on the other hand, so is sexual desire, which, for some, may be curbed by marriage.  So, "let them marry--it is no sin."  It would be easier to like those who rely in part upon I Corinthians to cause trouble for homosexuals if they ever exhibited an ounce of perplexity over the author's grudging acceptance of heterosexual marriage--not to mention his evident large error concerning the timing of the Second Coming. 

Probably I've been lured into making too much of this.  It's the inherent, enduring interest of all things sexual.  But my point is really that it's the conservative evangelicals who make too much of it.  Paul's ethics are all about how to live in the world at the end of time.  Since the Corinthians weren't living at the end of time, everything he says along this line is suspect.

Anyway, the letter, one of Paul's longest, has sixteen chapters, and not many of them rely upon his peculiar sexual views for whatever interest they possess.  He moves rather woodenly from one topic to the next, with not much in the way of connecting tissue.  The thirteenth chapter, the famous prose poem on love that's read at 107% of church weddings, seems out of place, like it was discovered in Paul's desk drawer and inserted at random toward the end of I Corinthians.  Some scholars think the text of the letter as a whole is not a unity but an amalgam of scraps assembled at a later time.  Others argue, I think persuasively, that the text itself explains why it may seem like bullet points from unrelated sermons.  Paul divulges that he's received a letter from a Corinthian delegation.  He has also heard rumors about their troubles from "Chloe's people," who are referred to explicitly at 1:11 (their, and Chloe's, identity remain unknown).  This letter is his response to the matters raised in these two sources, and he moves through them methodically, taking up first one and then another.  The main division may be detected at the beginning of the seventh chapter: "Now concerning the matters about which you wrote."  So the first six chapters, according to this view, are Paul's response to the issues raised by "Chloe's people"; most of what comes after chapter 6 is his response to the issues raised in the letter delivered by the delegation headed by Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaichus, who are called out at 16:17.

If, however, one felt compelled to search out a unifying theme to I Corinthians, the leading candidate, in my estimation, would be the dour consistency with which Paul rejects Corinthian enthusiasms of all kinds.  It's there in the sex and marriage sections.  In chapters 12 and 14, the theme is "spiritual gifts," preeminently "speaking in tongues," which receive another of Paul's sulky imprimaturs--you can almost, but not quite, make him out to be saying that this kind of "gift" is rooted in the psychological desire to be above other people.  There is a Pauline strain of religious triumphalism notable for seeming untriumphant: 

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles . . . .

He's saying that the world will not recognize his boast as a boast.  Guy on a cross, kind of a downer.

Parenting: reading the tea leaves

 

Regarding  parenting, it's easier to feel sure you're trying you're best than it is to feel sure you're doing passably well, and there are no mulligans.  Parents therefore tend to pay close attention to every clue concerning the kind of people their kids are turning out to be, and it was with some interest that I observed our 13-year-old when she condescended to be alone with me in the TV-viewing room for a few minutes last night.  MSNBC, to which I am addicted, was covering the rollicking Republican presidential race.  Without sitting down, she watched, leaning against a wall, arms crossed in front.  There was a clip of a Trumpean riff on Rubio's over active sweat glands and possibly related dry-mouth syndrome.  Then of course Rubio's suggestion, on the stump, that in the last "debate" Trump had wet himself during a commercial interlude.  She pushed off the wall and headed for the kitchen, the freezer, and the ice cream.  As she passed by me she spoke what to my knowledge were her only words of the evening.  "Effing disgusting," she said.

So that was encouraging.  We seem to be doing okay with her so far.

After last night

The Donald should love the poorly educated.  They're amazing.   Where would he be without all the crackpots who think Obama is a Muslim from MuslimLand?

But he deserves credit, at least, for what I imagine must have been a clear-eyed assessment of the Republican field.  All the "liberal media," not to mention the cheerleaders at Fox, etc., were swooning about the deep, talented field.  Trump, however, jumped in and has been showing the world ever since that he was right: none of the emperors had a stitch of clothing. 

On another topic, true dat.

Intriguing Patti Smith

Amanda sent me a link to this interview with Patti Smith.  If I was the editor of People, she'd be a fixture in the Most Intriguing People feature.  Who else, having made "Horses," "one of the great albums of the rock era" (as Casey Kasem might have said), would move to Detroit, take a job in a factory, and, with her husband, raise two kids entirely out of the public eye?  It's that life experience that lies behind what is obviously her most impassioned answer in the interview linked to above.  She was asked what she thought might be the "biggest misconception" about her.

The thing that bothered me the most was when I had to return to the public eye in ’95 or ’96 when my husband died. We lived a very simple lifestyle in a more reclusive way in which he was king of our domain. I don’t drive, I didn’t have much of an income, and without him, I had to find a way of making a living. Besides working in a bookstore, the only thing I knew how to do was to make records—or to write poetry, which isn’t going to help put your kids through school. But when I started doing interviews, people kept saying “Well, you didn’t do anything in the 80s,” and I just want to get Elvis Presley’s gun out and shoot the television out of their soul. How could you say that? The conceit of people, to think that if they’re not reading about you in a newspaper or magazine, then you’re not doing anything.

I’m not a celebrity, I’m a worker. I’ve always worked. I was working before people read anything about me, and the day they stopped reading about me, I was doing even more work. And the idea that if you’re a mother, you’re not doing anything—it’s the hardest job there is, being a mother or father requires great sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, and to think that we weren’t doing anything while we were raising a son or daughter is appalling. It makes me understand why some human beings question their worth if they’re not making a huge amount of money or aren’t famous, and that’s not right.

My mother worked at a soda fountain. She made the food and was a waitress and she was a really hard worker and a devoted worker. And her potato salad became famous! She wouldn’t get potato salad from the deli, she would get up at five o’clock in the morning and make it herself, and people would come from Camden or Philly to this little soda fountain in South Jersey because she had famous potato salad. She was proud of that, and when she would come home at night, completely wiped out and throwing her tip money on the table and counting it, one of her great prides was that people would come from far and wide for her potato salad. People would say, “Well, what did your mother do? She was a waitress?” She served the people, and she served in the way that she knew best.

She's a poet, a photographer, a rock star, the ex of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the widow of Fred "Sonic" Smith, and a winner of the National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids, published in 2010.  She's rail thin and that's the end of her resemblance to a fashion model.  The first present Amanda gave me was Volume One of Bootlegs from First Avenue--Celebrating 35 Years.  The sixth track is Smith performing "Redondo Beach" in the Mainroom on the evening of November 21, 1998, a Saturday.  I regret to say I wasn't there--probably wasting my life watching a basketball game on TV.  Here she is performing the same song in Stockholm in 1976. 

 

 

The Supreme Court and the coming election

How much time elapsed between news of Justice Scalia's sudden death and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's Facebook message stating that no way, no how would anyone nominated by President Obama replace Scalia on the Supreme Court?  I think it was right around one hour.  I don't know what took McConnell so long:  before his Facebook page was updated, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, preparing to spend an evening chanting liar-liar-pants-on-fire with their sidekicks in South Carolina, had tweeted the same message.

McConnell's message said:

The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.

That's an odd way of putting it.  Didn't the American people "have a voice" when in 2012 they elected Obama to a 4-year term that still has eleven months to run?  On Face the Nation this morning, Rubio said that a "lame duck" president should not make a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.  I wish John Dickerson had pressed him on that.  By Rubio's private definition, Obama has been a "lame duck" since January, 2013.  I doubt he thinks the Court should have a vacant seat for four years, but when exactly is the cutoff?  Had Scalia died a week ago, could Obama fill the vacancy?  I suspect not.  Last month?  On New Year's Eve?  On what date did he lose the constitutional authority to make appointments to the Supreme Court?

Obama will nominate someone.  Since there are 54 Republicans in the Senate, they can shelve the nomination and hope one of the clowns on stage last night in South Carolina is the next president.  It's a strategy,  however, that makes it quite a bit less likely that the next president will  be a Republican.  These kind of shady, partisan maneuverings are precisely what people hate. Being perceived as relatively untainted by the stench of them is probably the main reason "outsiders" have  been doing so well.  It's also true that a big fight over the next Supreme Court nomination helps the Dems, whose chances of winning rise with voter turnout.  Republicans should worry about their Senate majority as well.  Of the 34 Senate seats that will be filled by an election this November, 24 are currently held by Republicans, and six of those are in states that Obama carried twice. 

Scalia's death put Republicans in a bad place and it seems to me they are racing to make it worse.  To avoid getting one more Elena Kagan type justice, they are going to boost  the odds of getting Hillary Clinton in the White House, a Democratic majority in the Senate--and, delayed by a few months, an Elena Kagan type justice. 

Books of the Bible: Romans

One way to study an author is to read the works straight through in the order in which they were written, so as to obtain a sense of his development.  Reading the New Testament straight through, that's not how you get to know Paul, whose letters, or epistles, are presented pretty much in descending order of length.  This means you come first to Romans, which, besides being the longest, is pretty widely regarded as the crowning achievement of extant Pauline theological writings.  It was composed in about A.D. 57, relatively late in Paul's career, possibly before Phillipians but after Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence.  Martin Luther's preface to Romans begins:

This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel. It is well worth a Christian's while not only to memorize it word for word but also to occupy himself with it daily, as though it were the daily bread of the soul. It is impossible to read or to meditate on this letter too much or too well. The more one deals with it, the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes.

More than a thousand years before Luther, St. Augustine had reported, in his Confessions, that his conversion to Christianity had been consummated when, outside in a garden, he had heard a child's voice singing, "Take up and read."  He therefore opened a Bible and by chance his eye fell upon a passage from Romans 13 that spoke directly to his own wavering reflections.  (There are no known instances of anyone performing a similar exercise and opening, say, to a passage about the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant.)  I have a book, The New Testament: An Introduction, by the 20th-century scholar Norman Perrin: it's very sober and learned but I see now, scanning the "exegetical survey of Paul's letter to the Romans," that he is evidently struck mute by the  profundity of Romans 8:

In what is probably the greatest sustained passage from his letters, perhaps the greatest sustained passage from Christian literature altogether, Paul now depicts the details of the possibilities of the new life in Christ as he understands it in his maturity as a Christian missionary.  It is a passage to be read and reflected on by the individual reader rather than commented on by the scholar, and the present writer does not propose to make any remarks whatsoever.

To mimic Paul, "What then am I to say?"  Well, the general reader, handicapped by twenty centuries of intervening time, not to mention the elastic meanings of such terms as "sin" and "law" and "justification," is going to want some explanation for the grounds of the letter's reputation. I'm not sure that the following would satisfy Karl Barth, but I think it's in the right direction, and anyway who can ever tell what someone like Barth is talking about? 

Suppose you think of yourself as an enlightened, forward-thinking kind of person whose closest colleague in Cubicleland happens to be an observant Jew.  He has several habits that you view with disdain, none more perhaps than his way of noisily putting away his work things before the official quitting time on winter Fridays.  You know he does this so that he can make it home before the sun sets, thereby satisfying a Jewish law about Sabbath observance.  There's at least a couple of things about this that annoy you.  One, you strongly suspect that all the noise is meant to call attention to his departure, which everyone knows is connected with  religious observance.  It pleases him that he's observant.  Worse, it pleases him even more that you will have to notice that he is observant, a "good Jew."  Second, assuming for the moment that there is a God, it's ridiculous to think that He should concern Himself with when people get home from the office on Friday.  You suspect the purpose of such "laws" is to set before people a series of trivial hurdles that, when overcome in an endless sequence of mildly taxing acts of piety, has the desired effect of infusing every detail of life with fake religious significance.  Thus religion is enthroned.

Now, you might think of this as a thoroughly secular critique, but it is in line with the general outlook advanced by Paul in the letter to the Romans.  Following the religious law is a mirage, a futile dead end.  Obey all the teachings, observe the Sabbath, love your neighbor as yourself, all of that--useless.  This is because sin represents not ethically dubious acts but rather an inescapable state of being.  You can perhaps grasp something of what Paul means if you are brutally honest about the motivations of all the dear devout people: the self-seeking, the desire to be esteemed, the quest to acquire a reason for flattering oneself about one's goodness.  That Paul calls himself in this letter a "wretched  man" does not mean he thinks the rest of us are any better. 

Yet, while there is plenty to say against our kind, "if God is for us, who is against us?"--from chapter 8, revered by Dr Perrin.  Oddly, though, it seems to me that Paul in Romans is a little hazy on the details concerning redemption.  Yes, it's accomplished, but how?  At least one commentator, Wayne Meeks, seems to agree, for he remarks that in Romans we do not have "a systematic summary of Pauline theology--his Christology, for example, is presupposed, not described."  As we shall see when we come to our consideration of the randy Corinthians, Paul's evident preoccupations in a particular letter are generally attributed to the controversies besetting the original recipients.  But, having founded and visited many of the Christian churches to which he wrote letters, Paul knew firsthand what troubles they faced.  He'd never been to Rome.   Why did they get the letter they did?

No one really knows, but the Roman church of the first century was probably representative of other Christian communities that occupied some not easily defined place on a spectrum--something arguably more than an apocalyptic sect within Judaism but not yet anything like an identifiable world religion.  One characteristic of these early Christian communities, including the one at Rome, would have been a mix of Jewish and Gentile communicants, and it is reasonable to suppose that the place of the Jewish law might be a source of confusion to them.  Paul's solution to the problem signals a decisive break with Judaism.  A leading feature of this new faith would be its insistence on quite a severe anthropology.  Humanity has fallen too far to be able to help itself.  Its estrangement from God can be ameliorated only by God.  Everyone, friend and foe, recognizes this as Christian orthodoxy, but it wouldn't have had to turn out that way.  It's because of Paul that it did turn out that way.  The gospel narratives came later and don't require it.  As Luther indicates, the letter to the Romans has the strongest claim to being the urtext of the Christian religion.

Punctuation pointer

It's tempting to give Chris Christie his due for tipping Marco Rubio upside down and shaking the nothing out of his empty suit, but if he really wanted to perform a public service, he should have stayed in the race and gotten to work on Trump and Cruz.  Maybe it was only that one night that Christie had special powers.  If so, he probably wishes he had helped himself instead of outed Rubio.  Apparently, Republican voters dislike mean boys even more than slow ones.  My favorite Republican, Kasich, had a good night, but let's face it: with the campaign headed south, he's doomed.  It's going to be Trump, unless it's Cruz, right?  The voting has started, two races run, Trump has a gold and a silver, Cruz a gold and a bronze, and the Republicans of Dixie are mostly crazy and therefore a good fit for both of them.

Are you more interested in grammar than presidential politics?  I am a strong supporter of the serial comma, sometimes called the Oxford comma.  It's the one placed right before "and" in a sentence containing a list.  Minneapolis's Star Tribune newspaper abjures the Oxford comma, but I think it is always acceptable and sometimes necessary.  Consider these sentences:

I invited to my birthday party two strippers, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz.

I invited to my birthday party two strippers, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

In the first sentence, there are four invitees: two who are strippers plus two buffoons.  In the second, only two people are coming--a couple of strippers who are also buffoons. 

Rs rock on

I've been watching the politicking, when not shoveling snow or sunk in such classics as Amber Brown Horses Around, and I have to say the rollicking Rs are free of sin--if you accept the notion that the only sin is to bore.  Ted Cruz and his dirty tricks!  Donald Trump having a try at a concession speech!  Marco Rubio, the "boy in the bubble," according to Chris Christie, who evidently can't believe he was outpolled 12 to 1 in  Iowa by a marionette.  New Hampshire is a different place, big guy!  All the cable news talking heads concur.  Flinty conservatives, as opposed to the swooning evangelical variety.

Ted Cruz: listening to him, it seems odd that the word oleaginous existed before he did. 

I think my favorite campaign anecdote concerns his wife's explanation of why she fell in love with him.  Lots of fellas revere the Bible, or the U.S. Constitution, but Ted had them both by heart!  In case you wanted to know what warms up a Goldman Sachs girl. 

From a perch in the reality-based world, it appears the Republican primary electorate, taken as a whole, is inerrantly and sequentially alighting on the most preposterous choices available to it.  The spurned--Kasich, Christie--are generally the least absurd specimens.  I know, Santorum is at the back and he's pretty nutty, always worrying that somewhere two people might be having sex with each other, and enjoying it--maybe that's why he was almost the nominee in '12. 

Marco Rubio is going to save them from Trump and Cruz and electoral disaster?  It's as if I complimented someone on their French and so had to be told by a Parisian that there are very slim phrase books for sale.  "Excuse me, but can you direct me to the train station?" It's all he's got. 

Well, it's more work than Trump is willing to do. 

The only time I agree with these guys is when they're lampooning each other.