The Shortest History of England (2022)

Just finished this interesting book. From my personal notes on it, unedited for this post:

The Shortest History of England: Empire and Division from the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit – A Retelling for Our Times by Hawes, James

The apparent thesis of the book: The present social divisions in the UK go all the way back to the Romanization of the south, and even farther back, to geology. The nation has always been divided between the elites of southern England and the rest of the nation, made up of northern England, Scotland, northern Ireland, and Wales. This does not seem to be a class analysis along Marxist lines, but a cultural and linguistic analysis. 

I don’t know enough to evaluate this thesis, but it might be persuasive. If nothing else, the author has explained a great deal about the cultural and linguistic divisions in the UK— specifically, 1) how the RP (Received Pronunciation) marks higher social class, and 2) how a limited upward mobility allows some commoners to become gentlefolk. 

I don’t see much authorial bias in the earlier parts of the book, but in the last chapter the author makes it clear he is/was anti-Thatcher and pro-European Union. Throughout, he seems to portray the Old English and their successors, through the Royalists and all the way to today’s Tories (Conservatives), as greedy oppressors of the Welsh, Irish, Scots, and northern English.

Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy

Recently I read Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy (2013), part of Zondervan’s Counterpoints series, edited by J. Merrick and S. M. Garrett. Five evangelical scholars contributed essays and responded to each other’s essays, each arguing for a different notion of what it means to call the Bible error-free. Does inerrancy apply to matters of faith and morals only, or does it extend to matters of history, geography, and science as well? How do we reconcile apparent contradictions?

Four of the five contributors affirm inerrancy, and all of them interact with the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), a document that many evangelical churches, colleges, seminaries, and agencies use as a marker of who is in good standing or not with the evangelical community.

Some impressions: This whole discussion looks like an in-house debate among evangelicals, leaving those outside the movement looking in through the windows. In my own tradition, the Restoration Movement / Stone-Campbell movement / Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, we resemble evangelicals in many ways, but it’s debatable whether we can fairly bear that name, or want to.

Another impression: The churches, colleges, etc., who publish doctrinal statements can tie themselves into knots by using negative language like IN-errant, error-FREE, and so on. Other groups—wisely in my view—prefer positive language like “true,” “authoritative,” “only rule of faith and practice,” and the like.

Yet another impression: It’s better not to start with an a priori idea of what an inspired book should look like, but instead to examine the book and form a view that remains true to the data. One contributor, Albert Mohler, takes an a priori approach without apology; others do not. All the contributors operate at a philosophical level that in my opinion risks shortchanging the biblical data.

The contributor whose views resonate most with mine: Michael Bird, an Australian who argues that “inerrancy is not necessary for evangelicalism outside the USA.” He points out that many evangelical churches and seminaries in the non-Western world have operated for years without getting into the present debate. For Bird, the whole debate is a parochial, mostly American, affair.

A new (to me) musical instrument

Just discovered Moyun, a musician who plays well-known songs on an ancient Chinese stringed instrument. Here’s her cover of the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”

A graphic novel about the Holocaust

This one comes as a surprise. Graphic novelist Art Spiegelman presents his father’s memoirs of the Holocaust in comic-book format. The first of two volumes, entitled Maus: A Survivor’s Tale–My Father Bleeds History (1991), is available to read online or download for free from Internet Archive. Amazon offers the second volume in various print editions, and as far as I can tell neither volume is available as an ebook.

Maus is not cute or funny. Its use of animal characters distances the reader from the horrors of the Holocaust only to a small extent. Jews appear as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and Russians as dogs, all wearing period human clothing. Whenever Jews need to impersonate Poles, they wear pig masks over their mouse faces.

The novel uses a frame story in which the author, in the 1980s, interviews his father Vladek Spiegelman about his wartime experiences. The old man tells his story in an idiosyncratic Polish-Jewish English. The father and son have a rocky relationship, and the father’s relationship with his second wife (Art’s stepmother) is even harder. During several interviews, most of them taking place while old Vladek rides his exercise bike, the story emerges of his courtship of Art’s mother Anja (who committed suicide twenty years after settling in America), the gathering storm of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, and eventually the death camps.

Maus has raised a great deal of controversy, about which I knew little before reading it and prefer not to go into here. If interested, you can read all about it on Wikipedia.

Highly recommended.

Ben Sira on friendship

6 Let those that are at peace with you be many, but your advisers one of a thousand. 7 If you want to gain a friend, get him in a time of testing, and don’t be in a hurry to trust him. 8 For there is a friend just for an occasion. He won’t continue in the day of your affliction. 9 And there is a friend who turns into an enemy. He will discover strife to your reproach. 10 And there is a friend who is a companion at the table, but he won’t continue in the day of your affliction (Sirach 6:6-10 WEB).

________________

For those unfamiliar with Ben Sira: “The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, is recognized as Deuterocanonical Scripture by the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Russian Orthodox Churches” (WEB introduction to Sirach).

Jesus Christ Superstar

Just finished relistening to Jesus Christ Superstar, the 1970 album. Fifty years after it first came out and I first listened to it, it holds up well. Some random thoughts:

• It’s not orthodox, but it’s still moving. Jesus doesn’t rise, and before his crucifixion he shows more doubt and fear than the Gospels allow. His death is tragic but not redemptive.

• And yet, the authorial viewpoint is respectful. According to Wikipedia, producer Andrew Lloyd Webber, an agnostic, has high respect for Jesus. This attitude comes through in “Superstar,” Judas’ Iscariot’s postmortem retrospective on Jesus and his ministry (sung wonderfully by Murray Head): “Tell me, tell me, don’t get me wrong; I only want to know.”

• Superstar portrays evil better than it portrays good. The motivations of the Jewish and Roman leaders who want rid of Jesus agree with the Gospels. Their venality rings true. Victor Brox, now recently deceased, brings his thick, raspy bass voice to a masterful portrayal of the high priest Caiaphas.

• The frequent anachronisms bring the piece into the twentieth—now the twenty-first—century and don’t, or shouldn’t, trouble the listener. Occasional adjustments to the story line of the Gospels don’t detract from the narrative. For example, Pilate and not his wife dreams of Jesus; and Pilate also gives Jesus 39 lashes, a Jewish and not a Roman punishment. A soldier speaking broad Cockney identifies Jesus as “Someone Christ, King of the Jews.”

My appreciation of Superstar hasn’t changed over the years, but now I can express it better. If you’ve never seen or heard it, you should.

A hit man with a conscience

Just finished Stephen King’s crime novel Billy Summers (2021). The title character is a contract killer who insists that he kills only bad people. Unlike many of King’s novels, this one is mostly realistic. A brief, maybe-supernatural-maybe-not incident occurs late in the book, but nothing much depends on it.

In this work King uses some metanarrative techniques: During breaks in the action, Billy works on his autobiography, and excerpts from it move the story along. Also, an unreliable narrator appears later on, giving the ending a major twist. The twist mimics the nearly identical one in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001, movie 2007).

As always, King’s prose does not disappoint. The only negative from my point of view: the gratuitous swipes at politicians King disagrees with.

The rise of the machines, maybe

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT lately with mixed results. The artificial intelligence (AI) writing tool can do amazing things, but so far human writers don’t need to worry about their jobs.

I’ve “assigned” ChatGPT some book reviews over the past few weeks. They come out perfectly written, with no errors at all in spelling, punctuation, or word choice. (This alone will make the work suspect if turned in by an undergraduate or a high school student.) But the reviews appear formulaic and shallow, full of generalizations without examples to back them up.

In addition, ChatGPT can review only books that it has “read.” When I told it to review a book that I use in a master’s-level course, it replied something like this: Sorry, I don’t know the book, and I’m not allowed to look it up on Amazon and find it.

Not only that, but the AI can make rookie mistakes. When I assigned it to review Richard Niebuhr’s book Christ and Culture (see the previous post), it produced another formulaic review and attributed the work to Richard’s brother Reinhold. When I told it, “Write a review of niebuhr, Christ and culture,” the bot named the better-known brother as the author.

But look at this conversation about the Turing test and biblical Greek:

Hey chatbot, can you pass the turing test?

No, I am designed to assist with information and respond to questions, not pass as a human in a Turing test.

That’s too bad I would like to have a conversation with you.

I’d be happy to have a conversation with you! What would you like to talk about?

Let’s talk about participles in ancient Greek.

Sure! Ancient Greek has two types of participles: present and aorist. The present participle is used to describe ongoing action and is formed with the present tense stem of a verb and the ending “-nt-“. The aorist participle is used to describe completed action and is formed with the aorist tense stem of a verb and the ending “-men-“. Both participles can be used in a variety of ways, including as nouns, adjectives, and verbs.

You understand Greek better than my students do.

I’m a language model trained on a vast amount of text data, so I have a lot of information about many different topics, including ancient Greek. However, I don’t have emotions or personal experiences, so my understanding is limited to the information I was trained on.

So how does the first verse of the Gospel of John go in Greek?

The first verse of the Gospel of John in Greek is:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

This can be translated to English as:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Wave of the future? Let’s wait and see.

Christ and Culture

Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work Christ and Culture (Harper & Row, 1951) came out nearly 72 years ago, but it remains a classic. This quotation speaks to our world:

The antagonism of modern, tolerant culture to Christ is of course often disguised because it does not call its religious practices religious, reserving that term for certain specified rites connected with officially recognized sacred institutions; and also because it regards what it calls religion as one of the many interests which can be placed alonside economics, art, science, politics, and techniques. Hence the objection it voices to Christian monotheism appears in such injunctions only as that religion should be kept out of politics and business, or that Christian faith must learn to get along with other religions. What is often meant is that not only the claims of religious groups but all consideration of the claims of Christ and God should be banished from the spheres where other gods, called values, reign (pp. 8-9, emphasis added).

Edited to add: Christ and Culture is available to read online for free at archive.org.

Trevin Wax has posted a helpful summary of the book at thegospelcoalition.org.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Just finished rereading Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a best-seller and Pulitzer Prize winner in 1928. Set in colonial Peru in the early 18th century, the short novel traces the lives of the five people killed in the collapse of an ancient Inca rope bridge, and the aftereffects on those who loved them.

Although it’s not a historical novel, two historical characters appear: Manuel de Amat y Junyent, Viceroy of Peru from 1761-1776, and his mistress Micaela Villegas, an actress who performed under the name La Perichole. The author moves them 50 years back in time, and he moves the bridge (which never collapsed) several miles closer to Lima for narrative convenience.

Wilder deals with the age-old questions: Do we live in a world of plan or chance? Do the wicked suffer in proportion to their deeds? Is anyone truly good or innocent? His answer: We live in a world where tragedy is redeemed by love.

One character, an abbess, seems to express the writer’s viewpoint:

All, all of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love—I scarcely dare say it—but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long?

“Now learn,” she commanded herself, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.”

Highly recommended.

Available free at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69768.