Cinema as Exorcism (three): 2012 and the Persistence of the Apocalyptic Imagination
It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
And now for the next instalment of the ongoing if irregular series on cinema and/as exorcism (and further proof that I am incapable of writing anything of reasonable length, even on a weblog) …
A Promotional Image from the film 2012
Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster film 2012, is many things. Taken as a simple story, it tells the tale of what might happen if the disaster of 2012, the one predicted by the Mayan calendar, brings about the end of the world, an end that comes through the massive shifting of the earth’s crust, which is somehow related to the alignment of the planets. As a piece of storytelling, it is monumentally stupid and filled to the brim with plot holes large enough to sail an ark through (if you don’t believe me, re-read that last sentence). It is also lazily written, bafflingly paced, and at least half an hour too long. It is a dramatic and narrative sinkhole where a number of decent actors – Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Thandie Newton (here saddled with a naff, unconvincing American accent) – go to die for more than two hours in dark rooms all over the world. There is also no denying that it is a visual feast, a thrilling compilation of some of the very best large-scale CGI ever rendered. As a spectacular piece of moderately entertaining cinema, it goes one more step towards proving Guy Debord’s theory that spectacle is becoming all, that the spectacle will soon be, if it is not already, the sole remaining element in contemporary culture. It also offered this viewer the guilty pleasure of watching Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two of the worst cities on earth, crumble to dust.
An International Poster for 2012
All aesthetic matters aside, as a cultural document and as a virtual catalogue of Orientalist stereotypes, the film is almost perversely fascinating. We get the wise old Tibetan lama telling his student that the end of things is not all that bad, and then he surprises us all by producing the keys to an old pickup so the apprentice can escape. Good ol’ lama! So clever he is, just like those Mayans, who had it all figured out way before we, with all our fancy science, ever did! We see the devout – and vaguely feminine – but still stridently technological modern Indian man who dies with a crushing dignity with his family in his arms, his saviours from America having failed to pick him up on their way to the secret giant arcs built in the Chinese hinterlands. At the very end of the film, we are left with the image of the earth’s survivors – mostly wealthy, white, powerful Europeans, of course – sailing in giant arks towards Africa, where, given how profoundly dull all of these people are, will probably build strip malls and Red Lobster franchises. Due to the massive geological upheavals, there is a new mountain range in the south of the African continent, to which our heroes are heading. In a final Orientalist master-stroke, this mountain range, before any of the Europeans ever see it, has already been given a European name.
One of the reasons 2012 is so fascinating, and ultimately so worrying, is that how we imagine our end is an important element of who we are as a culture, as the literary theorist Frank Kermode reminds us in his classic study, The Sense of an Ending (1967). Kermode argues compellingly that every human culture needs visions of the end of things and that they are a necessary element in how we seek to find and maintain narratives that make the world coherent and thus liveable. Kermode writes,
[C]risis, however facile the conception, is inescapably a central element in our endeavours towards making sense of the world. It seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one’s own time to stand in an extraordinary relationship to it. The time in not free, it is the slave of a mythical end. We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises.[1]
We in the twenty-first century have a number of crises to choose from, from climate change to overpopulation to the very real possibility of a global conflict over dwindling resources, a number of which are poised to, perhaps inevitably, lead to the end of life as we know it. The seemingly endless cinematic drive to show us just how these ends might be met is in itself very interesting, as is the fact that such representations appear more frequently as the threat of real-world destruction grows more prominent. No wonder we have Emmerich, who threatens us with the end of the world not only in 2012 but also in Independence Day (1996), his dismal New York-set English-language remake of Godzilla (1998), and The Day after Tomorrow (2004), to serenade us as we march towards the end that people for all time have thought lies just around the next corner.
On top of all this, in important ways, 2012 offers a fascinating case study of the depths in which modern, even ostensibly secular cultures remain indebted to the Bible, and to its vision of the end of days. One of the biblical traditions’ greatest legacies, still readily accessible through such works as 2012, is that it has solidified and given form to that apocalyptic imagination that we still seems to haunt us. Literature, in the form of the modern novel, from which the narrative feature film is a direct descendant, has taken over from the biblical imagination to some degree, but many if not all of the images of the end that we see today (at least in the European and American contexts) are deeply rooted in the Bible’s vision of apocalypse. There is even an interesting and even necessary historical linkage between the two. Kermode notes that there is a crucial point of historical contact between the decline of Christianity’s earthly authority in modernity and the rise of the novel: ‘It is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account of the beginning was losing its authority’.[2] Fiction, then, is crucial to our own self-understanding as modern people living in modern cultures. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, his maddening account of the rise of the modern subject, in fact establishes the absolute importance of literary language for modernity:
It may be said in a sense that ‘literature’, as it was constituted and so designated on the threshold of the modern age, manifests, at a time when it was least expected, the reappearance of the living being of language … literature achieved autonomous existence, and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of ‘counter-discourse’, and by finding its way back from the representative or signifying function of language to this raw being that had been forgotten since the sixteenth century … Through literature, the being of language shines once more on the frontiers of Western culture – and at its centre – for it is what has been most foreign to that culture since the sixteenth century; but it has also, since this same century, been at the very centre of what Western culture has overlain. This is why literature is appearing more and more as that which much be thought; but equally, and for the same reason, as that which can never, in any circumstance, be thought in accordance with a theory of signification.[3]
Literary fiction then becomes an important site for examining the complexities of the relationship between modernity and the religious, the ways in which modernity both receives and mutates the different elements of its religious inheritance. However, precisely describing any relationship between the religious and the literary is a difficult task, as Franco Moretti acknowledges:
Virtually all book historians agree that the publication of fiction developed, throughout Western Europe, at the expense of devotion. This said, one major question must still be answered: did the novel replace devotional literature because it was a fundamentally secular form – or because it was a religion under a new guise? If the former, we have a genuine opposition, and the novel opens a truly new phase of European culture; if the latter, we have a case of historical transformism, where the novel supports the long duration of symbolic conventions.[4]
An International Poster for 2012
To a scholar of religion, two sequences in 2012 are of particular interest: in one, we see on television a mass of people being crushed by a massive stone statue of Jesus as Rio de Jeneiro’s O Cristo Redentor tumbles to the ground, broken from its hillside eyrie by an earthquake; in the second, we get to see St Peter’s Basilica – which for some reason is given the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – collapse and crush thousands of people gathered in the Vatican City for desperate prayer. In a nice, subtle touch (and this in a film where subtlety is the enemy), the first cracks in the dome of St Peter’s separate God’s finger from Adam’s, pointing to depths that this film doesn’t even begin to address.
Even in this deadly, apocalyptic mayhem – in which the audience is treated with almost perverse regularity to the sight of thousands upon thousands of little digital people falling into massive rents in the Earth’s crust, being crushed by falling cars and buildings, drowned, impaled, etc., etc. – not one of the characters, not even Lama Profundity, stops to ask any of the questions that I imagine most people would be asking in such a situation: What is humanity? What is civilisation? Can people make sense of a world in which they are separated from their traditions and their hopes, as the crack in Michelangelo’s fresco seems to imply? Do we in some sense deserve this sort of treatment? Can there be any meaning in any of this?
In 2012, do the people either in front of the camera or behind it ever wonder about any of these things? No, they do not. What is perhaps the most singular disturbing thing about 2012 is just how banal and superficial it makes the literal end of the world. It offers no existential or religious insights, and does not even consider the idea that such events could lead to a real crisis of meaning. It doesn’t even seem to give the people who survive it any pause for thought. The world ends because it ends, because it is necessary to the spectacle of the thing. Despite its lame, ultimately callow conclusions – that humanity must work together to survive, that the home is love, not location – 2012 is perhaps the single most nihilistic film in recent memory. It is enough to make one nostalgic for the cinematic world of even a decade ago, when in October 1999 David Fincher was able to offer an honest, challenging look at nihilism in his visionary take on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. In this sense, the quiet, gradual end of things that appears in Douglas Coupland’s new novel Generation A is far more chilling and far more plausible than the one so vividly visualised by Emmerich and his cohorts.
2012 does nothing to exorcise the demons of the apocalypse that seem to still posses us all. Its vision of the end of things is both utterly implausible and repellently appropriate for the times. The world may indeed come to an end someday, it tells us, but it really won’t matter all that much. By stripping the end of the world of its weight and by refusing to consider its meaning, the film (and so many others like it) give us new spectres to fear in the long moments when we’re alone and afraid in the dark. What is gives us most of all is the fear that indifference is the new fall-back response, even to our own ignominious finale.
When this world ends, the film suggests (though I am sure it doesn’t intend to), no one in their right mind is going to miss it.
[1] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 94.
[2] Kermode, Ending, 67.
[3] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translator unknown (London: Routledge Classics, 1966), 48-49.
[4] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London:Verso, 1998), 169, note 30.
How do the instructions Al Qaeda gave to the 9/11 bombers compare with the Holy War instructions God gave to Israel?
Let’s compare the biblical instructions concerning Holy War in the Old Testament with the instructions given to Mohamed Atta, the leader of the attacks of 11 September 2001. The instructions can be found in biblical passages such as Num 21:1-3; Deut 2:30-35; 3:3-7; 7:1-2; Josh 6:17-21; 10:28; 11:10-11; 1 Sam 15:1-33 and in the Guardian.
There are a number of significant comparisons between the instructions Al Qaeda gave to the 9/11 bombers and the instructions Yahweh gave to Israel. Here are some of the main points of comparison which struck me as I compared the two:
1. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda stir up their warriors by telling them that there is no need for fear, and that the only ones who should be afraid are God’s enemies:
“’The people are stronger and taller than we; the cities are large and fortified up to heaven! We actually saw there the offspring of the Anakim!’” I said to you, “Have no dread or fear of them. Yahweh your God, who goes before you, is the one who will fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your very eyes” (Deut 1:28-30)
“All of their [U.S.] equipment and gates and technology will not prevent, nor harm, except by God’s will. The believers do not fear such things. The only ones that fear it are the allies of Satan, who are the brothers of the devil.” (Al Qaeda instructions, §21)
2. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda try to inspire their people by saying that the few can defeat the many, with the help of God:
“When Yahweh your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you–the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you–and when Yahweh your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must devote them to destruction… It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that Yahweh set his heart on you and chose you–for you were the fewest of all peoples.” (Deut 7:1-3, 7)
“Remember: How many small groups beat big groups by the will of God… If you see the enemy as strong, remember the groups that fought the prophet Muhammad. They were 10,000. Remember how God gave victory to his faithful servants.” (§§12, 37)
3. In the case of both biblical Israel and Al Qaeda, the warriors are told to prepare with acts of washing and purification – because their mass-murders have a pure religious significance:
“Camp outside the camp seven days; whoever of you has killed any person or touched a corpse, purify yourselves and your captives on the third and on the seventh day. You shall purify every garment, every article of skin, everything made of goats’ hair, and every article of wood.” (Num 31:19-20)
“Shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne. Shower.” (§3)
4. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda advise that the warriors should be free fom sin, before their divinely sanctioned mission:
“Therefore, observe diligently the commandment–the statutes, and the ordinances–that I am commanding you today. If you heed these ordinances, by diligently observing them, Yahweh your God will maintain with you the covenant loyalty that he swore to your ancestors… You shall devour all the peoples that Yahweh your God is giving over to you, showing them no pity” (Deut 7:11-12, 16)
“Purify your soul from all unclean things. Completely forget something called ‘this world’. The time for play is over and the serious time is upon us.” (§9)
5. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda admonish that, even though they face possible death in battle, the warriors should be happy and courageous, sure in the knowledge that they are doing God’s will, and confident of their reward:
“From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory. No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you. Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:5-7)
“Do not seem confused or show signs of nervous tension. Be happy, optimistic, calm, because you are heading for a deed that God loves and will accept. It will be the day, God willing, you spend with the women of paradise.” (§24)
6. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda describe the mass-murders as a higher calling. Killing is not to be done with any thought of revenge or anger – but is a rational process, done for God’s sake:
“you shall inquire and make a thorough investigation. If the charge is established that such an abhorrent thing has been done among you, you shall put the inhabitants of that town to the sword, devoting it to destruction and everything in it–even putting its livestock to the sword.” (Deut 14:15)
“Do not seek revenge for yourself. Strike for God’s sake… before you do anything, make sure your soul is prepared to do everything you do for God only.” (§32)
7. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda warn that nobody is to be spared; no prisoners are to be taken; and no plunder is to be taken:
“No human beings who have been devoted to destruction can be ransomed; they shall be put to death.” (Lev 27:29); “Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.” (Deut 7:3); “keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the things devoted to destruction” (Josh 6:18)
“implement the way of the prophet in taking prisoners. Take prisoners and kill them. As Almighty God said: ‘No prophet should have prisoners until he has soaked the land with blood. You want the bounties of this world in exchange for prisoners and God wants the other world for you, and God is all-powerful, all-wise.” (§33)
In both cases, the instructions were given to divinely ordained warriors, preparing them for their upcoming religious slaughters. True and genuine religious slaughters, that is. The idea that such violence is untrue to religion is an idea frequently imposed on Islam by Western liberal humanism. It is also adopted by a small minority of Western Islamic scholars, most of them operating in the West, and wishing to impose a liberal, humanistic conception of Islam on every form of Islam. It is also held by many groups of Muslims who do not share a belief in this violent type of Islam. Islam should not be characterized as either a monolithically violent or a monolithically peaceful religion. Mohammed Atta’s views cannot be generalised to “Islam”, yet also it should not be denied that his were genuinely religious and deeply held Islamic actions. Similarly, the Holy War described in the Bible – whether it in fact occurred or is a fiction – reflects genuine religious beliefs, even if they are rejected today by many Christians and many Jews.
Bruce Lincoln comments, in Holy Terrors (2003):
“It is tempting, in the face of such horror, to regard the authors of these deeds as evil incarnate: persons bereft of reason, decency or human compassion. Their motives, however—as revealed by the instructions that guided their final days—were intensely and profoundly religious.”
Al Qaeda’s beliefs are genuinely religious beliefs, and beliefs which have a precedent in the violence which is an integral part of many varieties of “true” religious practice - not least, the Holy War traditions in the Old Testament.
Here are two good reviews of R. Crumb’s Genesis comic, from two of Berkeley’s Jewish Studies professors. The first review is by Robert Alter, on whose translation of Genesis Crumb largely bases his own text.
“Crumb has always been an artist with a single style, a distinctive and emphatic one–in this regard as in others he is certainly no Picasso; and so it should neither surprise nor disappoint us that he has used his style to interpret the Bible. His women have always been broad-shouldered, big-breasted, thick-lipped, erotically energetic figures with the physiques of NFL linebackers, and that is how his biblical women, from Eve to Rebekah to Rachel, appear. The Crumb brand is certainly here; but in this signature visual idiom he has produced a frequently arresting interpretation of Genesis. I stress that it is an interpretation, because the extremely concise biblical narrative, abounding in hints and gaps and ellipses, famously demands interpretation… The Midrash, produced in late antiquity, is often an interpretive fleshing-out of the spare biblical narratives, an attempt to fill in the narrative gaps and read closely and imaginatively between the lines. And this is essentially what Crumb does graphically, with a special emphasis on the element of flesh.”
(‘Scripture Picture’, by Robert Alter, The New Republic, 19 October 2009)
“What seems to have surprised many of the reviewers, including this one, is not only how “straight” Crumb played the Bible, but also how far from jolting even the most striking of these illustrations are, as if he were not imposing an alien and coarse modern sensibility on an exalted ancient text but rather uncovering a certain Crumbitude that had always been inhabiting it. There was, it seemed to me, an affinity between whatever it was Crumb stood for (sexual lewdness as well as emotional honesty, a fascination with the unbeautiful body, the interconnections between desire and vulnerability or beauty and power) and whatever Genesis had on offer.”
(‘Sex, the Body, the World: It’s R. Crumb’s Bible Now’ by Naomi Seidman, Religion Dispatches, 10 November 2009)
Don’t miss the amazing look-alike which was submitted by comment to the previous post, Cyborg, Hauntology, Spectrality and the Bible.
The Bible does not exist as such. In opposition to the question, “Why drag the Bible in on a subject [Cyborgs, Hauntology, and Spectrality] with which it has absolutely no concern?”, I could ask, “What makes you think the Bible exists – except as hauntology – as that which haunts some current discourse, being both repetition and first time, thing and simulacrum?”
There are so many such current discourses from which to choose an illustrative example. But here is one concerning a chimpanzee, or more precisely, the naming of a chimpanzee.
In an expedition which is frighteningly reminiscent of the New World’s slave-trading past, in the 1950s, the U.S. Space Program sent an expedition to Cameroon, Africa to obtain baby chimps to train as the first astronauts to be sent into orbit. According to some reports, their chimpanzee mothers were slaughtered to obtain their babies. The chimps themselves, of course, were chosen because they were considered dispensible, less than people. And many of them died in space or in training.
What did they name the first African chimp to be sent into space? Ham. Officially, “Ham” is just an innocent name, merely the acronym of the Holloman Aero-Medical laboratory in which the chimps received their training to be astronauts. So there would be no equation of the African monkey with the ancestor of the cursed race of (Black) people of Christian tradition. But the apparent innocence of the acronym is shown to be haunted by centuries of racism when we consider that the name given to the second chimp in space was also chosen from our primeval ancestors. His name was Enos (the Hebrew term for “man”).
So here - at the pinnacle of human achievement, among the most scientific of men, and barely a decade after those previous most scientific men of Nazi German had achieved their scientific acme - is the spectre of a racist and biblical past. It is also a racism thoroughly integrated with science. The implied progression from chimp to black to man (that is, white man) is inherent in the names used within the U.S. Space Program, just as it was among the early evolutionists and anthropologists. The three steps could easily have been derived from Edward Tyler’s own text-book. The pattern is already there in the Table of Nations, dividing the world into three parts, and providing a foundation myth to naturalize the inferiority and servitude of thousands upon thousands of other peoples. Modernity added the scientific nature of the racism, but the teleological ideology of science also has its traces in biblical apocalyptic.
Donna Haraway (she of Cyborg fame) identifies the link between space-chimp and biblical tradition:
“HAM’s name inevitably recalls Noah’s youngest and only black son.”
(The Haraway Reader, By Donna Jeanne Haraway, Published by Routledge, 2004: 92.)
Haraway understands the deep influence of the Bible in Western society. In this regard, she also notes that another chimpanzee in the U.S. Space Program, Chimp #65 was given the delightful name of Chop Chop Chang, “recalling the stunning racism in which the other primates have been made to participate” (94).
Today, as urgently as ever, we must speak with ghosts – engage in a spectral discourse - in order to identify injustices and in particular to identify the unfolding role of the Bible in creating injustice. In Jacques Derrida’s own, now spectral, words:
“No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.”
(Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994: xix.)
For if scholars refuse to recall ghosts, then the work may be left to others with much less critical memories, such as the memory-producing machine that is Hollywood. In the 2008 animation, Space Chimps, Ham III (the grandson of Ham) is picked by NASA for a space mission in which a group of chimpanzees must overcome the evil dictator Zartog on an Earth-like planet on the other side of the galaxy. Evil has been transferred to the other side of the galaxy, many light years from any association with NASA itself, who now appear on the side of intergalactic peace. That is one big transference of guilt! It need not be said that there is no explanation of the pejorative origins of Ham’s name and no appearance by Chop Chop Chang III the grandson of Chop Chop Chang. The institutional racism of NASA and of U.S. scientists has been forgotten and erased, purified and written out of the script. Wonder why? Perhaps somebody asked, “Why drag the Bible in on a subject with which it has absolutely no concern?”
Mark Ryden Sells God in a Box – YHWH is 17-inches tall, pink, made of vinyl, with 3 eyes, and bunny ears
Mark Ryden creates some extraordinary pop-art. A few months ago, in conjunction with Necessaries Toy Foundation, he began selling YHWH in a box. YHWH is a limited edition 17-inch tall pink deity, and there are only 2,000 images of YHWH which have been produced. YHWH is named after the central figure in Mark’s painting of the same name.
'YHWH', Mark Ryden
Here is the box which contains YHWH:
YHWH's Gold Embossed Box
You can still obtain your personal YHWH at various stores around the internet for around US$180. There is a favourable review of the toy at Plastic and Plush, together with a list of YHWH vendors.
I wonder if turning YHWH into a pole is the revenge of Asherah (YHWH’s wife, whose worship and sacred poles were banned after a monotheistic, iconoclastic innovation in Hebrew religion, which occurred some time in the mid-first millennium BCE)? The worshiper in the painting is, after all, a little girl.
Christopher Min considers this is Ryden’s attempt to represent the irrepresentable, a type of apophatic theology:
“What strikes me about this piece in particular, is Ryden’s grasp of Apophatic theology. Strains of Aphopatic [sic] theology within the Christian tradition can be traced as far back as Augustine. This approach, known as “the negative way” or “Via Negativa,” holds that the Divine is ineffable and our experience of God can only be recognized or remembered, rather than accurately described. What’s more, the imperfection of language and our finite ability to grasp the eternal necessitates that any attempt at describing God will ultimately prove flawed and incomplete. To that end, practitioners would not make propositional statements about the nature of God or what God is, but rather, what God is not.
Also worthy of noting is that in the Jewish tradition, “YHWH” is the ineffable and unutterable name of God. In fact, for reasons of reverence, its utterance is absolutely forbidden in many Orthodox Jewish communities, even in prayer.”
(Christopher Min, ‘A Crucifix for the 21st Century’)
'YHWH', by Mark Ryden
Holy water is sometimes available in a communal vessel at the entrance to Catholic and other churches. The faithful dip their hands in the water, moistening themselves with its sanctified droplets so as to receive the power of its blessing and purification. The rite of blessing for holy water reads as follows:
…ut creatura tua, mysteriis tuis serviens, ad abigendos dæmones morbosque pellendos divinæ gratiæ sumat effectum; ut quidquid in domibus vel in locis fidelium hæc unda resperserit careat omni immunditia, liberetur a noxa. Non illic resideat spiritus pestilens, non aura corrumpens: discedant omnes insidiæ latentis inimici; et si quid est quod aut incolumitati habitantium invidet aut quieti, aspersione hujus aquæ effugiat: ut salubritas, per invocationem sancti tui nominis expetita, ab omnibus sit impugnationibus defensa…
“… May this your creation be a vessel of divine grace to dispel demons and sicknesses, so that everything that it is sprinkled on in the homes and buildings of the faithful will be rid of all unclean and harmful things. Let no pestilent spirit, no corrupting atmosphere, remain in those places: may all the schemes of the hidden enemy be dispelled. Let whatever might trouble the safety and peace of those who live here be put to flight by this water, so that health, gotten by calling Your holy name, may be made secure against all attacks…”
However, as Reuters reports, “fear of contracting the H1N1 virus has led many in Italy – where some 15 people have died of swine flu – not to dip their hands in the communal water font.” The Catholic Italian response has been very practical. An Italian ‘inventor’ has invented an electronic Holy Water Dispenser for use in Catholic churches – thereby allowing the faithful to avoid contracting sickness from the very water which overcomes all sickness, disease, and other demonic afflictions.
Holy Water Dispenser
“After all the news that some churches, like Milan’s cathedral, were suspending the use of holy water fonts as a measure against swine flu, demands for my invention shot to the stars. I have received orders from all over the world,” said Holy Water Dispenser Inventor, Luciano Marabese.
It all started with the threatened closure of the biblical studies department at Sheffield University – at least the undergraduate programme – with staff offered early redundancies and no fresh faces to replace them. When the students, both religious and secular, found out, they united against the decision, and letters flooded in from around the world, written to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Burnett, supporting the department and asking for reconsideration. As Professor Maurice Casey, Emeritus Professor of New Testament Studies, University of Nottingham, wrote: “I hope you are aware that this would lead to the wreckage of a quite outstanding feature of British education.” He elaborated, “the Department has a fully justified reputation for research excellence throughout the world, because of the exceptional combination of creativity and independence of mind shown by members of staff in their publications and at academic conferences. These qualities enable them to make an outstanding contribution to British education as well. At a time in their lives when students frequently form and change their views of ideology, morals and everything that matters most, and should learn how to do so, this Department’s students are exceptionally free to maintain their views or change them. The staff contribute to this process as they should, by assessing different points of view in an independent manner by means of evidence and argument, with proper awareness also of what we do not know, and they support students regardless of their point of view. England cannot afford to lose a department like this.” Other letters, with similar endorsements made it screamingly obvious that the department had an outstanding international reputation recognised by scholars from all religious and non religious perspectives.
Finally, it appears the upper bureaucratic powers saw the light. The VC shone through and the department has survived. Thank God (apologies to Simon Holloway**). The department had after all, been awarded the top rating (24 pts) in the QAA Teaching Review. However, it appears that at least one international academic didn’t deem the department worthy of support. In fact this academic has had some rather appallingly serious, false accusations against the department, attributed to him in Christianity Today:
Other faculty [at Sheffield] were “bent on the deconstruction of the Bible, and indeed of their students’ faith,” according to Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary.
This scandalous allegation is all the more alarming considering the Biblical Studies Department’s “Aims and Objectives” outlined in the 2009-10 undergraduate handbook. These might compare with Asbury Theological Seminary’s “statement of faith”. One of Sheffield’s “aims” is to “develop tolerant, professional, and informed attitudes to a variety of approaches to biblical texts”.
The question was, not whether or not this “New Testament scholar” was aware of the methodological concept of ‘deconstruction’, which he appeared not to be, but did he actually say it? So I asked him – as you do – but as there wasn’t any other forum, I asked him in the comments on one of his blog posts … a post about a book called ‘Three Cups of Tea’. He responded respectfully, saying “This is not the venue for addressing this matter. I’ve had an email exchange with David Clines about this and its been sorted”. Ah, “sorted”. As Jorunn Okland a recent member of the Sheffield staff, and now Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies in the Humanities at the University of Oslo helpfully points out on James Crossley’s blog, “old gentlemen’s agreements at the back room is still what counts!” and she added, “Such agreements clearly are more important than public discussion, clear and transparent arguments, apologies, clarifications and the like. But this is perhaps representative of how things work in evangelical christianity?”. So it would seem. Nevertheless, I was delighted, naturally, but couldn’t help wondering … “We can look forward to a public apology from someone soon then”. Horrified, I received a rather terse dismissal: “I doubt there will be a public apology. There are too many wounded in action to account for. Honestly Stephanie, Sheffield did not act wisely in not hiring folks like Loveday Alexander or Andrew Lincoln once they were gone, as they at least nurtured people in their Christian faith” Wounded in action? I thought it was the wounded in action, the staff and students of the department, who deserved an apology … from someone. Besides, Sheffield had not been allowed to hire anyone new, as the powers that be had deemed it necessary to phase out the department completely. As for “nurturing people in their Christian faith”, Mike Koke correctly observed in a comment on James Crossley’s blog again, that “there are always University chaplains and Christian organizations available to nurture faith”.
I was shocked that there would be no apology and obviously the comments attributed to him in “Christianity Today” would not be withdrawn. He appeared to endorse everything they said and hadn’t tried to deny saying them. Ben reassured me “You shouldn’t be shocked. Do a little historical research. Start with F.F. Bruce and the original purpose and focus of the Biblical Studies Faculty at Sheffield. Then compare that to where we are now.” Astonishing I know, but I do know quite a bit about the history of the department and have known the current department for a little while now. I even like to attend the post graduate seminars there. Ben is also under the impression that he can give us all elementary lectures in history and consistently misreads what is said to him – misreading Dr James Crossley of the Sheffield staff for over four years now – and giving us all a little summary of Ralph Martin’s career, someone who retired from the department in 1996 and hasn’t had anything to do with it since! I think Ben assumes that universities should function in the same way ideologically as they did at their conception.
When I suggested he might not know what good critical historical scholarship was, he flew at me, accusing me of not having read his academic work. I corrected him – I have read some of his work. Indeed, I am fully aware of his theories on the authenticity of the Turin Shroud, the authenticity of the James Ossuary, and the theory that the assumed ‘beloved disciple’, whom the New Testament NEVER actually describes as “the beloved disciple”, let alone identifies, being Lazarus. I often wonder if, should he realise that any of these theories were wrong, he would ever concede his error? He has after all, made quite a success of himself with these sensational ideas. Indeed, I know quite a little bit about Ben. I also reminded him that it is “CRITICAL” historical scholarship of which I think he might have no understanding.
Critical historical scholarship … Asbury Theological Seminary, Ben’s employer, is a very conservative institution which is “called to prepare theologically educated, sanctified, Spirit-filled men and women to evangelize and to spread scriptural holiness throughout the world through the love of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit and to the glory of God the Father”. It also endorses the inerrancy of Scripture, whatever that is. Ben at least, only pays lip service to academic freedom. In the Sheffield Biblical Studies departmental handbook, the objectives include having students to “have acquired abroad understanding of Biblical Studies and the variety of approaches used to study the Bible”, to “have acquired detailed knowledge of individual biblical books”, to “have had the opportunity to take modules introducing them to some of the major scholarly issues in the study of the Bible and its understanding in the modern world”, to “be able to relate the Bible to broader cultural and intellectual contexts” and to “be able to assess critically scholarly argument about the Bible and be able to offer informed and reasoned arguments of their own”. There is quite a difference between Asbury and Sheffield.
He then proceeded to make more alarmingly false accusations, including “Sheffield has deliberately avoided hiring people of faith” which is scandalously untrue, as the most recent appointment is a committed Christian from the London Theological School who was chosen on academic qualities alone. Besides, the model for appointments that Asbury Theological Seminary uses isn’t allowed in British independent universities – thank God (apologies again to Simon Holloway*). The Sheffield University Equal Opportunities Policy and Code of Practice for Staff states that “The University will give fair consideration to all applicants for employment, supported through transparent procedures … ensuring appointments are based on individual merit” and “treating one person less favourably than another on the grounds of disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or belief or age is always illegal”. Italics, mine of course.
Later, echoing a comment on this initial conversation thread on James Crossley’s second post on the matter, Ben preached “Going forward one of the questions that ought to be seriously discussed is the issue of sensitivity to and tolerance of theological differences in the students and a thoughtful addressing of issues when students feel that pejorative comments about the Bible or about their faith are at the least not fair, and hardly value neutral.” But all with these allegations fired, where is the evidence? Who are these more than just one or two “disgruntled students”, and when did they attend Sheffield? And “pejorative comments about the Bible or about their faith”? Is this perhaps a reflection of his lack of ability to think critically? As I said above, one of the department’s aims is to “develop tolerant, professional, and informed attitudes to a variety of approaches to the biblical texts”. What is meant by “pejorative comments” anyway? Maybe the conclusion the student may arrive at that the Bible might not be the inerrant document they once thought it to be? These accusations could be potentially dangerous for Ben if someone took action on them. Perhaps he was talking about more than just “one or two disgruntled students” from the distant past, who “have felt both their faith and the Bible and its historical substance disrespected”, and they were not reflecting the current department at all. I discussed this conversation with friends who began to post on the matter, and I informed Ben of these responses.
SUDDENLY … The conversation on Ben’s blog comments DISAPPEARED!!! My! Did he realise he was wrong? Or did he consider the conversation inappropriate for his ‘Beliefnet’ blog? Whatever the reason, he made serious allegations against Sheffield which can no longer be seen. Dare I cast doubt on the academic integrity of Professor Ben Witherington? Kingsley Barrett, a conservative Christian, under whom he studied in Durham back in the 70s, always respected those who disagreed with him and merely asked for arguments with evidence. It’s a shame that principle doesn’t appear to have rubbed off on Ben. Regrettably, I am not holding my breath for any apology.
(This blithering scandal of Ben Witherington’s comments in “Christianity Today” has been discussed elsewhere on the blogs including those of: James Crossley (x3), Jim Linville, Jim West, and Pat McCullough, some of whom copied extracts of the original blog conversation which has now mysteriously disappeared from Ben’s blog.)
(*Roland Boer commented on James Crossley’s blog, “bewithering is becoming bewildering”)
(**Simon Holloway, a non-Christian student in Sydney, was one of those who originally posted about the controversy because he was “livid” that Ben Hinks, a Christian student at Sheffield, had thanked people for their “support, action” and, God forbid, “prayers”.)
Q. How do we know how tall Giants are?
A. Giants must be at least 15 cubits tall (23 feet tall).
Why? Yea, it is a matter of logic. The Bible tells us that the Great Flood covered the mountains by 15 cubits, killing all flesh. Yet, the antedeluvian Giants, the Nephilim of Genesis 6, appear alive and well after the flood (in Numbers 13). Ergo, the Giants who survived the flood must have been more than 15 cubits tall!
(This otherwise unimpeachable logic ignores any other ingenious ways that Giants managed to survive the Flood. Some rabbinic sources claim that Og managed to escape the Flood by holding onto the outside of Noah’s Ark).
Walter Stephens, in his wonderful book, Giants in Those Days, describes this lost medieval knowledge, concerning the height of Giants, as “an erudite commonplace”. Stephens mentions the Twelfth-century theologian Honorius of Autun or Honorius Augustodunensis (PL 172.165) and Sixteenth-century Italian man of letters, Francesco Sansovino as two scholars who had amassed much erudition concerning the height of Giants (65).
Sansovino quotes Tuscan folk as saying: “Ed hebbi voglia anco io d’esser gigante / Vedi che sette braccia sono a punto.” According to Stephens, these lines didn’t really originate with Tuscan folk at all. Instead, they reproduce part of the half-Giant Margutte’s self-description in the Fifteenth-century work by Luigi Pulci, Morgante: “Ed ebbi voglia anco io d’esser gigante, / Poi mi penti’ quando al mezzo fu’ giunto, / Vedi che sette braccia sono a punto” (18.113.6-8).
Why was Margutte a ‘half-giant’? Because he was only 7 cubits, not 15 cubits, tall. As Stephens translates the lines quoted from Morgante, above: “And I also desired to be a Giant, but I thought better of it when I had arrived halfway–note that I’m exactly seven cubits tall.”
QED
Auckland’s St Matthew in the City reprints Tom Scott’s cartoon about the recent invitation for Anglicans to join the Catholic Church, issued by the self-proclaimed ‘Pope’ of the universal Church:
Ok, I was just playing with the ‘theologian’ title there. But in recent years, Richard Dawkins has certainly been a big bad kitty running amok in the theological rooster coop. So he may be more deserving of the title than the dull defenders of dogma.
The news is that Richard Dawkins will be winging his way to Wellington, New Zealand for the Writers & Readers Week (9-14 March 2010) which forms a part of the 2010 New Zealand International Arts Festival. The full programme details are yet to be finalised.
Dawkins’ most recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth, marks a return to his own field of evolution. So his talk in Wellington could be expected to concentrate on that topic.
Sexy New Hebrew Dictionary: The Concise Dictionary of Classical Hebrew – the Abridgement of the (unfinished) Dictionary of Classical Hebrew
Yes, it’s out this week from Sheffield: The Concise Dictionary of Classical Hebrew. Even though volumes 7 and 8 of the unabridged Dictionary of Classical Hebrew are yet to be released, the abridged version can now be ordered. This is the most exciting news in Semitic lexicography for some time -the first Classical Hebrew-English dictionary built up from original research.
And unlike the case for most dead languages, The Concise Dictionary of Classical Hebrew just keeps finding new words!
“The CDCH thus contains not only the c. 8400 Hebrew words found in the standard dictionaries, but also a further 3340+ words (540 from the Dead Sea Scrolls, 680 from other ancient Hebrew literature, and 2120+ proposed words for the Hebrew Bible not previously recognized by dictionaries). All the words in the full Dictionary of Classical Hebrew are to be found in the CDCH.”
That’s hot.
James Harding and Gillian Townsley have drunk their way through every pub in Dunedin, in their quest to find the perfect venue for the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar next February. The venue will be The Bog, located on the corner of George and London Streets, Dunedin. Here’s a pic:
Remember, the due date for paper proposals is 31 December 2009. Proposals to James Harding (james.harding(at)stonebow.otago.ac.nz) or Roland Boer (roland.t.boer(at)gmail.com).
The Dunedin School
Eric Repphun
Deane Galbraith
Gillian Townsley
Gavin Rumney
Elizabeth Young
stephanie louise fisher
James Harding
Will Sweetman
