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The Dunedin School

Category Archives: Jesus

J.C. – More Jew Than You

06 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by Deane in Jesus, Racism

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

a little bit Jewish, James Crossley, Jeffrey Hunter, Jesus, supercessionism, totally Jewish, ueber Jewish, very Jesus

James Crossley provides an excellent rundown of recent critiques of scholarship’s ambiguous portrayal of Jesus Christ as a Jew.

the contemporary manifestations of ‘pro-Jewish’ rhetoric in NT scholarship is superficial in that it perpetuates the old notions of superiority seemingly more typical of the now so regularly denounced pre-Sanders scholarship. Or, put another way, if we cut through the scholarly rhetoric … have things really changed so much since prior to the 1970s?

– J.C. (James Crossley)

Jeffrey Hunter plays a not very Jewish Jesus in "King of Kings"

Jeffrey Hunter plays a not-very-Jewish-at-all Jesus in "King of Kings"

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Caption Contest: Jesus versus the Cops

06 Tuesday Apr 2010

Posted by The Dunedin School in Jesus

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Easter, Geelong, Heaven on Earth Church, John Spong, passion

The Dunedin School is pleased to announce our very first Caption Contest. Over in that wannabe-mini-America they call Australia, last Easter Saturday, members of the Heaven on Earth Church upset hoardes of little children with a graphically violent crucifixion scene, staged outside a local shopping centre. After the children started bawling and causing an unholy ruckus, and most importantly, interrupting sales, the cops were called in. The authorities quickly removed the bloody Jesus from his cross and detained him for questioning (“Who do you think you are, all covered in blood, like this? You oughta be ashamed. The Son of God, huh? So ya think you’re funny, do ya? How about you accompany us to the station looking like a half-naked Abo, and we’ll see if you’re still making jokes after an hour or two…”).

Anyway, issues of religious freedom aside, this pic is just begging for some witty captions. Go on, have a go (you know you want to):

A free copy of John Shelby Spong’s latest book, Eternal Life, to the lucky winner.

“Well this sucks: John 3:16”

05 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by thechristseminar in Cartoons, Jesus, Religion

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Advertising, St Matthew in the City

Another graffiti attack on a Church billboard has left the rather bizarre message “Well this sucks: John 3:16″.

I assume that this means that the Graffiti commentator thought that the content of John 3:16 sucked, or else they thought Jesus thought John 3:16 sucked.  The latter makes the most sense of this cryptic message.

However this raises the second question: does this mean Jesus thought that it sucks that God gave his son (ie. him), or that is sucks that we will have eternal life?  Either way the fact that Jesus is the one saying that John 3:16 sucks means that he was not really down with this plan.  Surely, the only possible explanation of this piece of exegesis is that the graffiti commentator has a theology that claims that Jesus was an unwilling sacrifice who did not want us to have eternal life?

Milbank: The Church as Poo

19 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Jesus

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

John Milbank, poo

In a recent interview, the unradical and tediously orthodox John Milbank recently described the Church in this way:

“the Church is … the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ.”

While I am no expert on the human digestive system, I am quite sure that the ultimate “continued event” of an “ingestion” is a poo.

But Milbank’s scatotheology does not end there. For something must emerge even from the poo (that is, theology itself):

“All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church [the poo], which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man”

So theology is a poo’s poo; the shit of shit. And it doesn’t stop there, because theology mediates a further presence. Applying Milbank’s logic, the God-Man is a poo’s poo’s poo all of this shit originates with the God-Man. And at the origin of all this shit, according to Milbank, is the God-Man.

Even though Milbank and Žižek seem to have argued almost entirely at cross purposes in their recent co-written book (The Monstrosity of Christ), here in his conception of the Church and Christ Milbank finally approximates Žižek’s own view:

“Protestantism … [conceives] Christ as a God who, in his act of Incarnation, freely identified himself with his own shit, with the excremental Real which is man … ”

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (2006): 187)

As a further complication, Milbank has also attempted to expel Adam Kotsko from his excremental body. See “Because I am lukewarm…”.

How to distinguish Biblical Metaphor from Literal Meaning

04 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Luke Johns in Jesus, New Testament

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

incarnation, Jesus, literal, Metaphor

God: I’ve already put in the scriptures that the Earth hangs upon nothing, over empty space [Job 26:7] – and let’s face it, how is that not obviously and irrefutably divinely revealed scientific knowledge about the nature of the universe?

Divine Council: Well, you also told them that the Earth sits upon pillars [1 Sam 2:8].

God: No, no. That one’s just metaphorical.

Divine Council: Oh. And the other one’s not?

God: No. The other one’s scientific fact. It’s – you know – hanging in … in space.

Divine Council: Well, how are people meant to tell the difference?

God: Well – the ones that are correct are facts and the ones that aren’t correct are just metaphors, of course!

– NonStampCollector, “What Would Jesus NOT Do?” (4:46–5:15)

How the more spiritually minded obsess about the body

11 Friday Dec 2009

Posted by Deane in Hebrew Bible, Jesus, Purification, Symbol

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

cannibalism, copulation, Eucharist, excretion, idolatry, John Milton, Maggie Kilgour, On Christian Doctrine, scatophagy, spiritualisation

In a well-known twist, what usually results from the illusory attempt to lead a pure and spiritual existence, free from material baseness, is an obsessive fantasizing about excreting, copulating, and other “lower” bodily functions.

For example, the more puritanical among the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Protestants were carrying on a long tradition of iconoclasm, one found in the biblical books, when they attempted to purify Christian rites of any material significance. The way they saw things, the Eucharist must be viewed as a spiritual remembrance which rendered the material bread and wine merely accidental or it would inevitably descend into gross and base literalism: the cannibalistic eating of the body of Christ. The nuanced Catholic conception of the symbol as something both present and physical, and yet absent and transcendent, got caricatured as gross materialism, via a fervant literalism that itself was responsible for creating the idol which it was criticising.

So John Milton, in On Christian Doctrine, warns that the Eucharist must be no more than an analogy for a spiritual process. The alternative, in Milton’s fantasy (although never conceived as such by his real rather than imaginary Catholic opponents), was idolatry and scatological obsession:

“if we eat his flesh it will not remain in us, but to speak candidly, after being digested in the stomach it will be at length excluded.”

(On Christian Doctine, 1.28; tr. in Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism)

Or, as Milton later caricatures the Catholic view, shuddering (with a secret delight?) to even think about it:

“when [Christ’s body] has been driven through all the stomach’s filthy channels it shoots it out – one shudders even to mention it – into the latrine.”

(On Christian Doctine, 6.560; tr. in Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism)

We’ve got both sides of the debate here, so it’s fairly easy to work out that Milton is misrepresenting the symbolic Catholic view. Perversely, it is Milton himself who is grossly obsessing on the materiality of the Eucharist. As Maggie Kilgour comments:

“in his attack on Catholic materialism he cannot resist the temptation of dwelling obsessively on bodily images, especially those related to the ‘lowest’ functions of eating and excretion. His own dualistic definition of communion enables him to indulge in the materialist fantasies he is suppose to be denouncing by projecting them outside of himself onto another group that he then attacks.”

(From Communion to Cannibalism, 84)

By contrast, in Isaiah 44, we don’t get both sides of the depiction of Babylonian worship, but just the Jewish caricature of the foolishness of idol-worship. But as George Soares-Prabhu questions in his article, “Laughing at Idols”: might there actually have been in Babylonian religion, behind this base caricature of idols,  “visual theologies of great depth and power”?

Tasting the Perimeter: The Porn Bible and God Loves Fags

02 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by Deane in Christianity, Jesus, Universalism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Candace Chellew-Hodge, Craig Gross, erotica conventions, Fred Phelps, God Loves Fags, Jesus Loves Porn Stars, Perimeter Church, Randy Pope, Tasting the Perimeter, Universalism, XXXChurch, Žižek

Jesus Loves Porn

A few years ago, evangelical Christian, Craig Gross started handing out “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” Bibles at erotica conventions, which provided a titillating story for the mainstream media to exploit. His ministry, which includes an online church for those suffering from porn addiction (XXXChurch.com), has recently expanded to attending Gay Pride festivals, where he organizes the handing out of “Jesus Loves You” water bottles and wrist bracelets. Gross commenced his recent “pro-gay” crusade by staging a counter-protest against Fred Phelps’ infamously kooky wee church, spreading what can only be described as a sort of “God Loves Fags” message. The message is intended as a reversal of the officially expressed anti-porn and anti-gay stance of most American Christians. In other words, they’re saying, “we are following Jesus’ example, and letting everybody in” (to inclusion in the Church, that is).

Except, as Candace Chellew-Hodge writes in a recent Religion Dispatches article, they’re not really. The apparent universalism of their expressed position turns out, on closer examination, to be an exclusion of real flesh-and-blood fags and pornstars. Who is really accepted? Is it those with non-monogamous, non-heterosexual sexual habits? I don’t think so. Instead, it is reconfigured, imaginary people, once they have been viewed through an idealistic eschatological lens — as if they were incorporated into the exclusivist Christian group, or rather, if they were in fact already the very same members of that group. The message is: we will include you, if you are not you… in fact, if you are, well, us! The one thing this purported universal Christian love will not do is love the person as they are, let alone allow a gay man to penetrate their community.

Randomly generated quote from Badiou, LaClau, Žižek, or Negri:

“What is perceived here as the problem is precisely the Christian universalism: what this all-inclusive attitude (recall St. Paul’s famous “There are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks”) involves is a thorough exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other “particularistic” religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon. The Christian motto “All men are brothers,” however, means ALSO that “Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT MEN.” Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the Chosen People and encompassing all of humanity – the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendenti[ous]ly excludes non-believers from the very universality of humankind.”

(Slavoj Žižek, On Belief. Routledge, 2001: 143-144)

Chellew-Hodge notes that one of Gross’s partner churches in the recent Atlanta Gay Pride outreach was “Perimeter Church” – “a member of the Presbyterian Church in America—the ultra-conservative arm of the Presbyterian Church.” That indicates the type of interests attracted to this “kinder, gentler Fred Phelps.”

Rimmer

Rimmer

Interestingly, Perimeter Church offers an introductory presentation to their church (for anybody, including curious ex-gays and ex-porn-stars). They have called this introductory presentation, “Tasting the Perimeter.” If you’re interesting in tasting the perimeter with them, you should establish contact with the organizer, whose name is Randy Pope.

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