Higgaion

Whatever happened to iTanakh?

drcheard — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:01:48 +0000

iTanakh is down temporarily, but will return

If you’ve tried to visit iTanakh recently, you may have received a “page not found” or “server not responding” error. I apologize for that; I just discovered it this morning and I don’t know how long the service has been down. The problem apparently stems largely from my hosting provider changing the way they organize files on the servers, a change meant to accommodate a new front-end for users. At any rate, iTanakh will be down for a while, but I definitely intend to bring it back.

In fact, I’m working on a way to bring it back better than it was before—better, stronger, faster. Well, maybe not faster, but you get my drift. I’ve purchased some software that promises to help me transform iTanakh from static HTML pages to a database-driven site. If all goes well, the software will even let me enable some quasi-social features like link ratings and user comments on the various listings. Please stay tuned, and don’t give up on iTanakh!

שָׁלוֹם עָלֵיכֶם

Pepperdine Bible Lectures 2013 via iTunes U

drcheard — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:30:34 +0000

Pepperdine Bible Lectures 2013

During the first week of May each year, Pepperdine University hosts the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, drawing several thousand members of Churches of Christ to campus for three and a half days of preaching, worship, and Bible study classes.

In past years, Pepperdine has contracted with an independent firm to record and distribute the Bible lectures. Those recordings were convenient, but could get expensive. This year, Pepperdine decided not to subcontract the recordings, and to try to make the recordings available for free via iTunes U. Not all classes were recorded, and speakers weren’t informed of this until Thursday night.

Sadly, my own class—“As Far As We Know: Genesis 1 and Contemporary Science” was not recorded, though I could easily have carried my own recording equipment had I known about the new procedures. On the other hand, Richard Beck’s two-day series on “Love Wins” (part 1, part 2) and Jeff Childers’s two-day class entitled “‘Eucatastrophe!’ Says J.R.R. Tolkien” (part 1, part 2) are among the 65 sessions published so far.

So head on over to the 70th Annual Pepperdine Bible Lectures page in the iTunes store, browse the selections there, and find something interesting to help you pass the time during an upcoming commute, workout, or similar activity.

שָׁלוֹם עָלֵיכֶם

Posturing for praise and prayer: standing, kneeling, and bowing

drcheard — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:30:18 +0000

Photo © jminso679 via Fotolia

Richard Beck’s account of kneeling for prayer at the San Buenaventura Mission during his recent visit to the Pepperdine Bible Lectures touched a nerve with me.

The old kneeler creaked loudly in the silent space, with a big echoing knock when it hit the floor. I knelt and took out my prayer book for morning prayers.

In many Church of Christ worship services nowadays, including the song services preceding the keynote sermons at the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, a sort of expectation has developed that the congregation will stand during songs that refer to standing. Back in Dallas in the 1990s, when Richard and I became good friends while working on our doctoral degrees at Southern Methodist University and worshiping at the Preston Road Church of Christ, the following scenario was fairly common at church. With the congregation sitting down, the song leader would launch us into the first verse of “I Stand in Awe of You.” We’d remain seated for the first verse, and when we got to first iteration of “I stand, I stand in awe of you” the first time through the chorus, everybody would stand up. I’m sure you get the picture. This remains pretty typical for large suburban Churches of Christ. It’s so predictable that it’s almost become hackneyed, but I don’t really object. I sing better standing up, anyway.

But now here’s the scenario that bugs me, and I’ve seen it over and over again in large suburban Churches of Christ and at Pepperdine Bible Lectures. The song leader launches into “Light the Fire.” As we sing “I stand to praise you,” everybody stands up. Cliché, but unobjectionable. But then we sing, “and I fall to my knees”—and everybody remains standing up. Why do we do things this way?

Richard could probably figure out some psychological reason for why we stand up when we sing “I stand,” but we don’t kneel when we sing “I kneel,” and we don’t bow down when we sing “we bow down.” Perhaps Richard would postulate that it has something to do with the way it makes us feel. Standing up makes us feel positive and triumphant. Kneeling and bowing make us feel humble and even debased. Richard might even work excrement and/or mortality in there somewhere.

Me? I’m going to blame the furniture. Okay, I should really cop to not kneeling myself just out of sheer self-consciousness and a kind of passive peer pressure. But let’s deflect this conversation from my own faults to the furniture. Churches of Christ don’t have kneelers, creaky or otherwise. Our auditoriums—we don’t even call them “sanctuaries”—are engineered for efficiency, designed to get the largest number of listeners into the space available. Our churches that have pews pack them tightly together to get a few more into the room. Our churches that have movable chairs use the kind that can be stacked up and moved aside so the room can be repurposed, which precludes a kneeler built into the back of the seat in front of you. When we worship in Firestone Fieldhouse during the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, we’re in a basketball stadium, sitting in or standing up from tightly-packed chairs designed for spectating, or bleachers designed for spectating, or folding chairs placed on the hardwood basketball floor. These arrangements accommodate standing just fine. They don’t accommodate kneeling very well, especially for the elderly. Our worship spaces weren’t designed with kneeling in mind.

More seriously, I think that our copious amounts of non-kneeling in Churches of Christ may derive partially from our Americanness. (If that wasn’t a word before, it is now.) In American culture, kneeling is not a common way to show respect. We don’t kneel to the president or, for those serving in the armed forces, to superior officers. We don’t kneel to our parents or to elderly people. We don’t kneel when a judge enters the room. We don’t kneel when welcoming a guest to our table. Instead, if an American wants to show respect in these situations, he or she stands up. So even though it violates my sense of “kinesthetic onomatopoeia” to stand while singing about kneeling, the semantic value of standing and kneeling may not be very far apart in these contexts.

And it sure is easier to stand in those tiny spaces between the pews.

A prayer on Mother’s Day

drcheard — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:56:46 +0000

Not Only a Father by Tim Bulkleley

I received an eleventh-hour request to offer the opening prayer at our Sunday morning worship service on May 12, 2013. Reflecting on the work of Tim Bulkeley and many others before him, I found the following words appropriate.

Lord God, on this day that our nation sets aside to celebrate the mothers among us, we marvel at the way you mothered your people Israel.

When Israel was a child, you loved him, and out of Egypt you called your son. You taught him to walk, held him in your arms, swaddled him with love, lifted him to your cheek, bent down to feed him.¹

And when Israel deserted the rock that bore him, when he turned away from the God who gave birth to him,² your heart winced and your compassion grew warm and tender.³

And as you waited during the time of his punishment, as he suffered the consequences of his rebellion, you kept still for a very long time. You were silent and restrained yourself. But then, like a woman in labor you moaned, you gasped,⁴ bringing forth your people Israel once again from the lands where they had been scattered, gathering your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.⁵

And now your son Jesus has sought us, and found us, and has brought us into your family like adopted children.⁶

And so we thank you for and honor today those earthly mothers who reflect the heavenly, motherly love that you have shown to your people throughout the ages. And we seek your blessings on mothers everywhere, in all stages of life, in all seasons of joy and grief.

¹ Hosea 11:1, 3–4
² Deuteronomy 32:8
³ Hosea 11:8
⁴ Isaiah 42:14
⁵ Matthew 23:37
⁶ Ephesians 1:5

שָׁלוֹם עָלֵיכֶם

Oh! Oh, selah!

drcheard — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:10:51 +0000

“King David Playing the Harp” by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Beckhorst (c. 1616), via Wikimedia Commons

Note: This is a repost, by request, of a post originally published on June 27, 2007. (If you need to know why it disappeared in the first place, please read about the “Secret origins of the Higgaion reboot.”)

In a ~~recent~~ June 27, 2007 post, Rick Brannan expressed a desire to read what John Hobbins, Tyler Williams, and I might have to say about the somewhat mysterious word סלה selah, which appears some 71 times in the psalms, plus three more occurrences in Habakkuk 3. I do not pretend to any special knowledge about this word, but in keeping with Rick’s request, I will share some observations.

First, etymology, which I think is not much help. Lexicographers recognize two verbs spelled סלה. One is translated “to value” and the other “to reject.” There is also a verb סלל “to build up.” I have no idea whether any of these are related etymologically to the mystery word סלה.

Now, for the function of סלה. When asking questions like this, I prefer to work inductively, so here’s what I notice about how סלה is used in the psalms.

Sometimes, סלה seems to occur in a position where the psalm content seems to shift mood, or to break up “contrasting” content. For example (all quotations are NRSV, and the English verse numbering is used; the Hebrew verse numbering will often differ by one verse, since English versions don’t number the superscriptions, while the Hebrew text treats these as separate verses):

Ps 3:2–3 …many are saying to me,
“There is no help for you in God.”
סלה
But you, O LORD, are a shield around me …

Ps 4:2–3 How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame?
How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?
סלה
But know that the LORD has set apart the faithful for himself,
the LORD hears when I call to him.

See also Ps 4:4–5; 7:3–8; 32:4–5, 5–6; 39:11–12; 44:8–9; 46:3–4 (?), 7–8 (?); 52:5–6; 54:3–4; 57:6–7; 62:4–5; 89:37–38 (praise/סלה/lament).

Other times, סלה seems to occur in a position between distinct but consistent thoughts. Some of these could be seen as סלה standing between a more specific statement and a more general statement, but this pattern is not evident in all of these examples:

Ps 3:4–5 I cry aloud to the LORD,
and he answers me from his holy hill.
סלה
I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, for the LORD sustains me.
(I.e., God answered my prayer on a specific occasion / סלה / I trust God in general.)

Hab 3:3 God came from Teman,
the Holy One from Mount Paran.
סלה
His glory covered the heavens,
and the earth was full of his praise.
(I.e., God was made manifest in a specific location / סלה / God was made manifest in general.)

Hab 3:9 You brandished your naked bow,
sated were the arrows at your command.
סלה
You split the earth with rivers.

Hab 3:13–14 You crushed the head of the wicked house,
laying it bare from foundation to roof.
סלה
You pierced with his own arrows the head of his warriors …

See also Ps 9:16–17 (where you will also find another interesting term); 20:3–4; 21:2–3; 39:5–6; 49:13–14; 52:3–4; 55:7–8; 57:3; 60:4–5; 61:4–5 (desire/סלה/rationale?); 62:8–9; 67:4–5; 68:7 (chronological setting/סלה/events), 19–20, 32–33; 75:3–4; 76:9–10 (?); 77:9–10, 15–16; 81:7–8; 82:2–3; 83:8–9 (complaint/סלה/plea); 84:4–5, 8–9; 85:2–3; 87:6–7; 88:7–8, 10–11; 89:45–46 (complaint/סלה/plea), 48–49 (complaint/סלה/plea); 140:3–4 (complaint/סלה/plea); 8–9; 6–7.
At still other times, סלה is the last word in the psalm (see Ps 3:8; 9:20; 24:10; 46:11).

One could pretty easily mount an argument that סלה separates stanzas or liturgical “movements” in Psalm 24. However, “exporting” that understanding to other psalms doesn’t work so well, and requires a great deal of speculation. The same explanation might work for Ps 32:7–8, where סלה stands between address to God and address to the human audience, and Ps 47:4–5; 48:8–9; 49:15–16 (change of addressee?); 50:6–7 (change of speaker); 66:4–5 (change of addressee), 7–8 (change of addressee), 15–16 (change of addressee); 67:1–2 (change of addressee); 76:3–9 (change of addressee); 77:3–4 (change of addressee); 87:3–4 (change of speaker); 89:4–5 (change of speaker). In Ps 59:5–6 and 59:13–14, סלה stands at the end of a verse, positioned just before the Psalm’s refrain.

The use in Ps 55:19, where סלה seems to interrupt the sentence, is utterly opaque to me.

So, I perceive several different positions in which סלה appears:

Topic A / סלה / topic B (contrastive)
Topic A / סלה / topic A’ (consistent)
Speaker A / סלה / speaker B (change of speaker)
Addressee A / סלה / addressee B (change of addressee)
סלה before refrain
סלה at end of psalm
סלה at change of liturgical action

I cannot really see any particular “common thread” that unites all these uses. In short, I’m baffled. I know of no better explanation than those that place סלה in the company of words like הגיון ,שגיון ,משכיל, etc.; that is, mysterious words that probably have some kind of liturgical or musical significance that is now all but lost to us.

Sorry, Rick. It’s not very satisfying. But it’s the best I can do just working with the Hebrew text. I’m unaware of any use of סלה in any inscription or whether it appears in the “sectarian” poetry from Qumran, and I’m not in a position (geographically) to check at the moment.

שָׁלוֹם עָלֵיכֶם

Handling handouts at connected conferences

drcheard — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 01:03:13 +0000

Photo © Belyaevskiy via Fotolia

While at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature this past weekend, I attended several sessions in which presenters brought handouts — but not enough of them. In fact, I think I only attended one session in which the handouts didn’t run short, and that session met in a relatively small room on Tuesday morning.

At the same time, I observed a good half to three-quarters of the attendees using smartphones, tablets, or laptops.

Given the relatively high level of connectivity at the Annual Meeting, presenters can very easily overcome the too-few-handouts problem by placing PDF copies online. Presenters who don’t manage their own dedicated webspaces can easily store their handouts online using Dropbox or similar services. URL shorteners like bit.ly, ow.ly, and goo.gl can keep the addresses short and convenient. You could even print a QR code on a few business cards or index cards and pass them around to help users quickly grab your handout.

If you’ve gone to the trouble to make a handout, go to the trouble to make sure your audience gets to see it.

שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם

The divine names in Genesis 1–2: a medieval solution to a modern problem

drcheard — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 20:48:30 +0000

Dead Sea Scrolls Psalms fragment with the Tetragrammaton written in Paleo-Hebrew

As most Higgaion readers probably already know, Jean Astruc’s “conjectures” about the alternation of divine names in the book of Genesis eventually gave rise to the modern Documentary Hypothesis, given classic expression by Julius Wellhausen and rapidly adopted by a majority of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars.

Several centuries before Astruc, however, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164) transmitted a different explanation:

Note that from the first verse of the Torah until the word made (Gen. 2:3), Scripture refers to the Deity as Elohim. Afterward, the honored and revered name (the Tetragrammaton) is coupled with it. How precious are the words of the ancients of blessed memory who said that the complete name of God is used over a complete world. Prior to the completion of creation there was no power to receive this name. (Ibn Ezra, commentary on Genesis, trans. Strickman and Silver, 1988: 57)

Although he celebrates here “the words of the ancients of blessed memory,” we must not think of Ibn Ezra as some sort of hidebound traditionalist (a tautology, I know). We might even credit Ibn Ezra with inventing source criticism by attributing Isaiah 40–66 to a different prophet than Isaiah of Jerusalem, son of Amoz. Yet here he offers readers an explanation of the “delay” in the Tetragrammaton’s appearance that coheres well with the content of the text of Genesis 1:1–2:3. His explanation may not accurately reflect the text’s history, but it does give us some caution about hitching our wagons too tightly to 19th-century solutions just because they’re “newer” than 12th-century solutions.

שָׁלוֹם עָלֵיכֶם

Secret origins of the עִבְרִית מִקְרָאִית page

drcheard — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:25:46 +0000

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As longtime Higgaion readers know, I teach Pepperdine’s three-course Biblical Hebrew sequence, which we offer in alternate years (when the fall semester begins in an odd-numbered year). I’ve posted a few quizzes and teaching slides here, but only yesterday did I finally create a dedicated page to serve as an index for this growing list of resources. If you use any of these resources to teach or study Hebrew, please be so kind as to leave a comment to that effect at the bottom of the new עִבְרִית מִקְרָאִית page.

I also took the opportunity yesterday and this morning to revise several of the exercises for a more consistent look and feel. Furthermore, I added two new quizzes, one focused on cardinal numbers (with a masculine variant and a feminine variant, since Hebrew numbers inflect for gender) and one focused on various times of day and typical activities at those times.

Just in case anyone wonders about this: in general, I lean toward self-publishing material under a CC-BY license. However, because these quizzes often use images that I’ve licensed from elsewhere, I must apply the stricter CC-BY-ND license to these quizzes, along with securing the PDFs against reuse of the images. Such measures cannot assure that end users respect the copyright holders’ rights in these matters, but they do represent my good-faith attempt to protect those rights.

שָׁלוֹם עָלֵיכֶם

The inspiration of scripture: prophetic sermons

drcheard — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 14:30:13 +0000

Michelangelo’s painting of Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel

Note: If this is your first exposure to this series, I’d appreciate it if you’d start with the introduction to the series and read through in order so that you’re able to put this post in context.

The previous installment in this series examined all the texts I could find in the Bible in which a heavenly being (God, the exalted Christ, or an angelic interlocutor) tells a human to write something, and discloses to that human the content that should be written, but does not quote an exact string of text that the human in question should write. In most of these few instances, the human writer is having or has just had some sort of visionary experience, which he (I haven’t found any such texts involving women) is told to communicate to someone else (as in Ezekiel 40–48). I also dealt with the closely related phenomenon of a biblical figure having a visionary experience and then communicating that experience to other people despite the absence of any divine command to write (as in Ezekiel 1). I called this “inspiration by disclosure” (because “inspiration by revelation” could create confusion with the biblical book of Revelation, and because “revelation” doesn’t start with a d —a point you’ll appreciate more fully later in the series).

But what about straight-up prophetic sermons that don’t derive from visionary experiences of the type associated with Ezekiel and Revelation’s visionary John? Do these represent instances of “inspiration by dictation,” “inspiration by disclosure,” a blend of the two, or something else entirely?

For myself, I am perfectly content to leave the matter fuzzy, and simply acknowledging that these instances live somewhere in the same neighborhood as “inspiration by dictation” and “inspiration by disclosure.” I hesitate to try to draw this distinction too sharply, because doing so requires, to some extent, speculating about the prophets’ subjective experiences of receiving revelation from God, and I’m nowhere near as confident as, say, Johannes Lindblom (not to be confused with Jack Lundbom) or Sigmund Mowinckel that I can accurately reconstruct those subjective experiences. However, I understand that some readers may wish for more specificity, and I do think that some useful observations can be made … so I will attempt to shine a little light on this issue nonetheless.

The books of the prophets (by which I mean the Latter Prophets) contain many different genres. For now, I’m going to focus specifically on “messenger speeches.” My previous post in this series already addressed prophetic and apocalyptic visions. As you’ll see later in the series, I don’t think we can approach prophetic biographies, prayers, and so forth the same way we approach visions and messenger speeches. Just in case anybody isn’t sure, by “messenger speech” I mean a speech in which a messenger speaks on someone else’s behalf, using first-person pronouns to refer to the sender. Messenger speeches often carry the marker “thus says so-and-so” (“so-and-so” being the sender); messenger speeches where God frequently use the marker “utterance (נְאֻם) of the Lord” instead of or in addition to the standard formula.

What does a biblical prophet’s use of a messenger formula imply about the composition of the exact words of the message? A little bit of technical terminology can help us here. In gospel studies, to deal with parallel passages where Jesus gives the same sermon or teaching in two or more different gospels with divergent wording, scholars sometimes distinguish between the “actual words” ( ipsissima verba ) and “actual voice” ( ipsissima vox ) of Jesus. The reasoning goes something like this: presumably, Jesus taught in Aramaic, so the gospels, written in Greek, actually present translations of Jesus’s teachings. This logic accounts for differences in wording between two gospels’ accounts of the same teaching; the Greek gospels don’t give us the exact (Aramaic) words that Jesus spoke, but could give the actual voice or message that Jesus tried to convey. Put in these terms, when a prophet says “thus says the Lord ,” does the prophet want the audience to expect to hear God’s actual words, or “only” an authentic, genuine message from God perhaps given in the prophet’s own words?

Different biblical passages point to different answers for this question. Some passages, especially in the latter prophets, imply something pretty close to a transmission of ipsissima verba. Jeremiah 3:12 is particularly striking; it reads, “Go proclaim these words to the north and say …” Here, unlike the usually singular “word of God,” we have “these words,” plural. Also, it’s interesting that when the prophet Nathan gives King David an off-the-cuff response to the proposed construction of a temple, he doesn’t use a messenger formula and his speech is fairly short, but after the Lord’s word comes to him, he does use the messenger formula and gives a longer speech (2 Samuel 7). In these passages and others like them, the author certainly seems to imply that a messenger speech claims to transmit God’s exact words, a script given to the prophet to repeat.

On the other hand, there are passages that imply that shaping appropriate messages, and proclaiming them under the rubric “thus says [sender],” was an expected and normal part of any messenger’s job. The most obvious example comes from 2 Kings 18 and Isaiah 36, chapters that are largely though not entirely parallel to one another. In this twice-told tale, an Assyrian official—let’s call him the “royal messenger,” as this term encapsulates his function, even if the precise lexical meaning of the Hebrew transliteration of his Assyrian title isn’t entirely clear—comes to deliver Sennacherib’s demands to Jerusalem. The situation here resembles the case of Jesus’s teachings: Sennacherib presumably gave the royal messenger his instructions in Akkadian, the typical language of Assyrian administrative documents, or perhaps in Aramaic, by then the go-to language for cross-cultural communications. It’s highly unlikely—well nigh unthinkable—that Sennacherib would issue instructions in Judean (Hebrew) to his royal messenger. Yet when the royal messenger shows up at Jerusalem, he speaks to Eliakim and the other officials in Judean (see 2 Kings 18:26)—even after they protest that they can converse in Aramaic just fine. Thus, it’s unlikely that the royal messenger gave Eliakim et al. Sennacherib’s ipsissima verba ; at most, he translated his king’s Akkadian or Aramaic instructions in the Judean with exacting care, but even this yields ipsissima vox , not ipsissima verba . Moreover, the back-and-forth of the conversation might imply that the royal messenger was composing his response to the Judeans’ response right there on the spot. In this light, the royal messenger does not appear to be a mere “parrot” of Sennacherib’s exact words, but more of a “press secretary,” composing appropriate words and attributing them to Sennacherib, accurately reflecting the king’s intentions, but not necessarily mirroring his vocabulary. Yet all of these messages are delivered with a messenger formula attached.

A similar, intra-Israelite example appears in Joshua 22:13, when the Cisjordanian Israelite tribes send Phinehas as an emissary to the Transjordanian tribes. Phinehas introduces his speech, “Here is what the Lord ’s entire community says.” The author of this passage can hardly expect readers to believe that the exact wording of Phinehas’s long speech (verses 16b–20) was written by a committee, much less a committee of the whole. Rather, the implication is that Phinehas was commissioned to deliver the sentiments of the Cisjordanian tribal leaders in a speech of his own composition.

Biblical prophets are, in effect, royal messengers in the service of the cosmic king, God. For at least some of the prophets, their authority and credibility derive from their claim to have witnessed the deliberations of the divine council. Micaiah (1 Kings 22), Isaiah (Isaiah 6), and Zechariah (Zechariah 3) may provide the clearest examples, but the analogy probably applies beyond them. For example, access to the divine council is what differentiates Jeremiah from rival prophets, according to Jeremiah 23:16–26. If we follow through with the analogy of prophets as royal messengers, we might well conclude that part of a prophet’s job description is to compose messages on God’s behalf, and to deliver those speeches under the rubric of the messenger formula. Assuming the prophet did his or her job well, listeners could consider those messages the ipsissima vox , but not the ipsissima verba , of the divine king, and it would be more appropriate to view such speeches as specimens of inspiration by disclosure rather than inspiration by dictation .

As I mentioned at the outset, I offer this analysis primarily for those readers who might be curious as to how I’d analyze prophetic sermons with messenger speeches in terms of the spectrum of inspiration that I’m unfolding in this series. In my next post, I’ll move on to quite a different literary genre, which I think demands a quite different approach to “inspiration.”

שָׁלוֹם עָלֵיכֶם

Only this, and nothing more

drcheard — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 01:59:35 +0000

At the risk of pouring vinegar on an open wound, there is something I must say about the controversy currently beclouding Emmanuel Christian Seminary: I feel ashamed of some of the treatment of Paul Blowers and of ECS coming out of the biblioblogosphere. We “overheard” Paul question Chris Rollston’s character (or at least some of his decisions)—and some of us responded by impugning Paul’s character. We “learned” that the “public opinion” held by ECS’s denominational constituency (including actual or potential donors) might influence ECS’s institutional behavior—and some of us responded by trying to leverage the “public opinion” held by “the academy” (of which we appointed ourselves spokespeople) to influence ECS’s institutional behavior.

I find these actions embarrassing. I find them self-referentially inconsistent. I find them lacking in both Christian and academic graces and virtues. Perhaps even more to the point, I find them completely inconsistent with Chris Rollston’s character. I cannot imagine that he would want anyone to defend him by attacking Paul Blowers, Michael Sweeney, or ECS as an institution.

This does not mean that I agree with Paul’s criticisms of Chris, or that I endorse certain actions that ECS is known or alleged to have considered or taken. It also does not mean that I wish to shut anybody up; I have already expressed my opinion that people who care about Chris have “standing” to express their support for him, regardless of institutional ties to ECS or lack of same. However, I do want to plead for virtuous speech on this matter, especially speech that reflects charity, temperance, and prudence. In retrospect, I believe my own comments on October 12 may have lacked prudence, particularly with regard to the metaphors I employed at the end of that post. I may have helped to fan the flames when I hoped to help calm them, and for that I wish that my foresight could have exceeded my hindsight.

To Paul Blowers I say: Paul, I disagree substantially with your criticisms of Chris Rollston and his August 31 article. I also think you’ve responded imprudently to some of your online critics in the intervening weeks. However, if my October 12 post expressed my thoughts in a manner you found hurtful or uncharitable, I seek your forgiveness, and pray that your critics may find more gracious ways to express their disagreements.

To Chris Rollston I say: Chris, I grieve to find you at the center of such a roiling controversy, and wish that I could do more to ease your own grief and speed your healing. However, if my October 12 post expressed my concern in a manner that reflected negatively on you within your local context at ECS, I seek your forgiveness, and pray that your critics may find more gracious ways to express their disagreements.

And to my dear friend in East Tennessee who opened my eyes and my heart wider than they had been before, I say: thank you.

In contrast to my normal practice, I will not be accepting comments on this post. I normally encourage free discussion of my ideas, but not this time. This post is not an invitation to discussion or argument, defenses or accusations. It is a confession. It is a sermon. It is a prayer, and it ends in prayer:

Κύριε ἐλέησον