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Beauty Tips for Ministers

or ‘Trinny and Susannah do the Church’.

I feel sure there are a number of my readers who would benefit from the Tips For Men section.   Also, I really enjoyed her Jeans Debate.  Obviously I don’t think ministers should be wearing jeans on Sunday mornings and there are points on both sides of the argument that are certainly wrong.  But still, it’s one of the more helpful things I’ve read for my ‘Clothes Maketh the Man’ essay on Exodus (which has now become Exodus as Ordination Rite and not really about clothes at all.  Oh well.)

Something very weird…

I opened Bibleworks just now to check something before this evening’s bible study.  Behind the opening image of the man in beard with ancient texts and Bibleworks screen, there was a background I’d never seen before.  It looked like a tray of potato croquettes.  Or possibly chicken nuggets.  Some orange-breadcrumbed-fried product lined up in rows.

In a spirit of experimentation, I closed the programme and opened it up again.  Nothing.  No fried foods at all.  Just the plain white.

Has this ever happened to anyone else or should I make an appointment to see a man in a white coat?

Beards

Every US President who has had a beard has also been a Republican. Curious. It doesn’t look as though this is changing any time soon. Unless Dan McCartney is thinking of running for the Democratic nomination?

If you’re wondering…

… who Boris Johnson is, I posted about this some time ago.

He is Miss Marple.

Jam (who actually lives in London and thus has a say in the matter) posts some thoughts on why Boris’s election may not be a bad thing at all.

The internet has got another think coming

Among the many things that frequently cause me anything from minor irritation to outright fury on the internet is the misuse of the expression ‘If you think that, you’ve got another think coming’ replacing the second ‘think’ with the meaningless ‘thing.’ What other thing is coming?

Language Log quotes from the OED to determine the original expression:

…the OED explicitly agrees about the direction of development

to have another thing coming [arising from misapprehension of to have another think coming ...]

Sadly, it also gives the statistics of internet usage:

Google has 146,000 hits for “another thing coming”, most of which are not the Judas Priest song, vs. 49,300 for “another think coming”, which I’m pretty sure is the original expression. (Arnold Zwicky observed thing’s internet victory back in June of 2004 — though the totals were much smaller then, 21,400 to 5,830.)

But, with your help, we needn’t let the internet keep winning! Turn the tide! I dare you. If we all make sure we use the correct expression, ‘another think coming’, in a blog post sometime in the next couple of days, and pass this on to your friends, then I bet we can reverse the Google hits in no time at all.

WTS and conversational theology

For anyone without the time or inclination to read the 146-page pdf file now available on the WTS website, Joel Garver has provided a helpful summary and analysis of the documents. He reads between the lines to discern some of the deeper issues that have led to the current crisis.  The following paragraph is particularly striking:

Perhaps, then, the current crisis bears witness to a larger breakdown in communication between departments and faculties, a failure of collegiality and inter-dependence between biblical studies on one side and systematic and historical studies on the other. Indeed, one wonders whether Enns might have written a better book had faculty collegiality and the inter-disciplinary environment been healthier.

Conversational theology, one might suggest, is what seems to have been lacking.  People who know, trust and respect one another talking to each other about what they’re studying, learning and thinking about.  Whether it’s over a cup of tea, at the pub with a pint of beer, or hanging out at the spring picnic, conversations not only build relationships, they also strengthen our theology.  Systematicians need to learn from biblical scholars so that they practice good exegesis; biblical scholars need to learn from the church historians and the systematic theologians so that they remain orthodox; all of us need to learn from the practical theologians so that our work is beneficial to the church.  And so on.

I have no way of knowing whether or not these kinds of conversations happen between WTS faculty members now, or whether they have in the past.  But I can speak from my own experience as a student at WTS and say that I’ve been disappointed at how little conversational theology goes on within the student body.  In part this is due to practical issues - very few students live on campus and many live a long way from the seminary; many students are working to pay their way through; courses are spread out through the whole day from 8.30am to 9pm so that students aren’t all on campus at the same time.  All of which makes it hard to establish a sense of community and to give people the opportunities to sit around and chat through what they’re learning.

Even among the PhD students, I’ve found it hard to establish these kinds of opportunities.  I know hardly any PhD students from the Historical and Theological Studies field (and those I do know, I’ve met at church not at the seminary), so I rarely have conversations outside of my field.  I miss that.  I miss hearing about (and arguing about) the finer points of someone else’s essay.  Especially when it’s an essay I’d never write.

I love that we have seminars in the biblical studies programme.  I hate that hardly anyone talks in them.  It’s so rare for us to have a proper discussion, with disagreements and arguments on both sides, and everyone becoming sharper in the process.

I don’t know whether Pete might have written a better book had there been a different level of collegiality among the WTS faculty.  I do know that I need my friends and colleagues who are systematicians and church historians to help me become a better biblical scholar.

A kingdom of priests

In The Priesthood of the Plebs, Peter Leithart notes the parallel between the Sinai Covenant and the priestly ordination rites (p.76). He concludes that ‘this parallel suggests that within the covenant with all Israel, Yahweh entered, through the ordination rite, into a priestly covenant with Aaron and his sons.’ I am sure Leithart is right in this, but I also wonder if it works the other way round. What if we read the book of Exodus as the ordination process of the kingdom of priests (19:6)?

The ordination process (Exod 28-29, 39-40) involves these stages:

  • selection of the appropriate people, determined by their ancestry (28:1)
  • bringing near to the entrance to the holy place (29:4)
  • washing (29:4)
  • dressing appropriately (29:5-9, see also 28:2-43 on making the appropriate garments)
  • anointing (29:7)
  • offering sacrifices (29:10-42)
  • sprinkling with blood (that has previously been sprinkled on the altar) (29:20-21)
  • feasting and enjoying the Lord’s presence (29:32-33, 42-46)
  • The book of Exodus shows the Israelites going through (almost) all these stages:

  • selection of the appropriate people, determined by their ancestry (1:1-7)
  • bringing near to the entrance to the holy place (12-19)
  • washing (chapter 14???, 19:10, 14)
  • dressing appropriately (19:10, 14)
  • anointing (???)
  • offering sacrifices (24:5)
  • sprinkling with blood (that has previously been sprinkled on the altar) (24:6-8)
  • feasting and enjoying the Lord’s presence (24: 9-11)
  • What do you think? I think the parallels between the speeches at Sinai and the instructions for ordination are suggestive, too:

    You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (19:4-6)

    I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. (20:2)

    Compare that with:

    I will consecrate the tent of meeting and the altar. Aaron also and his sons I will consecrate to serve me as priests. I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God. (29:44-46)

    So my two questions are, when are the Israelites washed in preparation for their consecration? Does the crossing of the Red Sea fulfil that role? Or is the washing of the garments and abstinence from sex sufficient?

    And second, is there an anointing process for the Israelites or is that unique to the Aaronic priesthood?

    Free books!

    No really!  Well, almost.

    Penguin are once again giving out books to bloggers.  You sign up, they send you a book and you undertake to write a review of it within 6 weeks.  See here for more details.  They’re sending me something by Nietzsche but not everything is that scary.  One of my friends is getting The Wind in the Willows, for instance.

    Putting things in perspective

    A recent conversation prompted me to do a few calculations. Petrol in the UK costs an average of £1.10/litre.

    One US gallon = 3.785 l  (UK gallons are different, as are UK pints).

    So in the UK you could buy 1 US gallon of petrol for approximately £4.16.  That’s $8.32.

    I’m finding it hard to feel sorry for people here who are paying around $3.60.

    Achtung!

    You know, there is one thing worse than discovering, halfway through writing a paper, that someone else has already written it for you. It’s discovering halfway through writing a paper that someone else has already written it for you in the form of a large book, written in the nineteenth century.

    In German.

    Oh dear.

    If anyone wants me in the next week, I’ll be in the study, hiding under the desk with a large dictionary and a bar of chocolate.