Telos Fall 2009 Issue

FALL 2009

Health Care in AmericaGod of this City: HBO’s The WireThe New Perspective on Paul

community

A WILLIAMs JournAL oF ChrIstIAn DIsCourse

02TELOS

Andrew ChenTasha Chu

Rebecca ChungEmily Ciavarella

Virginia A. CumberbatchDanny HuangGiana HuttonYue-Yi Hwa

Stephanie H. Kim

{Purpose} The Williams Telos is a journal dedicated to the expression of opinions and perspectives

informed by the Christian faith.

{Contact}Email [email protected]

with questions and comments.Email [email protected]

about subscriptions and donations.Email [email protected]

with submissions.

{Thanks}We are indebted to the Cecil B. Day

Foundation, the Chaplain’s Office, andCollege Council.

02

Fall 2009TELOSthe WILLIAMS

The Williams Telos is a journal dedicated to the expression of opinions and perspectives informed by the Christian faith. All pieces in the Williams Telos are reflections of personal opinion, interpretation, and understanding of the Christian faith, but

do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Telos board or the publication as a whole.

TELOS

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Virginia A.Cumberbatch ‘10

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Stephanie H.Kim ‘10

SECTION EDITOR

AnthonyNguyen ‘10

SECTION EDITOR

AndrewChen ‘11

LAYOUT EDITOR

TashaChu ‘11

BUSINESS MANAGER

GianaHutton ‘10

FACULTY ADVISOR

Darel E. Paul

Darel E. PaulPeter Pierson Jason PolingRick SpaldingAdam Stoner

Inez Tan Cale Weatherly

Ruth Yoo

{Contributors}

Fall‘09

02

TELOSthe WILLIAMS inside

03 Letter from the Editor

DANNY HUANG ‘11

06 Least of These Andrew Chen examines health care in America.

FEATURES

15 Two Cheers for Garbage Sustainability: the 70s vs. now. Jason Poling takes a look.

36 An Unrealized Passion Reconnecting via Facebook.

Fall 2009 01

25 Justification and the Lord’s Table Stephanie H. Kim looks at the New Per- spective on Paul.

REVIEWS 14 Black & Gold Giana Hutton reviews a song by Sam Sparro.

20 God of this City Cale Weatherly explores Baltimore in an analysis of HBO’s The Wire.

32 Grace Inside a Sound A review of U2’s latest album by Darel E. Paul.

REFLECTIONS

02 The Williams Telos

02

TELOSthe WILLIAMS

04 Stomach and Soul A look into Inez Tan’s refrigerator.

08 Intimacies Finding comfort on the way to see Tabitha. Rick Spalding looks into Acts.

13 Quiet Woods A poem by Peter Pierson.

24 Illuminated A poem by Emily Ciavarella.

31 Untitled A photo by Danny Huang.

18 I haven’t become anyone else Featured artwork by Adam Stoner.

11 Bound to Freedom Yue-Yi reflects on a newfound freedom.

ADAM STONER ‘11

30 Slowly A poem by Peter Pierson.

35 Majestic A photo by Tasha Chu.

“Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ. So then, whilewe have opportunity, let us do good to all people...” Galatians 6:2-10

What is community? How do we define it? And as a community of faith, what is our responsibility to the societies in which we dwell? On a college campus such as Williams the word community assumes various meanings and understandings. For some, all are included as a part of the Williams community, but for others community is the personal relationships developed out of common points of view, interests and vision. When we find happiness in the familiar and reliable people of our inner circle of friends, how do we don the mantle of respon-sibility to care for and understand the communities outside our own comfort zone? As Christians, God has called us to share in “sweet fellowship together walked in the house of God in the throng.” (Psalm 55:14). But unconditional love and concern for brothers and sisters in Christ is only part of God’s mandate. It is one thing to devote oneself to the interests and issues within the church or Christian commu-nity, but it is an entirely different thing to reach beyond the accustomed and identify with a community entirely not your own. Jesus says in John 17:23 that “I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.” We are all bound to one another, Jesus and all God’s children through the father.

So what does this mean in the context of our daily lives? As examined in our fall issue articles, “Least of These” and “No Line on the Horizon,” transcendence is critical to the vitality of community. “No Line on Horizon,” U2’s latest album, demonstrates how we should build bridges between the insular Christian community and the rest of the world. In other words, we must actively seek ways to reach beyond our comfort zone into a multi-faceted universe, without losing sight of the heavenly communion to which we belong. While we all share the inevitable nature of sin it is through Christ that the hope of salvation becomes our commonality. We ought to love each other just as Christ unconditionally loves us. Taking part in this community on Williams’s campus gives one various responsibilities to expand our notion of community, beyond the purple bubble, beyond our national borders. And as a part of the body of Christ, I have often thought of myself as a dual citizen, an aspirant for the Kingdom and a naturally born citizen of a nation, and I bear a responsibility to both. So as we bask in the aftermath of an exciting year in politics and a shift in social consciousness we must continue to expand our obligation to care for one another. Ask ourselves, “What should be our community--our civil responsibility--in the midst of a fallen, suffering world?” (Acts 2:42-47).

Though worship, fellowship, feasting and all we do should be carried out under the Father’s eye, God has called us to live outside our usual social or cultural spaces. God’s intention is to break down the barriers that humans have built between one another - this means coming to understand our role as unifiers within and between our communities. The questions, “Who is my neighbor?” need to be answered in a wholly inclusive way by believers which live in the presence of and in expectation of God’s unconditional love. God’s love has no social obligation and no borders. Therefore, all people belong to the neighborhood in which this community of Christians must labor for the common welfare. And so as you reflect on how you define your own community or communities here at Williams, -- whether culturally, racially, religiously or socially defined, also contemplate ways in which you can extend your fellowship, care and love to those who may not take part in your inner circles, but are part of the universal community. After all, ultimately we all belong to the community of love and fellowship with our Father. And so I ask you as we watch the leaves change color, pull out our winter clothes and come into a season of thanksgiving and fellowship, to explore the ways in which you can begin to redefine community and our responsibility to it.

God Bless, Virginia A. Cumberbatch

Letter from the Editor

Fall 2009 03

As a college student, I consider it my mission to hunt and gather as much food as I possibly can. Here are just a few of the things my suitemates and I currently have in our mini-fridge: seventeen eggs; sixteen cartons of yogurt; Tupperware containers filled with lasagna, hummus, and tomato soup; celery and two kinds of carrots; two kinds of lemonade, apple cider, and two large mugs full of milk; five sticks of butter; three kinds of cheese; oyster sauce; three bottles of soda; and cookie dough. We’re all on the fourteen-meal plan, and we live within sight of two dining halls. We have so much food that we’re thinking about sending one of our moms a care package.

Given my obsession with acquiring food, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that my favorite stories in the Bible all involve the provision of food: God sending manna and quail from heaven (Exodus 16), Elijah and the widow whose jar of flour and jug

of oil never became empty (1 Kings 17), Jesus’ first miracle of changing water into wine (John 2)… I also love the way Jesus made food and drink a natural part of en-gaging people to tell them about God. He struck up a conversation with a Samaritan woman, when Jews were not supposed to speak to Samaritans at all, by asking her for a drink of water. He taught a crowd of over 5,000 people and also miraculously fed every one of them with only five loaves of bread and two fish, with extra left over! To paraphrase Paul in Philippians 4:19, God met all His people’s needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus. Physi-cal nourishment went hand in hand with spiritual food.

Let’s examine Jesus’ teachings in the last two examples more closely. After feeding the 5,000, He told His disciples, “I am the

bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty” John (6:35). To the Samaritan woman He said, “Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). At first, comparing mere food and drink to the Christ, the source of everlasting life and full salvation, makes these examples sound like overextended metaphors. “Never go hungry?” No amount of bread I could eat would keep me full for more than a couple of hours! “Never be thirsty?” No amount of water I drink now

Stomach and SoulWith God, neither goes hungry

By Inez Tan

INEZ TAN ‘12


could prevent me from getting thirsty a few hours later.However, I believe that Jesus deliberately chose perishable food to mirror our relationship to

Him because He understood the limits of our spiritual walk while on earth. No one runs on a spiritual high all the time. Consider Elijah in 1 Kings 19. He had just witnessed an amazing miracle: God sent a conflagration that consumed an altar of sodden wood, while the priests of Baal could do nothing. Here’s what happens in the next chapter:

Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets (of Baal) with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.”

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the tree and fell asleep.

All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. (1 Kings 19:3-6, NIV)

Strengthened and renewed, Elijah began a forty-day journey to Horeb, the mountain of God, where he witnessed another supernatural display of God’s power. He went from being com-pletely discouraged to having another ‘mountaintop experience,’ another turning point in his life. But Elijah’s revival began with bread and water: the gentlest of reminders, the simplest sign of care. Just as we can always eat to satisfy our hunger, so we can always turn back to God and know we will be fed, physically and spiritually. And even though I’m a food-hoarder, ultimately I have to acknowledge that I will never be able to provide for myself.

The fact that my stomach and my soul are both of importance to God has implications for the way I live my life. I’ve never missed a meal, so why should I skip a daily Bible reading? How would my life and the lives of those around me be changed if I talked to God or meditated on His word as often as I filled my stomach? As Jesus demonstrated, a simple meal can be a glorious opportunity to give thanks to God, to care for someone, or to bear witness for Him. Surely that is what Paul had in mind when he wrote, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”

Inez Tan ‘12 enjoys creative writing and cookie-eating. The last place she lived was New York City.

“I’ve never missed a

meal, so why should I skip a daily Bible

reading?”

Fall 2009 05

“Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed.”

-Isaiah 65:20, NIV

As the debate on health care reform rages through Con-gress and around American dinner tables, in the midst of gnarled policy and deft political maneuvering, the most im-portant voice has been ignored. Twenty-four hour news chan-nels weave narratives of tit-for-tat partisan melodrama, and the American public sits enthralled - an essential spirit has been strangled. The focus of the health care debate has become an exercise in self-centeredness. Questions of how a public option would affect a doctor’s income or a small business’s expenses are certainly important, but our nation has seemingly forgot-ten the moral imperative that compels our country’s healers to “first do no harm.” This imperative is not exclusively Chris-tian, but it should be Christians’ exclu-sive desire. Today’s health care system is not only financially unsustainable, but it is also a system that places profit above the welfare of its patients. Followers of Jesus must demand a health care system for this nation that truly embodies the second of the Greatest Commandments: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

James 1:27 says, “Religion that God our Fa-ther accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Over and over again, the Bible pro-claims that a Christian heart places others before itself, and works to liberate the oppressed. In America today, millions of people are indeed neglected by a health insurance system that privileges profit to the detriment of its customers’ welfare.

In order to maximize their earnings, insurance companies seek to divest themselves of “risky” customers and cover only those with the least likelihood of illness or injury. Moreover, those who have purchased health insurance often have to deal with large coverage gaps. According to a study published this year in The American Journal of Medicine, 62.1% of all personal bank-ruptcies in the United States in 2007 occurred as the result of medical costs. Three-quarters of these bankruptees had health insurance, but “Many families with continuous coverage found themselves under-insured, responsible for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.” Medical insurance is intended to be a safeguard in a time of emergency – its supposed intention is to protect families in times of dire need. As Christians, as people pledged to lift up the downtrodden, we cannot and should not accept a health insurance system that keeps medical care from those who need it most for the sake of sheer profit. Like the Pharisees that Jesus condemned, today’s insurance companies “tie up heavy loads and place them on men’s shoulders, but

they themselves are unwilling to lift a fin-ger to move them.” (Matthew 23:4 NIV)

Neither should Christians tolerate a pharmaceutical industry that spends more on selling a drug than creating better medicines. A 2008 study by two research-ers at York University discovered that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry as a whole

spends 24.4% of its sales dollar on advertis-ing, and only 13.4% for research and develop-

ment. The costs of this advertising are passed on to patients in the form of ever increasing drug prices. Indeed, apart from New Zealand, the United States is the only country where di-rect-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising is legal. The sale of medicine has become more important than its improvement as a science. In the Gospels, Jesus quietly asks those he heals to not mention it was he who made them whole. In particular,

Least of TheseThe Christian Imperative for Health Care Reform

By Andrew Chen

VIRGINIA A. CUMBERBATCH ‘10


in Mark 1, after healing a leper, Jesus commands him: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” A Christian ideal of medicine privileges the act and not the adulation. It wishes to create an industry driven by research and fueled with a passion for the mending of wounds, a business that tends to the temples of its patients’ bodies.

Today, the battle over health care reform is being painted in television’s broad, gaudy strokes as a high-stakes game of political intrigue. There are people who claim to speak as the voices of Christian mo-rality in public policy, who nevertheless seem determined to stop health care reform at all costs. Fueling the rage of the ignorant with claims of death panels, socialism, and fascism, these people have thrown aside their Christian faith in favor of sheer partisan pettiness. They have completely forgotten that a primary Christian duty is to seek the liberation of the down-trodden and oppressed. There are legitimate arguments to be had about how large a role government should play (if any) in health care, or whether an individual insurance mandate is a good idea. However, these are not the questions that many health care reform opponents are asking. Some are simply concerned about appearing to support the President’s agenda, seeking to undermine his political standing at any cost to make health care his “Waterloo.” Napoleon did fall in power after that fateful battle, but thousands of ordinary citizens also lost their lives. If some decide to cut down health care reform to weaken the President, so too, will thousands of Americans con-tinue to perish from lack of adequate health care. There are times when it is appropriate to put aside the bitterness of failed election years and work for the undeniable greater good of this nation’s citizens - this year of health care reform is one of those fateful glimpses. One cannot claim to love Jesus and yet ignore the plight of the sick for the sake of sheer political power. Quite simply, Christians in Congress who should be passionate about reform have instead abandoned the love that saves them.

Christians of this country, Democrat, Republican, and Inde-pendent, must all begin to take the lead on health care reform.

Those today who are being excluded from health care insurance or beaten down by exorbitant drug prices and insidious adver-tising are our priority – it is our highest calling to seek an end to their suffering. As men and women of Christ, we must take to heart the call to action in Psalm 12:5:

“Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy, I will now arise, says the LORD, I will protect them from those who malign them.”

Before we became Demo-crats or Republicans, we were children of God, the God of the weak and needy. Our country has a tremendous opportunity to help millions lead better lives – we cannot, we must not let it pass us by.

References

David U. Himmelstein, Deborah Thorne, Elizabeth War-ren, Steffie Woolhandler. Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study. The American Jour-nal of Medicine - August 2009 (Vol. 122, Issue 8, Pages 741-746, DOI: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2009.04.012)

Gagnon M-A, Lexchin J (2008) The Cost of Pushing Pills:

A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States. PLoS Med 5(1): e1. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050001

For more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITT6bYYGVfM .

Andrew Chen ‘11 is an English major from Folsom, Califor-nia.

Virginia Cumberbatch ‘10 is a history and sociology major from Austin, Texas and loves to break a sweat.

{ }“Followers of Jesus must de-mand a health care system for this nation that truly embod-ies the second of the Greatest Commandments: ‘Love thy

neighbor as thyself.’”

Fall 2009 07

“Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devotedto good works and acts of charity. At that time she became ill and died.When they had washed her,they laid her in a room upstairs. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter

was there, sent two men to him with the request, ‘Please come to us without delay.’ So Peter got up andwent with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs...”

- Acts 9:36-39, NRSV

Peter climbs the dim stairs to the death-room on the second floor of the house. The passageway is full of shadows: the playing of lamplight, the uncertainty about what he will find, apprehension at the prospect of another dead body, another set of stupendous expectations. What will he see as he looks into this tomb? Will this one summon his faith, or his doubt? What questions will he have to answer this time, if they probe his loyalties? In another courtyard – was it a few weeks or a hundred years ago? – words had deserted him, and he found his mouth dry of everything except denial. How will the twilight expose him this time, in this grief-dimmed household in Joppa by the great sea?

He finds reassurance in remembering that there will be no wounds that are difficult to look at; evidently, this woman has succumbed to illness quietly, ignored by the bloody powers and principalities that have been chasing him and the rest of them. Hurrying into the dusk on the ten-mile walk from Lydda toward the sea, the two who came for him have only been able to tell him that she was called Tabitha - though she was known also by the Greek equivalent of her name, Dorcas. The irony strikes him: in both languages, the name means gazelle – yet she lies still and impervious while he, Peter, the Rock, is fleet and breathless, darting from crisis to opportunity, between the expanding gospel and the pursuit of its enemies, sometimes without knowing which is the lamp unto his feet.

At the top of the stairs, he finds himself suddenly among a circle of waiting women. The thing about them is their eyes: in the sparse light every one of them is trained on him, and all are sparkling with liquid light. What has he been summoned into the midst of – what intimacies of grief and remembrance fill the dark corners of this house? Has he intruded into the closeness of

IntimaciesBy Rick Spalding

REBECCA CHUNG ‘11


broken hearts, the sacred closeness of women? But then, what to make of the calm that he begins to feel among them – what hope has his arrival stirred? Peter wonders whether he has tears left in him to rise in greeting to theirs – whether he has enough breath in him to catch a Gazelle.

Sometimes a roomful of people can cast for themselves a way to be together without ever deciding or talking. So it is now: after a few silent moments for the meeting of eyes, somehow it is cast among Peter and the women that this will not be a time for words. Instead there is a rustling, a movement of hands and arms... and now out of the shadows they are producing things to show him. All things she has made, he comes to understand: a tunic carefully lined, held close to the light to show a row of perfect, even stitches...a piece of drapery fingered with a reverence of admiration... a child’s quilt cradled in an embrace, almost as though it were itself a child. Peter reaches to touch the quilt, notices the coarse fingers of a fisherman on its fine, clean loveliness, thinks again of the child he will never father, never wrap or cradle.

The women are folding the garments now, with their glistening eyes. Hands smooth wrinkles away, fondle edges and seams, as though each tender touch recalls the dexterity of the Gazelle, so patient and careful in love. Such a death always raises the question: will all this tangible kindness now vanish with this flesh? – does this chapter of goodness now finally close, and are these clothes all that is left of this life? One piece, folded so carefully and laid like a sacrament on the bench, reminds Peter of a certain cloth lying neatly folded in a place by itself, the cloth that (how many weeks or months ago was it?) had been used to shield the gaping, clotted wounds after the body came down from the cross – the cloth whose having been inexplicably moved and folded had been the first sign of the changed shape of the whole world... To clothe anyone is such a tender act; to dress a body is such an intimate kind of love at the beginning or the end of its life. Suddenly the crucified one seems so near. But what will happen now? What do they expect of him? What can he expect of himself? Sometimes the presence of the absence of Jesus is so overwhelming...

Now the women withdraw, with their eyes cast down, as though not looking will somehow make a wider place for the answering of their prayers. They leave Peter alone with their lovely Gazelle, so still in her dignity on the bed among the crumbs of light. Her peace is so deep that, for all he can tell, she might be forty or eighty. The muscles of her mouth have relaxed into what seems a slight smile; the little creases around her eyes and across her cheeks still carry the flowing kindness of her face like an intricate riverbed. She seems to rest, not so much in the completion of her work as in the permanence of her love.

Peter kneels by the bed, wonders whether he is worthy to touch these fingers, is surprised at the gentleness of his own rough hands when they meet hers. To see the hard-won final peace of his Jesus, to touch those splintered, resting hands, was an intimacy that circumstances denied him – in exchange, perhaps, for his own denial. But to touch the stillness of these hands, and to have seen their ingenious work so much alive in the dexterity of all those eyes, is an intimacy of its own. How, he wonders, did this Gazelle come to be a disciple? How is it that the good news has already found its way west from Jerusalem to the edge of the great sea? Was she there on the plain when Jesus spoke his blessing upon the meek, his beatitude of comfort upon the mourning of her widowhood? Were some of these other hushed women perhaps among those who had stayed to keep watch as he died even after the men had fled?

“How did they learn

to stitch the love of

Christ across the broken-nes of their

hearts, stitch it into the choices of

every ordi-nary day?”

Fall 2009 09

How did they learn to stitch the love of Christ across the brokenness of their hearts, stitch it into the choices of every ordinary day? How beautiful, how beautiful upon the mountains, are the feet of those who announce peace, the hands of those who mend, the faces of those whose every breath and gesture proclaim, “Your God reigns!”

Only after her still hand is nestled in his hands do the

names of this woman leave their mark on him. Tabitha... Dorcas... Perhaps, on the one hand, a faithful Jew with an Aramaic name; but perhaps, on the other hand, a gentile bearing a Greek name – one whose hands, whose death, whose company it is considered uncouth, unclean, unfaithful to touch. But where are the boundaries any more? Where are the edges of orthodoxy, the edges of safety, the seams between life and death, any more? Peter looks into her face but finds no hint of boundaries in the lines etched there. Instead he reads a truth between the lines: if he had known this Gazelle, she would have loved him too, even him, across any boundaries anyone might ever think to draw, male or female, Jew or Greek, innocent or guilty – would have loved him with an affection to mend his own unworthiness, coarseness, inadequacy, even denial.

It is a Love he has seen before – utterly continuous with the Love that first mended him like one of his own nets and cast him out upon the great sea of the world. Recognizing it for what it is becomes his prayer as he kneels in the faint light of the death-room beside the Gazelle, touching her deft fingers, which even in death have mended him, brought to life in him again the breathing intimacy of Jesus.

His head is bowed, his eyes turned inward to where he can see, in an instant, the whole landscape of the journey from the boats on the lake at the beginning to this moment beside the great western sea. The costs of this journey are staggering. But they are nothing, nothing compared to the beauty of this face, these hands, these feet upon the mountains, this Love without seams. This Gazelle is mothering him in the love of Christ – and the child he has feared he would never father is he, himself, or perhaps it is the whole world leaning forward like a child hungry for good news. He has caught up to her. Their hands are touching, defying every boundary. He feels the pulse, the stirring, the infinitesimal sacrament of breath. When the word is finally spoken – “Arise” – he doesn’t know what part he says to her and what part to himself – or whether it is even his voice that speaks it.

Rick Spalding, Chaplain to the College and Coordinator of Community Service at Williams since 2000, is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Rebecca Chung ‘11 is a Studio Art major from Buford, Georgia.


As if the exchange rate, the accent and the tube (read: subway) weren’t confusing enough, my first week of study abroad in London confronted me with course reading lists. The list for my econ class, for example, suggested 42 different readings for Week 6. Notwithstanding my nerdy love for school, I was tempted to agree with the bird that relieved itself on one of my reading lists two days into the term.

I hadn’t exactly expected extra academic independence this semester—I thought I’d swapped the Land of the Free for wonder-ful, stodgy England. I also hadn’t anticipated how tricky it would be to navigate this newfound autonomy. So far, if I’m feeling like a Good Williams Student, I get a bunch of books from the library and pretend to skim them. Most days I confine myself to whatever’s in the study packs (read: reading packets) and hope for the best.

But in addition to schoolwork and recent acquisitions from London’s annoyingly alluring secondhand bookstores, I’ve been perusing the Book. Recently I stumbled upon this verse:

“I run in the path of your commands,for you have set my heart free.” - Psalm 119:32, NIV

It wasn’t the first time this improbable declaration had floored me: celebrating liberation with self-im-posed subjection sounds like a sad exercise in misguid-ed gratitude. But then again—if the one who let you loose also keeps tossing goodies your way, trailing after him might well be the selfish thing to do.

I’m not advocating Pascal’s Wager. I’m arguing that the premise of God’s existence does not make choice a sham—which, if my year-old memory of Philosophy 102 holds, is probably closer to a Hume-esque compatibility of freedom and determinism. We’re stuck in a creeping tomorrow-tomorrow-and-tomorrow chronology wherein decisions are crucial and exciting because we have no clue where they will take us. But when our level of analysis reaches the every-when God, yesterdays and the last syllable of recorded time just are. In the perpetual now, free agency and predestination collapse into each other, Arminians and Calvinists hold hands, moral responsibility coexists with eternal grace, and grammar gets upset—who on earth calls themselves the “I Am” anyway?

Even more bizarre, we actually enjoy the most freedom when complying with the Master of the Universe. It’s not like Brits saying “Cheers” when they impose on you, as if they expect you to be happy about it. Some people offer the analogy of how you get the most out of a computer if you obey the manual. My computer science friends would disagree, but computers aren’t God, thank … God, and hopefully you get the point.

Bound to FreedomBy Yue-Yi Hwa

The paradoxical joy of obedience, in Psalm 119:32

Fall 2009 11

The glorious irony of the freedom-obedience optimization is embodied in Psalm 119, an acrostic poem on steroids: all eight lines in each stanza start with the same Hebrew letter, and all 22 stanzas represent different letters of the alphabet. Each stanza also mentions all of the eight terms for “law.” It’s crazy that this slavish rigidity lifts a paean to freedom, but beauty and truth are often insane.

A note on translations: different English versions of the Bible yield dif-ferent poetry. There is general agreement about the running-in-the-path-of-commands bit. However, the second metaphor, comprising two Hebrew words that mean “to grow large, or broaden” and “the heart, or seat of understanding/emotion,” permits varied interpretations. In an uncharacteristically elegant moment, the New International Version renders this phrase as “set my heart free.” Other translations range from the more literal “enlarge my heart/understanding” to the paraphrase “enable/show me how to do so.” My personal favorite is the result of feeding the text of my Arabic Bible into Google Translate: “I rushed in the way of your com-mandments for you explain my heart.” But whichever way you read this literary incarnation of liberty-in-unity, the causality is as follows: God invests agency in us (a), so we give him obedience (b).

Or maybe not. Maybe we could look at it the other way round: since God made us in his image, and individual will is para-mount in that image, we imitate God (b) by exercising our freedom (a). Or yet another way: us following God (b) is him em-powering us (a), because we are thus at our best (c? f? α?). I may be confounding myself, but it’s clear that freedom and obedience are coterminous.

It’s also convenient that the running bit is unambiguous. I’m no runner (don’t think I can’t hear you guffawing back there), but my latent athlete wannabe resonates with C.S. Lewis’ observation in The Last Battle: “If one could run without getting tired, I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.” In Psalm 119:32, the jubilant recklessness of motion is at an apogee because the psalmist isn’t running to anywhere or for anything, but simply in the track of emancipation for its own sake.

For me, singing is to running as the bathroom is to the first half mile, but one reason why I love singing is that the melodies and rhythms constrain me so that I’m not conscious of whether I sound Malaysian or fake American or pathetic British-ish—I revel in the song. Possibly at the expense of my associates’ revelry, but I digress.

Because God’s “good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2, NIV) delimits me, I am liberated from anxieties about my future. Because He offers me permanent status as a loved child-servant (no wonder Jesus was born in Asia), my insecurities are irrelevant. Because I trust in the one who is sovereign over relationships, I don’t need to fret about boys. At least, in theory. More often than not, I’m like a hamster so preoccupied with its wheel that it doesn’t realize the cage door has been opened.

In the nerdy scheme of things, I need to get off my wheel and judiciously skim some econ readings right now, because class starts in 20 minutes. Wish me luck. Cheers.

References

Photo by Josa Jr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/josa/124836531/), available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial License.

Hwa Yue-Yi ‘11 is a political economy major from Malaysia. This semester, she is studying abroad at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.

{ }It’s crazy that this slavish rigidity lifts a

paean to freedom, but beauty and truth are

often insane.


Quiet WoodsBy Peter Pierson

The woods are quiet, and I wonder…if theEnd will be like this?

Vernal voices stilled, but thunder…shoutingDown and singing Bliss.

Single voices greet the sun’s rise…where theForest chorus once hailed;

Curtain ready, trumpet surprise…SaintsArising, heaven filled.

RUTH YOO ‘10

Peter Pierson ‘73, teaches History at Pine Cobble School in Williamstown and pastors a small church in North Adams. He and his wife, Mary, live in nearby Grafton, New York.

Fall 2009 13

Universal Republic, 2008

“‘Cause if you’re not really herethen the stars don’t even matter

Now I’m filled to the top with fearbut it’s all just a bunch of matter

‘Cause if you’re not really herethen I don’t want to be either

I wanna be next to youBlack and goldBlack and gold

Black and gold.”

Using a combination of Techno, Pop and R&B, Australian-born singer-songwriter Sam Sparro explores the wider depths of evolution and the creation of the world in his song “Black & Gold.” Growing up as the son of a gospel minister, Sparro used his singing to explore his own personal interests. After some time in the music arena in the United Kingdom, Sparro returned to the United States, where he worked at a Los Ange-les coffee shop. The transition represented a low point in his

life, and it was during this time that Sparro was able to become inspired to write “Black & Gold”.

While the song might at first seem like a simple account of creation, it is infused with an inspired discovery: that God not only exists but is an active presence in the universe. A closer look at each verse seeps with this revelation. From the begin-ning, when he questions why “you even set my world into mo-tion,” to his later assertion that he “feel[s] a way of something beyond [the heavens]”, his lyrics indicate a certain existential preoccupation. As he finds himself in the midst of the falling stars and “golden beacons” of the sky, he cannot help but won-der why exactly he came to be in this world. Yet while the song may begin by contemplating the creation of the world, its over-arching tone encompasses Sparro’s need to have a validation of God’s physical presence, despite the fact that he is cognizant of some spiritual presence: “If vision is the only validation/then most of my life isn’t real”. The ambiguous tone of Sparro’s validation for the physical is reflective of his own personal be-liefs: while Sparro considers himself to be a spiritual being, his affinity to a specific religion remains to be said.

Though Sparro’s lyrics can easily become lost behind the song’s upbeat tempo, the greater world in which he explores his faith translates to the unknown world within his lyrics.

References

Photo from (http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Mu-sic_g77-Headphones_Mixer_Decks_p453.html), available from FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Giana Hutton ‘10 is a history major from Flossmoor, Illinois with an interest in public policy.

Black & GoldBy Giana Hutton

A Review of Sam Sparro’s Single


Two years ago, our church moved into an old building after its former congregation had dwindled to the point of unsustain-ability. As they moved out, we moved in, and we transformed a basement that had last seen fruitful use as Sunday School class-rooms during the Nixon administration into a safe, clean and bright space for the youngsters that we have so steadily multiplied. This process entailed five solid weeks of gutting, decontamination, and reconstruction, a feat that would have been miraculous even if it had not fallen between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

One day amidst this transformative process, as an older lady from the former congregation was clearing out the artifacts of nearly two hundred years of ministry, I was stripping several decades of paint off a nearby support post. I apologized to this kind saint for the mess, but she admonished me, “You can’t get any work done without making dust.”

It may come as a surprise to both “creation care” advocates and the flinty Yankees and Depression survivors of my ancestry that conservation is not a virtue given particular emphasis in the Bible. God’s command to humanity was, and is, to sub-due and populate the earth: to exercise responsible dominion (Gen. 1:26-28). It is a mandate to practice wise stewardship, and this image of faithful and prudent management appears throughout the Scriptures in the personages of shepherds, foremen, entrepreneurs and benefactors. The wise person, according to Scripture, is not the one who hoards; it is the one who invests, shares, distributes (Ps. 112:5, Prov. 11:25-26, Luke 12:42-48, 2 Cor. 9:5-15, and 1 Tim. 6:17-19). And makes dust.

I understand the conservationist impulse quite well. My room in Lehman came equipped with two wastebaskets: a dark brown one for garbage and an ivory one for recyclable paper. These paper baskets featured a list of acceptable contents; the most unusual restriction applied to sticky notes, which were not recyclable on account of the adhesive used to make them sticky. I was informed, however, that one could tear off the adhesive portion and recycle the rest. I did, with abandon.

When I tell people about this practice today, their responses tend to fall in two categories: “Of course,” and “How neurotic.” Growing up as I did in the era before curbside pickup, I came to college for the most part more willing than able to recycle my trash. Younger friends have been in the habit of recycling since childhood, but for my contemporaries and me, it has generally been an acquired discipline.

And not all acquired it. My junior year brought about a revelation as I encountered an alternative lifestyle: my next-door neighbor, Mark, did not recycle. What’s more, he generated a prodigious amount of trash, as he typed his notes into his com-

Two Cheers for Garbage

By Jason Poling

“I wasn’t even banking on my environmental responsibility as a mitigating factor; I just couldn’t bring myself to hide a bottle in the garbage when it could be recycled.”

Fall 2009 15

puter (these were the days when laptops weighed slightly less than a sofa-bed) and consumed vast amounts of disposable reading material, from the New York Times to The New Republic to the Sporting News.

Indeed, Mark generated an awful lot of an awful-lot of an awful-lot of things: sleeping no more than four hours a night, he generated an astounding quantity of material for his classes, the opinion journal we edited together, and his side business, handicapping professional basketball. Mark’s senior thesis—mind you, this was a bachelor’s thesis—ran over 700 pages…before endnotes. He was, and is, an astonishingly productive individual; this, combined with his upbringing in a less environmentally sensitive household, meant that he cast off the detritus of his life with nary a concern for its quantity.

This baffled me. Some are raised by wolves; I was raised by liberal Protestants whose parents had survived the Depression. I didn’t hear much about souls being saved, but those leftovers had to go in Tupperware for future resurrection. (My mother’s dreadful cooking did not improve with age, so the charter membership in the Clean Plate Club, which has contributed to my Chestertonian girth, can be blamed in small part on her.) The advent of community recycling programs meant that trash could be disposed of in a virtuous fashion, or at least some of it; consumption and the waste it generated were to be minimized as much as possible.

The degree to which this impulse to conserve is hard-wired into my DNA is reflected in the fact that, after I finished off a bottle of bourbon I had purloined from a neighbor while babysitting, I put it in our basement with the other glass items to be recycled, more concerned about the environmental impact of my behavior than the interrogation that would surely follow. I wasn’t even banking on my environmental responsibility as a mitigating factor; I just couldn’t bring myself to hide a bottle in the garbage when it could be recycled.

Today, I continue in the lifestyle of an inveterate recycler, personally attending to the proper distribution of our church’s re-cyclables and rescuing the bottles and cans that less enlightened guests have left in my own garbage cans. Between this and my appointed duties as the male head of household to take the trash out every Monday night and the recyclables out every Thursday night, I am quite aware that my family and I generate quite a bit of waste.

And I don’t mind a bit. For just as bodily waste is the proof that a person is being sustained nutritionally, the waste produced in our lives is proof that we are continuing to part-ner with our Creator in the work of exercising domin-ion. We are responsible for stewarding not only natural resources, but our time as well: some days my daugh-ters go to school with juice in reusable cups, but some days they go with juice box-es, and I don’t lose any sleep over it. The fact is that all productive activity generates waste of some sort: sawdust in the workshop, bones and trimmings in the kitchen, placebo control groups in the laboratory. Some may be used in another way—I par- TASHA CHU ‘11


ticularly enjoy making stock on a cold Saturday—but some will simply end up in the garbage. As a pastor, I spend countless hours researching and studying various ideas, some of which must ultimately be excised from what I bring to the pulpit. I spend hours of “small talk” with people who will one day come to me for counsel on significant matters. Or not. Unaware of what fruit will be borne, I attend to the various trees in the orchard God has given me, knowing that some will bear fruit and some will be uprooted.

What ends up on the cutting room floor is part of the process of bringing a finished product to the screen. Surely there is waste that is gratuitous, but there is also plenty of waste that is necessary and, in its way, productive. It is incumbent upon God’s people to recognize that he has given us this world so that we may steward it wisely. And he has given us plenty of room for the dust that we generate.

Jason Poling ‘94 is the pastor of New Hope Community Church in Pikesville, Maryland.

Tasha Chu ‘11 is a Political Science and Psychology major from Monrovia, California.

“The fact is that all productive activity gen-erates waste of some sort: sawdust in the workshop, bones and trimmings in the kitchen, placebo con-trol groups in the labora-tory.”

Fall 2009 17

Adam Stoner ‘11 is a studio art major at Williams College. He is originally from Charlotte, North Carolina.

ADAM STONER ‘11


Fall 2009 19

“For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.”

[Hebrews 13:14, NIV]

“He’s got the fire and the furyAt his command

Well you don’t have to worryIf you hold onto Jesus’ handWe’ll all be safe from Satan

When the thunder rollsYou gotta help me keep the Devil

Way down in the hole.”-Tom Waits, “Way Down in the Hole”

But what is the Devil, and how do we keep it in the hole? The cosmic imperative of The Wire’s theme music contrasts starkly with the program’s grey moral metropolis. In the Balti-more of HBO’s magnificent crime drama, which concluded its fifth and final season in 2008, police officers plot and scheme, politicians construct public policy for private gain, and drug traffickers hold to rigid ethical codes. Devils are manifold: vio-lent criminals, the sins of those in authority, the destructive im-pulses common to all persons. They are buried and concealed, but never destroyed.

The Wire begins with a narrow focus on a police investiga-tion into a drug organization, and gradually widens its gaze to an entire city, where grace and redemption persist among

God of this CityBy Cale Weatherly

A Review of HBO’s The Wire


insurmountable social problems. Over sixty episodes, creator and writer David Simon, a former Baltimore journalist, and co-writer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective, pres-ent a startling vision of the fallen nature of man, and a deep yearning for a city fully restored. To achieve these remarkable ends, The Wire has developed a unique narrative style. It is a crime drama, but it shares little with sensationalistic procedur-als such as CSI and Law & Order and it is less self-consciously artistic than other HBO dramas. Each of The Wire’s five seasons is dedicated to a single case undertaken by Baltimore police de-tectives, and views like an extremely long film with many intermissions. Its novelistic structure gives it the freedom to develop complex plots, to flesh out an enormous cast of char-acters, and to expand its subject matter from the Baltimore police department to the drug organizations, labor unions, politicians, schools and news media that compose the city.

The program has received considerable praise for its so-called realism. Although it is virtually impossible for the ordi-nary viewer to evaluate the accuracy of the show’s depictions of drug trafficking and police work, the program certainly adopts a stylistic realism. The visual style is simple, patient and objec-tive, scenes are arranged chronologically, and there is no un-derscore. Characters speak in a local dialect, rife with extreme vulgarity and difficult slang, and the writers have an excellent ear for the natural rhythms of conversation. Few of the actors are well-known, and many are natives of Baltimore without prior acting experience. These deliberate stylistic choices create and somber and direct tone, one that makes it difficult for the viewer to dismiss The Wire as “just television,” and invites seri-ous reflection on its themes.

Because a thorough discussion of The Wire’s political outlook and sociological preoccupations could easily occupy a doctoral dissertation, I will limit my analysis to the program’s most gen-eral concern, the nature, plight and direction of humankind. While it would be inappropriate to call the show’s view of hu-

manity a Christian view (creator David Simon is Jewish), the views share striking similarities, and the threads of darkness, redemption, and longing depicted in The Wire echo closely the patterns we find in the Christian narrative. The program ad-vocates the dignity of all persons, and it is outraged at the loss of this dignity. It takes great pains to depict the humanity of all its characters--its heroes, its villains, and the vast majority who fall in between--and and draws the viewer into the lives

of the unseen of society. It compels us to admire the compassion that her-oin addict and con art-ist “Bubbles” shows for a young man thrown to the streets, and to understand the passions of the ruth-less and vengeful manager of the Barksdale organiza-tion, Stringer Bell, a Gats-byean figure who dreams of bringing the organiza-

tion to full legitimacy and become an ordinary businessman. It brings us to empathize with the impossible choices presented to D’Angelo Barksdale, a conscious-stricken drug trafficker and admitted murderer, who, out of familial loyalty, accepts a twenty-year prison term by refusing to testify in court against his uncle Avon. And it expresses a righteous fury at the devalu-ing of human life – in the turf wars of the drug dealers, the insistence of Baltimore City Hall on improving crime statistics rather than on doing true protective police work, and in the media’s fascination with rare, gaudy killings, rather than the violence common in the lives of the urban poor. It is both a view that can arise from a secular philosophical foundation and one demanded by Judeo-Christian belief that humans are cre-ated in imago dei, the image of God, that they share many of his important attributes and are thus of incomparable worth.

Despite this affirmation of human worth, the characters of The Wire are invariably flawed, sinful creatures. A typical case is Jimmy McNulty, as close to a protagonist as the show has. He is a brilliant investigator in the great anti-hero tradition, who bucks the orders of his superiors in the service of his work. In an ironic twist on this romanticized archetype, Jimmy is portrayed as emotionally adolescent, a serial adulterer, and an

{ }“Though these are poor

moralities, they indicate

the persistence of con-

science among fallen

people, the desire to live

according to proper rules

and restrictions.”

Fall 2009 21

alcoholic, whose work is motivated more by intellectual vanity than by the pursuit of justice. By depicting the moral failings of all its characters, the program avoids drawing its conflicts according to the paradigm of good vs. evil. Though it is deeply critical of the police department and its perpetuation of ad-diction and violence, the program is direct in depicting the horrific actions perpetuated by the drug traffickers. The sinful nature of all persons is also a fundamental Christian belief.

The also program demonstrates the human yearning for moral regulation. One of the program’s most popular and per-plexing characters is Omar Little, a legendary tactician who makes his living by robbing drug dealers. Omar is a mess of contradictions, a gangster and a homosexual, a murderer who speaks politely and chastises others for using profanity, a high school dropout with an affection for Greek mythology. He also abides by a strict moral code – he does not harm anyone who is not involved in “the game” of drug trafficking. Simultaneously, it seems that the one inviolable moral principle of both police and drug dealers is unwavering loyalty to one’s own. Even if it is personally expedient, dealers are expected to protect their or-ganization by refusing to provide police and juries with infor-mation. Those suspected of disloyalty are summarily murdered. Similarly, police officers are expected not to report the inappro-priate behavior of their peers or their immediate subordinates, to lie as necessary to protect those around them. Though these are poor moralities, they indicate the persistence of conscience among fallen people, the desire to live according to proper rules and restrictions.

Perhaps the central task of The Wire is an examination of the impact of man’s fallen nature on the work of human in-stitutions. Most worldviews contain a “fall” narrative, an ex-planation for why the world is not as it should be. The Judeo-Christian “fall” narrative is that humans, intended by God to reside in paradise, disobeyed God and were thus banished from their dwelling, and that suffering and unrest persist because of humankind’s continued disobedience. As it surveys human problems, The Wire also suggests that humans are to blame for the continuation of human problems. It examines several in-stitutions designed to correct social problems, and a common pattern of institutional behavior emerges – individuals within the institution pursue personal ambition at the expense of duty, and when an institution’s leaders are called to account-ability, they deflect blame to their subordinates. Within the

police department, high-ranking officers doctor statistics and punish subordinates who complete serious criminal investiga-tions that interfere with those statistics. Politicians deliberately make poor policy decisions to cater to special interest groups and prepare for future campaigns. School administrators insist on teaching standardized test curricula at the expense of true learning in order to avoid oversight by state officials. Leaders hide their sins, burying their devils in their holes, ensuring that they save face.

Given the failings of these leaders, the show asks what is to be done about the problems that confront the city of Balti-more: drug dependence, violent crime, homelessness, a weak job market, a failing school system. It cannot be through the positioning of better persons in institutional leadership, be-cause persons are inherently flawed and untrustworthy. This is painfully illustrated in the show’s fourth season, when the elec-tion of the idealistic new mayor Tommy Carcetti leads police officers to declare “a new day in Baltimore.” Carcetti’s idealism and promises are soon broken, partly by budgetary realities, but mostly by his calculation of what policies he must adopt and what alliances he must forge if he is to campaign success-fully for governor two years later.

The show does not suggest that there is some hidden class of moral persons who are not in power, and who would be ca-pable of effective leadership. In the show’s final season, one of the more despicable characters, a corrupt state senator named Clay Davis, is brought before a grand jury comprised of ordi-nary citizens on money laundering charges. Despite his obvious guilt, Davis is able to manipulate the jury with accusations of racism against the prosecution and claims of his own generos-ity, leading to his acquittal. Here and in many other incidents,

“As the show indicates that human institutions

cannot correct social problems, so Christianity claims that humans are incapable of eradicating

their sinful nature.”


the show suggests that ordinary persons are no more capable of carrying out justice than those already wielding power. As the show indicates that human institutions cannot correct social problems, so Christianity claims that humans are incapable of eradicating their sinful nature.

Thus, The Wire is fundamentally pessimistic about the pos-sibility of wide-scale change for Baltimore, but it does not descend into nihilism. Amidst the darkness of the city, a few lights begin to glow faintly. A retired police officer adopts the son of an incarcerated soldier in the Barksdale organization. A drug trader abandons the life in order to open a boxing gym for poor youth. A disgraced police officer becomes a dedicated and effective middle school math teacher. And in one of the se-ries’ most moving scenes, “Bubbles,” standing below a crucifix, speaks to an NA meeting, celebrating his anniversary of free-dom from heroin, and he begins to confess to a greater sin and secret. Notably, these persons act outside of or in opposition to major institutions, and their good works require dramatic changes of occupation and lifestyle, and they occur immediate-ly after a significant moral or professional failing. This pattern is mirrored in the Christian salvation narrative. In this narra-tive, sinful humans are called to participate in Christ’s death, dying to their selfish lives, and to participate in his resurrection and new life. It is through the redemption of individuals that both narratives provide hope.

Yet The Wire seems to long for the redemption of the whole of Baltimore, a community that is more than the sum of its in-dividuals. The pervading grace of the city is the fraternity that exists among its denizens, and perhaps the show’s most tragic moments are the severances of that fraternity. If loyalty is the great moral principle of The Wire’s characters, it is also their greatest pleasure. It is present among police officers, among impoverished schoolchildren and among drug dealers. The show also provides timely commentary on the disintegration of community. The show’s title comes from the wiretaps used by police officers to eavesdrop on suspects, a symbol of the way in which police officers are detached from the neighborhoods they protect and the criminals they apprehend. The show’s final scenes survey the Baltimore skyline from different perspectives, and in viewing these, it is impossible not to sense the show’s deep love for the city.

This desire for community is true to the human spirit and a fundamental component of the Christian view of eternity.

The book of Revelation describes the eternal dwelling of those redeemed by Christ, called “The New Jerusalem,” and states, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:3b-4). Mired in darkness, the Baltimore of The Wire yearns for this promised dwelling.

References

Photo by Brian Oh (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bri-anoh11/3478242466/in/set-72157617236345365/), used with permission.

Cale Weatherly ‘09 was a founding member of the Telos and currently lives in Cincinnati, OH.

“It is through theredemption of individuals

that both narrativesprovide hope.”

Fall 2009 23

I hear men of GodA long time past Took to scripting theWord in goldEvery letter holyEvery stroke in light

What devotion! To sitCrouched by candles Squinting eyes to readThe Psalms once againTo color David’s song

Yet how long ago that wasThe pages I have areBlank with blackType and fingerprintsOccasional annotationsOrdinary to the touch

What makes a mark?How much of God doI see with my ownEyes? My own light?What have I sung backTo angels?

And so I say to youWho gilded the WordHeaven bless youI’ve seen your earthly workYou shared your soul With me and with the world

IlluminatedBy Emily Ciavarella

REBECCA CHUNG ‘11

Emily Ciavarella ‘13 is from Short Hills, New Jersey.


Justification and the Lord’s Table

The New Perspective on Paul

By Stephanie H. Kim

The New Perspective on Paul—or the “NPP,” as it is often abbreviated—is a hot topic in Protestant1 theology these days, one that stretches as far back as the 1970s but is even more fiercely debated today. I first learned of it while studying theology at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, where I studied last spring. After my class attended a lecture by James D.G. Dunn, the man who coined the phrase back in 1982, our professor regaled us with stories of respected scholars losing their cool and breaching etiquette in public forums over this issue. Some of its recent prominence can be attributed to the two public figures who have taken it up, lifting it out of the insular classroom and into everyday Christian life: John Piper and N.T. Wright. Both are popular writers and theologians with large followings, particularly among American evangelicals.2

1 While the debate has primarily been taken up by main-line Protestant and evangelical scholars, the prominence of a cer-tain Anglican bishop (N.T. Wright) in the discussion keeps it from being a solely low-church (i.e. not Catholic or Anglican) issue.

2 The term “evangelical” is a famously thorny one, and everyone—from those who self-identify as evangelicals to sociolo-gists to historians to random outsiders—seems to have a different understanding of what it means. With that said, I am loosely us-ing the term to refer to the branch of Protestant Christianity that can be traced to the revivals of the “Second Great Awakening” in the 1820s, which stresses the authority of the inerrant Bible, the importance of personal conversion, and the death and resurrection of Christ as the central Christian doctrine.

Fall 2009 25

As recently as May of this year, they were carrying on the NPP debate as loudly as ever—Wright published Justification: Paul’s Plan and God’s Vision (IVP Academic, 2009) in response to Piper’s The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright (Crossway Books, 2007), which was, in turn, a response to some of Wright’s earlier works.

But what is this New Perspective on Paul that is getting everyone so worked up, and what is at stake in this conversation? Providing an exhaustive overview of this ongoing, vigorous debate would take far more space than I’m allowed here. But I can give you a rough outline of what it is and whence it came. First of all, it is crucial to note that “the New Perspective on Paul” is a bit of a misnomer. There is no definite, unified idea or teaching that the NPP encompasses; it is “not a stringent school of thought with set boundaries as much as it is a trajectory”.1 Every scholar who has taken it up, whether as champion or challenger, has used a specific and oftentimes unique definition to discuss it. Furthermore, the NPP isn’t a new perspective on Paul the person, or even everything Paul-related. Rather, it’s a new perspective specifically on Paul’s writings on works-righteousness and justification, and one that discourages us from viewing either Paul or his Jewish context in polemical, caricatured form.

We can trace the origins of the NPP to E.P. Sanders’s seminal 1977 work, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Scholars widely accepted this book at the time as one that “broke the mould” of Pauline studies.2 In his book, Sanders challenges the traditional view of Second-Temple Judaism,3 in which it is seen as a “religion of legalistic

3 I.e. the era between the construction of the second Jew-ish temple in Jerusalem in 515 B.C.E. and its destruction by the Romans in 70 C.E.; the period in which Jesus, Paul, and their contemporaries lived.

works-righteousness”.3 Attempting to place Paul’s writings in their historical context, he proposes the notion of “covenantal nomism” as a more accurate description of Second-Temple Judaism; that is, the idea that “covenant” was what brought a person into relationship with God, while “works” were what maintained that relationship, both as an obedient response and a “means of atonement for transgression”.4 Sanders largely blames Martin Luther’s tendency to read Paul’s writings with

his own socio-historical context in mind—thereby conflating Second-Temple Judaism with his personal understanding of Roman Catholicism at the time—for the misguided but traditional reading. Thus, Sanders’s basic claim is that “the picture of Judaism drawn from Paul’s writings is historically false”,5 and his challenge is to “view

Judaism on its own terms, and not in terms of the distinctive themes of Christian theology”6. While he was not the first to express such a revisionist treatment of Second-Temple Judaism, he was perhaps the first to do so in a sufficiently cogent manner to leave a powerful impact on the theological world.

When James Dunn and his colleagues found Sanders’s argument about Second-Temple Judaism compelling but considered his treatment of Paul weak in comparison, they formulated the NPP in an attempt to correct those flaws. In Dunn’s view, Sanders portrays Paul as entirely and almost arbitrarily rejecting Judaism, focusing on the differences between righteousness in Judaism and Christianity without providing a convincing account for Paul’s (and, indeed, other Jewish converts’) switch in religious systems.7 Thus, using Sanders’ book as something of a springboard, Dunn began to formulate what he first dubbed “The New Perspective on Paul” in 1982.

Over the years, a few basic principles emerged as the core of this new perspective. First of all, NPP scholars seek to recast Paul’s vision of justification in light of this new perspective on Second-Temple Judaism, “which grounds Judaism in

{ }“... he has forced us

all to take a good

long look at Judaism

rather than settle for

skewed caricatures

of it…”


a foundation of grace” rather than a foundation of merit-based legalism. In doing so, they turn away from the legacy of interpretation left by such Church history heavyweights as Augustine and Luther. But if Paul was not referring to a doctrine of merit-based salvation when he condemned “justification by works” in his letters, what was he criticizing? The answer, NPP scholars claim, can be found not by viewing a fixation on “the law” as the source of Jewish legalism—strict adherence to divine laws for the sake of spiritual reward—but rather by focusing on “the social function of the law to separate Jews from Gentiles”. More specifically, the laws with which Paul was concerned were the dietary and circumcision laws that Jews, and therefore Jewish Christians, used to mark the boundary between Jewish and Gentile communities. At the time of Paul’s writing, there were divisive rumblings among the various local churches, where some Jewish Christians considered themselves superior to or somehow held apart from their Gentile brothers and sisters. Therefore, Paul’s theological rejection of “justification by works” was a rejection of the notion that the law is indispensable to remaining in the covenant, not the notion that obedience to the law leads to salvation (which Sanders, after all, discredited).8 Thus, the NPP concludes that Paul understood faith in Jesus Christ “not simply as a narrower definition of the elect of God, but as an alternative definition”,9 one that overturned the boundaries separating the “insiders” from the “outsiders” and had significant implications for the Jew who chose it.

The NPP, since its inception, has faced a steady stream of criticism, much of which has consistently fallen into several broad categories: an objection to the NPP’s reading of Luther; claims that it paints “too rosy a picture of Rabbinic Judaism”;10 and criticism regarding methods of exegesis. All three objections have been raised and rebutted, dismissed and reformulated, throughout the existing scholarship on the topic. But most crucially, some of the NPP’s critics have revealed a preoccupation with keeping the doctrine of individual salvation by the work of Christ intact, and they perceive a redefinition of “justification by faith” as a threat to that doctrine. Additionally, those of Reformed and evangelical traditions are reluctant to touch that phrase at all, as it has served as a cornerstone doctrine for their theological systems. Thus, they worry that while the NPP “[vindicates] Paul from the charge of anti-Semitism, a lot of other things disappear from Paul’s theology”11—and by

“things,” they mean an emphasis on personal salvation. As Francis Watson, a leading NPP critic, points out, “Paul does not confine himself to the abstract point that through Christ God has brought Gentiles within the scope of his covenant people. He speaks concretely of what God has done in Jesus”.12 But in fact, Dunn, Wright, and other NPP scholars would be quick to agree with this last statement; Wright himself has stated clearly that the NPP “in no way reduces the importance of every person being confronted with the powerful gospel”.13 NPP scholars are arguing for a paradigm shift, a new way of reading some familiar texts. They are not arguing for anyone to erase the notion of personal salvation from Pauline theology. In his most recent book, Wright goes so far as to read Ephesians 2 as a representation of both the “old” and “new” perspectives: “Ephesians 2:1-10 is the old perspective: sinners saved by grace through faith. Ephesians 2:11-22 is the new perspective: Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ…[They are two halves of the Pauline gospel, and] they belong intimately together”.14

While the temptation for those who take part in this debate might be to consider “resolute rejection or unqualified embrace” as the only tenable positions, the issues at stake are far too complex for either.15 But if that is the case, why does the New Perspective on Paul even matter to the everyday Christian, who is usually uninterested in the exegetical squabbling of scholars? And why isn’t the debate more self-contained, considering the inaccessibility of some of its arguments? Controversy attracts an audience, and that’s surely part of it. And N.T. Wright is a popular guy; that’s also probably part of it. But the key here seems to be that the New Perspective presents some heavy implications not only for the way we think, but also for the way we live. Wright has identified the main “problem” of

“... this perspective offers an important response

to the church’s history of anti-Semitism and weak

ecumenism, after years of missing the point: that all are welcome at the table.”

Fall 2009 27

Galatians as “the question of how you define the people of God,” or “how you can tell who is a member of the covenant family”.16 As a result of this emphasis on the “covenant family,” an auxiliary objective of the NPP is to explore how the doctrine of justification might combat nationalism and racism. Wright, in particular, believes the NPP places a timely emphasis on corporate ecclesiology in an age of Western individualism. Thus, viewing justification as an ecclesiological (how to be a church) issue as much as a soteriological (how to be saved) one, proponents of NPP theology believe this perspective offers an important response to the church’s history of anti-Semitism and weak ecumenism, after years of missing the point: that all are welcome at the table.

In fact, that was the phrase that made everything click into place for me when I first heard about the NPP, during that lecture by James Dunn. “The point,” Dr. Dunn proclaimed, “is that regardless of racial, theological, or social differences, all are welcome at the table of Christ.” As any close examination of the debate reveals, this is indeed the point of the New Perspective on Paul—not dismissing Luther, diminishing the work of Christ on the cross, or eroding the importance of personal salvation. Regardless of how convincing you find these scholars’ daring attempt to shift away from traditional interpretations, the validity of their point remains: the New Perspective calls Christians to reconsider the boundaries and barriers that we allow to define our community. Paul might have declared that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28), and Jesus might have prayed for us to “be

brought to complete unity” as a demonstration of the Father’s love (John 17:23), but we are much more apt to start a new church because of irreconcilable differences with members of our old one, fellowship only with believers who look and act like us, or avoid sharing table space with Christ-followers who adhere to different doctrines from us than we are to heed either of those messages. The New Perspective tells us that being comfortable in our divisiveness is unacceptable, and that at the very heart of the gospel, alongside the message of redemption in Christ Jesus, is the erasure of the identity markers we use to size each other up and put each other in our places. It calls for a gospel of humility and communion, reconciliation and ecumenism. And it challenges all believers to take up that call in good faith.

References

1 Michael F. Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God (Paternoster Biblical Monographs) (New York: Paternoster P, 2007) 88.

2 James D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr (P. Siebeck), 2005) 90.

3 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London: S.C.M., 1977) 3.

4 Sanders 75.5 Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” 91.6 Cornelis P. Venema, The Gospel of Free Acceptance

in Christ An Assessment of the Reformation and ‘New Perspectives’ on Paul (Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 2006) 98.

7 Ibid 94.8 James D.G. Dunn, “The New Perspective: whence,

what and whither?” The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr (P. Siebeck), 2005) 15.

9 Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” 103.10 Francis Watson, “Not the New Perspective,” British

New Testament Conference, Manchester, Sept. 2001, University of Aberdeen Divinity and Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen, 20 Apr. 2009 <http://www.abdn.ac.uk/divinity/staff/watsonart.shtml>.

11 J. Ligon Duncan, “The Attractions of the New

“The New Perspective tells us that being comfortable in our divisiveness is unacceptable, and that at the very heart of the gospel, alongside the message of redemption in Christ Jesus, is the erasure of the identity markers we use to size each other up and put each other in our places.”


Perspective(s) on Paul.” Alliancenet.org, 2003, Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc, 20 Apr. 2009 http://www.alliancenet.org/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,PTID307086|CHID560462|CIID1660662,00.html.

12 Watson.13 N. T. Wright, “New Perspectives on Paul,” 10th

Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference, Edinburgh, 25-28 Aug. 2003, NTWrightPage.com, 21 Apr. 2009 <http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_New_Perspectives.htm>.

14 N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009) 168.

15 Bird, 184.16 N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Lion

Hudson Plc, 2003) 120, 122.

Photo from (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rublev_Saint_Paul.jpg).

Stephanie Kim ‘10 is an Engliah major and Jewish Studies con-centrator from Rockville, Maryland.

Fall 2009 29

Slowly, O so slowly, am I gaining solid ground?

Tethered by a will strong, biting cords surround;

Stumbles every moment as I strain to hear the sound

Of my Saviour’s voice…familiar!

Every last chain soon unbound.

SlowlyBy Peter Pierson

STEPHANIE H. KIM ‘10


UntitledBy Danny Huang

Danny Huang ‘11 is a Computer Science major.

Fall 2009 31

Interscope Records, 2009

In 1979, four teenagers from the rock-and-roll backwater of Dublin recorded and released their first EP, Three. Thirty years later, those same four lads have released their twelfth full-length studio album, No Line on the Horizon. U2 is a true rarity in rock music: a band which remains at the cutting edge of popular music, sits at the very top of the charts, and continues to earn critical acclaim, all with the same lineup featured on their very first single. The Beatles split up, and the Rolling Stones rotated through guitarists on their way to rock dinosaurdom, but U2 continues to fill stadiums and break new ground with one of the most durable and compelling musical unions in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

No Line on the Horizon marks another experimental turn in U2’s long history, lying somewhere between the daring and acclaimed Achtung, Baby (1991) and the misbegotten electronica-influenced Pop (1997). Yet unlike the group’s output from the previous decade (including the grim and artistic 1993 release Zooropa), No Line marks a less radical departure from what went before. Casual fans will still enjoy pounding radio-friendly hits interlaced with the band’s signature political engagement and spiritual questing, while more dedicated followers will continue to unearth new and old treasures of religious and emotional depth. Both Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly have described this album as U2’s best since Achtung Baby. While this may be an exaggeration, No Line is still a considerable success.

Overall the album is a compelling combination of lighter

upbeat numbers (‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’, ‘Get On Your Boots’), quieter contemplative pieces (‘White As Snow’, ‘Cedars of Lebanon’, ‘Moment of Surrender’) and truly great songs that stand among the band’s best work (‘Magnificent’, ‘Unknown Caller’, ‘Breathe’). The album also feels more substantial from start to finish than their two previous releases. While some tracks on All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000) and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) felt like filler, none of the twelve songs on No Line fall into that category.

Consistent with the band’s work over the past dozen years, No Line offers a wealth of openly Christian material with no obfuscation. ‘White As Snow’ contains perhaps the most obvious allusions, with its verses sung to a variation on the popular Advent hymn ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’ and Bono’s lyric “Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not / Only the lamb as white as snow”. In ‘Stand Up Comedy’, a driving song with a host of witty and occasionally self-mocking

Grace Inside a Sound

By Darel E. Paul

A Review of U2’s “No Line on the Horizon”

“U2 is a band that has always be-lieved in transcendence while, coun-ter to expectations, also insisted that

rock music can be the bridge be-tween Spirit and flesh, the temporal

and the eternal, the omnipotent Cre-ator of the universe and a helpless

babe in an animal trough.”


lines, Bono reworks a famous passage from St. Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth in a contemporary idiom, singing “I can stand up for hope, faith, love”. He chastises Christians keen for a milquetoast Jesus too meek to make demands of His followers, urging listeners to “Stop helping God across the road / Like a little old lady”. One of the album’s best lines also appears in this track, perhaps a response to the recent outburst of atheist fundamentalism à la Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens: “God is love / And love is evolution’s very best day”.

By far the most emotionally compelling, well composed and theologically rich song on the album is ‘Magnificent,’ which deserves to ascend to the U2 firmament and take its place alongside greats such as ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ ‘Pride,’ ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,’ ‘Where the Streets Have No Name,’ ‘Until the End of the World’ and ‘Beautiful Day,’ all towering U2 rock classics deeply rooted in Scripture. ‘Magnificent’ begins quietly, building through anticipatory layers of instrumentation, until Larry Mullen finally drives through five bars of sixteenth notes and the sound bursts into the light. Set to an alternating contemplative and then soaring melody, the lyric is a moving personal testimonial soaked in Scriptural allusion: “I was born to sing for you / I didn’t have a choice / But to lift you up / And sing whatever song you wanted me to / I give you back my voice / From the womb my

first cry / It was a joyful noise.” One would not be far from the mark in interpreting this track as a Christian praise song. The Edge’s guitar solo is a prayer unto itself; combined with

Bono’s lyric “Justified till we die / You and I will magnify / Oh, the magnificent”, it is U2’s rendition of the Virgin Mary’s own song of praise: “My soul magnifies the Lord / and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . .” (Lk 1:46-47) Bono also beautifully renders the Bible’s sometimes difficult teachings on the Lord’s discipline (or in older translations, “reproach” or “chastisement”) of those he loves by weaving it together

with His unfailing commitment to us, an expectation of self-sacrifice first modeled and offered by God the Son Himself on Calvary. The refrain shows Bono at his lyrical best: “Only love / Only love can leave such a mark / But only love / Only love can heal such a scar”.

‘Unknown Caller’ is a strangely compelling song and over the course of the first U.S. leg of the No Line tour has become an important part of the band’s set list, with The Edge’s prominent role being especially

conspicuous. His guitar work here is beautifully measured. The track opens with a guitar part and tape loop that sound precisely like the “sunshine, sunshine” later sung in a high register, soaring over the music. On the refrain both The Edge and Bono share lead vocals, with Edge’s voice the more prominent of the two. Seemingly random phrases from the

{ }The Edge’s guitar solo is a prayer

unto itself.

Fall 2009 33

virtual world of Blackberries and personal computers dot the refrain and set the scene for spiritual wake-up calls from the real world beyond the screen and the keyboard. Bono at one point sings “3:33 when the numbers fell off the clock face”, which recalls a message on the album cover of All That You Can’t Leave Behind hidden on an airport gateway sign: “J33-3”. Bono has identified this as a reference to Jeremiah 33:3 (“Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things which you have not known.”) – in Bono’s words, “God’s phone number”. However, in this track, what is compelling is less the lyrics themselves and more the quality and texture of their delivery. The Edge’s chant-like delivery is interspersed with the uplifting vocalization “oh” running down the scale a fourth and then back up a third, crying out for the listener to add his or her voice alongside. Unusual for a U2 song, ‘Unknown Caller’ ends with an extended instrumental passage lasting well over a minute. The final section begins with a brief church organ interlude before switching seamlessly into a guitar solo of great beauty which eventually quiets to reveal the organ chords which, it turns out, have never left us. Perhaps what makes this song so moving is that, in the end, I can’t pin down exactly what strikes that chord.

U2 is a band that has always believed in transcendence while, counter to expectations, also insisted that rock music can be the bridge between Spirit and flesh, the temporal and the eternal, the omnipotent Creator of the universe and a helpless babe in an animal trough. At their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, Bruce Springsteen aptly characterized the group as “a band that wanted to lay claim to not only this world, but had their eyes on the next one as well.” From ‘Gloria’ and ‘40’ of their early years to No Line on the Horizon today, U2 continues to make a play for being not only the world’s greatest rock band, but the world’s greatest Christian rock band as well.

References

Photo by Scott (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U2_bullfight.jpg), available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Darel E. Paul is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program in Political Economy at Williams. He twice taught the Winter Study course “The Gospel According to U2” and earlier this year presented a paper at the world’s first academic conference solely devoted to U2. He is not, however, interested in U2charists.


MajesticBy Tasha Chu

Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

- Lamentations 3:22-23

Fall 2009 35

In 1982, my best friend Bobby drove westbound from New York City soon after completion of his undergraduate studies at Manhattanville College. Though we remained out of touch for most of the next twenty-five years, the grapevine would periodi-cally provide us with updates on each other’s pursuits and life milestones—for example, I learned that he eventually settled in southern California and became interested in acupuncture and Eastern medicine.

We recently reconnected via Facebook, and many blanks were filled in for both of us. Bobby was always a passionate guy, and his Facebook groups read like a résumé for social activism, ho-listic medicine, and progressive thinking. It all makes so much sense now, having known him so well during college and witnessing firsthand his daily struggle for a sense of self. I was comforted that my old friend seemed to have fared so well after our separation so many years ago; yet I was also a bit jealous that he had found and followed his passion in life, while I had not.

But lamenting at length on my passionless life eventually led me to a “duh” moment, and I realized what my life’s passion has been all along. Right there, clear as day under my own Facebook mug shot, are the words “Thank God for God.” And just beneath that, "Divine Mercy" is listed under my religious views. When I first constructed my Facebook profile, those phrases occurred to me as quickly as my list of favorite movies and music. I have had a life passion this whole time after all – just unrealized.

So now I wonder if he perused my Facebook page with the same level of interest that I did his. And if he did, what did it say about me, and what must he have thought about the course and nature of my life? And did he remember that, ironically, it was in fact his friendship that put me on a path toward a more personal and meaningful relationship with my Lord? In the end, nostal-

gic curiosity via Facebook led me back to an old friend. Twenty-five years after our first connection, the same person who played a key role in my faith formation indirectly helped me to realize the definitive passion of my life. Oh, thank God for God.

References

Photo from (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Find_us_on_facebook_badge.gif ), available under the Creative Com-mons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Anonymous is a staff member at Williams College.

An Unrealized Passion

By Anonymous

“But lament-ing at length on my pas-sionless life eventually led me to a ‘duh’ moment, and I realized what my life’s pas-sion has been all along.”


ADAM STONER ‘11

FA L L 2 0 0 9TELOS

Documents

Telos Fall 2009 Issue