Christian Humanist Profiles The Christian Humanists

Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation.  We can learn a fair bit about public life and public speech just tracing the course and changes and counter-thrusts surrounding words and phrases like fake news, alt-right, social justice, and woke.  Sola Scriptura goes back centuries before these other terms, and its career likewise promises to shed light on some complex relationships between texts and communities whose common lives involve something called Bible.  Dr. Ben Witherington’s recent book Sola Scriptura: Scripture’s Final Authority in the Modern World from Baylor University Press explores both the ways Sola Scriptura as a phrase has changed and the important continuities that emerge when careful historians examine the Church’s relationships with the Holy Scriptures. 

Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another.  But etymological roots don’t go far making sense of the fascination and the division and the devotion and the emotion that literature and scriptures bring forth in readers of all sorts.  David Jasper has spent a career examining the literary character of Christian and Jewish Scriptures, the strange gravitational influences those Scriptures have exerted on recent literature, and all kinds of likewise compelling things, and his new collection of essays Scripture and Literature: A David Jasper Anthology traces some of the big questions that he’s pursued over the years for the benefit of just those readers, including us.

What is education for?  The oldest grand library of which I have any knowledge is the tablet-collection of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, and as far as I can tell, it’s mainly a collection of magic spells for the court sorcerers to draw from when they need this or that kind of wizardry.  And on the other end of things, in our little corner of the twenty-first century, some colleges seem to advertise exclusively (or pretty dang near exclusively) what kinds of financial benefits their schools offer to those who enroll.  Folks who have heard the Christian Humanist Radio Network talk about education over the years know that we tend to favor visions of education from somewhere in between historically and nowhere in the vicinity theologically, and that’s why I’m excited to have Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro and Dr. David Henreckson on the show to talk about The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education from Plough Press.  This collection, which they edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, doesn’t really get into the sorcery end of things–just not that urgent any more, I suppose–but have a good deal to say about the aspirations and visions of education that in our moment stand as a compelling and faithful calls to Christian communities concerned with teaching what’s most worth teaching.

 If you don’t spend much time around Biblical-studies people, the neologism “parallelomania” might be a new one on you, so let me explain: for different reasons, some writers in Biblical studies seem bent on discovering, naming, and insisting on a particular significance for any text that looks like, sounds like, works like, and otherwise resembles canonical and orthodox and historically central texts.  Sometimes the parallelomaniac insists that the similarities render orthodox Christianity a mere winner among contenders, historically speaking, and sometimes the parallelomaniac wants to say that the tradition that comes down to most of us is not much more than centuries of plagiarism.  Dr. Michael F. Bird wants to slow down a bit: yes, the ways that worshipers talk about Jesus develop from generation to generation, and yes, some of the formulations differ from one another, but the conclusions might be too hasty.  His recent book Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World proposes some different practices for reading a spectrum of ancient texts, and then he shows the reader what those reading processes look like, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show to talk about all of it.

History as a practice examines the contingent.  Everything that leaves evidence of having-happened might have happened otherwise, and nothing that has come to be except that it displaced other things that might have been. In the realm of Black religion in the United States, the what-if questions and counterfactuals wonder about a seventy-year-old Dr. King, to be sure, but they also wonder about the directions that theological and political and cultural movements took and what possibilities, lost to contingency, might be worth reclaiming.  Such claims and counter-claims are the stuff of Dr. Gary Dorrien’s book A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK from Yale University Press, and Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome Dr. Dorrien back to the show.

Some of us first encounter them as the wicked city that Jonah eventually visits.  For others they’re one of the Asian empires that Herodotus surveys on his way to the grand showdown between the Persians and the Greek-speaking city-states.  Some of us have run into their legendary figures Sardanapallus and Semiramis in Dante or Byron.  And of course some of us still aren’t sure how to avoid the Gorge of Eternal Peril when the old man asks us “What is the capital of Assyria?”  (We’ll address that one later.)  But relatively few of us know much about the Assyrians as they present themselves and how they fit into the changing landscape of ancient civilization.  So Christian Humanist Profiles is glad today to welcome Eckart Frahm, whose recent book Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire does just what the title promises, showing us what that ancient world looks like from inside Assyria as well as the spectrum of views from beyond the fall of those grand urban walls.