Randy Greenwald

The debate in the newspaper this morning is whether ‘Black Friday’ will creep into becoming ‘Black Thursday’. I find that grievous thought on several levels. Those who move Christmas shopping earlier in the season have a champion in my sister who called about a week or so ago asking about something my son might want. I had not begun to think about such things. She had.

Since it is that season, and since there are those of you out there making plans now about what to give then, I’d like to step into the role of Recommender of Gifts, if only for a couple of posts. This post will be dedicated to feeding the soul, the next to feeding the body. And I tend to think that at a critical level the two are related.

First, the soul.

The Christian who is hungry to know God will, we hope, read his Bible. If he does, he will regularly run into portions which seem to raise more questions than they answer. What will he do then?

1. Nothing.

2. Ask his pastor.

3. Check the notes in his study Bible.

4. Look up an answer on-line.

5. Read up on it in the free public domain digital copy of Matthew Henry he got free from a good friend.

Sometimes doing nothing is not a bad choice. It depends upon how troubling the passage is and the amount of time available. Further, it is often good to allow a passage to percolate in one’s own mind before rushing off too quickly to get someone else’s ‘authoritative’ insight, which may be presented with more authority than it ought.

Surprisingly, ‘2’ is really not often pursued. While as a pastor, I don’t want to set up shop as a Bible Answer Man, and most pastors would not have the time to answer with clarity and thought every question that might come his way, nevertheless sometimes I wonder why this route is avoided. There is an alternative, though, which in most cases is far better.

I am no more a fan of study Bibles than I am of red letter ones. Some, for sure, have great notes, but not all. My opposition is not based upon the physical bulk added, and only partially for the profit motive added to their production. My concern is that by adding commentary to the text of the Bible, we do two deleterious things. First, we short-circuit the reader’s own reflective thinking about a puzzling text. Instead of meditating upon the text, the reader’s eyes too easily head to the notes to find ‘the answer’. Secondly, by putting an interpretation of a text on the same page as the text, the separation between the two is blurred. We will tend to grant an authority to the notes which should be reserved for the text.

To look up an answer on-line can open us to all kinds of horrors. It is like on-line dating without the eHarmony screening. And as much respect as I have for the ministry and insight of Matthew Henry, and as much as we all like the word ‘free’, his insights are not always helpful in answering the questions we might be asking about a text.

So there must be a better way.

A brilliant solution, of course, would be to take study notes by trusted biblical authorities and publish them in a separate book, distinct from the Biblical text, but still convenient enough to be reached for when the need arises. I once suggested this in a letter to R. C. Sproul who was at the time busy at work on the New Geneva Study Bible. He did not see it for the brilliant idea it was.

A few weeks ago, though, I realized that a resource I already regularly used was really the resource I was envisioning. As a result, I have begun to recommend widely the New Bible Commentary, a one volume commentary on the Bible published by InterVarsity Press. Edited by four of the most highly regarded evangelical Biblical scholars of our day (Gordan Wenham, R. T. France, D. A. Carson, and Alec Motyer), this is wonderfully useful and trustworthy tool. Its concise commentary on every passage of every book of the Bible may not always answer all the questions we have, but it more often than not sheds light on books and passages which may otherwise seem obscure or impenetrable.

This is not a volume you can stuff in your back pocket or cart around to your next small group meeting (it is 2½ inches thick!). But at 2¢/page (if my math is correct) it is a gift that any who often read and ponder the Bible will love for a long, long time.

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Full disclosure: I receive nothing from IVP for the endorsement of this book. But if you follow the link above and buy the book, Amazon gives me a kickback. I feel a bit self-serving in pasting such links in my blog, but if Amazon wants to support my blog in that way, I’m happy to let them.

The cover of my copy of Richard Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents is crowned with a quote from Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg in his review written for The Boston Globe. The quote says simply, “A triumph.”

I’m not sure what to make of that. The review itself as far as I can tell is inaccessible to all but subscribers to the Boston Globe. A triumph of what? A triumph over what? I would love to see the point being made. Muller is a professor of physics at UC, Berkeley and has taken this book, subtitled “The Science behind the Headlines” from a popular course taught there for non-science students.

The idea for the course/book is in fact brilliant, perhaps even a triumph. (I should like to write a book, or see someone write, “Theology for Future Presidents”. It wouldn’t necessarily be a triumph of any sort, but it could be helpful to inject some careful thought about theological and religious issues into current political debate.) Muller’s intention is to bring a sense of objective scientific understanding to the issues of the day, specifically terrorism, energy, nuclear war/power, space exploration, and climate change.

His intention is fulfilled. That he intended to accomplish this without bias (“Just the facts, ma’am”) is cute, but always impossible. I do feel that I know more now about the science behind many of the current debates. But I know enough as well to realize that no objective treatment of such hot issues is ever possible. I resist the scientists’ claim to absolute objectivity. As much as any of us may want to follow the facts where they lead, we must be aware, with much humility, that our interpretation and application of the facts will be always tainted with our own subjective predisposition.

It is good that he attacks his goal with non-technical language. But is there a reason the book reads as if it were intended for a sixth grader? Simple sentences predominate. Perhaps he feels that this style better communicates. Perhaps this is his assessment of the intellectual capacity of those who might aspire to the land’s highest office. The book’s triumph is certainly not literary.

Don’t let my quibbles mislead, however. Good information is here. I won’t remember the statistics that suggest that the danger from nuclear power plants is minimal, but I will have a resource to which I can turn if I need to defend that case. I have been made to think and to reflect upon the value of manned space exploration and the legitimacy of the science behind global warming. I’m grateful that he removes from the table the fears which lead to panic regarding the possibilities of a mass terrorist attack. There is good stuff here. A helpful resource, for sure. An accomplishment if not a triumph.

Muller, some of you may know, was a staunch critic of the science of climate change until a Koch brothers’ funded research project led him to refine his position, to the consternation of his benefactors. (This led to his being crowned a ‘brave thinker‘ by the Atlantic.) Curiously, critics of the book in on-line reviews slam it for its harsh treatment of Al Gore and those standing with him. And yet, the edition which I have read begins the section on global warming with a sentence which reads, “…as our most recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate, form Vice President Al Gore, says in his powerful Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006)….” If he is a Gore critic, I’d be interested in seeing what Gore’s fans might say. He critiques the extreme presentation of the evidence of global warming, even that which is found in Gore’s film, as unhelpful. I find his critique of sloppy reasoning to be the most beneficial aspect of the book, for sloppy reasoning is found everywhere in political debate.

Is the book a triumph? No. Helpful? For sure.

At age 18 I drew, or was assigned, #31 in the 1975 Vietnam draft lottery, nearly insuring a trip to Vietnam. I promptly filed for and was granted conscientious objector status. I never went to Vietnam and no one close to me did either.

Since then, its memory has not been something I have had to often face. Even though I have been an avid devourer of movies, I have managed to avoid all of those set in Vietnam or attempting to come to grips with that war, with the sole exception of We Were Soldiers.

However at the end of last year I began to hear about a book reported to be remarkable in its writing and subject matter, a novel written over a period of two or three decades by a former Marine and Rhodes Scholar, Karl Marlantes, titled Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War.

The hype was strong. The New York Times listed it in its list of 100 notable books for 2010. Mark Bowden, the author of Black Hawk Down in a special Amazon review says:

Here is story-telling so authentic, so moving and so intense, so relentlessly dramatic, that there were times I wasn’t sure I could stand to turn the page. As with the best fiction, I was sad to reach the end.

I was intrigued and so asked for and was given the book for Christmas last year. I finished reading it just about a month ago. There are books you read, which are quickly forgotten, and there are books you experience, which become a part of you and are hard to shake. This one belongs in the latter category. The experience of reading it is still with me.

Is it a great and notable book? I’ll let others assess its literary merit. But taken as a whole this is a book to be read and savored and pondered. Normally something hyped disappoints. Not this. Bowden is right. I was sad to reach the end.

This is my first introduction to a view of that war from the jungle level. I leave this book almost able to smell and to taste and to feel the awful conditions under which Marine grunts and others had to fight in that jungle environment. I have often heard that veterans of that war cannot really talk about that experiences with any but those who were really there. This book gives a feel for why that is so.

On the one hand, the story revolves around the possession, abandonment, and bloody retaking of an ultimately meaningless piece of Vietnam geography. On the other hand, it is the story of the movement of a privileged lieutenant from one who is concerned for climbing the command structure to one who finds a deep and indescribable bond with the men with whom he fights. The book makes me want to be a part of those who fought there, and makes me glad I never had to. There is nobility here and there is idiocy. There is the full scope of human capacity and depravity and glory. And it is dramatic, gritty, real, captivating.

War is romanticized and criticized. War IS an awful thing, but sometimes war is sadly necessary. At some level war is always mad. The WWII movie The Bridge on the River Kwai may be remembered more for its clever whistled theme than for its content. But its power lay in the final two words of dialog forming a commentary on all warfare. “Madness! Madness!”

Yes, Matterhorn shows the madness and sadness of war. But it does so without trivializing it or preaching about it. There is a humanness in this novel that makes me want to avoid war at all costs, but causes me to wonder if I would have the courage to fight for those things worth fighting for.

I read little crime fiction, but during a recent few days away I had occasion to finish a P. D. James Adam Dalgliesh mystery A Mind to Murder. I was delighted to find in James occasional wry side comments regarding the human and social condition, a few of which seem sharable:

“His Marriage…had been doomed from the start, as any marriage must be when husband and wife have a basic ignorance of each other’s needs coupled with the illusion that they understand each other perfectly.”

“Her house was the centre for a collection of resting actors, one-volume poets, aesthetes posing on the fringe of the ballet world, and writers more anxious to talk about their craft in an atmosphere of sympathetic understanding than to practice it.”

“‘I was also with my brother-in-law who happens to be a bishop. A High Church bishop,’ she added complacently, as if incense and chasuble set a seal on episcopal virtue and veracity.”

“People did not automatically become kind because they had become religious.”

Finding such quips is one of the joys of reading. Unless, of course, the sting is aimed too much in my direction.

“‘I should be relieved if I could produce even an evangelical curate to vouch for me between six-fifteen and seven o’clock yesterday evening.'”

Yes. Even one of those, suspect as they may be, would do.