Meanderings, 17 August 2024

Good morning! How do you drink your coffee?

Luxhaus.

By the way, answers two and three are, well, IYKYK.

I’m grateful for Patricia Gundry, as well as to her husband Stan. Tov folks.

Patricia Gundry, an evangelical author who taught that “God was the first feminist,” died on July 31 at age 87.

She was part of a movement of women—including Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Letha Scanzoni, and Nancy Hardesty—who reevaluated Christian teachings on gender and hierarchy in light of Scripture.

With an evangelical commitment to rejecting tradition unless it could be backed up by the ultimate authority of the Bible, they came to believe the church had been wrong about women. The limitations and strictures placed on women were cultural, they said, and the hierarchy supposedly found in “creation order” was not part of God’s good plan but a result of sin entering the world.

The evangelical feminists argued that people who loved Jesus should follow him in his proclamation to the woman “crippled by a spirit” in Luke 13, declaring, “Woman, you are set free.”

Gundry adapted Jesus’ phrase for the title of her first book, Woman Be Free! It was published by Zondervan in 1977 and sold about 9,000 copies in two years—a moderate success, but with a significant impact.

Complementarian theologians John Piper and Wayne Grudem identified Gundry’s book as one of the “new interpretations of the Bible” that had provoked a “great uncertainty among evangelicals,” leaving many men and women “not sure what their roles should be.” They coined the new term complementarianism and developed a theology of gender roles in response.

Many regular readers of Woman Be Free! said they weren’t thrown into uncertainty, though. To them, the book was validating.

“I felt seen,” one woman in Ohio wrote on Goodreads after finishing Woman Be Free! in a single day. “Knowing you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, and you’re not defective is a great feeling.”

In 1996, Christianity Today called Woman Be Free! one of the books with the greatest influence on American evangelicals since World War II.

[SMcK: eventually Stan, teaching at Moody, got into some trouble over Pat and I pick up the story there:] A group of conservatives opposed to the amendment [ERA] started a letter-writing campaign. Moody received around 80 letters, according to reporting at the time, and the issue of whether people who believe in women’s equality could teach at Moody went to the trustees. The school decided the answer was no. Stan Gundry was told that if he resigned, he could receive a severance.

Stan Gundry couldn’t find a job teaching at a Christian college after that and had to change careers, going to work as an editor for Zondervan. He told CT he didn’t regret it, though.

“I wore it as a badge of honor,” Stan Gundry said. “It was the right thing to do and I stood by her.”

Also, it wasn’t all bad. Free from Moody’s strict lifestyle rules, he told the Chicago Tribune at the time, Stan Gundry was finally able to go and see Star Wars.

Tim Walz and the Minnesota Lutheran:

In terms of the relationship between religion and politics, the 2024 presidential election offers four candidates who have little in common, beyond the fact that not one is an evangelical Protestant. Donald Trump was raised on Norman Vincent Peale and has spent far more time “dialing up religious dog whistles” among Christian nationalists than going to church himself. Kamala Harris is a Black Baptist whose husband is Jewish and whose mother is Hindu. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is a former atheist who converted to Catholicism as an adult.

Then there’s Minnesota governor Tim Walz, chosen last week by Harris to complete the Democratic ticket. Raised Catholic, he has most often identified himself as a “Minnesota Lutheran.” …

As importantly, I’d ascribe a political “style” to Minnesota Lutherans that has more to do with what we might call “cultural Christianity” than the living out of “two kingdoms” political theology.

Consider what our governor said at a labor rally this past spring:

Because we’re good Minnesota Lutherans, we have a rule: If you do something good and talk about it, it no longer counts. So what you have to do is to get someone else to talk about you.

It’s Midwestern humor straight out of Lake Wobegon. But in her recent story on Walz’s faith, religion journalist Kelsey Dallas quoted that comment in support of her conclusion that “Minnesota Lutheran is both a religious identity and a cultural one [for Walz]. It’s someone who will tell a self-deprecating story while sharing a jello mold with you at a potluck after church.”

Now, I don’t know how often Tim Walz attends church, or how involved he is in the ministry and mission of his congregation. But according to its own figures, just over 25% of the baptized members of his congregation — or, if you prefer, 35% of its confirmed members — worship there, in person or online. That’s not unusual in my experience of the ELCA and other Lutheran bodies. At the much larger ELCA church in our neighborhood, the same figure is below 20%.

For the non-attending majority, “Minnesota Lutheran” may be a cultural identity, even if it’s less of a religious one. That doesn’t mean that their faith makes no difference to those Minnesotans, any more than would be the case with other cradle Protestants in a country where only 30% of such Christians go to church weekly. Or back in the mother countries of so many Minnesota Lutherans…

What the British journalist Michael Booth says about the Nordic lands may, in this sense, also describe the American state to which hundreds of thousands of Norwegians and Swedes — and smaller numbers of Finns and Danes — migrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: “Though the Nordic people have largely grown out of religion… their particular form of Christianity, Lutheranism, has been a formative influence on the Nordic psyche and remains fundamental to the way people here behave and relate to one another.” Booth argues, for example, that the “core principles of Lutheranism—parsimony, modesty, disapproval of individualism or elitism—still define the manner in which the Danes behave toward one another and view the rest of the world.”

A problem in 2 Chronicles:

American Christians today have different ways of reading the Bible. Some are “inerrantists” and “literalists.” That’s how I grew up. For people like this, it’s funny what seems bothersome and what doesn’t. For many, worries about how many days creation took and whether Jesus literally walked across the surface of a lake have been more bothersome than the antepenultimate  (next to next to last) sentence in this section. That worries me now.

Did you notice that sentence? “. . . and whoever would not seek the LORD, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.”

If you and I disagree on questions like the days of creation and the meaning of the miracle stories, we can live together, maybe even worship together, unimpeded. But what if one of us worships a God who we believe ordered his people two or three millennia ago to kill their neighbors with whom they had religious disagreements? Even if we say, “Ah, that was a special commandment for that moment, which does not apply to us,” but we also affirm that God does not change, and that the Bible is the inerrant, unchanging word of the unchanging God, have we not thereby affirmed that at some times, under some circumstances, the God whom we worship might conceivably order us to exterminate our neighbors as expression of our own fidelity? 

What—you say that could never happen? …

For myself: for some time now—I do not know exactly how long, it was a decades-long process—I have been unable to believe that the God I worship ordered ancient Israelites to slaughter men, women, and children of other ethnicities and religions. Unable? Yes; also unwilling. The plausibility of such a notion collapsed entirely. I certainly do not believe that the God I worship (or the God worshiped by faithful Christians and Jews) has given modern Israelis license to dispossess and slaughter the Palestinian people. The God I worship is light, in whom there is no darkness at all. The God I worship is love, and love does not license theft and murder.

Further consequence: I cannot accept people who worship an authorizer of theft and murder as fellow worshipers of the same God. I must see them as idolaters. Which—fear not!—does NOT make me think that God might want me to kill them.

[James Ernest has a question for you:] If your hermeneutic—your way of interpreting and applying the Bible, whether or not you use words like “inerrant” and “literal”—ends up making you OK with theft and murder as long as it’s being done by rather than to “us,” do you think you might need a new hermeneutic?

There’s spicy and there’s extreme spicy, but I’ll take mild. Same with coffee. No bold coffee for me.

Whether the spice they seek is fiery or acidic and sour, humans can be drawn to the perceived danger of extreme foods. Like watching a horror movie, the experience stimulates a fight-or-flight response during which the brain releases endorphins and dopamine, hormones that make people feel good. After the brain determines everything is safe, there’s a sense of accomplishment in overcoming a dangerous situation.

“These challenges are really drawing people in who have that psychological affinity — sensation-seeking, reward-seeking types of behaviors. So the more dangerous it is, the more thrilling it is,” said Elisa Trucco, director of the Research on Adolescent and Child Health Lab at Florida International University.

Both sour and spicy foods generate painful responses, though they activate different nerves in the body. When saliva breaks down spicy food, capsaicin travels to the throat, nose and esophagus and activates nerves involved in the sense of touch, said Robert Pellegrino, a postdoctoral fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The ensuing pain is similar to touching a hot stove.

“You can feel spice everywhere,” Pellegrino said.

On the other hand, sourness activates taste nerves. When people eat sour foods, the body initiates a pain reaction because it detects an acidic substance that could be harmful if ingested.

In both cases, the brain can override the initial pain reaction. Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, attributes this override to humans’ ability to differentiate between serious and “benign” pain. Eating moderate amounts of spice is generally safe, he said, but even so, the body treats it as a health threat.

“That’s where the pleasure comes, from the fact that you’re overriding your body’s signal not to do this,” Rozin said.

Fascinating.

I gotta say this stuff at times also fascinates, in a completely different way than the history lesson above, and at other times I think it’s just plain hokey. How about you?

A Boeing pilot recorded strange lights in the sky during a flight from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria that the pilot said did not show up on radar.

Captain Ruud Van Pangemanan uploaded the video to YouTube, capturing lights hovering outside the cockpit of the Boeing 747.

Pangemanan said the lights appeared around 30 minutes into the flight and described them as moving freely and extremely bright. He also said they did not appear on radar.

The captain said it was a strange experience and described the lights as UFOs.

There are possible mundane explanations, including satellites, stars or planets. The lights could also be ball lightning, a phenomenon that consists of balls of light seen in the sky, often in association with thunderstorms.

It’s also possible the lights are connected to the Perseid meteor shower, which is happening this month and sending hundreds of shooting stars through the atmosphere.

Pangemanan has said he doesn’t believe the lights were stars or satellites, citing the way the lights behaved.