But, Ma, he's nekkid
Roy & the Emperor’s New Clothes
Roy was my assistant at my second Navy assignment in Washington, DC forty years ago. A GS-15, he was a master of bureaucratic gobbledygook. Incomprehensible and meaningless, Roy's writing was as vacant as the emperor’s new clothes. But it read so formidably that nobody but me his new supervisor had the guts to call him on it; incredibly, even the officers before me had been snowed and he had skied his way to senior civil service rank on male bovine droppings. Roy’s prose was so unchallengeable that our admiral depended on him to write all the command’s letters of commendation and recommendations for military medals. Even my own service dress blue uniform may have a medal for which Roy wrote the BS for desk duty performance above and beyond the call. Among other things, that Washington tour taught me to be cynical of authors and whatever they write.
This is an apology that I'm reading an article with the sentence, "... even the hermeneutical spiral ... cannot rescue us from our epistemological troubles, and can even exacerbate them ... ." Anyone who wonders hasn’t read theologians. A theologian is an author whose subject is speculative and whose vocation is accordingly and therefore to daunt the reader with writing so mystical, mysterious and misty that you can’t ask what the hell does that mean without risking yourself to be scoffed a dimwit. Aboriginals of The Cloud, theologians make their living by arguing with their colleagues and writing textbooks about it: Our Boarding House with Major Hoople Recidivus and Amos Hoople Redux. Readers of theology become accustomed to being close to the barnyard.
The author of the article I just read is brilliant, as career and colleagues certify. Vocabulary is superior and the piece is interesting, making a case that Christians should be concerned with doing what pleases God, not with doctrinal certainty and purity. With my view that certainty, certitude, is our greatest sin, I bought the book solely because of the title of that one article. But the author isn’t coming at the subject as an Anglican, an Episcopalian, it’s more an apologetic for fundamentalist and evangelical dogmatism, trying to untie that boat and push it gently away from the pier without anyone falling overboard.
The book, anonymous, has nine essays by various authors. I read one other article, by a different author, about making sense of Genesis One, and found it also such an apologetic, but also interesting, worthwhile, and informative. It observes that in Genesis One the Creator first structures, then fills. So, on days 1, 2, and 3 God structures respectively, day/night, sky/waters, and land; then on days 4, 5, and 6 respectively, God fills the day/night with the sun, moon and stars; fills the sky and waters with birds and fish; fills the land with animals and humans. Primarily, this piece makes a convincing case that Genesis One has a link with Egyptian creation stories that's older than any link with Babylon's Enuma Elish.
The book, anonymous, has nine essays by various authors. I read one other article, by a different author, about making sense of Genesis One, and found it also such an apologetic, but also interesting, worthwhile, and informative. It observes that in Genesis One the Creator first structures, then fills. So, on days 1, 2, and 3 God structures respectively, day/night, sky/waters, and land; then on days 4, 5, and 6 respectively, God fills the day/night with the sun, moon and stars; fills the sky and waters with birds and fish; fills the land with animals and humans. Primarily, this piece makes a convincing case that Genesis One has a link with Egyptian creation stories that's older than any link with Babylon's Enuma Elish.
TW+