Privileged westerners and the call of Jesus

Jesus’ call to discipleship included this demand: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). What can this call to discipleship mean for those of us who are privileged Westerners? It seems to me that we haven’t taken the call of Jesus seriously unless we have felt the pressure of this question. And confronted with the absoluteness of Jesus’ call, our exegetical instinct may often be one of self-preservation.

I’ve noticed that many sermons on the sayings of Jesus start out with Jesus’ own sharp antitheses and shattering absoluteness—and then the preacher ends up with a harmless and domesticated middle-class interpretation (or, worse still, an “application”) of these sayings! This self-preserving interpretive strategy is perfectly understandable, precisely because Jesus is not just announcing something that we already knew for ourselves. He is announcing a wholly new thing: the breaking-in of the reign of God. And this new thing demands a new and absolute decision: either/or!

Thus it’s no coincidence that, faced with the absolute and very concrete demands of Jesus’ call to discipleship, the rich young man “went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Mark 10:22). It seems to me that if we privileged Westerners don’t feel tempted to do the same, to “go away sorrowful,” then we haven’t yet really been grasped by what Jesus is saying.

(This post is adapted from my comment on Michael Jensen’s blog.)

Quote of the day

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden: or, Life in the Woods (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 80.

Biblioblogger of the month

Mike Bird’s Euangelion is the new biblioblog of the month, and there’s an excellent and informative interview with Mike here. (Note: I detect evidence of a redactor, since this photo does not reflect the true redness of Mike’s hair.)

Others who love Mozart

Tchaikovsky: “Mozart is the musical Christ.”

Bernard Shaw: Mozart’s was “the only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.”

Charles Gounod: “Mozart exists, and will exist, eternally; divine Mozart—less a name, more a soul descending to us from the heavens, who appeared on this earth, stayed for a little over thirty years, and left it all the more rejuvenated, richer and happier for his appearance.”

Victor Borge: “In my dreams of heaven, I always see the great Masters gathered in a huge hall in which they reside. Only Mozart has his own suite.”

Phil Goulding: “For one moment in the history of music all opposites were reconciled; all tensions resolved; that luminous moment was Mozart.”

Edvard Grieg: “In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.”

Franz Alexander von Kleist: “Mozart's music is so beautiful as to entice angels down to earth.”

Albert Einstein: “Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it—that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.”

Georg Solti: “Mozart makes you believe in God.”

Theologians who love Mozart

Søren Kierkegaard: “I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may.”

Karl Barth: “With an ear open to your musical dialectic, one can be young and become old, can work and rest, be content and sad: in short, one can live.”

Hans Küng: Mozart’s music has “relevance for religion ... precisely through the compositional technique of the non-vocal, purely instrumental music, through the way in which music interprets the world, a way which transcends extra-musical conceptuality.”

Pope Benedict XVI (formerly Joseph Ratzinger): “His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the whole tragedy of human existence.”

Historicity and the Old Testament

Jim West and Joe Cathey (among others) have recently been debating the question of the historicity of the Old Testament sources. No doubt some of the Old Testament bloggers will already have noted this article in the latest issue of the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament—but it’s worth mentioning again here (although I’m not a “minimalist” myself):

David Henige, “In Good Company: Problematic Sources and Biblical Historicity,” JSOT 30:1 (2005), 29-47.

The paper sharply criticises an interpretive attitude of basic provisional trust in the biblical sources, and argues instead that “the notion that historical sources are innocent until proved guilty and therefore need not ... be tested is thoroughly naïve, inasmuch as historical sources have perjured themselves time and time again” (p. 31).