Practical Beauty

In our time, many of us have been taught to strive for an insane perfection that means nothing. Christopher Alexander

He Gets It

This is what is going on when we read a Scriptural text. The infusion of theological meaning into a cultural situation in order to present God’s take on the matter. Professors should ask their students to do this and show them the parallels with the texts they are reading. The students are doing exactly what the ancient peoples did. The only that remains to be discussed are the roles of prophet, revelation, and inspiration – but none detract from the basic principle of understanding religious texts.

Update

He gets it too

Tight Feedback Loops

Feedback loops need to be tight. By tight I mean clear and short. When they get lossy and take forever – everyone does a poor job. It doesn’t matter if this is a research project that was a result of meeting, or a client-facing project. These are both feedback loops. One starts and ends internal, the other starts and ends with the client. The longer the project takes the more times you have to go back to the client and re-assure them “No really, everything is fine“. The longer the loop the more work you need to do to maintain the status quo.

To make a bad analogy, look at DSL lines. You can only get them if you are close enough to the central office. Why? The signal dissipates after a certain length and it becomes unusable. It is lossy and long. Some ISPs have lengthened that distance by placing very expensive repeaters to lengthen the life of the signal. But it does not come without serious cost and there is still a limit on how far you can go. People are the same way. The signal dissipates the longer the loop goes on.

For some strange reason, manglement thinks that just pushing deadlines out further is a solution. But this only increases the feedback loop. It is why Scrum, by definition, will not go longer than a month – they realize anything longer requires way too much work to keep rolling. The solution is pushing the deadlines in closer, and only working on that one project until it is done. Don’t multi-task, focus on a single task. You will get more projects done over the span of a year doing it this way. And the clients would be happier, the projects would have less issues, and your teams would get along better (since these are the things that really matter here).

Fallible Criteria

Michael Barber is Singing about the criteria most often used by historians, and I am finding a lot of truth in what he says. At the moment I am reading through a critique of NT Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. And I just finished Michael Borg’s critique of Wright, which is basically a whole different set of presuppositions about how to do history. And they are all fair.

In discussing the parable of the Vineyard and its historicity, Michael shares the most common points for which this parable is assigned to the construction by the later Church, and not Jesus:

1. That the “the son” is rejected and killed would seem to point to a post-Easter setting.
2. The implications of the parable are that Jesus is the son of the vineyard, i.e., the Son of God. This is also said to most likely reflect the theology of the early church.
3. In the parable the judgment on the tenants comes only after the “son” is killed. This highlights the unique importance of Jesus and thus also seems to point towards the early community’s view.
4. The destruction that comes as a result suggests a setting after the destruction of Jerusalem.
5. The son is depicted as the final climax, being sent only after other messengers have been killed. This is said to make little sense―why would a father send his son into such a situation? The language is only explicable if one sees Jesus as the climax of salvation history―as the one who comes after all the prophets, a view most see as more likely the product of the early church than Jesus himself.
6. The image of the vineyard being handed over to others is said to point to a period after the “parting of the ways”—i.e., to some belief that God has rejected Israel in favor of the Church.

He goes on to answer those specific points, so if you are interested in those, please jump on over there for them. However, I wanted to step back, since this is exactly what Borg’s take on the situation is. He cannot, based on the probability, assign certain things as going back to Jesus. There is an inherent problem here.

The basic logic works as Michael has described, sayings are attributed to the early Church based on their proclamation of it. However, no one disputes whether or not the early Church said Jesus was the Son of God. Therefore, whether Jesus said it or not, there is always a reason, and it is a very good reason, to expect an at best even, often a higher probability of the Church saying it. If we are making decisions based on probability we are going to have a problem. Because Jesus could never have said anything the Church did say, according to this method. It is always better to err on the side of caution saying the “The Church put that in the Scripture, it did not come from the mouth of Jesus”.

Of course I am not saying anything new here, NT Wright went on about exactly these fallible historical criteria in his book. The strange issue is that no one is talking about the validity of his own criteria, specifically the criterion of similarity and dissimilarity – which would seem to do a much better job of highlighting whether or not Jesus did, or did not say something historically. Simply put, if the words are similar to Judaism, yet suggest a difference in interpretation, while at the same time being similar to the later Church, while being either never fully carried out/implemented or simply dropped to the extent spoken of, there is a high probability it was spoken by Jesus, rather than created by the Church. It would seem to me that this method would do far better justice to the evidence. With the other method you have, at best, a coin-flip: “It really could have been either one”, and at worst “That is exactly what the Church said, therefore I have no confidence Jesus said it”. It boils down to this. One would expect some continuity between Judaism and Jesus, and Jesus and the Church. If Jesus really did not say anything the Church proclaimed he said – well you really do have a big historical problem on your hands. How in the wide-world did the Church come to be? (And there are serious people working on this problem: “How did the Church come to exist given that miracles do not occur, Jesus never claimed to be the messiah, and was not resurrected”). That historical problem, I would think, should scare historians rather than a small chance of a false-positive that Jesus did not in fact say something we think he did.

On Power

We are more than conquerors

HT: Naked Pastor

One Can Only Hope

On Iran

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited.
Washington Post

Deeply Resonating…

with what Michael is saying here. Follow that conversation.

…convinced that the pursuit of the truth was more exciting than presupposition of numerous axioms…

Crisis

No change is going to occur unless someone experiences a crisis in their thinking. But this is rare.
Naked Pastor

Unfortunately this is how we’re wired. I’ve been fortunate in certain areas to push myself to a crisis point – I don’t like mental dissonance and questions that tear at the fabric of the topic. It means something isn’t elegant. Something is out of place. The mental furniture is blocking the sunlight coming through the window. Move the furniture.

Furniture is everything you thought you knew to be right and true. Take it, move it. Just see what it looks like in the other corner, facing the wrong direction. Jumble it around. Don’t be a stick in the mud. Try a little experimenting, thinking out of the box. And when the conclusion that you though least viable starts looking like a real solution – have your mental crisis.

People only change as a result of something massive that shifts their entire worldview. Whether it is someone you loved totally screwing you over, and therefore you can’t trust people, or someone treats you in such an unexpected way you start to believe in people again. When you can, alter someone else’s worldview. When you can, alter your own. Change is good.

Barth

Love

may be recognised by the fact that it is determined, and indeed determined upon the life-partnership of marriage. Love does not question; it gives an answer. Love does not think; it knows. Love does not hesitate; it acts. Love does not fall into raptures; it is ready to undertake responsibilities. Love puts behind it all the Ifs and Buts, all the conditions, reservations, obscurities and uncertainties that may arise between a man and a woman. Love is not only affinity and attraction; it is union. Love makes these two persons indispensable to each other. - (CD III.4, 221)

Mode of Transportation

It rides like a dream! I put the first ten miles on today.