OF A GOLDEN AGE

Andrew Sullivan linked to this post I devoured and loved. The role of the educated, reasonable theologist has been marginalized by those whom Andrew appropriately labels “Christianists,” wielding carefully parsed scripture and quotations as weapons of intolerance or self-congratulation.

Governor Mark Sanford claimed recently to be a King David figure, or at least to draw significant parallels between this parable and his situation. From the WaPo:

And that King David analogy surely is understandable for Sanford, since it makes the governor’s errant ways seem exceptionally minor.

Father Stephen gets to the heart of the matter:

The problem with such use of Biblical imagination is that it simply has no controlling story. Nothing tells us which story to use other than our own imagination (which is generally a deluded part of our mind). [ . . . ] The gospel is not preached – souls are not saved – the Bible is simply brought into ridicule.

One of the problems inherent to our soundbyte-obsessed culture is that people don’t feel the need to acquaint themselves with context before they speak or cite. Recently, Sarah Palin tweeted an out-of-context remark from Walter Cronkite on the “liberal” nature of the media. Of course, Kronkite’s whole conversation involved a more literal definition of liberal rather than political, and he was encouraging the evenhanded and voracious acquisition of knowledge and viewpoints.

Palin acting a fool is no big news, and I think she’s too ignorant to understand the way she manhandles information. But she represents a larger movement toward a people who love quotations more than books, who pull lines from websites and use them as “Favorite Quotes” when they don’t even know who the speakers were or what they represented.

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