Once, a Lutheran pastor went up to an author (who's also an ex-monk who spent many hours in monastic choir and Latin chant) and asked, how could one have a personal relationship with God in prayer when all was set and programmed, all was ritual, formal, and liturgical?? This author later wrote in his memoirs,

I have never, ever, thought that Latin chant opposes personal prayer. It is simply personal prayer as part of a total community at prayer. It helps you to distinguish, in prayer, between human echo and divine response, between your own will set to sound and the divine will that allegedly transcends it. As a simple analogy: Does singing the national anthem communally enlarge or diminish personal and individual patriotism??

It's amazing how much you can learn from people who've been deemed outcasts, super-deviants and heretics from your community. I suspect there are Christians who wouldn't touch the works of John Dominic Crossan with a 10-foot pole. But after reading A Long Way From Tipperary: What A Former Irish Monk Discovered In His Search For The Truth, whilst I'm nowhere near agreeing with his views on the historical Jesus, I can identify with his struggles, his doubts, his pain (I can almost weep with him over the loss of his first wife).

I see a man who needs the love of Jesus Christ, yet also one I can learn from tremendously (even N.T. Wright has celebrated Crossan's genius; see the opening remarks in his chapter on Crossan in Jesus & The Victory of God). If nothing else, Crossan's wit-filled prose brings literary delight which one finds rare in evangelical works. For example:

If, in fact, you want a parent metaphor for God, I think father is much more appropriate than mother. It is the mother who is publicly knowable, visibly provable, and legally certifiable. You do not need faith to know a mother. You need faith to know a father, because he is known only on the mother's word and sometimes not even then.? (p.37)

Whilst evangelicals rightly ought to warn the community of the problems in Crossan's writings, we would do well to humble ourselves and learn from our enemies? (wouldn't we want them to learn from us, too?). Try this sharp observation on the Catholic-Protestant schism:

It is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which Catholicism and Protestantism forced each other into opposite extremes (faith or works, Bible or tradition, individual or community, real or symbolic, etc. or etc.)in that separation within Christianity, Catholicism lost any internal but loyal opposition, any sternly self-critical voice from within. In that separation, Protestantism lost anything to protest against save itself and has continued to fracture into every increasing diversity.? (p.72, emphasis mine)

Perhaps we need (or God has allowed? or predestined?? [grin]) writers like Crossan, the quintessential postmodern Biblical scholar, drawing his inspiration from, among others, the work of Jacques Derrida, to shake us into seeing our own problems, to look closer at our sacred cows.

But speaking of Derrida, I'e also restarted on John D. Caputo's Prayers & Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, where the French author's notions or quasi-notions of deconstruction and differánce are compared and contrasted against theological concepts and paradigms. This postmodern stuff is tough-going. How do you figure out the meaning of a writer who teaches that meaning is in a constant flux? How would you know what someone is saying when this someone says that sayings cannot be 'pinned down?? And how's this for 'intellectual masturbation? (a phrase I heard from a Deloitte consultant):

"The quasi-transcendental work of differánce is to establish the conditions which make possible our beliefs and our practices, our traditions and our institution, and no less to make them impossible, which means to see to it that they do not effect closure, to keep them open so that something new or different may happen?(But) a quasi-transcendental condition is a condition of or for entities, not an entity itself; a condition under which things appear, but too poor and impoverished, too unkingly, to dictate what there is or what there is not, lacking the power to bring what is not into being, lacking the authority to prohibit something from being?

And I'm only at page 13.

Deconstruction, I think, reminds us that meaning is rarely 'static?; the text, the signifiers, the symbols keep shifting, not unlike our consciousness, I guess. If writing is a reflection of thought, then isn't it at least conceivable that the meaning behind texts, not unlike our thoughts, cannot be permanently 'fixed??

I mean, how often do you get pure static unchanging thoughts with only one EXCLUSIVE ? thing? (or mental 'event?) and nothing else? The closest we get to this would be a mantra. And what is a mantra if not an impossible attempt to squeeze out all contexts, all influence, the ultimate ceteris paribus, unworkable in communication, quite senseless without interpretation? If thought ? the very stuff of our minds ? are like this, shouldn't we expect texts (one of thinking's greatest agents/mirrors) to be similar? This is some radical shit. I need to get a Coke.

But as for being 'radical? (i.e. left), one day Crossan was at a book-signing event, someone came up to him and said, "My pastor told me not to come here tonight because you are even to the left of Marcus Borg.? Crossan replied, "Give your pastor my best regards and tell him that is the good news. The bad news is that both Borg and me are to the right of Jesus. And worse still, if he will recall Psalm 110, Jesus is to the right of God.?