thanks

One of the main things that keeps me going as a Christian is the idea that there is a happy ending. Call it heaven or community or satisfaction or success or prosperity or whatever you want, but the message is…

So, since that post, I stumbled across a more contemporary voice that might offer more light on Psalm 88, another voice that speaks of the same despair and calls us to take it seriously, not dismiss it as a phase in our theological project(“Don’t worry, Jesus loves you and died for your sins and even though it feels bad now, Jesus will make it all better.” Yuck!!) The voice is that of Ellison. When I listen to the pain he experienced in racist America, I can’t help but hear Psalm 88 with a different accent. Here’s the quote from THE INVISIBLE MAN: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. You’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.” Do I see this man? Do I really hear that voice in Psalm 88? Maybe not. But how would I know if I saw this invisible man or really heard that voice in Psalm 88? I know I suffer from poor vision. How am I set free from all the ways I blind myself? Who can illumine the text? Now, as I read those voices like Psalm 88 that grind against the way I think the canonical story is suppossed to flow, I hear Ellision and think of all the others who I refuse to see. I wonder if there are ways, practices we can cultivate, that make us better at lingering with these voices instead of bumping into them on my way somewhere else, somewhere more comfortable, more familiar, not so strange.

I also wonder if it is related to the history of the Sons of Korah. They tried to abolish the temple priesthood and make the priesthood of all believers the only priesthood. For this rebellion, they were swallowed by the earth.

What do you think?

Isaac, for a while my answer to the “unifying threads of Scripture” question came from Jonathan Wilson. He remarked that perhaps what unifies the evangelical community is the very things we argue about. So it’s not necessarily the things that we agree upon that unify us, but the ideas and practices we find worth arguing about. I’ve applied this to Scripture in a couple of papers in the past, saying that the things the authors of Scripture found worth arguing about (the lordship of Christ, the divinity/humanity of Jesus, the inclusion of the Gentiles into the church, etc.) are the things that unify Scripture. I’m not so sure of the argument any more, it seems it might be a way of avoiding the question, and I’m not sure it can be used to demonstrate the unity of Scripture in other areas (i.e. oneness of God, importance of repentance, etc., aboout which Scripture seems to have a unified voice). But maybe it’s a starting point.