Monthly Archives: July 2022

Medieval Church Perception

Medieval Church Perception

I really shouldn’t watch popular media set in the early medieval period or the medieval period generally. By this time of life, I should realize that doing so will only annoy me–but somehow I never learn…

The latest example confirming this occurred when I saw a review video of the Arthurian-ish Netflix show “Cursed.” Cancelled after a single season, this show apparently–and I say apparently because I’ve only seen the above video, the first episode, and read a brief synopsis–features as antagonists the Red Paladins, a group under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire and directed by the Pope, who conduct a murderous campaign against the magic-wielding pagan protagonists and their fey allies.

The idea of a militant group from the Holy Roman Empire ordered around by the pope slaughtering folks in Arthurian England is so strangely anachronistic to boggle the mind. A reasonable equivalent would be a tv show about the American Revolution where the Battle of Bunker Hill is won by Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders with their laser rifles at the behest of the United Nations.

Here’s the thing…

Anyone watching the latter would question what was going on there. It’s not probable, not believable. The inaccuracies are too great compared to what the viewers know. However, the writers of “Cursed” assumed their viewers would accept the first as quite believable. Why is that?

There’s a lot that could be said here. I could talk about the historical basics–why are the aspects of this presentation so mind-bendingly wrong. I could talk about historical education–how to fix the knowledge gaps. But I’d rather identify the evangelism angle. The reality is that in this matter the historical actualities are irrelevant.

I’d wager the target audience of the show–teens and young adults–would find this portrayal of the church as a vast, powerful institution that uses force to achieve its political and social ends compelling. That’s because this show isn’t interested in getting the history right; rather the writers are taking their contemporary experience of their perspective of Christianity and retrojecting it into their fantasy-medieval past. It’s not hard at all to see the conflict as the show sets it up (at least in the initial bits I saw) as a modern parable about the social conservative campaign against all things lgbt+.

Furthermore, these sorts of portrayals inform a vicious cycle.

Americans learn their history from media. I have no doubt that many viewers could and would easily assume this is an accurate portrayal of what “the Church” is actually like. Or at least it’s a scenario they would see as plausible. And who would want to be a part of a thing like that?

Sometimes I see the challenges of modern evangelism constructed as faith vs. science or faith vs. capitalism with the chief struggle being about belief. But I sometimes wonder if a major issue might not be faith, or God, or Christ, but the perception of the Church itself.

Job's friends (1521 printed Bible)

Psalm 34 and Christian Psalm Exegesis

I was reminded of one of my biggest challenges in writing about the psalms again today upon the appearance of Psalm 34 in Morning Prayer for the Feast of St. James: it makes everything sound so easy…

Psalm 34–just like Ps 91 with which I have a long-standing dispute–flat-out says that for those who believe in the Lord and place their trust in God, everything will be ok:

6   I called in my affliction and the LORD heard me *

and saved me from all my troubles.

7   The angel of the LORD encompasses those who fear him, *

and he will deliver them.

(Ps 43:6-7, BCP)

The issue is that this is not the case. Life experience, history, Christian history specifically, the experience of Christ himself, all confirm that these statements are not true on the literal level.

Here’s the thing. If you just found yourself saying, “well, maybe, but you have to understand that what it’s really saying is…” then what you’re doing is a classic interpretive move in order to avoid the actual literal sense of the text. And that’s a perfectly normal and ok thing to do–the challenge in writing about it as a biblical scholar for lay people is helping people recognize that that interpretive move is even happening at all!

There’s a reason why the Early Church generally and specifically Origen–one of our first and best interpretive minds–determined very early on that reading spiritually/morally/allegorically were important tools in the Christian exegetical toolbox alongside and sometimes instead of reading literally. Reading and praying the psalms involves quite a lot of reframing and reinterpretation to shift them into a Christian mode… If you’re just praying them as an individual, a lot of that interpretive heavy-lifting can be by-passed, or hand-waved, or maybe even outright ignored. And indeed some very shallow and very damaging theology can be and has been built on such inattentive and dismissive readings.

Facile literalists often poke fun at the interpretive children of Origen who tie themselves into interpretive knots to explicate the biblical text. But as Origen laid out as far back as the second century, sometimes the only way to attend closely to the words on the page at both a macro and micro level, to believe sincerely that they contain self-revelatory truths from God, and to wrestle with them with integrity, means putting in a lot of hard work which ends up being a re-interpretation of the literal meaning of the text rather than a simple affirmation.

(My hot-take on Ps 34 is that it presents traditional Wisdom orthodoxy in poetic form: trust God, keep your nose clean, don’t do bad stuff, and things will go well for you. From a poetic perspective, I can even see it conveying the poet’s feeling of comfort and pleasure in the supernatural support of God. I can recognize and honor that feeling of being swaddled in divine grace, mercy, and assistance–it’s a lovely emotional state; but it tends to fall apart quickly when human events around you do too… It’s a classic example of the Just World fallacy which leads to very reductive thinking a la If good things happen, it’s because you’re good; if bad things happen, you must have done something wrong. For what it’s worth, this is the fallacy which gets so much air-time in the book of Job. Job’s friends assume he had to have done something bad for everything to go so wrong; Job protests that he didn’t do anything wrong so it’s not fair! God’s final speech is to note that chaos is inherent in the system; if you assume life, the universe, and everything are neat and tidy, you haven’t been paying attention from the beginning.)

Admin Note

Admin Note

I’m doing some work around the site to clean things up, get it all back to code, and generally preparing to do more thinking and writing here

A key task that I’ve completed is restoring the established links to David White’s Anglican Gradual & Sacramentary. While the content is great, the shift from the old WordPerfect files to the present Rich Text Format remains a little clunky, but I don’t have time to address this now.

Rather, I’m going to be putting more time into some breviary clean-ups, actual writing of text, and progress on the long-stalled Anglican Breviary project. So–watch this space and–with God’s help!–more stuff will be showing up here shortly.