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The Academic Project Process in One Flow Chart

You know it’s true.

Indeed

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True fact.

Ministers of Propaganda

Good evangelical Christians are Republican. It seems like it’s always been this way. 
 
That means the propaganda is working. 
 
Scott Coley trains a critical eye on the fusion of evangelicalism and right-wing politics in Ministers of Propaganda. This timely volume unravels rhetoric and biblical prooftexting that support Christo-authoritarianism: an ideology that presses Christian theology into the service of authoritarian politics. Coley’s historically informed argument unsettles evangelical orthodoxy on issues like creation science or female leadership—convictions not as unchanging as powerful religious leaders would have us believe. 
 
Coley explains that we buy into propaganda because of motivated reasoning, and when we are motivated by perceived self-interest, the Christian message is easily corrupted. But if we recover Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, right-wing propaganda will lose its power. Any reader troubled by American evangelicals’ embrace of racism, misogyny, and other unchristian views will find answers and hope in these pages.

Scott has written a book that all American Christians ought to read, ponder, digest, absorb, and most of all, take seriously.  The recent history of this country and the behavior of some of our nation’s Christians has made this book a corrective necessity.  Not because Coley is preaching, but because he is setting the record straight and such necessitates what I can only call the need for repentance by vast swaths of American Christians.

I want to cite his conclusion in order to whet your appetite for the volume-

On some level, the antidote to Christo-authoritarianism lies in the recognition that there is objective truth about what people deserve and what we owe each other, and our participation in politics should aim to bring about public institutions that conform to that truth. Notably, the matter of whether a given social arrangement suits my personal preferences or aligns with my self-interest is largely irrelevant. So we can resist the forces of ideology and motivated reasoning by actively interrogating the legitimacy of social arrangements that work to our own benefit, which is precisely what Christ calls us to do. When we are no longer concerned with legitimizing the established order, we are free to abandon theological narratives that the religious right uses to legitimize that order—along with any antagonism toward expertise that poses a threat to those theological narratives. Thus the antidote to Christo-authoritarianism is the pursuit of justice over and against the pursuit of social arrangements that reinforce my own power and privilege.

There is something wrong in American evangelicalism.  There’s a sickness in that body.  Scott diagnoses it with clarity and perspicuity.  His book, like ‘Jesus and John Wayne‘, is simply required reading if Christians in this country wish to understand why so many seem so blind to the obvious failings of the religious right.

Judah in the Biblical Period

The collection of essays in this book represents more than twenty years of research on the history and archeology of Judah, as well as the study of the Biblical literature written in and about the period that might be called the “Age of Empires”. This 600-year-long period, when Judah was a vassal Assyrian, Egyptian and Babylonian kingdom and then a province under the consecutive rule of the Babylonian, Persian, Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires, was the longest and the most influential in Judean history and historiography. The administration that was shaped and developed during this period, the rural economy, the settlement pattern and the place of Jerusalem as a small temple, surrounded by a small settlement of (mainly) priests, Levites and other temple servants, characterize Judah during most of its history.

This is the formative period when most of the Hebrew Bible was written and edited, when the main features of Judaism were shaped and when Judean cult and theology were created and developed.

The 36 papers contained in this book present a broad picture of the Hebrew Bible against the background of the Biblical history and the archeology of Judah throughout the six centuries of the “Age of Empires”.

The essays here collected are unaltered save for the fact that the bibliographies have been standardized and presented at the conclusion of the book instead of appearing at the end of each essay.

As is always true of collections of essays, these make access to the materials more convenient than trying to track them down in their original sometimes obscure sources.  They also allow readers to get a grand overview of the thinking of their author over a greater span of time.  If individual essays appearing in journals are a snapshot of a scholars thought, essay collections are a movie, allowing the thought of the scholar to move from place to place and idea to idea.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Lipschits, this is an excellent introduction.  If he is new to you, you should most certainly read this collection.

And if you are well familiar with him and his work this volume will bring together many of his key essays and you will have them at your fingertips.

I cannot commend it highly enough.  It contains so much detail and material of interest.  It’s akin to a beautiful mountain.  It would be silly to describe every rock and valley and crevice- instead one must simply look at the whole, and gasp in its majesty and wonder.

Behold, scholarship at its best.  At its apex.

Bibi’s Genocide Has Zionist Assistance

Oh, and reminder- Zionism is a political movement and opposing it is NOT anti-semitism, no matter how much the Zionists wish to use that cudgel to silence any opposition.  And if anyone says otherwise they are a feckless liar.

Bibi and his Zionist accomplices want nothing less than the deaths of all Gazans.  Children, men, women.  And it is pure demonic evil.

An Extremely Important Day in Scholarship’s History

Is today- because it is today that S.M. Jackson finished his edition of Zwingli’s Latin Works and published them in English.  The Preface tells the fascinating tale-

THE first collector, editor and publisher of the works of Huldreich Zwingli was his scholarly and devoted son-in-law, Rudolf Gualther, who married his daughter Regula, became pastor of St. Peter’s in Zurich in 1542 and succeeded Bullinger as antistes in 1575. He translated more than thirty of Zwingli’s German treatises into Latin, which gave them a much wider constituency. These translations, along with the works originally in Latin, he brought out in 1545 and prefixed to the three volumes in folio an elaborate Apologia pro Zuinglio, which was also separately published. To Gualther’s three volumes a fourth was added,1 consisting of biblical annotations furnished by Leo Jud and Kaspar Megander, either directly from their notes of Zwingli’s lectures or from what he had himself written out. This edition was reprinted in 1581.

The third edition is the one familiar to all modern students of Zwingli, and which has well served them for many years. It was collected and edited by Melchior Schuler and Johannes Schulthess. It separates the Latin from the German treatises and puts them in different volumes. In this edition the letters by and to Zwingli are included. The edition is in eleven parts and a supplement.

The fourth edition is that now appearing. It was projected by two Swiss scholars who had paid particular attention to the Reformation in that country, Emil Egli, professor of history in the university of Zurich, and Georg Finsler, teacher of religion in the gymnasium of Basel. It has been incorporated into the Corpus Reformatorum as Volumes LXXXVIII. and successors, and so Zwingli takes his place in this authoritative collection next to Melanchthon and Calvin. The edition was long preparing and is a great improvement upon its predecessor. It began to appear in parts in the fall of 1903. With the second volume a different publisher begins his work, but otherwise there was no change. That was soon to come. Egli died on December 31, 1908, within eight days of his sixty-second birthday. His successor is Walther Köhler, who also succeeded him in the university.

The last part of the second volume appeared in October 1898. The next part to appear was the first of the seventh volume, for very wisely it was determined to do as Schuler and Schulthess did and interrupt the succession of the treatises with a portion of the letters to and by Zwingli. For the collection of these letters Egli had especially exerted himself and had much increased their number by diligent search on every hand, both in and out of Switzerland. It would have been a particular delight for him to have seen his labours in print, but it was not to be.

The correspondence in the Schuler and Schulthess edition fills volumes seven and eight, and in the new edition the same numbers will be given to them. Volume seven was finished on December 31, 1910. Another change in the order of publication was made, and now volume three is appearing alternately with volume eight. Nothing seems to be lacking to give this edition scholarly completeness. Each of its contents is provided with a special introduction; it is then studied philologically and bibliographically, and in the case of the German treatises, because of the difficulty of reading the Swiss German, provided with a glossary at the foot of the page. Besides, each treatise has adequate notes giving information on all appropriate points. The contents are arranged chronologically. All of these editions are found in the library of Union Theological Seminary, in New York City.

Most of the translations which appear in this volume were made years ago from the Schuler and Schulthess text for the publication I then contemplated, but circumstances, among which was the fact that there had been announced a new edition of the originals, led me to postpone the enterprise and then I became absorbed in other work and could not attend to it. When I was at liberty to do so the new edition had made considerable progress. Happily the translators were willing to revise their translations with the new text in hand. These translators are Mr. Henry Preble of New York City, who has done all the Latin treatises, and Lawrence A. McLouth, Professor of German, New York University, and Walter Lichtenstein, Ph.D., librarian of Northwestern University, who have made the renderings from the German.
When the present volume was undertaken, I asked permission of the editors and publishers to be allowed to use such portion of their notes and introductions as suited my purpose. They have generously given me permission and so my readers will share with those who use the new edition, in the original, a considerable part of their learning.

I desire here to thank these editors, publishers and translators for their generosity and manifestation of interest in this enterprise. By this combination of Swiss and American labours, Zwingli is properly presented to the English-speaking public, as he would not be without it.

Those familiar with my Selections from Zwingli, published by the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, will notice that in this and the volumes which, I trust, are to follow, the contents of that volume appear. For permission to reprint that matter I am indebted to the courtesy of the Department of History of that University, and I here express my grateful thanks.

In this volume, will be found, in English translation, all the matter from Zwingli given on the first three-hundred and twenty-seven pages of the edition of the originals now appearing, and by way of introduction, and as far more interesting than anything I could write, the original life of Zwingli, written by his bosom friend, Oswald Myconius. This is, I believe, its first appearance in the English language in modern times, but, as the special introduction states, it was first translated in the sixteenth century.

I have also inserted a treatise attributed to Zwingli in the Schuler and Schulthess edition, but which was really by Erasmus and Thomas Blarer, because it is alluded to by Zwingli in his Suggestio, which will appear in Volume III of this series. The grounds for its inclusion by Schuler and Schulthess are thus stated in their special preface:

“When Zwingli learned that the papal anathema was upon the point of being launched against Luther, he went to his friend Wilhelm von Falk, who in the absence of the legate Ennius was fulfilling his functions towards the Federation, and tried to persuade him to dissuade the Pope from putting forth the condemnatory Bull, on the ground that nothing could be more surely foreseen than that the Germans would treat both the Bull and the Pope with contempt. Reporting this to Myconius in a letter1 Zwingli said, ‘That the same fate awaits myself seems exceedingly likely; I am ready, and in such event shall not lack for consolation.’ But the warning was altogether too late. And now Zwingli published this writing without the name of the author or of the place of printing, the edition coming out in the late summer of 1520.

“Simler gives in his collection (Vol. IV.) two Latin editions, one written in Latin letters, the other in German letters (one sheet folded in quarto), and a translation of the same period, with the title ‘Consilium hominis ex animo satisfactum cupientis et Romanae sedis dignitati et Christiani orbis paci’ (‘Advice of a man who from his heart desires that both the dignity of the Roman See and the peace of the Christian world be fully safeguarded’). 1521 (a sheet and a half folded in quarto). The Latin edition in German letters is characterized by many errors, several omissions, and bad punctuation. There is an appendix with the title, ‘Apologia Christi dni nostri pro Martino Luthero ad urbem Rhomam,’ (‘Christ Our Lord’s defence of Martin Luther before the city of Rome’). Cratander, printer at Basel, sent this writing to Von Watt on March 8th with the Acta Lovaniens (‘Louvain Proceedings’) against Luther, remarking that he recognised in both the pen of Erasmus. The inference was correct in regard to the ‘Proceedings’ but not in regard to the ‘Advice,’ etc., for Von Watt in the copy preserved in the Library of the monastery at Zurich has made a note in his own hand that Zwingli was the ‘Advice’ suggester.1 The ‘Defence’ is also without mention of its author: only the fact that it is appended to the ‘Advice’ makes it seem probable that it is the work of one and the same author.”

It is proposed to follow this volume with others, until all the Latin treatises of Zwingli, all the letters to and by him, and much of the matter now in German, including both the First and Second Disputations, shall have been published. It is not expected to include his commentaries on the Bible. The volumes will necessarily vary in size, but will probably average five hundred pages each. This initial volume is unfortunately much smaller than those which follow, but circumstances have prevented its enlargement.

Since work was begun by me on this volume there has come into my hands the Rev. Dr. Beresford James Kidd’s Documents illustrative of the Continental Reformation. (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1911.) It is a first-class source book. The headings to the sections are admirably done and present a remarkably concise history of the period covered. Most of the selections are in Latin, but there are also translations from the German, and some of the matter is in its original English. The section devoted to Zurich affairs is to be highly commended. Almost all the Latin matter will be found in this and subsequent volumes, translated, while in English Kidd gives the items from Egli’s Actensammlung relative to the punishment of those who broke the Lenten fast in 1522, the street fighting which ensued, and the defence of Froschauer before the magistrates, all of which are referred to in this volume’s special introduction to the sermon “On the choice of foods.” But much other illustrative material will be welcomed by the student.

SAMUEL MACAULEY JACKSON.

NEW YORK,
May 20, 1912.*

We can all give thanks to God for scholars like Jackson, who devote their lives and labors to preserving and promulgating things that really matter.

_____________________
*The Latin Works and The Correspondence of Huldreich Zwingli: Together with Selections from His German Works. (Vol. 1, pp. iii–xi).