For instance, he has this to say about how historical Jesus scholarship engenders theological dilemmas on all sides of the spectrum:

Those who subscribe to Nicaea should be anxious, for the historical Jesus did not think of himself what they think of him. To be sure, his identity, like that of the rest of us, cannot be restricted to his self-conscious evaluation, whatever we judge that to have been. Jesus must have been more than the sum of us own thoughts. Still, traditional, orthodox christologies have assumed that Jesus was fully aware of his own godhead and spoke accordingly, whereas modern criticism has, in the judgment of many of us, exterminated this possibility. The orthodox tradition thus needs to acknowledge that revisionist christologies of the last two centuries have been partly occasioned by advances in knowledge. There has been good cause to rethink some changes.

As for those who reject of radically reinterpret Nicaea and Chalcedon, a historical Jesus who placed himself at the center of a mythological end-time scenario is not likely to be regarded with affection. For such an individual conceived himself to be extraordinary and indeed unique, in a category all his own. As with the orthodox, so too, then, with their opponents: their evaluation of Jesus does not line up with his evaluation of himself.

The upshot of the foregoing pages is that the historical Jesus remains, in Schweitzer’s familiar words, a stranger and an enigma. As a Christian, however, I do not find this so dreadful. What good is Jesus if he does not trouble our theological dreams? Certainly the character in the Gospels combats complacency and self-satisfaction, and what but complacency and self-satisfaction can come from a historical Jesus who confirms us in our theological ways, whether those ways be liberal or conservative? A domesticated Jesus who sounds like us, makes us comfortable, and commends our opinions is no Jesus at all. (pp. 89-90)

Comment below.

In related news, our gov’ner here in Orygun declared today an indefinite moratorium on the death penalty. After a few moments of applause–after all, I’m an obedient anti-capital punishment pacifist like the rest of ‘em–I began thinking that this might be a more laudable move if it represented an attempt to institute a holistic approach to peace and the respect of human life.

As it turns out, however, it does not. Kitzhaber is pro-choice (see this article from the 2010 election here) and Oregon is one of the most lax states on euthanasia. (Ironically, it also has one of the highest suicide ratings.)

Allow me a few more paragraphs to drive this point home.

Kitzhaber’s decision to forestall the death penalty arrives two weeks shy of Gary Haugen’s scheduled execution. Currently, the only way to get executed in Oregon is by asking for it. Literally. You have to “volunteer,” relinquishing intentions to any future appeals and requesting–formally, before a judge–to be executed.

So what’s the State of Oregon telling its residents?

Well, it’s OK to request to be killed if you’re not in prison (euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are legal), but it’s not OK to request to be killed if you’re in prison (death penalty is on moratorium). Oh, and it’s really bad to kill yourself (suicide is frowned upon), but you can kill your unborn babies (abortion is legal).

All this comes to a head in Kitzhaber’s rhetoric when he claims that it was his physician’s oath to “do no harm” that led him to the decision about the death penalty. Hmm.. Where is that oath when you whitewash abortion as “women’s health”? Where is it when you enable physicians to help their patients kill themselves?

Let me be clear: I’m not arguing for a social ethic that ignores the complexity that each and every one of these issues harbors. There’s no “one answer” to everything. But I am arguing for coherence among the legislation that shapes us as a culture and as a community. I’d like to see a compelling vision of human flourishing govern the way we conduct ourselves in Oregon–not a patch-quilt of politically-motivated legislation to appease these constituents at one point in the cycle and these others and a different point.

Is that such a naive hope?

It’s interesting to note that his remarks at the Response are theologically sound and responsible. But we’ve been warned that the Antichrist will likely appear in the same fashion..

Here are a few disparate thoughts…

What does it mean to say that Jesus is the name of God…? This makes God infinitely more universal as well as infinitely more historical and particular…

Universal because it if the man Jesus is the name of God, then there’s no need to utter the name—every word uttered from the mouth of a human participates and (in some mysterious way) honors and glorifies God, because God has in Christ sanctified all mouths and all words.* Yet particular because he did this through one man, living at one point in time—and then (mystery of mysteries!) not living at all, then living again eternally in some strange fashion none of us has ever experienced.

So the sort of exclusivity Christians enjoy by virtue of worshipping God through his very name is not the sort of exclusivity which is generally meant when someone claims to be worshipping a god by name. Jews have “Yahweh,” the sacred name of God given to them in the story of Moses’ encounter at the burning bush (Ex. 3). Muslims have “Allah,” given to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel, though this is not considered by them to be a proper name (but merely the Arabic word for “God”–literally, “the god”).

Thus, each tradition implicitly claims exclusive access to God by virtue of calling God by his true or proper name.

*(This might be considered a parallel insight to the one undergirding the atonement theory commonly called “Christus Victor,” in which God redeems all men by virtue of becoming a man himself.)

It’s interesting to note that Carr can’t even make his point without using the trope he’s criticizing. His continued use of the words “circuitry” and “hardwiring” to describe brain functions testify to the fact that the industrial way of relating to the world–including the human mind–is, in some sense, inescapable.

Here’s a fascinating nugget from the article:

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

I can think of at least two additional implications Carr didn’t hit on in the article.

First, our college students are unable to engage the critical skills necessary for analyzing a text. Unless they’re English or philosophy or religion majors, they’ve likely never been asked to read something and arbitrate between competing interpretations. They seem to assume that someone will simply give them the “right” interpretation.

Indeed, Carr notes that imaginative, independent thought–the sort of intellectual work that the university’s mission and culture is defined by–is under attack. He distinguishes the sort of reading (and thinking) that characterize one’s engagement with the internet from those that characterize one’s engagement with a book:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

I have only dealt with one instance of plagiarism in my (exceedingly short) career as a college instructor, but it railed me. I was so completely astonished that a student could think it was permissible to cut and paste into their own paper whole sentences–even whole paragraphs–from another’s published work. But had I considered the differences between the way my students access and engage information and the way I was taught to access and engage information, I might have been less surprised.

Plagiarism in the age of the internet is not only easier to accomplish (one should note it has also been made easier to catch), but it’s easier to morally justify as well. In other words, if we construe the human mind as simply a decoder and transmitter of information, then what does it matter where that information originated? After all, the plagiarist claims, my brain accessed the relevant information and transferred it to my paper, which I then submitted. What more can you ask of me??

That’s the first implication. The second I’m experiencing on a more personal level.

In short, I’m having trouble praying. I know, I know–I don’t need to blame my spiritual indolence on the internet. But seriously, if the internet alters the way we read as well as the way we think (so Carr argues), might it not also alter the way we pray?

It’s way easier to consult God briefly for things that are already on my mind. It’s far more difficult, I’ve found, to enter into a meditative state, to allow the presence of God to open up a catalogue of desires and needs and anxieties and fears–in order for these items to be subjected to God’s purifying flame.

I began Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation today. In it, he speaks of “every moment and every event in every man’s life… [planting] something in his soul” (p. 17). For these “seeds” to grow, for them to “spring up one day in a tremendous harvest” (p. 18), one must cultivate the contemplative life.

Is the internet anti-contemplation? In its content, Lord no! There’s much one can find on spiritual direction and discipline on the internet–and more eyes have viewed the words of spiritual masters as a result.

But in its execution, in the way in which it beckons one to engage one’s world, one’s heart–one’s God, even!–it just may be antithetical to a robust theological conception of what it means to be human.