Aigner’s on a roll when it comes to Mark Driscoll’s now being on Patheos Evangelical (which I think is ridiculous):

Forgiveness is one thing. Stupidity is quite another. Driscoll is not just a guy who made a mistake or two. He is an unrepentant, abusive, self-aggrandizing bully who has only voiced weak, vague, gaslighting strains of apology when his back was truly against the wall. He deserves no more chances to prove himself. Giving him yet another is a slap in the face to those who are still trying to heal from his abuses.

As you might have guessed by now, I’m shocked and appalled that Mark the Cussing Pastor is my newest neighbor here. If his personal history repeats itself, he will turn ours into a neighborhood of make-believe, a space in which he can continue living out his own personal delusions of grandeur.

Let the record show that, though he is now a “colleague” here, I claim no association with him. I flee from his hostile theology. I reject his ministerial philosophy. I abhor his abusive treatment of women and anyone else he perceives to be “weak.” I defy his nasty concept of masculinity.

[SMcK: Amen.]

Churches into bars:

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (AP) — Ira Gerhart finally found a place last year to fulfill his yearslong dream of opening a brewery: a 1923 Presbyterian church. It was cheap, charming and just blocks from downtown Youngstown.

But soon after Gerhart announced his plans, residents and a minister at a Baptist church a block away complained about alcohol being served in the former house of worship.

“I get it, you know, just the idea of putting a bar in God’s house,” Gerhart said. “If we didn’t choose to do this, most likely, it’d fall down or get torn down. I told them we’re not going to be a rowdy college bar.”

With stained glass, brick walls and large sanctuaries ideal for holding vats and lots of drinkers, churches renovated into breweries attract beer lovers but can grate on the spiritual sensibilities of clergy and worshippers.

At least 10 new breweries have opened in old churches across the country since 2011, and at least four more are slated to open in the next year. The trend started after the 2007 recession as churches merged or closed because of dwindling membership. Sex abuse settlements by the Roman Catholic Church starting in the mid-2000s were not a factor because those payments were largely covered by insurers, according to Terrence Donilon, spokesman for the archdiocese of Boston.

Gerhart’s is scheduled to open this month after winning over skeptics like the Baptist minister and obtaining a liquor license.

“We don’t want (churches) to become a liquor store,” said Michael Schafer, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, which has imposed restrictions on turning closed churches into beer halls. “We don’t think that’s appropriate for a house of worship.”

A good story about Chamique Holdsclaw:

Chamique Holdsclaw’s All-Star basketball career allowed her to mask her mental illness. Until it didn’t. After hitting her lowest point, she walked away from the court and found a higher purpose. …

Over her 11-season, four-team career, Holdsclaw would ultimately be awarded All The Things, among them, six WNBA All-Star nods, as well as an Olympic gold medal.

“Back then I was always chasing something,” Holdsclaw says as she eats breakfast at a trendy Atlanta diner. “I wanted to be the first person from Christ the King to play for Pat Summitt. I wanted to be the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft. I wanted to get my own shoe. I always wanted to be first, first, first.”

She leans over the table, lowers her eyes. “Ask me: Do I remember a lot of those things?”

She pauses, shakes her head. “No.”

Relaxing slightly into her chair, Holdsclaw takes a fork, pushes a bit of soggy egg to the corner of her plate. She clarifies that she’s not being rhetorical, that she genuinely doesn’t recall pivotal life events or moments of glory. The memory gaps are a consequence of the battle her brain was waging with itself at the time, a struggle of such pernicious and exhausting intensity that entire swaths of her life dissolved before her eyes as if written on an Etch A Sketch, shaken and lost forever.

This was before she knew what was happening in her mind. When she knew only how to pretend that it wasn’t.

Charles E. Gutenson:

The man had a way with words. About that, there can be no doubt. In my view, he was a master of putting such a sharp edge on things that one could hardly read what he said without one of two reactions — simply dismiss them as meaningless hyperbole or let them cut to the quick our own hypocrisy. My sense is that the latter is almost always the appropriate response, but to each her own. Our own need to see ourselves as friends of God who are faithfully living out the gospel frequently trumps any invitation to visit the possibility that we might be seriously off track. I wish my own writing were as trenchant as the following quote, but alas, I’ll have to settle for sharing his words:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations (Plough, 2002), 193

Hyperbole, you suppose? Perhaps, but one of the things that makes hyperbole successful as a literary trope is that the exaggerations deployed unmask an underlying truth in a powerful way. The underlying truth here? That neither understanding Scripture nor following Jesus is all that complicated, and the thing that prevents us from faithfully imitating Christ is that we really don’t want to. Let that sink in. The primary obstacle is that we just don’t really want to bear the cost of being imitators of Christ.

Do me a favor. For the next few minutes, let Kierkegaard’s words have your undivided attention as you ponder their truthfulness. Have we tried to “be good Christians without letting the Bible come to close?” [HT: JS]

From Health Day:

Cute, yes, but touching them might send you to the hospital.

Puppies are transmitting potentially deadly Campylobacter bacteria infections via contaminated poop to the humans who handle them, with 55 people now sickened in an outbreak reaching across 12 states, as of this writing.

In the latest update from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency says cases rose from 39 in mid-September to 55 reported by Tuesday.

“Evidence suggests that puppies sold through Petland are a likely source of this outbreak,” the CDC said in a news release issued Sept 11. “Petland is cooperating with public health and animal health officials to address this outbreak.”

Since mid-September, “four more hospitalizations have been reported, bringing the total to 13,” the CDC said in its Tuesday update, but so far “no deaths have been reported.”

Campylobacter infections linked to the puppies have now been reported between September 2016 and October 2017 in Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming, the CDC said.

Campylobacter is a bacteria that causes people to develop diarrhea (sometimes bloody), cramping, abdominal pain and fever within two to five days of exposure to the organism, said Dr. Sophia Jan, director of general pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center, in New Hyde Park, N.Y.

Nice: from AP

WASHINGTON, Pa. (AP) — A mystery couple has been picking up the checks for other customers at a southwestern Pennsylvania restaurant.

KDKA-TV (http://cbsloc.al/2fCvFJR ) reports the couple has been doing that for years at the Applebee’s in Washington, Pennsylvania, but only recently have their good deeds come to light.

Jolie Welling says she was celebrating her daughter’s birthday only to find the couple recently paid the entire tab — for 16 people. Samantha Powell, the waitress for that party, says the gesture touched her, too, and almost brought her to tears.

Bernie Lewis, the restaurant’s assistant manager, says she has sworn to keep the couple’s secret.

Powell knows them, too, and says they own a local business. She says the man once told her he pays others’ checks because, “I grew up poor and now I’m not.”

Kerin Wiginton:

Getting through the workday on little sleep is a point of pride for some. But skimping on shuteye could be shortening your life and making you a less than stellar employee, according to Matthew Walker, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Underslept employees tend to create fewer novel solutions to problems, they’re less productive in their work and they take on easier challenges at work,” said Walker, author of “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams,” out Tuesday.

Operating on short sleep — anything less than seven hours — impairs a host of brain and bodily functions, said Walker, who is also a professor of neuroscience and psychology. It increases your risk for heart attack, cancer and stroke, compromises your immune system and makes you emotionally irrational, less charismatic and more prone to lying.

We spoke to the sleep scientist about what’s keeping us from getting to bed and how we can make the most of our slumber.

Six Ground-breaking Discoveries

A Summary of “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34–5” New Testament Studies 63 (2017) 604–625 (c) 2017 Payne Loving Trust

Philip B. Payne

Philip Barton Payne, author of Man and Woman, One in Christ, (PhD, Cambridge) has served with his wife Nancy with the Evangelical Free Church Mission in Japan for seven years. He has taught New Testament studies in Cambridge colleges, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Gordon-Conwell, Bethel, and Fuller, and is known for his studies on textual criticism, the parables of Jesus, and Paul’s teachings on women. He blogs at www.pbpayne.com.

This summary of six groundbreaking discoveries from my New Testament Studies 63 (October, 2017) article about the oldest Bible in Greek, Codex Vaticanus, henceforth “Vaticanus,” dated AD 325–350, highlights their implications for the reliability of the transmission of the Greek New Testament and for the equal standing of man and woman:

1. Scribe B, who penned Vaticanus’s entire New Testament and Old Testament Prophets, was extraordinarily faithful in preserving the text of its exemplars, namely the manuscripts from which Vaticanus was copied.
2. The entire text of all four Gospels in Vaticanus is even earlier than the text of Bodmer Papyrus 75, henceforth P⁷⁵, written AD 175–225 and containing most of Luke 3 through John 15.
3. The entire text of the epistles in the second oldest Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, dated AD 350–360, is arguably at least as old as the text of P³², dated ca. AD 200.
4. The two-dot symbol (the technical term is “distigme”) marking the location of textual variants throughout Vaticanus also occurs in the fourth to fifth century LXX G.
5. Scribe B left a gap following seven two-dot+bar symbols at the exact point of a multi-word later addition.
6. Scribe B marked 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, the only Bible passage commanding women to be silent in the churches, as a later addition.

Scribe B Preserved the Text of Vaticanus’s Exemplars with Remarkable Fidelity

Scribe B (name unknown) is the only scribe of Vaticanus who preserved the bars (the technical term is “obeloi”) Origen (ca. 185–ca. 254, the most famous expert on the text of the Bible from the early church) used to show where the Septuagint Greek translation (henceforth “LXX”) of the Hebrew Scriptures added words not in the Hebrew text. Scribe B reproduced Vaticanus’s Prophets so faithfully that he or she did not add bars to the exemplar’s text even by passages explicitly identified as “not in the Hebrew.” “Or she” reflects Eusebius’s statement in Church History 6.23.2 that Origen employed “girls skilled in penmanship.”

The sharp contrast between the virtually complete absence of periods at the end of sentences in Vaticanus’s Gospels and the presence of periods throughout all its epistles shows that Scribe B copied both exemplars faithfully. This is the only explanation for this sharp contrast congruent with a copyist’s primary task, to reproduce the exemplar’s text.

Vaticanus symbols marking differences between manuscripts show that Scribe B was aware of variants, copied exemplars faithfully, and preferred the earliest possible text. Scribe B was extraordinarily careful not to add to or take away text from Vaticanus’s exemplars, not even adding periods after sentences or bars where original ink marginal notes identify LXX additions. All this supports Birdsall’s judgment in The Bible as Book, 35, “Behind the quality of the New Testament text in this codex, there appears to be critical ‘know-how’.”

The Extraordinarily Early Text of the Gospels in Vaticanus

The text of P⁷⁵ is remarkably similar to the corresponding text in Vaticanus. Carlo Martini’s Il problema della recensionalità del codice B alla luce del papiro Bodmer xiv argued this in detail, and scholars have confirmed his findings. The virtually complete absence of periods at the end of sentences in the Vaticanus Gospels but their presence throughout the Vaticanus epistles and P⁷⁵ indicates that, as usual then, all four Vaticanus Gospels were copied from the same manuscript, but one so primitive it had virtually no periods. The Vaticanus Gospels’ lack of periods indicates that their text is earlier than the Vaticanus epistles’ text and even earlier than P⁷⁵’s text. Paul Canart, world-renowned expert on Vaticanus, agrees with this explanation and knows of no publication of this apparently original observation. None of the New Testament papyri that the standard Nestle-Aland critical text identifies as second-century (P^{32, 90, 98, 104}) contains a period. Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament, 287, state, “the original texts … naturally also lacked punctuation.” The Vaticanus Gospels’ text is so old it was not contaminated by any of the five blocks of added text their two-dot+bar symbols mark. These discoveries corroborate both halves of Bruce Metzger’s judgment in ‘Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament’, Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (NTTS 8; Leiden/Grand Rapids: Brill/Eerdmans, 1968) 145–62, at 157–58, “Since B [=Vaticanus] is not a lineal descendent of P⁷⁵, the common ancestor of both carries the … text to a period prior to AD 175–225, the date assigned to P⁷⁵.” It also supports Stephen Pisano’s affirmation in Le manuscrit B de la Bible, 96, “of the text of B as an extremely reliable witness …, especially of the Gospels and Acts.”

The Second Century Text of the Epistles in Codex Sinaiticus

Chris Stevens’ November 18, 2015 Evangelical Theological Society paper, “Titus in P32 and Sinaiticus: Textual Reliability and Scribal Design,” showed that there is only one letter in the text of Titus in P³², dated ca. AD 200, that differs from the text of Sinaiticus, so the Sinaiticus text of Titus goes back at least to ca. AD 200. Since fourth century scribes copied entire collections of the epistles, not separate epistles from different manuscripts, the rest of the Sinaiticus epistles’ text is probably also this old. This supports a second century date not only of the entire text of the Vaticanus Gospels, but also of the entire text of the Sinaiticus epistles.

The Antiquity of Two-Dot Symbols in Vaticanus

Approximately 780 two-dot symbols in the margins of Vaticanus mark the location of Greek textual variants. Fifty-one of them match the original Vaticanus ink. Two more with original ink protruding behind reinking suggest that most two-dot symbols were re-inked with the rest of Vaticanus ca. AD 1000. The same symbol occurs in the fourth- or fifth-century LXX G, the earliest extensive copy of Origen’s annotated LXX. LXX G’s and Vaticanus’s many parallels suggest they came from the same scriptorium. The following example from LXX G 228 demonstrates ancient use of this two-dot symbol to mark textual variants between Greek manuscripts.

These two dot symbols give us insights regarding textual variants in a corpus of very early manuscript text far wider than has survived from before the time of Vaticanus. Because manuscripts have survived showing textual variants at most of their locations, they show that we probably know through surviving manuscripts most of the textual variants that were available to the producers of Vaticanus. This greatly reduces the plausibility that the original manuscripts were significantly different from what we know from surviving manuscripts.

Scribe B Left a Gap Following Seven Two-dot+bar Symbols at the Exact Point of a Multi-word Later Addition

Seven key facts support the conclusion that all eight bars with characteristic features adjacent to a two-dot symbol mark the location of a multi-word textual addition:

1. The Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece 28th edition identifies a multi-word textual variant somewhere in the line following each characteristic bar. If all eight were simply paragraph marks, this conjunction would have to be mere coincidence. The probability that multi-word variants identified by Nestle-Aland would occur somewhere in each of eight randomly-selected Vaticanus lines is less than one in a trillion.
2. Even more astounding, Scribe B left a gap at the exact letter where a widely acknowledged, multi-word textual addition begins following every characteristic bar except one that was evidently added by a different hand.
3. None of the other twenty bars adjacent to a two-dot symbol combines as much extension into the margin and total length as any of the eight characteristic bars. All eight extend, on average, almost twice as far into the margin as the other twenty and are, on average, almost one third longer than the other twenty. This distinguishes them graphically from paragraph bars randomly occurring after dots. Their extension into the margin associates them with their adjacent two-dot symbols, whose purpose was to mark the location of textual variants. Characteristic bars specify which    category of variant—multi-word additions.
4. Scribe B undoubtedly used horizontal-bars in the Vaticanus Prophets to mark the locations of blocks of added text since one is in the middle of text and since explanations that these bars mark added text display original Vaticanus
5. All eight characteristic bars adjacent to a two-dot symbol resemble the shape and length of each bar marking added text in the Vaticanus
6. A horizontal bar was the standard Greek symbol for marking added text.
7. Bars also mark blocks of added text in other manuscripts at John 7:53–8:11 and Mark’s longer ending. Apparently every manuscript with a bar introducing Mark’s longer ending notes that this ending is not “in some of the copies.”

All this supports the conclusion that two-dot+bar symbols mark the location of multi-word blocks of added text.

Vaticanus Scribe B Marked “Let women keep silent in the churches … for it is a disgrace for a woman to speak in church” as a Later Addition

1 Corinthians 14:34–35 silences women in church three times with no qualification. Chapter 11, however, guides how women should prophesy, and chapter 14:5, 24 (3x), 26 and 31 affirm “all” speaking in church. Popular resolutions of this contradiction limit 14:34–35’s demand for silence only to disruptive chatter or, recently contrived, only to judging prophecies. These resolutions should be rejected since they permit speech verse 35 prohibits, namely asking questions from a desire to learn.

As this photograph shows, Scribe B identified 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 as added text

but faithfully preserved those verses from Vaticanus’s epistles’ exemplar, just as Scribe B faithfully preserved text in the Vaticanus Prophets marked with a bar as later additions. It is precisely because of honest preservation of textual data that Scribe B’s textual judgments should be respected, not dismissed.

In the 121 cases of a bar in the Vaticanus Prophets, a comparison with the Hebrew Scriptures shows that Scribe B’s judgments were correct, that the Greek translation being copied did indeed add words that were not in the Hebrew text.

Furthermore, manuscripts confirm a block of text was added at the gap Scribe B left following every other two-dot+bar symbol. Therefore, this symbol implies that Scribe B had manuscript evidence 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 was non-original, added text. We should trust Scribe B’s textual judgments because the wide scope of textual variants Scribe B marked implies access to far more pre-Vaticanus NT manuscript text than survives today.

1 Corinthians 14:34–35 is the only multi-word textual variant ever identified at the gap following this two-dot+bar symbol. At least sixty-two textual studies argue that 14:34–35 is a later addition. Joseph Fitzmyer, First Corinthians, 530, notes that “the majority of commentators today” regard verses 34–35 as a later addition. Kim Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest, 62, affirms this of “[n]early all scholars now.”

This is important theologically because the two-dot+bar symbol at the interface of 1 Corinthians 14:33 and 34 provides a resolution to the notorious difficulty of reconciling verses 34–35 with 1 Corinthians 11’s inclusion of women prophesying and chapter 14’s affirmations of  “all” prophesying—verses 34–35 were not in Paul’s original letter, but are a later addition. Therefore, Paul’s unqualified affirmations of the equal standing of man and woman in Christ (Galatians 3:28; Romans 16; 1 Corinthians 7; 11:11–12) need not be qualified by verses  34–35’s huge caveat. Nor must one resort to implausible interpretations of 14:34–35. The twenty-two page article, “Vaticanus Distigme-obelos Symbols Marking Added Text, Including 1 Corinthians 14.34–5” with twelve color photographs, will be downloadable free in September from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/open-access.

I’m with you Joshua Becker:

A few years ago, I began to intentionally wear the same outfit every day—a dark grey T-shirt and khaki pants. At first, I tried it just as a one week experiment. I wanted to see what people would say and how I’d reflect on this experience.

Every day, I wondered when people would finally say it: “Enough Joshua! Why are you wearing that again?” And if they didn’t mention anything, were they secretly thinking it?

Even though I was voluntarily wearing the same clothes, I felt pressure to change them. Most of us are trained to look for a new outfit every morning—I was no exception.

Societal norms and habits are potent influencers of our purchases, and they weighed heavily on me. Clothing brands actively produce seasonal and “sub-collections” to constantly “refresh” stores. Enter one of these stores today, and you might not recognize it next week. You could build a wardrobe and have it turnover every month, season, and year.

Because of our conditioning, I imagined everyone looking at my recycled outfit and judging me for it.

However, one week into my experiment, nobody mentioned anything.

And in that silence, I was liberated.

In reality, most people were too caught up with their own demands to recognize this repetition—a perfect example of what social psychologists call the “spotlight effect.”

These societal norms could be broken, and I could be freed of these assumed expectations.

Whether you’re thinking about minimizing your wardrobe, adopting a life uniform, or simply wanting to consume less, here are five reasons why you should try this one-week experiment:

The Bee takes on skinny jeans, or is it skinny jeans takes on The Bee?

SEATTLE, WA—After being seen on 43-year-old Preaching Pastor Scot Martin’s legs during his City Church sermon on Sunday, a pair of RUDE Blue Livier Wash Vintage Super Skinny Jeans issued a heartfelt apology to the church community, sources confirmed Monday.

“I am so embarrassed,” the statement read in part. “There is no excuse for me to be spotted on any man of this age—especially a pastor. This was a serious lapse in judgment. I have no idea why Scot thought this would work out.” [HT: :mic]

Very sad to see this, by Valerie Volcovici:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will no longer sponsor an awards program honoring voluntary corporate actions to combat global warming, it announced on Friday, the agency’s latest move to undo Obama-era climate change programs.

Since 2012, the EPA has been the lead sponsor of the Climate Leadership Awards program and conference, which recognizes companies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their internal operations and supply chains.

In an email sent on Friday, the EPA announced it will no longer be involved in the awards or the conference.

Under Administrator Scott Pruitt, who has repeatedly expressed doubts about climate change, the EPA has moved to undo dozens of Obama-era climate regulations in what it says is an effort to ease the regulatory burden on energy and agriculture companies.

In the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2018, the EPA was the target of the largest cut – 31 percent – a figure that Republican and Democratic lawmakers opposed.

Dining in Detroit:

It’s Thursday morning in the dead of summer, and Steven and I just returned from dropping our daughter, Celia, at the airport for her first solo trip out of town. While she skyrockets toward Charleston, we’re here, licking our metaphorical wounds (and chops!) at that hot & happening diner, Parks and Rec. This (downtown? Midtown? call it Stadiumtown) eatery is two years old now, and located in the omnipresent, 19th-century castle known as the Grand Army of the Republic—a building erected for Civil War veterans that went on to house Detroit’s Parks and Recreation Department in the early 1940s.

Skipping ahead to 1982, when Motown was in the throes of its protracted collapse and maintenance on the GAR became unmanageable, Mayor Coleman Young ordered it boarded up—and so it languished for three decades in what was, by then, an emptied-out neighborhood.

Was anything happening around here during those years? I ask Steven, who visits Motown’s numerous communities more often than I do. He thinks a moment, as we scrounge for change at the gleaming-new parking meter alongside the GAR. Not really, he finally says. The area was pretty much homeless guys, prairie grass, and crumbling buildings far as the eye could see.

Not like now. Because three local businessmen renovated the GAR to its faux-medieval glory, complete with crenellated turrets soaring mightily toward heaven. Within its no-longer-crumbling walls, you’ll find not one, but two restaurants (Parks and Rec, and its older by a year sister, Republic Tavern), which, like certain portions of Detroit, appear to be thriving. In fact, this once-ghost town of a district is jumping with new residents, with two stadiums and another well on its way, and with theaters, clubs, construction everywhere you look. With more restaurants that are hungry to give P and R and Republic a run for their money.

Speaking of money, when we’ve got a little to spare, our family likes to check out Detroit’s recently opened cafés and bistros and brasseries. We can’t visit them all, of course, but to our delight, every place we’ve tried has been pretty good. More often, they’re marvelous.

Michael Tanenbaum:

The School District of Philadelphia announced Thursday that it has revised its Student Code of Conduct to eliminate suspensions for kindergarten students who behave out of line.

“We remain focused on academic achievement, children reading on grade level, and college and career readiness. The early years are most important and we need students in school,” Superintendent William R. Hite said in a statement. “Studies show that more kindergarten suspensions lead to less opportunity for children to stay on grade level with their peers.”

As part of the shift in disciplinary strategy, the district will work proactively to develop new interventions that will help teachers manage conflict and recognize trauma. This will include resolution and de-escalation training for educators of the city’s youngest learners.

Brain trickery:

If you enjoy expensive wines, keep the findings of new brain research in mind: Your pleasure may have more to do with the price of the vino than its quality.

“The reward and motivation system is activated more significantly with higher prices, and apparently increases the taste experience in this way,” said researcher Bernd Weber, acting director of the University of Bonn’s Center for Economics and Neuroscience in Germany.

He and his team had 30 study participants — average age 30 — sample wine while lying down in an MRI scanner. Their brain reactions were monitored as they sipped wine they were told was either expensive, moderately priced or inexpensive. The wines were actually identical.

Previous research has shown that people’s higher expectations about high-priced food affect how the brain processes taste.

“However, it has so far been unclear how the price information ultimately causes more expensive wine to also be perceived as having a better taste in the brain,” Weber said in a university news release.

For this study, the participants were given an average- to good-quality red wine with a retail bottle price of about $14. But they were told it cost either $3.50, $7 or $21.

The study participants reported that the “higher-priced” wine tasted better than an apparently cheaper one.

Ultimately, said researcher and post-doctoral fellow Liane Schmidt, “the reward and motivation system plays a trick on us.”

This is known as the “marketing placebo effect,” explained the researchers, referring to health benefits people often feel when they’re given a “placebo,” or dummy, medication.

The measurements of brain activity in the MRI scanner confirmed this effect.

[SMcK: I wonder if someone were saying “two buck chuck” would it lead to the “yuck factor”?]

Big thanks to Kris for finding so many of the links this week, and she finds many of them most weeks.

Joi Marie McKenzie:

Some lucky Atlanta students got a huge surprise last week. Mentors encouraged them as they walked into school for the very first time this year.

During the welcome, approximately 370 boys at BEST Academy of Atlanta, an all boys school for grades 6 through 12, were greeted with cheers, handshakes, high-fives, hugs and encouraging words from over 70 men.

The heartfelt welcome was thanks to a partnership by several Atlanta non-profit organizations, including 100 Black Men of Atlanta, Emerging 100 of Atlanta, The Collegiate 100 and the 100 Black Men of America.

BEST Academy student Gs3 Harris told ABC News he had no idea what to expect when he walked off the bus on August 1.

The graduating senior said his first reaction when seeing the dozens of men cheering was, “Oh snap! All these people came here to see us?”

Harris, 17, said one man even pulled him aside and said, “You look like you’re going somewhere. You’ll be famous soon.”

“That was kind of special because not too many people think that of me,” said the student, who plans to study mechanical engineering at Georgia State University when he graduates. “It was a boost in morale.”

Ray Singer, the program director for 100 Black Men of Atlanta and the liaison for the school, said the morning also benefited the mentors.

“At the end of the day, all of our volunteers walked away with just as much as experience as the student,” he told ABC News. “It gives them an opportunity to have some real dialogue with students about careers … and they walk away feeling uplifted.”

Political correctness, by William Deresiewicz:

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

I also heard that the director of the writing center, a specialist in disability studies, was informing people that they couldn’t use expressions like “that’s a crazy idea” because they stigmatize the mentally ill. I heard a young woman tell me that she had been criticized by a fellow student for wearing moccasins—an act, she was informed, of cultural appropriation. I heard an adjunct instructor describe how a routine pedagogical conflict over something he had said in class had turned, when the student in question claimed to have felt “triggered,” into, in his words, a bureaucratic “dumpster fire.” He was careful now, he added, to avoid saying anything, or teaching anything, that might conceivably lead to trouble.

I listened to students—young women, again, who considered themselves strong feminists—talk about how they were afraid to speak freely among their peers, and how despite its notoriety as a platform for cyberbullying, they were grateful for YikYak, the social media app, because it allowed them to say anonymously what they couldn’t say in their own name. Above all, I heard my students tell me that while they generally identified with the sentiments and norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they thought that it had simply gone too far—way too far. Everybody felt oppressed, as they put it, by the “PC police”—everybody, that is, except for those whom everybody else regarded as members of the PC police.

I heard all this, and a good bit more, while teaching one class, for 12 students, during one semester, at one college. And I have no reason to believe that circumstances are substantially different at other elite private institutions, and plenty of reasons not to believe it: from conversations with individuals at many schools, from my broader experience in higher education, from what I’ve read not only in the mainstream media but also in the higher education press. The situation is undoubtedly better at some places than others, undoubtedly worse at the liberal arts colleges as a whole than at the universities as a whole, but broadly similar across the board.

So this is how I’ve come to understand the situation. Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

Some of you have students in college,

and I recommend this Amazon Prime for Students:

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Karen Matthews:

NEW YORK (AP) — An old construction barge planted with vegetables, apple trees and fragrant herbs is giving apartment-dwelling New Yorkers a chance to pick something and eat it.

Part floating garden, part artwork and part community organizing project, the barge called Swale is currently docked on a river in the South Bronx and will move to Hudson River Park in lower Manhattan from Sept. 15 to Nov. 15.

Founder Mary Mattingly created Swale in part to give New Yorkers an opportunity to forage for food, which is illegal throughout the city’s 30,000 acres of public parks. The no-foraging rule doesn’t apply to Swale, since it’s a barge.

“Because not everyone has access to healthy food in New York, I saw Swale as a tool to advocate for policy change,” said Mattingly, an artist who is dividing her time between Swale and her summer residency at Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France.

Swale’s harvest is free for the taking. Dariella Rodriguez, director of outreach for Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, a community group that leads tours of Swale, said many visitors are surprised they don’t have to pay.

“Immediately they’re like, ‘how much?’ And when we tell them that it’s free, they’re really shocked,” Rodriguez said.

Swale was launched in 2016 with funding from Kickstarter and A Blade of Grass, a nonprofit that supports socially engaged art.

Shih Tzu by Gabriella Borter:

(Reuters) – When distressed students at Middle School 88 in Brooklyn end up in the principal’s office, Petey Parker often totters over, tail wagging, to comfort them.

The rescued Shih Tzu mix is the darling of some 1,400 students who call out his name and lean over to pet him as he walks the corridors.

“He’s like a guidance counselor but in a dog form,” said Maciel, an 8th grader at MS 88, donning a Principal’s council t-shirt with an image of Petey’s face printed on it.

Petey joined the MS 88 community last December as one of the first participants in the Comfort Dog program, which is expanding to 30 more New York schools this fall after a pilot of just seven last year.

“It is amazing to me that one dog can bring empathy and serve as a comfort for close to 1,400 students,” MS 88 Principal Ailene Altman Mitchell said. “He’s king of this castle.”

The initiative, led by Chancellor Carmen Fariña of the New York City Department of Education, brings rescue dogs into the classroom to promote social emotional learning.

New York City’s Comfort Dog program is based on the Mutt-i-grees curriculum, which was developed by Yale researchers in partnership with North Shore Animal League America and aims to integrate rescue dogs into classroom lessons on empathy, resilience and conflict resolution.

Audrey Gorden:

Telemarketers have a new trick to get you to answer the phone — and it’s hitting close to home.

Caller ID spoofing, a technique to fake the number a call is coming from, makes detecting pesky robocalls more difficult. One increasingly popular way telemarketers are getting people to answer the phone is by mimicking the user’s number — copying the recipient’s area code and sometimes even the first few digits of their number.

Not even the head of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates phone lines and telemarketers, is immune. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told NPR he’s been targeted by telemarketers using the tactic.

“(The call will) seem to be coming from the 202 area code, which is here in Washington, and then our prefix for these BlackBerries,” Pai told NPR. “And I know for a fact that, you know, it’s probably not someone calling from the office.”

Joel Whalen, a professor of marketing and business communications at DePaul University, says caller ID spoofing can make consumers more comfortable answering a call.

“A person will answer the telephone and begin to engage in conversation, and that overcomes the first hurdle a telemarketer faces — getting someone to answer the phone so they can start the pitch,” Whalen said.

The widespread utilization of caller ID spoofing by telemarketers and scammers is made easy by the availability of internet-based calling and third-party caller ID spoofing services. The practice in itself is not illegal: According to the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009, spoofing and caller ID manipulation is prohibited only if the caller’s intent is to “defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value.”

Ashley May:

The man behind the 2003 report responsible for many current password guidelines says the advice is wrong.

Bill Burr, the author of an 8-page publication released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, told The Wall Street Journal his previous advice of creating passwords with special characters, mixed-case letters and numbers won’t deter hackers. In fact, he told the journal, the paper wasn’t based on any real-world password data, but rather a paper written in the 1980s.

“Much of what I did I now regret,” Burr told The Wall Street Journal.

The problem is that federal agencies, businesses and institutions took the paper seriously—very seriously. The report turned into password protocol. Today, even though Burr’s report was updated in June, we are still prompted to change our password every 90 days using at least one capital letter, symbol and number.

These combinations aren’t secure, mainly because people choose predictable combinations.

The advice about frequently changing a password has been criticized since the report. A 2010 study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed that updating passwords often can actually help hackers identify a pattern. Another study from Carleton University said frequent changes are more inconvenient than helpful.

Traci Watson:

It’s official: an Argentine dinosaur as heavy as a Boeing 737 is the biggest ever discovered.

The behemoth weighed more than 65 tons and perhaps as many as 77, a new study says. That makes the animal not just the biggest known dinosaur but also the biggest known land animal ever. Only a few whale species are heftier — and this dinosaur’s bones show it was still growing.

Scientists have christened the gigantic vegetarian Patagotitan mayorum, in honor of the Argentine region of Patagonia and the Mayo family, owners of the Patagonian farm where a worker stumbled on the fossil in 2010. The titan of Patagonia is described in scientific detail for the first time in this week’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The study also sheds new light on how and when dinosaurs went from big to truly gargantuan.

Patagotitan, which was some 120 feet long, has some competition as the world’s biggest dinosaur. Tantalizing scraps of bone hint at species that are more massive still.

“I don’t think the record we have now will hold forever,” says study co-author Diego Pol of Argentina’s Egidio Feruglio Museum of Paleontology. But “so far, out of the dinosaurs … we can recognize as valid species, we don’t have any (others) as big as Patagotitan.”

Greg Toppo:

When the school year begins Thursday at Marion County Public Schools in central Florida, the district’s 20,263 elementary school students will come to class sure of one thing: No matter what the school day brings, most nights they won’t have homework.

Instead, Superintendent Heidi Maier is urging families to read with their kids every night for at least 20 minutes — any book, newspaper or magazine of their choice. The Bible works, as does Popular Mechanics, Harry Potter or Walter the Farting Dog.

The move comes as schools nationwide revisit longstanding policies on homework, especially for young children. What was once a bedrock principle of the school year is now under the microscope as research shows few benefits, and as families complain about evenings spent stressing over problem sets.

Maier said her teachers can make exceptions for special projects such as book reports or science fairs, but that otherwise she’s discouraging the practice of sending home worksheets and other materials intended to give kids more practice.

Homework has long been “a catalyst for arguments at night with family members,” Maier said. “That’s something we want to avoid.”

Recent research has mostly been focused on homework assigned to older students — and it shows mixed results.

What does Jesus mean when he says “Blessed are those who…”? What does it mean to be blessed or bless-ed?

This is the question Jonathan Pennington attempts to answer in his new important book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. It’s one of the most important questions for the interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount, and he has gone to considerable depths in his virtue-ethics understanding of “blessed” as “human flourishing.” I’ll give his basics. I have always approached this term “blessed” in Matt 5:3-12 through the work I have done how the Greek term is used in the LXX and the various connotations it evokes; hence, I’ve had one might be called a maximalist approach to the term.

The Greek word is makarios, and “beatitude” is thus a macarism. Here is Pennington:

A macarism is a makarios statement that ascribes happiness or flourishing to a particular person or state. A macarism is a pronouncement, based on observation, that a certain way of being in the world produces human flourishing and felicity. 42

Notice that his opening definition favors the idea of human flourishing, or as one might say, a more minimalist view of the term: it refers to the state of being, that is, the state of human flourishing. Behind makarios is the Hebrew ashre, as in Psalm 1. He is not intent on finding brk behind the Greek term makarios. The LXX behind markarios is ashre. The most common Greek term for human flourishing is not markarios but eudaimonia. [At this point I do wonder if Pennington uses too much eudaimonia to understand the ashre/makarios connection. Why, it might be asked, is it makarios and not eudaimonia if the main idea is virtue ethics human flourishing?]

Pennington contends brk is translated eulogetos and refers to divine favor while makarios refers to the state of human flourishing. This is what I mean by a more minimalist approach to the term, and this is not a criticism so much as a description. Brk and ashre, he shows, have an organic connection: divine blessing results in human flourishing, but makarios is about the latter. Macarisms are wisdom literature; blessings are covenant language.

The English term “blessed” is so heavily loaded with the narrower sense of “divine favor” that the sense of human flourishing is almost always lost. 50

Again, yes, yes, yes, that emphasis is present but the question is how constrained is markarios. Some of us would argue that the Woe of Luke 6 as the counter to the markarism of Luke 6 indicates a both-and maximalist reading of makarios. (That “some of us” is me.) I don’t think it is possible to turn woe simply into a “non-flourishing” kind of life. The term is a judgment from God on people.

So, Pennington thinks “Flourishing” is the best translation of markarios in the Beatitudes. Even if I think he is a little restrictive, his emphasis is right and we need that balance. I’m still curious why makarios instead of eudaimonia, and of course the LXX sets the precedent, but why there too?

He has good discussions of other makarios texts in Matthew, but I can’t go with him on 16:17,  where the emphasis falls on God’s favor and God’s revelation not on the flourishing life: “Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven’.” Perhaps my years of teaching the more expansive view just lead me to reading it in a more expansive sense.

There are then several approaches: divine favor, eschatological reversal blessings, and a wisdom or virtue-ethics reading, and he opts for the third. He’s not alone, and we are in his debt for his tour de force on this word.

The question is about where to sit so one can get the best view of Jesus and hear every word.

This is what Jonathan Pennington is doing in his new book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing.

I like Pennington’s book because it makes me think and because it takes direct aim at a subject — the Sermon and virtue ethics — that is far more often simply assumed rather than discussed. After all, since “everyone” is a virtue ethicist, or since it’s what everyone today thinks, so Jesus must have too. Did he?

When I wrote my commentary on The Sermon on the Mount I argued that Jesus was not a virtue ethicist but no one had argued it as Pennington now has so there is more room for discussion, and since this is the major section I disagree with the most (I endorsed this book without qualm) I want to offer a summary of his view and then push back some.

First, in contrast to Kavin Rowe’s new book (One True Life) Pennington argues for an encyclopedic approach. (Against the genetic and Rowe’s traditioned approach.) What does he mean? (Glad you asked.) Pennington thinks we are to become the “Model Reader” who knows two big traditions coming together — like two big rivers — into the Sermon on the Mount: the Story of Israel with a wisdom (and apocalyptic) tradition as well as the Greco-Roman virtue ethics tradition.

Eco is a heavyweight thinker who steps into the ring of a heated, long, and highly publicized fight between theorists on how to interpret literature and how meaning occurs. At the risk of oversimplification, in one corner are those who emphasize the role of the author who produced the original text. In the other corner are those who suggest that the reader plays the determinative role in meaning production. Again, with some unfortunate but necessary oversimplification, this could be called the difference between objectivism and subjectivism or modernism and postmodernism, between authorial intent and reader response, when these categories are applied to the interpretation of texts (hermeneutics). 20

Yet in contrast to much of literary theory today, Eco insists on the importance of intention in the creation of a text and on the historical situatedness of the author, who exists in a particular time and place. 21

Communication and texts come from real people in real situations, complete with cultural assumptions and evocations; communication does not exist outside of these historical realities. 21

He emphasizes that texts are not just words, which means we need a dictionary approach, but embedded in cultures, which means we need an encyclopedia approach. Rowe over cooks the boundaries between traditions too much but in this book Pennington blends what I’m not so sure can be blended as smoothly as he believes. Yes, basically this is correct in his adaptation of Umberto Eco:

Every text is not just language but is also an actualization of some aspects of the cultural encyclopedia in which it was created. And because texts are created in real situations and have an intention, through historical, cultural, and literary analysis a good reader can actually ‘isolate a given portion of the social encyclopedia so far as it appears useful in order to interpret certain portions of actual discourses (and texts).’ 22

The Model Reader then, for Eco, is the one who sits at the juncture where the particular text connects with the cultural encyclopedia in the most coherent and economic way possible.23

More specifically, I will argue that the form, material, and verbiage of the Sermon reveal that it lies at the nexus of two seemingly opposed but providentially coordinated contexts—the Second Temple Jewish tradition and the Greco-Roman virtue tradition. 24

First, I like his use of wisdom literature and the wisdom tradition, but I would have sketched the wisdom tradition quite differently. Instead of quoting secondary literature, we need to examine such texts as Proverbs 1:1-7 or Sirach or Wisdom of Solomon (and less so Ecclesiastes and Job and Song of Solomon). But I do like this wisdom tradition approach. I’m not as convinced of how he approaches — again through secondary literature — of the apocalyptic tradition for he tends to synthesize it down to inaugurated eschatology while apocalyptic — we are back now to the debate between the apocalyptic approach and the eschatological approach as seen in Campbell and Wright. Neusner is fine but much better are Leo Perdue, Ellen Davis, and Roland Murphy. Then, too, Ben Witherington’s own stuff on wisdom shows how Jesus adapts wisdom. And I’m a bit nervous about Pennington’s use of “imminent” in the eschatology of Jesus and the Sermon for I want to know what he means by “imminent.”

Second, that Hellenism impacted Judaism is undeniable (Martin Hengel is the right scholar he points to); that therefore Hellenism’s virtue ethics tradition is justified because Hengel, Betz, and Meeks argue for a similar-to-Hengel Hellenism theme just doesn’t cut it for me. I want to see the Aristotelian theory of virtue ethics spelled out from Nicomachean Ethics and show that the terms and thought patterns of this virtue tradition line up with the Sermon’s terms and thought patterns. Again, not secondary literature — I can appeal to a host of scholars who think the Sermon is Jewish and not Greco-Roman virtue ethics — but Aristotle and Epictetus and Seneca. Plus, one needs to define the cultural and social contexts of virtue ethics: that of “friendship” in Aristotelian and Ciceronian contexts, a friendship of elite males who have the leisure to promote mutual growth in virtues.

So, while I would agree with the general description of virtue ethics he offers, the question for me is Whether or not Jesus taught that habits form a character that form a character-who-acts virtuously. I don’t see that habit of thought for Jesus.

So, too I can agree with this in general but I wouldn’t put the emphasis on what he does: “Namely, the Sermon is offering Jesus’s answer to the great question of human flourishing, the topic at the core of both the Jewish wisdom literature and that of the Greco-Roman virtue perspective, while presenting Jesus as the true Philosopher-King” (36).

Thus, too, I don’t agree: “Thus, to conclude this discussion we can arrive at an important point and depict this dual context intentionally. The point is that both of these contexts overlap in their goal of and emphasis on whole-person human flourishing, but the basic orientation of the Sermon is first and foremost that of the eschatological story of Israel, the coming of God’s reign/kingdom with Jesus as the King. This redemptive-historical perspective greatly shapes and modifies the virtue vision of the Sermon relative to its otherwise similar approach in Greco-Roman philosophy” (38).

So, to the point directly: Pennington finds Solomon or David behind the Sermon more than I would and he does not find Moses enough. Nothing is more clear from Matthew’s text than Mosaic themes in 5:1 with 7:28-29 and the whole — yes the whole — of 5:17-48. Not enough Moses, too much Solomon/David, and too much Aristotle. My contention is the Sermon has three plus more angles: an ethic from Above (God’s revelation as with Moses), an ethic from Beyond (eschatology of judgment/prophets) and an ethic from Below (wisdom tradition), plus christology and plus ecclesiology and plus Spirit.

To date, Pennington’s approach is the best virtue ethics approach.

On therapy animals, which we saw on a bus at Logan International airport this week:

A therapy-animal trend grips the United States. The San Francisco airport now deploys a pig to calm frazzled travelers. Universities nationwide bring dogs (and a donkey) onto campus to soothe students during finals. Llamas comfort hospital patients, pooches provide succor at disaster sites and horses are used to treat sex addiction.

And that duck on a plane? It might be an emotional-support animal prescribed by a mental health professional.

The trend, which has accelerated hugely since its initial stirrings a few decades ago, is underpinned by a widespread belief that interaction with animals can reduce distress – whether it happens over brief caresses at the airport or in long-term relationships at home. Certainly, the groups offering up pets think this, as do some mental health professionals. But the popular embrace of pets as furry therapists is kindling growing discomfort among some researchers in the field, who say it has raced far ahead of scientific evidence.

Earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Developmental Science, an introduction to a series of articles on “animal-assisted intervention” said research into its efficacy “remains in its infancy.” A recent literature review by Molly Crossman, a Yale University doctoral candidate who recently wrapped up one study involving an 8-year-old dog named Pardner, cited a “murky body of evidence” that sometimes has shown positive short-term effects, often found no effect and occasionally identified higher rates of distress.

Overall, Crossman wrote, animals seem to be helpful in a “small-to-medium” way, but it’s unclear whether the critters deserve the credit or something else is at play.

“It’s a field that has been sort of carried forward by the convictions of practitioners” who have seen patients’ mental health improve after working with or adopting animals, said James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. “That kind of thing has almost driven the field, and the research is playing catch-up. In other words, people are recognizing that anecdote isn’t enough.”

Yikes.

BARBIE LATZA NADEAU

07.07.17 1:00 AM ET

ROME—It all started with the usual complaints from disgruntled neighbors: funny smells, slamming doors, loud music, the sound of squeaky beds and laughter late into the night. In almost any other situation anywhere in the world, the angry neighbors would have confronted the noisy tenant, maybe left a mean note on the door or complained to the landlord and the matter would be settled.

But this particular dispute occurred in one of the most prestigious addresses in Rome, the so-called Ex Sant’Uffizio Palace, in the very apartment owned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith where Joseph Ratzinger lived for decades before becoming Pope Benedict XVI. The palatial ochre-colored building is home to dozens of high-ranking cardinals who live within walking distance of their jobs at the Roman Curia in Vatican City next door.

The fed-up neighbors were simply sick of what they described as a “steady stream of young men” who frequented Ratzinger’s former apartment, which had been given to Monsignor Luigi Capozzi, the secretary for Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, which busies itself with deciphering and clarifying various points of canon law. So they called the cops, in this case the Vatican’s elite Swiss Guard gendarmerie unit, when the noise and movida nightlife just got to be too much.

The Vatican police showed up to find an orgy in progress, with an untold number of naked men allegedly writhing around the floor with Capozzi and his cohorts, who were apparently under the influence of hard drugs according to the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano which broke the story that a host of Italian and international media have since picked up.

Calls to the Swiss Guard turned up neither confirmations nor denials, but Capozzi is no longer at his job, according to the switchboard operator at his boss’ office.

The qof section of Psalm 119, vv. 145-152, explores the psalmist’s call to God. The psalmist, once again in a condition of being hunted down like an animal (v. 150), cries out to God. And along with his cry is a corollary.

The psalmist cries to God — and he asks God to answer him (145) and to save him (146). These two verses are parallels to one another.

Along with this cry to God to hear his prayer (of deliverance) and to save him (from his enemies no doubt), he makes a commitment: “I will keep your statutes” (145) and “that I may observe your decrees” (146).
I don’t think it would be right to see this simply as a bargain with God, though I should not think it inappropriate for the psalmist, but more of an opportunity: he wants deliverance so he can obey God longer.

I doubt it is simply that he wants deliverance and, if God delivers him, he’ll be obedient.

No one who has worked through this psalms thus far would think the psalmist is simply bargaining with God; what strikes the reader of this psalm is his utter and relentless declarations that he will obey the Torah (or the various words he uses for God’s Torah).

The psalmist is diligent. Notice his words — a kind of two-step direction in his diligence:

147 I rise before dawn and cry for help;
I put my hope in your words.
148 My eyes are awake before each watch of the night,
that I may meditate on your promise.
Morning and at intervals during the night the psalmist first:
Cries for help (once again, like vv. 145-146) and second:
Meditates on God’s promise (uttered promises).

He cries and he meditates. He does it all night long and early in the morning. What does he do it for?
It appears to me that v. 147 shows what his diligence was directed at: “hope in your words.” The meditation then of v. 148 is probably not simply Torah-study but meditation on God’s words in order to find comfort during his oppression.

The psalmist’s hope of deliverance is so he can continue his life of obedience to the Lord.

The psalmist is crying out for deliverance from his persecutors. He wants to be delivered so he can continue a life of Torah observance. He cries out to God all night long — and the foundation for his cry for deliverance is significant:

In your steadfast love hear my voice;
O LORD, in your justice preserve my life (149).

It is often said that theology (what we think of God) should shape our prayers; it sure does this psalmist. In fact, it has been said that our theology determines our prayer and our prayer reveals our theology.

The psalmist thinks God should deliver him because:

1. Of God’s steadfast love and
2. Of God’s own justice.

God’s chesed and God’s mishpat. The theology of the psalmist is this: God is faithful in his love and God’s faithful love should give rise to God’s judgment on behalf of the psalmist.

What we see here is the confidence of the psalmist in God.

The psalmist’s confidence brims over the top now: if v. 149 shows that he can make claim on God because of God’s steadfast love and judgment, in vv. 150-151 the psalmist expresses a singular confidence.

150 Those who persecute me with evil purpose draw near;
they are far from your law.
151 Yet you are near, O LORD,
and all your commandments are true.

Here is his confidence: his opponents are near in the sense that they are at his doorway and ready to bring him down. They may be near to the psalmist’s place, but they are “far from your law” (150).

But, and here’s a big one, they may be near, but God is near. God’s nearness trumps the nearness of the opponents.

The last line in v. 151 might just be another way of restating what the psalmist said in v. 149: God’s steadfast love and judgment are God’s utter faithful truthfulness (v. 151). God remains true to his word; God remains true to himself. Therefore, God’s nearness trumps their nearness: if God is near and if God is true to his righteous judgment, then the opponents are doomed.

Confidence.

The psalmist begins this section by crying out to God for deliverance. As the section develops he becomes confident, and part of the reason for his confidence can be found in v. 152.

Memory: he remembers that long ago he learned the decrees and he learned at that time that God’s decrees are set in stone. They are permanent because God is permanent.

So, the opponents may be near, but God is also near. And because God’s judgment is true and because God’s decrees are permanent and forever, he can utter a sense of relief: he can rely on God to deliver him.

I find this psalm a bit like Psalm 77 — where we find a psalmist struggling with God until he finds relief in remembering the faithfulness of God.