by Judy Jones
ASSYRIANS AND BABYLONIANS: The bad guys (Mesopotamian division), each of whom was responsible for one especially traumatic dislocation of the Jews. The Assyrians (who predominated during the eighth and seventh centuries b.c., who lived in the mountainous north of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, whose capital was Nineveh, and who did all those bas-reliefs of winged beasts and heavily bearded humans) were militaristic and wanted nothing more than to fight all day, every day. Their most telling blow against the Jews was the taking captive, in 722 b.c., of the ten northern tribes of Israel, whom they then proceeded to scatter over the Assyrian desert. These so called Lost Tribes have subsequently been identified with the peoples of Ethiopia, Latin America, and Afghanistan, not to mention high-caste Hindus and Japanese, the Indians of the Eastern Seaboard, and, most endearingly, the English. Major Assyrian kings: Sargon, Sennacherib, and Assurbanipal. The Assyrians were eventually defeated by an alliance of Persians and Babylonians (see below). You can read about them in 2 Kings 16–19.
The Babylonians (who predominated during the sixth century b.c., who lived on the fertile plain in the south of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, whose capital was Babylon, who are sometimes referred to as the New Babylonians—or even the Chaldeans—to distinguish them from a much earlier Babylonian civilization under Hammurabi, and who built the Hanging Gardens), were fighters, too, but they were also fatalists and sensualists, which in the end did them in. Their most devastating move against the Jews is called the Babylonian Captivity (or the first Diaspora), and involved the two tribes of Judah, just south of Israel, tens of thousands of whose members were forced into exile in and around Babylon in 586 b.c. The Babylonian king par excellence: Nebuchadnezzar. His son was defeated by the Persians. You can read about the Babylonians in 2 Kings 20-25, and in Daniel (where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the fiery furnace, where Daniel is thrown into the lions’ den, where the handwriting shows up on the wall, and where Nebuchadnezzar goes temporarily insane and eats grass, “as oxen”).
Seven People Not to Bother Sharing
Your Old God-Spelled-Backward
Insight With
And they’re all theologians, engaged in an ages-old attempt to talk rationally about the Word, the Way, and the Messiah, while, like the rest of us, keeping an eye on things down at city hall and out in the ’burbs. KARL BARTH
(Swiss, Calvinist, 1886-1968)
Not a whole lot of fun. For starters, he’d had it with the liberal Protestant theology of the preceding century, an I’m-OK-thou-art-OK affair that put man and God on roughly the same footing and that burbled a lot about human progress. God, said Barth, is not only totally divine, totally supreme, and totally transcendent (i.e., nothing like the rest of us), He’s also totally unknowable except through His revelations, the times and places for which, by the way, He chooses all by Himself. So forget worrying about how you should “talk with God”: It’s not even an option. Concentrate instead on your own sinfulness, because that—not the goodness and dignity the liberals so liked to emphasize—is man’s true nature. You can call all of the above “neo-orthodoxy.” Or you can call it “crisis theology,” Barth’s catchphrase for how faith derives not from front-pew smugness but from front-line peril, in this century specifically from the dislocations and devastations of two world wars. But you’d be smart to let it go at that. The alternative—attempting to dip into Barth’s Church Dogmatics, twelve volumes’ worth of the bottom line on revelation, creation, reconciliation, redemption, and the like—is, as reading experiences go, the equivalent of chewing a mouthful of bubble gum and sand. PAUL TILLICH
(German Emigrant to the United States,
Lutheran, 1886-1965)
Thoroughly modern and more or less human. Tillich viewed theology as a perfectly natural, perfectly personal endeavor, with a built-in man-asks-God-answers format. In many ways the opposite number of Barth, who saw God as wholly other and transcendent, way out there (and not at home anyway), Tillich sees Him as, if maybe still way out there, at least willing and able to make the trip in from time to time. God has presence, not just existence; in fact, He’s both the source and the goal of everything—the “Ground of Being,” in Tillich’s famous phrase—and religion is the “sacred depth,” the unifying center of every aspect of life. Drawing on then-trendy existentialism and psychoanalysis as well as on philosophy and theology proper, Tillich attempted to redress Barth’s obsession with the “revelatory” pole of Scripture and tradition by dancing round and round the “situational” one of what this century has dealt us. As a result, his work—most notably the three-volume Systematic Theology and the chattier, slightly autobiographical The Boundaries of Our Being—is full of discussions of culture, society, ethics, and current events. Keep awake especially for raps on Christian socialism and something called theonomy, through which Tillich hoped we could all unite our own beings with the Ground of Being, and in so doing resolve the conflict between the individual and the state. Not that human truth is ultimate—just that the human condition is worth addressing oneself to. RUDOLF BULTMANN
(German, Lutheran, 1884-1976)
The debunker. Specifically, the man who set out to “demythologize” the New Testament, stripping it of the myths that second- and third-generation Christians had encrusted it with back when Jesus’ death was still news and nobody wasn’t privy to at least one firsthand account of the Resurrection. Insisting that there was no point in continuing the nineteenth century’s search for a “historical” Jesus, yet understandably reluctant to throw the baby (that would be Christ’s, and Christianity’s, essential “message”) out with the bathwater, Bultmann turned to a succession of techniques to get the worshipper-friendly effects he wanted. Among them: form criticism, a biblical-research style that asks, say, why a specific Gospel narrator would choose to relate a miracle when he could equally well have thrown in a parable or a bit of scenic description; hermeneutics, a way of interpretatively updating a text—like the New Testament—so that it bears on and reads for a whole new tribe or generation; and, like Tillich, Christian existentialism, the midcentury movement committed to reassessing religious doctrines and traditions in terms of sheer human interest. A reasonable enough program, you say? Not to Bultmann’s critics, who argued that it cut into not only the box-office appeal of Jesus but the big-daddy authority of God. REINHOLD NIEBUHR
(American, Evangelical, 1892-1971)
Not easy to pigeonhole: A theologian who was able to make the connection between sin and politics and an activist who thought history had more to do with irony than with progress. A pragmatist, certainly, and a Midwesterner, the bulk of whose career was, nevertheless, spent teaching Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Also, an aphorist of sorts: The so called Serenity Prayer—“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other”—is vintage Niebuhr. Nor is it any easier trying to slot the man according to what he opposed: the Babbittry underlying American business life and the American dream; the naïveté of liberal Protestants who thought improving society really brought the Kingdom of God any closer; the emphasis that Barth put on the supernatural; the emphasis that Tillich put on the here-and-now; anybody who thought grace was for Christians only; totalitarianism; unthinking pacifism; pride; and complacency, to name just a few. It’s not wrong to think of him as a Christian socialist, manning the sociopolitical barricades, meeting power with power, seeing that justice is done, but you should keep in mind that the neoconservatives also claim him as a role model. Anyway, he was a second-generation American (and not all that heavy-duty a theoretician), and he believed that sin is basically a misuse of human freedom; that values and judgments have to be understood in terms of a person’s circumstances (Niebuhr is the father of contextual ethics); and that while you have a responsibility to fight for what’s right, you don’t count on always winning. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
/> (German, Lutheran, 1906-1945)
The martyr. Hanged by the Nazis (but not before he’d smuggled enough letters out of his prison cell to flesh out what would become a transatlantic bestseller), Bonhoeffer knew all about horror, repression, outrage, and the deft turn of phrase. It was the term “cheap grace,” an early effort, that first aroused attention; it characterized “comfortable” Christianity, the kind that costs its followers little or nothing in the way of abnegation, hardship, or lack of popularity, and was opposed to the genuine (and expensive) grace that active, exclusive discipleship under Christ entails. Bonhoeffer would later plead for a secular, “religionless” Christianity, directed toward “man come of age,” with an emphasis on this world rather than the next, freedom instead of obedience, and “behavior not belief.” Such an approach to religion (a word he didn’t much go for, by the way) would appeal to men not where they were weak but where they were strong, and in “the marketplace of life” rather than “outside its city limits.” (The last turn of phrase is ours, but we think he’d—and maybe He’d—approve.) Not such good ideas, per Bonhoeffer: metaphysics, in which men speculate after God in the interstices of scientific knowledge; psychotherapeutic and existentialist approaches to Christianity; and too much “inwardness,” whether on the mystical or the merely pietistic model. All things considered, and despite his premature death, Bonhoeffer has probably had a bigger (and a more international) response than any other modern theologian: Not only are there file cabinets full of “Bonhoeffer literature” consisting mainly of readers’ correspondence, with a few scholarly tracts and cult items thrown in, there’s also a Bonhoeffer Society that holds regular congresses and keeps those cards and letters coming. MARTIN BUBER
(Austrian, Jewish, 1878-1965)
This century’s most important Jewish religious thinker—for the record, “theologian” is pretty much a Christian label—at least among Protestants and Catholics. (Jews had problems with his iron-out-the-differences, Arab-Israeli-cohabitation approach to Zionism; they also were uncomfortable with his Hasidic tale-teller persona and all that quaint straight-from-the-Kabbalah lore, not to mention the fact that the Christians seemed to like him so much.) The best-known Buber bequest: the “I-Thou” relationship, which can be undertaken only with “the whole being” and “in total openness to the other”; which is opposed to the obviously less desirable “I-It” relationship; and which is how we’re meant to get along not only with each other but with God—for Buber not an object of belief, but the subject, the “Eternal Thou.” In fact, because, as he saw it, each little daily I-Thou moment, even the shopping-mall ones, had Eternal Thou reverberations (how we behave to each other is how we’re behaving toward God), don’t be surprised when Buber filibusters about interpersonal relations, public life, politics, community versus society, and life on the kibbutz, all at least as intricately bound up with religion as going to temple ever was. Be prepared, too, for a lot of existentialist imagery: the walk on “the narrow ridge,” modern man “at the edge,” and a bundle of “abysses,” including those between Israel and the Arabs, Jews and Christians, friendship and alienation. Not the scholar’s scholar, exactly, but Buber is hands-down the person’s person. PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
(French, Catholic, 1881-1955)
Out there—a doer as much as a thinker, and a mystic into the bargain. Trained not only in theology but in paleontology, Teilhard had been in on the discovery of Peking man, then got himself into trouble when he tried to make sense of the find. From most people’s point of view, it’s hard to see what anyone could dislike about the idea that science and religion aren’t irreconcilable, and the notion that human evolution never stopped, just moved indoors, seems like simple common sense. The Catholic Church, though, had other ideas: Teilhard was enjoined from publicizing, in his lifetime, his theory of cosmic evolution—in which, according to him, man has come to have a guiding hand—and his conviction that belief in same does not entail a rejection of Christianity. (He was also packed off to Africa.) Still, nobody can deny that, at least posthumously, Teilhard got off a few good ones, most notably in The Phenomenon of Man; among them were the terms “noösphere” (the realm or domain in which the mind does it all, modeled on—and destined to supplant—mere biosphere) and “Omega point” (variously interpreted as the integration of all personal consciousness and as the second coming of Christ). Anyway, turns out you weren’t the only one who wondered how come, if all the birds and animals already existed in the Garden of Eden, there could also be dinosaur tracks up the road.
*For the record, they’re talking about the time before the Flood.
**Properly associated not with reggae music, but with the first Babylonian captivity.
* Ecclesiastes (Greek for “preacher”) is now believed to have been the nom de plume of a wealthy, kindly old cynic who lived around 200 b.c. For a long time he was considered too materialistic, pessimistic, and agnostic to be included in the Bible at all; naturally, he is a big favorite with modern readers.
** The subject here is old age and death, about which Ecclesiastes worried a lot. The rest of the passage is also worth remembering: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”
† Spoken of the errant people of Israel who were, as usual, off worshipping false idols and wallowing in luxury while the kingdom collapsed into political confusion and Assyrian armies gathered ominously to the north.
‡ The seventh seal is the last of those which secure the great book held in God’s right hand. It is being opened, at the moment in question, by a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns.
Out of the Cyclotron, into the Streets
Some scientific terms yearn for a notoriety greater than the university community or the industrial complex can provide. Bored with having a precise, agreed-upon meaning known only to a few white-coated old lab technicians, they set their caps at becoming indispensable to David Letterman and Barbara Walters. They may lose a little of their cogency in the process, but they sure do get around.
Catalyst
In chemistry, a catalyst has to satisfy two separate requirements. The first is that it promote, enhance, or speed up a chemical reaction. This it does by combining, on the molecular level, with each of the active ingredients involved, bringing them into certain contact with each other, rather than waiting for their chance collision. The second requirement is that, though it furthers a reaction, it remain itself unchanged, unspent, and unaccounted for afterward. In effect, it simply walks away. (Enzymes, those protein molecules that figure in the chemical reactions of living organisms, meet both these requirements and are hence the body’s catalysts.) If you set out to fix up your two best friends, making the restaurant reservation, lubricating the dinner conversation, and paying the bill, you’d be a catalyst. Also a cockeyed optimist, but that’s another story.
Centrifugal Force
The “center-fleeing” tendency that comes over a ball when it’s being spun at the end of a string, a liquid like blood or milk when it’s undergoing separation in a centrifuge, or you when you’re taking a curve in a car that’s going too fast. Essentially, the effect is one of being pulled away from the center of a specific orbit, to a degree based on the mass of the object in question, the speed at which it’s traveling, and the radius of its path. It is the complement of centripetal, or “center-seeking,” force, which can be gravitational, mechanical, or electric in nature, and which is what keeps the ball, the blood, the milk, and you from being somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean by now. Both terms pop up all over the place: A historian, for instance, might tell you that Thomas Jefferson’s sympathies lay with the centrifugal, not the centripetal, forces of the new nation—with rural life, farming, and the decentralization of powers rather than with urban life, manufacturing, and the centralization of them.
Fission and Fusion
They’re both nuclear reactions (i.e., they change the structure of an atomic nucleus) and they both repre
sent what happens when Einstein’s famous E = mc2 is acted out. In fission, which is behind atomic bombs, nuclear reactors, and radioactivity, the nucleus of a big uranium atom is split into smaller parts when struck by a free neutron. Uranium is the fuel of choice because it “splinters” readily, releasing two or three more neutrons, which in turn strike and splinter neighboring uranium nuclei in a chain reaction. The result: energy; also, Chernobyl.
In fusion, which is behind starlight, sunshine, and the hydrogen (a.k.a. thermonuclear) bomb, and which scientists hope someday to adapt to nuclear-energy production, the nuclei of two little hydrogen atoms are joined together, or fused, at temperatures approaching 50,000,000°C, to form a single, heavy helium nucleus, ejecting high-speed neutrons (and impressively little pollution) in the process. In both fission and fusion, the atoms resulting from the splitting and the joining, respectively, weigh slightly less than the ones that went into the process. It’s this difference in mass that has been converted into energy.
