It’s 2020. What vision will we have for our state and country in this Year of the Eye Doctor? We’ll have a serious commentary at the end of this entry from a St. Louis theologian who worries, as we enter this campaign year, about who is telling or will tell the truth. But first, a couple of things to unburden our chest.
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Thing one: Your ever-alert observer has noted some instances in which people have referred to 2019 as the end of a decade. We suppose it is, if you consider the decade to have started in 2000. And if you count to ten and think 9 is the last number.
We’re a little peevish about this sort of thing. It isn’t the end of a decade unless you count a year ending in zero as the first year of a decade. We realize some of you will quickly take umbrage at that observation but we need look no farther than our own birthdays.
Let’s assume you were born on May 5 in the year 0.
By explanation— if we go from 1BCE to 1CE —archaeologists use the phrases “before common era” and “common era” to avoid conflicts with various religious calenders—and since BCE counts backwards (King Tut served from about 1342 to 1325 BCE), time works backwards from one to zero and time then moves forward a like amount to year 1, the first anniversary of the switchover from BCE to just CE.
When were you be one year old in you were born on May 5, 0?
Right. Year 1. You have completed one year since your birth. On May 5 in year nine you celebrated the NINTH anniversary of your birth, not the tenth. You celebrated your tenth anniversary on May 5 in year 10, the end of your first decade. Therefore the decade begins with one and ends with zero, or as we would say in our time—2011-2020. (Incidentally, I think it is Kurt Vonnegut who has suggested we have only one birth day. All succeeding observances are anniversaries of our birth day.)
To put it less obtrusively, when Count von Count on Sesame Street counts, what does he start with?
When a boxing referee counts a fighter out at the count of ten, what number does he start with? If he started with zero he’d be giving the fighter eleven seconds to get up.
When we count out the number of pennies in a dime, how many are there? 10. If we stated out with the first penny at zero, we’d have 11 when we got to ten cents, which doesn’t seem to make much, uh, sense.
So the decade has another year to go.
Of course, in the cosmic sense, decades are immaterial. And we can consider a decade anything we darn well want to consider it. A person born in 1994 would celebrate a decade of life in 2005. Since time is an abstract concept invented by the human mind, a decade can be anything the human mind wants it to be whenever it’s convenient.
So what the heck are we arguing about? Let’s move on.
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Thing two: If you can’t do anything else, get the name right (that was one of the first rules of journalism I learned). As long as we’re chest-unloading, let’s again see if anybody thinks it’s disrespectful to mispronounce the name of another. We heard a reporter on one of our mid-Missouri television stations report something a few nights ago that was going to happen at Jefferson City’s Bynder Park. It’s not pronounced “Bine,” it’s “Bin.” Frederich Heinrich Binder was born in Hanover, Niedersachsen, Germany in 1845. He came to Jefferson City in 1866 and until his death in 1911 he was a major leader of our city and a builder. It’s Binder, not Bynder.
One of the grocery stores where we stock up is Gerbes East Supermarket. It’s bad enough that regular folks on the street refer to it as “Gerbs,” but it’s just plan inexcusable that the store’s public-address system that tells you what wonderful bargains there are today says the same thing. Frank Gerbes (Gur’-bus) was running a Kroger store in Tipton when he started his own business in 1934. In coming years he established Gurbus stores in several mid-Missouri towns. In 1986, he merged his company with Dillon’s which two years later became part of the Kroger chain. Frank had been dead eleven years by then, long enough—we guess—for the people who are now Kroger employees (and the company, apparently) to forget how to pronounce the name of a small town merchant who built a little grocery store empire in mid-Missouri named Frank GURBUS.
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Okay, now it’s time to start the new year on a more thoughtful although more volatile topic: truth. A friend of ours passed along something from an internet site called Theologycorner, a contribution that worries about what has happened to truth and what will become of it—and of us—if we are not afraid of discovering it from people we don’t want to listen to. This is from a theology professor here in our state:
The Death of Truth: “Both Sides” don’t deserve our consideration
Ruben Rosario Rodriguez December 30, 2019 Idioglosalalia
As a university professor of Theological Studies I have always engaged current events, and have always done so with a high degree of objectivity. By the same token, as a theologian, ethicist, and practicing Christian, I have always asserted that the church ought to stand outside partisan politics while working across party lines for the common good, remaining free to offer a prophetic critique whenever the state overreaches or neglects its duty. In other words, I have taken the apostle Peter’s advice as my guiding mantra for navigating church and state: “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29, NRSV).
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that in the context of serious class discussions I have been critical of the Trump administration’s policies separating children from their families and creating border detention centers. Just as I am critical of Trump’s immigration policies now, I was critical of Obama’s use of drones and W’s use of torture then. However, unlike previous students, my most recent batch of first-year undergraduates is unable to grasp that I am not being partisan when making a serious theological critique of politicians.
Though I have explained to them how I leveled equally harsh—yet justified—criticisms at previous administrations regardless of party affiliation, for these kids so much of this is ancient history. Even though I argued cogently and fairly that Congress was justified in initiating impeachment proceedings against both, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019, all they see is the now—and since Trump is currently in office, it leads to comments like this in my course evaluations:
“Sometimes I felt uncomfortable when the professor would share some harsh political views that I didn’t fully agree with. I’m always interested in learning about the point of view of others, [but] I just felt that as a teacher it’s important to share both sides of an issue even if you have a bias towards one.”
One of the things I like to model in my class is a fair and balanced presentation of opposing viewpoints, so these words really cut to the quick. A colleague argues these students’ inability to transcend their point of view stems from the widespread perspectival approach to morality and ethics. In other words, “You may believe it to be true, but that doesn’t make it true for another.” To which I respond, “Yes, but as a teacher it is my responsibility to challenge these students to move beyond mere opinion and offer clear, defensible reasons why they believe one thing and not another.”
Truth has been devalued to such a degree that those who cannot recall a time before the post-truth era find it increasingly difficult telling fact from fiction. Thankfully, we have been here before, and can learn from the past. During the rise of fascism in the 1930s, journalist and novelist George Orwell observed that useful lies were preferred to harmful truths, and truth had been replaced by propaganda. Consequently, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” In such times, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
In the aftermath of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, President Trump vacillated. Instead of immediately repudiating the heinous acts of white nationalism that led to the death of Heather Heyer, a peaceful counter-protester, and the beating of DeAndre Harris, an African American counter-protester brutally beaten by six white men, the President claimed there were “very fine people on both sides,” and that the mob chanting hateful racist propaganda included, “a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.”
Ostensibly a protest against the removal of a Confederate monument to Robert E. Lee, the rally was also a calculated move to draw national media attention to the various factions comprising the Alt-Right in an effort to move from the Internet fringes of U.S. politics into the Trump-era mainstream. Protesters included white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and various, heavily armed, militia groups. Amidst the chants of “white lives matter,” “Jews will not replace us,” “Whose streets? Our streets!” (co-opting a Black Lives Matter slogan used during the Ferguson protests), and the Nazi slogan, “Blood and soil,” marchers carried signs with anti-Semitic slurs, brandished Nazi swastikas and waved Confederate flags, while also carrying “Trump/Pence” signs.
This is not respectful conversation; when one’s interlocutor brandishes symbols of hatred and genocide—and even calls for violence against others—there is no duty to present “both sides.” However, as a Christian, I have a moral duty to condemn hatred and violence, and I recognize there are times when remaining silent is a morally reprehensible act. This we learn from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred in a Nazi concentration camp for resisting Nazi racial policies: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Anti-Semitic attacks worldwide rose 13 percent in 2018 from the previous year, most notably in the US and Western Europe. While it would be dishonest and slanderous to link the rise of anti-Semitism to the election of Donald Trump, it is fair game to critique his administration’s lukewarm condemnation of anti-Semitism. Five years ago such acts were deemed intolerable and the public outcry from pastors and elected officials would have dominated media coverage. Today there is too much silence from Christian leaders and elected officials in light of this increase. It started with vandalizing Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, then mass shootings in synagogues, and most recently a weeklong series of vicious attacks in NYC targeting Jews during Hanukkah.
In seminary, my first ever theology professor was the late James H. Cone. To this day I carry with me the words he shared the first day of class at Union Theological Seminary in New York: “The task of theology is saying ‘Yes’ to some things and ‘No’ to others.” Theology is an inherently political undertaking—not partisan but political—and as such Christians cannot remain neutral in matters of truth, justice, and ethics. We can respectfully disagree on matters of policy—i.e., on how to address the problem of hunger and food insecurity in our public schools—but we cannot ignore the reality of poverty. We can propose different solutions to the problems created by undocumented immigration, but that does not give us license to discriminate, marginalize, or in any way mistreat undocumented immigrants.
Consequently, students in my classes will continue to be exposed to “harsh political views” they might not necessarily agree with. I don’t expect my students to agree with me on matters of politics. I do expect them to present evidence for why they believe one thing and not another. Most of all, I expect them to see beyond political posturing and demagoguery in order to evaluate all politicians (and their words and actions) from the perspective of Christian truth. And I will not tolerate Pilate’s evasive response, “What is truth?” (John 18:38, NRSV), in my classroom.
Dr. Ruben Rosario Rodriguez is a Professor of Systematic Theology at St. Louis University. He describes himself:
“I am a constructive theologian and ethicist who stands within the Reformed Protestant traditions (Calvin, Barth) yet is steeped in liberation theology (Gutierrez, Ruether, Cone). The first theological text I read (at age 15) was Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology (3 volumes-in-one University of Chicago hardbound edition). James H. Cone was my first theology professor, and I once met Iggy Pop in lower Manhattan back in the early 1990s. I strive to be a theological pastor and a pastoral theologian, and here I am guided by the words of Prof Cone: “If I couldn’t preach it, I wouldn’t write it.”
—–Something to think about, particularly in this era and in this campaign year of 2020. We hope it turns out to be a happy new year.
