{"id":109,"date":"2008-10-09T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-10T02:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/?p=109"},"modified":"2008-10-09T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T02:00:00","slug":"of-bullwinkle-borg-and-bardolph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/?p=109","title":{"rendered":"Of Bullwinkle, Borg and Bardolph"},"content":{"rendered":"
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News flash: Marcus Borg\u2019s mentor revealed!<\/em><\/strong> Left to muse idly, mid-adult study group last Tuesday evening, I was struck by the eerie parallels between Dr. Borg\u2019s scholarly re-visitation of the Bible (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time<\/em>) and a long-dusty favorite of mine, Mr. Peabody\u2019s Improbable History<\/em>. For those readers over fifty, this may twig flashbacks to those Saturday morning beauties, the precursors to \u2018adult cartoons\u2019, long scooping the Simpsons and South Park: Dudley Do-right, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and of course, Mr. Peabody and Sherman.<\/p>\n

Borg\u2019s contention \u2013 and probably the most significant point of suasion fostering my return from the wilderness \u2013 is that the Bible is an \u2018historical \u2013 metaphorical\u2019 document. Loosely interpreted, he (and many others of us) would opt to have these manuscripts read as quasi-historical accounts (on one level) and carefully crafted messages with a meaning (on another). Most adamantly, the Book is not intended to be experienced in any literal way. Hence the fundamentalist\u2019s reactivity to his writings.<\/p>\n

Epiphany had (the aforesaid parallel), a bit of buffing up on Marcus\u2019 cartoon doppelganger (thanks to Andy\u2019s Anachronisms, if you\u2019re interested) confirmed what I\u2019d suspected: Mr. Peabody and Dr. Borg are one in the same. In both cartoon and academic versions, our commonly accepted accounts of history, while \u2018objectively accurate\u2019, are shown to have been in great peril of turning out otherwise \u2013 without the intervention of some Johnny-come-lately\u2019s<\/em> (in one case Peabody and Sherman; in the other, some script writers penning the various Gospels).<\/p>\n

To prevent the myopic William Tell from splitting son\u2019s head instead of apple, Peabody inserts a magnet in said fruit attracting the (lethal) arrow, and ta-da, history is preserved (along with son\u2019s skull). Matthew trots out Isaiah 7:14, \u201cTherefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel\u201d, and presto, Mary\u2019s a virgin. True \u2013 I wonder? With truth and meaning \u2013 probably. To quote Mr. Andy: \u201cPeabody and Sherman would discover that the reality of the past was not what the history books had made it out to be . . . and take it upon themselves to . . . set things right (ed note<\/em>: and here\u2019s the kicker) to keep history on the right track<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n

With Tuesday\u2019s session focusing on both a metaphorical as well as an historical appraisal of text, a task became reading various passages \u2018for their deeper meaning\u2019. Again Peabody anticipates: no episode would be complete without the sage puppy\u2019s (always ostensibly for the studious Sherman\u2019s benefit) pronouncement of the importance behind the \u2018historical\u2019 event, inevitably framed as a pun. (In Tell\u2019s episode, Peabody notes that history has honored the poorly sighted dad by christening an ophthalmological disorder after him: television.) How close is this to Borg\u2019s plea for a more lyrical, less literal meaning behind and supplementing the historic!<\/p>\n

OK, OK, it\u2019s a stretch \u2013 but it got me through Tuesday.<\/p>\n

With tongue slightly removed from cheek, a second awareness for me flowed from Borg\u2019s commentary on the ways in which parables are received \u2013 even by our fundamentalist brethren. No one reads these so-oft cited stories as literal truth. They\u2019re seen as allegorical references, teaching points, metaphors. We sit in our lovely theatres in Stratford, engrossed in Hamlet, watching \u2018the Mousetrap\u2019 \u2013 a play within a play, designed to \u2018catch the conscience of the king\u2019. No one argues for an instant that this contrivance, orchestrated and manipulated by Hamlet to \u2018make his point\u2019 to the guilty Claudius, is \u2018true\u2019. Neither, however, do we, as members of the audience, removed not only from Hamlet\u2019s little drama, but also the larger play staged before us \u2013 and despite having read of the \u2018historical origins\u2019 of the tragedy \u2013 see the Shakespearean production, its \u2018container\u2019 as \u2018true\u2019. This is entertainment; this is someone\u2019s fictional account (based loosely on historic events) designed to make a point, to comment on cultural truths, to foster our self-examination, and on and on. But it is not \u2018true\u2019; it is not history.<\/p>\n

Why then is it so easy to look at Good Samaritans, Mustard Seeds, or Prodigal Sons and see them as fables with a moral, metaphors for our edification. And yet so difficult to look at the Biblical text that contains these stories<\/em> (the gospel writers\u2019 accounts \/ playwrights\u2019 drama) as something other than historic, literal \u2018fact\u2019. How different is the task and the product of a man, some eighty years removed from an event and its players (as was Matthew), writing, recalling, researching and with an agenda<\/em> from that talented Elizabethan attempting to prick our consciences, proscribing and pronouncing in his own time. Perhaps we need to consider the parallels here as well: parables to plays-within-plays; Biblical \u2018casts\u2019 to actors on a stage, speaking lines pregnant with meaning; and always we, the audience, observers of the play and seekers of the deeper truth these stories<\/em> (at both levels) carry. <\/div>\n

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Postscript: The ever-vigilant webscribe, in search of picture to accompany this piece, provides a bit of support for the \u2018stretch\u2019 of linking Peabody and things ecclesiastic: cf. (http:\/\/christianmystics.com\/?p=238<\/a>)<\/div>\n
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David Howard<\/div>\n

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News flash: Marcus Borg\u2019s mentor revealed! Left to muse idly, mid-adult study group last Tuesday evening, I was struck by the eerie parallels between Dr. Borg\u2019s scholarly re-visitation of the Bible (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time) and a long-dusty favorite of mine, Mr. Peabody\u2019s Improbable History. For those readers over fifty, this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}