We are living at a time period when the rapidity of the daily news, even what seems the most innocuous, feels overwhelming upon receipt. There are many options to different sources but some of these have a spirit of cynicism and cruelty about the most important topics of the day. Often this is where the online spaces, especially social media, looks its worst. What am I talking about?
The reactions to the latest Taylor Swift album, of course.
Just kidding—but what I said does ring true about Taylor and some other artists with a big enough fanbase to care (and to have haters).
Last year at this time I wrote a blog about one of my favorite musical artists: Leonard Cohen (see my Anxious Bench post and my book review). I am continuing this trend this October focusing on two of my favorite musicians: Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. My affection for Cash is evident since we named my oldest son after him (middle name). Like my blog post about Cohen last year to reflect on 10/07/23, remarkably, there were parts that I could connect to the other two poet/musicians for this October.
But before we connect to the two great American musicians, I want to review the context of some of the problematic readings of the Bible especially as it regards contemporary history.
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I just wrapped up reading Edjan Westerman’s book Learning Messiah: Israel and the Nations: Learning to Read God’s Way Anew, recommended to me by former professor Judith Rood, who has a new book Beauty for Ashes that just came out. I have been living with these two books for the last month.
Westerman writes a biblical theological tome that covers the whole Bible. It served as a nice devotional each morning for the past month or so. But what motivated such a grand writing project? It seems that Westerman fears a growing anti-Judaism within Christian circles. Westerman writes: “We as the ‘Church of the ages’ have loved Jesus Christ and wished to follow Him; at the same time we have made Him unrecognizable to His people” (Westerman, 298). He discusses some aspects of church history, but his real aim as a biblical theologian is to once again remind the church of its Jewish roots.
I learned about aspects of the fallout of this anti-Jewish sentiment during my college years especially since I studied twentieth-century European Christian theologians Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Moltmann. The link between bad Christian theology and the Holocaust can be seen in Susannah Heschel’s book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (she also talks about it at my former graduate school Fuller). This was an intentional replacement theology that tried to erase all traces of Jewish existence from Christianity.
American Jewish rabbi and author Arthur Cohen, like many other postwar Jewish thinkers, point out the utter failure of the Protestant churches to mount even a slight opposition to the Nazi state. He declares: “Only Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany and Karl Barth at its borders inveighed against the capitulation of Church and State” (Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, 199-200). This idea haunts me.
We might debate the accuracy of Cohen’s only, but the capitulation by the churches to a fascist state in the past is a stark reminder that it is a threat that could happen again in the future.
Much has been written about Barth’s role in the relationship between Judaism and Christianity that I have kept up with but do not have much current interest to revisit (I still think R. Kendall Soulen’s book The God of Israel and Christian Theology is the definitive place to look at the history of anti-Jewish thought throughout church history, including Barth). However, as I wrote about last month, the changing nature of ecumenical dialogue in the postwar saw some positive changes to this relationship at least in the United States.
Now let’s take a quick look at the way Cash and Dylan dealt with the relationship between Jewish and Christian history.
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“You see, for somebody like me who grew up singing Jesus songs all his life and who raised up in a Baptist Church, going to Israel is like going home.” Johnny Cash (see Dave Urbanski, The Man Comes Around, 112)
One among many interesting facts about Johnny Cash is that right after his rededication to Christianity in the late 1960s, he ended up traveling to Israel for his next few creative projects, including two albums, The Holy Land (1969) and The Gospel Road (1973), and a movie The Gospel Road. Evidently he traveled there on a few other occasions (see this post especially for the pictures and for this enlightening post by Shalom Goldman for more about Cash’s visits including another Holy Land film). The Gospel Road was formed from a dream that Cash’s wife June Carter had about Cash on a mountain top somewhere in Israel holding a book in his hand (probably the Bible) while preaching the gospel. In fact, they would honeymoon in Israel in the late 1960s, visiting important sites from the Gospels.
A coincidence of timing is that Bob Dylan visited Israel roughly around the same time as Cash’s visits; he would also be the premier artist on the Johnny Cash Show in 1969 (along with Joni Mitchell). He would visit many times throughout his life (see Shalom Goldman’s—yes, him again—very recent post). It would be a decade or so later when Dylan would go through his Gospel phase (3 albums in a row in the early 1980s). And if you think Taylor Swift has had to deal with some bad press in the past, Dylan was mercilessly criticized for his new “born again” music (maybe more so than when he went electric). Critics came from all over the place, including some from the American Jewish community. This has all been recently catalogued in books like Scott M. Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (thanks fam for the birthday present).
Westerman suggests that we need watchmen against this new rise of antisemitism (Westerman, 328). I wonder if one reason for the new rise is that our culture is less biblically literate in general? Or do some voices, often the loudest online, seem to willfully forget? It just seems remarkable that two of the most famous artist in American history, end up in the Holy Land around the same time, sensing a connection between the world of the Bible and the land today. As I wrote about last October, even Cohen ended up in the Holy Land during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Moreover, if I am completely honest, when I hear watchmen I think of the passage from the prophet Isaiah—but my first thought is from Dylan’s song “All Along the Watchtower.” Book length studies of Cash, Dylan, and Cohen illustrate how biblically enriched their entire music catalog is and this was mostly music for the public not aimed at a particularly religious audience. Do listeners now miss this because we are not reading the whole Bible?
Cash’s interest in the places where Jesus walked is a reminder of a historical moment when Christians felt a special tie between the two Testaments, especially the Jewish roots of Christianity. In some ways, Dylan’s identity between Judaism and Christianity also illustrates the thread of connectivity of the whole Bible. As Greg Laurie suggests in his recent book Lennon, Dylan, Alice, & Jesus about Dylan: “He is Jewish. He is Christian. He was born Jewish, and he was ‘born again’ to be a Christian. Being a Christian does not mean you no longer are Jewish. Jesus was Jewish. The Apostles were as well, including the Apostle Paul” (Laurie, 73).
I am still on this Cash/Dylan kick so expect a few more posts about them (I may include one specifically on Kris Kristofferson since he had a big role in The Gospel Road and was more politically engaged than either Cash or Dylan). Spoiler alert: a song Kristofferson wrote that was used on the Gospel Road movie/soundtrack made me weep. I would like to close this piece with a quote from Dylan, who was touring in Egypt in the late 1980s before he arrived in Israel, that is a good reminder for our time:
“You know the Jews and Arabs have the same father. They’re brothers. Basically, there shouldn’t be a problem between them. They’re both Semitic people. If someone is anti-Semitic, they’re anti-Arab as much as anti-Jew. The problem is politics” (Marshall, 107).
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