Hunting the Urban Hipster

(Whispering, intoned sotto voce) Today we are at Wegman’s on the hunt for the lone Eastern Pennsylvanian Hipster or Coolus obscurus.

Our guide is big game hunter, Mookie Robinson. Mookie is a tough, white, fearless hunter who has chosen to live in the violent, unrelenting world of millennial, urban life, where only the ironic survive.

We are currently established in the organic food isle of the Wegman’s grocery store. It’s quiet. We first see a beatnik pass.

Suddenly, Mookie crouches to examine some hipster spoor. Chuck Taylor All-Star tracks and a Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle cap. The hipster is close.

Mookie puts out a box of organic gluten-free grains with the label “sustainability” printed on it to lure the hipster out into the open.

We hide behind crates of imported cheeses and wait.

Suddenly, Mookie spots the hipster we’re after.

And there it is! A truly magnificent specimen. The hipster looks to be about six feet tall, with a plaid shirt, bowtie, tight jeans, Sylvia Plath cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses. The beard weighs two pounds and is easily capable of sopping up a bowl of lintel soup. From the looks of the hipster, it’s probably into knitting, veganism, urban beekeeping, and bookbinding classes. The real embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics.

The hipster slowly approaches the box of organic food. Two more strides and the hipster could reach out and touch someone with its beard.

Mookie raises his rifle. For the past few months, he’s been rehearsing this moment in his bedroom closet in Brooklyn, aiming, reloading, aiming again. He shoots. The rifle’s thunder is somehow insigni­ficant. The shot catches the hipster in the appropriate place, in the iPod.

But a hipster iPod is a big piece of equipment—it can include thousands of songs from obscure 80s and 90s bands that you’ve probably never heard of, all on continuous shuffle.

Mookie’s bullet did not apparently disrupt the iPod enough to take down the hipster in a single shot. It shakes its head, as if to wag away the pain of distorted indie music. There is a second shot that strikes it in the earbuds. It turns to flee, probably towards its fixed gear bicycle, but its right foreleg has buckled. It drops its iPod. It strives to stand. It steps on the iPod. The earbuds pull it down. Right in the middle of Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up”. The hipster falls without realizing the irony. It’s a success. The hipster is dead. But Mookie must make sure. He fires a final shot. There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded hipster.

But the hunt is not over. With well-practiced skill Mookie skins the hipster. The beard of a full grown male hipster can in fact fetch anything up to $4 on the open market.

The long day is over and it’s back to base camp for a night’s rest.

Jesus and the Shema

The most important prayer in all of Jewish life from its conception down to today is the Shema of Deuteronomy 6 which begins in verse 4 with “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one.”

This was the central prayer of Judaism in the time of Jesus and Paul and the defining statement of Jewish monotheism. Yahweh was the one and only god. He is the creator god. There is no other gods except him. In the world of paganism, this was what defined Jewish worship and was their central theological point.

Now when we come to Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 8, he is addressing the issue of whether or not Christians should eat food that has been sacrificed to idols. To make his point, he references the Shema in verse 6a: “for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him.” His point is twofold.

First, because there is only one God (Yahweh), don’t worry about such pagan sacrifices because there are no gods to be sacrificed to.

Second, because God is the Creator, what he created was good and all food is good to eat.

But in making his point with reference to the Shema in verse 6a, he immediately follows it with 6b: “and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.”

Let’s put this together now:

“For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.”

This is the most amazing and earth shattering statement anyone could make. Paul has put Jesus into the Shema, the supreme Jewish prayer, and equated him with God the Father (Yahweh). This is a reformulated Shema to include Jesus within the Godhead.

As I researched this passage, I found many scholars argue that verse 6 may not even been original to Paul but may be an early Christian confession that Paul is citing to make his point.

The odd thing though is that Paul is not having to argue this concept at all. In his letters, he is arguing about food, circumcision, Torah, and inclusiveness, but just 20 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul (and the rest of the New Testament writers) don’t have to argue to either Gentile or Jewish Christians that Jesus was the embodiment of the Israelite god, Yahweh. This is a statement of fact that everyone seems to agree upon and from which other issues either spring or by which issues are answered.

Two points to be made from this:

First, the idea that Christians (including Jewish Christians) only recognized the divinity of Jesus centuries later with a succession of ecumenical councils does not hold water. Indeed, the first church councils were formed in order to affirm Jesus’ humanity, not his divinity.

Second, this early recognition of Jesus as embodying their creator god, Yahweh, by Jewish Christians lends additional historical evidence to his resurrection. Without the resurrection it’s historically implausible that a group of Jews who knew better would say to themselves, “You know that guy who the Romans crucified in the most shameful way possible? I think that that guy was our creator god. Let’s include him in the Shema.”