Eating Words

Mondays with Montaigne (on the day of one's death)

2011-07-11T06:00:00.002-04:00

From I:19. That we should not be deemed happy till after our death.

Scilicet ultima semper
Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus
Ante obitum nemo, supremaque funera debet

[You must always await a man's last day: before his death and last funeral rites, no one should be called happy.]

Fortune sometimes seems precisely to lie in ambush for the last day of a man's life in order to display her power to topple in a moment what she had built up over the length of years, and to make us follow Laberius and exclaim: 'Nimirum hac die una plus vixi, mihi quam vivendum fuit.' [I have lived this day one day longer than I ought to have lived.]

The good counsel of Solon could be taken that way. But he was a philosopher: for such, the favours and ill graces of Fortune do not rank as happiness or unhappiness and for them great honours and powers are nonessential properties, counted virtually as things indifferent. So it seems likely to me that he was looking beyond that, intending to tell us that happiness in life (depending as it does on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest. In all the rest he can wear an actor's mask: those fine philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:

Nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur, et reipitur persona, manet res

[Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast. The mask is ripped off: reality remains.]

That is why all the other actions in our life must be tried on the touchstone of this final deed. It is the Master-day, the day which judges all the other; it is (says one of the Ancients) the day which must judge all my years now past. The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart.

Mondays with Montaigne (on experts)

2011-07-04T06:00:00.000-04:00

From I:17. The doings of certain ambassadors

On my travels, in order to be ever learning something from my meetings with other people (which is one of the best of all schools), I observe the following practice: always to bring those with whom I am talking back to the subjects they know best.

Basti al nocchiero ragionar de' venti,
Al bifolco dei tori, e le sue piaghe
Conti'l guerrier, conti'l pastor gli armenti.

[Let the sailor talk but of the winds, the farmer of oxen, the soldier of his own wounds and the herdsman of his cattle.]

For the reverse usually happens, everyone choosing to orate about another's job rather than his own, reckoning to increase his reputation by so doing; witness the reproof Archimadamus gave to Periander: that he was abandoning an excellent reputation as a good doctor to acquire the reputation of a bad poet. Just observe how Caesar spreads himself when he tells us about his ingenuity in building bridges and siege-machines: in comparison he is quite cramped when he talks of his professional soldiering, his valour or the way he conducts his wars. His exploits are sufficient proof that he was an outstanding general: he wants to be known as something rather different: a good engineer.

The other day a professional jurist was taken to see a library furnished with every sort of book including many kinds of legal ones. He had nothing to say about them. Yet he stopped to make blunt comments, like an expert, on a defence-work fixed to the head of a spiral staircase in that library; yet hundreds of officers and soldiers came across it every day without comment or displeasure.

The elder Dionysius, as befitted his fortune, was a great leader in battle but he strove to become mainly famed for his poetry - about which he knew nothing.

Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus.

[The lumbering ox years for the saddle: the nag yearns for the plough.]

Follow that way and nobody achieves anything worthwhile.

Dreams of idleness

2011-06-30T16:20:00.003-04:00

Samuel Johnson remarked, "If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation." Commenting on this C.S. Lewis said that he would "be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read [Italian epics] eight hours of each happy day."

Jerome K. Jerome contemplated something similar. As a young man he became ill and was prescribed rest:

I pictured to myself a glorious time--a four weeks' dolce far niente with a dash of illness in it. Not too much illness, but just illness enough--just sufficient to give it the flavor of suffering and make it poetical. I should get up late, sip chocolate, and have my breakfast in slippers and a dressing-gown. I should lie out in the garden in a hammock and read sentimental novels with a melancholy ending, until the books should fall from my listless hand, and I should recline there, dreamily gazing into the deep blue of the firmament, watching the fleecy clouds floating like white-sailed ships across its depths, and listening to the joyous song of the birds and the low rustling of the trees. Or, on becoming too weak to go out of doors, I should sit propped up with pillows at the open window of the ground-floor front, and look wasted and interesting, so that all the pretty girls would sigh as they passed by.

Much as I love reading I can't say I'd submit to illness - even small illness - in exchange for leisure time. At this point I'd be happy if I could work in the same town in which I live. (I'm working on it.)

Mondays with Montaigne (channeling the Stoics)

2011-06-27T06:00:00.000-04:00

From I:14. The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion.

Neither good nor ill is done to us by Fortune: she merely offers us the matter and the seeds: our soul, more powerful than she is, can mould it or sow them as she pleases, being the only cause and mistress of our happy state or our unhappiness. Whatever comes to us from outside takes its savour and its coulour from our internal attributes, just as our garments warm us not with their heat but ours, which they serve to preserve and sustain. Shelter a cold body under them and it will draw similar services from them for its coldness: that is how we conserve snow and ice. Study to the lazy, like abstinence from wine to the drunkard, is torture; frugal living to the seeker after pleasure, like exercise to the languid idle man, is torment: so too for everything else. Things are not all that painful nor harsh in themselves: it is our weakness, our slackness, which makes them so. To judge great and lofty things we need a mind which is like them: otherwise we attribute to them the viciousness which belongs to ourselves. A straight oar seems bent in water. It is not only seeing which counts: how we see counts too.

Come on then. There are so many arguments persuading men in a variety of ways to despise death and to endure pain: why do we never find a single one which applies to ourselves? Thoughts of so many different kinds have persuaded others: why cannot we each find the one that suits our own disposition? If a man cannot stomach a strong purgative and root out his malady, why cannot he at least take lenitive and relieve it? 'Opinio est quaedam effeminata ac levis, nec in dolore magis, quam eadem in voluptate: qua, cum liquescimus fluimusque mollitia, apis aculeum sine clamore ferre non possumus. Totum in eo est, ut tibi imperes.' [As much in pain as in pleasure, our opinions are trivial and womanish: we have been melted and dissolved by wantonness; we cannot even endure the sting of a bee without making a fuss. Above all we must gain mastery over ourselves.] We cannot evade Philosophy by immoderately pleading our human frailty and the sharpness of pain: Philosophy is merely constrained to have recourse to her unanswerable counterplea: 'Living in necessity is bad: but at least there is no necessity that you should go on doing so.' No one suffers long, save by his own fault. If a man has no heart fro either living or dying; if he has not will either to resist or to run away: what are we to do with him?

Mondays with Montaigne (on money)

2011-06-20T06:00:00.000-04:00

From I:14. The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion.

I make my income and my expenditure run along in tandem: sometimes one pulls ahead, sometimes the other, but only drawing slightly apart. I live from day to day, pleased to be able to satisfy my present, ordinary needs: extraordinary ones could never be met by all the provision in the world.

And it is madness to expect that Fortune will ever supply us with enough weapons to use against herself. We have to fight with our own weapons: fortuitous ones will let us down at the crucial moment. If I do save up now, it is only because I hope to use the money soon - not to purchase lands that I have no use for but to purchase pleasure. 'Non esse cupidum pecunia est, non esse emacem vectigal est.' [Not to want means money: not to spend means income.] I have no fear, really, that I shall lack anything: nor have I any wish for more. 'Divitiarum fructus est in copia, copiam declarat satietas.' [The fruit of riches consists in abundance: abundance is shown by having enough.] I particularly congratulate myself that this amendment of life should have come to me at an age which is naturally inclined to avarice, so ridding me of a vice - the most ridiculous of all human madness - which is so common among the old.

Agnosticism versus fallibilism

2011-06-14T15:24:00.002-04:00

Eric Reitan has a helpful post distinguishing between agnosticism and fallibilism. First, definitions:

In roughest terms, to be an agnostic is to withhold belief on a matter, whereas to be a fallibilist is to have a belief but recognize that you could be mistaken, that those who disagree with you could have some or all of the truth, and that it is important to comport yourself accordingly.

Then he sets up two epistemic circumstances to illustrate the difference:

Epistemic Circumstance 1 (EC1): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that "reasonable people" (however that is to be understood) generally accept, but you recognize that there are different ways of fitting that evidence into a coherent whole—different "stories" we can tell that fit just as well with the given evidence. In other words, we have certain mutually exclusive holistic ways of seeing the evidence, each of which maps onto the evidence just as well. For simplicity, let us assume there are only two such ways of seeing that fit as well onto the evidence, which we will call Worldviews A and B.

Epistemic Circumstance 2 (EC2): You confront a body of presumptive evidence that reasonable people generally accept, as well as certain further "apparent truths," that is, things you experience as clearly true/self-evident/obvious/hard to deny/intuitively correct. But some of the people you regard as rational don’t find these apparent truths nearly as apparent as you do, and may instead find other things evident which are hardly evident to you. So, within the total body of "evidence" with which you are confronted, some of it is "shared evidence" whereas some of it is "personal evidence." Now suppose that, as before, Worldviews A and B both map onto the shared evidence (and are the only worldviews you have so far encountered that do this). But now let us suppose, furthermore, that Worldview A maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and your personal evidence, while B doesn’t (accepting B would force you to abandon things that seem clearly right to you). At the same time, Worldview B maps well onto the conjunction of the shared evidence and what is apparently the personal evidence of reasonable people other than you.

While there is no reason, on the evidence, to prefer A or B in EC1, there may be personal reasons. "You might find A more hopeful. Or you might like who you are better when you live as if A is true. Or perhaps you’ve grown up with a community that embraces A, and you continue to have a sense of solidarity with that community. Or perhaps you’ve tried to see the world through the lens of B and it just doesn’t sit right with you because of what you identify as mere quirks of personality. Or perhaps it is a combination of these factor." You make your choice while recognizing that your reasons are idiosyncratic and not required based on the evidence.

In EC2, on the other hand, you do have certain personal evidence that moves you to accept worldview A rather than B. But note that this decision is based on your personal evidence - evidence which is not accepted by other "reasonable" people. This leads you to hold your personal evidence with less confidence, though it certainly does not mean your personal evidence is wrong.

In EC1, your reasons for favoring A over B are ones that do not appear to you as evidence for the truth of A, and in this sense are seen by you as nothing but pragmatic reasons to operate as if A is true. But in EC2, your reasons for favoring A over B have the "look and feel" of evidence, that is, they seem to be truths that speak in favor of the truth of A. And this makes your epistemic situation clearly different. It means, among other things, that when you endorse A, it is because A seems right to you in a way that B does not. You favor A over B on the basis of considerations that present themselves to you as evidence for the truth of A and against the truth of B.

In EC1 you are agnostic on the theoretical level because you have no reason based on the evidence to hold one over the other, though you may have pragmatic or personal reasons. In EC2 you are not agnostic on the theoretical level because you do have evidence - albeit personal and not universally held - for holding A over B. These features require you to hold an attitude of fallibilism in EC2:

While A just seems right to you in a way that B does not, you also know that you are fallible, and you know that some of the evidence you are using in arriving at A is not regarded as veridical by other people who otherwise seem eminently reasonable. This fact alone does not make the evidence seem less veridical to you, but it does motivate an attitude of due caution, a willingness to investigate, to hear opposing arguments and be open to be moved by them if they do amount to "defeaters" of your presumptive evidence. And it also makes you resistent to condemning those who endorse B.

I'll leave the application of these distinctions as an exercise for the readers. I only wanted to note them here.

Mondays with Montaigne (on discovering himself accidentally)

2011-06-13T06:00:00.001-04:00

From I:10. On a ready or hesitant delivery

I cannot remain fixed within my disposition and endowments. Chance plays a greater part in all this than I do. The occasion, the company, the very act of using my voice, draw from my mind more than what I can find there when I exercise it and try it out all by myself. And that is why the spoken word is worth more than the written - if a choice can be made between things of no value.

This, too, happens in my case: where I seek myself I cannot find myself: I discover myself more by accident than by inquiring into my judgement. Suppose something subtle springs up as I write - I mean, of course, something which would be blunt in others but is acute in me. (Enough of these courtesies! When we say such things we all mean them to be taken in proportion to our abilities.) Later, I miss the point so completely that I do not know what I meant to say (some outsider has often rediscovered the meaning before I do). If every time that happened I were to start scraping out words with my eraser I would efface the whole of my Essays. Yet, subsequently, chance may make what I wrote clearer than the noon-day sun: it will be my former hesitations which then astonish me.

Trollope and Eliot on preachers

2011-06-10T15:10:00.003-04:00

No offense to any preacher who may read this. I don't agree with everything they say. I am posting it here because I was struck by how similar their thoughts were - even in sequence. (And you have to admit: Trollope, at least, is pretty funny.)

George Eliot, "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming": Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.

---

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers: Here was a sermon to be preached before Mr. Archdeacon Grantly, Mr. Precentor Harding, and the rest of them! Before a whole dean and chapter assembled in their own cathedral! Before men who had grown old in the exercise of their peculiar services, with a full conviction of their excellence for all intended purposes! This too from such a man, a clerical parvenu, a man without a cure, a mere chaplain, an intruder among them; a fellow raked up, so said Dr. Grantly, from the gutters of Marylebone! They had to sit through it! None of them, not even Dr. Grantly, could close his ears, nor leave the house of God during the hours of service. They were under an obligation of listening, and that too without any immediate power of reply.

---

Eliot: Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic; let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time; ardent and imaginative on the pro-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious toward every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival Moore's Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as the "horn that had eyes," "the lying prophet," and the "unclean spirits." In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious "light reading" the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander's having taken a horse's tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations.

---

Trollope: There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips.

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Eliot: Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of Sunday! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay splendors, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a thousand eyes, and predominates at once over the Amphitryon with whom he dines, and the most captious member of his church or vestry. He has an immense advantage over all other public speakers. The platform orator is subject to the criticism of hisses and groans. Counsel for the plaintiff expects the retort of counsel for the defendant. The honorable gentleman on one side of the House is liable to have his facts and figures shown up by his honorable friend on the opposite side. Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he is dull or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience quietly slip out one by one. But the preacher is completely master of the situation: no one may hiss, no one may depart.

---

Trollope: Let a professor of law or physics find his place in a lecture-room, and there pour forth jejune words and useless empty phrases, and he will pour them forth to empty benches. Let a barrister attempt to talk without talking well, and he will talk but seldom. A judge's charge need be listened to perforce by none but the jury, prisoner, and gaoler. A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out. Town-councillors can be tabooed. But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sindbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday's rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes God's service distasteful. We are not forced into church! No: but we desire more than that. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship, but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God without that anxious longing for escape which is the common consequence of common sermons.

---

Eliot: Like the writer of imaginary conversations, he may put what imbecilities he pleases into the mouths of his antagonists, and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will contradict him; he may exercise perfect free-will in logic, and invent illustrative experience; he may give an evangelical edition of history with the inconvenient facts omitted:--all this he may do with impunity, certain that those of his hearers who are not sympathizing are not listening. For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a "feature" in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen.

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Trollope: With what complacency will a young parson deduce false conclusions from misunderstood texts, and then threaten us with all the penalties of Hades if we neglect to comply with the injunctions he has given us! Yes, my too self-confident juvenile friend, I do believe in those mysteries which are so common in your mouth; I do believe in the unadulterated word which you hold there in your hand; but you must pardon me if, in some things, I doubt your interpretation. The Bible is good, the prayer-book is good, nay, you yourself would be acceptable, if you would read to me some portion of those time-honoured discourses which our great divines have elaborated in the full maturity of their powers. But you must excuse me, my insufficient young lecturer, if I yawn over your imperfect sentences, your repeated phrases, your false pathos, your drawlings and denouncings, your humming and hawing, your oh-ing and ah-ing, your black gloves and your white handkerchief. To me, it all means nothing; and hours are too precious to be so wasted—if one could only avoid it.

Alan Jacobs on making the Great Books your steady intellectual diet

2011-06-10T13:10:00.002-04:00

Read what gives you delight - at least most of the time - and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don't make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant restaurant every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed. The poet W.H. Auden once wrote, "When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit" - for our own personal Christmases and Easters, not for any old Wednesday.

It's noteworthy that what someone like the young Richard Rodriguez thought of as true and high seriousness - reading masterpieces and masterpieces only - Auden sees as "frivolous." This is not so paradoxical as it seems. What's frivolous is not the masterpiece itself, but the idea that at any given time I the reader am prepared to meet its standards, to rise to its challenges. Those challenges wear heavily upon the unprepared reader (at age ten or twenty or sixty) and as a result the reading, which in anticipation promised such riches of meaning, proves in fact to be that dread appointment with the elliptical trainers I mentioned earlier. And who needs that?

Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, p. 23

We make our contribution and depart

2011-06-09T14:31:00.004-04:00

"I need to read this guy's books," I thought, as I was listening to an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah. "Maybe I'll pick one up after I finish reading David Copperfield. But I'm also wanting to read some China Mieville and that book on Montaigne..."

I love discovering new authors and collecting book recommendations. Ever since I began reading for pleasure I've maintained book lists with the assiduity of a fantasy football fanatic. The web has given me vast resources for indulging this habit, from Arts and Letters Daily to Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" to Bookforum - which I had to quit following because I became so overwhelmed.

And overwhelmed is what I felt as I listened to that interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah. There are so many fascinating books out there - how can I ever read everything that interests me? Consider these facts from Linda Holmes' article "The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything":

Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore.

We have two options, she says. We must cull or surrender. Culling is deciding what is worth your time. Surrender "is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time." Holmes says culling is easy because it dismisses whole swaths of culture in an act of self-defense. "It's an effort, I think, to make the world smaller and easier to manage, to make the awareness of what we're missing less painful."

Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That's the moment you realize you're separated from so much. That's your moment of understanding that you'll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there's something being performed somewhere in the world that you're not seeing that you would love.

What makes this a fact not only sad but beautiful is the realization that humanity has produced such a vast treasure of culture that a single lifetime cannot possibly comprehend it.

So we're bound to miss almost everything. But books, music, films, etc., are one of the primary ways we encounter ideas. If we're bound to miss almost everything then we are also bound to miss some of the greatest ideas of humanity. Moreover, we're bound to miss some of the greatest counterarguments to the ideas we already hold. Only by intensive specialization can we hope to hold certain opinions with great confidence. But we can't specialize in everything. In fact, most non-academics have little time to specialize at all.

As individuals we can only access parts of humanity's vast fund of knowledge over our lifetime. In the words of Edmund Burke, the individual is foolish but the species is wise. We are limited in every way.

(By quoting Edmund Burke I am showing the conservative pedigree of this bit of wisdom. Yet it is not the exclusive property of conservatives. It has been often remarked (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) that those modern conservatives who have become cheerleaders for capitalism aren't interested in conserving much of anything. No one in today's politics talks more about limits than the eco-left. What clearer example do we have of the dangerous consequences of arrogantly remaking the world than agribusinesses seeking to maximize profit? And haven't we learned anything in the past ten years about messianic foreign policy delusions? While many conservatives have not abandoned it, the recognition of limits has increasingly become, over the past few years, a feature of the left. Nevertheless, all sides have much to learn here.)

Socrates became the gadfly of Athens by insisting to those who had a reputation for wisdom that only those who recognized their own foolishness are, in fact, wise. This is the wisdom of limits and a guard against hubris. But it is important to note that Socrates' test for wisdom was not a discovery arising wholly from his own mind. It was a response to the Oracle of Delphi, which said that Socrates was the world's wisest man. Socrates couldn't believe this, so he began searching for a wiser man. Only after finding none did he came to understand the nature of his own wisdom.

Socrates received the gift of the oracle, examined it, modified it, and passed it on to those who were willing to receive it. This is our pattern. We receive some piece from humanity's fund of knowledge, examine it, modify it, and pass it on. Our contribution may be as small as passing that piece of knowledge on to someone else (as in raising children) - but that act contributes to the expansion of the fund of knowledge.

We do not build from the ground up out of our own private resources. Very few of us are either willing or capable of building a intellectual system. Even those who do are dependent on those who came before them. I am not responsible for answering every question or acquainting myself with every fact. I take what I have been given and, in the context of my life and interests, I make my contribution. To have done this without hubris, in recognition of my limits, and in gratitude for what I have received, is to have lived well.

In A Theology of Reading, Alan Jacobs passes on this arresting image from Kenneth Burke which encapsulates what I have attempted to say here:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Mondays with Montaigne (on lying)

2011-06-06T06:00:00.000-04:00

From I:9. On liars.

Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanors, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness. Those faults grow up with the children. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up. That is why some otherwise decent men are abject slaves to it. One of my tailors is a good enough fellow, but I have never heard him once speak a truth, not even when it would help him if he did so.

If a lie, like truth, had only one face we could be on better terms, for certainty would be the reverse of what the liar said. But the reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits. The Pythagoreans make good to be definite and finite; evil they make indefinite and infinite. Only one flight leads to the bull's-eye: a thousand can miss it.

Mondays with Montaigne (on discharging emotions against false objects)

2011-05-30T06:00:00.001-04:00

From I:4. How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects

What causes do we not discover for the ills which befall us! What will we not attack, rightly or wrongly, rather than go without something to skirmish against? It is not those blond maiden tresses which you are tearing, nor the whiteness of that bosom which you are beating so cruelly in your distress, which killed your beloved brother with an unlucky musket-ball. When the Roman army in Spain lost those two great commanders who were brothers, Pliny says "flere omnes repente et offensare capita". [at once, they all start weeping and beating their heads.] A common practice. And was it not amusing of Bion the philosopher to ask of that king who was tearing out his hair in grief: "Does he think that alopecia gives relief from sorrow?" And how has not seen a man sink his teeth into playing-cards and swallow the lot or else stuff a set of dice down his throat so as to have something to avenge himself on for the loss of his money! Xerxes flogged the waters of the Hellespont, put them in shackles and heaped insults upon them and wrote out a challenge defying Mount Athos; Cyrus kept an entire army occupied for several days in taking revenge on the river Gyndus for the fright it gave him when he was crossing it; and Caligula demolished a very beautiful house on account of the pleasure his mother had taken in it.

...

Yet as that old poet says in Plutarch:

Point ne se faut courroucer aux affaires:
Il ne leur chaut de toutes nos choleres

[There is no point in getting angry against events: they are indifferent to our wrath.]

But we shall never utter enough abuse against the unruliness of our minds.

Jesus died of being human: McCabe and Forde on atonement

2011-05-29T08:25:00.001-04:00

In his chapter on Good Friday in God Matters, Herbert McCabe OP gives his explanation for the death of Jesus.

First, he says, it's important to remember that, as demonstrated by his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus did not want to die. Neither did the Father want him to die. If God is Father in any way like humans, then God wanted Jesus to live a fully human life. In fact, this was Jesus' mission:

Not Adam, but Jesus was the first human being, the first member of the human race in whom humanity came to fulfillment, the first human being for whom to live was simply to love - for this is what human beings are for.

Unfortunately, "we have made a world in which there is no way of being human that does not involve suffering."

Human beings have not come to terms with the change that came to us when we developed language. (Note: Some of what McCabe says here may be thrown into doubt by later scientific discoveries and a less anthropocentric theology. Or maybe not. I honestly don't know.) We went from being an animal within nature to one who can, in some ways, stand over against nature. We became the first animals capable of love. In fact, our social organization demanded love, since it was no longer based on the dictates of genes and was capable of great destructive power. This conflict between love and both our genetic inheritance and our destructive capabilities leads to the contradictions of human life.

For this reason we are afraid and settle for being less than human. We recognize that our very nature calls us to something new and frightening; it calls us to communication, which means self-giving, self-abandonment, being at the disposal of others. We recognize, however dimly, that we are the kind of being that finds its fulfillment, its happiness and flourishing only in giving itself up, in getting beyond itself. We need to lose our selves in love; this is what we fear.

We do not want to take this risk - and the failure to do so is what we call sin. Love has a "destructive creative power" which we fear; so "when we meet love we kill it." We do not always kill love, of course. Our relationships need love, however imperfect, in order to flourish. But when it came to us fully revealed as it did in Jesus, we killed it.

Jesus' "whole life and death was a response in love and obedience to the gift of being human. ... As he grew up his increasing self-awareness must have been his increasing awareness of being loved - it is this, surely, that shaped his notion of the Father. You might say that the whole of his teaching was summed up in this: that the Father loved him and that his followers, those who believed in him, were invited into their love."

The love expressed in Jesus not only threatens us, it threatened the powers of the world in which he lived. All human societies are built on structures of dominance and violence. Jesus was a threat to the stability of the powers' order and so he had to be eliminated.

Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress; the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist.

-----

Gerhard Forde says something very similar in "Caught in the Act: Reflections on the Work of Christ" in A More Radical Gospel. After pointing out the weaknesses of the objective (Anselm), subjective (Abelard), and Christus Victor (Aulen) theories, he suggests that we should begin with the actual events of Christ's life; we should look at it "from below" before trying to understand it "from above". He says that God could and did forgive sins before the death of Christ. God does not need payment in order to forgive; forgiveness is about mercy, after all. Forde explains the problem to be solved by the atonement:

It is surely a mistake to say, to begin with, that Jesus was killed because God's honor or justice or wrath was the obstacle to reconciliation which had first to be "satisfied" before mercy could be shown. Surely the truth is that Jesus was killed because he forgave sins and claimed either explicitly or implicitly to do it in the name of God, his Father. When we skip over the actual event to deal first with the problem of the divine justice or wrath, we miss the point that we are the obstacles to reconciliation, not God. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!" (Matt 23:37). We are caught in the act. We have first to come to grips with the fact that we did it. The victory motif also errs in this regard when it allows us more or less to drop out of the "drama" in favor the demonic forces. Surely the view must be deepened to say (at the very least) that the demonic powers operate through us, their quite willing lackeys. As it was put in a Pogo comic strip, "We have met the enemy and they is us!" We did it.

At this point Forde gives exactly the same reason as McCabe for why we killed Jesus: We were threatened by him.

God's problem is how to get through to us. This leads to two considerations. First, we remain under God's wrath because God is not satisfied. God is not satisfied because we will not allow God to be who God wants to be: the one who unconditionally forgives our sins.

Second, God can do nothing about this situation in the abstract. As we have seen, the abstract idea of forgiveness threatens us and the world we have built. We want a conditional God who offers forgiveness only after certain requirements are met. So the only way God can get through to us is to come and actually do what God wants to do.

Why does God abandon Jesus to be murdered by us? The answer, it would seem, must lie in that very unconditional love and mercy he intends to carry out in act. God, I would think we can assume, knows full well that he is a problem for us. He knows that unconditional love and mercy is "the end" of us, our conditional world. He knows that to have mercy on whom he will have mercy can only appear as frightening, as wrath, to such a world. He knows we would have to die to all we are before we could accept it. But he also knows that that is our only hope, our only salvation. So he refuses to be wrath for us. He refuses to be the wrath that is resident in all our conditionalism. He can indeed be that, and is that apart from the work of Christ. But he refuses ultimately to be that. Thus, precisely so as not to be the wrathful God we seem bent on having, he dies for us, "gets out of the way" for us. Unconditional love has no levers in a conditional world. He is obedient unto death, the last barrier, the last condition we cannot avoid, "that the scriptures might be fulfilled" - that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. As "God of wrath" he submits to death for us; he knows he must die for us. That is the only way he can be for us absolutely, unconditionally. But then, of course, there must be resurrection to defeat that death, lest our conditionalism have the last word.

-----

The Trinity, says McCabe, makes sense of this for us because only in the Son does God find an equal to love. It is by our identification with Christ in baptism that we are taken up into the love of the Trinity and given a share in divinity by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Love is what caused the incarnation. That same love took the form of the cross in our world, a world that cannot accept the risk of love. But even on the cross God approaches us in love and "begins in us the difficult and painful process of transforming us into saints."

It is precisely as a human - a true, perfect human - that Jesus saves us. He obeys the Father until the end. "It is this loving obedience displayed finally on the cross that merits for Jesus his resurrection and the salvation of his followers. We are not saved by the intervention of a god but by the great sanctity of one of ourselves, a sanctity great enough for his prayer for us to be heard."

The cross is the prayer of Jesus; this prayer was answered in the resurrection.

-----

The resurrection, says Forde, is "the vindication of Jesus' life and proclamation of forgiveness, God's insistence that unconditional forgiveness be actually given "in Jesus' name." To accept such forgiveness is to die to the old and be made new in him. His death is, therefore, our death."

We are caught in the act of murdering love. That love then catches us up into the life of the Trinity:

When faith is created, when we actually believe God's unconditional forgiveness; then God can say, "Now I am satisfied!" God's wrath ends actually when we believe him, not abstractly because of a payment to God "once upon a time." Christ's work, therefore, "satisfies" the wrath of God because it alone creates believers, new beings who are no longer "under" wrath. Christ actualizes the will of God to have mercy unconditionally in the concrete and thereby "placates" God. When, that is, we are caught in the act so that we are caught by the act, God reaches his goal.

More on replacing the government safety net with private charity

2011-05-26T11:03:00.004-04:00

In April I wrote a post arguing that the belief held by some conservatives that private charity could replace government safety net programs was simply wrong. A recent Ethics Daily post by Robert Parham says much the same thing (via Fred Clark). He quotes Franklin Graham, who said:

A hundred years ago, the safety net, the social safety net, in the country, was provided by the church. If you didn't have a job, you'd go to your local church and ask the pastor if he knew somebody that could hire him. If you were hungry, you went to the local church and told them, 'I can't feed my family.' And the church would help you. That's not being done. The government took that. And took it away from the church.

In arguing against this, Parham uses WIC as an example:

WIC is a supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children that feeds almost 9 million people each month. House Republicans proposed cuts of $747.2 million for the current fiscal year. It is simply dishonest to suggest that American charity can replace such a cut.

He ends the post by citing Wayne Flint:

When Flynt started making speeches about a just tax system in Alabama, he was accused of wanting government to solve all the problems.

"When people insisted that I was a socialist, that I wanted government to solve all the problems, I would offer this alternative," said Flynt. "OK, I accept your argument. There are 10,000 communities of faith – Muslim, Jewish, Baptist, Baha'i, Buddhist, Shintoist – in Alabama... Let's divide 10,000 communities of faith into the 740,000 [poor] people."

He asked, "How many does your church get?"

The retired Auburn history professor pointed out that most of those faith communities had about 100 members. That meant that each faith community would get between 50 and 100 poor people to look after.

"Your private charity is going to be responsible for them. Do it. We won't have to have Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, taxes of any kind... We can abolish taxes. We can abolish the IRS," said Flynt.

"And all you have to do is for your congregation to adopt 50 to 100 poor people, and mentor them, and love them, and educate them and nurture them," he said.

"And I'll guarantee you that if you do that, it will be closer to what Christ intended than Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. And they will never do it," said Flynt. "They will never do it...[T]he churches will not do it."

He's right.

It's time for some honesty in the pulpit and public square about the dishonest national discourse that churches and charities can take care of the poor, those in ill health and the ones suffering from natural disasters.

Anselm on paying the debt of obedience

2011-05-25T08:30:00.006-04:00

In I:11 Anselm states that obedience is the debt we all owe to God:

Every wish of a rational creature should be subject to the will of God. ... This is the debt which man and angel owe to God, and no one who pays this debt commits sin; but every one who does not pay it sins. This is justice, or uprightness of will, which makes a being just or upright in heart, that is, in will; and this is the sole and complete debt of honor which we owe to God, and which God requires of us.

He goes on to say that this debt must not only be paid, but the guilty party must (as we might say now) pay punitive damages.

In I:12 and I:13 Anselm denies that it would be proper for God "to put away sins by compassion alone, without any payment of the honor taken from him." If sin is remitted without punishment then:

There would be no difference between the guilty and the innocent and "this is unbecoming to God"
Sin becomes subject to no law and is therefore more free than justice
God's dignity and honor is violated

Then he argues (I:14) that in punishing the sinner God is actually exacting payment for the debt of obedience:

It is impossible for God to lose his honor; for either the sinner pays his debt of his own accord, or, if he refuse, God takes it from him. For either man renders due submission to God of his own will, by avoiding sin or making payment, or else God subjects him to himself by torments, even against man's will, and thus shows that he is the Lord of man, though man refuses to acknowledge it of his own accord. And here we must observe that as man in sinning takes away what belongs to God, so God in punishing gets in return what pertains to man. For not only does that belong to a man which he has in present possession, but also that which it is in his power to have. Therefore, since man was so made as to be able to attain happiness by avoiding sin; if, on account of his sin, he is deprived of happiness and every good, he repays from his own inheritance what he has stolen, though he repay it against his will. For although God does not apply what he takes away to any object of his own, as man transfer the money which he has taken from another to his own use; yet what he takes away serves the purpose of his own honor, for this very reason, that it is taken away. For by this act he shows that the sinner and all that pertains to him are under his subjection.

Perhaps he may go on to reinforce this argument (I haven't yet read much beyond this point) but, as it stands, I don't see it. The debt is obedience - but God, according to Anselm, is forcibly subjecting the sinner. I do not see how forcible subjection is the same thing as obedience. The big kid on the playground may beat up the smaller kid, but that does not mean the weaker is in any way made obedient to the will of the stronger. Anselm is (rightly) concerned with God's dignity and honor. I suppose it's possible to see a certain honor in God "showing 'em who's boss". It's not a very honorable honor, though.

Far more satisfying is the idea of universal reconciliation, where sinners are indeed brought to a state of loving obedience. Universal reconciliation sees punishment as having a redemptive, reforming effect, e.g., not merely vindictive. But universalism isn't the focus of this post. I'm only interested in pointing out the difficulties in Anselm's argument at this point.

Anselm on the devil's rights and the punishment of sin

2011-05-24T07:00:00.001-04:00

I'm not familiar enough with Christus Victor to say for sure, but Anselm's criticism in Cur Deus Homo I:7 sounds like it is aimed at a version of that theory:

Moreover, I do not see the force of that argument, which we are wont to make use of, that God, in order to save men, was bound, as it were, to try a contest with the devil in justice, before he did in strength, so that, when the devil should put to death that being in whom there was nothing worthy of death [i.e., Jesus], and who was God, he should justly lose his power over sinners; and that, if it were not so, God would have used undue force against the devil, since the devil had a rightful ownership of man, for the devil had not seized man with violence, but man had freely surrendered to him. It is true that this might well enough be said, if the devil or man belonged to any other being than God, or were in the power of any but God. But since neither the devil nor man belong to any but God, and neither can exist without the exertion of Divine power, what cause ought God to try with his own creature (de suo, in suo), or what should he do but punish his servant, who had seduced his fellow-servant to desert their common Lord and come over to himself; who, a traitor, had taken to himself a fugitive; a thief, who had taken to himself a fellow-thief, with what he had stolen from his Lord. For when one was stolen from his Lord by the persuasions of the other, both were thieves.

Anselm describes an argument that states that humanity belonged to the devil because humanity voluntarily placed itself in the devil's service. The devil, therefore, owned humanity. God could not violate this right, so God sent Jesus into the world to trick the devil into having him killed unjustly (since Jesus was free from sin and divine). By this act, the devil would lose his right to humanity.

The obvious objection to this is that God owns both humanity and the devil, since they exist only at God's pleasure. The devil is only a fellow-servant with humanity. It would not, therefore, be unjust of God to "snatch" humanity from the hands of the devil.

Then he makes an even more interesting argument:

For man merited punishment, and there was no more suitable way for him to be punished than by that being to whom he had given his consent to sin. But the infliction of punishment was nothing meritorious in the devil; on the other hand, he was even more unrighteous in this, because he had not led to it by a love of justice, but urged on by a malicious impulse. For he did not do this at the command of God, but God's inconceivable wisdom, which happily controls even wickedness, permitted it.

Anselm assumes that humanity's sin is punished by the devil (in this life? in hell? both?); whether that is true I leave to the side. The punishment, however, is justly deserved by humanity. Nevertheless that does not mean the devil is doing a praiseworthy thing. He does not torment humanity out of a desire to obey God, but out of his own malice. God is leaving the fellow-servants to themselves - and that is punishment enough.

As I read this I was reminded of Saruman and Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings. Wormtongue voluntarily placed himself in the service of Saruman, to aid in the destruction of Theoden. After his restoration Theoden offers a way of redemption to Wormtongue: ride to battle with him and prove his loyalty. Wormtongue refuses and flees to Saruman. After the battle at Helm's Deep Gandalf confronts Saruman and Wormtongue at Isengard, where they are both offered a path to redemption. They both refuse. Gandalf says, "Small comfort will those two have in their companionship: they will gnaw one another with words. But the punishment is just. If Wormtongue ever comes out of Orthanc alive, it will be more than he deserves." Wormtongue deserves his punishment but that does not mean Saruman is a force for good in administering it. They will be a misery to each other.

This is further illustrated by the saying of Jesus in Matthew 18:7: "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" Some evils may be necessary or just but that does not make the instrument of evil blessed, e.g., Judas Iscariot.

In several biblical texts we are warned that sin is its own punishment. Paul says in Romans 1 that God punishes some by leaving them to their own sin, allowing it to work itself out in their lives. Again, an evil does not become a good simply because it is used as the means to a good.

We can't know whether any one occurrence is actually the judgment of God upon any particular sin. Evil things happen to both "good" and "bad" people. But even if we could we do not need to celebrate that occurrence or pretend that it isn't an evil. Our reaction to all evils should conform to the words of Jesus in Luke 13:

Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

Mondays with Montaigne (on delaying duties beyond death)

2011-05-23T06:00:00.000-04:00

From I:7. That our deeds are judged by the intention

I have seen many men in my time smitten in conscience for having withheld other men's goods who arrange in their testaments to put things right after they are dead. But it is valueless to fix a date for so urgent a matter or to wish to right wrongs without feeling or cost. They must pay with something which is truly theirs: the more burdensome and onerous their payment the more just and meritorious their atonement. Repentance begs for burdens.

Worse still are they who reserve for their last will and testament some hate-ridden provision affecting a near one, having concealed it during their lifetime. By stirring up against their memory the one they have offended they show scant regard for their reputations; and they show even less for their consciences since they cannot, even out of respect for death, make their animosities die, prolonging the life of them beyond their own. They are iniquitous judges, postponing judgement until they can no longer take cognizance of the case.

If I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life.

Mondays with Montaigne (on why he began writing the essays)

2011-05-16T06:00:00.001-04:00

From I:8. On idleness

Recently I retired to my estates, determined to devote myself as far as I could to spending what little life I have left quietly and privately; it seemed to me then that the greatest favour I could do for my mind was to leave it in total idleness, caring for itself, concerned only with itself, calmly thinking of itself. I hoped it could do that more easily from then on, since with the passage of time it had grown mature and put on weight.

But I find -

Variam semper dant otia mentis

[Idleness always produces fickle changes of mind]

- that on the contrary it bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.

New weekly feature: Excerpts from Montaigne's essays

2011-05-12T15:42:00.001-04:00

Steve Douglas has a weekly feature called "Mondays with MacDonald" in which he posts excerpts from the writings of George MacDonald. I'm going to steal that idea and start posting excerpts from Montaigne's essays every Monday ("Mondays with Montaigne", geddit?). I'll be drawing from the Penguin Classics edition of the complete essays translated by M.A. Screech.

I never thought I'd find an argument for monarchy compelling ...

2011-04-29T14:17:00.003-04:00

... but this one from @johnthelutheran, also expressed by @zugzwanged, makes a lot of sense: constitutional monarchy depoliticises head of state and says we are not /defined/ ultimately by politics. We Americans invest a lot of symbolic power in the presidency (note: I have not read the linked book) and it might be useful to redirect that towards someone who fulfills a more explicitly symbolic function, i.e., has no actual power. Also, the things that unite Americans tend to be abstract ideas. It's always easier to unite around an actual person.

John also argues that monarchy is a good reminder that life isn't fair. [UPDATE: I misrepresented John's point here. See comments.] I see his point, but - believe me - I have plenty of opportunities to be reminded of that fact in our present political configuration.

Not that I expect (or even want) a constitutional monarchy in America. It's just an interesting thought experiment.

Ben Myers' six types of reading

2011-04-27T13:20:00.004-04:00

Based on Ben's typology, the majority of my reading is binge reading, though sometimes I binge on topics rather than authors. If it wasn't obvious already I've been reading about the Christian response to poverty lately.

I dearly hope he continues making these videos.

Jesus accepts his failure and abandons himself to the Father

2011-04-22T14:41:00.004-04:00

On the cross Jesus finally abandons himself to the Father. His life work has ended in failure. It looked very optimistic at first: the crowds gathering to hear all those attractive things they needed to hear and received with such enthusiasm, but now all that has collapsed. His followers have deserted him, the foremost of them has disowned him, he has been arrested and condemned, the crowds who once listened to him are now howling "Crucify him, crucify him". The whole attempt to form a little community of friends based on himself and, through him, the Father's love, one in which people could relate to each other in love and mutual forgiveness instead of domination of submission, has been a complete failure. Nevertheless, his mission was not to be a world leader but just to be human and accept the consequences of being human, which culminate in defeat. He accepts his failure and refuses to compromise his mission by using the weapons of the world against the world. It is his Father's mission and it is for the Father to bring his own purposes out of Jesus's failure. Jesus knows he is not going to live to establish the Kingdom. He did not transform the world; the colonial society went on as before; the same kinds of bitterness and meanness and hatreds went on as before. In death on the cross he handed over all the meaning of his human life to the Father; this is his prayer. The Father has not accomplished his will through any success of Jesus; Jesus is left with nothing but his love and his obedience, and this is the prayer to the Father to work through his failure.

Herbert McCabe, "Good Friday: The Mystery of the Cross", God Matters, pp. 99-100.

Go to Dark Gethsemane

2011-04-22T10:02:00.007-04:00

At our Maundy Thursday service we sang "Go to Dark Gethsemane", one of my favorite hymns. The recording below includes the final, Easter verse, which we didn't sing of course. (So stop after verse three unless you want to be a liturgically incorrect cheater.) The phrase "turn not from his griefs away" has been with me all day. This is the value of moving slowly through Holy Week rather than rushing straight into Easter. We watch the process unfold. He suffers before our eyes. And, as the hymn says, the events not only show us our sin and God's love, but they form the contemplation of our own lives.

Go to dark Gethsemane, ye that feel the tempter’s power;
Your Redeemer’s conflict see, watch with Him one bitter hour,
Turn not from His griefs away; learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

See Him at the judgment hall, beaten, bound, reviled, arraigned;
O the wormwood and the gall! O the pangs His soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss; learn of Christ to bear the cross.

Calvary’s mournful mountain climb; there, adoring at His feet,
Mark that miracle of time, God’s own sacrifice complete.
“It is finished!” hear Him cry; learn of Jesus Christ to die.

Early hasten to the tomb where they laid His breathless clay;
All is solitude and gloom. Who has taken Him away?
Christ is risen! He meets our eyes; Savior, teach us so to rise.

Remembering the poor on Maundy Thursday

2011-04-21T14:36:00.003-04:00

Much of what follows is a riff on Gustavo Gutierrez's chapter "Memory and Prophecy" in The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology. My contribution is a rather poor attempt to connect it to Cavanaugh's thought, the Offertory, and the meaning of Maundy Thursday.

The memory of God - and our inclusion in it - is a major biblical theme. God repeatedly tells Israel that the covenant will not be forgotten. In one of the most memorable passages of the Bible, God says through Isaiah

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

Not only are we included in the memory of God, we are called to remember as well. But this memory is more than a simple recollections of events; it is the basis of action. Thus we have the prologue to the Ten Commandments: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." The remembrance of the saving acts of God is the foundation of our religious lives and the model for how the redeemed community should behave toward strangers, the poor, etc. (cf Deut 5:15, 15:15, 16:12, 24:18).

We see the same thing in the New Testament. "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34). And at the heart of the Eucharist, the central act of the Church's life, are the words, "Do this in remembrance of me".

Christians are, like Israel, commanded to remember the poor and outcast - for we were once one of them. This is not limited, however, to the spiritually poor. In Galatians 2, Paul tells the story of the meeting in Jerusalem where he presented himself as the apostle to the Gentiles. James, Peter, and John - the pillars - accepted Paul's mission with the instruction that he should remember the poor, which he did by taking collections.

Ideally, we do the same today by using a portion of our offerings for the aid of the poor and disadvantaged. It is significant that the offertory is a part of the Eucharistic liturgy. We bring our money to the altar as part of the same liturgical movement in which we bring the bread and wine to the altar for consecration. It is also significant that in the early church (or so I've been told) a portion of the bread and wine brought by the worshipers was put aside for the poor. The remembrance of the poor is thus included in the Eucharistic liturgy.

But not only there. Today is Maundy Thursday. There is some debate about the meaning of the word "maundy". Is it derived from mandatum, meaning command, the first word of Jesus' "new commandment" to love one another? Or is it derived from the "maundsor" baskets in which was collected alms for beggars? Either meaning points to the remembrance of the poor - the first as described above and the second more directly. In fact there survives to this day a "Royal Maundy" service in the CoE, in which the monarch distributes "Maundy money". Originally the monarch not only gave money to beggars but washed their feet. Unfortunately, the coins now distributed are collector's items and no monarch has actually washed anyone's feet since the 17th century.

The remembrance of the poor is also a part of Eucharistic theology. William Cavanaugh has shown us that in the Eucharist the divisions between you and me, between what is mine and what is yours, are broken down. We become food for others. "Those of us who partake in the Eucharist while ignoring the hungry may be eating and drinking our own damnation."

On this Maundy Thursday we remember the Eucharist as the body and blood of Jesus given and shed for the forgiveness of our sins. As Luther said, "We are all beggars." But let us also remember the materially poor, whom we find included at the heart of our worship.

Howard Thurman on the rise of hatred

2011-04-20T12:27:00.002-04:00

According to Howard Thurman (in Jesus and the Disinherited), our hatred is normally taboo. But occasionally (as in a war or national crisis) it "provides for us a form of validation or prestige". Thurman, for example, "noticed a definite rise in rudeness and overt expressions of color prejudice" after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. These times also serve to illustrate the way in which hatred arises.

"In the first place, hatred often begins in a situation in which there is contact without fellowship, contact that is devoid of any of the primary overtures of warmth and fellow-feeling and genuineness." It has often been observed that hatred of a certain person or group dissolves once the hater comes to genuinely know the hated.

"In the second place, contacts without fellowship tend to express themselves in the kind of understanding that is strikingly unsympathetic. There is understanding of a kind, but it is without the healing and reinforcement of personality." Not all understanding is sympathetic. There is a kind of understanding "that one gives to the enemy, or that is derived from an accurate knowledge of another's power to injure". Understanding without fellow-feeling may contain pity but never sympathy. "I can sympathize only when I see myself in another's place."

"In the third place, an unsympathetic understanding tends to express itself in the active functioning of ill will."

"In the fourth place, ill will, when dramatized in a human being, becomes hatred walking on the earth."

A current example of this process is Islamophobia. Those who are most clearly guilty of this are people who have no real fellowship with actual Muslims, or if they do it is not a relationship of sympathetic understanding. Some of them do have enough knowledge to quote bits of the Quran (often with no apparent awareness that the Bible contains troublesome passages as well). And some of them merely say, "All I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11". This is fertile ground for hatred.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Rich get richer! Poor get poorer!

2011-04-20T09:59:00.002-04:00

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.

"Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" by Joseph Stiglitz

The average income of the four hundred richest Americans (measured by AGI) has increased while their average tax rate has decreased:

More tax charts from Mother Jones magazine and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

As life gets better and better for the rich, the poor continue to suffer.

The World Bank has warned that rising food prices have put the world's poor "one shock away from a full-blown crisis."

Tax preparers are targeting the poor with their usurious refund anticipation loans.

Debt collectors using harrassing and threatening tactics have decided that the risk of violating federal law is just the price of doing business.

The Indiana Senate has voted to defund Planned Parenthood as part of a larger abortion bill - even though abortions are only 3% of their business and are funded by private giving. If this is signed into law we can expect more unplanned pregnancies.

Without Planned Parenthood, [Gayla Winston of the Indiana Family Health Council] said, there would be no clinic south of Monroe County and east of Dubois County where a woman could get free birth control pills.

A 2008 study by the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive health policy nationwide, found that 31 percent of Indiana women who need contraceptives have those needs met. That's 10 percentage points lower than the national average.

I am a pro-life Christian, but defunding Planned Parenthood is a blockheaded thing to do. Many poor women use PP as a primary provider.

Dan Horan, OFM, on being willfully ignorant concerning the conditions of the poor:

"I just don’t want to know" is not a legitimate or justifiable excuse. It is a reflection of the sin of willful ignorance, because, although what you don’t know may not hurt you, it most certainly hurts others. We have an obligation, a responsibility as members of the human family and the Body of Christ to learn about both the “joys and hopes” as well as the “sorrows and anxieties” of the people of the world. And we should then, aware of suffering in the world, work to bring about justice and alleviate suffering in whatever way we can.

"The hungry cannot wait; the heavenly feast is now."

2011-04-16T19:54:00.003-04:00

William Cavanaugh contrasts the market and the Eucharist in the closing pages of Being Consumed (pp 97-98):

Adam Smith's economy underwrites a separation between contractual exchanges and gifts. Benevolence is a free suspension of self-interested exchange. As such, benevolence cannot be expected or even encouraged on the public level, because the market functions for the good of all on the basis of self-interested consumption and production. Benevolent giving freely transfer property from one to another; nevertheless, it respects the boundaries between what is mine and what is yours. In the eucharistic economy, by contrast, the gift relativizes the boundaries between what is mine and what is yours be relativizing the boundary between me and you. We are no longer two individuals encountering each other by way of contract or as active giver and passive recipient. Without losing our identities as unique person - Paul's analogy of the body extols the diversity of eyes and hands, heads and feet - we cease to be merely "the other" to each other by being incorporated into the body of Christ. In the Eucharist, Christ is gift, giver, and recipient. We are neither merely active nor passive, but we participate in the divine life so that we are fed and simultaneously become food for others.

Our temptation is to spiritualize all this talk of union, to make our connection to the hungry a mystical act of imaginative sympathy. We can thus imagine that we are already in communion with those who lack food, whether or not we meet their needs. Matthew [in chapter 25] is having none of this: he places the obligation to feed the hungry in the context of eschatological judgment. Paul, too, places neglect of the hungry in the context of judgment. At the eucharistic celebration in Corinth, which included a common meal, those who eat while others go hungry "show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing" (1 Cor 11:22). Those who thus - in an "unworthy manner" - partake of the body and blood of Christ "eat and drink judgment against themselves" (11:27, 29). Those of us who partake in the Eucharist while ignoring the hungry may be eating and drinking our own damnation.

The Eucharist places judgment in the eschatological context of God's in-breaking kingdom. There is no gradual, immanent progress toward abundance that the market, driven by our consumption, is always about to - but never actually does - bring about. The Eucharist announces the coming of the kingdom of God now, already in the present, by the grace of God. Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium affirms the eschatological dimension of the Eucharist in these terms: "In the earthly liturgy we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims. ..." In the Eucharist, God breaks in and disrupts the tragic despair of human history with a message of hope and a demand for justice. The hungry cannot wait; the heavenly feast is now. The endless consumption of superficial novelty is broken by the promise of an end, the kingdom toward which history is moving and which is already breaking in to history. The kingdom is not driven by our desires, but by God's desire, which we receive as the gift of the Eucharist.

Consuming and being consumed by the Eucharist

2011-04-15T14:41:00.001-04:00

In Being Consumed William Cavanaugh argues that consumerism is more about shopping than owning. Contented ownership is antithetical to the pursuit of novelty essential to consumerism. Like religion, consumerism preaches a sort of transcendence and promotes a sort of community - but a transcendence and community without a shared telos, or end.

The Eucharist turns consumerism upside down. We do consume in the Eucharist, of course, but we are also being consumed. "St. Augustine hears God say, 'I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.'" We are "absorbed into a larger body."

We also become food for others. Cavanaugh cites Matthew 25, where Jesus says that whenever we serve another, we serve him.

What is truly radical about this passage is not that God rewards those who help the poor; what is truly radical is that Jesus identifies himself with the poor. The pain of the hungry person is the pain of Christ, and it is thus also that the pain of anyone who is a member of the body of Christ. If we are identified with Christ, who identifies himself with the suffering of all, then what is called for is more than just charity. The very distinction between what is mine and what is yours breaks down in the body of Christ. We are not to consider ourselves as absolute owners of our stuff, who then occasionally graciously bestow charity on the less fortunate. In the body of Christ, your pain is my pain, and my stuff is available to be communicated to you in your need, as Aquinas says. In the consumption of the Eucharist, we cease to be merely "the other" to each other. In the Eucharist, Christ is gift, giver, and recipient; we are simultaneously fed and become food for others.

The Augustinian Amanda Palmer. Also, metal keeps you sane.

2011-04-15T13:09:00.002-04:00

According to William Cavanaugh, Augustine believed our desires were socially formed, not simply internally generated, and are often unclear to us. Not only "I don't know what I want", but also "I don't know why I want what I want".

Amanda Palmer probably wouldn't thank me for describing her as Augustinian, but her "In My Mind" does in some way describe this understanding of desire. (In fact, I'm struck by the song's echoes of Paul in Romans 7.) Palmer resolves the tension by self-acceptance, i.e., the person she is is the person she wants to be. That's not a particularly Augustinian resolution, but there's truth in it.

---

Lee links to a great Atlantic article by James Parker ("How Heavy Metal is keeping us sane") which begins - of course - with Black Sabbath:

Black Sabbath created heavy metal. We can say that with a satisfying kick-drum thump of certainty. Cream was heavy; Hendrix and Led Zeppelin were heavier still; in Japan, the Flower Travellin’ Band was shockingly heavy; but Black Sabbath, from Birmingham, England, was heavy metal. No joy here, nor any wisp of psychedelic whimsy. From the first note, this band sounded ancient, oppressed, as if shambling forward under supernatural burdens.

Parker uses "Lord of this World" to illustrate this. But if you want my opinion, there is no more terrifying song than "Black Sabbath". Ozzy's screams are chilling:

Schillebeeckx wrap-up

2011-04-11T21:15:00.002-04:00

I've finished reading Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God but I'll be thinking about it for some time to come. It's full of such rich theology. You need to find a copy and take your time with it.

"You have shown yourself to me, Christ, face to face," says St. Ambrose: "It is in your sacraments that I meet you." it is by the sacraments that we journey toward our final goal - the sacramental way is our hidden road to Emmaus, on which we are accompanied by our Lord. And even though we are not yet able to see him, we are conscious of his concealed presence near us, for when he addresses us through his sacraments, our hearts, intent upon his word, burn with longing and we turn at once to Christian action - in the words of the Evangelist, "Was not our heart burning within us whilst we spoke in the way?"

Image: Edward Schillebeeckx by David Levine

Private charity could never replace government anti-poverty programs

2011-04-11T15:57:00.007-04:00

Now and then a conservative will say that if only the government would give us back our tax money we could care for the poor more efficiently than it could. Christians, specifically, point out that biblical commands to care for the poor are given to individuals, not governments. (I believe that statement is wrong in several ways, but that's not my concern in this post.) I think this idea can be soundly dismissed by looking at what we actually do with our charitable donations.

A Center on Philanthropy study determined that 30% ($77.3 billion of the total $252.6 billion) of our charitable donations go to meet the needs of the poor. Here is how it breaks out by charity type:

The study broke out all giving into the categories you see in the chart. Then it determined what portion of each category was directed toward the poor. All giving in the "helps meet basic needs" category was focused on the poor. The researchers were unable to determine what percentage of giving to the arts was focused on the poor. The rest of the categories ranged from 18% to 25%.

So when we have money to give to charity we give it for the benefit of the poor 30% of the time. How do we direct most of our charitable giving? If you make $200,000 or less per year, which is 97.8% of the population, it is overwhelmingly to religious operations. If you make over $200,000, it is split more evenly between arts, education, health, and religious operations.

Some more facts. Medicaid spending in 2009 amounted to $373.9 billion. Spending on various safety net programs (EIC tax credit, cash payments like SSI and unemployment insurance, in-kind assistance like food stamps and housing, child-care, and energy assistance, etc.) totaled $482 billion in 2010. This gives us a total of $855.9 billion, or 6.5% of GDP. Charitable contributions have averaged 2% of GDP since the 1990s (figure from the CoP study). This means that in order to cover the costs of Medicaid and the various safety net programs charitable giving would have to increase fourfold to 8.5% of GDP, assuming we redirect 100% of our tax savings into private organizations that perform equivalent services.

Do you think that is likely - especially given that we only direct 30% of our charitable giving to the poor? This also does not take into account the losses through administrative costs that would result from moving from government programs with strong buying and organizational power into multiple private organizations. There's just no way. Claiming that it would work is utopian in the extreme, which is odd since conservatives are supposed to be the anti-utopians.

If the argument based on human nature doesn't convince you then how about one from history? In 2006 Obama proposed some changes to the allowable deductions for charitable giving. In response, the Center on Philanthropy released a study examining the effect the change in tax policy could have on giving. They determined that changes in the overall economy and/or in personal income had a greater effect on levels of charitable giving than did changes in tax rates (which, presumably, would be what would change if the federal government dropped Medicaid and the safety net programs).

When you give people money back through tax cuts they will spend it in any number of ways. The best that could be hoped for is that government could devise some incentive (though income tax deductions, perhaps) that would redirect the money to benefit the poor. I'm certain, though, that most of it would be spent in some other way. But even if some incentive structure could be devised, why bother? Spending it through the present system of taxation is at least as efficient as devising some complex incentive program to make sure the money is still being spent to help the disadvantaged.

As I was putting the finishing touches on this post, The Lead posted a link to a study (pdf) showing that faith-based initiatives do not actually increase faith-based groups' involvement in social ministries. (Faith-based initiatives, you recall, were attempts to prove that faith-based institutions could serve as alternatives to government run safety net programs.) This seems to show that private organizations are limited in their effectiveness as providers of safety net services.

I have no doubt that most conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, who want to dismantle the welfare state and replace it with networks of private institutions do indeed want to effectively help the poor and disadvantaged. Nevertheless, the evidence against this idea is overwhelming.

Republicans' budget would harm the poor, sick, and elderly

2011-04-06T08:26:00.005-04:00

The following is a letter I submitted to the local newspaper. Ezra Klein's blog and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities have been particularly helpful here.

The Republicans' proposed 2012 budget would harm the poor, sick, and elderly - but benefit the rich [also see this post].

Medicaid would be converted into block grants. Currently, Medicaid costs are shared by the federal and state governments. As costs increase or decrease, funding increases or decreases. Converting it into block grants would mean that the federal government would give a chunk of money to the states at the beginning of the year. If costs increase due to a flu epidemic, for example, or if more people need Medicaid due to recession, there would be no increase to the grant. The grant would be indexed to inflation, but health care costs increase at a much higher rate than inflation.

In short, if claims increase, if we go into recession, or if health care costs rise faster than inflation, then the state would have to pick up the increased costs - which means they'll either come up with the money or cut benefits. Benefit cuts would disproportionately harm the disabled and the elderly because, while children and adults constitute 74% of the enrollees, it is the elderly and the disabled that account for 67% of actual Medicaid expenditures.

The budget proposes the same for SNAP, aka food stamps.

It also proposes the privatization of Medicare for the next generation of retirees. Because of Medicare's buying power it is much cheaper than comparable private insurance options. Under the Republican budget, there would only be a selection of private options, meaning the elderly would either have to pay higher premiums or receive lower benefits.

But there's good news if you're rich or a corporation: The Republican budget would lower the top individual and corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%.

How's that for a "path to prosperity"?

See also:

"Chairman Ryan Gets Roughly Two-Thirds of His Huge Budget Cuts From Programs for Lower-Income Americans"

"Medicaid Block Grant Would Shift Financial Risks and Costs to States"

My (and the Reformer's?) confusion about ex opere operato

2011-04-05T06:13:00.006-04:00

Schillebeeckx's discussion of ex opere operato has me confused. He says the Reformers opposed ex opere operato because it was too much like magic, that it laid an obligation on God, and that it endangered appreciation of the free mercy of God. This, he says, is a misunderstanding of the doctrine, though there were some popular notions afoot that make it an understandable mistake. But I thought the Reformers' problem with it was that it denied the necessity of faith.

His definition of the doctrine sounds acceptably Lutheran to me (the not-even-amateur theologian):

Put negatively, the significance of the sacramental efficacy ex opere operato is that the bestowal of grace is not dependent upon the sanctity of the minister, nor does the faith of the recipient put any obligation on grace; Christ remains free, sovereign, and independent with regard to any human merit whatsoever. Put positively, ex opere operato efficacy means that this act is Christ's act. ... In the Church's ritual symbolic act, not only are Christ's prayer and worship really present in visible and sacramental form, but really present also is the infallible response to this prayer, the effective bestowal of grace.

Obviously if you haven't read the book you can't comment specifically on it. But to any readers who are familiar with the doctrine: Is Schillebeeckx definition adequate? If so, were the Reformer's objections to ex opere operato the result of a misunderstanding?

UPDATE: The Catechism of the Catholic Church seems to say the same thing:

IV. THE SACRAMENTS OF SALVATION

1127 Celebrated worthily in faith, the sacraments confer the grace that they signify. They are efficacious because in them Christ himself is at work: it is he who baptizes, he who acts in his sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament signifies. The Father always hears the prayer of his Son's Church which, in the epiclesis of each sacrament, expresses her faith in the power of the Spirit. As fire transforms into itself everything it touches, so the Holy Spirit transforms into the divine life whatever is subjected to his power.

1128 This is the meaning of the Church's affirmation that the sacraments act ex opere operato (literally: "by the very fact of the action's being performed"), i.e., by virtue of the saving work of Christ, accomplished once for all. It follows that "the sacrament is not wrought by the righteousness of either the celebrant or the recipient, but by the power of God." From the moment that a sacrament is celebrated in accordance with the intention of the Church, the power of Christ and his Spirit acts in and through it, independently of the personal holiness of the minister. Nevertheless, the fruits of the sacraments also depend on the disposition of the one who receives them.

1129 The Church affirms that for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation. "Sacramental grace" is the grace of the Holy Spirit, given by Christ and proper to each sacrament. The Spirit heals and transforms those who receive him by conforming them to the Son of God. The fruit of the sacramental life is that the Spirit of adoption makes the faithful partakers in the divine nature by uniting them in a living union with the only Son, the Savior.

I suppose it all depends on what you load into the opening words, "celebrated worthily in faith".

UPDATE 2: Schillebeeckx later distinguishes between fruitful and unfruitful sacraments:

The sacraments are signs of Christ's redemptive act in its actual grasp of a particular individual. For this reason, even when on account of the recipient's interior dispositions a sacrament remains (probably only for the time being) fruitless, every valid sacrament achieves a certain fruitful effect. It cannot be an empty sign, for even in such a case it is still a sacramental prayer of Christ and his Church for the person receiving it. And precisely on those grounds a sacrament can, as it is said, "revive." If, however, the personal power of supplication of the recipient is joined with the power of the ritual supplication of Christ and his Church, so that the outward sign which the recipient makes is not a fiction with regard to his inward dispositions, then the outward sign by that very fact becomes an effective bestowal of grace, and in consequence its full significance is also realized.

So personal faith is not nothing - but it does not affect the power of the sacrament. Even a sacrament received without personal faith "achieves a certain fruitful effect" and can "revive". Still not sure what to make of this but this distinction clarifies it somewhat.

Schillebeeckx: Sacraments are the visible tokens of Christ's love

2011-04-04T12:28:00.004-04:00

One man's inward act of will with regard to another man only becomes a completely human reality with meaning for the other man when this inner intention has been manifested in an external act. Only in the expressive word or gesture does a human intention directed to some other person received its perfect meaning. Now as man Christ is the mediator between God's love and ourselves. Consequently his mediation takes place through human acts, through loving saving acts of will which find their full expression in an expressive and loving gesture. The specific expressive "gesture" of Christ's saving love is his exalted and glorified body, the established sign of the victorious redemption. It is in the Church's sacraments that Christ wants to make this expression of love visible within the sphere of our earthly life and earthly world, which through our human activity is made into an extension of our humanity. In this way material things of the world around us are taken and humanized through our own proper corporeality: that is to say, in a union with our own bodies they become an expression of our spiritual thoughts. [Schillebeeckx is here referring to his earlier discussion of the universal impulse of humanity to create symbols that express religious thought or feeling.]

We find something of the same kind in Christ, who through his glorified body takes up material things of our human world into a dynamic unity with his risen and active body. I hope I may be forgiven for drawing a likeness between the sacred sacramental event and present-day jazz, but perhaps the coherence of the sacramental whole can best be suggested by means of the image of a drummer. Just as when a drummer is playing he is extending himself through all his bodiliness into the instruments grouped about him, so that these instruments dynamically participate in the expressiveness of his rhythmic movement, making but one total movement which, arising from within the drummer, flows through the rhythm of his body, of his beating hands and stamping feet, and produces a varied harmony of percussion - so too the heavenly saving will of Christ, through his glorified body, makes one dynamic unity with the ritual gesture and the sacramental words of the minister who intends to do what the Church does.

It is only when a person's love is manifested in some telling and appealing gesture, through which it becomes possible for me to enter into this love, that I become personally confronted wit this love for me. The flowers which I have an agency deliver to friends overseas on their wedding day are to them the concrete present of my love and friendship; the concrete interpretation of my love; love in a form that is visible. This, but in infinitely greater measure, is the case in the sacraments too. For the proof Christ gives us of his love is not turned into a lifeless thing. It is not merely an indication of an absent love which nevertheless in the indication somehow becomes present. The sacramental proof and token of love makes a living unity with the human saving will of Christ in heaven. Because this is a personal act of God the Son - even though done in human form - it transcends time and space, and therefore in the literal sense of the word, like the soul in the body, becomes incarnate in the outward rite.

Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, pp 76-77

The no-fly zone lie

2011-04-04T08:44:00.003-04:00

Don't you love being lied to?

Some of the United States’ partners have acknowledged that the initial descriptions of the intervention in Libya no longer apply. "What is happening in Libya is not a no-fly zone," a senior European diplomat told reporters, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity. "The no-fly zone was a diplomatic thing, to get the Arabs on board. What we have in Libya is more than that."

"In Libya mission, war blurs humanitarian focus"

Off to a convention, plus links

2011-03-31T08:15:00.002-04:00

Today we'll be travelling to Cincinnati to attend our first homeschool convention. The drive involves at least two hours on a notoriously bad two-lane highway with a girl who doesn't travel well. My daughter isn't much better. But once we're there we're hoping to find a good reading and Spanish curriculum. We're also excited to hear one or two of Peter Enns' talks and check out his Bible study curriculum.

Some stuff to leave with you:

This is NOT the reason we're homeschooling (via MoJo):
Robin Parry asks if Rob Bell is really a universalist. I interpreted Bell's book in the same way.
Also check out Robin Parry's article debunking seven myths about univeralism.
There's a promising new blog on Catholic Moral Theology. I haven't read all their posts yet, but "Praying and Framing" (on how we are shaped by the liturgy) is great.
Finally, an excellent Al Jazeera interview with Cornel West, the prophet (via memoria dei). He is sharply critical of Obama.

Schillebeeckx: The threefold historical orientation of the sacraments

2011-03-30T12:12:00.004-04:00

From all this we see that the sacraments, as "mediation" between Christ and ourselves, must be situated not immediately between the historical sacrifice of the Cross and our twentieth-century situation, but rather between the Christ who is living now and our earthly world. More precisely, what takes place in the sacraments is the immediate encounter in mutual availability between the living Kyrios and ourselves. The sacraments are this encounter. And it is this immediate encounter with Christ that explains the threefold historical orientation of the sacraments. For they are first of all an anamnesis or a commemoration of the past sacrifice of the Cross, because of the relation of the eternally actual redemptive act, present in the sacrament, to the historical moment in which Christ shed his blood. Secondly, they are a visible affirmation and bestowal of the actual gift of grace inasmuch as the recipient becomes concerned in the enduring redemptive act by which the Kyrios is reaching out to him here and now. In the third place, they are a pledge of eschatalogical salvation and a herald of the parousia, because the sacraments are the sacramental present of Christ the Eschaton, either because of a real transubstantiation (in the case of the Eucharist), or because of the sacramentalizing of his eternally actual redemptive act (in the case of the remaining six sacraments). Hence a visible intervention in our time of the Eschaton himself takes place in the sacraments. Sacramental encounter with the living Christ in the Church is therefore, in virtue of the historical mysteries of Christ's life, the actual beginning of eschatalogical salvation on earth.

E. Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, pp 62-63. Reading Dominican theologians certainly makes you feel your neglect of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Schillebeeckx: Sacraments are "the face of redemption turned visibly toward us"

2011-03-30T06:06:00.000-04:00

Having shown that Christ is the primordial sacrament, Schillebeeckx then points out that "mutual human availability is possible only in and through man's bodiliness. ... Human encounter calls for mutual availability." We humans do not commune with each other except through our bodies.

The problem is that Jesus has gone from us. We can no longer encounter him in the way his contemporaries did. But we are not left with a mere "spiritual" communion:

Because God loves man and has a sovereign respect for our earthbound humanity - for our reality as persons who in their own bodiliness live in a world of people and of things, and thereby grow to spiritual maturity - God always offers us the kingdom of heaven in an earthly guise.

How are we to encounter Christ, then, since he has gone from us? Through the "separated sacraments".

If Christ does not show himself to us in his own flesh, then he can make himself visibly present to and for us earthbound men only by taking up earthly non-glorified realities into his glorified saving activity. This earthly element replaces for us the invisibility of his bodily life in heaven. This is precisely what the sacraments are: the face of redemption turned visibly towards us, so that in them we are truly able to encounter the living Christ. The heavenly saving activity, invisible to us, becomes visible in the sacraments.

Schillebeeckx illustrates this by saying that Jesus' twelve disciples were never baptized because they had personally encountered Christ the primordial sacrament. Yet St. Paul, the thirteenth apostle, was baptized, never having encountered Jesus in the flesh. "Sacramentality thus bridges the gap and solves the disproportion between the Christ of heaven and unglorified humanity."

From this account of the sacraments as the earthly prolongation of Christ's glorified bodiliness, it follows immediately that the Church's sacraments are not things but encounters of men on earth with the glorified man Jesus by way of a visible form. On the plane of history they are the visible and tangible embodiment of the heavenly saving action of Christ. They are this saving action itself in its availability to us; a personal act of the Lord in earthly visibility and open availability.

Comedian Lee Camp: "Evil people have plans"

2011-03-29T16:02:00.000-04:00

I have discovered Lee Camp today. I'm not sure how much of him I could take, but this is pretty funny.

Rachel Held Evans on the future of Evangelicalism

2011-03-29T06:47:00.000-04:00

Rachel Held Evans has a sharp post on the future of evangelicalism. I should note from the outset that I'm not heavily invested in evangelicalism, having never considered myself one of them. I have moved from fundamentalism to the LCMS to the Episcopal Church. So I'm not Rachel's intended audience. (I felt the same way about Rob Bell's and Michael Spencer's books. Good books, but not really addressed to me.) Nevertheless, some of what she says resonates with me.

Rob Bell's book, she says, points to the divide within evangelicalism between the "young, restless, and Reformed" and the emerging evangelicals. The former are organized and have clear denominational affiliations. The latter are less organized and don't like labels. Can these two groups stay together in evangelicalism? Rachel has her doubts:

The problem, as I see it, can be summarized in the now infamous tweet issued from John Piper: "Farewell Rob Bell."

Those three words triggered a profound reaction within a lot of young evangelicals because many of us have heard them, in some shape or form, before. ... Piper wasn’t simply bidding "farewell" to Rob Bell, he was bidding "farewell" to any of us who agree with Rob Bell, or ask the same questions as Rob Bell, or at the very least wish to stay in fellowship with Rob Bell. It is no longer enough that we too want to love and follow Jesus Christ, or that we too can affirm the creeds of historic Christianity.

This is exactly right. John Piper was one of several theologians and preachers who helped lead me out of legalistic fundamentalism - but that tweet infuriated me. He perfectly illustrated with it the very way of Christianity he helped me leave behind. Rachel goes on to say something I've been feeling for some time now:

But the problem is that after ten years, I’m getting tired of trying to convince fellow Christians that I am, in fact, a Christian, even though I may vote a little differently than they vote, interpret the Bible differently than they interpret it, engage with science a little differently than they engage with it, and understand sovereignty and choice a little differently than they understand those things.

For my part I've decided to disengage with people who aren't interested in a truly open conversation. One thing I've learned from signing off Facebook and Twitter during Lent is how much noise and useless antagonism I've had in my life recently. I'm going to try to move on and do something constructive.

Rachel's predictions:

So my first prediction is that in the next few years the evangelical community will engage in a serious conversation about the Bible. And I suspect that that will be the tipping point McKnight asks about. Let’s pray that this conversation will be as civil and as loving as possible.

My second prediction is that the so-called “new evangelicals” will in large part drop the evangelical label. We don’t like labels to begin with, and evangelicalism already carries a lot of political and theological baggage. Some will head to mainline churches, others will rediscover the rich history of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and some will leave Christianity altogether. Still others will remain evangelical in spirit, but without the label—opting instead for “non-denominational” or simply “follower of Jesus.”

My third prediction is that the word “evangelical” will go the way of “fundamentalism” as its adherents become increasingly homogonous and as the word becomes associated with dogmatism regarding politics, science, women’s roles, homosexuality, salvation, and biblical literalism.

THAT IS UNLESS my generation—both Reformed and emerging/progressive evangelicals—decide to intentionally preserve the diversity of our tradition, stop launching personal attacks, and move forward together.

As I said before, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I pray, however, that those who do may find peace.

Like it or not, we're fighting a war.

2011-03-28T14:13:00.000-04:00

Kevin Drum:

In case it wasn't already clear, the Western coalition is now providing close air support to one side in a civil war. I'm OK with that — though I'd be more OK if I knew more about the rebels we were supporting — but this is a very far cry from merely enforcing a no-fly zone. We're fighting a war in Libya, and anyone who tries to pretend otherwise is just trying to distract you from the truth.

The Bible and the Word of God

2011-03-25T06:35:00.000-04:00

Steve Douglas takes a shot at the frequently heard statement: "We might not like it, but it's in the Bible, so ...":

I’m very much disturbed to see how often it is that Christians are so devoutly interested in upholding their scriptures that they don’t mind if either God or neighbor gets black and blue in the process.

The trick to being an evangelical these days seems to be the willingness to maintain that evil is not necessarily evil when it comes to God. Besmirching His character under the ironic cover of defending God, what passes for good Christian apologetics is actually much more of a defense of prized doctrines such as inerrancy or Augustinian/Reformed soteriology than the only thing worth defending, viz. God’s character. Defending both our carefully constructed doctrines and God’s character cannot always be done simultaneously because they are often at loggerheads (or else many popular apologists would be without a job). Slick, ear-tickling apologetics serve the much-in-demand function of reassuring people that the Bible is everything they think it needs to be in order for their faith to remain comfortable and unquestionable.

I have heard variations on the statement Steve is criticizing, usually from people who are clearly uncomfortable with what the Bible says on a particular subject, but because of their commitment to inerrancy do not feel like they can question it. I thought I'd add to what Steve has said by describing how I think of the Bible. My view has been cobbled together from my interaction with many sources, so it's not original.

The proclamation of the Gospel in word and sacrament constitutes the Church. This is the foundation on which I base my understanding of the Bible's role.

God has always spoken to God's people - to Abraham, to Moses, to Israel through Moses' law, to Israel through the prophets. And now in these last days God has spoken to us in the Son (Hebrews 1:1-2). The Apostles were sent by Jesus to tell the world of what God has accomplished through Jesus' ministry.

The Bible is the record of the way in which they set about this mission. The Old Testament was retained because it spoke of the Messiah to come. The early church followed the example of Jesus himself in reinterpreting the Old Testament in light of what they had experienced. The gospels are didactic recollections of the life and ministry of Jesus. The epistles teach and shape the Church in its mission. And so on.

The reason we care about the Bible is because it tells us about Jesus, in one way or another. It is a witness, not a divine book sent from heaven with authority in and of itself. It it authoritative insofar as it conveys the Word of God - that is, Jesus himself. The Bible is subservient to the Word of God.

Understood in this way the Bible is sacramental. It is, like the sacraments, first and foremost encountered in the ministry of the Church. It is a means of the performative proclamation of the Gospel. It conveys heavenly grace (the Word of God) through earthly, physical means (the Bible).

The problem with those who say "we might not like it but it's in the Bible" is that they are placing the Bible over the Word of God. Jesus is God's perfect revelation, not the Bible. If the Bible doesn't jive with what we learn of God in the life and ministry of Jesus then the problem is with either our interpretation of the text or the Bible itself. I believe that people are usually too quick to conclude the problem is with the Bible. On the other hand, sometimes they're right.

We must not hold so firmly to our idea of biblical inspiration or authority that we end up portraying God as a monster. To do so is to undermine the revelation of God in Jesus.

Of course, the fact that something makes us uncomfortable does not mean it is untrue. God should makes us uncomfortable in some ways. It is also true that God's thoughts are not our thoughts. But these facts have too often been used in ways that end up discrediting the Gospel.

It's all about Jesus. The proclamation of God's action in his life and ministry is the sine qua non of the Church. Nothing - not even the Bible - has authority over that.

---

After writing this I saw this post from Arni Zachariassen and thought I'd append it. John Piper is at it again:

God has a good and all-wise purpose for the heart-rending calamity in Japan on March 11, 2011 that appears to have cost tens of thousands of lives. ... The power felt in an earthquake reveals the fearful magnificence of God. This is a great gift since “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). Most of the world does not fear the Lord and therefore lacks saving wisdom. The thunder-clap summons to fear God is a mercy to those who live.

Arni replies that this sort of theology strips language of its coherence. Killing thousands of people is not good - yet when God does it it becomes good:

I have difficulty seeing how we can go on at all saying anything about God after such a radical redefinition and relativising of the concept of goodness. What difference would it make here if we decided to call God evil instead of good? By the rules of Piper's game, we can logically call God anything we want, regardless of his alleged works. God is good, even when he does what in all other circumstances would be regarded as evil.

It is not the place of humans to test and judge God. But it's imperative and absolutely so that we judge God-narratives. If God is truly good - and as a follower of the crucified Christ I believe absolutely that that's the case -, then we must reject narratives that portray God as evil.

The text I bolded neatly captures one of the things I was trying to say above.

Thirty-one years after Romero, the poor are still being shafted

2011-03-24T13:12:00.000-04:00

There is one rule by which to judge if God is near us
or is far away –
the rule that God’s word is giving us today:
everyone concerned for the hungry, the naked, the poor,
for those who have vanished in police custody,
for the tortured,
for prisoners,
for all flesh that suffers,
has God close at hand. (The Violence of Love)

Thirty-one years ago today, Oscar Romero, bishop and martyr, was shot while celebrating the Eucharist. Yesterday President Obama visited Archbishop Romero's tomb - a remarkable thing, given Romero's criticism of the United States and his embrace of liberation theology. (Beck, et al, will be foaming at the mouth over this one.) Both Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado's and Daniel Horan's comments are worth reading.

Romero was a strong advocate for the preferential option for the poor. You can understand, then, why I'm so angry after reading today that House Republicans are considering cutting food stamps and other anti-poverty programs in their 2012 budget, while at the same time proposing a tax holiday for corporations' overseas profits. The cut in food stamps is supposed to encourage those "stuck in the system" to find "gainful employment" - which might be a problem given that there are so few jobs available right now. The corporate tax holiday is meant to spur job growth.

So let me get this straight: We're going to get America back to work by cutting welfare programs for the poor and increasing corporate welfare. The idea, I suppose, is that tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy will eventually help the poor. That's a convenient bit of logic. More likely, though, is that the rich have political clout and the poor do not. Politicians have fits of conscience about this and dream up Orwellian fables meant to justify their neglect of the poor. "Rising tides lift all boats" and such. Economic development is good for everyone, they say - but, as Archbishop Romero said:

What good are beautiful highways and airports,
beautiful buildings full of spacious apartments,
if they are only put together with the blood of the poor,
who are not going to enjoy them?

Speaking of Peter Enns ....

2011-03-23T16:29:00.000-04:00

Here is Dr. Enns lecturing on the problem of reconciling St. Paul's belief in a historical Adam with what we have learned about human evolution:

Midweek links

2011-03-23T11:05:00.000-04:00

Ken Ham is upset that Peter Enns is being permitted to speak at homeschool conventions. Convention organizers have responded to Ham's criticisms by barring AiG. Enns will be making the rounds promoting his Bible curriculum, which appears to be the very thing Rachel and I have been looking for. We're attending the Cincinnati convention next week and plan to hear Enns speak.
Daniel Horan, OFM alerts us to a NYT editorial noting the appearance of a new collection of Dorothy Day's correspondence.
Glenn Greenwald: "The notion that opposing [the intervention in Libya] is evidence of indifference to tyranny and suffering is simple-minded, propagandistic, manipulative and intellectually bankrupt."
I've been listening to some Josh Ritter this week. Here are videos for two of my favorites (the second of which I've watched more times than I'm willing to admit):

Is homosexual desire a manifestation of original sin?

2011-03-22T07:15:00.001-04:00

A common argument employed by traditionalists is that homosexuality is a manifestation of original sin, just like the desire to be promiscuous. Just as one person may "naturally" desire to be promiscuous so may another person "naturally" desire someone of the same sex. These desires are natural because human nature is fallen, not because God intended us to be this way. (Interestingly enough, some traditionalists go so far as to say that even if it is ever proven that homosexuals are in fact "born that way" that would have no bearing on the moral status of homosexual behavior. After all, we're all born with sinful desires.) Therefore sanctification involves for one person the fight against the desire to be promiscuous and for the other person the desire for someone of the same sex.

I disagree with this - and here is why.

The origin of all love, including sexual love, is the interpersonal love of the Holy Trinity. Love at its best models the Trinity as a reciprocal, self-giving relationship.

Luther defined sin as being curved in on the self. Sin destroys loving relationships. In fact, one of the best ways to determine the sinfulness of a given action is to determine whether it destroys love.

A relationship is truly loving when it is reciprocal, self-giving, focused on the other. A relationship is not loving when it is focused on the self and selfish desires.

Everyone agrees that heterosexual desire is capable of leading to genuinely loving relationships. It is also capable of leading to destructive relationships. In fact, heterosexual desire is a neutral fact of nature. It is the actions arising out of heterosexual desire that are either loving or sinful.

Let's look at a couple of manifestations of heterosexual desire that everyone agrees are sinful, that is, destructive of love. Promiscuity does not lead to genuinely loving relationships because

it is concerned with fulfilling selfish desires rather than the desires of others
it actually harms others by intentionally ignoring their desires, e.g., the desire for a committed relationship

To take another example, pedophilia does not lead to genuinely loving relationships because

it is incapable of the mutual consent that is a foundational requirement in modern sexual relationships, i.e., it lacks real reciprocity
it may in fact be a desire rooted less in sexual desire and more in the lust for power, i.e., again, it lacks real reciprocity

While I've only looked at two examples I am sure that every example of sinful behavior can be shown to be destructive of love. It seems to me to be a workable definition of sin.

Homosexual desire, according to the traditionalists, is the same sort of thing. According to God's plan, homosexuals are really heterosexuals but because of sin their sexual desire is so defective that they actually desire someone of the same sex. They perceive this to be natural but it actually is not.

Let's apply the loving relationships test to homosexual desire. Does homosexual desire lead to relationships destructive of love? In some cases it obviously can. But it is also clear that it also leads to genuinely loving relationships. It seems indisputable that there are large numbers of fully committed, perfectly normal, genuinely loving homosexual couples.

So is homosexual desire like the desire for promiscuity which always and everywhere destroys genuine love? It does not appear to be. Homosexual desire appears to be more like heterosexual desire - a morally neutral fact of nature. Again, sin arises out of what a person does with that desire.

The problem with humanitarian interventions

2011-03-21T10:48:00.000-04:00

Ross Douthat is clearly right when he calls the action in Libya "a clinic in the liberal way of war":

In its opening phase, at least, our war in Libya looks like the beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention. It was blessed by the United Nations Security Council. It was endorsed by the Arab League. It was pushed by the diplomats at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, rather than the military men at Robert Gates’s Pentagon. Its humanitarian purpose is much clearer than its connection to American national security. And it was initiated not by the U.S. Marines or the Air Force, but by the fighter jets of the French Republic.

This way has its advantages. It "spreads the burden of military action, sustains rather than weakens our alliances, and takes the edge off the world’s instinctive anti-Americanism." It also has its disadvantages:

Because liberal wars depend on constant consensus-building within the (so-called) international community, they tend to be fought by committee, at a glacial pace, and with a caution that shades into tactical incompetence. And because their connection to the national interest is often tangential at best, they’re often fought with one hand behind our back and an eye on the exits, rather than with the full commitment that victory can require.

But it's not even clear that this is a genuine coalition effort. In "The Coalition Has No Clothes", Justin Elliot posts this report of NBC's Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I am utterly conflicted about this. I despise Qaddafi's actions. On the other hand, though we are bombing Libya in the name of protecting civilians, bombing itself is notorious for causing much of the civilian deaths in modern warfare. I wonder, in fact, if bombing can in any way be justified as a method of war in light of classic just war theory. Bombing campaigns seem mainly to be used as a way of waging war with minimum loss of American lives. Obviously, the fewer lives lost the better. It also, incidentally, is a good way of maintaining popular support of the war effort. But bombing does always increase civilian deaths.

This is intended to be a humanitarian intervention. Nevertheless, violence always leads to more violence. There are Libyan children today who have lost their fathers. How much hatred are we fertilizing in those little hearts? I know. I know. War is hell. Justice is sometimes a very messy business. I also know these words of Jesus:

Jesus said to his disciples, "Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble." (Luke 17:1-2)

Recognizing God's work in LGBT Christians

2011-03-21T09:12:00.000-04:00

"And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, 'John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.' If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?" When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, "Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life." (Acts 11:15-18)

Here St Peter is recounting his mission to the house of Cornelius, a Gentile. In a vision prior to his mission God revealed to Peter that "what God has made clean, you must not call profane", which Peter came to understand meant that the Gentiles would be included in God's redeemed community. Some of the circumcised believers in Jerusalem criticized Peter for eating with and ministering to uncircumcised Gentiles. But when they heard that the Holy Spirit fell upon Cornelius and his household "just as it had upon us at the beginning", they realized that God was indeed acting in a new way and their response must be to recognize that action and embrace it.

I am hardly the first to draw upon this story when making the case for the full inclusion of LGBT people in God's Church - but it is, for me, a powerful and fitting analogy. Peter (and subsequently the church in Jerusalem) had plenty of reasons for believing the "unclean" Gentiles had no place in the redeemed community. They had Scripture and tradition backing them up. Nevertheless, God surprised them.

The LGBT situation is shockingly similar. We have in our midst numerous baptized Christians (that is to say, recipients of the gift of the Holy Spirit) whose lives indicate the fruit of the Spirit. At the same time they understand themselves to have a fundamental sexual orientation that is different from the majority. They understand themselves to be (and in many cases to have always been) attracted to the same or both sexes, or to have a different understanding of their gender altogether. Yet these are people who by all evidence are graced by the Spirit.

This, in turn, drives us to reconsider what we believe to be clean and unclean in the eyes of God, to re-examine our interpretation of Scripture and tradition - just as we have in the case of Gentiles, women, slaves, etc. We must not call profane what God has called clean.

The obvious objection is that we do not accept the self-understanding of those who, perhaps through self-deception, consider themselves to be at the same time Christians and adulterers, pedophiles, drunkards, or habitual liars. The difference, it seems to me, is that those latter cases are all cases of clearly identifiable moral or psychological defects. The person who is fundamentally unable to remain faithful to marital vows or refrain from raping children or resist alcohol or tell the truth is a person whom everyone knows to have something objectively wrong with them. In all of these cases there is very likely an underlying psychological cause. (Remember we are talking about people who are not merely tempted to do these things, but understand themselves to be fundamentally oriented in this way. This is a crucial distinction.) Psychologists, however, have long ceased considering LGBT people, as such, as mentally unsound in any way.

This story also illustrates why talk about "inclusion" of LGBT Christians is a misnomer. When we fully include LGBT Christians in the life of the Church we are not granting them a favor - we are submitting to and recognizing the prior work of God in them.

Schillebeeckx: Christ is the primordial sacrament

2011-03-20T08:10:00.000-04:00

Precisely because these human deeds of Jesus are divine deeds, personal acts of the Son of God, divine acts in visible human form, they possess of their nature a divine saving power, and consequently they bring salvation; they are the "cause of grace." Although this is true of every specifically human act of Christ it is nevertheless especially true of those actions which, though enacted in human form, are according to their nature exclusively acts of God: the miracles and the redemption. Considered against the background of the whole earthly life of Jesus, this truth is realized in a most particular way in the great mysteries of his life: his passion, death, resurrection, and exaltation to the side of the Father.

That is not all. Because the saving acts of the man Jesus are performed by a divine person, they have a divine power to save, but because this divine power to save appears to us in visible form, the saving activity of Jesus is sacramental. For a sacrament is a divine bestowal of salvation in an outwardly perceptible form which makes the bestowal manifest; a bestowal of salvation in historical visibility.

...

Consequently if the human love and all the human acts of Jesus possess a divine saving power, then the realization in human shape of this saving power necessarily includes as one of its aspects the manifestation of salvation: includes, in other words, sacramentality. The man Jesus, as the personal visible realization of the divine grace of redemption is the sacrament, the primordial sacrament, because this man, the Son of God himself, is intended by the Father to be in his humanity the only way to the actuality of redemption. "For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Personally to be approached by the man Jesus was, for his contemporaries, an invitation to a personal encounter with the life-giving God, because personally that man was the Son of God. Human encounter with Jesus is therefore the sacrament of the encounter with God.

E. Schillebeeckx OP, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, pp 14-15.

The class struggle and the life of the age to come

2011-03-19T10:25:00.000-04:00

What is wrong with capitalism is simply that it is based on human antagonism, and it is precisely here that it comes in conflict with Christianity. Capitalism is a state of war, but not just a state of war between equivalent forces; it involves a war between those who believe in and prosecute war as a way of life, as an economy, and those who do not.

...

Christianity is deeply subversive of capitalism precisely because it announces the improbable possibility that men might live together without war; neither by domination nor by antagonism but by unity in love. It announces this, of course, primarily as a future and nearly miraculous possibility and certainly not as an established fact; Christians are not under the illusion that mankind is sinless or that sin is easily overcome, but they believe that it will be overcome. It was for this reason that Jesus was executed - as a political threat. Not because he was a political activist; he was not. ... Certainly Jesus was not any kind of socialist - how could anyone be a socialist before capitalism had come into existence? But he was nonetheless executed as a political threat because the gospel he preached - that the Father loves us and therefore, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, we are able to love one another and stake the meaning of our lives on this - cut at the root of the antagonistic society in which he still lives.

Christianity is not an ideal theory, it is a praxis, a particular kind of challenge to the world.

Herbert McCabe OP, "The class struggle and Christian love", God Matters, p. 193.

McCabe's mention of the possibility of living together in love as a "future and nearly miraculous possibility" brought to mind Rob Bell's discussion of heaven. (Not that Rob Bell and Herbert McCabe agree politically. McCabe is a socialist. I'd be surprised if Bell is. Though don't tell John Piper or Justin Taylor about this post or that'll be the next controversy.) Eternal life is the life of the age to come. That age that is often described by the prophets in this-wordly ways using words like justice and peace. We are called to live the life of the age to come in this present age, to pull the future into the present. In this way we are to be imitators of Jesus, who not only exemplified this but brought about its possibility by his ministry.

I do not mean to imply that the life of the age to come means participating in the class struggle. Neither do I mean to deny it. I just made the connection as I read McCabe this morning and thought I'd pass it on.

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Eucharist

2011-03-18T12:48:00.000-04:00

The practice of the Eucharist is a practice of awareness. When Jesus broke the bread and shared it with his disciples, he said, "Eat this. This is my flesh." He knew that if his disciples would eat one piece of bread with mindfulness, they would have real life. In their daily lives, they may have eaten their bread in forgetfulness, so the bread was not bread at all; it was a ghost. In our daily lives, we may see the people around us, but if we lack mindfulness, they are just phantoms, not real people, and we ourselves are also ghosts. Practicing mindfulness enables us to become a real person. When we are a real person, we see real people around us, and life is present in all its richness. The practice of eating bread, a tangerine, or a cookie is the same.

When we breathe, when we are mindful, when we look deeply at our food, life becomes real at that very moment. To me, the rite of the Eucharist is a wonderful practice of mindfulness. In a drastic way, Jesus tried to wake up his disciples.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, pp. 22-23. Worth considering. I see that he has also written a couple of books on Jesus and Buddha.

Book Review: Love Wins by Rob Bell

2011-03-18T10:43:00.000-04:00

I was right.

Bell has been reading Capon.

I suspected this early on in the book and, sure enough, in the "Further Reading" section he recommends Capon's The Mystery of Christ ... and Why We Don't Get It to learn more about "Jesus in every square inch of creation".

In fact, the book makes more sense if you look at some of the books he recommends, e.g., Lewis' The Great Divorce and Wright's Surprised by Hope. (It may be true of his other recommendations also, but I'm not familiar with them.) What we have in Bell is someone who strongly believes in grace and yet is willing to question many of the assumptions of evangelicalism.

To answer the big question: He is not a universalist, at least not in any direct way. Actually, I think Bell's view is very close to Capon's (from The Romance of the Word, p. 9):

I am and I am not a universalist. I am one if you are talking about what God in Christ has done to save the world. The Lamb of God has not taken away the sins of some — of only the good, or the cooperative, or the select few who can manage to get their act together and die as perfect peaches. He has taken away the sins of the world — of every last being in it — and he has dropped them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. On the cross, he has shut up forever on the subject of guilt: "There is therefore now no condemnation...." All human beings, at all times and places, are home free whether they know it or not, feel it or not, believe it or not.

But I am not a universalist if you are talking about what people may do about accepting that happy-go-lucky gift of God’s grace. I take with utter seriousness everything that Jesus had to say about hell, including the eternal torment that such a foolish non-acceptance of his already-given acceptance must entail. All theologians who hold Scripture to be the Word of God must inevitably include in their work a tractate on hell. But I will not — because Jesus did not — locate hell outside the realm of grace. Grace is forever sovereign, even in Jesus’ parables of judgment. No one is ever kicked out at the end of those parables who wasn’t included in at the beginning.

For Bell, love requires freedom. This freedom must include the ability to reject the offered love. True love respects that rejection. So Bell maintains a tension:

God loves everyone and desires reconciliation with all creatures
Some people reject that invitation. They may, in fact, continually and forever reject it, thus creating their own hell

He believes we shouldn't try to resolve this tension - "because we can't, and so we simply respect [it], creating space for the freedom that love requires."

He is also not an exclusivist who believes explicit profession of faith in Jesus as Savior is necessary for salvation, though he is clear that Jesus is indeed the only way to God. This will be controversial with some, but it's a pretty widely held belief among Christians, even "conservative" ones.

Bell's hell is rejection of the eternal ("of the age to come") life God offers. This rejection creates all kinds of hell, including the kind on earth. Hell is a word "that refers to the big, wide, terrible evil that comes from the secrets hidden deep within our hearts all the way to the massive, society-wide collapse and chaos that comes when we fail to live in God's world God's way." Hell is punishment, to be sure, but punishment directed toward reconciliation, not retribution. The gates to the New Jerusalem are always open (Rev 21:25).

But God never changes God's nature. That is, God does not move from loving agent of reconciliation to wrathful, fiery tormenter. Bell seems to hold to something like an Orthodox view of hell. God's love is a fire, perceived as bliss by the reconciled but anguish by the rebels. St Isaac of Syria:

I also maintain that those who are punished in Gehenna, are scourged by the scourge of love. Nay, what is so bitter and vehement as the torment of love? ... It would be improper for a man to think that sinners in Gehenna are deprived of the love of God ... The power of love works in two ways: it torments sinners... Thus I say that this is the torment of Gehenna: bitter regret. But love inebriates the souls of the sons of Heaven by its delectability. (Ascetical Homilies 28, Page 141)

Bell's view of heaven is also quite good. It's very much a this-worldly view, similar to N.T. Wright's in Surprised by Hope, if I recall correctly. I'll give it short shrift, though, in order to close up this review.

Love Wins is not a rigorous theological work. It is, in the best sense, an inspirational book informed by theology. Dogmatic types will be completely frustrated by Bell's lack of clear, propositional statements. But he is clearly not writing for them. In fact, he seems to be ignoring them completely and focusing on those who have been turned off or discouraged by Christianity as they have encountered it. This could be a very effective book for those people. I'm hoping that those people represent a large part of its astounding sales figures.

If we crave light,
we're drawn to truth,
we're desperate for grace,
we've come to the end of our plots and schemes
and we want someone else's path,
God gives us what we want.

If we have this sense
that we've wandered far from home,
and we want to return,
God is there,
standing in the driveway,
arms open,
ready to invite us in.

If we thirst for shalom,
and we long for the peace that transcends
all understanding,
God doesn't just give,
they're poured out on us,
lavished,
heaped,
until we're overwhelmed.
It's like a feast where the food and wine do not run out.

These desires can start with the planting of an infinitesimally small seed deep in our heart, or a yearning for life to be better, or a gnawing sense that we're missing out, or an awareness that beyond the routine and grind of life there's something more, or the quiet hunch that this isn't all there is. It often has its birth in the most unexpected ways, arising out of our need for something we know we do not have, for someone we know we are not.

And to that,
that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire -
God says yes.
Yes, there is water for that thirst,
food for that hunger,
light for that darkness,
relief for that burden.
If we want hell,
if we want heaven,
they are ours.

That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced.
It always leaves room for the other to decide.
God says yes,
we can have what we want,
because love wins.

Exorcising Chase Bank

2011-03-17T15:29:00.000-04:00

I don't know if these people are acting on the theology of the powers found in Stringfellow, Wink, Yoder, et al, but I certainly support their action:

Clergy Perform Exorcism On Chase Bank To Banish 'Demons Of Selfishness, Avarice' from New York Communities for Change on Vimeo.

via Fred Clark

Wherein I, like everyone else, talk about Rob Bell and universalism

2011-03-17T09:38:00.001-04:00

So I bought and began reading Rob Bell's book yesterday. I'm in the middle of his chapter on heaven, which sounds (if I recall correctly) very much like N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope. It's certainly a this-worldly conception of heaven and, consequently, is very different from much of what you hear in blandly evangelical churches. It does not, however, strike me as "dangerous". Of course, the controversy centers on his view of hell, which I'll read about in the next chapter.

The most troubling thing I've encountered in his book so far is his tendency to format paragraphs
Like verse.
(Versically?)
Apparently in order to
Emphasize,
Call out,
Draw attention to,
His points.
And he loves him some adjectives.

But until I make my way through the entire book I thought I'd link to some of the better blog posts addressing universalism. First, Eric Reitan addresses some of the "pat responses" to universalism. I've not followed much of the debate (I'm not on Facebook or Twitter during Lent) but some of the statements made by critics of universalism show that they have no interest in really engaging in a debate (ahem, ahem). It's useless to talk with people who insist caricatures are reality.

Tony Jones says this article by Kevin DeYoung is what you NEED to read about universalism. Though I haven't read it yet.

I say what you NEED to read is Richard Beck's series. The posts to date are:

The most essential posts, for me, are numbers 3 and 6, where he addresses prophetic/apocalyptic language and the meaning of "eternal". He discusses Matthew 25:31-46 and concludes that Jesus is using prophetic language which reveals to us God's view of the present situation. Those guilty of not visiting the sick, prisoners, etc, are under God's judgment and will be punished. (Beck does not believe God is too nice to punish sinners. He just doesn't think it will be unending punishment. This is pretty typical of the universalists I've read, proving that those who think all universalists believe in a teddy bear God are simply wrong.) This prophetic message is and must remain "the leading edge of gospel proclamation". Jesus confronted his hearers with God's judgment on their behavior and we must do the same. "Consequently, a universalist can and should scream hellfire and brimstone with the best of them."

The difference between the universalist and the traditionalist comes down the road - after the punishment. The traditionalist doesn't believe there is anything after the punishment because it is unending. Beck-style universalism believes that the punishment is educative, not retributive, and all will eventually repent of their sin and turn to God. To summarize:

And so this is why 99% of the New Testament reads the way it does. The language of God's pathos, the language of judgment, heaven and hell, dominates. As it should. What we need, right now, is the Divine perspective, the view of heaven. And that is what the New Testament is preoccupied with communicating.

But in the remaining 1% of the New Testament we do get a glimpse of The End of the story. The story after the story in Matthew 25. ... There are places in the New Testament where The End is glimpsed, if only fleetingly. And when The End is glimpsed you see the universalist vision, that in The End "God will be all in all" (1 Cor. 15.28). That the fullness of Creation--all things seen and unseen--will be reconciled to God in Christ (Col. 1.19-20). That God "will have mercy on all," on everyone He bound over to a prior disobedience (Rom. 11.32). That through Adam all have died, but through Christ all shall live (1 Cor. 15.22). That in the end everyone will confess that Jesus is Lord (Philippians 2.11).

This is for me a profoundly satisfying way of reconciling the difficulties surrounding this issue. The threats of punishment are real. At the same time, the glimpses of a fully reconciled creation are also real and do not require explaining away. This doesn't mean universalism is the slam-bang obvious position. There are difficulties. But there are difficulties (much difficulter difficulties, I'd say) with the traditional doctrine. Thank God for Rob Bell opening up this conversation for us.

An exercise in lazy blogging

2011-03-15T13:55:00.000-04:00

One of my goals for Lent is to reduce the time I spend online in order to get a better idea of what is truly essential and what is just a distraction. One thing is sure: I've had more time to read through all those "starred items" in Google Reader. Here are a few I thought I'd pass on to you:

psnt.net explains OT wisdom literature mathematically:
1. Proverbs: if A, then A.
2. Job: if A, then -A
3. Ecclesiastes: if A, then Q? or -W? or who the hell knows?
I have discovered Bread for the World. It looks like an excellent organization. I'd appreciate any information you may have about them. I see the president has written an interesting-looking book: Exodus from Hunger: We are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger
The author of The Last Ring-Bearer explains why he reimagined LOTR from Mordor's perspective.
The Lead calls our attention to an essay on how we need to do Lent better:
We let desire become our master, and desire has no use for sacrifice. For centuries, Christianity sought to temper primitive desire for addictive pleasures, dominance of neighbors, hoarding of resources, and other idols that ruin lives. But the broader culture has persuaded us to cut loose, to obey our lowest passions, lest they fester into perpetual frustration.
Finally, here is video of FDR presenting his Second Bill of Rights:

Lent is a time for solidarity

2011-03-09T09:54:00.000-05:00

If you are anything like me, Lenten discipline (of whatever sort) is difficult. I begin to ask myself why I should bother with it. "I need to be self-disciplined" weakens as a motivation as the forty days wear on.

A more outwardly focused motivation occurred to me last week - solidarity. Take fasting, for example. Instead of focusing only on self-denial as the reason for fasting, consider also that millions around the world are going without food through no choice of their own. Regard your relatively insignificant suffering as a joining in with the genuine suffering of the world's hungry. When you are stricken with hunger pangs, pray for those who endure that pain daily:

God of the hungry, so many are hungry.
Rescue your hungry children,
fill their stomachs with food
and their hearts with gladness.
Send your Spirit to the hungry and to the unhungry,
until all feast with Jesus in the new age.
Amen.
(Adapted from this pdf.)

Yet remember the warning of James 2:15-16. Don't just pray. Find some way to feed the hungry yourself.

Solidarity gives an outward focus to Lenten discipline. Lent is, after all, preparation for Holy Week and Easter, the time in which Jesus put aside his own comfort for the sake of others.

Living humanly in the time of the Fall.

2011-03-04T10:19:00.001-05:00

Christians ethics, according to William Stringfellow, is the attempt to live humanly in the time of the Fall. Faced with dilemmas, we have no direct access to the judgment or opinion of God. To attempt to determine and then enact God's judgment dehumanizes us. It disrepects both our vocation as humans and God's vocation as final judge.

Some might reply that we do, in fact, have access to the opinion of God - in the Bible. There are several problems with this, but I'll focus on one that Stringfellow notes. The Word is event: not a dead letter but a living testament. The reason the Bible is important isn't because it is Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth or a magic book (thank you, Michael Spencer). It is important because it is the instrument through which the Spirit teaches us about both Jesus and ourselves. It is closely associated with the sacraments. The Spirit works on us through it - and demands our response. To use N.T. Wright's analogy, the Bible is like the first acts of an unfinished play. It gives us our starting point, sets our trajectory, and then calls us to finish it.

A limited view of the Bible - one that sees it as an inerrant holy book to be interpreted (to use that horrible word) literally - denies this dynamic relationship. It puts us in a straightjacket, rather than liberating us to live it out in our own context, to join in the ongoing conversation. Here's Stringfellow:

Any literalistic interpretations of the Bible are a false pretense - a substitute for rather than a type of exegesis - which violates by their verbatim mechanics the Bible's generic virtue as a living testament. They devalue the humanity of the reader of listener by assigning the person a narrow and passive role depleted of the dignity of participation in encounter with the biblical Word which the vitality of the Word itself at once invites and teaches.

Or, as Thom Stark says, inerrancy stunts your growth as a moral being. All sorts of evils are justified in the name of inerrancy. Genocide, for example, is excused because the Bible says God ordered it. "God's ways are not our ways". Well, yes, but God's ways are not evil either. If I have to choose between 1. The Bible is inerrant and therefore God ordered genocide or 2. The Bible is wrong about God ordering genocide, then I will unhesitatingly choose #2. No view of the inspiration and authority of the Bible is worth the price of #1.

So we do not have in the Bible as book of God's opinions. What we do have is a book used, in conjunction with the sacraments, as an instrument of God's action in our lives. There is no need, in the name of biblical authority and inspiration, to use the Bible to justify believing or doing things that either dehumanize us or monstracize God.

Rather than attempting to peek into the mind of God we should attempt to live as Jesus lived - in love, prayer, and self-sacrifice. He was not afraid to overturn what was previously understood to be the clear will of God if it meant living in a more fully human way. It is our duty to live in humble imitation of him, always with the "kyrie eleison" on our lips.

Wobbly music

2011-02-24T13:20:00.001-05:00

If you're interested in unions in general or the Wobblies in particular you owe it to yourself to listen to Utah Phillips' "We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years", an album of songs from "The Little Red Songbook". It is a live recording, which means you get to hear Phillips telling stories and interacting with his audience. Highly recommended. Here's one of the tracks:

Is the right to work legislation dead?

2011-02-22T20:26:00.001-05:00

The so-called right to work legislation in the Indiana House may be dying. There have been massive union-sponsored protests at the statehouse this week, culminating in the House Democrats leaving the state in order to deny the Republicans the quorum needed to proceed. The walkout is particularly effective because over 20 other bills could expire if they are not voted on.

Mitch Daniels supports the legislation in theory but has made it clear that he believes it distracts from more pressing issues. And if the Republicans were hoping for a show of support from him today they must feel disappointed. This plus the potential expiration of several other bills give me a reasonable hope that they may withdraw the legislation. I'll be joining the protest tomorrow so if Republicans could withdraw it while I'm there it'd really make my day.
See here for a libertarian argument against right to work legislation. In short, it violates the right to contract.
Here is George Bailey defending unions. Well, he's talking about the savings and loan, but this speech came to mind last night as I was talking with Rachel. Imagine that he is talking about unions and you'll see why.

Guns and religion

2011-02-22T16:17:00.001-05:00

This strongly worded post from respected Evangelical scholar Ben Witherington is worth considering (read it here):

To my fellow Christians that like to think guns and Christianity go well together - enough is more than enough. You are living in denial of the Gospel, and its time to grow up. 'Thou shalt not kill' does not have a codicil of addendum to it which reads 'except in self-defense' or the like.

My views on gun control have been in a state of flux since Tucson. I still consider hunting a legitimate use for guns, even if it's not something I'm interested in. Beyond that, though, I'm having an increasingly difficult time justifying the private ownership of guns explicitly designed to kill people. Witherington does a good job of addressing the usual argument against gun control in the post.

I came upon Witherington's post via Dan Horan, OFM. You can read his thoughts on guns and religion here and here.

Only a pawn in their game.

2011-02-21T08:54:00.001-05:00

Though I'm sure Dylan is referring to more mundane chessmasters, "Only a Pawn in Their Game" (written in response to the assassination of Medgar Evers) resonates with William Stringfellow's belief that presidents, officials, corporate leaders, etc., are themselves slaves and victims of the powers. They're not so much evil as dehumanized through serving the power of death - manifested by their struggle for survival.

Or, as St Paul said:

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

"Only a Pawn in Their Game" (Watch video here)

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed
He's only a pawn in their game.

A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin" they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof beats pound in his brain
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clench
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.

Love is the measure

2011-02-20T21:05:00.001-05:00

What we would like to do is change the world - make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute - the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words - we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world.

We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and dear God - please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.

Dorothy Day, "Love is the Measure", June 1946

The line about the "worthy and unworthy poor" reminded me of today's Gospel reading:

You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. (Matthew 5:38-42)

It makes me think that Jesus wouldn't think very highly of the common advice not to give money to panhandlers.

And, once again, I despair for American Christianity

2011-02-19T20:33:00.001-05:00

So Evangelical Christians' top three choices for federal budget cuts are aid to the world's poor, unemployment benefits, and environmental spending. They were also more likely than non-Evangelicals to favor increased military spending. This is yet more proof that American Christianity has become completely disconnected from the teaching of Jesus and enslaved to conservative politics.

As the slacktivist points out, it's not only proof of Evangelicals' "politics of spite", it's proof that they don't know what they're talking about. Humanitarian aid is a tiny sliver of discretionary spending and discretionary spending is a small part of the total budget.

I'll let him have the last word:

The combination of stupidity, selfishness and resentment for resentment's sake here is an unholy abomination that makes me want to scream and throw things. And I would, if I thought screaming and throwing things would help get through to these folks, but at this point I have no idea what would get through to them. Neither facts nor faith seem to matter to them at all.

The ideals of progressivism

2011-02-19T15:57:00.001-05:00

Progressivism at its core is grounded in the idea of progress - moving beyond the status quo to more equal and just social conditions consistent with the American democratic principles such as freedom, equality, and the common good.

John Halpin and Conor P. Williams, "The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America"

That linked paper is part of a series on progressivism from the Center for American Progress. In it, the authors explain the rise of the progressive movement in America. I don't intend to go into a detailed accounting of the history here. (If you're interested click the link above.) What interests me most at the moment is the seven progressive ideals outlined by the writers:

Freedom, in its fullest sense, including negative freedom from undue coercion by government or society and the effective freedom of every person to lead a fulfilling and economically secure life
The common good, broadly meaning a commitment in government and society to placing public needs and the concerns of the least well-off above narrow self-interest or the demands of the privileged
Pragmatism, both in its philosophical form of evaluating ideas based on their real world consequences rather than abstract ideals, and in more practical terms as an approach to problem solving grounded in science, empirical evidence, and policy experimentation
Equality, as first put forth by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and updated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Social justice, the proper arrangement of law, society, and the economy to ensure that all people have the formal and informal capacity to shape their own lives and realize their dreams
Democracy, the full participation of citizens in the major decisions and debates that affect their lives
Cooperation and interdependence, particularly as these ideas relate to global affairs, an overall humanitarian vision, and the importance of shared social and economic knowledge

Another essential point made by the authors is that progressivism sees in our founding documents the promise of democracy. They set out our national project. They are not, as some conservatives believe, sacred documents that must be followed in a literalistic manner, as a static set of principles. The are our starting point and their principles must be adapted to fit a changing society.

This idea hit me with considerable force when I first heard it clearly articulated by Barack Obama in his speech "A More Perfect Union", delivered in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy. This is the speech, in fact, that made me an Obama supporter. Our project as a nation is to bring to realization the promise of freedom that was, in fact, not a reality at the time of the founding. Obama:

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

Supporting unions, while understanding their nature.

2011-02-18T22:50:00.001-05:00

Republican efforts to bust unions both in Wisconsin and here in Indiana have caused me to do some thinking and plan some reading on the role of unions. I agree with this statement by Lee:

Unions are prone to corruption and abuse just as any other human institution is. Maybe it’s a Churchillian, the-worst-there-is-except-for-all-the-alternatives kind of situation.

What I think is clear is that (1) unions are largely responsible for many of the improvements in the lives of workers during the 19th and 20th centuries that we now take for granted and were instrumental in the creation of the social safety net, (2) there was significantly more economic equality during the heyday of union influence (I think that’s a good thing), and (2) without unions, there is no plausible candidate (at least that I’m aware of) for providing an institutional counterweight to the influence of the rich in our politics.

Or, in the words of Kevin Drum:

Unions have lots of pathologies: they can get entranced by implementing insane work rules, they can get co-opted by other political actors, and they can end up fighting progress on social issues, just to name a few. But they fight for economic egalitarianism, and they're the only institution in history that's ever done that successfully on a sustained basis. That's what makes them so indispensable to liberalism and that's what makes them the sworn enemies of conservatism.

Or, in the words of Joe Hill, as sung by Billy Bragg:

Lest I be accused of a naive view of unions perhaps it would be useful to consider them in light of the reading I've been doing about "the powers". What follows is only a rough idea. Suggestions for refinement are welcome.

The powers are those institutions or structures intended to serve humanity but, in their desire to take the throne of God, turn against humanity and seek to enslave them. The powers become demons whose sole desire is survival.

Unions are one of the powers. Their desire to survive is the source of those pathologies mentioned by Drum. As one of the powers, they are in rebellion against God in this era of the Fall. It is for this reason that we should not put our faith in them, i.e., we must not become idolaters. If we do we will become as enslaved to the power of death inherent in them as any fanatic is enslaved to his ideology or bigot to his race.

Though I can't speak for Yoder or Stringfellow or Wink, I do not believe that this theology of the powers necessarily means we must (or even can) separate ourselves from all powers for fear of their nature. Our task is to live humanly in the midst of the Fall. This means that in the course of our fight against dehumanization we will sometimes find ourselves on the side of one or another power. As long as we do not become their servants I see no problem with this.

So, yes, unions are not innocent and will do whatever is necessary to ensure their survival - exactly like any other power. But corporations and right-wing ideologies are powers as well. Unions have been and may yet again be a source of resistance to these forces of dehumanization.

Principalities and powers

2011-02-15T06:40:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago I finished reading Yoder's Politics of Jesus and now I'm reading William Stringfellow's An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land - so I've been thinking about the "principalities and powers" lately. (I read Walter Wink's "Powers Trilogy" a couple of years ago but I don't think I was prepared for it. Need to re-read.)

We're all familiar with Ephesians 6:12

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

A lot of spiritual, emotional, and psychological harm has been done in the name of spiritual warfare against demons. Because of this - and because, frankly, our scientific age has a hard time believing in imps trying to do us dirty - many Christians today don't know what to think about demons.

There's the liberal position that demythologizes demon-talk, stripping out all the supernatural and leaving only the existential. But this is also unsatisfying because we still believe the language of evil and the demonic points to something real. Take everyone's favorite example: Hitler. We can try to explain him in scientific and political and psychological terms - and yet there's still something about him that goes beyond all those explanations. There is a residual*, which we call demonic.

Yoder and Stringfellow and Wink point to a way of understanding principalities and powers that takes into account the mixed ways the Bible talks about them. At times the writers seem to be referring to actual beings; at other times they seem to be referring to institutions.**

In short, the powers are structures created by God and necessary to human flourishing. Think governments or religious institutions or ideologies. Though they were intended to serve humanity they tried to set themselves in the place of God. They are in rebellion against God and they seek to enslave humanity.

So in this understanding the powers are not invisible demons but aspects of the world's system. Spiritual warfare is not praying that angels fight demons up in the sky. Spiritual warfare is confronting the institutions that set themselves up as idols and calling them to their proper place.

There is much, much more to say on this but I'm running short on time this morning. There is an excellent blog series by Richard Beck, beginning here, which goes into more detail. And, of course, I'd recommend the books mentioned above.

* - The idea of the residual is one I learned from Richard Beck.
** - See Beck's fourth post for the biblical texts.

A second Egypt miscellany

2011-02-12T08:12:00.001-05:00

I am so happy for the Egyptian people, who drove out the dictator through peaceful means (apart from a bit of rock-throwing). Now we pray for genuine democratic reform

(Image via Sylvia.)

Some links:

Hossam Tammam argues that the danger of religious radicalism overtaking the political revolution is overstated. The religious establishment (Muslim and Christian) was mostly supportive of Mubarak - and, consequently, the people ignored them.
Timothy Burke says we should ignore the so-called realists:

[The "realists"] triumph on the fields of policy for a day, but against the deeper powers now stirring, stirring since the 18th Century all around the world, that realism is delusion. The political elites who try so hard to turn liberal democracies into dusty-dry technocracies reveal again and again that they have no real faith in the long-term revolutionary force of liberalism. Every declaration of independence, every constitution written, every proclamation of human rights, they have tried to limit or hedge or restrict those commitments before the ink on them is dry. Democracy, but not for you. Rights, but not there. Emancipation, but not so far. Free elections, but not where we need stability. And every hedge and limit condition since the 18th Century been a self-evident kludge, transparently temporary and provisional.

And so again and again, the realists, pundits and technocrats and advisors, find themselves dully amazed to be on the wrong side of history, staring forlornly from a ditch at the side of the road as their ride disappears into the distance. Eventually they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and say, “I knew it all along”. And a few days after that, “We must be realists about what will happen next”, as they restore a managerial composure, make scenarios, wargame out the possibilities, repaint and reframe what was for them a black swan event.
As Bob Herbert watched the revolution in Egypt he wondered about the future of democracy here in America:

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.
And now the fight for freedom moves to Algeria ....

Since you asked: My opinion about homosexuality

2011-02-09T11:52:00.000-05:00

After expressing my opposition to a proposed amendment to the Indiana state constitution designed to ban same-sex marriage, some people have asked me for my opinion about the moral and religious status of LGBT people.

Initially, I refused to get into that question because I firmly believe that the religious question and the civil question must be kept separate. Those who oppose government recognition of same-sex marriages must give a non-religious reason for that opposition. Opponents cannot deny marriage equality on the basis of their interpretation of the Bible. (And, yes, it is an interpretation. The moment the words on the page form thoughts in your brain you are interpreting.) Not everyone is a Christian who recognizes the authority of the Bible. Not all Christians who recognize the authority of the Bible agree with your interpretation of it. America recognizes religious freedom. Therefore, opponents of SSM must express their opposition in terms accessible to everyone. For example, those who defended California's Prop 8 argued that the state has an interest in promoting procreation. It's not a particularly convincing argument, but at least it is one arguable on non-religious grounds.

This is not to say that religious opinions should not shape a person's political opinions. Far from it. What I am arguing is that public policy cannot be based on religious arguments. We do this all the time with other moral issues like adultery, divorce/remarriage, etc. Of course, some people will still want to base public policy on their interpretation of the Bible. While they have every right to believe that, the differences between us are so great that I don't think we could discuss this issue fruitfully.

The essential question of the SSM debate is whether opponents can find non-religious reasons for opposing it. I have not. It is for this reason that I privately and reservedly supported SSM long before I re-evaluated my religious views on homosexuality.

Conservative Christians have generally been unwilling to consider the arguments for SSM because they fear that it will force them to abandon or radically alter dearly held beliefs. I believe that separating the religious issue from the civil issue is essential if we ever hope to convince conservative Christians that they can in good conscience support SSM, even if they disapprove of it morally. This argument for separating the issues is no ploy to try to get conservative Christians to change their religious beliefs. I genuinely believe it.

Having said that, I do not disapprove of homosexuality on moral grounds. Or, to state it more positively, I believe in the full inclusion of LGBT people in the Church. Homosexuality is the equivalent of left-handedness, i.e., a difference, not a moral deficiency.

The obvious objection at this point is, "But the Bible says ....". And to answer those arguments I am going to point the interested reader to some resources. Michael Westmoreland-White has written an excellent series of blog posts that covers all the essential arguments: "GLBT Persons in the Church". He addresses the biblical texts as well as other issues. Also, Bishop Gene Robinson has a less thorough series on the texts only: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.

These two series of blog posts will get you minimally informed on the arguments for full inclusion of LGBT people. In addition, I would recommend the following books, which I have read and found helpful:

A Time to Embrace: Same-Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics by William Stacy Johnson
Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality by Jack Rogers
The New Testament and Homosexuality by Robin Scroggs

I'd also recommend the documentary "For the Bible Tells Me So".

Next is a list of books that come highly recommended but that I have not yet read:

Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the NT and Their Implications for Today by L. William Countryman
The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology by Mark D. Jordan
Homosexuality and the Christian Faith by Walter Wink

It is my opinion that anyone who wishes to genuinely and thoughtfully engage in a discussion of this issue will invest the time in understanding the arguments of those who believe in full inclusion. Too often people simply react without considering the possibility that the issue is more complicated than they imagine, or that they could even be wrong. There are serious arguments on the side of full inclusion and Christian charity demands that conservatives give them a fair hearing, even if they remain unconvinced.

I am sure that my opinion will disappoint people I love and respect. I assure you that I think no less of you for disagreeing with me and I hope that you will think no less of me for disagreeing with you. God will make all things right in the end and I can only trust that God will be merciful with me if I am wrong. My opinion here is not based on a desire to be fashionable, but to reflect the love and acceptance of God manifested in the ministry of Jesus.

I am willing to discuss this issue with anyone who has taken the time to engage the arguments for full inclusion and has genuine questions. I am not interested in debate for debate's sake. I have been discussing religious and political questions online for over seven years and I know how these discussion often end up. I am not interested in that.

I believe we are seeing the Spirit at work in our churches calling us to abandon long-held prejudices. At various times Christians have changed their opinions on issues previously thought to be clear and unambiguous - inclusion of Gentiles, married clergy, slavery, women in ministry, etc. I believe, in time, homosexuality will be another one of those issues where later generations look back with bewilderment at earlier generations' beliefs. In baptism God has already accepted God's gay children. It is up to us whether we will accept this, or, like the elder brother in Jesus' parable, refuse to join the party.

G.A. Cohen's argument against capitalism

2011-02-05T20:21:00.001-05:00

Via Lee at A Thinking Reed. Wikipedia's entry on G.A. Cohen.

A miscellany on Egypt

2011-02-05T10:56:00.001-05:00

I support the Egyptian freedom movement. Here's why.

The universal right to freedom for every person is rooted in human nature. As a Christian I believe that God has given us freedom as a means of realizing our moral growth as servants of God and our fellow humans. Abridgement of human freedom, as by a dictator, is a violation of human dignity and thwarts human potential. Equal freedom for all of God's children is a right that must be defended by everyone.

Political freedom is a necessary condition for human flourishing. If we are to experience moral growth and exercise our duty toward the society in which we live we must be allowed the right to political self-determination. At present, some form of democratic rule is the best way to achieve political freedom for all people.

The Egyptian people have come out in huge numbers to demand freedom and the end of the rule of the dictator Mubarak. Since they have no recourse to a political process to end his rule they have been protesting in the streets. As freedom loving people we must stand in solidarity with the Egyptian people.

There has been some worrying on the American political right about how this will turn out, what it means for America, etc. Of course, some of this is well-justified. As Americans, after all, we should be concerned about what world events mean for us.

What is not acceptable, however, is any questioning, on the basis of what it will mean for us, of whether the Egyptian people have a right to demand the end of Mubarak's rule. If freedom is rooted in human nature then we are obligated to support freedom movements. We must never side with rulers who oppress their people. If a freedom movement succeeds and creates a government that is not aligned with American interests then that is the right of those people. Americans cannot and must not interfere with human flourishing in the name of "security" or "stability".

Too many Americans suffer from an intractable, nationalistic conceit that we are the judge and jury of everyone else on the planet. They have forgotten the Golden Rule. As Americans we would not want any other nation interfering in our democratic process. We would be deeply offended by foreign commentators saying that we do not deserve our freedom because we might use it to elect leaders who will not attend to the interests of foreign governments. We react strongly to American stereotypes perpetuated by anti-Americans abroad. Yet so many of us do the exact same thing, especially when it comes to Arabs and/or Muslims.

-----

One of the concerns on the right is about the Muslim Brotherhood. Following are several links to articles written by experts that try to calm some of those fears. The essential points seem to be that the MB renounced violence many years ago and have experienced repression and torture under Mubarak (and, so, hopefully would not do the same thing to others). They do share roots with radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda but those radical groups broke from them years ago. al-Qaeda, specifically, regards MB as sell-outs.

MB will, of course, have some part in the new government, since they represent a significant chunk of the Egyptian population. And they are indeed a conservative Muslim group. But to equate conservative Muslims with radical terrorists is pure Islamophobia. In short, we have no reason to believe that a government with MB backing will be, ipso facto, radical.

In fact, an article in today's NYT reports this:

Mohamed el-Beltagui, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist group that had been the major opposition in Egypt until the secular youth revolt, said that the organization would not run a candidate in any election to succeed Mr. Mubarak as president.

He said his members wanted to rebut Mr. Mubarak’s argument to the West that his iron-fisted rule was a crucial bulwark against Islamic extremism. “It is not a retreat,” he said in an interview at the group’s informal headquarters in the square. “It is to take away the scare tactics that Hosni Mubarak uses to deceive the people here and abroad that he should stay in power.”

Mr. Beltagui, who represents the Brotherhood on an opposition committee to negotiate a transitional government, said the group wanted a “civil state,” not a religious one. “We are standing for a real democracy, with general freedom and a real sense of social justice.”

Now here are those links I promised:

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Finally, a couple of the most moving images of the protests. I hope for more kissing and praying and less stone- and bomb-throwing - but that's easy for me to say as I sit here in peaceful, free Bedford.

Powerful, powerful anti-war poem

2011-02-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

The following was written by a Wilfred Owen, a soldier poet who fought and died in World War I. The Latin phrase which ends the poem, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" translates into English as "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country". It is a line written by Horace to encourage his fellow citizens to fight for Rome and was used by war-promoters in the run-up to WWI.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!---An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Transfiguration, deification, vision

2011-01-21T06:42:00.001-05:00

I was hoping to treat this last section more fully but this short summary will have to suffice. This will also be my final post on Orthodox Spirituality: An Outline of the Orthodox Ascetical and Mystical Tradition.

The glory of the resurrection is connected with another event in Jesus' life, the transfiguration. Some more recent Orthodox writers see in this event a foreshadowing of the transformation of the world. But even apart from them the transfiguration has played an important role in Orthodox spirituality. The hesychasts, particularly, believed that a similar transfiguration experience ("the light of Tabor") could be experienced inwardly by the mystics.

The transfiguration is linked to the concepts of deification and vision. Deification is the normal course of Christian life in which the soul is unified with God. The process may be continual or it may be interrupted by falls, but it is the path of all Christians which is perfected "when Christ has attained in him the stature allowed by God to the capacity of that man." Visions are often closely linked to the unitive life. They are not limited to "sensory visions". Also included are: inner or intellectual visions; "the vague and diffuse feeling of an outward or inner life"; "awareness of an atmosphere"; consciousness of the presence of God; "divine light of direction"; a prophetic dream. Visions are the "anticipation and reflection, however dim, of the vision of God in heaven" and a "participation in angelic life".

Eternal life will bring the fulness of vision, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known" (1 Cor 13:12). But, in this earthly life, every Christian, whoever he may be, can obtain at least a glimpse of the Vision. Some ray from the glory of God may be granted to him. These glimpses, these rays, are often given; far more often than we think. And it is only because of these gracious gifts that many who are heavily laden are able to live on. The Face of our Lord can be dimly reflected in the mirror of the heart of man. If the Lord Jesus calls us and says: "What will ye that I shall do unto you?" let us answer: "Lord, that our eyes may be opened" (Matt 20:32 ff). For a vision is destined to every man. And blessed are they who, at the journey's end, can say: "I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision" (Acts 26:19).

Christ our Passover

2011-01-08T08:32:00.001-05:00

Notes on chapter five of Orthodox Spirituality: An Outline of the Orthodox Ascetical and Mystical Tradition, "Christ our Passover".

The Paschal Lamb. "Eucharistic grace fulfills the grace of Baptism and the grace of Chrisma." The Paschal Mystery consists of the Lord's Supper, the Passion, and the Resurrection.
The Supper of the Lamb. "The fractio panis, the breaking of the bread, remains the center of the Holy Mysteries." The Orthodox Church affirms the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but does not have a theory explaining it. "The Greek Fathers nevertheless eschewed the crude literalism which might become a kind of Eucharistic materialism. which might become a kind of Eucharistic materialism. They warned us against a one-sided or disproportionate piety towards the sacramental action or elements. They knew the the Eucharistic sacrament is not an end in itself, but a means to a spiritual reality greater than the sacraments." The Eucharist is a means of union: "Communicating with Christ, we communicate with all His members. ... The individual Jesus, the historical Christ, was in some sense the sacramentum, the sign, of the mystical body and total Christ, who constitutes the res, the full and ultimate reality of the Eucharist." Other Eucharistic beliefs/practices:
- Orthodox Christians generally do not commune frequently, though there is a strong tradition in the Fathers for frequent communion. Augustine recommends that everyone act according to their conscience here.
- Jesus is himself the "real and invisible priest" in the Eucharist.
- The faithful offer small loaves of bread, prosphorai, which the priest slices into small bits. These pieces are not consecrated, but are placed inside the chalice after the wine has been distributed. This symbolizes the union of Christians with the sacrifice of Christ.
- The Eucharist is not a "new immolation" of Jesus. "Our present Eucharists are offerings, actualizations, applications of this one all-sufficient Sacrifice." They are "unbloody sacrifices" of praise.
The Blood of the Lamb. It is not true that the Orthodox church gives less consideration to the Cross than the Western church. The Cross is commemorated in the Orthodox liturgy numerous times. They do not, however, have realistic depictions of Christ on the cross, preferring to keep crucifixion and resurrection together by depicting Christ on the cross as a victor. There is a veneration and mysticism of the wounds of Jesus in Orthodoxy. Linked to these things is the Orthodox passionate feeling for the martyrs and its traditional "evangelical non-resistance to violence".
The Marriage of the Lamb. The Bride of Christ is the Church, but "nuptial analogies" have also been used of the relationship between Christ and individual Christians, e.g., virgins, martyrs, mystics. Although Orthodoxy sets virginity above matrimony, the union between a husband and a wife is "a sharing in the marriage between the Lamb and the Church."
The Triumph of the Lamb. "Christ immolated is also the risen Christ." A peculiarity of the Orthodox church is the way they give the grave of Christ "a kind of predominance" over the cross. Another difference in emphasis between East and West is the way that the Orthodox keep cross and resurrection together, not limiting Easter joy to the resurrection only. [Comments: This seems a little unfair. Even so, I prefer proceeding through Holy Week at a more deliberate pace, not jumping ahead to the end of the story.] Gillet concludes with a section on the Transfiguration, deification, and vision, which I will discuss in a separate post.

The self-immolation of parenting

2011-01-07T08:40:00.001-05:00

The goal of healthy parenting is children who are capable, upon reaching adulthood, of creating their own lives. That is, the goal of parents is to render themselves unnecessary. As the years pass and children grow in independence, parents must learn to let them go. But it is only in achieving the death of the relationship of necessity that a new relationship of mutuality can be resurrected.

Christ, the sender of the Spirit

2011-01-07T05:41:00.001-05:00

Notes on chapter four of Orthodox Spirituality: An Outline of the Orthodox Ascetical and Mystical Tradition, "Christ, the sender of the Spirit".

The grace of Pentecost. "The grace of Pentecost follows and completes on the grace of Baptism." Water and Spirit are linked numerous times in Scripture. Chrisma (the Eastern equivalent of Confirmation) is the "external expression of the mystery of our participation in the Holy Spirit", though, as with baptism, the Spirit cannot be "exclusively identified" with Chrisma (i.e., others are given the Spirit apart from it). "The Holy Ghost does not replace Christ and does not serve as His substitute, but He prepares us for Christ and achieves in us the Parousia, the eternal coming and Presence of Jesus the Lord."
The Anointing. "Our Chrismation is an extension of, and a sharing in, the unction of our Lord [Christos, the Anointed] with the Holy Ghost, accomplished by the Father." "The sacramental link between the Spirit and the oil or balsam of Chrisma or Confirmation was sometimes conceived by the Fathers as being parallel to the link between Christ and the Eucharistic elements", though the Orthodox church proposes no theory about the relationship.
The seal. The Holy Ghost is spoken of in the Scriptures as a seal, but as a seal with reference to Christ. "The sealing by the Holy Ghost means therefore that the Spirit imprints on us the Father's likeness, that is, the Lord Jesus Himself." "In the Orthodox Church, the priest anoints the Christian's organs of sense, saying at each anointing: 'The seal of the gift of the Holy Ghost.'" This sealing is both ascetical and mystical. Ascetical in that we dedicate our senses to God, shutting out from them anything opposed to God. The mystical aspect is discussed next.
The new spiritual senses. This gift of grace is the "opening of our senses to realities until then unperceived, untasted." This is not merely symbolic. The lives of the saints provide evidence of the physical senses opened up to spiritual realities, e.g., visions, voices.
Charismatic life. The gifts of the Spirit are given to the Church for all times. The Orthodox church does not have a rigid enumeration of these gifts. Their purpose is "the sanctification of the man who holds it and ... the edification of other people." Though these gifts are normally manifested in saints, there is also a communication of Pentecostal grace in the ordination of bishops, priests, and deacons, i.e., they are not mere administrators. The reason these gifts are seen as exceptional today is our lack of faith. The Eastern church is much more open to asking for the demonstration of these gifts than the Western church, though she agrees that the gifts are not the aim of the Christian life. The gifts and miracles of the Spirit are "a return to the primitive, free state of creation, i.e., a world entirely transparent to the glory of God." The saints and charismatics "are the liberators of the world."
Pentecost and Illumination. "If Baptismal grace mainly corresponds to what has been called the way or life of purification, Pentecostal grace corresponds, rather, to the illuminative life. At this stage, spiritual life becomes less subjective. Our doubts, difficulties, and emotional flights cease to be foremost." The experience of the divine darkness is the beginning of the illuminative life in which the Holy Ghost works directly upon the soul. [Comments: This is perhaps at odds with (what I believe is) the Lutheran view that God only works through means, not directly. But, then, Lutheran theology is uncomfortable with mystical experience while Orthodoxy clearly is not.] "Under the touch of the Spirit, the soul acquires an acute penetration, an inner and experimental knowledge, of divine things." The soul is given the discernment of spirits, knowledge of hidden things, understanding of Scripture, and habitual guidance in daily life. We recognize the true voice of the Lord in these experiences by determining whether it produces the fruits of the Spirit and by discussing it with our spiritual father, who consults the wisdom and tradition of the Church.
Praying to the Holy Ghost and Praying in the Holy Ghost. The Orthodox Church has few prayers directly addressed to the Holy Ghost. It does practice prayer in the Holy Ghost, in which "the words and the intentions are not our own, but are given by the Spirit, or a praying silence in which the soul unites herself to the unknown and continuous prayer of the Spirit."
The Christ of the Spirit. This section is discussed here.

The Christ of the Spirit is not merely the historical Jesus

2011-01-06T10:36:00.001-05:00

There's a fascinating section of Orthodox Spirituality called "the Christ of the Spirit" that I want to break out as a separate post. Frankly, I don't know if I agree with it or not. It seems to be in danger of cutting Jesus loose from history by separating the "Jesus of history" from the "Christ of faith". It sounds similar to what I've read about Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of historical Jesus scholarship, though I may be wrong about that since I have not read the book. Please let me know what you think. I'll summarize the opening and then quote Gillet.

The Spirit reveals "new aspects of our Lord. Christ, as disclosed by the Spirit after Pentecost, cannot be merely identified with the historical Jesus." He cites 2 Cor 5:16: "From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way." The "Christ of the Spirit has replaced the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53" (as seen in Orthodox art's predilection for Christ glorified), though his sacrifice remains salvific.

To the Orthodox mind a "back-to-Jesus" movement, stripping the Gospel of all its supposed "later accretions", would not constitute progress. Real progress consists in becoming more and more deeply conscious of the presence and action of our Lord in all the phases of human life and of our own life. The "Galiliean Gospel", the ipsissima verba of Jesus, cannot be isolated from the interpretations put upon it by the eye-witnesses of His Life and the ministers of His words. Modern criticism has made it perfectly clear that the Sermon on the Mount, taken by itself, does not provide an adequate explanation of the rise of Christianity. The vitalizing centre of Christian thought and devotion was neither a body of ethical teaching, simply relating the individual to his Father and Maker (Harnack, Tolstoi), nor a mere eschatalogical expectation (Schweitzer). Christianity was a stream of charismatic life flowing out with torrential might from Palestine upon the Greco-Roman world. It was a new spring-tide of the Spirit. Out of faith in, nay, out of experience of the risen and exalted Christ and the manifestation of His Glory grew the whole efflorescence of prayer and belief, of grace and self-giving, which we call the Holy Catholic Church. "Christ", on our lips, is no longer the exact equivalent of the name "Jesus" or of the Jewish title "Messiah". When we say "Christ", we think of the Pentecostal Christ, of the spiritual Lord of the new life. It is this spiritual Christ, and not merely the Christ of history, who was the source of Christianity. The confession of faith of the first Christian generation was: "Jesus is the Lord" (Kyrios Christos). But during the same period Paul wrote: "The Lord is the Spirit - Kyrios to Pneuma" (2 Cor 3:17). This equation magnificently expresses the fact that the Holy Spirit living in the Church is one with the historical Jesus, and is really the Spirit of Jesus (as well as the Spirit of the Father).

We have yet, perhaps, to recognize more clearly that the Spirit - or, if we prefer it, the Spiritual Christ (and by this phrase we do not mean to belittle in any way the distinct personality of the Holy Ghost) - is still a genuinely creative force among men to-day. Not only Paul but the author of the Book of Revelation, the Alexandrine exegetes, martyrs like Ignatius of Antioch, Felicitas and Perpetua, and many others, have witnessed - (the "cloud of witnesses") - to the Spiritual Christ, to the actual charismatic presence of the Lord, as the great fact behind the whole Christian movement. Do we believe as intensely in the reality of the Spiritual Christ? For the early Christians, the danger was of secluding themselves in the worshipping remembrance of the historical Jesus, and of perceiving but dimly the actuality of the Pentecostal Christ. For us, the danger is rather of localiizing and limiting the Pentecostal Christ within the Apostolic or sub-Apostolic times, and so failing to acknowledge that He is just as much present now as He was then.

The baptizing Christ

2010-12-30T12:50:00.001-05:00

Notes on chapter three of Orthodox Spirituality: An Outline of the Orthodox Ascetical and Mystical Tradition, "The Baptizing Christ".

Jesus and the Water of Life. "Water has become the sign of salvation" (Isa 55:1; John 3:5; John 7:37-18; Matt 28:19). "Eastern Fathers, chiefly St Ignatius of Antioch, teach that the contact of our Lord's body with the water of the Jordan is the principle of the sanctifying action of water in the holy mystery of Baptism." The feast of the Baptism of Jesus (Epiphany or Theophany) has a special emphasis in the Orthodox Church. It is more important than Christmas, "which she regards as a comparatively private event". On that day they bless water for the faithful to drink. Water is associated with the mysteries of light and illumination, so that Epiphany is also called the Feast of Lights. Light is such an important aspect of Orthodox theology that "it could rightly be said that Orthodox mysticism is a 'Light-mysticism.'"
Baptismal grace. "Baptismal grace is the 'first grace', i.e., the grace that communicates to man life in Christ." It continues throughout life. It can be lost and recovered. The Holy Spirit is given in baptism, though this must be distinguished from the Pentecostal grace of chrism, which will be discussed later. "Our Lord invisibly grants [baptismal] grace to souls of good will who, consciously or even unconsciously, are longing for the Water of Life. This has been called 'baptism of desire'." There is also a "baptism of blood" for unbaptized martyrs. The "baptism of fire" (Luke 3:16-17) is thought by some of the Fathers to be the "ultimate purification of souls and the final destruction of sin." Three fundamental elements in the Orthodox rite of Baptism:
- Liberation from the yoke of Satan, or Christ forgiving and healing
- The creation of the new man, or Christ conforming to Himself, the patter and archetype
- Incorporation into Christ
In each of these there is an ascetical (human effort) and mystical (divine gift) aspect.
The forgiving and healing Christ. Repentance, baptism, and absolution are inseparable. First, the soul must be freed from the power of Satan, which is done in the rite of exorcism within the baptismal rite. This exorcism can be renewed throughout life. Types of Penance:
- Inner penance, "being pricked in the heart"
- Public penance, prescribed for idolatry, murder, and adultery, but seldom used now
- Private penance (confession and absolution)
Penance is a "new baptism". The priest hearing a confession is not a judge but a witness, and the absolution is imperative, not declarative. "Whatever form Penance may take it must always be a breaking of the heart at the feet of Christ." Tears may even be a form of baptism. Some Fathers even believe that sins committed after water baptism may not be forgiven without the baptism of tears. [Comments: This is far too close to justification by works for me. Granted, the tears are probably seen as granted by God, but they don't always come.] Monastic profession contains a penitential element and is considered a second baptism. The rite of second marriage is also penitential. [Comments: The details of the rite as related by Gillet are unduly harsh.] "The mystery of Unction, in the Orthodox Church, is a joint mystery of bodily healing and of remission of sins" (James 5:14-15).
The re-creating Christ. "Baptismal grace takes away original sin, and penitential grace, the extension of Baptism, blots out actual sin. But the baptizing Christ performs yet another work. He restores the primitive order abolished by sin, and creates a new man." Jesus as the New Adam returns us to the "state of integrity" possessed by the first Adam. This is the true "state of nature". This re-creation is expressed with the "oil of catechumens" applied before baptism as a preparation for it. It differs from Chrismation, which comes later and communicates Pentecostal grace. The restoration of the state of nature, or better yet the nature of Jesus, is the grounds for asceticism. "According to Origen, asceticism is to make the nous [the rational mind, or heart] dominant over the whole man: the entire soul must become nous." Asceticism is "the good fight" against the main sins of gastrimargia (gluttony), porneia (impurity), phylargyria (covetousness), kenodoxia (vainglory), lupe (melancholy or acedia), katalalia (slander), orge and oxycholia (irascibility), pikria (bitterness). This are reducible to "the three fundamental lusts - the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, pride of life [1 John 2:16] ... which are but various aspects of one egoism: the self-assertion of the separated." There are four main ascetical methods for the defeat of these sins:
- The custody of the heart, i.e., "strict and permanent control of the imagination"
- Continence. Sexual activity is good, provided it is "directed toward the multiplication of the children of God and controlled by the Logos". As a result of human weakness, however, this is rarely the reality. Therefore, the Orthodox Church considers "the way of continence as in practice a safer means to perfection ... [and proclaims] the superiority of virginity and celibacy over marriage", though she does, like Jesus, bless marriages. [Comments: I'm far too Protestant to accept this.]
- Fasting and alms-giving. The Orthodox Church has strict rules for fasting, but, in order to heed Isaiah's warning in Isa 58:6-7, it does not separate fasting from alms-giving.
"The whole asceticism of the Orthodox Church may be said to be expressed in the prayer of St Ephrem which is recited in all the Lenten services: 'O Lord and Master of my life, grant me not a spirit of slothfulness, of discouragement, of lust of power, of vain babbling. But vouchsafe unto Thy servant the spirit of continence, of meekness, of patience and of love. Yea, Lord and King, grant that I may perceive my own transgressions and judge not my brother.'"
Our incorporation into Christ. "Christian life is more than Christocentrism: it is Christification." We are in Christ, made members of his mystical body. Mystical in this case means "secret" or "invisible", not symbolic. "Chrysostom insists: the baptized Christian is not only born of God, but has put on Christ; and this not only morally, through charity, but in reality. The Incarnation (ensarkosis) has rendered our incorporation into Christ and our divinization (theosis) possible." As St Gregory Nazianzen said, "What has not been assumed has not been healed."
The spring of the soul. The Christian life is not "the full summer of spiritual life. It is the transition from the winter of sin to the spring of the redeemed existence. It is the morning dawn, not the splendour of noon. ... These times of Baptism, of Penance, of conversion, of healing and forgiveness, are the blessed times of the first meeting, or of a new meeting, with the Lord Jesus."

The essentials of Orthodox spirituality

2010-12-29T12:50:00.001-05:00

Notes on chapter two of Orthodox Spirituality: An Outline of the Orthodox Ascetical and Mystical Tradition. The essentials of Orthodox spirituality:

Aim and means of Christian life. "The aim of man's life is union (henosis) with God and deification (theosis)." Deification is a sharing in the divine life (2 Peter 1:4) which causes man to participate in the love that flows within the Trinity. This union is the only way which humans can love God and neighbor perfectly. It is accomplished through the Mediator, Jesus Christ, and through the operation of the Spirit. It is a product of the action of God and not the natural effects obtained by human discipline. "The basis of the spiritual life is not psychological, but ontological."
Divine grace and human will. "The incorporation of man into Christ and his union with God require the co-operation of two unequal, but equally necessary forces: divine grace and human will. Will - and not intellect or feeling - is the chief human instrument of the union with God. ... But our weak human will remains powerless if it is not anticipated and upheld by the grace of God." Orthodoxy has a synergistic view. They did not face Pelagianism (as in the West) and so do not speak the language that arose out of that controversy. Their fight was against an "oriental fatalist gnosis."
Asceticism and Mysticism. "The 'ascetical life' is a life in which 'acquired' virtues, i.e., virtues resulting from a personal effort, only accompanied by that general grace which God grants to every good will, prevail. The 'mystical life' is a life in which the gifts of the Holy Spirit are predominant over human efforts, and in which 'infused' virtues are predominant over 'acquired' ones; the soul has become more passive than active." These are not mutually exclusive lives, though one may be predominant in a particular individual. "Graces of the mystical order are not necessary to salvation", but many of the Greek fathers believed that they are offered to all souls of good will.
Prayer and Contemplation. "Prayer is a necessary instrument of salvation." Cassian distinguishes three ascending degrees of prayer:
- Supplication for oneself
- Intercession for others
- Thanksgiving or praise
Contemplation is not necessary to salvation, but, like mysticism, is open to all. Contemplation is not "high intellectual speculations or extraordinary insight". It begins with the "prayer of simplicity" or "prayer of simple regard", which consists in "placing yourself in the presence of God and maintaining yourself in His presence for a certain time, in an interior silence which is as complete as possible, while you concentrate upon the divine Object, reduce to unity the multiplicity of your thought and feelings, and endeavor to 'keep yourself quiet' without words or arguments." A contemplative life is one that opens itself up regularly to these acts of contemplation. Contemplation can be acquired by personal effort (as the ascetical life) or it can be infused by divine grace (as the mystical life). In the West, St Theresa distinguished four states of contemplative prayer:
- The prayer of quiet, silent concentration of the soul on God, which however does not exclude distractions
- Full union, in which there are no longer distractions, and which is accompanied by a feeling of "ligature of the powers" of the soul
- Ecstatic union, in which the soul "goes out of itself"
- Transforming union, or spiritual marriage
The Greek fathers do not have such a strict classification, but it does parallel their thought. The first two stages are degrees of hesychia and are "the normal end of any habitual and loving prayer-life", though, again, love is the perfection of the Christian life, not contemplation.
The Holy Mysteries, i.e., (in Western terms) the sacraments. The Orthodox church believes "the sacraments are not mere symbols of divine things, but that the gift of a spiritual reality is attached to the sign perceptible by the senses." They are reluctant to give exact definitions of the mysteries, e.g., the eucharistic presence. "The Orthodox Church wants a mystery to remain a 'mystery', and not to become a theorem, or a juridical institution." They agree with the scholastic axiom that "God is not bound to the sacraments" and do not assert that those who are outside the Orthodox church are deprived of grace.
The Communion of Saints. "The worship of the saints is not latreia, the adoration due to God, but douleia, service or sebasmos, veneration." In addition to the apostles, the martyrs, and the other saints, the Orthodox church also venerates OT saints and the angels. The Greek fathers particularly emphasized guardian angels. "At the summit of the celestial hierarchy is the Theotokos, the blessed Virgin Mary." The Council of Ephesus (431) was key here. The most Orthodox form of piety toward Mary is based on the Gospel texts themselves, e.g., Luke 1:28, 38; John 2:3, 5; Luke 11:27-28; John 19:26-27. Ikons occupy an important place in prayer. They are designed not as a resemblance of the subject but as a stylized symbol or hieroglyph. "While the likeness is for the West a means of evocation and teaching, the Eastern ikon is a means of communion."
The stages of the spiritual life. The western distinction between the three stages of the spiritual life (purgative, illuminative, and unitive) has correlations in the Orthodox church. More authoritative, however, is the view that the three holy mysteries - Baptism, Chrisma, and Eucharist - represent the three stages in the way that leads to God. All the sacraments, sacramentals, prayers, and the liturgy itself are focused on these three mysteries. This does not mean that the spiritual life is "merely ritual life". On the contrary, these mysteries are signs of invisible graces, viz, Baptismal grace, Pentecostal grace, and Paschal grace. It is the realities behind the outward signs that are the essential thing.

The historical development of Orthodox spirituality

2010-12-28T06:59:00.001-05:00

I'm currently reading Orthodox Spirituality: An Outline of the Orthodox Ascetical and Mystical Tradition by "A Monk of the Eastern Church". I thought I would post notes on the book here, in case anyone else is interested.

Six elements in the development of Orthodox spirituality:

The Scriptural element. Certain books have been particularly influential:
- The Psalms, through their use in both public worship and monastic life.
- The synoptic Gospels.
- The letters of Paul, especially as interpreted by St John Chrysostom.
- The Gospel of John is sometimes thought to have been particularly influential, but this is doubtful.
Traditions of scriptural interpretation include both the literal and historicist school of Antioch and the allegorical and speculative school of Alexandria. In addition to this there is the tradition of an evangelical spirituality, which stresses the values of the Gospel, on following Christ, and caring for the poor. Examples include St John Chrysostom, the rules of St Basil, St Theodore the Studite, St Nicholas, St John the Almsgiver. It also has a long tradition in Russia.
The "Primitive Christian" element, i.e., the first three centuries before the conciliar and dogmatic fourth century. Martyrdom is central here. Asceticism also developed in this time as a preparation, or in some cases a substitute, for martyrdom. It is also characterized by a belief in the imminent Parousia.
The Intellectual element. This is the Alexandrian school of speculative spirituality. Its main features are:
- Dualistic view of matter and spirit
- Leaning towards dialectic
- Scriptural allegorism
- Apophatic theology
The dogmatic formulations of this era were also brought to bear on the spiritual life, e.g., in Maximus the Confessor's interpretations of pseudo-Dionysius. Orthodox contemplative spirituality was indeed influenced by Platonism/neo-Platonism. On the other hand, in ethics and asceticism, Orthodoxy has also been influenced by Aristotelianism and Stoicism. There is also present a "'sophianic' attitude which might defined as an acute perception of, and communion with, the spiritual beauty of the world. ... This spiritual-aesthetic element is very strong in Orthodoxy."
The Early Monastic Element, i.e., the monasticism of the desert fathers. Desert monasticism differs from Benedictine or Basilian monasticism in several ways:
- Separation from the world is rigorous. The only "work for the world" is prayer.
- Life is directed toward contemplation and asceticism.
- Individual forms of monastic life prevail, though there are instances of communal life.
- Emphasis on fighting against the powers of evil. Demonology owes a great deal to the desert fathers.
- Prayers of a few words, e.g., the Jesus prayer, is a favored method.
- Apatheia was the supreme ideal. It is the "state of a soul in which love towards God and men is so ruling and burning as to leave no room for human (self-centred) passions." It is not apathy or Stoic impassibility.
Desert monasticism still exercises an influence on Orthodoxy today. "An Orthodox can hardly conceive of salvation without a certain severance from the world, without a complete self-denial."
The Liturgical element. General characteristics of Orthodox liturgy:
- Dispenses both Word and sacrament
- Elaborate, intended to convey spiritual truth and beauty
- Public worship predominates over private devotions
- Church calendar recollects the life of Jesus
The liturgical practices are to some degree influenced by both the Hellenistic mystery cults and the Byzantine court, in addition to Scripture. Beyond these characteristics, the liturgy itself exercises influence over theology, most notably in the work of Nicholas Cabasilas (c 1371). The veneration of icons, relics, the saints, and the Virgin Mary are also essential aspects of Orthodox spirituality.
The contemplative element, i.e., the "hesychast" tradition. Goes back to St Symeon the New Theologian and Nicetas Stethatos. Associated with Mt Athos and, later, with the theology of St Gregory Palamas, though it can be understood apart from Palamas' disputed theology. Four characteristics of the hesychast method:
- The striving toward a state of total rest and quiet.
- The repetition of the Jesus Prayer.
- Practices designed to help the concentration of the mind, e.g., physical immobility, breathing exercises, fixation of the eyes on the heart or stomach
- The feeling of an inner warmth and physical perception of a "divine light" or "light of Tabor"
Points two and three are ways to achieve the state of total rest so that culmination of point four can occur. The hesychasts, however, are not offering an infallible technique. It is also important to place this tradition in its proper position. It "may be compared with the great Spanish school of mystics in the Latin church of the 16th century" in its attempt to make spirituality more practical and accessible. It does not surpass or supercede the spiritual traditions that preceded it.

Cut military spending, strengthen diplomacy and the economy

2010-12-27T15:52:00.001-05:00

In his latest column, Nick Kristof says we must bust the taboo against cutting military and security spending. He cites some facts (the following points are direct quotes):

The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.
The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?
The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

He goes on to say that we need a strong military, but that it must be balanced with strong diplomacy. The problem is that our military budget is wildly out of proportion to our diplomatic budget. In fact, House Republicans want to cut the State Department budget further.

The world and the problems it faces are changing. Traditional military solutions, as we have seen in our very recent history, are not always effective; rather, they sometimes worsen the problem. There are several proven ways of "winning hearts and minds" that have nothing to do with the DoD budget. (Kristof mentions several of these, and not for the first time.)

In a New Republic article, Paul Kennedy writes that American power is and has been abnormally huge and that is must, like every other great power, decline to a more normal size. He doesn't deny that America will remain enormously powerful, but that the level of power we wield today cannot be sustained. It will take on more normal proportions and we must prepare ourselves for this. Citing Joseph Nye, he says that American power is like a stool of three legs: soft power, economic power, and military power. Soft power (the ability to persuade other nations to do what we want) is clearly waning. Economic power has taken a serious blow. Military power is the only leg that remains strong. But, like Kristof, Kennedy says that military power is not an all-purpose cure.

In light of all of this it seems to me (and my opinion plus a dollar will buy you a cup of coffee) that we should cut military spending and direct it toward strengthening those other two legs, especially since it is increasingly clear that it is an ineffective way of solving our problems.

Pray for peace.

2010-12-24T08:18:00.001-05:00

It's Christmas time - a time when Christians hear the angels proclaim peace on earth and our thoughts turn to the Holy Land. It is fitting then to remember and pray about the plight of Christians in the Middle East. Here is a story about Iraqi Christians (like the one in the image above) fleeing in increasing numbers from their homeland. Here is a story about the institutionalized prejudice face by Coptic Christians in Egypt.

But we must neither limit our prayers to persecuted Christians nor direct our anger at their persecutors. That would be to ignore the command of Jesus to love our neighbors and pray for those who persecute you. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, yes, but pray also for the peace of the whole world.

A God who turns the other cheek

2010-12-21T06:25:00.000-05:00

In Patience with God Tomas Halik tells of a man who sent him a manuscript whose purpose was to disprove the existence of God. After advancing the usual arguments it suddenly turned personal as the writer expressed his rage at God for allowing the death of his granddaughter from cancer. It ended with the line: "You're a tyrant with bloody claws. I curse you!"

Halik:

With his litanies of atheist arguments, was the man trying to take revenge on God for the loss he had suffered? Did he really want to trample God into nonexistence? Or had the vacuum left by the God whose nonexistence he had so intricately proved been immediately filled by the "tyrant with bloody claws," the very God he needed on whom to vent his rage, because yelling into a total void is even more wretched?

Am I to write to him that the "tyrant with bloody claws" really does not exist, that the arguments with which he'd just filled so many sheets of paper were all true as regards that monster? A god like that truly does not exist - we are in total agreement on that score! But what is his prospect now? Will it help him to think that the death of his granddaughter was just an "accident," an absurdity without any meaning at all? Will it help him to be advised not to seek any deeper meaning in her death, to simply content himself with the medical explanation of the malignant process that cause the death of such and such a number of people according to statistics, and simply suppress the unanswerable question: "Why me of all people?" "Why her of all people?" Did it come as a relief for him to find in God a culprit into whose face he could yell all his pain because he could find no other culprit? And even if he found one - a doctor who had diagnosed the condition too late, or the mother who failed to seek medical advice in time - could he use the same tone with impunity when speaking to them?

Is it part of God's service to humanity that he "turns the other cheek," that he puts up with a cry that is even harsher than Job's indictment - or had God really hidden his face from this atheist, so that he wrestled with only a projection of his own horror and pain?

Or had the man never in fact encountered the Gospel, so that his religious world was actually the world of ancient tragedy, where all events in the world of humans are directly controlled by gods, and implacable Fate rules over gods and man alike? A Promethean revolt against the gods may have made some sense there. But the God of the Bible is not a cold-blooded director of our destinies, hidden somewhere behind the scenes of the historical stage. He personally entered the history of our misfortune and drained the cup of our pain to its dregs; He knows all too well the weight of our crosses! Why revile a God who does not intervene in our lives like a deus ex machina in the dramas of antiquity, a God to whom we have access solely through the one who took upon himself the fate of a servant, "who came in human likeness," who "was accustomed to suffering"? After all, Christianity does not offer us a God who is to provide us with a life without adversity or who will immediately provide satisfactory answers to all the painful questions that adversity raises in our hearts, nor does it promise days that will not be followed by night. All He assures us is that, in those profoundest nights, He is with us, so that this assurance itself would give the strength not only to bear their darkness and burden, but also to help others to bear it, particularly those who have not heard or accepted His assurance.

He goes on to say that it is at times like these that we should simply "mourn with those that mourn", not offer contrived arguments. He concludes:

I still haven't replied to his letter, and I'm not sure whether it is due to cowardice, laziness, weakness, and the irresoluteness of my own faith and theology, or whether I judged correctly that any words in this phase could only pour more oil on the flames and salt in the wound. If I didn't live so far away, I expect I would have gone to see him and gripped his hand in mine. "Where was God when your granddaughter was dying? I don't know," I'd tell him truthfully. "But at this moment, I'd like you to feel Him in the hand gripping yours."

What have you learned?

2010-12-20T12:45:00.000-05:00

Andy and I have been arguing for years - though it does seem like things have settled down recently. I don't know if that is because we've given up on each other or we've learned how to tolerate our differences.

At first, I merely wanted to win, that is, force him, by the power of my arguments, into agreement with me. Eventually, though, I started to actually listen to him. I attempted to see the world through his eyes. Once I did that I quit seeing his beliefs and questions as threats to be defeated. In fact, I not only came to question some facile assumptions - I actually changed in important ways.

Your ability to answer the following question will determine whether you and your "opponent" are simply arguing from entrenched positions or having a productive discussion: What have you learned from her or him?

These thoughts were inspired, in part, by the book I'm reading now, Patience with God by Tomas Halik.

This mountain will be thrown into the sea.

2010-12-16T08:06:00.000-05:00

Tomas Halik, in Patience with God, says that the "mountain" of Mark 11:23 (which will be thrown into the sea, if we believe) is actually the Temple Mount. I was fascinated by this interpretation, which sounded very N.T. Wright-ish. Sure enough, Wright says the same thing in Mark for Everyone. I'm dependent upon him for the following.

It's important to keep the flow of the story in mind. First, Jesus curses the fig tree, which seems odd since it's not the season for figs. This is a signal that this is a dramatic or enacted parable, not an outburst of anger from a hungry man. We understand the point of the parable in the next event, the Temple cleansing.

The Temple cleansing is not simply about religious commercialism - it is a condemnation of the Temple itself. As Wright says, "The Temple has always been an ambiguous thing." Israel knew that it could not be the full and final dwelling place of God. Isaiah and Jeremiah made it clear that Israel would be blessed through the Temple, but that if they used it as a cover for unjust or immoral behavior they and the Temple would fall under judgment. By bringing the sacrificial system to a grinding halt (even for a few minutes) Jesus was acting out God's judgment on the Temple system as a whole.

The next day they passed by the cursed fig tree, which had withered. What does this tell us about the Temple? Just as Jesus had cursed the fig tree and it withered, so would his curse against the Temple bring it to an end. It is at this point that he says:

"Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea', and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses."

Judging by the context, the mountain Jesus is referring to is the Temple Mount. This is not a promise that if you pray in faith God will "move your mountains". This is about the passing away of the Temple system and the coming of the kingdom of God in the ministry of Jesus. Read in this way, Jesus' statement reminds me forcefully of the words of the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." In saying these words we are joining with Jesus in prayer for the coming of God's kingdom and, by implication, the casting down of all competing kingdoms. Since this is prayer according to the will of God we are assured that it will come to pass. But note that this is not to be prayed in a spirit of anger, but with humility and the acknowledgment of our own sins (v. 25). Again, we see the same model in the Lord's Prayer.

In context, then, this exhortation to prayer is not a way to get God to fix our problems (because, if nothing else, experience teaches us that God does not always do that), but a participation in the work of Jesus. As Jesus predicted, the Temple system passed away. Yet, other systems oppose themselves to the kingdom of God in our day. We have this promise that they, too, will fall.

War's a banker, flesh his gold

2010-12-10T13:53:00.000-05:00

While Philip Vellacott's translation of Aeschylus' "Agamemnon" is, by his own admission, not very literal, it is powerful. Having just described the misery of Menelaus after losing Helen, the Chorus of Elders tells of the sorrow - and anger - of the Argive soldiers' families:

Such are the searching sorrows
This royal palace knows,
While through the streets of Argos
Grief yet more grievous grows,
With all our manhood gathered
So far from earth of Hellas;
As in each home unfathered,
Each widowed bed, the whetted
Sword of despair assails
Hearts where all hope has withered
And angry hate prevails.
They sent forth men to battle,
But no such men return;
And home, to claim their welcome,
Come ashes in an urn.

For War’s a banker, flesh his gold.
There by the furnace of Troy’s field,
Where thrust meets thrust, he sits to hold
His scale, and watch the spear-point sway;
And back to waiting homes he sends
Slag from the ore, a little dust
To drain hot tears from hearts of friends;
Good measure, safely stored and sealed
In a convenient jar – the just
Price for the man they sent away.
They praise him through their tears, and say,
"He was a solder!" or, "He died
Nobly, with death on every side!"
And fierce resentment mutters low,
"Yes – for another’s wife!" And so
From grief springs gall, which fear must hide
Let kings and their revenges go!
But under Ilion’s wall the dead,
Heirs of her earth, lie chambered deep;
While she, whose living blood they shed,
Covers her conquerors in sleep.

A nation’s voice, enforced with anger,
Strikes deadly as a public curse.
I wait for word of hidden danger,
And fear lest bad give place to worse.
God marks that man with watchful eyes
Who counts his killed by companies;
And when his luck, his proud success,
Forgets the law of righteousness,
Then the dark Furies launch at length
A counter-blow to crush his strength
And cloud his brightness, till the dim
Pit of oblivion swallows him.
In fame unmeasured, praise too high,
Lies danger: God’s sharp lightnings fly
To stagger mountains. Then, I choose
Wealth that invites no rankling hate;
Neither to lay towns desolate,
Nor wear the chains of those who lose
Freedom and life to war and Fate.

Aeschylus, trans. Philip Vellacott, The Oresteian Trilogy, Penguin: 1964, p. 58-59.

The voice of the Lord speaks

2010-12-10T11:28:00.000-05:00

I was looking through some old posts from my various defunct blogs and found this from five years ago. I am not a poet, but I'm at least not embarrassed by this attempt.

Inspired by Psalm 29

The voice of the Lord speaks:
   Leviathan plays in the sea,
   The sons of God shout for joy,
   Man awakes.

The voice of the Lord speaks:
   Stars make obeisance,
   Oaks dance like dervishes,
   Waves clap their hands.

The voice of the Lord speaks:
   The snake crawls on his belly,
   The cherubim draws his sword,
   Man dies.

The voice of the Lord speaks:
   Children promised without number,
   A bush burns, unconsumed,
   The waters open like gates.

The voice of the Lord speaks:
   His handmaiden sings,
   An Infant is laid in a manger,
   God cries.

The voice of the Lord speaks:
   A mother’s heart is pierced,
   “Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit.”
   God dies.

The voice of the Lord speaks:
   The strong man is cast down,
   Angels speak to startled women,
   Man lives.

Mister Rogers, the saint

2010-12-08T11:42:00.001-05:00

Just watch this interview with Fred Rogers:

Isn't it wonderful how he starts asking Charlie Rose questions, with what appears to be such genuine concern? It's as if we're watching a private counseling session rather than an interview. (He was a ordained Presbyterian minister, after all.) I'll even admit to getting a little choked up as I watched it.

Brief thoughts on self-denial

2010-12-08T07:20:00.000-05:00

We believe that God created the universe not out of any internal necessity but out of pure self-giving love. It was creation for the benefit of others.

God, not being subject to sinful passions, can fully and freely love in this manner. Humans, on the other hand, being subject to sinful passions, must first engage in self-denial before any self-giving is possible.

Here we must follow Jesus. The culmination of his life was the abnegation of his own will in his gift of himself for others. It was self-denial oriented towards love. Take up your cross and follow him.

The Christmas wars are a failure of hospitality

2010-12-04T17:06:00.000-05:00

It's almost Christmas, and that means it's time to start griping about people saying "Happy Holidays". Right?

It seems to me that the Christmas wars are primarily a failure of hospitality on the part of those Christians engaged in them. Hospitality is a prominent theme of the Bible. "You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21, NRSV). "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it" (Hebrews 13:2, NRSV). We are commanded to be hospitable, especially to those who are not like us.

In a country with a variety of religions, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds the practice of hospitality takes on a new importance. Our neglect of it has led to our annual conflict - conflict at the time of year when we remember the song of the angels proclaiming peace on earth. Hospitality, among other things, mean making room for those who are "other", welcoming them, even learning from them. A hospitable person will not be offended by others saying "Happy Holidays" in recognition that, for example, not all of their customers are Christians. A hospitable person will not demand that their ways dominate to the exclusion of others.

This becomes especially ironic when we consider that the Christmas story turns on the issue of hospitality. Mary and Joseph could find no room at the "inn". This could be, in the traditional telling, because the innkeeper was a nasty man who only grudgingly allowed the pregnant woman to stay in the barn. There is an alternate version, though, that portrays the "innkeeper" as a relative of Joseph who did what he could to give them a place to stay, possibly in the family quarters since there was no room in the guest room/"inn". (For more information see here and here. It looks like Kenneth Bailey, a respected scholar, is behind this retelling.)

However you take it, hospitality is an important Christmas theme. It is all the more urgent, then, to be hospitable at Christmas. This means more than opening your home to your family ("do not even the gentiles do the same?"). It means making room for those who are not like us. If hospitality in a multicultural society demands that we modify our holiday greetings then it seems like a small price to pay.

The Angelus: A Christ-Centered Marian Prayer

2010-12-02T07:14:00.000-05:00

I have heard people defend Marian prayers on the grounds that Mary is only revered because of her relationship to Christ, that is, strictly in her role as Mother of God. Nevertheless, I've never been comfortable with Marian devotion, for all the usual reasons - not the least of which is that we have no promise she (or any of the saints) hear us.

I have come to see that the Angelus, on the other hand, can be read in a Christ-centered way. Here is the text:

V. The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.
R. And she conceived by the power of Holy Spirit.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

V. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
R. Be it done unto me according to your Word.

Hail Mary...

V. And the Word was made flesh.
R. And dwelt among us.

Hail Mary...

V. Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.
R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray: Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, Your grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His resurrection; through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

The context of the prayer is the remembrance of the Incarnation. We remember (in the versicle and response) and then we respond by asking Mary to pray for us that we may receive the word of God as faithfully as her. Read in this way, the Hail Marys are not prayers to an alternate, more compassionate mediator, but requests to an (the?) exemplar of faithful response to God to pray for us that we may also hear and treasure the words of God.

The lack of a promise that Mary hears our prayers remains as a real problem. There are plenty of standard answers given in any number of Catholic apologetics books or websites. One way of framing this, however, comes from Elizabeth Johnson:

Interpreting invocation of the saints within the companionship model of the communion of saints allows a measure of response to the criticisms rightly levied against its practice in the patronage model. To Reformation commitment that Christ not be overshadowed: the saints are not petitioned as intermediaries with a judgmental Christ but addressed as codisciples in a small act that strengthens bonds of fellowship in grace across the generations. To feminist passion for relationships of mutuality: rather than casting one into the dependent, subordinate position of petitioner typical of patriarchal elitism, invocation activates mutual regard and provides a vehicle for leaning on and being supported by the saving solidarity among all the friends of God and prophets. To postmodern spiritual agnosticism [with its doubts about the specifics of the “afterlife” and the relationship between the living and the dead]: read as symbolic rather than literal address, calling the other by name with a request for prayer is a concrete act by which we join our lives with the prayer of all who have gone before us in common yearning for God. Within the companionship model, invocation of any saint, in Rahner’s luminous words, “is always the invocation of all the saints, i.e., an act by which we take refuge in faith in the all-enfolding community of all the redeemed.” We dive into the whole company of saints through a single categorical deed.

The Angelus can be a way of imaginatively placing yourself in first century Palestine, witnessing the Annunciation and, later, the Visitation, and asking the Blessed Virgin Mary to pray for you. In this way it is a form of imaginative prayer, not a direct address to Mary, which sidesteps the problem of whether she actually hears our prayers. It is by framing it in this way that I've tentatively begun incorporating it into my prayers. Am I merely making arguments for a practice I already want to accept? Maybe, but you do it too.

Follow-up on healing and acceptance

2010-12-01T22:10:00.000-05:00

Julie Clawson has an excellent post related to what I was saying a few days ago in "The suffering God accepts you". She speaks from experience, having been born missing her left arm below the elbow. Here is an excerpt:

I have church friends (and yes, family members) who let me know that they have been praying for years that God would grow my arm. According to their view, if I only had the faith of a mustard seed then some sort of miraculous arm sprouting would occur. I've learned to take such responses in stride, knowing that their rejection of who I am says more about their insecurities than it says about me.

...

Few people would deny that it is hurtful to tell a woman she must become a man or to tell a black man he must become white in order to be a full member of the body and experience wholeness. But some people still assume that people who are differently-abled need to become like someone else in order to be whole.

Our faith celebrates the idea of the word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, yet we reject physical bodies that seem different. It is one thing to say that our condition as human beings is broken. It's another thing to assert that some people are more broken simply because they have only one arm, or use a wheelchair, or have different mental processes. We are all the broken body of Christ struggling to be in communion with God and each other.

Please, read the whole thing.

Marriage is a school of virtue

2010-11-30T12:21:00.000-05:00

There's a fantastic statement of the theology of marriage in Andrew Peterson's beautiful song "Dancing in the Minefields". First, the video:

Now the text I'm particularly interested in:

"I do" are the most famous last words,
The beginning of the end.
But to lose your life for another, I've heard,
Is a good place to begin.
Cause the only way to find your life
Is to lay your own life down.
And I believe it's an easy price
For the life that we have found.

What I like so much about this is how he takes an old joke about marriage and turns it on its head, drawing out of it Paul's comparison of marriage to the love of Christ. He then alludes to the sayings of Jesus that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for another, and that whoever loses one's life will find it again.

Marriage is the merging of two lives into one - "and they twain shall be one flesh". It is a school of virtue that teaches each partner to extinguish the need for supremacy by learning to submit to one another. When both learn to lay down their own lives they are given back a new, joint life that far surpasses the previous relationship characterized by striving wills. They learn to find their fulfillment in each other.

It's a risky business. We don't want to hear that we will be required to put aside our own interests, even sacrifice some things we think are necessary for our happiness, so that the relationship may flourish. We want it on our own terms - but it doesn't work like that. But, as Peterson says, "it's an easy price for the life that we have found".

(By the way, I recommend Peterson's entire album, "Counting Stars".)

"A tension within a deeper unity"

2010-11-21T07:27:00.000-05:00

Near the end of his discussion of St John of the Cross in The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, Andrew Louth says that the doctrine of the Dark Night is foreign to many Eastern Orthodox Christians. The Dark Night of the Soul, for St John of the Cross, is the experience of the full revelation to the soul of its sinfulness. It is the action of God entering into the soul and purifying it in preparation for union with it.

The Orthodox have a more synergistic doctrine that has the process of purification continuing throughout the mystical ascent to God. Louth cites Mme Lot-Borodine, who says that this difference is well illustrated in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a Catholic doctrine that states that Mary was preserved from the corruption of original sin (that she was "immaculately conceived") and thus enabled to give her assent to the Incarnation. The Orthodox reject this doctrine, in part because it is itself a rejection of the sort of synergism that is essential to Orthodoxy.

But Louth questions whether there really is a fundamental difference between Western and Eastern Christianity here. It's possible that the Eastern coolness to the doctrine of the Dark Night is a result of the monergism versus synergism debate - but perhaps the difference is a matter of emphasis:

For there is no fundamental contrast between the idea of our responding to God and the idea of our working with God. There would indeed be such a contrast if God were external to me, if God were not the One who has created me and holds me in being, if God were not interior intimo meo. But, in responding to God, "in whose service is perfect freedom", I find true freedom and so become a fellow-worker (synergos) with God. It is a paradox that St Paul lays hold of when he says, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure": here the ideas of your own effort, God's grace, and the fact that the fruits of our efforts in obedience are the work of God, both at the level of deed and at the deeper level of the inspiring will, are united. Here is true synergism that cannot be opposed to the idea of response.

There may, however, be a difference of style according to whether one is influenced by teaching on synergism or response as keys to interpret mystical experience, and these different styles draw out different areas of mystical experience. If East and West display different styles in the way they explain the same experience of the souls' engagement with God, this is but evidence of a tension within a deeper unity, and suggests that East and West have much to learn from one another here.

I find this convincing, but then I've always had a strong syncretic impulse. To me it seems to be a matter of missing the forest for the trees. All movement toward God is the result of God's prior action. Augustine's famous line, "Thou has made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee", locates the source of the desire for God in God's creation of us. In the course of our lives ("on the ground") our movement toward God seems to be an action of our own will alone. From another perspective, however, we can see that our movement toward God is in fact a response to the prior action of God - in Creation, in the Incarnation, in the institution of the Church and its sacramental ministry, etc. Maybe someone could show me where I am wrong, but Louth's assessment, that it is more a difference in style than fundamental disagreement, seems right to me.

The suffering God accepts you.

2010-11-17T08:45:00.000-05:00

Arni Zachariassen recently posted a video of a group of people claiming that a deaf man was healed (again, I don't approve of the captions inserted by the person posting the video)

A couple of days later he posted some further thoughts, part of which I want to quote here:

What I find deeply distasteful is how in some of the churches where divine healing is so focused upon there is a perverse undercurrent of spiritual alienation for those perceived to be in need of it - those who are sick, but most profoundly, those who are disabled. Not only the obvious problem of why, if God wants everyone healthy, the sick and disabled remain sick and disabled, but the deeper problem of sick and disabled not being accepted as they are and always being (kept) a few steps away from full acceptance. Acceptance by God, by the church and by themselves. The bitter irony is that far from being actually healing, this conception of divine healing is deeply destructive.

I know this is true, not only because I spent the first 25 years of my life as a Pentecostal, but from experience with my Dad. For the last several years of his life he suffered from Hepatitis C, then died as a result of complications arising from a liver transplant. He had many people praying for him in all those years. He went forward for prayer in the times set aside for the anointing of the sick. None of it worked - and not due to any lack of sincerity or earnestness on his part or on the part of any of the people who lovingly and consistently prayed for him.

For a number of reasons Dad always had trouble believing God loved and accepted him - a feeling that was exacerbated by the sickness of his final years. He believed that his sickness was punishment sent by God for his past sins and, further, that God was refusing to heal him because of some continuing, unknown sin. I and others would talk to him about the grace and love of God and he'd feel better for a while. Then the dark thoughts would return.

I don't blame anyone particularly for my Dad's spiritual torment. And I know that no one wants to claim that the sick and disabled are somehow second-class Christians. Nevertheless, the emphasis on and the expectation of the miraculous - and, crucially, the requirements laid on those who need a miracle - inevitably leads to this sort of despair. I wish that churches who emphasize the miraculous could learn what Arni goes on to say, "Maybe God loves disabled bodies, as they are, and the acceptance of that love is the only healing needed."

I don't know what I believe about the miraculous, let alone why some experience miracles and others do not. Frankly, over the past few years I've run screaming away from any claims of healing or supernatural action. Now I find myself more willing to accept the idea of the mysterious action of God. (I am, for example, trying to keep an open mind as I've been reading about the saints and mystical theology lately.) I cannot and will not, however, accept the idea that if a person is not healed the fault lies with them. That is indeed damaging theology, as I have experienced firsthand.

The Gospel is far more important than any miraculous claims. God is not dangling carrots in front of you. God is not playing games with you. God loves you and accepts you, whatever the state of your health. If it is your lot to suffer then the God who suffered on the cross will be with you and somehow bring good out of evil.

The likelihood of various threats to the planet.

2010-11-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

In yesterday's post I said that we can do serious damage to planet even if we can't literally destroy it. Lee passed on to me this post from Byron Smith in which he lists various threats to the planet and his estimation of their likelihood.

Destruction of the planet itself: Well-nigh impossible.
Destruction of all terrestrial life: Very difficult.
Destruction of all human life: Difficult.
Destruction of our civilisation and of the conditions under which large-scale human civilisation is possible: Possible.
Significant decline in human population and/or biological diversity: Fairly likely over the long term on our present path.
Downfall of/significant departure from the present mode of our society: Likely and probably imminent in the next few decades.
The ongoing catastrophe of history that we call progress: Presently underway.

If these things come to pass it will be because of our failure with regard to our responsibility of mutual care, which includes the restraint of our appetites. These are moral, not merely technological, issues.

What can we do? Byron Smith has another post that points us in the right direction: "Twelve responses to converging crises".

Does God's promise to Noah mean we can dismiss climate change warnings?

2010-11-11T19:05:00.000-05:00

Three points:

1. As for the text itself, as @jrhermeneut said, God's talking about what he will or will not do - not what we might do.

2. I'm not aware of any climate change expert warning about the destruction of earth (except in maybe a hyperbolic way). Some of the possible effects are rising sea levels resulting in flooding, a rise in species extinctions due to habitat loss, more extreme weather patterns, etc. These things, in turn, will also have political and economic effects. So, no, we may not destroy the planet but we could seriously screw it up.

3. This line of reasoning (i.e., God says the planet won't be destroyed so we don't have to worry about the "doomsayers") could be used to justify any number of atrocities. We don't have to worry about destroying the planet so we shouldn't worry about pollution. We don't have to worry about destroying the planet so we shouldn't worry about using nuclear bombs. And so on.

This particular justification for dismissing the arguments for climate change doesn't work. In fact, it's an irresponsible way of forming environmental policy. Tragically, this guy is in the running for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Note: The title of the video above is the responsibility of the person who posted it to YouTube and doesn't reflect my own attitude.

We can't go on living this way.

2010-11-09T10:03:00.000-05:00

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources. We persist in land-use methods that reduce the potentially infinite power of soil fertility to a finite quantity, which we then proceed to waste is if it were an infinite quantity. We have an economy that depends not on the quality and quantity of necessary goods and services but on the moods of a few stockholders. We believe that democratic freedom can be preserved by people ignorant of the history of democracy and indifferent to the responsibilities of freedom.

Our leaders have been for many years as oblivious to the realities and dangers of their time as were George III and Lord North. They believe that the difference between war and peace is still the overriding political difference - when, in fact, the difference has diminished to the point of insignificance. How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry - between, say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "tradeoff".

Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were, in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

We are involved unremittingly in a war not against "foreign enemies," but against the world, against our freedom, and indeed against our existence. Our so-called industrial accidents should be looked upon as revenges of Nature. We forget that Nature is necessarily party to all our enterprises and that she imposes conditions of her own.

Now she is plainly saying to us: "If you put the fates of whole communities or cities or regions or ecosystems at risk in single ships or factories or power plants, then I will furnish the drunk or the fool or the imbecile who will make the necessary small mistake."

(Wendell Berry, "Word and Flesh" [1989], What are People For?)

It seems clear to me that our American lifestyle is unsustainable. There is a limited, nonrenewable quantity of oil in the world. We cannot, morally speaking, continue to exploit third world labor to produce our goods. There is a limit to the amount of land we can turn into trash dumps (unless we become truly obscene and start trashing up outer space). The litany is long and familiar.

There is a lot of concern right now about burdening future generations with national debt. Tragically, however, we don't hear much concern from our political leaders about passing on a damaged planet and a corrupt, unsustainable lifestyle. This is because politicians know that Americans don't want to hear that they cannot continue living as if the world is their playground. Left and right promise solutions that cause no pain and cost no money.

But, as Wendell Berry says in another place:

The problems are our lives. In the "developed" countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.

The economies of our communities and households are wrong. The answers to the human problems of ecology are found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and in character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

There is, to be sure, a need for government action on these problems. But what we really need is a change in cultural values on the scale of what was brought about by the civil rights movement. There are, of course, racists remaining in our nation - but they are the objects of society's disapproval. We have come to understand that racism is evil.

If our future is going to be sustainable we will need to learn an ethic of care. Exploiters will continue to exist, of course, but they, like racists, must become the objects of society's disapproval. We must learn to see ourselves as members of a community that includes nature as well as other humans. What we really need is to learn to love others as ourselves, but I'd settle for an awareness of mutual responsibility.

The saints: Friends or patrons?

2010-10-26T16:01:00.000-04:00

There is a lot in Elizabeth Johnson's Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading Of The Communion Of Saints. It touches on several aspects of eschatology in addition to its discussion of the communion of saints. For now, though, I want to focus on her essential distinction between the patronage model and the companionship model of the communion of saints.

By the fifth century, the Christian church had begun to adopt the Roman system of patronage as a way to understand the communion of saints. In this understanding the martyrs and saints were seen as patrons, that is, someone with special influence (because of the holiness of their life and/or their martyr's death) who could intercede with God on behalf of their client/petitioner. Over time - and for a variety of reasons - the saints became understanding and effective patrons who interceded with a remote, even judgmental, Christ. The saints were pictured as courtiers in a hierarchy of importance, headed by Mary, gathered around the throne of Christ. Each was thought to have their own sphere of influence ("patron saints"). Mutuality was obscured or even eliminated. There were the saints and there were the commoners on earth, appealing to their betters for a favor.

The Reformation criticized this model, particularly as it manifested itself in the invocation of saints. They claimed that it obscured Christ's role as mediator and, worse, "it distorts faith, turning the 'kindly Mediator' into a 'dreaded Judge'". Furthermore, they said, there is not scriptural warrant for it and no promise that the saints can hear the prayers. The conservative, Lutheran Reformation retained the practice of remembering and honoring (though not invoking) the saints for three purposes:

to thank God for them
to allow our faith to be strengthened by theirs
to imitate them

Vatican II, according to Johnson, brought reform to the doctrine of the communion of saints that was very much in line with the Reformation criticisms. Broadly speaking (see the book for all the details), it moved toward a companionship model for the communion of saints. It recognized that the saints were fellow travellers - paradigmatic, of course, but part of the whole people of God. Ordinary folks in their pursuit of sanctity in everyday life were part of this same fellowship called to holiness. The system became more Christ-centered.

The companionship model is what we see in the New Testament and, according to Johnson, was the dominant metaphor for the communion of saints before the patronage model took hold. The phrase "cloud of witnesses" in Hebrews is the classic statement of the companionship model.

Johnson says that there is room in the companionship model for invocation, though she stresses that even in Catholic theology this has never been required of laypeople. Her concern, however, is to encourage those practices amenable to a companionship model of the saints. We should remember the saints and imitate them. We should thank God for them. We should lament their sufferings, which in some cases will inspire us to work for justice in our world.

Johnson did not mount a defense (or even much of a discussion) of the practice of invocation. In fact, she de-emphasizes it. As I was reading I also began wondering about Eastern Orthodox practice. I know they invoke the saints but I do not know whether they adopted the patronage model or if they work from completely different principles. Neither Peter Brown nor Elizabeth Johnson address this.

Apart from the issue of invocation, though, this is an excellent book. For those who might be concerned with the feminist aspect, there is no need to worry. She does criticize the traditional, patronage model for, among other things, its patriarchalism. I believe many of her criticisms are valid. Even if I did not, however, the critical aspects are not dominant. It is a remarkably helpful book.

Tolkien's tragic conservatism

2010-10-11T09:07:00.000-04:00

As I've been rereading Lord of the Rings (for the third or fourth time) I've become aware of how deeply conservative it is. (Perhaps this is because I have myself become less conservative.)

The most telling characteristic is the pervasive sense of hierarchy. Most people seem to know their place, even the bad guys - though for them it's a more servile awareness. Women play almost no role in the books. The chief exception, of course, is Galadriel. Arwen, who plays a larger role in the movies, more or less stays home - literally - sewing. Examples could be multiplied but I don't think it's necessary.

To my mind, its more distinctly conservative feature is its sense of loss and the diminishing course of history. Everywhere the travelers find signs of a lost, nobler age. Those with the greatest knowledge of the past - the elves - are the characters that elicit (in me, anyway) a sense of pathos or, more accurately, sehnsucht. They're painfully beautiful, especially because they know their time is passing away. The happiest of Middle Earth's folk are the hobbits, who have very little knowledge of history or the goings-on of the world around them. The wise are those who know that theirs is a lesser age.

This is encapsulated perfectly in Galadriel's idea of "the long defeat". The battle against evil is not a straightforward story of mounting victories. The number of defeats is large, perhaps larger than the number of victories. And even those victories are not complete. Evil is never fully defeated. The great battle between Sauron and the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, which looms large in the background of the story, isn't decisive. Sauron's spirit lives on and Isildur, who takes the One Ring, is overcome by temptation and refuses to destroy it. For those who fight the long defeat, battles must be fought without expectation of victory. It's not hard to make the connection to the conservative side of the culture wars.

All of this resonates with cultural and "temperamental" conservatives. Maybe not so much for mainstream conservatives, tied as they are to the fortunes of electoral politics. I suspect those types are less truly conservative than the cultural or temperamental conservatives anyway. Tolkien's conservatism is not that of the Tea Party or the neoconservatives. It's much more akin to the conservatism of Wendell Berry, who once said that he is one who mourns for what is lost. It's a tragic conservatism. I don't much admire the rigid hierarchy of Tolkien's work, but there remains in it what Lewis described as "beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart."