#250 Decision Making in the ANE

We all know that when we are drunk we don't make the best decisions, but at least the truth comes out. On the other hand when we're sober, we make better decisions, if less honest decisions. What to do?

According to Herodotus' 2,500 year old account, the ancient Persians found a solution:

"[The Persians] are accustomed to deliberating on the most serious business while they are drunk, and whatever decision they reach in these sessions, it is proposed to them again the next day by the host in who house they had deliberated the night before. Then, if the decision still pleases them when they are sober, they act on it; if not, they give it up. Conversely, whatever provisional decisions they consider while sober, they reconsider when they are drunk."

-- The Histories, 1.133

This best of both worlds approach checks two of humanities worst tendencies! All decisions are provisional decisions until the blood/alcohol content has varied one way or the other.

#249 The ELCA Vote and Macroecclessial Boundaries

While the decision that led to the split between the Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Church of England has been well publicized, the same decision made by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) at their recent general convention has received relatively little coverage. What's revealing is that the media coverage has been inversely proportional to the size of the denominations. The ELCA is, by rough estimation, about 3 times the size of the TEC in terms of membership. But I think it's pretty clear what makes the TEC/Anglican story bigger news: it is a division of a formerly united body where the progressives are in the minority relative to the larger body and where the decision did not take place in the context of a general convention of the global communion. By contrast, the ELCA decision is a majority decision by the general assembly of the whole body. I think that distinction accounts for a large degree of the difference in media coverage.

Both the conservative and liberal American Christian popular magazines of record, Christianity Today and Christian Century, respectively, have articles on the ELCA story. CT's article had a more editorial bent while CC had a more journalistic bent. The CC article pointed out that everyone was expecting that after the Episcopal decision that the next dominoes to fall would be the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) and the United Methodist Church (UMC), but speculated that the stronger southern (Bible Belt) constituency of these two denominations, compared to that of the Episcopal and ELCA churches has delayed that from happening. The article indicated that based on the demographics the PCUSA would likely be the next domino to fall while the UMC might not make the shift for a while, if ever.

My initial take is that the decision won't have a large immediate effect on the denomination due to it's semi-congregational polity and specific stance on the issue. They are taking a decentralized approach in allowing each congregation to make its own decision. The only change I see is the slow bleeding of members who find the decision unacceptable even though their local congregation might not be affected. But it's not like these churches aren't bleeding a younger generation of progressives back the other way. So only time will tell.

Ironically, the genius of the centralized polity of the Roman Catholic church actually gives them an advantage that no other church, otherwise governed, can benefit from. In their much-criticized policy of celibacy for all priests, they completely avoid the debate over whether to allow the ordination of practicing homosexuals. After all, practicing sex, hetero or homo, is not allowed for priests, period. The issue that the Protestants are dealing with is one of discrimination. The Catholics skirt that thorny issue entirely.

What's interesting is that the church is becoming increasingly divided by a criteria of their tolerance of this particular sexual practice, rather than over the doctrines that have traditionally caused macroecclesial divides, such as trinity, baptism, views on the Holy Spirit, etc. Without ignoring important distinctives, it has become hard for those outside the Christian tradition to distinguish between certain denominations. Of course, we can clearly distinguish Christianity from Bhuddism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. And it's easy enough to distinguish Orthodoxy from Protestantism and Catholicism. But the deeper you go, the less visible the distinctions become and occasionally, the more discouraging the distinctions become.

#248 Romans 1-4: Paul Borrows from Nathan

Reading the first four chapters of Romans, I can't help but think that the Old Testament story of Nathan confronting David is a pretty good parallel to Paul's method of confronting his Christian-Jewish friends in Rome. Here's a quick recap:

In II Samuel 12, Nathan is sent by God to David. The prophet tells the king the story of a rich man who welcomes a traveler into his home, but is unwilling to sacrifice any of his abundant supply of livestock to feed the traveler. Instead, he takes the only little lamb of a poor man who had acquired and raised the lamb like a daughter.

The king is shocked. He rightly recognizes the coldhearted nature of the crime and says that the rich man should not only repay four times the amount of the lamb but that he deserves to die. Then the Nathan turns the tables on David by telling him that he is the rich man in the story. David had killed a man and stolen his wife.

Fast forward to Romans 1-2, and we see Paul playing the part of Nathan while the Jewish Christians of Rome, and presumably the whole of the Jewish people, play the part of David. Compare the two passages closely. Paul, as Nathan was, is a messenger of God's truth. Paul, as Nathan did, tells the corruption of the worst sort. Paul, as Nathan did, misdirects the attention of his audience by not immediately identifying the true target of his polemic. For Paul simply uses the word "they" while Nathan uses the phrase "the rich man." So both audiences are right where these messengers of God want them, ready to issue condemnation on the ungodly and unrighteous.

But, just then, both Nathan and Paul turn the tables on their self-righteous listeners. Compare the two responses. Nathan says to David: "You are that man." Similarly, Paul says to the Roman-Jewish Christians: "You who judge practice the same things." The "rich man" in Nathan's story becomes the "David" of real life. The "they" of Paul's story become the "you" of Roman-Jewish Christians. It's almost as if Paul is taking a cue from his familiarity with the story of Nathan and David.

But this is not just a coincidental parallel for us. Rather, I think this is the key to understanding at least the first four chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, specifically that the first two and even the first four chapters are part of the same sustained argument. The indictment of the world in the first chapter is not by any means tangential, or an unrelated chapter in some kind of systematic theology of natural knowledge, but an integral tool for subverting the church's consciousness regarding their position before God.

#247 Interesting Links XXIX

Ben Myers points out the absurdity of the new "Green Bible," an ecologically themed Bible. This is as bad as the recent Patriot's Bible. Idolatry on the left, idolatry on the right...

I really like JL Wall's post on the banality of evil. He says that remarkable evil does not require a remarkable man. It doesn't not necessarily even require a bad-bent. It does not require bad intentions, and it may even result from good intentions, and dare I say a noble heart. It's important to remember the banality of evil. Wall quotes Leonard Cohen's All There is to Know About Adolf Eichmann: "What did you expect? Talons? Oversized incisors? Green saliva? Madness?" It's not enough to teach future generations about the Holocaust as bare fact. We must drive this point about banality home.

David Neff of Christianity Today is one of the few voices from the evangelical community speaking out on the torture issue. Why? Although, thankfully, Richard Land of the SBC has also spoken out.

I roll my internal eyes whenever I hear talk of how our culture is going downhill, or our generation is so horrible. "People try to put us down j-j-j-just because we get around. Talking 'bout my generation!" In contrast I think humanity is at the bottom of that downhill slope and has been since the fall. Read a little about the Roman empire and it's easy to see, we've always been there. A new study saying that teen pregnancy underwent an astonishing decline from 1970-2009 at least rebuts those who would talk worse ill about my generation than their own.

Ever wonder what Jesus meant when he talked about the sign of Jonah? So many of Jesus sayings are enigmatic to us today, although less so to his immediate audience. But I think Michael Barber has hit the nail on the head with this post which offers a reason why Jesus might have said what he said in this case.

In the Christian subculture humor category, Michael Spencer posts a few books ideas.

Nicholas Kristof says drugs won the drug war.

We did not have our son baptized as a baby as we both believe that baptism is a choice he needs to make. I've never really been too interested in the debate over infant baptism, though I was raised in the Catholic church where it was the standard, and spent my later high school and college years in the PCA where it was also common, if not the standard. I was baptized in the Catholic church as an infant, but then at the age of 12 at my non-denominational summer camp I felt the need to be baptized again making me a literal, if not theological, anabaptist. I now no longer think that was necessary, and yet if I had to start from scratch I believe baptism is for willing adults. I've never seen this better articulated than by Justin Taylor and D.A. Carson. Taylor makes an important distinction between the Old and New Covenants, while Carson tackles an obscure passage in Jeremiah that now makes a lot of sense to me.

Very cool images of a volcano erupting... from space.

I keep coming back to Michael Spencer's posts as he, every so often, has a post that really articulates where I stand on issues that don't get articulated enough in the public square. In this post he expresses one of my frustrations exactly. As Christians, we've all heard derivatives of the following phrase: “You need to pray until you find God’s will.” If those kinds of phrases annoy you as much as they do me, then the post is for you. If you're clueless as to why those kinds of phrases could possibly annoy anyone, then the post is for you.

The quote at this link sounds like it surely comes from some damn, dirty, smelly, we-are-the-world-singing hippie. But then you see at the bottom of the quote the name of the person who is quoted, and... Surprise! Not who I expected. Hint: He's 500 years old this year.

#246 Microecclesiology

By titling my last post as I did, I intended to distinguish between two ways of looking at church order and governance. It is not enough to say that the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church is divided simply along theological lines, for governance styles have historically played a large role in the process. But neither is it enough to generalize about polity without making a distinction between normative church order at the local level and normative church order at the global level. So just as we study macroeconomics and microeconomics, we can also study macroecclesiology and microecclesiology.

Macroecclesiology is the process of answering the questions I posed in the last post. Namely, how should churches that are geographically separate relate? I want to say that the New Testament gives us minimal guidance on that question, though we can identify a few general principles. In stark contrast is the New Testament's exhaustive teaching on microecclesiology. Microecclesiology is the process of answering questions about how the members of an individual local church should relate within that local church.

In Rowan Williams' letter to the Anglican Communion he is strictly dealing with the macro question, a question made all the more difficult by the sparse evidence for concern in the early church over what specific form polity should take. (Side note: need to check sources, not least the NT, on that statement). But my hunch is that his ideas in the letter are driven by a growing realization that our micro interactions (both theological and ecclesial) are ultimately closer to the heart of God, than are our macro decisions (both theological and ecclesial).

After all, my reading of both the Old and New Testaments makes it clear to me that the way Rowan, as one individual, loves or fails to love John Doe, one of his local parishioners, on any given Sunday has far greater eternal significance than the most momentous decision he could ever make regarding the seventy million member Anglican Communion's "official" views on this or that doctrinal position.

#245 Macroecclesiology

We are living in an exciting time when the leading bishops of two of the largest denominations that practice episcopal polity are both insightful theologians and clear communicators. I am talking about Joseph Ratzinger and Rowan Williams. I've posted some thoughts on Ratzinger's second encyclical Spe Salvi before. Today I read Williams' response to the American Episcopal church's decisions at their recently completed general assembly. Both are well thought out pieces that evidence the fine minds behind their words.

In 2003, V. Gene Robinson made history by becoming the first openly gay, non-celibate bishop of a major Christian denomination, namely the Episcopal Church of America. This led to six years of discussions within the broader Anglican communion regarding the issue of homosexuality and now to two major resolutions passed just this month. The first allows full access to the ordination process including the bishopric to LGBT persons. The second allows for the blessing of same-sex unions. Though the Robinson situation occurred as far back as 2003, these two resolutions taken together are being widely seen as the straw that broke the camel's back, with the camel being the worldwide Anglican communion.

So naturally the Archbishop of Canterbury has responded. I think his response strikes the right tone while suggesting a new ecclesiastical direction for the global Anglican communion. But he is now being attacked from both sides in the debate, by the conservatives for not coming out with a more forceful condemnation of the progressive bishops, and by the progressives for what they interpret as a relegation of their ilk to second-class status. While I have my nuanced disagreements with Williams essay, I'd argue that both sides could benefit from a closer engagement with what he has to say.

What's more, I think the larger church could benefit from the major ideas put forward in Williams letter, because this is not a theological debate. The exegesis required to explore the biblical record on the issue of homosexuality is not that difficult. It's been done and has reached as far as it's going to reach. Rather, the issue at stake is the future of church governance and what unity looks like on a global scale.

There is only one question worth asking now and it is this: what is the best model for ecclesiastical polity? This question can be put a variety of ways. Does the church best fulfill its potential through a global, hierarchical, top-down, authoritarian, episcopal polity a la the Roman Catholic church? Does the church best fulfill its potential through a regional, hierarchical, loose-authoritarian, presbyterian polity? Or does the church best fulfill its potential through a local, grass-roots, microecclesial congregational polity?