#294 The National Day of Prayer

A frightful email went out this week, or at least frightful is what it purported to be.  The first line of the email read as follows:

"On April 15, 2010, United States District Court Judge Barbara Crabb, for the Western District of Wisconsin, struck down the National Day of Prayer statute, ruling that it is unconstitutional."

That sets the stage.  But I find the next section the most puzzling:

"The National Day of Prayer belongs to Americans. It is a tradition that dates back to 1775 and it is not for a Judge to take away. This really amounts to an attack upon the religious heritage of Americans - this terrible court ruling does NOT cancel the 59th annual observance of NDP on May 6th, but it does threaten to remove it in the future."

In the same breath, a contradiction: how can a tradition that dates back to 1775 celebrates its 59th annual observance on May 6th, 2010.  Wouldn't that have occurred in 1834?  Or would this year actually mark the 235th annual observance?

Anyway, were we to retain the holy day, wouldn't it be better to be more explicit about it's addressee?  Why not call it The National Day of Prayer to Yahweh or The National Day of Prayer to Shiva?  What good does a pluralistic prayer jamboree do for a jealous god?  What good does it do for the subjects of the true god?

Now I'm not qualified to comment on the merits of the legal arguments either for or against having state-instituted prayer, though the thought makes me uneasy.  But for the sake of argument, let's say appeals fail and the court ruling does indeed cancel the 59th (or 235th) observance of the holy-day.  Would the appeals court have canceled anything meaningful?

After all, it doesn't take a nation.

"I tell you the truth, if two of you on earth agree about whatever you ask, my Father in heaven will do it for you.  For where two or three are assembled in my name, I am there among them (Matt. 18:20)."

Richard Hays has suggested that this is a clear reference to the church community, specifically in Matthews original setting, for which he posits a late date, but more generally until the end of the age.  Earlier in Matthew's gospel Jesus had said,

"And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.  I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.  Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you release on earth will have been released in heaven (Matt. 16:18-19)."

Whatever this means, it at least means that the church has been granted immense power by the king himself.  Next to this power the gates of hell become irrelevant as does national recognition of our high holy days.  They can take nothing from us.  It doesn't take a nation to pray, it takes a church.  And a church requires a simple community.  And a church community is a mere two or three individuals.  Tragedy can only occur when two or three fail to gather together in the name of Christ.  Tragedy can only occur when the church fails to be the church.

So the questions are best put the church, that is, to any small community of individuals that gathers together in the name of Jesus.  The senders of the frightful email don't want the government "cancelling" the national day of prayer.  But I would point out that the whole idea of a government instituting such a day is quite creepy in the first place.  Haven't we asked Leviathan for too much?  Won't he ask for too much in return?  Wouldn't it be better to say to the government and the rest of the nation, like Joshua, "Go ahead and pick your poison, as for me and my house, we'll serve the Lord thank you very much."  Won't we still pray with the window open toward Jerusalem (not Washington) and at the mouth of the lion's den like Daniel?  Aren't we still going to pray whether Nero, Caligula, or Constantine are in charge?  Shouldn't we render unto Caesar and then stay the hell out of his way?

#293 Interesting Links XXXV

My dream is to one day flee the city - whatever city I happen to be living in - and move to a 10 acre farm in, I don't know, say Kentucky.  I hope to do this sooner rather than later.  I am afflicted with nostalgia for an era I never participated in.  I don't have illusions of self-sufficiency; the idea is an illusion itself.  But I do have designs on a simpler life, a life rooted in community and family.  That would entail becoming more self-sufficient in some ways, but more reliant on family and community in other, healthy ways.  It turns out I'm not the only one, though most people look at me funny when I bring up the subject.  Apparently for many, Green Acres is the place to be.

Ben Myers discusses Rastafari theology.  I say that, of course, the pen is mightier than the sword.  Myers says, "If speech is a fundamental mode of human action, then – surprisingly – it makes a good deal of sense for the Rastas to cultivate reggae in place of ethics. The more seriously we appreciate the Rastas' preoccupation with language, the more we might wonder if their project is even more ambitious than any liberation theology: they are turning the world upside down, one syllable at a time."

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I'll say again that residential real estate is everything that an investment should not be.  It is highly leveraged, not the least bit diversified, extremely illiquid, and come with very high relative transaction costs as a percentage of the asset, both at purchase and sale.  Additionally for the less-leveraged, middle class folks, the standard deduction gets you close if not above the mortgage interest deduction, and of course, you can only choose one.  Felix Salmon writes on the same theme.  He concludes, "In my experience, most people who buy a home do so primarily for psychological reasons. They’re not bad reasons, necessarily, they just don’t make a lot of financial sense. People who insist that their home is an investment tend to be people who would have bought anyway, but who are just casting around for good-sounding reasons to justify their actions. They should just be happy that they have what they want."  With all that said, I'm an American, I've got to fulfill the dream, so I'll be buying one like the rest of you.  I'd be mocked as financially obtuse if I didn't.

This guy just couldn't catch a break.

Chris Harrison (no, not the host of The Bachelor) is a graphic artist who uses the Bible to create visual displays.  Check it out.  My favorite are the people and place distribution charts.

LibriVox provides free audio records of books which are now in the public domain.  The quality of the recordings varies, but a great service for those who both like old books and spend a lot of time commuting.

Is the human race destroying itself?  Read here and decide for yourself.  The article will worry you, but the last line of the article may temper that worry: "One possibility is that couples who are infertile may have naturally higher levels of epigenetic changes than the rest of the population, perhaps explaining the cause of their infertility."

So Conan just landed at TBS which was a big surprise to everybody.  In the age of internet TV the artist transcends the network.  His fallout with NBC was interesting, if only because it was the culmination of a decades old rivalry between O'Brien and NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker.  As it turns out, they were classmates at Harvard, and not only classmates, but rivals.  Zucker ran the Crimson which was the daily newspaper, while Conan ran the Lampoon, which was a humor paper, kind of like The Onion.  Here's a story of one of their first encounters.

Here is a pretty cool map.  It redivides the territory of the 50 states into 50 units of equal population size, i.e. between 5-6 people a piece.  The result is that pieces of my state (Georgia) become part of four new ones.  The all states would now be equal in population size, New York and Los Angeles become the smallest states in terms geographic area since 5-6 million people are packed so tightly there.  Meanwhile, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Nebraska and Idaho combine to form the largest state simply because it takes all that area to encompass 5-6 million people.

John Hobbins compares the use of myth in the Bible to that found in Egyptian, Hittite, and Ugaritic literature.  If you're interested in ANE religion, Hobbins makes reference to a set of books that looks pretty cool, though a bit on the pricey side: The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions, and Archival Documents from the Biblical World.

#292 Sacraments for Infants

So I posted just a week ago on why I choose not to have my children baptized.  That decision is in line with the evangelical churches I grew up in but differs from the historic teaching of the vast majority of the church including western Catholics, eastern Orthodox, and various forms of the Church of Perpetual Protest, both mainline and not so mainline.  But the Eastern Orthodox go even further.  They actually offer communion to their babies.  See this post from OrthoCath for details, but Mark Shea recounts a story:

I remember going to hear Franky Schaeffer speak at a local Orthodox parish back in the early 90s, where he talked about going through instruction with his priest and puzzling over the Eastern custom of giving the Eucharist to infants.

"They don't even know what it is!" he objected.

"Do you?" he priest retorted.

He was rightly and properly flummoxed.

That's a good corrective for me and those like me who protest long-running church practice:

#291 The Message of the Text

Now I'm reading Richard Hays' The Moral Vision of the New Testament.  We can only guess at how much of his work will represent the actual ethical framework of the earliest Christian communities.  However, we do know that it will inevitably represent, at least in part, the moral vision of Richard Hays.  He admits as much.  But against Stanley Fish's reader-response theory which says that there is no meaning in the text itself, only in the reader's interpretation of text (an idea which I could never buy into), Hays says the following,

"It is of course true that all interpreters are embedded in cultural contexts and traditions, but to acknowledge that is very different from saying there is no text or that the text itself has no power to generate or constrain interpretations.  Historically, the church has looked to Scripture as a word extra nos, a voice that can correct or even challenge tradition; such a view of Scripture was foundational for the Reformation.  One may, of course, repudiate this construal of Scripture's role in the church, but not without far-reaching theological consequences."

He goes on to call it a commonsense acknowledgment that,

"...texts do have determinate ranges of semantic possibility and that a text's world of signification can be meaningfully distinguished from the tradition's construal of it[.]  This last option represents the working assumption of the present study."

I'd also add that it's the working assumption of any kind of reform or restorationist movement.  Stanley Fish makes no assumptions to begin with save about himself.  I can't help but make the same assumption Hays does every time I sit down to wrestle with one of the Gospels or Paul's letters.  If I don't, then the whole enterprise falls apart.

#290 April Modified Protestant Chronological Practical Bible Reading Plan

Apr 1-3: II Kings 14-20
Apr 4-6: Joel
Apr 7-9: Amos
Apr 10-12: Isaiah 1-10
Apr 13-15: Isaiah 11-20
Apr 16-18: Isaiah 21-30
Apr 19-21: Isaiah 21-40
Apr 22-24: Isaiah 41-50
Apr 25-27: Isaiah 51-60
Apr 28-30: Isaiah 61-66

#289 Let the Children Come

Thanks once again to my benefactor, I am able to keep my reading project going this year.  One of my gifts was a book on parenting which contains following quotation:

"Parents sometimes give their children a keepable standard.  Parents think that if their children aren't Christians, they can't obey God from the heart anyway.  For example, the Bible says to do good to those who mistreat you.  But when children are bullied in the schoolyard, parents tell them to ignore the bully.  Or worse, parents tell them to hit others when they are hit first.

This non-biblical counsel drives children away from the cross.  It doesn't take grace from God to ignore the oppressor.  It doesn't take supernatural grace to stand up for your rights.  To do good to oppressors, however, to pray for those who mistreat you, to entrust yourself to the just Judge, requires a child to come face-to-face with the poverty of his own spirit and his need of the transforming power of the gospel."

Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp, p. xxii

I write, in pencil, in all of my non-fiction books.  In the margin next to the last part of this quote I wrote, "Amen! The radical call to the cruciform life, even in the life of a child."

With great trepidation, I enter into a phase of shepherding the hearts of my own children.  Because of my own multitude of uncertainties concerning the biblical narrative, I have been nervous for a while about how to present the good news about Jesus to them.  My standards for what can be known with certainty are low, but paradoxically, I'm concerned about lowering those standards for my children.  Maybe this is the dilemma of every Christian parent: How do I present the story of Noah's Ark with a straight face?  Jesus and Paul I can do.  But Noah?

Tedd Tripp's little book isn't going to solve all my problems, certainly not my Noah one.  But I think he's really hit on something important here that goes beyond the difficulty of the historicity of the various biblical accounts.  That is, that apologetics is not the only efficacious method for presenting the gospel to your children.  I can't think of better news concerning imparting the Good News.  Hence my marginal "Amen!" above.  What Tripp is suggesting is that if all you do is make reasoned arguments for the existence, sovereignty, and goodness of God, your child is never confronted with the challenge of the cross.  As Karl Barth says,

"Anxiety concerning the victory of the gospel - that is, Christian apologetics - is meaningless, because the gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome... God does not need us."

The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth, p. 35

And anxious about the victory of the gospel in my child's life is precisely what I am.  But Barth is right: it's a victory I can't win.  The gospel itself must be allowed to win its own victory.  That simple concept instantly lifted a gigantic burden off my shoulders. The apologetic one was too much for me to bear.  But paradoxically, as the burden was lifted off of me, it was placed squarely on the heads of my children.  Here's my provisional attempt to explain:

I chose not to have my son baptized as an infant for a couple of reasons.  First, I always try to approach theological or practical religious problems canonically first and foremost.  With that said, baptism is strongly associated with repentance in the New Testament.  There are possible exceptions to the rule,  but they are not explicit and they are exceptions to the general rule.  Therefore, it occurred to me that where baptism is not associated with repentence, it's loosed from its canonical moorings, at the very least.

Secondly, and more related to this post, I chose not to have him baptized because I don't want him to take a decision for Christ lightly.  Better yet, the decision to live the cruciform life is way too serious for any one individual to make for another individual.  Taking up a cross (an ancient Roman instrument of torturous execution) is very serious business, very dangerous business, and baptism is the first step in that direction.  This route should only be taken by individuals willing to live their lives in such a way that it leads to the same end to which it led Christ: injustice, torture, and execution.

To my mind, if such a monumental decision is made by the parent for the child, then the decision becomes much less monumental.  The child gets the sense that they have always been a follower of Christ and they can just keep doing what they're doing.  But baptism should result from a confrontation with the cross and call forth a radical change in the life led.  Similarly, Paul warns the Corinthians regarding another sacrament, that it is perilous to eat and drink the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner.  Therefore self-examination is recommended.

So the decision to repent and the decision to commune are very serious enterprises.  It goes without saying that they are not to be taken lightly.  Since both involve the sacrifice of self, it should also go without saying that they are not to be made by anyone other than the individual making the critical decision.  Christianity should never become a birthright or nothing more than a way to denote ones cultural or ethnic background much like many forms of Judaism and Catholicism have become in our culture.  Christianity ignores background, gender, race, and societal status by rooting any concept of a unified humanity in Christ and only in Christ.  And to be in Christ requires an individual confrontation with, and participation in, the sufferings of that Roman instrument of torture and execution: the cross.

So, as Tripp suggests, the parent's task is not to give their children a keepable standard.  Rather, it is suffer your little children to sit at the foot of a crucifix and cry with the crucified: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me."