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#384 Post-Liberals Against Apologetics

2012-01-25T23:12:00.001-05:00

"'The most fateful issue for Christian self-description,' [Hans] Frei wrote…, 'is that of regaining its autonomous vocation as a religion, after its defeat in its secondary vocation of providing ideological coherence, foundation, and stability to Western culture.' We no longer live in what Kierkegaard called Christendom. But old habits die hard, and Christian theologians had fallen into the habit of trying to delineate the religious dimension of our general culture. Some seem not to notice that our culture, by and large, isn’t much interested. Some grow angry at the lack of interest. Some try all the more desperately to make the appropriate connections.

In a post-Christian age, however, Christianity might instead try to regain 'its autonomous vocation as a religion.' We Christians still have stories to tell—distinctive stories. Stories about how God worked in the life of Israel, and God’s self-revelation in the life of Jesus Christ. Stories that define a community different from the world around us because of the way these stories shape our self-understanding, a community that may sometimes be wildly radical politically and on other issues seem conservative... Hans Frei called us to be tellers of such tales."

-- William Platcher quoting Hans Frei in Hans Frei and the Meaning of Biblical Narrative

I post this quote to explicitly contrast coherent apologetics to the telling of what Chesterton might call the strangest tale ever told. Jesus was most certainly a teller of tales, strange tales, rather than an apologist. The martyr Steven's last act before being rushed and stoned, as a man named Saul gathered the coats of onlookers, was to simply repeat Israel's story one last time.

As Andrew Perriman has pointed out, religion is a poor choice of words for Frei. But I know exactly what Frei is getting at and can look past that. His idea that Christianity has been defeated at its secondary vocation echoes Alisdair MacIntyre's famous quote at the end of After Virtue about the Benedictines turning aside from the task of "shoring up the Roman imperium."

#383 Steno Quote

2012-01-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

"Fair is what we see, Fairer what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in veil."

-- Nicolas Steno, in a quote that sounds as if it were taken right from Chesterton were it not written centuries earlier.

#382 Occupy vs. Inhabit

2012-01-11T21:48:00.003-05:00

News events can crisscross in our minds in funny ways. Somewhere between watching the Occupy movement unfold and subsequently fold again all over America and the wax and subsequent wane of focus on the plight of North Korea in the wake the Dear Leader's death, I began to think about what it might mean to incarnate rather than invade a place, about the two alternative courses of action I might take after crossing the border of North Korea for the first time: Occupy or Inhabit.

Occupy invades. Inhabit incarnates.

Occupy goes against. Inhabit comes alongside.
Occupy takes over. Inhabit believes the victory is already won.
Occupy starts a revolution. Inhabit seeks to be radical, that is to go to the root.
Occupy becomes a rebel. Inhabit becomes a citizen.
Occupy forces the hand of change. Inhabit recognizes that we have been and will be changed.
Occupy imposes its will. Inhabit is open to being imposed upon.
Occupy demands justice. Inhabit bears injustice.
Occupy asks "Why are we suffering wrong? Why are we being cheated?" Inhabit asks, "Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?"
Occupy sets up an outpost. Inhabit is a signpost.

Occupy strikes out of place. Inhabit lives life in place.

#381 Lectio Divina

2012-01-03T22:03:00.001-05:00

During adolescence, my faith was very emotional, hot. Over the past 10 years or so it has become academic and cold. Both represent extremes but both, in their seasons, were integral to what I've become. Last year I began to feel an increasing urge to go back towards that intuitive, wide-eyed passion I had as a child, but not all the way away from the calculating, open-eyed faith of my later years. So it is that with a new year comes new resolve. I resolve to swing that pendulum of my faith back towards, without over-shooting, that middle ground. And what better way to center myself than in prayer.

So I found something called Lectio Divina, which is Latin for Divine Reading. It is the reading of scripture in prayer. It is the reading of scripture as prayer. It is reading scripture as if God were real. Though I've never doubted God's reality, the faith of my more mature years was more concerned with God-the-concept than the God-as-person that my youthful self was so in tune with. Lectio Divina is an attempt to marry the two: A relationship centered in scripture.

The method consists most traditionally of four steps: 1) read, 2) meditate, 3) pray, 4) contemplate. You start by reading a passage of scripture which can be as short or as long as you like and can be done repeatedly or just once. This is followed by meditation on the passage. This is not an academic analysis but a pondering, a consideration with the mind open for the Holy Spirit. Then comes prayer which may be inspired by the reading and meditation. Finally, contemplation. Perhaps a better word for this step is listening. This is, for me, a complete silencing of the heart and mind before God as one who can speak. The whole process is an act of faith. But for me, this last part is especially.

I have been at it for three days now, each day of the new year. My choice for the reading step has been to read one Psalm four times. First in NASB, then in KJV, then NASB again, then KJV again. These are the only two versions I own. The whole process takes anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes for me. I have yet to hear from God, but I believe he rewards persistence, particularly the desperate kind, and I'll report if I hear anything. Before this past year I wouldn't have thought this kind of commitment possible. Over the last year, I've realized it's not just possible but necessary. And now I find it simple enough, once I've finished with the usual nightly routine of coming home from work, playing with the kids, putting them in bed, and fulfilling any other immediate obligations, to go into my room, sit at my empty desk with no electronics or other paperwork and divinely read, meditate, pray, and listen. Lectio, meditatio, oratio, audite.

#380 Books of 2011

2012-01-03T21:54:00.001-05:00

Here is a list of all the books I read this year ranked from favorite to least favorite. Another busy year with very few books read. I purchased three of these and was given eight for a low total of 11.

I - Recommended Reading

1. The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Ed Smith, 8 out of 10
2. Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 7 out of 10

II - Middling

3. Moby Dick by Herman Melville, 6 out of 10
4. Chasing Fireflies by Charles Martin, 6 out of 10
5. Antiquities by Josephus, 6 out of 10
6. Romans Commentary by Ambrosiaster, 6 out of 10
7. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 6 out of 10
8. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Freedman, 6 out of 10
9. The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, 5 out of 10
10. Rabbit, Run by John Updike, 5 out of 10

III - Not worth the your time or effort

11. New Elucidations by Hans Urs von Balthasar, 3 out of 10

#379 Second Temple Never Had A Chance

2011-12-07T00:03:00.001-05:00

If you ever asked why Jesus was born at the time he was, why God sent his son into the world at the particular point in history that he did, you probably got an answer that had something to do with the Greek language having spread across the region subsequent to the conquests of Alexander the Great, thus enabling the the gospel to reach a wider audience. Additionally, the Pax Romana enabled early missionaries, Paul being the best example, to travel easily to spread the message. But maybe these were more fortuitous than planned. Maybe God had another reason.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority released news of an archeological finding which suggests that large portions of the temple were not completed within Herod the Great's lifetime, including four bronze coins found underneath the western wall of the temple mount that were struck in 17/18 AD which is around 22 years after the death of Herod's death in 4 BC. The IAA is always trying to scrounge up news to support their national narrative and bring in tourism revenue, but scholars aren't impressed as it confirms what they, Josephus, and John (2:20) already knew, that the temple was only started by Herod but completed later.

But it is news to me. I had always assumed, even after reading Josephus (whose chronology can be difficult to follow at times), that Herod finished his temple. I think most people assume that. That is the common assumption. But now it appears that the foundations of large parts of the temple were still exposed as late as 17/18 AD! Assuming a birth-date for Jesus of 6 BC, this means that Jesus would've been nearly 24 years old at the time the above-ground construction would've... begun. This means that in the years leading up to the beginning of his anti-establishment activity portrayed in the gospels, he would've been aware of and probably saw the the final and most visible phases of construction.

I previously thought of the second temple as having been built with good intentions, completed, and having served a godly purpose for a short time before being corrupted by the Jerusalem leadership and later destroyed. But this new chronology collapses that timeline. It suggests that Jesus pronounced prophetic judgment on the building immediately. It was never legit from planning to completion.

Luke tells the story of Jesus approaching Jerusalem for the final time:

"And when he approached, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, 'If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you when your enemies will throw up a bank before you, and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation."

Then, using an old prophetic technique (Ezekiel's brick under siege, Hosea's prostitute wife), Luke has Jesus demonstrate symbolically that which he just warned about, "And he entered the temple and began to cast out those who were selling."

And indeed, just as Jesus had prophetically acted it out less than a generation earlier, the day came when the Romans entered Jerusalem, threw up banks, surrounded them, hemmed them in, leveled the city, and as can be seen from the picture below, threw down the stones of the walls from atop one another.

Later, overhearing commentary on the beauty of the buildings, Jesus sounded a sour note (my paraphrase of Luke 21:6, 32): "Guys, everything you're looking at will be gone within your lifetime." The disciples were probably thinking, "But it was just built. How can God already be judging it?" This is an indication that God was pronouncing judgment not on this particular incarnation of the temple. After all, it never had a chance to get off the ground (literally) and show its true colors. He was pronouncing judgment on the entire system. And with the destruction at the hand of the Romans on the horizon and the approaching completion of the temple, God was giving this people one final chance at escape.

#378 The Life He Imagines

2011-12-04T22:19:00.001-05:00

“He didn’t love farming enough to be a farmer, much as he loved it, but he loved it too much to be entirely happy doing anything else. He is disappointed in himself. He is regretful in some dark passage of his mind that he thinks only he knows about, but he can’t hide it from his mother. I can see it in his face as plain as writing. There is the same kind of apology in him that you see in some of the sweeter drunks. He is trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.”

-- from Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter

#377 Children's Blessing

2011-11-17T20:41:00.001-05:00

We dedicated our children at church this past Sunday and this is the blessing we put together for them. It is a paraphrase of several passages, including Ephesians 3, Colossians 1, Psalm 56, and Psalm 23.

Gavin and Elena,

We bow our knees before the God from whom every family inheaven and earth comes, that out of his riches, he would give you strength inthe power of the Holy Spirit, that Jesus may dwell in your hearts through faith,that you being rooted and grounded in love may know how wide, how long, howhigh, and how deep is the love of Christ Jesus which surpasses everything weknow, that you may be filled up with all the fullness of God.

We always give thanks to God for you because of the hopelaid up for you in heaven and we ask that you may be filled up with him. May you walk in a manner worthy of theLord to please him in all respects, bearing fruit like trees in all the goodworks that you do.

As Jesus became one of us, our highest hope for you is thatyou become one with the lowly, the lonely, and those who feel left-out.

When you are afraid, may you trust in God and not beafraid. He puts your tears in his container. He records them in hisbook. May you know that he is onyour side.

The Lord is your shepherd, you don’t need anythingelse. May he make you lie down ingreen pastures and lead you beside still waters. He will restore your soul and lead you down the rightpath. Even when you’re in thedark, don’t be afraid. God is withyou. He will comfort you. May God’s goodness and love chase youevery day of your life.

#376 The Moral Challenge of the Law

2011-11-10T00:11:00.000-05:00

Here are three mutually exclusive ways to look at the difficult moral challenges presented by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

Starting in the 4th century, Ambrosiaster reads it the way that comes naturally when you first encounter the text at face value, that is that Jesus took the moral standards in the law of Moses (don't murder, don't commit adultery) and raised the bar (don't hate, don't lust):

"[The law and the gospel]: both have a single author. Yet in the time of Christ it was necessary to add something, namely, that we should love our enemies as well as our neighbors, whence love is the fulfilling of the law (Romans 13:10), so that righteousness is to love one's neighbor, but overflowing and perfect righteousness is to love one's enemies."
-- From his commentary on Romans

But in the 16th century, John Calvin, commenting on Matthew 5:20 and the surrounding verses, seems to directly address Ambrosiaster's comments and says that interpretation is all wrong:

"It has been a prevailing opinion, that the beginning of righteousness was laid down in the ancient law, but that the perfection of it is pointed out in the Gospel. But nothing was farther from the design of Christ, than to alter or innovate any thing in the commandments of the law. There God has once fixed the rule of life which he will never retract. But as the law had been corrupted by false expositions, and turned to a profane meaning, Christ vindicates it against such corruptions, and points out its true meaning, from which the Jews had departed... That Christ, on the other hand, intended to make no correction in the precepts of the law, is very clear from other passages: for to those who desire to enter into life by their good works, he gives no other injunction, than to, keep the commandments of the law (Matthew 19:17). From no other source do the Apostles, as well as Christ himself, draw the rules for a devout and holy life. It is doing a grievous injury to God, the author of the Law, to imagine that the eyes, and hands, and feet alone, are trained by it to a hypocritical appearance of good works, and that it is only in the Gospel that we are taught to love God with the heart. Away, then, with that error, 'The deficiencies of the law are here supplied by Christ.'"
-- From his commentary on Matthew

Then in the 21st century, along comes what I take to be the standard kerygma of most reformed-leaning churches I have attended over the past ten years. John MacArthur, contradicting both Ambrosiaster and Calvin, provides a good example:

"The purpose of God's law was to show you that you had to have more righteousness than you could come up with on your own; that's the point of it, the purpose. Galatians 3:24 articulates it with this statement: 'Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.' The law was the schoolmaster, or the disciplinarian, to bring us to Christ. The law was the perfect standard which would show us our sin; that was its purpose. The law was to show us that we couldn't do it on our own, that even the best - the scribes and the Pharisees, with all of their religiosity, trappings, ceremony, and ritual - could not gain the righteousness required to enter the Kingdom. In other words, if you want it simply, the law was given with the purpose of frustrating us, showing us our inadequacy. The law wasn't to tell us how good we are, but to show us how rotten we are."

-- From a sermon delivered on March 18, 1979 entitled Christ and the Law, Part 4.

For what it's worth, Ambrosiaster rings true and Calvin hits the nail on the head. But I've heard countless sermons more along MacArthur's line where morality/virtue/ethics/good works/merit/law/what-have-you are viewed as nothing more than a foil, a matador's cape, to show you how depraved you are. These preachers have a strong, sincere belief that the greatest threat their congregants face is the chance that they might slip into thinking they can earn their salvation through works and it is their top priority to disabuse them of this notion. Why else do I hear this sermon Sunday after Sunday? Why else do the words separated by slashes above feel like such dirty words when spoken among Protestants? Why else do accountability partners feel the need to remind me that I can't earn my salvation when I share about a moral hill I am trying to climb? I say they are preaching to straw men. And I say if God is waving a matador's cape when he urges obedience, then he is waving it at a straw bull. And while MacArthur and the countless other preachers I've heard in person over the years will help someone who grew up in a very legalistic environment struggling with an existential crisis, they do so by stretching the text to fit into their own preconceived gospel story.

#375 Interesting Links XLIII

2011-10-26T23:18:00.001-05:00

Is sugar toxic? That's the argument being made by Robert Lustig in a 90 minute presentation here. The NYT magazine article about the topic is here. As Dr. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Harvard Medical School says, "Sugar scares me."

When Jerusalem was sacked in 597 BC, its inhabitants were raped, tortured, and murdered. The Babylonians even committed infanticide according to the Jewish history as found in the book of Ezekiel. So how do we read this as Christian scripture given a loving God? Dr. Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer (via Michael Bird) suggests that we, "read Ezekiel in tandem with Lamentations [and Job] and so complain that God has gone too far, and leave the response up to God."

Josh Rowley passes along a quote from Ron Sider (of Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger fame): "What the Almighty will do if thousands of praying, loving Christians non-violently face death in the search for peace and justice will remain shrouded in mystery--at least until we have the courage to try it"

John Updike sounds like the Protestant version of Flannery O'Connor here: "This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; menwho are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcendthe limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what ispeculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willingto accept restrictions, and who love their environments with suchvitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic ... Whatever the many failingsof my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love forthe time in which I was born.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer from a 1932 essay: "Praying for the kingdom cannot be done by the one who tears himself away from his own misery and the misery of others, who lives unattached and solely in the pious hours of his 'own salvation.' The church may have hours in which it can sustain even that, but we cannot. The hour in which the church prays for the kingdom forces the church, for better or for worse, to identify completely with the fellowship of the children of the Earth and world. It bind the church by oaths of fealty to the Earth, to misery, to hunger, to death. It renders the church completely in solidarity with that which is evil and with the guilt of their brothers. The hour in which we pray for God’s kingdom is the hour of the most profound solidarity with the world, an hour of clenched teeth and trembling fists. It is not a time for solitary whispering, 'Oh, that I might be saved.' Rather, it is a time for mutual silence and screaming, that this world which has forced us into distress together might pass away and Your kingdom come to us."

Cool picture of a gorilla being evacuated from a Congo war zone here.

Walter Burghardt offer five suggestions for creating a contemplative life of prayer and expands on each of them at this link. First, seek out some sort of desert experience. Second, cultivate a feeling for festivity, the experience of doing something utterly lacking in utilitarian value. Closely related is the third suggestion: cultivate a sense of play. Fourth, learn to let go, to not posses, to let experiences and things be ephemeral. Finally, make contemplative friends, friends who radiate wonder, whose sense of delight is finely tuned.

The Afghan tribal elders know that America will go the way of all empires who enter The Graveyard. It's only a matter of time.

Here's a bunch of art indexed by biblical text.

List of messianic pretenders.

#374 Lifted to Death

2011-10-15T00:12:00.001-05:00

The particular Old Testament references through which we choose to view particular New Testament events will have a significant impact on the interpretation of that event. That's largely redundant, but here's a drawn-out example. John 12 contains the following account,

"The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him. They began to shout, 'Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the king of Israel!' Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written, 'Do not be afraid, people of Zion; look, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt!' (His disciples did not understand these things when they first happened, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about him and that these things had happened to him.)"

The contextual background to this passage is a political and cultural situation whereby the storied and formerly triumphant Jewish people were undergoing nothing short of an existential crisis as a result of assimilation into and domination under the Roman Empire. Things are looking bleak and then, as indicated by the OT passages being quoted, the hopes of the entire nation for an anointed servant of God, a messiah, who would deliver them from their oppression appear to be coming to fulfillment. However, the author of the gospel of John tells us parenthetically that at the time of these events, Jesus' own disciples failed to make any connection between what they were witnessing and the prophecies which foretold of the deliverance of their nation by a messiah and that they finally understood seemingly only as a result of his being later "glorified."

Not cooincidentaly, almost immediately on the heels of this explanation, the author has Jesus abruptly put an end to his ministry of public healing by refusing to entertain a meeting with some Greek proselytes who had requested some time with him, saying instead that,

"'The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified... Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.' (Now he said this to indicate clearly what kind of death he was going to die.)"

And because of this second parenthetical, I've always interpreted this phrase about Jesus being "lifted up" in the same way, i.e. as referring to the type of death he would die, on a cross. When asked how Jesus died, you might say he was lifted to death. Allusions to the OT passage where Moses holds up a serpent on a stick always came to mind and just like that, this interpretation was confirmed and stuck.

But now there is a problem with John's interpretation of Jesus' motivation for using the phrase "lifted up." It is that even after he was lifted to death on the cross, the disciples still failed to understand. They failed to be drawn. Good Friday came and went. Holy Saturday came and went. Nothing about Jesus being lifted to death was ever going to draw anyone, much less all men, to himself, except perhaps prolepticly. In fact, the fact that Jesus was lifted to death was a very good reason why this man could not have been the hoped for savior-king of Israel. After all, dead kings cannot be triumphant. So we'll have to look elsewhere for the referent of the "lifted up." That will be the next post.

#373 Praying With Atheists

2011-09-25T22:48:00.002-05:00

I'm extremely uncomfortable praying when there are other Christians listening. There is a certain grammar and rhythm to it that I either can't produce or that integrity won't allow me to produce were I able to. There is appropriate language and there is inappropriate language. There are formulas despite lip-service paid against them. Around atheists though, I think I could be myself, because the words would flow freely. The awkwardness, questions, stunned silences, confusion, and long pauses would be appropriate, as they truly are when speaking with God. I sense that, in the words of Brad Johnson,

"In the end, if one doesn’t share the grammar — prayers, etc. — whether one is saying the same thing by way of that grammar or not, the risk of alienation is high."

#372 Von Balthasar Against Apologetics

2011-08-24T20:33:00.000-05:00

Previous posts have quoted Ignatius of Antioch, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, Joseph Ratzinger, Michael Spencer, and John Hobbins as either against the enterprise of apologetics all together, or at the very least relativizing it. Here's Hans Urs Von Balthasar continuing the time-honored tradition:

"But the essence of the matter is faith, not a (neutral) looking on or a desire to experience something (for oneself). One who snatches at psychological experiences (presumably perhaps "in the Holy Spirit") will reach into a void. And one who gropes for the flame will get burned by it. Faith is reverent; it allows the light space in which to burn. Still more: it receives from the light the eyes with which it sees the light. Si comprehendis, non est Deus*: and if you think to have grasped it, you are not one whom God has grasped...

Jesus has no need of apologetics: he shines through. He shines upon everyone who comes into the world (John 1:9) and does not deliberately look away (John 1:12). The Church should not pursue any apologetics for herself, but should instead endeavor to make her Lord visible."

-- Von Balthasar, "Does Jesus Shine Through?", Communio (1968), 319ff

* from St. Augustine, Sermo 52, 16: PL 38, 360; roughly translated: "If you understand, it is not God."

#371 In Leviathan We (Selectively) Trust

2011-08-23T21:06:00.001-05:00

In my experience, I've found that supporters of the recent wars, perpetual U.S. military presence in far reaches of the globe, and the National Security apparatus (may it's name be praised) that has grown up in the years since 9/11 (which includes but is not limited to the Orwellian P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, the Homeland Security Department, or Minipax, warrantless wiretaps, torture by any other name, etc.) often happen to be simultaneously be for limited government. Of course, how you can have an open distrust and hostility toward big government with one half of your brain, while not letting said half in on the secret that the other half of your brain vociferously supports an empire that even ancient Rome would've envied, is beyond me.

Similarly, it's oddly consistent that most advocates of the death penalty also happen to be pro-life. So a question for those pro-life/pro-death penalty persons out there: how can a culture that fails to take seriously and with appropriate gravity the life and death of one helpless segment of its society (the unborn) be trusted with the power over the life and death of another helpless segment?

Regarding the death by firing squad of Ronnie Lee Gardner just a year ago, Joseph Bottum writes at First Things,

"There is, in fact, only a single reason that Ronnie Lee Gardner died last night—a single explanation that makes any sense at all. And it is that he deserved it. The murder he committed twenty-five years ago still cries to the heavens for justice.

And maybe it does. Certainly it does. But where, exactly, does the State of Utah get the authority to answer the calls on heaven? Where, exactly, does a modern nation, founded on no deliberate godly principle, derive its power to kill in the name of high justice? This is a nation, after all, that refused—with the infamous “mystery” passage in Casey v. Planned Parenthood—to protect the unborn, precisely because, the Supreme Court said, no such metaphysical foundation can be imposed by government. So where do these assertions of divinely based power for the death penalty come from?"

He goes on to answer the obvious objections that arise based on the standard reflexive and careless use of Romans 13:1-7 to legitimate the act and then closes by bringing it steering his post toward the direction in which I started mine, i.e. trust/distrust (which is it?) of government and the devolution of society's moral consciousness:

"More to the point, there is nothing in Paul that demands death in every situation of punishment. And if we don’t have to kill a prisoner, in the ordinary social justice that demands protection of citizens, then we have a responsibility not to kill a prisoner. The death of Ronnie Lee Gardner last night, four .30-caliber bullets in his heart, was unauthorized, wrong, and foolish.

We have so devolved that we kill even while we cannot explain how we are allowed to take matters of life and death into our hands. And that is a door I fear to watch our government—or any government—walk through."

#370 Treason

2011-08-16T20:56:00.000-05:00

"If a man slanders his people... you shall hang him on a tree and he shall die. On the testimony of two witnesses and on the testimony of three witnesses he shall be put to death and they shall hang him on a tree. If a man... curses his people, the children of Israel, you shall hang him also on the tree, and he shall die. But his body shall not stay overnight on the tree. Indeed you shall bury him on the same day. For he who is hanged on a tree is accursed of God and men."

-- Dead Sea Scrolls, The Temple Scroll, Column LXIV

"Then he began to speak to them in parables: 'A man planted a vineyard. He put a fence around it, dug a pit for its winepress, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenant farmers and went on a journey. At harvest time he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from them his portion of the crop. But those tenants seized his slave, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. So he sent another slave to them again. This one they struck on the head and treated outrageously. He sent another, and that one they killed. This happened to many others, some of whom were beaten, others killed. He had one left, his one dear son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, "They will respect my son." But those tenants said to one another, "This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and the inheritance will be ours!" So they seized him, killed him, and threw his body out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.'"

-- Mark 12:1-9

#369 Election Year

2011-08-13T22:57:00.000-05:00

A parable about American elections in these latter days of the empire, from Judges 9:

9:7 When Jotham heard the news, he went and stood on the top of Mount Gerizim. He spoke loudly to the people below, “Listen to me, leaders of Shechem, so that God may listen to you!

9:8 “The trees were determined to go out and choose a king for themselves. They said to the olive tree, ‘Be our king!’ 9:9 But the olive tree said to them, ‘I am not going to stop producing my oil, which is used to honor gods and men, just to sway above the other trees!’

9:10 “So the trees said to the fig tree, ‘You come and be our king!’ 9:11 But the fig tree said to them, ‘I am not going to stop producing my sweet figs, my excellent fruit, just to sway above the other trees!’

9:12 “So the trees said to the grapevine, ‘You come and be our king!’ 9:13 But the grapevine said to them, ‘I am not going to stop producing my wine, which makes gods and men so happy, just to sway above the other trees!’

9:14 “So all the trees said to the thornbush, ‘You come and be our king!’ 9:15 The thornbush said to the trees, ‘If you really want to choose me as your king, then come along, find safety under my branches! Otherwise may fire blaze from the thornbush and consume the cedars of Lebanon!’

You won't find olive trees, fig trees, and grapevines on-stage for political debates. So voters, every four years like a dog returning to its vomit, take shelter in their favorite brier patches.

#368 What if it were true?

2011-08-09T20:27:00.000-05:00

In an essay that is worth at least a couple reads, Robert Jenson asks, "What if it were true?" Here's an excerpt:
“In 451 the Council of Chalcedon set out to establish Cyril of Alexandria’s teaching, in the less alarming of its forms, as the norm of teaching about the person of Christ. It was Cyril’s great concern that everything the Gospels say about their protagonist is to be taken as true of one and the same concrete subject, that whether the Gospels say Jesus told a parable or forgave sins, whether he wept for Lazarus or raised Lazarus, we are talking about the same personal protagonist. So the council, starting off on Cyril’s line, laid it down as its primal doctrine that 'one and the same' is the subject of the whole gospel-narrative.

“Particularly, in the council’s polemic context, it is one and the same one who is born of Mary in Bethlehem and born eternally, begotten of the Father. And we can very straightforwardly continue with Cyril: it is one and the same who has the divine attributes displayed in the Gospels and who has the human attributes therein displayed, one and the same who forgives sin and who is tempted, one and the same who prays in anguish and rules all history, one and the same thought it took a few more councils to say it out loud who is crucified and who orders the galaxies, one and the same who as Luther loved to say lies muling and puking in his mother’s arms and the while restrains Satan.

“Chalcedon begins with the `one and the same,’ and so far, one may say, so very good. But when the fathers at Chalcedon moved on to the necessary work of setting boundaries for the contending schools of theology, outlawing the errors that each side feared the other must really be thinking, they did not quite dare carry on from their beginning. The formulas they produced have been memorized by centuries of theological students and have frustrated all of them, by their surface profundity and material elusiveness. Notoriously, the council stipulated that Christ has two 'natures,' one divine and one human, which while remaining unmixed, unadulerated, etc., are united in 'one hypostasis.' The trouble is, that they refrained from unpacking the notion of `one hypostasis,’ which one would have thought was more or less the whole point. Chalcedon’s formulas fulfill some ecumenical and occasionally disciplinary functions, but conceptually they are close to being empty.

“Then finally the council appended the famous letter of Pope Leo as an authorized interpretation of the whole, which at least on its face says something rather different than the face value of the council’s primal teaching. According to Leo, one entity, 'the divine nature' does the glory bits and another entity, 'the human nature,' does the suffering bits, each 'with' the other. Ever since, at least in the West, we have found great relief in the notion that each of Christ’s natures does its own thing. We have been relieved to think that while of course it is the one hypostasis of Christ who died on the cross, he did it in such fashion ‘according to his human nature' that we do not need to think that the God the Son himself was ontically affected. We have been relieved to think that while of course it is the one hypostasis of Christ who rules the universe, this is in such fashion 'according to his divine nature' that Jesus qua human participates in this rule only by way of special but nevertheless creaturely human endowments. Christology, we have supposed, is a matter of discerning the relation between two entities, Christ’s `divine nature’ and his `human nature,’ and we have exploited that way of thinking to shy away from Cyril’s blunt faithfulness to the narrative unity of the Gospels.

“But what if Cyril’s teaching, and the teaching with which the council began its decree, were true in the dumb sense? What if, given the Incarnation, there were not two entities for Christology to relate to each other, but just the one person for Christology to describe? Perhaps indeed with such analytical terms as `divine’ or `human’ or `nature?’ What if talk of distinct human and divine `natures’ of Christ were therefore only a sometimes useful, or even necessary, abstraction from what is actually given? What if it were the unadulterated fact of the matter, that this particular human individual with all his peculiarities, the executed Palestinian Jew, the prophet and rabbi from Nazareth, is the second identity of God? Getting down to the level I want to probe: that he is the being who appears in Scripture and theology as the Logos of God and God the Son?”

#367 One Hitters IV

2011-08-08T21:02:00.000-05:00

1. Denominational lines don't seem to matter much in theological discourse anymore, if they ever did.
2. Joseph said God meant it for good. God means things.
3. The Westminster Confession started as a parliament commissioned revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Can you imagine a U.S. congress-commissioned revision of any religious document being considered legitimate by evangelical reformed Christians now or 300 years from now?

#366 Principalities and Powers

2011-06-29T22:51:00.001-05:00

I've written about the government and big business policy of scratching each others backs before here. Thanks again to Wikileaks, and no thanks to the free press, we now know this:

"A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour... It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).

Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year ... As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.

Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents."

Some questions. Since when did the Clinton state department become a division of Hanes and Levi Strauss rather than a function of the executive branch of our democracy? Was this intentionally hidden by the Obama administration? If not, why does the media scarcely mention this story? Is the media fresh out of journalists? Why am I asking rhetorical questions?

I'm not sure exactly why Clinton/Obama felt beholden to the underwear industry but both U.S. and especially Haitian citizens can have answers if they choose to seek them. This choosing to seek answers is probably what our founding fathers meant when they said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Certainly, the Haitian president felt obligated to act as a vassal to Washington due to the American outpouring of support after the earthquake last year and surely the Clinton/Obama team took advantage of this fact.

Those are issues worth investigating for someone with skill in such things. But this leak really got me thinking about something else. (And isn't that the value of leaks, Wiki or otherwise, in a democracy? To get people thinking. Thinking is dangerous to a totalitarian state, but healthy to a democracy.) It got me thinking about the undershirts I wear every day to work. I probably pay somewhere around five dollars for a pack of five. But do these shirts really cost a dollar?

The obvious answer is yes. Consumers simply look at the price tag and the resulting debit to their own personal bank account to determine the cost of any product. Their questioning stops there. Economists look a bit further and include things like opportunity costs and some measurable negative externalities. Their questioning stops there. But ethicists (which I believe all Christians are called to be) go even further. They ask about the human costs, the environmental costs, and the moral costs. A Christian ethicist has to see the world with wider eyes.

In short, this ethic asks about the true cost of things, not to the self only, but and even primarily, about our neighbor, especially the least of these. What does it truly cost to get a t-shirt for a mere dollar? Thanks to Wikileaks, we're closer to that answer. My ability to get a cheap t-shirts cost Haitian textile workers the difference between a 31 cent an hour wage and a 61 cent an hour wage. If I doubled my wage like that, I'd go from the very comfortable lifestyle I lead now to what I and most of the world outside America would consider a luxurious lifestyle. But all in all, not a big deal to me. I currently have the necessities and then some. The difference between what I make now and what I make doubled is not a life and death difference. It is not the difference between having health insurance and not having it. It is not the difference between feeding my children healthy foods and just getting them by. It is not the difference between providing my children with a decent education and making them work at a young age instead.

But for Haitians, I'd imagine it is all of these things. The Clinton/Obama team has pulled the rug out from under the lowest of the low. And the weighty thought is this: my decision to purchase a one dollar t-shirt from Hanes costs far more than one dollar. It is just that, until I widen my eyes, the one dollar portion of the cost is the only portion I'll ever notice.

Why did the Haitian president make the decision he did? He is beholden to the state department of course, thanks to an earthquake. Why did the state department exert the pressure they did on him? It is beholden to a big business, thanks to backroom dealings. Why did Hanes and Levi Strauss lobby in secret as they did? They are beholden to me, the consumer, thanks to a purchase decision. As eating is an agricultural act and voting an ethical act, so purchasing is a moral act. I am the principalities and powers.

Anyway, the next time someone tells you how benevolent America is, know that even charity has a price. It just doesn't get media play. Oh, but remember, they hate us for our freedoms.

#365 From Wikipedia

2011-06-25T20:56:00.000-05:00

Super-centenarian Leila Denmark, who I was a patient of on a couple occasions, is still alive and kickin' at the ripe old age of 113. I'd already decided that the ultimate secret to health is to simply avoid added sugars. Everything else, I believe, will fall into place. But this confirms it:

"On her 100th birthday in 1998, she refused cake because there was too much sugar in it. On her 103rd birthday she refused birthday cake, telling the restaurant's server she had not had any food with sugar in it (other than natural sugar like fruit) in 70 years."

Inspiring, but challenging for me since my favorite man-made product of all time, Coca-Cola (which turned 125 this year) contains a large quantity of a sugar-like substance.

#364 Interesting Links XLII

2011-06-21T21:35:00.000-05:00

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), which studies products for the health and environmental impacts much like Consumer Reports studies the quality and durability of products. They do a lot of good work and they have just come out with their 2011 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce based on their own testing. The result is a list of the "Clean 15" and the "Dirty Dozen". The "Clean 15" are the produce types that were lowest in pesticides (the three most clean being onions, corn, and pineapples), and the "Dirty Dozen" which contained the most pesticides and which it would therefore be better to buy organic (the three "dirtiest" being apples, celery, and strawberries). This is helpful for consumers concerned about their own health and the health of those they are feeding. The deficiency of the report however, is that while it provides information about what amount of pesticides end up on produce at the supermarket shelves, it doesn't tell us which produce requires the most to produce. After all, it could be the case that while corn has almost no pesticides once processing is complete, they could actually require an inordinate amount applied to the land to grow. By the same token, apples may hold or bond pesticides more strongly and so they rank as "dirty", yet they may not actually have as many or as much applied to them. Who knows? And that's where the report is lacking. It helps us make better health decisions, but not better environmental ones.

Adam Smith, though probably thinking about his own experience as a British citizen, explains 200 years in advance, explains why America has such a thirst for perpetual war.

More maps! This one is a map of crime in San Francisco. Each map represents a different type of crime displayed topographically so that the part of the city where that crime is most frequent appears to have a higher elevation.

Andrew Sullivan asks if the creation of Israel was a mistake, to which I reply, of course!

The phrase "That's what she said" is ubiquitous. There is an archival project underway so as to collect the occurrences of this gem for posterity. Here is what is arguably the first ever recorded version of an archaic form of the phrase.

Cool video of an 8 month old deaf baby hearing for his first time ever after the activation of a cochlear implant.

Quote on the death of God: "It is ironic that some of the people who express the most shock that anyone would say God is dead are the very ones who have most insistently and most cold-bloodedly killed God off in some of the basic areas of their lives. To say that God doesn’t belong in certain areas of life is to say that God is dead in those areas, at least."

Dan Ariely attempts to make a list of the 7 habits of highly ineffective people. I think I succeed (or is it fail?) on most of them.

How pro-life was our federal spending during the Bush administration? The GAO runs the numbers.

Here is a fantastic graph clearly showing how our energy economy works.

#363 Washing Hands, Shaking Feet

2011-06-20T21:59:00.000-05:00

Two examples of absolution. Pilate washed his hands. Paul and Barnabas shook their feet.

Judges wash their hands. Prophets shake their feet.

When Pilate washed his hands, he acknowledged that there is moral culpability in condemning someone to death even while not being the executioner.

Acts is the story of the apostles literally fulfilling Jesus command to go from town to town, and if necessary, to shake the dust from their feet.

#362 On Food, Inc.

2011-06-06T21:34:00.000-05:00

"Eating is an agricultural act." -- Wendell Berry

And by way of extension, an agricultural act is an ethical act. I watched the documentary Food, Inc. not because I'm concerned with the personal health consequences of the food I eat, but rather with the agricultural, environmental, and moral consequences.

Food, Inc. begins with scary propagandesque music and informs us that the labels we see on our food is merely the "Spinning of this pastoral fantasy." What you see is not what you get from the industrial farm to the supermarket. There were several horrifying scenes in the film. A few of them were surprising, but most of them are known but just not pondered. If the documentary is proposing that we slaughter our own pigs, I have to say that I'm glad that horrific job is left to someone else. But instead, what it is doing is confronting us with the fact that by eating mass produced pigs, or any other animal for that matter, we are participants in the inhumane slaughter. See Berry quote above.

We watching live chicks rolling off a conveyor belt and down a shoot, pigs being shoveled along for a mass killing, and chickens who have been modified so that their bones and internal organs cannot keep up with their weight. They are grown like plants: strictly for slaughter. The filming inside the Purdue or Tyson chicken houses was disconcerting. Local farmers were being pressured by their consumers down the supply chain not to allow Food, Inc. to film inside the chicken houses.

"Why can you get a hamburger for 99 cents but you can't even get a head of brocolli for 99 cents?" One organic farmer's answer: "Industrial food is not priced honestly." Industrial food does not take into account the full costs of its production. This is in part due to subsidies, but also a result of negative externalities which are born by society. This has consequences: 1 in 2 minorities will contract early onset diabetes.

As a society, we've outsourcing food production to corporate board rooms thousands of miles away from the land where people make decisions and don't live with the consequences of their decisions. Money quote from the same organic farmer: "We have learned how to plant, fertilize and harvest corn using GPS technology and nobody sits back and asks, should we be feeding cows corn. We've become a culture of technicians. We're all into the how of it. And nobody's stepping back and saying, 'But why?'"

The size of that corn-field flown over in the film was unfathomable. If the Bible was made into a motion picture, this would be the scene they would choose for Isaiah 5:8: "Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land." Was the size a special effect or real? The creation and propagation of E. Coli. There was a heart-breaking story of child's sudden death as a result of eating a hamburger on a family vacation. E. coli is not just something that happens naturally. As we learn in the film, cows allowed to graze and thus fed grass, as they always had been, will fend off E. coli, even an existing infection. However, our nation feeds its cows unnaturally, with corn.

The revolving door between government and big agribusiness (particularly Monsanto) is disturbing. Monsanto owning patents on 90% of soybeans is disturbing. Monsanto running farmers out of business is disturbing. Monsanto acting like the Russian Mafia is disturbing.

While the widespread viewing that this documentary is receiving largely due to word of mouth is encouraging, it's sad that another documentary which reveals a small bit of what's become of us since 9/11, Taxi to the Dark Side, is hardly viewed by anyone, despite its Oscar win. Could it be in part that the narrative of Food draws the viewer in as a victim of a force outside themselves, i.e. agribusiness, while the narrative of Taxi suggests that we are all under indictment? But as Berry's quote suggests, we're responsible for all of our actions, and that includes eating.

#361 The Lense of Politics

2011-06-04T09:20:00.001-05:00

Every cultural happening seems to only matter for its impact on politics, specifically for how it affects the horse race. The farmer with the big glasses in Food, Inc. had a memorable quote: "We have become a culture of technicians." That is brilliant. What he meant was that we ask a lot about what, but rarely do we ask about why. We'll probably see this played out as the end of this latest E. Coli outbreak. They will find the source and mitigate the problem which is actually just a symptom of the problem. And then we'll move on. No one will question how or whether our large-scale modern agricultural practices are contributing to these outbreaks.

This is the distinction Plato was making in his shorter dialogues between the sophist and the philosopher. The sophist looks at everything through the lens of politics while the philosopher looks through the lense of the good, the just, and the true. It is what Glen Greenwald would call the difference between the journalist and the royal court stenographer.

I remember being as dumbfounded as both the farmer and the philosopher about the media's coverage of Wikileaks. Rather than address the substance of the revelations and questions they raised about good governance and corruption, the supposedly neutral media was more concerned about how it made America look. They were purely interested in aesthetics. For them, the world is a beauty paegent.

When anything substantive threatens to happen in this country, the media is quick to ask... not about that substance but rather, "Does this make the president look bad?" An example from a major cable news network: After an airstrike in one of the many countries we manage which killed nothing but children, a correspondent was asked for his thoughts. His thoughts? He cited it as an example of bad publicity for the U.S. and the president.

#360 DFW on Boredom

2011-06-02T20:49:00.000-05:00

I've posted before here about the soul-destroying nature of my chosen career as expressed by a choice quote from the Peter Gibbons character in Office Space. DFW makes essentially the same, if less comical point in his posthumous novel about life in an IRS field office. One the characters, Lane Dean, tries to recite the Jesus prayer to combat the monotony but only finds despair:

"He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices."

He is equating my daily existence with hell. I can't say I disagree. As the reviewer who posted this quote here says, his Kenyon College speech turned this coin over to its hopeful side:

"But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things." In the same speech he said, "The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

Completely incidentally, the reviewer who posted these passages quotes DFW as saying that he wanted to write a book in which "something big threatens to happen but doesn't actually happen." Sounds like the movie Jarhead.

#359 Pater Noster

2011-05-18T21:34:00.000-05:00

The Lord's Prayer essentially consists of eight statements so that it looks something like this in outline:

Heaven.
Heaven.
Heaven.
Heaven.

Us.
Us.
Us.
Us.

So a version might look like this:

Our Father, make earth like heaven.

Heaven, where you are.
Heaven, where your name is hallowed.
Heaven, where your will is done.
Heaven, where your kingdom is.

Give us.
Forgive us.
Lead us.
Deliver us.

Amen.

#358 Colossians 2:1-3

2011-05-14T01:13:00.000-05:00

After celebrating the Colossians past (their testimony of faith), exhorting them to remain firm in the present (to the true gospel), and describing their future role (as witnesses of the mystery of Christ), he now shares his prayer for them:

"For I want you to know how great is the contest in which I am engaged for you and those in Laodicea, and all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged as they are united in love, with a view to [their gaining] all the wealth of fullness of understanding -- namely, the knowledge of the mystery of God, that is, Christ, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are concealed."

It seems pretty clear that the contest mentioned here is between Christ and human traditions and the elemental spirits of the world that are mentioned in 2:8. This was alluded to earlier in the letter and twice later. In what way is Paul engaging in this struggle/contest? In 4:12, Epaphras work/struggle takes the form of prayer and this is likely part of what Paul is referring to here in 2:1.

The importance of holding firm to the faith, or perseverance, was a central theme to chapter one and it surfaces again here. Whereas in chapter one the danger of the failure to persevere was highlighted, in chapter two the benefit of succeeding in perseverance is made known. While failing to hold firm to the faith could jeopardize their status as a persons reconciled with and blameless before God (chapter one), a failure to continue on further in that faith by perfecting their unity in love could cause them to miss out on all the benefits (wealth) of being in Christ such as understanding, knowledge, and wisdom which are highly prized here.

While I've scoffed at the two-tier system of Pentecostal Christians who seem to believe that there are Christians and then there are baptized-in-the-holy-spirit Christians, they just might be onto something. And that is that being saved initially is not enough. For Paul, holding firm to that salvation once obtained isn't even enough. We are called to advance continually toward the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding of Christ that comes with a continually increasing unity in brotherly love.

Not all Christians will stand equally before God as if God looks merely at Christ's righteousness and not at all at our own deeds. This is the unequivocal witness of the New Testament, despite being the target of much evangelical preaching in the 20th century. Chrysostom, in his homily to his saved parishioners on Colossians, warns them,

"For don't think that you truly and already have all things. These are hidden also even from angels, not from you only; so that you ought to ask all things from him."

The position of the Christian is lifelong reliance on the continued mercy of God in assurance of his faithfulness to those who put their faith in him and his grace to those who have not yet done so. And while salvation is certainly a result of the Christian life, it is more of a beginning than an end.

#357 Chipper HOF, Continued

2011-05-09T20:14:00.000-05:00

I think the table at this link pretty much puts the case of whether Chipper is a hall-of-famer or not to rest. The person who put the table together ranked them by “WAR” which is a statistic I don’t understand. But more importantly, notice that Chipper is the only .300/.400/.500 guy on the entire list. Even Teixeira, who doesn’t make the list, isn’t a 3/4/5 guy and he can’t steal a base to save his life. When you are sandwiched in between Pete Rose and Mickey Mantle on any list, and remarkably comparable to both of them, you have a pretty good chance of getting in. And since what voters really like are milestones, his 2,500+ hits and 1,500+ RBI will help just as much. This also means that if they don’t put him in, they will have drastically raised the bar on who does and doesn’t get in. And to my mind, that'd be a good thing for baseball anyway.

#356 One Hitters III

2011-05-06T20:34:00.000-05:00

1. In a small school, everybody is a caricature.

2. Why miracles? They made one century believe and the subsequent nineteen doubt.

3. Shouldn't the settlers of America be called the unsettlers? They settled themselves, but unsettled America in the process. And it has yet to settle back down again.

#355 The Death of a Wicked Man

2011-05-03T22:51:00.000-05:00

For those that pledge allegiance to the flag, Sunday was a day to celebrate. Caesar handled it as Caesar was ordained to handle it (Rom. 13:1-7). However, for those that pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ, things are more complicated. First four passages being cited by many:

"Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles; lest the LORD see it, and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him." -- Prov. 24:17-18

"Do you think that I like to see wicked people die? says the Sovereign Lord. Of course not! I want them to turn from their wicked ways and live." -- Ezekiel 18:23

"For I take no delight in the death of anyone." -- Ezekiel 18:32

“Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.” -- Ezekiel 33:11

Now some reaction from those whose allegiance is to Christ rather than Caesar:

Don Carson:

"That is the trouble with revenge, of course: it does not feel like a sin. It feels like justice. Many of us have become inured to the distinction because we have watched so many movies or read so many books in which revenge, especially revenge that is adamantly pursued when the proper authorities either cannot or will not pursue justice, is itself just. It matters little if the hero is Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western or a Dirty Harry film, or Bruce Lee in a martial arts flick, or Rambo getting even in Vietnam. In every case, we enjoy a cathartic release because we are made to feel the violence is just and therefore that the revenge is justified. When the right is on your side, revenge, no matter how violent, is a pleasure. It is just‘." -- from Love in Hard Places, 2002

Jason Goroncy:

"The Church, of course, is the child of the narrative at the heart of which is reconciliation, a narrative which is ‘difficult’, to be sure, but whose Author makes it possible to ‘from now on … regard no one from a worldly point of view’ (2 Cor 5.16), to live hopefully by the word that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us’ (2 Cor 5.19), and to rejoice in the vocation of being ‘Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us’ (2 Cor 5.20). Such is a narrative is difficult to live by because, as Ignatieff notes, it exists in relentless competition with ‘the powerful alternative morality of violence’."

Fr. Federico Lombardi:

"Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibility of everyone before God and man, and hopes and pledges that every event is not an opportunity for a further growth of hatred, but of peace."

Michael Gorman:

"Why does the story of the terrorist-turned-apostle named Paul not give people pause in their lewd rejoicing?"

Michael Gorman:

"The common theme in Congress, in the media, and on the streets seems to be that this event has pulled the diverse and factious body of people called Americans together like nothing else in a very long time. That should give everyone, Christian or not, at least a little ethical hiccup. How sad is it when the killing of a human being is the chief cause of human unity, even for a day or a week?
But wait–and here is the irony–for us who call ourselves Christians, the killing of a human being actually is the cause of our unity, only for us it is the being killed rather than the killing, the heroic role of victim not victor, that is the source of unity."

Sam Rocha:

"Today is a day of perverse clarity: we can see, in the words and actions of the elect, that we are ruled by thugs and war lords, that Osama and Obama observe the same creed; that the theology of violence, ritualized in the practice of physical, mental, and spiritual war, is at the heart of their politics, regardless of their polemic affiliations. Make no mistake: Osama was a killer. The culture of Saudi Arabia from which he came (and both the secular and Islamic Middle East) is a culture of death, ruled by violent men. But make no mistake: Obama is a killer too. His liberal ways of killing are more subtle at times, but he is the commander in chief of the American military industrial complex; he presides over all US wars, those fought through martial forces and technologies and those waged through institutions that violently enslave the bodies, hearts, and minds of people at home and abroad. The culture of the United States of America is a culture of death ruled by killers... who are themselves dying..."

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

"What does a milestone mean on a road that is endless?"

Peter Leithart:

"I am glad Osama bin Laden is dead. He was an evil man. And I think the surgical method used to kill him is commendable. The Bible, especially Judges, endorses assassinations: Kill the head, and the body becomes powerless . Wars slaughter thousands, or hundreds of thousands of relatively innocent young men, always on both sides. War is costly, especially in human terms. Better to destroy war-mongers who start wars. That said, my enthusiasm for this operation is tempered by the recollection that the US made Osama bin Laden... We supported bin Laden in his battle against the Soviets, as we also supported Saddam Hussein so long as he was fighting Iran. We had a hand (how direct is a matter of dispute) in creating bin Laden, creating the Taliban, creating al-Qaeda. Americans have a right to breathe a sigh of relief. Yet the lesson is not, as President Obama, Charles Krauthammer, and others have suggested, that 'we do big.' The lesson is that we’re pretty good at creating messes, and that we’re occasionally good at the mopping-up process. When the euphoria is over, will we take the opportunity to reflect seriously on our record of cultivating the serpents we later kill?"

Brad Littlejohn:

"Romans 13, in context, appears to teach that the civil authority, outside of Christ, functions as an indirect instrument which God uses to exercise retribution, but which he does not command to do so (e.g., note how Assyria is used as such a tool, but then actually punished for it), and which, when in the hands of Christians, he does not want to do so."

Jeffrey Polet:

"I want to state emphatically I am NOT saying that we shouldn’t have killed bin Laden. But the paroxysms of celebration, the orgiastic bloodlust ought to give pause to decent people. Violence, after all, and we have this on good authority, begets violence. To treat this incident as if one just won the national championship in basketball is to set aside and not advance the fundamental tenet of liberal democracy, of America at its very best: the inherent dignity of every person... Whatever else is the case, for a nation to find itself in a position where it commits tremendous financial and personal resources, and puts at risk the lives of its service men and women, not to mention its citizens, in the effort to hunt and kill one man, ought to cause for serious reflection and not drunken revelry... Girard’s positing of the connection between violence and the sacred pertains in this case to the tenets of American civil religion. Indeed, Osama’s death, like so many others in the wars before him, serves to deepen the religion of America, whose object is America. Osama is killed, and Americans take to the street chanting 'USA' and singing the national anthem. People start talking about recovering the unity we had after 9/11, never once asking why this is a desirable thing, or what ends it will serve other than to make America 'great,' and insure, as the President said, that 'America can do whatever we set our mind to'... How false and shallow must be the unity that emerges from a violent killing that takes place half a world away. How empty the lives of those who see in violence a release from the otherwise humdrum monotony of their existence. How simpleminded a country that seems incapable of taking moments such as this as opportunities to ask hard questions of itself, of its heritage, of its ideas – questions it won’t ask because it fears the answers. How precarious the security of a people who insist on purchasing it always and only with blood."

Besides my list above, here are more reactions from followers of Christ.

#354 The Local Church Experiment, Part Two

2011-04-30T00:03:00.000-05:00

Family is family despite ideology. Despite embarrassments, hurt feelings, and attacks from outside, families defend their own. Nations and their armies do the same. Marriage is marriage despite ideology. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. Cultural institutions like these are witnesses to the unity that can be achieved when love manifests itself in commiment. Institutions like these, institutions of true commitment, are a prophetic witness against the post-Reformation church.

While the family that prays together stays together, the church that prays together retains the option to go their separate ways for any, even amiable, reason. Your small, boring church filled with old people becomes a prison. Doctrinally questionable young people become a danger. The church a couple more miles down the road has better music, more conservative dogma, more charisma, better preaching, more spirit. This approach is perfectly acceptable in the modern church. We wouldn't dream of judging church changers. They are us. We are them.

Here's David Fitch:

"We see how the church gets ideologized all the time. 'Oh that church is the Bible church – they believe in the Bible' implying the others don’t. Or we’re the church that believes in community. The others somehow don’t. That church? They’re the gay church and that one is the church that is against gay marriage.' We all know this phenomena and have participated in it.

"Generally speaking, it is the human tendency to form communities around ideas. People gather for certain reasons having to do with needs, whether economic, social or psychic. We articulate how to meet these needs in the form of ideas we are pursuing together. We rally around these ideas as common causes that enable us to organize to meet these various needs. The study of ideology, in its various brands, studies how we come together in these ways – what holds us together.

"I want to show how whenever we extract ideas like this from its context – where the idea makes sense and is practiced – it tends to become ideologized in a bad way...

"I try to show how our core beliefs turned into ideological ideas (what Zizek calls Master Signifiers). The 'inerrant Bible,' 'the Decision for Christ' and 'the Christian Nation' have all become these kind of ideological banners that set us in antagonism against the culture we seek to witness the gospel. In the process, we turn the world into enemies."

The alternative is the local church. The church right down the road. The church of this place. Just as we are born into a family without our being consulted (disagreeable though they may be); circumstance, chance, our own decisions, and the will of God place us. Just as marriage is most meaningful and at the height of its beauty and sanctity when it is seen as a lifelong commitment, the church is fulfilling its deepest calling when it not only prays together but stays together. The concept of the global church denominating itself has not, itself, failed the test of time. However, the way in which the church has chosen to denominate itself, across ideological and stylistic lines, has failed the test of time. The local church is a faithful alternative.

Fitch again:

"It is only through 'place' that we break the cycle of ideological church. It is only through engaging in the practices of being the local expression of Christ’s body that we can break out of the entanglements of ideological cynicism..."

#353 Other Moby Dick Quotes

2011-04-15T23:55:00.000-05:00

"In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality." p. 100

"But I now leave my great cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing uopon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught - nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience." p. 128

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown by still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him." p. 145

"Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!" p. 149

"For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it." p. 184

"Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance; aye, change, free will, and necessity - no wise incompatible - all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course - its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained it its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events." p. 193

"Go to the meat market on Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibals jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras." p. 270

"'Not that,' said Stubb, 'no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's coming off to make us our coffee.'" p. 314

"... Derick and all his host were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase. Oh! many are the Fin-Backs and many are the Dericks, my friend." p. 324

"... the whale has no voice... But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I, known any profound being that anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!" p. 333

"And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor - as you will sometimes see it - glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye." p. 335

"Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country..." p. 373

"... all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be..." p. 464

"The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks." p. 465

"Omen? omen? - the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives; darkling hint." p. 489

#352 On Hell

2011-04-11T21:07:00.000-05:00

Why read Rob Bell or John Piper, when you could read the more humble, thoughtful, hopeful, orthodox work of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus? Christopher Benson has some excerpts from Neuhaus' September 2001 First Things essay on the subject of hell. Below are a couple choice passages that I picked out. Benson has a fuller set of choice passages here. Or to read the entire theological outworking, the First Things link is here.

"...one cannot rationally and knowingly choose to live contrary to God’s will, since to do so is contrary to one’s own nature, which nature is to live in accord with God’s will. One avoids sin because to sin is to act against God and against oneself, not because, or not chiefly because, of the threat of future punishment. More precisely, punishment, understood as damnation, is the culmination of having lived against one’s highest good, namely, God. It is doubtful that one could really want life with God forever if one does not want life with God here and now..."

"It is sometimes said that Protestants, who subscribe to “justification by faith,” know they will be saved, while Catholics only hope they will be saved. That is a distinction without a difference. Faith is hope anticipated, and hope is faith disposed toward the future..."

"... our sense of justice requires that we believe some people are eternally punished. It seems the favorite candidate here is Adolf Hitler [but] rating “big” and “little” sinners is a very dubious business. I expect there are many petty tyrants in homes and offices who are every bit as disposed to evil as was Hitler, but who have a more restricted range of opportunity for acting on that disposition... Further, it is not our sense of justice but God’s perfect justice that is to be satisfied. And, be it noted, that perfect justice is satisfied by the perfect sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

" . . . the command and impulse to evangelize is premised not on the bad news that we do not know but on the good news (i.e., “gospel”) that we do know. To be sure, good news may be good in relation to the bad, but there is enough bad news that we know for sure that we do not need to pretend to know more bad news than we do in order to make the good news good."

"As both Redemptoris Missio and the year 2000 statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, make clear, everyone who is saved is saved because of Christ, even if they have never heard the gospel. If they are in heaven, they will certainly know then that it is because of God’s reconciling work in Christ. As it is usually put, faith’s response to the gospel proclaimed and enacted in word and sacrament is the “ordinary means” of salvation. That is exactly right. At the same time, God is not limited to the ordinary. Why evangelize? Evangelization is most importantly driven by the means of salvation revealed, by Christ’s clear command, and by the sharing of fellowship so that “our joy may be complete” (1 John 1:4). We know what we are to do, and why. But the fullness of what God can and will do for the world that He loves is not limited to what we do."

"... the fact is that we all pray that all may be saved. Is it possible to pray for that without hoping for that? I think not. It follows that we pray, and therefore we hope, that all will be saved. Catholics by the millions pray the rosary every day, adding at the end of each decade, O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy."

"We pray and we hope, but we do not know that that will be the case. I have a terrible fear that it will not be the case. If all are not saved, if many or most are lost, I do not know-despite the many elegant explanations that have been proposed-how to square that with biblical passages and the theo-logic that suggest universal redemption. But God knows, and that is enough. We know that we are to proclaim the saving gospel, we know what we hope will be the case, but we know these things in the full recognition that the ultimate working out of God’s mercy and justice eludes our certain grasp."

#351 Interesting Links XLI

2011-03-13T13:48:00.000-05:00

I've been fascinated by maps ever since I thought I was lost once. Here are two: A grid map of London and one showing the average annual drainage of the major river systems in Georgia.

Couch forts: a critique.

Here's Jason Heyward's swing progression.

Turn to page 12/13 of this publication for a look at the Amish of Holmes County.

The statistic that says 50% of marriages end in divorce is a generalization at best. Here is some more detailed research.

Speaking of maps, here are ten that changed the world.

Ken Silverstein highlights the children's Motrin recall that wasn't.

Theologian clerihews by Ben Myers and Kim Fabricius. Here's part 2.

More evidence of Glenn Beck's wackiness from Chaplain Mike.

Chris Blattman shares my lament, but did something about it.

#350 Utopia

2011-03-08T21:45:00.000-05:00

"All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need."

-- Acts 4:32-37

#349 Ambition

2011-03-02T23:25:00.000-05:00

"...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands..."

-- I Thessalonians 4:11

#348 Together They Have Become Worthless

2011-02-27T22:58:00.000-05:00

As I was reading through the United Methodist Church page on Wikipedia I came across the following statement in a section on the church's doctrine regarding the visible and invisible church:

"Nevertheless, it also upholds the concept of the "visible and invisible Church," meaning that all who are truly believers in every age belong to the holy Church invisible, while the United Methodist Church is a form of the Church visible, to which all believers should belong as it is the institution where worship in the name of Jesus is conducted and the sacraments are administered; nonetheless, there may be many unworthy members in the visible church."

Emphasis mine. There may be many? Surely the idea that there are any worthy people at all in the UMC is not official church doctrine is it? This is an especially odd statement to see coming from a denomination which puts such an emphasis on the unmerited grace of God through faith. Take it away Herman Melville:

"Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending." -- Moby Dick, p. 73

If Melville doesn't help, perhaps Romans 1-4 could assist. Barth's commentary can drive the point home if needed.

#347 The Synoptic Problem and The Canonical Jesus

2011-02-23T23:26:00.000-05:00

Mark Goodacre is puzzled:

"I must admit to being somewhat baffled by those who find the Synoptic Problem boring. It is so basic to so much of what we do in studying the New Testament that saying that it is boring is a bit like saying that New Testament study is boring. It's a literary enigma, it's a historical puzzle, it's a theological essential. What is not to enjoy?"

He then lists reasons why students might find it boring. Michael Bird, in an unconnected post, has a few thoughts on the historical vs. the canonical Jesus that I think nicely address some of the inconsistencies in the gospel narratives. The canonical Jesus, being what the apostles and early church believed about Jesus, is different from "the Christ of faith," being what the faithful in any era believed about Jesus. The canonical Jesus stands between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. For me, it's the true and only knowable Jesus. Here are a couple highlights:

"The historical Jesus is not the untheological Jesus. Our only access to Jesus is through the faith and theology of the early church. The Gospels contains a mixture of fact and faith, history and hermeneutic, authenticity and artistry. Jesus himself was theologically grounded and his message was about God (i.e., his message about God addressed the socio-political circumstances of Palestine and the position of Israel vis-a-vis God) . So we can expect to find theological matter (not abstract theology) in the historical Jesus and in the memory that Jesus himself generated."

That's a nice summary and Bird draws out its implications further:

"The Gospel's may be the authorized witnesses to Jesus, but they are not the only witnesses to Jesus. The church fathers were more than aware of other legitimate traditions (oral traditions, agrapha, sayings in non-canonical Gospels) that relayed reliable or relevant information about Jesus and they utilized it accordingly. The church fathers had to wrestle with the historical character of the Gospels and were aware of claims of fiction and alleged inconsistencies, and endeavoured to read the Gospels theologically and historically. Origen wrestling with Gergesa or Gadara is a prime example (Mk. 5.1 and par.)"

#346 Culture and Character

2011-02-19T14:42:00.000-05:00

Rod Dreher summarizes some thoughts on the importance of culture in shaping us:

"I would no more put my kids in a school full of rich white kids who carry with them a culture of hedonistic materilistic values than I would a school full of poor minority kids who carried with them the same culture. I would rather put my kid in a school full of Asian kids who carried in their heads a culture of hard work, self-discipline and diligent study than a nominally Christian school whose kids carried in their heads a culture of privilege and well-upholstered suburban decadence. Bottom line: when it comes to schooling for my kids, I don't care about the race, the family income or the professed faith of the student body. I am most interested in the quality of the culture that dominates the school and its students, because that is going to be the greatest determinant in the quality of life, and the content of the character, of my children. And money can't buy that."

#345 Provisional Status

2011-02-17T22:19:00.000-05:00

Ben Myers reads Jacob Taubes:

"In Barth’s interpretation of Paul, Taubes finds a recovery of the ‘nihilistic’ impulse of apocalyptic politics. The illegitimate nomos of the world is passing away. Neither quietism nor revolutionary zeal counts for anything; what the world needs is neither conservation nor reform, but annihilation and recreation."

He concludes:

"Taubes’ political appropriation of Barth/Paul should therefore also be modified: what his political nihilism lacks is a good dose of ecclesiological nihilism – or in Barthian terms, the (politically charged, but never secularised) concept of witness. The church’s witness to divine action is always simultaneously a gesture to its own provisional status, an acknowledgment of the abyss of judgment over which it is suspended – and thus also a witness to that strange anarchic grace by which God’s people are gathered into being out of nothingness."

#344 Colossians 1:24-29

2011-02-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

Paul has now set the stage by recounting the Colossian church's testimony. He has warned them against losing hope in the one true gospel. He now delineates his role and theirs in what is to come next:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh whatever is lacking of the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, which is the church. I have become a minister of the church according to the stewardship of God given to me with you in view, to make the word of God fully known. This is the mystery which has been concealed for ages and generations, but has now been manifested to his saints. To them God chose to make known the glorious wealth of this mystery among the Gentiles - it is Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is he whom we preach, as we instruct everyone and teach everyone in all wisdom, so as to present everyone perfect in Christ. This indeed is the end for which I labor, contending according to his power which operates mightily within me.

It shouldn't be surprising that Paul identifies his own suffering with the messiah's. As F.F. Bruce points out in his commentary, Paul's experience on the Damascus road taught him that the messiah himself identified the sufferings of his people with his own suffering. Though Paul (then Saul) persecuted Christians, Jesus ask the question this way: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" As Bruce puts it, "Christ suffered in his people." Bruce also notes that Paul and Barnabas allude to the Isaianic servant passages when they turn their mission toward the Gentiles at Pisidian Antioch. For Paul, "... the Servant's mission of enlightenment to the nations is to be carried on by the representatives of Christ."

The idea of filling up what is lacking is an eschatological concept. Bruce says that a "quota of affliction" before the end could come is a rabbinical idea. It is certainly a New Testament theme (here in Paul and I think in Revelation as well). It is also an early church concept. In The Shepherd of Hermas, a metaphor of a tower being built plays the same illustrative role. When the last stone is placed in the tower, the end comes.

Verse 27 is grammatically odd. Perhaps Paul's meaning was something akin to the following paraphrase: "God chose you to be his agents to make known the glorious wealth of the messiah among the rest of the Gentiles. The hope of their glory is the messiah in you." To the saints, God had given the task of making him known by putting Christ on full display. Paul is calling on the Colossians to join him in this project of revealing the mystery to the broader Gentile world. Certainly, the Jewish messiah being found in and revealed by a bunch of Gentiles from Asia Minor is a striking witness to the watching world that the salvation promised by the god of Israel is now opened to everyone.

Indeed, Paul's goal is nothing short of salvation for the entire world. The threefold "...every man... every man... every man" in 1:28 drives the point home. The mystery that had been hidden from the Gentiles (obscurely in the law and prophets) is now on display. In Christ, revelation takes the place of apocalypse and the church must now bring to completion the suffering which Christ had begun. In order to achieve the full eschatological measure, the Colossians will need to hold firm to reveal the Jewish messiah in them (oddly enough) to their fellow Gentiles. The cross was not the end of pain, suffering, and death; it was only the beginning.

#343 Melville on the Pulpit

2011-02-14T21:00:00.000-05:00

Pastors and priests are in a unique position:

"Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and the picture. It's paneled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows... What could be more full of meaning? -- for the pulpit is ever this earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow."

-- Moby Dick by Herman Melville, p. 35

#342 Three Year Old Theology

2011-02-11T22:24:00.000-05:00

The other night when I was putting my son to bed, I mentioned something about Jesus in his heart. Immediately, the whites of his eyes brightened the darkness of his room. He lifted up his shirt, pointed to his chest, and said completely flummoxed, "In here?" A lifetime of church, Christian schools and culture, and my own theological dabbling failed to prepare me for that moment. I was speechless. I'd gone and confused a not-yet three year-old and he'd gone and dealt my years of training a devastating blow.

My first instinct was to explain the concept of metaphor but I quickly remembered I was dealing with a two year-old and stumbled into another response. I honestly can't remember how I answered, proving that there was nothing memorable about my answer. Weeks later, I made the "mistake" of saying that God was in heaven. The now three year-old pounced. "Far away?" This time I surrendered. "Yes, far away." Had I been given more time, I could've come up with something better. But this time, I wasted no time tucking my tail in defeat.

In Jimmy Dunn's Colossians commentary he says, "That a person should be spoken of as indwelling another no doubt poses something of a conceptual difficulty, but the idea of divine immanence in an individual is simply an aspect of the larger concept of divine immanence (see on 1:19), and generations of Christian believers have evidently found no problem in using such language to describe the experience of personal communion with God understood in terms of Jesus Christ and the inner strengthening which comes through it."

No doubt indeed. No problem? Not so much. This conceptual difficulty is not limited to toddlers. Like my son, I'm perplexed. Are Dunn's "generations of Christian believers" using Paul's language of indwelling properly when for them it describes an "experience of personal communion with God" through Christ? If so, the language of indwelling as a metaphor is more palatable, though I'd wait to have that conversation with my son until a later date. So in what sense can we speak of Christ being in us and God being in heaven without feeling absurd in front of our three year-olds?

#341 About That Tiger Mother

2011-01-20T21:25:00.000-05:00

A pro-homeschooling post is forthcoming, I just have to find the article (I think it was in an issue of First Things) where I found the argument. But for now, here's the other side. As we know the spelling bee winners are always Asian. How did they get so smart? Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a critique of the softer American style of parenting, shows how:

"Chua didn’t let her own girls go out on play dates or sleepovers. She didn’t let them watch TV or play video games or take part in garbage activities like crafts. Once, one of her daughters came in second to a Korean kid in a math competition, so Chua made the girl do 2,000 math problems a night until she regained her supremacy."

The quote is from a David Brooks editorial and lists other examples of what we might consider a harsh parenting style, but we get the idea. Critics of Chua are up in arms about her book, in which she recounts her own story and criticizes the laxity of American parenting. So while everybody is criticizing her for being overbearing on her children, David Brooks takes a different approach:

"I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t. Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale. Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement..."

The key phrase there is that, again, "She's protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn't understand what's cognitively difficult and what isn't." And there I thought that he's captured years of my own struggle in one sentence. It is still far more mentally taxing for me to walk on any given night into a party filled with strangers made up of various cliques than it ever was to take any of the most difficult academic tests I've ever attempted such as the SAT, the CPA exam, and others. I'd rather spend 2 hours working on a difficult accounting issue than spend five minutes getting the answer from my boss.

I realized early on in my working career that everybody in my profession is actually pretty smart whether they went to private, public, or home schooled. What separates those who stay at the bottom from those who rise to the top is not smarts at all. It's the ability to schmooze, to socialize, to say the right things, to be the alpha dog. This is all stuff you only learn in battle. Smarts will only get you in the building. They won't get you off the floor of that building. Brooks goes on,

"Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together. This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table. Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?"

Harvard, Yale, and Oxford don't hold a candle to the elementary school bus ride, the middle school cafeteria, the high school dance, or even the weekend sleepover. Those are the times that try men's souls. Childhood is hell. We extend that hell when we fail to discern the "truly arduous tests" in life.

#340 Interesting Links XL

2011-01-06T23:10:00.001-05:00

Patrick Deneen delivered a lecture entitled "Making Whole Our Historical Sense." From the intro:

"Liberalism (and the market economy it advances) emphasizes the present tense; Progressivism (and its belief in the future transformation of humanity) emphasizes the future tense; and Nostalgism overstates the perfection of the past tense. I argue instead on behalf of the need to repair the historical sense to include the past and future more fully into the present.

Interestingly, while one might have thought that a group of conservative students would be most exercised about my indictment of "nostalgism" - which might implicate conservatism's tendency to look to the past for wisdom and correctives - it was my indictmnent of liberalism - and especially the "free market" - that seemed most to bother a number of the students who posed questions and approached me afterwards. La plus ça change..."

Here's another one from Deneen on The New World Order we are living in.

John Hobbins quotes Michael Spencer regarding the term innerrancy in discussions about the Bible: "we have to understand why 'inerrancy' is a required term, when the church operated just fine without it for centuries."

Sometimes you go to preach Jesus and you find he is already there. Without preaching at all, I got a taste of that when I read Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, by Denis Covington. I wrote about it before here a few years ago. Hobbins says,

"By the time you’re done with the book, you will feel a kinship with the snake-handlers. A massive achievement." He goes on, "One of the great self-deprivations of 'respectable' forms of Judaism and Christianity is the outsourcing of the imagination, archetypal, eschatological, utopian, and dystopian, to practitioners of the comics and science-fiction genres, to adepts of New Age spirituality, or worse still, the occult. To put it strongly: why should one bother to attend synagogue or church if the whole person, down to the dark depths of one’s psyche, is not attended to? It is there that healing needs to take place. A more holistic approach : the resourcing of human imagination based on traditional content from the Bible and beyond. The relevant texts are numerous."

Joel Willits questions "Love the sinner, hate the sin."

Dr. Robert Atkins has been posthumously vindicated. Ultimately Michael Pollan's simple advice is the best advice: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. The key to Pollan's formula, I think, is in the word food. the meaning of which he unpacks in his books. I never had a problem with the Atkins diet as a science, though I barely made it through any science class I ever took above the elementary school level. But what Atkins was lacking that Pollan provides is sustainability. Atkins was a diet and diets cannot be sustained for a lifetime and so are only good for disappointment and depression. The only thing that works is a lifestyle change and Pollan offers a framework that opens up that possibility.

Truly, Waldo is "a man unstuck from place and time." This is a funny YouTube video.

The Supreme Court basically refused to settle the real dispute behind the dispute regarding a cross displayed on government property used as a war memorial. I agree with the sentiments of University of Missouri law professor Carl Esbeck:

“I’m not a big fan of religious symbols on government property,” said Esbeck. “I believe there is a detriment because it dilutes the real purpose of the symbol. They’ve taken a symbol of the church and turned it into civil religion. This can be bad for evangelicals because when people look at a nativity scene or a Roman cross, we want people to think of the God of the Bible. If these too become simply civil religion to Americans, it makes the task of evangelism harder for Christians.”

I think that Chrisendom made a big historical mistake somewhere along the way the moment it first decided to display a cross without a suffering Christ upon it. It allows the cross to be used like a tidy corporate logo and a marketing tool. There is a bumper sticker which uses symbols from the various religions of the world to spell the word coexist. It looks like this:

This was made possible by those who decided an empty cross was a better public face to put on Christianity. How? Can you imagine them coopting a true crucifix complete with a haggard-looking, bloodied, suffering Christ for their bumper sticker? While preached and resolved to know nothing but Christ and him crucified, we've lost our capacity to shock the world. It looks more like a lower case "t" on the end of that bumper sticker than it does a stumbling block for Gentiles.

Aric Clark points to a study which shows that Somalia has actually fared better under 20 years of anarchy than under the years of corrupt centralized dictatorships to which it had been subjected. An argument from the extreme for anti-federalism, distributism, and maybe even a certain form of anarchy itself.

Chris Blattman links to an Amartya Sen article about misreading Adam Smith. He includes the following quote which you'd think came straight out of the mouth of some left-wing politician if you didn't know that Smith himself said it: "When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters." Well I'll be. The point of the Sen article is that history has read The Wealth of Nations and neglected The Theory of Moral Sentiments to its own disadvantage.

The lowest form of humanity is probably a talk-radio host who also happens to be a political hack. There are plenty of them on Atlanta radio and national radio and the bigger names are very influential. Conor Friedersdorf has come up with an interesting experiment to try to pop their bubble:

"Who can better insulate themselves from inconvenient facts than broadcasters with a microphone in one hand, a team of screeners to vet calls, and one finger on a button that can cut the mic of anyone with a devastating rebuttal? Until a few years ago, the realities of the talk radio medium enhanced the ability of hosts to lie with impunity, and kept their listeners safely inside an information bubble. But maybe social media changes everything. I’ve got an idea about how to pop the talk radio bubble. Please join the experiment."

In John Hersey's Hiroshima, I read the story of an encounter between a survivor of Hiroshima and the man who dropped the bomb from the Enola Gay on the old television show This is Your Life. You can see a small portion of the awkward encounter at that link. The producers of the show who set that up must have been some pretty fucked up people. Here's another strange encounter: Alex Gibney, the man who exposed torture and Don Rumsfeld, the man who authorized it. This time, the victim couldn't make it for the fancy Washington dinner party. He had been murdered.

#339 Superlatives Get Out the Vote

2011-01-04T23:26:00.000-05:00

Thanks to wife, I am a reluctant semi-expert on ABC's the Bachelor. Through the years, the show's host, Chris Harrison, has frequently hyped up the next episode with previews after each week's show which claimed that next week, we would witness "the most dramatic rose ceremony ever." Better yet, without fail a few episodes later, he would say the exact same thing, and on and on through the seasons. The show seems to be always raising its standards.

I think our nation is also constantly raising its standards. During the 2008 election cycle, I heard the phrase, "This is the most important election of our lifetimes," in a scary voice more times than I care to count. And much like Chris Harrison, our rulers, cable news contributors, radio personalities, and fellow citizens also said the same in 2004 and 2000. I remember '96, but not all the commentary surrounding it. Was it also said then? What about '92, '88, '84 and so on? I'm sure it was so, because according to Charles Dickens, it was so as far back as 1859 in London and even 1775 in Paris. I know because of these two cities he said,

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Maybe the standards of "importance" have been raised. But maybe they only appear to have been raised by the relative descent into hackery and sophistry of our own noisiest authorities, whether they be rulers, newsmen, pamphleteers, or fellow citizens.

#338 Books of 2010

2010-12-22T22:24:00.000-05:00

For the first year in nearly two decades, I purchased no music so I have no list of favorite albums of 2010. But here is a list of all the books I read this year ranked from favorite to least favorite. Once again, I didn't even make it to twenty this year, but it was a busy year. I purchased seven of these, was given five, borrowed two, got two from the library, and read one off a Kindle, for a total of 17.

I - Recommended Reading

1. The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard Hays, 9 out of 10
2. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, 8 out of 10
3. The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth, 8 out of 10
4. Republic by Plato, 7 out of 10

II - “I’m going to put this out there, if you like it you can keep it, if not you can throw it back”

5. It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong, 6 out of 10
6. The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, 6 out of 10
7. The Essential Dialogues by Plato, 6 out of 10
8. Hiroshima by John Hersey, 6 out of 10
9. Summa of the Summa by Thomas Aquinas, ed. Peter Kreeft, 6 out of 10
10. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, 6 out of 10
11. The Histories by Herodotus, 6 out of 10
12. Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp, 6 out of 10
13. Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall, 6 out of 10
14. Economic Policy by Ludwig Von Mises, 6 out of 10
15. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 5 out of 10
16. When Helping Hurts by Brian Fikkert, 5 out of 10
17. The Tempest by William Shakespeare, 5 out of 10

III - Not worth the effort you will put in

Nothing to report in this category. All books were at least halfway decent this year.

#337 Advice For Those Entering College

2010-12-14T22:43:00.001-05:00

1. Don't try to find a career you'll love. Odds are good that you won't find it and there's a good chance that if you do, the enjoyment will be fleeting. Rather, find a career where lifelong contentment is a real possibility. Contentment is a treasure that most pirates on the seas of life never find.

2. The old advice that said "just get the piece of paper," i.e. the degree, was wrong. Avoid college and the expense, debt, and disillusionment that go along with it until and unless you have a specific career in mind. Many of us were a perfect fit and destined to thrive in some career that didn't require a college degree and college has either stunted our growth in that area or diverted us from it permanently.

3. Regarding the proverbial history degree, if you're going to go for it, go with gusto. And you can insert sociology, English, music, art, philosophy and any of the other liberal arts here. Have a good idea of exactly what you will do with it. Have a good idea of why it is that you are paying that much for a degree in that subject and why it is that you are spending four years learning something you can learn on your own as a hobby. Make no mistake, there are very good reasons to pay that much and spend four years earning those degrees. Just make sure one of those reasons is yours. Parlay your English degree into a high school teaching position and be the best there ever was. If philosophy, be a voracious reader of it and be ahead of the class. If art is your thing, there's nothing wrong with being a starving artist. There is something wrong with being a dispassionate starving artist. The hard sciences and my business degree leave room for half-asses like me. The liberal arts require something more.

4. Choose classes by the reputation of the professor, regardless of the subject matter.

5. Load-up. You've only got one shot at this and tuition is often fixed up to a certain maximum number of credit hours.

6. Don't overestimate the quality of education you will find at big-name schools while underestimating the ability of the smalls to provide you with the same. Don't underestimate the job opportunities, contacts, and name-recognition that the big-name schools will offer while overestimating the ability of a smalls to provide you with the same.

#336 A Failure to Measure

2010-12-10T20:06:00.000-05:00

In the last post and (I believe) the post about not voting, I used the analogy of a decision between various heads of the same beastly body to describe voting in order to illustrate that what matters is culture and virtue and that until these change, legislative changes will be mere window dressing. I think this is also, in part, what Alisdair MacIntyre used St. Benedict of Nursia to illustrate at the end of After Virtue. While my analogy draws on Biblical apocalyptic imagery (The Beast), in the fourth book of Republic, Plato makes a very similar remark using a very similar analogy from the Greek thought world (The Hydra):

"Socrates: And without divine help, Adeimantus, they will go on forever making and mending the laws... Yes, I said; and what a delightful life they lead! They are always doctoring and increasing and complicating their disorders, and always fancying that they will be cured by any panacea which anybody advises them to try... do you not admire, I said, the coolness and dexterity of these ready minsters of political corruption?

Adeimantus: ... not all of them, for there are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen.

Socrates: What do you mean? I said; you should have more feeling for them. When a man cannot measure, and a great many others who cannot measure declare that he is four cubits high, can he help believing what they say?

Adeimantus: Nay, he said, certainly not in that case.

Socrates: Well, then, do not be angry with them; for are they not as good as a play, trying their hand at paltry reforms such as I was describing; they are always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of frauds in contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning, not knowing that they are in reality cutting off the heads of a hydra?"

-- Plato, Republic, 4.425e - 4.426e

Surely it's hugely significant that this is the lead-in to the dialogue's lengthy discussion of it's main concern: justice. Plato's work was in teaching his guardians the first principles and then allowing legislation "to naturally flow out." Similarly, the work of the church is in teaching culture to measure, not in teaching those who can't measure to legislate.

#335 You Scratch My Back...

2010-12-08T21:52:00.002-05:00

Conspiracy? Well... obviously.

First, government scratches the back of big business:

"New cables released by the WikiLeaks website disclose how Visa and Mastercard received lobbying support from the Obama administration. The US was concerned that Russia was planning a new credit card payments system which would lose the two companies billions of dollars in processing fees. The US was concerned that Russia was planning a new credit card payments system which would lose the two companies billions of dollars in processing fees." -- From the Telegraph

Next, big business returns the favor:

"MasterCard is the latest in a string of U.S.-based Internet companies - including Visa, Amazon.com, PayPal Inc. and EveryDNS - to cut ties to WikiLeaks in recent days amid intense U.S. government pressure... WikiLeaks' extensive releases of secret U.S. diplomatic cables have embarrassed U.S. allies, angered rivals, and reopened old wounds across the world. U.S. officials in Washington say other countries have curtailed their dealings with the U.S. government because of WikiLeaks' actions. PayPal Vice President Osama Bedier said the company froze WikiLeaks' account after seeing a letter from the U.S. State Department to WikiLeaks saying that the group's activities "were deemed illegal in the United States." -- From The Washington Post

So we have a vivid example of an employee of our citizen government (i.e. Obama) working on behalf of big business while he's on our payroll. But nevermind that. Let's prosecute Mr. Assange, shall we?

Anyway, last I checked, the judicial branch, not the executive branch, was in the business of deeming what is and isn't illegal in the United States. But who cares about the proper function of government anymore, eh? The leaking of information is most certainly illegal and those individuals should be duly prosecuted. However, the publishing of leaked information is not. Otherwise, Bob Woodward and any other journalist who actually bothered to hold governments around the world accountable would've been in prison long ago. I wonder if Mrs. Palin thinks we should target Mr. Woodward for assassination.
Sure enough, our Platonic guardians will change the law to keep the truth hidden with overwhelming bipartisan support and everybody will think America is safe and we'll all pat each other on the backs. No doubt they're drafting up the laws now. In reality, government actions will only become more secretive, dark, and corrupt with absolutely no check or balance left. Prepare to have journalism neutered.

But society can choose to go in one of two directions: towards a more closed or towards a more open society; towards larger, more secretive governments, or towards governments of, by, and for the people; towards a government which belongs to the people, or towards a people which belongs to the government. Cablegate, at the very least, gives us as citizens the opportuity to choose which path we want to take. That way, we only have ourselves to blame when it all goes to hell.

It's clear that anyone who thought Obama would put an end to the gross expansion of executive power that took place under the Bush administration was sorely mistaken. Remember, when you vote in 2012, whether it be for Obama, Palin, Romney, or Huckabee, you are voting for the same beast. Your only choice is between which head of that beast you want to represent the rest. Not much of a choice.

#334 Colossians 1:21-23

2010-12-06T23:31:00.000-05:00

As God has reconciled all things to himself through Christ, the Colossian Christians are lucky enough to have been included.

You also, who formerly were estranged and hostile in mind, as was shown by your wicked works, he has now nevertheless reconciled in the body of his flesh, through death, to present you holy, blameless, and irreproachable in his presence - provided you remain firmly founded and stable in your faith and are not shifted from the hope of the gospel which you heard. This gospel has been preached in all creation under heaven; of this gospel I, Paul, have been made a minister.

F.F. Bruce suggests the "as was shown by" rendering above in order, he says, to exclude "any suggestion that the enmity was the consequence of the wicked works." The translators of the NET Bible make a similar point. But really? We don't want any suggestion? What does this do to our interpretation of Romans 3:23 which says that all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory? Does it mean that it's better to interpret Romans 3:23 to be saying that we both sinned and fell short as a result of our estrangement and hostile mind, rather than the traditional reading which says that we fell short as a result of our sin? In other words, are sinful works merely a display of a hostile mind, with the hostile mind being what has condemned us? Does Jesus save us then by giving us a new mind, renewing our mind as it were? How does Jesus save us?

The simple fact that the thirteen letters of Paul are all addressed to Christians while being filled with warnings is enough to demolish the evangelical idea that says, "Once saved, always saved," otherwise known as "perseverance of the saints" in Calvinist circles. But if you're looking for a more succinct statement from Paul, you could do no better than the passage above. As Paul says explicitly, the Colossians are currently reconciled and ready to be presented holy, blameless, and irreproachable. In the parlance of our time, the Colossians to whom Paul is writing are "saved." If you disagree, ask yourself, is it possible to be reconciled to God without being saved? Is it possible to be presented holy, presented blameless, presented irreproachable before God without being saved? If the answer is no, then it is clear that Paul believes the Colossians to have been "saved."

But Paul makes it clear that they are so only contingently. This present declaration of both present and future standing before God is only true inasmuch as they remain stable in faith without shifting from the hope of the gospel. Paul believed that reconciled folks could retroactively become unreconciled based on the stability of their faith and hope. He believed that the saved could become unsaved. We can agree or disagree, but what Paul believed is clear.

So where does that leave the concept of Christian assurance? How then can we have assurance? In Christ of course! I've often thought in my mind that prayer doesn't work. Only God in Christ works. In the same way there is no assurance of salvation for the Christian. There is only assurance in God through Christ. Prayer and salvation are gifts offered by a God who alone is sure. Gifts are never sure. The giver always is.

What did the "shifting from the hope of the gospel" that Paul is concerned about look like? Was it outright denial, or just sin, or both? Maybe the key to those questions is found in Paul's statement about which gospel he fears them shifting from,

"... the gospel which you heard. This gospel has been preached in all creation under heaven."

This particular statement serves a very specific function and it's telling that this is the second time Paul has mentioned this gospel being preached in all the world in the short span of chapter one, especially in a letter known as one which appears to be combating some kind of local heresy. That this heresy was the occasion of Paul's letter to the Colossians will become clear in chapter two.

We can only speculate, and many people have, what this particular heresy might have involved, but regardless, it's likely there were multiple gospels on the market by the mid first-century. Paul is concerned that the Colossians Christians are not captivated by these other gospels but rather that they continue to hold firm to the particular one which they originally heard from Epaphras. This same gospel is endorsed by Paul and indeed is the same one that has been (past tense) preached (v. 23) and is bearing (present tense) fruit all over the world. Make no mistake: Paul is slapping an ID tag on his gospel. This is the real gospel; the catholic, apostolic gospel. This makes clear that Paul isn't warning against generic sin, per se. His is a very specific warning against shifting from a very specific gospel.

#333 Interesting Links XXXIX

2010-11-22T21:40:00.000-05:00

John Hobbins thinks the question of the whether the events in Joshua happened as narrated is a dumb question no matter who is asking it. His post is lengthy, but here's an introductory remark: "In ancient Israel and ancient Greece, the texts which narrate the formative periods of their respective polities post-date the events they narrate by give-or-take a half millennium. The texts shape collective memories and traditions for patriotic purposes. The authors of Joshua and the Iliad and the Odyssey worked with the memories and traditions they had, not the ones we wished they had. They cared much about questions of virtue and ultimate loyalty and the interaction of gods and men, all of which are front and center in their respective narratives. They cared little at all about the kind of questions a historian is used to posing."

Rod Dreher has posted links to the ugliest churches of our time. He describes the first as "an ottoman mating with an armchair." Does anybody know where to find a listing (with pictures) of the most beatiful churches around the world? I remember seeing a picture of one in Barcelona once that was pretty cool looking. And that big marble-looking white one in Florence that I saw in person was pretty nice too.

Just last year, C-SPAN posted almost its entire video archive on the web. Sounds like a pretty boring news story, but could create for some interesting YouTube mashups causing politicians to eat their words.

Burke's Corner reminds conservatives why they exist while Austin Bramwell compares that odious thing that used to be conservatism (the GOP) to Orwell's 1984.

Daniel Larison compares Barack Obama to Woodrow Wilson.

Brad Littlejohn takes the contrarian view on Christianity and property rights, and claims the support of Aquinas, Basil, and Chrysostom.

In the book of Revelation, seven letters were written to the city churches in what is modern-day Turkey. We don't so much unite by city as the early Christians did, but rather denominate ourselves by the nuances of our belief systems. So if a letter were to be written to the evangelical church in America, I would imagine it should contain something like this from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

This is your literature on drugs.

And finally, John Calvin sounding very Catholic here.

#332 One Hitters II

2010-11-19T22:17:00.000-05:00

1. In what sense are prayers answered? What does an answer look like? Should we ever be saying things like, "that's an answer to prayer," or "my prayers were answered," or "prayer works"? If prayers seem to go equally or exceedingly unanswered as much as they appear answered, and in a fashion unknown to man, how can we venture to say things like this? When we do pray, we alternatively receive and fail to receive with no noticeable correlation with the prayer. When we don't pray, we alternatively receive and fail to receive. No correlation with not praying that man can see. Anyway, as Garth Brooks has noted, sometimes God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

2. What is worth reading in the 800+ years between Augustine's Confessions (400 AD) and Aquinas' Summa Theologica (1274)? What is worth reading in the nearly 400 years between Calvin's Institutes (1536) and Barth's Epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed. (1921)? And what is worth reading in the 250+ years between Aquinas and Calvin?

3. If it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (read: impossible), then is it equally hard for the healthy man?

#331 Coinage

2010-11-15T23:53:00.000-05:00

St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Magnesians on his way to die:

"It is right, therefore, that we not just be called Christians, but that we actually be Christians... For just as there are two coinages, the one of God and the other of the world, and each of them has its own stamp impressed upon it, so the unbelievers bear the stamp of this world, but the faithful in love bear the stamp of God the Father through Jesus Christ, whose life is not in us unless we voluntarily choose to die into his suffering."

-- The Letter of Ignatius to the Magnesians, 4:1-5:2

Jesus on his way to die:

"'Hypocrites! Why are you testing me? Show me the coin used for the tax.' So they brought him a denarius. Jesus said to them, 'Whose image is this, and whose inscription?' And they replied, Caesar's.' He said to them, 'Then give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.'"

-- Matthew 22:18-22

#330 Ecumenical Coetibus

2010-11-11T22:03:00.000-05:00

Cardinal William Levada, head of the church office formerly known as the Inquisition but now renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the opportunity presented by Anglicanorum Coetibus:

"Union with the Catholic Church is the goal of ecumenism—one could put, “we phrase it that way”. Yet the very process of working towards union works a change in churches and ecclesial communities that engage one another in dialogue, in actual instances of entering into communion do indeed transform the Catholic Church by way of enrichment. Let me add right away that when I say enrichment I am referring not to any addition of essential elements of sanctification and truth to the Catholic Church. Christ has endowed her with all the essential elements. I am referring to the addition of modes of expression of these essential elements, modes which enhance everyone’s appreciation of the inexhaustible treasures bestowed on the Church by her divine founder.

"The new reality of visible unity among Christians should not thought of as the coming together of disparate elements that previously had not existed in any one community. The Second Vatican Council clearly teaches that all the elements of sanctification and truth which Christ bestowed on the Church are found in the Catholic Church. What is new then is not the acquisition of something essential which had hitherto been absent. Instead, what is new is that perennial truths and elements of holiness already found in the Catholic Church are given new focus, or a different stress by the way they are lived by various groups of the faithful who are called by Christ to come together in perfect communion with one another, enjoying the bonds of creed, code, cult and charity, in diverse ways that blend harmoniously.

"Since the Church is like a sacrament, she bears within herself the truth and grace of Christ. When we say that Christ reveals God, and that the Church bears the revelation of Christ in the world, we are admitting that the unenlightened human intellect is not up to the task of knowing God’s ways perfectly. We humans need revelation, enlightenment. Baptism as the foundational sacrament of Christian faith is the normal means for that enlightenment to begin to penetrate our intellects. Even so, while God in Christ has revealed as much about Himself and about our relationship to Him as we need, revealed truths about the infinite God still exceed our finite intelligence. There is always an element of mystery in our knowledge of God and God’s work. Therefore, we fully expect that, while we may accurately know what can be truthfully said, the full knowledge of what that means is enhanced by the contemplation of many groups of people on the same mystery...

"Visible union with the Catholic Church does not mean absorption into a monolith, with the absorbed body being lost to the greater whole, the way a teaspoon of sugar would be lost if dissolved in a gallon of coffee. Rather, visible union with the Catholic Church can be compared to an orchestral ensemble. Some instruments can play all the notes, like a piano. There is no note that a piano has that a violin or a harp or a flute or a tuba does not have. But when all these instruments play the notes that the piano has, the notes are enriched and enhanced. The result is symphonic, full communion. One can perhaps say that the ecumenical movement wishes to move from cacophony to symphony, with all playing the same notes of doctrinal clarity, the same euphonic chords of sanctifying activity, observing the rhythm of Christian conduct in charity, and filling the world with the beautiful and inviting sound of the Word of God. While the other instruments may tune themselves according to the piano, when playing in concert there is no mistaking them for the piano. It is God’s will that those to whom the Word of God is addressed, the world, that is, should hear one pleasing melody made splendid by the contributions of many different instruments... The experience we are embarking on with Anglicanorum Coetibus promises also to make the Church’s fundamental unity manifest by adding to her life distinctive expressions of Christ’s gifts."

Love the quote. Nothing to add. But it goes without saying that before the symphony could begin, the nitpicking church would argue about who gets to be the piano and who the tuba. But it's a start. Burke's Corner first reacts harshly (while making a fair charge) to a few Bishops making the switch , and then checks himself a bit.

#329 Rhetorical Palindrome

2010-11-09T20:40:00.000-05:00

Speaking of Colossians, Peter Leithart notices what he calls a "chiasm" - which appears to be a word for a rhetorical palindrome - beginning at 1:16. He comments,

"The structure, rather surprisingly, centers on Paul’s description of his own ministry. All the exposition of the mystery and headship of Christ circles around Paul’s labor and struggle among the churches."

He sees another one beginning in the middle of the first on which he comments:

"One of the important results of this structure is to reinforce the connection between the cross and the 'circumcision of Christ'... the circumcision of Christ is not a description of baptism or any experience of conversion, but instead a description of the cross."

He's probably seeing things that aren't really there, but it could still be a useful tool to get an idea of what Paul is emphasizing. Check out the link to see the structure.

#328 Interesting Links XXXVIII

2010-11-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

I saw this quote in the local paper about the local behemoth church: "North Point Community Church in Alpharetta has an annual budget of about $40 million, the church reports on its website. By comparison, the city of Alpharetta has an operating budget of $50.3 million for the 2011 fiscal year."

We are getting rid of cable soon and I need ideas for how to watch TV for free online. So far the PBS site looks great with old episodes of Austin City Limits, American Experience, and Frontline available. I've heard of Hulu, but where else do I go?

Sometimes it seems like the Protestant church is so concerned about something they call "works righteousness" that it's all they preach about. Seems like I can't get through a Sunday without somebody reminding me that I can't please God and have to rely on his grace. It's like we have no other sermon. My concern is justified if it all leads to its logical extreme, as one Steven Anderson demonstrates.

So apparently Martin Luther had some pretty strange views on sex. See here.

John Hobbins takes New Testament Christians to task. An excerpt: "The Christians of the New Testament were Old Testament Only Christians. They had what we call the Old Testament, what they called Scripture, and they experienced what they took to be Christ crucified and risen in worship. If they were lucky, they knew someone who could share a few stories about what the guy did and said before he was crucified and God raised him from the dead. That’s all they had, and that’s all they needed. They read Scripture, compared it with what the Holy Spirit was doing in their midst, and said, “This is that” (Acts 2:16). The last thing they needed was the New Testament."

Paul Griffiths urges a middle ground between ignoring the news and being a news junkie, calling the pagan world "an arena of grace."

Walter Russell Mead sets up a liberal straw-man and said liberal straw-man equates the Israeli government with the Myanmar, Eastern Congo, and Darfur governments. The problem is no such straw-man even deserves knocking down if one existed. The point was never that the crimes of the Israeli government against the Palestinians are in any way equal to those of more terrible regimes around the world. Only Mead is "ranking sufferings." The point of debate is that, in the words of Greg Scobelete, "by virtue of its aid and diplomatic support, the U.S. is implicated in Israel's behavior in a way that it simply is not with other countries."

What has a society come to when its Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can make a statement like this: "What is morally just and right—that’s not my job" What would Augustine and Aquinas have thought of John Roberts? Surely that the decline and fall of American was imminent if not complete.

Bin Laden won a far greater victory on 9/11 than anyone was willing to admit. In a way, that day was the end of America.

Justin Taylor sets us straight, but is it possible that some of the same individuals who urged people not to fill out the census this past summer would also lambaste people who refuse to vote? The census is one of the view constitutionally valid powers that our government exercises. Civic duty is great and all, in November. But when it interferes with a power grab, civil disobedience is the name of the game. And to think, the people of Minnesota re-elected this crazy witch hunter.

#327 Colossians 1:15-20

2010-11-04T21:34:00.000-05:00

Now that the Colossians have been transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, the king of their new domain is described:

He is the image of the invisible God, firstborn before all creation, because in him all things were created - things in heaven and things on earth, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers - they have all been created through him and for him. He indeed is before all things, and they all cohere in him; he is also the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, firstborn from the dead, that he might be preeminent in all things, because in him it was decreed that all the fullness should take up residence and that through him [God] should reconcile all things to himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross - [through him], whether those on earth or those in heaven.

So Paul begins with a simple statement of the lead fact: Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The rest of the early Christian hymn describes what that means. It means that at the center of everything that a doing God does is Christ. YHWH is a creating God and does so through Christ. YHWH is sovereign over the powers and is so by Christ. YHWH reconciles and accomplishes this in Christ. So all of God's action vis-a-vis the world finds its agency in Christ. This is what it means to say that Jesus Christ is God incarnate.

Against the pre-Gnostics, Christ is not at variance with the creator god; he is in fact Israel's creator god. He is here seen to be doing all of the things that a first century Jew would've expected YHWH to be doing. This concept of Jesus fulfilling what a first century Jew would've expected YHWH to fulfill is argued at length by N.T. Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God.

What is the fullness that was decreed to take up residence in Christ? I'm having trouble with this one. Could it possibly have the same meaning as the "pleroma" in Romans regarding the salvation of the Gentiles or is Paul battling pre-Gnostics here?

If similar to the meaning in Romans, then maybe as Christ is the head and the firstborn, fullness simply means that the church - being the subsequently born - proceeds to take up residence as the body of the head so as to avoid a disembodied head. Stated more succinctly, he is the head because he's where the fullness is taking up residence. The fullness is not taking up residence because he is the head.

It is as if the so-called "Colossian heresy" was fundamentally a wrong answer to the following question, "Where will we as a body take up residence if not with the principalities, powers, thrones, and dominions?" Paul's answer: God has decreed, "with Christ!" He is, after all, the firstborn from the dead, and since you are next to be born from the dead, it only makes sense. Otherwise, you're dead.

All creation seems to have been at war with God and with itself and since God only acts toward humanity via Christ, Christ is the agent who brings peace. Somehow this blood is the method whereby YHWH fulfills his agency of peacemaking.

#326 Broken for Who?

2010-11-02T21:11:00.000-05:00

The pastor at church Sunday said something to this effect when introducing the Eucharist: "If you are not a believer, then it wouldn't make sense for you to participate in this meal." Pastors always say something to this effect to discourage non-members from communion.
Do they know why they say this? I don't believe there's anything explicit in Scripture to this effect, so we can't say with any confidence that it is apostolic teaching.

At the inaugural Eucharist, Jesus pre-enacts his sharing of himself with, among the other disciples, Judas Iscariot, the wheat among the tares.

The criticism Paul has in I Corinthians 11 is of the congregation's failure to share enough, not their sharing too widely. Whatever else Paul believe about drawing a fence around the Eucharist, support will have to be found elsewhere than in I Corinthians 11.

If Jesus broke his body and shared it with the world, why should we break it and hoard it amongst ourselves? Are we failing to do precisely what Jesus asked us to do in remembrance of him?

Related posts:
Sacraments for Infants
Do What in Remembrance of You?

#325 We Are All Marxists Now

2010-10-30T20:15:00.000-05:00

There's a great column from R.R. Reno on the First Things site that ties in with what I posted on voting and the Plato quote. He opens it with this:

"Ours is the age of misplaced priorities. Instead of art and culture, we focus on politics and punditry. Chatting over lunch, we talk about the upcoming elections or Sarah Palin’s significance for the conservative movement or the effects of the Chinese trade surplus. Imitating news analysts, we speculate about what it will mean for the future."

He goes on to show that it wasn't always like this. Time was when "Literature, theater, film, the visual arts—a certain acquaintance with and command of these domains made people intellectuals... debates about novels and poetry seemed more fraught with public significance than the ins and outs of current electoral politics." Reno says that the high value placed on the classics following World War II was at least partly the result of that conflict and the depression earlier in the century:

"The impulse to buy the Harvard Classics... undoubtedly stemmed from class anxieties, but it also reflected a real desire to rethink modern identity. The traumas of the Great Depression and World War II profoundly disoriented Americans, as did the rapid growth in income and increase in status so many experienced, and many felt the need to answer basic questions about society and human destiny. Some turned to the classics of the past, others sought answers in Marxism or Freudian psychology, and still others drew inspiration from the cultural experimentation that culminated in the 1960s.

In this atmosphere, the pressing question about politics was not 'Who is going to win?' but instead the question 'What is politics for?' It was a question that required examining our more fundamental views of what human life is for, and what role society plays."

This is essentially the question Plato was asking in the excerpt from Phaedrus in my last post, i.e. shouldn't we first ask about the nature of rhetoric and politics, about good and evil, justice and injustice, power and the limits thereof, before we ever wield power. Today we don't ask those questions anymore. We just know. Reno illustrates and draws a interesting parallel:

"Today as we shift toward a seemingly ever-increasing interest in the machinery of partisan politics, we’re becoming Marxists by default. Marx held that economic realities are fundamental, and questions of culture are epiphenomenal.

To use the technical terms of Marxist theory, the struggle for economic power functions as the base of social reality, while literature and poetry, music, and the arts are part of the “superstructure” that is determined by the base. Thus the primacy of politics, for whoever controls the levers of state power can influence and guide economic affairs, and thus control everything."

The politicians, talking heads, political junkies, and activists of our day would've been the Sophists and rhetoricians of Plato's. Reno continues:

"Not every controversial political issue boils down to economics (though it’s amazing how much passion gets invested in whether the top marginal rate is 35% or 39%). The question of who controls the Supreme Courts also looms large. Yet across the board we assume that politics is about power—getting it and wielding it. The question, asked by Plato and Aristotle, as well as Augustine and Aquinas, 'What is politics for?' is irrelevant, and indeed uninteresting.

This tacitly Bolshevik mentality is mistaken. Yes, of course people vote their pocketbooks. 'It’s the economy, stupid,' as Bill Clinton reminded his campaign in 1992. But we also vote in order to forestall what we fear, and to achieve what we hope for. We’re only likely to put our shoulders behind political causes we believe necessary or desirable, which isn’t a matter of syllogisms, surveys, or social scientific analysis.

This is why the most potent force in political life is the human imagination, not control over the levers of state power. Utopian fantasies and exaggerated dreams of national greatness agitated millions in the twentieth century, providing legitimacy to communist and fascist regimes. Nightmares about cancerous aliens made Nazi anti-Semitism seem plausible. And today it is the cultural imagination of the Islamic world—not its oil wealth or official foreign policies—that makes the region so volatile.

At the end of the day, elections don't shape or influence our cultural imaginations. On the contrary, our imaginations influence our elections, as the naive nation builders who thought that bringing elections to Iraq would transform the country discovered, much to their dismay."

The tail can't wag the dog no matter how hard we try. The lesson that Iraq taught me is that at the end of the day, neo-conservatism is just another name for liberalism with big, Rooseveltian stick. Reno concludes:

"As the midterm elections approach, it’s worth remembering that the future of America will turn on culture, not politics: the poetry of our moral and social imaginations, not punditry. So by all means vote, but don't neglect the real and deeper sources of public life."

By all means vote. I've got too many questions to do so at this time.

#324 Less Politics, More Virtue

2010-10-28T21:58:00.000-05:00

What happens when an electorate puts the cart of politics before the horse of virtue? Plato asked the same question:

"And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse puts good for evil, being himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having studied the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades them... about the good which he confounds with evil, what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?"

-- Socrates in Plato, Phaedrus, 260c

#323 Why I May Never Vote Again

2010-10-20T21:56:00.001-05:00

A short time to go until the midterm elections, and for the first time in my life I don't believe I'll be visiting the voting booth. And if I won't vote in this November's elections, why would I vote in the next, or ever again? I don't think I will. Of course, I may. I'm a work in process. All my judgments are provisional, tentative, and therefore subject to change. That'll be as true as ever when I'm 80 years old; it's certainly true at 28.

If I thought less about it, I'd say my reason for this decision (or indecision if you want to look at it that way) is apathy. But I think more about it and my decision about what not to do in November is, on the contrary, very much the result of a decision not to participate. Further below is my attempt to articulate. Or I could just quote someone who knew a little something about the responsibility of the citizenry:

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner; Liberty is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin

Consider me Liberty this November.

This is a really rough draft of several thoughts floating around in my head. As such, I'm probably leaving several ideas out that are important for me and perhaps including others that are less so. I'm convinced I could write this a lot better, but I've reworked it a couple times with only marginal improvement. So I'm posting it to set it free. Here are five theses on why I won't vote.

Thesis #1 - The Benedict Option

It's hard to articulate clearly why I'm not voting, but the roots of my decision go back to shortly after the last election when I came across the following quote from the last lines of Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue:

"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age... and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are... A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another - and doubtless very different - St. Benedict."

In a nutshell that is why I'm not voting. If your top priority when it comes to the polis is civility and moral community, and if politics ceases to serve that purpose, then it only makes sense to shift your focus to other forms of community wherein morality and civility can flourish. When the means no longer fit the end, the means become superfluous. For Rod Dreher, who has termed this path The Benedict Option, this includes homeschooling, living a sustainable agrarian lifestyle, localism, etc. For Benedict himself, it was the cloister. But in general, as Macintyre says, it means setting ourselves to the the task of constructing new forms of community within which the moral life can be sustained through the coming dark ages.

For me, it simply means that as I get older, I see myself less and less as a citizen of the American nation - whatever that may mean in the first place - and more and more as a citizen of the church. To pledge allegiance to any nation's flag - a creepy thought in and of itself - alongside my pledge of allegiance to Christ and his church is giving me cognitive dissonance. Ironically, I've never been a member of a church in my adult life. But even so, my people are church people. That's where my loyalties lie. Renouncing the principalities and powers, my energy is best poured into building up the church community, which is itself an outpost of the kingdom of God, in order to collectively pour ourselves out for the world

Furthermore, as Macintyre feared, the barbarians are already within our gates. When people like Christine O'Donnell, Charlie Rangel, Sarah Palin, and Harry Reid are given airtime and power, you can see that intellectually vapid barbarians have already secured our cultural and political strongholds. So I've chosen, in Macintyre's words, to turn aside from the task of shoring up the American imperium. What is most controllable by me - and incidentally, most important to the future of morality and civility at large - is my family, then radiating outward, my community of friends, my church, my neighborhood associations, and my business acquaintances. Leviathan is neither necessary nor helpful for this task and never truly was. Family, church, and culture are more important than politics.

Thesis #2 - Moral Outsourcing

The torture - not to mention the expansion of executive power generally - that occurred under the Bush administration had a profound impact on me. Politics allows us to be one step removed from the consequences of our actions. I didn't have to torture anyone. I outsourced it. I was not willing to torture, but I didn't ask questions when our own government did it. While unquestioningly accepting the Afghanistan invasion and vociferously arguing for the Iraq War, I was not willing to fight the wars myself, so I hired someone else to do it.

I've created the same moral buffer for myself in regards to domestic policy. Theoretically, I have no problem with the death penalty, so I have an agent, the bureaucratic state, handle this for me. However, I know inside that I'd never be willing to actually flip the switch with my hands on anyone sitting in an electric chair. And I started to realize that whether I'm flipping the switch or giving someone else a mandate to flip the switch (via a vote), I'm committing the same act. Outsourcing your dirty work doesn't remove the moral weight of your actions, it just blinds you to it. I'm just no longer willing to charge someone else with the completion of a task I would not be willing to complete myself. When citizens ask the state to perform tasks which - based on the citizens own moral reasoning - they could not bring themselves to perform, there you have the end of civilization. There you have barbarism. And as Macintyre says, "the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament."

Thesis #3 - Voting as Legitimation

Perhaps I should change how I label myself politically from classically liberal conservative to anti-federalist because I just feel that there is a fundamental weakness in our constitution that allows a representative from Los Angeles to impact my life in Atlanta while sitting in an office in Washington. If you were to drive a circuit between these three cities you would have driven over 5,000 miles. I doubt even the Roman Empire had the extent of power over local communities that Washington claims.

This point was driven home for me during the debates over the building of a Muslim community center in New York City this year. I was astonished that people in Atlanta (or any other American city), were complaining to people in Washington, about the actions of people in New York City, practically begging Leviathan to put his totalitarian boot down and say no to the construction. That is absurd! What business does Atlanta have in New York? What business does Washington have in New York? This is the New York community's problem to solve; it's Manhattan's problem to solve.

All this leads me to feel that I can no longer legitimate Washington as a source of authority, and voting is nothing if not legitimation. It is often said that if don't vote, then you cannot complain. I would flip that on its head. If you do vote you assent and whatever is done subsequently is done with your stamp of approval on the authority you have vested with those in power. If you do vote, then you cannot complain. You have only yourself to blame. Voting is at best assent, at worst a mandate, and at least a legitimation. We as citizens of God's kingdom must reckon with these facts before we consider whether voting is a good or a bad thing.

I'm no historian, but here's my hypothesis: In the middle ages, we moved from strong local governments to weak nation states. With the Enlightenment's enshrinement of universal "self-evident" human rights, we moved from weak nation states to strong nation states legitimated by the mandate to protect these rights, local preference be damned. The constitution of the United States is one of the tangible results of this philosophical epoch. This struggle of universal human rights as opposed to local control is what eventually led us through everything from civil war in the mid-19th century to debates about prayer in schools into the 21st, in large part due to the weakness in the constitution. Opposing the majority of the founding fathers, the anti-federalists - including Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and James Monroe - tried to point out these flaws in the document from the beginning, but the federalists got the upper hand and we have paid the price ever since. In the mid-20th century, with the end of WWII and increasing globalization, we began to develop global governance structures. This trajectory raises the question, if there were to be a one-world government and we had to elect a world leader, would you participate in the festivities and vote in the election or would you abstain?

Phrased another way, and this is a practical question for many people living in tyrannical regimes around the world, would you vote in the rigged Cuban election that perennially gives Castro the victory? Well, you might not vote for Castro. But you may vote for the opposition. But might it be better not to vote at all?

Perhaps a more stark example will strike a chord. Imagine you are a Christian of the first century A.D. and you are given the opportunity to vote for the office of emperor. The choices: Nero and Caligula. To put it in terms first century Christians would've understood, do you vote for the beast, or do you vote for the beast? To put it in the terms of the apocalypse, which one of two of the multi-headed beast do you vote for?

A more hypothetical example: if a dictator held a vote about whether to kill all infants under the age of two, would you drive to the booth check the box that said, "No, we should not kill all infants under the age of two"? I would not. I would not because the question itself is illegitimate. To answer a question is to legitimate the question and the questioner's right to ask such a question. For me, this is all a rhetorically drawn out way of saying that by voting for anyone in Washington, in either party, I legitimate the idea that Washington has any business in Georgia in the first place.

Despite the Iranian protests of the last year, Ahmadi can still reasonably claim legitimacy. Why? Despite irregularities, the opposition participated, thus creating a veneer of a fair fight: exactly the cover Ahmadi was looking for. Participation by the so-called "Green Revolution" in the most important election in the last 30 years of Iranian history backfired and legitimated the regime. How? Because no one in their right mind volunteers for an unfair fight. By volunteering for the fight, the Greens created the illusion of fairness.

Imagine an alternate history. What if instead, no one who opposed Ahmadi went to the polls in Iran that day? What if no one went to the polls in Cuba on election day? What if no one went to the polls in Baghdad in the Hussein era?

It's often said that to refrain from voting is to stay silent so that the equation looks like this: voting = having a voice. But in these societies, doesn't the equation run something like this: voting = staying silent and doing what you're told? It all reminds me of the response pacifists give when confronted with the question of what would've happened if all Christians had conscientiously objected during WWII and not stood up to Hitler. Their comeback: what would've happened if all Christians in Germany had conscientiously objected during WWII and not stood up with Hitler. Sounds irrelevant, but here's the point. Sometimes, it's requires more courage, more strength, and indeed more patriotism, to refuse to stand up.

It is often argued that to refrain from voting is cowardly, disrespectful, and unpatriotic. On the contrary, I'd argue that the tough, brave, and patriotic decision for those Christians whose pledge of allegiance is to Christ and his heavenly pater (the transliterated Greek word for father, from which I assume the English word patriot is derived) is not between beastly body parts, or the Democratic head of the federal American beast or the Republican head of the same American beast, but rather between whether or not to legitimate a questionable regime. Patrick Henry thought it questionable, Samuel Adams thought it questionable, and at least early on, James Madison thought it questionable. I too find it questionable.

My gut sense is that Elijah, Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos would not have voted had there been elections in ancient Israel. The system was too corrupt and the power of the monarchy could only truly be legitimated anyway inasmuch as that power was subjected in obedience to YHWH. The rest of the citizens of ancient Israel did provide the quiet acquiescence that legitimated the system. This is their version of today's democratic assent. The people's actions, their presumed displays of support for those in power and their challengers, are now assigned to history's dustbin. The prophets, by contrast, did something more powerful than any Get Out the Vote campaign. They spoke a word, or I should say a Word. That's what I propose Christians, living under the reign of any seven-headed beast throughout history, are to do. Speak the Word, be a witness - remembering that witness is the English word for the Greek word martyr.

Can you imagine any Israelite pledging allegiance to the flag of the united tribes of Israel, and to the monarchy, for which it stood, one nation under YHWH, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all? Well, of course. They were an idolatrous bunch. But I imagine YHWH would not have been pleased.

Thesis #4 - Disaggregating Church and Nation, Distinguishing Public and Political

Another objection says that if I don't vote, then I fail to do something in opposition to immoral federal policy? The objection implies that voting is somehow the only thing we can possibly do to oppose our enemies. Since when did our view of social action become so limited? Certainly Elijah, Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos' methods were more broad than that. Voting is not the be all and end all of social action. In fact, the prophetic opposition through spoken word and action were far more powerful than any vote ever could have been.

This leads me to a quote I read once in an interview with James Davison Hunter, author of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. The book is, in part, a broadside against traditional forms of political engagement by Evangelicals across the political spectrum from right (as exemplified by James Dobson) to left (as exemplified by Jim Wallis).
He says, "There are two tasks for a post-political witness. First, we must disaggregate the life of the church and the life of the nation. Second, we must renew a distinction between the public and the political." This almost directly parallels Macintyre's quote at the start of this post. Benedict of Nursia did precisely these two things. In his mind, he disaggregated the life of the church and the life of the nation. For too long we've conflated church and American nation to the detriment of the prophetic voice of the church as a corrective to the nation. In Benedict's actions, he renewed a distinction between the public and the political. Here's Hunter to get a practical view into how making this distinction might work in a 21st century context,

"What would a post-political gesture look like in the pro-life movement? Borrowing an example from a friend, imagine ten thousand families signing a petition in Illinois that declares they will adopt a child of any ethnic background and physical capability. If they wanted to do something spectacular, they could go to city hall for a press conference, announcing that in the state of Illinois there are no unwanted children. That would be a public but not political act. Such an act leads with compassion rather than coercion."

Public but not political. Church but not nation. This is what it means to be post-political and of course, this route is only intelligible as a member of the church anyway. Non-Christians should continue to actively participate in politics because it is pragmatic. Pragmatism is a value, a moral, for them. When you're of the world, might does make right. Neither pragmatism nor might are values of the cross. That's oxymoronic if you've read the story. Weakness and kenosis don't work out too well in politics. So with Macintyre, Dreher, and perhaps Hunter, I too am waiting for another Benedict.

There is also a danger in political power and Christians, being intimately familiar with the depravity of their own souls, should be wary of the power they wield when they vote. As Wendell Berry, who says everything so well, says in his collection of essays entitled The Way of Ignorance,

"Do what we will, we are never going to be free of mortality, partiality, fallibility, and error. The extent of our knowledge will always be, at the same time, the measure of the extent of our ignorance. Because ignorance is thus a part of our creaturely definition, we need an appropriate way: a way of ignorance, which is the way of neighborly love, kindness, caution, care, appropriate scale, care, good work, right livelihood. Creatures who have armed themselves with the power of limitless destruction should not be following any way laid out by their limited knowledge and their unseemly pride in it. The way of ignorance, therefore, is to be careful, to know the limits and efficacy of our knowledge. It is to be humble and work on an appropriate scale."

In the 20th century, the world certainly armed itself with "the power of limitless destruction." The key phrase in that quote for me is "appropriate scale." My family, my church, and my community are of an appropriate scale for the doing of kingdom ethics which Berry espouses. Voting for a politician in Atlanta to go to Washington to make decisions affecting people in Los Angeles is wildly out of scale. It borders on total-itarian.

Thesis #5 - The Church's Place in the World

To read thesis #5, you'll have to read these two older posts of mine which probably locate the beginnings of my post-political shift as being - prior to reading the Macintyre quote - in my own reading of what Paul was trying to say in Romans 12-14. The connection with this post won't be obvious, but this understanding of Paul helped me to see the role of the church in the world as contrasted with that of the state.

Kasemann and Romans 13, Part One
Kasemann and Romans 13, Part Two

#322 The Resurrected Christ As The Outcome of History

2010-09-11T21:08:00.000-05:00

"The pain of our memories is something of a false memory, in that it will not last forever. Only memory that is grounded in the End of things – memory that is eschatological – has true significance. There are forces that are seeking to re-write history at this very moment. There are false believers who imagine that acts of violence can shape the outcome of history.

This is not so. The outcome of history took place in the Resurrection of Christ. Regardless of whatever madness we may imagine year by year, the Resurrected Christ is at the center of all things, He is the Alpha and Omega. He cannot be seen with eyes of hatred and anger. That vision is normatively given to the pure in heart ...

For tears to be wiped away, they must also be shed. For the dead to rise again, they have to die. To remember the truth is, finally, to remember the End of all things when the Truth shall be revealed. The former things – which were always distortions – will pass away. What remains will abide forever."

-- Orthodox priest Fr. Stephen Freeman

#321 Never to Be Broken

2010-09-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

I saw the following list in an article about Pete Rose on ESPN.com. I'd say they're probably right that all of these are unbreakable.

Ten Unbreakable Career Records

Cy Young's 749 complete games
Cy Young's 511 wins
Connie Mack's 53 seasons as a manager
Walter Johnson's 110 shutouts
Sam Crawford's 309 triples
Barry Bonds' 688 intentional walks
Pete Rose's 4,256 hits
Vin Scully's 61 (and counting) seasons with one team
Nolan Ryan's 5,714 strikeouts
Rickey Henderson's 1,406 steals

I don't see how 749 complete games is even humanly possible without a man's arm falling off. Considering that Greg Maddux finished with right around 350 wins, no one will ever come close to Young's record. I wouldn't say Mack's or Scully's records are out of reach considering they're not player records. Johnson's, Crawford's, and Bond's records seem to be reachable, but I've never thought of those stats before, so I'm not sure if any active player is close. Like Young's pitching records, I think Rose's hits record is equally unreachable considering that even a player who gets 200 hits a year for 20 years would still not be there. That's unbelievable. John Smoltz was a strikeout kind of guy who played for nearly 20 years and barely made it across the 3,000 line. How could Ryan have had nearly 6,000. Hard to imagine. A lot of these records are no longer reachable because the game has changed in fundamental ways. But I see no reason why Henderson's steals record couldn't be broken were the right player to play for the right manager(s) long enough. Then I realize that 20 years at 50 steals would only get you a third of the way there and I realize how impossible that is.

#320 Studying Well

2010-09-06T21:24:00.000-05:00

The New York Times presents new research into how to make information stick in your head:

"'When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,' said Dr. Rohrer. 'That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.' With mixed practice, he added, 'each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.'

These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter."

I can't figure out why, but I've found the same technique to work well for me, i.e. using mixed sets when trying to learn something. The reason may be found later in the article:

"The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future. Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle alters that property: 'Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,' he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less."

I think that's why doing randomized practice problems while I was studying for the CPA exam helped me far more than reading the material as it was presented. Here's more:

"In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material. But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later. 'Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,' Dr. Roediger said. 'Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.'"

#319 Sparta and Athens III

2010-09-02T20:21:00.000-05:00

Diodotus son of Eucrates:

"I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usually goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind. As for the argument that speech ought not be the exponent of action, the man who uses it must be either senseless or personally interested: senseless if he believes it possible to deal with the uncertain future through any other medium; interested if wishing to carry a disgraceful measure and doubting his ability to speak well in a bad cause, he thinks to frighten opponents and hears by well-aimed calumny... The good citizen ought to triumph not by frightening his opponents but by beating them fairly in argument." (Thucydides, War, 3.42.1-2, 5)

I thought of three things when I read this quote: 1) myself and other supporters of the Iraq War during late 2002/early 2003 telling those on the fence the world was going to end if we didn't act, and 2) Hank Paulson breathlessly going from Sunday talk show to Sunday talk show during prior to the big bailout telling those on the fence that the world was going to end if we didn't act, and 3) LBJ's "daisy" ad which assisted him in achieving a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which showed a picture of the world ending if viewers didn't act. All of these were cases of haste and passion being the enemies of conservatism. The implication? By definition, it is occasionally better not to triumph. Why? Because good is better than triumph.

#318 Sparta and Athens II

2010-08-31T21:06:00.000-05:00

Not all of Athens liberality was a bad thing. Here is an excerpt from the Athenian general Pericles speech to his fellow citizens at the close of the first year of the war. He was of course propagandizing to maintain support for the war, but he says some good things nonetheless.

"If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of the enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens." (Thucydides, War, 2.39.1)

He goes on,

"... instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all." (Thucydides, War, 2.40.1)

An inspiring piece of propaganda on the bravery of his soldiers who died in the first year:

"Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonor, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, left behind them not their fear, but their glory." (Thucydides, War, 2.42.4)

Here's where he really starts to play on the emotions of the parents of the soldiers that had died under his command:

"Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is what I have to offer the parents of the dead who may be here. Numberless are the chances to which, as they know, the life of man is subject; but fortunate indeed are they who draw for their lot a death so glorious as that which has caused your mourning... Yet you who are still of an age to beget children must bear up in the hope of having others in their stead; not only will they help you to forget those whom you have lost, but will be to the state at once a reinforcement and a security... While those of you who have past your prime must congratulate yourselves with the thought that the best part of your life was fortunate, and that the brief span that remains will be cheered by the fame of the departed." (Thucydides, War, 2.44.4)

This guy Pericles is starting to sound a lot like Chairman Mao.

Finally he address the widows:

"On the other hand if I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad." (Thucydides, War, 2.45.2)

Compare that to the apostle Paul's comments on the role of women in the church. Pericles speech was given 500 years before Paul's letters were written, but surely they hint that Paul's comments were culturally situated. This is part of why I won't be drawing the dividing line of Christian orthodoxy on women pastor's any time soon.

As the fortune of Athens takes a turn for the worse in the second year of the war, Pericles has to defend himself. Here are some more quotes:

"For those of course who have a free choice in the matter and whose fortunes are not at stake, war is the greatest of follies." (Thucydides, War, 2.61.1)

#317 Sparta and Athens

2010-08-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

I've often compared present-day America to ancient Rome in the period just before its decline. The Athenian Empire according to Thucydides may actually be a better parallel. The Corinthians, seeking to persuade the conservative Spartans into war with the more liberal Athens in 432 BC compare the two. I've bolded what I think are the parallels between ancient Athens and modern-day America, and italicized the ways in which Sparta represents the conservative contrast. Here's hoping we become more Spartan in our old age:

"The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you [Sparta] have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough. Again, they [Athens] are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine; your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger there is no release. Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home, you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind. They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country's cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions. Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others."

#316 Mosques on Private Property

2010-08-18T22:08:00.001-05:00

A few posts back, I found it odd that small-government, free market advocates were the most vociferous opponents of illegal immigration. I asked, why would they want the government to tell businesses who they can and can't hire, to artificially restrict the supply of labor, and to interfere in the resource allocations of private business. Why were self-professed free market advocates clamoring for more state control of the economy? That post is here.

The proposed New York Sufi Muslim community center housing a mosque provides a good parallel. Why are small government, free market advocates the most vociferous supporters of government intervention into private property decisions? Why are conservatives the biggest drivers of radical extra-legal intervention by Washington politicians into citizens decisions regarding what to do with their private property? Why are Americans whose heritage and gift to the world is the idea of religious freedom clamoring for larger government involvement in decisions on where to place religious buildings? Don't the Christians in opposition to the Cordoba house realize they are next in line to be interfered with by Washington? They remind me of disaffected Israelites begging for a king to rule over them like the other nations. We all know how that worked out. You get in bed with Leviathan and he'll fuck you next. Furthermore, what business has Washington in New York? I know the answers to all of these questions.

#315 The Local Church Experiment, Part One

2010-08-13T22:37:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther King once said that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning. He, of course, was referring primarily to the racial divide that existed then between all-black and all-white churches. The inference, of course, is that racism was unmistakeably the cause of this division. But frankly, I'm not intrinsically uncomfortable with racial distinctions in the church since it seems to me that geography, tradition, and culture per se play a far larger role in our voluntary segregation than does racism.

For example, in any city in America, there is a more generally black side of town and a more generally white side of town. I, being white, live on the generally white side and attend an all-white church (excluding the church's own prized tokens). But, as far as I can judge my own heart, I have no inherent racist sentiment which keeps me at that all-white church nor that keeps me from attending an all-black church. The things that keep me from attending an all-black church are simple and unglamorous. They are: a) the miles my car would have to drive to the black side of town and b) the difficulty and discomfort of integrating myself into a tradition and culture that I have no experience in.

In fact, the very fact that the divide still remains despite remarkable progress in racial reconciliation within just a couple of generations is a testament to the fact that racism is no longer primarily what divides us. So I don't lose sleep over the fact that I attend a different congregation on Sundays than my black brothers and sisters in Christ.

I am uncomfortable, however, with age distinction whereby, for example, one congregation will contain mostly elderly members while another next door contains primarily post-boomers. That is a curious distinction that can't be explained as easily, historically speaking, and highlights actual problems that can and should be solved. Strangely, even churches that have a fair amount of age diversity often choose to divide their internal programs by age such as small groups and Sunday school (of all things!). Do the old have nothing to teach the young in these settings? Do the young have nothing to teach the old?

The situation we find ourselves in is the responsibility and failure of both the old and the young. It's the failure of the old to flex, grow, be curious and humble. And it's the failure of the young to forgo church-shopping and make a lifetime commitment to the discipline, love, and service of their local community, however small, ragtag, and lifeless it may seem.

I'll go ahead and lay my cards on the table: I have a disdain for mega-churches that I can't quite articulate. It has something to do with the church-as-self-help-pamphlet theme of the sermons. It has something to do with the church-as-entertainment model of most of its functions. But perhaps mostly it has to do with the demographics. According to one study, "Megachurch attenders are younger and more of them are single . . . Additionally, they are more educated and wealthier."

Ruth Tucker, formerly of Calvin Theological Seminary, puts it this way,

"In the megachurch, young people have their own building and programs created to keep them constantly entertained. But there are some who would question the long-term spiritual benefits. The more deeply youths identify with youth programs, the weaker the chances they will remain in the church as adults.

While in small congregations, multigenerations sit together in pews. Out of necessity, young people are active participants, serving as ushers, nursery workers, singing in the choir. This gives them a sense of belonging that follows through adulthood.

When you think about it, she argues, Jesus doesn't easily fit into the fashionable, megachurch mentality of the 21st century. It is possible that a genuine left-behind church in its humble authenticity points to Jesus in a way that no megachurch, with all its user-friendliness, could. The first shall be last."

That all gets around the issue, but again, my disdain for the youthful mega-church movement I can't fully articulate. I have a little more trouble judging the elderly hangers on. They are old enough and wise enough to either make a change or alternately justify themselves in their present course of action. All I would ask is that the church, not just explore, but set itself to the task of integrating these demographics: the old and the young, the mega and the minuscule.

#314 Colossians 1:9-14

2010-08-02T19:19:00.000-05:00

1:9 - For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,

This is where Paul finally picks up where he left off in v. 4. He had gone off on a long tangential parenthetical right after he was about to tell them what he was doing since he heard of their faith. Well now, he tells them that for them, he is praying for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Not really sure what spiritual means here and why that modifies wisdom and understanding. Maybe someone come up with a satisfactory answer to that.

1:10 - so that you may walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God;

If we cannot know the reason for the modifier "spiritual," then at least we are told toward what end the Apostle and his companion pray. Walking in a manner worthy is a creative way of putting the challenge for the follower of Christ. As we'll see later, the Colossians have already been transferred in as members of the kingdom of Christ. Now they show that they belong. Belonging precedes the reflection of that kingdom. We are simply challenged to "walk" as would be pleasing to him. How do we do this? By bearing fruit, that is by doing good work.

1:11 - strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously

We shouldn't let another run-on sentence cause us to forget that the authors are still talking about their prayer for the Colossians that it is through God (specifically his power and might) that perseverance is possible.

1:12 - giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

On the path of persevering, the followers of Christ are always to be joyous in giving thanks. It is the Father who does the qualifying. The holy ones share in an inheritance, but I'm not sure what "in light" means. Too many mysteries in this letter already and no explanation is forthcoming. Ah, but look at v. 13. There's the answer.

1:13 - For he delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son,

This strikes me as one of the key verses of the passage. The qualification granted in v. 12 is part of a transfer from one side of a dichotomy to another. And I think this is big for Paul and the New Testament generally. For lack of more mature and scholarly terminology, there is a good kingdom and there is a bad kingdom, a domain of darkness and a domain of light. The Colossians were formerly (notice the past tense) on one side, but are now (in the present) on the other. This is huge. They don't have to wait for an eschatological new age. They have already been transferred, delivered, and qualified. That has already happened. What happens from there on out is something Paul amply addresses elsewhere. But on thing is clear, they currently stand on God's side.

1:14 - in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Elsewhere Paul connects the transfer with the forgiveness/redemption mentioned here, but here it's like an aside. By connecting the two with only the phrase "in whom" we are left unclear about how forgiveness and redemption interact with transfer, deliverance, and qualification.

#313 Aquinas Against Apologetics

2010-07-30T22:59:00.000-05:00

I've posted quotes before from Ignatius of Antioch and Barth of Basel about the irrelevance of apologetics. Now, Thomas of Aquino (of all people) chimes in against the enterprise:

"For the will of God cannot be investigated by reason... But the divine will can be manifested by revelation, on which faith rests. And it is useful to consider this, lest anyone, presuming to demonstrate what is of faith, should bring forward reasons that are not cogent, so as to give occasion to unbelievers to laugh, thinking that on such grounds we believe things that are of faith."

This could be interpreted as a pretty good argument against natural law, which is especially odd coming from Thomas. In fact, I'd say he sounds Barthian, but then that would be anachronistic. So instead, it seems that Barth was Thomistic. And both were Ignatian. Great minds think alike.

#312 Interesting Links XXXVII

2010-07-24T21:30:00.001-05:00

The complaint most often heard regarding Barack Obama's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize was that he had yet to achieve anything. That statement is true enough. But what's worse is that in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize, he argued for precisely the opposite, War. Now the prevailing wisdom of our day is that war is the method by which we achieve peace. George Orwell would call that doublespeak. The president's actions have proven his words true. He has, after all, increased defense spending and doubled down in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But then, we were warned. During the campaign, he frequently cited Reinhold Niebuhr as a primary theological influence on his thinking. This "Christian" realism has been the dominant paradigm of Christian thinking regarding violence since Augustine but is most often associated today with Niebuhr. The Everyday Thomist shares with us another way: The Anabaptist Vision.

David Bentley Hart with a humorous take on Pat Robertson's comments about Haiti's pact with the devil.

Andrew Sullivan posts an important quote for apostolic workers from Thomas Merton. It begins, "Do not depend on the hope of results..."

Michael Bird has linked to a documentary critiquing the Christian Zionist movement. It's worth checking out the one minute trailer here. A quote: "It's important to understand that the Jewish people have gone through thousands of years of suffering. But from that, two paths can be taken: the path of compassion and mercy and justice and peace or the tradition of Berlin walls being built which exclude people who are not of us... we have an Israeli domestic policy that has placed over 3 million people under military occupation and has created the largest refugee population in the entire world... We have to ask ourselves, why is this defended by the Christian church?" The documentary is aptly named, "With God On Our Side".

Mark Shea and Halden Doerge, fellow Seattle citizens, think Mark Driscoll is crazy. So is he? Doerge's criticism is more biting, frequent, and bombastic. Shea relates it to his own experience in the Catholic church: "Generally speaking, you will find, in any age, that the same pathologies and enthusiasms that go berserk in the world are also found, in muted form, in the Church. But they don't take over the Church. Instead, as Jesus says, 'if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them.' So the Church has drunk everything from the mystery cults to neoPlatonism to extreme ascetisism to the death cults of the plague years to Calvinism to charismatic enthusiasms and has come out stronger for it. It will drink the Manly Men enthusiasms of Driscoll and the Paradigm Shifts of McLaren too. Heck, that will scarcely be a blip on the radar."

Burke's Corner excerpts the always sharp Andrew Bacevich on the illusion of the American century.

Conor Friedersdorf on Switzerland's far more liberal (in the classical sense) gun ownership policies than America.

Michael Bird relates an encounter Markus Barth once had with Billy Graham. The son of the 20th century's most influential theologian told America's premier evangelist the following: "Why do you speak 10 minutes about the Bible and 40 minutes about the altar call? We'd like to hear a bit more gospel and a little less method". He also posts a brief biography of Markus.

This is the unbelievable story of a man who broke into Auschwitz. Yes, into Auschwitz.

Finally, this is a fantastic chart posted by Chris Blattman. It shows water consumption in Edmonton, Canada during this year's Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game. The conclusion? Canadians clearly pee between periods! And considering all the beer they drink, they probably pee clearly between periods as well.

#311 Simplify Your Life

2010-07-22T22:25:00.000-05:00

Here's a list that was posted a while back with forty-three ways to simplify your life. I won't re-post the whole list here because the link can be followed.

Here are some that I've already done that have helped me. Give them a try.
6. Automate your finances.
9. Add items you want to a wish list as you think of them.
19. Create an organizing system that works for you.
21. Carry a notebook and pen with you where ever you go.
22. Unsubscribe from emails, newsletters or RSS feeds that don’t provide value anymore.
26. Reduce the amount of TV you watch.

Here are some I'd like to try next.
3. Go to bed early.
12. Make your lunch for the next day the night before.
13. Make time to catch up with an old friend.
15. Ask for experiences not things for your birthday and Christmas this year.
27. Get outside.
38. Finish old tasks before taking on new ones.

Anybody else got any ideas?

#310 Minority Theology: Blacks

2010-07-14T21:05:00.001-05:00

Race is incendiary. That's why I've never blogged about it. It's really the one topic we're really not allowed to talk about in America. But what the hell. Though I'm destined to piss everyone off, to my right and to my left, I'll give it a go. My primary failure, I suspect, will be that I don't understand history well enough.

According to James Cone, the critique that Malcom X made upon the black churches of the 1960s was that they had assumed that although whites did not treat them right, their was nothing inherently wrong with the white church's thinking about God. In the 1989 preface to his 1969 book Black Theology and Black Liberation, Cone explains how he struggled with that charge as a young man:

"Since I was, like many African-American ministers, a devout follower of Martin King, I tried initially to ignore Malcom's cogent cultural critique of the Christianity as it was taught in black and white churches... For me, the burning theological question was, how can I reconcile Christianity and Black Power, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s idea of nonviolence with Malcom X's 'by any means necessary' philosophy"

I can understand the tug as most of us whites can if we flip the script. Nonviolence is a concept that both powerful whites and powerless blacks despise in equal numbers. Whites don't like restraints when dealing with their Arab enemies, as blacks didn't like restraints when dealing with their white enemies. Restraint is cowardice to whites and complacency to blacks.

This is why a person like Martin King can't be seen as merely an African-American hero, but is more broadly an American hero, whatever his personal failings. He, and not just he, but many of his black and white contemporaries with him, helped counteract the precursors of the 'by any means necessary' philosophy. And yet, he was not silent in the face of injustice.

Is it any stretch to imagine widespread black-on-white racial violence extending through and beyond the 1960s that one might call a "race war" had not Martin's theology prevailed over Malcolm's pragmatism? What am I missing, historically speaking, if I say that while we are accustomed to thinking of Martin Luther King as a hero to blacks, he is actually an equally important hero to whites for stemming a violent tide that threatened our lives and the very fabric of our society?

Just remember this. France had its Jacobins. The UK had its IRA. Israel had its Intifadas. These were all plagues on these countries and their citizens. America's story was to turn out differently. Because while America had its Malcolm, it also had its Martin.

#309 July Protestant Chronological Canonical Practical Bible Reading Plan

2010-07-10T21:53:00.000-05:00

Jun 30-Jul 2: Malachi
Jul 3-5: I Chron 1-10
Jul 6-8: I Chron 11-20
Jul 9-11: I Chron 21-29
Jul 12-14: II Chron 1-12
Jul 15-17: II Chron 13-24
Jul 18-20: II Chron 25-36
Jul 21-23: Lamentations
Jul 24-26: Esther
Jul 27-29: Song of Songs
Jul 30-Aug 1: Proverbs 1-11

#308 All War Is War Between Gods

2010-06-26T08:43:00.000-05:00

9/11 was an attack on our on our gods: Mammon the god of money at the WTC towers and Mars the god of war at the Pentagon. In fact they made an attempt on Zeus the god of power at the U.S. Capitol but they landed short, in Pennsylvania, where presumably no god reigned save the god of Israel and some local deities.

The attackers felt that we were attacking their god so they attacked ours. This is a result of their view that all foreign interference in the Middle East is an infringement on the territory of Allah, not the result of them somehow "hating us for our freedom", no matter how many times a certain person liked to repeat that view. One wonders why our forbears didn't bother to take the conservative approach by considering this dangerous view of radical Islam before interfering in the first place. I'm sure the widows of 9/11 wonder the same.

This all sounds like a justification. It's certainly not, but one still might acknowledge yet retort by saying, "Yeah, but they killed innocent civilians."

Since when did that matter in the western or Jewish practice of war? The Deuteronomic history is a history of relgious war. The ancient Israelites thought little of innocent civilians in a time of war. What was important to them was that their God won out over all the other gods. They essentially said, "We're going to defeat your gods. If you either perpetuate the system or merely happen to be standing in the temple worshipping your god at the time of our attack, you will be considered nothing more than collateral damage." The 9/11 hijackers said the same. The Americans say the same about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British had their Dresdens and Hamburgs.

All perpetrators say this without really saying it. Behind the scenes in all cases, the gods of both the victims and the perpetrators are at war. Pricipalities and powers in cosmic struggle. It seemed to be a small concern that any human being happened to be standing in the way. After all, they were in the bosom of their respective gods.

#307 June Modified Protestant Chronological Practical Bible Reading Plan

2010-06-23T20:39:00.000-05:00

May 31-Jun 2: Ezekiel 11-20
Jun 3-5: Ezekiel 21-30
Jun 6-8: Ezekiel 31-40
Jun 9-11: Ezekiel 41-48
Jun 12-14: Habakkuk, Lamentations
Jun 15-17: Daniel, Obadiah
Jun 18-20: Ezra
Jun 21-23: Haggai
Jun 24-26: Zechariah
Jun 27-29: Malachi

#306 One Hitters

2010-06-19T06:51:00.002-05:00

This post will a placeholder for all my thoughts that aren't long or well thought out enough to merit a full blog post. It'll just collect various unrelated ideas over time so I don't lose them either in the recesses of my brain or on scattered scraps of paper.

1. Were the genocidal parts of the Dueteronomic history created as therapy for national post-traumatic stress disorder? I can imagine a nation, in pursuit of its own manifest destiny, swept up by nationalist fervor, and believing strongly in its divine favored status, committing an unspeakable crime and justifying it in our day. Germany in the mid-20th century comes to mind, but pick your poison. I can then imagine a tradition developing either immediately or millenia later in which not only did God approve of the action, but explicitly commanded the action. All of this resulting from sincerely held belief and not any kind of malicious attempt at revisionist history. How can a nation take proud ownership of such an unspeakable crime without prefacing it with, "God told us to do it, so we had no choice"?

2. Religion is at its best when it is in protest to God. This is especially strong in the Jewish tradition. Examples include the Israelite slavery and wilderness wandering, the Psalms, Lamentations, and Job ("yea, though he slay me...") It's also found early in the Christian tradition (Jesus forsaken cry on the cross, the martyrs questioning "how long?" under the table in Revelation) but becomes less acceptable in later church history to the point of being relegated to private piety in our day. I wonder if traditions of this kind are found in Islam or other religions?

3. You often hear people say of dead loved ones, "God called him home." Whatever happened to death being the wages of sin and dust returning to dust? If God called him home, whither the resurrection? Why was Jesus raised, but we are merely "called home"? We've got some explaining to do.

#305 On Reading Technical Things

2010-06-17T22:42:00.000-05:00

Since I'm an accountant, anything I read for work is by definition boring. In fact the selections are mind-numbing, they deplete my soul, and surely, in some psychosomatic way, they shorten my lifespan. It is so awful that I often find myself reading large swaths of material without any comprehension at all.

So to keep me focused, I've had to trick myself into thinking that I am some kind of interrogator trying to extract meaning out of the text. (See that. I just used me, myself, and I, all in the same sentence.) Anyway, the only way I've found to do this effectively is to, as I read, force each sentence of the text to answer certain questions before I move on to the next sentence. This obviously has the negative effect of slowing my reading but it vastly improves my comprehension. Here are the five questions I ask each sentence to aid my reading comprehension in the order I think best for asking them. In fact, these are helpful questions to ask not only as you read, but also as you edit your own writing.

What is each sentence trying to say? Attempt to understand the sentence first on its own terms before moving onto the next sentence.
Could each sentence have been said in a more clear way? Attempt to paraphrase the sentence.
Is each sentence a necessary sentence? Attempt to eliminate the sentence entirely to determine if the paragraph or surrounding argument can stand without it.
What new questions does each sentence raise? Attempt to determine the implications of the sentence.
What else needs to be said? Attempt to fill in any gaps left by the sentence.

This has helped me with the accounting literature and I'm sure it could be useful to any sort of non-fiction, especially theology and philosophy, and even fictional literary criticism.

#304 Von Mises on the Issues

2010-06-07T20:37:00.000-05:00

In 1958 Ludwig Von Mises was invited to give six lectures to students at the University of Buenos Aires. After his death, his wife collected these lectures into a book called Economic Policy. It's a really quick read and most of it is just a basic overview of free market principles which he does a good job of illustrating. Here are a few choice quotes that may be especially relevant today:

On a powerful nation that once tried to police the world...

"In eighteenth-century England, the land could support only six million people at a very low standard of living. Today more than fifty million people enjoy a much higher standard of living than even the rich enjoyed during the eighteenth century. And today's standard of living in England would probably be still higher, had not a great deal of the energy of the British been wasted in what were, from various points of view, avoidable political and military adventures."

On freedom...

"In nature, there is nothing that can be termed freedom, there is only the regularity of the laws of nature, which man must obey if he wants to attain something."

"... there is no such thing as perfect freedom. Freedom means something only within the framework of society. The eighteenth-century authors of "natural law" - above all, Jean Jacques Rousseau - believe that once, in the remote past, men enjoyed something called 'natural' freedom. But in that remote age, individuals were not free, they were at the mercy of everyone who was stronger than they were. The famous words of Rousseau: 'Main is born free and everywhere he is in chains' may sound good, but man is in fact not born free. Man is born a very weak suckling. Without the protection of his parents, without the protection given his parents by society, he would not be able to preserve his life."

On governments run using Plato's philosopher-kings ideal...

"If you have to convince a group of people who are not directly dependent on the solution of a problem, you will never succeed."

On the relative size of government...

"A famous, very often quoted phrase says: 'That government is best, which governs least.' I do not believe this to be a correct description of the functions of a good government."

On foreign wars as a distracting tool for domestic power-grabs...

"Great Britain was not brought to socialism by the Labour government which was established in 1945. Great Britain became socialist during the war, through the government of which Sir Winston Churchill was the prime minister. The Labour government simply retained the system of socialism which the government of Sir Winston Churchill had already introduced. And this in spite of great resistance by the people."

On the French finance minister during the American revolution who ran deficits during a time of war...

"Necker's greatest mistake having been his attempt to finance aid to the American colonists in their war of independence against England without raising taxes. That was certainly the wrong way to go about solving France's financial troubles. There can be no secret to the solution of the financial problems of a government; if it needs money, it has to obtain the money by taxing its citizens..."

On politicians refusing to raise taxes when necessary...

"The government may think that inflation - as a method of raising funds - is better than taxation, which is always unpopular and difficult."

On the gold standard as a tool that forces fiscal responsibility...

"If, under the gold standard, a government is asked to spend money for something new, the minister of finance can say, 'And where do I get this money? Tell me, first, how I will find the money for this additional expenditure.' ... Under a gold standard, sound government has a much better chance; its leaders can say to the people and to the politicians, 'We can't do it unless we increase taxes.'"

On the America's prospering despite its fiscal irresponsibility...

"One of the privileges of a rich man is that he can afford to be foolish much longer than a poor man. And this is the situation of the United States... Perhaps the United States can afford to be foolish a bit longer than some other countries."

On America's superiority complex...

"There prevails among some groups of North American workers a tendency to believe that they themselves are better than other people - that it is through their own merit that they are getting higher wages than other people. It would only be necessary for an American worker to visit another country - let us say, Italy, where many American workers came from - in order to discover that it is not his personal qualities but the conditions in the country that make it possible for him to earn higher wages... The difference is not personal inferiority or ignorance. The difference is the supply of capital, the quantity of capital goods available."

On why the budget will never be balanced under either party...

"The legislative representatives whose only concern is to satisfy the voters... can represent the people only in a very weak way... the voters... do not realize that there are also opponents who want the opposite thing and who prevent their representatives from achieving full success. This system leads to a constant increase of public expenditures, on the one hand, and makes it more difficult, on the other, to levy taxes... It was not the idea of the eighteenth century founders of modern constitutional government that a legislator should represent not the whole nation but only the special interests of the district in which he was elected."

#303 Law and Order in Pluralistic Societies

2010-06-04T23:20:00.000-05:00

The heading of this blog indicates that my primary interest is with the church, specifically it's interactions both within itself and with the world at large. That's why I posted a summary here a while back about Rome and Canturbury's unique plans to create and maintain unity within the church. I summarized Rowan Williams' plan in particular in that post.

Both bishops have also worked to think through how the church should operate within the existing secular political structure. In February 2008, Williams spoke before the Royal Courts of Justice on the subject of Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective. His speech concerns how, "a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions."

Here's my summary of Williams speech with my own thoughts and examples related to American sprinkled in:

There is a growing problem, moreso in Europe than America, of how to integrate diverse religious communities into one secular society. As an example Muslim communities in Britain have expressed a desire for the freedom to live under sharia (religious) law. Most people hear this term and immediately think of repression. For example, Williams relays the example of a sensational media report that claimed a woman with learning difficulties was forced into a marriage which had been sanctioned by sharia (religious) law.

Similarly in America, we are challenged with the integration of polygamous communities associated with certain sects of Mormonism. According to Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, "polygamy is illegal in Utah and forbidden by the Arizona constitution. However, law enforcement agencies in both states have decided to focus on crimes within polygamous communities that involve child abuse, domestic violence and fraud." In other words, under this approach, our society grants religious law a limited sphere of sovereignty.

But this issue affects more than just Muslims and Mormons. It's about Orthodox Judaism, Christianity, and any other religious community that is compelled to explore the boundary line at which obedience to the state ends and subservience to God begins. For example, can Jewish non-profit agencies opt-out of the law which requires equal opportunity employment regardless of creed? Should Catholic adoption agencies be exempt from laws regarding the eligibility of same-sex parents?

To return to Williams' Islamic example, a common misconception is that sharia is a fixed code within Islam. However, it is best seen as the practice of applying the revealed law. So it can vary within Islam across communities and cultures depending on interpretation. So one can never say sharia means this or that. The context is crucial. This means that, "To recognise sharia is to recognise a method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts rather than a single system."

But, and this is where the western media has misinterpreted Williams so poorly and thus created its sensational narrative, sharia does not contain any intrinsic demand for Muslim dominance over non-Muslims, though it may be interpreted that way by certain groups of Muslims. Rather it relies on the voluntary submission of the believer. There is a strong historical support within Islamic societies (particularly Pakistan, Jordan, and Morocco) for this claim. So there is a recognition in these societies that religious and political allegiances are not identical, and that all citizens are dual citizens, citizens of both a heavenly and an earthly kingdom. This clarification provides a helpful framework for a better examination of our own thinking of the secular law's relation to religious duty in the Western world.

Thinking outside the boundaries of Islamic law and more generally about various religious communities, if a society's legal mechanisms fail to take into account the distinctive moral reasoning of particular communities within its boundaries, it fails in one of its main purposes. This insight raises at least three questions: one procedural, one theoretical and one practical. Procedurally, how should courts weigh the distinctive moral reasoning of minority communities in their deliberations? Theoretically, what does it mean to live in more than one jurisdiction? Practically, is the solution merely an increased attention to diverse moral reasoning or the more radical step of local delegation?

One objection to either of those practical steps relates to the difficulty which comes with the attempt to distinguish simple cultural habits and uninformed prejudice from true religious or community conviction. In a way, however, delegation to community or religious courts might actually have the function of making that distinction. After all, the conviction is theirs, not society's at-large, and it is thus in their best interest to maintain it by exposing imposters.

A second objection is that by allowing more local religious or community autonomy we run the risk of ignoring and even reinforcing some of the most unjust elements of these minority communities. This concern, and the fine line on which it rides, was highlighted vividly for us here in America during the April 2008 federal raids on the FLDS communities out west.

Were supplementary jurisdictions to be established, it would have to be a fundamental rubric that any such local or religious authorities would in no way, "have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens [of the larger society] or to punish its members for claiming those rights." Ironically and conveniently, this directly addresses the underyling concern of the minority group in the first place, "that the situation should not arise where membership of one group restricted the freedom to live also as a member of an overlapping group, that (in this case) citizenship in a secular society should not necessitate the abandoning of religious discipline."

In many cases, that's a simple and agreeable rule to apply. In some cases however, the minority community will actually feel threatened by the increased freedom granted to its members by virtue of their membership in the larger overlapping group. However, the minority group must recognize that difference of conviction is not automatically a lethal threat.

The authority granted for a religious community to regulate its own affairs is not to be used as a justification for ignoring the laws of the larger community of which it is a part. After all, we don't want to leave behind the dominance of the larger federal community over the individual only to turn around and subject the individual to the dominance of the smaller local community. That's like getting over the flu just to catch a cold. And so the difficulty is in clarifying the relation between overlapping jurisdictions. After all, one of the foundational tenets of western law is that we all stand as equals under it. Do we risk incoherence, or worse, injustice by creating multiple spheres of jurisdiction?

A legacy of the Enlightenment as it relates to issues of law and justice is the idea that tradition alone is inadequate justification of authority in light of the idea that there are universal principals, norms, and rights that can be discovered through reason. The Enlightenment's claim was that these universals override any local or religious traditions, customs, values, and beliefs. For example, in America, our Declaration of Independence claims that, above all local, community, and religious norms and practices, stand universal principles that individuals that the document declares were all created equal cannot be denied. These claims made sense against the backdrop of despotic regimes in place at that time or any time throughout history.

So perhaps it's best to see the role of the secular, universal law in pluralistic societies as a guarantor of basic freedoms and as an appeal of last resort. This is not the libertarian vision of "an uneasy alliance of self-determining individuals arguing about the degree to which their freedom is limited by one another and needing forcible restraint in a war of all against all." Rather, it regards as private what should be regarded as private. And it declares over against the Enlightenment's claims to universal reason that the role of the secular, universal law should never be dissolution of existing culture and tradition.

Thus the limited purpose of the law would not be to enshrine certain universal principles, but rather to guarantee the peace between groups. Its purpose would not be to supersede culture's own principles. All the while it must be remembered that even without reference to particular religious communities or local culture, let alone more federal or universal formations of society, individuals alone have a certain freedom. The universalist doctrine of human rights too often overlooks the possibility of an individual religious community conscientiously choosing to opt-out of the practices of broader society.

Taking all of this into account, one practical way forward might be "a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents." Of course, the danger here is that you possibly create a "market" atmosphere where various juridictions are competing for the loyalty of individuals. But if the goal of social cohesion and accomodation of ethically diverse communities is desirable, then such an atmosphere seems unavoidable.Besides, there are upsides to this situation as well. For example, the differences that have always been hidden under the surface are brought into the open and discussed with honesty and conviction.

Underlying this entire discussion is the need for a recognition of the sad fact that "universal law and universal right are a way of recognizing what is least fathomable and controllable in the human subject" and not an evolutionary step ahead of cultural, local, and religious law and right. Universal Enlightenment principles are best seen as a check and balance rather than a supersession of existing custom.

#302 Interesting Links XXXVI

2010-05-29T22:54:00.000-05:00

Rod Dreher doesn't see a big problem with the news of John Paul II's self-flagellation. I really don't either. It's a method of self-discipline and most importantly suffering-with, much like fasting.

Spencer Ackerman introduces Liz Cheney to some guy named David Petraeus.

I really liked this Google Super-Bowl ad.

As expected, Obama continues Bush's disgraceful record of disrespect for the rule of law with the help of the Patriot Act. Julian Sanchez breaks it down.

Daniel Larison calls out hypocrites as he is wont to do.

Jacob Sullum shares a case of Obama contradicting himself within the confines of a single sentence: "We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the farm bill immediately."

Newt Gingrich has trouble keeping his facts straight.

What have we done? We're getting to that point in the story that Tocqueville spoke of when he "When American ceases to be good..."

The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage from Ted Olson, whose conservative credentials can be viewed here. He was at the first meeting of the Federalist Society and successfully represented Bush in Bush v. Gore.

Humans have been around a really long time. Ben Witherington analyzes the discovery of an 11,500 year old temple found in Turkey.

#301 Conserving the Rule of Law

2010-05-26T23:00:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has given former OLC lawyer, current University of California at Berkeley professor, war criminal, torture defender, and unchecked monarchial and near dictatorial executive power evangelist John Yoo the opportunity to speak regarding an article Elena Kagan wrote back in 2001 in the Harvard Law Review:

"Nonetheless, those who persevere will find that her article clearly and directly rejected the theories supporting the executive branch’s broad constitutional powers. Rather, it is in line with the views of a majority of the Supreme Court justices and many liberal scholars who feel the executive branch’s powers are quite limited"

Remember when it was conservatives who felt that the executive branch's powers were constitutionally quite limited? Those were truly the good old days of the Republican party. I remember as a child the atmosphere created by the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco and the lack of trust we all placed in government. That all began to change in 2000 when George W. Bush was elected. Doubt in the ability of government to solve problems evaporated from the party. The deal was quickly sealed on 9/11 when the GOP threw conservatism out the window and bowed to the god of National Security at all costs.

Now, my guess is that Yoo's editorial is a caricature of Kagan's views. She will be, in all likelihood, as acquiescent to executive power which governs from the left as Yoo disastrously was to the executive power that governed from the right. After all, when an individual's party is in power, they tend to have the amazing ability to go blind as the Republican party did for eight long and rule-of-law-trashing, budget busting, government expanding years as the dear leader made the world safe for democracy in Mesopotamia. Funny that they found their voice again on January 20th, 2008. Hmmm, I wonder what happened that day. Oh yeah, the other party's dear leader was elected. What a coincidence! Anyway, welcome back to distrusting government and making your voice heard. Welcome back to conservatism, at least for now. Where were you for eight years? America could have really used your voice.

Remember, Yoo is the man who has sees no moral or legal issue with crushing the testicles of a young child of a unconvicted suspect if the American fuhrer thinks it might prevent a terrorist attack. Yoo is the man who embodies the term "moral relativism." I sense Edmund Burke and Ronald Reagan rolling over in the graves every time this man puts pen to paper. If you're in the market for good reading on executive power, go with Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage over John Yoo any day.

#300 Do What In Remembrance of You?

2010-05-23T21:44:00.000-05:00

Luke has it that Jesus said,

"Now when the hour came, Jesus took his place at the table and the apostles joined him. And he said to them, 'I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.' Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he said, 'Take this and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.' Then he took bread, and after giving thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' And in the same way he took the cup after they had eaten, saying, 'This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.'"

Luke 22:14-20

Neither Mark nor Matthew add the bit about doing anything in remembrance. Instead, Jesus simply says that they'll all drink again together in the kingdom. John presumably doesn't find the story important enough to include in his account at all. My guess is that Luke relied on Paul's source because Paul makes Jesus' command about remembrance a prominent part of his critique of his Corinthian friends.

But what exactly is it that Jesus would have us do in remembrance of him? I have always assumed that the simple act of taking communion on Sunday was the way to fulfill this command by giving ourselves a weekly reminder of Jesus sacrifice. In other words, Jesus instituted a simply mimetic mnemonic. And, of course, it does function for many of us in precisely that way. But was Jesus symbolically asking for something more? Matthew Whelan thinks so:

"The Eucharist is the communal remembrance of Jesus' gift of himself for others. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist, he spoke of the bread as his body. But he was concerned with bread not only at the last supper. Issues surrounding food, feeding, sharing meals, and the banquet at the end of the age, marked his entire ministry. Concern with food animated a life, followers believe, lived as a gift for others. So when he takes the bread, breaks it, shares it, tells his disciples that the bread is his body and that they should 'do this in remembrance' of him, he speaks of a way of living in which his followers' bodies, like his, are to be gifts for the nourishment of others. Such bodies are Eucharistic: the spirit that moves them is one of concern for the nourishment of others. It is through this labor of peace, in which the self pours itself out (Isaiah 58:10), that individual bodies and the communal bodies in which they participate bear witness to the lord's light, which flickers in our world like a candle in danger of being extinguished."

So now the life of discipleship gets harder than we ever imagined. A weekly, mysterious, memorial meal complete with literal bread and wine is edifying, but Jesus is asking for more. He is asking for nothing less than that we break our own bodies, in the same way he broke his, for the nourishment of others. Doesn't this tie in nicely with the fact that εὐχαριστία (eucharistia) is the Greek word for thanksgiving? Jesus is asking, symbolically, that we make our bodies Eucharistic, to use Whelan's phrase. Or to use Paul's phrase, the request is that we make our bodies a living sacrifice. Jesus is asking us to suffer, like him, on behalf of others. Notice the pattern: Jesus gave thanks (eucharistia) and then broke the bread (his physical body) and passed it to us. We are to give thanks (eucharistia) and then break the bread (our physical bodies) and pass it on to others. This idea of receiving a gift and responding by passing it along has echoes with the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18.

The church has historically been in unanimous consent that Jesus' breaking of bread and drinking of wine are to be interpreted as a symbolic foreshadowing of his own suffering and death, that is that his physical body would be broken and his blood poured out. Meanwhile, the church has historically been in unanimous consent that we should interpret them literally when applying them to ourselves, that is that we are to eat literal bread and drink literal wine regularly whenever we gather together. Whelan's article, which is about how Eucharistic practice can exist in a world which hungers, suggests that when we apply Jesus command to our own lives the way he did to his own we come closer to the heart of what Jesus demanded:

"The paradigm for compassion is that Jesus' body is given up for others. The church is therefore called to 'make up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions' (Col. 1:24) in its participation in God's suffering in the world... The suffering bodies of Jesus' followers become redemptive when their suffering is undergone on behalf of others, as Christ's was."

Already in Paul's day, we can see that Jesus symbolic action and command was being interpreted literally rather than as a calling to suffer. Paul's extended critique of his Corinthian friends regarding their distortion of the Eucharistic practice is worth reading in full [italics mine]:

"Now in giving the following instruction I do not praise you, because you come together not for the better but for the worse. For in the first place, when you come together as a church I hear there are divisions among you, and in part I believe it. For there must in fact be divisions among you, so that those of you who are approved may be evident. Now when you come together at the same place, you are not really eating the Lord’s Supper. For when it is time to eat, everyone proceeds with his own supper. One is hungry and another becomes drunk. Do you not have houses so that you can eat and drink? Or are you trying to show contempt for the church of God by shaming those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I praise you? I will not praise you for this!

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread, and after he had given thanks he broke it and said, 'This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, every time you drink it, in remembrance of me.' For every time you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

For this reason, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself first, and in this way let him eat the bread and drink of the cup. For the one who eats and drinks without careful regard for the body eats and drinks judgment against himself. That is why many of you are weak and sick, and quite a few are dead. But if we examined ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned with the world. So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If anyone is hungry, let him eat at home, so that when you assemble it does not lead to judgment. I will give directions about other matters when I come."

I Corinthians 11:17-34

What is the exact accusation Paul is making? Notice that his comments are book-ended by assertions that everyone in the community "proceeds with his own supper" (v. 21) and fails to "wait for one another" (v. 33). This indicates that the specific failure which Paul is confronting is not a failure in hearts of individuals as they participate in the eucharist per se. The failure to examine oneself is not a failure to look deep inside one's own soul, although that's the way in which I've always interpreted it. No, Paul is addressing the failure to do precisely the opposite. The Corinthian community has failed to look outside their own selves to the physical needs of the body of Christ.

I have always stood there in fear on Sunday's with the plastic cup in my hand wondering what the heck it is I'm supposed to be looking for in my heart, what I'm supposed to be examining. But the only questions I've ever needed to ask were these: Am I proceeding with my own supper? Is another hungry while I am full? Am I shaming those who have nothing? Am I following the Eucharistic call of suffering which the broken bread and poured out wine symbolize? Am I proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes? The question which sums them all up is, am I really eating the Lord's supper or my own?

To fail at our Eucharistic task is to fail at our task of κοινωνία (koinonia), that is sharing in the sufferings of Christ along with the body of Christ. That is the meaning of Paul's invective against those community members who ate and drank "without careful regard for the body" (v. 29). The body that he speaks of is none other than the body of Christ. This is the meaning of the word body in the entirety of this passage. But of course, for Paul, the body of Christ always has a double-meaning. On the one hand it is the sharing community of Christ's followers. On the other, those who fail to partake in the sharing of this community are said to be "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord" himself. Ouch. This idea of Christ's solidarity with the hungry "least of these" has echoes with the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. Paul phrases it this way earlier in the letter: "If you sin against your brothers or sisters... you sin against Christ." (8:12)

Finally, my warrant for claiming that Paul's use of the term body in I Corinthians 11:17-34 is a reference to the church is that the church is overwhelmingly what the entirety of First Corinthians is all about. More specifically, it is Paul's guidance to a community struggling to live out its call to share in Christ's sufferings. The letter starts out by encouraging the community to end its divisions and unite followed by Paul's theological rationale for his plea. The remainder of the letter (and indeed much of Paul's writing elsewhere) follows this pattern of practical exhortation followed by theological rationale. He even makes the explicit connection in 10:16-17, just before the passage we have been examining: "Is not the cup of blessing that we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread that we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all share the one bread." Just after the passage we have been examining, in chapter 12, Paul launches into the most extensive discussion of the "body of Christ" concept anywhere in his letters.

We often separate the theological from the practical in the Pauline epistles. But, in fact, all of Paul's theological reasoning in his first letter to the Corinthians is in support of his message of koinonia to them. My argument here is that we've historically done the same thing with the words of Christ. If there's any recovering of the meaning of the Eucharist that had already begun to be lost at Corinth and is today obscured, it will be by following the command of Christ to do koinonia in remembrance of him. It will be by following Jesus' command to share sufferings in remembrance of him.

#299 The Story of My Life

2010-05-22T20:43:00.000-05:00

My favorite quote from one of my favorite movies:

Peter Gibbons: It's not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It's about all of us. I don't know what happened to me at that hypnotherapist and, I don't know, maybe it was just shock and it's wearing off now, but when I saw that fat man keel over and die - Michael, we don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about, about mission statements.

Michael Bolton: I told those fudge-packers I liked Michael Bolton's music.

Peter Gibbons: Oh. That is not right, Michael.

I am Peter Gibbons. We are all Peter Gibbons.

#298 Minority Theology: Women

2010-05-13T06:34:00.000-05:00

Regarding the woman who annointed Jesus feet at Bethany,

"Although Jesus pronounces in Mark, "And truly I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her" (Mark 14:9) the woman's prophetic sign-action did not become part of the gospel knowledge of Christians. Even her name is lost to us. Wherever the gospel is proclaimed and the eucharist celebrated another story is told: the story of the apostle who betrayed Jesus. The name of the betrayer is remembered, but the name of the faithful disciple is forgotten because she was a woman."

That's Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, the first woman to ever become president of the Society of Biblical Literature as quoted in Hays' MVNT. What is the service that feminist theology provides? She answer this question at great length, but the conclusion is that,

"Feminist theology therefore challenges biblical theological scholarship to develop a paradigm for biblical revelation that does not understand the New Testament as an achetype but as a prototype. both archetype and prototype denote original models. However, an archetype is an ideal form that establishes an unchanging timeless pattern, whereas a prototype is not a binding timeless pattern or principle. A prototype, therefore, is critically open to the possibility of its own transformation."

#297 Yoder on Taking Up the Cross

2010-05-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

To live is to suffer, obviously. But to live as a community who follows Christ is to suffer with intent.

"To be a disciple is to share in that style of life of which the cross is the culmination."

-- John Howard Yoder, in The Politics of Jesus, p. 38

Is our style of life in the church one that leads toward crucifixion? Further,

"The believer's cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer's cross must be, like his Lord's, the price of social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of a path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not... an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; is is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to Come."

-- John Howard Yoder, in The Politics of Jesus, p. 96

#296 May Modified Protestant Chronological Practical Bible Reading Plan

2010-05-04T21:10:00.000-05:00

May 1-3: Micah
May 4-6: Hosea
May 7-9: II Kings 21-25
May 10-12: Nahum, Zephaniah
May 13-15: Jeremiah 1-10
May 16-18: Jeremiah 11-20
May 19-21: Jeremiah 21-30
May 22-24: Jeremiah 31-40
May 25-27: Jeremiah 41-52
May 28-30: Ezekiel 1-10

#295 Immigration and Free Markets

2010-05-02T12:30:00.000-05:00

Arizona has every right to enforce the laws as it see fit. However, businesses that hire Mexicans do so because they can more efficiently produce their products that way due to lower wage rates. Mexicans get work done more efficiently, in a financial sense, than Americans do. That is a fact. These business know that or they wouldn't be hiring Mexicans. But regardless of whether or not we agree with the last two sentences, the concept raises a question for proponents of truly free markets: why would we want the government to tell businesses who they can and can't hire? Stated differently: why, from a free market standpoint, would we want to restrict the supply of labor? Better yet: why are we asking for more government interference in business and in the resource allocation decisions thereof? Why are we clamoring for more state control of the economy?

#294 The National Day of Prayer

2010-04-28T22:45:00.001-05:00

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

2010-04-21T21:48:00.000-05:00

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

2010-04-18T21:03:00.001-05:00

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

2010-04-13T20:48:00.000-05:00

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

2010-04-13T20:45:00.001-05:00

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

2010-04-09T22:06:00.000-05:00

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."

#288 A Theory of Justice and Freedom

2010-03-26T21:17:00.001-05:00

A certain news outlet had a summary of just some of the notable details of the new health care reform law. One in particular stood out to me. It said that insurance companies can no longer charge women higher premiums than men. Presumably they had been charged higher premiums in the past due to their increased risk of needing special services such as for pregnancy and related issues. That sounds like a good change, but I don't know how to give a good answer.

Sometime this year I'm going to be reading a few things and maybe they'll help me formulate an answer, if only a tentative one, in my own mind. These were already on my reading list, but in light of the new bill, these books just got a whole lot more interesting. First I'm going to read Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (or should I read Hayek?) to get an intelligent answer from one side of the spectrum. Then I'm going to read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (or should I read Milbank?) to get an intelligent answer from the other side of the spectrum.

But I'd actually be most interested to hear Phillip Blond's take, who I've only recently heard of. Jonathan Derbyshire calls him conservatism's next philosopher-king, which is something we desperately need. After all, we've sunk from a high point of Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman, and Buckley, to all-time low of Palin and Prejean. The reason I'd like to hear from Blond is that a year or two ago, I read the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. Through several commentaries on the same, I became aware of the Catholic social teachings of subsidiarity and distributism which are a couple of so-called "third-way" economic concepts.

The ideas excited me, but I thought the philosophy, and any practical hope for its implementation, was dead in the water, due to the fact that its main proponents were early 20th Catholic writers and thus, since it is the 21st century, dead themselves. These writers included G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. But what excites me now is that Phillip Blond seems to be taking up the torch of the distributists, the torch of subsidiarity.

Just recently, in an op-ed for Britain's The Guardian entitled Let's Get Local, Blond connects globalism to the economic crisis and proposes a more sustainable way forward. Read his article here, it is pretty short. In it, he illustrates subsidiarity as follows:

"Traditionally, subsidiarity means that no function should be performed at any level that could be performed by a level below it. So in a dramatic reverse of the trend towards centralisation, bureaucracy and monopoly, subsidiarity insists on a radical decentralisation, and delegation to the level below it. In practice this means that the state defers to civil society, civil society to institutions and institutions to individuals. Its political correlate is federalism and localism and its political outcome is a dramatic increase in the power and potency of individuals and communities."

Doesn't that sound an awful lot like the way the U.S. Constitution was written? Doesn't that sound like something libertarians can cheer? Doesn't that sound like something FLDS members, homeschoolers and gun owners can get behind? I sure can. Blond continues,

"The net effect of this doctrine is radical empowerment of what normally suffers under modern political settlements – individual sovereignty and communal autonomy."

Now distributism sounds eerily like a nicer word for communism. But as Blond illustrates above, here we are not talking about a distribution of wealth, but rather a just distribution of power. Subsidiarity and distributism are goals worth striving towards, for reasons of justice alone. But the economic crisis has revealed so many more good reasons for radical empowerment. His next book is coming out in April. It is entitled Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It. He's got a chance to as any as he is an acknowledged adviser to British leader David Cameron.

#287 Interesting Links XXXIV

2010-03-24T22:12:00.001-05:00

A study by the Brookings Institution has estimated that 85% of people who received the $8,000 home buyer tax credit would've bought a house anyway. Additionally, they estimate that 82% of people who participated in the Cash for Clunkers car buying program would've bought cars anyway. We already knew that these were giveaways. Now we know they were for the most part ineffective.

Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda and Lee Cobb is one of my favorite films of all time. Here is a chart which graphs the interactions of the characters throughout the course of the film. Apparently someone had a lot of time on their hands because they also graphed the original Star Wars trilogy, Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and something called Primer. If you look at the chart, you'll see part of why Twelve Angry Men was such a creative movie, and why it was especially apt for charting in such a way.

It's good to be the King! At least in Connecticut.

James Surowiecki points out the obvious, that the current tax code encourages debt and quotes John Kenneth Galbraith who once said that out-of-proportion debt is the cause of every major financial crisis. But I'm glad he does, because it's not so obvious to people. Here's Surowiecki: "The second thing about these breaks is that their social benefits are pretty much nonexistent. Advocates of the mortgage-interest deduction, for instance, claim that it increases homeownership rates. But it doesn’t: in countries where mortgage deductions have been eliminated, homeownership rates haven’t dropped. Instead, the deduction simply inflates house prices." I think this is where Paul Ryan's plan to reduce the deficit could be a useful starting point.

So I mentioned that I'd really like to see a website where I can key in my zip code, click together a grocery list, and have it spit out the total cost with tax for the five closest stores to me. When someone takes me up on the offer and invents this, I imagine that the following will occur in grocery stores across America:

Tim Lynch debunks John Yoo regarding terrorism trials in civil courts similar to the way Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the Shoe Bomber, John Walker Lindh, the Lackawanna Six, and Zacarias Mussaoui were convicted. All I have to say is that we have a PERFECT record convicting terrorists in court, and it has the added benefit of showing them up for who they really are (worthless criminals) rather than martyrs in some heroic war. Former Bush justice department officials Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith also defend Holder's decision against ignorant political rhetoric. While Lynch is at it, he also points to how Radley Balko's journalism on violent, no-knock drug raids has taken a man from death row to the possibility of being freed altogether.

Count me as not at all surprised that Bill O'Reilly would exclaim, "I don't care about the Constitution!" live on his show. He and many of his ilk started shredding it on September 12th, 2001, even as they decry the shredding that continues to occur under the new administration. Luckily Andrew Napolitano is a regular sane voice of reason on his program.

Mark Shea is snarky as usual when he says, "Success! Iraq is being liberated ...from its Christian population! Fortunately, they're just Chaldean Christians which means a) American Evangelicals don't much care since they aren't *real* Christians and b) secular Americans don't care because hey! they're just Christians. That's why the persecution of the Iraqi Church is *so* dominating the headlines and has for so long. Mission accomplished!"

Andrew Sullivan with a musical/visual demonstration of our occupation of Afghanistan over the past 9/10 years. Wow, has it really been that long! We will never escape the morass. The final lyrics of the song demonstrate our entanglement in The Graveyard of Empires: "You put your whole self in and you shake it all about. You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around. That's what it's all about!" To quote Eric Bogle's reflection on seeing the grave of a 19-year old victim of WWI, "Did you really believe that this war would end wars?"

There are plenty of classical just war arguments available if a Christian is seeking mental justification before going to war. But Ben Myers can only laugh at Gene Edward Veith's failure to employ any of these traditional methods, and instead employ his own twisted logic.

#286 Tradition as Barrier and Shroud

2010-03-14T21:46:00.001-05:00

I think I've come to realize that it's not Catholic theology that I object to; it's Catholic practice. As I've posted before, theology is not what divides the universal church; it's the husk of tradition that does it and what is needed for unity is creative co-existence. Peter Leithart, in an article published by First Things in 1995 entitled Why Protestants Still Protest asked why so many former RCC members indicate that when they left the church they became Christians.

I have my own questions. Why so often does official church doctrine not get filtered down to the masses? Why are Catholics so woefully ignorant of what their own church believes? Why are Catholics not up to the task of speaking for their church, of giving voice to its teachings? Why has Catholicism become increasingly a term to denote cultural background rather than a religious affiliation much like Judaism has in modern times? Why does the proclamation so often not fit with the practice?

Leithart suggests that the problem is pastoral, rather than theological,

"..the Word and Sacraments [has] been so shrouded by layers of tradition and distracting ceremony that Christ could be perceived only with difficulty."

That's my fundamental problem as well. Why do we have to peel back so many layers of pomp and ceremony to get the heart of the gospel? Tradition is well and good. But where it obscures the gospel uneccesarily, it should be done away with. As importantly, where it impairs the unity of the universal church, it should be reconsidered. For example, I get that you want to venerate Mary. I get that you have a list of saints that you think have unique abilities to intercede for you in various situations. That's all fine. Do that in your own home, on your own time, and maybe even in your own local church if all of the members are comfortable with that. But it's not necessary in the life of the church universal, it's a barrier to ecumenical dialogue, and a veil over the gospel.

Leithart quotes Calvin's An Inventory of Relics to illustrate that, while modern-day Catholics may no longer require bones, teeth, and copious amounts breast-milk of the Virgin Mary for their practice as they did in his day, the mindset is the same in the 21st century,

"'The first abuse,' Calvin wrote, 'and, as it were, the beginning of the evil, was that when Christ ought to have been sought in his Word, sacraments, and spiritual influences, the world, after its wont, clung to his garments, vests, and swaddling clothes; and thus overlooking the principal matter, followed only its accessory.' In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin offered a similar critique of the liturgical tradition of the medieval Church. Formally, Calvin's argument is that many medieval ceremonies were human inventions, unwarranted by Scripture. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce his argument to a trivial quarrel over the warrant for this vestment or that gesture. Calvin's principal concern was evangelical and pastoral; he wished to direct sinners to that 'place' where they could encounter the living God. Ceremonies, he argued, 'to be exercises of piety, ought to lead us straight to Christ.' Ceremonies and devotional practices that fail this test are best removed from the Church."

Tom Wright has a good way of illustrating the same concept. Francis Beckwith, among other, had suggested that the so-called New Perspective on Paul was a big step in the direction of Roman Catholicism. Wright responded by pointing to the shortcomings of the Council of Trent,

"Trent, and much subsequent RC theology, has had a habit of never spring-cleaning, so you just live in a house with more and more clutter building up, lots of right answers to wrong questions... which then get in the way when you want to get something actually done... The best RCs I knoow... are great conversation partners mainly because they have found ways of pushing the accumulated clutter quietly to one side and creating space for real life."

I might add that Ratzinger, of all people, does this "pushing aside" quite well. To imagine that a non-believer or a non-Catholic would find the quickest route to the gospel of Jesus Christ via Rome is to ignore the present situation. Wright, never without a good illustration or analogy, draws the picture even clearer for us,

"[For non-believers or non-Catholics] to say “Wow, I want that stuff, I’d better go to Rome” is like someone suddenly discovering (as I’m told Americans occasionally do — sorry, cheap shot) that there are other countries in the world and so getting the first big boat he finds in New York to take him there... when there were plenty of planes lined up and waiting at JFK. Rome is a big, splendid, dusty old ocean liner, with lots of grand cabins, and, at present, quite a fine captain [referring to Ratzinger] and some excellent officers — but also quite a few rooms in need of repair. Yes, it may take you places, but it’s slow and you might get seasick from time to time. And the navigators have been told that they must never acknowledge when they’ve been going in the wrong direction."

I suggest, along with Leithart and Wright, that we clean out the rooms a bit, upgrade the ship, and meet somewhere between JFK and the harbor. Leithart ends on a hopeful note,

"Though Protestants believe that Roman Catholic teaching continues to veil the Christ of the gospel, we know that God has a habit of rending veils."

#285 David Foster Wallace on Worship

2010-03-07T22:47:00.000-05:00

I'm a little behind on my yearly Bible reading plan. I'm at the tail end of Joshua. If YHWH, and by extension, Moses and Joshua had one overarching message for the Israelites, it was don't worship anybody but him. Idolatry was the chief of all sins and it was the only way that God's covenant with the nation could be broken. Other sins seemed to happen within the context of the covenant. This one was the entrance into and out of the covenant.

"Joshua warned the people, “You will not keep worshiping the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God who will not forgive your rebellion or your sins. If you abandon the Lord and worship foreign gods, he will turn against you; he will bring disaster on you and destroy you, though he once treated you well.”

-- Joshua 24:19-20

It's as if Joshua believes that if you worship YHWH, you stay within the covenant and your other sins are forgiven. But if you worship either the gods from across the Euphrates, the gods of Egypt, or the gods of Canaan, your exit the covenant and your other sins are not forgiven. So again, sinning, per se, doesn't exclude or include. Idolatry does.

Compare this with a quote from David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, who, regrettably, commited suicide by hanging on September 12, 2008:

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth.

Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day,"

Now compare that quote with Joshua, who essentially says, "Serve the Lord with integrity. If you don't want to worhsip YHWH, fine, then pick someone now." After all, as DFW points out, you do it unconsciously whether you like it or not.

"Now obey the Lord and worship him with integrity and loyalty. Put aside the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt and worship the Lord. If you have no desire to worship the Lord, choose today whom you will worship, whether it be the gods whom your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But I and my family will worship the Lord!”

-- Joshua 24:14-15

Why? Why worship YHWH? Why devote our attention, awareness, and discipline to others continually in petty unrewarding ways? Because everything else will eat you alive.