I note this week I sat in on an interview panel, as a civil rights advisor, for the open position of an accountant at our firm. As one of the applicant's attributes, she advertised a Master's degree, not just in accounting, but in the way it's performed as an IT function. It turned out the job qualifications weren't how a person might calculate a ledger of assets and expenses but how to perform as a project manager skilled in the successful compilation of performance measures, not to pass financial audits, but to accreditate security credentials, and to acquire passing grades mandated by legislative acts (though I'm not sure who ultimately marks the pass/fail grades - I suspect there may be no wizard behind the curtain).
It's yet one more sign the world's passed me by. There's no longer a place on any shelf for those oversized leather volumes of economic activity with the year embossed on a binding that resembles a guitar neck. The only use they serve now is to capture the ancient daily life of a parish or firm, for a specialized historian, where other than a name, date, event description and transaction amount, the lives of a corporate tribe have long vanished from the stage.
Ledgers can tell a dramatic story if there are eyes to see and ears to listen. When parish pledges in sixteenth century England, for example, no longer funded the construction of dedicated chapels and statues of saints, it meant the idea of praying to those residing in the limbo of purgatory had passed, and all of those monies and energies were secuarly freed to build an English nation able to resist the Armada.
At my company, I've nurtured and championed machines installed thirty years ago, that still outperform more modern equipment. They are German-built; all mechanical parts and electrical lines; not a chip to be found. Despite their established success and dependability, there's a plan afoot and well advanced to culminate their many years of useful service. One of our directors said in an open forum that the firm was looking for something other than dependability - the very quality I've devoted my career to achieving and maintaining. Although I've cast every bureaucratic trick from out from under my viser of spells to ward off the impending armageddon, the end draws near.
My machines are fast and dumb. Their downfall from grace is accredited to their lack of intelligence. Although, they require special skills of their own to run efficiently, those talents are no longer admired or appreciated. The men that installed them were rough and tough mechanical cowboys. Some carried, not papers, but bottles of Schnapps in their briefcases; some were 'white-tie' mechanics - those that could wear a white shirt whilst repairing a machine and rise from the job without a speck of grease upon them. Some were 'hammer' mechanics whose motto was, don't force it, get a bigger hammer; these hardy machines of case-hardened steel could withstand even the foulest of tempraments.
After work, we'd repair to a local tavern, argue till the wee hours over the best oil to apply to a chain, then take the discussion outside for resolution. Such exciting times are finished forever: there's no room for anything today that resembles even mock-agreesive behavior, even if it's borne of a deep passion not possible if you'd been otherwise debating which button to best push on a computer console control module.
Fifteen years ago, or so, I visited a factory where other long abandoned machines were made. At dusk one day, while the sunlight filtered in from a skylight, a man stood in front of a music stand upon which stood an illuminated manuscript. The craftsman slowly, expertly, carved raised arabic letters onto a steel print drum, a job that today would be programmed on a computer. There's no longer any need now for high-speed, large volume impact printers, anyway. What have we lost?
To blow off steam after finals in college, we'd drive to clay pits in the country, to shoot historical weapons we'd collected as period pieces. When you slid the bolt on a standard German Army-issue Mauser rifle, took aim and fired, the gun became an extension of your body - the entire action was elegantly bio-mechanical. It's simply a manufacturing story of a factory task well executed by the loving hands of experienced craftsmen, not the tale of a box assembled by anonymous laborers in a pristine germ-free lab.
I note the story this week of a woman who called for a cable upgrade installaion. No one came on the appointed day. When a technician arrived, two days later, he failed to complete the set-up. The next day, the company cut off the service altogether. She drove to the office. She waited two hours, only to be told the manager had left for the day. She went back the next day, hammer in hand, and smashed a keyboard, monitor and telephone. She was charged with disorderly conduct, received a 3-month suspsended sentence and a $345 fine. She said, "many people have called me a hero. But no, I'm just an old lady who got mad. I had a hissy fit."
It'd be too ironic if I was complaining about technology while writing on a blog in cyber space. Yet, the anger I feel when I can't access something, or if its to slow, is of a degree I don't experience with any other usual frustration in my life. I'm not sure why that is and I know it's not healthy. Maybe it's because there's no chance I can act like a hammer mechanic with this equipment, though there are times I've come awfully close.
I'm sure glad I'll retire prior to the final destruction of my beloved machines. I suppose that's the way people felt when machines replaced artisians in the early 1800's, and trains replaced horses. They wouldn't have thought machines or trains had souls. I don't think computers have souls; I think they may be the devil. Yet those early machines and trains are the subject of much love and devotion today. I'm the last one around the firm that can relay the venerable stories of my machines - when I leave, and the machines are gone, these old dependable warhorses will possess no history to speak of and will pass unmourned unless a historian, 500 years from now, uncovers their record of unblemished dependability in the production and on-time delivery of billions of units and marvels at how that may have been possible.
Will someone love the computers that are killing my machines like I love what they're replacing? It's hard to envision. When you grow old, your way of life passes you by. You go along for the ride as much as you can and throw a hissy fit now and then when it all becomes too much. That may be all you can do, for time and tide, wait for no one.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
The Crazy Uncle
I note this week everyone I know has at least one crazy uncle in the family. After my sister's wedding, we were lined up, per usual, outside the chapel, ready to throw rice, and here comes Uncle J, drunk as a lord, who stumbles a few feet and falls flat on his face.
This startling event happens all the time when I read the First Things magazine. There are brilliant letters and articles on history, theology and culture throughout, before the end-piece, The Public Square, where Father Neuhaus comments on the news of the day. It's like watching Uncle J plow through those doors and drop, over and over again.
Such was my experience in reaching the end of Norman Podhoretz' The Prophets which I studied in preparation to teach an upcoming class in our Adult Sunday School. All's well from page 1 through 344; during the final 14 (only .038% of the book), Podhoretz not only falls, but he flies, over the barriers, right off the road, like an out-of-control DUI.
Uncle Pod, consistently, before the accident, coherently synthesizes much serious scholarship. Like how the Prophets running commentaries on society, politics and history drew the attention of their audience to what they could and couldn't control in their lives and Who ultimately was in charge. How manners count if not elevated to self-righteousness, and how all those who nominate for sainthood should be closely watched. How there are Barthian-style limits, as we've been discussing in the past few week, to applying Biblical principles, in the creation of a perfect society on earth, and how secular prophets always fail when they establish a new regime devoid of any religious principles.
That last point is a tricky, if not downright ironic, where Uncle Pod is concerned for he's a founding neo-con if not theo-con. In one sense, he denounces appeasement with nations he can clearly identify as evil, even if others disagree, just as the ancient rulers of Israel unsuccessfully concluded alliances that thwarted God's plans. In another sense, though, isn't his advoacy of the idea that one country can import and impose its way of life upon another, an example of the idealism to which he contends is very limited in application?
It's a debate that could be, and is presently, conducted by people of good will, albeit an area where opinions and subsequent government policies have deadly consequences. At this point, though, Uncle Pod and I are still driving down the road civilly discussing these points. It's at the next intersection that the car starts to shake like we might have hit someone lying in the road.
U.P. contends, and I fully agree, that the Prophets never advocated not fulfilling the law when it came to Temple ritual. He writes convincingly that God's greatest desire was that the ritual not be rote, but sincere and meaningful, since if it wasn't, then the hypocrites offering the sacrifice revered other idol's than God.
Uncle Pod insists this is the primary Law that must be fulfilled above all others, and not to perform and conform in this way, labels one 'antinomian,' or anti-law. I'll digress a bit here and note this week it's the 60th anniversary of Levittown. I didn't live there but did reside for three years in its sister city on Long Island, Hicksville (famed mostly as the hometown of Billy Joel). Those affordable starter homes for the Greatest Generation were subsequently mocked and derided as ticky-tacky "Little Boxes," the very symbol of suburban conformity. Gosh, my memories are anything but - those summer days, in the backyard, lying literally under the apple tree, reading Superman and Sports Illustrated, are the fondest times in my memory of overwhelming warmth and peace.
Anyhow, back to the story of my harrowing drive with crazy Uncle Pod for this is the point where he veers suddenly and violently to the right. He blurts out, screaming at the top of his lungs, that the entire counter-culture generation is antinomian since "it attempted to invert the moral order of the middle class which had itself grown out of the biblical tradition." Say, what? The Bible foretold of the establishment of the Kingdom of God and a Davidic dynasty on a city on the hill named Levittown?
My crazy uncle is frothing at the lips, hollerng about Black Masses, and that most awful of awfulest compendium, the very essence of the liberal agenda of sin: tolerance, multi-culturalism, diversity, conservation, gay rights, featuring, of course, Adam and Steve, and horror of all horrors, working mothers, who in their neglect of children, are no better than the pagans of ancient days that sacrified their children in the fires of Molech.
By this time, I'm clawing at the door locks, leaping from the car. Guess I'll have to hitchhike home. Yet, try this on, Uncle Pod: what the counter-culture was saying, just like the Prophets you revere, is that the emptiness of living a life of habitual ritual while the world offered so much potential for sincere joy, love and meaningful existence, is a waste of time.
All those labels you pin upon us as sin, we carry proudly: wise stewardship of the environment; liberating women to be good mothers, if that is there choice, and anything else they want to be if they choose another path; freeing our glbt brothers and sisters from a life of prejudice and violence so they can live in peace on equal terms with everyone else; celebrating a natural world wide diversity and multi-culturalism where there is no need for agressive adventures by any one nation over another.
We believe in the strength of a nuclear family, and the spiritual extended family of humanity, even if our family may look a little different than those in your day. Even you are still a part of our family, dear Uncle Pod, and we love you; we just wish you'd get some help.
This startling event happens all the time when I read the First Things magazine. There are brilliant letters and articles on history, theology and culture throughout, before the end-piece, The Public Square, where Father Neuhaus comments on the news of the day. It's like watching Uncle J plow through those doors and drop, over and over again.
Such was my experience in reaching the end of Norman Podhoretz' The Prophets which I studied in preparation to teach an upcoming class in our Adult Sunday School. All's well from page 1 through 344; during the final 14 (only .038% of the book), Podhoretz not only falls, but he flies, over the barriers, right off the road, like an out-of-control DUI.
Uncle Pod, consistently, before the accident, coherently synthesizes much serious scholarship. Like how the Prophets running commentaries on society, politics and history drew the attention of their audience to what they could and couldn't control in their lives and Who ultimately was in charge. How manners count if not elevated to self-righteousness, and how all those who nominate for sainthood should be closely watched. How there are Barthian-style limits, as we've been discussing in the past few week, to applying Biblical principles, in the creation of a perfect society on earth, and how secular prophets always fail when they establish a new regime devoid of any religious principles.
That last point is a tricky, if not downright ironic, where Uncle Pod is concerned for he's a founding neo-con if not theo-con. In one sense, he denounces appeasement with nations he can clearly identify as evil, even if others disagree, just as the ancient rulers of Israel unsuccessfully concluded alliances that thwarted God's plans. In another sense, though, isn't his advoacy of the idea that one country can import and impose its way of life upon another, an example of the idealism to which he contends is very limited in application?
It's a debate that could be, and is presently, conducted by people of good will, albeit an area where opinions and subsequent government policies have deadly consequences. At this point, though, Uncle Pod and I are still driving down the road civilly discussing these points. It's at the next intersection that the car starts to shake like we might have hit someone lying in the road.
U.P. contends, and I fully agree, that the Prophets never advocated not fulfilling the law when it came to Temple ritual. He writes convincingly that God's greatest desire was that the ritual not be rote, but sincere and meaningful, since if it wasn't, then the hypocrites offering the sacrifice revered other idol's than God.
Uncle Pod insists this is the primary Law that must be fulfilled above all others, and not to perform and conform in this way, labels one 'antinomian,' or anti-law. I'll digress a bit here and note this week it's the 60th anniversary of Levittown. I didn't live there but did reside for three years in its sister city on Long Island, Hicksville (famed mostly as the hometown of Billy Joel). Those affordable starter homes for the Greatest Generation were subsequently mocked and derided as ticky-tacky "Little Boxes," the very symbol of suburban conformity. Gosh, my memories are anything but - those summer days, in the backyard, lying literally under the apple tree, reading Superman and Sports Illustrated, are the fondest times in my memory of overwhelming warmth and peace.
Anyhow, back to the story of my harrowing drive with crazy Uncle Pod for this is the point where he veers suddenly and violently to the right. He blurts out, screaming at the top of his lungs, that the entire counter-culture generation is antinomian since "it attempted to invert the moral order of the middle class which had itself grown out of the biblical tradition." Say, what? The Bible foretold of the establishment of the Kingdom of God and a Davidic dynasty on a city on the hill named Levittown?
My crazy uncle is frothing at the lips, hollerng about Black Masses, and that most awful of awfulest compendium, the very essence of the liberal agenda of sin: tolerance, multi-culturalism, diversity, conservation, gay rights, featuring, of course, Adam and Steve, and horror of all horrors, working mothers, who in their neglect of children, are no better than the pagans of ancient days that sacrified their children in the fires of Molech.
By this time, I'm clawing at the door locks, leaping from the car. Guess I'll have to hitchhike home. Yet, try this on, Uncle Pod: what the counter-culture was saying, just like the Prophets you revere, is that the emptiness of living a life of habitual ritual while the world offered so much potential for sincere joy, love and meaningful existence, is a waste of time.
All those labels you pin upon us as sin, we carry proudly: wise stewardship of the environment; liberating women to be good mothers, if that is there choice, and anything else they want to be if they choose another path; freeing our glbt brothers and sisters from a life of prejudice and violence so they can live in peace on equal terms with everyone else; celebrating a natural world wide diversity and multi-culturalism where there is no need for agressive adventures by any one nation over another.
We believe in the strength of a nuclear family, and the spiritual extended family of humanity, even if our family may look a little different than those in your day. Even you are still a part of our family, dear Uncle Pod, and we love you; we just wish you'd get some help.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Do as I do, not as I say
I note this week an on-line Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens where he faces the reality a solider killed in Iraq was inspired to fight by what he wrote. When the Gospel is read on Sunday in Church, it's my custom to genuflect at my head, lips and heart. It's become mere habit. In light of the Hitchens piece, and recent continued studies of theologian Karl Barth, the act's taken on renewed meaning.
Who has more of a right to speak, and who would we respect more, than consequential victims, like that soldier? I'm always interested to read the words or listen to the music of those who've experienced grief or those about to die. I thought McCartney might have emparted something deeper after the death of Linda. Warren Zevon's album, the Wind, produced as he died of terminal cancer, had its moments. I've just purchased Etheridge's new post-breast cancer record. When I worked at Hospice, I listened for the profound from those about to die; I discovered greater and more astonishing profundity from surviving children when we spent weekends in group therapy at grief and loss camp.
My starting point on Barth was that while it's greatly pleasurable to read such brilliant theology, and derive theological insights of searing intellectual significance, it would be troubling if this man, who'd been courageously dismissed from his professorial post in 1935, in Germany, for standing up to the Nazi's cn the supremacy of Jesus Christ, never was affected either before, during or after, by the persecution unto genocide occuring around him.
Theologically, I now understand how that may be possible. Barth see's the people of the covenant, ancient Israel, as the chosen elect, there to reveal God's plans for humanity, not only for themselves, but through them, to all the nations of the world. Since he also see's the Church, after Jesus, as the subseqeuent elect, for the same purpose, it follows, in his view, that Israel was subsumed into the Church, since they both hold the one ultimate purpose. That doesn't leave room for a separate destiny for the original elect who may indeed still hold a distinct purpose from the Church: the idea that the Old and the New hold dual covenantal destinies.
I examined the Barth-authored "Theological Declartion of Barmen," composed in 1934, the primary confessional statement of the anti-Nazi German Church. Indeed, while the statement boldly professes the supremacy of Jesus Christ, there is not a single word in reference to persection of non-Christians.
Like a shining yet tarnished nugget in a gold mine, I did discover his mea culpa, written many years later, "I have long since regarded it as a fault on my part that I did not make this question a decsive issue, at least publicly in the church conflict (e.g., in the two Barmen declarations I drafted in 1934). A text in which I might have done so would not, of course, have been acceptable to the mindset of even the "confessors" of that time, whether in the Reformed or the general synod. But this does not excuse the fact that since my interests were elsewhere I did not at least formally put up a fight on the matter."
Is a statement that his 'interests were elsewhere,' in the midst of horrific persecution, sufficient on behalf of a man who possessed great public influence? Can a Christian like Barth have acted otherwise if his otherworldy theology worked against the necessary worldly public political action?
In a belated response to the Holocaust, the Catholic Church, in the person of Pope Paul VI, addresses the merits of other religions in relation to Christianity. The jury is still out on whether Nostra Aetate is adequate to that task, for like Barth, the document can be discerned between the lines as maintaining one universal theological solution that negates the destinies of all other sects. If, in the end, the religion you profess is delineated as exclusive in its claims, how can it ever be otherwise? Yet, I am determined to continue to explore that critical nexus point in the instinctivly optimistic belief and hope this is somehow possible.
I've been preparing Adult Sunday School materials for a class on the Prophets. One thing is a constant: while God employs Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian agressors, amongst others, as His hammers to rain theological blows upon His elect, He always leaves a remnant, upon whom He anoints His consistently ultimately disappointed hopes to create a renewed people. As with secular movements, I reject any direct political application of that concept outside of the theological world due to the misery produced and real victims claimed.
Yet, then, let's still look prophetically at today's schism in the Episcopal Church from God's vantage point as if He was in control at every stage:
1) God ensures Gene Robinson is elected causing opponents great dismay;
2) God ensures Bishop Katharine is elected thereby further hardening hearts;
3) God sends Englishmen and Africans, some invited, some not, to lay siege;
4) God creates Episcopal remnants, such as my parish; this is His purpose.
(Isn't it always that those who go around saying "God is in control," who are the most manipulative control freaks?) - anyway, what would God's purpose be for His remnant, my parish, now we've established it, at least, as one of His purposes, in either an interim or permanent way? Perhaps, like the surviving children of grief and loss at Hospice camp, the greater wisdom inevitably comes from the remnant of a once unified community family, just as God always promised to preserved a remainder, as a light to the world, in the time of the Prophets.
Prophetically speaking, we are (a) required to attend to Temple practice (will regular attendance on Sundays suffice?); (b) exhibit ethical business practices - don't swindle, take care of the widow, the orphan, etc.; (c) through our particular existence as a remnant, be a light unto the world in a universal way. Since we are here, it has to be in God's plan, that we are significant - and this, in its circular logic, is very Barthian, since we are only discerning Scripture, not to create history on earth, on human terms, but as practicing stewards of what we best discerned as God's instructions on how to live.
This merely 'being,' isn't natural to my activist inclination. Neither patience, nor reconciliation, are as attractive as achieving the justice of full inclusion within our Church now. Something has to translate into political action if human lives, as well as eternal souls, are at stake, as they are, in our struggle. This much we can learn from Barth's story.
On the other hand, I've referred to the legacy of tactics on this blog before - our parish remnant is incapable of being anything but extraordinarily kind and desirous of re-establishing the old community of friends as it once was; is that what God intends for us, in lieu of, or alongside achieving justice?
Barth made his bones on the famous post-World War I framed commentary he wrote on Romans. There, in 11:22, Paul writes, "Note then the kindness and the severity of God; severity toward those who have fallen, but God's kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off."
Kindess is what naturally distinguishes our parish - discovering the balance point between exhibiting kindness and achieving justice is where I inevitably return to, again and again, no matter what I do, no matter what I write here. I don't believe anyone will fight and die after reading this blog; I don't believe, either, anyone else will be killed. It will not be necessary, twenty years later, to write a mea culpa for anything written here. This may be, more than anything, separates those who struggle for the justice of inclusion versus those who wage war against it.
The atheist Hitchens faced up to his own arrogance with a genteel humility to be admired. I profess to believe in God as a member of an exclusive religion - there must be a place carved out within this sect where humility is enshrined as a great gift that counteracts individual and corporate compulsions toward superiority and dominance. This is the shining city on the hill visible in the distance through the mist. It's the road upon which we'll continue to travel.
Who has more of a right to speak, and who would we respect more, than consequential victims, like that soldier? I'm always interested to read the words or listen to the music of those who've experienced grief or those about to die. I thought McCartney might have emparted something deeper after the death of Linda. Warren Zevon's album, the Wind, produced as he died of terminal cancer, had its moments. I've just purchased Etheridge's new post-breast cancer record. When I worked at Hospice, I listened for the profound from those about to die; I discovered greater and more astonishing profundity from surviving children when we spent weekends in group therapy at grief and loss camp.
My starting point on Barth was that while it's greatly pleasurable to read such brilliant theology, and derive theological insights of searing intellectual significance, it would be troubling if this man, who'd been courageously dismissed from his professorial post in 1935, in Germany, for standing up to the Nazi's cn the supremacy of Jesus Christ, never was affected either before, during or after, by the persecution unto genocide occuring around him.
Theologically, I now understand how that may be possible. Barth see's the people of the covenant, ancient Israel, as the chosen elect, there to reveal God's plans for humanity, not only for themselves, but through them, to all the nations of the world. Since he also see's the Church, after Jesus, as the subseqeuent elect, for the same purpose, it follows, in his view, that Israel was subsumed into the Church, since they both hold the one ultimate purpose. That doesn't leave room for a separate destiny for the original elect who may indeed still hold a distinct purpose from the Church: the idea that the Old and the New hold dual covenantal destinies.
I examined the Barth-authored "Theological Declartion of Barmen," composed in 1934, the primary confessional statement of the anti-Nazi German Church. Indeed, while the statement boldly professes the supremacy of Jesus Christ, there is not a single word in reference to persection of non-Christians.
Like a shining yet tarnished nugget in a gold mine, I did discover his mea culpa, written many years later, "I have long since regarded it as a fault on my part that I did not make this question a decsive issue, at least publicly in the church conflict (e.g., in the two Barmen declarations I drafted in 1934). A text in which I might have done so would not, of course, have been acceptable to the mindset of even the "confessors" of that time, whether in the Reformed or the general synod. But this does not excuse the fact that since my interests were elsewhere I did not at least formally put up a fight on the matter."
Is a statement that his 'interests were elsewhere,' in the midst of horrific persecution, sufficient on behalf of a man who possessed great public influence? Can a Christian like Barth have acted otherwise if his otherworldy theology worked against the necessary worldly public political action?
In a belated response to the Holocaust, the Catholic Church, in the person of Pope Paul VI, addresses the merits of other religions in relation to Christianity. The jury is still out on whether Nostra Aetate is adequate to that task, for like Barth, the document can be discerned between the lines as maintaining one universal theological solution that negates the destinies of all other sects. If, in the end, the religion you profess is delineated as exclusive in its claims, how can it ever be otherwise? Yet, I am determined to continue to explore that critical nexus point in the instinctivly optimistic belief and hope this is somehow possible.
I've been preparing Adult Sunday School materials for a class on the Prophets. One thing is a constant: while God employs Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian agressors, amongst others, as His hammers to rain theological blows upon His elect, He always leaves a remnant, upon whom He anoints His consistently ultimately disappointed hopes to create a renewed people. As with secular movements, I reject any direct political application of that concept outside of the theological world due to the misery produced and real victims claimed.
Yet, then, let's still look prophetically at today's schism in the Episcopal Church from God's vantage point as if He was in control at every stage:
1) God ensures Gene Robinson is elected causing opponents great dismay;
2) God ensures Bishop Katharine is elected thereby further hardening hearts;
3) God sends Englishmen and Africans, some invited, some not, to lay siege;
4) God creates Episcopal remnants, such as my parish; this is His purpose.
(Isn't it always that those who go around saying "God is in control," who are the most manipulative control freaks?) - anyway, what would God's purpose be for His remnant, my parish, now we've established it, at least, as one of His purposes, in either an interim or permanent way? Perhaps, like the surviving children of grief and loss at Hospice camp, the greater wisdom inevitably comes from the remnant of a once unified community family, just as God always promised to preserved a remainder, as a light to the world, in the time of the Prophets.
Prophetically speaking, we are (a) required to attend to Temple practice (will regular attendance on Sundays suffice?); (b) exhibit ethical business practices - don't swindle, take care of the widow, the orphan, etc.; (c) through our particular existence as a remnant, be a light unto the world in a universal way. Since we are here, it has to be in God's plan, that we are significant - and this, in its circular logic, is very Barthian, since we are only discerning Scripture, not to create history on earth, on human terms, but as practicing stewards of what we best discerned as God's instructions on how to live.
This merely 'being,' isn't natural to my activist inclination. Neither patience, nor reconciliation, are as attractive as achieving the justice of full inclusion within our Church now. Something has to translate into political action if human lives, as well as eternal souls, are at stake, as they are, in our struggle. This much we can learn from Barth's story.
On the other hand, I've referred to the legacy of tactics on this blog before - our parish remnant is incapable of being anything but extraordinarily kind and desirous of re-establishing the old community of friends as it once was; is that what God intends for us, in lieu of, or alongside achieving justice?
Barth made his bones on the famous post-World War I framed commentary he wrote on Romans. There, in 11:22, Paul writes, "Note then the kindness and the severity of God; severity toward those who have fallen, but God's kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off."
Kindess is what naturally distinguishes our parish - discovering the balance point between exhibiting kindness and achieving justice is where I inevitably return to, again and again, no matter what I do, no matter what I write here. I don't believe anyone will fight and die after reading this blog; I don't believe, either, anyone else will be killed. It will not be necessary, twenty years later, to write a mea culpa for anything written here. This may be, more than anything, separates those who struggle for the justice of inclusion versus those who wage war against it.
The atheist Hitchens faced up to his own arrogance with a genteel humility to be admired. I profess to believe in God as a member of an exclusive religion - there must be a place carved out within this sect where humility is enshrined as a great gift that counteracts individual and corporate compulsions toward superiority and dominance. This is the shining city on the hill visible in the distance through the mist. It's the road upon which we'll continue to travel.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Ambivalence
I note this week, for the first time, I needed to mail a note to the Catholic Worker to stay a subscriber. Before, if you'd sent in 25 cents, once, you were in for life. Even now, they're not asking for the money to cover their higher printing and mailing costs, just committment. How very like these naieve fools for Christ.
Ric Rhetor, for one, writes in this edition's Book of Notes column, "If you come in the front door, or up the dining room steps at Maryhouse, and continue apace to the first floor, your eyes are likely to catch sight of a banner hanging way down toward the end of the auditorium stage. It reads, in large black letters, "WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE."
Are we? For what? Connie asked last Saturday I buy 8 shrimp at Giant. As I stood at the fish counter, a fella ahead in line ordered 2 lobsters drawn live from the tank. On the scale, their antenni twitched; their claws grasped until they were taped shut. They'd soon be boiled alive. I'm no vegetarian; am I responsbile for their sufferring?
I love to shop at Wal-mart. I own an extensive wardrobe of $7 shirts, $14 pants and $19.99 boots. On a recent newsworthy tv show, they said in order for Wal-mart to sell clothes at that price, they force wholesalers to produce goods in China. In an interview, a man in Ohio said his factory shut down. I refuse to buy a foreign car. I own a Ford Ranger. Am I responsible for the unemployment of the Ohio man and the employment of Ford employees in Minnesota?
Alan Dershowitz has a compelling theory of rights. He writes while people can disagree on cases such as the merits of vegetarianism or shopping at Wal-mart, i.e., what does or doesn't constitute perfect justice, it's easier to start from the bottom up. Most of us agree on what constitutes perfect injustice: genocide, torture, dictatorship, etc. So if we focus on the rights of citizens that prevent perfect injustice, our system will leave room for open debate on important but less vital issues.
I've been reading the works of theologian, Karl Barth. From out of the university library treasure trove, I first read a 1930 general explanation of his theology. Then I happened across a mid- 1960's little book called "Why I Changed My Mind." This had me excited and I'll tell you why.
As far as an independent reading can take a person, I'm led to understand he's a proponent of a Great Gap - that there can be no analogy between God and man other than an analogy of faith. Believers can aspire at best to receive the Word of God. History proves, indeed, there are no ideologies or 'ism's that humanity can create which approach a perfect concept of what constitutes God's actions of creation or ideas of justice. I know also that Barth was forced to resign his professor's post in Germany in 1935, and leave the country, for his insistence on the supremacy of God over any other gods of human imagination.
Yet, I was disappointed Why I Changed My Mind contained no mention of the Holocaust. It's indicative of the nagging criticism of the Hitler-era German Confessional Church that it's otherwise courageous members, even Bonhoeffer, never adamantly condemned the Jewish persecution. Their advocacy addressed the supremacy of the Christian God, and some paid for that with their lives, but it skirted the travails of non-Christians. (I've mentioned before on this blog, I've personally encountered this underlying festerng literlist malevolence when I attended a once-Episcopal, now Nigerian-Anglican, fundamentalist church.) Though, Barth, mentioned in passing a 'German' cultural problem extending from Frederick the Great through Bismarck, through Hitler, and referred to some assistance to someone else who aided Jewish refugees from within the safety of his exile in Switzerland, he failed utterly to confront genocide head on (or anywhere else, as far as I can yet ascertain, though I've just checked out Prospects for Post-Holocaust Theology which contains a Barth-chapter, so more on this later...).
There is nothing more inviting than reading, discerning and writing theology even if it's merely an end in itself. In this, and more, if I understand him correctly, I agree with Barth and his advice to get serious about God; also that people would do well to concentrate on Last Things (and I'd add) rather than First Principles. Since I already philosophically accept the existence of God (and oh my, Barth would hate that notion), and sense and revel in the presence of the Holy Spirit in community and at prayer, my relevant, rather than simply enjoyable, studies must consist of post-Holocaust literature. It doesn't have to be addressed forthrightly, but if the book was written prior to it, it's absence as one critical event renders a certain incompleteness to any work, espcially if there's no 'after,' to complement the 'before.'
At an Elie Wiesel lecture, he answered the, 'I'm-sure-not-unexpected,' question at every event, about belief in God after the Holocaust, by saying, "I don't know." That doesn't equate with a desire to end theological studies; it means rather than certitude, any answers to questions you derive, may only be ambivalent at best.
I note this week on the anniversary of the deaths of the Amish schoolchildren, the unmarked land upon which the school once stood, has been allowed to remain fallow. How unlike the modern world not to erect a public memorial. I always stop to wistfully read the obituaries in our local rag that proclaim "Joe was a farmer all his life," or in the recent case of a nun, "she did domestic work for her order." Those are well lived lives of honest labor and prayer that did not overtly touch on the larger issues of the day, but beckon, as gentle and organic.
Is that farmer, this nun, myself, or are you, implicitly responsible for cruelty to animals, unemployment in Ohio, the Holocaust? I don't know. Perhaps, the next batch of books, from Kierkegaard, Pannenberg, Lewis, hold keys to unlock the mystery. It's fall; school's in - the thrill of discovery permeates the air; let's find out together. We'll hold our own on-line 'discussions for the further clarification of thought,' as the Catholic Workers have done every week for decades despite the fact we'll never know what we know for sure.
Folks like the Workers embody service; no one is turned away from their houses, their farms; no one judged; all welcomed and affirmed. In their world, responsibility is justice, personified; no ambivalence.
Ric Rhetor, for one, writes in this edition's Book of Notes column, "If you come in the front door, or up the dining room steps at Maryhouse, and continue apace to the first floor, your eyes are likely to catch sight of a banner hanging way down toward the end of the auditorium stage. It reads, in large black letters, "WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE."
Are we? For what? Connie asked last Saturday I buy 8 shrimp at Giant. As I stood at the fish counter, a fella ahead in line ordered 2 lobsters drawn live from the tank. On the scale, their antenni twitched; their claws grasped until they were taped shut. They'd soon be boiled alive. I'm no vegetarian; am I responsbile for their sufferring?
I love to shop at Wal-mart. I own an extensive wardrobe of $7 shirts, $14 pants and $19.99 boots. On a recent newsworthy tv show, they said in order for Wal-mart to sell clothes at that price, they force wholesalers to produce goods in China. In an interview, a man in Ohio said his factory shut down. I refuse to buy a foreign car. I own a Ford Ranger. Am I responsible for the unemployment of the Ohio man and the employment of Ford employees in Minnesota?
Alan Dershowitz has a compelling theory of rights. He writes while people can disagree on cases such as the merits of vegetarianism or shopping at Wal-mart, i.e., what does or doesn't constitute perfect justice, it's easier to start from the bottom up. Most of us agree on what constitutes perfect injustice: genocide, torture, dictatorship, etc. So if we focus on the rights of citizens that prevent perfect injustice, our system will leave room for open debate on important but less vital issues.
I've been reading the works of theologian, Karl Barth. From out of the university library treasure trove, I first read a 1930 general explanation of his theology. Then I happened across a mid- 1960's little book called "Why I Changed My Mind." This had me excited and I'll tell you why.
As far as an independent reading can take a person, I'm led to understand he's a proponent of a Great Gap - that there can be no analogy between God and man other than an analogy of faith. Believers can aspire at best to receive the Word of God. History proves, indeed, there are no ideologies or 'ism's that humanity can create which approach a perfect concept of what constitutes God's actions of creation or ideas of justice. I know also that Barth was forced to resign his professor's post in Germany in 1935, and leave the country, for his insistence on the supremacy of God over any other gods of human imagination.
Yet, I was disappointed Why I Changed My Mind contained no mention of the Holocaust. It's indicative of the nagging criticism of the Hitler-era German Confessional Church that it's otherwise courageous members, even Bonhoeffer, never adamantly condemned the Jewish persecution. Their advocacy addressed the supremacy of the Christian God, and some paid for that with their lives, but it skirted the travails of non-Christians. (I've mentioned before on this blog, I've personally encountered this underlying festerng literlist malevolence when I attended a once-Episcopal, now Nigerian-Anglican, fundamentalist church.) Though, Barth, mentioned in passing a 'German' cultural problem extending from Frederick the Great through Bismarck, through Hitler, and referred to some assistance to someone else who aided Jewish refugees from within the safety of his exile in Switzerland, he failed utterly to confront genocide head on (or anywhere else, as far as I can yet ascertain, though I've just checked out Prospects for Post-Holocaust Theology which contains a Barth-chapter, so more on this later...).
There is nothing more inviting than reading, discerning and writing theology even if it's merely an end in itself. In this, and more, if I understand him correctly, I agree with Barth and his advice to get serious about God; also that people would do well to concentrate on Last Things (and I'd add) rather than First Principles. Since I already philosophically accept the existence of God (and oh my, Barth would hate that notion), and sense and revel in the presence of the Holy Spirit in community and at prayer, my relevant, rather than simply enjoyable, studies must consist of post-Holocaust literature. It doesn't have to be addressed forthrightly, but if the book was written prior to it, it's absence as one critical event renders a certain incompleteness to any work, espcially if there's no 'after,' to complement the 'before.'
At an Elie Wiesel lecture, he answered the, 'I'm-sure-not-unexpected,' question at every event, about belief in God after the Holocaust, by saying, "I don't know." That doesn't equate with a desire to end theological studies; it means rather than certitude, any answers to questions you derive, may only be ambivalent at best.
I note this week on the anniversary of the deaths of the Amish schoolchildren, the unmarked land upon which the school once stood, has been allowed to remain fallow. How unlike the modern world not to erect a public memorial. I always stop to wistfully read the obituaries in our local rag that proclaim "Joe was a farmer all his life," or in the recent case of a nun, "she did domestic work for her order." Those are well lived lives of honest labor and prayer that did not overtly touch on the larger issues of the day, but beckon, as gentle and organic.
Is that farmer, this nun, myself, or are you, implicitly responsible for cruelty to animals, unemployment in Ohio, the Holocaust? I don't know. Perhaps, the next batch of books, from Kierkegaard, Pannenberg, Lewis, hold keys to unlock the mystery. It's fall; school's in - the thrill of discovery permeates the air; let's find out together. We'll hold our own on-line 'discussions for the further clarification of thought,' as the Catholic Workers have done every week for decades despite the fact we'll never know what we know for sure.
Folks like the Workers embody service; no one is turned away from their houses, their farms; no one judged; all welcomed and affirmed. In their world, responsibility is justice, personified; no ambivalence.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Hello Newman
I note this week the phrases 'exerise restraint,' and 'not to authorize public rites,' in the House of Bishops post-New Orleans statement.
I'm loathe to agree with Akinola on anything yet his description of this language as 'not a whole-hearted embrace,' and 'merely a temporary adjustment,' is spot on. Just as it was a simple matter to drive holes through Mark Lawrence's language on whether he'd stay loyal to TEC if elected Bishop of South Carolina, this old bureaucrat could cruise a Buick through the gaps on the HoB highway. Akinola and his henchmen may be wicked; they're not stupid.
Appeasement is a rascally charge for those who quite rightly and nobly advocate negotiations and are otherwise partial to peaceful means under the vast majority of circumstances. It can certainly be employed to justify pre-emptive reckless behavior. Here, though, it plays to form: "In international relations, the Lesson of Munich asserts that adversaries will interpret restraint as indicating a lack of capability or politcal will or both; appeasement discredits the defenders' willingness to fight, and encourages the agressor to escalate his demands.'
The HoB statement, decidedly rejected by Akinolista's everywhere, also didn't play well with those it was its round-about intention to defend. Reactions of some here-to-fore faithful gay and lesbian Episcopalians, as reported on the Inch at a Time website, include resignation of ordination, departures to the UCC, and conversions to Judaism. I've always told Connie that after a last stand at an Episcopal Dunkirk, it's the Unitarians that beckon an escape to a theological England. When I was but a lad growing up in pre-Disney Orlando, it was exposure to that idealistic sect which formulated the progressive religious and political ethics I uncompromisingly carry fifty years later.
Friends, like Mark, temper caution, and I'm not ready to depart the beloved parish to which we've returned as it rebuilds after the majority voted to join the Akinola-Minns-Duncan axis of evil. So it's time to step back from the emotional precipice - my way, as always, is to seek solace in the timeless stepstones that calm and deliver. As revealed last week, the study of John Henry Newman's, 'The Development of Christian Doctrine,' lays out a path which demonstrates time is on our side if we but have the patience to wait, even though our patience is wearing thin.
First, though, a provisio: Newman would likewise have been disdainful not only of the HoB statement but the process. He wrote, "Sometimes discordant ideas are for a time connected and concealed by a common profession or name. Such is the case of coalitions in politics and comprehensions in religion, of which commonly no good is to be expected. Such is an ordinary function of committees and boards, and the sole aim of conciliations and concessions, to make contraries look the same, and to secure an outward agreement where there is no other unity."
The aforementioned Mark once gravely warned against an acceptance of a vestry nomination to serve. How right he was: after enduring an unending series of 9 to 1 votes on whether to move the parish from a low-income immigrant-friendly neighborhood to an affluent suburb so we could 'more effectively minister to the wealthy who were more like us,' I resigned in disgust one and a half years into a three year term. Did you know that despite being described as magnificantly healthy, Robert E. Lee mysteriously took ill and mysteriously died immediately after a two-hour vestry meeting? (This comes as no suprise to any current/past vestry member...)
Anyhow, John Henry projects ideas as corporeal - they grow or die, following an organic eleven-step process:
1) after birth, they are initially expressed inadequately;
2) agitation ensues a -
3) period of confusion;
4) new lights emerge;
5) judgments emerge/aspects accumulate;
6) a teaching arises -
7) that's contrasted against existing teachings -
8) the new is interrogated, criticized, defended;
9) opinions are collectd, sifted, selected, rejected;
10) the idea interjects itself into our lives, changing public opinion, strengthening or undermining the established order;
11) to become a theology - "a being in substance - what the idea meant from the first, with the corrections of many minds, and the illustrations of many experiences."
Who can deny that the idea of the societal justice of full inclusion has reached step 10 and is gaining fast on step 11 - the Akinolistic last remaining redoubt of reactionary opinion? This final barricade won't fall through appeasement; it must be stormed.
Newman is one of those iconic figures, like Bonhoeffer, like Lewis, who are revered and claimed by progressive and reactionary partisans. Perhaps that's the sign of true greatness. When John Henry writes, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often," it naturally appeals to those who aspire towards justice; yet, there are those who read Newman and would emphasize a life that appears on the surface to resist all change in practice, and that would characterize most change as corruption rather than right development.
During a recent parish hall meeting this month, voices were raised as to whether stronger local action is desirable in terms of action to regain the church property illegally seized by those who voted to leave TEC. Although I agree with those that said no action should be unoppposed that conveys itself to public opinion and the courts that the squatters possess property rights, I agree also that our primary job as foot soliders is to dedicate our energies to rebuilding the parish which in itself stands as a rebuke to all those who discount our existence.
Ideas, like evolution, don't evolve in a straight line. From a single point of introduction, branches emerge and grow in all directions depending on the circumstances that create them. Newman writes, "Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical, all at once; it is esoteric and exoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love and it is fear." All of that has been, and is, on display in this struggle.
Newman also wrote, "Growth is the only evidence of life." The conflaglatory schism we are struggling through is growth. It is the evidence of an active Church life. When do we boldly stride beyond appeasement to justice? How many of us will be left? How long, how long?
I'm loathe to agree with Akinola on anything yet his description of this language as 'not a whole-hearted embrace,' and 'merely a temporary adjustment,' is spot on. Just as it was a simple matter to drive holes through Mark Lawrence's language on whether he'd stay loyal to TEC if elected Bishop of South Carolina, this old bureaucrat could cruise a Buick through the gaps on the HoB highway. Akinola and his henchmen may be wicked; they're not stupid.
Appeasement is a rascally charge for those who quite rightly and nobly advocate negotiations and are otherwise partial to peaceful means under the vast majority of circumstances. It can certainly be employed to justify pre-emptive reckless behavior. Here, though, it plays to form: "In international relations, the Lesson of Munich asserts that adversaries will interpret restraint as indicating a lack of capability or politcal will or both; appeasement discredits the defenders' willingness to fight, and encourages the agressor to escalate his demands.'
The HoB statement, decidedly rejected by Akinolista's everywhere, also didn't play well with those it was its round-about intention to defend. Reactions of some here-to-fore faithful gay and lesbian Episcopalians, as reported on the Inch at a Time website, include resignation of ordination, departures to the UCC, and conversions to Judaism. I've always told Connie that after a last stand at an Episcopal Dunkirk, it's the Unitarians that beckon an escape to a theological England. When I was but a lad growing up in pre-Disney Orlando, it was exposure to that idealistic sect which formulated the progressive religious and political ethics I uncompromisingly carry fifty years later.
Friends, like Mark, temper caution, and I'm not ready to depart the beloved parish to which we've returned as it rebuilds after the majority voted to join the Akinola-Minns-Duncan axis of evil. So it's time to step back from the emotional precipice - my way, as always, is to seek solace in the timeless stepstones that calm and deliver. As revealed last week, the study of John Henry Newman's, 'The Development of Christian Doctrine,' lays out a path which demonstrates time is on our side if we but have the patience to wait, even though our patience is wearing thin.
First, though, a provisio: Newman would likewise have been disdainful not only of the HoB statement but the process. He wrote, "Sometimes discordant ideas are for a time connected and concealed by a common profession or name. Such is the case of coalitions in politics and comprehensions in religion, of which commonly no good is to be expected. Such is an ordinary function of committees and boards, and the sole aim of conciliations and concessions, to make contraries look the same, and to secure an outward agreement where there is no other unity."
The aforementioned Mark once gravely warned against an acceptance of a vestry nomination to serve. How right he was: after enduring an unending series of 9 to 1 votes on whether to move the parish from a low-income immigrant-friendly neighborhood to an affluent suburb so we could 'more effectively minister to the wealthy who were more like us,' I resigned in disgust one and a half years into a three year term. Did you know that despite being described as magnificantly healthy, Robert E. Lee mysteriously took ill and mysteriously died immediately after a two-hour vestry meeting? (This comes as no suprise to any current/past vestry member...)
Anyhow, John Henry projects ideas as corporeal - they grow or die, following an organic eleven-step process:
1) after birth, they are initially expressed inadequately;
2) agitation ensues a -
3) period of confusion;
4) new lights emerge;
5) judgments emerge/aspects accumulate;
6) a teaching arises -
7) that's contrasted against existing teachings -
8) the new is interrogated, criticized, defended;
9) opinions are collectd, sifted, selected, rejected;
10) the idea interjects itself into our lives, changing public opinion, strengthening or undermining the established order;
11) to become a theology - "a being in substance - what the idea meant from the first, with the corrections of many minds, and the illustrations of many experiences."
Who can deny that the idea of the societal justice of full inclusion has reached step 10 and is gaining fast on step 11 - the Akinolistic last remaining redoubt of reactionary opinion? This final barricade won't fall through appeasement; it must be stormed.
Newman is one of those iconic figures, like Bonhoeffer, like Lewis, who are revered and claimed by progressive and reactionary partisans. Perhaps that's the sign of true greatness. When John Henry writes, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often," it naturally appeals to those who aspire towards justice; yet, there are those who read Newman and would emphasize a life that appears on the surface to resist all change in practice, and that would characterize most change as corruption rather than right development.
During a recent parish hall meeting this month, voices were raised as to whether stronger local action is desirable in terms of action to regain the church property illegally seized by those who voted to leave TEC. Although I agree with those that said no action should be unoppposed that conveys itself to public opinion and the courts that the squatters possess property rights, I agree also that our primary job as foot soliders is to dedicate our energies to rebuilding the parish which in itself stands as a rebuke to all those who discount our existence.
Ideas, like evolution, don't evolve in a straight line. From a single point of introduction, branches emerge and grow in all directions depending on the circumstances that create them. Newman writes, "Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical, all at once; it is esoteric and exoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love and it is fear." All of that has been, and is, on display in this struggle.
Newman also wrote, "Growth is the only evidence of life." The conflaglatory schism we are struggling through is growth. It is the evidence of an active Church life. When do we boldly stride beyond appeasement to justice? How many of us will be left? How long, how long?
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Moral Physics
I note this week two new Heroes of the Book.
Damien Cave of the NY Times reports on Baghdad booksellers Mukdad Ismail and Naim-al-Shatry who own shops on Mutanabi Street. A curfew and bombing that took 26 lives shut them down - for a while. Now that the curfew's lifted, they've both reopened. Mr. Shatry said, "Today I am a king."
Even though there are few customers brave enough to venture out (though if I'd been forced to stay away from my beloved bookshops for a year, I reckon I'd be desperate enough to try), Mr. Ismail says, "I believe in the gradual theory. Everything can't come together at once." Cave observes Mukdad "picked up a black hardcover history of the Kurds, with an attractive photo on the front. Tapping it twice with his right hand, sending dust flying, he kissed the cover and said, "We are happy to be here again with these beautiful books."
Heroes kiss books in hell.
I note in contrast to all would-be theocratists, also according to the Times, Reform Judaism is poised to introduce a new Prayer Book "intended to offer something for everyone - traditionalists, progressives and everyone else - even those who do not believe in God."
When you open the book, reading right to left, there's a prayer in Hebrew, the phonetic version, and a literal translation. On the left, a poetic ode and meditation. It's traditional, gender-neutral, evangelical; there aren't even any rise, stand, sit instructions lest they hinder personal preference. It's as eager to please as a new puppy.
If you're altogether fed up debating whether God's the Father, He and/or She: invent your own language (at college, after we argued what's meant when we say 'it' is raining, i dropped the class), Amber Dance of the Post writes about the "weirdly Babelesque boom of new languages." J.R. Tolkein stared things off: as a hobby, he invented an amalgam of Latin, French and Welsh; then he conceived people to speak it and places for them to live; thus Middle Earth was born.
In the early 20th century, linguists Sapir and Whorf, "proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts: That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them." Today, when a pseudo-need is manufactured daily to create a market niche, it's not surprising "the Web site Langmaker.com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem," (even as native languages die out at a pace of one every two weeks.)
It's when we can barely cope with anything more new, that many turn to the ancient language of Scripture for comfort and stability. Even that refuge, however, can be problematical. Peter Steinfels writes, in reviewing James Kugel's, "How to Read the Bible," the author "propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable - and fundamentally incompatible."
Why? The original translators of the Hebrew, people like Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scroll scribes, the patristic Christians "effectively recast the Bible's meaning in terms that came to dominate the way it was read by both Jews and Christians right up to recent times." Kugel contends "they all converged on four assumptions: that deeper meanings lay behind biblical texts; that the Bible was a book of instruction about the world; that it was somehow seamless and harmonious despite surface conflicts; and, finally, that it was of divine origin."
The historical criticism scholars of the 19th century, through the Jesus Seminar participants today, seek to discard those translations to unearth source materials derived from pre-translated fragments; in the process, Kugel declares they've "let the real Bible elude them." Steinfels adds "modern minds will still seek deeper meanings and still want relevant instructions for living. As for the anicent worry about seamlessness, modern minds, sensitized to multiple perspectives, often find more coherence in contrasting accounts than perfectly harmonized ones." Even if you accept the Bible is a compendium of orally transmitted Godly-inspired accounts of various persons, then the issue of seamlessness recedes anyway just as if you and I were present at a concert and conveyed varied impressions.
Yet I confess I'm of two minds: what archeologists and "historical Jesus," specialists brilliantly uncover provide a bedrock foundation for faith; the knowledge that King David or Jesus actually walked the roads of an excavated town conveys familarity and immanence. On the other hand, I find it's through reading reflections and commentaries, solo and in community, that more personally meaningful revelations surface; those that have been filtered through lives of the interpreters.
In preparation to teach Brueggemann's "Prophetic Imagination," in adult Sunday school, I've been adjunctly reading Podhoretz's "The Prophets." Podhoretz, more known as the political father of contemporary neo-con's, is an amateur Biblical scholar, but one superbly accomplished in bringing a multiplicity of citations to bear. In the section on Hosea, he introduces conflicting views on whether the first three chapters were written by a Hosea I and the last eleven by Hosea II. Issues of authorship are inevitably defined through detailed scientic analysis' of linguistics and grammar.
The non-technical theories are equally if not more fascinating. As Podhoretz writes, Hosea I's "focus on idolatry as against morality places him in the ethos and era of pre-classical prophecy," while "the primacy of the ethical law over the ritual or cultic only becomes a feature of the book [some scholars] say, in Chapters 4 through 11." In other words, could Hosea I be an earlier writer emphasizing ritual obedience when the people were newer to monotheism versus a later writer, in more prosperous Solomonic times, who sought to connect what transpired in worship to the needs of the poor? Would fundamentalism today naturally tilt towards the former while progressives instinctively turn to the latter, in the same way some geneticists argue blue or red-state political leanings are primarily biological?
Brueggemann, according to Wikipedia, is an advocate of a rhetorical criticism that "studies the use of words and phrases to explicate how arguments have been built to drive home a certain point the author or speaker intended to make." Reflecting a greater plurality within contemporary congregations, he wrote in 1995, "An honest facing of pluralism can only be pastorally and usefully engaged by an open-ended adjudication that takes the form of trustful, respectful conversation. While such an approach sounds like relativism, an answerng objectivism is destructive not only of the community but of any chance to receive new truth together."
Had Brueggemann's comments on respectful conversation been taken to heart by our entire parish, especially that "texts are open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," it is more likely than not that a small number of partisans wouldn't have taken the actions that destroyed the church, in their view, in order to save it.
How does their secessionist rallying cry 'Spritual Authority,' affect discernment? Are they advocating obedience to ancient texts that only scholars can authenticate and decipher; to stories orally transmitted and compiled by pre or post-exilic Hebrew editors reflecting different periods and concerns in the progressing history of Israel; or do they more traditionally only rely on the Septuagint Greek or the King James?
At the former Episcopal, now Ugandan, church I once attended, the preferred translation was the New International which draws primarily from the Greek as directed by a committee "united in their committment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God's Word in written form." That literalist approach would not likely predispose a completed version "open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," as much conform to cultural norms of the intended demographic. If the subsequent Bible did not, the final product would not be marketable to the audience for which it was created.
Brueggemann writes, "the collapse of the hegemony of medieval Christianity, hastened by the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the rise of science, produced, as Susan Bordo has made clear, a profound anxiety about certitude." The profound need for certitude is a compelling force as contrasted against the an ever growing plurality in once homogenous churches. The resulting backlast enables and enacts a defense mechanism justified as a faithful reaction against a perceived coercion that reflects the new reality as an intrusion.
An announcment advertising a lecture by Brueggemann at the Mayfield Salisbury Church, in Edinburgh, Scotland, stated "for present-day Christians who find themselves in a bewildering atmosphere of materialism and scientific secularism that puts enormous pressure on their inherited faith." Typical reactions are "to adopt an unquestioning attitude to Scripture which Brueggemann associates with fundamentalism, or to accept the objective, analytical approach, discarding in the text anything that does not yield to a rational understanding of faith and theology. He seems the main object of faith that is grounded in Scripture as the transformation of human life, and this, he thinks, is not achieved by expounding doctrine or ethics or by historical criticism. These do not change people. It is in the telling of stories, in vivid images and analogies, that human imagination is stirred to receive the Word of God in Scripture."
The ad concludes, "at the heart of this is a question about the nature of God - the domesticated God of conventional religion, or the free, unpredictable God who works wonders in the human soul. Faith that is reliant upon the freedom of God against the assumptions of human reason makes things possible that the world defines as impossible, and brings about transformation in the human spirit that strengthens and renews a person's life, moving him on to a deeper, more creative faith."
In the book of Hosea, God equates sin in a personal way with lewdness; in a corporate way with national idolatry; like a Father who looks murderously upon a child when he's disobedient, and lovingly, when she's true; He condemns; He adores - He even argues with Himself and changes His mind repeatedly. This free Creator demonstrates while choices have consequences, they aren't predictable, or dependent on human reason, just as an untamble passion more often than not, rules over logic, in our self-destructive impulsive moods that are later much regretted (as God might have after the Flood when He declared He would never again destroy every living creature).
Eamon Duffy's written a new book, "Marking the Hours," that begins with an exposition on the standard Medieval English prayer book yet hinges on the everyday lives of its readers. While horrified art dealers wail against the desecration of these ancient illuminated tomes through scribblings in the margins (which I admit also makes me cringe), Duffy re-animates the lives of the doodlers. In his review in the Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reports, "One woman, in her marginalia, laments the destruction of a shrine and details the contents of her linen closet."
Duffy, a Cambridge historian, is a grand writer with a marked perspective. He's an advoate of a Tudor top-down Reformation despite the legacy of John Wycliffe and the anti-Rome Lollards, a century before, and evidence the the great majority of the English grassroots laity wholly embraced Protestantism within twenty years of its introduction. Duffy nevertheless claims the Reformation wasn't natural, but aristocratically forced, against an organic Catholicism. It's not surprising, but any less poignant, that the most dramatic marginalia in the book belong to Thomas More in the Tower, who wrote "Gyve me thy grace good lord/To set the world at nought." A prayer book is what it is; it gains vitality through the traces of its owner's life.
I've discovered how to become a guest patron at our local university library (there's an annual fee but it's less than what I would've spent at Borders in a month). On the third floor, where I've yet to observe more than a handful of students, there are stacks of theology, glittering like buried treasure, to tempt willing hearts and minds. I'll be mining the trove for years, hoping to share sparkling trinkets that personally resonate in ripples outward over time as Duffy's marginalia speaks to him and his readers over the centuries (and some of these books haven't been checked out for a hundred years).
My first: the elusive Development of Christian Doctrine by Cardinal Newman. When he wrote it, he said, "I had no sleep for a week, and was fainting away or something like it day after day," no doubt in anticipation of the reaction of disciples like William George Ward who said of his hunger for dogma, "I would like to find a Papal Bull each morning on my breakfast table." Who could resist this?
Newman may be the greatest all-time artiste of rhetorical criticism. This book, unlike books that seek to please everyone, was attacked as too Catholic for the Anglicans and too Anglican for the Catholics. If something is detested by adversaries on either side, it's probably just right. Newman egged them both on by writing, "growth is the only evidence of life," and that the Bible contains, "the main outlines of a great system of dogmas, which remain to be fully developed."
I can hardly wait to unearth how Newman distinguishes legitimate development from corruption. In Colin McGinn's review of Stewart Pinker's new book, "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature." McGinn reports Pinker concludes words like 'going, having, preventing,' are genetic and necessary as survival skills. Pinker relates this to verbs where 'pour,' and 'fill' fulfill the same physics function but imply different meanings from the perspective of the actor, the pourer, and the filled, the container.
McGinn writes, "it just doesn't seem true that everthing nonphysical that we think about is metaphorical; for example, our legal concepts such as 'rights' are surely not all mere metaphors, introduced on the shoulders of the concepts of intuitive physics." I think they are as well. My driving compulsion is to unveil explicit connections between covert or overt language and its derivative destructive consequences, the abridgement of human rights, so that actors appreciate and acknowledge the moral physics of action.
The prophet Hosea II, Podhoretz (rather ironically), and Brueggemann, write of the primacy of morality over ritual. Newman originally railed against the dogmatic corruption of Roman Catholicism, then backtracked to justify his conversion. In the end, it's the Baghdad booksellers, though, that are the steadfast containers, bravely facing death, at the hands of malevolent pourers. Of this, I am always mindful.
Damien Cave of the NY Times reports on Baghdad booksellers Mukdad Ismail and Naim-al-Shatry who own shops on Mutanabi Street. A curfew and bombing that took 26 lives shut them down - for a while. Now that the curfew's lifted, they've both reopened. Mr. Shatry said, "Today I am a king."
Even though there are few customers brave enough to venture out (though if I'd been forced to stay away from my beloved bookshops for a year, I reckon I'd be desperate enough to try), Mr. Ismail says, "I believe in the gradual theory. Everything can't come together at once." Cave observes Mukdad "picked up a black hardcover history of the Kurds, with an attractive photo on the front. Tapping it twice with his right hand, sending dust flying, he kissed the cover and said, "We are happy to be here again with these beautiful books."
Heroes kiss books in hell.
I note in contrast to all would-be theocratists, also according to the Times, Reform Judaism is poised to introduce a new Prayer Book "intended to offer something for everyone - traditionalists, progressives and everyone else - even those who do not believe in God."
When you open the book, reading right to left, there's a prayer in Hebrew, the phonetic version, and a literal translation. On the left, a poetic ode and meditation. It's traditional, gender-neutral, evangelical; there aren't even any rise, stand, sit instructions lest they hinder personal preference. It's as eager to please as a new puppy.
If you're altogether fed up debating whether God's the Father, He and/or She: invent your own language (at college, after we argued what's meant when we say 'it' is raining, i dropped the class), Amber Dance of the Post writes about the "weirdly Babelesque boom of new languages." J.R. Tolkein stared things off: as a hobby, he invented an amalgam of Latin, French and Welsh; then he conceived people to speak it and places for them to live; thus Middle Earth was born.
In the early 20th century, linguists Sapir and Whorf, "proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts: That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them." Today, when a pseudo-need is manufactured daily to create a market niche, it's not surprising "the Web site Langmaker.com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem," (even as native languages die out at a pace of one every two weeks.)
It's when we can barely cope with anything more new, that many turn to the ancient language of Scripture for comfort and stability. Even that refuge, however, can be problematical. Peter Steinfels writes, in reviewing James Kugel's, "How to Read the Bible," the author "propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable - and fundamentally incompatible."
Why? The original translators of the Hebrew, people like Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scroll scribes, the patristic Christians "effectively recast the Bible's meaning in terms that came to dominate the way it was read by both Jews and Christians right up to recent times." Kugel contends "they all converged on four assumptions: that deeper meanings lay behind biblical texts; that the Bible was a book of instruction about the world; that it was somehow seamless and harmonious despite surface conflicts; and, finally, that it was of divine origin."
The historical criticism scholars of the 19th century, through the Jesus Seminar participants today, seek to discard those translations to unearth source materials derived from pre-translated fragments; in the process, Kugel declares they've "let the real Bible elude them." Steinfels adds "modern minds will still seek deeper meanings and still want relevant instructions for living. As for the anicent worry about seamlessness, modern minds, sensitized to multiple perspectives, often find more coherence in contrasting accounts than perfectly harmonized ones." Even if you accept the Bible is a compendium of orally transmitted Godly-inspired accounts of various persons, then the issue of seamlessness recedes anyway just as if you and I were present at a concert and conveyed varied impressions.
Yet I confess I'm of two minds: what archeologists and "historical Jesus," specialists brilliantly uncover provide a bedrock foundation for faith; the knowledge that King David or Jesus actually walked the roads of an excavated town conveys familarity and immanence. On the other hand, I find it's through reading reflections and commentaries, solo and in community, that more personally meaningful revelations surface; those that have been filtered through lives of the interpreters.
In preparation to teach Brueggemann's "Prophetic Imagination," in adult Sunday school, I've been adjunctly reading Podhoretz's "The Prophets." Podhoretz, more known as the political father of contemporary neo-con's, is an amateur Biblical scholar, but one superbly accomplished in bringing a multiplicity of citations to bear. In the section on Hosea, he introduces conflicting views on whether the first three chapters were written by a Hosea I and the last eleven by Hosea II. Issues of authorship are inevitably defined through detailed scientic analysis' of linguistics and grammar.
The non-technical theories are equally if not more fascinating. As Podhoretz writes, Hosea I's "focus on idolatry as against morality places him in the ethos and era of pre-classical prophecy," while "the primacy of the ethical law over the ritual or cultic only becomes a feature of the book [some scholars] say, in Chapters 4 through 11." In other words, could Hosea I be an earlier writer emphasizing ritual obedience when the people were newer to monotheism versus a later writer, in more prosperous Solomonic times, who sought to connect what transpired in worship to the needs of the poor? Would fundamentalism today naturally tilt towards the former while progressives instinctively turn to the latter, in the same way some geneticists argue blue or red-state political leanings are primarily biological?
Brueggemann, according to Wikipedia, is an advocate of a rhetorical criticism that "studies the use of words and phrases to explicate how arguments have been built to drive home a certain point the author or speaker intended to make." Reflecting a greater plurality within contemporary congregations, he wrote in 1995, "An honest facing of pluralism can only be pastorally and usefully engaged by an open-ended adjudication that takes the form of trustful, respectful conversation. While such an approach sounds like relativism, an answerng objectivism is destructive not only of the community but of any chance to receive new truth together."
Had Brueggemann's comments on respectful conversation been taken to heart by our entire parish, especially that "texts are open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," it is more likely than not that a small number of partisans wouldn't have taken the actions that destroyed the church, in their view, in order to save it.
How does their secessionist rallying cry 'Spritual Authority,' affect discernment? Are they advocating obedience to ancient texts that only scholars can authenticate and decipher; to stories orally transmitted and compiled by pre or post-exilic Hebrew editors reflecting different periods and concerns in the progressing history of Israel; or do they more traditionally only rely on the Septuagint Greek or the King James?
At the former Episcopal, now Ugandan, church I once attended, the preferred translation was the New International which draws primarily from the Greek as directed by a committee "united in their committment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God's Word in written form." That literalist approach would not likely predispose a completed version "open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," as much conform to cultural norms of the intended demographic. If the subsequent Bible did not, the final product would not be marketable to the audience for which it was created.
Brueggemann writes, "the collapse of the hegemony of medieval Christianity, hastened by the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the rise of science, produced, as Susan Bordo has made clear, a profound anxiety about certitude." The profound need for certitude is a compelling force as contrasted against the an ever growing plurality in once homogenous churches. The resulting backlast enables and enacts a defense mechanism justified as a faithful reaction against a perceived coercion that reflects the new reality as an intrusion.
An announcment advertising a lecture by Brueggemann at the Mayfield Salisbury Church, in Edinburgh, Scotland, stated "for present-day Christians who find themselves in a bewildering atmosphere of materialism and scientific secularism that puts enormous pressure on their inherited faith." Typical reactions are "to adopt an unquestioning attitude to Scripture which Brueggemann associates with fundamentalism, or to accept the objective, analytical approach, discarding in the text anything that does not yield to a rational understanding of faith and theology. He seems the main object of faith that is grounded in Scripture as the transformation of human life, and this, he thinks, is not achieved by expounding doctrine or ethics or by historical criticism. These do not change people. It is in the telling of stories, in vivid images and analogies, that human imagination is stirred to receive the Word of God in Scripture."
The ad concludes, "at the heart of this is a question about the nature of God - the domesticated God of conventional religion, or the free, unpredictable God who works wonders in the human soul. Faith that is reliant upon the freedom of God against the assumptions of human reason makes things possible that the world defines as impossible, and brings about transformation in the human spirit that strengthens and renews a person's life, moving him on to a deeper, more creative faith."
In the book of Hosea, God equates sin in a personal way with lewdness; in a corporate way with national idolatry; like a Father who looks murderously upon a child when he's disobedient, and lovingly, when she's true; He condemns; He adores - He even argues with Himself and changes His mind repeatedly. This free Creator demonstrates while choices have consequences, they aren't predictable, or dependent on human reason, just as an untamble passion more often than not, rules over logic, in our self-destructive impulsive moods that are later much regretted (as God might have after the Flood when He declared He would never again destroy every living creature).
Eamon Duffy's written a new book, "Marking the Hours," that begins with an exposition on the standard Medieval English prayer book yet hinges on the everyday lives of its readers. While horrified art dealers wail against the desecration of these ancient illuminated tomes through scribblings in the margins (which I admit also makes me cringe), Duffy re-animates the lives of the doodlers. In his review in the Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reports, "One woman, in her marginalia, laments the destruction of a shrine and details the contents of her linen closet."
Duffy, a Cambridge historian, is a grand writer with a marked perspective. He's an advoate of a Tudor top-down Reformation despite the legacy of John Wycliffe and the anti-Rome Lollards, a century before, and evidence the the great majority of the English grassroots laity wholly embraced Protestantism within twenty years of its introduction. Duffy nevertheless claims the Reformation wasn't natural, but aristocratically forced, against an organic Catholicism. It's not surprising, but any less poignant, that the most dramatic marginalia in the book belong to Thomas More in the Tower, who wrote "Gyve me thy grace good lord/To set the world at nought." A prayer book is what it is; it gains vitality through the traces of its owner's life.
I've discovered how to become a guest patron at our local university library (there's an annual fee but it's less than what I would've spent at Borders in a month). On the third floor, where I've yet to observe more than a handful of students, there are stacks of theology, glittering like buried treasure, to tempt willing hearts and minds. I'll be mining the trove for years, hoping to share sparkling trinkets that personally resonate in ripples outward over time as Duffy's marginalia speaks to him and his readers over the centuries (and some of these books haven't been checked out for a hundred years).
My first: the elusive Development of Christian Doctrine by Cardinal Newman. When he wrote it, he said, "I had no sleep for a week, and was fainting away or something like it day after day," no doubt in anticipation of the reaction of disciples like William George Ward who said of his hunger for dogma, "I would like to find a Papal Bull each morning on my breakfast table." Who could resist this?
Newman may be the greatest all-time artiste of rhetorical criticism. This book, unlike books that seek to please everyone, was attacked as too Catholic for the Anglicans and too Anglican for the Catholics. If something is detested by adversaries on either side, it's probably just right. Newman egged them both on by writing, "growth is the only evidence of life," and that the Bible contains, "the main outlines of a great system of dogmas, which remain to be fully developed."
I can hardly wait to unearth how Newman distinguishes legitimate development from corruption. In Colin McGinn's review of Stewart Pinker's new book, "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature." McGinn reports Pinker concludes words like 'going, having, preventing,' are genetic and necessary as survival skills. Pinker relates this to verbs where 'pour,' and 'fill' fulfill the same physics function but imply different meanings from the perspective of the actor, the pourer, and the filled, the container.
McGinn writes, "it just doesn't seem true that everthing nonphysical that we think about is metaphorical; for example, our legal concepts such as 'rights' are surely not all mere metaphors, introduced on the shoulders of the concepts of intuitive physics." I think they are as well. My driving compulsion is to unveil explicit connections between covert or overt language and its derivative destructive consequences, the abridgement of human rights, so that actors appreciate and acknowledge the moral physics of action.
The prophet Hosea II, Podhoretz (rather ironically), and Brueggemann, write of the primacy of morality over ritual. Newman originally railed against the dogmatic corruption of Roman Catholicism, then backtracked to justify his conversion. In the end, it's the Baghdad booksellers, though, that are the steadfast containers, bravely facing death, at the hands of malevolent pourers. Of this, I am always mindful.
Friday, September 14, 2007
If Mickey's a Mouse; Pluto's a Dog; What's Goofy?
I note this week the sale of the century. The CoE Diocese of Truro sold a collection of pre-1800 books to a dealer for 36,000 pounds. They said they needed the room and nobody had checked one out in a long time. (Is there anyone who finds the thought of reading a book from the Henry Phillpotts collection exciting? -sadly, I do) The dealer who bought the collection made 500,000 reselling it - he's closed shop in London and is retiring to the country.
I received an on-line offer last week I fear doesn't have quite the same profit-making potential: spurred on by the Pope's move towards restoring Pre-Vatican II liturgy, a bookseller's offering 1958 Latin missals. Don't think I'm going to take them up on it with an eye towards re-sale.
Twenty thousand English parish churches, some a thousand years old, now lie unattended and locked up. Not everything ancient is as good as Henry Phllpotts library, I'll grant, nor as dubiously useful as Latin missals; what I bemoan most is the passing of the truly goofy: an absent-minded librarian that doesn't realize or ever bothered to know the monetary value of his books; the idealisticaly Book of Acts-communally socialist-leaning vicar who everyone affectionately calls 'red rev;' the Bobby on a bike cycling obliviously and unintimidatingly around the village square -- the lost world of the comfortably eccentric, not a gated nation of the differently suspicious and therefore dangerous and threatening other.
When I visited Cork, about a decade ago, walking down the High, the church bells announced twelve o'clock. Shopkeepers and punters alike headed to Mass. There was nothing forced about it, nothing arrogant; just a naturalness to what people customarily did on their lunch break. I was reading an article by noted skeptic Daniel Dennett where he said "religion is a powerful force in the world. Now more than ever. We need to study it scientifically so that we can anticipate its changes." It didn't feel powerful in Cork; it felt organic, like the description Eamon Duffy paints of pre-Reformation English-Catholic parish life. Yet, of course, in actuality, it's rubbish - there was never any golden age of peaceful villages, then or now. Truth, however, doesn't necessarily diminish the beautiful vision.
Evelyn Waugh wrote about a non-theological unscientific perception of faith in Brideshead when Charles Ryder asked Sebastian Flyte why he believed in Mary and the Virgin Birth. Sebastian replied 'because it's charming.' Sebastian's terrible mother echoed the theme when justifying her place in heaven despite her wealth by saying, 'It's not usual for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle but that's all part of the Alice in Wonderland nature of religion.'
It's the same kind of argument I made against Christoper Hitchens last week that I'll renew in opposition to Richard Dawkins now. In a review of Dawkin's God Delusion, in Skeptic magazine, Norman Levitt writes "that Dawkins gives little quarter to liberal theism, that is to say, the kind of undogmatic, difficent, and even diluted faith, that finds it easy to coexist with atheism in a social context, that eschews high pressure proselytizing, and that offers no objection to evolutionary biology or cosmology or to science in general. In other words, he finds it contemptible that theological propositions get an epistemological free pass even when the theology in question is easygoing and gracious to those who don't accept it."
I plead guilty.
Levitt goes on to write, "What if hypothetically it were possible to create and propagate a religion that really did evoke honesty, kindliness, self-sacrifice, and even tolerance in most of its adherents?"
Bingo. That's it - that's what Dennett, Levitt, Hitchens, Hawkins and the other presently notorious atheists don't get. It's not a matter of a lack of scientific proof and evidence. If the physical questions are essentially unknowable, anyway, who cares about evidence? To follow up Levitt, a non-harmful faith is possible, and perhaps more the norm than not, even if it's never fully universally achieved, the belief in the potential hope of it negates their arguments by rendering them irrelevant. It's the same argument I hold against Scriptural literalism - if you don't insist it's all true in the first place, you don't need to defend it, as much as glean it for wisdom and apply it if you can.
The closest I can describe it in theological and historical terms is from the viewpoint of latitudinarianism, a practice that broadly characterized the Anglican Church in Victorian times, as described by A.N. Wilson in "God's Funeral." Many priests of the day prefaced the Nicene Creed by stating, "I'm prepared to live my life as if," -I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty," etc. Highly charged Anglican litmus-test partisans today would immediately initiate schism against any denomination possessing such a non-doctrinal, non-authoritarian mindset.
The pre-split parish I attended was at its best when it was at its goofiest. When our forget priest got frequently lost in the middle of the sermon and laughed heartily. When the acolyte caught the fire retardent sleeve of his vestment on fire after we'd all been put to sleep by the Taize service. When the girls in youth group cooperatively built cardboard condominiums during an all night lock-in to simulate homelessness while the boys confidently built isolated shacks that collasped within an hour. When I donned the most pathetic Easter Bunny costume in the world and couldn't stop the ears from flopping into my eyes. When one of our girls fell out of the relatively safe bleachers at the evening program on a mission trip after working fixing a dangerous roof all day.
By the time the vestry required members to sign a statement attesting to their doctrinal beliefs, they'd succeeding in choking the very life out of it. There was no room for amazement in the presence of an awesome God; no joy; little humanity.
When Jesus asked Peter if He could wash his feet and Peter said no way; When Jesus said if you don't let me, you're fired; when Peter responded, okay boss, wash my feet, my hands, my head -- that's a charming, endearing and goofy story worthy of raucous praise.
I received an on-line offer last week I fear doesn't have quite the same profit-making potential: spurred on by the Pope's move towards restoring Pre-Vatican II liturgy, a bookseller's offering 1958 Latin missals. Don't think I'm going to take them up on it with an eye towards re-sale.
Twenty thousand English parish churches, some a thousand years old, now lie unattended and locked up. Not everything ancient is as good as Henry Phllpotts library, I'll grant, nor as dubiously useful as Latin missals; what I bemoan most is the passing of the truly goofy: an absent-minded librarian that doesn't realize or ever bothered to know the monetary value of his books; the idealisticaly Book of Acts-communally socialist-leaning vicar who everyone affectionately calls 'red rev;' the Bobby on a bike cycling obliviously and unintimidatingly around the village square -- the lost world of the comfortably eccentric, not a gated nation of the differently suspicious and therefore dangerous and threatening other.
When I visited Cork, about a decade ago, walking down the High, the church bells announced twelve o'clock. Shopkeepers and punters alike headed to Mass. There was nothing forced about it, nothing arrogant; just a naturalness to what people customarily did on their lunch break. I was reading an article by noted skeptic Daniel Dennett where he said "religion is a powerful force in the world. Now more than ever. We need to study it scientifically so that we can anticipate its changes." It didn't feel powerful in Cork; it felt organic, like the description Eamon Duffy paints of pre-Reformation English-Catholic parish life. Yet, of course, in actuality, it's rubbish - there was never any golden age of peaceful villages, then or now. Truth, however, doesn't necessarily diminish the beautiful vision.
Evelyn Waugh wrote about a non-theological unscientific perception of faith in Brideshead when Charles Ryder asked Sebastian Flyte why he believed in Mary and the Virgin Birth. Sebastian replied 'because it's charming.' Sebastian's terrible mother echoed the theme when justifying her place in heaven despite her wealth by saying, 'It's not usual for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle but that's all part of the Alice in Wonderland nature of religion.'
It's the same kind of argument I made against Christoper Hitchens last week that I'll renew in opposition to Richard Dawkins now. In a review of Dawkin's God Delusion, in Skeptic magazine, Norman Levitt writes "that Dawkins gives little quarter to liberal theism, that is to say, the kind of undogmatic, difficent, and even diluted faith, that finds it easy to coexist with atheism in a social context, that eschews high pressure proselytizing, and that offers no objection to evolutionary biology or cosmology or to science in general. In other words, he finds it contemptible that theological propositions get an epistemological free pass even when the theology in question is easygoing and gracious to those who don't accept it."
I plead guilty.
Levitt goes on to write, "What if hypothetically it were possible to create and propagate a religion that really did evoke honesty, kindliness, self-sacrifice, and even tolerance in most of its adherents?"
Bingo. That's it - that's what Dennett, Levitt, Hitchens, Hawkins and the other presently notorious atheists don't get. It's not a matter of a lack of scientific proof and evidence. If the physical questions are essentially unknowable, anyway, who cares about evidence? To follow up Levitt, a non-harmful faith is possible, and perhaps more the norm than not, even if it's never fully universally achieved, the belief in the potential hope of it negates their arguments by rendering them irrelevant. It's the same argument I hold against Scriptural literalism - if you don't insist it's all true in the first place, you don't need to defend it, as much as glean it for wisdom and apply it if you can.
The closest I can describe it in theological and historical terms is from the viewpoint of latitudinarianism, a practice that broadly characterized the Anglican Church in Victorian times, as described by A.N. Wilson in "God's Funeral." Many priests of the day prefaced the Nicene Creed by stating, "I'm prepared to live my life as if," -I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty," etc. Highly charged Anglican litmus-test partisans today would immediately initiate schism against any denomination possessing such a non-doctrinal, non-authoritarian mindset.
The pre-split parish I attended was at its best when it was at its goofiest. When our forget priest got frequently lost in the middle of the sermon and laughed heartily. When the acolyte caught the fire retardent sleeve of his vestment on fire after we'd all been put to sleep by the Taize service. When the girls in youth group cooperatively built cardboard condominiums during an all night lock-in to simulate homelessness while the boys confidently built isolated shacks that collasped within an hour. When I donned the most pathetic Easter Bunny costume in the world and couldn't stop the ears from flopping into my eyes. When one of our girls fell out of the relatively safe bleachers at the evening program on a mission trip after working fixing a dangerous roof all day.
By the time the vestry required members to sign a statement attesting to their doctrinal beliefs, they'd succeeding in choking the very life out of it. There was no room for amazement in the presence of an awesome God; no joy; little humanity.
When Jesus asked Peter if He could wash his feet and Peter said no way; When Jesus said if you don't let me, you're fired; when Peter responded, okay boss, wash my feet, my hands, my head -- that's a charming, endearing and goofy story worthy of raucous praise.
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