Infinite Resources

Sexual Liberation: What You Liberate Might Not Let You Go Free

2009-10-08T17:22:00.000-07:00

“If the demand for sexual pleasure is so compelling that we can throw overboard moral principles that extend back to the very roots of our civilization, it is not clear why we would insist that it stop short and respect the consent of individuals. In short, sexual liberation conjured up a spirit of moral nihilism to liberate the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure, and it is not at all certain that such a spirit can be commanded to behave once it has been summoned.”- Carson Holloway(Click his name for rest of article).

Stanley Fish on Liberalism's Inability to Be Fair to Religions that Don't Mirror Its Presuppositions

2009-08-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

“Liberalism as a doctrine is incapable of accomodating strong religiosity and the reason is simple. Liberalism as both a philosophy and a theory of the state depends at bottom on the distinction between the public and private. That's how liberalism deals with the diversity of men and women in the society. Men and women in the society believe a great many things and those beliefs are important to them but if they are going to participate in the public sphere, says liberalism, they should participate as citizens, not as sectarians. They should in fact leave their strongest doctrinal concerns and affiliations at the door and only give arguments in the public sphere that will be recognized as arguments by everyone else, no matter what their religion, or even their absence of religion. Obviously, that kind of imperative- the imperative of liberalism, will not sit well with a form of religiosity that refuses to recognize the line between public and private and indeed believes that adhering to that line is an act of impiety and makes fun of it... And so I believe that I do want to make American liberals uncomfortable with the claim that they often make that they can be fair to religion. They can only be fair to a religion which mirrors the liberal distinction of the liberals sequestering a religion in private spaces. The moment a religion makes claims that cross that line liberals become extremely uncomfortable and start using terms like
'zealot', 'extremist' and even 'nut'.” - Stanley Fish in an interview with Ken Myers on Mars Hill Audio, Volume 97.

Carlyle on Rousseau and the Consequences of Ideas

2009-08-10T18:32:00.000-07:00

"Thomas Carlyle, the eminent Scottish essayist and sometime pphilosopher, was once scolded at a dinner party for endlessly chattering about books: 'Ideas, Mr. Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas!' To which he replied, 'There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas! The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.'" -Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World and 5 Others that Didn't Help, (2008), Regnery Publishing, p. 2.

[I do not think it right to give Rousseau too much credit for movements which may have had plenty of life without him, but I think it is good to recognize the vast consequences ideas can have].

Irenaeus: The Gnostics, Denial of the Virgin Birth, and Post Modern Pathologies

2009-08-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

"A certain Cerinthus taught in Asia that the world was not made by the first God, but by some Power which was separated and distant from the Authority that is above all things. He proposes Jesus, not as having been born of a Virgin- for this seemed impossible to him- but as having been born the son of Joseph and Mary like all other men, and that he excelled over every other person in justice, prudence, and wisdom."
-Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book One, Chapter 26, 1 (p.90).

[It is interesting to read of this and consider its parallels with present times... Today as then there are those who deny the Virgin birth. What is the nature of their denial, the dynamic of it. Why do they deny this but accept say the resurrection and the creation of the world by God?

I can only remember talking to one person professing a kind of faith in Christ who denied the Virgin birth. Not that that means they don't abound. I really don't know. But the question I asked him was simply if he believed that God created the world on what basis did he not believe that God could bring about a Virgin birth or that even if He could, he did not? He had no answer. Perhaps others do?

Cerinthus thought he did. Obviously he went beyond what many today are comfortable with who might deny the Virgin birth. Their innovation is purely negative. They do not assert or posit multiple gods, including a flawed and wicked creator god.

The Virgin birth was one of the tenants rejected by Henry Emerson Fosdick. Gresham Machen and he had a famous debate in the 1920s in which Fosdick defended liberalism and Gresham defended orthodoxy. The time was very contentious. Machen's church defrocked him for his orthodoxy. Denial of the virgin birth and similar tenants have a long lineage in todays mainline churches.

There is an assertion of a kind of authority even in the mere denial of the doctrine. The implications are enormous for the nature of Christ, if one thinks about it. So those who do not think the denial of the virgin birth is important as a tenant of belief also, it would seem inescapably to follow, also are relinquishing a stance on the importance of Christ and Christology, or they are opening their Christology up to innovations such as the Gnostics felt at liberty to bring. It is absurd to say that denial of the virigin birth has no effect on Christology.

On the liberty of the Gnostics and their vieing for innovations, Irenaeus remarks a number of times. Here is an example:
"Already many offshoots of many heretical sects have been made from the ones we have mentioned, because many of these people, in fact all, wish to be teachers and to forsake the heresy in which they had been. They insist on teaching in a novel manner, composing from one teaching another tenet, and then another from that. They declare themselves inventors of any opinion which they may have patched together." -Irenaeus, Book 1, Chp, 28, 1 (p. 92-93).

Today the pathology (what the ancients called heresy) has not reached to that level in many of our circles, to be sure. Rather, at this stage, people want to be "nutured, not taught". People are feeling rather disaffected and disengaged from what is called "truth". They are not even sure she exists. It is only after refusal to love the truth repeatedly that strong delusion sets in. Churches are placating budding stages of pathological denial of the truth today and that is deadly.

Camus on Love and Frenetic Daftness

2009-08-06T21:34:00.000-07:00

A beautiful section in the opening of Camus' The Plague:

"Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and the proceeding to fritter-away at card-tables, in cafes and in small-talk what time is left for living. Nevertheless there still exists towns and countries where people have now and then an inkling off something different. In general it doesn't change their lives. Still, they have had an intimation, and that's so much to the good. Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern. Hence I see no need to dwell on the manner of loving in our town. The men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called 'the act of love,' or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these extremes. That, too, is not exceptional. At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love one another without knowing much about it."
-The Plague, pages 4-5.

Camus's lines to me are peculiarly powerful. Resting a quote from them is like taking something from its natural seemless environment. There is a brimming whole vitality like the Mediterranean coast's.

The Gnostics and Anti-Semitism

2009-08-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

Noticed in Irenaeus today several places where the Gnostic doctrine recounted implied anti-Semitism. For example, according to one sect Christ came to destroy the God of the Jews (Bk 1, Chp 24, 4-5). The prominent German "higher criticism" scholar Adolf von Harnack wrote Marcion; The Gospel of an Alien God, about the ancient heretic who reviled the Old Testament. The author looked very favorably on Marcion and apparently adopted much of his view, I have heard recounted, though I have no first hand knowledge of the book.

I have noticed the presence of German "higher criticism" in the Nazi "thought" and wonder about what degree of connection there was.

Here is Wikipedia on this subject:
"Theologian Adolf von Harnack - in agreement with the traditional account of Marcion as revisionist - discusses the reasons for his alterations to Luke. According to von Harnack, Marcion believed there could be only one true gospel, all others being fabrications by pro-Jewish elements, determined to sustain worship of Yahweh. Furthermore, he believed that the true gospel was given directly to Paul by Christ himself, but was later corrupted by those same elements, who also corrupted the Pauline epistles. He saw the attribution of this gospel to "Luke" as another fabrication. Marcion thus began what he saw as a restoration of the original gospel as given to Paul.[1]

Von Harnack writes that:

For this task he did not appeal to a divine revelation, any special instruction, nor to a pneumatic assistance [...] From this it immediately follows that for his purifications of the text - and this is usually overlooked - he neither could claim nor did claim absolute certainty. "

[My question is how much was the scholarship on Marcion friendly to the raging anti-Semitism in Germany at the time Von Harnack was writing?]
----

Eternal Beauty and Fools Daily Despoiling It In Their Hearts, Driven By A Principle of this World

2009-08-05T20:36:00.001-07:00

“But since these men differ among themselves both in doctrine and in tradition, and since those of them who are acknowledged as the more modern endeavor to excogitate [contrive, devise or invent by careful thought] something new every day and to produce something that no one has ever thought of, it is difficult to describe all of their opinions.” -Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Bk 1, Chp. 21, 20 (p. 80).

[There is of course a vacuity to a one-sided approach that seeks only the new. It is just as bankrupt, if not more so, as binding one's thoughts to old custom because it is old. There is at least a fairly reliable presumption for the later that if a custom is old it has been able to stand the test of time and has some substance to it. But both courses can be a substitute for the love of the truth. To those who always seek what is new I ask where is eternity in their hearts? Is it no longer there?

Irenaeus is describing some of the characteristic behaviors as well as painstakingly describing the different doctrines of the Gnostics of his day (Perhaps he would not use the term Gnostic). He is depicting their psychology to an extent. It is not a flattering depiction but though Irenaeus is depicting in order to criticize and he does not think that their error could be graver, it is marvelous to see the kind of spirit Irenaeus embodies, the equanimity, and even humor with which he deals with those he regards as apostates and heretics who are innovating on the doctrines of the faith in a folly that destroys in them and their listeners the sublimity of the God initiated religion.

“They really deserve our pity, these men who by means of the alphabet and numbers so coldly and violently tear to pieces so great a religion, the greatness of the truly unexpressable Power, and the so great Economies of God... Really more impious than every impiety are these people who claim that the Maker of heaven and earth, who alone is the all-powerful God, above whom there is no other God, was emitted from degeneracy, which in turn was emitted from another degeneracy, so that according to them he is the emission of a third degeneracy. Such a doctrine we must really exhale from ourselves and execrate. We must, moreover, flee far from such people. And the more they boldly affirm and rejoice in their fictions, so much the more should we realize that they are under the influence of the Ogdoad [he is here using their teaching on a Ogdoad of Aeons as part of their theology of the origins of everything- Ogdoad I believe means eight] of wicked spirits.” -Bk 1, Chp. 16, 10-18 (p. 70).

Bejamin Paloff takes Pot Shot at Czeslaw Milosz

2009-08-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

I am annoyed by apparent pot shots at the late, great Czeslaw Milosz in an article in the Nation entitled “Cures for the Common Cold War: Postwar Polish Poetry”.

“Yet Anders is not without serious competition from fellow Polish writers. The most imposing is the latter portion of The History of Polish Literature (1969) by Czeslaw Milosz, with its contentious opinions, occasional errors and imperious language. Milosz describes Wislawa Szymborska--who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, sixteen years after Milosz was awarded it--as a poet who "often leans toward preciosity" and who "is probably at her best where her woman's sensibility outweighs her existential brand of rationalism." Though the Polish language has no definite or indefinite articles, summary judgments like these leave no doubt that Milosz understood what it meant to crown his History with The instead of A. “

While I like both Milosz and Szymborska, I think Milosz may be right about Symborska and Paloff's resort to support from award of the Nobel prize to Symborska is hardly a thoughtful reply. More to the point, the quote Paloff supplies does not serve to support his judgment of Milosz's history as “contentious” and “imperious”. And that snide insinuation about the title of Milosz's history. I suspect Paloff is guided merely by his apparent bias for a postmodern sensibility rather than an actual knowledge of Milosz's demeanor. Couldn't that simply have been the choice of Milosz's editor following publishing conventions of the time?

Paloff cites Jaroslav Anders, whose book he is reviewing, as saying: "Poetry as a 'witness of history,'" Anders writes, "was a constant motif of Milosz's essays as well as of many of his poems. In many cases, this view of literature as mentor and consoler was certainly true. But in time it inevitably led to a one-sided, reductive reading of some of Poland's most complex writers."

Here is the clincher from Paloff: “For the "certain way of reading" to which these essays bid farewell may have had its time and place, but it ultimately proved too orthodox, too programmatic in its vision of good and evil, to survive in a postglobalization, postmodern and--no use avoiding it--post-Communist world.”

Postmodern sensibility should rule is the take away lesson. I'd rather read Milosz. Here for instance is a charming excerpt from him I came across the other day:

“We learned so much, this you know well:
how, gradually, what could not be taken away
is taken. People, countrysides.
And the heart does not die when one thinks it should,
we smile, there is tea and bread on the table.
And only remorse that we did not love the poor ashes in Sachsenhausen
with absolute love, beyond human power...”

-from “Elegy for N.N.” from New and Collected Poems, 1993-2001, p. 267. The poem was written at Berkeley in 1963.

[Sometimes the presumed knowingness of the postmodern strikes me as impoverished and thin, a pitiable delusion, especially beside some the deep seeing eye of one like Milosz. Is appears a knowingness like that of the ancient Gnostics and sophists, inflated with imagination and thin on content and the bold weathering of reality].

Notes on Irenaus's Against Heresies

2009-08-04T19:47:00.000-07:00

“Hence, they claim, material substance took its beginning from ignorance and grief, fear and bewilderment.” -Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Bk. 1, Chp. 2, Pt. 3

The Gnostic reviling of creation.
In Irenaeus I am finding many unanticipated thing. He has a deep sense of the connection between doctrine and actions. Perspicuity in describing this system of doctrines, and a calm that is not associated with the use of the term “heresies”. Not only that, even a playfulness. He sees the imaginative nature of the manufacturing by the Gnostics of their doctrines and so he suggests tongue-in-cheek additions to their doctrines. He has a real sense of the wider community of Christians.

He describes some who teach that the spirit of the spiritual is incorruptable and that therefore they can do anything and it will not effect their eternal destiny. For instance, they even attend gladiatorial games and seduce other men's wives. This reminds me of Dostoevsky's remark that if there is no God than everything is permitted. Doctrines need not deny God to produce the same effect. Doctrines need not even be religiously rooted, to the average observer's eyes.

The speciousness of the treatments of Scripture...making it something that they merely attach their system to. An imperial system which is also deceptive. Imperial? Because it seeks to appropriate and convert to its own organization, merely giving lip service to the outward trappings of the religion that it is seeking to leech, to possess like a parasite on a host.

A Case Where President George W. Bush Is More Articulate than President Obama (and especially President Clinton)

2009-07-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

"A Study in Contrasts

The differences between President Bush’s 2007 “Executive Order Expanding Approved Stem Cell Lines” and President Obama’s executive order overturning it are striking especially given the popular mischaracterization of both. Despite its demonization as a right-wing Christian rejection of modern science—if not of modernity as a whole—the language of Bush’s order manages to acknowledge the serious and profound ethical dilemmas that surround embryonic stem cell research and to clearly articulate both the scientific and moral principles that ground its conclusions. Thus, the order recognizes the great promise of biomedical innovation but also its potential conflict with “human life and human dignity,” making it “critical to establish moral and ethical boundaries to allow the Nation to move forward vigorously with medical research.” In fact, the entire document is a model of transparent political argument meant to broker some measure of civic compromise without sacrificing either clarity or conviction regarding moral principle. It even draws attention to the unique difficulties that present themselves to the federal government as a democratic body representing a constituency with diverse moral worldviews and therefore having a “duty to exercise responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds.”

In fact, the entire order is premised upon two forcefully stated moral principles and two empirically defensible definitions. President Bush objects to embryonic stem cell research on two grounds: first, that “the destruction of nascent life for research violates the principle that no life should be used as a mere means for achieving the medical benefit of another,” and second, that “human embryos and fetuses, as living members of the human species, are not raw materials to be exploited or commodities to be bought and sold.” One could argue that the former principle is characteristically Kantian and the latter Christian, but Bush also marshals scientific support for the classifications his moral principles rest upon. He provides a clear and scientifically defensible definition of the term “human embryo” and explains in plain prose what counts as “subjecting to harm a human embryo.” One can certainly take philosophical issue with the substance of the argument, but there can be no doubt that an articulate argument is proffered, that it carefully balances the benefits of science against its moral risks, and that the argument is premised upon scientifically defensible categorizations of human life. President Obama’s executive order never attempts to reject the interpretation of human life offered in the Bush order it overturns, assuming instead that its celebration of science is evidence enough of its scientific superiority.

Furthermore, President Bush’s order is a legitimately political one in two important ways. First, it resigns itself to an irresolvable contest of interests instead of attempting a merely cosmetic harmony through demagoguery. The position espoused in his executive order is meant to be a respectful and equitable compromise between opposed constituencies, and it recognizes the real limitations placed upon the federal government as an arbiter of a moral dispute between such profoundly divergent convictions. Secondly, a democratic and representative deference to a split in the will of the people doesn’t necessarily justify the abdication of any and all moral principle or require a comprehensive moral skepticism; Bush’s political compromise regarding the federal funding of stem cell research still draws an unequivocal moral line in the sand—there are certain kinds of research he won’t prohibit but refuses to assist, and then some (human cloning, for example) he simply will not countenance. The great virtue of Bush’s 2007 executive order is that it is appropriately political without being merely political; he captures the need for compromise but also eludes the danger of brokering merely an amoral compromise. It is correct to say, then, that Bush’s approach is Christian but not in the sense usually (and malignantly) understood—it is Christian in the sense that it espouses some universal moral truths, like the unique dignity of each human life, but also accepts that such recognition does not undercut the need for prudence in applying these truths to the theater of real political experience. In other words, it is Thomistic in a way philosophically consonant with the principles of the American founding and the tradition those principles subsequently birthed.

President Obama’s executive order, by way of contrast, makes no mention of any controversy at all but rather prefers to tout the “broad agreement in the scientific community that the research should be supported by federal funds,” ignoring the more pressing question of whether this is essentially a question of scientific expertise in the first place. He does note that his order removes “barriers to responsible scientific research,” thereby indicating a distinction between that and the irresponsible variety; however, there is no attempt to address what counts as either. Obama never articulates any moral principle other than the absolute sovereignty of scientific activity. He makes it unambiguously clear in his memorandum on scientific integrity that the real issue is that the “public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions.” Obama fails not only to identify a genuine moral predicament worth mentioning but also any real participatory role for the public to exercise its consent. As he sees it, the public’s job is to accept passively the wisdom of technocratic experts.

In his remarks delivered to the press, President Obama does discuss the moral “concerns” of many “thoughtful and decent people” and the corresponding need to maintain the kind of “difficult and delicate balance” such concerns warrant. Yet despite the directive to “respect their point of view,” he marginalizes such dissent by claiming that the “majority of Americans...have come to a consensus” and that the “proper course has become clear”—a polite way of saying that these “thoughtful” dissenters are simply wrong and nearly everyone knows it. In fact, Obama implies less than subtly that the time for “discussion, debate, and reflection” has really passed and that there is nothing left but “a false choice between sound science and moral values.” For those who still cling to their now fully discredited religious reservations, Obama assures them that he offers this dismissal of their views as a “person of faith” himself. Likewise, for those who still insist there is any moral uncertainty, he comforts them with the simplistic platitude that the only relevant moral imperative is our “work to ease human suffering.” Obama’s rhetorical gestures towards the opposition are transparently perfunctory: he is so insistent on avoiding any political compromise whatsoever that he actually neglects even to mention that the research progress encouraged by his predecessor may have made it possible to sidestep the moral controversy. While much of President Bush’s 2007 order was devoted to the exciting discoveries being made for “less morally problematic alternatives” to embryos as a source of stem cells, Obama fails to mention these alternatives, or to mention that his new executive order also revokes Bush’s encouragement for exploring them, opting instead to support “promising research of all kinds,” problematic and otherwise.

In contrast to his predecessor’s circumspect effort to strike the right balance between scientific progress and political restraint, President Obama attempts to render them mutually exclusive: he wants scientists to operate free of the “manipulation and coercion” that are constitutive of any “political agenda.” To ensure that “scientific data is never distorted” and that “scientific decisions are based on facts, not ideology,” Obama effectively denies that there are any political judgments that cannot be settled by scientific investigation. For Obama, “responsibly conducted science” means science unobstructed by political intrusion, free even from the democratic will of the people. Science trumps politics entirely, or, to be more precise, simply absorbs it; any reference to values or interests that cannot be legitimated by scientific analysis is branded as ideology, whether or not supported by popular consent. Obama goes as far as to suggest that the political aggrandizement of America as a nation is inseparable from its stewardship of technological innovation. He not only wants to “advance the cause of science in America” but also hopes for “America to lead the world in the discoveries it may one day yield.” To update John Winthrop’s famous line, we shall be as a laboratory upon a hill."

-from Ivan Kenneally's excellent article "Technocracy and Populism" in New Atlantis Spring 2009

After "Constantianism" Supposedly Established, St. Ambrose Excommunicates Caesar

2009-06-29T20:48:00.001-07:00

Sometimes our formulations are too easy. When Protestants do history I think we should be especially on guard because, let's face it, our propensity is to slough off the effort from a long tradition of neglect of history between Augustine and Luther, or beyond. For instance, in the case of the charge that since Constantine the church has succumbed to "Constantinianism" and "doing ethics for Caesar" has to be mitigated if not thrown out when actual intricacies of history are look at seriously. Take for instance the following case which occurred almost 90 years after Constantine has become emperor:

"When, in the year 390, Saint Ambrose excommunicated the Christian Theodosius for his massacre in Thessalonika, he was holding Caesar accountable to the ethics of the Church". A more correct view seems to be the following:

"The history of the relations between the church and the state in the Middle Ages is a history of a long dispute waged with wavering fortune on either side. Extravagant claims on one side called forth equally extravagant claims on the other. The Eraastianism of post-Reformation settlements was the answer to earlier imperiousness on the other side" (p. 34, American Babylon, 2009, Richard John Neuhaus).

Dorothy Sayers and Christian Economics

2009-06-29T20:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/06/dorothy-sayers-and-economic-so

“...Sayers would have agreed that the housing meltdown was, at base, a moral failure. The belief that it was not merely reasonable, but virtuous, to want that which you could not afford would have struck her as preposterous as well as sinful...Moreover, Sayers would have identified envy as the sin at the heart of left-wing critiques of capitalism. "If avarice is the sin of the Haves against the Have-Nots," Sayers reminded her audience, "Envy is the sin of the Have-Nots against the Haves," and therefore "can always find support among those who are just and generous-minded." We are as familiar as Sayers with these plausible plaints, but Sayers recognized in envy a deeper and more subtle evil, in which the spirit of vindictiveness masquerades as righteous indignation. ”

“...Her address to the Council Sayers entitled "The Other Six Deadly Sins," in which she berated the churches’ concentration on lust. Sayers took avarice and held it to the light, with results that must have been unpleasant to the more reflective audience members. "The Church says covetousness is a deadly sin—but does she really think so? Is she ready to found welfare societies to deal with financial immorality as she does with sexual immorality," Sayers mused, rhetorically asking "does the Church arrange services, with bright congregational singing, for total abstainers from usury?"

Christ's Face a "Very Present Pledge of Salvation"

2009-06-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

“...we lack nothing for an abundance of all good things and for assurance of salvation so long as the Lord is our God. And rightly so! For if his face, the moment that it has shone forth, is a very present pledge of salvation, how can he manifest himself to a man as his God without also opening to him the treasures of His salvation? He is our God on this condition: that he dwell among us, as he has testified through Moses [Lev. 26:11]. But one cannot obtain such a presence of him without, at the same time, possessing life. “ -John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, CH. X, Section 8.

Here is another surprising (for me) little meadow opening up in Calvin's prose, a familiar theme, one that should be familiar I think to every Christian: the face of Christ. It is hard for me to imagine a person truly looking into Christ's face in comprehension and yet thinking there might be others of equal value. I am forced by love to think of their minds as darkened.

The present intimacy with Christ cannot really be sectioned off. But I think there is a place for contemplation of the future and of the past within this present intimacy. The past in seeking to allow God to shape your life into a story worth telling, the future in memento mori, etc. both to clear up one's judgment and thereby clear up the capacity to see Christ.

Calvin's reflection from Scripture on the Christ's face as the very present pledge of salvation is hymned in a beautiful poem by John Donne, one of the peaks of the English language:

A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
by John Donne

I.
WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
II.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
III.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
And having done that, Thou hast done ;
I fear no more.

Contemplation in God of Neighbor

2009-06-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

“We ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: whatever the character of the man, we must love him because we love God.” -John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, CH. VIII, Section 55.

[A succinct formulation of a basic teaching of Christianity...The contemplation of all in God. “In a single feeling of love” - an inner disposition we learn from continual remembrance and communion. ..."the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love" sounds something of a misanthropic note. Perhaps I would feel more the same if for instance a close friend of my youth was burned at the stake for espousing views deemed heretical (as was Calvin's friend). Regardless if we commiserate with the starkness of Calvin's formulation and the hard sentiment, he rightly points the way to love the wellspring of love, that same one as natural human love, but deepened, clarified and revealed.

True Courage: Advancing Toward the Horror Knowing

2009-06-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

“Fortitude presumes to a certain extent that a man is afraid of evil; its essence does not consist in knowing no fear but rather in not allowing himself to be compelled by fear into evil or to fail to accomplish the good. Anyone who ventures into some danger, even for the sake of the good, without realizing how dangerous it is, or out of an impulsive optimism ('Nothing is going to happen to me'), or with a well-founded confidence in his own power and capacity for struggle does not yet have the virtue of fortitude. The possibility of being courageous in the true sense comes about only when all those apparent or genuine elements of security fail, that is, when the natural man fears for himself; indeed, not when he fears for himself out of baseless anxiety, but rather when, on the basis of clear perception of the true state of matters, he cannot do otherwise- as it were, with good reason- but fear for himself. Whoever in such a situation of unqualified seriousness, in the face of which any miles gloriosus (glorious soldier) falls mute and every heroic gesture becomes crippled, nonetheless advances toward the horror and does not allow himself to be prevented from doing the good, specifically for the sake of the good and thus finally for the sake of God, not out of ambition or out of fear of being taken for a coward: that person is truly courageous.” -Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, pgs. 26-27.

Tasting Truth As It Is

2009-06-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

"A wiseman is one to whom things taste as they are". A saying from the Middle Ages. I pause here to steal a moment of free form reflection. Implied in the statement is an oughtness to taste. What is rejected is the kind of rejection of judgment of taste by some forms of utilitarianism such as that of Sedgwick.

What this and all my subsequent reflections must not be is a perishing into mere words, a kind of low mental rearranging of words, outside of the purview of life. Modern vogue ways of knowing seem largely to adopt an Enlightement division of knowledge and action and, as Hamann noted of Mendelssohn, tend to cut them into two dead halves. That is a splitting of prudence right down the middle in the name of knowledge.

I think implied in the quote is a view of wisdom which encompasses the soul and emotions. Right emotions in the face of things. But all this is rather convicting (and probably hard to follow). One can talk about virtue but actually trieing to live virtuously is, to one bent, monstrous. Beyond sorting through the facts and getting to controlling principles there is a deeper place in which virtue has its roots. It is that deeper face that provides the context for the virtuous principles. Otherwise, the abstract principles are just deadly. The touch of the Spirit of God provides the context out of which order may arise.

Mere Knowledge of Scripture

2009-06-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

“'Bible Religion' is both the recognized title and the best description of the English religion. It consists not in rites or in creeds, but mainly in having the Bible read in Church, in the family, in private. Now I am far indeed from undervaluing that mere knowledge of Scripture which is imparted to the population thus promiscuously. At least in England, it has to a certain point made up for great and grievous losses in its Christianity. The reiteration again and again, in fixed course in the public service, of the words of inspired teachers under both covenants, and that in grave majestic English, has in matter of fact been to our people a vast benefit. It has attuned their minds to religious thoughts; it has given them a high moral standard; it has served them in associating religion with compositions which, evenly humanly considered, are among the most sublime and beautiful ever written; especially, it has impressed upon them the series of Divine Providence, in behalf of man for his creation to his end, and, above all, the words, deeds, and sacred sufferings of Him in whom all the Providences of God centre.”

-John Henry Newman, The Grammar of Assent, Bk. 56-57.

[In 1 Timothy 4:13, Paul instructs Timothy regarding the main tasks as a pastor he is to perform win Paul's absence: “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.” I have been thinking lately that these three things are still vital signs of a church's health.

Paul follows up: “Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” 'Diligence in these matters' includes the three things he mentioned above, it seems. The quote from Newman stirs cultural memory of a time which is now largely past, but in which the “mere knowledge of Scripture” through “the Bible read in Church, in the family, in private” was a marked sign of Christianity in England. I know there are considerations and questions that deserve attention regarding what this meant in Paul's day. It might be suggested that as far as such public Scripture reading, it was called for by the high rates of illiteracy of the time. There is certainly a place for discussion about the formats that modern shapes of living call for in advancing this “mere knowledge of Scripture”, but a bottom line for a healthy church is that Christians should know and be taught to know the Scripture. Paul even ties up these labors of Timothy with salvation for him and his hearers.

Sometimes the classical liberal notion of the equality of religions is held forth in the old adage that the different religions are like a bunch of blind men in a room with an elephant who have never seen an elephant and who latch onto just part of the elephant and think it is the whole and dispute with each other that the dimensions of their part of the elephant are the correct one. The problem with this analogy, which is meant to suggest the folly of adhering to any one religion, is that it presupposes a bird's eye view, a superior vantage point. In order to see the folly of the blind men you have to presume to see the elephant whole (or the Brahmin spirit, or the Oversoul or whatever you call it). Rather than exposing the pride and folly of the religions it turns out to conceal a presumed superiority which may turn out to be the most acidic pride of all. And this vantage point becomes the effective religion, rather than any one of the religions.

Contrast then with the kind of devotion Paul is speaking of here. He does not speak of Christianity as merely a culturally positive local place to plant yourself, one which is interchangeable with other faiths. He does not harbor a sense that it is bigoted and a fallacy to presume that Christianity has some special corner on the truth, some X marks the spot. Rather he says that these things mean salvation. Not fashion and fancy but life and death.

Josef Pieper on Distraction and Its Cure

2009-06-07T21:14:00.001-07:00

“The 'concupiscence of the eyes' reaches its utmost destructive and extirpative power at the point where it has constructed for itself a world in its own image and likeness, where it has surrounded itself with the restlessness of a ceaseless film of meaningless objects for show and with a literally deafening noise of nothing more than impressions and sensations that roar in an uninterrupted chase around every window of the senses. Behind their papery facade of ostentation lies absolute nothingness, a 'world' of at most one day constructs that often become insipid after just one-quarter of an hour and are thrown out like a newspaper that has been read or a magazine that has been paged through; a world which, before the revealing gaze of a sound spirit uninfected by its contagion, shows itself to be like a metropolitan entertainment district in the harsh clarity of a winter morning: barren, bleak, and ghostly to the point of pushing one to despair.

Still, the destructive element of this disorder, born out of and shaped by illness, is found in the fact that this disorder obstructs the original power of man to perceive reality, that it renders a person unable not only to attain his own self but also to attain reality and truth.

If, therefore, a fraudulent world of this kind threatens to overrun and conceal the world of reality, then the cultivation of the natural desire to see assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and self-defense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable temptation to indiscipline with all the power of self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressingly unruly pseudoreality of empty sights and sounds-in order that, through and only through this asceticism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence.”

-Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, Ignatius Press (1991), Trans. By Paul C. Duggan, p. 40-41.

The Soloist- On Putting Connection with the Person First, Above and Beyond the Limits of Science

2009-06-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

"Making a diagnosis isn't as important as making a connection...He tells me the challenge for doctors, mental health workers and advocates is to treat the person and not the disease."

-Insights on helping those with mental disorders from Mark Ragins as conveyed by Steve Lopez in The Soloist, p. 57. (Mark Ragins is the author of a book called A Road to Recovery which unfortunately is not available in any bookstores or on Amazon.com, at least not the big chain stores I checked at. )

From "Against Readings" by Mark Edmunson

2009-06-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

"...The desire to turn the art of reading into a science is part of what draws the profession [Academic literary criticism] to the application of sterile concepts...Criticism is getting into skeptical dialogue with the text. Mounting a conventional academic reading- applying an alternative set of terms- means closing off the dialogue before it has a chance to begin."

-Mark Edmundson, "Against Readings"

What's Wrong With Modern Education?

2009-06-05T19:06:00.000-07:00

"...For a long time I puzzled over this image of the well-educated person, especially because so many of the men and women I teach with are actually strongly motivated by a love of truth. Slowly, however, I have come to realize that we tend to teach as much in response to our fears as our hopes. There are, perhaps, two main and very different intellectual fears. The first is a fear of opportunities squandered, of truths unnecessarily missed. The second is a fear of deception, of falsehoods wrongly cherished.

It is crushingly obvious that the present dictatorship of relativism is profoundly motivated by the second fear. Aside from the natural sciences, we give students little more than training in critique. Loyal to our critical principles, we can barely squeak out the slenderest of affirmations. Fearful of living in dreams and falling under the sway of ideologies, we have committed ourselves to disenchantment.

I find myself recalling one of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He urges us to remember that love is just sexual intercourse: “it is the friction of member and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus.” We are to apply this method of critical thinking to all aspects of our lives in order to free ourselves from fanciful notions. “Where things make an impression which is very plausible,” he advises, “uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves.” The goal is simple: Humanize yourself by disabusing yourself of illusions.

No philosophy or faith worth its salt endorses a witting love of illusions. It’s the truth we want, not fantasies. Yet, there is something desperate and loveless in the triumph of suspicion. Love falls. As the urgent, searching bridge in the Song of Songs reminds us, love risks the dangers of deception and betrayal. We cannot fall into the embrace of truth by way of cool, dispassionate critique. If we fear that truth will elude us, then we must search and seek with reckless desire..."

-R.R. Reno, "Teaching in the Twenty-First Century"

Murder in the Name of Economics

2009-06-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

..Consider the following example. Lawrence Summers—currently the head of President Obama’s National Economic Council—for a time served as Chief Economist of the World Bank. While in that position he sent an internal memo to a colleague arguing that the World Bank should encourage poor countries to sell space for western pollution. “A given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” The Economist got hold of the memo and, while acknowledging that the language was “crass,” went on to admit that “on the economics his points are hard to answer” (37). If “economic logic” leads to the obvious conclusion that it is good for developing countries voluntarily to assume the “health-impairing” toxic waste of developed countries, then perhaps there is something wrong with economic logic. Could it be that it is blind to important facets of reality?..."

-from "The Dismal Science vs. Community", by Mark T. Mitchell

A Response to President Obama's Order for Embryonic Stem Cell Research

2009-03-23T17:13:00.000-07:00

On a basic level it is obvious and beyond dispute that embryos are developing human life. If you compare their features to the developing embryos of another species they are not that species but the human species. And you have to engage in a kind of special treatment of language to say that they are not life. This generally means opting for a non-biological signs of life criteria, criteria which tend to be a lot more subjective, such as “personhood” and “consciousness”. When it comes to this, there is a debate. Some like Peter Singer will acknowledge the obvious, that fetuses are human, but then he will argue that this does not mean that we should not kill them and he and others go into debate about the permissibility and ethical calculations in this regard. That debate needs to be carried out, but the Obama position is that there is no viable debate. It is the enforcement of one view on the public. And he does it by advancing lines that belie distorted or unjust assumptions. Robert George: “The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being "divisive" and even "politicizing science." “ If I were embracing Darwinian race theory and assuming not only that blacks were lower on the biological hierarchy but that they were actually a threat to the health and well-being of my biological race, but must be tolerated for the sake of compassion, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century I would not lack a majority among scientists (not a conspiracy then but a twisted culture). Although my stance could find support from the likes of Ernst Haeckel, and though it seemed profitable to give care to the moral hygiene of people, so that I would agree with Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr. that we don’t need any more degenerates and therefore we should sterilize “the morally degenerate”, wouldn’t it be not only wrong, in the sense of an intellectual error, to hold these views, but morally wrong? The way President Obama frames it, the question of whether scientists should experiment on human embryos is a question best left to the scientists. It is not a moral but a scientific question. This is not science but the indiscriminate idolatry of science. Let me ask you why we think so highly of science in our society? Isn’t it because of a proven track record of being able to produce knowledge and material gains? But aren’t these the result of a dogged pursuit of truth in investigation of material causality? Isn’t the honor we give science properly given in so far as the science is a pursuit of the truth? Doesn’t science derive its due honor from truth? Isn’t truth above science, and science properly the servant of truth? Here is an NIH scientist on truth and embryonic stem cells: “In the summer before the 2004 Presidential election, Ron McKay, from the National Institutes of Health, admitted that he and his fellow scientists had generally failed to correct the media’s false reports about the promise of stem cells- but that was all right, he told the Washington Post, since ordinary people ‘need a fairy tale.’ They require, he said, ‘a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.’” http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6380 What would become of science if scientists as a whole adopted this attitude toward truth and asked in their representation of the truth of the material world (which of course scientists sometimes do) what does it matter if it’s true as long as it is beneficial? (I wonder if the science community as well as the press fell prey to what became the Hwang fiasco largely because of this sort of susceptibility to the benefit of fairy tales and useful myths.) To my ears this is a subtle or not so subtle betrayal of what is good about science and suggests more a care for the veneer and the politics and how to use science for one’s limited view. It is a focus on what we think the truth ought to be, rather than a focus on the truth.
Melody Barnes, the President ’s domestic policy advisor, wrote a column extolling the President ’s executive order and she takes up the same lines I find so onerous in President Obama’s speech, establishing it is a line the administration is choosing to follow. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/12/ED6516CTN2.DTL ):
She writes: “The order will allow responsible researchers to conduct potentially life-saving work that could benefit millions of Americans who suffer from debilitating diseases. Just as importantly, the President 's executive order closes the book on an era that put politics first and science a distant second.
[The claim is directed primarily at President Bush’s embryonic stem cell policy, of course, and the claim is that the reservation he showed toward experimentation on live human embryos was politics before science. (I consider you might think that using the term “live human embryos” weights the argument but I think you have to given reasons why that should be bracketed).]
“Under the Bush administration's restrictions, the National Institutes of Health was allowed to fund human embryonic stem cell research on cell lines created before Aug. 9, 2001 and was prohibited from conducting research on cell lines created after that date. The August date was arbitrary, a function of the political calendar, and without any basis in science…. Instead, we will embrace the potential stem cell research offers, ensure this research is conducted responsibly and rely on scientists - not politicians - as we work to cure disease and ensure more Americans live longer, healthier, happier lives… The president's order lifts this restriction. From this time forward, decisions about federal funding of stem cell research will be based on scientific principles. In the Obama administration, the scientific community will be empowered, but not unaccountable. Scientists who wish to conduct stem cell research must do so in a responsible manner and the president Obama will not allow scientists to leave our shared values at the laboratory door. But unlike the past eight years, political ideology will no longer trump sound science. “
[Here she is taking the same line one can see in Obama’s speech (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/us/politics/09text-obama.html ). They both attempt to relegate the question of whether we should experiment on human embryos to science, but that is not properly a question that science can answer. She does refer to “our shared values” and says that experimentation on embryos should be done responsibly but this ignores or dodges the moral question of whether research on embryonic stem cells should be done at all (in the actual situation of current science and not in some abstraction). Ascribing to science moral questions suggests a superficiality to the professed honoring of science because rather than honoring and valuing the actual work that science does, it focuses on the veneer. The gains from science are allowed to induce a gold rush mentality in the bystander and as result they become enamored, not with science itself, but with the veneer, with the power and prestige that adheres to it. Consequently, rather than really knowing it and cherishing it, they idolize it and ascribe to it powers beyond its purview. And our whole society becomes accustomed to this so that we don’t bat an eye when we are told that we should relegate our moral decision-making to science technocrats and Mustapha Mond.
Writing in 2008, Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen observed the current tendency for conflation in this area which can be seem all over the press as well as in Obama’s speech:“It is critical to engage seriously with embryo ethics today. For it is not uncommon to hear embryo researchers and their supporters claim that only science should have a say in what science does, and that ethics, and religion, and politics have no business in the concerns of science. Such sentiments should sound familiar to anyone who has listened to proponents of such research defend the freedoms and even the imperatives of scientific research.” from Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. ]
It seems to me that much of the argument for embryonic stem cell research and much of the policy is guided by indiscriminate acceptance of what have becomes currently unquestioned commonplaces. The argument proceeds from assuming that IVF and abortion are not morally problematic. Here is one author, Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in The New Yorker arguing along this lines: “Stem cells for research are drawn from blastocysts—embryos that are a few days old, consist of several dozen cells, and are smaller by far than the pinhead on which theology’s angels dance. Infertility clinics create and freeze such embryos in the thousands every year, and the vast majority—more than ninety per cent—are never implanted in a woman’s womb. Whether these excess blastocysts are simply discarded, as the opponents of stem-cell research would apparently prefer, or whether a few hundred of them become the basis for a biomedical alchemy that could benefit millions, the amount of actual human suffering entailed would be the same: zero.” He raises two main points in that paragraph, as I see it, but I am focusing right now on the first. The argument goes that because IVF clinics produce embryos in the thousands every year they should be used and not wasted. But is it right and was it ever right to assist fertility by a method producing embryos which would be destroyed? A lot of the arguments I here are basically going with what has become commonplace, the moral landscape such as it is, not questioning its moral validity on its own merits. When IVF clinics were first coming into existence advocates such as Ellen Goodman dismissed the possibility of what has become the norm. In 1980 she wrote: “A fear of many protesting the opening of this clinic is that doctors will fertilize a myriad of eggs and discard the ‘extras’ and the abnormal, as if they were no more meaningful than a dish of caviar. But this fear seems largely unwarranted.” Years later, faced with the new norm, she simply changed her mind. This illustrates the slippery slope down which the respect for life has gone. Obama’s refusal to support protections for infants who escaped the womb during an abortion seems to me a new stage in the slippery slope, but not the last. As for the point that the embryos feel no pain, pain is hardly the mark of a person’s worth. If it were conceived to be possibly to the health advantage of someone or to a group of persons if a man were to be suddenly annihilated before he would even have a chance to blink, say with a nuclear laced shell or something like that, so that he had no chance to feel pain or awareness of his fate, the sacrifice of another for one’s own good would still be a lessening of the greatest good of the survivors, the good which encompasses more than physical well being. Also, those who follow this line of reason seem inevitably to end up sanctioning the pain and death of more developed human beings as well. People don’t want to fight any more about abortion. They are willing to yield truth for harmony with the social norm of the day and yield to its trajectory, whatever way it is going.
I would like to talk further about the view of science. Instead of understanding science as the investigation of material causality, definitions such as its being “methodological naturalism” or “methodological atheism” betray a desire to convert science into a total worldview. C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man focuses in on this aspect of modernity which postmodernity has inherited, the inability to think with clarity and articulateness about the moral, the inability to acknowledge the moral and the sublime without occlusions. This is illustrated by attempts to subsume questions of morality under science which is incapable of answering those questions. The President and Melody Barnes’ statements provide good examples of this conflation. As philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, the moral sources are occulted. They are necessarily occluded and covered over because they are supposed to fit within science, or science mythologized (my words, not his) and close inspection of science reveals the contradiction. Nevertheless, moral language is still used, often with stridency, but its connection with a truth and reality in which science is suppose to be the one, true, supreme authority providing all the answers cannot bare inspection and demands occulting.
This has consequences. It is not enough to say you don’t believe an embryo is a human. I think Peter Singer recognizes the kind of nihilistic abyss suggested for morals by the assumption that science encompasses all. Since he holds the assumption, instead of arguing that unborn babies are not human, he begins to elaborate arguments for periods of say 28 days after birth for parents to decide whether to keep or kill the infants. Science can provide no rationale for valuing humans.
What science actually tells us is that embryos are human:“…Moore and Persaud write that the initial totipotent cell that is the result of fertilization ‘marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual (italics added).’ William Larsen writes that male and female sex cells ‘unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual.’ Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Muller state that ‘a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte (italics added).’
All these embryologists and developmental biologists, who are collectively responsible for the standard textbooks in their fields, agree in marking fertilization… as the beginning of a human individual.” (from Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, by Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen).
What science tells you is that the embryo is a living human. What it doesn’t tell you is the worth of the human. Social norms through history have divided the worth of humans into different categories of value. For instance, the Dred-Scott decision in the US created the legal fiction “that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants-- whether or not they were slaves—were not legal persons and could never be citizens of the United States” (from Wikipedia entry for Dred Scott v. Sandford). Another example of such a division of peoples worth is the caste system in India, which falls hardest on the ‘untouchables’. These are unjust doctrines and legal fictions that issue in injustices. The Gospel is different because “in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor freeman, but all are one in Christ Jesus”. It is different because Jesus would not bruise a broken reed. It is different because Jesus identified with the discarded and the least and taught his followers to do the same.
Adult stem cells have more demonstrated potential than embryonic stem cells already, and both have been experimented on for some time now throughout the world. One entirely avoids the moral problem of experimenting on the human and commodifying the contents of women’s bodies, especially poor women, and procedures that pose danger to those women. It also makes the point of the bodies possible rejection of the embryos moot because adult stem cells come from the same person. Nevertheless, it is not as if the playing field is now leveled between ESC and Adult Stem Cell Research. President Obama rescinded the Presidential order encouraging research into alternatives to embryonic stem cell research. I find the logic in Wesley Smith’s statement regarding this (from the article I cited above) convincing: (from http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/263fnapt.asp) “The big news in biotechnology in 2007-08--proving the wisdom of the Bush policy--was the development of a technique known as "cell reprogramming," in which ordinary human skin and other cells are transformed into "induced pluripotent stem cells" (IPSC). This achievement and subsequent advances in research were deemed so impressive and important that the journal Science named the development of the IPSC as the scientific "breakthrough of the year" for 2008.
As criticism of Obama's betrayal of alternative sources has slowly bubbled up in cyberspace, some have claimed that he "had" to rescind the order because it contained a clause describing embryos as human life. Here is the offending text from the Bush 2007 executive order: Section 2 (d) human embryos and fetuses, as living members of the human species, are not raw materials to be exploited or commodities to be bought and sold;But that clause is not only accurate biology--human embryos and fetuses are not Martian, after all--but also reflects federal law. Besides, if telling the biological truth in an executive order so seared the delicate Obama sensibility, he could have reissued the alternatives-funding order omitting the biological facts about nascent human life--and then publicized it as an example of a bridge across the cultural divide that he has promised to erect.
I can think of only two reasons for this unwarranted revocation: vindictiveness against all things "Bush" or considered by the left to be "pro-life"; or a desire to get the public to view unborn human life as morally akin to a crop ripe for the harvest so as to open the door to funding destructive embryo and human cloning research--actions advocated, not coincidentally, by the New York Times in the immediate wake of Obama's stem-cell executive order. Wait, there's a third potential reason: both of the above.
President Obama's silent revocation of alternative-methods funding as a special project of the federal government betrayed the concerted attempts made over the last eight years to find a common way forward in one of the most ethically contentious areas of biotechnological research. So much for bridging the country's cultural and political divides. So much for transparency in governance. So much for taking the politics out of science.”
[Ultimately Obama injected a lot more politics and ideology into the issue than he claimed or thought, it appears, and that he believes it makes it all the worse.]

Immanentizing Evil to Religion and Creating a Secondary Ideology Against the Venom

2008-12-17T19:36:00.001-08:00

One thing I keep thinking about is the kind of constellation of thought that keeps cropping up out there that suggests that religion is the root of all evil and that people need to be proactive and ruthless in rooting it out of the human psyche. On the one hand I see this lining up with the description of self-deception T.S. Eliot aptly and wryly gave. How convenient, he muses in one passage, to find all evil embodied in another group. There is nothing like it to put a spring in your step. But it is self-deceptive and Christians should not partake of it. But when faced with others bigotry, when they begin to regard what you stand for as the embodiment of evil, there is a temptation to counter with the same. And who knows what group started the cycle. Against the blind venom of ideological rigidity, one is tempted to form a “secondary ideology”, a defensive and despising militancy. But this is the great test of the Christian faith. Will we love our enemies as Christ loved us when we were His enemies (and as He does when we act like His enemies)? (Some seem to think the test is whether we hate ourselves for the sake of our enemies until well, Christ gets the shaft, and we rage with the nations against the Son of God).

Cardinal Newman Resists the Fracture of the University

2008-12-15T19:23:00.001-08:00

It is interesting to me to learn that John Henry Cardinal Newman during his first years as a fellow at Oriel in Oxford was initially greatly influenced by the friendly guidance of two Seniors, one of whom would later become archly opposed to him for his stance that teachers ought, at the then ostensibly Christian Oxford university, to not merely teach but also watch over the religious life of their pupils.

“It was the powerful minds of two friendly seniors that really shaped him, in these first Oriel years, Richard Whately and Edward Hawkins. And the Oriel ‘spirit of moderation and comprehension’, wrought very powerfully, in these years to lessen that morbid sensibility and irritability of mind’, in religious matters, against which, as a characteristic weakness of his early manhood, his father had once gravely warned him.”

Several years later, in 1828, Hawkins would become Provost of Oriel in 1828 and Newman and he would come into head on collision.

“The subject of the dispute was the contention of Newman and his fellow tutors that their duties were not merely to teach but to watch over the religious life of their pupils.”

As Provost, Hawkins responded to Newman’s disagreement by ceasing to assign him any more students after 1830. Newman reflected later that had he not been deprived of his tutorship, the Tract movement (the Oxford theological movement which among other things would influence the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous) would never, humanly speaking, have occurred. The hardship was the necessary precursor to a fruitful movement.

What I find especially interesting is the point of dispute between Hawkins and Newman, a point of dispute that one might say is also between the modern university and Newman’s idea of the university. The neat, arbitrary, paralyzing and neutering divisions of modernity which cut the cords between knowledge, morality and beauty were eschewed by Newman who insisted on the synthesis even to the point of being censured and persecuted.

It may be necessary to mention that Newman at this time had been from 1822-1833 Vice-principal of a small college, the acting pastor of St. Clement’s parish in Oxford, one of the four Public Tutors in his college, and as a dean, he had “played a prominent part in taming a rowdy, hard-drinking set of undergraduates and in restoring long-relaxed college discipline.” There is more, but the point I drew from it is that he was a preacher and a spiritual man who could not and would not divorce the spiritual from the intellectual. Indeed, as he points out in his book The Idea of the University, the original idea of the university was to be versed in multiple fields of knowledge that were all ultimately unified. Modern man on the other hand lives with fracture and tends to hallow it as normal, inured to even a longing for the unified whole, and impaired in his thinking by his complacent divisions.

Last there is this note about this formative time in Newman’s life: And of all the varied forces that worked on him in the ten years since he went to Oriel, none had effected him so powerfully, by 1833, as the systematic study of these early Christian writers, Greek and Latin, whom we call the Fathers. ‘In the long Vacation of 1828 I set about to read them chronologically.”

* Quotes taken from an introduction to the Apologia Pro Vita Sua by Philip Hughes in an Image Book copy (1956), pgs. 16-18.

Golgotha Undiscerned: Philosophy's Fatality

2008-12-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

"In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all too familiar sight- three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, 'It's disgusting the way the mob enjoys such things. Why can't the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?' Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the true, the good and the beautiful." -W.H. Auden, 'Meditation on Good Friday' in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (Faber, 1971), qtd. in Richard Harries' Art and the Beauty of God: A Christian Understanding, (Continuum, 1993).

Sertillanges on Virtuous Intellect

2008-10-15T16:46:00.001-07:00

“The Virtues of a Catholic Intellectual”, Chp. 2 of Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life

As I listened to chapter 2 of Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life, I experienced a mixture of reactions. At times he roused, at times, my conscience smarted under his well aimed exhortations; at times he seemed quaint or naïve, and, when I perceived the overall unity and integrity of his vision that emerged in the chapter as a whole, I was at times moved to pause in admiration. His understanding of the interconnectedness of things impresses me as an exalted and deep grasp or reality and essential to his ability to rouse and challenge. The central and unifying vision to this chapter and to the book as a whole is the contextualization of “the intellectual life” within a whole life devoted to God. Tolstoy once wrote to the effect: “Before I am a writer, I am a man”. There must be this sense of the whole, this attentiveness to each aspect of our lives in their interconnected-ness, so that the parts can be mutually fortifying, rather than devalued and detracted from by disorder in any area. “Life is a unity”, Sertillanges insists. He discusses the connection of the virtues to the intellect, but he also discusses its connection of the body (and the body of course is connected to the virtues as well). He also counsels the Golden Mean: the right behavior and soundest course is often between two extremes. And he urges, in harmony with Scripture, that we test ourselves in order to work from a sound estimation of our capacities, neither too great, nor too low. As the Apostle Paul writes:

“If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else, for each one should carry his own load” (Galatians 6:3-5).

Many times my response to these exhortations by Sertillanges is perhaps an especially American response: “How?”- also characteristically accompanied by an impatience to “get ‘er done.” But the answer called for is a response that includes infinite dimensions. It is a call to eternal worship.

“The true springs up in the same soil as the good: their roots communicate” (p. 19). Sertillanges’ sense of the unity of truth, goodness and beauty has him captive, but he seems to overstate his argument on page 18 to the point of seeming quaint and naïve:

“Would there not be something repellent in seeing a great discovery being made by an unprincipled rascal? The unspoiled instinct of a simple man would be grievously hurt by it.”

Haven’t many great discoveries and many great works been made by singularly unprincipled rascals? In a book disturbing for its project as well as its content, the historian Paul Johnson enumerates very unprincipled sins of many leading intellectuals in the Western tradition, providing a few examples from world history of memorable intellects possessed by very badly behave men and women. But Sertillanges mitigates his statement, though not entirely, it seems, on page 19, by remarking that truth visits those who love her, and that the man of genius at work is already virtuous but that it would “suffice for his holiness if he were more completely his true self.” There remains something noble, something lovely to be reflected on in the work of a genius, even if much of their life is sinful. I can agree with Sertillanges on this and also agree with him in believing that wholeness and abundant life is not in an opposition of the intellect’s life, however, brilliant, to the virtues and the care of the body, or a negation of these, but that there is an essential unity God designed us for and God is redeeming us to, and that we should rise to with all our might, knowing Christ.
Sertillanges makes his point about the unity of the intellect and the virtues eloquently on page 22:

“But stupidity apart, what enemies do you fear? What about sloth, the grave of the best gifts? What of sensuality, which makes the body weak and lethargic, befogs memory? Of pride, which sometimes dazzles and sometimes darkens, which so drives us in the direction of our own opinion that the universal sense may escape us? Of envy, which obstinately refuses to acknowledge some light other than our own? Of irritation, which repels criticism and comes to grief on the rock of error?”

Remove the vice, he says, and the gift can reach its full measure. I think he is right. Profligate geniuses are not as sound as saintly geniuses. I prefer Newman to Lucretius, but can profit from both.
Coupled with the theme of the unity of our lives before God is the counseling of the Golden Mean: “To the virtue of studiousness, two vices are opposed: negligence on the one hand, vain curiosity on the other” (p. 25). I prize this aspect of Sertillanges’ counsel, which recurs throughout the book, and think it gives distinctive depth to his treatment of the books’ subject. An essential part of pursuing study as a spiritual discipline and as part of a life of devotion to God is not studying when you have another duty that you should be doing. To be errant in your duties as a man or woman in order to study is to cheapen your study and turn it into dilettantism.
Finally, he counsels a “sound body in a sound mind”. (Incidentally, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda also counseled this: “Salim bal fi salim jism”, but that only shows that sound advice can sometimes appear in extremely distorted lives). “Exercise every day.” Neglect of the body and its health detracts from the whole.
As a parting note, in pondering the unity of the intellectual life, the virtues, and the body, and of learning to in some manner live life as a whole with some sense of the whole, I am posed with a challenging question: how do we live our lives as a whole? And especially in a culture where more and more it seems our fragmentation is codified in our in the shape of our lives. Some of Picasso’s paintings of distorted faces of people comes to mind as illustrations of peculiarly modern form of this distortion. I also think of a debate in neuroscience about our nature and of Aristotle’s point that it makes more sense to say “I do this”, or “I do that” than to say “My soul does this”. There is a place for this (I think of the Magnificat). But from being useful, this can become codified and a numbness to a sense of the whole can set in. In neuroscience, culminating a trend throughout the medical profession and in our society in general, materialists urge that saying our brain did something is the same as saying that we did it. This expresses itself in a turn to mood altering drugs as a cure for every aspect of behavior on massively irresponsible levels in the medical profession. And this understanding, or rather failure of understanding of ourselves as a whole is also where sources of self-discipline are being eroded. But it is not easy to identify the solution. Still it occurs to me that the way to all embracing wholeness is exactly as Jesus said and made possible: we lose ourselves in a life of worship of God, the Truth.

David Alexander
9/30/2008

Pyrrhonism, of Which Civilization Can Die

2008-09-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

Pyrrhonism: 1. the doctrine taught by Pyrrho (c. 360-c. 270 B.C.), a Greek Skeptic, that all knowledge, including the testimony of the senses, is uncertain 2. Extreme skepticism.

“But one of the features of development, whether we are taking the religious or the cultural point of view, is the appearance of skepticism- by which, of course, I do not mean infidelity or destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and of the capacity for delayed decision. Scepticism is a highly civilized trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism, it is one of which civilization can die. Where skepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the strength to make one.” –T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, (1940), p. 102.

[Something I wrote previously reflecting on a book by Sertillanges appies here. When Eliot talks about Pyrrhonism he seems to me to be alluding to a defining weakness of Postmodernity, the failure of judgment.]

Sertillanges has deep insight into the act of judgment. A passage I found particularly resonant is toward the end of the preface where he describes the proper approach to knowing a thing aright. In the whole of his description I can see lesser halves, distorted approaches to knowledge, which his wholeness on the subject avoids. “To be long multiple is the condition of being richly one,“ he writes. “Unity at the starting point is a mere void.” That is a saying I plan to remember. It seems to me that much of the ideologies of modernity are unities that are “mere voids” but that postmodernism seems definable by a weakness of being only multiple, and not aiming and finally believing in the richly one. Postmodernism, as successor, justifies its excesses against the excesses of the preceding ideologies. “It is a great secret to know how to give radiance to an idea by means of its twilight background. It is a further secret to preserve its power of convergence in spite of this radiating quality.” The strength of postmodernism lies in its attunement to the first secret, perhaps, but it becomes a weakness, a sickness unto death, if it does not learn the second secret.

Neither Liberalism Nor Conservatism, O Christians!

2008-09-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

“But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative, or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of permanent things.”

–T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, (1940), p. 76 .
(from a reprint of a broadcast talk, delivered in February 1937 in a series on ‘Church, Community and State’).

Moral Duty to Think About the Lovely, Etc.

2008-09-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable- if anything is excellent or praiseworthy- think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me- put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”Philippians 4:4-9

It occurs to me as I read this again that this is not a suggestion, but an exhortation. It is a moral duty. The notion I used to hear growing up that a thing was “just entertainment”, as far as it at times seems to have meant an amoral sphere, a place to suspend our critical faculties, seems anathema to what is said here. Even entertainment that does not try to stimulate our baser “instincts” but that is simply not lovely, noble or good takes up our day and absorbs from our limited span of energy, postponing a closer communion with truth, keeping God in the waiting room of our lives.

Matthew Arnold, a poet and literary critic, a deep and brilliant man, advanced an idea of culture in his book Culture and Anarchy that is, it seems to me, idolatrous. However, I think in the following quote the sentiment expressed is very compatible with Philippians 4. Culture, he wrote, is ‘the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought or said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.” –Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 6.

The concept he means by perfection, if I understand him right, is that of developing a thing to the fullness of its kind, its given nature, in accordance and harmony with what God has wrought. I think of a plant. Beneath my dubious care a plant has grown up scraggly and ugly. The same breed of plant under my friend Br. Dunstan’s consummate care has flourished until its similarity to the other plant in kind is hardly recognizable. Br. Dunstan’s stewardship of the plant has brought it to a kind of perfection. What Arnold means by perfection here, with a special focus on the mind, is bringing the mind to fullness of fruition by humble attentiveness and application to that which harmonizes with what God has made.

Preface to A.G. Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Method

2008-09-11T04:14:00.000-07:00

Reflections on the Preface to A.G. Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life

A.G. Sertillanges opens The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Method, his masterful book on study and the Christian intellectual life-the best on its subject that I am aware of- with an elegant and challenging preface. At the heart of the book there is a challenge, an exhortation to love the truth, and many subsidiary challenges beside to support this one life charge. The preface is marked liked the rest by this bracing atmosphere of serious and vibrant summons to greater, life-encompassing depth. In many places I hear the echo of the words and spirit of Christ. The words of Scripture come to mind in thinking about the concept of truth pressed in this book.

“They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will be condemned who have not believed the truth, but have delighted in wickedness.” (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12, set in the context of a reference to the “man of lawlessness” and his followers.)

The love of and belief in truth is set against delight in wickedness and being delivered over to delusion. At the heart of this book is the strong and compelling call to ardent love of the truth, set within the context of a focus on vocational calling. (“Vocation,” Buechner wrote, “is where your deep joy meets the world’s deep need.”) It is exquisitely formed so as to grip those with an inclination to this work and charge them with wholehearted love, through their vocation, for the truth.

Sertillanges’ beginning advice in the preface is:
“Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worthwhile.” –A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Method, Conditions, p. viii.

Airy praise is fine but he has a meaty purpose. He is exhorting the reader to establish in their way of life, not rigidly but as a whole man or woman, a necessary condition for intellectual work, one however that is attainable to all, that can and should be sought by all, and not just those that feel in some measure a call to engage in this type of work. It is a necessary condition for both.

The view of the intellectual life presented, embodied and urged here is one of attunement and responsiveness to the given and the Giver. He makes the point that the intellectual is not self-begotten but it “the son of the Idea, of the Truth, of the Creative Word, the Life-giver immanent in His creation” (viii). We are not here as in darkness. Godliness in intellectual work is not to conjure on a whim. We are to unfold the teleological and providential precedent. God has left us notes. We are to pick them up and unfold them with the growing ardor that their content elicits.

Sertillanges points out a path to intellectual readiness for the truth in moments of insight, readiness in such moments to attend, to welcome, to follow out its courses, to love the truth. He describes not just a moment’s effort, a straightening of the tie over a wrinkled shirt when royalty is about to walk by, but a way of life punctuated by moments of receptive self-giving to the truth: “The Spirit passes and returns not. Happy the man who holds himself ready not to miss”(ix). It is like the parable of the ten virgins. Perhaps we were called for such a time as this. “Make the most of every opportunity for the days are evil.”

On page ix-x, he describes two different types of memory, one that actually closes the ways of thought in favor of words and fixed formulas, something Matthew Arnold also denounced as “mechanical thinking”, “stock notions and habits” for which he thought culture was the cure. The opposite of this rigidity is a memory that is “receptive in every direction, and in a state of perpetual discovery”, like a child or a poet. “It functions in contact with the springs of inspiration.” In the experience where we draw near to this, the stage is set for us to yield our deepest self to the truth. Sertillanges is describing worship. When I most feel love, freedom and openness and peace toward my fellow man is in moments of this embrace of truth.

In the preface and throughout the book there is an essential focus on spirit. He describes the many specific and practical decisions that must be made in pursuing the discipline of study in a godly and loving way, and he makes the powerful point that such specificities can only be judged of in “the moment of ecstasy when we are close to the eternally true, far from the covetous and passionate self” (p. xi). I think this point profound. The moment when spirit touches Spirit is the moment when we are best able to judge and order.

Sertillanges has deep insight into the act of judgment. A passage I found particularly resonant is toward the end of the preface where he describes the proper approach to knowing a thing aright. In the whole of his description I can see lesser halves, distorted approaches to knowledge, which his wholeness on the subject avoids. “To be long multiple is the condition of being richly one,“ he writes. “Unity at the starting point is a mere void.” That is a saying I plan to remember. It seems to me that much of the ideologies of modernity are unities that are “mere voids” but that postmodernism seems definable by a weakness of being only multiple, and not aiming and finally believing in the richly one. Postmodernism, as successor, justifies its excesses against the excesses of the preceding ideologies. “It is a great secret to know how to give radiance to an idea by means of its twilight background. It is a further secret to preserve its power of convergence in spite of this radiating quality.” The strength of postmodernism lies in its attunement to the first secret, perhaps, but it becomes a weakness, a sickness unto death, if it does not learn the second secret.

I have more I would like to say about the “contacts with men of genius” he describes, enjoins, assumes you will do (p.xi; xii) but I think this will have to do.

David Alexander, 10 September 2008

Some Thoughts on Luther, Lutheranism, Anti-Semitism and Nazi Germany

2008-04-03T19:29:00.000-07:00

Luther was undeniably anti-Semitic in his writings in his later years about the Jews. Luther and others in the Reformation threw a lot into question, even turning a doubtful eye on certain of the Scriptures, such as the book of James. He also in his Table Talks when asked what should be done to a huge mentally retarded man who ate like a horse and was a burden on his poor family, said that he should be killed, and this was quoted in a court case over eugenics in pre-Nazi Germany as a justification for eugenics. In Germany, it was Protestant Liberalism, specifically radical Lutheranism, that later undermined the authority of the Scripture. The school of Tubingen and the German school of Higher Criticism did this by applying naturalistic exclusionary principles to their interpretation of the Bible. The vein of this influence is observable in references made by Nietzsche and by Hitler to the Bible. I am thinking of their antagonistic interpretation of the apostle Paul's writings, which seems to draw on the work of Bauer and others, who dreamed up massive rifts in the early church. The hands of those who held the Bible, having stripped the Bible of a normative authority even intellectually, were free to deal with it disingenuously, to distort its teaching according to their agendas. From my perspective, which I doubt you can understand, not sharing my presuppositions, it is to be expected that a Satanic hatred of the Jews, as a covenant people of God whom God watches over in a special way for the sake of His promises to the patriarchs, will express itself again and again over the centuries, sometimes from surprising quarters.However, in the midst of the Third Reich's rise to power, there was a powerful theological movement called the Confessing Church which deeply influenced much of Protestantism and the Catholic church afterwards, led by Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller, Helmut Thielicke and others which was characterized by a resounding emphasis on the Word of God and a resounding "Nein!" to naturalistic shepherding of the churches. A natural outcome of this was the anathematizing of race theory as heresy in the famous Barmen Declaration. They stood against the Nazi "science" even at the cost of life, the cost of discipleship to Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer was executed. Martin Niemoller was declared the personal prisoner of Hitler by Hitler in a rage when he heard that Niemoller was going to be let out of prison. Thielicke was stripped of his profesorship, etc. So even just in the history of the Lutherans, a return to the Scripture made the uncommon difference in an uncommonly horrid situation.

"Cheap Grace" Versus Ezra's Example

2008-04-02T04:14:00.001-07:00

Here is a note from the commentary I am reading this morning: "Drawing upon the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thronveit remarks that Ezra's prayer/speech 'speaks against the attitude of cheap grace that has counted on God's continual provision but has failed to heed the warnings of scripture or history". -Matthew Levering, Ezra & Nehemiah, Brazos Theological Commentary, p. 102.

As I am reading Ezra and being aided in my reflections by this commentary, it is brought out to me how clearly Ezra looked to scripture and to God's working in history. He understood Israel's exile in terms of God's judgment as the book of 1 & 2 Kings does, and he understood the return of the remnant as a fulfillment of Jeremiah's prohecy of return after 70 years of captivity. He also saw God's providential working in the leniency of the Persian kings who allowed the Israelites to return and facilitated their rebuilding of the temple, and he was afraid that the Israelites intermarriage with idolatrous peoples around them would bring about the same judgment on Israel as that recounted in 1 & 2 Kings in which both Judah and the Northern Kingdom, after hundreds of years of flagrant idolatry, finally are discarded. But this time, Ezra fears, the judgment may be more final. He rips his hair and beard, and rends his clothing. He sees God in history, and leads all Israel into communal confession of sins.

It is interesting to think of cheap grace in reference to our understanding of God working in history and in our relationship to the Scriptures. If the Scriptures cannot demand anything of us, except when morphed into human principles, then it is cheap grace. Similarly, if we do not see God at work in history and in our times, in our lives and in the broader world, then it is cheap grace.

Notes on The Stranger by Camus

2008-03-27T03:47:00.000-07:00

Notes on The Stranger by Camus:

-The Stranger as the depiction of the Un-man, one of the "men without chests," lacking in natural affections, a malaise peculiar to modernities specific defromities.

-The Stranger as the depiction of the psychopathology of modernity.

-The psychopathologing of modernity, as depicted in characters like Raskolnikov and Meursault, is integrally related to modernity's methodical imbalance.

-Doestovesky, Camus, etc. as modernity being authentic, revealing the disease beneath Enlightenment rhetoric, the wounds it has not cured.

Thomas Merton on Sanity, Insanity and Love

2008-03-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

“One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, ‘well-balanced,’ unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.

He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. ..

It is the sane ones, the well adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying the sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then it will be no mistake.

We can no longer assume that because a man is ‘sane’ he is therefore in his ‘right mind’. The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be ‘sane’ in the limited sense that he is not impeded by his disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly manner, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly ‘adjusted’. God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one’s own? Evidently this is not necessary for ‘sanity’ at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian notion. What business have we to equate ‘sanity’ with ‘Christianity’? None at all, obviously.” –Thomas Merton, “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann,” Raids on the Unspeakable, (New Directions: 1964), pgs. 45, 46-47.

Some Thoughts On the Suppression of Agency by Displacement

2008-03-25T19:53:00.000-07:00

Always, it now seems to me safe to say, in trying to explain agency away, materialists merely displace agency onto inanimate objects. A suppressive, barely conscious, occulted mental disposition.

Criminals are fully aware of advantages to the therapeutic and sociological bent of modernity. It pervades their own accounts of their behavior. Eichmann, for example, argued that he was just following orders. It was the system that was broken. He was not responsible.

One has to ask to what extent such “non-responsible” explanations of human behavior undermine behaving responsibly, by moving the onus off the competent agent onto objects now mystically endowed with the agents’ power. This has been a recurrent theme for materialists of various brands: the Marxist historical-sociological determinism being an example and the tendency to anthropomorphize genes and “memes” as determining agents being another. Those taught by these doctrines are encouraged to think of human behavior as something caused purely by outside forces. Concepts necessary for self-discipline are subsequently eroded, while any deleterious effect is loudly denied.

One example of the inculcation of passive, sheep-like self identity is the use of the term ‘consumer’, or, in other words, ‘blind mouths’. A critic of Christianity might point out its stress on obedience and the identity of being “the people of his pasture”, but there is a difference between being obedient and easily led by a God who is understood as being above every man, and thinking in terms of societal organizations which are ultimately in the hands of individuals. If an individuals ultimate dut, a duty which trumps every other duty, is to God, then his obedience to other men and women must always be mitigated by this higher fealty. Not so in social contracts, etc. By exalting a system to the level of primary cause, do we subtly exalt the systematizers?

“Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control.” -Proverbs 25:28

“ People know life as a series of choices. Sometimes a choice has no clear outcome; in such cases, people make their best guess. Yet, even when guessing, people make the choice themselves. By robbing people of the desire to think and act differently, or robbing them of the ability to see the consequences of their actions, Artificial Happiness makes the choices for them. Whether it pushes them toward inaction, freezing them in their present circumstances no matter how noxious those circumstances might be, or conceals from them the outcome of different choices, Artificial Happiness disrupts the natural decision-making process by which people navigate life. Doctors abet this paralysis of mind by pushing drugs, alternative medicine, and obsessive exercise. They also contribute to the phenomenon by getting people to see unhappiness as something separate from life. This mind-set prepares people to seek or receive Artificial Happiness. A case told to me by a prison psychiatrist illustrates how far people have taken this attitude. In jail for robbery and second-degree murder, one of the psychiatrist’s patients complained of low self-esteem. The psychiatrist responded, “You have low self-esteem? Of course you have low self-esteem. You’re a murderer and a thief!” The psychiatrist complained that too many of his patients these days saw self-esteem as something disconnected from life and to be given out in the form of a pill. To the extent that people today uncouple happiness from life, they are merely following the doctors’ lead, while the doctors themselves fall into the clutches of this logic after several decades of faulty reasoning.
Doctors once saw unhappiness as something embedded in life. In the late 1960s, during the medical profession’s first crisis, doctors began to reflect on the mechanics of unhappiness. During the course of their reflections, their attention shifted, first from life to the brain, then from the brain to neurons, then from neurons to synapses, and finally from synapses to neurotransmitters. They concluded that the whole unhappiness problem lay in the neurotransmitters, which caused their entire understanding of life and happiness to be thrown out of gear. In a twisted way, they were right; their error led them to detach unhappiness from life and treat it separately. The public took the doctors’ message to heart; eventually the whole country’s deliberations on unhappiness lost their way. Because of this train of errors, Artificial Happiness is now the country’s favored solution to unhappiness, concealing from people a proper understanding of the relationship between happiness and life.” – Ronald W. Dworkin, Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class, p. 252-253.

"Your land shall be called Married"

2008-03-24T04:33:00.000-07:00

"You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My delight is in her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be called married." -Isaiah 62:4

Excerpts From a Scathing Article on AIDS and the Churches Myths

2008-03-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

http://firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6172

“Responses to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic are often driven not by evidence but by ideology, stereotypes, and false assumptions. Referring to the hyperepidemics of Africa, an article in The Lancet this fall named “ten myths” that impede prevention efforts—including “Poverty and discrimination are the problem,” “Condoms are the answer,” and “Sexual behavior will not change.” Yet such myths are held as self-evident truths by many in the AIDS establishment. And they result in efforts that are at best ineffective and at worst harmful, while the AIDS epidemic continues to spread and exact a devastating toll in human lives.
Consider this fact: In every African country in which HIV infections have declined, this decline has been associated with a decrease in the proportion of men and women reporting more than one sex partner over the course of a year—which is exactly what fidelity programs promote. The same association with HIV decline cannot be said for condom use, coverage of HIV testing, treatment for curable sexually transmitted infections, provision of antiretroviral drugs, or any other intervention or behavior. The other behavior that has often been associated with a decline in HIV prevalence is a decrease in premarital sex among young people. …

… Katherine Marshall and Lucy Keough, lead authors of the report, are clearly uncomfortable with approaches to HIV prevention that emphasize sexual responsibility, behavior change, and morally based messages. They praise the work and compassion of faith communities in treating and caring for people living with AIDS and their families, yet harshly criticize the messages of faith communities for increasing the stigma of AIDS. Their discomfort with attempts to change sexual behavior is evident early in the report, when, for example, they muse: “Should the focus be on changing the behaviors that contribute to HIV/AIDS? (Is that possible? Desirable? How? With what assurance?)”
If Marshall and Keough are undecided as to whether changing sexual behavior is even desirable in the context of an epidemic driven by people who have more than one sex partner, they then need to become educated in the basic epidemiology of HIV transmission. One must ask whether they are more concerned with upholding a Western notion of sexual freedom or with saving lives. Their concern over any prevention approach that might be “moralistic” causes them to miss entirely the evidence for the remarkable success of sexual-behavior change in reducing HIV infections. They miss, as well, the crucial contribution of faith communities to HIV prevention, even while they are producing a report on the role of faith communities in the HIV crisis.
….
The Georgetown report tells us: “While the ‘mainstream’ HIV/AIDS program and global communities accept that widespread availability of condoms and promotion of condom use are major elements in successful HIV/AIDS prevention strategies, a focus on condoms is contentious for some religious communities because it contradicts the core recommended strategy of abstinence before marriage and faithfulness within marriage.”
In fact, the mainstream HIV/AIDS community has continued to champion condom use as critical in all types of HIV epidemics, in spite of the evidence. While high rates of condom use have contributed to fewer infections in some high-risk populations (prostitutes in concentrated epidemics, for instance), the situation among Africa’s general populations remains much different. It has been clearly established that few people outside a handful of high-risk groups use condoms consistently, no matter how vigorously condoms are promoted. Inconsistent condom usage is ineffective—and actually associated with higher HIV infection rates due to “risk compensation,” the tendency to take more sexual risks out of a false sense of personal safety that comes with using condoms some of the time. A UNAIDS-commissioned 2004 review of evidence for condom use concluded, “There are no definite examples yet of generalized epidemics that have been turned back by prevention programs based primarily on condom promotion.” A 2000 article in The Lancet similarly stated, “Massive increases in condom use world-wide have not translated into demonstrably improved HIV control in the great majority of countries where they have occurred.”

Dawkins and Cosmopolitan Sex Geniuses

2008-03-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

Two things that struck me as ironic today:

In Richard Dawkins' "dangerous idea" article in The Edge, he suggested that we ought to grow up and stop thinking in terms of responsibility. I have noticed the irony or absurdity of this before. But in discussing this matter on discussion board, a defender of Dawkins tried to show that he was only elaborating from things like the insanity plea. The problem with that argument is that Dawkins was arguing that the concept of responsibility itself ought to be suspended, not just in some cases, but in all cases. The irony of this occurred to me in conjunction with his well known pejorative that anyone who didn't believe in evolution was either "ignorant, insane or wicked." It occurred to me that by applying the insanity plea across the board, he in effect called himself and everyone insane.

The second irony was seeing in a grocery store line the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine with a young woman's picture and a caption next to it reading "Sex Genius". It occurred to me that what was being labeled as a sex genius was probably rather the opposite. What passes for wisdom in the world often turns out to be the greatest folly imagineable.

Perhaps there is a connection between this and an editor of Cosmopolitan having called Dawkins sexy?

"The eternal wound of existence" : Perceptions of Nietzsche's Pain

2008-03-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

“It is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiate will can always, by means of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the flux of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful illusions that the will has always at hand”…
- Friedrich Nietzsche. Birth of Tragedy Translated by Clifton P. Fadiman, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, p. 64.

[Here it seems to me I heard something of Nietzsche’s pain. The is truth in his criticism of Socrates and the Enlightenment for the notion that if people knew the good they would do it. As for his denial of eternal life there is only the assertion of his will, which was not that great after all. When I hear “the eternal wound of existence” I confess I thought of Nietzsche’s father, an evangelical Christian who after an accident, lived a agonized space before dying. It seems this must have been a decisive turning point for him, why the little boy called “the little pastor” ultimately became one of the world’s most famous atheists. I say I confess because I have a sense of discomfort in psychoanalyzing the man but to an extent it is a necessity of human fellowship. I do not find a lot in common with Nietzsche but I do relate to a fellow human being’s suffering. Nietzsche pejoratively, or insultingly, revaluated Christianity and Judaism, much like the ancient Gnostics. In his interpretation, Christianity and Judaism were slave religions and founded on resentment by inferiors of superiors. Rene Girard and no doubt others have remarked on the irony of Nietzsche’s characterization, ironic because it seems that so much of what characterized Nietzsche’s life as whole was resentment, resentment above all against God. ]

“Our art reveals this universal trouble: in vain does one depend imitatively on all the great product periods and natures; in vain does one accumulate the entire “World-literature” around modern man for his comfort; in vain does one place one’s self in the midst of the art-styles and artists of all ages, so that one may give names to them as Adam did to the beasts: one still continues eternally hungry, the ‘critic’ without joy and energy, the Alexandrian man, who is at bottom a librarian and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch, goes blind from the dusty books and printers’ errors.”
-Ibid., p. 67.

[One of the things I think that is good about Nietzsche is the pitch to which he brings the error of modernity. But he also looks beyond modernity’s faith in Reason, though he looks down. He is pivotal, at the doorway of postmodernity. That is why there is some value in judiciously reading him, as I see it (though he is indeed sadly blameworthy for ennobling crime, lies and blasphemy, like the Gnostics.) In the quote above there is something of an echo of Solomon in Ecclesiastes crying “Vanity of vanities!” He is intent on root realities. At least he is looking at these. Most people are eroding their lives in triviality upon triviality, “distracted from distraction by distraction” (as Eliot put it). Well, he is intent but at root he is turning away from root realities. Like the Gnostics he reality is a cheap phenomenon, a grossness, and the spirit must turn away from the real, from the true to a self-creation beyond the world.

It seemed to me here too that I sensed Nietzsche’s pain, the acerbic acquaintance with the hard, hard aspects of life, in some ways, out of which he spun a spider web of bad choices. ]

Charles Taylor on Conflating Violence with Religion

2008-03-19T03:56:00.000-07:00

“The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable. And this is the more damaging in that it affects the culture of the media and of educated public opinion in general. I take a striking case, a statement, not admittedly by a social scientist, but by a Nobel Laureate cosmologist, Steven Weinberg. I take it, because I find that it is often repeated in the media and in informal argument. Weinberg said (I quote from memory): “there are good people who do good things, and bad people who do bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this. What are we to make of those noble, well-intentioned Bolsheviks, Marxist materialist atheists to a man (and occasional woman), who ended up building one of the most oppressive and murderous brace of regimes in human history? When people quote this phrase to me, or some equivalent, and I enter this objection, they often reply, “but Communism was a religion,” a reply which shifts the goal-posts and upsets the argument.

But it’s worth pondering for a minute what lies behind this move. The “Weinberg principle,” if I might use this term, is being made tautologically true, because any set of beliefs which can induce decent people, who would never kill for personal gain, to murder for the cause, is being defined as “religion.” “Religion” is being defined as the murderously irrational.

Pretty sloppy thinking. But it is also crippling. What the speaker is really expressing is something like this: the terrible violence of the 20th Century has nothing to do with right-thinking, rational, enlightened people like me. The argument is then joined on the other side by certain believers who point out that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were all enemies of religion, and feel that good Christians like me have no part in such horrors. This conveniently forgets the Crusades, the Inquisition, and much else.

Both sides need to be wrenched out of their complacent dream, and see that no-one, just in virtue of having the right beliefs, is immune from being recruited to group violence: from the temptation to target another group which is made responsible for all our ills, from the illusion of our own purity which comes from our readiness to combat this evil force with all our might. We urgently need to understand what makes whole groups of people ready to be swept up into this kind of project…”

–Charles Taylor in “Statement At The Templeton Prize News Conference”, http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/9827/Default.aspx

Science as Disdain for the Material (With Criticism of ID and the New Atheists)

2008-03-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

Steve Talbott wrote a very fine essay underscoring the irony of a trend of thinking which finds expression even in the pages of Nature in an article influenced by Daniel Dennett which emphasized evolutionary algorithmic computer "simulations" in such a way as to forcefully downplay the importance of attention to the actual, to the material, to presence. Talbott writes beautifully and insightfully and I find the thoughts in the essay cogent, instructive, and timely. Here is a sample, a section which touches on Intelligent Design and its materialist counterparts:

From: “Ghosts in the Evolutionary Machinery”
By Steve Talbott

"Machines, Design, and the World
There is one distinction I have thus far glossed over. While the mathematically rigorous laws of physics can contribute in a real and profound way to our understanding of the physical world, the logical syntax of a computer does not in the same way contribute to our understanding of the physical machine. The law of gravity is a native law of copper, glass, and silicon in a way that the computer’s program logic is not. Rather, the program logic relates primarily to the way we have articulated the physical parts one with another so as to create a humanly useful mechanism. The computer’s logic is a function of design activity external to the materials themselves—an activity imposed from without—whereas the law of gravity arises from what matter and space are. Remove the program from the computer, or disassemble the physical machine, and there is no loss to the nature of copper, glass, and silicon; but you cannot remove gravitation without losing the materials themselves—their very substance is in part a “gravitational way of being.”
In other words, we cannot think of the logic or mathematics of gravity in relation to the physical world the way we think of program syntax in relation to a computer. The importance of this can hardly be overestimated at a time when the lawfulness of the universe is increasingly conceived as a kind of software governing a world-machine.

Here, incidentally, we can recognize the common ground shared by the advocates of Intelligent Design and their conventional opponents: both view the universe as a grand machine. This groundless assumption is the explicit foundation equally of the case for intelligent design (“the machine requires a Designer”) and the case for a materialistic, mindless universe (“a machine is merely a machine—and we learned long ago simply to ignore the question of a Designer or First Cause, or to conceal it behind the obscurity of the Big Bang”). The theists correctly understand that a machine requires an intelligent designer, whether we acknowledge this fact as such or attempt to smuggle the designer into our thinking by obscure bits and pieces. The materialists, in turn, see well enough that a machine-world is no suitable habitation for a human soul and spirit.

One way out of the ill-tempered and lightless debate between the two sides is to recognize that the intelligence we see in the world is not imposed from the outside upon pre-existing material, in the way we impose our design upon a machine. The intelligence in nature works always from within. In the world’s phenomena we see intelligence embodying itself in that visible, significant, aesthetically compelling speech we can’t help recognizing everywhere around us. The one thing we can be certain of is that whatever—or whoever—speaks through these phenomena is not doing so in the way we speak through the design of our machines. It is the height of hubris to think that we have become creators in that fundamental sense. Our design of machines does not bring material reality itself into existence as the embodiment of our own expressive powers. It is not both the lawfulness and the substance of things.” From The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, Fall 2007. ( http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/18/talbott.htm)

Elie Wiesel and Francois Mauriac

2008-03-18T04:06:00.000-07:00

“In his interview, Elie Wiesel is unequivocal about his faith in God. Wiesel says this: ‘When I am thinking of my personal experience, there comes to mind, as a luminous example, Francois Mauriac. I, a Jew, owe to the fervent Catholic Mauriac, who declared himself in love with Christ, the fact of having become a writer…Once Mauriac dedicated a book to me and he wrote: ‘To Elie Wiesel, a Jewish child who was crucified.’ At first I took it badly, but then I understood that it was his way of letting me feel his love.’” –Qtd. by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things, April 2008, No. 182, p. 70.

[Mauriac was a profound French novelist, not often spoken of at present. His short novel The Viper’s Tangle (sometimes translated A Knot of Vipers) is a tremendous book which takes a profound look at sin and redemption. ]

Nietzche and Ancient Gnosticism's Pejorative Revaluations

2008-03-17T16:37:00.000-07:00

“…The legend of Prometheus is indigenous to the entire community of Aryan races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic, and that the two myths are related as brother and sister. The presupposition of the Prometheus myth is primitive man's belief in the supreme value of fire as the true palladium of every rising civilization. But for man to dispose of fire freely, and not receive it as a gift from heaven in the kindling thunderbolt and the warming sunlight, seemed a crime to thoughtful primitive man, a despoiling of divine nature. Thus this original philosophical problem poses at once an insoluble conflict between men and the gods, which lies like a huge boulder at the gateway to every culture…” –Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Part 9, pg. 32.

[A great weak point of Nietzsche’s philosophical argument seems to me to recur in his accounts of origins. We are to believe that man’s discovery of his abilities in relation to the order around him poses an inevitable opposition between the gods and man for the thinking man. But this doesn't follow at all. One of the qualities of A Beautiful World is the illumination to some extent of how the universe seems to have been made for man’s development and discovery. Man's ability in the universe can easily, more easily, it seems to me, be accounted for in terms of a harmonious order, an order that evokes gratitude. Another place where Nietzsche's account of religions seems to me a weak point is in The Genealogy of Morals when he seeks to explain the formation of society in terms of transaction... Commerce establishing society. The more primal, more fundamental reality is that of a mother and child. It is that out of which society springs- love, not will to power. Love will ultimately survive secular impotency.

There is in Nietzsche what seems to me a Gnostic turn, a course of assumptions, a stance, but it is far from being the inevitable outcome of astute reflection.

Hans Jonas in his landmark work of scholarship on ancient gnosticism, The Gnostic Religion, describes an aspect of gnosticism which parallels the nihilism Nietzche enjoins, in this, his first book:
“The cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and the world, and correspondingly that of man and world. The deity is absolutely transmundane, its nature alien to that of the universe, which it neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis: to the divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. The world is the work of lowly powers which though they may mediately be descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct the knowledge of Him in the cosmos over which they rule. The genesis of these lower powers, the Archons (rulers), and in general that of all the orders of being outside God, including the world itself, is a main theme of Gnostic speculation….The spheres are the seats of the Archons, especially the “Seven,” that is, of the planetary gods borrowed from the Babylonian pantheon. It is significant that these are now often called by Old Testament names for God (Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddai), which from being synonyms for the one and supreme God are by this transposition turned into proper names of inferior demonic beings- an example of the pejorative revaluation to which Gnosticism subjected ancient traditions in general and Jewish tradition in particular. The Archons collectively rule over the world, and each individually in his sphere is a warder of the cosmic prison. Their tyrannical world rule is called heimarmene, universal Fate, a concept taken over from astrology but now tinged with the gnostic anti-cosmic spirit. In its physical aspect this rule is the law of nature; in its psychical aspect, which includes for instance the institution and enforcement of the Mosaic Law, it aims at the enslavement of man. ..”
[A little familiarity with Nietzsche would seem to be enough to see a parallel between this notion of Mosaic Law, etc. as enslaving, as slave religion. Certainly there is a pejorative revaluation. There seems to be a widespread tendency not to get this aggressive note. It seems gnosticism is now popularly imagined as a victim, and nihilism too is thought of largely as a passive permissiveness or indifference to transgression. ]

“The law of ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt not’ promulgated by the Creator is just one more form of ‘cosmic’ tyranny. The sanctions attaching to its transgression can affect only the body and the psyche. As the pneumatic is free from the heimarmene [fate], so he is free from the yoke of the moral law. To him all things are permitted, since the pneuma is ‘saved in its nature’ and can be neither sullied by actions nor frightened by the threat of archonic retribution. The pneumatic freedom, however, is a matter of more than mere indifferent permission: through intentional violation of the demiurgical norms the pneumatic thwarts the design of the Archons and paradoxically contributes to the work of salvation. This antinomian libertinism exhibits more forcefully than the ascetic version the nihilistic element contained in Gnostic acomism.” –Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p.46.

This brings me to the second part of Nietzsche’s quote:

“Man's highest good must be bought with a crime and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering which the offended divinities visit upon the human race in its noble ambition. An austere notion, this, which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall--a myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue; this notion provides us with the ethical substratum of pessimistic tragedy, which comes to be seen as a justification of human ills, that is to say of human guilt as well as the suffering purchased by that guilt. The tragedy at the heart of things, which the thoughtful Aryan is not disposed to quibble away, the contrariety at the center of the universe, is seen by him as an interpenetration of several worlds, as for instance a divine and a human, each individually in the right but each, as it encroaches upon the other, having to suffer for its individuality. The individual, in the course of his heroic striving towards universality, de-individuation, comes up against that primordial contradiction and learns both to sin and to suffer. The Aryan nations assign to crime the male, the Semites to sin the female gender; and it is quite consistent with these notions that the original act of hubris should be attributed to a man, original sin to a woman.”

Like the ancient Gnostic, Nietzsche not only permits but actively enjoins the commission of a crime as a kind of perverse self-development. Nietzsche obviously favors the “Aryan” view against the Semitic and Christian belief in the Fall. He enjoins the conferral of a dignity on crime. He deems the feminine the weaker and associates it with the Semitic; he deems the Aryan, Promethean view as the masculine and superior.

Nietzsche like Freud attacks the Fall. Freud, in suffering a terrible cancer of the mouth, nevertheless, chain-smoking, commits suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement, after having written, as his final book, an attack on Judaism, Moses and Monotheism.
Men like Jonas have long been aware of these things but it is something of a revelation for me to see them brought out. (Note: Jonas is a lucid writer. He clearly exposits the foreign terms before he utilizes them and a quote has out of context can be overwhelming but I would hope not to daunting.)

Learning About Versus Learning From Scripture

2008-03-17T04:22:00.000-07:00

“Whether or not one is convinced by this or that conclusion of modern biblical scholarship, as a tradition of reading it cannot be incorporated into living religious communities. There is a spiritual parting of ways, [Kugel] suggests, that separates ancient from modern traditions of interpretation. The old ways of reading involve ‘learning from the Bible,’ while the modern critical approaches end up ‘learning about it.’ Ancient interpretation teaches us to live inside Scripture; modern reading keeps its distance…One feels that Kugel overdraws the contrast with ancient interpretations…Yet Kugel sees a real problem, or at least he sees it in outline. The great chasm of difference is a matter of exegetical atmosphere rather than historical techniques or even interpretive conclusions. Modern scholars want to master the Bible. We can see this in their often smug conclusions. ‘Well,’ we are told, ‘this or that biblical story is really about sustaining the ideology of the Jerusalem cult.’ In contrast, religious readers want to be mastered… This spiritual difference is becoming more and more obvious today. It has nothing to do with whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or whether Isaiah is a compilation of diverse prophetic material from different eras. It has to do with what we let the Bible say to us. On this point, Kugel is surely right. The old influence of liberal Protestantism on elite graduate programs in biblical studies has come to an end. We now see an aggressive indifference to the religious interests of biblical readers or postmodern theoretical gestures posing as theology. These days it is plain to see that a modern tradition of interpretation does not train readers to hear the Word of God in the Bible, even in its darkest corners. One reads purely and proudly as an outsider. This sensibility, this interpretive stance, is irreconcilable with the path charted by ancient readers. They read with the assumption that the Bible has the power to make us insiders. It is the path that faithful Jews and Christians continue striving to walk down.”
-R.R. Reno, “The Bible Inside and Out”, First Things, April 2008, pgs. 14, 15.

Whose the Fount of Your Religion?

2008-03-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

“Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a ‘moral genius’ or a ‘spiritual genius.’ Thus insinuating that this virtue or spirituality is ‘creative’ or ‘original.’ If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction,… in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours.” –C.S. Lewis, “Christianity and Literature”, in Christian Reflections (ed. Walter Hooper) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), pg. 6.

[This point attacks a modern concept I want in my tiredness to faintly articulate. One reaction may be, how backward. “Everything must change”. (Man I am belligerent. I keep having to erase what I write.) But I think Lewis hits in the final sentence on why it is not, on the essential point, the difference between humility and will to power, the difference between “you have said you were gods” and real worship of a real God. From one angle, which seems essentially the fleshly angle, the idea of orthodoxy as the bane of creative genius is deadening, deathlike, of graves. But that is an angle from the self as sovereign, not from the self as crucified with Christ. What is remote and lost on the lost is a reality that Dostoevsky referred to when he wrote in his journals for the composition of his great novel Crime and Punishment, “In Christ Jesus, there are infinite resources for life.” I recall an eccentric woman recounting to me in my college days a dream she had had in which she saw cherubim flying around the throne of God with wings over their eyes, as depicted in Revelation. She asked one of them why they covered their eyes and they said, “Because every time we look at the Lord we see a new facet of His greatness that is wonderful beyond description” (paraphrasing). Whatever the nature of her dream, the content struck me then and still does as true of God. God is indeed great beyond all describing and the fount of life and blessing. We were dead in our sins; now we are alive in Christ. The source of our life is to be rooted in Him. ]

Theory, Innate to Man, Turned the Ending of Man

2008-03-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

“Modern theory is about objects lower than man: even stars, being common things, are lower than man… (Even in human sciences, whose object is man,) their object too is ‘lower than man…’ For a scientific theory of him to be possible, man, including his habits of valuation, has to be taken as determined by causal laws, as an instance and part of nature. The scientist does take him so- but not himself while he assumes and exercises his freedom of inquiry and his openness to reason, evidence and truth. Thus man-the-knower apprehends man-qua-lower-than-himself and in doing so achieves knowledge of man-qua-lower-than-man, since all scientific theory is of things lower than man-the-knower. It is on this condition that they can be subject to ‘theory,’ hence to control, hence to use. Then man-lower-than-man explained by the human sciences- man reified- can by the instructions of these sciences be controlled (even ‘engineered’) and thus used…And as the use of what is lower-than-man can only be for what is lower and not for what is higher in the user himself, the knower and user becomes in such use, if made all-inclusive, himself lower than man…Inevitably the manipulator comes to see himself in the same light as those his theory has made manipulable; and in the self-inclusive solidarity with the general human lowliness amidst the splendor of human power his charity is but self-compassion and that tolerance that springs from self-contempt; we are all poor puppets and cannot help being what we are….”

-Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 195-196.

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

2008-03-06T20:02:00.000-08:00

“Yet, although Dostoevsky is in more than one respect the forerunner of Nietzsche, and although Nietzsche said: ‘He is the only person who has taught me anything about psychology,’ it cannot really be said that the one profoundly influenced the other. Nietzsche’s enthusiasm soon waned. Without disowning his first feeling, he had time for second thoughts. In a note in Der Wille zur Macht [The Will to Power] dated 1888 he still spoke of the ‘release’ that came from reading Dostoevsky. But on 20 November of the same year, when Georg Brandes was warning him against Dostoevsky as ‘wholly Christian in sentiment’ and an adherent of ‘slave morality’, he replied: ‘I have vowed a queer kind of gratitude for him, although he goes against my deepest instincts.’ ‘It is much the same as with Pascal,’ he added. And in Ecce Homo, enumerating the writers who had been his spiritual sustenance, he did not mention Dostoevsky. The initial attraction was coupled with an equally violent repulsion.”-Henri De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist of Humanism, (1950), p. 168.

[Perhaps the author of the essay “Macbeth and the Moral Universe”, Harry V. Jaffa (http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1510/article_detail.asp), is in something like Nietzsche’s initial reaction to Dostoevsky.]

“Nietzsche, in cursing our age, sees in it the heritage of the Gospel, while Dostoevsky, cursing it just as vigorously, sees in it the result of a denial of the Gospel.” -Henri De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist of Humanism, (1950), p. 172.

The Religious 'Indoctrination' of Children and Atheism

2008-02-11T17:59:00.001-08:00

By now Richard Dawkin’s assertion that religious indoctrination of children constitutes a form of child abuse has reached broad circulation, and has found a receptive audience among some. That well may be one of those arguments that rides on the ability of audacity to quell and confuse the obvious. But often the obvious can quite disappear under societal trends conditioning general approaches. In reading the following extended quote from Peter Berger, published in the 1969, it struck me how much the reverse question was raised rather cogently regarding the nature of the implied teaching of atheism, agnosticism, or more to the point, just sheer silence, to a child, and whether not assuring a child would form a kind of child abuse. As Berger argues, cogently in my view, a child’s being reassured of order, ubiquitously administered by parents worldwide, is a kind of priestly role, one called into question by the atheist. Further, this scene of reassurance might be plausibly taken as an epitome of the human, a site replete with what we think of as most essentially human.

I am conscious that in raising this point, it might be taken as a counterblast against atheists which attacks them in general as being inhuman, or an attack on Dawkins as being inhuman, but these are not at all my intent. It is hard to avoid the sharpness of the pitch of rhetoric that the public contention has been brought to, but rather than believing ill of Dawkins, I quite suspect that Dawkins did act the part of a priest with his daughter, assuring her of order, and that the fault lies rather in the poorness of his philosophical argument and the virtue lies in his lack of consistency in living it out.

Berger mentions in this quote atheists who, based on their “stoic realism”, refused to rear children rather than to lie to them or give them the cold truth, as they saw it. This raises the question whether this is the nobler position for an atheist to take. Apparently Dawkins did not think so, having raised a child.

I suspect that my point here will be attacked by those who support Dawkins’ accusation of “child-abuse” against religious “indoctrination” on at least two fronts. For one, it will be argued that assuring a child that all is in order and that it is OK is not the same as assuring them that there is a transcendent hope. But what exactly is it if it is not? What in the merely natural world makes you think that everything is alright? And why do we choose the terms we generally do in assuring a child? Another objection that might be raised is that whether or not it is a cold thing, it is the truth, but it may not be a truth that the child is ready to comprehend, and thus the necessity for vague and unjustified assurances until they are old enough to understand. This may be the tactic Dawkins has followed, as evinced by his open letter to his daughter. Yet it seems to me that the reassurance of order was first necessary before the argument against order could commence, and this is an essential point in correctly characterizing the nature of the kind of argument Dawkins makes. Dawkins had to be raised to a degree of psychological stability based on such an “illusion” of meaning and order before he could begin to attack it. And furthermore, Dawkins professes to base his argument for atheism on science, yet in what sense can science be divorced from the presumption of order and meaning? The advance of science is and always has been by the presumption of an orderly universe. Isn’t the logical end of the road to the un-reflected stoicism of the atheist the ultimate dismissal of order and meaning, the end of science, and the rejection of what your mother told you when you cried in the darkness of the night? Here is the quote:

“Man’s propensity for order is grounded in a faith or trust that, ultimately, reality is “in order,” “all right,” “as it should be.” Needless to say, there is no empirical method by which this faith can be tested. To assert it is itself an act of faith. But it is possible to proceed from the faith that is rooted in experience to the act of faith that transcends the empirical sphere, a procedure that could be called the argument from ordering……Consider the most ordinary, and probably most fundamental, of all- the ordering gesture by which a mother reassures her anxious child. A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream, and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred or invisible, and in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother will do just that. She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna. She will turn on a lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light. She will speak or sing to the child, and the content of this communication will invariably be the same- ‘Don’t be afraid-everything is in order, everything is alright.’ If all goes well, the child will be reassured, his trust in reality recovered, and in this trust he will return to sleep. All this, of course, belongs to the most routine experiences of life and does not depend upon any religious preconceptions. Yet this common scene raises a far from ordinary question, which immediately introduces a religious dimension: Is the mother lying to the child? The answer, in the most profound sense, can be ‘no’ only if there is some truth in the religious interpretation of experience. Conversely, if the ‘natural’ is the only reality there is, the mother is lying to the child- lying out of love, to be sure, and obviously not lying to the extent that her reassurance is grounded in the fact of this love- but, in the final analysis, lying all the same. Why? Because the reassurance, transcending the immediately present two individuals and their situation, implies a statement about reality as such.To become a parent is to take on the role of a world-builder and world-protector. This is so, of course, in the obvious sense that parents provide the environment in which a child’s socialization takes place and serve as mediators to the child of the entire world of the particular society in question. But it is also so in a less obvious, more profound sense, which is brought out in the scene just described. The role that a parent takes on represents not only the order of this or that society, but order as such, the underlying order of the universe that it makes sense to trust. It is this role that may be called the role of high priestess. It is a role that the mother in this scene plays willy-nilly, regardless of her awareness or (more likely) lack of awareness of just what it is she is representing. ‘Everything is in order, everything is all right’ – this is the basic formula of parental reassurance. Not just this particular anxiety, not just this particular pain- but everything is all right. The formula can, without in any way violating it, be translated into a statement of cosmic scope- ‘Have trust in being.’ This is precisely what the formula intrinsically implies. And if we are to believe the child psychologists (which we have good reason to do in this instance), this is an experience that it absolutely essential to the process of becoming a human person. Put differently, at the very center of the process of becoming fully human, at the core of humanitas, we find an experience of trust in the order of reality. Is this experience an illusion? Is the individual who represents it a liar? If reality is coextensive with the ‘natural’ reality that our empirical reason can grasp, then the experience is an illusion and the role that embodies it is a lie. For then it is perfectly obvious that everything is not in order, is not all right. The world that the child is being told to trust is the same world in which he will eventually die. If there is no other world, then the ultimate truth about this one is that it will eventually kill the child as it will kill his mother. This would not, to be sure, detract from the real presence of love and its very real comforts; it would even give this love a quality of tragic heroism. Nevertheless, the final truth would be not love but terror, not light but darkness. The nightmare of chaos, not the transitory safety of order, would be the final reality of the human situation. For, I the end, we must all find ourselves in darkness, alone with the night that will swallow us up. The face of reassuring love, bending over our terror, will then be nothing but a merciful illusion. In that case the last word about religion is Freud’s. Religion is the childish fantasy that our parents run the universe for our benefit, a fantasy from which the mature individual must free himself in order to attain whatever measure of stoic resignation he is capable of. It goes without saying that the preceding argument is not a moral one. It does not condemn the mother for this charade of world-building, if it be a charade. It does not dispute the right of atheists to be parents (though it is not without interest that there have been atheists who have rejected parenthood for exactly these reasons). The argument from ordering is metaphysical rather than ethical. To restate it: In the observable human propensity to order reality there is an intrinsic impulse to give cosmic scope to this order, an impulse that implies not only that human order in some way corresponds to an order that transcends it, but that this transcendent order is of such a character that man can trust himself and his destiny to it. There is a variety of human roles that represent this conception of order, but the most fundamental is the parental role. Every parent (or, at any rate, every parent who loves his child) takes upon himself the representation of a universe that is ultimately in order and ultimately trustworthy. This representation can be justified only within a religious (strictly speaking a supernatural) frame of reference. In this frame of reference the natural world in which we are born, love, and die is not the only world, but only the foreground of another world in which love is not annihilated in death, and in which, therefore, the trust in the power of love to banish chaos is justified. Thus man’s ordering propensity implies a transcendent order, and each ordering gesture is a signal of this transcendence. The parental role is not based ona loving lie. On the contrary, it is a witness to the ultimate truth of man’s situation in reality. In that case, it is perfectly possible… to analyze religion as a cosmic projection of the child’s experience of the protective order of parental love. What is projected is, however, itself a reflection, an imitation, of ultimate reality. Religion, then, is not only (from the point of view of empirical reason) a projection of human order, but (from the point of view of what might be called inductive faith) the ultimately true vindication of human order. “ –Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural , (1969), pgs. 54, 55, 56, 57.

A Lent Reflection: "A Secure Passage"

2008-02-10T08:06:00.000-08:00

When you were a child, you cried out in the night at the nameless threats in the darkness, and human hands held you and assured you, “It is alright.” Is it?

Jesus, unlike the first Adam, was tempted in a desert, in the “wasteland”, in the fallen world. In no sense was he naive of, or removed from, the sufferings and pain of the creation. He might, as many do, have taken the cursed earth and the sufferings of its denizens as proof against a loving and all-powerful God. It could have been part of his arsenal in a league with the original argument opened in the garden against the goodness, truthfulness and beauty of God’s will. Neither was his response to politic with the devil and draw out debate on God’s righteousness. Instead, he responded with the superbly spare and to the point, “It is written: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:1-11) (Genesis 2:15-17; 3:17). Adam, in a garden, in luxuriance and vitality, fell to the tempter. Jesus, in barrenness and extremity of physical weakness and discomfort, kept perfect faith with the Father, in complete love and fidelity. “I and the Father are one,” He could tell his disciples.

Christ, taking the form of a servant, that is, a man, didn’t fall, though all have fallen, and he didn’t impugn God, though he was the most fully aware of the suffering on the earth, and the most fully compassionate, with an eye not in the least compromised by sin and a heart not in the least dulled to the sufferings of others. To appropriate the words from my prayer book this morning, in him no languor oppressed, no iniquities chilled, no mists of unbelief dimmed the eye and no zeal ever tired. Those who did not believe must have missed the heaven in his eyes.

He chose to walk the road of being desolated to the bitter end, which all flesh, including his, loathed, rather than to speak against God or to break faith with His Father.

This we have not done. We have not been Jesus. Whatever we have been, we have not been perfect. We have fallen. We fall. And the Father vanishes from the picture. Confronted with these two points of references, ourselves and Christ, a mistake is to think of Christ only in terms of an example and an embodiment of the Law. I might easily think of Christ’s victory in the desert over temptations merely in terms of a feat of ascetic discipline, an act of spiritual heroism. “If I am faithful in the little things then I will be faithful in the big things.” If I “think positively”, I will “think and grow rich”. “Whatever you conceive, if you believe, you will receive.” “If I have true grit, I will break these chains that bind me, like a gravitating kung fu hero with a ‘spiritual’ sticker.” That is missing the point. It is nearly missing the boat. It is density in the face of enormous grace and generosity. “Do not be like the horse or mule which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you” (Psalm 32).

The point is not merely to redouble your efforts in the “wasteland”, in the midst of pain and suffering, given such a shining example and wise guru. “For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Exiled from Eden, cursed and cursing, suffering and sinning, we are not able to storm the gates of Eden. Even if we agree to “be good” now, and we exert rare and amazing will power, which humans sometimes surely can do, the hour is late, the situation is more desperate, and darkness falls. But it is into this that Christ has come, not to mock and revile, but to hold and to heal. He has been revealed to our wounded hearts as the Way, the Truth, and the Light. He is the “new and living way”. The angels with the flaming swords tasked to bar return to the garden, until now stern, terrible and unsurpassable, will part to Jesus and you, and will look on you with joyous love.

Suffering and pain have, through Christ, become not merely the take home message at the end of a realistic movie that gives you the bite of authentic reality, that makes you feel more desolate but more real. They have become a secured passage. What we could not accomplish in Him is given (Romans 5:12-19). It is not a secular stoicism He has braced us for; it is a beating heart of warmth He has bound us to, the warmth of God’s love, cutting decisively, as one with authority, through the blurr and the blister of it all, and justifying the fragile assurance a mother gives to her child when he cries in the night. The desire of nations has come. Humanity’s hope is not a vice and a delusion but a forerunner of Christ and a signal of the transcendent. It is alright, in an astonishing reversal of the atheist’s stoic realism. It is a greater realism into which the children of man are brought through Christ and through which they are adopted, redeemed, and led home to God.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Toasts Ideologue

2008-01-16T06:57:00.000-08:00

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=08EYqwyns-k&feature=related

Some Christian Criticism of ID

2008-01-16T06:42:00.000-08:00

“In The Blind Watchmaker, [Dawkins] provided a sustained and effective critique of the arguments of the nineteenth- century writer William Paley for the existence of God on biological grounds. It is Dawkins’s home territory, and he knows what he is talking about. ^This book remains the finest critique of this argument in print. The only criticism I would direct against this aspect of The Blind Watchmaker is that Paley’s ideas were typical of his age, not of Christianity as a whole, and that many Christian writers of the age were alarmed at his approach, seeing it as a surefire recipe for the triumph of atheism. There is no doubt in my mind that Paley saw himself as in some way ‘proving’ the existence of God, and Dawkin’s extended critique of Paley in that book is fair, gracious and accurate.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins turns his attention to such other ‘arguments’ based on the philosophy of religion. I am not sure that this was entirely wise. He is clearly out of his depth, and achieve little by his brief and superficial engagement with these great perennial debates, which often simply cannot be resolved empirically. His attitude seems to be ‘here’s how a scientist would sort out this philosophical nonsense.’ [Examples follow in the book.]…

In The God Delusion Dawkins criticizes ‘the worship of the gaps.’ This is a reference to an approach to Christian apologetics that came to prominence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- the so-called God of the gaps approach. In its simplest form it asserted that there were necessarily ‘gaps’ in a naturalistic or scientific understanding of reality. At certain points, William Paley’s famous Natural Theology (1801) uses arguments along these lines. It was argued that God needs to be proposed in order to deal with these gaps in scientific understanding.

It was a foolish move and was increasingly abandoned in the twentieth century. Oxford’s firs professor of theoretical chemistry, the noted Methodist lay preacher Charles A. Coulson, damned it with the telling phrase ‘the God of the gaps.’ In its place he urged a comprehensive account of reality, which stressed the explanatory capacity of the Christian faith as a whole rather than a retreat into ever-diminishing gaps. Dawkins’s criticism of those who ‘worship the gaps,’ despite its overstatements, is clearly appropriate and valid…Unfortunately, having made such a good point, Dawkins then weakens his argument by suggesting that all religious people try to stop scientists from exploring those gaps…[Despite my desire to further quote criticism of Dawkins I will stay on topic here. It is interesting to me to note here how the 'God of the gaps' is a term coined by a Christian preacher in the porcess of criticizing a specific apologetic strategy, a preacher who was by no means alone in his rejection of this new development in modern times in some Christians' thought.]

It is hardly surprising that the ‘all too limited’ human mind should encounter severe difficulties when dealing with anything beyond the world of everyday experience. The idea of ‘mystery’ arises constantly as the human mind struggles to grasp some ideas. That’s certainly true of science; it’s also true of religion.

The real problem here, however, is the forced relocation of God by doubtless well-intentioned Christian apologists into the hidden recesses of the universe, beyond evaluation or investigation. Now that’s a real concern. For this strategy is still used by the intelligent design movement- a movement, based primarily in North America, that argues for the ‘intelligent Designer’ based on gaps in scientific explanation, such as ‘irreducible complexity’ of the world. It is not an approach which I accept, either on scientific or theological grounds. In my view, those who adopt this approach make Christianity deeply- and needlessly- vulnerable to scientific progress.

But the ‘God of the gaps’ approach is only one of many Christian approaches to the question of how the God hypothesis makes sense of things. In my view it was misguided; it was a failed apologetic strategy from an earlier period in history that has now been rendered obsolete. This point has been taken on board by Christian theologians and philosophers of religion throughout the twentieth century who have now reverted to older, more appropriate ways of dealing with this question. For instance, the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne is one of many writers to argue that the capacity of science to explain itself requires explanation- and that the most economical and reliable account of this explanatory capacity lies in the notion of a Creator God.

Swinburne argues that the intelligibility of the universe itself needs explanation. It is therefore not the gaps in our understanding of the world which point to God but rather the very comprehensibility of scientific and other forms of understanding that requires an explanation.” –Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? : Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, (2007), p. 24-25, 29-31.

“When philosophy textbooks gather under the same heading a range of texts from the Middle Ages to today, from Anselm and Aquinas through Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant to contemporary writers, as if all these folks were doing the same thing- offering ‘proofs for the existence of God’- they mislead the students who read them. In fact the medieval texts so cited were usually doing something like the opposite- giving an account of God that would render anything like a ‘proof’ altogether inappropriate. Those who seek to reduce Christian faith to the arena of rational proof- whether liberal Deists trying to eliminate Christianity’s ‘irrational’ elements or conservative advocates of ‘intelligent design’ trying to make religion fir their own version of the ‘scientific’- are not preserving traditional Christianity but engaging in a particular and characteristically modern project that has diverged from the Christian tradition. “ –William Placher, The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology, (2007), p. 10.

God's Story: As For The Story the Tyrants Try to Write

2008-01-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

“Throughout the centuries, the blood of the righteous has been spilled on the earth: the blood of Abel and the blood of countless innocents who died during the violent times before the flood; the blood of nameless infants of Israel slaughtered by Pharoah and the blood of the innocents shed during the reign of Manasseh; the blood of the prophets sent to Ahab and Jezebel and the blood of the infants surrounding Bethlehem slaughtered by Herod; the blood of Stephen and James and Peter and Paul; the blood of Thecla and Polycarp and Lawrence and Ignatius and Agnes and Hippolytus. They have been crucified, skinned, torn in pieces, and fed to lions.

From all appearances these martyrs are forgotten forever. There are no warcrimes tribunals; there are few monuments, few memorials, few memories. Hundreds and thousands remain forgotten, nameless, faceless. By one estimate, seventy million martyrs have been killed in the history of the church, as many as forty-five in the past century. They have been killed in Russia and in Nazi Germany, in Turkey and in Algeria, in Nigeria and Sudan and Pakistan…Who even knows? Their blood is soaked into the ground and is silent forever.

That is what Ahab and Jezebel think, and that is what all the cruel powers who prey on the innocent have always thought- and hoped. As [Rene] Girard argues in book after book, all religions and cultures outside of Christianity are premised on this perverse hope, that blood is only blood, the hope that innocent blood can be silenced. When imitative desires fracture a society into war of all against all, harmony is restored by uniting all energies and hostilities against a scapegoat. The scapegoat does not cause the descent into social anarchy, but suffers as if she or he had and restores the social order…In all these systems, the gods underwrite the powers, the scapegoating majority, instead of defending the scapegoat. Girard argues that the Bible is unique in proclaiming the innocence of scapegoats and in revealing a God who hears the cry of innocent blood.

The innocent scapegoat is not some peripheral issue in Scripture but its central message: the gospel is the story of a man whose enemies conspire against him, a man falsely accused of blasphemy, a man taken outside the city to endure an unjust execution (Heb. 13:10-13). Naboth’s body [See 1 Kings 21 for the story of how Ahab and Jezebel murdered Naboth in order to take possession of his vineyard] like the flesh of a purification offering, is taken outside the camp to be destroyed (Lev. 4:11-12, 20-21), foreshadowing the greater purification offered by Jesus. In one sense the blood spilled from the cross speaks a word of mercy for the world, a better word than the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24). Yet the Lord remains an avenger of blood, even after the cross (Rev. 17-19), and the blood of martyrs cries out for vengeance against the persecutors of Christ, his bride, his gospel. That cry will be heard; that blood will be avenged.” –Peter Leithart, 1 & 2 Kings, Brazos Theological Commentary, (2006), p. 156-57.

“Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea and said: “With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again… “ The following verses describe how the music and the commerce and the social events will be silenced forever. The reason: “By your magic spell all the nations were led astray. In her was found the blood of the prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth” (Revelation 18:21, 23-24).

The movie Cry Freedom (with Denzel Washington) recounts the story of Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid leader in South Africa who was savagely tortured and murdered by the South African police for his outspokenness. I know little about Biko beyond this movie. I do not even know if he was a Christian, a “saint”, let alone a prophet-saint. But he was murdered for standing up for justice and God hears the cry of innocent blood. He is in solidarity with the poor, whether they call on Jesus name or not. The judgment of Babylon referred to in the passage quoted from Revelation is not merely for the blood of Christian martyrs.

Stephen Biko

(See: http://www.sshep.com/stephen_biko.htm).

Though Biko’s murder gathered media attention and helped to break the back of apartheid, many died unjustly and only a few knew, and official slanders and absurdities became their capstones. In Russia, many who profited during Soviet communism from the slander and torture and murder of the innocent still enjoy the loot of their corruption and the country suffers for not having had a public reckoning, which makes the demoralization more intense. Many believe in the existence of wickedness but as for goodess... But there is a new and living way and a vantage point has been opened to us: The wicked may prosper for a season, but let us sing with Rich Mullins, “Jesus, write me into your story!” We are a people who believe in the resurrection and a people who believe the story is ultimately one of justice for the innocent, The grave does not end the story. The case is not like Epicurus thought- that we should not sin, unless we can get away with it. The blood is remembered and there is a reckoning. Tyrants, big and small, observe the wind over the naturalistically silent graves of their victims and dream and hope and therapeutically remind themselves that after we die there is only annihilation. Though Lady Macbeth may wring her hands sleepwalking, with the apparition of the blood of her victims on them, when she wakes it is to a mundane, sealed existence safe from seeming unreality of guilt's claims on her. "Guilt" is only the threat of being caught in this lifetime. But God hears the blood, even if it is only Him alone who knows, and this ultimately will determine the end of the story.

C.S. Lewis

2008-01-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

"One who has been instructed by the pagan examples"

2008-01-11T08:51:00.000-08:00

The following section comes from a short work by the early church father, Basil the Great, addressed to young Christian men on the study of the classics of Greek Literature, , "Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature". Although there are things in the work as a whole which one clearly need not agree with, much of what Basil writes is quite helpul and valuable food for thought, it seems to me, and illuminative of the consonance and continuity with Christian teaching through the centuries. I found little that I disagreed with in the following section (though I suspect Alexander's scorn of the women was for purely noble reasons) in which he discusses specific instances of ways in which Christians can benefit from heathen literature:

"VII. After this wise, then, are we to receive those words from the pagan authors which contain suggestions of the virtues. But since also the renowned deeds of the men of old either are preserved for us by tradition, or are cherished in the pages of poet or historian, we must not fail to profit by them. A fellow of the street rabble once kept taunting Pericles, but he, meanwhile, gave no heed; and they held out all day, the fellow deluging him with reproaches, but he, for his part, not caring. Then when it was evening and dusk, and the fellow still clung to him, Pericles escorted him with a light, in order that he might not fail in the 110 practice of philosophy.27 Again, a man in a passion threatened and vowed death to Euclid of Megara,28 but he in turn vowed that the man should surely be appeased, and cease from his hostility to him. How invaluable it is to have such examples in mind when a man is seized with anger! On the other hand, one must altogether ignore the tragedy which says in so many words : 'Anger arms the hand against the enemy;' 29 for it is much better not to give way to anger at all. But if such restraint is not easy, we shall at least curb our anger by reflection, so as not to give it too much rein. But let us bring our discussion back again to the examples of noble deeds. A certain man once kept striking Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, in the face, yet he did not resent it, but allowed full play to the ruffian's anger, so that his face was swollen and bruised from the blows. Then when he stopped striking him, Socrates did nothing more than write on his forehead, as an artisan on a statue, who did it, and thus took out his revenge. Since these examples almost coincide with our teachings, I hold that such men are worthy of emulation. For this conduct of Socrates is akin to the precept that to him who smites you upon the one cheek, you shall turn the other also 30 — thus much may you be avenged; the conduct of Pericles and of Euclid also conforms to the precept: 'Submit to those who persecute you, and endure their wrath with meekness;' 31 and to the other: 'Pray for your enemies and curse them not.' 32 One who has been instructed in the pagan examples will no longer hold the Christian precepts impracticable. But I will not overlook the conduct of Alexander, who, on taking captive the daughters of Darius, who were reputed to be of surpassing beauty, would not even look at them, for he deemed it unworthy of one who was a conqueror of men 111 to be a slave to women.33 This is of a piece with the statement that he who looks upon a woman to lust after her, even though he does not commit the act of adultery, is not free from its guilt, since he has entertained impure thoughts.34 It is hard to believe that the action of Cleinias,35 one of the disciples of Pythagoras, was in accidental conformity to our teachings, and not designed imitation of them. What, then, was this act of his? By taking an oath he could have avoided a fine of three talents, yet rather than do so he paid the fine, though he could have sworn truthfully. I am inclined to think that he had heard of the precept which forbids us to swear.36" http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/basil_litterature01.htm

Plato on Articulation of One's Beliefs

2008-01-11T08:34:00.000-08:00

“ATHENIAN: So it looks as if have to compel the guardians of our divine foundations to get an exact idea of the common element in all four virtues- that factor which, though single, is to be found in courage, restraint, justice and wisdom, and this in our view deserves the general title ‘virtue.’ This element, my friends, if only we have the will, is what we must now cling to like leeches, and we must not relax our grip until we can explain adequately the essence of what we have to contemplate… ATHENIAN: Well, then, do we have the same line about goodness and beauty? Should the guardians know no more than that these terms are a plurality, or should they understand the senses in which they are unities? CLEINIAS: It looks as if they are more or less obliged to comprehend that too- how they are unities. ATHENIAN: But what if they understood the point, but couldn’t find the words to demonstrate it? CLEINIAS: How absurd! That’s the condition of a slave. ATHENIAN: Well, then, isn’t our doctrine going to be the same about all serious questions? If our guardians are going to be genuine guardians of the laws they must have genuine knowledge of their real nature; they must be articulate enough to explain the real difference between good actions and bad, and capable of sticking to the distinction in practice. CLEINIAS: Naturally. ATHENIAN: And surely one of the finest fields of knowledge is theology, on which we’ve already lavished a great deal of attention. It’s supremely important to appreciate- so far as it’s given to man to know these things- the existence of the gods and the obvious extent of their power. The man in the street may be forgiven if he simply follows the letter of the law, but if any intended guardian fails to work hard to master every theological proof there is, we must certainly not grant him the same indulgence; in other words, we must never choose as a Guardian of the Laws anyone who is not preternaturally gifted or has not worked hard at theology, or allow him to be awarded distinctions for virtue.” –Plato, The Laws, Trans. By Trevor J. Saunders, Penguin Books, 1970, (Reprinted 1975), pgs. 525-526.

[Plato here is articulating a principle about articulation which I have heard before from C.S. Lewis and which I think is generally true: If one cannot articulate an understanding then chances are they do not fully understand the subject matter, so we should aim in our educational endeavors to be able to articulate as well as to understand. There are some things which cannot be spoken- the ineffable- which nevertheless can be articulately evoked at times. Nevertheless, many subject matters can be. I find for instance in talking with Alex and Megan and many others of you that I am confronted with a challenge to articulate my understanding on a subject, and it does not always come easily, and the temptation sometimes is to slough off the effort. I think there are many instances where I have said something in response to a question which was in effect a settling for a more or less insufficient articulation of a buried understanding or view point of mine. But when I have made a ‘straight up’ and proper reply, with some pepper, it is valuable, either for having given form to and having conveyed my understanding, or having given a full articulation of my viewpoint which then exposed it to criticism and so possible correction, whereas if I had not fully expressed my understanding or viewpoint, it have remained insulated from either benefitting others or my being benefitted by its correction. Often when I seek to express some understanding or insight the endeavor allows me to self-correct the otherwise dormant mistaken thinking.

Thinking of and putting into practice ways by which we can together challenge each other to articulate fully our understandings and develop our views, especially on what we think are the most important things, and to cultivate among us articulateness and receptiveness and understanding, is surely a fruitful goal.

Plato’s Gaurdians are the rulers of his imagined colony and they are to understand above all others the whys of the Laws of the colony as well as what the Laws are. They must be able to articulate for instance to a lawbreaker the virtues of the Laws and why they are good to embrace and why it is bad to not follow them. Similarly, elders and leaders in a church should be able to articulate the reasons why they believe, and there should be a general culture in the church in which this articulation is grown and fostered.]

The Demographic Descent of Russia

2008-01-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19951/pub_detail.asp

“…The forces that have shaped this path of depopulation and debilitation are powerful and by now deeply rooted in Russian soil. Altering this demographic trajectory would be a formidable task under any circumstances. Unfortunately, neither Russia's political leadership nor its voting public have begun to face up to this enormous challenge…
…For example, in Italy--the prime example in many current discussions of a possible depopulation of Europe--there are today about 103 deaths for every one hundred live births. Russia, by contrast, reports more than 170 deaths for every one hundred births….
…Russia's current depopulation bears all the trappings of a "demographic shock," reflecting abrupt and violent changes in the nation's vital rates in the immediate wake of a momentous, system-shattering, historic event. This shock is probably not just a temporary disturbance: there are good reasons to believe that Russia's population trends define a new norm for that country….
…First: Russia's poor and declining overall health patterns extend into the realm of reproductive health, meaning that involuntary infertility is a more significant problem for Russia than for Western countries, and possibly a worsening one. According to some recent reports, 13 percent of Russia's married couples of childbearing age are infertile--nearly twice the figure for the United States in 1995. Other Russian sources point to an even greater prevalence of infertility today. Russian womanhood has been scarred by the country's extraordinary popular reliance upon abortion as a primary means of contraception--with the abortions in question conducted under the less-than-exemplary standards of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine. As one expert (Murray Feshbach) has noted, "approximately 10 to 20 percent of [Russian] women become infertile after abortions, according to numerous reports." Add to this the explosive spread of potentially curable sexually transmitted infections. According to official figures, the incidence of syphilis in 2001 was one hundred times higher in Russia than in Germany. Second: Russian patterns of family formation have been evolving markedly over the past generation-and not in a direction conducive to larger families. Simply put, young Russians are now much less likely to marry--and ever more likely to divorce if they do. In 2001 Russia recorded three divorces for every four new marriages. Third, and perhaps most important: With the end of the Soviet system, Russia has in some real sense commenced a rejoining with the rest of Europe--and in present-day Europe, Russian fertility rates are by no means aberrant. While Russia's levels tilt toward the lower end of the European spectrum, they are actually higher than for some other post-Communist areas whose "transitions" to democracy and market order look rather more complete (Slovenia, 1.21; Czech Republic, 1.14)--and are comparable to the current levels in a number of the established market democracies of the European Union (Austria, 1.31; Greece, 1.29; Spain, 1.26; Italy, 1.24). Viewed over a longer horizon, Russia's postwar fertility levels and trends look altogether "European." But Russia's death rates do not look European at all. Over the four decades between 1961-1962 and 2002, life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by nearly five years for males; it also declined for females, though just slightly. Desperately poor health conditions are distributed with a wretched evenness across the land….
…As for mortality attributed to injury--murder, suicide, traffic, poisoning, and other violent causes--age-adjusted levels for men and women alike more than doubled between 1965 and 2001. Among contemporary societies at peace, Russia's level of violent deaths places the country practically in a category of its own. For men under sixty-five, the death rate from injury and poisoning is more than four times that of Finland, the nation with the worst rate in the European Union…
…As for the effect of population decline on daily life and affairs of state: in the decades immediately ahead, Russia seems likely to contend with a sharp falloff in its youth population. Between 1975 and 2000, the number of young men ages fifteen to twenty-four ranged between ten million and thirteen million. By 2025, on current UN projections, the total will be barely six million. Apart from the obvious military implications of this decline, there would be economic and social reverberations. With fewer young people rising to replace the older retirees graduating from the Russian workforce, the question of improving (or perhaps maintaining) the average level of skills and qualifications in the economically active population would become that much more pressing. And since younger people the world over tend to be disposed toward and associated with certain kinds of discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurial risk-taking, a pronounced choking off of younger blood could have real consequences for Russia's social capabilities and economic responsiveness…”

Feeling Burdened by Others Expectations of You?

2008-01-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

Donkey: "Idiots!"

This reminds me of a story from the life of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. When he was a slave of a bodygaurd of Nero, one day his master was torturing him by twisting his leg. He calmly and characteristically told the man, "Master, if you twist my leg further it will break." The man continued twisting and his leg broke. Epictetus responded, "I told you it would break."

The Demographic Descent of Europe: What Does It Mean?

2008-01-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

“Above all, and most urgently of all, why is Europe committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson calls the greatest ‘sustained reduction in European population since the black Death of the 14th century’?

Why do eighteen European countries report ‘negative natural increase’ (i.e., more deaths than births)?
Why does no western European country have a replacement-level birthrate? (The replacement level, according to demographers, is 2.1 children per woman; as of 2004, Germany’s birthrate was 1.3; Italy’s 1.2, Spain’s 1.1, and France’s 1.7; the higher French rate is due to Muslim immigration).
[Footnote: "As demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has noted, the difference between a replacement-level birthrate and a birthrate of 1.5 or 1.4, other things being equal, is the difference between a stable population over time and a population that decreases by one-third as each generation passes."]
Why is Germany likely to lose the equivalent of the former East Germany in the first half of the 21st century?
Why will Spain’s population decline from 40 million to 31.3 million by the middle of the century?
Why will 42 percent of Italians be over sixty by 2050- at which point, on present trends, almost 60 percent of the Italian people will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, or uncles?
Why will Europe’s retired population increase by 55 percent in the next twenty-five years, while its working population will shrink by 8 percent- and, to repeat, why can’t Europeans, either politicians or the public, draw the obvious conclusions from these figures about the impending bankruptcy of their social welfare, health care, and pension systems? Why, to cite Niall Ferguson again, is Europe’s ‘fundamental problem… senescence’?
What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation?
Why do many Europeans deny that these demographics- which are without parallel in human history, absent wars, plagues, or natural catastrophes- are the defining reality of their twenty-first century?

These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily by reference only to Europe’s distinct experience of the twentieth century and what Europe learned from it. Nor can they be answered by appeals to European shame. A deeper question has to be raised: Why did Europe have the twentieth century that it did? Why did a century that began with confident predictions about a maturing humanity reaching new heights of civilizational accomplishment produce in Europe, within four decades, two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War threatening global catastrophe, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag? What happened? Why?”

-George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral, (2005), p. 21-23.

Weigel goes on in this slender and fascinating volume to gather and assess anaylses of the contemporary European scene in the context of its historical trajectories.

Marriage Conceptions Leading to Divorce, and Same Sex Unions' Use of These Conceptions

2008-01-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

Here is some interesting commentary. There is widespread distaste for and rejection of the views of marriage that have resulted in rampant divorce. Many of those who have grown up as the children in these families do not accept the view of the family as expendable if the romance dies between the parents. Yet same-sex unions are being based on this idea of marriage, posing a further exascerbation of this misery.

"... David Blankenhorn writes in his recent book The Future of Marriage against the idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults. Marriage, Blankenhorn persuasively contends, is and always has been a social institution with the primary public purpose of ensuring that children will have an emotional, moral, and legal relationship to the parents who are responsible for their existence. Blankenhorn quotes approvingly the counsel of the German theologian-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote to a young couple getting married that it is not only their love that will sustain their marriage but also their marriage that will sustain their love. Blankenhorn argues in a very civil manner free of polemics that the idea of same-sex marriage is a further and potentially fatal deinstitutionalizing of marriage….

As Blankenhorn argues in The Future of Marriage, the crucial factor is not the number who deviate from the norm, although that is not unimportant, but the effectiveness with which the norm is defended. The idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults has no doubt gained ground in recent decades. More important than its impact on agitation for same-sex marriage is the impact of that idea on the prevalence of divorce. Many millions of children have been subjected to the wrenching experience of the divorce of their parents, and studies suggest that young people today have little patience with the notion that the family is expendable if the adults responsible for holding the family together do not find their relationship emotionally satisfying. That is a hard-earned wisdom born of much sorrow, but it is wisdom, and it enhances the persuasiveness of David Blankenhorn’s argument in The Future of Marriage….There is nothing speculative about the millions of children of divorce who have a deep personal interest in not further destabilizing what is meant by marriage and family. "

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=943

Civilization cannot survive the repetition of these crimes.

2008-01-02T11:05:00.000-08:00

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

–Justice Robert H. Jackson in the Nuremburg Trials of the Nazi doctors, qtd. in the documentary In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine.

Your Grandmother Extremely Lively, You A Paralytic

2008-01-02T07:44:00.000-08:00

"A 6000-year-old Egyptian tomb bears this inscription: 'We live in a decadent age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They inhabit taverns and have no self-control.'"

-Robert J. Morgan in Then Sings My Soul, p. 151.

Sound familiar? The cliche "Somethings never change" comes to mind, but it seems to me the more nuanced understanding brings to mind that civilizations and societies go through different stages and phases. The Egyptian may be quite right in his observation.

This brings to mind the following:

"Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.
-G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying.

"How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom the spreading laurel tree."
-W.B. Yeats, "A Prayer For My Daughter"

(Quotes taken from Robert Kimball's splendid essay, "The Fortunes of Permanence", available on the web.)

William Wilberforce in a pivotal night of prayer, wrote that Almighty God had laid on his heart the goals of abolishing the slave trade and of reforming English manners, and he then devoted the next fifty some years of his life to these ends, effectively. Manners in the sense of civility and humane and humble deference are essential for civil discourse and fruitful dialogue. The "New Atheists" of late have been distinguishing themselves by their willingness to forgo the "ceremonies" of civil dialogue, Sam Hall, for instance, suggesting that people should be killed for holding certain beliefs. This is the kind of thing Yeats decried when he wrote "The center can not hold. Things fall apart..." The theme of humaneness and honoring of parents and faithfulness to friends was huge for Confucius and other wisemen like Plato who, whatever their faults, both helped to establish civilizations which had admirable and noble aspects to them as well as the blameworthy. Tongues of disorder in ascendance and pervasive shock trooper mentalities don't bode well for a particular society or civilization.

Biotechnology Raises Unavoidable Theological Questions

2008-01-01T19:40:00.000-08:00

“When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies, they reach first for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of our moral vocabulary does not equip us to address the hardest questions posed by cloning, designer children, and genetic engineering. That is why the genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo. To grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world- questions about the moral status of nature, and about the proper stance of human beings toward the given world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make them unavoidable…It is commonly said that enhancement, cloning and genetic engineering pose a threat to human dignity. This is true enough. But the challenge is to say how these practices diminish our humanity. What aspects of human freedom or human flourishing do they threaten?” –Michael Sandel, The Case Against Perfection, p. 9, 24.

"Christ-killer"

2008-01-01T16:59:00.000-08:00

The documentary The Cross and the Star ascribes to the Gospel of John and Matthew in particular anti-semitic texts, but on what basis? In these texts the death of the earthly Christ is said to have occurred by the hands of the Jews. But there is something odd in charging these texts with anti-semitism. We know in hindsight how they have sometimes been used against the Jews in a long history of anti-semitism in which Jews were called “Christ-killers” and charged with deicide. But the charge of these texts with anti-semitism, while coming from an understandable emotionalism in response to the horror of the Shoah, hardly seems to make sense. The historical statement that the Jews crucified Jesus under Pontius Pilate is a mere historical assertion that is unexceptional in itself. It has taken on extra-historical connotations for many who hear it today, but these are the issue and not the simple historical content of the Gospel. Changing history because of the symbolical misuse of it is hardly the solution. Rather, any tendency to ascribe to the historical account undue meaning should be addressed from within the church by a countering theological correction. As for Jews today and those who surreptitiously support the Jews but attack religious particularity, their skepticism is understandable until clear teaching is presented that maintains the historical account of the Gospels intact but clearly counters any tendency to make the Jews the pariah. The Christian Scriptures in fact ascribe to the Jews a continuing privileged and beloved place in God’s design. They are identified as loved by God “on account of the patriarchs”. The eleventh chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans could not be more explicit in the acceptance of the Jews, the rebuke of the Gentiles who mistreat them, and the assertion that the Jews have an ongoing place in God’s plan. The solution of those who are supposedly the friend of the Jews of saying that any claim to particularity and superior truth in either the Christian, or by un-extrapolated implication the Jewish religion, as was advanced axiomatically in the abovementioned documentary, is the root of the problem is in fact to attack the tenants of both religions. The Jews await a Messiah and the Christians say that Christ is the Messiah. These are irreducible doctrinal differences but they should not equate to rejection and ascription of immorality by either side.

The following poem by John Donne captures for me a theological point that seems crucial to real Christianity. Although immediately offensive and anti-Semitic, according to the definition of anti-Semitism taught in the documentary, it seems to me that a thoughtful reading discovers in it a counter to anti-Seimitism that doesn’t resort to emotionalism and historicism to deal with a terrible problem:

Holy Sonnet XI
Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side,
Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me,
For I have sinned, and sinned, and only he
Who could do no iniquity hath died:
But by my death can not be satisfied
My sins, which pass the Jews' impiety:
They killed once an inglorious man, but I
Crucify him daily, being now glorified.
Oh let me, then, his strange love still admire:
Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment.
And Jacob came clothed in vile harsh attire
But to supplant, and with gainful intent:
God clothed himself in vile man's flesh, that so
He might be weak enough to suffer woe.

Anyone who does not believe that Christ was crucified because of their own sins, and not because of the Jews, is not a Christian in any believing sense. Donne repeats the historical assertion of the Gospels that the documentary brands as anti-Semitic, but he is saying that for the Jews it was a mere mundane killing of an inglorious man. For those who believe, there is a greater guilt, a greater sin, repeated daily. To call Jews Christ-killers is in Christian teaching to malign the significance of Christ’s teaching for one’s own life. It is a mock piety, a show that always reveals to the discerning unbelief, lack of humility, and distortion of the Gospels and the New Testament teachings. It is in fact a killing of Christ to call Jews “Christ-killers” because the term is clearly appropriating the historical event and ascribing to it a narrowness of symbology that is anathema to the gospel of salvation. Anyone who says to his brother "Christ-killer" is in danger of the fires of hell.

The Armenian Genocide

2008-01-01T09:51:00.000-08:00

A very valuable documentary about the Armenian Genocide:

http://www.amazon.com/Armenian-Genocide-Critically-Acclaimed-Documentary/dp/B000FIFHZ0/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1199209859&sr=8-1

An issue that Turkey to the present day is cavilling about and stonewalling.

The coiner of the term "genocide" had in mind the Turkish genocide of Armenians as well as the Holocaust. "Hitler sardonically asked, 'Who remembered the Armenians?'" (Qtd. in the documentary "The Cross and The Star")

When people say that life was good under the dhimmis comparative to life under Christian dominion, stop and consider this: The extermination of a million and a half Armenian Christians as a desperate expression of the Muslim Ottoman dimishment of power.

They wanted knowledge and beauty now

2008-01-01T08:04:00.000-08:00

"The horrifying slaughter of September 11 tempts us to draw a line around that day and treat it and its immediate consequences as an exceptional case. There is a deep sense, however, in which the terrorist attacks underscore not the fragility of normality but the normality of fragility. This is a point that C. S. Lewis made with great eloquence in a sermon he preached at Oxford in 1939. “I think it important,” he said,

to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is
not panache: it is our nature."-qtd. by Roger Kimball in an excellent New Criterion article on culture with much in relation to Christianity:

http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/20/summer02/fortunesofpermanence.htm

Plato wrote in the wake of the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. He founded his school during a lifetime full of turmoil, and yet the school would last a thousand years before it shut its door, and his writings would continue to challenge and train to the present day.

Apologetics and the Biblical Christ by Avery Dulles

2007-12-20T21:07:00.001-08:00

Apologetics and the Biblical Christ by Avery Dulles
S.J., Woodstock Papers: Occasional Essays for Theology, No. 6, Newman Press, 1971.

Apologetics is endangered when too much is ascribed to its office, it seems clear. A likely result seems to be a reaction to the hubris in which the whole endeavor is rejected altogether. A more effective and less theatric endeavor for Christ is in the path between the two. Avery Dulles, now a Cardinal in the Catholic Church, and still a frequent contributor to the first class periodical First Things (my favorite magazine) now in his 80s, wrote this helpful and astute overview of apologetics in 1971 yet I found it helpful in elucidating key aspects of modern Biblical scholarship. The clarity of definitions is helpful and the historical account of historicist apologetics and the critique of them I think would be helpful to anyone seeking a better grasp of how to think of the Bible in its relationship to modern scholarship.

I am afraid that time has passed and memory of the specifics is already receding after reading this book but I want to at least call to my rough mind some of the few praiseworthy things I have been made aware of through reading it. I appreciate Dulles concise and clear coverage of the history, nature of, dangers and virtues and viability of certain kinds of apologetics. A large point of the book is to reject historicist apologetics and point to possible paths for apologetics. Dulles defines historicist apologetics as apologetics which placed unquestioning confidence in the powers of the scientific historical method to defend the rational basis of the Christian faith. His first chapter is devoted to explaining what the apologetics of historicism has been. He notes in it that even in the Victorian era religious thinkers like Kierkegaard and Newman “protested that history, considered as a purely scientific discipline, could not impose a definite religious interpretation of the person of Jesus.” I pause for a moment on this: here the scientific methodology by being given ascendancy strips history of the certainty and militates against the discernment of metanarrative. It has a limiting, curbing nature to it.

Dulles notes two major charges which had been raised against historicist apologetics in recent times: 1) misunderstanding the limits of history and 2) misconstruing the nature of the biblical sources. On the first he writes the following: “Academic history, it is clear, cannot be the final judge in matters of religion. It does not pretend to be able to pronounce on matters of philosophical truth, aesthetic, ethical , or religious values. The object of technical history is simply the phenomenal past- past events, that is, as they appeared in their spatiotemporal relationships. The ultimate interpretation of the source and significance of such events cannot be achieved by historical research alone. Even to say that the phenomenal past can be recovered by history is to risk exaggeration.” (p. 12).

Dulles goes on to make the following interesting point: “Let us assume, however, that the historical method could establish with overwhelming verisimilitude a definite picture concerning what Jesus had said and done. Would it follow then that history could tell us whether He was really the Messiah and the Son of God? A moment’s reflection will suffice to answer in the negative. At its ideal best, scientific history, conducted according to the norms of the historical-critical school, can put us in the same situation as the original spectators. We have no reason to believe that Jesus’ contemporaries found it easy to believe. Their faith did not issue more or less automatically from what they saw and heard.” (p. 13-14).

In the second chapter of the book, Dulles addresses the topic of the Gospels and scientific history. He addresses the issue of the Synoptic Gospels and “endless list of discrepancies among [them] in reporting the same events.” Examples are the different versions of the Our Father, and the Beatitudes. Dulles writes:

“Divergences of this nature, as Fr. O’Keefe has said, ‘serve to counteract any naïve understanding of the Gospels as some sort of photographic representation of the life of Christ… The Gospels have a freedom in the order of the facts, in their presentation, in their very redaction of the words of Christ, which shows that their authors did not feel bound to the repetition of a definitive formula’ (Catholic Biblical Quarterly 21 [1959]. 173 f.). Matthew and Luke do not, to be sure, radically innovate. We never find them inventing, so to speak out of whole cloth. But these minor changes which they do introduce should makes us cautious in assuming that in any given instance we know exactly what we should have seen or heard if we had been on the spot. What is here said of the Synoptics applies a fortiori to John, whose testimony is not greatly esteemed by positivistic historians.” (p.25)

John Calvin noted the same long ago:

“We know that the Evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates, or even in detailing minutely everything that Christ said or did” (John Calvin, Commentary on the Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. William Pringle, vol. 1, Calvin’s Commentaries 16 (repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 216. )

“The Gospels likewise provide “history” in the minimal sense of stories about an actual human being who lived at a particular time and place not all that far distant from the time of their authors. That they are not “accurate” in many of the ways a modern historian would try to be is not a recent discovery. Calvin took it for granted that their authors rearranged details- the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, combined sayings originally delivered at different times. His doctrine of ‘accommodation’ allowed that God speaks to human beings in ways we can understand, [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.11.13; ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:462-63.] and that might mean expressing a spiritual truth in terms of the worldview that would make sense to a scientifically primitive people: ‘He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.’ [Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. John King, Calvin’s Commentaries 1 (repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 79] …One reason that the Reformers and their successors recognized such freedom with detail is that they knew the Bible so much better than we do and were therefore aware of the smallest discrepancies.” – William C. Placher, The Triune God, p. 54-55. Calvin wrote: “Pious and modest readers ought to be satisfied with having a brief summary of the doctrine of Christ placed before their eyes, collected out of his many and various discourses.” (Calvin, Harmony of the Evangelists, 1: 259.

It is nice to see John Calvin and a Catholic scholar who is now a Cardinal of the Catholic Church agreeing, if unknowingly.
Dulles concludes:

“Most Biblical scholars would now hold that the tradition is faithful without being servile; it transmitted the words and deeds of Jesus with such adaptions as were required to render them intelligible and significant for a different generation living in a different environment.” (p. 26)

Dulles the technical skill and range of knowledge needed in the task of historical criticism, which includes a knowledge of archeology, philology, textual criticism, and comparative religion. He remarks that the task is not a proper field for amateurs and notes that certitude is a rare and precious jewel in it.

He ends the chapter by concluding that the quarrel over the historical value of the Gospels cannot be settled by the techniques of history itself. The conflict, as far as pure history is involved, between the believer and the unbeliever, is irreducible. To overcome the opposition, he directs us to transfer the debate to some other ground.

In the third section, entitled “The Gospels As Confessional Documents”, Dulles elaborates on what he means by moving the debate to other ground, and he asserts this is grounded in the very nature of the Gospel. The Gospels do not aim to transmit a photograph of Jesus as He might have appeared to detached observers. Rather, it is a portrait of Jesus as understood by the believing church. The portrait is an appeal to faith and adoration and an invitation to join the Church in her devout confession. There is no escaping the deadlock on the plane of academic history, Dulles argues, but by moving to the terrain of religious concern we may hope to find a solution.

“Once we have grasped the spiritual nature of their mission, we can easily see why the apostles and Evangelists write as they do. It would be utterly inappropriate for them to offer documentary poofs and hold themselves to the rules of judicial evidence. They can afford to be frankly partisan and to be careless of points of chronology, geography, and descriptive detail.” P. 36.

Dulles avers that there are however, excellent reasons for judging the evangelical portrait of Jesus as credible. First, the New Testament unquestionably reflects the way Jesus was understood by his immediate band of followers. There are many theologies in the New Testament but only one faith. Second, the New Testament faith about Jesus is proclaimed with the stoutest conviction. Third, the New Testament doctrine about Christ is utterly novel. Nothing in the Jewish tradition would have predisposed them to accept what they now proclaimed and they would have shrunk in horror from it before becoming Christians- paying divine honors to a man! One can extend this to also say that nothing in the Hellenic society around them also prepared them for this. Gresham Machen’s The Origin of Paul’s Religion goes into detail about numerous theories that were raised about how the Christian religion could have been derived from Jewish sources (other than the Old Testament) and pagan cults and shows how everyone of them was problematic and how the most likely answer was that Paul’s religion had its origin in the love of the resurrected Christ. Fourth, the apostles themselves were transformed into new men by the news they bore. Fifth, the intrinsic qualities of the Christian message is not the type easily fabricated by the ingenuity of the wise.

In the fifth section, entitled “The Resurrection: History and Confession”, Dulles seeks to demonstrate the difference between the historicist apologetic, which he debunks, and the and the confessional apologetic, which he proposes. The historicist apologetic, he writes, may be boiled down to the following syllogism: “The Gospels are reliable historical sources; moreover, they affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus; therefore, the bodily resurrection occurred.” p. 45. Dulles writes that there is much that is good in the historical critical approach that should be retained but to treat the whole problem with the presupposition that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts is to oversimplify the problem out of existence. “It is to demand concessions which no adversary, or well-informed believer, will grant.”
Sources for example on the appearances of Christ after the resurrection were considered when Dulles was writing (I don’t know the case now) by many to have been from relatively late material. ( I am uncomfortable with this point until I know the reasoning behind such positions better and am not inclined to yield benefit of the doubt on it.) The three Gospel accounts of the appearances are “widely discrepant”. Dulles goes into more detail about this and there are some difficult things to reconcile about this if one is trying for a photographic representation of events. Have you ever tried to compare the different accounts of the appearances side by side? There are difficulties and scholars have ruminated on many angles of these and he mentions some of the most prominent of these points apparently.
Also, there is a difficulty relating to literary genre. “Some of the incidents are narrated in the concise, simple style characteristic of old, traditional material. But other episodes, such as Luke’s account of the journey to Emmaus and the Johannine version of the lakeside apparition, are told with such consummate artistry as to suggest the hand of a skilled litterateur. History can perform an invaluable service for apologetics by removing many of the preposterous conjectures and constructs (Again, Machen’s book is an example of how this may be done). But history can only bring us to the point where opinion divides similar to the way men in Jesus’ day were divided about his miracles. Scientific history may allow us to deny that anyone has the right to deny the resurrection occurred based on it but those adhering to it may not necessarily affirm that anyone in the name of “pure” (scientific) history could affirm that it happened. Dulles further discusses the passages of the post resurrection appearance and how it appears a tradition in the early Church that to percieve the risen jesus required something more than the normal use of one’s eyes and ears. Think of the road to Emmaus and how the disciples did not recognize Jesus at first. Think of Mary Magdalene mistaking him for a gardener. “At the Sea of Tiberias it was reserved for the beloved disciple to perceive and to declare, “It is the Lord.” The other disciples did not apprehend Him so clearly. Otherwise it would hardly be written of them that they did not dare to ask Him: ‘Who art thou?’ (Jn 21:12).”

This point makes sense to me. As it says in Proverbs, “Lean not on your own understanding but in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your path straight.” It is not merely a rational step to believe. The whole is enveloped. And it is not merely a self-awareness or perfection of self-discipline. It is a new birth into believing awareness of God with us. We cannot therefore isolate apprehension of the resurrection from its doctrinal aspect. Dulles quotes Fr. Levie:

“If we bracket the doctrinal aspect, if we deny to dogma and theology any right to intervene in our apologetics, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in April of the year 30 of the Christian era becomes an unintelligible fact, unthinkable to the human mind, since it would be meaningless and contrary to all ordinary likelihood. As a profane historian, I will have no choice except to reduce the documents which seem to favor it to the framework of the verisimilitude to which I am accustomed…If my reconstruction runs up against serious improbabilities, they will seem to me more tolerable than a resurrection in which I can see no meaning.”

This reminds me, oddly enough of a Rumi poem, for the parallel imagery to our Lord’s reference to being born again, though granted it is an appropriation from Rumi’s original sense:

“If anyone were to say to an embryo in the womb, “Outside is a world well-ordered,
a pleasant earth, broad and long, wherein are a thousand delights and many things to eat;
Mountains and seas and plains, fragrant orchards, gardens and sown fields,
A sky lofty and full of light, sunshine and moonbeams and innumerable stars;
its wonders are beyond description: why dost thou say, drinking blood, in this dungeon of filth and pain?’-
The embryo, being what it is, would turn away in utter disbelief; for the blind have no imagination…”

(frm. A poem called “The Unregenerate” in Selected Poems of Rumi trans. By Reynold Nicholson).

We must be born again, and being born again, we must look and see with faith, and not merely with profane science. Reason and education can not save us. Only God can.

In the final section entitled “The Divinity of Christ: History and Confession” Dulles makes similar points about investigation of the claim of Jesus’ divinity. “If it was not clear, even to Jesus’ intimates, that He was more than a national saviour, it may well be asked how a modern reader, by recapturing the words and actions of jesus in His earthly life, could find a clear presentation of His divinity. As a factual historian, I suggest, he cannot hope o rise notably above the level achieved by Jesus’ own disciples.” Dulles continues, though, by asserting that this does not mean that academic history is useless. It can indeed establish the great verisimilitude that Jesus did in numerous ways indicate that His origin was more than human. Further, the rapidity with which the early church came to believe dogmatically that He was the Lord, the Adonai of the Old Testament, can be established with a robust strength of exegesis. A fine example of the logic along this lines is the following:

In many of the regions of the empire it was quite possible to deify a private citizen. but itn at least one nation it was impossible, and that was among the Jews. They adored Yahweh, the one God, the transcendent and ineffable God, whose image they did not portray, whose name they did not pronounce, who was separated from every human creature by abyss upon abyss. To associate with yahweh any kind of man at all would have been a sacrilege and a supreme abomination. The Jews honored the emperor but they let themselves be cut to pieces rather than profess even in a whisper that the emperor was a god; and they would also have let themselves be cut to pieces if they had been obliged by to say the same thing about Moses himself. And would the first Christian whose voice we hear, a Hebrew son of the Hebrews [St. Paul], associate a man with Yahweh in the most natural manner in the world? This is a miracle I refuse to accept." -P.-L. Couchoud qtd. in Le mystere de Jesus (Paris: Rieder, 1926, p. 84), which is qtd. in Apologetics and the Biblical Christ, by Avery Dulles (now a Cardinal in the Catholic church), 1971, p. 70.

Certainly in saying that understanding and seeing Christ for who He is requires more than mere sight and that we should not lean on our own reason we need not and we should not say that reason and logic is to be thereby abandoned, abused and despised. We need men like Couchoud to manifest the logic of it. Dulles puts it succinctly:
“There can be no question of framing arguments, whether deductive or inductive, which rigorously prove the divinity of Christ. Syllogisms can have rhetorical and expository value, but they do not really capture the dynamism by which the mind arrives at the recognition of Christ’s godhead. “ p. 72.

Dulles ends in a quite Catholic way by concluding that in the end there is only one sign of credibility: “the whole Christ in His Church”.

As For Secularism

2007-12-13T15:25:00.000-08:00

“It is fairly obvious that there is some direct, indissoluble bond between faith and the will to a future, or between the desire for a future and the imagination of eternity. And I think this is why post-Christian Europe seems to lack not only the moral and imaginative resources for sustaining its civilization, but even any good reason for continuing to reproduce. There are of course those few idealists who harbor some kind of unnatural attachment to that misbegotten abomination, the European Union--that grand project for forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity--but, apart from a bureaucratic superstate, providently and tenderly totalitarian, one cannot say what there is to expect from that quarter: certainly nothing on the order of some great cultural renewal that might inspire a new zeal for having children…

A culture--a civilization--is only as great as the religious ideas that animate it; the magnitude of a people's cultural achievements is determined by the height of its spiritual aspirations. One need only turn one's gaze back to the frozen mires and fetid marshes of modern Europe, where once the greatest of human civilizations resided, to grasp how devastating and omnivorous a power metaphysical boredom is. The eye of faith presumes to see something miraculous within the ordinariness of the moment, mysterious hints of an intelligible order calling out for translation into artifacts, institutions, ideas, and great deeds, but boredom's disenchantment renders the imagination inert and desire torpid.” –David B. Hart, “Religion in America: Ancient and Modern,” New Criterion, March 2004, p. 6.

The fertility rate of all of the European countries is below replacement level.

“He said: We have observed that theoretical knowledge is something beautiful and valuable and that some theoretical sciences surpass others, being superior either in one or both of two things- namely, in the eminence of the subject and in the firmness of the demonstration occurring in that art…knowledge of the soul is beneficial for every science one intends to learn, and this is due to three considerations: because knowledge of the principles of every science is attained in this science; because other sciences posit as a principle that which has been explained here…and because a main part of the knowledge of a particular science can be attained only by knowing it…For a main part of the natural scientist’s study deals with animal life, knowledge of which is completed only by knowing the soul, the most noble principle of animal life.”-Averroes, Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, p. 1. Aristotle does not generally strike one as bored though whether he strikes one as boring may be a different question. Aristotle here is expressing a robust and exalted view of knowledge of the soul. In secular and materialist philosophy there simply is not a soul. The counterpart of the “death of God” is the death of the soul. Isn’t it noteworthy that the announcement of the “death of God,” received with all seriousness in the West, preceded a frenzy of man's self-destruction suggestive of a man-made Apocalypse? In Christian terms this may be understood with the help of the following: “The ‘love of God,’ as a love accepted by us, consists precisely in the fact that we for our part love him. We are so inclined to the erroneous division of this one love into two separate acts because we have forgotten to regard man in his indissoluble connection with God and have preferred instead to take as our starting point the false conception of ‘man in himself,’ man as one who has his being in himself. All this is expressed in the fore-mentioned section of the Apology [of the Augsburg Confession] which says that in his mercy God himself becomes for us a lovable object: ‘We cannot love God until we have grasped his mercy by faith. Only then does he become an object that can be loved.’ In the very fact of his being revealed to us as the loving subject, the one who does the loving, in that very fact is God the lovable object; that is, we for our part are now subjects who love. We are so in virtue of this fact. We do not have to become loving subjects, nor demonstrate that we are grateful (at any rate this command belongs to a different context): we simply are! Our love appears here as the reverse side of the love of God.” –Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations, Vol. 1, p. 66-67. [Thielicke was a German pastor who oposed Hitler when it counted the most.] There is a profound reason that in the Scriptures the analogy of marriage is repeatedly returned to for God’s relationship with Israel and for His relationship with the Church of Christ Jesus. Now I am going get a little graphic, but I think the following further illustrates something of the nature of the ideal, analogous relationship, the perfect love and oneness, that is conceived of as the only wholesome state of relationship between God and man in the Christian religion: “After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they were touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.” –Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p. 31. The love of God and man is two-sided and seamless. The result of the death of one, or the death to one, is the death of the other. Secularism promises only further death, aimlessness and the boredom of nihilism because in it man has lost their partner for life.

The Origin of Paul's Religion by J. Gresham Machen

2007-12-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

J. Gresham Machen was at the center of the storm of controversy about Biblical criticism and more broadly, the controversy between liberalism and orthodoxy in the first few decades of the 20th century. Years ago, I first took note of his name when reading Francis Schaeffer’s The Great Evangelical Disaster. In it Schaeffer had written:

“Then in the mid 1930s, there occurred an event which I would say marks the
turning-point of the century concerning the breakdown of our culture. By 1936
the liberals were so in control of the Northern Presbyterian Church that they
were able to defrock Dr. J. Gresham Machen. Machen… had been a brilliant
defender of Bible-believing Christianity, as can be seen for example, in his
book entitled Christianity and Liberalism published in 1924…it marked the
culmination of the drift of the Protestant churches from 1900-1936. It was this
drift which laid the basis for cultural, social, moral, legal and governmental
changes from that time to the present. Without this drift in the denominations,
I am convinced that the changes in our society over the last fifty years would
have produced very different results from what we have now. “(p. 34-35).

Not being a Presbyterian or deeply familiar with their tradition, Schaeffer’s remark, impressive for its forcefulness, has sometimes struck me as making too much of the Presbyterians and their affairs, but nevertheless, I’ve regarded it as something noteworthy and still do. Reading on the same page, I was first clued into what seems to me a compelling connection between the philosophically naturalistic Biblical criticism known as “higher criticism” and the Nazi phenomenon: “It is interesting to note that there was a span of approximately eighty years from the time when the higher critical methods originated and became widely accepted in Germany to the disintegration of German culture and the rise of totalitarianism under Hitler.” (p. 35).

Thumbing through the book again now, his rhetoric seems more rigid and simplistic than I recalled, yet Schaeffer still, it seems to me, is worth regarding and evaluating firsthand, and his analysis seems to me to have hit on the vital in this point. The German poet Heinrich Heine, a Jewish convert to Christianity, perceiving the trajectories of the naturalist philosophies which would come to characterize and guide “higher criticism” (and which Schaeffer was looking back on), predicted the Nazi holocaust a hundred years in advance in a prescience I still find stunning whenever I return to it (which is often) in the final pages of his book Religion and Philosophy in Germany which was published in 1832:

"Christianity-and that is its greatest merit- has somehow mitigated that brutal
German love of war, but could not destroy it. Should the subduing talisman, the
cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane
Beserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more
burst into flame... The old stone gods will then rise from the ruins and rub the
dust of a thousand years from their eyes and Thor will leap to life with his
giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals... Do not smile at my advice- the
advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians and Fichteans and
philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same
revolution in the realm of the visible that has taken place in the spiritual...
Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder, German thunder... comes
rolling somewhat slowly, but... its crash... will be unlike anything before in
the history of the world. At the uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead,
and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away... a play
will be played in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an
innocent idyll ." (For more on this quote and on Heine go to http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/quo-heine.html ).

J. Gresham Machen lived at a time when the triumphalism of naturalism was at its peak (before it was meeked by blood) and he dwelt more or less in its storm center, especially as far as the US participation in the theological and philosophical arguments of the day was concerned. The trajectories of the mainline churches today were pivotally affected by the events in which he was a key player. It is also note worthy, it seems to me, that he was defrocked at the same time as the rise to ascendancy of the Third Reich in Germany.

Machen did his undergraduate studies at John Hopkins U. in 1898, majoring in classics, and then went to Princeton U. for an M.A., and then went to Germany where he studied directly under many of the liberal professors whose arguments he would address in The Origin of Paul’s Religion. “Machen considered himself and consciously chose the title of Calvinist, an adherent of the Reformed faith, in the tradition flowing from the Word of God through Paul, Augustine, Calvin, and in America in the noteworthy and great tradition represented by Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, and the other representatives of the "Princeton School," rather than a fundamentalist (a term that he said that he never called himself). The later title was often put on him by others.(6) More precisely yet, Machen considered himself in the tradition of the Westminster Confession, of "Old Princeton," and "Old School Presbyterianism." Machen considered himself a fundamentalist only in the sense that if one meant by that, one who is opposed to modernism.” -http://www.apologeticsinfo.org/papers/machen.html

Much of postmodernist thought is also opposed to modernism and its certainties. Machen did scholarly battle with many of the false certainties in the naturalistic higher criticism of many of the liberal Bible scholars of that day, on their own turf, drawing on his vast knowledge of the ancient world to answer their arguments. “In a well-known 1922 sermon, Harry Emerson Fosdick threw down the gauntlet to fundamentalism when he demanded whether ‘anybody has the right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him.’ In words that could have been lifted from the editorial page of today’s New York Times, Fosdick lamented that ‘the fundamentalists are giving us one of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance that the churches of this country have ever seen.’ John Gresham Machen responded a year later with the great popular defense of conservative theology Christianity and Liberalism, warning that ‘the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology’… In his 1923 response to modernism, John Gresham Machen wrote that “vastly more important than all questions with regard to methods of preaching is the root question as to what it is that shall be preached.” Machen understood that theology matters a great deal to the preservation of historic Christian orthodoxy. The modernist-fundamentalist controversies in which Fosdick and Machen were central characters are long over, but the same battle between two Christianities—a historic faith grounded in a supernatural biblical record and two thousand years of church tradition, and a modern Christianity redefined by the assumptions of Enlightenment anti-supernaturalism—rages on.” ” – Dean C. Curry, First Things, October 2007, “Evangelical Amnesia”.

“…with his involvement in the debate about the Philadelphia Plan of 1920,
the publication of The Origins of Paul's Religion in 1921, and of Christianity
and Liberalism in 1923, Machen went from a relatively unknown professor of New
Testament to one of the central figures and spokespersons in the
modernist-fundamentalist controversy, and at that not just within the
Presbyterian Church U.S.A., and of Princeton Seminary, but in Christendom. On
May 21, 1922 at the First Presbyterian Church, New York City, Harry Emerson
Fosdick, a Baptist, who had been invited to be the associate minister of the
church, preached a sermon entitled, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"(11) The
sermon contrasted among other issues the conservative and liberal views (which
Fosdick subsequently admitted he held) of the virgin birth, the inspiration of
Scripture, and the atonement, and pleaded for tolerance of both views within the
church.(12) Through a series of events, the sermon whose title had been changed
to "The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith," was reprinted and sent around
the country.” -http://www.apologeticsinfo.org/papers/machen.html

In my volume American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr., one of the classic sermons is J.G. Machen’s “History and Faith” and the other is Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” They are worth comparing side by side and are relevant to the modern divides. Both make noteworthy points. A very noteworthy observer came to the US at the time and made pertinent remarks:

“Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary as a postgraduate fellow, having
completed two doctoral programs at the University of Berlin. At this time he was
‘making up his mind’ about faith and practice. He was a careful observer of all
of his experiences outside of Germany. The American experience was enriching,
but, in many ways, it was also disappointing. Bonhoeffer was turned off by the
message of celebrated American preachers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick at the
Riverside Church, and by what he described as ‘Protestantism without the
Reformation.’ Preachers did not do justice to biblical interpretation of
theological creeds, as he viewed their message. They were mainly interested in
social issues. This lack was reinforced by the absence of serious theological
reflection. He observed that ‘only in the Negro churches did he find that they
spoke and heard in a Christian way of sin and grace and love toward God and the
final hope.”

–J. Deotis Roberts, Bonhoeffer & King: Speaking Truth to Power, p. 45.

I find Machen’s writings generally persuasive, sometimes even with a prophetic force. So when I emphasize the following distinction, I do not wish to imply much direct criticism of him, but more of what has generally come to be known as “fundamentalism”. Bonhoeffer’s criticism of Harry Emerson Fosdick could seem to imply that he was on the side of Machen in opposition to liberalism but Bonhoeffer expressed no awareness of Machen that I know of but only of the vitality of the faith in the Negro churches. Nevertheless, I think they had a lot in common in their stances. The following however is a description of a broad trend into which may be accurate in describing the broad trend into which the “fundamentalists” seem to fall. Pay attention to what Placher says about the Westminster Confession of Faith. I’ll come back to that:

“In sum, premodern thinkers like Anselm and Aquinas, and the mystical tradition
before the early modern age, were not trying to prove God’s existence, define
God’s essence, or describe their own experiences of God. They were trying,
instead, to show that such enterprises are impossible and that God lies beyond
all our proofs and definitions and imaginations. But the world changed, and
after the Reformation, in a divided Christian world, each party wanted to be
able to argue for its own correctness, which meant drawing matters of faith into
a realm where decisive argument was supposedly possible. Protestant orthodoxy,
for example, took the doctrine of Scripture- in the hands of Luther and Calvin a
way of challenging tradition- and turned it into a theory of propositional
authority. The Westminster Confession of 1647, which unlike previous Protestant
statements of faith began with the authority of Scripture rather than with God,
provides one mark of the change. Catholics countered with new definitions of the
authority of the church.” –William C. Placher, The Triune God: An Essay in
Postliberal Theology, (2007), p. 20.

After Fosdick’s sermon had been reprinted and widely distributed the modernist-fundamentalist controversy rose to a new pitch culminating in a famous General Assembly of 1923 in which the Assembly was asked to affirm “‘Five Declarations’ or the five necessary or essential doctrines: the infallibility of the Bible; the virgin birth of Jesus; his substitutionary atonement on the cross; his bodily resurrection; and Christ's mighty miracles, as essential doctrines of Scripture; and to reaffirm its adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith.” This Assembly was split something similar to our nation in the last election with a vote of 439 to 359 on a pivotal issue. In response this action of the 1923 General Assembly “a committee of 150 Presbyterian ministers, headquartered in Auburn, New York, issued a document.(16) This document became known as the “‘Auburn Affirmation.’ It had two major contentions: (1) that the General Assembly had no constitutional right to elevate the five doctrines as special tests for ordination to the ministry, unless the constitution was changed by a vote of the presbyteries”; and (2) that the five doctrines are non-essential to the system of doctrine taught in Scripture and that they are only theories of about what the Bible actually teaches.(17) It was signed by over twelve hundred Presbyterian ministers in the spring of 1924.” The idea that Christianity can remain uncompromised fatally with the exclusion of the doctrine of Christ’s bodily resurrection is anathema. Central issues were at stake and Machen was rising to the issue, a bold and capable man. But there still might be noticed from afar, outside the heat of that battle (though similar battles certainly still rage), possible weaknesses in assumptions of the brave.

As regards Placher’s observation, this seems to be a crucial issue now in hindsight, something that to some extent defined the “fundamentalists”, and a weakness. Machen was all about the Westminster Confession of Faith. Yet Placher observes that the Westminster Confession marks a turning point from emphasis on the authority of God to the authority of Scripture, and is a trend of combat which effectively was reducing God in some ways to proofs and Scripture. Machen would be one of if not the central figure in the breaking off from Princeton to form Wesminster Seminary. Yet hear what Machen says about the Bible:

“The Bible, then, is right at the central point; it is right in its account of
Jesus; it has validated its principal claim. Here, however, a curious phenomenon
comes into view. Some men are strangely ungrateful. Now that we have Jesus, they
say, we can be indifferent to the Bible. We have the present Christ; we care
nothing about the dead documents of the past. You have Christ? But how, pray,
did you get Him? There is but one answer; you got Him through the Bible. Without
the Bible you would never have known so much as whether there be any Christ. Yet
now that you have Christ you give the Bible up; you are ready to abandon it to
its enemies; you are not interested in the findings of criticism. Apparently,
then, you have used the Bible as a ladder to scale the dizzy height of Christian
experience, but now that you are safe on top you kick the ladder down. Very
natural! But what of the poor souls who are still battling with the flood
beneath? They need the ladder too. But the figure is misleading. The Bible is
not a ladder; it is a foundation. It is buttressed, indeed, by experience; if
you have the present Christ, then you know that the Bible account is true. But
if the Bible were false, your faith would go. You cannot, therefore, be
indifferent to Bible criticism. Let us not deceive ourselves. The Bible is at
the foundation of the Church. Undermine that foundation, and the Church will
fall. It will fall, and great will be the fall of it.”(http://homepage.mac.com/shanerosenthal/reformationink/jgmhistfaith.htm )

Yet Machen goes on and conflates the Bible with Christ! : “The Bible is despised—to the Jews a stumbling block, to the Greeks foolishness—but the Bible is right.” Why this move? A shrewd combat technique? I am treading dangerous ground because I believe I am toying with criticism of a godly man who rose to the challenge more straight then many around him, and truly contending for the faith. But there is a scent of danger in the way in which he elevates the Bible as well as a swell of courage. The Bible is shamed in the liberals hands and its uniqueness is forsaken but this does not mean that the fundamentalists had it all right. In case I appear to claim that I have sounded these events or can navigate them in any great depth or detail, I want to state here that I do not know them well or thoroughly. It is still to me like a faint din that has been brought nearer by some recent reading. My purpose in the above is to situate my summary of Machen’s book The Origin of Paul’s Religion in the historical controversy in which it was born. I now intend to cover only some main points that have most struck me in reading the book, the main things I have learned from it, and the questions the book and the reading around it have brought more into relief for me. Machen raises all sorts of questions. He is at the center of divisions and many have accused him of being a divisive character. This is the tenor of Fosdick’s general argument in his famous sermon noted above. So one question that is brought forward for me is how to distinguish the nature of diviseness as a work of the flesh versus divisiveness (See Galatians 6:20-21) as the work of Christ (“I came to bring not peace but a sword.”)

Another question that comes to the fore is the general one of how best to understand the nature of the arguments at these times. Were J. G. Machen and B.B. Warfield reactionary and narrow-minded in the face of the modern advances? There are severe problems in taking a naïvely liberal, one-sided view of these events. They are certainly caricatured in the modern memory, what little there remains of it, and the word fundamentalist is a pejorative now. But when one takes a closer look at the writings of these men, I for one find they were not simple-minded ideologues. Their argumentation was informed by the heights of scholarship of their day and many of their arguments still hold. Machen argued against the naturalist interpretations and constructs in a vigorous way, citing fully the strengths of a position, laying it out with clarity, giving each what seems their due acknowledgments, before answering them, sometimes with quite a bite. Many of the liberal scholars he argued against he had sat under personally. He was not speaking condemnation from a remote cave, blind to the progress of modernity. He was, however, rejecting modernity, before the postmodernists. Likewise the liberal positions of the day were not the paragons of sobriety and sturdy mindedness that they are now often assumed to be.

Take for instance the Scopes trial held at that time and generally regarded as a triumph over fundamentalist narrow-mindedness. Few seem aware that the “science” that was being argued for at that time was evolutionary theory wed with, one with, of a piece with eugenics, Darwinian race theory, Nietzschean nihilism and Social Darwinism. I recommend everyone read the Wikipedia entry on A Civic Biology, the text book that Scopes was brought to trial for teaching from. Here are some excerpts: “The Races of Man. -- At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America. .. Eugenics. -- When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics. ... Parasitism and its Cost to Society. -- Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.” It may not fit with the ‘stories we tell ourselves” but the “fundamentalists” like William Jennings Bryan were fighting eugenics and race theory when they were fighting the teaching of evolution in the schools because that is what evolution meant at that time. Much of what liberalism of that day stood for has been backed off from by all today. Much of what was believed to be scientific (and therefore most true) is now called scientism. Machen was facing what he saw as a mortal threat to sound doctrine. Fosdick and others were ready to sacrifice doctrine for the sake of unity in other matters. Fosdick, for instance, rejected belief in the virgin birth in accommodating the false absolutes of the liberalism of that day.

Here is a sample of the kind of aggressive stance Machen takes toward liberalism:

“The particularism of the Old Testament might have been overcome by practical
considerations, especially by the consideration that since as a matter of fact
the Gentiles would never accept circumcision and submit to the Law the only way
to carry on the broader work was quietly to keep the more burdensome
requirements of the Law in abeyance. This method would have been the method of
‘liberalism’. And it would have been utterly futile. It would have meant an
irreparable injury to the religious conscience; it would have sacrificed the
good conscience of the missionary and the authoritativeness of his proclamation.
Liberalism would never have conquered the world. Fortunately liberalism was not
the method of Paul. Paul was not a practical Christian who regarded life as
superior to doctrine, and practice as superior to principle. On the contrary, he
overcame the principle of Jewish particularism in the only way in which it could
be overcome; he overcame principle by principle. It was not Paul the practical
missionary, but Paul the theologian, who was the real apostle of the Gentiles.
In his theology he avoided certain errors that lay near at hand. He avoided the
error of Marcion, who in the middle of the second century combated Jewish
particularism by representing the whole of the Old Testament economy as evil and
as the work of being hostile to the good God. That error would have deprived the
Church of the prestige which it derived from the possession of an ancient and
authoritative Book; as a merely new religion Christianity never could have
appealed to the Gentile world. Paul avoided also the error of the so-called
“Epistle of Barnabas,” which, while it accepted the Old Testament, rejected the
entire Jewish interpretation of it; the Old Testament Law, according to the
Epistle of Barnabas, was never intended to require literal sacrifices and
circumcision in the way in which it was interpreted by the Jews. That error,
also, would have been disastrous; it would have introduced such boundless
absurdity into the Christian use of the Scriptures that all truth and soberness
would have fled.” –The Origin of Paul’s Religion, p. 17-18.

One thing I noted in Machen’s writings is the appearance of rudiments of the “Lord, Liar, Lunatic” argument that is commonly attributed to C.S. Lewis. It appears both in the sermon and in The Origin of Paul’s Religion. For example here is part of the argument at least in “History and Faith”:

“It is really impossible, but suppose it has been done. You have reconstructed
the historical Jesus—a teacher of righteousness, an inspired prophet, a pure
worshipper of God. You clothe Him with all the art of modern research; you throw
upon Him the warm, deceptive, calcium-light of modern sentimentality. But all to
no purpose! The liberal Jesus remains an impossible figure of the stage. There
is a contradiction at the very centre of His being. That contradiction arises
from His Messianic consciousness. This simple prophet of yours, this humble
child of God, thought that He was a heavenly being who was to come on the clouds
of heaven and be the instrument in judging the earth. There is a tremendous
contradiction here. A few extremists rid themselves easily of the difficulty;
they simply deny that Jesus ever thought He was the Messiah. An heroic measure,
which is generally rejected! The Messianic consciousness is rooted far too deep
in the sources ever to be removed by a critical process. That Jesus thought He
was the Messiah is nearly as certain as that He lived at all. There is a
tremendous problem there. It would be no problem if Jesus were an ordinary
fanatic or unbalanced visionary; He might then have deceived Himself as well as
others. But as a matter of fact He was no ordinary fanatic, no megalomaniac. On
the contrary, His calmness and unselfishness and strength have produced an
indelible impression. It was such an one who thought that He was the Son of Man
to come on the clouds of heaven. A contradiction! Do not think I am
exaggerating. The difficulty is felt by all. After all has been done, after the
miraculous has caretully been eliminated, there is still, as a recent liberal
writer has said, something puzzling, something almost uncanny, about Jesus.2 He
refuses to be forced into the mold of a harmless teacher. A few men draw the
logical conclusion. Jesus, they say, was insane. That is consistent. But it is
absurd.”

There may be an overconfidence and leaning upon proofs too much but there is something healthy as well, something strong in the reasoning dispatch of men like Machen. He reminds me in some ways of C.S. Lewis. They were men of their times but we have much we can learn from them. My ambivalence in criticizing Machen is in part because I don’t want to contribute to an already misleading critical caricature. I also am afraid that I have focused in some ways on peripherals and have given little discussion of the content of the main book in question. The argumentation is dense and is navigating some of the most prestigious scholarship of the day. Much of the arguments Machen makes still hold today and variations of them can be seen in the apologetic of N.T. Wright today, for example.

Machen certainly does not think we should avoid biblical criticism of liberal scholars. He himself was fully engaged with them and fully believed the essentially orthodox gospel of Christianity was the superior understanding available through scholarship, and not in spite of all the ideas observations and theories of predominantly naturalist modernist Bible scholarship. In summing up in the final pages of his book, Machen concludes on the question of the origin of Paul’s religion that it was the love of Christ:

“If Jesus was not the divine Redeemer that Paul says He was, how did the Pauline
religion of redemption arise? Three great hypotheses have been examined and have
been found wanting. Paulinism, it has been shown, was not based upon the Jesus
of modern naturalism; if Jesus was only what He is represented by modern
naturalistic historians as being, then what was distinctive about Paul was not
derived from Jesus. The establishment of that fact has been a notable
achievement of Wrede and Bousset. But if what is essential in Paulinism was not
derived from Jesus, whence was it derived? It was not derived, as Wrede
believed, from the pre-Christian apocalyptic notions of the Messiah; for the
apocalyptic Messiah was not an object of worship; and not a living person to be
loved. It was not derived from pagan religion, in accordance with the brilliant
hypothesis of Bousset; for pagan influence is excluded from the self-testimony
of Paul, and the pagan parallels utterly break down. But even if the parallels
were ten times closer than they are, the heart of the problem would not have
been touched. The heart of the problem is found in the Pauline relation to
Christ. That relation cannot be described by mere enumeration of details; it
cannot be reduced to lower terms; it is an absolutely simple and indivisible
thing. The relation of Paul to Christ is a relation of love; and love exists
only between persons. It is not a group of ideas that is to be explained, if
Paulinism is to be accounted for, but the love of Paul for his Saviour. And that
love is rooted, not in what Christ has said, but in what Christ had done. He
‘loved me and gave himself for me.’ There lies the basis of the religion of
Paul; there lies the basis of all of Christianity. That basis is confirmed by
the account of Jesus which is given in the Gospels, and given, indeed, in all
the sources. It is opposed by modern reconstructions. And those reconstruction
are all breaking down.”

In the closing words above and elsewhere Machen gives a fine sense of the nature of the faith, and intuitively rejects the historicist project that was a pitfall especially then. Line up the facts in verisimilitude and you may still not see it. Faith comes by hearing but we must grasp the whole, the essential, the simple love of Christ. He also emphasizes that what Paul grasped about Christ was not from what he said but from what he did. A good way to end a defense of doctrine. For a fascinating window into the current state of affairs in the PCUSA, I recommend going to the following link and selecting number 10 to listen to the fascinating the interview with Parker Williams. According to his perspective the PCUSA refused to censure in the highest PC court the statement, "What is the big deal about Jesus?" Williams is an intriguing figure:
http://www.stannespublichouse.com/newdraught/

And it might finally be worth noting one of of the main observations of Bonhoeffer in regard to the churches in the US (as summed up by Roberts): "there is no arrogance in claiming to be the true church of Jesus Christ. The church is a church for sinners and not only for the righteous." p. 45.

The Day the Leader Was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz

2007-12-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

The Day the Leader Was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz
(translated by Malak Mashem), (orig. pub. in 1985).

This is a slender novel by Mahfouz, only 103 pages. Mahfouz is one of the greatest writers of the Middle East in modern times. He was recognized for his accomplishment with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Almost anyone in the Middle East you talk to knows of him. He died only this year, in his nineties. It was primarily through him that the novel as a form of writing was introduced into the Middle East. And O, how richly! The warmth and humane eye of his novels ponders the streets of Cairo, Egypt, the lives and loves and struggles and sorrows of humanity in the alleys and streets and behind the closed doors. The universal commonality of people is clearly brought to the fore in his deft works.

I don’t care to make this a lengthy and needless praise. My purpose here is to hopefully bring to mind some of the noble and lovely, etc. things for at the least my fuller contemplation. The story is exquisitely told. It is about the love of a working age couple under the stresses of poverty and political unrest in Egypt. Each chapter alternates between three characters, Elwan and Randa and Elwan’s grandfather, Mutashimi Zayed. The grandfather in the story is a pious Sufi Muslim that has had a wild past. The kind of sweetness and stress on universal love in Sufi Islam comparative to the more austere and stern and miltant strains seems to be reflected in Mahfouz’s books in general, but that is just a guess.

This book is a fine piece of art. It takes a writer like Mahfouz to be able to find the exact sentences with which to somehow evoke depth of emotion in his characters and the corresponding resonance in his readers in so few words. It takes a truly praiseworthy elegance of mind to trace the inner thoughts and lives of these three characters in a way that really captures depth and dimension, passion and sweetness, anger and despair, not just in them but also in the peripheral characters through their eyes.

There is something about Mahfouz’s writings that is like a kind of sunlit illumination. I don’t mean this sentimentally. First there is his broad eye which is reminiscent of Tolstoy for how much he takes in and the deft verisimilitude with which he paints a picture of the lives in his story. And there is the soulful focus on people. People are central to his writings. By the sunlit I mean this kind of attention to each person, even to the villains, that somehow is soft like the light of sunset. There is a kind of benevolence and knowing in his novels. He sees a great deal and does not hesitate to portray the dark motives and the evil behaviors but he treats all with a dignity so that there is a kind of perspective that is not inimical to the command to love ones enemies.

This book was also for me a chance to reflect on the exterior pressures such as finances and family on love. The portrayal of poverty and the sense of its oppressiveness and strain was also made more palpable. Elwan was not able to make enough money to pay for a flat and so he had to postpone marrying Randa until her parents began to intervene and her lecherous and ambitious boss sought to make the most of the opportunity and to enlist her in his project like a useful item rather than an end in herself. The dignity and the pride and humbleness in the midst of the stresses of poverty is portrayed in a moving way in the lives of these characters, each with their perspectives and cares and perceptions and emotions. The grandfather’s love for his grandson as he is nearing the end of his life with the distance of age is also movingly depicted.

Reading a book on the Triune God and going in increasingly rarified air, it was a true respite to turn to this novel on a sleepless night.

Such a novel I think depicts simply and elegantly and truthfully something that is often denied now, put out of mind as strange and foreign, or even militantly and openly attacked, the perception that men and women have natures, that love can grow up naturally and more or less purely between them, and that these routes can be abandoned by warping ways that effect our character, such as ambition, which stifles and paves over the possibility of true love in a man or woman’s breast, by solidified ways of thinking and basing their life which negate the other, the Thou, preventing the fullness of the I and Thou relationship. It is in this sense a good and gentle reminder of the natural and a beacon to seek it.

One of the sins condemned in Romans 1 is the lack of natural affection (such as a mother who abandons her baby). C.S. Lewis discusses this concept as it was conveyed in an archaic meaning of the word kinde in a poem by George Herbert: “In Herbert’s ‘I the unkinde, ungratefull’ (from Love) the modern meaning would be disastrous; the idea of general beneficence fromman to God borders on the absurd. Herbert is classing himself with ‘unkind mothers’ and ‘unnatural children’ as one who, with gross insensibility, makes no response to the arch-natural appeal of the tenderest and closest personal relation that can be imagined; one who is loved in vain.” –C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, p. 32-33.

This is what I think of when I think of the effects of idolatry, on me and on others. The plastering over of natural affections, the replacement of them with void and drugs and distractions, with buzz and squirminess and shallow vapidity in the presence of the profound and lovely and whole. In every country it seems there are always those growing up who view their country with a canny eye, who love the people and life they know enough to caressingly portray truth about it, granted with the imperfection and limitation of man. But they are always signs, it seems, to point us all, any who will heed, to truths which are plain to all except when pushed out by idolatry.

The Richness of Unanswerable Questions

2007-11-21T22:24:00.000-08:00

"6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world...
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that is exists.
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni [under the category of eternity] is to view it as a whole- a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole- it is this that is mystical." -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 149

"To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning." -Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, 74e, entry for 8.7.16.

[Interjection: Here W. is reminding me of the Sabbath and of the knowledge we come to in conversion. By knowledge here is referenced, I think, what W. also says in these words: "Feeling the world as a limited whole- it is this that is mystical". I like Philip Rieff's term "the feeling intellect." The menuha, the positive rest of the Sabbath, is properly a resting embrace of this wholeness, of this larger meaning, of the eternity that God has placed in our hearts. Perhaps some may feel threatened by my linking knowledge to conversion, that is, special knowledge that sets the believer apart from others, in a more enviable position, having something the princely, self controlled Buddhist may not, while one is poor and of no account and still swayed by addictions, perhaps. Some Jesus freak loser. But there are, however you cut it, differences in the "wholes" acknowledged, either by secularity or Buddhists, to use these examples, with Christianity. For example, in secularity, the facts of the world are the end of the matter, but: "To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter." Buddhists deny that we have a self. They point to discontinuities and suggest from this that we are not we.... Christ, on the otherhand, says, only if you lose yourself will you find yourself. The Buddhists are also, apparently (from my limited knowledge) keen to avoid self-absorption and self-centeredness. They acknowledge the problem that Jesus is addressing. They just seem to disallow the solution that Jesus Christ's words speak about. So their wholeness is not the wholeness of the self surrendered to Christ. It is a different wholeness. But then one must admit that this is doubtless a highly surface level reading. Still, don't fear the synthesis. Its how you live! ]

Famous final words of Wittgenstein's Tractatus : "7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

"My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits on the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing , I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it." -Wittgenstein in a letter to the editor Ludwig von Ficker.

"Positivism holds- and this is its essence- that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about." -Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir (1987 trans.), p. 97.

"Life seriously led poses questions whose answers lie beyond language's reach, questions that can be answered only in the living. But Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard and Levinas, realized how impoverished life would be absent such questions ." -William Placher, The Triune God: An Essay In Postliberal Theology , 2007, p. 36-37. [All quotes were also taken from the cullings presented in Placher's book).

There Is A God by Antony Flew

2007-11-19T19:55:00.000-08:00

Antony Flew’s There Is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, 2007, Harper Collins.

http://www.amazon.com/There-God-Notorious-Atheist-Changed/dp/0061335290/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195530032&sr=8-1

I found this book exceedingly interesting and absorbing though requiring careful attention to the elegant simplicity of the arguments in which few if any words were wasted.

Antony Flew was one of the most influential atheists of this century, helping to set the agenda for world atheism for a half century. His “Theology and Falsification”, a paper first presented at a 1950 meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club chaired by C. S. Lewis, became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century.

Roy Varghese writes in the introduction, “It is not too much to say that within the last hundred years no mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew’s fifty years of anti-theological writings.” In comparison, Bertrand Russell only produced a few polemical pamphlets on his skeptical views and his disdain for organized religion. There were other atheists in later years, but none of them have changed the agenda in the way that Flew did.

Part of the learning I have derived from this book was of the first hand historical accounts. Antony Flew first really began his path of atheistic argumentation in the debate forum of the Oxford Socratic Club chaired by C.S. Lewis. He gives an account of one famous night when the atheist Elisabeth Anscombe debated Lewis and routed him, causing the revision of a chapter in his book Miracles. He tells of the Lewis’s surprise and describes his memory afterward of seeing the lone figure of Lewis retreating to hurriedly walking to his study in the distance and Anscombe and her friends directly ahead of Flew laughing and in high spirits. Lewis has been accused at times of chauvinism. Women I respect have detected it in his writings. It occurs to me that sometimes God humbles through objects of our scorn and in this case it may have been an atheist woman. Certainly for anyone who has read much of Lewis, though, especially for instance his reflections upon the death of his wife in A Grief Observed, the tenderness and humility and devotion he shows there seem to indicate that if he was chauvinist he progressed in his beliefs to greater wisdom, or at least showed at times an uncommon feeling connection to the opposite sex.

It was also at the Oxford Socratic Club that Flew made his first and only presentation, reading the paper “Theology and Falsification”, which would become the over the years the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century and a regular staple for philosophy courses. Of the Oxford Socratic club, Flew notes: “This Socratic principle [“follow the argument wherever it leads.”] also formed the inspiration of the Socratic Club, a group that was really at the center of what intellectual life there was in wartime Oxford. The Socratic Club was a lively forum for debates between atheists and Christians, and I was a regular participant at its meetings. Its redoubtable president from 1942 to 1954 was the famous Christian writer C.S. Lewis. The club convened every Monday evening during term time in the underground Junior Common Room of St. Hilda’s College. In his preface to the first issue of the Socratic Digest, Lewis cited Socrates’ exhortation to ‘follow the argument wherever it leads.’ He noted that this ‘arena specially devoted to the conflict between Christianity and unbeliever was a novelty.’” (p. 22-23).

Obviously my attention is being caught especially by Lewis, a truly “beautiful mind”, in Flew’s accounts. However, there is something noteworthy about Flew from the beginning here that sets him apart from the “New Atheists”. Flews’ first work, while challenging theism is also considered by him to have been a driving of the nail into the coffin of logical positivism which as a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical tactic had had the effect of silencing conversation and toleration between the theists and atheists. Flew participated in and truly appreciated the open exchange of views and the dialogue between atheists like him and men like Lewis, who altered their views when confronted with logic regardless of who it came from. Part of what this book brings out in clarity and historical perspective is how intellectual communities are often guided by tactics and temporal vogues of approaches that frame their thinking and debates. Understanding this brings out in relief how the tactics being adopted by the New Atheists as a whole are similar to the Logical Positivists in not allowing for discussion or debate.

Flew defended the legitimacy of discussing theological claims against the logical positivist tactic and challenged philosophers of religion to elucidate their assertions. Oddly enough, his principled atheist argumentation facilitated the rebirth of rational theism in analytic philosophy. Before him the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, popularized by A.J. Ayer in the English speaking world by his 1936 work, Language, Truth and Logic, held that only statements which could be verified through sense experience or which were true simply by the nature of their form and the meaning of the words used. At the heart was the claim called the “verification principle” that the meaning of a proposition lies in its verification. Flew considered his argument in “Theology and Falsification” a final nail in the coffin against this position. “Instead of the arrogant announcement,” he wrote, “that everything which any believer might choose to say be ruled out of consideration a priori as allegedly constituting a violation of the supposedly sacrosanct verification principle- here curiously maintained as a secular revelation- I preferred to offer a more restrained challenge. Let the believers speak for themselves, individually and severally.” Ayer himself agreed on the death of logical positivism and stated that he no longer thought much of Language, Truth and Logic was true, but that it had a cathartic effect at the time.

“In ‘Theology and Falsification’, God and Philosophy, and The Presumption of Atheism….he laid out a road map for subsequent philosophy of religion. In ‘Theology of Falsification” he raised the question of how religious statements can make meaningful claims (his much-quoted expression ‘death by a thousand qualifications’ captures this point memorably); in God and Philosophy he argued that no discussion on God’s existence can begin until the coherence of the concept of an omnipresent, omniscient spirit had been established; in the Presumption of Atheism he contended that the burden of proof rests with theism and that atheism should be the default position. Along the way, of course, he of course analyzed the traditional arguments for God’s existence. But it was his reinvention of the frameworks that changed the whole nature of the discussion.”

Flew in his introduction responded to the spurious claims by Dawkins and others hand waving a man of his accomplishment off by reference to his age at a distance, without listening to the man, no doubt. He responds to this and Roy Varghese responds too, much more blisteringly. Flew’s response is with the quiet lucid reasoning that characterizes the book as a whole. The wise, the few, will note that popular opponents, such as Richard Dawkins, of positions like Flew’s are indicating by their silencing tactics their willingness to be intolerant but not their capacity to answer the superior arguments that men like Flew quietly, elegantly, serenely give. Flew writes: “It has been said that fear concentrates the mind powerfully, and these critics had concluded that expectations of an impending entrance into the afterlife had triggered a deathbed conversion. Clearly these people were familiar with neither my writings on the nonexistence of the afterlife nor with my current views on the topic. For over fifty years I have not simply denied the existence of God, but also the existence of an afterlife. My Gifford Lectures published as The Logic of Mortality represent the culmination of this process of thought. This is one area in which I have not changed my mind. Absent special revelation, a possibility that is well represented in this book by N.T. Wright’s contribution, I do not think of myself “surviving” death. For the record, then, I want to lay to rest all those rumors that have me placing Pascalian bets.” After reading the book the vacuity of the dismissive remarks is amply apparent. There is no reason to belabor this point but I would like to remark that the vast majority including Dawkins are unable to write such a well reasoned book as the one Flew has provided.

I am not going to try to reconstruct the arguments of the book in detail. It recounts key issues and how positions he held and argued forcefully were met and answered in ways he had not at first seen. The story is one of an incremental change, a progress in philosophy, in following the argument where it led. Four key chapters address the following questions (chapter headings):

Who wrote the laws of nature?
Did the universe know we were coming?
Did something come from nothing?

In reading this book one of the things that were brought home to me was the work of philosopher and how beyond reading books there is the reading of arguments, exactly the thing Socrates was so keen on. The work of following an argument requires great labor at times and may lead to embarrassing overturning of ones hard fought positions. It is easier to cast aspersions and revel in prankish tongues, ‘innovative’ for their intolerance, but weak on reason. But there is a reward in love of the truth.

Flew is a quiet sign to searchers that beyond the silencing tactics of the “new atheists” and others voices in an increasingly intolerant secularism, there is the argument and the questions, and if one is brave enough in their soul to heed these instead of the cosmic diversions, a lucid and narrow way beckons.

Another thing that occurs to me is the nature of atheism in general. It becomes more vividly apparent that not all views are equal. Flew directly contrasts with much of what atheism stands for, which is often an evasion and silencing of deeper questions. Materialism after all from ancient times has had the notion that the cosmos always was and is and will be and that therefore we need not ask why is there anything and not nothing. Many atheists express their distaste for ultimate questions, their boredom, their repugnance, their pride in innocence from contemplation, their erstwhile avoidance of philosophy. Schopenhauer’s quip remains true: “…materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” I do not mean to say by this that there are not honest and truth loving atheists that are sincerely seeking the truth. I know at least one. But as for the repudiation of ultimate questions, that is more blameworthy than anti-science, which is quite blameworthy. It is avoidance of, well, one’s reason. There is always something lesser to lose yourself in, you cowards!

Especially interesting in the context of the present debates is Flew’s history with Richard Dawkins, most recently the author of The God Delusion, and his pointed criticism of some of Dawkins arguments. I see about recounting some of these in more detail, especially if there is expressed interest. One point is perhaps in a sense more minor but not too flattering of Dawkins. He points out that Dawkins is aware of and cites Max Jammer’s book Einstein and Religion, (Jammer was one of Einstein’s friends) but uses it very selectively in order to uphold the view Flew previously held that Einstein was an atheist. Dawkins tries to explain away Einstein's statements about God as metaphorical references to nature. Roy Varghese writes, "But this bit of Einsteinian exegesis is patently dishonest. Dawkins references only quotes that show Einstein's distaste for organized and revelational religion. He deliberately leaves out Einstein's belief in a 'superior mind' and a 'superior reasoning power' at work in the laws of nature, but also Einstein's specific denial that he is a pantheist or an atheist." Einstein even in one place cited by Jammer expresses anger at the attempts of atheists to misuse his statements to this end. Jammer also dispels notions that Einstein believed in Spinoza’s God, relating Einstein’s relation to Spinoza, which was not a deep conceptual one.

This book is worth getting a copy of even for the preface and first appendix alone by Roy Varghese in which he sets out an astute and withering critique of the New Atheists. Similarly, the final appendix by N.T. Wright stands on in its own right, where he sets out a powerful argument for belief in the resurrection of Christ, the most powerful that Flew says he has ever encountered.

Below touches on Varghese’s critiques:

Roy Varghese notes that oddly the recent books by the new atheists read like fundamentalist sermons with hell-fire and brimstone and asks how the new atheists fit into the philosophical discussion on God of the last several decades. He answers that they don’t, that basically they are a reversion to the refuted logical positivism of another age.

First, he says, they refuse to address the central grounds for positing a divine reality. “Dennett spends seven pages on the arguments for God’s existence. Harris none… Dawkins talks of the origins of consciousness as ‘one-off’ events triggered by an initial stroke of luck.’ Wolpert writes: ‘I have purposely [!] avoided any discussion of consciousness, which remains mostly poorly understood.’ About the origin of consciousness, Dennett, a die-hard physicalist, once wrote, ‘and then a miracle happens.’

Dawkins talks of the origins of consciousness as ‘one-off’ events triggered by an initial stroke of luck.” Besides the rationality implicit in all our experience of the natural world, Varghese identifies autonomous agency, consciousness, conceptual thought and the self as unaccounted for by all of the new atheists. He develops his point about each of these in Appendix A of the book.

Secondly, the new atheists show no awareness of the raise and fall of arguments of logical positivism.

Third, they seem entirely unaware of the massive work in analytic philosophy of religion or of the sophisticated arguments within philosophical theism.

Varghese then notes in contrast to Dawkins how often Russell was known to change his mind and also the case of J.N. Findlay who argued that God's existence can be disproved but then reversed himself and argued for the existence of God in a series of subsequent books.

"Dawkins 'old-age' argument (if it can be called that) is a strange variation of the ad hominem fallacy that has no place in civilized discourse. True thinkers evaluate arguments and weigh evidence without regard to the proponent's race, sex, or age." p. xvii

““It would be fair to say that the ‘new atheism’ is nothing less than a regression to the logical positivist philosophy that was renounced by even the most ardent proponents. In fact, the ‘new atheists,’ it might be said, do not even rise to logical positivism. The positivists were never so naïve as to suggest that God could be a scientific hypothesis- they declared the concept of God to be meaningless precisely because it was not a scientific hypothesis. Dawkins, on the other hand, holds that ‘the presence or absence of creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.’ This is the kind of comment of which we say it is not even wrong!” -Roy Varghese p. xviii.

Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings

2007-11-04T19:59:00.000-08:00

Summary of Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.

Ralph McInerry once said of the Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper that he “speaks out of the abundance of his heart and mind where knowledge has become wisdom.” I think that captures what I wanted to express about Pieper’s writing but couldn’t find the words for. Pieper is one of those writers whose work is full of choice phrases culled reflectively from the classical texts of philosophy with a practical and applicational soundness generally. He is an excellent communicator of the ideas of philosophy similar to C.S. Lewis. Only the Lover Sings is the second volume I have read by him. (The first was In Defense of Philosophy: The Power of the Mind for Good and Evil, Consists in Argumentation). He is most well-known for his book is Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which Br. Dunstan has recommended to me.

Only the Lover Sings is a short, 76 page collection of essays on art and contemplation, originally published in German in 1988. The first essay entitled “Work, Spare Time and Leisure” in which Pieper discusses the ancient conception of leisure held by those such as Aristotle, which is a substantially different concept than one might think of when hearing the term today. Pieper argues that avoiding idolization of labor today cannot be achieved except by an objection based on some ultimate truth about human nature (which is therefore to be taken as of lasting relevance, he assumes). He notes how there are still vague notions about the seventh day of the week being special and about holidays and quitting time (in Germany), but that we are ignorant of how the accumulated wisdom of our Western cultural and existential tradition “as expressed, say, by Plato, and Aristotle, or the great teachers of Christianity” viewed leisure.

“The most important element in this teaching declares: the ultimate fulfillment, the absolutely meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding, namely in the contemplating awareness of the world’s ultimate and intrinsic foundations.” P. 22. He asks the question what constitutes here and now an activity that is meaningful in itself, in contrast to an activity that is meaningful for what it produces, and he answers that it is whenever in contemplation we touch, however remotely, the core of all things. As Matthew Arnold once wrote, “The touch of truth is the touch of life.”

He says that in feast days (he glancingly mentions the Sabbath, focused more on the Greek heritage rather than the Jewish) man has traditionally expressed his being in harmony and awareness of being surrounded by such fundamental realities, in nonordinary ways.

He says, indeed, that wherever there is lacking the attitude of heart and mind recognizing and seeking to live in harmony with this fundamental truth of human nature (“even if beheld through a veil of tears”), all endeavors to organize relaxation techniques turn hectic and, indeed, become an “outright desperate, form of work”.

Pieper has in mind some of the Communist materialists’ notions of work and of the human. Although Communism has receded, materialism has not, and the erosion of the spiritual conceptions of man and work and rest still remains. Piepr mentions five-year plans which were apparently rigid impersonal plans by which the Communist countries attempted to idealistically pursue science in a scientific way. Michael Polanyi also mentions these plans in The Tacit Dimension and in Science, Faith and Society. Polanyi was a ground-breaking chemist who turned to philosophy in the later part of his life in order to defend science as he understood it against the materialist conceptions of science exemplified by the Communists at the time, of which the Five-Year plans were an example. Pieper and he seem to share the same impulse here. They are defending a view of man against a rival, materialist anthropology. This battle still rages in a different form today.

What Pieper is arguing is that we must acknowledge that man is created with a telos, with a purpose and a design which he does not operate well without conforming to, and that leisure that allows for contemplative wholeness is part of that design. However, acknowledgment of a telos is something disputed by the broader public. In some ways it seems that acknowledgment of a telos is systematically excluded by a secular milieu. I believe it was in Roe vs. Wade that there was a famous mystical paragraph asserting a kind of right of people to forge for themselves their own good and evil. Maybe I am parodying that a little. But the idea was certainly the rejection of a telos, of responsibility, of a right and a wrong to one’s actions. (This reminds me of the book of Amos where justice is disgraced in the courts. I hope Blackwater does not in the end end up being another such a disgrace in American courts! Let justice roll down like a river and don’t let legal loopholes prevent it!)

The great Medievalist scholar Etienne Gilson wrote a book entitled From Aristotle to Darwin and Back which by many accounts I have been coming across is an excellent treatment of telos and the view of human nature. Darwinism tends to convert human nature into a liquid thing, to create static for notions of telos. (Unfortunately the book is out of print and the only copy on Amazon sells for $300! Publishers of the world, what is wrong with you?)

The question Pieper raises is significant and touches on the question of Sabbath observance and similar wistful hopes of Christians today. Does such a high view of leisure, one which sees it as essential to fulfilling the existential purpose of man, have a basis only in a belief in there being a telos of man? Well, if I put it that way… But I mean to say, is there no securable place in our hearts for rest and contemplation which ascend to the highest of human experience without such a recognition of our nature? This may be a tricky question. How much did Pieper for instance consider the Buddhist positions which hold that there is no self. Without a self, what telos can there be? One can say that without regarding leisure of this contemplative kind as to be aimed for there can be no pursuit of it, and without a cogent reason for its pursuit the pursuit will deteriorate in half-heartedness or be a desperate asceticism for asceticism’s sake. But how is one to counter Darwin? How is one to extract telos from a supposed sea of chance and natural selection? It seems Pieper’s point is that there will be no leisure and no Sabbath without this understanding of human nature, or telos. The Jews rested on the seventh day because that is when God rested and they are created in God’s image. I think that is at least a theologically sound way of putting. Pagans had cultic feast days in which they recognized something more than is sold in the secularist bill of goods perhaps.

In the second essay, “Learning How To See Again”, Pieper asks the excellent question “How can we be saved from becoming a totally passive consumer of mass-produced goods and a subservient follower beholden to every slogan the managers may proclaim? The question really is: How can man preserve and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality? He suggests that more and more we tend to see with less detailed grasp, to hear with less detail (in contrast for example to the Indians) and to remember with less capacity (he didn’t mention that but I was thinking of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death which cogently points out the loss of memory skills with the advent of writing).

He says that fasting and abstention from the “noise” is a valuable first step but hardly sufficient. “A better and more immediately effective remedy is this: to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see.

Nobody has to observe and study the visible mystery of the human face more than the one who sets out to sculpt in a tangible medium. And this holds true not only for the manually formed medium.”

I think his recommendation is excellent and true. There is a sense too in which familiarizing with works of art can also train the eye and awaken to reality. I think Emerson was not all wrong when he said works of art depicting people train the eye to look at actual people. A while ago I took a day off and spent half of it at the National Museum of Art, and it was for me very revivifying. The stimulation from contemplating the works of art I saw there noticeably to me opened my eye to the perception of the world around me after I had left. An afterglow lingered with me for a day or two. There was a kind of generative stimulation that suggested I do the same. (Note to myself an interesting parallel that occurs between the notion of generativity from the male side in The Skies of Babylon and from the feminine side in Elaine Scary’s On Beauty). If this could be incorporated in my life into a better rhythm of work and rest much could be accomplished! But on the other hand, let this not be strumming on David’s harp and improvisation of musical instruments while the poor are crushed (see Amos 6:5), aristocratic complacency at the expense of others.

The third essay, entitled “Thoughts About Music”, argues that music by its nature is very close to the fundamentals of human existence. He asks “What indeed do we perceive when we listen to music?” He quotes Schopenhauer in answering this question: Music “does not speak of things but tells of weal and woe”.

“To repeat: thus has the nature of music variously been understood in the Western philosophical tradition- as nonverbal articulation of weal and woe; as wordless expression of man's intrinsic dynamism of self-realization, a process understood as man's journey toward ethical personhood, as the manifestation of man's will in all aspects, as love. This, for instance, is the meaning of Plato's statement that 'music imitates the impulses of the soul', or as Aristotle puts it: music is similar to ethics and related to it. The same tradition continues in remarks by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche when they say that music 'invariably is the expression of an immediacy as no interfering medium is involved'; or (Schopenhauer) that of all the arts it is music that represents the will itself; or (Nietzsche in his interpretation of Wagner) that music lets us hear 'nature transformed into love'.””

Pieper argues that since music is an expression of individual’s inner dynamic, and that, as the process of ethical growth is one faced with innumerable dangers and interferences, “a thousand different expressions of pretense error, and confusion can also appear. "

“Thus the musical articulation may include a shallow contentment with the facile availability of the cheapest 'goods', the rejection of any ordered structure, the despairing denial that man's existential becoming has a goal at all or that such a goal could be reached. There can also be, as in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the music of nihilism, which lives on parody and comes about through the 'devil's help and hellish fire under the cauldron'.”

Pieper obviously accepts Plato’s and others of the Western traditions’ view that music can be a force for good or evil and that it is not wise to merely regard it as an indifferent matter. This is an open question for me. We are told to think about whatever is lovely, etc. but some argue that beauty is a purely subjective, an personal matter. Here is an expression of a counter view to Pieper’s which suggests the indifference of musical medium:

"The apostolic tradition is a tradition of words, not music. It’s the words that are important and not their method of delivery. In the few times where singing is specifically mentioned in the New Testament, I think it’s reasonable to think that if the music were important, some sort of musical instruction would have been preserved in the texts. This is particularly important when we consider the Greek “Doctrine of Ethos,” which held that certain musical devices influenced character. In regards to that widespread belief, if it had carried any weight in the circles in which the New Testament documents were formed it would be reasonable to see it reflected in those documents (“and when they had sung a hymn in the Dorian mode, they went out to the Mount of Olives” or something like that). There isn’t even a hint of that kind of notion in the New Testament. There isn’t even a hint because music, the business of high and low notes, half steps and whole steps (and how big the half steps are, because the size changes), loud and soft,—is a mater of adiaphora, or indifference. That doesn’t mean that music is unimportant, it just means that it’s not particularly privileged and the specifics of what is or isn’t appropriate decided on an ad hoc basis." from Michael Litton, http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=858

If it is true that music is indifferent, then an arbitrary standard may simply cause divisions. But then one might ask whether knowledge of the beautiful and that which heeds the depths in musical composition versus that which is on a more incognizant level is really a baseless distinction. Perhaps there is difference and it rides on the nature of reality. But it doesn’t seem like something to fight about, but something to heed.

“Music and Silence” is a short contemplation of the middle place music occupies between noise and absolute silence. The two antipodes both destroy the any possibility of mutual understanding but

The final essay, “Three Talks in a Sculptor’s Studio” is reflection on memory in relation to the muses. This follows the other essays in perceiving the realist foundation of art. Memory of the actual the window on the foundations of existence. Contrast this with the point made in a Far Eastern proverb, “Those who only look at themselves do ever radiate nothing.” There is included a reflection also on a piece of art on t the conversation of those crucified beside Christ Jesus and a poem. An association is made between the arts and times of festivity, between dark times and heaven. Lastly there is the point made that art should neither be merely depiction of the real, like a photograph, nor ‘absolute’ art which is indifferent to the forms of the world.

The Sabbath by Abraham Heschel

2007-11-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

Summary of The Sabbath by Abraham Heschel

Abraham Heschel is one of the most respected Jewish scholars of the 20th century and of an orthodox view friendly to Christian belief. He was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement and wrote a seminal study called The Prophets and a number of works of reflective and broad scholarship. (I will append a summary of Heschel’s life by Richard John Neuhaus at the end).

In this slender and reknowned volume, Heschel sets forth an explanation of the Sabbath tradition among the Jews. In my faulty way I would like to recall here to mind some of the things that I have learned, the questions that it raised and the contingent reflections I have had in relation to it, in hopes of fulfilling the injunction in Philippians 4 prescribing the contemplation of the lovely and true, etc.

One thing that stands out is the cogency of Heschel’s explanation of the Sabbath as a spiritual fitting rhythm of life. He speaks of the rest, the menuha, of the Sabbath not in the negative sense of merely ceasing labor.

“Menuha which we usually render with ‘rest’ means here much more than withdrawal from labor and exertion, more than freedom from toil and strain or activity of any kind. Menuha is not a negative concept but something real and intrinsically positive.” p.. 22-23

Like Aristotle and other ancient Greeks’ conception of leisure, the conception of the Sabbath rest is positive in nature, and is viewed as the purpose and culmination of labor. Work in the mundane realities is to culminate in rest and contemplation from which we may cease from the hustle and bustle and attend in quietness and rest to the Lord. As it is says in Isaiah, “In quietness and rest is your strength…” "Labor without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without the spirit the source of depravity." (p. 18. of The Sabbath.)

It seems to me that perhaps a great enduring strength in the religious culture of the Jewish people lies centrally in the keeping of the Sabbath. In so doing, they fulfill that of which the verse I quoted above speaks. I counterpoise this in my mind with the ambition to control and conquer space in Descartes’ schematic. This brings me to a major point of the book. Heschel finds a distinction between the Jewish religion and other religions in that in others’ religions, grand temples and cathedrals are built as sacred space, but that in the Jewish religion a cathedral in time is built to God, the cathedral of the Sabbath. He notes the distinction between this and for instance Spinoza’s propensity for supposing the geometrico sufficient for explanation of all, an extension of Descartes, and in some sense the paradigm of the modern, and especially of science.

“The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments”, Heschel writes. This reminds me of the experiences related of Jacob in the Bible. There is one in particular, perhaps a more obscure one, but one which struck me by its nature as conveying indeed a real historical experience, a sacred moment, which moved Jacob to purify his household. Judaism, and Christianity after it, are distinct in being irreducibly historical in their accounts which are punctuated by pivotal sacred moments, and which also imply sacred moments in the life of every believer. If these sacred moments in the Bible are mythologized in their entirety, as for instance, it seems to me, the philosopher Eric Voegelin does, then they are completely devalued. They are no longer the Faith.

Part of the cogency of Sabbath-keeping seems to me to lie in the nature of the self and our relation to God. We live a fractured and distracted existence. The fractured paintings of Picasso for instance seem to capture some of the fractured-ness of self in the modern world. Resting and ceasing allows us to remember what it is all for, to renew our bearing and orientation to the ultimate and in so doing helps to fulfill the ultimate of our being or existence. The shalom, the peaceful fullness of living, is attained only in this beholding relationship. But it is not all about self and certainly not about “self-help”. I think of the over-extendedness of Descartes who made the leap to supposing mathematics valid for all realms of human inquiry, and the motivated definition of the self that is inherited markedly from him which leaves no place of honor and recognition to the infinite and the to the I and Thou. Contrast this with the Sabbath which recognizes a limitedness to man, but not merely a limitedness but a purpose and a directedness of man’s aspirations, which establishes an end to man’s grasping control and allows for a beholding and a composition of the self to the whole.

This reminds me of Martin Buber in that the Sabbath is such that it is to help us to rise beyond the I-and-It to the wholeness of our being in the I and Thou. When this is learnt through living wisely, then even in the “chrysalis state of the It,” the I and Thou is still intact. In the same way the Sabbath principle of orientating toward the eternity in our hearts, when kept wisely, becomes something that persists through the days of labor.

It seems to me too that the Sabbath is very much related to the Jewish tradition of universality in the doctrine of the Imago Dei which became in modern times the basis of human rights thought. The humaneness seems to me related to the anthropology/ view of the self and of relation to God and man manifested in the practice. Through the quietness and rest and contemplation, the human soul is equipped to help others, the helpless, the homeless, the outcast and the needy. There needs to be sought and grown a wholeness out of which kindness and ministry is deepened.

An image that I found particularly poignant was in a rabbinic tale that Heschel related and drew morales from. Honestly, the tale was largely outlandish and comic-bookish to my ears, but at the end there was the beautiful story of an old man who ran by holding bundles of myrtles to honor the Sabbath. Myrtles are fragrant flowers that are ubiquitous in the traditional Jewish wedding ceremonies. The old man running at twilight to welcome the Sabbath represented Israel. The Sabbath is seen as a bride based on the injunction in the Old Testament to keep the Sabbath, which uses a word which has the association of a wedding in it:

“When the people of Israel stood before the mountain of Sinai, the Lord said to them: ‘Remember that I said to the Sabbath: The Community of Israel is your mate.’ Hence: “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it” Exodus 20:8) The Hebrew word le-kadesh, to sanctify, means in the language of the Talmud, to consecrate a woman, to betroth. Thus the meaning of the word on Sinai was to impress upon Israel the fact that their destiny is to be the groom of the sacred day, the commandment to espouse the seventh day.” P. 51-52.

The image strikes me as beautiful and conveys the positive nature of the Sabbath in the Jewish thought and imagination. Traditionally averse to personification, in this case they personify the Sabbath as a bride. Heschel elaborates on this wonderfully.

In closing, although I still have questions about the relation of Christianity to the Sabbath and the keeping of special days, I am convinced of the cogency of the principle (and of the value of exploring the relation further), so that it is incumbent upon me to give careful thought about how I might order my life in such a way that conforms to this knowledge wholly, and that I might encourage the community of Christ to do likewise, not legalistically but in order to live.

Richard John Neuhaus on Heschel:

Abraham Joshua Heschel
I first met Abraham Joshua Heschel in 1965, when he was fifty-eight and I a kid of twenty-nine. The occasion had to do with defending protestors against the Vietnam war, which led to the formation of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV). We hit it off in a big way, and ours became an intense intellectual and spiritual friendship until his death in December 1972. We both loved to argue, and mainly we argued about the connections and conflicts between the Jewish and Christian ways of being children of Abraham. I thought he was too enamored of what I viewed as an excessively easy pluralism. He thought I was too insistent in my Christian particularism. For hours beyond number we went back and forth, often in his book-crammed office high in the tower of Jewish Theological Seminary, he smoking his cannon-sized cigars and I puffing on my pipe until the air was so thick we had to open the window even in the dead of winter. (He quit the cigars after a minor heart attack a few years before he died.) Of course I learned much more than he did from these exchanges. Heschel was a very learned man, and a great soul.
His books are still in print (e.g., The Earth is the Lord’s, The Sabbath, Man is Not Alone, God in Search of Man) and I warmly recommend them. Since his death twenty-six years ago, something of a Heschel cult has sprung up. In fact, it had already sprung during his lifetime. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, the first volume of the biography by Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner appeared, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (Yale University Press). It has been admirably and admiringly reviewed by Rabbi David Novak, one of Heschel’s star students, in these pages (October 1998). It is also reviewed in Commentary by Jon Levenson of Harvard, a frequent contributor to this journal, under the title "The Contradictions of A. J. Heschel." While Levenson, too, admires Heschel, he has some big problems.
Heschel came from a dynasty of hasidic rabbis in Poland, took his doctorate at the University of Berlin, succeeded Martin Buber as head of the Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, and, after escaping Nazism to America, became the most read and most influential Jewish theologian of his time. He was a devoutly observant Jew who believed there are many ways to the truth. Kaplan and Dresner say it is a wonder that he was able to "reconcile" the different worlds of which he was part. Levenson is not sure that he did. "The question of the authority of halakhah, traditional rabbinic law in all its specificity, is the most obvious point of division between the traditionalist world of Heschel’s origins and Jewish secular modernity. But it is, or should be, a no less troubling point of division between the world he grew up in, and whose basic religious dictates he continued to follow, and the world of religious but non-Orthodox Judaism in which he spent his entire professional life both in Germany and later in the United States." Levenson’s conclusion is that "it was not out of the reconciliation but out of the collision of the several worlds in which he traveled that his most profound reflections on Jewish theology and spirituality were born."
It is for others to figure out the "contradictions" in Heschel’s way of being Jewish. I am interested here in another question about Heschel’s thought that Levenson raises, a question that was at the heart of our friendly but intense disagreement. He notes that at the University of Berlin Heschel immersed himself in the emerging fields of aesthetics, phenomenology, and psychology (a combination in which another Polish thinker of the time was also deeply immersed-Karol Wojtyla, later to be Pope John Paul II). From this he developed his crucial understanding that God is always the Subject and man the object of divine action; the initiative is always with God. In Heschel’s case this was combined with the dominant liberal Protestantism of Berlin that pitted the prophetic against the priestly, and the authentically spiritual against the religiously institutionalized. As Levenson observes, this "very dubious dichotomy . . . was a staple of Protestant biblical studies and was, moreover, often linked to anti-Jewish (and anti-Catholic) polemics."

'3:10 to Yuma' and the World's Last Whimper

2007-09-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

“…[Alasdair] MacIntyre writes, ‘At the beginning of modern moral philosophy- which I date in the 1780s- the moral agent as traditionally understood almost, if not quite, disappeared from view. The moral agent’s character, the structure of his desires and dispositions, became at best a peripheral rather than a central topic for moral philosophy, thus losing the place assigned to it by the vast majority of moral philosophers from Plato to Hume.’ Choice- conceived by Kant and Reid as deciding between desire and the requirements of morality and later by Sartre as the condition of an individual’s authenticity- replaced character as crucial for moral agency. And the rest, as the story goes, is history.” – Stanley Hauerwas, “The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre”, First Things, October 2007, p. 37.

What is said above by the theologian Stanley Hauerwas in summary of the philosopher and Catholic Christian Alasdair MacIntyre’s view of moral philosophy of modernty is interesting to me. When I discovered many years ago in an obscure nook in my dad’s library a copy of a book with the intriguing title, Celebration of Discipline, which resonated for me as one adrift in a slouchy milieu, I was quickly swept into its challenging and serious depth. It was especially through Richard Foster that talked of the “spiritual disciplines” began to revive at least in the populist Christian culture in which I was growing like a weed. Foster’s book issued a challenge that still resonates with me over the years. It was a book that was the fruit of prayer and listening. He opens his book: “Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people. The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths.” –Celebration of Discipline, p. 1.

A few pages later he writes, “We are accustomed to thinking of sin as individual acts of disobedience to God. That is true enough as far as it goes, but Scripture goes much farther. In Romans the apostle Paul frequently referred to sin as a condition that plagues the human race (i.e., Rom, 3:9-1. Sin as a condition works its way out through the ‘bodily members’; that is, the ingrained habits of the body (Rom. 7:5ff.). And there is no slavery that can compare to the slavery of ingrained habits of sin. In Isaiah 57:20 we are told, ‘The wicked are like the tossing of the sea; for it cannot rest, and its waters toss up mire and dirt.’ The sea does not need to do anything secial to produce mire and dirt; that is the result of its natural motions. That is also true of us when we are under the condition of sin. The natural motions of our lives produce mire and dirt. Sin is part of the internal structure of our lives. No special effort is needed. No wonder we feel trapped. Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on willpower and determination… Willpower will never succeed in dealing with ingrained habits of sin…The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that He can transform us…Law-bound Disciplines breathe death…” p. 3-4, 6, 7.

My mind has often returned to this book and its pregnant words on “spiritual disciplines” such as fasting and study and prayer and service. I heartily commend the book but can tell you some criticisms of it too that I am aware of but which do little to my mind to deface some of the rich veins that can be found in it. I bring it up because what is said of modern moral philosophy, and MacIntyre’s revitalizing critique of it, and work in it, parallels what Foster observed. Richard Foster’s book, if it is taken like a self-help book with maxims for the go-getter to hyper drive the will-to-power-it into the megadeath, bezerker-rage blackout and destruction, becomes of miserably little use. However, as a call to deeper Christian living, to Christian vision in Christian community that calls us to walk with God (not whim with God in a flash-fire of energetic, violent, ineffectualness), to depth as people of God who, no bones about it, know God, who know the Shepherd’s voice and come, it impresses me as on the mark.

Freshly from seeing the film “3:10 to Yuma”, I am still struck by what I take to be the abject poverty of the moral vision, the moral philosophy, expressed in the movie. It seems in some ways to me a popular expression of the long trend in the impoverishment of “the Western world” in its moral philosophy which MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Foster and so many others have noted, and in their way, done their best to counteract. In this movie the character played by Russell Crowe is a Satanic figure who quotes the Bible and accuses others for crimes he himself does. The bizarre thing is how the character seems to be held up to emulate when nothing consequential in the movie is done to establish any redeeming virtue in his character, it seems to me. He points out that a bounty hunter he knows, though being an outwardly pious man, has participated in genocidal acts against Indians in retaliation for attacking trains. Yet, his character also participated in genocidal acts, killing families. The death throes of the moral philosophy in this film seem to me so weak that hardly the slightest movement can be detected. The film is interesting at times in its degree of accuracy of depiction of evil but then it merely becomes an embrace of evil and a lionization of a fool. There is at the end a bizarre feint at a ‘redemptive moment”, so to speak, where the violent and senseless killer is beguiled by the thought of joining in league with the father of a boy in order to create a show, a legend to write on the heart of the boy of nobleness with purpose that does not actually exist. Both the father and Crowe’s character want to appear good instead of be good and they hope that a story instead of the truth will have a benign effect on the boy. The miserable poverty of this view evokes a pity. (People (me above all) need the Lord!)

What in the end appears to me a whim, a very violent whim, is supposedly the redemptive moment. This is the weak climax of the decline of moral philosophy. This is the whimper that T.S. Eliot refers to when he asks how the world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper. That Crowe’s character has not made a substantive change seems clear to me in the end in that once the story he wishes to paint seems securely imprinted on the boy, he is ready to go back to what he was before the moment. Nothing has changed. It was merely catharsis instead of grace. His character has not changed. He has merely had a self-delusional, self-help moment, in his case involving the death of a lot of others, for a cathartic “choice”. The story of moral action, according to this view, is a mere story we construct- a captive truth, like the ark born away by the Philistines. Crowe’s character bears away the ark, the symbol of the Lord’s presence, as a story he cherishes like an aesthetic bauble, something he does not comprehend. Moral action has become merely an aesthetic notion, a “glinting transiency”. (Nietzschean aesthetic materialism, anyone?)

The character is similar in some ways to the main character played by Tom Cruise in Collateral, another violent movie which lionizes a character who is a fool, a Social Darwinist Nietzschean materialist, who like Wade, mentors others to sieze life by embracing his ethos of moral fog, “beyond good and evil” mentality, like a beast, a wolf, freeing itself to live at bottom by the fundamental truth of its assumed biological nature, a sham authenticity from which springs a fountain of evil. (In that movie the character invokes Darwin’s name as justification for his nihilism).

Contrast that with what Hauerwas says of Alasdair MacIntyre’s lifework: “If I am right about the trajectory of MacIntyre’s work, the central contention in After Virtue is his remark that ‘the concept of an intelligible action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action”. If I understand right, this means, applied to moral philosophy and to “3:10 to Yuma” that the choices have become almost unintelligible and absurd, mummified returns of the dead, because they are removed from the context of character in community upheld by the grace and provision of God. As the sociologist/philosopher Charles Taylor says, the moral sources have been occulted. The assumptions of modernity are driving one to it. It is better to seek a respite from the object lessons God gives in such cases by prayer and fasting and humbling ourselves before the Lord and listening to the deep call to our depths rather than giving way to the pretentious mystique of the Satanic.

"Fools"

2007-09-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

“One would think that the generation I have the honor of living in must be a kingdom of gods. But this is by no means so.; the vigor, the courage, that wants to be the creator of its own good fortune in this way, indeed, its own creator, is an illusion, and when the age loses the tragic, it gains despair. In the tragic there is implicit a sadness and a healing that one indeed must not disdain, and when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth. If he wants to be the absolute in all this, his relativity, then he becomes ludicrous.” –Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part 1, “The Tragic in Ancient Drama”, I-123, (p. 145).

“Now, what will this human voice say? It will say: Man must be biologically re-bred. The obsolete apparatus of the created human organism must be modernized. ‘Biometrics’ (as this new method is called) will take these long-since outworn designs of the Creator, this hoary and antiquated old dodderer, and breed the new man, the space man. Why do I mention this story? Because it expresses a feeling about life which is shared more or less by all of us, even though it may not be stated as drastically as it is here. We can describe this feeling by reference to an idea which has already become almost a commonplace: we are convinced that we can make anything. Good heavens, what have we not made with out technology! We can see things that happen a thousand miles away, [etc.]…why shouldn’t we be able also to change the biological construction of the author of all these things, man himself? After all, this is what the Marxists have always wanted to do. All you need to do- this is their formula- is to change the social conditions and man will change. Then you can turn him from a person with an unpredictable will and an unmanageable conscience into a compliant marionette, indeed, into an insect which will conform without friction to the termite state. The possibilities are endless. No rules are laid down for us, nothing is prescribed as far as creation is concerned; we are not limited by any alleged Lord of the world. “Everything is created,” you say. Nonsense! Everything can be made!... They have their proper place in it because all this concerns our soul. For anybody who holds that everything can be made must want to make everything. And anybody who has taken everything into hand must then keep on moving that hand. He can no longer be still. Our overactivity, which constantly keeps us on the merry-go-round and yet, no matter how fast we go, gets us nowhere but only makes us dizzy, is not caused by the fact that we were so nervous or that we had no time. It is just the opposite. We are nervous and we have no time because we think everything will stop without us and because we think we are so tremendously important- we parvenus in this old business of creation! And this is why we can never let anything get out of our hands and be entrusted to others. That’s why we hold on to everything convulsively and thus wear ourselves out all over again. Undoubtedly, all this is connected with the ultimate decisions of our life and not so much at all with medicine or with the problem of our modern way of life. And because we have thus taken over the management of the bankrupt assets of creation, because now we do everything ourselves and therefore must always be producing something, we never get away from constant care and concern. For anybody who takes everything upon himself finds that everything depends on himself…Luther once said, ‘While I drink my little glass of Wittenberg beer the gospel runs its course.’ That is truly the finest and most comforting thing I have ever heard said about beer and trust in God….The fanatics who believe that man can “make” everything are really fools at bottom. They are not realistic at all, even though they have the cold, sober eyes of hardheaded men of fact. But the man who has grasped the mystery of the seed growing secretly and, like the farmer in the parable, goes out and does his part of the job and then commits the fields to God and lies down to sleep in his name- that man is doing not only the most godly thing but the wisest thing. For godliness and wisdom are far more closely related than out philosophy and the wisdom of the ‘managers’ ever dream.” –Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus, (1959), “The Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly”, p. 84-85.

"Of course, there was always a certain oafish audacity in Fletcher’s degenerate driveling about “morons” and “defectives,” given that there is good cause to suspect, from a purely utilitarian vantage, that academic ethicists—especially those like Fletcher, who are notoriously mediocre thinkers, possessed of small culture, no discernible speculative gifts, no records of substantive philosophical achievement, and execrable prose styles—constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world? And should those men be permitted, in their turn, to sire offspring? I ask this question entirely in earnest, because I think it helps to identify the one indubitable truth about all social movements towards eugenics: namely, that the values that will determine which lives are worth living, and which not, will always be the province of persons of vicious temperament. If I were asked to decide what qualities to suppress or encourage in the human species, I might first attempt to discover if there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to moral idiocy and then, if there is, to eliminate it; then there would be no more Joseph Fletchers (or Peter Singers, or Linus Paulings, or James Rachels), and I might think all is well. But, of course, the very idea is a contradiction in terms. Decisions regarding who should or should not live can, by definition, be made only by those who believe such decisions should be made; and therein lies the horror that nothing can ever exorcise from the ideology behind human bioengineering. Transhumanism, as a moral philosophy, is so risibly fabulous in its prognostications, and so unrelated to anything that genomic research yet promises, that it can scarcely be regarded as anything more than a pathetic dream; but the metaphysical principles it presumes regarding the nature of the human are anything but eccentric. Joseph Fletcher was a man with a manifestly brutal mind, desperately anxious to believe himself superior to the common run of men, one who apparently received some sort of crypto-erotic thrill from his cruel fantasies of creating a slave race, and of literally branding others as his genetic inferiors, and of exercising power over the minds and bodies of the low-born. And yet his principles continue to win adherents in the academy and beyond it, and his basic presuppositions about the value and meaning of life are the common grammar of a shockingly large portion of bioethicists. If ever the day comes when we are willing to consider a program, however modest, of improving the species through genetic planning and manipulation, it will be exclusively those who hold such principles and embrace such presuppositions who will determine what the future of humanity will be. And men who are impatient of frailty and contemptuous of weakness are, at the end of the day, inevitably evil. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/9/hart.htm

“I repeat: Let no one take me as a fool. But if you do, then tolerate me just as you would a fool, so that I may do a little boasting. In this self-confident boasting I am not talking as the Lord would but as a fool. Since many are boasting in the way the world does, I too will boast. You gladly put up with fools since you are so wise! In fact, you even put up with any who enslave you or exploit you or take advantage of you or push themselves forward or slap you in the face. To my shame I admit that we were too weak for that!” 2 Corinthians 11: 16-21

Poor, Powerless America

2007-09-09T15:08:00.000-07:00

"Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as a society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude responsible people do not have or desire. In fact, our ability to do harm, by act or omission, is great beyond all reckoning, and greater by the measure of our refusal to accept this fact and its implications. Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themsleves, since they must always react to the forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame." -Marilynne Robinson, "Facing Reality", The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, p.78-79.

Truth is God.

2007-09-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

[Something we should pause to consider, it seems to me, is the stress these two men of unquestioned moral strength and courage lay on truth, which in one place Ghandi calls "my God". The vey concept of truth is now questioned among the church as well as outside but we should ask, it seems to me, whether we can act nobly like these men if we forsake the concept, the quest and the life of truth. A book by Richard Rorty and another has the title "What Use Is Truth?" but it seems the wrong question to ask. If truth is used it is abused in our hearts and minds. Truth is God.]

Ghandi on Truth (and Study): "Generally speaking, observation of the law of Truth is understood merely to mean that we must speak the truth. But we... should understand... Truth in a much wider sense. There should be Truth in thought, Truth in speech, and Truth in action. To the man who has realized this Truth in its fulness, nothing else remains to be known, because all knowledge is necesaarily included in it. What is not inlcuded in it is not Truth, and so not true knowledge; and there can be no inward peace without true knowledge. If we once learn how to apply this never-failing test of Truth, we will at one be able tofind out what is worth doing, what is worth seeing, what is worth reading." - from Yeravda Mandir, qtd. in Ghandhi: A Man for Humanity, p. 19. Ghandhi's word cause me to recall Solzhenitsyn's, which parallels Ghandi's so I will also quote at length a relevant passage from Solzhenitsyn here what I have quoted elsewhere: ""When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ``I am violence. Run away, make way for me--I will crush you.'' But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally--since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies--all loyalty lies in that. And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me. This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism. We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth out loud or to express aloud what we think. It's not necessary. It's dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think. This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted. And it is much easier--it's dangerous even to say this--than the sort of civil disobedience which Gandhi advocated. Our path is to talk away fro the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside. That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world. So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood--of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies--or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries. And from that day onward he: Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth. Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role. Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music. Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue. Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept. Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities. Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question. Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda. Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed. Of course we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook. No, it will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice. But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest. On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices even in the most secure of the technical sciences. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude. " -Sozhenitsyn in "Live Not by Lies!", http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/livenotbylies.html

Brave New World, Materialism and Artificial Happiness

2007-09-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

"Brave New World at 75" “‘Mr. Huxley, of course, sees so clearly what the psychologists do not see, that such a world must give up not only war, but also spiritual conflicts of any kind, not only superstition, but also religion, not only literary criticism but also great creative art of whatever kind, not only economic chaos, but also all the beauty of the old traditional things, not only the hard and ugly parts of ethics, but the tender and beautiful parts too.’ Lamenting the death of metaphysics, Needham wrote that science, which was born of philosophy, had overtaken its parent to become “the only substratum for Reason” and “nothing more nor less than the Mythology accompanying a Technique.”

[ME: *Science was born of philosophy, especially Baconian and Cartesian philosophy. It is not a surprise that science has overtaken its parent, philosophy, when one considers that the philosophy that it was largely born from heaped contempt on philosophy and religion. See Descartes’s Meditations.

*Suppressing spiritual conflicts based on a wager that everything is material would seemingly be sensible if materialism was adequately shown to be true. But if it is not, solving spiritual conflicts by trying to suppress spiritual reality is bound to exacerbate the spiritual condition causing the conflict to express itself in more extreme ways. That is what happened in the political mass movements of modernity.

*The Epicurean mythos of materialism attempts to solve mankind’s problems by dismissing religious claims altogether. This “terrible simplification” is hardly a cure. The Soviet Union was powered by a materialist philosophy whose ostensibly humanitarian motives of justice did not end as the materialists predicted. The Enlightenment solution to the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has proven a hoary nightmare. One might consider Nietzsche’s maxim at this point (paraphrasing from memory): “When you go to hunt monsters, be careful that you do not become one yourself.” That is indeed what happened. Now collective amnesia is cultivated to prop up the materialist narrative of the world, the meaning of unmeaning that they fitfully ascribe to the cosmos.]

“Needham saw in Huxley’s book an illustration of something Russell had observed: the mutinous tendency of the modern scientific enterprise, as the means of mastering nature overtake its original intended ends. “It is as if a number of passages from Mr. Bertrand Russell’s recent book The Scientific Outlook had burst into flower, and had rearranged themselves in patches of color like man-eating orchids in a tropical forest,” he suggested. Indeed, Russell’s blueprint of a scientifically ordered society in his 1931 book is very similar to Huxley’s World State, highly regimented and organized around the principles of comfort, stability, and efficiency.” - Caitrin Nicol , “Brave New World at 75”, New Atlantis, Number 16, Spring 2007. (Quoting Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist and embryologist contemporaneous with Aldous Huxley). http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/16/nicol.htm

[ME: “highly regimented and organized around the principles of comfort, stability, and efficiency”. In other words, Epicurean ataraxia. The lukewarmth of it and the repugnance naturally felt toward this including by Russell is of the essence. The root suppression of primal reality in order to make the flashing, soulless halls of power is sensed but not understood by the materialist who axiomatically, schematically can not incorporate the signals of transcendence into his understanding, making his understanding a mockery of knowledge the more perfect it gets. Only in the materialists imperfection and backsliding from their doctrine is their knowledge good. ]

“In a review of Brave New World called “We Don’t Want to Be Happy,” Russell elaborated on the promise and perils of this scientific deliverance. Huxley, he wrote, “has undertaken to make us sad by the contemplation of a world without sadness.” After describing the material comforts of the fictional society, he reflected on the puzzling instinct to recoil from it:In spite of these merits, the world which Mr. Huxley portrays is such as to arouse disgust in every normal reader, and obviously in Mr. Huxley himself. I have been asking myself why, and trying hard to think that his well-regulated world would really be an improvement upon the one in which we live. At moments I can make myself think this, but I can never make myself feel it. The feeling of revulsion against a well-ordered world has various sources: one of these is that we do not value happiness as much as we sometimes think we do.Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley’s World State, though totalitarian in its orthodoxy, is ostensibly ordered on the wants of the governed rather than the governors. Threats are rarely used or needed. Rule by bread and circuses has proved more potent than force—and more pernicious, precisely because every means of control is a perversion of something people really want. The only people with any capacity for dissatisfaction are a handful of Alphas, who are as unable to articulate their objection as Russell is. It is difficult to reject the sinister when by slight distortion it masquerades as the sublime. Why feeling should be able to distinguish these things while reason cannot is an interesting question, one which could be left forever unsettled by tinkering, through biotechnology or psychological control, with what Huxley (in a later foreword to the book) called “the natural forms and expressions of life itself.One such expression, of course, is a certain measure of autonomy over the meaning and direction of our lives. Its total absence in the World State is ominously signified by the professional title of the genetic engineers: the Assistant Predestinators. But conflating the influences and experiences that shape our identities with the biological reconstruction of life, Russell, revolted but bemused, reasoned himself into a corner:But we are shocked—more, I think, than we ought to be—by the idea of molding people scientifically instead of allowing them to grow. We have a notion that we can choose what we will be, and that we should not wish to be robbed of this choice by scientific manipulators drugging us before we are born, giving us electric shocks in infancy, and whispering platitudes to us throughout our childhood.But this feeling is, of course, irrational. In the course of nature the embryo grows through natural causes. The infant learns haphazard lessons of pleasure and pain which determine his taste. The child listens to moral propaganda, which may fail through being unscientific, but which, none the less, is intended to mold the character just as much as Mr. Huxley’s whispering machines. It seems, therefore, that we do not object to molding a human being, provided it is done badly; we only object when it is done well.”In the end, Russell said, “what we cling to so desperately is the illusion of freedom, an illusion which is tacitly negated by all moral instruction and all propaganda. To us human life would be intolerable without this illusion. In Mr. Huxley’s Brave New World men live quite comfortably without it.”[ME: Russell, like Dawkins today and so many other materialists, in their idolatrous exuberance for the power of the method, become apologists for the enslavery of man. He, like Dawkins, must axiomatically call freedom an illusion. To me this seems fundamentally because freedom can not be incorporated into the mathematical method, which would mean that Descartes was wrong in his extrapolation, the modern materialistic extrapolation. No, man must be cipherable under the Method as well. This is the initial commitment. You don’t want to have an embarrassing God of the Gaps exposure moment do you? So stick to the Method like a madman even when it means sacrifice, massive sacrifice. Thus an expression of faith such as the following by Sam Harris is commonplace: “In a follow-up article, Fish deepens his inquiry by looking at the kind of evidence that atheists like Dawkins and Harris present for their "scientific" outlook. Harris, for example, writes that "there will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments themselves at the level of the brain." (Qtd. in: http://www.tothesource.org/7_17_2007/7_17_2007.htm)For the sake of these future dream worlds present life is to be sacrificed. Such was the Communist schtick as well, and they sacrificed millions of lives to that illusory end.What I find especially interesting in this article’s treatment of Russell is what it reveals of Russell’s ambivalence, of his unrest in exerting his “logical”, “scientific” point of view when it comes to human freedom and happiness. He struggles with Huxley’s insight. After all, it is a story envisioning his materialist dream world. He cannot figure out why it is repugnant and suggests it is because we don’t value happiness. His ambivalence is revealing of the materialist suppression of reality in their pursuit, in an idolatrous fever, of a feeling-less world of quantified happiness, one that repulses them when it is reflected to them in a prophetic mirror. The aspect of human freedom is a key aspect of materialism. I do not understand those who claim freedom and meaning as materialists (perhaps if they could explain) but their adopted spokesmen are clear enough in their repudiation of these. But it necessarily involves a suppression and disingenuousness to go forward with the materialist program. I sympathize with those who call Marx and Nietzsche “intellectual swindlers” on this point. If everything is determined by things outside of us, who is driving the boat? And why are materialists moralizing and avidly, in some cases, rabidly, trying to persuade and move the course of events as if they were, well, free agents? Because they lie and suppress. That seems the best reason I can make out for how they could hold such belief contradictory to their behavior. Has anyone come up with a better answer?]."In the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment, he pits Christ’s offer of redemption against the church’s promise of security:With us everyone will be happy, and they will no longer rebel or destroy each other, as in your freedom, everywhere. Oh, we shall convince them that they will only become free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit to us. Will we be right, do you think, or will we be lying? They themselves will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom led them."{ME: How to escape the weight of glory in being free? Succumb to materialist doctrine}.“In the thematic climax of the novel, Mond defends his spiritually arid civilization by recalling the terrible history that preceded it. Love, literature, liberty, and even science itself are sacrificed in this most scientific of societies—all to serve the goals of happiness and stability. “Happiness,” Mond says, “is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.” To achieve lasting social happiness, all else must be given up…”“Christ’s answer is a resurrection and a kiss; John parries, thrusts, and grandstands. His haphazard education has ill prepared him to argue with the World Controller—but armed with Shakespeare, desperation, and an excess of nobility, he bravely embraces those things which once made bravery necessary:

“Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond.

“Quite apart from God—though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”

“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller replied.

“Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”

“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.

“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”

“V.P.S.?”“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”

“But I like the inconveniences.”

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

There was a long silence.“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders.

“You’re welcome,” he said.”
---

“… In the foreword to Brave New World’s 1946 edition, Huxley regretted not giving John an alternative to “insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other,” an alternative he would later try (unconvincingly) to negotiate in his positive techno-utopia Island. But read in conversation with The Brothers Karamazov, West saw that something deeper is on trial: “Mr. Huxley is attacking the new spirit which tries to induce man to divert in continual insignificant movements relating to the material framework of life all his force, and to abandon the practice of speculating about his existence and his destiny.”…

[ME: This is another key aspect, it seems to me, of embracing philosophical/ religious materialism: suppression of primal questions. One of the evasive movements in currency today of the practice of elevating to the level of certainty speculation about multi-verses, to replace the ancient materialist belief in the eternality of matter. With such a “warranted” belief in place, the question why anything exists at all is put at a further remove, allowing materialists to assume the answer to this question as part of their core doctrine: The universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be (Democritus originally, before Carl Sagan)].“By shifting the question from political control to personal conscience, West’s reading anticipated the decentralized way that many of the particular scientific and cultural furnishings of Huxley’s world have made appearances in ours. Orwell’s and Zamyatin’s predictions of inevitable centralized totalitarian government have not come to pass—and indeed, neither have Huxley’s. But the separation of sex from procreation, and love from sex; the consumption-saturated culture threatening to commodify the consumers; the increasingly physico-chemical attempt to explain and treat a troubled psyche—we did not need bureaucratic threats or hypnopaedic repetitions to want these things, and in this sense Huxley profoundly overestimated (or is it underestimated?) mankind, and his book may, in the deepest sense, have gotten our present all wrong. We chose these things ourselves, uncoerced by terror or war or social engineers. They have been developed to respond to real human hurts and desires; and, as might be expected of human choices, the results and motives have been mixed.”

"When you go to the Barbarian tribes"

2007-04-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

"Zixia said: 'The various craftsmen occupy workshops in order to complete their tasks, but the gentleman studies in order to develope his Way." ]."- Confucius, Analects, Bk. 19, 7.

"Fan Chi asked about humaneness. The Master said: 'Courtesy in private life, reverence in handling business, loyalty in relationships with others. They should not be set aside even if one visits the barbarian tribes."- Confucius, Analects, Bk. 13, 19.

[There is no one I am willing to call Master but Jesus Christ and there is no Way but the Way now that I know enough to think of it. But this does not prevent me from seeing the good and the nobility in the writings of Confucius. The two sayings somehow struck a note in me. Though I remembered them slightly different than they appear upon review, the first helped me to reflect and sharpen my awareness of the necessity of making studies subservient to the goal of the transformation of the mind in Christ. They must serve this end, all the more now that He is known to me through the gospel witnessed in human context. The second I remembered paraphrased like this: "When you go to the barbarian tribes, do not cease to be a gentleman." Frankly, I see a certain level of barbarity and lazy brutishness and decadent indirection and glorying in sin. I see it but Isaah would really see it, I think. But, again, the idea is not to be trapped in the hostilities of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of ours minds. So the expected power over one, may it be broken by willing acceptance of the cross.]

"You, have you heard the six sayings about the six hidden consequences?' When he replied that he had not, the Master went on: 'Sit down and I will tell you. If one loves humaneness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is folly; if one loves understanding but does not love learning, the consequence of this is unorthodoxy; if one loves good faith but does not love learning, the consequence of this is damaging behavior; if one loves straightforwardness but does not love learning, the consequence of this is rudeness; if one loves courage but doe not love learning, the consequence of this is rebelliousness; if one loves strength but does not love learning, the consequence of this is violence." Bk. 17, #7.

[What can the part I emboldened mean in Confucius's context? What does his conservatism mean? I don't fully know so I wonder how much I am just using these sayings as a convenient peg to impose my meanings. I don't know. But I want to look at what such a statment might mean in a Christian context because it seems helpful... (the others are more clearly helpful, it seems to me). Understanding without love is judged for what it is in 1 Corinthians 13- a resounding gong. Pascal writes:

"I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God" (#77).

It may be that the resounding gong of nuclear explosions will be the peak of scientific achievement that would destroy all flesh except for the return of Christ at the end times, if we allow ourselves through science and technology to become pathologically materialistic (methodological naturalism becoming pathological naturalism). Or perhaps, the gong of machines still running after the heat has killed the last human. Or, we show some restraint for the sake of the really valuable and livable.]

The Power Which Posited Us From Two Different Perspectives

2007-04-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

There is a wonderful documentary film named Emmanuel's Gift which tells of the overcoming spirit and triumph of a handicapped boy from Ghana who grew to be a man that is inspiring those who are largely discarded and considered accursed in his society, the handicapped, to take courage and to believe and live joyously and overcoming though given a difficult lot in life. The film introduces you to others that have had in some ways even starker challenges- a man hit by a car twice, the founder of an association for handicapped athletes shows an amazing spirit of faith and overcoming. I think of this in relationship to my reading of Kierkegaard today who also had his own personally gigantic struggles in which it seems he overcame in his Christian faith. Kierkegaard describes the psychology of a kind of despair that one is tempted to in suffering a misfortune, and as part of his overcoming he is able to to diagnose it, it seems to me, to some extent, to discern the sorrowful state and to affirm the good instead.

"A self which in despair is determined to be itself winces at one pain or another which simply cannot be taken away or separated from its concrete self. Precisely upon this torment the man directs his whole passion, which at last becomes a demoniac rage. Even if at this point God in heaven and all his angels were to offer to help him out of it- no, now he doesn't want it, now it is too late, he once would have given everything to be rid of this torment but was made to wait, now that's all past, now he would rather rage against everything, he, the one man in the whole of existence who is the most unjustly treated, to whom it is especially important to have his torment at hand, important that no one should take it from him- for thus he can convince himself that he is in the right. This at last becomes so firmly fixed in his head that for a very peculiar reason he is afraid of reternity- for the reason, namely, that it might rid him of his (demoniacally understood) infinite advantage over other men, his (demoniacally understood) justification for being what he is. It is himself he wills to be; he began with the infinite abstraction of the self, and now at last he has become so concrete that it would be an impossibility to be eternal in that sense, and yet he wills in despair to be himself. Ah, demoniac madness! He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery from him!"- Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, (p. 205-206).

This and other sections in this tightly weaved masterwork (which Kierkegaard said was one of the two best things he had ever written) describes a Christian psychology that it seems to me is a valuable curative given by God to help bring us out of Nietzshcean and Freudian diminuitive psychology. It seems that the greatest and most effective answers to the challenge of Nietzsche is in providing the profounder, more authentic psychology, something which it seems to me Doestoevsky and Kierkegaard provide essential aids for. Part of what I think surpasses Nietzsche in Kierkegaard and Doestoevsky is a grasp of a structure that is more comprehensive and sturdy enough to withstand the tempestuous blast of the arch fury of someone like Nietzsche which it seems is described by Kierkegaard here and even more precisely in the following pages some of which I will quote here:

"it does not even in defiance or defiantly will to be itself, but to be itself in in spite; it does not even will in defiance to tear itself free from the Power which posited it, it wills to intrude on this Power in spite...Revolting against the whole of existence, it thinks it has hold of a proof against it, against its goodness. This proof the despairer thinks he himself is, and that is what he wills to be, therefore he wills to be himself, himself with his torment, in order with this torment to protest against the whole of existence. Whereas the weak despairer will not hear about what comfort eternity has for him, so neither will such a despairer hear about it, but for a different reason, namely because this comfort would be the destruction of him as an objection against the whole of existence..."

(He goes on to make an imaginative analogy here.)

Kierkegaard, like Doestoevsky and Nietzsche, wrote out of experience of intense personal suffering (much of it brought on themselves). Nietzsche had an evangelical Christian father who when Nietzsche was young boy had fallen and suffered brain damage and for a period of time had gone insane before he died. Called the "little pastor" as a child, Nietzsche grew into a virulently anti-Christian writer- perhaps more so than has ever occurred before. What it seems to me is that he excercises in a kind of systematic way an option God has left open to humans and made of himself an objection to God, willing to be by his very self an objection to "the Power which posited him". Kierkegaard was inflicted with a spinal curvature and his relationship too the oppostie sex is said to have amounted to a black comedy. This is not to equate the suffering. How are we to measure the suffering of a person?(I eschew utilitarian calculations of pain as imaginary mathematics. ) In the writings of Kierkegaard, which I am a new comer to, it seems one sees a monumental struggle ending with faith in the living God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He too suffered but rather than succumbing to the despair of being that he describes, probably with no conscious relationship to Nietszche (I have no idea if they were ever aware of each other's writings), it seems he found a vantage point, like the best kind of Danish mountain climber, the vantage point from which to rightly reject the despair that leads to death with which he had been tempted. He testified to a reality and authenticity that are in opposition to Nietzsche's account. So did Doestoevsky who wrote once that his "hallelujah was born out of a furnace of doubt." Nietzsche said of Doestoevsky that "he is the only psychologist from which I have anything to learn." Nietzsche was not all wrong. He had deep perceptions which is why he is largely worthy of his aura of danger. But Kierkegaard and Doestoevsky, in my judgment, had greater and more psychologically and mentally and authentically advantageous perspectives.

State Lotteries are Civic Corruption

2007-03-14T18:45:00.000-07:00

“Libertarian defenders of state lotteries can’t have it both ways. If a lottery is, like dry cleaning, a morally legitimate business, then why should it not be open to private enterprise? If a lottery is, like prostitution, a morally objectionable business, then why should the state be engaged in it?

…Not surprisingly, lotteries direct their most aggressive advertising at their best customers- the working class, minorities, and the poor.

…Massachusetts, with the highest grossing per capita lottery sales in the country, offers stark evidence of the blue-collar bias. A 1997 series in the Boston Globe found that Chelsea, one of the poorest towns in the state, has one lottery agent for every 363 residents; upscale Wellesley, by contrast, has one agent for every 3,063 residents. In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, this ‘painless’ alternative to taxation is a sharply regressive way of raising revenue. Residents of Chelsea spent a staggering $915 oer capita on lottery tickets last year, almost 8 percent of their income. Residents of Lincoln, an affluent suburb, spent only $30 per person, one tenth of 1 percent of their income.

…With states hooked on the money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across America must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune consigns them.”

-Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, “Against State Lotteries”, pgs. 70-72.

A Community Focused on the Good and Realizing Its Telos

2007-03-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

"Humility, like all the virtues, comes as a gift made possible by being part of a community that has, quite literally, no use for pretense. Pretense can be defeated only when a people have such good work to do that they have no time for the games of status. Such work is no better exemplified than the l'Arche movement begun by Jean Vanier. L'Arche is the community in which some learn to live with those whom the world calls mentally handicapped. Those who live with the mentally handicapped want to help them grow, but according to Vanier, before

'doing for them, we want to 'be with them.' The particular suffering of the person who is mentally handicapped, as of all marginal people, is a feeling of being excluded, worthless and unloved. It is through everyday life in a community and the love that must be incarnate in this, that handicapped people can begin to discover that they have value, that they are loved and so lovable.' (Vanier 1979, 3)

Such a community both makes time and takes time." -Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, p. 162.

I am attracted to this section of Hauerwas especially by his stress on focus as a community and not just as individuals on the great good of reaching thos marginalized by our society. "Talk is cheap, brother", I feel some of you say sometimes. There is a great need in Baltimore and here in DC, a great crying need. There is a good work to do and in the doing it I hope we might find the focus together which increasingly humbles us as Hauerwas describes. I don't think that community in all cases is necessary for humility. It seems that many prophets had to go without. But maybe I am wrong. Certainly to be a prophet of God you've got to be humble. Think of the company they keep. I am thinking of the focus implied here in conjunction with something I read from Michael Sandel about commercials in public classrooms:

"But, even if corporate sponsors supplied objective teaching tools of impeccable quality, commercial advertising would still be a pernicious presence in the classroom because it undermines the purposes for which the school exists. Advertising encourages people to want things and to satisfy their desires: education encourages people to reflect on their desires, to restrain or to elevate them. The purpose of advertising is to recruit consumers; the purpose of public schools is to cultivate citizens." Public Philosophy, p. 75.

Sandel argues in a way that I find persuasive that the purpose for which the schools exist is undermined by the commercials in the classroom and the manifold little compromises. I remember seeing the kids subjected by the arm of the State to captive commerical watching when I was a substitute teacher so that the schools could have free TVs for every room. I knew something was deeply disturbing and outrageous about this but I couldn't articulate it very well at the time. It seems that the time has come for us to learn to articulate just what is wrong with this kine of excessive encroachment. Jesus said we should watch and pray so that the cares of this world and the love of it do not snuff out our faith. We should ask what is our purpose as a church for existing and see that our focus is increased and not drawn away into the world's manifold distractions whether commercial or ascetic.

An Adulterous Generation

2007-03-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I am reading a book an author will say something which strikes me as a window into their heart, their soul, their cherished belief. It seems to me that Stanley Hauerwas made such a statment in his commentary on Matthew when he was speaking about Yoder, the author of The Politics of Jesus, and was saying that he thinks one of the greatest tasks before the church today may be to encourage and house prophets. He apparently reveres Yoder as something of a prophet and it seems he also selects Wendell Berry for some of the same reasons. He quotes Wendell Berry who writes:

"This is true both literally and figuratively: The dominant tendency of our age is the breaking of faith and the making of divisions among things that once were joined. This story obviously must be told by somebody...But how has it been told, and how ought it to be told?...The story can be told in a way that clarifies, that makes imaginable and compassionable, the suffering and the costs; or it can be told in a way that seems to grant an easy permission and absolution to adultery and divorce. (Berry 2000, 133-34)." - from Life is A Miracle.

By the way, I have about about four Wendell Berry books including this one. One I put in my church library that was recommended by the emergent village reading list. I thought it very good with excellent things to say about Christians and the environment and the economy and in supporting local farms,etc. and overall a hardy and wholesome contribution toward a good turn in the road that I hope we will all have contributed to in the end when all is said and done.

Someone else I think was something of a prophet in terms of one with deep perception of the signs of the time was the poet and literary critic of the late Victorian era, Matthew Arnold. A line which seemed to capture something of the same thing to which Berry is referring to in the quote above is taken from his poem "To Marguerite," or at least it struck me that way when I read it:

"Or if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things-

...Of happier men!- for they, at least,
Have dream'd two human hearts might blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end..."

Bummer. Arnold was in the processing of "losing his religion" so he didn't have for instance the strength of my friend Isaac who remains strong spirited even in bodily weakness and with the prospect of death. But what I was focusing on is not so much Arnold's melancholy merely but what it evoked at least in me of a sense of the character of the age, an adulterous age that finds it hard to even conceive of the desirabilty of lifelong, conjugal love.The prevailing philosophy has obscured the good and we need good philosophy to help articulate the case for everlasting love. But more than that we need the blood of Christ and our faithful Lord to lean upon along the Way.

Solzhenitsyn, Arch-Enemy of Totalitarianism, Attacked Out of Shallow and Transparent Adherence to Anti-Telos World Blindness

2007-03-12T18:23:00.000-07:00

From the First Things blog for today, with my coments interspersed:

"Solzhenitsyn reiterated a claim that was central to his controversial commencement address at Harvard University in 1978: “if there are neither true or false judgments, man is no longer held [accountable] for anything. Without universal foundations, morality is not possible.” For this, as much as for his defense of a humane and self-limiting Russian patriotism, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the most powerful and sustained critique of totalitarianism ever written, was denounced as an enemy of liberty and the spiritual architect of a new authoritarianism."

[This seems to hit on a central point of struggle between the teleological and the anti-telos worldviews. The charge of authoritarianism and coercionism seem to be aimed at each other, from both sides. The liberal voluntarist position which emphasizes self-creation and freedom from moral limits cries “theocracy!” when the older tradition in politics is urged, one which included in its politics the aim of instilling in its citizens civic virtues necessary for self-government. This seems to me the temporary victory of the anti-telos, Nietzschean perspective.]

"As I argued in a 2004 article in First Things, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,” these tendentious assaults helped shape a “new consensus” about Solzhenitsyn. Moreover, this consensus has been remarkably resistant to correction on the basis of a balanced critical analysis of what Solzhenitsyn actually says in his writings. …

Which makes it all the stranger that the review of the book in the March 9 issue of the Times Literary Supplement could have appeared in Syntaxis thirty years ago.

Written by the émigré novelist Zinovy Zinik, the review recycles all the same tired charges of “stale traditionalism” in literature and politics, authoritarianism, and neo-Stalinist rhetoric—as if the old fights have to be re-fought one more bloody time. But this time they are presented without deep conviction and with plenty of internal evidence that contradicts the author’s claims.

Thus Zinik readily concedes that Solzhenitsyn a literary innovator, but somehow a “stale traditionalist” anyway. It would be “preposterous,” he says, to call Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite, though he goes on to insinuate it anyway. Solzhenitsyn has given support to the most “reactionary” elements in Russian politics and literature, Zinik insists—even while noting Solzhenitsyn’s continuing denunciations of the “maladies of Russian nationalism” and his unflagging opposition to the Red-Brown coalition of unrepentant communists and racialist nationalists.

In his only reference to the actual contents of the Reader, Zinik concedes the accuracy of the portrait of Solzhenitsyn’s views found in our “comprehensive preface” and “informative introductions to each part” of the volume. He admits that the Solzhenitsyn who emerges from the book is a “moderate conservative, a religious but tolerant old-fashioned thinker.”

But it turns out that none of this is of any importance. Instead of analyzing Solzhenitsyn as a writer, historian, and moral philosopher, Zinik issues a thunderous, if a rather passé, attack on a man whose views are disqualified by his moralizing, “theocratic” character.

Zinik can assert all this only by saying nothing, absolutely nothing, about the actual contents of the seven-hundred-page book. If he had to refer to real texts he would have to concede that Solzhenitsyn is a critic of “stale traditionalism” in both politics and literature. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his 1993 “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” the task of a “healthy conservatism” is to remain “equally sensitive to the old and to the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without which no future can ever be born.” Zinik sees no need to consult texts since he believes Solzhenitsyn has been excommunicated from civil discussion by his unwillingness to confuse human freedom—an inestimable good—with the tenants of relativistic ideology.

Zinik ends his review by insinuating that Solzhenitsyn is a prisoner in an authoritarian Russia of his own making (although once again he concedes—quite rightly— that Solzhenitsyn’s “most cherished” political idea is that of “saving Russia by strengthening the independence of local government, Swiss-style”).

In truth, Solzhenitsyn remains—as he has been for decades now—a thoughtful and passionate advocate of “repentance and self-limitation,” a critic of the “lie” in all its forms, an advocate of what he calls a “clean, loving, constructive Patriotism” as opposed to a radically nationalist bent” that “elevates one’s nationality above a humble stance toward heaven.” In contrast to the consensus that increasingly dominates in both liberal and conservative circles in the West, Solzhenitsyn saw Russia in the 1990s—with its criminal corruption, unholy alliance of oligarchs and unrepentant communists, its betrayal of the rule of law and a genuine market economy in the name of a misguided “market ideology”—as a new “Time of Troubles” for his beloved homeland. He has a balanced view of Russia today in no small part because he does not identify the 1990s as a period of true democratic reforms as so many people mistakenly do in the West. "