Month: February 2005

Hugo Schwyzer on moving towards veganism as part of a consistent ethic of life.

Jim Henley on why he’s still a libertarian:

What I come back to everytime is that I am viscerally anti-bully and government still seems like the biggest bully around. I don’t believe government is inherently a force for good. I do not accept that democracy is a process by which “we” govern “ourselves.” I believe it is a process by which a larger group imposes its will on the smaller, and the most energetic and glib busybodies impose their will on the larger. …

Josh at Armagideon Time writes in defense of Constantine:

In seminary, one thing many students and professors were found of saying was that Constantine’s conversion to Christianity was good for Constantine, bad for the church. I believe nothing could be farther from the truth. Constantine was the best thing that could happen to the church.

GO EAGLES!!

UPDATE: Dammit…

Here’s another nugget from Fr. Jape on “practicing the discipline of place”:

It is the idea that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation. The Puritan heritage of America has long chafed against this discipline as it necessarily limits one to a small field of action in a world with seemingly little hope for eschatological fulfillment.

This resonates with Luther’s doctrine of vocation, at least as Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde explains it (see, A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism). According to Forde, what justification by faith does is put an end to all our projects for journeying out of the world, trying to reach God by our own efforts, along some path of “spiritual development” or moral and/or political overreaching. God’s kingdom comes to us as a gift and not by our efforts. Justification by faith spells the death of the old self, the self that is constantly trying to justify itself, and brings to life a new self that lives by faith.

What this does, Forde argues, is turn us back into the world – the concrete, eveyday world – freed from the need to escape the world via some project of transcendence. Because there’s nothing left for us to do “before God” we journey back into the world in all its quotidian messiness. Forde rejects the dictum that God became man so that we could become gods in favor of the idea that God became man so that we could become truly human. By which he means live within the limits of what it means to be a creature, caring for creation and our neighbors “for the time being.”

We do this primarily through our various tasks in the orders of creation: household, work, politics, culture, etc. “Vocation” in the Lutheran sense is not about “self-fulfillment”, much less making oneself pleasing to God, but about serving others in the specific needs. And since serving the needs of the neighbor is the telos of these orders, they can be altered as those needs change or in order to better meet them. Forde advocates the “political” or “civil” use of the law, not as a natural law that reflects an eternal law (as in some Catholic thought), but as the basic conditions for human life and community in the world.

The disciplines of place are, as a Lutheran would understand it, the opportunities we are given to serve our neighbors, which we can do with grateful hearts once we are freed from the anxiety of trying to justify ourselves and endow our lives with a self-created “meaning.”

Maybe you’d like to revive the ancient practice of abstaining from meat during Lent (a practice still observed by many Orthodox Christians, who, as I understand it, also fast from eggs and dairy making them virtual vegans!). If so, check out this site.

So, I noticed among the much-discussed Time magazine list of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals” is Brian McLaren who, it appears, is the founder/guru/grand poobah of something called the “Emerging (emergent?) church.” Can somebody fill me in on what this is all about? From what I’ve been able to glean, it seems to be made up of a lot of evangelicals disaffected with the mega-church style and looking for something more “authentic,” including a recovery of traditional patterns of worship (daily office! liturgical worship! candles!). There also seems to be a lot of talk about “postmodernism” and how it’s changed everything (a claim of which I remain suspicious – “modernism” is/was never the monolith a lot of people seem to claim it is/was).

So, is this a new kind of church, a new kind of gospel (heaven forfend) or just new wineskins? As a Lutheran I have what you might call a very thin ecclesiology (some would call it no ecclesiology at all!) that comes straight out of the Augsburg Confession (Article 7 to be exact):

Also they [i.e. the evangelical churches] teach that one holy Church is to continue forever. The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike. As Paul says: One faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, etc. Eph. 4, 5. 6.

(emphasis added)

So, I have no objection, in principle, to experimenting with different “human traditions…rites or ceremonies.” I don’t get bent out of shape about the debates between “traditional” and “contemporary” styles of worship (though I certainly have my preferences!).

However, I’m curious if the emerging church sees itself as something more than that. Also, how, if at all, is it related to the “post-constantinian” church envisioned by people like Hauerwas?

The New Pantagruel 3.1 is up and, as usual, it offers a feast of meaty articles from a variety of perspectives. I haven’t has a chance to dig in yet, but this article on the resurrection of Caelum et Terra looks good, as does this piece by Michael Baxter on the notion of “one nation under God.”

Also, “Fr. Jape” is his usual saucy self in dissecting the foibles of various sects within Christendom. Of particular interest to me was this bit on Mark Noll’s desire to create an “evangelical tradition”:

“Culturally adaptive biblical experimentalism,” as Noll has in the past described the Evangelical ethos, has always sounded to me like “making it up as we go along and turning out to be just like everyone else.” That idea can’t have escaped Noll’s attention. Alan Wolfe, Ron Sider, and Christian Smith (among others) have recently charted Evangelicalism’s dipping into what Smith has called the “heresies” of “moralistic therapeutic deism.” (Carla Barnhill might stand as a case in point.) And certainly Noll has chafed at Evangelicals’ penchant for a right-wing politics that he found impossible to support in the past several presidential elections. In this regard Noll was not alone, and aside from my deep disagreement with Christians (including some of our compatriots at tNP) who abstained from voting or who opposed the incumbent (and despite my sympathy for their motives), it says something singularly significant that Noll finds himself so politically and ecclesially alienated from both his Evangelical brethren and his “classical” Protestant cousins. Wanting a “tradition” but not content with any particular tradition as it actually exists–including Evangelicalism as it is–Noll seems afflicted with the very poverty of coherence that he knows is the fruit of “life without tradition.”

Is suffering redemptive? There is certainly no rule to say it is. If there were, it would only be a new law, a new way. We are not promised, however, a life free from suffering for the time being. Indeed, we are led to expect that anyone who sets out on a journey of faith in the gospel can expect to suffer. But as Luther always insisted, suffering may, indeed will, come, but is not to be sought. It is not a new way, a “negative theology of glory.” Not the law, but Christ, crucified and risen, is the redeemer, the one who takes our place and gives us his. — Gerhard O. Forde, “In Our Place”

Via Hugo I found a link to Home, Throne & Altar, the blog of John, a conservative, royalist, pentecostal-holiness New Zealander! (Ain’t the blog-world grand? (N.B. I refuse to employ the barbaric neologism “blogosphere.” Trying saying that out loud and see how dumb it sounds.))

Anyhoo, John has a post on abortion and how he came to his present views. He suffers from cerbral palsy and talks about how his condition can be threatening to those who want to believe that they are in charge of their destiny (and that’s all of us at sometime or another, isn’t it?):

Two years ago, I was put into a wheel-chair for a month or two, to recover from corrective surgery. Then, the hatred got obvious, so I couldn’t explain it away. It wasn’t in action, but in attitude, in looks, in eyes. People didn’t like to look at me. I made them afraid. With more mature eyes, I began to understand. People were afraid of me because I was a reminder. They hated me because I demonstrated something they tried very hard to forget. They are not in control. A car crash, ten minutes without Oxygen, a natural disaster, and as I am, thou shalt be. That’s an uncomfortable thought. We like our lives controllable, in little boxes, safe, and comfortable. We live on a knife-edge, partying away over the abyss, not wanting to think about how close we are to the edge of it. I was a reminder of that, of the fact that there are uncontrollable factors, that we are not, as we have taught ourselves to think, gods. So, people tried to make me go away. And when I wasn’t, when I obstinately refused to go from their eyeline, they lashed out. They got angry.

He sees the same desire for control in abortion and related aspects of the “culture of death”:

At the root of the culture of death is a desire for control, a fear. Control of one’s womb, heedless of he or she inside it. Euthenasia is a fear of dying “like a dog”, a desire to control death, to make the problem go away, with a nice drug. Embryonic Stem Cell research is a desire for control; a desperate searching in the dark, for the fountain of youth. We will not live forever, but we would like to try, even at the cost of ourselves. Shuffling the dying off to the Kevorkians of the world, shuffling the aging to homes, to age in a place where we don’t have to see them; institutionalising the mentally ill and disabled; at the root of the culture of death is fear, and pride, and selfishness. We are afraid. Groping in the dark, we have let go of Father’s hand. And because we have forgotten God, we have no-one to whom to trust the future. Having forgotten God, we also begin to forget each other.

Now, leaving aside the issue of abortion (though I think it’s clear I’m in great sympathy with John’s views), what struck me when reading this is how it illuminated the question of torture, which I’ve been thinking about lately. In comments to this post, Camassia said that I may have given short shrift to the view that killing someone on the battlefield is less dehumanizing than torturing them. And I think that’s right for reasons not unlike John’s reasons for opposing abortion.

Torture is the expression of a desire to subject that other person to our complete control, to invade the inner citadel of the self and conquer it. On the battlefield your opponent still retains his moral agency (however qualified), whereas in the torturer’s chair the object is to erase that moral agency. It is to try and usurp the place of God (as Camassia pointed out here).

More than this, though, the resort to torture, even in a good cause, is, it seems to me, an expression of deep fear, a refusal to relinquish control over our lives, to recognize that no one gets out of here alive (or as Paul Ramsey said, “God intends to kill us all in the end.”). The modern (or post-modern) world still lives on the promise of technology. We think that if we are ingenious enough in the use of our techniques we can (someday) prevent anything bad from ever happening. Drawing moral lines always threatens that promise because it says that some things are “off limits.”

The promise that we can control the future is, of course, the second-oldest one in the book: “Ye shall be as gods.” But it’s not the one we’re supposed to put our faith in, and doing so has, so we’re told, led to all kinds of mischief.

Marcus makes a conservative case for gay marriage.

Camassia engages in a little UN-baiting, which I applaud. Despite my disagreements with large swaths of what passes for conservative orthodoxy I am still enough of a right-winger to find the UN creepy and vaguely threatening.

Via Keith Burgess-Jackson, an interview from a few years ago with Roger Scruton (who, it appears, has come on board with KBJ et al. at The Conservative Philosopher).