Month: June 2005

Having been hanging around Lutheranism (at least in its ELCA version) for about five years now, I’ve noticed that, like many other mainline Protestant denominations, there are several distinct sub-groups or factions that appear to co-exist with varying degrees of tension. For instance, most readers are probably familiar with the divisions within Anglicanism between evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, etc., but may be less familiar with such divisions within Lutheranism.

Herewith, then, is my feeble attempt at identifying some of these various sub-groups:

• Liberal Protestants are probably well-represented among the clergy and denominational poobahs, these are the theologically liberal National Council of Churches, peace ‘n’ justice types. They are the ones who are advocating most eagerly for acceptance of homosexuality in the church and other aspects of a “liberationist” agenda.
• Evangelicals are eager to join in on the great evangelical megachurch success story. They tend to be morally conservative, but want to downplay Lutheran distinctives (liturgical worship, sacraments) in favor of “seeker sensititve” services and a kind of generic American evangelical piety.
• Confessional Protestants are the folks for whom the Reformation and the Lutheran Confessions still provide the touchstone of Lutheran identity. Very suspicious of ecumenism, they balk at having things like the historic episcopacy foisted on them.
• “Small-c” Catholics (a.k.a. “evangelical catholics”) see the Lutheran church as a reform movement within the universal catholic church. They tend to be “high-church” and favor more “catholic” styles of devotion and liturgy and emphasize the Lutheran tradition’s continuity with the pre-reformation church. Like the Lib Prots they are ecumenically minded, but tend to be more favorably disposed to Rome and Orthodoxy (rather than other mainliners), even envisioning eventual reunion. They also tend to be morally conservative, sometimes making common cause with confessional protestants and evangelicals.

What do you all think? Did I leave anybody out? Do other churches have these kinds of divisions?

Following the George Lucas approach of setting expectations so low that you can’t help but exceed them, the new Batman flick looks like it’ll be light years ahead of the last two horrible, horrible entries in the series.

The two typical approaches to the character are either campy (think the 60s tv series) or ultra dark and gritty (think Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns). However, there is a third approach to the character that I prefer, which incorporates the tortured aspect of the character, but tempers it with a kind of dark, sardonic humor. After all, you can’t take the angsty Batman too seriously – he is a guy who dresses up like a bat to fight crime after all!

It looks like Batman Begins is going for dark and gritty. Should be fun summer fare in any event.

This is interesting (via A Conservative Blog for Peace) –

Am I objecting to the notion of America being a “Christian nation,” especially because I am Muslim? No, not at all. Like I said before, I have absolutely no problem with this being a nation based upon Judeo-Christian values, because those values are my values. Yet – as I said before – if we are truly a Christian nation, as many contend, then this comes with a number of obligations and implications.

A Christian nation always stands on the side of justice, no matter what the political ramifications. A Christian nation must always act in accordance with the principle that right makes might, as opposed to the other way around. A Christian nation must always oppose those who commit injustice, even if it be its own friends and allies. A Christian nation must always have compassion for the poor and less fortunate, especially those living within its own borders. A Christian nation can never say one thing and do another. Now, I believe a Muslim nation is bound by the same obligations, but I am not a citizen of a Muslim nation, but rather a majority-Christian one.

Too many times, however, our country has hardly acted like a Christian nation. The most recent example of such failure is the invasion of Iraq, a war which the late Pope John Paul II himself said failed to meet the criteria of a Christian just war. Talk is cheap. If this country is truly a “Christian nation” – as many are wont to claim – if we are to talk the talk, then we have to simultaneously walk the walk. Otherwise, all America will ever be is just a nation of Christians. We can do much better than that.

Marcus says that the churches don’t need to abandon the supernatural worldview of traditional Christianity in order to survive, but that they should re-think their sexual ethic, since the sexual revoution is a fait accompli.

I think he may be on to something, though I might quibble about a few things.

During much of the 19th and 20th centuries Christians were subjected to a torrent of commentary, much of it by theologians and clergymen, that “modern man” is no longer able to believe in the worldview of the Bible with its anthropomorphic God and his interventions in the physical cosmos. No one can “use the wireless” and beleive in the three-tiered universe of earth, heaven, and, hell.

The funny thing is that this appears to be flatly untrue. In point of fact, people seem quite able, psychologically, to believe in all sorts of supernatural phenomena while being quite comfortable with the world of modern technology. Just walk into any bookstore in America and note the ever-expanding “New Age” sections, not to mention those dedicated to the more traditional faiths. Fundamentalist Protestants expertly deploy the latest in communication technologies. It seems like every other week we read about a new apparition of the Blessed Virgin. Creeping secularism seems to have given way to a proliferation of quirky ideas about the supernatural world.

And, anyway, the hermetically sealed universe of Englightenment philosophy never made much logical sense either. If there is a God who created the universe and the laws that govern it, and who sustains it in its being at every moment, why couldn’t he intervene if he so chose? This point hit me like a ton of bricks when reading C.S. Lewis’ Miracles after spending a couple of years plowing through theologians like Tillich and Bultmann who insisted on demythologizing everything in the Christian story that smacked of “supernaturalism.” (Young and foolish as I was, I wanted to see if there was anything left of Christianity that an enlghtened modern such as myself could still believe in.) Lewis simply pointed out, quite cogently I thought (and still do), that if “we decide that Nature is not the only thing there is, then we cannot say in advance whether she is safe from miracles or not.”

Moreover, the drift of philosophy and theology in recent years has been away from the Englightenment view of the world due in part to a realization that “reason” as the Enlightenment understood it is far to narrow to make sense of all our experience. In this sense someone like Bishop Spong is something of a throwback – someone who still thinks the philosophy of Voltaire is cutting edge.

So, I agree with Marcus that “miracle and mystery” are not quite the obstacles for “modern man” that they’ve been made out to be.

But I think he’s right that the Church’s tradtional ethical teaching, especially its sexual morality, does provide an obstacle for many people. But I don’t think we should pose the choice as “traditional morality” vs. the sexual revolution. Even if we agree that the traditional sexual ethic may need rethinking, there are certain aspects of the “sexual revolution” (and I’m sure Marcus would agree with this) that the church should say “no” to. I don’t think she should make peace with promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography, for instance.

If the church’s sexual ethic has to be rethought, I think it needs to be rethought within a theological context. That is, what is sexual love for, theologically speaking?

One approach that may have promise is suggested by Eugene Rogers in an essay in the Christian Century from last year. Drawing on the Eastern Orthodox tradition Rogers says that sexuality is not (primarily, at least) for procreation, but for sanctification:

Sexuality, in short, is for sanctification, that is, for God. It is to be a means by which God catches human beings up into the community of God’s Spirit and the identity of God’s child. Monogamy and monasticism are two ways of embodying features of the triune life in which God initiates, responds to and celebrates love.

Rogers goes on to argue that for people who find themselves attracted to members of the same sex, monogamous partnerships can provide the kind of context for growing in holiness that traditional marriage provides for heterosexuals.

I’m not sure if his argument succeeds; for one, he seems a little too dismissive of the weight of Scripture and Tradition. (And I confess to being pretty conflicted about the matter myself.)

But the point, I think, is this: the church shouldn’t simply go along with whatever the larger society is saying, be it in sexual mores or any other area. But instead of simply saying “no” it needs to provide a powerful positive vision of what sexuality is for in God’s plan. To the extent that the Christian tradition has given the impression that marriage is simply a way to contain lust or strictly for procreation it may have failed to uphold that kind of positive vision. Maybe such a vision is already there, but if so I think it’s fair to say that the churches haven’t done a great job communicating it. And I think people want sexuality to be meaningful; surely the kind of banal hedonism that our culture all too often promotes must be leaving a lot of people unsatisified.

Oops – I just broke my rule about not posting on sex or gay marriage. Oh well.

Well, sort of.

A good editorial on fear-mongering about religion (via Jesus Politics):

Exposés of right-wing Christian America are often hardly less apocalyptic than the pronouncements of the radio preachers citing Revelation. The sky is falling, the new brown shirts are taking over, our beloved republic is being conquered by fundamentalists who are as crazy as al-Qaeda zealots. A recent set of articles in Harper’s describes evangelical leaders such as Ted Haggard, leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, and James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, in alarmist, almost panicked tones. The goal of such clarion calls is clearly the marshaling of another set of troops to take back America.

The religious movements Harper’s laments are worthy of the strongest critique. Yet at times the magazine seems to fear religious faith itself as a motivating factor or intellectual template for action—as if anyone who acts on faith has made a step toward embracing the swastika. The writers’ high level of fear blinds them to the many faith activists who have worked for agendas now taken to be “progressive”—Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day, to name just a few. And fear blinds them to the rigidity of their own ideological demand that people have to be secular in order to be reasonable.

People for the American Way has a selection of quotes from Janice Rogers Brown (who was just confirmed), apparently intended to demonstrate how nutty she is and what a threat her confirmation is to all that is good and decent. And indeed, some of it does seem a bit nutty; Brown appears to be a libertarian of the school that thinks the courts should be striking down any economic regulation that infringes on strict laissez-faire.

But what about this:

Janice Rogers Brown on the right of privacy vs. the “right to keep and bear arms” [dig the scarequotes]:

Curiously, in the current dialectic, the right to keep and bear arms – a right expressly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights – is deemed less fundamental than implicit protections the court purports to find in the penumbras of other express provisions. (citations omitted) But surely, the right to preserve one’s life is at least as fundamental as the right to preserve one’s privacy. [Concurring opinion in Kasler, 2 P.3d at 602]

Now, I’m sort of a squishy moderate on gun control (I come from a family with a long tradition of responsible gun ownership and have no problem with the private ownership of firearms in general, but I’m also fine with restrictions on automatic weapons, waiting periods, etc. And I don’t personally own guns or particularly wish to), but this doesn’t really seem that kooky to me, I have to confess.

I mean, surely Brown is right that the right to preserve one’s life is at least as fundamental as the right to preserve one’s privacy, isn’t she? On what moral scale would my privacy (and all that that has come to mean in our post-Roe world, which is what I take it Rogers is partly getting at) possibly be more fundamental than my life?

(PFAW link via Bunnie Diehl)

you realize that you’re closer to the age Anne Bancroft was when she played sexy “older woman” Mrs. Robinson than you are to Dustin Hoffman’s recent college graduate.

Sigh.

The BBC is having a vote to determine the greatest (western) philosophers of all time. The voting is closed, – UPDATE: Thanks to Jack Perry I see now that the voting is not closed; it’s the nominations that are closed. My mistake. So, go vote if you want a say! – and the results will be announced in July.

I’m not entirely sure what the value of this kind of exercise is, but here’s the short list:

1. Aquinas
2. Aristotle
3. Descartes
4. Epicurus
5. Heidegger
6. Hobbes
7. Hume
8. Kant
9. Kierkegaard
10. Marx
11. Mill
12. Nietzsche
13. Plato
14. Karl Popper
15. Bertrand Russell
16. Sartre
17. Schopenhauer
18. Socrates
19. Spinoza
20. Wittgenstein

No really obvious omissions, though one could quibble. How about Locke, Berkeley, or Leibniz? And does anyone seriously think Karl Popper is the greatest philosopher who ever lived? Or Sartre?

And how are we measuring greatness anyway? Influence? Originality? Approximation to the truth? Surely only the latter is the truly philosophical way of measuring greatness.

Also, it’s somewhat misleading to list Plato and Socrates separately since virtually everything we know about Socrates’ philosophy comes from Plato.

I cursed his aunts and his uncles and him and all the rest of the family.

‘Do you know that Lady Florence has broken off her engagement with me?’

‘Indeed, sir?’

Not a bit of sympathy! I might have been telling him it was a fine day.

‘You’re sacked!’

‘Very good, sir.’

He coughed gently.

‘As I am no longer in your employment, sir, I can speak freely without appearing to take a liberty. In my opinion you and Lady Florence were quite unsuitably matched. Her ladyship is of a highly determined and arbitrary temperament, quite opposed to your own. I was in Lord Worplesdon’s service for nearly a year, during which time I had ample opportunities of studying her ladyship. The opinion of the servants’ hall was far from favourable to her. Her ladyship’s temper caused a good deal of adverse comment among us. It was at times quite impossible. You would not have been happy, sir!’

‘Get out!’

‘I think you would also have found her educational methods a little trying, sir. I have glanced at the book her ladyship gave you — it has been lying on your table since our arrival — and it is, in my opinion, quite unsuitable. You would not have enjoyed it. And I have it from her ladyship’sown maid, who happened to overhear a conversation between her ladyship and one of the gentlemen staying here — Mr Maxwell, who is employed in an editorial capacity by one of the reviews — that it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.’

–P.G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves Takes Charge”

Pastor Frontz and Camassia have both been discussing Catholic-turned-Episcopalian priest and guru of “Creation Spirituality” Matthew Fox’s new “95 theses” which he recently posted to the cathedral door in Wittenberg (what is it with these revisionist Episcopalians and their self-important Luther impersonations?).

Some of Fox’s theses are silly, some are eminently debatable, some are just politically correct bromides, but the thing that I’ve always wondered about folks like Fox and Spong is why, if the Christian Church is as despicable as they say it is, would they want anything to do with it? For them it seems to be a near-continuous history of imperialism, militarism, sexism, partriarchy, homophobia, punitive Father-god worship, exploitiation, abuse of the environment, etc. etc.

I mean, if it’s that bad wouldn’t it make more sense just to start over from scratch?