Month: September 2005

Will Pennsylvanians ever be free from the despotism of our commonwealth’s ridiculous blue laws? Here’s a step in the right direction anyway.

Russ Feingold (D-Wis) could be the antiwar candidate in 2008. He was one of only three senators to vote against the authorization of force in Iraq, so he has the kind of credibility that someone like Kerry lacked. He was also the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT (sic!) Act that was rammed through congress immediately after 9/11 (say what you will about the act on its merits, its passage was hardly a model of democratic deliberation).

All of which suggests Feingold has a refreshing independent streak. He has also bucked his party on Clinton’s impeachment, NAFTA (he was against it), and gun control. Hey, how about a Feingold/Hagel maverick-fusion pro-peace ticket?

Pro-war bloggers and pundits have made much hay of George Orwell’s dictum that pacifists are “objectively pro-fascist” because their aim is to obstruct the war effort and, thus, aid the enemy. This bit of rhetoric got particularly nasty during the run-up to the Iraq war when war opponents (pacifist or not) were routinely characterized as being “pro-Saddam.”

I always thought this was a weak (not to mention insulting) argument, but in addition, it’s interesting to note that Orwell himself later repudiated it:

We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated. This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising.

In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.

(Orwell links via Hit & Run.)

You are a Black Coffee

At your best, you are: low maintenance, friendly, and adaptable At your worst, you are: cheap and angsty You drink coffee when: you can get your hands on it Your caffeine addiction level: high

(via Lutheran Chik)

Now I think Peter Singer is a philosophical and moral disaster. He has consistently applied utilitarian principles to argue, for instance, that infanticide is justifiable in some cases, and that human beings are not intrinsically more valuable than other animals. Indeed, I would regard that as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism.

Nevertheless, you don’t need to accept his more dubious principles to agree with the thrust of this op-ed. In fact, anyone minimally committed to opposing cruelty to animals and a posessing a certain consistency (e.g. why is it ok to treat a pig in ways you would never dream of treating a dog?) should look askance at many American farming practices.

One of the great things about a long weekend is the chance to catch up on my reading. I’m one who’ll go to library and check out an armfull of books, intending to get to them all…eventually. This weekend I finally got to John Wesley’s A Simple Account of Christian Perfection. It’s basically a collection of reflections, sermons, hymns, and essays on Wesley’s distinctive doctrine.

In a nutshell, Wesley’s claim is that it is possible for Christians to attain perfection in this life, in some cases many years prior to death. By perfection Wesley means, essentially, to be so completely full of love for God and one’s neighbor such that one no longer commits sin (in the sense of an intentional infraction of the moral law). Perfection, he is careful to point out, does not free us from ignorance or other weaknesses that belong to our status as finite embodied beings per se. Perfection also has a strong doxological and eucharistic aspect as we come to accept all things that happen to us with praise and thanksgiving, seeing them as God’s will.

For Wesley, justification means the remission of guilt on account of Christ’s atonement, whereas sanctification is the regeneration of the heart whereby we are “cleansed from all unrighteousness.” He thinks that it is very clear from the Bible that God promises to do this – not merely to save us from the consequences of sin, but to save us from sin itself.

It’s important to note that Wesley doesn’t think that perfection of total sanctification usually comes immediately after justification. There may be, and often is, a long period of growth toward perfection during which we still struggle with sin (though he doesn’t rule out that God may act on someone to bring them to perfection almost immediately). However, the final transition to perfection is an instantaneous movement even when it is preceded by a long period of growth. He also points out that, once attained, this state can be lost, but it needn’t be.

Wesley seems to have a synergistic account of sanctification – while justification is by faith alone, he thinks that the human will cooperates with God’s grace in attaining perfection. Though at times he suggests that it is entirely God working in us. So I’m not sure if he was unclear on this relation, or if he clarifies it elsewhere. He also thinks that we can know both that we have been justified and that we have attained total sanctification. This knowledge seems to come from self-examination, though others can corroborate it to a certain extent. Though he doesn’t claim to have attained this state himself, he does claim to know of people who have.

What to make of Wesley’s account? First of all, I think he’s right that the Bible (and tradition) holds that we are not just forgiven our sins on account of Christ, but God wants to actually deliver us from our sin. I think most Christians would agree that justification & the forgiveness of sins inagurates a new life in which we participate in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. And it has usually been taken that some progress in sanctification is possible in this life, that Christians are empowered to live according to God’s standards of rigteousness.

Does that mean, though, that it’s possible to attain perfection in this life? Here I think Wesley may overreach. First of all, I think his epistemology is a bit questionable. Is it really possible to determine by self-examination that we have been justified and/or attained perfection? This seems like a notoriously unreliable procedure. Once we make our own internal states the test of how we stand with God, we seem to be in danger of building our house on some pretty unstable sand.

This is where I think Luther’s emphasis on the “external word” can have a salutary effect. According to Luther we should not look inward to try and determine if we really have faith, but rather we should look outward – to Christ and to the promises God makes to us, which we receive through the preached word and the sacraments. These external means of grace have a solidity and objectivity that we can trust. Luther well knew the dangers of excessive self-examination.

Even if we could verify it by self-examination, I wonder if asserting that some do in fact attain perfection is to claim to know more than has been revealed to us. Exegetical considerations aside, it seems safer to say that one may attain perfection, and that it is something to be strived for, but we should be agnostic about whether this in fact occurs. We could draw a parallel with the question of universalism. Some want to positively assert that God will or must save everyone. But this seems to be more than we can know, and in fact an attempt to tie God’s hands by appeal to some abstract notion of justice. Better, I think, to say that we should hope and pray that God will save everyone, without asserting that we know this will in fact happen.

Another reason to be agnostic about the attainment of perfection is that making perfection the telos of our life may, ironically, lead us to an excessive self-concern. This is another point where the Lutheran tradition has a contribution to make. Rightly understood, justification by faith alone ought to inculcate in us a certain self-forgetfulness. Since my destiny is secure, because my life is “hidden with Christ in God,” I don’t have to worry about traversing some path of holiness or climing some spiritual ladder. Again, the Christians attention is turned outward toward the neighbor and his needs. Precisely because I don’t have to worry about myself I am free to serve the neighbor in love.

That said, I think Wesley has a word to say to us as well. Lutherans, perhaps becuase they have tended to focus so much on justification, have downplayed sanctification. This can result in a certain complacency about sin, whereas Wesley reminds us that it is always possible to press on further toward the goal, even if we don’t attain it in this life.

Another contribution that Wesley’s emphasis on holiness can make is that it can give shape to Christian love. In emphasizing the neighbor and his needs, a Lutheran ethos may fail to provide us with a way of distinguishing genuine from spurious needs. “Love and do what thou wilt” may be a sufficiently concrete ethic for saints, but I suspect that the rest of us need more guidance than that. Lutherans have often fallen back on the “orders of creation” as specifying in more detail the obligations we have to others. But this can blunt the radicalness of Christianity and sanctify the status quo. By contrast, the Wesleyan emphasis on the imitatio Christi can give a more particularly Christian shape to works of love directed toward the neighbor.

Open Court Press appears to have stumbled on to a publishing goldmine with their Popular Culture and Philosophy series – each title offers a collection of essays reflecting on some aspect of pop culture. Initially I was suspicious that anything good could come of this, but a friend bought me The Simpsons and Philosopy as a birthday present and it was surprisingly good.

So, when I found myself at Borders last night with a 30% off any item coupon in my hot little hands, I was pleasantly surprised to come across Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy. The essays offer philosophical reflection on the film itself, but also on the broader topics it raises like the Atonement, artistic depictions of the Passion, Jesus and violence, and so on, all written by serious scholars. I’ve only read one essay so far, but it was a really excellent one by Loyola University of Chicago philosopher Paul K. Moser on “The Crisis of the Cross: God as Scandalous” (which you can also read online here).

Obviously the Passion of Our Lord has a rich history of providing fodder for deep thinking, so maybe the quality of this volume exceeds such titles as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy or The Atkins Diet and Philosophy(!), but based on my limited sample I have to say that they’ve produced some quality material.

“Fr. Jape” has a long, rambling, at times snarky, critique of the new “chastity movement” among hip young evangelicals in the latest New Pantagruel. This, however, is a good point:

Much of the energy of the purity brigade is generated by the opposite notion—that it is the chaste, rather than the unchaste, who suffer. Thus, as opposed to their happy-go-lucky-rutting-round-the-clock counterparts, the chaste require “intentional communities,” as Winner makes it, for constant group therapy. Being consigned to a life cut off from human contact would entail suffering. But trying to avoid sin is hardship, not suffering. The idea that you are suffering is just your dirty “old man of sin” talking, as the Apostle names the bugger. You should want him to suffer and drop dead. His pain is your gain! But don’t try to make an epic tale out of it. In the history of the church, many people have truly suffered, but the struggle for chastity seems to rate as a particularly saintly, heroic enterprise only among the evangelicals and Jesus freaks—and only in recent decades. They need to grow up.

Now, at the risk of offering more information than readers care to have, I’m in no position to lecture others on the virtues of pre-marital chastity. But it does strike me that we’ve lowered our standards quite a bit when simply managing not to have sex is taken to be an exercise in heroic virtue!

All the ink spilled over Cindy Sheehan and Pat Robertson over the last few weeks seems pretty trivial now doesn’t it?

Just another quick post to highlight some hurricane relief efforts.

Here is a good list of organizations.

This site has some tips on giving wisely and effectively.

Some specific church groups providing relief:

ELCA Disaster Response
Catholic Charities
Methodist Relief
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance
Mennonite Central Committee