Month: April 2006

Some good reading out there this week. I particularly liked “Dembski and the Cause of Evil” at Siris, “The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons” at Mode for Caleb, and the discussion of The Gospel of Judas at Even the Devils Believe.

We just started watching the short-lived late 90s series Freaks and Geeks on DVD. Very funny and sweet. Especially if you were – ahem – not the most popular kid in high school. In the episode we watched last night, Lindsay, a smart girl who’s testing the waters of rebellion by hanging out with the “Freak” crowd (roughly, stoners), decides to throw a keg party while her parents are out of town to impress her new friends. But her “geeky” younger brother Sam and his friends switch the keg out for one filled with non-alcoholic beer in an attempt to forestall trouble. Problem is, the guests manage to convince themselves that they’re getting drunk anyway.

Unlike most TV shows about high school, the actors actually look like they are in high school, they talk like high schoolers, and they go through the same kinds of painfully awkward experiences that many people go through in high school. And the characters are sweet, funny, and likable. Naturally it was cancelled.

On the musical front I’ve been enjoying the 1998 album Something Wicked This Way Comes by the power/thrash metal band Iced Earth. These guys combine some of the epic and melodic sound (and fantasy-tinged themes) of bands like Iron Maiden with elements of thrash. Good stuff.

There’s been a fair bit of discussion recently about presumed presidential aspirant (and current Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and how that might play with voters.

Romney faces two distinct, but not unrelated problems. Evangelical Protestants who make up an influential portion of the GOP base tend to see Mormons, despite their their social conservatism, as a dangerous cult. Meanwhile, moderate Republicans, independents, and swing voters, whom any candidate would need to woo to win the general election, tend to see Mormonism as, er, well, a dangerous (or at least bizarre) cult (and are less warm to Mormons’ social conservatism).

Some of the writers linked above think that voter uneasiness with electing a Mormon amounts to a de facto religious test, but that’s surely nonsense. Voters are free to vote or not vote for a candidate for any reason they like. However, are there good reasons not to vote for someone simply because he or she is a Mormon? I’ve known a few Mormons and nothing about them makes me fear the idea of a Mormon in office any more than, say, your average Southern Baptist or Unitarian. I mean, yeah, Mormons hold some unorthodox beliefs, many of which I find pretty wacky. But then, I find some Methodist beliefs pretty wacky too* and I voted for George Bush. (Of course, we see how that turned out…) If anything, someone who comes from a minority religion may well turn out to be more sensitive to church and state issues, and more aware of the fact that most of his fellow citizens don’t share his views.

I suppose one argument might be this: Anyone who believes things that are so transparently weird (and therefore presumably false) has, at best, a tenuous grasp on reality and therefore shouldn’t be elected to public office. But “weird” is decidedly in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? It’s pretty weird to believe that a crucified itinerant rabbi is in fact the Second Person of a Three-personed God who is nevertheless not three gods but one. On the other hand, there are some religions whose intrinsic weirdness and manifest falsity would probably prevent me from voting for them. One of the commenters at The American Scene mentions how he would never vote for a Scientologist, which I would tend to agree with.

What say you, readers? Are there good reasons not to vote for someone sheerly on account of his or her religion?
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*Just ribbin’ ya, Methodist readers!

The Lutheran Zephyr has asked for reflections on What It Means to Be Lutheran. I’m going to split this into two parts: why did I become Lutheran and why do I stay Lutheran.

Embarassing as it sounds, I literally picked the local Lutheran church out of the phone book. My then-fiancée and I were obliged by the church we were getting married in to undergo some kind of pre-marital counseling. Neither of us were churchgoers at the time, and the church where we were supposed to be married was in another city (as well as somewhat theologically uncongenial), so we needed to go local. We ended up receiving counseling from a local Lutheran pastor, a wonderful guy, and started attending worship at his church. Five and a half years and three moves (two of them out of state) later, and we’re still Lutheran.

As to why I stay Lutheran, I’d say it’s because I’ve come to appreciate the way Lutheranism balances the evangelical and catholic elements of the Christian heritage. We have the liturgy, believe in the Real Presence, and hold to the creeds and confessions of the early church, but understand all this through the prism of God’s free saving grace in Jesus. The center of Lutheran faith is undeniably Christological and evangelical. Unlike some, the Lutheran exultation in paradox and dialectic often baffles me. I’m a rationalist at heart and have a hard time making sense of signature Lutheran themes like Law/Gospel, sinner/saint, kingdom of the left/kingdom of the right, etc. But I think documents like Luther’s On Christian Liberty and his Catechisms contain an attractive and compelling vision of evangelical Christianity.

I also like the way that the ELCA, for all its flaws, remains a more or less centrist institution (despite what you may have heard) whose unity is grounded in the Gospel more than in a particular social or political agenda. This doesn’t please the ultra-conservatives or the ultra-liberals, but so far the center has managed to hold. In a time when most people, including many Christians, seem to see religion primarily as a project for moral improvement or social reform (at best), the stubborn Lutheran insistence on putting the good news of Jesus Christ at the center is worth holding onto.

P.S. Feel free to offer comments on what drew you to your tradition, or what you find especially compelling about it.

Lutheran church holds “Worship with the Beatles.”

Gag. At least U2 sings about Jesus sometimes.

(link via Here We Stand)

Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff, whose popularity peaked in the mid-80s (Moscow on the Hudson, etc.) has reinvented himself as a philosopher-therapist who uses humor and positive thinking to cure folks of what ails them! He’s finishing up his master’s thesis at Penn on “love and laughter” under the tutelage of “positive psychology” guru Martin Seligman.

Thomas at Without Authority writes on the different meanings of “grace” in the Catholic and Lutheran traditions as well as the “Finnish” interpretation of Luther.

Let’s make a deal (with Iran), via Unqualified Offerings.

A “wager argument” for vegetarianism, via Siris.

Caleb McDaniel draws an analogy between nuclear abolitionism and the abolition of slavery.

Jonathan at The Ivy Bush reviews Rowan Williams’ The Truce of God.

Armagedion Time talks Gospel of Judas.

Nice article on John Stuart Mill (via Arts & Letters Daily) that argues that he was more complicated than people frequently think. He’s often reduced to a one-dimensional figure, depending on the preferences of the person discussing him (e.g. the libertarian Mill, the socialist Mill, the utilitarian Mill), but this piece shows him as a more interesting, if somewhat inconsistent, figure.

Mill’s not my favorite philosopher by any stretch, but he’s certainly important; most of us probably take for granted any number of notions that were first clearly enunciated by him.

Lots of good comments in the post below.

Prior to this discussion I’d been reading Gerald O’Collins’s The Tripersonal God: Understanding and Interpreting the Trinity. He has some things to say on naming the Trinity that might be helpful:

When the Trinity is named, God the Father functions validly if we align ourselves with the meanings communicated in that metaphor by the biblical witnesses (above all, by Jesus himself) and refuse to literalize it. It is these meanings that convey true information about the tripersonal God. Father names personally the God revealed in Israel’s history and known relationally as the Abba of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (together with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit). Father fixes the reference when Christians speak distinctively of the tripersonal God and what they believe the Trinity to be like. The image and language of Abba emerged from Jesus’ specific experience of God. Once we agree that language and experience, while distinguishable, belong inseparably to each other, we would misrepresent Jesus’ experience if we insisted on replacing his central language for God. Fidelity to Jesus calls on believers to name the first person of the Trinity primarily as Father, which entails acknowledging Jesus himself (though once again not exclusively) as the Son of God.

By not arguing for an exclusive use of male names, I recognize that we do and should also use other names: Such a gender-neutral name as Creator for the first person of the Trinity and such a female name as Wisdom for the second person. Once we move beyond trinitarian formulations, many possibilities open up: well over 100 distinctive names for Jesus in the NT alone and “God” (in the form of ho Theos) as the name with which the NT often designates God the Father. The question at issue is not the use of other distinctive names but rather the primary way of naming the Trinity when we use trinitarian formulations, and–in particular–the name Father for the first person. (p. 186)

The key points here, it seems to me, are that “Father” fixes the reference to the God of Jesus, and that language and experience are inseparable, so we can’t simply assume that we can retain the same meaning with a change of language. It’s fidelity to Jesus and his experience of God, not some vague idea we may have about “fatherhood,” that licenses the use of “Father” to address the first person of the Trinity. If anything, in the biblical tradition the character of God defines and sets the standard of fatherhood that human fathers are measured against, rather than being a projection of human qualities onto God.

Later Fr. O’Collins writes:

Suppressing the traditional naming of the Trinity would mean loss rather than gain. Such alternate proposals for the first person as Source and Parent sound remote, even impersonal, and nowhere near as directly relational as Father. Unquestionably, these alternatives contain or imply some personal and relational elements and are not intended to subvert Christian belief in a personal God. But if we try using (exclusively?) Source, Parent, and so forth as forms of address to God, we will perceive the superiority of Father. Some of the alternative triads (e.g., Creator, Christ, and Spirit) have a strong Arian flavor about them, as if only the first person of the Trinity were properly divine, possessed the power of creation, and had in fact freely created out of nothing Christ and the Spirit. One might object here that Hilary of Poitiers said something similar when he wrote of faith “in the Creator, the Only-Begotten, and the Gift.” Yet, he used such language immediately after recalling Jesus’ mandate to baptize “in the name of the Farther, and the Son, adn of the Holy Spirit” (De Trinitate, 2.1.33). The context for Hilary’s alternate triad removed any sense of Arian ambiguity.

Although it may claim some kind of NT pedigree (perhaps in Acts 3:13, 26; 4:27, 30), “Child” (as in Parent, Child, and Paraclete and Father, Child, and Mother) seems to depricate the second person of the Trinity, as if the Son were not yet properly mature. Moreover, to use Father, Child, and Mother could seem a little like a rerun of a Gnostic myth summarized by Irenaeus as Father, Mother, and Son (Adversus Haereses, 1.29). Renaming the first person of the Trinity in different ways could well mean saying something different and changing basic belief. A certain crypto-modalism comes through in some of the alternate proposals I listed: Creator, Liberator, and Comforter, for instance, can readily suggest a monopersonal God who behaves toward us in creative, liberating, and comforting ways but whose inner life is not differentiated into three divine persons. Another triad, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, can claim considerable background in Christian tradition. But if used by itself, it fails to distinguish Christianity from other religions in a way that naming Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does. After all, other religions can and do profess faith in deities who create (or in some lesser way make), redeem, and sanctify human beings. The names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit tie Christian faith firmly into the revealing and saving history that culminated in the events of the first Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Once again, let me insist that I am speaking about the primary way of naming the Trinity, the three names used in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. This does not mean that such formal trinitarian language is the only way of speaking about and addressing God. In these days, we may need more than ever some alternatives to prevent our “Father” language from collapsing into crass literalism. (pp. 189-90)

This approach seems to strike a good balance. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit remains the primary way of naming God because it keeps our faith fimly anchored in the historical particularity of the Gospel. Christianity is, after all, a historical religion, not a religion of abstract truth or speculation. But it allows for a certain flexibility in our images and forms of address to God. Theologians and mystics have frequently been quite daring in their language to and about God, and I don’t see good reason for the church to discourage that. We do need to be reminded that our language remains inadequate to its object.

Today our congregation started incorporating elements from the new worship book produced by the ELCA and approved at this summer’s churchwide assembly. Though the book itself won’t be in use til this fall as I understand it.

Now, I freely admit to being resistant to change; just when I get used to a particular liturgy they go and change it on me. This forces me to focus on the liturgy when the point is to have our attention on God. The liturgy is, after all, an instrument of worship, and an instrument works best when you scarcely notice you’re using it, right?

Nevertheless, change is sometimes necessary I suppose. But what I’ve seen so far isn’t too encouraging. There were two changes in particular that I noticed. The first was the response after the first reading. Usually, after finishing the reading, the reader says, “The Word of the Lord,” and the congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.” But today it was “Holy wisdom, holy word”/”Thanks be to God.” I’m not really sure why that change was made, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that it actually dates back to the early church.

The other, more significant change was in the Trinitarian invocation at the end of the service. Instead of “May God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit bless you now and forever” we got “Holy Eternal Majesty, Holy Incarnate Word, Holy Abiding Spirit, one God, bless you now and forever.” While admittedly not as bad as the popular, and highly theologically dubious, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” I admit that I don’t really think that the Trinitarian name is something we should be monkeying around with. I’m all for gender neutral or feminine images being used to balance out traditional masculine imagery, but the Christian Church has always held that the Trinitarian name is part of God’s self-revelation. It’s not something we came up with ourselves. It’s God’s proper name. As Robert Jenson put it:

From time to time, varous concerns lead to proposed replacements of the trinitarian name, for example, “In the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” or “In the name of God the Ground, God the Logos, and God the Spirit.” All such parodies disrupt the faith’s self-identity at the level of its primal and least-reflected historicity.

Such attempts presuppose that we first now about a triune God and then look about for a form of words to address him, when in fact it is the other way around. Moreover, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier,” for example, is, like other such phrases, not a name at all. It is rather an assemblage of after-the-fact theological abstractions, useful in their place but not here. Such assemblages cannot even be made into names, for they do not identify. Every putative deity must claim, for example, somehow to “create,” “redeem,” and “sanctify.” There are also, to be sure, numerous candidates to be “Father” or “Spirit,” but within the trinitarian name, “the Father” is not primarily our Father, but the Father of the immediately next-named Son, that is, of Jesus. The “Holy Spirit” within the name, is not merely any “spirit” claiming to be holy, but the communal spirit of the just-named Jesus and his Father. By these relations inside the phrase, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” is historically specific and can be what liturgy and devotion–and at its base, all theology–must have, a proper name of God. (The Triune God, p. 17)

By all means, experiment with a variety of images for God. Many of our hymns do this wonderfully. But the Trinitarian name isn’t something to be cast aside for the sake of change or for some politically correct agenda.