A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Power, state, and Reformation

    Leaving aside the anti-Catholic animus (as well as what seem to be some dubious historical assertions) this is an interesting piece by British journalist Rod Liddle on the deep connections between English culture and Protestant Christianity.

    There has been a revisionist view, popularized by Eamon Duffy in particular, that Catholicism represented the authentic religion of the English people which was stripped away by the heavy hand of Henry VIII and the English state. Liddle is here taking the more traditional view that it was a matter of England throwing off the shackles of Roman tyranny.

    As it happens, I’ve just finished Own Chadwick’s history of the Reformation (Owen, brother of Henry, edited the Penguin series on the History of the Church in which Henry’s volume on the early church also appears). Chadwick takes more of a middle of the road view. He sees the decline in the church’s power in relation to the state as something that happened across the board, in Catholic as well as Protestant countries, and probably necessary for a more modern and rational form of government to emerge. Chadwick, in other words, takes a somewhat “Whiggish” view of the Reformation.

    Chadwick also contends that, while reform could hardly be called a populist movement in England, the people accepted it fairly readily, and even among conservatives those calling for a restoration of the pope’s authority were a minority (of course, Chadwick’s book, having been written some time ago, doesn’t take Duffy’s scholarship into account). One of the virtues of Chadwick’s book is that he takes “reform” to be something that took place throughout Europe, but took different forms in different countries. This enables him to see the “counter” Reformation as more than simply a reaction to Protestantism, but also as a genuine Catholic response to the drive toward reform.

    There’s a lot of interest in using this history polemically. Not just Roman Catholics, but Anglo-Catholics tend to emphasize the “catholic” elements of English Christianity and even take a somewhat dim view of the Reformation. One occasionally hears that Anglicanism has its theological and liturgical sources in the Fathers and the early church rather than in the Reformers (why not both?). On the other side, as in Liddle’s essay, Reformed Christianity is identified with English culture and nationhood, while Catholicism remains an essentially foreign, and somewhat menacing, force.

    Either way, history, by itself can’t settle theological disputes. It’s certainly possible that the Reformers were right in their main criticisms of the medieval church even if the Reformation often made progress by means of state power. (For that matter, Catholicism hardly foreswore the use of the sword.) Success doesn’t prove truth, but it doesn’t prove falsehood either.

  • Christo-fascism, again.

    War correspondent Chris Hedges has the latest entry in the impending Christo-fascism sweepstakes with his new book, cleverly titled American Fascists. Read the Salon interview here. LA Times review here.

    The MO of a lot of these books seems to consist of cherry-picking the few people who actually adhere to a “dominionist” ideology and then imputing that ideology to the mass of evangelical Christians. Or, alternatively, supposing that the masses are so dumb or easily led that all that’s required is some catastrophic event to get them marching in lockstep. So all evangelicals become “dominionists” in embryo.

    Interestingly, Hedges offers a Rumsfeldian “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” type argument against the objection that we don’t, in fact, seem to be on the brink of fascism. In fact, there seems to be a curious symmetry between the arguments of the Christian right alarmists and some of the more feverish arguments on the right about the impending takeover of Islamism. Both see a minority with a dangerous ideology, but then fail to note the disparaty between the ideology and the ability to actually carry out their schemes. They also both imply that the co-religionists of the radical minority are potential recruits to the fringe movement (whethere they’re evangelicals or Muslims). But what is the plausible chain of events whereby the “dominionists” or the radical Islamists actually succeed in establishing control of America?

    This isn’t to say that both groups couldn’t cause a lot of trouble, though it has to be pointed out that Islamists have actually succeeded in killing thousands of people, whereas it’s hard to point to any significant political victories for hardline Christian dominonists. Fear-mongering about “Christianists” also seems to overlook what seem to be far more plausible explanations for things like US foreign policy. The fact that the policies of the Bush administration, for instance, don’t depart in any radical way from what has been the bipartisan doctrine of “full spectrum dominance” ought to tell against imputing excessive influence to the Christian right. As should the fact that very little traction has been made in the areas supposedly most important to the Christian right on Bush’s watch (e.g. abortion, school prayer, gay marriage, etc.).

    What frequently seems to happen is that positions which, in themselves, would seem to be legitimate matters for debate in a democratic society, such as how far abortion rights should extend or what the proper relationship between religion and the state is, are taken to be part of a sinister “totalitarian” ideology by secular liberals. Thus, anyone who presses those positions in the public square becomes not just a political adversary, but an enemy of the open society as such.

  • Wright on the radio

    Via a friend who is a Calvin College grad, here’s a link to a lecture N.T. Wright gave there recently.

    Also, the lectures Bishop Wright gave at Harvard Memorial Church when he was here last fall are now available online.

    I haven’t listened to any of these yet, but thought I’d draw folks’ attention to them.

  • Small Is Beautiful

    This looks promsing: in the spirit of Crunchy Cons and Reactionary Radicals, a blog to promote Joseph Pearce’s new book Small Is Still Beautiful, which argues for the continuing relevance of the economic ideas of E.F. Schumacher.

    From the book description:

    Joseph Pearce revisits Schumacher’s arguments and examines the multifarious ways in which Schumacher’s ideas themselves still matter. Faced though we are with fearful new technological possibilities and the continued centralization of power in large governmental and economic structures, there is still the possibility of pursuing a saner and more sustainable vision for humanity. Bigger is not always best, Pearce reminds us, and small is still beautiful.

  • Our animal friends and the temptations of fanaticism

    Very nice post from *Christopher at Bending the Rule.

    I was at an Epiphany party last night and was trying to make a qualified case for vegetarianism to a couple of the attendees, without much traction I’m afraid. And it’s hard to do it without coming across as shrill or fanatical. (Though in my defense, a few of them came across as somewhat fanatical in their liturgical preferences.)

    But I think *Christopher’s right that there are always ways in which we can live less violently with our animal friends. It needn’t be all or nothing. In fact, it can’t be all. Andrew Linzey has repeatedly pointed out that there’s no “pure land” on which to live. Even a strict vegan would be complicit in and benefit from a host of practices that harm animals. I think Karl Barth was wrong when he called vegetarianism a “wanton anticipation of the eschaton,” but to think that we can live in this world without adversely impacting the lives of animals would seem to fit that description.

    The flipside though is the danger of complacency. The thing is, there are a lot of ways we could greatly increase the well-being of animals (especially those we raise for food, who account for the vast majority of animals we interact with) without any great sacrifice on our part. The fact that the use of animals is so widely bound up with our current civilization does make it hard of course, if only psychologically, to make certain sacrifices, but in terms of our objective needs, the sacrifice of, say, regular access to cheap meat would have to count as relatively minor.

    At the end of the day this is just the challenge of the moral life in general: we have to do what we can, hoping to avoid complacency, and gently encouraging others ideally while remaining humble about our own shortcomings and without falling into fanatacism or self-righteousness.

  • Romans 13 as death penalty proof-text

    There’ve been a variety of discussions and arguments among Christians in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s execution about whether it’s proper for them to support capital punishment. Invariably, someone trots out Romans 13 as a proof-text for the pro-death penalty side of the argument:

    Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

    Verse 4 in particular is frequently appealed to as the clincher: “for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”

    First off, I think there’s legitimate room for disagreement about what “bearing the sword” means in this context. Does it refer explicitly to capital punishment, or is “the sword” a more general symbol of earthly authority? Presumably this has been hashed out by people far better informed than me.

    But, even assuming that v. 4 does refer to capital punishment, are the folks who use this as an argument for Christian acceptance of the death penalty prepared to bite the bullett and accept the political stance that seems implied by the passage as a whole? As has often been pointed out, Rom. 13 seems to encourage a stance of extreme submission to the existing political authorities. At the very least this would seem to rule out any kind of armed rebellion against the state. Are we prepared to repudiate the American revolution, say, in order to endorse the principle of “be[ing] subject to the governing authorities”?

    Some theologians have argued that Paul is only referring to legitimate authorites whose rule is in harmony with the moral law, but that seems like a forced reading of the passage to say the least. So, it seems to me we’re forced, for the sake of consistency, not to appeal to it as a justification of capital punishment unless we’re prepared to assent to the teaching of the entire passage. I certainly don’t recall hearing too many pro-death penalty Christians repudiating the principles of 1776, but I’m open to correction.

    Moreover, the point of the passage hardly seems to be to encourage Christians to support the death penalty within the empire, or petition for its frequent use. It looks a lot more like Paul is telling the Roman Christians to live in such a way as to be blameless before men and God. It’s about how they should act, not how the state should organize its criminal justice system.

  • Reporting from the road

    I’m in Atlanta, traveling for work, which, ironically, gives me more time to blog since I’m sitting here in a hotel room by myself with nothing to do. Interestingly, I seem to be here at the same time that this is going on, so my hotel is full of well-scrubbed Baptist kids walking around with Bibles. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just kind of surreal – no one in the northeast walks around carrying a Bible. But if any of them try to evangelize me I’ll just brandish my Book of Common Prayer to ward them off.

    On the plane I started reading P.D. James’s The Children of Men. Very gripping and full of Christian themes. Dystopian science fiction is my favorite variety. It’s the first book of hers I’ve read, but I think I recall reading somewhere that James is an Anglican; she certainly takes some shots at modern watered-down versions of Christianity. And some of the heroes are explicitly Christian in their motivation. I wonder how much of that the new movie retains.

    We don’t have cable tv, so whenever I’m staying in a hotel I’m always astonished at how shallow and sensationalistic cable news is. I watched about 5 minutes of the Lou Dobbs show, which seems to be an extended exercise in xenophobia; all of America’s problems, it seems, are caused by foreigners – foreigners overseas who want to take our jobs, or foreigners coming here. Then the inevitable Wolf Blitzer’s show came on. The one spot of serious analysis was when Blitzer had the NYT’s John Burns reporting from Iraq on what a mess the whole Saddam execution debacle has become. Regardless of your views on the death penalty, it’s pretty hard at this point to see it as a victory for democracy or the rule of law, much less a victory for the U.S.

    I also watched a bit of the Gerald Ford funeral coverage. Interesting that he and Jimmy Carter became such close friends (at least to hear President Carter tell it). It’s pretty hard to imagine that happening now – Carter said that he used to give Ford regular briefings on his foreign and domestic policy! I’m not one to get sentimental about presidents or the pomp of our civil quasi-religion, but Ford seems like he was a pretty decent guy. RIP.

    Not much else to report. I think I’m going to raid the mini-bar and get back to The Children of Men.

    P.S. For the record, no Gideon’s Bible in the rooms in the Atlanta Westin. I actually didn’t pack a Bible because I wanted to pack lightly and figured there’d be one in the room. I actually thought hotel-room Bibles were universal. Or is this just cut-rate chains? (Also for the record, hotels in Utah have Bibles and copies of the Book of Mormon.) Maybe I should track down one of those Baptist kids…

  • Prayer as remembrance

    Liturgical scholar Paul F. Bradshaw’s Two Ways of Praying argues for a reconnection between liturgy and spirituality which he contends have been separated in the Christian West. One of the reasons for this, he thinks, is that Christians have often been unclear about what exactly they’re doing when they pray. This is partly because there have been two “models” of liturgical prayer – the “cathedral” model which emphasizes communal praise and petition, and the “monastic” model which focuses on individual spiritual formation through prolonged meditation on biblical texts – which have not always been clearly distinguished and which call for different practices appropriate to their respective understandings of what prayer is for.

    Bradshaw’s point is not to argue for one form over the other, though he does seem to think that communal “cathedral” style praise has been neglected in favor of a more “monastic” understanding. But a balanced spiritual diet contains elements of both ways of praying. Meditative prayer such as lectio divina or praying the Rosary can and should co-exist with communal praise and petitionary prayer.

    The problem, Bradshaw thinks, is that the structure of various forms of liturgical prayer are often best suited for one form but are used for the other. For instance, the Daily Office in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is geared toward the recitation of the entire psalter and a more or less continuous reading of scripture. This makes it more suitable for a “monastic” approach to prayer emphasizing spritual formation through exposure to and meditation upon scripture over time. But the same form may be less well suited to the function of a service of congregational worship, which may be better served by the frequent use of particular psalms or the repetition of key passages of Scripture.

    One concept that Bradshaw introduces which I found enligtening is that of prayer as anamnesis, or remembering. He traces this to two distinct forms of biblical prayer, the berakah and the hodayah. Both of these prayer forms include a recounting and acknowledgement of God’s mighty acts which takes the form of praise. An example of the former comes from Exodus 18:10-11: “Blessed be the LORD, who has delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharaoh. Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods, because he delivered the people from the Egyptians, when they dealt arrogantly with them.” The hodayah, which comes from the Hebrew word hodah, meaning “thank” or “to acknowledge” or “to confess”. An example from Daniel, Chapter 2 runs “…To you, O God of my ancestors, I give thanks and praise, for you have given me wisdom and power, and have now revealed to me what we asked of you, for you have revealed to us what the king ordered.” The Berakah blesses God for what he has done and the Hodayah thanks God, but both are forms of praise rooted in the remembrance of what God has done.

    These prayers of remembrance function, according to Bradshaw, as ways by which worshippers interpret their experience in religious terms, or we might say, place themselves within God’s story. The also act as confession or acknowledgement of God, proclamation, and consecration of our lives to God. Petition then becomes a natural outgrowth of the acknowledgement and confession of God’s character. “[A]ny intercessions that are added to this nucleus are merely the explicit articulation of what is already implicit in the act of remembrance itself–the desire that God will continue the salvific activity that has been recalled, and hence sanctify those for whom prayer is made and draw all things back into a right relationship with God” (p. 50). This form of prayer continues in the New Testament, primarily in the prayers of Jesus and Paul.

    In Bradshaw’s view, this form of praying serves as an antidote to egocentric forms of prayer that consist primarily of our own needs and wants:

    A recovery of the richness of the biblical heritage of our prayer tradition, therefore, can rescure us from such a subjective and potentially egocentric perception and enable us to see that much more than expressing gratitude is involved in a eucharistic pattern of prayer. Recalling to mind what God has done, we are interpreting our human experience in religious terms; we are making our credal confession of faith; we are proclaiming our gospel to the world; we are restoring ourselves and all creation to a relationship of holiness to God; and all this not for ourselves but so that God may be glorified. (p. 55)

    Liturgical prayer is ideally suited for this precisely because it puts our own prayers in the broader context of the prayers and confession of the entire church. For instance, both the Anglican daily office and Luther’s Small Catechism incorporate the creed as a part of daily prayer. “Praying” the creed may seem counterintuitive at first, but when prayer is understood as remembrance of God’s salvific actions it makes a lot more sense. Likewise, the meditation on scripture familiarizes us with God’s story and helps us to interpret our own experience as part of that story. In fact, this is a helpful way to think about the liturgical year: we call to mind and recount what God has done for us, seek to be incorporated into that story, and anticipate its consummation.

    This understanding of prayer is why Bradshaw sees the need for a recovery of “cathedral” prayer. Praise and intercession are at the heart of cathedral prayer, as a response to “God’s gracious actions in the world” (p. 120). In contrast to “monastic” forms of prayer, he thinks this might require a more selective use of psalmody and scripture reading and a greater attention to the seasons of the liturgical year. Ultimately, though, he thinks that “monastic” and “cathedral” elements are necessary for a balanced Christian spirituality.

  • Jesus the Jew and Christian practice

    UPDATE: Welcome, readers of Theolog! I have responded to Jason Byassee’s comments here.

    Lutheran Zephyr and Derek the Ænglican already have good comments on this article by Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Professor Levine argues for a stronger recognition of the essential Jewishness of Jesus by the Christian community, and sharply criticizes practices and rhetoric that define Jesus over against Judaism.

    She is certainly right, I think, that a lot of Christian talk still lapses into a lazy caricature of “Judaism” as Jesus’ foil. And, as Prof. Levine points out, progressives, feminists, and liberation theologians aren’t exempt from this. It’s obscene, for instance, when extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, which at times borders on the anti-Semitic, is served up in the name of Jesus.

    However, I also think LZ and Derek are both right that she seems to focus on the “Jesus of history” as normative for Christian faith in ways that are far from problem free. For instance, what are we to make of the claim that “preserving the fact that Jesus wore fringes [symbolizing the 613 commandmetns of the Torah], the New Testament mandates that respect for Jewish custom be maintained and that Jesus’ own Jewish practices be honored, even by the gentile church, which does not follow those customs”? Early on the church decided, for better or for worse, that keeping the Torah was not mandatory for Christians. So, it’s not clear what “mandting respect” for that practice would entail within the Christian community, apart from respecting the practices of our Jewish elder brothers and sisters in the faith.

    Or take Prof. Levine’s contention that “as for Jesus’ Jewish identity, neither he nor his Jewish associates would have mourned the loss of a herd of hogs—animals that are not kosher and that represent conspicuous consumption in that they cost more to raise than they produce in meat”? Does this mean that Christians, to take one of my personal hobbyhorses, are free to treat pigs and other un-kosher animals as having no dignity as creatures of God?

    What all of this gets at – and Derek, following Luke Timothy Johnson, highlights this point – is how difficult it is for Christians to simply take the “Jesus of history” (itself a problematic notion) as normative for their faith and practice in any straightforward way. First, as Derek also points out, the church has never confined Jesus’ influence to the example set by a historical figure 2,000 years ago, much less to the latest scholarly reconstruction. For Christian faith Jesus is first and foremost the living Lord whose Spirit continues to guide the church. Of course, that faith would be a mirage if the Jesus of history didn’t do and say the kinds of things recorded in the gospel accounts. But Christians aren’t committed to slavishly imitating all the details of Jesus’ life, even the religious details. That much was made clear at the Council of Jerusalem.

    This doesn’t mean that Jesus’ Jewishness is unimportant, and Prof. Levine is correct to warn against the kind of crypto-Marcionism that seems to be a recurrent temptation in the church. The Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament constitute the matrix out of which Jesus came and out of which our faith comes. But the ongoing tradition and experience of the church isn’t necessarily bound by the details of the Judaism of Jesus’ day, anymore than contemporary Rabbinic Judaism has to ape the Judaism of the 1st century.

    But, to say this also presents a challenge for contemporary Christians. Often the imitatio Christi is thought of in terms of simply copying the lifestyle of the historical Jesus (usually one favorite particular version), and this is sometimes presented as a superior alternative to the life of the institutional church. Or the Jesus of the gospels is treated as having ready-made answers to all of our moral dilemmas. If Christians believe in a risen Lord, though, attempting to mimic a 1st century Jewish rabbi, or wonder-working sage, or cynic philosopher, or whatever the Jesus du jour is, rather misses the point. One follows Jesus precisely by being incorporated into his body through partaking of the holy mysteries and hearing the Lord’s word. By being part of that body, we believe that we gradually, if haltingly, come to be formed according the pattern of Jesus, his life of self-giving service and love (again, I think L.T. Johnson is very good on this – see The Real Jesus and Living Jesus; both of these books had a big impact on me). In other words, why chase after a historical reconstruction when the living Jesus makes himself available to us here and now?

  • Just what I always wanted!

    An Archbishop of Canterbury Christmas tree ornament! One of our cooler Christmas gifts, courtesy of my brother-in-law and his wife, who took a trip to Merry ole England this fall.