Author: Lee M.

There’s been a minor tempest in a blogspot in some quarters over the fact that the newly elected Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori preached a sermon in which she referred to Jesus as “Mother.” Surely, we’re told, this is the death knell of kooky liberal mainline Protestantism which has finally sold its soul to neo-pagan postmodernist relativism!

In response, the blog Kinesis has a nice roundup of quotes from saints, sages, and mystics (not to mention the Bible) showing that feminine language for God has ample precedent in the church. (via Guanilo’s Island)

It’s entirely possible and consistent to uphold the use of the traditional Trinitarian name and yet want to expand our language and imagery to include feminine terms and images (which is in many cases a recovery, not an innovation).

The Independent Institute has posted an “Open Letter on Immigration” with over 500 signatures from economists and other social scientists, including five Nobel Laureates. These folks come form across the political spectrum, but support the idea that immigration has been and continues to be a net gain for the U.S.A.

(See here for previous post.)

In chapter 3 of his Past Event and Present Salvation, Paul Fiddes tackles the question of the historical Jesus and how our knowledge of his earthly ministry should shape our understanding of atonement. He rejects the view, associated with Bultmann and others, that we can’t know much of anything about the Jesus of history, a view that drives a wedge between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” Fiddes also argues that how we see the atonement should be of a piece with the character of Jesus and his ministry as we have it in the Gospels. At some points in Christian history Christ’s work on the cross was treated in near isolation from his earthly ministry and teachings, and Fiddes wants to correct this imbalance.

Moreover, the great acts of God can’t be detached from the historical (and political) context in which they took place. Despite the fact that God’s acts transcend the categories of history and are not strictly susceptible to the historian’s investigations, it doesn’t follow that history is irrelevant to faith:

If God has really become flesh in our world, in the very marketplace where Pilate struts with his petty power, then an investigation of the scene on which God has acted is bound to be relevant to faith. A historian can only tell us about the worldly setting for God’s mighty acts, but this must throw light upon the meaning of the event as faith perceives it. (p. 37)

Understanding the ministry of Jesus, and the conflicts that it engendered with the prevailing religious and political authorities, then, will help us understand the meaning of God’s act of reconciliation on the cross. Fiddes finds the center of Jesus’ mission in his conflict with the established interpretation of the Law and the way it divided people into respectable and not respectable, clean or unclean. Not only did Jesus welcome “the poor” or the common people into his fellowship, but also sinners – tax collectors, prostitutes, and the like.

Jesus, Fiddes says, exhibited a profound freedom with respect to the Law, both in offering the Father’s free forgiveness and acceptance to sinners and in his “reduction” of the Law to its essential purpose – that of loving God and neighbor. He cut through the thicket of legal requirements by “incarnat[ing] the intention of moral rules in flesh and blood, as a skillful speaker of a language fills out the aims of the rules of grammar in his speech–and often sits loose to the letter of the rules the more beautiful and effective his speech becomes” (p. 47).

Jesus cannot be pinned down in either the simple category of a law-supporter or a law-breaker. He escapes our labels, and ‘fits no formula’. The whole thrust of his ministry was to cut through the maze of moral rules, even of the highest quality, in order to offer forgiveness and the acceptance of the Father. Even if the phrase ‘but I say to you’ is not from Jesus himself, he clearly laid claim to an astonishing authority, assuming that rules could be waived for those who accepted him as the agent of the kingdom. There is no need to set up the scribes and Pharisees as either hypocrites or unbelievers in the divine mercy in order to explain the conflict between them and Jesus; the question was who was right about the way that God was acting. In the parable of the prodigal son there is no suggestion that the elder brother was a moral hypocrite, or that he thought it impossible for his rake of a brother to be forgiven under any circumstances; he just failed in sympathy with the outrageous generosity of the father. (p. 47)

How we understand the atonement, then, should be consistent with how we understand the thrust of Jesus’ ministry. To take one example, it seems, at least on the face of things, difficult to see why the Father required Jesus’ death before he could forgive sins when Jesus seemed to freely forgive sins during the course of his earthly ministry. The atonement, Fiddes argues, should be of a piece with the character of Jesus’ ministry:

Since the act of atonement on the cross sums up and completes the whole course of Jesus’ life, the controlling aspect of any doctrine of atonement must be the forgiveness and acceptance of God. As Jesus showed a sovereign freedom over the way of the law, so a doctrine of atonement must be free from any notion of a ‘transaction’ which somehow satisfies the demands of the divine law code. It hardly makes sense that the Jesus who declined to give law any final importance and who was certified as being in the right about this when God raised him from among the dead should have died as a means of satisfying law. (pp. 47-8)

Jesus’ proclamation of the rule of God was profoundly threatening to the established powers, both religious and political. In addition to calling into question the established rules about how people are to be made right with God, Jesus’ life and death also call into question the way political power is exercised in our fallen world:

Jesus was crucified because he called the ultimate claims of human power ‘there and then’ into question, insisting upon the final demands of the rule of God. If we believe that through this death God was bringing salvation, this must have relevance for the situation of those oppressed by human powers ‘here and now.’ (p. 51)

Fiddes admits that no historical account of Jesus’ ministry can carry certainty. But part of the risk of faith is acting on incomplete knowledge. History can’t prove faith, but it can help shape and give content to faith rooted in a contemporary encounter with the risen Christ. The risen Christ, if he is not to become an abstraction, must be seen as continuous with the human pre-resurrection Jesus of Nazareth, and the character of Jesus should act as a control on our doctrinal formulations.

[This post has been edited slightly]

Noam Chomsky delivering a lecture on just war theory to a group of cadets at West Point. Makes for interesting listening/viewing.

Via Red State Son.

I just received a copy of British theologian Paul S. Fiddes’ Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement. As the title indicates, Fiddes is concerned with the relationship between the historical event of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and how the salvation those events make possible is appropriated in the present.

Here’s a snippet:

Salvation happens here and now. It is always in the present that God acts to heal and reconcile, entering into the disruption of human lives at great cost to himself, in order to share our predicament and release us from it. This may seem obvious, and if we examine the hymns of popular piety we can often detect just such an appeal to a present experience of atonement, expressed in phrases like ‘Jesus saves.‘ It is ironic, however, that when this devotion has been translated into sermons it has often emerged as more equivalent to ‘Jesus saved.’ For there is a great deal of difference between believing that God ‘saves’ through Christ, and believing that we simply claim the benefits of a salvation that has already happened, a deal that has already been concluded. Salvation in the present tense has frequently been depicted as if it were merely picking up a ticket to paradise which was issued long ago, and which has been waiting through long ages on the counter of a celestial travel agent. But a transactional view of atonement like this is highly impersonal. If salvation is the healing of a broken relationship between persons, then it must actually happen now; it must involve the human response as an intimate part of the act of atonement. (p. 14)

Any adequate understanding of the atonement, Fiddes thinks, has to keep both the “objective” and “subjective” aspects in view. God was doing something on the cross of Christ, something essential for our salvation, but its goal is the restoration of a relationship between God and us, which requires our participation. Fiddes thinks that Peter Abelard’s so-called subjective theory of the atonement can help us here:

Earlier theories of atonement (with the partial exception of Abelard’s) tended to begin at the objective end of the spectrum of understanding with some kind of transaction, and then added a subjective appendix. Modern ideas have tipped the balance the other way; they tend to begin at the subjective end with the present human response to God, and then to affirm an objective focus for response. This, I believe, is basically the right orientation for Christian thinking today. If we are to serve our age and our culture–though this includes being prepared to challenge it at some points as well as being shaped by it–we must learn from insights of the human sciences into the nature of relationships and personality. We are bound to understand reconciliation by analogy with the process of healing rather than by analogy wiht a legal or commercial transaction. Using traditional terms this might be called ‘subjective’, but it will work hard at understanding the ‘objective focus’ of God’s activity, both in past and present events. This means, I believe, understanding the cross of Jesus as an event which has a unique degree of power to evoke and create human response to the forgiving love of God. An event of power like that goes far beyond an ‘example’ or ‘window into God’s love,’ important descriptions though these are. (p. 29)

I think Fiddes is right that any satisfying account of atonement has to take the “subjective” dimension into consideration. Sometimes the atonement has been presented in ways that make salvation an event that happens “over our heads” in some heavenly transaction between the Father and the Son (or between God and the Devil!). But if reconciliation means the restoration and healing of a relationship, then it seems like it has to be a process in which we are intimately involved, not something entirely “external” to us.

As I work my way through Fiddes book I hope to post on some of his ideas in more detail.

Andrew Greeley thinks so (via Conservative Green):

The United States is not much good as an imperial power because it lacks two of the qualities essential for effective imperialism: a population that is ready to absorb serious casualties in the cause of the empire and leadership that is sufficiently cynical to abandon moralism when there is a chance to deal.

It will do no good to lecture the American people on their obligation to endure substantial loss of life in a cause that the leadership thinks is a national duty. Americans will rise up in righteous anger if they have been attacked and destroy the foe, make no mistake about that — as the Japanese did in 1941. But they quickly become impatient with the endless, small wars, in which young Americans die without any clear purpose and without any “light at the end of the tunnel.”

That may be immature of Americans, but that’s the way we are. We lack the stern moral determination that the Wall Street Journal preaches to us several times a week. We are not exactly passivists, but we are isolationists. We always have been isolationists. Tell us that we must do something about Darfur or Kosovo or Rwanda and we ask: Why us? If the rest of the world is interested in doing something, OK, but don’t expect us to go it alone for long. After Korea and Vietnam, that should have been clear.

We went along with the Iraq invasion because our leaders were able to persuade us that it was a war to punish the Sept. 11 terrorists when in fact it was about the belief that a “democratic” Iraq would shift the balance in the Middle East.

I think it’s probably more accurate to say that people supported the Iraq war because they were convinced that Iraq posed a serious threat to our security. But beyond that, I think Greeley’s on to something here. In fact, this may be where the division between the elites and the rest of us that David Brooks was getting at may have some real traction. Despite disagreements over specific conflicts like Iraq, the one thing that our political elites agree on is repudiating “isolationism.” No major politician today would dream of running on a platform of “Come Home, America” as George McGovern did in 1972.

However, Greeley is, I think, giving short shrift to what’s been called America’s nationalistic “Jacksonian” impulse. This visceral patriotism is ready to kick ass and take names when necessary and believes in the essential righteousness of America and her ways. I think a lot of post 9/11 foreign policy gets its support from a union of this Jacksonian impulse among ordinary people with the technocratic globalism of the elites. True Jeffersonian isolationism is, I suspect, rarer than Greeley thinks. (See here for a clarifying discussion of various strands in America’s ideological DNA.)

There have been some great comments on the Eucharistic adoration post, much better informed and more insightful than the original post, in fact!

On a related note, here’s the text of the sermon that was preached at The Church of the Advent on Corpus Christi.

Yesterday we worshipped at Trinity Church (Episcopal) in Copley Square. This church is considered by many to be the most beautiful church in Boston. It was designed by architect H. H. Richardson in a style that came to be known as “Richardsonian Romanesque.” A friend of ours who studied historical preservation described it as an attempt to incorporate elements that specifically evoked America into the basic Romanesque style.

Here’s more:

Richardson’s work was — and remains — truly original. While he named the eleventh century Romanesque churches of Central France as his inspiration, he called Trinity a “free rendering” of those sources.

The three-dimensional effect of its massive open interior, for example, bears no historical precedent. The centralized space seems to rise from the modified cruciform perimeter straight into the tower, one vast, coherent vessel — an unbroken cross reaching to heaven, an open, static, serene, massive pyramid of space and light.

But Richardson knew the More of worship required more than sheer volume. So he balanced this massive openness with personal moments of color, detail, and storytelling, intimate notes struck in the murals and stained glass designed of John La Farge. His work, too, sought the spiritual center of the congregation for guidance. It is said that Phillips Brooks, preaching from the pulpit near the chancel entrance looked often for inspiration to La Farge’s stunning tripartite Christ in Majesty windows, where the translucent figure rises resplendent against the western light flanked by lancets of voluptuous aquamarine.

On the exterior we are reminded by the quiet voice of Richardson’s Massachusetts contemporary, Emily Dickinson, that “the Outer — from the Inner Derives its Magnitude.” Just as Brooks put liturgical necessities in the service of the sturdy, sure weight of Christ’s good news, ornamental detail in Richardson’s exterior got sacrificed to the sturdy lithic masses, round arched openings, the mass and void, and the color, texture, and scale typical of Romanesque concerns. Since the site was free-standing and the church thus would be seen in the round, Richardson employed these devices to full sculptural effect, inviting the subtle play of his restrained chromatic selection with the muscular quietude of his elemental forms.

See here for a good slideshow.

Directly across from the church on the other side of the square is the Boston Public Library, itself an example of of American Classicism, so the result of the square is the feel of an Italian piazza.

Almost.

Next to the church is the Hancock Tower, a striking glass skyscraper standing in sharp contrast to the old-world feel of the square. I’m not sure if I like the ultra-modern intrusion of the Hancock Tower, but it definitely makes Copley Square unique.

The service at Trinity was definitely “lower” than at the Advent and felt more similar to a traditional Lutheran service. They appear to be between rectors at the moment, but the preacher delivered a good sermon on Jesus’ parables of the growing seed and the mustard seed and what they would’ve meant to His hearers, to Mark’s community, and what they might mean for us.

A really nice church, but I don’t think we’d make it our regular church home. The fact that it is such a tourist attraction (complete with daily tours and gift shop!) kind of makes it feel less like a worshipping community than a museum. Though attendance at the service we were at was good, it didn’t seem as tight-knit as the group of people we met at the Church of the Advent.

After church, we walked out on the square to see people setting up for what was apparently some kind of pro-Israel rally. There were people holding “We Support Israel” signs and a guy with a beard and a yarmulke playing guitar up on a stage. There were also lots of police and guys dressed in black suits with sunglasses and earpieces, so someone quasi-important must’ve been scheduled to speak. Turns out it was the annual Boston Celebrates Israel rally.

There were also some pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered. Actually anti-Israel might be the better way to characterize these particular protesters. Their slogans of “Racist, sexist, antigay, Nazi bigots, stay away” struck me as less than helpful, to say the least. I mean, who are they trying to convince with that kind of rhetoric? I’m not exactly an ardent Zionist and I found it offensive. I can only imagine what the folks gathered there must’ve thought. That’s one of the things that has always bothered me about some forms of protest. Too often it seems like it’s more about smugly demonstrating one’s own righteousness than about trying to convince others of the rightness of one’s cause.

Anyway, we beat it out of there and had brunch with a friend at The Paramount in Beacon Hill, a fantastic place for breakfast. Great omelets and pancakes.

Rod Dreher and others have been discussing David Brooks’ (he of the pithy generalizations) new political typology of “populist nationalists” vs. “progressive globalists” (The original Brooks column is available to NY Times subscribers only). Populist nationalists, in Brooks’ account, see themselves as “the ordinary, burden-bearing people of this country. … the ones who work hard and build communities” who “recognize that our loyalty to our fellow Americans comes first.”

The policy positions that follow from this are, in Dreher’s words:

1) no more waste of blood and treasure on fantasies of democratizing the Middle East; 2) securing our borders against terrorists and illegal immigrants; 3) standing up to “the big money interests who value their own profits more than their own countrymen;” 4) supporting a government that will “stand up to Internet porn and for decent family values; and 5) the defense of government programs that help ordinary people bear the burdens that threaten to wipe them out (e.g., health-care costs).

On the other side are the “progressive globalists” who supposedly favor free trade, open borders, international institutions, and an interventionist foreign policy with a Wilsonian cast. This is the ideology of cosmopolitan coastal elites in business, government, and the arts (Christopher Lasch’s revolting elites, you might say).

As Leon Hadar points out, this dichotomy doesn’t exactly map onto reality. Many people who would be describable as populist nationalists support the Iraq venture for instance. Indeed, the degree to which post-9/11 foreign policy has tapped into a deep strain of American nationalism doesn’t seem to be appreciated by Brooks. Meanwhile, many among the foreign policy elites, especially those of an internationalist-realist bent opposed the Iraq war (many of the old hands from the Bush I administration, for instance, as well as conservative internationalists like Sen. Chuck Hagel). Brooks is basically characterizing any opponent of the Iraq war in particular and the Bush brand of interventionism in general as someone who favors a “closed” society which has shut its doors to foreign trade and foreign immigration. This may accurately describe some people (Pat Buchanan comes to mind), but there’s no necessary connection between those positions. It’s possible to be in favor of free trade and immigration and opposed to preventive war and nation-building. (This was in fact the stated position of candidate George W. Bush in 2000 which suckered me into voting for him. Sigh.)

In some ways this is another variation of the slur occasionally made against opponents of the Iraq war that if you oppose our invasion and nation-buiding project there it must be because you don’t think Iraqis are suited for democracy and therefore you’re racist. As though it was racist to oppose bombing foreigners!

Contra Brooks, in other words, the possible choices are not exhausted by either closing ourselves off to the rest of the world or trying to dominate it.

On a lark I recently picked up the latest CD by Tool called 10,000 Days. Amusingly, I heard a DJ say that the title referred to the length of time George Bush has been in office. Now, I realize to some it may seem like Bush has been in office for nearly three decades, but in fact the title apparently refers to a long period of illness suffered by singer Maynard James Keenan’s mother before her recent death.

Anyway, for some reason I’ve never really gotten into Tool before (though I did see them perform way back at Lollapalooza in 1991 and recall that they put on a pretty good show), so I can’t really speak to the complaints of fans that 10,000 Days doesn’t break much ground over previous albums. What I’ll say is that they have a sound that I’d call “progressive metal” but without being inaccessible. Several of the tracks pass the double-digit mark in length, yet don’t get tedious or boring. (The album as a whole clocks in at 77 minutes!) In some ways the album reminds me of Metallica’s …And Justice for All with its mix of heavier tracks and longer, moodier pieces (though unlike Justice there are no out-and-out thrashers on Days). I definitely now have a higher opinion of the band and am curious to check out some of their earlier material.

Also, for Johnny Cash fans (and if you’re not a Johnny Cash fan, I pity you), the Cash Personal File has been released to good reviews, though I haven’t heard it yet myself. It consists of two discs worth of acoustic material that Cash recorded in his home studio back in the 70s. And on July 4th we have the final (presumably) set of studio recordings Cash did with producer Rick Rubin for the American label. It’s called American V: A Hundred Highways.

Many critics of Christianity, and not a few Christians themselves, have seen belief in eternal life as competing with a commitment to making life better here and now. C.S. Lewis didn’t think so; in fact, he thought a vivid belief in our eternal destiny provided us with a strong impetus for being concerned with the well-being of our neighbors.

Here’s a bit from his sermon “The Weight of Glory” (found in the book of the same name):

Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations [about the nature of eternal life] which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations–these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit–immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously–no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner–no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latiat–the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. (pp. 45-46)