Author: Lee M.

The Iraq sanctions appear to have “worked” in that it seems Saddam Hussein was unable to reconstitute his WMD programs, but at what cost? With a confrontation with Iran looming, this article at In These Times revisits the issue (via Antiwar.com).

This article by Ira Chernus, a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, makes several good points with respect to religion and politics.

First, he points out that belief in a transcendent moral order is not the sole property of the political Right. Thoreau and Martin Luther King, for example, both justified their civil disobedience by appealing to a moral law that transcends the positive laws of the state. If anything, belief in a transcendent moral order can well be subversive of the existing order, since it calls it into question and judges it in light of moral principles which are independent of any particular set of social arrangements. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her study of Lord Acton, “To take seriously this Liberal theory of history, to give precedence to ‘what ought to be’ over ‘what is,’ was, [Acton] admitted, virtually to install a ‘revolution in permanence.’”

The second point made by Chernus that is worth highlighting is that religion isn’t the property of any side of the political debate. There’s been talk among certain religious progressives about “taking back” God/Christianity/faith from the Right. But as Chernus warns, “As soon as one group says, ‘God’s on our side. Just look at the sacred text,’ that gives every other group the right to make the same claim. Then you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”

Chernus concludes:

Religion was, is, and always will be available to any political persuasion that can offer it love and respect. As in any courtship, though, you can’t fake it and get by. The love and respect have to be genuine.

There are plenty of people on the left side of the aisle who can offer religion real love. Let’s let them do their work. Everyone else can offer respect. And that’s enough. Most religious people don’t ask to be loved by the non-religious. They ask only to be respected. They deserve it.

As I’ve written several times on this blog, I’m all for “de-linking” religion from a particular political agenda, be it of the right or left. It simply doesn’t do justice to the fact that religious people can and do come to varying conclusions about political questions. This doesn’t mean that religiously infused values don’t or shouldn’t influence one’s politics, or that religious people have to remain agnostic about political issues, but that there’s rarely a straight line from a particular value to the policies that will best put it into effect.

Um, I only watched an hour’s worth because it was soooo mind-numbingly boring. And I’m sure it didn’t help that I haven’t seen any of the movies that were nominated for best picture. Happy to see that Reese Witherspoon won the best actress award for Walk the Line though, being a fan of the movie and her in general (go, Reese!).

Also, I don’t have cable, but I sure hope Jon Stewart is funnier on his regular gig.

Here’s an article about a trend among churches using the “contemporary” praise-band-and-overhead-screen format to reintroduce what some are calling a “classic service,” complete with choir and hymnals:

No one can dispute that the contemporary-style worship has helped churches grow by pulling in “unchurched” young and middle-age people, who tend to like the informality and rock-influenced music. It is still far more common to see a mainline church experimenting with a contemporary service than a contemporary-style church trying out tradition.

But some students of the contemporary style say that much of its music lacks the melodic sophistication of enduring hymns, or the poetry and doctrinal depth of lyrics penned by such writers as Charles Wesley (“Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”), Isaac Watts (“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”), Fanny Crosby (“Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine”) or Thomas Dorsey (“Precious Lord, Take My Hand”).

And while traditional worship can be stiff and uninvolving, the contemporary experience – music, big screens, mood lighting – is often derided as “church lite.”

I’ve never had a problem with the idea that the opening chapters of Genesis, which I re-read just the other day, are to be read in a way alternately described as “myth,” “legend,” “metaphor,” “saga” or what have you. Moreover, I think reading Genesis in this way is fully compatible with as robust a theory of biblical inspiration as you care to assert. There’s no contradiction that I can see between saying the Bible is inspired and saying that each book has to be read according to the conventions of the genre(s) it exemplifies.

In the case of Genesis, I’m perfectly comfortable with the common view that the creation story is more about disclosing God as creator of the universe, and humankind’s special place as the imago dei than it is a literal account of the mechanics of how the universe and life came into existence. In other words, there’s no reason to reject the view that human beings evolved from less developed forms of life in order to maintain the truth of the creation accounts.

However, what I’ve never seen resolved to my satisfaction is the role of the Fall in a post-evolutionary understanding of human origins. It’s difficult to square an evolutionary account of human origins with the idea that humanitiy’s original state was one of blessedness from which they fell into a state of sin. As far as evolutionary history can tell us, there’s no evidence for such a radical break in human pre-history. And there was almost certainly no period when human beings didn’t suffer death, disease, and the other afflictions mortal flesh is heir to.

Simply dispensing with the idea of the Fall hasn’t seemed viable to most Christians, not least becasue it would seem to have major ramifications in Atonement doctrine and responses to the problem of evil, among other things. So there have been a number of different attempts to re-think the Fall in the context of an evolutionary worldview. For instance, one might think of the Fall as describing something that each of us experiences individually, or a sort of ahistorical description of the “human condition” (see, e.g. Reinhold Niebuhr’s seminal Gifford Lectures The Nature and Destiny of Man). One problem with this view is that it has a tendency to make sin a constituent part of human nature or creation or finitude as such, which seems to compromise the goodness of God’s creation.

Another move has been to adopt what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call a “neo-Irenaean” view. Irenaeus, it appears, held that humankind was not created in a kind of preternatural state of power, wisdom, and innocence. Instead, he thought Adam and Eve were more like undeveloped children and the Fall, rather than being a cosmic catastrophe, consisted of humanity gettting off track from the path God intended for them. This has obvious similarities to the evolutionary view in that it sees humanity as starting out from an undeveloped state, rather than one of what seems to us to be superhuman blessedness. On the other hand, it may at times tend to a naively Pelagian view of freedom and to blunt the seriousness of sin, which may partly account for Irenaeus’s view that the Incarnation would’ve happened even if humanity hadn’t sinned.

So, any thoughts? Do you think of the Fall as a historical event (even if the Genesis account isn’t to be read as literal history)? Is it a metaphor? Something in between?

Interesting NY Times article about young, mostly evangelical, Christians adopting the “Christian-as-rebel” model. Tough to separate the wheat from the chaff, though. On the one hand, you have what look for all the world like transparent marketing ploys trying to reach the Hot Topic crowd, such as

full-contact skateboard Bible study groups; […] Christian punk, Goth and hip-hop CD’s; […] evangelical tattoo parlors; […] sportswear brands like Extreme Christian Clothing and Fear God; [..] alt churches or ministries called Revolution, Scum of the Earth and Punk Girl; […] a podcast called Xtreme Christianity, which turns out to be a fairly conventional weekly sermon delivered by a Baptist minister in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.

But then you have what seem to be genuinely salutary movements like the quasi-monastic communities that have been formed in North Philly and elsewhere:

The claim of a Christian counterculture, which recurs periodically in American Protestantism, cuts in two directions, defining itself as counter to the consumer-driven secular culture and to mainstream church culture. For Shane Claiborne, 30, the author of “The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical” (Zondervan), it has meant living for a decade in a monastic community in North Philadelphia, whose members make their own clothing, refrain from sex outside marriage and minister to the homeless and poor.

Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz and other books, seems to have the most sensible take though:

“It’s a cart-before-the-horse thing,” said Mr. Miller, who frequently speaks to Christian youth groups and works with campus ministries. “If you’re a Christian, you need to obey God. And if you obey God, you’re going to be seen as a rebel, both within American church culture and popular culture. But that’s not the point. The point is to obey God.”

That seems right. There’s no particular virtue in being rebellious or countercultural as such. Plus, the fixation on being countercultural and rebellious, especially when it involves aping secular culture, often ends up pandering to “the youth,” surely one of the most pernicious tendencies in American culture. This just reinforces our sociey’s prevalent age segregation which the church of all places should resist. “The kids” are not a repository of all that is good and true, and young Christians have always needed “elders in the faith” to instruct them in the ways of the church.

As my Lenten reading I’ve decided to have a go at Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale. I’m only about ten pages in, but it’s full of rich nuggets of theological goodness like this:

The image of man which revelation sets before us differs radically from the idea of the animal rationale, mortale which empirical inquiry suggests. In point of fact, man is ‘destined’ and chosen ‘before the foundation of the world’ to be ‘blessed … with every spiritual blessing’, so that he might stand ‘holy and blameless’ before his Creator ‘in the Beloved’, that is, in the Son and ‘through his blood’ (Ephesians 1, 3-4). In this way, the entire order of sin and redemption appears inclusively integrated. The first idea of what man is already bears the determining mark of the Trinitarian economy. (p. 12)

This kind of thing brings out all my black-helicopter-watching-new-world-order paranoia. I’m with the Left Behinders on this one – no Mark of the Beast for me!

From Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame):

When it comes to anything complicated, I’m too ignorant to have a useful opinion. For example:

Some Guy: Scott, do you think we should return to the gold standard?

Scott: Um…

Some Guy: Should the U.S. stay in Iraq and be bled to death or leave now and let the bad guys get a foothold from which they can better try to destroy us?

Scott: Um…

Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue.