Author: Lee M.

Trailer for Walk the Line (Johnny Cash biopic) online (via Amy Welborn). And is Phoenix doing his own singing? Sounds like it.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:1-18)

Continuing with my lazy-blogging, let me throw out another article written by someone else. This essay, by Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf analyzes the ecclesiology of 1 Peter in light of Ernst Troeltsch’s church/sect dichotomy which H. Richard Niebuhr picked up on in his Christ and Culture.

Volf thinks that Christians should not be countercultural per se – i.e. shouldn’t define themselves by what they’re against. Nor, however, should they uncritically accept the values of the social world they find themselves in. Rather, rooted in a specifically Christian identity, they will find various aspects of the surrounding culture acceptable or not as they critically sift through them.

The stress on Christian difference notwithstanding, the “world” does not seem a monolithic place in 1 Peter. We encounter evil people who persecute Christians and who will continue to do the same, blaspheming what is most holy to Christians (4:4,12). We come across ignorant and foolish people who will be silenced by Christian good behavior (2:15). We meet people who know what is wrong and what is right and are ready to relate to Christians accordingly (2:14). Finally, we encounter people who see, appreciate, and are finally won over to the Christian faith (2:12; 3:1). Thus, the picture is more complex than just the two extreme and contrary reactions. This testifies to a sensitivity in 1 Peter for the complexity of the social environment.

One of the really appealing things about this is that, according to Volf, our confidence in our identity in Christ is precisely what enables us to be humble in the face of those who are different rather than trying to dominate them.

It might be appropriate to call the missionary distance that 1 Peter stresses soft difference. I do not mean a weak difference, for in 1 Peter the difference is anything but weak. It is strong, but it is not hard. Fear for oneself and one’s identity creates hardness. The difference that joins itself with hardness always presents the other with a choice: either submit or be rejected, either “become like me or get away from me.” In the mission to the world, hard difference operates with open or hidden pressures, manipulation, and threats. A decision for a soft difference, on the other hand, presupposes a fearlessness which 1 Peter repeatedly encourages his readers to assume (3:14; 3:6). People who are secure in themselves-more accurately, who are secure in their God-are able to live the soft difference without fear. They have no need either to subordinate or damn others, but can allow others space to be themselves. For people who live the soft difference, mission fundamentally takes the form of witness and invitation. They seek to win others without pressure or manipulation, sometimes even “without a word” (3:1).

Found this essay at Harbinger.

ADDENDUM: This article from The Christian Century sheds some more light on where Volf is coming from, I think. He endorses, with some qualifications, the attempts of some conservative Christians to practice what he calls “selective separatism.”

Via Confessing Evangelical comes a discussion of The DaVinci Code and various pseudo-Christian neo-gnosticisms by N.T. Wright (go to page 22 of the PDF). Wright points out, among other things, that it was orthodoxy, not the privatized spirituality of the gnostics, that provided a challenge to the political status quo:

[T]he divinity of Jesus is already firmly predicated by Paul, within twenty or thirty years of Jesus’ death. John and Hebrews – and indeed Luke and Matthew, who are almost as explicit – are written by 90 or so at the latest, quite possibly much earlier. The idea that Jesus was ‘just a good man’ who ‘walked the earth and inspired millions to live better lives’ is a modern trivialization that, to do them justice, even the Nag Hammadi documents do not perpetrate.

In particular, the resurrection of Jesus was central to early Christianity; and his death was consequently interpreted, from extremely early in the movement, as (a) the fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures, (b) the defeat of all rival spiritual powers and (c) the means of forgiveness of sins. Early Christianity was not primarily a movement which showed, or taught, how one might live a better life; that came as the corollary of the main emphasis, which was that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had fulfilled his age-old purposes, had dealt with the powers of evil, and had launched his project of new creation upon the world. The early Christian gospel, which was then written up in the four canonical gospels, was the good news, not that a new teaching about hidden wisdom had appeared, enabling those who tapped into it to improve the quality of their lives here or even hereafter, but that something had happened through which the evil which had infected the world had been overthrown and a new creation launched, and that all human beings were invited to become part of that project by becoming renewed themselves.

In particular, this included from the start a strong political critique. Not the tired old left-wing harangue in Christian dress, of course, but a more subtle, more Jewish, more devastating critique: Jesus is Lord, therefore Caesar isn’t. That is there in Paul. It is there in Matthew. In John. In Revelation. That is why, from at least as early as the second century, the Roman empire was persecuting the people who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and the rest – not, we note, the people who were reading ‘Thomas’, ‘Philip’ and the other Nag Hammadi codices. Why would Caesar worry about people rearranging their private spiritualities?

[…]

One of the basic fault lines in the contemporary western world is the line, which does not coincide with the huge left-right polarisation in America or its equivalents in Britain and Europe, between neo-gnosticism on the one hand and the challenge of Jesus on the other. Neognosticism (‘search deep inside yourself and you’ll discover some exciting things, and the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find’) is not a religion of redemption. It appeals to both the pride that says ‘I’m really quite an exciting person, whatever I may look like outwardly’ – the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today’s world – and to the stimulus of ever-deeper navel-gazing (‘finding out who I really am’). The challenge of Jesus, in the twenty-first century as in the first, is that we should look away from ourselves and get on board with the project the one true God launched at creation and re-launched with Jesus himself. The gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and selfdiscoveries to be realigned in that light.

God’s project, and God’s gospel, are rooted in solid history as opposed to gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cossetting self-discovery. And it lives by, and looks for the completion of, the new world in which all knees will bow at the name of Jesus; not because he had a secret love-child, not because he was a teacher of recondite wisdom, not because he showed us how we could get in touch with the hidden feminine, but because he died as the fulfilment of the scriptural story of God’s people and rose as the fulfilment of the world-redeeming purposes of the same creator God. If there is any Holy Grail hidden in Durham, it might be the memorials to Lightfoot and Westcott, who gave us a century ago the solid scholarship upon which a robust and refreshing view of Christian origins can still be founded.

Since I criticized Joseph Bottum’s article on the “new fusionism,” it seems only fair to note that he has a really good article on capital punishment in this month’s FT. (Not that Mr. Bottum was losing sleep over criticisms from these parts!)

The Christian Century on Joel Osteen.

It’s actually a pretty balanced article giving Osteen credit for having a multi-racial ministry for one thing. It also points out that the “prosperity” gospel isn’t necessarily as far from the Christian mainstream as one might think:

In some ways Osteen echoes an ancient and venerable Christian tradition that borrows from Aristotle in calling itself “eudaemonistic.” That is, Christianity offers the happiest life possible. The church fathers and medieval thinkers who picked up this philosophical tradition did have ample biblical material with which to integrate it. “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart,” the psalmist promises. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you,” Jesus says. What Christian could fail to agree that our faith claims to offer the fullest life of joy and abundance possible?

Though the author points out that Scripture has a decisively less rosy take on wealth to say the least.

Plus, there are other serious theological deficiencies in Osteen’s preaching, the writer thinks:

Osteen’s version of the gospel is full of “ifs.” If we enlarge our vision, if we choose to be happy, if we think thoughts and speak words of victory and blessing, if we give of ourselves abundantly—then God will bless us with everything we want. The conditional nature of these sentences is telling. This is not a gospel of grace, in which God acts in spite of our lack of faithfulness to redirect our wants. Instead this is a gospel of reward in which God does nothing until we get our act together. In traditional Christian theology, Protestant and Catholic alike, we can do nothing in and of ourselves to merit God’s favor. Rather, God comes to us in Christ when we are without merit, without ability to please God and without reason to think we can be saved or helped. Such a view of grace is surely part of the grumpy theology Osteen seeks to upend—but it is central to Christianity.

More here.

Since Alberto Gonzales does not have a public record of opposing Roe v. Wade or being otherwise pro-life, some media outlets seem to have dubbed him a “moderate” choice for the Supreme Court.

Gene Healy explains why you should be troubled by a Gonzales nomination whatever your stance on abortion (via Unqualified Offerings).

I ranted a bit about Gonzales here.

Disturbing piece from George Neumayr (via Amy Welborn):

Each year in America fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The reason is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal technology to screen unborn children for disabilities, then they use that information to abort a high percentage of them. Without much scrutiny or debate, a eugenics designed to weed out the disabled has become commonplace.

Not wishing to publicize a practice most doctors prefer to keep secret, the medical community releases only sketchy information on the frequency of eugenic abortion against the disabled. But to the extent that the numbers are known, they indicate that the vast majority of unborn children prenatally diagnosed as disabled are killed.

One of the more troubling things Neumayr points out is how the threat of “wrongful birth” suits provides incentives for doctors to recommend abortion of fetus that are disabled, or even may merely run the risk of having a certain disease:

In some cases, the aborted children aren’t disabled at all but are mere carriers of a disease or stand a chance of getting one later in life. Prenatal screening has made it possible to abort children on guesses and probabilities. The law and its indulgence of every conceivable form of litigation have also advanced the new eugenics against the disabled. Working under “liability alerts” from their companies, doctors feel pressure to provide extensive prenatal screening for every disability, lest parents or even disabled children hit them with “wrongful birth” and “wrongful life” suits.

In a wrongful-birth suit, parents can sue doctors for not informing them of their child’s disability and seek compensation from them for all the costs, financial and otherwise, stemming from a life they would have aborted had they received that prenatal information. Wrongful-life suits are brought by children (through their parents) against doctors for all the “damages” they’ve suffered from being born. (Most states recognize wrongful-birth suits, but for many states, California and New Jersey among the exceptions, wrongful-life suits are still too ridiculous to entertain.)

In 2003, Ob-Gyn Savita Khosla of Hackensack, N.J., agreed to pay $1.2 million to a couple and child after she failed to flag Fragile X syndrome, a form of mental retardation caused by a defective gene on the X chromosome. The mother felt entitled to sue Khosla because she indicated on a questionnaire that her sibling was mentally retarded and autistic, and hence Khosla should have known to perform prenatal screening for Fragile X so that she could abort the boy. Khosla settled, giving $475,000 to the parents and $750,000 to the child they wished they had aborted.

Had the case gone to court, Khosla would have probably lost the suit. New Jersey has been notoriously welcoming to wrongful-birth suits ever since Roe, after which New Jersey’s Supreme Court announced that it would not “immunize from liability those in the medical field providing inadequate guidance to persons who would choose to exercise their constitutional right to abort fetuses which, if born, would suffer from genetic defects.”

According to the publication Medical Malpractice Law & Strategy, “court rulings across the country are showing that the increased use of genetic testing has substantially exposed physicians’ liability for failure to counsel patients about hereditary disorders.”

The publication revealed that many wrongful-birth cases “are settled confidentially.” And it predicted that doctors who don’t give their patients the information with which to consider the eugenic option against disabled children will face more lawsuits as prenatal screening becomes the norm. “The human genome has been completely mapped,” it quotes Stephen Winnick, a lawyer who handled one of the first-wrongful birth cases. “It’s almost inevitable that there will be an increase in these cases.”

The combination of doctors seeking to avoid lawsuits and parents seeking burden-free children means that once prenatal screening identifies a problem in a child, the temptation to eugenic abortion becomes unstoppable. In an atmosphere of expected eugenics, even queasy, vaguely pro-life parents gravitate toward aborting a disabled child.

From Newsweek (via Get Religion):

Keeping Republicans and their conservative kin together won’t be easy. For the first time in a nomination fight, corporate lobbyists are determined to play a leading public role. They are concerned that an obsessive focus on abortion and gay marriage will jeopardize what they regard as a once-in-a-generation chance to unshackle commerce from the grip of federal regulators. To hold their hands, they have not only [GOP lobbyist Ed] Gillespie—whose lobbying firm maintains a roster of big-business clients—but former senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the actor-lawyer-lobbyist, who signed on as the “sherpa” who will walk at least one Bush nominee through the confirmation process (think Virgil in Dante’s “Inferno”).

So, what happens if the pro-lifers and social cons get sold out for someone who will “unshackle commerce”? Will they desert the GOP? Do they have anywhere to go?