Author: Lee M.

Maybe you’d like to revive the ancient practice of abstaining from meat during Lent (a practice still observed by many Orthodox Christians, who, as I understand it, also fast from eggs and dairy making them virtual vegans!). If so, check out this site.

So, I noticed among the much-discussed Time magazine list of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals” is Brian McLaren who, it appears, is the founder/guru/grand poobah of something called the “Emerging (emergent?) church.” Can somebody fill me in on what this is all about? From what I’ve been able to glean, it seems to be made up of a lot of evangelicals disaffected with the mega-church style and looking for something more “authentic,” including a recovery of traditional patterns of worship (daily office! liturgical worship! candles!). There also seems to be a lot of talk about “postmodernism” and how it’s changed everything (a claim of which I remain suspicious – “modernism” is/was never the monolith a lot of people seem to claim it is/was).

So, is this a new kind of church, a new kind of gospel (heaven forfend) or just new wineskins? As a Lutheran I have what you might call a very thin ecclesiology (some would call it no ecclesiology at all!) that comes straight out of the Augsburg Confession (Article 7 to be exact):

Also they [i.e. the evangelical churches] teach that one holy Church is to continue forever. The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike. As Paul says: One faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, etc. Eph. 4, 5. 6.

(emphasis added)

So, I have no objection, in principle, to experimenting with different “human traditions…rites or ceremonies.” I don’t get bent out of shape about the debates between “traditional” and “contemporary” styles of worship (though I certainly have my preferences!).

However, I’m curious if the emerging church sees itself as something more than that. Also, how, if at all, is it related to the “post-constantinian” church envisioned by people like Hauerwas?

The New Pantagruel 3.1 is up and, as usual, it offers a feast of meaty articles from a variety of perspectives. I haven’t has a chance to dig in yet, but this article on the resurrection of Caelum et Terra looks good, as does this piece by Michael Baxter on the notion of “one nation under God.”

Also, “Fr. Jape” is his usual saucy self in dissecting the foibles of various sects within Christendom. Of particular interest to me was this bit on Mark Noll’s desire to create an “evangelical tradition”:

“Culturally adaptive biblical experimentalism,” as Noll has in the past described the Evangelical ethos, has always sounded to me like “making it up as we go along and turning out to be just like everyone else.” That idea can’t have escaped Noll’s attention. Alan Wolfe, Ron Sider, and Christian Smith (among others) have recently charted Evangelicalism’s dipping into what Smith has called the “heresies” of “moralistic therapeutic deism.” (Carla Barnhill might stand as a case in point.) And certainly Noll has chafed at Evangelicals’ penchant for a right-wing politics that he found impossible to support in the past several presidential elections. In this regard Noll was not alone, and aside from my deep disagreement with Christians (including some of our compatriots at tNP) who abstained from voting or who opposed the incumbent (and despite my sympathy for their motives), it says something singularly significant that Noll finds himself so politically and ecclesially alienated from both his Evangelical brethren and his “classical” Protestant cousins. Wanting a “tradition” but not content with any particular tradition as it actually exists–including Evangelicalism as it is–Noll seems afflicted with the very poverty of coherence that he knows is the fruit of “life without tradition.”

Is suffering redemptive? There is certainly no rule to say it is. If there were, it would only be a new law, a new way. We are not promised, however, a life free from suffering for the time being. Indeed, we are led to expect that anyone who sets out on a journey of faith in the gospel can expect to suffer. But as Luther always insisted, suffering may, indeed will, come, but is not to be sought. It is not a new way, a “negative theology of glory.” Not the law, but Christ, crucified and risen, is the redeemer, the one who takes our place and gives us his. — Gerhard O. Forde, “In Our Place”

Via Hugo I found a link to Home, Throne & Altar, the blog of John, a conservative, royalist, pentecostal-holiness New Zealander! (Ain’t the blog-world grand? (N.B. I refuse to employ the barbaric neologism “blogosphere.” Trying saying that out loud and see how dumb it sounds.))

Anyhoo, John has a post on abortion and how he came to his present views. He suffers from cerbral palsy and talks about how his condition can be threatening to those who want to believe that they are in charge of their destiny (and that’s all of us at sometime or another, isn’t it?):

Two years ago, I was put into a wheel-chair for a month or two, to recover from corrective surgery. Then, the hatred got obvious, so I couldn’t explain it away. It wasn’t in action, but in attitude, in looks, in eyes. People didn’t like to look at me. I made them afraid. With more mature eyes, I began to understand. People were afraid of me because I was a reminder. They hated me because I demonstrated something they tried very hard to forget. They are not in control. A car crash, ten minutes without Oxygen, a natural disaster, and as I am, thou shalt be. That’s an uncomfortable thought. We like our lives controllable, in little boxes, safe, and comfortable. We live on a knife-edge, partying away over the abyss, not wanting to think about how close we are to the edge of it. I was a reminder of that, of the fact that there are uncontrollable factors, that we are not, as we have taught ourselves to think, gods. So, people tried to make me go away. And when I wasn’t, when I obstinately refused to go from their eyeline, they lashed out. They got angry.

He sees the same desire for control in abortion and related aspects of the “culture of death”:

At the root of the culture of death is a desire for control, a fear. Control of one’s womb, heedless of he or she inside it. Euthenasia is a fear of dying “like a dog”, a desire to control death, to make the problem go away, with a nice drug. Embryonic Stem Cell research is a desire for control; a desperate searching in the dark, for the fountain of youth. We will not live forever, but we would like to try, even at the cost of ourselves. Shuffling the dying off to the Kevorkians of the world, shuffling the aging to homes, to age in a place where we don’t have to see them; institutionalising the mentally ill and disabled; at the root of the culture of death is fear, and pride, and selfishness. We are afraid. Groping in the dark, we have let go of Father’s hand. And because we have forgotten God, we have no-one to whom to trust the future. Having forgotten God, we also begin to forget each other.

Now, leaving aside the issue of abortion (though I think it’s clear I’m in great sympathy with John’s views), what struck me when reading this is how it illuminated the question of torture, which I’ve been thinking about lately. In comments to this post, Camassia said that I may have given short shrift to the view that killing someone on the battlefield is less dehumanizing than torturing them. And I think that’s right for reasons not unlike John’s reasons for opposing abortion.

Torture is the expression of a desire to subject that other person to our complete control, to invade the inner citadel of the self and conquer it. On the battlefield your opponent still retains his moral agency (however qualified), whereas in the torturer’s chair the object is to erase that moral agency. It is to try and usurp the place of God (as Camassia pointed out here).

More than this, though, the resort to torture, even in a good cause, is, it seems to me, an expression of deep fear, a refusal to relinquish control over our lives, to recognize that no one gets out of here alive (or as Paul Ramsey said, “God intends to kill us all in the end.”). The modern (or post-modern) world still lives on the promise of technology. We think that if we are ingenious enough in the use of our techniques we can (someday) prevent anything bad from ever happening. Drawing moral lines always threatens that promise because it says that some things are “off limits.”

The promise that we can control the future is, of course, the second-oldest one in the book: “Ye shall be as gods.” But it’s not the one we’re supposed to put our faith in, and doing so has, so we’re told, led to all kinds of mischief.

Marcus makes a conservative case for gay marriage.

Camassia engages in a little UN-baiting, which I applaud. Despite my disagreements with large swaths of what passes for conservative orthodoxy I am still enough of a right-winger to find the UN creepy and vaguely threatening.

Via Keith Burgess-Jackson, an interview from a few years ago with Roger Scruton (who, it appears, has come on board with KBJ et al. at The Conservative Philosopher).

This is the sort of thing that drives libertarians nuts. And yet, It’s hard to deny the logic of a statement like this:

…modern government, with its myriad prescriptions, proscriptions and incentives, cannot help but endorse and, to some extent, enforce certain values. So it should be thoughtful and articulate about it.

This is essentially no different from the insight of various “postmodern” theorists (e.g. Stanley Fish) that there is no “neutral” ground to stand on politically. Someone’s values are going to prevail one way or another.

Nothing really new here. But a useful roundup of the apparently growing conservative discontent on the war.

Why are we so squeamish about torture? More specifically, why do we think that torturing someone is worse than killing him?

My evidence that we do in fact think this is that there has been so much controversy over whether the government ever has the right to torture people, but there has been very little controversy over whether the government has the right, at least sometimes, to kill people. To make it more personal, as a non-pacifist I think that there are some cases, however rare, where the use of lethal force is justified. But I am very hesitant to admit that it would ever be okay to use torture. Why?

One possible answer is that we only kill when the stakes are extremely high, and that the stakes are never that high in situations where we might be tempted to resort to torture. But this seems clearly false; just consider the “ticking time bomb” scenario where people are going to die unless you find out where the bomb is. Those stakes are just as high as some cases where we think killing is permissible.

Maybe the difference lies in the fact that we only think it’s okay to kill an actual aggressor whereas it’s sometimes suggested that innocent people might be tortured to provide life-saving information. Okay, but let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that candidates for torture are only those directly complicit in the act of aggression we’re seeking to prevent (e.g. the ticking bomb).

It has been suggested that what makes torture wrong is that it dehumanizes its victims. For instance, Jonathan Schell says:

Torture is wrong because it inflicts unspeakable pain upon the body of a fellow human being who is entirely at our mercy. The tortured person is bound and helpless. The torturer stands over him with his instruments. There is no question of “unilateral disarmament,” because the victim bears no arms, lacking even the use of the two arms he was born with. The inequality is total. To abuse or kill a person in such a circumstance is as radical a denial of common humanity as is possible.

The implication, it seems to me, is that killing on the battlefield is less wrong because the other guy can at least shoot back! But then again, torture doesn’t necessarily (or even usually) lead to death, and isn’t death a greater harm? Don’t I deny someone else’s humanity in an even more radical way by literally reducing him to a thing (permanently)? Is it worse to torture a helpless person than to kill someone who can fight back?

It may be that someone who is an immediate threat (coming at me on the battlefield) seems more dangerous than someone I have tied up in a chair in front of me. But what if that person has planted a bomb that stands to kill hundereds of people? Then, despite his apparent helplessness, isn’t he just as much of a threat?

I don’t know what the right answer is here. It may be that I’m wrong about our moral intuitions and most people really don’t think torture is worse than killing. But if so, why do we countenance the latter fairly casually but not the former? Or maybe we just think it would be foolish to trust the government with the power to torture? But we trust it with the power to kill, and so we’re back to the question why torture is more dangerous.

William T. Cavanaugh argues against justifying torture by appeals to the idea that “everything changed” on 9/11. He quotes Walter Benjamin, “the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule in history.”

The Christian counter-story, says Cavanaugh, is this:

…this is not an exceptional nation and we do not live in exceptional times, at least as the world describes it. Everything did not change on 9/11; everything changed on 12/25. When the Word of God became incarnate in human history, when he was tortured to death by the powers of this world, and when he rose to give us new life—it was then that everything changed. Christ is the exception that becomes the rule of history. We are made capable of loving our enemies, of treating the other as a member of our own body, the body of Christ. The time that Christ inaugurates is not a time of exceptions to the limits on violence, but a time when the kingdoms of this world will pass away before the inbreaking kingdom of God.