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Just a note that the much-heralded VI blogroll has been recently updated. Amazing how many good blogs there are out there.

It has long seemed plain to this Protestant that the invocation of saints’ prayers must be possible and if possible surely desirable. I certainly can ask a living fellow believer to pray for me. If death severed the fellowship of believers, I could not of course ask a departed fellow believer to pray for me. But the New Testament hardly permits us to think that death can sever the fellowship of believers — and the eucharistic prayers also of Protestant bodies explicitly deny that it does. Thus there seems to be no reason why I cannot ask also a departed believer to pray for me. And if I can do it, there will certainly be contexts where I should do it. Thus there should be no problem about asking Mary in her capacity as sancta, Saint Mary, to pray for us.

Those of the Reformers who thought otherwise needed to produce more stringent arguments than any I am aware of their adducing. Simply saying with Melanchthon that there is no scriptural mandate to address individual saints, will not do. Magisterial Protestant churches live by all kinds of practices, perhaps most notably infant baptism and the authority of the New Testament canon, for which no scriptural mandate exists, and which can be justified only by chains of argument far longer than the one just developed for invoking saints. On infant baptism Luther’s final word was simply that this had long been the practice of the church, and that he saw no decisive argument against it. One must wonder why the same cannot be said about invocation of the saints. — Robert W. Jenson, “A Space for God”

Via “Gaius” (the blogger formerly known as Marcus) comes this interesting tidbit about Americans’ support for various health care measures. Turns out we overwhelmingly support not only standard fare like Medicare, but also more drastic “socialistic” measures:

The online survey of 2,242 U.S. adults found an overwhelming majority (96%) of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” favor Medicare, the medical assistance program for the elderly and disabled, while 91% say they support Medicaid, the program to assist people with very low incomes.

The poll also showed high support for policies or practices that are considered more controversial. Eighty-seven percent of those polled say they support funding of international HIV prevention and treatment programs, while 75% favor universal health insurance, compared with 17% who oppose it. Another 70% support embryonic stem-cell research, compared with about 19% who oppose it.

Now, universal health insurance can mean a lot of different things (e.g. single-payer systems like in Canada, mixed systems like in the UK), but it would seem to indicate massive support for some pretty major changes in the way the U.S. delivers health care.

Which makes it all the more baffling that the Dems haven’t made this more central to their campaigns. Too scared after the Clinton health plan debacle?

I’ve been reading Diogenes Allen’s Quest: The Search for Meaning Through Christ and have found that he develops some ideas that resonate with what I’ve long thought. Allen is addressing the condition of the “seeker” and trying to show how attending to the story of Jesus can draw them into the life of God. What I think is invaluable about Allen’s work is that he is cognizant of post-modernism and the way it challenges the Enlightenment understanding of truth and rationailty, but he doesn’t jump into the arms of the po-mo relativists or try and make Christianity a hermetically sealed languge game. Nor does he reduce the claims of Christianity to moral or spiritual platitudes in order to secure universal assent.

Allen’s argument is that by attending to the story and teachings of Jesus, and by earnestly seeking God through prayer and other practices, we will come to a greater experience and knowledge of God’s reality. He doesn’t claim to prove the doctrines of Christianity, but he does see a positive role for reason and philosophy in removing common intellectual objections to Christianity’s claims. This serves to clear a space where we can go on to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

He describes the journeys of Tolstoy and Simone Weil and how their experience led them to a process of seeking through prayer and reasoning. There is no separation of theology and the spiritual life here, but they’re intertwined in an ongoing ascent. (For more on that see this article.)

He even goes on to compare the persistent search for God to the methods employed by science:

Persistence in prayer has a direct parallel in experimental science. Russell Stannard, who directed a research team that confirmed the existence of the fourth kind of quark, called “charm,” used his experience in small-particle physics to answer a young woman’s question about how to find God. Although he had estimated the odds of confirming the existence of charm by the experiments his team had prepared as about one out of five, they had not put less effort into their preparations than they would have done if the odds had been higher. One hundred percent effort, so to speak, had to be made, even though the odds of success were less than twenty percent. He and his colleagues invested two years of their scientific lives to plan, prepare, and conduct experiments that might well fail. If it took concentrated effort for two years to confirm the possible existence of a sub-atomic particle, Stannard thought it reasonable to advise the young woman to set aside five minutes each day for two years for prayer. Not just prayer but persistent prayer is needed in our search for God. (Quest, p. 102-3)

Now obviously the search for God differs in important ways from the search for a sub-atomic particle. Since God is always the subject, never an inert object, the initiative always belongs to God to reveal himself to us. And our relationship to God involves us in a personal existential way that testing a scientific hypothesis usually doesn’t. Nevertheless, there is precedent in the Christian tradition for saying that we should put ourselves in a position of receptivity so that we can hear God.

This whole line of thought reminds me a lot of Pascal. Pascal was a critic of the Enlightenment when being a critic of the Enlightenment wasn’t cool. Though a brilliant and accomplished mathematician and scientist, Pascal believed that Cartesian rationalism was destructive of faith because it substituted the “god of the philosophers” for the living “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” He used reason to demolish the pretensions of reason, showing how its claims were more limited than the best and brightest of the day supposed.

Reason’s impotence to decide ultimate questions of religion made Pascal’s famous “wager” necessary. But I think we misunderstand Pascal if we think of the wager as simply willing oneself to have faith. For one thing, as a Jansenist-symp Pascal had an extremely high view of God’s grace and sovereignty, so he would’ve seen faith as a supernatural gift, not something we can will ourselves to have. Nor was Pascal psychologically naive enough to think that we could just will ourselves to have a particular belief.

I think the wager is best understood as the initial willingness to put oneself in the position to receive faith. This is underscored by his admonition following the wager argument:

[A]t least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet you cannot believe. Endeavor, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. “But this is what I am afraid of.” And why? What have you to lose?

Pascal doesn’t promise us that wagering on God will give us faith or quiet all doubts and questions, but he urges us to take the first step on the path. He tells us to put ourselves in the company of those who believe, by “acting” as if we believe, participating in religious services and so on. When we do that we increase the chances of being open to God’s grace and presence. You might say that things like Bible reading, prayer, worship, acts of charity, etc. are ways of exposing ourselves to God’s spiritual radiation. Pascal and Allen want us to try acting on the assumption that there is something to be exposed to.

Patricia E. Bauer writes about her experiences as a mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome in an age of prenatal testing.

If it’s unacceptable for William Bennett to link abortion even conversationally with a whole class of people (and, of course, it is), why then do we as a society view abortion as justified and unremarkable in the case of another class of people: children with disabilities?

She claims to have met people who think that parents have a duty to abort a child diagnosed with a disability like Down’s Syndrome. Is there a growing expectation that every child should be a “perfect” child? I honestly don’t know how prevalent such a sentiment is.

(link via 11D)

From Christianity Today:

President Bush faces a defining question of morality on which he has yet to receive any discernible guidance from the faith-based coalition that helped put him in office. The question: whether it is ever right for Americans to inflict cruel and degrading treatment on suspected terrorist detainees.

We read credible reports—some from FBI agents—that prisoners have been stripped naked, sexually humiliated, chained to the floor, and left to defecate on themselves. These and other practices like “waterboarding” (in which a detainee is made to feel as if he is being drowned) may or may not meet the technical definition of torture, but no one denies that these practices are cruel, inhuman, and degrading.

Today, the practical application of that question is whether the President should fight the efforts of a group of Republican senators, led by John McCain, who has introduced amendments to a defense bill that would outlaw such abuse. Two weeks ago, the Senate passed the McCain amendment, but whether it is put into place will be determined by the conference committee charged with resolving differences between the Senate and House defense bills.

For the President’s base of evangelicals and conservative Catholics, no practical expediency, however compelling, should determine fundamental moral issues of marriage, abortion, or bioethics. Instead, these questions should be resolved with principles of revealed moral absolutes, granted by a righteous and loving Creator.

Indeed, recent survey results from the Pew Research Center indicated that, in rating the importance of Supreme Court issues, the treatment of terrorist detainees is a close second only to abortion on the list of concerns of evangelical and Catholic voters. Where, then, are the robust voices of theological reflection and moral reasoning that we have come to expect in these debates?

I do not know how others would advise the President theologically on these matters, but as a convinced Christian who has tried for 20 years to apply principles of evangelical faith to issues of human rights, here are three principles of a biblical worldview that seem applicable:

• The state has the authority to protect its citizens by detaining criminals and using force to restrain those who seek to destroy innocent life.
• All those whom the state detains retain the image of God and are due a standard of care required by God.
• Because the power of the state over detainees is exercised by fallen human beings, that power must be limited by clear boundaries, and individuals exercising such power must be transparently accountable.

Therefore, even if it is expedient to inflict cruelty and degradation on a prisoner during interrogation (and experts seem very much divided on this question), in my view, the moral teachings of Christ, the Torah and the Prophets do not permit it for those who bear the Imago Dei.

Read more here.

I once heard or read a story that Stanley Hauerwas, at a panel on the ethics of scientific research using aborted fetuses, asked a proponent of the research, “If it turned out that fetuses were a delicacy, would it be okay to eat them?” Obviously a kind of reductio ad absurdum, right?

Well, the problem with reductio ad absurdum arguments is that, sooner or later, you’ll find someone willing to embrace the absurdum.

To wit:

Britons desperate to halt the ageing process are being injected with the stem cells of aborted foetuses at a clinic that charges £15,000 for a controversial new cosmetic treatment. Despite warnings from biologists in the UK that the process is unproven and could be harmful, dozens of British women have flown to Barbados in the hope that the injections will make them forever young – and possibly even boost their sex drive.

(Link via The American Scene)

Brendan O’Neill skewers what he says is a new breed of rock stars who suck up to politicians, avoid drink and drugs, and generally have evacuated rock music of any trace of rebelliousness:

When Noel Gallagher of Oasis visited Downing Street in July 1997 to congratulate the incumbent New Labour regime on its stunning victory, it was the end of Britpop as we knew it. The sight of this Mancunian rocker — the bad boy of Britpop, who together with his brother Liam had injected some much-needed laddish abandon into a music scene dominated by skinny art students and millionaires’ daughters — taking tea with Tony and nibbling canapés with Cherie …well, it was too much for some to take. A friend of mine even threw out his Oasis CDs in disgust (though he bought them all again a couple of weeks later). What kind of working-class hero is it, we wondered, who takes part in an official orgy of brown-nosing for a Prime Minister as unhip and illiberal as Blair?

Now, however, I am almost willing to forgive Gallagher. For today’s stars of British indie rock have committed a treason far graver than his. Never mind chatting to Blair over champers; this new generation of Britpoppers is made in Blair’s image — they look like Blair, sound like Blair and think Blair is ‘BRILLIANT’. And they espouse every mealy-mouthed prejudice of the Blairite age, taking a safety-first, shrink-wrapped approach to life, love and politics that would have been anathema to the punks and grunts of yesteryear. From Coldplay to Keane, James Blunt to Franz Ferdinand (the band, that is, not the assassinated Austrian archduke), the independent music scene is dominated by the most insufferable, middle-class, non-smoking, anti-drugs, safe-sex-observing bunch of Blairite bores and arse-kissers you could ever have the misfortune to clap eyes on. We’ve gone from Britpop to Blairpop. The kids, I’m afraid, are not all right.

I’m re-reading William Placher’s The Domestication of Transcendence. His argument, in a nutshell, is that, starting in about the 17th century, thinking about God moved sharply away from an emphasis on mystery and the inadequacy of all human language and concepts when applied to God (as he finds in St. Thomas Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin) and toward an obsession with formulating clear and distinct ideas about God and making God part (even if the most important part) of a metaphysical scheme or system.

In chapter 6, “The Domestication of Grace,” Placher discusses how post-Reformation groups like the Pietists, Jansenists, and Puritans recoiled from the Reformers’ radical doctrine of grace and fixated upon discerning the signs of grace in themselves and in others. This led, almost inevitabley, to the idea that the successful and respectable members of society must be among the elect, and the poor and disreputable must be among the reprobate.

In the Pietists this took the form of endless introspection in order to determine whether one had been justified or not, as well as an almost obsessive avoidance of anything that might smack of impropriety, like dancing, joking, etc.

Placher contrasts this with Luther’s attitude:

If we are justified by grace alone through faith alone, he said, then we can take risks in our faith. After all, a Christian should not think “he is pleasing to God on account of what he does, but rather by a confident trust in his favor he does such tasks for a gracious and loving God and to his honor and praise alone. And in so doing he serves and benefits his neighbor.” The person trying to earn salvation can never fully concentrate on either the glory of God or the good of a needy neighbor; one will always be thinking about how much credit a morally good act will build up in one’s own account. If we realize that we need not worry about our salvation, by contrast, that “for ourselves we need nothing to make us pious,” then we act out of “pleasure and love.” “If someone desires from me a service I can render him, I will gladly do it out of good will, whether it is commanded or not. I will do so for the sake of brotherly love and because service to my neighbor is pleasing to God.” I can glorify God because God deserves the glory, and I can help my neighbors because they need my help; my own fate already rests secure in God’s grace.

Such confidence ought to free Christians from worrying overmuch about moral rules. Luther even proposed that, to make sure we do not take our own virtues too solemnly, we should from time to time consciously exercise our Christian freedom in a harmless way: sleep too late, eat or drink more than usual, take part in a practical joke. A faithful relation to God, he proposed, is like a good marriage. “When a husband and wife really love one another, have pleasure in each other, and thoroughly believe in their love, who teaches them how they are to behave to one another…?” They do not need checklists of instructions–indeed, if they are resorting to such checklists, then something has already gone wrong with the marriage–but they spontaneously do “even more than is necessary,” and freely, “with a glad, peaceful, and confident heart.” (p. 90)

The Pietists tended to look in themselves for assurance of their salvation. But Luther always insisted that we look outside of ourselves, that faith have something external to the self to hold on to. This is why he emphasized so strongly the promise in our baptism, in God’s word, and in the Lord’s Supper. We should, in other words, always look to Christ.

This interesting essay (via Kevin Carson) argues that Greens and Libertarians have enough in common, philosophically and politically, to forge an alliance.