I greeted with joy the announcement from Clarence House this morning that Prince William of Wales will marry Catherine Middleton. Why? I am an American citizen with some English roots. But that's not it. It's also fairly probable that the future man and wife never will be crowned and instead will take up a quiet life in the country after a bloodless constitutional reform, so the couple's impact on the world stage is likely to be limited to philanthropy.
No, I was overjoyed at the thought of a grand televised Anglican royal wedding. Certainly, new music will be commissioned. We will see the spectacle of +Rowan and perhaps +John and +Richard and other much controverted English bishops processing about to officiate at the joining of a rescue helicopter pilot and his artistic wife. It will be unspeakably grand, beautiful, and silly, and unlike a certain wedding roughly twenty nine years ago, it will feel more like a fait accompli of a love match than a virgin sacrifice.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
What Reason Cannot Fathom
Let the clever world be angry that God's son should forsake his throne of honour, that he should clothe himself in flesh and blood and suffer as a human being. The greatest wisdom of this world must before the counsel of the most high become the greatest folly. What God has decided, reason cannot fathom; she is the blind leader who misleads the spiritually blind --
Recitative from Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (Cantata No. 152) -- J.S. Bach and S. Franck
Franck's lyrics screamed at me from the program page at a concert I recently attended. The epoch in which it was written marks a transition between the two great challenges of reason to the Christian faith. The older reasoning was skeptical that a metaphysical being ever could or would take a physical form. It was a bit of an epistemological jeu de verite , of course. Plato's concerns were more ethical than ontological. He despised the fabulous stories of the fallible Greek gods and was convinced that somewhere out there, the ideal Jupiter more likely smiled on his notions of virtue than gazed upon earth in search of his next lay. Eight centuries later, Augustine was faced with many of the same ethical concerns and eventually embraced the Christian faith, because it made relationship possible with an ideal Jupiter who still has transcended fallible human nature. The Christian faith provided the earthy stories that engaged the plebeians but grounded them in the virtue ethics of the aether beloved by the philosophers.
In these times, I only can explain the captivation of the wise with the exercise of unmitigated, uncorrected, unsupplemented, and arrogant reason with a genuine disregard for virtue outside their own private sphere. The recent feast of St. Michael and All Angels draws this problem into focus. Angels in popular Christian culture and sometimes theologically have served as a cipher for the mysteries of being. Tradition has assigned the motions of the stars, the turnings of the winds, and even reality itself to the communication of the aethereal plans of the Divine Maker into the quotidian reality of middle earth. Angels, originally mediators (jn the sense of communication) between God and men in the Holy Scriptures were transformed by Platonism into much more detail-oriented providers of divine information content. And so as our understanding of nature has improved, the natural philosophical need for angels has diminished to nearer its proper level, that is, nil, but those of a natural philosophical bent have forgotten that there are other philosophical needs beyond those of nature.
People certainly need angels for some reason. In the last year, we have been treated to a spectacle of a Norwegian royal princess and her business partner operating educational and practical programs for communication with angels. They do not have an exclusive monopoly on this kind of thing. All manner of folk will mediate communication with Ascended Masters, angels, spirit guides, and the dead these days. No matter in how much detail nature is put to the question for her secrets, most of the world still seeks realia beyond the most rigorous notions of the real.
The temptation of the new atheists has been to deride this kind of behavior. For them, a course in angel communication is no less a crime against reason and good mores than the kinds of things I say or do seven mornings per week. I can't imagine, honestly, why they never wonder if there might be something more to human notions of a metaphysics than neurochemistry, or perhaps, evolutionary adaptations that maintain social cohesion or that encourage risky behavior to enhancs sexual competition. The end point of this thinking is that our moral actions, our emotions, and the relationships we form are nothing more than a series of chemical reactions in a social context. Eventually, I do imagine that we will confront the moral and existential challenges of human life with the help of chemical buffers, for in a purely natural philosophical universe, the anxieties of those Germans whose funeral music I heard last Saturday night were very real, indeed tragically so, but they lacked any significance. And so with love and so with beauty. As we gain more and more of God's creative freedom among the things that are seen, we will seek to control the inconvenient manifestations of those things that are unseen.
In the first lesson at Evening Prayer last night, the Prophet Daniel is caught up in a vision on the banks of the Tigris. As for his companions, they see nothing but still sense something odd is occurring. Daniel encounters his unnamed Lord, which the rabbis who go for this kind of thing probably read as Metratron, the apotheosized Enoch, but who we traditionally read as the Second Person of the Trinity. The Lord tells Daniel that He strives with the Prince of Persia and soon with the Prince of Greece, but He only has the help of Michael, "your Prince", that is the Prince of the Jewish people. Persia and Greece are the great hegemonic powers of the era. The fate of God's chosen people will depend on their strategic decisions. It would be tempting to imagine the invisible hosts of heaven and hell striving on the battlefield in parallel to Alexander the Great or something, but we are reading prophecy rather than watching the Russian fantasy film, Night Watch . Instead, the Lord is speaking of the necessary struggles that precede His Incarnation. These struggles can be viewed to be of a temporal nature, requiring the restoration of the Jews to Judah and their cult at Jerusalem, but they also can be spiritual. Both Persia and Greece present to the Jews the whole new set of relations, ethics, emotions, and philosophies. The war against the Prince of Persia is less about Jewish power than about Jewish identity. (Which is the true power in the pre-Christian world in that it makes possible the Christ.) Daniel is stuck in the service of Persia, but the great question of his life is always whether he still can remain a Jew. The war in heaven is indeed a Platonic war, a war of ideas.
In the second lesson, we hear of the beginning of the final campaign is this universal war of ideas, in which the victorious Lamb finally is prepared to open the seven seals and transform natural philosophical reality entire in the image of his glorious resurrected Body. The precursor of this transformation is the transformation of primary mimetic form of that Body, that is, the Church, which is described as a kingdom of priests drawn from every tribe, race, language, and nation. In a time of exciting extrasolar planet discoveries, I find it significant that the scroll of the Lamb is sealed with seven seals, the canonical number of heavenly bodies and crystal spheres that the ancients at the time of John of Patmos's revelation believed separated us from God. For as the Apostle reminds us, "...our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." We will be misled if we project the natural philosophical world upon the worldview of the Old and New Testaments, which viewed the universe as a completely different set of relationships in which the physical and metaphysical worlds were connected. Thus, we have little to fear from Jupiter beyond its baleful influence on the long term evolution of Earth's orbit and the motions of asteroids and comets, but we have much to fear from the ideas, vices, and actions signified by Jupiter.
Ultimately, it's not easy for a modern to understand such things. Even the relicts of this worldview in our time are merely for show. No competent astrologer of the ancient world would publish the generalized horoscopes we see in the daily paper. Astrology didn't work because the stars have any influence on human affairs, it worked because looking to the stars allowed the astrologer to unconsciously gain insight into the psychology of the individual and his or her social relations. It is very little different than a mathematics professor I know who remembers theorems by staring at the foliage outside of his window.
So instead the tradition of the Church leaves us with angels to remind us of the gulf between us and God, the existence and significance of invisible things, and the wondrous mystery that the invisible things have crashed into this world once before and will do so again.
Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Recitative from Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (Cantata No. 152) -- J.S. Bach and S. Franck
Franck's lyrics screamed at me from the program page at a concert I recently attended. The epoch in which it was written marks a transition between the two great challenges of reason to the Christian faith. The older reasoning was skeptical that a metaphysical being ever could or would take a physical form. It was a bit of an epistemological jeu de verite , of course. Plato's concerns were more ethical than ontological. He despised the fabulous stories of the fallible Greek gods and was convinced that somewhere out there, the ideal Jupiter more likely smiled on his notions of virtue than gazed upon earth in search of his next lay. Eight centuries later, Augustine was faced with many of the same ethical concerns and eventually embraced the Christian faith, because it made relationship possible with an ideal Jupiter who still has transcended fallible human nature. The Christian faith provided the earthy stories that engaged the plebeians but grounded them in the virtue ethics of the aether beloved by the philosophers.
In these times, I only can explain the captivation of the wise with the exercise of unmitigated, uncorrected, unsupplemented, and arrogant reason with a genuine disregard for virtue outside their own private sphere. The recent feast of St. Michael and All Angels draws this problem into focus. Angels in popular Christian culture and sometimes theologically have served as a cipher for the mysteries of being. Tradition has assigned the motions of the stars, the turnings of the winds, and even reality itself to the communication of the aethereal plans of the Divine Maker into the quotidian reality of middle earth. Angels, originally mediators (jn the sense of communication) between God and men in the Holy Scriptures were transformed by Platonism into much more detail-oriented providers of divine information content. And so as our understanding of nature has improved, the natural philosophical need for angels has diminished to nearer its proper level, that is, nil, but those of a natural philosophical bent have forgotten that there are other philosophical needs beyond those of nature.
People certainly need angels for some reason. In the last year, we have been treated to a spectacle of a Norwegian royal princess and her business partner operating educational and practical programs for communication with angels. They do not have an exclusive monopoly on this kind of thing. All manner of folk will mediate communication with Ascended Masters, angels, spirit guides, and the dead these days. No matter in how much detail nature is put to the question for her secrets, most of the world still seeks realia beyond the most rigorous notions of the real.
The temptation of the new atheists has been to deride this kind of behavior. For them, a course in angel communication is no less a crime against reason and good mores than the kinds of things I say or do seven mornings per week. I can't imagine, honestly, why they never wonder if there might be something more to human notions of a metaphysics than neurochemistry, or perhaps, evolutionary adaptations that maintain social cohesion or that encourage risky behavior to enhancs sexual competition. The end point of this thinking is that our moral actions, our emotions, and the relationships we form are nothing more than a series of chemical reactions in a social context. Eventually, I do imagine that we will confront the moral and existential challenges of human life with the help of chemical buffers, for in a purely natural philosophical universe, the anxieties of those Germans whose funeral music I heard last Saturday night were very real, indeed tragically so, but they lacked any significance. And so with love and so with beauty. As we gain more and more of God's creative freedom among the things that are seen, we will seek to control the inconvenient manifestations of those things that are unseen.
In the first lesson at Evening Prayer last night, the Prophet Daniel is caught up in a vision on the banks of the Tigris. As for his companions, they see nothing but still sense something odd is occurring. Daniel encounters his unnamed Lord, which the rabbis who go for this kind of thing probably read as Metratron, the apotheosized Enoch, but who we traditionally read as the Second Person of the Trinity. The Lord tells Daniel that He strives with the Prince of Persia and soon with the Prince of Greece, but He only has the help of Michael, "your Prince", that is the Prince of the Jewish people. Persia and Greece are the great hegemonic powers of the era. The fate of God's chosen people will depend on their strategic decisions. It would be tempting to imagine the invisible hosts of heaven and hell striving on the battlefield in parallel to Alexander the Great or something, but we are reading prophecy rather than watching the Russian fantasy film, Night Watch . Instead, the Lord is speaking of the necessary struggles that precede His Incarnation. These struggles can be viewed to be of a temporal nature, requiring the restoration of the Jews to Judah and their cult at Jerusalem, but they also can be spiritual. Both Persia and Greece present to the Jews the whole new set of relations, ethics, emotions, and philosophies. The war against the Prince of Persia is less about Jewish power than about Jewish identity. (Which is the true power in the pre-Christian world in that it makes possible the Christ.) Daniel is stuck in the service of Persia, but the great question of his life is always whether he still can remain a Jew. The war in heaven is indeed a Platonic war, a war of ideas.
In the second lesson, we hear of the beginning of the final campaign is this universal war of ideas, in which the victorious Lamb finally is prepared to open the seven seals and transform natural philosophical reality entire in the image of his glorious resurrected Body. The precursor of this transformation is the transformation of primary mimetic form of that Body, that is, the Church, which is described as a kingdom of priests drawn from every tribe, race, language, and nation. In a time of exciting extrasolar planet discoveries, I find it significant that the scroll of the Lamb is sealed with seven seals, the canonical number of heavenly bodies and crystal spheres that the ancients at the time of John of Patmos's revelation believed separated us from God. For as the Apostle reminds us, "...our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." We will be misled if we project the natural philosophical world upon the worldview of the Old and New Testaments, which viewed the universe as a completely different set of relationships in which the physical and metaphysical worlds were connected. Thus, we have little to fear from Jupiter beyond its baleful influence on the long term evolution of Earth's orbit and the motions of asteroids and comets, but we have much to fear from the ideas, vices, and actions signified by Jupiter.
Ultimately, it's not easy for a modern to understand such things. Even the relicts of this worldview in our time are merely for show. No competent astrologer of the ancient world would publish the generalized horoscopes we see in the daily paper. Astrology didn't work because the stars have any influence on human affairs, it worked because looking to the stars allowed the astrologer to unconsciously gain insight into the psychology of the individual and his or her social relations. It is very little different than a mathematics professor I know who remembers theorems by staring at the foliage outside of his window.
So instead the tradition of the Church leaves us with angels to remind us of the gulf between us and God, the existence and significance of invisible things, and the wondrous mystery that the invisible things have crashed into this world once before and will do so again.
Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Gen Y This And Gen Y That
Fr. Bob recently posted a brief quote about the Millennials (Generation Y) on his blog recently. My visceral response to it captured for me how I feel about the kinds of generational generalizations that have become fashionable in the last few years. I think this kind of demographic thinking can come to represent the worst kind of discourse of humans about power. It is the step between, "We will win because of the power of our ideas" and "We will win through overwhelming force." Instead, demographic analysis becomes a way for older generations to project their discontents on the rising generation and say to the theses of their age, "We will win by the power of our ideas seeded in the minds of a new generation." Or as the Salty Vicar once put it, "We will eat your children."
As a Millennial, I, of course, would like to blame my parents' generation as a whole for all manner of evils: the rape of the environment, the destruction of traditional institutions of American civic life, the corruption of the traditional institutions that survived, the loss of idealism, and the obsession with theological uncertainty and transgressive theories. But there is nothing historically inevitable about my generation doing the opposite or reforming the Boomers' mistakes. You can't put vices back in the box. You can't go back to the forest. Social change is inherently hysteretical. The very process of change prevents the system from being anywhere as reversible as it was versible.
I would prefer that if older generations have programs of innovation or reform, they realize that some Millennials may accommodate them. But they do not allow those Millennials to participate in these programs of innovation or reform independently, creatively, and moderately, so that they do not allow those programs to be instructed and corrected, they diminish those Millennials as human beings and impoverish themselves.
I'm pretty sure Fr. Bob knows these things. He, after all, is operating at the grassroots. But let him and others like him be reminded of them anyway.
As a Millennial, I, of course, would like to blame my parents' generation as a whole for all manner of evils: the rape of the environment, the destruction of traditional institutions of American civic life, the corruption of the traditional institutions that survived, the loss of idealism, and the obsession with theological uncertainty and transgressive theories. But there is nothing historically inevitable about my generation doing the opposite or reforming the Boomers' mistakes. You can't put vices back in the box. You can't go back to the forest. Social change is inherently hysteretical. The very process of change prevents the system from being anywhere as reversible as it was versible.
I would prefer that if older generations have programs of innovation or reform, they realize that some Millennials may accommodate them. But they do not allow those Millennials to participate in these programs of innovation or reform independently, creatively, and moderately, so that they do not allow those programs to be instructed and corrected, they diminish those Millennials as human beings and impoverish themselves.
I'm pretty sure Fr. Bob knows these things. He, after all, is operating at the grassroots. But let him and others like him be reminded of them anyway.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Change of (Physical) Address
Gentle readers, I write to you from the centrally isolated portion of a large Northeastern State, where I am recently come to live and work. At present, my new home county and townlands are on edge, awaiting the arrival of the transient population of undergraduates and some graduate and professional students, which swells the population of the county by 20% and the population of my city of residence by perhaps 70%. The crippling increase in traffic that shall arrive in coming days only will be the beginning of the oppression of the collegiate year, which, by all accounts, is filled with rudeness, public intoxication, vandalism, and civil disorder. If it did not snow here, the townsfolk would have to invent some other suitable form of containment for the young and privileged good-for-nothings that inhabit the Palatine and Capitoline for two semesters each year. Since I look very much of the age to be the object of local ressentiment and am employed by one of the kindly mothers of studies upon these hills, I walk the streets feeling dangerously suspect. On one hand, the employment and limited incubation of entrepeneurial endeavors provided by the institutions here is essential to a local economy whose days of skilled, heavy manufacturing are over and whose labor's conscience may or may not object to the hydrofragmentary rapine of the neighboring plots of Earth for natural gas. On the other hand, college students raise rents, assert privilege, and cause trouble. I, however, have risen far enough in academia to know that my sympathies lie just on the side of the town.
My new parish is distinctly lovely and hospitable to newcomers and to the poor. Her grossest liturgical abuse is the Gospel sandwich. Her preaching focuses on culture and contemplation more than policy and politics. Her social teaching, if I may speak of such a thing, is very little different than my former parish, but it is lived out in harmony with tradition rather than conflict. As much as I dearly miss my friends in Christ in Laodicea, I am content with the change in sea from the Ionian to the Aegean.
In the next week, my new boss comes to town in company with her charges in statu pupillari . I have a new research project and research group dynamic to forge in the coming weeks. So my updates likely will be infrequent as they have been for some time to come. They should be less polemical, though.
My new parish is distinctly lovely and hospitable to newcomers and to the poor. Her grossest liturgical abuse is the Gospel sandwich. Her preaching focuses on culture and contemplation more than policy and politics. Her social teaching, if I may speak of such a thing, is very little different than my former parish, but it is lived out in harmony with tradition rather than conflict. As much as I dearly miss my friends in Christ in Laodicea, I am content with the change in sea from the Ionian to the Aegean.
In the next week, my new boss comes to town in company with her charges in statu pupillari . I have a new research project and research group dynamic to forge in the coming weeks. So my updates likely will be infrequent as they have been for some time to come. They should be less polemical, though.
Monday, July 19, 2010
In Search of the Ur-Faculty Advisor
Some academics, especially mathematicians, like to play a genealogical game, in which their faculty advisor, usually their Ph.D. advisor, is considered a parent. They then enjoy tracing their intellectual forebears into distant antiquity. I was rather bored today, so I decided to trace my own academic genealogy. On an earlier attempt, I became lost in Scottish surgeons of the 19th century, but the Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University opened up a completely different genealogical path in Germany, a country with a stronger tradition (or better records) of faculty advising.
Eight generations back, I encountered Bunsen (of burner fame).
Sixteen generations back, I discovered my academic ancestors were Lutheran apologists, mainly educated at the University of Wittenberg.
Twenty four generations back, I found Nicholas Copernicus, a man whose contributions to modern astronomy are somewhat overestimated but whose work on the revolutions of the planets was the first shot of the Scientific Revolution.
Copernicus's academic ancestors were medieval astronomers at the University of Vienna. So twenty nine generations back, I found the great reforger of the University of Vienna, Henry of Langenstein, who wrote about planetary science in the sense that he argued that the appearance of a comet did not portend any future event.
The funny thing is that Henry of Langenstein (and the Byzantine scholar, Gemistos Pletho) are the oldest scholars listed by the Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University. In some sense, they are the ur-faculty advisors of science. Scientific genealogies generally end there.
But did they have advisors? The unadvised advisor is even more unlikely than an unmoved mover. Well, maybe Socrates was the unadvised advisor. But the discontinuity between Plato's Academy and the medieval universities of the West makes it hard to connect Socrates and me, though Pletho indeed could be the link.
So I decided to trace Henry of Langenstein further. In theology, he seems to have been advised by a Cistercian master of some obscurity, but scientifically, it is often claimed he was influenced by Jean Buridan, who taught in the Faculty of Arts at Paris. (You should google "Buridan's ass.")
Buridan probably was most influenced by the instruction of William of Ockham (of Ockham's Razor fame). Considering the influence of the principle of parsimony, Ockham really could be the ur-faculty advisor of natural science. Yet it is claimed by some authors that Ockham may have received instruction from John Duns Scotus, the Postulant's chief philosopher of expertise. And coincidentally, Scottish. The trail then grows cold in the midst of the faculty of the Franciscan studium generale at Oxford.
So after thirty-two generations of graduate students, we have progressed from Scotus to me. Darn, I was hoping for Aquinas.
Eight generations back, I encountered Bunsen (of burner fame).
Sixteen generations back, I discovered my academic ancestors were Lutheran apologists, mainly educated at the University of Wittenberg.
Twenty four generations back, I found Nicholas Copernicus, a man whose contributions to modern astronomy are somewhat overestimated but whose work on the revolutions of the planets was the first shot of the Scientific Revolution.
Copernicus's academic ancestors were medieval astronomers at the University of Vienna. So twenty nine generations back, I found the great reforger of the University of Vienna, Henry of Langenstein, who wrote about planetary science in the sense that he argued that the appearance of a comet did not portend any future event.
The funny thing is that Henry of Langenstein (and the Byzantine scholar, Gemistos Pletho) are the oldest scholars listed by the Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University. In some sense, they are the ur-faculty advisors of science. Scientific genealogies generally end there.
But did they have advisors? The unadvised advisor is even more unlikely than an unmoved mover. Well, maybe Socrates was the unadvised advisor. But the discontinuity between Plato's Academy and the medieval universities of the West makes it hard to connect Socrates and me, though Pletho indeed could be the link.
So I decided to trace Henry of Langenstein further. In theology, he seems to have been advised by a Cistercian master of some obscurity, but scientifically, it is often claimed he was influenced by Jean Buridan, who taught in the Faculty of Arts at Paris. (You should google "Buridan's ass.")
Buridan probably was most influenced by the instruction of William of Ockham (of Ockham's Razor fame). Considering the influence of the principle of parsimony, Ockham really could be the ur-faculty advisor of natural science. Yet it is claimed by some authors that Ockham may have received instruction from John Duns Scotus, the Postulant's chief philosopher of expertise. And coincidentally, Scottish. The trail then grows cold in the midst of the faculty of the Franciscan studium generale at Oxford.
So after thirty-two generations of graduate students, we have progressed from Scotus to me. Darn, I was hoping for Aquinas.
Saturday, July 03, 2010
How To Set Off An Atomic Bomb
In this guide, we will describe how to construct a thermonuclear device capable of blowing the Anglican Communion to kingdom come in an exceptionally catholic and orthodox way.
1. Take a gay man.
2. Ordain him a priest in the Church of England.
3. Make him awesome.
4. Make him celibate and thereby turn his long-term relationship celibate.
5. Wait a while.
6. When civil partnerships become legal, let him and his long-term partner enter one.
7. Consecrate him a bishop.
Warning: This device can be defused by a spineless Archbishop under pressure from Anglican Mainstream and allied groups.
Well, it's happening again. The Holy Spirit has put it in a bunch of minds in the Church of England to make Jeffrey John a bishop, this time of Southwark. We'll see if it the appointment actually is made, but oddly enough, it said that neither Canterbury (+Cantaur) nor York (+Ebor) have made any objection. I may have to take back what I said about the Grace of God not being irresistible.
The significance of John's consecration as Bishop of Southwark would be immense. Being partnered, celibate, and open about his sexual orientation and his sexless life, John literally conforms to the Deuteronomic/Levitical standards of sexual conduct while having a manner of life that confounds conservatives and probably makes some liberals equally uncomfortable. He and his partner (also a priest) model a third way for gay relationships and the Christian faith that is equally modernist and traditional. If he becomes a bishop in the Church of England, the Global South will have to compromise their homophobia or reject the Church of England. Or as is more likely, they could mutter about penal atonement and face alienation from the more catholic Provinces of the Communion. Whatever happens, prayer and a good supply of popcorn will be necessary.
1. Take a gay man.
2. Ordain him a priest in the Church of England.
3. Make him awesome.
4. Make him celibate and thereby turn his long-term relationship celibate.
5. Wait a while.
6. When civil partnerships become legal, let him and his long-term partner enter one.
7. Consecrate him a bishop.
Warning: This device can be defused by a spineless Archbishop under pressure from Anglican Mainstream and allied groups.
Well, it's happening again. The Holy Spirit has put it in a bunch of minds in the Church of England to make Jeffrey John a bishop, this time of Southwark. We'll see if it the appointment actually is made, but oddly enough, it said that neither Canterbury (+Cantaur) nor York (+Ebor) have made any objection. I may have to take back what I said about the Grace of God not being irresistible.
The significance of John's consecration as Bishop of Southwark would be immense. Being partnered, celibate, and open about his sexual orientation and his sexless life, John literally conforms to the Deuteronomic/Levitical standards of sexual conduct while having a manner of life that confounds conservatives and probably makes some liberals equally uncomfortable. He and his partner (also a priest) model a third way for gay relationships and the Christian faith that is equally modernist and traditional. If he becomes a bishop in the Church of England, the Global South will have to compromise their homophobia or reject the Church of England. Or as is more likely, they could mutter about penal atonement and face alienation from the more catholic Provinces of the Communion. Whatever happens, prayer and a good supply of popcorn will be necessary.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Attribution of a Prayer
Today, the commencement speaker) at my graduation, the Administrator of NASA, (did you know he is an Episcopalian?) quoted from the Prayers of the People of The Book of Common Prayer. Or so he claimed... (I know the Prayers of the People well enough to tell his attribution was incorrect).
I initially thought it was a prayer from Enriching Our Worship . My father thought it was from the New Zealand Prayer Book. A little work with Google suggested It was a slightly modernized version of a prayer of Sir Francis Drake re-posted here and quoted as such in very recently published collections of prayers. (Other prayers are attributed to Drake, including an adaptation of one of his prayers used for propaganda purposes during World War II.)
The earliest reference I can find to the prayer is in a 1985 issue of the newsletter of the National Cathedral. It's quoted in The Witness the next year. Unfortunately, I can't figure out to whom the prayer was attributed in those publications. But its origins do lie at the door of the Episcopal Church, just not in The Book of Common Prayer .
I initially thought it was a prayer from Enriching Our Worship . My father thought it was from the New Zealand Prayer Book. A little work with Google suggested It was a slightly modernized version of a prayer of Sir Francis Drake re-posted here and quoted as such in very recently published collections of prayers. (Other prayers are attributed to Drake, including an adaptation of one of his prayers used for propaganda purposes during World War II.)
The earliest reference I can find to the prayer is in a 1985 issue of the newsletter of the National Cathedral. It's quoted in The Witness the next year. Unfortunately, I can't figure out to whom the prayer was attributed in those publications. But its origins do lie at the door of the Episcopal Church, just not in The Book of Common Prayer .
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Fulmen E Cantuaria Salutandum Est Fulgure Ex America
Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. --Hebrews 12:11
I met Katherine Grieb once. She is an exceptionally well-spoken and charming woman of a certain age. I am unsure whether I would like to be the Secretary-General of the Anglican Communion, Ken Kearon, right now. If Katherine Grieb is still a consultant to the many-lettered acronymous beast from which she has been partially disaffiliated, he still might have to look her in the face once in a while. Hopefully, by that time, he will have discovered that there is all manner of Anglican border crossing occurring in this country. I need only lift mine eyes unto the hills to see ecclesiastical Bolivia, just a few kilometers to my west.
A long time ago, Rev. Fr. Prof. Dr. AKMA asserted it was necessary that he be in communion with Canterbury and that he might consider leaving the Episcopal Church to continue in that communion. Well, while the present discipline measure of the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a full rupture of communion, it is clear that whatever rupture has been made, it is against the Episcopal Church as a whole. You cannot obey the moratoria on your own, as the Bishop of Montana has learned, and expect to remain in +Rowan Cantuar's good graces.
For the moment, I am willing to bear all things for Christ's sake. If it is necessary to maintain a Communion by a rather niggling sort of disapprobation once in a while, I am willing not to stir up a stink, being in the main unaffected by it and fairly sure that those "fairly" or unfairly injured by this action suffer no physical harm. I am far more concerned that this kind of disapprobation is not also applied to those who stymie the Communion-wide Listening Process by remaining neutral or actively encouraging gays and lesbians to remain in fear and concealment.
But I will allow our gracious Primate to set the terms of his own discipline within reason. If the border crossing actions of Rwanda, the Southern Cone, and Nigeria (and others unknown to this blogger) are not met with similar discipline, I would very much like there to be a stink. Here's the form it could take:
1. Funding by General Convention of the Anglican Communion Office and similar organs should be cut off entirely. Big fat goose egg. Money should be transferred to Episcopal Relief and Development or other line items connected with joint evangelism or relief work with other Provinces of the Communion. If a little of this money ended up in the hands of Changing Attitude Nigeria or Integrity Uganda, so be it.
2. We should encourage our brothers and sisters in the Church of England to pursue whatever means the Archbishop of Canterbury might be censured, disciplined, or otherwise suffer consequences through action of General Synod or Parliament.
3. The faculties of the Archbishop of Canterbury or any of the college of Bishops in the Church of England unwilling to disavow his iniquitous, inequitable, and hypocritical (and still entirely potential) actions should not be honored in the United States.
We Anglicans claim to belong the particular churches of particular places that is part of One visible and invisible Church whose Head is Jesus Christ. When we do naughty things to one another, we ought not to bear it as divine sanction or the fury of the powers but as the actions of our fellow sinners that require resistance. Some say that the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks himself a Pope. Well, we have no Pope but Our Father in Heaven. +Rowan Cantuar is Our Primate and so subject to our discipline as we are to his.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Reviewing Solar
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
There's something about a few lines into the opening of Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar , that conjured for me the opening paragraph of Jane Austen's Emma :
I found the parallel wasn't perfect on second glance,
Earlier in the opening, Beard is: "vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever."
The contrast is striking. Emma is a clever woman who has done nothing, while Beard is a Nobel laureate who has done entirely too much. But I suspect McEwan might echo Austen's sentiment about Emma, "I'm going to make a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Daring for a woman to say in the early 19th century, while bog standard pretty much any time else, including for McEwan.
But in the same way that the opening to Emma tells you much about what is going to happen in the novel, so does the opening in Solar prefigure the chief metaphor of the novel: Beard is the First World.
Beard is the Occidental, staid and technically focused, that engages in increasingly unsatisfying excess to his destruction. He eats and drinks alcohol like a competitive eater and boozer, sometimes considering the taste, though is usually more interested in the quantity. There are multiple episodes on which he is on the verge of vomiting. He constantly gains weight and is starting to see the later stages of cardiovascular disease.
And his gluttony is only the beginning of his ills. Beard is an addict to food, to sex, and to professional reputation and success. He takes surprisingly little pleasure in his addictions and enjoys most the process of others suffering for him and cleaning up his messes. He keeps an apartment himself that gradually decays into uninhabitability.
In a moment that would make Rev. Sam shudder, he discusses peak oil and climate change as problems unassailable by reducing consumption or as he also terms it, virtue. Instead, he urges a group of institutional investors to fund his technological fix, solar power that imitates photosynthesizing plants (a genuine technology being explored by acquaintances of mine), because a new economy is necessary and their greed should be sufficient to make it reality.
Without giving away the denouement completely, vice is ultimately punished. There is something suitably Victorian about the novel in that sense. And with Beard's doom, McEwan seems to herald our own.
In the course of this rake's progress, the novel is readable, though not entrancing. The irony is sometimes too delicious. Beard makes a few ill-considered remarks about why there are so few women physicists. The climax of his public shaming is a debate with a series of white male humanities professors critiquing his "hegemonic" place or his white male privilege in more familiar terms. They also claim that there are no objective truths and that even gravity is socially constructed, to the approbation of a leftist postmodernist audience. Yet Beard's true foil is a cognitive psychologist from Tel Aviv, who uses quite convincing research results to show that gender differences in physics ability are due to cultural conditioning. Beard is willing to concede the error of his thinking, but the audience does not care, believing the foil to be complicit in the atrocity of Palestinian containment just because she is Israeli.
And sometimes McEwan is just a little too obsessed with meta-discourse, in which an event that occurs to Beard is identified as folkloric trope on retelling to a folklorist. But then the reader thinks, "Ah, I am reading a novel, so it is a folkloric trope all along. Ha, ha, ha, ha." I think McEwan was trying to make a point about how prophecies of doom aren't just a folkloric trope but that doom is sometimes objective reality, but it fell flat.
What disturbs me most is that there isn't a place for virtue either. The closest thing we see to virtuous is a Christian couple who study theology, raise identical twins as best they can, and divvy up the chores as equally as they can, including prayer and meditation. We hear little about them, but they seem anything but happy. Vice will be punished, yes, but virtue is not worth much detailed consideration. Inadvertently, McEwan may have summarized the course of the 21st century.
There's something about a few lines into the opening of Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar , that conjured for me the opening paragraph of Jane Austen's Emma :
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
I found the parallel wasn't perfect on second glance,
But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken.
Earlier in the opening, Beard is: "vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever."
The contrast is striking. Emma is a clever woman who has done nothing, while Beard is a Nobel laureate who has done entirely too much. But I suspect McEwan might echo Austen's sentiment about Emma, "I'm going to make a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Daring for a woman to say in the early 19th century, while bog standard pretty much any time else, including for McEwan.
But in the same way that the opening to Emma tells you much about what is going to happen in the novel, so does the opening in Solar prefigure the chief metaphor of the novel: Beard is the First World.
Beard is the Occidental, staid and technically focused, that engages in increasingly unsatisfying excess to his destruction. He eats and drinks alcohol like a competitive eater and boozer, sometimes considering the taste, though is usually more interested in the quantity. There are multiple episodes on which he is on the verge of vomiting. He constantly gains weight and is starting to see the later stages of cardiovascular disease.
And his gluttony is only the beginning of his ills. Beard is an addict to food, to sex, and to professional reputation and success. He takes surprisingly little pleasure in his addictions and enjoys most the process of others suffering for him and cleaning up his messes. He keeps an apartment himself that gradually decays into uninhabitability.
In a moment that would make Rev. Sam shudder, he discusses peak oil and climate change as problems unassailable by reducing consumption or as he also terms it, virtue. Instead, he urges a group of institutional investors to fund his technological fix, solar power that imitates photosynthesizing plants (a genuine technology being explored by acquaintances of mine), because a new economy is necessary and their greed should be sufficient to make it reality.
Without giving away the denouement completely, vice is ultimately punished. There is something suitably Victorian about the novel in that sense. And with Beard's doom, McEwan seems to herald our own.
In the course of this rake's progress, the novel is readable, though not entrancing. The irony is sometimes too delicious. Beard makes a few ill-considered remarks about why there are so few women physicists. The climax of his public shaming is a debate with a series of white male humanities professors critiquing his "hegemonic" place or his white male privilege in more familiar terms. They also claim that there are no objective truths and that even gravity is socially constructed, to the approbation of a leftist postmodernist audience. Yet Beard's true foil is a cognitive psychologist from Tel Aviv, who uses quite convincing research results to show that gender differences in physics ability are due to cultural conditioning. Beard is willing to concede the error of his thinking, but the audience does not care, believing the foil to be complicit in the atrocity of Palestinian containment just because she is Israeli.
And sometimes McEwan is just a little too obsessed with meta-discourse, in which an event that occurs to Beard is identified as folkloric trope on retelling to a folklorist. But then the reader thinks, "Ah, I am reading a novel, so it is a folkloric trope all along. Ha, ha, ha, ha." I think McEwan was trying to make a point about how prophecies of doom aren't just a folkloric trope but that doom is sometimes objective reality, but it fell flat.
What disturbs me most is that there isn't a place for virtue either. The closest thing we see to virtuous is a Christian couple who study theology, raise identical twins as best they can, and divvy up the chores as equally as they can, including prayer and meditation. We hear little about them, but they seem anything but happy. Vice will be punished, yes, but virtue is not worth much detailed consideration. Inadvertently, McEwan may have summarized the course of the 21st century.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Fruit of a Poisoned Tree
I've just watched a couple of episodes from Season 2 of The Tudors . In the course of the two episodes, Henry VIII sends his wife, Catalina de Aragon, away from court and creates his paramour, Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke suo jure in anticipation of their marriage. Thomas More resigns the Lord Chancellorship, handing over the Great Seal of England to the King as a weight too great for him to bear. And in the shadows, the King's closest counselor, Thomas Cromwell, mutters about destroying the clergy. It is certainly television, sometimes lacking fidelity to names and dates. But the megalomania of Henry is likely true to life as are the divided loyalties of More and the infectious hatred of Cromwell for the ecclesiastical order of his day.
One moment is particularly telling. Henry is in Parliament, asking that the Lords Spiritual acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. They agree with the rider, "as far as the Law of Christ allows," or in the mind of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, not one whit.
Christopher* reminded the Episcopal Church in the Internet assembled
once and
again today that titles like that of Henry are blasphemous or at least hubristic. As we proclaim in one of the Eucharistic Prayers, Jesus Christ alone is the Head of the Church, the Author of our salvation. His daughter, Elizabeth, initiated the trend toward decentralized power in our church by taking the title of Supreme Governor (I doubt it was just because she was a woman as some say) and empowering Parliament to provide lay oversight of the church in consultation with the clergy. In other words, as England's civil polity evolved to concentrate less power in the person of the Crown, its spiritual polity would evolve in the same way. Her father's homicidal manias had motivated closer attention to the problems of power in general.
The Church of England is thus the fruit of a poisoned tree. It arises from the particular difficulties of an island on the edge of the known world in the wake of the Great Famine and Black Death of the fourteenth century. The combined effects of these crises was to eviscerate the deep relations between lord and peasant as a familial and feudal bond. With labor so scarce, individual peasants worked on the land of those who would pay in cash, destroying their attachment to the land. At the same time, a paid labor force was disposable and evictable. It was soon realized that strip-based cultivation was inefficient at point of sale. Beneath the wars with France over the remaining Angevin possessions and the English civil war that followed, the land was gradually enclosed in favor of monocultures, particularly the monoculture of sheep. Early in his reign, Henry (or really his minister Cardinal Wolsey) himself introduced stern legislation to restrain enclosure, but more and more of the agricultural laborers of England were dispossessed of their land and even work. It's the tendency of Marxist historians to see the seeds of the English Reformation in the struggles over enclosure. But opposition to enclosure did not always correlate with opinions on the religious questions.
Instead, the English Reformation is like the Continental Reformation. They originate from ecclesiastical dissent that found both secular ears willing to listen to it and support it and no fair hearing from a restored, centralized, and increasingly absolutist papacy. Dissent was common enough during the High Middle Ages. The Cathars, the spiritual Franciscans and like movements, the Western Schism, and conciliarism. This dissent could be suppressed with more or less difficulty, often by feeding the lusts of secular rulers for mastery over the temporalities of the dissenters. In that sense, the Church of England was poisoned by some of the very same venom that fed the Church of Rome.
In that light, the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon at a ecumenical service in commemoration of the Carthusian Martyrs is a corrective to our discourses about ecclesiastical power. One passage is particularly beautiful:
The power of the Church is ultimately held not by those who hold some office or pre-eminence by canon law, whether Pope, or Primate, or General Convention or Synod but by those who regard the still, small silence of God as a form of residence not to be snatched at and enter into the same kenosis as the Lord. Only by a witness and death like Him can they enter into the government that is His alone. That's not to say that we don't need an org chart on this side of the veil, but we should remember that it's not really the org chart.
One moment is particularly telling. Henry is in Parliament, asking that the Lords Spiritual acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. They agree with the rider, "as far as the Law of Christ allows," or in the mind of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, not one whit.
Christopher* reminded the Episcopal Church in the Internet assembled
once and
again today that titles like that of Henry are blasphemous or at least hubristic. As we proclaim in one of the Eucharistic Prayers, Jesus Christ alone is the Head of the Church, the Author of our salvation. His daughter, Elizabeth, initiated the trend toward decentralized power in our church by taking the title of Supreme Governor (I doubt it was just because she was a woman as some say) and empowering Parliament to provide lay oversight of the church in consultation with the clergy. In other words, as England's civil polity evolved to concentrate less power in the person of the Crown, its spiritual polity would evolve in the same way. Her father's homicidal manias had motivated closer attention to the problems of power in general.
The Church of England is thus the fruit of a poisoned tree. It arises from the particular difficulties of an island on the edge of the known world in the wake of the Great Famine and Black Death of the fourteenth century. The combined effects of these crises was to eviscerate the deep relations between lord and peasant as a familial and feudal bond. With labor so scarce, individual peasants worked on the land of those who would pay in cash, destroying their attachment to the land. At the same time, a paid labor force was disposable and evictable. It was soon realized that strip-based cultivation was inefficient at point of sale. Beneath the wars with France over the remaining Angevin possessions and the English civil war that followed, the land was gradually enclosed in favor of monocultures, particularly the monoculture of sheep. Early in his reign, Henry (or really his minister Cardinal Wolsey) himself introduced stern legislation to restrain enclosure, but more and more of the agricultural laborers of England were dispossessed of their land and even work. It's the tendency of Marxist historians to see the seeds of the English Reformation in the struggles over enclosure. But opposition to enclosure did not always correlate with opinions on the religious questions.
Instead, the English Reformation is like the Continental Reformation. They originate from ecclesiastical dissent that found both secular ears willing to listen to it and support it and no fair hearing from a restored, centralized, and increasingly absolutist papacy. Dissent was common enough during the High Middle Ages. The Cathars, the spiritual Franciscans and like movements, the Western Schism, and conciliarism. This dissent could be suppressed with more or less difficulty, often by feeding the lusts of secular rulers for mastery over the temporalities of the dissenters. In that sense, the Church of England was poisoned by some of the very same venom that fed the Church of Rome.
In that light, the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon at a ecumenical service in commemoration of the Carthusian Martyrs is a corrective to our discourses about ecclesiastical power. One passage is particularly beautiful:
We treasure with perhaps a particular intensity the martyrdom of the contemplative, because the contemplative who knows how to enter into the silence and stillness of things is, above all, the one who knows how to resist to resist fashion and power, to stand in God while the world turns. In that discovery of stillness lies all our hope of reconciliation, the reconciliation of which John Houghton spoke in this place, this place where we are met to worship, before the community gave its answer to the King's agents. A reconciliation of which he spoke (as do so many martyrs) on the scaffold, a reconciliation which is not vanquished, defeated, or rendered meaningless by any level of suffering or death. If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton. If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim. If humanity is saved, it is by the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ and all those martyrs who have followed in his path.
The power of the Church is ultimately held not by those who hold some office or pre-eminence by canon law, whether Pope, or Primate, or General Convention or Synod but by those who regard the still, small silence of God as a form of residence not to be snatched at and enter into the same kenosis as the Lord. Only by a witness and death like Him can they enter into the government that is His alone. That's not to say that we don't need an org chart on this side of the veil, but we should remember that it's not really the org chart.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Creeping Secularism
Thinking Anglicans this morning links to this column of Stephen Bates in the Guardian . It turns out that the judge in the appeal of the counselor who was dismissed for refusing to counsel gay couples for reasons of conscience, Judge Laws, is an regular communicant of the Church of England and married to a New Testament scholar.
So despite what Lord Carey may think, the debate about secularism in the UK is not polarized between an atheistic juggernaut and a faithful remnant. Instead, it is still very much a debate within Christianity.
So despite what Lord Carey may think, the debate about secularism in the UK is not polarized between an atheistic juggernaut and a faithful remnant. Instead, it is still very much a debate within Christianity.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Hiatus
No, the blog is not going on hiatus. I've had too long of a hiatus from blogging while I was writing my thesis. Instead, this week has felt very much like a hiatus. I managed to find a small, but very nicely located apartment in my future home. (The urge to settle here permanently is already growing within me, though that's not yet practical.) And now I take a walk out of my hotel now and then to get a meal, see a movie, or skim a book in the public library. Hopefully, I'll see friends this evening. It's not really a vacation. Any pretense to this being a business trip vanished this morning. So instead it's a pause. I'll leave early next week. I'll go back home with a renewed vigor, focusing on whatever will make life here smoother and make permanent settlement (here or somewhere else) more probable.
One of the priests at my current parish is a former university chaplain. She said to me recently, "We love having folks from [my institution] here, but then you have to leave in four or five years, just when you're most deeply involved." Yet I felt joyful having five years to spend anywhere, knowing that the next stage of my life involves moving every one or two years in hopes of being able to stay somewhere for a minimum of six. So I really need to enjoy the year or two I get to spend here and restrain my feelings of rootlessness for a while.
One of the priests at my current parish is a former university chaplain. She said to me recently, "We love having folks from [my institution] here, but then you have to leave in four or five years, just when you're most deeply involved." Yet I felt joyful having five years to spend anywhere, knowing that the next stage of my life involves moving every one or two years in hopes of being able to stay somewhere for a minimum of six. So I really need to enjoy the year or two I get to spend here and restrain my feelings of rootlessness for a while.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Gospel According to Dog the Bounty Hunter
A+E used to be basic cable's version of PBS. Now, it's a place for people, who in the 19th century would have been larger-than-life folk heroes, to get their own reality shows.
Last night, I spent 90 minutes watching Dog the Bounty Hunter . I don't know much about Dog. He has a lot of children by different women, some of whom he employs. He's probably been to prison. And he's a Christian.
It's the Christian part that's interesting. Before he goes out on a job, he gets his employees/relatives together and prays, "Lord, thank you for this day. Protect us in apprehending X. Protect X from getting hurt. In Jesus's name. Amen." It's funny. You can see Dog get mad at guys accused of hurting women or being otherwise reprehensible. He's very glad when they're caught, even when he doesn't collar them personally. But he hopes that those he meets are just like he was, capable of redemption. He doesn't expect them to be a new creation, he just wants them to be improved one. He takes bail bonds in the hope that his bail bond service will be better keeping them on the straight and narrow, so they can stay out of jail, hold a job, and look (and be) more capable of rehabilitation to a judge. I didn't see him preach once. But the way he treats those he apprehends reminds me of what Jesus preached to the soldiers mixed with the commissions to the apostles. Do your job by the book. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
His wife does curse out people and threaten them with economic ruin. But I think there's even love in that.
Last night, I spent 90 minutes watching Dog the Bounty Hunter . I don't know much about Dog. He has a lot of children by different women, some of whom he employs. He's probably been to prison. And he's a Christian.
It's the Christian part that's interesting. Before he goes out on a job, he gets his employees/relatives together and prays, "Lord, thank you for this day. Protect us in apprehending X. Protect X from getting hurt. In Jesus's name. Amen." It's funny. You can see Dog get mad at guys accused of hurting women or being otherwise reprehensible. He's very glad when they're caught, even when he doesn't collar them personally. But he hopes that those he meets are just like he was, capable of redemption. He doesn't expect them to be a new creation, he just wants them to be improved one. He takes bail bonds in the hope that his bail bond service will be better keeping them on the straight and narrow, so they can stay out of jail, hold a job, and look (and be) more capable of rehabilitation to a judge. I didn't see him preach once. But the way he treats those he apprehends reminds me of what Jesus preached to the soldiers mixed with the commissions to the apostles. Do your job by the book. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
His wife does curse out people and threaten them with economic ruin. But I think there's even love in that.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
She That Tarried At Home Divided the Spoils
By now you probably have seen a link to an article entitled, "A Canterbury Tale" in The New Yorker . Some critiques already have been put forth about the article itself: from some errors in reading the politics to the use of Episcopalian as an adjective.
What struck me less was not the reporting but the particular nature of the theological sound bytes that filled the piece. They were more illuminating than usual and thus appeared more true.
For instance, here's what Jonathan Baker of Pusey House has to say,
He didn't finish the sentence? I'm not sure what to make of this. But I'll proceed under the hypothesis that he actually finished with the premise that Christ was male. In that case, let's break the argument down.
1. Tradition is tradition. The reflexive property of eternity. A bit further down, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford has this to say about tradition:
With all due respect to Professor MacCulloch, until a dusty papyrus with the minutes of the secret church council to deny the apostolate of the BVM et al. comes to light and goes on a thirty-two city tour with Elaine Pagels, I am not sure there is any reliable witness to claim an intentional power grab by male followers of Jesus. It's possible that such a tradition arose from concerns about the flightiness of women (II Tim. 3:6-7) and a variety of other misogynistic tropes, but an argument of polluted tradition has no firm justification beyond a few manuscript alterations (e.g., Junia becomes Junius in Romans 16:7).
Instead, we are left with the tradition is the tradition. Why are we not satisfied?, Father Baker asks. MacCulloch has something to say about, "a doctrine of the Holy Spirit." I wonder if the idea is that without ecclesiastical innovation, there is no reason to have a Holy Spirit. Or is the problem really that the lust for innovation is the infection of scientism and related elements of progressivism into Western civilization. That those who maintain tradition cannot justify their worth in our ever-advancing scientific/technological/consumerist society. (Deneen has a point in most of his particular examples. He is the kind of thinker who might be tempted to apply his ideas to this problem but wrongly, I think.)
We are not satisfied because tradition in this case has the form and nature of a statute (חֹק), that is in the technical sense as it is translated in the Pentateuch. Tradition becomes an inscrutable and inalterable prescription of God. I abhor statutes. Even the Jews abhor statutes. That is why there is an Oral Torah and MIshnaic and Talmudic literature. I think I remember that Calvin likes them, because he believes that there are laws our nature is incapable of understanding. But otherwise, tradition is allowed to remain until it is questioned and if it is questioned, it only may be sustained so long as it has positive justification.
2. The priest acts in imagine Christi and Christ was male.
The continued endurance of this argument boggles my mind. It depends on the utter inability of the Universal Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church as presently received by the Pope to think of Jesus's sex/gender in terms beyond Luke 2:21. But let's be clear, even if the Scriptures were absolutely unanimous on the exclusive maleness of God the Son and Jesus Christ (and they're not, read Eusebius for one key traditional example), the witness of the Catholic creeds suggests that Jesus's maleness is a secondary characteristic of His Incarnation:
Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed:
ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα.
Ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.
Athanasian Creed:
In the Chalcedonian Definition, the view rejected is that the one born of the Virgin Mary is not an anthropon einai and that he is born of the Virgin Mary according to his anthropoteta .
Based on these usages that refer to Jesus in terms of his humanity rather than his maleness ( vir or aner ) in concert with assertions that is for humans in general (according to the same usage) that Jesus came to save and humans in general that Jesus will judge, we must conclude that an all-male priesthood justified under this particular argument affirms the incapability of women for at least one of these three: sin, salvation, and judgment. And even in this case, Jesus can be purely male in terms of a secondary characteristic.
It rather puts the position of Andrew Burnham, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet into necessary context:
This is a degenerate (ambiguous) statement but telling in its degeneracy. (The bread and wine do change after all.) The only justification of an all-male priesthood that does not depend on inaccurate stereotypes about women, Christological errors, or denial of the gender-indiscriminate efficacy of Christ's saving work is that the Catholic priesthood is a successor of the Jewish priesthood. Which is true only in part, because as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, Jesus wasn't a descendant of Levi or Aaron (according to patrilineal assessment of priestly descent). If Jesus were a true successor of the Jewish priesthood, he only could be a descendant of Levi or Aaron through his mother. That's why the Letter to the Hebrews asserts that Jesus was called to priesthood de novo as a priest of a more perfect covenant, the order of Melchizedek, to which Episcopalians admit everyone through baptism. (And I suspect other catholic churches do, too.)
The most telling argument is the one that sounds most misogynist,
I know many women priests who would go willingly into bad neighborhoods and do drive a few nights per week to the hospital to succor the dying. Just as women can be excellent shepherds of sheep, they can be excellent shepherds of Christians. The risk of the overly feminine clergy is not that they will be bad at their jobs but too good. That if you believe stereotypes about women, you might believe they are more skilled in helping and healing. They just might be better pastors. The male/female gender ratio of priests in the Church of England is expected to reach parity in 2025. You make the call.
I would like to be charitable. I would like to believe in all controversies that the position of my opponents arose from truth and virtue. But reading an article like this makes such a belief entirely too hard to sustain.
What struck me less was not the reporting but the particular nature of the theological sound bytes that filled the piece. They were more illuminating than usual and thus appeared more true.
For instance, here's what Jonathan Baker of Pusey House has to say,
“The question now,” he told me, “is whether our quest for unity with Rome can ever be filled institutionally—and is the ordinariate of Benedict XVI’s proposal the answer?” He thought it might be: “The reason for an all-male episcopate is that it’s the tradition of the Church. The tradition is the tradition. Let’s reflect on it. Not ‘Let’s find the theological justification.’ The priest is the sacramental representative of Christ as the High Priest, and . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence: “and Christ was male.”
He didn't finish the sentence? I'm not sure what to make of this. But I'll proceed under the hypothesis that he actually finished with the premise that Christ was male. In that case, let's break the argument down.
1. Tradition is tradition. The reflexive property of eternity. A bit further down, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford has this to say about tradition:
“The historical against-women argument about twelve male apostles—it comes from the early years of the Christian era and the spectacles put forth by the male leaders, who had wanted to be the ones to ‘see’ Christ first. By the end of the second century, a male leadership had emerged, and after that it became the ‘men were what the Holy Spirit intended’ argument and then the ‘tradition of the church’ argument. It was specious.
With all due respect to Professor MacCulloch, until a dusty papyrus with the minutes of the secret church council to deny the apostolate of the BVM et al. comes to light and goes on a thirty-two city tour with Elaine Pagels, I am not sure there is any reliable witness to claim an intentional power grab by male followers of Jesus. It's possible that such a tradition arose from concerns about the flightiness of women (II Tim. 3:6-7) and a variety of other misogynistic tropes, but an argument of polluted tradition has no firm justification beyond a few manuscript alterations (e.g., Junia becomes Junius in Romans 16:7).
Instead, we are left with the tradition is the tradition. Why are we not satisfied?, Father Baker asks. MacCulloch has something to say about, "a doctrine of the Holy Spirit." I wonder if the idea is that without ecclesiastical innovation, there is no reason to have a Holy Spirit. Or is the problem really that the lust for innovation is the infection of scientism and related elements of progressivism into Western civilization. That those who maintain tradition cannot justify their worth in our ever-advancing scientific/technological/consumerist society. (Deneen has a point in most of his particular examples. He is the kind of thinker who might be tempted to apply his ideas to this problem but wrongly, I think.)
We are not satisfied because tradition in this case has the form and nature of a statute (חֹק), that is in the technical sense as it is translated in the Pentateuch. Tradition becomes an inscrutable and inalterable prescription of God. I abhor statutes. Even the Jews abhor statutes. That is why there is an Oral Torah and MIshnaic and Talmudic literature. I think I remember that Calvin likes them, because he believes that there are laws our nature is incapable of understanding. But otherwise, tradition is allowed to remain until it is questioned and if it is questioned, it only may be sustained so long as it has positive justification.
2. The priest acts in imagine Christi and Christ was male.
The continued endurance of this argument boggles my mind. It depends on the utter inability of the Universal Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church as presently received by the Pope to think of Jesus's sex/gender in terms beyond Luke 2:21. But let's be clear, even if the Scriptures were absolutely unanimous on the exclusive maleness of God the Son and Jesus Christ (and they're not, read Eusebius for one key traditional example), the witness of the Catholic creeds suggests that Jesus's maleness is a secondary characteristic of His Incarnation:
Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed:
ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα.
Ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.
Athanasian Creed:
Est ergo fides recta ut credamus et confiteamur, quia Dominus noster Iesus Christus, Dei Filius, Deus [pariter] et homo est. Deus [est] ex substantia Patris ante saecula genitus: et homo est ex substantia matris in saeculo natus. Perfectus Deus, perfectus homo : ex anima rationali et humana carne subsistens. Aequalis Patri secundum divinitatem: minor Patre secundum humanitatem. Qui licet Deus sit et homo, non duo tamen, sed unus est Christus. Unus autem non conversione divinitatis in carnem, sed assumptione humanitatis in Deum. Unus omnino, non confusione substantiae, sed unitate personae. Nam sicut anima rationalis et caro unus est homo : ita Deus et homo unus est Christus. Qui passus est pro salute nostra: descendit ad inferos: tertia die resurrexit a mortuis. Ascendit ad [in] caelos, sedet ad dexteram [Dei] Patris [omnipotentis]. Inde venturus [est] judicare vivos et mortuos. Ad cujus adventum omnes homines resurgere habent cum corporibus suis; Et reddituri sunt de factis propriis rationem. Et qui bona egerunt, ibunt in vitam aeternam: qui vero mala, in ignem aeternum. Haec est fides catholica, quam nisi quisque fideliter firmiterque crediderit, salvus esse non poterit.
In the Chalcedonian Definition, the view rejected is that the one born of the Virgin Mary is not an anthropon einai and that he is born of the Virgin Mary according to his anthropoteta .
Based on these usages that refer to Jesus in terms of his humanity rather than his maleness ( vir or aner ) in concert with assertions that is for humans in general (according to the same usage) that Jesus came to save and humans in general that Jesus will judge, we must conclude that an all-male priesthood justified under this particular argument affirms the incapability of women for at least one of these three: sin, salvation, and judgment. And even in this case, Jesus can be purely male in terms of a secondary characteristic.
It rather puts the position of Andrew Burnham, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet into necessary context:
Certain things are unalterable. You can develop women’s ministry in a normal way, but you can’t change ministry or the episcopate any more than you can bread and wine. What remains is Jesus’ choice of twelve men. The Catholic priesthood is successor to the Jewish priesthood. A gracious patriarchy. The only apostolic themes in the New Testament are men. I have followed the teaching of the Church.
This is a degenerate (ambiguous) statement but telling in its degeneracy. (The bread and wine do change after all.) The only justification of an all-male priesthood that does not depend on inaccurate stereotypes about women, Christological errors, or denial of the gender-indiscriminate efficacy of Christ's saving work is that the Catholic priesthood is a successor of the Jewish priesthood. Which is true only in part, because as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, Jesus wasn't a descendant of Levi or Aaron (according to patrilineal assessment of priestly descent). If Jesus were a true successor of the Jewish priesthood, he only could be a descendant of Levi or Aaron through his mother. That's why the Letter to the Hebrews asserts that Jesus was called to priesthood de novo as a priest of a more perfect covenant, the order of Melchizedek, to which Episcopalians admit everyone through baptism. (And I suspect other catholic churches do, too.)
The most telling argument is the one that sounds most misogynist,
John Broadhurst was already mourning the loss of strong father-figure priests, swept away by the petticoats of an “overly feminine” clergy that was “not equipped for service in the kind of neighborhoods where people get stabbed in the middle of the night and a priest has to get up and drive to the hospital to administer last rites.” In a war between the petticoats and the happy-clappies, he thought the evangelicals would win.
I know many women priests who would go willingly into bad neighborhoods and do drive a few nights per week to the hospital to succor the dying. Just as women can be excellent shepherds of sheep, they can be excellent shepherds of Christians. The risk of the overly feminine clergy is not that they will be bad at their jobs but too good. That if you believe stereotypes about women, you might believe they are more skilled in helping and healing. They just might be better pastors. The male/female gender ratio of priests in the Church of England is expected to reach parity in 2025. You make the call.
I would like to be charitable. I would like to believe in all controversies that the position of my opponents arose from truth and virtue. But reading an article like this makes such a belief entirely too hard to sustain.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Caelius Spinator Philosophiae Doctor
Cryptic, eh? The monks have been doing a lot of praying, but a faculty committee of the Imperial University of Science and Technology on Ionia has recommended that I be admitted to the degree. So I'm now a Ph.D. by courtesy until June.
Friday, April 02, 2010
Sabbath
Somewhere in an upper middle class neighborhood in Jerusalem, the Sabbath lamps are burning low. A few men and more women sit in the front room. They span generations. There's the young servant girl who wonders when they all will go to bed, since it's a week of hard work ahead for her in the remaining days of Passover. There's the young master, who had been studying in Galilee of all places and returned to Jerusalem last week. There's some older women, visitors from the suburbs or from more distant villages.
You may laugh, Reader. This night seems so present to me. But this night is with us still somewhere, receding far into the distance beyond our grasp. A few photons from those lamps may have reached the Veil Nebula by now.
No one is speaking. They cannot speak. Words and logic fail them.
The three Miriams are there. Each one has a different place in the schema of mourning. The second Miriam mourns out of duty for a nephew and a sister's loss. She does not speak out of decency, out of compassion. She does not say what she must have thought for at least a year: that Joshua was coming to a bad end. The third Miriam mourns the loss of an intimate friend, the loss of a man who seemed to walk living out of the legends of Israel, the loss of a man who had restored true prophecy to the chosen people of God. The young master sitting across from her and some others mourn in the same way. They have seen signs and wonders, but it all has ended in blood and pain outside the city walls this afternoon. They are trying to wake themselves as from a dream. They are trying to tell themselves that they imagined it. Not the death. The death was very real. The death was the real thing that broke the dream. Everything else was imaginary. The third Miriam thinks of her brother. It was very good that the man who died figured out her brother had been entombed alive.
But it is the first Miriam who is most alone, isolated not only by the unique depths of a mother's grief, the sense that a life and heart and breathed and beat with her own had been extinguished cruelly. She is the second Eve, the foretaste of a new deal for creation. But the young master is the one who ponders cosmic significance. We revere the first Miriam because she said, "Yes." Because she agreed to a dangerous intimacy with God. We revere her as a teenager. But this is the night that makes her the first of us all. This is the night on which faith in Jesus Christ as Man and God is first tested by doubt. The first and deepest doubt is reserved for the mother of the deceased, who could not explain away the dream as easily as the rest. She could pretend there was no angel. She could pretend there were no eastern sages or adoring shepherds. But she couldn't pretend that her dear child had come in the ordinary way. Her sign and wonder was not a sudden cure or a thing of light and shadow. He came to her as a little boy, dependent on her for everything. He was a thing that could not be, should not be, and whom she loved dearly because of that, in spite of that. And so when he claimed to be the son of God, she felt as if that weird vision, that sudden pregnancy, that fight with her mother, that gracious response by Joseph, that hard journey to Bethlehem, that rude birth, that time in Egypt, and all of those odd events made sense. It's nonsense now. That is her pain, her weight.
Despite what the servant girl may hope, those men and women aren't going to move much until sunrise. They'll say nothing. Later, no one will write anything about this day beyond a mention of the very private burial. Come sunset, a note will come to the young master from respected family friends. It will say something about how it's all been taken care of and that he should come and see them after the festival. They will advise him to lie low and keep those Galileans out of sight.
You may laugh, Reader. This night seems so present to me. But this night is with us still somewhere, receding far into the distance beyond our grasp. A few photons from those lamps may have reached the Veil Nebula by now.
No one is speaking. They cannot speak. Words and logic fail them.
The three Miriams are there. Each one has a different place in the schema of mourning. The second Miriam mourns out of duty for a nephew and a sister's loss. She does not speak out of decency, out of compassion. She does not say what she must have thought for at least a year: that Joshua was coming to a bad end. The third Miriam mourns the loss of an intimate friend, the loss of a man who seemed to walk living out of the legends of Israel, the loss of a man who had restored true prophecy to the chosen people of God. The young master sitting across from her and some others mourn in the same way. They have seen signs and wonders, but it all has ended in blood and pain outside the city walls this afternoon. They are trying to wake themselves as from a dream. They are trying to tell themselves that they imagined it. Not the death. The death was very real. The death was the real thing that broke the dream. Everything else was imaginary. The third Miriam thinks of her brother. It was very good that the man who died figured out her brother had been entombed alive.
But it is the first Miriam who is most alone, isolated not only by the unique depths of a mother's grief, the sense that a life and heart and breathed and beat with her own had been extinguished cruelly. She is the second Eve, the foretaste of a new deal for creation. But the young master is the one who ponders cosmic significance. We revere the first Miriam because she said, "Yes." Because she agreed to a dangerous intimacy with God. We revere her as a teenager. But this is the night that makes her the first of us all. This is the night on which faith in Jesus Christ as Man and God is first tested by doubt. The first and deepest doubt is reserved for the mother of the deceased, who could not explain away the dream as easily as the rest. She could pretend there was no angel. She could pretend there were no eastern sages or adoring shepherds. But she couldn't pretend that her dear child had come in the ordinary way. Her sign and wonder was not a sudden cure or a thing of light and shadow. He came to her as a little boy, dependent on her for everything. He was a thing that could not be, should not be, and whom she loved dearly because of that, in spite of that. And so when he claimed to be the son of God, she felt as if that weird vision, that sudden pregnancy, that fight with her mother, that gracious response by Joseph, that hard journey to Bethlehem, that rude birth, that time in Egypt, and all of those odd events made sense. It's nonsense now. That is her pain, her weight.
Despite what the servant girl may hope, those men and women aren't going to move much until sunrise. They'll say nothing. Later, no one will write anything about this day beyond a mention of the very private burial. Come sunset, a note will come to the young master from respected family friends. It will say something about how it's all been taken care of and that he should come and see them after the festival. They will advise him to lie low and keep those Galileans out of sight.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
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