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.

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.

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,

“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.

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.

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.

Maundy Thursday Reading

Saravia on the Eucharist