I.1 Returns

The science is a little less mungy. A little poetic in places. But I did correct the gross inaccuracies about early photosynthesis. Next Time: 2. The First Global Biogeochemical Crisis: The Rise of Oxygen and the Snowball Earths


Part I: The Mysteries of Ancient Times

Hear my teaching, O my people;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will declare the mysteries of ancient times.
That which we have heard and known,
And what our forefathers have told us,
We will not hide from our children.
We will recount to generations to come
The praiseworthy deeds and the power of the LORD,
And the wonderful works he has done.

(Psalm 78:1-4)


1. How Did We Get Here?: The Origin(s) of Life on Earth

It is tremendously hard to date when life first arose on Earth. The usual approach is to bracket the origin of life within an age range. The first date is the time before which life was unlikely to exist and the second date is the time at which fossils become unambiguously identifiable as fossils. Both dates have been tricky to pin down. Traditionally, the first date corresponds to the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, a hypothesized period of extremely intense meteoritic impact primarily inferred from dating of some of the rocks found by the Apollo astronauts, which contain an material that is indicative of asteroid impact. This glass probably forms when an asteroid hits the Moon, vaporizes lunar material, and the material flash-freezes. Some of this material happens to be orange, though not necessarily the impact glass in the older rocks. (I’ve actually seen some of it under the microscope. It may be the most colorful substance on the Moon.)

The story the rocks tell is that ~3.8-3.9 billion years ago, there was some disturbance in the Solar System that sent many comets and/or asteroids spiraling toward the Sun. Although the Sun is big and the Earth and Moon are small, there was apparently enough material spiraling Sunward that the Earth would have experienced the cosmic equivalent of anthropogenic Mutually Assured Destruction every 10-100 years or so. The Moon did not fare much better and some of the largest craters on the Moon probably date from this period. In addition to producing a crater (~ 30 km. or so on the average), such a large impact would have stripped off a bit of the atmosphere, flash-boiled the surface of the ocean within ~100 km., and sent a potentially cell damaging sonic wave over the immediate area. Condensing vaporized rock and other impact fragments also might put particles into the air that would scatter sunlight. Until interest in possible extraterrestrial microbial life grew in recent years, it was generally thought impossible that life could survive in such circumstances, let alone develop. Now, there is less pessimism about the development of life during this entirely too exciting time. Michael Russell, a professor at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, argues that the most likely origin mechanism would have to have a high probability of repeatability, since life would have been wiped out constantly. However, the nature of the first date does not change too much, since it now marks its “emergence” rather than its origin.

The second date very quickly becomes a matter of opinion? What is a fossil? How can you tell that some structure in a rock is evidence that something was once alive? Well, the oldest strategy is what is called aktualism. You assume that lifeforms in the past might have looked like present organisms or made similar kinds of holes in rocks and draw parallels. Although this particular example of aktualism sounds fairly reasonable, it was quite controversial in the 17th century when Nicholas Steno, a Danish scientist employed by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, argued that the things that looked like seashells in the mountains north of Florence actually were seashells and not random inorganic structures. Of course, aktualism only works if the potential fossil organisms have modern analogs.

One less obvious example of aktualism more relevant to early life is the controversy about the stromatolite. A stromatowhat? Well, stromatolites are structures in layers of sedimentary rock that look like little sets of half-circular layers disturbing the exceptionally regular layers of early sedimentary rock. (I’ll probably mention later why sedimentary rocks tend to have more mottled structures). The original hypothesis was that stromatolites still existed as algae still living in one of the harshest environments on Earth, the intertidal flat, the large piece of shoreline that is alternately covered and uncovered by the tide in areas with a large range between high tide and low tide like the coast of Newfoundland. This particular habitat is a tricky one to occupy, since the chemistry of the water changes radically between high tide and low tide etc. The algae, however, are chemically flexible, just very vulnerable to being eaten, so they do well in intertidal flats but rarely remain as coherent structures on any other surface in modern marine environments. The algae also secrete mucus, like any other typical cluster of cells. This mucus tends to trap clay particles, eventually killing the algae, but forming a new place for their descendants to live on: the graves of their ancestors. Eventually, these algal colonies form mounds that are similar in size and shape to semicircular structures first seen in the rock record about 3.5 billion years ago. Much later, stromatolites actually show evidence of being eaten. Are modern stromatolites the same as ancient stromatolites? Well, the present consensus is that ancient stromatolites differed biologically from modern stromatolites, being cyanobacteria (photosynthesizing bacteria) as opposed to more closely related to the plants like algae. Smaller examples of cyanobacteria fossils are preserved in rocks as old as 3.8 billion years old, suggesting that photosynthesis, a chemical process so complex that humans cannot reproduce it, i.e., use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen at high efficiency, is at least as ancient as the oldest rocks that possibly could preserve evidence of it.

Rounding out our story of controversial fossils might be the hypothesized biological structures within ALH84001. And by ALH84001, I mean the first meteorite found in the 1984 field season in the Allan Hills area of Antarctica. Or indeed, by ALH84001, I mean a 4.2 billion year old or so chunk of Mars that was knocked off the surface by meteor impact and eventually landed on the Earth. Because no one knows if there is life on Mars or what it might look like, the features of ALH84001 that are proposed to be biological supposedly look like the most primitive microbes on Earth. The more scientifically trained reader might enjoy Allan Treiman’s courageous attempt to keep an open mind about ALH84001 , but the present consensus is that all properties of the meteorite, including its texture, could be produced without biological interference.
Why have we spent so much time talking about dating and early fossils? Wouldn’t the mechanisms of the origin of life be of more interest? Well, they are. In fact, there was heated discussion in the Letters of Science last week of the two major competing hypotheses about what kind of environment produced the first microbes. But it is the dating issue that has stimulated more theological reflection lately.

I really do not know the full story I am about to tell in any detail. I have picked up bits and pieces over the years in my reading and conversing with evolutionary biologists and people who think they have found a proof for the existence of God, but I’ll try to give you a basic idea. In the 1950s, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago created organic molecules by shocking a miniature model of the primitive Earth’s atmosphere. This was supposed to simulate lightning on the early Earth. Later research has suggested that the early atmosphere may have been compositionally different (and more or less favorable to organic production) than what was believed in the 1950s. But the chief problem with the Miller-Urey experiment was not its experimental setup but how it has been interpreted in the textbook literature and popular thought. Miller and Urey did not create life. They created organic molecules, the building blocks of life, which at the time seemed fairly close to life. However, organic molecules, we have learned since, are fairly ubiquitous in the Solar System. Meteorites, for instance, contain some fairly sophisticated organic molecules, though of a particular and limited kind. Titan, the chief moon of Saturn, has a much broader organic repertoire in its atmosphere, which has parallels with the atmosphere of the early Earth.

By the early 1980s, researchers realized that the major property that distinguished life from organic molecules was the ability to remember how to manufacture certain kinds of organic molecules that would be useful for the organism. Presently, our own bodies have DNA and RNA to perform that function, but DNA and RNA are far too sophisticated to have been produced by abiotic organic synthesis at random . What was needed was some sort of inorganic substance that could store “information” and eventually make the sophisticated molecules that would replace its function. By the early 1980s, information also was a technical mathematical term, connected with probability, permutation, entropy, and digital computing. Moreover, the analytical techniques of mineralogy had advanced greatly, allowing the structural diversity of naturally occurring inorganic substances to be understood. Soon there developed the Clay Mineral Hypothesis, which proposed that the first life began very much like your grandmother’s wedding china, as polymerized layers of closely bonded silicon and oxygen, filled with magnesium, potassium, iron, aluminum, and water, like a sandwich. Accounting for structural defects and the particular arrangement of metal ions and layers, clays have high potential information content for an inorganic substance. Moreover, clays are ubiquitous, as any mother knows when her small child comes in from playing in the rain. Mud is mostly clay. Clays also typically are a byproduct of volcanically heated water solutions altering volcanic rock, one of the proposed settings for the origin of life.

At this point, I think it would be fair to mention that both the Urey-Miller Experiment and the Clay Mineral Hypothesis had a peculiar attraction to the more religious biologists. The latter especially reminded them of mankind being formed out of the dust of the earth as the second creation account of Genesis implies (and these sentiments have made it into the scientific literature). I think at the back of the mind of many serious Christian scientists is that Moses may have been shown the creation and subsequent events by God and had some trouble comprehending what he was shown, thus any hypothesis that sounds anything like Genesis strengthens one’s faith. Other proponents of the Clay Mineral Hypothesis may like that it is a rehabilitation of the spontaneous generation hypothesis common among the Greeks.

Interest in the Clay Mineral Hypothesis comes and goes. The mineralogists, of course, are fans. Michael Russell (mentioned earlier) seems sold on it. But it serves an illustration of why life is more than organic chemicals. It is the ability to reproduce. It is the ability to resist entropy, i.e., absorption of its own information to the decaying information of the universe. It is the ability to perform the same reaction over and over again, even though the rest of the environment naturally might do something else. In other words, life is coordinated imbalance of the abiotic world. Any hypothesis for the origin of life has to explain why the biotic appears to have a will of its own.

And when photosynthesis developed, life’s role in creating a coordinated chemical imbalance became quite important (wait for the next chapter) The first evidence of this chemical imbalance, the apparently biologically mediated oxidation of iron, is found in rocks in Greenland slightly older (give or take 100 million years) than the first cyanobacteria fossils. In other words, life could not have developed or developed very much before 3.8 billion years, the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. And yet, life was so chemically sophisticated by the end of the cosmic blitz that it had developed a primitive form of photosynthesis. Is that fast or slow? Well, the first life survived by various simple chemical reactions called oxidation-reduction reactions, typically called chemotrophy. One simple example might be reduction of iron by oxidation of acetate. If you don’t remember your chemistry, it doesn’t matter. The basic reaction is somewhat like spraying rusty metal with WD40, and it produces energy. Chemotrophy, however, doesn’t produce much energy, so the reaction must be repeated at fairly high frequency to keep the organism alive, not unlike a human being trying to survive by eating celery constantly. Worst of all, much chemotrophy results in some sort of solid substance forming in the cell such as iron, which eventually poisons the cell. So chemotrophs must export solids to the environment, which is very energy-intensive.

Despite its disadvantages, chemotrophy is a popular manner of life in hydrothermal vents and other extreme environments. Moreover, the simple chemistry of the chemotrophs appears to be the foundation of the much more sophisticated activity of our own cells and the equally interesting plants. Photosynthesis itself probably began as a modified form of chemotrophy, perhaps as some reactive intermediate absorbed sunlight and split. The hypothesized earliest form of photosynthesis involves the absorption of infrared radiation, just a little redder than the human eye can see. The energy of this absorption was used to oxidize the iron ion Fe2+ to Fe3+, almost always producing iron hydroxide in the presence of water.
In the 1980s, mathematicians became interested in quantitative evolutionary biology. And the evolution of the microbes seemed to be the simplest problem. So these mathematicians tried to produce a mathematical model of how various chemical reactions and structures could evolve, accounting for radiation damage mutations and sex (bacterial sex is a fun subject apparently) etc. The eventual results were that the evolution of the photosynthetic cyanobacteria should have taken billions of years. But I told you earlier that it barely took any time at all. Photosynthesis apparently developed much faster than it should have.

I was in high school when I read the first stories about the emerging intelligent design movement. On one hand, the intelligent design movement stems from the attempts of old earth creationists to rehabilitate their parlor tricks or culture warriors to justify their vision of Biblical morality by giving the intellectual classes a reason to believe in God or something. I once was in charge of catechizing the parents of infants about to be baptized in my parish and the issue of the swift evolution of the bacteria was brought up by one of the parents. So on the other hand, there is an important scientific problem at the heart of intelligent design. The biologists do think carefully about it. Indeed, Joseph Kirschvink, perhaps one of the most gifted thinkers about the origins and ends of life, has speculated that life probably developed in the potentially more favorable environment of Mars.

The theological content of this problem is not quite what William Dembski et al. would like us to believe. The Creeds proclaim a God intimately connected with life, especially through the Person of the Holy Spirit. But while photosynthesis developed relatively quickly, more than a billion years passed before these organisms were dominant. And indeed, at least another billion years passed before the full oxygenic photosynthetic reactions we know today were developed. Before inferring God’s special providence from a potentially fallible mathematical model, let us consider how the Scriptures speak of life and death, particularly Psalm 104, “You send forth your Spirit and they are created…you turn your face away and they fall to dust.” Aristotle, one of the greatest biologists of the ancient world, classified souls in terms of the ends they pursued in unity with their bodies. In more modern terms then, the soul is very much the information content of our body, directing our life processes relative to the abiotic world and hopefully being led to its end in God. Perhaps, the origin of life came when sufficient information content was available to some organic chemicals that the Spirit provided them a nutritive will to sustain them, the basis of the natural law of self-preservation. Perhaps, this consequence was enough to reduce the randomness of evolution, quickly evolving the diverse lifestyles of microbes but was not the specific direction by God to the end of dominant oxygen photosynthesists, for why did it slow? I think I know what answer Dembski would give me, but that will be tackled in my next chapter.

But I don’t think natural law arguments for evolution are theological content either. The question that the origin of life on Earth presents to us is one of our uniqueness. If life is very common, our responsibilities in the wake of Christ become quite complex. The possibility that there are other rational beings out there might direct us to use the resources of the planet as a vehicle for witness, a means of evangelism. But if life is very uncommon and endures with difficulty, we are quite alone and the words of Psalm 95 ring out, “The Earth is the Lord’s, for he made it.” Life on Earth is of such amazing variety and sophistication even in comparison with the inorganic world that there is no possible higher purpose to govern our responsibility to the rest of the world than to preserve this splendid work of God whole and undefiled. It is this principle of uniqueness and the value of the rest of biological life as the masterwork of God’s hands that divides those who believe that they will be held accountable for not exploiting from those who believe they will be held responsible for exploitation of the Earth’s resources.

Part I Begins

Upon further reflection and a seminar by one of the experts on the Clay Mineral Hypothesis, I've realized that a little bit of the science here is mungy (i.e., how did photosynthesis work 3.8 billion years ago?) or I've given a little more impression of certainty than is justified by the evidence (i.e., Late Heavy Bombardment). So I'll try to get back to revising things after I take a little time to let Lent begin. If you've been linked here by Fr Kniseley etc., please enjoy the Context and Preface below.

Notes on the Coming Biogeochemical Crisis: Preface

Preface

I walk into my office and say to my officemate: “you have to see this figure.” My officemate presumably just has returned from brunch after Mass and I’m fresh from a meeting after Eucharist. But soon we’re staring at several maps of the Northern Hemisphere in polar projection: output from NCAR’s CCM3 sea ice model.

Some people, including former professors of mine, tend to become quite romantic about “climate models,” about the perfection of the physics on which their based and on the splendor of their verification against past data of one sort or another. But every month or so, I notice some almost “fundamental” flaw in the climate model on which I work or hear how a climate model represents the world correctly by doing two things wrong in the right way. These are the times I catch my breath and remember that the telos or more truly the idea of the climate model is founded on the very Word and Wisdom of God, in God doing what the Psalmist asks in 104, “Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the Earth.” These partially coordinated sets of clever approximations are not being itself. They are an ikon of the Living God at work in His Creation, even if we imagine that work is very standard and unexceptional.

Yet with all their flaws, the climate models have become an uncertain harmony on an increasingly certain melody, like the music of the Ainur as Arda first came into misty form. If some stranger were to come and notice that there were many different depictions of Christ in your churches but wondered why so many of them depicted him in association with two crossed bars, you would be sure to tell him of the wondrous Cross. Well, climate modelers feel much the same way. They see a variety of visions of the future and wonder which disaster will come. And unlike SimCity, Godzilla isn’t one of the options.

The disaster that confronts me and my officemate on that Sunday afternoon is disappearing sea ice. The shores of Antarctica and the North Pole of the world are covered with a thin layer of ice, built up over countless millennia as powerful storms, drew cold winds from the land over the warmer waters, transferring heat to the air and freezing the water to compensate. I am sure that anyone with the experience of a snowy winter remembers there often being an especial chill in the wake of the cold front after a snowstorm in comparison with that after a rainstorm. That impression is not just a matter of how cold the air behind the front is. In addition, the snow reflects additional sunlight from the surface, resulting in less radiation from the ground that can be absorbed by greenhouse gases. This cool blanket of snow, however, does happen to be a poor conductor of heat and thus insulates plants and animals below its cover. Sea ice plays a similar but far less inconstant role, especially reducing the potential of absorption of sunlight during the long polar summer.

Sitting in those colors and geographic outlines and a lone black curve of the climate model output was a frightening result: most sea ice would be gone by 2050. And worst of all, most of that loss would happen in the space of five years, 2025-2030. The Northwest Passage. The Northeast Passage. Both would be a reality by 2030. And during that long polar summer, almost all solar radiation at the North Pole would be absorbed by the ocean. If this occurred, I now recalled, the change locally would be radical. North of Scandinavia lies the Norwegian territory of Svalbard. Last winter , most sea ice was present unusually far north of Svalbard, inconveniencing hunters and outdoors enthusiasts used to spending time on the sea ice. January temperatures were twenty four degrees above normal Fahrenheit. For reference, observations at Svalbard have been taking place as long as many sites in the United States, i.e. since about 1900. Salt Lake City in 2003 had its all time warmest January, recording a mean temperature 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. By July, Svalbard had broken its all time record temperature by 1.5 degrees, reaching 19.6 degrees Celsius. See RealClimate for more details . Svalbard’s ice-free year might be a portent of Svalbard’s ice-free future. Would future Polish legislators be praying for rain (as they were this summer)? Nothing is certain in the geosciences, but the impact on the Arctic alone of sea ice loss in the span of a decade would be disastrous. The IPCC speaks very much about what will happen in 2100, and this kind of thinking had lulled even me into a false sense of security.

The next day my officemate and I talked about the implications of this fresh forecast of doom and its immediacy. 2025 is not long from now in the scheme of human affairs. I am not likely to have a child through college by then. Indeed, 2025 likely figured in my thoughts as the stage in my life when I finally might ease myself into respectability in the various endeavors of my life, find myself trying to keep a marriage warm, and begin to think whether I could have a legacy among “famous men, our ancestors in their generations.” Very few of us hold onto the world of their youth, but I at least kept hope that the atmospheric circulation of my youth might not beat me to my grave.

As we reviewed the potential consequences, bringing ourselves to one that might cause the extinction of the species, my officemate commented, “You seem unusually calm about our impending extinction.” I replied that I was calm, not because I was numb or because I did not intend to do something to stop it but because I had hope that there was something beyond the extinction of the species, that the Christian faith encourages both an affection for and a detachment from the sensible objects, thinking mainly of how the Articles describe the Sacraments, the most worthy of the sensible objects, “not ordained…to be gazed upon or carried about, but that we should duly use them”, i.e. use them according to their righteous purpose, the quickening of Grace.

So it occurred to me a few Sundays after that while reading Rev. Sam and listening to John Houghton that if the temporal things are passing away, I might say something about them and the future to which we are rushing as those “who neither know, nor understand but walk about in darkness.” For I think we are coming very close to a major biogeochemical crisis, if we are not already in the midst of one. And while I intend what I write here to be very much a theological view of science, there will be some passing relation of this work to one put out by the Discovery Institute about intelligent design, in which the challenges which life has faced in the past have been overcome through the algorithms of a beneficent God. Indeed, a global biogeochemical crisis is not without precedent and in the pages to follow, I will speak in some detail of the little we know about two or three of them.

And because I confess there to be one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who became incarnate as Homo sapiens sapiens in Bethlehem Ephrata, I also will warn you that I will take no such optimistic view. I know not when the Kingdom shall come. But I do suspect that it might be of some theological significance that this coming global biogeochemical crisis can be traced to the door of the human race, creatures capable of living in the image of God and charged with the stewardship of this world; creatures are capable of living into the fullness of the natural law through their gift of reason but often heedless of that prescript of Christ to live God and their neighbor, heedless of that parallel dictate of the natural law to paraphrase the Summa : to get along (and love) those with whom we have to live. Creation is groaning in anything but patient expectation. It’s time to hear what the Book of Nature might have to say.

Notes on the Coming Biogeochemical Crisis: Context

Notes on The Coming Global Biogeochemical Crisis

Context

For the last week, I have felt as if I do not have my priorities straight. Bls is right to say that there is no crazy like church crazy and nothing crazier than some piddling young layman in a liberal diocese in a liberal Province blogging about matters that hypothetically more expert people are doing to death. And when I started reading Rev. Sam the Elizaphanian’s series of parish fora and when I heard Sunday Worship last week, I realized that there are some matters on which I do have a unique perspective.

The preacher at Sunday Worship was Sir John Houghton, head of the UK Met Office, a notable Evangelical, and a lead author on the last set of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Houghton has played a still to be assessed role in the American religiopolitical landscape by using his friendship with John Stott, sometimes called “the evangelical Pope” and an Anglican priest, in order to speak with Evangelical leaders in this country about global climate change. Have you heard about the National Association of Evangelicals and their new work to promote “creation care.” Well, there in the background is Sir John Houghton.

I am a very junior climate scientist. I work on other planetary bodies as well as the Earth. My area of expertise, if it could be called that, is restricted to some aspects of the circulation of the Pacific and vortices so undistinguished that the Australians call them “willy-willies.” But I hear things. I go to seminars. I become distracted from my research reading reports in Science and Nature or other papers and reports that often do not come to public notice. I also have been a professional historian, which has given me a deep interest in historiography and its relevance to the earth sciences and an unusual perspective on the collapse of classical civilization in the Mediterranean world and other collapses in other parts of the Earth.

And I also read roughly five readings from the Bible every day, am never sure whether I ever get through the Psalter, and I sin constantly. Basically, I am just like most of you. What follows may be utter rot. And if it is, I would very much appreciate you telling me that. I will warn you that I may be free with citation, but I will respect copyright, cite all quoted sources, and try to remember from whom I have paraphrased.

Circa Visionem Beatificam

I upgraded to Google, which likely will provide all sorts of new features and wasn't particularly annoying. I've taken this opportunity to change my handle to use a more suitable cognomen.

Today is the feast of Thomas Bray, which I was quite happy to celebrate. Today, I also saw a trailer for a movie coming out next weekend, which you might want to see provided you're not giving up the cinema during Lent, which I've contemplated. It's a movie about William Wilberforce and the abolition of the slave trade called Amazing Grace . Both of these men and the organizations they helped to found, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary Society, were powerhouses for the Gospel, but the organizations are not without ironies in their history. For instance, Bray was disgusted with the condition of the slaves of Maryland and yet the SPC ran a slave plantation in the West Indies as cruel and deadly as any other in the brutal islands. Modern history blames each organization for a variety of colonials evils, but the last few years have seen the strongest blame as the events of Lambeth 1998 and beyond are described as "the revenge of the CMS" ( see Pr. Aelred's second comment ).

Beyond the clobber passages about slavery, beyond the clobber passages about gender, beyond the clobber passages about homosexual intercourse, still stand the Scriptures, the icon of the Eternal Word of the Almighty Father delivered to us men by the Holy Ghost. Are they a pharmakon ? Will we poor patients die of our disease if we inwardly digest too little? Will we be poisoned by being too invested in them and confute the creature with the Creator? Will we poison others? Wilberforce had to answer in the affirmative to both these questions. Will his successors do likewise?

Somewhere there is a throne where Christ offers His Body, His Blood, and his prayers for us, bathing us in and feeding us with the fullness of humanity in Him. And around that throne, I pray that Thomas Bray and William Wilberforce add their prayers to mine that the Church of England scattered throughout the Earth might remain an intact chunk of Christ's Body broken and redeemed by His Blood and that all might name those eunuchs who keeps His sabbaths and statutes with the name He calls them, a name more everlasting than that carried by sons and daughters. Amen.

Because I Can't Focus At the Moment

Bls wanted to hear about the Gregorian chant revival at my alma mater. Well, I can't say that I know the salient details, but it became clear that my class (and the following classes) were especially suffused with young Roman Catholics of a more traditionalist bent than my Roman Catholic relations (with the exception of my grandfather, who was not a big fan of liturgical reform but still managed to enjoy an Episcopal wedding by a woman priest in his own backyard).

The especial casus belli of these RCs were:
Abortion (anti)
Oregon Catholic Press (anti)
Gregorian Institute of America (anti) [I tried to tell them that Richard Proulx wasn't their enemy at least...]
Lifeteen masses (anti)

There were many results of their participation in the local Catholic campus ministry, but the most interesting of them was the Gregorian chant choir, described here in great and educated detail. Apparently, they greatly enlivened worship.

The story you don't hear here is that the Episcopal campus ministry was blessed with the doyenne of Gregorian chant on campus, who we shall call Julian, since that is what she tends to call herself online (you might enjoy her bachelor's thesis . On one hand, Julian had dealings with the Roman Catholics, but she also learned from the professionals at the principal Anglo-Catholic parish of the city. Julian kindly provided her offerings to the campus ministry, but we frankly didn't appreciate her as much as we should have. That said, this was very cool (but the images really are necessary)

This Is Only A Test...

The Episcopal Emergency Broadcasting Network (EEBN) is either a useful resource or a mildly humorous schtick. Either way, stay tuned. (FYI: The blogger is Fr. Harding's son, not Fr. Harding. You probably knew that, but it comes up a lot among those who have discovered the junior ACN crowd.)

It Would Have Been A Good Idea at the Time

Bls and I have been discussing the perils of liturgical local option. It occurs to me that I am torn between two very different views of ecclesiology, one very Rahnerist, emphasizing the importance of local ecclesial cultures contributing to a diverse but universal whole. This view is quite popular today and probably will be expressed most deeply at Taize in the future. On the other hand, I worry about how absorption in our local ecclesial cultures conditions us to be very inflexible if our own personal circumstances change. The compromise is to promote a national ecclesial culture, since personal mobility is typically limited most to the national level and is very Anglican. However, national ecclesial culture tends to become authoritarian per English tradition and even from experience in the United States. Perhaps, the alternative would be to found ecclesial culture on the urban level (Diocesan) as it was in the Church before Nicaea. The churches pretty much did what they wanted liturgically but sought some unity theologically. The purpose of Councils was to ensure that the Bishops (who were in charge of the liturgy ultimately) had sufficient theological unity. So perhaps the Roman idea of universal liturgy as a mark of catholic unity is an abuse of the pre-Nicene tradition? Well, there's one problem with this idea. Indeed, it's an epistemological problem I constantly encounter. Let there be some particular practice Y, which appears to follow from some principle X. Well, if you see Y, isn't an X a principle? The problem is that the inversion is non-unique. The practice could follow from some other principle, be due to technological or epistemological limits, or be completely unconscious. Inferring principle from praxis is an ill-posed problem, and the only way to constrain it is to understand exceptions carefully and look for someone justifying Y by X. Well, you're in a lurch if the practice is unconscious. For instance, bls claims that common prayer was called so because it belonged to the people. Well, Edward VI's regents did make some effort to put the BCP in the hands of the people, but did they do so because they believed the liturgy derived from their preferences, needs, or authority or because they were propagandizing the Reformed religion? Well, I would guess the latter, but I really can't say.

The central question I'm posing here is whether our present epistemological frameworks can be considered superior to those in the past that we can assume that our X would be the explanation chosen to justify Y if it had been an option for our ancestors. Or indeed are our epistemological frameworks so superior that we believe our X's are objectively superior justifications for Y? The latter sounds ridiculous, but a tremendous amount of scholarship is founded on the latter principle. Indeed, the natural sciences make the latter a key foundation of their methods. I keep running and running around this question, because the insistence that epistemology is progressive seems to be the key principle of modernism. Oh, and post-modernism is completely useless here, since it insists that the problem is always ill-posed.

That Was The Retreat That Was

Bls asked me how this retreat was. Well, it was wonderful. We stayed in a lovely retreat center just south of Nicomedia, which appears to be affiliated with some sort of liberal Roman Catholic splinter group. The food was simple but well-prepared from local organic produce. Fortunately for the other retreating groups, our boisterous group (average age=~27) had an individual house all to ourselves well away from the main part of the retreat center.

My intention this retreat was to stay quiet and listen carefully to the stories of those there, who are a representative sample of the young blood the Episcopal Church can draw upon, and also listen carefully to their responses to certain issues of Anglican identity. Well, that was an exercise in futility. Innate personality traits, early environment, and my education generally have conditioned me to talk even when I'm trying to listen. Oh, well.

For future reference:

I'm not sure that I grew up in the Episcopal mainstream. I grew up in parishes where no one was too High or too Low that co-existence in churchmanship ever was problematic. I grew up in parishes where faithful gays and lesbians (in both senses) were far less of an issue than unfaithful straight ones. I do not have too much experience with conservatives, because while I did listen carefully when I had an opportunity to hear conservatives talk, those times were few and far between and the conservatives in question generally were restraining themselves for the sake of peace. As a result, I still do not understand why FiFNA objects to the ordination of women.

I always use the term Anglo-Papist affectionately.

There is such a thing as happy-clappy, Anglo-Catholic worship. It happens in South Africa.

I was principally catechized by three individuals:

(1) A Tennessean who represented some sort of intermediate between Keble and Affirming Catholicism. He taught me the importance of prayer and regular corporate worship and the wonders of Holy Scripture. He also taught me that Holy Scripture should be read with an eye to its historical context.

(2) An Affirming Catholic scholar, who taught me that ancient theology and practice could be relevant to modern problems.

(3) An ethnic Syriac, who taught me that the mystical tradition of the Faith and its social implications never could be divorced.

In other words, I was born and bred a Radical Traditionalist. I honestly don't think that I represent the Episcopal mainstream.

I have read many things. I have not read everything. If I have a choice to read primary sources or secondary sources, I read primary sources. If I have a choice between relatively old and new works, I read relatively old ones. I am not quarter as clever as you think. I am not half as clever as I think.

[end useless information]

Now that we have those matters out of the way, I will talk a little about the actual retreat. The goal of these particular retreats is to focus more on the inward than the outward life, which is the usual focus of the small group during the first half of the year. The theme was Anglicanism, considering such topics as the history of Anglicanism with particular view to social justice issues, Anglican decisionmaking, and the Book of Common Prayer. Perhaps the highlight of the program was an instructed Eucharist, which took nearly three hours but provided me with some new perspectives on liturgical practice in a variety of settings. At some point, I'll have to talk in more detail about evangelism and what I heard this weekend.

We had a bit of a break on Saturday afternoon, so I ended up lying on the beach reading Anglicanism: The Answer to Modernity , a fine little volume of essays by Cambridge chaplains, which has much to say to us all about the future of the church and the weaknesses of its present polity.

On Sunday, we went for Eucharist to a monastery high above Nicomedia. If I ever need a brief vacation, I know where I'm going. The liturgy was a blend of traditional and contemporary features, including curtseying and incense. The sermon was lovely. More interesting was the brief talk we heard from the preacher after the service. In it, he described the revival of Anglican monasticism, including the recent reform of this particular order, which had started out very much in imitation of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic orders, depending on hierarchy to maintain the harmony of a common life. However, this resulted in great dysfunction, since whenever two Brothers were having personal conflicts, the authorities just moved one of the Brothers to another monastery until after a cycle of a few more houses, the troublesome Brother would return again. The solution to this problem was for the order to adopt the Rule of St. Benedict, a surprising choice for a group mostly made up of parish priests who had forsaken the world. As you can imagine, it turned out to be a good choice. They now see themselves very much more like a family and make decisions more democratically. Viewing themselves as a family forced them to confront their interpersonal problems and made them seek counseling. Apparently, the monks were seeing a family counselor once a week but are now down to a few times a year. They also made a connection with more experienced Roman Catholic Benedictines to the north, who now visit them every once in a while (just in case they want to see interesting exhibits in Laodicea). All in all, their reform seeks like a model for the kind of reform the Communion needs, even if the scaling may be a little trickier.

The Brother who was talking to us also mentioned that groups from evangelical colleges were visiting the monastery, implying that monastics are facilitating in interest in liturgy and devotional practice from the Emergents and the Emerging.

The bookstore at the monastery is excellent. Their selection ranges from books on the theology of human sexuality to astrophotography to a very fine collection of Patristic and later monastic writings. I was tempted to buy a copy of the Conferences , but I settled on a volume of Bede's sermons, thinking of Derek's endorsement.

One thought I had at the monastery did not come to fruition until I came home and read one of Derek's recent posts on the Stoic underpinning of Benedictine thought. The Brother who talked with us discussed his parents' marriage as one that did not start with a burning romance but because they both needed someone to marry. He described how the business of living together over the years had produced between them a great deal of mutual respect. Hearing his account, I thought nothing so much as Titus Lucretius Carus's De Rerum Natura in which he describes the highest form of the love as that produced by consuetudo , i.e., the business of living together and the habit of relating, the gradual conversion of one to another. Although Lucretius was quite the antithesis of the Stoics, his approach to agape seems good even if his approach to eros is utterly irresponsible.

The Bishop of Durham Speaks (Again!)

By his own lights, the Bishop of Durham should take a backseat to the councils of the Communion for a little while, since it's clear he's straining the bonds of affection by not engaging properly in the listening process. Or else he and the Presiding Bishop need new media consultants, because one can't read his latest interview by Ruth Gledhill without cringing at his lack of sensitivity and poor information about the Episcopal Church. Let us be clear. Tom Wright is a fine scholar. I agree with much of his work as an apologist and appreciate how much admiration he gains for Anglicanism from those outside it, especially in the vein of "well, those Anglicans aren't so bad after all." My disagreements with him will come in his application of his scholarship where he thinks he should promote his fairly accurate view of what Paul thought without considering whether he might be better off considering how Paul thought. I woudn't want to be gay in Durham. I can imagine he's pretty much a brick wall.

But as I had to say at the time of last General Convention,

Well, Bishop Wright, I'll give it to you straight. I would prefer there be strong compliance with Windsor or no compliance. But at this point, we reassessors have no assurances that border-crossing will be punished, nor that the parts of Lambeth I.10 we like will be enforced. Thus, if you're going to quote committee documents or Lambeth resolutions (you only do so implicitly) as law to us, you must simultaneously give assurances that the whole of the law is enforceable in some settled tribunal. And the thing is, my Lord, it's not.

The Primates' Meeting isn't a settled tribunal either. However, I am not so burned by Wright's ignorance of the cast of characters or his rather bizarre view of what party in North America is schismatical. No, I am far more critical of his accusation that we are doctrinally indifferent and novelly so. Now, I know that Bishop Wright claims succession from Bishop Butler, a man who of all the bishops of the Church of England was not doctrinally indifferent, but his colleagues generally were. Doctrinal indifference is anything but novel in Anglicanism. More importantly, while I see pockets of it in ECUSA, it cannot be said to be as general as he imagines it. Fr. Clavier had a most revealing comment on this issue when he discussed how ECUSA appears to the rest of the Communion. Every time the Presiding Bishop goes anywhere, he or she is a spokesman for General Convention, a forum in which the Church expresses herself in terms of laws and ends and not in terms of theology, so that the Presiding Bishop must justify ECUSA in terms of the political agenda of the winners of the particular vote. Such a representation only caricatures us. And so Wright commits the chief crime of the lazy academic. He represents his opponent's view in the most inaccurate way possible to justify his own. But let us not forget that much of his rhetoric is very present in our own church. One almost can hear Father Harding and LEAC appealing to a blissfully ignorant center ready to be saved from the infernal plans of the "church rats." Let us pray to God to free from our slanderers.

One key essay in Anglicanism: The Answer to Modernity concerns the Primates' Meeting in Portugal in 2003 before VGR's election. The issue there was the consecration of missionary bishops for North America in the Province of Southeast Asia. The author of the essay argued that the deal brokered in Portugal was that the esse of church polity lay in the ability of the decisionmaker to be present for the ecclesial community. Thus, the Primates were to make decisions in their particular churches adapted to the situation but careful of the needs of the rest of the Communion with whom the Primates also were present.

The question we have to ask is who breached this agreement more: +Griswold, when he acceded to the local development of VGR's election and consecration, knowing how unacceptable this was to the rest of the Communion or +Akinola and company when they chose from their hierarchical post to cause contention and confusion in the North American churches? All have sinned...

O God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Savior,
the Prince of Peace: Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the
great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions; take away
all hatred and prejudice, and whatever else may hinder us
from godly union and concord; that, as there is but one Body
and one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith,
one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, so we may be all
of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth
and peace, of faith and charity, and may with one mind and
one mouth glorify thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Poetry

Bls is having a Poetry Carnival of some sort, so I'll bite. I'm afraid my taste runs very much to epic poetry. My tastes in the lyric generally lie in the direction of romantic and mournful Old Irish stuff.


Unfortunately, my Irish is horrible, so there's no way I can translate any of it to post, but I managed to find my favorite one . I love Thomas Kinsella's translation, but this one isn't bad if rather clinical.

It also has my favorite description of late adolescence:

When I was a child I was modest:
I used not to be engaged on the evil business of lust;
since I reached the uncertainty of age
my wantonness has begun to beguile me.

.

Cranmer's Kids

A post by bls on the Feast of the Purification started me thinking about The Churching of Women, something which would make most modern Episcopal women I know boil. The thought I had was that Cranmer's choice to include the rite in the Prayer Book as quite interesting, because it's a genuine case of a non-celibate male theologizing about reproduction and female sexuality in the catholic tradition, something which many feminists think doesn't happen. But this is a rather moot point if Cranmer was childless. His wife never had to go through the "humiliating ritual" as some call it. But I had no idea whether Cranmer ever had children. Having no full biography of Cranmer to hand, I went googling to find this item from the Journal of the Commons . A similar item is in the Journal of the Lords, which signifies that Parliament restored the inheritance rights of Cranmer's children, lost when their father was convicted of high treason and heresy. The item also suggests that Cranmer and his wife were rather lucky, having christened two surviving children with their parents' names.

On Retreat

Well, not quite yet, but I'm excited. I'm packing my duffle bag and heading to the local holy mountain, which is in the vicinity of Nicomedia ;). I'm looking forward to seeing my first large Episcopal monastic foundation. That is all.

It's A Patronal Feast

I hope you all had a blessed Feast of Charles, King and Martyr today. The Charter of the Monastery contains a variety of oddments, but none more odd than the explanation for why King Charles is a patron of the Monastery,

"And the monks also shall have as their Patron, Charles Martyr, King of England, France, Scotland, and Ireland, not as some do, in order to affirm that by God, kings rule and tyrants hold the land, but as a reminder to our heirs and successors that even the most earnest and godly rulers are bound by the law and as a warning to all vindicated in equity against our heirs and successors against the shedding of their blood."

In other words, kings shouldn't overstep their bounds, but the ruled should strive for bloodless revolutions. The Charter further states that only the feast of Charles' martyrdom should be celebrated and not "other vain and sundry feasts connected with his cult" whatever they are.

I realize, of course, that in those parts of America that haven't translated the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of their blogs to completely different parts of space-time or a few extremely Anglo-Catholic parishes of a certain sort, this is not a feast day, but it still is in England, as Madpriest reminds us.

I also should note that some are quite wary of this feast in the United States, because King Charles I has come to represent nothing so much as the violation of the liberty of conscience. For instance, on the floor of St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, there is found inscribed, "Constant oral tradition affirms that near this spot a brave Scotchwoman Jane T. Geddes on the 23rd July 1637 struck the first blow in the great struggle for freedom of conscience which after a conflict of half a century ended in the establishment of civil and religious liberty." Apparently, Geddes threw a stool at the head of the Dean of the Cathedral when he tried to read from Laud's Book. This is plaque is horridly ironic. Civil and religious liberty in this case only meant the freedom to be Presbyterian. There was no religious liberty for my Roman Catholic but highly monarchist Scottish ancestors, who settled in Ontario after fighting for George III in the American Revolution. There was no religious liberty for men like William Smith, who likely fled to America without taking a degree at Aberdeen, because it was made a felony for an Episcopalian to teach school. Smith was the first Provost of what is now the University of Pennsylvania and was instrumental in founding the first University of Maryland (now St. John's College).

Speaking of Pennsylvania

I'm not going into any details until it becomes news, but it looks like that Diocese is in serious need of our prayers in the coming weeks. So please remember her in your prayers if you get a chance.

That it may please thee to illumine all bishops, priests, and
deacons, with true knowledge and understanding of thy
Word; and that both by their preaching and living, they may
set it forth, and show it accordingly,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to bless and keep all thy people,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to send forth laborers into thy
harvest, and to draw all mankind into thy kingdom,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to give to all people increase of grace
to hear and receive thy Word, and to bring forth the fruits of
the Spirit,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

That it may please thee to bring into the way of truth all such
as have erred, and are deceived,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Preaching the Cross

The Bishop Visited on Sunday

The Bishop of Laodicea is both larger than life and as large as life. He has one natural leg and the faith of Dorothy Day mediated by Loyola or perhaps vice versa . He also apparently spoke on the unpleasantness in the Forum, but I was not feeling well that morning and so missed the Forum.

Speaking of Episcopal Visitations

As he lay dying, John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, was in great pain, but he fought through his pain to give some advice to Francis Cuming, a young priest, who attended him during his last hours in the rectory of St. Peter's Binghamton, where he had been stricken in the midst of a visitation. The key advice was this, "Be sure that in all your preaching the doctrines of the Cross be introduced: no preaching is good for any thing without these." Now there has been some discussion of what these doctrines are over at Canterbury Trail. I made a little epitome of Athanasius on this account, in which the doctrines of the Cross might be summarized as:

1. The resurrection of the body incorruptible and heralded by Christ.

2. The perfection of humanity restored in Christ Jesus incarnate and humanity restored in part and then in full through Christ Jesus.

3. Friendship with God extended to both Jews and Gentiles through friendship with Christ. Recall that Abraham was a friend of God by faith according to the Epistle to the Hebrews.

4. The power of Satan, Hell, and Death broken by Christ.

5. The curse occasioned by the primal and continued disobedience removed by Christ.

Now, I happen to have an evangelical pastor of some sort in his pajamas in my living room, so I am tempted to ask him what he would say the doctrines of the Cross are, but I think I'll demure for the moment.

The interesting point came up in discussion at Canterbury Trail that younger preachers and writers are more traditional in their doctrine. My name was cited under the lay heading by bls, though she's never heard me preach. The question I had to ask myself was whether points 1-5 appear in any of my sermons.

So let me provide some example quotes out of context:

[From a sermon on the Feast of St. Anselm]

"The Good News of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is universally relevant."

"Through the covenant with Israel, the Psalmist and the writers of the Wisdom Literature did learn definite truth about what God knew would keep them from death and ensure a decent living. They learned through the minutiae of the Law and their inability or difficulty in following it to the letter the deep sinfulness of man and recoil of our being against the commandments of God. What they missed was this business was an imperfect solution, requiring that some human beings would lose their dignity in the eyes of their fellows for reasons other than sin. Before he healed a man born blind, Jesus was asked, “Did this man sin or his parents?” and He said to them that he was blind so that God might be glorified. This did not just mean that God would be glorified by healing but is a general statement on why we all are born. We are born so that our Maker be glorified in us: some works of nature are common grace, falling on the good and the wicked alike. The Law says that some choose otherness from God and death through their own fault. Jesus and the Psalmist suggest that some who appear dead, other, ignorant, and stupid in the eyes of wise are as suffused with God as much as the wise and intelligent and the righteous of the world according to the Law. And likewise with the Greeks who observe nature and seek God but achieve no knowledge of the truth that can be explained as easily as the redemptive message of Jesus Christ

And our certainty that this surprising God will be benevolent to us is his past actions and this is also the justification for our faith. These acts are generous beyond our deserving. Anselm was one of the great exponents of the atonement theory of Christ’s death, that bloody, messy, and “primitive” doctrine that I keep seeing criticized everywhere these days. That’s another sermon. But Paul and Anselm challenge our assumptions in these days of grace by reminding us that though filled by the Holy Spirit presently, we were all enemies to God who required justification through the blood of Christ. We were all dead to sin and yearning even to bring God to the same death. And God was still there. God did not say, “Ooogh, I can’t stand those sinners. I shall not endure being in Sheol. I’m going over here now. or I’m not going to Earth, it’s dirty and messy and risky and surprising.” He came, He left the place much better than he found it, He’s coming back. And it’s going to be very surprising. Amen.

[5 Easter, 2003]

"His dying and rising to life was small in scale and His resurrection at least was witnessed by very few, yet He destroyed death and changed the entire nature of the created universe."

"Yet Jesus promises that he will dwell in the Father, and we will dwell in Him. Hence, we also will dwell in the Father. At the least, this is a most wonderful promise of eternal life. Before Christ and the Spirit’s outpouring, all died according to the flesh because of the decree of God in Genesis, “My Spirit shall not remain in a man forever.” In former times, our alienation from God made it both necessary and easy for God to take His breath from us. Yet Christ now promises that we can be in God in the same way God is in us. Hence, though we will die according to the flesh, His Spirit can never be taken away from those who dwell in Him. Therefore, Christ is not just promising the Spirit to the apostles, he is giving them deep insight into eternal life."

[Last Sunday after Pentecost, 2003]

Next, when Pilate asks if he is a king, Christ responds “you say that I am” or another translation says, “‘King’ is your word.” No, Christ doesn’t say, well, king is a word that might make you understand me according to your experience. But the way Christ is speaking here is common to the Passion narratives. Admittedly, he occasionally admits being the Messiah, but as he approaches the tomb, who he is becomes much less clear. Being Messiah, by all contemporary interpretation, would imply kingship and priesthood. But not victimhood. This is a sacrificial narrative. In these few hours, the Book of Hebrews and Paul claim that Christ managed to perform the Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) sacrifice at the same time as the Passover sacrifice. Thus, by his apparent surrender to Death, the times of religious festivals are altered. In these few hours, Jesus, Judas, and a man named Jesus Barabbas all will be male yearling sheep led to the slaughter. Christ will be sacrificed both to Azazel, the demon of the desert and to God, being both the representation of human sin and its atonement. If Christ agreed that he was a king, he would be denying the wonder of his nature: the universal brought into the world for through him the world was made. He would be saying that he was just a king instead of the complexity that has driven his followers mad since his leavetaking from us.

[Vigil of All Saints, 2004]

"The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us that those faithful to God have lived stories with a similar choice of outcome. By faith, David sought the kingship and by faith he won it. Daniel’s faith cast him into the lion’s den and brought him safely out of it. But not everyone has been so lucky. The faithful have been tortured to death, flogged, imprisoned, sawed in half, and exiled to the wilderness. Their costume in the older sense of the word has been the “skins of sheep and goats.” Indeed, “The world was not worthy of them…” And while many of these tortures would have been familiar to this letter’s early Christian audience, the sufferers here are all Jews before the coming of Christ. These horror stories are all from the Old Testament. But the writer assures us that all of these faithful have won “resurrection to a better life” and “God’s approval because of their faith.” Mysteriously, we are told that these sufferers of the Old Testament “did not receive what was promised” “that only with us should they reach perfection.” It doesn’t matter. It’s clear enough that whatever a Macabee knew after he was dispatched by the forces of Antiochus Epiphanes, he knows the joy of victory in Christ offered to the presently suffering Christians.

(Note: This is very 2 Peter and Christus Victor of me. It's not the unambiguous reading.)

And I am also reminded of the reading tonight from Revelation in which we are told that the blood of the Lamb has “bought for God people of every tribe and language, nation and race.” The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that all those who were faithful to God were made perfect through Christ and the Church even if they did not know Christ and the Church.

Tuesday is also Election Day. And the Word of God illumines this secular feast as well as the sacred three days that will be completed on the same day. The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that by faith kingdoms rise and fall. It is by faith and not by suffrage that the powers and evils of this world are most strongly opposed. And if we are still not satisfied by that promise, let us also remember that the regimes of this world are impermanent: that the victory that Christ won for us was not limited to eternal life with Him. Revelation promises us that the saints “shall reign on Earth.” In the end, Christ, as divine and supernatural actor, will sweep away the world driven by the analysis of reality. He will also sweep away the world driven by the activity of the powerful. He will sweep away all of those objects that do not endure that we call the world. And he will send the faithful who we commemorate on these three days to execute the commission described by the Psalmist, “to wreak vengeance on the nations and punishment on the heathen/ binding their kings with chains, putting their nobles in iron/ carrying out the judgment decreed against them— THIS IS GLORY FOR ALL HIS LOYAL SERVANTS.” Amen.

(Yes, this is my eschatological commentary on the "reality-based" kerfluffle. It sounds strange out of context).

[4 Epiphany, 2003]

"In that light, the readings today encompass time and professional vocation in order to vindicate a kairotic view of time within the full record of God’s creative and salvific acts. Not so far from Paul or the Evangelist Mark’s minds, I think, is Plato’s Republic in which we are told that each profession achieves the greatest success when the right things are done at the right time. The word for right time is, you guessed it, kairos. For Jesus, now is the right time for him to begin his ministry. Indeed, his apparent political ineptitude is intentional, for it puts him on the radar of the political authorities and will lead him to Jerusalem and the cross, the most important events to occur since the creation of the universe."

[Maundy Thursday, 2004]

What then are we doing here? Transcending the loathsomeness of feet? Forgiving? I argue that this ritual is significant for one reason. It is a ritual of true ecclesiastical discipline. This element is best seen in the dialogue between Peter and Jesus. First, Peter is confused why Jesus, the Master and Teacher of the group, is doing the washing. He does not want to humiliate the person he respects most in the world. Jesus says, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” We are inclined to put our religious leaders, whether bishops, priests, deacons or wardens, vestrymen, and Sunday School teachers on pedestals. In this ritual, the entire Church is leveled, even her Head. One cannot have a friend who is not in some way an equal. Peter, by refusing washing is refusing equality with Christ and friendship with Christ. He is refusing the love that the woman who washed Jesus’ feet is said to have in Luke’s Gospel, the same love that will make Jesus lay down his life for his friends tomorrow.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hmm...6 out of 8, though I admit some of them are rather passing references. Oh, I also should mention that if some of the references seem unusually erudite, I was preaching to college and graduate students, who would have some familiarity with these texts.

The question I want to ask is how do you preach the Cross. Do you do it intentionally, looking for some place to insert a relevant excursus on the resurrection of the body? Or do you let it flow from the Scriptures? Because I can tell you, even after reading the Scriptures even more heavily than I did while I was preaching, sometimes the Cross isn't there.

One of the common memes at ILEOS is that most preaching elsewhere neglects hard Scriptural truths about war, money, and sex. But what I don't hear at ILEOS and elsewhere in the Episcopal Church (I do leave Laodicea sometimes) are hard truths on "eternal punishments, on rivers of fire, on the venomous worm, on bonds that cannot be burst, or exterior darkness." (Chrysostom, Against the Jews, Homily 2). OK, maybe, that would be a little too much, but I think preaching closer to this vein is a part of our tradition. Is there a happy medium?

Feast of Fabian, Bishop of Rome, 250

The Anglosphere is very alight this morning, so I decided I would post an old sermon of mine for this particular day.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, Our Strength and Our Redeemer. Amen.

One irony immediately strikes me about Fabian. Although as bishop of Rome from roughly 235-250, he appointed seven deacons to record the martyrdoms in his diocese, no direct account of Fabian’s martyrdom has survived. This is especially strange, since he is traditionally considered the first martyr of the persecution of the Roman Emperor Decius. What we know of his death comes from a condolence letter by Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage to the clergy of Rome. Cyprian gives one of the strangest eulogies I’ve ever read, rejoicing “greatly that, in harmony with the integrity of his administration, an honorable consummation attended him.”

Some have suggested that Fabian died in the first flushes of persecution, from the stress of the hearings or the shock of prison. I doubt it. Cyprian’s words, while they lack personal warmth, suggest profound respect for Fabian. Respect, which I think, would have been more muted if Fabian had wilted at the first sign of trouble. Moreover, there is one story about Fabian that describes him as more than administrator or martyr. Fabian apparently had been a farmer somewhere near Rome. He had become bishop after he went to Rome for an episcopal election. Fabian was a layman. He probably was there out of simple curiosity. But as the clergy were chatting up the “suitable” candidates, waiting for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a dove descended on Fabian in the same manner as the dove of the Holy Spirit at the Baptism of Christ. Fabian, of course, was elected immediately. Whether this story is true or not, it implies that his contemporaries and successors saw something special in Fabian. Someone whose election had been so remarkable likely would have been martyred honorably or attracted charitable comment about his weakness. Moreover, I doubt anyone would tell Christ-like stories about “lousy” martyrs. It’s almost blasphemous.

Perhaps, this dove story even has entered the Lectionary through the vision of Ezra of the coronation of the martyrs in our First Lesson today. Here, coronation and martyrdom are strongly connected. I suspect the idea behind its inclusion was that the divine circumstances of Fabian’s election were perfected by the example of his martyrdom, which Cyprian seems to suggest was followed by many in Rome,

But why should we consider Fabian exemplary on account of his martyrdom? To many in the modern era, the ethic of martyrdom in the Early Church seems distinctly sick. Nietzsche, based on rather damning evidence from writings of the Church Fathers, argued that the ecstasy of the martyrs was driven not by fidelity to Christ or hope of reward but by the faith that whatever tortures they experienced on Earth they would see visited on their torturers ad infinitum at the Day of the Lord, a situation they seemed to desire with glee and malice rather than pity. For modern Christians, martyrdom is laden with complex emotions. Some of us feel guilty that we are not persecuted and cry that the Church would be better somehow if we were. Others feel that old-fashioned martyrdom would distract us from the hard work of reconciling God with humanity and healing the ills of the nations and therefore modify the terminology of martyrdom to apply it to the kind of the living rather than the kind of dying we are called to in Christ. Others feel so guilty about not being martyrs that they see persecution everywhere. But also don’t forget that there are modern Christians for whom martyrdom is not old-fashioned, who are flogged by councils, judged by governors and kings, and betrayed by their families. “Wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” their churches are bombed and even the due process and rule of unjust law, which Christ assumes in the Gospel of Matthew will be the context of his disciples, are denied to them in Sudan, in Pakistan, and elsewhere in the world.

The Good News the Gospel has today for all Christians is that martyrdom, like other things, happens. By accident, by grace, by demonic powers? Well, no. Martyrdom just happens! Christians initially are passive in the process. “They will hand you over…you will be dragged and flogged…because of me…brother will betray brother…you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” Martyrdom comes looking for the martyr. Its absence is not about the martyr personally, because it is about Christ, the one to whom the martyr testifies. Moreover, the ecstasy of martyrdom is nothing for which to prepare. Total disregard for life for the sake of Christ comes not through careful consideration or a desire for vengeance or vindication, but through fidelity to the Holy Spirit who will tell the martyr what to say. And if you think this is comforting, remember that martyrs have to filter out a lot of voices to hear the Spirit.

So martyrdom happens. But why did it happen to Fabius? Fabius was the first martyr of the persecution of Decius. Decius in the most charitable reading seems to have been trying to promote a sense of national identity in the Roman Empire. Probably forced to take the throne from his predecessor by overenthusiastic subordinates in the Army, Decius was a conservative Roman aristocrat of provincial birth but probably of Italian ancestry. Because of the insecurity of his position and his concern that Roman values and national security might be in decline after the passing of the 1000th anniversary of the city of Rome, Decius made a law that ordered everyone in the Empire to offer a sacrifice of an animal or incense to the local deities in prayer for the safety of the Empire. Those who did so received a certificate. Failure to get a certificate resulted in interrogation and imprisonment, property confiscation, torture, and possibly death. Some Christians fled to the hills. Some sacrificed or bribed officials to get certificates, causing much debate about under what circumstances they should be reconciled to the Church.

What still boggles my mind is that while Decius’ order was rather flexible to local circumstances in order to join the diverse peoples of the Empire into one body, it was unacceptable for the Christians to comply by prayers for the public safety in their liturgies, something which the acts of the martyrs suggests they did anyway. But was all of that obstinacy on the Roman side? Ezra’s vision of a multitude on the Mount of Zion being crowned by the Son of God is but another viewpoint on the events John of Patmos sees in Revelation 7, A vast throng no one could count from every race, nation, tribe, and language.” Perhaps, Fabian thought that God was no local god that could join with his false fellows to unify a temporal realm and remove distinctions between peoples. In which case, this is obstinacy to praise. It is one thing to pray for public safety and the welfare of kings and those in authority, it is another thing to use religion as the unifying force of the polity and the eraser of distinctions between peoples, since the latter is the clear province of the Christian faith.

So, when Decius gave the order, who was Fabian and what did he need to do when happened to him? Fabian was the bishop. A dove had alighted on his head. He was a good shepherd, the follower of the Good Shepherd. He laid down his life to tell his fellows not to run to the hills, not to bribe, and to make the right kind of sacrifices. Amen.

Comment on Kyle Potter's Latest on the Problematized People of God...

Wow. So much here.

First, let me take on Father Abbot Creech's discussion about a "life without sex." Many of the gay and lesbians I know have substantial formation in the monastic tradition, some even took vows, though I never asked how permanent they were. The first they usually say to me when they discuss this is that celibacy is a charism, for which they have the witness of the Fathers concerning something called the eunuchmaking power, which allows one to fulfill Jesus' call to be "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven." The witness is not general. Cassian suggests that one can suppress all desire for six months at a time by careful self-denial, implying it might not be charismatic. But the general point is that celibacy, not merely chastity, is the final telos of the Christian, being the image of the Kingdom in full where there is no marriage, nor betrothal. Paul affirms this to the Corinthians but also emphasizes through his Epistles that marriage has legitimate teloi associated with it (I hate to use an Aristotelian framework for Paul, but this is how I roll.) More correctly, he asserted that marriage was better than being constantly tempted to unchastity. And these teloi of which I speak might include evangelizing one's children, which certainly has borne much fruit according to tradition. So the question I must ask is this. Imagine Paul had given different advice to the Corinthians, can you imagine the turpor among unmarried heterosexuals in the church? Can you imagine your own turpor? I am 24 years old. I believe that I am a heterosexual not called to celibacy. I restrain my problems with unchastity as best I can. It certainly has inclined me more to devotional practice and given me less abandon with respect to debauchery, but I don't think I could do so if I were completely barred from sex or any kind of intimate friendship. Father Abbot Creech is worried that the Christian community is maligned when the homosexual Christian fears loneliness, but I charge him to find some community willing to acknowledge publicly that celibate homosexuals live among them, admit that their orientation is natural but broken, and are willing to upbuild them and celebrate them publicly so that the word of the Lord might be fulfilled, "To those eunuchs who keep my covenants, I shall give a place in my house and a name better than children." Some Roman Catholics are going in this direction, but the Vatican isn't biting. I'm afraid that the public "unbridled" sexuality of gay men is considered dangerous, and the same public "unbridled" sexuality of lesbians is subversive. And the "bridle" I speak of is not the yoke of Christ in the work of celibacy. This is why the conversatives want to keep things secret and the liberals want "unions." One sees the Pauline problem, while the other adapts a Pauline solution.

Next, we have Father Tessone's "they're born like that" isn't an argument. Well, I could cite at least two instances from Chrysostom in which he infers that homosexual activity of some sort (and one of them clearly referring to pederasty) must be Satanic since it is clearly a reversal of the natural order of things which even brute beasts obey. And how do we know the natural order of things. Well, the Angelic Doctor says that marriage must be within the natural order of things, for it follows from the practices of the animals, by way of proof he cites Ulpian. And I don't think such arguments are mere dicta. They seem unrelated to us, because we keep a secular history and sacred history of things constantly in our mind, and so do not understand that Paul and the Fathers were reading the world in light of their understanding of nature. Paul's Jewish teachers likely thought that homosexuality was the curse of God upon the gentiles, to which Israel was immune unless a strayer from the way contracted it through idolatry. Who knows what they thought if they figured out their sheep were committing to'evah? The argument is not so much that they're not born like that, but that they have not contracted it through idolatry and that the order of nature is not reversed. Please, however, do not take this to mean that everything according to the natural law is lawful generally, which wouldn't fly with any authority I respect, and frankly, I understand, looking at the monkeys. Chrysostom also says, "And in a like way with those, these he also puts out of all means of defending themselves by charging them not only that they had the means of gratification, and left that which they had, and went after another, but that having dishonored that which was natural, they ran after that which was contrary to nature." (Homily 4 on the Romans), suggesting that "they're born that way" wouldn't be irrelevant to Chrysostom.

Next, we have Kyle's point about the goods of homosexual relationships do not imply God's approval of homosexuality in toto . Again, we need to return to Paul and the natural law, as we constantly must in this argument. Consider Paul's argument about buying meat in the market, which potentially had been offered for sacrifice. This is quite analogous to homosexuality, since the latter concerns sexual acts whose lawlessness is particularly connected to idolatry by Paul as even Holy Sergius and Bacchus seem to understand. Imagine homosexuality as something that is natural but "broken" as Father Abbot Creech states by its association with idolatry, which might have been true in the ancient world in a figurative sense with respect to the cult of youth and virility and sympathetic magic relating generation and education. What does Paul say concerning meat? "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." If homosexuality exists outside of idolatry and within the fullness thereof, it should produce the "fruits of the Spirit" as the liberals claim. Thus, provided you work in a framework in which you believe homosexual can be natural, unassociated with idolatry and hatred of neighbor, and appears to bear fruit, one must ask whether it is better to have "same sex unions" or burn with lust. The argument does not exist in isolation. The man committing incest with his mother (likely his father's widow) might have had some semblance of joy, peace, and self-control in some matters, but his incest surely violated some higher principle.

I think that's enough for tonight. The Lord grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.

Various and Sundry

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday

Strictly, today marks the secular holiday, despite local commemoration in church yesterday. King ought to be commemorated by the Church on the anniversary of his martyrdom (4 April). I can't say I ever am very enthusiastic about this particular holiday, though this has very little to do with King himself, whose sanctity of life may be controverted but whose sanctity of purpose cannot be denied. I dislike this holiday, because I fear that King's legacy has been abused by both sides of the political aisle. On one hand, the abuse by one side is rather obvious. Today, the President visited a Washington area high school, where there was a Service Day commemorating Dr. King. The President used the occasion as an opportunity to discuss how those sprucing up the school are continuing in King's footsteps. Considering that King was one of the strongest critics of American intervention in Southeast Asia, one wonders whether the President's own critics are following Dr. King more closely than these civic-minded individuals. Or whether Dr. King might have something challenging to say about the postcard writing to victims of Hurricane Katrina. I really don't think you can reduce King to a promoter of civicmindedness or volunteerism. There was far more Tocquevillean public spirit in his age than our own. Indeed, I think King's path represents a departure from those kinds of social institutions, of which the church, especially in the African-American community, had become a launching pad. At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. DuBois describes the African-American churches as the largest black-"owned" corporate bodies and as a catch-all for social service within the African-American community. Indeed, I know examples of African-American churches and voluntary organizations sending rather sizeable sums of money to victims of disasters who were very unlikely to be of their own races. The world King knew as a child within his own immediate circles was one of open hands, open hearts, and open backs. King himself came from an intellectual family but was quite comfortable in overalls, suggesting that he knew how to work with his hands. If the President were successful in restoring the Tocquevillean ideal wherever it used to be, he only would succeed in restoring the formative world of King.

And thus King easily could have lived his life as a pastor, facilitating these intraracial voluntary organizations and self-improvement initiatives, the so-called Atlanta Doctrine of Booker T. Washington. But King chose otherwise. He chose to diagnose the illness of the system. He fought the disabilities in law and culture that kept African-Americans from reaching their full potential in American society, and he also questioned the effects of American power over the rest of the world, the conflict with the Soviets, etc. King identified and resisted systemic evil. That's a road that many of us can't follow. But it is best to admit that was his road.

On the other side, we hear from the NAACP and other organizations with a history of association with King telling us, "the civil rights movement isn't over. Racism isn't yet vanquished." Well, of course not. But these organizations don't seem to understand why they're becoming irrelevant to my generation, particularly African-Americans. One wonders if King might become a cultural critic in the vein of Bill Cosby or whether he might be inferring some interesting things from the popularity of African-American popular culture among economically disadvantaged youth of other races. Why is racism an acceptable bugaboo of our discourse but class disparities are not?

Two Candidacies

A few days ago I learned that Randall Foster (Texanglican) had passed his canonical exams and therefore was admitted to candidacy in the Diocese of Ft. Worth. Today, I learned that the Postulant has been the Candidate since Michaelmas. These two (along with two others in the Process) are daily in my prayers and I'm happy that God is speeding them toward further dedication to His service.

Lutherpunk Asks Why We Go to Church

He also asks why we practice the Faith. He also asks us to think about those we know who don't go to church and why we care so much that they don't. So here's my answer:

1. The world is not right. The cosmos is not right. I am not right.

2. The majority of people throughout the ages have concluded (1) by inspection and intensely desired that they and the rest of the world be made right.

3. I have concluded that Jesus Christ is the way to rectitude for me and everything else, fulfilling our desires beyond our imagining.

4. A lot of other people have concluded (3) and come up with some sort of framework that explains (1), (2), and (3) and is summarized in three Creeds composed by a bunch of DWEMs and thus sounding quite DWEMish.

5. The unsummarized framework has some holes.

6. The unsummarized framework also poses my professional life as more than some independent and selfish inquiry into truth or a colossal waste of societal resources but as a way to stronger relationship with God and to my neighbor.

Many people I know who don't go to church spend their whole lives thinking but would prefer not to think about religion, so they feel very turned off and intimidated by those like me who do or else think that I don't think enough about religion. Others find themselves alienated by the facere of the church, where the mysteries at the heart of our faith become lost in the lust for mastery. I find myself often troubled by the facere of the church but strive to seek those things in which there is life and immortality. I seek God in the Word poorly proclaimed and the Eucharist poorly said, if this is necessary. What makes me happy is that many of my generation who do attend church very much strive to cultivate some humility about their practice and the state of their souls.

I can't say the life of the community is very easy for me. I am not a particularly social person. I dislike being the youngest person (usually) in the Adult Forum. I feel uncomfortable being young and single. I feel most uncomfortable about my inability to feel part of my particular church, when I was very used to feeling a part of my previous three communities. But I go every week and practice the Faith as best I can, because this is the way God has ordered me to be. I am meant to be uncomfortable in the human world.

Borrowed from Lutherpunk via Anastasia

1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?
Drink ice wine. It was very, very good.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn't have any New Year's resolutions last year. I have two this year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes. One of my officemates, just before she defended her thesis.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No.

5. What countries did you visit?
Canada.

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
A girlfriend, a driver's license, and a master's degree.

7. What dates from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
October 5, the date of my qualifying examination.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Passing my qualifying examination.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not submitting a paper by the end of the year.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing serious.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
An album of the Psalms in Anglican Chant.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My research advisors, though I won't go into detail why.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
No one I know personally.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent + Savings

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Getting through my qualifying exam. Do you sense a theme here?

16. What song will always remind you of 2006?
Headlights on Dark Roads--Snow Patrol

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
a) happier b) even steven c) slightly richer, but I am a graduate student.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Upbuilded the church of God.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Read blogs.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Relaxing.

21. Did you fall in love in 2006?
This question has been ruled a mistrial. Will retry.

22. How many one-night stands?
Moi? Non.

23. What was your favorite TV program?
A tie between Jericho and Eureka, though Big Love and Rome are very good.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Fortunately not.

25. What was the best book you read?
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
BT

27. What did you want and get?
I passed my qualifying exams.

28. What did you want and not get?
A publication in a refereed journal.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?
The Queen First Apostle's review is spot on.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
24 was fairly boring.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
A copy of the Syrian adelphepoesis liturgy.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?
Dumpy graduate student.

33. What kept you sane?
The Daily Office.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Anne Hathaway. She was impossibly beautiful in the Devil Wears Prada .

35. What political issue stirred you the most?
Climate change.

36. Who did you miss?
My college friends.

37. Who was the best new person you met?
No comment.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.
Checked luggage is a dangerous thing.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
For once, I'd like to be the car crash, not always just the traffic jam.



In 2007...

1. Will you be looking for a new job?
Certainly not.

2. Will you be looking for a new relationship?
Yes.

3. New house?
I'm going to try to avoid it.

4. What will you do different in 07?
Collaborate more.

5. New Years resolution?
Write and submit three papers. It will likely be only one.

6. What will you not be doing in 07?
Letting Sabellians get to me.

7. Any trips planned?
Not yet. Maybe I'll go to Orlando in October.

8. Wedding plans?
No.

9. Major thing on your calendar?
Oh, wait. Big event in June. Need to get on that.

10. What can't you wait for?
Holy Week.

11. What would you like to see happen differently?
I would like a friend of mine to have steady employment.

12. What about yourself will you be changing?
My antipathy to the operation of the automobile.

13. What happened in 06 that you didn't think would ever happen?
I reconnected with an old mentor.

14. Will you be nicer to the people you care about?
No, but I'll try to spend more time with those I can?

15. Will you dress differently this year than you did in 06?
No.

16. Will you start or quit drinking?
I will continue drinking.

17. Will you better your relationship with your family?
Hopefully.

18. Will you do charity work?
Hopefully.

19. Will you go to bars?
Almost certainly. I just hope they'll have decent hard cider.

20. Will you be nice to people you don't know?
Where possible.

21. Do you expect 07 to be a good year for you?
I expect to get a B in this course. (This is a very inside joke.)

22. How much did you change from this time last year till now?
Not much. But I have changed quite a bit in the last five years.

23. Do you plan on having a child?
I plan to avoid reproduction this year.

24. Will you still be friends with the same people you are friends with now?
Probably. I may make new ones.

25. Major lifestyle changes?
Hopefully nothing drastic.

26. Will you be moving?
Didn't you ask me this question. I'd prefer to avoid it.

27. What will you make sure doesn't happen in 07 that happened in 06?
I will try to avoid caffeine trips.

28. What are your New Years Eve plans?
I watched Entourage and then waited until the ball dropped.

29. Will you have someone to kiss at midnight?
Not really.

30. One wish for 07?
That we discover a terrestrial planet outside the Solar System.

Two Items from the Southern Bloggers

I hope you all are enjoying Christmas, now in its ninth day, bringing us to the Feast of Basil and Gregory Nazienzus. No vasilopita for me this year (as yet). I spent the latter part of Advent and Christmas in a nearly vegetative state and enjoyed returning to work this morning, despite a variety of technical difficulties and the fact that half of my luggage entered the Twilight Zone at some point yesterday and has yet to emerge.

Over Christmas, the blogs were fairly quiet, but Derek the Aenglican and Anastasia (and others) were discussing two issues of great interest.

Anglican Identity

Derek in a recent post opined that he didn't want to hear anything about Anglican Identity from those without grounding in the Divine Office and corporate worship. Someone I know recently said that many of the troubles we're having with Anglican Identity come from those from other Christian traditions coming in and bringing their baggage or poor catechesis with them, focusing on some aspects of Anglicanism while discarding others and thus upsetting the balance of the tradition. Upon reflection, I realized that this wasn't a matter of welcoming "the wrong sort," as some wags might have it. Instead, I think the gradual defrosting of Anglicans (especially in this country) only has exposed the decayed hulk of the devotional and corporate practice that is central to our tradition. One of my college chaplains, for instance, never had anything to do with the Office, because he said it wasn't a part of his personal devotional practice. Now I understand why he might want to encourage lay-driven Morning and Evening Prayer, especially for the seminarians in his charge, but he probably should not have pooh-poohed its importance. And, of course, the conversional aspects of the Office cannot be doubted. Indeed, the evidence always lies before us. What made Derek an Aenglican? Or why does Lutherpunk have denominational identity issues? Blame Cranmer.

Jesus And Indigenous Mediterreanean Religions

Like Anastasia, I am quite used to people being comfortable with a Jewish Jesus. Indeed, I think much of the popularity of this idea comes from the great affinity mainline Christians have for Reform and Conservative Jews, who often share much of the political outlook of the mainlines. And I can't deny that there's been some theological cross-pollination. Most sermons I hear live these days quote Rabbi Abraham Heschel for the same reason. I actually think that to some extent, Heschel's reassertion of the prophetic tradition within Judaism as a persistent social critique has had beneficial influence on Christianity. And, of course, affinity between Christians and Jews also has been a corrective for a long history of conflict, oppression, and dangerous rhetoric. So lest I launch into a grand critique of a thinker not unlike Heschel by the name of John Chrysostom and his Adversus Iudaeos , I really should address Anastasia's point about the relations between early Christianity and Indigneous Mediterranean Religions.

Anastasia says that she never speaks of Greco-Roman religion, which reflects an important reality of ancient religion. As St. Athanasius points out, each city and people of the ancient world had their own gods and own particular rites and these gods and peoples were constantly at war with another until the coming of Christianity. Of course, Athanasius' point is a little too expansive. First of all, many "separate nations" had similar gods to their neighbors on account of common ethnic origin. Mars was worshipped at Rome and Mamers was worshipped further south. Zeus and Jupiter connected the Greeks and Romans. Of course, the same god may be worshipped differently. Something tells me that a Hindu and a Siberian tribesman show different forms of reverence for the fire god Agni.

Second of all, metropolitanization and central government led to syncretism. In HBO's series Rome , Augustus' mother Atia is depicted as a worshipper of the Egyptian deity Isis and keeps a large statue of the goddess in her house. Yet she also retains the household gods of the Julian and Octavian gentes . This is a realistic portrayal of religious practice by a woman of her class. And indeed, the gradual erosion of traditional Roman religion and the embrace of foreign cults eventually became the most influential meme to explain the decline of Roman power, for do not both Tacitus and Gibbon describe Christianity as a dangerous foreign cult? And does not Augustine spend much of his time refuting this idea? However, as early as Claudius and probably earlier, it was realized that future Roman power depended on the investment of as many as possible in Roman institutions. In political terms, this meant the admission of more provincial aristocrats to the Senate and the principal magistracies and the extension of citizenship to all free persons by the early 3rd century. However, it had a fascinating impact in religious terms. Characters in Rome constantly are swearing by the "Black Stone," a focus of the cult of Cybele (or the Magna Mater). What's interesting about the Black Stone is that its presence in Rome was not private contamination of the mos maiorum of the Roman people but a matter of public policy. During the Second Punic War, the Black Stone was brought to Rome from Phrygia after consultation of the Sibylline Books.

In later days, the general policy of the Empire was that one could worship whatever deities you wanted as long as you did not cause civil disorder by disparaging the local cults of your city and worshipped the emperor. Christians usually failed on both counts, though they did pray for the Emperor. Often locals preferred that you worshipped the local gods, too. The Decian persecution, for instance, seems to have been a concerted effort to unify the Empire through religious fervor, much like a National Day of Prayer proclamation.

But note the irony. The genius of the emperor and his safety were formalized by Decius' legislation as the common deity of the Empire. And so Athanasius' point rings like a note in the cathedral of Picardy. Christ wasn't quite the first object of worship that unified mankind. The emperor was. At least ideally.

Anastasia points out that Augustus, too, might have sought to be a figure of universal veneration, especially since he called himself, "son of a god." Although Augustan propaganda played very differently in the provinces than at Rome, I would like to point out that Augustus played a very odd game with his religious status. First, he knew his strongest political protection was derived from the ordinary people of the city of Rome. His status as Augustus and tribune of the people both implied that he was sacrosanct but in touch with the interests of the little man and traditional religion. His enemies weren't religious men, but they had seen the outrage of the people at Caesar's assasination. Augustus sought to add what religious aura he could to his demogoguery. Second, Augustus posed himself as "pius." In Latin, he called himself 'filius Divi', which doesn't quite mean son of God. It means son of Divus. Up to that time, all deified humans worshipped at Rome were called by some other name. So Aeneas was worshipped as Indiges, which Livy claims is short for Juppiter Indiges (Indigenous Jupiter). Romulus was worshipped as Quirinus, probably because the original residents of the little villages out of which Rome developed likely called themselves the Quirites. Julus Caesar, when deified in 44 BC, became Divus Julius, the deified Julian. This may sound like a nitpicky point, but divus and deus are different. Augustus was not saying that he was son of an important god or the vague philosophic god popular in the smart set of the Greek world (to theos), which would have too pharaonic for the Roman mind, but that he was the heir of the great Julius Caesar, the avenger of his death, and the continuer of his general program.

In the Greek East, of which Judaea was a religiously exotic backwater and with which most of the early players would have been familiar, Augustus was far more receptive to divine honors. In Greek, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't end up being huios theoi or whatever. Such affectations were expected of great rulers. And since Augustus and his successors were legally Pharaoh in all but title, a little pharaonic pretension would be prudent.

But it occurs to me that I confuse the issue. What disturbs Christians about indigenous Mediterranean religion is that Christianity appears to have borrowed from it, possibly suggesting that incidents traditionally held to be historical are syncretic emendations. This dynamic is especially present in the debates about the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, which certainly have pagan antecedents. But if all things were equal, I could note thay many things Jesus did had Jewish antecedents or that an abundance of authors told stories about men reaching the Moon by means of rocket propulsion before the event actually happened. Roman Catholicism has an especial discomfort with indigenous Mediterranean religion because its careful assimilation of pagan practice has led to rhetoric that it is a pagan religion. You get one guess about what church is built on the ruins of the Temple of Cybele. Or you could note that the Pantheon is dedicated to all the martyrs. Or why is the Pope the Supreme Pontiff? Or why do the Neapolitans honor San Gennaro as they do? Or the Irish Brigid?

Of course, I don't have much discomfort at all with these connections. Our myths have expressed our deepest desires throughout the ages, whether you adhere to some school of psychology or believe that all false religion comes from evil spirits. The power of the Triune God is that these myths have come to life in Jesus Christ.