Reviewing Solar

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

There's something about a few lines into the opening of Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar , that conjured for me the opening paragraph of Jane Austen's Emma :

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

I found the parallel wasn't perfect on second glance,

But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken.

Earlier in the opening, Beard is: "vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever."

The contrast is striking. Emma is a clever woman who has done nothing, while Beard is a Nobel laureate who has done entirely too much. But I suspect McEwan might echo Austen's sentiment about Emma, "I'm going to make a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Daring for a woman to say in the early 19th century, while bog standard pretty much any time else, including for McEwan.

But in the same way that the opening to Emma tells you much about what is going to happen in the novel, so does the opening in Solar prefigure the chief metaphor of the novel: Beard is the First World.

Beard is the Occidental, staid and technically focused, that engages in increasingly unsatisfying excess to his destruction. He eats and drinks alcohol like a competitive eater and boozer, sometimes considering the taste, though is usually more interested in the quantity. There are multiple episodes on which he is on the verge of vomiting. He constantly gains weight and is starting to see the later stages of cardiovascular disease.

And his gluttony is only the beginning of his ills. Beard is an addict to food, to sex, and to professional reputation and success. He takes surprisingly little pleasure in his addictions and enjoys most the process of others suffering for him and cleaning up his messes. He keeps an apartment himself that gradually decays into uninhabitability.

In a moment that would make Rev. Sam shudder, he discusses peak oil and climate change as problems unassailable by reducing consumption or as he also terms it, virtue. Instead, he urges a group of institutional investors to fund his technological fix, solar power that imitates photosynthesizing plants (a genuine technology being explored by acquaintances of mine), because a new economy is necessary and their greed should be sufficient to make it reality.

Without giving away the denouement completely, vice is ultimately punished. There is something suitably Victorian about the novel in that sense. And with Beard's doom, McEwan seems to herald our own.

In the course of this rake's progress, the novel is readable, though not entrancing. The irony is sometimes too delicious. Beard makes a few ill-considered remarks about why there are so few women physicists. The climax of his public shaming is a debate with a series of white male humanities professors critiquing his "hegemonic" place or his white male privilege in more familiar terms. They also claim that there are no objective truths and that even gravity is socially constructed, to the approbation of a leftist postmodernist audience. Yet Beard's true foil is a cognitive psychologist from Tel Aviv, who uses quite convincing research results to show that gender differences in physics ability are due to cultural conditioning. Beard is willing to concede the error of his thinking, but the audience does not care, believing the foil to be complicit in the atrocity of Palestinian containment just because she is Israeli.

And sometimes McEwan is just a little too obsessed with meta-discourse, in which an event that occurs to Beard is identified as folkloric trope on retelling to a folklorist. But then the reader thinks, "Ah, I am reading a novel, so it is a folkloric trope all along. Ha, ha, ha, ha." I think McEwan was trying to make a point about how prophecies of doom aren't just a folkloric trope but that doom is sometimes objective reality, but it fell flat.

What disturbs me most is that there isn't a place for virtue either. The closest thing we see to virtuous is a Christian couple who study theology, raise identical twins as best they can, and divvy up the chores as equally as they can, including prayer and meditation. We hear little about them, but they seem anything but happy. Vice will be punished, yes, but virtue is not worth much detailed consideration. Inadvertently, McEwan may have summarized the course of the 21st century.

Fruit of a Poisoned Tree

I've just watched a couple of episodes from Season 2 of The Tudors . In the course of the two episodes, Henry VIII sends his wife, Catalina de Aragon, away from court and creates his paramour, Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke suo jure in anticipation of their marriage. Thomas More resigns the Lord Chancellorship, handing over the Great Seal of England to the King as a weight too great for him to bear. And in the shadows, the King's closest counselor, Thomas Cromwell, mutters about destroying the clergy. It is certainly television, sometimes lacking fidelity to names and dates. But the megalomania of Henry is likely true to life as are the divided loyalties of More and the infectious hatred of Cromwell for the ecclesiastical order of his day.

One moment is particularly telling. Henry is in Parliament, asking that the Lords Spiritual acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. They agree with the rider, "as far as the Law of Christ allows," or in the mind of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, not one whit.

Christopher* reminded the Episcopal Church in the Internet assembled
once and
again today that titles like that of Henry are blasphemous or at least hubristic. As we proclaim in one of the Eucharistic Prayers, Jesus Christ alone is the Head of the Church, the Author of our salvation. His daughter, Elizabeth, initiated the trend toward decentralized power in our church by taking the title of Supreme Governor (I doubt it was just because she was a woman as some say) and empowering Parliament to provide lay oversight of the church in consultation with the clergy. In other words, as England's civil polity evolved to concentrate less power in the person of the Crown, its spiritual polity would evolve in the same way. Her father's homicidal manias had motivated closer attention to the problems of power in general.

The Church of England is thus the fruit of a poisoned tree. It arises from the particular difficulties of an island on the edge of the known world in the wake of the Great Famine and Black Death of the fourteenth century. The combined effects of these crises was to eviscerate the deep relations between lord and peasant as a familial and feudal bond. With labor so scarce, individual peasants worked on the land of those who would pay in cash, destroying their attachment to the land. At the same time, a paid labor force was disposable and evictable. It was soon realized that strip-based cultivation was inefficient at point of sale. Beneath the wars with France over the remaining Angevin possessions and the English civil war that followed, the land was gradually enclosed in favor of monocultures, particularly the monoculture of sheep. Early in his reign, Henry (or really his minister Cardinal Wolsey) himself introduced stern legislation to restrain enclosure, but more and more of the agricultural laborers of England were dispossessed of their land and even work. It's the tendency of Marxist historians to see the seeds of the English Reformation in the struggles over enclosure. But opposition to enclosure did not always correlate with opinions on the religious questions.

Instead, the English Reformation is like the Continental Reformation. They originate from ecclesiastical dissent that found both secular ears willing to listen to it and support it and no fair hearing from a restored, centralized, and increasingly absolutist papacy. Dissent was common enough during the High Middle Ages. The Cathars, the spiritual Franciscans and like movements, the Western Schism, and conciliarism. This dissent could be suppressed with more or less difficulty, often by feeding the lusts of secular rulers for mastery over the temporalities of the dissenters. In that sense, the Church of England was poisoned by some of the very same venom that fed the Church of Rome.

In that light, the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon at a ecumenical service in commemoration of the Carthusian Martyrs is a corrective to our discourses about ecclesiastical power. One passage is particularly beautiful:

We treasure with perhaps a particular intensity the martyrdom of the contemplative, because the contemplative who knows how to enter into the silence and stillness of things is, above all, the one who knows how to resist to resist fashion and power, to stand in God while the world turns. In that discovery of stillness lies all our hope of reconciliation, the reconciliation of which John Houghton spoke in this place, this place where we are met to worship, before the community gave its answer to the King's agents. A reconciliation of which he spoke (as do so many martyrs) on the scaffold, a reconciliation which is not vanquished, defeated, or rendered meaningless by any level of suffering or death. If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton. If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim. If humanity is saved, it is by the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ and all those martyrs who have followed in his path.

The power of the Church is ultimately held not by those who hold some office or pre-eminence by canon law, whether Pope, or Primate, or General Convention or Synod but by those who regard the still, small silence of God as a form of residence not to be snatched at and enter into the same kenosis as the Lord. Only by a witness and death like Him can they enter into the government that is His alone. That's not to say that we don't need an org chart on this side of the veil, but we should remember that it's not really the org chart.

Creeping Secularism

Thinking Anglicans this morning links to this column of Stephen Bates in the Guardian . It turns out that the judge in the appeal of the counselor who was dismissed for refusing to counsel gay couples for reasons of conscience, Judge Laws, is an regular communicant of the Church of England and married to a New Testament scholar.

So despite what Lord Carey may think, the debate about secularism in the UK is not polarized between an atheistic juggernaut and a faithful remnant. Instead, it is still very much a debate within Christianity.

Hiatus

No, the blog is not going on hiatus. I've had too long of a hiatus from blogging while I was writing my thesis. Instead, this week has felt very much like a hiatus. I managed to find a small, but very nicely located apartment in my future home. (The urge to settle here permanently is already growing within me, though that's not yet practical.) And now I take a walk out of my hotel now and then to get a meal, see a movie, or skim a book in the public library. Hopefully, I'll see friends this evening. It's not really a vacation. Any pretense to this being a business trip vanished this morning. So instead it's a pause. I'll leave early next week. I'll go back home with a renewed vigor, focusing on whatever will make life here smoother and make permanent settlement (here or somewhere else) more probable.

One of the priests at my current parish is a former university chaplain. She said to me recently, "We love having folks from [my institution] here, but then you have to leave in four or five years, just when you're most deeply involved." Yet I felt joyful having five years to spend anywhere, knowing that the next stage of my life involves moving every one or two years in hopes of being able to stay somewhere for a minimum of six. So I really need to enjoy the year or two I get to spend here and restrain my feelings of rootlessness for a while.

The Gospel According to Dog the Bounty Hunter

A+E used to be basic cable's version of PBS. Now, it's a place for people, who in the 19th century would have been larger-than-life folk heroes, to get their own reality shows.

Last night, I spent 90 minutes watching Dog the Bounty Hunter . I don't know much about Dog. He has a lot of children by different women, some of whom he employs. He's probably been to prison. And he's a Christian.

It's the Christian part that's interesting. Before he goes out on a job, he gets his employees/relatives together and prays, "Lord, thank you for this day. Protect us in apprehending X. Protect X from getting hurt. In Jesus's name. Amen." It's funny. You can see Dog get mad at guys accused of hurting women or being otherwise reprehensible. He's very glad when they're caught, even when he doesn't collar them personally. But he hopes that those he meets are just like he was, capable of redemption. He doesn't expect them to be a new creation, he just wants them to be improved one. He takes bail bonds in the hope that his bail bond service will be better keeping them on the straight and narrow, so they can stay out of jail, hold a job, and look (and be) more capable of rehabilitation to a judge. I didn't see him preach once. But the way he treats those he apprehends reminds me of what Jesus preached to the soldiers mixed with the commissions to the apostles. Do your job by the book. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

His wife does curse out people and threaten them with economic ruin. But I think there's even love in that.

She That Tarried At Home Divided the Spoils

By now you probably have seen a link to an article entitled, "A Canterbury Tale" in The New Yorker . Some critiques already have been put forth about the article itself: from some errors in reading the politics to the use of Episcopalian as an adjective.

What struck me less was not the reporting but the particular nature of the theological sound bytes that filled the piece. They were more illuminating than usual and thus appeared more true.

For instance, here's what Jonathan Baker of Pusey House has to say,

“The question now,” he told me, “is whether our quest for unity with Rome can ever be filled institutionally—and is the ordinariate of Benedict XVI’s proposal the answer?” He thought it might be: “The reason for an all-male episcopate is that it’s the tradition of the Church. The tradition is the tradition. Let’s reflect on it. Not ‘Let’s find the theological justification.’ The priest is the sacramental representative of Christ as the High Priest, and . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence: “and Christ was male.”

He didn't finish the sentence? I'm not sure what to make of this. But I'll proceed under the hypothesis that he actually finished with the premise that Christ was male. In that case, let's break the argument down.

1. Tradition is tradition. The reflexive property of eternity. A bit further down, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford has this to say about tradition:

“The historical against-women argument about twelve male apostles—it comes from the early years of the Christian era and the spectacles put forth by the male leaders, who had wanted to be the ones to ‘see’ Christ first. By the end of the second century, a male leadership had emerged, and after that it became the ‘men were what the Holy Spirit intended’ argument and then the ‘tradition of the church’ argument. It was specious.

With all due respect to Professor MacCulloch, until a dusty papyrus with the minutes of the secret church council to deny the apostolate of the BVM et al. comes to light and goes on a thirty-two city tour with Elaine Pagels, I am not sure there is any reliable witness to claim an intentional power grab by male followers of Jesus. It's possible that such a tradition arose from concerns about the flightiness of women (II Tim. 3:6-7) and a variety of other misogynistic tropes, but an argument of polluted tradition has no firm justification beyond a few manuscript alterations (e.g., Junia becomes Junius in Romans 16:7).

Instead, we are left with the tradition is the tradition. Why are we not satisfied?, Father Baker asks. MacCulloch has something to say about, "a doctrine of the Holy Spirit." I wonder if the idea is that without ecclesiastical innovation, there is no reason to have a Holy Spirit. Or is the problem really that the lust for innovation is the infection of scientism and related elements of progressivism into Western civilization. That those who maintain tradition cannot justify their worth in our ever-advancing scientific/technological/consumerist society. (Deneen has a point in most of his particular examples. He is the kind of thinker who might be tempted to apply his ideas to this problem but wrongly, I think.)

We are not satisfied because tradition in this case has the form and nature of a statute (חֹק), that is in the technical sense as it is translated in the Pentateuch. Tradition becomes an inscrutable and inalterable prescription of God. I abhor statutes. Even the Jews abhor statutes. That is why there is an Oral Torah and MIshnaic and Talmudic literature. I think I remember that Calvin likes them, because he believes that there are laws our nature is incapable of understanding. But otherwise, tradition is allowed to remain until it is questioned and if it is questioned, it only may be sustained so long as it has positive justification.

2. The priest acts in imagine Christi and Christ was male.

The continued endurance of this argument boggles my mind. It depends on the utter inability of the Universal Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church as presently received by the Pope to think of Jesus's sex/gender in terms beyond Luke 2:21. But let's be clear, even if the Scriptures were absolutely unanimous on the exclusive maleness of God the Son and Jesus Christ (and they're not, read Eusebius for one key traditional example), the witness of the Catholic creeds suggests that Jesus's maleness is a secondary characteristic of His Incarnation:

Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed:
ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα.
Ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.

Athanasian Creed:

Est ergo fides recta ut credamus et confiteamur, quia Dominus noster Iesus Christus, Dei Filius, Deus [pariter] et homo est. Deus [est] ex substantia Patris ante saecula genitus: et homo est ex substantia matris in saeculo natus. Perfectus Deus, perfectus homo : ex anima rationali et humana carne subsistens. Aequalis Patri secundum divinitatem: minor Patre secundum humanitatem. Qui licet Deus sit et homo, non duo tamen, sed unus est Christus. Unus autem non conversione divinitatis in carnem, sed assumptione humanitatis in Deum. Unus omnino, non confusione substantiae, sed unitate personae. Nam sicut anima rationalis et caro unus est homo : ita Deus et homo unus est Christus. Qui passus est pro salute nostra: descendit ad inferos: tertia die resurrexit a mortuis. Ascendit ad [in] caelos, sedet ad dexteram [Dei] Patris [omnipotentis]. Inde venturus [est] judicare vivos et mortuos. Ad cujus adventum omnes homines resurgere habent cum corporibus suis; Et reddituri sunt de factis propriis rationem. Et qui bona egerunt, ibunt in vitam aeternam: qui vero mala, in ignem aeternum. Haec est fides catholica, quam nisi quisque fideliter firmiterque crediderit, salvus esse non poterit.

In the Chalcedonian Definition, the view rejected is that the one born of the Virgin Mary is not an anthropon einai and that he is born of the Virgin Mary according to his anthropoteta .

Based on these usages that refer to Jesus in terms of his humanity rather than his maleness ( vir or aner ) in concert with assertions that is for humans in general (according to the same usage) that Jesus came to save and humans in general that Jesus will judge, we must conclude that an all-male priesthood justified under this particular argument affirms the incapability of women for at least one of these three: sin, salvation, and judgment. And even in this case, Jesus can be purely male in terms of a secondary characteristic.

It rather puts the position of Andrew Burnham, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet into necessary context:

Certain things are unalterable. You can develop women’s ministry in a normal way, but you can’t change ministry or the episcopate any more than you can bread and wine. What remains is Jesus’ choice of twelve men. The Catholic priesthood is successor to the Jewish priesthood. A gracious patriarchy. The only apostolic themes in the New Testament are men. I have followed the teaching of the Church.

This is a degenerate (ambiguous) statement but telling in its degeneracy. (The bread and wine do change after all.) The only justification of an all-male priesthood that does not depend on inaccurate stereotypes about women, Christological errors, or denial of the gender-indiscriminate efficacy of Christ's saving work is that the Catholic priesthood is a successor of the Jewish priesthood. Which is true only in part, because as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, Jesus wasn't a descendant of Levi or Aaron (according to patrilineal assessment of priestly descent). If Jesus were a true successor of the Jewish priesthood, he only could be a descendant of Levi or Aaron through his mother. That's why the Letter to the Hebrews asserts that Jesus was called to priesthood de novo as a priest of a more perfect covenant, the order of Melchizedek, to which Episcopalians admit everyone through baptism. (And I suspect other catholic churches do, too.)

The most telling argument is the one that sounds most misogynist,

John Broadhurst was already mourning the loss of strong father-figure priests, swept away by the petticoats of an “overly feminine” clergy that was “not equipped for service in the kind of neighborhoods where people get stabbed in the middle of the night and a priest has to get up and drive to the hospital to administer last rites.” In a war between the petticoats and the happy-clappies, he thought the evangelicals would win.

I know many women priests who would go willingly into bad neighborhoods and do drive a few nights per week to the hospital to succor the dying. Just as women can be excellent shepherds of sheep, they can be excellent shepherds of Christians. The risk of the overly feminine clergy is not that they will be bad at their jobs but too good. That if you believe stereotypes about women, you might believe they are more skilled in helping and healing. They just might be better pastors. The male/female gender ratio of priests in the Church of England is expected to reach parity in 2025. You make the call.

I would like to be charitable. I would like to believe in all controversies that the position of my opponents arose from truth and virtue. But reading an article like this makes such a belief entirely too hard to sustain.

Caelius Spinator Philosophiae Doctor

Cryptic, eh? The monks have been doing a lot of praying, but a faculty committee of the Imperial University of Science and Technology on Ionia has recommended that I be admitted to the degree. So I'm now a Ph.D. by courtesy until June.

Sabbath

Somewhere in an upper middle class neighborhood in Jerusalem, the Sabbath lamps are burning low. A few men and more women sit in the front room. They span generations. There's the young servant girl who wonders when they all will go to bed, since it's a week of hard work ahead for her in the remaining days of Passover. There's the young master, who had been studying in Galilee of all places and returned to Jerusalem last week. There's some older women, visitors from the suburbs or from more distant villages.

You may laugh, Reader. This night seems so present to me. But this night is with us still somewhere, receding far into the distance beyond our grasp. A few photons from those lamps may have reached the Veil Nebula by now.

No one is speaking. They cannot speak. Words and logic fail them.

The three Miriams are there. Each one has a different place in the schema of mourning. The second Miriam mourns out of duty for a nephew and a sister's loss. She does not speak out of decency, out of compassion. She does not say what she must have thought for at least a year: that Joshua was coming to a bad end. The third Miriam mourns the loss of an intimate friend, the loss of a man who seemed to walk living out of the legends of Israel, the loss of a man who had restored true prophecy to the chosen people of God. The young master sitting across from her and some others mourn in the same way. They have seen signs and wonders, but it all has ended in blood and pain outside the city walls this afternoon. They are trying to wake themselves as from a dream. They are trying to tell themselves that they imagined it. Not the death. The death was very real. The death was the real thing that broke the dream. Everything else was imaginary. The third Miriam thinks of her brother. It was very good that the man who died figured out her brother had been entombed alive.

But it is the first Miriam who is most alone, isolated not only by the unique depths of a mother's grief, the sense that a life and heart and breathed and beat with her own had been extinguished cruelly. She is the second Eve, the foretaste of a new deal for creation. But the young master is the one who ponders cosmic significance. We revere the first Miriam because she said, "Yes." Because she agreed to a dangerous intimacy with God. We revere her as a teenager. But this is the night that makes her the first of us all. This is the night on which faith in Jesus Christ as Man and God is first tested by doubt. The first and deepest doubt is reserved for the mother of the deceased, who could not explain away the dream as easily as the rest. She could pretend there was no angel. She could pretend there were no eastern sages or adoring shepherds. But she couldn't pretend that her dear child had come in the ordinary way. Her sign and wonder was not a sudden cure or a thing of light and shadow. He came to her as a little boy, dependent on her for everything. He was a thing that could not be, should not be, and whom she loved dearly because of that, in spite of that. And so when he claimed to be the son of God, she felt as if that weird vision, that sudden pregnancy, that fight with her mother, that gracious response by Joseph, that hard journey to Bethlehem, that rude birth, that time in Egypt, and all of those odd events made sense. It's nonsense now. That is her pain, her weight.

Despite what the servant girl may hope, those men and women aren't going to move much until sunrise. They'll say nothing. Later, no one will write anything about this day beyond a mention of the very private burial. Come sunset, a note will come to the young master from respected family friends. It will say something about how it's all been taken care of and that he should come and see them after the festival. They will advise him to lie low and keep those Galileans out of sight.

Maundy Thursday Reading

Saravia on the Eucharist

Topics at Thanksgiving Dinner (Not Introduced By Me)

Anglican chant.
The present and historical importance of Benedictine spirituality in the Episcopal Church and in Anglican churches generally.
The necessity of theology by holding Scripture, reason, and tradition in dialectical tension ala Richard Hooker.
Various parts of the Hymnal including S288 and 365. Etc.

The host was a very senior professor in my department who just happens to have a daughter who is an Episcopalian and a connexion who is a retired priest.

So it was a fun afternoon, stuffing, pie, and all.

Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving!

And the name of the Apostolic Constitution is:

Anglicanorum coetibus

I originally read it as Anglicanorum coitibus. I'd wager someone in the Vatican chancery had the same thought.

Creator and Redeemer of All the Worlds Redux

Lee of Thinking Reed posts about an astrobiology conference at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

You may remember a piece I wrote a few years ago on the subject of this conference . You also may have seen ABC's remake of V, in which the Vatican (presumably infiltrated by the aliens) immediately welcomes Anna and her vast cohort with open arms.

A couple of points from the Washington Post article Lee links are worth fleshing out:

"I think the discovery of a second genesis would be of enormous spiritual significance," says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist from Arizona State University who is speaking at the Vatican conference. He believes the potential challenge to Christianity in particular "is being downplayed" by religious leaders.

"The real threat would come from the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, because if there are beings elsewhere in the universe, then Christians, they're in this horrible bind. They believe that God became incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind, not dolphins or chimpanzees or little green men on other planets."

Davies explained the tensions within the Catholic Church: "If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations," he said, referencing the belief that Christ could have appeared on other planets at other times. "The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism." (As Giordano Bruno learned.)

This is one of those situations in which the Creeds send us for a loop. For we proclaim, "δι’ ού τά πάντα εγένετο (through him all things were made)" but then say, "όν δι’ ημάς τούς ανθρώπους καί διά τήν ημετέραν σωτηρίαν κατελθόντα εκ τών ουρανών (for us human beings and for our salvation he came down from heaven)." Those who debated the Christian faith in the 4th century simply had no conception of a heavens filled with Earths. Yet the basic proclamation of the Gospel to us is clear. The defining characteristic of the Christian revelation is the Incarnation, the one through whom all things were made emptying himself and becoming a very small part of creation. The widest proclamation of the Great Commission is probably the oldest: that the Gospel be proclaimed to every ktisis created being. That the fullness of creation receive the message of the Creator. In that case, there is no need for another Incarnation, for a human to an alien to intelligent cetaceans are just as irrelevantly different in the economy of salvation as the Jew and the Gentile. The deciding factor in the operation of grace as we know it is that of Abraham whose faith the author of the Letter to the Hebrews was reckoned to him as righteousness. Lee is correct that aliens without religion would be a troubling scenario, since we are not always kind to the creatures among us whose capability for faith in God we cannot discern.

But, of course, there is another opinion in the article:

Many Protestant scholars agree with Funes, saying that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would not pose a major challenge to their faith or theology, especially if it was not intelligent or morally aware. But on the evangelical side, there is a deep concern, one reminiscent of the battles over evolution. "My theological perspective is that E.T. life would actually make a mockery of the very reason Christ came to die for our sins, for our redemption," Gary Bates, head of Atlanta-based Creation Ministries International, told me recently in a critique of the Vatican conference. Bates believes that "the entire focus of creation is mankind on this Earth" and that intelligent, morally aware extraterrestrial life would undermine that view and belief in the incarnation, resurrection and redemption drama so central to the faith. "It is a huge problem that many Christians have not really thought about," he said.

To some extent, you can read the Scriptures to support a very geocentric position on the acts of God. The sun, moon, and stars are described in Genesis, "as signs both for festivals and for seasons and years." The Psalmist has a somewhat different opinion, "When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars you have set in their courses, What is man that you should be mindful of him?" (Psalm 8). This Psalm is Christological. The exalted human compared to the vastness of the heavens is Jesus Christ, the one through whom all things were made. But the exaltation of Jesus or the kenosis of God the Son in human flesh is an act of randomness. Why humans? Why Abraham? The freedom of God is to relate to anyone He chooses. Moreover, the Psalmist tells us, "Yours is the day, O God, yours also the night; you established the moon and the sun. You fixed the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter" (Psalm 74). I just can't read this without seeing this as an acknowledgment of God's dominion being exercised through physical law. And yet these same physical laws could allow for other habitable planets, even intelligence. Like Leviathan, who knows what God has made for the sport of it.

Gary Bates's position reminds me of the speech to Job out of the whirlwind. You can imagine Bates encountering an extraterrestrial at the resurrection of the body and asking God to explain himself, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?" Don't you know how the universe works? The basis of "biblical creationism" lies in a theological view that cannot deal with the universe that God created: that makes their faith in the Creator dependent on the nature of the creation. Biblical literalism or inerrancy can be an idol as thrilling like any of the Amorites. I suspect that Bates thinks if Christians did think about it, they would attack the effort to find out the truth. This is dangerous error. Truly living under the government of God means accepting the creation that has been given to us and opening ourselves to the possibility that God's love is wide enough for all created beings.

From Another End of My Diocese

I decided to take a look at what's been going on "John 1:5" lately.

Here's an excerpt from a reply to someone angry about the Church of the Blessed Sacrament's decision to be a parish with some members under DEPO of Bishop +Ed Little (including the clergy I would presume) and some under ACNA The very idea of doing something like this is so astoundingly creative (and beats the alternative) that you all should know about it.

Moreover, the sloganistic words “diversity” and “inclusivity” have little or nothing to do with the Christian faith of the New Testament, which is the foundation of our life. Diversity and inclusivity are valuable principles only when they are expressive of the much richer and deeper Christian virtues of firm adherence without compromise to revealed truth, lived out in powerful charity. When these convictions are held, then “diversity” and “inclusivity” do not need to be mentioned, for they are already being done. I don’t think you can even find these words in the New Testament—you find much more powerful and richer words than “diversity” and “inclusivity”. How can one be more inclusive than to “preach the Gospel to every creature”? When one is committed to preaching to every creature, one doesn’t have to repeat how “inclusive” one is being. The very appellation “Evangelical” requires “inclusivity”. And how can one be more diverse than “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female—you are all one in Christ Jesus”? Being incorporated into Christ does not obliterate or ignore these real differences, but rather affirms the uniqueness and value of each believer and revels in the differences that make up the one Body. The very appellation “Catholic” requires “diversity”.

The attraction of the progressive tendency in the Episcopal Church these days is that I find more room there than anywhere else to discern how the promise of God in Jesus Christ along these lines can be genuinely realized. I worry that we may be led into self-idolatry if it goes too far. But to borrow from Alister McGrath's analogy of Christian doctrine as a ship, there is bad wood in some parts of the ship that's causing illness and violence among the sailors. My love for the shipwrights will not blind me to the faults in the cabin walls. And anyone who says otherwise must be challenged just as much those who are trying to tear up the entire ship "to give us all some fresh air."

Excerpts from Paul the Deacon

Derek was nice enough to post a chapter of his dissertation discussing the important influence Paul the Deacon had on the medieval church in the West.

I found out he was a poet and was curious what he wrote. I have mixed feelings on Carolingian poetry. I like their hymnody, e.g. a solis ortus cardine , but I found Alcuin rather bizarre. I think I like Paul the Deacon.

For those who don't read Latin, here is a very little taste: (I don't believe in dry or literal translations for poetry)

From his verses to Peter the Grammarian
"I am compared to Homer, Horace, and Vergil/ I am more a rhetorician or a hack philosopher/ But you, O man of Verona rate with Tibullus."

"I don't know even a little Greek, forget Hebrew/ Three or four on the faculty have taught me a few words/ The little I've gleaned is all I bring to the threshing floor."

Thank You For Your Prayers

I just wanted to thank you all for your prayers for my late grandmother and my family. I've been mostly on the road this past week, so I'm understandably not up to writing about much. But I thought you might enjoy this Pandagon conversation about tipping , which raises some very interesting issues, not the least how I think the strong Sabbatarian streak in American Protestants is reflected in some of our behavior at Sunday lunch.

Breaking Silence

I am the third of the dissertating trio in this little section of the blogosphere, and while Christopher and Derek seem to be over the hump, I am still very much in the thick of it. I smell very much of camel. Therefore, I really haven't been thinking much about the usual matters of this blog. I enjoy reading Haligweorc , The Topmost Apple , Thanksgiving in All Things , and Culture Choc . Thanks for sharing your thoughts and the wonders of the world beyond my computer screen.

Could I beg a favor of you? Could you pray for my grandmother and my family. My grandmother is between life and death at the moment. If you ever wonder why I read appear to read so widely, you can trace it to my grandmother, from whom I inherited (through my mother) my voracious appetite for good books of all kinds.

Responding to C056: Seeing the Grace Among Us

Note: Apparently, the House of Deputies has yet to approve C056. It will take up the legislation this morning.

Well, it's happened. Every three years, General Convention is asked to approve liturgies for "same-sex blessings" or approve the drafting of such liturgies for further study. Finally, in 2009, we have C056, which says:

Resolved, the House of Deputies concurring, that the 76th General Convention acknowledge the changing circumstances in the United States and in other nations, as legislation authorizing or forbidding marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships for gay and lesbian persons is passed in various civil jurisdictions that call for a renewed pastoral response from this Church and for an open procession for the consideration of theological resources and liturgies for the blessing of same gender relationships; and be it further

Resolved, That the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, in consultation with the House of Bishops, collect and develop theological resources and design liturgies, and report to the 77th General Convention for further action; and be it further

Resolved, That the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, in consultation with the House of Bishops, devise an open process for the conduct of its work inviting participation from provinces, dioceses, congregations, and individuals who are engaged in such theological work, and inviting theological reflection from throughout the Anglican Communion; and be it further

Resolved that bishops, particularly those in dioceses within civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships are legal, may provide generous pastoral response to meet the needs of members of this Church, and be it further

Resolved that this convention continue to honor the theological diversity of this Church in regard to matters of human sexuality and be it further

Resolved that member of this church be encourage to engage in this effort.

In other words, General Convention has authorized me and every other Episcopalian to reflect on "the blessing of same gender relationships." So I am going to do just that.

Recently, the Diocese of Niagara in the Anglican Church of Canada posted their trial liturgy for such blessings on their web site. I remember skimming this liturgy and thinking something to the effect of "I might have to stifle laughter frequently during the ceremony." Derek quotes some gifted reader as saying,

"I believe their new liturgy is the absolute quintessence of everything that is wrong with liberal
Anglican liturgics. It’s so supernally bad, abysmally written, and theologically horrifying that if I were a gay man in the Diocese of Niagara contemplating marriage, I might throw myself over the falls in despair. It’s no wonder that so many anti-inclusion Anglicans see inclusivity as the path by which the Anglican Churches will abandon their fidelity to the Creeds and to the theology of the Prayerbook.

I currently attend the parish in the Anglican Communion that has been blessing same gender unions the longest (nearly two decades). I once attended such a liturgy, which resembled a wedding of two sensible straight people beyond childbearing age with a slight shift of pronouns from the 1979 BCP (well as faithful as my parish ever is to the Liturgy of this Church). Louis and Ernest Crew (though much younger) apparently used the 1928 BCP.

From these anecdotes, I think the blessing of same gender unions is likely to go one of two ways. Either liturgies will be developed that showcase the descent of Anglican liturgics further and further toward Unitarianism or pop paganism, because someone will think that living in a homosexual relationship is apostasy anyway (they'll say "progressive" or something rather than apostasy, but let the reader understand) or someone will alter the Marriage liturgy decently and in good order.

The first essentially denies a same gender union a Christian character or at least a Trinitarian one. The second says that a same gender union is the same as an opposite gender union in terms of Christian theology.

I can't find the quote at the moment, but someone (I think on Thinking Anglicans) said something to the effect of, "Anglicans bless fishing boats and dogs but not the love [between two people of the same gender]"

From a theological perspective, the blessings of the Church fall into three categories. Fishing boats and dogs fall into a category that probably should be called sacramentals . The Roman Catholics use this name for any ritual outside of those necessary for the efficacy of the Sacraments. So sprinkling holy water or praying over someone in general is a sacramental. (The Methodists call our next category sacramentals, but I'm a High Churchman and prefer the Roman usage.) The Scriptural warrant for the fishing boat/dog type of sacramental is 1 Timothy 4:4-5. The Apostle says, "For every thing created by God is good and nothing to be refused, if received in thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer." Except for the fact that Paul is knocking kashrut, this is very Jewish approach to the world. And so a sacramental reminds us of the goodness of each created being and the whole of creation and their utility to the Kingdom when used by members of the Kingdom. But beyond this, a sacramental has no particular theological significance. A scientist might call a sacramental relevant to Christian life on short timescales: the sanctification of the little things of daily life.

Marriage in Anglican theology falls into a second category defined by the Articles of Religion as, "states of life allowed in the Scriptures...for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God." (Article XXV). In true High Church fashion, I regard these as Sacraments not of the Gospel or commonly called Sacraments, as the Article saith. These are important on scale of our natural lives. They aren't necessary to salvation. No one need use them. But they are the standard forms of care for great changes and long timescales in our life. For some, they can serve to deepen the work of God within us and our communities. The Apostle says of some women that they will be saved through their children. He was arguing against marriage at that time (on prudential grounds), but this comment shows he recognized that the raising of children could be means of relating to God. In fact, it's a good example of how our relating to God more deeply is very often couched as mimesis . By relating to our own children, we understand how God tries to relate to us. Something I often hear from parents who want to baptize their children is that they hear the words of the Father to Jesus in his baptism and want to say this with God to their own children.

The 1662 BCP says of Marriage (or the Solemnization of Matrimony):

DEARLY beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.
First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.
Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.
Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace.

The first part is interesting in that it does everything but say that Matrimony is a Sacrament. It is instead an "estate", a thing in which to stand, to be stable. Thus if I may dispense with explaining the eternal nature, relevance, and necessity of the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism, Anglican theology recognizes three means or forms of blessing: sacramentals, estates, and Sacraments. Of course, to be consistent, I guess sickness and/or wellness are estates as well to include Unction, but anyone who has been sick or especially chronically ill might appreciate that there is a particular form of blessing and care for that estate. (Penance is for for spiritual illness after all. Hmmm...)

I think the blessing of a same gender union ideally is the blessing of an estate, a particular and not universal need. Like Penance (or Matrimony for that matter), all may, some should, and none must. The question is whether the estate of a same gender union is Matrimony or not. I would argue from the 1662 BCP that it isn't for the very reasons that opponents of homosexual love in general might use. Same gender unions don't arise from the primal union of Adam and Eve. Jesus didn't go to a gay wedding in Cana. Most obviously, same gender unions do not signify to us the mystical union between Christ and His Church. Nor could a gay couple procreate (using their own resources) for most of human history. Matrimony arises from Scriptural witness that connects male-female romantic love with the relationship between God and the covenant people. Matrimony is a mimetic exercise with distinct obligations of the partners. In former times, theologians often emphasized the New Covenant role of the husband and the Old Covenant role of the wife: sacrifice for one, obedience for the other. In modern times, we're having a lot of trouble dealing with gender complementarity, gender roles, equality between men and women in all spheres and life, the evils of patriarchy, and a past in which the equal status of men and women in Jesus Christ and elsewhere was denied. Yet even in this more egalitarian age, I think New Covenant role of a wife requires serious reflection. If a wife is supposed to imitate the Church, I think that could mean something quite different in the present era. But maybe I'll figure out what that is if I ever get married.

In our era, I think the confusion of same gender unions with "the way of a man with a maid" (or at least the lawful way) is logical. Matrimony has become egalitarian, so the notion that husband and wife might have distinct mystical significance and roles in a marriage seems old-fashioned, backward, and dangerous. So let me tell you a story. My mother was the first person in her particular white collar workplace not to leave when she had a child. I was very well taken care of when I was a baby. My parents worked different shifts. My mother ensured that I was fed the old-fashioned way using modern technology and the transfer of necessary nutriment took place when they changed shifts. My father recognized that the work my mother did was important to her flourishing (and possibly larger aims) and nobly inconvenienced himself in a variety of ways to make it happen. (I associate my father with household chores stereotypically associated with men and women). My mother realized that bringing me into the world was an important telos as well. In a world in which women try to be both mothers and active in the labor force (and often fail without support), I find the self-giving love of Christ for a Church pursuing actively his Reign to be quite palliative to the often falsely egalitarian modern marriages, in which husbands appreciate their wives' income (and children) but not the struggle that it takes to do it if relieving that struggle would hurt their own careers.

I suppose same gender unions could have that dynamic. In a lesbian relationship, one partner could have the kids, the other not. Surrogacy etc. allows all sorts of permutations with regards to reproduction, and I know the progeny of these relationships and think that they turned out very well. What worries me is that being gay or lesbian is a gift from God: an occurrence throughout the created order and thus the result of natural law. If God didn't give such a gift for a good and particular purpose, I think it would not be fitting, considering the prejudice humans show to those out of the mainstream in anything. I worry that we might try to incorporate gay and lesbian relationships into Matrimony, because we do not appreciate the unique charisms such relationships have in the Church and the world. How many times does a gay couple get asked, "Who's the woman?"? Well, from my reading of certain ancient texts, that's not how life-giving same-sex relationships work. To relate to someone in love of the same gender, you need to relate on the same level. The ancient world was obsessed with active and passive and violence and exploitation. That's not love. That's not a permanent and faithful union. That's not a mimesis of anything of things where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Part of our theological work with same gender unions must be about the unique charisms such relationships bring to the Church. This will be hard. In our discussions of civil marriage, we demand equality in all things, fearing that the equality of our citizenship depends on it. In the Church, we need not worry. Our equality lies in the Sacraments. But thinking about estates means thinking about gender distinctives or distinctives in gender relationality, the particularity of our creation, and how we participate in the divine life with one another. As I've written before, there's an eschatological hierarchy in all of this. A monk is in an estate. An anchorite is in an estate. And at the eschaton all estates end and merge into an estate in union with the Triune God.

I've argued before that the mimesis of same gender unions lies in the relationality of the members of the Body (with Christ as Head) or the members of the Trinity, following the ancient estate of adelpheia (signified through the rite of Adelphepoesis). But I'm open to any other ideas or arguments. In this time of theological reflection, I would urge us all to spend time in fellowship with faithful couples of all types in the Episcopal Church. See how unions solemnized by matrimony work. See how unions of two men or women work. See the gifts they bring to each other, the church, and the world. And then I urge brothers and sisters to pray on the how the life of God in relation to creation is reflected therein. Only then should the liturgizing begin.

P.S.: The rite *Christopher and his partner used is far and away the best I've seen. (Yes, I wrote part of it, but I only could write what I wrote because of the theological vision of the rite and its celebration of the unique charism of the union of two Godly men.) The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music needs to read it well before the next General Convention.

Two Hits

1. The title of our youth Christian Education hour today was, "The G.C. in the O.C.-I in You and You in Me."
Ubuntu==High Priestly Prayer in John.

2. The key mission question for TEC today: How can we be post-Evangelical?

The USA: Where Even the Extreme Right Are Modalists

I was reading Pandagon today, which was exposing the virulent "Biblically-based" homophobic rhetoric of Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern, including her "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality." I then was surprised to see this Proclamation close with:

BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned, humbly call upon Holy God, our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer, [emphasis mine] to have mercy on this nation, to stay His hand of judgment, and grant a national awakening of righteousness and Christian renewal as we repent of our great sin.

For the record, Rep. Kern is married to an Independent Baptist minister. As in the case of many Episcopal priests, it is not known whether the formula used above is a mistaken attempt at inclusive Trinitarian language or intentional Modalism.

Postcards from the Edge

Well, at least postcards from thesis writing.

The current and former graduate students among my readers will know or remember that writing a thesis is alternately tedious and exhilarating in roughly equal proportions. Like Anastasia, I'll try to anonymize my subject matter as much as possible. My thesis mostly will be a series of journal articles on the air conditioning system of a nearby ball of rock that may or may not be red. Chapter 2 on momentous hot flashes has received decent reviews from my collaborators but still require substantial revision before it gets to the journal. Chapter 3 on the distribution of contaminants in the air conditioning system is mostly ready for others to read but in light of the comments on Chapter 2 probably should be revised. Chapter 4 on the origin of contamination in the air conditioning system in certain seasons is stuck on the part where I blame a form of contamination on Warner Bros' famed Tasmanian Devil. There may or may not be a Chapter 5 that is a broad overview of the air conditioning system, its seasonal variability in operational efficiency, and the general distribution of condensation and contaminants in the system. Yet whether there is a Chapter 5 or not, I still probably will be writing most of a paper on that subject. Unfortunately, I still feel very silly writing about the parts of the air conditioning system, some of which really don't have names in the literature. Yay, thesis! I just wish I could write for more than five hours per day without feeling entirely empty of cogent thoughts.

In other news, I have another round of baptismal preparation to help facilitate in July and also am helping out with a community-supported agriculture project. On this blog, I tend to complain bitterly about my parish, but I also should point out that the parish actually puts the same amount of energy into its service of others as it does into its iconoclasm. I'm not sure whether it is really prepared for our more energy-constrained future in some senses (Ionia's social safety net is not long for this world without a robust tech sector and the Asian trade), but we do seem to be working on efforts related to sustainability and community-building that may make life better for many of our neighbors even in the greater metropolitan area.

I was a groomsman at a wedding this weekend in the Midwest. I had a great time. The friend who was getting married is a Friend, but his bride was LCMS, so the ceremony was LCMS. I was moderately surprised at how egalitarian marriage liturgies can be even in the more confessional side of American Lutheranism and how very similar to the 1979 BCP. The hymn choices were wonderful. We sang both "Earth and All Stars" (physicist marries veterinarian...) and "Alleluia, Sing to Jesus!" But the best part of the wedding was how amazingly hospitable everyone was. (Oh, and I managed to see many old friends again...). Unfortunately, I also appear to be allergic to the Midwest during the summer or in general. I've long suspected this after a few interesting family vacations and four years of college, but I wish I knew why.

In a few weeks, General Convention 2009 meets in Disneyland. I'm not kidding. I'm not planning on going to GC, but I did work out the two trains and a bus I'd need to get there. Given the hubbub about the K.T. Forrester election, I am curious how heated "The Happiest Place on Earth" might become if the different "revisionist" factions in the Church start fighting each other. My advice to delegates: Go to Knotts Berry Farm. It's cheaper and at least as fun. My advice for everyone else: see p. 818.