Change of (Physical) Address

Gentle readers, I write to you from the centrally isolated portion of a large Northeastern State, where I am recently come to live and work. At present, my new home county and townlands are on edge, awaiting the arrival of the transient population of undergraduates and some graduate and professional students, which swells the population of the county by 20% and the population of my city of residence by perhaps 70%. The crippling increase in traffic that shall arrive in coming days only will be the beginning of the oppression of the collegiate year, which, by all accounts, is filled with rudeness, public intoxication, vandalism, and civil disorder. If it did not snow here, the townsfolk would have to invent some other suitable form of containment for the young and privileged good-for-nothings that inhabit the Palatine and Capitoline for two semesters each year. Since I look very much of the age to be the object of local ressentiment and am employed by one of the kindly mothers of studies upon these hills, I walk the streets feeling dangerously suspect. On one hand, the employment and limited incubation of entrepeneurial endeavors provided by the institutions here is essential to a local economy whose days of skilled, heavy manufacturing are over and whose labor's conscience may or may not object to the hydrofragmentary rapine of the neighboring plots of Earth for natural gas. On the other hand, college students raise rents, assert privilege, and cause trouble. I, however, have risen far enough in academia to know that my sympathies lie just on the side of the town.

My new parish is distinctly lovely and hospitable to newcomers and to the poor. Her grossest liturgical abuse is the Gospel sandwich. Her preaching focuses on culture and contemplation more than policy and politics. Her social teaching, if I may speak of such a thing, is very little different than my former parish, but it is lived out in harmony with tradition rather than conflict. As much as I dearly miss my friends in Christ in Laodicea, I am content with the change in sea from the Ionian to the Aegean.

In the next week, my new boss comes to town in company with her charges in statu pupillari . I have a new research project and research group dynamic to forge in the coming weeks. So my updates likely will be infrequent as they have been for some time to come. They should be less polemical, though.

In Search of the Ur-Faculty Advisor

Some academics, especially mathematicians, like to play a genealogical game, in which their faculty advisor, usually their Ph.D. advisor, is considered a parent. They then enjoy tracing their intellectual forebears into distant antiquity. I was rather bored today, so I decided to trace my own academic genealogy. On an earlier attempt, I became lost in Scottish surgeons of the 19th century, but the Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University opened up a completely different genealogical path in Germany, a country with a stronger tradition (or better records) of faculty advising.

Eight generations back, I encountered Bunsen (of burner fame).

Sixteen generations back, I discovered my academic ancestors were Lutheran apologists, mainly educated at the University of Wittenberg.

Twenty four generations back, I found Nicholas Copernicus, a man whose contributions to modern astronomy are somewhat overestimated but whose work on the revolutions of the planets was the first shot of the Scientific Revolution.

Copernicus's academic ancestors were medieval astronomers at the University of Vienna. So twenty nine generations back, I found the great reforger of the University of Vienna, Henry of Langenstein, who wrote about planetary science in the sense that he argued that the appearance of a comet did not portend any future event.

The funny thing is that Henry of Langenstein (and the Byzantine scholar, Gemistos Pletho) are the oldest scholars listed by the Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University. In some sense, they are the ur-faculty advisors of science. Scientific genealogies generally end there.

But did they have advisors? The unadvised advisor is even more unlikely than an unmoved mover. Well, maybe Socrates was the unadvised advisor. But the discontinuity between Plato's Academy and the medieval universities of the West makes it hard to connect Socrates and me, though Pletho indeed could be the link.

So I decided to trace Henry of Langenstein further. In theology, he seems to have been advised by a Cistercian master of some obscurity, but scientifically, it is often claimed he was influenced by Jean Buridan, who taught in the Faculty of Arts at Paris. (You should google "Buridan's ass.")

Buridan probably was most influenced by the instruction of William of Ockham (of Ockham's Razor fame). Considering the influence of the principle of parsimony, Ockham really could be the ur-faculty advisor of natural science. Yet it is claimed by some authors that Ockham may have received instruction from John Duns Scotus, the Postulant's chief philosopher of expertise. And coincidentally, Scottish. The trail then grows cold in the midst of the faculty of the Franciscan studium generale at Oxford.

So after thirty-two generations of graduate students, we have progressed from Scotus to me. Darn, I was hoping for Aquinas.

How To Set Off An Atomic Bomb

In this guide, we will describe how to construct a thermonuclear device capable of blowing the Anglican Communion to kingdom come in an exceptionally catholic and orthodox way.

1. Take a gay man.
2. Ordain him a priest in the Church of England.
3. Make him awesome.
4. Make him celibate and thereby turn his long-term relationship celibate.
5. Wait a while.
6. When civil partnerships become legal, let him and his long-term partner enter one.
7. Consecrate him a bishop.

Warning: This device can be defused by a spineless Archbishop under pressure from Anglican Mainstream and allied groups.

Well, it's happening again. The Holy Spirit has put it in a bunch of minds in the Church of England to make Jeffrey John a bishop, this time of Southwark. We'll see if it the appointment actually is made, but oddly enough, it said that neither Canterbury (+Cantaur) nor York (+Ebor) have made any objection. I may have to take back what I said about the Grace of God not being irresistible.

The significance of John's consecration as Bishop of Southwark would be immense. Being partnered, celibate, and open about his sexual orientation and his sexless life, John literally conforms to the Deuteronomic/Levitical standards of sexual conduct while having a manner of life that confounds conservatives and probably makes some liberals equally uncomfortable. He and his partner (also a priest) model a third way for gay relationships and the Christian faith that is equally modernist and traditional. If he becomes a bishop in the Church of England, the Global South will have to compromise their homophobia or reject the Church of England. Or as is more likely, they could mutter about penal atonement and face alienation from the more catholic Provinces of the Communion. Whatever happens, prayer and a good supply of popcorn will be necessary.

Attribution of a Prayer

Today, the commencement speaker) at my graduation, the Administrator of NASA, (did you know he is an Episcopalian?) quoted from the Prayers of the People of The Book of Common Prayer. Or so he claimed... (I know the Prayers of the People well enough to tell his attribution was incorrect).

I initially thought it was a prayer from Enriching Our Worship . My father thought it was from the New Zealand Prayer Book. A little work with Google suggested It was a slightly modernized version of a prayer of Sir Francis Drake re-posted here and quoted as such in very recently published collections of prayers. (Other prayers are attributed to Drake, including an adaptation of one of his prayers used for propaganda purposes during World War II.)

The earliest reference I can find to the prayer is in a 1985 issue of the newsletter of the National Cathedral. It's quoted in The Witness the next year. Unfortunately, I can't figure out to whom the prayer was attributed in those publications. But its origins do lie at the door of the Episcopal Church, just not in The Book of Common Prayer .

Fulmen E Cantuaria Salutandum Est Fulgure Ex America

Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. --Hebrews 12:11

I met Katherine Grieb once. She is an exceptionally well-spoken and charming woman of a certain age. I am unsure whether I would like to be the Secretary-General of the Anglican Communion, Ken Kearon, right now. If Katherine Grieb is still a consultant to the many-lettered acronymous beast from which she has been partially disaffiliated, he still might have to look her in the face once in a while. Hopefully, by that time, he will have discovered that there is all manner of Anglican border crossing occurring in this country. I need only lift mine eyes unto the hills to see ecclesiastical Bolivia, just a few kilometers to my west.

A long time ago, Rev. Fr. Prof. Dr. AKMA asserted it was necessary that he be in communion with Canterbury and that he might consider leaving the Episcopal Church to continue in that communion. Well, while the present discipline measure of the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a full rupture of communion, it is clear that whatever rupture has been made, it is against the Episcopal Church as a whole. You cannot obey the moratoria on your own, as the Bishop of Montana has learned, and expect to remain in +Rowan Cantuar's good graces.

For the moment, I am willing to bear all things for Christ's sake. If it is necessary to maintain a Communion by a rather niggling sort of disapprobation once in a while, I am willing not to stir up a stink, being in the main unaffected by it and fairly sure that those "fairly" or unfairly injured by this action suffer no physical harm. I am far more concerned that this kind of disapprobation is not also applied to those who stymie the Communion-wide Listening Process by remaining neutral or actively encouraging gays and lesbians to remain in fear and concealment.

But I will allow our gracious Primate to set the terms of his own discipline within reason. If the border crossing actions of Rwanda, the Southern Cone, and Nigeria (and others unknown to this blogger) are not met with similar discipline, I would very much like there to be a stink. Here's the form it could take:

1. Funding by General Convention of the Anglican Communion Office and similar organs should be cut off entirely. Big fat goose egg. Money should be transferred to Episcopal Relief and Development or other line items connected with joint evangelism or relief work with other Provinces of the Communion. If a little of this money ended up in the hands of Changing Attitude Nigeria or Integrity Uganda, so be it.

2. We should encourage our brothers and sisters in the Church of England to pursue whatever means the Archbishop of Canterbury might be censured, disciplined, or otherwise suffer consequences through action of General Synod or Parliament.

3. The faculties of the Archbishop of Canterbury or any of the college of Bishops in the Church of England unwilling to disavow his iniquitous, inequitable, and hypocritical (and still entirely potential) actions should not be honored in the United States.

We Anglicans claim to belong the particular churches of particular places that is part of One visible and invisible Church whose Head is Jesus Christ. When we do naughty things to one another, we ought not to bear it as divine sanction or the fury of the powers but as the actions of our fellow sinners that require resistance. Some say that the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks himself a Pope. Well, we have no Pope but Our Father in Heaven. +Rowan Cantuar is Our Primate and so subject to our discipline as we are to his.

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.