...For That Which Is Signified

Very recently, I was sitting less than 20 minutes' drive from Moore, OK, discussing the historical reconstruction of Earth's climate system. I'll summarize the discussion by saying that the climate system is complex, our records of it always will be incomplete, and that reconstruction of the past always defies our ideal standards of proof and causality. Nature is impersonal. It has no motivations, only the compulsions of forces and the gradients in mass, composition, and energy that sustain them, which do arise at random. 

When we attempt to understand the co-evolution of life with the climate system, we are tempted to read those compulsions as motivations. One thread of intelligent design is that the historical evolution of the Earth system is motivated to produce human beings or at least some creature, "blessed with memory, reason, and skill," as the Eucharist Prayer puts it. One example is the mass extinction about 250 million years, at the end of Permian and the beginning of Triassic time. At the end of the Permian, there lived a creature called Lystrosaurus , a synapsid (mammal ancestor) who had evolved a rib cage and internal organs somewhat resembling ours so as to live underground like a gopher. Perhaps thanks to this lifestyle, Lystrosaurus survived the mass extinction and passed on its traits to its descendants, who perhaps include us. 

Stephen Jay Gould takes on the idea of teleological evolution in Full House , and for the moment, I'll accept his conclusion that the case for humanity as the telos of evolutionary processes is weak. Intelligent design tries to make a rational, objective case for something that is ultimately subjective: that we are one of the intended results of creation, like light and darkness, the celestial objects, plants, the birds of the air, the fish in the sea, and all the creatures that live on land. That the ultimately random and impersonal forces of nature do somehow harmonize. But we know this from revelation, not from nature. And it is from revelation, we, too, must understand how to read impersonal natural forces on shorter timescales.

I was on Twitter in Detroit Airport on Monday when I saw a debris signature in a radar image someone had posted. I had flown out of Oklahoma City a couple of hours before, and I tried to orient myself in the image with the places I'd been in the previous few days. Already having been delayed in Oklahoma one night, I had been quite enthusiastic about leaving before another round of severe thunderstorms developed, and seeing evidence of a tornado on radar within ten miles of the airport I would have been in, had the random odds of airline re-booking not been in my favor, came with some self-justification. Oh, how good had my judgment been. And then I thought, "That's a sprawling metropolitan area. I've seen those houses clustered here and there on the landscape. People live there. And that's a big tornado." Before I left Detroit, it was clear that a very strong tornado had caused multiple fatalities and severe damage.

It is a tenet of our civil righteousness that most dead people do not deserve to be dead. We make exceptions for murderers, some of those who abuse drugs or children, and people who die by sheer incompetence (if we are unconnected with them), but we draw the line well beyond people who die in natural or anthropogenic disasters. And by disasters, I mean those fatal events of a scale where grief is overwhelming because grief is correlated. And in these cases, we often attribute the escape of survivors to the grace (or visitation, as I sometimes say) of God. At funerals, we are known to say the converse: that the dead are dead, because God wanted them with Him in heaven. Our civil righteousness, however, bristles at the idea that the dead died for their sins or those of society as a whole, though some preacher almost always goes there. 

Mark Joseph Stern has a piece in Slate today about journalists trying to inject divine agency into people's experiences of the Moore tornado, which helpfully re-hashes some Enlightenment ideas about theodicy or atheodicy (justifying the ways of no God to man). (Or as  At one point, Stern quotes Isaiah 45:7 and then remarks, "These are thorny theological questions." As a mesoscale meteorologist (the particular type of scientist who studies tornadoes), I know that tornadoes are the outcome of physics on a planet like ours that has a day and a night, varying climates, seasons, and transports water from the land to the sea. As Callan Bentley points out, meteorologists at the National Weather Service and on broadcast media gave advance and accurate warning of the tornado in Moore as well as the probability for severe weather generally in Oklahoma. As a theologian, I know that tornadoes also are a manifestation of harmony that arises from apparently contradictory natural forces. For Athanasius in Contra Gentes, harmonious structures like tornadoes (not one of his examples) gave him insight into the oneness and goodness of God, which seems remarkably frustrating when the objects of demonstration kill people. 

In such cases, I'd say to people like Callan Bentley or Mark Joseph Stern, I pray, not because I believe it does anything (you'll hear why in a minute), but because if the Church is One Body with Christ, it ought to cry in pain when it is so badly injured. That we cannot cry in pain for all injuries is a measure of our limits, not the futility of prayer in such cases.

Which is not to say that Bentley and Stern don't have a point about divine agency saving people from tornadoes. They do, but I prefer to let Jesus make my argument. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, He justifies it by giving an example of the holiness of God, "Who lets the Sun shine on the evil and the good, and sends rain upon the just and unjust alike" (Matthew 5:45). One of the solemn and insoluble mysteries of the world is that we can find both sustenance and death from the operations of nature and that what we find can be (but is not always) decoupled from the content of our character. 

Jesus also insists that anthropogenic disasters and even mass murder is subject to the same calculus. See, for instance, Luke 13: 

"1 And there were present, at that very time, some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

2 And he answering, said to them: Think you that these Galileans were sinners above all the men of Galilee, because they suffered such things?

3 I say to you, No: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.

4 Or those eighteen upon whom the tower fell in Siloe, and slew them: think you, that they also were debtors above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem?

5 I tell you: No: but unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish."    

To paraphrase Peter: we know that Jesus's disciples died and their earthly bodies experienced corruption. Indeed, the tomb of Peter and others is with us to this day. Jesus is not saying that if repent, hide ourselves in Him, or experience whatever form of soteriological unity you prefer, we can escape the mysterious, intractable vulnerabilities of the created order. After all, Jesus couldn't. Or since we know Jesus could, we know that he didn't. Instead, I only can read Luke 13 to mean that death at any scale or random, lucky escapes at any scale signify for us law and grace in the eternal and soteriological context. Dying or not dying in a tornado is not the action of law and grace to individuals, it merely signifies these things for us. An unbelieving scientist need not start a sentence with "A God who is powerful enough to do X" and expect a believing scientist to be convinced of anything, the God we believe is as powerful and necessary as the laws of physics and their consequences thereof. But more.

So why do we confuse the signifier with the signified? Why do we identify the survivors with Grace and used to identify the dead with the punishment of the Law? Jacob Smith, the priest in charge of Calvary St. George in New York City may have reached the heart of this when he spoke at Mockingbird's NYC conference last month on "Ministering to Winners: The Poor, Captive, Blind, Oppressed (and Other People Like You and Me) or perhaps "the theology of the Cross vs. the theology of glory." At one point, he mentions that old Reformation term (familiar to my readers through *Christopher), we are curvatus in se. To paraphrase the Rev. Mr. Smith, the overwhelming action of universally accessible human salvation is reduced by the action of sin in our hearts to the glorification of our own personal story. And it's just the same when we see the miraculous escapes of others from natural disasters.

And I suppose I might have something different to say if I were being burned at the stake and the fire did not harm me or one of the other apparent suspensions of the natural law we hear of in the acts of the martyrs, but until then, I will try desperately to convince myself that the world entire is the proper object for thanksgiving, not just my lucky breaks.    

Co-Creating with the Millennials: Some First Steps

Yesterday, I was sitting at brunch with someone from church, who said, "I really like the way you've incorporated yourself into the church. So many young people just want so much from the church but won't give anything, they need to meet us half way."

The next words out of my mouth were not, "I am a single, straight white male, lifelong Episcopalian with a well-paying, if not particularly stable job. If I can't fit into this church, you should close your doors now."

This leads us to Crusty Old Dean's latest essay on the future of The Episcopal Church as my generation, the Millennials, eventually succeeds into leadership. Crusty Old Dean helpfully argues that this succession process should begin yesterday and be more cooperative than presently envisioned by the powers that be, so that TEC and other mainline denominations do not fail as miserably with the Millennials as they have with Generation X.

Reading essays about Millennials and Christianity always makes me feel inadequate. I feel, as a more or less intensely practicing Episcopalian of a certain age, that I should have brilliant insights about how to incorporate my generation into the church. I should feel constantly empowered by the Holy Spirit to win my generation for Christ. Or perhaps I have been reading too many eHarmony profiles (more on that later).

Unfortunately, I don't have any such brilliant insights, because I can't speak from my own experience. The way that Anglican Christianity and I are one is a type of the unity of the Godhead (in the least blasphemous and most inferior way possible). My faith and practice are inexplicable mysteries to me. I'm a cradle Episcopalian, who's never been off the figurative membership rolls of a parish since baptism, and whose longest period away from worshipping in an Episcopal church was ten happy weeks with an ELCA parish in suburban Houston (I didn't have a car). I've never been in the ordination process. I've never taken off a year to do domestic or foreign missionary activity, though I've taken a couple of weeks every once in a while. And I've been a member of three parishes of which neither parent was a member. I'm not bragging. I'm just pointing out that the number of people I know with background and experience like mine is smaller than the fingers on one hand.

Crusty Old Dean, in the essay I linked to and in other places, recounts being in meetings where he is the only generational representative in the room (in his case, X). And the others then have the politeness to ask him for his thoughts. I've had those moments, too. The realization I've had is to think about those of one's generation who are not here but might like to be, or even not know they want to be.

So now that I have professed my ignorance on the subject, let me now pontificate upon it. Crusty Old Dean proposes co-creation of a new Episcopal Church with Millennials. In other places, he thinks about creating a broader mainline body. I've seen what co-creation between Boomers and Millennials looks like. It is or was called the Occupy Movement.

Away from Wall Street, Occupy was a marriage of college-aged activists and Boomer/GenX-led activist groups. The latter groups often were closely associated with partisan politics, like MoveOn.org, or connected to partisan groups with little or slightly more influence in American electoral politics, such as the Democratic Socialists of America or the perpetual Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. In other cases, the groups were more local, grassroots organizations with limited partisan affiliation. Let's draw the analogy between the partisan/electoral groups and denominational structures or national ecumenical groups. Let's also draw the analogy between the local, non-partisan groups and parishes, individual ministries of parishes, and local parachurch/ecumenical organizations.

One Lesson from Occupy: Democratically-Joined Activities vs. Top-Down Institutional Efforts

So what happened with Occupy? Well, there was conflict. The most important conflict centered around Millennial concern that Occupy was being co-opted by the Boomer/GenX-led organizations. In one reading, Occupy was a brand. Occupiers were cautious about the brand being associated with one party or another. In another reading, Occupiers were concerned that their time and effort were being stolen by organizations who they could not influence.

This conflict was resolved cruise director style. You choose the activities in which you want to participate. The stuff more people want to do generally is more fun. Whatever MoveOn.org wanted to do would not be endorsed by Occupy but non-partisan political efforts by another organization could be announced in General Assembly meetings. Non-institutional efforts outside of Occupy could receive somewhat more formal endorsement from Occupy. For example, Bank Transfer Day is not an institution. Someone posts an idea on a calendar. If the idea goes viral, people do it. Bank Transfer Day could be sponsored by the NCUA or someone, but it's a clear, purposeful, and defined activity that doesn't attempt any kind of national institutional organization.

The lesson we can take from this conflict and its partial solution is that doing church in the future may look like a series of hastily planned, low-budget experiments. The future urban parson or lay reader may walk from park to park tweeting that they're sitting on a bench somewhere or in a coffee shop. Larger, in-person events especially may be very unpredictable. Even GenX seems not to understand the purpose of RSVPing sometimes.

The advantage we have as a church is access to space, knowledge, and a living tradition of prayer and ascesis. If we structure our experiments right, those who spend time with us will serve and be renewed.

At the moment, another Millennial and I are running a fairly random discussion group in the local pub one night a month. We're doing it mostly through a Facebook group. I don't have much hope for it, honestly. But if you asked me what I needed, I would say that I'd love access to the church bulletins of every parish within twenty miles (Presbyterians and Methodists, too). There's probably one to three people in every parish who'd be up for this, but I have of no way of knowing who they are, and I want it to be a soft sell. Second, I need access to my church on that night for Compline. Note that these ideas probably wouldn't cost much money but require an investment in trust and communication. I don't want to hear concerns about the content of our discussions or worries about competition with this or that. I just want to forum to bring 20-40 year old mainliners together to talk about the things that matter to us.

Occupy presents the church with other lessons, but I'm going to make the transition to another important subject:

What Do Millennials Want to Know About the Christian Life?

The problem with 21st century adulthood is that it doesn't have a manual, it has a Library of Babel filled with them. Between the Internet and the unprecedented democratization of the printing press in the digital era, there is no shortage of advice in the form of the written word. If you're a mainline Protestant, though, you're in a bit of a bind. Episcopalians take some fairly clear sides in the culture wars in General Convention, but relating what we say there to everyday life is complex.

Recently, B.P. Zahl (just to distinguish from her husband and many distinguished in-laws) and Gibson published a study on young adults' relationship with God . Their sample, which included me, represented a group of Millennials deeply engaged with the Christian faith. The conclusion (probably an overly strident reading): young adult Christians experienced God as far less loving and more judgmental than they had been taught in church. For many people my age, there is a disconnect between life and doctrine.

For reasons that should be obvious by the very mention of it, I've been reading a lot of eHarmony profiles. And because my level of religious engagement is out of the ordinary, the computer matching wizards of Pasadena have been matching me with women who want "a leader," "a man after God's own heart," "Godly head of a household," who is "interested in homeschooling," so they may live "pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen ;)" Some expressions recur over and over again to the point that I recognized them as scripts. Evangelical Christian publishing (and some Roman Catholic), preaching, and formation sets forth a coherent vision of "Biblical womanhood." I disagree with that vision, but I admire it for its coherence. No one is telling me how to be a godly Episcopal man in my personal and professional life, though I'll thank Derek for referring me to Martin Thornton as a start.

Some of this advice, of course, will be relevant to dating and mating. Surely, the third date is not "the sex date," but when and how a romantic relationship should become physical is a dubium . So is how to date someone who is not a Christian or from a much different Christian tradition. How do you articulate your faith within the marriage or in childrearing? Or perhaps we can even add, how do you know you're called to marriage at all?

But much of this advice will go into areas of vocation and work/life balance, a key Millennial concern in employment.

Ultimately, Millennials want to be told what to do and why they're doing it, but they also want to know what to do when they can't do what they're supposed to be doing or when circumstances spin beyond their control. Seriously engaging with popular culture may help. Mockingbird is doing some good things. I'd love to see something on April Kepner of Grey's Anatomy or Pastor Casey on the Mindy Project.

What Should Millennials Give the Church?

Although I made a little fun of his sentiment, I agree with my Boomer friend about the need for Millennials to give as much as they get in the course of the necessary leadership transition. To other Millennials, I'd give three pieces of advice.

1. If you don't like the place, trust your instincts and find somewhere else.

I've been very lucky with my last three parishes. I haven't needed to church shop. The church down the street (more or less) has been the one for me. But I've visited some parishes that would scare me off. Trust that instinct. As Crusty Old Dean points out, being a young person of faith can be tough, especially an Episcopalian. You often sense that other Christians as well as the secular people you work with think of you like the Church at Laodicea. The last thing you need is for your parish church to feel hostile or merely isolating.

2. Find mentors

Joining a new parish is very much like starting a new job. You need to know the parish's history, the state of its finances, learn about ministries that will suit or develop your gifts, and just make friends. Sometimes, your mentors will be your grandparents' age, but enjoy it. You have a lot to learn from them. They have a lot to learn from you.

3. Pledge

Most Millennials I know stick two bucks in the collection plate, the "loose plate." Loose plate is a useful revenue source for the church. The Canons require that some of it goes to some special purposes, but if you're regularly attending a parish, make a pledge. It doesn't have to be much. The average American Christian tithes every four to five years. If you're a college graduate and employed outside academia, that's $15 a week or so. But the impact on incorporation is huge. The people who count the offerings will see your name somewhere on the line connected with the money. They'll have a record that you regularly show up to church. And the compensation for this financially burdensome breach of privacy is that they will start treating you like a fellow member of Christ's Body and not like some weird alien to be feared, ignored, or appeased. Besides, at some point, you're going to have pay for this anyway. You better start getting used to the idea. Trust me. The more you like where you are, the more you will give. And the more good you will see your gifts doing.

I Have A Vocation, Just Not That Vocation or Responsibility, What's That?

In an older era, when the lines between academic and religious instruction were far more blurry, professors were described as being "called" to their professorships, just as we speak of clergy being called to their cures.

In that light, I am in my first call and feel an odd affinity with my clerical analogs. If I were a regular/ordinary professor, the parallels would be more striking. I would teach on a regular basis. Note, for instance, that early Protestant New England used to refer to a ceremonial centered around the preaching of the Word as "lecture."

My job also familiarizes me with the roles that clergy have beyond their primary job description. I raise money (or at least try to do so). I advise on the purchase of equipment. I go to and sometimes lead meetings. I have control over a small budget and must watch carefully to make sure it is being spent properly.

Now, most white collar workers share these secondary roles in one way or another. The commonality between professors and clerics is a central focus on the proclamation and interpretation of texts, an unusual freedom from bureaucratic forms of control, the need to be mostly self-directed, and the sense that one's most valuable and efficient interactions are on the personal level. The cure of souls and the education of the mind most naturally occur on the scale of the individual, so we both recognize the importance of collaborative development in the realm of both the spirit and the intellect.

Older language again teaches us something. George Fox used to roam around 17th century England harassing the professors in their steeple houses, by which he meant priests of the Church of England in their parish churches. In this thinking, the priest, elder, presbyter etc. is always a professor of "religion" or of the things of God.

Recently, Derek posted on his concerns about a curious phenomenon: "Clergy tend to be folks who didn't/couldn't find fulfillment in the church as laity."

One part of his discussion (oft mentioned in the comments) touches my experience. If you're bright and have a devout, yet geeky interest in Christianity, people are always wondering why you don't become ordained. My answer is very simple: my vocation is not to be a priest. My vocation is to keep people from dying on other planetary bodies, unravel and meditate upon the history of Earth and other planetary bodies, and possibly figure out to how make other planetary bodies more like Earth (or otherwise flourish).

Not all of us are going to have such engaging and time-consuming vocations, but most of us are not going to have clerical ones. What we need to think about is how being a lay person can be more fulfilling. And part of that is understanding that the vocation of a lay person is often complementary to what they do in the world. In some cases, it's analogous. How many of your church's Sunday School teachers are teaching or have taught elsewhere? Do you have interior decorators, hair dressers, florists, and other aesthetic experts on the Altar Guild?

Sometimes, what the laity does in church is not analogous, but still complementary. A lawyer may enjoy helping out with the emergency homeless shelter, because she enjoys ministering to the material needs of the disadvantaged rather than their legal ones. The concern I have for the laity is that we too often are repeating the patterns of our vocations in the world within the church, or the exact, yet kindred opposite, we pretend that the standard operating procedure of human institutional structures does not apply on Sunday morning. And I see danger in both of those bad habits for clergy-lay relations as well as the general health of our parishes. If we want a church that serves the world as Jesus calls us to do, we need a laity that feels empowered and renewed by what they do in the church, not a laity that is simply transferring their skill set from the world to the church.

As Derek mentions, we can do this, because we have means that the world does not know. I truly believe that God does empower, restore, and direct us by the things we do and that this process can happen more effectually if we have a better sense of who He is, what He has done, and what we can do to relate to Him, as he always is seeking to relate to us.

The other issue that comes up in the comments is what happens when a lay person is better educated in the intellectual content of the faith and/or perhaps better formed spiritually than the clergy. The church is a hospital for sinners. The Three Holy Hierarchs and the Desert Fathers and Mothers are constantly reminding us that the soul and the body are cared for by analogous means and arts.

In medicine, basic science researchers without M.D.'s are common. Excluded from clinical practice, by their own choice, they explore fundamental biology, chemistry, and even physics in search of ways to improve the standard of care. In collaboration with physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and others, they have helped bring medicine to extraordinary, if imperfect heights in comparison with the 19th century. There is jealousy and conflict in this relationship, but it tends to be generational. Doctors believe the science of their own day over the bleeding edge.

In that light, it's not surprising to me that there's tension between clergy and other theologically educated individuals. Clergy, like many allied professionals, suffer from a little impostor syndrome.

Clergy need to realize that their specialness does not lie in how smart they are or how fit they are for ministry. We set them apart in particular because they meet a standard, but once they've met that standard, we set them apart because they have made a choice, vows, and taken on the high responsibilities that come with the cure of souls, the preaching of the Word, and the celebration of the Sacraments. Their specialness lies in the acceptance of that responsibility, just as my project responsibilities change between when I'm Principal Investigator of a grant or I'm just being paid off the grant. If I'm PI, my specialness does not change if my student is more brilliant and better-educated in physics than I am. (Which I'm sure is going to happen some day.) I'm responsible for directing their abilities to the best project outcome I can.

I wish I could separate out what clergy do and laity do and talk about spheres and onlapping magisteria etc. But when I read the Gospels, I don't see Jesus or the Apostles, our clerical prototypes, keeping to that kind of script. Our lay prototypes are the ones who Jesus heals and are sent out to proclaim what has been done for them. The only true distinction I see is one of responsibility, "Feed my sheep."

Three Faiths, One Program

I'm currently in the midst of Bruce Feiler's Abraham , less of a search for a the "historical Abraham" but an extended meditation on how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have viewed Abraham, particularly the stories they tell about Abraham outside the bounds of the Scriptural witness of Genesis.

In a little more than a hundred pages, it has been quite clear to me that all three faiths not only share many of the same stories, but also the same language of signs that interprets them. All three religions have their interpretive fundamentalists, surely, though the Jews are less prone to this than the rest of us, but we share a system of mystical interpretation that brings together a whole set of thinkers that never co-existed in time or space.

A good example is Feiler's account of the interpretation of the shofar by a Jerusalem shofar-maker. The shofar-maker refers to the shofar as a lawyer. Traditionally, the shofar is blown at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the beginning of a week in which God is said to take an annual account of the sins and good deeds of the world. The shofar, the maker says, is a reminder to God of Abraham's offering of Isaac.

The concept of Jesus as our lawyer or Advocate with the Father is familiar from Christianity, and Christians from very ancient times have recognized parallels between Jesus's self-offering and the binding/sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis. (I've probably written on the prefiguring of Jesus as advocate in the Book of Job.) Indeed, in Ascensiontide, we often sing the Rosh Hashanah Psalm, "God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of the ram's horn." Now, I have no idea what that really meant to the God-inspired Jew who wrote that. But I do know what it meant to early Christian interpreters reading Jesus' life.

Later Jewish interpreters replied by arguing that the story in Genesis suggests that Isaac himself was actually killed and raised by God after three days. Isaac's sacrifice became the inspiration for Jewish martyrdom in the face of forced conversion by Christians, an idea signified for Jews by the imposition of ashes. One can almost hear the Letter to the Hebrews, "These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth." (Feiler has engaged obliquely with Hebrews in Abraham so far (particularly the idea of relating to God by living as an alien), but I'm curious to see what else he makes of it.)

For Muslims, the binding of Isaac is more complex, as is the Crucifixion of Jesus. The Koran actually says that Isaac was the sacrifice, though if you were to ask most Muslims, they would say Ishmael was. Moreover, the Koran suggest the binding occurred in a dream rather than in waking life, as Genesis does. As for the Crucifixion, the Islamic account is a weird twist on the typological thread in the Gospel accounts.

So let me remind you of the Christian absorption of Jewish typology. As alluded to in the Letter to the Hebrews, the Crucifixion is a culmination of the Jewish sacrificial system. Traditionally, the Yom Kippur sacrifice involved the choosing of two goats. In the Gospels, Pilate gives the Jewish people the choice of releasing Jesus and the similarly named Jesus Barabbas (Jesus, son of the father). One is guilty of preaching a subversive spiritual kingdom. The other is guilty of "stasis," a word that signifies in Greek, the subversion of the temporal order (riot, rebellion...). And the high priest's party stirs up the crowd to call for Jesus, not Barabbas (but yet...). Thus, just as the Kohen Gadol (the High Priest) casts lots between the two goats, so here as well. Who is sacrificed in the Temple or who is offered to Azazel, the demon of the desert (and quietly shoved off a cliff in the wilderness) is not something the Gospel writers are very clear about. But within the first century after Jesus's death, incidents of Jesus's life (especially his last days) were being interpreted as a sort of Jewish Fasti, the Jewish sacred calendar encompassed in a human life.

For Islam, the Crucifixion is unacceptable, in two ways. First, if Jesus were actually killed, the typological parallels to Ishmael/Isaac would be impossible to ignore, making Jesus very much like God's son/partner. But the Koran is clear that God has neither son, nor partner. Second, the entire post-Easter narrative has to be wrong, because it makes Jesus, the authoritative advocate with the Father and the Holy Spirit into the Paraclete. Muslims believe that Jesus promised the Paraclete. They, however, believe that Muhammad was the Paraclete. Therefore, the Islamic Crucifixion involves Jesus being assumed into heaven before even being placed on the cross. Someone is put in his place, bearing his likeness. The Koran, I think, is ambiguous on who exactly it was. Islamic-influenced pseudo-Gospels put Judas there. I wouldn't be surprised if some say Barabbas. The idea that Simon of Cyrene was substituted pre-dates Islam by four centuries. In fact, like the ambiguity about whom exactly Abraham sacrificed, Islam attains greater intellectual consistency by not specifying who exactly suffered on the Cross.

I point to these complexities, because I notice that the stories that three most numerous Near Eastern monotheistic religions (note that few others exist in very small numbers) tell and the rituals they use are a strongly overlapping set. Rather than create entirely new typologies, polemic among the Big Three is a process of re-shaping, call and response. Rather than making up a new game, religions explore the creative freedom of the game that Abraham or God or whoever invented. The closest phenomenon I can think of is that of the evolution of U.S. history textbooks over the 20th century, in which the same first three centuries of European settlement, revolution, republic-making, expansion, and civil war are shaped into a vast diversity of narratives that tell us how historians want to see the United States.

Which leads me to a fascinating conclusion. That the big Three are the same logical system. However, as Russell and Godel established, there is no universal system of mathematical logic. Every system must be based on axioms. The fun is trying to see what axioms are the most general. For Judaism, I find it in the opening of the Krias Shema, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one." In Islam, I hear it in the Shahada, "There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God." The distinctions between the big Three very much stem from these axioms. But what is the Christian equivalent? The historical Creeds are just too long to be the fundamental axioms. And many Christians reject the Creeds. The Creeds contain the axioms that distinguish smaller sub-sets of faith in Jesus.

Instead, I find the fundamental axiom of Christianity in Rite I of the Book of Common Prayer (which I was fortunate to hear this morning), "Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God..." In other words, by stating that Jesus is Lord, both explicitly and with the English for "Shema" (hear!), these words are a very subtle variation on the opening lines of the Krias Shema. The close parallel of the axioms fundamentally distinguishes Judaism and Christianity by the messianic secret above messianic secret of Jesus, "I am the Lord." But it's not a contest.

The brothers of this holy house extend these thoughts to you on the Sunday of Judgment in Advent and pray that you may greet your counsel with boldness at the time of his appearing.

The Inhumanity of Nature and Society is the Seed of the Church

Tertullian famously said that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." That's certainly one way to read the New Testament narratives and the martyrologies of the latter eras, but it's a bit of a shortcut. I would argue that persecution was not the fuel for the growth of the Early Church. Instead, persecution strengthened the power of the evangelical message by revealing clearly and bloodily the corrupt and inhumane nature of society. Yet because those who present the early evangelical message to us were themselves oppressors (Paul's self-understanding as a persecutor of the church, for instance, shapes his soteriology in a way that would be distinct from Onesimus), the Gospel tends to be posed as the good news of salvation from one's individual contribution to collective inhumanity (one's sins) through Jesus Christ rather than salvation from the collective inhumanity of society and nature through Jesus Christ. I am afraid to say that this is the deep and nearly irremediable flaw of Patristic writing, perhaps only tempered by the indistinct lens on less elite characters seen in the accounts of the Egyptian monastics. Once an elite individual experiences conversion in a society so much at the whim of nature and so cruel to the least among them, that individual sees those communal sins reflected clearly in their own viciousness.

Therefore, the effect of the Gospel is strongest where nature is most directly afflictive to human life or where society is structured in the least egalitarian manner. The temptation that comes is to pose the Gospel as good news of magical salvation from nature (a common theme in evangelical/Pentecostal thought) or as an excuse for general social reform (the liberal tendency). Possible counter-examples lie in the death camps of Hitler and Stalin, but you may note that 20th century dictators in those presumably nominally Christian societies killed their enemies in the countryside and the wilderness, where no one could see them. The Caesars (and many later Christian rulers) felt quite comfortable erecting crosses on public highways and getting rid of religious dissenters as a form of public entertainment. Roland Barthes commented on a capital case in France in the 1950s, "When the State decides to kill a man, they deny him the power of speech." The inhumanities of the First World, at least, are most easily maintained, when they are most invisible.

Rowan Williams, if you listen hard enough, is constantly trying to find a kernel of the Gospel that speaks to a relatively prosperous and egalitarian society like England. He warns how technology is allowing us to limit personal human interactions. He moans about the demanding and conformist expectations on children in the educational system. He is trying desperately to find a Gospel that will not fall into the category of socialist or Establishment moral judgment, but he naturally has some trouble making the Gospel intelligible in a social welfare state with a relatively stable electrical grid.

Perhaps the strongest argument for the power of the Gospel with regard to nature actually comes from Stephen Jay Gould's Full House , where he argues that there is no evidence that humans represent the culmination of evolution or that the evolution of humanity (or the type of sentience we possess, since sentience is not unique to us) was the necessary outcome of evolution. The Discovery Institute's musings to the contrary, we are not privileged in the grand course of planetary or cosmic history. The intelligibility of physical law (reason) may argue for the existence of God; I'll let the philosophers continue to dither about that, but without revelation, we are a random, irrelevant species that would be better off ending our increasingly dangerous campaign of ecological and biogeochemical disturbance by jumping into the ocean. The salvation that Jesus Christ brings to me is to assert that the emergent randomness (like humans, whales, and copepods, both as individuals and species) in an otherwise neat and tidy natural order is not random, but beloved, even perfectible in Himself. He then can more easily proceed to saving me from my sins.

Responsory Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church for the Feast of John Donne

The Officiant shall say

Almighty and everliving God, your holy apostle Paul has taught us to make prayers, supplications, and thanksgivings for all people.

To which the People shall reply:

We humbly beseech thee most mercifully to receive these our prayers, which we offer unto thy divine majesty.

That it may please thee to inspire continually the universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord.

Grant that all they that do confess thy holy name may agree in the truth of thy holy word and live in unity and godly love.

Give grace (O heavenly Father) to all Bishops, Priests and Deacons.

That they may both by their life and doctrine set forth thy true and lively word and rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments.

And to all thy people give thy heavenly grace, and especially to this congregation here present, that with meek heart and due reverence,

We may hear and receive thy holy word, truly serving thee in holiness and righteousness all the days of our lives.


We beseech thee also to defend and save all those in authority among the nations, especially the President of the United States, the Governor of this State, and the Mayor of this City.

And grant us also the grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace.

We most humbly beseech thee of thy goodness (O Lord) to comfort and succor all them which in this transitory life be in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity.

I ask your petitions, either silently or aloud.

The People may add their own petitions.

O Lord, thy servant, John Donne, whom we commemorate this evening, reminds us that when the Church buries someone, that action concerns us all:

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;”

We bless thy Holy Name for all thy servants who have departed this life in thy faith and fear and beseech thee that it may also be for them and us as Donne has said, “

“God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and advocate. Amen.

A Quick Thought on a Royal Engagement

I greeted with joy the announcement from Clarence House this morning that Prince William of Wales will marry Catherine Middleton. Why? I am an American citizen with some English roots. But that's not it. It's also fairly probable that the future man and wife never will be crowned and instead will take up a quiet life in the country after a bloodless constitutional reform, so the couple's impact on the world stage is likely to be limited to philanthropy.

No, I was overjoyed at the thought of a grand televised Anglican royal wedding. Certainly, new music will be commissioned. We will see the spectacle of +Rowan and perhaps +John and +Richard and other much controverted English bishops processing about to officiate at the joining of a rescue helicopter pilot and his artistic wife. It will be unspeakably grand, beautiful, and silly, and unlike a certain wedding roughly twenty nine years ago, it will feel more like a fait accompli of a love match than a virgin sacrifice.

What Reason Cannot Fathom

Let the clever world be angry that God's son should forsake his throne of honour, that he should clothe himself in flesh and blood and suffer as a human being. The greatest wisdom of this world must before the counsel of the most high become the greatest folly. What God has decided, reason cannot fathom; she is the blind leader who misleads the spiritually blind --
Recitative from Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (Cantata No. 152) -- J.S. Bach and S. Franck

Franck's lyrics screamed at me from the program page at a concert I recently attended. The epoch in which it was written marks a transition between the two great challenges of reason to the Christian faith. The older reasoning was skeptical that a metaphysical being ever could or would take a physical form. It was a bit of an epistemological jeu de verite , of course. Plato's concerns were more ethical than ontological. He despised the fabulous stories of the fallible Greek gods and was convinced that somewhere out there, the ideal Jupiter more likely smiled on his notions of virtue than gazed upon earth in search of his next lay. Eight centuries later, Augustine was faced with many of the same ethical concerns and eventually embraced the Christian faith, because it made relationship possible with an ideal Jupiter who still has transcended fallible human nature. The Christian faith provided the earthy stories that engaged the plebeians but grounded them in the virtue ethics of the aether beloved by the philosophers.

In these times, I only can explain the captivation of the wise with the exercise of unmitigated, uncorrected, unsupplemented, and arrogant reason with a genuine disregard for virtue outside their own private sphere. The recent feast of St. Michael and All Angels draws this problem into focus. Angels in popular Christian culture and sometimes theologically have served as a cipher for the mysteries of being. Tradition has assigned the motions of the stars, the turnings of the winds, and even reality itself to the communication of the aethereal plans of the Divine Maker into the quotidian reality of middle earth. Angels, originally mediators (jn the sense of communication) between God and men in the Holy Scriptures were transformed by Platonism into much more detail-oriented providers of divine information content. And so as our understanding of nature has improved, the natural philosophical need for angels has diminished to nearer its proper level, that is, nil, but those of a natural philosophical bent have forgotten that there are other philosophical needs beyond those of nature.

People certainly need angels for some reason. In the last year, we have been treated to a spectacle of a Norwegian royal princess and her business partner operating educational and practical programs for communication with angels. They do not have an exclusive monopoly on this kind of thing. All manner of folk will mediate communication with Ascended Masters, angels, spirit guides, and the dead these days. No matter in how much detail nature is put to the question for her secrets, most of the world still seeks realia beyond the most rigorous notions of the real.

The temptation of the new atheists has been to deride this kind of behavior. For them, a course in angel communication is no less a crime against reason and good mores than the kinds of things I say or do seven mornings per week. I can't imagine, honestly, why they never wonder if there might be something more to human notions of a metaphysics than neurochemistry, or perhaps, evolutionary adaptations that maintain social cohesion or that encourage risky behavior to enhancs sexual competition. The end point of this thinking is that our moral actions, our emotions, and the relationships we form are nothing more than a series of chemical reactions in a social context. Eventually, I do imagine that we will confront the moral and existential challenges of human life with the help of chemical buffers, for in a purely natural philosophical universe, the anxieties of those Germans whose funeral music I heard last Saturday night were very real, indeed tragically so, but they lacked any significance. And so with love and so with beauty. As we gain more and more of God's creative freedom among the things that are seen, we will seek to control the inconvenient manifestations of those things that are unseen.

In the first lesson at Evening Prayer last night, the Prophet Daniel is caught up in a vision on the banks of the Tigris. As for his companions, they see nothing but still sense something odd is occurring. Daniel encounters his unnamed Lord, which the rabbis who go for this kind of thing probably read as Metratron, the apotheosized Enoch, but who we traditionally read as the Second Person of the Trinity. The Lord tells Daniel that He strives with the Prince of Persia and soon with the Prince of Greece, but He only has the help of Michael, "your Prince", that is the Prince of the Jewish people. Persia and Greece are the great hegemonic powers of the era. The fate of God's chosen people will depend on their strategic decisions. It would be tempting to imagine the invisible hosts of heaven and hell striving on the battlefield in parallel to Alexander the Great or something, but we are reading prophecy rather than watching the Russian fantasy film, Night Watch . Instead, the Lord is speaking of the necessary struggles that precede His Incarnation. These struggles can be viewed to be of a temporal nature, requiring the restoration of the Jews to Judah and their cult at Jerusalem, but they also can be spiritual. Both Persia and Greece present to the Jews the whole new set of relations, ethics, emotions, and philosophies. The war against the Prince of Persia is less about Jewish power than about Jewish identity. (Which is the true power in the pre-Christian world in that it makes possible the Christ.) Daniel is stuck in the service of Persia, but the great question of his life is always whether he still can remain a Jew. The war in heaven is indeed a Platonic war, a war of ideas.

In the second lesson, we hear of the beginning of the final campaign is this universal war of ideas, in which the victorious Lamb finally is prepared to open the seven seals and transform natural philosophical reality entire in the image of his glorious resurrected Body. The precursor of this transformation is the transformation of primary mimetic form of that Body, that is, the Church, which is described as a kingdom of priests drawn from every tribe, race, language, and nation. In a time of exciting extrasolar planet discoveries, I find it significant that the scroll of the Lamb is sealed with seven seals, the canonical number of heavenly bodies and crystal spheres that the ancients at the time of John of Patmos's revelation believed separated us from God. For as the Apostle reminds us, "...our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." We will be misled if we project the natural philosophical world upon the worldview of the Old and New Testaments, which viewed the universe as a completely different set of relationships in which the physical and metaphysical worlds were connected. Thus, we have little to fear from Jupiter beyond its baleful influence on the long term evolution of Earth's orbit and the motions of asteroids and comets, but we have much to fear from the ideas, vices, and actions signified by Jupiter.

Ultimately, it's not easy for a modern to understand such things. Even the relicts of this worldview in our time are merely for show. No competent astrologer of the ancient world would publish the generalized horoscopes we see in the daily paper. Astrology didn't work because the stars have any influence on human affairs, it worked because looking to the stars allowed the astrologer to unconsciously gain insight into the psychology of the individual and his or her social relations. It is very little different than a mathematics professor I know who remembers theorems by staring at the foliage outside of his window.

So instead the tradition of the Church leaves us with angels to remind us of the gulf between us and God, the existence and significance of invisible things, and the wondrous mystery that the invisible things have crashed into this world once before and will do so again.

Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Gen Y This And Gen Y That

Fr. Bob recently posted a brief quote about the Millennials (Generation Y) on his blog recently. My visceral response to it captured for me how I feel about the kinds of generational generalizations that have become fashionable in the last few years. I think this kind of demographic thinking can come to represent the worst kind of discourse of humans about power. It is the step between, "We will win because of the power of our ideas" and "We will win through overwhelming force." Instead, demographic analysis becomes a way for older generations to project their discontents on the rising generation and say to the theses of their age, "We will win by the power of our ideas seeded in the minds of a new generation." Or as the Salty Vicar once put it, "We will eat your children."

As a Millennial, I, of course, would like to blame my parents' generation as a whole for all manner of evils: the rape of the environment, the destruction of traditional institutions of American civic life, the corruption of the traditional institutions that survived, the loss of idealism, and the obsession with theological uncertainty and transgressive theories. But there is nothing historically inevitable about my generation doing the opposite or reforming the Boomers' mistakes. You can't put vices back in the box. You can't go back to the forest. Social change is inherently hysteretical. The very process of change prevents the system from being anywhere as reversible as it was versible.

I would prefer that if older generations have programs of innovation or reform, they realize that some Millennials may accommodate them. But they do not allow those Millennials to participate in these programs of innovation or reform independently, creatively, and moderately, so that they do not allow those programs to be instructed and corrected, they diminish those Millennials as human beings and impoverish themselves.

I'm pretty sure Fr. Bob knows these things. He, after all, is operating at the grassroots. But let him and others like him be reminded of them anyway.

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.