tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83099962024-03-07T17:53:12.945-05:00IthilienContarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-43211820912909692142018-12-31T15:40:00.002-05:002020-03-30T17:27:36.437-04:00It's a Wonderful Life: defending eucatastrophe<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><img alt="Image result for it's a wonderful life" src="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2016/12/20/Its-A-Wonderful-Life_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqGw_8_YqFn6oOhW46YSWn1FxCe004bvMokFszOIdIF4.jpg?imwidth=450" /></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><i>It's a Wonderful Life</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> has been in my mind a lot recently. Not least because a few weeks ago I had the </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">privilege of </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">playing </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">George Bailey in the climactic scene, as part of a "Christmas Showcase" put on by </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">Spotlight Playhouse in </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">Berea, </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">Kentucky. My wife's been talking about the movie a lot as a metaphor for</span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">our lives, and she was really upset </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">that it </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">got voted down in a poll of Christmas movies one of our </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">friends</span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">ran on Facebook. And, of course, it was on </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">TV on </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">Christmas Eve.</span><br />
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My FB friend and fellow ASP member Carlo Mariano recently posted a link to an <a href="https://christandpopculture.com/george-bailey-at-the-bridge-the-costly-virtue-of-its-a-wonderful-life/?fbclid=IwAR08yG0LWJDUaUyD01Z_OOhLIoHf4OljXnWHFbcGYHTSIgnsu0i5bC_B468">article </a> by K. B. Hoyle </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>It's a Wonderful Life</i> making the case that the popular understanding of the movie as a joyful </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">affirmation </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">of the meaningfulness of life doesn't really express what makes the film so great. According to </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hoyle, the </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">"better message" of the movie is about self-denial and self-sacrifice for the sake of the </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">community: "Die to yourself, daily. Die, and die again." Hoyle points out that George spends most of the </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">movie making decision after decision that sacrifices his own desires and dreams for the sake of what is </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">good for his family and his town. Tellingly, she invokes Macaulay's ballad retelling of the Roman story of Horatius at the bridge (a poem </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I loved in my childhood), offering his life in defense of his city. Similarly,</span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">she concludes, we should live lives </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">of "civic virtue," offering ourselves up on behalf of our communities </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">instead of trying to be "true to ourselves" </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">in an individualistic fashion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I think this is all true, but at the same time I think that dismissing and denying the uproarious joy of the </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">ending </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">as </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">not really central is a mistake. God created us for joy. Just telling us to keep plugging the gap </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">and sacrificing</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">ourselves creates people with gritted teeth and set brows who as often as not wind up turning into </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">self-righteous</span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;"> prigs who hate and despise the people they are sacrificing themselves for.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">So I think the apparently superficial happy ending is also essential to what makes this a great movie. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Yes, </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">the </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">"angel earns his wings" theme is silly (and for some reason typical of mid-century Hollywood </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">movies </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">about angels, </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">probably because they were created by people whose lives were dominated by the </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">studio </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">system and who imagined </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">h</span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">eaven as a sort of idealized MGM). And to be sure, we can't be assured </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">that </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">if we ever get in real trouble the people </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">we have helped will turn out and rescue us. It's nice if they do,</span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; white-space: pre;">but George would have been doing the right thing even </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">if Mr. Potter had been right and the people he had </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">helped had ridden him out of town on a rail. And yet, the ending of </span><span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>It's a Wonderful Life</i> isn't just a bit of Hollywood sentimentality. It's a shining example of what another mid-20th-century storyteller, J. R. R. </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tolkien, called "eucatastrophe." It's the fitting ending, the ending that should happen but doesn't, in our </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">broken world, always happen. It's the moment when George's long obedience finally gets the response it deserves, as the people he has helped turn out to save him from disgrace and acknowledge what he has </span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">meant to them. </span><br />
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I'm a big fan of what many people consider "depressing" movies. I've been watching the three-part film series </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Masaki Kobayashi (set, as it happens, around the same time as <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i>), called in English </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/2106-the-human-condition">The Human Condition</a>. </i>So far, I've seen the first two parts. The films tell the story of Kaji, an idealistic young Japanese man during WWII, who tries to act morally in a society consumed by imperialistic, nationalistic madness. In the first film, he works for a factory in Manchuria that uses forced Chinese labor, seeking to </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">make conditions better for the workers while still trying to produce the efficient results that will meet his superiors' approval and keep him out of the army. It doesn't go well, either for him or for the Chinese he is </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">trying to protect, and in the second movie he is in the army, where the same pattern repeats itself. He tries to stand up for fellow recruits who are being brutally hazed, and again, he fails. At the end of the film, as the Japanese are being overrun by Russian tanks, Kaji kills one of his fellow soldiers with his bare hands because the other man has gone crazy and is giving their position away to the Russians. And from what I've read, the third movie doesn't get any brighter--it ends with Kaji dying alone in the snow. It's an unsparing, bleak masterpiece. And the bleakness comes not only from the vicious opposition Kaji faces from his fellow Japanese, but from the way he gradually crumbles under pressure, continually making compromises, seeking </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to preserve his own life, and even at the end of the second movie confessing himself a "monster" after he brutally kills a comrade. At one point in the first movie, one of the Chinese tells him "you have less faith in humanity than you want to believe you do." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And of course the same could be said of George Bailey, though he shows it in more minor ways, as when </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he lashes out verbally at his daughter's teacher. Hoyle recognizes this, speaking of George's "brokenness." Tolkien, too, describes Frodo "failing" at the end, a failure that Tolkien seems to find pretty much inevitable. Sometimes trying to be faithful results in being broken. Sometimes it really is an impossible task. And often, </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">as with Frodo, we have to depend on others in order for our broken faithfulness to have its effect.
<i>The Human Condition</i> demonstrates how hard--perhaps impossible--it is to act morally <i>and effectively</i> in a society where pretty much everything militates against you. It's a sober, realistic deconstruction of our fantasy </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of the lone hero against a corrupt culture.
But on the other hand, the ending of <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i> shows the proper goal and result of moral action: the formation of a community where people build each other up and affirm each other's dignity. George's reward, at the end, is not merely an arbitrary plot device to make us feel good (though it is a plot device and it does make us feel good). It's the natural result of his actions throughout the movie, actions that have been nourished by </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1c1e21; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the real though imperfect virtues of small-town America and which have in turn reinforced those virtues, making Bedford Falls not into a utopian paradise but into a place where at least to some extent virtue can flourish and receive its proper reward.
We are made for joy. We are made for community. A vision of moral action in which we are only the givers and never the receivers, in which we are expected to grit our teeth and act heroically with no reward, is a vision that, in spite of its apparent nobility, actually results in corrupting moral action into an expression of pride and self-assertiveness. Christian virtue, grounded in humility and charity, is about receiving as well as giving--about acknowledging our vulnerability and our need for support and affection. Christian virtue is not that of Horatius. It is not Stoic virtue. It is the virtue of the Son of Man who, on the eve of sacrificing himself for the life of the world, wept alone in a garden and longed for the affection and support of his friends.
Hoyle says that the message of <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i> (and by extension of Christianity) is "Die, and die again."
But the fuller Christian message is, "Die, and live again." Not only in a life beyond this, but over and over again in this world. Those who give up fathers and mothers and wives and children will, Jesus says, receive a hundredfold even in this life: not in some crass form of worldly prosperity, but in the joyful affirmation of a beloved community. It doesn't always happen like this, and when it doesn't, then yes, we are called to give ourselves in love anyway. But love finds its greatest fulfillment not in lonely and self-congratulatory sacrifice but in beholding its reflection in the face of the beloved. And that's why the image that stays with most of us from Capra's masterpiece is the closing image of George, holding his daughter, surrounded by family and friends, seeing the reward of his long sacrifice in the faces of the community that would, without him, have inhabited a bitter and despairing wasteland dominated by one twisted old man's greed and ambition.
Let's not be afraid to be weak. Let's not be afraid to be needy. Let's all dare to be less Roman, less stoic, more vulnerable, and more open to others in this new year that is upon us.</span></div>
Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-8581952689720276092018-10-31T23:49:00.003-04:002020-03-30T17:27:53.646-04:00Reformation day revisited, from the other side of the Tiber<br />
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Three years ago, I wrote<a href="http://stewedrabbit.blogspot.com/2016/11/reformation-day-post-year-and-day-late.html"> this </a>rather polemical piece attacking the celebration of "Reformation Day" by Protestants. I still stand by what I wrote there. But, in my usual contrarian fashion, now that I've been a Catholic for a year and a half, I have a renewed appreciation for Protestant spirituality. I never rejected that aspect of Protestantism, and I still have problems with the Reformation as a norm. But I'm now much more sympathetic than I used to be to the language many Protestants use about Luther's teachings as a rediscovery of the Gospel, a source of spiritual liberation.</div>
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One of the reasons for this shift is just that I'm a contrarian and always see the other side. As a Protestant I was always siding with Catholics. Now that I'm a Catholic I tend to side with Protestants.<br />
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But there's another reason too. For the past year and a half I have attended the sacrament of confession quite regularly (sometimes as often as every week, sometimes more like every month/six weeks). I now think that no one can really appreciate Luther who hasn't done this.<br />
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The sacrament is, in many ways, a great source of spiritual strength and comfort to me. And contra Luther, I think that the mortal/venial sin distinction can actually help <i>avoid </i>scrupulosity and despair. (If you haven't committed an objectively serious act with full knowledge and consent, it's not a mortal sin.) But trying to follow Catholic teaching on confession, and particularly on reception of the Eucharist, really does become difficult. It feels as if you are in a "state of grace" for brief moments at a time. I've even read conservative Catholic authors suggesting that most of us should expect to spend much of our lives in a state of unworthiness to receive Communion. At some point in the past year and a half, all of this has stopped feeling like a source of grace and has become more of a set of hoops to jump through. And when I feel that way, I feel once again the power of Luther's teaching that jumping through hoops is fundamentally not the point, that God's grace surrounds and precedes and enables us rather than waiting for us to meet the right conditions to receive it. (Yes, I know that Catholic theology teaches prevenient grace.) Ironically, confession is for me most lifegiving when I approach it in a Lutheran spirit, as an admission of my own inability to save myself and a humble acceptance of God's forgiving and transforming grace.<br />
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The bigger problem here is that my desire to become Catholic in the first place was driven by my wish to "get it right," to follow God's will, to open myself to grace by living up to the truth I believed I had seen. And now I'm not sure that whole quest for rightness and purity was one I should have been on in the first place.<br />
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None of this is really new. For years before becoming Catholic I argued that perhaps we should all just live in the brokenness and find God's grace in it as best we could, a la Ephraim Radner. But this always felt like a cop-out. And so I took the leap--I tried to follow what I thought God was calling me to do. And after a year and a half of it I feel exhausted and torn apart.<br />
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This kind of "post-conversion blues" is pretty common. People get through it. But the one good thing about it is that I finally think I understand Luther.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-85557486065261178152018-10-21T18:37:00.002-04:002020-03-30T17:29:10.485-04:00Honest apostasy vs. faithful dissent<div style="text-align: right;">
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Every so often one hears conservative Catholics (or conservative Christians generally) say that people whom they consider insufficiently orthodox should just leave, because it's the "honest" thing to do. Most recently, the Patheos blogger Mindy Selmys has announced that she is leaving the Catholic Church, and has been applauded for her "honest apostasy" on the website of the conservative Catholic periodical <i>Crisis. </i>Now for starters, I don't think people leaving the Catholic Church but remaining Christians should be referred to as "apostates," but that's a separate issue. The question I want to tackle here is this: at what point does it become legitimate, or even obligatory, to leave a particular religious community due to doubts about its teachings? When does loyalty become dishonesty? Or, to put it the other way round, when does honesty become a kind of pathological restlessness that makes faithfulness to a community impossible?<br />
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One basic point that needs to be made to clear the ground: when speaking of the rational bases for religious faith, we are always talking about varying degrees of probability. Absolute certainty, while subjectively possible (for some people--not for me), is not possible on a purely rational basis. When I speak of probability I don't mean a mathematical probability that can be calculated, but a judgment, based on numerous factors, that a particular claim is more believable than another one. The rational basis for faith is a judgment of the relative probability of one explanation for the evidence (of all kinds) versus another.<br />
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In the case of Catholicism and other religious communities that require adherence to particular doctrinal claims, there are three things that need to be balanced:<br />
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1. The basic claim that Catholicism as a whole is true and authoritative.<br />
2. The authoritative status of the particular doctrinal claim. I.e., the claim that a particular doctrine is a genuine, authoritative part of Catholic teaching and cannot be questioned without questioning Catholicism as a whole.<br />
3. One's doubts and difficulties about the particular claim. Or, to put it propositionally, the statement "this doctrine is false."<br />
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These propositions: "Catholicism is true," "Catholicism authoritatively teaches X," and "X is false," cannot all be true. Thus, we will inevitably judge the least probable of the three points to be false. In some cases this is an easy judgment, while in others the three may be very close to each other. Obviously one's faith will be more secure if proposition 3 is far behind the other two (and one's unbelief will be secure if point 1 is far behind). But in what follows I want to look rather at the dynamics that arise from different orders of relative probability for these three items, regardless of how close to each other they may or may not be. Obviously this analysis assumes that they are relatively close--otherwise the analysis isn't needed.<br />
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The first possibility, yielding a very secure faith (at least with regard to the doctrine in question), is the order 123. This means that I am most confident that the Church is true, and secondarily believe that a particular teaching is a necessary part of Catholic faith. Since I'm more confident of these things than I am of the truth of any arguments against the doctrine in question, I can quite reasonably dismiss these arguments, even if they are strong enough that I would believe them in the absence of my faith in the authority of the Church. Furthermore, even if I did come to believe that the arguments were true, the new "loser" among the three claims would be the claim that the teaching is a necessary part of Catholic faith. I would thus become a "faithful dissenter" (ordering the items 132) rather than abandoning Catholicism. (More about faithful dissent later.) That's why this is a particularly stable situation to be in.<br />
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However, holding to all Catholic doctrines in this order is unstable in a different way. The attachment to the Church is secure, but the attachment to any particular doctrine is in principle dispensable. If all doctrines are seen as dispensable, then one's faith comes to have no really secure content _except_ faith in the authority of the Catholic Church itself. The second kind of solid, secure Catholic faith is one in which the items are ordered 213. In this case, I am more convinced of the proposition "if Catholicism is true, then X doctrine is true" than I am of the proposition "Catholicism is true" in the first place. My faith in the Church, in other words, depends indispensably on certain key doctrinal claims and is subordinate to these claims. The most obvious example for me would be the resurrection of Jesus. I would be disturbed by a Catholic telling me that he/she is more certain of the teachings of the Church than that Jesus rose from the dead. A Catholicism that no longer proclaimed the Resurrection would have ceased to be itself. Hence, 213 is a healthier ordering in this case. But if one held to all ostensible Church teachings in this order, then one's faith would tremble any time the arguments against a particular teaching started to look convincing. So the most solid faith actually seems to be one in which some very basic doctrines are held <i>more </i>firmly than one's faith in the overall authority of the Pope, while the others aren't.<br />
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But what if one becomes convinced that a particular doctrine really is false? Obviously the easiest situation is one in which one is more certain that the doctrine is false than that it is the genuine, permanent teaching of the Church, but more certain yet that the Church's claims as a whole are true. When one holds this position (the order 132) with regard to a teaching that _appears_ to be Church teaching at this point (the impossibility of ordaining women, say), then one is clearly justified in "faithful dissent." The 132 dissenter will argue that what appears to be Church teaching really isn't. This will bring claims of heresy and even dishonesty, but it appears, when we put things in terms of the relative probability of the three propositions I have identified, to be the most honest way to proceed. It would be absurd to abandon the Church, which one is convinced is true, because of a teaching which one is convinced is false. Obviously the more the Church insists on this teaching, the more difficult the situation will be, and a 132 dissenter may be forced out of the Church against his/her will. But there is nothing at all dishonorable about such a stance. And it's unlikely that things will go that far. Because the 132 dissenter is _most_ fully convinced of the overall authority of the Church, there's obviously a decent possibility that if the Church insists strongly enough, the 132 dissenter will rethink the question of whether the doctrine under dispute is true. So, for instance, there are people who might have supported women's ordination before John Paul II's authoritative statement on the subject but then ceased to do so. Others might change their minds if an Ecumenical Council or an unquestionably ex cathedra Papal statement ruled on the subject.<br />
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But what if the person is _more_ convinced that the doctrine is false than that the overall authority of the Church is true? Such a person--a 312 dissenter--would still be justified, I believe, in remaining in the Church. The 312 dissenter still believes that the Church is true. But that belief now depends on the conviction that 2 is false: that in fact, the Church does not permanently and solemnly teach the doctrine in question. With regard to women's ordination, this would be someone who hangs on in the Church solely on the grounds of a conviction that eventually the Church will listen to the Spirit and ordain women. The same increasingly authoritative pronouncements that might bring a 132 dissenter in line would drive a 312 dissenter out of the Church. But as long as the propositions remain in the order 312, the dissenter remains justified in remaining in the Church, however difficult his/her position.<br />
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Finally, there are two orderings of the propositions that do make it impossible for a person to remain a faithful Catholic: 321 and 231. Here the last proposition in order of probability, and hence the one rejected, is the overall authority of the Church. The difference between these, however, is that 321 is a position more open to reconsidering whether the doctrine is authoritatively taught, while 231 is more open to reconsidering whether it is false. Obviously as with 123 and 213, the reasonableness of each position will depend very much on the doctrine in question. If someone leaves the Church because of the rejection of women's ordination, it's reasonable to be a 321 dissenter open to being persuaded that in fact the Church may not be permanently committed to this position. But it would be foolish for a Catholic to try to persuade someone to move from 231 to 321 on the doctrine of the Trinity or the Resurrection or even the Real Presence.<br />
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There's another way to pair these six possible positions, by which of them turn into which if the last two items were switched. 123 and 132, as I noted above, easily turn into each other. So do 312 and 321, unsurprisingly--a person who is convinced that a doctrine the Church appears to teach is false may easily become someone who no longer believes in the Church at all. But the interesting pair is 213 and 231. These easily turn into each other as well. That is why, as I suggested, holding all Church doctrines in the order 213 actually makes for a rather brittle faith. Some of the most frustrating conversations to have, as a Catholic or (as I was for a long time) a Catholic sympathizer, are with people who are convinced that some relatively questionable issue, perhaps something that occurs in apparently authoritative form in the past but from which the Church seems to have moved away, really is the permanent teaching of the Church and thus justifies rejecting the Church altogether. Yet these folks share basic assumptions with the most traditional Catholics.<br />
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I find this numerical way of looking at the question helpful--this line of reasoning played a big role in pushing me into Catholicism, because I couldn't honestly say that I was 321 or 231 on any issue. (Of course, there's a big difference between "what justifies remaining in the Church" and "what requires one to join the Church.") I think it's also very helpful in checking the impulses many Catholics seem to have to question why other people remain in the Church, Yes, of course some people may be 231s or 321s who remain in the Church for reasons other than conviction (such as the alleged statement by a feminist theologian that she remained because that's "where the copying machines are," or the more honorable reasons deriving from the pull of community or family). But more often than not, they are 132s or 312s. They are already in a lot of internal conflict. To add to that conflict is cruel. To drive them out of the Church is, from a Catholic point of view, arguably the kind of behavior that makes one's neck worthy of a millstone.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-15355996359259922002018-10-07T19:50:00.001-04:002020-03-30T17:29:24.689-04:00An alternate history scenario for supporters of Brett Kavanaugh<br />
Consider the following tale from another timeline:<br />
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It was sometime during the presidency of Barack Obama. There was a Supreme Court vacancy. Obama picked a prominent Muslim judge who, before becoming a judge, had worked in the Clinton White House. Indeed, his appointment as judge by President Clinton had been controversial because of charges of partisanship and of anti-Israel sentiment. His ability to be nonpartisan was very much in doubt, but at the same time he was highly qualified. Conservatives saw in his record a troubling pattern of support for sharia and a strong pro-Palestinian bias, and some even accused him of anti-Semitism, but his supporters pointed to the large numbers of Jews who had clerked for him over the years, many of whom testified in his favor.<br />
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Then the bombshell dropped. A respected academic who, while no longer a practicing Muslim, had attended the same Islamic high school as the judge, claimed to have heard him and some of his friends discussing a plan to blow up a public building as an act of jihad. The judge angrily denied these claims, and none of the friends named corroborated it. However, the accuser did rightly identify some of the judge's high-school friends, some of whom had expressed radical sentiments. Many who knew him in high school claimed that he had generally Islamist sentiments at that time, in spite of his later reputation for moderation.<br />
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Then his yearbook surfaced. It turned out to contain a number of what appeared to be radical Islamist slogans, though the judge desperately tried to explain them away, more successfully in some cases than others. Several other accusations of involvement in unsuccessful terrorist plots surfaced, though none of them were well corroborated. <br />
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Furthermore, in his response to the accusations, the judge went on a rant against the members of the Senate who opposed his confirmation, accusing them of being dupes of the Zionist lobby. Opponents saw this as evidence that he lacked the judicial temperament and was too partisan to be a successful judge. Supporters, meanwhile, claimed that all the accusations against him were trumped-up instances of "Islamophobia" and that if he was not confirmed it would prove that America was hopelessly biased against Muslims.<br />
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To conservatives who say that not confirming Kavanaugh would have been a travesty of justice and an instance of mob violence: would you really have no qualms about confirming a judge under the circumstances described above? Would you say that people who connected his documented positions on Israel and other sensitive issues with the accusations of radicalism were simply engaging in political assassination? Would you say that accusations of being involved in terrorist plots were simply to be dismissed because they were not well corroborated? Or would you perhaps say that we should be careful whom we seat on the Supreme Court, even if the accusations against him were not strong enough to stand up in a court of law?Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-24733039271555271062018-06-28T13:19:00.000-04:002018-06-28T13:19:03.023-04:00The American Solidarity Party: still very much alive<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/72/Americansolidaritypartylogo2016.jpeg/180px-Americansolidaritypartylogo2016.jpeg" imageanchor="1"><img alt="Image result for american solidarity party" border="0" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/72/Americansolidaritypartylogo2016.jpeg/180px-Americansolidaritypartylogo2016.jpeg" /></a><br />
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The political party to which I belong, the American Solidarity Party, has been going through a lot of internal conflict in the past year. Founded in 2011 as the Christian Democratic Party USA, the ASP has roots in Catholic social teaching as well as the thought of the Reformed theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper. It's an attempt to bring the European "Christian Democratic" tradition into American politics. Our most fundamental commitment is to a consistent ethic of life. If you have ever asked the question, "why don't prolifers care about. . . . " we are the prolifers who do. Many of us, on economic matters, are influenced by distributism--the idea that both capitalism and socialism are fundamentally flawed and that property should be distributed as widely as possible. We tend to be anti-war, anti-death penalty, pro-immigrant, pro-welfare, pro-universal healthcare, as well as anti-abortion. You can read our platform <a href="https://solidarity-party.org/platform/">here</a>.<br />
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We have all kinds of disagreements about the details of these positions. However, in the past year a fissure has opened between two different broad visions of our mission. In one, our goal is to become a mainstream, secular political party centered on a consistent ethic of life: a "whole-life progressive party." The other side prioritizes our roots in Catholic social teaching and traditional Christian values more generally. The issue that most clearly divides these two visions is same-sex marriage. When I joined the party in 2016, our platform called for a legal definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman for life. I was one of the people who wanted to change or eliminate this language, since it seemed completely unrealistic as a political program, however correct as an expression of Catholic thought on the matter. And in 2017 the plank was eliminated. Many who were unhappy with this change and with the direction of the party generally formed a group called the "Dorothy Day Caucus" to advocate for their vision of a party rooted more firmly in Catholic social teaching.<br /><br />Now here's where things get weird. You would expect--and I did expect--that the "DDC" side of the party would be the intolerant, purist side. The group that dominated the National Committee 2017-18 talked about a broad tent, and I expected that with the anti-SSM plank removed, we could draw to the party people from a wide range of positions across the political spectrum, united by commitment to a consistent ethic of life broadly conceived. To some extent we did, but many on the "whole-life progressive" side were concerned that the vocal presence of the DDC in online discussions was tarnishing our image and hindering the recruitment of the "right" people. The legitimate concern here was that, as a small party, we were vulnerable to a "hostile takeover" by extremists. And in fact we did attract some members who, for instance, would love to see America turn into a monarchy with Catholicism as the state religion.<br /><br />Hence, the dominant faction on the National Committee put a lot of energy into denouncing the DDC and distancing the party from it, repeatedly warning them that they were not allowed to use the party's name for any of their forums or other online expressions. Eventually, in compliance with these warnings, the DDC renamed itself "<a href="https://www.imagodeipolitics.org/">Imago Dei Politics</a>," an independent political organization most of whose members still belonged to the ASP. In May, shortly before a national (online) convention in which seven of the nine seats on the NC were up for grabs, the NC passed a resolution saying that no one could hold office in both the IDP and the ASP. This seemed to be an attempt to disenfranchise the conservative opposition right before the convention. (<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/qgetxuono8ifsb2/ASP-IDP-Conflict-of-Interest.pdf?dl=0">Here's </a>a defense of the decision from one of the NC members.) While this resolution was later modified in order to remove that impression (allowing IDP leaders to run for the NC and then resign from the IDP if they won), it seemed to me and many other people to be part of a pattern of authoritarian, even Machiavellian, behavior by the "progressive" side of the party. I think this is the main reason for the sweeping victory, in the election last weekend, of a slate of candidates who ran on what they called the "<a href="http://www.contract-with-asp.com/Default">Contract with the ASP</a>." (I myself voted for nine people--we have a system called "approval voting" that allows voters to choose more candidates than there are slots--five of whom were "contract" candidates, and four of whom, all contract candidates, won.) The "contract" candidates were largely supported by the IDP but ran on a promise to decentralize the party and to avoid discriminating against party volunteers based on ideology.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the opponents of the IDP understood this electoral defeat as a sign that the party has been taken over by right-wing extremists. Both the chair of the national party, Lillian Vogl, and the chair of my own state chapter, Ephrem Bensusan, are leaving the party as a result. Ephrem has given his reasoning <a href="https://ninthstation.blogspot.com/2018/06/goodbye-american-solidarity-party.html">here</a>. This leaves me as the acting chair of the Kentucky chapter (I was previously Ephrem's Vice-Chair).<br /><br />As you can see from the foregoing, I disagree strongly with Ephrem's assessment of the situation. I disagree as a result of my experiences over the past year, beginning as a supporter of Ephrem and becoming increasingly alienated by his approach to those who opposed his vision for the party. I remain broadly in agreement with Ephrem's positive vision for the party, though I am much more sympathetic to distributism than he is and am also more interested in the party serving as a radical witness than in the unlikely prospect of our actually becoming a major party. (That would be nice if it happens, but not at the expense of selling out our principles.)<br /><br />So in spite of our recent rough weather, I encourage anyone reading this to give us a try. Read the platform, particularly our four core principles. If you agree with them, then join us and help us get better at implementing them. Let's overcome the left-right dichotomy that is tearing this country apart. Let's come together around the core principle of respect for human life, even if we disagree on some of the specifics of implementation.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-45261205831162014392018-03-26T17:27:00.000-04:002020-03-30T17:30:18.896-04:00The much-heralded death of European ChristianityThe <i>Daily Mail</i> announces<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5536431/Losing-religion-Christianity-Europe-dying-study-finds.html"> breathlessly</a> that "Christianity in Europe is dying out." This is just the latest in a long series of such stories that flit about the Internet, often heralded with equal glee by atheists (for obvious reasons) and by conservative American Christians who are happy to use their European brothers and sisters as a foil for their own allegedly more vibrant expression of the faith.<br />
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Peter Ormerod <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/22/christianity-norm-underground-mystery">responds</a> in the <i>Guardian </i>that this alleged "death" is actually a good thing for Christianity. It frees European Christians to embrace the "weirdness" of the Faith rather than trying to accommodate it to the pressures of society. I think he's absolutely right. In my own experience traveling in Europe, I have been struck by how vibrant and generally hopeful the (admittedly small) congregations I've visited are. Also, there typically are a significant number of young people.<br />
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The use of the term "death" for steep numerical decline is highly misleading. Yes, Christianity as a "cultural norm" is dying--but hasn't it been dead in that sense for a while now, in much of Europe? As long as there is even one new convert being drawn to Christianity, or even one person raised in the Faith retaining it or returning to it, the Faith is not dead.<br />
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To argue by numbers in matters of faith is one of the most vulgar and destructive mistakes we can make. Each human person is of infinite value. Life and death are not quantifiable.<br />
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Meanwhile, American Christianity, also in numerical decline compared to the recent past, seems to have wedded itself to structures of power with new fervor--at least conservative evangelicalism (and to some extent conservative Catholicism) has done so. I would much rather worship with a tiny congregation of European Christians free to proclaim the Faith in all its richness than in a megachurch whose Gospel was a corrupted blend of self-help superstition, American nationalism, and the worst cliches of prooftexting free-church Protestantism.<br />
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The further question that needs to be asked, though, is why the decline of European Christianity? The simple, and largely correct, answer given by Ormerod and others is that European Christianity has allied itself with power and that this has made it seem lacking in credibility. We often think of the medieval Church in this respect--the magnificent art and learning combined with the often brutal use of coercive power.<br />
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But while I do think that's part of the story, I wonder if we blame the Middle Ages too much. There is a much more direct and more obviously corrupt connection with more recent European history. In the Middle Ages, the people in power who used coercion to enforce Christianity were generally acting, as far as I can tell, out of sincere conviction that Christianity was true. The common people, while often poorly observant, generally (so far as we can tell) also accepted the truth of the Christian Faith. And the elites engaged in a number of efforts to evangelize the poorly catechized, precisely because the genuine truth of the religion was commonly accepted.<br />
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But beginning with figures such as Machiavelli in the Renaissance, some members of the elite began to argue that religion was valuable because of its role in maintaining social order. This was of course a revival of a view held by many ancient pagans. It's a fundamentally un-Christian, even anti-Christian position. By the 19th century, it was plausible for atheists to claim that many bishops (of the Church of England, say, but it was commonly believed that this was true of Catholicism as well) really "knew" that Christianity was false but maintained it for its social effects. One of the most common arguments against atheism was that it would lead to social chaos--an argument that tacitly conceded that the truth-based arguments for Christianity were at best inconclusive.<br />
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Now I suspect that unbelievers tended to exaggerate wildly how many members of the religious establishment really thought like this. If you think Christianity is patently false, you will have trouble imagining that its representatives are sincere. And of course we can't rule out the possibility that people in the Middle Ages thought this way as well. Certainly some of the Islamic philosophers seem to have thought that the Qur'an and Shari'a were mostly there to guide people who weren't capable of being guided by philosophy.<br />
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Nonetheless, it does look very much as if the modern era saw the rise of a more cynical attitude to religion, in which the maintenance of social order was no longer the natural outcome of believing the truth but a substitute for truth. And this is, in fact, what many people in Britain at least think "religion" is--simply an instrument of social control. Often Christians like myself get defensive about this and feel as if our unbelieving relatives and friends are being unfair. But we shouldn't forget that, in fact, there were people who explicitly maintained that religion was valuable specifically for this reason--and there still are such folks.<br />
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This is the kind of religion decisively discredited by the World Wars. If your main reason for supporting a Christian order is that it keeps people in line and keeps them from killing each other, and you proceed to spend several decades killing each other on a massive scale, "religion" is going to seem useless.<br />
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And this brings us back to Ormerod's point. The kind of Christianity that is dying in Europe needed to die. Religion for the sake of respectability, religion for the sake of social order, is not authentic Christianity. It is a particularly decadent and corrupted form of paganism with a Christian veneer.<br />
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In America, this kind of religion still has some legs. The widespread support of many evangelicals for Donald Trump--even the willingness to believe that in some vague way he's really a devout Christian in spite of all the actual evidence pointing the other way--is rooted in a deeply fearful, power-hungry vision of the relationship of faith and society. Some conservative Christians seriously argue that without Trump and other Republican politicians, Christianity in America is doomed. And of course, what they really mean by that is that America will go the way of Europe.<br />
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Not only is this craven and faithless (as Greg Forster pointed out in<a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/roy-moore-eschatological-politics/"> this</a> magnificent piece), but it flies in the face of the historical evidence from Europe. It is precisely this kind of thinking that has led to the current steep numerical decline in European Christianity.<br />
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In this, as in so many other things, if you aim for a lesser good you lose it, but if you aim for the true good you may (possibly--nothing is guaranteed) get the lesser good as well.<br />
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So why not drop all the triumphalist nonsense about how the "right" kind of Christianity flourishes numerically, and all the idolatrous rhetoric about saving <a href="http://stewedrabbit.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-victory-of-reason-review.html">Western Civilization</a>. If we are going to be Christians at all, let's be Christians because it is true and beautiful and gloriously weird. Let's let the consequences take care of themselves. And if that means that we dwindle and die, so be it. The one thing we can be sure of is that if we cling to power we will face destruction anyway, having first corrupted and (so far as is possible) destroyed the faith delivered to us.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-40414102919885703622018-03-26T00:24:00.001-04:002020-03-30T17:30:42.350-04:00The Last Jedi: a defense and explication (lots of spoilers)<div style="text-align: center;">
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In this post, I'm going to lay out what I think the film <i>The Last Jedi</i> is about, and why the film is, for me at least, a thorough-going success, rivaling the original trilogy. This is not to deny the validity of many of the criticisms that have been made. The film doesn't, for instance, do a good job of explaining why the situation is so desperate and why the Republic appears to have failed entirely. But on the other hand, the prequels tried to flesh out the politics of the Star Wars universe and were largely unsuccessful. It makes sense that the new trilogy would turn away from political analysis to return to the story of a rag-tag band of rebels against an evil host. I regret the lack of effective world-building, but I can still appreciate both TFA and TLJ for what they are. TFA is an enjoyable homage to the original trilogy. TLJ contains plenty of echoes itself, particularly of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but it's obviously going for something different. Is that something different worth going for? And does TLJ succeed? My answers are "yes, definitely" to the first question and "yes, mostly" to the second.<br />
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What impressed me about TLJ, as I watched it, was the way every part of this sprawling film interlocked to reinforce the overall theme. The theme, as in most fantasy stories, is about the proper way to struggle against evil. TLJ has gotten a lot of criticism for being iconoclastic, but frankly the bizarre and naive combination of Manicheanism and pseudo-Eastern monism present in the original trilogy needed to be smashed. I don't read TLJ as cynical or nihilistic at all--rather, its complex narrative fleshes out what genuine heroism in a good cause looks like. Kylo Ren's line "let the past die" has been quoted as the major theme of the film, but I think the ultimate message is better summed up in Rose's words to Finn near the end of the movie, "It's not about fighting what you hate; it's about protecting what you love." (Alas, that doesn't make the "crash your plane into his plane in order to save him" episode any less ridiculous.)<br />
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The film tells three interlocking stories. The first story is about Rey's quest to find Luke Skywalker and bring him back to save the galaxy, and when that fails, to turn Kylo Ren to the light as Luke had turned his father Darth Vader. This too fails, when Ren kills Snoke but takes his place as leader of the First Order, inviting Rey to join him, which she refuses to do. But, in the final climax of the film, Luke does show up (though only via "Force Projection") for a showdown with Ren, echoing another moment from the original trilogy, the death of Obi-Wan. Rey rescues the tattered remnant of the Resistance and they all fly off on the Millennium Falcon. This is the principal strand of the story and the one that has gotten most acclaim.<br />
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The second story focuses on the fighter pilot Poe Dameron and his conflict first with Leia and then with Leia's temporary replacement Admiral Holdo, as the Resistance fleet attempts to flee the First Order. This part of the story shows strong influence from Battlestar Galactica (a good thing in my book), and is an extended "setup" in which we are led to think that Poe is the hero and that Holdo is either cowardly or traitorous, only to find that in fact she and Leia were on the same page and had a perfectly reasonable plan, which Poe manages to destroy leading to thousands of deaths.<br />
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The third strand of the plot, a spinoff of the second, is the story of the former Stormtrooper Finn and his new friend Rose, who ally with Poe and go off on a hare-brained quest for an expert code-breaker who will allow them to disable the tracking mechanism on the First Order flagship. Their adventures on a "casino planet" have been largely dismissed as a silly digression from the main story, but some critics have pointed out that in fact this episode gives the fight between good and evil more specificity and believability than Star Wars usually attempts. Finn and Rose wind up with an amoral criminal as their expert codebreaker, who casually betrays them (and the fleet) to the First Order when they are captured. Reunited with Poe in the final showdown on the salt planet, Finn disobeys the chastened Poe's orders to break off a suicidal attack, only to be (absurdly) knocked out of the sky by Rose, who delivers the line I quoted earlier as the fundamental motto of the film as a whole.<br />
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I'll get back to why I think this third strand of the story is actually important. But first, back to the Rey/Luke/Kylo Ren strand and the much-discussed theme of "killing the past."<br />
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<b>The first strand: "The Jedi must end"</b></div>
Rey goes to Atch-To as a naive hero-worshiper of Luke, whom she had considered a myth until the events of the previous film. She clearly expects, as do other characters in the story, that Luke will teach her to be a Jedi as Obi-Wan and Yoda had taught him. This is what the logic of Star Wars has led us to expect. But Luke confounds these expectations by tossing the lightsaber over his shoulder and insisting that the Jedi are a failure and need to die. Kylo Ren reinforces this message by telling Rey in their telepathic conversations (which we find out later were enabled by Snoke in order to turn Rey to the Dark Side) that she needs to "let the past die" or even "kill it if necessary."<br />
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The interesting thing about this is that it puts Luke and Ren on the same side. Both of them have taken away the same basic message from their confrontation (which we--and Rey--learn about three times, first from Luke, then Ren, then Luke again, each claiming to correct the other's previous version). Both have concluded that the Jedi Order needs to be destroyed. Some reviewers have suggested that Luke's reaction to his momentary impulse to kill his troubled apprentice is out of proportion--why conclude that the Jedi are all wrong just because you almost made one terribly bad choice? And, some have asked, why would the person who saw good in Darth Vader fail (until it was almost too late) to see anything redeemable in his own young nephew?<br />
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To answer this , we need to look at the history of the Jedi as shown in the films, including the much-despised prequels. The Jedi are an elite order of people who have been trained to use the "light side" of the Force. Theoretically, the Jedi want to recruit everyone who has the capacity to use the Force, although they have to get them very young in order to train them properly. The training includes rigid control of the emotions, which are generally linked to the Dark Side. This appears, from what we see in the prequels, to include a commitment to celibacy. That would mean that when Yoda warns Luke that his feelings for Leia could be made to serve the Dark Side, he's understating considerably and he's not just talking about the incest aspect. (Just looked this up and apparently Lucas claimed in an interview that the Jedi <i>were</i> allowed to have sex, just not marriage or family or any kind of "possessive relationships." The case for the creepiness of the Jedi just got way stronger!)<br />
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I don't want to get into the whole question of whether this is an implicit criticism of the Catholic Church, and if so whether it's a fair one. (But I think it is fair to say that TLJ is a Protestant, maybe even Quaker movie!) As portrayed in the SW movies, the Jedi approach seems to be fundamentally unsustainable. Vows of celibacy are one thing, but a hostility to all emotion is quite another. (<a href="http://kethrim.com/jediarchive/j/28.html">This </a>website, which of course isn't canon, says that Jedi are encouraged to feel emotions, observe them and then "let them pass through you" rather than clinging to them--which sounds very Buddhist. But it does say that emotions get in the way of hearing the Force. What then about "trust your feelings, Luke"? Feelings and emotions are different, I guess?) And predictably, the Jedi seem to have little to offer someone who is experiencing inner turmoil. Such turmoil is, itself, seen as a manifestation of the Dark Side. The Jedi are also capable of ruthless violence, all for the greater good of course and done without anger. Yoda tells Luke in <i>Empire Strikes Back</i> that the Jedi must only use the Force for "knowledge and defense," but if that's true, then "defense" has a very flexible definition.<br />
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All of this explains why Luke responds as he does to the young Ben Solo. His abortive attempt to kill his apprentice was not just a momentary aberration. It was the reasonable way for a Jedi to respond to what appeared to be a rising tide of darkness within an extremely gifted student. After all, Obi-Wan and Yoda had both insisted to the young Luke that he had to kill his father, and both began discussing contingency plans (otherwise known as Leia) when they realized that he might not be willing to do this.<br />
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When Luke first meets Rey, he realizes that she, like Ben, is a deeply troubled person with great talent. He tells her that this "didn't scare me enough" in Ben's case. When she immediately feels the draw of the "dark" place under the island, he treats this as some fundamental flaw in her. Yet when Rey dives into the repository of the "dark side," nothing terrible happens. She doesn't become evil--instead, like Luke in the parallel scene in <i>Empire Strikes Back</i>, she gains self-knowledge. Luke encountered a vision of Darth Vader (whom he did not yet know was his father) and killed him, only to see that the face inside the helmet was his own. Rey seeks a vision of her parents, but only sees endless images of herself. This paves the way for Yoda's words to Luke that Rey already has all the wisdom she needs within herself.<br />
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Luke has been on the island for years, seeking to reject the Jedi traditions--but he has deliberately sought out a place of great holiness for the Jedi tradition, and has never actually been able to carry out his intention of burning the Jedi texts. He treats Rey in classic Jedi master fashion even while claiming that he is only teaching her in order to debunk the Jedi ways. He is deeply terrified by her alleged attraction to the "Dark Side," which is a highly conventional Jedi reaction. Thus, ironically, the naive Ray, who seeks initiation, into the Jedi tradition is the push Luke needs to free himself from the Jedi tradition--or, perhaps, to renew it by returning to its true principles.<br />
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Luke's final "duel" with Kylo Ren shows the new enlightenment he has reached because of his encounter with Rey. It is a homage, of course, to Obi Wan's death in the first Star Wars movie. But while Obi Wan tells Darth Vader "if you strike me down I will become more powerful than ever," Luke tells Ren, "Strike me down in anger, and I will always be with you, just like your father." It is the language of relationship, rather than the language of power. It is a threat, but also a promise.<br />
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Ren's desire to destroy the past violently is not actually a constructive answer. Killing the past, striking it down in anger, only means that it haunts us all the more. Rey's attempt to turn Kylo Ren to the light fails, but that doesn't make it foolish or wrong. At the end of the movie, Ren appears triumphant, but he has unfinished business with both the dead Luke (and, as Luke has pointed out, with his father) and the living Rey. And Rey has emerged as a genuine heir of everything good in the Jedi tradition, regardless of her parentage.<br />
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<b>The second strand: Poe vs. the women</b></div>
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The strand of the story that concerns Poe's conflict with Leia and Holdo over the proper way to fight has gotten a lot of praise and criticism on ideological grounds. Generally speaking, conservatives hate it because they see it as heavy-handed feminist propaganda and they find its attitude to heroic sacrifice inconsistent (good when women do it, bad when men do it). Feminists typically like it, for obvious reasons. I'm on the feminist side on this one. I think it's a neat reversal of conventional stories of derring-do, as well as a homage to Battlestar Galactica (which on the whole I find a good thing). I recognize that there are problems with the plot, but on the whole I found the characters engaging and the standoff one of the tensest parts of the movie, because the film created genuine uncertainty about who was in the right. I don't find Holdo's actions inconsistent--the movie never suggests that courage and sacrifice are bad things in themselves, only that they need to be, as Catholics would say, "rightly ordered." (See Aristotle, and Aquinas, on courage as a mean between cowardice and rashness.) </div>
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Just as the main strand of the film criticizes the ideology of the Jedi order, so this strand criticizes the<br />
ideology of action movies in general, in which the way to resist evil is <i>always</i> to "get in a plane and blow things up." And yes, this is gendered, because men generally are more likely than women to fall into this error. Holdo is set up to look like what my wife and I would call (if you'll pardon a reference to the <i>other</i> classic screen sci-fi mythos) a "Kai Winn" character, from the obnoxious Bajoran leader in Deep Space Nine--someone who conceals her selfish ambition, and perhaps even her treason, behind the mask of motherly female authority. Personally, I loved this part of the story, precisely because I found it disconcerting. I also loved the completely unrealistic gentle treatment Poe got from Holdo and Leia when his mutiny failed.<br />
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This strand of the story mirrors the main strand in that more conventional "Star Wars values" are first presented, then debunked, then reaffirmed in a chastened way. Heroic self-sacrifice isn't bad--it just needs to be clearly necessary and serve the common good rather than being an expression of machismo.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">The third strand: "Protecting what you love"</span><br />
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The Rose/Finn section of the film has attracted the most criticism, and it does have some problems. The extended sequence on the casino planet drags the movie out, and Rose's "saving" Finn by crashing into him is a rather bizarre act that strains suspension of disbelief, besides seeming like a heavy-handed statement of a theme that has already been made adequately. But from a strictly thematic point of view, this is actually the strand that pulls it together, with Rose's line about protecting what you love rather than fighting what you hate.<br />
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Again, this is really just a restatement of a line we have heard from Yoda: "Fear leads to anger. . . anger leads to hate. . . hate leads to suffering." (Maybe the only memorable thing in <i>The Phantom Menace? </i>Other than just how goofy it was?) That this line, which summarizes the message of the film as a whole, is given to such an "unimportant" character further cements the democratic, iconoclastic message of the film.<br />
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The closing scene of the film takes us back to the "casino planet" for a shot of a kid using the Force to lift a broom. In spite of the problems with the earlier casino planet sequence in terms of the pacing of the plot, the events on the casino planet turn out to be thematically central to the film. Rose has commented that the financiers who gamble on the casino planet are the "worst people in the world." The true villains of <i>The Last Jedi</i> are not cackling space wizards but well-heeled, respectable people who sell weapons to both sides in the conflict. And the true heroes, at the film's end, are the down-trodden children who are just beginning to discover their own innate power.<br />
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<b>Conclusion</b></div>
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For me at least, <i>The Last Jedi</i> is just iconoclastic enough to be fresh, while managing to evoke the combination of corny humor and romantic myth-making that made the first trilogy so successful. In the end, the film does not destroy the mythos of the series as a whole--it refreshes it by challenging some of its unacknowledged problems and giving it a more egalitarian message. Star Wars is one of the quintessential American myths (in both good and bad ways). By subverting the "hero blowing things up" model and substituting a message about the potential for heroism in everyone, this last installment has substituted one aspect of the American myth for another. From my perspective, this new version is largely an improvement.<br />
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I was finally inspired to finish this long review by watching <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> today with my five-year-old daughter. The Yoda sequences on Dagobah are among my favorite scenes in the whole franchise, and watching them I realized how much <i>The Last Jedi</i> owes to its predecessors even as it tries to sort out some of their mixed messages. Also, not having watched <i>Empire</i> for a while, I'd forgotten how much TLJ's closing fight really does echo the battle on Hoth in the earlier film. In one scene, Luke destroys an Imperial Walker when the battle is functionally over, accomplishing nothing that I can see for the greater cause. It is precisely this kind of pointless derring-do that the later film will criticize. The earlier films, like most action adventures, create action sequences that in the end don't accomplish much, while completely skating over this futility. In TLJ, the futility is hammered home. Actions have consequences.<br />
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With TLJ, the Star Wars franchise has finally, reluctantly, grown up a little. Maybe that's not entirely a good thing. But in a culture of delayed adolescence with a fixation on acts of violent heroism by young males, I think it mostly is.</div>
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Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-2489131376480602732017-12-16T16:09:00.000-05:002020-03-30T17:31:00.759-04:00Star Wars movie review--but not the one you expect<br />
I've been working on a series of blog posts on Brad Gregory's <i>The Unintended Reformation</i>, which was published five years ago and which I finished reading about a year ago. So it probably shouldn't surprise that I am now writing not about the new Star Wars (which I'm going to see on Tuesday) but the last one, which I only just watched last night (in preparation for seeing the new one). I'd heard a lot of mixed reports on it--many of my friends think that it's too much of a rehash of previous films. Having watched it, I think that's true. It's not a shattering, ground-breaking movie, but I enjoyed it a lot (and probably would have been more impressed on the large screen). I'm certainly looking forward to watching the next one.<br />
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<a href="about:invalid#zClosurez" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>Like many people, I particularly liked the story of Finn, the stormtrooper who changes sides. He begins the story without a name except the designation FN-2187. Early in the film, one of his comrades is killed, and reaches up and touches FN-2187 on the helmet, leaving a bloodstained handprint. At this point we only know the character as just another faceless stormtrooper, but the bloodstain individualizes him. A few minutes later, he and he alone refuses to massacre civilians, and eventually helps a Resistance pilot escape. In the fighter, as they are fleeing the "First Order," the pilot, Poe Dameron, names FN-2187 "Finn," just before the fighter crashes and Finn believes that Dameron is dead. I wasn't sure that Dameron would stay dead, and of course he doesn't--turns out he was thrown from the craft and survived perfectly fine. Apparently the original plan was for him to die, and I think that would have made Finn's journey from nameless stormtrooper to individualized hero more poignant.<br />
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I also really liked the ending, in which Rey finally tracks Luke Skywalker down on a coastline that reminded me vividly of my ancestral Shetland (i believe it's actually Skellig Michael in Ireland). As I said to someone today, I can put up with nearly anything in a movie that gives me a shot of a windswept landscape overlooking the North Atlantic.<br />
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The curse of Star Wars, I think, is Joseph Campbell. His homogenized stereotype of a "hero's journey" has locked the franchise into certain patterns that it can't seem to escape. Of course Hollywood blockbusters tend to follow well-worn grooves anyway, but the particular mythic model George Lucas chose has, I think, accentuated that basic tendency of commercial entertainment. This is why George R. R. Martin's work stands out, I think. It isn't so much that Martin is "cynical" or "nihilistic" (though of course his vision is very dark), but that he treats his characters as individuals. Their actions fall into certain broad patterns, but the complexity and freedom of real human lives keeps busting the heroic stereotypes apart.<br />
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Supposedly the new Star Wars movie is bolder than its predecessor. I'll find out on Tuesday. But since apparently it starts with more shots of Skellig Michael, I'll be happy no matter what.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-19123600972911109892017-12-10T16:49:00.000-05:002020-03-30T17:33:15.644-04:00Brad Gregory--Excluding God, or, It's all the fault of Duns Scotus<br />
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Chapter One of <i>The Unintended Reformation</i> is probably the most often cited. Indeed, many of the negative reactions to the book focus on the thesis Gregory argues here. Ironically, the chapter is atypical inasmuch as the root of modern secularism identified here lies not in the Reformation itself but in late medieval theology, specifically the work of Duns Scotus. According to Gregory, Scotus' concept of "univocity" radically altered the traditional Christian understanding of God. In traditional Christian theology (i.e., in the work of the Church Fathers, the Eastern tradition, or the earlier scholastics such as Aquinas), God is radically other than creation. All creation depends on God and participates in God, but no concept drawn from creation (as all our concepts are) is adequate to describe God. God is not a specific example of a broader category of "things that exist." God transcends all our categories and all our language. For Aquinas--himself much less "apophatic" (i.e., more willing to make positive claims about God) than many other great theologians of the tradition--even "being" can only be predicated of creatures and God analogously. Creaturely "being" derives from God's and thus has something that resembles it, but the differences are always going to be far greater than the similarities.<br />
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Scotus, in contrast, believes that there is a concept of "being" that can be univocally applied to God and creatures. Gregory argues that this is, implicitly, a radical move that makes it possible to think and speak about God in the same way we do about creation. But he admits that in itself this highly abstruse theory would have had little effect. This is where the Reformation comes in. By shattering the unity of Western Christendom and igniting fierce debates about how we know God's revelation, the Reformation cast Europeans back on an abstract, philosophical concept of God, which had been subtly altered by Scotus. Hence, post-Reformation Christians (both Catholic <i>and </i>Protestant) increasingly tended to think of God as the greatest of beings within a universe that could in principle be explained through reason and natural law. As the rapidly developing disciplines of the natural sciences explained more and more of reality without reference to God, God's place within this cosmos dwindled to that of the First Cause of Deism, and eventually to Feuerbach's mere projection of the human mind.<br />
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There is a reason why this sweeping argument has drawn so much criticism. In the first place, it's generally a bad idea to rest big claims about intellectual history on Scotus if you aren't a Scotus expert, because Scotus is such a darn difficult author. (In fact, I have a paper on Calvin I have wanted to publish for years which, among other revisions, probably needs to have all the Scotus cut out.) While Scotus <i>did </i>say that one can predicate being univocally of God and creatures, this was a very narrow and technical point, and the people I know who know something about Scotus generally seem to agree that it won't bear the weight Gregory puts on it. While Gregory does cite Scotus scholarship, he generally doesn't seem to be familiar with the bulk of recent work on Scotus, or at least he doesn't cite that work. Instead, his view seems to owe a lot to a 20th-century Catholic polemical trope of blaming the Reformation on the distortions of late medieval theology. In the 1990s, the largely Anglican theological movement called "Radical Orthodoxy" embraced the idea that Scotus had been the point where the Western theological tradition Went Wrong, and many more broadly "post-liberal" theologians of different traditions make similar points, it seems to me. Gregory cites Fr. (now Bishop) Robert Barron's 2007 <i>The Priority of Christ </i>for his view on the significance of Scotus' adoption of the concept of the univocity of being. Now I myself am very sympathetic to this strand of recent theology. I think there may be something to the "blame Scotus" argument, in fact. But it's unwise to rest too much weight on these claims when generally speaking the people who are actual Scotus experts qualify them at best and scoff at them at worst.<br />
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Furthermore, the idea that post-Scotus theologians, including the Protestant Reformers, thought of God as fundamentally the same kind of being we are seems very strange. William Ockham, seen by many (including Gregory) as taking Scotus' innovations even further, had a radically "apophatic" view of God in which God's nature is pretty much completely unknowable and all we can talk about is God's will. And this is generally the approach of the Reformers. Calvin, contrary to the stereotype many hold of him, fulminates against the idea that God is arbitrary, to the point of rejecting the basic distinction all medieval theologians made between what God has chosen to do and what God could have done but didn't. (I write about this in that paper I referred to earlier.) He believes that all God's actions flow from his nature. But the nature, again, is fundamentally unknowable. The older Catholic polemical trope of blaming everything on the late medieval scholastics, in fact, was more likely to argue that Ockham in particular made God so entirely <i>other</i> from us that reason has nothing to say about God--and this is certainly a more plausible interpretation of at least some of the early Protestant theologians (most notably Luther).<br />
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But even if Gregory is all out to sea on what he says about Scotus, and wrong to suggest that the Reformers followed Scotus in this respect, that doesn't really affect the basic argument of the chapter, at least insofar as it supports the overall case made by the book. After all, blaming Scotus wouldn't, in itself, support Gregory's argument that the Reformation is the source of the modern secular world. Rather, Gregory's most significant argument is that the sharp disagreements about God's acts of revelation that took place in the Reformation left post-Reformation Christians with no sure ground to speak about God <i>except</i> that provided by reason and natural science. And put in that way, I think it's a highly plausible argument. Not conclusive--as various reviewers have pointed out, one can easily argue that post-Reformation developments, by no means determined by the Reformation, were more truly decisive than anything connected directly with Protestantism.<br />
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There's also a somewhat more nuanced way to put the argument than Gregory chooses, one that was made by Louis Bouyer in <i>The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism</i>. In this way of thinking, late medieval philosophy and theology tended to set up an either/or between God and creation. This became central to the Reformation. The Reformers sought to tear down human agency in order to exalt divine agency, rather than seeing the two as occupying radically different metaphysical "space" and thus as fundamentally compatible, as Aquinas did. (For instance, Aquinas seems to have no problems speaking of God causing humans to act in a particular way--freely. And yet he generally defines freedom in a "libertarian" rather than a "compatibilist" way, as the ability to choose one of two contraries.) Arguably, the Reformation's exaltation of the divine against the human caused Europeans to think of the two as a zero-sum game, so that every discovery of natural causality pushed God into a smaller and smaller "corner." Even this only makes sense if we speak in terms of a very general ethos rather than specific ideas about nature, since all the Reformers would have insisted that, in Calvin's words, nature is the "theater of God's glory," and would have agreed with the medieval tradition that God is active in and through "secondary causes." (Their opposition of divine and human causality was pretty much limited to soteriology and revelation, it seems to me.)<br />
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All of that being said, it's surely hard to deny that most modern people <i>do</i> have assumptions about God that are radically different from those of the patristic and medieval traditions. The popularity of "Intelligent Design" among conservative Christians, with the assumption that this says something meaningful about God's activity in creation, is one indication of this. (I wrote two blog posts about ID which you can read<a href="https://stewedrabbit.blogspot.com/2016/08/why-intelligent-design-is-not-good.html?m=0"> here</a> and <a href="http://stewedrabbit.blogspot.com/2016/08/intelligent-design-part-2.html">here</a>.) As a number of people have pointed out, nearly everything that Richard Dawkins and other "New Atheists" write betrays a radical ignorance of what Christians have historically meant when we speak of God. It's incredibly hard to get through to atheists on this, not least because so many Christians hold precisely the view the atheists are attacking. To be sure, most medieval people weren't educated in the nuances of theology and no doubt held "crude" views of God, but the prevalence of misunderstandings (or just a radically different set of assumptions about what "God" means) among highly educated people indicates that there really is some kind of major chasm in the Western intellectual tradition. As MacIntyre famously said about ethics, there has been an intellectual eclipse similar to what post-apocalyptic sci-fi often posits with regard to science. And while the Reformation itself clearly did not cause the chasm, Gregory's thesis that it threw Europeans back on the resources of a purely abstract, non-theological concept of God seems plausible.<br />
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Plausible of course doesn't necessarily mean convincing. This is a highly interesting chapter, but not the strongest way to begin the book given the speculative nature of the argument and the serious reasons to question major parts of it. In later posts, I'll discuss whether the later chapters make stronger arguments (spoiler: generally speaking I believe they do).Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-24724383739928198302017-12-03T16:06:00.001-05:002020-03-30T17:34:03.743-04:00Silence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Several weeks ago, I finally watched Martin Scorsese's film <i>Silence</i>. Given the title and the theme, it's probably appropriate that it's taken me so long to write about it, though that's fairly typical for me.<br />
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For people who don't already know the film: it's based on a book by the Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, which is in turn based on historical events of the early 17th century during the Japanese persecution of Christians. A Portuguese Jesuit missionary, Christovao Ferreira, has disappeared in Japan, and rumor has it that he has apostasized. Two young priests are sent to find out what happened to him. After ministering to the persecuted Japanese Christians, they are betrayed and arrested. Both the novel and the film focus on one of them, a fictional character named Rodriguez (played by Andrew Garfield) who himself eventually follows Ferreira's footsteps and apostasizes.<br />
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The apostasy, in both book and film, is presented as a paradoxically Christian act. Rodriguez himself is never tortured--the Japanese authorities choose rather to torture Japanese Christians (who in some cases have already apostasized), telling Rodriguez that he can end their suffering by renouncing the faith himself. This is done by the ritual act of treading on a portrait of Christ, the "fumie." In the climax of the story, witnessing the tortures of the Japanese Christians, pressured by his own former mentor Ferreira with the argument that apostasy is the Christlike, unselfish thing to do, Rodriguez hears the voice of Christ saying, "You may trample. . . .it was to be trampled on by men that I was born into the world." His renunciation of Christ is therefore, an ultimate act of discipleship--or at least this is the suggestion that Endo's narrative makes, followed by Scorsese's film.<br />
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I read the novel many years ago and need to reread it. From here on, I will refer primarily to the film. In Scorsese's telling, at least, Rodriguez is fulfilling not only a Christian ideal (imitatio Christi) but a Buddhist one. Both Japanese interrogators and his apostate mentor Ferreira (played by Liam Neeson, himself a Buddhist in real life) suggest that by ceasing to cling to his faith, he would be letting go of self, transcending all attachments in an act of pure compassion. Scorsese explicitly endorsed this interpretation of Rodriguez' apostasy in an interview with him I heard on NPR. It isn't surprising, then, that many conservative Catholics have reacted badly to the film (as many Japanese Catholics reacted badly to Endo's original novel). Furthermore, Ferreira also tells Rodriguez that Christianity is fundamentally unsuited to Japan, like a tree that can't take root in a swamp. He argues that since the Japanese have no conception of a spiritual reality transcending the natural world, even the converts who suffer and die heroically for their faith are really dying for an unrecognizable distortion of Christianity and are acting primarily out of personal loyalty to Rodriguez and the other missionaries.<br />
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If I remember rightly, these ideas are present in the original novel. But as a viewer of the film, I find them unconvincing. Scorsese never shows us a good reason to believe that Ferreira is right. The actual glimpses we get of Japanese Christians seem to contradict his claim that they aren't "really" converts to Christianity and are simply motivated by loyalty to the missionaries. (And why are they so loyal to the missionaries anyway?) The Japanese elites who mastermind the persecution are sophisticated and plausible, but they have utter contempt for their own commoners and, of course, are willing to use horrifying brutality in order to preserve their social order. Ferreira's narrative, and that of his Japanese masters, appears to be self-serving nonsense given the evidence we see in the film. In fact, in the world of the film, the Japanese peasants receive Christianity with joy as a message that brings them hope and meaning, and they cling to it stubbornly in the face of agonizing torment.<br />
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The film actually ignores a great deal that could be said on behalf of the Japanese authorities and against seventeenth-century Catholicism. Except for one moment when the Japanese "Inquisitor" thinks Rodriguez is inviting Japan to "marry" the Portuguese (as he points out, he's actually talking about the Church), the imperialist undertones of the conflict aren't really addressed. The Japanese had good reason to worry about the way the Portuguese colonizers used Catholicism to give themselves a foothold. In Sri Lanka and Southern India, the Portuguese persecuted Buddhism, destroying the holiest relic of Sri Lankan Buddhism (Buddha's tooth) in a public ceremony (the Buddhists now claim that this was a replica and that the real tooth is still intact). Even the use of the term "Inquisitor" for the Japanese persecutor is ironic, given its normal association with Catholicism. Had Rodriguez gone back to Europe and proclaimed that Christ had told him to apostasize, he would have encountered his own religion's Inquisitors quite quickly. While the brutality of the Catholic Inquisition has often been exaggerated and in fact paled in comparison to the methods the Japanese used, the fact remains that the Catholics of this era were quite willing to use torture and execution to preserve <i>their</i> social order against threats. Similarly, early modern Europe was not exactly a place in which the lives and human dignity of peasants were highly regarded. Japan and Europe had a great deal in common, in fact. The film makes no attempt to draw out these parallels. That isn't a criticism--it's not as if the social injustices of early modern Europe or the violence employed on behalf of the Catholic Church are unknown in our culture, or as if Hollywood is generally interested in presenting an unduly favorable picture of Catholicism. But since some Catholics have apparently dismissed the film as anti-Catholic, it's worth noting that in many respects it is, if anything, the reverse. Indeed, it is if anything an anti-Buddhist film, shattering the "peaceful Buddhist" positive stereotype many in the West indulge in and showing the brutality of which a Buddhist culture was capable.<br />
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That is not to deny the very real sympathy Scorsese clearly feels with Buddhism. The Buddhist understanding of "no-self" and compassion comes through very clearly. But ironically, it is Rodriguez, not Ferreira, who most fully embodies it. Neeson's Ferreira is weary and sad, "empty" in the negative Western sense as well as (or instead of) the positive Buddhist one. In the flashbacks the film provides, it seems that his apostasy, unlike that of Rodriguez, was prompted by his own torture, after he had already witnessed that of others (Rodriguez, in contrast, is never harmed physically). His explanations seem like ex post facto rationalizations. But they give Rodriguez the framework on which he will act when the spectacle of the Japanese converts' torment becomes unbearable. Rodriguez does what Ferreira suggests, and he arguably fulfills the "selfless" ideal Ferreira has held out to him, but he does it for deeply Christian reasons. And in the end, Christianity gets the last word, with a final shot of Rodriguez corpse, wrapped in flames as part of a Buddhist funeral, clutching a crucifix.<br />
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<i>Silence</i> is an ambiguous and tragic film, not a work of propaganda for one side or the other. It defies easy explanations, even those of its own director. It captures the paradoxes and ambiguities of religious faith as powerfully as any film I have ever seen. And, precisely because of that, it is one of the most profoundly Christian films ever produced, worthy of a place just a step below the sublime <i>Of Gods and Men</i>.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-43982474005141920612017-11-01T01:17:00.000-04:002017-11-01T01:17:28.562-04:00An appreciation of the Reformation<img alt="1000 Years of German History Documentary 8: Martin Luther (1483 A.D)" height="400" src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d5/c8/d2/d5c8d25063cf82ffda9d7762f38e51eb.jpg" width="362" /><br />
As usual, I'd meant to have posted more on the Reformation leading up to the 500th anniversary tonight, including a series on Brad Gregory (only one post out in that so far). However, this is only the anniversary of the posting of the Theses, which is typically seen as the public <i>beginning</i> of the Protestant movement. So I'll be posting more in the months--and years--to come, perhaps up to (or even beyond) the anniversary of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Since I'll be 81 by then, this assumes that I will still be alive--and that we won't all have been enslaved by robot overlords, or slaughtered by a supervirus, or uploaded into an AI, or doomed to nuclear annihilation as a parlor game for billionaire playboys.<br /><br />But tonight I'm going to set polemic aside and write about what is worth appreciating in the Protestant Reformation, and in Luther particularly, since this is his night.<br /><br />Luther's <a href="http://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html">95 Theses</a> were provoked by the public scandal of "indulgence-selling." Technically no selling took place--it was a lot like the "recommended donations" Christian radio and TV stations list these days. In return for a donation to the Church, people were given certificates assuring them of a partial or complete (the latter depending on certain spiritual conditions) forgiveness of the "debt of temporal punishment" due to sin. (I am not going to explain all of that here and now. If anyone reads this and wants it explained, post a comment asking and I'll be happy to oblige.) In other words, he was attacking a kind of popular religion in which people assuaged their fears of God's judgment (particularly of purgatory) by ritual acts.<br />
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The theology that produced the Theses, however, had been forged in the crucible of Luther's struggle with a very different strand of late medieval theology: an intense, internalized piety that did not rely on external rituals to pacify the conscience. In this rigorist theology, to be forgiven even in the sacrament of confession required genuine contrition and a love for God above all else. In the theology Luther was taught (a version of "nominalism" mediated by the fifteenth-century theologian Gabriel Biel), God had established a covenant that he would give grace to anyone who "did what is in them." This was meant to be reassuring--do your best and God will do the rest. But since "doing what is in you" was understood to mean loving God with all your heart, Luther found that it was not, in fact, in him at all. What was in him, after many efforts, was a smoldering resentment against the God who would demand such things in the name of the Gospel.<br /><br />In the Presbyterian church where I played the organ last Sunday, the pastor said (in what was on the whole an excellent sermon) that late medieval Christians thought they would be justified by keeping the commandments of the Old Testament law. This isn't accurate. But from Luther's point of view, it would have been an improvement. Jesus made the law <i>more difficult</i> by internalizing it. And it was this internalized law that Luther had received as the Gospel--the "new law" of love, understood as a command to love God and neighbor at the very threshold of the spiritual life.<br /><br />Luther's fundamental starting point, which he learned from his confessor and mentor Johann von Staupitz, was that God's love for us precedes and causes our love for God, not the other way round. For Staupitz, this was expressed through traditional Catholic devotional practices such as meditation on the Passion (something that, of course, would be central to Lutheranism as well, if in a somewhat altered form). But as early as portions of his first Psalm lectures (1513-15), and certainly in his Romans lectures (1515-16), Luther was moving beyond Staupitz. Staupitz was working within the broad Augustinian consensus of medieval theology (and indeed was part of the rigorously Augustinian wing of that theology), in which we are acceptable to God by being transformed by charity, infused by God into our hearts. Luther found this insufficient, because he worried that his charity was not enough and his transformation was too imperfect. Hence, he began to formulate a radical "negative theology," partly influenced by the German mystics, in which our only righteousness is our acknowledgment of our unrighteousness.<br /><br />This is why, for Luther, the practice of selling indulgences, or indeed encouraging people to earn them as means of avoiding purgatorial punishment for themselves and others, was so abhorrent. It was not simply that such a practice was an "abuse" and exploited people (though Luther certainly cared about that) but that it defeated the whole purpose of repentance and, indeed, of purgatory. A truly repentant person would not run away from God's punishment, but would throw himself on God's mercy. Purgatory, as Luther saw it at this point, was a postmortem state of uncertainty about one's salvation, just as hell was the state of despair about one's salvation. When the soul acknowledged that it deserved hell, it would find itself in heaven. Indulgences were not just a financial scam--they were a spiritual scam, luring people into a nervous, self-justifying quest for spiritual comfort rather than the true peace that is only found when we stop trying to cajole God into accepting us.<br /><br />Luther's mature doctrine of justification by faith alone was not yet present in the Theses or in the broader critique of scholastic theology out of which they arose. I'll write more about that theology (and the points where I disagree with it) later. But clearly Luther was right that much of the religion of his time--and of ours--is about trying to strike a deal of some kind with God, and that all such deals fundamentally miss the point and trap us further in the very doom we are seeking to escape.<br /><br />In the film version of <i>Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone</i>, the three heroes become trapped in something called "Devil's Snare"--a vine that winds itself around its victims more tightly the more they struggle. (This happens in the book too, but they get out by lighting a fire--there's good symbolism in that as well, to be sure.) Hermione calls out to the ever-nervous Ron, "Don't struggle--relax." Not an easy thing when you are being strangled to death by a sentient vine, but when he manages it, the tendrils loosen and he falls to the floor. Luther's soteriology is, fundamentally, that we are all caught in the devil's snare, and we only get out when we stop struggling. This is why he used extravagant, hyperbolic rhetoric such as the infamous advice to Melanchthon in 1521 to "sin boldly but believe yet more boldly."<br /><br />There are all kinds of criticisms that could be made of the way Luther interpreted and applied this concept. But for all of us who have suffered various kinds of spiritual anxiety, the fundamental insight is vitally important. Anxiety about salvation, the worry that somehow we may be displeasing God if we do or say or believe the wrong thing, is at the root of much of the evil Christians have done over the centuries. That's why the focus on abuses and corruption is so wrongheaded, and so false to Luther, when talking about the Reformation. Much of the evil in the Church comes not from worldly prelates who don't care about the things they profess to believe (though when that happens, it's certainly harmful), but from people who are desperately, passionately attempting to secure their own standing with God, and who sacrifice other people on the altar of their own spiritual insecurities.<br /><br />So here's the fundamental truth in the Protestant Reformation, which Christians of all traditions should honor and take to heart: the sacrifice is already offered. The victory is already won. We do not have to convince God to save us. We have to refocus our attention from our own anguished self-importance to the objective, sovereign, unshakeable act of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Among all the theologians of the Christian Church, Luther may be the one who points most consistently and most inexorably to the Cross. And that is why we all need him.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-84257428653293787292017-10-22T15:33:00.001-04:002020-03-30T17:35:43.645-04:00The Unintended Reformation, part 1<br />
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I have been meaning for some time to write a review of Brad Gregory's <i>The Unintended Reformation</i>, which came out five years ago now and attracted a lot of attention. Reformation scholars, at least those focusing on theology, have, generally, panned the book, while Catholic apologists of course find it red meat.<br />
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Personally, I greeted it with delight when I first began to read it, as the book I would have wished to write myself if I had had the time and the learning to do so. On soberer analysis, it certainly has significant faults, and many of the objections that reviewers have raised are entirely valid. Nonetheless, I find the central thesis hard to dispute. No doubt some of this derives from my youthful exposure to the writing of Chesterton, but my years of studying the Reformation with David Steinmetz tended to confirm rather than refute that early impression. (It is only fair to say that Steinmetz himself was not a fan of Gregory's book--indeed the last conversation I ever had with him was in large part an argument on this very subject.)<br />
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The thesis is quite simple and is stated by the subtitle of the book: "How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society." Gregory argues that the division caused by the Reformation--the breakdown of the broad consensus on the basic questions of life that had characterized the Middle Ages--contributed decisively to the rise of a society in which these questions would be answered in secular ways, and indeed in which no coherent and unified answers would be possible. He articulates this in six specific ways, to each of which he dedicates a chapter:<br />
1. Metaphysics (Excluding God): division over the proper understanding of divine revelation led Europeans to fall back on an already existing concept of God as the "greatest being" within a rationally comprehensible universe, a view of God which (unlike the more orthodox, apophatic view that had previously prevailed) would turn out to be "excluded" by the rise of modern science.<br />
2. Epistemology (Relativizing Doctrines): division over what the proper doctrines were led inevitably to skepticism and relativism about the possibility of ultimate truth.<br />
3. Politics (Controlling the Churches): the breakdown of a unified Church led to governmental control of religion, and eventually to the exclusion of religion from public life<br />
4. Ethics (Subjectivizing Morality): The relativization of doctrinal claims, combined with the Protestant rejection of traditional Catholic soteriology and ethics, led to the breakdown of moral consensus described by Alistair MacIntyre in <i>After Virtue.</i><br />
5. Economics (Manufacturing the Goods Life): All of these previous developments, combined with the sheer chaos and violence of Reformation-era warfare, led to an unleashing of greed that, freed from the restraints of traditional Christian ethics, created modern capitalist society.<br />
6. Secularizing Knowledge: The traditional understanding of education as a quest for truth beneath the broad umbrella of the Church turned into a purely secular quest for objective, rational knowledge, which, as in other areas of modern society, eventually broke down into subjectivism and pragmatism.<br />
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In subsequent posts, I'll look at each of these chapters in detail. But first I want to say something about Gregory's basic methodology, which I think has often been overlooked or simply dismissed contemptuously by his critics.<br />
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In his first book, <i>Salvation at Stake</i>, Gregory took on what he saw as reductive, secularist, theory-driven approaches to the phenomenon of martyrdom (specifically martyrdom at the hands of other Christians in the Reformation era). He insisted that we must attempt to understand sixteenth-century people on their own terms rather than claiming to understand them better than they understood themselves. This created a great kerfuffle at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, but many Protestants as well as Catholics appreciated his respect for sixteenth-century Christians of all stripes. (In fact, I couldn't tell from the book that he was Catholic). While many Protestants have seen <i>The Unintended Reformation </i>as nothing more than Catholic propaganda, it needs to be understood in terms of his overall project of rescuing Reformation history from reductivism and what Gregory calls "supersessionism" (the view that our present inevitably followed from the past and is superior to it). Gregory sees the hyper-specialization of historical scholarship as an obstacle to serious, respectful analysis of the collective choices that made history take one turn rather than another. He is trying to do a kind of meta-history that all the scholarly fashions of our time militate against. Hence, I think that a lot of the criticisms misfire. We need to consider first whether, in fact, what he's trying to do can and should be done, and then whether he has, overall, succeeded in doing it (if it should be done).<br />
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I think that what he's trying to do is ambitious and, in the nature of things, impossible to do perfectly. He's working at such a large scale of generalization that he's certain to make a lot of mistakes--and he does. He also has a tendency to be overly grandiose and combative in tone (which got him in trouble with the previous book as well), and this puts people's backs up. But I think his book is, on the whole, a much-needed trumpet blast waking us up from the slumber of hyper-specialization and dreary reductionism.<br />
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One possible criticism is that while he argued in the previous book for understanding past figures on their own terms, in this book he claims that, in a way, he understands what happened in the Reformation better than the Reformers did. But I think Gregory would respond that he's not claiming that their actions were "really" something other than they thought they were, but simply that their sincere religious reforming efforts led to consequences down the road. And that is, as far as it goes, correct. Nonetheless, there are places where Gregory does seem to impose a "metanarrative" that distorts what the Reformers themselves thought they were doing. The first chapter of the book, on which a lot of reviews have concentrated, is unfortunately one of the major examples of this, as I'll explore in the next entry.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-24921764861432856122017-10-20T14:43:00.000-04:002020-03-30T17:35:52.598-04:00Saving the embryos: a new variation on the "trolley problem"My friend David Schell has asked me (and several other prolifers he knows) to respond to the <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/sci-fi-writer-baffles-abortion-foes-with-simple-question-would-you-save-1000-embryos-or-one-child-in-fire/">viral pos</a>t describing Patrick Tomlinson's supposedly deadly challenge to the prolife position. <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/22360/pro-abortion-fanatic-presented-thought-experiment-ben-shapiro">Several</a> good <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/an-honest-answer-to-that-dumb-twitter-rant-on-abortion/article/2010099">responses</a> have already been written, including some fine posts on David's FB page. Here's mine.<br />
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In Tomlinson's scenario, we have a choice between saving a five-year-old child or 1000 embryos from a fire. This is, of course, a variant of the "trolley problem," and as in all such dilemmas, the situation is made artificially simple and stark. Tomlinson claims that no prolife person has ever said they would save the embryos, and that this proves that prolife people don't really believe that life begins at conception.<br />
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First of all, as others have pointed out, it's absurd to claim that if other people would act, under pressure, in ways that don't seem compatible with their declared beliefs, then they don't really hold those beliefs and you don't need to deal with the intellectual arguments for them. That reflects a very shallow understanding of human psychology, and perhaps a certain desperation to dismiss the actual philosophical arguments for life beginning at some point before birth.<br />
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Tomlinson's argument needs to be refined: rather than asking whether one <i>would</i> save the child or the embryos, he should ask which the prolifer thinks <i>should</i> be saved. That of course weakens the conflict he wants to create between prolifers' instincts and their alleged principles. But the fact that Tomlinson's original argument was specious isn't my fault. And it's still a dilemma--I feel considerable reluctance to say that it would be morally right to let a child die in order to save embryos. And here Tomlinson is right: this is because I, personally, am more certain a five-year-old child is a human being than I am that an embryo is a human being. It does not follow from this that there are no good reasons to protect embryonic life. Under pressure, in such a stark dilemma, I would most likely save (and think it right to save) the child. It does not follow that it is right to destroy embryos deliberately.<br />
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Like most polemicists on both sides, Tomlinson chooses the extreme example that suits his side of the argument. There is a wide range of room for "moderate" positions in which life begins at some point between conception and birth, and we aren't sure which. Thus, even if his example proved everything he might wish, it would not follow that life does not begin until birth.<br />
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But the biggest problem with Tomlinson's scenario, and with all variants of the trolley problem, it its utilitarianism. Tomlinson assumes that he's made the point especially strong by using a thousand embryos instead of just one. Some counter-arguments assume that the moral situation would be radically altered if, for instance, the embryos were essential to the continuation of the human race, or if instead of a five-year-old child the alternative was to save an old and sick person.<br />
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One of the fundamental moral principles which secular moralists (and some religious moralists too) seem to have abandoned in our culture is that the value of human life is not numerate. (There is, for instance, an entire moral argument against empathy on the grounds that empathy is "innumerate.") Of course, if we can save several lives rather than one, then all things being equal, we should do so. But because human life is of infinite value, multiplying the number of humans at stake does not fundamentally change the moral situation. Not only would it be legitimate, under many circumstances, to save one person rather than a thousand--but often it would be morally obligatory to do so.<br />
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If I had a choice between saving one of my daughters and saving a thousand people who were not close family members, I would save my daughter. And I would not think of this as an act of moral weakness. On the contrary, I would think it wrong to make the <i>opposite </i>choice. I have an overriding moral obligation to protect and nurture my children. That doesn't mean that I think their lives are more valuable than those of others--but they aren't less valuable either, and all human life is of infinite value.<br />
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A further basic error of a lot of modern secular ethics is the belief that action and inaction are morally equivalent. This stems from utilitarian consequentialism--the idea that what matters most is the result of our actions. Thus, if I let someone die or kill them, the result is the same so the moral quality of the act is the same. This is nonsense and leads to impossible moral dilemmas. And as Ben Shapiro has pointed out, it's implicit in this scenario's argument--that the choice to allow embryos to be destroyed in order to save a child makes moral objections to actively <i>killing</i> unborn children insincere.<br />
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In a real, plausible situation, the decision would almost certainly not boil down to two sharply opposed possibilities with the certainty that whichever I saved would live and whichever I didn't would die. My decision as to which of two lives (or groups of human lives) to save would depend on all kinds of factors: my responsibility to one or the other party, the helplessness and vulnerability of the parties, the possibility that others might save one or other of them, the likelihood that I would be able to save them, my physical proximity to them, and, yes, the relative numbers involved and the probable effect of saving or not saving those particular lives.<br />
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In short, this argument does have some value in making prolifers question whether we are really as sure that an embryo is a human person as we are that a five-year-old child is a person. But it does not do the work that Mr. Tomlinson and his many fans want it to do. But it is doing something else valuable--provoking all of us to think through more carefully why we believe what we believe and just what we mean when we say that human life has value.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-76370854011563158412017-10-09T00:33:00.000-04:002020-03-30T17:36:02.462-04:00Celebrating the Reformation: a reply to Sarah CondonThe Episcopal priest Sarah Condon has just written a defiant <a href="http://www.mbird.com/2017/10/reformation-celebration-i-will-drink-your-tears-with-my-champagne/">blog post</a> expressing her frustration with (male) Protestant clergy who mourn the Reformation. She gives three basic reasons (or sets of reasons) for celebrating the Reformation:<br />
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1. Women can be ordained and clergy can be married (openly and legally--she points out correctly that a large number of medieval priests lived in illicit but tacitly accepted relationships with women, and that the women involved were called "whores" and had a low social status).<br />
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2. The Reformation allowed people to hear the Gospel of God's grace clearly and the Bible was translated into vernacular languages.<br />
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3. Sometimes God calls us to "burn it all down," pouring out his judgment on the established order. (Obviously this is dependent on the previous two points.)<br />
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To the first point: Rev. Condon says with certainty that we know that women would not be ordained if the Reformation had not occurred. Pope John Paul II would, of course, agree with her. But then, Rev. Condon doesn't agree with the Pope's reasons for thinking this (i.e., that the ordination of women is theologically impossible). From a purely historical point of view, I think the matter is much less certain than she claims. One of the big mistakes Protestants (and secular post-Protestants) make about Catholicism is to assume that Counter-Reformation Catholicism is what Catholicism would have been like if not for the Reformation (at least in all the aspects they consider bad--they are happy to take credit for what they consider real reform). Kingsley Amis' novel <i>The Alteration</i> is a really good example of this. We simply don't know what would have happened if Protestants had rejected schism as a means of reform. Maybe they would all have been stamped out without much trace, but I suspect not. And with regard to clerical marriage, where Condon makes the same claim, I'm fairly sure not. The possibility of allowing married clergy was seriously batted about in the Reformation era among Catholics, particularly as a means of healing the growing schism. One of the reasons it didn't happen was that schism happened anyway, and the Catholic Church adopted a very hostile attitude to signature Protestant demands even when there wasn't a clear doctrinal reason to do so. I am reasonably confident that there <i>would</i> be married clergy in the Catholic Church today if Protestants had pulled back from the doctrinal and liturgical demands that were genuinely incompatible with the Tradition and had doubled down on practical reforms. More on that later. First, a few more points about women and the Reformation.<br />
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Rev. Condon seems to follow a line of scholarship, which was once very common, holding that the Reformation was a liberating movement for women. She points to the role Katy Luther played in sometimes arguing theology with Luther and his friends and students. (From the quotes I remember in the Table Talk, I think she's exaggerating a bit--my memory is that Katharina played the role of the sympathetic and common-sense "uneducated woman" whose views were recorded with a bit of a patronizing smile--but I could be wrong, and Rev. Condon is right that at least they were recorded and she had her say.) But there's another approach, which has on the whole been more dominant in recent decades, I think (at least it seemed so when I was in grad school and I don't think it's waned since), which emphasizes the ways in which the Reformation doubled down on patriarchy. Lyndal Roper's book <i>The Holy Household</i> on the Reformation in Augsburg is one of the key works arguing this position, though her arguments have not been accepted without controversy. Amy Leonard has documented the stories of German nuns in the Reformation era who resisted the efforts of (male) Protestant clergy to "liberate" them from their vocations. (Of course there were other nuns, such as Katharina von Bora, who did find Protestantism liberating. But their stories may not be as typical as Protestant propaganda has claimed.) Sometimes these efforts were quite coercive and even, at least by threat, violent.<br />
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The Protestant Reformers by and large argued that women's only vocation was within the household. Martin Bucer objected to Catholic veneration of Mary in part because it made her a powerful figure in her own right over against her husband, whereas Bucer insisted that after the miraculous events of Jesus' birth Mary lived the life of a perfect and obedient housewife and should only be celebrated in that context. Luther said in his treatise on <i>The Estate of Marriage</i> (1522) that women were created to bear children and that it didn't matter if this wore them down and shortened their lives. (To be fair, as <a href="http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2010/04/luther-if-women-wear-themselves-out-in.html">this</a> Protestant website points out, he also said that childbearing was healthy for women and that it was better to have a short life in good health than a long life in bad health.) In medieval Catholicism, on the other hand, women often exercised powerful social roles with considerable independence from men. They weren't priests, true, but they were abbesses, anchorites, hospital workers. . . . There is a lot of evidence of women resisting the Reformation because their spirituality was focused on the very shrines and rituals that the Protestants destroyed. And yes, there are other examples of iconoclastic women who mocked Catholic piety by saying that they could piss as holy water as the priest could make, and so on. It's complicated--far more complicated than Rev. Condon's desire for celebration allows.<br />
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I am married to an Episcopal priest myself, so I understand how important vocation is. I understand that Rev. Condon probably experiences her vocation in a way that this particular essay does not do justice to. But as it stands, her way of speaking about it sounds like a confirmation of what many conservative Catholics and conservative Anglicans say, that women want ordination as an expression of personal power. It sounds as if she is saying "the unity of the Church doesn't matter--what matters is that I get what I want." Again, I'm sure that there's more to her sense of vocation than this, but in this particular piece of writing it doesn't come through, at least to me.<br />
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Her snarky and witty style no doubt contributes to this. But to be honest, this is one of my problems with the whole piece. I appreciate Rev. Condon's lively writing, but her rhetorical approach (indicated by the title, for starters) is of a piece with a general trend in our culture that I think is deeply toxic. The willingness to flout other people's sensibilities, to glory in being offensive, to jeer at what others hold sacred--I think we are drowning in these things already. I don't think more of this is needed, however justified Rev. Condon may find her particular cause. I know that many conservative Catholics and Anglicans treat ordained women this way. I can only say, inadequate as Rev. Condon will find it, that I protest passionately against it when I run into it. I think her anger and snark are understandable. I don't think they are particularly convincing to anyone not already in her corner. But perhaps she doesn't intend them to be.<br />
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As an Anglican priest, Rev. Condon presumably confesses regularly her faith in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I don't see how she can reconcile that profession with the cavalier way in which she mocks those (she claims they are all male, but I doubt that) who care about unity. Yes, of course, unity must be unity in truth and justice. But a love of unity itself is not something to be ashmed of.<br />
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Rev. Condon's second point is that the Reformation restored a proper understanding of grace. (She also claims that the Reformation is responsible for the Bible being in the vernacular, which ignores the multiple translations in multiple European languages that existed before the Reformation.) This isn't the place to deal with this claim, which is of course the basic Protestant claim and is a solid reason to celebrate the Reformation if true. Indeed, since I think the Reformation did give us some fresh insights on grace, it's a reason why I do celebrate <i>aspects</i> of the Reformation (but not the schism). But Reformation theology, taken "straight," does not liberate grace so much as segregate it. "Law" is allowed to reign in the affairs of this world, but banished from the Gospel. I don't think that's Biblical. The Sermon on the Mount is at the heart of the Gospel, as the Gospels themselves define it. Here's a basic challenge for Rev. Condon and other defenders of the Reformation: does racial justice belong to law or Gospel? Or, in other words, is a church that proclaims and practices racial segregation preaching the true Gospel?<br />
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Her final point is that sometimes God wants us to burn everything down. I think she's wrong there. Yes, there is divine judgment. Biblically, the harshest proclamations of judgment are against God's own people. The problem with "burning it all down" is that you are repudiating your former people and starting a new people, who presumably don't deserve God's judgment. But the new people always do too. After 500 years, is it really still credible to claim that the endless sequence of burning it all down that has marked Protestant history is God's will? But perhaps Rev. Condon doesn't mean that. She is, after all, an Anglican, a tradition distinguished from most other Protestant traditions precisely by its level of continuity with the past. So what does she actually mean by "burning it all down"? Wouldn't that, logically, lead her to abandon Anglicanism itself? (Not that I want her to do that--but she's not going to listen to me anyway!)<br />
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<br />Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-76901270621426982142017-10-07T13:38:00.002-04:002017-10-07T13:38:37.117-04:00High and LowHigh and Low is a 1963 movie by Akira Kurosawa which I saw a few days ago. It's a modern police procedural, with the rather cliched plot of a kidnapper who taunts the father of his victim by phone and seems to have uncanny abilities to see what his target is doing. (Actually, perhaps it wasn't cliched in 1963.)<br /><br />Except that the target of the extortion demand, played by Toshiro Mifune, isn't actually the father of the victim. The kidnapper has accidentally snatched the chauffeur's son instead. This sets up the fundamental moral conflict of the film. Will Mifune's character, a prosperous shoe manufacturer named about to clinch an important deal that will give him control of the company he works for, give up his professional ambitions by paying the massive ransom demanded by the kidnapper and thus plunge himself into debt. (Mifune has mortgaged everything he owns in order to raise the money for the buyout that will give him control of the company, and this is the money he would need to use to pay the kidnapper.) This makes the film more than just a taut procedural--though it is certainly that.<br />
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The moral challenge Mifune faces is presented in heavy-handed terms right after the kidnapping, when he thinks his son has been taken and declares, without hesitation, that of course he will pay whatever it takes to get him back. But Mifune's character is not cold-hearted or unsympathetic. He has worked his way to the position he has, although we find out eventually that he also owes a good deal of his status to his wife's inherited money. At the beginning of the movie, he is confronting the directors of the company over their desire to make shoddy, flashy shoes instead of the solid work he wants to turn out. Kurosawa first gives us a conflict between good and bad capitalism, and then casts doubt even on the "good capitalism."<br />
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The title of the film in Japanese, apparently, translates more literally as "Heaven and hell." It turns out that the kidnapper is motivated primarily by envy of Mifune's literally exalted status in a beautiful house on a hill overlooking Yokohama. Mifune hasn't done anything to hurt the kidnapper, and the latter's rage seems irrational, but Kurosawa makes us empathize with him in spite of our horror at his actions.<br /><br />It may be relevant that in Buddhism, unlike Christianity, heaven and hell are temporary destinations. Gods, who live in heaven, are beings who have achieved happiness through their good actions in previous lives, just as Mifune has worked his way from a simple craftsman to a position of wealth and privilege. But in Buddhism, being a "god" is not a particularly desirable thing. The gods are typically unaware of the temporary nature of their bliss. Eventually they too will have to descend from the heights. Enlightenment results not simply from good actions, but from an awareness of the temporary, contingent nature of all reality, even apparently secure bliss. In Mahayana Buddhism, the spiritual ideal is the "bodhisattva," who takes a vow not to enter Nirvana until every other creature in the universe has been enlightened as well. At the end of the movie, having lost his fortune but gained a position with a smaller company where he can do the kind of work he wants to do, Mifune visits the kidnapper in prison. While the film ends on a somber note with the kidnapper's howls of rage and despair, Mifune's trajectory is a redemptive one for himself at least, from arrogant assumption of superiority to compassionate presence with someone who has done him (and others) great evil.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-38767245648619009882017-09-17T19:46:00.003-04:002020-03-30T17:37:37.239-04:00The Lives of Others<br />
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In a key scene from the 2006 German movie <i>The Lives of Others</i>, the playwright Georg Dreymann plays a piece of music called <i>Sonata for a Good Man</i> to his girlfriend Crista-Maria Sieland, and comments, "how can anyone listen to music like this and be a bad man?" It's a lot of weight to hang on music (admittedly haunting and effective music) composed specifically for the film by Gabriel Yare. (The original story that the film-maker, Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, took as his inspiration for this scene referred to Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata.) That audacity is typical of the film, which tells the story of the conversion of an agent of the East German secret police (the Stasi), Gerd Wiesler, through the power of art and empathy.<br />
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Wiesler, splendidly acted by Ulrich Muhe (who in real life had himself been the victim of surveillance by the Stasi and claimed that his own wife had been one of the informants), is a buttoned-down, quietly intense officer whom we first see interrogating a prisoner and then using recording of the interrogation to instruct students. When a student protests that the sleep deprivation method Wiesler uses is "inhumane," Wiesler responds by proving that, in fact, the prisoner was lying and arguing that only such extreme methods can break down the arrogance of the "enemies of the state." The picture is clear: this is a person capable of recognizing the moral problems with what he is doing ,but convinced that the ends justify the means--a true believer whose sensitivity and intelligence make him all the more chilling. When he first sees Dreymann, he immediately comments that Dreymann displays the arrogance typical of "enemies of the State" and ought to be put under surveillance, even though he appears to be a model Communist whose poetic dramas glorify East Germany as "the best country in the world." Wiesler's concerns find a receptive ear with the loathsome government official Bruno Hempf, who desires Dreymann's girlfriend and wants to get Dreymann out of the way. And so the main action of the film begins, as Wiesler bugs Dreymann's apartment and sits day after day with earphones on his head, monitoring what goes on inside.<br />
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In the course of the film, Dreymann does become the dissident Wiesler suspects him to be. But in the process, Wiesler comes to have empathy for his victim, so that when the time comes to tighten the noose, he can't bring himself to do it. In the process, like Dreymann and Hempf in their own very different ways, Wiesler falls in love with the fragile, troubled Sieland, or at least comes to have deep compassion and admiration for her. (Sieland is somewhat of a sexist stereotype, though a fascinating and well-acted one--the doomed, flawed woman who functions both as guardian angel and Achilles' heel to the man she loves. The way in which all the men in the story are defined by their reactions to her is rather reminiscent of Hugo's Esmeralda.) After initially manipulating Dreymann into discovering Sieland's affair with Hempf (though given the level of coercion involved, it might better be called rape), Wiesler later approaches Sieland to assure her (as an anonymous fan) of his respect for her art and of her worthiness as a human being. Later, when called on to interrogate her, he will deliberately use some of the same language he had employed in that earlier conversation in an apparent attempt to reassure her covertly that he is on her side and she need not despair. Tragically, she fails to recognize him.<br />
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I will respect our culture's silly superstition about "spoilers" enough to avoid giving away any more details of the plot. It is a highly melodramatic (though well-constructed) one, but the most unrealistic and often criticized element is the key point on which the whole story turns--the possibility of a Stasi agent softening toward his victims and becoming an agent of hope and compassion. The director of the museum now housed in the former Stasi headquarters refused to allow the movie to be filmed there because he believed that it whitewashed the subject, pointing out that there is no record (among all the meticulous records they kept) of any Stasi agent softening toward his victims, and that even if one had he would have been instantly caught because of the many levels of double-checking in place.<br />
<i><br />The Lives of Others</i>, for all its careful, rich detail about life in Communist Germany, is fundamentally a fantasy, more like Lord of the Rings than the grim realistic drama I rather expected it to be. It turns on what Chesterton rightly pointed out long ago was perhaps the most fantastic of Christianity's supernatural claims: that human beings have free will.<br />
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The best response to the critics, perhaps, is the story of a 29-year-old captain in the Israeli intelligence service "Unit 8200" who, in 2014, joined 42 of her colleagues in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/world/middleeast/elite-israeli-officers-decry-treatment-of-palestinians.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A8%22%7D">refusing</a> to participate further in the surveillance of Palestinians. She cited <i>The Lives of Others</i> as the trigger that finally convinced her that her job was immoral:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 17px;">“I felt a lot of sympathy for the victims in the film of the intelligence,” the captain said. “But I did feel a weird, confusing sense of similarity, I identified myself with the intelligence workers. That we were similar to the kind of oppressive intelligence in oppressive regimes really was a deep realization that makes us all feel that we have to take responsibility.”</span></blockquote>
The film has frequently been cited in other contexts relating to intrusive surveillance efforts by governments, including the NSA program that prompted Edward Snowden's massive leaks. It may well be unrealistic to imagine that a Stasi agent could have acted as Wiesler does in the film. But as the Israeli intelligence officer's story demonstrates, the power of the film to create empathy both with Wiesler and his victims can be transformative in the real world. The film may not describe the behavior of Stasi agents, but it may play some role in preventing others from turning into Stasi agents. It witnesses to the hope that, in Tolkien's words, "in the armour of fate there is ever a rift, and in the walls of doom a breach"--that the poets and the lovers have the last word after all, and that music has the power to create the goodness of which it sings. When men like Minister Hempf once again hold positions of power, we need stories like that. We always need stories like that.</div>
Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-45943713225987935952017-09-13T11:04:00.002-04:002017-09-13T11:09:26.663-04:00Dear Protestants, Here's Why I Didn't Sign the Reforming Catholic Confession, and Other Dispatches From Living Among Catholics as a Protestant Priest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>My wife said yesterday, "I'd like to post this on <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/missionwork/">my blog</a>, but it isn't in any way about the theology of work." I said, "You could put it on my blog."--Edwin</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>By Jennifer Woodruff Tait</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yesterday, I got into a discussion about the </span><a href="http://reformingcatholicconfession.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reforming Catholic Confession</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and why I, despite having been given an opportunity to do so, had not signed it. The reasons are several, but one of the most salient is that I am married to a Roman Catholic. In fact, I am a female Episcopal priest married to a Roman Catholic. I can’t imagine that there are that many people in this position, which I find roughly analogous to being in about the third round of a session of youth-group Twister. It is perhaps worth dwelling on what I have learned after five months of playing ecumenical Twister (Edwin was received into the Catholic church in April).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My main acquaintance with large groups of Catholics since Edwin became one has been the blogosphere, which I realize warps my perspective. (Edwin assures me that the average Roman Catholic in the pews knows no more about their faith than the average Protestant, perhaps less.) But here is my #1 dispatch from the front after five months of ethnographic observation:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dear Protestants, Catholics do not care if you exist.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t mean that they don’t care that you, as individual children of God and rational humans, exist. I mean that they don’t care that you collectively exist. If Catholics disappeared tomorrow, Protestants would notice. Wherever they are on the spectrum from “Catholics are the antichrist” to “Catholics are valued ecumenical partners whom we secretly envy for their </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really cool hats</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,” they would notice. (Edwin grew up towards the former end of that spectrum, I the latter. In fact I spent quite a number of years as a ferocious post-Vatican-II liturgist of the “what’s the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist” joke type.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But if every Protestant denomination was wiped off the face of the earth, Catholics would go on having the same conversations they do now as if nothing had happened, except that eventually Edwin would notice that I had stopped doing the laundry. Protestants are haunted by Catholics. Catholics are haunted too, but not by Protestants. If I had to put a finger on it, I would say they are haunted by the desire to catch the vanishing tail of unplumbable deep mysteries. But they are not haunted by me.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Edwin was discerning whether or not to become Roman Catholic, he met with a trusted Methodist pastoral advisor and friend. The friend said “Ask Jenn what you need to do to support her in ministry.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Edwin came to me and asked, I knew that it was in my power to say “Don’t become Catholic.” I knew that he is the most honest, respectful, and chivalrous person I know. I also knew I couldn’t take advantage of that. What I actually said was “I need to know that you have my back.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So Edwin went to the lay catechist in charge of RCIA and then eventually to the priest. He said “I will still consider my wife a priest and I will not break communion with Protestants to be in communion with you.” He expected they would say </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. They said </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">yes. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which brings us back to ecumenical Twister.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edwin will explain his position to people by saying that he is not claiming to believe that what happens in Protestant Eucharists, and in the setting apart for ministry of Protestant pastors, is the same thing that happens when the Roman Catholic church makes Roman Catholic priests and they make Roman Catholic Eucharist. He is only claiming that he cannot deny the presence of grace in Protestant sacraments.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only place I am not haunted by Catholics is the place you think I would most be, and that is in Protestant sacraments. I became a priest, in large part, out of a devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For this I endured a complex discernment process that took me out of Methodism and into Anglicanism and ultimately took 23 years. (I began discernment in 1992. I post this on the second anniversary of my <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152663340847465&set=a.10150223871292465.279357.586552464&type=3">ordination as a deacon on the Eve of Holy Cross in 2015</a>.) </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a former Methodist, people found such a devotion awkward. Despite a rich history of Eucharistic reflection by the Wesleys, the accepted reason for becoming a Methodist pastor is “Because I want to help people.” I do want to help people, but I have always felt chiefly called to help them by offering the grace of the sacraments and getting out of the way. Someone else can hold hands and sing Kum Bah Yah. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I once got asked by Edwin to bless a tent that had previously had a hard life. I was actually not feeling well, but I went out to our backyard in my bathrobe, placed a stole around my neck, consecrated a teacup full of water, asperged the tent in the name of the Trinity, took off my stole, and went back to bed. So much of being a Protestant in dialogue with Catholics is being made to feel, through benign neglect if not through actual apologetic argument, that you are simply playing church. I was not playing church that day. I was in deadly earnest. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I am every time I stand at the altar, the table of the Lord, with the bread and wine. Quite a lot of doing the liturgy--especially for someone like me who was raised on Methodist folksiness and has a difficult time picking up choreography--is simply remembering what to pick up, what to set down, and what not to bump into.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it never fails that when I lift the bread and lift the cup, and when I say “Sanctify these gifts,” that I am caught up in the thought “This is Jesus. This is the vanishing tail of unplumbable mysteries.”</span></div>
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Jennifer Woodruff Taithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17041961778438664567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-59600436232258098642017-05-12T12:21:00.000-04:002020-03-30T17:35:16.304-04:00How mere Christianity made me a Catholic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For many years now, the main rival to Catholicism for me has been the concept of "mere Christianity" articulated by C. S. Lewis. Lewis' most famous explanation of the subject is, of course, in his book of that name (based on radio lectures he gave to the Royal Air Force during WWII). Lewis' articulation of basic Christian teaching has been extremely influential, but perhaps even more influential has been the very idea that there is such a thing. Lewis may,, in fact, have done more for Christian unity than the entire institutional ecumenical movement.<br />
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Lewis himself was, of course, an Anglican. Catholic admirers have often wondered why he didn't go "all the way" and become Catholic--indeed, there are no fewer than three books on the subject. (The most <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Walking-Tour-C-Lewis/dp/1628923172">recent</a> is actually by a Protestant, I believe.) But of course even asking the question presupposes a Catholic position. Tolkien was right, I think, in saying that Lewis became Anglican primarily because that was his heritage (and a very honorable reason that is, in my opinion). But certainly the relative lack of dogmatism of Anglicanism and its emphasis on the ancient consensus of the Church suited Lewis' temperament very well.<br />
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While Lewis did occasionally make criticisms of Catholicism or try to explain to Catholic friends why he saw no need to "convert," Lewis himself did not actively set "mere Christianity" over against "Roman" Catholicism, or indeed any particular Christian tradition. In <i>Mere Christianity</i>, he compared what he was articulating to the vestibule of a house. The goal, according to Lewis, was to choose a room and settle in.<br />
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But there's something intrinsically unstable about this metaphor. After all, the point of "mere Christianity" is that it covers basic truths all Christians agree on such as the Incarnation, the need for divine grace, the sacraments (at least baptism and Eucharist), the authority of Scripture, and so on. For any particular version of Christianity, these things are at the center of the "house"--they aren't simply the vestibule.<br />
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So it's not surprising that many people who adopt Lewis' slogan treat "mere Christianity" as a rival to more particular Christian traditions, such as Catholicism. Lewis has, in fact, given substance and focus to the longstanding Protestant rhetoric of distinguishing between "essentials" and "nonessentials." The fatal flaw in this approach has always been the disagreement among Protestants as to which items are "essential" and which are "nonessential." Lewis seems to point the way to a solution.<br />
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But in fact, the problem remains. For instance, a few years ago there was talk of starting a new "Great Books" Christian college, named after C. S. Lewis, which would have "mere Christianity" as its only standard. This was explained to me as being defined by the Nicene Creed. S. M. Hutchens, however, a writer for <i>Touchstone </i>(which bills itself as a journal of "Mere Christianity"), suggested that if the college wanted to be faithful to Lewis' vision of mere Christianity it should exclude anyone who believed in women's ordination, which Hutchens (claiming Lewis' support) believes is fundamentally incompatible with orthodox Christianity. (Hutchens made this statement in a comment which I now have trouble finding, but his view can be clearly seen in <a href="http://touchstonemag.com/merecomments/2016/06/messier-case-acna/">this</a> later article about the conflict over women's ordination in the ACNA.)<br />
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The question of gay unions and "non-traditional" sexualities generally is an even more acid test of "mere Christianity" as a measure of orthodoxy. Many who are willing to accept disagreement on women's ordination, or even regard the ordination of women as the obvious move, see a "liberal" view on homosexuality or "gender identity" as incompatible with "mere Christian" orthodoxy. Yet there are many who accept historic creedal orthodoxy while believing that this is a point where new understanding of human psychology and biology needs to prompt a shift in how we think about sexuality, and that this is entirely compatible with the basic principles of traditional Christian sexual morality. So we have, at least, a three-way division among would-be proponents of "mere Christianity": those who accept both gay unions and women's ordination, those who accept women's ordination but not gay unions, and those who accept neither. Factor in the distinction between holding to one position or the other and thinking that it's an essential part of "mere Christianity," and things get more complicated. (I, for instance, am not convinced that "mere Christianity" is incompatible with <i>any</i> of these positions, although my own theological judgment is "liberal" on women's ordination and "conservative" on sexuality.)<br />
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"Mere Christianity" is by definition something that we can only see in the rear-view mirror. It provides little help in solving live debates in the present. Whenever the status of any one belief or practice is challenged, "mere Christianity" itself cannot solve the dispute--a living, concrete community is needed for that. But this, of course, takes us out of "mere Christianity" and back to the sectarian reality from which "mere Christianity" is supposed to deliver us.<br />
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So if Lewis was wrong that "mere Christianity" is merely the vestibule (because it's obviously the center of <i>all</i> the various forms of Christianity), and if "mere Christianity" can't function as an alternative to more concrete communities, where does that leave us? We need a concrete, rooted Christian tradition <i>centered</i> on "mere Christianity" but capable of addressing "borderline" issues and responding dynamically to the changing world.<br />
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I am not going to argue here why I think Catholicism fits that description better than the alternatives. Rather, the point I want to make is that for me Catholicism is not a rival to mere Christianity, so much as its fulfillment. As a Catholic, my faith is rooted deeply in precisely those elements of the faith that Lewis expounded so well--the ancient C<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">reeds, the seven virtues, and the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The sacraments are a good place to see the relationship between "mere Christianity" and Catholicism. For Protestants, and thus for "mere Christianity" </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(sin</span>ce "mere Christianity" is by definition what Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants have historically shared), there are two fundamental sacraments. For CAtholics, of course, there are seven. Yet Catholic teaching affirms that baptism and Eucharist are <i>central</i> to Christian life, and that the other five sacraments flow from them and are ordered to them.<br />
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To be Catholic, then, should not mean sneering at the concept of "mere Christianity." Yes, it is a poor substitute for Catholicism. But a Catholicism that does not have a clear sense of the "hierarchy of truths," that treats all Catholic teaching as just "stuff the Church tells us to believe," is a deeply incoherent and unconvincing Catholicism. If there is one common denominator in the many ex-Catholics I've talked to, it is, overwhelmingly, a failure to see the underlying <i>structure</i> of Catholicism. Instead, ex-Catholics describe Catholicism over and over again as a set of "rules" that had come to seem largely arbitrary to them.<br />
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Thus, Catholics need "mere Christianity" just as "mere Christianity" needs Catholicism. "Mere Christianity" is neither a vestibule leading to a variety of equally legitimate "living quarters," nor a coherent alternative to Catholicism and other concrete embodiments of Christian faith and practice. It is the beating heart of the Faith, the "hearth" shared by all members of our squabbling, tragic, confused family.<br />
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Without "mere Christianity," I would not have become Catholic. Indeed, I would not be a Christian at all. But without Catholicism, "mere Christianity" would remain an abstraction.<br />
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Lewis' most powerful and compelling account of "mere Christianity" is not in the book of that name, but in his essay "On Reading Old Books," appropriately <a href="http://www.romans45.org/history/ath-inc.htm#ch_0">prefaced</a> to a translation of Athanasius' <i>On the Incarnation</i> by Sister Penelope Lawson. Here, Lewis presents "mere Christianity" as a reading strategy--a standard that gives us balance and sanity as we navigate the often confusing labyrinth of contemporary religious opinion. And this approach is rooted in his own experience (which he would describe at more length in <i>Surprised by Joy</i>).<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were "influences." George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think—as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries—that "Christianity" is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages "mere Christianity" turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe—Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed "Paganism" of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet—after all—so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">
an air that kills</span></center>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">
From yon far country blows.</span> </center>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then. Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.</span></div>
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My own experience matches Lewis', except that I approached the Christian tradition from a radical Protestant perspective rather than from that of an atheist ex-Anglican. Like Lewis, I was struck by what all these authors have in common. But once my feet were on the "great level viaduct," I discovered that it was taking me somewhere. And, like the pilgrim John in Lewis' <i>The Pilgrim's Regress</i>, I found that it led me to Mother Kirk, in a somewhat more alarming and concrete way than Lewis himself intended by the term.<br />
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Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-55350725765450791542017-04-27T15:32:00.001-04:002020-03-30T17:37:04.914-04:00Why we need the words "conservative" and "liberal"<br />
One often hears people say that the labels "conservative" and "liberal" aren't helpful and we should drop them. In particular, in Catholic circles it's common for pious people to claim that the terms "conservative" and "liberal" don't apply. Many of the folks who say this are what I would call very conservative Catholics who think that there is only one possible Catholic position on most controversial topics. There are no "conservatives" or "liberals" because that would imply two legitimate groups. Rather, there are those who are orthodox and there are those who are not. The "orthodox," of course, agree with the speaker's interpretation of orthodoxy. Others genuinely wish for a faith that transcends political labels, and rightly note that "conservative" and "liberal" in their current American political senses don't map well onto the Catholic paradigm (or any traditional Christian paradigm).<br />
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Indeed, I think that it makes more sense to speak of conservative and liberal in terms of Catholicism than in terms of American politics. American political traditions are, by definition, "liberal" in the original 18th-century sense of the term. Americans exalt individual freedom and disparage tradition. To be a "conservative" in the contemporary political sense means to be pro-capitalist and generally pro-individualism--hardly what "conservative" traditionally meant.<br />
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While "conservative" and "liberal" do have specific meanings rooted in European politics, I think their most useful meaning is a general, relative one describing dynamics that occur in all organized groups or self-conscious traditions. In any group of people having an identity that endures over some time, there will be two related methodological questions:<br />
1. How much change is compatible with maintaining the identity of the group? and<br />
2. How strictly should norms of belief and/or conduct be enforced?<br />
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A "conservative" is one who pushes for less change and strict enforcement. A "liberal" is one who argues for more change and less policing of boundaries. These are the two most obvious alignments. However, one can draw up a quadrant in which the two questions form two distinct axes: change vs. continuity and strict enforcement vs. freedom.<br />
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It's possible to favor continuity with the past but relatively lax enforcement of boundaries, though this may be the hardest position to maintain (it's also more or less where I fall--go figure). It's also possible to make a break with the past and enforce it through rigid boundary controls (this is relatively more common, I think). For instance, in Calvin's Geneva people who gave their children saints' names could be hauled up before the Company of Pastors and fined. The break with the past was enforced through what looks to most of us today like very "conservative" forms of church discipline. But of course over time the "radical" position comes to be seen as the "traditional" one, making this position simply "conservative." One very funny example of this was during the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Western media referred to those who wanted to preserve Communism as the "right" within the Soviet Union, when of course the entire Soviet political tradition was originally extreme "left." But by the 1980s people who were orthodox Marxist-Leninists were "conservatives" by the standard of their own tradition.<br />
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So there are four basic orientations:<br />
Conservative (high continuity, rigid boundaries)<br />
Liberal (low continuity, lax boundaries)<br />
Radical (low continuity, rigid boundaries)<br />
Traditional (high continuity, lax boundaries)<br />
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The naming of the fourth group is a problem. I'm not actually sure that it's a rare position, but it is a position that tends over time to be eroded, at least in modern Western culture. That is to say, modern Western culture is fundamentally "liberal," so continuity with tradition has to be a conscious effort by members of the particular community. My own position would (on a scale of 0 to 10 for each of the four categories) be something like 7 on continuity and 3 or 4 on freedom. That is to say, I favor quite a bit of freedom, but not by any means unlimited, while I stress continuity heavily.<br />
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A further complication is that these characteristics are, of course, tradition-specific. I'm describing my position primarily with regard to Catholicism--for years before I actually became Catholic, I thought about things through a primarily Catholic lens and saw Catholicism as the community against whose standards I should measure myself. As an Episcopalian, I was more straightforwardly conservative, because the Episcopal Church is much more liberal. Indeed, one of the reasons I became Catholic was so I didn't have to be my own boundary police any more.<br />
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To be more precise, I think about the first category more in terms of the Christian tradition as a whole. That is to say, when I ask "how much should we maintain continuity with the past," I am asking whether we should be more like liberal Protestants or fundamentalist Baptists or Pentecostals or neo-Anabaptist emergent hipsters or Eastern Orthodox or whatever. But when I ask how strictly the boundaries should be maintained, I am thinking of the authority structures which I have for years now accepted as normative--those of the Catholic Church. All baptized Christians are part of the Church. And this means that the authority structures of the Catholic Church are relevant for all Christians. That's one reason why I have never fit in as an evangelical. I can't take their authority structures seriously.<br />
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If I were asking the first question in terms of Catholicism alone (at least as represented by official teaching), I'd wind up as more like a 0, or maybe even a 1 in the direction of discontinuity. And if I were asking the second question in terms of all varieties of Christianity, I'd be more like a 2 in the direction of maintaining boundaries. If in terms of Episcopalianism alone, more like a 5.<br />
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In summary: we need the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" because all communities have to ask questions about continuity and about boundaries. But we also need to recognize that this is not a simple binary and that the concepts are fluid and relative.<br />
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In a subsequent post, I'll talk about liberal and conservative in terms of contemporary "culture wars," and how the Christian faith relates to that particular liberal-conservative conflict.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-8066760266621058212017-04-11T19:31:00.004-04:002020-03-30T17:37:20.789-04:00"Missing out": why helicopter parenting commodifies childrenA friend of mine just posted on Facebook an incident in which someone berated her for "missing out on precious moments" with her child because she was checking Facebook while the child played. Now of course, in an age of social media, it is easy for parents to become absorbed with online trivialities at the expense of building a relationship with their children. But a stranger is in no position to know if a parent is doing this simply because she happens to be using technology at some particular moment.<br />
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What strikes me about this particular meme (which I've seen before--there are online articles that have gone viral expressing this idea) is the commodified approach to time it expresses. Economists speak of "opportunity cost": if you do X rather than Y, you are "paying" the opportunity to do Y for the sake of doing X. And obviously this is true, in the sense that, as Chesterton put it: "<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;">Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon." But for Chesterton this is about drama and adventure. The problem with the "missing out" argument is the assumption that "moments" with one's child are some sort of possession which one should covet greedily if one has the right priorities. While it sounds like a glorification of parental love, it actually treats the child, and the parent's relationship with the child, as being valuable for what the parent gets out of the relationship. The parent could have X number of "precious moments" but is settling for X-n. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;">In fact, children need some time to play by themselves without the parent hovering. Parents who insist on being involved with every moment of the child's lives are refusing to allow the child to develop any degree of independence. It is control under the guise of love. This is how we get "helicopter parenting."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;">I'm sure that most of us who are parents could do with spending more time with our children and less time on social media. But it's not because our children are a source of a finite commodity called "precious moments" of which we should be greedy. It's because they are human beings, worthy of our love and attention and respect. Sometimes we show that respect by putting down our computers and spending time with them. Sometimes we show it by leaving them alone.</span>Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-49652072614970989512017-03-13T12:58:00.002-04:002020-03-30T17:40:06.201-04:00Ben Carson is right: Slaves were immigrants<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/Slave-ship.jpg/300px-Slave-ship.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Image result" border="0" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/Slave-ship.jpg/300px-Slave-ship.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Turner, "The Slave Ship," public domain</td></tr>
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So the Inte<span style="font-family: inherit;">rnet went up in flames last week over Ben Carson's<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/06/politics/ben-carson-immigrants-slavery/index.html"> insertion</a> of slaves into the American immigrant narrative in his first speech</span> as Secretary of Housing and Human Development. Apparently, after speaking of the work ethic of immigrants in general, Carson said, <span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background-color: #fefefe;">There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;">As it turns out, President Obama made basically the<a href="http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/07/liberals-criticized-ben-carson-for-calling-slaves-immigrants-but-guess-who-did-it-first/"> same</a> comparison, if in a somewhat more nuanced way. But, of course, Obama might be wrong as well. Indeed, I think that both Obama and (more blatantly) Carson are wrong. But not because they refer to slaves as "immigrants." Clearly slaves were among the many people who came to what is now the United States from some other part of the world. So why the outrage over Dr. Carson's claim?<br /><br />In context, Carson seems to have been praising the work ethic of immigrants, and of course that is a grotesque context in which to mention slavery, as if slaves were simply an extreme example of people who were willing to undergo great hardship and work hard in order to make a better life for themselves and their families. But obscene as such a suggestion is, focusing on Carson's poor choice of wording misses the bigger point made (unintentionally) by his remark. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;">People are reacting so strongly to Carson's use of the word "immigrants" because the term is not, for most Americans, a neutral description of "people who move from one place to another." It is a sacred word, a ritual evocation of one of the key pillars of the secular religion called American nationalism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;">The orthodox American narrative holds that this country was built by people who came here seeking a better life--tough, independent, resourceful pioneers who "beat a thoroughfare for freedom" (across the bodies of native people, of course) and created a society that values initiative, self-sufficiency, and hard work. There are conservative and liberal versions of this narrative. The conservative version emphasizes the virtue of the "good" immigrants and judge both immigrants and native-born Americans when they fail to reach the standard. The liberal version emphasizes the generosity of American society in giving immigrants a chance, and expects contemporary native-born Americans to live up to <i>that </i>standard. The "slaves as immigrants" remarks of Carson and Obama, respectively, represent these two different versions of the immigration narrative.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;">But the narrative as a whole founders on the fact that slaves <i>were</i> immigrants. Both Carson and Obama try to weave slaves into the orthodox immigration narrative. Carson does it more clumsily, and Obama more subtly. But neither attempt works. Slaves did not come here looking for a better life. They were forced to come here by people seeking to exploit them. Yes, of course they sought a better life for themselves once they were here. Yes, many African-Americans came to believe in American ideals of liberty and democracy, and held white Americans accountable for the flagrant way in which they violated their own professed ideals. (Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" is the most obvious example, and <a href="http://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2945">Frederick Douglass</a>' "What to a slave is the Fourth of July" speech is even more striking in the way it combines endorsement of American ideals with scathing condemnation of the way white Americans failed to live up to those ideals.) But they can't be shoehorned into a story about immigrants "seeking a better life for themselves" in a "land of opportunity. For African slaves, America was a land of horror and exile, not a land of opportunity. Any immigration narrative that doesn't acknowledge this is a lie.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #fefefe;">The flip side of "slaves were immigrants" is "many immigrants were slaves." If we take that sentence seriously, then the entire American narrative about immigration will have to be rewritten, or even discarded. Rewriting the immigration narrative to include slaves doesn't jam together two quite different things. Rather, it reveals what a pious fraud the orthodox narrative always was. After all, slaves are only the most obvious exception to that narrative. Immigrants came to North America for all kinds of reasons. Some were seeking economic opportunity. Some were seeking religious freedom. Some were seeking simple survival--the Irish refugees fleeing the potato famine, for instance. Some were seeking a laboratory to explore radical political or religious ideas. Some were murderers or rapists or other criminals fleeing justice or seeking a new start in a country where their past was unknown. And yes, many of them came in chains, on slave ships, not seeking anything but hoping desperately, somehow, to survive.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fefefe;">A true narrative about American immigration must take <i>all </i>of these categories into account, as well as the who came thousands of years ago and whose prior claim was violently set aside by later waves of immigrants. The "orthodox" narrative is not just historically native--it is actively pernicious in the way it affects Americans' attitudes to immigrants today. Current waves of immigrants, such as Latin American "illegals" or Syrian or Somali refugees, are judged against an ideal standard and found wanting. "Real" immigrants are resourceful would-be entrepreneurs who seek a better life for themselves rather than desperate people forced to come here by war or famine in their homelands. "Real" immigrants are ideologically committed to American principles before they set foot here. "Real" immigrants assimilate. And so on. Over and over again I've seen people recite piously the narrative of American generosity to immigrants as an excuse for being less than generous to the immigrants actually under consideration. Simply repeating the "nation of immigrants" cliche, while true, is futile in countering this narrative, because it leaves untouched the assumption that the heirs of former immigrants have the right to stand in judgment on later immigrants, only urging them to do so generously. Since conservatives are convinced that they are already unbelievably generous, this appeal is in vain.</span><br />
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The fact that slaves were immigrants blows this assumption sky high.<br />
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Since slaves were immigrants, the heirs of the enslavers have no moral standing to judge later immigrants.<br />
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Since slaves were immigrants, appeals to the sacredness of immigration law are grotesquely hypocritical.<br />
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Since slaves were immigrants, torn from pagan or Muslim cultures, sold to Christian masters, and eventually tossed the Gospel as a pacifier, white Christian Americans have no business fretting about the supposed danger of Muslim immigration.<br />
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When we hear reports of families torn apart, of "illegals" being rounded up and shackled and penned in holding facilities, we have no right to say smugly, "well, that's what they get for breaking the law." We should rather hear the terrible echoes of what our ancestors once did to black "immigrants," and we should tremble and repent.<br />
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Recognizing the moral burden placed on us, as white residents of North America, by the misdeeds of white Americans in the past does not mean that we walk around oppressed with guilt. It does not mean that we deny the parts of the orthodox narrative that are true. There is much that is noble and inspiring in the story of immigrants coming to America. There is much that is beautiful and heroic in American history as a whole. By all means tell those stories and live in the light of those ideals. But don't construct a triumphalist narrative denying the horror and injustice that are also part of the story. And don't approach contemporary issues as if that narrative gave you the moral high ground. We are much more likely to act justly if we start from a position of honesty and humility.<br />
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Dr. Carson's remarks were indeed obscene. Not because he said that slaves were immigrants, but because he refused to acknowledge how devastating that fact is to the narrative of immigration he was trying to promote.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-47527304100509370602017-02-22T16:47:00.000-05:002020-03-30T17:40:27.331-04:00Nazism and Christianity: a reply to Danusha GoskaJohn Guzlowski kindly invited me to respond to Danusha Goska's <a href="http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/2017/01/against-identifying-nazism-with.html">essay</a> on the relationship of Nazism and Christianity on his blog. You can read my response <a href="http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/2017/02/nazism-and-christianity-response-to.html">here</a>. It's overly long and a bit laborious due to my desire not to leave any point unanswered. Here's the last paragraph:<br />
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I don't actually think that Danusha and I fundamentally disagree about the nature of Nazism. I think we disagree much more about how we should speak, as Christian scholars, about the role of Christianity in history. Danusha ends by saying that the Christians who ended the slave trade, led the movement for women's suffrage, blew the whistle on the sexual abuse crisis, and rescued Jews from Nazis deserve "nothing less than the truth." I agree. But similarly, the many people who have suffered in body, mind, and spirit from Christians' failure to live up to the truths of our holy faith deserve nothing less than a rigorous admission of these failures on our part, without excuses. Christians as a whole have, over a period of centuries, failed miserably in loving our Jewish neighbors. Perhaps exactly the same things would have happened if Europe had been pagan or Islamic or Buddhist for a thousand years. But it wasn't. It was Christian. And we must take responsibility for that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-9727829669676997552017-02-19T14:01:00.002-05:002020-03-30T17:40:36.349-04:00John McCain is rightwhen he <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-john-mccain-criticizes-trump-20170219-story.html">warns</a> that calling the media the "enemy" is "how dictators get started."<br />
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I hear so many people following President Trump's lead in labeling the "mainstream media" as "fake news." Mistrust of the media has built for a while, and Trump has fed on it and nourished it in turn.<br />
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And there are good reasons to mistrust the media. They are made up of human beings as prone to error and bias as anyone else, though hopefully with training that will help them detect and control their bias and avoid glaring errors. Sometimes they make errors anyway. Sometimes reporters are deliberately dishonest.<br />
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But the role of the media in a free society is to be a counterbalance to political power. The "mainstream" media were certainly open to criticism under Obama, because they did cut him far too much slack. But on principle, no matter the relative positions of the President and the media, one should be slow to dismiss media stories critical of any U.S. President. And if they go against one's own bias, one should take them particularly seriously.<br />
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These are just basic, non-political rules for how to avoid being any more deluded than we have to be. Truth is hard. We make it unnecessarily hard for ourselves if we dismiss stories that don't suit our bias or have negative implications for someone we admire. And maintaining a just and free society is hard. We make it unnecessarily hard for ourselves if we try to silence or render irrelevant dissenting voices that pose a challenge to the most powerful person in the world, no matter who happens to be playing that role at the moment.<br />
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This is also why I am suspicious of "pro-business" government policies. It's not that I think the government is necessarily purer than business. It's that business and government are _both_ extremely powerful. I don't want them working together. I want them checking each other.Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-22073110700264710152017-02-18T15:55:00.000-05:002020-03-30T17:45:02.376-04:00The Wrath of the Lamb: Why the NT is not necessarily "non-violent"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In comparative discussions of violence in Christianity and Islam, one often hears the argument that the <i>New Testament</i> specifically is non-violent, whereas the Qur'an contains many injunctions to violence. This of course has the benefit of side-stepping the difficult question of how we compare the undoubtedly violent parts of the Old Testament to the Qur'an. On the negative side, it seems to imply that the OT is irrelevant for Christians, which obviously is not the case in orthodox Christianity. (Denial of the divine inspiration and relevance of the Old Testament is called "Marcionism," and is one of the oldest heresies.) Of course people who make this appeal don't generally mean that the OT doesn't matter at all, and of course there are all kinds of debates within historic, orthodox Christianity about just how authoritative the OT is and how it should be interpreted. But for now, let's accept the challenge and leave the Old Testament out of the picture.<br />
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Comparing the New Testament to the Qur'an, the obvious difference is that the later sections of the Qur'an are addressed to a community of people possessing political power and engaged in warfare, while the entire NT was written long before Christians had the capacity to wage war. We shouldn't assume too quickly that this was simply a matter of necessity. The Gospel of John describes Jesus refusing efforts by the crowd to crown him as a king. Whether or not that account is historically accurate, I think it's fair to say that Jesus could have taken the path of so many other would-be Messiahs in seeking to bring in God's kingdom by military means, but chose not to. That being said, the early Christians who wrote the NT in the form we have it were hardly in the same position as the Islamic community at Medina. And the fact that the NT was written by people who did not have political power has always made it a tricky guide for Christians who <i>did</i> have such power. Unless Christians are willing to renounce political and military power altogether (i.e., a strict Anabaptist position) we need to be wary of claiming spiritual superiority based on the nonviolent nature of the New Testament's injunctions.<br />
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The New Testament does, however, repeatedly use apocalyptic language--colorful descriptions of a final, world-shaking confrontation between good and evil in which God's kingdom would be established. There's a lot of debate, of course, about what first-century Jews would have thought this language meant. N. T. Wright argues for a highly metaphorical meaning of the language, but this doesn't necessarily mean "spiritualized." In fact, he and many other scholars would point out that Jewish contemporaries of the first Christians routinely used metaphorical "cosmic" language to refer to very this-worldly events they expected to take place--a literal war against the wicked in which a literal kingdom would be established on earth. (And other scholars think that Wright has overstated the metaphorical nature of the cosmic language, arguing that writers and readers of apocalyptic really did expect the stars to fall from the sky and so on.) Even today, many Christians interpret apocalyptic language as describing quite literally events that will happen in our future (see the <i>Left Behind</i> books, for instance). One of Wright's mistakes in his criticisms of American dispensationalism, in fact, is his claim that this is a spiritualizing of the faith, when in certain respects it's a very concrete, this-worldly vision of the End.<br />
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All of this is to say that the apocalyptic language we find in the NT can be applied in a diversity of ways to the "this-worldly" situations Christians find themselves in. And that's relevant, because this language is vividly, brutally violent. Here are some examples:<br />
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In Matthew 3: 11-12, John the Baptist says that Jesus will "burn up the chaff [the wicked] with unquenchable fire."<br />
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Similarly, Matthew 13:40-42 interprets the parable of the weeds in the field to mean that the "Son of Man" will send out his messengers ("angeloi"--yes, this presumably refers to supernatural heavenly beings, but to grasp the force of the passage in Greek the more generic meaning should be heard as well) who will weed the wicked out of the world and burn them in a fiery furnace. 49-50 repeat this language in the context of the parable of the net.<br />
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Matt. 22:7 describes the king (clearly representing God) sending out an army to destroy "those murderers" (who had mistreated his servants) and to "burn their city." This most likely refers, in its immediate context, to the very this-worldly event of the destruction of Jerusalem.<br />
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Matt. 24, of course, uses apocalyptic language to describe the destruction of Jerusalem and the "coming of the Son of Man." And in that context, the parable of the sheep and the goats in 25:31-64 once again uses language of fiery punishment to describe the judgment of the wicked.<br />
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Luke 19:27, in the "parable of the pounds" (Luke's version of Matthew's "parable of the talents") has the king say of his enemies who had opposed his kingship, "bring them here and slay them before me."<br />
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Romans 1-2 describe God's judgment on the wicked. 1:32 got a lot of attention a few months ago when the NYT ran an article interpreting it as saying that homosexuals should be killed. Of course, the verse does not simply refer back to the "shameful lusts" passage in 26-27, and the "death" in question might be "spiritual death." But the passage could quite easily be taken as a justification for the imposition of the death penalty on those whom Christians see as wrongdoers, including (but not limited to) those described in 26-27.<br />
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2 Thess. 1:8 speaks of Jesus coming "with blazing fire" to "take vengeance" on those who "do not know God" or obey the Gospel.<br />
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2 Peter 2:4-9 (mirrored by Jude) again speaks of God's vengeance, connecting the punishment of the fallen angels, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the punishment awaiting the wicked on the day of judgment. 10-12 goes on to speak of those who "despise authority," describing them as being like animals made to be caught and destroyed. (Imagine how much fun Christians would have with a passage like this if it were in the Qur'an. We'd see claims like, "The Qur'an says that anyone who doesn't submit to Muhammad is an animal and should be killed!")<br />
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And this is all before we even get to the book of Revelation, with death and destruction on every page, Jesus as a conqueror on a white horse slaughtering his enemies until blood comes up to the bridles of the horses (chap. 19), and the final torture in the lake of fire of all those not "written in the book of life."<br />
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Of course <i>none</i> of these passages were commands to first-century Christians to go out and kill their enemies. But too often Christians are content to say this without thinking through the implications of what the NT does say. Here are some things that we might expect Christians shaped by these passages would believe, and which many Christians throughout history have in fact believed:<br />
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1. God's character is expressed, at least in part, through taking vengeance on his enemies in the same way that an earthly king would do--slaughtering them in war, executing them, torturing them, burning their cities, and so on.<br />
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2. God uses messengers and agents to carry out this vengeance. These may be supernatural beings ("angels") or earthly armies (as in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem). In the broader context of the Biblical narrative, it's clear that some of God's instruments may be evil. Nonetheless, one would not gather from these passages that being an instrument of God's vengeance on his enemies is incompatible with being a righteous and holy servant of God.<br />
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3. The nonviolence enjoined on Christians in the "present age" is therefore shot through with the eager expectation of the "blessed hope" of God's coming judgment. Romans 12:19 urges Christians not to avenge themselves, in order to "leave room for God's wrath" (at least according to most modern translations--the Greek simply says "wrath," so it could be read as "give way to the unrighteous wrath of the wicked and don't fight back"). For God has said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." This is in fact the attitude that Christians in the first three centuries took over and over, gloating about the future punishment of the wicked while practicing nonviolence here and now. And I think it's no concidence that Paul goes on, in the beginning of Romans 13, to speak of earthly powers "bearing the sword" by God's authority to punish the wicked. The "vengeance" which belongs to God has been, according to Scripture, entrusted to <i>earthly</i> authorities--not to Christians as such, but to the rulers entrusted with maintaining justice by punishing evildoers on God's behalf.<br />
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In light of these considerations, what would we expect Christians to do once they <i>did </i>have power? Would they not be quite likely to conclude that God's kingdom had come and that the time for vengeance on the wicked was here? And in fact at least some of them did conclude this. Eusebius referred to Constantine's reign as an image of God's kingdom, and praised Constantine's war-making as a means by which God was establishing peace and order in the earth. And the long history of Christians justifying and even sometimes encouraging violence in God's name went on from there.<br />
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Yes, this story has always been qualified. Yes, there are many passages in the NT that speak of love and mercy and forgiveness, and these cannot simply be swept aside by saying that early Christians were just tactically practicing nonviolence in the expectation of God's vengeance. I am emphasizing the passages that can be read to support violence, because Christians so often speak as if no such passages exist in the NT.<br />
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Of course Eusebius' eschatology was not universal and was perhaps not even typical. Quite quickly Christians realized that the Christianized Empire was not God's Kingdom. In the West, Augustine's <i>City of God </i>heavily qualified Christian acceptance of Empire. In the East, bishops and (more often) monks often held up the ideals of God's peaceable kingdom against the worldly kingdom of the Empire.<br />
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But the case I'm making here is a deliberately one-sided one: not that the NT, read overall in a theologically thoughtful way, supports violence, but that historic Christian violence cannot simply be swept aside as an obvious rejection or misunderstanding of the New Testament. When the Crusaders slaughtered the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099, they saw themselves as purifying God's city from defilement in an apocalyptic act of judgment. They were not simply medieval soldiers who got out of control (though they were that too)--they thought that in this particular case their violent behavior was righteous, in part because of the resonance of what they were doing with New Testament (not just Old Testament) language. Similarly with the Crusaders who sacked Beziers in 1209, the Catholic authorities who burned Protestants at the stake in the sixteenth century, the Calvinist mobs who sacked convents, the English Protestant government that ripped out the intestines of Catholics for the crime of going to Mass, and so on.<br />
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These passages of Scripture continue to be used to justify violent words and actions today. Jeff Sharlet <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/jesus-killed-mohammed/">claimed</a> in 2009 that American soldiers in Iraq sprayed "Jesus killed Mohammed" on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and had an interpreter shout the slogan as they drove through the streets of Samarra <i>during the Islamic call to prayer</i>. Better known are the remarks of General William G. ("Jerry") <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2003/oct/16/nation/na-general16">Boykin</a> that "my God was bigger than his" (referring to a Muslim warlord in Somalia). More recently, working for the Family Research Council, Boykin has said that Jesus is coming back with an assault rifle (since that's the modern equivalent of a sword) and therefore Christians should buy <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/boykin-when-jesus-comes-back-hell-be-carrying-an-ar-15-assault-rifle/">assault rifles</a>. (To be fair, Boykin clarifies that Christians are not to "build the kingdom" with guns, but that fighting will be incidentally necessary as part of the work necessary to build the kingdom.)<br />
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The combination of apocalyptic violence and belief in the divinely ordained authority of earthly governments means that Christians have persistently, over the centuries, seen political power as an invitation to use violence against the perceived enemies of God. This has been construed and nuanced in many sophisticated ways, and it has always stood in tension with the non-violent elements of the Christian tradition that we would all rather talk about. But we must talk about all of it. We must be honest about the <i>whole</i> of our tradition and the multiple ways in which the many voices of Scripture can be harmonized with each other.<br />
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We should try living out Jesus' command to love our enemies instead of using it as a badge of superiority to other religions. Instead of arguing that Christians are more nonviolent than Muslims, we should <i>be</i> nonviolent. And above all, we should not play the game of "our violence is not as bad as their violence" in order to justify our violence.<br />
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If my reading of Scripture is correct, then when we as Christians fall into this trap, using Jesus as a badge of superiority instead of following his choice to renounce superiority, we <i>become</i> those enemies of God on whom God's judgment falls. The violent parts of the New Testament should not be renounced or treated with embarrassment. They should be read humbly and with godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire, taking vengeance on those who take his name in vain.<br />
<br />Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8309996.post-32719964927126841152017-01-14T08:22:00.000-05:002020-03-30T17:45:25.160-04:00The Man in the High Castle: some thoughts from a reader of the book who hasn't seen the series<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="abro4" data-offset-key="7rgun-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="7rgun-0-0"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/dec/16/the-man-in-the-high-castle-trump-amazon-drama?utm_source=FB&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=MITHC">This</a> article about the Amazon series <i>The Man in the High Castle</i> makes me want to watch the series, but also provokes some reflections on ways in which the series appears to differ from the book (which is one of my favorite sci-fi novels, indeed one of my favorite modern novels period). </span><br />
1. In the book, the metaphysical speculations about alternative reality are front and center. The book does not feel, to me at least, primarily about "what would the world be like if the Nazis had won" but more about living in a tragic world with faith and hope. I found it striking that the article says that Tagomi's sections are "slow." I think I may have reacted that way on the first reading too, but I now find Tagomi to be the real heart of the book. Similarly, it sounds as if the I Ching, which is a central device in the novel, is absent from the series. <i>High Castle </i>is Dick's greatest book precisely because it balances incisive alternate-history sci-fie with the metaphysical and religious themes that would come to dominate his later books.<br />
2. At least one of the worlds envisioned by Tagomi, as well as the world described by Amundsen, does not actually appear to be our world. The book is not so much about imagining a dystopian world in contrast to our (presumably better) world, but rather about parallels between the nightmare "primary world" of the novel and our own somewhat less nightmarish but still quite awful world. The capacity to imagine a better world than the one we live in is, in the novel, a key part of being a virtuous person capable of resisting the evil in which we live. It's not so much "how wonderful it is that we live in a world in which the Nazis didn't win" but "whatever evil exists in our world is not inevitable and should be opposed with imagination and compassion." Fundamentally, it's a novel about contingency and free will. </div>
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<span data-offset-key="bqu6m-0-0">3. In the book, Amundsen is a novelist. I see why one might turn the novel into film footage for a TV series, but I'm not sure it works as well. Again, in the book the messages from the "other world" come through visions and imagination, mediated in many cases by the Chinese divination manual the I Ching. The big reveal about Amundsen at the end of the novel is that he actually wrote his alternate-history novel (depicting an Allied victory) by consulting the I Ching for every plot point. Thus, the novel is a kind of divine revelation. It looks as if the series turns this into a more conventional kind of alternate history.</span><br />
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4. The article says that the Japanese characters are WWII tropes. In the novel, they are somewhat culturally stereotypical, but they read much more like Japanese people as Westerners encounter or imagine them in the modern, post-WWII world. That is to say, there is actually little trace of imperialistic arrogance in them and they behave in conquered America essentially as Japanese tourists do in our world. This is very funny (and, in fact, quite stereotyping), but actually lets the historical WWII Japanese off the hook, I think. The Japanese in <i>High Castle </i>are fairly clearly the "good guys," mostly because the Japanese person we see most of is Tagomi, who is the most virtuous and compassionate character in the novel. So I'd fault the novel for its white-washing of the Japanese record. But, again, in the novel this is partly about challenging our assumptions about good guys and bad guys. Characters in the novel casually refer to the terrible atrocities committed by the Allies, especially the British. In a world in which the Axis won, it is conceivable that the Japanese might have developed into a relatively benign civilization and might have sought to cover over their past atrocities, while of course the atrocities committed by the Allies would not have been excused or covered over as they often have been in our world. If we take the point-of-view characters in Dick's novel to be entirely reliable, then the book gives a very naive picture of the Japanese. But the novel uses a limited third-person point of view (from the perspective of multiple characters) precisely, I think, in order to force us to think through the differences between their perception of the world they live in and the reality, and then to apply that same critical thinking to our own perceptions of our own world.</span></div>
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In summary, I hope to see this series at some point, but I would strongly urge people to read the book, which is one of the greatest sci-fi novels (and probably the single greatest alternate history novel) ever written.</div>
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Contarinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16602533442067190380noreply@blogger.com0