Toward Attention

Funneling the Cattle

Several years ago: in the aftermath of the ordination of the divorced, partnered and openly gay Gene Robinson to an episcopal seat in the Episcopal Church USA, an evangelical radio station with two or three hosts was airing call-ins to their station. The outward and apparent goal was to allow people to air their grievances, but it was just an example of typical evangelical theatrical opportunism: they wished to steer the herd of disaffected into the ranks of approved evangelical meeting-houses. It was obvious that these herders could not imagine any option but Secularism and Evangelicalism for the disaffected, and wanted to save them.

One woman called in, after several earlier "successful" re-directed call-ins, and said that she became Catholic, "because the Catholic Church will never ordain women or partnered homosexuals." The radio hosts were completely caught off-guard, and with their emotional defenses down they fully consented to this fact, and seemed bewildered by their own agreement with this rather plain woman of no remarkable intelligence (in another context they might have geared up to be hostile to such affiliation with Catholicism, but in this context they were forced to agree with her choice according to the logic of their own setup -- the drama of the options diminishes when you add third choices like "Catholicism" to Secularism vs. Evangelicalism for the disaffected -- play actors like to keep it simple, because it helps the drama.

Striving for Righteousness

He who follows righteousness and mercy

            finds life, righteousness, and honor.

--Prov. 21: 21

The plain sense of this verse is completely at odds with any notion of total depravity. I'm just sayin'.

Peter Berger on One Element of Protestantism's Contribution to Secularism

"If compared with the "fullness" of the Catholic universe, Protestantism appears as a radical truncation, a reduction to "essentials" at the expense of a vast wealth of religious contents. This is especially true of the Calvinist version of Protestantism, but to a considerable degree the same may be said of the Lutheran and even the Anglican Reformations. Our statement, of course, is merely descriptive -- we are not interested in whatever theological justifications there may be either for the Catholic pleroma or for the evangelical spareness of Protestantism. If we look at these two religious constellations more carefully, though, Protestantism may be described in terms of an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality, as compared with its Catholic adversary. The sacramental apparatus is reduced to a minimum and, even there, divested of its more numinous qualities. The miracle of the mass disappears altogether. Less routine miracles, if not denied altogether, lose all real significance for the religious life. The immense network of intercession that unites the Catholic in this world with the saints and, indeed, with all departed souls disappears as well. Protestantism ceased praying for the dead. At the risk of some simplification, it can be said that Protestantism divested itself as much as possible from teh three most ancient and most powerful concomitants of the sacred -- mystery, miracle, and magic. This process has been aptly caught in the phrase disenchantment of the world." The Protestant believer no longer lives in a world ongoingly penetrated by sacred beings and forces. Reality is polarized between a radically transcendent divinity and a radically "fallen" humanity that, ipso facto, is devoid of sacred qualities. Between them lies an altogether "natural" universe, God's creation to be sure, but in itself bereft of numinosity. In other words, the radical transcendence of God confronts a universe of radical immanence, of "closed-ness" to the sacred. Religiously speaking, the world becomes very lonely indeed."

    "The Catholic lives in a world in which the sacred is mediated to him through a variety of channels -- the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the "supernatural" in miracles -- a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen. Protestantism abolished most of these mediations. It broke the continuity, cut the umbilical cord between heave and earth, and thereby threw man back upon himself in a historically unprecedented manner. Needless to say, this was not its intention. It only denuded the world of divinity in order to emphasize the terrible majesty of the transcendent God and it only threw man into total "fallenness" in order to make him open to the intervention of God's sovereign grace, the only true miracle in the Protestant universe. In doing this, however, it narrowed man's relationship to the sacred to the one exceedingly narrow channel that it called God's word (not to be identified with a fundamentalist conception of the Bible, but rather with the uniquely redemptive action of God's grace -- the Sola Gratia of the Lutheran confessions). As long as the plausibility of this conception was maintained, of course, secularization was effectively arrested, even though all its ingredients were already present in the Protestant universe. It needed only the cutting of this one narrow channel of mediation, though, to open the floodgates of secularization. In other words, with nothing remaining "in between" a radically transcendent God and a radically immanent human world except this one channel, the sinking o the latter into implausibility left an empirical reality in which, indeed, "God is dead." This reality then became amenable to the systematic, rational penetration, both in thought and in activity, which we associate with modern science and technology. A sky empty of angels becomes open to the intervention of the astronomer and, eventually, of the astronaut. It may be maintained, then, that Protestantism served as a historically decisive prelude to secularization, whatever may have been the importance of other factors."

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1967), 111-113.

Quote From Jakob Böhme

"For he that will say, I have a Will, and would willingly do Good, but the earthly Flesh which I carry about me, keepeth me back, so that I cannot; yet I shall be saved by Grace, for the Merits of Christ. I comfort myself with his Merit and Sufferings; who will receive me of mere Grace, without any Merits of my own, and forgive me my Sins. Such a one, I say, is like a Man that knoweth what Food is good for his Health, yet will not eat of it, but eateth Poison instead thereof, from whence Sickness and Death, will certainly follow."

Calvin and Calvinism

I must say, that I think I hate Calvin and Calvinism, and am often saddened by how most often Calvinists are very, very difficult people to get close to emotionally -- especially if you disagree with them on their Reformed principles.

If Calvinism is true, how could it be that the most ardent defenders of "the True Faith" most often wind up being emotionally cold and so underdeveloped (or even sometimes twisted) human beings?

Tillich, Bultmann, Etc.

I found an article on Tillich and Bultmann, and the final section is worth quoting:

Tillich’s attempt to recast Christianity in the vulgate of the 1950′s is stale, but not merely stale because it is dated: stale because it is pedantic and wrong–atheism dressed as a bishop, when it was perfectly possible to dress in shirt and trousers and say what you really think and mean: The God of Christian theism is a story.  He does not exist.  All theological projects to prove his existence have failed.  The historical and critical work of the last two centuries have made his existence absurd to increasing numbers of people, making religious beliefs harder to maintain and defend.  This has turned millions of people into seekers, and created a situation which humankind has not encountered before.  Its outcome is still unknown.

That is what Tillich should have confessed because it is what he thought. Yet his solution was to offer sedatives and linguistic figments to people whose imagination, courage and intellect he didn’t trust.  Methadone, as I said, for religion-recovery.

Well-said.

I know people who seem to think highly of Tillich, and espouse his basic framework. I don't. I'd rather just be a Heideggerian (instead of a Tillichian) and find another way, and stop propping-up a dead god.

Of course, I am neither, but am Orthodox, though that's another story.

Why?

An acquaintance of mine recently sent me a letter regarding Schleiermacher. I had said in conversation that Schleiermacher was a heretic. I defined it by Schl.'s rejecting the Creed, especially the belief in the Resurrection (both of Christ, and of all the dead at the end of the Age). My colleague replied (via e-mail):

why does he NEED to confess the Nicene Creed? Why does he need to have "a trinitarian ontology" at all? And why is resurrection necessary? I think I understand, but I do not believe that those are the only marks of a Christian, if you will.

I replied:

I guess I just think that if we're gonna sell the farm on things like Resurrection and Trinity, then it seems silly to still play Christian -- then we're really something else that has inherited the debris of a dead and broken Christian life-form and iconography, whether the figure of Jesus or Sunday morning habits or chant traditions or "bad metaphysics" or whatever. And that might very well be where we all are -- but we should call it something else. "I love to play in the ruins of dead churches" and all that other Nietzschean jazz. Heidegger is probably where we should be in such a case. But that's not Christianity. If Christianity doesn't mean Resurrection, I'm not sure what it could mean, historically or otherwise. The tradition took on a certain form. That this is, when considered abstractly, a contingent development is irrelevant to the fact that it did develop this way, and no other. Critiques on the order of "it could have happened this way" or "there are power tactics in play here that led to this decision or result" or whatever are interesting, but don't secure or demonstrate anything by way of truth or falsity that they haven't already assumed. If it's true, it is thusly historical: if it's false, then criticism is simply doing what Nietzsche said he was doing.

Christianity is not providing us with contingent historical material for our improvisation: in Christ, God reveals Himself, is seen and touched. He comes to us. His hisstory is contingent, like the tradition. That does not make it less divine. Christianity is not founded on any necessary truths of reason, nor upon perspectival invariances.

I love these kinds of questions, I must admit, because they force one to answer clearly.

Human Rights

From part of the Wikipedia entry on Stanley Hauerwas:

Language of rights

Hauerwas finds the language of “rights” to be disturbing as it assumes that people relate to others as strangers, and lends even the understanding of the family to that of a contractual society. He argues that being part of a family, however, is not a voluntary undertaking. As such, when one is part of a family, the kinds of responsibilities each member holds are in relation to each other. Hauerwas finds that as a parent, you have a duty to your children, not just because you brought them into existence, but because the role of parent is to ensure the children are brought up in a way that is conducive to the community’s values. Thus, the issue with “rights” language is that it attempts to prevent maltreatment of individuals to the point of exclusion of familial and communal responsibility. Hauerwas’s bottom line is that there can be no real society if its members only relate in terms of noninterference. The language of rights destroys society because we regard people as strangers instead of assuming the responsibility towards them as family and members of the community that we share.

Frederick Beiser on Hegel's Reception of Spinoza

In Frederick Beiser's marvelously-written book on Hegel, there are two paragraphs (bear with the first one to get to the second one) that reinforce my suspicions about the political motives present in the Protestant spirit from the beginning: or rather, it confirms my suspicions that the spirit of Protestantism tends towards a kind of political religion; or rather, that the spirit of Protestantism as a cultural movement always had a kind of political dimension to it that controlled other dogmatic concerns. It seems that the only way that this political tendency can be stopped from overturning traditional dogmas and from seeking its natural end is by other factors arresting it or steering it differently. 

What did Hegel and the young romantics get from Spinoza? What they saw in him was first and foremost his attempt to rationalize religion. Spinoza's famous dictum deus sive natura, his identification of God with the infinitude of nature, seemed to resolve the conflict between reason and faith that had preoccupied philosophers and theologians throughout the Enlightenment. Spinoza's dictum divinized nature as much as it naturalized the divine, and so it seemed to make a religion out of science, a science out of religion. If God were the same as "the one and all" -- if the divine were the creative force of nature, the dynamic unity behind all its laws -- then there would be no reason to oppose reason and faith. Instead, the objects of religion and science would be one and the same. The case for Spinozism seemed only strengthened by the weakness of its traditional rivals, theism and deism, which, by the end of the eighteenth century, were on their last legs. Theism not only rested its case on miracles, which were hard to square with science, but it also suffered greatly from the new biblical criticism. For its part, deism had simply collapsed under the relentless barrage of Hume's and Kant's criticism of the traditional proofs of God's existence. Only Spinoza's pantheism did not seem in danger of such obsolescence. The reality of Spinoza's God was as palpable as that of nature itself. Rather than being a mysterious spirit, like the God of traditional theism, or an irrelevant abstraction, like the God of deism, Spinoza's God is the whole of nature, and so equally present within everyone alike. Since we are all modes of the single infinite substance, we only have to reflect upon ourselves to find the divine within us.

It is important to see that the romantic attraction to Spinoza was not only religious but also political. To understand these political factors, it is worthwhile to keep  in mind a famous remark of Heinrich Heine: that pantheism had always been the secret religion of Germany, the faith of its cultural underground. Heine knew whereof he spoke. Since the end of the seventeenth century in Germany, Spinoza had become the patron saint of radical Protestants, of all those discontented reformers who accused Luther of selling out to the princes and betraying his two grand ideals: religious liberty and the priesthood of all believers. These radicals embraced Spinoza for a variety of reasons, all of them perfectly Protestant. They saw Spinoza's separation of church and state as a guarantee of religious liberty; they embraced his critique of the Bible because it freed Lutheranism from its biblicism, its deadening emphasis upon the letter as a rule of faith; and they loved his pantheism because it seemed to justify the equality and priesthood of all believers. After all, if God is infinitely present within everyone alike, we are all equal; and then there is no need for a priest or spiritual authority to mediate our relationship with God.

Genesis, Creationism, C. John Collins

I'm not a Creationist, if by Creationist one means (A) "someone who believes that the world is (very roughly) 6,000 years old and was made in seven literal 24-hour periods," (B) "Man did not develop from the lower animals, but is the immediate and special creation of God" or (C) "the Bible is literally true, and the Paradise story records historical events that one could have seen with a camcorder."

Nonetheless, the Fathers generally seem very clearly to favor the interpretation of an historical Adam (see St. John Chrysostom here), and this is such a widespread belief, that to deny it seems to call into question, for me, the assumptions of Orthodoxy regarding the inspiration of the Tradition as well as the inspiration of the Scriptures (which also seem to teach an obsolete cosmology -- which wouldn't be a problem for me if the obsolete cosmology did not seem inseparably tangled-up with dogmas such as the Ascension and the Fall and whatnot).

So I read and I read and I read on this topic, because it causes me such pain. The texts seems to me to have been written by a priestly school that did not understand them to be literal reports, but how to reconcile this with the Tradition? The function of Adam language is logically seperable from the question of the correlation of such statements to historical events. That seems the way to go.

Unfortunately, not everyone who is bothered by this issue is honest about it to the end. I don't really have a solution, only fragments. Some people, in their published writings on this topic, wish for you to grant them premises that are not obvious, would like to make it look like some things are plainly obvious to all that are not obvious (at least, not to me).

So I'm reading an article by a Protestant writer on this topic, Mr. C. John Collins. I came across it elsewhere, and I don't want to buy another book (the article is an abridgment of a book). It is frustrating to skim past what strikes me as superficially technical discussions of "story" and "history" (they're almost good at some points, but miss the mark), and especially "worldview" (such a meaningless word: it really can only mean "perspective"...if it's used to mean something else, reach for your purse, because you're being had).

He rightly touches upon the relation between the Church's dogmas and the historical affirmations they are bound up with. Though he fumbles with articulating the problem clearly, he clearly does get that there is a problem in this general area: people like me, who wish to schuck the early chapter of the Genesis text (and the Church's traditional interpretation of them) to any concrete historical Adam, Eve, or Garden, may not be able to hold on to the Church's corresponding teachings regarding Creation, Man, Evil, Theodicy, Salvation, etc.

Does the story carry the worldview, equate to it, communicate it, or something else? However we articulate this, there is one common affirmation: the worldview is not an abstraction derived from the story; one cannot treat the story simply as the husk, which we then discard once we have discovered the (perhaps timeless) concepts. Of course, there may well be transcendent truths (such as moral norms); but they gain their power from their place in the story—that is, they equip the members of a community to play their parts in the story meaningfully. It is the worldview story that, if well told, captures the imaginations of those who own it, thereby driving them on and holding their loyalty.

As you can see, the word "worldview" should be dropped. It brings needless obfuscation. How do we tell the story of the world and of salvation if we reject the historical nature of the Genesis texts, of their characters and events? Elsewhere he better states the problem:

[...] authors who say things like, “Genesis 1–11 aims to tell us, not history or science, but theology,”31 are trying to say something worth saying about Genesis 1–11, but they are indulging in a problematic disjunction. The theology is not separable from the story, as we can see from the fact that one of those “theological truths” is that the One who created the world is the good God who revealed himself to Israel, and not the capricious gods of the other peoples—a historical assertion!

If he's correct, then the Church will fade away: or rather, it will be broken, and her fragments, her components -- her corpse -- will be gathered up into new religious configurations. This seems to be already happening in some places (I dare not name them, for I may include some who ought to be excluded, or exclude some who ought to be included, or it may simply be ubiquitous, and Nietzsche's Death-of-God may truly have fallen upon us).

He'll make some OK distinctions about the different ways that people read the text, such as 

there are at least four possible ways of taking the material in Genesis:

1. The author intended to relay “straight” history, with a minimum of figurative language.

2. The author was talking about what he thought were actual events, using rhetorical and literary techniques to shape the readers’ attitudes toward those events.

3. The author intended to recount an imaginary history, using recognizable literary conventions to
convey “timeless truths” about God and humans.

4. The author told a story without even caring whether the events were real or imagined; his main goal was to convey various theological and moral truths.

(Unfortunately, Collins favors (2). He might be correct: but then the biblical author(s) of Genesis 1-3 would be wrong.) Then he goes on to write things that sound very sensible, followed by quotes that seem completely at odds with what he writes about them:

No one knows what materials the author of Genesis used in composing this story. Probably he had access to some versions of the Mesopotamian stories; but beyond that, God alone knows what else he might have had. Maybe there were Hebrew stories of the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham; some of them might even have been written. Perhaps Henri Blocher’s suggestion is best, that the author of Genesis “reconstructed” the past, working backwards from ordinary human experience to what must have caused it, giving us a tale that provided a contrast to the other stories:

"Genesis aims to supply the true reconstruction, guided and guaranteed by divine inspiration, over against the fantasies and errors reconstructed by the others. There is nothing in that which allows us to take the event as a symbol."

Finally,

Blocher also points out that “the presence of symbolic elements in the text in no way contradicts the historicity of its central meaning.”

Of course, as Collins presents it, and as it stands, Blocher is not really pointing out anything, but asserting something.

I'm still working my way through the article, but that's my two cents so far. Frustrating. Does anyone actually want to engage the science? No. Creationists, by definition, seem to always avoid dealing with the science in a direct, sustained way. They sometimes pick off bad science, it is true, but then they expand their legitimate critiques into the foundation for counter-positions, which they are not adequate for.