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.

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.

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.

Benny Hinn is a Monster

My neighbors are into this guy, or rather, go to a "church" founded by him. Great article here.

Apparently at the Hinn "church" they go to, they don't even really have sermons: they bring sick people on stage and implore them to seek a miracle, and turn it into some kind of a circus event.

These poor people. People say that organized religion is evil, but this is what people will run after if we don't have a healthy organization that canonically forbids these things: what a terrible thing that the Catholic Church has lost her moral credibility with this uncanonical behavior that reached so very high. She has exposed so many poor souls to such wicked men.

Four Things (On Clerical Formation)

Four things will never mix well: the Academy, the Mechanic's Shop, the Administrative Office, and the Monastery. In any hybrid, one will be dominant. In examining our curriculum, should examine what kind of outcome we wish for our students. In forming clergy, we should ask ourselves what is primary before setting up a curriculum -- if a curriculum is the primary thing needed.

Secularization seems to make greater inroads when the bishop is separated from the charismatic office and implements canons as an aloof administrator with subsidiary mechanic-priests, likewise aloof. This is a perversion of Catholicism when it happens there (less so today with Catholic priests in America than it was 50 years ago), and when it happens to Orthodox bishops it is a perversion of Orthodoxy likewise. In all communities where this occurs (at least in the US), Nominalism seems to be more widespread.

Thinking about the situation last year in a Roman Catholic hospital, and the kind of response that the bishop gave, it seems clear that he was formed as an Administrator with secondary training in the Mechanic's Shop and tertiary training in the Academy (perhaps I have the 2nd and 3rd swapped). Traditionally, the Academy has had a very strong place in clerical formation amongst Roman Catholics. Unfortunately, it has for too long been separated from those, like the Carthusians, who are serious about their ascetical life. (According to Roman Catholic Canon Law, of course, such a bifurcation is abberrant, for all priests are expected to say a Mass daily, and to keep the hours -- clear indications of the mystical function that is at the heart of the priestly office.) Administrative concerns can always peripheralize the other three of the four things. Roman Catholics are not alone in being vulnerable to this.

Protestants have traditionally seen the Academy as the center of clerical training (if I am not mistaken, the original Reformers would not wear clerical vestments during the services, but only their academic robes), and only recently have some of the Revivalist schools of thought been sliding more towards a more Mechanic's Shop/Administrative Office hybrid (i.e., "Purpose Driven Life" and other marketed programs and megachurch setups) or else to Mechanic's Shop/Monastery setups (a rarer breed have been focusing on spiritual disciplines and retreats, etc.).

I wonder: what is the vision of clerical formation operative within Orthodoxy? Traditionally it has been all over the map, with strong emphasis on Monastery as the primary with Academy as secondary -- though this prioritizing seems artificial when applied to many historical figures, who were both/and as well as brilliant Administrators with a Mechanic's genius.

Still, I don't doubt the helpfulness of this heuristic, even with its failings.  What do we want?

Charles Finney and Calvinism

Last night I came across Charles Finney's name -- some Calvinist had made a DVD and titled it "Beware of False Prophets: Charles Finney [etc., etc.]," and had put up an advertisement for this DVD on a webpage that I was looking at for some reason I can no longer remember. I didn't see a single excerpt from the DVD, but I was curious who Charles Finney was (I remember seeing his name a great number of times in relation to Protestantism), so I looked him up on Wikipedia.

Interesting -- he looks to be the father of evangelicalism/Revivalism in North America. He was also a Presbyterian, and not a Calvinist. It looks as though the DVD was made by Calvinists who "want people to know that Finney perverted the pure Gospel," etc. An excerpt from his journal on these issues:

I have spoken at considerable length of my protracted controversy with my theological teacher, Mr. Gale. Upon reflection I think that I should state a little more definitely some of the points upon which we had so much discussion. I could not receive that theological fiction of imputation. I will state, as nearly as I can, the exact ground that he maintained and insisted upon. First, he maintained that the guilt of Adam's first transgression is literally imputed to all his posterity; so that they are justly sentenced and exposed to eternal damnation for Adam's sin. Secondly, he maintained that we received from Adam, by natural generation, a nature wholly sinful, and morally corrupt in every faculty of soul and body; so that we are totally unable to perform any act acceptable to God, and are necessitated by our sinful nature to transgress His law, in every action of our lives. And this, he insisted, is the estate into which all men fell by the first sin of Adam. For this sinful nature, thus received from Adam by natural generation, all mankind are also sentenced to, and are deserving of, eternal damnation. Then, thirdly, in addition to this, he maintained that we are all justly condemned and sentenced to eternal damnation for our own unavoidable transgression of the law. Thus we find ourselves justly subject to a triple eternal damnation.

Then the second branch of this wonderful imputation is as follows: The sin of all the elect, both original and actual--that is, the guilt of Adam's sin, together with the guilt of their sinful nature, and also the guilt of their personal transgressions, are all literally imputed to Christ; and therefore the divine government regarded Him as an embodiment of all the sins and guilt of the elect, and treated Him accordingly; that is, the Father punished the Son precisely as much as all the elect deserved. Hence their debt being thus fully discharged by the punishment of Christ, they are saved upon principles of exact justice.

The third branch of this wonderful theological fiction is as follows: First, the obedience of Christ to the divine law is literally imputed to the elect; so that in Him they are regarded as having always perfectly obeyed the law. Secondly, His death for them is also imputed to the elect; so that in Him they are regarded as having fully suffered all that they deserve on account of the guilt of Adam's sin imputed to them, and on account of their sinful nature, and also on account of all their personal transgressions. Thirdly, thus by their Surety the elect have first perfectly obeyed the law; and then they have by and in their Surety suffered the full penalty to which they were subject in consequence of the guilt of Adam's sin imputed to them, and also the guilt of their sinful nature, with all their blameworthiness for their personal transgressions. Thus they have suffered in Christ, just as if they had not obeyed in Him. He, first, perfectly obeys for them, which obedience is strictly imputed to them, so that they are regarded by the government of God as having fully obeyed in their Surety; secondly, He has suffered for them the penalty of the law, just as if no obedience had been rendered; thirdly, after the law has been doubly satisfied, the elect are required to repent as if no satisfaction had been rendered; fourthly, payment in full having been rendered twice over, the discharge of the elect is claimed to be an act of infinite grace. Thus the elect are saved by grace on principles of justice, so that there is strictly no grace or mercy in our forgiveness, but the whole grace of our salvation is found in the obedience and sufferings of Christ.

It follows that the elect may demand their discharge on the score of strict justice. They need not pray for pardon or forgiveness; it is all a mistake to do so. This inference is my own; but it follows, as everyone can see, irresistibly, from what the Confession of Faith itself asserts, that the elect are saved on principles of exact and perfect justice.

I found it impossible to agree with Mr. Gale on these points. I could not but regard and treat this whole question of imputation as a theological fiction. Upon these points we had constant discussion, in some shape, during the whole course of my study.

The whole journal entry for this particular matter of Mr. Gale and Calvinism can be found here. It's not long, and very enjoyable to read.

Separation or Holiness

This is a common perversion of the holiness of the Church in Revivalist Protestant Churches -- holiness is affectively and practically understood (generally) as judgment, dissent, and aloofness. This is a component of its widespread elitism and misanthropy, regardless of the happy faces worn.

Power and Control

Science, as I understand it, boils down to mathematical-mechanical representations that allow for technological mastery. It originates in the desire to control things and outcomes.

Religion is not properly about this, but about meaning. (I'm ignoring the voices that wish to make it more complicated -- I'd make several concessions to them and overturn several of their arguments, and I'd end up returning to this point.) Nonetheless, there are plenty of people all across the board who make it about control -- who turn religion into magic. This is obvious to us when we see it in primitive societies and in foreign cultures, but less obvious when it pops up in our backyard, or even our own hearts.

I recently had a series of short conversations with a Protestant acquaintance of mine that I've known for several years, and it became clear to me that he values the teaching of the sole infallibility of scripture because this teaching (A) gives him clarity and a foundation to (B) know with certainty what is true about topics that are otherwise impossible to achieve total certainty on (C) the same way that a master mechanic knows his way around an automobile to fix it, or to show other people how it works ("it's simple: see, this does that, and we know that this works because over here that valve is in there, and so this must be your problem," etc.).

In the end, I think that Protestantism comes into conflict so often with Scientistic varieties of Secularism precisely because they are interested in control. Look at how many Protestants in the U.S. are interested in imposing theocratic legislations, even when the legislation superficially has exclusively democratic language in it.

Enjoyable

Michael Legaspi

I began reading The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies by Michael Legaspi recently, and I must say it's excellent. I'll post some quotes from his book soon (I'm in terrible back and neck pain at the moment, and can hardly type). For now, I encourage you all to read this article of his.