Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

From the Inbox 31 May 2006

A few things for today.

From Mike Aqulina's Fathers of the Church weblog, a reflecton on the early Church's Memorial Day: Memorial Day from Time Immemorial.

Chuck Colson offers his thoughts on the "emerging church" movement in Emerging Confusion. At the end you'll find links to his exchange with emerging church guru Brian Mclaren.

From the English newspaper The Daily Telegraph, a news story on the possibility (liklihood, as far as I can tell), that Unwed couples could get property rights. The columnist Mary Kenny (a practicing Catholic) responds to this assault on marriage in the guise of justice in If you want your share, get married. Marriage, she notes,

is about more than love, conjugality or spiritual union. Nine tenths of the historical literature dealing with marriage is about property. For all her romantic and feminine feeling for the marriage of true minds, Jane Austen has a keen sense about the role played by property in any match. She knew, instinctively, that property is a stabilising element in any betrothal, and increases people's sense of responsibility to their society, and their sense of responsibility towards their descendants.

She also makes the common sense argument that cohabitation is a ridiculous basis on which to divide property.

Also from the DT, a provocative article bby Janet Daley, West must take pre-emptive action for its own security. She argues that some people think, with the problems Prime Minister Blair and President Bush are having,

In no time at all, we will be back to business as usual: the UN can hunker down happily into its familiar stalemates and corrupt corridor deals, while Europe witters about the minutiae of its latest wave of regulations. And the peoples of the world who live under murderous despots can go to hell in a handcart.

Well, it's not to be: never business as usual again, I'm afraid. The status quo ante is not an option — not just, as Mr Blair likes to say, because of 9/11, but because the old dispensation was a product of the Cold War.

The lucid and clear-seeing (and lucid because clear-seeing) Stanley Kurtz writes on Zombie Killers for National Review Online. It's a phrase taken from some intellectual's writing on marriage. He argues that, after translating the jargon and political calculation behind which some pro-"gay" scholars hide, you find that

conservative opponents of same-sex marriage and some of Europe’s most influential sociologists are saying much the same thing: Same-sex marriage doesn’t reinforce marriage; instead, it upends marriage, and helps build acceptance for a host of other mutually reinforcing changes (like single parenting, parental cohabitation, and multi-partner unions) that only serve to weaken marriage.

In short, “the queering of the social” (meaning a broad spectrum of family change, including, but not limited to, same-sex partnerships) calls into question the normativity and naturalness of “heterorelationality” (i.e., traditional marriage).

The London School of Economics' Anthony Giddens, one of the real biggies in Anglo-American intelectual life, is one, and two influential German sociologists named Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, are another. (Viewed as a unit, though the names suggest such one-flesh identity is not something they want. Really, if you have to hyphenate your name, though I'll warn you it's awfully passe even in "liberated" circles, both of you ought to do it.)

From the English weekly The Spectator (my favorite magazine), Amnesty Could Kill Itself, on Amnesty International's move to endorse abortion as a human right it will work to protect and extend. As he puts it:

the hour is drawing near when, through the courage of their convictions, they will proclaim, ‘Fiat justitia, ruat coelum’ (‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall’) as they redefine human rights according to a strictly secularist doctrine which is a world away from that on which Amnesty was founded.

AI has been moving this way for some time — alas, I must say, speaking as someone who long supported it. For example, and this is only one example of its recent pro-abortion work:

In March 2005 Amnesty seemed ready to add the United States to its blacklist when it decried a refusal by Washington to pay for abortions overseas as an ‘attempt to stifle the evolution of the human rights framework’."

He argues, however, that the organization could ruin itself by alienating its Christian members if it becomes more overtly and officially pro-abortion. I hope that's true, but then who will do the work Amnesty International now does?

And finally, You're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you, chapter eight of Joseph Dellapenna's Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, just published. (It's a book we'll be reviewing.) From the summary of the book on the website, discussing the "new orthodox history of abortion," upon which Harry Blackmun, a name that shall live in infamy, based his argument in Roe v. Wade:

This new orthodoxy proclaimed four theses as summarizing the “true” history of abortion in England and America:

(1) Abortion was not a crime “at common law” (before enactment of abortion statutes in the nineteenth century). (2) Abortion was common and relatively safe before the statutes were enacted. (3) Abortion statutes were enacted to protect the life of the mother rather than the life of the embryo or fetus. (4) The moving force behind the nineteenth-century statutes was male physicians’ efforts to suppress competition from (largely female) practitioners of alternative forms medicine.

Each of these theses is incorrect. Only by placing strictly legal materials in social, political, and technological contexts can one properly understand what happened in the past and how the law specific to abortion changed through time. Anglo-American law always treated abortion as a serious crime, generally including procedures performed early in pregnancy. Prosecutions and even executions go back 800 years in England, establishing law that carried over to colonial America - law that focused consistently on protecting the life of the unborn child.

A Moving Day

My contributions to Mere Comments are a bit thin (no wisecracks please) of late because I have been on vacation, packing up our house to move. My wife and I have been in this house for nearly 18 years. At one time all six of our children lived here with us. Now, aside from a college graduate who has a summer job out of state, we have one. I won't write about empty nests, though (and it's not quite empty).

But the process of packing, which includes sifting and purging things from the past hidden away in some corner of the basement or closet, and moving, gets me thinking about real estate in the sense of real property we own, real land and places, by which many of us in part define ourselves. You can see the act of self-definition in grand style in parts of Chicago where ultra-luxurious condos are going up where factories and distressed properties once stood. Some are offered "starting at $599,000," or some such figure beyond the dreams of most of us.

It's easy, and trite, I will confess, to wax eloquent, or least make the attempt, about passing vanities and all that, and how we have no stable home on earth, ultimately. Yes, we're just passing through, and all that. Such thoughts sometimes arise as a sort of spiritual reflex to assure ourselves that we aren't all that materialistic, and so on.

But my thinking about this came to me from another direction last week when a dear friend of my wife fell asleep in the Lord in the midst of our packing.

My wife was primarily responsible for the funeral arrangements for this man who had no family to speak of and no money at all. He was destitute and the state was willing to bury him at no cost, but we would not have been able to have a Christian funeral for him at any time.

That would not stand, so we arranged a funeral at the cemetery last Friday. Our priest and deacon vested outside the small cinder block chapel, while 7 or 8 other mourners waited for the Orthodox funeral service to begin. Since the death occurred during our Paschal Season (Ascension begins this evening), we sang in grand style the Paschal Matins from the main Easter service--that is what is prescibed for funerals.

"Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." The chant repeatedly filled the chapel. At first I was dismayed by the bare concrete floor and the water that stood in pools in various places among the folding chairs we didn't use. What sort of dignity is this, I thought, but quickly a rejoinder came: what sort of dignity lay hard upon our poor departed brother in Christ lying in that coffin?

Death and its corruption, to make it clear, is the low estate to which all men are subject--millionaire and public aid recipient. No dressing up of mausoleums with silent stone facades can take away the odor of death. The dead lay buried in the sea, in pits, in common graves of the concentration camps, in the showy tombs of the rich and famous (even when reduced to ashes).

But there was something about this cemetery that struck me afterwards when we drove through it toward the front gates: I had been here before. Not this cemetery, I mean, but it seemed to me at least that every foot of every cemetery I have ever been--from Iowa to Chicago to rural Michigan to Detroit to Canada to Scotland-- is part of the same piece of real estate. It's a piece that binds all men together in a common inheritance, death, but with a hope for something else.

The inheritance doesn't end there, and it we knew in the hymns of the faithful in that small chapel, words stronger than our sorrow, that behind the breath of our voices lay the trumpets of angels announcing to the women disciples that He is risen, indeed, and because He is, so shall all the dead be raised.  So it's the light of the Resurrection that I pray will shine in our new home, and every Christian home, a reflection of the eternal hymn, "Shine, shine, O new Jerusalem, the glory of the Lord has shone on you."

The Front Line

     Faithful Touchstone reader Rev. Paul Scalia has sent me this excerpt, fitting for Memorial Day, by Ernie Pyle, reporting from Tunisia in 1943:

     "I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without.
     "I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this  particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.  A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.
     "All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.
     "The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal.  Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.  On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.
     "They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.  In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory—there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
     "The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men."

     God bless the infantrymen who not only hold the line, but are the line, and may their sufferings be the crucible wherein their faith, hope, and love are tried.  Even their hope, when all seems brutal and foolish and pointless.  I must believe that in all such lines of average Joes, whatever nation justly or unjustly sends them to war, another Soldier walks with them, unseen.  Let us all say a prayer tonight for those Americans who have already agreed to give up their lives, that the sacrifice might not yet be required of them, and that they may return to their families and their countrymen again.

    

Judas and the Decline of National Geographic

The June 2006 issue of The American Enterprise includes a brief commentary on the culture war politicization of National Geographic magazine, once a trusted mainstay of middle American households. As evidence, TAE notes the magazine's fawning over hyper-Darwinist E.O. Wilson and regarding Prince Charles's proposals for state-engineered organic farming and the like. TAE points out the latest downgrade of National Geographic with its recent cover-story on the Gospel of Judas:

Speaking of Iron Age scribes, there was a pathetically hyped story on the "Gospel of Judas," packaged for rubes as if there was something fresh and authoritative in finding a deviant manuscript written by Gnostics, who have long been known to have fed parasitically on Christianity (and other religions as well), distorting and mixing and rewriting at will, centuries after the original events described. What was found in this case was basically a very old New Age novel written by a fourth-century Egyptian equivalent of a cross between Marianne Williamson and Ward Churchill. Yet National Geo essentially announced on the basis of this single chunk of papyrus that moldy old Christianity is going to have to overturn much of what it believes to be true. This betrays either cluelessness on the complexities of religious scholarship, or shamelessness in preferring splashy subversion to accuracy.

I suppose National Geographic has always had a bit of a subversive edge to it. Every American neighborhood had the kid who passed around copies of his parents' National Geographic, giggling over the photographs of scantily-clad exotic women.

Wonder if the coming generation will find eight year-old boys saying to their friends: "Psst, come check out this ancient Gnostic text?" or "Hey, don't tell your folks, but you've gotta see the plans Prince Charles has for Belgian Endive in the UK"?

Robert George in Christianity Today

You won't want to miss the interview with Touchstone senior editor Robert George in the June issue of Christianity Today. The interview is not yet online, but is available in the print edition of the magazine. In the most interesting part of the interview, Robby discusses how Christian ecclesiology protects against both libertarianism and collectivism:

The trouble with libertarianism is that fails to do justice to our connectedness and to the obligations we have in solidarity with each other as brothers and sisters. But on the other side, there's a collectivism that also must be rejected, the idea that the individual human being is simply a cog in a larger social wheel.

You should check out this CT issue not only for Robby's insights, but also for the photograph of George in trendy shades, no doubt the good Professor's calculated accommodation to the hip evangelical crowd at CT.

Three's Tyranny?

The legal and cultural issues of polygamy and polyamory are taken up in two very different magazines of late, the gay weekly The Advocate and the neo-conservative Weekly Standard. While the Advocate is boldly open to legally recognized pseudo-polygamous unions as part of the new order, the Standard argues that the move toward polygamy and polyamory (in legal briefs and culturally in such developments as HBO's Big Love television broadcast) represents a threat not just to traditional marriage but to democracy itself.

The Advocate considers how much visibility to give to polyamory in the marriage debate, given the ways in which the very mention of a more-than-two marriage seems to confirm all their opponents fears:

“There is a feeling of not wanting to allow the right wing to change the subject from the question that is really being asked, which is, What reason does the government have for denying committed same-sex couples the legal commitment of marriage?” says Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, which seeks equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. “Because the Right doesn’t have the answer to that question, they are eager to change the subject.”

While there are grassroots efforts by straight people to legalize polygamy, there has been no noteworthy effort by LGBT activists to bring polyamory into the fight for marriage equality. “We’ve been very involved in work for same-sex marriage rights,” says Chvany. “Even if we aren’t interested in using them ourselves, they are important to our community as a whole and to people we care about.”

In the Weekly Standard, Stanley Kurtz writes:

Far from offering a democratic solution to the problem of multipartner unions, egalitarian polyamory simply reveals another face of the polygamy dilemma. It is inherently difficult to keep multipartner unions together. The traditional solution is to rely on rules, clear lines of authority, the suppression of emotion, and a sense of obligation to kin. Collective solidarity is the material and spiritual payoff for all the sacrifice. Yet the polyamorists cultivate love, resist authority, dispense with organizational rules, and try to wish jealousy away. Once all the stability-inducing sacrifices have been dispensed with, impermanence is the inevitable result.

Polyamory is a cover-all term for a bewildering variety of relationship forms--everything from open marriage, to bisexual triads, to a man with multiple women, to a woman with multiple men, to large sexual groups, and many more. The "rules" governing these arrangements are entirely flexible. There might be three "primary" partners who actually live together, and several additional "secondary" partners (collectively shared or not) to whom the three "primaries" are less committed. The levels of commitment, and the range of partnership and mutual involvement, are subject to continual change and renegotiation. Open and honest communication is the only rule. Polyamorists emphasize that multipartner unions take intense and constant work. Yet this need for a higher level of monitoring and negotiation only highlights the forces pushing against stability.

The contrast between postmodern polyamory and the patriarchal polygamy of Muslim fundamentalists resembles the nineteenth-century duality of "free love" and Mormon polygamy. Mormon plural unions were authoritarian and relatively stable (although even in the nineteenth century they had very high divorce rates). The free love experiments nearly all collapsed after a few short months or years, although new experiments were generated continually for decades. That record of instability was repeated when the hippie communes of the 1960s and 70s fell apart.

This might not matter were it not for the problem of children. Family stability is highly desirable for children. Not only would legally recognized polyamory be unstable, but the legitimization of polyamory would also be incompatible with one of our core reasons for giving marriage the backing of law at all: to reinforce monogamy as a cultural value.

You can't send the message that marriage means fidelity when even a small portion of recognized marriages are polyamorous. The reliance of Western marriage systems on monogamous companionate love for stability is all but ignored by the advocates of polyamory, who have little or nothing to say about children. Over and above prevention of individual abuses, protection of the broader cultural ethos of monogamy is the reason both polygamy and polyamory must go unrecognized in America. Democratic culture depends on monogamous marriage. The alternatives are either too authoritarian to be adapted to our society or so hyper-individualist that they cannot perform the work of families. And recognition of either alternative would undermine the monogamy on which the stability of American marriage depends.

Happy Birthday Walker Percy

Driving through the Gentilly section of New Orleans, the setting of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer, I wondered what Percy would think had he lived to see the neighborhood here utterly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. With piles of debris and emptied streets, Gentilly resembles more one of Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic-dystopian fictions than one of Percy's apocalyptic-but-hopeful volumes.

No doubt Percy would have written an essay explaining what both the post-Katrina chaos in the Superdome and the post-Katrina neighbor love in the surrounding communities tell us about human nature, human sin, human dignity, and the quest for God.

One wonders further what Percy might have said about current debates over embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and the attempt to bio-chemically alter human nature through medicines designed to numb sadness and to deaden guilt. Truth is, most of these things Percy already wrote about, because he saw them coming, from his little room in Covington, Louisiana, long before they arrived.

On May 28th, Walker Percy would be ninety years old. Perhaps it is appropriate for those who loved his life and work to thank God for giving us such a quirky prophet. Perhaps this weekend would be a good time for those of us who have been shaped by Percy's writings to give a copy of one of his books to a younger Christian. By my lights, The Moviegoer is the best of Percy's fiction, and Signposts in a Strange Land is the best collection of his essays. The collection of letters between Percy and his best friend, the unbelieving but brilliant historian Shelby Foote, is also a good place to start to understand Percy the man.

Gentilly lies in debris. Shelby Foote is now dead too. Self-help books still abound. Thanatos Syndrome-like scientists are still feverishly at work in the search for a chemically-accessible Eden. Read some Percy today in honor of his birthday. And then thank God for the good doctor's reminder to us that even when there is a wasteland everywhere around us, there is love in the ruins still.

The Living Fathers

A friend of the magazine once complained to me about a review we ran in the Book Notice section of a new translation of one of the Church Fathers. I think the Father was St. Cyril, but if not him, another of the early Church's stars. My friend wondered why we reviewed a book so old, when there were current bestsellers to be addressed.

A quote from the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky, published on the biblicalia weblog, explains it:

When I read the ancient classics of Christian theology, the fathers of the church, I find them more relevant to the troubles and problems of my own time than the production of modern theologians. The fathers were wrestling with existential problems, with those revelations of the eternal issues which were described and recorded in Holy Scripture. . . . The reason is very simple: they were dealing with things and not with the maps, they were concerned not so much with what man can believe as with what God had done for man.

I haven't given the whole quote, but this gives the heart of it. For us, and this is true of our Protestant editors as well as our Catholic and Orthodox editors, the Fathers really are fathers, and indeed living fathers, fathers to whom one naturally goes for instruction and guidance. They're authorities. They're part of the conversation, if you will. They're, um, sorry to use this word, relevant.

And indeed more relevant than most bestsellers, including most religious bestsellers. They're more relevant for the reason Dr. Florovsky gives: they saw more clearly than the average bestseller's average author (including the average religious writer) the essential matters, which are just as essential today as then.

They're first among those who — if we think to invite them to join us in our conversation — will cut through the nonsense we believe, all the errors and mistakes, the genuinely stupid ideas, the self-justifying theories, the party positions, the blindspots we suffer just from growing up in this place and time, and the simple ignorance created by indolence, sloth, and the myriad lusts of the flesh, to help us see what we don't easily see, or indeed see at all without help. They're not just relevant, they're necessary.

That explains why to us a review of a new translation of a Church Father is something to be shared with our readers, even ahead of a review of a titanic bestseller. And practically speaking, lots of good Christian magazines and weblogs will be writing about the bestseller, but not that many will be telling people about the Church Fathers. When everyone's gathered at the table arguing about the latest thing, someone has to go open the door and let the wise old men in.

My thanks to Mike Aquilina's Fathers of the Church weblog for putting me on to this.

Waking Up the Comatose

According to the journal Nature, Sleeping pills offer wake-up call to vegetative patients. The story begins:

Clinical researchers have discovered that they can rouse semi-comatose patients by giving them, bizarrely, a common sleeping drug. If more wide-ranging tests are successful, the drug could become the first effective treatment for 'persistent vegetative state', the condition at the centre of the US legal battle over sufferer Terri Schiavo last year.

Like many scientific discoveries,

The treatment was a chance discovery, Clauss [Ralf Clauss of the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, one of the discoveres] says. He recalls that one of the vegitative patients was experiencing restless movements, and that Nel [a South African doctor Wally Nel, the other discoverer] was trying to calm them with the use of a sleeping pill. "Lo and behold, he woke up 15 minutes later," says Clauss. "And so now we're using a sleeping drug to wake people up in the morning."

My thanks to Gene Godbold for the link.

A Great Deluge, Indeed

Sometimes reading a critical book review is like watching a man punching out a violent purse thief on the street corner. You may wince a bit, but, after all, the robber had it coming.

I am typing this from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, visiting my family on the way back from a speaking engagement in Auburn, Alabama. The FEMA trailers and blue tarp roofs are still everywhere, as are the piles of rubble left in the wake of Katrina. Just before leaving Kentucky for Mississippi, I finished Douglas Brinkley's new book, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I was prepared to write a highly critical review of Brinkley's latest offering, but I don't have to. My fellow Touchstone senior editor Wilfred McClay beat me to it.

Reading Bill's withering review almost made me feel sorry for Brinkley, except that Bill's review is relatively restrained given how awful the book actually is.

Bill's review, originally published in the New York Sun and now on-line at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, hits Brinkley for his scholarly mediocrity, his research sloppiness, and his political pandering. Bill writes: "Would you trust a writer who trades on his intimate knowledge of the Gulf South, and yet claims at one point that a tired-looking President Bush could not have been jetlagged because 'Washington was in the same time zone as Mobile?'" I could add numerous other mistakes, such as Brinkley's reference to "former Louisiana senator Trent Lott."

McClay also points out the embarrassing lengths to which Brinkley goes to curry favor with Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu (who last Saturday lost his race for New Orleans mayor) while relentlessly attacking Mayor Ray Nagin for everything from his administrative incompetence to his profanity to the length of a shower he took on Air Force One.

Bill closes the review as follows:

One should add, too, that there is no serious criticism of the astounding malfeasances of the news media in covering this story. No mention of the hysterical falsehoods about bodies stacked in freezers and gunfights in the Superdome that were put out to the world, and that have stuck in the world's mind, even as their basis in fact crumbled. Instead, Mr. Brinkley writes about the news media exactly as you would expect someone who wants to be well treated by them, and invited back to appear on their cable shows: They were all heroes.

All of this would be forgivable if Mr. Brinkley had written a book that was lively and evocative. But The Great Deluge turns out to be a book worthy of its title. It just goes on and on and on, a veritable Mississippi of sludgy, sophomoric, rebarbative prose, with gimmicky human-interest stories, transcriptions of press releases, gratuitous quotations from great writers about hurricanes, and potted history. This author may feel the gravity of his subject, but he does not manage to convey it.

As a native Biloxian, I suppose I had to read Brinkley's book. You can wait for a better one to come along. But read Bill McClay's review. And, as you do so, remember: he's holding back.

Religious humor

Something I found while looking for something else: the Grove Press's humour page. The jokes are preacher's jokes, if you know what I mean, but most of them are funny. This one amused me:

Democracy

The minister of a Baptist church decides that God is calling the church to a new vision of what it is to be and to do. So at the Elders' Meeting, he presents the new vision with as much energy, conviction and passion as he can muster. When he had finished and sat down, the chair of the meeting called for a vote. All 14 elders voted against the new vision, with only the minister voting for it.

'Well, pastor, it looks like you will have to think again,' says the chairman. 'Would you like to close the meeting in prayer?'

So the minister stands up, raises his hand to heaven, and prays, 'LORD, will you not show these people that this is not MY vision but it is YOUR vision!

At that moment, the clouds darken, thunder rolls, and a streak of lightning bursts through the window and strikes in two the table at which they are sitting, throwing the minister and all the elders to the ground.

After a moment's silence, as they all get up and dust themselves off, the chairman speaks again.

'Well, that's fourteen votes to two then.

Meet Mr. Scruton

The New Pantagruel offers an interesting interview with the conservative thinker Roger Scruton. It includes, for example, his thoughts on the nature and effect of the market upon social order and community. Scruton says:

The free market is a necessary part of any stable community, and the arguments for maintaining it as the core of economic life were unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. [Friedrich] Hayek developed the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence of ‘spontaneous order’, as the means to produce and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality.

The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.)

Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.

Bioethics News

A weblog you may want to know about: Bioethics.com. Besides entries reporting on particular stories, it offers a daily list of links titled "Bioethics in the News," which will put you on to all sorts of interesting stories.

Back to the Didache

Two new articles on The Didache you may find helpful:

First, from Christianity Today, William Varner's What the Teaching Can Teach Us, which summarizes the text and suggests how Evangelicals might apply it. Much of it is very good, but I don't think the writer has quite understood the document, for among his arguments is:

The passage about baptism contains the following opening clause, "After you have reviewed all these things, then baptize." The "things" that were to be reviewed are the six chapters of instruction that the Didachist had just given. They consist almost exclusively of practical instructions relevant to the life of a renewed person saved from the rampant vices of a pagan empire.

Missing, however, is any detailed instruction in what we today call theology. I emphasized before that the Teaching is thoroughly orthodox in doctrine, with a high Christology and a clear affirmation of the Trinity. But mostly the Teaching describes the behavior that should characterize a new believer.

So far, so good. But then he goes on to say that:

My perception is that the vast majority of instruction classes in our churches today deal primarily with what we are to believe, not how we are to obey. Perhaps the Teaching has something to offer us, when we find so many doctrinally orthodox believers struggling in their daily temptations, in their marriages, and in their practical Christian walks. Maybe a training program along the practical lines of the Teaching should replace the rote doctrinal rehearsals that characterize many of our classes for baptismal candidates.

The observation that we (most Christian leaders in most Christian traditions) ought to do a better job in teaching obedience is certainly true, but the way the writer has dismissed instruction in doctrine (even with the disclaimer "characterize many of our classes") seems to me throwing out the baby with the bath water, and throwing him out from a very high window, and throwing him out on purpose. And more to the point, throwing him out when the writer or writers of the Didache would have kept him safe.

The Didache is a practical work, but does the writer not realize that it was written by people who knew the importance of Christian doctrine, living as they did in a religiously pluralistic and syncretistic world, and having at least some of the (dogmatic) New Testament documents to guide them? Does he not realize that they would have had to explain and defend the practices they assert, i.e., given a doctrinal answer to the people, Christians and pagans, who would say "But why do this?" Does he think they would have made the same suggestion?

To put it another way, why does he not say "Maybe a training program along the practical lines of the Teaching should be added to instruction in doctrine"? That would be the traditional Christian practice, especially for baptismal candidates, who almost certainly don't know which end is up. They didn't in the first century, and they don't now.

Of course no one wants "rote doctrinal rehearsals," but there are other ways of teaching doctrine than rote rehearsals (which, now that I think of it, might be defended). This kind of prejudicial writing makes me cross. I'd think an editor would have caught this.

And practically speaking, what good is in "practical instruction" to people who don't know why you're telling them to do what you're telling them to do? Why in the world would they try to do all the difficult things Christianity tells them to do if they don't know the value of the effort, especially, to put it crassly, the cash value of obedience?

Which cash value is in part, in great part, eschatological. If you don't believe in the next world, you're not going to suffer in this one. You have to have a vison of the whole of life from birth to eternity, a vision that connects the moral choice you're facing now with the sort of man you want to be in the next world, to make the right choice when it's hard or painful or to all appearances ridiculous. In other words, you have to know and believe the doctrine.

Second, from Mike Aquilina's Fathers of the Church weblog, The Time Capsule, which offers a more Catholic reading. It includes a helpful list of links at the end.

Not Harvard Bound, Again

In our May issue we published an article called "Not Harvard Bound" by Terrence O. Moore, about students who are seeking an even higher education. This piece in the Wall Street Journal by Vincent Cannato on the "Confusion on Campus" discusses former Harvard dean Harry Lewis's "Excellence without a Soul": the schools have become "soulless" and Harvard itself no longer even knows what a good education is or what it is really for.

A Harvard education, the university states, "must provide a broad introduction to the knowledge needed in an increasingly global and connected, yet simultaneously diverse and fragmented world." Mr. Lewis, rightfully dismissive, notes that the school never actually says what kind of knowledge is "needed." The words are meaningless blather, he says, proving that "Harvard no longer knows what a good education is."

Worse, Harvard "articulates no ideals of what it is to be a good person." They gave that up a long time ago, and after it has paraded its prominent nakedness for years, someone in the crowd has noticed. And it's not only Harvard, but American higher education in general, with, of course, notable exceptions.

The "promising" students profiled in the Touchstone article noted above are looking for the exception: a truly higher education for the soul.

ACP Winner

The editors are pleased to tell you that Touchstone received eight awards in this year’s Associated Church Press competition, for issues published in 2005.

Most encouragingly, we again won the Award of Excellence (first place) for journals. (We have won both years we've entered, having been members for only two years.) The excerpt from the judge’s comments printed in the announcement said that Touchstone is “Nicely designed and well written. Excellent blend of the timely and the timeless. . . . This is a vigorous and provocative publication cleverly disguised as a genteel journal. But it’s not one you dare relax with.”

Almost as encouragingly, we also won the Award of Excellence for editorial courage for Gifts of the Womb, the March editorial on in vitro fertilization. This, I admit, slightly surprised me, given how un-p.c. was the argument we made and the conclusion we offered, which upset even some long-time readers.

The other awards:

● The Award of Excellence in the category “Media Review” for the book review section, described by the judge as “An outstanding review section, embodying a clear editorial vision.”

● The Award of Excellence in “Theological Reflection: Short Format” for Patrick Henry Reardon’s “Dogmatic Love” in the October issue. “A well-developed and well-articulated essay, masterfully done,” the judge wrote.

● The Award of Merit (second place) in “Department: Magazine” for our Quodlibet section. It is described as “Compelling, often subtle, and promisingly helpful to the readership: a column rich in intelligence, the sort of material that makes one think. Deftly blends modern issues with biblical foundation.”

● The Award of Merit in “Biblical Interpretation” for Patrick Henry Reardon’s “War and Poetry” in the November issue. On this, the judge commented: “I don’t think I have ever read anything on Numbers 27, and now I think I can never forget it.”

● Honorable Mention (third place) in “Feature Article: Ecumenical Magazine” for Anthony Esolen’s “A Requiem for Friendship” in the September issue.

● Honorable Mention in “Humor: Written” for Christopher Bailey’s “New Manuscript Discovery,” also in the September issue.

You will forgive me, I hope, if I use this as an excuse to urge you to subscribe.

Gladys Knight Meets Joseph Smith

The Washington Post reports on what seemed to be a rocking revival meeting in the nation's capital, featuring music and testimony from R&B singer Gladys Knight. The gathering was unique in that it was sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints as part of a Mormon initiative to reach African-Americans.

At the event, Knight testified of her own conversion from Baptist to Latter Day Saint, a church that banned blacks from the priesthood until the 1970s. The Post reports:

"I am pressed so surely in my spirit to give you my testimony," said Knight, telling the crowd about her conversion from the Baptist Church (sic) to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1997. "They thought I was crazy. They thought that I had lost my mind. 'What are you doing over there with those Mormons? They don't like black people.' Yes, when I came to this church, I asked, 'Do y'all like black people or not?' "

Of course, it will take much more than has-been musical stars to reach African-Americans for Mormonism. But the LDS seems to see an opening, an opening they plan to fill. Biblical Christianity shouldn't ignore Mormon expansionism. The answer is to preach the gospel everywhere and to everyone, and to be ready to give an answer when we're asked: "Do y'all like black people or not?"

Da Vinci Code: Unfair to Gnostics

I know I ought to see The Da Vinci Code movie before I say anything about it, but I don't want to. I'm not boycotting. I'm just bored.

Let's face it. Gnosticism, whether of the second-century systematic kind or of the twenty-first century commercial kind, is not just evil but dull too. Dan Brown takes an already absurd conspiracy theology and makes it even dumber and even duller. One wonders whether Irenaeus would have bothered to pen Against Heresies if Dan Brown were the Gnostic guru of his day.

In an article on the Slate magazine website, Christian scholar Larry Hurtado argues that The Da Vinci Code is even more inaccurate than most Christians claim. It's not just historically inaccurate in its portrayal of orthodox Christianity, Hurtado argues, but it's also unfair to Gnosticism. Writes Hurtado:

Curiously, The Da Vinci Code presents the so-called Gnostics, who regarded other Christians as lesser beings than they and were in turn treated as heretics, as the heroic defenders of a thoroughly human Jesus. But actually the historic Gnostics and the gospels often linked with their circles did not emphasize Jesus' human nature at all—quite the opposite. Typically, Gnostic Christians portrayed Christ as a heavenly being who came down to earth to awaken them from their spiritual slumber by disclosing their own divine inner nature. Regarding the physical world as a source of delusion and place of confinement, Gnostics were deeply negative about bodily existence, including their own. So, they tended to treat Jesus' body as simply the temporary vehicle for his revelatory mission, believing that he discarded it before returning to his heavenly status in the realm of pure light. It was actually the Orthodox Christians who made much of Jesus' full human nature and the reality of his death as the essential redemptive act.

In Brown's scheme, the Gnostics are also the suppressed source of the true account of Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene. In reality, the Gnostics' negativity about the body includes a dim view of procreation and the sexual activity that went with it. Usually in their writings Jesus is the ideal ascetic who models for his followers a disdain for bodily appetites. So, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene isn't just antithetical to Orthodox accounts. It goes against the Gnostic grain, too—if anything more so.

All right. Maybe I'll go see the thing eventually. If I do, I doubt I'll find picketing Gnostic League members outside the theater. But I do expect that I'll be bored. Maybe the antidote will be to carry a flashlight to read a really interesting anti-Gnostic bestseller about a really interesting cosmic conspiracy: the Gospel of John.

Triple Income No Kids?

Jennifer Roback Morse writes at her site on Polygamy: Red Herring or Real Threat?

I'd say it's a threat. If anyone thinks there is little at stake in the struggle to defend marriage, and who doesn't think it matters who gets appointed to our courts and who gets elected to our legislatures when it comes to such a fundamental feature of social life as marriage, all I can say is they don't have their priorities straight. Never mind that religious freedom itself will be threatened by the arrival of society at the bottom of the abyss of so-called sexual liberation.

I can see it now, the ideal marriage: a man has his wife in the city who lives in a condo where his office is located; on weekends, mostly, he retreats to his country house where he has another wife and soccer matches to attend. Of course, I could be accused of being sexist to not suggest it might a woman with two husbands, so consider it suggested. But let's just say partners, since wife and husband are out of fashion.

And why couldn't the country wife, I mean partner, have a job in a suburb, and during the week live--at her country house--with another partner of her choosing (who on weekends trips into the city where he shacks up with a weekend party wife)? I mean, why should we restrict polygamy to a nuclear design?

The World's Largest Museum

     The Catholic news service, Zenit, has recently reported on the measures that a few European countries have taken to increase their birth rates -- in effect, to reverse a not-so-slow cultural suicide.  You can read the article at http://www.catholic.net/global_catholic_news/template_news.phtml?news_id=89456.

     The measures have had only modest success, probably because they prescind from the same assumptions that are killing Europe in the first place.  It is a good thing to give people generous time off from work when their children are born; but it is not a good thing to assume that all people will be earning salaries, nor is it a good thing to tax people so heavily as to punish mothers who stay home with their children.  Yet I suspect that even if Europe were to ease back from its confiscatory taxes, it wouldn't be enough.

     One reason is that we in the west no longer conceive of work as what we do to put food on the table.  Work is central to our identity, our self-esteem; we don't have jobs anymore, but careers.  And the worth of our career in the first instance refers to ourselves, not to our families, certainly not to our neighborhoods, nor to our country or church.  There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but I don't meet many young people, even among the so-called conservatives, who consider their family not simply the most important earthly thing in their lives, but the central thing, that which all the rest that they do must subserve.  I hate to sound like a broken record, but Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism nailed it here, too.  The corporate men who were lanced in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit were joined by women: the last hope of sanity and rootedness in the natural world gave themselves up to the establishment.  Why, even the Girl Scouts nowadays will not let a child earn a patch unless she investigates how the activity she loves can be parlayed into a career.  Radicals indeed.  "Go into plastics, Michelle, plastics are the wave of the future."

     The governments of Europe are assuming that people are too poor to have larger families; but the truth is, they are too rich, and do not want to give up the toys of egoism.  Children themselves are a part of the egoism, being such cute accessories, and later on, after an expensive education in madness, such impressive trophies.  Why, even a perfectly manicured sod lawn of Zoysia grass is not so grand a thing as a kid accepted to Oxford.  There may be no reversal in the offing, either.  Because if people can no longer submit their egos to the good of that most natural of social units, the family (and I note that in Europe nobody is bothering to marry anymore, either), they will surely not be able to submit to the good of a city or a nation or a church.  If people do not learn in the family the complex habits of sacrifice and virtue, they are not going to learn them in rotten schools, not by the millions, anyway.  We are not here talking about a civilization in decline; we are past that. 

     So, Europe, do not send for whom the bell tolls.  But I'll join Pope Benedict in his hope that God will work a miracle for her.  A miracle it will have to be, because it has been more than a few days already, and she stinketh.

Indifferent, not Egalitarian

     Recent discussions on this site on the ordination of women have led me to believe that we are bedeviled by an Enlightenment definition of equality, one that reduces to indifference or to mathematical identity.  Suppose I write the equation 1 = sin x sin x + cos x cos x.  Despite the apparent complications, all I am saying is that the two items I have written are not two but one.  I merely happen to have written it in alternative ways, perhaps to reveal a truth about the sine and the cosine.  But, practical purposes aside, the expressions are interchangeable.

     But human beings are not interchangeable.  Tom is not the same as Harry.  In fact, it is precisely here that our dignity as human beings (and not sticks or stones) subsists.  If two persons are of equal dignity, that equality cannot reside merely in what the two share.  It's a subtle philosophical point, and maybe I'll take my lumps for it, but when I say that Tom is "equal" to Harry, if that expression goes beyond asserting a formal identity, I must be asserting not simply that both Tom and Harry are men, but also that this individual, Tom, is possessed in his individuality, in his personhood, of an equal dignity with that individual person named Harry.  In other words, if the claim "Tom is equal to Harry" means anything really rich, it must assert the equality of the two persons not despite their differences, nor with those differences set aside, but in and through those differences.  To apply the point to differences in role, if I say that "Corporal Smith is as good a soldier as Sergeant Jones," I am not saying that Smith ought to be sergeant, or that there ought not to be corporals and sergeants.  I am saying rather that Smith, precisely in his office as corporal, is a soldier equal in dignity to Jones, in his office as sergeant.  Indeed, Smith would express his soldierly equality by obeying the commands of Jones.

     Now the wrongly named egalitarians assert that for all temporal purposes, including those in the Church, maleness and femaleness are of no importance.  In other words, sex reduces to an accidental feature, like being lefthanded, or having blond hair, or having a scar over one's nose.  A red numeral 3 is the same as a blue numeral 3, because in mathematics the color of a numeral is a matter of indifference.  But as soon as we assert that indifference, we efface the terms whose equality we wish to assert.  We say not that men and women are equal, but that "men" and "women" are accidental groupings of human beings, except perhaps for the single purpose of reproduction, and even that exception should not prove insuperable.  (There are a few who insist that we need women pastors precisely because they are different; but these few suddenly find themselves face-to-face with Saint Paul, without any longer any way to accuse him of unfairness.)

     Here I can only glance at the theological quicksands that await, once this indifferentism is raised to the level of theological truth.  (It does warrant notice that Scripture rules it out: we are not told that the unity of the human race was effected by the creation of left-handers and right-handers, or of blondes and brunettes, but by the creation of male and female, without which the singular-collective "man" would not exist.)  We will be led to assert the indifference of the sex of the Savior; the culturally-conditioned language expressing the fatherhood of God; the crypto-Gnostic separability of the person from the sex that the person happens to possess; the indifference of various sexual combinations, subject only to the vague stricture that the combiners "love" one another, a love defined in Gnostic fashion by inner enlightenment rather than by acts delimited by the nature of maleness and femaleness.  And, of course, we will be led to overturn the clear commandments of Saints Paul and Peter; the divinely revealed analogy between the church and the family; the natural law that sees the father or a father-figure as the head of the family; and we will have women pastors.  That is not, by a long shot, the final stage of ecclesial suffocation in the sand, but it is a sign that the ground beneath is very bad.  Only two fates await a man in the quicksand, and neither of them is determined by his own energy or determination or good intentions.  In fact, the more energy he shows, the quicker he sinks.  To this last law of demonic hydraulics many a denomination and religious order will testify.

Hard, Not Brittle

Comment from a reader:

"Timothy George, the dean of Beeson Divinity School, writes not irregularly for Touchstone. Beeson as official policy grants Master of Divinity degrees to women, and even has a few women professors.  Beeson (and George) grant their M.Div. degrees knowingly to women who will and do go on to positions of pastoral authority.  Then there is Phillip Johnson who is an elder at First Presbyterian (PCUSA) Berkeley that has sponsored women (albeit quite orthodox ones by their own lights) for ordination. Given SMH's vigilance on this issue I'm wondering how these men made into the pages of Touchstone, and why they remain there."

This is a reasonable question. These men appear in our pages writing as “mere Christians,” the content of what they write being more important than their connections, even if their opinions are different than ours on matters we consider important. Not that their connections or opinions are disregarded when we assess their writing, but that when all the relevancies are weighed and registered, if the consensus is that the submission supports the mission of the journal and will edify our readers, this will result in publication, unless the senior editors judge that some scandal would result. Despite our reputation, we—and yes, even the fire-breathing Hutchens--try to be as reasonable and flexible as possible in the manifold of circumstances under which we work.

This involves consideration of levels of involvement with the magazine. While firm agreement on its mission and character is expected of the members of the governing and editorial boards, somewhat less is demanded of contributing editors, less yet of contributors. (Normally, people who do not wish to be associated with Touchstone don’t send us manuscripts, so relieve us of the trouble of rejecting them on grounds that they are members of, say, Lesbian Conservatives for World Evangelism.) We tend to be less interested in establishing laws and policies than in discerning the spirit of the enterprise and working in accordance with it. This will produce some apparent anomalies, and of course, we will make mistakes.

That’s the nature of life. The secret of maintaining it is, I believe, discerning the new growth of the embryo from that of the neoplasm, the true pregnancy from the false—the work of the Holy Spirit in the body of the Church from that of the devil or of sincere but foolish men. It is chiefly the duty of the (here, editorial) head to make these discernments, to choose what supports true life wherever it is found, and to reject what opposes it, however attractive it may at first appear.

To this end we must be gentler with people than we are with ideas, regarding this as necessary for our own salvation as well as theirs. If we are to be saved, we and our errors must be severable, and the actual severance must be made. This cannot be done by treating error with kindness, but doing what may be done to kill it completely without killing the patient. Note that I say, without killing the patient, not without hurting him. It can’t be done without hurting. The physician who claims the ability to do that is a quack.

Speaking here for myself, I will say that as much as I like the learned and very personable Dr. George, it is quite plain that I could not teach as regular faculty at his divinity school, and as valuable as the brilliant and courageous Prof. Johnson’s work supporting intelligent design has been, I could not join him on the session of his PCUSA church. In their cases and in our judgment, however, these have not served as a bar to publication in Touchstone, nor has their work been of small service to the Faith. Indeed, we judge them—along with those we won’t publish--as we ourselves wish to be judged, that in God’s mercy our sins may be forgotten and our good works remembered before the judgment seat of Christ.

One More for the Code

I promise, this is the last one; it's just too good to pass up. In today's Wall Street Journal, Dan Henniger does a great job in "Holy Sepulcher!" unmasking what Dan Brown was thinking. No, it's not another refutation, detail by detail, of what's in his DaVinci Code, but an explanation of the Joke behind it. You know, I think he's on to something. There was this plot, you see.... And Jacques Chirac descended from Judas?

Only Story Like This Ever Told

Joseph Loconte has a good piece in the Houses of Worship section of the Wall Street Journal, not exactly about the DaVinci Code (which gets tiring), but about C. S. Lewis and his thoughts about conspiracies theories about the gospels.

I think I've raised this question before, but I'll state it again, addressed to the debunkers and demythologizers who seem to know what's true and false in various ancient manuscripts: For the sake of argument assume the Gospel Story to be true. Given the times, the culture, the people, what sort of records, testimony, and after-effects what exactly would be looking at instead of the canonical Gospels, the Book of Acts, the Epistles of the New Testament?

Lewis, as Loconte points out, comments about the Gospels: "I have been reading poems, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this."

Heavy Without Mass

The other day I was glancing through a newspaper dated July 16, 1979, and ran across the headline, “Mafia Don Buried, No Mass.” The UPI article chronicled the earthly end of Carmine Galante, an ambitious gentleman whose entrepreneurial designs upon territories claimed by others of similar temper but contrary opinion had provoked a special meeting of a local vestry in which the final vote had not gone in his favor. Mr. Galante was accordingly marked for dispatch by way of lead poisoning, which soon overtook him at one of his favorite restaurants. Photographs of his bullet-riddled corpse are notable for disclosing that even in sudden death he retained his cigar in full smoking position.

For me the article was most notable, however, for the Archdiocese of New York’s refusal to allow Galante a funeral mass. Reminiscent of the funeral scene from The Godfather, “About 50 mourners, each holding a dark red rose, stood solemnly in a drizzle beside the gold casket as the Rev. Felician Napoli read three short prayers from the ‘First Plan of the Funeral Rite’ . . . . The five-minute ceremony consisted of a recitation by Napoli from the third station of the funeral rite. ‘Lord God, through your mercy those who have lived in faith find eternal peace,’ Napoli read. ‘Bless this grave and send your angel to watch over it. Forget the sins of our brother.’”

In its public statements the archdiocese made it clear that denial of permission for a funeral mass was “not a judgment of the state of Mr. Galante’s soul or of his intimate relations with God”—which is, indeed, something that always needs to be made clear. The Church is not God, and cannot make judgments reserved to him. Rather, the mass was refused, the archdiocese's spokesman said, because of “the scandal that would ensue” if it were granted.

One cannot know from this account just how much praise should be given to the archdiocese—whether in refusing the mass it was acting on firm principle, or whipping off its biretta before the new occupants of Galante’s vacated space. Denial on the grounds of “the scandal that would ensue” sounds more than a bit like fear of what the fastidious will think than explication of the technical meaning “scandal” has in the language of the Church—skandalon being biblical Greek for a stumbling stone put in the way of someone else’s faith, thus of their salvation—which surely would be symbolized in the Catholic Church by giving a funeral mass to Galante as though his publicly sinful life didn’t really matter.

Be that as it may, the critical thing was done: the mass was denied—the Church said “No” where it should have, giving one of the richest and most influential Catholics in New York no more than a few minutes of its public time, letting the rest of the flock know that lives such as Carmine Galante lived were not all right.

Pastors who do things like this are among the “mean people” the asinine bumper stickers deplore, the kind of men who increase the sorrows of the mourners by speaking ill of the dead to warn the living when instead they could be dropping comforting hints that good old Carmine, who was, after all, always nice to people he liked, is presently enjoying the same kind of patronage in heaven that he had received on earth—that God is a sap, the Church is a comedy, and its pastors are clowns. God save us from the people our Lord described as “hirelings,” and bless the pastors who say No when they should.

Right Left Right?

Amy Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, thinks The Christian Right Moves Left. It may be true that Senator Santorum, indeed, is in a heap of trouble--that's been the word for some time now. But I think Ms. Sullivan may be over-reading the significance of the NAE. It's been a while since I've been to it's annual conference (I've attended three), but a considerable decline in numbers and growth in hair greyness was obvious. There have been new attempts at revitalization. I can't say how successful they have been in reversing the trend, but I am fairly certain that a statement such as Sullivan's

"Enter the big-tent NAE, an organization that represents 59 denominations with 45,000 churches and 30 million members across the country--a formidable bloc of potential voters"

gives a false picture as it's used in the article. It's hardly a bloc, with many of the NAE folks unlikely to really move "left" if what is meant is that they will change their pro-life views or look kindly on "gay marriage."

The NAE indeed is a very big tent, perhaps more like a loose tent, still finding its  way after nearly going in the tank a few years ago. But it no more represents 30 million members than the National Council of Churches represents 45 million church members they claim, whose church bodies happen to still belong to it.

Border Patrols for Marriage?

With all the coverage of illegal immigration and border security in the news, another boundary that is getting some attention, but maybe not enough, is that of the definition of marriage. Definitions are not always arbitrary, and one cannot change all words and their meanings without changing other realities on the ground.

Chuck Colson's column at Town Hall sums up some of Maggie Gallagher's recent Weekly Standard article: "gay marriage" is going to erode religious liberties, folks.

I have argued elsewhere that Christian citizens need to pay attention to "first things first," above everything else, when it comes to the public square. The man and the wife together, from the beginning, have been foundational, as has the sanctity of human life, made in the image of God. Indeed, even the sanctity of life in God's image and the sanctity of marriage are closely related: The family itself--not just the individual human being--is, in the words of St. Paul, a "patria" [family] named after the Father in heaven (Eph. 3:14). It's not just a convenient association.

Christians in this country at this time in history need to defend marriage against those intent on destroying its boundaries. As for those coming over our geographical borders, I would wager most of them still know what marriage is for, even if we don't, or don't care enough to take a stand. The future belongs to those who do.

Vineyard Churches Move Toward Women Pastors

According to a report from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, the national board of directors of the Vineyard churches denomination has adopted a set of guidelines opening the door for female pastors. The Vineyard is the largest third wave charismatic group, founded by John Wimber in 1984.

The guidelines ask Vineyard members, including those who reject gender egalitarianism, to "bless" the ministry of women in the role of senior pastor in Vineyard churches. Theologian Wayne Grudem, a former member of the Vineyard movement, responds that asking those who hold to a complementarian view of gender roles to "bless" such a thing is asking believers to sin.

Grudem says:

"Under the guise of ‘mutual respect’ I believe the Vineyard leadership, by this policy, will drive out the pastors who are most faithful to the teaching of John Wimber and most faithful to the Word of God itself," Grudem said.

"With sadness and regret I now expect that compromise with the spirit of the age will soon follow in other areas of Vineyard teaching as well.  I sincerely hope that the Vineyard will reverse this policy."

I am still hoping for evidence to prove me wrong in my assertion that feminism is winning the gender debate among American evangelicals, but the Vineyard downgrade doesn't help.

Once a Man, But Not a Father

A glimpse of a possible American future from today's Daily Telegraph: Man who was a woman cannot be girl's parent. It begins:

A transsexual whose 17-year marriage to an heiress was nullified when the wife discovered that her husband was a woman is not legally a parent of her 14-year-old daughter born from donor sperm, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

English law now allows a transsexual to a new birth certificate describing him as the sex he wants to be rather than the sex he is (genetically if no longer genitally) and the right to marry as a member of his new sex. And so:

Dismissing Mr J's challenge, Lord Justice Wall said the court accepted that he was now a man in the eyes of the law.

But he continued: "That does not, however, mean that he was not a woman on 17 July 1977, the date that he entered into the ceremony of marriage with Mrs C."

Another Plug

Although his opinions on such matters as he has addressed below are generally considered reliable, you don't have to take David's word for it.  Thomas C. Oden in his new and highly informative Turning Around the Mainline (Baker, 2006) says "The journal that best gives voice to many aspects of the new ecumenism is Touchstone, a magazine of 'mere Christianity,' published by the Fellowship of St. James." 

In a footnote he says, "I am deeply indebted to David Mills, former Anglican theologian, now Catholic, editor of Touchstone, for providing me with sharp categories I have considered before, but never seen presented more intelligently or systematically.  In his essay "Necessary Doctrines: Why Dogma is Needed and Why Substitutes Fail," he has stated a new form of the classical argument on how the unity of the church is grounded in the truth of its doctrine.  Everything hinges on the seriousness with which it takes its guardianship role in relation to the revealed truth."

Thanks, Dr. Oden.  We think so too.

Get the June Touchstone

Touchstone was, we are pleased to say, given the Associated Church Press's "Best Journal" award for the second year running (and the second year we've entered) and several other awards as well, including their award for editorial courage.

As it happens, we got the news while we were finishing reading the page galleys of the June issue, which leads me to share with you the contents of that issue and to suggest that you subscribe to this award-winning journal.

Long-time readers of Mere Comments may be saying to themselves, in tones ranging from affection to annoyance, "He says that every month." Well, yeah. Do you think I'm not going to tell you to subscribe? I think you should subscribe, and know that some of you need constant encouragement. So deal, as my eldest two say. Or, actually, "So, like, deal," as they tend to say.

Anyway, here is the Table of Contents for the June issue. It's a very good issue. And yeah, I say that every month too, but the Associated Church Press will tell you I'm justified.

EDITORIAL:

Steven Hutchens, writing for the editors, "The God Who's Still There: Why Few Mistake Liberal Religion for Real Christianity"

VIEWS & COLUMNS:

• Paul Gregory Alms, "In His Stead: On being paid to act like Jesus"
• Robert Hart, "Lower Than the Idols: On the superiority of paganism to pornography"
• Annegret Hunter, "My Homework Assignment: On giving up a career and finding a vocation"
• Christopher Bailey, "Secret Sequel: an exclusive look at Dan Brown’s next blockbuster novel"
• Diogenes, "The Selectric Gospel"
• Patrick Henry Reardon, "Cross Central" [the "As it is written . . ." column]

FEATURES:

• David Mills, "The Creed We Need: On the picture of God we draw with words"
• Anthony Esolen, "Over Our Dead Bodies: Men who are willing to lay down their lives"
• Martin Hilbert, "Darwin’s Divisions: The pope, the cardinal, the Jesu