Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Karl Barth and the Cartoon Jesus

I just read Westminster/John Knox's new Barth for Armchair Theologians. I expected not to like it, given my sharp theological differences with the author, John R. Franke (the inheritor of Stanley Grenz's mantle as chief theologian of the postmodernist evangelical left). I was surprisingly impressed with the text of the book. Franke presents Barth's views fairly, succinctly, and winsomely. As the book's title claims, Franke makes Barth accessible to laypeople who want the gist of the theologian's thought without reading all of the Dogmatics for themselves.

What revolted me was not any pomo-evangelical theology from Franke. It was instead the drawings W/JK commissioned to illustrate the text. I do not object to visual representations of Jesus. But the cartoon Jesus representations in this book cross every conceivable line. Jesus is pictured grinning from the cross, asking "Don't I look dependable?" He stands grimacing between Friedrich Schleiermacher and a figure representing Enlightement scholarship. The cartoon Jesus looks down from the cross to a powdered wig philosopher and quips, "Your Enlightenment is killing me...again." The representations of God the Father are even worse, a buffoonish white-bearded old man, who is seen looking over Barth's shoulder as he writes.

There's been a lot of discussion on this site lately about taking the name of the Lord in vain. I don't agree with my colleague Steve Hutchens that the "Godblog" conference name does this, but I do agree with him that we don't think enough about what it means to trivialize the name and concept of the Great King of the heavens.

Thankfully, unlike Muslims reacting to Danish cartoons of Mohammed, no one of us is going to riot over the cartoonization of Jesus and the Father. But shouldn't we cringe when we see such ridicule from a Christian publisher? And shouldn't we note the irony that such things appear in a volume explaining a theologian who insisted on the utter transcendence and majesty of the Deity?

I don't agree with Karl Barth on many things. But, I suppose, if he were here he'd have the same reaction I do to the cartoons in this book that bears his name: Nein!

Ten Arguments for Sanity, 3-4

Continuing with non-Scriptural, natural law arguments against homosexual marriage.

3. It will drive a deeper wedge between man and woman.

 The unhappy parting of man and woman that I have described in argument 2 is already a common feature of our day. In my own lifetime I have witnessed the last petering out of a tradition of song and poetry that had lasted eight hundred years, from the troubadours of Provence to its last and decadent efflorescence among the rockers of the 1960’s. I am speaking about poetry and song of love. What has happened to it? Men no longer celebrate the beauty of women they admire from afar, whose hand they aspire to hold; more to the point, men are no longer inspired by women, as Dante was by his Beatrice, and Petrarch by his Laura. The reasons are distressing. It takes a good man to admire a woman, and a good woman to be admired by a man. But does a good man snarl at woman, calling her names that I do not care to repeat here, or, even if he is too polite to use the words, treating her as such? Does a good woman look down with ignorant contempt upon her brothers?

 Perhaps the reader will ask what homosexuality has to do with this problem. It is simple: the acceptance of homosexuality is predicated upon the tacit assumption that male and female are not made for one another. It defines male apart from female, female apart from male; or it leaves those terms free-floating, without definition. Young men and young women already are growing up without understanding what they are to be for one another. Again, the results are predictable. Fewer young people marry.  When they do marry, their emphasis on personal fulfillment, rather than on interpersonal and complementary gifts, bodes ill for the survival of the marriage; for a spouse will destroy many a foolish daydream of youth. They will have fewer children. In no western country does the birth rate now assure even a replacement of one generation by the next; in many countries, the birth rate is so low as to constitute a slow and numb despair, a resignation to cultural suicide. If this situation is to be reversed, and the unarguable mathematics shows that countries like Italy and Japan are rapidly nearing a point of irreversible decline, then men and women must be brought together again. How they can be brought together, when we offer them the chance, though delusory, to “fulfill” themselves sexually apart from one another, or when we implicitly affirm that sex is simply a matter of individual preferences, is hard for me to fathom.

4. It makes a mockery of chastity.

 Every faculty of man has its proper use. If I walk every day, I will develop strong legs for standing and walking and bracing myself. That is what legs are for. Chastity is the virtue of using one’s sexual desires properly. Since the act that is biologically designed to produce babies has the predictable propensity to, well, produce babies, and since the desire to perform that act is one of man’s strongest and most violent drives, all cultures have resorted to means of curbing that desire or channeling it towards healthy ends. Before the advent of the modern welfare state, most peoples laid heavy blame on those who brought children into the world when they were unfit to care for them. Traditions regarding these matters vary from culture to culture, but several things remain notably constant. If you indulge yourself in the marital act and produce a baby out of wedlock, you are in big trouble. In general, that act is reserved for marriage, or for something closely associated with it (as, for instance, is the tradition among some peoples, where a man is duty-bound to sleep with his brother’s childless widow, that his brother’s seed may endure).

 Chastity has all kinds of practical considerations going for it. If you are chaste, you stand a much lower chance of being beaten or murdered by someone driven witless by jealousy; you will probably not contract certain filthy and debilitating, even deadly, diseases, and if your spouse is chaste, you certainly will not contract them; your marriage begins in better shape, as you will not be spoiled or confused by memories of previous affairs, many of them painful; you will not help destroy a family with your looseness, your own family or someone else’s. The psychological considerations are greater still. What insanity of ours, that we encourage boys and girls to set forth on a long series of sexual train wrecks, with all their concomitant misunderstandings, abuses, and treacheries, as preparation for lifelong marriage! It is a miracle almost if they do not reach their twenties as thoroughly cynical about themselves and the opposite sex as is the most embittered divorcee. How can love survive the bath in acid?

 But how can we recommend chastity to the young, when we enshrine the principal that what they do with their genitals is strictly their own business, and that such activity is all for personal fulfillment? What value can sexual restraint possibly have, except as some cold, calculating means towards keeping one’s resume clean along the road to wealth and power? In particular, how can we even talk about chastity when we accept homosexuality? For a homosexual defines himself or herself by the action. A teenager calls himself homosexual because he has performed homosexual acts. It is utterly incoherent to suppose that we can ever recommend to “straight” teenagers a chastity that must be violated by the homosexual in order for him to define himself as such. What homosexual could possibly “wait until marriage,” even if such “marriages” were made legal? What reason would there be for him to do so? In short, if homosexual acts are accepted, there remains no reason at all to condemn or even frown upon premarital sex.

 That point illustrates what I have often argued, namely that sex can never be merely a matter of satisfying an individual's desires. We are all in the same cultural boat. What you compel me to condone in one case will cause me also to condone other things, necessarily. We are not islands unto ourselves.

All Shook Up

The Boston Globe has found the last surviving members of the Shaker movement of ascetic Christianity. There are four of them. Since Shakers forbid marriage and require celibacy of all members, there are no Shaker Vacation Bible Schools.

As one of the final four says to the Globe, the Shakers aren't all dead yet. But they will be, unless some new converts come into the fold, and quick.

The Globe looks to Gerald Werkin, director emeritus of the American Folk Art Museum in New York to explain Shakerism:

"The Shakers are known for turning their backs on ideals that Americans have always held dear: the spirit of individualism, owning private property, personal autonomy, marriage," he says."Shakerism strikes at the heart of the American psyche."

The Globe reports that there have been inquiries from potential converts. "Many inquirers are attracted to the romantic notion of the simple life espoused in chic, urban publications like Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple," the newspaper states.

The Shakers say that, after explaining what the movement believes and requires, they never hear back from these people.

Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor is the subject of the latest issue of Credenda Agenda. You can access it here in either PDF or HTML formats.

Kirk at Camp

The New York Times reports today about students reading the works of Russell Kirk as part of the curriculum at the Young America's Foundation camp at the Reagan Ranch. Kirk, of course, paid a pivotal role in the formation and flourishing of Touchstone. One is surprised by how haphazardly some of the students apply Kirk's canons of conservatism to some contemporary debates (e.g., support for a democracy-spreading foreign policy and legal abortion), given Kirk's own thoughts on such matters.

The Myth of the Apolitical Evangelical

This morning's New York Times features a front-page story on the members who have left Woodland Hills Church in suburban St. Paul over Pastor Greg Boyd's denunciation of "politics."

Some of the things Boyd renounces in the article and well worthy of renunciation. Some churches have too closely aligned the Kingdom community with one particular nation-state or political party, that is true. But the article also leaves murky, as does Boyd's new book on the subject, how the church plans to challenge prophetically such social and state-sponsored evils as abortion. If Pastor Boyd wants his church not to be seen as "Republican," many of us can agree with him. If he wants his church to be silent on theological issues, such as abortion and religious liberty, that the ambient culture deems "political," then he is now just what he fears about the flag-waving megachurch pastor down the street: a dupe for the powers-that-be.

It is interesting that the Times chose to interview postmodernist "emerging church" leader Brian McLaren about this. McLaren, of course, lambasted the politicization of evangelical Christianity. Again, some of this critique is called for. Voting guides with a "Christian" position on the Balanced Budget Amendment and the line item veto right next to a Christian view of partial birth abortion tend to trivialize the importance of issues about which the church should rightly speak.

But McLaren and the seeming political isolationists on the evangelical left and the postmodern ooze are hardly apolitical. They constantly call the church to a Kingdom view of sustainability or opposition to global warming or, with Bono in tow, debt relief for Africa. Many of these things are quite worthy of Christian proclamation and action. But how is opposition to legal abortion "political" while economic, energy, and liberal foreign policy statements are not? The ambient culture applauds a position on third world debt relief or automobile emissions controls. It doesn't applaud legal protection of the unborn. Herod doesn't mind John the Baptist calling for cleaner and safer aqueducts. Just leave my naked dancing girls alone.

I would cheer movements like Boyd's if they were saying, don't think the Republican Party is the Kingdom of God. Evangelicals shouldn't be anyone's voting bloc, and we shouldn't give a blank check of support to any party's policies because they agree with us on some important ones. That's true. Some pastors and Christian leaders on the right will support any program and endorse any agenda, so long as it keeps the White House door open to them.

It just seems disingenuous when they tell us not to talk about some issues from a biblical perspective while rallying around other issues from a biblical perspective, and those issues just happen to be consonant with the Democratic Party platform. We're as duped as we want to be.

One aspect of Boyd's critique is absolutely true, and is borne out in the New York Times article. Evangelicalism has taken on a political identity while shedding a theological one. A thousand people left Boyd's church. They held a "conservative" stance on issues such as the church's role in society. And yet, for years, Boyd has taught that God does not know the future free actions of people. He has preached that the universe is a democracy rather than a monarchy, and that God's purposes are thwarted by human and angelic decisions he didn't anticipate and he can't overturn. He has articulated an egalitarian view of men and women fully in line with the feminist movement and fully out of step with the biblical canon. Where were the thousand "conservatives" then?

Terri Schiavo and Election 2006

Terri Schiavo is at the center of another electoral skirmish, this time in Connecticut. U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, is, of course, is in code-red, high-alert mode as his prospects for winning the Democratic primary seem to be hurtling downward against anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. In recent days, Lieberman has had former President Bill Clinton in the state to campaign for him. And Lamont has had Michael Schiavo on the stump for him.

Schiavo is the husband who requested, and was allowed by the courts, to cut off food and water to Terri, his comatose wife. Schiavo told the New York Times that his campaigning against Lieberman is the result of the vote of the senator (and 2000 Democratic nominee for Vice President) to allow a federal court to intervene in the case. Lieberman "should've just stayed out of it," Schiavo said. 

The Times reports:

"Mr. Lamont wove the Schiavo case into a broader narrative of out-of-control government, linking it to issues as diverse as abortion rights and law enforcement wire-tapping. He also reiterated that the Schiavo case had helped propel him into the Senate race and said it remained 'central to his campaign.'

'It just says an awful lot about where you want your government and where you don't want your government,' he said.

Lewis and the Two Ways

A friend asked me recently about C. S. Lewis’s understanding of our earthly pilgrimages making us more like God or the devil. I post my answer here in case some might find it useful.

The problem with the concept of becoming Godlike on one hand (the Orthodox straightforwardly use the term “deification”) and devil-like on the other, as Lewis knew very well--and he was careful with his theology here—is that these ends are not to be perceived as though they were on opposite sides of a fulcrum, as polarities.   The Journey takes us in one of two directions, to be sure, but heaven and hell are not opposites any more than are God and the devil, or the saints and the damned.  The best Lewis could do with this was to picture hell, which appears infinite from within, as being in fact a sort of molecule in the soil of the far outskirts of heaven--not nothing, but as close  to it as something can be. Nor were humans who were sent to hell reduced to nothing, strictly speaking. Lewis made them dead coals or smudges on the landscape or little piles of dust to be discarded. Hell is not so much heaven’s greatwalled adversary as its dustbin. 

Lewis viewed God and his dwelling place as fullness, the devil and his as, let us say, the "proposal of emptiness," an attempt at negation of the Positive that in the final analysis finds that it cannot accomplish its intention, but has only been incorporated.  "Though I make my bed in hell, Thou art there" applies to Satan as well. 

So while Lewis would use language, as he did explicitly in Mere Christianity, and implictly in many other places, indicating that the human pilgrimage went two different directions, toward God and away from him, that the saints go one direction and devils and damned men go the other, he gives no spiritual "weight" to the latter course, but pictures it as an failed attempt to achieve the impossibility of Nothingness--a botch of making the devil into God's Opposite.  (The impossibility of this is why the Church rejects Manicheanism, and all dualistic theologies, however ethically serious they may be.) 

No polarity can exist in which the devil is God’s opposite, and Lewis knew it.  Every bit of the weight, every bit of the light, comes from God, and to move away from him can only involve the loss of substance.  (Substance and light are ultimately one not only in physics, but in theology as well.)  The darkness can never be, despite its pretense of being so, an abysmal Absolute.  It is rather a shadow that derives a starved existence from the light it attempts to flee.

There can be no "Dark Side of the Force," which the Bright Side must strive to balance, and so bring peace to the cosmos. This is why, while the devil is frequently portrayed as phenomenally powerful and intelligent, there is a tradition of deeper truth in the folklore of many countries that depicts him as a bumbling fool of whom "Jack" takes easy advantage.

 

Sex Education and the Social Order

We're not going to gain a consensus on whether or how to teach sex education in America's public schools. That's the conclusion of University of California at Berkeley sociologist and law professor Kristin Luker in her new book, When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex, and Sex Education, Since the Sixties (Norton).

Luker summarizes her thesis in this way:

"I suspect that sexual liberals and conservatives, like their counterparts in the larger political world, will never agree because each side gives priority to something different. It's a cliche, but as other researchers have found, political conservatives tend to value stability and liberty while political liberals tend to value equality, and this finding applies to the sexual realm as well."

Luker, rightly I think, points out that divergent views of sexual liberals and sexual conservatives when it comes to sex education are about more than sexual morality, and about more than the rights of parents to protect their children from the sexual revolution. Instead, the two sides inevitably view the purpose of the public school system differently, because they have differing views of hierarchy and the social order. Luker explains it this way:

"Sexual liberals, who view society as a web of relationships rather than a well-organized hierarchy, and who have a preference for porous boundaries, are deeply offended when conservatives say bad things about teachers. They too believe in a division of labor between school and home, but for them the differences are not so much about substance as about expertise. They mentioned over and over that teachers are trained professionals and parents must take their lead from teachers, who know what they are doing when it comes to children."

I think Luker is on to something here, something that may help us to understand why this argument is so heated. It may also help us to understand something about American Christianity which, even (increasingly) in its most conservative wings, trumpets an egalitarian, non-patriarchal social order. Is it really all that surprising that, when it comes to the same sorts of issues, some of our denominational assemblies are as divided as our local school boards?

As Ezekiel Said, "Roll Tide"

Speaking of Christian retailing, my friend Tim Ellsworth at Union University sent along to me the latest example of Christian merchandise: college sports Bible T-shirts. On his blog, Tim tells about an Alabama company, BibleSports.net, that now markets these shirts.

University of Alabama fans can get a shirt that, quoting Ezekiel 20:29, reads on the front: “Then I said to them, what is this HIGH PLACE you go to?” On the other side, it says, “It is called BAMAh to this day.”  Auburn fans can buy a shirt with a citation from the Proverbs: “The way of an EAGLE in the sky.” The Auburn shirt is, of course, orange and the Alabama shirt, red.

Now, at one level, this isn't all that surprising to me, having grown up a stone's throw from the Alabama line. Football there is serious business. I once had a pastor friend who, when talking to a pulpit committee in Alabama, was asked to pledge neutrality in the pulpit on the issue of Auburn vs. Alabama football. And historian Wayne Flynt in his excellent new work, Alabama in the Twentieth Century, makes the case that college football in Alabama is far more of an establishment of religion than Roy Moore's Ten Commandments display could ever hope to be. I always thought my Alabama friends were joking when they said such things. Apparently, they'd never seen the Bible Sports shirts.

Still, one can't help but marvel at the pitch made by the company's spokesman:

“Our hope and our prayer is that someone will see these shirts,” he said. “It may not be the scripture. It may be the sports avenue that attracts their attention. If it is, that’s OK. But our prayer is that God will use these shirts in the sense that someone may see these verses and think, ‘I didn’t realize that was in the Bible. Where is that?’ and open the word up.”

I hope so too. I hope many read the Bible as a result of these shirts. And I hope that when the Roll Tide is called up yonder, they'll be there.

Outrageous in Iowa

Sometimes my copy of the Weekly Standard arrives late, as in the same day as the next weekly issue, so I get two of them. So I am late in reading Robert P. George's and Gerard Bradley's "Barring Faith: A federal judge strikes down prison ministries" in the July 17 issue.

It's about the recent federal district court ruling against Prison Fellowship Ministry's program in an Iowa prison. PFM's affiliated Inner-Change Freedom Initiative (IFI) contracted with the state of Iowa to run a voluntary program in one prison, a program that Warden Terry Mapes said "is the thing we hope [in] corrections will make a difference." He got, he said, "a substance abuse program, ... a victim impact program, ... a computer education program." The bottom line is rehabilitation.

While the court found "no evidence" that promoting religion was the intent of the program, the authors note that Judge Pratt's "sprawling and undisciplined opinion" concludes startlingly that

Prison Fellowship and IFI are, in fact, "state actors," and thus are no more permitted to espouse Christianity than is the state of Iowa.

So any time a faith-based organization does anything that the state has, or claims, interest in--such as reducing recividism--the organization must be secular. If healthcare is in the state interest, then Catholic hospitals must be owned and operated by a secular Catholic Church? Orphanages?

Further, despite unamimous testimony, even on the part of prisoners, that the program was entirely voluntary, the judge dismissed the program as coercive because prisons themselves are "inherently coercive environments."

Finally, write George and Bradley, the most important part of the ruling

undermines the very concept of faith-based social services provided at public expense. The Iowa court said that there is "no set of circumstances under which state funds could support the transformational values-based treatment methods employed in the Inner-Change Program." . . . Accoring to Judge Pratt's logic, if religion is an integral component of a provider's programs, then that provider may under no circumstances receive government grants.

George, who knows a few things about constitutional law, calls the ruling "appalling". To add insult to injury, the judge also ruled that Prison Fellowship, for its IFI offense committed in that Iowa prison, in the authors' words,

must repay all the money expended at the Newton facility--despite the fact that Prison Fellowship won its contract in a fair competitive bidding process and fully delivered the services it had agreed to provide. In effect, then, IFI and Prison Fellowship are being fined $1.7 million for the sin of violating a Constitution that exists only in the mind of Judge Pratt.

Fined for helping prisoners turn their lives around? Outrageous.

Christian Retailing and the Great Commission

Guest-hosting the "Albert Mohler Program" today, I interviewed Alan Wolfe of Boston College about the shape of contemporary Christian retailing. Wolfe, an unbeliever, told me he finds the kind of "stuff" he sees at venues such as the International Christian Retail show to be indicative of an anemic American evangelical subculture.

Wolfe said in no certain terms that he does not want Christians to "witness" to him about the gospel, but, nonetheless, he sees in Christian T-shirts, breath-mints, and boy bands the reality that Christians don't want to witness to him anyway. Wolfe said that he cannot imagine an unbeliever coming to faith through, say, a Christian bumper-sticker on the car in front of him. Buying the stuff gives Christians an easy conscience that they are carrying the Great Commission without ever having to verbally and relationally engage their unbelieving neighbors.

I suspect he's right. The Los Angeles Times report from the Christian Retail expo is depressing. The makers of a "new genre" of "Christian perfume" rolled out their product, with the promise that it can be an effective evangelistic tool.

"It should be enticing enough to provoke questions: 'What's that you're wearing?'" the marketer said. "Then you take that opportunity to speak of your faith. They've opened the door, and now they're going to get it."

Going to get what? A migraine headache? An allergic reaction? Or the gospel of salvation?

Mentioned in the Times piece also are Christian golf balls with John 3:16 on them, so that, even if you lose it in a sand trap, well, "lose a golf ball, share the gospel."  Also for sale are Christian sandals that leave footprints that leave the message "Follow Jesus" in the sand behind them.

Whatever the "evangelistic" selling point of these products, I think the real reason they make money is an American Christianity seeking to form a common community, a common culture. Unfortunately, instead of finding this in churches, with one Lord, one faith, one baptism, we find it the same way the culture around us does: by buying stuff with the same logos.

And, sadly, that's "logo-s" with a small "l" rather than Logos with a capital "L."

Skull and Bones: The New Happy Face?

The skull and bones was once a fearsome image, warning us of deadly danger on poison containers, waving fearsomely from atop pirate ships. Now it's just trendy.

According to the New York Times, the skull image is everywhere in contemporary youth fashion trends, so much so that it now evokes hipness more than fear. The Times writes:

“The skull is all-purpose,” said Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker. “It simultaneously refers to horror movies, to the Misfits and, by extension, all punk rock, and to a generalized culture of blackness and spookiness and the larger, mall-Goth culture.” So, he said, “if you’re really at heart a Goth, but you have friends who are into metal and punk, you can rock the skulls and be friends with all of them.”

Or in fashionspeak: skulls — fun, flexible, easy, breezy!

The article cites a fashionable jeweler who now uses the skull motif often in his creations:

In his view skulls are not less threatening because a chic jeweler is casting them in precious metal but because, in an age when slasher films are top grossers, death itself has become less threatening. “In the 19th century, when people died, they were laid out in the living room,” he said. “I think we’ve lost that connection to death.”

I don't think we've lost the fear of death. Divine revelation tells us this fear is universal, and universally enslaving apart from Christ (Heb 2:14-15). Our black-clad, skull wearing youth, who powder their faces to look corpselike, are not exempt from this. But what are they telling us about what they have learned from contemporary American culture?

What we may have lost is our hatred of death. We walk, after all, in a world in which we lock our elderly away in nursing homes, experiment on the corpses of the frozen prey of our unborn children, and celebrate the latest vanities of Paris Hilton and Brad Pitt.

As the Wisdom of God once said, "All who hate me love death" (Prov 8:36).

Ten Arguments for Sanity: 1-2

     Most people believe that the principal objections, or even the only objections, to the drive to legalize homosexual “marriage” spring from religious faith.  But that is simply not true.  Beginning with this post I'll offer ten objections that have nothing to do with any religion at all, except insofar as the great religions of the world happen to reflect the nature of mankind.  These objections spring from three sources.  The first is a commonsense observation of man -- his needs, his shortcomings, and his aspirations.  The second is a consideration of history: our own recent history, and the history of those who once committed the mistakes we are committing now.  The last is logic, that relentlessly honest instrument of thought.  The objections are such as should make everyone in our world uncomfortable, both those who call themselves conservative and are busy destroying the heritage of western civilization, and those who call themselves liberal and are busy curtailing and denying every freedom but that of the zipper.

1.  The legalization of homosexual “marriages” would enshrine the sexual revolution in law.

     Forty years ago, we were advised by popular singers that we needed to open our hearts to love, meaning a free and easy practice of sexual intercourse, without what were called “hangups”.  Modesty was decried as prudishness, and chastity ridiculed as either impossible or hypocritical.  Experimentation abounded: the so-called “open marriages,” public intercourse, intercourse under the influence of psychedelic drugs.  A few of the experiments fizzled out for a time, though they are now resurging, as witness the sewer of websites devoted to “swingers.” The #### explosion shows no sign of abating, having been given its second life by the internet.  In what they discuss and the salaciousness of their photos, the magazines that women buy at grocery store checkout lines are as salacious as anything put out by Hugh Hefner in the 1950’s.

     Is there any honest observer of our situation, or any political partisan so intransigent, who dares to argue that the results have not been disastrous?  We were told that the legalization of abortion would lead, paradoxically, to fewer abortions, and fewer instances of child abuse.  Instead it led to far more abortions than even the opponents ever imagined, and it so cheapened infant life that child abuse spiked sharply upward.  It has remained so high that no one is surprised to hear, on local television, an account a child chained to his bed and allowed to starve in his own filth, or a baby bludgeoned to death by a boyfriend, with the mother as accomplice.

     We were told that the legalization of contraceptive drugs would lead to fewer unwanted children -- certainly to fewer children born out of wedlock.  Anyone with a passing familiarity with the human race should have known otherwise.  Whatever one may believe about contraception, one must admit the historical fact: by reducing the perceived risk of pregnancy almost to zero, contraception removed from the young woman the most powerful natural weapon in her arsenal against male sexual aggression.  She no longer had any pressing reason not to concede to the boyfriend’s wishes.  So she agreed; and we now have one of three children born out of wedlock.  The sexual chaos has touched every family in the nation.  Who does not know at least one family whose children require an essay merely to describe who under their roof is related to whom, and how, and why they live together, and why others they call their father or mother or brothers or sisters do not?

     Some people reckon up the losses from this revolution in terms of percentages: of unwed mothers, of aborted pregnancies, of children growing up without a parent, usually the father.  It will take artists of the most penetrating insight to reckon up the losses as they ought to be reckoned, in human misery.

2.  It would, in particular, enshrine in law the principle that sexual intercourse is a matter of personal fulfillment, with which the society has nothing to do.

     It is hard for us to imagine, in a world of mass entertainment and its consequent homogenization of peoples, how central an event the marriage is in every culture.  It marks the most joyful celebration of a people, who see their own renewal in the vows made by the young man and the young woman.  For although marriage focuses upon the couple (and it is interesting to remember that even our word focus is a marriage word, denoting in Latin the hearth), it does so because the couple embody a rejuvenation in which everyone, young and old, male and female, take part.

     In his Epithalamion, the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser summons everyone to the solemn celebration of his wedding -- and after the priest has “knit the knot that ever shall remain,” and the revelers have splashed themselves and the groom’s walls with wine, and the girls have danced and the boys have run shouting up and down the street, and the bonfires have blazed and the hours of celebration have been hastened along in glee, he bids everyone to leave him and his bride alone.  They enjoy each other’s love, and pray that from their “timely seed” they may raise a large posterity.  Here we have an understanding of marriage infinitely deeper than the meager thing we are now left with.  Of course it is personal and private: and it is public, and universal, even cosmic.  It bridges two chasms that must be bridged, lest the culture, that is the cultivation of all that a people most dearly cherish, wither away, and the people separate one from another, into a suspicious world of privacy.  One chasm is that which divides the generations.  At the true wedding, the elders know that the future belongs to the couple, who in their love that night, or on a night soon to come, will in turn raise up yet another generation.  Sexual intercourse is, as a brute biological fact, the act by which we renew mankind.  We celebrate the wedding because it betokens our survival, our hope for those to come after us.

     But we could not have children without the bridge thrown over the more dangerous divide, that which separates two groups of human beings who seldom understand one another, whose bodies and psyches are so markedly different; who try to love one another, and so often fail, yet who try again for all that.  I mean men and women.  The wedding is a symbol of the union of differences: the generations, certainly, and separate families, but most strikingly, man and woman.  The very word sex derives from Latin sexus, denoting that which separates; it is cognate with a whole host of words for severance, such as (in English) schism, scissors, sect, shed.  It is a mark of our degeneracy that the ugly term “having sex” has come to mean the marital act, with the once delicate term “making love” similarly demoted.  What man and woman do in the marriage bed is not “have” sex; the sex, that is the separation, they are provided with already.  What they do is to unite, across the separation.  And unless man and woman unite -- and, given their differences, it always amazes me that they can -- the culture cannot survive.  The women will split away to protect their persons and their relatively few children; the unattached males will pass the dull hours in destruction.

The Self-Made Man

In my “day job” as a librarian I run across, and read, books that otherwise I would not go looking for. One of the most interesting I have picked up recently is Nora Vincent’s Self-Made Man (Viking, 2006) written by a--not feminine, but very female--lesbian whose observations on the interplay of the sexes made her curious about whether being a man was all it was cracked up to be in the mainstream of respectable modern women’s opinion. To find out, she disguised herself as a man—this comes off as a rather weird and fairly amusing operation—and jumped headfirst into what she thought might be some of the most distinctively male modes. She became a member of a men’s bowling league, a strip-club patron, a single guy looking for dates, a prospective novice in a monastery, a salesman working for a sell-or-die agency, and a member of the “men’s movement” that seeks to recover Ur-maleness in a world hostile to it. She writes about all these experiences with closely engaged observation and winsome empathy.

By and large she finds the male world she encounters surprisingly difficult, discouraging, and something she is glad to escape back to womanhood, despite the latter’s manifest and continually harped-upon disadvantages. What seems to disturb her most about that environment as she experiences it is the feeling of isolation that male reticence to express emotion engenders—something that she as a woman finds almost impossible to tolerate, and for the bearing of which she comes to both pity and admire the men she meets.

I would remark that while the form and intensity this reticence takes has a great deal to do with culture, men across cultures share a reserve that makes it more likely that they, for a complex of reasons, will formalize relations between themselves in all but a few well-defined situations. Pre-eminently this means with the brother (in any form he takes)--frequently not the wife, despite what she typically thinks her due in emotional intimacy. Men simply do not communicate intuitively with either the volubility or alacrity of women. They are built that way, think it’s fine, and see good reasons for it. A man, Ms. Vincent discovered, may do no more than grunt at his friends twice in an evening, and they take that as an acceptable level of communication. They leave his space uninvaded if that’s the way he wants it, and let him talk only when and if he wants to. That’s how they operate when they are not being badgered by someone to act like women, or are attempting on their own initiative to make themselves fit company for them.

What drove Ms. Vincent to distraction about this very typical maleness is that it is universally regarded by men as part of being a grownup of their sex. It’s why she was so disappointed with the monks, from whom she expected markedly higher levels of empathy than are customary among men, when they turned out to be a pretty typical bunch of guys, nervous about all the hugging she wanted them to do because some of them were (as some guys always are) fighting homosexual impulses.  The monks, while not identifying "Ned" as a woman, thought he was a homosexual.

My guess is that a number of men she encountered would have seen through her disguise had they come from environs where sexual identity is more ambiguous than in the man’s world she visited—in places where it is a distinct possibility that the person appearing as of one sex may be of the other. “Ned” seemed to encourage a lot of hugging, and as one who has hugged a great many people himself, it is hard for me to believe that men she hugged couldn’t have figured out that she was a woman (even though her breasts were tightly and apparently successfully bound), and even though she had worked out with weights. Rare is the woman, even the strong one, whose shoulders and upper back—combined with her usual lesser height--can be mistaken for those of an adult man.

But the vast majority of men and women do not dress as each other, and in normal society there would be no greater insult to a man than to question his masculinity. The train of thought that would bring a man to this question about another man is naturally repugnant to him, and fraught with both inutility and danger. He keeps it so far from his mind that the likes of Ned will be considered a defective man until it is impossible to avoid the fact that he is not in fact a man at all.

The most personally disturbing, and certainly most revealing, conundrum Ms. Vincent faces is her conventionally modern dislike of the artificiality of sex roles on one hand, and on the other the ineffable mystery of the fundamental ontological, inescapably biological and psychological difference of the sexes from which these roles arise. She is forced by her honesty (for which, along with her extraordinary pluck, one comes to admire her) to conclude the reality of the difference, but does not take us here into a more nuanced and critical understanding of “roles” as being founded in the inescapably real, with “artificiality” therefore to be judged only on the basis of a prior understanding, or at least reasonable intuition, of what is proper to maleness and femaleness. That, perhaps, is her next book, and if she writes it, I will read it.

 

Mainliners End

On the mainline watch, I see that Jim Tonkowich of the Institute on Religion and Democracy has weighed in at the Weekly Standard with Religion Without Foundations. I don't think I've ever written anything quite this before, but if anyone wonders anymore whether or not one's Christian conscience can remain unperturbed with the Episcopal Church USA or the Presbyterian Church USA, he need only ponder the implications of recent denominational decisions and policy. I cite, also, the words of the new (elect) "Presiding Bishop" as quoted by Tonkowich:

Katharine Jefferts Schori preached her first sermon to the Episcopal Church General Convention as presiding bishop-elect, she announced, "Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation and we are his children."

O sister, where art thou?

Breeding Grounds

I write just a few hours after driving my wife at 4:30 am to our daughter's apartment so she could watch our grandson, Aidan, while our daughter and husband went to the hospital for the (successful) birth of our ninth grandchild. Madeline Rose is our third granddaughter. My wife and I have six children, four of them married.

Arriving at the office, I found the August issue of Christianity Today, with a cover story, "The Case for Kids," written by a "six-time breeder." Yes, "breeders", as if having children in today's enlightened society is somehow a throwback to a primtivism bordering on reverse evolution. (Only the irony is that those who "breed" the most will end up "surviving," to put things in Darwinian terms.)

Six-time breeder Leslie Leyalnd Fields, in her CT article, notes that

It was not my plan to have six children--it was God's. Thought the last pregnancies were difficult, life was the only possible choice. What else could I say but, like Mary, Yes, I am your servant. (Emphasis author's)

What happens in larger families? Children are more tolerant. They learn that they are one part of a whole much larger than themselves and that the common good usually takes precedence over their particular desires. They also discover the principle of scarcity; they learn to conserve. Their clothes are on loan and passed on to others when they are done. They have to share their toys. They cannot take more food than they can eat, or someone else will not have enough. . . . They are not the center of the universe.

Anthony Esolen has an article, "Dozens of Cousins," in the July/August issue of Touchstone, (still available, but not on-line) making additional points about the benefits of extended families as well. He writes:

We say we can't have a lot of children because we want to give the children we do have the greatest opportunities we can. Thus we assume that our children are deeply selfish, as if they would prefer a yearly vacation in the Adirondacks to another brother or sister....

I was (still am) the beneficiary of both having six other siblings and more than 20 first cousins within a short driving distance. My grandmother died in 1979 with no money to speak of, but she died rich. Any child that came along was more than welcomed with generous smiles and hugs and newly-knit baby clothing and blankets and birthday cakes year after year celebrating the sheer existence and the name of the grandchild.  We were the jewels in her crown. (Grandpa died in 1956.)

With 7 children in our family, a trip to Vail Colorado was out of the question, so we acted locally and vacationed with 17 cousins in all, one Scots clannish heap piled out of three cars each year on the shores of a Michigan lake and into cabins for 2 or 3 raucous weeks at a stretch.

It must be those summer weeks, along with various weddings and Christmas eve parties and Thanksgivings, with great aunts and uncles and second cousins in tow, that gave me a severe case of nostalgia in the middle of night recently. I don't mean nostalgia in the usual wistful sense, but an aching that, I'm told, Russians (I'm a quarter) experience when absent for a long time from their home country--nostal-ghi'a. In my dreams my aunts and uncles and cousins slowly faded from my reach and I woke up, pierced with a heart-aching loss.

But what a loss to know. My grandmother on her death bed broke into joyous smiles at the sight of a new grandson. Having children is to embrace life and hope. What are people waiting for? How much money is enough? How many rooms and bathrooms sufficient? Grandma's heart was simply large enough for whatever number of surprises there may be.

"Make love, not war" was the prophetic word of the late 60s. One would think it really meant, "Have sex, not babies." The "case for kids" is one case that shouldn't be very hard to make. Old age can be lonely enough without adding to it a scarcity of grandchildren. Breeders indeed. More like believers.

My Senator & Public Faith

My senator Barack Obama gave a speech last month in DC to an organization Call to Renewal at a conference Building a Covenant for a New America. He spoke about the role of religion in public life and was calling for his fellow Democrats to make sure that there is room for religious believers in the party. His words at the time garnered headlines to effect that the senator was calling for people to have faith.

In his speech he addressed the issue of the "Christian nation": "Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.

I am not sure why he thinks we need to read our Bibles when he has just cited several reasons why reading the Bible doesn't get us much agreement that is useful to our national life. Or does the Bible somewhere tell us how to balance it all out? He goes on:

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

While this might sound sort of reasonable--a caution against theocracy, perhaps? (as if we have ever had a theocracy and as if any but the most marginal fringe of a fringe would want a theocracy)--it really isn't. The American Founders did evoke God's will in saying that men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including the right to life. Would the good senator have rejected all religious argument opposing slavery as too "religion-specific"?

The arguments against abortion are not found in the Sermon on the Mount nor in the Christian Scriptures exclusively. Not just one religion happens to oppose abortion, dear Senator. I've translated my concerns into a universal one that forbids the killing of human beings before their birth.

Final Causality

     Etienne Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again:

    "Compared to generalizations such as the principle of least action, economy of thought, and other similar ones, the notion of natural teleology cuts a modest figure.  It can be reproached with being anthropomorphic, but in a science which is the work of man what is not?  Furthermore, the important thing is to know whether or not it expresses a fact given in nature, for if we object to final causality as an explanation, it remains a fact to be explained.  It is true that if we make room for it, further problems of a different order than that of natural science and philosophy present themselves.  But, first of all, nothing obliges anyone to pose them; and, next, their solutions are not given in advance; and, finally, it would not be reasonable to take exception to so sensible and manifest experience so as to render impossible in advance the pressing of certain metaphysical problems, problems that would be susceptible to answers so undesirable under this scheme that one might consider it more prudent not to ask them."

     Gilson's book, written in 1971, makes for an interesting read; he does not believe in a young earth, and he neither affirms nor denies the separate creation by God of every species of plant and animal.  What he is at pains to show is that the problem of final causality -- the notion that what a thing is for in large part determines what sort of thing it is -- cannot simply be wished away.  Some points, in no certain order:

1. Darwin was a keen and loving observer of natural phenomena.  He was also a very poor theologian, who lacked the broad reading that would have enabled him to keep his faith once he had come to believe that the earth was more than a few thousand years old.  (For example, he had never heard of the rationes seminales that Augustine suggested were present in all matter at the instant of creation.)  But though he lost his faith, he retained the ardor -- and that ardor caused him to be as great a partisan of non-creation of species as he would have been of their creation.  So he will praise Lamarck, who taught that the giraffe acquired his long neck from ages and ages of stretching, despite the fact that he found Lamarck's explanation of change absurd; he praises him for denying that species were created, and that is enough for the aged Darwin to see in Lamarck a worthy predecessor.  One is reminded of Epicurus, who put forth several (and mutually inconsistent) explanations for the existence of the universe, with the one stipulation that none of them involved the gods.

2. Darwin seldom used the word "evolution," and for good reason: it suggested an e-volving of something that had already been in-volved, a natural de-velopment of what was already present.  The term was popularized by the philosopher-wannabe Herbert Spencer, was grossly inadequate to describe Darwin's theory of change by means of natural selection, and yet was seized upon by the public and applied to Darwin -- much to Spencer's disgruntlement.

3. Darwin's title The Origin of Species presents a conundrum that Darwin himself never resolved.  He was, as it turns out, opposed to the Linnaean notion that there were distinguishable species at all.  That too, in his mind, smacked of the theory of separate creations.  So he often argued that the term "species" had no real meaning, and would be more properly replaced by "variety".  Of course he could not foresee the discoveries of modern genetics and the discrete quanta of information and building-instructions contained in the DNA helix.  He wanted rather to insist upon infinitesimal gradations that would eventually become so great as to constitute, for all practical purposes though not in ontology, a separate species.

4. In this regard, Darwin's frequent celebration of the work of stockbreeders is illuminating.  They too produce a seemingly endless variety of sheep or dogs or cows, and if the words variety and species are simply interchangeable, then Darwin's thesis seems to have been proved.  Unfortunately, thousands of years of conscious selection, selection determined to deviate far from any statistical mean for color or woolliness or size or docility or just about anything man prizes in domesticated animals, has succeeded in producing no new species, only new varieties; and at that, there seems to be a limit beyond which stockbreeding simply will not take us (we will not produce dogs that stand six feet at the shoulder).  Thus the very activity that Darwin claims as evidence for the truth of his theory casts it in doubt.  Man has domesticated the dog -- that is, he has manipulated the gene pool in the species wolf.  He has not produced another sort of creature; dogs and wolves are genetically the same species.

5. We hear that it is anthropomorphic to compare the parts of animals with the parts of machines, that are clearly made for a purpose; but as Gilson notes, the ancient teaching of Aristotle is that man's art imitates nature, not the other way around.  So we call those things that hold up the table "legs," not attributing to nature the teleology we see in our own works, but attributing to our works the teleology we see in nature.

John Paul II & the Jewish People

On September 6, 2006 the Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust--will celebrate the legacy of John Paul II with the opening of a special exhibition, A Blessing to One Another: Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People.

On September 7, the day after the exhibition opens, leading Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish theologians will participate in a program open to the public in which they will reflect on the pope's legacy and explore the changing relationships among faiths. The program will take place in the Museum's edmond J. Safra Hall starting at 7 p.m. The program is free with suggested donation.

I don't know exactly how the relationships among the faiths are or will be changing, but only note in passing that innocent civilians of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim practice continue to suffer in the the Middle East. They are often neighbors. If, please God, somehow that could change for the better, perhaps it would be sign that something was learned from the carnage of the 20th century. But it's not looking good.

Anyone in the NYC area interested in the exhibit: the website is www.mjhnyc.org.

A Word of Comfort

Those who disagreed with my remarks in an earlier post about the dreadfulness of the term "Godblog" will be gratified to see that the Higher Powers are on your side, as the advertisement displayed to the left, and near the top of the Touchstone home page, make eminently clear.   And you can rest easier knowing that the influence of their (unrepentant) author goes only so far around here.

"Christian" Colleges and Academic Esteem

This morning's New York Times features a story about continuing tensions between Southern Baptist state conventions and the colleges they support. The article focuses in on the recent agreement between Georgetown College in Kentucky and the Kentucky Baptist Convention (KBC) to part ways. As the Times reports, the separation was shepherded through the process by Georgetown president Bill Crouch and my friend and colleague Hershael York, then the president of the KBC.

While the article highlights Baptist struggles over this issue, the same article could be written, with different details, about virtually any segment of American Christianity. Should (small o) orthodox Christians fund and promote a "progressive" university, whose faculty oppose the most significant things the conservative churchgoers believe? Does a confessional Christian identity mean the end of academic integrity?

The article ends with what, I think, are two very revealing quotes that indicate why, at least in this case, the university and the churches were looking to two different audiences. Georgetown's provost says the college was seeking a Phi Betta Kappa chapter, a chapter they didn't believe they could achieve with a close relationship to the state convention. "Phi Beta Kappa is the gold standard," she said. The article closes with this: "It's good to go to a college that's religious, but it doesn't really matter to me," said John Sadlon, a sophomore. "What matters to me is getting my education."

HT: Jim Smith

College bound?

Where should Christian kids go to college?  Please read Terrence O. Moore's Not Harvard Bound from the May issue of Touchstone and then join the discussion on the Treaders site.

Chariot of Fire

While at home yesterday carrying up boxes of books from our basement to keep them dry from encroaching water (from heavy rains), I opened one box that was way too heavy to hoist and took out a stack. On top was The Mystical Language of Icons by Solrunn Nes, and I placed it on my desk--the book flap had been used to mark a page, and when I opened it, I came upon The Prophet Elijah.

"Funny," I thought, "his feast day is today, July 20." The ground-saturating rains and storms rolled in, right on cue, after having read 8 hours earlier at vespers about the drought-ending storm the capped off Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel.

Elijah would not be welcomed today at very many interfaith dialogues, of course.  His "debate" with the prophets of Baal, which ended badly for the Baal side, is not model for dialogue, really, that just anyone can adopt.

Yet, Elijah's words about not limping between Baal and the Lord apply every bit as much today as back then when it comes to the decisions we face between a culture of life and one that embraces death. No harm will come to mankind from choosing not to use embryos for stem cells and organ harvesting. Great harm, however, will come from going down that path. No harm will come to man for choosing not to clone human beings. Great harm will come from allowing this.

Elijah's assumption into heaven in a fiery chariot, writes Nes in her book of icons, "may be understood as a prefiguration of Christ's ascension." And the story of Elijah itself is bracketed in fire, with the fire from the Lord descending on Mount Carmel and the fire of the chariot ascending with Elijah into heaven. The fire itself is often associated with transforming power of God, even with His very being: "Our God is a consuming fire."

However, unlike the devouring devil who consumes man, the consuming fire of God is positive, even as it burns away all sin and dross. Nes writes:

"St. John of Damascus compares the saints with red-hot iron. Iron that is made red-hot by fire is still iron, but unlike iron that has become cold, it can be moulded. The saints do not lose their identities as individuals by striving to become one with God."

For the saint, it is choice to say yes to the Lord, and a resounding no to the other gods that entice us away from our true identities in God. It's one of the lessons of Elijah, man of God and prophet in whose steps walked John the Baptist, who also preached of fire even as he prepared the way for Christ, the One who baptizes with fire and spoke of casting fire upon the earth.

So what has Elijah to do with Christians? For one thing, if you want the authentic Jesus, you have to take the heat. "Everyone will be salted with fire," promises Christ  (Mark 9:49) Preachers who never preach fire, therefore, are leaving something out of the message.

Noah and the Conservatives

In light of the conversation below on "pro-life" Members of Congress voting for embryonic stem cell research funding, I found this comment in the Spring 2006 issue of Modern Age interesting. In an article entitled "The Conservative Movement in Discontinuity," Paul Gottfried writes:

"One is reminded here of the gloss usually provided for the phrase in Genesis, 'Noah was righteous in his generation.' According to standard medieval Jewish interpretation, what this means is that Noah was not particularly virtuous but that in comparison to his depraved contemporaries, he seemed worthy of being saved from the Flood. In the same relativistic sense, one may have to look at neo-conservative journalists. They are those who belong to an exceedingly bad lot but are least hostile to conservative thinking, although even these relative exemplars of virtue get worse and worse because of the environment in which they function. Such people, needless to say, have more in common with others in their vocational and social group  than with the typical readers of this magazine; likewise, most Republican politicians have more in common cosmologically as well as professionally with their Democratic counterparts than with Richard M. Weaver, Russell Kirk, or George W. Carey."

If the Gold Rust

     If you want to learn how to reach the conclusion you wish, regardless of the rules you are sworn to obey, you might pay close attention to the exegesis of somebody called the "Diocesan Liturgist" in the Roman Catholic diocese of Winona, Minnesota.  The question is the appropriateness of using glassware for the Eucharist.  Here is the relevant passage from Redemptionis Sacramentum, 117:

     "It is strictly required, however, that such materials be truly noble in their common estimation in a given region, so that honor will be given to the Lord by their use, and all risk of diminishing the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species in the eyes of the faithful will be avoided.  Reprobated, therefore, is any practice of using for the celebration of Mass common vessels, or others lacking in quality, or devoid of all artistic merit, or which are mere containers, as also other vessels made from glass, earthenware, clay, or other materials that break easily.  This norm is to be applied even as regards metals and other materials that easily rust or deteriorate." (italics mine)

     Now, you want to use glassware for communion.  What do you do?

1. Play Kreskin the Magnificent.  For judges who cannot find in the Constitution what they need, there is always the handy Phantom of the Constitution in the closet, which phantom, conveniently vague and therefore conformable to any conceptual container, can be made to serve any purpose.  Roman Catholics have their own Phantom of Vatican II, when they wish to make the documents of that council say what their drafters did not say or had no idea ever of saying.  The Phantom, apparently, is a medium with acute psychological and eschatological insight, reading the tarot cards of history, knowing well what our forefathers really felt and also where we are all really going.  In the case of the glassware, the Diocesan Liturgist reads the minds of the drafters of the document, making them say what they did not say, thus:

    "This statement is regulating against the use of domestic wine glasses and crystal (common vessels) from household dining rooms."

But the document says nothing about household dining rooms; it proscribes glass because it is glass, simply.  Glass is used all the time, as are clay and porcelain.  Gold and silver are not.

2. Draw Factitious Distinctions.  Yes, Saint Paul inveighs against sodomites.  But our sodomites are not like their sodomites.  Yes, the Bible proscribes fornication.  But we don't fornicate the way other people do; we're in love.  So the Diocesan Liturgist finds a difference between glass and glass.  She notes that the glassware used in Winona is "approximately 3/8 inches or more thick" (sic).  Therefore the vessels "do not break easily but could be broken if a person purposefully works at it" (sic).  Well, plexiglass could hardly break at all, with normal use.  Why shouldn't the manufacturers of windshields carve out a lucrative side business in communion vessels?  The point of the instruction is not to guard against the breakage of vessels, but to proscribe materials of a sort that is perceived as breakable; some fired clay is actually hard to break, but we still consider porcelain as a sort of material that can be broken.  That is why the instruction specifically states that even vessels that are not common and that do possess artistic merit are not to be used if they are made of glass or clay.

3. Blow a Trumpet before You.  Yes, we do sin against the sixth commandment, but we're really good at following the seventh!  Yes, we hate our neighbors, but look how we give to the United Way!  Now usually, I daresay, people who trumpet their obedience of one law in order to divert attention from their disobedience of another very often are not really obeying either one.  So when the Diocesan Liturgist writes, of the glasses, that they "are hand blown which qualifies the criterion of 'artistic merit'" (sic), I am only half willing to grant that the vessels might actually be finely crafted and artistically beautiful.  But even if they were indeed so, they are still glass.  Many excellent sculptures are made of terra cotta.  But Luca della Robbia himself would not be permitted to fire a terra cotta vessel for use in communion.

4. Tar the Legitimate.  Sure, abortion kills, but so do the Marines!  Sure, homosexuals violate the law of God, but look at all the incest among heterosexuals!  It is a neat tactic: after you have raised the illegitimate to the level of the legitimate, you lower the legitimate to the level of the illegitimate.  Thus gold too becomes an obviously breakable material: "So it is with gold which could be scratched or bent if a person purposefully works at it.  Any accidental drop could do damage to each."  So determined is the Diocesan Liturgist to place gold and glass on an equal footing that she forgets her chemistry -- forgets the very reason why gold has ever been prized as a noble metal: "We could be concerned with some pewter communion ware in some parishes that is soiled with age or silver and gold that is not useable (sic) due to rust, lack of cleanliness, or careless handling."  News to the Diocesan Liturgist: tarnished silver is not hard to clean.  And gold does not rust.  At least, the gold we dig up out of the earth does not rust.  That's why it is so valuable.  As for other, metaphorical, sorts of gold, we quote the words of Chaucer's Parson, who lashes out against slackness and disobedience in the clergy, as these will inevitably end in corrupting the laity too: If the gold rust, what shall the iron do?

Pro-Life?

The President's veto of the Congress's bill forcing taxpayers to fund research on unborn babies is in the news right now, with the left and the right seeking to find the political and cultural significance of it all. The arguments of the "pro-choice" legislators of either party are not all that surprising, and just as sad as they always are.

But what is especially infuriating are the votes of supposedly "pro-life" Members of Congress, including Senators Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Trent Lott (R-Miss.). These senators, and the "pro-life" House members who joined them, have argued that life begins at conception, murder is wrong, and that, since frozen unborn babies will die anyway, we should kill them and profit off their corpses. That's incoherent, and these men are not that dumb.

I am thankful for the veto. Let's thank God for this obstacle to "science." But let's also be sure to check out the roll call votes in the Senate and in the House on this one. Maybe pro-life voters need to start asking what the definition of "pro-life" is.

Middle East Peace: A Kingdom Roadmap?

The Apostle Paul didn't know anything about Hezbollah or the Israeli defense ministry. But he did know something about hatred and hostility between irreconcilable people groups. And, more importantly, he knew something about the Kingdom of Christ.

Much of the Christian response to the headlines and television images coming out of the Middle East is informed by more intricate hermeneutical and theological tendencies, especially among evangelicals. Evangelical thought on the Middle East crisis is linked inextricably to evangelical thought on the Kingdom of God. Some evangelicals believe peace in the Middle East is a hopeless endeavor, until Jesus sets foot on the Mount of Olives. Other evangelicals believe peace in the Middle East can be hammered out in the West Wing of the White House. Both groups are partially right, but both groups easily can miss a crucial element of the biblical vision of Kingdom peace, the church.

It is difficult for contemporary Christians to grasp just how real the Jew/Gentile division was in the first-century congregations. This was about more than some rancorous business meetings. Instead, the issue was the gospel itself. Gentiles were more than just an ethnic category--they were the heirs of Esau, the enemies of the people of God. In the midst of all this turmoil, the apostle Paul declared that the gospel meant the creation of a new humanity in Christ. The church, he concluded, was a model of the coming Kingdom that embraced both Jew and Gentile, reconciled to God and to each other through the last-days triumph of their common Messiah (Eph 2:11-21). Paul went so far as to declare that the peace within the congregation of Christ served as a herald to the cosmic powers that God has enthroned Jesus as the indisputable King of the entire created order (Eph 2:8-11).

Paul saw the big picture of humanity at war with itself, and with its Creator. He also saw the small picture of local congregations modeling the peace of the coming Kingdom. And he saw that these two foci were linked together. The church doesn't just pray for peace and justice; it is to demonstrate it within its own walls.

I, for one, support Israel's response (so far) to the terrorist attacks against it. It seems to me to be well within the framework of Romans 13 for a state to defend itself against aggressive evildoers in this way. Whatever our view, Christians should pray for the coming of our Messiah, who will decisively beat all swords into plowshares (Isa 2:4). But we should also pray for Kingdom congregations that declare the truth of the gospel with their very existence. That's not just overseas. As America's inner cities simmer still with racial tension, let's pray and work for churches in which white, black, and Latino Christians worship Christ and love their brothers, together.

And as the Middle East grows more and more incendiary, let's pray for political peace. But let's also pray for churches in which Jewish and Palestinian Christians pray to the same Messiah, and manifest the love and unity of the Spirit--together.

The United Nations might not notice congregations like that. But Scripture promises us that the spirit world cannot ignore the message of such Kingdom-focused churches--the message that Jesus is Lord.

Apocalyptic Kiddie Lit

In the Summer 2006 Claremont Review of Books, Dorothea Israel Wolfson reviews the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, and finds in it a desire to turn children into adults. This is done specifically by using literature as a tool to turn children on to "the grim realities and multicultural obsessions of contemporary adults."

Wolfson observes that almost every text and author, except for very recent ones, is "subjected to a wicked scolding from the editors for its racism, sexism, and elitism. Forget about ogres, witches, monsters, and evil stepmoms," she writes. "Today's villains are gender stereotypes, white males, the middle class, and the traditional family." She cites the Norton editors' applause for the way in which "judgments of 'good' and 'evil' are no longer easily made" in children's literature, "the distinction between heroes and villains is often blurred."

Wolfson identifies the key factor in the shift from traditional and contemporary children's literature in the assumptions about childhood itself, assumptions in which "the lines between childhood and adulthood have themselves become blurred." This is the reason, she asserts, that the most celebrated contemporary stories for children deal explicitly with such "adult" matters as the mechanics of sexuality (she cites a 1984 children's book on The Facts of Life that is a "pop-up" book). It's also why so many contemporary children's books are