The Next Problem Bishop

I held out hope in the whole Gene Robinson consecration debacle that perhaps at least the question could be confined to the Donatist question of his presumed sexual sins rather than having to confront idiosyncrasies of his theology. Well, now he is retired, and I have heard the news that he is now to have a column at The Daily Beast. And I have found out, via Bryan Owen and Peter Carrell, that Robinson's opening column makes some quite problematic statements:

God is infinite, and it comes as no surprise to me that there have developed, over time, many credible and faithful approaches to understanding God. In the end, no religion holds a lock on the reality of God. Each religion grasps only a part of the infinite God and offers insight into God’s reality, and we would do well to exercise a good measure of humility in claiming we know God’s will. Better to begin each pronouncement we make about God with “In my experience…” or “From my perspective…” or simply “For me….” At the end of the day, no matter how much we believe we know God’s will, we must acknowledge that each of us is only doing the best she/he can.

Well, Lewis said something similar, and yet utterly different. I don't accept this "blind scholars and the elephant" theory of religion and theology; to the degree that other religions may have something to say that is "valid" (i.e., accurate), that validation can only come from comparison with the Christian revelation. To try to assemble the "parts" of God each religion grasps is to construct an idol, the inevitable outcome of such syncretism. In Robinson's case he will, if unknowingly, make God in the image of upper middle class liberal American mores.

Likewise, his plea for subjectivism is against everything the New Testament teaches, and never mind the Torah. I say this over and over again: anamnesis is central to Christian theology and ecclesiology. The Mystery of Faith that we state on a Sunday is not three personal experiences or perspectives: it is three statements of the reality of Christ's salvific acts. We are not here to preach what we feel; we are here to remember what Jesus did, and to tell all the world about it.

But instead, we get the dreary, routine (and I will presume political) moralism which has been part and parcel of liberal Anglicanism for decades, buttressed with the platitudes of American religiosity. I sense that the retired bishop can do no more for his church than reassure a certain class of "seekers" (especially the "spiritual but not religious" set and the followers of moralistic therapeutic deism) that the faded religion of American Episcopalianism is no threat to their anemic faith.

But to stand up each Sunday and profess the tenets of the Creed: that would be a quite different matter. But at this point it seems safe to say that those tenets are not going to get play in the bishop's columns.

Theology, and the Poverty of the Virgin

This is one of those years when Candlemas, AKA the Feast of the Presentation or of the Purification, falls on a Sunday, and therefore even the run-of-the-mill Episcopal parish observes it (at least if they haven't forgotten what it says on page 16 of the BCP). It's an interesting juxtaposition considering that we are in Year A and therefore (in the RCL) the story of Jesus at the temple also appears in the lectionary, so that we hit most of the first few chapters of Luke (Holy Name/Circumcision being the exception, it being impossible to get any but the most dogged A-Cs to show up to church instead of watching the Tournament of Roses parade on New Years Day).

And it presents an interesting problem for the preacher, who finds Jesus' teaching, as a rule, a much more congenial topic. These early stories demand treatment as theology and not moral advocacy, which seems to be a problem in this church. In that light I would like to commend Tobias Haller's sermon for its investigation of connections which I had forgotten or did not put together before. The presentation, after all, is about the satisfaction of two mosaic commands: first, for the purification of Mary after giving birth, and the second, for the presentation of Jesus, the first-born. And it is about the fulfillment of promises, to Simeon and Anna. One should take a moment to consider that, some few months earlier, the aged Elizabeth had stood among the younger women at this same place (John being Kohanim and therefore not being presented).

The specifics of these rites leads me to another issue. Leviticus specifies, for the purification offerings, a lamb and a dove, but allows a second dove to be substituted for the lamb if the latter cannot be afforded. Mary, it is recorded, offers two doves. This is taken as an implication of poverty, which in my opinion is overstated. Consider the larger context, and never mind that, as far as I know, we don't have a good handle on the price of lambs at the temple. First, Joseph: he's a skilled tradesman, not a laborer or a subsistence farmer or fisherman. By the standards of most eras, this makes him a working man, to be sure, but not poor. Second, Elizabeth: she is a high status wife, having married into the top priestly class. One gathers that both marriages, before March 25th, were unremarkable and didn't strain at class boundaries.

It's significant at this juncture to note that Jesus' teachings about money presuppose a set of class divisions that beings to look modern. We fail to notice that all his talk about salvation as an investment is too familiar, and that merchants and bankers are, in the world of his parables, people of considerable status, and that working stiffs of all sorts also play prominent roles. Joseph and Mary, as the marriage plays out, are not the poor to whom mercy is to be directed; they are at the lower reaches of those of whom mercy is expected. Millais's notorious (at the time) image of Jesus as a child in his father's shop creates a new modern scandal by setting Joseph among the sort of people who in this era might vote Republican— but then again, maybe they would join a union.

The point is that not everything in scripture is about social justice politics. Mary is, in the end, not an unwed mother, and Jesus was not reared in abject poverty. Paul's "bourgeois" directives simply bring home the point that in the early church the good news was not just for the destitute. And that gospel is theological first. The early chapters of Luke, the beginning of John, the early words of Matthew: all of these emphasize how Jesus came into the world as a spiritual act, and they demand a religious response.

A Liturgical Footnote

OK, people: who will be the first one to point out what's nostalgic about standing for the Gloria?

All Stand

It's a scene which instantly transports me to high school chapel: the congregation stands, and all turn to face the altar for the Gloria:

In my day we never used Rite I or for that matter the 1928 book; until the first 19-, er, 1976 BCPs arrived, we used pamphlets which I believe were based on the Green Book. But the ritual postures in this video are utterly familiar and slip on my worshipping body like the oldest and most familiar of clothes.

So much of what was done then was set aside: the "Episcopal aerobics" of old, where one constantly moved from sitting to standing to kneeling, have been toned down, so that indeed in many parishes there is little if any kneeling, and hardly anyone moves at all for the psalm. Increasingly the seating arrangements mean that nobody turns toward anything except the gospel if it be brought into the nave. But one does find places that remember the old ways and doggedly stick to the old postures.

So, this morning I was at Trinity, Copley Square, the queen of Boston parishes and the pinnacle of Romanesque Revival, for the 9 o'clock service, Epiphany 2, Year A. The choir was huge, numbering upwards of forty, adults and children; the church was comfortably full but not crammed. If I had not read the bulletin, all might have seemed well at first, though the tell-tale avoidance of "him" in the opening sentences gave an early warning to those who have memorized the BCP text. And it was odd to skip the epistle (about which omission a word later), but up to that point all was done in the grand style of an urban parish justly proud of their musical program and their spectacular worship space.

But then the preacher began, and he spoke not in the triune Name, but in the name of that old Father-denying modalist formula. Great, I thought to myself, another heretic, and tried not to dismiss his social action sermon, which ignored the lessons (the first of which was not according to the lectionary, though I do not recall that the change figured in his message). And when we got to the prayers, instead of one of the six standard formulas we had this paean to the works of Martin Luther King Jr., whose secular feast is observed tomorrow. Once again I found myself running through Form III sotto voce in order to touch those topics prescribed by the rubrics, and I thus also found myself reviewing the confessional (another novel-to-me formulation) to gain assurance that I could say it in good conscience.

And from that point I was caught in a struggle between competing scruples, for I approached the altar to find the preacher about offer me the Sacred Elements. I assuaged my conscience with the thought that another acted as celebrant, only to be "blessed" by that celebrant (the rector, who also had managed to skip over the Sanctus--it was Prayer C, you knew it was going to be Prayer C, and he went a response too far) in the Modal Name. Unsurprisingly the bulletin invited all comers to partake, in violation of current canon and ancient tradition.

Trinity is an astonishingly beautiful place, if you are comfortable with its High Victorian fussiness, and the music is as good as it ever gets in an Anglican parish. People around me did sing. And yet as religion the thing was deeply rotten. In retrospect I'm surprised that they didn't mess with the opening sentences for a modalist three-fer. Jesus said to Andrew, "come and see", but the message I got from the sermon was, "come and see what wonderful work we are doing in the world, in our noble efforts against racism." Worship was taken for granted; theology could not be done right, for fear of being accused of another -ism. I wondered at the time whether the epistle had been set aside because it is the words of Paul which so often offend our revisionists. And this is what I find in all places. Looking through the parish websites I saw that most within range of my hotel promised (to the canny Anglican reader) that I would be subjected to this, and perhaps might even use Enriching Our Worship or some even more egregious emasculating bastardization. I almost went to the Old North Church simply because their website made no promises at all about what I would encounter there; in retrospect I should have swallowed my preference for a sung service and worked out the logistics.

This is what the travelling Anglican has to put up with. Unless one is completely indifferent (in which case one might well look to the first steeple in view, and risk a Baptist or Catholic service), one has to check websites or other clues for signs of aberration. The blue and white sign might as well say, "the Episcopal Church welcomes you, but we don't promise you'll get an Episcopal service." All the predictions of how abandoning the centuries-old Cramnerian language would result in collapse have been acted out in the interest of making upper-middle class and aging parishioners feel good about either their clerisy's liberal politics, or their own self-righteous resistance to the same. We burn the accumulated capital of our tradition to keep our own hearts warm.

And nothing will come of it. It is possible that homosexual marriages will have a better record than the ordinary sort if only because children are a major source of marital stress. Those ordinary ones are not doing so well, and it is not credible that we should instruct the other classes to eat wedding cake as we do. Indeed, we barely bother to speak to our own on the matter. Yet the problems of ordinary family life of of far greater import. It is possible that we may instill a greater awareness of the morality of running a corporation, but I doubt it: we are too wedded to Mammon for our retirement accounts and for the corporations who employ the lawyers in our parishes, and the likes of Steve Jobs and other such irreligious magnates have long since ceased to heed us. Our superior social conscious is not enough to save, not on earth, and perhaps not in heaven.

The Word of Scripture Hath No Authority, Apparently

So here we are with another run around the track of the modernist raceway, in this case loftily brushing off the "authority" of scripture. I suppose the reason these tracts get published is so that the textual liberals and modernists can rehearse their tropes so as to have them on the tip of the tongue when the equally ancient objections are raised anew.

This round used as a pretext an incident in which the "bible" used for an oath as recorded in an iPad app, with (I suppose) the physical iPad and its display as proxy. Now, the author of our tract quickly lost interest in whether this was an appropriate act, and so do I; it seems a less than ideal symbolic act, but in the end it doesn't have a lot to do with Christian ideas about scripture. But at any rate our author turns immediately to disparagement of the "existence" of the bible at all. What this turns out to mean isn't that it doesn't exist, but that it isn't one single inarguable reference, like the standard kilogram. Well, uh, yeah, but what's the point? Translation isn't an exact science; textual criticism is required to resolve the variety of variant texts; even the original language doesn't always seem to have survived without damage. But this is, in the end, overstatement. This is the kind of thinking that leads to spurious claims such as the notion that the Great Commission is a late addition to the gospel text when in fact there is no evidence for that at all. It's just a passage that someone wants to be late, so they can dismiss it.

And thus we are led off into a dream world in which there is no "authentic" text, but only a "process of engagement between a human psyche and the narrative contained within the text." OK, let's start off with the fact that not all of scripture is narrative, and never mind that there a different kinds of narrative. The trope here is heading off into the direction of reducing all of scriptural text to parable. As an Anglican I would agree with the notion that interpretation is an element of the scriptural reading process that has to be accepted as such, but there is more to what's going on then that, and the words traditionally used to talk about this are less abstract and less inviting of abuse.

Our author does go on to talk about one of the other key elements: the need to interpret the text within the community. But this community is not just present and proximate, but historical and spiritual. You cannot just read your favorite modern theologians or talk with your peers; you must know what the church fathers said and what theologians through the ages have said. And "within the community" has some specific content. If you are an Anglican, for instance, the creeds have a canonical function circumscribing the community. If you deny the creed, then to some degree you aren't fully within the community.

Likewise, going back to the narrative, it has to be admitted that there are certain parts of the scriptural narrative which force strongly divergent conclusions if different readings be taken. The crucial one, if you will pardon the pun, is of course the passion and resurrection narrative. The testimony of the church was and is that Jesus is actually no longer dead, and that the disciples and the women were direct witnesses to this. It is unsurprising, however, that the comments to the article in question are full of denial of the whole idea of authority in the first place, so one presumes that they do have a problem with the church teaching any such thing using scripture as a reference.

I on the other hand see no reason to respond to the text in this manner. I may argue with it, or may talk about various kinds of readings. But the obvious and only alternative to taking scripture and its accompanying tradition as a point of authority is making it up. Scripture is not a palimpsest, an erased manuscript over which I may write what seems best to me: it is canonical, a standard against which theology may be tested. It is testimony to how flaccid official theologizing has become that this kind of thinking is put forth routinely be clerics and others connected to the hierarchy and church institutions, but this is not the theology of the prayer book, which still upholds a standard of belief and faith which this debased reasoning fails to meet. It is only as it is read, wrestled with, "inwardly digested," that the narrative takes on reality, life and meaning.

Syncretic-Crazy Christmas

Those nuts at Lutheran Satire take on various December 25th bogus legends in their own inimitable way:

Scroogely

We in the Wingate household finished off Christmas evening, as the goose roasted, watching the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol. Of course, everyone should sit down and read the Dickens original at least once. It is quite short, and displays Dickens's distinctive prose and his knack for quickly sketching characters to best advantage. But it is a story which cried out for stage and movie treatment, and received it early. IMDB records upward of twenty film versions; Wikipedia claims twice that many.

Naturally there is dissent over the the "best" version. The more eccentric versions I have never seen, or seen but once. And really, the thing should be seen purely before one sees the take-offs, so I'm not going to address Mr. Magoo or the muppets, or any of the several musical versions. And especially I will not speak of Jim Carrey.

This leaves us with four principal versions which tell the story straight and (mostly) entire, and of them, I must confess to never having seen the Reginald Owen version from the late 1930s, so I cannot offer an opinion on it. The next version is the purist's favorite, the Alistair Sim version of 1951. It has much to commend it, starting with Sims's bitter and defining performance. But it has one drawback which for me puts it out of the running, and it is a technical issue: it looks absolutely dreadful. Every copy of it I've ever seen has looked to have been printed on old cigarette wrappers found in the ditches and gutters of postwar London. It is terribly murky and the night scenes (which are many) are often all but indecipherable. And I must also say that acting has come a long way: Sims may be truest to Dickens's rather flat characterizations, but the relentlessly nasty Scrooge of this version comes across these days as something of a caricature.

Skipping to the last of the four, there is the 1999 Patrick Stewart version, expanded from his one-man show stage version. Now, this has a lot going for it in places. Joel Grey is cast to perfection as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Ian McNeice's Fezziwig is delightful, and the brilliantly telescoped scene wherein Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a whirlwind tour of celebrators is not marred by the knowledge that the singing of "Silent Night" in English is an anachronism (Young's translation was fifteen years in the future). But there are some terrible flaws, and unfortunately one of of them is Stewart himself. He is not even slightly convincing as a Victorian; the least he could have done was put on a period wig for a hirsute age. Worse, though, is the dreadful Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who looks like a Star Wars Jawa with severe Marfan's Syndrome. This is the emotional crux of the story, and it is, for me, fatally marred by bad effects and lighting. So much of the rest is good that it is a shame when this scene comes along and spoils it.

Which brings me to the 1984 Scott version. This may not be the best version at every single point, but it is never bad. And when it is good, it is wonderful. Scott makes no attempt at a fake British accent and is utterly convincing nonetheless; he looks and feels the part from end to end. He is Scrooge as the consummate and ruthless businessman, worshipping the "golden idol" so thoroughly that he isn't in the slightest aware of his adoration. And yet one sees from early on that there is a human soul locked away inside. What really makes this version shine, however, is the superb supporting cast, not neglecting Shrewsbury, which puts on a very convincing simulacrum of 19th century London. David Warner, cast wildly against his later type of overbearing villainy, is a delightful Bob Cratchit. George Woodward's Christmas Present is by turns jovial and bitterly pointed. Roger Rees as the nephew Fred is perfectly cast in the sort of role he was born to play. One sees considerable care in costuming and makeup, so that one can date each scene from the changes in hats and hair (with some slight anachronisms in a brace of musical instruments). The effects, are, I must admit, a bit dated, but effective. And finally, of course, there is Christmas Yet to Come, a huge, howling, menacing man/puppet, never fully seen and moving like no human. It is easy to see why Scott's Scrooge is terrified of it.

Dickens's Carol is rather the yang to Charlie Brown's yin when it comes to talking about Christmas outside the nativity narrative itself. Linus puts the narrative in front of all else; Dickens's tale fails to mention Jesus by name at all, nor is anyone seen in church in all the celebrations. The only real reference to the gospel narrative is an odd remark of Tiny Tim's, about Jesus' healing miracles. In this modernist age one must take care to recall that Christmas isn't just about the Spirit of Giving, but is first and foremost (as Linus says) a recollection, an anamnesis of the incarnation as real, earthly, historical fact. But A Christmas Carol's realization of the parable of the sheep and goats has its place in the season too; and if you care to see it told, it seems to me that you would do well to seek out Scott's embodiment of the storied miser.

Watching with Joseph

This being Year A in the lectionary, Joseph, the father of Our Lord, makes some of his rare appearances in the readings. Joseph is one of the more fugitive figures in scripture, making his first appearance in the first verse of Matthew (as part of the genealogy) and his last at Jesus' visit to the temple at age twelve (which we shall also be privileged to hear this year), where he is not named but may be assumed to be one of the plural parents mentioned. Then he disappears; Mary is seen in several episodes and is present at the crucifixion, but Joseph is never heard from again, and the last references to him are oblique, when Jesus is called "the carpenter's son."

It is thus presumed in the legenda that Joseph died before Jesus' ministry began, and he is typically depicted as an older man. Some tales claim that he was a widower and that therefore James and the other brothers and sisters were from this first marriage, thus making possible the perpetual virginity of Mary. In truth, we do not know: even the Catholic Encyclopedia deems these stories "unreliable". Nor does Joseph feature prominently in the history of saintly devotion, or for that matter much at all. Mary's cult traces back as far as we can trace anything; a true cultus of Joseph is not found until the 1300s, and took another century to really catch on; the day of his observance only dates back to the 10th century.

Traditionally, in the nativity story, we are associated with the shepherds, taken by surprise in the fields. But I have come to think that Jesus' earthly father is a better image for most of us church goers. The nativity is not, after all, a surprise to us; but we are both participants and bystanders. Here is Joseph, who finds out about the blissful event first through rumor and then through a dream; and now here he is towing his far-too-wife down to Bethlehem, and arranging lodging in what space is to be had. And now the holy night arrives, and it is all too likely that he is, at first, reduced to standing in the street (or nursing an anxious beer in the tap room) while a midwife handles the sacred birth. (Saint Bridget's account may be safely set aside as devotional.) Attending the mother and newborn, he must also deal with the surprise visitors from the fields, a duty repeated when the magi make their visit. And then must take the family to Egypt, and thence, finally, back to Nazareth. Presumably also accompanies the mother and child and the various ritual visits to the temple.

And that is all. Simeon receives the promised vision, but Joseph leaves the story when it is quite incomplete. And is it not so with us? Our own stories are writ and each such book closed, but though we pray "maranatha, come Lord," it has become clear over the years that the divine "soon" is in a great fullness of time, which none of those living is perhaps destined to see, for glory or grief, until the day comes when all graves yield and holy judgement, dread in mercy, is worked to its conclusion. We are as often the bystanders, witnesses to grace, as we are the grace-bearers (the charitokos, as it were) or even midwives; and often enough we do not see the end of grace as it is worked out. And yet these are honorable and saintly roles. The cultus of the Holy Family is deserving of our consideration, for Jesus was as much in need of a father as of a mother.

Therefore let us wait with Joseph for the sacred birth, and worship with him the holy child. And let us receive with him the visit of the shepherds, and marvel at the wonder of the incarnation, even if we, like him, sleep before the last glorious morn, laid to rest in the promise and hope of that day's fulfillment.

The Church of the Unchecked Brain

A particular Episcopal catchphrase has attracted attention of late due to its appearance in the letter to the church from the Taskforce for Re-Imagining the Episcopal Church: "you don’t need to leave your mind at the door." Robert Hendrickson wishes we would stop saying this, and so do I, and his reasons are largely my reasons for saying so.

But let me be blunter about it. "Checking your mind at the door" is a code phrase signifying on the one hand the anti-intellectual climate ascribed to the Southern Baptists, and on the other the rigid dogmatism ascribed to the Roman Catholics. Now, there's no doubt that we do serve as a refuge from some people who find either extreme impossible to live in as a churchman. But that isn't our mission; it's merely a beneficial side effect of the way Anglicans are supposed to do theology. We are supposed to have a theological tradition which ranges over the entirety of Christian thought, but which lacks a magisterial commitment to a single program dictated by the hierarchy.

But what it means in practice is that we have made our church, in far too many places, the chaplaincy of a particular and narrow segment of the upper middle class: college-educated and in a perpetual state of rebellion against a perceived (and generally assumed to be politically conservative) establishment. Therefore "not checking one's mind at the door" means that we have priests and even bishops telling people that they ought not to believe in core tenets which they then recite as part of the Creed. It means, in practice, that the concrete notions of the Anglican tradition are deprecated in favor of the alien notions of Tillich and his fellow modernist travellers. It comes to mean, in practice, "we don't believe any of that primitive stuff." As Hendrick observes, "much of our culture already thinks that we have checked our brain at the door simply for believing at all," so we've positioned ourselves perfectly for those who want church for the aesthetic or "spiritual" experience, without those nasty religious commitments.

Thus there is now a constant struggle between those who still have a commitment to the religion of our forefathers, and those whose evangelistic targets are those intellectual progressives who find the Unitarians lacking in poetry, the Ethical Culture Society lacking in God, and the atheists lacking in couth. Increasingly those of a more conservative cultural bent have thrown in the towel because they are held in such contempt and treated as heretics in this supposedly tolerant church. The church has become more narrow-minded and expresses, all too often, the very mental closure that is supposed to be a selling point. And I, too, have experienced the ignorance, the lack of theological curiosity, and the theological rigidity which Hendrick observes among our clergy. Ignorance is not of itself a fault, if acknowledged and if one be open to education, and likewise a lack of curiosity; but to brag about our intellectual tradition while mired in either is hypocrisy, as is the spurious claim to open-mindedness. It all amounts in the end to a class appeal to the kind of person who doesn't notice, because they share the prejudices of the clerisy.

And it is the class signal which is the most bitter. Back in England the Anglican church and its worship were part and parcel of the culture, and both the day laborer and the lord of the manor were expected to worship in the same place under the same rite, if not in the same pew. In the USA we have gradually abandoned this, so that while there are a few of the old colonial gentry who continue to attend out of a sense of noblesse oblige or because they feel it would be too lowering to go elsewhere, our emphasis on being the intellectual church leaves no room for those in the lower classes for whom education is a stigma rather than a mark of social standing. Even our potential college-educated recruits are turned away by our commitment to the intellectual and social program of liberal academia, because they did not frequent that side of campus.

Above all, the self-congratulation in this catchphrase is deeply corrosive to the soul. It stinks of "We thank thee, Lord, that we are not like other Christians." Well, except that we probably wouldn't say "thee", nor "Lord" for that matter, since That Word has fallen out of favor among our class; We are, after all, not only better than those of other churches, but also our forefathers in our own church. This needs to end. It's about time we instead said, "OK, Lord God, have mercy on us for our pride and arrogance."

In Case You Didn't Know, Spong Has a New Book Out

So here I am on Facebook, and someone puts up a link to a RNS puff piece on Jack Spong, who, it is said in the title, "has no regrets." Well, I would suppose he wouldn't. And I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this piece is really a book tie-in, or that the long, long list of those who hold Spong anathema aren't given any significant voice.

And I suppose I shouldn't be the last surprised that the writer so soft-pedals Spong's legacy: a greatly diminished diocese, a record of heretical theologizing, and a tradition of divisive controversialism. The 2011 statistics are out, and it should surprise nobody that with the exception of Average Sunday Attendance the statistical trends of the last four years show no overall change from the consistent decline seen from the turn of this century, so that I am pretty safe in predicting that the 2012 numbers will leave membership below a hundred ninety thousand and ASA below six hundred twenty thousand, and this year's numbers will show declines from that. And as Spong continues to be invited into churches to push his idiosyncratic heresies, we continue to find bishops who cannot commit to the most basic tenets of the faith. Preaching has been so captured by the socio-political inclinations of the liberal upper middle class that I should to have been surprised to told that the gospel story of the healing of the ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19 for those who check up on that sort of thing) is somehow about the social action we should do, rather than being a type of the rejection of Jesus by the Jews.

But the point, after all, is not serious engagement with Spong's datedly-wrong theology (Tillich is, after all, so late-1950s), nor a balanced historical recollection (which would lay bare the breadth of disagreement with Spong's later ideas), but rather to present him as a noble, heroic dissident in order to make his books more salable to the godless ex-Catholic intelligentsia whom the booksellers see as the surviving market for this kind of work. As for myself, I have no interest at all in what Spong has to say at this late date; I only wish that the people at the Religious News Service (not to mention the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia), who are supposed to know better, would cease this hagiography.

Our Earthly Rulers Falter

I don't really want to get into politics here much, especially considering the many times I have excoriated our church leaders for doing the same. But it occurred to me this morning how apropos Chesterton's words are in the present shutdown crisis. The walls of greed do entomb us; the swords of scorn do divide. Therefore I do pray that He may take away our pride, and that we be bound in the living tether, and raise us united. So be it, Amen.

One Myth About The Washington Post

... and that myth would be that they have any commitment to decent religion reporting.

The first of all questions asked of anyone about Jesus, by Jesus, is of course "who do you say that I am?" So when we get a column in the Washington Post claiming to explain Five myths about Jesus, when one reads the byline and finds that the author is Reza Aslan of Zealot fame, one can already presume to guess that the "myth" in question is that any part of the gospels can be taken seriously, and that one can expect a rationalization typical of Bultmann's followers.

And that, indeed, is exactly what we get. It's not necessary to go through all five claims, as most of the faults of the argument are manifested in the first claim: that Jesus was not born in Bethlehem. Well, one can go through all sorts of attacks upon the gospel narrative, but when all is said and done, it comes down to a 21st century apostate (not to mince words about it) arguing about whether the narrative is reasonable, not whether or not it is true. History, however, is frequently unreasonable: what is reasonable about the king of Greece dying of an infected bite from a monkey and then being succeeded by his own father, who was in turn succeeded by his eldest son? It is a preposterous tale, and of course everyone knows that the second son isn't king first, but nonetheless this is the true tale of the Greek monarchy, whose improbable course was not ended until the 1970s.

There comes a point when arguing that the narrative is unreasonable reduces to nothing more than a preference for a different narrative. The possibility that Luke didn't have all his details quite right doesn't prove that Jesus wasn't born in Bethlehem. There's no positive evidence that Pilate didn't do more or less what the gospels maintain, and it should be pointed out that the gospels are basically in agreement through this passage: it's the most strongly conserved part of the narrative. There's no proof that Jesus wasn't properly buried, just that this is the currently fashionable idea.

And then we get to the sixth, missing myth, because Aslan apparently didn't have the nerve to step up to the myth of the resurrection. Or perhaps the Post editors didn't have the nerve to allow it to remain in the article, but in any case that's the only one that really matters. Since Jesus is risen, there's not a lot of point in quibbling over how much the Church got the rest of the story right. If one wants to argue over whether Jesus had siblings, well, that's a doctrinal point which doesn't affect the core; if one wants to quibble about the number of disciples, I think that's fixing a problem which isn't a real problem. But as far as trusting the gospel story: well, if you're a Christian, why not believe it? And why should you worry about what some apostate modernist feels is improbable?

And beyond this, I don't buy the implication from the Post that Aslan is someone worth heeding. I've long ago rejected the modernist program of scriptural criticism, but even then I don't see a source for his implied authority as a teacher. As I see it, he's just another rationalist repeating the same old tired arguments. If you're a believer, the first thing you should do before reading anything like this in the paper or in a general news magazine is to find the next article and skip to it. Very occasionally such article prove to be educational, but the odds are against it.

UPDATE: Rick Allen has pointed out this review of Aslan's book from the Jewish Review of Books. It's an intelligent examination of the books many problems which more or less cements my resolve not to subject myself to his arguments, from a perspective which could hardly be called apologetic.

A Note On Music as a Ministry

The most important musical ministry is to the musicians.

Numbered Among the Sheep or the Goats, on Facebook

Matt Marino has a confession to make:

Facebook gets a lot of grief, but I have a confession, I like Facebook. It allows me to peek into people’s joys and struggles, rejoice and grieve with friends, and spurs me to pray more. I keep in touch with people I would never see.

He talks about Todd, a not-really-friend from school who remembered him, because he treated Todd decently when, I gather, others didn't. I would have liked to think of myself in the same terms, but really, I wasn't so much a jerk in those days as I was held captive by my own considerable problems. I cannot imagine that I was ever numbered among the "cool kids"; it was hard enough not to be a pariah, but I think that by graduation I had the respect of most of my classmates, purchased to some degree at the cost of a lot of people not coming back after my first or second year there. At least one of them I surely treated poorly, perhaps for his more exaggerated version of my social drawbacks.

My Facebook friends list is a strange intersection of family (not many of those), school friends (high school and college), church people, and the larger Anglican world who I am privileged to know mostly through this blogging. I don't get a lot of friends requests, but if I ask for a list of suggestions, there are always plenty whom I know in some sense. And then I think, "do I know them well enough to presume upon their acquaintance? Are they someone who will bury me in trivialities and forwarded messages? Am I going to come in conflict with them if I say the sort of things I might say here?" And so I am quite the coward, and I keep my friends list pretty short; and there is much I do not talk about on Facebook.

The grace I give is thus stunted. I can argue with strangers at length, but to do so with friends consumes my spirit. I am a poor comforter, for I do not know what to say. And yet I do hope for the small grace that I do give. I hope that all the many words that I write here given people hope for their faith and their church, even among all my cries against the wrongs that I see there.

And so must we all hope, and work for a presence here which uplifts those who fall.

"I need Church, because Church reminds me of everything that's important."

Tara Woodard-Lehman, the Presbyterian Chaplain at Princeton, answers the question: Do You Really Need Church?

The New Life of Eternal Meaning

A sermon preached for Proper 13, Year C, Track 2; these are also the readings in the 1979 BCP lectionary for the same date.

Most people know of the the book of Ecclesiastes through the song made popular by the Byrds: To every thing, turn, turn, turn, There is a season, turn, turn, turn... That lesson doesn't come up in the Revised Common Lectionary, though churches which neglect to observe the Feast of the Holy Name may choose to use it on New Years Day. But we do not observe January 1 for its own sake, and today is this book's only appearance in the readings, placing it with such lectionary losers as Haggai and Habbakuk.

And, well, the biblical scholars aren't too thrilled with this text either. Now Job—there's a worthy book, commented upon by all and sundry. But Ecclesiastes: well, it's so whiny. King Solomon, the supposed author, sounds like a pompous teenager, rambling on about how hopeless it all is and how we're all going to die and how fickle fate is, as if nobody else in the history of creation had ever noticed any of these things. He's only outdone by the prodigal son's older brother, the one who whines to Dad, “how come you never gave me a party?” Thus the preacher tediously belabors this transitory life, and the lectionary grants it this one hearing and turns away, preferring the patriarchs, the Law, and the prophets, in which the divine message is more patently heard.

This preacher is said in the text to be Solomon, the biblical epitome of wisdom, just as his father David signifies poetry and music. And yet, for all his wisdom, his kingdom hardly survives his passing: his son Rehoboam rashly answered those who questioned how he would rule, and Israel was divided from Judah; the kingdom would never again be united. If you are a wise biblical scholar, you are supposed to stroke you chin and say, “well of course this book was not authored by the real Solomon,” and if one looks at the text it seems rather choppy at points, with interjections that seem as if another may have written them long after; there's even a two verse postscript. But this is all quite irrelevant: the point is not history, nor personal testimony, but wise counsel.

So, what of this wisdom? From one angle (the long-suffering parent of teenager angle) it seems trivial, trite, and obvious. Worldly things—position, power, wealth, even life itself are transitory. A man may build, and those that follow sweep it away; a woman creates a thing of beauty, and it is forgotten and lost. People talk of having a meaningful life, as though we lived to compose episodes in some great saga; but the pages of our lives are written, often in the ink of deepest suffering, and they are blown in the wind, burnt or crumbled to dust. Often our stories teach nothing beyond futility, or at best serve as cautionary tales (largely forgotten or ignored) to those who might emulate our sins and foolishness.

We few who are well-off may, for a time, escape acknowledgment of these “truths”; if our projects do not fall quickly to ruination, at least we are fed, and housed, and have some respite from personal disaster. We therefore, paradoxically, have the leisure to contemplate the transitory nature of our fortunes, while those who live in peril of starvation, homelessness, destitution and injury have to not the luxury to take up the quest for meaning. To live on is meaning and story enough, perhaps.

So here we have this wisdom, stupidly obvious yet deeply and troublingly undeniable. Pleasure passes; wealth comes and goes; death erases all, sooner or later. Even to the well-off, the hand of disaster touches us here and there, and people seek meaning and purpose even in such injury. But God does not promise any such thing. Job's suffering has no more meaning than to test his endurance and to prod his friends into fatuous assurances; Solomon has not even that. All his wealth, his power, the glory of his rule: they are vanity. The kingdom is undone within a year of his death, and soon enough Israel is conquered and dispersed, with the Samaritans the sole surviving trace thereof. Judah is captured and taken away, and Solomon's temple is razed and looted; the people, the Jews, weep in Babylon.

And yet, hope is given through grace. God's wrath against his faithless people is not limitless; He remembered his promise to Abraham, and after a time Judaea was restored, and a new temple raised upon the ruins of the old. This too came to an end, and the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and dispersed the Jewish people, and though a third Israel was established, its survival is precarious. But in the fullness of time, the promises revealed through the prophets were made manifest through the birth of the Incarnate Christ, Jesus son of Mary. He lived as one of us, and was put to death as the final sacrifice for all people, and rose again in triumph over death, breaking that meaningless which has beset us since Adam and Eve were first led astray by the serpent. And thus God Himself, through his own incarnation, gave in Jesus' life a new meaning, a story we read in scripture, which means our salvation if we bury ourselves in it through baptism and feed upon it at the altar.

We thus have salvation given to us, yet, worldly vanity nonetheless continues. A man builds storehouses on earth, and death comes and takes it from him, and him from his wealth; and will the ledgers of his banks and estates tell out his value? No! The sheep and goats will not be divided on such a basis, but on what treasure is laid up in heaven, through our faithfulness to what we have been taught; not only in our lips, but in our lives. As Paul says, we must cast off sin, and live in Godly charity; and if we be wealthy, Jesus is rash enough to suggest purchasing a ticket to the new Jerusalem by crassly buying friends through charitable works! And while I suspect that he was being more than a little sarcastic, it is clear that, as he says today, wealth stored up here will avail us not if not brought to bear for God's work, rather than just our own ephemeral ends.

Our God is a mighty fortress, sang Martin Luther, and he prevails amid the flood of mortal ills. But goods and kindred do go, and this mortal life also; except perhaps for those doomed to live in the last days, when the wrath of God is finally spent on the old earth, the body will be killed, by age, disease, or disaster. All that is earthly shall pass away, and all earthly works shall eventually prove vain, unless they lift up the new Kingdom, which is founded in Jesus and which he alone rules. Creation is good; God saw this in the beginning when he made it. But it shall pass away, and though we do not revile it, and we care for it, as God commanded, it is not in things material that we have hope, but in things spiritual: the grace of God, revealed in Christ, in which is the new life of eternal meaning.

I Would Not, Could Not, in a Church

Theodor Seuss Geisel was, I am told, a lifelong member of a LCMS parish in Springfield, Massachusetts.

This, of course, was perpetrated in an Anglican parish.

The Interesting Thing About Religion

Matt Gunter has posted a letter from Evelyn Underhill to Cosmo Lang (then Archbishop of Canterbury) on the subject of the purpose of religion and the need for "greater interiority and cultivation of the personal life of prayer" in the church's clergy. It is a message that is ever more pertinent in today's Episcopal Church, where it seems that matters of public policy come first, and where matters of theology are purely discretionary. There is no hope for the increase of the gospel where its ministers are not interested in what it tells us about God, and where its ministers are not in converse with that God. A priest without a regular rule of prayer is spiritually malnourished, and cannot properly feed his charges; a priest who is not conversant with the theology which is handed down from the fathers, and who does not walk in the path which they have written for her, cannot properly bring her people into the same knowledge. There is nothing wrong with preaching for action, but it is not all there is to preaching, and people can be inspired to action elsewhere. But it is only in the church that people can be brought to know Christ and to live in him, and to do that, those people much be led into religion, that is, the right relationship with the divine.

Symbolo Fidei

Derek Olsen has pointed to a post by Bosco Peters arguing against the use of the Creed in liturgy. Olsen objects, and so do I. My principle reason is essentially along the lines of one of the responses:

Third, I used to be in a parish that omitted the recitation of the Nicene Creed contrary to the American rubrics. One motivation might have been the publicly expressed doubts of some of the clergy and staff in what was proclaimed there. At some point, they also started to celebrate the Eucharist with prayers of their own creation that better expressed their faith in Christ. These prayers certainly had new energy, but they were a way of working out clerical doubts, not a way of better edifying the gathered community.

I notice, for instance, that Fr. Peters's "liturgical affirmation" edits away one of the points which most commonly gives rise to reservations: the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. Presumably other parishes would dispense with God the Father or with anything suggesting the physical actuality of Jesus' resurrection. The situation is worse than just "there are an awful lot of Christians [...] who do not grasp the basics of the Faith;" there are a lot of clerics who lack that grasp, or who have turned away from the catholic doctrines.

For the creed is the central symbol of our catholicity; it represents what binds into the faithful across the ages who were and are and will be linked into common worship within the Christian faith. It is the answer to the question, "why do we come here?" The anaphora answers a different question: "what worship did Jesus command?" It tells what to do, of a Sunday, but it is the Creed that explains why we bother to do what Jesus commands. Therefore one is not redundant to the other; I think it is also of some importance that the anaphora is prayed on our behalf, but the Creed is recited by all. It is a spiritual comfort to me, and a powerful affirmation of faithful unity, to think that all over the world, worshippers turn to the altar and repeat the basic principles of the faith, what we all believe.

I am glad to hear that Fr. Peters preaches on the creed; so do I, and so have most priests I have had as rectors; and all priests should do likewise. But I do not see this teaching as a substitute for saying it; it is necessary insurance that those who say it understand what they say. (An earlier version of this could be read as implying that Fr. Peters's own beliefs might be unorthodox. I regret this implication and have tried to remove it.)

Barad-dur and the Multiplex

Life parodies art sometimes, and it's at it again. Over at RealClearChurch they're running through a list of "The Ugliest Churches in the World", and when they get to the former cathedral of the Diocese of Upper Michigan, perhaps I might be conceded a sense of relief at being able to say, "well, at least it isn't one of ours anymore." I don't know whether this cranky monument to bad 1960s modernism was the ugliest Episcopal building ever; surely there is some Brutalist blockhouse out there somewhere I've missed (though those were more likely to be Roman Catholic), but this is definitely in the category of "so determinedly peculiar they must either be churches or forgotten Yugoslavian war memorials".

OK, so the diocese of Northern Michigan, having failed to elected a Buddhist bishop, became one of several dioceses which had to close its cathedral. So they sold it off, and it was bought by an evangelical megachurch whose Average Sunday Attendance probably exceeds that of the entire Episcopal diocese. And part of the reason for this is that they built a whole new megachurch building right next to the ex-cathedral. It's in one of the currently fashionable "emergent" styles, which is to say it looks exactly like a ten screen cinema multiplex, hip to the point of having neither a cross nor even a name over the door. Instead, the church website's URL in shiny letters runs across the sleek aluminum sheathing of the entrance canopy.

I personally do not go to church for a "fun, relevant, genuine experience with God" (which is what you get in the multiplex sanctuary, apparently), but then what appears to be the difference between this and what happens in the "old" building is that the latter lacks "fun" and is "acoustic" (which does not apparently mean that the bigger space is an advance in sacred telepathy, but rather that the guitars are not amplified). Either way "relevance" appears to call for a large video display behind where the altar is/was. Where this leaves Anglicanism, I don't know. It was probably possible to have a decently Anglican service in the ex-cathedral in its former state, but everything about its new occupants screams to me that I will feel profoundly unwelcome and alienated there. On the other hand, I cannot honestly say that the multiplex church is ugly; it is merely a profoundly banal caricature of evangelical (as opposed to mainline) modernism. I think I would feel more prayerful in a corner of the parking lot, looking at whatever weed might have escaped the maw of the tractors it must take to mow the lawn there.