On My Way to the Higher Countries

Tagged By Carrie

2008-06-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

A - Attached or single: Delightfully attached. At the hip...
B - Best Friend: Betty, Art, Joshua, Jon, Nathan W, and Nathan H.
C - Cake or Pie: Yes, please!
D - Day of the Week: Friday afternoons...the weekend seems just about eternal right now, beer in hand, sun shining down.

E - Essential Item: Book and Computer (sadly enough about that second one...bleech...)

F - Favorite Color: The color of the mountains and ocean under a clear sky.
G - Gummi Bears or Worms: Worms. More tart and chewy.

H - Home town: Port Townsend, WA
I - Indulgences: Beer. Tillamook Chocolate Mudslide.
J - January or July?: January in New England, July in Seattle.
K - Kids: 13 or so...
L - Life is incomplete without: God. And books, friends, and beer.
M - Marriage Date: to be determined…
N - Number of Siblings: 3 brothers.
O - Oranges or Apples: Apples, but oranges have their place too. In juice.
P - Phobias or Fears: Spiders (in the house) Early death after a meaningless life. Lingering death. (Prefer to be blown up or just shot if I have to go young. Though, I do plan a grand exit the last 10 years or so, acting as crazy as possible while still keeping power of attorney.)
Q - Quote: Sursum Corda
R - Reason To Smile: Dogs. Particularly Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds. Kids. Sunshine. Cool breezes on hot days. The smell of Betty's hair. Sailboats, the beautiful 1989 M5 I saw on the freeway today. Garden. Mts. Rainier and Baker.

S - Season: Fall in New England, Summer in Seattle.
T - Tag Three: Too lazy.
U - Unknown fact about me: My sinuses make dolphin noises. I was also raised by pirates. (Seriously!)
V - Vegetarian or Oppressor of Animal: If God hadn't wanted us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of tofu. Truly though...I like it mooing when it hits the plate.
W - Worst Habit: Their name is legion...
X - Rays or Ultrasounds: I don't have health insurance...so for now, 'it's not a tumah'
Y - Your favorite food: Tie: Thai and Lebanese
Z - Zodiac Sign: Taurus. I can also produce the bull.

Privilege...Courtesy of Beth

2008-06-15T23:41:00.000-07:00

This exercise in recognizing privilege was developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University.

Directions: Bold the statements that apply to you.

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.
3. Mother went to college.
4. Mother finished college.
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher social class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18. (I paid for them.)
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.
16. Went to a private high school.
17. Went to summer camp.
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child. (My mom painted it?)
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.
24. Your parents owned their own house or apartment before you left home.
25. You had your own room as a child.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course.
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

I'm a Godfather

2008-05-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Here's the proof...
He name is Ainsley Elaine Mahar.
To date her primary responses to me have included falling asleep and throwing up. Both of which I've had before from others. I'm looking forward to more complex and rich interactions in the future. Particularly when it comes to teenage boyfriends...

I Love my German Shepherd

2008-04-07T13:56:00.001-07:00

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.3323/pub_detail.asp

If You Love the Poor, Become a Capitalist...

2008-03-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/cuckoo-for-switzerland

Why I Don't Watch the News...

2008-03-13T21:53:00.000-07:00

I don't watch TV. I'm rather busy and it seems to be largely a waste of time. Not to mention it turns ones brains to mush and makes an all too mold-able clay of the heart. That being said, TV News is the worst aspect of TV...

To wit,

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-02-13.html#feature

Lately...

2008-02-11T22:16:00.000-08:00

So,
It's been quite some time since my last post. A lot has happened, and seemingly not much has happened at all. That's how it always feels to me when I survey a chunk of my life. I know some important things have happened, but rarely have I slowed down enough to take notice of them. I need more liturgy in my life, and a little less desperation. Anyhoo, for those of you who care, here is what's up:

I've moved back to Seattle to pursue my girlfriend Betty. She flew out to to Boston, and we drove across the country in Emma, my Black Honda Civic, with WAY too much crap packed into and on the car. We live in a glorious and spacious land.

Betty and I are getting on swimmingly.

I miss the North Shore quite a lot, and will never carp about New England ever again. It's a positively wonderful place. (Particularly in light of Christ Church, Beer and Bull, the sunny winters, the vicious wild Turkeys, the Wrights, and the Mahars)

Times have been hard here in Seattle. I've been homeless up until a few weeks ago and my job has been unpleasant to say the least. Hopefully in the next couple days I will have a decent job for the first time since I've moved back. Though, I'm thankful to God for my amazing friends (particularly Jon, Arthur, Josh, and Nathan) who have been no small help in this time.

I've been working at a call center for Starbucks. Daily I contemplate seppuku as an act of protest. It's subhuman work, being a living cog in a dead machine. If there were a computer program with the adaptive and improvisational abilities of human being, we'd be replaced before the week was out. Our flesh and blood is merely provisional. We are expendable, and treated accordingly. Though, in all honestly, I do suffer from a bit of an entitlement mentality because I've worked sucky jobs for too long in my own (rather spoiled) estimation.

I've decided that the following things are spiritually important on a scale that I never realized before:
Tea
Homebrewing
Gardening
The keeping of horses and other livestock
Wooden sailboats(you that know me will readily acknowledge that I've always seen sailing in spiritual terms, but now things have moved on to another metaphysical iteration...ask if you're interested)

Sacramentalism continues to more fully work it's way into the nooks and crannies of life. Epistemologically and ethically it's been particularly relevant of late. The beat of the bird's wings is the beat of my heart is the rhythm of God's masterpiece.

Sigur Ros is positively the most beautiful contemporary music I've ever encountered.

I've come to miss the following people acutely: the Mahars, the Wrights, the Conrows, Lydia Frazier, Jurgen, Mario, and Bart; George Wingate, Thomas Howard, and the rest of Beer and Bull as well, the couple who hosted Beer and Bull (whose names I can't remember right now, to my great shame!). The Fee family. Richard Lints. Pete and Christine Alvarez. Arica Heald. Mark Dirksen and Beth Maynard. Matt Miller. Eve Amendola.

I'm coaching my old debate team from college. It's fun, and it pays well. How nice to get paid for something that you enjoy doing and really believe in, so to speak.

I live in a community house, where I often lead liturgical prayer, and have many conversations that hopefully bring a little bit of Christ into people's lives.

My car has been stolen. I had such fun plans for a new camo paint job and some interesting decals on the side too...this has been a significant financial setback for me.

I have become a neo-Thomist as far as I can tell. I've been reading and taking notes as if this were true, anyway. Hopefully Fordham, St. Louis, or Boston College take a liking to me.

Ironically, the poorer I've gotten and the harder things have been, the more conservative I've become. For a decent (though not exhaustive) summation of some of my thoughts, see this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalist_Conservatism
I'm open to discussion and expansion on such matters. Unlike many of my liberal friends.

All that to say, it's now the Lenten season. Reflection, self-denial, participation with Christ, ultimately...repentance and hope.

I hope, for those of you that care, that this catches you up a bit

Love,
t.

Christmas Wishlist

2007-11-29T14:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/V1IK967LXSNO

Seminary

2007-04-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

CAVEAT LECTOR (Reader Beware!)
It should be known that I wrote this at a point of deep despair and resentment against the institution I am getting ready to leave now. Things have gotten markedly better. I am not angry anymore like I was when I composed this. Now it's just funny.

What I’ve Learned at Seminary
By Troy A. Henley

1. Pretty much no one cares about you, and the ones that do have no power except to commiserate with you.

2. You are on your own. No one is going to help you. If you find help, they’ll have no money or power to change anything. The people with the money and power are about as interested in you as they are the plague. Correction, the plague has a bit of mystique and cache about it, being deadly and all. i.e. “I met the Plague once. He was cool. I liked his Ferrari.” You, on the other hand, are pond scum. Deal with it.

3. We are kind to each other only inasmuch as it assuages our consciences for not really giving a damn.

4. God may not like you after all. Thanks Calvin.

5. Christians are as dysfunctional, if not more so, than the folks ‘in the world.’

6. Life is hard. Really hard. It doesn’t get any better. (see point #4)

7. If you’re white and poor, you’re a non-entity. In more ways than one.

8. Common sense has no place here. At all. Ever. Esoteric hyper-spirituality or rote rationalism are your two choices. Hurry up and choose. You’re holding up the line.

9. Don’t be too fat, no one will want to date you.

10. Don’t be too skinny, no one will want to date you.

11. Don’t be different, no one will want to date you.

12. Don’t be like everyone else, you’ll be boring. And no one will want to date you.

13. Don’t be Arminian, no one will think you have a brain.

14. Don’t be Calvinist, no one will think you have a heart.

15. Be loud, self-aggrandizing and puerile is all your actions and mannerisms, and people will respect you for it.

16. Be kind or at all sophisticated in speech and manner and you’ll be thought strange. Or a flirt.

17. Never flirt with anyone or ask anyone out (You lecher, you’re supposed to be spiritual!)

18. Always flirt and ask people out (What, are you too good for me?)

19. If you are not perfect in every way, become androgynous and accept your fate.

20. Don’t break taboos. Ever.

21. You will be gossiped about. A lot if you have even a whiff of individuality about you.

22. Be happy. Or else…

23. If you can’t be happy, at least be drunk.

24. There is always one good cop who likes to talk with you and share a smoke on the steps. Then there is always a bad cop. He will shoot you. Then ticket your dead body for littering.

25. Don’t be too smart, or prone to too many intelligent questions or conversations, no one will think you love Jesus.

26. Don’t love Jesus too obviously, people will think you never ask any good questions, or can hold up your end of a conversation.

27. Practice before you come.

a. Have someone you trust beat you with a hardwood dowel several times a week for the year leading up to your departure for Seminary. The dowel should be at least as big around as your thumb. Preferably bigger. Bible College can be good practice also.

b. Prepare for fun and engaging roommate experiences. Sleep with a wet dog in the room and/or dry your soaked gym shoes on the heater. Stare at the wall for hours to get accustomed to the level of intellectual discourse you’ll soon be taking part in.

c. Wear a hair shirt

28. Get ready for New England culture:

a. Find the surliest drunk you know. Now shackle your legs together. Keep him liquored up and listen to “Shipping out to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys on repeat.

b. Administer blunt force trauma to your skull until all your ‘r’ sounds become ‘ahh’ sounds. Redeploy aforementioned ‘r’ sounds as a suffix to words ending with vowels. i.e. “sofer” as opposed to “sofa” or "cah" rather than "car."

c. Driving: Take your family sedan off road while having your friends do their best to hit you with their cars. Scream obscenities and practice unkind gestures for quick use in the cabin of the car.

d. Start hating where you’re from right now. No place will ever be as cool as New England. And I’ll kick your lily ass if you tell me different. Wait...you don't like the Yankees do you?

29. Bring a snow shovel.

30. Adopt the mindset of a farmed mushroom: Be content living in the dark and having shit thrown on you.

31. Always check your mail. Notices of loan default and forced “F” grades go there first.

32. Eat at the cafeteria a lot. You’ll need the protective layer of blubber to see you through the winter. Fatty.

Stupid Things I Think about While Praying...

2007-02-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

So, this morning in Church during the "Prayers of the People, Form IV" my mind wandered. Now, before anyone goes 'ahah, proof the deadness and woodeness of that silly old liturgical Christianity!' let me say one thing. Everyone wanders off during prayer, and the beauty of the liturgy is that it can go on without me. I'm not conjuring up spiritual feelings and fervor when they just aren't there. I can come with my humanity, my broken-ness, my sinfulness, (and even occasionally, some HONEST fervor), And still the real worship of God moves forward, even when I don't because of my weakness. The liturgy takes bringing glory to God off my shoulders. The liturgy takes into account my weakness, and makes a way for a less than perfect shmoe like me to know myself in my sinfulness, deal with my sin, know myself as an object of God's love, and then to give Him glory and thanks, and receive Him into myself in fellowship through the Eucharist, and through the Spirit...

More importantly, when I do check back in, I still know whats going on, and I'm not fishing around for some hyper-spiritual mish-mash to recover my appearances of holiness.

Anyway...that being said, what I really wanted to talk about is how much I am amazed at my own weirdness. This morning, during prayer, after the lady that was leading us in prayer (I was doing good up until that point, staying on the ball...) asked God to 'help us Lord to use the resources of the earth rightly, to your glory and to serve others...' my mind began it's first little trip. I though, 'mmm, I like using the the earth...hiking is fun...what if I go hiking in the Southwest someday....what about rattlesnakes? What if one crawls into my sleeping bag for warmth? What would I do?" And so it went....I thought out the options: a fast exit, hoping the little bastard wouldn't get a hold of me before I got out. Perhaps I could slip my arm out quietly and push down on the outside of the sleeping bag between my self and the snake so I could get out with the snake pinned to one side. Maybe I could just go the 'direct' route and keep a big stick near the head of my sleeping bag to whack it to death...

I came to somewhere near the end around where the lady was asking God to have mercy on those who had died and take them into His presence. Then I heard my own voice...
"Is that really want I sound like? Man, I must be distracting...I hope I'm not distracting Nathan....shit, I'm distracting myself...where are we again?"

Intellectual Cowardice

2007-01-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

I can bear many things, one thing I cannot, however, are those who abandon meaningful conversations, or refuse to give reasons for actions that have ramifications for others. Perhaps they do not want to go to the trouble of defending themselves and making sense of their actions. Perhaps they just don't like to act in ways that make sense. Perhaps they are afraid of Truth, thinking He will enslave them. They forget that ultimately we will all serve something, whether we are conscious of it or not, and that the only real choice is whether your Master will be beneficent or cruel. Will you be driven by it to Death, or to Life? I am not claiming to be Truth, or even to being particularly truth-full myself. But I know the difference between one who seeks, and one who just doesn't give a damn. Albert Borgmann speaks eloquently to this. To wit,

“At times sullenness is voiced in telling phrases. Indolence comes to the fore in the expression, so often delivered with finality, “it’s my choice.” What sounds like the assumption of ultimate responsibility is usually the flourish of moral retreat, the refusal to discuss, explain, and justify a decision, and the retirement to self-indulgence.”

Albert Borgmann in Crossing the Postmodern Divide

A good article from aldaily.com on Free Speech in France...yes it matters to us too...

2007-01-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

The Redeker Affair
Christian Delacampagne

This past September, Robert Redeker, a French high-school philosophy teacher at Saint-Orens-de-Gameville (a small city near Toulouse) and the author of several scholarly books, published an op-ed article in the newspaper Le Figaro. The piece, a response to the controversy over remarks about Islam made a week earlier by Pope Benedict XVI, was titled “What Should the Free World Do in the Face of Islamist Intimidation?” It was a fierce critique of what Redeker called Islam’s attempt “to place its leaden cloak over the world.” If Jesus was “a master of love,” he wrote, Muhammad was “a master of hatred.” Of the three “religions of the book,” Islam was the only one that overtly preached holy war. “Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites reject and delegitimize violence,” Redeker concluded, “Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred.”

Having been posted online, the article was read all across France and in other countries as well, and was quickly translated into Arabic. Denunciations of Redeker’s “insult of the prophet” spread across the Internet. Within a day after publication, the piece was being condemned on al Jazeera by the popular on-air preacher (and unofficial voice of Osama bin Laden) Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi. In Egypt and Tunisia, the offending issue of Le Figaro was banned.

As for Redeker himself, he soon received a large number of threats by letter and e-mail. On an Islamist website, he was sentenced to death in a posting that, in order to facilitate a potential assassin’s task, also provided his address and a photograph of his home. Fearful for himself and his family, Redeker sought protection from the local police, who transferred the case to the national counter-espionage authorities. On their advice, Redeker, his wife, and three children fled their home and took shelter in a secret location. Since then, they have moved from city to city, at their own expense, under police protection. Another teacher has been appointed by the French Ministry of Education to replace Redeker, who will probably never see his students again.

As a long-time friend of Robert Redeker, I was, of course, deeply disturbed by these events and worried about his and his family’s safety. My distress was only compounded by the reaction to the Redeker affair of the French establishment. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was virtually the only public official who took an honorable position, declaring that this “fatwa” against a French intellectual was “unacceptable.” A group of centrist intellectuals, including Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, also issued an appeal on Redeker’s behalf and in defense of France’s “most fundamental liberties.”

But the vast majority of responses, even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher. The Communist mayor of Saint-Orens-de-Gameville, echoed by the head of Redeker’s school, deplored the fact that he had included his affiliation at the end of the article. France’s two largest teachers’ unions, both of them socialist, stressed that “they did not share Redeker’s convictions.” The leading leftist human-rights organizations went much farther, denouncing his “irresponsible declarations” and “putrid ideas.” A fellow high-school philosophy teacher, Pierre Tévanian, declared (on a Muslim website) that Redeker was “a racist” who should be severely punished by his school’s administration. Even Gilles de Robien, the French minister of education, criticized Redeker for acting “as if he represented the French educational system”—a bizarre charge against the author of a piece clearly marked as personal opinion.

Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his “regret.” The editorial board of Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, characterized Redeker’s piece as “excessive, misleading, and insulting.” It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,” implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.

To be sure, Redeker’s language had not been gentle. But since when has that been a requirement of intellectual discourse in France? One can often find similarly strong language in, say, Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and on whose editorial board Redeker has long served. Yet, to judge by the response to his “offense,” large sectors of the French intellectual and political establishment have carved out an exception to this hard-won tradition of open discussion: when it comes to Islam (as opposed to Christianity or Judaism), freedom of speech must respect definite limits.

How did France reach this point?

The first and most immediate explanation is that the country is about to enter an important electoral season, with races for the presidency and legislature scheduled for May of this year. As many as five million Muslims reside on French territory, and most of them are citizens eligible to vote. No political party can afford to be caught in a serious confrontation with this growing community. Moreover, memories are still fresh of the riots that roiled the suburbs of the largest French cities in the fall of 2005. Similar if less dramatic violence remains an ongoing problem in these areas, with their large populations of Muslim, French-born young people of African or North African descent, and fear of another conflagration has steered the French political class away from anything touching on the subject of Islam.

More puzzling is the complicity of the French media. Naturally, they too wish to avoid being perceived as adversaries of the Muslim community. But they have gone beyond the mere exercise of caution. In the wake of the riots, major newspapers, magazines, and news shows have shown little interest in the sociological reality of French Islam, especially the rising influence of Islamist propaganda. Thus, it was not a journalist but the extreme-Right politician Philippe de Villiers who drew attention recently to the Islamization of the workforce at Charles de Gaulle airport. This phenomenon was hardly a secret—the airport is located in the mostly Muslim département of Seine-Saint-Denis, and hires locally—but no respectable publication saw fit to investigate it. In the face of Islamic militancy, French journalists as a class would seem to have lost their nerve and compromised their professionalism.

As for the French academic world, that is a more complicated story. Working on sensitive issues related to race and religion has never been an easy choice for a French scholar, especially one whose views fall outside the conventions of the academic Left. During the 1950’s, the great historian Fernand Braudel tried to discourage Léon Poliakov from writing a Ph.D. on anti-Semitism, a subject about which Poliakov would go on to compose many distinguished books. Years later, I too was steered away from the subject of anti-Semitism by well-intentioned people concerned about my career prospects. Having ignored their advice and published a book titled L’Invention du Racisme (1983), I was unable to find a job at the university level. Happily, I have fared better in the United States.

Today in France, research on the most contested issues of race and religion is taboo unless one exhibits the “right” politics. To speak at conferences or to be considered for important posts, a scholar must be prepared to describe the colonial era in French history as nothing less than an exercise in genocide and to denounce American policy in the Middle East as barbaric cruelty. Those who refuse to comply find themselves shut out.

A notable instance of such blacklisting occurred in 2004, when a scholar applied for a three-year position at the prestigious Collège International de Philosophie. His credentials were formidable, but when his “pro-American” views became known to one member of the committee (the candidate, it seemed, was not completely opposed to the war in Iraq), a quiet but effective campaign was organized to deny him the post. Details of the case were reported in the weekly newspaper L’Express. The name of the unjustly treated candidate was Robert Redeker.

One can point to many explanations for these extraordinary, interlocking biases, but I am convinced that their origins lie in the complex history of the relationship between France and the Arab world over the past 150 years. The dominant factor in that history, of course, has been France’s various efforts to establish an overseas dominion.

French colonialism started in Algeria in 1830, later extended to Morocco and Tunisia, and eventually reached Syria and Lebanon when, after World War I, the Versailles Treaty made France the mandatory power in those two newly established countries. In Algeria, the colonial period was the longest, lasting until 1962, and the most bitter. Its final years were stained by a bloody war of independence, in the course of which Algeria’s Muslim clerics played a crucial role, not only by supporting the military operations of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) but by making Islam the defining ideology of the war.

So fraught a historical background might be assumed to imply the persistence of a strong antagonism between the ex-colonial power and its former colonies. But, strangely enough, the reality has been just the opposite. With the exception of the aborted Suez expedition of 1956, when France was allied with Great Britain and Israel against Egypt, successive French governments have maintained notably friendly relations with the Arab countries. Indeed, if there has been one permanent trend in French diplomacy from Charles de Gaulle to François Mitterrand to Jacques Chirac, it is the country’s firm position in the pro-Arab camp.1

The foundation for this alliance was laid by de Gaulle. At the end of the Algerian war, he decided that it was vital to restore good relations with the Arab leaders, especially with the Egyptian regime, which had strongly backed the FLN. To achieve that goal, however, he had to break the diplomatic and military partnership that had existed between France and Israel since 1948. The Six-Day war of 1967 offered him the pretext he needed.

The most vivid episode of this realignment (and certainly the most famous) was de Gaulle’s remark, at a November 1967 press conference, that the Jews were “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.” The significance of this comment was not lost on the distinguished commentator and political scientist Raymond Aron, who recognized it as a classic anti-Semitic trope about the supposed Jewish thirst for power. It was de Gaulle’s signal of a new turn in French foreign policy—going beyond close relations with the Arabs to an embrace of the anti-Zionist cause.

De Gaulle’s shift reinforced other ideological trends in French society that were already strong at the time and remain powerful today. The first of these was the long-standing resistance of French Catholics to seeing Palestine—the Holy Land, the birthplace of Jesus—returned to the Jews, whom they regarded as the enemies of Christ. More practically, the Church had always sought good relations with Islamic regimes in order to protect Christian interests in the region. France’s early sympathy with Israel had strained those efforts; de Gaulle gave the Church a diplomatic asset.

Of even more enduring importance was support for de Gaulle’s about-face among ideological partisans of the “non-aligned countries,” as the third world was then called. For these elements in French politics, Zionism was just a form of Western colonialism, now backed by the brute strength of an imperialistic United States. This idea has become, over the years, nearly universal on the French Left, to say nothing of bien-pensants intellectuals elsewhere in the West. Indeed, one of the sad ironies of French politics is that the Left, through its unthinking hatred of Israel, has become much more anti-Semitic than the extreme Right, with its long and well-known history of animosity toward Jews.

A final (if often unappreciated) factor in the peculiar attitude of French elites toward the Arab world has been the influence of the country’s academic community of “Orientalists.” As a result of colonization, French universities were early in developing programs of North African and Middle Eastern studies. But the field, despite its many achievements, was tainted from the outset by some of the ugliest ideological undercurrents in French society.

The first of the great Orientalists was Louis Massignon (1883-1962), a Catholic intellectual who published his first books a century ago and, as France became embroiled in the Dreyfus affair, moved openly in anti-Semitic circles. Then along came a famous trio: Jacques Berque (1910-95), Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004), and Vincent Monteil (1913-2005). An expert on Indonesia, Monteil converted to Islam and, after World War II, subscribed to various right-wing theories denying the reality of the Holocaust. Rodinson, a Jew, was a Communist activist during the cold war. As for Berque, who grew up in colonial Morocco, he lived for so many years in Arab countries, both in North Africa and the Middle East, that with the passing of time he became progressively less able to maintain a critical distance.

Indeed, while working in the cultural section of the French embassy in Cairo in 1988, I was regaled by Berque over lunch one day with stories of his complete assimilation into Arab culture. Traveling through Iraq in the early 1970’s, he had pretended to be a Moroccan, and as such was invited by the imam of a big mosque to comment on a Qur’anic verse during the Friday sermon. Had he been discovered as an imposter, he would have risked death. But, as Berque happily told the story, his Arabic was so fluent (he was the only non-Arab member of the Egyptian Academy of Arabic Language) and his knowledge of the material so extensive that no Iraqi could have detected he was a mere Frenchman.

Nor was Berque’s identification with the Arabs strictly cultural. Looking back over his political pronouncements, one finds a clear pattern. He called Israel’s birth an illegitimate act and insisted that the Jewish state would not survive more than a few years. In 1967, he predicted that Nasser would wipe Israel off the map. In the late 1980’s, he declared that Saddam Hussein was a great socialist and secular leader who was going to bring democracy to the Middle East, and demanded that France treat him as a good friend. In his final years, he argued that Islamism might make inroads here and there, but that it could never gain much of foothold among elites in a country like Egypt.

Unfortunately, today’s heirs to this Orientalist tradition in France entertain similar biases and are no more reliable in their political judgments. Gilles Kepel, in The War for Muslim Minds (2004), has proclaimed Islamism a failure and al Qaeda a spent force, going so far as to describe the attacks of 9/11 as an act of sheer despair. Olivier Roy, the author of Globalized Islam (2004), sees Islamism as a revolutionary program that answers popular aspirations, even if it happens to express itself in reactionary terms. Another scholar, François Burgat, argues in Face to Face with Political Islam (2005) that Western countries, instead of fighting Islamist leaders, should enter into a friendly dialogue with them.

None of this is to suggest that these scholars lack knowledge of the political situation in the Arab world. But they give a distorted image of that situation—and, I believe, they do so deliberately. Eager to discourage any sense of menace that the West might feel from the direction of Islam and the Arabs, they minimize both the importance of radical Islamism and its threat to international peace and freedom. In defiance of what the Islamists themselves say, France’s Orientalists insist time and again that there is no “clash of civilizations.”

The effect of these views on the wider political discussion in France is profound. The present generation of Orientalists is omnipresent in the French media, unavoidable on radio and television. They assure the country that the progressive Islamization of European suburbs, plain for all to see, poses no danger. They suggest that the problem with Israel is its very existence. They inspire the open sympathy with Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that can be found in newspapers like Le Monde and Libération. And they encourage the use of the term “Islamophobia” (a coinage of Iranian clerics) in order to delegitimize all those who might be tempted to disagree with them—individuals like Redeker.

I am neither an Orientalist nor any kind of expert on the issue of Islamism. But I have spent years in the Middle East, as well as in other Muslim countries, and I know that the situation in the Islamic world corresponds very little to the wishful thinking of so many French scholars, journalists, and political leaders. A quick look at a world map—from Chechnya to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir, southern Thailand, and the southern Philippines—reveals that the planet’s most devastating wars are now of the jihadist type. All are fueled by Islamism.

I also know that the growing anti-Semitism one encounters in France, combined with the increasing tendency of the country’s elite to speak of Israel as a “temporary” state, is not only dangerous in itself but bad for France. A republic founded on principles of freedom and equality cannot easily accommodate such noxious ideas. Corruption is difficult to confine, and the moral and intellectual compromises that allow educated people to deny the nature and reality of today’s struggle against Islamism—a struggle facing the West as whole—soon find their way into other aspects of public life.

When I finally reached Robert Redeker by e-mail a few weeks after he had gone into hiding with his family, he was still astonished by his fate. “I never thought that such a thing could happen in our old Republican France,” he wrote to me in a short, stoic message. Neither did I. But things have changed. What was once unthinkable in France has already come to pass.

I'm Thankful for...

2006-11-24T15:03:00.000-08:00

Jesus (and other memebers of the Trinity)
Liturgical Worship
The Church Calendar
The Incarnation, and all the good things that stem from it
My Family
My Friends
Dogs and other mammals, (because being affectionate with reptiles seems to be a loosing proposition from the start...think about cuddling with an Iguana) specifically my dog Heather.
Oceans
Mountains
Creeks
Snow
Open Wilderness, be it alpine or otherwise
Sunsets
Snowboarding
German Automobiles
Beer
German Beer?
Liturgical Incense
Priestly Vestments
The Bible
New Zealand
Warm Clothes
Food in abundance
The benefits of being born in America
Hiking
Truth
Beauty
Wildebeest
Seattle, WA
Vancouver, BC
Sailing
Pipe Smoking
The Oregon Coast
Aristotle
Sir Thomas More
Albert Borgmann
My Teachers
Letter Writing
Scarves
Mellowing with age
Hookah, Yerba Mate, eating a shared meal without utensils, and anything else that forces one to sit down, speak in quieter tones, share germs, participate in a high-context and relational event, and otherwise violate American notions of hyper-individuality.
Meals with friends
Wine
Sunday nights at Jon's apartment
Wooden Boats
Bono
The San Juan Islands
The Economist (magazine)
Music
Cheese

I've never come so near to completely agreeing with anyone in my life...

2006-10-24T05:03:00.000-07:00

WE ARE ALL BIG BABIES

Bombarded by petty rules, bossy advice and celebrity tittle-tattle, we have forgotton how to be adults. It's time we grew up, says Michael Bywater

I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.

It's time to stop behaving like children and face up to responsibilities

Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn't done or which it hadn't even occurred to you to do.

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

We are told what to think. We are talked down to. We are distracted with colour and movement, patronised, spoon-fed, our responses pre-empted and our autonomy eroded with a fine, rich, heavily funded contempt.

Here is a random sample of what is implicit in the assumptions that are made about all of us: We are unable to control our appetites;
advertisement

We cannot postpone gratification;

We have little sense of self, and what we do have is deformed;

We have no articulable inner life;

We are pre- or sub-literate;

We are solipsistic;

We do not have the ability to exercise responsible autonomy;

We require constant surveillance and constant admonition;

We are potentially, if not actually, violent;

We have no social sensibilities beyond the tribal;

We have no discrimination.

Do we still want to sign up to this? Do we want to be Big Babies?

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn't have a lifestyle. He didn't need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture.

There were some exotic things in it, brought back from exotic places. The most exotic things were African carvings and Benares brassware. The African carving had been brought back from a war, possibly the Boer one.

The brassware was brought back from Benares by my grand-father's friend Dr Chand, who lived next door but was a Brahmin from Benares.

Dr Chand didn't have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather's case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible. In Dr Chand's case, it was the same, because he was a doctor too.

I suspect that my grandfather's life was real in a sense that my father's life hasn't quite been, and my life is not at all.

The crucial difference is my grandfather's lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is a hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchily on the edge of self-obsession, occasionally aware that the life that exists only to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life.

It is a preparation for a life. The consistently introspective life of the Big Baby is as much a simulacrum as life on Big Brother.

To keep the simulacrum going we need help. And we need that help because that help is available.

It's the old paradox. We need distraction from our fragmented and solitary lives because the distractions available to us have rendered our lives fragmented and solitary.

And we need lifestyle advice from magazines and websites and newspaper supplements and health advisers and personal trainers precisely because we are being nagged about our lifestyle all the time by magazines and websites and newspaper supplements and health advisers and personal trainers…

If one of the markers of adulthood is autonomy, then one of the preconditions of autonomy is being left alone.

My grandfather wasn't nagged. Once he turned 21, he was a man, and a grown-up, and nobody battered him round the clock with opportunities he was missing, miseries he didn't know he had, aspirations ditto, inadequacies doubly so.

Nobody told him about being good in bed, grooming tips, what his car said about him, what he should have to eat, how much he should drink, what his house said about him, how Benares brassware was so over, where he should go on holiday, what this season's must-have product would be, how his suits should look.

He knew some of these things, and didn't care about the others because nobody was drawing them to his attention. He knew what his suits should look like: trousers, waistcoat, jacket, all made out of the same material.

He knew about grooming: you shaved. He knew what he should eat: breakfast, lunch, dinner. He probably had no idea that good-in-bed even existed, or that furniture did anything except furnish, or that where he went on holiday was of any significance, or that his car said anything about him at all, except 'Oh, here comes Dr Bywater, I recognise his car.'

But the Big Babies have no such autonomy, and are harangued to death; nor have they learned the adult trick of simply ignoring the fishwife-and-huckster voices. Instead, Baby tries to comply.

Believing it when he is told that he is unhappy, he then believes the cure the same fishwives and hucksters proceed to offer.

The house, the furniture, the car, the exotic holidays, the new wines to try, the squid and worms and foreign muck cooked in jam with the gravy underneath the meat, the peculiar vegetables like weeds or tumours, best thrown away; the uncomfortable places to go, the uncomfortable ways to get to them ('Travel the Amazon on anaconda-back'), the uncomfortable and dismaying sex ('Do we have to do buggery?'), the uncomfortable and dismaying life, funded on credit, built on debt, Carol Vorderman smiling as the bailiffs home in and the Official Receiver prepares for another day's official receiving.

And it is all a world of make-believe, a set of status symbols notable only for symbolising someone else's status… except that when there is nothing but status for the Big Baby in the Age of Distraction, then our symbols are our status.

We live on a diet of shadows, and we can only imitate them, stuck in the playpen, waiting to be distracted.

Admittedly, it's tricky, being grown up. The great thing about being a Big Baby is it's so easy and so rewarding, and everybody else can just bugger off.

Once one has embraced the 'isms' that characterise the Baby Boomer's creed of modernity - individualism, relativism, voluntarism - and lapsed into the hooting, crooning self-validating babyhood that inevitably follows, then one is beyond criticism.

Anyone who says otherwise just doesn't understand us and, what is more, is just plain wrong.

Being grown up is not nearly as comfortable. Let's, just for a moment, beg the question and say that one of the qualities of being a grown-up is what the Romans called discrimen and what we would perhaps call 'discrimination', though that doesn't quite cover it.

Discrimen is the ability to judge a situation and to take right action without being sidetracked by peripheral considerations. Sailors would call it 'seamanship'.

Surgeons speak of 'decisiveness'. In all cases, discrimen is about knowing what to do in the circumstances, even if there is no guarantee of pulling it off.

But if discrimen is a cardinal virtue of adulthood, the tenets of infantilism work against it. Discrimen calls for right judgment; but the idea of something being 'right' is in profound conflict with individualism (which says I can only claim my judgment as being right for me).

It is in conflict with relativism (which says others may have different ideas, which are right for them) and with voluntarism (which says that those different ideas are just as valid as mine, because they, too, have been chosen).

Infantility, indefinitely prolonged, is also the indefinite prolongation of (false) promise.

It's never too late… never too late to stomp, cadaverous, around the stage singing 'Can't get no satisfaction'.

Never too late to cast off the old wife and find a new one. Never too late to make the big killing, to score the goal, to find the perfect shoes, to acquire the perfect six-pack, rack, complexion, butt, pecs or thighs. Never too late (hell, someone must be answering the spam) to get the perfect dick, pumped up with a scoopful of mail-order Viagra; never too late to give her the perfect orgasm, get the perfect house, fill it with the perfect furniture, take the perfect vacation, drive the perfect car…

As the body ineluctably decays (the mind's long gone, of course; who needs it?), perpetual infantility glosses over the rheum, the pains and creaks and flaccidities. As the opportunities dwindle, perpetual infantility offers us illusion on easy terms with pick-'n'-mix spirituality, self-improvement, angels and goddesses, diversion and aspiration.

As time slides past, doling out its irreversible quanta, perpetual infantility offers us… the perfect wristwatch: shockproof, waterproof, antimagnetic, a perpetual movement which says everything about us except the single intolerable truth: that we have had it and are headed for oblivion, tick by tick.

We have had to make it up as we go along, we Big Babies. And we have not done a terribly good job. We want (don't we?) to grow up. How? Here's the simple answer: watch carefully, ask why, and mind our manners. It's really that simple. How would the world be if everyone did it?

It would be grown up.

How to be an adult

Don't be affronted Being affronted (or offended, or complaining about 'inappropriateness') is no response for a grown-up. Only children believe the world should conform to their own view of it: a sort of magical thinking that can only lead to warfare, terrorism, unmanageable short-term debt and the Blair/Bush alliance

Mistrust anything catchy, whether it's the Axis of Evil, advertising slogans, or blatant branding ('New Labour'). Catchiness exists to prevent thought and to disguise motive. Grown-ups can think for themselves

Ignore celebrities, except when they are doing what they are celebrated for doing: acting, playing football et cetera. Skill does not confer moral, political or intellectual discrimination. (Except in the case of writers. Writers know everything and can lecture you with impunity.) If a celebrity is not celebrated for doing anything but being a celebrity, smile politely but pay no notice

We should not assume that market forces will decide wisely. The market is rigged by manipulation and infantilisation

Consider our own motivations. We may rail about being treated like children, ordered about, kept from the truth, nannied and exploited… but are we complicit in it? Could the reward actually be infantilisation itself?

Autonomy is the primary marker of being grown up. Babies, children and adolescents don't have any. We don't want to be in their boat

Suspect administration Its purpose is to free the organisation to do what it's meant to do: but the triumph of the administrators - the lawyers, the accountants, the professional managers - means that too many organisations now believe that what they are meant to do is administer themselves. This is a profoundly infantile attitude

Do not love yourself unconditionally. Such love is for babies and comes from their mothers. Ignore fashion, particularly in clothes. You don't want to look like a teenager for ever

Never do business with a company offering 'solutions' as in 'ergonomic furniture solutions which minimise the postural strain associated with sitting' (chairs) and 'Post Office mailing solutions' (brown paper). The word suggests we have a problem, but since we are grown-ups, that is for us to decide

Denounce relativism at every turn. Shouting 'not fair' is childish. Demanding respect without earning it is childish. Don't fear seriousness. Babies aren't allowed to be serious

Watch our language. Is there really much difference between a six-year-old in a fright-wig and his father's waders shouting 'I'm the Mighty Wurgle-Burgle-Urgley-Goo' and an ostensible grown-up demanding to be called 'Tony Blair's Respect Tsar'?

Hide Grown-ups are not required to be perpetually accountable, while the instincts of government and big business, both of which are, almost by their nature, great infantilisers, are to keep an eye on everyone all the time

Eat it up There is nothing more babyish than having dietary requirements

Never vote for, do business with or be pleasant to anyone who uses the words 'ordinary people'

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Taken from'Big Babies' by Michael Bywater, published by Granta on 2 November. It is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115 john reynolds

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

Today's...

2006-10-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

Music: The Album Leaf
Emotion: Melancholy
Physical State: Exhausted
Activities: Church, Consumption, Dinner
High: Soaring trumpet at the end of this mornings hymns.
Low: Physical pain induced by lack of sleep...
Clothes: Professor-ish
Weather: Gray
Purchases: One(1) Bottle of Beer, One(1) Bottle of Wine, One(1) pair of jeans, and two(!) varieties of hair product...what a nancy...
Hope: Rest
Giddiness: The use of incense, todays priestly vestments, and singing a hymn written by Thomas Aquinas...
Sentiment: The Blessing of the Animals next Sunday (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi)
Snacks: Tuna Melt on very healthy bread, mid-afternoon.
Facial Hair: Chops only, tastefully coiffed.

Where's My Cross?

2006-09-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

O Lord Our God,
In a world that conspires with me to sanitize all things, and make me comfortable, please help me find what it is that I'm supposed to bear. I really don't want it you know, Lord, but I do need it. In this this rubber-room reality where everything of substance and reality is blunted by endless shallow delights, and the thick padding of 'conveniences' I wonder if splinters digging into my back may be the only way of escape from this world of shining tin. I am far too comfortable, and I am far too complacent in light of your love. Rome burns. I play the fiddle. The play goes on, I sit with my feet dangling on the edge of the stage, leaving both earthly actors and heavenly spectators wondering if I have a part at all. I am more happy to finger those things of shining tin than to walk on streets of gold. Help me find my cross Lord, and see fit to secure it firmly to my back, even unto Calvary. Help me to encounter reality as it is Lord, by encountering the lynchpin of reality, the Cross. No more delusions, no more lies about this life. I will not say I am ready, or willing, and sure ability will be left to You also, but I will say come and lead to my Cross as I have shunned it for too long.
Amen

What Sort of John Cusack Am I?

2006-09-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

Which John Cusack Are You?

A Great John Wesley Quote, or "Why I'm glad I am neither Frugal nor Industrious nor Diligent"

2006-09-09T00:07:00.000-07:00

I fear wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore, I do not see how it is possible in the nature of things for any period of revival of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But, as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. How, then, is it possible that Methodism, that is a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as the green bay trees, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently, they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this--the continual decay of pure religion?
John Wesley circa 1740

The Mystery (of the Sacraments, the Eucharist in particular, and the Incarnation, as well as alot of other stuff)

2006-08-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

This is a phenomenal quote, and is a partial insight into why I love Sacramental worship, and why I think it's one of the best things Christianity has to offer the typical young person of our time. It's why young hipster Seattle-ites crowd into St. Mark's Cathedral every Sunday night for Compline, though they hardly know what they're being exposed to, it's why witchcraft and New Age spirituality in various forms is exploding, and it's why Evangelical Christianity is fading into irrelevance and mere self-preservation, (well, there are other reasons for all those things as well, but this one plays no small part!) As we try to know everything exhaustively through our ever-increasing technological apparatus by way of 'the scientific method,' we eliminate mystery. Not because we've actually succeeded in 'debunking' anything, (the whole idea of dis-enchanting the world and being a habitual 'debunker' is a dubious pursuit to begin with I'd say...unless you like places like Auschwitz and the Gulag) but because our claims to know all (or that we will someday know everything, or just about everything) do not permit a notion of mystery. More importantly, our arrogance does not want to permit such a thing. Something incomprehensible would be an insult to our claim to the possibility of complete knowledge of everything, but more honestly, to our sense of power over all those things we might know. Should God Himself make a claim that is beyond our ability to contain rationally, we don't actually argue against it, or for it, or whatever, we simply eliminate it as a possible answer, thereby usually eliminating the question also. As you consider the notion of Sacrament (a material/physical way of giving and receiving divine grace), and why it so powerful, keep the quote below in mind. I believe that in receiving the Eucharist, I am not just memorializing the life, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, I am actually encountering Him in the elements as well. In the final analysis friends, it may indeed be just bread and wine after all, but what a truly awful impoverishment...so let us keep the feast.

"Partly because the history of the intellect in the West has Christian roots, and partly because Christians wish to remain in dialogue with the secular mind, we in the West fail to satisfy the hunger of those who come and stare at the feast. Living among those utilitarian rationalists who control the world and with whom we seek to communicate, we Christians can forget the nature of Christian perception. We confess to doctrines profoundly mysterious by their nature- that a man should be God, that one God should be at the same time three persons, that we of corruptible flesh should also be temples of the living God. So we believe, but so we cannot comfortably think. For as 'thoughts,' these are in essence mystery. Mystery is what many contemporary minds are hungry for; it is what they seek for afield, in the non-Christian realms and such Eastern, Asiatic sources as the Bhagavad Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We Christians in the west have not shared what we possess. We have mystery in plenty, yet our own discourse averts it, avoids it as if in embarassment. For mystery is what we have been taught through our education to relentlessly extinguish...Our continual impulse is not to 'apprehend' mystery, but to render it extinct."
Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon pgs. 93-94

From an old Professor of Mine circa Fall 2001

2006-08-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

From my friend's colleague at the UN....

FYI

French Intellectuals to be deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taliban of
Non-Existence of God
[Paris]

The ground war in Afghanistan heated up yesterday when the Allies revealed
plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers
into
the country to destroy the morale of Taliban zealots by proving the
non-existence of God. Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade,
or
'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt,
despondency and existential anomie among the enemy.

Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long
occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a
number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines.
There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature
of
life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied
by
a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread
dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five
minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his
confidence
in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very
intense
and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said,
"The Taliban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There
is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am
talking."

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's nauseating
freedom
of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of
Alfred Hitchcock.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as
inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the
Frenchmens' endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in
the
area.

I Didn't Know Tech Support Dealt with Such Things...

2006-08-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Tech Support:

I recently upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected child processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure. In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during system initialization where it monitors all other system activity.

Applications such as Boys Night Out 2.5, and Golf 5.3 no longer run and crash the system whenever selected. Attempting to operate Saturday Rugby 6.3 always fails but Saturday Shopping 7.1 runs instead. I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favourite applications. I am thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0 but uninstall doesn't work on this program.

Can you please help.

Phil

Dear Phil:

This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding. Many men upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITIES & ENTERTAINMENT program. Whereas Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its creator to run everything. You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0 as Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the system once installed.

Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See in manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors Fees). Having Wife 1.0 installed myself I recommend you keep it installed and deal with the difficulties as best you can. When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the C:\ I Apologize program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-key. It may be necessary to run C:\ I Apologize a number of times but hopefully eventually the operating system will return to normal. Wife 1.0 although a very high maintenance program can be very rewarding. To get the most out of it consider buying additional software such as Flowers 2.0 and Chocolates 5.0.

Do not under any circumstances install Secretary (Short Skirt version) as this is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly crash. As well as any second operating system. To run Girlfriend 8.0 in the background will lead to total system failure in both operating systems.

Best of luck

Tech Support

Does it always smell like pee here?

2006-08-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

Originally written some time in May of this year:

So, it's 2am, and I'm here at my new place of employment. To put it quite simply, 'here' is a home for abused and neglected children called "Health and Educational Services." It smells like pee here right now because the torrential rains that lashed New England last week flooded the bottom floor of the establishment, and they had to rip out the carpets to stave off mold. Unfortunately, whatever happened in the time between the coming of the Floodwaters-of-God's-Judgment Upon-the-Unrestrained-Evil-That-Is-Massachussets and the removal of the offending carpet left the place smelling rather like a truckstop mens room. The word on the street is that the new carpet will remedy all things. It's almost eschatological. The job I am 'training' for is basically an overnight watchman/janitor. I just learned the janitorial part...not exactly rocket science, and it only takes about 40 minutes. Other than that little flurry of activity, the other 90% of my job will be staying awake, and making sure the kids stay in their rooms, and tending to them if they have any legitimate needs. Apparently, these overnight shifts are pretty low intensity. That's putting it mildly. Other than the cleaning duties, I can read/study, surf the net, and basically screw off while getting compensated handsomely. It will pay more than Starbucks, give me more hours, give me plenty of time to study on the clock, benefits, two weeks of paid vacation per year guaranteed, and a load of paid official holidays. Now for the two downsides: First, as I already pointed out, it will be an overnight shift: from 11pm to 9am, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings. Of course, this means a significantly disrupted sleep schedule on these days, which I will hopefuly be able to more or less 'reset' on Sundays by staying up and going to bed at a regular hour on Sunday evening, rather than sleeping a portion of the daylights hours (as I will have to on Friday and Saturday). Now for other downside: The building we are located in is haunted by the apparition of a young child. Yup, thats right people, a good ole' fashioned New England we-burn-people-at-the-stake-and-other-crazy-shit haunting.

Great...

Apparently, whatever 'he' is, 'he' isn't particularly malicious, and 'he' doesn't appear to anyone directly, only out of the corner of ones eye, or by causing various sorts of mischief like slamming doors, unseasonal temperature variations from room to room upstairs, or by just giving you an incredible case of the willies as you traverse the stairs up to the kitchen and bathrooms. My 'office' is downstairs. My 40-minute per night cleaning duties are upstairs. "He" never appears downstairs, or to any of the children, (who are also securely downstairs at night). "He" only appears upstairs.

Great...

The guy that hooked me up with this opportunity is one of my current roomates, and a Christian. He told me he has only had one run-in with 'him', and that was the thrice-repeated mysterious door slamming. At that point, my roomate spoke out loud to the whatever 'it' was and rebuked in the name of Jesus Christ, told it to never appear or 'affect' him again unless it was ready to be cast out. He hasn't had much problem since, other than what can only be described as a few self-inflicted cases of 'the willies.' Tonight, in the midst of my 'training' I was left alone upstairs for several minutes. I wasn't feeling anything, no presence, no anything. Those of you that know me, know that even as a Charismatic Christian who believes in the immediacy of the spiritual world, know that I am still a bit of a skeptic. So, I hedged my bets...I stopped mopping for a minute, leaned against my mop handle, and spoke out loud (most likely to myself) and told whatever 'it' might be that I served the Living and Most High God, and that in the end, even though I wasn't that fearsome, Who I serve, was. I told it that it would be exorcised and sent packing without further ado if it tried anything with me. That being said, I went back to my mopping.

So...What do y'all think?

As orthodox Christians, we basically believe that whatever composes the spiritual/non-material aspect of a human being departs this existence upon physical death, or actually just ceases with biological death, awaiting resurrection at the end of history. This 'part' is most often referred to as the 'soul.' Moreover, we affirm the the physical body will be resurrected on the last day to biological life, and whatever the soul was doing/wherever it was, it will be reunited with the body at that point, if it was ever seperated to begin with. The Christian doctrine of the resurrection is not altogether that simple, nor would everyone agree with me on what goes on with the persons soul between death and resurrection, but thats kind of the basic nuts and bolts of a Christian notion of what happens to a person between now and the end of time, and the final resurrection of the dead. With that being said, I belive in demonic and angelic forces at work on our plane of existence. These are not dead people, they are righteous angels that enjoy fellowship with God, and fallen angels that rebelled against God at some point in the past.

But...

Apparently, this 'little guy' is not malicious, at least not in a specific sense.
'He' apparently limits 'himself' to poltergeist like things, basic silliness like the slamming of doors, or making things fall, or whatever. ('poltergeist' is actually German for 'mischievous spirit'). I think if there is indeed anything in this place, it's either demonic or merely pscyhological, not a 'ghost' as popularly conceived. By implication, if it is demonic, it means that regardless of its specific activiities here, it is evil by it allegiance with Satan against God.

Once again, what do all of you think?

Does your worldview even permit these things to be anything more than 'in my head'? Do you agree with my basic notions of what happens to humans after death? Do you agree with my ideas about non-human spiritual beings? If you disagree, does the historic Christian faith permit the existence of ghosts proper? If so, what is to be our response to them?

Michigan, road trips, changes, changes, changes...

2006-08-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I went to a wedding in Jackson, Michigan. My friends Ryan and Katey were tying the knot, so two friends (Mara a bridesmaid, and Ben, another pew-warmer like myself) and I drove out to participate. Ryan and Katey are part of a group of friends I took part in during my first and second years of Seminary, but who have now all decamped to various places around the country and world, save for the few of us who are still here in South Hamilton finishing school. It was very good to see everyone together again, but the normal wistful sentimentality that afflicts me at weddings was compounded by the presence of this group of friends, in toto, at this wedding. 3 seperate times in my adult life I have been forced to part fellowship with a group of close friends due to the end of a step of our respective educations, several people getting married at once, or the arising of some other opportunity far away (hence my leaving Seattle), or just plain growing in distance from one another due to laziness. I think I'm rather tired of it, and it's not over yet. I will avoid ranting (too much) about the evils of a hyper-mobile, hyper-consumptive culture and context that makes such hyper-mobility, and such self-seeking individualism (and concommitant loneliness) intelligible or even practical. I will also only mention in passing my complicit participation in this state of affairs. Don't get me wrong, I am the Quisling in this discussion, friends, not the self-righteous looney in the pulpit. In truth, I am more like the Jacob Marley of this tale. I will only say this, are we happy like this? Am I? No...I'm rather happy with my education, with the adventures involved with going to new places, but I must say I am made distinctly miserable by the consistent building up and then severing of relationships that this sort of life entails (and not just this lifestyle, but the general acceptance of hyper-mobility, career-chasing, emphasis upon the individual, or, by way of concession, upon the nuclear family torn from the life of the extended family, neighborhood, and community) and that a permanent and non-optional (i.e. non-consumable and non-disposable) sense of 'home' 'community-with-rightful-claims-upon-me' and 'place' while postiviely medieval, is challenging my other much vaunted and more 'socially acceptable' goals (PhD, professional success, etc.) for supremacy right now. I suppose this is all slightly pathological for me, rather than philosophical. I don't have much of a sense of family, and so go to great lengths to create proxies everywhere I go. Is this the Church to me? Is that what Church is supposed to be? Is it my group of friends? Is this what a group of friends is supposed to be? Should I get married to attenuate some of this? Am I expecting too much from people around me? I'm inclined to think I am. I find myself torn between these things.
Loyalty to a group of friends, to a region, to a set of ideals, to a community, to anything permanent and of 'commanding presence' as Albert Borgmann would put it...the time and place we find ourselves in as a culture are quite corrosive to these things. Nonetheless, they are the thing that give our lives the substance and substrate of meaning that make them live-able, even joyous. All the same, in pursuit of the education I feel that I need to articulate and protect these unseen ecologies and webs of life that hold our realities together, I participate not in them but in their destruction precisely by my departure to the other side of the continent to pursue schooling to point them out and protect them. Who knows if I will ever be able to resurrect those friendships that were left behind? I hope so, but who knows? We'd like to think that all the things we pursue or happen to us are largely for the better. I'd like to think becoming an Anglican is all for the best, not just for me, but for those I love. Is it? While no one from my old church has stayed in touch with me much, the few people I still really care about there are sure to be slightly taken aback by my decision to jump off the Assemblies of God/Foursquare boat and swim for the shore of Anglicanism. Certainly, the dream of planting a church with a particular one of those people that we harbored once or twice in our hearts is dashed. What if my coming to Gordon-Conwell, and coming over to Anglicanism amongst other things are just an outplay of my rootlessness? Not a display of liberty and responsibility, but of disorienting and nauseating freedom. Not a ship free from the constraints of port and under sail, but torn from it's moorings and drifting in a strong wind towards a lee shore? Don't get me wrong on this point, ships are meant to sail, so are we meant for a certain degree of educational, psychological, financial, and geographical mobility...but I am speaking of hyper-mobility here. That prefix assumes a continuum upon which can be found deficiency, normalcy, and excess. I find us as a culture in the excess of this activity/trait at this point in time, and use the term hyper to denote this state of affairs. Anyway...maybe I should just stop whining. Things are going to be ok. Heaven isn't so far away, and there we hope to to find a fellowship forever unbroken with all things. The Road may go Ever On, but luckily it is the odd spots that are lonely, and not the character of this path as such that makes it so, and so we have hope both for Heaven and for Earth.

Dreaming about the end of the World

2006-07-13T05:04:00.000-07:00

So, last night I watched M. Knight Shyamalan's "Signs" with a friend. It was the second time I'd seen it, and it was not the experience I was anticipating. The first time around, I didn't find it all that scary, this time, it was mildly so. I remember liking the ending, but this time being rather nonplussed. Finally, the first time around, I was left with no after-effects, not even an opinion. This morning right before I woke up, I was having a dream about the end of the world. Now, don't feel sorry for me, it wasn't really a nightmare (in the light of my Christianity, the end of all things and the return of Christ generate at least grim trust if not outright delight when looking forward), but it was was extremely vivid, yet left unresolved, and altogether off=putting. What made it off-putting? Visions of Satan and a foul end for me and my loved ones? No... Spooky signs and paranormal events? Nope, save for my car (in the dream) having supernatural powers.
You see, it wasn't the end of all things, or the sense of impending doom that made the dream disconcerting...it was the sense of not being prepared. I'm not even talking about spiritual prepared-ness here (i.e. Am I ready to face this end?). It was a strange sense of 'Donnie Darko-esque' black frivolity combined with the mild annoyance of having forgotten something at home upon arriving at a campsite. I was struggling to do something, to get something done before the looming darkness that seemed to fill the horizon reached me. However, for all the super-powers my car seemed to possess, it was helpless. I seemed to possess weapons on my person, and I wasn't afraid to the point of freezing up, but I somehow knew that I was no match for what was coming, and there was that hated feeling of helplessness. Whatever that task was, whatever I was preparing to do, (regardless if I failed at doing it) I was on my way to it, to meet it. I wished so badly to re-enter the story that I actually hit the snooze button on my alarm, something that I never do. But alas...in the half-consciousness of those few 10 minutes, I just swam around in the images and thoughts of the dream, awake enough to be frustrated by the lack of resolution, but not asleep to do anything about it. I would have liked to have gotten my car unstuck...

My New Home

2006-06-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

So, after a tumultuos 2 day marathon of moving, I am now ensconced in my new home, the Mill Street House. MSH is headed up by two members of my parish (Christ Church of Hamilton-Wenham) Mark Dirksen and Beth Maynard. Beth is an ordained priest, and her husband Mark is a conductor, talent musician, and supports those habits by being a real estate agent. MSH is a neo-monastic, intentional, and missional community in a low-income neighborhood in Beverly, MA. My desk is still in shambles, and I don't have a bed yet (huzzah for inflatable mattresses!), but things appear to be stabilizing. My room is much smaller than my old one, and costs more. However, I have plenty of storage space in the basement of our house, and because of the much shorter commute to both work and school from here, I will recoup the higher rent in fuel savings. So what is a neo-monastic, intentional, and missional community? Basically, the neo-monastic part is regular communal prayer twice a day kept in the form of Church 'Offices' i.e. morning prayer, and evening prayer (aka 'Compline'), observance of the Church Calendar, shared living arrangements with the other members of the community, and a commitment to a lifestyle of contemplation, prayer, and service. The intentional community aspect is rather simple. Rather than living on our own respectively, the members of the community have decided to live together in this house (a three-story multi-family arrangement, composed of three independent apartments stacked upon each other, with a chapel composing one of the rooms on the second floor), and to live a Christian life in community with others. I have much by the way of opining and philosophizing about this aspect, but that can wait for a later post. As for the missional aspect, the community hopes to live together as an incarnation of the body of Christ in this needy neighborhood by keeping the daily offices, as well as the Church calendar, and from that liturgical lifestyle moving outward in service and relationship. We basically just want to go be Christ to and with people. It is at once rocket science and at the same time not. Well, thats seems like enough for now, I should call it quits. I need to shower up, go to Compline, then head off to work.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers New Album "Stadium Arcadium"

2006-05-23T09:13:00.000-07:00

This is easily one of my top 25 albums ever I think. When I bought it, the audiophile at the record store said something like, "It's like a 'Greatest Hits album' of new songs." I was a bit skeptical, and was expecting something between a one trick pony and the standard mediocrity of bands in their middle age. I was proven most delightfully wrong. As usually happens with me and the Chili Peppers, it's not the track that gets the most radio play that I like the most, (though 'Dani California' is a good song) it's the entire album as it fits together. I don't know if RHCP built Stadium Arcadium as a concept album or an 'art' piece, but both discs and all 20+ songs on them really do flow together musically and lyrically. I recommend it highly.

Top 5 Pubs within Stumbling Distance of Gordon-Conwell

2006-05-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

1. The Wildhorse tied w/ The Black Cow (Best nachos EVER/Great Beer Selection)
2. The Weathervane (delightfully cheap Guinness, and nice staff)
3. Garden City Pub (Where everyone knows your name...because you work with them)
4. The Pickled Onion (Where everyone screams your name the din...)
5. Kitty O'Sheas (good Reuben Sandwiches)

Right now...

2006-05-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

This ship is slowing. Its engines are silent, and there is no wind. I am looking over the side at perfectly smooth water, impossibly smooth water, disturbed only by the ships bow wave. Ladies and gentlemen, we have now arrived at a full stop. The air is warm and still, the stars cold and I wish they would move. As I lean farther over the rail, the water looks like the gently swaying surface of oil, dark blue and deep beyond imagining. I absent-mindedly roll over the rail, as if I might just have easily done it as not. The wind whips my clothes, and the circular yellow flashes of a few decks worth of portholes go by. The water doesn't hurt, though my awkward impact should have. The music plays on as the ship and I drift away from each other. Only slightly worried, I say, "I think this is going to ruin my suit." The ship is now a distant outline on the farther edges of my vision, lit only by a rising or a setting sun, I can't really tell which. There is silence in heaven for about half an hour. A few wayward strains (souls) of music still make their way back to me. In the end, I don't know if I threw myself over or if I was thrown. I await judgment.

Eerie as it is now, I wasn't afraid then. It was all quite nice, actually

End of another Semester at the Ole' Seminary, and it's my birthday tomorrow!

2006-05-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

Well, I recommend the Hasidic Jewish Reggae artist 'Matisyahu.' His music sings like some of the richest and most devoted Christian music I've ever heard. He truly is waiting and hoping for the coming of Messiah. If only Christians had so much zeal for Christ. It would be very nice to have Christ return and see this guy's hopes truly fulfilled. Anyway, if you like reggae, and thoughtful lyrics that are actually composed of more than just the same old drivel of sex and drugs, check him out.
Hmm, what else is going on? The past couple days have been some of the most stressful ever. Today was the last day of written work for my school, and I had 15 page paper due today. I worked both Saturday and Sunday for a full 8 hours each at the 'Bucks. So it went something like this: Saturday I read all my collected research and made notes and an outline. After work on Sunday (started at 0630am off at 3pm) I wrote till midnight. Got up at 6am-ish this morning, and wrote till about 2pm. Turned it in and drove to my other class at Boston College (which doesn't end till May 10th or so...) There has been much drama with our registration office, trying to get an extension, trying to get a class reinstated that I dropped. At this point, I need a lot of extra time to play catch up for the class I actually attended today (for the first time in month, since I am going to actually finish it rather than drop it!) So, until they get back to me, I don't know if I will have a week to do the work or a month! The time constraints have been absolutely incredible. Right now is some of the first free time I've had in a couple months. Haha! The semester isn't really over either, but I am taking a Sabbath tomorrow anyway, just so I don't have a nervous breakdown. It's my birthday too, so maybe I have it coming. I dunno. Hmm, what else...I really have nothing incredible to say. I am too exhausted to be either pretentious or witty. I am becoming Anglican, but a very Charismatic sort of Anglican. C.S. Lewis was an Anglican...so please don't freak out people. I still love Jesus. Very much so. I may end up being a priest as well a professor (Don't worry, being Anglican basically means its the kind that can still get married thankfully! Oh yes, I am still a big fan of the ladies my friends. HAHA!) I miss home. Sailing in a fresh pacific breeze, the mountains in summertime, EVERYTHING about Seattle and life there,(I can't wait to minister there, actually...big surprise to some of you, I know!) big open spaces, normal people, good food, my family, and my old friends. Mom, Pam, Phyllis, Dad, all three brothers, Arthur and Josh. Living Way peeps. Well I am about to pass out, I am totally spent in every way, and only by the grace of our loving and amazing God have I come this far. Sola Deo gloria.

Holy Crap...I'm So Blessed!

2006-03-30T19:26:00.000-08:00

OK, so I was in my Calvin class for three hours this evening with Dr. Gwenfair Adams. She is phenomenal, and the subject matter is great. After class, a couple of other teacher's pets and I (we have official titles at this level, we're called a "T.A.")
accompanied her back down to her office, helping her carry several piles of books and the like. In her office, there are books lining the walls, and too many other cool things to recount here. However, she had two of the coolest things I've ever seen: A vellum (animal skin) from the 15th Century with a Psalm written on it with muscial notation, AND a book of "Decredals" from the Council of Trent (The Council of Trent was the Catholic response to the Reformation) The Psalm on the vellum was from 1400 and somthing, and the book of Decredals was from 1580-1592 roughtly! AND I GOT TO TOUCH THEM! I got to smell them, poke them, turn them over and over, heck, I could have tasted them! (I was sniffing them, and the temptation was there...) What the HECK?! That is so cool! She just has these IN HER OFFICE! LAYING AROUND! AND SHE LETS US GRUB AROUND WITH THEM AND HANDLE THEM! 400+ year old artifacts of Christianity available for my perusal! WOW! After that I went upstairs, and found people worshipping in the Chapel. Thereupon I realized how rare and blessed this whole situation really is. I mean, this level of scholarship, so closely and consciously dedicated to God, for His glory, purposely tied to the church, its worship, devotion, and ministry? Simply amazing...Not that other institutions aren't in the final calculus aimed at building the Kingdom and serving God, it just seems to me that they are often 'many times removed' from that central point. Here, most of our professors are also ministers or minister-ing in some capacity. Their highest flown theology is never distant from the pulpit, the soup kitchen, and the pastor visiting in your living room. Anyhoo, enough rambling, just wanted to share the coolness of seminary with y'all.

"It Really is all about Mercy"...OR... 'leave it to a Catholic to tell a Protestant about Grace!'

2006-03-19T22:23:00.000-08:00

So here I am during Lent, fasting from Sweets. Sweets being pretty loosely defined as...pretty much anything with simple carbohydrates: desserts, sugar in my tea, EVERYTHING at Starbucks, and the list goes on and on. Giving something up for Lent really is not a big deal, lots of people do it. I am not that terribly special. However, several key things have taken place nonetheless. First, my appreciation for other tastes and flavors has increased a great deal. Beers, wines, and coffee have whole new levels of nuance and 'sweetness' now that I am not regularly dosing myself with refined sugars. I think I may also be losing a little weight...I don't actually know as I avoid scales like the Plague. These are all very fleshly benefits from Lent, and while certainly not bad in themselves, seem at times to be a bit wide of the mark in regards to what Lent ought to really be about. I've been struggling a great deal frankly. I've been diving headfirst into what it means to be Anglican, and that includes the Church Calendar, and specifically right now, Lent, and what is supposed to take place therein:
-I've had some notions of 'replacement' go through my mind, i.e. that luxury item or indulgence (which is NOT bad in itself, when properly enjoyed, thank you!) that I am abstaning from for Lent is a sort of support or fulfillment that can be assumed by God upon its removal. This runs afoul of a number of problems, not least of which is "what happens whent Lent is over, Easter (Resurrection Day) comes, and we celebrate and FEAST?" (Apparently my church has a gigantic party after Resurrection Sunday and everything a person could have possibly given up for Lent is present. It's supposedly a smashing good time.) Nonetheless, does God get the boot out of some section of my being when I start to eat sweets again? You can see the problems with this model...
-My other idea for Lent was a matter of mere self-discipline. This connects with my aspirations for a diet, and a little weight-loss, and while expedient, and God-honoring inasmuch as moderation and self-discipline are God-pleasing, this to seems shy of the mark too. In pursuit of the 'self-discipline as central goal' model, I intended to go for the entire Lenten season without sweets, even giving up my opportunity every Sunday to indulge, as is allowed. This smacks dangerously close up against the self-reliant works-righteousness quagmire, as well as the pop-psychological/self-improvement ass-clownery that pervades too many shelves at Barnes and Noble these days.
-Two very good Reformed friends of mine, (they were mentioned in the blog prior to this one) ran the idea by me, that it was really a matter of centering oneself on Christ, and directing ones life towards Him by sharing in the self-denial and emptying God the Son, that is, Jesus, faced by becoming Incarnate. We are certainly not earning anything, nor are we trying just have a mere exercise in personal discipline, nor are we trying to narcissistically place ourselves at the center of Lent, and 'replacing' various things in our life with God, as if He wasn't already present, and kindly holding our flimsy reality together (including its sugary indulgences.)This certainly was a partial answer, and not without its applicability and explanatory power.
-While going over the "what the heck am I supposed to DO with Lent?" issue with a Catholic brother at work the other day, I expressed to him my desire to go for all of Lent without sweets, disregarding the release of every Sunday to go and enjoy. He said to me that I really should enjoy that which I'm fasting from that Sunday, because, as he said "it really is all about Mercy." Every Sunday we celebrate "the Lord's Death till He comes" which means it’s a day chocked full of anticipation and hope to begin with, regardless of the season. Every Sunday, in the Eucharist, we receive spiritual nourishment, and union with Christ and each other, and we prefigure the coming feast of the Lamb at the end of history, when there will be plenty for all, no more death, nor more pain, no more tears, peace, harmony, wholeness, and unimaginable blessing in general. Oh yes, sin will be impossible too...I think we will like each other more then. The Eucharistic and Worship activities of the average Sunday model and image God's grace and mercy by showing (1.) God even desires our company on that day, and then (2.) mercifullymakes a way for us to share that day with Him through Jesus Christ. It really is all about Mercy...YHWH could require much more of us, rather, He sees our inability and weakness, and carries us along as we are. It really is all about Mercy, because God relents, He removes all His wrath and righteous requirements onto Christ, so that we would not have to bear them. (Something we would not be able to do anyway!) In a very real way, by rejecting the freedom to break my fast on Sundays, I was spurning the Grace of Christ, and being very self-reliant. I preferred to demonstrate my own strength of will, and ‘stick-to-it-ive-ness’ rather than ‘lay back and rest in the Grace of God’ as Calvin would put it. None of which God is particularly thrilled with. After work that night, we cleaned up and went home. After work Sunday, I ate cake. (Only after dinner of course...) Praise be to God, merciful Lord that He is…I can eat cake? Yes I know, not quite the phenomenal rhetorical crescendo I was hoping for either…but alas, no one needs more ‘wise speech’ (1 Corinthian 1-3) from me, a ‘philosopher of this age.’ It seems more often than not that His truth sneaks into our hearts like a mouse under the door. I can only hope to speak quietly as to not drive it away… Aside from all the historical and liturgical theology that goes into all the preceding discussion, it was an incredibly tangible encounter with the reality of God's grace. (mmm, nothing like good incarnated theology!) So in terms of what I was trying to 'get out of Lent' this year, (So consumeristic!) I think I've found something. How I will grow next year, I don't know. For now however, I think I've found out what Lent really is all about Mercy, and how we don't have an adequate realization and thankfulness for it. So it takes an incarnate nudge from the Living God with a little Eucharistic cake to wake me up.

Introducing two cool new friends...by way of the Trinity (duh, how do YOU talk about friendship?)

2006-02-24T17:26:00.000-08:00

So, we worship, love, and pursue a Trinitarian God. God in three Persons. One God, three persons. Sharing the same substance in three different centers of being. That being said, for a Christian the functional presupposition about God is that He is profoundly relational. The Father didn't begin singular, then just randomly produce a couple more folks like Himself (the Son and Holy Spirit). Even speaking of a 'beginning' in regards to Him is nonsense. From the get go, from 'eternity past,' this is the way He Is: 'Triune' or 3-and-1. In our humanity (and very North American emphasis on singularity) we have a really hard time wrapping our mind around this concept, that is, thinking of living a life in this manner. In reality though, God has left hints of Himself written on us,, blind as we are to see them most of the time. A really healthy marriage or a great friendship can give us tiny glimpses into the intra-Trinitarian life that we will someday share in fully. However, because of sin (both in terms of personal moral failure and the much larger and harder to see 'systemic' varieties of evil that arise in any organization or community that humans lay their hands on) we are either lonely hyper-individualists or so subsumed into our respective relationships as to become mere extensions of one another. Neither distinct or fully without distinction, stuck in a psycho-spiritual limbo of sorts. It's hard for us to be individuals-in-communion, that is, properly 'Trinitarian' in our relationships. (If you like, you can check my much earlier blog on "What I Believe" for a rather simple Trinitarian Doctrine. That being said, being made in the Imago Dei presuppositionally includes (or at least includes the intent for) relationships of depth, meaning, and delight. Long Story Short: God thought up the idea of spouse-ship, frienship, sonship, daughtership and any other relational ships you'd care to board. No other animal on this planet has our (human) capacities for participation in, and enjoyment of relationship, specifically that of friendship. He is the author that has written His love for parties, theology and a pint with the boys (and girls), big meals with friends, and dates with the one we love on our hearts. My pastoral admonition? Drink good beer, eat nachos at the Wild Horse regularly, and read Luther...no wait, wrong pastoral admonition. Or maybe not... My real admonition? Go look like God: be good friends with someone. Model the Divine life with them, letting your light shine out so to speak. And check out the blog of my two newest friends, Jonathan and Tish, they kick ass: www.speculationsandsuch.blogspot.com

Hehe....

2006-02-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

I got an A at Harvard.

A Small Response to a Comment given on the Blog Entry Immediately Prior to this one...

2006-02-07T21:52:00.000-08:00

So, Hello to 'anonymous.' I am genuinely sorry if I've offended you in some way. If you want to take issue with me or something I've said, please email me. It will be just between you and I, and only for the sake of restoring anything thats broken, straightening whats crooked between us, or just plain apologizing for what I've done. I hope to hear from you soon. As for your comment proper, I think its a bit of mis-characterization. Indeed, I am a bastard, any of my friends will tell you this if pressed on the issue. 'Pharisee' however is not my particular flavor of bastard though, because, you see, a Pharisee trusted (foolishly and self-deceptively) in his own righteousness before a very particular and impossible-to-satisfy Law or Code. He then held that legalistic 'righteousness' over others. Why am I not a Pharisee? Because I know, and will admit openly that my righteousness is a tattered rag, insufficient in every way. I've nothing to be proud of. Only by the grace (grace means UNDESERVED FAVOR by the way) of God go I. So what does that mean in relation to my blog? Simply this: Any confidence or boldness I have in proclaiming the Truth (or even merely a single aspect of it) comes not from my own righteousness (though certainly, a Christ-like life on my part wouldn't hurt the credibility of the Gospel!) but because of the reality and righteouness of Christ. The reality of Christ is reliably presented in the New Testament documents and is only doubted by those with ideological axes to grind, not by anyone with an even vaguely even-handed assesment of them. But I digress: The reality of Christ confronts us with the very Person of God. He loves us dearly, enough to die for us...but He will not be toyed with or ignored, and He will certainly give no quarter to any pretense of rightesouness that is claimed outside of the work of his Son. Much more importantly is the fact that Christ's righteouness has been applied to my life and its complete lack of righteousness, to cover up my ugliness, to pay for what I've done, and what I will continue to do, unfortunately. I am a new person in Him, and by God's grace, I will live more and more in such a way as to reflect the new Life that has been given to me: that of Christ. I am a Sinner saved by Grace, and I only want to tell the story of my sorry ass being saved from itself. Feel free to be in touch, whoever you are. At the very least, please repost an accusation that sticks. None of us fully sees themselves, we need friends to tell us the truth about ourselves. Cheers!

When the going gets tough, the tough get going...but they still whine like wee little girls most of the time.

2006-02-05T21:05:00.000-08:00

So, I've been reviewing some of my own blogs this evening. I complain alot. I will probably complain more too. I am a pretty tough guy, and I don't give up on anything anymore really. But I am big whiner. At least I have been since I came out here. That in itself is the reason I'm writing this. Seattle, towards the end, was getting to easy. I actually thought I was on top of my personal flaws. Ha! I am finding that seminary, working at Starbucks, and dealing with the joy ('joy' in the "yay, its time to get nailed to a cross/burnt alive/fed to lions"...y'know... New Testament-sense-of-joy) that is New England has had the effect of bringing a number of character flaws that are resident in me to the surface. Then I whine...and then my over-inflated sense of manliness is faced with the person of David.
The psalmist begged God to 'remove his dross' or 'alloy.' Dross are the impurities that float to the surface of a molten puddle of gold. Alloy is the state of a metal when it is not strictly composed of one element. While today, 'alloys' of many sorts are stronger than many 'pure' metals (i.e. steel is an alloy of iron and carbon primarily) in Biblical times, plowshares, basic tools/implements and swords were all considered of better quality if they were free of a. Dross, and b. Alloy. Gold could only be refined by a heat sufficient enought to liquefy it so its various impurities would float to its surface and there be removed. Bronze and Iron could only be purified by an even higher heat. These processes are called 'forging' and 'annealing.' These are rather technical terms that aren't worth really explaining right now. Suffice it to say that the best plowshares and the strongest of blades were made of iron or steel that had been heated to near its melting point, had had the tar beaten out of it with hammer and anvil, and thereupon been quickly cooled down in a bucket of cold oil, only to begin the process again. Each fell blow of the hammer did two things to the blade. It beat the impurities out of the steel (its dross and alloy), and it changed the internal structure of the blade by compressing the molecules it was composed of into latticed 'stacks' one upon the other, thereby multiplying its strenght and flexibility by many times. All that to say that in the end, one was left with a thing of remarkable beauty, utility, and durability.
With those sorts of thoughts in mind, we return to the Psalmists' pleas to have his 'dross' and/or 'alloy' removed. It seems that he knows that he can be made into something of value (purified gold, a gleaming sword) and it seems that he knows something about the process (exposure to intense heat and pressure, and literally 'getting the crap beaten out' of him) and asks for it anyways. Brave man...asking YHWH for such things. I will plainly admit I am eisegeting this text a little, but not without point, and not abusively so. David wants to be purified. And so do I...
So far, coming to seminary has been my forge, and my circumstances the fell blows of the Purifier, the Swordsmith. When the Lord is in His temple, surely the Master is in His Smithy too. So...I need to stop complaining...at least I am not consigned to the scrap heap beside the forge, no?
C.S. Lewis, in "The Problem of Pain", and in "A Grief Observed" observed that God was chiseling away at us, the unfinished lumps of stone that we are, trying to turn us into fully human creatures. Many times this is undertaken by the application of pain and suffering. Furthermore, in "The Great Divorce" that ascent from the dreary Hell to the resplendent Heaven (by way of Bus) is marked by the main character becoming more and more 'real' as he ascends. When He gets to Heaven, he is still not 'solid' or 'real' enough to get on in that place, for even the blades of grass pierce his feet like actual blades, and the waters of a Heavenly Stream grip him like a vise and almost carry him away.
It seems that to be purified, to be strengthened, to be made ready for service, to be made more 'real' or more 'solid' involves pain. But what a lovely pain...or at least a worthwhile one. I suppose I would really have something to worry (and complain about...) if I weren't feeling any pain. (Then again, I wouldn't be complaining about it would I? The anaesthetized comfort of a being that is less than real is the comfort of a man on his death-bed.) So let us pray (as I am trying to) that God would not take away His fell blows, His determined pruning back of our wilding boughs, His making of us into more 'real' and 'solid' people, but that He would lend our suffering purpose, as He lent it meaning on the Cross.
(Cf. Proverbs and Hebrews "God disciplines the sons (and daughters!) that He loves")
Hoping you are encouraged in Christ,
Troy

Kate Beckinsale, grades, everything else...

2006-01-20T13:31:00.000-08:00

So I just went and saw the next installment of Underworld. It's a vampire movie. Gruesome, but not terrifying. The only real complaint I had about the content was the extended sex scene. As I concentrated on the subtleties of the theater floor, my peripheral vision nonetheless picked up lots of horizontal shots along the long axis of the two main characters getting very horizontal with their long axises. Sigh...What else is going on? Well, I got my grades back yesterday, well almost all of them. My Harvard class has yet to report in, hopefully an A. My GPA has remained stable, but hasn't gone up, and 3.5 isn't good enough. An 'A' and 'B' is all I know so far. I have another year and half to take care of things, and I think I can get myself back up to a respectable 3.8+ by then. I also am struggling to maintain my patience with (a) Gordon-Conwell's ridiculously short administrative business hours (they are barely open for a total of 4 hours a day!) and (b) the nearly impenetrable bureaucracy of Boston College (where I am registered for a class on Virtue Ethics). Underpaid young Protestants on one end, senile spinster Catholics on the other. Errr... Oh well, it's a great class, and people are very nice, just not very helpful at times. I am listening to Bad Religion right now, how fitting. As for Boston College itself, and my class, it all looks rather nice. My class is taught by 50-something Jesuit fellow from Brooklyn. He went to school for 17 years apparently (not counting High School) before embarking fully on his teaching career. He is HILARIOUS. He still has his Brooklyn accent, and breaks up pretty much any prejudice you have about Catholic teachers. Boston College is gorgeous; plenty of neo-Gothic architecture, old stone buildings, a beautiful Cathedral, and it's built on the western outskirts of Boston. It's wonderfully long and relaxing ride on the T (Boston's Subway) out there, and its nice geographically, being built on some low hills. Well, cheers everyone.

Let's get pissed!

2006-01-17T21:29:00.000-08:00

You have to say the title to this blog with a thick Scottish accent. Think "So I Married an Ax Murderer." Thats right, the Dad. Slur the 'i' into an 'e' "Pessed" The Fall term is finally over for me. I turned in all my Harvard Divinity stuff yesterday. woot! woot! I got an A on my paper for my theology class, and my church history class is still not back in yet. We'll see what happens. Regardless, its done. It was probabaly one of the most stressful semesters of my life. Praise God for seeing me through it! Now that I've started my classes officially at Boston College, a lovely little Jesuit institution. Tonight I went out with Ben, Amanda, Jon, Nathan and Johanna. It was great. I went home for a week last week. Snowboarding, spending time with my old church family, possibly lining up a job opportunity for when I am done here, if I don't go directly into a Doctorate. It was nice to just be back home. Seattle really is one of the best places on earth, and I've seen some of whats out there! Hmm, what else? It's been bitterly cold here lately, but now it has 'improved' to freezing rain. Nonetheless, it is nice how much sun they get here. After a storm blows through, the sun comes out and it will stay sunny for a few weeks. Hmm...I am starting to fade a bit. I think I will post more tomorrow or something.
Cheers...

They asked for a blog entry...

2006-01-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

If any of you get the C.S.L. reference in the title of this blog, good for you. For those that don't, don't kill yourself o'er it. So, right now its 6:30am and here I am blogging. I didn't sleep a wink last night. When I came home last night, I found my roomates smoking cigars in the house. Needless to say, the entire house (including my room and clothes I am wearing right now) smelled like baked horse shit...) I was more than a little displeased by the smoke, what I could make of it, because I also have a head cold...which wasn't helped by the house being filled with clouds of flaming-horse-shit-smoke. I actually can't express how angry it made me. It just seemed inconsiderate. disrespectful...a sort of 'f*** you' to the other two human beings in the house. In retrospect, as I raged quietly in my room I began to realize how angry, sullen, and withdrawn I have allowed myself to become lately. Why had it made me so angry, why couldn't I just go talk to them about it? Why am I so hateful? The truth is, I don't know...Which in itself is frustrating because I am very used to being able to look inside myself, and understand what is going on. My own feelings and behaviors have never been a mystery to me. Not so anymore... I won't lie. New England sucks. It would suck to be here even without my sinful predilection for the easy taking of offense. Nonetheless, I have never met a more vulgar, inconsiderate, and downright uncivil people than the sort that live around here. (A few shining lights that are contra what I said above: Calvin, Marie and Bob at work; several of my professors who are New Englanders; and Mary Anne the events coordinator at the Hilltop Steakhouse, these people are great, and not just because they take care to be 'nice' but because they are actually kind people) To return to my aforementioned topic: I am really stressed out lately, I am afraid. I don't know if I can do this. Why isn't my paper done yet? Why wait this long? Because every time you write a theology or philosophy paper you have to re-invent the wheel. What if my ideas are terrible? What if the wheel I've crafted for Professor So-and-so for the umpteenth time is square in his opinion? I got straight A's last year, and even now I seem to be 'doing OK.' Regardless, OK isn't good enough. I have to get my GPA up, its hovering around 3.5 right now because of Greek this past summer. (Oh how I loathe that language!) There is no option for me, no other way forward. No one favors me, no one is handing me free money or opportunities. I shouldn't be surprised though. This is how it has always been. This is it, and there is no parachute or safety net. I am out the door and flying. And if I don't fly I will fall. So yeah, I think stress could be part of it. I feel under the gun all the time. I haven't had a day free from worry in months. All I do is worry. My horizons shudder, then expand or contract jerkily with each grade I get back. In reality, I can't wait for this to be over. A PhD program (Lord speed the day) seems like a cakewalk compared to this. No Starbucks, just a solid 8 or 9 hours every day writing and reading in a libary, then home for food and family (or out for a beer with friends perhaps in lieu of that!) No threat of constant failure in the classrrom or reprimand at work hanging like a blade over my head. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I sure hope and pray that God doesn't leave me alone in this, because if He doesn't strengthen me, I'm lost.
On a MUCH happier note, my good friends Joe and Carissa just got married yesterday afternoon. I was wrangled into a few more things that I originally planned to do, but I didn't really mind. It was a honor to be included in their big day. As Ben said, "...they are part of our community, and once you are helping in a wedding at all, you are in all the way." Besides, I got a free steak dinner out of it too, how could I go wrong? In all honesty though, it was a nice, small ceremony, beautiful and relatively simple. (at least from the perspective of someone who wasn't involved with the planning, haha!) It was great to be a part of it, and ushering was fun because I was privy to all the minor and entertaining mishaps without being responsible for any of them! It's neat to see the working of God in our lives as a community-as a group of friends that has welcomed Joe, no longer a M.I.T. but a full Midget. Haha. Carissa, our sister and good friend is married now. Praise God. Every time I go to a wedding something 'deep' usually strikes me, and this time was no different. In a world composed of so much triviality, where shameful vanities are the crowns we wear, and pointless dissipations form the foundations of who we are, Joe and Carissa have done something altogether serious and meaningful. Not a morose seriousness (the kind I am most likely to exhibit!) but a joyful seriousness. A solid-ness of life and meaning that comes from commitment to something, and the deep satisfaction that goes with it. Promises made and kept in the face of a world that can't remember the oathes it has made, and would not fulfill them if it could. It doesn't get any better. Amen and amen. I pray Joe and Carissa would be blessed and cared for by God.
Hmm, what else is going on? Oh yes, the reason I am up before dawn blogging? Yeah, I 'got up' at 4:45 this morning to go to work at Starbucks, only to discover upon getting there that I opening TOMORROW morning not THIS morning. It's moments like these where I am really glad I can laugh at myself, because with all the dumb things I do, I can either laugh or be miserable. I prefer the latter. So, here I sit in the Great Room, drinking some tea, hoping to muster the intellectual gumption to write a paper today. Nonetheless, this could be a blessing in disguise, even now as the sunrise is reaching my windows, I feel some faint energy...and so I am off to write this silly paper, lest it thwart my impending vicrory on the field of academic battle.

Harvard, Mississippi,and the delight of hard work.

2005-11-29T18:29:00.000-08:00

So, here I am again. Facing the mountainous pile of procrastination I have made for myself. In reality, it's not nearly as bad as I make it sound. Two good papers in two weeks. Then another really REALLY good paper by January 17 for my Harvard class. By the way, for those that care, I got my first 'A' there. Pretty cool huh? As happy as I am about it, I mention it more so because it marks a place I NEVER thought I would be. Poor kid, poor family, no educational prowess or pedigree to speak of, and no one really thought I could do it till I was here. Amazing what a few little words can do, eh? "I think you've got what it takes, Troy." Them again, that prof was not without evidence. Point being, more than any level of success I have (or ever will, for that matter) attain, its the 'narrative' quality of it that I revel in, not the glory of a notch in my academic belt. I mean, who woulda thunk it? Me? Here? Getting good grades at Harvard? Pshaw. God is good. He has not failed to write the story well, or at least this chapter I should say. Praise Him, not me.
In other news, I went to Mississippi for a week early in November with a professor, some other students, and several people from the professors church. We did disaster relief and 'social justice work' for victims of Hurricane Katrina. It was great. As with anything that is truly meaningful, it is not an easy thing to explain. Suffice it to say, it was incredibly worthwhile, we got to serve a man and his daugther, serve our Presbyterian brothers and sisters, and just be Christ to people. Those of you who have done sociail justice/missionary/relief work will understand the spiriutual and emotional dynamic I am speaking of. Those of you that haven't done such work...well you won't. It's a bit of an impoverishment of the soul too if you ask me. But then again, you didn't ask...
Things here are otherwise very normal. I am delighting in my studies. Working a hard day in the library, or a 'combo day' (8 hours at the 'Bucks, then whatever remains of the day reading, writing, and other business) is VERY satisfying. Talking theology over beer with friends is truly delightful... and it allows us to entertain our communal delusions of academic grandeur.
Hmm, I imagine there is plenty more to be said, but the library is shutting down, I am expected elswhere, and its time to be on my way. Cheers.

"Once more into the breach, dear friends..."

2005-10-26T22:39:00.000-07:00

So I haven't posted in like a month. Sorry folks, for those of you that care. That being said, I just got back from my class at Harvard. Today was a good day in many ways. Got some work done, helped out a friend with her theology paper, went to class and talked to the teaching fellow after section. He is doing his doctorate in American Religious History there, and it turns out that he is a Gordon-Conwell dude like myself, and that there is actually a fair number of us at the Div school. At least amongst the people who are doing history... This relieved a recurring fear of mine: systematic and ideological exclusion of evangelical/orthodox/conservative Christians from the Ivies, or at the very least from Harvard Div. That being said, huge numbers of people apply there yearly, and what I want to work on may be nowhere near what anyone there is intertested in, so I am not setting my hopes on going to Harvard. But...what a concept huh? Delusions of grandeur sure are fun...That being said, Boston University was referred to as 'confessional' and 'a school where they pray in class' and of coure Boston College would be a better place to study virtue ethics, (c'mon, Peter Kreeft calls it home, it doesn't get much better than that!) So yeah...Harvard isn't the end-all be-all. It's just a pretty face... with millions of dollars...and a list of connections that would make Ma Bell blush. Speaking of our dear Catholic brother, Mr. Kreeft, I would recommed a nice little book of his called "Back to Virtue" Not only does it give a run down of classical Christian virtue ethics (did you know the 7 deadly sins have their opposites, the 7 cardinal virtues? Or that doing the right thing can feel great and not be fattening?) When you read the book you can detect a pastoral geniality and playfulness that makes it most enjoyable, almost as if sat down every day to work on it with smirk on his face. That being said, I have not been virtuous lately. My old laptop finally went belly up, and I have been without a computer for about a month now. Of course, this was a very convenient excuse to procrastinate...so now we have the Semester half over, and not nearly enough reading and writing done. There is also the 'deer in the headlights' factor. Last year was the first year in my life that I have even gotten straight A's, and now that this year has gotten off to such a lurching start, I wonder if I can keep this up. I moved up to the coast, which, while beautiful, places me a significant distance from my school, and my friends. I have been working way too much, and everything has just been slipping...slipping quite badly actually. Now the good part. To be quite honest, to those of you that know me, you know I am highly skeptical of 'vision language' as way too 'pop Christianity' for my taste. Casting vision, being a visionary, regaining a vision, yadda yadda yadda. However, just as God has been giving the divine impatient-snort-and-raised-eyebrow to my other cynicisms and pretentions for the past year, so He has with this one. As I sat there one evening wallowing in self-doubt, my untouched books surrounding me like a pack of intellectual hyenas, I realized I had let my fear and insecurities blur out what I want to do. I hate to use psychologized language, but it sometimes is helpful and explanatory (or perhaps I just lack to the vocabulary as of yet to say it any other way!) To put it simply, I had to 'recover my vision' (gaahhh! yeeech! get it off! i feel dirty!) I had to keep the main thing the main thing. What the hell am I about? Where do I want to go? What am I good at? Where can I express that? From what pulpit can I preach the Gospel while I quip about the quality of beer in Seatle? I am tempted to say this was an awakening on a merely natural level, but, bless it's little snow-covered-dung-heap of a heart, I don't think it would be very Reformed of me to say that. There was no 'visionary' experience proper, just a steady Sense of A Question from the One, that for a moment blotted out the cacophony in my mind: "What are you about? What do you think I AM about?" The latter we will all spend eternity figuring out. Nonetheless, for me, the former is like the latter. The God we will spend eternity 'figuring out' (it seems almost a vulgarity to put it that way now that I think of it, as if He would ever stand for being put into a beaker for such an objective treatment!) I want to get a head start on right now... Further Up, Further In. I would like a PhD at a fantastic institution thank you very much Lord. "Once more into the breach, dear friends..." To the Holy Roller-ization of the hallowed halls of Harvard, the Pentecostalizing of Princeton, and a Charismatic Cambridge. Amen. In all seriousness, do pray for me and the other folks out here, this place can be very draining spiritually and physiologically. There is no rest, and there won't be for two more years yet. I had to steel myself with that realization. I will be working 25 hours a week at Starbucks, expected to get straight A's, minister in my church, and be happy about it for another two years. Funny...Working 12 hour days in a library for 5 years on a doctorate almost seems too bon vivant for me...Cheers everyone, I love you all.

Analysis/exposition in part of some points made in John Piper's points in his book "Let the Nations be Glad"

2005-10-04T17:07:00.000-07:00

On the point of Worship being ultimately important-
Yes, missionary activity is not an end in itself. Missionary work is embarked up for the sake of bringing people to God that they may worship Him. Ultimately, the universe and all the people who are in it will give God glory and honor willingly or unwillingly. Our job as a the Church is get as many people as we can to do it willingly and happily. To take this statement to its full logical conclusion, God is the center of the universe not man. Missionary activity happens to be good for us: i.e. its better to amongst the belieiving saved than not, but it seems that in Piper's ananlysis that missionary activity and the saving of souls (which if you are Calvinist is strictly God's purview also) is a means to an end, an instrumentality used by God to garner Himself more praise. This all seems remarkably megalomaniacal until you encounter John Piper's other point: :

"Missions is the overflow of God's delight in being God."
One of the traditional western dictums about the nature of God, arising partly out of the Greek philsophical tradition
(Platonic Forms, Aristotle's unmoved mover, etc.) , as well as the Old and New Testaments, is that God is by definition a being who is so effulgent and manifoldly wonderful, that He is ultimately worthy of all serious praise and attention in the Universe. Even His own. His perfection is so complete, that when He considers His own perfection, He cannot help but take delight and wish others to share in His appreciation for His own perfection and beauty. How gracious of Him to make us strictly for the sake of comprehending and being eternally giddy over Him. Boring it will not be. Praise be to God. We as humans cannot bear this sort ofthing in each other, and rightfully call people who take part in this behavior megalomaniacs, fascists, and dictators. And perhaps this is as it should be, because only God is worthy of such adoration and attention, and our rightful place is at His feet giving credit where credit due, not being morbidly introspective at the outskirts of the Heavenly City, plumbing the depths of our own glory (or lack thereof).

Random Rantings of a Lawless Libertarian...Or just me playing the Devils Advocate

2005-10-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

I think its important to realize that there are manifold nuances to the situations we find ourselves in as Christians in the world, and obeying the speed limit is one of them. A wrote Biblicism dictates that we must obey the speed limits as an extension of the 'laws of the land' that we are enjoined by Paul to obey for the sake of peace in the Body of Christ, peace with surrounding non-Christians, and for the sake of witness to our fellowmen and government. However, that is only if something is actually against the law, and I think most speed laws are ridiculous. The idea of a speed limit is predicated on assumptions that are in a way quite offensive (by assuming your stupidity as the citizen), and that inculcate stupidity/irresposibility in drivers by removing the responsibility from drivers themselves, and placing it in the hands of the government. We live in a system where people are insulated from the consequences of their actions. We do this by placing the care and management of more and more facets of our lives in the care of the governement and/or corporations. Speeding is a great example. The government regulates speed. Why? Because in the end, IT will end up paying for the bills of people who break their cars, destroy the road, and hurt themselves and others. To mitigate this liability to themselves they set speed limits to theoretically reduce the number of accidents and thereby reduce the amount of time, money, and trouble they must spend on the people who have relegated their welfare to the state rather than take care of themselves, and be responsible for their actions. I say, let people who are stupid enough to speed dangerously (either by driving beyond their skill level, speeding in bad weather, exceeding the engineering capabilities of their vehicles, whatever...) suffer the consequences of their actions financially and personally rather than let them wallow in child-like viciousness (i use that term in the traditional manner, i.e. someone who is full of vice and not virtue) and irresponsibility that the insulating layers of police speed-management and welfare-state/insurance company-coddling that is engendered by our current system. Some prime examples, there was a point in the not-too-distant past wherein (a) Car insurance was optional NOT mandatory, that state of affairs was built on the idea that you kept enough resources in reserve to take care of yourself and your financial responsibilities to others in the event of an accident, and when you didn't you suffered certain consequences. Most people chose insurance, but the point was that it WASN'T required, they made a responsible decision, they didn't have their thinking done for them. The ones that didn't were either willingly or unwillingly held responsible for the damages they incured to others and their property. (b) Up until several years ago, Montana had no daytime speed limites (oh what halcyon days THOSE were!) as well as no open container laws. People got along just fine. They were only penalized for ACTUALLY incurring harm another, not just POSSIBLY (i.e. a speeding ticket) In a system where we are taken care of paternalistically by the state, then yes, of course there should be speed limits and police enforcment of them. However, if one is willing to be an adult, and responsible to others in the even that one does harm or damage to them, then NO, there shouldn't be speed limits and Christians shouldn't be legalistic sticklers about such things. The law is for those who are lawbreakers, those who would intentionally do harm by their irresponsibility. That being said, its fun to play the devils advocate sometimes.
Cheers

Just some thoughts on the Sabbath,

2005-10-04T16:59:00.000-07:00

The Sabbath. I refer centrally in my ideas about the Sabbath to Jesus' rebuke of the Pharisees when He says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for rest, and for the meditiation upon God and His Word. That being said, I am not at all a stickler for when one takes a Sabbath, just that one takes it, and does what one ought to with it. Rest, Christian fellowship, and worship/communion/contemplation of the Lord. We Christians play pretty fast and loose with the day it falls on anyway, as it seems we changed it from Saturday to Sunday right in the begining. Biologically speaking, we need rest and recuperation for our physical bodies. Spiritually, we need to be with God, and give ourselves to Him in a wholehearted manner regularly, and more than a daily prayer and devotion time can suffice for. Emotionally and psychologically in Our Time, where there is no liturgy to life, nothing in our days that is set, realiable or restful, no places filled with peaceful silence and solitude, the Sabbath seems all the more 'made for man.' Moreover, in a society so self-absorbed, isolated (have you seen how many people live their lives between a set of earphones?), and ultimately lonely as ours, it might be very good for us, and them, to set aside a day which is largely possessed largey of being loved (most of time by people who find us remarkably unloveable save for the Grace of God) and loving other people (most of whom we find unloveable because of their vast superiority to us).

I suppose in terms of my personal theological concerns I see the Sabbath, hopefully taken on Sunday with other believers for the sake of fellowship, as an aspect of our prophetic-witness-to-the-culture. Mary is right to make note of the nature of our society, and its endless busy-ness and movement. We are more materially productive in one day on average in our society, than a person in the Middle Ages was in a week or a month. We produce fantastic amounts of...well...everthing, but still we never take time to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We run ourselves ragged in pursuits of things, even lofty and noble things for some of us, but never take time to contemplate He Who Is the ultimate Source and Goal of all things Noble (and Humble). Funny how we call our amusements 'distractions' without knowing what we are saying, no? In our time of endless busy-ness, noise, and entertainment-all things that insulate, deafen, and anesthetize us to reality, we need to be daring and take the time to be quiet, unentertained, un-distracted.
To face the more ultimate quesitons about life, and what is really important. For the believer this is a serious, but at bottom, very joyful business. As Christians who reguarly take time to contemplate God, ultimate goodness/beauty, and the like, it seems strange to think of this, but most people in the world don't do those things! They have no opportunity, nor any realization that they should because its good for them. If people took more Sabbaths, and did 'sabbatical things,' I think our culture would be healthier, and more people would turn to God, because for a moment they would take their eyes off their workbenches, off their keyboards, away from their tools and books,and for just one day a week look heavenward and see more than the harried rat race around them. For the Christian, as I said above, this is serious but joyful business, to quietly face ones own evil, and then to face the majestic and fearsome grace of God. For them it is a call to repentance and praise. For the unbeliever, left in the roaring silence of a still solitude that is not a peaceful silence but one dreadfully filled with the all icy wind-blown emptiness of an eternity without God, it is a wake-up call. How good for both parties to have to face such things regularly

A Brief History of French Warfare-As Brought to You by The Portland Spectator March 2003

2005-09-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Gallic Wars- Lost. In a war whose ending foreshadows the next 2000 years of French history, France is conquered by of all things, an Italian.

Hundred Years War- Mostly lost, saved at last by female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates the First Rule of French Warfare; "France's armies are victorious when not lead by a Frenchman."

Italian Wars- Lost. France becomes the first and only country to ever lose two wars when fighting Italians.

Wars of Religion- Frances goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots

Thirty Years War- France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.

The Dutch War- Tied

War of the Augsburg League/King William's War/French and Indian War- Lost, but claimed as a tie. Three ties in a row induces Gallo-philes the world over to label the period as the height of French military power.

War of the Spanish Succession- Lost. The War also gave the French their first taste of a Marlborough, which they have loved ever since.

American Revolution- In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."

French Revolution- Won, primarily due to the fact that the opponent was also French.

The Napleonic Wars- Lost. Temporary victories (remember the First Rule!) due to leadership of a Corsican, who ended up being no match for a British footwear designer.

The Franco-Prussian War- Lost.

WW I- Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States.

WW II- Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.

War in Indochina- Lost.

Algerian Rebellion- Lost. This marks the first defeat of a western army by a non-Turkic Muslim force since the Crusades, and produces the First Rule of Muslim Warfare; "We can always beat the French." This rule is identical to the First Rules of the Italians, Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Esquimaux.

War on Terrorism- France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe.

This was an email circulating in the military community in 2003

In the Midst of the Storm: See Luke 8:22-25

2005-08-31T14:27:00.000-07:00

I think we ought to be reminded as we see the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and beyond to look to God in multiple ways. First and foremost, not that I am saying that this was (or was not, for that matter) an act of judgment by God, but that as an expression of God's power and sovereignty over natural forces it should give us pause in our considerations of Him. As per the Scripture reference above, we know that God is ultimately in control of all things, including hurricanes. Why does He permit them to happen? That I cannot answer. We know that God is good, and all powerful, but that bad things still happen. My tendency is answer that human freedom resulted in the fallen world, and now we corporately reap the consequences of that, namely in this instance, in the form of really bad weather. If we are free, and using that freedom to reject God, than we are rightfully experiencing an existence that is free of God and His protection (at times, anyway) But I digress...the Question of Evil will not be answered by me today. Our lot is to overcome that which happens be it good or bad, following our Lord regardless of our circumstance. Praying, serving, and giving up our lives for others. He is Lord over the Storm, and He does indeed care for us, as Christ so directly showed the Disciples that evening in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. My concern is more pastoral. If this storm, a creaturely thing, a thing which is less than God in power can bring this nation to a standstill, threaten it at its economic core, and destroy a vast swath of its territory, we ought to meditate upon His power and sovereignty,and be thankful for His altogether good and loving nature. Certainly, a being that was all-powerful, but not completely good would bring about much greater unpleasantness than this mere hurricane! As we contemplate the social, economic, familial, and spiritual implications of this event, the fleeting and contingent nature of all self-identities, safety nets, organizations and powers not rooted in God should become apparent. Will our nation fall on account of this? Of course not, or rather, I should hope not. However, as the most powerful nation on the face of planet...ever, we are tempted to trust in many things other than God as we revel in our own resplendence. The truth is that long after all the cultures, styles, fashions, worldviews, institutions, and foundations of America/Western Civilization have passed away in full or changed into their next iteration, the Gospel, Jesus Christ, and His Church will still be present. This ought to cause us to grapple with the questions of where our identities are founded. Am I a disciple and follower of Christ first, and everything else ('American' or 'Republican' or 'Academic' or "Charismatic" or "Reform") secondarily? Is my citizenship in the final analysis in this nation, or in God's coming and eternal Kingdom? This display of natures destructiveness is an illustration of God's power to judge or bless serves to (amongst other things) relativize us. By it we are 'put in our place' so to speak. It demonstrates in tangible ways what has really been the case all along: we are contingent, finite beings. We long for permanence, for that which is larger than ourselves. We want to be part of something bigger than us, but to not lose our individuality. To be 'persons-in-community.' And rightfully so! We build institutions, structures, even nations. These are certainly not bad, but as with our very selves, they are contingent and finite also. To find permanence and meaning in them is to find it in the wrong place; because ultimately they cannot provide it. As co-Creators with God, we give these structures of meaning/identity/permanence their value and traction inasmuch as we relate them to God through our own relationship with Him. Not vice-versa. All that to say, we are reminded by this tragedy of the fleeting nature of our own existence and our sources of personal and corporate meaning when they are disconnected from God. Thanks be to God however, that the inverse is also true! When our lives and institutions/sources of identity are properly related to God (recognizing His Lordship, and rightful ultimacy to them) they have eternal and appropriately ordered meaning! On a practial note, the Biblical enjoinder once again is simple: serve and contribute practically where possible, and most importantly to pray. Finally a word of encouragement: The Lord cares for us, and we can lean on Him in all things. The Disciples probably had a seaworthy vessel, moreover they were experienced fisherman, but rather than relying on either their boat or themselves, it was to Jesus they went in the Storm. We should be so wise...

So...here we are.

2005-08-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

This is my new blog. The dreary "members-only" netherworld of myspace will no longer keep me from my readers! (Ahh, the delicious flattery of delusion!) I don't know about pictures or private information yet... Here you get my writing, such as it is, and my thoughts, such as they are. With that in mind read, reflect, rant. The purpose of this 'place' is conversation!

What I believe, more or less...

2005-08-28T13:19:00.000-07:00

The journey I am now on with Christ began when I was 14, but to identify the ‘beginning’ of that journey merely with my taking note of and assenting to the reality of God and His rightful place in my life would be to make too much of the story mine to tell. At 9 or 10 years old, I was very strongly convinced of the existence of an Other that was personal, beyond me, and to which I owed something. So I prayed to a God I didn’t know, the only prayer that I did, “Now I lay me down to sleep…” Except for some nights when I was too tired, too distracted by some movie or family event, or just plain forgot, I would pray. This situation did not improve much over the course of the next couple years until I became friends with the son of the Pastor of the local Assembly of God congregation. I doubt his intentions were fully missionary, regardless though, it was through him that I came to church and eventually confessed Christ, and that I belonged to Him. My teenage years were an alloyed collection of advances and retreats. Eschatologically speaking, there is a sense in which that evening in the Spring of 1994 when I was face down on the carpet, staining it with my tears was Christ’s D-Day on the enemy shores of my heart, but as Hoekema has said, we live between D-Day and V-Day in the grand corporate sense, and so do I personally as well. To be moved from the Kingdom of Darkness into the Kingdom of Light is a great thing. However, one can very easily remain in the provinces, never making their way to seat of the Empire, the figurative Rome. And so it was with me until I went to College: I remained in the spiritual hinterlands of God’s kingdom, wandering the provinces of His empire throughout High School. During College I went through a time of cynicism and rejection of much of my Pentecostal/Charismatic training and upbringing. I certainly was serious about the reality of God and Christ, and the reality of the Christian existence and life. It was the many negative cultural accoutrements and additions that I saw manifesting themselves in my tradition that enraged me. These elements were not just a matter of ‘putting culture to good use’ in my view, but a replacement, a warping of the truth of God inasmuch as these cultural elements were shaping the Gospel rather being shaped by it. In my fervor to purify my thinking and theology of these elements, I rejected much of my past Pentecostalism, relegating myself to a sort of milquetoast Charismatic idealism that permitted me to fellowship with other people of my ilk, but never participating fully in their life. What began to pull me back into the Charismatic life of the church I participated in was at once theoretical and experiential. It was to a Foursquare Church that Providence and circumstance lead me, and it was there that I found a relationally functional and healthy community in which I thrived. As I began to share life with genuine Pentecostal and Charismatics, people possessed of sound minds and authentic faith, I could no longer deny the reality of the Charismatic experience as I had so arrogantly done in the intervening time between the height of my Pentecostalism and the watery Charismatic theology I held to at that point. However, I had yet to separate the genuine activity of God in the lives of those around me from the genuine theological difficulties I had with the way in which people manifested the power of God, as well as the problem of the Charismatic culture and its interactions with the world and other Christian traditions. Eventually, I was able to see that while the gifts/empowerments of the Spirit as Charismatics express them are at their core affected by contemporary culture, they are not merely cultural. It is very possible to be charismatic in and to fundamentally distinguish oneself from the culture at large while fully expressing the gifts as they have been given. Having come upon this realization, I have been able cautiously re-appropriate much of my own Charismatic tradition. The challenge of late is creating a meaningful charismatic ecclesiology and approach to culture that makes headway without falling into the mistakes of my forbears and their ‘over-indulgence’ in pop culture. And so this is the point of departure, my theology has been forged as much by cool reflection as white-hot experience. Coming from an anti-intellectual tradition, the fires of that crucible have burnt me in their own unique ways. Nonetheless, abandoning ship, no matter how much water she is taking on is not my way, least of all in terms of my Charismatic brothers and sisters.
I believe that ‘in the grand sense’ Scripture is the Statement of God about Himself and His activity in History. God has revealed not just information about God, but He has revealed Himself to us, with the ultimate revelation of God taking place in the Person of Christ. From these encounters with the Person of God both before, during, and after the Incarnation, God has inspired and divinely authored a collection of writings about Himself through human authors. These writings are firmly placed in history, and require careful study by the reader, but in their message and what they communicate about the Character of God, they remain authoritative. While Scripture does not touch on all questions we have directly, we can extrapolate the character and nature of God sufficiently but not exhaustively from it, and from there answer many of our questions effectively. To speak of sufficiency sets up that which we know with surety about Him, and what He requires of us, to reject exhaustiveness takes the power away from Man to turn Yahweh into another idol by removing his (mans) ability to say in a minimizing fashion that ‘this is all that God is and requires.’ That being said, He (God) will not violate or deviate from what He has demonstrated about Himself in the Bible. I believe that the writing of both the Old and New Testaments were inspired in their autographs and that with much historical study the text as received has been shown to be reliable and faithful to the message and intent of both the human and Divine authorial intention. The Canon as we have it now is authoritative for teaching and rebuke as St. Paul has said, as well as for the formation of Christian believer into the image of Christ. Ultimately the Story of God in the Bible is ‘the story which swallows up all other stories’ or the ‘meta-narrative.’
God is quite simply the Ultimate Being in the Universe. He created it, sustains it, and is intimately involved and knowledgeable concerning it. He has unlimited power and knowledge over all things, and He is everywhere at once and anywhere He wants to be. His attributes, mind, and Person are not constrained my time, distance, or our human lack of conceptual categories capable of grasping Him.
God exists as Three Persons who are at such fundamental and substantive unity that their diversity simultaneously exists as one Person. This is the basis of the Divine Community into which Humanity is called for fellowship and worship. This model of otherness-in-unity is less something for us to try to understand that for us to imitate. For obvious reasons, as fallen, incarnate beings we can only approximate this Trinitarian life. The Bible, while tantalizing with its insights into the workings of the Godhead, seems to call us more to acceptance, contemplation, and imitation rather than a comprehensive understanding. The Trinity contains, relativizes, and gives boundaries to us, rather than vice versa. The God of the universe will not be made an Object of Study. Nonetheless, with godly and God-given curiosity we press in…
God’s purpose in Creation was to bring glory to Himself, and to have creatures to fellowship with Him. We do not know why He seems to value the latter, because there can be glorification of God without creaturely consent or desire, but the former is explained simply by this: God is ultimately the most worthy being in the Universe. He is not an omnipotent megalomaniac, but the Being who is worthy of praise above all other beings. God’s desire for worship of Himself is rooted in His self-awareness of His own glory, purity, beauty, holiness, and uniqueness. He knows that He is good, and that it is good for His creatures to worship Him. To return to the concept of fellowship however, it seems that while God in no way harbors a ‘need’ for our company and conversation, He takes some sort of delight in being with us. To poke and prod at the mind of God intrusively where He has remained mysterious yet graceful in regard to us seems a bit unwise to me. I suffice it to say that what He wants He gets, and if its me He wants, I am not going to say ‘No.’ All things that have been made are either immediately or ultimately dependent upon God for their creation, sustenance, continued being, and completion. All things exist at His behest, and for His pleasure. God is involved with, but not the same as His creation, God created all the beings in the Universe, and is above them all.
Of the beings God has created, Man has a special place in Creation. Mankind was created for fellowship with one another and with God. We are made male and female to model ‘other-ness’ to each other and to call us out of ourselves to those who are different from us, as God calls us away from ourselves to Him. The man and woman were made to care for one another and to exercise dominion over and care for Creation. The Man and Woman were placed in the Garden to serve as the Image of God, to represent Him to Creation.
The Fall of Mankind originated in a fully irrational and nonsensical action by Adam to rebel against God, under the deceptive influences of the Serpent. The Fall has affected the entire human race since, and we have inherited the sin as a fundamental aspect of who we are from our original representative, Adam. Adam was our representative before God, and failed in his duty to represent us to God. Because of his failure, we have lost the moral ability to conform to God’s will. Whether one interprets this narrative of the Edenic rebellion literally or figuratively in relation to the Fall of Mankind, it speaks the same truth about us: we are separated from God by our willful rejection of Him, and His rightful place in our lives.
Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man. In the mystery of His power, God limited Himself in humanity but in no way reduced His essential God-hood. The same affirmation goes for the human aspect of Jesus. Whatever makes God God and whatever makes man man is successfully combined in Jesus. There is no other way Jesus could have been Who He was and successfully completed His mission, having borne what He must, and having done so, been resurrected as the God-Man to sit down at the right hand of the Father, symbolizing the completed work of His life and mission on earth. That Mission was to show us who God truly was and to bring us back into fellowship with Him. Jesus revealed unto us God in His Person, and through His death in our place on the Cross for our sins restored friendship between God and Man.
The work of Jesus at the Cross is applied to the believer by the Holy Spirit upon their acceptance of Christ as their Savior in the form of Salvation from enslavement to sin and the punishment of eternal separation from God. They are re-created/regenerated in God’s image. The prominent Biblical imagery in this topic is the resurrection from the dead of the new believer. God has called the person forth, and called them back to life for the purpose of fellowship with Him. In a temporal sense I am a Wesleyan through and through at this point. For sin, worship, fellowship, and all the other sorts of relational terminology that surround regeneration and its benefits to make sense, humans must have a real choice. That being said, our wills are bound and broken by sin-totally incapable of moving towards God- and it takes grace from God to sufficiently free and resurrect the will to enable a real choice for or against Christ. However, it seems rather silly that from eternity past to eternity future God would not be able to see who will accept Him and who will not. This leads me to posit that while God does enable actual choice in the believer, any activity of His Spirit in the life of the individual is efficacious inasmuch as God is aware of who will believe in Him to start with and either (a) doesn’t bother with thoroughly rebellious humans, or (b) simply exercises His power in a meaningful futility that ensure a creatures separation from Him is of its own accord. In a slightly modified sense, one could say I am ‘from an eternal perspective’ a Calvinist.
Temporally speaking then, justification is applied at the ‘time of salvation’ but from eternity past that act has been foreknown and planned upon by God in relationship to the believer. Justification is both a legal and a relational term biblically speaking. In the legal sense, we have been declared righteous by God inasmuch as He sees Christ in our stead, and we are justified inasmuch as we are unified with Christ. It is this unity with Christ that allows our sins to be dealt with in the eyes of God by His Son.
Sanctification is the gracious gift of God through His Spirit and His Church to the believer and the Covenant Community. God in His righteous hatred of sin recognizes that evil behavior and ways of life are not only self-destructive for the sinner and corrosive to the flourishing life of the community of believers, but also an affront to Himself. For all these reasons His Spirit partners with the believer, and the Church to impart righteous character and habits of living both individually and corporately to the Church. These are most basically understood as the Fruit of the Spirit, which will be covered in a moment. As for perseverance I will take a position similar to the one I formulated in my account of Salvation. I think that it is largely a matter of perspective. We cannot predict who will ‘fall away’ and who will ‘persevere.’ For God, these questions are easy to understand and answer from eternity. The text in Hebrews 6 seems to presuppose a real salvation that can be really be fallen away from, but if one presupposes that God is fully capable of causing a saint to persevere, than they were never truly saved anyway, or are experiencing some sort of temporary rebellion or ‘hiccup’ in their (from the eternal perspective) saving relationship with God. So, from God’s perspective such issues are already decided, but in our linear and temporal experience of reality, we cannot help but think in terms of ‘choices’ and ‘turning points.’ Hence why I call such issues a matter of perspective.
The Holy Spirit is indicated in several texts to be a person, or at the very least to have personal attributes. He is referred to the parakletos or Advocate/Family Lawyer. In the Johanine Epistles we see the Trinitarian formulations using ‘water’ as a moniker for the Spirit. There is use of personal pronouns in reference to the Spirit in both the New and Old Testaments. It is obvious that the Father and Son are clearly delineated Persons in Scripture, and when encountering germane baptismal, doxological, and creedal formulas in the New Testament and early Church nothing less seems to be logical in reference to the Holy Spirit. Having established the personhood of the Spirit, we move on to His work in the believer…
The Spirit imparts the Fruit of the Spirit in the form of character traits that exemplify Christ in the life of the believer and enable a more complete and thriving community life. This impartation takes place in a partnership with the Church Community and the individual believer. This Spirit-empowered dialectic between individuals and communities is the environment in which vices are exposed, dealt with, and eventually replaced with their opposing virtues.
The Spirit also imparts gifts that are for the edification and building up of the Church. These gifts are miraculous and powerful in nature, but are expressed throughout an entire range of personalities that shape that expression. The ‘gift lists’ in Corinthians and other Pauline epistles are not exhaustive in my opinion, but merely set up a context and give parameters/delimiters to help the Church understand and correctly express/use the gifts as they (the gifts) operate from the will of God through the believer. The Spirit is still working miraculously, powerfully, and visibly in our current era, and is evidenced in a multitude of ways.
The Church is a Community called forth in diversity for a purpose. Its commanded and sometimes nearly approximated unity does not demand uniformity. I think that the running disagreements in the Church may actually be a purposeful on the part of God to keep the paradoxicality, ineffability, and incomprehensibility of Who He Is firmly in view. The Church is to be simultaneously salt and light with Abraham Kuyper exercising dominion and authority over all spheres of life in this fallen world and thereby participating in Gods saving work in the world, while also understanding its otherness and ‘over against-ness’ to the world, and its duty to be the Church so the world can be the world, and so that both can know themselves and the other as they are a la Stanley Hauerwas. The Church exists to serve the world, but also to stand prophetically against it, telling it the truth about itself and all of reality, and pointing it always towards God and Christ.
While I believe Church government is given to us by God, it is most often not what we could call ‘inspired...’ I think that three primary forms of Church governments are a rather pragmatic reflection of the needs and desires of the particular times and circumstances in which they are employed. The onus is now not on the exegetes to answer an old and over-argued question, but for the leadership of given communities to exercise prayerful judgment and discernment as to what sort of government of the three primary New Testament varieties is most conducive to a promoting a healthy church. More often than not the question is posed in such a way as to only allow one right answer. I would propose that a certain degree of ‘holy pragmatism’ seems appropriate to these questions, because were all three systems of Church government (episcopal, presbyterian, and congregational) co-existing at the time of the New Testament, hence the reason they are all evidenced in Scripture!
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper…the two things that ought to bring unity to the Church, are often the grounds for their most bitter debates. This should not be, and so I will endeavor to say little about them, lest I add to the fires of disunity. Baptism is the sign of the continuing covenant of God with His covenant people. This sacramental action can take place at either a young age or as an adult. The obedience of being baptized as a symbol of inclusion in the Covenant Community and the impartation of grace is where the emphasis lies in Scripture, not the specific time frame (whether as a child or as a believing adult) With that being said, even if one is obedient in baptism but does not persevere as a believer, whether they were baptized as a baby or adult, it was just another common encounter with water!
The Lord’s Supper is a time in which the personal and spiritual presence of Jesus with His people is celebrated, remembered, and participated in. Ontologically and metaphysically the bread remains the same, but it is still more than just a symbol. Christ’s spiritual presence goes with it in a special way. The precise ontological and metaphysical attributes of pita bread and grape juice seem to me much less important than the liturgical and community-building aspects of participation in the Lord ’s Table. The Church restates its covenantal relationship to God and to one another in taking communion, and takes seriously its commitments to both. In having this peaceful meal with God and one another we are saying ‘We belong to God and one another, and we will show God and our brethren practical hospitality as well as hospitality of the heart, giving away our lives to them both.’
In terms of theological propositions, my Eschatology can be summed up very simply. In terms of the actual ‘system’ I adhere to, I suppose amillenialism would be the closest to what I believe about the nuts and bolts of the chronology of the second coming of Christ. I believe that History finds its terminus, goal, and ultimate meaning in the Kingdom of God which is already present among us in part, but is not yet fully come to pass as it will be at Christ’s return. God’s Kingdom had been inaugurated and set on its course in the first coming of Christ, and it continues to grow to this day, and will find its consummation and completion in the New Heavens and the New Earth. Jesus will come again, all things will be His to rule over, justice, joy and peace will be universal and permanent. All of Christ’s followers throughout history will be in blessed fellowship with God and one another in an ecologically and spiritually renewed Creation. Those that have rejected Him will experience the final results of the trajectory that they have set themselves on: they will experience eternal separation from God. Beyond this, I know that our job as the Church is to simply worship God, persevere through tribulation, and overcome the world; this is the Scriptural admonition to the Church in the Revelation. Ours is not to know comprehensively so that we may have security and a sense of control over our circumstances, ours is to trust in our Bridegroom. Ours is not to manipulate history to try and affect the timing of God’s plan, but to hope and wait faithfully for Him. Ours is not to calculate the day and the hour, but to understand that the signs of the times have been all around us for a long time, which, quite simply, places us in the ‘last days’ whether we realize it or not. This recognition of the precariousness of Our Time in redemption history ought to remind us to be watchful and prayerful in the way we live.

Theology and Sexuality: Towards a Positive Theological Account of Human Sexuality

2005-08-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

This originally was a term paper for an Ethics Class...unfortunately the footnotes didn't survive the transfer from my WP program to here. Oh well, enjoy!

Human sexuality is a powerful force for Christians and non-Christian alike, but it is our Christianity, our identity as a counter-culture that requires that we provide a meaningful account of our sexuality that challenges this worlds’ truly god-less view of sexuality. In recognition of that fact, and to that end, a case will be made herein that sexuality has been mistreated by the church as much as by the world even to the present day, and that the church must deal comprehensively with sex positively in a theological and practical way. After outlining ways in which the contemporary culture has misused and misunderstood sex, the same treatment will be applied to the church. After that, a brief overview of the important recurring themes in the emergent sexual theology of contemporary orthodoxy will be given, and in conclusion there will be comments from the author on the ecclesial nature of Christian sexuality. This paper will not attempt an exhaustive account of human sexuality or try to pursue every implication hinted at to its fullest extent as that is not within the scope of this paper. Inasmuch as the author approaches each of these topics, it is with the realization that they each deserve comprehensive treatment in themselves, and can only be sketched briefly within the practical constraints of this paper.
By way of introduction it must be said that as Creatures of the sixth day, we know we lead an incarnated existence, sharing with our fellow creatures of the earth the natural aspects and trappings of biological life, including genital sexuality, but as the Image-Bearers of God we also are made to look to the endless seventh day, and He who rests and dwells there, for our ways and means in that biological life. This recognition of our super/natural life and meaning is the source of any Christian understanding of human sexuality.
The Church and the World on Sex: Two Sides of the Same Coin
If the world has lifted sex to the heights of Heaven and expected Heaven of it, then the Church has historically pushed it down to Hell and is now catching Hell for doing so. First we shall deal with the world, as its sin is obvious, then the Church’s as its sin is shrouded in much holy apparel. The fact that sex can be powerfully constructive or destructive psychologically, spiritually meaningful/meaningless on the deepest human level, and not least immensely pleasurable has obscured the truth from both Church and World in different ways, and must be dealt with accordingly.
The contemporary culture, (defined as those contemporary systems of thought and cultural sentiment which do not find their philosophical basis in the moral monotheism of the Bible, and lead to a less-than-fully ‘human’ account of our sexuality) has taken man from his proper place at the pinnacle of God’s created order, and reduced him to a merely biological being. As the culture has done this, it has also discarded God as both the source and goal of human life, and more to the point the source and ‘goal’ of human sexuality. In so doing they have also taken sexuality and done one of two things with it: “turned it into a false infinite’ or debased it as nothing more than a commonplace biological act like eating or sleeping. This idolatrous false infinite is created by the transcendence physiologically and experientially implied by sexual union. This transcendence, while very much hinted at anecdotally, is hard to quantify. In a recent ‘phenomenological’ study, MacKnee pointed out the occurrence of ‘sacred Christian sexuality.’ In those instances intense feelings not only of personal transcendence and union between the married lovers, but a tangible sense of God’s holy, sanctifying, and accepting presence was experienced. These sexual ‘mountaintop’ experiences were by no means something manufactured on demand by the lovers involved, but were firmly set in the context of Christian orthodoxy, a functional marriage relationship, and long-term commitment (on the order of decades) and profound emotional care. These peak experiences that exceed normal sexual expectations for both believers and non-believers alike in terms of personal psychological power and numinous quality will be important later in this paper, but for now they show all the more clearly the immense power of sexuality, and give us a lens through which can be seen one of the contemporary culture’s primary misunderstanding of sexuality, sexuality as false absolute or ‘false infinite.’ In the pleasure and intimate union of the sex act, the desire of the human being for self-transcendence, for the joining with the ‘Other’ is indeed ‘hinted at’ to once again quote Yancey. Paradoxically, even though this self-transcendent power remains in sex even for those who believe in no ultimate Other in the form of YHWH, the dominant naturalist/Darwinist worldview has legitimized the cheapening of human sexuality as an animal act that is nothing more than an expedient for the sake of evolution. Ultimately, in evolutionary terms, sex is pleasurable to cause us to participate in it more often, so that we will ensure the continuation of our species. Inasmuch as the only true metaphysical concern in sex is the propagation of mankind, sex is seen as comparable to eating, sleeping, and other common bodily functions. This point is interesting inasmuch as it shows the way in which our culture participates in the unhealthy debasement of human sexuality that is a result of the naturalistic/Darwinistic account of humans sexuality. From these two extremes we can withdraw one very important observation: that neither the viewing of sex as a ‘false absolute/infinite’ or the purely naturalistic explanations of Darwinism are sufficient accounts of what it means to be a sexual human being. It is plain to see that sex is not a divinizing act in the proper and strict sense, because it is plain to see that there are a lot of humans having a lot of sex, and none of which are approaching any sort of god-hood. Nor does the fact that many people behave like animals make them animals, nor does our cultures attempt at voiding sex of meaning make it any less meaningful a force for our hurt or betterment. The power of sex is considerable, but human beings are still precisely what they are: Immanent, contingent individuals that find meaning in their singularity by being in community, and participating in transcendent acts that make their contingent singularity bearable and meaningful, transcendent acts like sex.
The Church, as counter-cultural witness to the world’s ways, means, and weltenschaung, has failed in many ways up until recently to advance a thoroughly Christian account of the meaning and value of human sexuality. It has in various times and places proscribed and (very rarely) prescribed it, but has only as of late attempted at a fully orbed structure of thought that can explain the continuing mystery, power, and created goodness of sex. Up until this point, the two primary ways in which the world conceptually misunderstands sex (from which all of its misuse, abuse, and mis-construal is derivative) has been sketched for the purpose of showing what the church must face in building a meaningful theology of sex. However before that can happen, the church’s laxity must be discussed.
Historically speaking, the Church’s theology has been informed by dualistic, Platonic thinking about sex that relegated it to the realm of the body, of the earth, of the flesh. It was considered an unfortunate necessity at best. This suspicion and rejection of sex arose from a number of circumstances that swirled around the Church in its earliest years. The licentious sexuality of the Greco-Roman culture, and the link that was seen between that civilization’s eventual downfall and its out-of-control expressions of sexuality was a compelling reason for Christians to participate in a degree of anti-sex sentiment. While a historical treatment of the Church’s understanding of sexuality and culture is beyond the scope of this paper, it is helpful to understand in brief what has taken place historically so as to make sense of the attitudes towards sex in the 21st Century amongst evangelical Christians.
Evangelicals in the 20th Century, and more specifically since the late 1970’s have had an increasingly open attitude towards the discussion of sexuality. In a break with the perceived and/or real prudery of the past, they have assimilated a standard secular mode of sexual education: the Sex Manual. Described therein are various techniques, suggested models and timelines for intercourse, and various descriptions of the respective partners’ sexual responses. While DeRogatis is somewhat critical of the broad categories and generalizations made by the conservative/Protestant evangelicals, and applies a feminist critique of the language and substance used in these manuals, she does nonetheless point out their respective similarities. The aspect most important in DeRogatis’ treatment of these “Evagelical Sex Manuals” as she called them, is that they create a strong conceptual link between Scripture, the Protestant understanding of the inherent goodness of Creation, and the acceptance of heterosexual, monogamous, married sexuality as a gift from God. While there is room for critique of the presuppositions about gender roles that are consciously and unconsciously manifested in these books, it does provide an insight into the historical-cultural progression of the sexual attitudes of contemporary evangelicals. This progression of mores and the evangelical subculture’s assumptions will be the departure point for the next part of the discussion.
The evangelical movement in the 20th Century began to part ways with prudery as early as the 1930’s in its attitudes towards married sexuality and more importantly towards the education of married couples for the purpose of marital sexual fulfillment. This stage of initial concurrence in the early to mid-20th Century between the ‘norms’ of the larger society as evidenced by the similarity of Christian sex manuals and education to secular sex manuals and education was soon disturbed by the development in Christian thought of sex not being just ‘permitted’ for the purpose of the control of lust and promiscuity outside the marriage bond, but by it being altogether positive in terms of its ability to unify and bring ‘one-fleshness’ to the marriage partners. With the recent proliferation of Christian sex manuals since 1980, it can now be seen that the evangelical subculture is beginning to take sex not simply as ‘take it or leave it’ sort of matter, but one of great importance, not only for its moral implications (both inside and outside of marriage) but for the way in which Christians are sexual. DeRogatis’ observes that mutually satisfying, unifying, and intimate sex for married Christians is beginning to take on an aspect of witness. The fact that Christians can tout higher levels of satisfaction and fulfillment in marriage is seen as proof of the validity of the institution of Christian marriage itself. While in some ways, this might be an effective advertisement for the relative superiority of being a Christian in a sexualized culture such as ours, it also places the foundation for the value of Christian marriage on shaky ground, inasmuch as sexual dysfunction, poor health, or simple marital discord can oftentimes be detrimental to short or long term sexual fulfillment in marriage. That being said, it seems that regardless if the participants are always in a state of ‘personal fulfillment’ the value of being a Christian in marriage, as well as the value of Christian marriage respectively both remain regardless of their level of ‘sexual success.’
Historically, this movement from prudery to progress has seemed to proceed from a general disgust/distrust with sex (as caricatured at the beginning of this paper in the ascetic, Greek philosophy-influenced Christianity that informed much of the Church’s official thinking up until the time of Luther) to the ambivalent ‘sex as not bad, but morally and spiritually neutral at best’ model illustrated in the sex manuals of mid-20th Century conservative Protestants and Evangelicals. From there we see the current stage of Christian thought on sex as actually positive, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Currently, sex is viewed as spiritual and positive in the personal sense, inasmuch as it builds unity and accord between the partners. In the public sense, Christian sexuality is still viewed as not precisely spiritual in the theological sense, but spiritual inasmuch as it can be harnessed to the concept of ‘witness.’ Christian sexuality is viewed as an act of ‘witness’ in the popular sense when it garners more of the World’s desired results (numbers of orgasms, amount of personal fulfillment, etc) while reaching those results in an altogether ‘Christian’ manner. This is useful if one’s paradigm for witness is selling the Gospel, or making the Christian life (and Christian marriage) an attractive path leading to greater worldly happiness and pleasure, but as mentioned before, this puts the institution of Christian marriage as well as our corporate witness on shaky ground. Christian marriage ought to include meaningful and satisfying sex, but this is certainly not everything that ought to appeal about it! To reduce its ‘value in the world’s eyes’ to simply getting more of what the world is after is to miss the fact that Christian marriage is fundamentally not participated in for the same reasons as ‘wordly’ marriages are, as will be discussed later.
This reduction of Christian sexuality to a one dimensional expression of the Church’s witness should be a clarion call to the academic theological community that it is time to construct a positive theology of sexuality that moves beyond the mere vagaries of pop culture and its churchly imitators into an understanding of sexuality as an important and vital part of God’s created intention for humanity and not merely a simplistic attitude of “sex is for marriage.” While sex is certainly not less than this, it is so much more, and that will be the task of the concluding section of this paper, showing the innovative and powerful directions that some pastors, mental health professionals, as well as theologians proper are taking human sexuality.
It has been said that all of Western Philosophy is an extended footnote to Plato, and when it comes to contemporary theology, much of the 20th and now it seems the newborn 21st Century will in some way find itself derivative or referential in relationship to arguably the greatest of the 20th Century theologians, Karl Barth. Barth held that at its core human gendered-ness was a statement by God about Himself. In the Genesis passages that indicate Adam’s sense of ‘having no one suitable for him’ as a partner (prior to Eve that is!) as well the Pauline texts that speak of the couple becoming one flesh, Barth saw that the separation between the sexes indicated not only profound sense of difference, but also an inherent desire for one another, a profound sense of need and longing for the ‘other. ‘
“In our attraction-in-difference is reflected the difference-in-relation in the Trinitarian God.” Hereupon is where we encounter eros as a theological category. While eros is never spoken of in the New Testament, it is clearly seen that theologically speaking that the various models of Christ relationship to the Church as His ‘bride’ indicate a level of ‘erotic’ desire for the ‘other.’ As it was in Graham Ward’s article, eros is herein defined as the kenotic emptying of oneself to another, a joining of oneself to another for their (the others) own sake. This ‘erotic’ desire for the “Other” goes both directions, from Christ to the Church, and from the Church to Christ. It is this “I and Thou” relationship that is seen modeled in human sexuality. While Ward does make some theological moves that are unsettling, removing the basis of male and female en-gendering from its biological and historical location in the respective sexes, placing them purely in ‘relational’ contexts (the basis whereupon later in his article, he will begin to defend homosexuality) his analysis of Barth on this point is not only insightful, but makes plain much of what Barth is expressing.
The ‘otherness that desires togetherness’- that is the watchword of human sexuality, once again to quote Wards’ analysis of Barth, “-their vocation as male and female is to be for the other, a vocation that is divine and there communicated through the Spirit; and their desire for each other. The sexual difference is a theological difference…The Church then occupies a space in which the dualism of agape and eros, kenotic and possessive desire, is deconstructed. The agapaic enables the proper realization of the erotic (the completion of the couple, their incorporation) and stands in tension to the more general self-giving of one to another in the community.” From this Barthian foundation, we see not only his foresight and prescience of vision in terms of his theology of sexuality, but also the basis for much of the positive theological analysis that is happening in our own time.
In this Barthian notion of erotic sexuality as desire for the unity with and giving of oneself to another we find a starting point from which, consciously or unconsciously, most contemporary theological thought concerning sexuality springs. In the concluding pages of this paper several derivative themes that are found initially in Barth will be briefly sketched out, with some concluding thoughts on the ecclesiological character of Christian sexuality.
Sex as Sacrament
It is interesting to see this interplay of differing opinions on this particular idea from amongst the authors culled for this paper. The rather more conservative journal includes an article that speaks the most sacredly about sex, implying that God’s presence and graceful blessing are present and wrapped up in the sex act in some way for married believers. “Each contributor knew, beyond a doubt, that God was present with him or her as sexual intimacy was taking place…God’s presence during profound sexual intimacy provoked heightened feelings of physical and emotional responsiveness.” However, Ward, who gave the aforementioned critique and analysis of Barth, (not to mention a very positive account of homosexuality) gave ‘sacramental sex’ very short shrift in his introduction, “I do not believe orgasm and revelation are the same things or two forms of similar self-transcendence.” Instead seeing human eroticism purely as a model from which he wanted to “construct a theology of desire, God’s desire for me (a desire which is prerequisite for any doctrine of election and hence redemption) and my desire for God.” In this author’s opinion, either approach is a way forward because they seem to be two sides of the same coin. If sacrament is the practical participation in and impartation of God’s grace and presence through immanent-physical means (the consuming of bread and wine, the baptism of water) than both approaches are sacramental in their own way. MacKnee’s phenomenological approach locates a tangible, almost ‘charismatic’ presence of God accompanying and bound up with the sexual union in marriage. In the ‘reverse engineering’ that Ward seems to use when constructing his “Erotics of Redemption” the sex act is at least symbolic if not participatory in God’s graceful presence and unity with humanity. In many ways, this fits under the rubric of Ephesians 5:21-33. There is to be mutual service and love between the partners in marriage, each considering the other before his or her self. Moreover, if we are to take Inspiration seriously we ought to take as meaningful the fact that Paul’s chosen metaphor for Christ’s relationship with the Church is marriage! Whether God manifests himself sacramentally in the sex act tangibly or symbolically, it is not to be dismissed flippantly.

Gendered-ness and Sexuality as “I-Thou” Relationship
Genesis 2:18 puts forth that God saw that it was not good for man to be alone, and so created for him a partner suitable for him, much to Adam’s delight! (Genesis 2:23-24) However it was surely not unknown to God that Adam would be lonesome in this state, and would require someone else to complete Him. From these two verses, the first pointing out the incompleteness of one sex without the other, and the second shedding light on the pleasure, rejoicing, and the sheer ‘giftedness’ of the first two humans to one another, we see a model of how God relates to the Church, to the World, and to the individual. “God also created sexuality with male and female becoming one flesh. This is His ultimate Love Story that we retell in our love stories, Christ and the Bride throughout eternity…we experience deep longing and feelings of being incomplete which can only by fulfilled by union with God. He created within man and woman a desire for each other and intimate completion that mirrors our need for Him.”
In this it plain to see that we (all of the respective individual “I’s” to the great single “Thou” of God) were made for the Other, the Thou. We were made to clearly understand our incompleteness, made manifest in our sense of loneliness and longing for a partner in life; that realization of incompleteness was intended to make obvious our need and indeed our created purpose of relationship with God. This understanding of the individual as one made and intended for the other, be they human or divine militates not only against any sort of radical individualism that would separate itself from God in an attempt at freedom and independence, but more directly against homosexuality. Homosexuality is not a seeking of the Other, the Altogether Separate, the Different, as the seeking of male and female for one another, or God and man for one another is. Homosexuality is the avoidance of risk, it is the seeking of the Self, the Same in the Other. It is sin manifestly because it represents metaphorically the human search for Self as Source of Ultimate Meaning and Completion instead of the search for those things in the Ultimate Other, the Eternal Thou, God. That being said, a loving, forgiving, and serving attitude towards homosexuals (their sin is no uglier than mine!) is certainly in order.
Ecclesiology and Sexuality: A Re-interpretation of Sex as Witness
Early in this paper mention was made of evangelicalism trying to use ‘successful’ sexuality as a selling point for the Gospel. This author argued against that because in the end the Church, it seems, is trying to ‘sell’ the Gospel to people on account of its ability to deliver greater earthly goods to them. (“Become a Christian, and you too will have more frequent, and more fulfilling sex!”) The difficulty with this is not that it is necessarily untrue, many studies seem to show that it is indeed true actually. It is the use of ‘successful’ sexuality as an enticement that allows those who have a sexual failure, moral failure, or who simply do not enjoy the relatively ‘good’ sex lives other couples do to de-legitimize the Gospel in their own lives and corporately. These are the dangers in trying to ‘market’ the Gospel to people in terms of its worldly benefits: The Gospel only very indirectly offers worldly goods as rewards for the Christian life if at all, and all the more importantly it misses the true significance of sex for the Christian marriage. In the light of the Gospel not promising phenomenal sex and ecstatic marriage experiences as commonplace for the Christian believer, what does the Gospel have to say about the way in which Christians are sexual? Here we arrive at the conclusion of the matter: it is not altogether central that Christians have more frequent and more enjoyable sex (though it seems that they indeed do…) or that they reject sex as dirty or a necessary evil (as did the church for a very long time) or that they indulge in it as if was devoid of meaning or invest too much power and meaning into it, rendering it an idol (the two common mistakes of the world) but that the reasons and ways, and the means and ends in which the Christian community uses sex for its proper ends are altogether good, and lead to human flourishing in the Christian community.. Speaking apophatically, we can name what Christian sexuality is not, and proclaim a witness from within that. Christian sexuality is not self-seeking, it is not damaging, it does not destroy intimate bonds, it does not break trust between its participants. To speak positively, it is restorative, refreshing and constructive; it is the modeling of God’s Other-ness, the unveiling of the mysterious bond between Christ and His Church, and it is the establishment of a bond in marriage. It is these things that allow the Church to consider sex a matter of witness. With these things in mind we must approach our sexuality both privately and corporately in the body of Christ.

Platonism and Asceticism

2005-08-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

Initially it is hard to see how Platonic dualism has affected Christian ethics. However, that is because it seems that dualism is/was so commonplace in our outlook as to blind us to its presence. Being more Aristotelian in my ethical stance, I cannot help but militate against the lack of 'instantiation' or 'incarnation' that is engendered by Plato's ethical/moral dualism. With that in mind, forgive me for beng largely critical (at least herein) of Plato in this respect.
I think that we see the negative effects of moral dualism across the breadth of Church history in the the various expressions of asceticism. It has been said all of Western philosophy is but footnotes and addendums (be they pro or con) to Plato. Much the same thing could be said of 'asceticism as central spiritual discipline.' As you will soon see, I will be coming down on the 'con' side.
The removal of man from his environment, that is, the incarnate life, with all its 'materialality'(which, whether we like it or not is where we are stuck for the time being, and in a redeemed fashion, what we will be resurrected into for the rest of eternity) doesn't do much to aid the living of the authentic Christian life in the midst of the world. I am not a rabid pragmatist/utilitarian by any means, but it is simply unabalanced, and it denies the created goodness of the physcial body, as well as the created order by extension. In its own way it is a retreat into the self, and away from the sometimes nasty, and certainly morally alloyed front lines of the Kingdom and ministry to the world. In emphasizing evil/sin as a thing that is 'of the body' or peculiarly linked to incarnate existence, we make the mistake of thinking we can avoid it by simply removing that which is 'of the body' (food, reasonable comfort, fellowship, sex;--which leads to another difficulty: what are the criteria for the determination of what is fleshly or not? What happens if asceticism takes a particularly ironic turn and calls study and communal scholarship a thing of the flesh, and then follows our culture into its pronounced inter-personal atomization?) Anyway...The danger of this is that it places sin/evil once removed from us as fallen beings. Inasmuch as we can say 'the devil made me do it' or 'I was in the flesh when that happened' we have rejected our own depravity as a meaningful anthropological category. We are sinful; we don't like to admit it, and so we attempt to justify ourselves by way of identifying a cosmic source of moral evil outside of ourselves to ease our throbbing consciences. Or we simply say that that its a matter of our 'physicality overwhelming our spirituality.' The former is true in a minimal sense regarding Satan simpliciter, but in a more holistic sense, sin is in me, not out there. Not in Satan, nor in strong drink, nor in the beauty that gives opportunity for lust. Even in that sentence is seen the core of the argument. One does not blame the beautiful woman for the lust of the lecher, but rightly the lecher is deemed blameworthy. Sin is not found in the warp and woof of physical beauty, (for her beauty is a gift from God, who does not give evil or substandard gifts) or at the bottom of a pint, or on on the shining porcelain of a plate licked clean after a great feast, but in the interiority of the lover/lecher, the drinker/alcoholic, or the feaster/glutton. The sin is inside me. It is the perversion of goodness to which my whole being is bent. I cannot extirpate these seeds by simply avoiding the soil they find most fertile, but only by allowing my garden to be weeded and my stock of seed replenished from a better Gardener than I. Moreover I think the New Testament miliates against Plato's faulty linking of moral evil with ignorance of the soul, as caused by its fleshly prison. Mere ignorance and mere knowledge are not the determinig factors for moral evil in the human person. More than a few intelligent and well informed people were/are very sinful. (Nazi doctors, the Nixon administration, me...) There must be another noetic/anthropological category by which we can explain our behavior. (I hear a voice in my head saying, 'It's the SIN stupid!') Any anthropology or ethical framework that doesn't take into account mankinds fully sinful constitution (spiritually and bodily fallen, to use a dichotomy I dislike) denies Scriptural testimony about us. Moral dualism of the Platonic variety, besides quietly elevating Satan to a position of parity with God (a la Zoroastrianism) also allows us an easy escape from the reality of our own depravity and responsibility, thereby cheapening the grace of God.

Thoughts on Equality

2005-08-28T13:07:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was reading an essay by C.S. Lewis called "Religion and Rocketry" in which he postulated the ramifications both practical and non-matierial of life other than our human variety in the universe. He conjectured that there might be races that could be unfallen, innocent, and sinless. How crass and backwards we would appear those god-like creatures! Perhaps this unfallen race would be surprisingly less advanced and not as highly developed technologically or organizationally as we, pity that sort of creature if it ever fell into our hands for surely we would destroy them in a heartbeat! (i.e. "Earth first! We'll log the other planets later...") A thing that struck me in all his conjecture, as it has struck me in a number of his other works is his unabashed comfort with inequality between people, between species, perhaps even between human beings and extra-terrestrial races. I suppose this is a classical conservative position that should not really surprise coming from a mid-20th centure British academic. Yet still...yet still...After all the accuasations of him being a dead white guy, a classist, a snob, a 'man of his times' have been voiced, the truth of our fundamental inequality still holds true. Surely, political equality and democracy are very good things. Not because people are good and really deserve power in government and decision-making, but because we are all evil and selfish. The true genuis of the American republic is not that it 'gives everyone their fair say' (to tell the truth some of the things people 'jsut have to say' are crap, because they are ignorant twits and they shouldn't be given the helm of grocery cart let alone a nation) but that it spreads power out. It (tacitly, perhaps even unconsciously) assumes the fallen selfishness of everyone, and therefore avoids the mistake of allowing a single person or oligarchy too much power. It acknowledges that a good way to keep a persons selfish fallen-ness in check is to put it in competition and accountability to another persons fallen selfish-ness. (i.e. checks and balances in the three branches of government...sort of) But I digress...

The reality is that we are not all equal, and thats ok... The regard that human beings are required to have for each other is not based upon their merit, only from their status as creatures made in the image of God. Oftentimes there is a search for a meaningful basis for human 'rights' or dignity outside of the Bible, even we Christians do this. I do think there is some to be found, but in reality this can only be a hazy and endlessly debate-able 'natural revelation' of what has plainly revealed in Scripture. I have done this myself, but it seems to arise from my desire to justify a theistic Christian wordlview and ethical stance to non-believers by 'proving' Christianity on their (the non-believers) own intellectual terms, that is, on territory that is not 'theistic' or 'Christian.' This seems to me to be an interesting endeavour (I like doing it actually!) but nonetheless quixotic. In truth, the Christian is better off founding their ethical-moral framework and ethical anthropology on the the revelation of Scripture, and using natural revelation as merely an apologetical tool rather than as the basis simpliciter for their ethics. That being said I digress once again....

Once again the regard we have for each other as human beings is based upon the understanding that we are all made in the image of God, and that while our existence now is one of real and true inequality on many levels (socio-economic, political, in terms of physical beauty and intelligence, and unfortunately race also...) that our regard for, and concordant good treatment of, one another is not based upon these criteria anyway. Who is to say that some sort of meaningful inequality amongst the blessed citizens of the new heavens and new earth will persist after the end of time? I certainly don't like to believe in gradients of eternal reward, but surely, God in His wisdom and love is not constructing a place of discord and strife? If there is to be inequality...well then I am sure it will be the most delightful sort possible. Perhaps like a loved child before its Father? Could the Hobo I avoided today on the sidewalk be the one who is gently rebuking me and helping me grow on the other side of eternity? This life demands that we take inequalities seriously, and not artificially try to ignore them. Some people are simply more capable at some things than others. Or more beautiful, or what have you. It does not lessen the moral or ontological value of the the less-capabe individual, just their utility in that situation. Unfortunately we are a society that values pragmatic capitalism above all else and we have sinfully absolutized those mercenary values inasmuch as they have become the criteria by which we judge more than a persons utility, but their very value as people. This should not be so. All that to say, Jesus loved 'em so I should too.

The Sovereign God of the universe made me and placed me in history where He saw fit. If that statement is true, than my socio-economic position, my accomplishments, my physical beauty (something I must remind myself to be thankful for on a regular basis) are not what determines my value. The same goes for others. With that in mind, we can love and pray for our betters as those who bear the greater weight of responsibility that we because of their greater gifts or endowments (rather than with envy) and treat our inferiors with responsibility and deference of service (rather than self-aggrandizing condescension or abusive instrumentalization of them). Moreover, Jesus makes it pretty clear that those who woud lead His remarkable little enterprise through history (heretorfore known as "The Church") would be the same ones that scrubbed the toilets, cared for the dying, and tolerated the diapered screamers in the third pew back. In conclusion, the superior pays to the inferior the debt of love by deference and care, be it man to animal, man to man, or extra-terrestrial to man!

So there...