Basically a good person

The Coen brothers made several of my favorite films: The Big Lebowski, Fargo, and Miller's Crossing, among them. I find those and several others eminently rewatchable — and I'll watch anything they make at least once. The most recent of their efforts I've seen is A Serious Man, and it took a few viewings before I began to appreciate it. This review, by Sonny Bunch, helped:

Many of the critiques of the latest Coen Brothers film, A Serious Man, began by comparing the struggles of protagonist Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a college physics professor in the midwest, with those of Job. The New York Times' A.O. Scott, the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert, and the Washington Post's Anne Hornaday, among others, made reference to the Book of Job and poor Larry's varied predicaments: His wife is leaving him, a South Korean student named Clive is attempting to bribe him (and then threatens to sue Larry for defamation for pointing out that he is under an ethical obligation to report the bribe), and his world is just generally falling apart.

The point that the critical corps was making is relatively simple, that Larry is a good man who has been made to suffer a seemingly endless series of trials for no apparent reason. God, it would seem, is testing our hero. ....

As events in the film later show, however, appearances can be deceiving. An absence of bad is not the same thing as the presence of good, and herein is Larry's problem. He's so passive and so unable to take charge of his own life that it is easy to understand why such a wave of misfortune is now rolling over him. ....

It says something about the nature of our culture that so many people have simply gone along with the idea that Larry is a fundamentally decent guy and, therefore, good. It is especially shocking considering the things we actually see Larry do as the film progresses. We live in a time where the absence of evil is treated as a good unto itself, where paying your taxes, staying loyal to your spouse, and treating people decently — things that are all expected of us but not particularly praiseworthy in and of themselves — are all it takes to be considered good. It's the bigotry of soft expectations writ large, a sign that our expectations are so soft they're practically butter. .... (more)

If you've seen the film, read it all. If you intend to watch it, wait.

A Serious Man? — Review — In Character, A Journal of Everyday Virtues by the John Templeton Foundation

"A wonderful plan for your life"

In an article about the "de-churched," i.e. those who have left the church, Skye Jethani identifies two distinct categories: those who leave because they have heard a false gospel and those who leave because they've become cynical about the church as an institution. Those in the first group:

....believe that if they just follow God’s rules he will bless their lives. When things fail to work out as promised, they bail on the church. Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion, has called this belief MTD—moralistic therapeutic deism. I prefer a more sinister and downright damnable name: Moralistic Divination—the belief that one can control and manipulate God’s actions through moral behaviors.

While there are many churches that promote this sort of false thinking, including those within the prosperity gospel crowd, I believe most do not. So why do so many Christians, particularly the young, carry these beliefs? In most cases the problem isn’t what the church is preaching, but in what it is assuming.

For example, the popular summarization of the gospel known as “The Four Spiritual Laws” begins with the statement, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” This idea, drawn from scripture and rooted in orthodoxy, may be faithfully preached in your church. But how is it received? How does a person formed and hardened for decades in the furnaces of consumerism hear this statement?

The biblical understanding of a “wonderful life” looks dramatically different than the consumer culture’s definition of a “wonderful life.” If this assumption is never identified, named, and deconstructed, a person may hear “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” very differently than we intend. .... The result is a hybrid consumer gospel in which God exists to serve me and accomplish my desires in exchange for my obedience—voila, Moralistic Divination.

When this consumer gospel fails to deliver on its assumed promises, as it inevitably does, frustration, disappointment, and disillusionment quickly follow. And the pool of the de-churched gains another swimmer. .... [more]

Note: As Jethani writes, this isn't a criticism of the orthodoxy of the "Four Spiritual Laws" but simply an example of a common misunderstanding that God's " wonderful plan for your life" is that God will give us what we want — not a very good prescription for blessedness — or happiness — and not how that statement was intended to be understood.

Who Are the De-Churched? (Part 2) | Out of Ur | Conversations for Ministry Leaders

Not just the disposal of a thing

Russell Moore, who is Dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,  has written before about his view "...that burial, not cremation, best pictures the imagery of death as a sleep from which one is awakened at the last trumpet" and that two millennia of Christian practice is being abandoned without serious consideration of the implications. A new history of the faith supports his opinion:

“As hellfire receded, there advanced the literal fires of the crematorium.

So writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in the concluding chapter of his massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. ....

Increasing rates of cremation in the West, MacCulloch writes, are surprising because cremation “is the abandonment of a key aspect of Christian practice since its early days.” .... He shows how “universally archaeologists are able to detect the spread of Christian culture through the ancient and early medieval world by the excavation of corpse burials oriented east-west.” ....

MacCulloch, no conservative, establishes that the unanimous voice of the church, in every sector, was for burial over against cremation, and concludes the traditionalist case (that cremation is a pagan practice inconsistent with historic Christianity) is “unanswerable.”

For MacCulloch, there are several implications of the skyrocketing cremation rates. The first is that the theological and doxological claims against it, once held with unanimity, are not even discussed by cremation proponents. Arguments instead focus on public health, cost (and I would add the American evangelical response: “why not?”). .... [more]

In a 2007 article for Touchstone, "Grave Signs," Moore advocated Christian burial rather than cremation. That article was inspired by the cremation of his grandfather and the discomfort he felt about it. He included references to biblical precedent for burial from both testaments. Burial, he argues, has not only the support of scripture, but theological significance, and respect for the person who has died.

.... Of course God can resurrect a cremated Christian. He can also resurrect a Christian burned at the stake, or a Christian torn to pieces by lions in a Roman coliseum, or a Christian digested by a great white shark off the coast of Florida.

But are funerals simply the way in which we dispose of remains? If so, graveyards are unnecessary, too. Why not simply toss the corpses of our loved ones into the local waste landfill?

For Christians, burial is not the disposal of a thing. It is caring for a person. In burial, we’re reminded that the body is not a shell, a husk tossed aside by the “real” person, the soul within. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:6–8; Phil. 1:23), but the body that remains still belongs to someone, someone we love, someone who will reclaim it one day. ....

Burial is a fitting earthly end to the life of a faithful Christian, a Christian who has been “buried with Christ in baptism” and is waiting to be raised with him in glory (Rom. 6:4). A Christian burial does not mean that we are “in denial” about the decomposition of bodies—that is part of the Edenic curse (Gen. 3:19). It does mean that this decomposition is not what, in this act of worship, we proclaim as the ultimate truth about the one to whom we’ve said goodbye.

Burial conveys the image of sleep, the metaphor Jesus and his apostles used repeatedly for the believing dead (John 11:11; 1 Cor. 15:51; 1 Thess. 4:13–14). It conveys a message, a message quite different from that of a body already speed-decayed, a body consumed by fire. .... [more]

Cremation and a New Kind of Christianity, Touchstone Archives: Grave Signs

"Not from comfort but from affliction"

Roger Scruton on "Gratitude and Grace":

.... The term (Latin gratia) translates a variety of words in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Sanskrit, but all the sacred texts seem to point in the same direction, affirming that God's relation to the world as a whole, and to each of us in particular, is one of giving. The beseeching of God's grace is the central feature of the Anglican liturgy. The great prayer of the Catholic Church, based on a poem in the New Testament, greets the Virgin Mary with the words "Hail Mary, full of Grace, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." The Koran opens with the verse that forms a refrain in the life of all Muslims: bism illah il-rahman il-rahim, in the name of God, full of grace, full of graciousness, as Mohamed Asad translates it, and the root rhm is shared with Hebrew, used often in the Old Testament to denote God's concern for us, His recognition of our weakness, and His abundance of gifts. The idea that the world is sustained by gift is second nature to religious people, who believe that they should be givers in their turn, if they are to receive the gift on which they depend for their salvation. ....

Gift supposes ownership: I cannot give you a thing unless that thing is mine. In giving it to you I relinquish ownership, while demanding nothing in exchange. Gratitude is your acknowledgment of this: your recognition that I have deliberately incurred a loss, in order that you should receive a benefit. And we normally expect the relation between us to be changed by this. We assume that you will bear in mind the good that I have done you, and be prepared, in the right circumstances, to reciprocate. Of course, the opportunity to reciprocate may never arise, and the truly generous person, the one who takes pleasure in giving and who regards giving as a good in itself, will not think that he is, through his giving, securing some future benefit. ....

Everyone who has suffered some major calamity, be it illness, loss, or some sudden reversal of fortune, feels, on pulling through, a great surge of gratitude. And gratitude comes in two forms. First, you are grateful for pulling through — you are still alive, still functioning, still able to love. Secondly, you are grateful for the experience itself. Here again the religious person would be disposed to speak of the workings of Grace. You can be grateful for something bad: grateful for the affliction that awoke you to the truth about yourself, that enabled you to confront it, to overcome it, to understand. You are grateful to have learned that life is a gift, and that to receive it fully you must give in turn. As William Law expressed the point, in his A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, "whatever seeming calamity befalls you, if you can thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing." It seems to me that this is the way we learn gratitude — not from abundance, but from dearth, not from comfort but from affliction. [more]

Much of the essay is about the disappearance of the charitable impulse and why gratitude is being replaced by envy and resentment.

The American Spectator : Gratitude and Grace

Michael Spencer, RIP

Michael Spencer has died. He blogged as the Internet Monk and was one of the first Christian bloggers I discovered. Often provocative and always interesting, he was ecumenical in the best sense, interested in every tradition, unconvinced that any had it all right. I particularly appreciated his emphasis on worship. Apart from his writing, I didn't know him, but it felt like I did, and I will miss him. Michael Spencer, 1956-2010, rest in peace.

A seemly modesty

Robert Samuelson explains one of the reasons increasing numbers of people are simultaneously politically motivated and cynical about politics. Having "thrown the bums out" in the last two elections, they seem prepared to do it again - except this time it's the other "bums." Every political issue has moral implications respecting both means and ends, but it is often less obvious that we have grasped them than we are inclined to think. Self righteousness is no more attractive in politics than in personal relationships.

.... Purging moral questions from politics is both impossible and undesirable. But today's tendency to turn every contentious issue into a moral confrontation is divisive. One way of fortifying people's self-esteem is praising them as smart, public-spirited and virtuous. But an easier way is to portray the "other side" as scum: The more scummy "they" are, the more superior "we" are. This logic governs the political conversation of left and right, especially talk radio, cable channels and the blogosphere.

Unlike economic benefits, psychic benefits can be dispensed without going through Congress. Mere talk does the trick. Shrillness and venom are the coin of the realm. The opposition cannot simply be mistaken. It must be evil, selfish, racist, unpatriotic, immoral or just stupid. A culture of self-righteousness reigns across the political spectrum. Stridency from one feeds the other. Political polarization deepens; compromise becomes harder. How can anyone negotiate if the other side is so extreme? ....

American politics caters to people's natural desire to think well of themselves. But in so doing, it often sacrifices pragmatic goals and sows rancor that brings government and the political system into disrepute. The ultimate danger is that the poisonous polarization of elites spreads to the country at large. (emphasis added) [more]

One of the reasons politics has become so venomous is that every issue in society has become a "problem" that politicians should solve. And yet political interventions often just seem to create more difficulties and consequently cynicism about politics grows. Glenn Reynolds reminds us there are practical reasons to have modest expectations about what government can do:

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. ....

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can't possibly be smart enough to make them work. .... [more]

Thanks to Betsy Newmark for the references.

Robert J. Samuelson - The posionous politics of self-esteem, Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem

If Christ has not been raised....

J.R. Daniel Kirk, via By Every Word:

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the Misfit explains the world-shattering significance of Jesus' resurrection: "He thrown everything off balance. If he did what he said then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow him, and if he didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can."

"...[I]f Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
(1 Corinthians 15:17-22, ESV)

He is risen indeed!

By Every Word...: What if it's true?....

And the Sabbath was beginning

It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, “Certainly this man was innocent!” And all the crowds that had assembled for this spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts. And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching these things.

Now there was a man named Joseph, from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man, who had not consented to their decision and action; and he was looking for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a tomb cut in stone, where no one had ever yet been laid. It was the day of Preparation, and the Sabbath was beginning. The women who had come with him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments.

On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

(Luke 23:44-56, ESV)

"He was crucified for us"

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only-begotten Son of God,
begotten of the Father before all worlds:
God of God, Light of Light,
very God of very God; begotten not made;
being of one substance with the Father,
by whom all things were made;
who for us men
and for our salvation came down from heaven;
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the virgin Mary,
and was made man.
He was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried....

"Ain't No Grave"

Sean Curnyn reviews for First Things the most recently released of Johnny Cash's "American Recordings," American VI: Ain't No Grave:

As goes Scripture, so goes country music: The great lines are reused forever. Just listen to the final song that Johnny Cash composed, titled “I Corinthians 15:55,” and the refrain, which goes like this:

Oh death, where is thy sting?
Oh grave, where is thy victory?
Oh life, you are a shining path
And hope springs eternal just over the rise
When I see my Redeemer beckoning me

The first two lines are the ones cited in the title, from St. Paul, but Paul in his turn was quoting Hosea 13:14 in that particular passage. Cash would have known well that he was invoking both the Old and New Testaments there, and the resonance of a promise that doesn’t fade. ....

That song by itself, Curnyn says, makes the album worth buying, even though some other tracks are weaker. He concludes the review:

I only recently saw the 1972 film that Johnny and June made called The Gospel Road, a story of Jesus Christ utilizing both music and actors. To my chagrin, I found it almost unwatchable; to me (even as a believer) it was excessively didactic and awkward. But no such weaknesses accompany the way Cash puts over a song of faith, whether “Ain’t No Grave” here or his rollicking version of “The Old Account” from back in 1959. His sound has always been that of a man aching for his Redeemer, desperately in need of that redemption, and at the same time filled with joy at the softest touch from above, already received. And there surely ain’t no grave gonna hold his body down. [more]

Sean Curnyn is the blogger at RightWingBob.com, one of my favorite blogs, combining as it does my religious, political and musical enthusiasms.

Johnny Cash: One More Time | First Things

"God's law rather than man's"

I have previously posted information about Seventh Day Baptist involvement in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. Another instance is reported in the Olean Times Herald: "Friendship farmer was agent on Underground Railroad," by Douglas Roorbach. The farmer was a man named Ethan Lanphear.

Mr. Lanphear’s parents, Samuel and Hannah Lanphear, moved from Rhode Island to Alfred, N.Y., when young Ethan was just two years old. He had two brothers and three sisters, all raised by their parents to live upright, moral lives in accordance with the Bible.

Just before he turned 20, Ethan took over the operation of a grist mill that his father had built and five years later he married Lois Greenman, a local schoolteacher.

Frederick Douglass

In 1844 the couple moved to Nile, at the time an enclave of Seventh Day Baptists two miles south of Friendship. At his doctor’s urging, Mr. Lanphear quit the mill and became a farmer, a trade at which he was quite successful for at least two decades.

During those years, Mr. Lanphear became active in politics as a Republican and an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln. He also supported the abolitionist movement, especially after 1850.

That was the year Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, requiring that runaway slaves be returned to their previous owners and making it a federal offense to harbor them. Like many others, Mr. Lanphear took part in what would become our nation’s first major act of civil disobedience.

“This (the Fugitive Slave Act) was too much for Christian men to bear,” he wrote years later, “and they revolted on the ground that it was their duty to obey God’s law rather than man’s.” ....

It was in 1851 that Frederick Douglass came to Allegheny County, spoke in several Seventh Day Baptist churches, and probably met Mr. Lanphear:

Ethan Lanphear

The next day Mr. Douglass went on to Friendship, speaking “to a large and attentive audience,” Mr. Cole wrote, which was “alive with interest, frank, intelligent,” Mr. Douglass put in his report.

Friendship Town Historian Mark Voorheis surmises that, given Mr. Lanphear’s abolitionist activities, he was likely to have been in the audience that day — Oct. 1, 1851 — and may well have met Mr. Douglass.

Perhaps it was Mr. Lanphear that convinced Mr. Douglass to add a lecture at Nile, where Mr. Lanphear was prominent in the Seventh Day Baptist community. Mr. Douglass spoke there that evening, in the chapel, “an exceedingly neat little building … filled with a quiet and tidy-looking congregation,” he wrote. ....

...Mr. Douglass spoke at Alfred Center, perhaps, again, at the behest of Mr. Lanphear. The Alfred stop had not been on the original tour agenda. Mr. Lanphear had lived in Alfred with his parents, and still had many ties there, including with Rev. Hull, the Seventh Day Baptist minister who entertained Mr. Douglass at his home.

It turned out to be the largest meeting of the series, Mr. Douglass wrote. “There is here a flourishing Seminary … [which] has students to the number of 200, about all of whom attended my meeting … the school being adjourned for the purpose.”

Mr. Douglass was so popular he held a second meeting in Alfred that evening, “Where again I had a full house,” he wrote. ....

Mark Voorheis, historian in the town of Friendship, notes that although there is no record of Mr. Lanphear and Mr. Douglass meeting at the time, the two did become friends and remained close for the rest of their lives.

In their later years, after the Civil War and after the Lanphears had moved to Plainfield, N.J., Mr. Douglass was a regular guest at their home.

Whether or not it was Mr. Douglass who did so, it is clear that Mr. Lanphear was encouraged to continue his activities with the Underground Railroad.

“I was an early abolitionist when it was an unpopular position to take, and my home was a resting-place for many a poor slave that was endeavoring to find freedom,” Mr. Lanphear wrote in his book.

The three part series in the Olean Times Herald: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Friendship farmer was agent on Underground Railroad

Trinity?

Some students at a university founded by Presbyterians object to the vestigial remnents of Christian influence still present. James Taranto:

"A group of students at Trinity University is lobbying trustees to drop a reference to 'Our Lord' on their diplomas, arguing it does not respect the diversity of religions on campus," reports the San Antonio Express-News:

"A diploma is a very personal item, and people want to proudly display it in their offices and homes," said Sidra Qureshi, president of Trinity Diversity Connection. "By having the phrase 'In the Year of Our Lord,' it is directly referencing Jesus Christ, and not everyone believes in Jesus Christ."

Qureshi, who is Muslim, has led the charge to tweak the wording, winning support from student government and a campus commencement committee. Trustees are expected to consider the students' request at a May board meeting. . . .

The debate started last year when Isaac Medina, a Muslim convert from Guadalajara, Mexico, noticed the wording while looking at pre-made diploma frames in the Trinity bookstore. When Medina applied to Trinity, university staff told him it wasn't a religious institution and that it maintained only a historical bond to the Presbyterian Church.

So the godly reference "came as a big surprise," said Medina, who graduated in December. "I felt I was a victim of a bait and switch."

Whatever you do, don't tell Qureshi and Medina what "Trinity" means!

And the Latin motto on that seal on the diploma might be a problem, too. And what is that book? And then there's the name of the city...

Birth of a Notion - WSJ.com

Self-esteem is self-absorption without self-examination

Theodore Dalrymple on "Self-Esteem vs. Self-Respect":

With the coyness of someone revealing a bizarre sexual taste, my patients would often say to me, "Doctor, I think I'm suffering from low self-esteem." This, they believed, was at the root of their problem, whatever it was, for there is hardly any undesirable behavior or experience that has not been attributed, in the press and on the air, in books and in private conversations, to low self-esteem, from eating too much to mass murder.

Self-esteem is, of course, a term in the modern lexicon of psychobabble, and psychobabble is itself the verbal expression of self-absorption without self-examination. The former is a pleasurable vice, the latter a painful discipline. An accomplished psychobabbler can talk for hours about himself without revealing anything. ....

When people speak of their low self-esteem, they imply two things: first, that it is a physiological fact, rather like low hemoglobin, and second, that they have a right to more of it. What they seek, if you like, is a transfusion of self-esteem, given (curiously enough) by others; and once they have it, the quality of their lives will improve as the night succeeds the day. For the record, I never had a patient who complained of having too much self-esteem, and who therefore asked for a reduction. Self-esteem, it appears, is like money or health: you can't have too much of it. ....

The problem with low self-esteem is not self-dislike, as is often claimed, but self-absorption. However, it does not follow from this that high self-esteem is not a genuine problem. One has only to go into a prison, or at least a prison of the kind in which I used to work, to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people (the young thugs) who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. For them, their whim was law, which was precisely as it should be considering who they were in their own estimate. It need hardly be said that this degree of self-esteem is certainly not confined to young thugs. Most of us probably suffer from it episodically, as any waiter in any restaurant would be able to tell us.

In short, self-esteem is but a division of self-importance, which is seldom an attractive quality. That person is best who never thinks of his own importance: to think about it, even, is to be lost to morality. Self-respect is another quality entirely. Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else's place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance. ....

Self-respect requires fortitude, one of the cardinal virtues; self-esteem encourages emotional incontinence that, while not actually itself a cardinal sin, is certainly a vice, and a very unattractive one. Self-respect and self-esteem are as different as depth and shallowness. .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple on Self-Esteem vs. Self-Respect

Blood and gore

I have an early memory of sitting in the car with the door open while my father and our pastor stood near me talking. The only thing I remember of the conversation was the pastor saying that he didn't want any of those gory hymns in our church. One of the most famous "bloody" hymns was written by the great English poet, William Cowper, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood," a hymn we can't use in my church because of the images it arouses for one member. Russell Moore, yesterday, asked "Is Your Church Losing Blood?:

American Christianity is far less bloody than it used to be.

Songs like “Power in the Blood” or “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” or “Are You Washed in the Blood?” are still sung in some places, but fewer and fewer, and there aren’t many newer songs or praise choruses so focused on blood. The Cross, yes; redemption, yes; but blood, rarely. We’re eager to speak of life, but hesitant to speak of blood.

And this is not only a Protestant phenomenon. Roman Catholics—centered as they are on the Eucharist—often seem to go out of their way to speak of the “real presence” of Jesus in the elements, without going so far as to mention that this presence is believed to be that of his body and blood, as well as soul and divinity. Even Catholic communion hymns, I’m told, prefer terms like “the Cup” to “the Blood.”

The eclipse of blood in American Christianity has quite a bit to do, I suspect, with American prosperity. .... (more)

Today, he explains "Why Blood Shocks.

Moore to the Point by Russell D. Moore

But, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try

Stephen Hebert, writing at Withering Fig, has been thinking about "What’s Wrong with Systematic Theology" and particularly some presentations of it. Perhaps there is a reason revelation comes to us through a collection of disparate documents rather than the words of a single prophet or a logically organized manifesto. From Withering Fig:

.... To me, what is most interesting and compelling about Christianity are the paradoxes. For example, Jesus Christ himself represents the most incredible paradox: God and Man in one. Serious reflection on this idea requires pages and pages and pages of thought to work out.

Another example of a paradox is systematic theology itself. Here we have a human attempting to systematize, categorize, and make easily referenced that which defies and even denies systematization. As Paul says in 1 Cor 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly…” Sure, we understand some attributes of God. We can offer some kind of mental assent to God’s infinitude and the paradoxes inherent within (e.g., love and justice | eternal and temporal | etc.). But, at the end of the day, we only have a faint impression of his fullness. The best Christian thinkers are like Monet in his later periods, stricken with cataracts that alter his perception of color — we are painting a half-blind impression of the fullness of God.

So what’s wrong with systematic theology?

Infinitude defies finite system.

But, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try…

But as we try, a certain amount of humility is in order.

What’s Wrong with Systematic Theology. | Withering Fig

"It's just what it is."

In an article, "Christian faith: Calvinism is back" in The Christian Science Monitor, Josh Burek describes the ministry of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, the church pastored by Mark Dever in Washington, D.C.  Much of what he describes is appealing even to those of us disinclined to call ourselves Calvinists:

.... "A lot of people think religion is something you piece together [from] ideas you think are sweet and that you personally find beneficial," says Mr. Dever. "No. It's like a doctor's report.... It's an objective reality. It's just what is."

More broadly, the Calvinist revival reflects an effort to recast the foundation of faith itself. From conservative evangelical churches to liberal new-age groups, the message of much modern teaching is man's need for betterment. Not New Calvinism; its star is God's need for glory. And the gravity of His will is great: It can be denied, but not defied. ....

As morning light filters into a fourth-floor room on a Sunday, students huddle on tiered seats, listening to a lecture on substitutionary atonement. The teacher poses a tough question, but a hand shoots into the air, eager to answer with a recitation of the week's memory verse from I Peter 3:18: "For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God."

Scholars and seminarians call this systematic theology. Kindergartners at CHBC just call it Sunday school. ....

Membership at CHBC isn't for the faint of holy. Classes on theology and Christian history are required before joining. At the "Lord's Supper" once a month, members stand and recite an oath that ties them to one another. In addition to Sunday worship and Wednesday night Bible study, they spend hours each week in small-group study or one-on-one "discipling." They say those sessions – a time for confessions, encouragement, and prayer – are the most challenging and rewarding feature of church life. ....

Many members were drawn to CHBC precisely because they had yearned to be "convicted of their sin" again and grown frustrated with "watered-down preaching." School vice principal Jessica Sandle says she came after the pastor at her former church read a book on growth and became consumed with filling pews. "So he stopped talking about sin, and why we need God," she says. .... [more]

Christian faith: Calvinism is back / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Bacon is good for you

Woody Allen seems to have been only half right about dietary science. But who knows, hot fudge may turn out to be a health food too. "The misguided war on fat may be making us sicker":

.... Ultimately, saturated fat—named because it contains no double bonds, so all of its carbon atoms are saturated with hydrogen atoms—may be neutral for the heart. Meanwhile, some mono-unsaturated fats (which have one double-bond and are found in many nuts) and some poly-unsaturated fats (which have multiple double bonds and are found in fatty fish) could be good for the heart. For instance, a meta-analysis published in PLoS Medicine this month reports that the substitution of polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat can cut heart disease risk.

If saturated fat doesn't adversely affect cardiovascular health, what does? Sorry, Nabisco: We should be giving a closer look to foods with a high glycemic index—a measure that reflects a food's influence on blood sugar levels, based on how quickly it is digested and absorbed. Typically, that means carbohydrates like cereal, bread, chips, and cookies. ....

...[I]t seems that processed carbohydrates are America's most deserving nutritional enemy. And our misguided war against fat has just made us more addicted to them, because when people cut out fat, they typically turn to "diet" foods high in carbs—SnackWells, Baked Lays, even low-fat Jif, which contains the same number of calories as the regular version, with less peanut butter and more "corn syrup solids." That's not to say that all carbs are bad; fiber is a carbohydrate, and an important one. And there is still a lot left to be desired about certain fats. Trans fats really are bad for you, and foods very high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fats—such as corn oil and margarine—are not particularly healthy, either. But overall, Americans could stand to start replacing carbs with fat. More bacon, fewer Bacos. .... [more]

The misguided war on fat may be making us sicker. - By Melinda Wenner Moyer - Slate Magazine

Misdirected compassion

Roman Catholicism is enduring unremitting criticism with respect to the sexual abuse of minors by priests and other religious. Needless to say, those guilty of such abuse, and those who failed to act to stop such abuse, or who actually acted to cover it up, deserve censure and/or punishment. But increasingly, it seems to me, the justified outrage against the guilty has become an unjustified attack on the institution, and a weapon wielded against the faith by those who wish Christianity ill.

A case in point is that of a Wisconsin priest, undoubtedly guilty, whose crimes are now being used to attack Pope Benedict for supposedly intervening to protect him. Since the Milwaukee diocese knew of his behavior decades before Rome was informed, the fault would seem to lie here rather than there, especially since his last known offense occurred  a quarter century before his trial was scheduled to begin. Raymond J. de Souza lays out the facts at NRO:

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism. .... [much more, including a timeline of events]

Since the bulk of these crimes seem to have taken place in the seventies and eighties a reasonable surmise might be that the generally loosened standards of that period might be at least partly to blame as this writer, reporting on the situation in Ireland, notes:

.... Canon law, or Church law, has been blamed for forcing bishops to cover up the allegations, to hide them, and certainly it is true that anyone taking part in a canonical investigation is required to swear an oath of secrecy, or confidentiality.

But the Murphy report itself is very interesting about canon law. It points out that a big problem with this law isn’t that it was used, but that it wasn’t used.

It says: “The Church authorities failed to implement most of their own canon law rules on dealing with child sex abuse...canon law appears to have fallen into disuse and disrespect during the mid 20th century. In particular, there was little or no experience of operating the penal (that is, the criminal) provision of that law... for many years offenders were neither prosecuted nor made accountable within the Church.”

Why did it fall into disuse and disrespect? It was because priests and bishops began to regard it as being overly legalistic and too focused on punishment. They decided it lacked compassion.

Therefore, they stopped using it. No longer did priests accused of child abuse face a canonical trial and the possibility of "defrocking".

Instead, and with disastrous consequences, they were sent for therapy and then, "cured", they were reassigned to ministry.

The bottom line is that if canon law had been used properly, fewer children would have been abused. Civil authorities would still not have been informed, but priests found guilty of child abuse under Church law would have been punished and likely removed from ministry making it more difficult for them to offend again. ....

The Catholic church was simply behaving like a lot of judges do, following a pattern consistent with an influential strain of modern criminology: therapy rather than punishment, turning the perpetrators into victims, ignoring justice for both the guilty and the actual victims.

More: Ross Douthat blames both permissiveness and the hierarchy:

.... The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.

What’s more, it was a conservative hierarchy’s bunker mentality that prevented the Vatican from reckoning with the scandal. In a characteristic moment in 2002, a prominent cardinal told a Spanish audience that “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign ... to discredit the church.”

That cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. Since then, he’s come to grips with the crisis in ways that his predecessor did not: after years of drift and denial under John Paul II, the Vatican has taken vigorous steps to promote zero tolerance, expedite the dismissal of abusive priests and organize investigations that should have happened long ago. Because of Benedict’s recent efforts, and the efforts of clerics and laypeople dating back to the first wave of revelations in the 1980s, Catholics can reasonably hope that the crisis of abuse is a thing of the past. ....

A Response to the New York Times - NRO, Therapy led to soaring abuse rate in Irish Church - Times Online, In the Catholic Church, a Time for Contrition - NYTimes.com

Better silent than dead

Not long ago there were those who agonized over the possibility that a Christian fundamentalist theocracy threatened religious liberty in the United States. This was always ludicrous, focusing as it did on monuments to the Ten Commandments in public parks. There are, however, genuine threats not only to religious liberty, but to every kind of liberty. Reviewing a new book by Paul Berman, Ron Rosenbaum notes the increasing self-censorship by European intellectuals in the face of life-threatening intolerance:

.... What made the difference between the wholehearted response to Rushdie and the cold-hearted response to Hirsi Ali? Berman may disclaim it, but I think the subtext of his critique of Ali's nitpickers is that, in the two decades since the Rushdie affair, standing up against Islamist death threats requires more physical courage than the intellectuals are willing to muster. ....

But now the threat of murder, the attempted murder, and the actual murder of dissidents from Islam have all become a regular feature of the intellectual landscape of Europe. ....

It was not healthy for Theo van Gogh to get too close to Hirsi Ali. The Danish cartoonists are still under constant death threats, Berman reports. And Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym of another apostate, reads death threats against himself online, while Bassam Tibi, who, Berman tells us, "pioneered the concept of Islamism as a modern totalitarianism and pioneered the concept of a liberal 'Euro-Islam' [as well] ... spent two years under twenty four hour police protection in Germany. ... [T]he Egyptian and Italian journalist Magdi Allam ...was travelling with a full complement of five bodyguards. ... The Italian journalist Fiamma Nienstein … was accompanied by her own bodyguard. … Caroline Fourest in France, the author of the first and most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection. ... [T]he French history professor Robert Redkeker had to go into hiding. In 2008 the police in Belgium broke up a terrorist group that had planned on assassinating, among other people Bernard Henri Levy."

He spends an evening in New York "... with Flemming Rose the culture editor of the Danish newspaper who was visiting New York only because at that particular moment it was too dangerous for him to remain in Denmark."

The list continues. Kurt Westergaard, Boulem Sansal. This is cumulatively (and individually) scandalous. .... The fact that theological censorship backed by death threats has been installed on the continent of Europe with just about everyone deciding it would be wiser to keep silent about it is once again burying the lede. But to my mind, printing it at all is a service.

A certain kind of irreverent speech once valued in Europe since the time of Chaucer and Rabelais has been, it seems, powerfully threatened if not silenced, and the heirs to that intellectual tradition are too scared to speak out about that silence. .... [more]

Paul Berman's outraged attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's attackers. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine

The best explanation

John Polkinghorne was a physicist — a highly respected one — the discoverer of the quark and professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge. Since the early eighties he has been an Anglican priest. He is interviewed at In Character. Two of the questions and his answers:

Do science and religion approach reason in different ways? Is the reasoning of faith different from the reasoning of science? Can either help the other to get a more complete understanding of the universe?

I suppose the answer is yes and no. I think both science and religion are concerned with the search for motivated belief. They are not just plucking ideas out of the air but they have reasons from experience to support the ideas they believe to be true. But the way they seek them is somewhat different. Science is looking at the world as an object — as an “it”—which you can pull apart and do with what you want. And with science you can repeat things. You can do the same experiment over and over again until you feel sure you understand what is going on. And that gives science a great secret weapon. But there are great swaths of human encounter with reality where you meet reality not just as an object but where there is a personal dimension. Unlike with the scientific experiment, no personal experience is ever going to be exactly repeated. If we listen to a Mozart quartet, even if we play the same disc twice, we shan’t experience it in quite the same way on each occasion. Similarly, the encounter between persons, even more the encounter with the personal reality of God, has to be based on trusting and not on testing. If I were always setting little traps to test my friends, I would pretty soon destroy the possibility of friendship between us. And certainly religion respects that you shall not put the Lord your God to a test. So there are differences between the two. But the motivation, the search for truthful understanding through well-motivated belief, is a common feature. Of course, religious understanding is much more complex obviously because of its personal character. ....

Is it important to be able to prove the existence of God?

Well, I don’t think it’s possible to prove the existence of God. There are many things I don’t think you can prove in an absolutely cast-iron, logical way. You can prove that two plus two equals four; you can’t prove the foolishness or falseness of ridiculous assumptions. I could maintain that the whole world came into existence five minutes ago and that our memories of the past were created at that moment. I don’t think you could defeat me in logical argument about that, though we all know that would be an absurd thing to say. So proof, cast-iron proof, is pretty limited and not actually a very interesting category of things. I believe in quarks and gluons and electrons. I believe that’s the most intelligible, economic, persuasive interpretation of a whole swath of physical phenomena, but I don’t think I’ve proved their existence in the two plus two equals four sense — just as I can’t prove the existence of God. What we need, I think, is beliefs that are sufficiently well-motivated for us to feel that we can commit our lives to them, knowing that they may be false, but believing that they are the best explanation. I’m very sold on motivated belief but I am not sold on knowledge through proofs either in science or religion, or anything in between. .... [more]

John Polkinghorne's Unseen Realities — Features — In Character, A Journal of Everyday Virtues by the John Templeton Foundation