When Christ calls us,” Bonhoeffer famously wrote in his book Discipleship, “he bids us come and die.” What an ironic statement of the Gospel: Is not the Gospel a call to life? Is it not a word of joy and hope? Isn’t it the story of the triumph over death? What’s with this “come and die,” anyway?
In that pithy, eminently quotable little clause is the sum of what I am trying to say about “submission.” To believe the Gospel – and that, in other words, is the summons of the Gospel – is to change, to “repent,” to become a new creation. (No, Brother Paul, not by one’s own efforts by the in-dwelling of the holy-ing Spirit – a phrase I have picked up from Prof. Mary Solberg – who is given free, gratis, on good faith from God the Father.) I think this is a not-so-well articulated fundament in all the various expressions of Christian faith. “To be in Christ is to be/come a new creation.”
To see Christ is to see God; that much we can agree on. To hear the summons of the Gospel is to hear the call to be in Christ, to become as Christ, to become one with Christ. And what is the distinctive thing about Christ in the pictures we have of him? It is his willingness to go even to death in order to remain faithful to God. Beneath the radical critic of society and the Judaism of his day, behind the welcomer of lepers and tax collectors and ladies of the night, between the crushes of crowds and the moments of retreat, at the heart of the miracle-worker and signs-giver was the man Jesus who gave all of himself over to the correct worship of his Father – i.e., of God. Infusing all Christology and soteriology must be the clear vision of this 1st-century Jewish man and the life he lived. His being and his doing or living may not and cannot be separated; the “two natures” doctrine is more than a theological nicety.
What we see if we bother to look is The Faithful Servant at work (and play) abroad in the world. The Second Member of the Trinity did not count equality with God a thing to be “grasped” or savored or held over others’ heads, but emptied himself of whatever glory and worship he was dui to appear in the form of a servant. And to quote Luther: What does this mean?
It means that to be faithful to Christ and through him to the Father who graciously sent him is to submit to his ministry and to his example. We who claim his name are called to follow the path he trod in submission to the will of his Father. That path eventually led to his death, a not uncomplicated and non-controversial fact that has irritated theological thinkers for two thousand years. But even that death must be seen as faithful yielding to the will of the father, even though he clearly would have preferred to have been spared the suffering (“If it be your will, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”).
Now it can hardly be said that Jesus was a wallflower or a milquetoast or a shrinking violet – and I’ve run out of clichés. His submission was a discerning submission; it required him to decide in every situation whether a given course of action would be faithful to his Father or betrayal. And so he stood up to the “lawyers” – who I gather were the theologians of his day! – and to the uptights; he violated commonly accepted prescriptions on Sabbath activity and hung out with many who were considered unclean (although, in formulating our ethics, let’s not forget that he dined at many houses of apparently well-to-do types as well); as one friend put it, “he upset the hoity-toity by his hanging around with the hoi poloi.”
In all of this, he didn’t assert his own, deserved privilege. We read of no instance where he said anything like “I’m the Son of God; I can’t be expected to do that.” Instead, he read his Bible, he said his prayers, and as he met situations on the road, he dealt with them in the way fitting to the nature of the God about whom he read and to whom he prayed.
As I said, he bad mouthed the Pharisees and rebuked those who claimed to be holier-than-thou. But he didn’t push back for his own self-interest. He openly invited and welcomed many whom the religious establishment of his day warned against as unclean. But he also rejected any claims by even his closest friends to “seats of power” or to positions of influence. And when he was confronted with the final demand, that of his life, he responded the same way: He didn’t resist; he didn’t rebel; he didn’t take up arms; he didn’t seek the protection of his friends. Nor did he march forthrightly forward in the model of noble hero. Despite the slap to the faith of his followers, even though he brought down mockery and derision on all that he had stood for, he walked the Via Dolorosa to the cross in order to meet the final enemy on his own turf and there defeat him – not with swords or wits or ransom, but with the integrity and full force of godliness.
If we keep this model before us – and I think it important to accept Jesus as a model, whatever else we may develop in our Christologies – then our complaints against or concerns about submission can be placed in context. As I said, the Gospel is a summons to death. But it is a death of our old self, not a physical death (at least not initially; it may become such). We are called to “repent” – which is a call to reorient our thinking, our “knowing” (as the philosophers are trying to teach me to say), our sensitive spots, our lives. To die to self, which is the summons, is a call to remove oneself from the judgment seat and to allow God to sit there. It is to take one’s marching orders from him – not from one’s own previous sense of self, not from one’s political or ideological cronies, not from the wider culture within which one resides. It is to abandon claims to “count” in favor of a willingness to serve others. It is to stand up to a culture that says “You should come first” by saying “No; God must come first.”
To be even more personal than I have been up to now: It has taken me most of a normal lifetime finally to discover the desert Fathers and Mothers – those amazing and often bizarre creatures who sought solitude in the deserts in order battle the evils of this world and win a victory for Christ. Even though I have had wonderful experiences in monasteries and can claim to have been trained by one of the greatest of monks (Fr. Godfrey Diekmann at St. John’s Abbey), I am by nature distrustful of monasticism, mainly because I think it posits a kind of duality to Christian life – the hard life for monks, who get tempted to spiritual pride, and the “ordinary” and less-than-demanding life for the rest of us, who get tempted to spiritual ennui. And so I have resisted getting too friendly with the desert people in our Church’s history.
I am now, however, growing to appreciate more Anthony and Moses and Mary of the Desert and Mary Magdalene (who wasn’t technically one of the earliest hesychasts, but is treated in somewhat that fashion within the tradition – cf. Harlots of the Desert by Benedicta Ward). In part it is the guidance of such scholars as Ward and my friend John Chryssavgis, who lay out a kind of hermeutical lens for reading the sayings and stories. But part has also been, I think, the intervention of the Holy Spirit who has helped me to hear in their voices the crystalline call to set aside concerns and submit to God (however imperfectly I – or anyone, I suppose – might succeed). I see beyond the retreat from the world, which also bothered me a lot, to an alternative engagement with the world.
One of the things that I am learning – to my discomfort still – is that “activism” in the name of the Gospel is a dangerous thing. While I do not feel called to be quiescent, I find that my activism – whether broadly political or ecclesiastical – often devolves into my playing the world’s power games, and I lose touch with the proper ends and means of such activism. To cite a lowly example: I’m a liturgical perfectionist and it drives me crazy that my congregation, which holds itself out as something of a model of careful and reverential liturgical practices, does stupid things in sloppy ways – certainly not all the time, but often enough to make me bite my nails. For years, I have been a pain in the neck of the parish’s Worship Committee and pastor and cantor, by drawing shortcomings to their attention. But it dawns on me slowly that even though my motives may have been pure (and who among us can know), I was serving God less than my own standards and preferences. I was losing the ability to worship, to focus on what God was doing on Sunday and on how I was responding, because of my “critical” eye and ear. And so, in an effort to bring my soul back to the altar, I have resigned from the Worship Committee and resolved to focus on what’s happening more than what’s not.
I acknowledge that that is a minor thing – except for those who will be happy to know that I’ve left the committee, for whom it will be a reason to rejoice. But it is one illustration I can offer of what it means to submit, that is: by the power of God to set one’s own interests aside in favor of more serious attention to the work of God on-going in the world.
I’ll try to say more about the “activist” side of the story in my next post.
NOTE: Thanks for sticking with me in my process of thinking through a new idea about the Christian life. This is new stuff for me, in a sense. I am coming to terms with some new vocabulary as a result of my reading and talking with more Eastern Orthodox people. My friend C, as I have indicated, gave me this new word – and I do love new words. Another friend, Fr. John Chryssavgis has inspired me by the warmth and steadiness of his life and by the erudition and reverence of his books. At this time, Vigen Gouroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian, is providing some guidance on the ethics component. And I find myself being drawn to Meyendorf and some others through the tricky marketing ploys of Light and Life Publishing – a local publishing and supply company which parks its stock on steel shelves by title, thus forcing one to browse to find something.
Of course, I perceive all this stuff through Western eyes and ears. I do not have Eastern liturgies in which to immerse myself while thinking and praying this through. And I’m not sure that I want that right now; I’ll settle for my recordings of Russian, Armenian, and Greek liturgical music.
But please know that while I write most of this is the indicative mood, I intend it to be considered in the interrogative. I do not claim final insights. What all y’all are helping me with here is to think through the nature of faith from a tack that I’ve not taken before. It’s a little less German, I think.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
A little more on "Submission"
These reflections are going to be piecemeal; I'm not able to get a systematic handle on how to treat the issue I raised earlier -- that of "submission." Here, I comment on some of the "back text" to the discussion.
I think modern people -- including Christians -- have trouble with any notion of submission, because the very idea of subordinating one's own will or thinking or action to that of an authority outside oneself is anathema to the modern mind. Now, I'm no philosopher; certainly you know that if you've read even one of my previous posts. And I'm not a theoretical theologian -- or even much of a theologian according to some of my friends. But this idea makes sense to me.
By "modern people" I mean those people who live in the "West" (I don't know how much influence modernity has in the so-called "East") who have been influenced by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, broadly construed, was an intellectual movement (originating about the 18th Century, I think), influenced by and influencing the development of scientific methods, that sought to subject all aspects of life to scrutiny -- and to scrutiny carried on in a particular way. It was a project to subject all truth claims to some kind of so-called objective or scientific verification. (You see the connection to science.) It was, at root, a negative reaction to all forms of tyranny -- whether over minds or bodies -- and so argued, in its fundamentals, that at base, the only judge of truth is observation.
In a crude form (because I am not a philosopher, remember), the Enlightenment said this: "I will not rely on anything that cannot be demonstrated. Unless I can confirm something with my own eyes and according to the rational terms of my own mind, I will not buy it. Since external authority is the antithesis of this approach to knowledge, I reject that external authority insofar as it denies me the ultimate authority to make my own decisions."
Now, much good came from the Enlightenment break-through: Science was able to assert the kind of independence that it needed to advance knowledge. (Yeah, I know: That thesis begs all kinds of questions about the ethics of scientific research and its results.) And without the Enlightenment, it is unlikely that we Lutherans would have come into being, for Luther benefited from the advances in humanities research and in academic freedom that were facilitated by the new attitude. The "great republics," including the US, have sprung from Enlightenment-enlightened political thinkers and activists.
But foundationally the Enlightenment is built on a self-contradiction. If we reify the Enlightenment, we have her saying to people: "Bow to no principle that arises from an authority outside yourself." But of course, that statement is itself a command coming from an authority outside the auditor. (I owe that insight to Stanley Hauerwas, who is frequently able to crystallize an idea with lucidity and a great Texan accent.) So the Enlightenment is an ideological position, built on an assertion of external authority, as strong as the Pope's or whoever's. (Thomas Kuhn makes that point in spades with respect to science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions -- on of the most significant books for shaping how I think.)
Furthermore, the Enlightenment places the individual at the center of his or her own universe. In essence, the Enlightenment makes everyone his or her own god. If I am the master of all I consider, the judge of relevance and truth, then I am god, and no amount of revelation will change that. I must "think for myself"; "I'll be the judge of that."
We who read these words have all benefited from the Enlightenment, and we have all been warped by it. We are inclined to distrust external authority; we are inclined to resist pressure or influence (especially when we feel that it is being applied); we want to be self-determinative; we glory in activism and decry passivity; we hope to and appreciate "thinking for ourselves." I admit that I appreciate it, if somewhat grudgingly, when my fourteen-year-old daughter asserts herself to challenge my statement of fact or "questions authority" or decides to think for herself and not go along with the crowd. Thus for the benefits of the Enlightenment. If, as I contend, it has been a mixed blessing, it has contributed to the evolution of the human person.
There are, however, problems that inexorably arise -- especially in the context of Christian faith: To Enlightenment minds and hearts, talk of "submission" sounds like reversion to the Dark Ages of credulity, fideism, meekness, and Rover-like rolling over. We attach to the word overtones of self-denial (which properly understood, it is), dehumanization, powerlessness. (It need be neither of those, of course, as I intend to argue.)
I think such an attitude is especially evident in an essay in the Trelstad collection I mentioned earlier by Rosemary Carbine, "Contextualizing the Cross for the Sake of Subjectivity." She analyzes the cross from the standpoint of women's "resistance" to suffering. Carbine argues that such resistance, in various forms, is a requisite of women's becoming fully human. Liberation is living free from the imposition by others of suffering (which she doesn't really define, as far as I can see). Agency -- i.e., being active and not being passive or accepting -- is key to her understanding of what it means to be human.
And that seems to be common thinking in our time. We value taking independent stands with respect to church teachings and practices. We want to vindicate our "rights" in such things as sexual ethics, same-sex marriage and ordination, fetal research, and abortion -- to name only a few. We must be "true to ourselves" -- as though that identity is something we develop on our own or with others whom we select.
But absent from such thinking is an appreciation of the "place" of community -- because the individual is the subject of Enlightenment thinking -- and of legitimate authority -- because no external authority is legitimate if it frustrates my self-actualization. Absent, in other words, is knowledge of the Church.
The Church depends on a doctrine of revelation, on an understanding of truth that comes from outside ourselves: We do not discover the Gospel on our own, we do not understand Jesus outside the Church, we cannot interpret the Scriptures outside the community of faith. The Church is the repository of the Church's revelation, and to be Christian involves bending one's will and mind to that revelation. Now, it's not as severe as it sounds -- especially in these days when the Church and her "teachers" have had to learn how to deal with the Enlightenment context. But it is a harsh reality that Jesus is not whoever we want him to be. And the Good News has factual and specific content; it is not just any word that makes us feel better or less anxious or stronger. And properly to hear that word and be able to speak it to others, we must "submit" to that revelation.
As Christians, we are called to "obey" God, to submit to his ways and will. We are not encouraged to make our own way, to make our own decisions on the basis of our own principles, to live how we want. The second chapter of Genesis makes that abundantly clear, it seems to me. And the Sermon on the Mount speaks the same insight into the Christian context. And therein lies the key to "submission."
At its root, submission is nothing more than to respond to the Gospel. Philip Watson once characterized Luther's theology as "Let God be God." And to do so requires submission. To hear the Gospel, we must submit to its harsh word -- viz., that our attempts to live, to love, to worship are inadequate, wrong, and sinful. Only by letting God be God will we know the salvation that has been made for us. It is free for the taking, but it is expensive to us, because it costs us our Enlightenment-bolstered self-assertion -- as Bonhoeffer so brilliantly described in Discipleship.
But so to hear the Gospel is already to hear a counter-cultural message. For the culture is Enlightenment-formed, and it encourages the exact opposition of self-sacrifice. In the culture of the Enlightenment, self-assertion trumps -sacrifice, autodidacticism is superior to being taught, acting is more human than listening, asserting makes more sense than discerning.
And that's why it's so hard to read or hear talk about "submission." It seems somehow unnatural; it seems to encourage weakness (although read the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and see just how much weakness was involved!). It sounds like what the tyrants always want: sheep who follow meekly lowing. Oh, we describe it in various ways. But fundamental to all of our objections is the pattern of thinking planted in our souls by the Enlightenment.
So having laid the blame where I want it to lie, I intend to say some things about what submission is NOT. Then, I hope to draw you out in some conversation about what differences this discussion will have for our lives of faith.
I think modern people -- including Christians -- have trouble with any notion of submission, because the very idea of subordinating one's own will or thinking or action to that of an authority outside oneself is anathema to the modern mind. Now, I'm no philosopher; certainly you know that if you've read even one of my previous posts. And I'm not a theoretical theologian -- or even much of a theologian according to some of my friends. But this idea makes sense to me.
By "modern people" I mean those people who live in the "West" (I don't know how much influence modernity has in the so-called "East") who have been influenced by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, broadly construed, was an intellectual movement (originating about the 18th Century, I think), influenced by and influencing the development of scientific methods, that sought to subject all aspects of life to scrutiny -- and to scrutiny carried on in a particular way. It was a project to subject all truth claims to some kind of so-called objective or scientific verification. (You see the connection to science.) It was, at root, a negative reaction to all forms of tyranny -- whether over minds or bodies -- and so argued, in its fundamentals, that at base, the only judge of truth is observation.
In a crude form (because I am not a philosopher, remember), the Enlightenment said this: "I will not rely on anything that cannot be demonstrated. Unless I can confirm something with my own eyes and according to the rational terms of my own mind, I will not buy it. Since external authority is the antithesis of this approach to knowledge, I reject that external authority insofar as it denies me the ultimate authority to make my own decisions."
Now, much good came from the Enlightenment break-through: Science was able to assert the kind of independence that it needed to advance knowledge. (Yeah, I know: That thesis begs all kinds of questions about the ethics of scientific research and its results.) And without the Enlightenment, it is unlikely that we Lutherans would have come into being, for Luther benefited from the advances in humanities research and in academic freedom that were facilitated by the new attitude. The "great republics," including the US, have sprung from Enlightenment-enlightened political thinkers and activists.
But foundationally the Enlightenment is built on a self-contradiction. If we reify the Enlightenment, we have her saying to people: "Bow to no principle that arises from an authority outside yourself." But of course, that statement is itself a command coming from an authority outside the auditor. (I owe that insight to Stanley Hauerwas, who is frequently able to crystallize an idea with lucidity and a great Texan accent.) So the Enlightenment is an ideological position, built on an assertion of external authority, as strong as the Pope's or whoever's. (Thomas Kuhn makes that point in spades with respect to science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions -- on of the most significant books for shaping how I think.)
Furthermore, the Enlightenment places the individual at the center of his or her own universe. In essence, the Enlightenment makes everyone his or her own god. If I am the master of all I consider, the judge of relevance and truth, then I am god, and no amount of revelation will change that. I must "think for myself"; "I'll be the judge of that."
We who read these words have all benefited from the Enlightenment, and we have all been warped by it. We are inclined to distrust external authority; we are inclined to resist pressure or influence (especially when we feel that it is being applied); we want to be self-determinative; we glory in activism and decry passivity; we hope to and appreciate "thinking for ourselves." I admit that I appreciate it, if somewhat grudgingly, when my fourteen-year-old daughter asserts herself to challenge my statement of fact or "questions authority" or decides to think for herself and not go along with the crowd. Thus for the benefits of the Enlightenment. If, as I contend, it has been a mixed blessing, it has contributed to the evolution of the human person.
There are, however, problems that inexorably arise -- especially in the context of Christian faith: To Enlightenment minds and hearts, talk of "submission" sounds like reversion to the Dark Ages of credulity, fideism, meekness, and Rover-like rolling over. We attach to the word overtones of self-denial (which properly understood, it is), dehumanization, powerlessness. (It need be neither of those, of course, as I intend to argue.)
I think such an attitude is especially evident in an essay in the Trelstad collection I mentioned earlier by Rosemary Carbine, "Contextualizing the Cross for the Sake of Subjectivity." She analyzes the cross from the standpoint of women's "resistance" to suffering. Carbine argues that such resistance, in various forms, is a requisite of women's becoming fully human. Liberation is living free from the imposition by others of suffering (which she doesn't really define, as far as I can see). Agency -- i.e., being active and not being passive or accepting -- is key to her understanding of what it means to be human.
And that seems to be common thinking in our time. We value taking independent stands with respect to church teachings and practices. We want to vindicate our "rights" in such things as sexual ethics, same-sex marriage and ordination, fetal research, and abortion -- to name only a few. We must be "true to ourselves" -- as though that identity is something we develop on our own or with others whom we select.
But absent from such thinking is an appreciation of the "place" of community -- because the individual is the subject of Enlightenment thinking -- and of legitimate authority -- because no external authority is legitimate if it frustrates my self-actualization. Absent, in other words, is knowledge of the Church.
The Church depends on a doctrine of revelation, on an understanding of truth that comes from outside ourselves: We do not discover the Gospel on our own, we do not understand Jesus outside the Church, we cannot interpret the Scriptures outside the community of faith. The Church is the repository of the Church's revelation, and to be Christian involves bending one's will and mind to that revelation. Now, it's not as severe as it sounds -- especially in these days when the Church and her "teachers" have had to learn how to deal with the Enlightenment context. But it is a harsh reality that Jesus is not whoever we want him to be. And the Good News has factual and specific content; it is not just any word that makes us feel better or less anxious or stronger. And properly to hear that word and be able to speak it to others, we must "submit" to that revelation.
As Christians, we are called to "obey" God, to submit to his ways and will. We are not encouraged to make our own way, to make our own decisions on the basis of our own principles, to live how we want. The second chapter of Genesis makes that abundantly clear, it seems to me. And the Sermon on the Mount speaks the same insight into the Christian context. And therein lies the key to "submission."
At its root, submission is nothing more than to respond to the Gospel. Philip Watson once characterized Luther's theology as "Let God be God." And to do so requires submission. To hear the Gospel, we must submit to its harsh word -- viz., that our attempts to live, to love, to worship are inadequate, wrong, and sinful. Only by letting God be God will we know the salvation that has been made for us. It is free for the taking, but it is expensive to us, because it costs us our Enlightenment-bolstered self-assertion -- as Bonhoeffer so brilliantly described in Discipleship.
But so to hear the Gospel is already to hear a counter-cultural message. For the culture is Enlightenment-formed, and it encourages the exact opposition of self-sacrifice. In the culture of the Enlightenment, self-assertion trumps -sacrifice, autodidacticism is superior to being taught, acting is more human than listening, asserting makes more sense than discerning.
And that's why it's so hard to read or hear talk about "submission." It seems somehow unnatural; it seems to encourage weakness (although read the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and see just how much weakness was involved!). It sounds like what the tyrants always want: sheep who follow meekly lowing. Oh, we describe it in various ways. But fundamental to all of our objections is the pattern of thinking planted in our souls by the Enlightenment.
So having laid the blame where I want it to lie, I intend to say some things about what submission is NOT. Then, I hope to draw you out in some conversation about what differences this discussion will have for our lives of faith.
Friday, May 18, 2007
The Disappeareds
Click here for a fascinating, horrifying, and touching word-and-visual slide show, on Slate.com, that deals with how to memorialize those who have been "disappeared."
The crimes of those who are snatched by government or paragovernment units and imprisoned or killed are stunningly difficult to address: How do you prove the crime when, by definition, the victim has disappeared. It's a legal horror, but it's an even greater assault on humanity. Professor Bill Cavanaugh dealt with that profoundly in his doctoral dissertation at Duke, later published as Torture and Eucharist.
Christians must learn about this tactic, its history and practice through the world. And American Christians must reflect seriously on the phenomenon because it is practiced by our government. The whole "enemy combatant" designation, along with the ultra-secrecy of homeland-security law, is premised on making some people simply disappear, never to be heard from again. If we deny any knowledge of someone we hold in detention, if we arrest and deny contact with outside counsel, if we ...
It is no longer necessary to say "if" because our government does it. And we USAmerican Christians should speak up to stop this -- when practiced by our government and when supported or not opposed by our government. We must speak the Truth to caesar.
I was struck, during the recent debate among Republicans running for President, by this: John McCain spoke against torture. Now, even I (who distrust him in the extreme) acknowledge that on this, he has moral and personal authority to speak. He aptly characterized the arguments over whether to torture as "not about them" but "as about us -- who and what we are as a culture." His comments were met with utter, and I mean complete, silence by the crowd assembled. On the other hand, when Mitt Romney began calling for even more torture, he was wildly cheered in the middle of his remark. That was a chilling and frightening moment for me.
I confess to a guilty pleasure: I watch the TV serial, 24. Now, this is a show that I ought to hate -- and I actually just burn with anger during the show. It is produced by an ultra-right-winger (profiled in a long recent article in The New Yorker) who wants the very things the show toys with -- pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Arab countries, racial profiling of (and indeed outright racism against) Arabs, torture at the whim of covert operatives, suspension of civil liberties for the sake of protecting our liberty (you figure that one out). And all of that gets acted out in fascinating, psychological, and gory detail.
Curiously, the show demonstrates the futility and wrongness of the very things its producer wants to promote. Torture, so far as I have seen, has produced no good results: The one being tortured gives the torturer what he thinks the torturer wants to know, not the truth. The "good guys" end up being deluded; many of the Arabs are shown to be patriots.
Maybe the producer was spoofing in the TNY article; perhaps he's really a liberal radical in camoflage clothes. But I find it fascinating that the pattern to this cultural icon is so clear.
Is this perhaps an illustration of the Christian assertion that Truth Will Out?
With respect to torture and disappeareds, the Truth Will Out. That which is hidden will be revealed; those who are lost will be found and reclaimed. We know that because there was One who was tortured and killed (apparently legally within the constraints of the law of his day), but who was not abandoned to death by the One who sent him. Biology is not destiny, and neither is any of the tricks we try to pull to secure our position in this world.
The crimes of those who are snatched by government or paragovernment units and imprisoned or killed are stunningly difficult to address: How do you prove the crime when, by definition, the victim has disappeared. It's a legal horror, but it's an even greater assault on humanity. Professor Bill Cavanaugh dealt with that profoundly in his doctoral dissertation at Duke, later published as Torture and Eucharist.
Christians must learn about this tactic, its history and practice through the world. And American Christians must reflect seriously on the phenomenon because it is practiced by our government. The whole "enemy combatant" designation, along with the ultra-secrecy of homeland-security law, is premised on making some people simply disappear, never to be heard from again. If we deny any knowledge of someone we hold in detention, if we arrest and deny contact with outside counsel, if we ...
It is no longer necessary to say "if" because our government does it. And we USAmerican Christians should speak up to stop this -- when practiced by our government and when supported or not opposed by our government. We must speak the Truth to caesar.
I was struck, during the recent debate among Republicans running for President, by this: John McCain spoke against torture. Now, even I (who distrust him in the extreme) acknowledge that on this, he has moral and personal authority to speak. He aptly characterized the arguments over whether to torture as "not about them" but "as about us -- who and what we are as a culture." His comments were met with utter, and I mean complete, silence by the crowd assembled. On the other hand, when Mitt Romney began calling for even more torture, he was wildly cheered in the middle of his remark. That was a chilling and frightening moment for me.
I confess to a guilty pleasure: I watch the TV serial, 24. Now, this is a show that I ought to hate -- and I actually just burn with anger during the show. It is produced by an ultra-right-winger (profiled in a long recent article in The New Yorker) who wants the very things the show toys with -- pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Arab countries, racial profiling of (and indeed outright racism against) Arabs, torture at the whim of covert operatives, suspension of civil liberties for the sake of protecting our liberty (you figure that one out). And all of that gets acted out in fascinating, psychological, and gory detail.
Curiously, the show demonstrates the futility and wrongness of the very things its producer wants to promote. Torture, so far as I have seen, has produced no good results: The one being tortured gives the torturer what he thinks the torturer wants to know, not the truth. The "good guys" end up being deluded; many of the Arabs are shown to be patriots.
Maybe the producer was spoofing in the TNY article; perhaps he's really a liberal radical in camoflage clothes. But I find it fascinating that the pattern to this cultural icon is so clear.
Is this perhaps an illustration of the Christian assertion that Truth Will Out?
With respect to torture and disappeareds, the Truth Will Out. That which is hidden will be revealed; those who are lost will be found and reclaimed. We know that because there was One who was tortured and killed (apparently legally within the constraints of the law of his day), but who was not abandoned to death by the One who sent him. Biology is not destiny, and neither is any of the tricks we try to pull to secure our position in this world.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Another sign of the End?
My wife is fond of saying, when something outrageous crosses our path, "Well, that clinches it. The End is near." Well, with respect to recent news out of Britain, I think she may be right.
A British company is marketing a pregnancy test that will tell you, even before the sixth week of pregnancy, the sex of the fetus. Now, I ask you, what can be the possible point of this? Oh, I know the usual answers: The company's is the lamest. They say that this will help the potential parent/s get a jump on shopping for gender-appropriate clothes, wall coverings, and the like. (And if you buy that, well, have I got a deal for you.) I've not heard anyone yet raise a more reasoned argument: There are certain genetically transmitted diseases and disabilities that are gender-linked, and early detection of the gender of the child may help with early intervention to deal with the potential issue. (I'm really dumb about genetics and medicine, so I don't know whether there can be any such intervention before six weeks.)
But let's be honest: The primary reason for this test is to allow people to learn early on the gender of their coming child so that they decide whether they want to keep a child of that gender. Even though the company is not marketing their kit in -- say -- China or India, where boy babies are much preferred, I cannot help but see that area of the world as a real cash cow for them. And in the more "developed" areas of the world, this will be yet another manifestation of the culture of choice.
We are rapidly moving in the direction of designer babies: Choose the hair color, the height, the body structure. Why not the gender? Learn early enough and rejecting a bad roll of the dice is much easier than later.
Call me paranoid -- you wouldn't be the first! -- but can't see any good's coming from this development.
And on a related note, has any of you engaged in conversation about this or other biomedical ethics issues with your faith families? We're not doing it at my church, and I think it may be time.
A British company is marketing a pregnancy test that will tell you, even before the sixth week of pregnancy, the sex of the fetus. Now, I ask you, what can be the possible point of this? Oh, I know the usual answers: The company's is the lamest. They say that this will help the potential parent/s get a jump on shopping for gender-appropriate clothes, wall coverings, and the like. (And if you buy that, well, have I got a deal for you.) I've not heard anyone yet raise a more reasoned argument: There are certain genetically transmitted diseases and disabilities that are gender-linked, and early detection of the gender of the child may help with early intervention to deal with the potential issue. (I'm really dumb about genetics and medicine, so I don't know whether there can be any such intervention before six weeks.)
But let's be honest: The primary reason for this test is to allow people to learn early on the gender of their coming child so that they decide whether they want to keep a child of that gender. Even though the company is not marketing their kit in -- say -- China or India, where boy babies are much preferred, I cannot help but see that area of the world as a real cash cow for them. And in the more "developed" areas of the world, this will be yet another manifestation of the culture of choice.
We are rapidly moving in the direction of designer babies: Choose the hair color, the height, the body structure. Why not the gender? Learn early enough and rejecting a bad roll of the dice is much easier than later.
Call me paranoid -- you wouldn't be the first! -- but can't see any good's coming from this development.
And on a related note, has any of you engaged in conversation about this or other biomedical ethics issues with your faith families? We're not doing it at my church, and I think it may be time.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Mea culpa -- now edited to reverse a mistake
Thank you to those of you good friends who check back for my ramblings. I have not been loyal to the blog, even though I have about 60 posts running in my head. The fact is that I have been busy: I have taken a short-term second job as a contract lawyer, and my time is filled with that work (not to mention the interminable demands for chauffering raised by my 14-year-old daugher!). In addition, my laptop died (again?) so that my time to ruminate online is restricted by the need to share the two remaining laptops in our home. (I'm hoping against hope that mine can be revived -- especially since we're now a wireless household and I can take the thing into the backyard and putz on it while enjoying nature's splendor.)
I'm in process of reading Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, edited by Marit Trelstad (who teaches at PLU). Much of the first section of the book deals with feminist/womanist critiques of "the cross". Now I'm not sure what they mean by "the cross" -- keeping in mind Juergen Moltmann's observation, "At the beginning of Christianity there are two crosses: One is a real cross, the other a symbol." The feminist/womanist scholars (and I'm only slowly getting a handle on the term "womanist") object that the cross has been used to justify a kind of passivity in the face of suffering that has led women to accept abuse, marginalization, low self-esteem, and the rest of the gamut of well-known issues.
Reading some of the essays raises for me the age-old (and utterly contemporary) question of the place of experience in theology. I have raised the ire of many of my friends who are women by suggesting -- no, insisting -- that God's name "Father" is non-negotiable. Despite the bad things that "fathers" have done, that experience in no way changes the biblical witness (a) that Jesus said to call on God as "Father," thus establishing "Father" as a name and not as a metaphor, and (b) that fathers are to be evaluated by the standards of love and benevolence of the Heavenly Father and not the other way around. Most of the feminists I read in the Trelstad book operate from a rather standard epistemology that posits experience first and doctrine second. That means that I develop doctrine -- and I argue, twist the biblical narrative -- to fit my experience. (Please be aware that I don't claim that approach is unique to feminists of any age: It has been a rather stock approach to the treatment of theology throughout the life of the Church. On a less significant level, Constantine finally gives the church legitimacy in the Empire and so the leaders of the Church -- which has a more concrete structure than it had before -- start dressing like leaders of the Empire. Of course, they also began to adopt more and more of the "leadership" mentality -- a development not unproblematic in our own time!)
In response, I want briefly to sound one tone, which I hope to meditate on more systematically over time. I was brought to this insight by my friend, C, who has flown the Lutheran coop -- something she thought she'd never do. (We'd discussed this in the past: Her husband and children are Orthodox, but she couldn't leave "Bach" behind. Well, she discovered that her misgivings were promptings of the Spirit. So after an appopriate period of discernment, she was christmated and is NOW -- a previous oversight had this read: "not" and that is most certainly not the case; she is as happy as clam there -- happily ensconced in the congregation that is the proud guardian of the icon I reference in my previous post.)
C has helped to see that "submission" is of the essence of Christian faith. Before anything else, the call of the Gospel is "Submit to God." From what I can tell, all of Lutheran theology has been aptly summarized by the phrase, "Let God be God!" (Thank you, Watson.) In fact, all of theology gets at that call. What got Adam and Eve in trouble? It was the failure to live securely in life given them by God. They felt the need for self-assertion; it overruled the very clear mandate from the Creator to submit to his rule and avoid the one -- only one -- tree. "Repent and believe the Gospel" is a call to submit to the judgment of God. It happens to be a gracious, forgiving, reconciling judgment. But the only way to appropriate that judgment is to submit to the jurisdiction of the Heavenly Judge. (See how I work my legal and theological training together.)
What does it mean to submit or to be submissive? I think that's an important question. I've raised it here in one or another context -- e.g., arguing that gay people must submit their own senses of justice and vocation to the discernment of the Church, which functions by virtue of the Holy Spirit, while praying for a more acute perception by the Church on the issue of same-sex relationships. But it is more than a question; it is a fundamental approach to the life of faith.
I hope to continue to talk things over with C because she has given me the "watchword" by which I can summarize my view of faith: submission. We will discover, I think, that to be submissive is not necessarily to be meek, passive, wallflower-ish, "non-agential" (to quote the nasty neologism formulated by the womanist scholars). But it is to acknowledge that one's will or one's experience or one's desires or one's "agency" is not the determining factor around which Christian faith revolves. The priority of the will of God is the sine qua non of Christian faith. Fortunately for us, that will is a benevolent, saving, reconciling, strengthening, upholding will. That's what makes the Gospel "good news."
In a future post, I intend to deal with Paul Althaus' The Divine Command (from 1966 -- a classic!) in which he distinguishes between God's command and "law" (in what he argues is the Lutheran sense of the term). Thus, the Ten Commandments are not "law" in the Lutheran sense (in fact, I have also learned from another source that Luther never once referred to the Commandments as "law"); instead they are the expression of God's intent for the Creation to which all creatures are called and from which no creatures are released. By my reading (and as I have claimed in talks I've given on the Ten Commandments -- delivered before I read Althaus), the Ten Commandments are a distillation of the will of God according to which we are summoned to live in freedom. In other words, they are indications of how to live the saved life we are offered. The life of faith is submission, inter alia, to life according to the commandments. But more on the Althaus later.
For now, I shall try to pay closer attention to this enterprise and to respond to any comments you make. I'll offer more on the meaning of submission (and on both the Trelstad collection and the Althaus monograph). Give me feedback.
Peace to you.
____________________________
I SHALL NOT DIE, for I am within the Life. I have the whole of life springing up as a fountain within me. -- St. Symeon the New Theologian.
I'm in process of reading Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, edited by Marit Trelstad (who teaches at PLU). Much of the first section of the book deals with feminist/womanist critiques of "the cross". Now I'm not sure what they mean by "the cross" -- keeping in mind Juergen Moltmann's observation, "At the beginning of Christianity there are two crosses: One is a real cross, the other a symbol." The feminist/womanist scholars (and I'm only slowly getting a handle on the term "womanist") object that the cross has been used to justify a kind of passivity in the face of suffering that has led women to accept abuse, marginalization, low self-esteem, and the rest of the gamut of well-known issues.
Reading some of the essays raises for me the age-old (and utterly contemporary) question of the place of experience in theology. I have raised the ire of many of my friends who are women by suggesting -- no, insisting -- that God's name "Father" is non-negotiable. Despite the bad things that "fathers" have done, that experience in no way changes the biblical witness (a) that Jesus said to call on God as "Father," thus establishing "Father" as a name and not as a metaphor, and (b) that fathers are to be evaluated by the standards of love and benevolence of the Heavenly Father and not the other way around. Most of the feminists I read in the Trelstad book operate from a rather standard epistemology that posits experience first and doctrine second. That means that I develop doctrine -- and I argue, twist the biblical narrative -- to fit my experience. (Please be aware that I don't claim that approach is unique to feminists of any age: It has been a rather stock approach to the treatment of theology throughout the life of the Church. On a less significant level, Constantine finally gives the church legitimacy in the Empire and so the leaders of the Church -- which has a more concrete structure than it had before -- start dressing like leaders of the Empire. Of course, they also began to adopt more and more of the "leadership" mentality -- a development not unproblematic in our own time!)
In response, I want briefly to sound one tone, which I hope to meditate on more systematically over time. I was brought to this insight by my friend, C, who has flown the Lutheran coop -- something she thought she'd never do. (We'd discussed this in the past: Her husband and children are Orthodox, but she couldn't leave "Bach" behind. Well, she discovered that her misgivings were promptings of the Spirit. So after an appopriate period of discernment, she was christmated and is NOW -- a previous oversight had this read: "not" and that is most certainly not the case; she is as happy as clam there -- happily ensconced in the congregation that is the proud guardian of the icon I reference in my previous post.)
C has helped to see that "submission" is of the essence of Christian faith. Before anything else, the call of the Gospel is "Submit to God." From what I can tell, all of Lutheran theology has been aptly summarized by the phrase, "Let God be God!" (Thank you, Watson.) In fact, all of theology gets at that call. What got Adam and Eve in trouble? It was the failure to live securely in life given them by God. They felt the need for self-assertion; it overruled the very clear mandate from the Creator to submit to his rule and avoid the one -- only one -- tree. "Repent and believe the Gospel" is a call to submit to the judgment of God. It happens to be a gracious, forgiving, reconciling judgment. But the only way to appropriate that judgment is to submit to the jurisdiction of the Heavenly Judge. (See how I work my legal and theological training together.)
What does it mean to submit or to be submissive? I think that's an important question. I've raised it here in one or another context -- e.g., arguing that gay people must submit their own senses of justice and vocation to the discernment of the Church, which functions by virtue of the Holy Spirit, while praying for a more acute perception by the Church on the issue of same-sex relationships. But it is more than a question; it is a fundamental approach to the life of faith.
I hope to continue to talk things over with C because she has given me the "watchword" by which I can summarize my view of faith: submission. We will discover, I think, that to be submissive is not necessarily to be meek, passive, wallflower-ish, "non-agential" (to quote the nasty neologism formulated by the womanist scholars). But it is to acknowledge that one's will or one's experience or one's desires or one's "agency" is not the determining factor around which Christian faith revolves. The priority of the will of God is the sine qua non of Christian faith. Fortunately for us, that will is a benevolent, saving, reconciling, strengthening, upholding will. That's what makes the Gospel "good news."
In a future post, I intend to deal with Paul Althaus' The Divine Command (from 1966 -- a classic!) in which he distinguishes between God's command and "law" (in what he argues is the Lutheran sense of the term). Thus, the Ten Commandments are not "law" in the Lutheran sense (in fact, I have also learned from another source that Luther never once referred to the Commandments as "law"); instead they are the expression of God's intent for the Creation to which all creatures are called and from which no creatures are released. By my reading (and as I have claimed in talks I've given on the Ten Commandments -- delivered before I read Althaus), the Ten Commandments are a distillation of the will of God according to which we are summoned to live in freedom. In other words, they are indications of how to live the saved life we are offered. The life of faith is submission, inter alia, to life according to the commandments. But more on the Althaus later.
For now, I shall try to pay closer attention to this enterprise and to respond to any comments you make. I'll offer more on the meaning of submission (and on both the Trelstad collection and the Althaus monograph). Give me feedback.
Peace to you.
____________________________
I SHALL NOT DIE, for I am within the Life. I have the whole of life springing up as a fountain within me. -- St. Symeon the New Theologian.
A new super icon
| My friend Cha has been boasting (in a very refined, humble way) about the new icon that her Russian Orthodox congregation have been installing on the ceiling of their church building. Well, a mutual friend of ours, Dash, has posted some amazing pictures that she took during the installation of the icon. (As she explains, the icon was written on canvas; the canvas was cut up so that it would fit the barrel-vault of the ceiling; it was plastered in place; then the iconographer filled in the spaces created by installing flat canvas on a vaulted space.) Please view the pictures here. I expect that you'll be inspired. |
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Say again!?
I suppose if I worked on it, I could tease out of one corner of my mind some sense of this news. But I think the following item is bizarre. It's drawn from page 2 of the Winter 2007 issue of the Spectrum, the apparently aptly named alumni magazine of the Yale Divinity School (YDS):
I don't quite get why an atheist would want a graduate degree in religion -- and especially why he or she would go to a divinity school to get it (even Yale's). How does one proceed to earn a degree when one denies the very premise upon which the education is built -- viz., the reality, in some, way, shape, or form of a "divine"? I understand that the (presumably) young man is in an academic program, not in the M.Div. sequence. But still ... .
I don't know whether to be happy or not that when "Riley approached the dean of students about organizing likeminded students," he "received an encouraging response." Come on now, folks, isn't that leaning a little heavy on the inclusivity staff?
One of the most dynamic new student groups at YDS draws from a long
unrepresented constituency at the divinity school: nonbelievers. They are the
Left Behind, a group of agnostics and atheists who aim to provide a "caring and
inclusive atmosphere to those who already subscribe to our beliefs," ion the
words of Matt Riley '08 M.A.R., who helps lead the group.
I don't quite get why an atheist would want a graduate degree in religion -- and especially why he or she would go to a divinity school to get it (even Yale's). How does one proceed to earn a degree when one denies the very premise upon which the education is built -- viz., the reality, in some, way, shape, or form of a "divine"? I understand that the (presumably) young man is in an academic program, not in the M.Div. sequence. But still ... .
I don't know whether to be happy or not that when "Riley approached the dean of students about organizing likeminded students," he "received an encouraging response." Come on now, folks, isn't that leaning a little heavy on the inclusivity staff?
Wednesday of Holy Week
In preparation for the Triduum, I invite your visit to this site, a kind of virtual Stations. Some of the works of art are quite moving.
And I offer blessings for memorable Pascha.
And I offer blessings for memorable Pascha.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
R.I.P., Brother Herman
The Rev. Dr. Herman G. Stuempfle who served Gettysburg Seminary as professor, chaplain, dean, and president has died.
I was privileged to study preaching with Dr. Stuempfle -- along with a January course on Bernard of Clairvaux and a course on literature and theology. The integration of the fine arts into the task of preaching was of particular skill to Dr. Stuempfle, and he was always generous, clear, and committed in promoting his approach.
Eternal rest grant him, O Lord;
And let perpetual light shine upon him.
I was privileged to study preaching with Dr. Stuempfle -- along with a January course on Bernard of Clairvaux and a course on literature and theology. The integration of the fine arts into the task of preaching was of particular skill to Dr. Stuempfle, and he was always generous, clear, and committed in promoting his approach.
For those who want to read on, here is the entire communication from the synod in which Dr. Stuempfle served:
Lutheran Educator, Seminary President, and Prolific Hymn Author Herman G. Stuempfle Dies (Gettysburg, PA)
The Rev. Dr. Herman G. Stuempfle Jr., a Lutheran church leader known for his outstanding contributions as a preacher, professor, president and poet died Tuesday, March 13, 2007, following a long illness. StuempfleÂ’s life and work will be remembered in a memorial service to be held at the Church of the Abiding Presence, the chapel of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Saturday, March 17, 2007, at 2pm.
Stuempfle, born April 2nd 1923 in Clarion, Pennsylvania, was a resident of Gettysburg for more than five decades and best known as the President of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, serving as professor, dean and president for a total of 27 years. Beginning in 1962, he served the seminary as the John and Susannah Ulrich Professor of the Art of Preaching, teaching seminarians as late as the spring semester of 2003.
The Rev. Michael Cooper-White, President of the Gettysburg Seminary, said "During the latter half of the 20th century, no other individual left a larger imprint on the life of Gettysburg Seminary than Dr. Herman Stuempfle." "On his watch as dean and president the Seminary fortified its reputation for academic excellence," Cooper-White continued, "doubled housing capacity for students, launched the widely renowned Music Gettysburg! Concert series, welcomed the local YWCA to our campus, and navigated the turbulent times as the newly formed Evangelical Lutheran Church in America struggled to solidify its system of theological education. But it was in the classroom and chapel where Dr. Stuempfle's most enduring legacy was forged. As professor of homiletics, and author of the widely acclaimed Preaching Law and Gospel, he sounded a defining tone for a whole generation of us who were blessed to be his students."
Stuempfle, a product of the public schools of Hughesville, PA, was a graduate of Susquehanna University and the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. He received additional advanced degrees from Union Theological Seminary in New York and the doctoral degree (Th.D.) at Southern California School of Theology at Claremont. Before coming to Gettysburg Seminary in 1962 as professor of preaching, he served congregations in York and Gettysburg, PA and in Baltimore, MD. For four years he was associate director of the Board of Social Ministry of the United Lutheran Church in America. In addition to his teaching, he served as seminary chaplain for a brief time and in 1971 he became dean of Gettysburg Seminary.
Following his inauguration in 1976 as the 10th president of the Gettysburg Seminary, the oldest Lutheran graduate and professional school in North America, he spent thirteen years of service as its president. He retired in 1989, remaining a rostered pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).Stuempfle is the author of several books and numerous articles and lectures on preaching, history and theology.
The Rev. Donald McCoid, Bishop of the ELCA's Southwestern Pennsylvania Synod and chairman of the Seminary Board of Directors, said "Herman Stuempfle will long be remembered for his preaching, his hymnody and his personal graciousness. Years after he preached them, we can still remember some of his sermons."
His most widely read theology text, Preaching Law and Gospel, was published by Fortress Press in 1978. He also wrote Preaching in the Witnessing Community (1973) and Theological and Biblical Perspectives on the Laity (1973), and Images for Ministry: Reflections of a Seminary President (1995). He contributed to preaching resources such as Proclamation: Lent. In addition, he wrote scholarly and popular articles for journals, the Lutheran Magazine, and adult Christian education curriculum. Stuempfle and his wife of 50 years, Gretchen S. Parkinson, are the parents of two sons, Stephen and David, and one daughter, Kristin.
Presidency
In the years of Stuempfle's presidency, the seminary faculty continued to evolve with more than ten appointments. The presence of women in the student body increased from 13% to more than a third of seminarians. The Seminary initiated its Washington, D.C. based program of study and established its House of Studies there during Stuempfle's tenure. At the same time, Stuempfle helped develop the Town and Country Church Institute, created a permanent chaplaincy for students, and initiated a support program for the seminary's overseas students. A major chapel renovation resulted in the installation of the Andover tracker organ and the beginnings of the Music, Gettysburg! concert series. Also under his leadership, the Seminary entered into a long term agreement with the YWCA permitting its facility on the seminary campus. The Seminary also expanded the A. R. Wentz library. Annual support for the seminary grew 400% during his 14 year presidency and a successful capital campaign added significant resources to the seminary's assets.
The Hymn Writer
Stuempfle is among the most honored and respected of hymn writers of the 20th and 21st Centuries. His four volumes of hymn texts, published by GIA Publications, include songs of devotion and reflection; dancing and jubilation; sorrow, wonder, and delight. The collections are entitled: The Word goes Forth : hymns, songs, and carols (1993), Redeeming the time : a cycle of song for the Christian year (1997), Awake our hearts to praise : hymns, songs, and carols (2000), Wondrous Love Has Called Us (2006). His texts have graced Lutheran congregational anniversaries, consecrations of Roman Catholic bishops, and English hymnal supplements.
It was in retirement that he became an active hymn writer. He has written an estimated 550 texts, more than half of them already published. Stuempfle is among the most published hymn writers in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, published in 2006, which features eight of his hymn texts. Stuempfle has always been mindful of the link between preaching and hymn writing, saying "Hymns are the sung testimony to God's mighty acts of grace and judgment," and creating hymns always remained for him a part of his "fundamental vocation to communicate the Gospel." Dr. Mark Oldenburg, the Seminary's Steck-Miller Professor of the Art of Worship, and fellow hymn writer said his "language is simple, glorious, and deep, whether he's preaching or writing."
Community Leader
Dr. Stuempfle was known throughout the Central Pennsylvania area, and Gettysburg in particular, for leadership in community and civic projects. Always taking an active stance in social issues, he participated in the creation of day care centers, served on the Gettysburg area Inter church social action committee, and the community wide observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. He helped create and support prison ministries and a local homeless shelter. He tutored young people in the after school program of Christ Lutheran Church of Gettysburg, where he was a member, and where and chaired the congregation's most recent building expansion and renovation efforts. He was a trustee of both Susquehanna University and Gettysburg College.
Honors
Stuempfle has been honored everywhere he has served, spoken and contributed. Symbolic of the esteem with which he was held in many communities over decades, Susquehanna University, Gettysburg College and Thiel College, Greenville, PA. presented him with a honorary degrees. He became the first recipient of the Gettysburg Seminary Distinguished Alumni Award in 1989. The Seminary named a student apartment facility for him and recently began a major project to fund the Herman G. Stuempfle Chair of the Proclamation of the Word in his honor. That endowment project1 milliony crossed the $1million mark on its way to full funding at $1.5 million.
The Gettysburg Rotary organization presented Stuempfle with its fourth 2006 Eisenhower Humanitarian Award, the first going to Eisenhower himself and Bob Hope. He was granted the "Peacemaker Award" from the Gettysburg area based Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice. He was admitted to the Academic Hall of Fame of Hughesville High School in 2003. The Hymn Society of the United States and Canada awarded Stuempfle the elite status of "Fellow of the Hymn Society" in 2004, demonstrating the deep and abiding appreciation for his dynamic creativity in the pulpit, at the lectern, and at the writing desk.
The Rev. Carol Hendrix, Bishop of the Lower Susquehanna Synod, ELCA, gave thanks "to God for the gift of the Rev. Dr. Herman G. Stuempfle Jr., pastor of the church, whose pastoral presence and words have impacted the lives of people throughout the world. A consummate churchman, Dr. Stuempfle used his many God-given gifts in service to Christ's church and as a faithful disciple of the lord Jesus Christ. Through his books, his teaching and preaching, and the hymns he wrote he helped to keep the church faithful. He was a gracious, gentle man whose life we celebrate."
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
All in there Family
| -- with apologies to Norman Lear. There is a fascinating discussion going on over at The Volokh Conspiracy, here, that wrestles with issues of familial essentialism, biology-is-destiny, adoption, artificial insemination, and -- while they don't address is there -- public policy regarding child protection. Chuck Colson is always good for a good and controversial quote. (Does he really mean to suggest that there is something theologically suspect about adopting a child?) Thanks to Eugene Volokh (one of the conspirators) for highlighting the issue. This is an issue that cuts me at several levels. I have served as a family lawyer in divorce and custody cases. (Thank God I had the good sense to leave that behind.) And I have served as a guardian ad litem in juvenile court -- charged to represent not children or parents or others, but in the lingo of the law the "best interests of the child." (And that can be a painful and important distinction.) Beyond that, I wrote my M.S. thesis on ethnic connections (and variations) in family structures, and I wrote my law review article (I might add, "award-winning" law review article) on same-sex marriage. Before those experiences, I was originally trained and ordained as a pastor, so theological issues are never far from the surface. (In case anyone is interested, even though I am no longer "rostered," i.e., serving as pastor on the roles of any denomination's clergy, I still believe myself bound by the vows I made at my ordination -- primary among them to stand fast against false doctrine and inadequate scriptural representation.) To assert that we are in the midst of a social upheaval regarding what constitutes "family" is to test other's patience with its obviousness. So when Brother James Dobson urges politicians to "Focus on the Family," I wonder what "family" he references with that definite article. When I remember back to my first child-protection case, I wonder what we all think a family is, that we so blithely consign children to their biological roots regardless of the chance for harm to them. In my first child protection case, "my child" -- i.e., the child whose best interests I was charged with representing to the court -- was a 6-month-old baby whose mother was 13 years old, (She had become pregnant at age 12 by a high school senior of her acquaintance, and the "father" was no where to be found.) The case came to child protection from the baby's pediatrician, who was concerned that the mother kept leaving the baby with friends so that she could do the things young teenagers do and then forgetting for days on end where she had left her child. Mother and child were living with mother's 42-year-old grandma (who was herself pregnant) because mother's mother couldn't control mother. Under state law, the court was charged with doing all in its power to keep that "family" together -- or "reunifying" the "family" if the child had been taken from the home, as she had been. In other words, the system was geared to returning the child to the care of the mother (with the county's providing appropriate supports to help her succeed as a parent, commonsense doubts of the effectiveness of that service notwithstanding). After several months of wrangling in and out of court, sure enough, baby was placed in custody with her great-grandmother so that mother could continue to "parent" her under guidance of the great-grandmother. I read Chuck Colson to say that there is something biblically, sociologically, psychologically, and all else healthier and "normal" about that situation for a child than there is when a separating lesbian couple each desire custody of the child they had been raising together (even though only one of the mothers had a biological connection with the child). I also read him to say that society has played an unholy game with children by allowing artificial insemination (in all its various guises, I suppose, but primarily in its third-party donor variety) and even adoption. That strikes me as faulty theology, if not just damned silliness. Biology is not destiny, according to Scripture. If the resurrection doesn't prove that, nothing does. Additionally, family ties are important; no dispute there. But Jesus also cautioned his followers of the contingency of familial ties. And marriage and childbearing within marriage have been blessed by God; that is undeniable. But the rest, it seems to me is argument from silence. There may be good prudential reasons for cautions about artificial insemination. (I hear that there are lawsuits at least pending that seek to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding donors for purposes of finding one's "real" father or gaining child support or whatever. But they will only succeed in a structure which presumes that "fatherhood" is exclusively biological, as opposed to social, bond and experience.) And one may argue against same-sex marriage on prudential, moral, and theological grounds. But I think it completely wrong to ignore that children borne into a relationship are children of the relationship, regardless of whether the partners are married straights or partnered gays/lesbians. Children who are adopted need to be socialized to see that their "real" parent (how I loathe that talk) is the one who wiped up the puke when they were sick, and drove them to soccer, and put up with their sass -- not the one who biologically "fathered" the child or bore her to birth. (I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but I think that Jesus' experience with Joseph is probably not something that we can analogize from.) Chuck Colson is on sinking sand with his argument. Perhaps more later. But in the meantime, check out the controversy. |
Monday, March 05, 2007
"Versus Populum" versus "Versus Orientam"
When I named this blog "Versus Populum," I chose the title deliberately. Because of my interest in liturgy, I intended a slight nod in the direction of what had been for some time a relatively minor controversy among church-types -- viz., whether the mass ought to be celebrated with the presbyter/pastor/priest facing the altar or facing the people. "Versus Populum" translates as "facing the people," but I did not intend to act as a proponent of that liturgical posture: I, in fact, prefer (for aesthetic, theological, liturgical, and pastoral reasons) the opposite -- called "ad orientem" or "toward the East" -- in which the pastor faces the same direction of the people, traditionally east, to face the rising sun/Son. I was convinced of the propriety of this position -- in contradiction of what I was taught by Robert Jenson decades ago -- by no less an authority than then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in a book written "before he changed the color of his cassock" (as Fr. Newman -- see below -- describes the situation).
I chose the title because I wanted to raise issues of church life face-to-face, as it were, with the people of the Church. I want to speak eye-to-eye, not from some great tower from which my wisdom can fall like rain on the needy. Just so it's clear: My choice of a title was word play.
Now comes a blog with a title the opposite of mine which does, in fact, stand for what it says: Fr. Jay Scott Newman writes "Ad Orientem," and he strenuously argues regularly for all kinds of re-orientation in the Church. Fr. Newman is a robust scholar, debater, writer, and priest. Even when I disagree with him (as I often do), I find that he is worth reading. (That, in this case, we agree both in principle and in level of enthusiasm on the matter of east-facing priests pleases me.) At this entry, he commends a book on the subject of the direction a priest ought to assume in leading the mass. I will try to read the book soon, especially given that it argues for a position with which I agree (and that it is endorsed by the person who convinced me of the propriety of the posture).
I commend further Fr. Newman's blog to you. He is a good friend of Fr. Al Kimel, whose work in "Pontifications" I regularly recommend here. And by reading the two of them (with a critical eye), one could get a quite decent education in classic Christian theology.
By the way, my title to this post is also meant humorously. I do not mean to suggest that there is a battle of the blogs going on between Fr. Newman and me. I'm smarter than that: I'd lose any such contest hands down. The lawyer in me just couldn't resist using "versus" three times in one heading.
I chose the title because I wanted to raise issues of church life face-to-face, as it were, with the people of the Church. I want to speak eye-to-eye, not from some great tower from which my wisdom can fall like rain on the needy. Just so it's clear: My choice of a title was word play.
Now comes a blog with a title the opposite of mine which does, in fact, stand for what it says: Fr. Jay Scott Newman writes "Ad Orientem," and he strenuously argues regularly for all kinds of re-orientation in the Church. Fr. Newman is a robust scholar, debater, writer, and priest. Even when I disagree with him (as I often do), I find that he is worth reading. (That, in this case, we agree both in principle and in level of enthusiasm on the matter of east-facing priests pleases me.) At this entry, he commends a book on the subject of the direction a priest ought to assume in leading the mass. I will try to read the book soon, especially given that it argues for a position with which I agree (and that it is endorsed by the person who convinced me of the propriety of the posture).
I commend further Fr. Newman's blog to you. He is a good friend of Fr. Al Kimel, whose work in "Pontifications" I regularly recommend here. And by reading the two of them (with a critical eye), one could get a quite decent education in classic Christian theology.
By the way, my title to this post is also meant humorously. I do not mean to suggest that there is a battle of the blogs going on between Fr. Newman and me. I'm smarter than that: I'd lose any such contest hands down. The lawyer in me just couldn't resist using "versus" three times in one heading.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
A Guest Reflection
I haven't been doing my work for Versus Populum because I've been obsessing over a task I've undertaken in my church: I'm leading a four-session study of Genesis 1-3 -- one which tries to read the text anew and to unpack things that may be new to people. (I'm trying to avoid a "distillation" of the Genesis "meaning" into simple concepts such as "creatio ex nihilo" -- which, frankly, is not supported by the text -- or "Fall" -- which I think needs to be defined rather carefully.
It's a lot of fun -- even though it's proceeding in a kind of sporadic way: For various reasons, some involving scheduling and others resulting from God's gift of a foot of snow last weekend, we've ended up meeting every other week -- something that makes for difficulty in maintaing continuity.
The point, though, is that I've been thinking about little else than Genesis. I've been exploring the Hebrew, a real stretch for me in that I can barely decipher the script, let alone analyze the words. (Thank God, sincerely, for good lexical aids.) I've been reading von Rad (even though I didn't plan to read commentaries) and Colin Gunton and Westermann because they are scintillating and beautifully written pieces of work. (With respect to the Gunton work, which is basically a historical study of the Christian doctrine of "creation": I didn't anticipate getting excited reading about the Christian response to Thales and Plato. But I am.)
I'll get back to harumphing shortly, however. There are too many things going on.
For now, however, I can't resist posting (and I hope it falls within the fair-use doctrine in copyright law) this recent offering from the Marty Center at the U of Chicago -- it's biweekly e-mailed "Sightings," to which you can subscribe by following the link at the end of the piece. The Ted Haggart fiasco has given me a crick in my neck from shakling my head in amazement, outrage, open-mouthed shock at the stupidity of the deal. Here, Jack Stackhouse provides some good
insight into a decent, non-celebrity model for ministry that takes into account human frailty without adopting an everything-goes approach (which is where the American Church seems to be heading).
Without further ado:
It's a lot of fun -- even though it's proceeding in a kind of sporadic way: For various reasons, some involving scheduling and others resulting from God's gift of a foot of snow last weekend, we've ended up meeting every other week -- something that makes for difficulty in maintaing continuity.
The point, though, is that I've been thinking about little else than Genesis. I've been exploring the Hebrew, a real stretch for me in that I can barely decipher the script, let alone analyze the words. (Thank God, sincerely, for good lexical aids.) I've been reading von Rad (even though I didn't plan to read commentaries) and Colin Gunton and Westermann because they are scintillating and beautifully written pieces of work. (With respect to the Gunton work, which is basically a historical study of the Christian doctrine of "creation": I didn't anticipate getting excited reading about the Christian response to Thales and Plato. But I am.)
I'll get back to harumphing shortly, however. There are too many things going on.
For now, however, I can't resist posting (and I hope it falls within the fair-use doctrine in copyright law) this recent offering from the Marty Center at the U of Chicago -- it's biweekly e-mailed "Sightings," to which you can subscribe by following the link at the end of the piece. The Ted Haggart fiasco has given me a crick in my neck from shakling my head in amazement, outrage, open-mouthed shock at the stupidity of the deal. Here, Jack Stackhouse provides some good
insight into a decent, non-celebrity model for ministry that takes into account human frailty without adopting an everything-goes approach (which is where the American Church seems to be heading).
Without further ado:
Sightings
2/22/07
Wounded Healers
-- John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
By now we've all heard the latest about Ted Haggard, former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and former head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Brother Haggard -- and, as a fellow Christian, he is my brother -- was found to have been having sexual relations with a male prostitute in Denver. He resigned in disgrace, and has since been in counseling.
According to the February 6 issue of the Denver Post, the four pastors in charge of overseeing New Life Church in the wake of this disaster made a surprising -- to some, an astonishing, and to others, an absurd -- announcement. One of them, Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur, Colorado, was quoted as explaining Haggard's three-year relationship with the man in these terms: Haggard "is completely heterosexual. That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."
Columnists have had a field day with this recent announcement, of course, with many wondering what stresses could possibly drive a "completely heterosexual" man into the arms of a male lover. Others have simply gotten the story wrong, saying that Haggard is claiming to have been "cured" of homosexuality in just three months, rather than the years that might be expected for rebuilding such a basic component of one's personality -- if indeed such a thing is possible at all. The media circus continues.
In all of this, I am reminded of the late Henri Nouwen, the superb spiritual writer who taught at Harvard and Yale before spending his last years in pastoral service at L'Arche, Jean Vanier's community for the developmentally disabled. Nouwen also wrestled with homosexuality -- "wrestled" with it because his religious beliefs, like Haggard's, diagnosed it as a deformation of the personality.
Also like Haggard, Nouwen maintained a position of spiritual advisor to many. His sexual difficulty did not disqualify him from offering his
considerable gifts to others -- nor should Haggard's have kept him from pastoral service.
Unlike Haggard, however, Nouwen refused to engage in preaching or public activism against homosexuality. He avoided, that is, any risk of incurring the taint of hypocrisy, which is a far more serious problem -- in the Bible and in the public eye -- than is homosexuality.Nouwen gave us the lovely phrase, the "wounded healer." Some have exploited this term -- as all lovely things are vulnerable to exploitation -- to suggest that you can be entirely comfortable with all manner of sins and still be a spiritual leader. You can be proud, you can be lustful, you can be greedy, you can wrathfully dismiss dissenting colleagues, and on down through the seven deadlies -- but hey, you're a "wounded healer" and darned popular -- in other words, "blessed in your ministry." So it's okay, right?
No, says Nouwen, by word and by example. Serve, yes, offering your God-given talents to make God's beloved world a better place. But serve out of consciousness of your wound, which means to serve in humility, in compassion, in patience. "There but for the grace of God go I."Nouwen's insight is that, clergy or not, we must not wait to become perfect before we help others. We can help them, that is, precisely as fellow sufferers, with genuine fellow feeling -- but also with a strong and clear sense of our limitations. And even if you've never been a fan of Ted Haggard, nor of the populist celebrity-evangelicalism that he exemplifies, you can still cultivate sympathy for him, for his family, and for his church.
And, thanks to Brother Nouwen, we can also better recognize that our wounds may not be healed right away, nor even over months or years. According to Nouwen's theology, God may well allow some of those wounds remain a while -- for as we endure their pain, their shame, and their debility, we may be given the gift of remembering just how needy each of us is, and how great the possibilities of restoring love.
John G. Stackhouse, Jr., is Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College.
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The current Religion and Culture Web Forum features "The Earth Charter as a New Covenant for Democracy" by J. Ronald Engel. To read this article, please visit: http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/index.shtml.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Lutheran Romani?!
| I can hardly deny that I am both narrowly educated in matters of the world and painfully naive as to my own families' cultures. I mean I don't know very much -- say, compared to Sister Dash, who's a fiend on her Swedish identity -- about my Norwegian and Icelandic heritage, let alone my Bohemia-Czech-Slovak-Polish side. So I was surprised and delighted to run across this article about Lutheran Romani (otherwise known as "gypsies") in Transylvania/Romania. Now, I have no personal investment in Transylvania (although I'd really like to master that "Dracula" accent!), but the Romani (or Romany) are another matter: A family legend, presumed factual, is that the Penas family ended up in Bohemia because their gypsy travels brought them there. There is support for such a story, too. For example, my Fulbright-Fellowship-winning uncle was unable to trace the family back in Bohemia and Eastern Europe much beyond the days before they moved to the States. And our name is a Greek-related name, meaning "poor" (when Jesus says "blessed are the poor" the word translated "poor" is "penas" -- pronounced "pen-ace," which is how some in the family tree pronounce it): I had a Greek doctor in Illinois who took great delight in greeting me in Greek and addressing me as the "beggar," because in modern Greek our patronym refers to the gypsy-beggar. So there is circumstantial evidence that there is "gypsy blood" in these, my veins. Now I find out that some maybe-distant cousins are fellow Lutherans. How exciting is that? For me: quite! |
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Ted Haggard
It's a great relief to me personally that Ted Haggard is "completely heterosexual" according to the team of loving pastors that has been overseeing his recovery. See here. It's also a great relief to me that the loving pastors overseeing his recovery have counseled him to leave his home area and to give up church work -- where he might have expected some sort of support during his time of reconciliation and healing -- in favor of secular employment in some other area of the country. (Same article.) It would likely be a bad example for the 14,000 members of New Life congregation and the National Association of Evangelicals to have ever before their eyes a human being who must struggle with sin and malfeasance and the consequences thereof. And God forbid that they actually be called on to understand the struggle and perhaps to forgive.
It is, of course, only natural that a person with as much psychological baggage as the (formerly Rev.?) Mr. Haggard carries to be encouraged to seek a career (along with the wife to whom he was unfaithful) in psychology. It's good to know that the universe is still filled with irony.
And now, if I could dislodge my tongue from my cheek, I'd get on with other business.
It is, of course, only natural that a person with as much psychological baggage as the (formerly Rev.?) Mr. Haggard carries to be encouraged to seek a career (along with the wife to whom he was unfaithful) in psychology. It's good to know that the universe is still filled with irony.
And now, if I could dislodge my tongue from my cheek, I'd get on with other business.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Church and World: A Sermon
| Friend Art Halbardier preached at Mount Olive Sunday, on the Gospel text wherein Jesus preaches in his home synagogue and ruffles a few feathers. (Art is a member of Mount Olive, and he was substituting for the pastor, who was on vacation.) For his focus, Art raised the charge, "When the Church rises up to be the Church, the World rises up to be the World." It was an eloquent, quietly urgent bit of preaching. And it powerfully made the point that to live faith is not to be at ease in the world we live in. It was wonderfully Hauerwasian, which Art said he did not intend (but so what, eh?). Hauerwas says that the world needs the Church to be the Church so that the world knows that it is the world. (That is SO Hauerwas, I think.) The Church is not simply the religious aspect of living a regular life in the culture; the Church is the new culture, its own culture, brought into being, modeled, and enabled by the Triune God. The "world" is that which has not yet been won over to the ways of God. And we shade the borders between the two at our own peril -- as Art suggests. I commend his sermon to you (even though I don't often recommend sermons). You may read it here. |
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
And now for something completely different ...
| Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a complete sports know-nothing. Oh, I like to watch football and dear friend Bjoern continues to try to encourage a love of European handball and I've been known to take part in a game of beach volleyball, but beyond that, I'm pathetic. But I have a great love of watching horse racing. Again, no knowledge, just "know what I like." So I was very saddened by the news that Barbaro had been put down. He's the 1-year-old who won the Kentucky Derby and then broke his leg right afterward. He's been battling for 8 months to return to integrity, but the struggle was finally too much for him and for his owners. And the world lost a creature of God who (I suppose I should say that or which) demonstrated class, beauty, fortitude, and (by all accounts) courage and good spirits all through his short life. I remember a seminar during seminary years, led by Robert Jenson (who might like to disown the who project, for all I know) in which we spent a lot of time arguing about whether animals would be in heaven. It was one party's view that there is nothing in Scripture to suggest that there will anything other than human animals. But the other party argued from the structure of creation and millenia of experience that if heaven was to be in any sense continuous with life on earth (thus fulfilling the creation, not cancelling it out), then animals -- pets, penguins, and (I'd now add) race horses -- must be a part of the scheme. Well, regardless of the outcome of that argument, I think it appropriate to thank God for "fashioning" (in the word from Genesis) such a magnificent creature and for the brief chance that most of us had to see him in play. This all arises because of a comment to one of my posts from David over at American Legends, a blog he maintains with other presumably sports nuts. He blogged an obituary there, which I appreciated finding among all the commentaries on the Super Bowl and the like by people who take their sports seriously. (Me, I'm just rooting for Chicago because it's Da Bears and I lived and continue to love the City of Chicago -- even though Tony Dungy used to coach here in Minnesota!) Well, David suggested a cross-listing of our blogs and I'm pleased to be asked. So, you;ll find a new reference in my list of blogs. Especially if you're a sports fan or an afficionado of sports sociology and culture, I invite you to check it out: http://americanlegends.blogspot.com/ David, if you're reading, I hope I get to know you and your cohorts better. |
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Update, with Bibliography (with later correction)
I haven't been able to raise much controversy here lately, because I've been working on gunning up the adults in my congregation: In February, I'm going to do a four-week adult forum on Genesis 1-3 (which I'm calling "Reading Genesis Together") in which I hope to lead a discussion, chapter by chapter, of this marvelous section of that marvelous book. I hope not to lecture TOO MUCH (that is very difficult for me, despite by Great Books background), but rather to work with whoever shows up to uncover new appreciation for the language, the drama, the whatever. I don't want to just jump into a discussion of such dogmatic issues as "The Doctrine of Creation" or "Creatio ex nihilo" (which is not very well supported by these chapters, anyway, incidentally). But I'm confident that with some due seriousness about the text, we will grow in reverence, awe, and gratitude to the God who created, redeemed, and sustains all that is.
I'm using a variety of what are for me nontraditional sources. My reading and thinking are being guided by references that are new to me. (A few years ago, I read von Rad's commentary on Genesis and fell in love with reading commentaries as books, in their entirety. I am, however, refraining from reading commentaries-as-commentaries this round, so I won't be quoting the dear Doktor Professor.)
First on my list is Leon Kass' The Beginning of Wisdom. Kass is not a theologian; he's not even a religous Jew. Rather, he's trained as a physician and a philosopher who now teaches at the University of Chicago. (Some may remember that he headed up the President's commission on biomedical ethis a few years ago. That gives you some indication of where he sits.) But he had been required to teach the book as a part of a core-curriculum program at the UofC, and it finally got in his craw and he began a diligent study of the book. (He's also something of an expert on evolution, so there was a connection there, too.)
Kass tries to think about Genesis a priori -- that is, philosophically, not theologically, to see what opens with a close reading. In the process, he lays out some of the linguistic fun of the book. But he spends most of his time positing a kind of "what if the book leads us to think this" rhapsody. It's a brilliant boo, I think. And it's giving me a new perspective on a book that I thought I rather knew.
From the other end of the spectrum, I am spending a lot of time with Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses. Here's anaother non-religious treatment of the book, this time a translation by one of the country's finest experts in comparative literature. He doesn't intend his book to be a commentary or reflection, but he so amply footnotes his translation, providing lucid explanations for why he translated something the way he did, that it's almost like reading a commentary.
As for commentaries, as I said, I'm pretty much avoiding them -- except for the Ancient Christian Commentary on the Scriptures volume on Genesis. For those who don't know it, this is a compilation of comments on the Scripture by the early Christian fathers -- that is, the Christian preachers, teachers, and mystics from the Church's early years. It's a successor to Thomas' catena auria (or gold chain), which was a listing of pearls of wisdom that the early Christians offered on the lectionary readings. Here, under the editorship of an evangelical scholar (!), Thomas Oden of Drew University, the effort is to collect such wisdom for each book of the Bible.
The upshot for my class is that I'll have tidbits of wisdom to bring in from readings in the Scriptures from earliest times. Thus, my title "Reading Genesis Together" will be an attempt to read as a community in Minneapolis that is informed and in communion with the community of the Church's history. It doesn't look like I'll have time to read Luther (woe is me!), but I'll put that up the group, too.
Finally, friend Susan Palo Cherwien (the poet and hymntext writer) recommended Everett Fox's translation of the Torah for the Schocken Bible. Also called The Five Books of Moses, this is an effort to translate the Bible (obviously understood as what Christians call the "Old[er] Testament") in such a way as to preserve its Hebraic quality -- and thus, a kind of foreignness to the text. The translation is meant to sound (when read aloud) more like the Hebrew would have sounded -- and, yes, I understand the problem with such a statement. And it's given me some interesting insights, too. (If I recall correctly, Jaroslav Pelikan -- may his memory endure -- used the Schocken translation in all his reflection during the last years of his life.)
Here I try to make two points: First I explain my lack of postings: I have been immersed in Scripture study, and have not sought to put thoughts to paper that do not relate to that endeavor. I have not grown humble and, thus, shut up about matters theological. I intend to continue blogging -- even though a significant number of my blog-models have quit doing so. I'm wrestling with a couple of books as bedtime reading, and I hope to comment on them soon. Second, the books I cite here are all worthy resources for your attention, and I commend them to you.
On an entirely different track, I am also involved in trying to make sense of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. We're reading it for my Saturday book group, and since I have never read this work by Faulkner, I'm giving it the old college try. (Joan Buckley, this one is for you.) I can't imagine the response to the book when it was published. I can only reflect on comments that fellow-readers are having -- e.g., "I read that first chapter and I'm thinking, 'What the hell is this?'" I don't think it's as incomprehensible as one review suggested, but we'll see! I've always been a Faulkner fan (God knows why -- maybe because I got a really good grade and comments on my paper on Light in August -- more Joan Buckley.)
So, read you Bible -- especially Genesis. And if you have thoughts about it, the comments section is open.
Pax.
I'm using a variety of what are for me nontraditional sources. My reading and thinking are being guided by references that are new to me. (A few years ago, I read von Rad's commentary on Genesis and fell in love with reading commentaries as books, in their entirety. I am, however, refraining from reading commentaries-as-commentaries this round, so I won't be quoting the dear Doktor Professor.)
First on my list is Leon Kass' The Beginning of Wisdom. Kass is not a theologian; he's not even a religous Jew. Rather, he's trained as a physician and a philosopher who now teaches at the University of Chicago. (Some may remember that he headed up the President's commission on biomedical ethis a few years ago. That gives you some indication of where he sits.) But he had been required to teach the book as a part of a core-curriculum program at the UofC, and it finally got in his craw and he began a diligent study of the book. (He's also something of an expert on evolution, so there was a connection there, too.)
Kass tries to think about Genesis a priori -- that is, philosophically, not theologically, to see what opens with a close reading. In the process, he lays out some of the linguistic fun of the book. But he spends most of his time positing a kind of "what if the book leads us to think this" rhapsody. It's a brilliant boo, I think. And it's giving me a new perspective on a book that I thought I rather knew.
From the other end of the spectrum, I am spending a lot of time with Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses. Here's anaother non-religious treatment of the book, this time a translation by one of the country's finest experts in comparative literature. He doesn't intend his book to be a commentary or reflection, but he so amply footnotes his translation, providing lucid explanations for why he translated something the way he did, that it's almost like reading a commentary.
As for commentaries, as I said, I'm pretty much avoiding them -- except for the Ancient Christian Commentary on the Scriptures volume on Genesis. For those who don't know it, this is a compilation of comments on the Scripture by the early Christian fathers -- that is, the Christian preachers, teachers, and mystics from the Church's early years. It's a successor to Thomas' catena auria (or gold chain), which was a listing of pearls of wisdom that the early Christians offered on the lectionary readings. Here, under the editorship of an evangelical scholar (!), Thomas Oden of Drew University, the effort is to collect such wisdom for each book of the Bible.
The upshot for my class is that I'll have tidbits of wisdom to bring in from readings in the Scriptures from earliest times. Thus, my title "Reading Genesis Together" will be an attempt to read as a community in Minneapolis that is informed and in communion with the community of the Church's history. It doesn't look like I'll have time to read Luther (woe is me!), but I'll put that up the group, too.
Finally, friend Susan Palo Cherwien (the poet and hymntext writer) recommended Everett Fox's translation of the Torah for the Schocken Bible. Also called The Five Books of Moses, this is an effort to translate the Bible (obviously understood as what Christians call the "Old[er] Testament") in such a way as to preserve its Hebraic quality -- and thus, a kind of foreignness to the text. The translation is meant to sound (when read aloud) more like the Hebrew would have sounded -- and, yes, I understand the problem with such a statement. And it's given me some interesting insights, too. (If I recall correctly, Jaroslav Pelikan -- may his memory endure -- used the Schocken translation in all his reflection during the last years of his life.)
Here I try to make two points: First I explain my lack of postings: I have been immersed in Scripture study, and have not sought to put thoughts to paper that do not relate to that endeavor. I have not grown humble and, thus, shut up about matters theological. I intend to continue blogging -- even though a significant number of my blog-models have quit doing so. I'm wrestling with a couple of books as bedtime reading, and I hope to comment on them soon. Second, the books I cite here are all worthy resources for your attention, and I commend them to you.
On an entirely different track, I am also involved in trying to make sense of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. We're reading it for my Saturday book group, and since I have never read this work by Faulkner, I'm giving it the old college try. (Joan Buckley, this one is for you.) I can't imagine the response to the book when it was published. I can only reflect on comments that fellow-readers are having -- e.g., "I read that first chapter and I'm thinking, 'What the hell is this?'" I don't think it's as incomprehensible as one review suggested, but we'll see! I've always been a Faulkner fan (God knows why -- maybe because I got a really good grade and comments on my paper on Light in August -- more Joan Buckley.)
So, read you Bible -- especially Genesis. And if you have thoughts about it, the comments section is open.
Pax.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Lutheran? Find Out
OK, we get a little parochial here. Give this a try and you may surprise yourself. (Unfortunately, I can't find a way to figure out where I screwed up on my 1%.)
After you've finished that quiz, switch over to big-time Lutheran discussion at Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, here, with its open discussion of the Book of Concord.
You are 99% Lutheran! This is most certainly true.
Nicely done! Martin would be proud of you! You may or may not have room for growth in understanding Lutheran terminology and culture. Good thing Salvation is by Grace and not by merit. We can add nothing to what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. But it never hurts to learn a little more about the church on earth. Thanks for taking the quiz!
How Lutheran Are You?
Create a Quiz
After you've finished that quiz, switch over to big-time Lutheran discussion at Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, here, with its open discussion of the Book of Concord.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
I'm a couple of days late with this, but I offer to you with my prayers that Christmas is all that it is meant to be for you and "yours."
On the Morning Of Christ's Nativity
by John Milton
I
I
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
This is the month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
II
That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heav'n's high council-table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside, and here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.
III
Say Heav'nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to this his new abode,
Now while the heav'n, by the Sun's team untrod,
Hath took no print of the approaching light,
And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?
IV
See how from far upon the eastern road
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the angel quire,
From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Nativity: A Christmas Poem
Nativity
by John Donne
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov'd imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod's jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith's eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.
by John Donne
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov'd imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod's jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith's eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.
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