Note from CM: Thanks to Richard Beck for giving permission to re-post his thoughts about what the Christian faith says about evil. This is actually part two of a two-part post at his blog, Experimental Theology, and if you want to read more about the first two assertions, follow the link in this post to his first article.
• • •
Monday with Richard Beck Christian Assertions about Evil
To recap, the first Christian assertion about evil is that evil is not ontological, an eternal and permanent fixture of existence that we must become stoically resigned to living with.
According to Christianity, evil can be defeated.
The second assertion is that God is working to defeat evil, and we are called to that work.
A third assertion Christianity makes about evil is this: Humans are not the source of evil.
In Genesis, the snake is already in the Garden of Eden. Humans succumb to evil. That is, while the origins of evil are not described in the Bible the catastrophe predates human beings. Yes, humans frequently are a source of evil in our world, but they are not The Source.
I think this third assertion about evil is a helpful balance given the first. Evil is not an eternal, ontological aspect of existence. This prompts ethical resistance of evil over stoical resignation. But that ethical resistance must also recognize the third assertion, that humans are not the ultimate source of evil. This assertion is important for two related reasons.
First, the third assertion humbles the utopian aspirations of the Revolution. If evil were solely a human problem we’d be tempted to think that humans were perfectible. That’s the utopian fantasy of the Revolution, the moral perfection of human society. But if evil exists outside of the human sphere then no matter how good we become the snake is always there to tempt us back into the darkness. Even the best of us and the very best of our political projects–I’m looking at you America–can fall back into darkness.
Second, recognizing that humans aren’t the source of evil helps us fight the temptation of believing that our fight against evil is a fight “against flesh and blood,” against other human beings. If humans are the source of evil then fighting evil would mean fighting, ultimately and only, against other human beings. Resistance to evil becomes sorting the world into Angels and Demons and then eradicating the humans deemed demonic. This is the temptation that tips the Revolution toward blood.
(By the way, this is the temptation I name in Reviving Old Scratch when progressive, liberal Christians demythologize “spiritual warfare” to mean “social justice.”)
So, this a third Christian assertion about evil. One that I think, like the other two, is pretty good.
Humans succumb, submit and obey evil, thereby bringing horrors into the world, but humans are not the source and origin of evil.
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
Today’s Brunch is sprinkled with Peanuts. Just thought you ought to know.
Nostalgic autumn photos from Vermont in the 1970s (by yours truly)…
Best quote I read this week…
Doubt is only a problem if certainty is the expectation.
• Austin Fischer
Recommended viewing…
If you haven’t had a chance yet to see Ken Burns’s film, The Mayo Clinic: Faith-Hope-Science, I recommend that you make some time to do so soon.
As one who works in healthcare, and who has faith-based, idealistic, communitarian, and public service reasons for doing so, I found this documentary instructive and refreshing when one considers the complex, profit-oriented, inefficient, and ineffective system of healthcare in the U.S. today. The Mayo Clinic has a history, from its founding, of being just the opposite of that — patient-centered, collaborative, and uncompromisingly, even sacrificially, devoted to the common good. This ethic grows out of its Franciscan roots and its midwestern (Minnesotan) neighborly traditional common sense ethics. In watching this inspirational film, I learned a great deal that I didn’t know before about how faith and religious values have played such a strong role in the Mayo way from the beginning.
Kudos to Ken Burns for bringing this to our attention. In my opinion, this is a must-see documentary.
The precreated state of the earth with darkness and chaos suggests that everything hostile to life is not a result of sin. This is Job’s discovery (Job 38-41). Job is mystified by his whole experience of suffering. God’s response is to make clear that everything negative in creation from the human perspective is not a result of human sin. The chaotic forces — sea, darkness, and the like — are a mystery to human beings. Although these forces seem, for the moment, hostile to life, human beings can still trust the benevolence of the Creator because the malevolent forces of creation operate only within his constraints.
Numbers or Narrative? The evolution of pitching in baseball:
Clayton Kershaw
As we move into the championship series of Major League Baseball, it is clear to me that, in many ways, it is a much different game than the one I played in my youth — especially when it comes to pitching. An article at The Ringer explores this thoroughly, explaining how various forms of “bullpenning” are fast becoming the approach teams are using with their pitching staffs. This is in contrast to one of the long dominant narratives of the game: the prominence of the starting pitcher.
These days, the game is increasingly run by those who follow a science of baseball statistical analysis called sabermetrics. When applied to pitching, statistics show that batters trend better against a pitcher the longer he is in the game, with a significant improvement in the batter’s success the third time he faces a pitcher. Therefore, as I saw time and time again throughout the season, most starting pitchers are now taken out in the 5th or 6th inning, no matter how they are doing, so that batters will not face them that third time around. The rest of the game is pitched by various specialist relief pitchers from the bullpen. Some teams have gone as far as to use different pitchers every one or two innings, ditching the idea of a “starter” altogether.
There are exceptional pitchers, of course, who occasionally pitch longer and may even throw a complete 9-inning game (a rare feat these days). But the new approach is now winning the day. As a former starting pitcher and as one who has attributed heroic status to the great starting pitchers with the courage, creativity, grit, and endurance to find ways of overcoming the batters they’ve faced inning after inning, I find this new trend hard to swallow.
In the article by Ben Lindbergh, he points out that this is the biggest conundrum this new approach raises. It sets up a battle between numbers that make sense and one of the traditional narratives that has made baseball such a compelling game.
Sandy Koufax
However inefficient the stats said it was, a head-to-head battle between aces who went deep into games was—and occasionally still is—a source of excitement that transcends the competition between teams. It’s the closest baseball comes to a heavyweight title bout. We still get marquee matchups, but they don’t define the game as often; in the playoffs, even a Justin Verlander–Corey Kluber confrontation like last Friday’s is liable to be limited to not much more than 10 innings combined. We’re less likely to see a signature start that lives on as legend, and more likely to see a solid six innings followed by a couple clean outings from generic right-handed relievers who don’t amass enough innings a year to have high profiles and whose names we’ll forget in a few years.
…[B]aseball is, for most spectators, a TV show. And although it’s not scripted, it does depend on a cast of compelling, recurring characters with whom we have histories. “Something we learned from Wings, that we employed when we were creating Frasier, is keep your cast small,” Cheers writer and Wings and Frasier cocreator Peter Casey once told me. “Don’t have a big cast, because in real life, they’re all actors, they all want their lines. And if you have 11 characters in a show that’s only 22 minutes long, everybody’s gotta get fed.” A big cast, Casey said, can become unwieldy. One might say the same about a big bullpen.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’ll take narrative over numbers any day.
Where searching for extraterrestrial life is going next:
A few decades ago, finding life beyond Earth was an idle dream — but today, astrobiology is a thriving field, fed by incredible discoveries across different realms of science and the possibility of still more to come.
And to shape where astrobiology goes next, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine gathered a panel of expert scientists to reflect on what has happened in the field since 2015 and what consensus suggests should be priorities going forward. The result is a paper published today (Oct. 10) highlighting a suite of recommendations for NASA.
Among the recommendations:
Investing in technological advances in more powerful telescopes and starlight-blocking instruments.
A continuing emphasis on interdisciplinary cooperation that promotes system-level thinking “looking at habitability as a spectrum, rather than as a simple yes-or-no question.”
Thinking more creatively about where to look for life in our own solar system. In particular, exploring the possibilities of subsurface life.
“The report also emphasizes a key challenge to identifying life: accurately finding and interpreting what scientists call biosignatures, the chemical changes characteristic of life. “
Most of all, the report emphasizes the tantalizing promise of astrobiology itself and its potential impact on our lives and worldviews. “Taking a look at what we find out from these other planetary systems can shine a light back on Earth,” Sherwood Lollar said. “It really is a comparative approach where by taking a look at all of these complex systems, we can learn more about each and every one of them.”
Jokes aside about flying squirrels, nuts served on planes and bushy-tailed passengers, squirrels and planes do not actually mix. At least not on Tuesday at Orlando International Airport, where an unidentified passenger hadn’t gotten the memo.
She boarded her Cleveland-bound Frontier Airlines flight toting a cage containing the furry occupant. She did her due diligence by noting on her reservation that she would be bringing an emotional support animal, Frontier said in a statement. She even had the animal cleared by TSA’s X-ray machine. She just failed to notify the airline that her companion was a squirrel.
Once onboard, the woman was told that squirrels are rodents — and rodents are not welcome. (So don’t get any ideas, proud hamster, rat and mouse owners).
The woman refused to get off the flight, Frontier said, and Orlando police stepped in.
“Everyone was deplaned so police could deal with the passenger,” Frontier said.
An Orlando Police Department spokesman said the woman got off the plane once officers arrived, so no further action was taken.
Sometimes I forget there are real people on the other side of the discussion, or listening in on the conversation.
I remember way back in my university days an acquaintance expressed concern about the nuclear arms race. Sensing a chance for some fun, I immediately argued that the best solution to end the nuclear arms race was a first strike attack on the Russians. I didn’t believe that. But I thought it would be fun to argue it. I only realized I had gone too far when his face went beet red and he started twisting his glasses in his lap.
I think I am/was built that way. Taking contrarian points of view and seeing what kind of argument I can build. I wrote a paper around that time arguing that Botswana was a major African power. This couldn’t have been further from the truth as this was in the early eighties, when their second largest city had only two paved streets, and diamonds hadn’t yet been discovered in the country. I got an A.
Of course the advent of social media has only increased the opportunities. I have only been unfriended by a few people on social media (that I am aware of), but in most of the cases it was because my desire for a debate overrode my concern for the other people involved.
The same can be said of my writing on Internet Monk. I know of a number of commentators who have stopped contributing because of either direct or off hand comments that I have made.
Maybe I was right in my assertions. Maybe I wasn’t. That is not the point. There was a post earlier this week talking about the difference between “facts” and the “truth”. Whatever the facts may be in an in-person discussion, a Facebook thread, or an Internet Monk interchange, the truth is that there is a real person at the other end. A person with real feelings, a person who may feel more strongly about a particular topic than you do. A person whose experiences may have been different to yours.
I was going to write a different post tonight. A earlier hurtful conversation that I fully found out about today, made me realize that my intended topic might have been hurtful to someone I know. I have left it until I can word it while keeping the other person in mind.
I have appreciated the Internet Monk site because of the respectful discourse that generally occurs. I, for one, am going to try to do my best to make sure that my tone, if not my intent, is respectful of others’ comments. That doesn’t mean that I won’t censure or put my foot down over some conversations. I did find though in a previous series that encouraging respectful debate did actually result in respectful debate. Perhaps we can all keep this in mind as we continue to dialogue with each other here at Internet Monk.
We are reviewing the book, “Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship” by John Polkinghorne. Today we will look at the third part of Chapter 3- Lessons from History. John continues his comparative study of science and Christian theology with some additional historical examples of how the discovery of further truth proceeds in these two disciplines. Last time we looked at: (2) Collateral developments. Further examples considered. This week we look at:
(3) Tides of fashion. The questions considered significant, and the style of thinking found appropriate to answering them, are influenced by contemporary intellectual and cultural attitudes.
(a) Relativistic quantum theory. Science, like any human endeavor, is not immune from the tides of fashion. Being a community of humans, sociological factors are certainly at work, although Polkinghorne asserts that it is a gross exaggeration to suggest they determine the nature of the conclusions eventually reached. Polkinghorne illustrates these effects in his description of the development of relativistic quantum theory.
In 1928, Paul Dirac, working in his small, cloistered room in St. John’s College in Cambridge, developed quantum field theory and came up with the celebrated equation of the electron (which is engraved on his memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey).
It was soon realized that all relativistic quantum equations needed to be treated as field theories. In physics, a field is a physical quantity, represented by a number that has a value for each point in space and time. For example: an electric field can be thought of as a “condition in space” emanating from an electric charge and extending throughout the whole of space. When a test electric charge is placed in this electric field, the particle accelerates due to a force. Physicists have found the notion of a field to be of such practical utility for the analysis of forces that they have come to think of a force as due to a field.
Dirac’s equation was verified experimentally, and this success, coupled with the conceptual clarification of wave/particle duality and also Dirac’s successful prediction of the existence of antimatter, clearly showed that quantum field theorists were on to something.
However, when more refined calculations were attempted, instead of yielding the small corrections that were to be expected, they gave nonsensical results, for the answers turned out to be infinite! Something was going badly wrong. As a result, for a while people lost interest and confidence in quantum field theory.
The post-WW2 physicists then found an ingenious, if somewhat sleight-of-hand, way around the problem. In quantum electrodynamics (the field theory of the interaction of electrons with photons, abbreviated as QED), it was discovered that all the infinities could be isolated in terms that simply contributed to the mass and charge of the electron. If these formally infinite expressions were replaced by the actual finite values of these constants, the resulting calculations were not only free of infinities, but they also proved to be in stunning agreement with experiment.
Quantum field theory had regained its popularity, but it did not last. When attempts were made to apply the same techniques to interactions related to nuclear forces, they failed to give satisfactory answers. Physicists began to question the whole field idea again. It is based on the supposition that one can describe what is happening by means of a formalism (a description of something in formal mathematical or logical terms) expressed in terms of all points of space and all instants of time. Of course, in a laboratory there is only limited access to what is going on. The basic technique used is a scattering experiment, described simply in terms of colliding particles coming in and scattered particles coming out.
It was therefore proposed that fields should be replaced by a much leaner account, simply linking “before” to “after” the scattering interaction. The resulting formalism was called S-matrix theory (S for scattering). Certain mathematical properties of the S-matrix were known to be implied by relativistic quantum mechanics, and it was hoped that these properties would provide the basis for a new theoretical formulation. It looked promising, and a good number of theorists devoted themselves to the task. In the end, however, the theory became so complicated that it simple collapsed under its own weight.
Just about this time, developments began that were to give field theory a new lease on life. A new class of field theories was identified, called gauge theories, in which interactions were found to become weaker as distances increased. This meant that some of the old techniques could, after all, be used to discuss nuclear matter in certain circumstances. Field theory once again became the place where the young and ambitious theorist would want to be. This phase has continued so far, and all contemporary theories that are favored in elementary particle physics are gauge field theories.
(b) The historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. In the realm of theology, fads and fashions are, as the saying goes, “a target-rich environment” to say the least. Polkinghorne chooses as his analogy with the fluctuating quantum field theory the “search for the historical Jesus”. Critical historical study of the gospel material had its origin in the later eighteenth century under the influence of the spirit of the Enlightenment. It is characterized by an aversion to any suggestion of the miraculous and a commitment to a flat historicism based on the axiom that what usually happens is what always happens. For example, H.S. Riemarus (1778) suggested in his book that the disciples stole the body of Jesus and concocted a story of his resurrection in order to promote their dead leader as a spiritual redeemer. They committed this deceitful act, Riemarus believed, to conceal the fact that Jesus had been more concerned with nationalistic issues than religious matters.
Most people have heard of the Jefferson Bible (although Jefferson never referred to his work as a bible) where he literally (using a razor and glue) excised every reference to the miraculous. One of the most notable proponents of such an Enlightenment approach was David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus (1835) made extensive use of the category of myth in giving explanation of the content of the gospels. Strauss was willing to attribute any miraculous element to symbolic value only. The orthodox Christian claim that Polkinghorne defends in this book is that there well may be mythical components to the gospels but (after C.S. Lewis) they are enacted myths, not only true symbolically, but also true historically.
The liberal nineteenth century view of the historical Jesus makes Jesus look remarkably like a nineteenth century liberal, as catholic writer George Tyrrell remarked wittingly about Carl Gustav Adolf von Harnack, who was a German Lutheran theologian and prominent church historian, that: “the Christ Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well”.
These fads continue on down through the 20th Century with Rudolf Bultmann, whose opinion is that the gospels need demythologization of the miraculous in order to be acceptable to persons living in a scientific age. Polkinghorne says:
Yet commitment to a person unanchored in history because so little could reliably learned about him might well prove to be commitment to an illusion. In my opinion, a positive evaluation of the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith lies at the heart of a credible Christology. Christians cannot rest content with a purely symbolic figure. The religion of the incarnation is inescapably concerned with the issue of the degree of actual enactment that can properly be seen to be involved in the origin of its myth. Least of all in a scientific age can we be satisfied with less than a careful investigation into the historically embedded motivations for Christian belief about the unique significance of Jesus. To treat him as a symbolically evocative, but historically unknown, figure is to lose contact with his reality. It is not surprising that in the second half of the twentieth century, Christological fashion changed again and, in my opinion, changed for the better. A “new quest” was inaugurated in search of the historical Jesus. It continues vigorously today, in its contemporary phase laying great and justified emphasis on the need to take full into account the context of first century Judaism within which Jesus’ life was lived. Just as quantum physics was driven to seek a more detailed, and consequently more illuminating understanding than that afforded by the veiled account of S-matrix theory, so Christology had to return to its foundational roots in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.
John is asserting that, just as in the progress in quantum physics that led to a truer and more useful understanding, real progress has been made in our theology of Christ. We have moved from a naïve and unsophisticated historicism, through a period of rigorous and scathing skepticism, to a nuanced appreciation of the mystery of the incarnation and the reality of “God with us”. I wonder if such a movement in history is also reflected in the life of a believer as our faith, hopefully, matures and deepens.
Another moment I have always remembered was walking out on deck one night after supper and finding a young red-haired officer peering into the dark through binoculars. He told me he was scanning the horizon for signs of other ships, and the way to do that, he explained, was to look not at the horizon but just above it. He said you could see better that way than by looking straight on, and I have found it to be an invaluable truth in many ways. Listen not just to the words being spoken but to the silences between the words, and watch not just the drama unfolding but the faces of all around you watching it unfold. Years later when preaching a sermon about Noah, it was less the great flood that I tried to describe than the calloused palm of Noah’s hand as he reached out to take the returning dove, less the resurrection itself than the moment, a day or so afterward, when Jesus stood on the beach cooking fish on a charcoal fire and called out to the disciples in their boat, “Come and have breakfast.”
Truth generally doesn’t knock on the door and introduce itself when you open up to see who’s there.
You might recognize a fact that way, the way you open a book and it says Roger Maris hit 61 homers in 1961.
But a fact like that is just like a name on the map, the place you used to live, let’s say.
Truth, on the other hand, comes when you remember how it felt to ride your bike over the old brick street in front of your house in that little Midwest town, while the baseball cards you had clothespinned to the back wheel thwack-thwack-thwacked against the spinning spokes.
And then you recall that one of those cards might have been a 1962 Roger Maris.
You bought it the summer before, when you and a few of your buddies rode your bikes like banshees to the corner store several blocks away, jumped off, set your kickstands, and poured through the door. The smell of bread and candy wafted over the wooden floors and counters and the gray-haired lady in the apron by the cash register greeted you as if you were family. She kept her eye on you, too.
Some older kid had announced that the latest series of baseball cards was out, and every single one of you raced home to dump the change out of your banks, and scrounge it from under your bed, off the kitchen counter, wherever you could find it. You stuffed it into your pocket and the screen door slammed behind you as you jumped off the porch and mounted your bike.
Now, there in the store, you dug through your pockets and counted that change. How many packs could you buy?
You flipped through the shiny plastic packs in the display boxes and picked out the ones you hoped held a rare and precious card. Your grubby little boy hands piled jingling coins on the counter. A few strays had slipped out of your pocket and spun on the floor. You reached down and picked them up and put them in the pile. The lady counted your money, rang it into the register, gave you the change, and handed you a brown paper bag. You and your crew rushed outside to make your discoveries.
You stuck as many pieces of the hard pink bubblegum as you could in your mouth and examined your cards. There it was. Roger Maris. Home run champion of all time.
Then you and your friends, with all your loot, pedaled like mad pirates back to the neighborhood. “Maris! I got Maris!” you cried as you saw the older kids playing wiffle ball in their driveway.
Your bike wheels rumbled over the bricks until you whipped left into your driveway, slammed on the brakes and skidded, laying a line of rubber on the concrete. “Hey mom!” you shouted as you burst through the screen door and the kitchen and bounded, two stairs at a time, up to your room. You fell on your blue cotton bedspread and laid the baseball cards out in front of you.
One by one you looked at them, chomping on your bubblegum. You picked up that special card over and over again, examining every detail.
“Wow,” you thought. “61 home runs, 142 RBI’s. Roger Maris.”
Today we continue our series of reflections on Rowan Williams’s book,Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer, continuing with the third big theme of the practice of being Christian — the sacrament celebrating how God welcomes us to his table: the Eucharist.
The resurrected Jesus is doing what he always did. And that is why it is very significant that in the Acts of the Apostles, when the risen Christ is proclaimed, the apostles identify themselves as the witnesses who ‘ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead’(Acts 10.41). (p. 45)
Isn’t that verse striking? I like it as a description of what it means to be a Christian today as well. We are the people who eat and drink with the risen Christ! This is the essential meaning of the Eucharist. Whatever theological differences believers may have had about the details, this is the heart of it all. At the Lord’s Table, we meet with him and share a meal together.
Rowan Williams puts it like this:
We can see, then, that when the risen Christ eats with the disciples it is not just a way of proving he is ‘really’ there; it is a way of saying that what Jesus did in creating a new community during his earthly life, he is doing now with the apostles in his risen life. We who are brought into the company of the apostles in our baptism – which, remember, brings us to where Jesus is to be found – share that ‘apostolic’ moment when we gather to eat and drink in Jesus’ presence. And that is why, throughout the centuries since, Christians have been able to say exactly what the apostles say: they are the people with whom Jesus ate and drank after he was raised from the dead.
Holy Communion makes no sense at all if you do not believe in the resurrection. Without the resurrection, the Eucharist becomes simply a memorial meal, recalling a rather sad and overpowering occasion in the upper room.
…There is indeed a certain sombreness about some ways of celebrating the Eucharist (and a bit later on, I’ll suggest why that is not always inappropriate). But the starting point must be where the apostles themselves began, eating and drinking with him after he was raised from the dead, experiencing once again his call into a new level of life together, a new fellowship and solidarity, and a new willingness and capacity to be welcomers themselves. (pp. 45-46)
This is why it only makes sense to me that Christians should celebrate the Lord’s Table every Sunday in worship. The reason we meet on the first day of the week is to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection and gather in the presence of our risen Lord. The apostolic way of doing that is to break bread together and share the cup of salvation with him at his Table.
They committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers. (Acts 2:42, MSG)
Yesterday’s lectionary Gospel reading was Mark 10:2-16, a passage I understand a lot of pastors dread preaching. It is a “divorce” passage where Jesus speaks directly to the subject.
I like what our pastor said. He stressed God’s design for couples to marry and live together in love for a lifetime. And then he said, “Of course, we know that we fail to live up to that design in many ways, and sometimes marriages end, and all kinds of troubling things happen in our family relationships. That’s when we take care of each other. It’s just what we do as God’s family.”
I loved this word of grace, a sharp thrust of the sword to self-righteous moralism and judgmentalism, which is always the temptation for religious people. Too bad we so often relate to one another on bases other than grace.
It is always — ALWAYS — about faith working through love for the one who trusts and follows Jesus.
• • •
As you may have noticed by yesterday’s post, I have started re-reading Christian Wiman’s luminous My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. It is near the top of the list of my favorite books of all time, with its honest and heart-breakingly beautiful prose about life, death, faith, and the journey through it all.
You can’t get out of the preface without being stunned by Wiman’s brilliant writing. Here’s an excerpt:
Initially I thought this book wouldn’t even mention my illness. I told myself that I wanted to avoid any appearance of special pleading, wanted to strip away the personal and get to ulterior truths. In fact, I think what I most wanted was escape and relief. During the years that I have worked on this book—which is very much a mosaic, not a continuous argument or narrative—my cancer has waxed and waned, my prospects dimmed and brightened, but every act and thought have occurred in that shadow. The form of the book reflects this, not simply the fragmentary and episodic quality, but also the accelerating urgency of the last chapters. I feel quite certain that I would be writing about matters of faith had I never gotten sick—the obsession is everywhere in my earlier work—but I also suspect that without the impetus of serious illness, my work would not have taken the particular form that it has. It seemed dishonest to avoid this dynamic.
When my life broke open seven years ago, I knew very well that I believed in something. Exactly what I believed, however, was considerably less clear. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question—the real difficulty—is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being? What might it mean for your life—and for your death—to acknowledge that insistent, persistent ghost?
Allert makes the case, which I find utter persuasive, that evangelicals (and he himself is one) have failed to seriously take into account how the NT was put together in forming their doctrines about scripture. When you do that, the whole debate about the Bible’s authority takes on a different cast.
Most evangelicals, particularly at the popular level, have what I call a “dropped out of the sky” understanding of the Bible. What I mean by this is that since the Bible is the primary source for evangelical faith and life, it is taken for granted as being always there and handed on to us as such. We give little thought to the question of why we have this particular collection. How, when, and why did this collection come into being, and why was it raised above all other documents of the early church? How was the authority of this collection recognized and appropriated in the early church? Did it act as the church’s sole authority?
It is a significant lacuna that the understanding of the formation of the Bible is rarely broached by those who offer a “high view of Scripture.” A constant theme in what follows, therefore, is that a high view of Scripture should take account of the historical process that bequeathed to us the Bible, and that examination of this issue should actually precede an investigation into what the Bible says.
…Even when evangelical treatments of Scripture cover the issue of canonicity, this near deification of the Bible sets the agenda. For example, in the only full-length evangelical treatment of New Testament canonicity and doctrine of Scripture to date, R. L. Harris argues that the recognition of a document’s inspiration determined inclusion in the canon. The divinity of the text sets the agenda for his examination of canonicity, and the very real and important work and judgment of the early church is glossed over in favor of God virtually forcing these documents on the church so that even the process of canonization is deified. This, again, has the effect of making any further examination of the canon process unnecessary because such evangelicals claim that the church did not choose the documents to be included in the canon; rather, the documents forced themselves on the church by virtue of their divine inspiration. Thus, all the church did was recognize, not choose. Yet how this inspiration was recognized is given little explanation.
This neglect of the canon process has left evangelicals with an inadequate understanding of the very Bible we view and appropriate as authoritative. (pp. 10, 12)
• • •
My Autumn Playlist for 2018:
•1. North Country (The Rankins)
2. Summer’s End (John Prine)
3. Autumn Leaves (Nat King Cole)
4. Bach Goldberg Variations – Aria (Glenn Gould)
5. September Grass (James Taylor)
6. Je Suis De’Sole’ (Mark Knopfler)
7. No Footprints (Bruce Cockburn)
8. These Days (Jackson Browne)
9. Our Town (Iris Dement)
10. Ready for the Storm (Kathy Mattea)
11. Southbound Train (Jon Foreman)
12. Orangedale Whistle (The Rankins)
13. Last Train Home (Pat Metheny)
14. Start It All Over Again (Battlefield Band)
15. Mandolin Rain (Bruce Hornsby & the Range)
16. Northern Downpour (Panic! At the Disco)
17. If You Could Read My Mind (Gordon Lightfoot)
18. The Dangling Conversation (Simon & Garfunkel)
19. How I Spent My Fall Vacation (Bruce Cockburn)
20. Asheville Skies (The Milk Carton Kids)
21. Late in the Afternoon (Tracey Thorn)
22. And So Begins the Task (Stephen Stills & Manassas)
23. Bach Cello Suite #1 – Prelude (Yo Yo Ma)
24. Goodbye Again (Mary Chapin Carpenter)
25. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (Faith Like a Butterfly’s Wings) (Bill Mallonee & Vigilantes of Love)
26. Ho Ro Mo Nighean Donn Bhoidheach (The Rankins)
27. Beautiful (Gordon Lightfoot)
28. Harvest Moon (Neil Young)
29. Autumn Waltz (The Wind River Turnaround) (Bill Staines)
30. Before Gas and TV (Mark Knopfler)
Sunday with Christian Wiman No half-remembered country
In fact, there is no way to “return to the faith of your childhood,” not really, not unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’d been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.
Heading South. Photo by Pieterjan Vandaele at Flickr
The IM Saturday Monks Brunch: October 6, 2018
Settling into Fall…
There is a beauty to autumnal darkness — the softness of the night sounds and the cool air, the way shadow pools in even sparse thickets of urban trees, lending them the gravitas of deep woods. But more than that, there is the respite hidden in them and the way we need it now. “The summer demands and takes away too much,” the poet John Ashbery wrote, “But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.”
People with their pets in Santiago, Chile, wait for a priest’s blessing inside the church of San Francisco on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi on Oct. 4, 2018. Tradition holds that St. Francis had a great love for animals and the environment. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)
One gracious and delightful occasion in many churches is the Blessing of the Animals service. According to the website, Let All Creation Praise! –“The blessing of pets and animals is often celebrated on October 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, or on a Sunday near that date. This is also set to coincide as the culminating conclusion for the Season of Creation.” The site contains liturgies, hymns, and other resources for holding such a service.
Here are some pictures from St Mary Help of Christians Catholic Church, Aiken, South Carolina and their service on Oct. 4.
A paper, “Selfies: A boon or bane?” published this summer in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care warned that selfies are increasing leading to injuries and deaths, and the number of deaths, especially among adolescents, is on the rise.
Moreover, the study said, “death by selfie” isn’t an official cause, and so these fatalities are difficult to count. The global study also only looked at reports in English, and at accounts in which a selfie was taken so the true magnitude of the problem, the paper added, is likely higher.
…Causes of death included: getting hit by a moving train, being washed away by waves on a beach, capsizing in a boat while rowing, burning in a fire, being shot, electrocuted, attacked by an animal — and, as in Michigan, falling off the edge of a cliff. The average age of those who died: 23.
…came to her fame honestly. A classmate of Holly’s and his drummer, Jerry Allison, while at Lubbock High School, she began going out with Allison, often double-dating with Holly and his girlfriend. By the time Buddy Holly and The Crickets were in the recording studio, working on a rocker that Holly was planning to name after his niece, Allison suggested that a song about Gerron might further charm her. So after changing the subject and the song’s beat from a cha-cha to a paradiddle, “Cindy Lou” became “Peggy Sue.”
And here is a performance from 1957 on the Ed Sullivan Show:
Greatest political attack ad ever…
Thanks to Mike the Geologist for passing along this witty political attack ad from a candidate for Congress from Minnesota. Kudos, Dean Phillips! Whaddya know, a politician has a little imagination and a sense of humor.
As @RepErikPaulsen hides from voters and misrepresents his record and the truth, here’s a little dose of humor based on fact: a Congressman who avoids voters at all costs, is the 6th biggest taker of PAC money in Congress and is bought and sold by special interests. #Truth#MN03pic.twitter.com/3CLebkyV75
A 22-pound rock that has been propping open a door in Michigan for decades turns out to be a meteorite valued at $100,000, according to Central Michigan University.
Mona Sirbescu, a CMU geology professor, gets asked all the time by people to examine the rocks they bring her — but none ever turn out to be an official space rock.
“For 18 years, the answer has been categorically ‘no’ — meteor wrongs, not meteorites,” Sibescu said in a statement from CMU on Thursday.
But that all changed when she was asked to examine an oddly shaped large rock that a Michigan man, who didn’t want to be named, had had in his possession for the last 30 years.
“I could tell right away that this was something special,” Sibescu said.
After testing, she determined it was a meteorite, made of of 88.5% iron and 11.5% nickel. This isn’t just any space rock, though. Weighing 22 pounds, it’s the sixth-largest recorded find in Michigan — and potentially worth $100,000, according to CMU.
…The rock arrived on Earth sometime in the 1930s, according its owner, who obtained it in 1988 when he bought a farm in Edmore, about 30 miles southwest of Mount Pleasant. While touring the property, the man spotted the rock propping open a door and asked the farmer what it was.
The farmer told him it was a meteorite, that it was part of the property and he could have it.
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
Rowan Williams on the Eucharist (2)
.
The Internet Monk Archives 