Well, it's new to me...

I posted a link a couple weeks ago to an address given by Stanley Hauerwas in 1991. A few Google searches later, and I have found, courtesy of this blog, something slightly more recent, from 2002. It's always encouraging to find a voice saying things one oft has thought, whether it expresses them so well or so-so. Some highlights:

(Asked generally about September 11)

" People say that September 11 forever changed the world. That is false. The year 33 A.D. forever changed the world. September 11 is just one other terrible event in the world's continuing rejection of the peace God made present through the Resurrection."

"American Christians simply lack the disciplines necessary to discover how being Christian might make them different. For example, after the Gulf War, people rightly wanted to welcome the troops home, so they put yellow ribbons everywhere including the churches. Yet if the Gulf War was a "just war," that kind of celebration was inappropriate. In the past when Christians killed in a just war, it was understood they should be in mourning. They had sacrificed their unwillingness to kill. Black, not yellow, was the appropriate color. Indeed, in the past when Christian soldiers returned from a just war, they were expected to do penance for three years before being restored to the Eucharist. That we now find that to be unimaginable is but an indication how hard it is for us to imagine what it might mean for us to be Christian."

It would be interesting to know what period of history he's talking about, although I would assume it has to be sometime in the Middle Ages.

(Asked about homosexuality)

"The problem with debates about homosexuality is they have been devoid of any linguistic discipline that might give you some indication what is at stake. Methodism, for example, is more concerned with being inclusive than being the church. We do not have the slightest idea what we mean by being inclusive other than some vague idea that inclusivity has something to do with being accepting and loving. Inclusivity is, of course, a necessary strategy for survival in what is religiously a buyers' market. Even worse, the inclusive church is captured by romantic notions of marriage. Combine inclusivity and romanticism and you have no reason to deny marriage between gay people.

When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremonies, ministers think it's interesting to ask if they love one another. What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage isn't about whether you're in love...

The difficulty, therefore, is that Christians, when they approach this issue, no longer know what marriage is. For centuries, Christians married people who didn't know one another until the marriage ceremony, and we knew they were going to have sex that night. They didn't know one another. Where does all this love stuff come from? They could have sex because they were married."

I remember C.S. Lewis saying something similar about marriage in Mere Christianity.

Hauerwas also (on the bottom of the first page) uses the word "image" as verb in the sense of "imagine," a usage I first encountered in Sharon Howell, my pastor throughout high school, who, like Hauerwas, grew up in rural Texas. The OED does list such a use of the verb "image" and even dates its first use all the way back to 1440! So I guess it's legitmate and no provincial innovation (or at the very least a rather old one). But I've still only ever encountered it in these two Texans.

The Blood of the Martyrs...

Jim West, always colorful, always prodigious, posted a link yesterday to this website, the online presence of a group which seeks to alleviate discrimination against Christians in Europe. That their 'About Us' statement feels obligated to make the claim that their cause "by no means disregards or devalues the dramatic persecution of Christians in several countries of the world, but rather supplements this worldwide concern," is I think enough to demonstrate that there exists even on the part of its architects an anxiety about this project; that those same architects appear either oblivious to the good reasons for such an anxiety or unwilling to heed them should excite disapproval in the conscious Christian. It is one thing to appropriate the discourse of this world to advance the Gospel; it is quite another to allow that frame of mind to shape the Christian.

It is precisely that worse alternative which seems to have informed the program of this site. This fact is in view from every angle: the clinical calmness of the description of "Christianophobia," the validating citation of a non-Christian scholar who coined the term, the ugly term itself, a faux Hellenism crafted carefully to invoke the authority of Science. Christianophobia, we are told, is "a negative categorical bias," a "prejudice," "a form of religious intolerance," that "may lead to stereotyping or discrimination." One need not have any sharp perception of style to understand that all these terms have been chosen and accumulated for their shock value only, and that the only statement in them, bereft as they are made in their close proximity of any real meaning, is that this sort of thing is something society really rather disapproves of. There is not a theological appeal, that I can find, in the whole page; to the bogeymen of liberal democracy, there are many.

Such cheap rhetoric should be disappointing to any thinking person, but to the Christian it should be a source of deep dismay. For such labels and terminologies are not only not Christian in any positive sense, but, far from being even neutral, promote a decidedly anti-Christian view of the world. Let us take an example from the front page of the site, where the call is sent out for "victims" to share their stories; we must first move beyond the reverberations of that language in the popular sphere, which has been discussed above. What suffering Christian has ever or could ever be properly called a "victim?" Did not our Lord "suffer under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried?" Did he not thereby, far from suffering as a victim, arise in triumph over the last enemy to be destroyed, which is death? (1 Corinthians 15:26). Had not this same victorious Lord exhorted his followers to "rejoice and be glad" in the experience of all ranges of persecution (Matthew 5:11-12), knowing that through his love they would be "more than conquerors" and under all catastrophes and duress inseparable from the single source and object of their being (Romans 8:36ff). Are any of those properly called victims to whom the apostle says "if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name?" (1 Peter 4:16) All Christians must suffer at the hands of this world for their Master's sake (John 16:33), but in this suffering no Christian is belittled or made less. On the contrary, in that he shares however meanly in the life and the suffering of Christ, who was "despised and rejected" (Isaiah 53:3), the Christian has a share in that which is highest, truest, and best. Such a one is no victim of the world, but rather a victor in Christ.

The authors of the site are correct in insisting that their statements in no way lessen the real and far worse persecution of Christians occurring now in many parts of the world. Indeed how could they or anyone else do so: it is Christ the Lord who stands by those who suffer for his name and elevates them to the prize of an imperishable crown (1Corinthians 9:25). The authors are no less correct in pointing out that there is a casual but explicit antipathy to the Christian faith in some influential segments of the West, among intellectuals (as they are called) especially. Yet in their tone and mindset they are so terribly gone wrong and appeal so feebly to the powers of this world, that they can serve as no aid to the Christian but that of a cautionary example.

Ignatius of Antioch, one of the so-called "Apostolic Fathers," who lived at the beginning of the 2nd Century AD, when he had been brought to Rome to face trial for his life, pleaded with the more influential members of the Christian community there not to interfere with his case, and to allow him the victory of a martyr's death. Roughly a century later, with Christianity still very much illegal in the Roman world, writers such as Tertullian and Origen could lament the fact that the Church had not kept the mentality of martyrdom. I do not know what they would say to these things. Tertullian certainly wrote with great eloquence and passion against the anti-Christian bigotries of his time in his Apologia, and it is perhaps in this same apologetic vein that these exposers of "Christianophobia" wish to operate. But I cannot help but feel from the language they employ that they truly do seek and desire merely those worldly comforts of privilege and law which are the idols of our age. And this no Christian should do. No Christian should ever take his cares and his complaints to the state, to have them heard, and to have them satisfied. For our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20): Christ was on the cross for our cares, and it is to him that we should take them. We have in him a better advocate before a truer judgment than any worldly court can provide.

Some Links

A strange basketball oddity.

An even stranger basketball oddity (read the story).

High Comedy.

An Amen! (practical)

An Amen! (theoretical)

Something Refreshing.

Genesis in Geneva

I feel as though I should take it for some sort of significance that the most prize of all my Christmas gifts this year was a facsimile of the 1560 Geneva Bible. The Geneva Bible, which was the first translation of the whole Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek, was the work of expatriate scholars in Calvin's Geneva who had been driven out of England under the reign of Mary. Their translation quickly became the most widely used English version of the Bible, and sustained this position for a century, until the 1660 Restoration jettisoned it for its Calvinist notes and began the process of turning the King James translation, which had dwelt in relative unpopularity since its first publication in 1611, into The Bible. The Geneva Bible was the familiar Bible of Shakespeare, Milton, and the whole litany of great Elizabethan and Jacobean writers; even King James' translators in the very preface of their new translation quote the Geneva version.

In any case, I took some time last night to read through the first few chapters of Genesis in my brand-new old Bible, enjoying especially the notes. For example, observe this sequence in the last few verses of Genesis 2 (The Geneva Bible was also the first English Bible to employ verse divisions, certainly an inheritance of mixed benefit):

Verse 23: "She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man."
Note to 'woman:' "Or, Mannet [little man], because she cometh of man; for in Ebr [Hebrew] Ish is man and Ishah the woman."
You'll find a similar note in any modern Bible.

Verse 24: "Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
Note to 'leave:' "So that marriage requireth a greater duty of us toward our wives than otherwise we are bound to show to our parents."
An interesting thought, once you get past the knee-jerk sexism assumed in "our wives."

Verse 25: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
Note to 'not ashamed:' "For before sin entered all things were honest and comely."
An innocuous comment on the surface, but its placement with this particular verse certainly takes sides on the age old speculative question, "was their sex in Eden?"

The note which particularly caught my attention, however, was this one:

Chapter 3, verse 22: "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever..."
Note to 'behold:' "By this derision he reproacheth Adam's misery, whereinto he was fallen by ambition."

Having always assumed that God was talking to himself in this verse, I have often been troubled by such an apparent proof of the common portrayal of the petty God begrudging his creatures knowledge and life. But this interpretation, besides being more amenable, follows more sensically from the previous verse where God has "made them coats of skins and clothed them." God's words take on the character of a mock presentation, saying sarcastically to Adam and Eve "How impressive this new man and woman are! Now that you have this little bit of knowledge, you're pretty much the same as I am!"

I am reminded of this older post on Chris Heard's blog about the comical and childlike characteristics of Adam and Eve. The tone of the story of the Fall is something that I think modern scholars have increasingly questioned, opting against the solemnity that bears the aura of the received interpretation. I am usually skeptical of modern positions which encourage a satirical or comic reading of texts traditionally considered serious; they seem so often no more than echoes of that careless irreverence which typifies our age. But if the somber scholars of Calvin's Geneva had room for a sarcastic, scolding God, perhaps I ought to be more reserved in my judgment, just as the promoters of such positions ought to accept that they may not be offering much that's radically new.

Another Fun Quiz

Well, according to this quiz, I should probably read up on Captain Canterbury and find out what he's got besides a famous (and I would assume much misunderstood) proof of God's existence.

Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Anselm Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?' Anselm 80% Karl Barth 73% Friedrich Schleiermacher 60% John Calvin 60% Augustine 47% Charles Finney 40% Jürgen Moltmann 40% Martin Luther 40% Paul Tillich 33% Jonathan Edwards 27%

A Thought For Advent

In his sermon this morning, Pastor Brady suggested that there is something very special about God becoming a baby, not only that in becoming a baby the Almighty has become the least powerless of us all, as is often noted, but also that the presence of a baby has a way of bringing people together regardless of other circumstances. I find something excellently charming about this second proposition, for I think it is ratified even by the experience of those of us who are less than thrilled by children. It is a peculiar sort of misanthrope who does not brighten a bit at a calm baby, and feels no compassion for the mother cloud his irritation at the presence of a wailing one. In the case of babies only do people almost universally warm to a stranger, whether at home, in a restaurant, on the street. A baby of any people can indeed be ‘a great joy to all peoples.’ (Luke 2:10) Some might say that this is circumstance of our particular culture—as though that somehow undid the significance of the fact that our Lord was a baby, as though he was not born for us too—; some might say that it is merely a predisposition necessary for the survival of the race, again as though that mitigated things, as though the significance of the Incarnation, which is God-With-Us, can be understood only insofar as we extract it from all its human contexts of history and matter, that is, as God not with us. When God chose to make things clear to us by becoming flesh, does it seem as though He would then demand we understand Him in that state in terms other than our own, when it was His aim to greet us on our own terms, in the flesh?

There is also an interesting way in which our behavior towards babies provides space in the Incarnation for some divine irony. For it is only said that we ‘fawn over’ babies for need of a sillier term; the action is adoration. We adore them and make them an object of our hope and love. How beautiful is it then that out of this little idolatry, this common sin of ours, God has worked actual worship? How beautiful that out of unconscious evil good was brought forth? Make then this occasion for sin a reminder of the good worship we all should aim at, and of the incredible ingenuity of God’s good working.

Jonson's Alchemist

Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist is the ancestor of all con-man movies; it also is an excellent expression of classical aesthetics. The play centers on what happens when a gentleman leaves his residence in London to avoid the plague. In his absence one of his servants sets up shop posing as an alchemist and takes in many deceived customers; an ever-increasingly complicated sequence of hoaxes culminates in the master's return and a frantic salvaging of the situation/getaway. It's all great fun. And since we're dealing with Ben Jonson here, it hardly appeals to the lowest common denominator: the funniest scene in the play involves a prostitute babbling about the book of Daniel.

Some good lines:

Face: By the way, you must eat no cheese, Nab: it breeds melancholy,
And that same melancholy breeds worms. (III.4.110-111)

Dame Pliant: Truly I shall never brook a Spaniard.
Subtle: No?
Dame Pliant: Never sin' eighty-eight could I abide 'em,
And that was some three year afore I was born, in truth. (IV.4.29-32)

Ananias [a puritan]: Thou look'st like Antichrist, in that lewd hat. (IV.7.56)

Lovewit [the master of the house]: Gentlemen, what is the matter? Whom do you seek?
Mammon: The chemical cozener.
Surly: And the captain pandar.
Kastril: The nun my sister.
Mammon: Madam Rabbi.
Ananias: Scorpions, and caterpillars. (V.5.20-23)