A Very Christian Concept

The War on God has a Catholic front, and it has seen some fighting lately.

The chief battle, of course, comes from crypto-paganism, in the form of what the press calls  President Trump's "transactional" view of relationships, which recognizes no principles except self-interest, and so cannot conceive of altruism or charity as ends in themselves.  This meshes easily with a variety of other ideologies: New Thought, the Prosperity Gospel, even good old Objectivism.  To be clear, the president is not himself an ideologue; he is rather a raging Id, a Hyde with no Jekyll; but he is surrounded by people who have constructed or borrowed ideological structures to justify their own self-interest.

With this in mind, it is interesting to consider our vice-president, JD Vance.  Vance is quite a different figure from Trump.  Rather than privilege, he is a child of relative poverty, whose Horatio-Alger story has been the subject both of a bestseller and a movie.  Where Trump seems to have emerged from his father's brow a fully-formed braggart, liar, swindler and racist, Vance has engaged in a more interesting process of self-creation; his rise from poverty, his education, his profession(s), and even his name are the result of his own deliberate and purposeful choices. 

What interests us in all this is that Vance is an adult convert to Roman Catholicism, having been baptized and confirmed in 2019, at the age of 35.  It would be a terrible injustice to attribute something as personal as a spiritual conversion to expressly political motives, but it should be noted that, rather than being formed intellectually by the church, Vance entered the church fully formed as an intellectual and a politician.  As he said to his friend Rod Dreher, 

My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching. That was one of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church. 

This remark is noteworthy because, to an outside observer, it raises the question of how much Vance knew at that point in his life about the details of Catholic social teaching.  Surely he knew about abortion and birth control. Had he yet been catechized concerning, for example, the rights of workers to form and join unions? The preferential option for the poor? Unclear, but he was already helping to lead a party that is sketchy about these things, and many other things spelled out in the documents.

Questions like this became more pointed on 30 January 2025, when Vance, during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, said: 

... as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn't mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. 

Many listeners resonated easily with this statement.  It appeals to our sense of what is "natural." It is hard to imagine caring about a far-off stranger the way one does for one's spouse or child.  As church council members never tire of saying, "charity begins at home." Right?

But Vance identified this as "a Christian concept," and one did not need to be an expert theologian to observe that, as such, it struck a sour note  After all, agape, a foundational Christian idea, is understood to be a universal love, one which is not conditioned by relationships of family, tribe, nation or what have you.  Specifically placing "neighbor" between family and community will have drawn a cringe from those reared on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Actual skilled theologians were quick to observe that, so far as they could tell, Vance had been referring to, and misrepresenting, the ordo amoris. That phrase literally means the "order of love," although it is often glossed in English as "rightly-ordered love," which isn't unfair. One finds it articulated by Augustine in The City of God, 15:22, and refined by Aquinas in the Summa, 2/2/Q26.  (Both, incidentally and somewhat strainedly, cite Songs 2:4, which says in the Vulgate "ordinavit in me caritatem.")

To be clear, Augustine does not say what Vance attributes to him.  For one thing, and we may call this the first flaw, Vance doesn't mention God, whereas Augustine's central point is that God must be loved above all other beings.  This is because lesser things -- art, music, a spouse -- are susceptible to being loved wrongly, because they are loved in preference to to God or to the things God wants.  This is not because art, music or a spouse are bad, but because human beings are sinful. As Augustine puts it, "when a miser loves his gold more than justice, it is not the fault of the gold." Aquinas even argues that we are obliged to love our neighbor (a term he does not define with Vance's narrowness) more than our own body.

So if the first flaw in Vance's attempt at theology is setting God aside, the second is that he replaces God's desires for us with what we may (and Augustine does) call the desires of the flesh.  Because of these flaws, he proposes an order of love that is quite at odds with the one known to the Christian tradition. Vance wants us to love family first, a concept that would have been ridiculous to the generations of Christians who looked to the fable of St Thecla for solace when faith separated them from their families. He wants us to love our nation next, which would have looked suspicious to those same early Christians as they died rather than sacrifice to the emperors. What he does not ask us to love, but Augustine does, is virtue itself, and things virtuously.  

All Christians have a right to think as deeply as they are able about the things of God.  But when Roman Catholic leaders of nations begin to opine in public about theology, they will naturally draw the attention of those to whom theological judgments have been entrusted in their church -- meaning, ultimately, the Pope. And so on 10 February 2025, US bishops received a letter from Pope Francis which referred obliquely to "the crisis in the United States," meaning the Trump Administration's announced program of mass deportations, which it described as problematic from the point of view of Catholic social teaching.  (You remember:  the same Catholic social teaching that Vance was so excited about in 2019).

Francis also addressed, beginning with paragraph 6, Vance's misrepresentation of Catholic doctrine:

6. Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

7. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

Yes, we know:  it is written in Vaticanese, so it seems dull or even obscure.  Read closely, however, this is a sharp rebuke.  "Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests" -- which is just how Vance described it. Instead, the Pope reminds us, each of us Christians has a relationship with all people, and it is through these relationships, especially with the poorest," that we become our true selves.  Talking about our relationships, such as national identity, apart from this universal relationship and option for the poor is to take part in a lie told by the strong to harm the weak.

That's what the Pope's letter actually says, in print, and it is a swayt on the knuckles with the proverbial rule.  Reading between the lines, the message is more like a slap in the face:  Hey, JD -- leave theology to the theologians.

The Sense(lessness) of the House

 In a moment of crisis, when a display of courage and good judgment is called for, the U.S. House of Representatives can usually be counted upon to act like monkey in the zoo, throwing poop at all and sundry.

In witness whereof, we offer H. Res. 59, introduced to that august body by Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK-2) and his 20 co-sponsors on 23 January, 2025.  It seeks a resolution declaring the "sense of the House" that Bishop Budde's sermon at the National Prayer Service was "a display of political activism" with a "distorted message."

This is, of course, not merely nonsense but nonsense doomed to fail.  But as a record of these grim times, we offer here the text of the resolution:

Whereas the National Prayer Service is a longstanding tradition in which the United States publicly affirms dependence upon God and prays for the success of our President and Vice President;

Whereas, on January 21, 2025, President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took part in the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC; and

Whereas the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop leading the inaugural prayer service, used her position inappropriately, promoting political bias instead of advocating the full counsel of biblical teaching: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That—

(1) it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the sermon given at the National Prayer Service on January 21st, 2025, at the National Cathedral was a display of political activism; and

(2) the House of Representatives condemns the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s distorted message.

It is a sign of the times that a plea for mercy on behalf of the powerless is construed as either political activism or a distortion of the Christian message, when in fact is very nearly the heart of Christian social ethics.

Disturbing as the misunderstanding of Christianity may be, we find the misunderstanding of Congress's role more disturbing still. While the very existence of a National Prayer Service (and Breakfast, and many other things) raise significant questions about the separation of church and state, it is the attempt of Congress to condemn a preacher's sermon that poses those questions most sharply. 

Are our elected officials now theologians? Are they now, like King James I, going to summon tame court preachers, who tremble before them and flatter them for fear of retribution? In other words, is the Christian faith expected to be an unreflective servant of the civil power, a bit of ceremonial frippery tacked up to impress the rubes and impart a nimbus of piety to impious princelings?

The answer that politicians have always desired, to all those questions, is Yes.  But the answer proposed by the Constitution is a resounding No.

The War Against God

 Among the more curious books to be found in the Egg's reference library is a volume called  The War Against God.  It is a collection of essays by various authors, edited by Carl Carmer and published in 1943. The thesis of the book, if an anthology may be said to have a thesis, is that the Second World War, then being fought, was, among many other things, a deliberate assault on the Christian faith, conceived by Hitler and promoted by his deputies.

Nazi leaders are depicted as neo-pagans and outright haters of Christianity, who show to the faithful a display of like-mindedness so superficial that it might pass inspection only by the most willing suspension of disbelief. Hitler is personally quoted to the effect that "one is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both," and "Nothing will prevent me from tearing up Christianity root and branch, and annihilating it in Germany." Alfred Rosenberg's dream of a National Reich Church is laid out in thirty damning theses, including this one:

The National Reich Church is immutably fixed in its one objective: to destroy that Christian belief imported into Germany in the unfortunate year 800, whose tenets conflict with both the heart and the mentality of the German.

The book is not a masterpiece. Assembled in the midst of battle, it lacks any rigor -- the tone is uneven, many sources are not cited.  A review by Albert W. Palmer, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary and a noted pacifist, called it, disdainfully, an "arsenal" for the use of those who "believe[d] the war was a great religious crusade," and argued that it set aside the "economic and imperialistic nature of the ... conflict."  He found in it "that lack of discrimination by which partisanship so often tends to overplay its hand," contrasting "moderate" and "noble" essays by Pearl Buck and Martin Niemoller with the "extreme and violent" articles by other authors. The criticisms are fair.  

On the other hand, we do well to remember that while the war was by no means a religious crusade, it was in fact a moral one -- while there were racism and imperial ambition on all sides, one side, and only one, was plainly devoted to conquest and genocide.  The starkness of this distinction is undermined by many of the steps that were needed to prosecute the war, not least an alliance with the demonic Stalin, but the distinction remains valid.

We bring this up because there does seem to be a latter-day Kirchenkampf emerging in these United States. The second Trump administration began by authorizing immigration enforcement agents to enter houses of worship in pursuit of their quarry. In the following weeks, the Episcopal bishop of Washington DC has been called upon by the president to apologize for asking him to show mercy; the network of Lutheran social ministry organizations have been accused of "money laundering" for contracting with the federal government and with USAID; and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has been accused by the vice-president of caring more about  "their bottom line" than about the needs of the poor or the right administration of justice.

It does not take a genius to see the pattern.  Administration officials recognize that their interest in further marginalizing immigrants, poor people at home an abroad, and LGBTQ+ people (with a special animus toward the "T")  puts them at odds with the organs of traditional Christianity, which have varying degrees of commitment to the well-being of those same communities.  They have long seen conflict with the mainline as an inevitable result of the policies that they pursue.

The traditional churches are naive, but not stupid.  They see this same inherent conflict. Bishop Budde's sermon was predicated on it.  But that sermon, bold in context but mild in content, is an example of the old-fashioned gentility with which mainline church officials are accustomed to proceed -- she pleaded with a leader to show mercy, among the chief Christian virtues, to those over whom he wields power.  It can be called a shot across the bow only if the thing shot is not a cannon ball but a badminton birdie. Bishop Eaton's response to being called a Mafia princess was equally genteel, with a touch of pedantry -- she quoted Scripture and told a familiar historical fable. She might have written it in Greek and made the same impression upon the same audience.

The evident conundrum is that mainline churches, and especially their leaders, are not prepared to engage in ideological battle with belligerent yahoos. They have been trained to speak cautiously, precisely, and respectfully, all the while remembering that they shepherd flocks among whom little internal unity is to be found. On balance, we admire this about them -- especially at the Egg, where our mouth often runs a few meters ahead of our judgment. But we are not sure that such admirable character will serve in the emerging crisis.

Meanwhile, the administration's next move has been to float the idea of a Faith Office, to defend religious liberty, oppose antisemitism and [the much, much more difficult to discern] displays of bias against Christianity and other religions.  The very idea raises the sort of hair-splitting legal problems that make a certain class of lawyers salivate.  While we suppose that the defense of religious liberty is a valid cause for the American government to undertake, it must be stressed that the defense of religion -- as opposed to irreligion in any of its constitutionally-protected forms -- is not.  And the defense of any particular religion -- say, Christianity -- is terrifying.

The anointed head of this office is a curious figure. Paula White-Cain is a televangelist, co-founder and former pastor of Florida institutions called New Destiny Christian Center and Church Without Walls, the latter of which declared bankruptcy soon after her departure.  White-Cain has long been part of Trump's circle, identified as his "spiritual advisor." 

While in theory it should not affect her call to public service, the most important thing for a Christian reader to understand about White-Cain is that she is not a Christian as that term is conventionally defined.  She is a proponent of the Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that God's desire is for the faithful to be rich -- not just in spirit, but in bank account and credit line.  Although it developed within the broadly Christian cultural milieu, and uses the Bible and other Christian symbols, the Prosperity Gospel is in fact a different religion, using the language of one faith to tell the story of another.  In this, it can compare easily with Mormonism or Gnosticism.

In effect, President Trump has followed the original playbook, and appointed a crypto-pagan to head his Reichskirche.  We are amused to note that, while liberals and Constitution-lovers are troubled by the existence of the office, many of the MAGA faithful have expressed dismay over its leader.  Evangelicals are often too quick, in our estimation, to accuse people with whom they disagree of "heresy." In this case, however, the term seems apt. Time will tell how they respond.

What concerns us at the Egg most, however, is the response of Christianity's more sedate traditional wing.  The new War Against God has begun, and we are eager to see whether the angels will fight on the side of those who typically disdain fighting altogether.

In (Faint) Praise of the "Palsied Limb"

 We have been haunted, these past few weeks, by an hymnic earworm, consisting largely of the phrase "and at Cana Wedding-Guest blah blah blah palsied limb and fainting soul." These are not the worst lyrics to have in mind while preaching through the Sundays following the Epiphany, but the mental hodgepodge created by those blah blah blahs almost demands that we return to the source, and think about the lovely song they have muddled in our minds. All the more so since the song, when we sang it in worship lat Sunday, didn't quite match our memory.  Has the earworm turned?

The hymn is Songs of Thankfulness and Praise, by the Rt. Rev. Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885), late Bishop of Lincoln and, not incidentally, nephew of the poet. Those of us burdened with Evangelical Lutheran Worship may find it there as # 310.  The hymn in question was not written during his episcopate, but years earlier.  Having been booted from the headmastership of Harrow on accusations of high-churchiness and suspicions of Popery, Wordsworth was made a canon of Westminster Abbey and vicar of the brilliantly named parish of Stanford-in-the-Vale cum Goosey.

It was at Goosey that Wordsworth wrote and published The Holy Year; or Hymns for Sundays and Holydays [sic] throughout the year, and for other Occasions in 1863.  The title explains quite nicely what are the contents of the book.  Our hymn is appointed for the Sixth Sunday following Pentecost, and we offer you a transcription of its original text.

1. SONGS of thankfulness and praise, 

Jesu, Lord, to Thee we raise ; 

Manifested by the Star 

To the Sages from afar ; 

Branch of Royal David's stem 

In Thy Birth at Bethlehem. 

Anthems be to Thee addrest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

2.  Manifest at Jordan's stream, 

Prophet, Priest, and King supreme ; 

And at Cana Wedding-Guest 

In Thy Godhead manifest ; 

Manifest in power Divine, 

Changing Water into Wine ; 

Anthems be to Thee addrest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

3.  Manifest in making whole 

Palsied limbs and fainting soul ; 

Manifest in valiant fight, 

Quelling all the Devil's might ; 

Manifest in gracious will, 

Ever bringing good from ill : 

Anthems be to Thee addrest, 

God in Man made manifest 

4. Sun and Moon shall darken’d be, 

Stars shall fall, the heavens shall flee ; 

Christ will then like lightning shine. 

All will see His glorious Sign : 

All will then the Trumpet hear; 

All will see the Judge appear. 

Thou by all wilt be confest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

5. Grant us grace to see Thee, Lord, 

Mirror'd in Thy holy Word; 

May we imitate Thee now, 

And be pure, as pure art Thou ; 

That we like to Thee may be 

At Thy great Epiphany ; 

And may praise Thee, ever blest, 

God in Man made manifest. 

Amen. 

This is quite close to the text found in modern hymnals.  The most obvious difference is Stanza 4, which -- in many decades of singing the hymn -- we had never before encountered. It does not appear in ELW, LBW or SBH, nor in the PECUSA's Hymnal 1940.

Wordsworth himself explains the function of the hymn in a prefatory note.  It is a 

[R]ecapitulation of the successive Manifestations of Christ which have already been presented in the Services of the former weeks ...; and Anticipation of of that future great and glorious Epiphany, at which Christ will be manifested to all, when he will appear again to Judge the World.

That is to say, his intent is to sum of the various manifestations presented by the Gospel readings up to and including the Sixth Sunday.

However, it should be noted that Wordsworth does not touch on certain of the Gospels.  Present are the Appearance to the Magi (Feast of Epiphany);  Wedding at Cana (Second Sunday); healing the leper and the centurion's servant (Third Sunday); "quelling all the Devil's might" refers to the wheat and the tares (Fifth); and the Matthean "Little Apocalypse" on the Sixth Sunday, which was present in Wordsworth's lectionary but is not in ours.  Missing, however, are the Presentation in the Temple (which was read on the Second Sunday in Wordsworth's BCP), and any discernible reference to stilling the storm (Fourth).  

Curiously, the final stanza, about discerning Christ in the words of Scripture, would fit quite nicely with the story of Jesus reading in the Nazareth synagogue, which is read on the fourth Sunday after Epiphany in the RCL, but did not appear among the seasonal readings of the old BCP lectionary.

Apart from the deletion of a stanza, the other changes to this hymn are easy to understand.  "Jesus" for the archaic "Jesu" is scarcely noticeable. "God in Man," while not wrong -- Jesus was indisputably a man -- is neither exhaustive, nor true to the Nicene formula , nor fit for contemporary tastes, and the LBW-era "God in Flesh" is a meet substitution.  Wordsworth himself changed "mirror'd" to "present" in a later revision.

But what about those palsied limbs?  They have been changed, in ELW, to a "weakened body."  The idea is certainly the same, and there's no apparent theological matter at stake. But as a matter of poetry, we think "palsied limb"s is considerably more specific.  

"Palsy," a medical term for partial or complete paralysis -- a weakening, sure enough -- is an old word, coming into English by way of Old French, which got it from the Latins, who (in typical fashion) lifted it from the Greeks.  Those stout Hellenes used a word for "loosening" (para + lyein) to indicate disability or enfeebling, and their use has remained strikingly consistent through the ages.  It's not a bad word, and not so far as we can discern a pejorative one. It is old, familiar, and clinically apt.

As for "body," it is simply less specific than "limb." Like "weaken," it isn't wrongly used here -- but it does help to make the expression a bit more vague.  We think it is an unnecessary and ever so slightly unhelpful change to a fine and carefully-wrought hymn.

About "Mary"

 Funny thing about the oldest known manuscript of John's Gospel.  The scribe who wrote down what we now call Papyrus Bodmer II, or more lovingly P66, seems to have been a careless type, prone to screw-ups and self-corrections, as many as 450 of them.  One such self-correction -- if that is what it is -- appears at 11:1, where the words "There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and of Mary his sister" have been corrected to the more familiar "... the village of Mary and of Martha her sister."

Looking at the manuscript, a reader can actually see where the iota has been scratched out and a theta added as a superscript, changing marias to marthas.

The question is whether this is just one more of a sloppy scribe's errors, as is commonly assumed, or whether it may be one small part of a larger strategy, to add Martha to a story in which she did not originally appear.

The latter thesis is is argued by Elizabeth Schrader Polczer in her paper ,"Was Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century," in Harvard Theological Review 110:3 (2107), pp. 360-392.  You can hear her non-technical, and very entertaining, discussion of the idea in a recent (2024) podcast with Dave Roos and Helen Bond, at Biblical Time Machine.

Polczer's argument does not by any means hang on this single cut-and-paste. She looks at a range of manuscript witnesses to John, notably Codex Alexandrinus, but also many other, both Greek and early Latin, and finds that Martha's presence is "unstable." Sometimes she appears in John 11 & 12, sometimes she does not; sometimes the grammar suggests one sister, sometimes two.  So persistent is the confusion that traces can be found in Tyndale and even first printing of the KJV.

Her suggestion is that the earliest scribes faced a dilemma of some sort.  Perhaps there was an earlier text of John in circulation, which did not feature Martha, or which featured her isn a smaller role. and they felt a need either to bring her in or to enhance her position.  Indeed, source critics, such as Bultmann, Fortna, and many others, have often suggested something like this, but without much reference to the textual history.

But if such an ur-John existed, why add or magnify Martha?  Merely to identify John's Mary the sister of Lazarus with Luke's Mary the sister of Martha?  Or to make a theological point by doing so?

We won't hold you in suspense.  Polczer suggests, tentatively, that the objective was to separate in readers' minds the Mary of John 11 and the Mary of John 20, "where one woman named Mary also cries and speaks with Jesus at another tomb."  In other words, she proposes a more-or-less concerted effort to reduce the prominence of Mary Magdalene in the Fourth Gospel. If so, this was ultimately accomplished "by dividing one woman into three," that is, into Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and Martha.

("But wait," you cry.  "Bethany is one town, and Magdala another.  How can she come from both?"  Briefly, there is, and always has been, a strong case that John's epithet "called Magdalene" refers not to a particular village, but to a nickname derived from the Aramaic migdal, or "tower." As Cephas and the Boanerges testify, Jesus liked to give his followers nicknames.)

If this is true, what was the theological objective of the Magdalene-minimizers?  Polczer's paper stops short of a clear proposal, although in the podcast she and the hosts engage in some banter about the Peter-o-philes, meaning Christians who wanted to depict Peter as the primary heir to Jesus' authority.  That such a faction existed in the early Church is clear, although offhand we can't think of evidence for it as early as 200 CE, the rough date of P66.

None of this is certain, but Polczer has many sources, and her thesis is interesting.  It does indeed suggest a possibility to which we were exposed, in a passing comment by a seminary professor many years ago, that the New Testament as we have received it shows signs of selective editing around the ministries of certain critical figures -- Peter and Paul, obviously, but also John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene.