Spooky Time Has Begun

The Four Horsemen, probably by Boris Vallejo

November is a peculiar time for churches that use the Revised Common Lectionary.  From All Saints forward, the lessons take an ominous tone, as they dwell on the completion of God's promise and -- depending upon one's perspective -- the coming of the Messiah, or his return in glory, perhaps even the end of history and of the world as we know it.

In the next few weeks we will be asked to meditate upon Paul's eschatology, as it is worked out in 2 Thessalonians and the magnificent "Cosmic Christ" passage of Colossians 1:15-20; upon Malachi's promise that "the day is coming like a burning oven" when the Sun of Righteousness shall arise to heal the world; upon Jesus himself talking about the Day of Resurrection, about the destruction of the Temple and a time when his followers are called to endure terrible things as they await their final salvation.  It is tempting to say that these themes reach a climax with the observance of Christ the King, but in fact they continue into Advent, both with the Messianic promises of Isaiah and John the Baptist, and with the Lord's own reminder that he will return "at an unexpected hour." (The old lectionary likewise drew on the "little apocalypse" of Matthew 24-25).

We called it "ominous." To many listeners, these lessons will sound grim and even frightening.  They shouldn't, of course; but it is human nature that they will.

This pre-Advent season has no name, at least so far as we are aware.  In our hearts, we call it Spooky Time, but that probably would not fly with the masses.  So we just just call it "November."

That November, in particular, should be the time when these lessons are read seems to reflect the northern-hemisphere bias that shapes so much of the church calendar.  This is the month -- in northern climates -- when trees burst out in a final blaze of glory, then drop their leaves and stand like gray skeletons against the gray horizon.  By the end of November, the world seems cold and even dead.

Among the little-remarked treasures of the ELCA's liturgical corpus (yes, there are such treasures) is the Eucharistic Prayer appointed for November in With One Voice.  Like all the WOV prayers, it is brief; also like them it displays a sort of prosodic tone-deafness.  Still, we find the opening apt and moving:

Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal:     surrounded by evil and bordered by death     we appeal to you,     our Sovereign, our Wisdom, and our Judge.
We praise you for Christ, who proclaimed your reign of peace     and promised an end to injustice and harm.

The word "death," it should be observed, occurs rarely in the liturgy.  This is strange, considering how much of Christian theology -- indeed, how much not only of religion in general but of all human endeavor -- is shaped by our awareness, and typically dread, of death.  Law?  Medicine?  Politics?  Theater?  Death permeates them all, and drives them to their greatest degrees of intensity.

But, perhaps because of a crippled popular deeply committed to denying the reality of death, our liturgy makes little of it.  So we wonder whether, when the November prayer is prayed, whether that word does not drop into the nave like a stone, breaking through the silent complacency of the assembly, rousing them from their revery either of boredom or confusion and shaking them awake with a reminder that all this is about something real.

We look forward to this spooky time each year.  Maybe we've just spent too much time in Gothic churches, looking at the morbid little displays one finds tucked away at side altars, the mutilated corpses of beloved saints and graphic statues of flagellants.  Or maybe it is that the same reason that so many pastors enjoy preaching at funerals:  because the frank acknowledgment of death's presence in the world throws the Gospel promise of new life into sharper relief.

Anyway, Spooky Time has arrived.  Don't waste a moment of it.

In Paradisum Deducant

Today, lest anyone forget, is the Feast of All Souls.  Dia de los Muertos.  Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.

It is the day on which we remember all the faithful who have died -- including especially those who were not, at the time of their death, distinguished by any particular holiness of life.  If yesterday we thanked God for those saints whose lives serve as a witness and inspiration to our faith, then today we thank God for the abundant grace which offers eternal life even to those whose time on earth was (ahem) less than inspirational.

At which point, some readers may respond, like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, "What you mean we, white man?"

Sad to say, we Evangelicals do not much observe All Souls.  One does not find it on our church calendars, nor indexed in our hymnals. (Hymn suggestions here, if you need some.)  Our tendency, so far as Fr. A. can tell, is to merge the two days, and remember all the Christian dead on All Saints (or, more usually, the Sunday following).  This is entirely sensible for people whose theology makes much of the simul iustus idea, and which grounds salvation in baptismal grace rather than works.  We are all saints and we are all sinners; dividing the two is redundant at best and actively misleading at worst.  Indeed, it requires us to make a judgment -- saint of sinner?  sheep or goat? -- which must properly be reserved for God alone.

At least that's the idea.  Personally, we at the Egg are not convinced.  The division of the two days may serve valuable purposes, both psychological and pedagogical.   We Christians know in our heads that God makes no distinction between Mother Teresa and, let us say, that nasty old Uncle Harry who died last week, the one who never had a kind word for anybody and cursed the nurses on his deathbed.  To God, both are equally sinful and equally beloved.  But in our hearts, we feel them to be quite different from each other.  Dividing the days allows us to acknowledge our own very different experience of the lives these two people have led -- while still proclaiming clearly, still teaching, that God has saved them both.

Frankly, it may be useful to some people -- those whose memories of Uncle Harry are tainted by a keen awareness of just how loathesome the old coot was in life -- if we set aside a day for saying, clearly, "It isn't just virgins and martyrs; loathesome old coots are God's people too."

This brings us, naturally, to the overweight gorilla in the room:  Purgatory.  The medieval piety surrounding All Souls was very much concerned with Purgatory, and specifically with figuring out how we on earth could move ourselves and others out of the place as fast as possible.  This led first to prayers for the dead, then to paying other people to pray, and thence by an ugly road to the traffic in indulgences, the sale of Masses, and all the other terrible things that prompted the 95 Theses.  The worst of this was superstition rather than formal doctrine, but still, there it was.  And no sane person, Protestant or Papist, wants to go back there.

Protestant theology deals with Purgatory much as it once dealt with the Canon of the Mass -- effectively saying "This thing is so messed up that we cannot fix it.  Therefore, let's throw it out altogether."  Never mind the old axiom that abusus non tollit usum.  We despise the bath-water more than we love the baby.

Luther provides a ready example.  Melanchthon, in the Apology, was careful not to throw out Purgatory, even amid his sustained and forceful attack on the abuses it had occasioned.  Luther, in the Smalcald Articles, is less careful.  He writes:

[P]urgatory, and every solemnity, rite, and commerce connected with it, is to be regarded as nothing but a specter of the devil. 

This seems amply clear.  But in context, Luther is really raging against the attempt to define doctrine solely upon human opinion -- in this case, St Augustine -- apart from the Scripture.  If the Papists were to stop making that particular error in theological method, he says, then we might discuss these things with them.  To this, theologians of a later and less controverisal era might well respond that negotiations are often freer when entered into without conditions.

And of course, we should remember that there is Purgatory and then there is Purgatory.  Jacque LeGoff has brilliantly traced the history of the idea, from its roots in antiquity to its blossoming in Scholastic Paris, and demonstrated that not all conceptions of Purgatory are identical.*  Simply put, one can believe that God has means to purify impure souls after death without necessarily signing on to the whole Dantean cosmography.  As Newman said in Tract 90, recognizing (with the 39 Articles) that the Popish Purgatory is "a fond thing vainly invented" does not prevent us recognizing some other, non-Popish, version.

Tertullian's casual reference to a "refrigerium interim," a place of temporary refreshment for those who are not yet prepared for the Beatific Vision, could be one starting place for an Evangelical account of Purgatory.  Call it Heaven's Narthex, or Confirmation Class for the Dead.

In a sense, one might even argue that simul iustus depends upon the assumption that God has some means to strip from the newly dead their sin and leave only the holiness of Christ.  That there are tools appointed on earth for this is clear:  baptism and absolution.  But it seems natural that there are also tools in heaven, to be used upon those who die impenitent, the nasty old Uncle Harrys of the world.  To believe otherwise is to weaken either God's omnipotence or, as the Calvinists sometimes do, God's mercy.

And "Purgatory" is simply the name that we give, as  a matter of convenience, to these tools.

At least it could be.  The Orthodox, so we are told, believe that God deals mercifully with the dead, but shy away from giving this merciful dealing a Latin name or attaching to it the trappings of either indulgences or "purgatorial fire."  We Evangelicals, being also Latins, might be able to take a middle position here, and call Purgatory by its customary name, while making clear at the same time that its inner workings are God's business, hidden deliberately from our eyes and certainly from our power to alter or affect.

_____________________________________________________________________
* For those who care, Father A. has explored some of the implications of LeGoff's research in the light of anthropological theory, in an article published in Pro Ecclesia (13:4, Fall 2004, pp. 494ff.)

Our Hero: Captain Justice

We can't tell this story as well as Lisa Needham does at Happy Time People.  If you have a minute, please ... please -- read her post all the way through.

If you insist on getting the capsule version, here it is.

A state prosecutor in Tennessee has taken exception to being referred to in court as "the Government," even though this is customary in his state.  He works, after all, for the state's government.  Declaring that it somehow prejudicial -- presumably because of how much Americans seem to hate their own government -- he has petitioned the judge in a particular trial to call him ... something else.

Counsel for the defense, a man with the brilliant name of Drew Justice, has filed a counter-motion that is nothing short of genius.  It reads, in part:

[if the Court is] inclined to let the parties basically pick their own designations [then] the Defendant no longer wants to be called “the Defendant.” This rather archaic term of art, obviously has a fairly negative connotation. It unfairly demeans, and dehumanizes Mr. D.P. The word “defendant” should be banned. At trial, Mr. P. hereby demands to be addressed only by his full name, preceded by the title “Mister.” Alternatively, he may be called simply “the Citizen Accused.” This latter title sounds more respectable than the criminal “Defendant.” The designation “That innocent man” would also be acceptable.

Good, right?  But it gets better:

Moreover, defense counsel does not wish to be referred to as a “lawyer,” or a “defense attorney.” [...] Rather, counsel for the Citizen Accused should be referred to primarily as the “Defender of the Innocent.” This title seems particularly appropriate, because every Citizen Accused is presumed innocent. Alternatively, counsel would also accept the designation “Guardian of the Realm.” 

Further, the Citizen Accused humbly requests an appropriate military title for his own representative, to match that of the opposing counsel. Whenever addressed by name, the name “Captain Justice” will be appropriate. While less impressive than [assistant district attorney] “General,” still, the more humble term seems suitable. After all, the Captain represents only a Citizen Accused, whereas the General represents an entire State.

Yes.  Captain Justice is our new hero.

Vos Sancti Proceres

Given its importance in the church calendar, All Saints Day does not boast as many hymns as you might think.

The most obvious choice, for English-speakers, is For All the Saints.  Frankly, it is a masterpiece.  Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones, although often looked, may be still more spectacular in its summoning of those who enjoy the Beatific Vision.  We have already professed our affection for Bernard's O Quanta qualia, best known in John Mason Neale's translation as Oh, What Their Joys.

Then what?

Which is to say:  a decent hymnal offers these three songs, they are wonderful, let's all sing them.  But if, for some reason, your particular parish wants to explore lost and lesser gems, the pickings grow quickly slim.  You might at least consider Jean de Santeul's Vos sancti proceres, translated by Isaac Williams.  

This is a modern hymn, by churchy standards -- de Santeul lived from 1630-1697.  Although trained by the Jesuits and professed at St-Victor,  he was apparently "a fountain of levity," remembered after his death for a variety of scandalous antics.  Williams published a popular volume of Hymns from the Parisian Breviary in 1839.  Despite translating many hymns, Williams is not by any means our favorite poet, and we wish that we had a Latin original for comparison or, better, retranslation.  But we don't.

The hymn is short and charming, quickly describing a few saints by category and ending with a sentimental allusion to Isaiah:

Ye saintly choirs, that round the regal seat, 

Through Heav'n's eternal palace, endless throng, 

May we with voice for mortal not unmeet, 

Join your eternal song. 

Myriads of spiritual hosts the throne around 

Stand with their votive offerings, day and night; 

There doth the herald Baptist dive profound 

       In the deep flood of light. 

There they, whose voice sounding Christ crucified, 

Like thunder went about from strand to strand, 

With the anointed Prophets by their side, 

The twelve great Preachers stand. 

There in their purple stole are Martyrs seen, 

And Virgins white that knew no earthly flame, 

Like roses which with lilies blend between, 

The victim's wreath to frame. 

They who have fed their flocks are feeding there 

In God's own fulness, brought for ever near; 

And they who wept,—a Father's calming care 

Wipes away every tear. 

The meter is a damnable 10.10.10.6.  We aren't sure what tunes it could be sung to, but perhaps readers can offer suggestions.

What If Theology Were in English?

This morning at breakfast, young First-Grader Anonymous (who had been up all night vomiting) asked his Father (who had been up all night cleaning vomit off of sheets, books and stuffed toys) what he was reading.

"It's the Book of Concord," we muttered groggily.

"What's it about?"

"Well, this part is called the Epitome of the Formula, and it's about the doctrine of election."

"They have doctors just for voting?"

"Umm.  No.  Not that kind of election, exactly."

What followed was a brief discursus on the verb eligo, "I choose," and the various instrument of choice available to human beings as opposed to the instruments available to God.  The youngster seemed to take it all in stride, especially so for somebody whose main consideration was whether he would be able to hold down a handful of dry Cheerios.

Afterward, though, it occurred to us that we might have saved time by saying that Epitome XI concerned "teaching about choice" or something like that.  Perhaps, for clarity, "the Church's teaching about how God chooses people."

The point is that there is no necessary reason for theology to be couched, as it generally is, in Latinate words when Anglo-Saxon ones will do.  Indeed, as our ninth-grade English teacher pointed out, this is true of most writing in English.  She delighted in pointing out (often to the children of IBM managers) the folly of business writers who preferred "utilize" to "use" and "finalize" to "end."

Theologians, like people in so many other lines of work, often seem to hide simple ideas behind needlessly long and strange words.  We talk about "eschatology" when we mean "about last things," and "ecclesiological" when we mean "churchy." (Father A. himself remembers well the first time he heard a professor use the adjective "salvific" -- his snort of contempt would have made that old English teacher proud. ) Life would probably be much easier for the people around us if we used more straightforward words.  They might even be able to take us a little bit more seriously.

Two qualifications must be noted at once.  First is the fact that theological jargon, like the jargon of any other profession, does have a practical side.  It is a sort of code which makes communication faster and more efficient among those who use it every day.  "Soteriology" may be a stupid-sounding word, but it is genuinely easier to say than "doctrine, study or language for talking about salvation."  This becomes even more true when one is attempting to read theological works written in a foreign language -- the fact that so many languages employ cognate words with Greek and Latin roots makes skimming and translation much easier than they might otherwise be.

This is most true in certain kinds of liturgical and historical study, in which familiar foreign words are customarily used in their original form, often as proper nouns.  It is far easier to speak of the Kyrie and Gloria in excelsis, of capax and simul iustus, than to stop and translate these every time we use them.

The second qualification is that many of the people who write theology are well aware that their cultic language is an obstacle for the common reader, and have tried to help.  Witness the frequent replacement of the word "theology" itself with the good Anglo-Saxon compound "God-talk."  This is not a matter of dumbing down, either.  Some writers (Gordon Lathrop comes to mind) work hard to avoid jargon, and yet are still required by the nature of their ideas to adopt a style that requires great attention from the reader.  Attention -- but not a glossary.

Still, qualifications noted, we could do better.  Many of the things that Christians believe about God are indeed complicated and difficult to describe in ordinary language.  Some -- notably the teaching of the Trinity -- seem to elude clear description.  But many others are simple enough:  God made us, God loves us, God saves us.  We don't need to hide them behind complicated expressions, and may serve both God and the Church better if we don't.

Random Gleanings

Herewith a few phrases that have comer to our attention recently, in no special order, with a bit of context.

1.  Burke's "Chivalry"

In a wide-randing lecture on the uses of "gothic" and medieval" in English culture, Michael Alexander discusses the fact that the Middles Ages have been appropriated, at different times, by both the left and the right.  When the Houses of Parliament were rebuilt by Pugin, it was because the high Gothic was associated with democracy and public discourse.  Conversely, Edmund Burke famously remarked of Marie Antoinette's death that

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. 

Of this remark, Alexander curtly observes,

"Chivalry" is a code word for "a stratified society."

Take that, conservative Romantics.

2.  Cushing's Bacon

At the Second Vatican Council, Boston's Richard Cardinal Cushing gave a powerful speech in which he called for an end to Catholic anti-Semitism, and a new relationship with the Jewish people.  This speech, controversial at the time, helped move the Council toward its breakthrough in Nostra Aetate.

Speaking at Boston College, Rabbi James Rudin mentions a remark attributed to Cushing, for which he can find no credible attestation.  Before he got on the plane, Cushing is rumored to have said:

If I don't bring home the bacon for the Jews, I can't ever show my face in Boston again.

3.  Wright Stuff

N. T. Wright, in the opening pages his slim book entitled Paul in Fresh Perspective, discusses the tension between scholars who see in the apostle's writing the pure exposition of a systematic theology, and those who see rather individualized responses to the problems of particular communities.

To this, Wright offers words of wisdom for all parish pastors:

Anyone who has preached to different congregations, and engaged in pastoral ministry with different kinds of people, will know only too well that the moment when a particular situation presents itself is precisely the moment when you need to draw deeply on something very central and non-negotiable.   

One might almost formulate a general rule that the more specific the situation, the more what is needed is a return to core truth, however freshly stated.

Amen, brother Wright.

More Freedom

We're still thinking about Luther's "The Freedom of a Christian," as we prepare for Sunday.  It has, truly, been a long time since we read the essay; we were quite different ourselves in those days, and so we looked to Luther for different things.  Now in wizened old age, we are delighted to stumble across treasures which were hidden from our callow youth.

For example, here is a beautiful illustration of Luther on the froehlich Wechsel, or "joyful exchange" model of salvation:

Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation; the soul is full of sin, death, and condemnation. Let faith step in, and then sin, death, and hell will belong to Christ, and grace, life, and salvation to the soul. 

For, if [Christ] is a husband, he must needs take to himself that which is his wife's, and, at the same time, impart to his wife that which is his. For, in giving her his own body and himself, how can he but give her all that is his? And, in taking to himself the body of his wife, how can he but take to himself all that is hers?

We may steal this outright on Sunday.

Beneath this image lies, of all things, Song of Songs 6:3 and related passages.  It takes the Biblical image of the Church as a the Bride of Christ and personalizes it, applying it to the spiritual life of each individual Christian.

This is a sharp contrast to the "commercial" model many of us (including Fr. A.) have been taught.  In that model, human sin creates a debt to God, which is paid for each of us by the merits of Christ.  The only real difference between Luther and his opponents, in this view, is whether the Church has the power to move these merits around like so much cash in a counting-house, or whether that power is exercised exclusively in Heaven.

As Paul Hinlicky pointed out at our last synod assembly, the "commercial" model is, like the "forensic" or legal model beloved of the Gnesio-Lutherans, profoundly impersonal.  The movement of merits, like the judicial judgment, takes place somewhere else, far from us.  We are saved or damned in absentia.  But to speak of salvation as a marriage, albeit between parties of vastly different stature, is inherently personal.  Our exchange of wedding gifts can only take place only as the result of an intimate personal encounter -- indeed, the most intimate and most personal encounter.  (Insert here your own giggly allusion to Bernini's Santa Teresa).

One might not want to go too very far with this language.  Marriage, as it was known either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, had a side that may seem sordid to us moderns.  Brides, in particular, did not always enter into it of their own will.  Within marriage, women lost some of their identity and, not infrequently, claim to much of their property.  Love was an ancillary consideration, especially among the upper classes.

Still, we are enchanted by this idea, and plan to run with it for a good long while.

"Bishop of Bling" is Busted

How much does it cost to renovate a medieval bishop's palace in modern Germany?  What's a fair cost for that sort of thing?  How do you even go about getting an estimate?

Well, in Limburg, Bishop Franz-Peter Trebatrz-von Elst did get estimates, for something in the neighborhood of 5.5 million euros.  That's a big wad of cash, the sort that could probably make a significant dent in -- we're just making this up, now -- the lives of poor people in Limburg.  But the bishop went ahead with his renovations.

Which cost a whopping 31 million euros.  About $42 million in real Fahrenheit money.

There are stories of a $20,000 bathtub and a conference table that cost ... well, never mind.  Plus the first-class flights to visit poor people in India, and so forth.  A lot of freaking Deustchmarks, if Deutshmarks were still a thing.

It all smells like a steaming pile of -- and you knew this was coming, didn't you? -- Limburger cheese.  Needless to say, this wasn't going to play well with a pope who has named himself after the Poverello, the Little Poor Man.  And it didn't.

Bishop Trebartz-von Elst has been suspended by the Vatican pending the findings of an official inquiry.  Word is that, on his way to get smacked down by the Pope, he flew on a discount airline.

Preaching on Mary and Free Love

Perhaps, for Reformation Day this year, we will preach on the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Rightly or wrongly -- and the answer is wrongly -- the lectionary provides a single rather drab set of readings for Reformation Day.  Year in and year out, it is Jeremiah, Romans, and John.

And yet it was Galatians that Luther compared to his own wife, and Genesis upon which he taught some of his longest lessons in the classroom. (Remember the "sacristy prayer"?  That's where it comes from.)  Surely these books have something to offer us by way of insight into what people began talking about on Halloween in 1517.  (And the Common Service did prescribe Gal. 2:16-21 for Reformation, a text that is positively pregnant with opportunity for a teacher interested in the relationship of pistis to theosis.)

One of these years, by gosh, we will muster the courage (and the advance planning) to throw out those idiotic bulletin inserts, set aside the lectionary, and choose our own readings for Reformation Day.  But this year, we regret to say, it will be Jeremiah, Romans and John.

Most of our attention will probably go to the last of these, and the promise of Christ that "the truth shall make you free."  The text is almost certainly chosen to refer us back to Luther's famous essay on Christian freedom, written in 1521, and so we have been reviewing our battered paperback copy this afternoon.  This essay lacks the wild ambition of Babylonian Captivity -- in which Luther re-imagines the sacramental system -- but may have more lasting relevance.  It is an astonishingly deep piece of writing, so deep that its meaning may sometimes be difficult to discern.

Here, fairly early on, we begin to sense the complex relationship that Evangelical theology will have to the Law.  In places, as when he cites 1 Timothy to the effect that "the law is not made for a righteous man," Luther does start to sound like the antinomian some have tried to make him.  He is not, by any means, and no sustained reading of the treatise will support that idea.  But as Leonard Klein often remarked, during his days as editor of Lutheran Forum, "At its best, Lutheran theology does come very close to antinomianism."  Close, but never ... quite ... there.

For Luther, no matter what drivel you have heard to the contrary, faith and works are inextricably linked.  Indeed, we believe these days that the real hermeneutical key to Luther is to grasp that faith and works are not, really, ontologically, separate things.  "Faith" is a word which expresses a condition of the soul in response to divine grace; this condition is manifested in obedience to the Law.  It is not that faith inspires works, or expresses them, but that where faith in the specific sense Luther intends is present, so too is obedience.

All of which leads us to this illustration, which we had long since forgotten:

The Blessed Virgin, beyond all others, affords us an example of the same faith, in that she was purified according to the law of Moses, and like all other women, though she was bound by no such law, and had no need of purification. Still she submitted to the law voluntarily and of free love, making herself like the rest of women, that she might not offend or throw contempt on them. She was not justified by doing this; but, being already justified, she did it freely and gratuitously. Thus ought our works too to be done, and not in order to be justified by them; for, being first justified by faith, we ought to do all our works freely and cheerfully for the sake of others.

Ah.  There it is.  (And no, we don't think the translator meant "free love" in that sense.  Get your mind out of the gutter, this is the BVM we're talking about.)

We do not know about Mary's faith from any verbal affirmation (here), but from the fact of her obedience to the Law -- and at that, the ceremonial law, the covenant law, which most Protestant theology dismisses out of hand.

So what then does it mean that she was not "bound" by the Law?  Here is that Augustinian thing, about the meaning of the Law in the life of the converted.  She was not bound to it by the threat of punishment, since she had been delivered from that punishment by grace.  But this does not mean that she was "free" from it, in the sense that modern people might hear those words -- she was not free to disobey it.  That was not the effect of God's grace or Mary's faith.  The effect was that she obeyed "freely and gratuitously," or in a more modern translation "out of a free and willing love."

All this, of course, is summed up by the simple preacher's shorthand "Not freed from the Law, but freed for the Law."  You've said those words a million times, and so have we.

And come Sunday, we'll say them again.  But next year, Galatians.

Our Secret Life

Here's our confession:  there is more to Father Anonymous than sex, religion and politics.  Not a lot more, frankly, but a little.

Like cartoons.

And the desire to make the world a better place, using cartoons.

One way to do this, as a friend pointed out years ago, is to make cartoons that inspire kids to do things they didn't think they could do.  For instance, letting little boys know that they can grow up to be peaceful and nurturing men -- not something you pick up easily from the mass media.

Or letting little girls know that they can grow up to excel at science and technology, and that they can use these tools to keep on making the world a better place.  That is the idea behind Gangly Sister.  We aren't ready to spill all the beans about this yet, but you can get some ideas from following the link.  Which you should.  Then like us on Facebook.  And support our Kickstarter.

Because, come on, don't you want the world to be better?

GOP Push to Repeal 19th Amendment

Well, not exactly.  But close.

Having worked overtime to disenfranchise poor and black voters in 2012, and lost the White House anyway, the Republican Party is trying to figure out who else it can prevent from voting in the future.

The answer is easy:  women.

And the place is urgent:  Texas, where pro-choice heroine Wendy Davis stands a reasonable chance of success in her run for governor.

The strategy is simple:  adjust voting laws so that votes must produce a photo ID with their current leal name.  This reasonable-sounding rule in fact disenfranchises a surprising number of women -- as many as 34% of them.  Young women, apparently, don't rush to update their driver's licenses after they are married.

Jean Anne Esselink, writing at The New Civil Rights Movement, sums it up:

You have to hand it to Texas. Abortion politics threaten to drive the election for governor, so they have figured out a way to discourage a large group of women who are likely have a personal interest in the issue of choice: married women of child-bearing age. Women who might favor Wendy Davis.

Yeah.  We actually think it's that simple.

Wishful Thinking

The great majority of Christians take very little interest in the Revelation of St. John because it seems so obscure and mysterious and very difficult to understand. It is probably the least read book in the Bible.

So writes R.L. Weidner of the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary, in his 1898 commentary on Revelation.  (At Google books). This seems terribly unfair to Nahum, Habbakkuk, and the Song of Songs

Perhaps the culture of American Christianity has taken a more apocalyptic turn since then, or perhaps Prof. Weidner was simply mistaken.

In any case, we're bracing ourselves to lead a parish Bible study on this book, which -- however strangely popular it may be -- remains "obscure, mysterious and very difficult to understand."  Wish us well.

Republicans Getting High, Having Bunny Sex

"Are you high," Anderson Cooper recently asked GOP strategist Alex Castellanos.

"I wish I were," Castellanos replied, with surprising frankness.  Who in the political world, and especially the Republican hemisphere, has not recently wished for the sweet Coleridgean release of some drowsy syrup?

Nonetheless, the apparently sober Castellanos went on to provide a unique theory explaining the recent, and seemingly self-destructive, behavior of Senator Ted Cruz.

He's having bunny sex.

As Castellanos said:

[T]he snowshoe hare — I thought it’s a marvelous explanation — every ten years, multiplies six fold. Bunnies like sex apparently. But the boom produces a bust. They press their food supply, they invite predators. Right now, Ted Cruz, what’s he’s doing, feels good; he’s growing his supporters. It’s leading the Republican Party, I think, into a bust.

Well.  Now we know.

Gnesio-Republicans?

Among Evangelicals of the Lutheran persuasion, there is a ratty old saying which regularly makes the rounds: Nihil est adiaphoron in casu confessionis et scandali.  That's the long form, attributed to Matthias Flacius Ilyricus.  More commonly, we are prone to look daggers at one another and mutter "In statu confessionis," letting the rest trail off ominously.

What we mean when we say this is, "No," to whatever has been proposed, with the implication that "If you try to make me do anything, then I am required by my faith to disagree with you about everything."   It is an incredibly stubborn position, one which virtually shuts down conversation.  And yes, it is written into our confessions of faith (e.g., SD 10).

Properly, this principle only applies in times of genuine persecution, when violence is used or threatened as a tool to suppress the Gospel.  In practice, it is thrown around somewhat more freely.  Episcopalians make the historic succession of bishops a condition of full communion?  Status confessionis!  The ELCA recognizes same-sex unions?  Status confessionis!  It is an easy knee-jerk reaction, just one of the many that earn us our reputation for stubbornness.

In statu confessionis.  These are fighting words among our tribe.  They go back to the 1540s, when -- in a somewhat quixotic effort to reunite the broken Church -- Melanchthon and some other Lutherans agreed to permit any number of ceremonies which had been cast aside by the Reformation.  They argued that, so long as the central teaching of salvation by grace was allowed to stand, ceremonies instituted by human beings ought not be allowed to divide the Church.

This seemingly reasonable position aroused immense resistance from other Evangelicals.  The resistance was, we suspect, largely emotional.  Every pastor has at some point attempted to introduce a widespread ecumenical practice into the congregation's worship, only to be told "That's too Catholic."  That's what it boils down to.

Melanchthon was abused mercilessly, as were his followers.  To this day, Lutheran folk history accuses him of "weakness" or "indecision."  In fact, he was among the finest Patristic scholars of his age, and also among the most passionate ecumenists.  Her struggled mightily to do something that Protestantism still struggles with:  articulate the role of the redeemed person's will in living a godly life.  Had he been given the respect and support he deserved, it is entirely possible that the main Reformation schisms -- not only German, but Swiss and English -- might have been healed.  But he was not.

Melanchthon's vitriolic opponents, called the Gnesio-Lutherans, may have been driven by emotion, but they also had a point.  The tentative agreements of the 1540s, called the Interims, were made under threat of violence.  If the Evangelicals did not capitulate, the result was likely to be war.  So although the Evangelical party had professed (from the preface of the Augsburg Confession forward) its deep desire to keep Western Christianity united, as well as its desire to retain the ancient polity and practices so far as they were consonant with the Gospel, it is easy to argue that the negotiations which resulted in the Interims were not made in good faith.  They were the result of coercion.

So one part of the Gnesio-Lutheran argument was that you can't negotiate with a sword pointed at you. Sound familiar?  Of course it does; this is just what President Obama said at the beginning of the present political crisis.  And it's the truth.

In that specific sense, Obama's position does echo Flacius.  And conservative critics are doing their best to argue that, like the Gnesio-Lutherans at their worst, it is the Democrats who are being needlessly stubborn.  After all, they aren't "negotiating."  Never mind that "negotiation" here means capitulation under coercion -- to an electoral minority, at that.

The ACA is a reasonably popular law -- nobody's first choice of solutions, either on the left or the right, but at least a viable compromise.  Shutting down the government is wildly unreasonable, an act of wanton destruction growing from a refusal to compromise.  Insisting that a good law be put into abeyance is bad government; shutting down the government if you don't get your way is somewhere between childish and insane.

So in fact, it is the Republicans who are acting like the dumbed-down modern version of Gnesio-Lutherans:  stubborn asses who want things their way, and will not be moved by any amount of reason.  Their fight, especially as they scale back their demands, is about preserving their image, both among themselves and among the voters.  They're like a congregation saying, "Well, chasubles are okay, but if you light incense, we'll burn the church down."

And the Democrats are like Philippists:  smarter, milder, more pragmatic.  Only this time, the Philippists are not caving.

Vatican Misspells "Jesus"

Stolen from The Telegraph

On Tuesday, the Vatican released, and hours later withdrew, a medal intended to celebrate the present pope's first year.

Around its periphery, the medal was mean to show the words of a sermon by the Venerable Bede, on St. Matthew's Gospel (9:9-13):

Vidit ergo Iesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi "Sequere me."

It means, roughly,

Therefore, Jesus saw the tax collector, and because he saw by having mercy and by choosing, said to him, "Follow me."  

This is the source of Pope Francis's personal motto, "Miserando atque Eligendo."  The official translation is "Lowly but chosen."

Sadly, the medal actually read "Vidit ergo Lesus."  With an L.

Lesus, needless to say, is not the name of our Lord and Savior.

Is the GOP Shutting Down?

Time has not permitted us to blog about the current clusterboff in the nation's capital (and, specifically, its capitol).  This does not mean we aren't following it all with interest.

We serve a congregation filled with government employees and contractors, many of them directly and personally affected by the shutdown.  We also serve in what is said to be one of the most deeply Republican counties in the state -- although a party leader has confessed to some concern that the Democrats are gaining ground recently.  We can only imagine that this trend is about to accelerate.

Because who, being in their right mind and not obsessed by ideology, would ever vote for a Republican again?

The GOP has long been perceived to be running out of time, as its core constituency of old, white men gradually loses its hegemony in American culture.  Periodic efforts to broaden its base have been half-hearted and unsuccessful.

Now, Republicans in the House have allowed themselves to be driven by their extreme fringe -- driven, that is, right over a cliff.  A month before an election, the party and its leaders have made themselves immensely unpopular. Their poll numbers have never been lower, while the President's are up ever so slightly.  Although it appears that the extremists themselves are largely safe from re-election challenges, it is hard to imagine that the party will not lose some of its clout next month, and more in the Novembers to come.

Losing favor with the electorate is bad.  What may be worse for Republicans is the possibility of losing favor with their sugar daddies in the world of business.  A recent BusinessWeek article described the growing distance between the fiery ideologues and the practical minds of the business world:

If Republican lawmakers were as responsive to business concerns as they once were, the chance of a prolonged shutdown would be slim. But that’s no longer the case. “Republicans are not the party of business anymore,” says Robert Shapiro, chairman of the economic advisory firm Sonecon. “They’re the party of antigovernment.”

 A Times article yesterday revealed just how angry the business lobby is about the shutdown.  They are losing money, and lots of it, with no end in sight.  This is, to put it cynically, not the government they paid for.

And they do put it cynically.  Here's the money quote:

“We ask them to carry our water all the time,” said one corporate sector lobbyist, who demanded anonymity in order to speak frankly about the relationship with Republicans. “But we don’t necessarily support them 100 percent of the time. And what has happened is the rise of an ideological wing that is now willing to stand up to business interests.”

It is hard to know whom to hate more in a situation like this one:  the corporate fat cats or their Congressional water-boys, who chose the wrong time to show a rebellious streak.

In a sense, America's corporate oligarchs are a little like the House of Saud.  They have sponsored the raving of ideological extremists (Tea Party, Wahabists, whatever) as a way to distract the masses from their own corruption -- and now they have to face the fact that these radicals may actually believe their own nutty rhetoric.  Worse, they are willing to act on their belief in ways that threaten to bring down their masters' cushy palaces -- along with the rest of a the country.

The GOP is divided against itself, and in danger of losing its connection to both mainstream voters and corporate money.  Meanwhile, its core constituency continues to dwindle.  How long can this go on?

The New Republic is fantasizing when it offers up a headline about "the death throes of the Republican Party."  Outright collapse, represented by a prolonged period of political impotence, seems as unlikely as Karl Rove's dream of a "durable Republican majority" ever did.  For better or worse, America is deeply in love with its two-party system, even if it does not love the parties themselves.  Voters will simply switch back and forth until they arrive at the balance that they want.  These two parties have dominated the landscape for 150 years, and it is hard to imagine they they will stop dominating it any time soon.

Of course, somebody might have said that about the dinosaurs.

"The Epitome of Love"

Our friend Father Nedward, when he is not hot-tubbing with beautiful ladies, has long waged a battle to reclaim canon law for the Lutheran church.

He is not exactly alone in this effort.  We ourselves have a longstanding interest in the systematic application of Biblical and historical norms to the rules governing church life.  So do many of our friends and colleagues, not to mention all ELCA secretaries to date.  It is Fr. N.'s particular charism -- or burden, perhaps -- to insist upon actually calling this body of norms by its proper name, canon law.  As Ray Schulze pointed out to us many years ago, Lutherans in America have an abiding aversion to the word "law," in almost any way it can be used.  Preface it with "canon" and they are likely to collapse into agonized screams of "No popery!"

This is (as Nedward observed recently) ironic, given the prominent role that Kirchenrecht plays in the life of European churches.  It is nonethless true.  He says that two out of three American church historians surveyed, when asked about canon law after the Reformation, simply objected that Luther had burned the Roman code, and refused to discuss the subject any further.  A third historian, to his great credit, observed that Luther may have burned the code, but that he also found it helpful to keep a copy at his bedside when he actually had to administer church affairs.

In fact, the relationship of the early Evangelical movement to the corpus of canon law is absolutely fascinating.  We recently stumbled across a brilliant study of the subject by John Witte Jr.  Here is the abstract:

Why would Luther in 1520 burn the canon law books but in 1530 write a commendatory preface to a canon law textbook for use at his own University of Wittenberg? Why would German magistrates ban the study and use of canon law texts in the 1520s, only to import canon lawyers and transplant canon law rules in the 1530s and thereafter? Why would neophyte Lutheran jurists be content to rely on the Bible and custom in their early writings, only to turn with greater regularity to canon law authorities later in their careers? 

"Inertia" is part of the answer. Prior to the Reformation, the canon law had ruled effectively and efficiently in Germany for centuries.  ... Most of the jurists and theologians who had joined the Reformation cause were trained in the canon law .... In the heady days of revolutionary defiance of Pope and Emperor in the 1520, it was easy for Protestant neophytes to be swept up in the radical cause of eradicating the canon law and establishing a new evangelical order. When this revolutionary plan proved unworkable, however, theologians and jurists invariably returned to the canon law that they knew. ... 

"Innovation" is also part of the answer. This evangelical transplantation of the canon law was based on the strength of considerable theological and jurisprudential ingenuity. Theologians after 1530 offered an innovative theory of the church, grounded in the evangelical theory of the two kingdoms. The invisible church of the heavenly kingdom, they argued, might well be able to survive on the Scripture alone, free from the accretions of the canon law. But the visible church of the earthly kingdom, filled with both sinners and saints, required both biblical and canonical rules and procedures to be governed properly. ...

The article, which you can download here, is a model of scholarly detail, filled with illustrative details.  We learned a lot from it.

One thing Witte does not mention, because it would have taken him far from his actual subject, is the antinominan movement within formative Lutheranism.  Led by John Agricola, some of the early Evangelicals argued that no law -- not even God's -- applied those who had been regenerated by baptism and whose spirits had been converted.  Although soundly defeated in its own time, the antinomian impulse continues to crop up among modern Lutherans, especially those with a little, but not too much, theological training.

Antinomian Lutherans take the Law/Gospel dynamic to an absurd extreme.  So determined are they not to terrify or be terrified by the unfulfillable demands of God's Law that they reject it altogether, or declare that it is of interest only to Jews and heathen.  Although this was not likely a factor in the rejection of canon law in the 1520s or its restoration (as a civil function) in the 1530s, we do suspect that it helps explain the very weak and even scattershot governance which prevails in the ELCA.

But in fact, as the early Lutheran jurists understood, canon law is an important, valuable and even a beautiful thing.  Nicolaus Everardus called it "the epitome of the law of love" and "the mother of justice."  It is a remedy for arbitrary decisions and the tyranny of pastors, bishops and other church authorities.  Churches talk about justice, but without sound and systematically-applied guidelines for discipline they are often hard-pressed to provide it.  In a church plagued by chronic struggles over authority, in which members and congregations in conflict rarely find any meaningful path to reconciliation, canon law can offer tools of great value -- not because it is a law, but because it is a law of love.

The Peshawar Martyrs

Sunday morning, Mass was just ending at All Saints Church in Peshawar -- of Anglican origin, and now a parish of the [Anglican/Methodist] Church of Pakistan.  The six hundred or so people there were leaving, as people do after worship.  Many were headed for the yard, where free food was to be distributed.

That's when the suicide bombers struck.

At last report (Times, BBC), 75 were dead and at least a hundred more were wounded.  More than half were women and children.  The Taliban has unembarrassedly accepted responsibility.

Look.  We realize that this was, in all likelihood, an effort to sabotage the government's efforts to make peace with these bloodthirsty sons of bitches the Taliban.  We realize that peace is objectively a good thing, to be pursued even in the face of terrible provocation.  We realize that the attacks on religious minorities in Pakistan do not represent an authentic form of Islam.  We are especially grateful for Prime Minister Sharif's clear statement that:

 “The terrorists have no religion, and targeting innocent people is against the teachings of Islam and all religions.” ...

At this point, it is hardly news that this sort of murderous violence is to Islam as protecting child molesters is to Christianity -- a vile perversion of the faith which has nonetheless taken root among some of its loudest exponents.

We are also grateful that

[t]he Pakistan Ulema Council, the largest clerical body, also condemned the blast, saying that the council was “standing with our Christian brothers in this tragedy.”

But still.  Add this to the al Qaeda-inspired horror in Nairobi, and it is very difficult, sometimes, to keep from giving them what they want -- to fall back into the medieval mindset, so inflamed by irrational religious hatred that it can be easily manipulated in the interests of geopolitics.

(The bombers had the gall to claim that they murdered their countrymen -- and women -- in retaliation for American drone strikes.  Please note the rhetorical sleight of hand  They want to imagine that our distinctly secular and pluralistic nation is somehow "Christian", so that all Christians are magically "American," and therefore legitimate targets.)

It is is difficult to keep from falling into their trap, and hating their (supposed) religion rather than merely hating them for themselves, but we will.  Maybe, when we cool down, we will even find a way to stop hating them at all.

Anglicans Pick Female Bishop ... in Ireland

As you know, the Church of England ordains women to the priesthood, but not, thus far, to the episcopate.  It's a testy situation among some of their faithful, who seem not grasp the concept of "in for a penny, in for a pound."

Their recalcitrance may get a little harder to maintain now that the [Anglican] Churches of Wales and Ireland have signaled that female bishops are jake with them, and that the C of I has has actually elected one to the post.

The Rev. Pat Storey of Derry will become the new Bishop of Meath and Kildare.  According to the Guardian, she is 53, was ordained in 1997, has two grown children and is married to a priest.

We extend our deepest condolences to the Bishop-Elect Storey and her family.

Party Down

Playboy Magazine has long managed to be "adult" in the sense of "pornographic" without being the least bit "adult" in the sense of "not juvenile."  From its lousy cartoons and it lame jokes to the leering double-entendres that accompany its photographs of women young enough to be your daughter, it has long been a monthly reminder to American men of just what it was like to be a horny pre-teen.

Or, uh, so we've heard.

Then, yesterday, it seemed that Playboy had turned over a new leaf, and started treating sex as a grown-up thing, to be engaged in thoughtfully and with mutual respect by the people involved.  Even if they were drunken frat boys.

Specifically, Playboy's annual list of Top Ten Party Schools -- or something like it -- was published on the web, with a truly touching preface:

 Over the years, it has been brought to our attention that some of our long-standing party picks have a not-so-toast-worthy, rape-ridden side to their campus life. 

Somewhere in the countless hours we spent tallying up co-eds and scoring beer pong, we lost track of the most essential element of the Playboy lifestyle: sexual pleasure. Rape is kryptonite to sexual pleasure. The two cannot co-exist. For our revised party guide to live up to our founder’s vision, we had to put a new criterion on top. Namely, consent. 

In other words… A good college party is all about everyone having a good time. Consent is all about everyone having a good time. Rape is only a good time if you’re a rapist. And fuck those people.

A couple of great paragraphs, and we wish that the real editors of the real Playboy had written them. We also wish they'd come up with the prudent list of "commandments" for mutually respectful collegiate nookie that follow.

The site is a hoax -- or anyway, a parody -- put together by FORCE, which is committed to "upsetting the rape culture."  Apparently, they also came up with a lot of fake press coverage, too, and planted it all over the web.  Very impressive work.

Parenthetically, let us pause to ask:  What kind of horrible world do we live in where groups like that are necessary?  Where there is an identifiable "rape culture"?  Lord, have mercy.

Anyway, we applaud FORCE for doing such a fine job of this.