Used and Abused

This looks very interesting: Robert Jenson has published a little book called Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse. Steve Wright gives it a quick review at Faith & Theology.

Regular readers know that the abuse of slogans (and logia) is one of the Egg's interests, and stimulates our occasional efforts to find sources and contexts for the sort of sayings that people tend to take for granted. (Fr. A.'s first published work of scholarship was, in fact, an exploration of the the words lex orandi, lex credendi. Hint: nobody uses them -- or even quotes them -- rightly.)

Wright gives few examples of the slogans addressed in Jenson's book. He mentions sola Scriptura and the law/gospel distinction. We wonder whether, and hope sincerely that, they also include sola fide, sinning boldly, and "sacrifice," or rather the rejection thereof.

Two matters give us pause. First, Wright says that Jenson "takes almost every effort afforded him to disagree with Melanchthon." Disagreement with Melanchthon has been a common enough pastime among Lutherans from the very beginning, but we are inclined to consider it an unhealthy one -- more like smoking than playing baseball.

It seems increasingly clear to us that Melanchthon is the essential Reformation theologian, the vital and indispensable link connecting the many different ideas and approaches that were then in play. It is Melanchthon the classicist who prevents Luther's evangelical insights from coming unmoored from patristic tradition; it is Melanchthon the ecumenist who, so long as he can, keeps the Reformation of Germany in communication with those of Switzerland and England. And yes, it is Melanchthon the much-abused "pussyfooter," the "synergist," even the author of the Interims, who offered the best hope that the Reformation had of being what it always claimed, a reform movement within a united church.

And second, we note that the book is published by ALPB, as was Jenson's catechism a few years back. Nothing wrong with that, but we do wonder why one of the three or four best American theologians is publishing with such a very small house. We hope it is because he chooses to.

The Least Safe Way

Old Father A. has never actually shopped at a Safeway supermarket. Now it appears he never will.

Last week, a former USAF staff sergeant and her husband moved from California to Honolulu. They went for a walk, got lost, and stopped into a supermarket to buy some food -- and eat a sandwich, planning to scan the wrapper at the checkout counter. (She's 30 weeks pregnant, so you can imagine how hungry a getting-lost-in-your-new-neighborhood walk made her). Although they bought $50 worth of groceries, they forgot to scan the wrapper, and so failed to pay for the sandwich.

So, when the security guard dragged them away, they were pretty embarrassed, and offered to pay for the sandwich. But it seems that Safeway's policy wouldn't let them do that. Do you know what Safeway's policy required the store to do?

Have the couple arrested. And put in jail. And have their 2-year old daughter taken away by Child Protective Services.

Obviously, Safeway supermarkets are going to fold all over the country, because from now on nobody in his or her right mind will ever shop at one. But the story (here, here, here) does raise another question: what sort of half-wit police officers do they hire in Honolulu? Because it is one thing for some lardass mall cop and his pimple-faced management trainee boss to follow this policy; it is another thing for the actual police to make it happen.

Oh. What? There -- Joys!

Here in South-East Central Europe, people are heading to the cemeteries today, to place candles by the graves of the faithful departed. Many American Christians will never know that All Saints Day has come and gone; many others will only celebrate it next Sunday.

And don't get us started on All Souls Day, a day once reserved for the not-so-faithful departed. If you ask us, it was the more realistic of the two November holy days. The general Protestant disdain for Purgatory pretty much killed that one, although ... Tract XC, anybody?

Anyway. Your congregation will probably sing For All the Saints; almost everybody does, and well they might. Great freakin' hymn. But please do consider this gem, by Peter Abelard:

O quanta, qualia sunt illa sabbata

quae semper celebrat superna curia.

quae fessis requies, quae merces fortibus,

cum erit omnia Deus in omnibus.

quis rex, quae curia, quale palatium,

quae pax, quae requies, quod illud gaudium,

huius participes exponant gloriam,

si quantum sentiunt, possint exprimere.

vere Ierusalem est illa civitas,

cuius pax iugis est, summa iucunditas,

ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,

nec desiderio minus est praemium.

illic molestiis finitis omnibus

securi cantica Sion cantibimus,

et iuges gratias de donis gratiae

beata referet plebs tibi, Domine.

Illic ex sabbato succedet sabbatum,

perpes laetitia sabbatizantium,

nec ineffabiles cessabunt iubili,

quos decantabimus et nos et angeli.

Nostrum est interim mentem erigere

et totis patriam votis appetere,

et ad Ierusalem a Babylonia

post longa regredi tandem exilia.

Perenni Domino perpes sit gloria,

ex quo sunt, per quem sunt, in quo sunt omnia;

ex quo sunt, Pater est; per quem sunt, Filius;

in quo sunt, Patris et Filii Spiritus.

Here is John Mason Neale's translation:

O what their joy and their glory must be,

those endless Sabbaths the blessèd ones see;

crown for the valiant, to weary ones rest:

God shall be All, and in all ever blest.

What are the Monarch, his court and his throne?

What are the peace and the joy that they own?

O that the blest ones, who in it have share,

all that they feel could as fully declare!

Truly, "Jerusalem" name we that shore,

city of peace that brings joy evermore;

wish and fulfillment are not severed there,

nor do things prayed for come short of the prayer.

There, where no troubles distraction can bring,

we the sweet anthems of Zion shall sing;

while for thy grace, Lord, their voices of praise

thy blessèd people eternally raise.

Now, in the meantime, with hearts raised on high,

we for that country must yearn and must sigh,

seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,

through our long exile on Babylon's strand.

Low before him with our praises we fall,

of whom and in whom and through whom are all;

of whom, the Father; and in whom, the Son;

and through whom, the Spirit, with them ever One.

It is one of Neale's best efforts, although he apparently did not bother to translate stanza 5, illic ex sabbato, etc. (Basically, it says that there where sabbath follows sabbath forever, saints will forever celebrate the Sabbath, singing our joyful songs alongside the angels.)

One thing to observe is that "O quanta qualia" doesn't mean "joy and glory." It is a more subtle expression, something on the order of of "O, how many and of what sort." Also, the "blessed ones" are actually described as "the supernal court," matching the expression in the next stanza.

Sadly, the thing most to be noted is that Lutherans have long been deprived of so much from this hymn. The LBW includes only 4 (altered) stanzas, so the wonderful rhetorical questions of st. 2 are gone, as is the comparison of life on earth to the Babylonian exile. But all that pales before the fact that ELW doesn't include the hymn at all.

Still, here are the words, for anybody who wants them. They're worth singing today.

Living, Dying and Being Damned

Many remarks by Martin Luther get tossed around, often without great care for their context. Upon closer examination, some of these prove to be spurious -- it seems he never offered to plant a tree just on the eve of the apocalypse. Others prove to be genuine, but still worth a little exploration.

Consider this:

Living, nay dying and being damned, make a theologian, rather than comprehending, reading, or speculating.

The original reads:

Vivendo, immo moriendo et damnando fit theologus, non intelligendo, legendo aut speculando.

The source in a 1520 lecture on Psalm 5:11 ("let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice," etc.), reprinted in the Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 5, p. 163, lines 29-30. The source is often cited on web pages, although we suspect strongly that many of these sites are copying from each other.

We took a moment to confirm the citation, using the astonishing Internet Archive. More than a moment, actually, since the enormous file slowed our browser to a crawl. Thanks, Uncle Marty, for your legendary logorrhea.

Writers generally use the remark as a prooftext for what may be called the existential side of Luther's theology, the sense of personal struggle against sin, death and Hell. They are surely right to do so, at least within limits. (We stumbled over an LCMS document that seems to use it as a model for seminary education. No comment.)

What we have not seen mentioned is the context. The much-quoted remark follows a passage that says, very roughly, this:

I would want to be warned that it is said, from Italy all the way to Germany, in the Commentary on the Mystical Theologians of Dionysius: that it is merely an annoying display of one's own learning, not to truly be a mystical theologian, but to read, teach and understand this, or to understand and teach what the vision was.

Okay, that's a junk translation, and we apologize. But do you see the point? Both remarks make a distinction between a true theologian and merely learned person -- a useful distinction. But it is by no means original to Luther, who is here restating for his students a remark he has himself found in the writer now generally identified as Ps-Dionysius (or maybe a commentary on Ps-Dionysius).

This matters, at least a little, because so many Protestant theologians have an abiding hatred for the rehashed neoplatonism of Ps-Dionysius, with its ladders of being which extend from heaven straight through the earth, and which were used to reinforce the rigid social and ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Middle Ages. (Indeed, Ps-D. seems to have invented the word hierarchy). We had two different professors at two different seminaries who assigned this guy, merely in order to refute him.

We do not doubt that Luther himself eventually had some harsh words for Pseudo-Dionysius. He had harsh words for everybody, to be frank. But it may be useful to remember that one of Luther's most frequently repeated remarks, and one of lasting value, was intended as a no more than a reflection of something the other guy said first. We expect there's a moral in there, about listening to people we disagree with, and not throwing out the good ideas with the bad ones.

Happy Reformation Day, everybody!

Dept. of No Surprise: Google Buzz Stops Buzzing

Google is cancelling its "Buzz" service.  Color us shocked.  We use a lot of Google products -- Blogger, for one! Google Books!  Google Translate! -- but even we only looked once at Buzz.  Our response, as we recall it, was "Meh."

Still, we give them credit for efficiency.  Think how long it took MySpace to get to the same decision.

Rick Perry is Unimpressive

Or perhaps he is simply made to sound that way by this brief interview posted at the Times.  Editors, of course, have the power to make an interview subject sound foolish simply by leaving in, unedited, his or her "ums" and "ahs."  So it is technically possible that Perry has some worthwhile ideas and expresses them clearly.  That is not, however, the impression he has given in the Republican debates, nor is it the impression one takes away from this interview.

On the contrary, Perry sounds desperate.  He is trying to steal some of Herman Cain's thunder by flogging a flat tax -- or, if you will, a massive tax break for the wealthy.  When goaded by the interviewer, he takes an obligatory swipe at Mitt Romney ("a fat cat" -- seriously, is it 1969 again already?).

But the most ludicrous exchange is certainly this one:

Q: Why did you choose to keep the birther issue alive?.

A: It’s a good issue to keep alive. You know, Donald [Trump] has got to have some fun. It’s fun to poke him a little bit and say “Hey, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.” I don’t have a clue about where the president — and what this birth certificate says. But it’s also a great distraction. I’m not distracted by it.

Um .... what?  Apparently it's fun to "poke" the President rather than engage in substantive policy discussion; we understand that idea, even if we do not sympathize.  But "it's a good issue" about which he claims to have no clue?  It's "a distraction" by which he claims not to be distracted?  What do those sentences even pretend to mean?

The answer, of course, is nothing, in the sense of grammar and logic.  But, between the lines, they say something very clearly:  "I, Rick Perry, am a desperate man, willing to pander to any possible constituency, no matter how intellectually and morally irresponsible.  Please elect me, please please please."

A World Like New York

A few times every day, Father Anonymous passes somebody wearing a Yankees cap. At first, to be honest, he didn't even notice them. He's a New Yorker, so Yankees caps, and sweatshirts and other merchandise, are a customary feature of his visual landscape, no more remarkable than billionaires or crazy people. But after a few months, Fr. A stopped in his tracks and said, "Waitasecond! I live in Eastern Europe."

A quick GPS check confirmed this insight, and the curious little cleric sat down to sip a cappuccino in the piazza and contemplate. Yes, caps with the distinctive Yankees logo are common here; likewise sweatshirts and sweatpants. A quick survey, however, revealed that other popular athletic clubs are represented less well. The raw numbers look like this:

Team	Hats	Sweats	Other
Chicago Bulls	0	0	0
Los Angeles Lakers	0	0	0
Brooklyn Dodgers	0	0	0
Texas Rangers*	0	0	0
Minnesota Vikings**	0	0	0

Even the Mets come up goose eggs.

More remarkable is the paucity of local team logos. Except, perhaps, on game day, CFR and U-Cluj jerseys are invisible; although we have seen Steaua Bucuresti merch in shops, we suspect that nobody actually buys it.

All this struck Fr. A. as curious. One expects to see one's hometown team supported in the hometown, and one is hardly surprised to find a few stray fans in Philadelphia or even Boston. (The latter a bold crew, willing to risk life and limb by wearing their pinstripes in Beantown). But ... why here?

Mother A. simply shrugs and says, "To many people, New York is America." This idea fascinates us, since to so many people, especially Americans, New York is anything but America. (Also Dutch businessmen. We sat up drinking with a few dozen of them the other night, and each time we introduced ourselves as American, Geert or Hans would ask which part of America; and then say, "Ah, so not really America." (We had this conversation so often that we began to wonder about the Dutch educational system, and considered sending a shipment of US maps to our distant cousins in Deventer.)

Comes now the news (courtesy of a sharp-eyed reader, Dr. Dan) that Mohamed el-Bibi, the Libyan freedom fighter said to have discovered the late Col. Qaddafi hiding in a sewer pipe, has been widely photographed wearing a Yankees cap. A blog at the Times meditates on this, and defers to the suggestion of Max Fischer at the Atlantic, that Mr. Bibi's hat should not be taken a sign of team loyalty: "Probably he doesn't even know what the Yankees are."

Probably. But he's still wearing the cap. And why?

Here's our answer: Because New York is America. And a particular vision of America. It's not just that "Yankee" is a catchall term for our compatriots (often followed by "go home"); an eagle or a flag or a big Thanksgiving turkey could represent America qua America better than the elaborately scripted initials NY. Rather, New York -- meaning here the city in particular -- represents the America that people all over the world admire, and dream of: a place of freedom, peace and relative prosperity; a place of almost infinite opportunity; a city that welcomes strangers, of whatever race or faith. A place where the Jewish mayor wouldn't mind a mosque at Ground Zero.

It may not be just as they imagine it, but this is what they imagine, and what they want for themselves, for their own countries, even in countries where is is the dream is almost impossibly unlikely. Perhaps especially in those countries. It isn't that people want to move to New York, so much as that they want the places in which they live to be more like the New York they have heard about.

So while the terrorists plan their next attack -- almost certainly aimed at New York -- it is helpful to remember that they are choosing this particular target because it is the envy of the people they most want to crush. And while Republican presidential candidates fall all over themselves in the effort to credit some other country -- any other country! -- for bringing down a dictator, it is helpful to remember that the guy who actually caught Qaddafi was dreaming of a world more like New York.

______________________________________________________

* Does this team still exist? We have heard a persistent rumor that Bush Jr. destroyed it, along with everything else his wretched and incompetent hand ever touched.

**Lutherans! Or so we choose to believe.

The Soul of Wit

We do not know David Shayer of Palo Alto. But in a letter on p. 24 of the current Economist, he says in few words something we have struggled to say in many more:

Sir -- Why is is called "class warfare" to advocate raising taxes on the rich, but not when it comes to cutting benefits to the poor?

Just so.

Dept. of No Surprise: Mormonism is a "Cult"

"Mormonism is a cult!" Or rather, "Evangelical Pastor Calls Mormonism a Cult." Or, in detail, "Rick Perry Supporter Calls Mormonism a Cult." Those are the variations on a story which is making the rounds this week, and which bears a moment's reflection.

Let's handle them in reverse order.

#3: "Rick Perry Supporter Calls Mormonism a Cult": Per the Times, a Southern Baptist minister named Robert Jeffress introduced Gov. Perry at a shindig called the Values Voter Summit, held in Washington. (The summit -- remember when that word meant Reagan meeting Gorbachev? -- was organized by groups like the Family Research Council, and we gather that its values didn't include, say, the right of labor to organize, or the occupation of Wall Street.)

So, Jeffress introduced Perry as "a genuine follower of Jesus Christ," and then -- in separate statements to the press -- used the "c" word to describe the faith of another Republican candidate. As the Times says, "injected a potentially explosive issue into the presidential campaign," and "raised immediate suspicions that the attack may have been a way for surrogates or supporters of Mr. Perry ... to gain ground by raising religious concerns."

For the record, when Perry himself was asked, he said that he does not consider Mormonism a cult. Still, since he (like Michelle Bachmann) makes much of his faith on the campaign trail, it is likely that a bit of religious furor will help him. In that sense, the papers are justified in making a fuss about this, and even is suspecting a bit of campaign opportunism. (Here's Sarah Posner's take on "anti-Mormonism" at the VVS).

But let's consider #2: Evangelical Pastor Calls Mormonism a Cult. Well, duh. This version of the story is dog-bites-man, as they say, meaning utterly unremarkable. Somewhere in America, some evangelical pastor probably does this every few minutes.

The mistake that the Times makes, and which we suspect some other news organs will as well, is to restrict the story to "Evangelicals," in the American news-media sense of that word. The fact is that no Christian community, so far as we are aware, recognizes in the Latter-Day Saints as sharing a faith compatible with its own. In other words, none of us consider them Christian. (Think about that: Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, and the Metropolitan Community Church can see in one another the same essential faith, and yet none of them can see it in the LDS).

The Mormons are understandably peeved by this. By their own lights, "followers of Jesus" is precisely what they are; they simply have access to more information about him than the rest of us.

But the Jeffress story has an added complication, since he didn't merely make a distinction between Mormons and Christians-as-conventionally-defined. This brings us to variation #1: Mormonism is a Cult! In the current cultural climate, these are fighting words. No wonder, since to be called a "cult" is to be lumped in with Jim Jones and David Koresh, with Jack Hickman and the Raelians. It is to be classified as a brain-washing, child-abusing, apocalypse-mongering collector of guns, concubines and federal warrants. And few people familiar with Mormonism would seriously mean to do that.

Of course, the word "cult" is tricky. It can be used sociologically, to describe manipulative and authoritarian patterns of leadership and behavior, but its earliest use was religious. Some modern Christian apologists use it to describe heretical movements -- not just within Christianity, but within other religions. This is the standard by which most Christians unhesitatingly identify the LDS as a cult. Like Elijah Muhammad's renegade creator scientist Yakub, Joseph Smith's visit of Jesus to the New World is a critical bit of mythological history unacceptable (and a bit comical) to more conventional believers.

But underneath even this use lies an older non-pejorative use of the word "cult": to mean a particular religious movement, especially when regarded as a system of worship. This is the sense of the Latin cultus, which at its root is about agriculture, whence nurture and reverence, whence finally worship. When Peter Brown writes (brilliantly) about "the cult of the saints" in Latin Christianity, he offers no judgment, either theological or sociological. And in that sense, we're all cultists. (Ooops.)

What, then, should we make of the Jeffress story, and of Gov. Perry's putative involvement?

On one hand, we at the Egg can affirm that Mormonism is indeed a cult, in both less and more pejorative senses of that word: it is a system of divine worship, and from any Christian perspective an heretical one. Yet we have to reject the most pejorative sense; Mormons may be odd ducks, but they are not, as a group, the brain-washed Kool-Aid drinking automata that many people associate with the word. Quite the contrary.

So when, in the midst of a heated (and in Perry's case, floundering) contest, one candidate's supporters start declaring that another candidate is a cult-member, we do indeed think it is a cheap shot, intended to stir the coals of religious bigotry. Needless to say, that sort of thing has no place in a secular democracy, not to mention no place among civilized people. Or, to put it more bluntly: Hey, Jeffress -- leave it for the ayatollahs, okay?

I Eat Because It Is Absurd

Apparently, there's a Manhattan restaurant called Tertulia, reviewed here by the Times. Sounds lovely. The name is supposedly a Spanish word for a literary or intellectual gathering -- like salon, maybe.

But we know better, don't we?

Fr. A. wishes he were in the Big Apple, just so he could mosey into Tertulia, order some tapas, and then casually ask the waiter what Athens has to do with Jerusalem. Or whether the morcilla is made with actual seed-of-the-church. And then, when that romantic couple at the back table begins to indulge in some PDA, he might mutter to a friend, "See how they love one another!"

Dept. of No Surprise: Sewage is Icky

Per Science Daily, scientists have found a "surprising number of viruses in sewage." More astonishing yet, some of these viruses "could relate to human health." We know -- astonishing, right?

As it happens, the climax to our very favorite movie occurs in a sewer. Orson Welles is the villain, his veneer of charm torn away to reveal the vicious, treacherous s.o.b. underneath. He is chased through the bowels of Vienna by the police and even by his childhood friend Joseph Cotton. Wounded, he tries to escape, crawling up a staircase and reaching his fingers up through the grating. He doesn't make it. It is a dramatic moment, and one which is not without theological weight. (Screenplay by Graham Greene, remember).

But here's the thing, and it's something old Fr. A. thinks about every time he watches the picture. If the bullet hadn't killed old Orson, do you think the viruses would have?

Hark! The Church Proclaims Her Honor

Here's a hymn we had never seen, and quite like. It sounds like the sort of thing many of us need to hear after the council meeting gone wrong, or the synod assembly gone long.

It was written by Samuel Preiswerk, translated by Catherine Winkworth. (CyberHymnal proposes singing it to Lobe den Herrn, although we think that may be a mistake.)

Hark, the Church proclaims her honor,
And her strength is only this:
God hath laid His choice upon her,
And the work she doth is His.

He His Church hath firmly founded,
He will guard what He began;
We, by sin and foes surrounded,
Build her bulwarks as we can.

Frail and fleeting are our powers,
Short our days, our foresight dim,
And we own the choice not ours,
We are chosen first by Him.

Onward, then! For naught despairing,
Calm we follow at His word,
Thus through joy and sorrow bearing
Faithful witness to our Lord.

Tho’ we here must strive in weakness,
Though in tears we often bend,
What His might began in meekness
Shall achieve a glorious end.

Pinker as Pangloss

Tired of grim tidings from around the world? Can't handle the thought of predator drones, Hellfire missiles, car bombs and loose nukes? Here's some good news: we're living in the golden age of peace and personal safety.

Stephen Pinker does not believe that we are living in the best of all possible worlds. But he does believe that we are living in a world that has become progressively less violent throughout history. He knows that this flies in the face of many stereotypes (but ... but ... but ... two world wars!), and so he came with charts. Please do read the transcript of Pinker's presentation, courtesy of Edge.org. It's fascinating stuff.

The data seem compelling, although we aren't nearly expert enough to evaluate them. Here are some tidbits:

• "CSI Paleolithic": Prehistoric burial sites show rates of violent death averaging 15%, against 3% in the twentieth century and 0.3% in the twenty-first. (So far.)

• Europe's homicide rate has plunged since 1300: "So a contemporary Englishman has about a 50-fold less chance of being murdered than his compatriot in the Middle Ages. (By the way, [the high point] of 100 per 100,000 per year comes from Oxford.)"

• Fewer atrocities: Pinker looks at major events -- war, man-made famine, and so forth -- measured as a proportion of the world's population throughout history. He finds that "World War II just barely makes the top ten. There are many events more deadly than World War I. And events which killed from a tenth of one percent of the population of the world to ten percent were pretty much evenly sprinkled over 2500 years of history."

There's much more of this. In the present age, colonial wars are gone; wars between great powers are becoming rare; while civil wars are more numerous, they are growing less deadly. Slavery is illegal, wife-beating is on the decline. Arab Spring, anybody?

Why is the world so much less violent? Pinker proposes that there are four developments which incline people toward peace:

1. The Hobbesian Leviathan: "a state and justice system with a monopoly on legitimate use of violence, can reduce aggregate violence by eliminating the incentives for exploitative attack; by reducing the need for deterrence and vengeance (because Leviathan is going to deter your enemies so you don't have to), and by circumventing self-serving biases."
2. "Gentle Commerce": "Over the course of history, improvements in technology have allowed goods and ideas to be traded over longer distances, among larger groups of people, and at lower cost, all of which change the incentive structure so that other people become more valuable alive than dead. To be concrete: I doubt that the United States is going to declare war on China (though there's much that we don't like about that country), because they make all our stuff. And I doubt China will declare war on us, because we owe them too much money."
3. The "Expanding Circle": (The term is borrowed from Peter Singer, the idea from Darwin.) "[E]volution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy. That's the good news; the bad news is that by default, we apply it only to a narrow circle of allies and family. But over history, one can see the circle of empathy expanding: from the village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to more recently to other races, both sexes, children, and even other species. This just begs the question of what expanded the circle. I think one can argue that the forces of cosmopolitanism pushed it outward: exposure to history, literature, media, journalism, and travel encourages people to adopt the perspective of a real or fictitious other person."
4. The "Elevator of Reason": "As literacy, education, and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally, and that will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others. Reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules."

Now, its all seems very nice, and fits well with our own elitist private-college blue-state worldview. But we do have some reservations.

First, this sounds suspiciously like those confident Victorian declarations that history is the record of endless progress from savagery to a state of universal civilization. These declarations were shot through with prejudices of race and class. They presumed that "civilization" was defined and evaluated by the standards of male Anglo-Americans of a post-Enlightenment Protestant tendency.

Pinker is neither Protestant nor particularly confident -- he sees no guarantee that the trend toward peace will continue -- but he (and his audience, to judge from the Q&A) clearly do have the prejudices of the modern academic class. Surely it can't be a coincidence that he attributes human progress to governments, travel, journalism, books and abstract thinking -- just the things that modern liberal academics value most.

Second, Pinker dances around the role of religion. This is easy to understand; it doesn't take an atheist to recognize that religious faith has served to create both peace and conflict. But where are the comparative data? It seems to us that one of the great contributions of the world's largest religions -- Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism -- has been to help "expand the circle," by uniting in one loose community people who had previously been divided by various forms of tribalism. Ultimately, this process has served to unite (more or less) billions of people at a time. How does this contribution measure up against the subsequent tendency of these united communities to make war on each other? We don't know, but we'd like to see some charts.

Third, Pinker seems to dismiss "moralism" while ... moralizing. His brief conclusion is a modest defense of modernity and the Enlightenment against their occasional detractors. He talks about moving from a "moralistic mindset to an empirical mindset" -- this is the hallmark of Enlightenment thinking, and we ourselves like it very much. But let's be honest about the internal contradiction when Pinker describes this move as asking "not just 'What have we been doing wrong?' but 'what have we been doing right?' " The question, like the presentation, itself presupposes at least a rudimentary moral framework, in which violence is bad and non-violence is good, and a society without violence is best of all. It is hard to disagree with this presupposition, and we certainly do not; but it is a moral position nonetheless. The truth of this becomes more clear when we notice that Pinker's measurements of non-violence include the growth of vegetarianism and the decline of harm to "sentient beings" such as chickens.

Still, reservations duly noted, the presentation is fascinating, and well worth some time.

"How to Talk About Religion Without Starting a Fight"

That's the title of a handy little post at Jezebel.

It's basic stuff: figure out if it's appropriate; don't assume you're an expert; seek common ground. Still, we've known people to whom we would have liked to hand a printout of the post, along with a magnet to make sure they put it on their refrigerator.

Funny thing: some of those people don't even believe in God, and yet they still have astonishingly strong opinions on religion.

Hard-Working Muscles

The hardest-working muscle in the body politic, at the moment, is not the Republican presidential candidates. Rodeo-clown season is winding down, and the serious players are probably on the field: Romney, Perry, and a few other people (Bachmann, Paul) who can't possibly win the nomination, much less the election, but who may influence the process. At this point, though, none of the candidates can afford to say anything noteworthy, and none has much power to do anything at all. The Supreme Court isn't in session yet, so Justices Scalia and Thomas are presumably enjoying sleepovers with their favorite corporations, roasting marshmallows and talking about which girls they like.

It's not even Ron Sukind, whose current book on sexism in the Obama administration quotes former communication director Anita Dunn as saying that the White House is such a boys' club that it "would be in court for a hostile workplace," when what she actually said was "if it weren't for the President, this place would be in court," etc. (It still doesn't make the White House sound like a lot of fun. C.J. Cregg never talked like this!)

No, the hardest-working muscle these days is made up of the Republicans in Congress. Attentive readers know that's not meant as a compliment.

Item: They're trying to destroy foreign confidence in America's fiscal stability. Key GOP leaders in Congress just wrote a letter to Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, demanding that his institution refrain from stimulating the economy via "quantitative easing." (Politico report, here). We have, frankly, no grasp of the economics here. But we do know that the Fed's independence from politics is important to its ability to maintain the trust of international markets. So when politicians start throwing their weight around, they put the Fed in a tough spot. If it goes with them, it appears to be caving; if it resists, then it's defiant. Either way, its independence is open to question.

Item: They're going to almost-shut-down the government again. The question at hand is whether Congress can pass a stopgap funding bill. The Senate wants to add an amendment requiring the US to fund disaster relief at the levels Congress has already agreed to. Where you or I might call this "paying the bills," House Republicans call this "playing politics," and plan to blame Harry Reid when they make another big stupid stink that gets our credit rating downgraded and makes us all look like idiots.

Item: They don't actually know what Social Security is or how it functions, but they want to dismantle it anyway. According to Lawrence Hunter (who is obviously a Commie, even though he writes for Forbes, supports the gold standard, and thinks "Obamacare" is a cancer),

The position of the Republican establishment in Washington is not to convert Social Security from a financial house of cards into an actuarially sound retirement program that would improve everyone’s retirement income, but instead to scrub its rolls and transform it into a real welfare program by means testing it, reducing benefits and making people work longer.

He goes on:

Trying to make Social Security a better deal for government by making it a worse deal for workers as the Republican Establishment wants to do is the ultimate exploitation of the people by the government.

When Forbes is sticking up for the workers against the GOP, things are just plain scary.

Curvature Crowdsourcing Query

Perhaps a friend with access to a proper theological library can assist us here.

If you ask the internet, it will tell you -- over and over -- that Augustine described a sinner as homo curvatus in se (or in se curvatus, or se incurvatus; same diff.). It will not, however, tell you where Augustine might have said that. A search of Augustine's online opera omnia reveals virtually nothing, except a remote possibility that the phrase has its inspiration in Ps. 38:6 (Vg. 37:7). (There, however, Augustine clearly relates miser sum et curvatus to the humility of Christ).

Matt Jenson has written a dissertation-cum-book on the subject of sin-as-curvature in Augustine, Luther and Barth, of which we can skim part at Amazon. (This is a great idea for a book, and we look forward to reading it.) He mentions that Anders Nygren located the image "in two of Augustine's expositions of the psalms and in one of his sermons," and offers a citation to Agape and Eros (Harper & Row: 1969), p. 485 n.6. Since it's under copyright, Google books will only provide us with a snippet of the Nygren book, and it doesn't include the reference.

So. Does a kindly reader have a moment to skim one or the other of these books, and give us an idea of where the late bishop of Hippo used the historically-important phrase in question? Just because questions like this keep us awake at night.

Class Warfare Waged by the Political Class

Republicans love to talk about class warfare. Only Communists in the days of Lenin seem to have loved the phrase more, or used it with more gusto. Here's the latest, via Politico:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan is ripping President Barack Obama's plan to raise taxes on the rich, calling it "class warfare."

"Class warfare might make for good politics, but it makes for bad economics," the Wisconsin Republican said on "Fox News Sunday."

Acually, Ryan's got it backwards. Using "class warfare" as a rallying cry is great politics. There are still a few Americans left who harbor a visceral antipathy for anything that reminds them of the Reds. And many more of us, virtually all, take seriously the idea that our society, however stratified economically, is still classless in the sense that all people are equal under the law.

So talking about "class warfare" hits us all in a sensitive place, because we cherish the idea that we're all in the same class. And, so far as the criminal code goes, that is more or less true. More or less, since black people are clearly not in the same class that white people are, at least so far as rates of conviction and incarceration, as well as what lawyers call "collateral consequences."

But economic stratification does create different classes, at least economic ones, and it bewilders us that Republicans perpetuate the idea that there is something wicked about a tax code that recognizes these differences.

In fact, it was those Commie-symp pinkos of the Greatest Generation -- you remember, the ones who fought WWII and built the suburbs -- who voted into effect the sort of progressive tax code that created a thriving and productive American middle class. Nobody called it class warfare in those days, though. They called it common sense and good citizenship.

As for economics, the myth of the "trickle-down" remains deeply beloved of the right. They believe, in the face of all evidence, that when the wealthy are left to do whatever they want with their money, they will choose to create jobs. That this is nonsense ought to be shown by the fact that America has, right now, the greatest concentration of wealth in the fewest number of hands since the Gilded Age, and yet it also has the deepest unemployment crisis since the Depression. After they buy a few houses and some yachts, the super-rich don't create jobs; they create big bank accounts. Lots of jobs for investment advisors, but not so many for the rest of us.

The irony, of course, is that Ryan is attacking a proposal nicknamed "the Buffett Rule," after one of the most successful investors in history. Buffett has long argued that rich people don't pay enough in taxes, and when asked whether he would lend his name to the President's proposal, answered, "Sure, its what I believe."

So if Paul Ryan and the Republicans want to argue that the proposal is good politics and bad economics., they will first need to convince us that they aren't scoring cheap political points, and that they know as much about economics as Warren Buffett.

Does GR Really "Get Religion"?

That's the question Joanna Brooks asks over at Religion Dispatches. They're having a spat over gay Mormons; Brooks said that the LDS community is starting to accept them, and GR honcho Terry Mattingly said that it's not.

In the latest exchange, Brooks chides Mattingly for beating up on a reporter who says that Roman Catholics "worship" Mary, rather than "venerating" her. Ah, yes: dulia versus latreia. It's an important theological distinction, to be sure; but as Brooks says, it is often lost on the faithful. She even has an example:

... Mattingly’s piece reminded me of the day I sat in the back pew of a Catholic church on the eastside of Austin, Texas, with my friend Rose, who is Tejana and Catholic. Pointing to a gorgeous mural of a dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe that spanned the cathedral chancel, Rose smiled at me conspiratorially and said, “I bring my kids here to see God as a big, brown-skinned woman.”

Don’t tell Rose that she doesn’t worship Mary, or that she doesn’t “get” Catholicism, as heretical as her feminist Tejana take on it might be.

Of course, it is perfectly cogent to argue that a "heretic" doesn't get her own religion. That's a loose definition of heresy. But Brooks has a point as well. This is the old academic distinction between "official" and "popular" religion which is rarely drawn as sharply as in Roman Catholicism. Frankly, if Johann Tetzel had restricted himself to the official teaching on indulgences, the Reformation might never have happened.

Longtime readers know that we find Get Religion both indispensable and infuriating. It provides a much-needed running critique of the confused, ignorant and sensationalistic stories too often served up by reporters on the "God-beat." (Just like you, we get sick of hearing Pentecostals described as "Evangelicals," and anybody with a conviction as "fundamentalist.") On the other hand, GR has two biases of which readers need to be aware.

The first is a mild preference for the traditionalist wing of any Christian church that has one. All told, it's pretty mild, and we think that Brooks is overreaching to call GR a "conservative watchdog." It's notably less doctrinaire than, say, Religion Dispatches. But the preference is pretty clear in the stories that the team chooses to examine, and in many of the conclusions they draw.

The second, about which we have written (and to which Mattingly has happily copped) is a preference for reporting about official doctrine over the way adherents experience their faith.

Both of these biases -- or, if you prefer, editorial preferences -- make a lot of sense. The vast majority of religious communities seek to sustain and pass on a particular vision of reality, one which was passed on to them. This the definition of tradition, and it is inherently conservative. Likewise, in a world full of opinions, it is important to recognize that official statements of a community, in its canons and so forth, have a generalized descriptive power which the remarks of a single priest or parishioner (or theologian) can't. Lutheranism is, in fact, defined by the Book of Concord, rather than by the peculiar folkways of Lake Wobegon.

But still. The imaginary people of Lake Wobegon -- or the real ones in Minneapolis, Stockholm or Harare -- may be shaky on, say, the duplex versus triplex usus legis, but they still call themselves "Lutheran," and mean something by it. While sorting it all out may be work better suited for an anthropologist than a reporter, it still seems to us that reporters can legitimately be allowed to write about popular religion, and to do it in layman's language. While we warmly approve of GR's call for clarity of thought and expression, we worry that it sometimes turns into an expectation that reporters will become amateur theologians, and make distinctions somewhat above (or, really, below) their pay-grade.

The Last Shall Be First

If you're preaching Sunday, you might have a look at Augustine's Sermon 87 (Latin here, English here), on St Matthew 2o:1-16. It rambles a bit, but contains the usual lapidary moments. It is also a nice example of how to talk about works while preaching grace. And, frankly, there a few places where Augustine sounds like an American revivalist.

He reads the parable of the workers in the vineyard eschatologically. It is a story about the last times, and of our eternal fate. The "evening" of the parable is the Day of Judgment, and he depicts it as a brief history of salvation:

The first righteous men, as Abel, and [Noah], called as it were at the first hour, will receive together with us the blessedness of the resurrection.

Other righteous men after them, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all of their age, called as it were at the third hour, will receive together with us the blessedness of the resurrection.

Other righteous men, as Moses, and Aaron, and whosoever with them were called as it were at the sixth hour, will receive together with us the blessedness of the resurrection.

After them the Holy Prophets, called as it were at the ninth hour, will receive together with us the same blessedness.

In the end of the world all Christians, called as it were at the eleventh hour, will receive with the rest the blessedness of that resurrection.

Even though Augustine has already, and somewhat blithely, mentioned that the Jews have lost their reward for rejecting Jesus, here he lines up a bunch of Old Testament figures and sends them straight to Heaven, with no limbus patrum to worry about. Christians, humbly, are added on last.

This is noteworthy. Preachers often turn this parable into "lifers" versus "converts," or even "longtime members versus new members," which is a message some churches need to hear. And Augustine talks about this reading as well:

[Some] were called at the first hour, who begin to be Christians fresh from their mother's womb; boys are called as it were at the third, young men at the sixth, they who are verging toward old age, at the ninth hour, and they who are called as if at the eleventh hour, are they who are altogether decrepit; yet all these are to receive the one and the same denarius of eternal life.

But his first distinction is between the community of the Old Testament on one hand, and that of the New on the other. And for Augustine, we Christians are all the new members. All Christians are late to the table, all Christians are eleventh-hour hires, all Christians deserve (by human thinking) less than those who came before.

He goes on an excursion (which may belong to some other sermon), talking about

[T]wo things [that] are the death of souls: despair, and perverse hope. For as a good and right hope saves, so does a perverse hope deceive.

We mentioned Luther's White Devil the other day, a clever nickname for the perverse hope which makes a person think that something evil is actually righteous. This may be useful for some sermons.

But then Augustine hits on something that most of us in the Pauline tradition have to deal with: the moral hazard of grace. You know -- spiritual laziness, the "I can sin a little bit now, and be forgiven later, and still go to heaven with the saints." That is, surely, one way of reading the parable; and as we all know, it was a popular one in some quarters. Government bigwigs would put off their baptism until they retired, or even lay on their deathbeds, so that they could launch as many wars or kill as many prisoners as they wanted, and have it all washed away at the end.

Augustine attacks the problem from several angles. For example, he says, don't claim that you have not yet been called; Christ is nowadays known and preached everywhere, and that preaching calls you. To pretend otherwise is to wilfully reject Christ. People do reject him, of course; usually either in a frenzy or in a torpor, out of rage or out of laziness.

Frenzy and torpor are both symptoms of an illness. When you are sick, says Augustine, you go to the physician, right?

Well, the whole race of mankind is sick, not with diseases of the body, but with sin. There lies one great patient from East to West throughout the world. To cure this great patient came the Almighty Physician down. He humbled Himself even to mortal flesh, as it were to the sick man's bed.

The Incarnation is a house-call? Sweet. Then come examples of Christ healing the people whose symptoms are frenzy: Saul, of course; the first persecutors, some of whom changed their hearts afterward, so that "they were converted to Him whom they crucified, and as believers drunk in the Sacrament His Blood, which in their violence they shed."

And then, at last this:

And so again many lethargic ones are healed. For to such are they like, who are not violent against Christ, nor malicious against Christians, but who in their delay are only dull and heavy with drowsy words, are slow to open their eyes to the light, and are annoyed with those who would arouse them. Get away from me, says the heavy, lethargic man, I pray you, get away from me. Why? I wish to sleep. But you will die in consequence. He through love of sleep will answer, I wish to die. And Love from above calls out I do not wish it.

Just read the last bit over a few times: Ille amore somni, Mori volo, respondet. Et caritas desuper: Nolo. Gives you the shivers, dunnit?

The Good Old Days

Per Philip Schaff:

The Lutheran order of worship underwent some radical changes in the eighteenth century under the influence of Rationalism; the spirit of worship cooled down; the weekly communion was abolished; the sermon degenerated into a barren moral discourse; new liturgies and hymnbooks with all sorts of misimprovements were introduced.

Misimprovements, eh? Nicely said.

In defense of the modern age, we consider the spirit of worship to be warm enough, at least most of the time and in most places, and of course weekly communion has spent a century (and more) fighting its way back. So we're two-for-four over some of our ancestors.

Still: how many sermons have you heard or read, over the years, on subjects like self -care (disguised as "keeping the Sabbath"), or welcoming strangers (disguised as evangelism, but in which sharing the Gospel is reduced to recruiting members)? Don't get us wrong here. We warmly approve of self-care and churches that make people feel welcome; discourse about them is rarely "barren." But it is, at best, moral counsel, and never the Word of Life.

As for the misimprovements, well, just look for the word "alt." at the bottom of a hymn, and make your own decision.