Avdat

Health care reform and abortion

I've always been a bit wobbly on abortion rights, so it should come as no surprise that I'm not terribly bothered by either the Stupak amendment or the Nelson amendment, both of which would limit federal funding for abortion in the new health care regime. In 2005 the average cost of an outpatient abortion was $413. Honestly, this is not a lot of money, even for poor women. You'd be amazed at the money even very poor people can come up with if they are sufficiently motivated.

Of course taxpayer dollars go to a whole range of programs that I think are either practically unwise or morally dubious, but I pay my taxes anyway. On balance, the bureaucracy is a net benefit to human flourishing. If these restrictions didn't make it into the final bill then that won't change my support for it; I'm so over the politics of purity (see below). At the same time, if you're really into "justice," then aren't there bigger hills to die on than getting in and out of an abortion clinic for a copay and some change?

Making the perfect the enemy of the good

Fire Dog Lake asked me to sign an online petition calling for the death of the Senate health care reform bill. Instead I filled out their unsubscribe form. I'd just as soon the Tea Bagging Right hold a monopoly on political purity. I myself am a recovering purist. Back in the day, I thought that a vote for Nader was worth it, even if it meant handing the White House to the Republicans. I was tired of compromise.

We see how well that worked out. 

Yes, it is infuriating that you need 60 votes to do routine business in the Senate. Yes, Joe Lieberman is insufferable. And Yes, maybe a bill more to liberals' liking would have emerged from the Senate had pieces of the bill been shoved through using the budget reconciliation process.

Nevertheless, the Senate bill would cover an additional 30 million people; end the denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions; end the equally pernicious practice of capping benefits; and most importantly, begin to compensate health care providers for good outcomes, not sheer number of procedures, thus reigning in skyrocketing medical inflation.

What's not to like?

I did get a useful email from MoveOn contrasting the House and Senate bills. The former does have a public option, and pays for the plan with a tax increase on wealthy Americans rather than taxing so-called Cadillac plans, which is how the Senate pays for the bill. I have no idea which is the better policy. The House plan is probably the better politics for Democrats,given that rich people don't vote for Democrats anyway, unless they're movie stars, and given that a lot of these Cadillac plans were negotiated by labor unions. If the conference committee opts for the House tax rather than the Senate tax, that's fine with me.

But I'm not into tilting at the public option windmill. It's dead. There aren't the votes in the Senate for it. I hate it that Democrats would filibuster their own party's signature piece of domestic legislation over the public option, but unless Fire Dog Lake can cast an Imperius Curse on Lieberman, Lincoln, Landrieu and Nelson, going to the wall on this point means no health care reform at all. I don't want to be in the position of saying to uninsured Americans, You'll have to wait until we take Joe Lieberman to the woodshed.

Instead of cutting off your nose to spite your face, why don't liberals take what they can get today, and work like the devil to elect liberal Senators and minimize losses in the House next year, so that progressive legislation doesn't need smokin' Joe's vote?

Seasonal atonement theories

What seems like forever (but was only two months) ago I (re)read Anselm's Cur Deus Homo? in my Medieval Church seminar. What struck me this time around was that God rewards Jesus Christ for his sinless life and death on the cross. But Jesus Christ is the Son of God. God from God; Light from Light, and all that. The quintessential Man Who Has Everything. What need of a reward does Jesus have? None at all. So he shares the reward with us. Because we desperately need some rewards. Especially immortality.

So you know what this makes Jesus?

A regifter.

I'm not a big fan of Singing Christmas Trees. They tend to be put on by Baptist churches, and the climax is always the singers rearranging themselves into a cross. C'mon, can't we do without the blood for just one evening? But maybe Satisfaction Atonement has some weird resonance with one of the quirks of this great annual Potlatch we're about to celebrate.

Might be a good sermon illustration. Just sayin.'

Calling all Thomists

In the spirit of the best way to learn something is to teach it, I led a Church History section on Thomas Aquinas' Summa yesterday. We discussed Part One, Questions 1 & 2, which deal with the nature and extent of Christian doctrine, and the existence of God.

In these first two questions, Thomas is trying to prove that Christian theology meets Aristotle's three criteria for a science: 1. Its first principles are secured; 2. It proceeds by deductive syllogisms, and 3. It's comprehensive.

Now one might object that Theology is not a science because not everyone believes; thus its first principles aren't secured. Thomas replies that a science's first principles can be secured in themselves, like mathematics, or they can be secured in a higher science, like music, which is a science because it's applied math. So then, Christian theology is a science in the way that music is. It's first principles aren't secured in itself, but in Divine Revelation, which is even more secure than any human science.

One student wasn't impressed by this argument because it appeared to her that Thomas is begging the question. Thomas hasn't yet demonstrated any reasonable proof that God exists. That comes in Question 2. Does he have a right to appeal to revelation so early in his argument?

Does anybody have a reply to this? I didn't.

P.S. Of all the proofs for God's existence, I like this one, which trades on the distinction between necessary and contingent creatures. Everything that exists in nature, says Thomas, didn't have to exist. We're all contingent creatures. Now, given an infinite amount of time, all possibilities for the coming into existence or not coming into existence of contingent creatures would be exhausted, including the possibility that none of us came into existence. Now if that had ever happened, nothing would exist even to this day because a contingent creature can't create himself. Obviously that didn't happen. So there has to be a necessary being to call the rest of us contingent beings into being. "And by this everyone takes it to mean God."

Itn't that great?

You Tube Friday: non-crappy Christmas carol version

Yes Virginia, there are crappy Christmas carols out there, but I Saw Three Ships is not one of them. In fact, the song is indestructible. You cannot murder it.

See what I mean?

Hermeneutical coincidences

Strange coincidence: Yesterday I turned in a paper on patristic hermeneutics, specifically on the role of history in the interpretive strategies of Origen and Antiochene exegetes. The same day Thomas J. Bridges posted some thoughts on the same topic at An und fuer sich. So this has emboldened me to post my paper here now, which is probably unwise since it hasn't been graded and returned to me yet!

More coincidences. Tomorrow the Theology Discussion Group is going to discuss a few songs, including Crash Test Dummies' God Shuffled His Feet, which I guess is the perfect Antiochene retort to the allegorists: people want answers and all you give them are pretty little stories!

Surging in Afghanistan

Some reactions to Obama's speech:

1. At the beginning of the speech, as he summed up how we got into this jam and the nature of it, he looked alternately angry and disgusted. There's nothing like having to clean up someone else's pile of poo, but then again, he asked for this job, and he got what he asked for.
2. I thought that his attempt to put the best face on a possibly stolen election in Afghanistan fell flat. And doesn't that call into serious question this counter-insurgency strategy? Doesn't a successful counter-insurgency depend on the government that you're trying to prop up having legitimacy in the eyes of its people?
3. I was very glad to hear him set a deadline. A high school graduate who enlisted in the Army this summer was ten years old when this war started. Our fifth graders on 9/11 are now fighting in Afghanistan. Enough is enough.
4. I was also very glad to hear him say in effect, "We can't afford this war." Because we can't. A trillion dollars in "supplemental appropriations" for two wars is why we are broke. It's not the stimulus, and its not even the bank bailouts. For people wringing their hands about all the debt we're running up this year, the takeaway lesson is, Don't borrow money in good times to fight a war of choice, not of necessity, because when the bad times return, they'll bite you in the butt.
5. I was most pleased to hear the President commit to moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons. A Jack Bauer guided fantasy on torturing a terrorist who knows where the suitcase containing the loose nuke is great, but you know what would be even greater? Living "under your own vines and fig frees, unafraid" and untroubled by certain apocalyptic anxieties because nuclear weapons no longer exist. And what we've learned in this decade is that preventive war is a lousy way to work toward a nuclear free world. The more mundane work of negotiating treaties, verifying them, and vigorous law enforcement is what will get the job done.
6. As I said in the previous post,I don't think any President would have enough political capital to walk away from a war in which the enemy is ascendant. And because the enemy is on the march, the status quo is unacceptable. One last effort to pacify the country before we get out is thus our only viable option. It seems to have worked in Iraq, much better than I thought it would in late 2006. 
7. But given the corruption in #2, and the failure of the Iraqis thus far to take advantage of the improved security and forge a political reconciliation, doesn't this mean that both surges are more about finding a face-saving way to get out than victory?
8. It was sobering to see an audience full of pimply guys in gray cadet uniforms. Some of them will surely be killed before they live long enough to clear up their acne.That's not right.
9. If it's not right then why aren't you more vigorously opposed to this escalation, Marvin? I suppose the answer is, I think that some mixture of sin, history and even Providence have brought us to this ugly point of no good alternatives and no real alternatives at all other than the path outlined last night, and "opposing" the policy makes as much sense as opposing the tide coming in. I think a better question is, Are we learning anything from this slow motion disaster?
10. In Advent we dare to hope for peace on earth and good will toward men, but we also hear John the Baptist's contempt for pious hopes that aren't backed by repentance. Beating swords into plowshares isn't a mandate only for the bad guys.

Turns out Obama's not the messiah after all

I understand that people on the left are deeply disappointed in the Obama administration, especially on the eve of this Afghan troop surge announcement, but they have only themselves to blame. Barack Obama campaigned on shifting the war focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, and that is what he is doing. You didn't really think that you'd elected a peacenik, did you?

Even if Obama were a true peacenik, I'm not sure that he could stop an escalation in Afghanistan if he wanted to. The military wants this. Between Republicans and moderate Democrats, there's probably a majority in Congress who want this. The elite journalists think that peace is an unserious proposition. Can one man, even if he is President of the United States, withstand the sustained pressure of the federal bureaucracy and its allies in the fourth estate?

We're talking about principalities and powers here. We're talking about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Obama, and any President, has a tiger by the tail. They all wind up getting eaten eventually.

Ditto on domestic issues. Liberals are furious with the excruciatingly slow pace of health care reform, and frustrated that Obama hasn't brought the hammer down on recalcitrant members of his own caucus, but Obama didn't campaign as the Dick Cheney of the left. He pledged to be a post-partisan President. And post-partisanship means tolerating a meandering legislative process and a certain amount of showboating by people who aren't where you are politically.

I get frustrated too, but I don't really think I'd want my own man stifling dissent the way that the Bush administration stuffed a sock in John Dilulio, assassinated the character of Richard Clarke and won a spurious criminal conviction against Don Siegelman. Do you? Do you want to move along health care reform by having friendly state attorneys general opening campaign finance investigations against Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman? 

To paraphrase Dennis Green, the Obama administration is who we thought they were. Moderate by temperment and constrained by forces they aren't fully in control of, Obama is doing about as well as I thought he could.

Much better than the alternative.

Your Monday morning irony alert

Obama to escalate war this week, receive Peace Prize next week.

A bit of Christology: communication of attributes

In The Nature of Doctrine George Lindbeck put forth a novel argument regarding in what sense Christian doctrines are true. Doctrines are not true in a first order sense, that is, they don't tell us anything directly about God's nature. Rather, doctrines are second order speech about God. They reflect on the proper use of Christian scriptures, liturgy and prayer. Doctrines, Lindbeck argues, are a kind of grammar of faith. Just as the rules of grammar make no sense isolated from the language they regulate, Christian doctrines don't make any sense apart from the scriptures and liturgy they regulate.

This understanding of doctrinal truth allows for seemingly contradictory dogmatic assertions from competing religions to stand as true. The doctrine of the Trinity or the Muslim Shahada are true or false, not in relationship to each other, but in relationship to the communities whose speech they're trying to regulate.

Lindbeck cites Athanasius's extensive writings on the Nicene Creed as support for his argument. Indeed, you can boil down a lot of what Athanasius writes to one basic point: taken properly, the Father-Son metaphor means "like begets like," and not, as the Arians took it to mean, that one Person is prior to the Other.

But I think that where you get this in spades is in the next century and the Christological controversy. It's fascinating to me that the Church hammered out its final answer on the divine and human nature of Jesus Christ by arguing over whether you can call the Virgin Mary "The Mother of God."

So, without further ado, this is what I wrote up about said controversy and the communication of attributes, that is, the idea that one can attribute human predicates like suffered and died to the divine subject, the Son of God...