Avdat

Irritated

Reading this Ross Douthat column on Rome's latest overture to disaffected Anglicans makes me wanna go all Barthian-existentialist on the man. "No, Sir! Christianity's most enduring and impressive foe is Christ. Not Islam."

Return of the one state solution?

Back when I read Counterpunch, I became a fan of a one state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It seemed the only way to honor the legitimate religious and historical claims of both parties to the land and its sacred sites.

But I soured on it because some of its advocates sounded frankly anti-Semitic. Plus, given the fact that peaceful and prosperous Canada and Belgium have nearly split recently along ethnic and linguistic lines, putting Israelis and Palestinians together in one, happy, multi-ethnic nation-state seemed like a pipe dream.

But I wonder if a two state solution is any more realistic. I think that there are something like 150,000 Israelis living in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It took the TVA forty years to move only a third of that number for the lakes that they created. Moving that number of people seems like an impossible task, especially given the trauma Israelis experienced over evacuating the paltry sum of settlers from Gaza a few years ago.

Not to be trivial, but this stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminds me of season three of Battlestar Galactica. After the attacks and the failed experiment on New Caprica, each side has perpetrated so much evil on the other that reconciliation seems impossible. But given the fact that the  Cylon-Human offspring Hera lives, and that Baltar's sleeping his way through the female Cylon skin jobs, and that the mysterious final five may well be lurking in the fleet, each side's dream of getting shed of the other looks increasingly unlikely.

That's where Israelis and Palestinians are, locked in a death grip that neither party can disengage from. The Cylons and the humans managed to turn that death grip into an embrace. It's easy to do that with a TV show. But as hard as it would be to do in the real world of the Holy Land, it may be the only viable option.

You Tube Friday: baiting Pat Buchanan edition

If you choose me to be your token white friend, what I can bring to this relationship is extensive experience in New Balance running shoes. Plus, I will be your Dungeon Master. (HT)

An amazing blog post about a heretofore completely unexamined topic: the death of Constantinan Christianity

Yesterday's post got me thinking. When was the last time a Protestant theologian appeared on the cover of Time magazine? The answer is Martin Luther, on March 24, 1967. Heh.

There's been plenty of popes on the cover since then, but not all recent popes could be called intellectuals. And there have been plenty of Protestant religious leaders on the cover of Time since then, including Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and Rick Warren, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that none of these men are intellectuals.

Now I suppose that the RO analysis of this long absence would be along the lines of, "Great! It's about time the Church's best and brightest quit whoring for secular accolades. Let's hope that the next generation of best and brightest Christians takes it to the next level and gets tortured to death at Gitmo. Like Origen and Irenaeus. Then we'll be cooking with gas!"

Like I said in yesterday's post, setting out to get your mug on Time magazine may entail a certain psychological imbalance that inevitably results in sexual or financial misconduct, or substance abuse. Maybe it's for their own good that today's Protestant intellectuals toil in obscurity.

There is, however, another consideration. Perhaps the fact that a dead German theologian appearing on the cover of Time less than a year after the infamous Death of God cover signals the death of top-shelf Protestant thought. Maybe our long absence is less due to disentangling ourselves from the world, and more due to the fact that our intellectual output isn't all that impressive. Into the vacuum has stepped religious leaders with ecclesiastical and political heft.

Put differently, "the death of Constantinianism" really means the death of high level Protestant intellectual engagement with the secular. In practical terms, it means that the face of public Christianity is not Niebuhr, Barth and Tillich, but Warren, Robertson and Swaggart. I can't see how this state of affairs is as full of wondrous opportunities as the RO luminaries say it is.

Sinful theologians

Two weeks ago, which is, like, ten-thousand years in blog time, Halden observed that even skirt-chasing, hard-drinking, bourgeois theologians sometimes speak the truth in spite of themselves--like Caiaphas did. Adam Kotsko retorted that theologians, as a class, are no more sinful than the laity, and further, theologians should be evaluated solely on their intellectual prowess and ability to critique the church's preaching and discipline.

Hmm...

The problem with the people on Halden's book shelf is not that they're theologians. It's that they're famous. It's hard enough to keep your head about you when you're a lowly community college professor whose students have a crush on you. It's even harder when you wind up on the cover of Time magazine. The material with which theologians work doesn't exempt them from the same temptations that politicians or movie stars face, but it may provide them with a little more immunity. With the exception of Paul Newman, I can't think of an actor who died happily married. Famous theologians probably handle the ego inflating aspects of their profession better than other professionals do.

I wonder if the time and effort it takes to be first rate in any field almost inevitably results in an interior imbalance that breeds bad behavior. Is there only so much heart and soul and brain power to go around, and if true greatness demands it all, then maybe there's not enough left to cultivate a healthy marriage, or habits of hospitality? Then again, there are plenty of non-achievers out there who are also womanizers, crack heads, or emotionally abuse their children. What's their excuse?

It seems like there's a general agreement in the comments that there's a gap between church and academy; the only disagreement is, Whose fault is it? Ivory tower, whoremongering intellectuals; or the materialistic, vapid laity?

On the one hand, I'm not sure we need to assign blame. It's fine with me if the sermons I hear don't sound like papers presented at an AAR meeting; in fact, I would prefer that they not, and I would frankly dread membership in a congregation that resembled an AAR event in any way, shape or form. At the same time, somebody needs to be doing theology at a highly refined and rather inaccessible level of learning that may or may not trickle down over a long period of time in the "dumbed down" mode of sermons and curricula.

Put differently, my brother-in-law and his wife are both civil engineers. I don't need to know the ins and outs of statics and dynamics in order to enjoy living and working a building that can stand up straight and not fall down. But there had better be somebody out there who does know that stuff backwards and forwards. I'd like to be one of those people one day in the field of the history of doctrine.

I'm going back and forth on Adam's fear of

a kind of “Donatism for theologians” that would amount to little more than an ad hominem argument — by and large, theologians are perfectly capable of carrying out their theological duties while committing adultery or skipping church.

If one criterion of a theologian's competence is critique of the church's preaching and discipline, isn't the trade-off a willingness to be subject to the church's preaching and discipline? It's the principle of "The measure you give will be the measure you get," and "Those who teach will be judged with greater strictness." If the theologian's task is to convey knowledge of ideas to students, then I suppose that Adam's right, but if the theologian's task is to form students as Christians, then it seems like there'd be much less tolerance for slippage between words and deeds.

To put it differently again, I am not sure if an adulterous theologian is like an MD who smokes (incongruous, but not so much as to stop me from being his patient), or an attorney who embezzles (who should be disbarred).

In the end though, I keep going back to my own experience with a seminary professor who later left the seminary because of accusations of some type of sexual misconduct (not with me, I should be clear). I wouldn't trade what I learned from him for all the tea in China. Whatever he did or didn't do doesn't invalidate the wisdom he gave me, even though the incongruity was especially high, given that he was in the pastoral theology department. Furthermore, hardly anybody who taught me left  academic life for such reasons, and I suspect it's not just because they were never caught.

BSG lands east of Eden

Spoiler alert.

We finished Battlestar Galactica last night. Not everybody was happy with the finale (HT). They didn't find plausible the idea that 38,000 star-traveling humans would give up their technology to inter-marry with hunter-gatherers.

Yeah, like an aircraft carrier in space is plausible. Dude, it's a TV show. It's a science fiction TV show. Isn't a willing suspension of disbelief something like mandatory? At any rate, it's no less plausible than positing a glorious Gondor some time prior to the wretchedness of Neolithic western Europe.

I thought the ending was wonderful. Have you ever toured one of those World War II era battleships or aircraft carriers that are tied up in various ports? Can you smell the strong odor of metal and oil, activated by summer heat? I thought it fitting that Laura Roslin didn't have to die with that smell in her nose. Ahh, green grass after five years of blue-gray steel illumined by fluorescent bulbs. I was happy and greatly relieved for all of them who made it.

Mainly I was happy for myself. After the mutiny, after listening to Galactica's hull groaning, after Cavil capturing Hera, the only way I was able to watch the next DVD was when Laura pointed out that it was the last one. I'm not sure I could have taken much more betrayal, loss and the attendant despair--even though it was just a TV show.

So, Baltar and Six are Adam and Eve, right? She tempted him; he yielded out of love; their conspiracy destroys a world, but they are the god-parents of a new civilization, wandering off into the Veldt to cultivate a plot of land. That's how I took it. And thinking of it in this way added a certain power to the Christian teaching on original sin that I had not felt before. Caprica wasn't paradise by any means, but as an icon of what might have been, it helped me feel a sense of "paradise lost" that the doctrine has always failed to communicate to me. Plus, Baltar and Six, unlike Adam and Eve, experience a kind of redemption in their own lives, rather than being relegated to anti-types of Jesus and Mary, who come along much later to fix it all.

What'd you think?

Baroque rhetoric

In the context of discussing Fox News' abandoning all pretense of journalistic objectivity, a Talking Points Memo reader asks, "[W]ould someone ask the Fox news spokesperson why Fox's news anchors continue to refer to suicide bombers by the Bush administration's favored term "homicide bomber?"

Good question, but for me, "homicide bomber" is a sign of another odious aspect of recent American history. In both words and deeds, the Bush administration set the volume at 10. Anything less was considered weakness. So we got terms like "homicide bombers" because--I'm assuming--that while the word "suicide" immediately poses the question "Why?" and a willingness to understand, "homicide" or "homicidal" signifies meanness, and while there is an interest in ascertaining motive in murder cases, there's no pity there like there is in some cases of suicide. In short, homicide is a meaner word than suicide.

But in fact, "homicide bomber" conceals more than it reveals. All people who plant bombs are homicidal; but not all bombers are suicidal. IRA operatives didn't strap explosives to their chests. Ku Klux Klansman didn't crash truck bombs into black churches. Timothy McVeigh parked his Ryder truck full of combustible fertilizer in front of the federal building, and walked away.

Calling somebody a suicide bomber doesn't betray feelings of sympathy that one might feel when one gets the news that a friend or loved one has killed themselves. But it does narrow down the form of violence to a particular MO that signals a particular context, set of grievances, aims, etc.

This particular right wing tic is a symptom of a broader cultural disease in turn-of-the-century America, it's, shall we say, baroque tendencies. Everything has to be larger than life. McMansions. Hummers. Supersized fries. And in the realm of public policy, we can't just dismantle an organization that's part religious cult, part paramilitary organization, and part organized crime racket with a variety of military and law enforcement means. We have to call it a "War on Terror" to signify our toughness. Even if "Terror" is a tactic, not a belligerent state whose officials we can drag onto the deck of the battleship Missouri to sign unconditional surrender papers.

Deep thought

Balloon Boy ain't got jack on Bat Boy.

You Tube Friday: coach gonna make me run suicides edition

The part that makes you want to say Doh! starts at the 1:30 mark:

HT

Will the real Yoderians please stand up?

This Craig Carter post and the comments raises the question, If you're a pacifist, are your ethics for you or for everyone else? Some of comments insist that John Howard Yoder's pacifism, although it presupposes a churchly context, does not preclude Christians from strongly censuring state-sponsored violence, especially gratuitous or pre-emptive violence. Carter says that pacifism is not an ethic for nation-states, that commending non-violence to states is naive, and when free church people do so they forsake the Yoderian pacifism that rises out of their thick ecclesiology for the dread "liberal pacifism." The rejoinder is that Carter is not the Yoderian pacifist he claims to be, that he is advocating a two-kingdoms ethic that limits the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately the debate gets hashed out on the fraught terrain of Israel's security and its relationship with Gaza and Iran. Carter's politics are clearly neo-conservative, and I think his critics have the better of him when they point out that it's hard to get from Yoder to Israeli jets bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. But Carter's sidebar indicates that he's moving away from Yoder and really digging Augustine these days. I think it's questionable whether Augustine is a firm foundation for the kind of foreign and domestic policy today's Republican Party stands for, but whatever. It's his journey, not mine.

But I also wonder if a dual ethic for Church and State always amounts to placing the state beyond the reach of Christ's Lordship. We recently took up Church-State issues in my medieval church seminar, which gave me a chance to read a little bit of Bernard of Clairvaux's Treatise on Consideration, which sort of scrambled my categories regarding war and peace, and Church and State.

The setup: A century before Bernard, Peter Damian said that Church and State exist in a non-hierarchical, symbiotic relationship, and if each does their duty well, then each will preserve the other. Then along came Hildebrand, who asserted (in hysterical language) that the Church was morally superior to the State; therefore the Church is entitled to rule as a super-state in Christendom, even to the point of popes deposing kings.

Now Bernard also believed that the Church was morally superior to the State, but for that very reason the Church (read--the Clergy) ought not get involved in secular affairs. It's too sordid a business. But he was no Anabaptist, nor was he a two-kingdoms quietist. He thought that the Church ought to direct the State, but from a distance. Hands that wield the sword are not clean enough to be raised in prayer. But hands that wield the sword need someone to raise clean hands on their behalf, so that the sword executes justice and not tyranny.

It's a dual ethic that doesn't place the state beyond the reach of Christian ethics. But it does so by treating the violence endemic to statecraft not in ethical terms but in terms of holiness and purity. Soldiering or trying cases is like burying the dead or making leather goods was in ancient Israel--absolutely necessary, and defiling. A holy place, attended to by holy persons, is also absolutely necessary. So everybody does their respective job, and God preserves the society. Which gives you what is, from our vantage point, the utterly weird paradox of a man like Bernard, who'd no sooner be a soldier than be a prostitute, and yet who preached a crusade.

Of course this is unworkable for our contemporary context for all kinds of reasons. A major reason is that in a democracy everyone's a citizen, which means that everyone's a potential soldier. If everyone's a potential soldier, it's hard to think about the military in terms of a necessary but necessarily stigmatized social subgroup. The idea that some people need to renounce violence in order to perfect the practitioners of violence is kept alive, I suppose, in the military 's quaint requirement that chaplains not be armed, but nobody else is articulating that kind of non-violence.

So I don't really know why I'm bringing this up, except to say that a dual-ethic hasn't always meant giving the State a moral free pass, and that studying Church History continues to shuffle the theological deck of cards that the contemporary context has dealt me.