Avdat

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...

Is Advent all that necessary?

In your humble blogger's opinion, State beating Carolina IS realized eschatology, but I do intend to go to church this morning to cover my bases...

Rodney Stark preachin' to the choir

Was visiting the in-laws over the Thanksgiving holidays, and Missus Avdat called my attention to this article in the hometown paper profiling a new book by Rodney Stark titled God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades. I am always leery of mainstream journalism's coverage of religion, but if they've got this one right, then readers ought to be equally leery of Stark's acumen as a historian. In short, the Muslims had it coming, and the Crusaders were motivated by pious zeal, not a desire to loot and pillage.

From the article:

"I suspect that Muslims will hate the book, and I'm sorry about that," Stark said. "That's just the way the world is. I make no apologies or real accusations."

This is a non-apology apology worthy of our best politicians and celebrities. And from an academic! Yeah team!

Stark has a small point, but I'm afraid it may be lost in an attempt to write a quotable and contrarian best-seller. George Marsden wrote that for Jonathan Edwards, "Hell was as real a place as China," and the same was true for Medieval Christians. A plenary indulgence was a powerful inducement to march on the Holy Land, one that modern people have a hard time wrapping their heads around.

On the other hand, one cannot ignore the economic forces at work. It's no coincidence that the Normans conquered England and Sicily in the same century that the first Crusade was launched. The warrior class was running out of turf to fight over in western Europe.

But a book sub-titled The Case for the Crusades would appear to do more than emphasize religious factors neglected in current scholarship. According to the Amazon reviews Stark argues that the Muslims were worse than they're made out to be (an argument in search of a target; seriously, how many apologists for Medieval Islam can you come up with?), and that the West owes them nothing, not even Arabic numerals.

With certain egregious exceptions (i.e., Nazi Germany)I get really impatient really quick with arguments about which culture, religion, society or era was better or worse than another. I mean, who has a computer and a moral compass up to crunching that data?

But what most people don't know is that the current arrangement between a technologically advanced West and a natural resource rich Orient was reversed in the Middle Ages--the difference being that that the natural resource was European wood, rather than Middle Eastern oil. When scholars inform the public that when London and Paris were towns of 25,000, Baghdad boasted a million residents, and that European intellectuals had to relearn Aristotle from the Arabs, and that cynical popes preached Crusades against political enemies within Western Europe as well as Muslims, they are educating people.

But I suspect that Stark's book will just confirm the ignorant in their biases.

On turning the other cheek

According to Walter Wink, the interpretive key to Matthew 5:39 is that Jesus specifies being struck on the right cheek. Why the right cheek? In a right-handed world, the only way that one could strike a person on the right cheek is by delivering a back-handed slap, like a master would to his slave. Thus Jesus is counseling the relatively powerless among his hearers on how to assert their equality. Offering the other cheek isn't a way to avoid getting hit again, but his time, he'll have to punch you like you're an equal. It's an appealing interpretation because it provides exegetical validation to the techniques of a variety of non-violent social change movements.

But is Wink correct? Yesterday I was reading On First Principles by Origen, and he chalks up the right cheek detail to one of those absurdities that litter the scriptures which demand a deeper, spiritual, non-literal interpretation:

What could be more unreasonable than the command which simple minds think the Savior gave to his apostles: "Salute no one on the road" [Luke 10:4]? The saying about the right cheek being struck [Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:29] is also most unlikely, for anyone who strikes would strike the left cheek with the right hand unless he happened to suffer from an unnatural condition.

Now Origen, a third century Alexandrian, is as far away from Jesus of Nazareth as I am from the War of 1812. But he is a lot closer to the Sermon on the Mount in time and space than Walter Wink is. If Jesus is speaking directly to the plight of a slave humiliated by a back-handed slap, then it seems like Origen would have recognized the context of that detail immediately.

What gives?

Another question: has anyone written a book on the history of the interpretation of "turning the other cheek?" I'm not familiar with one, but I'd be shocked if there weren't one out there. Seems like that'd be some low-hanging fruit for any number of people eager to get published.

Sexy and not-so-sexy health care reform

Ron Brownstein has written a long and somewhat wonkish assessment of the health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate. Long story short, the bill's chief purpose is to cut skyrocketing health care costs by moving the system away from a fee-for-service template and toward a fee-for-outcomes template.

Republicans outside elected office like the bill, but wish it had as many sticks as carrots to encourage better coordination of care among providers. And malpractice reform. But since Republicans have decided to not play ball with the White House and the Democratic majority, there's no one at the table lobbying for the latter.

Like a lot of liberals, I've tended to view the success or failure of the bill almost solely in terms of the survival of the public option, but the article points out that a state-sponsored insurance plan "would affect who writes the checks in the medical system, but not what the checks are written to pay for." It raises the question of the relationship between universal coverage and cost containment, and the priorities of the two.

Apparently, President Obama is rather smitten with the article, and Rahm Emanuel has made it required reading for the White House staff. 

Campaigning for universal coverage is sexy in that social justice kind of way. But the HCR bill detailed by Brownstein's article isn't a bit sexy. It's the government using its regulatory and reimbursement power to encourage a set of best practices that are designed to make health care less expensive and the nation's citizens healthier.

And that's OK. In fact, that's probably the best we can expect from people at the pinnacle of power in 21st century America.

It's the difference between Amos's passion and Joseph's prudence. So long as the prudent are seeking to achieve the aims of the passionate, we ought not denigrate reform just for lacking sex appeal.

A bit of Gnosticism

Gnostic scriptures are as esoteric as advertised. But the wild ride they take you on is worth the tedious struggle of making sense of them! Unfortunately, Irenaeus's rejoinder to the Gnostics, that our hope is in the renewal of creation, not in our escape from it, seems lost on many contemporary Christians. A lot of people who got all bent out of shape at The Da Vinci Code are, ironically, crypto-Gnostics without realizing it. My paper on one Gnostic text, The Gospel of Truth, is below the fold:

Church and state in the high middle ages

Periodically I have to write 4-5 page papers on my seminar readings. The purpose of these papers is to jump-start the seminar conversation. One seminar has me doing a bunch of these shorter papers instead of a final term paper, so that's what I've spent much of my fall composing. Not blog posts. But since I'm one of these bloggers who, A. Gets anxious when I'm not posting a lot, and B. Doesn't have time to blog a lot, I've decided to put some of these class papers up here. This one, on Church-State issues, is where this earlier post about wrestling over the mantle of John Howard Yoder came from. These might not be everyone's cup of tea, but if they suit, you are welcome, as usual, to comment.

Getting to yes on health care reform

Even though health care reform leaped yet another hurdle yesterday, I'm less buoyed than before. With Blanche Lincoln joining Joe Lieberman in threatening to filibuster a final bill that contains a public option, it seems like the prospects for a public option are now rather dim. And without a public option, will Congress wind up passing a bill that forces people to buy health insurance they can't afford? That's neither a policy nor an electoral winner.

Lincoln's is a frustrating case. One might hope that she's posturing, but apparently she spoke in such categorical terms that there's no way she could walk away from her threat without a loss of face. Even stranger, Lincoln's web page still shows her supporting a public option. I definitely expected more party discipline than this.

Then again, it may be that the last two elections are masking the real ideological balance of power in Congress. The Democrats built large majorities in Congress running against the Bush administration's manifold incompetence, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Congress or the nation as a whole has moved as far to the left as those numbers indicate. Under more normal circumstances, we might have watched Democrats negotiating with moderate Republicans to overhaul the health care system this year, but since there are no moderate Republicans left, Democrats are negotiating with Democrats. The result is starting to look like a centrist compromise, rather than the more progressive bill that 60 Democratic Senators could theoretically enact.

Then again, as Yglesias is so fond of pointing out, we wouldn't being having this discussion if the Senate ran according to majority rule, or, even better, if we didn't have a legislative body in which Wyoming, population 532,688, has the same representation as California, population 37,756,666. So we have the Founding Fathers to thank. Even now they are saving the Republic from the mob rule of the uninsured and the price gouged.

UPDATE: Here's Robert Reich on the slow withering of the public option.

Andrew Sullivan has jumped the shark

Andrew Sullivan, teasing us with the "possibility here of such a huge scandal that we would be crazy not to take our time either to debunk it or move it forward for further examination" suspended blogging operations so that he and his staff could go over Sarah Palin's new book with a fine toothed comb. His blogging seems to have returned to normal today, but his Face of the Day is none other than Palin family outlaw Levi Johnston posing for Playgirl.

Gay man lust. Eww. But, "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

Look, I agree with Sullivan to the extent that I think that Sarah Palin would be an awful President, and that Barack Obama is a good President. But the effusive gushing over Obama, the creepy man crush he appears to have on Levi, the vendetta-like preoccupation with Palin, and the pompous self-importance he's attached to said vendetta, makes reading his blog extremely uncomfortable at times.

I especially don't get the breathless shilling for Levi. The Palins are right off the set of Judge Judy. When dealing with such people, it is best not to get too involved, much less choose sides. Even if Sarah Palin is a liar, that doesn't make Levi a truth-teller. Turn the channel, I say.