Avdat

More determinism

Lee comes to bury my praise of determinism:

As Clark Williamson argues, one criteria for doing contemporary theology is that you shouldn’t say anything you couldn’t say “in the presence of the burning children” of the Nazi death camps. Could we tell them that their suffering was part of God’s will for them?

This isn’t to say that God’s arm is too short to save, but to offer a different understanding of divine sovereignty. Whatever else we know, we know that God doesn’t in fact save people from undeserved suffering or death (that is, unless you have such an intense doctrine of original sin that no amount of suffering would be undeserved). Instead, I’d propose that divine sovereignty is an eschatological concept: it means that God’s purposes will ultimately triumph, despite the best efforts of fragile and foolish human beings.

I cannot disagree with what Lee has written here. In fact, in my one and only sermon I ever preached on hell, I said as much. "The power of nothingness has yet to come under the rule of God," said Karl Barth. My thinking about providence, like my thinking on hell (see here and here), is wonderfully incoherent.

That said, I refuse to take full blame for this. No one has proposed a slam dunk solution to the problem of reconciling God's power and love with gratuitous pain, suffering and evil. I usually find myself overreacting to poorly thought out and/or stated articulations of either a classical theism that's vulnerable to determinism, or a narrative, process theology-like reading of texts and reality that's vulnerable to uncertainty or despair about the eventual outcome. 

Piper's is a tone deaf Calvinism. And tone is important. The Westminster Confession cautions ministers to preach God's sovereignty carefully, yet Piper's smug self-satisfaction in the face of catastrophes is neither all that careful nor all that edifying. It's vulgar.

What worried me about Zachariassen's post, however, is the assumption that some guy who can look on the deaths of thousands with something like grim satisfaction is an adequate spokesperson for "Calvinism." One does not have to be a classical theist (which includes Calvin, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and--in my opinion--Schleiermacher) to appreciate the tradition's intellectual rigor and pastoral nuance--provided you've read deeply and thoughtfully in the tradition.

  Calvin's determinism, for instance, is coupled with a really fine and powerful articulation of Jesus Christ's full humanity, especially in Calvin's explication of the article "he descended into hell." And given Calvin's context--a world in which nobody knows much about proximate causes such as tectonic plates shifting, a world in which fate and not God seemed to be the ultimate cause of everything--Calvin's humanistic determinism was a powerful comfort.

And that's where I was coming from in the last post.

So I hope that Zachariassen, if he hasn't already, gets around to reading Calvin and not "Calvinists." And I wish that the "Calvinists" would wipe that s**t-eating grin off their faces every time a few thousand people perish all at once. Really.

I come to praise determinism, not to bury it

Arni Zachariassen calls John Piper a "theological nihilist" for concluding, "Therefore, God has a good and all-wise purpose for the heart-rending calamity in Japan on March 11, 2011 that appears to have cost tens of thousands of lives." (HT) Arni writes:

One of the most depraved aspects of Reformed theology (see what I did there?), as done by Piper and his Calvinistic comrades, is how it strips theological language completely of its coherence. God is good, says Piper. Most of us theists would agree with that. Most of us, theist or not, would also agree that someone who is in the business of the "unilateral taking of thousands of lives" is not good, but evil. But according to Piper, when God is in that business, it is suddenly good. We're talking about God now. And God is good, no matter how evil he appears to be - and the killing of 25,000 people sure does make him look evil.

Hmm...

I think the word is nominalism, not nihilism. Isn't there an assumption here in Zachariassen's complaint that good and evil are concepts existing independently of God, and God's acts must conform to them in order for God to be good? If that's the case, then is God truly God?

If you posit an omnipotent and omniscient Creator, it's hard for me to see how you aren't but a hop, skip and a jump away from a naturalistic determinism (known as a High Doctrine of Providence), or a personalistic determinism (known as Predestination). Unless you're shrewd, and define sovereign grace as a self-limiting, cooperating  grace, as some have done.

If you aren't into Greek metaphysics, and many people aren't these days, be warned: narrative interpretations of scripture can lead one down the same, deterministic path.

How I will spend my Megamillions winnings

Fast fact: for the cost of those 100 cruise missiles we lobbed at Colonel Gaddafi, we could have provided safe drinking water to the entire population of Congo. (HT) This depressed me so much that I went out and bought a Megamillions ticket. Given the waste, fraud and abuse at the highest levels of the federal government, somebody needs to be throwing some serious cash at some seriously important priorities.

I'll have to pay half of the $300 million in taxes. $70 million for water and sewer in Congo. That leaves $75 million. I'll keep enough to take the family to Iona every summer, and the rest I figure I'll give to some peace oriented think tank to convince the American people that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Because we are a well-intentioned people. We saved the world from Hitler, didn't we? (Well, with an assist from the Brits who stood in the gap, along with 30 million dead Russians.)

True, true, true.

But good intentions are more than made up for by the awful misery of war. Ever since World War II, we well-intentioned people with a ginormous military have been running around the world like a bull in a china shop. "The Good War" blinds us to an unpleasant truth: we have little to show for all the wars since then. Consider:

• Korea: Technically, the war's not over yet. Check back in 5 or 50 years.
• Vietnam: We lost the war. We lost 57,000 lives. Only the Civil War split the country worse. We still aren't over it.
• Lebanon: disaster.
• Grenada: victory!
• Libya: I don't know that bombing Gaddafi in the '80s accomplished anything, but it felt good at the time, didn't it?
• Gulf War: Won the war. Lost the peace.
• Haiti: we invade them periodically. Can't tell that it makes much of a difference.
• Somolia: a fiasco. Read all about it in Black Hawk Down.
• Kosovo: this appears to have been a success.
• Afghanistan. How much blood and treasure does it take to eliminate some guys armed with box cutters living in caves? How many generals would Lincoln have fired by now? This deference to military brass who clearly don't know how to prosecute this war is an unfortunate legacy of Vietnam.
• Iraq: FUBAR.
• Libya: stay tuned.

Madeleine Albright famously asked Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if you can't use it?" But doesn't our track record belie the seemingly obvious implication of her question? Our most successful postwar deployment--to Europe as part of NATO--was in a purely defensive posture.

Long story short: we really need to stop starting wars.

And even when the others guys start it, we do have choices about how to respond. I remember right after 9/11 Jacques Chirac was paying a visit to Washington, and a reporter asked him about "The War on Terror," and he declined to characterize the effort against Al Qaeda as a "war." That struck me as strange at the time, but Stanley Hauerwas has made the point repeatedly that the term "war" properly describes a conflict between states, and when you talk about a "War on Terror," you aren't signaling your awesome determination so much as you are granting a state-like dignity to a rabble of religious fanatics. And you ought not do that.

It makes you wonder: what if we hadn't gone to war against Al Qaeda in 2001? What if we responded in a purely law enforcement mode? Has the war really made any difference in terms of our security, or could we have stopped the use of airplanes as projectiles simply with stopping the flow of money to Al Qaeda and stopping known terrorists from boarding planes?

I will spent the other $70 million raising these questions in public.

And No. I will not give you any money. You have clean drinking water. Your kids don't die from diarrhea. You don't have problems. Talk to the hand.

Hard times for single pastors

Halden Doerge has flagged a New York Times article about the discrimination that single pastors face in seeking a call to conservative, Evangelical congregations. Halden calls out Albert Mohler in particular for making an idol of the family. The reporter quotes Mohler saying, "Both the logic of Scripture and the centrality of marriage in society (justify) the strong inclination of congregations to hire a man who is not only married but faithfully married."

It's a minimalist "logic of scripture" that would look askance at single clergy. I think where it comes from is limiting one's thinking on the matter to 1 Corinthians 7:9 and 1 Thessalonians 4:4 (AV). Those two texts in isolation yield a sexual ethic that begins and ends with finding a suitable receptacle for semen.

Within these parameters single clergy, especially single male clergy, are hopelessly compromised. Why? Because men ejaculate periodically. Our bodies churn out sperm and seminal fluid; there's no helping it, and sooner or later, they'll find their way out in one of three ways: intercourse, masturbation or nocturnal emissions. The first is fornication for the single, while the second and the third inevitably involve some kind of lust (erotic dreams accompanying the sadly involuntary third exit). And if we expand our proof texts for sexual ethics to include Matthew 5:28, then by definition, single men are implicated in sexual sin and thus are unfit for ordained ministry.

Thus the only solution, as Mohler sees it, is to get thee to the church on time, or else you won't be preaching in any church anytime. I guess that Mohler's not going to want to get into any kind of casuistic analysis of when masturbation might be a permissible concession to what biology and providence have wrought concerning the lack of an available and suitable "vessel."

Boy, I'd hate to be a pastor's wife in Mohler's worldview. Your role in life is to be a sperm bank for your godly head of household and maybe the piano player and/or CE director. How depressing.

In a sense, the church puts single clergy in the same bind as it does gay and lesbian clergy. Biology fates both groups to sin and disapprobation because when the Church isn't thinking beyond a few proof texts, it's simply refusing to incorporate what we've learned about the human body and human sexuality.

This is not a Barmen Declaration moment. This is not the Church standing courageously against the onslaught of decadent neo-paganism. This is the Church requiring not faith but what Tillich calls "intellectual good works" as the price of salvation and belonging. Not that I think that Tillich's own sexual ethics should be any guide to clergy ethics. But seriously, can't we get beyond any of this?

Do theologians need to man up?

I TA Theology II, and in today's lecture our professor delivered a mild-mannered rant about universalism, or more exactly, how we debate universalism. He shared an anecdote about a Presbytery meeting he attended in which a couple of candidates being examined for ordination were grilled about the concept.

If I get the anecdote right, neither candidate affirmed universalism; they affirmed a kind of middle-of-the-road, "We must hope well of all and not rashly judge anyone to be reprobate" point of view, but that wasn't good enough for a few. A few, in the presence of the candidates and especially out of their presence, mocked the candidates for an equivocating, mealy-mouthed faith in a saccharin-sweet God who's too darned nice to judge anybody.

Questioning the manhood of universalists, or even suspected universalists, is nothing new. In the fifth century Augustine wrote:

It is quite in vain, then, that some--indeed very many--yield to merely human feelings and deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be. Not that they would go counter to divine Scripture--but, yielding to their own human feelings, they soften what seems harsh and give a milder emphasis to statements they believe are meant more to terrify than to express the literal truth.

The sentimental might hope that all dogs go to heaven, but the tough-minded know better.

Or do they?

Why should I listen to you? BECAUSE I HAVE A VOICE!

When we moved out of the seminary apartment and into a home on Brookland Parkway we found a Sherwood Park neighborhood newsletter on our steps. How friendly! Inside we found out about the neighborhood listserve, subscribed to it, and have continued to subscribe after moving across Laburnum Avenue last summer. It keeps us informed about lost pets, dubious door-to-door salesmen, and other Northside phenomena.

Over the weekend someone posted this to the listserve:

Neighbors,
     Are you aware that the former Holiday Inn is about to become a night club open from 9 PM until 3 AM every Friday and Saturday night? 
     This morning __________ handed me an advertising postcard and free grand opening pass for the Zodiac Night Club at the former Holiday Inn.  They are planning Hip Hop parties every weekend starting March 25.
     We need to organize and stop this before we have all the problems moving from Shockoe Bottom to our community.

After a few other posts rallying to this call to action, I decided to put in my two cents worth:

I think that more facts are needed before there's any organized attempt to stop this new nightclub. Who are the managers? Has anyone contacted them? Do they have a plan for security and crowd control? Do they manage other nightclubs, and if so, what's the safety record at their other locations?

If these questions can be answered satisfactorily, then the neighborhood doesn't need to organize to stop this, but to welcome a new business to the community. A well-run business in that location would certainly be preferable to a building standing empty. And I imagine that well-run nightclubs do exist; they just don't make headlines.

In short, the neighborhood needs to act out of a sense of curiosity, not from a place of knee-jerk fear, stereotyping and NIMBYism.

Yours,
Marvin Lindsay

In reply I got one "Hear hear" and one request to confirm my current residence in Sherwood Park since the home we used to lived in on Brookland Parkway was demolished last summer. "We live in Bellevue, at 1216 Greycourt Avenue," I replied, and that's the last email I've received from the listserve. But my wife has received several messages from the listserve since then.

I think I have been banned!

I guess it's because we've moved so very, very far from Sherwood Park, and live so much farther from the old Holiday Inn at Boulevard and Hermitage than Sherwood Park residents do, that I really have no business commenting on local matters:

Now that outside agitators like me have been silenced, the group can get on with assembling pitch forks and marching on City Hall.

Meanwhile my wife, who due to sloppy purging on the administrator's part is able to function as my Sherwood Park listserve mole, informs me that still another person has posted on the dread scourge of hip hop invading our community in the dead of night. According to this person, the nightclub's already been open for a couple of weeks now.

Imagine that: black folks dancing and rapping and they slept right through it! That sleep apnea machine works wonders, doesn't it?

Natural disaster blogging

I'm sure we've all seen more than enough tsunami and earthquake video, but this video shot at street level as the water inundates a Japanese town or city is remarkable. It's not the Hawaii Five-O gigantic wave crashing. It begins with the water running up the street like it does when a water main bursts, but it keeps flowing and flowing and flowing, and before you know it, houses are floating past you. You hope that the driver of the white minivan that turns up the street at the outset of the video didn't find his/her way blocked by earthquake damage, and you wonder how far and how fast you'd have to drive to stay ahead of the surge.

Another link, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, is to this counterintuitive Felix Salmon post urging people not to donate to Japan. He argues that earmarking disaster relief money hobbles non-profits because when the needs are met in Disaster Region X, the non-profit is left with with a ton of money that could be better spent elsewhere, but can't be. Plus, Japan is a wealthy nation. They've got this.

Fortunately, Presbyterian Disaster Service is up front about the first problem. Their web site says that if the needs are met, your donation will be used for a similar crisis, or used at their discretion. As for Japan being a wealthy country well, that's true, but I imagine that Katrina victims were happy to receive help from the Japanese via donations. One good turn deserves another.

Lastly, I've never prayed for a nuclear reactor before, but there's a first time for everything...

The Presidency is a ring of power

What would possess a nice guy like Barack Obama to subject an accused (not convicted) criminal like Bradley Manning to forced nudity and prolonged solitary confinement? After all, he assured us in his inaugural address that a war against terrorism could and would be prosecuted in a manner consistent with our nation's highest ideals. Was he lying?

No, says Megan McArdle; it's the office of the presidency. Presidents are powerful men. And they're knowledgeable men. And that combination of knowledge and power corrupts by isolating them--from others and even from their better selves, as they try their best to solve problems. She cites a conversation between Henry Kissinger and the Bradley Manning of the previous generation--Daniel Ellsberg:

"Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

"I've had a number of these myself, and I've known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

"First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all -- so much! incredible! -- suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

"You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools.

"Over a longer period of time -- not too long, but a matter of two or three years -- you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

"In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: 'What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?' And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues....and with myself.

"You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours."

....Kissinger hadn't interrupted this long warning. As I've said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn't take it as patronizing, as I'd feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn't have the clearances yet.

McArdle concludes that we don't need better people in the White House; we need to hold accountable whoever's in the White House. Indeed the best people, the Gandalfs and Galadriels of the world, would know better than to occupy the office, no matter how tempting.

But holding accountable that moral second tier would mean a population who would punish elected officials at the ballot box for screwing up the Bill of Rights as much as screwing up any response to the latest, horrifying intelligence data. We aren't there, are we?

Heresy hunting in Lent

So our family has a devotion every evening. And as part of our devotion we read the Bible. And as Sunday past was The Transfiguration of the Lord we read Mark's account of the Transfiguration, which was close enough to the lectionary text from Matthew. And Mark's account of the Transfiguration closes with the disciples "questioning what this rising from the dead could mean." And one of our sons spoke up and said, "That's easy! It means that he rose from the dead!"

Now I did not tell my son that that was a tautology. I did not tell him that because I try not to be a douche bag with my own children. Whether or not I'm a douche bag with everybody else is, naturally, your call to make, Dear Reader.

What I did do was repeat the question: But what does rising from the dead mean? At that point our other son piped up: It means that he came back in flesh and blood and not as a zombie.

A zombie.

Now the early church (and today's church) had to knock down the heresy of docetism, which maintained (maintains) that Jesus only appeared to be a human being, when in fact he was a divine spirit. That sounds more like a ghost to me.

And in fact we have a ghost in the Holy Trinity, but it's not Jesus Christ.

I'm unaware of any heresy that would mistake Jesus for a zombie, rather than a ghost, unless one thinks of the needlessly corporeal sacramental theology of the medieval church, which forced poor Berengar of Tours to, in a Mitt Romney-like repudiation of his own record, confess that the communing Christian "grinds Christ with his teeth."

But that makes the Christian a zombie, not Christ himself.

At any rate, my kids have firmly repudiated a potentially new heresy, and if you and yours do as well this Lenten season, well, good for you.

Debt

My senior Senator, in concert with some Senators across the aisle, is proposing a plan to address the nation's mounting debt. This is all well and good, but I think that the debt problem is a lot like the Israeli-Palestinian problem: everybody basically knows what the solution is; all that's lacking is the will to do it.

Consequently, we don't need a new plan. We need a crisis that will provoke action. When Congress and President Reagan restructured Social Security in 1983, they did so because the Social Security Administration was less than a year away from not being able to write checks. When Congress and President Clinton balanced the budget in the late 1990s through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, they were responding to the electoral shock of Ross Perot and his obsession with the debt.

No crisis means no action. And make no mistake, the budget cutting that's unfolding on Capitol Hill is not meaningful action on the debt. The programs that House Republicans have in their sights are thin slices of the budget pie compared to military spending and Medicare.

Actually there is a crisis today--a jobs crisis. Unemployment is still unacceptably high. Unfortunately, given the weakness of the economy, the budget trimming that Congress is getting ready to do will actually make the jobs crisis worse. The government recently revised down the GDP figures for the fourth quarter of last year. The lower growth was due to... wait for it... wait for it... reduced government spending.

Sigh.