Avdat

Dissertation topic here just for the askin'

OK, so I think a title like "Queer Eye for the Ascetic Guy: Homoeroticism, Children and the Making of Monks" is too clever by half for a referred journal. But there it is, in my June issue of JAAR.

So, I read it. I mean, I am going to do a dissertation on monasticism, so I have a, ahem, professional obligation to immerse myself in the full range of scholarly literature on the topic. And the author argues, and I quote, "Monastic texts prohibiting sex nonetheless authorize and normalize a voyeuristic gaze on the part of monks. They cultivate a decidedly queer eye for the ascetic guy." Get it? Get it? Just because I can read Coptic doesn't mean I don't watch TV!

If you don't get it, the author provides a few examples. One is of a father and son who went out to the desert to live as monks, but the other monks were gossiping about something sexually illicit afoot, until the son put a stop to it by disfiguring his body in chemicals used to embalm mummies. Our geeky, culturally relevant academic asks the naughty questions, "Did you flinch when reading of Zacharias entering the natron? Did you take pleasure in the flinch?"

Speaking only for myself, the answers are Yes, and, um, NO, respectively.

But I'm not a naughty little monk trying to subdue my passions.

We knew this, didn't we? It's a variation on a theme that goes back at least to Romans 7 in which Paul observes the irony that law can actually incite the behavior it prohibits. Pity the poor monk who didn't know what lust was until he read some lurid cautionary tale about sodomy in an Egyptian cave. Now he's a quivering mass of homoeroticism.

If this can get published in a peer-reviewed journal, then I swear that there's a dissertation out there waiting to be written about Deadspin. Because it does the same thing. The site's wall-to-wall coverage of Michael David Barrett, peeping tom to ESPN reporter Erin Andrews, is a case in point. Deadspin writers and commenters rightly skewer Barrett for the pathetic loser that he and any peeping tom is, but even as the reader enjoys Barrett getting his just desserts, he's thinking about what Barrett got to see--Erin Andrews--Naked!!! See, stern and witty disapproval of voyeurism makes us all... voyeurs.

The rest of the site does the same thing. There's skin there, but also text that mocks the surgical enhancements, the obvious promiscuity of the coed, and the crass media pandering to idiot guys for whom watching sports and oggling girls are two great tastes that taste great together. But Deadspin still incites you to lust, even as it exhorts you not to be "that guy." See what I mean?

When you turn this into a dissertation and then a monograph, I don't ask that you dedicate it to me, only that you mention me among all the other little people who helped you write it...

On "natural disasters"

Every once in a while, somebody shoots their mouth off about the bad things that happen in our world. There were Robertson and Falwell opining that 9/11 was God's judgment on the gays, and John Hagee's statement that God willed the Holocaust in order to establish the State of Israel (which I blogged about here). Now we have John Piper declaring that God sent a tornado to Minneapolis to punish the Lutherans meeting there for ordaining gays (HT). Always the gays!

In one sense I don't have much to say about Piper that I didn't say about Hagee. Piper knows a bit too much about God's will; he collapses the distinction between providence and history, and reduces the hermeneutical circle to a point. Piper's statement is entirely consistent with a theology in which God ordains evil in order to be glorified through its punishment, and lucky for Piper that he's on God's side! He need not fear but only take grim satisfaction in all manner of "natural disasters" and "strange coincidences."
But between the Hagee post and today I took a seminar on Augustine, and my final paper was on Augustine's doctrine of evil. I focused on book seven of the Confessions, and then branched out from there to survey Augustine on "natural evil," and the origins of evil (God? The Free Will? Fallen Angels?) I'm going to re-post the last third of that paper here because, while Piper's statement is offensive, it doesn't come out of the blue, as you'll see if you have the patience to slog through it!

Last point before the paper--which I also left in the comment thread at Inhabitatio Dei. We would all do well to do less theorizing about the origin and meaning of evil, and do more practical work ameliorating its effects.

            In sum, Augustine’s conviction that evil is internal and insubstantial is the corollary of his confession that God is good, omnipotent and immaterial. These twin beliefs represent a marked departure from his earlier Manichean beliefs, that good and evil are materialistic, dualistic principles whose warfare precipitated the world and its mixture of good and evil. Both Nebridius and the Neo-Platonists helped free Augustine’s theology from materialism, the former by undermining his faith in astrology and a mutable God, and the latter by giving him an argument for evil as insubstantial and a way to experience God as immaterial.  Ultimately, the journey was one of spiritual maturation, not just intellectual enlightenment.  Augustine attributes his arrival at the Truth and perseverance in it to the One who is Truth incarnate, Jesus Christ, whom the pagans do not worship, the philosophers will not consent to learn from, and whom the Manicheans have deeply misunderstood.  The one who humbled himself humbled the proud Augustine, rendering him teachable and able to both see the light and abide in it.

            While this paper has traced the development of Augustine’s theodicy, some unanswered questions remain, and the implications of his theodicy have yet to be fleshed out.  To these concerns this paper now turns. 

            All things, to the extent that they exist, are good. On this maxim Augustine’s doctrine of insubstantial evil depends. All things? Even, say, a locust plague?  And what of the goodness of good things, such as the moon, for is it not of dubious character when compared to the surpassing greatness of the sun? Perhaps God erred in denying to the moon the greatness of the sun, and perhaps God erred in creating such wretched creatures as voracious grasshoppers.

            Augustine briefly responds to this problem in Confessions VII:  “In some parts of it certain things are regarded as evil because they do not suit certain others; but these same things do fit in elsewhere, and they are good there, and good in themselves” (Conf. VII.13.19). The problem then, is not with the creature itself, but with an imbalance in the relationship between creatures. Locusts are good, but too many of them in one place may harm a wheat field. So in locating evil in the state of balance between the creatures, rather than in the creatures themselves, Augustine has yet again demonstrated evil’s insubstantial nature.

             In On Free Will, Augustine explains what it means that things in themselves are good, and collectively, very good.  Rather than faulting the glory of Thing X or God its Creator for not living up to the glory of Thing Y, one should appreciate the role that Thing X plays in the glory of Thing Y by offering itself to Thing Y by way of contrast:

For the earth contains land of all kinds, passing by gradual stages from the most fruitful and pleasant to the most deceitful and infertile tracts, so that you can only find fault with one kind of land by comparing it with a better kind.  So you ascend through all the grades of land with their varying praiseworthy qualities, and when you find the very best land you are glad that there are other kinds as well (On Free Will III.v.13).

 

            Thus in order to think of evil properly, it is important to “keep the totality in view” (Conf. VII.13.19). Fallen humans tend to evaluate good and evil from an ad nostrum point of view; that is, “If it is good for us, it is good, and if it is bad for us, it is evil” (Brachtendorf 88-9, cf. City of God XI.22). But when one adopts a God’s eye view of creation, one sees that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and even the lowliest part is not without value for the contribution it makes to the glory of what ranks ahead of it.

            Augustine assumes a hierarchical universe in which things that manifest a more complex unity are greater than things that manifest a simpler unity.  For instance, mice, which are a living unity of body and mind, are greater than bread, which is an inanimate object.  Ad nostrum, we would greatly prefer bread in our cupboard to mice, but “a more wholesome judgment” (Conf. VII.14.20) would assign the greater glory to mice (Brachtendorf 88-9).

            Thus there is a strong aesthetic dimension to Augustine’s theodicy.  Just as the color black, in the hands of a skilled artist can contribute to a masterpiece, those things which humans experience as evil are, in fact, subordinated to the greater glory of the whole according to the creative will of God.

            In his essay “Insubstantial Evil,” Rowan Williams argues that Augustine does not present an aesthetic of evil. The statement, “For you evil has no being at all” (Conf. VII.13.19) does not imply a point of view, writes Williams, but only that “unlike us, God is not tempted to short-circuit the argument and ascribe to evil a substantive life it does not and cannot have” (Williams 107). Yet Augustine’s own words about “keeping the totality in view,” his accusation in City of God XI.22 that an ad nostrum point of view leads directly to the Manichean heresy, and his treatise On Order belie Williams’ assertion that Augustine’s theodicy does not contain an aesthetic element. In the latter, Augustine’s conversation partner Trygetius acquits Divine Providence of responsibility for evil, but faults the human inability to survey the totality of creation (Sohn 49).

            One last issue remains, the origin of this vitiation of the good and imbalance in the created order called evil.  Augustine, one will recall, locates evil internally, in the free choice of the human will to turn from the good.  Because evil is insubstantial, the human will is not evil by nature, but defective.  What was left unanswered was what accounted for this turning away.  In City of God XII Augustine picks up the trail and follows it back in salvation history as far as he can. Before God created human beings God created the angels.  Angels are rational, spiritual beings with a will, and theirs’ has to be a good will because all created things, to the extent that they exist, are good.  But some of these angels, of their own free will, turned away from God and in on themselves in haughty self-regard. These wicked angels, in turn, tempted the first humans to sin, and Adam and Eve, of their own free will, gave into temptation. Since “all sinned in Adam,” there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as natural evil. There are only evils that rebuke sinners and teach the elect to hope in a better world to come.

            What caused the will to choose such a thing?  This is a useless question (Maker 156):

Augustine.—Since will is the cause of sin, you now ask what is the cause of the will. If I could find one, are you not going to ask for the cause of the cause I have found? What limit will there be to your quest, what end to inquiry and explanation? You ought not to push your inquiry deeper… An evil will, therefore, is the cause of all evils” (On Free Will III.xv.48).

 

            Another way Augustine puts it is that there is no efficient cause of the will’s turning from God, only a deficient cause (City of God XII.7). The buck stops with the will. Now there may be some inherent instability in the will. Though created good, it is created ex nihilo, and prone to return to nothingness through the privation of falling away from the good (City of God XIV.13). Nonetheless, we are left with something of a mystery as to that first turning of the will away from God. Or are we? In contrasting the good and evil angels Augustine writes,

Those other angels were created good but have become evil by their own bad will; and this bad will did not originate from their nature, which was good. It came through a voluntary falling away from good, so that evil is caused not by good, but by falling away from good. Either they received less grace of the divine love than did the others, who continued in that grace; or, if both were created equally good, the one sort fell through their own evil will, while the others had greater help to enable them to attain to the fullness of bliss with the complete assurance that they will never fall away (City of God XII.9)

 

            The consensus in the seminar was that Augustine raised the first option, only to dismiss it in favor of the second, and that the phrase “while others had greater help…” refers to the gift of perseverance given to the good angels as a reward for their obedience. But Babcock reads it differently:

In the end, then, Augustine does propose—perhaps as a bulwark against the intimation that the fall of the evil angels was a matter or sheer chance?—a differentiation between the two groups of angels, the evil and the good… The critical point of distinction between the two groups of angels turns out ultimately to rest in an external factor, something that God has given to the one but not to the other… To the inexplicable conundrum of the good will’s unprompted turn from God to self, then, Augustine has added the inexplicable mystery of a God who, for no apparent reason, gives aid to some and withholds aid from other angels… [I]t is in relation to the angelic fall that Augustine explicitly addresses the question of the origin of the evil will, and here, despite his best efforts, his analysis swivels between a position that, in effect, reduces evil to a random outcome… and a position that... makes the first evil will a function of God’s withholding aid

(106-7).

 

            Babcock’s analysis points the way toward a darker theodicy that can be argued for based on Augustine’s theology. Perhaps God willed the angelic fall and consequent human fall in order that a fallen creation would result. Indeed, Augustine pronounces this present miserable creation “perfect” (On Free Will III.ix.26), not only from the point of view of a God who can see in an instant how the inferior creatures glorify the superior, and not only in light of the future glory awaiting the suffering saints, but also in light of the present miseries for sinners justly punished. A pre-lapsarian world could not have manifested the good of the punishment of sin.

            In the Supralapsarian belief that God damns some for God’s own glory, and in all theodicies, both amateur and professional, that appeal to God’s sovereign will to pre-empt hard questions about the goodness of God and the reality of evil, Augustine’s immaterial Creator becomes something of a mad artist who is enthralled with his project to the point of indifference to the pain and suffering of the creatures on the canvas. Perhaps for this reason Williams wants to deny, despite much evidence to the contrary, the aesthetic dimension of Augustine’s doctrine of evil.

            Yet Augustine denies that sins or misery are necessary to the perfection of the universe (On Free Will III.ix.26).  There is neither aesthetic necessity nor moral necessity of evil in the beautiful chain of being (Sohn 52). There is a God who makes all things work together for good for those who love him (Romans 8:28), who judged it better to bring good out of evil, than to not permit evil to exist (Sohn 52).

Works Cited

Augustine.  City of God XII.  London:  Penguin Books, 1972.

                        .  The Confessions. Hyde Park NY: New City Press, 1997. 

                        . “On Free Will.” Augustine: Earlier Writings. John H.S. Burleigh, ed.

            Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953.

                        . Teaching Christianity. Hyde Park NY: New City Press, 1996. 

Babcock, William S.  “Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency.” The Ethics of St. Augustine.

            Atlanta: Scholars Press. 87-113.

Brachtendorf, Johannes. “The Goodness of Creation and the Reality of Evil:  Suffering As a

            Problem in Augustine’s Theodicy.” Augustinian Studies 31.1 (2000) 79-92.

Coyle, John Kevin. “God’s Place in Augustine’s Anti-Manichaean Polemic.”  Augustinian

            Studies 38.1 (2007). 87-102.

Cress, D.A. “Augustine’s Privation Account of Evil: A Defense.” Augustinian Studies 20

            (1989). 109-128.

Maker, William. “Augustine on evil:  the dilemma of the philosophers.” International Journal

            for Philosophy of Religion 15.3 (1984). 149-160.

Plotinus.  The Enneads. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.

Sohn, Hohyun. “The Beauty of Hell? Augustine’s Aesthetic Theodicy and Its Critics.” 

            Theology Today 64. 47-57. 

Williams, Rowan. “Insubstantial Evil.” Augustine and His Critics. Dodaro & Lawless, eds. 

            London: Routledge. 105-123.

Paganisms

Michael Novak on Obama's first week:

The Obama presidency is only one week old, but it has already limned its main moral outlines:

On January 20, President Obama called for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. He also declared his intention to give multiple rights and privileges to homosexual couples. 

 [snip]

From these announcements we learn that President Obama recognizes no difference between the Jewish-Christian covenant between a woman and a man (a covenant that they will have and nurture children, if they are so blessed), and a civil contract between two persons of any sex, in order to set up a household of affection and sexual favors.

This is a relapse into paganism. The point of monogamous family networks is to treat male and female with complementary and mutually cooperative dignity and to tie the power of sexuality (male, especially) to self-sacrificing communities of love.

Perhaps Novak means "hedonism" rather than "paganism," although bringing homosexual relations under the regime of rights and responsibilities that the estate of marriage entails doesn't sound awfully hedonistic to me. And civil marriage is not by necessity a  "community of self-sacrificing love." That would be the Church, in which case the proper concern would be that gays got married in a Church surrounded by Christians who will support them and hold them accountable, rather than tying the knot at the magistrate's office.

More to the point, Paganism in many of its Indo-European manifestations, is a religion whose chief end is to propitiate god/the gods in order to maximize this-worldly success: health, economic well-being, security, and so forth.

To the extent that American government, technology and economic theory are attuned to economic growth, longevity, and maintaining a balance of power among competing interest groups, our society's ethos is pagan, although we don't look to transcendent power, either good or malign, to account for health and wealth and security. Studying proximate causes, rather than ultimate causes, is enough. Novak himself, to the extent that he's a cheerleader for the American way, is more thoroughly paganized than he surely realizes.

The question is, what do you do about this? A-ha! Time for a lesson from history!

A lot changed as Roman power declined in the West. Christianity went from being a persecuted sect to a state religion. The practice of religion began to focus on shrines that held the relics of saints. Christians learned to bless the rough and tumble techniques of statecraft, so long as the sword was deployed against non-Christians (Jews, Arians, pagans, etc.)

Russell's book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that Christianity is essentially a world-denying religion focused on sin, forgiveness and eschatological judgment, but it had to give a bit when it came up against a world-affirming and robust paganism in the Germanic tribes rampaging through the Western Roman Empire. What was a temporary concession to the pagan worldview became a syncretistic religion. Old pagan shrines are re-dedicated to the Christian deity. Old pagan remedies for illness are replaced by the healing power of saints' relics. And Christian morality gets boiled down to Germanic notions of honor. So you get the Crusades. Medieval Christianity, Russell argues, ain't much different than Voodoo.

Now one might ask how world-denying a religion is whose founder raised the dead, healed the sick, fed the poor, feasted with sinners, and so forth. Russell's book is not without its critics in the scholarly community, and here is a review that seems to reflect both the praise and blame that scholars have afforded it.

More to the point, to what extent does the Church acknowledge this worldly concerns as legitimate, while reorienting people to other-worldly concerns, the meaning of one's life in light of the certainty of death, the dependence on a new creation in light of the failure of all man-made utopias and the scientific judgment that one day this whole universe is just going to fizzle out?

Why I don't read the Presbyterian Outlook

I picked up a copy today in the student center and read a letter-to-the-editor that boiled down the homosexuality debate to scripture v. experience. It was like I'd stumbled upon a 1995 Presbyterian Outlook preserved in amber. Neither dog-eared nor the slightest hint of yellowing.

Who are these people who are content to carry on a decades-long argument that never changes? Just endless recitation of the same talking points? This is why I don't argue with anybody about homosexuality anymore. I just treat people the way I think God expects me to treat them, and I vote, when I have the opportunity.

Square pegs, holiness and justice

I can't get that Talk of the Nation episode about the indeterminacy of gender off my mind.  I think about it in light of Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology (sorry, it's boxed up; I can't cite page numbers), in which he writes that Leviticus and Deuteronomy are parallel and perhaps competing reflections on what it means to honor the God of the Exodus. 

Leviticus says that you carve a zone of order and purity out of a chaotic and disorderly world so that the Holy God can dwell with you.  Deuteronomy says that you create an anti-Egypt, a society of justice and righteousness befitting God's Lordship, not Pharaoh's. 

So if your preoccupation is with order and purity, you'll want to steer clear of life's square pegs.  Shrimp, for instance.  Is it a land creature?  Well, it has legs and armor, but it lives in the sea.  Better not put that in your mouth.  Or what about poor Jacob, who got his testicles crushed at the quarry?  He looks like a man, but he can no more spread his seed than my wife can.  Better not let him in the sanctuary.

So with sexual orientation and sexual identity, a purity-based religion would want to keep clerical collars off of gays, lesbians and transsexuals, for all three seem to blur well-established boundaries.  A justice-based religion might want to affirm these people, for just like the widows, orphans and aliens in ancient Israel, these people are vulnerable, and we need to bend over backwards to provide for them.

Brueggemann argues that in the sexuality debates, the two sides usually talk past each other because their arguments begin and end in parallel universes.

Now we are not at an impasse.  It is not the case that the Bible offers two ways of keeping covenant with God, and we can pick and choose.  The prophets, who are in some sense Israel's prosecuting attorneys, tend to come down on the side of justice when justice and purity collide.  So Isaiah basically tells his contemporaries to ignore the Mosaic law against barring eunuchs from the worshiping assembly, so long as the eunuchs keep the sabbath.  And the sabbath in Deuteronomy has a decidedly humanitarian rationale.

In other words, so what if you're a square peg?  If you're a good square peg, i.e., you do right by your neighbor, then you belong.

Square pegs invite our derision.  Gray areas frighten us.  Certainty is preferable to ambiguity.  But there they are, gays, lesbians and transsexuals.  Their relationships don't fit our paradigm for love.  They call into question settled assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman. And we can choose whether to shut them out in God's name, or welcome them in God's name.  That is, we can abide a bit of ambiguity in the name of justice, or not abide some of our fellow human beings in the name of holiness. 

As I see it, a bit of ambiguity is far preferable to any amount of injustice.

Gender is plastic

Listening to yesterday's Talk of the Nation, I learned that Olympic officials have to test for more than EPO and HGH when snooping for cheaters. They have to test for gender. Men have won medals in the past impersonating women.

The problem is, according to Jennifer Finley Boylan, that gender isn't all that easy to pin down. There are more than a few men and women walking around whose chromosomes are more ambiguous than their identities are. There are a small number of people with indeterminate sex organs, but have been raised as either male or female and fully embrace that identity as adults. In its present form, says Boylan, the Olympic testing regime can cast an unnecessary cloud on some competitors by revealing physical or genetic abnormalities about the athletes they might never have been aware of, or have nothing to do with their self-understanding as women.

Boylan wrote an op-ed about this in The New York Times, and remarked that she'd gotten a lot of angry emails in response. For a lot of people, the news that there are shades of gray in the male-female polarity is a deeply disturbing concept.

Sexual identity and sexual orientation are distinct topics, but I couldn't help but think about all this in light of the long-running debate in both church and society about the legitimacy of same-sex relationships. I know that society has become a lot more permissive, but unlike co-habitation and serial monogamy, I don't see the issue of same-sex marriage an erosion of standards. We're learning more about what makes people tick, and what we've learned is that sexual orientation is on a continuum. It's not that homosexuality is a willed deviation from the norm--Brittney and Madonna's french kiss notwithstanding.

It seems prudent as well as compassionate to encourage the few people who for whatever reason cluster at the far end of the continuum to either be celibate or mirror all that is best in heterosexual marriages. That means giving them the opportunity to formalize their relationships, and giving them the support we give to all other married couples.

Left my heart in San Francisco

Gay, Catholic, conservative Andrew Sullivan is the go-to blogger today:

Ed Harrington, the general manager of the city's Public Utilities Commission, was one of the staff members in the mayor's office shortly after the decision was released. Harrington has lived with his partner for 35 years and in 2004 Harrington married about 40 same-sex couples.

"You wait for this your whole life," said Harrington, who said he planned to call his partner and say, "I love you. What more do you say on a day like this?"

I've spent the bulk of my ordained ministry dealing with guys who live by the "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" motto and gals who inexplicably accommodate them.  I'm finding it hard to get all that worked up over people who are eager to marry.

Mark Driscoll is a jerk

Avdat reader Bob W calls me out:

Mark Driscoll has preached hundreds of hours of sermons and it's a bit unfair to pin him down based on 2 or 3 sentences taken out of context. When you've listened to 7 or 8 complete sermons and then have a good feel of where he stands, come back and give an honest opinion. Until then, it seems like you may be scratching an itch.

Fair enough.  I begin by reading all of Driscoll's answers in the Relevant Magazine interview from which the "2 or 3 sentences" were lifted.  Judging from the first Q and A, I don't think I've taken anything out of context:

What trends in church and worship styles do you see? Are they positive or negative?

Mark Driscoll: I’ll be happy when we have more than just prom songs to Jesus sung by some effeminate guy on an acoustic guitar offered as mainstream worship music. Right now most worship music is still coming from the top down through such things as Christian radio and record labels. But the trend today in a lot of churches is writing your own music to reflect your culture and community, and I pray this trend of music from the bottom up continues.

This guy is a jerk.  A homophobic jerk.  Great--the guy who was giving swirlies in the locker room to the computer geeks and tuba players has grown up to run a megachurch in Seattle, and has defined sanctification as conformity to his own weird, hyper-masculine standards.

Does Driscoll know that 30% of teen suicides are attributable to young people struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identity?  Does he care?  Such casual nastiness gives ecclesiastical sanction to acts of violence.  Whether that would give someone like Driscoll pause is a question I can't answer yet.  Maybe the study series on Ruth and Nehemiah will enlighten me.

In the meantime, Driscoll still seems like a whacked out guy at the center of a personality cult, who inspires his minions not with calls to take up a cross, but with calls to lift up the girly men of the world in a group wedgie. 

Again I say, put your money where your mouth is.  There are at least ten Army Recruiting offices in metro Seattle.  I hear they need chaplains in Iraq.

Bush vs. Pittsburgh Presbytery

I'd been feeling better about the health of my denomination.  But this week, not so much. 

Some background for non-PC(USA) types:  Like a lot of Christians we Presbyterians have been duking it out over homosexuality for going on a generation.  1997 was a milestone year. The denomination amended its Constitution by adding specific language to bar the ordination of gays and lesbians:

Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

Most every year there have been votes to amend or rescind this language, all of which have failed by narrow margins.

In 2006 the denomination's Task Group on Peace, Unity and Purity made an interesting recommendation:  to resurrect the old concept of "scruples" for use in ordination standards.  Time was, candidates for ordination had to declare a scruple if they disagreed with a part of the Westminster Confession.  The governing body then had to decide whether or not said scruple was a significant enough departure from the essentials of the Reformed faith to warrant saying No to the candidate.

The PUP Report proposed letting elders and ministers declare a scruple about their ability to comply with the fidelity and chastity language.  The examining body, Sessions in the case of elders, and Presbyteries in the case of Ministers, would decide whether or not to allow the ordination to proceed.

It amounted to a states rights approach to the ordination issue, rather than a federalist approach.  It won approval by a strong majority.

I liked the compromise.  There is no consensus on homosexuality in the PC(USA).  And while this drives advocates on both sides nuts, it seems to make sense to simply acknowledge it and sidestep it, rather than suiting up year after year for more trench warfare that fails to break the stalemate.  By retaining the long-fought-over language but giving some flexibility in applying it on a case-by-case basis, neither the far left nor the far right got what they wanted, but the broad middle of the denomination did.  They got a way to walk the Church back from the precipice, and move forward by focusing on mission and not on bruising annual fights over ordination standards.

But last week the Permanent Judicial Commission of the PC(USA) (our Supreme Court) ruled that scruples are for opinions only, and not for behavior. 

This really stinks.  The denomination had finally found a way to agree to disagree, but the PJC has torn it all up, and so now we are almost certainly back to where we were in the late 90s, with our annual fight like hell over homosexuality date in early-February, the meeting when presbyteries usually vote on proposed changes to the Constitution.

"Activist judges" can be found on the right as well as the left.

I feel sorry for the members of the PUP Task Group who risked friendships with their respective allies in order to reach out across fault lines, found some way to compromise with people with whom they strongly disagree, showed the denomination a healthy way forward, and now have it all flung in their faces.

And I think that the right wing of the Church will rue the day they "won" this victory in court.  They are slowly losing the argument on the legitimacy of same-sex relationships.  A compromise that let them retain their ideal language while leaving the door ajar for a gay or lesbian ordination here and there was about the best that they could have hoped for.  But now that the battle is joined again, it will continue to be fought until the fidelity and chastity language is stripped from the Book of Order.  And then they will have lost the war.

A Pyhrric victory indeed, this case.

I don't get Baptists

It took the Southern Baptist Convention 150 years to apologize for slavery.  I suppose it'll take another 150 years for them to get around to apologizing for stuff like this, but by then the nation's largest and most hidebound denomination will have surely set itself to some new tomfoolery.

That said, Rev. Shoemaker's argument, that the gay-friendly Myers Park Baptist deserves a seat at the SBC table because, "We think the local (Baptist) church ought to be free to interpret Scripture itself ..." seems deficient.  If your sole unifying principle is that you get to agree to disagree on everything, well then, that seems a bit tenuous to me.

The early Church, beset by heretics on all sides, established some boundaries by fixing the canon (a Bible with two testaments), writing a rule of faith (a creed), and establishing a hierarchical authority structure (the episcopate).  This three-legged stool is a durable support for the healthy exercise of church order.

Baptists want to do away with two of those legs in favor of creedless, autonomous congregations who rely on scripture alone.  But you get problems.  In fact, no one is without a creed.  For Southern Baptists it's a creed with two articles:  the inerrancy of scripture, and social ethics that elevate post-war patriotism and gender roles to the level of sacred dogma.  Your reading of the Bible had better conform to that creed, or you're out of here. 

A one-legged stool is an inherently unstable piece of furniture.