Avdat

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...

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.

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.

Marathons and other secular ascetic regimes

You know, studying the awesome lengths our ancestors in faith went to punish their bodies for the Lord is one of the more inspiring aspects of studying medieval history. I know; I know, you're wondering, So what's it going to be, Marvin? Bricking yourself up in the wall of a church? Corporal punishment for sneezing in worship? Naw, I decided to run a marathon instead.

The Richmond Marathon is a great event. Patrick Henry himself came out with a bullhorn to cheer us on. I grunted "Give me liberty or give me death" at him, and he said that he liked the sound of that that so much he'd have to remember it. A great gospel choir was singing where the course ran by Virginia Union. The race organizers add a few junk food stops to the usual water/gatorade stands. Gummy bears. Coke. Krispy Kreme donuts. Best of all, at mile 22, there were dudes out in the median of Fauquier Avenue handing out shots of Yuengling. You guys were my guardian angels!

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.

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...

Inclusive language back in the day

Halden notesthat the uber-repressed, hyper-patriarchal Augustine once called God Mother. I believe John Calvin did the same thing in his Commentary on Isaiah, although he may have employed a simile rather than a metaphor. I don't have the text before me.

Here's a hunch. Such language is not a protest against patriarchy, or even an attempt to oh-so-slightly smooth patriarchy's sharp edges, but is a direct result of patriarchy. Given the relatively static gender roles of both Calvin and Augustine's day, both theologians could probably experiment with such daring language and feel utterly safe in doing so. "God our Mother" is a kind of via negativafor a pre-egalitarian Christianity.

I'm thinking this because I'm remembering a pastoral visit to an elderly couple, in which the husband, a World War II Navy vet, broke out some old photos of his time in the service. Some of the pictures were of a day when the whole crew, to blow off steam, dressed in drag and threw a party. He laughed out loud at them, but they sort of creeped me out. I think that our different reactions owe a lot to the fact that I came of age in an era of much less gender role stability.

Long story short: people's aversion to inclusive language is at bottom about the vertigo they feel living in a world in which women do run meetings and preside at the Eucharist. But I'm no rhetorician, or a women's studies expert, so feel free to correct me.

Can kissing this bone clear my blocked duct, or should I try the sage again?

We kicked off our Medieval Christianity class with Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints. A classmate who moonlights as a humanities teacher at a parochial high school said he appreciated the book because Brown rather forcefully pushes back against the CWthat the transition from Patristic to Medieval Christianity basically amounts to a re-paganization of the Church. That's the point of view he sees articulated in a lot of western civ textbooks.

Brown's argument, in short, is that both Jews and pagans regarded cemeteries as places of cultic pollution, and viewed with askance the Christian move to build churches over the graves of the martyrs. When Christianity moved into the Roman and post-Roman countryside, they erected shrines as monuments to the saints out there too. It wasn't so much the Church shrewdly co-opting the pagan pantheon--the goddess Brigit morphing into the nun who founded the Church at Kildaire, for example. It was instead the triumph of a Christianized urban patronage system over a rural healthcare system based on herbal remedies and magic. The sick in the countryside were convinced/compelled to seek healing from the martyred saint's relics at the shrine in the way that pagan urban Romans once sought relief from their patrons at the Forum. (The bishop here acts as the saint's authorized representative).

So, yea! No pagan-Christian syncretism! And Boo on all those Protestant historiographies that say as much about everything that happened between 325 and 1519.

But the problem with what did happen-assuming Brown's argument is correct--is that Christians engaged in an act of gross cultural imperialism as they evangelized the rural West. In terms of healing, it was probably a wash. The placebo effect from seeking a cure from an especially efficacious relic was probably as good as the trial by error herbal remedies rural Celts and Gallo-Romans had arrived at. But why not investigate whether or not the roots and herbs had any healing power apart from the incantations said over them, and run with it? Alas, it was an age of scientific and technological stasis.

Long story short: Christianity obviously changed a whole lot between, say, Irenaeus (3rd century) and Gregory the Great (7th century), and there's a bit fight in the scholarly community as to whether the Church conceded too much (see Russell's The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or too little (see any neo-pagan revisionist European history or any of the laments that Celtic Christianity got squashed by the Roman bureacracy) as it ensconced itself among the barbarians invaders and the rural populace.

It's a fun period to study because Christianity always has to sail between Scylla of syncretism and the Charybdis of imperialism in its missionary journey, and you get these issues in spades in the late antique-early medieval period.

If it weren't for the Reds, we wouldn't have Tang

One of the curiosities of western intellectual history is that the scientific revolution didn't happen before it did, says Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages. The reintroduction of Aristotle to the West planted the seed, but Thomas Aquinas, the most adept exploiter of Aristotelian thought, only used Aristotelian thought to confirm Christian Platonism. Cantor views Thomism as something of an intellectual cul-de-sac.

Proving Christian Platonism with Aristotelian method is a tour de force, but a lot of people at the time (the Franciscans) were unhappy with Thomism because they thought that religion was a matter of the heart and will, not reason and intellect. So to secure the revelatory basis for religion, they turned away from Aristotle, but they did use his methods for science. In the 14th and 15th centuries thinkers unknown to us were positing theories of inertia and gravity, but their theories never gained wide circulation because nobody was interested in funding their work. It was only when European military leaders started experimenting with artillery fire that anybody got interested in physics, because they needed reliable rules to predict how shells would fly through the air.

The more things change...

We visited the spectacular Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport last December. It really brings out the little boy in you. Walking down the corridor to the gigantic hanger containing the exhibits, you're looking down the nose of an SR-71 Blackbird. Cool. Intimidating. The museum also contains a Concorde (a frakking Concorde!), the Space Shuttle Enterprise (the prototype that never flew), and all kinds of space capsules.

There's also plenty of military aircraft, including the Enola Gay. As you walk through the exhibits, it's quite striking how quickly aerospace technology evolved during the wars. The stuff that was flying before 1914 is primitive compared to what was in the air just four years later.

Which makes me sad. If kids like it, it's cool, right? Dinosaurs, planes. Stuff that's bigger and faster is cool, especially to those who are slower and littler, and kids are the slowest and the littlest. It's just too bad that the leading reason why all this cool stuff is on display is that 20th century Europe was hell-bent on self-destruction.