Confessions of a Would-Be Theologian

The Joys of Parenting

2012-01-15T13:32:00.001-08:00

It started Thursday night. I've been fighting off the same chest cold that sent Calista to the doctor's office New Year’s Day, so before I went to bed, I took a couple NyQuil to help me sleep. About 1:00 am, I woke out of a drug-fogged sleep to find our four-year-old son Caedmon crawling into our bed. That wasn't unprecedented, but it's not normal either. I was groggy enough that I decided to cut him some slack, so I put up with him squirming and kicking me for 15 minutes or so before finally deciding that no, he had to go back to his own bed. So I picked him up and carried him back to his room. I was setting him down into his bunk bed when I noticed a strong sour smell in the air, and simultaneously felt my hands plunge into a wet, sticky substance covering his blankets. My brain took a few seconds to put it all together and draw some conclusions. Then I sighed and picked him up and carried him back into our room. We made a bed for him on the floor, got a bowl from the kitchen, and put him down, hoping that would be the end of it.

About 20 minutes later, we were awoken again, to the sound of Caedmon gagging. Most of it made it in the bowl, but by no means all of it. More cleanup and consoling. Then something like sleep, more gagging, more cleanup, more consoling. This repeated itself all night long, every 20 minutes or so, until about 5:00 am, when Caedmon finally managed to get to sleep and stay asleep. About the same time, I removed myself to the couch downstairs, and got an hour or so of rest.

When we woke up, we let Caedmon continue to sleep in our bed, and Galena began cleaning his room. Our one-year-old daughter Calista wasn't making any noise, so we let her sleep, while I tried to entertain our two-year-old son, Brendan. By 8:30 or so, though, Galena decided that she really needed to check on Calista. When she opened the door, she got a full whiff: turns out Calista had been having the same troubles, but had suffered them all in complete silence. (We even had the baby monitor on!) So her crib, her blankets, and her hair was encrusted with not-quite-dried puke. Calista herself was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, and gave us a big grin as we gingerly tried to extract her from the Crib of Dried Vomit.

After that, Friday and Friday night passed more-or-less without event. On Saturday morning, we thought we'd seen the worst of it, and since the kids were begging to go outside and play in the snow, we got them dressed and spent some time outdoors. (Caedmon discovered that it's painfully tricky to ride your bike in the snow; Brendan and Calista discovered, once again, that your hands get cold and hurt when you play in the snow and refuse to wear gloves.)

But Saturday afternoon, Calista started having a variety of diarrhea episodes, including at least one "Level 3 Containment Failure" (I'll leave the exact definition of that to your imagination). And then Galena started looking green around the gills. And then she threw up. And then the other end as well. Rinse and repeat.

So Galena took herself to bed, while I did my best to entertain the kids. Caedmon and Calista were definitely feeling better, but were still a little stunned after their run-in with the Stomach Bug That's Going Around. Brendan seemed to have a stainless steel immune system, however, and wasn't going to let anything slow him down. (And you have to remember, through all this, that I've got a cold too, and periodically feel like I'm about to hack up a lung.) When evening rolled around, I finally got the kids fed and down to bed, and all seemed quiet. So I checked in with Galena, who was still in bed, and then left for Bellevue, for a movie night with some friends that had been long planned (and for which I was supposed to supply the movie).

I got a call from a groggy-sounding Galena around 8:30. "Brendan just threw up," she said, sounding on the verge of tears. "Can you come home?" By 9:00 pm or so, I was thus available to make myself the target for Brendan's third heave of the evening. After several more abortive attempts to get Brendan to sleep, I gave up, and for an hour or two, he sat on my lap with a bowl in his hands. We passed the time by watching extreme skiing videos off of YouTube (at Brendan's request). We'd pause the video - or sometimes not - whenever Brendan started heaving, then I'd wipe his mouth, and we'd start watching the video again. It was oddly bonding. By midnight, the worst had passed, and I put him to bed.

I should note that during all this, my side of the bed had gotten nailed with at least one round, so I elected to spend the rest of the night in the guest bed in the library. Galena's side was relatively clean, and more than that, she was too tired to care.

I got up around 7:30 this morning to find Brendan and Caedmon in great spirits: they weren't up to the Running and Chasing Game, precisely, but they were quarreling normally and demanding books and juice and videos. But by 9:00 am, when Calista still hadn't made any noise, I decided to check on her. Turns out that (once again) she'd been having the same trouble as everyone else, but (also once again) hadn't complained to let anyone know about it. The carpet around her crib, her bedding, her hair, and the outside of her pajamas were covered with one particularly noxious substance; the inside of her pajamas, and most of her body, was covered with a different one, surprisingly similar in texture and smell, and equally objectionable. Even after I gave Calista a shower, Galena was still combing unidentified chunks out of her hair.

That brings us up to the present. I'm the only one who hasn't gotten the bug yet, but I can feel it circling warily at a distance, like a pack of wolves preparing for the attack. We've basically decided that all the normal household rules and routines are out the window. The kids are watching videos and drinking juice and eating pretty much whenever and whatever they want. Galena informs me that Calista has just fallen asleep in the hallway. Brendan and Caedmon have scattered a box of paper clips around my office, and I can barely bring myself to care. Civilization and discipline has given way to raw survival.

Wish us luck.

My favorite C# micro-optimizations #2: 1D Arrays

2011-11-04T16:42:00.001-07:00

This is my second post on my favorite C# micr0-optimizations. Everything I said in the first post applies to this one as well, namely, don’t optimize until you know that you need to; and spend most of your optimization budget optimizing the algorithms, rather than figuring out which way to access an array is faster.

That said, this was a surprise to me: jagged arrays (e.g., arrays of arrays) are much faster than rectangular arrays: but indexed access into a 1D array is faster yet.

In other words, this is relatively slow:

   1:  for (int x = 0; x < size1; x++)

   2:  {

   3:      for (int y = 0; y < size2; y++)

   4:      {

   5:          result = twoDArray[x, y];

   6:      }

   7:  }

This is significantly faster:

   1:  for (int x = 0; x < size1; x++)

   2:  {

   3:      for (int y = 0; y < size2; y++)

   4:      {

   5:          result = jaggedArray[x][y];

   6:      }

   7:  }

But this is the fastest:

   1:  for (int x = 0; x < size1; x++)

   2:  {

   3:      for (int y = 0; y < size2; y++)

   4:      {

   5:          result = oneDArray[x * size2 + y];

   6:      }

   7:  }

Benchmark results on my machine (1000 iterations through a 1000x1000 array):

2DArrayTest action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 3111, averageCompletionTime = 3101.400
JaggedArrayTest action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 2283, averageCompletionTime = 2256.000
1DArrayTest action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 1698, averageCompletionTime = 1638.800

It’s also very much worth noting that the order in which the iteration happens is important. Sequential memory access is faster than purely random memory access, most likely because data is fetched from main memory to the CPU’s cache in chunks, so that subsequent sequential reads are from cache.

In other words, if instead of this at the center of each loop:

result = jaggedArray[x][y];
result = twoDArray[x, y];
result = oneDArray[x * size2 + y];

We switch the order of the indexes, so that memory is accessed out-of-order (this is called “diagonal access”):

result = jaggedArray[y][x];
result = twoDArray[y, x];
result = oneDArray[y * size1 + x];

Then the tests take more than twice as long:

JaggedArrayTest action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 7499, averageCompletionTime = 7676.400
2DArrayTest action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 6790, averageCompletionTime = 6818.600
1DArrayTest action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 5862, averageCompletionTime = 5883.200

It’s interesting that in a diagonal access pattern, rectangular arrays are indeed faster than jagged arrays: but one-dimensional arrays are still the fastest.

My favorite C# micro-optimization #1: Buffer.BlockCopy()

2011-11-03T13:38:00.001-07:00

So a caveat first-off. Micro-optimizations are evil. You almost never need them. You can live the vast majority of your life as a programmer and never use them; and most of the time you use them, you’re going to use them incorrectly. If your program is running slow, you’ll almost never find some tiny little micro-optimization that will fix it.

But there are times when they’re handy, and with all the work I’ve been doing the last couple years on a custom Silverlight media stack, I’ve had a number of opportunities to learn about how to speed up code that gets called thousands of times each second. This series of articles is the result of that experience.

And my first suggestion is to use Buffer.BlockCopy() when you need to move data in and out of arrays. You don’t normally need to do this very heavily, but when you’re dealing with real-time multimedia, you’ll find yourself doing it all the time, so the faster you can do it, the better.

I mention this because a common way to move data from one array to another is through a for loop, like so:

   1:  for (int i = 0; i < sourceArray.Length; i++)

   2:  {

   3:      destinationArray[i] = sourceArray[i];

   4:  }

Unfortunately, that’s very nearly the slowest way to do it. (Array.Clone() is actually slower, but that’s another story.) A much better way to do it is to use Array.Copy(). Indeed, this is normally the preferred method, since you don’t have to worry about the size of the individual elements, which is an easy place to mess up. Moreover, Array.Copy() works for arrays of any type, instead of just intrinsic value types.

   1:  Array.Copy(sourceArray, 0, destinationArray, 0, sourceArray.Length);

But as it turns out, Buffer.BlockCopy() is slightly faster for many operations, since it doesn’t have to perform certain checks at the beginning of the copy:

   1:  Buffer.BlockCopy(sourceArray, 0, destinationArray, 0, sourceArray.Length * sizeof(short));

Benchmark results on my machine (10 million copies of a 64-element short[] array):

Buffer.BlockCopy action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 420, averageCompletionTime = 422.000
Array.Copy action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 478, averageCompletionTime = 482.600
forLoop action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 1092, averageCompletionTime = 1093.000

That said, the difference between Array.Copy() and Buffer.BlockCopy() tends to disappear the larger the amount of data to copy (while a for loop falls further and further behind). If you’re copying 64,000 elements instead of 64 elements, these are the results:

Buffer.BlockCopy action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 1251, averageCompletionTime = 1229.000
Array.Copy action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 1254, averageCompletionTime = 1218.200
forLoop action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 11063, averageCompletionTime = 11082.200

But there’s one significant caveat: if you only need to move a few elements, even the minimal overhead of Buffer.BlockCopy() can be too much. If you need to move less than 32 elements, you’ll probably find that a straightforward for loop (or perhaps an unrolled version of it) is the fastest. Of course, you’ll want to do your own testing to find out where the break-even point is. But here are my results with 1,000,000 copies of a 16-element array:

Buffer.BlockCopy action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 367, averageCompletionTime = 363.800
Array.Copy action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 418, averageCompletionTime = 420.000
forLoop action completed: iteration = 5, completionTime = 291, averageCompletionTime = 290.000

Fast (approximate) Sqrt method in C#

2011-11-01T16:28:00.001-07:00

As part of the video codec that Alanta uses, we need to calculate the variation between blocks in one frame and the equivalent blocks in the next frame. I’ve been using an algorithm proposed by Thiadmer Riemersma that looks something like this:

public static double GetColorDistance(byte r1, byte g1, byte b1, byte r2, byte g2, byte b2)
{
    int rmean = (r1 + r2) / 2;
    int r = r1 - r2;
    int g = g1 - g2;
    int b = b1 - b2;
    int weightR = 2 + rmean / 256;
    const int weightG = 4;
    int weightB = 2 + (255 - rmean) / 256;
    return Math.Sqrt(weightR * r * r + weightG * g * g + weightB * b * b);
}

It works pretty well, but that last step depends on a square root calculation, which is relatively slow; and when this is something you need to run on every pixel in a frame, you want it to be as fast as possible. Consequently, I’ve been looking at ways to optimize it.

The important thing to note is that for my purposes, close is good enough: I don’t need IEEE precision. It turns out that there’s a pretty good approximation that’s available in languages like C or C++ which let you do unsafe casts back and forth between ints and floats:

float sqrt_approx(float z)
{
    union
    {
        int tmp;
        float f;
    } u;
    u.f = z;
    u.tmp -= 1 << 23; /* Subtract 2^m. */
    u.tmp >>= 1; /* Divide by 2. */
    u.tmp += 1 << 29; /* Add ((b + 1) / 2) * 2^m. */
    return u.f;
}

The problem with this approach is that C# doesn’t normally let you play this kind of magic.

The key word being “normally”, of course.

Turns out there’s one trick you can use to make C# treat the same memory address as either an int or a float, and that’s to create a struct with a [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit)] attribute. (And surprisingly enough, the trick works in Silverlight as well.) The resulting class looks like this:

public class Approximate
{
    public static float Sqrt(float z)
    {
        if (z == 0) return 0;
        FloatIntUnion u;
        u.tmp = 0;
        u.f = z;
        u.tmp -= 1 << 23; /* Subtract 2^m. */
        u.tmp >>= 1; /* Divide by 2. */
        u.tmp += 1 << 29; /* Add ((b + 1) / 2) * 2^m. */
        return u.f;
    }

    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit)]
    private struct FloatIntUnion
    {
        [FieldOffset(0)]
        public float f;

        [FieldOffset(0)]
        public int tmp;
    }
}

The results are pretty good: it’s more than twice as fast, and the results tend to be within 2% of the “real” answer:

MathSqrtTest: averageCompletionTime = 2424.000
ApproxSqrtTest: averageCompletionTime = 1058.000
Average variation: 0.0253587081881525

If you want a bit more accuracy at the cost of an additional CPU cycle or two, you can use this one, based on the famous inverse square root method in Quake 3:

public static float Sqrt2(float z)
{
    if (z == 0) return 0;
    FloatIntUnion u;
    u.tmp = 0;
    float xhalf = 0.5f * z;
    u.f = z;
    u.tmp = 0x5f375a86 - (u.tmp >> 1);
    u.f = u.f * (1.5f - xhalf * u.f * u.f);
    return u.f * z;
}

It’s a tad slower than the first (though still nearly 2x as fast as Math.Sqrt()), but much more accurate:

MathSqrtTest: averageCompletionTime = 2428.400
ApproxSqrt2Test: averageCompletionTime = 1361.000
Average variation for method2: 0.000928551700594071

Dead to Sin, Alive to Christ

2011-09-25T18:58:00.001-07:00

Today was our last Sunday at Overlake Park Presbyterian Church. Three weeks ago, we made it public that we’d decided to begin attending a church closer to our house. This was a hard decision to make, and even harder to tell everyone about. Folks at OPPC have welcomed us warmly for the last seven years, and they love our kids. But it was nearly a half hour drive to church, and we decided that for our kids’ sake, we needed to belong to a church that was closer to home. So today we said goodbye. In a rather astonishing show of good will, they asked me to preach; and this is what I came up with.

Introduction

Many stories in the Bible evoke a sense of crisis, of paths diverging forever, of profound, world-changing events turning on the smallest details. God’s selection of Abraham. Moses hidden in the reeds. The sound of a horn at Jericho. The voice of an angel in Mary’s room. One of the most important examples of small details that change the course of history is found in the words that the risen Jesus spoke to Saul of Tarsus, when He met him on the road to Damascus. “Saul, Saul,” Jesus said, “why are you persecuting me?”

We’ve heard those words so many times that we often miss their significance. To put them into perspective, ask yourself the question, “Who was it that Saul had thought he was persecuting?” Because of course, Saul hadn’t been intending to persecute Jesus at all. As far as Saul knew, Jesus was dead and buried, and good riddance. Saul had been harassing Jesus’ followers precisely because Jesus wasn’t around to bother with. But that day, when Saul fell blinded onto the ground, Jesus didn’t say, “Saul, why are you persecuting my followers?” He said instead, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

We all know the rest of the story. As a result of his archetypal “Damascus road experience,” Saul became a Christian. He disappeared from sight for some years. And when we hear from him next, he is already an apostle and a missionary, proclaiming loudly and eloquently the story of Jesus’ life and death. But Paul is also doing something else that is quite interesting. He’s not just telling the story of Jesus: he’s telling us what the story means. Because, after all, that story is a little ambiguous, isn’t it? I mean, so there was this Jewish rabbi from Galilee who caused a bit of a stir, and stirred up a bit of trouble, and ran afoul of the establishment, and ended up tortured to death at the hands of a police state. His followers claimed that this rabbi had come back from the dead, but even if that was true, well, so what?

It’s precisely that “so what” which interested Paul. And for Paul, the key to understanding the significance of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection lay in those first words from Jesus’ mouth: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Because those words tell us, as they told Paul, that those who follow Jesus are not just well-meaning disciples of some Jewish rabbi. On the contrary, those followers are Jesus, and when Paul was persecuting them, he was actually persecuting Jesus Himself. And if that is true, something big and entirely unexpected is afoot.

The Cross

In his letters, Paul develops this initial insight in a variety of different ways. One of them is through his familiar image of the Church as the Body of Christ. To the Corinthians Paul wrote, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). And to the Romans, similarly, “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Rom. 12:4-5).

As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it,

the just man...
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces

The other way Paul develops this insight may be a little less familiar to us, though it is perhaps even more important. Paul says that when Jesus suffered and died on the cross, we ourselves, the Church, were right there with him. “Do you not know,” he asks in today’s passage, “that whoever has been baptized into Christ Jesus has been baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3). “I am crucified with Christ,” he writes to the Galatians, “and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). And in the same way, we were somehow present in Christ at the moment of His resurrection. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Rom. 6:4).

But what exactly does this mean, to be “crucified with Christ”? And why have Christians always believed that the cross was at the heart of Christianity?

To put this into perspective, if you were a Muslim, the symbol of your religion would be a crescent moon. If you were a Buddhist, the symbol of your religion would be a lotus flower. If you were a Jew, the symbol of your religion would be a six pointed star. These all symbolize things like beauty, grace and life. But as Christians, our emblem suggests nothing like that. Our emblem is the cross, a crude but effective method of execution invented by the Romans for the gruesome purpose of convincing would-be criminals that whatever they were contemplating, it just wasn't worth it. The symbol of Christianity is a symbol of ugliness, suffering and death. Why? Why do all other religions have as their symbols something reminiscent of light and beauty, yet Christians insist on exactly the opposite?

I certainly don’t have a complete answer. But it’s worth noting that this theme of death and resurrection was not merely a Christian invention. On the contrary, it has been the refrain of the great myths and stories throughout history. The Babylonians told the story of how Gilgamesh sought and failed to find the secret of immortality after the death of his best friend. The Egyptians told the story of how Osiris was brought back to life after his body was cut into 14 pieces and scattered across the earth. The Greeks told of Persephone, and how she was abducted by the king of the underworld, and then returned to the earth again after her mother cut a deal with the gods. Perhaps most remarkably, Nordic legends tell of how Odin, the chief of the gods, sacrificed himself to himself, by piercing his side with a spear and then hanging himself on the holy tree at the center of the world.

Beyond those legends, science tells us much the same story. According to the theory of evolution, life arose through pain and suffering and sacrifice. Think of how many different systems in your body need to work perfectly, just to keep you alive. Then think about how many random genetic mutations were required to arrive at those perfectly functioning systems: and how many thousand times more mutations failed, and left the organisms who inherited them vulnerable to accidents, predators and sickness. You and I have life only because untold billions before us suffered and died. Our bodies work because their bodies didn’t. You might very well say, “By their stripes we are healed.”

In other words, a life that comes through death is at the beating heart of our world. So when we see the same pattern in Christianity, we shouldn’t be surprised. Life followed by death followed by new life is not just an abstract doctrine: it’s as close as we can come to reality itself. As George MacDonald put it, “When Jesus died on the cross, He did that, in the wild weather of his outlying provinces, which he had done at home in glory and gladness.”

Crucified with Christ

So then: Christians have chosen the cross as their emblem, because we believe that it gives expression to the fundamental reality underlying the universe. As Paul said, “We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). But again I ask: what does this mean? So we are somehow united with Christ in his death and resurrection; and Christ’s death and resurrection somehow shows who God is in a way that nothing else could. But what does that mean? What is its significance? Does believing this actually change anything?

This is a profound question, and I don’t think we can do anything more than touch on it today. But it’s worth noting three things.

#1 – This is God’s Life

The first is that Jesus tells us that it’s only by conforming to this pattern that we can partake of the life that He came to bring. In Luke 9:23, Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” I don’t think that Jesus is saying, “Unless you’re willing to sacrifice yourself, you’re not good enough to be a Christian.” Rather, I think he means that sacrificing ourselves is what the Christian walk looks like. We partake of the life that God offers us precisely to the extent that our lives resemble God’s Life; and that Life is a life of love, and therefore of sacrifice. The same is also true of another difficult saying of Jesus: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a random for many” (Mark 10:43-45). The requirement that we serve others is not an arbitrary standard, a line which God drew in the sand but which could have been drawn elsewhere; rather, the requirement of service expresses certain unalterable facts about God’s own nature.

#2 – This is forgiveness

The second thing to note has to do with forgiveness. For both to ask and to receive forgiveness is a kind of death. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Again, it’s not that God won’t forgive us unless we forgive others; it’s that we can’t truly repent, and ask for that forgiveness, until we ourselves have learned to extend it.

I’ve had a pretty good life, and I can only think of one instance where someone has done me a significant and genuine injustice. I was angry about that injustice for years; and if you get me talking too much about it, you’ll find that I still am. It’s very true, of course, that my anger, and my lack of forgiveness, isn’t hurting anyone except me. But it is hurting me, and it’s hurting me precisely because that part of me doesn’t want to die. I want to hold on to my rights, I want to insist on what’s coming to me. And to the extent that I’m not dying to myself, to the extent that I’m continuing to hold on to my natural life, I simply can’t participate in the new life that Jesus offers.

Because I need to be clear: extending forgiveness to someone who has genuinely done you wrong, means death. Imagine trying to forgive a serial killer who had kidnapped, tortured and murdered one of your children. Even the thought of forgiving someone who had done that would gnaw away at your insides. It would feel like you were betraying your murdered child; it would feel like you were condoning the murderer’s actions. In short, it would kill you to forgive him. But it would kill you in the right way. It would put to death just that much more of that part of yourself which refuses to participate in God’s life.

But there is maybe even a better way to look at it. For if it hurts us to forgive someone who has done us an injustice – just imagine how it must feel to God. Can it be any less of a death for God to forgive? God loves the child who has been murdered, the wife whose husband was unfaithful, the partner who was cheated out of his business, far more than we could ever hope to. If it kills us to forgive someone, how much more must it kill God? And if Christianity is right, that is precisely what it did: it killed God. People talk nonchalantly about God forgiving sins as if it was the easiest thing in the world. But our own experience gives the lie to that facile assumption. Forgiving sins isn’t easy: there is no more difficult thing in all of creation. It’s so hard that the undying God Himself had to die in order to do it. And we must die as well, if we want to participate in that forgiveness.

#3 – This is Resurrection

Third, we must remember that Jesus’ death on the cross was not the end of the story. Yes, Jesus died; and it was a true death. His heart ceased to beat. The neurons in his brain ceased to register the agony of his body. His muscles, on fire for the last six hours, finally slumped, and his corpse began its slow, inevitable decomposition in that merciless April sun. But God had something else in store, for He would not abandon Jesus to the realm of the dead, nor allow His Holy One to see corruption. On the morning of the third day, God raised Jesus from the dead; and the life he now lives, he lives to God. One small part of the meaning of the Resurrection is the lesson that God is faithful to those who engage in self-sacrificial love. Indeed, how could He not be? For He cannot deny Himself; and those who sacrifice their own desires for the good of others, are already living in God’s love, whether they know it or not. If we die to our sinful nature, we will be alive to God. As Paul says elsewhere in Romans, “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

Two Stories

I should point out as well that self-sacrificing love is not merely rewarded in heaven. To the extent that we live in that love in this life, to the extent that we die to ourselves, we experience God’s new life right now.

I have two examples of how this can work: one from my own very recent experience, another from the experience of one of the great saints of the Church.

Olivet University

To give you some background, twenty years ago, I graduated from a small Christian school in the Santa Cruz Redwoods named Bethany University. Bethany was a lovely school in many ways, but it’s been teetering on the edge of financial ruin for years, and finally, this summer, it ran out of money and was forced to close its doors. Many people had loved that school, and were genuinely grieved at its closure. But within a month after Bethany announced that it was closing, another tiny Christian school by the name of Olivet University announced that it was going to purchase the Bethany campus, and continue Bethany’s mission of ministerial training. On the face of it, this was welcome news.

But after that, things kind of got weird. This isn’t the place to go into all the details, but suffice to say that this new school, Olivet, was surprisingly sloppy with the truth as they began the process of moving onto the Bethany campus. To a wide range of alumni who were still grieving their school’s demise, it felt like our school’s heritage was being used fraudulently – and for purposes that we could only guess at.

My involvement in all this started when I wrote a blog entry in which I complained about some of Olivet’s behavior, and pointed out some of the misinformation that they had been spreading. I uploaded the post to my blog, turned off my monitor, and headed downstairs with a book. I presumed that was going to be the end of it: among other things, really, nobody reads my blog. So I was pretty well surprised when I got a phone call that very evening from an Olivet administrator, in which he threatened legal action if I didn’t take my blog post down.

I didn’t take it down, of course, but as you can imagine, that was the wrong approach for him to take, and it got me even more suspicious about what Olivet was up to. So I started doing quite a bit of research on Olivet University, its history, its background, its faculty, everything I could find. And I followed up that initial blog post with several more, detailing some of the relevant information that I’d found. And some of the information I found was indeed quite interesting.

But here’s the point that I’m finally getting to. As I was researching Olivet, and writing up my findings, I found myself, almost without thinking about it, wanting to stretch the truth. Olivet had made me angry; and I absolutely wanted the bad things I found to be worse than they were; and I absolutely wanted the good things I found to not be as good as they were. I wanted to include any incriminating information I turned up, even if I thought it wasn’t likely to be true; and I wanted to leave out anything that tended to exonerate them. I found myself having to go back and rewrite whole paragraphs of my blog posts, because I had been doing exactly what I was accusing Olivet of doing, of being insufficiently careful with the truth. In brief, I wanted to be right, and I was willing to go to rather inappropriate lengths to convince others that Olivet was in the wrong. Worse than anything else, though, was the realization that I tended to do this with more frequency than I was happy to admit. My conflict with Olivet was not the first time that I had been ready to present “facts” with an unwarranted confidence.

I’ll confess, I wasn’t entirely comfortable when God pointed this out to me. But after some squirming, I did what I should really do more frequently: I repented. I didn’t get down on my knees or anything, but as I sat there, my hands on my keyboard, I prayed, “God, help me to love the truth more than being right.”

As I stand here now, I’ll confess, that sounds kind of lame. But I can’t express how freeing that simple prayer was. I have no illusions about being cured of my tendencies to exaggerate, or my desire to prove the other side wrong. But at least in that one particular debate, that one particular prayer entirely changed my perspective. The debate was no longer about me, but about the truth, and that made all the difference. I ended up having to admit that I was wrong about a couple things, but it felt OK to say so. And when my worst suspicions about Olivet eventually proved to be unfounded, I was very grateful that those suspicions hadn’t made it onto my blog. Giving up my insistence on being right was only the tiniest sip from the cup of death: but the freedom which followed in its wake was no minor taste of life.

St. Francis of Assisi

The second story I have to tell comes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Apart from Jesus himself, more than any other human being, St. Francis’ life is an example of the extent to which dying to yourself is merely the start of an entirely new life. You may know the story. St. Francis was born to a wealthy family, but in his early twenties he renounced all of his worldly possessions, and began to serve and care for the lepers around his village. St. Francis has a well-deserved reputation for loving nature, and for caring for all of God’s creatures; but it’s worth noting that this love of nature was combined with a very strong asceticism. He renounced any possessions, he walked barefoot through the snow, and regularly engaged in extended fasts. During one such forty-day fast in preparation for Easter, St. Francis prayed that he would know the full pain that Christ suffered, and in answer to this prayer received the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ in his own body. When he died two years later, he requested that they lay him naked on the ground, so that he could return to God the same way he came. Several years ago, a modern medical analysis of St. Francis’ skeleton showed that he was suffering not only from starvation, but also quite likely from leprosy.

And yet, despite these sufferings, those who knew him universally said that the overriding characteristic of St. Francis was not pain, not sadness, not depression; but rather joy.

In his biography of St. Francis, G. K. Chesterton sums up this paradox well:

[St. Francis’ self-denial] was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. … He held on this heroic course from the moment when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the winter woods to the moment when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say, with almost as deep a certainty, that the stars which passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down upon a happy man.

Conclusion

OPPC has been through a great deal over the last year. We said good-bye to Charlie last August, and then unexpectedly had to say goodbye to him again just last month. We said goodbye to Pastor Vonna just last week. And as you presumably know, Galena and I are saying our own goodbyes: this is our last Sunday here. With all of these changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us sometimes felt a little like St. Francis, lying shivering on the rocky floor.

But if you feel that way, think back again on Jesus’ words to Paul. Any pain that Jesus’ church feels, is experienced by Jesus Himself. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to our Lord; and we go forth today, not merely in His name, but with His power and authority coursing through our own bodies. We die daily, but our life, our true Life, is hidden with Christ in eternity. OPPC may yet have further deaths to die, whether literal or sacramental, and that is as it should be. In a far less dramatic manner than St. Francis, we are called to partake of our Lord’s sufferings; but we are equally called to partake of our Lord’s glory. For we are His Church, His Body, and we live in the power of His resurrection.

Excess Excitement at the Smith Household

2011-09-18T17:21:00.001-07:00

You know your morning just got interesting when you're downstairs and hear a huge thud from upstairs, followed by your wife screaming. When you get upstairs and she's laying on her back, still screaming, you know it just got very interesting.

The long and the short of it is that when Galena was getting dressed this morning, she went to step up onto our bathtub, so that she could get a full-length look at herself in the counter mirror. As she was stepping up, however, her kneecap dislocated again (#3!), and she crashed backwards down onto the floor (which was the thud that I'd heard). By the time I got up there, she was lying on her back, holding her knee in her hands, alternately screaming, then whimpering and then screaming again. The kids piled into the bathroom behind me, with rather wide eyes. I very briefly tried to relocate her patella, but not having the foggiest idea what I was doing, quickly gave that up, and ran to get some ice, which was maybe a nice gesture, but almost equally pointless. After contemplating what would be required to get her to the hospital on my own, with three kids in tow, I gave up on that idea too, and just called 911.

In the meantime, Caedmon had run to get a couple pillows for Galena, so that she could rest (slightly) more comfortably. Brendan had progressed from wide-eyed to his signature line, "It's too scary! It's too scary!" Calista, thankfully, was almost entirely oblivious, and occupied herself with rolling toys down the stairs, to make sure the paramedics were appropriately welcomed.

The ambulance arrived a couple minutes later, and they made their way upstairs. The lead paramedic examined her and said, "I've never relocated a patella before, but a doctor showed me how once. You want me to give it a shot?" These weren’t perhaps the most reassuring words, but Galena nodded grimly, and after one false start (which resulted in a great deal more screaming), it slid back into place. And with that, the pain went away almost entirely. The paramedics decided to take her to the hospital anyway, just in case something worse had happened, and bundled her out the door.

That was my signal to call Karn Hanhart, who very graciously dropped everything she was doing, and rushed over. Caedmon was initially very keen on coming to the hospital with me, but then he heard me instructing Karn to let them watch as much TV as they wanted. He figured another opportunity like this wasn't going to come his way anytime soon, and decided to stay home.

At the hospital, they x-rayed her leg, concluded that nothing else was wrong, and sent her home. The whole thing finished up by 11:45 am or thereabouts. At this point, Galena's hurting a little bit, but not badly. She's lying on the couch, resting and basically letting Caedmon wait on her, which he seems pretty happy to do.

She's supposed to go visit an orthopedist later this week. Since this is the third time this has happened, they may recommend surgery, or physical therapy, or maybe nothing: but we'll wait until she's had the consult before making any decisions.

A Welcome Update from Olivet

2011-09-13T15:46:00.001-07:00

On the Bethany Alumni forums today, someone challenged my constant harping on how Olivet had been framing their connection with Bethany University by saying, in effect, “Well, what do you want them to say?”

That was a very fine question, and after some thought, this is what I came up with:

In 2011, Bethany University had to announce its closure and submitted its teach-out plan. However, Bethany made an appeal for Olivet University to continue the mission of training ministry-bound men and women in Santa Cruz. Olivet University fully affirms the mission and the heritage of Bethany, and feels privileged to continue in the tradition of ministerial-based education that Bethany pioneered. The Bethany that was founded in 1919 has closed its doors, but with the full blessing of the Assemblies of God, the mantle has been passed to a new generation and to a new university. We chose retain the name "Bethany University" precisely to honor that heritage.

After I posted it, and various folks had the opportunity to read and comment on it, I forwarded it to Nate Tran, Olivet’s Dean of Administration, and asked if he’d be willing to post something like that up on the website. I was quite pleased when he responded quickly, and said that they’d be willing to make the appropriate changes. A few minutes later, the website had been updated. This is very good news from my perspective, and I’d like to thank Olivet for working with the alumni on this. We all wish Olivet the very best as they endeavor to serve our common Lord; and it’s my hope and prayer that their students experience the same divine blessings at 800 Bethany Drive that so many thousands of Bethany students before them did.

Follow-up on Olivet University

2011-09-12T00:25:00.001-07:00

Tonight, Bethany University breathed its last. Bethany had already closed its doors earlier this summer, but just a few hours ago, they held the final memorial service in Craig Chapel. Folks from all over the country came to attend, and hundreds more watched via a live stream. There was much laughter, there were many tears, and I don’t think anybody who saw it was unmoved.

Towards the end of the service, the president of Olivet University, William Wagner, spoke memorably for a few minutes. I enjoyed his stories, and I appreciated and strongly affirm the vision he expressed, of reaching the world for Christ through the wide range of new technologies and media that have revolutionized society over the last two decades. Bethany was a lovely school in many ways, but nobody could have claimed (with a straight face) that it was on the cutting edge of technology or media. There’s no doubt that Olivet is much further down this road than Bethany was or could ever have gone. (And of course, it was very generous of Olivet to donate what is now their chapel for this final memorial service. Folks from Bethany who worked with the staff and students from Olivet in the run-up to the service said that they were invariably helpful, gracious and hard-working.)

Dr. Wagner’s was actually the second Olivet voice I’ve heard recently. A few hours after my last post, the Dean of Administration from Olivet, Nate Tran, gave me a call, to discuss my concerns. I appreciated his attempt to reach out to me, and we talked for nearly an hour. On the whole, the call was productive, though somewhere in the middle it reached a remarkable low point, when Mr. Tran said that his “superiors” had instructed him to warn me that if I didn’t remove or rewrite my post, they would be forced to consider legal action. As you can imagine, that didn’t do much to help the tone of the call, and my response was Christ-like only in the sense that it perhaps faintly resembled the Christ who cleansed the temple. I may have done some shouting. (Take note: if you’re ever responsible for reaching out to thoughtful critics of your organization, it’s very bad form to start by threatening to sue them. All it’s gonna do is make folks even more suspicious.)

That interlude aside, however, our conversation was cordial and helpful, and I found Mr. Tran to be a reasonable interlocutor. I didn’t take notes during the call, but in general, I think it would be fair to say that he expressed three primary concerns about my post.

(1) His first concern was that my post described Olivet as “unaccredited”. He contended that this wasn’t accurate, and indeed, depending on what you mean, he’s right. Accreditation is a reasonably complex topic, but I’ll summarize (inadequately) by saying that there are roughly four different levels of “academic accreditation” in the United States: (1) entirely unaccredited; (2) accredited by an organization that isn’t recognized by CHEA or the USDE; (3) accredited by any of a fairly large number of bodies that are recognized by the CHEA and USDE; and (4) accredited by one of a very small number of “regional accreditation organizations”. In my experience, when folks in academia talk about a school being “accredited”, they usually mean #4, i.e., regionally accredited. They often lump schools from categories 1-3 into roughly the same boat, and use the term “unaccredited” to describe them all (which is why I originally used that term). The reason for this blunt approach is fairly simple: regionally accredited schools will generally only recognize coursework or degrees from other regionally accredited schools. If you go to a school in category #3, you can get financial aid from the US government; but your degree or coursework will typically only transfer to other schools if they come from a school in category #4. There may be exceptions; but they will tend to be exceptions.

With that in mind: Bethany was accredited by WASC, a regional accreditation body, and hence fell into category #4; Olivet is accredited by the “Association for Biblical Higher Education”, and falls into category #3. In other words, technically, yes, Olivet is accredited. However, from a practical perspective, what this means is that Olivet provides some, but by no means all the benefits of what is usually meant by an “accredited” school. Hence, before you decide to go there, you need to think carefully about what you plan to do afterwards.

Because Mr. Tran had a good point on this one, I’ve updated my previous post.

(2) Mr. Tran’s second concern was that my post didn’t accurately characterize the nature of the changes to the Bethany website. His understanding, he said, was that these changes had been purely cosmetic (new colors and pictures, that sort of thing), and that the content hadn’t been touched: and that’s why it still presented the “1919” Bethany history. I expressed some doubts about this while we were still on the phone, and a bit of investigation afterwards showed that he was demonstrably wrong on this point. You can verify this yourself if you visit the last version of the Bethany website on the Wayback Machine, and compare it to the current version. Among numerous other differences, the new website lists a whole bunch of degrees that Bethany never offered, but which are effectively the same degrees that Olivet offers. It describes a Center for Information Technology that never existed at Bethany, but is featured prominently on Olivet’s website. The "e-Library" it describes is quite clearly the Ralph D. Winter Library at Olivet, not the Wilson Library at Bethany. And so forth. In other words, the institution it was describing was clearly Olivet – except when it came to Bethany’s history and heritage, which it attempted to appropriate as its own.

Since this was an easily verifiable inaccuracy, my assumption is that Mr. Tran was simply misinformed.

(3) Mr. Tran’s third concern was that my post didn’t do justice to the very fluid situation in which Bethany and Olivet now find themselves. As I’ve said previously, I’m effectively an outsider, and have no first-hand knowledge of the state of the purchase; moreover, I don’t want to reveal anything that Mr. Tran may have wished to remain confidential. Suffice to say, that although Olivet is in fact leasing the campus from the Bethany Corporation, and has made a fairly significant down payment, the transaction is by no means complete. Furthermore, because the Bethany campus is facing imminent foreclosure by the banks who hold its debt, Olivet has been forced to move very quickly. Anybody who is familiar with the traditional pace of academic institutions will know that in a traditional university, it would be impossible to perform the requisite due diligence, raise the necessary funds, close the transaction, move the entire school, and then start classes, in anything less than two or three years. Olivet has had something like three months. Given both the speed and the complexity of the situation, Mr. Tran said, Olivet’s communications have been intentionally sparse: they haven’t wanted to provide premature, incorrect or confusing information. And although he didn’t actually say this, I’ll add on his behalf that, given this situation, it would be quite surprising if some significant mistakes didn’t occur in the communication that was provided.

All this is true. One indication of just how true is that since my conversation with Mr. Tran, Olivet has updated the “About” page on the Bethany website. The previous version of the page that Olivet had created (you’ll have to take my word for this) made no reference to the acquisition by Olivet, or to the fact that Bethany had actually closed its doors in the summer of 2011. Without any caveats, it presented the Bethany advertised by the website as being the Bethany which had opened its doors in 1919. And that was, to put it graciously, entirely inaccurate.

Currently, however, that page reads:

Bethany University was founded in 1919, originally called Glad Tiding Bible Institute, as a training center for an urban San Francisco ministry. The nearly 100-year-old school is deeply rooted in rich Christian tradition and its long history has set Bethany as a highly respected institution in carrying out Christian mission.

Throughout the years, Bethany has gone through several transitions. The school relocated to its new home in Scotts Valley in 1950 and changed its name to Bethany Bible College 5 years later. In 2005, the Bible College expanded into a university and was named Bethany University.

In 2011, Bethany University had to announce its closure and submitted its teach-out plan.

However, Bethany made an appeal for Olivet University to continue the mission of training ministry-bound men and women in Santa Cruz. Olivet University has since transformed Bethany into an online university to provide greater accessibility to educational resources for churches in the global mission field.

Bethany has re-emerged under the management of Olivet University. Both institutions continue to provide world-class theological education together.

There’s no doubt that this is more accurate. But it’s still not very accurate.

To start with a minor point, it’s laughable that either of two tiny denominational schools (of which one has never achieved regional accreditation, and the other was perpetually on the verge of losing it) could provide a “world-class theological education”. I loved Bethany, I loved my professors, and they gave me a fine theological education, but none of them would have claimed that it was world-class. Still, I’ll forgive that as standard marketing-speak (we all expect marketers to lie, don’t we?), though I do wish Christian institutions had more respect for reality.

But it’s worth highlighting the rest of the paragraph in which that claim is found:

Bethany has re-emerged under the management of Olivet University. Both institutions continue to provide world-class theological education together.

These sentences strongly imply that Bethany is still around, that it has merged in some sense with Olivet, and that under new management, basically the same institution is carrying on. But that is highly misleading, to say the least. I honestly don't know what legal ground Olivet is on: from everything I’ve heard, Olivet is merely purchasing some of Bethany’s assets, not the actual entity itself. Still, it’s possible that I’ve been misinformed, and that Olivet is actually buying the actual Bethany corporation. So legally, technically, it’s possible that they may have the right to say that the Bethany which started in 1919 is still around and under new management. But even so: I’ve been asking around, and I’m only aware of one former staff member from Bethany (the groundskeeper) who will be making the transition to Olivet. Bethany’s WASC accreditation no longer exists, and wouldn’t transfer in any event. None of Bethany’s degree programs are being offered. I’m not aware of any former students who are attending. To the best of my knowledge, none of the former faculty will be teaching at Olivet. To take just one example of just how closed Bethany is: if you’re a Bethany alumni and need a transcript, you’ll need to order it from a different AG school, Vanguard University, which is taking over Bethany’s records: because there isn’t anybody left from Bethany who can fulfill those requests. You won’t be ordering that transcript from Olivet, or from whatever this new institution that might be named Bethany is. As I said before, this new school will share with my alma mater nothing more than a name and a campus.

Given that the Bethany I graduated from has shut its doors, fired all its employees, sent its students to other schools, is no longer in operation, and has for all intents and purposes come to a grinding and painful halt, I don’t see how it's possible to say, "Bethany has re-emerged under the management of Olivet University. Both institutions continue to provide world-class theological education together."

In other words, I appreciate the fact that Olivet, after getting caught in a blatant misrepresentation, has attempted to correct that misrepresentation. I remain concerned, however, that even this correction is still badly misleading.

So what does all this mean?

Well, I’m honestly not sure. As I said previously, the hypothesis implied by the Davidian Watcher blog, that Olivet and its associated institutions are just a front for a dangerous cult, simply doesn’t hold water. You don’t get a life-long Southern Baptist missionary to be president of your school unless you’re reasonably orthodox. But that doesn’t mean Olivet might not have other significant cultural and institutional problems. Having precious little first-hand information about Olivet, I need to reiterate that I’m not qualified to offer anything more than questions. But what I’ve learned since my first post has left me with more of those, including:

Why was Olivet so fast to threaten legal action over such an innocuous post? Does it say something significant about their culture, or even about whether they have something to hide? (For what it’s worth, a lawsuit is one of the tactics that the Davidian Watcher blog says they used on him.)
Why was Mr. Tran misinformed about the nature of the changes to the Bethany website? Was it just normal and innocent communication SNAFU’s? Or was someone intentionally trying to mischaracterize those changes (and hadn’t realized it was possible to check them via the Wayback Machine)? Or somewhere in-between?
Why does the “corrected” version of the website still present a highly misleading picture of the relationship of Bethany to Olivet? It was already clear that people were paying attention, and cared about what was being communicated. If I’d been in their shoes, I would have gone out of my way to make sure that this page left no inaccurate impressions. They clearly don’t want folks throwing stones: why give critics another opportunity?
Most speculatively, does all of this imply that Olivet has a culture of disregarding the truth, of treating perception as more important than reality? I’ve worked with folks in the past who possessed a remarkable “reality distortion field” that was very effective in-person, and within the organizations they led – but who were, for precisely that reason, entirely unprepared and unable to deal constructively with critical perspectives from outside the organization. That’s what this reminds me of.

Like I said, no answers, just questions.

I should add one last note. Last Friday, after my conversation with Mr. Tran, I sent him an email asking for his answers to a variety of questions. I haven’t yet heard back from him, but if I do, and if this is still interesting to anybody besides myself, I’ll try to post and respond to his reply.

[Note from 2011-09-13: Olivet has since updated the language on the Bethany “About” page to a version that I feel is much more accurate. See this post for more details.]

What’s Up With Olivet University?

2011-09-09T13:43:00.001-07:00

For as long as I’ve known and followed Bethany University (I graduated from there in 1990), it’s had financial troubles. On the whole, Bethany was a warm, loving place, and I’m grateful for the spiritual and intellectual formation I received there. But its financial difficulties were of long standing (well before I matriculated there in 1986), and they finally came to a head this last summer, when Bethany announced that its search for a white knight who could relieve its $15MM debt burden had failed, and that it was closing its doors for good.

This was very sad, of course, and a number of alumni have expressed ongoing grief about the closure of the school that they’ve known and loved. But this was also problematic for the Northern California/Nevada District of the Assemblies of God for a very different reason. The NCN District had counter-signed for something like $8MM of Bethany’s debt, and when Bethany closed and defaulted on that debt, the assumption was that the district would likely have to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Among other things, this would have meant the closing and sale of many small churches, and it would have hampered the district’s mission for years to come.

Everyone involved, therefore, breathed a huge sigh of relief when Olivet University, a small, ~~unaccredited~~ ABHE-accredited Christian school located in San Francisco, agreed to purchase the campus, very roughly by assuming Bethany’s existing $15MM debt. Among other things, this meant that the NCN District would not have to declare bankruptcy; and that the Bethany campus, beloved by so many, would continue to serve as a center for Christian formation and ministry. So far, it’s hard not to see the hand of God at work.

So it’s with some trepidation that I find myself asking, “What exactly is Olivet University?” In a very real sense, I have no business asking the question. My formal affiliation with Bethany ended some 21 years ago; and at any rate, that institution is now defunct. And I should be (and am) grateful for any resolution to the NCN District’s financial difficulties that doesn’t involve outright bankruptcy. But there’s been a twist. Apparently Olivet University has received permission from the NCN District to continue business under Bethany’s name. That’s not too weird (Il Giornale did the same thing when it bought Starbucks); but it means that Olivet is now very closely associated with the institution whose name is on my diploma. That piques my interest. And it gets a little stranger.

For one thing, several months after the deal became public, the Olivet University website still doesn’t mention anything about the purchase. Moreover, the folks from Olivet have now put a new Bethany University website up that (as of 9/9/11) doesn’t mention the transition either. And more than that, they’re explicitly claiming to be Bethany University. The degrees they discuss are the degrees offered by Olivet. The library they describe is Olivet’s library. The academic standards they outline are Olivet’s academic standards. But they also claim that they’ve been around since 1919 (when Bethany was founded). They claim that they used to be Glad Tidings Bible Institute (Bethany’s original name). They claim that they relocated to Scotts Valley in 1950 (when Bethany moved from San Francisco). They claim to be an institution that’s almost 100 years old.

But none of that is true.

When Bethany closed its doors this summer, all the administration, staff and faculty were laid off: and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have been rehired by Olivet. All of Bethany’s students were forced to find other schools: and to the best of my knowledge, none of them will be attending Olivet. When Bethany closed, it immediately and understandably lost its WASC accreditation; and Olivet ~~is not accredited~~ has no regional accreditation. In other words, there are only two things that the original Bethany University and the new Bethany University have in common: the name, and the physical grounds. Consequently, it seems disingenuous at best, and outright false at worst, to claim, without any acknowledgment of the discontinuity, to be Bethany.

And what’s really strange about this is that they didn’t need to handle it this way. There’s no reason that Olivet shouldn’t acknowledge the transition – from my perspective, the fact that a new institution with the same mission has purchased the Bethany campus is worthy of celebration. It’s a great story. It shows how God is still at work. It’s Elijah passing the mantle to Elisha. It’s a wonderful thing.

So why hide it?

I’m not certain of the answer, but one of the disturbing possibilities that occurs to me is, “Because they’ve gotten into the habit of not speaking the absolute truth.” And another is, “Because they’re trying to whitewash something.”

I need to be up-front and say that I have no first-hand knowledge about any of these things. But as I’ve hunted around for more information about Olivet, what I’ve found hasn’t really allayed my suspicions. I certainly haven’t found any smoking gun. But I’ve found a lot of small things that, when put together, show a consistent pattern that’s just a little odd.

Olivet University is closely associated with a denomination known as the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches. This is not the same thing as the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The EPC is a reasonably small but otherwise well known conservative Presbyterian denomination that is well within the mainstream of evangelical Christianity. Their Wikipedia article has as much information about them as you’d ever want to know. Apart from their own website, however, I can find hardly any direct information about the EAPC. There’s no Wikipedia article. It has no history. I have no idea how many churches it has. In other words, it’s not just small: it’s tiny. There’s nothing wrong with that; but it does raise the question, “Where did they get the $15MM to buy the Bethany campus?”
From its own website, the EAPC seems to be reasonably orthodox and evangelical. But when you read its position papers, say, on divorce and remarriage, or ordination, you’ll find that they were explicitly lifted straight from other denominations (the EPC and Assemblies of God, respectively, in this case). Again, that’s just a little odd. In other words, these position papers didn’t arise organically through the life of a denomination. It’s more like someone said, “We need some position papers to put up on our website. Bob, go find something.”
As I said before, Olivet is very closely associated with the EAPC; so much so, that the two seem to almost be the same organization. For instance, the moderator of the EAPC is Dr. Tom Cowley. Apparently this isn’t a full-time job, as he’s also the Dean of the Olivet College of Business. Again, there’s nothing explicitly wrong with this – it just shows that they’re a very tiny and inbred denomination (if denomination is the right word for it).
Olivet’s Library advertises that they have “150,00 physical and electronic items”. But if you poke around, you find that they’re including things like the (freely available) Christian Classics Ethereal Library in that number, which is disingenuous, to say the least.

Well, whatever. They’re small, they’re trying to appear bigger than they are, they’re getting big money from somewhere. No big deal. But there’s more; and here’s where things start to get a little strange.

The current Chancellor at Olivet University, and former President, is a man named David Jang. As it turns out, David Jang is a fairly controversial fellow. There’s an entire website – a very strange website, I should add – which is dedicated to convicting him of claiming to be “Second Coming Christ”; and there’s an entirely different website – equally strange – dedicated to clearing him of those charges. Unfortunately, much of the debate seems to take place in various Asian languages, and I don’t trust Google Translate enough to draw any real conclusions from the automatically generated English versions.
At least some websites allege that David Jang used to be a member of Sun Myung Moon’s “Unification Church” (i.e., a “Moonie”), and that in the 1980’s, he was (peripherally?) involved in the fraudulent takeover by the Unification Church of a Methodist seminary in Korea.
Apparently David Jang is a fairly busy individual, because he’s also the founder of (or at least closely associated with) several youth mission organizations, including the Young Disciples of Jesus, and Apostolos Campus Ministry, along with some large for-profit websites, like ChristianPost, ChristianToday, Gospel Herald, and International Business Times. Those mission organizations have generated some controversy, as this extended discussion makes clear. (Basically, several people on the forum say, “I was a part of ACM, and yes, I was taught that David Jang was the Messiah”, while other folks say, “I was a part of ACM, and no, I wasn’t taught that David Jang was the Messiah.” And then it degenerates into the sort of extended but endlessly fascinating paranoid name-calling that should be familiar to any participant on Internet forums.) I should note that Olivet University is closely associated with all of those organizations, as their 2009 Student Handbook makes clear. (Basically, it lists a whole bunch of David Jang’s ministries and/or companies, and encourages students to work and/or volunteer with them during their time at Olivet.)

And then there’s other stuff that’s not really weird, except maybe in the larger context.

Olivet University is a Presbyterian school (sort of), but their current president, William Wagner, once presented himself as a candidate for the head of the Southern Baptist Convention. In this ecumenical age, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it certainly indicates that its leadership isn’t closely associated with any particular denomination.
Olivet, the EAPC, and the various organizations associated with David Jang repeatedly go out of their way to stress their ties to mainstream evangelical organizations, such as their membership in the NAE and the World Evangelical Alliance. They call their library the “Ralph D. Winter” library, after the famous missiologist, and prominently advertise the fact that he was there at its opening. I get the impression that Olivet was another, pre-existing Bible college in the Bay Area, before the EAPC took it over in 2000 and stamped it with their own identity. The EAPC gave themselves a name that’s confusingly close to a very different denomination; and the same is true of the ChristianToday website. On top of all this, they’re clearly very eager to assume the mantle and even the identity of Bethany University.

On the whole, reading between the lines, the consistent impression I get of Olivet University and its associated institutions is that they’re eager: especially when it comes to giving folks the idea that they’re bigger and more reputable than they are. The various institutions are all clearly a little inbred, and seem to revolve around David Jang in a manner that’s hard to characterize, but feels a little unsettling. For instance, David Jang and his companies are the obvious source for the $15MM Olivet is spending on Bethany’s campus; but nobody seems to be acknowledging it.

Unlike poor D. W. and his now-abandoned website, I don’t think that Olivet and the EAPC are just a front for the Moonies or some other Korean cult. But they do seem to have a culture of slanting the truth, and sometimes stepping over the line into outright falsehoods (such as their claim to still be the Bethany University that was founded in 1919). Perhaps that’s just a cultural difference between Asian and American Christians: but regardless, it seems unhealthy, and not the sort of straightforward adherence to reality that you’d want in any educational institution, let alone a Christian university. Let’s just say that it’s a significant red flag for me. I hope that the folks assuming the name and identity of my alma mater are worthy of her mission and heritage.

[Edit 9/9/11 – After a conversation this evening with the Dean of Administration at Olivet, I adjusted the parts of my post where I said that Olivet was “unaccredited”. That wasn’t quite accurate: Olivet is indeed accredited by the Association for Biblical Higher Education, and the ABHE’s accreditations are recognized by the USDE and CHEA as legitimate for financial aid status. However, it’s worth noting again that Olivet is not accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which is the only accreditation that really matters when trying to get your credits to transfer (see http://www.acswasc.org/faq.htm#11). In other words, if you spend two years at Olivet, and decide to transfer to UCSC, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll need to start from scratch.]

[Edit 9/12/11 – I’ve added a follow-up to this post which explores in some detail – perhaps excessive detail – Olivet’s response, and my ongoing concerns and questions.]

[Note 9/13/11 - Olivet has since updated the language on the Bethany “About” page to a version that I feel is much more accurate. See this post for more details.]

My Take on Homosexual Behavior and the Church

2011-06-07T11:38:00.001-07:00

My denomination, the PC(USA), has recently given its presbyteries the option to begin the ordination of practicing homosexuals. I lamented this decision in my last blog post, but since I’ve thought and read a great deal about this topic over the last few years, I actually had more to say. So I figured that it’s finally time that I summarize (most of) my thoughts on this issue in one place.

The Texts

Oddly enough, this will be the shortest part of my post, for the simple reason that I think the evidence is beyond any serious debate. The starting point for any Christian has to be the acknowledgement that every time the Bible mentions homosexual activity, in the New Testament or in the Old, it condemns that practice unequivocally. In the Old Testament, homosexuality was a capital crime (like murder, though also admittedly like breaking the sabbath, or disobeying your parents). In the New Testament, Paul reaffirms that it's a sin (primarily in Rom. 1:26-27, but also in 1 Cor. 6:9-11 and 1 Tim. 1:9-10), and sees both male and female homosexual behavior as unnatural, dishonorable and shameful.

I should note that Paul's attitude is especially interesting, because homosexuality in the ancient pagan world was viewed largely like homosexuality in today's culture. Aristotle, to be sure, thought that for a man to be sexually attracted to other men was “bestial” and “unnatural”, like eating cinders, but in Plato’s dialogues it was something that you could joke or titter about: it certainly wasn’t a big deal to most Athenians. Paul takes a very strong stance against that attitude, and virtually identifies same-sex activity with rebellion against God. And Paul’s opinion would have been entirely uncontroversial in Jewish or Christian circles of the first century.

There have been some attempts to quibble with the particular kind of homosexuality Paul was referring to in Romans and 1 Corinthians, but frankly, they're quite strained, so strained that I can’t even muster up the energy to engage with them. It’s just not an interesting argument. There's never a hint that any Biblical writer saw homosexuality as acceptable. True, the topic isn’t brought up that often, but when it is, there’s no doubt of the writer’s opinion. Indeed, the relative paucity of texts is likely because opposition to homosexuality was such an unquestioned assumption that the writers didn’t feel they needed to talk about it. In addressing a Jewish audience, Jesus didn’t express an opposition to homosexual behavior, any more than he expressed an opposition to murder or incest, because it was one of many assumptions He shared even with his opponents.

The Story of Liberation

That said, the Presbyterians (and Lutherans and Methodists and Episcopalians) who have argued for ordaining practicing homosexuals don't typically just say that we should ignore the Bible. Rather, they start from a position that I actually agree with, that it's simply not feasible to take every injunction in Scripture as an absolute command for every time and place. If you’ve ever read The Year of Living Biblically, you’ll know what I mean, but to take just a couple New Testament examples, 1 Cor. 14:34 says that women should be silent in the church, though 1 Cor. 11:4 presumes the opposite. 1 Cor. 11 also says that men should only have short hair, and women should keep their heads covered in church, neither of which is exactly enforced these days by any mainstream Christian church. And so forth: I could go on. Whatever view we take of Scriptural authority is going to have to be somewhat more subtle than, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

With that in mind, the best argument I've heard for the ordination of practicing homosexuals is to start by pointing out that both the Bible and the history of Christianity tell a story of liberation. And this is very true. To take the best known example, we’ve pretty much all concluded that Christianity is incompatible with slavery, despite the various passages in the Bible that allow for its practice: because the general thrust of the Bible points towards strongly away from slavery and towards liberation. The Israelites got their start as the people of God when God freed them from their slavery. The prophets were quite strong in their condemnation of economic oppression, and equally bold in their vision of a society marked by peace, justice and freedom. Paul told slaves to obey their masters, and even sent a runaway slave back to his owner. But Paul also told slave owners to be “right and fair”, and when he told Philemon about Onesimus’ return, he repeatedly pointed out that this slave was now “better than a slave, a dear brother”, “a brother in the Lord”, and “my very heart”. Philemon could hardly miss the hint that a Christian should not own someone whom Christ had purchased with His own blood.

Similarly, most Christians have concluded that the Gospel is incompatible with the unequal treatment of women, and for the same reason. Various passages tell us that, for instance, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man” (1 Tim. 2:12), or that “women should be silent in the churches, for it is not permitted that they speak” (1 Cor. 14:34-35). Against this, Paul apparently did allow women to speak in the church (1 Cor. 11:5), and even acknowledges some as apostles (Rom. 16:7). But most tellingly, in an amazing text of liberation, Paul proclaims to the Galatians that “there is no longer slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

So far, I buy this argument. But then these folks go on to say that we should re-interpret the various passages that condemn homosexual behavior from this same perspective. In other words, since it would be unfaithful to Christ to slavishly follow every command the Bible lays out for us, and since the story that the Bible tells, and which God has been telling through the Church, is a story of liberation from oppression, the moral force of this overarching narrative of liberation outweighs any specific scriptural commands that are themselves oppressive. It’s incumbent on us as Christians, they say, to love homosexuals, and to work for their liberation; and we can’t do that if we deny them access to the same opportunities as heterosexuals.

The Witness of the Church

It’s precisely here that, to my mind, the argument falls down. There’s no doubt that the Bible tells a story of liberation from oppression; the question is whether this story can bear the interpretive weight that its proponents allege. I don’t think that it can, for two distinct reasons.

The first reason is that in contrast to the examples of slavery or women in ministry, the Bible, the historical Church, and nearly all contemporary Christians speak with one voice on the topic of homosexual behavior. Like the advocates of homosexual ordination, I take the Bible to be the authoritative but not an inerrant witness to the work of God in Jesus Christ. What God did in Jesus is critical and fundamental; the Bible's witness to that is authoritative, but so far as I can tell, not necessarily coherent in every detail. If the Bible points in a variety of different directions on a particular topic (as it does with the role of women in the Church), if there's an obvious cultural or incidental explanation for a particular injunction, if there doesn't seem to be any larger theological basis for it, and if the Church as a whole has not seen the wisdom in a particular practice, it's presumably not incumbent on Christians to follow a given command. However, if every verse that mentions a particular topic points in exactly the same direction, if there's a larger theological basis for those statements, and if the Church as a whole has concluded that a particular perspective or practice is wise and appropriate (or unwise and inappropriate), then Christians are in a very different position.

And this is precisely the situation with homosexuality. Every time the Bible mentions homosexual behavior, it condemns it. Every time the great theologians of the Church mention homosexual behavior, they condemn it. And apart from a few declining, liberal denominations in the West, Christians today remain united in their view that homosexual behavior is harmful. I don’t have precise numbers, but I would guess that if you were to poll everyone in the world who was sitting in a pew on some Sunday morning, probably 90-95% of them would agree that homosexual behavior is sinful.

So my point is not precisely that verse 'x' or verse 'y' can be used as a proof-text (though they certainly can). It's much broader and deeper than that. Not just the Bible, but Christian thought for the last two millennia, and contemporary Christian practice anywhere outside certain liberal Western circles, is all strongly against homosexuality: though of course there are some expressions of it which I have to imagine Paul (or Augustine or Aquinas or Luther or Calvin) would say are much less objectionable than others. But none of them match up to the creational norm which Jesus raised as a standard: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.”

The Story of Faithfulness

The second reason is that so far as I can tell, and for all its importance, the story of liberation remains a secondary story in the Bible. A much more prominent theme is the requirement of faithfulness to God’s revelation under the constant temptations of the surrounding culture. It’s quite true that the Bible tells how God liberated various people, ranging from the Israelites under Egypt, the exiled population of Judah in Babylon, and the scorned and despised in first century Galilee. But for every verse that talks about economic or social liberation, I suspect there are ten which talk about the faithfulness that God requires of His people in the midst of a culture which scorns such exclusive fidelity.

It would be tedious and exhausting to list all the evidence for this claim, but I’ll at least try to touch on a few out of the thousands of relevant texts. The very first commandment God issues is “You shall have no other Gods before me.” The worst punishments against the Israelites on their desert travels came not from their failure to enact social justice (as important as that is), but because they mixed pure worship with the practices of the nations around them. Pick up any random spot in the prophets, and you’ll find the same theme emerging. “The eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose to do my will and hold fast to my covenant, shall receive from me something better than sons and daughters” (Isaiah 56:4-5). “People from many nations will pass by this city and will ask one another, ‘Why has the LORD done such a thing to this great city?’ ⁹ And the answer will be: ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD their God and have worshiped and served other gods’” (Jeremiah 22:8-9). “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion” (Hosea 2:19). The deuteronomistic history tells same story; indeed, it’s arguable whether it tells any other. Judgment is solemnly issued on each king, with a single, unwavering standard: “Yet Jehu was not careful to keep the law of the LORD, the God of Israel, with all his heart. He did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam, which he had caused Israel to commit” (2 Kings 10:31).

Paul brings it all together in powerful and demanding call to holiness in the midst of a corrupt and corrupting society (2 Cor. 6:14-18):

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? ¹⁵ What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? ¹⁶ What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:

   “I will live with them
   and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
   and they will be my people.”

¹⁷ Therefore,

   “Come out from them
   and be separate,
            says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
   and I will receive you.”

¹⁸ And,

   “I will be a Father to you,
   and you will be my sons and daughters,
            says the Lord Almighty.”

You could read the Bible through many times (as I did) and miss the story of liberation. It’s there, but it’s subtle enough that, quite honestly, I didn’t notice it until I got to college and my professors pointed it out. But you can’t even dip into the Bible without being repeatedly beaten over the head with God’s requirement for faithfulness to His law and covenant, intimately paired with warnings against being influenced by the surrounding culture.

It’s also worth noting that this faithfulness to God is frequently presented in terms of sexual purity. Paul clearly links the two when he upbraids the Corinthians for their immoral behavior. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?” he storms. “Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute?” The prophets repeatedly make the same connection. “I will put a stop to the lewdness and prostitution you began in Egypt,” God says in Ezekiel, and the unfaithfulness to which He’s referring appears to be both literal and spiritual. At least one of the reasons why the Bible puts such an emphasis on sexual morality is because it is a sign, a seal, and a sacrament of God’s covenant with us. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body. ³¹ “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” ³² This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

In other words, I think that the argument between the liberals and the conservatives in the Presbyterian church (and elsewhere) can largely be reduced to an argument between the dueling narratives of liberation vs. faithfulness. Unfortunately, it’s quite clear to me which of these two narratives is closer to the heart of the Bible. God is unwavering in His requirement for social justice; but this is always within the larger context of fidelity to His covenant. Liberals argue that we should ordain practicing homosexuals, because we must adhere to the requirements of social justice. Conservatives argue that we should not, because we must adhere to the requirements of covenant faithfulness. Both themes are present in the Bible: but there’s simply no question as to which is the more prominent and fundamental.

The Influence of Culture

Nevertheless, many Christians would disagree, and one of the reasons they give for this disagreement is that the Church has often sinned by being on the side of the powerful against the powerless. And it is quite true that Christians have sinned horribly, and that the Church has made grievous mistakes. When the Pope parceled out the New World between Spain and Portugal; when Southern Baptists broke away to form a new denomination in favor of slavery; the Inquisitions, the Crusades, the pogroms. But it needs to be pointed that that, with a very few exceptions, the majority of these sins and failures came from too close a connection to the surrounding culture, rather than too much distance from it.

A good example of this is the Papal bull “Sublimus Dei”, issued by Paul III in 1537, forbidding the enslavement of Native Americans, and threatening excommunication for anyone who mistreated them. It's a well-written document and a fine piece of theology, and it took a strong and principled stand against the genocide that was happening in the New World. It was also rescinded the following year, when the Spanish King Charles V threatened to march on Rome if the Pope didn't take it back. Its withdrawal was a sin: but the sin came from too close a connection to the culture. The culture tempted the Church to unfaithfulness, and the Church very regrettably succumbed to that temptation.

As a result, if the surrounding culture is headed strongly in a particular direction that seems to be at odds with the historic traditions of Christianity, I think the Church is right to be suspicious. It's made that mistake too many times. There are times when the surrounding culture may be correct (I think that women's rights is one of these, though even there, it was often Christians fighting for them). But more often than not, from the perspective of hundreds of years later, the surrounding culture will be judged to have been horribly wrong, and the Church itself will be condemned to the extent that it went along with it. Consequently, although it's quite clear that homosexuality is growing in acceptance, it's not the Church's job to move with the times. As Chesterton said, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

Born Homosexual?

An issue that often comes up when discussing homosexuality is the question as to whether it’s innate or not. Folks often argue that (a) homosexuality is no more a choice than the color of your hair, and therefore (b) God must have intended for them to be that way. (As someone said recently, “How many more gay people must God create before we accept that He wants them around?”)

On this question, I don't agree with many Christians who argue (against the available scientific evidence) that it's purely a choice. At least, I could no more imagine myself being tempted towards homosexuality than I could imagine myself being tempted, say, to eat a slug. Someone who is tempted to engage in homosexual activity must be made of different stuff than I am. That said, I do think there's quite likely more of a volitional or cultural component to it than gay advocates will sometimes admit. It’s hard to keep a straight face and argue that gender is a social construction but homosexuality is purely biological. From what I understand, many people (though not all) who identify themselves as homosexual in some fashion actually acknowledge a "spectrum of desire", and say that they feel (to some degree) attracted to both sexes. In a culture where homosexuality was not a live option, or where they felt strong moral scruples against it, those "bisexual" folks would presumably settle into a reasonably comfortable heterosexual lifestyle.

But that's really neither here nor there, because I fully acknowledge that some people are more-or-less born homosexual. From my perspective, that's roughly equivalent to being born with a tendency towards any kind of behavior that doesn't match what God wants for us. I know lots of folks who appear to have been born with addictive personalities, i.e., if they drink at all, they're quite likely to become alcoholics. I understand that scientists have even discovered a genetic basis for this predisposition. This is tragic, and they have my love, my sympathy and my support: but I don't see that it excuses them from the duty of living as sober and disciplined a lifestyle as they can. Or another example: it's widely acknowledged that, as a male, I have a biological tendency to want to cheat on my wife. But I doubt that excuse would very much mollify Galena were I to proffer it. Heredity is orthogonal to morality.

Now, clearly, homosexuality doesn't make you fall down in the street the way alcoholism does. In our culture, at least, it has roughly the same negative social repercussions as extramarital heterosexual activity: that is to say, virtually none at all. The question is whether homosexual behavior has other ramifications, especially of the sort that don’t show up in a psychological survey.

Christian Morality

From a Christian perspective, there are three aspects to morality: (1) right relations between people; (2) a right inward disposition; and (3) a right goal for the human life. C. S. Lewis used the example of a fleet of ships sailing in a convoy. Morality is concerned with making sure the ships don't sail into each other (the first one), that each ship is in good working order (the second), and that they're all sailing to the right destination (the third). Christians and non-Christians can generally agree on the various rules that govern the first (with a few exceptions, like abortion), but Christians have a somewhat different perspective on the second, and a completely different approach to the third.

With this framework in mind, Christians believe that homosexuality interferes with the second and third aspects of morality. In other words, at least in our culture, and apart from the risk of AIDS, homosexual behavior is not really a matter of justice, of right relations between people. (In many other societies it is: if you sleep with another man, you're exposing that man to ridicule and humiliation, or worse: like what happened to Oscar Wilde.) Rather, Christians say, it interferes with your ability to keep your ship in order, and it tends to make your ship head off in the wrong direction. Indeed, this is exactly what Christianity says about sleeping with anyone you're not married to.

And of course, these impacts aren't always obvious from the outside, so if you're not a Christian, if you don't share the overall Christian framework for looking at life, you presumably won't come to the same conclusions. The spiritual effects of homosexuality would be no more visible to a psychologist studying the subject than, say, the spiritual effects of lust, pride, greed or intemperance. So long as you keep your lust under some modicum of control, so long as your pride and anger doesn’t get you fired from your job, so long as your greed keeps earning you more money and you stay out of jail, no psychological test will ever declare you “abnormal”. But from a Christian perspective, homosexuality is exactly like those sins: it’s one among many behaviors and attitudes that are widely accepted in our culture, but which nevertheless exercise a slow, inevitably corrupting influence on those who practice them.

So What Should Christians Do?

C. S. Lewis once said,

“Many people cannot be brought to realise that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better and best, or bad, worse and worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing: if you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being evasive. If you reply that it is far better to forgive a man than to fight a duel with him, but that even a duel might be better than a lifelong enmity which expresses itself in secret efforts to do the man down, they go away complaining that you would not give them a straight answer.”

With this in mind, the best option for a homosexual Christian is chastity. This is hard, no doubt about it, and I’m grateful that God has not laid this call on me. But I also believe that God has a special grace to offer those who find themselves in this difficult situation.

Nevertheless, not all homosexual relationships are the same, any more than heterosexual relationships. I suspect that some kinds of homosexual behavior are much more damaging to your soul than others. If you're a Christian with strong homosexual tendencies, and you find that you simply can't make chastity work, then shacking up with someone permanently, with all the hard work and self-mortification that any long-term relationship entails, is certainly better than frequenting San Francisco bath houses.

Similarly, if a homosexual couple came to my church, I would treat them exactly like I would treat a heterosexual couple living together without being married. I would love and welcome them in the name of Christ. I would encourage them to get involved, to attend Bible studies and home groups, to sing in the choir and sit on committees and help with VBS. But I would also encourage them to reflect critically on their relationship with God and each other. And it would not be appropriate for them to serve as elders or deacons, as teachers, or as pastors.

The PCUSA’s Decision to Ordain Practicing Homosexuals

2011-05-16T13:29:00.001-07:00

I just read that the PCUSA (the denomination to which I belong) has made the decision to begin ordaining practicing homosexual ministers:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/pcusa-votes-to-allow-openly-gay-clergy-50176/

I'm still struggling with how to respond to this. My concern is not precisely with the details of this decision, but with the reasoning behind it. The theological shifts necessary to make this seem reasonable require that we ignore the unanimous witness of Scripture, two thousand years of Christian reflection and praxis, and the all-but-unanimous consensus of Christians around the world. The PCUSA has apparently decided that these are no longer authoritative, and that strikes me as a very dangerous step. If we're no longer to be constrained by any of these three sources of authority, the PCUSA will almost certainly find itself “blown about by every wind of doctrine.” Fashion, not faithfulness, will reign. In another hundred years, without any solid authority as a guide, it will only be by the grace of God if the PCUSA remains a recognizably Christian organization.

The possibility of apostasy may seem remote now, but when you consider how John Calvin or John Knox would view this move, I think you can get a sense for how far the PCUSA has already shifted from its foundations. Yet this is not just an abandonment of its own roots in the Reformation: it's a clear step away from its ties to historic Christian faith and practice, and to the larger Christian communion worldwide. That more than anything else is what frightens me.

I'm no fundamentalist, but this is a bright line for me and for my wife. We love our church, but our primary commitment is to Christ, to His Word, and to the great traditions of His Body, and we need to be a part of a denomination with the same goals.

Compel Them to Come In

2011-05-15T13:39:00.001-07:00

I had the opportunity to preach again this morning; and once again lacking anything substantive to put on my blog, I figured I might as well post my sermon.

Introduction: The Great Commission

Martin Luther once compared humanity to a drunkard trying to ride a horse, first falling off on the left, and then falling off on the right. And this is quite true. Hardly has humanity managed to make a mistake in one direction before we overcorrect, and fall off the horse on the other.

A good example of this is the way that our society treats religion. Back in the 1600’s, religious beliefs were not merely things you argued about; you were also expected to fight for them, and quite likely, to die for them. During the disgraceful 30 Years War, Protestant Christians fought Catholic Christians across the length and breadth of Europe, slaughtering entire cities, and burning whole countrysides, simply because their inhabitants held a different view of ecclesiastical authority, or used different words to describe communion. Perhaps a third of the population of Europe was killed during this brutal period in Western history. It was largely in reaction to those horrors that our own founding fathers enshrined in our Constitution the twin principles of individual religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. We are, and we should be, quite grateful for these protections.

And yet, if it is possible to fall off the horse on one side, slaughtering those who don’t share the details of our faith, it’s just as possible to fall off the horse on the other, and conclude that religious beliefs don’t matter. That is largely the situation in which we find ourselves today.

If you’ve been a follower of Christ for any length of time, you’ve probably had the opportunity to talk to someone who isn’t a Christian, about the fact that you are. If your experience is at all similar to mine, at some point during those conversations you’ve heard the following sentiment expressed: “I’m glad that it works for you, but it’s not really for me.” In other words, their assumption is that religious beliefs aren’t actually true. Faith might be helpful, faith might work for some people, but faith isn’t the sort of thing about which you could say, “this is correct” or “this is false.” Faith, most people are convinced, is a private matter, and if I have a different perspective than you do, the polite response is to say something conventional like, “Well, it takes all sorts.”

Of course, we can see a certain value to thinking this way. We need not go back so far as the 30 Years War to understand the power and terror of religious beliefs. September 11 was less than ten years ago, and religious terrorism remains a persistent threat to people across the globe. When we see religious beliefs used as a justification for killing, it’s perhaps natural to conclude that we should keep any beliefs we might have about the fundamental nature of reality to ourselves. As a result, common-places like “it takes all sorts” and “I’m glad it works for you,” aren’t just something people say to get out of a potentially awkward conversation; they represent a perspective that’s ingrained in our culture, and is reinforced in countless ways by the books and magazines we read, the television shows we watch, and even the advertisements we endure.

This belief, that religious claims have no real truth content, is so ingrained into most people that they don’t even recognize it as a belief: they never think to question it, because they never think about it in the first place. Yet when you do think about it, this perspective really is quite odd, and stands out sharply against the background of human societies. It only makes sense if you’ve already elevated individual selves to an almost insane epistemological height. And we most certainly have done so. I doubt there has ever been a society in the history of the world so intensely individualistic as ours. We want not only to choose our own religion free from external constraints; we also want to make up whatever religion we please; and we would generally prefer that the resulting work of our hands be free from any criticism.

In his book Habits of the Heart Robert Bellah describes an interview with a young woman named Sheila Larson. Sheila describes her religious beliefs as “Sheilaism”, and says that they basically consist of “trying to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.” Although Sheila feels the individuality of her religious beliefs so intensely that she can’t call them by any other name than “Sheilaism”, these beliefs are not nearly so unique as she would have them. What Sheila fancies to be her own private religion, has actually become the unquestioned assumption of hundreds of millions of people. Who says that irony is dead?

But there is a flip side to this intense individualism. Since individuals can make up their own religions as they go, and since different individuals will certainly reach different conclusions, the obvious corollary is that everyone should keep those conclusions to themselves. From this perspective, religious beliefs should be a purely private matter, like underwear: it’s generally acknowledged that most people have them, and that they make life more comfortable, but we’d rather they not be on display. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it.” As soon as religion became a purely individual matter, it necessarily became a purely private one as well.

In the face of this almost universal “Sheilaism”, two aspects of Christianity stand out sharply. The first is that Christianity claims to be true: not just true for me and perhaps true for you. Christianity claims to be true, full-stop. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” Jesus said. “Nobody comes to the Father except through me.” “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” These are fundamental claims about the deep workings of reality. Before a statement can possibly be right, it has to start by being possibly wrong, and while these statements of Jesus are astonishing and outrageous on their face, they have a single glaring virtue: they might be false. And therefore they might be true.

Second, Christianity insists on delivering its message to other people, and in a loud enough voice that they have no option but to hear it. “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations.” “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.” The truth of the Gospel is inseparable from its proclamation. Christianity at its heart is a missionary religion.

So this is the situation in which we find ourselves. We live in a society which believes religion should be individual and private; but we serve a Lord to whom every knee will eventually bow, and who has called us to proclaim the good news of His resurrection in a very public and conspicuous manner. I suppose the Gospel finds itself in conflict with some aspects of every culture: but these conflicts seem particularly sharp in our own. Consequently, it’s worth thinking some more about these missionary impulses – and more specifically, seeing what the Bible has to say about them.

The Master and His Feast

In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus begins by describing the Kingdom of God as a sumptuous banquet to which God has sent out invitations to all and sundry. This image of a feast and celebration is something we should keep firmly in our minds as we contemplate what it means to proclaim the Gospel. For it is indeed something we often forget: that the Christian proclamation is good news. That’s what the English word “Gospel” means, as well as the Greek word from which we get “evangelism”. And the content of Jesus’ message, and the story of His life, death and resurrection, is in fact very good news. Everywhere, Jesus describes the message of the Kingdom in images of almost outlandish pleasure and beauty. It’s a lavish wedding, a pearl of great price, a sumptuous banquet. The Gospel is health and healing, the best wine you ever tasted, water and light, bread and harvest, the fatted calf, the son who was lost and now is found.

There is, of course, one obvious way in which the Gospel is good news: the proclamation of the Gospel, and our acceptance of its message, brings the possibility of eternal salvation. If we are truly in Christ, we participate vicariously in his life, death and resurrection, and we experience in Him the hope of eternal life. One day, Christ will return to rescue the world, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away; and all will be new. An eternity with Christ, an eternity contemplating the glorious vision of God, basking in God’s undying love for us, and loving and praising God in return: that is certainly beatitude.

But we sometimes forget that the Gospel brings with it a present hope as well. Jesus’ message of salvation and redemption was not just for the age to come; it is also highly relevant to the age and to the world in which we now live. The Gospel changes people; indeed, it changes whole nations, and has changed the course of history. This present world, without the message of the Gospel, would be dramatically impoverished.

I think one of the reasons we sometimes forget this is because we are keenly aware that the arrival of this Gospel did not, in fact, always mean good news for those who heard it. For hundreds of years after Columbus, European Christians committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Christianity against Native Americans. Christians have oppressed women, have carried out pogroms against Jews, and crusades against Muslims. These are dark blots indeed against the followers of Christ, and it is important that we remember how easily even Christians can be seduced into horrific evil. But our sorrow over these sins, and our repentance that they were done in something like our name, should not make us forget how hard, even during these horrible times, many true followers of Christ sacrificed all they had for the cause of peace and justice. Evil is a powerful force in this world, and Christians have not always resisted it with success. But through the power of the Gospel, they have indeed opposed it: and there is no doubt that the Gospel has made a powerful positive difference in the history of the world.

To take but one example: throughout human history, slavery was a nearly universal institution. It has existed in one form or another, across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, throughout all of recorded history – until Christian activists fought to abolish it. It’s now inconceivable for a country to tolerate slavery: and this is entirely the result of the light of Christ being shown on the practice. Although Christians sometimes regrettably and shamefully participated in slavery, the movement to abolish slavery began with followers of Christ and was all but unknown except in nations influenced by Christianity. This is not an accident. The Gospel is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of owning another human being. If it is really true that Christ died to save even the lowest slave, there is no justification for slavery of any sort. I suspect very strongly that were it not for the yeast of the Gospel of Christ leavening the world, institutionalized, industrial chattel slavery would still be a prominent feature of life today. Just imagine what our world would be like without the moral force of Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison, or Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman. Try to imagine the stench of a slave market in Bellevue Square Mall, or the sound of the lash on Boeing assembly lines. For the millions now living in freedom who would otherwise be enslaved, for those feasting on liberty at the table of the Kingdom, the proclamation of the Gospel certainly has been good news indeed.

Those Who Declined the Invitation

When we hear the Gospel, we are receiving an invitation to sit down with Jesus at this very feast. But Jesus’ parable makes it clear that we do not need to accept that invitation. Indeed, the whole story turns on the possibility of rejecting the divine offer. And this is another key aspect of the proclamation of the Gospel. It is not always successful. In the parable of the sower, only one of the four seeds eventually bears fruit; but our own efforts to evangelize our friends and neighbors may come to fruition even more sparingly.

This does lead to another question, however, that Jesus doesn’t address directly. We all understand, I suppose, that those who consciously and explicitly reject the Gospel message have nobody but themselves to blame if they’re not present at the heavenly feast. But what about those who have never heard? Or indeed, what about those who have heard, and have even given the Gospel a fair hearing, but simply can’t convince themselves that it’s true? Is it fair for God to send someone to Hell simply because of an honest intellectual mistake?

This question is as difficult as it is common, and it remains puzzling to me that nowhere in the Bible is it clearly addressed. So in offering my thoughts on the matter, you should understand that I’m trying to put together an answer to a question the New Testament never even raises, let alone answers: so take this next bit with whatever dosing of salt you feel is appropriate.

First, the New Testament is quite clear that salvation only comes through Jesus Christ. If the Bible is indeed the Word of God in any meaningful way, it’s simply not tenable that all religions are equally viable paths to God. If we are ever to stand before God with anything like equanimity, we will do so only through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Second, the New Testament doesn’t make any sense if it isn’t possible to reject the Gospel. There are simply too many passages that warn us against such a rejection, and which offer a very clear view into the fate of those who do. Those warnings come from all sources: Paul, Peter, James, and most insistently of all, from Jesus Himself. I wish I could be a Universalist and believe that in the end everyone will make it to heaven. But I can’t square that even with today’s text, let alone the rest of the Bible. God is a gentleman, and He will not override the choices we have spent our whole lives making.

Third, not all mistakes are honest mistakes. I don’t know how God will judge the person who wants to believe, wishes that he could believe, even struggles to believe – but simply can’t convince himself that it’s true. That’s for God to decide, not me. But I don’t think many of us are actually in that position. To put it bluntly, we’re far too gullible. Unless we’re faced with overwhelming evidence, humans tend to end up believing what they wish were true. In my experience, the vast majority of people who believe that the Gospel is not true also hope that it’s not true. They dislike the idea of an Authority who will one day assess their every word and deed. They want to call their lives their own. They really do hope that no outside Power will ever judge each of their choices nor weigh every slow, imperceptible turning of their soul. When someone in this position mistakenly concludes that the Gospel is not true, their mistake is not, perhaps, completely innocent.

Finally, many Christian thinkers have speculated that those who were not Christians in this life might be offered a “second chance” to acknowledge Christ as Lord when they finally stand before His throne on the Day of Judgment. C. S. Lewis was one of those, and he put it this way in Mere Christianity:

There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.

I very much hope that Lewis’ belief is true, though I must also be honest and say that I don’t know if it is or not.

Those Who Accepted the Invitation

But the rich friends who declined to attend the feast are only half the story. For the master’s house was eventually filled with the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. When Jesus first told this parable, sitting in the house of a Pharisee, it would have been difficult to miss His point: that the religious leaders of his day, the ones who should have embraced His message and been first into the Kingdom of God, had instead rejected it. In contrast, those who would have been expected to reject the Gospel, the poor and uneducated, the traitors and collaborators, the whores and drug addicts, had actually embraced it.

This strange dichotomy did not disappear after Jesus’ earthly ministry. Paul himself, in writing to the Corinthians, says,

26 Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him.

And this remains true today. At the macro level, Christianity is no longer a phenomenon restricted to the rich, Western world. On the contrary, Europe and the United States seem to be growing more and more secular with each passing year: but the message of Christ is vibrant, thriving and growing quickly in the poor countries of Africa and South America.

But this is also true on a much smaller scale. I’ll tell you one story; there are thousands like it.

When I’m visiting my parents in Longview, I usually go with them to their church, Columbia Heights Assembly of God. Over the years, I’ve grown acquainted with a program Columbia Heights is running called Celebrate Recovery. As you might guess from the name, Celebrate Recovery is targeted at addicts, and in Longview, this invariably means methamphetamine. Every Friday night, in the church fellowship hall, nearly a hundred current and recovering meth-heads get together to talk about Jesus. I’ve met many of these folks, and trust me, this meeting isn’t a pretty sight. My Dad, who isn’t one to mince words, says it looks like the bar scene out of Star Wars. Last Halloween, everyone came in costume, and my Dad said he couldn’t tell the difference. The people who come to Celebrate Recovery have had precious little to celebrate in their lives. They’re addicts and prostitutes and alcoholics. Many of them have spent time in jail. Most of them have spent time on the street, homeless. They don’t have any teeth. They talk weird. They’re strange. They smell. They make me uncomfortable. I don’t like how they sing.

And they love Jesus. And Jesus loves them; and they know it. Columbia Heights is in a rich neighborhood: but it’s these poor broken and bloodied slobs from Celebrate Recovery who are the beating heart of that church. On Sunday morning, it’s easy to spot them. They’ve got their hands raised higher than anyone else, and they’re singing louder. They’re not ashamed to get their bodies into it, either, and if you happen to be sitting next to one, you may get bumped a little as they start dancing. They’ve been called in from the highways and byways, they’re the crippled the blind and the lame who don’t belong at the Feast of the Kingdom of God, but got invited anyway.

I don’t mean to say that the folks from Celebrate Recovery are perfect Christians. Hell, they know that. That’s why they’re there. They know they’re not perfect: but they know that they are loved.

Conclusion: The Great Authority

I think many of us find the whole idea of evangelism intimidating. It brings to mind images of street preachers, or folks turning up on your doorstep on Saturday morning, smiles plastered on their faces and a stack of tracts in their hand. To be sure, those things have their place, especially for those who are called to that sort of ministry.

But evangelism doesn’t have to be intimidating. To start with, remember that evangelism is the reason why you’re here this morning. The reason your butt’s in that pew is because Peter or Paul or James or John told somebody who told somebody who told somebody else about Jesus – and one of those somebodies told you. Evangelism isn’t something foreign to any of us: it’s something we’ve each experienced. It’s why we’re here. There’s no reason to be scared of it.

So if you want to start evangelizing, if you want to start taking seriously Christ’s command to proclaim the Gospel, do this. Start by thinking about the things that attracted you to Christ, and the things that have held you to Him over the years. Think about the satisfaction that comes from serving Him and His body. Think about the difference He’s made in your life: how you’re not the person you once were, or would have been, had He not been with you, step by step. Think about why you’re here this morning. And then look for opportunities to explain those reasons to the people around you. As Peter said, “Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

There’s no particular need to be pushy about it. To be sure, if you’re a natural salesman, feel free to be as assertive as you want: I’ve seen it work. But most of us aren’t like that. We already have conversations with friends and family and coworkers where it’s natural to ask questions about their own beliefs: so go ahead and ask, and listen to their answers. And when the timing is right, or when they ask, tell them what you yourself believe, and why. If someone is going through a hard time, offer to pray for them. Go out of your way to help people out. Talk about your church. Bring a thoughtful but explicitly Christian perspective into conversations about politics or business or family life. Talk about why you went down to D’Iberville to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Tell them why you think God is interested in social justice. Pique their curiosity. Surprise them. Give them an explanation for the hope that is within you.

When Jesus told his disciples – when he told us – to go forth into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation, He didn’t tell us it would be easy. As a matter of fact, He told us pretty bluntly that it would be difficult. But He also told us that He would be with us as we went, even to the end of the age. And that makes all the difference.

Why do the Nations Rage?

2011-03-06T19:35:00.001-08:00

I had the opportunity to preach at my church this morning, and since my blogging has been a little thin lately, I thought I’d post it here as well.

The Crevice

Strange things happen on mountains. Mountains are hard to climb, and even harder to live on. They can kill you if you’re not careful, and sometimes they can kill you even if you are. Twice, I’ve fallen into crevasses on a mountain; but I’ve also seen sights of unbearable beauty from their summits. Mountains take your breath away, literally and figuratively. They leave your lungs aching from the exertion and your heart aching from their beauty. They are astonishing and terrifying, as inhospitable as they are alluring. We’re not meant to live on mountains, but our lives would be far less rich if we could never see their distant peaks, imagine their thin, cold air, and sometimes, stand on their summits.

It’s no surprise, then, that mountains have often been places where God chooses to meet human beings. Mountains stand apart from our daily lives; they are beautiful and mysterious and terrifying: and in this way, they are much like our God. When Moses removed his sandals before the burning bush, he was standing on the sides of Mt. Sinai; and less than a year later, he was standing on its summit, communing with God, receiving the Law of God’s covenant with His holy people, hiding in a crack in the rock when God Himself passed by in a storm. Many hundreds of years later, when Elijah fled from Jezebel, he took refuge in perhaps the same cleft in the rocks of Mount Sinai, and once again God descended: but this time, God was not in the earthquake, God was not in the fire, God was not in the storm: but after the storm, there was a still small voice, and God spoke to Elijah, restored his faith and his courage, and sent him on his way.

And of course, in our passage today, Moses and Elijah are once again privileged to meet God on a mountaintop, though in a rather different setting. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, that point in the church year when we remember first the sleepy, then the astonished and finally the terrified looks on the disciples’ faces. Mountains are places where God can break through into our normal existence, and today we will try to imagine, and maybe even remember, some small part of what that can look like.

The Climb

When Jesus took Peter, James and John for a hike on that late winter day two thousand years ago, it was at a crucial time in Jesus’ ministry. Matthew tells us that that just six days prior, Jesus had for the first time revealed to His disciples that His destiny was a death by torture at the hands of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. The disciples were still reeling from this revelation, none more than Peter, who, like many of us, was the proud owner of a tongue that frequently outran his brain. Peter began to upbraid Jesus for thinking this way, and for his troubles received perhaps the harshest rebuke Jesus ever uttered: “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Peter’s response made it clear to Jesus that His disciples needed to understand more about exactly who He was; and this undoubtedly weighed on His thoughts as they ascended together that morning.

Peter, James and John, similarly, must have had much on their minds. They had been together with Jesus now for nearly three years. They had left their careers and their families to follow Him, even though they didn’t really know what they were doing, or why they were leaving all they held dear, or even who they were following. There was no doubt Jesus was a popular rabbi and a charismatic teacher: the crowds hung on His words, and He spoke with an uncommon authority, even daring on occasion to constrain or correct the Law of Moses. But the more time they spent with Him, the more impressed they grew. He spoke with authority not only to the crowds, but also to the wind and the waves. His touch could not just comfort the sick, but could also heal them. A leper who approached Jesus did not make Jesus unclean, but rather, it was Jesus who made the leper clean. So the disciples knew Jesus was at least a prophet, and a powerful one: anointed by God in a way that Israel had not seen for many generations. But was Jesus something more? Perhaps, they thought. Perhaps He might even be the one to redeem Israel, to return Israel to the glory she had formerly enjoyed, and to the faithfulness that she had not. But even as these hopes were rising in their hearts, Jesus had begun to talk of disturbing things: of conspiracies and betrayals, of a trial, torture, and death. None of this made any sense to them. How could God raise up a servant, and then allow that servant to suffer? How could God place His Spirit upon a prophet, and then withdraw His protection? How could God anoint a king, and then lead that king to his death?

And so it was that Jesus and His disciples reached the summit. With all this on their minds, and after a wearisome climb, followed by a lengthy prayer, it’s perhaps understandable that the disciples decided a nap was in order. And so, one after another, their eyelids closed, and they began to drift in and out of sleep.

Try to imagine what it must have been like to be one of those disciples on that morning. Lying on a hard bed of uncomfortable rocks, you’re napping fitfully, slipping in and out of dreams, occasionally lifting an eye to see if anything interesting is happening. Then something you had initially mistaken for another uncomfortable dream abruptly becomes all too real. It’s the shadows from the rocks that you notice first: they’re all at the wrong angles. A sudden light has flooded the mountaintop, and with a start, you look up and realize that the light is coming from your rabbi’s face. Just a few seconds earlier his tunic had been grey with old dirt and muddy from the morning’s ascent. But now His clothes are suddenly and painfully white – whiter than any earthly detergent could make them, as Mark tells us helpfully. Still blinking and shielding your eyes, a mounting excitement compels you look closer, a mounting terror all but convinces you to flee. And then you see not just Jesus, but two other figures that weren’t there a moment ago. In that sharp and frightening light, you can’t make out their faces, but you hear Jesus greet them by name: Moshe, He says. Eliyahu. It takes a minute to sink in, but as they begin to converse, you realize who your rabbi is talking to. Moses. Elijah. And He’s talking with them like they’re old friends.

Luke adds an interesting detail at this point. He’s the only one of the Gospel writers to give us any hints as to the content of that memorable conversation. He tells us that Moses and Elijah were discussing with Jesus his impending departure from Jerusalem. We should note that Luke was a very careful writer, and the Greek word he uses for “departure” is literally “εξοδος”, “Exodus”. Moses and Elijah were discussing the Exodus that Jesus was about to bring to completion in Jerusalem. And remember what the Exodus was: it was when God made the children of Jacob into the children of God, when God established an eternal covenant between Himself and the squirrelly sons of Israel. And Jesus was about to do the same thing in Jerusalem: he was about pour out his life-blood to establish a new covenant between God and humanity.

It’s at this point that poor Peter’s mouth runs away with him again, and he utters what must be one of the greatest non sequiturs of all time. He’s just been confronted with two of the greatest figures of the Old Testament, heroes of Israel who have been dead for a combined two thousand years. In addition, it’s become apparent that Jesus is on speaking terms with these two men; and beyond that, has developed an uncanny resemblance to a light bulb. So what does Peter say in response to this astonishing situation? “Umm, Lord, Lord, umm, hey, I’ve got an idea. This would be a great place to pitch some tents.”

But perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so hard on poor Peter. His idea actually had some merit to it. The Greek word for “tent” – σκηνη – also means “tabernacle”, that is, a place of worship. A σκηνη was where the Ark of the Covenant dwelt; a σκηνη where all of Israel worshiped until Solomon built his famous temple. A tent, a tabernacle, was where Israel celebrated the great acts of God, and remembered the amazing things that God had done in bringing them out of Egypt, repeatedly delivering them from the hands of their enemies. So although it’s not entirely clear what Peter was thinking in suggesting three tents, he certainly realized something big was happening there on the mountain, something worthy of celebration and remembrance.

The Crux

But hardly were the words out of Peter’s mouth when the disciples’ very strange and impressive day became even stranger and more terrifying. While Peter was still speaking, a cloud covered the mountaintop, much as clouds had covered Mt. Sinai during Moses and Elijah’s earlier visits. And a voice came from the shining mist: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.”

If you’ve ever been in an earthquake, you must have some sense for what the disciples were feeling at that moment. A powerful earthquake is an almost numinous experience. When you feel concrete and asphalt begin to move under your feet, when you watch solid rock dance like a wave in the ocean, when the hills themselves skip like lambs, it becomes plain that the mundane and simple texture of what we call reality is not all that there is. In an earthquake, we realize that an external force has the potential to break through into our daily lives, that perhaps this reality has always been breaking through, that our lives are mere foam on the surface of something larger and infinitely more powerful than ourselves, that the depths of existence hold a power and a mystery and a terror we had never suspected.

Any thoughts the disciples might have entertained about being equal to Jesus, or for that matter, of being equal to the situation, were immediately abandoned. They did what every sane person would do: they fell trembling on their faces before the God of the universe.

But what did the voice in the cloud mean by those mysterious words? “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!” Any first-century Jew could have told you in an instant that those words were an allusion to a famous and well-known Messianic psalm. Earlier today, we read this passage from Psalm 2:

I will proclaim the LORD’s decree:
   He said to me, “You are my son;
   today I have become your father.
⁸ Ask of me,
   and I will make the nations your inheritance,
   the ends of the earth your possession.
⁹ You will shepherd them with a rod of iron;
   you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

Psalm 2 describes a revolt of the nations against the King of Israel, the “anointed one,” for that is what the Hebrew word משיח, Messiah means, or the Greek word χριστος, Christ. In this Psalm, the Messiah had been anointed, installed as king and proclaimed as the Son of God on the holy mountain of God. But the Messiah now faced a rebellion from those who should have known better.

The kings of the earth rise up
   and the rulers band together
   against the LORD and against his anointed, saying,
³ “Let us break their chains
   and throw off their shackles.”

Originally, this psalm referred to a specific king of Israel: perhaps David, possibly one of his descendants, Solomon, Hezekiah, or one of the others. This king had been crowned on Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, and ruled, under God, with God’s blessing. But there were many nations around Israel: Moab, Syria, Edom, Egypt, and others. These nations were restive, and were often opposed to Israel, to Israel’s king, and to Israel’s God. When the kings of Israel were strong, the neighboring rulers resisted their authority. When the kings of Israel were weak, the neighboring rulers took advantage of this weakness, and plundered their people and stole their territory. But in the end, this psalm says, God would stand up for His king and would redeem His people: and those who opposed God in this matter would find themselves learning better wisdom in a somewhat painful fashion.

It should be obvious now how this psalm relates to the story of the Transfiguration, and what the disciples would have understood the voice from heaven to mean. “This is my Son, the Messiah,” God was saying. “Here on the holy mountain I have installed Him, and I proclaim that He speaks with my blessing and acts with my authority. The ends of the earth are His possession; the whole world belongs to Him. Even so, what He has been telling you is true. He is facing a challenge from those who claim to rule the world I gave Him. They will reject His authority, and conspire against Him. But I will be with Him, and in the end, their rebellion will not succeed. They will be broken like pottery, and my Son, the son of David the shepherd king, will shepherd not merely the people of Israel, but all the nations of the world.”

The Cross

The Transfiguration stands out sharply against all the other stories in the New Testament. We are told, of course, that Jesus performed many strange and wonderful miracles during the course of His ministry. Indeed, miracles followed Him around like so many sheep: from the angel who announced his birth, to the angels who greeted the wondering disciples on the Mount of Olives after his ascension, Jesus’ life was marked by repeated incursions of the supernatural into our merely natural world. But amidst all these miraculous stories, the Transfiguration remains unique. The Gospels clearly present Jesus as the suffering servant: but in the Transfiguration, we see him, for the first and only time prior to the Resurrection, as a triumphant Lord. The Gospels tell us Jesus was a man, fully human, like ourselves; in the Transfiguration, we are shown that Jesus was God, fully divine, like His Father. We know that Jesus did not defend Himself before the Sanhedrin and Pilate; the Transfiguration tells us that Jesus could have defended Himself very ably indeed, had he but chosen to.

The brilliance that shone from Jesus’ face that morning brought light to much that had hitherto been shrouded in mystery. But nothing on which that light shown threw so long and dark a shadow as the cross; and that shadow stretches out over the centuries, and reaches across the oceans. Indeed, we still live today in that shadow. For in the light of the Transfiguration, it becomes clear what actually happened on that dark afternoon on a hill outside Jerusalem. It was not a good man going bravely to his death. It was not a teacher of peace and love whose message had been sadly misinterpreted. It was not even a dangerous revolutionary, ruthlessly executed by those whose positions he threatened. No: the cross was the death of the undying God, the passion of the impassive deity, Omnipotence made helpless. On the cross, Life itself gave His life so that we might live.

And of course, this changes everything. If God did not go to the gallows, Christianity is at best a maudlin religion with a mildly interesting moral code. But if it was God in person who hung on that tree, if it was God Himself who left infinite glory to rescue a fallen humanity, then everything we thought we knew about this world is wrong. We are far worse off than we thought: because it took the death of God to save us. But we are far more blessed, and far more important, than we could have imagined: because our redemption was purchased with a price beyond any possible value.

As G. K. Chesterton said:

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already: but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.

The Crown

But eventually the cloud lifted, and the awful light faded. The disciples felt Jesus shaking them: “Arise,” he said, “don’t be scared.” And when they dared to raise their eyes, they saw only their rabbi, with the same dirty clothing, the same care-lined face, the same long beard and dusty sandals.

Their descent off the mountain that afternoon must have involved some long and interesting conversations, as well as some equally long and interesting silences. All we know, however, is that Jesus told them not to tell anyone about what had happened, until He had been raised from the dead. And it’s not hard to see why: however true what had happened on the mountain, and however important the lesson, it was a dangerous truth, and the lesson could be easily misunderstood. For just as Jesus needed to make it clear to the disciples that he was not just another prophet, not just another rabble-rousing Messiah with dreams of greatness, Jesus also needed to make it clear to them that his destiny did not consist in evicting the Romans from the land of Israel. Yes, Jesus’ authority was not that of a human being, however wise, moral or charismatic. His choices and His destiny brooked no argument from a mouthy Peter, for Jesus had set his face towards Jerusalem, and His destiny was death on the cross. But while the Transfiguration made it clear that Jesus was more than a prophet, it was not until Jesus’ death and resurrection had been accomplished that the disciples could understand just how radical Jesus’ mission was.

The voice on the mountain had declared Jesus to be the unique Son of God; and by quoting from Psalm 2, God had, in effect, made Jesus the recipient of the extravagant and even militaristic claims in that psalm. All the old prophecies, all the old promises, were to come true in Jesus. Jesus could ask of God, and God would give Him the nations as His inheritance, the ends of the earth as His possession. If Jesus had asked the disciples for advice at this point, they would certainly have recommended that Jesus use that position and authority to drive out the Romans, and restore Israel to its former glory.

But however far the disciples could see that day on the mountain, Jesus could see further. He could see far beyond the borders of Israel, over the oceans, and through the millennia. He could see into a small church on the outskirts of Seattle, into a congregation mostly faithful, sometimes struggling, always in need of grace. In short, He could see us. He knew that we needed redemption every bit as much as Israel did. He knew that we needed His love and His leadership, His compassion and His wisdom. And He knew that we needed His death.

And so it was that Jesus went willingly from the Mount of Transfiguration to the Mount of Golgotha. He asked, and His Father truly gave Him the nations as His inheritance. You and I are a small part, but a well-tended and cherished part, of that possession. For we belong to Christ.

These recent weeks have been filled with two events of great moment and some discomfort for our church. Pastor Vonna announced last month that she will be leaving in September, and I anticipate that we will feel the want of her gifts immensely. And we received word just this week that after 13 years of hard work and faithful service, Pastor Charlie won’t be returning at the end of his sabbatical. He is leaving with good will and blessings on both sides, but I, for one, will miss my friend a great deal.

In these times, it may be all too easy, like Peter, to jump to conclusions and pass judgment on matters we don’t understand. Like Peter, it may be tempting for us to let our mouths race ahead of our brains and say things that we may later regret. These are unsettled times, after all. But we also have the opportunity to learn a lesson it took Peter many more tries to learn: that Jesus is in charge. This is not Pastor Charlie’s church. This is not Pastor Vonna’s church. It is not mine, and it is not yours. It is our Lord’s. Our Lord died for this church. Our Lord bought every member of this congregation with His blood. You and I, each one of us, and every one of us: we are not our own, for we were bought with a price. Our Lord could see us from the Mount of Transfiguration when the disciples fell on their faces; He could see us from the Mount of Golgotha, when the disciples fled in fear; He could see us from the Mount of Olives when He ascended to heaven; and He is watching over us right now, from His seat at the right hand of His Father. Our Lord is present with us, and He will not abandon us, for we belong to Him, and He takes good care of His own.

Alanta Web Conferencing Released to Beta

2011-01-08T15:20:00.001-08:00

I’m pleased to announce that the product the small team at Alanta has been working on for the last 18 months is finally in beta. Now, this is a true beta, rather than a Google-style “forever-beta”, so use at your own risk. But we’ve been dog-fooding it ourselves for the better part of six months, and we decided it was time to let other folks start banging on it. As Matt Mullenwegg said, “If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.” And if that’s true, well, we haven’t exactly waited too long.

If you have only a small amount of courage, you can start using it here: http://alanta.com/

Some Details

Alanta is the first completely in-browser web conferencing and collaboration solution with acoustic echo cancellation. There are other in-browser solutions, like DimDim and TokBox, but because they use Flash, and because Flash has no echo cancellation, they’re basically unusable unless everyone in the conference is wearing headphones. We managed to add echo cancellation by using Silverlight as our platform, which gave us raw access to the audio and video streams, though precious little else. As a result, we ended up having to rebuild the entire web conferencing stack, more-or-less from scratch: but the result is a solution that can offer features nobody else has.

Some Important Caveats

We’re still working through some stability issues with our media server. As a result, sometimes sound will cut out on one or more parties. Our best recommendation is to (a) refresh your browser when this happens, and (b) don’t use this yet for mission-critical stuff. Like I said, this is a real beta.
At the moment, this is all just running on one aging server for which we’re paying $70 / month. We’re not expecting a ton of usage right out the gate, but if we’re wrong, we might hit some near-term scalability issues.
We theoretically support Macs, but our testing shows that this support is still pretty iffy. It turns out there are important differences in how various sound card/web cam drivers behave under Silverlight, and these differences seem to be worse on Macs. We’re working to improve this. Still beta, remember?
There’s no hard-coded limit to the number of concurrent sessions in each call, but we’ve noticed that our media server starts acting weird after four or five. We’re working on that. Have I mentioned that this is beta?

Some Additional Details

This all free at the moment – we haven’t even built the piece to charge folks. We anticipate that we’ll eventually offer a free and several paid levels.
This is all written in Silverlight. Some folks have wondered about our choice of platform, mostly because of the limited reach of Silverlight compared to Flash. We don’t think this is going to be an issue in the long term: Silverlight had ~25% reach when we started, is now up to ~70%, and is continuing to grow at ~2% a month (see riastats for details). HTML5 isn’t going to be an option for at least five years, as the W3C/IETF committee tasked with working on realtime web conferencing technologies only spun up last month, and is likely years away from a working spec, let alone widespread browser adoption.
We built the media pieces basically from scratch. We used CSpeex for our audio codec and ported the Speex preprocessor from C to C# for the heart of our audio DSP, but we rolled our own video codec, media server, and protocol. It would have been nice to use RTP and a concomitant RTP server, but Silverlight doesn’t support UDP, and we have some long-term plans to fix the problems inherent in real-time two-way communication over TCP/IP that required us to control the underlying protocol. Our acoustic echo cancellation is the piece that needs the most long-term work: we’re measuring about 90% echo removal in our tests, which is OK for 2-3 people in a room, and lots better than Flash, but the 10% that remains is still too annoying when it’s multiplied by lots of simultaneous participants.

Because all this is happening is completely in-browser, the next step in our strategy is to offer a simple API that websites can use to add real-time communications to their own sites. Imagine car dealerships talking with customers in real-time as they’re browsing their site, or Nordstrom’s “personal shoppers” talking with their clients, or, really, any website with a high-touch sales model. Or use it to turn casual games into social games: Scrabulous meets Chatroulette (presumably without the penises). Or lots of stuff we haven’t thought of yet. Our bet is that companies will be looking to distinguish themselves over the next few years by adding real-time communications to their websites; and that customers will grow to expect it.

I’d like to offer a special thanks to Andre Kirchner and Roman Buchyn, the two other Alanta developers, and to Alex Ermolaev, our CEO. You’ve been a great team to work with, and I look forward to conquering the world with you.

URL Rewriting Module Interferes with WCF REST Service Processing

2011-01-05T09:34:00.001-08:00

I spent most of yesterday and a good chunk of this morning troubleshooting a problem with a WCF REST service I’ve been trying to create. Specifically, I had a brain-dead simple WCF service that looked like this:

    [ServiceContract(Namespace = "AjaxRoomService")]
    public interface IAjaxRoomService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Wrapped)]
        string SayHello();
    }

The implementation looked like this:

    public class AjaxRoomService : IAjaxRoomService
    {
        public string SayHello()
        {
            return "Hello";
        }
    }

And the actual .svc file looked like this:

<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="Alanta.Web.Services.AjaxRoomService" Factory="System.ServiceModel.Activation.WebServiceHostFactory" CodeBehind="AjaxRoomService.svc.cs" %>

Note that I was using the WebServiceHostFactory, so I didn’t need to have anything in my web.config file. Simple, right? Everything should have worked, right? But when I tried to call the service (i.e., by navigating to http://localhost:51150/Services/AjaxRoomService.svc/SayHello), I consistently received a 404 error.

I did my standard Google searches, but all the issues people described had to do with running the service in IIS, and I wasn’t even getting that far: I was just trying to get this running under Cassini, in Visual Studio.

But after much troubleshooting and more than a little swearing, I finally put my finger on it. We’re using a simple URL rewriting module that shouldn’t have been interfering with this, but it was. The trouble was in this particular line of code in the URL rewriting module:

HttpContext.Current.RewritePath(rewrittenPath);

A debugger showed that it was rewriting the path from “/Services/AjaxRoomService.svc/SayHello” to “/Services/AjaxRoomService.svc/SayHello” – in other words, it wasn’t making any changes. But as soon as I changed it to only rewrite the path if the path had actually changed, my problem went away:

// Only rewrite the path if the path has changed, as otherwise it interferes with .svc request processing.
if (string.Compare(HttpContext.Current.Request.Path, rewrittenPath, true) != 0)
{
    Debug.WriteLine(string.Format("Rewriting {0} to {1}", HttpContext.Current.Request.Path, rewrittenPath));
    HttpContext.Current.RewritePath(rewrittenPath);
}

Not exactly a dramatic discovery, but I figured it might benefit someone else at some point, so I’ll toss it out there for the Google indexer to discover, in the hopes that it helps someone else someday.

A Eulogy for Elmer Smith

2010-12-20T00:23:00.001-08:00

My 97-year old grandfather died this week, and I’m currently down in Southern Oregon to attend his memorial service and to help clean up his house. This is what I read at his memorial service.

Elmer Smith came from the humblest of beginnings, but by the time he graduated from high school, his teachers were telling him he needed to apply to MIT. That was the sort of mind my grandfather had been given: intense, analytical, searingly precise. But my grandfather had other goals besides academic achievement. He wanted a wife, and he wanted a family. That was the sort of heart my grandfather possessed: generous, disciplined, searingly loyal. So he turned from MIT to Montana: he exchanged the dreams of a brilliant engineering career for a pair of lips that he first kissed on a quiet Kalispell street in 1933. And my famously skinflint grandfather would have called the price cheap.

Although I came into the picture much later, I have no experience of life without him. In my earliest memories, he is a constant figure: often present, always desired. He was not just strong: to my young mind, he was strength itself, and intelligence, and character. For many years, even as he entered his eighth and ninth decades, it seemed impossible that he should ever depart this earth. He was the earth, and the salt thereof. He was my hero, everything I ever wanted to be, the very special gift of a God who knows how much little kids need Grandpas. God gave many gifts to our family, but none more valuable or valued than a patriarch who loved his wife, who loved his family, and who loved me.

It wasn’t until about fifteen years ago, when my grandfather lost his eyesight, that we began to realize that the Lord would eventually take back those many gifts he had given. Five years ago, my grandfather broke his ankle, and began using a cane. Three years ago, he lost his beloved wife of 72 years to cancer. Two years ago, he broke his hip. Last year, he had to leave the property he had nurtured for 60 years. The brilliant and brash young man who had conquered his wife’s heart as easily as he conquered the Salmon River was now lonely, crippled and blind. God had given my grandfather in his youth great strength, amazing health, a warm home, and a loving wife; and as my grandfather aged, God slowly and inexorably withdrew each of those gifts. In the end, God recalled even His gift of rational thought. The time came, during his last weeks, when my grandfather’s reason rambled but loosely through his conversations.

But it was during this time, when almost everything God had provided him was removed, that we could see most clearly who my grandfather was at his core, and who he had always been. From his bed, unable to walk or see, he talked a great deal about fixing things, even if those things existed only in his imagination or memory. He talked continuously about family, even if the loved ones with whom he was conversing had departed years ago. And he talked ardently about his Lord. He felt God’s presence a great deal in his final days. When we gathered with him to pray or to sing hymns, tears would stream down his face, and his scattered wits would slowly recollect themselves. He prayed constantly for his family, and made each of us assure him that we would, in our turn, meet him in heaven.

Rest did not come easily to my grandfather, nor to a heart that had beat steadily for 97 years. But he is at rest now, at peace in the presence of the Savior he served faithfully, and reunited with the wife he loved passionately.

During these last weeks, I’ve thought a great deal about death, how it comes to us all, even the strongest and best. One day, I know, I will follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. One day, God will require from me an account of all the many gifts that I have received. I hope, when that day comes, that I will face it with the same fortitude and good humor my grandfather showed in his final years. I pray that I will have lived a life of enough faith and love that, like my grandfather, my own children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will be gathered around me. One day, I will follow my grandfather down the long valley of the shadow of death; and one day, I pray to meet him again when the world is made new.

Confessions – Book 9

2010-12-06T22:41:00.001-08:00

This is my final series of notes on Augustine’s Confessions. Although there are 13 books in the Confessions, we’re only covering books 1-9 in our Bible study, so at least for the moment, this will be my final set of notes.

Opening Meditation (9.1)

As always, Augustine is mystified by the nature of human will. Now that he was a Christian, he says, “Now I did not will to do what I willed, [but] began to will to do what thou didst will.” Paradoxically, his own will was not formerly free when he simply willed to do what he wanted: rather, his will became free the moment God gave him the grace to will what God wanted.

Leaving the World (9.2-6)

Augustine and his friends decided to leave their secular employments and devote themselves full-time to God’s service. Augustine did not quit his job immediately, however, but waited for several weeks, until the start of the harvest vacation (from late August through mid-October). He seems a little worried that people might think he took this time because he wasn’t completely committed, but says that he actually took this course due to the opposite fear: that if he were to leave in the middle of the term, it would look ostentatious and proud.

Some of thy servants, my brethren, may say that I sinned in this, since having once fully and from my heart enlisted in thy service, I permitted myself to sit a single hour in the chair of falsehood. I will not dispute it. But hast thou not, O most merciful Lord, pardoned and forgiven this sin in the holy water, along with all the others, horrible and deadly as they were?

Augustine’s friends took his conversion in various ways. Verecundus, his landlord, was rather dismayed to find Augustine following this path; although he was interested in becoming a Christian, he only wished to do so if he could become as “complete” a Christian as Augustine, i.e., a chaste, unmarried one. Since he was married, and divorce was considered an even worse state than marriage, this was obviously not possible. It was only when he fell ill and was on his deathbed that he allowed himself to be baptized. In contrast, Nebridius was excited, and quickly abandoned the last remnants of his docetic heresy, in submitting himself as a candidate for baptism.

Cassiciacum (9.7-13)

During the harvest vacation, Augustine left to a country villa in Cassiciacum, a small village north of Milan, within sight of the Alps. He was accompanied by his son Adeodatus, his mother Monica, Alypius, and half a dozen others. While at Cassiciacum, he wrote several important treatises, including a dialog with his son called The Teacher, The Happy Life, Soliloquies, and several others.

What Augustine treasures most about this time, however, was not the writings which he finished, but the hours spent in prayer and meditation on the Psalms. Paragraphs 8-11 are basically a meditation on the Old Latin text of Psalm 4, which of course, being a translation of a translation of a translation, differs in some important ways from what we read in the NIV. To take just a couple examples:

Verse	Old Latin	NIV	Significance
3	Know that the Lord has magnified his Holy One.	Know that the LORD has set apart his faithful servant for himself.	The Old Latin “magnified” and “Holy One” seem to be clearer references to Christ than “set apart” and “faithful servant”.
4	Be angry and do not sin.	Tremble and do not sin.	Augustine interprets “be angry” as “Be angry at yourself for your sins so that you will not sin” (a different interpretation than Paul gives it in Eph. 4:26). The NIV translation seems to be saying, “Tremble at God, so that you will not sin.” The object of the initial verb is different, though the thought is similar.
7	Many are saying, who will show us the good? O Lord, the light of your face shines bright upon us.	Many, LORD, are asking, “Who will bring us prosperity?” Let the light of your face shine on us.	Augustine interprets the verse to mean, “Only when God’s face shines upon us can we know the true good” (in both a philosophical and moral sense). In contrast, the NIV seems to mean, “Only when God’s face shines upon us can we be prosperous” (in both a pecuniary and moral sense).

Augustine also apparently experienced a (relatively minor) instance of divine healing. He was suffering from a toothache, which was probably a dramatically more troublesome experience in the centuries before modern dentistry and analgesics than it is now. It was troubling him horribly, however, and he asked for prayer; and as soon as his friends knelt to pray for him, the pain disappeared.

Baptism (9.14-16)

Augustine mentions only briefly the death of his son (which took place about a year after this point). He was clearly a proud father, and if the dialog reproduced in The Teacher is any indication, a justly proud one. It’s very interesting, though, and perhaps just a little disturbing, that he seems to feel no grief about the premature death of such a talented and promising son, “our companion, as if he were the same age in grace with ourselves”.

Augustine mentions how moving he now found the hymns and psalms sung in the church – which were apparently a new innovation. Presumably shortly before his conversion, during the height of the Arian controversy, the empress Justina attempted to enforce Arian doctrine in Milan, going so far as to attempt to remove the orthodox Ambrose by force. When the soldiers arrived, they found the people of the church barricaded inside. Ambrose refused to give up the church, though he equally refused to use force to keep the soldiers out. To keep the people’s spirits up during this time of heightened confrontation, Ambrose borrowed a tradition from the Eastern Church, that of communal (and antiphonal) singing. This was an early version of what later became Gregorian chant, and it’s the first recorded communal singing in church (apart from various NT references to “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs”). Seven of the hymns that Ambrose wrote are still a part of the Roman Catholic liturgy.

Monica’s Life and Death (9.17-33)

Some of the customs Augustine describes seem quite strange to us, and even perverse, such as the rule instituted by Monica’s nurse that children should only drink water at mealtimes:

“You drink water now only because you don’t control the wine; but when you are married and mistresses of pantry and cellar, you may not care for water, but the habit of drinking will be fixed.”

This reminds me of Aristotle’s recommendation that infants should be exposed to the cold as much as possible, so that they would grow up used to it.

Similarly, Augustine accepts with a certain equanimity the fact that bad-tempered husbands beat their wives (this is at best mildly problematic for him), and that masters beat their servants (he seems to think this is a good thing).

On the flip side, some of what Augustine commends his mother for seems downright farsighted: such as the role she played as peacemaker in various quarrels:

She would disclose nothing about the one to the other except what might serve toward their reconciliation. This might seem a small good to me if I did not know to my sorrow countless persons who, through the horrid and far-spreading infection of sin, not only repeat to enemies mutually enraged things said in passion against each other, but also add some things that were never said at all.

Towards the end of this section, Augustine describes a vision which he and his mother together experienced. It is similar in many ways to the “Plotinian ecstasy” which he experienced and describes in 7.23, but is much more specifically Biblical (not necessarily Christian) in its content.

And when our conversation had brought us to the point where the very highest of physical sense and the most intense illumination of physical light seemed, in comparison with the sweetness of that life to come, not worthy of comparison, nor even of mention, we lifted ourselves with a more ardent love toward the Selfsame, and we gradually passed through all the levels of bodily objects, and even through the heaven itself, where the sun and moon and stars shine on the earth. Indeed, we soared higher yet by an inner musing, speaking and marveling at thy works.

Augustine’s reaction to his mother’s death is almost – almost – the opposite of his reaction to the death of his friend in book 4. He never says anything like, “I knew that I would see my mother again.” His consolation appears to be somewhat deeper than that – though he clearly experiences grief as well, though in a much more subdued form than he had experienced as an adolescent, despite its surface similarity:

I was then left destitute of a great comfort in her, and my soul was stricken; and that life was torn apart, as it were, which had been made but one out of hers and mine together.

Despite his determined, near-pagan stoicism, God eventually graced Augustine with an unwanted gift of grief:

It was a solace for me to weep in thy sight, for her and for myself, about her and about myself. Thus I set free the tears which before I repressed, that they might flow at will, spreading them out as a pillow beneath my heart. And it rested on them, for thy ears were near me.

Confessions – Book 8

2010-12-01T12:59:00.001-08:00

This is a continuation of my notes on Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine’s Final Objections (8.1-2)

By this time, Augustine was convinced intellectually of the truth of Christianity. The old Manichaean doctrines – that God was material, and in time – held no more attraction for him. But Augustine himself was still material (and hence subject to lust) and still in time (and hence unstable). And he was possessed of a subtle pride that perhaps he did not recognize even when he was writing the Confessions: he didn’t feel like he could be just an ordinary Christian. Lots of other folks were Christians and were married, but Augustine wasn’t content with that sort of ordinary Christian life. If Augustine were to become a Christian, he disdained the example of even his own mother: the hermit life of Anthony, or the monastic life of Ponticianus’ friends, was much more suited to Augustine’s subtle pride. On top of that, Augustine was apparently convinced that even sex within marriage was lawful only if it were for the explicit purpose of procreation: and if he were to be baptized, and married, it would be difficult for him to obey that stricture. (This ascetic ideal, it should be noted, was not just a feature of 4^th-century Christianity, but also of contemporary philosophical paganism, Manichaeism, and Judaism. It’s an example of how Christianity can be swayed in unfortunate directions by societal trends. Our own century has many unfortunate examples of Christianity being swayed in the opposite direction by opposite trends.)

Simplicianus and Victorinus (Conversion Story #1) (8.3-5)

Seeking moral counsel from a trusted source, Augustine visited Simplicianus, a respected Christian who had baptized Ambrose and eventually succeeded him as bishop. Simplicianus told him the conversion story of Victorinus, a story which closely paralleled Augustine’s own journey, and which is the first of five conversion stories (and eight total conversions) which Augustine recounts in this book. It is worth noting that, like Augustine, Victorinus’ conversion was not intellectual (both had been convinced of the truth of Christianity for some time), but volitional.

One minor issue that gives scholars heartburn is that Augustine talks about having read Victorinus’ translations into Latin of the Neo-Platonists:

When I mentioned to him that I had read certain books of the Platonists which Victorinus--formerly professor of rhetoric at Rome, who died a Christian, as I had been told--had translated into Latin, Simplicianus congratulated me that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, which were full of fallacies and deceit, “after the beggarly elements of this world,” whereas in the Platonists, at every turn, the pathway led to belief in God and his Word.

The problem with this paragraph is that we have several pretty good records of all of Victorinus’ works (including one by Jerome, who was Victorinus’ student), and none of them mention any such translations. Either the lists we have are incomplete, or Augustine is remembering something incorrectly.

Celebrity Conversions (Conversion Story #2) (8.6-9)

Augustine spends some time thinking through an issue which is of some relevance to us today: is there any special value to celebrity conversions? His answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that yes, there is. His argument, however, doesn’t assume that the celebrities are any better than average Christians – on the contrary, it assumes that they are in greater danger. But precisely because they are in greater danger, greater is the rejoicing amongst those who have watched them fight their way free of it.

For the enemy is more overcome in one on whom he has a greater hold, and whom he has hold of more completely. But the proud he controls more readily through their concern about their rank and, through them, he controls more by means of their influence. The more, therefore, the world prized the heart of Victorinus (which the devil had held in an impregnable stronghold) and the tongue of Victorinus (that sharp, strong weapon with which the devil had slain so many), all the more exultingly should Thy sons rejoice because our King hath bound the strong man, and they saw his vessels taken from him and cleansed, and made fit for thy honor and “profitable to the Lord for every good work.”

Here Augustine also makes reference to a second conversion story: when Saul defeated the sorcerer Bar-Jesus, and led the proconsul Sergius Paulus to the Lord (Acts 13:4-12), accepting (Augustine believes) the proconsul’s name as a symbol of his victory. It’s worth noting that this is the only conversion story which actually turns on the subject becoming convinced of the truth of Christianity, and it is the briefest of the various stories told.

Augustine’s Final Objections Part 2 (8.10-12)

In these paragraphs, Augustine rehearses the hesitancy which kept him from baptism and a full commitment to Christ. He wanted to become a Christian, to submit his own will to Christ, but found that he was unable to make the final movement on his own. His will was enslaved to itself, as a punishment for its choices:

For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity…It was through me that habit had become an armed enemy against me, because I had willingly come to be what I unwillingly found myself to be. Who, then, can with any justice speak against it, when just punishment follows the sinner?

Ponticianus and His Friends (Conversion Story #3) (8.13-15)

Ponticianus, a highly-placed Roman court official, told the story of two friends of his who had joined a monastery. Again, the parallels with Augustine are notable: in the story, the two were not becoming convinced of the truth of Christianity (indeed, they were both apparently baptized Christians), but became convinced that they had a higher calling.

Can our hopes in the court rise higher than to be ‘friends of the emperor’? But how frail, how beset with peril, is that pride! Through what dangers must we climb to a greater danger? And when shall we succeed? But if I chose to become a friend of God, see, I can become one now.

This story also introduces St. Anthony, a famous fourth-century monk, whose own conversion story will be told later.

Augustine’s Final Objections Part 3 (8.16-21)

As Augustine draws closer to the final crisis, he reflects on the goal he set himself as a young man, reading Cicero’s Hortensius, to pursue philosophy at all costs. He realizes now that philosophy is not enough to save him. Nothing that he can do can save him, for this is precisely the issue. His will is bound. Even his prayers are against him: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Augustine is amazed at the paradox he encounters: mind and body are separate things, but the mind can tell the body, “Do this,” and it does it, without hesitation. But the mind cannot tell itself, “Do this.” “My body more readily obeyed the slightest wish of the soul in moving its limbs at the order of my mind than my soul obeyed itself to accomplish in the will alone its great resolve.”

It’s worthwhile to note the Genesis imagery that appears during this account of his struggle: like Adam, and like Jesus, Augustine’s struggle against sin took place in a garden. Adam’s sin centered around a tree, and his attempt at redeeming himself involved a fig tree; Augustine’s temptation and conversion likewise took place under a fig tree.

A Digression Against the Manichees (8:22-24)

Augustine’s conclusion that we may have more than one will leads him into a brief digression against the Manichaean version of this argument. The Manichees went further than saying that we had more than one will; they said that each will represented a separate nature, one good and one bad. Their evidence for this, apparently, was that we often found ourselves willing more than one thing. This is likely a straw-man argument, but Augustine is happy to knock it down. Willing good at the same time we are willing evil is no argument for multiple natures, however much it may be an argument for multiple wills. It’s no different, in Augustine’s book, than hesitating between going to the theater or to the circus (both bad), or between reading a Gospel or a Psalm (both good).

Augustine’s Final Objections Part 4 (8:25-27)

Again, Augustine rehearses the objections which prevented him from making his leap into Christianity. This time he introduces the image of the Lady Continence, opposing his “former mistresses”, who “tugged at my fleshly garments”. This hearkens back (at least) to the classic contrast in Proverbs between the personifications of Wisdom and Foolishness as two women who each seek to entice a man into their orbit. The significance of the fig tree, in this instance, centers around the fact that Adam and Eve tried to cover their shame with fig leaves: this attempt was notoriously unsuccessful, because only God can rescue us. Similarly, Augustine was trying to achieve celibacy and continence through his own efforts under the fig tree, and it was only when he threw himself fully on God’s mercy (and stopped adding the “but not yet” to his prayer) that he was able to achieve the continence and self-control that he wanted.

Anthony’s Conversion (Conversion Story #4) (8.28-29)

Augustine finally withdraws from even the closest human companionship and moves deeper into the garden, much like Jesus on the night of his arrest. The phrase he hears (Tolle, lege) could mean either “Take it, read it”, or “Pick it up, look at it” (the latter perhaps being a phrase chanted by agricultural workers during harvest time). Augustine finally tells the actual story of St. Anthony’s “conversion” (like the others in this chapter, not to Christianity, but to a deeper commitment to Christ). He’s been saving this one, partially because it was the most famous, but also because it resembled his own in having been achieved by the hearing of a specific passage of Scripture.

The Conversions of Augustine and Alypius (Conversion Story #5) (8:30)

Augustine’s own conversion was fully effected when he followed the injunction of the chant of the children he had heard, and picked up the book of Paul that Ponticianus had commented on. There he read: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” (Rom. 13:13). This immediately quieted his soul, and allowed him to express himself to Alypius. Alypius was so moved by Augustine’s decision that he himself was prompted to make the same choice. However, because Alypius had never had the same struggle with sexual desire that had marked Augustine, his choice was much easier: you get the impression that he had merely been waiting for his friend to make the first move.

Confessions – Book 7

2010-11-22T14:59:00.001-08:00

This is part 7 of my notes on Augustine’s Confessions.

The Remnants of Augustine’s Materialism (7.1.1-7.2.3)

Augustine was but slowly working his way out of the materialism that remained from his days as a Manichee. Specifically, he knew that God was incorruptible – he couldn’t imagine a God that wasn’t – but he couldn’t imagine how God couldn’t be physical in some sense. Augustine simply couldn’t imagine a God who existed, but didn’t exist physically. That said, Augustine was well aware of the problems associated with the Manichaean materialism, including a dilemma proposed by his friend Nebridius. Basically, Nebridius’ point is that the Manichaean explanation for human beings has a hole in it. The world as we know it is a mixture of divine substance corrupted by exposure to matter. But how can this be, if God is truly immutable and incorruptible? The whole idea of God having to fight evil seems to imply that evil could do some harm to God, which would mean that God is not incorruptible – which was anathema to Augustine, as soon as he had put the question to himself clearly.

I should note that it’s precisely this question about the mode of God’s existence that Augustine is driving at back in book 1, during the long series of rhetorical questions with which he opens his work.

3. Since, then, thou dost fill the heaven and earth, do they contain thee? Or, dost thou fill and overflow them, because they cannot contain thee? And where dost thou pour out what remains of thee after heaven and earth are full? Or, indeed, is there no need that thou, who dost contain all things, shouldst be contained by any, since those things which thou dost fill thou fillest by containing them? For the vessels which thou dost fill do not confine thee, since even if they were broken, thou wouldst not be poured out. And, when thou art poured out on us, thou art not thereby brought down; rather, we are uplifted. Thou art not scattered; rather, thou dost gather us together. But when thou dost fill all things, dost thou fill them with thy whole being? Or, since not even all things together could contain thee altogether, does any one thing contain a single part, and do all things contain that same part at the same time? Do singulars contain thee singly? Do greater things contain more of thee, and smaller things less? Or, is it not rather that thou art wholly present everywhere, yet in such a way that nothing contains thee wholly?

It’s quite interesting to note that the questions which at one point kept him from the faith have here become rather a means for deepening it, a source of praise and wonder, rather than a lament.

Have you ever run into a Christian doctrine which, when you first heard it, seemed awkward and unpleasant, only to have it later become meaningful?

The Origin of Evil – Take 1 (7.3.4 – 7.5.7)

Augustine’s initial attempts to think through the problem of evil from a Christian perspective kept running up against the idea that our will didn’t appear to be completely free. He frequently found himself doing things that (at least in his better moments) he didn’t want to do: and he was mystified as to why that conflict would be present in him. How did it get there? The Manichaean answer – that human beings were made up of both divine and diabolical stuff – was no longer sufficient, but he didn’t have any better alternative.

Furthermore, his materialism exacerbated any attempt to find an answer. If both God and evil have a substantial, spatial existence, it’s quite impossible to maintain that God is truly good and all powerful. It’s also interesting to note that Augustine still seemed (at this stage) to think of evil as somehow originally bound up with matter: “Was there some evil matter out of which he made and formed and ordered [the world], but left something in his creation that he did not convert into good? But why should this be? Was he powerless to change the whole lump so that no evil would remain in it, if he is the Omnipotent?” This appears to be a remnant of his Manichaeism, which he hadn’t yet thoroughly purged from his thinking.

Astrology (7.6.8 – 7.6.10)

It seems like it took Augustine an astonishingly long time to grasp the principal problem with astrology: people born at exactly the same time have dramatically divergent fates. Not sure how that could have escaped his notice for so long.

Neoplatonism (7.7.11 – 7.10.16)

In the midst of this materialistic confusion, Augustine discovered the books of the Neo-Platonists (probably the Enneads of Plotinus, though we’re not sure), and his world was turned upside down. The Neo-Platonists had a simple argument against strict materialism: truth did not have a physical, spatial existence, yet who could doubt its existence? The same was true of thought, of love, and many other abstract concepts. The genius of this particular line of thought is that it tried to look at God in much the same way: all ideas and concepts can be subsumed under higher concepts, until you get to the one concept that holds all others, and that is God. Once Augustine found the Neo-Platonists, his materialism was gone forever.

Yet for all the influence that these philosophers had on him (and it seems that he devoured whatever of their writings he could get his hands on), he couldn’t give his heart to them: for they had nothing to say about Jesus. Augustine still wasn’t sure who Jesus was – but he was sure that he was important. And eventually it couldn’t help but strike him that everything he found valuable in the Neo-Platonists was itself already in Scripture; and that Scripture contained much more that attracted him.

And therein I found, not indeed in the same words, but to the selfsame effect, enforced by many and various reasons that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” That which was made by him is “life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shined in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Furthermore, I read that the soul of man, though it “bears witness to the light,” yet itself “is not the light; but the Word of God, being God, is that true light that lights every man who comes into the world.” And further, that “he was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.” But that “he came unto his own, and his own received him not. And as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believed on his name” --this I did not find there.

In the end, Augustine was willing to borrow from the Neo-Platonists and other philosophers whenever he found them helpful, which was not infrequently. After all, “I had sought strenuously after that gold which thou didst allow thy people to take from Egypt, since wherever it was it was thine.”

One very interesting result that came from reading these philosophers is that Augustine appears to have had a mystical vision of some sort. “Being admonished by these books to return into myself, I entered into my inward soul, guided by thee… When I first knew thee, thou didst lift me up, that I might see that there was something to be seen, though I was not yet fit to see it. And thou didst beat back the weakness of my sight, shining forth upon me thy dazzling beams of light, and I trembled with love and fear.”

The Origin of Evil – Take 2 (7.11.17 – 7.16.22)

Armed with a variety of concepts borrowed from Neo-Platonic philosophy, Augustine made a second run at the problem of evil, this time with much more satisfactory results. Here Augustine makes his first profound contribution to Christian thought: all that is, is good, precisely because it is. Of course, it can be corrupted, either naturally, by returning to a state of nonbeing, or unnaturally, through evil. But to the extent that it is at all, it is good. With respect to Christian theology, this is a breakthrough quite as important as Newton and Leibnitz’ discovery of the integral calculus: it really is that big, and has had an impact on Christian theology every bit as large as calculus has had on mathematics and physics.

Augustine’s argument that being itself is good is interesting and subtle.

And it was made clear to me that all things are good even if they are corrupted. They could not be corrupted if they were supremely good; but unless they were good they could not be corrupted. If they were supremely good, they would be incorruptible; if they were not good at all, there would be nothing in them to be corrupted. For corruption harms; but unless it could diminish goodness, it could not harm. Either, then, corruption does not harm--which cannot be--or, as is certain, all that is corrupted is thereby deprived of good. But if they are deprived of all good, they will cease to be. For if they are at all and cannot be at all corrupted, they will become better, because they will remain incorruptible. Now what can be more monstrous than to maintain that by losing all good they have become better? If, then, they are deprived of all good, they will cease to exist. So long as they are, therefore, they are good. Therefore, whatsoever is, is good.

In other words, Augustine says, imagine an object, any object. Since I’m sitting on one, imagine a chair. And imagine all the goodness removed that chair through corruption, like a spiritual refrigerator: imagine it reaching a state of “absolute zero”, so that no good remains in that chair at all. Now, if all good has been removed from this chair, does the chair still exist? If it does still exist, but all good has been removed from it, this means that it can suffer no further corruption, which means that it is incorruptible. But for Augustine, this is absurd, because incorruptibility is not just a good, it’s the good. How could something that has had all good removed from it participate in the very best good of all? We must conclude, therefore, that if our chair has had every ounce of its good removed, it must also have had every ounce of its existence removed. In other words, existence is as necessarily connected to goodness in Augustine’s account, as energy is connected to matter in Einstein’s. And both connections are equally radical and world-shaking.

And of course, this was the (final) end of Augustine’s Manichaeism. The Manichees imagined evil as a substance with an independent, autonomous existence. Augustine now knew it for what it was: a parasite, entirely dependent on God’s sufferance, at most borrowing existence from God’s good creation.

One of the implications of this is that there is some good in all creation, even the “lower” parts that human beings find less congenial (such as snakes and mosquitoes). The fact that we don’t like them shows partially that our vision is finite, but also that our taste is corrupt. The point is that all things in creation harmonize with each other.

Holding Fast to Christ (7.17.23 – 7.21.27)

Despite the mystical vision of the intellect which Augustine had been granted, he found that he was unable to sustain that level of engagement with God.

And thus with the flash of a trembling glance, it arrived at that which is. And I saw thy invisibility [invisibilia tua] understood by means of the things that are made. But I was not able to sustain my gaze. My weakness was dashed back, and I lapsed again into my accustomed ways, carrying along with me nothing but a loving memory of my vision, and an appetite for what I had, as it were, smelled the odor of, but was not yet able to eat.

Specifically, Augustine says, he was unable to “connect” with God because his faith in Jesus was, at best, unformed. Jesus is the one is the mediator between God and man, the one who gives us access to God. However, Augustine didn’t yet understand this. He thought Jesus was merely a superlative human being, one who could show us the way to God, but not actually God. Against the Manichees, he had concluded that not only was Jesus’ body real, but also that Jesus was possessed of a human soul: for deciding and feeling are appropriate to the changeable human soul, not to God proper.

There’s an interesting note here in Alypius’ (initial) take on Catholic doctrine. He initially thought that Catholics taught that Jesus had a divine rather than a human soul, and he (quite rightly) disagreed with this, because it was clear that Jesus’ soul must have been human. However, it eventually became clear that the position with which he was disagreeing was not, in fact, the Catholic one, but rather that held by Apollinarius, who was declared a heretic. (The opposite heresy is that of Nestorianism, which holds that there are in fact two persons in Christ, not just two natures.)

The orthodox position is laid out in the Definition of Chalcedon:

Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

As Augustine sought more to understand who Jesus was, he was introduced to Paul’s writings, which was another turning point. Everything that he found attractive in the teaching of the Neoplatonists was present in Paul, along with a great deal more.

Confessions – Book 6

2010-11-19T14:46:00.001-08:00

This is part 6 of my notes on Augustine’s Confessions.

Monica (6.1.1 – 2.2)

Monica was clearly a little out of her element when she arrived in Milan. She had come from northern Africa, where the Donatists remained very influential, and consequently where veneration of the saints was a much more prominent part of Christian faith and practice. Nevertheless, Augustine says, she managed to adapt to the practices of northern Italian Christianity without too much difficulty. Ambrose had put strict limitations on the practice of venerating the saints, for at least two reasons that Augustine alludes to, and perhaps for a third: (1) It tended to encourage drunkenness; (2) it could easily be mistaken for pagan ancestor worship; and (3) it tended to slide too much towards the Donatist positions.

What do you think of the current Catholic practice of venerating the saints, whether Mary or St. Francis or any of the others? Do you think it’s OK to pray to the saints?

The Influence of Ambrose (6.3.3 – 6.5.8)

As Augustine spent more time listening to Ambrose, he began to move closer toward Catholic Christianity. Under the influence of Ambrose’s preaching, Augustine realized that he had been badly misinformed on what Christians actually believed. For instance, referring back to the verse in Genesis where God creates man “in His image”, the Manicheans had apparently told him that Christians believed God had a physical body. Augustine was both relieved and mortified to realize that this charge, which he had himself leveled repeatedly, was not accurate.

Have you ever badly misunderstood a point of Christian doctrine? How did you feel once you had it better explained to you?

In addition, Ambrose employed a very different method of explicating Scripture than Augustine had previously been exposed to. Eventually this worked its way out to a “fourfold sense” of Scripture, which remained the standard medieval doctrine, pretty much up until Luther. Augustine’s basic doctrine of Scriptural interpretation, which presumably had its roots in Ambrose, was not quite so convoluted as this. Rather, he said (in On Christian Doctrine):

“The end of the Law, and of all Holy Scripture, is love… Whoever then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought. If, on the other hand, a man draws a meaning from them that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious, and he is wholly clear from the charge of deception…. Whoever takes another meaning out of Scripture than the writer intended, goes astray, but not through any falsehood in Scripture. Nevertheless, as I was going to say, if his mistaken interpretation tends to build up love, which is the end of the commandment, he goes astray in much the same way as a man who by mistake quits the high road, but yet reaches through the fields the same place to which the road leads. He is to be corrected, however, and to be shown how much better it is not to quit the straight road, lest, if he get into a habit of going astray, he may sometimes take cross roads, or even go in the wrong direction altogether.”

In addition, like St. Paul, Augustine believed that it was legitimate to interpret Scripture allegorically. To take one example, again from On Christian Doctrine:

Why is it, I ask, that if any one says that there are holy and just men whose life and conversation the Church of Christ uses as a means of redeeming those who come to it from all kinds of superstitions, and making them through their imitation of good men members of its own body; men who, as good and true servants of God, have come to the baptismal font laying down the burdens of the world, and who rising thence do, through the implanting of the Holy Spirit, yield the fruit of a two-fold love, a love, that is, of God and their neighbor;--how is it, I say, that if a man says this, he does not please his hearer so much as when he draws the same meaning from that passage in Canticles, where it is said of the Church, when it is being praised under the figure of a beautiful woman, "Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are shorn which came up from the washing, whereof every one bears twins, and none is barren among them?"

How do you deal with the difficult passages in Scripture? Which passages bother you the most?

Augustine also determined at this point that the εποχη advocated by the skeptics and academics was harder to carry out than it would seem. “My desire was to be as certain of invisible things as I was that seven and three are ten.” For he could not be mathematically confident even of the identity of his parents: yet he had to live as if he did know. In the same way, he could not achieve mathematical certainty about any of the philosophical and theological questions which beset him – but he could quite probably arrive at a reasonable certainty. And at any rate, it simply wasn’t possible to live with all judgment suspended on these questions. Augustine had never ceased to believe that God existed; and he slowly became convinced that this God would not have allowed these Scriptures to attain such authority through all nations if there were not something to them.

How confident are you that Christianity is true? Why do you believe it?

Ambition and Marriage (6.6.9 – 6.13.23)

Even as Augustine began to work his way up in the circles of the court, he became more and more conflicted about his career choice. He had tasted the good life and wanted more of it: but he was more and more aware that true happiness was not to be found in the pursuit of worldly pleasures, whether the lawful or the unlawful sort.

This particular section is, in some ways, oddly disjointed. At some points, he indicates that he despised the pursuit of trivial pleasures during this point in his life; at others, he indicates that he honored them. Probably this reflects the actual disorder in his mind, the cognitive dissonance he felt between the high honors he was pursuing at court and the moral compromises he was forced to make as a result.

The distress and confusion Augustine felt during this period is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in 6.11.18 – 20, an astonishing (and astonishingly disjointed) passage that nevertheless resonates even today:

O you mighty Academics, is there no certainty that man can grasp for the guidance of his life? No, let us search the more diligently, and let us not despair. See, the things in the Church’s books that appeared so absurd to us before do not appear so now, and may be otherwise and honestly interpreted. I will set my feet upon that step where, as a child, my parents placed me, until the clear truth is discovered. But where and when shall it be sought? Ambrose has no leisure--we have no leisure to read. Where are we to find the books? How or where could I get hold of them? From whom could I borrow them? Let me set a schedule for my days and set apart certain hours for the health of the soul. A great hope has risen up in us, because the Catholic faith does not teach what we thought it did, and vainly accused it of. Its teachers hold it as an abomination to believe that God is limited by the form of a human body. And do I doubt that I should ‘knock’ in order for the rest also to be ‘opened’ unto me? My pupils take up the morning hours; what am I doing with the rest of the day? Why not do this? But, then, when am I to visit my influential friends, whose favors I need? When am I to prepare the orations that I sell to the class? When would I get some recreation and relax my mind from the strain of work?

19. “Perish everything and let us dismiss these idle triflings. Let me devote myself solely to the search for truth. This life is unhappy, death uncertain. If it comes upon me suddenly, in what state shall I go hence and where shall I learn what here I have neglected? Should I not indeed suffer the punishment of my negligence here? But suppose death cuts off and finishes all care and feeling. This too is a question that calls for inquiry. God forbid that it should be so. It is not without reason, it is not in vain, that the stately authority of the Christian faith has spread over the entire world, and God would never have done such great things for us if the life of the soul perished with the death of the body. Why, therefore, do I delay in abandoning my hopes of this world and giving myself wholly to seek after God and the blessed life?

“But wait a moment. This life also is pleasant, and it has a sweetness of its own, not at all negligible. We must not abandon it lightly, for it would be shameful to lapse back into it again. See now, it is important to gain some post of honor. And what more should I desire? I have crowds of influential friends, if nothing else; and, if I push my claims, a governorship may be offered me, and a wife with some money, so that she would not be an added expense. This would be the height of my desire. Many men, who are great and worthy of imitation, have combined the pursuit of wisdom with a marriage life.”

20. While I talked about these things, and the winds of opinions veered about and tossed my heart hither and thither, time was slipping away. I delayed my conversion to the Lord; I postponed from day to day the life in thee, but I could not postpone the daily death in myself. I was enamored of a happy life, but I still feared to seek it in its own abode, and so I fled from it while I sought it. I thought I should be miserable if I were deprived of the embraces of a woman, and I never gave a thought to the medicine that thy mercy has provided for the healing of that infirmity, for I had never tried it. As for continence, I imagined that it depended on one’s own strength, though I found no such strength in myself, for in my folly I knew not what is written, “None can be continent unless thou dost grant it.”168

How do you deal with all the conflicting claims on your time, attention and effort? How can God help to bring order to these conflicting claims?

One interesting note: in his late 20’s, largely at his mother’s urging, he became engaged to a girl who was not yet old enough to marry. Since the legal age of marriage was 12, this presumably means that she was only 10 years old. This also had the side-effect of Augustine dismissing his concubine, and sending her back to Africa, without even her son to accompany her. It’s uncertain why he did this, since he was obviously torn up horribly about it: “My mistress was torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, and my heart which clung to her was torn and wounded till it bled.” Perhaps his mistress was from another class, perhaps even a slave? Or perhaps she had tired of Augustine’s pursuit of philosophy and ambition more than her, and the choice to leave was as much hers as Augustine’s. Whatever the reasons for her departure, however, Augustine was notoriously unable to maintain continence even for two years, and quickly took another mistress (of whom nothing more is said).

What do you think of Augustine for sending away his concubine?
Augustine was conflicted about marriage: it was a path towards lawful sexual fulfillment, but it also promised to interfere with his pursuit of philosophy. In this he echoes St. Paul in 1 Cor. 7. What is your take on marriage? What are the upsides and the downsides to it?

Alternatives (6.14.24 – 6.16.26)

As empty as the pursuit of worldly pleasures and ambitions was proving to be, Augustine was confounded in his search for any alternative. Marriage, he suspected, would be just as much a snare as his concubine had been. He wanted to live with his friends in a sort of proto-monastic commune, pursuing philosophy and supported by rich sponsors, and they had almost decided to start one when someone pointed out, “What do you think our wives will feel about this?” It’s almost comical that in all their planning, this question had never bothered to cross anybody’s mind.

The two sides of Augustine’s mind during this period are expressed well by his claim that Epicurus’ account of human happiness seemed the best – except that Epicurus left out any possibility of the afterlife, and Augustine was convinced of its reality.

Confessions – Book 5

2010-11-18T16:39:00.001-08:00

Post #5 in my series of notes on Augustine’s Confessions.

Predestination (5.1.1 – 5.2.2)

Augustine’s strong emphasis on God’s sovereignty (and corresponding grace) was at the heart of the theology of Martin Luther and especially John Calvin. Augustine developed this theology most fully in his debates with the Pelagians later in his life, but it is apparent even in earlier works like The Confessions.

For the closed heart does not bar thy sight into it, nor does the hardness of our heart hold back thy hands, for thou canst soften it at will, either by mercy or in vengeance, “and there is no one who can hide himself from thy heat.”

Do you agree with this perspective? If God can soften our hearts or harden them, does that mean that God picks and chooses favorites? On what basis does God pick some people vs. others? Does this make God in some sense responsible for sin?

The Natural Sciences (5.3.3 – 5.4.7)

We should remember that the ancients knew a great deal more about the structure of the natural world that we sometimes give them credit for. For instance, they were also able to predict certain very mysterious events, such as lunar and solar eclipses. They were also very clear on the idea that the earth was round, and they even had a pretty good idea about its size: one fairly standard estimate had it at about 25,000 miles in diameter. In this respect, Columbus was wrong and everyone else was right: the debate between Columbus and his detractors was not whether the earth was round or not (they all agreed that it was spherical), but how large it was. Columbus was relying on some very faulty calculations when he argued that the earth was only 13,000 miles around.

Augustine was duly impressed by these achievements of physical science, and if you read between the lines, he gave them all their appropriate due. But he was also aware that these achievements were a dangerous stimulant. Nearly all of these advances had been come through the hands and minds of pagan philosophers, and from Augustine’s perspective, these accomplishments accomplished perilously little. In the end, does it matter that you can predict an eclipse of the sun if you don’t acknowledge the sun’s maker? Or to put it more bluntly, what is the value of being able to program a computer if you’re gonna go to hell when you die?

Do you agree with Augustine’s critique of natural science?
Does Augustine leave any room for a Christian to be a scientist? What would “Christian” science look like?

Scientific and Religious Conceptions of the World (5.5.8 – 5.5.9)

Although Augustine quite definitely believed that religious concerns should trump merely material scientific concerns, he held to at least a preliminary doctrine of “separate concerns”. It was a nearly fatal strike against Manichaeism that its cosmology appeared to contradict what was known scientifically. If Manichaeism had neglected to speak on scientific matters entirely, this would not have bothered Augustine; nor if individual Manichees had been misinformed would this have troubled him in the slightest. But Mani was claiming to speak under divine inspiration, and consequently, Augustine believed, we should expect that he would speak accurately on those matters. I don’t know the precise nature of the inaccuracies of which Augustine speaks, and haven’t been able to find good documentation on what those inaccuracies might have been. Perhaps Mani’s explanations of various physical phenomena simply disagreed with contemporary science but were not strictly falsifiable (such as his claim that the phases of the moon were related to the ascent of souls back to the original light); perhaps he made predictions which were not borne out by observation.

How much does it bother you that a particular religious scheme does not seem to be scientifically accurate? Under what circumstances would you expect Christianity either to confirm or to conform to science?
How do you deal with what seem to be disagreements between Biblical accounts of creation and contemporary scientific explanations?

Faustus (5.6.10 – 5.7.13)

Interestingly, Augustine’s mildly critical account of Faustus seems to differ somewhat from his later no-holds-barred attack on Faustus a few years later (in Reply to Faustus the Manichaean). In the Confessions, he says that Faustus was intelligent and well-spoken, and appropriately humble about the limitations of his own knowledge. However, he is unsparing in his criticism of him in his later work: perhaps because he was required to publically defend doctrines which Faustus had publically attacked, and because Augustine was dealing with Faustus not in his capacity as former friend and disciple, but as a bishop of the Catholic Church.

Rome (5.8.14 – 5.9.17)

The Academics (5.10.18 – 5.10.20)

Augustine had apparently been studying various contemporary and ancient philosophers for a while, but as the result of his growing dissatisfaction with the Manichaeans, decided to embark upon a systematic study of the philosophers. The school of thought which he found most congenial to his current state of mind was that of the Academics, philosophers of a skeptical turn who had established themselves in Plato’s Academy in Athens. They were primarily known to Augustine and his contemporaries through the writings of Cicero, especially his Academica. Their fundamental idea was the requirement of εποχη, suspension of judgment. They basically said, “You shouldn’t claim to know something unless you’ve got a pretty good reason to claim it. Under most circumstances, therefore, you would be wisest to withhold judgment.”

Despite this moderate skepticism, Augustine apparently continued to form and test theories about the fundamental nature of things. One of these theories, formed much earlier and continuing a firm hold on Augustine’s imagination, was that all of reality (even divine reality) was fundamentally material. God existed and was eternal, Augustine held, but was a substance of infinite extent, in conflict with evil, another eternal substance of infinite extent. This idea is basically a philosophically refined abstraction of Manichaeism: it’s the basic idea of Manichaeism, but without its silly, offensive and inaccurate cosmological ideas.

Milan (5.12.22 – 5.14.25)

Augustine’s stay in Rome was a brief one. He stayed there long enough to learn that students were effectively the same everywhere. The ones in Rome were, on the surface, better behaved, but scratch the surface, and they were still fallen. So when the opportunity came to pursue a career in government as a court rhetorician, he jumped at the opportunity. The result was that by the end of the year, he found himself in Milan, still teaching, but now living off a government salary.

One of the advantages Milan extended to this newly questing Augustine was the opportunity to observe and interact with Ambrose, the city’s influential and hyperactive bishop. As a teacher of rhetoric, Augustine was interested in Ambrose’s style of address, and although Ambrose was not at the level of Faustus in this regard, he nevertheless did not disappoint Augustine’s discerning ear. Furthermore, unlike Faustus, the more Augustine listened to Ambrose’s sermons, the more he found himself approving not just their style, but their content as well.

The net result was that Augustine found himself abandoning the Manichaeans, but his newly free allegiance remained torn between the philosophers and the church.

Confessions – Book 4

2010-11-18T11:20:00.001-08:00

My continuing notes on Augustine’s Confessions.

Astrology (4.3.4 – 4.3.6)

Augustine was once a fan of astrology, probably because he was led to it by his interest in Manichaeism. Manichaeism was influenced to some degree by Zoroastrianism, which was heavily invested in astrology, and Manichees believed that the movements of heavenly bodies strongly influenced or even controlled events here on earth. The Christian Augustine strongly disapproved of astrology for at least two reasons: (1) He didn’t think its claims were true, and Augustine valued truth above all things; and (2) at its heart, astrology was deterministic, which removed human responsibility for their actions.

Do you agree with Augustine’s critique of astrology? Why do you think so many people throughout history have believed in it?
We may agree with Augustine that the stars don’t determine our fates. But modern science has dramatically increased our understanding of how closely we are tied to the matter and material events which form our bodies. Is this “new” determinism compatible or incompatible with Christianity?

The Death of Nebridius (4.4.7-4.8.13)

The death of his closest friend when Augustine was still in his late teens or early twenties left a huge impression on Augustine. It was his first acquaintance with grief, and it shocked him deeply. It’s especially interesting to compare the grief that he felt over Nebridius’ death when he was a Manichee to the far more restrained grief he felt over his mother’s death once he was a Christian.

Augustine has been much criticized, not for his youthful grief, but for his mature disparagement of that grief. Sometimes criticism of Augustine is the product of a conflict of worldviews: it’s only to be expected that atheist philosophers like Nietzsche would despise not just Augustine’s theology, but the piety which informed it. But sometimes even folks who otherwise share a great deal of Augustine’s perspective have parted ways with Augustine over this issue. C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, has an especially interesting and thoughtful critique of Augustine’s scorn for this youthful grief. Lewis very much agrees with Augustine that our earthly loves may be in competition with our love for God, and that to the extent that they are taking the place of our love for God, they are quite likely to go very wrong. We need to be on our guard, both Augustine and Lewis would say, against any love that would claim to take the place of, or threaten in any way to lessen, our love for God. But Lewis disagrees with Augustine on whether the desire to save ourselves heartache is a legitimate reason to limit our love for creating beings.

Is it legitimate for Christians to feel grief? Is it possible to feel too much grief?
Was Augustine’s grief for his friend excessive (as Augustine certainly feels that it was)?
Is Lewis’ critique of Augustine legitimate? Is Augustine actually saying, “Be careful not to love too much, lest your heart break?”

How to Love Temporary Things (4.9.14 – 4.12.19)

Augustine has a specific take on the right way to love temporary things. Clearly, we are supposed to love temporary things, for they are good and have come from the hand of God. But we should love them as God intended them to be, that is, as temporary. God appointed a beginning and an end to each individual thing, and we should love that individual thing as God intended it to be, that is, temporary. “Blessed is he who loves thee, and who loves his friend in thee, and his enemy also, for thy sake; for he alone loses none dear to him, if all are dear in Him who cannot be lost.” We sin when we love temporary things as we should love eternal things, when we base our lives on them, and find ourselves radically shaken when those temporary things move on. And indeed, if our perspective matched God’s eternal perspective, we would be eager that these things pass on, in the same way that when we are listening to a sentence, we are eager that one syllable succeed the next.

Would then death have existed before the Fall? Augustine implies as much when he says, “Behold, these things pass away that others may come to be in their place. Thus even this lowest level of unity may be made complete in all its parts.” And he says so explicitly in The Literal Meaning of Genesis: “One might ask why brute beasts inflict injury on one another, for there is no sin in them for which they could be a punishment, and they cannot acquire any virtue by such a trial. The answer, of course, is that one animal is the nourishment of another. To wish that it were otherwise would not be reasonable. For all creatures, as long as they exist, have their own measure, number, and order.”

On the Beautiful and the Fitting (4.13.20 – 4.15.31)

In this section, Augustine gives us some hint of what his views of God were before he became a Christian. One of the more interesting hints is that he was apparently unable think of God as anything other than a “substance” which had some sort of physical existence. This view may have been similar in some ways to pantheism, except that the dualistic Augustine believed that God was only part of reality (i.e., the good, spiritual part), not the whole of it. Augustine later came to disavow nearly everything he wrote in his first book, specifically:

(1) That evil is a substance. “I imagined that in the disunity there was some kind of substance of irrational life and some kind of entity in the supreme evil.”

a. But: Evil is not a substance, for all substances come from God, and God cannot create evil. Evil is rather the ultimate non-entity, the ultimate expression of non-being.

(2) That the soul is the highest good. “I conceived that unity consisted of the rational soul and the nature of truth and the highest good.”

a. But: The soul is not the highest good. Among other things, the soul is changeable, and the highest good cannot be changeable in anything like the same way, or else it would be moving from one good to another, and hence would not have always been the highest good.

(3) That God is a substance. “Substance” was a key idea for Aristotle, and he divided up the world into (1) substances; (2) the categories to which individual substances belonged, i.e., which gave them their definitions; and (3) the attributes which could be applied to individual substances. The young Augustine adopted this view of the world, and applied it to God. “I still supposed that thou, O Lord God, the Truth, wert a bright and vast body and that I was a particle of that body.” “I tried to interpret them, O my God, so that even thy wonderful and unchangeable unity could be understood as subjected to thy own magnitude or beauty, as if they existed in thee as their Subject--as they do in corporeal bodies--whereas thou art thyself thy own magnitude and beauty.”

a. But: A substance (or a body) could be more ‘x’ or less ‘y’ without changing its fundamental definition. Yet God cannot be more beautiful or less merciful: he is the ultimate beauty, and the source of all mercy. He cannot even theoretically change in this way. The only way that you can ascribe “beauty” to God is to say, as Augustine does, that God is His own beauty. “Thou art thyself thy own magnitude and beauty.”

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

In The Four Loves, Lewis offered a thoughtful critique of this book of the Confessions:

In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation in which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions iv, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one's heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.

Of course this is excellent sense. Don't put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don't spend too much on a house you may he turned out of. And there is no man alive who responds more naturally than I to such canny maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as "Careful! This might lead you to suffering". To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving? Would you choose a wife or a Friend - if it comes to that, would you choose a dog in this spirit? One must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates. Eros, lawless Eros, preferring the Beloved to happiness, is more like Love Himself than this.

I think that this passage in the Confessions is less a part of St. Augustine's Christendom than a hangover from the high-minded Pagan philosophies in which he grew up. It is closer to Stoic "apathy" or neo-Platonic mysticism than to charity. We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special sense, he "loved". St. Paul has a higher authority with us than St. Augustine - St. Paul who shows no sign that he would not have suffered like a man, and no feeling that he ought not so to have suffered, if Epaphroditus had died. (Philippians ii, 27.) Even if it were granted that insurances against heartbreak were our highest wisdom, does God Himself offer them? Apparently not. Christ comes at last to say "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Confessions – Book 3

2010-11-16T23:30:00.001-08:00

These are my notes on the third book of Augustine’s Confessions, which our church Bible study is reading through this Fall. As I’ve said before, don’t expect great writing – these are just notes, but could conceivably be helpful for folks.

Plays and Entertainment (3.2.2 – 3.2.4)

Augustine seems to deplore the stage plays that he enjoyed as a youth. As he asks, “Why does a man like to be made sad by viewing doleful and tragic scenes, which he himself could not by any means endure?” The best answer he can come up with is that we enjoy the emotions we experience when watching a play because it is a shadow of something better. It is a good thing to feel mercy when someone is actually suffering, and indeed, we were likely intended to feel good when we show mercy, in the same way that we feel good when we fall in love. And the enjoyment we feel when watching tragedies unfold on the stage is a reflection or a shadow of this. Unfortunately, that’s all it is. It isn’t the same thing. It enjoys the same relationship to real mercy as masturbation does to marriage. In other words, Augustine says, the problem with plays is that we find ourselves falling in love with something that doesn’t exist. Indeed, this is such a problem, Augustine says, that we should beware of feeling any joy in compassion, lest we find ourselves rejoicing in others’ sorrows.

Do you agree with Augustine’s disparaging of secular entertainments?
We don’t tend to be as thrilled today by tragedies as Augustine was. Is there anything in his critique that is still relevant?

Cicero and Philosophy (3.4.7 – 3.4.8)

Cicero was a Roman philosopher and politician who lived from 106 BC to 43 BC. He was one of the first to introduce Roman audiences to the Greek philosophical treatises, along the way coining a number of critical Latin words. (He invented the Latin words which lie behind the English words “morals”, “property”, “individual”, “science”, “image”, “appetite”, and others.) Cicero subordinated philosophy to politics, and it is not surprising therefore that he primarily employed philosophy as a means to support politics – and thus found himself adopting tenets from a variety of different philosophical schools. Cicero was eventually assassinated/murdered/executed during the civil wars that ended the Republic and initiated the Empire.

The book which so affected Augustine, Cicero’s Hortensius, is now lost, and the only fragments which remain are found in Augustine’s own works. You get the impression from reading The Confessions that Augustine still found much to commend in this book, though he knew that Cicero was not a Christian. It urged a search for the truth qua truth, independent of any sect or viewpoint, and Augustine could no sooner have repudiated that exhortation than he could have repudiated the God who was Himself Truth. Certainly Augustine recognized that philosophy could be godless: he quotes Paul in 2 Col. 2:8-9 to this effect. But the root of philosophy, the “love of wisdom”, was very much a Biblical idea.

It is worth noting, however, that even the “pagan” Augustine here found himself unable to give complete allegiance to Cicero’s ideals. For some reason, likely because of his mother, he had a thirst for Christ (if not precisely for Christianity) that he knew secular philosophy could never slake.

Have you ever had a philosophy class or read a book on philosophy? What did you think? Did it help you understand your Christian faith any better?

The Bible

After reading Cicero, reading the Bible was a disappointing experience for Augustine. The mature, Christian Augustine of the Confessions looks at the Bible through much different eyes than the young, intellectual Augustine he remembers being. He alludes to these difficulties when he describes the allure that the Manichees held for him. He wholeheartedly agreed when the Manichees pointed out that the Bible often portrayed God as possessed of a body (not just in the New Testament, but also in the Old), and spoke of Him as consumed by jealousy and anger, all passions that Augustine himself had suffered from, but perhaps for that very reason scorned all the more. Especially telling was the fact that the Bible portrayed its heroes obeying a morality that was substantially different from that which Augustine himself (even at that time) believed was appropriate. (See my last point below.)

Augustine found it initially quite difficult to get anything out of the Bible. What has your experience been? Do you tend to agree more with the younger or with the more mature Augustine?

The Manichees (3.6.10-3.6.11)

The Manichees thrived largely between the 3^rd and 7^th centuries AD. It was based on the writings of a Persian prophet named Mani (216-276 AD), who taught that he was the Paraclete which Jesus had promised in the book of John. Manichaeism had adherents as far east as China and as far west as Italy and northern Africa. Like its successor, Islam, it claimed to be the fulfillment and complete version of other religions which had preceded it, which meant, in practice, that it adopted much of the terminology of the various religions with which it came in contact (including Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism).

Mani produced seven writings, most of which are lost, though fragments remain (i.e., are quoted in other books). A close analysis of these writings indicates that they are heavily influenced by intertestamental Jewish literature (such as the Aramaic Enoch, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls), as well as by 2^nd century Gnosticism.

Manichaean theology taught a dualistic view of good and evil. A key belief in Manichaeism is that the powerful, though not omnipotent good power (God) was opposed by the semi-eternal evil power (Satan). This addresses a theoretical part of the problem of evil by denying the omnipotence of God and postulating two opposite powers. Humanity, the world and the soul are seen as the byproduct of the battle between God's proxy, Primal Man, and Satan. The human person is seen as a battleground for these powers: the soul defines the person, but it is under the influence of both light and dark. This contention plays out over the world as well as the human body—neither the Earth nor the flesh was seen as intrinsically evil, but rather possessed portions of both light and dark. Natural phenomena (such as rain) were seen as the physical manifestation of this spiritual contention. Therefore, the Manichaean worldview explained the existence of evil with a flawed creation God took no role in forming and was the result of Satan striking out against God.

Mircea Eliade, summarizing bar-Konai's Syriac narration, describes the Manichaean cosmogony in his A History of Religious Ideas:

In the beginning...the two "natures" or "substances", light and obscurity, good and evil, God and matter, coexisted, separated by a frontier. In the North reigned the Father of Greatness...in the South, the Prince of Darkness...the "disorderly motion" of matter drove the Prince of Darkness toward the upper frontier of his kingdom. Seeing the splendor of light, he is fired by the desire to conquer it. It is then that the Father decides that he will himself repulse the adversary. He...projects from himself, the Mother of Life, who...projects a new hypostasis, the Primordial Man...With his five sons, who are...his "soul" and "armor" made from five lights, the Primordial Man descends to the frontier. He challenges the darkness, but he is conquered, and his sons are devoured by the demons...This defeat marks the beginning of the cosmic "mixture", but at the same time it insures the final triumph of God. For obscurity (matter) now possesses a portion of light...and the Father, preparing its deliverance, at the same time arranges for his definitive victory against darkness. In a second Creation, the Father "evokes" the Living Spirit, which, descending toward obscurity, grasps the hand of the Primordial Man and raises him to his celestial homeland, the Paradise of Lights. Overwhelming the demonic Archontes, the Living Spirit fashions the heavens from their skins, the mountains from their bones, the earth from their flesh and their excrements...In addition, he achieves a first deliverance of light by creating the sun, the moon, and the stars from portions of it that had not suffered too much from contact with obscurity. Finally, the Father proceeds to a last evocation and projects by emanation the Third Messenger. The latter organizes the cosmos into a kind of machine to collect - and...to deliver - the still-captive particles of light. During the first two weeks of the month, the particles rise to the moon, which becomes a full moon; during the second two weeks, light is transferred from the moon to the sun and, finally, to its celestial homeland. But there were still the particles that had been swallowed by the demons. Then the messenger displays himself to the male demons in the form of a dazzling naked virgin, while the female demons see him as a handsome naked young man...fired by desire, the male demons...give forth their semen, and, with it, the light that they had swallowed. Fallen to the ground, their semen gives birth to all the vegetable species. As for the female devils who were already pregnant, at the sight of the handsome young man they give birth to abortions, which, cast onto the ground, eat the buds of trees, thus assimilating the light that they contained. Alarmed by the Third Messenger's tactics, matter, personified as Concupiscence, decides to create a stronger prison around the still-captive particles of light. Two demons, one male, the other female, devour all the abortions in order to absorb the totality of light, and they then couple. Thus Adam and Eve were engendered.

It’s difficult to see how an intelligent man like Augustine could have been taken in by stuff that sounds like such complete nonsense to us; it’s less difficult to see why he detested it so much once he had left it. “The heresies men leave are hated most.”

Augustine picks out one particular Manichaean doctrine for particular ridicule in 3.10.18, when he makes reference to the teaching of the Manichees that:

It was bad to pick a fig, because it made the tree “weep”.
If that fig was eaten by one of the “elect”, it would be digested and release the particles of light within it, after which they could return to God.
If that fig was eaten by anyone else, the particles of light would be condemned to continued existence in the material world.

You can see how this is similar to the tactics Mani describes in the war between the forces of light and darkness.

Does this description of Manichaeism remind you of any modern religions? How do modern (non-Christian) religions tend to be similar or to differ from Manichaeism?

Changing Mores (3.7.12 - 3.9.17)

One of the critiques of the Manicheans against the Bible was that it portrayed its heroes doing things which good, modern Romans would find repugnant, such as marrying multiple wives, or participating in the slaughter of men or animals. Augustine’s mature response to this is unflinching: God commands different things at different times. For Augustine, God was no mere abstract ideal of justice: He was a King, and a King could do whatever arbitrary thing he desired. So it was nothing odd for a King to declare that members of one town could arm and defend themselves, while declaring that members of another town should submit to the army coming against them. In the same way, it might have been a legitimate application of God’s moral law for Joshua to commit genocide against the Canaanites, even if it would be a terrible violation of that law if we were to do the same thing.

“Is justice, then, variable and changeable? No, but the times over which she presides are not all alike because they are different times.” (3.7.13)

No Christian really disputes this today. The question is where you draw the line, i.e., which practices are always and inherently against God’s moral law, and which are merely cultural applications of that law? So, for instance, where does homosexuality or premarital sex fall on this continuum? Many Christians, including our representatives at the Presbyterian General Assembly, have concluded that the Biblical prohibitions against these acts should be received in much the same way as the Biblical acceptance of slavery, or prohibitions against women with short hair (or men with long).

Others point out that the Bible tells us more about gender relations than just “Do this” or “Don’t do that”. The Bible portrays our gender identities as being, in some mysterious way, a part of the imago dei, an inherent part of the Creation itself. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two of them will be one flesh: what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” The Bible has a specific ideal for marriage that involves one man and one woman, however honored more in the breach than in the observance. Moreover, on many issues, the Bible has multiple perspectives. Joshua may be seen as encouraging genocide: Jesus pretty clearly forbids it. Jacob had two wives: Deuteronomy prohibits even the king from multiple marriages. In 1 Corinthians, Paul forbids women to speak in church, then describes how they should do it. However, the Bible never speaks from two different perspectives about homosexuality. Everywhere it is mentioned, it is clearly and specifically condemned. If it is the case (as some argue) that God is asking us to adopt a different standard on homosexuality, the Bible gives us no encouragement or preparation that He might be doing so.

And of course, this is precisely the view which Augustine himself takes on the matter:

Offenses against nature are everywhere and at all times to be held in detestation and should be punished. Such offenses, for example, were those of the Sodomites; and, even if all nations should commit them, they would all be judged guilty of the same crime by the divine law, which has not made men so that they should ever abuse one another in that way. For the fellowship that should be between God and us is violated whenever that nature of which he is the author is polluted by perverted lust. (3.8.15)

Presbyterians are in the middle of a number of controversies regarding changing cultural standards. What is your take on issues like homosexuality or sexual activity outside marriage?

Confessions – Book 2

2010-11-16T09:59:00.001-08:00

The Third Day

Part of the background for Book 2 is Augustine’s use of the six days of creation to correspond to the six ages of history and the six stages of a human life.

Number	Ages of Man	Six Days	History	Confessions
1	Infantia (pre-verbal)	Light	Adam to Noah	Book 1.7-1.12
2	Pueritia (childhood)	Sky/Earth	Noah to Abraham	Book 1.12 – 1.1.31
3	Adulescentia (15-30)	Waters/Plants	Abraham to David	Book 2.1 – 6.26
4	Juventus (30-45)	Planets	David to Babylon	Book 7.1-
5	Maturitas (45-60)	Fish	Babylon to Christ
6	Senectus (60-90)	Animals/Man	Christ to the End

Book 2 begins his discussion of his own third age, and throughout the book Augustine uses language reminiscent of either the third day of creation, or of the Exodus journey. Specifically:

Vegetation

2.1 - For as I became a youth, I longed to be satisfied with worldly things, and I dared to grow wild in a succession of various and shadowy loves.

2.3 – [You are] able also with a tender hand to blunt the thorns which were excluded from thy paradise.

2.5 - no matter how barren I was to thy tillage, O God, who art the one true and good Lord of my heart, which is thy field.

2.6 - The thornbushes of lust grew rank about my head, and there was no hand to root them out.

2.18 - I fell away from thee, O my God, and in my youth I wandered too far from thee, my true support. And I became to myself a wasteland.

Waters

2.2 - The mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy. … I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications--and yet thou didst hold thy peace, O my tardy Joy!

2.3 - If only there had been someone to regulate my disorder and turn to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and to fix a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves upon the shore of marriage!

2.4 - But, fool that I was, I foamed in my wickedness as the sea and, forsaking thee, followed the rushing of my own tide, and burst out of all thy bounds.

Wilderness Wanderings

2.1 - For love of thy love I do this, recalling in the bitterness of self-examination my vile wanderings, that thou mayest grow sweet to me, thou sweetness without deception!

2.18 - I fell away from thee, O my God, and in my youth I wandered too far from thee, my true support. And I became to myself a wasteland.

Baptism

It should be noted that at this time, it was fairly common for people to hold off on baptism, because it was assumed that only sins committed before baptism could be entirely remitted -- sins committed after baptism would be punished harshly by God. So the idea was that you would wait until either you were on your deathbed, or were at least past the excesses of youth, before you would submit yourself to baptism. This involved a pretty chancy set of calculations, and Augustine disapproved of the whole mercenary idea behind it.

Why is it still dinned into our ears on all sides, “Let him alone, let him do as he pleases, for he is not yet baptized”? In the matter of bodily health, no one says, “Let him alone; let him be worse wounded; for he is not yet cured”! (1.11.18)

(2.4.9 – 2.10.18) A Certain Theft from a Tree

Augustine spends over half of book two trying to understand why he stole a load of pears from a tree. He has often been mocked for this excessive concern over such a small sin (in the scheme of things), but Augustine knew what he was up to. He concentrates on this particular sin for (at least) the following reasons:

Augustine knew that small sins paved the way toward big sins. As C. S. Lewis says, “That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers; they seem to be so strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of thought as if they were immensely important: and then they talk about the most frightful murders and treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be forgiven. But I have come to see that they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure – or enjoy – forever.” (Mere Christianity, p. 92).
The sin has an obvious rhetorical parallel with Adam’s sin: it involved the stealing of forbidden fruit from a tree.
The sin has many less obvious parallels with Adam’s sin:

It was an apparently trivial matter;
It was forbidden by God;
There was no obvious motive;
The actual motive was a hidden one, a desire to maintain community with someone else (at the expense of communion with God).

Consequently, this theft becomes a fairly good “hook” on which Augustine can hang a profound discussion of the nature of evil.

The Nature of Evil

Always lurking in the background of Augustine’s discussion of the origin and nature of evil is the Manichaean doctrine of evil. The Manichees were dualists. They believed that evil came from an invasion of the good – the Kingdom of Light – by a hostile force of evil, equal in power, eternal, totally separate – the Kingdom of Darkness. So for them, evil was an independent principle, a positive substance, something which did not depend on God for its existence. Furthermore, human beings were not entirely free: each human being is composed of a body, which is physical and hence belongs to the darkness, but also of a soul, which is immaterial and hence belongs to the light.

Augustine was a Manichee for over a decade, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that this episode of the theft of the pears may have played a part in that. As Augustine says, he can’t initially think of any reason why he would have engaged in such a silly and stupid bit of thievery. He goes through the possible reasons at some length, but nothing obvious initially presents itself. And of course, this has potential problems for Augustine, because if he can’t come up with a reason, then it means that perhaps he loved evil for evil’s sake, which would go against the Christian understanding of evil.

Because from a Christian perspective, Augustine taught, evil is a privation of the good. This is easiest to see when we look at the reasons why people do bad things. Nobody loves evil for the sake of evil. Rather, we engage in evil behavior because we want something that, in itself, is good. But we go about acquiring that good in the wrong way, or we give up some better good to acquire the worse. The most inexplicable acts of evil that we have heard or can imagine – the Holocaust, say – become oddly comprehensible when looked at in this way. Hitler justified the murder of six million people because he wanted something that was, in itself, a good thing: a strong, healthy society. He wanted a good thing: the evil was not in the desire, but in the subordination to that desire of the other things he should have been desiring, such as mercy and compassion, or even simple truth (since obviously the Jews were not the cause of all of Germany’s problems, and he should have known that).

This is indeed the nature of all evil: it is a lack of good. “It is a parasite on existence leeching existence from good things” (Will, p. 76). It is a reversal of creation.

Augustine’s account of evil thus leaves no room for evil to be an end in itself. So why did he do it? Augustine returns to his analysis of his own motives in 2.16 with a fresh observation: he would not have done it by himself. He did it, in other words, to be with friends, in a perverted sort of inimica amicitia, a dangerous friendship. This was Adam’s sin as well (though not Eve’s): Eve was deceived by the serpent, but Adam knew full well what he was doing (1 Tim. 2:14). He didn’t eat the fruit because it was tasty or because it would impart knowledge, Augustine concluded, but because he wanted to be with his wife and to do what she did. (See City of God 14.11.)

Questions

What do you think of Augustine’s description of his sexual awakening in puberty? Is he too hard on himself? Is his description of what it’s like to be a teenage male accurate? (Cordelia: Does looking at guns make you wanna have sex? Xander: I'm seventeen. Looking at linoleum makes me wanna have sex.)
Where does evil come from? Is it possible to love evil the same way it’s possible to love good?
Why does Augustine make such a big deal about this theft of pears? Is Augustine too hard on himself?
What does Augustine conclude was his primary motive in stealing the pears?
Augustine seems to say (2.3) that sex should only be used for procreation (“for the begetting of children, as your law requires”). Presumably we disagree – but why?
Augustine says that all evil aims at some good. Is he right? Can you think of any counter-examples?

Confessions – Book 1

2010-11-16T00:39:00.001-08:00

This year, the Bible study that I’m leading at my church is on the theme of “Christian Classics”, and we’re reading through four great works: Augustine’s Confessions, The Imitation of Christ, G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. At the moment, we’re in the middle of the Confessions, and I’ve been jotting down my thoughts on each book as we go through it. Since I haven’t posted much else on my blog recently (besides some rabble-rousing stuff on Silverlight), I thought I’d post some of these notes. Just don’t expect great writing: these really are just notes.

Chapters 1-6 - Introduction

The Confessions is a prayer, and it begins with an analysis of what prayer is. Augustine is saying, in effect, “I desire to praise God,” and then tries to understand what that means. It turns out that each element of this triad (“I”, “praise” and “God”) is problematic.

Augustine examines the last two elements first.

Augustine begins by confessing that he doesn’t understand what he means by “God”. Although he wants to pray to something he calls “God”, he knows that he needs God’s attention to do this successfully. But before he can do that, he needs to be sure that this is the right God, that, in fact, he knows enough about this God to be sure he’s addressing the God, and not some figment of his own imagination. But Augustine can’t know he’s addressing the right God, unless God Himself enlightens him. But how can Augustine request to be enlightened, unless he first prays to God (a God whose identity Augustine cannot know)? Augustine’s response is to acknowledge the circularity: “I shall seek you then, Lord, by calling for you, call for you by believing you exist” (quaeram te, domine, invocans te, et invocem te credens in te). This faith, of course, does not come from Augustine, but from God, through His Son. Still, this is admittedly circular, and Augustine will return to the question of God’s identity before he’s finished with his introduction.

Augustine similarly confesses that he doesn’t understand what he means by “praise”. Augustine desires to be in relationship with this God, to call this God to himself – but what would that look like? Augustine specifically picks apart a spatial metaphor: “What in me is large enough for my God to enter?” (et quis locus est in me, quoveniat in me deus meus?) But before we smile at Augustine’s naïveté, we should take a closer look at our own preferred metaphors. “God, be with me.” “God, help me.” Even more abstract language would fail Augustine’s test: “God, I would be in relationship with you.” Think about what we mean by “relationship”, and you’ll see pretty quickly that it’s just as much a metaphor as, well, anything else we can come up with.

Augustine acknowledges this in his masterful description of the divine paradoxes: “Then what are you, God – what, I inquire, but simply God the Lord?” (Quid est ergo deus meus? quid, rogo, nisi dominus deus?) “You love without lust, you’re jealous and secure, you repent without sadness, you’re angry and at peace” (amas nec aestuas, zelas et securus es; paenitet te et non doles, irasceris et tranquillus es).

In other words, even if there were no other issues, language would be completely inadequate to grasp either the reality of God, or even His relationship with us. But there is more than that at work. The first term in Augustine’s triad, Augustine himself, is equally problematic. Augustine needs God ‘in’ him, but he is a completely inappropriate vessel for God’s indwelling. “My soul is too cramped for you to enter it – widen it out. It is in disrepair – restore it” (Angusta est domus animae meae, quo venias ad eam: dilatetur abs te. ruinosa est: refice eam). In order to begin this impossible journey towards God, therefore, Augustine must be reformed; but before he can be reformed, he must first understand himself. And that is precisely what he spends the rest of the work (or at least books 1-9) attempting to do.

Chapters 7-12 – Infancy

The introduction, without ever quite saying it, is all about the inadequacy of language as a medium for exchange with the divine. The rest of book 1 is basically all about language as a medium for exchange between humans, and Augustine the rhetorician is at pains to describe the origin as well as the appropriate and inappropriate uses of language. Language is critical to Augustine partly because it was his specialty: he had been trained and had made his living as a master rhetorician. But even more, language was critical because God Himself had appeared to bless language when the second person of the Trinity was termed “the Word” (verbum).

Infancy is specifically interesting to Augustine, because he can’t quite imagine being human without language. Our identity is tied up in our memories, of course, but our memories can’t be expressed or even understood without language. A human who can’t speak, therefore, is not all that a human is meant to be, and the result is what we have all seen in infants and toddlers: “When I was frustrated, because I was not understood or was demanding something harmful, I threw a tantrum because adults did not obey a child, free people were not my slaves, and I inflicted on them my revenge of wailing” (et cum mihi non obtemperabatur, vel non intellecto vel ne obesset, indignabar non subditis maioribus, et liberis non servientibus, et me de illis flendo vindecabam).

Chapters 13-24 – Childhood

Augustine’s description of his childhood is again tied up with his concern for language, specifically, for how language is learned. Interestingly, Augustine is clear that he taught himself language, that it wasn’t something imposed on him from the outside.

Chapters 19-31 – Schooling

Augustine contrasts how he learned Latin, his mother tongue, with how he learned Greek, the academic language of the day. He highlights the significant role that love played in the former, and the extent to which it was missing from the latter. He makes clear that it was sinful for him to neglect his lessons in Greek, but he’s not very subtle in his implication that if love had played as great a part in his Greek as in his Latin lessons, his response might have been very different.

Language is also the medium by which society “keeps its own in line” (euge, euge dicitur, ut pudeat, si non ita homo sit). Society (mos) is fundamentally a community of those who share the same language, and language forms the boundaries for appropriate behavior in any given community. The literature of a society, therefore, serves as a justification for that society’s behavior, a role which Augustine lamented in his own case.

Questions

- Are children inherently good, only corrupted by society? Or is there some sort of corruption inherent in human beings from their birth?

- In what ways does Augustine see his infancy reflecting the good world that God created? In what ways does it reflect original sin?

- What can we learn from Augustine about the best way to raise children? How would an ideal Augustinian education differ from contemporary public education?

- How did culture/society/custom influence Augustine? How does contemporary culture/society/custom influence us?

- However much he loved pagan literature in his youth, Augustine clearly was not a fan by the time he wrote Confessions. What do you think of this judgment? Is there any benefit, or danger, to Christians participating in secular entertainments?