The Questioning Christian

The Parable of the Talents and Psalm 90: Trust in God helps advance the continuing creation

2008-11-17T06:10:37-06:00

Yesterday's Gospel reading was the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25. Some observations:

• The two successful servants evidently trusted their master; they didn't seem to share their third colleague's 'knowledge' that the master was supposedly a harsh kleptocrat who reaped where he had not sown. Maybe the third servant had a warped view of things that caused him to fearfully hoard what he had instead of putting it to good use.

• I wonder if the manuscript of Matthew was badly edited: Maybe those who will be given more aren't those who have, in the abstract, but those who specifically have trust in God, as the two successful servants had trust in their master. Likewise, for those who have nothing by way of trust in God, even what they do have in this world will inexorably be taken from them (as it will be from all of us): by rust and moths (Matt. 6.19) and other agents of chaos, aka the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

• Our senior associate rector, Doug Richnow, preached on how awesome a God must be who created the billions and billions of stars, planets, and us. He drew on Psalm 90 that's also in the day's readings, and on the evident fine-tuning of the universe's physical constants. (No, he didn't argue against evolution.) Doug's sermon got me to thinking: Taken together, Psalm 90 and the Parable of the Talents could be read as urging us to make the best use we can of whatever assets have been entrusted to each of us — not just because it pleases God in some vague and undefined way, but more specifically because that's how we do our jobs as created co-creators, laboring in the service of the continuing creation. (I'm going to ask our music directors whether it was a coincidence that the closing hymn was Come, Labor On ....)

Praise hymns according to Garrison Keillor

2008-11-16T15:29:08-06:00

In a book-promoting lecture at Washington National Cathedral, Garrison Keillor said that the people of the church of his youth "wouldn’t have belonged in the praise churches today, where people gather in big gymnasiums, and they hold their hands up over their heads, and they sing what we call 7-Eleven songs, where you sing seven words 11 times." (Hat tip: The Lead.)

What if Starbucks marketed like the church?

2008-11-14T17:19:46-06:00

From Beyond Relevance (hat tip: Think Christian via The Lead):

Obama's faith, in his own words

2008-11-14T16:41:44-06:00

Today BeliefNet features the full text of a 2004 interview of President-elect Barack Obama by Cathleen Falsani. (Hat tip: Fr. Gawain.)

Excerpt:

FALSANI:
Who's Jesus to you?

(He laughs nervously)
OBAMA:
Right.
Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.
And he's also a wonderful teacher. I think it's important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.
FALSANI:
Is Jesus someone who you feel you have a regular connection with now, a personal connection with in your life?
OBAMA:
Yeah. Yes. I think some of the things I talked about earlier are addressed through, are channeled through my Christian faith and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

It's worth a look.

Multiple universes might still need a Creator

2008-11-11T07:16:50-06:00

"Our universe is perfectly tailored for life. That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many." (Emphasis mine.) So says the slug of a very readable article by Tim Folger published yesterday in the on-line version of Discover magazine: Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory.

The slug is wrong about one thing: It's not an either-or proposition. Even if multiple universes have been created, and ours is the one we happen to live in, we're still left with the question: How did that come to pass? (So says the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, quoted in the Folger article, in one of his books.)

There's no reason to think a Creator would not create multiple universes instead of just one. That would be roughly parallel with the way we think evolution works in our particular universe: Lots of 'experiments,' with the ones that work, continuing on.

Or as Paul says in 1 Thess. 5.20: Don't scorn people who come up with novel ideas; instead, test everything, and keep that which seems good.

Let's end adolescence: Newt Gingrich

2008-11-09T12:06:04-06:00

From former House speaker Newt Gingrich (emphasis is mine, paragraphing edited):

It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us .... American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.
The solution is dramatic and unavoidable: We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.
Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood. ... it was understood you were either a child or a young adult.
... Benjamin Franklin was an example of this kind of young adulthood. At age 13, Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood.
John Quincy Adams attended Leiden University in Holland at 13 and at 14 was employed as secretary and interpreter by the American Ambassador to Russia. At 16 he was secretary to the U.S. delegation during the negotiations with Britain that ended the Revolution. ...
Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.
... By trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. ...

And for too many middle-class and wealthier young Americans, adolescence has been an excuse to delay work, family, and achievement—and thus contribute less to their own well-being and that of their communities.
... Fortunately, innovations in technology and in financial incentives to learn offer hope.
The Information Age makes it possible for young people to learn much faster than our current failed bureaucracies and obsolete curriculums permit. ...

Original sin: Self-interest motivating self-deception

2008-11-07T08:11:31-06:00

"The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. ... There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. ...

— Rodney Clapp, "American Soundings," The Christian Century, Nov. 18, 2008, p. 45.

Related posts:

Financial regulations can be like fire safety rules

2008-11-06T11:47:11-06:00

I tend to favor market-based solutions, with as little government regulation as practicable. But for markets to work, the players have to keep long-term risks firmly in mind; they can't just chase blindly after short-term gains in the pretense that the risks don't exist. (Another reason why face the facts isn't bad advice to live by, not to mention a corollary of the First Commandment.) On that score, MIT professor Andrew Lo was quoted in yesterday's NY Times as saying something sensible:

Financial regulation, Mr. Lo said, should be seen as similar to fire safety rules in building codes. The chances of any building burning down are slight, but ceiling sprinklers, fire extinguishers and fire escapes are mandated by law.
“We’ve learned the hard way that the consequences can be catastrophic, even if statistically improbable,” he said.

Steve Lohr, In Modeling Risk, the Human Factor Was Left Out, NY Times, Nov. 5, 2008.

There's always a danger that excessive regulation will stifle innovation. But the right amount of regulation serves as a kind of institutional memory, forcing market players to think about, and act on, lessons learned painfully in the past.

Conservatives laugh more than liberals?

2008-11-04T16:15:51-06:00

From John Tierney's column today in the NY Times:

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.
“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”

Check it out.

Political differences may lie in different fear responses

2008-11-04T11:33:11-06:00

From the Boston Globe:

... researchers found a strong correlation between subjects' political attitudes and their physiological responses to threat. People who showed more "blink startle" and perspiration after a threatening stimulus tended to cluster on the right politically. They advocated capital punishment, school prayer, and defense spending, and they supported the Iraq war.

In contrast, liberals - who supported "less protectionist" policies such as gun control, open immigration, and increased foreign aid - showed significantly less physical response to the threatening stimuli. ... And the degree to which a person was startled by threatening stimuli indicated how much he or she advocated policies that protect society from external and internal threats such as wars and crime. [¶ ¶]

When researchers compared subjects' physical responses with their political opinions, they found a striking correlation. "It was clear," Hibbing said, "that some individuals have certain central-nervous-system reactions in the part of the brain involved in fear - there's a genetic basis for this - and this brain activity underlies both their startle response and their political views."

Eve LaPorte, Born to Party, Boston Globe, Nov. 2, 2008 (emphasis added; hat tip: Hacker News).

The Good Shepherd, isn't?

2008-11-03T13:13:24-06:00

From Christopher Hitchens, quoted in the New York Times:

Shepherds don’t look after sheep because they love them — although I do think some shepherds like their sheep too much. They look after their sheep so they can, first, fleece them and second, turn them into meat. That’s much more like the priesthood as I know it.

The quotation is from an account of a debate between Hitchens and Rabbi David Wolpe on the subject, "Is religion good for the world?" It's worth a read.

Jesus might not have really said it

2008-11-02T07:54:35-06:00

From Tobias Haller:

Have you ever observed the extent to which people appear not to notice that so much of what the church is recorded to have gone through in Acts and the Epistles (I'm thinking of the debate on whether Gentiles should be part of the Church, and the discussion on eating meat offered to idols, or other unclean food) would not have been necessary if Jesus had actually said some of the things the Gospels record?

We know the Gospels post-date the Epistles in terms of time of composition, so were these passages in Jesus' teaching retrofitted? Or were they recollected?

Were the apostles not listening attentively when Jesus told them to baptize all nations, and not to worry about whether food was clean or unclean?

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Memory distortion reading notes

2008-11-02T07:34:53-06:00

A recurring theme on this blog is the danger of relying too heavily on the accounts of events in in the New Testament. Even eyewitness testimony is less-than-optimally reliable, and time and retelling can distort any story. I'm copying this quote about memory distortion from a legal-journal article on stock-option backdating so that I'll be able to find it later. The context of the quote is the difficulty of determining in hindsight when a document was actually signed if there is reason for doubt about the stated signature date.

Countless studies reveal that human recollection even by the most forthright individual under the best possible circumstances is far from accurate.⁷⁶ Distortions in memory range from slight modifications of the actual event to the construction of memories of events that never occurred.⁷⁷ Both internal sources and external influences at the time of encoding and retrieval of memories affect the accuracy of recollection.⁷⁸ For instance, providing subsequent suggestions or new information can completely distort someone's original memory.⁷⁹ Considering that ideal circumstances rarely exist and that even a person with the best of intentions will likely resolve uncertainties in his or her favor in at least some cases,⁸⁰ the prospect of discerning an accurate set of "facts" is often dim.

Jeffrey L. Kwall & Stuart Duhl, Backdating, 63 The Business Lawyer 1153, 1166-67 (2008).

Footnotes in original:

76. Daniel L. Schacter, Kenneth A. Norman & Wilma Koutstaal, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory, 49 Ann. Rev. of Psychol. 298 (1998) (noting that since 1932 psychological studies have indicated that memory is not an exact reproduction of events, rather it is a constructive process that can be distorted).

77. See Guiliana Mazzoni & Manila Vannucci, Hindsight Bias, The Misinformation Effect, and False Autobiographical Memories, 25 Soc. Cognition 203, 208-09 (2007).

78. See Valerie F. Reyna, Robyn Holliday & Tammy Marche, Explaining the Development of False Memories, 22 Developmental Rev. 436, 441-42 (2002). See also Mazzoni & Vannuci, supra note 77, at 211 (stating that factors such as familiarity, plausibility, and memorability of an event as well as social variables can cause people to have biased recollections and false memories).

79. Mazzoni & Vannucci, supra note 77, at 205.

80. See Raymond S. Nickerson, Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises, 2 Rev. of Gen. Psychol. 175, 178 (1998).

The 'street' longs for the Awaited One - Fouad Ajami

2008-10-30T12:37:48-05:00

Professor Fouad Ajami writes in today's Wall Street Journal ($) of the crowds that have been greeting Barak Obama in his presidential campaign; his imagery is reminiscent of messianic stories told in the gospels and epistles:

... Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right. ... [¶¶]

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

I don't share Ajami's view of American political crowds; the lenses of his life experience likely are creating too much distortion on this subject, I suspect.

But his take on the Middle Eastern 'street' makes for an interesting perspective on the New Testament tales of the crowds who wanted to make Jesus king.

Pittsburgh's separatists should be laughed out of court

2008-10-20T07:27:46-05:00

HYPOTHETICAL: Suppose that: (1) The board of directors of General Motors approves the business plan of the Chevy division to experiment with other technologies such as the Volt hybrid. (2) Many of the workers of the Cadillac division get upset by this decision. They claim GM's board has abandoned The Automotive Faith Once Delivered that automobiles burn gasoline, damnit! (3) These dissidents proclaim that Cadillac is withdrawing from General Motors and temporarily joining the Indian car manufacturer Hindustan Motors [an actual company], under the auspices of the International Association of Automobile Manufacturers [there's no such thing, so far as I know], so that they can continue to build luxury cars the way they're meant to be built.

QUESTION: Who owns the Cadillac factory, the brand rights, the dealership contracts, the buildings and fixtures, the office supplies, etc. — is it the Cadillac dissidents, or General Motors?

ANSWER: General Motors, of course. The Cadillac dissidents would be horse-laughed out of court if they claimed Cadillac had ‘seceded’ from GM. We can stipulate that the Cadillac factories, office buildings, etc. were built largely through the efforts of generations of Cadillac workers and execs. Even so, at best the dissidents would be treated as having constructively resigned en masse. And as with any other resignation, the courts wouldn't let them take so much as a desk stapler with them.

(What the courts would do, and what should happen, are not necessarily the same thing. See my post from last year, Property ought to go where it can be best used.)

I adapted the above from my comments in a discussion thread at TitusOneNine. Another commenter, 'Jeffersonian,' claimed that my hypothetical was inapt because, (supposedly) unlike Pittsburgh, ”GM created Cadillac, owns Cadillac and runs Cadillac. At no time was there an organization called “Cadillac” that had to petition to join GM. It never was, is not, and never will be an independent entity.”

Historically, it appears Jeffersonian is wrong: According to Wikipedia, Cadillac was originally founded as an independent company in 1902; it was acquired by General Motors in 1909.

Even so, Jeffersonian's response nicely supports my hypothetical: It seems that at no time was there ever an organization called ‘the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh' until it was created by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. According to the separatists' Web site, until 1865, western Pennsylvania was simply part of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania:

The first known Episcopal clergy resident in this western third of what was then Diocese of Pennsylvania included . . . . [¶¶] For a decade after 1810, Joseph Doddridge, pioneer missionary in our region, wrote letter after letter to the eastern bishops pleading with them to convince General Convention to establish a western diocese. But conservative forces continued to guard oversight of entire states. The first division finally was set up in 1838 in western New York, but no further divisions took place until the western third of Pennsylvania with its 24 counties became the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 1865. [Bold-faced emphasis added.]

So, contrary to Jeffersonian's argument, the Diocese of Pittsburgh was not a standalone entity that elected to join the Episcopal Church. No, the diocese was a creature of the Episcopal Church from its very beginning.

In science, the most exciting expression isn't Eureka! It's Huh? - NY Times

2008-10-14T05:38:27-05:00

Here's yet another illustration of how many things we don't know about the universe:

The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.
At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto, and that is typical of the way many scientific discoveries emerge. Cellophane, Teflon, Scotchgard and aspartame are among the many inventions that have emerged through some form of fortunate accident or intuition.
“In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist based in Cambridge, Mass., and a board member and investor in SiOnyx.
Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.

John Markoff, Intuition + Money: An Aha Moment, NY Times, Oct. 11, 2008 (emphasis added).

And of course, much of what we think we know could turn out to be wrong - see, e.g., Ulcer Docs' Nobel Prize Illustrates the Dangers of Dogma.

An agnostic seeker emails me - my response

2008-10-11T13:07:43-05:00

Reproduced below is an email exchange from a week ago, between me and someone who wishes to remain anonymous. I responded to this person by interspersing comments into the text of his/her first email to me. (I broke up the paragraphing for easier reading, and am using Mark Harris's practice of putting long quotes in a different color.) I'm posting this with the other person's permission, with certain identifying details redacted.

I get emails like this every so often. There are more than a few people like this out there. As putative followers of Jesus, part of our job, I believe, is to try to help these folks to take baby steps — which might be very difficult for them — in the direction of God.

===================

First, I'd like to thank you for your wonderful website ... I've been reading through it today, and it is helping me make some decisions on my faith.

Just to give you a little background on myself, I'm a XXXX living in XXX. Although I was baptized, I was raised in XXXX by agnostic / atheist parents [...] who generally scoffed at the idea of God.

Generally that led to me growing up in the same vein, although I didn't really think of the implications of an agnostic lifestyle until early adulthood.

Around that time, I considered the subject more, and I would say that throughout my 20s I vacillated between a belief in some sort of "spirituality" and fairly strong agnosticism.

I should also say that I'm highly scientifically minded, and have had a very difficult time accepting many of the stories as set forth by the Bible or the belief in a God that I could not scientifically verify.

[...]

For whatever reason, over the past few months (and certainly more so, weeks) I've once again become interested in the topic, so I launched a full-scale research effort.

I've looked down various atheist rationales, read the theories of some philosophers and looked at religion (mostly Christianity).

Unfortunately, most religions simply do not seem to acknowledge reality and what science has taught us.

That being said, I think that your visions of Christianity and religion reconcile rather nicely with modern science. The Big Bang does seem to me to indicate some variety of beginning.

So, as I first mentioned, I'd like to thank your for you website. I don't know how much "faith" I truly have, but as you present it, God seems plausible to me, and I'd like to explore further. At the very least, it is comforting. [DCT: Thanks!]

I have a few questions that I was hoping you could help me answer, if not, I understand. [DCT: I’ll try ….]

==========================

How do you reconcile all of the unconverted souls throughout history with Christianity? ... [H]ow do you envision them fitting in under your vision of God?

[DCT RESPONSE: I don’t worry about that. Orthodox Christians claim that to be saved, you have to believe X, Y, and Z (for example, that Jesus is God Incarnate and his suffering and death atoned for the sins of mankind). Jesus, on the other hand, reportedly told the inquiring scholar of the Law, in essence (Luke 10:25-37), that if he followed the Summary of the Law, then he’d live eternally — “do this and you will live.”

Inasmuch as we can’t control whether we ‘love’ God and our neighbor (at least I can’t), I usually paraphrase the Summary of the Law as entailing:

• striving to put God first — which entails, among other things, as best we can, facing the facts of the reality he wrought, along with keeping in mind that whatever God might be, we ain’t it; and

• seeking the best for others as we do for ourselves.

It seems to me that on the whole, individuals and groups that follow these two basic principles are far more likely to have their descendants survive to reproductive age, and for their cultures to continue being practiced.

In other words, in emphasizing the Summary of the Law, Jesus put his finger on what I think is a crucial part of the fundamental fabric of Creation.

Getting back to the question of the afterlife: It also seems to me that a super-intelligent Creator, who set up so many interacting natural processes that have produced us, his ‘created co-creators’ (in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner), would not just consign us to nothingness when we die.

Why? Because eventually we’d figure out that there was no future for us after this life. That would be pretty demotivating, no? Such demotivation likely would make us of little further use in the continuing creation.

That might be just fine with God, but in the absence of evidence to that effect, I’ll go with my speculation that he won’t just discard us like so much used sandpaper.

By no means do I assert that for sure this is what’s happening; I just say it’s as plausible as any scenario posited by the virulent atheists.

In any case, life is full of gambles. The evidence appears pretty compelling that the Creator has set things up so that, on the whole (and not without horrible exceptions), life doesn’t seem too terrible for us, and it seems to be getting better over time.

I’m willing to gamble on trusting the Creator that, in the very long term, things will work out OK for all of us.]

==========================

Also, I have always had a difficult time understanding how mentally impaired people fit into the religious fold. In instances of schizophrenia for instance, who is the soul?

[DCT RESPONSE: I don’t worry about that either – “it is what it is”; see also the response above about life after death.]

==========================

Perhaps these questions are too mundane, but I'm trying to reconcile these ideas with a Christian view of God.

[DCT RESPONSE: If by the Christian view of God you mean the Trinity, who (sometimes) answers prayers, rewards the ‘good,’ and punishes the ‘bad,’ I place that view in the same category as the Ptolemaic view of the universe: it explains a few things in an OK way, but ultimately it’s unsatisfactory.

==========================

Also, I've briefly looked at the churches in my neighborhood, and most appear to be fairly traditional in the teachings of Christianity. Do you know how I could find some that are more along the progressive lines that you seem to represent?

[DCT RESPONSE: ... If I were starting from scratch, I’d look at the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalists (although from what I’ve read, the UUs have been pretty much captured by the atheists, agnostics, Wiccans, etc., and theists are made to feel like a distinctly-uncomfortable minority).

As it happens, I’m an Episcopalian and can’t see that changing, even though we’re far from perfect. If you haven’t already done so, you might look at my blog posting Why I Still Call Myself a Christian and an Episcopalian.]

==========================

Finally, is it ok for me to reach out to a priest in a local church to discuss these ideas, or would he / she be upset with my uncertainty of faith?

[DCT RESPONSE: By all means! Keep in mind that there are great priests like my rector (in the blog posting just cited, I tell a story about one of our conversations), but there are also some real duds, who get threatened if you even suggest that their worldview might be suboptimal. If you run across one of the latter, don’t get discouraged.]

===========================

Jesus is Lord didn't mean Jesus is God

2008-10-10T13:37:41-05:00

Traditionalists arguing that Jesus was God incarnate like to point out that Paul called Jesus by the title of kyrios, which is the Greek word used in the Septuagint for YHWH. Only in their imaginations does that get them very far, though: In Col. 4.1, Paul also uses the plural kyrioi in addressing slaveowners: “Masters [kyrioi], provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a master [kyrios] in heaven.” [NIV]

On U.S. aircraft carriers, the senior officer who heads the Air Department is traditionally called The Boss. That's also what people call Bruce Springsteen, but it doesn't mean they think he's a naval officer.

It matters how an Episcopal diocese came into being

2008-10-05T09:01:51-05:00

The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh's diocesan convention voted yesterday to secede from the Episcopal Church. Many conservative Episcopalians take the view (erroneous, in my judgment) that any Episcopal diocese can secede According to these folks, a diocese voluntarily 'joins' TEC and can voluntarily withdraw at will.

This view, however, seems to presuppose that a given diocese was formerly an independent, free-standing association or entity that existed outside TEC, and which mutually agreed with TEC to change that status. Think of the Republic of Texas joining the Union in 1845 following nine years as an independent state. (Or as was half-seriously proposed a number of years ago, Canada's Western provinces deciding to become the 51st etc. states of the United States.)

A handful of Episcopal dioceses may have originated in this way. My guess, however, is that for most dioceses the reality is otherwise. Many Episcopal dioceses originated, not as free-standing churches like the Republic of Texas, but because Episcopalians 'colonized' mission territory as an extension of the existing Episcopal Church, eventually petitioning for full diocesan status in the church. This would be comparable to, say, the states of Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska: If memory serves, each of those states was colonized by Americans as an extension of the United States (I'm not going to get into the rights-of-indigenous-peoples argument here), and later sought and received full statehood status from the Congress.

Ironically, two of the present cases involve the Episcopal dioceses of San Jose and, in all likelihood, Fort Worth. Each began when it was carved out of an existing diocese by authority of the General Convention. In that regard, these dioceses are like the state of Maine, which was carved out of the existing state of Massachusetts by Congress as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In the coming months, it will be useful to keep in mind these distinctions of origin, I think.

Our faithfulness, not our success, is what matters

2008-09-29T14:19:15-05:00

"As a priest I am called not to be successful, but rather to be faithful to the Good News." So says the new bishop-elect of the Diocese of Southern Virginia, the Rev. Herman “Holly” Hollerith, IV. This standard, I submit, applies not just to priests, but to all of us: What matters is not our apparent success or failure in the world, but whether we remain faithful to God and his Good News.

Fr. Hollerith's comment is found in his nominee statement, where he tells of an important moment in his spiritual journey:

Perhaps one critical and vocationally formative moment occurred when I was a young rector of a parish in South Carolina. I had hit a low in my ministry and was feeling like all my efforts to enlighten minds, raise the consciousness of my flock, and resolve problems had come to naught. I honestly felt the parish was moving backward in time, and I was pretty sure it was my fault and that I was simply an inadequate leader.

Across the street from the parish rectory was a neighbor of mine, a prominent retired priest, who had been a supportive mentor and sounding board. I wandered over to update him on my lack of progress and feelings of failure.

Finally, in mid-sentence he stopped me, pointed his finger right at my nose and said, “Your problem, Hollerith, is that you have confused success with faithfulness. They are not the same thing, but you have yet to figure this out and you think, only when you are successful, that you are doing the will of God.”

Those words hit me right between the eyes, because they were the words of Christ. Faithfulness and success are not the same thing! As a priest I am called not to be successful, but rather to be faithful to the Good News. It was a critical spiritual moment in my life that has since defined how I see things.

(Italics in original; bold-faced emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

We have to remember that the world will always tend to reward the appearance of success more than it does faithful effort alone. (We should also remember that the appearance of success can be fleeting, as recent turmoil in financial markets unhappily reminds us.)

And we can't just blithely ignore results, the reality of what our efforts actually produce. Being faithful to the Good News requires facing the facts and being willing to change course when necessary.

But if we do the best we can —

to face the facts;
to appreciate the goodness of the creation;
and to seek the best for our neighbors as we do for ourselves;

— in other words, if we do our best to follow the Summary of the Law — then we can stop worrying about whether we'll ever see "success" in our lives. Instead, we can luxuriate in the trust that in the very long term, things will turn out OK.

It's not for us to define God

2008-09-26T15:39:48-05:00

Blogger Steven S., coming across a posting I did several years ago, has challenged me to define what I mean by the term God:

Still wondering how you would define some of the terms your using, it seems that there is no real way to distinguish 'God' the way you use the word from the pantheist deity of Hindus or the deist deity of post-enlightenment westerners.
Isn't the Christian claim precisely about the definition of the word 'God?'
Defining God in terms of His self-revelation through Jesus' crucifixion then becomes the central mark of a Christian theology, doesn't it?

I don't try to define God, at least not in the way I understand Steven to mean. God is what "he" is, whatever that is.

To be sure, we can try to "define" the being(?) we call God, the Creator, le bon Dieu, Al-lāh, ho theos, Gott, and so on, in roughly the same sense that we try to define, say, Russian foreign policy: We can seek to discover as much as we can about "him."

FOOTNOTE: Paul was on to something in Romans 1.19-20, where he argued that "what may be known about God is plain to [men], because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made ...." Based on what we know of the universe and its history, I don't think it's entirely implausible to speculate that the Creator might be something like a patient bonsai gardener.

But it would be pretty brazen to construct a mental model of God, then proclaim that none may claim to be a follower of Jesus who do not accept, and worship, that model. There are times it seems that some in the church do just that. It's as though The Main Thing for them is their particular taxonomy of belief and making sure people fit neatly into it. They need to remember that the map is not the territory, and the portrait isn't the person.

Hurricane Ike update

2008-09-17T14:52:13-05:00

A quick update, via borrowed Internet access: We lucked out, in that our Houston home and most others on our block came through pretty much unscathed, unlike many in the area. Before the rain had even stopped, just about every able-bodied male on the block had emerged with saws, etc., to clear away downed trees from the street and from people’s driveways; the same thing has been happening all across the region. The lack of electricity and Internet access has been a pain, because I haven't been able to work (I'm writing from a borrowed office that has both), but the weather has been unseasonably pleasant, so the lack of air conditioning at home hasn’t been the problem we expected. Others have it far worse, e.g., in Galveston. We’ve passed some of the time pitching in a bit with various recovery efforts, along with many, many others — pardon my chauvinism, but that’s just what Americans in general, and Texans in particular, do.

If Paul got it wrong, would God be any less God?

2008-09-10T19:54:23-05:00

Few things piss off some traditionalist Protestants more than suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Paul might not have gotten it quite right about the mechanism of "salvation." (This assumes for the sake of argument that there is such a thing.) I'm oversimplifying, but in a nutshell these trads claim that, according to Paul, we can gain entry into heaven only by believing that Jesus' crucifixion bailed us out of the eternal torture that humanity's sin had otherwise earned for all of us. The problem is that there are are no reliable reports of anyone returning from the dead and confirming that Paul's alleged view was correct. So in assessing that view, we have to rely on indirect, circumstantial evidence. Many traditionalists don't want to confront some of that evidence — for example:

Paul had been a ferocious persecutor of the Jerusalem church, but after his abrupt 180-degree about-face, he claimed, with equal enthusiasm (or fanaticism) to understand Jesus' significance better than those who had actually known and followed the man in life.
James, thought to have been Jesus' brother and leader of the Jerusalem church, all but openly mocked Paul's faith-alone position, asking rhetorically, in his eponymous epistle, whether faith was worth anything if it didn't inspire one to help those who needed it.
A letter attributed to Peter (whose weak will seems to have led him to be pushed around by Paul on occasion) conceded that much of what his colleague had to say was difficult to understand.

To many of those whom Kendall Harmon calls "reasserters" of the Faith Once Delivered, none of that matters: Their understanding of Paul is, literally, Holy Writ. I've seen such folks go ballistic at even a mild suggestion that the mechanism of salvation might be different from what Paul allegedly imagined.

The question I like to pose to these folks is this: Suppose Paul was wrong — would God be any less God? Would we have any less reason to acknowledge, admire, and be grateful for what the Creator has done? Of course not — so why all the anxiety?

Resolved: Most of the church is not Christian

2008-09-08T08:27:25-05:00

In a discussion at TitusOneNine, I'm being politely asked, between the lines: If I don't believe the church's teachings about the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, etc., why am I intruding into the private club of those who do? In response, I posed this proposition for debate, Oxford Union-style (I've edited it slightly here):

RESOLVED: No one may call himself a Christian if he demands more, as a condition of church membership, than doing one’s best to follow the Summary of the Law — Jesus (reportedly) said in Luke 10.25-37, do this and you will live, so to presume to require more than this would be to set one’s self above the Lord.

Another commenter responded:

Disputed. ... Christianity is based on accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior and belonging to the community of faith—which includes belief in certain key precepts ....

Those who have come to believe those "key precepts" cannot be faulted for where their faculties and their consciences have led them. But I would disavow membership in any “community of faith” that went beyond this, insisting that its answers are the final ones and that those who don’t agree with the party line must either assent anyway or leave. Folks like that are like idolators, pridefully setting up their own conceptions above the reality that God has wrought. (Hard experience has taught us that we don’t know everything about that reality, and that what we do “know” is necessarily provisional.) Fortunately, most of the Episcopal Church isn’t like that.

Evolution in the classroom - great NY Times article

2008-08-25T08:22:12-05:00

You've probably already seen the article from this past Saturday's NY Times: A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash, by Amy Harmon.

David Campbell, the Florida biology teacher portrayed in the piece, deserves our gratitude for his persistence in defense of facing the facts. Equally laudable are his tact and his obvious concern for his students. The latter two qualities are clearly important in his efforts to wean the students off the creationist wishful thinking that they've been infected with by their parents and churches.

Pulitzer, perhaps?