A Yearning For The Hearth

The strict scientific materialism that positions itself so prominently in public discourse has some interesting implications. One is highlighted in the most recent Time magazine. The cover story features an investigation into what makes us good or evil. The article fails to delve into the deeper questions of what constitutes a right or wrong action, rather arguing that social constructs have encouraged the development of moral systems. Yet throughout the article the idea of morality is never questioned.

Ultimately the materialism they assume means that morality, like everything else can be reduced to one thing: chemicals. What else is there? Every action, feeling, motive, sense and thought is one hormone or another acting on our organs and producing one response or another. This response has an effect upon our behaviour that either has had a beneficial or detrimental effect upon the viability of the species, and the development of our species and the cultures surrounding it will inform the emotional response and moral categorization of it. This is the ultimate consequence of ardent materialism. Love your spouse and children? Only because it has proven beneficial to the survivability of previous generations. The proponents of these philosophies seem to rarely (if ever) follow it through to its ultimate conclusion.

Most people hold to at least two conflicting worldviews, a scientific materialism that governs a large part of their lives and a pseudo-spirituality that governs the rest. Eventually this will become untenable and we will have to begin to grapple either with a world in which the things we generally hold to be the most meaningful are really not, or a world in which the spiritual permeates all things much more deeply than we readily recognize.

I think we’ll come to see that there’s more to love than chemicals.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20071203,00.html

One thing that has stood out in my study of the Sermon on the Mount is the creative attempts various Christians have made to circumvent the disquieting implications of Jesus’ teaching. One of these attempts has, I think, had a profound impact on the North American church. I was surprised to learn that Dispensationalism, the theology best known for its elaborate ‘Left Behind’ end times theology, manages to evade the Sermon in its classic form. According to Dispensationalism, when Jesus arrived on earth it was with the set purpose to establish his millennial Kingdom, and that’s how he began his ministry. OOPS! That didn’t pan out. Fortunately there was a plan B, and Jesus completed his ministry preaching the coming Kingdom and so on. The implication of this teaching, however, is that Jesus early ministry was never meant for us…the Sermon on the Mount is the blueprint for the millennial Kingdom, not for our current era, so its bearing on us minimal. Given Dispositionalism’s profound influence on North American Christendom, we can probably guess many commentaries and books being drawn on by pastors and teachers still reflect this teaching, and that this in turn has had a profound (and pernicious) impact on the church.          

The comments on the November 2 post “The Canon” began to get into the idea of a ‘tiered’ Canon. This brought to mind something I read recently about Star Trek (you’ll start to think I’m a bigger fan than the casual one that I am). Apparently they’re filming a new Star Trek movie that takes place sometime before the original series, but well after the Enterprise series. The page I was reading noted that it would address an era never before explored in a ‘canonical’ work. I guess I was always aware of how deeply some people get into Star Trek, but I was never before aware that are different levels of ‘canonicity’ that pertain to various Star Trek ‘texts.’ The series and movies, and I guess some books are considered ‘canonical.’ Other Star Trek books, novels, memorabilia and so on might be edifying reading, but are non-canonical. There is also a body of literature and so on produced by fans on their own called ‘the fanon.’ This is of course purely apocryphal.

I was very interested by how the Star Trek fan base in governing their ‘canon’ has fallen into patters so analogous to the patters the church has used in treating its own Scriptures.

 

Early on, back when I was at the University of Saskatchewan I began to think about the state of the Social Sciences. It seemed as though the Social Sciences were an attempt to organize and study human behaviour using the same rules and philosophy that governed the Natural Sciences…and which had (at least up till that point) provided such stunning success in describing and predicting natural phenomenon. Yet this attempt seems to have failed. Sociology, psychology, political science (and others) do not render meaningful accounts of the human experience. They are adept at describing phenomenon, but lack the power to produce satisfying explanations.

This has had several effects. One is the profusion of Social Sciences that have been invented (check a few big university websites; there is a discipline and a degree for almost every facet of the human experience). Another is a diminishment of the arts. Truth is now found in studies and statistics. Art, like beauty is ‘in the eye of the beholder’ and can’t be relied upon to say anything meaningful. It was not always thus; not that long ago social theory was demonstrated in great novels like those of Tolstoy, Henry James, even Jane Austen. Theology was expressed in a painting. An interesting phenomenon I found while studying literature was the attempt to look at literature in the terms of the social sciences: Hamlet suffered from such and such a neurosis, Lady Macbeth from such and such paranoia. I personally think Hamlet and Macbeth provide a much better account of who those characters were than plugging them into some generalized category.  

I’m  finding that those on what seems to be next wave of theology have strong opinions on these issues. Alasdair MacIntyre has an extraordinary understanding of the Social Sciences but notes their ‘lack of predictive power’ and narrow focus. As I understand them, John Milbank and those in the Radical Orthodoxy movement go much further, believing that the modern Social Sciences in their un-theological, modernist assumptions are floundering hopelessly and that they have bought into the false and violent narrative of modernity and need to replaced by a new understanding firmly rooted in a Trinitarian/Christological theology.

What is the future and proper place of the Social Sciences?  

The Saskatchewan Party has just won a majority government in my home province of Saskatchewan, and it’s set me to thinking about politics and more especially, the peculiar politics of the Canadian prairies. Saskatchewan is the birthplace of the CCF, the grassroots socialist party started by farmers and blue collar workers that eventually morphed into the NDP. Saskatchewan was the first place in North America to elect anything like a socialist government, and there’s still a strong leftist constituency in the province. At the same time, for most of my life Saskatchewan has supported the libertarian and right wing Reform, Alliance and Conservative parties at the national level. So the natural state for Saskatchewan is to vote of the most liberal option available provincially, but for the most conservative option available nationally.

What it heaven’s name sustains this contradiction? I can’t tell you definitively, but I can tell you a few things. For one, the traditional NDP party of Saskatchewan is different than its national counterpart (Quite a bit more centrist). For another, the provincial Conservative party in Saskatchewan was caught in a scandal that wiped it off the map, weakening the opposition to the NDP for years. Finally, the animosity and distrust of the federal Liberal party (with the exception of Ralph Goodale) is so great that the middle ground is essentially wiped out of the picture, both nationally and provincially. This is true, of course, across the prairies (though not in BC where the provincial Liberal party has distanced itself sufficiently from its federal counterpart).

The NDP’s legacy in Saskatchewan is one of both achievement and embarrassing failure. On one hand, they helped to deliver Saskatchewan through the immensely difficult period during and following the Great Depression when things were truly bad out west, especially in Saskatchewan. They introduced Canada’s nationalized health care system, which spread throughout the country and has now become almost sacred. Yet Saskatchewan lags badly behind its neighbours, and while it can’t be pinned totally on years and years of the NDP, they bear a great deal of the blame.

When my great grandfather settled in southern Saskatchewan there were no roads, no power, no water, no rail lines. They lived in houses made of sod and farmed with oxen and horses. By the time he died, the province was fully industrialized. Now the rail lines have been pulled from the ground, the roads are crumbling and many houses are abandoned. Schools and hospitals are being closed. The population of Saskatchewan in 1901 (before it was a province) was about 91,000. In 1921 it was 925,000. At this point, Saskatchewan was one of the most populous and most important provinces in the Dominion. Now it’s about 980,000, and Saskatchewan is at best an afterthought. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the incredible hope and anticipation people had when they arrived on the prairies during that time of immense growth and expansion; when people went from sod houses and wagon trails to concrete and freeways. What happened to that optimism? I think two world wars and a great depression have something to do with it. Still though, why has Alberta (and Manitoba to some extent) been able prosper and grow? (Don’t say oil, it is not that simple)

I’m hopeful. I’m not so naive as to believe a simple change in government is going to alter the course of a people, but I think it signals a change in attitude and might demonstrate a renewal of hope and optimism. For many years people have voted one way out of fear, plain and simple. I think the Saskatchewan party has some good ideas. They’re really not that different from the NDP policy-wise, they’ll lower some taxes, they’ll free up some red tape, they’ll streamline some bureaucracy, but they don’t have the political capital to do much else (regardless of the strength of their majority). I’m hopeful that this election signals a change in the thinking of the people of Saskatchewan and a renewal of the optimism and dynamism that built the province early in the last century.   

I’ve been thinking lately about the removal of the ‘apocryphal/deuterocanonical’ books (such as Sirach and Wisdom) from the bindings of Protestant Bibles. There are several things about this decision which lead me to question its legitimacy.

·        Firstly, the Bible that was circulating at the time the NT was written was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint. It also contained these books. The Greek renderings of the OT in the NT are often direct quotes of the Septuagint, so it’s clear the Biblical authors were using it. What evidence is there that the NT authors distinguished between the various books within it?

·        Several of the NT books echo these books.

·        When the Reformers chose to diminish the status of these books, they followed the ‘Hebrews’ in rejecting the later works which were composed in Greek. Why was the church following their lead? We accept as canonical the Greek NT. Furthermore, the Hebrew sources for some of this material has since been discovered. Had it been available at the time of the Reformation, those portions would almost certainly have been included in the Protestant Canon.

·        The Reformers scorned lots of the Bible. Luther called James an ‘epistle of straw’ and said of Esther that he wished it had never been written. Much of the Bible might have culled!

·        It was not until quite recently that Protestants have been so bold as to remove these books from the Bible entirely. The Reformers stuck them in the middle and accorded them a lesser position in the life of the church, but did not remove them. Nor were they removed entirely from the life of the church: early Protestant liturgies and books of prayer made use of their content. It was only in the mid nineteenth century that Bibles were being printed without them.

·        We base our NT Canon on what the early church deemed canonical, and it recognized these pretty readily.

There are lots of reasons for why these books have been removed (there canonicity was not immediately assented to and, notably, when Jerome led the production of the Vulgate there were questions about their place and status), but I think there are some good reasons for taking a second look at them.