A Yearning For The Hearth

If you live in Canada you probably know this name, and you probably know that he’s been awarded the nation’s highest civilian honour - the Order of Canada.

In case you’re not Canadian he’s our abortion crusader. Passionately and totally devoted to ‘the right to choose.’ He’s been amazingly successful, Canada is unique on the planet with complete and unrestricted access to abortions for any women for any reason at any point during the pregnancy completely covered by medicare. In Canada, if your child is unborn it is your absolute right to have it killed. This is Morgentaler’s legacy, and this is what’s being honoured and tacitly endorsed by the Governor General’s office.

My initial reaction to this is pure dismay, but on further reflection there may be a positive side-effect: it may get people talking and thinking about the abortion issue again in Canada. The issue needs to be discussed and brought forward. Right now all discussion is repressed under a cloud of repression and political correctness.

I don’t think there’s much point in laying out why abortion is immoral, the argument has already been won by people smarter and more articulate than me. It’s also an absurdity that there is an argument, it’s like debating whether torturing kittens is cruel or whether generosity is good: if you’re arguing the point then your perspective is so skewed that debate is impossible.

What I’d like to ask is what it means that our culture is so at ease with itself, self-righteous in fact, while this immense horror is happening all around us. It can only mean that our culture is deeply and critically flawed.

The more I contemplate it, the more I believe that when our civilization is eventually eclipsed future generations will look back at us as the people of slaughter and ours as the age of the massacre. Abortion is only a part of this. The last two centuries have seen more people starved, burned, smashed, crushed, bludgeoned, incinerated, gassed, blown up, shot up and just plain butchered than the whole of human history. And it’s not just because there’s so many more of us. When we think back on medieval Europe we think of cruel and hash times. The Crusades, the Inquisition. Those were trifles, absolutely nothing. They were merely pioneering the art we have perfected. War to them was a few dozen gentry clanging away until they could extract tribute or kidnap someone worthy of ransom. War to us is annihilation.

We are completely blind to our own brokenness. I really question how far we can trust our moral perception when we acquiesce to evils like abortion. It can mean nothing but that we are terribly and deeply disordered on a deep philosophical and moral level. 

I sense a trend in Evangelicalism that there’s a disenchantment in the way the church is manifesting itself. There have been a couple of responses, I think the Emergent Conversation is one, but there’s another quite different response.

I came across this article in the Washington Post which discusses ways in which Evangelicals are tapping into the ancient traditions of the faith. The Ancient Evangelical Future is an organization which is grouping theologians and liturgists together and talking about what they believe to be the future of Evangelicalism, which consists of a recovery of the forms and practices of the ancient faith.

One of the things that I find interesting is that the people forming these groups are not turning to the denominations which have maintained these practices in large part; the Mainline Protestant churches. Why do their numbers continue to deplete, even while members in the growing Evangelical movement are searching for foundations? From my perspective, the Mainline churches appear to be too caught up in their own worlds, and their own agendas, to notice.

Since starting my latest round of studies I’ve had a few things introduced to me, and a few things clarified. Mostly in regards to Roman Catholic Theology since this is a Catholic school.

The first is natural law. The natural law tradition is a strong strain within the RC tradition and I did not have a good understanding of it until now (and I’m my understanding is still incomplete).

Natural Law is the order of things built into the Universe. It’s deducible by reason, so it’s possible for us to get to the heart of it. It also informs us intuitively in our conscience. All of this is part of an interplay with the Divine, although knowledge of God is not in and of itself necessary to make moral judgements based upon the natural law.

This sent my Protestant alarm bells off because, of course, our depravity is so grave that we can’t be trusted to make moral deductions. The natural order too has itself been disordered so that it cannot be trusted as a source of truth. So, what’s really at the heart of the issue is conflicting theologies about the fall.

Just how far have we fallen? What did that fall entail? theologians have varied quite a bit on this point. Protestants have tended to favour Augustine’s tradition, (ie, pretty far) whereas Catholics have held a somewhat more optimistic view…that while sin has twisted and distorted God’s creation, but it’s still God’s creation and it’s still got a lot of good left to it. This contrasts strongly with the teaching of the main reformed theologies, which heavily emphasize the ‘total depravity’ of man.

So, where am I settled? Well, I haven’t yet. I’m inclined to think there’s something to natural law, and since I never bought Calvinism, it doesn’t jar too badly with where I’m at.

More to follow…

In my random Internet wanderings, I sometimes read foreign newspapers to keep an eye on what’s happening in the world, or at least in the anglo-sphere. I recently read something interesting in the Jerusalem Post. The op-ed focuses on a point in the Republican You-Tube debate where one of the questions posed is whether the candidates believe in the Bible, saying: “This will tell us everything we need to know about you: do you believe every word of this book?” (He then holds a Bible up to the camera, I can’t tell, but it looks as though he may have also been trying to show us the traslation. King James, no doubt but it wasn’t picked up on).

The author of the the article asks the same question to some Rabbis. Their responses are pretty interesting. None of them affirm anything like verbal inspiration, even though some of them seem to hold to Mosiac authorship of the Torah. They clearly have a ‘tiered’ canon, with the Torah forming the center, the other books forming a commentary on the Torah, but all of it suppored by an indispensible and authoritative history of interpretation.

I recently read The Mediation of Christ by Thomas Torrance, in which he argues that Christians desperately need to communicate with and understand our Jewish brothers and sisters in order to (among other things) properly understand God’s covenental relationship with humanity and better understand our own faith. After reading this article I’m wondering now if they might have something to teach us about the study and use of Scripture too.

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?  

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.  

I’m doing a course on the Sermon on the Mount, and as I’m sure you know if you’ve read it carefully, it carries a very challenging message. I’ve read the Sermon on the Mount many times, even preached on it once, but the materials I’m reading as a part of this course are bringing new things to light. Here are a few random things which are new to me.

• The Beatitudes are not simply a list of conditions and promises, but are descriptions (or should be descriptive) of the people of God: meaning we are to be the meek, the poor in spirit, hungering after righteousness and so on. 
• We are to be light to the world. This is an oft quoted and cited metaphor, and also an oft ignored and neglected one. Most church congregations have withdrawn so far into themselves it is impossible for them to be ‘the city on the hill.’
• We are to be the salt of the earth. John Stott made note of the fact that in ancient times salt was not simply used to add savour to food, but to preserve it from rot. The image makes much more sense to me now.
• Careful analysis of the mid-part of the Sermon shows how deeply Jesus understood and applied Mosaic Law and how he neatly undoes the Pharisaic readings of the same texts; further reflection reveals that we have at many points reverted to the Pharisaic readings of the Law. 

  There’s much more to be said on this topic, and I’ll write more on it in the coming weeks.