Bonhoeffer: Salvation is Cosmic, not Individualist

From Bonhoeffer’s letters:

Hasn’t the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all? Aren’t we really under the impression that there are more important things than that question…? I know it sounds pretty monstrous to say that. But, fundamentally, isn’t this in fact biblical? Does the question about saving one’s soul appear in the Old Testament at all? Aren’t righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and isn’t it true that Rom. 3.24ff. is not an individualistic doctrine of salvation, but the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous? It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

[John de Gruchy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ (Making of Modern Theology) (p. 280). Kindle Edition.]

This seemed at least tangentially related to the current debate on the New Perspective on Paul.

Cartoon: White-Black Relations in the U.S.

White-collar Mortgage Fraud vs. Petty crime

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The CEO also contributed to the 6th-largest bank failure in U.S. history, and cost Americans 2,000 jobs as a result of the scheme. Oh, and they also tried to cash in on $500 of government funds from the TARP — although they ultimately failed.

Liberty and justice for all.

What happens when you read Marx? =)

Funny:

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I thought I just wanted to pass;
Good grades were all I cared for.
My college made me take the class
More stuff for me to ignore!
But then I found out that
His theories weren’t so bad:
Labor and class combat,
What a very clever man!

CHORUS
I read some Marx, and I liked it;
The friend of the proletariat.
I read some Marx, just to try it;
Hope Adam Smith don’t mind it!
It felt so wrong,
It felt so right;
Men of the working class, unite!
I read some Marx, and I liked it;
I liked it!

There is a spectre hanging o’er
The face of Europe!
‘Tis communism, and it’s more
Than just a social hiccup.
A time will come soon when
The masses rise as one
To carve out their place in
The brand new poetry to come!

CHORUS

Marx is the man, he’s working for you;
The bourgeoisie, they just ain’t your crew.
Alienation of labor is bad,
Commodification is not a good fad.
The capitalists are greedy you see;
A shorter workday, now that’s what we need!
I’m reading some Marx, and I’m liking it;
Rise up now, proletariat!

CHORUS

If only government would stop regulating business…

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If only corporations could have free rein without all this government regulation, the common person would truly live in paradise.

Wittgenstein…the photographer?

Cambridge University, home of the Wittgenstein Archives, is hosting an exhibition of a collection of Wittgenstein’s personal photography. There are some neat pieces to see in the slideshow hosted at Salon. (The slideshow is after you click a link below the article.)

Who knew Wittgenstein was into photography?

Stockholm Syndrome of the Middle-Class Right

Ideology is a powerful beast. While many middle-class folks on the Right want to defend laissez-faire principles, they’re the very ones who are being pillaged by the same principles they espouse.

The fact that any notions of further economic deregulation are being entertained at all in the wake of the financial meltdown is utterly stupifying. It’s one thing for political and corporate elites to suggest such things, but this is even being taken up by the masses (i.e the Tea Party).

It is a case of Stockholm syndrome par excellence: people believing in the very ideology that enslaves them.

Dancing to the Beat of War Drums?

My dear friend Daniel Camacho has posted an incredibly moving video of a poem on war and resistance, by the Muslim poet Suheir Hammad.

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Daniel writes,

I’m often puzzled by how easily American Christians get swept up and overpowered by nationalistic narratives of war. Going beyond the debate about pacifism and just-war theory, I would at least expect Christians to be more suspicious of the grandiose narratives that nation-states use to justify violence. To be sure, we cannot underestimate the power of these narratives. Usually clothed in utilitarian language, and endorsed by most of the news sources available to us, they take on an aura of objectivity. They simply make sense. It becomes hard to resist them. One way to resist such narratives is to recognize that they are just that—narratives. They represent one way of looking at things. By no means are they absolute. Once this is realized, they are able to be called into question. “Perhaps, this story has missed the picture. Perhaps, its focus has sidelined important obligations that we should have never forgotten.”

Resistance to a nationalistic narrative of war requires an alternative narrative to counter it. And given the hegemony that militaristic narratives enjoy, any counter-narrative will almost always be a marginalized narrative. Christians need to recognize that the Gospel itself is a marginalized narration of the state-of-affairs, one in which the King of the cosmos conquers through death on a cross. So Christians do have the resources for resistance. But the question is, do we still have the imagination to question the primacy of militaristic narratives? Can we re-imagine things in such a way that there is room for us to love our enemies?

It seems as though many Christians remain quite comfortable with the mainstream narratives of war. But we need to resist; we need to remember our story. In the mean time, maybe we will have to find inspiration from Muslim, Palestinian poets in Brooklyn.

Monty Python on Communitarianism vs. Authoritarianism

This is one of my favorite scenes of all time, from the hilarious movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

From the scene:

ARTHUR:  Old woman!
DENNIS:  Man!
ARTHUR: Old man, sorry.  What knight lives in that castle over there?
DENNIS:  I’m thirty-seven.
ARTHUR:  What?
DENNIS:  I’m thirty-seven, I’m not old!
ARTHUR:  Well, I can’t just call you ‘man.’
DENNIS:  Well, you could say ‘Dennis’.
ARTHUR:  Well, I didn’t know you were called ‘Dennis.’
DENNIS:  Well, you didn’t bother to find out, did you?
ARTHUR:  I did say sorry about the ‘old woman,’ but from the behind you looked—
DENNIS:  What I object to is you automatically treat me like an inferior!
ARTHUR:  Well, I am king…
DENNIS:  Oh king, eh? Very nice.  And how’d you get that, eh?  By exploitin’ the workers! By hangin’ on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society! If there’s ever going to be any progress—
WOMAN:  Dennis, there’s some lovely filth down here.  Oh—how d’you do?
ARTHUR:  How do you do, good lady.  I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Who’s castle is that?
WOMAN:  King of the who?
ARTHUR:  The Britons.
WOMAN:  Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR:  Well, we all are. We’re all Britons, and I am your king.
WOMAN:  I didn’t know we had a king.  I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS:  You’re fooling yourself.  We’re living in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working-classes—
WOMAN:  Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS:  Well, that’s what it’s all about! If only people would–
ARTHUR:  Please, please good people.  I am in haste.  Who lives in that castle?
WOMAN:  No one live there.
ARTHUR:  Then who is your lord?
WOMAN:  We don’t have a lord.
ARTHUR:  What?
DENNIS:  I told you.  We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune.  We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
ARTHUR:  Yes.
DENNIS:  But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
ARTHUR:  Yes, I see.
DENNIS:  By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,—
ARTHUR:  Be quiet!
DENNIS:  —but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more—
ARTHUR:  Be quiet!  I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN:  “Order,” eh? Who does he think he is?
ARTHUR:  I am your king!
WOMAN:  Well, I didn’t vote for you.
ARTHUR:  You don’t vote for kings.
WOMAN:  Well, how did you become king, then?
ARTHUR:  [angels sing] The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [singing stops] That is why I am your king!
DENNIS:  Listen—strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.  Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
ARTHUR:  Be quiet!
DENNIS:  Well you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR:  Shut up!
DENNIS:  I mean, if I went around sayin’ I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
ARTHUR:  Shut up!  Will you shut up!
DENNIS:  Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!
ARTHUR:  Shut up!
DENNIS:  Oh!  Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR:  Bloody peasant!
DENNIS:  Oh, what a give away.  Did you here that, did you here that, eh?  That’s what I’m on about—did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn’t you?

Stunning Photos of Shuttle Docking at Space Station

I thought this was really stunning:

It’s been imaged in artists’ renderings, but never before in actual photos from another spacecraft: the sight of a space shuttle berthed at the International Space Station. This view of shuttle Endeavour, taken by Italian astronaut Paulo Nespoli from aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on May 23, is the culmination of 36 space shuttle missions to build the outpost over the past 12 years. NASA wanted the shot before it retires the shuttle fleet after one final mission in July.

You can see even more stunning photos at the original site.

Image credit: Paulo Nespoli/NASA.

“Analytic Theology”? Incarnation vs. Excarnation

This past weekend was a conference at Notre Dame, organized around the new project of “analytic theology.”  This new movement is spearheaded by such sharp figures as Mike Rea and Oliver Crisp, and essentially seeks to apply the tools and methodology of analytic philosophy and philosophy of religion to the task of Christian theology and theorizing about God.  The conference had an all-star lineup: Pete Enns, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Kenton Sparks, Eleonore Stump, Kevin Vanhoozer, D. Stephen Long, and others—all with a wide array of opinions on the subject.

I’ve been following these conversations with more than a bit of skepticism, myself.  The analytic/continental divide in philosophy is a tiresome one, but there are certainly important differences between the camps.  Chatting with my friend Mike Dagle recently on the matter, it seems to me that my chief concern with “analytic theology” is the fundamental posture of analytic philosophy.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor uses the language of “excarnation.” This word signifies a kind of flight from particularity and embodiment.  I think this word is a very appropriate one to describe much of what I’ve come across in analytic philosophy.  The chief concern in analytic philosophy, as I’ve been exposed to it, is universal knowledge and Reason (with a capital ‘R’).  Reason and arguments are the chief tool, with syllogisms and logic. Whether you’re white or black, male or female, gay or straight, rich or poor, our Reason is the great egalitarian leveler. Everyone is endowed with Reason, and arguments are universal.

This can be seen, for example, in the analytic distinction between “statements” and “propositions.”  If I utter the phrase, “The sky is blue,” this is a statement. But someone could utter this phrase in Mandarin, Arabic, Italian, or Klingon. So the particular utterances in various languages are statements, but these are merely signifiers of the true referent, which is the “proposition.” The proposition is the universal, distilled content of the particular statements.

By contrast, the continental tradition of philosophy attunes us precisely to our particularity, embodiment, and “situated-ness.”  Due to our various backgrounds, we have different implicit understandings of the world.  Reason is not objective, neutral, or unbiased—instead, reason is shaped and colored by our discursive communities. A man’s experience will always be different from a woman’s.  A black person’s experience is incommensurable with a white person’s.  An aborigine views the world through an entirely different paradigm than an American does.

So to return to the example above, some cultures simply do not have “statements” that correspond to another culture’s “statements,” all of which point to some mysterious ethereal “universal proposition.”  I recently read about one Amazonian tribe that utterly lacks any abstract concept of “time,” something which is so fundamentally interwoven into our culture.  For us, the vast color spectrum of the rainbow is carved into seven chief colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But why carve it up in that particular manner, as opposed to capturing other color variations? (Indigo? Seriously?) I remember reading/hearing about another culture which lacked linguistic concepts to distinguish between green and blue. In this case, “the sky is blue” simply doesn’t work the way we want it to—it’s “lost in translation.”  This is a benign example, but there are more profound ones, as philosophers of science and language have shown. My favorite example is Rorty’s discussion of phlogiston, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which deals with these themes drawing on Wittgenstein and Kuhn.

This is also why you see continental figures—Foucault, Derrida, etc.—employed in feminist thought, postcolonial theory, minority discourse, queer theory, etc. Continental philosophy is sensitive to our embodiment. Analytic philosophy is more disembodying, whereby anyone can give any argument at any time, and if they are “rational” or “reasonable,” anyone would simply clearly see things in that way.

And to bring the conversation from philosophy to theology, then, Christianity simply has a tremendous emphasis on embodiment.  Our bodies and creaturely finitude are not something bad to be escaped, but is pronounced “good” at creation. In contrast to “excarnation,” Christianity’s chief emphasis is on a God of incarnation.

After writing these sentiments earlier, I was pleased to see another voice chime in on the same note: David Congdon. In a brilliant post, David diagnoses precisely the same problem. He writes,

“My general critique is a classically “continental” one: viz. that I am concerned with the apparently ahistorical and non-social conception of reason with which the analytic people appear to be working. That is to say, there seems to be a sense that theological claims and concepts can be evaluated in abstraction from the historical, cultural, and political contexts within which such claims and concepts originate and develop. So we can evaluate someone like Schleiermacher or Barth by distilling a set of propositions and deciding whether the conclusions rationally follow from the premises.”

David has hit the nail on the head.  And in this sense, I really don’t believe “analytic” and “continental” philosophy are two merely “separate but equal” programs—I think analytic philosophy is tremendously deficient here.  (And while the charge of obscurantism can be legitimately laid at continental philosophy on occasion, analytic philosophy can be just as guilty of this in its own right.)

Congdon has another good quote toward the end, and since this post is already so long, I’ll just quote it in full:

…the academic discipline of analytic philosophy understands its task to be the logical analysis of propositional arguments about various topics. Those who have not swallowed the Wittgensteinian, much less the Hegelian, pill—who still operate within the sphere of so-called universals—see themselves as capable of abstracting concepts from the historical contexts within which they are used; they can be analyzed apart from their concrete uses in particular situations for particular ends. A logically-justified claim has universal significance. Contrary to the “postmodern” continental tradition, everything is not hermeneutics.

For me, on the contrary, everything is hermeneutics. Every concept is culturally situated, every claim is determined by its location within history. There is no universally-valid ontology, no metaphysic that is not conditioned by a particular sociopolitical context. Now I think there are many ways of reaching this “continental” conclusion, but my reason is purely theological: Jesus Christ is the historicization of God, thus the historicization of theology. Speech about God is not speech about a universal concept of deity; it is contextual speech about the concrete reality of God in the world. This means that the very being of God is the ground for the hermeneutical nature of all theological discourse. There is no speech about God that is not essentially a matter of hermeneutical understanding. All talk of God is interpretation.

Thus, I remain skeptical of the prospects of “analytic theology.”  While the analytic tradition emphasizes excarnation, the Christian tradition emphasizes incarnation.

America wants YOU…..to shutup

"STFU or GTFO"

The Military Industrial Complex has a new recommendation: instead of the state making new laws forcing citizens to keep quiet about sensitive government information, one analyst recommends cultivating a “culture of restraint,” whereby citizens and institutions will “stigmatize” those “unattractive figures” who disclose state secrets to public scrutiny. This self-censorship is being heralded as a “virtue” and “civic duty.”

The 23-page paper was written by Dallas Boyd, in Homeland Security Affairs, the journal of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

Those sectors targeted for self-censorship and “stigmatization” include: scientists who describe threats to the food supply, graduate students mapping the internet, the Government Accountability Office (which publishes failure reports on the TSA), amateur enthusiasts who describe satellite orbits, the US Geologic Survey (which publishes surface water information), newspapers (the New York Times), TV shows, journalism websites, anti-secrecy websites, and more.

I’ll just add that the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea encourages its people to do the same.

Memorial Day and Civil Religion

I was pleasantly surprised by some good, balanced thoughts coming from Kevin DeYoung today, in light of the upcoming Memorial Day weekend.  Civil religion is healthy and strong in America, but perhaps nowhere is America more revered and worshiped than within evangelical Christianity.

Just as important as DeYoung’s content is his approach. As he is looked upon highly in evangelical circles (those who most ardently conjoin love of “God and country”), he delicately eases his audience into his chief point.  He begins with some points that evangelicals will be on board with: being a Christian does not nullify the particularities of our heritage—there is no “Jew or Gentile, male or female,” etc.  While this could be nuanced (according to scripture, being a Christian actually does make us a “new race,” alter our citizenship, etc.), it’s still a helpful sentiment: we retain our genitalia after conversion.

Another point I appreciate is a sentiment I’ve articulated myself: I love my family, I love my hometown, I love my alma mater. It seems that loving one’s country is merely a difference of degree, not of kind.  As long as alternate loves do not trump one’s love of God and our citizenship of God’s Kingdom, it doesn’t seem wholly inappropriate.  (This, too, could be nuanced: just because we appreciate our hometown doesn’t mean we can’t be helpfully critical of it.)

His conclusion is simple, but crucial: civil religion—and in this case, Memorial Day—should not be mixed into Christian worship.  While his conclusion is indeed mixed with some ill-advised points (“I love to see the presentation of colors and salute our veterans…”), he still says what needs to be heard:

Are we gathered under the banner of Christ or another banner? Is the church of Jesus Christ–our Jewish Lord and Savior–for those draped in the red, white, and blue or for those washed in the blood of the Lamb?

I’ve already noted some parenthetical tweaks above, but I’ll highlight one important point to add.  DeYoung writes,

In general, then, it’s possible to be a good Christian and a good American, or a good Ghanaian or a good Korean. [...] Allegiance to God and allegiance to your country do not have to be at odds.

The key words here are “in general.”  In general, I think this is the case—allegiance to family, or hometown, or alma mater, or one’s country does not have to be at odds.

The problem is that America is not merely a benign nation-state that merely wants to beneficently provide for national defense and some social security benefits.  America is more akin to the Roman Empire, with its own entire cult religion and mythos.  America has its holy texts (Declaration, Constitution), its patron saints (the “Founding Fathers”—note the capitalization), its holy days (Memorial Day, 4th of July, etc.), and more.  America even has its own soteriology: due to the intolerance and violence of religion, the colonists came to America to escape persecution and gain “freedom;” and today, this freedom must be maintained by the “ultimate sacrifice” of blood on the fields of battle.

So yes, “in general” allegiance to God doesn’t have to be at odds with (tempered) allegiance to country.   But in these specific circumstances, we must remember that the Christian confession “Jesus is Lord” was intentionally antithetical to the confession “Caesar is Lord.”  And today, while some place their hands on their hearts and pledge their allegiance to one kingdom, Christians should note well that they are citizens of another Kingdom.  Because in our case, the American state doesn’t merely want your taxes—it wants your soul.

Logocentrism Among the Evangelicals

Justin Taylor has posted a snippet of a review of a new book by Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion.  Here’s an excerpt of the review, where I put in bold the chief points of interest:

Another concern I had with the book was how Challies talked about mediation.  As stated earlier, for Challies a medium is something that stands in between.  What he doesn’t quite get right here is that media don’t just stand in the way, they are enablers.  Phones don’t just stand between you and me, they enable us to have a conversation.  To view media as something that enables rather than something that stands in between allows us to see mediation in a more positive light.  For Challies, mediated communication is worse than unmediated or immediate communication.  He says that unmediated communications is the ideal to strive for and anything mediated is only second rate (at best).

There are a number of things wrong with this position.  First, Challies provides almost no argument for why mediated communication is worse than unmediated communication.  He mentions one Biblical reference (Gen. 3:8) where Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden.  Challies interprets this to mean that Adam and Eve enjoyed face-to-face, unmediated communication with God before the fall.  But Genesis 3:8 occurs after Adam and Eve had already sinned.

Second, it isn’t exactly clear what Challies means by unmediated or immediate communications.  Presumably, given his definition of medium, unmediated communication means any communication where nothing stands between two people.  But how far do we take this?  Does clothing stand between two people?  How about cultures?  Or language?  Or air molecules?  Challies never indicates what he means by this or where the line should be drawn.

Taylor asks after the excerpt, “I wonder if Challies would say that having written Scripture—surely a mediated communication—is itself a concession to the Fall?”

There are a few things interesting to me about this.  First is that this issue is coming up in evangelical circles to begin with, which is great.  Second and unsurprisingly, Challies articulates the (intuitive!) position that is shared by the majority of the philosophical tradition, from way back to Plato up through Rousseau.  But third and more surprisingly, the original reviewer (and subsequently Taylor) pick up on some of Derrida’s insight on this position: Where do we draw the line between what constitutes “mediation” or “mediated” communication, versus what is “im-mediate”?  And is mediation necessarily bad—a result of the Fall?  (A fourth point of interest to me is the commendable evangelical impulse to draw on scripture to discuss the matter, despite it often not applying in the manner in which it is employed—as seen in the Gen. 3:8 example above.)

In Derrida’s case, he grapples with what he calls “logocentrism”: the privileging of speech over writing.  Writing is said to be mediated, derivative, corrupt and misleading; speech is pure, present, immediate.  But Derrida’s point is that even speech itself is never fully “present,” as the meaning of individual words is always found in their difference from other words, and meaning is always deferred from one word to the next (drawing on Saussure, and hence Derrida’s “différance”).

So is mediation in communication necessarily bad?  A result of “the Fall,” perchance?  No—rather, mediation is a necessary condition of our creaturely finitude.  Our very embodiment necessitates that all communication will always already be mediated in some fashion or another—even “present” speech.

But conversely, does that mean we should eschew privileging of face-to-face contact and communication altogether, and embrace all mediated communication as being equal?  I don’t think so—if we really want to honor our embodiment, we should acknowledge the uniqueness and importance of communicating while seeing a kind smile, eye contact, or having a warm embrace.  But we also oughtn’t condemn mediation as such.

Rapture Practical Joke (Video) – AWESOME.

EDIT: I didn’t test the video before posting, and apparently it was taken down from YouTube. After doing a bit of digging, I found it hosted at another site:
http://videosift.com/video/Really-Evil-Prank-Faking-the-Rapture

So in light of all the excitement about the supposed rapture happening on Saturday, I remembered a great video I posted on my blog a few years back. Enjoy! =)

Libertarian Dystopia: Amusing Ourselves to Death

Here is a great illustrated version of a section of Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.  Here, Postman compares George Orwell’s dystopia in the book 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s dystopia in the book Brave New World.  While many folks fear the former, what they might not realize is that they are often unwittingly clambering into the arms of the latter.

Take a look:

Parsing Free Markets as “Pro-Choice” vs. “Pro-Life”

In most debates over social issues, American conservatives traditionally come down on a more regulatory side of things.  When it comes to gay marriage, conservatives believe the government should regulate who a person can marry. When it comes to abortion, conservatives believe the government should regulate whether a woman can abort her baby.  Marijuana should be illegal.  Why? For the greater good of society.  While American progressives are the “pro-choice” camp, arguing that government should respect individual freedom, conservatives maintain that some choices simply should not be available.  Conservatives are “pro-life,” inasmuch as they suggest that in order to preserve the well being and common good of society, some choices simply have to be regulated.

But when we turn our attention to economic issues, the tables are turned.  American progressives come down on the regulatory side of things, while conservatives are the ones insisting the government should respect “individual freedom.”  But it seems that the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” monikers apply just as well here, simply reversed.

For example, a couple months ago, legislation was passed in a California city to prevent McDonald’s from putting toys in kid’s meals, to drop the incentive for parents and children to buy them.  Child obesity is at epidemic levels in the U.S., marketers are increasingly aggressive in their attacks on children and families, and fast food is generally awful for human health, especially developing children.  Conservatives were in an uproar about this, insisting that the state should let them be free to choose for themselves what to feed their children.  Progressives took the regulatory position that parallels the conservative social position: some choices simply should not be available, to preserve the well being and common good of society. Frankly, companies simply should not be selling greasy fake food with little toys to young children, period.

But really, isn’t this regulation of healthy well-being for children a deeply “pro-life” position?  And it certainly goes without saying that the conservative economic position is radically “pro-choice.”

Another example is environmental stewardship.  It’s the Left that tries to protect the environment, wildlife preserves, endangered species threatened by expanse of industry, etc.  While conservatives are the radical laissez-faire camp, it’s the progressives who are deeply “pro-life” in their concern for sustainable living and human flourishing.

Another dynamic that’s quite interesting is that progressives do not shy away from invoking language of “morality.”  Selling greasy food with toys to children is “immoral.” Balancing the budget by cutting state programs to those most vulnerable and needy is “immoral.” Destruction of the environment is “immoral.” (Just don’t bring up morality with abortion.)

So it seems that one could appropriately label the positions on free markets as “pro-life” or “pro-choice.”  And these monikers, applied in this context, illuminate just how incoherent both Republicans and Democrats are.  Each party is opposite on economic and social issues, and internally inconsistent.  While some conservatives are shifting toward a more consistent social and economic libertarianism (classical liberalism), a thoroughgoing “pro-choice” position, my sensibilities go in the opposite direction. What if instead, conservatives imagined a more consistent social and economic moral position?  A thoroughgoing “pro-life” position—not exclusively on abortion, but also on the corrosive social effects of market profiteering.  It seems that with respect to free markets, at least Christians should be “pro-life.”

Obama’s Birth Certificate and Epistemology

With Donald Trump parading around as a possible Republican presidential candidate (God help us), he has been reviving the “birther” issue: whether or not Obama was in fact born in the U.S.

I think this is a fascinating case study in the radical “believing” nature of human beings, as noted in Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith’s book, Moral, Believing Animals (2003).  There, he suggests humans are not the autonomous, rational cognizers that so much of our political-economic theory makes us out to be, but rather humans are fundamentally believing creatures (“homo credens”), situated in a moral order.  But note well: this “believing” and “moral order” need not be explicitly religious—other candidate moral orders (or “religions”) are reductive materialism, capitalism, Americanism, and more.  But essentially, everyone has basic axiomatic “truths” that they buy into to narrate their lives, apart from the “facts” or “data.” Indeed, these stories we tell ourselves help us sort the “facts” properly, according to our presuppositions and perceptions about the nature of what is true about the world.

The “birther” issue is a case in point.  No matter how much evidence is marshaled to prove the Hawaiian birth of Obama, some folks simply refuse to believe it—there is always a way to explain it away.  When the Obama campaign scanned the certificate and posted it online back in 2008, people insisted it was photoshopped, or a fake. When presented with two Hawaii newspaper articles that both list his birth on August 4th, 1961, people protest that it is a hoax, conspiracy, or all concocted as part of some grand scheme to smuggle a foreigner in as a future president.  When confronted with first-hand eyewitness testimony of forensic specialists, doctors, and state workers who have all personally held, inspected, and verified the birth certificate, people will argue that these testimonies could just as well be lies and deceit.

So what kind of “evidence” would it take in order to believe?  What amount of “facts” or “data” is sufficient in order to change such a person’s mind?  Would they have to physically hold the certificate in their own hands? Of course that’s still not sufficient—it could still be a fake. Or what if, by chance, someone just happened to have a primitive videorecorder in that Hawaiian delivery room, and we had actual video footage of Obama coming out of his mother’s womb with a palm tree in the background? No, it could be special effects.

Our believing trumps our perceiving.  If the old maxim was “seeing is believing,” then perhaps the postfoundationalist account would invert it: believing is seeing.  This becomes especially problematic when we take note of contemporary neuroscience that shows how the brain compensates for gaps in our perception, and “fills in” the holes with our expectations.

The Obama administration has today released the “long-form” version of the Hawaiian birth certificate, in the hopes that this will finally quell debates on the issue.  Will it? Let’s hope so.

A Postmodern Twist on “Faith and Science”

The modern debate over the relationship between faith and science seems a never-ending one. On the one hand, you have well-intentioned six-day creationists who reject much of contemporary science altogether (according to Archbishop James Ussher, the world was created in 4004 B.C., on October 22nd at 6pm). On the other hand, you get scientific positivists and reductive naturalists, such as Richard Dawkins, who insist that science represents the pinnacle of human knowledge, and negates the need for myths and religion. Somewhere in the middle, you have those “forward-thinking” Christians, seeking to synthesize faith and science: “Evolution and the Bible are compatible, and let me show you how.” The evangelical BioLogos Forum represents such a group, spearheaded by such sharp thinkers as Tim Keller, Peter Enns, and Francis Collins.

However, despite their wide disagreements between one another, each of these three groups agrees on one common fundamental assumption: a modernist Enlightenment view of science. On this account, science is the steady accumulation of knowledge; a neutral, unbaised observation of the world; “just reporting the facts,” you might say. Whether creationist, positivist, or somewhere in between, they all agree that this is what science in fact is.

So even within the “forward-thinking” Christians, the conversation is framed something like this: On the one hand, we have our subjective interpretations of scripture, that are always shifting with time. On the other hand, we have our objective findings in science, which tell us the way the world really is. So, we simply need to re-interpret our merely subjective readings of scripture to accommodate the neutral, objective findings of science. Viola! No problem!

However, as Nietzsche points out, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Foundationalist epistemology (and the modernist Enlightenment view of science built atop it) has been weighed on the scales and found wanting.  All observation is always already interpretation.  Any description is loaded with implicit prescription.  Nobody can ever be “objective,” and even the so-called “hard” sciences are inescapably subjective.

These postfoundationalist sentiments are introduced into the arena of science most popularly by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.  Kuhn demonstrates through history that contrary to the positivist’s wont to say otherwise, science is not a steady accumulation of facts but rather a sifting of “facts” into pre-existing scientific paradigms. But moreover, these “facts” are themselves theory-laden, and our paradigms dictate which “facts” are relevant for observation and which aren’t. The fact-value distinction becomes a messy blur, as merely those “facts” which are valuable to us filter through our paradigm. (Other philosophers of science in this vein are Michael Polanyi, Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and others.)

So if positivist science is a bankrupt project, we need to reframe our conversations between faith and science.  Even well-intentioned “forward-thinking” Christians that are trying to reconcile perceived obstacles between faith and science, such as BioLogos, are operating with this modernist Enlightenment view of science. We need to “go meta-”, and challenge even the premises that are loaded into the conversation. We need to introduce Mohler, Dawkins, and Keller to Nietzsche, Derrida, and Wittgenstein.

Resources for Intentional Christian Living

What I’ve noticed is that many otherwise tremendously devout Christians don’t realize how their lives are nevertheless embedded in systemic unChristian institutions of practice. For example, a person may read their Bible everyday, or even be the worship leader at a church, but they still purchase clothing or coffee that is made by exploited slave labor overseas, and not even realize it.

One of the chief goals of my blog is to dialogue with a more popular audience, and not focus strictly on academia.  I’ve posted a new page up here, “Unplug,” which I kind of think of as resources for intentional Christian living.  It’s a collection of videos, books, and more, that I recommend for Christians who want to reflect on being “in this world, but not of it,” and not merely going with the prescribed flow.

The apostle Paul writes, “Do not conform any longer to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2).  I hope that these resources will serve people to better reflect on our Christian being-in-the-world.

Check out the page, and please give me feedback for other resources to add, as well!

Nails Found that Crucified Jesus?

TIME Magazine has an article up:

Two nails that Israeli journalist Simcha Jacobovici says may have been used in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ are shown during a press conference on April 12, 2011, in Jerusalem. The Israel Antiquities Authority, however, cast doubt on Jacobovicis claims

Just in time for Easter, an Israeli television journalist has produced a pair of nails he says may have been used to crucify Jesus Christ. “We’re not saying these are the nails,” says Simcha Jacobovici, holding aloft a pair of smallish iron spikes with the tips hammered to one side. “We’re saying these could be the nails.”

The case for the possible rests on a specific combination of research, surmising, guesswork and either the ineptitude or the skittishness of Israeli archeologists who inventoried the tomb thought to contain the bones of the Jewish high priest who ordered Christ’s arrest. The tomb, found in 1990, appeared to contain the ossuary, or bone box, of Caiaphas, the jurist who paved the way for the crucifixion. Researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) listed everything found in the cave, including two Roman nails. But unlike everything else in the grave, the nails were otherwise unaccounted for. They were not measured, sketched or photographed, and nowhere to be found in the IAA’s vast collection.

You can read more at TIME.

Hitler Reacts to his Philosophy Grad School Results

There’s a really funny internet meme where folks take a video of Hitler ranting, and insert their own custom subtitles.  There are many hilarious variations (and some really awful ones), but here’s an appropriate one for the season: Hitler reacting to his philosophy grad school application results.

Ayn Rand among the Conservatives

Will the real Ayn Rand please stand up?

Ayn Rand, that prophetess of all-things-laissez-faire, is gaining traction among American conservatives as of late. Much of this renewed vigor is from the Tea Party.  However, there are a couple recent articles from both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (curious bedfellows), that rightfully note some strong dissonances between Rand’s ideology and American conservatism.

On the one hand, Rand is indeed a proponent of radical laissez-faire capitalism, for which she is adored by conservatives.  However, the difference between Rand and conservatives is that Rand is consistent in her ideology.  Not only is Rand an economic liberal (proper), she’s a social liberal.

Rand was a strong proponent of abortion (even before the Roe v. Wade decision).  In the ’60s she was a feminist, was against the Vietnam war, and spoke out against racism and segregation.  Moreover, her “objectivist” philosophy radically rejects morality, tradition, and religion of any kind.  Indeed, she was a self-proclaimed lover of Nietzsche, and believed in utter self-actualization.

Take one example from the WSJ piece:

In late middle age, she became enamored of a much younger man and made up her mind to have an affair with him, having duly informed her husband and the younger man’s wife in advance.

Rand was rejected by conservatives in the past, but today she is becoming wildly popular.  Her most famous novel Atlas Shrugged is climbing Amazon.com, and a portion is being released as a film.  Paul Ryan makes all the staffers on his team read her literature.

Is American conservatism making a shift?  It has ebbed and flowed in the past.  Most of the freshmen House Republicans, elected in large part due to the Tea Party energy last election, voted against the recent budget compromise between Republicans and Democrats, totaling a large 50+ votes.  Sarah Palin capitalized on this and criticized House Republicans just as much as House Democrats for coming to a compromise (indeed, “Don’t retreat, reload!“).

Perhaps with all the Ron Paul/Ayn Rand libertarian crossbreeding amidst conservatism, it is shifting toward a more consistent liberalism.

Economics Rap: Hayek vs. Keynes (Video)

Fun:

America: English Only? ;-)

This was pretty fun. (Read carefully

 

Back Up and Running!

After having my blog dormant for a couple months during the grad-school application season, I’m happy to finally bring it back online again.  I’ve had many things I’ve wanted to write about, so I’m excited to be firing up the engine.

More soon!

What does “Conservative” mean?

I am taking a class dedicated to “American Political Conservatism,” perspectives both for and against.  I’m very excited about this class, and even moreso after the introduction today.

I have a complicated and multi-faceted relationship with conservatism, and this class is helping already to pinpoint some of those bits of resonance and tension for me.  Despite my passion for such purportedly “liberal” themes as social justice, racial reconciliation, stewardship of creation, etc., nevertheless I still identify myself as a deeply conservative person, much to the chagrin of some of my left-leaning peers.  (Indeed, if I were gauged only by the various articles I post on my Facebook profile, I would be deemed a bleeding-heart “liberal.”)

This becomes infinitely more complicated when one tries to even define “conservative.”  For example, so-called “conservatives” today are the biggest champions for neoliberal economic policies, which the “liberals” today (or “progressives”) seek to regulate.  Indeed, “conservatives” today are just as much proper, classical liberals as the “liberals” today are, just with respect to different issues.  This is helpfully plotted in the “political compass,” which opens up our reductionistic “left/right” paradigm into a proper grid, with two “left/right” axes: social and economic.

Even conservatism can’t figure itself out.  There’s been five identified strands by historians: the Religious Right, Neoconservatism, the New Right, Libertarianism, and the Old Right.  However, Robert Muccigrosso in his Basic History of American Conservatism identifies some common themes of what broadly construes a “conservative”:

1) “Conservatives have tended to appeal to religion or at least to the presumed existence of a moral order to frame their beliefs.”

2) “They traditionally have leaned toward rule by or at least guidance from an elite rather than place their faith in the masses…”

3) “Conservatives also are strongly inclined to look backward to the accumulated wisdom of the past for instruction.”

4) “Further, they have placed a premium on the stability of the social order…  As Adam Smith bluntly noted: ‘The peace and order of society is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable.’”

5) “…they do not generally embrace [change] eagerly, and sometimes they seem to embrace it not at all.”

6) “A preference for liberty over equality, when it is necessariy to choose between the two, forms another characteristic commonly attributed to conservatives.”

7) “Further, conservatives historically have cherished, sometimes sanctified, property rights.”

I thought this was a helpful broad rubric for examining a lot of my own tensions and affinities with American conservatism.

Another tension is the role of libertarianism within conservatism.  Some say they belong together (small government), while others within both proper libertarianism and conservatism alike reject such a claim.  On the one hand, conservatives relish traditional, local, rural community life.  On the other hand, a “conservative” position is hierarchical and often downright anti-democratic: some people are better qualified, smarter, or better at running the show than others—none of this “one person, one vote” stuff.  They also are very heavy-handed with endorsing a large military force.  Indeed, on the political compass, the extreme liberal social position is libertarian anarchism, while the extreme conservative position is totalitarian fascism.

It should be a fun class.  I’ve signed up to do a presentation on libertarianism, but I also plan on offering a strong Augustinian account of positive freedom to contrast with libertarianism’s strictly negative freedom.

This brings me great comfort:

HT: The Charismanglican

Grad School Apps — I’m Goin’ Dark

Well, it’s that time—I’m sending in my applications to graduate schools.  So I am polishing up my fledgling CV, writing responses to application essay prompts, and generally trying to put the best PR-spin on my portfolio as possible =).

As such, I’m “going dark” — I’m going to be temporarily blotting my site here from the blogosphere.  (My Twitter account, too.)  This is simply to ensure I can put my best foot forward in the application process.

I’m applying to Duke Divinity School (MDiv), Princeton Seminary (MDiv), Yale Divinity School (MAR — Philosophy of Religion), and then either Wycliffe College in Toronto or Calvin Theological Seminary.  I’m hoping to get good scholarships more than anything else, so feel free to pray on that front — particularly for Duke, Princeton, and Yale =).  (I would have liked to have also applied to Notre Dame and Marquette, but I didn’t want to bother with the GRE’s for now, which the other schools don’t require.)

Happy 2011 everyone!  I’ll pull down the blog in a week or so.  See you on the other side!

Christmas Nativity Unveiled by the Book of Revelation

Christmas is most often commemorated by depictions of the nativity scene.  As we sing in the song “Silent Night,” the setting is quiet and serene with the “tender and mild” little baby Jesus, sleeping “in heavenly peace,” surrounded by animals and shepherds.  However, keeping with the theme of my last post, I thought I’d highlight the book of Revelation’s account.  As I mentioned in my previous post, N.T. Wright describes apocalyptic literature as “investing space-time events with their theological significance.”  So while we often reflect on the “silent night” of the nativity at Christmas, here is how Revelation depicts the birth of Jesus………

And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.

Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world— he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.

They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.

Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”

And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood. But the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth. Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea. [Revelation 12]

“Family Guy” as Apokalypsis on Globalized Consumerism

The episode of Family Guy that aired last night was fascinating.  It was in the vein of the biblical book of Revelation, providing an apokalypsis—an “unveiling”—of culture.  Far from meaning anything like “armageddon,” N.T. Wright describes apocalyptic literature in this way: “As a literary genre, ‘apocalyptic’ is a way of investing space-time events with their theological significance; it is actually a way of affirming, not denying, the vital importance of the present continuing space-time order, by denying that evil has the last word in it.”  In short, as David Dark describes it in his book Everyday Apocalypse, “Apocalyptic shows us what we’re not seeing.”  It is viewing the world through a different set of lenses, and seeing the true machinations at work and challenging them.

In this case, Family Guy unmasked what is today’s Christmastime consumerism and materialism, in our present globalized economy.  The episode is titled “The Road to the North Pole,” and follows Stewie and Brian’s trek to find Santa Claus.  It begins at the shopping mall—that temple of consumerist worship—where Stewie waits in line to meet Santa for hours, only to be snubbed at the last moment.  In typical Family Guy fashion, Stewie takes solace by vowing to kill the offending person—in this case, Saint Nick.

Brian explains to Stewie that Santa isn’t real, but Stewie insists they travel to the North Pole to prove it.  When they finally arrive, Brian is shocked to discover that there is in fact candy-cane gates greeting them in the barren snowy wastes!  Stewie is delighted, and they press onward into the magical elven kingdom that awaits.

However, upon entering, they are greeted with tall dark smokestacks and factories everywhere, surrounded by barrels labeled as toxic waste.  They knock on a door and find themselves greeted by an emaciated and sorrowful Santa Claus.  When Stewie reveals his intentions to kill him, Santa pleads and begs that Stewie end his misery and be done with it.  Taken aback, Stewie and Brian ask Santa just what exactly is going on—isn’t he supposed to be jolly and happy?  Santa explains that with all of the rampant materialism and greed constantly rising, the elves have had to constantly keep ramping up production.  The increased production also created excessive waste. And worse, the waste then mutated the elves (along with inbreeding to raise the elf population).  The elves work long shifts, and are effectively brain-dead zombies now.  Santa notes that some of them even walk out into the snow and collapse and die from sheer exhaustion.  The reindeer have resorted to eating the dead elves, which has made them feral, rabid creatures.

The dystopian picture of Santa’s Workshop is capped by a musical number, where Santa explains that “Christmastime is killing us.”  The song is well done, interlacing menacing music with Santa’s account of the horrors of the workshop, contrasted with playful music of Stewie’s naive objections about how happy Santa and the elves make everyone.  Stewie offers the surrogate voice of Western consumers: doesn’t “every smile make it worthwhile”?  But Santa persists in revealing the true misery that underlies the facade of happiness.  Under the present system, this “happiness” for some is at the expense of sheer misery for others—those who work to support and manufacture the happiness in slave labor.

All in all, it’s a very dark and bleak picture, even by Family Guy‘s standards.  Indeed, these apocalyptic spectacles are intended to reveal the reality of the organization of today’s globalized economy.  The innocent figures of jolly Santa Claus and his childlike elves are twisted into soulless hollow shells of themselves, precisely like the young laborers that produce cheap goods to ship to American shoppers.  William Cavanaugh reports that workers making Disney children’s books at the Nord Race factories in the Guangdong Province of China must work 13-15 hours a day, seven days a week, and earn only 33 cents per hour in abusive conditions.  He writes, “The Chinese have even coined a word—guolaosi—for death from overwork. A Washington Post article highlighted the death of Li Chunmei, a nineteen-year-old woman who collapsed and died after working 16-hour shifts for sixty days straight in a toy factory making stuffed animals for children in the ‘developed’ countries.”

Indeed, in the episode Stewie cries, “This isn’t in any of the songs or poetry! It’s a horror show up here!”  The songs and poetry of branding and marketing from trans-national businesses create a smokescreen to mask the horror of what truly undergirds “the American way of life.”  Santa goes so far as to say, “I don’t even pray for them anymore, seems pointless—what God would allow this?”

However, as David Dark notes: “Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope (lest too light winning make the prize light).”

And indeed, Family Guy does offer some hope.  At the conclusion of the episode, when the newscasters are reporting on the lack of Christmas presents on Christmas morning (due to Santa’s having been overworked), Brian jumps on the camera to make a plea.  He implores everyone to tone down the long wish lists, and temper their appetites for more “stuff.”  We need to cut down on the materialism and consumerism, and get back to a healthier, sustainable way of life.  He offers a concrete proposal: each person be happy and willing to appreciate one gift.

Overall, it’s an excellent episode.  Of course, it’s still Family Guy—it’s full of crude and lewd material.  But it’s precisely these highlights of apokalypsis that can make something prophetic—calling us out, challenging us, and pointing us forward in the right direction.  And by God’s common grace, even our fallen culture can see the twisted ways we have structured our globalized economy and the terrible evils it causes, and hope for something better.  It’s precisely at these moments that the Church must step up with a prophetic voice, to embody an alternative social life of human flourishing, and to usher the way ahead to shalom.

“I pledge allegiance to…” State or Christ?

What are we doing when we pledge our allegiance to something?

Here is a good article reflecting on Christians serving the state (in this case, to kill in war).

Loyalty Oath
A matter of ultimate allegiance
by D. Brent Laytham

Two years ago one of my students wrote a master’s thesis defending just war, then joined the U.S. Air Force to train as a fighter pilot. I suppose you could look at this as pedagogical success: I’m a teacher who helped one of my students turn the corner from theory to practice. But as a pacifist, I took it pretty hard.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it’s a pretty good salve for injured pedagogical pride. So I hadn’t given Aaron much thought until I was asked to come down to the college president’s office to meet with an officer of the Department of Defense. She showed me her badge and a pile of papers, all of which asserted that she was authorized to interview me about the character of my former student. Apparently, before you can get behind the controls of a multimillion-dollar fighter plane, the U.S. runs a high-level security check.

There were a number of mundane questions about how long and how well I had known Aaron. The questions became more interesting as they turned to relationships and to character. “Did Aaron associate with disreputable people?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, “he hung out with Jesus.” I was thinking, of course, about Jesus’ habit of associating with radicals like Simon the Zealot, cheats like Zacchaeus and riff-raff like the woman at the well. Worse, as Christopher Marshall has pointed out in Beyond Retribution, Jesus populated his parables with criminals and was finally condemned as one himself. But what would my interviewer think? “I know what you mean,” she confided. “I sometimes serve meals at my church’s soup kitchen.” Apparently Jesus is not disreputable enough to disqualify you from being trusted with high-tech weaponry.

“Does Aaron belong to any organization that puts him in contact with foreign nationals?” she asked. “Yes, he’s a member of the church.” I wasn’t trying to be coy, but catholic. In Christ we find ourselves placed in a body politic without territorial borders—the holy catholic church. The Letter to Diognetus puts it this way: for us “every foreign country is [our] fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.” Thus, we have no foreign nationals in the church, or we are all foreigners; either way, we cannot imagine that some of us are “us,” while others are “them.” At least we shouldn’t be able to imagine this.

“But did he associate with foreigners?” “Well,” I replied, “we have a number of international students here at the seminary. I’m sure that Aaron had classes with them.” I could have added that we intentionally seek to foster an awareness of global issues, hoping students from California will get to know students from Chile, wanting students from Korea to learn with students from Kansas, expecting that Mexicans and Minnesotans will pray together in every chapel.

She pursued the question, “How closely did he associate with them? Was it more than a normal amount?” How could I answer such a question, given the church’s calling to show the world that its version of “normal” simply isn’t? All I said was no. But I should have added, “The church is a ‘sign, herald and foretaste’ of the coming kingdom; we refuse to allow national borders to be mapped onto the body of Christ.”

There were many other questions, the hardest of which was, “Is he a loyal American?” I had little doubt that for Aaron the answer is yes. But what could that attestation mean coming from me, who relishes Dorothy Day’s retort “Of course we’re un-American; we’re Catholic”? I thought of Patrick Miller’s recent pamphlet on the first commandment. In The God You Have he differentiates between loyalty to others and obedience to God. Loyalty, he says, may appropriately be given to spouse, family, neighbor or country. It roots in and expands on the fifth commandment. Obedience, on the other hand, belongs to God and God alone. It is rooted in the absolutely fundamental claim of the first commandment. First commandment first; obedience before, beneath and beyond every loyalty.

The problem with Miller’s categories is that, in Caesar’s hands, they can too easily become a distinction without a difference. In the U.S. there is assumed to be a smooth fit between discipleship and killing. That assumption, held so easily and unreflectively, trespasses against our obedience to God alone. I wonder whether my questioner understands that for descendants of Jeremiah and followers of Jesus, obedience to God may require us to refuse the state’s claim to our loyalty. Does the Department of Defense grant that my fundamental obligation is not loyalty to country but obedience to God? I doubt it. In such circumstances, where Caesar cannot distinguish between our proper subjection and our ultimate allegiance, it may be best to say bluntly, “A loyal American? Of course not. I’m a Christian!”

But Aaron is a Christian too, and there’s the rub. My testimony now contributes to the testing of his discipleship. Will he manage to live by the moral restraint of just war, to embody its refusal of easy congruence between killing and Christ, to always remember that obedience to God trumps loyalty to country or comrade? I can only pray that he will.

[D. Brent Laytham teaches at North Park University in Chicago. He recently edited God is Not Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist (Brazos).]

Reprinted without[!] permission from The Christian Century magazine.

“Double Rainbow” Devotional, Oswald Chambers

My wife just informed me that the Oswald Chambers daily devotional for today, December 6th, is “My Rainbow in the Cloud.”  The scripture reads, “I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth,” Genesis 9:13.

In light of this, I thought I’d share this oft-celebrated meditation on the wonder of rainbows—in this case, a double rainbow .

That’s almost as good as it gets.  Almost.  But as hard as it is to imagine, it does actually get better:

 

Funny Video: “Emerging or Postliberal?”

This is a pretty dang funny video =).

A Priori Assumptions About Scripture

I had an interesting conversation yesterday about the nature of Scripture.  It was particularly on the role of women in ministry, and the person I was speaking with was a complementarian (women ought not hold ministerial office).  The person (who is an ordained teaching elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church) was describing his opposition to a seemingly incoherent position: where someone could simultaneously assert that (1) the Bible teaches that women ought not to be in ministerial roles, and (2) that the Bible teaches that women ought to be able to be in ministerial roles.  “This is contradictory and incoherent!”  He said that while he disagreed with the conventional egalitarian position that simply asserts “The Bible teaches that women can minister in the church,” at least it was a coherent one.  This alternative account, though—whereby the Bible contradicts itself—is not “rational” (his words).

So, while I don’t necessarily advocate the position under question (I haven’t studied it enough), I at least tried to play devil’s advocate a bit.  Really, it seems to me to fall back onto our doctrine of scripture, and our a priori assumptions about that.  The thought process goes something like this: “God is all knowing, and is the ultimate author of scripture; therefore, scripture will all be one coherent package and non-contradictory.”

I think this is valid reasoning, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.  The Jews had similar a priori expectations about their coming messiah:  “God is all-powerful, and God wants us to flourish; therefore, when the messiah comes, he will overthrow our Roman captors and establish our kingdom forever.”  But as Christians, we confess that these a priori expectations were wrong: that the Messiah came as a suffering servant, and his weakness reveals the power of God.

God turns our a priori expectations upside down—or better, “rightside-up.”  And in the Reformed tradition in particular, we confess that God—quite scandalously—overturns our a priori expectations about salvation.  While the conventional wisdom is that “I gave my life to Jesus,” the Reformed tradition confesses that it is in fact God who draws us to himself and elects us unto salvation.  (While the conventional wisdom may not be a particularly “a priori” assumption per se, nevertheless it’s another example of how God doesn’t conform to our expectations.)

Finally, this can apply to scripture as well.  While we may have an a priori expectation that “Surely if God (ultimately) authored a book, it will be thoroughly coherent and non-contradictory,” maybe this is yet another case where God can turn our expectations rightside-up.  While our modernistic tendencies seek rationality, coherence, etc., perhaps God would choose to reveal himself in a complementary manner, where different books of the Bible offer different perspectives on the same truth.  I can’t remember the exact wording, but there’s an old Jewish saying that “scripture has 77 faces,” or some such thing.  The idea is that there are various facets and interpretations of the text.

God doesn’t need to conform to our boxes.

John Piper Promotes Social Justice

As Christians, we are “in this world, but not of it.”  This is a fine line to walk, which demands a lot of discernment.

The issue of “social justice” is a sticky one.  On the political and religious Left, we have figures such as Jim Wallis who put a strong emphasis on social justice.  However, this often comes at the expense of emphasizing the distinctive robustness of the Christian gospel, and waters it down to a thin notion of “justice” that everyone can get on board with (“everyone” generally meaning liberal humanists).  These Left-ish Christians focus their efforts on alleviating suffering in the here-and-now, but often forget that Jesus also spoke about eternal suffering and hell—a lot.

By contrast, on the political and religious Right, conservative Christians have largely made the opposite mistake.  These brothers and sisters in Christ ignore or even downright reject any notions of “social justice.”  They have watered down their robust Christianity to synthesize with the Republican (and Tea) Party, where Christianity is merely your “personal salvation,” and does not have implications for social justice.  Right-ish Christians tend to forget that Jesus spent all his time with the poor, and condemned the rich—a lot.

So it is with great pleasure that I encountered a video this morning of conservative pastor John Piper promoting a more distinctively Christian approach.  Christians, he says, care about all suffering — both present, and eternal.  It’s not “either/or,” but rather “both/and.”  (Only the first bit of the video is immediately relevant).

During a time when most conservative Christians are allying themselves with the political right, this is a refreshing voice to hear coming from the conservative side.  We need to recover strong discernment in the American Church, and be a prophetic voice to culture.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

“The Simpsons” on Graduate Students

The looks about right:

Glenn Beck and Civil Religion

Russell Moore is a dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and offered some very penetrating commentary on Glenn Beck’s recent nationalist rally, and the state of the Church in America.  It’s a wonderful piece, and even more wonderful to hear such a refreshing voice come Southern Seminary.  At one point, Moore even condemns “Mammonism” as contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Is this a nice way of using a Bible-word (“mammon”) to underhandedly chastise capitalism?!

I also recently heard Dr. Moore interviewed on National Public Radio in the wake of the Gulf oil-spill, calling Christians to stop blindly aligning themselves with the political right and to defend God’s good creation.  For him being a conservative affiliated with such a conservative institution, I am tremendously thankful that there is a voice that perhaps some folks might actually listen to!

The Epistemology and Ontology of “Inerrancy”

My good friend Scott Lencke sent me a recent article by Al Mohler, reflecting on the past 50-year battle over the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.  But there was one particularly striking part about the article, when Mohler cites a genuinely wonderful quote by J.I. Packer:

“As Dr. Packer said years ago, ‘when you encounter a present-day view of Holy Scripture, you encounter more than a view of Scripture. What you meet is a total view of God and the world; that is, a total theology, which is both an ontology, declaring what there is, and an epistemology, stating how we know what there is. This is necessarily so, for a theology is a seamless robe, a circle within which everything links up with everything else through its common grounding in God. Every view of Scripture, in particular, proves on analysis to be bound up with an overall view of God and man’.” [underscores added]

The irony is how much this quote actually works against Mohler and his argument.  Mohler concludes from Packer’s quote:

“The rejection of biblical inerrancy is bound up with a view of God that is, in the end, fatal for Christian orthodoxy.”

But is this really so?  Let’s take it apart, exactly as Dr. Packer framed it: bibliology, epistemology, ontology.

BIBLIOLOGY: Mohler’s view of scripture is the doctrine of inerrancy, which most would narrowly define as scripture being (1) factually correct with respect to all scientific and historical assertions made by the Bible, and (2) by today’s standards.  (Most inerrantists would not be satisfied to say the Bible was inerrant according to ancient Near Eastern standards, but errant by contemporary standards.)

EPISTEMOLOGY: Any view of scripture, as Packer noted, comes with baggage.  This view of the “factuality” of the Bible across all of time and history is the epistemology inherited from modernity.  Modernity’s self-proclaimed “Enlightenment” emphasized the ultimate supremacy of reason and logic, which is neutral, unbiased, objective, and autonomous.  Because reason and epistemology are objective things, science is an objective endeavor carried out throughout all of history.  Reason and Creation are neutral, autonomous spheres of objective inquiry.

ONTOLOGY: If reason and creation are autonomous spheres, this paints a picture of what Radical Orthodoxy proponents call a “univocal ontology.”  This is an ontology where creation is independent of its creator, operating on its own mechanisms and machinations designed from the beginning, where the Creator is detached from creation — something akin to what we get from deism.

So, what is the problem with inerrancy’s epistemology-ontology cocktail, versus Christian confession?

By contrast, Christianity teaches that all of creation is radically dependent on its Creator — it is not autonomous.  “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).  There is not a sparrow that falls to the ground apart from the will of the Father (Mt 10:29).

Moreover, inerrancy buys into the assumption that human reason is “objective.”  By contrast, contemporary philosophers have demonstrated that reason is deeply subjective, even including that epitomé of “objectivity,” science (Thomas Kuhn).  All observation is filtered through interpretation.  But more importantly, humans are also dependent upon God for knowledge, through revelation.  Human reason cannot simply syllogise itself to ultimate truth, breaking free of the “noetic” effects of sin — we need grace.

So, coming back home to Mohler’s point: Is the rejection of inerrancy bound up with a view of God that is fatal for Christian orthodoxy?  One could arguably assert the exact opposite, and be more in accord with Christian tradition.

My 1-1/2-year-old son Justus Jammin’

I snapped these photos the other day of my 1-1/2-year-old son Justus, and they were too cute not to share =).

WWII Scenes Photoshopped Into Today

Here is a wonderful collection of photos by Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov.  He took some old photographs from WWII, and snapped modern-day photos of the same locations from the exact same camera angles, and photoshopped them together.  It’s a fascinating juxtaposition of our contemporary times with the war-torn world then, and gives a very visceral sense of our connectedness with the past.

Commodification of the Human Soul

There is a tremendous trend in universities right now, where humanities departments (and often particularly philosophy departments) are getting faculty axed left and right, while business programs (and sports!) are growing in funding and support.  The basic idea is that business, science, and engineering are more measurably profitable in cold hard cash, while the merit and worth of literature, history, philosophy, and the liberal arts is not.

It is the ultimate commodification of the university, where learning and education (and even intellectual integrity) are sacrificed at the altar of the “free” market.  In twisted irony, it is the very same disciplines that are getting the axe that provide us with the meaningful answers as to whether our commodification of everything in sight is a legitimate pursuit.  The administrators, it seems, are cutting the programs that they appear to have slept through, themselves.

One professor has decided to step up.  Eva von Dassow, professor of classics and Near Eastern studies, had this to say at a recent public forum of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents:

In a subsequent interview, von Dassow said that universities must choose whether “the guiding principles are going to be money” or “intellectually defensible principles.”

(Also, don’t miss the excellent exposition of the current financial crisis, as a “Crisis of Capitalism.”)

Proof that God Hates Epistemic Foundationalism ;-)

I was just reading Luke the other morning, and was struck by a passage.  Zechariah and his wife were unable to conceive.  One day, while Zechariah is in the temple, we read of a strange encounter:

Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth. Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Now, you have to imagine this scenario.  Whatever the angel looks like, at least we know that upon the sight, Zechariah was “startled and gripped with fear.”  Moreover, this angelic figure goes on to say that it knows of Zechariah’s prayers, and that they will be answered in this dramatic and climactic manner.  So, what is Zechariah’s response to such an encounter?

Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know this for certain?”

Ahh, Zechariah would make Descartes proud.  The ultimate goal of foundationalist epistemology: indubitability.  So, what is this messenger of God’s response to such a request?

The angel answered, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time.”

So that’s what epistemic foundationalism will get you!

Americans Growing Less Creative

Newsweek reports:

“For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. … Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test — a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist — has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect — each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter.

With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. ‘It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,’ Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America — from kindergarten through sixth grade — for whom the decline is ‘most serious.’”

Illustrated! A Marxist Take on the Financial Crisis

This was interesting:

Logic 101: Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens

A friend asked me a question the other day about validity of logical forms, so I thought I would post my answer for anyone that happens to google the subject.  She asked:

Can you explain to me why the first proof is valid and the second one invalid?

(1) If Golf is fun, then volleyball is fun.
Volleyball is not fun,
therefore golf is not fun.

(2) If golf is fun, then volleyball is fun.
Volleyball is fun,
therefore golf is fun.

Here was my answer:

SHORT version: The first example is “modus tollens” (valid), the second example is the fallacy of “affirming the consequent” (invalid).

LONGER version: There are two bread-and-butter forms of logic: modus ponens, and modus tollens. Modus ponens looks like this:

If golf is fun, then volleyball is fun.
Golf is fun!
Ergo, volleyball is fun.

Then you have modus tollens, which is your first example given above. It looks like this:

If p, then q.
Not q.
Therefore, not p.

However, both of these logical forms each have an easy-to-make fallacy. In modus ponens, the first premise is a conditional statement: “If abc, then xyz.” So the goal is to affirm the antecedent, which is “abc.” That will give you the result you want, which is “xyz.” However, the easy-to-make fallacy is accidentally affirming the consequent of the statement, which would be affirming “xyz” in order to conclude “abc.” That doesn’t work. For example:

If I own an elephant, then I own an animal.
I own an animal.
Therefore, I own an elephant.

This is wrong, because maybe it’s true that I do in fact own an animal, but my animal is a ferret.

The second fallacy that’s easy-to-make is with modus tollens, and that would be “denying the antecedent.” With a valid modus tollens, the goal is to reject the consequent of your conditional statement, in order to reject the antecedent. Example:

If I own an elephant, then I own an animal.
I do not own an animal.
Therefore, I do not own an elephant.

That is a valid modus tollens. In premise 2, I denied the consequent of premise 1. But here is an example of the fallacy of “denying the antecedent”:

If I own an elephant, then I own an animal.
I do not own an elephant.
Therefore, I do not own an animal.

But this is wrong, because maybe it’s true that I don’t own an elephant, but nevertheless I do own a ferret. So it would not be valid to conclude “I do not own an animal.”

Christian Denomination Statistics

I thought this was pretty interesting.

And the 33% of Protestants breaks down as such:

EDIT:  I thought I would add my latest results on the “Denomination Quiz”:

Take the quiz and post your results =).

“Truth” vs. “Fact”: Inerrancy and Wittgenstein

Kevin DeYoung is apparently doing something of a series on biblical inerrancy.  In one post in particular, DeYoung makes the classic Modernist mistake of equivocating “truth” with “fact.”  While his post is riddled with many problems, I thought I would post my brief comments on his blog here as well.

DeYoung writes,

There are many ways to defend inerrancy, but the simplest argument is this: Scripture did not come from the will of man; it came from God. That is clear from 2 Peter 1:19-21 and 2 Timothy 3:16 (to name the classic texts). And if it is God’s word then it must all be true. Because as Romans 3:4 tells us, “Let God be true and every man a liar.”

The problem should already be evident: DeYoung is insisting that because the Bible is “true,” it must therefore be “inerrant” (factually without error).  But here is what I wrote to Kevin:

God is said to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent — this would be “fact.” But God is also said to be a fortress and a strong tower — this is “true,” but it is not “fact.”

Jesus taught in parables, he did not teach in anecdotes.  “Facts” are not the chief concern, “truth” is the chief concern. The Bible is 100% true, but that doesn’t necessitate that all of it has to be 100% scientific and historiographical “fact.”

As a footnote, I’m fairly certain that using the resources of Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn, one could prove that both the inerrantists and infalliblists are both right and both wrong.  On the one hand, the infalliblists are correct that the Bible is not “inerrant” in the post-Enlightenment sense of science and historiography.  But on the other hand, the inerrantist could legitimately argue that the Bible was indeed factually inerrant insofar as its own contextual scientific paradigm and ancient Near Eastern “language-game” (Wittgenstein) is concerned.  So, the infalliblists don’t get what they want (to deny inerrancy altogether, per se), and the inerrantists don’t get what they want (to prove that the Bible is inerrant altogether, per se).

Instead, the inerrantists would be correct about the Bible in its own contemporary context, but the infalliblists would be correct about the Bible taken out of its context and put in today’s context.

(Of course, most inerrantists would likely not settle for this version of being “right,” and want to affirm a Modernist notion of metaphysical factuality transcendent of “language-games” or “paradigm shifts.”  I think the infalliblists are just as guilty here, embracing the same underlying assumptions with differing conclusions.)

The Tea Party Movement and Metaphysics

I know, I know — “Tea Party” and “metaphysics” don’t belong in the same sentence, right?  But there is a wonderful article that examines exactly that: the metaphysical underpinnings of the Tea Party movement.

Essentially, the Tea Party is a libertarian movement based on the ideas of essential human independence.  But using some ammo from Hegel, philosopher J.M. Bernstein from the New School for Social Research labors to show how even in liberal democracy (with our “independence”), the entire system is built on deep and fundamental interdependence.

I recommend reading the entire article.  The bit on Hegel is particularly excellent. But here is an extended excerpt if you haven’t the time for the whole thing:

[…] When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy.

There is a fierce logic to these views, as I will explain.   But first, a word about political ideals.

[…] My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.

The implicit bargain that many Americans struck with the state institutions supporting modern life is that they would be politically acceptable only to the degree to which they remained invisible, and that for all intents and purposes each citizen could continue to believe that she was sovereign over her life; she would, of course, pay taxes, use the roads and schools, receive Medicare and Social Security, but only so long as these could be perceived not as radical dependencies, but simply as the conditions for leading an autonomous and self-sufficient life.  Recent events have left that bargain in tatters.

But even this way of expressing the issue of dependence is too weak, too merely political; after all, although recent events have revealed the breadth and depths of our dependencies on institutions and practices over which we have little or no control, not all of us have responded with such galvanizing anger and rage.  Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that  one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions.    The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state.  Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.

Rather than participating in arranged marriages, as modern subjects we follow our hearts, choose our beloved, decide for ourselves who may or may not have access to our bodies, and freely take vows promising fidelity and loyalty until death (or divorce) do us part.  There are lots of ways property can be held and distributed — as hysterical Tea Party incriminations of creeping socialism and communism remind us; we moderns have opted for a system of private ownership in which we can acquire, use and dispose of property as we see fit, and even workers are presumed to be self-owning, selling their labor time and labor power to whom they wish (when they can).  And as modern citizens we presume the government is answerable to us, governs only with our consent, our dependence on it a matter of detached, reflective endorsement; and further, that we intrinsically possess a battery of moral rights that say we can be bound to no institution unless we possess the rights of  “voice and exit.”

If stated in enough detail, all these institutions and practices should be seen as together manufacturing, and even inventing, the idea of a sovereign individual who becomes, through them and by virtue of them, the ultimate source of authority.  The American version of these practices has, from the earliest days of the republic, made individuality autochthonous while suppressing to the point of disappearance the manifold ways that individuality is beholden to a complex and uniquely modern form of life.

Of course, if you are a libertarian or even a certain kind of liberal, you will object that these practices do not manufacture anything; they simply give individuality its due.  The issue here is a central one in modern philosophy: is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given  or a social creation?  Descartes famously argued that self or subject, the “I think,” was metaphysically basic, while Hegel argued that we only become self-determining agents through being recognized as such by others who we recognize in turn. It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects; those practices are how we recognize and so bestow on one another the title and powers of being free individuals.

All the heavy lifting in Hegel’s account turns on revealing how human subjectivity only emerges through intersubjective relations, and hence how practices of independence, of freedom and autonomy, are held in place and made possible by complementary structures of dependence.   At one point in his “Philosophy of Right,” Hegel suggests love or friendship as models of freedom through recognition.  In love I regard you as of such value and importance that I spontaneously set aside my egoistic desires and interests and align them with yours: your ends are my desires, I desire that you flourish, and when you flourish I do, too.  In love, I experience you not as a limit or restriction on my freedom, but as what makes it possible: I can only be truly free and so truly independent in being harmoniously joined with you; we each recognize the other as endowing our life with meaning and value, with living freedom. Hegel’s phrase for this felicitous state is “to be with oneself in the other.”

Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable.  And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource.  In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you.  I am everything and you are nothing.

This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.  And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury.  All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved.  However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence.  That is permanent.

As a side note, I find Hegel’s account of intersubjectivity as explicated here particularly interesting.  I like it better than Augustine’s Neoplatonic account that is getting so much traction in contemporary theology these days.  (Of course, that being said, Augustine is still the bomb-diggity.)

“Avatar”: Simultaneously Awe-inspiring and Sleep-inducing

(Note: All spoilers are flagged, so if you haven’t seen the film, you can skip the “spoiler” parts.)

With all the hype surrounding the new Avatar film, I simply had to see it.  It is being heralded as the film that has “upped the ante” in all film-making, and has set a whole new standard for the future.  I thought the movie was very, very, good; but not without some caveats.  Because everyone was excitedly shouting from the mountaintops that the movie was “absolutely the greatest film ever made,” I very excitedly put on my film-critic-goggles in anticipation for seeing the greatest film ever.  While the film fell short of my expectations, it was still quite the thrilling adventure.

The Good:

What makes the movie so tremendously awe-inspiring is the wonder of the magical world of Pandora.  The native Navi people, the environment and plantlife, the imaginative creatures—everything builds up into a whirlwind that takes your breath away.  Director James Cameron intentionally waited to make the film until the technology was available to pull it off, and the visuals are simply stunning.  It invokes a kind of bewilderment, and literally makes your jaw drop.

The Bad:

However, the film is not without its shortcomings.  The plot is downright elementary, and is pretty much as cliché as it gets.  It’s a cookie-cutter story with absolutely no unexpected plot twists whatsoever.  (James Cameron says he wrote it something like a decade before even Titanic, and it is pretty evident that it was early in his career.)  The characters are one-dimensional archetypes, who pretty much have as much sophistication as a poop-joke.  (That being said, everyone knows that poop jokes are still funny.)  And while I am sympathetic with most of the film’s core themes (spoiler: the pitfalls of capitalism, the need to be ‘green’, etc.), it was less-than-subtle, and actually was put on a little too thick.

Even from a film-making perspective, small snippets of the movie looked downright amateur: strange and unnecessary closeups of people’s faces or grimaces (and no, I’m not referring to the actually important facial close-ups, of which there were some as well), and other anomalies thrown in.  (Think of the frustratingly distracting product-placement closeups in a Michael Bay movie like Transformers, and you start to get the idea.  “Rush out and buy a Sandisk-branded memory card and GM vehicle, right now! And buy them on eBay!”)

These random shots built the movie up to its 2:40 film-length, which felt like it could cut a good 10-15 minutes (the film only got slow toward the end of Act 1, before Act 2).  When you consider sitting in the theater for an additional 45 minutes before that in order to get a good seat, by the end of the film you can actually identify with the main character quite a lot — (spoiler) a person imprisoned in a chair, trying to relearn how to use their legs.

Thoughts on the Film’s Themes (Spoilers):

The core themes of the movie are the pitfalls of capitalism, oppressive colonial expansion, the need to be green, the limits of a naturalistic worldview, and pantheism (God as part of creation).  Strangely, I had read somewhere that some Christians were up in arms over the themes, but in fact I think that they are all strongly resonant with the Christian message (obviously with some qualifications, such as pantheism).  For example, “the love of money is the root of all evil.”  We are also called to be good stewards of creation.  And while the movie may be promoting pantheism, Christians do indeed maintain that God is omnipresent, and “in him we live and move and have our being.”  The film has an undercurrent of naturalism vs. theism, and it clearly sides with (watered-down) theism.  Despite it feeling a bit preachy, I would think that Christians should be the last people to denounce the film’s themes, but rather promote them.

I also think that the beauty of the world of Pandora can be an important, refreshing look at the beauty of our own world.  We are so accustomed to our own exotic world that it has become less alluring, less enchanting.  From a young age we learn about zebras and jellyfish and giraffes, but familiarity breeds contempt.  The film does a magnificent job of reawakening the splendor of creation, and its important ties with its creator.

In Sum:

I know this review may sound overly-critical, but I guess it’s just because everyone had built my expectations so high.  I was practically expecting the return of Jesus and the ushering in of the eschaton, right there in my theater chair.  The various weak parts of the film scattered throughout kept me from being fully captivated and immersed.  I can’t even imagine how outstanding the film would’ve been with not only the magnificent setting it’s in, but also a great team of writers.

I always feel bad giving critiques of movies that everyone loves, because it seems like I’m saying that it was “bad.” But let me be clear: the film was really, really good. However, I do not think that it is the game-changer that it has been called.

Avatar is an extremely fun and entertaining movie.  Temper your expectations from all the hype, and you will have a wild ride =).