Little Gidding

Immanuel, the First and the Last

2011-09-19T08:11:00.000-04:00

One of Jesus's names is Immanuel, which means "God with us". In the first chapter of Revelation, we see Jesus among the lampstands, which are the churches in their light-giving aspect. In the opening to this book, the Lord God says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, who was and is and is to come, the Almighty." Alpha and Omega were the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, of course, and under this statement can be brought all sorts of ways in which God is the First and the Last. He is eternal, existing before the first thing and beyond the last thing; he encompasses all; he is the first and final cause of all things; he was there before the beginning and will be there after the end, etc. He always was, he is currently, and he is "coming" in the future. His saying, "Is to come" rather than the strictly parallel "will be" suggests a future not merely of existing but of acting, of self-revelation.

In the opening vision, we see Jesus standing among the Lampstands of the Seven Churches. He is there in their midst, holding in his hand their "angels". He identifies himself as "the First and the Last", not using the exact Alpha and Omega terminology used a few verses prior, but clearly reflecting the same idea. Do a word search on "first and last" and you will see that it is used of God throughout the Old Testament. (In the OT, it would not have been Alpha and Omega because those books were not originally written in Greek, but in Hebrew or Aramaic.)

So here, at the opening, we see Jesus, the eternal one, the one who died and returned to life, standing here on earth, in our midst, caring for us, having the angels of our churches in the palm of his hand. Jesus as Immanuel, God with us. Whatever frightening vision are to come, this revelation begins comfortingly with the truth that we are not alone in the world, that though we may not see Him with our physical eyes, yet Jesus is in our midst, walking among His churches.

The Number Seven in Revelation

2011-09-15T09:35:00.000-04:00

In the first chapter of Revelation I am immediately struck by the number Seven. This book is addressed to the seven churches in Asia. There are seven spirits before the throne of God. The Son of Man stands among seven golden lamp stands. In his hand are seven stars representing seven angels. Later in the Revelation we read of seven Seals, seven Trumpets, seven Thunders, seven Bowls of wrath; sevens are everywhere. In fact, the book of Revelation easily divides itself into seven sections: Letters to the seven churches, the seven Seals, the seven Trumpets, the Woman and her enemies, the seven Bowls of wrath, the fall of the Enemies of the Woman, and the final consummation.

So what's with the sevens?

This is another characteristic that this last book of the canon shares with the first, and this is a good place to note that essentially all the symbolism used by God in Revelation was taught to us in the Old Testament. The first place we see a strong "seven" is right there in the Genesis account of creation. As noted in the last post, the fullness of God's work in creation, including his own contemplation of it and his fellowship with Man, is accomplished in Seven Days. (BTW, I am an "Old Earth creationist", more or less, and think that to consider these “days” to be literal 24 hr periods is to almost miss the whole point of the whole account. The same wooden, concrete reading of what is meant to be highly symbolic, poetic material leads to the misinterpretation of Revelation in the same manner.) In Genesis, and in the Sabbath laws given later to Moses, God deeply grounds this symbolic seven. His work, including His rest, is a Seven. Man's work, like God's, is to be done in six days, and the seventh, like God's, is to be rest and fellowship with God. It is the seventh day, the Sabbath, which relates Man's work to God's. Seven is the number of completion of God's will with regard to Man and his world. Man was created on the sixth day, and without the seventh, without the Sabbath of fellowship with God and rest from his own work, he is alone with himself and the world. Six is the number of man alone, of Man without the Sabbath. Seven is the number of God's work, in its completion.

This symbolism is shot right through the Book of Revelation. The Seven Churches in Asia represent the complete set of all God's churches through the ages. What is written to them is not written only to them, but to any and every church that is like them, just as what was written by Paul to the Corinthians was not written only for the Corinthians of the first century. The Seven Lampstands (now separate...in the Old Testament temple lampstand they were seven branches on one stand) are the complete New Testament Church, through the NT age, seen in its light giving capacity. The Seven Spirits do not mean that the Holy Spirit is divided into seven, but represents His being distributed (remember Pentecost) among the churches down through the age, in His completeness. The Seven Seals represent the entirety of God's working in history through the entire church age, from the perspective of causality and the effects of the Gospel, culminating in the return of Christ. The Seven Trumpets represent the entirety of God's actions, through the church age, as regards providing warnings for mankind, culminating in the return of Christ. The Seven Bowls represent his visitation of final justice upon the unrepentant throughout the church age, culminating in the final judgement. The seven sections of Revelation itself represent a complete, whole view of the Church Age, from Jesus' first coming until his second and last. Seven represents the completeness of God's work, from beginning to end. It is a symbol whose meaning God has taken great pains to teach us.

Revelation: Opening and greeting

2011-09-11T08:59:00.000-04:00

In the first three verses, we learn some very important things about this book. It is for all the servants of Jesus Christ, and its purpose is to show them what must soon take place. The nearness of these events is mentioned twice in three verses: "Must soon take place" and "the time is near." This cannot be a matter of John being mistaken about this, and thinking that Jesus was returning sooner than He would. There is certainly evidence in the Gospels that the apostles expected Jesus to return in their lifetime, but this entire book is a revelation directly from Jesus to John, who is expected to pass it on to all the Church. Given that scripture is inspired by God, it would be a strange thing to presume that John would be allowed to so mislead us as to twice state that the events were near, if they weren't.

Furthermore, the blessing is to all who read, hear, and keep (or heed) this book. In these musings, I shall try to keep this in mind: we are not finished with our understanding of Revelation until we have come to understand how we should "keep it", how we should act and think and speak as a result of what we learn here. To me, this makes it very clear that the purpose of this book is not to allow us to predict future events, but to understand our current events as they unfold, whether in the first century or the twenty-first, and know "how we should then live."

Genesis and Revelation

2011-09-10T21:22:00.000-04:00

I do not believe that Revelation was intended to be a literal "future history of the end times", as it is taken to be by so many popular interpreters today. In fact, I think that one of the most unfortunate and harmful developments in the 20th century was the (mostly American) promotion of this manner of interpretation, to the extent that the average American Christian is aware of no other way to read this book. The "Left Behind" series and its movie have provided vivid mental images and deep predispositions to misinterpret this very important "final word" of God, with the result that we are largely expecting the wrong things and missing the comfort and instruction and wisdom that it was meant to provide.

Revelation was never intended to be a predictive literal history of the end times, so that we could figure out exactly what will happen and where. If that were its purpose, it would have been of no use to all the Christians living in the thousands of years between the first and the last coming of our Lord, and II Tim 3:16 would not apply to this book for those Christians. No, Revelation was intended for all the Church down through every day, decade, and century, so that God's people would understand the world they inhabit in any given age. It is a vivid, symbolic description of the forces behind the history of the Church age, so that we might recognize the enemy and his works, our Lord and His works, and take heart and comfort knowing that we are "more than conquerors through Him".

In this regard, Revelation is akin to the creation and fall account in Genesis. The purpose of Genesis was never to give us specific historical or scientific information about the formation of the cosmos, but to answer our very legitimate questions, "Where did we come from? What is the world like? What is our meaning and purpose? How does God relate to us and our physical, social, and psychological world? What is wrong with the world?" In other words, Genesis answers the origin and meaning questions profoundly. Our world is real, not illusory. It is a creation, meaning it has no self-existence, but came into being through the action of a creator who existed outside it and before it. It did not arise from chaos through struggle of primeval gods, as in the Enuma Elish, or accidentally, but came into existence through the thoughts and power of the creator, in an orderly manner. The categories of creation: form, substance, perception, time, life, habitat, rhythms, thought--all come from the mind of this creator, and all is related to all, by design. We come into being as the last and highest terrestrial creation, made to be so like God that we can actually have fellowship with him, walk with him. Our cosmos was created to be harmonious; it was all good. Our relationships to each other were good, without shame or deception or hiddenness; our relationship to the richly varied physical world was to be one of tending and keeping and further development. Work, in itself, was good, and involved tending and creating beauty and utility and sustenance for ourselves (gardening.) God made us as lesser gods to rule over the cosmos as his faithful servants, bringing forth out of the earth things delightful to us both.

All this is depicted as being accomplished in seven days. Man is created on the sixth, and God rests on the seventh. Seven, from the very beginning, becomes associated with the completion of God's work, including his contemplation and enjoyment of it. Like God, we are to do our own work over six days, and rest in fellowship with Him on the seventh. This is a deeply developed concept throughout the Old Testament; this Sabbath is to be enjoyed not only by Man but also by his animals and his land. The Sabbath...the seventh day...is developed further in the New Testament by the actions and teaching of Jesus, and of the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. In the latter, it becomes a symbol of our resting in the work of the Lord in our salvation, an endless Sabbath.

God gave us everything, but left us there in the Garden a single prohibition, by which His sovereignty and our faithfulness would be established: do not eat the fruit of this one tree. In this single law, the separateness of his will from ours was demonstrated. It was a moral universe, in which we had the choice whether to recognize his legitimate sovereignty or assert our own.
We asserted our own will and sovereignty over against God's, and fell, taking our whole domain with us. All our relationships were disrupted thereby; with God, with our habitat and fallen domain, and with each other. In this, we were tempted by the Serpent, who had apparently rebelled already. The consequences to this serpent included the pronouncement that, one day, the Seed of the Woman would crush his head, and the serpent would bruise the heel of this Seed.

So Genesis tells us much about our beginnings. We know where we came from, how we got here, how it is that we are so wonderfully godlike yet so terribly twisted. We understand the cosmos to be orderly and its behavior law-like. We find an explanation for the fascinating impression of design and purposefulness that we discover in the hard sciences, and an explanation for the aspirations and the perverseness that we find in history and psychology. But what of the future? Where are we going? Does future history have any guiding principles? Are we going to get better and better and overcome all our fatal flaws (Star Trek) or more and more complexly twisted until we have blighted everything (1984/Terminator/pick your apocalyptic story)?

Genesis and Revelation are the bookends of the revealed scripture. They are the transition zones, the interfaces, with unknown history. Genesis stands at the border of the unknowable prehistoric past, and Revelation at the border of the unknowable future. They help bring the specific, historical, didactic and literary scriptures right into our current world, whenever that happens to be. The Book of Revelation, correctly understood, was as important and meaningful to the first century Christians as it is now, and (the key is...) that understanding was the same then as now. "Blessed is he who reads these words, and blessed is he who hears them and keeps them." How do you "keep" a future history? That makes no sense. No, you "keep" words that are about how to live wisely and with understanding, whenever in history you happen to have been placed.

Musings on the Book of Revelation

2011-09-10T19:35:00.001-04:00

I am currently presenting the Book of Revelation to an adult Sunday School class. I am basing the presentation on William Hendriksen's More Than Conquerors, which was the first book on Revelation that made any sense to me, and which approach has informed my understanding of this wonderful book ever since. In college, in the early 70's, I had read Hal Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth, and was initially very intrigued, but after taking some ancient history courses I realized that much of his interpretation of "heads and horns" amounted to arbitrary selection of various ancient kings and kingdoms, and was not, ultimately, convincing. As the years went by and regimes changed, it became increasingly evident that the "future history" approach was useless, as the interpretations changed from year to year. Hendriksen's book pointed out that the foretelling of specific historical events was never the purpose of Revelation, but rather its work is to comfort the Church and help us to understand the world around us during the entire church age. We cannot predict the specifics of the future on the basis of reading Revelation, but we can understand current events as they unfold, and know what to expect, in general, in the future.

It has been great fun teaching this class, but the timeframe has not allowed very deep excursions into the text. We have mostly covered the large sweep of John's vision, its overview and dominant themes, but have not had enough time to really reflect on Revelation's teaching on how we should live now, in this world, today. Therefore, I thought it might be fun to start blogging on Revelation, considering each section and simply enumerating thoughts and reflections on the text. I know myself well enough not to commit to a well-organized essay on each section. If that were the goal, I would probably never start.

So, look here for further posts in which I muse upon themes and lessons and ways of seeing suggested by my understanding of this book.

Beauty, again

2010-08-18T11:06:00.000-04:00

Today I was reading Exodus 35 and was again struck by the Lord's concern for beauty, and that we participate in it. This section concerns itself with the provision of materials for the construction of the tabernacle and its furnishings, and provides for the participation of the people in the making of these beautiful things.

It strikes me that the participation was not mandatory, but in proportion to the degree to which each person felt led by his or her heart. Anyone who felt moved to do so would contribute items of beauty and value to the material needs of the tabernacle: earrings, brooches, signet rings, beautiful dyed clothes and skins and valuable woods. Furthermore, anyone who found within her a skill (in the Hebrew, the same word as "wisdom") for the making of beautiful materials could participate in that way, by spinning beautiful yarns and weaving beautiful fabrics, by casting and forging the precious and strong metals into beautiful hooks and eyes and rings and implements, elaborating upon the basic parameters given by God to Moses on the mountain. Both men and women were welcomed into this process. In a large sense, God is saying to his people, "Here is the overall plan of the tabernacle, and some of the themes I would like to be represented. Now you gather up all the best materials, as you feel led, and use your creativity, your skills, the gifts I have given you to make it come alive and be a beautiful place, the place where your creativity and eye for beauty are lifted up to me."

The Patience of Moses: Exodus 24

2010-07-26T22:34:00.000-04:00

In Exodus 24, Moses is called up the mountain to meet with God, and to receive the Ten Commandments from God's hand. Together with seventy elders from Israel, he "sees God" and does not die, remarkably. They ate and drank in God's presence. Then, Moses makes arrangements for governance in his absence (v. 15), and goes up the mountain to meet with God. A cloud covers the mountain for six days, and it is only on the seventh day that God calls for Moses. He waits upon the mountain for six days.

I have read this account many times over my lifetime, but only today was I struck by the patience of Moses, and how foreign his experience is to my own. Consider it in your imagination: You are the chief judge and governor for a huge multitude of people traveling through a wilderness, and you have made some arrangements for judicial coverage in your absence, and you have been called into the presence of God upon a mountain in the middle of a wilderness. You live a couple thousand years BC, so no iPhones, no white-gasoline Whisperlite stoves, no nylon tents, no communication of any kind with persons out of sight or shouting distance. You have climbed a mountain, a strange mountain that you do not know. It has become covered with a cloud, so you do not have a view, you do not see anything in the valley, the world has closed around you, you are completely isolated. You wait, for hours, and nothing happens, no call from God. You relieve yourself, you make a fire perhaps and prepare some food. Still nothing. Night approaches. You have to make some sort of shelter, you wonder what else is up there with you on this mountain. Where is God? What is the point of this past day? What is going on in the camp below? Did you misunderstand God? Did he want you to come up higher? Did you do something wrong? Did you leave something out? Really, what is the point of this? What are you thinking to yourself as hour after hour of waiting in this fog creeps by? You make some sort of shelter, you fall asleep, and you awake the next morning to more fog. You have to prepare, maybe find food. How much food did you bring? How long did you expect to be up here? Another whole day goes by, and no call from God. No change. Nothing. Minute by minute, hour by hour time passes, and nothing happens. The end of another day approaches. This happens for six consecutive days. Yet Moses waits.

I cannot identify, I cannot conceive of doing this. Six days with no word from God, isolated on a mountain in a cloud. I would have second-guessed myself any number of times by the end of the first day. I must have misunderstood, I must have gotten something wrong, surely. God would not waste my time like this. What is going on in the camp without me? (a legitimate concern, because Moses' absence does, in fact, lead to the camp taking matters into their own hands and creating the golden calf.) What kind of faith, what view of time and life allows a man to stay on a mountaintop, waiting, for six solid days? Is it patience? Is it humility? Was the culture that incredibly different from today? I wish I understood this. I wish I were the kind of man that could content himself with waiting in the dark, with nothing at all happening, for even one day, without busying myself and making excuses for why I am not waiting upon God, why I cannot wait upon God but must busy myself in the meantime. I cannot comprehend doing absolutely nothing but what is necessary to stay alive, and waiting upon God for an entire week. What was Moses thinking? Really, what was going on in his mind? I think I need to understand this. How did he occupy his mind, what were his conversations with himself, as he waited upon God? What did he see in his mind's eye?

Law with a Heart

2010-07-22T18:03:00.000-04:00

Today my reading through the Bible using M'Cheyne's schedule took me to Exodus chapter 23, headed "Sundry Laws" in my New American Standard version. Sounds dry, but it isn't. I was immediately struck by the high level of personal integrity required by these laws. One is to do what is right by another person regardless of what everyone else (the "masses" in v. 2) is doing, regardless whether he is rich (this sounds modern) or poor (this does not), whether he hates you, or whether he is a stranger. You are not to accept a bribe, because a bribe will distort your judgment. There is a very strong sense here that each person stands before the Lord and must answer for his treatment of another, with no pleading of others' opinions or actions, and no extenuating circumstances. Furthermore, one's treatment of another is here linked closely with sympathy and empathy for that other. One is not to oppress a stranger, not only because it is not right, but specifically because the Israelite should know how it feels to be a stranger, since they were strangers in Egypt.

The sabbath rest every seven days for man and beast, and every seven years for the land, are likewise explained in terms of empathy and sympathy, not agricultural technique. In the seventh year, the self-seeded food crop will feed the hungry, who will have to go and pick it. The seventh-day rest allows refeshment for workers and working animals.

Finally, God's sympathy for his people is demonstrated in his driving out the nations gradually, so that the wild animals will not grow too numerous or the fields be ruined by too long neglect.

Man's works and God's works

2010-07-09T14:00:00.001-04:00

Today's reading included Exodus 20 and Job 38, both involving the incomprehensible gap between God and his works, and man and his. Exodus 20 is the first delivery of what has come to be called the Ten Commandments; three commandments having to do explicitly with man's relationship to God, sometimes called the First Tablet, and seven commandments addressing man's relationships to other men and their possessions, called the Second Tablet. (This is the Catholic division; the Protestant division finds four commandments in the first tablet, considering the prohibition of the making of images to be separate from the command to not worship images, and six commandments in the second tablet, combining the command not to covet a neighbor's wife with that requiring us not to covet any of his non-personal possessions. I like the Catholic division, as it splits the Ten into two numbers that have ancient meaning, 3 and 7, and it does not prohibit the making of images per se, which amounts to the prohibition of representational art, not to mention photography.) It ends by specifying that altars must be built of earth, or of uncut stone upon which no tool has been used, and have no steps up to them lest our "nakedness" be revealed. This latter struck me as a bit strange.

In the chapter in Job, God demonstrates his sublime difference from Man by asking a series of questions that amount to, "Where were you when I created the cosmos, and what do you know of the deep workings of the world you live in?" The answers: Nowhere, I am but of yesterday, and know nothing. We moderns might think we can answer some of the specific questions God asks; perhaps we could recite our knowledge of the water cycle with regard to rain and snow. But fundamentally, we still don't understand the most basic aspects of the cosmos we live in. What exactly is time? Why is the speed of light unchanged in all frames of reference? How can it be, and what does it mean, that the smallest "particles" we can discover are not really "things" but rather wave functions? Why is mathematics, a type of symbolic mental language, the best tool for describing the world "out there"?

We can say that we have barely begun to understand the work of God in creation, and as for understanding ourselves, well, having just finished the bloodiest century in the history of man, in which over 110 million people were killed by their governments, quite apart from wars, it is hard to maintain that we know much about ourselves either. Before the majestic mind and work of God we stand as ignorant children who have bloodied each other and trashed our playroom.

Perhaps the rules about altar-building are to remind us of this. We may build altars, but must make them of the stuff which God has made, without much elaboration on our part. We may build them of earth, much as a child builds in the sand. Or we may pile rocks, as a child makes a fort. Not only may we not build finely carved marble altars, we may not even touch the stones with our tools. Without our flimsy tools we are unable to change that which God made from nothing. We must find them, as He made them, and recognize that they become holy not because we have had anything to do with them, but because they are dedicated to God. To put our own mark upon them with our tools, to shape them according to our liking, is to "profane" them.

The prohibition of steps up to the altar is also a measure to keep us from forgetting how small and dependent we are. God's elevation above us, using the spatial metaphor, is so high that no stairs or tower that we could build could begin to be significant, and the effort only makes us ludicrous. As we build our altars higher, our smallness just becomes more pathetic, and it becomes easier to see up our skirts, so to speak. No, there is no elevation that can bring us closer to God, there is no elaboration of cut stones that can bring us closer to God. If He does not meet us here, at our own level, in the world as we find it, then we have no hope.

Do we do this? do we meet God in the midst of our day-to-day earthen lives, living in the awareness of His sublime majesty and our evanescent dependence? "Our Father which art in Heaven" while we are here upon earth. It is the beginning of wisdom.

The Dark Years

2010-07-08T20:32:00.000-04:00

Reading back in my journal recently, I discovered that for four years I have been feeling depressed and rather directionless. Four years. I had not realized it had been that long. Trying to discover a reason, I noted that it was about four years ago that I abandoned the dream of leaving medicine and teaching college "across the curriculum", at St. John's or some situation like St. John's. At some level it was a crazy dream. I am the wrong kind of doctor for that, a master's degree in classical literature is not enough, and when it came down to it I was unwilling to leave my home of thirty years and all the relationships and family ties we have formed here. I could get a job teaching anatomy or physiology, I suppose, but my interest in teaching really lies in demonstrating the interconnectedness of ideas and our understanding of all aspects of life in this world.

Anyway, I am not even sure that that is the reason. I have also become very much aware of my increasing age and approaching death. In any case, I have been more or less moping about for several years, not very creative, not very engaged. Not praying much at all. Not finishing the reading of a single book.

Well, it has to stop. I have begun to exercise, to set aside time for prayer. I have thought about antidepressants, but it seems to me that that may be a kind of cheat for me. I know what things have to change in my life, and believe that if I begin to more regularly and faithfully avail myself of the means of grace, I shall find joy again.

As regards this blog, one of the activities that I enjoy and have some faculty for is writing. I have reservations about putting personal reflections "out there" for public review...even this post seems a bit too personal...but perhaps returning to reflective writing will have a therapeutic effect for me as well as holding some interest for others.

I do not want to be overly ambitious, so at first I may simply jot down some reflections on my daily reading of the Bible. I am using M'Cheyne's schedule of reading through the Bible, so each day there is a selection from the Old Testament, the Wisdom literature and prophets, the Gospels and the Epistles. We shall see.

Greater than the angels

2009-01-09T13:40:00.008-05:00

In the first chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, the author makes the argument that the Son is greater than the angels because, unlike them, he made the world and continues to uphold it all; he is the glory of God, the exact imprint of His essence, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. "He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." There is a great deal here, and more that lies beneath this argument in the assumptions that it makes about reality.

The language is strange to us moderns, who have grown unused to philosophical and theological discourse, and who have a cramped and impoverished imagination limited to the material and temporal. The ancients lived in a larger and richer intellectual space than we do today, as they had not limited the world to only what they could perceive with their five senses, as we have largely done. The world was a place full of meaning in its very nature, from its beginning. It contained more than was evident at first glance, and much that was mysterious yet true.

Our author's argument presumes a world full of personal beings, including God, the Son, these beings called angels, and us. At least. From the beginning of the Bible to its end we see beings that are neither us nor God, variously called "seraphim" or "cherubim" or "living beings" or simply "angels" (Gk angeloi) which denotes their function as messengers or representatives of God. We are told little about them, which is not surprising if the Bible is concerned primarily with the relationship between humans and God. We see them incidentally, as it were, enough to tell us that we are not the only sentient creations of God. We are told our own story, and not theirs. If they were only ever called "angels" (messengers) we might conclude that they were only manifestations of God, ways that He himself appears to mankind, as in the case of the three "men" who appear to Abram on their way to Sodom. But in many places they are named as regards "type" (cherubim and seraphim) and even as individuals (Gabriel and Michael). They clearly can manifest themselves in the domain of our own experience (matter/spacetime) but somehow transcend it, as they come and go in ways that we cannot.

In a world full of personal beings of various kinds, one would want to know how these beings relate to one another, especially in considering the place of this mysterious being, "the Son". Our author makes it clear that the Son is not one of the angels, who are servants of God, but a being far above them, having the "glory" of God, being his "very image" and furthermore being the very creator and sustainer of the world. This sounds a lot like God himself, who, if He is anything, is the Creator. Yet the author does not allow a complete identification of this Son with God, insofar as the Son is somehow a separate person sitting at the right hand of God, ruling with Him. Furthermore, the Son is "begotten" by God, and hence has "inherited a name" from God.

Now, one thing that was understood by ancient agrarian civilizations was that like begets like. Cattle beget cattle, sheep beget sheep, humans beget humans. In saying that the Son is "begotten", the author is claiming that the Son is the same type of being as God. This is made clearer in the claim that in being so begotten, the Son has "inherited a name" better than the angels'. We are peculiar today in naming our children according to how well we like the sound of the name. To us, a name is just a sound that "calls" the person. To the ancients, and in the scriptures (which are ancient documents), a Name is much more like the "essence" of a person or thing. This is why God renames certain persons in the scriptures at critical junctures in their lives, when their lives are about to take on additional meaning. Abram becomes Abraham; Sarai becomes Sarah; Jacob becomes Israel. Zacharias is told specifically what to name his son John, and Mary is told what to name Jesus. Adam's naming the animals in Genesis is much more than his thinking up funny sounds to call each one; he is sharing with God in the definition of what kind of things they would be.

So, the "Son" in Hebrews inherits his "name" from God himself, as a naturally begotten son would take on the family name. The names of God, which describe His essential being, are inherited by this Son. Whatever else he may be, the Son bears the names of God.

So here we have the beginning of a mystery: this being called the Son is somehow not exactly the same person as God, yet is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe and the "exact image" of God. He rules with God in the position (right hand) of highest honor; he is the same type of being as God, and shares His name and hence His essential nature. Angels exist, but they are mere messengers, far below this Son.

Hebrews 1:1

2008-12-01T11:43:00.007-05:00

A great number of important ideas are here in the first two verses of the book of Hebrews. God reveals himself by speaking. He does so in various different ways, down through time and history. There is a being called the Son through whom He speaks, and through whom He also created the world. This Son has been appointed an heir. These are the last days.

There is no effort on the part of the writer to prove the existence of God, nor the idea that He speaks and has spoken. He is apparently writing to those who accept these as truth. God exists and speaks to us.

Speech is important. We are speaking beings that live in time. Our words are so important that more often than not they are all that remains of us when we die. Millenia after their death, we the living still read the words of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Moses, and Jesus. The ability to speak and understand speech is hard-wired into our brains, and one of the largest areas of the motor cortex in our brains controls the organs of speech. Speech, or its proxy the written word, is undeniably our chief means of exchanging ideas of any kind.

If we posit, for the sake of argument, that there is a God that both created us and remains interested in us, would it not be our expectation that He would use speech and words to communicate with us? Furthermore, since we are the kind of being that exists in a sequential timeframe, and uses words to communicate between generations and pass knowledge down to those who come after, is it surprising that God would likewise reveal himself gradually over time? We may be slow learners when it comes to history, but we do eventually learn. These opening verses in Hebrews assert that God does use speech to reveal himself to us, and does so down through history. In the past, he used those men and women called "prophets", but finally he has used this being called "the Son".

Return

2008-12-01T11:31:00.003-05:00

It has been a long time since I have written here. Writing takes discipline, and I have not been exercising discipline very much lately, I'm afraid. I am also somewhat uncertain what place a blog should have in my life. Is it a type of journal? If so, it is too public for sharing one's deepest thoughts, the ones whose discernment and recording may be most beneficial to me. Is it a type of conversation? Perhaps, but with whom?

There is an effort involved in writing a blog that must have some sort of return, I think. Not simply a return to me, the writer, but some benefit accruing to the readers. One has to believe it is worth the effort.

I have been encouraged to write by some who have been my readers in the past. I am full of self-doubt; my life has had many failures recently, and I have felt very much less capable than I once felt. Nevertheless I will attempt to take up the practice of writing again.

Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

2008-03-21T10:22:00.003-04:00

It is Good Friday, and today's Daily Office offers Psalm 22, the psalm that begins with the words Jesus spoke from the cross as He was dying, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The incarnation of God as man is a deep mystery, but Good Friday begins a mystery that seems black and bottomless: the death of God, the sundering of the Trinity. In a sense, this is the center point of all history. The day becomes night, the earth shakes and splits, dead arise out of their graves and walk about. It is as if creation itself convulses, as well it might; its creator, the very hands that formed it, has unaccountably and inconceivably been destroyed by his own creation. Can such a thing be? How could the earth not cease to exist? All eyes, even the unseen eyes of Satan, who perhaps knows best what is happening, are pulled relentlessly to that cross. Can it be? Have I won? The centurions fall down in fear, "Surely this was the son of God!" Unseen forces tear the temple curtain in two. Did the earth splilt beneath as well, foreshadowing the downthrow of the now obsolete center of worship? What is happening? How can God forsake God?

I think that we cannot hope to explain these things. A toddler might as easily attempt to explain lightening. We are but of yesterday and know nothing. Our forefathers saw these terrors at midday and have passed them down without explanation. There they are, raw and aweful, assaulting the mind with impossible realities. We do not understand, but could we expect to understand? We do not even understand our own material world; how could we understand events that involve its creator?

Because Jesus spoke the opening words of Psalm 22 from the cross, we infer that he was invoking the entire psalm, and hence applying it to himself. In the past, when I have read this psalm, I was troubled that it seemed somehow too "human" to apply to Jesus. It seems to be a psalm of lament and supplication to God for rescue from oppressors, for salvation in fact. It reads very much like a human being in deep trouble, asking God to deliver him just as He had delivered his ancestors in the past.

Yet of course, it was especially as a human being, as the Human Being, the second Adam (Adam meaning, in Hebrew, Man as in man-kind) that He was being crucified. Another deep mystery. Jesus so deeply identified with those for whom he was dying that for all intents and purposes (especially divine purposes) he became those he was dying for. He became sin, and it was as such that he was dying. He was not dying because he was God--God had no need to die--but because he was Man. "Behold the Man," says Pilate. He was dying as the second Adam, the innocent Adam dying in place of the sinful Adam. Hence, all his thoughts in Psalm 22 are thoughts from a man's perspective, a human's perspective. He is speaking for us, as we might speak had we been dying there, only guiltless. That is why the Psalm does not speak from God's perspective, though Jesus is also God. These are his dying words, and he is dying as a man, for man.

Hence, he speaks of us as brethren, and says he will praise God in the midst of the "assembly" of us, his people. He, as a man, is really beset upon, is really surrounded by enemies, both material and spiritual, is really dying and is really praying for deliverence. In one sense, of course, He is not delivered. His enemies prevail, and He dies under torture. Yet He is indeed delivered, and we through Him. We are delivered from death through his death, and of course He knew this all along. The Father has not despised the affliction, nor Jesus' prayers upon the cross. He delivered Him from death, and hence from the power of death, through death. So Psalm 22 ends with praise coming from all the nations and all the peoples, who have heard and remember. Yet unborn people will hear and remember, and will declare His righteousness because "He has performed it."

Not Negative

2008-02-08T07:02:00.000-05:00

My friends at Reading Through the Bible are contemplating the Ten Commandments, first presented to Moses on Mt. Sinai, after the people had been delivered from slavery in Egypt. Note that the commandments begin by mentioning this context: "I am the Lord thy God which brought you out of bondage...you shall have no other gods before me." God then goes on to list ten rules, ten commandments mostly having the form, "You shall not..." Does this seem odd? I have heard the complaint that the commandments are "negative", and that it would have been better for God to have used "positive language". Yet here He is, right after reminding his people that they are now free men and women, delivering this set of "negative" rules. Doesn't he get it?

Is such a formulation of law really negative? Or perhaps the question can be better formulated, "Which type of law restricts our freedom more, prohibitions (thou shalt not) or prescriptions (thou shalt)?" I propose that prohibitions are the least restrictive form of law, and that is why God casts his commandments in that form right after setting his people free. The Ten Commandments are not only consistent with their new freedom, but are excellent signs and symbols of their new freedom.

Consider the Garden of Eden. What could Adam and Eve do? Everything....except one single activity, one simple rule. They could climb trees, cut down trees, make love under the trees, make love in the trees, burn the wood, use the wood, eat the fruit from every single tree, run around, sing... whatever. In short, every conceivable activity under the sun was lawful except one: don't eat fruit from this one tree. "Thou shalt not eat the fruit from this one tree" was the absolutely least restrictive rule one could imagine, because it was negative. By saying, "Don't do this", God is allowing everything else. Imagine He had formulated His commandment in the positive. How would that be stated? "Act in accordance with My will." There's a positive formulation, but what does it mean? At every act, A and E would have to consider, "hmmm...is this according to God's will?" Talk about anxiety! Perhaps God could have said, "Do everything except eat from the tree in the middle of the garden." In the first place, this still contains the negative, but now it contains a daunting positive command: do everything else. So now they have to make love in the trees, and have to run around and sing, have to burn the wood and every other conceivable activity.

Most of our own laws work the same way. The laws in a free land generally do not prescribe behavior but simply forbid a small subset of specific behaviors, leaving its citizens free to do anything that is not specifically prohibited.

The simplest and least restrictive form of law, which is simply the declaration of God's will as distinct from His creature's, is prohibition. The Ten Commandments leave entire worlds of possible activity open to us. We can relate to God in all sorts of ways, exploring our own individuality in our worship, but we can't worship anything but our creator. We can say anything we want; we can sing, write poetry and plays, and explore all the rich possibilities of language written, spoken and sung; but we cannot dishonor God's name or use it trivially, nor can we malign our neighbor. We can enjoy all the aspects of sexual love, madly, wildly, as often as we want, wherever we want; only with our spouse. We can take all kinds of things for our own use, and create all manner of secondary things with them; only we cannot take for our use what someone else has taken for his, nor can we use these things as gods.

The Ten Commandments are simply the boundaries of our design as creatures. We were made a certain way, with certain wonderful strengths, and the commandments are in a sense our "specs". As Israel contemplated their new freedom from slavery, God was showing them that they were now able to make all sorts of choices they could not make as slaves. They could be merchants, or farmers, or herdsman, or craftsmen. They could live in what village they wanted. They could build their homes large or small, east or west, marry whom they willed, move when they wanted. They were free. Only, there were these ten kinds of things they could not do without harming themselves and their community. These commandments, in their simplicity and in their "negative" form, presumed and were emblematic of the people's freedom.

The Apocalypse Code

2008-02-02T12:56:00.000-05:00

I read Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth in the early 70', in college, when the European Union consisted of 10 nations, the Unites States backed Israel, and Russia backed her enemies, making the Arab-Israeli conflict a very credible tinderbox for worldwide nuclear holocaust. Having only been a Christian a few years at that time, it was my first encounter with "End Times Prophecy", and I was very interested. As many of the points in Lindsey's timeline required the identification and counting of ancient kings, I took some courses in Ancient Near Eastern History. It was immediately clear to me that there is nothing simple or clear about ancient history, and that the matter-of-course manner in which Lindsey asserted his own interpretation of ancient and modern history was intentionally misleading to his readers, at the very least as regards the level of certainty with which the underlying historical facts can be known. It just wasn't that simple, and his self-assurance was unwarranted and smug. I tentatively accepted his general premillenial framework, because it seemed to be part of the general evangelical system of belief and I knew no better. I didn't pursue it any further, as it didn't seem to be something one could actually substantiate.

Some years later, in my mid 20's, I came across More Than Conquerors by William Hendriksen. This book introduced me to the idea that the Book of Revelation was written for and could be understood by the church throughout the ages, not simply the church that happened to exist just before the end. Of course! II Tim 3:16 applies to all scripture, including Daniel and Ezekiel and Revelation, and all Christians down through history. Revelation itself begins with the blessing, "Blessed is he who hears the words of this book and keeps them." How would a first century Christian "keep" a book about international political intrigue, attack helicopters, biological warfare and intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 20th century! (or 21st...it's getting pretty late, Hal.) It treated the Book of Revelation literally, ie, as literature, meant to be interpreted in the way it was written, by human beings who understand written language in all its forms. God had gone to great lengths to develop and teach a manner of expression suitable to the magnitude and sublimity of His works, and was using this language in the book intended to orient all his people, throughout the church age, to their own futures. This made great sense to me, and made all the king-counting and crazy ad-hoc mathematic contortions unnecessary, as the prediction of which part of the world was Gog and which Magog was entirely beside the point! I loved it. I still highly recommend it to anyone who is skeptical of all this Last Days Madness but feels that it goes with the territory of being a serious, Bible-believing Christian. It does not, and the good news, rarely heard in evangelical America, is that belief in such contorted end-times history is not the position of the Church through the ages, but a rather recent idea (end of the 19th century.)

Most recently, a gentleman in one of my Sunday school classes gave me a copy of Hank Hanegraaff's The Apocalypse Code. Do not confuse it with Hal Lindsey's "Apocalypse Code." Hanegraaff's subtitle is "Find out what the Bible really says about the end times, and why it matters today." I highly recommend it. Though it uses apolcalyptic literature (Revelation and Daniel and Ezekiel) as the context, it is really about correct exegesis and hermeneutics. It teaches one how to interpret the Bible, using the Bible as its own guide. The title expresses the core idea that the "decoder" for the book of Revelation is the Old Testament itself, as interpreted by Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. The concept is simple: God's purpose is to communicate truth to us, primarily truth about His nature and ours, and He has developed a rich linguistic, symbolic and metaphorical language to do so. He teaches us this language by using it in the context of known events in the Old Testament, then having Jesus himself use it in the context of events in the New Testament. Then, when he gives his great revelation to John on the island of Patmos, he uses the very same language, now presumably understood by His people who know his prior word, to lay out for them a vision of the Church age and its consummation in the New Jerusalem.

This book is great. Very readable, very honest, not the least manipulative, and not primarily concerned that the reader adopt a particular view of future history. He is more concerned that the reader learn how to understand Biblical imagery, and that the reader not adopt a wooden literalism in interpreting prophecy. He is also concerned to prevent the nearly-heretical aspects of some popular end-times interpretations, such as that a new temple must be built to reinstate the blood sacrifices that pointed to Jesus and that were fulfilled (and made obsolete) by his own sacrifice once for all.

Get it. Read it. Then talk about it.

(Click here for a site with podcasts of Hanegraaff discussing his book and the issues it addresses.)

The Right Hand of God

2008-01-27T11:16:00.000-05:00

**Your right hand, O LORD, glorious in power, your right hand, O LORD, shatters the enemy. (Exo 15:6)
**You stretched out your right hand; the earth swallowed them. (Exo 15:12)
**And to which of the angels has he ever said, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet"? (Heb 1:13)
**...looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb 12:2)
**Then I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals. (Rev 5:1)

The "right hand of the Lord" appears throughout the Bible, in over a hundred verses. What are we to make of this? Is God right-handed? Does He have a body? Does this reflect some primitive conception of God as Man-writ-large, like Zeus or Thor?

Though it might be argued that, in one sense, since the Incarnation of Jesus, God does have a body, yet that is not the notion behind these verses. Rather, this use of "God's hand" is the condescension of God in speaking to us, and in accepting our speaking of Him, in terms that have meaning to us who are embodied and finite. To us, "the hand is that part of the body which enables man to be a doer, a tool-making and tool-using being; thus it is associated with power or control." (ISBE, "Hand") It is with our hands that we make things and control things. Short of losing our minds, the loss of our hands is most disabling. Even within our brains, the amount of space given to sensation and control of our hands is larger than any part except that given to our mouths and speech. We are, essentially, speaking and making beings, made in the image of a speaking and making God.

For whatever reason, the vast majority of humans are right-handed; our right hands are more easily controlled. (It would be interesting to speculate about why God created us in this assymetrical manner. Why, when we appear to have bilateral symmetry, are we actually, inside, assymetrical?) So when we speak of God's power to do things, when we speak of him as a maker or controller, we speak in terms of his right hand. It is not because he is right-handed, but because most of us are. This demonstrates a fact about the Bible that it is critical for a reader to understand: The Bible is written for us humans, and uses all the aspects of human language and literature. To take the Bible "literally" means to read it as it was meant to be read, not woodenly or concretely, but as "literature" ("writing"). We humans use metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and many other non-concrete forms of language, and our most expressive and well-loved literature is most filled with such non-concrete language. The descriptors "poetic" or "lyrical" are generally taken to indicate praise, while "prosaic" is generally a criticism. The Bible speaks of God's mouth, his eye, his arm, his feet, his heart, his sword, his breath. God speaks to us in terms that we understand, as beings that have our powers located in those organs. He uses our own manner of speaking, so that we will understand him clearly.

So, the "right hand of God" usually speaks of his power and control. Standing or sitting at a ruler's right hand associated one with his power, and hence was a place of honor. When blessing children, the right hand was normally placed upon the firstborn, symbolizing the favored status of being firstborn. (See the scene where Jacob blesses Joseph's children, Ephraim and Manasseh) Jesus is the "firstborn among many brethren". He is our elder brother; the Father's right hand is upon him.

Praying the Psalter

2008-01-24T08:52:00.000-05:00

In his lectures on Wonder, Heartbreak and Hope recommended previously, Gideon Strauss observes that the chief reason he was able to avoid complete emotional and spiritual disintegration during his participation in South Africa's Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was that he had begun to pray the Psalter in the years immediately preceeding. He therefore already possessed a language for expressing to himself and to God the deep pain, personal brokenness, and agonizing thirst for justice that the endless accounts of violence and loss effected in him. Dr. Strauss is a learned man, and at the time already had his PhD in philosophy and had been many years a Christian. Nevertheless, it was these poems and songs, these works of literary art that preserved his soul and sanity, rather than the didactic, factual portions of scripture.

There is a sense in which we live in our songs and poetry more deeply than in our intellectual knowledge. This is most obvious in our youth, during which time we seek refuge in our music, even identify ourselves by our music. But I think it is true throughout life. Our hearts resonate with poetry and song more deeply than with other forms of expression.

Praying the Psalter gives language to our hearts, a vocabulary for every occasion in life from the most sublime joy to the deepest personal agony. The Psalms are especially human, and sometimes raw; they express even those feelings that we might otherwise feel are forbidden. They sing of feeling abandoned by God, of feeling jealous of the good fortune of people who seem not to deserve it, of hatred for enemies, of confusion, of sickness and fear of death, of the desire to be avenged. They are songs of human beings sitting honestly before a patient and understanding God, who is Himself a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief and betrayal. They lay it all out, even the twisted bits, and ask God to see and to respond, or even just to sigh with us. Praying these songs, seeking to identify with and understand the Psalmist, prepares us to meet these emotions and to see them as common to man if and when they come upon us.

Wonder, Heartbreak and Hope

2008-01-23T07:21:00.000-05:00

My friend Gideon Strauss has posted three powerful lectures containing his reflections upon insights he gained in the months and years surrounding his service as a translator for South Africa's Commission for Truth and Reconciliation. (Click on the title of this post to go there and listen, or you can download them for iPod use by right-clicking the links there.)

Be warned: this is hard, sad stuff. Dr. Strauss found himself praying Psalm 137 for two years after the experience (that's the Psalm that ends, "O daughter of Babylon, happy is he who repays you...who seizes your infants and dashes them upon the rocks." If you have had trouble with this Psalm, (as I hope you have), these reflections may help you understand why it is there in the Psalter, how real and violent and dark is the darkness in this world, and how our wonderful and weeping saviour may draw wonder and hope even out of such darkness.

Born in Zion: Psalm 87

2008-01-20T16:02:00.000-05:00

Over the past year, I have been spending a lot of time reading in Isaiah, in preparation for a Sunday school class I have been teaching. In that book are many oracles "against the nations", in which the Lord punishes them for their idolatry and for oppressing his people. There is a lot of doom and gloom in Isaiah, far more than those know who merely read the Christmas prophesies and the Suffering Servant segments, which are the climactic Good News that comes only after a lot of very bad news laid out in the preceding forty or fifty chapters. And it is not only the gentile Nations that are in trouble, but Israel and Judah especially, for they of all the nations should have known better, but behaved no differently.

How delightful then to find, again and again, in Isaiah and throughout the old and new testaments, that the delight of God rests, finally, not only in Israel but also in all the other nations of the world, even those who were her particular enemies. Zion is more than simply a hill in Jerusalem, but becomes figuratively that place, that city to which all of God's children eventually come.

In Psalm 87 we see a list of countries who were at one time enemies of Israel, and some of them her chief enemies: Egypt, Babylon, and Philistia. These are among "those who know Me", and it seems that God is pleased to say that they know Him. Furthermore, though being born in these countries granted one a certain panache in the ancient world, such as being from New York or Moscow or Beijing today, yet all those who know God are said to be "born in Zion." She is the central City, the only City in the end, after the fall of the only other city, Babylon. Once you become a citizen of Zion, that identity gathers into itself all one's other identities. When we are born again, this is the city in which we are born, so that it will be said, "this one and that one were born in her...."

That City will gather into herself all that is good, all that is beautiful and worthy in all the cultures and peoples of the world, and make it her own, because, of course, it was hers all along. As God makes his rain to fall upon the wicked and the righteous both, so His beauty is shed abroad among the nations, even to those who persecute His people and suppress his truth. All will bear fruit that will be gathered in again at the end, into his holy city for His pleasure and the pleasure of His people.

By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their
glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day--and there will be no
night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.
(Rev 21:24-26)

Reading Through the Bible

2008-01-10T10:24:00.000-05:00

Some old friends from "Kairos" have begun to read through the Bible together, and have started a blog in which they reflect on their reading. What a great format through which to wrestle with the truth! Click on the heading of this post to go there, and be sure to read the comments...I have asked one of their writers to see if she can post the reading schedule, so that anyone so inclined could join the group and read along. I have also placed a link in the margin at left, so you can easily jump there from this site.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library

2007-02-14T08:28:00.000-05:00

On the sidebar I have added a resource I use often, Calvin College's "Christian Classics Ethereal Library". It has hundreds, if not thousands, of public domain classics covering nearly all of the Church Age so far. You can read them online, or download them in various common formats like Adobe and Palm and Word and Reader. It was begun and is overseen by Harry Plantinga and now a board at Calvin. Check it out, it's great!

Random Thought...

2007-02-13T07:45:00.000-05:00

The capability of being delighted is a fine thing.

Some Thoughts on David's Blog

2007-02-11T08:07:00.000-05:00

Some thoughts on morality and the new Earth.

An Elegy for Buttercup

2007-01-20T09:10:00.000-05:00

This morning dawned clear and cold with a scattering of snow on the ground. It will be the last morning for our beloved dog, Buttercup. At 2:30 today, the vet will come to our home and put her to sleep. I hope that she wakes up enough before then to go outside with me a last time to sniff the air.

I am not taking this very well. I have gone off to weep several times in the days since we made the decision. There is much meaning wrapped up in a dog's life; many memories. It is hard to think of it ending. It forebodes other endings.

Our animals generally live much shorter lives than we do, at least the ones we choose as pets. Why should a 65 lb dog live only 15 years and a 120 lb adult live 80? Perhaps that we might more frequently and more safely contemplate life and death, and the cycles in our lives.

My life so far has encompassed the lives of two beloved dogs. I have had others, but only two whose lives were completely involved in my own from beginning to end. Pixie was the dog of my childhood, who shared my life from age 6 until age 16, when I entered upon my adulthood and my walk with Christ. When she died, in my arms, I somehow understood that my childhood was over, and she had seen me through it. She had been my companion on many explorations of my growing world; I shared my childhood sorrows with her, and she seemed to absorb them and bear them up quietly, as dogs do. I knew, when she died, that in the next ten years my adult life would be defined. She would not be there, she had done her part. And I knew that I was entering a world in which there would be losses.

Buttercup has been the dog of my maturity, growing up with my children who now, as she dies, are entering their own adulthoods in their various ways. The six of us were her pack; she was happiest when we were all home, and would lie where we were gathered. Each night she slept beneath one of our beds, or on the corner of a sleeping bag when friends were over. We have hiked, canoed, splashed in streams, dug snow forts together. She has slept amidst my wife and children when I worked those many nights. Our windowsills are scarred from her claws; our carpets are worn with her path up the steps under the banister. She was the gentlest of dogs. She loved to have her face rubbed.

Now she is nearly gone. Those once-acute ears can no longer hear the birds, nor any but the loudest speech. Her world is quiet, and her eyes are dim. For some time she has been unable to mount the stairs, so she sleeps alone. Over the years her pack has drifted away, to college and to other new homes. Her world has become very small. Sometimes at night she will yip the lonely yip, and one of us will sleep on the couch till she falls asleep. Sometimes she is incontinent, and embarassed. She is afraid of edges.

Yet she is still there, still in time with us, even now. She does not look bad; she does not look sick. She is still warm and soft and breathing. She still likes her face rubbed, though her eyes are somewhat glazed from the pain medications. But she cannot pee and has not eaten for days. She goes outside and is puzzled why no urine will emerge.

It is an odd thing, this contemplation of her coming death. I have seen death many times, of course, but nearly always of humans. It is always mysterious. One minute there is a person there, then there is just a body. With humans, it can be approached with language. There are last words; there are understood goodbyes. In this death, she does not understand. And I cannot make her know what she has meant to me and to her pack.

In four hours, she will go out of time. She will be there, warm and moving and loving us, and then she will be still, and will never move again. Somehow this thought is devastating to me. Time the destroyer, again.

C.S. Lewis wondered about the souls of animals. "Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?" (Ecc 3:21) He wondered whether beloved animals might become "real" by the chosen love of their masters, even as we become real by the love of our Master. I cannot read The Velveteen Rabbit without weeping. I do not like to think of a world in which anything really good, really beautiful is utterly lost. It does not seem like something my God would allow. I would pray, "Heavenly Father, you have made this beautiful, gentle animal to be our companion for these many years, a lesser being with enough consciousness to be faithful and gentle and loving, to form a bond with us greater beings that brings us both comfort and pleasure, to choose (usually) what she knew would please us, and to give both of us joy in our respective natures. As surely as other humans, this being has entered into the eternal lives and memory of us and our children. Can not this lesser being be granted an existence with us in eternity? Can she not share with us the new earth we shall inherit, content as a lesser being to attend at the heels of her beloved masters, even as we shall be content to walk with you as lesser beings basking in your love? Will our new earth be filled only with humans or greater beings, and no lesser? Is our condescension to and love for lesser dependent beings not a reflection of your love for us in some way? I think it may be so. If so, please grant that these beloved animals, among them this particular creation of yours, Buttercup, might have the pleasure and honor of renewal when you renew all things. "

We just walked outside for a bit. She sniffs the air, but does not seem interested. She tries to pee. I wonder what she knows. Does a merciful God allow the animals some acceptance of death? Some animal behavior suggests it. Does she discern a coming end in our sorrow, in our attendance upon her in these last hours? Is she sad with our sorrow, or with her own?

I contemplate my own end in this death. I doubt that my own life will encompass the life of another dog. I will be a grandfather in a few months. There will be dogs yet in the lives of my children, and in their children's, but probably not in my own. Perhaps there will be a dog of my old age; I do not know. It would be a dog of leavings and of sorrow. It will not be that long before I, too, will wonder why I cannot pee, and will lose the song of birds and the high notes of the children's laughter.

I know the ending of Ecclesiastes, have known it long. This is the way of things under the sun. There will be joy and sorrow both. Buttercup's life was a blessing and a joy, and her death is a sorrow. One entails the other till we return to our maker and enter into the new Earth prepared for us. There, I think, we will rediscover much that was lost here in this beginning of our long lives.

Hebrews 1 on Kairos site

2006-11-21T22:12:00.000-05:00

A few thoughts on Hebrews are posted on the Kairos blog.

In His hands are the Caverns...

2006-07-04T11:46:00.000-04:00

In the Daily Office, one frequenty recites a Venite which proclaims, "In His hand are the caverns of the earth; the heights of the mountains are His also." This is probably based upon Ps 95:4.

We are accustomed to looking up to the heights in our contemplation of God, and many feel somehow closer to God when on a mountaintop. But I am also moved by contemplation of the truth that not only the obvious mountains but the inapparent caverns are in His hand, are his workmanship.

As a child I visited various caverns with my parents, the largest being Luray Caverns in Virginia. The stories of the discovery of these caverns have a certain similarity. For millenia, their existence is hidden beneath the earth, and one day someone finds a sinkhole, or cool air emanating from under a rock, and digs a little to discover breathtaking beauty that has lain unknown and unappreciated beneath our feet for hundreds of years, thousands of years. All that time, slow millimeter by millimeter and unappreciated by mortal eyes, God has carved chambers filled with beauty and mirror pools and deep quiet. A work of removal and accretion, the work of Water moving through and out of Rock.

We are an impatient race. What work is God doing beneath our feet, unknown to us, over the decades of our own lives and over the centuries of the life of the City of Zion? What caverns of beauty will be revealed to us in that Day when we shall see clearly and know as we are known? What shapes are being carved out of our stony hearts by the slow but relentless movement through them of the water of life?

The Ten Commandments

2006-04-02T07:48:00.000-04:00

I have had a wonderful opportunity to think upon the Decalogue over the past several weeks, while discussing the Commandments in Kairos and our high school Bible study. How deep is God's wisdom, how searching his words! Here in these ancient instructions lie hidden deep truths about God, man, and our place in the creation. These commandments set themselves apart from the cultic and civil law of Israel by addressing the very foundations of our existence and our relatedness to God and other persons and things. They begin at the beginning, with the questions of who we are, where did we come from, and what is reality? Then, what is wrong with us, and how should we then live? They rough out a sketch of human life in a created world in which everything matters, and persons most of all. Without an understanding illuminated by this light, the world would seem dark indeed.

Then God spoke all these words, saying, "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
(Exo 20:1-17 NASB)

Fertile questions:

What assumptions about the world in which we live underly the commandment?
What is it about us that makes the commandment necessary?
What would perfect compliance with the commandment look like?

"Speaking of Faith"

2006-04-01T08:09:00.000-05:00

I recently discovered this very interesting podcast site. (In fact, I only just discovered the convenience of podcasts!) The hostess, Krista Tippet, may or may not be a Christian; I cannot tell from my listening so far, and have not explored it. However, she is a very respectful and sympathetic interviewer, without any discernable agenda or running subtext so common in programs about "faith" per se. She seems to be exploring the interface of religion and culture. She asks good questions, does not attack her interviewees, and is not eager to insert her own views. I have listened to programs on the gods of business, Einstein's god and his ethics, the Mohammad cartoon controversy, and Israeli and Palestinian narratives of the middle East conflict. All quite interesting. Check it out. It's free - including the podcasts - at the site above.

More Than We Ask

2006-01-30T08:12:00.000-05:00

In Genesis Chapter 18, Abraham contends with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Some commentators think that he was particularly concerned about his nephew Lot, and his family, whom he knew to be living in the plain cities. Abraham dares to importune God, and the angel of God agrees to spare the city if ten righteous men are found in it.

In Chapter 19, we see the Angels arriving in Sodom to rescue Lot and his family from the coming destruction. Verse 29 notes that, "God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot lived." God was not obligated to do this. As there were not ten righteous men in the city, he would have been completely justified in overthrowing both cities without rescuing the family of Abraham. Yet, though Abraham did not articulate it, God understood his unspoken concern for his family. As a loving father he granted not the prayer that Abraham articulated, but instead satisfied the desires of his heart.

I find this very comforting, and a great encouragement to prayer. Though we should always aim to communicate clearly with God, just as we aim to communicate clearly with each other, yet we should not worry that God will misunderstand us. He knows the desires of our hearts. He knows these desires better than we do. He loves those desires, or those portions of our desires, that are good and that correspond to his desires. These he grants; these he owns as being prayed in his name. He answers our prayers beyond the particularities that we may impose upon them. He gives us even better than we ask for.

Today is the feast of Epiphany

2006-01-06T09:03:00.000-05:00

One feature of Mission St. Claire's Daily Office site (that presents each day's prayer service from the Book of Common Prayer) is a brief explanation of the traditional Church Calendar. (A wise friend once noted that, if we ignore the Church calendar, we will fall back to the Hallmark calendar. Only too true...).
Today is Epiphany. Here, from St. Claire's site, is an explanation.

On this day we celebrate the holy Epiphany of our Lord and God and Savior
Jesus Christ.
In all the holy churches of God we celebrate today the holy
Epiphany of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ and from evening onwards we
keep a vigil because when the Lord completed His thirtieth year on earth He
wanted to make Himself known to people that He is God in body. When the Lord was
being baptized by John, he was revealed in voice by God the Father from above
and by the coming of the Holy Spirit to be true God and consubstantial with the
Father. From that time onwards it was made known to all through miracles and His
excellent teaching that He certainly is the God who was openly preached by the
prophets.
He came to baptism for such a reason: When the Lord became man for
us, he fulfilled the whole law throughout His whole life. John on the other hand
came from the desert and was baptizing in river Jordan according to what God had
told him and to the order and law of God, as Luke the evangelist says (Luke
3,2). That is why the Lord wishing to fulfil even this word as divine law, after
he completed thirty years of age, He went to John the Baptist to be baptized as
the rest of men did, although he had no need of baptism being sinless. John
respecting the Lord and thinking of his own worthlessness said: "I have need to
be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?" But the Lord encourages and moves
John to baptize Him, showing that what he thinks to be improper is most proper,
i.e. the Lord to be baptized by the servant. That is why He told him: "Suffer it
to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness". According to
the divine Chrysostomos righteousness is here called by the Lord the perfection
of all the commandments (in his homily on baptism), i.e. it is as if He says:
because I have perfected all the commandments of divine law, this is the only
one that is left, that is why I have to perfect it, too.
This is when John
gave up his objections. So, when the Lord was baptized by him, he immediately
rose from the water and behold! The heavens opened and John saw the Spirit of
God descending like a dove and going to Jesus. But even a voice from heavens
above was heard saying: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased".
From this it was made obvious to the Jews that John was not greater than Jesus,
according to the false conviction held by many, but that he was incomparably
lower than Him and that he was His servant. That is why the Spirit descending
addressed the Father's voice to Jesus and obviously showed as if pointing out
with the finger that "This is my beloved Son" was not said about John the
Baptist, although he was glorified and accepted by many, but it was said about
Jesus who was being baptized. When the Lord had completed this legal commandment
of baptism as well, He broke the curse which had been put on Adam because he had
broken the Divine law and, delivering us from condemnation, he brought every
ceremonial law to and end from that time onwards lifting them up to a more
spiritual and perfect level. Following this He discontinued the Jewish baptism
and gave to us, the faithful, the commandment to be baptized with the baptism of
the three immersions and immersions, which has the grace of the Holy Spirit that
was absent from John's baptism. Because, when the Lord had been baptized in that
same river, he completed the shadowy and imperfect baptism and opened the gates
of the spiritual and divine baptism of the Church.

Cast into the deep

2006-01-05T08:38:00.000-05:00

Today's Daily Office includes readings from Jonah and Exodus.

The chariots of Pharoah and his army has he hurled into the sea the finest of
those who bear armor have been drowned in the Red Sea.
The fathomless deep
has overwhelmed them; *they sank into the depths like a stone. (Exodus 15)
You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood
surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, “I
am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?”
The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around
my head at the roots of the mountains. (Jonah 2)

Jonah experienced the same terror as Pharaoh's army. The experience, viewed from without and even, largely, from within... was the same. Overwhelming, dark, stifling. Yet, Jonah still hopes in and praises God. Therein, his experience is different even before he is manifestly rescued.

I called to the Lord out of my distress,and he answered me; out of the belly
of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to
you, into your holy temple.

Remarkable.

Monasticism Anyone?

2005-12-18T06:45:00.000-05:00

As I contemplate the problems of our culture, secular and ecclesiastical,I find myself wondering increasingly whether an answer lies in monasticism. One problem is that I am not even sure what that means. Though I am from a Catholic background, I have had no exposure to monks or monasteries. What ideas I have probably come mostly from fictional accounts, and perhaps from "How the Irish Saved civilization" and Merton's "Seven Story Mountain," both read years ago. More specifically, though this page is named after a poem named after a Protestant religious community, I know almost nothing about such communities except that they almost universally failed in one or two generations. The nearby Ephrata cloisters are a case in point. A lovely tourist attraction, but no living community. There's a Moravian girls' school in Lititz, but apparently no Moravians.

Can anyone point me to any sites or books that discuss the foundational ideas of Protestant monasticism, especially of communities that survived for some time? I have found the following sites so far, but they don't provide much detail about the foundations:

Madman with bombs

2005-12-16T08:11:00.000-05:00

I am always puzzled when I read commentaries like this one from Charles Krauthammer. There is an almost frantic tone of issuing a wake-up call, but one has to ask, wake up to what action? So there is a mad man in charge of Iran. He's about to obtain nuclear weapons. He was democratically elected. He paints, "Israel must be obliterated" on his missiles. So what are we supposed to do about this?

He acknowledges that the chances of anything happening in the United Nations is nil. Yet we are supposed to support the United Nations, and our lack of enthusiastic participation so far, or our taking measures into our own hands when the United Nations fails to act, has been considered bad behavior. We could bomb their nuclear facilities, as is Israel's wont, or take out their president in an assassination, but these would constitute military actions and lead to a war. But war is bad. It seems to me that if we do anything except ask very nicely in the United Nations, the same commentators will take us to task for militarism or being cowboys, and will start publishing the American body count on day two.

The same issue occurs with respect to a bad conscience about our actions or inactions in Rwanda. We feel badly, and wring our hands about standing by while Rwandans killed Rwandans, but what were we supposed to have done? The United Nations acted as the United Nations always acts. Nothing else could have been realistically expected. Does anyone really think that Americans would have tolerated the sending of American troops to rescue black Rwandans? Do we think that it would have been a quick in and out operation? Really, the murderers are on the street with their machetes, and what kind of effective action could have been taken other than sending troops?

I would love to know what Charles Krauthammer thinks we should actually do about the Iranian President.

First Impressions of "Narnia"

2005-12-11T07:15:00.000-05:00

Remember that unlike "Lord of the Rings" these were written for children and emphasize a child's sensibilities. "Always winter but never Christmas" exemplifies this difference. What could "Christmas" possibly mean to Narnians? Nothing, but it speaks concisely to a child's heart. If you are expecting "Lord of the Rings" you will cringe when Father Christmas shows up in a sleigh with reindeer, but that is in the book. One of the lead characters is a talking beaver, after all.

All this to say, the movie is faithful to the book in both content and tone, and the depiction of atoning sacrifice is clear. Aslan does not fly (as he does in the book) which is probably a good thing. He sounds like Liam Neeson which is OK, but a less recognizable voice may have been better. The talking animals were spotty: the beavers worked, the fox and wolves not as well. This probably has as much to do with the physical structure of beaver and canine skulls and jaws as with the animators' prowess; beaver faces are more human in proportion so their mouths can more convincingly mimic human speech.

The battle scenes also work. The gore of the Middle Earth battles is absent, as it should be in a children's movie, yet the scenes are well choreographed and engaging. The final battle between Jadis and Peter is especially well done, and demonstrates the cold masterfulness of the queen.

Overall, I predict success and sequels. If anything, this movie is more faithful to Lewis' book than Jackson's to Tolkein's.

Rice on our Mid-East Policy

2005-12-11T07:08:00.000-05:00

See here for an interesting take on our foreign policy in middle east. Comments?

"Left Behind" and the problem with targums

2005-12-03T09:16:00.000-05:00

Rev 22:18-19 NASB
(18) I testify to everyone who hears the words of the
prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues
which are written in this book;
(19) and if anyone takes away from the words
of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life
and from the holy city, which are written in this book.

This would chill me to the bone if I were an author of the "Left Behind" series. Considering the fact that those authors certainly know this verse, I must conclude that they don't consider their several-volume expansive interpretation of Revelation, Thessalonians, Daniel and Ezekiel to be an addition or subtraction to the prophecy entrusted to John and thence to us. This despite the fact that they know, or should know, that for millions of people their books, and the movies, are the only interpretation of these texts they are likely to hear. The very title of the series, "Left Behind," is a substantial addition to the account of the so-called Rapture in the letters to Thessalonica, neither of which speak of anyone being left behind at Jesus' second coming, nor shows any concern at all to describe what, exactly, happens to the unsaved at that event. They go on to add volumes of speculative detail to events that are described apocalyptically and poetically in the text delivered to us through the Apostle.

The subtraction effected by the "Left Behind" series is more subtle but even more real: the narrowing of the imagination of God's people to this single elaborate account of the end times. I have taught the Revelation to adults several times over the last years, and believe me that this series has constricted their view of the future deeply and definitively. When they read Revelation, they do not wonder what it means, they do not engage their faculties of understanding of poetry and metaphor. No, they already know what it means. They've seen it at the movies.

But here I am most interested in the question, why does God find it necessary to explicitly prohibit the addition or subtraction of words to or from his revelation? And what does he mean by addition and subtraction?

Perhaps at one level God here prohibits the addition of fake text, of additional chapters or episodes. This is, no doubt, quite important. We can't have men or women adding their own uninspired text to the body of scripture and passing it off as inspired. Why not? This may seem like a silly question but, really, why not? Is it not because we need to preserve the ability to trace the expressed thoughts back to God, who is authoritative and sovereign, or to man, who is not?

What about expansive interpretations? Do they constitute additions in the sense proscribed?

This is a more difficult question, but we can at least begin with the need to preserve the distinguishability between God's words and the interpreter's ideas. This is admittedly not always a bright, clean line. All translation involves interpretation, which of course is why we generally require our preachers to read the original languages. Idioms, especially, require interpretation from one language or culture to another. Nevertheless, translation does not generally or frequently require expansion to be faithful to the original, and a translator seeks to match form with form, content with content, and connotation with connotation. There is a general one-to-one correspondence, and in this sense a translation is not inherently an expansion.

In "Colossians Remixed," Walsh and Keesmaat offer an expansive interpretation that they consider to be a "targum" of Colossians. They explain on page 38 that this is a form of interpretation arising during the Jewish diaspora, in which the rabbis did not simply translate the text, but "would update the text, apply it to the changing context, and put it into contemporary idiom." An accompanying footnote explains that a targum "could be commentary as well as translation, and impose a comprehensive interpretation on the original Hebrew." (p. 41) It is these latter aspects that may cause targa to fall afoul of the "no additions" mandate, in my opinion.

The fundamental problem that I believe underlies God's warning is that additions are subtractions. When one "imposes" such a "comprehensive interpretation" upon the text, it certainly can and often does exclude other appropriate interpretations that the reader, especially the Spirit-enlightened reader, might otherwise bring to it. It dominates and directs the imagination. It does so, I would submit, in proportion as it is an expansion; the more extensive the examples and cultural specificities supplied by the interpreter, the more restrictive is the targum to the reader's own mind.

Writers of targums (targa?) might object that the reader knows that their targum is merely an interpretation and hence not authoritative. Perhaps. I suspect the authors of "Left Behind" offer the same defense. What, in my opinion, makes them more pernicious than straightforward commentary is that they take the same form as the underlying scripture, and thereby enter the reader's mind by the same door as the scriptures would, and gain status thereby, so to speak. I think this is dangerous ground for any teacher to tread upon.

Ayotte

2005-12-01T07:37:00.000-05:00

Not much time to write this AM, but let me make a few observations about abortion and minor consent from the point of view of a physician practicing emergency medicine for 25 years.

Current law forbids my touching a minor even to treat her sore throat without parental consent.
The two exceptions are a) the existence of any medical emergency that requires action before consent can be obtained, and b) a minor who is pregnant or has been pregnant, who is considered "emancipated"
Though I may treat the true emergency as clinically necessary, I must also be making an effort to inform the parents, except in the case of the emancipated minor
I see complications of pregnancy all the time. I have never seen one that required an emergency abortion. In the first trimester, the health-threatening conditions all involve fetal demise in any case, and treatment consists of" cleaning up" after the miscarriage or tubal pregnancy. This is true in the second trimester also, where complications involve the placental apparatus for the most part, or a weak cervix, both of which primarily threaten the baby's life. In the 3rd trimester, there are conditions like pre-eclampsia that do threaten the mothers life, but these are treatable by delivery of a now-viable baby.
The only maternal health issue that does not involve an inevitable fetal demise is "mental health." To my mind, these are precisely the cases in which parents need to be involved.

Gotta run.

The Empire and Postmodernism.

2005-11-29T08:11:00.000-05:00

Though I believe the empire against which we struggle is Babylon, yet it is true that at this time and place (the West in the 21st century) Babylon is utilizing global consumerism as a tool of empire. Elsewhere, such as in the Islamic states, she uses other tools, older ones perhaps. But Walsh and Keesmaat are concerned with the West, so let us go forward and continue to follow their argument.

Empires seek stability by influencing every aspect of life, especially the intellectual and creative lives of its subjects. This can be seen in recent empires' concerns to control the curricula in schools, in the Hitler Youth movement, and the state-approved art of the USSR, the Third Reich and the Cultural Revolution. All these examples may seem obvious, and crude, because they are not our current culture and so can be seen by us more objectively.

If global consumerism is the economic structure of the empire, postmodernism is its intellectual structure. Postmodernism "on the street" is a deep-seated skepticism of all grand metanarratives, all grand stories or accounts that claim to organize or explain all of life. It is the doubt that truth is knowable, perhaps even the doubt whether Truth exists at all. Instead of believing or acting out of the convictions of a single metanarrative, the postmodern individual notes the existence of a plurality of differing organizing stories. He or she feels free to choose among them, even to the extent of picking them apart and selecting an account of origins from one and an account of sexuality from another. It is like mixing and matching clothing and accessories at the mall. In this way it is the perfect match to global consumerism. It is, in a sense, a "marketplace of ideas," or global consumerism of the mind. Furthermore, just as no one is expected to commit to one outfit or one laptop or one cellphone brand, so it is seen as backward and naive to commit to any particular philosophy or metanarrative combo as finally authoritative.

In all this, I think W and K are right on. Postmodernism is the official and sanctioned philosophy of the empire in these her Western provinces. A large portion of the book is devoted to exploring how the truth claims of God's kingdom can be brought forward in a manner comprehensible to a postmodern citizen of the empire. As I am not myself a postmodern man, I found this portion of the book most challenging. More on this later...

Who is the Emperor?

2005-11-28T10:22:00.000-05:00

Perhaps I was reminded of Plato when I read Colossians Remixed because the latter is, explicitly in places, a dialogue. The book is structured as a possible response to the questions or problems of four real people, William, Elanna , Eric and Anthony, all young postmodernists. At times, the authors address anticipated objections through explicit, Socratic-style dialogue with a fictional reader. These dialogues are very well done, and generally put the finger right on the objection that was forming in my mind. They did not set up straw men.

They begin with a premise that underlies the subtitle of the book: we, like Paul and Jesus, live in an empire. Our empire is cybernetic globalism, which involves consumerism, global corporations, militarism, and technological optimism. Like Rome, like all empires, our empire claims allegiance on the basis of its being the source of peace and all that is good in our lives, and extends its images and its viewpoint into every aspect of life. It is totalitarian and ultimate. It takes the place and claims the honors that rightly belong only to God.

This conceptualization of the consumerist culture of global capitalism is a very fruitful one, allowing all sorts of useful insights into our lives in the West today. I plan to think more deeply on the ramifications of this idea, and perhaps thereby fulfill, at least partly, Walsh and Keesmaat's purpose in writing this book. Nevertheless, there is a problem with drawing a parallel between the Roman Empire and global consumer capitalism. They are not in the same category. They cannot be made analogous.

Rome was an actual empire. The word "empire" has a tangible, geopolitical meaning, and Rome -- and Assyria, and Babylon, the Soviet Union and 19th Century Britain -- were empires in this sense. These had a hierarchical structure with a single sovereign at the top, even if that sovereign was an elected one. They had specific domains. They had an identifiable imperial army. They had specific written laws. In short, they were specific instances of a human sovereign having dominion over a specific, if broad, geographical territory.

Global capitalism is a different sort of thing, even if it has some of the same features. It is an "ism", so to speak. Communism is also not an empire, though it also shares features of totalism and manipulation of images and imagination. Global capitalism and communism are one sort of thing, empire is another sort of thing. Indeed, an actual empire, like ancient Rome or the British empire, may be globally capitalistic while another, like the old USSR, may be communistic.

This may seem like a quibble, but it is not. How one relates to a thing is limited by what sort of thing it is. Paul could, and did, appeal to Caesar. This was not merely symbolic, or metaphorical, but actual, because Rome was an actual empire. Who is the emperor of global consumer capitalism? If W and K had explicitly identified the Empire as the United States, the analogy to Rome would have been better, but it would have narrowed the scope of their critique.

A solution that occurs to me, that they approach occasionally but do not develop, and which I believe is quite biblical, is that the idea of totalitarian empire, of which Rome was an instance, and which our western culture and various eastern and communist cultures are instances, comes from the ancient enemy of God's kingdom, Mystery Babylon. Both Peter and John make explicit connections between their Rome and the ancient whore. If one examines the world's lament over fallen Babylon in Revelation, one finds all the totalitarianism and commercial features that W and K find in Rome and in our culture. If this is so, if the empire is today, and always has been, Babylon, then we have identified an emperor, one with many heads just as we may see today, perhaps.

So why didn't W and K take it to Babylon? I suspect because that would shift the reader 's focus to the heavenly or spiritual realms, and they wish to focus on earth, in a geopolitical sense. This, I fear, is an overreaction to a perceived unbalanced dualism that emphasizes the heavenly and spiritual over the earthly and physical. The biblical stories emphasize both. We struggle in both worlds. Paul struggled "not against flesh and blood" but against principalities and powers, yet a flesh and blood Roman soldier lopped off his head.

Subverting the Empire...

2005-11-26T12:48:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Walsh and Keesmaat's Colossians Remixed. (Subverting the Empire.) This is a book that warrants a second reading, not merely because it is relevant, but because its argument is complex and carefully constructed and hence its truthfulness is not immediately apparent, at least to me. Reading the book, I felt the same sense of being led to a particular foreseeable conclusion, by a series of questionable concessions, as I feel when reading Plato's dialogues. At each pivotal point, I feel that the argument has been a little contrived, that the theoretical choices have been oversimplified and therefore somewhat narrowed. Coming to the conclusion, one wants to backtrack and perhaps contest more carefully a point that one had granted while feeling just a little uncomfortable with the choices offered or with the accuracy of the underlying assumptions.

In any case, I want to go back now and carefully scrutinize their argument. I hope to reflect on that scrutiny here.

A Prayer of Confession

2005-11-20T08:10:00.000-05:00

From the Daily office of 11/18/05:

Let us confess our sins against God and our neighbor.

Most holy and merciful Father:We confess to you and to one another,and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth,that we have sinned by our own fault in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.

We have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind, and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not forgiven others, as we have been forgiven.
Have mercy on us, Lord.

We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us. We have not been true to the mind of Christ. We have grieved your Holy Spirit.
Have mercy on us, Lord.

We confess to you, Lord, all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives,
We confess to you, Lord.

Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people,
We confess to you, Lord.

Our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves,
We confess to you, Lord.

Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, and our dishonesty in daily life and work,
We confess to you, Lord.

Our negligence in prayer and worship, and our failure to commend the faith that is in us,
We confess to you, Lord.

Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty,
Accept our repentance, Lord.

For all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us,
Accept our repentance, Lord.

For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us,
Accept our repentance, Lord.

Restore us, good Lord, and let your anger depart from us;
Favorably hear us, for your mercy is great.

Accomplish in us the work of your salvation,
That we may show forth your glory in the world.
By the cross and passion of your Son our Lord,
Bring us with all your saints to the joy of his resurrection.

Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us all our sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen us in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep us in eternal life. Amen.

This prayer of confession appeared in the Daily office at Mission St. Clare a few days ago. I presume it is from The Book of Common Prayer. How wonderful it would be if such a comprehensive and searching prayer were a regular part of most of our evangelical Protestant churches. What beautiful babies were thrown out with the Roman bathwater...

Intelligent Design: Not a Theory

2005-11-18T10:59:00.000-05:00

Though I lament the derogatory tone of this Krauthammer editorial in the Washington Post, I believe he is right on. Intelligent design, which I believe to be true and correct, is not a scientific theory but rather a conclusion, drawn by many scientists, based on certain logical inconsistencies in the natural selection account of origins and also by remarkable coincidences found in both quantum physics and astrophysics.. As such, it should be taught in the schools. The fact that the data leads some world-famous scientists like Paul Davies to suggest that a cosmic designer does exist is out there and addressed by other world-famous scientists like Stephen Hawking. This is a conversation going on at the highest level of scientific philosophical discourse. Just read A Brief History of Time or any other of Hawking's coffee table books and you will find the question of a designer god in every chapter, and sometimes on every page. He is not arguing with the Kansas Board of Education, but with the likes of Paul Davies. They are not arguing about a theory, but about a conclusion. See my comment here.

It is disingenuous to say that this conflict was initiated by ID advocates. The reason these mandates from school boards arise at all is because fear of litigation by the likes of the ACLU has squelched all discussion in the classroom of the theistic conclusions or presuppositions that real scientists like Davies or Hawking ... or Behe...consider every day. It is safe for a teacher to say that natural selection based on unguided, random mutations explains all that needs to be explained about origins. They could even teach Francis Crick's conclusion of "panspermia", (the idea that space aliens seeded Earth with DNA and whatever was needed to jump-start life on this planet.) But they get sued for discussing the conclusion, actually drawn by many prominent and working scientists, that the data itself suggests purpose and even manipulation by nonrandom, non-chance agencies, because such agencies smack of "God" and hence may not be discussed in school. It is this prior stifling of any discourse with any religious content that leads school boards to feel the need to explicitly endorse or even mandate the discussion of Intelligent Design. If public school discourse were really free and open, the discussion of the possibility of an intelligent creator, a discussion that has engaged the minds of the best scientists for centuries, would be part of every upper-level science curriculum.

Waste Land Limericks...

2005-11-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

Hannah Eagleson has alerted me to Wendy Cope's translation of Eliot's The Wasteland into limerick form. It's a hoot.

Of other flocks and grafted vines

2005-11-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

(Joh 10:16 NASB) "I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd.

This verse has always captured my imagination. As a young Christian reading C.S. Lewis's fiction, I thought of other creations on other worlds, like Malacandra or Narnia. How exciting to have fellowship with other persons with substantially different histories and cultures, discovering the elements of truth vouchsafed to them and peculiarly brought forth in their own stories! What a sumptuous feast for the soul!

Later I came to understand that our Lord was most likely and most proximally speaking of the gentile nations. For a fan of fantasy and science fiction, this was at first a letdown. However, on deeper consideration I find it just as exciting. The cultures of the various Earth peoples and nations are strikingly different. They partake of vastly different cultural and intellectual histories. They have seen the work of God through different lenses. The feast will not be diminished even if all the fare comes only from the gardens of Earth.

Hence my aggravation as I continue to hear the currently popular teaching that, to properly understand God's word and world, we must return primarily, even solely, to the thought patterns and philosophical viewpoint of the ancient Hebrews. There is no doubt of the importance of God's initial self-revelation to this particular people in this particular language, just as there is no doubt that we must begin our study of the Messiah with God's word to Eve about her seed. But to begin at a place is not necessarily to end there, or to remain there. It seems particularly clear to me that God reveals himself progressively, and that He is and always was Lord of all the earth and all its history of all its peoples. He intended from the beginning to bring all the nations into his flock, and has therefore troubled himself all along to direct their particular cultural histories no less sovereignly than he did Israel's.

Not being vintners or nurserymen, we too easily misunderstand what grafting involves. A grafted branch indeed draws its life from the stem and root. But it bears fruit unique to its own nature, its own originating variety. Indeed, this is the purpose of grafting in the first place: To produce fruit with certain desirable characteristics that are not found in the native variety. A neighbor of mine used to graft walnut trees. He would begin with a locally native seedling, whose roots are suited to this soil and climate but whose nuts are unremarkable, even bitter. He would then graft the top of another seedling whose roots were weak or disease prone, but whose fruit was large and sweet. These branches would draw their life from the strong roots of the native stock, and the tree would grow tall and strong. The fruit, however, bore the flavor brought by the grafted-on branches.

I think we miss much of the intended richness of God's Kingdom by dismissing ideas brought into it by its grafted branches and conjoined flocks. God surely knew, for example, that Alexander would bring the richness of Greek thought into contact with Israel centuries before the coming of Messiah, so that the earliest branches grafted in would bear its flavor. Was it unintended by God that Augustine would imbibe of Plato through Plotinus prior to being grafted in and so, directly and indirectly through his influence on such giants as Aquinas, imparting that flavor through two centuries of Christian thought? I doubt it. Instead, I think God continues to shed light upon our understanding as each grafted branch brings its peculiar insights into the Kingdom. What else are the kings bringing into the Holy City?

Rev 21:23-24 NASB
(23) And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.
(24) The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.

Paris burning

2005-11-07T09:08:00.000-05:00

This is deeply disturbing, as it suggests to me that a very deep fault in European culture is beginning to slip. Insofar as many of these minorities are likely of Islamic background, it supports Gideon Strauss's contention that two of the five top issues for God's people at this moment in history are modern liberalism and Salafiyyah Islam.

No good divorces...

2005-11-06T08:15:00.000-05:00

Generation X is continuing to debunk the myths of their parents the Boomers. In this article in the Washington Post, Elizabeth Marquardt debunks the myth of the "good" (amicable) divorce.She concludes:

Those of us who grew up in the first era of widespread divorce have a new sobriety about it. Yes, sometimes divorce is necessary, but the uncomfortable truth our culture has been hiding for too long is that often it's not, and there is definitely no such thing as a "good" divorce. If parents must divorce, it's good to get along afterward. But people in high-conflict marriages aren't usually successful at "good" divorce (divorce doesn't typically bring out great new communication and cooperation skills). Couples in low-conflict marriages may manage a so-called "good" divorce, but many of them could also manage to, well, stay married and spare themselves and their children a lot of pain.
This sobriety is emerging in movies, in studies, on blogs. I'm convinced there's more to come. Our generation's story needs to be told, because our society still strongly wants to deny just how devastating divorce really is. Too many people imagine that modern divorce is another variation on ordinary family life. Sure, there may be some discomfort, but doesn't childhood stay basically the same?
The answer is no.

I am encouraged.

"In Heaven"

2005-11-03T11:13:00.000-05:00

I like watching pendulums (pendula, whatever). As I sit here I am watching the stately beat of the pendulum of our 1915 neo-Gothic grandfather's clock, and the slightly faster pendulum of an old regulator wall clock. However, I do not like being on a pendulum, whether an amusement park ride or a theological trend. It makes my head swim. I want to puke.

I do not believe truth is itself dialectical, though we often go at it as though it were. In the church, if we feel that there is a trend or a popular notion that is in error or insufficient, we tend to counter it by taking a stand that is just as far from the truth, but in the opposite direction. We justify this behavior as a type of balancing, and it often "works" in the sense that the mass of believers will come to be distributed between the two extremes and hence be "closer" to the truth. Problem is, this method requires distortion or overstatement, both of which are in themselves lies even if the effect is to temper an opposing error or lie.

For example, I have often heard it said at missions conferences that, "God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, no mouth but our mouths." Now, I understand the purpose of this saying, but it just ain't so! Some hearers will accept it as true, distorting their understanding of God's sovereignty and his great commission.

Lately, I have been hearing two ideas that are being stated as if they were established truth, but seem to be really counterweights offered against popular ideas that are perceived as unbalanced. One is monism or physicalism with respect to the nature of man, offered against a naive body-spirit dualism that is believed to lead to pietism or gnosticism. The other is the idea that there is no heaven-as-reward taught in the scriptures, which is offered to balance a perceived overemphasis on the afterlife to the neglect of this world in this life. I have heard it said, "The Bible doesn't teach that believers go to heaven when they die." Or, more carefully perhaps, "The Bible doesn't call us to seek heaven as a reward, but rather to seek God's kingdom on earth." This latter is subtle. It creates a tension, an opposition, between seeking rewards in heaven and seeking the penetration of God's kingdom on earth. Jesus seems to know nothing about this tension, and urged both explicitly.

The link above will take you to a list of all the verses containing the phrase, "in heaven." With regard to this issue,check out the verses from the New Testament, near the end of the list.

Focus Entails Elimination

2005-10-30T16:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, at a conference featuring Steve Garber and Byron Borger, we noted that the Biblical concept of knowledge includes, necessarily, responsibility to and care for the beloved, and is not simply rational or abstract or detached "head knowledge." We watched U2's music video "Numb," and noted that the modern glut of information coming at us from all sides has the effect of deadening our concern for any of it. It is easy to say that we should be personally involved, and should care for that about which we have knowledge, but it seems that today we are presented with so much information that it is manifestly impossible for a human being to care about all of it.

Perhaps we need to make a distinction between knowledge and acquaintance, to preserve the deep Biblical concept of "yada," Hebrew for "knowledge." We are simply "acquainted" with those myriad facts or ideas that enter our eyes or ears each day in this modem world, but about which we care nothing. We might say that we only "know" those persons or ideas about which we care and with which we are personally involved. All the rest is not knowledge but mere acquaintance.

It would follow that a person who is truly knowledgeable in this Biblical sense, is therefore truly concerned and involved. It also explains the moral dimension that the Bible attributes to both knowledge and ignorance, in which knowledge is virtuous and ignorance blameable. It is hard to see how head-knowledge, in the modern abstract and detached sense, could be anything but morally neutral. But if knowledge necessarily entails responsibility and care for the known, then increasing knowledge means becoming increasingly responsible and involved, and ignorance means irresponsibility and carelessness.

There remains the problem of focus. Given that we are deluged with information, how do we select which items will enlarge our knowledge and which should remain facts about which we are merely acquainted? This selection process, it seems to me, is a matter of "attention" and is analogous to our normal human sensory function of the same name.

As you sit reading this, the nerves carrying sensory information from your trunk and extremities, your ears and nose and even some of your internal organs, are all still functioning, sending information continually to your central nervous system (CNS). You are ignoring nearly all of it. Even in your visual field , as you look at these words, you are getting visual input from the edges of your monitor. Perhaps you can see the keyboard at the bottom of your visual field. But the attention function of your CNS is filtering out all the data that isn't pertinent to your reading this article.If you wish, without moving a muscle, you can note the precise position of the fingers on your left hand, or the sounds coming from outside, or the fullness of your bladder. If you do, you will decrease the attention you are devoting to the reading.

Attention -- focus--entails elimination. Persons with attention deficit disorder have difficulty ignoring sensory input that is not pertinent to the task at hand. Even those without such disorder regularly eliminate distracting elements from their environment when they wish to focus. We understand this. The crowd is hushed as the golf champion makes his putt.

I would suggest that in this modern age, if we wish to truly know the things and persons that should be known, we will have to do some eliminating. This elimination will not be the same for everyone, of course. Perhaps less time reading the paper. Less time on the computer. Less time with the cell phone on. Less time reading and more time praying, thinking and doing.

Notes on the Lord's Prayer

2005-10-25T13:06:00.000-04:00

At Kairos, we are studying the Lord's prayer. This will take you to some notes on the first words, "Our Father" .

"First Things": The Journal

2005-10-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

My son recently gave me a gift subscription to "First Things," a publication of an organization called The Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City, whose purpose is, "to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." I am finding it very interesting, reading almost every article in each issue, which is unusual for me. The articles are scholarly but approachable for the well educated generalist. It is edited by Richard John Neuhaus and has a distinctly Catholic flavor which may put off some on-fire Protestants. Recent contributors include Antonin Scalia, Avery Cardinal Dulles and John Haldane.

One of the things I appreciate is that First Things now puts its past issues online in their entirety. The website includes a blog by Neuhaus. While I enjoy being able to refer readers to articles online, such publication clearly compromises their ability to sell subscriptions. I would recommend, as a way of materially supporting Christians engaging the culture, that those of us with means to do so patronize journals and artists by actually purchasing their work if we find it good and would like to see more of it.

Amen

2005-10-22T11:27:00.000-04:00

What a wonderful word is "Amen."

The Daily Office used by the Northumbria community and printed in Celtic Daily Prayer has us pray,

"Who is it that you seek?
We seek the Lord our God.
Do you seek Him with all your heart?
Amen. Lord have mercy.
Do you seek Him with all your soul?
Amen. Lord have mercy.
Do you seek Him with all your mind?
Amen. Lord have mercy.
Do you seek Him with all your strength?
Amen, Christ have mercy."

How could we answer an unqualified "yes" to these questions? I do not even know what is the real extent of my whole heart, soul, mind and strength. I doubt that I have ever applied myself entirely to anything. I know, not only from scripture but also by experience, that my heart is deceitful.

Yet I wish it were not so. I would like to be better than I am. As I kneel and consider the query, "Do you seek Him with all your heart?" I say, "Yes, I wish it were so, I want it to be so, but I fear it is not completely so." I say, "Amen", "so be it", "may it be so truly." My affirmation carries within it a petition, an expressed wish that this intention become a reality. It expresses the tension between the now and not yet, the Kingdom that is here and yet still coming, my love that is present but not perfected.

A great word for those living in the Kingdom, on Earth, between the two Comings.

Prayer as Watershed

2005-10-20T14:01:00.000-04:00

(And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.) T.S. Eliot

Heading west from Downingtown on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, one passes a sign that reads,"Now entering Chesapeake Bay watershed." From this point west, until the beginning of the Mississippi watershed, any drop of water -- (or toxic spill) - -that falls to the ground will find its way into the distant Chesapeake Bay, in another state. I find the idea compelling. There is a line, real but invisible, to one side of which all water flows to the Chesapeake, and to the other side of which all flows to the Delaware. The place itself is very nondescript, without any remarkable ridges or elevations apparent. It's just a slight rise in a meadow. It isn't even the highest point between Philadelphia and the Susquehanna. Its nature as a watershed is a function of its elevation relative to its immediate surroundings, and in turn of those surroundings to the terrain surrounding them. The drop of rain falling on that spot doesn't know anything about the extended terrain, yet because of the nature of that terrain will inevitably end up in the Chesapeake, not the Delaware.

As we consider the topic, "Prayer'', in our Kairos study group, I am struck by the extent to which one's approach to prayer reveals the larger topography of his or her conception of reality as a whole. When one begins to talk about prayer, and even more when one sets out to pray indeed, she must confront the shape of her world, as that world is structured and represented in her mind. Is the future fully determined or open? Is the world simply matter-and-energy or is there real personal agency? How does God relate to us? Is He concerned only that we come to desire what He desires, or does He allow our desires to influence His own? What does it mean for God to change His mind? What is the nature of Time, chance and causality? What do we make of the irreducible imprecision of language? Why would God use such a medium?

At the point of prayer one finds practical implications of virtually all theological and philosophical categories and questions. The natures of God, Man and the cosmos. The sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man. What it means to know anything, to hope or desire, to imagine and dream. Time and eternity.

Let us go often into this field, and see how the land lies.

The Daily Office online

2005-10-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

For those of you who enjoy utilizing the Book of Common Prayer in your daily worship, but find it distracting to have to flip back and forth between sections, or find it difficult to decide just where in the church calendar we happen to be just now, here is an easy solution. This site provides the whole morning worship online, (including karaoke music to accompany the hymns!) I pull it up on my handheld tablet, together with E-sword for my prayer-list, and am ready to go.
(By the way, the completely free E-sword is one of the best computer-based Bible resources available. You have to pay a little to load a copyrighted Bible like NASB or NIV, but the searching, commentary indexing and study-note taking features are great. I now use it to develop all my lessons, as well as sermon-notes, etc. Combined with a tablet PC, it's like having a library in one's hands.)

The Call: Chapter 4

2005-07-16T09:33:00.000-04:00

Several brothers and sisters in our Kairos group have decided to read and discuss Os Guinness' The Call. Derek has suggested that we do some journalling based upon our readings, and I thought I might do so here, both because I can type faster than I write, and because, if the journalling is to be somewhat public, then this is a good venue for it.

I thought it interesting that this chapter echos one of the themes I touched on below, that God is a Namer and consequently so are we. God's naming is a type of calling into being;

Thus in the first chapter of Genesis, God called the light "Day" and the darkness he called "Night". This type of calling is far more than labeling...such decisive, creative naming is a form of making. Thus when God called Israel, he named and thereby constituted and created Israel his people. Call is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be. Thus "naming-calling"...is the fusion of being and becoming.

When God calls each of us into being, he calls into being our entire story, our entire life, which according to Ps 139 he sees in its entirety before there is yet one day of it. In this sense, His "call" comes to us simultaneously with our creation, and is always "there" before God. His call is what He has created us to be, and from His perspective does not change, and will certainly be accomplished.

From our perspective, living in these sequential dimensions of time and space, it may appear to us that our "call" changes. I have spent thirty years training to become and then practicing as a physician, and have no doubt that that was my true calling, for those years. It is not clear to me that, for the rest of my life, I am to continue to function primarily as a physician. Perhaps, when God called me forth, he saw me practicing medicine for thirty years and then teaching for twenty.

In this chapter, Guinness elaborates some on what he calls the "Catholic Distortion" of calling. This is the two-tier, higher-lower, sacred-secular, perfect-permitted dualism that sees the life of spiritual contemplation as the highest or most perfect calling, and the life of action in the world as merely permitted and second-grade. He notes that this dualistic view was present at least as early as Eusebius, and is found in Augustine and Aquinas. Luther seems to have rejected it, teaching that "all works are measured before God by faith alone."

While I agree that, so stated, this is a distortion, and one that is very prevalent today, I am always troubled by the ease with which nearly everything that is wrong with the Church can be attributed to some sort of "dualism". Any overemphasis of one end of any concept that exists in a continuum can be critiqued by positing a "dualism" that opposes one extreme to the other in an obvious manner, demonstrating that either extreme, taken alone, is wrong, and therefore that the only things to do are to either affirm the whole continuum equally or to collapse it.

In this section, we seem to be heading toward the idea that no calling is higher than any other. I'm not sure I can agree with that. Perhaps the "higher-lower" dimension runs along a different line than the sacred-secular dimension, but I have no problem acknowledging that Mother Theresa (to take an extreme example) had a higher calling than I, not because her vocation was spiritual and mine secular, but perhaps because hers required a much deeper attained sanctification than mine does. Likewise I honor as doing a higher work than myself those physicians who forego safety, honour and riches to practice among the devastated peoples of Africa or Haiti. I am struck by Paul's noting in Romans that God is free to create some vessels for honour and some for dishonour and destruction, and that suggests to me that He might also create some vessels for particularly high honor and some for less honor.

I think I like Luther's formulation, at least as it appears in this chapter: what matters is the faith with which one's activities are pursued. The value judgement of higher or lower does not attach to the job description itself, but to the person's relationship to God in the doing of it. This is what renders the work straw or stubble or silver or gold, of passing or eternal significance.

The Great Good Place

2005-07-15T18:40:00.000-04:00

Derek Melleby, always concerned to improve my mind, has given me Ray Oldenburg's book, The Great Good Place about so-called "third places" like pubs, cafe's, coffeeshops and barbershops (think Jayber Crow or Malcolm X). I've just begun reading, but it already has me thinking, again, about creating such a place myself. My wife and I own a small house about a quarter mile from our home, at a country crossroads which is in the midst of yet more suburban development, which has attached to it a 1500 square foot building previously operated as a country store. Right now, the house is an income property and the store is used as a shop for renovating the house, and as furniture storage (we rent the house furnished.) It is in walking distance of perhaps a hundred homes, but otherwise not on the way to anything, hence is not an ideal commercial property. For about 80 years it was operated as a store by the family that lived in the house, and the son of that family, now in his 80's himself, operates a small barbershop in one corner of it to this day.

I'm interested in determining what features my readers would consider attractive enough to actually warrant their incorporating into their daily lives some visits to such a place, to meet friends and neighbors. Tomorrow, I plan to create a little five-question interview like the "Books" interview, and answer it myself, then "tag" some others to answer it. Think about it: What kind of place would you actually go to once or thrice a week, spontaneously, on the way home from work or after dinner or on the weekend, to hang out with friends and meet neighbors? What would it take to interest you in such a public, informal place?

Still the best TV ads in a while...

2005-07-15T18:31:00.000-04:00

First seen during Superbowl 2005.

Words

2005-07-15T13:22:00.000-04:00

During our recent visit to San Francisco, my wife and I visited a café and boulangerie in Japan Town each morning for coffee, tea and pastries. One morning a young man with his two- or three-year old son sat at a table near ours, and the little boy kept up a steady stream of age-appropriate babble to his father as he picked apart his pastry and ate the sweetest parts first. I was not listening closely, of course, but I did notice that he interrupted himself twice to say the seemingly random words, “fire truck.” Only then did I notice that, in the background city noise, there was indeed a siren sounding (though it was certainly a police siren.) It had nothing to do with his conversation, and he did not talk about it or seem at all excited, but simply named that sound which he recognized.

During the same trip, down by Ghirardelli’s at the waterfront, a little girl walked by with her family, pointed to a street sign and said, “Golden Gate Bridge”. I looked, and the sign was one that used a stylized logo consisting of one of the pylons and a portion of the main span to symbolize, indeed, the Golden Gate Bridge. She recognized it and named it, addressing no one in particular. No further conversation followed, just the moment of recognition and the name called forth.

These observations brought the memory of an incident that struck me years ago as my wife and I stood by the sidelines of an intramural soccer game, together with other young parents and their young children. It was a still summer evening, and a little girl pointed up into the sky past my ear and said, “Balloon is up.” She said it twice. No one but me heard her or responded, but she did not appear to be seeking a response. She seemed quite satisfied to have made an observation of a hot-air balloon hanging in the sky above us, and having all the words necessary to describe the situation: “Balloon is up.” She turned away to look for other interesting things amidst the grass and blankets.

I remembered wondering at how content she seemed to be with her knowledge of the balloon. It was up. She got it. ‘Nuff said. She had no further questions. She was exercising her human capacity to name things, to attach sounds to objects and ideas. She was delighted as only very small children can be. Her knowledge was sufficient. She had a word for the object, and a word for its relative position, and (though she could hardly yet conceive any of these categories as categories) a word asserting its existence and the predication of its position.

How much more could be thought about the balloon! How many questions could be asked about it! Why does it rise? Because the air inside it is “warm”. Why does “warm” air rise? Which is to ask, what does it mean for air to be “warm”? Why did the maker of the balloon go to such trouble to make it colorful? Why do the people inside want to fly it? So many questions, so many concepts of which the child had no idea, and so was unaware that she had no words for them.

We are those who name. Adam’s first assignment on awakening in Eden was to name the animals. Primitive cultures, and ancient cultures including the Hebrew, attach a much deeper and almost mystical significance to names than do we moderns. To know a name was to know something deep about a thing, and to such knowledge was attached power over the thing named. In some cultures a person would have a public name and also a private name known only to friends and intimates. We see a hint of this in the white stones given to the saints in Revelation, on which is his own name known only to each saint and to God. Names, good names at any rate, contain knowledge and power. I think the ancients were right about this.

In the children I observed the satisfaction and pride we take in naming things, and in attaching words to ideas. Knowing a word for that shape in the sky, for that sound in the background, allows us to appropriate it as our own in some sense. We have a symbolic bin into which to place the memory of the thing, for our own future reference and for communication with others at some distant time or place. The children were appropriately pleased with themselves.

But our fascination with words and our sense of accomplishment in naming things hides from us the great depth of our ignorance. We tend to believe that if we can describe a thing well, using words or other symbols, then we have understood it, we have encompassed it about with our understanding. In what fundamental way is the statement, “The speed of light is the same in all frames of reference” (the kernel of truth underlying Einstein’s special theory of relativity) different from the statement, “The balloon is up”? For me, the working through of Einstein’s premise takes me pretty much to the end of my adult ability to comprehend and express, whereas the observations that satisfied the children are so apparent that I no longer even think to myself, “The balloon is up.” Why do we believe that the understandings and formulations that we construct as adult humans approach knowledge significantly more closely than those of our own children? Can we not easily imagine an intelligence for whom Einstein’s theories are as elementary and apparent as a child’s observation, “Fire-truck”? When we say, “God is eternal”, what, exactly, do we really know about what we are saying?

We must be careful when we use words lest, when we have constructed a complete sentence, we believe like the little girl that we have understood something. We rarely have; we have simply named it or collected a bunch of named concepts to describe it. Such knowledge is indeed wonderful, and is one of the ways in which we share the image of Him who Names, but it is, after all, like a child’s gathering a collection of beautiful smooth stones on a riverbank and feeling that he thereby understands the river.

The Natural Family Manifesto and Liberalism

2005-07-07T19:36:00.000-04:00

In the course of a conversation about liberalism, Caleb Stegall referred me to this Manifesto by Carlson and Mero, as an example of the type of position that he favors, and presumably that he considers non-liberal (since that is the context of the argument). I would recommend it highly.

I believe that Caleb considers this document to be non-liberal because it lists among its goals the limitation of certain "rights" that are currenly enjoyed by members of our American society, such as the right to abortion, to no-fault or easy divorce, and to government-sponsored daycare. If this is so, then I am decidedly non-liberal, as I endorse all the goals in this document. Furthermore, I would suggest that nearly all the folks he has accused of being incurably and unconsciously liberal would endorse this document and its goals. True libertarians, for sure, should have difficulty with this document. But it strikes me as odd that Caleb could have missed that most of those taking issue with him are on record elsewhere as opposing gay marriage, abortion, modern feminism, and divorce. The document's view of capitalism seems muddled; the authors seem to like small-scale, family-business capitalism but not large-scale, corporate and global capitalism. Some of his readers might disagree with the Family Wage concepts discussed therein, but I suspect that most would agree (again, including myself.)

My difficulty with Caleb may be that he seems to find fault with the modern liberal democracy in its processes, and does not distinguish this from its ends. He does not seem to like the process of sitting at a common table with representatives of antagonistic (to the goals of the Manifesto, for example) groups and foregoing coercive methods in favor of seeking consensus, seeming to believe that to procedurally grant equal discursive weight to contradictory beliefs or goals is tantamount to reducing those beliefs or goals to mere preferences or styles. If this is his view, and I am by no means certain that it is, it seems a willful ignorance about the depth of commitment by his blogging colleagues to many of these non-liberal, rights-limiting goals of political discourse and action.

This manifesto uses the formula, "We will...(recognize, allow, empower)." It nowhere states the mechanism by which these changes will be made. It is presumed that the Manifesto envisions such changes in the law of the land to occur through the processes of our modern liberal democracy. Interestingly, it traces the origin of our problem back to the French revolution, but not to our own. Is our own liberal democracy not deeply founded upon the thought of John Locke? It is undoubtedly so. If the Manifesto were to suggest that these changes are to take place through a military coup, or that after gaining political power through the means of liberal democracy we should abolish that democracy, and that process, in favor of rule by the church and an active suppression of dissenting opinion, then I would be against not the Manifesto's goals but its methodology. I see nothing in the Manifesto to suggest that it has anything but the highest regard for the process of modern liberal democracy. It merely makes the assertion that the smallest political unit is the family, not the individual.

This was actually the subject of one of my oral exams (which are really discussions led by the student) at St. John's: whether Locke's system requires the individual to be the smallest unit, or whether its account of government could be developed from some larger unit, such as a family or clan. It was my premise that it could be developed from a presumption of families or clans as the smallest unit. supported by the observation that Locke develops his sytem from individuals already organized as families (as opposed to Hobbes, who sees his state of nature as being mate-in-the-woods and move on.) For Locke, the family and clan were precursors of the larger state, very close to the state of nature, and not identical with the organization of the state of course. (He eschewed the argument for monarchy based on patriarchy). Nevertheless, all such formulations with the family as the smallest unit have difficulty comprehending the renegade individual. Just as biology, while recognizing the organism as a unit in some circumstances, must recognize the cell as a unit in many other circumstances. One cannot ignore the individual cell, simply because all larger tissues are, in one very important sense, simply organized collections of them. About half of us will die from the consequences of a single cell losing control of itself and escaping from the surveillance of the collective's systems to replicate itself, commandeer resources, and ultimately destroy the whole organization (cancer.)

Anyway, the Manifesto is an excellent document, somewhat simplistic perhaps in some of its macroeconomic ideas. The rights it proposes to curtail are not rights of access to the "public square", or to a "seat at the table", but only "rights" to behave in certain ways or to have one's property taxed or not taxed based on one's position in society and families. All this seems to me to be totally consistent with Locke's system, and hence with the modern liberal democracy, with the sole exception that this document asserts (though without working it out) that the family, not the individual, is the smallest political unit. Perhaps it is therefore crypto-patriarchal, but I don't think so. I'd like to see someone work through, as I tried at St. John's, a representative form of government based upon families. Would adult unmarried children vote? If so, would they have to vote like their father? Mother? If not, isn't this individualistic?

The Books tag.

2005-07-06T17:31:00.000-04:00

Derek Melleby has tagged me to answer the Books questionaire...

How many books do you own?
Counting only books on the shelves or on the floor next to shelves (ie, not in cartons in the attic), and only books thick enough to have titles on the spines, we have over 1,400 titles. Keep in mind that we homeschooled four children, so have many juvenile titles (think Newberry titles.)

What was the last book you bought?
I'm not certain, but in the "read next" pile are Lauren Winner's Real Sex, Guinness' Unspeakable, McIntyre's After Virtue, and Nahim's An Imaginary Tale: The Story of i (square root of -1).

What's the last book you read?
The last book I completed was Wendell Berry's The Memory of Old Jack. Almost finished Colson and Cameron's Human Dignity in the Biotech Century.

What are the five books that mean the most to you?
This is really hard. As if one book I will list all the essays of C. S. Lewis, especially those in Weight of Glory and The Problem of Pain. If there is one writer whose thoughts and examples I quote or contemplate most often, it would be Lewis. In fiction, I suppose the Lord of the Rings might be best beloved, together with Paton's Cry the Beloved Country. Very influential in my appreciation of poetry was Carl Sandburg (when I was very young) and T. S. Eliot (especially Four Quartets) when I reached middle age. My favorite Biblical commentator would be C. H. Spurgeon (or possibly Boice), and my favorite book of the Bible would be Ecclesiastes. I realize that I have not specified many titles, but I guess I orient more to authors than specific titles.

I do not have a very wide blog world, and most of those I know of have already been tagged. I'd be interested in hearing from my sons who have public blogs, David and Daniel, and a near-son, Justin Cave.

Ecclesiastes and air travel

2005-07-05T11:58:00.000-04:00

Flying to a distant city is an experience that affirms the observations of the Preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

This person here is a millionaire; he owns more and makes more than 98% of Americans, which means more than 99.9% of human beings. But look, from way up here you can barely see his house. In fact, if that house were bulldozed into dust, together with all his possessions, you couldn't detect a change in the landscape at all. The dust would barely reach the end of his street. He is part of a barely perceptible layer adherent to the great sphere of the earth, a film that could be scraped off with a fingernail. From here in the sky, not even very high up, I can look over the habitats of literally millions of his fellow creatures, his great cities merely a sort of excrescence, a scab upon the curve of the earth below. The smallness of his life, of his influence, is appalling. Truly man is dust, he is of yesterday and knows nothing.

I land in San Francisco. I make no difference whatsoever. Not one person in the city cares where I am from, who I am, what I do. I could be murdered in the Tenderloin and the city would grind on without a twitch, without a thought for my demise, because, truly, I mean nothing to it, I am completely inconsequential. I am not even visible from passing airplanes.

Considered from a viewpoint of a cruising 757, "under the sun", between the heavens and the earth, we are individually nothing, and even collectively, one senses that we could all die from plague and the earth would go on, the mountains would remain covered with snow, the desert foxes would hunt their prey, we would not be missed by this planet that is so huge, upon which we are such an insignificant smear. Yet our God knows each of us. It is a measure of the smallness of our minds that we work it backwards; we appreciate how small we are by contemplation of the size of the earth and its population. We do not think, because we cannot comprehend, how large God is to know, utterly, each one of those billions of souls as if she alone existed, to know each one better than I know my wife and children. What is man that thou considerest him? A smear on the earth, thinner than the the smear of mold on a tomato, yet each one a real person in God's eyes, known by Him. Let us enjoy our work under the sun, for that is God's gift to man. Let us not think it is particularly important in the grand scheme of things, or that we understand our place and the meaning of our lives. We do not. Yet that knowledge is not required of us; all that is required is that we remember God, that we attend to the relationship that makes us human and makes us significant apart from our miniscule effect upon the planet. We are known by the only knower that matters.

God is so personal...

2005-07-04T12:40:00.000-04:00

There are various reasons for my not having blogged for the past month...one is a big decision about where to go next with the embryology series, and a need to read some more before proceeding. Another is that my wife and I have been in San Francisco for the past week or so.

One reason for our trip was the duty to scatter my sister-in-law's ashes in the Pacific, as she had requested. She died two years ago, at age 52, of lung cancer, a few days after confessing her faith in the Lord Jesus, and the latter after over 30 years of faithful prayer by my wife. Susie loved the coast of the Monterey bay and peninsula, and especially loved the sea otters there. I found myself with 14 days off in a row, and we decided rather spur-of-the moment to fly west and do it.

Barb and I drove south from 'Frisco to a peninsula near Monterey and began to hike around looking for a good place to put the ashes into the sea. The vistas were gorgeous, with waves crashing on a rocky coast, twisted cypresses leaning against the wind, millions of nesting cormorants and other sea birds. We spent hours hiking the trails, looking for a spot that was private and had access to the water. Though it was unspoken, we both knew that Barb was also looking for sea otters. We knew that this area was a refuge for otters, and that, of course, there would therefore be otters around somewhere, or sometime, even if we didn't actually see one today. Still, Susie wanted otters…Barb wanted otters. We saw lots of seals hauled up on rocks or swimming around, but no otters. Finally, as the day waned, we had to just go somewhere and do it.

We had found one area of sandy beach that would do, though it wasn't, clearly, what we had in mind. We were thinking crashing waves with sea otters. There was one area we had not explored, and I had one of those odd, easy-for-a-scientist-like-me-to-dismiss-as-insignificant hunches that we should go there, and hike south, and if we didn't find "the spot", we would eventually end up at the beach which was at least acceptable. So that's what we did.

We parked and hiked out to the shore. There it was, the private rocky surf-carved place we were seeking. The surf was dramatic and a little scary, and the tide was coming in rapidly. We prayed, we cried, we thanked God for saving Susie at last, and committed her ashes to the sea.

As we rose to leave the rocks, I used the binoculars for one last scan of the kelp-fields. There, on his back smashing mussels on his belly, was a sea otter. Barb was delighted; this was the final touch, the personal touch of a God who cares about his children. I was moved again by the amazingly personal nature of God.

I realized that God frequently acts this way towards my wife. She prays, under her breath as it were, “It would be really nice if, on my fortieth birthday, God sent me a bluebird in the back yard. No big deal, but it would be nice.” And he does. “It would be really special if, when we scatter Susie’s ashes, there were sea otters.” And despite our efforts and hours of hiking in the “right” place, we cannot find a sea otter. Then, immediately after committing the ashes, there is a sea otter.

God does not act this way toward me, because I am not the same kind of person as my wife. I would not appreciate it, perhaps. I would write it off as coincidence, as silly, as beneath God’s attention. We do not relate in this way, God and I. But my wife has a collection of such personal touches in her life, the “insignificant” detail that was just the thing she was looking for as sign of God’s touch.

There is a recent movie whose identity escapes me, in which one character says to another, “It’s nothing personal.” And the other character wonders, “What does that mean? Everything is personal!” It is perhaps peculiarly (fallen) human to segregate events into personal and impersonal. Perhaps everything, literally, is personal. My relationship to my children is entirely personal; I regularly distinguish between them, love them differently according to their natures, and treat them differently according to their differing persons. In our home, we have always eschewed the concept of “fairness” as applied between parent and child among siblings. We do not pretend to treat all our children the same way; they are not the same persons. They have not grown up in the same home. One was an only child of parents in their mid twenties; one was a child with three older siblings and more experienced parents in their thirties. Everything is personal. In our home, the argument, “But you let so-and-so do it” carries almost no weight. You are not so-and-so, and my responsibility and relationship here is to you, not him. “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you?”

Perhaps we act impersonally because our minds are too small to act entirely personally. We have generalizing laws because we cannot manage case-by-case justice, every case taken absolutely on its own terms. We revert to custom and convention because we cannot attain to the complexity of really considering every person and every situation as entirely distinct and different. But God, of course, can and does.

If God is entirely personal, and if persons are the most fundamental things in the creation (which I suspect they are), then we cannot expect God to behave entirely “consistently”, i.e., he will not always do the same thing in what appears to us to be the “same circumstances”. They are not, of course, the same circumstances. They are only the “same” in a general way, a generalization required by our limited intellects, but not required in fact. This may be why scientific analyses do not reveal God’s activity; His activity does not follow what we would recognize as “natural laws”, which are fully generalizable predications. It may be, however, that the laws we do recognize simply “emerge” from God’s personal activity toward each of the billions of persons in his creation insofar as each of those persons do require certain consistencies of context to interact with each other and with Him. But this is to enter upon another topic, as well as to travel pretty far out a speculative branch.

In summary, I am overwhelmed by the deeply personal manner in which God relates to each of us, by the contemplation of the size of the heart and mind of a Being capable of such individuated concern for each of us. The whole world is transformed into a more deeply beautiful and mysterious place by these thoughts

Zygotes, Embryos and Narrative

2005-06-10T12:32:00.000-04:00

(This is part 5 of an ongoing series that starts here…)

To be human means to have a history. Our histories have profound effects upon who we are and what we are like. This is so evidently true that all languages have hundreds of words that make distinctions based upon personal history. A widow is physically indistinguishable from a divorcee. A father from a bachelor. A victim from a perpetrator. An orphan from an heir.

Our histories also affect our legal status. Immigrants have different status by virtue of origin. Seniors have certain rights by virtue of age. Victims have standing in a court while non-victims do not. Debilitating accidents may cast our self-determination upon others.

At least in my reading, most evangelicals writing about beginning-of-life issues make the assumption that “an embryo is an embryo is an embryo.” All embryos with human DNA are “human beings”, period. There is no recognition whatsoever that embryos themselves have narrative histories. There is the assumption that whenever an embryo exists, “someone’s” personal life history has begun. I am not certain this is true.

What are the salient features of the narrative of the beginning of life in the Bible? Adam was formed directly by God, (body from the earth) and then inbreathed by God as a separate, remarkable action. But prior even to this, God determined to make Man. Man existed first in the imagination of God, as an end of his forming of man. When God made Eve, the same elements are found: imagination, purpose, forming of matter, but not, this time, the separate breathing. God then commands them to reproduce and "fill the earth." But for Biblical man, this was never a matter of simple determination like it is for God. Man couples, but it is always understood that God opens the womb. The life narratives of adult husband and wife do include attempts to beget children, but do not include the actual beginning of any of their offspring’s' lives. These lives begin in secret, in the dark womb, as God's action. This is a deeply important concept in the scriptures, worth emphasizing. Children are not simply made, by the will of man or woman, but are given by God, originating in his mind just as did Adam and Eve, where is known their entire narrative, "all their days, before there is yet one of them." We see this over and over, from Sarah and Rebecca to Hannah, Bathsheba and Mary.

The narrative of each of our lives, then, originates not in those of our parents, but in God's. Our parents' lives are the setting, or context, but not the source of our own lives. The story of one's life originates in God.

This is the point made in Psalm 139, which is commonly reasoned backwards by evangelicals. The adult psalmist traces not only his origin but also his entire life story back to the mind and purposes of God. He is marveling not at the power of his own embryo to self-assemble and develop into a baby, but at God's sublime action in purposefully forming him through all the stages of his physical development. He sees his life as coming from God, who conceived him in His mind before he was even a single cell, and formed him in his mother's womb (of stuff he couldn't begin to understand; but the nature of that stuff is not his point, the Builder is.)

To close today: The zygote or embryo is not the origin of the narrative of any human life. That narrative begins in the purposes of God. This, I think, is the witness of all the Bible narratives, and meditations, from front to back. This distinction has several implications for how we view embryos, which I’ll begin to develop next post.

Mini Humor....

2005-06-09T19:48:00.000-04:00

(This short is illustrative of Mini owner's humor...)

Traditionalist Conservatism

2005-06-05T14:20:00.000-04:00

Just finished this interesting article in "The New Pantagruel." It is a little slow starting, but became pretty interesting to me about halfway through. I suspected I might be a neoconservative, but now think I am actually a traditionalist conservative. Some highlights:

The conservative spirit, as such, arises only when loss is at hand, or, probably more frequently, when loss has occurred. Consequently, there is always a “reactionary” dimension to such conservatism; the conservative typically arrives “too late” for mere conservation.
So drenched in the progressive spirit is American political discourse (how could it be otherwise in the novus ordo seclorum?) that the backward glance is usually rejected out of hand, and with the most facile of arguments.
While in possession, we take our good for granted and, so, often fail to recognize it. But in the face of loss, the human good is vividly revealed to us. We lament the loss of goods, not the loss of evils, which is why lament illuminates. Is it not striking that whereas antebellum Southern writers championed both the economic and moral superiority of the “peculiar institution,” post-bellum Southern conservatives typically did not lament the loss of slavery, but rather lamented the loss of gentility, gallantry, domesticity, and the virtues of yeoman agriculturalists? While it may be true that nostalgia views the past through “rose-colored glasses,” such a criticism misses the point. To see the good while blinkered against evils is, nevertheless, to see the good. This is a source of knowledge, as well as a moral source.
Whereas the Enlightenment “builds down” from politics to morals, the conservative “builds up” from morals to politics. Perhaps it would be fair to say that the liberal tradition even today has not yet generated a credible account of moral life. Perhaps it would be similarly fair to say that the conservative tradition has not yet generated a credible account of political life.

Check it out.

A Good Question...

2005-06-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

Perhaps persuasion is now the role of the blog... At least, it has that potential.

What is Cloning?

2005-06-04T09:04:00.000-04:00

(This is part 4 of a series, which begins here...)

“Cloning”, in general, refers to the production of an exact copy of a living organism. Generally, when nature creates a clone, a large number of copies are made. The term is used to describe the normal process within our own body whereby a certain type of immune cell is made. Something to which we are becoming immune will change one of our immune cells, which “recognizes” the foreign substance as foreign and constructs an antibody to that substance. Then this cell that “knows” the foreign substance is replicated by the body over and over again, so as to generate an army of identical cells, all of which can make the new antibody. (Palpatine’s Clone Army writ small…) Likewise, most cancers are “clones” of one or a few cells that somehow lost their ability to govern their own reproduction and have begun to replicate themselves endlessly. The huge colonies of E. coli and other microorganisms that are used to produce human insulin and other human protein medications are clones of a bacteria cell into which was inserted a human gene, the “blueprint” for human insulin for example, and then that cell was “cloned” into billions of identical cells, all of which have the gene for insulin and make insulin along with their normal products. When we do bone-marrow transplants, or grow skin tissue on Petri dishes to treat burn victims, we are relying upon types of cloning processes, using adult stem cells in the case of the bone-marrow transplant.

The cloning that is controversial is the reproduction of human tissues from “embryonic” cells. I have used quotation marks to indicate that the term “embryonic” can have different meanings, which may be philosophically as well as technically distinct. We already clone bone marrow stem cells to replenish cancer victim’s cells that have been wiped out by chemotherapy or radiation. We already grow layers of skin on culture medium to treat burn victims. We already swap whole tissues and organs from one individual to another, from corneas to livers to hearts and lungs. We therefore have not evidenced a theological problem with “tissue ownership” or with growing tissues outside the body to be returned to the body of a victim as “repair” tissue, even if the tissue was not one’s own. The problem resides in the concept of “embryonic”, because we identify the embryo as being an individual human being, so that any manipulation or destruction of the embryo is seen as human mutilation or murder.

Let us look closely at this type of “cloning”, considering the reasons people are interested in it, and the processes involved at this time in the development of the technology.

The type of cloning we are considering is called somatic-cell cloning. A somatic cell is a cell that comes from body cells as opposed to reproductive cells. If we wanted to generate a whole group of identical persons, for example, we could start with a zygote fertilized in the normal way, by combination of sperm and egg, and then keep separating that little ball of cells over and over again to get identical twins, then identical quadruplets, then identical octuplets, etc. These individuals would all be identical to each other, but different from everyone else outside their birth-group because their genetic material came, originally, from a sperm-and-egg fertilization and is hence unique. This is not somatic-cell cloning, because it starts with the germ cells.

In somatic cell cloning, a nucleus is taken from some non-reproductive-system cell in a developed organism, and “reset” to the original pluripotent status characteristic of a zygote. That is, all the “librarians” in the library are instructed to close all the open drawers, and now unlock only those drawers with those blueprints that are opened to begin development of the whole body from scratch, ie, those drawers which are open in an embryo at the ball-of-cells stage. It is like pressing the “reset” button, so that now this cell, which previously could only develop into a bone or muscle cell, could now develop into any and every tissue in the body. Because this cell came from a certain donor individual and has all that individual’s genetic material, this means that any tissue that developed from this cell would be genetically and immunologically identical to the donor’s tissues, hence it would be accepted back into the donor’s body in the same way that his own skin cells can be accepted back after being grown in tissue culture. It is the promise of being able to grow such identical replacement tissues that makes somatic-cell cloning such a hot research item.

So, the goal in human cloning is to take a donor's differentiated, determined cell and reset its nuclear material back to the embryonic state, so that it can then develop into any human tissue that is needed. How might this be done? How to convince the “librarian” proteins to reset the library to Day 1? Scientists reasoned that there might be something in the environment of an egg that sets the nucleus to behave as an embryonic nucleus, so they began removing the unfertilized nuclei from eggs, sucking the nucleus out of a donor’s somatic cell (a skin cell, for example), and injecting it into the enucleated egg. I am simplifying greatly, but the idea is to use the cell-constructing machinery of the egg cytoplasm (the cell organs outside the nucleus that do the building) together with the instruction set of a particular donor’s unneeded somatic cell nucleus. Whatever molecules or combination of circumstances that obtain within an egg cell, they serve to reset the genetic code in the nucleus. One day, almost certainly, the exact identity and mechanism of action of these “resetting” proteins will be discovered, and at that point the somatic nucleus may not have to be placed into an empty egg cell, but perhaps “reset” in a test tube, within its own original cell membrane. It is important to understand that the use of evacuated eggs is, at this point, simply a crude technique to accomplish an intranuclear event: the un-determination of the somatic cell, a reversion to an earlier state in the developmental program.

One can easily see the cause of the most serious alarm among evangelicals: the status of the reset nucleus-egg cell as “embryonic”. If indeed this technique creates a “fertilized egg” that, if implanted in a womb, would develop into the donor’s twin, does it not become a separate “human being” at the moment the nuclear program is reset? Is it not just the same as all the other in-vitro embryos that are created in the various processes of technologically-aided fertility? Is it not the donor's "twin"? More next time….

(This series continues here...)

Differentiation and Determination

2005-05-31T18:15:00.000-04:00

(This is installment #3 of a series on cloning. The beginning of the series is here.)

After fertilization, the zygote begins to divide, duplicating all 46 chromosomes faithfully each cell division so that every daughter has the same genetic material. At first there is no growth, and all the cells are the same, so that the size of the cells gets progressively smaller as their number increases. The cells keep dividing until there is a ball of cells. At this stage, every cell is pluripotent, meaning that any one of these cells, if separated from the others and placed in a nurturing womb, could develop into a normal baby. This means that the cells are not yet determined to become a particular type of cell, and since they are all the same, and not specialized yet into any particular type, they are also not yet differentiated. Identical twins occur at this point when something causes the undifferentiated, undetermined small ball of cells to come apart into two, each of which then continues to develop normally. Since all the cells have the same genetic material, the resultant individuals will be genetically identical. One could take this ball of cells and separate it into three parts, getting identical triplets. One could separate it into four parts, and get identical quadruplets. The point is, each of these cells, and any group of these cells, is capable of building an entire, normal individual. They are pluripotent stem cells, one of the types of embryonic stem cells you have heard so much about.

As the cells continue to divide, the ball begins to hollow out, and soon the hollow ball loses its complete symmetry as one side pushes into the interior of the ball so that some of the cells are on the “outside” of the ball and some of the cells are on the “inside”. At this stage, the cells begin to be determined, meaning that their instructions in their nuclei begin to be “set” irreversibly so that they become destined to become a certain class of cell, and lose their original capability to make every possible type of human cell. If you think of each type of cell deriving from some other type of cell, like branches off a tree with each smaller branch representing a more particular type of cell, the zygote (fertilized egg) is the trunk, and has the capability of developing into every type of human cell. It is therefore the ultimate “stem cell”, since all other cells “stem” from it. At very early stages, when the embryo is still microscopic, some of those cells become committed to become skin and lining cells, some commit to becoming nerve tissue, and some commit to becoming bones and muscles, though at this stage they still all look the same. The fact that they are committed means that they have become determined, and cannot go back to being pluripotent zygote-like stem cells. They are still stem cells, because they will give rise to yet more specific cells and retain the capability of being several types of cells, just not ALL types of cells. They might, for example, become a bone cell or a muscle cell, but can’t any longer develop into skin cells or brain cells. Since they aren’t yet actually bone or muscle cells, they are not yet differentiated, but their internal program is now set for a certain pathway of development, so they are determined.

The rest of the development of the embryo is a matter of continually narrowing capabilities of the stem cells, as they become more and more narrowly committed to a certain type of tissue. Also, the cells begin to look and act differently from one another, becoming differentiated into specific mature cell types. By the time of adulthood, the individual still has many stem cells scattered throughout (probably) all his tissues, which serve to heal injuries and replenish losses. Most of these stem cells are still very determined (that is, they are committed to a certain type of tissue), however, and very hard to isolate. The different types of blood cells are being continually formed from stem cells in the bone marrow, but these stem cells can only “branch” into specific types of blood cells, and couldn’t become skin cells. There are other stem cells scattered in our skin that can regenerate a few types of skin cell. For example, it is now thought that there may be some stem cells even in the heart, so that under the right circumstances cardiac muscle might be regenerated. Our livers already do a pretty good job of regenerating themselves, presumably from residual stem cells that are capable of becoming the various types of liver cell.

Returning to our metaphor of the nucleus as blueprint library, we can think of the librarians (the regulatory proteins that "tend" the DNA) as controlling very tightly the set of blueprints that can be accessed in each cell. One can think of them unlocking and locking various drawers, so that only certain blueprints are available in that library (that cell nucleus). At fertilization, they gather together the filing cabinets from the father and the mother's germ cells, and begin to open certain drawers that contain plans for molecules and building materials needed for formation of the ball of cells, and they lock up the drawers that have plans for very specific cell structures like nerves and bone and skin, that are not yet needed. As the contractor molecules come in for plans, they can only get those that have to do with being an embryo and setting up the framework for the organism as a whole. At some point, for reasons we do not completely understand, having to do with size and age of the embryo and with the position of the cell within the embryo, some of the librarian molecules in some of the cells open some new drawers, and lock up some old ones. The new drawers have plans for new structures, new molecules, new cellular machinery that will make the cell differentiate into a particular kind of cell, and the locking of the older drawers means that there is no going back now; the cell has been "determined" to the extent that the drawers for the earlier functions are now locked and inaccessible. As the cell divides and the "libraries" are duplicated, the librarians are duplicated also, so that the daughter cells will have the same drawers open or locked. An adult stem cell is a cell that keeps some of the earlier drawers open, in case injury necessitates the small-scale regeneration of some particular tissue.

The interest in stem cells derives from the observation that some animals, such as salamanders, can regenerate entire limbs, while we cannot. Why can we not? It appears that whatever stem cells we have retained, there are none “primitive” enough, none close enough to the original embryonic stem cells, that can recapitulate the original process and generate and direct the whole set of cells and processes needed to reconstruct the damaged limb or organ. The irony, of course, is that we know that the whole instruction set is “in there” in the DNA, we just don’t know how to push the “reset” button, so to speak. Those early blueprints, the parts that originally constructed our nervous system, musculoskeletal system, GI tract and skin all from a single featureless cell, are somehow there but “locked up”. Stem cell research is all about trying to learn how to turn these organ-construction programs back on again. It is about identifying those circumstances that push the "librarians" to return a given cell back to a pluripotent state, unlocking the very early file drawers and undoing its determination as a particular type of cell.

(This continues here...)

Chromosomes and Fertilization

2005-05-31T08:41:00.000-04:00

(The link above will take you to the latest NYTimes article on the Korean human cloning project.) (This is installment #2 of a series on cloning and the beginning of life. The first installment is here.)

Now for some details about what goes on in the nucleus of our cells, where our genetic information comes from, and how it is handled normally in the course of cell division, generation of sperm and egg cells ("germ" cells), and in fertilization. This section is long, but I believe that these basic concepts are truly necessary to consider issues relating to cloning and reproduction.

All cells, including bacteria, are constructed according to information that is contained as a type of code on extremely long molecules called DNA. Just as Morse Code contains only two distinguishable elements, a “dot” and a “dash”, so DNA contains only four elements, (A, T, C and G) that spell out strings of three-letter words that each signify a particular amino acid in a sequence. Most cells contain the entire instruction set for the entire organism in a structure called the nucleus, and even those cells that have lost all these instructions (have no nuclei), like red blood cells and platelets, were made from or within other cells that had the whole set.

In mammals and most other complex organisms, these long molecules of DNA are attended by, and in various ways attached to, many specific proteins and sugars whose job is to maintain and interact with the DNA so as to translate its message into actual structures and events in the life of the organism, and this combination of DNA and its associated proteins is called a “chromosome”. The complete set of instructions for each organism is divided into several chromosomes, and the number of chromosomes is species-specific, meaning that any particular species has a certain number of chromosomes, no more and no less. Humans have 23 different chromosomes, numbered 1-22 plus the sex chromosome, which together contain all the information necessary to build and maintain a human being. However, all mammals (actually almost all multicelled organisms) have two samples of each type of chromosome, one from the male parent and one from the female parent, so that for every instruction and every gene (except for a few genes on the X chromosome) each cell has two instances of that instruction or gene, one from each parent. This is a type of protective redundancy; if one of the samples of chromosome #3 is faulty, for example, the chance that the same gene is faulty on the other sample of chromosome #3, from the other parent, is exceedingly small, provided that the parents are not closely related to each other. So, while humans have 23 different types of chromosomes, they have two versions of each type, one from each parent, making a total of 46 chromosomes in each nucleated cell.

A useful metaphor for the contents of the nucleus in each cell is a large library of blueprints, complete with very focused and protective librarians. There is no other reading material…only blueprints. Each blueprint contains the plans for a molecule, which can be either a building-block or structural material, or a molecular machine that manipulates other molecules. Certain molecules that we might think of as “contractor” molecules can come into the library and get copies of each of these blueprints, but only if the librarian molecules allow it. The librarian molecules themselves, of course, were made from blueprints in the library, the complete set of which is called the organism’s “genome”. The blueprints are organized very specifically in certain locations on certain chromosomes, which might be thought of as specific drawers in specific filing cabinets.

Whenever a cell divides, it first makes a complete copy of each of its chromosomes, one for each daughter cell, and utilizes a complex but very reliable process to keep track of each chromosome and make certain that each daughter cell gets only one copy of each chromosome. All the filing cabinets are duplicated, so to speak, and each copy of each one is moved to one end of the library or the other, and then the library divides in half, one for each daughter cell. The only exception is when reproductive or “germ” cells are made, in which case the number of chromosomes is reduced back to only one instance of each of the 23 types, so that sperm and eggs each have only a single version of each chromosome. It is important to realize that there are several “shuffling” steps in the generation of germ cells, so that the 23 chromosomes in any given sperm or egg are a mixed set of genes from both parents, and, statistically, no two germ cells contain exactly the same set of genes. Not only are the maternal and paternal filing cabinets “shuffled”, but the drawers in each filing cabinet are shuffled, so that each cabinet in the end has the same number and type of drawers, but some of the drawers are from Dad and some from Mom. There are no longer any purely “Mom” filing cabinets or “Dad” filing cabinets in the germ cells. When sperm and egg come together, each brings (in humans) 23 chromosomes, so that the resulting “zygote” (fertilized egg) has 46 chromosomes again. The reason mules are infertile is that horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes, so that the resultant mule does not have a “matched set” of chromosomes and hence cannot make useable germ cells from its odd number of chromosomes.

When an adult human makes a germ cell (actually, a woman’s eggs are all made while she is still a fetus in her own mother’s womb, but a man makes sperm continually), each germ cell therefore should have 23 chromosomes, one of each type. Some birth defects, such as Down’s syndrome and XYY syndromes, occur because one of the germ cells had an extra chromosome, so that the resultant individual has 47 chromosomes instead of 46.

Let us consider the germ cells. These are properly cells that are part of the human being that made them; every one of their chromosomes is a copy of one of the human’s own chromosomes, their substance came from the cells that divided to make them. They are hence “human” cells, and cannot be thought of as belonging to any other organism than the one that produced them. Most of these cells die without issue; they do not reproduce, and most of them never meet a germ cell of the opposite sex to form a new individual. A male produces millions of sperm a day, all but three (in my case) dying without producing a new individual, and a woman likewise “wastes” all but a few of her eggs.

Fertilization refers to the merging of the nuclei of the sperm and the egg to form a single nucleus, containing a set of 46 chromosomes, 23 pairs, one member of each pair from each parent. For millennia, this occurred only within the body of the woman, usually in the fallopian tubes, as a result of normal sexual intercourse. Now it can occur within the woman as a result of artificial insemination, or outside the woman “in vitro” (“in glassware”). “In vitro” fertilization is similar to the manner in which fish and amphibians fertilize their eggs; the egg is outside the female, and the sperm is dumped over the egg to fertilize it. The egg chemically attracts the sperm; the sperm have no “eyes”, and therefore rely upon chemical signals from the egg in order to locate it. The egg is swarmed by thousands of sperm that work to penetrate its outer layers, and as soon as the first sperm penetrates a threshold, the egg raises a membrane-like structure to repulse all the other sperm so that only a single male nucleus can fuse with the egg nucleus to make 46 chromosomes. My point here is to note that the egg is not “passive” in fertilization, but interacts with the sperm. A normal egg and a normal sperm “do something” specific to effect fertilization. We will see that this is not the case in cloning.

The fertilized egg is called a zygote. At this time, since we cannot duplicate either sperm or eggs, every egg and every sperm is unique, no matter how obtained and no matter where fertilization takes place. Therefore, every zygote, at this stage, is unique. We will note that this is not the case in cloning.

(Next: Determination and Differentiation, here)

(Pause to admire the Mini Cooper)

2005-05-29T15:15:00.000-04:00

Andy Crouch on the Mini Cooper and other "devices as focal things". Just some fun. (By the way, while we do have a Mini Cooper, we have neither a TiVo nor a Viking range...just a middling Whirlpool and Panasonic DVD/VCR. Have to keep that Bobo impulse under some control...)

Conception and Embryology: Intro

2005-05-28T20:23:00.000-04:00

In forthcoming blogs I hope to explore beginning-of-life issues as they relate primarily to cloning, in vitro fertilization and abortion. My views have been gradually changing over the past decade, and one of the reasons for laying out some thoughts here is to get them “out there”, on paper, so that I myself may evaluate them in a manner more systematic than I can accomplish in my head. I will be exploring some ideas that have occurred to me, and am quite willing…even eager…to have them challenged.

Many readers will already be familiar with the details of human conception and embryology, at least those aspects that bear directly upon the moral and theological issues I will be considering here. However, on the possibility that some will not be familiar with the processes involved, and the likelihood that many will not be familiar with terms that have very specific meanings in this domain, I would like to quickly sketch the overall process of mammalian conception and early embryology. A few of the terms, such as differentiation and determination, are very important when discussing stem cells, but do not typically appear in the popular press and are therefore probably unknown to most non-medical readers.

Please note that I am consciously trying to avoid using terms that are “at issue”, specifically such terms that beg the question by presuming the outcome, such as “human being” and “person”. “Embryo” has a specific scientific meaning that predates the abortion controversy, as does “fetus”, referring to the developing organism in the early and late stages of gestation (pregnancy) respectively, and need not be taken to imply that the developing organism lacks human rights or does not deserve protection.

I feel very cautious about the term, “human being”. This term means, at least, some discreet entity that exists (being) and is of the human species. Some also take it to mean, as if by definition, a being created in the image of God and hence possessing all the rights of any such being vis-à-vis other similar beings, and all the duties owed to God by such a being. This is to identify the English words “human being” with the Hebrew word “adam” in Genesis, an identification that is not necessary and which drives many arguments about abortion and embryonic issues, which arguments often boil down to simply using the same words differently.

We will start with biology, simply so that we understand the terms and the processes about which we are speaking. Once we have surveyed the territory, we will begin to dig in more philosophically and theologically.

(The next installment of this series is here.)

The "Dark" Side

2005-05-20T12:38:00.000-04:00

For those of you who enjoy "dark" films (and I know you're out there...), my son David has recently posted reviews of "Blade: Trinity" and "Fight Club" on his film-and-book-review web site, Tears in Rain. I have not seen the second or third Blade installments; and quit Fight Club about half-way through (before the denouement.) The latter got too raunchy for me. Yet, this is clearly the stuff of twenty-somethings' discussion these days. Hmmmm...

How I Think

2005-05-20T10:18:00.000-04:00

Short version: I maintain a working account of reality, which some might label a "worldview", that I seek to keep as coherent as possible across all the domains about which I know anything. New ideas are integrated into this worldview to the extent that they increase coherence and explanatory power. Once integrated, most ideas lose their individual history...ie, I forget the source; the idea becomes "mine" insofar as it is simply part of the way I think.

Long version: I do not have a "good memory". By that I mean that I do not easily remember facts that are not part of an integrated framework of other facts and ideas. For example, though I am a physician and use certain medications every day, after 25 years I still have to look up dosages almost every time. This is because the dosage of a particular drug is not derivable from any other characteristic of that drug; it is idiosyncratic, so to speak. I can remember the general "potency" of a drug, such as whether it is used in gram or milligram quantities, but cannot remember if it is 20 mg/kg or 40 mg/kg. That's what reference tables are for, in my opinion.

Therefore, I do not easily remember names, dates, or terminology that does not emerge from the concept itself. Instead, I remember relationships, structures, and causal sequences. Though I started out my college career in Biology, I abandoned that science for Chemistry within one semester, because (at least as a freshman) biology was all about remembering nomenclature (King Phillip Came Over From Green Shores, you know...) There was no reason that a particular worm should be segmented or flat. In chemistry, however, one simply had to understand a few principles and then could derive secondary and tertiary principles. One could create an explanatory "account"...a system or model...and use that account to predict and explain additional observations or "facts". Physics was even better. Remember a few definitions, a few principles, and everything else lines up. I would remember F=MA, the concepts of momentum, mass, velocity and energy, and derive all the other formulas on the fly during a test. There was no way I could remember all the various specific formulas; I had to derive them all from the handful of fundamental "laws" of physics as I needed them. The downside was, this was slower than simply "knowing" the particular formula needed for a particular problem. The upside was, I could see the inter-relatedness of all the particular formulas. I understood. I had a "vision" of the material (mechanical) world that was coherent and, in a sense, "concentrated" into a handful of elegant and simple relationships. This vision, incidentally, is one reason that I am convinced of the existence of God, and one of the ways I understand Him. I believe it is why, in most universities, the atheists are in the humanities and not in the sciences. Ironically in an age in which science is popularly believed to be inconsistent with faith, a large proportion of working scientists are, and have always been, believers in a creator god. Even those who don't believe are troubled by the evidence of Mind and Design in the material world. Read a little Hawking; he fusses about God on almost every page.

As I have continued to read, think, and experience life over these decades, I have continued to build my account of the world, which includes ideas of its origin, destination, and creator. There are lots of loose ends, of course. As I encounter ideas, I evaluate them against and from within this account. If an idea seems to provide more coherence, ie. ties up more loose ends, or seems to reconcile or explain apparent paradoxes, or is simply more "elegant" (which is an aesthetic judgment that has to do partly with simplicity and scope) then I will tend to "adopt" it. By that I mean, it becomes part of the framework of my thought, joined to other thoughts in various mutually-supportive ways. As time passes, and I "use" it more, ie: I reason through it on the way to other ideas, its distinctiveness is blurred. A really useful idea becomes connected seamlessly with other ideas in my way of thinking, and its original connection to a particular book or conversation is lost. Hence, it is precisely the ideas that I find most useful whose origins I am most likely to forget. An idea that doesn't "fit" anywhere might be remembered if I have a sense that it is really elegant or promising but I just haven't yet figured out how to use it. It might be remembered if it is one that is often opposed to my own thinking in actual discourse. But the history of really useful ideas is usually lost to me rather quickly.

This is one of the reasons I dislike discourse that uses authors or technical labels as shorthand for the ideas themselves. Even if I've read the author, if it has been more than a year or two, I will have incorporated the useful ideas, without "labels of origin", and forgotten those I rejected. There are always exceptions, of course, especially if the author has a memorable style like Chesterton, or is so richly useful that I have read the works several times, like Lewis. I have also had the experience often enough of someone quoting an author or a book without really having understood either, but understanding simply where the ideas ought to go, understanding the context of the ideas without really comprehending the ideas themselves. A person can sound quite educated and erudite by using such quotations to stand for ideas that he does not quite comprehend and could not really integrate into any in-depth discussion. It is my experience that most books contain at most a handful of unique ideas, and usually only one or two fundamental ones from which all the others are derived. If one can't actually articulate one of these ideas in the discussion, quotation of the author or book suggests, to me, a slavish reliance on implied authority.

So what? Well, as I embark on some discussions of controversial issues, I will be attempting to reason closely, and will certainly utilize ideas that some readers may have encountered in a particular author or in a "school" of thought. I probably will not attribute the idea explicitly. I also will not be able to engage you in a "He said...She said" kind of dialogue, ie: "Didn't Descartes address this? and didn't Hume reject this? or Doesn't postmodernism say...?" The fact that I don't respond in kind, or don't understand a question framed in this way, does not mean I haven't read the author or can't address his issues. It may simply mean that I have digested what I read, incorporated the parts that seemed right and ejected the parts that seemed wrong. I would prefer to engage the ideas themselves, articulated specifically.

Human Cloning Proceeds Apace

2005-05-19T19:23:00.000-04:00

Here we go! this is coming as fast as we expected! This NY Times article shows our manifest inability to stop this technology. Should we stop it? Suppose we can't, as I suspect is the case. How should we respond to the presence of this technology in our world? If we cannot stop it, can we regulate it adequately? What theology is applicable?

I hope to begin some on-line thinking about these issues soon. I will be reading Human Dignity in the Biotech Century by Colson and Cameron, From Souls to Cells -- and Beyond by Malcolm Jeeves, Body and Soul by Moreland and Rae, and Clones, the Clowns of Nature, by Gareth Jones. I will also offer some reflections of my own, derived from mybackground in medicine and also from my reading of scripture and various philosophers. Should be a wild ride!

(Sorry, the NY Times link generator is apparently down.)

I'm Back...

2005-05-16T07:09:00.000-04:00

Well, my classes at St. John's are over, for now. I received my Master of Arts in Liberal Arts on Sunday. I will miss the very stimulating discourse, but will not miss the twice-a-week round-trips to Annapolis. That was getting old, even with great listening matter in the car. St. John's has a deal whereby Graduate Institute graduates can take a fifth semester for half price. I may consider this in a year or so, but for now I'm glad to be finished.

What to do now? Derek and I have been considering building some type of center for cultural engagement in this area, perhaps affiliated with CCO and our large, well-educated and generally affluent church. Perhaps a type of hosting organization, with weekly cafe-style discussion groups, monthly visiting speakers, offshoot studies in local prisons, medical ethics discussions for local medical school, etc.

Sometimes the above seems pretty free-form, and I wonder if I have the self-discipline to stay focused and productive with such a ministry. It also doesn't explain how my wife and I will secure health insurance or income from this activity. We have built up some substantial investments, but probably not yet enough to live on. I can provide both sufficient income and also health insurance by continuing to work as an emergency physician two days a week, but my heart seems divided here. More often lately the ER is overwhelmed, the patients are hostile and demanding while a good portion of them are abusing an expensive community resource by seeking convenience care at all hours of the day and night for problems that could wait for days or weeks, or that would resolve in a few days spontaneously (like colds). There's a part of me that is simply tired of it.

With a degree in chemistry, a doctorate in medicine, and a master's in the classics I could perhaps find a teaching position in a local college. This appeals to my love of teaching. But I worry that I will find entry-level positions in academia frustratingly full of multiple-choice tests and superficial survey courses. I'd love to be a tutor at St. John's, but beside the rarity of positions there, and the doubt whether I would qualify without a PhD, there is the relocation to a very high-cost city which would break our ties with this community of twenty-five years, and completely consume a lifetime's savings just for a home.

It is odd for me to be in this position. All my life I have known what was the next step. We shall see what the Lord has in store.

In the meantime, I can start blogging again....

Ongoing Collapse of Russia

2005-04-28T11:05:00.000-04:00

A rather alarming set of numbers here. The implications for future world peace seem pretty grim.

I'll be back soon....I've been caught up in a lot of work in the final weeks of my master's studies, but today I turn in my last paper, so will have more time to reflect here.

David Brooks on Abortion

2005-04-21T06:59:00.000-04:00

Gotta run to work, but here is an interesting view of the abortion issue from one who is becoming my favorite editorial columnist, David Brooks. He proposes that Harry Blackmun did more to undermine the American system than anyone last century, inadvertently, through the Roe V. Wade decision. He calls for its overthrow, not so much to stop abortion as to get our entire republic back on its representational feet. A good viewpoint, I think.

Wright on Virgin Birth

2005-04-16T19:50:00.000-04:00

Well, I believe I am discovering the answer about Wright's view on the Virgin Birth, which also deepens my suspicion about his views on the Incarnation and the Trinity, not to mention his views on the authority of scripture. Consider this article. I think he has a pretty big "suspense account". He will not come out and say that he doesn't believe it, but he certainly does not affirm it, and seems to find the whole question inconvenient and beside the point, which is his account of Jesus-as-vocational-Messiah, as radical-young-first-century-rabbi, neither of which require that He be actually, essentially, God. He seems to want to dismiss all these questions as the wrong questions, that we wouldn't even ask if we understood first century Judaism as well as he does. Am I wrong? Come on, guys...prove it ain't so....

N. T. Wright on Jesus?

2005-04-16T09:06:00.000-04:00

One of my good buddies, who shall remain nameless, was somewhat exercised by my recent post on the spirit of the age, and specifically by my vague doubt regarding N. T. Wright's approach to Jesus. In deference to him, I decided to listen to a few more Wright lectures on my way back and forth to Annapolis. There are four lectures on Jesus that he gave in some symposium setting around the turn of the millenium (the exact setting is not documented at the site, but inferred from the content):

Jesus and the Kingdom
Jesus and the Cross
Jesus and God
Jesus and the World's True Light

After listening to these lectures, I must confess that I was not reassured, but remained deeply troubled by the manner in which Wright speaks of Jesus. He speaks always of Jesus "believing" certain things about himself and God and his mission, never of His "knowing". He speaks of Jesus' "vocation" as a set of beliefs about what God "would do" and what, therefore, He should do to fulfill God's purposes. He speaks of Jesus' "incarnation" in terms not of Jesus being in essense (yes, I know it is a Greek idea...) God, but rather in that he made actual, in his own body in its actions and in its death, the purposes of God for Israel. It sounds very much like Wright sees the incarnation as something that happened to the man Jesus, and means that Jesus "became" the perfect image of God through his obedience and his insight into what God's purposes were. One has the feeling that Jesus could have accomplished his "vocation" and his "incarnation" by being simply a man who followed his beliefs about God's purposes and God's kingdom to the bitter end, and was then resurrected in an act of God's affirmation that he "got it right". Most alarming to me was Wright's comment at the end that he "still says the Creeds" but now "means something different than before" his studies.

Now I realize that these are simply four lectures, and that Wright has written numerous books, but these make six or seven lectures that I have listened to, and I feel no less concern about his orthodoxy than after the first. Can someone reassure me that Wright has committed, unambiguously, to the doctrines that:

1) Jesus was preexistent God, an eternal member of the Trinity distinguishable from the Father and Spirit before his birth as a human baby.
2) That He was truly born of a virgin, with no human biological father.
3) That he was completely without sin, meaning that he never sinned, not simply that he followed his understanding of God's purpose for his life whole-heartedly.
4) That he was incarnate God, not merely in his last years of ministry, but from his conception?

I would be glad to be so reassured, since Wright seems to be so important to my dear friend and several bloggers here, and I have intended to explore some of his writings when I finally complete my studies at St. John's. If he is so heterodox as to disagree with the elements of Christology above, however, then I have little interest in what else he may have to say about the Jesus he believes in, or how he may apply that Jesus' teachings to the church today. Somebody reassure me, please!

Brooks on the UN

2005-04-14T08:13:00.000-04:00

Another useful commentary by David Brooks in the online NY Times. I found that this brief commentary on the "two missions" of the UN helped me clarify and organize the various vagues discomforts I have had over the years when I think of the UN. I hope he is correct, that we will never accept the governance mission.

Jesus as Philosopher

2005-04-12T09:18:00.000-04:00

I remain convinced that it is important for Christians, at least some of us, to think philosophically, to provide an intellectually coherent account of life and reality and our relationships to each other and to God. I was therefore encouraged by this interview with Dr. Groothuis on "Jesus as Philosopher". (It is a downloadable MP3 file, can be placed on an iPod for treadmill or jogging time...) He points out that there is an antipathy on the parts of both our non-believing academy and our own churches to thinking of Jesus as a philosopher, but that he was a master thinker and used arguments all the time in his discourse, blowing away the competition, so to speak. He suggests that it is silly to think, "Jesus is Lord" without also realizing, "Jesus is Smart." He also argues against the idea that Reason is somehow non-biblical, or sub-biblical, and notes that Jesus never dismissed reason in his answers or his teachings, as he could have if reason were unimportant or did not apply to Him as the Creator. No, rather, his answers were closely reasoned and rationally unassailable. The problem with Rationalism is that it cannot discover all the necessary givens about the universe and God, and will not accept revelation as a necessary source and root providing these starting points. We are to use reason, as Jesus did, upon the substrate of revelation. Reason is necessary but not sufficient to a true understanding of God and his creation.

On Mirrors and the Spirit of the Age

2005-04-09T10:01:00.000-04:00

Today as I waited for the shower stream to heat up, I squinted at my 50-year old body in the mirror and heard myself mutter, "Well, if you're what I am then I'd better start exercising." As I did so, I was struck by the thought that this is exactly the attitude that has captured the minds and wallets of modern men and women across the West, who swell the membership of the Gold's Gyms and jog through our neighborhoods. This thought: this body is me--if it's beautiful and desirable, then I'm beautiful and desirable--if it's ugly then I'm ugly--underlies the eating disorders that stress our young women (and that killed Terry Schiavo, in one way of thinking). Our whole culture is body-centered. "Look Better Naked" is the billboard for Gold's Gyms in York, PA. The thought that, perhaps, I fundamentally am a body, rather than someone that has a body, had suggested to me the same body-centric self image that drives a huge portion of our consumer industry and that is clearly an aspect of the current "spirit of the age".

This was alarming, and I immediately felt several related thoughts snap into alignment in the back of my head. I heard John Lennon's "Imagine There's No Heaven" transposed upon a comment I have heard several times recently, that "the Bible is not about going to heaven, but about living on earth." Sooooo....this emerging concept also just happens to line up with what romantic materialists have been saying for the past 40 years. "It's not about saving souls, but about building the Kingdom (on Earth, by the way)" Hmmmm.

The Creation mandate directs us to become much more environmentally conscious and join the environmentalists who have, ironically, understood this truth all along. One of Jubillee's keynote speakers urges the youth to take up global warming as a Christian cause. The Gaian's are (practically, anyway) right after all.

We have recently discovered that the past 2000 years of Christian scholarship and exegesis has been terribly corrupted by ancient Greek rationalism and dualism, so we are busily exploring our ancient roots and trying to understand our scriptures from the point of view of our ancient, pre-industrial, agrarian forebears. Has anyone else noticed that this is precisely what pop religion has been doing for the past twenty years? "Rediscovering" primitive spirituality, whether it be Native American, Aboriginal or Wiccan, and rejecting philosophies based on reason and categorical thinking?

We are all about rediscovering "community" and the urban. Hello? These have been "Bobo" concerns for the past twenty-plus years.

So what am I suggesting? At this point, I am merely alarmed at the striking alignment of many of these Christian "hot topics" with the spirit of this age. An emphasis on the physicality of life, the goodness of this material world, a preference for the ancient and non-rational, urbanism and an emphasis on community, and a rejection of grand metanarratives are not only shared by the current culture, but the elites of that culture emphasized these things first. Is there any chance that we are simply assimilating, that we are seeking to rejoin the intellectual elites by aping their agenda, with a Christian twist to preserve the illusion that we are countercultural?

Welcome David to Blogger

2005-04-05T11:24:00.000-04:00

Well, another son has joined the Blogger community, my eldest son David. His site is called "The Learned Fool" (I fear both the learning and the foolishness may be traceable to yours truly in some degree...) He is a student with me in the masters program at St. Johns', so we get to see each other twice a week, which is really nice. He says he intends to write mostly film reviews. Take his warning seriously; his taste in film is definitely "edgy"! I'm placing a link in my margin. Welcome, David!

For future reference

2005-04-05T09:59:00.000-04:00

Prosthesis provides a link to a short discussion on soul (psuke) and spirit (pneuma) based on N. T. Wright's writing. I'm placing the link here because I intend to refer to this in a future post on the subject.

Peter Kreeft on Catholics and Fundamentalists

2005-04-02T10:18:00.000-05:00

Found this interesting link (click title) on the Boar's Head Tavern blog. I've always liked Kreeft. It is interesting, after interacting with the neoCals in this blogcircle, how very many of their critiques of current protestantism would be met in modern Catholicism. Especially check out the sections on "Whose in Authority here?" and "How do we get to heaven?"

Kristof and Brooks again

2005-04-02T08:59:00.000-05:00

Taxes, papers, nightshifts and oral exams on the horizon, so little time to theorize (except about Aeschylus and Locke.) But today's NY Times brings my guys to the online front-page again. Kristof notes how our tolerance of genocide and governmental starvation in countries run by blacks, when we would never tolerate it in a white colonial government, is a form of racism. Brooks muses on the preferability of broad understanding of cultures and history to objectivized and systematized analytical systems in intelligence work.

The Culture of Heredity

2005-03-30T18:55:00.000-05:00

Still short on time, so only a few thoughts. I am intrigued by the idea of a "culture of heredity" discussed within this article in the the New Pantagruel. I have noticed that the Catholic students at St. John's seem to be more comfortable with and open about their faith than the Evangelicals. (I must credit Hannah Eagleson as first putting her finger on an observation that had not quite gelled in my mind.) I believe that part of the reason is that the Catholic students are somewhat aware that they stand at the end of 2000 years of conversation within their religious community, while the Evangelicals' theology might go back 500 years if they are Reformed and substantially less if they are not. The Catholics' culture feels "thick", while the Evangelicals' feels "thin". In fact, the Evangelicals have no sense of intellectual history at all, in my opinion. Each generation starts afresh with the Bible, without encouragement to recognize work that has already been done. Evangelicals are always reinventing the wheel.

I feel this somewhat myself. I worshipped for many years as a Catholic; you know, the same prayers and liturgy every week, anathema to most Evangelicals. But in the Confiteor I had a prayer that was really excellent and theologically sound, better than most of the touchy-feely confessional prayers I hear in my current church. Furthermore, our liturgy demanded a time of self-examination and confession every worship service, without fail, like breathing. One knew what was coming; one could prepare one's heart. I watched my father, who had learned from his father. One was quiet before the Lord, one kneeled reverently and covered one's face for shame while he confessed his sin to God, then accepted God's forgiveness and stood and lifted one's head and sang the Gloria Patri. Truths were caught.

But such heritable culture involves authority necessarily. To work, there has to be some measure of recognition of authority in the traditions themselves, else they slip and slide as each person, or each particular church, chooses to make whatever changes might please them. I do not think it is an accident that there has been such fragmentation in Protestantism in the past 500 years; it is inherent in "Sola Scriptura" as it is commonly understood, as it comes to be commonly understood. Don't get me wrong, I believe the Scriptures are the final authority, but the "Sola" part comes to mean we need not look elsewhere at all, only at the scriptures and finally only at our own interpretation of scripture. In fact, of course, we Protestants do rely upon tradition, we just don't recognize it or have any coherent approach to it. For us, a commentary by Luther or Calvin, or an exposition by Kuyper, holds an authority that is not initially based upon an informed personal opinion but rather on their recognition within our denominational subculture as reliable authorities and fathers in the faith. But we stop short of admitting it, and of passing it on consciously to the next generation. If we hope to develop a heritable culture, we need to be much more careful about jettisoning the ideas of our brethren in the past, and much, much more careful about admitting new ideas into our churches. We have to have a deeper and more self-conscious respect for the authority of the historical church in matters intellectual, theological, and practical.

(For an essay into the dislocations felt by some of our young people, you might check out Daniel's post dated today. It's a long one, though...)

The Silence is Broken

2005-03-29T10:39:00.000-05:00

This is a nightshift week for me, so it may be difficult to get together any thoughts worthy of posting. However, my son Daniel has resumed blogging, after a silence that is explained in his recent posts. Check it out...http://danielkearns.blogspot.com/

SermonAudio.com

2005-03-26T10:22:00.000-05:00

For those of you with mp3 capability in your car or on your hip, check out this site. It has thousands of sermons in mp3 format. They can be searched by Bible verse, by speaker, by topic, by church...you name it. Of most interest to me personally, they have sermons by long-dead preachers like Spurgeon, Edwards and Wesley (through the magic of time travel!) No really, they do! OK, maybe it's not actually Spurgeon, and maybe it's not read exactly as he would have preached it, but they're his words, and you can listen to them on the road or on the lawn tractor or treadmill. How cool is that? The link will reside on my sidebar.

NY Times Editorials Today

2005-03-26T08:29:00.000-05:00

Today online, the NY Times has simultaneously featured their two columnists that I really respect, Brooks and Kristof. Neither are Christians, but neither are they (like Maureen Dowd) vituperative toward Christian viewpoints. Today, Brooks contrasts social liberals and conservatives on the Schiavo case, and finds both sides wanting, though offers no solution. Kristof writes about Christianity's ascendency in Africa and the East, noting that it is now probably stronger in the East than in the West, and that it thrives in adversity. Both are short interesting reads.

Reading up on Western Liberal Society

2005-03-25T19:35:00.000-05:00

Till yesterday, I was never suspected of being a liberal. I was therefore rather intrigued by Caleb's diagnosis in his comments on my blog from yesterday. Somewhere down the comments, near the end, he suggests some remedial reading, which I have done, and which I recommend to others. (Was it a ploy to increase the readership of tNP? I had not bothered to read these articles, though now I have...). Very interesting points, about which I mostly agree, having lamented (perhaps not here, though) many elements of our culture that are probably traceable to the Enlightenment assumption of individual autonomy as the only basis for civil society. (Ironically, my reading at St. John's these two weeks has been Hobbe's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise, both of which start at this premise and both of which are obviously foundations of our current Western democracies.)
While granting, for now, his diagnosis (in this sense), it remains to be seen whether anything can be done about it. Some things are irreversible; the opening of Pandora's box cannot be undone; the native American's will never have their land or culture back, etc. Can we go back to tradition (heritable culture), as opposed to simply "adopting" traditions, which is really just individual choice exercised in the area of quaint practices?
I have my doubts. There is much talk of monasticism these days, even among protestants. I would and have considered monastic orders, but then I come from a Catholic background. I was intrigued when John Michael Talbot and his wife entered the Franciscan (I believe) order when I was much younger. However, I cannot see this movement as having any real chance to change the culture, though it may allow some to escape it. This site is named after a failed religious community in England (Little Gidding). The monasteries and cloistered communities are already out there, and have been for a long time. Lots of people read Merton but few join the Cistercians. We Bobos all have Shaker furniture, but where are the Shakers? I live a few miles from the Amish, and I see no movement to adopt their lifestyle or to be attracted to Christ through their witness. I don't know. I don't think there is any going back, though I'd be willing to try if someone provided some credible vision of how to do so.

An invitation to commit...

2005-03-24T12:21:00.000-05:00

In reading the various blogs regarding the Schiavo case, I have felt that there have been some unspoken background stands that some bloggers seem reluctant to "out". I would like to provide an opportunity to commit to specific, somewhat simplified questions, so that we may know what are the underlying assumptions of your other writing. I specifically invite Moon, Caleb, whoever the Anonymous writer from tNP may be if not Caleb, Brian, Paul, Derek, Christie...anyone who has blogged about this in this interconnected group, to answer these two questions, without dissembling:

1) If Terri Schiavo's own wishes could be known (for example, a credible document or living will were found), would you allow her to refuse placement of a feeding tube, if that were the only means to provide her with food and water? Think of this as a thought question, if you will...please no arguing about whether such a document could be credible now, or whether she could be fed by mouth. (Assume she can't be, because some people certainly can't be.) Assuming that she could foresee her current state, or its possibility, would you allow her the right to refuse tube feedings under these circumstances?

2) If you, yourself, were in her exact medical situation, excluding the current intrusion of the public, and even assuming your own family situation if you like, would you want the tube placed into yourself?

Here's my answer. 1) I believe that refusing the placement of a feeding tube is one of Terri's acceptable moral choices. I believe that she has the right to prescribe that no person take such liberties with her body as to insert a latex, or plastic, or metal appliance into her mouth or nose, much less cut a new hole into her abdomen, if she does not wish it, and understands at the time of making the decision that such a proscription will eventuate in her own death under these circumstances. 2) I would exercise this choice in my own case. I unequivocally would refuse the placement of this tube, were I in her condition. I can, at this time, understand her condition and can comprehend the possibility that various events could lead to my being someday in a similar state. Under those circumstances, I would not want the tube placed. To me, regarding myself and my own family, it isn't even a difficult question.

Please do commit here. I feel we will be able to better understand your reasoning on your blogs if we know how you stand on these two questions.

One paper down...

2005-03-22T01:37:00.000-05:00

Well, one paper down (on Aquinas' Summa) and one to go (tomorrow, on Aeschylus' Agamemnon). Anyone interested in Aquinas on law, or in the kind of essays required at St. John's, or just having trouble sleeping as I am right now, can find it posted at my notes-style web page, in the link above. All St. John's essays are simply reflective, so there aren't any citations except from the work itself. If you don't know the works involved, the essays will mean little.

Well...to bed and try to sleep again...

A worthwhile blog on the Schiavo case.

2005-03-21T09:05:00.000-05:00

Moon has referenced what seems to me a very useful blog on the Schiavo case, which even includes a CT image of her brain. I had not seen these before. There is a lot of talk about her need for an MRI. Sorry, guys, I view CT's of heads every day, of normal folks and folks with advanced dementias from strokes or Alzheimers,, and this is the most pitiably degenerated brain I have ever seen in my 25 years of practice, and that by a very long shot. I can't begin to guess what anyone thinks an MRI will add. There is nothing there. This is not going to be one of those cases where Uncle wakes up and walks out. Ms. Schiavo has already awakened. To be awake requires only a brain stem, not a brain. In medical school we had a horrible cat whose cerebral cortex had been surgically removed. The cat still ate, stood up, walked, was "slinky" like a cat...all that, with only a brain stem and spinal cord. It did not have to be "kept alive" by "extraordinary means". I guess it was still "a cat". It was a miserable, pitiable thing nontheless.

Mr. Hilzoy makes the point (in the blog referrenced) that this is not about the state "killing" someone, and never was. It is about withdrawal of treatment and about consent issues regarding an incompetent patient. Michael Schiavo, like him or not, has been enabled by the courts to make decisions on Terry's behalf. Again, this is done all time, every day, and decisions to not resuscitate or to withdraw treatment are made every day in this way, and must be. If I tell my wife (as I have) that I don't want to be kept alive with a feeding tube, and if I subsequently lose my ability to elaborate on that verbal directive, you better be sure that I don't want anyone else out there preventing her from pulling my tube, especially not to make me a poster boy for the pro-life political agenda. (Which, by the way, has already lost this one, no matter how it goes for Ms. Schiavo. They have turned the eyes of the Leviathan toward this issue, and now there will be no end to legistative and judicial mucking about here.)

In the Nursing Home

2005-03-21T08:30:00.000-05:00

She is like a horse grazing
a hill pasture that someone makes
smaller by coming every night
to pull the fences in and in.

She has stopped running the wide loops,
stopped even the tight circles.
She drops her head to feed; grass
is dust, and the creekbed's dry.

Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.

(By Jane Kenyon)

Placing this poem on a blog is probably a copyright violation, but I will assuage my conscience by highly recommending this poet as a delightful, gentle Christian voice who has gone out of this world. Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems.

Congress and Terry Schiavo

2005-03-19T08:48:00.000-05:00

I have two papers to write for school, one on Aeschylus' "Agamemnon" and one on Aquinas on Natural Law, so not much time. Yet I wanted to submit the proposition that you all really don't want the Congress getting too mixed up in the Schiavo case. It can only complicate matters.

The pro-life carrying-on that is in all the newspapers now is, in my opinion, quite inappropriate and short-sighted. The last thing we want is the government weighing in more heavily in these issues. What the non-medical public seems to be forgetting is that decisions to remove feeding tubes, or to not put them in, or to not resuscitate, or to not treat in other ways, are made every day by families and physicians and individuals all over the country, and there is rarely any problem. Right now, somewhere, a feeding tube is coming out. Right now, some ER physician is deciding not to attempt to resuscitate someone. People die every day, and everyone has to die of something.

I am pro-life, have always voted pro-life...just to get my "credentials" out there. Yet, if I were Terry Schiavo, I would NOT want that tube put back. And I put feeding tubes in every week. Most of the time, I hate myself for doing it. I shove some smelly rubber tube through a weeping hole in some completely debilitated human being's abdomen, and wonder, "Why can't we accept that this person's race is run? Why can't we let her go in peace?" For, you see, I believe quite strongly that just as God placed within us certain mechanisms by which we are born (such as the foramen ovale and the ductus arteriosus that close at birth to allow us to become air-breathers), so He placed within us certain mechanisms by which we die when we are sufficiently broken. We stop eating. We stop breathing, or breath inadequately. We dehydrate. We die. That's how Grandma used to die, in her room off to the side. She "went off her feed", had insufficient oral intake of calories and water, weakened, and died, perhaps of an infection that today we would aggressively treat. This is dignified. This is the proper end of life.

Want to treat Grandma with respect and dignity? Keep her at home. When she is unable to feed herself, feed her, with a spoon. When you are unable to feed her enough, when she refuses food, (and it is not simply...and I say simply...depression) then make her comfortable, for she is in the process of dying. Clean her, keep her comfortable, and wait. It is the way we have been dying for millenia.

It is the same with devastating accidents. We have a built-in shut-off mechanism. I have seen a man cut in half, across the pelvis. Could such a man be saved? There is a chance. Would I honor such a man's request to let him go? Most certainly. These are admittedly more complex decisions, but my point is that they are not the kind of decisions that a government can make. Usually they are made in the midst of flashing lights and squirting blood, often by gut feelings about what is salvageable. Sometimes by a soon-to-be widow or widower standing by in tears.

The end of life is as holy a time as the beginning, and just as mysterious. Perhaps more so. To pretend to understand it, to regulate it like traffic or interstate sales, is to tread where we should not tread.

Colson - Wallis Exchange

2005-03-13T07:35:00.000-05:00

I found the following recent exchange between Chuck Colson and Jim Wallis very interesting, especially considering Colson's practical credentials. For thirty years he has been helping the most desparate and hopeless in our society, those in prison and their families. When he speaks about the basis for social justice, I listen.

Start with this recent Breakpoint commentary by Colson. Then you can read Jim Wallis' open letter to Colson, in response to this commentary. Finally, read Chuck Colson's open letter to Wallis.

I gotta say, I'm with Chuck.

Physicality of Evil: Shaking Hands with the Devil

2005-03-10T20:58:00.000-05:00

Just thinking out loud here. The link above will take you to an interview with Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who was commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda before and during the genocide. I recommend listening to it (can stream if you have a high-speed connection.) Toward the end of the interview, Terry Gross asks him about the title of his book, "Shaking Hands with the Devil". The general feels that there were certain individuals involved in the genocide that were, in a very real sense, "the devil". He seems a little embarassed by the claim, but does not seem to be speaking metaphorically. He does not elaborate.

In my thinking about the ethics of early life, I have had to consider the issue whether we are souls in a body, or simply a unified "nephesh", a simple thing. I have not decided yet which is a better account or way of expressing our understanding about human nature. But if the latter is true, if we are our bodies, then it seems we cannot think of evil as something only "out there", disembodied, but as likewise, at least sometimes, bound to bodies. If we do good only in our bodies, we do evil only in our bodies. I remember being intrigued and somewhat shocked by C. S. Lewis' "Perelandra", in which the embodied Ransom realizes that he cannot defeat the evil Weston by discourse alone, but must actually physically kill him to remove the evil from the new planet. It is only the embodiment of evil that allows this solultion. He must physically wrestle with the enemy, to the death. Only when Weston dies is his voice silenced. This is still a startling idea to me, but an emphasis on the physicality of our existence would seem to require a physical struggle against embodiments of evil, at least at times. The Hebrews certainly identified the enemies of God as physical persons who could and should be removed. I see no "love the idolater, hate the idolatry" in the Old Testament. This separability of the sin and the sinner seems to be a New Testament development. Can it be the case that sometimes a purely physical remedy...kill the one bent upon evil...is required? Watch "Hotel Rwanda" and listen to Dallaire and tell me what you think...

Hotel Rwanda

2005-03-09T09:11:00.000-05:00

Some events should never be forgotten, and they are precisely the ones that we wish to forget. If we wish to pass to the next generation the knowledge necessary to sustain anything like a civil society, we must be certain to place within their cultural memory the great failures and horrors of which mankind is capable, and teach them that these are not the exceptions but the rule. We hear about the 6 million Jews killed by Hitler. When you add up all the human beings slaughtered in conflicts or by totalitarian states in the "modern"20th century, the number is closer to 110 million. You want to see the face of natural man? Go see "Hotel Rwanda", or "Schindler's List", or "Saving Private Ryan", or "Dirty Pretty Things".

Some members of our Kairos group went to see the movie Hotel Rwanda last night. This is a movie that we should support by paying to see it or rent it or buy it. It is a tale that needed to be told in the way we Westerner's hear, on the screen. It is dreadful to watch, not because there is any explicit or gory violence, but because of the hate and fear and threat of death that is in every setting, that pervaded the entire land of Rwanda for a time. There is also a deep shame that came upon me as an American, as a white Westerner whose country refused to get involved, with full knowledge that civilians were being systematically dragged from their homes and hacked to death with machetes and scythes in their own front yards, with children especially targetted so as to wipe out the next generation of Tutsis. We did nothing. The UN did nothing. We pulled out, evacuating white tourists and pointedly leaving the Tutsis to their deaths. The UN soldiers left behind were not even allowed to fire their weapons.

I am not a pacifist if being a pacifist means that we should not be willing to take up arms and defend the innocent when such a calamity comes. I would gladly go, and would gladly send my sons to fight and die in an effort to stop such evil. I hear people say, "We can't be the policemen for the world" and I ask, why not? It seems to me that this is the only type of conflict we should get involved in. Not for increase of our own territory, and not for our "own national interests" (I am so sick of this selfish concept) but for justice simply. These elements of a just war--justice and retribution for injustice--have completely fallen out of our vocabulary. We now only fight for our own interests, directly or indirectly. As long as we thought there were WMD's in Iraq that might come our way, it was OK to fight there. The fact that a despot was slaughtering and torturing thousands of his own people was insufficient reason to get involved, since that, like the Rwandan genocide, was an "internal affair of a sovereign country." How cold.

So the black Africans died, but no Americans, and the slaughter burned itself out, leaving only one million dead. And, I am afraid, if it happened tomorrow, we would likely do the same thing. Easier to wring one's hands afterwards and lament someone else's calamity than to put oneself or one's loved ones in harm's way.

Ignorance and Mystery

2005-03-08T10:01:00.000-05:00

We are sadly unaware of the magnitude of our own ignorance, and we fail to reckon that we are called to live with mystery.

For Lent, I purposed to spend in silence half of each drive to and from Annapolis each week, about four hours a week. I usually listen to lectures or books on CD, but instead I turned off all audio and just meditated as I drove through Pennsylvania and Maryland between Hershey and Annapolis. I hoped that I could better hear what the Lord might be saying about the decisions that lie before me.

What He laid upon my heart that first day was the immensity of my ignorance. As I breeze along the roadway I intersect the lives of millions of beings of which I know, essentially, nothing. My eyes scrape the surface of a long tunnel of perception, catching the photons reflected from the outer few molecules of the trees and leaves, trees I will see several times a week but never in my life touch or know. In the distance a farmhouse I regularly admire, but I know nothing of its inhabitants, nothing of the loves and angers and disappointments that surely go on within those walls that I shall never enter. Houses everywhere, marking the habitations of persons and families I do not know. Closer at hand, cars pass me. I recognize their brands, can guess at their ages, but what do I really know of them? That minivan that just passed has a piece of plywood cut to cover its rear window. There is a story there, a history of error or accident, of loss and disappointment, perhaps the last straw that broke up a marriage and left children confused and hurt—but I do not know it. Someone knows it. The woman driving the minivan knows it, but she knows nothing of me, does not know what makes me drive to Annapolis to study the books of men and women long dead. She drives away. I will never see her again. Thousands of lifelines pass each other this ordinary Monday evening, thousands of souls thinking their own thoughts, living real lives that are not mine.

I turn the eyes of my mind to consider the structure of this world. I can imagine the xylem and phloem of the trees that pass by, idling now in winter, awaiting the rush of sap upward in the spring. I know that there are subtle clocks there, already preparing the buds. I know that there are animals out there, hidden in those trees, with their own clocks running to awaken them when spring comes. I know that there are millions of cicada nymphs in the ground beneath, sucking their own life from the roots of those trees, their clocks awaiting the seventeenth year to come forth, mate and die. What do I know of these? Nothing much. I cannot even comprehend the numbers involved.

I think inward, into my own body. As a physician, I “know” how this works, surely. But of course, I don’t, not really. I cannot comprehend the fact that billions and billions of my own cells in my GI tract and in my bloodstream will die today. Or that perhaps one, or many, will not die, but will shake itself loose from its nuclear control and begin to grow uncontrolled, one day to bring the rest of me down to the grave. In my mind, I can acknowledge that it has probably already begun, but I do not know. I do not know whether a plaque in my coronary artery is about to rupture and clot. I know almost nothing about my own actual body. I understand some theory, but I do not know the particular thing.

Even my own history I know only slightly. My parents are gone now, and there are things that happened in their lives that affected mine, that I remember only as sounds through the door, as sadness in their eyes, a photograph here, a sketchy note there. I have no objective vantage point from which to know any of this. It is mostly gone, and is completely unknowable now. “Dark, Dark, they all go into the dark…and we go with them.” (Eliot)

In discussing Genesis and the placing in Eden of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Derek Melleby pointed out that this tree shows that we were meant, even before the Fall, to live without knowing all, to live, in fact, knowing that we did not know all. To be content while knowing that God knows things that we do not. To live with Mystery. “We are but of yesterday, and know nothing” (Job 8:9) I think this is one reason I love Ecclesiastes, because it states plainly that the ultimate meaning of it all is hidden from us “under the sun”, so we need not feel that we are missing something when we cannot make sense of it all. It is why I love it that God did not tell us what the Seven Thunders said, but did tell us that they said something, so that we would know that we do not know. Even after the resurrection, I am convinced, we will not know “all”. We will know Him face to face, but we will never know all that He knows.

Perhaps a key lies just here. Perhaps knowledge of persons is not the same thing as knowledge of events or things. I am always drawn back to the hunch that the world is fundamentally personal, that when the sky is rolled up, we will see that all that was fundamental was personal beings, and all the rest merely created context. There is mystery enough here to keep me still a long time.