A Teacher’s Perspective

                This past Saturday morning, while working at Café on the Park at the Wheaton Public Library, I saw my freshman English teacher from college.  I had recently gone through my old college files, and I had intentionally looked at my essays and papers from Ms. Hecht’s English and Composition class.  I don’t have fond memories of her.  She was a nitpicky grader who always kept us a minute after the class was over and assigned us scores of papers.  As I thumbed through my old papers I was initially nauseous with how bad my writing was, but as I progressed through a year’s worth of papers I could see growth in my writing, and my grades climbed slowly from C+'s, B-‘s and B’s to B+’s, A-‘s and even an A or two.  And what I find so interesting is that my view of Ms. Hecht is so different now that I am teacher who teaches writing.  I’m that nitpicky grader!  And I’m sure my students get tired from my auspicious eye that catches every extra space, misplaced comma, split infinitive, and poorly chosen word.  But what I’ve learned from Ms. Hecht looking back as a teacher, is that I’d rather risk being that irritatingly picky and potentially unpopular teacher now with the hope that some will someday thank me in their heart for trying to make them better writers.  So this morning, I reintroduced myself to Ms. Hecht, who was, unsurprisingly, grading this year’s batch of English students, and I thanked her for teaching me how to write.  And I’m reminded that true education is committed to long-term growth that many of us teachers will never see.  But the seeds are planted, and God sees the growth and brings about the harvest.  Thanks be to God!

Pope John Paul II on faith and reason

From JP II's 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio:

"I wish to reflect up on this special activity of human reason.  I judge it necessary to do so because, at the present time, in particular, the search for truth seems often to be neglected.  Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention upon man.  From this starting-point, human reason with its many questions has developed further its yearning to know more and to know it ever more deeply.  Complex systems of thought have thus been built, yielding results in the different fields of knowledge and fostering the development of culture and history.  Anthropology, logic, the natural sciences, history, linguistics and so forth - the whole universe of knowledge has been involved in one way or another.  Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth that transcends them.  Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all.  It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost to capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being.  Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing.  Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned" (italics mine).

This touches on a previous post where I tried to clarify the philosophical difference between modern public education and classical Christian education.  The pope helps us see that an education based on modern philosophical assumptions (truth about ourselves divorced from truth about God; how can we know ourselves truly without knowing our Creator?) is one that is ultimately "at the mercy" of other forces.  In Illinois, students have 174 school days per year.  Naperville Central High School has eight 50 min. periods a day (one of which is lunch I believe, so seven periods are in the classroom) which equals 5.83 hours a day of classroom time.  174 days a year times 5.83 hours per day equals roughly 1,015 hours of classroom education a year.  Multiply that by 4 years of high school and you get 4,060 hours of class time.

So here is the great wager of modern public education: parents have to belief that these 4,060 hours of time in the classroom, where the curriculum is based on modern philosophy that is "one-sided" in its "concern to investigate human subjectivity," and has "forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth that transcends them," are actually NOT working against their child's education.  It's a huge wager, and in my experience it is one that so many good parents are not prepared to make because they've been, for whatever reason, blinded or ignorant of the powerful current at work underneath the surface of modern public education.  (Just to be clear, there are many Christian schools that simply ape the public schools in their curriculum and their assumptions.  Having a Bible class and weekly chapel doesn't make a school Christian.)

What price would you pay for an education that trains and guides kids to know themselves by lifting their gaze from the beauty of mankind and the world to the Creator of heaven and earth, the very source of that beauty?  On paper my school has more reasons to brag than most schools.  Our students take AP courses and regularly get 4's and 5's.  They take the ACT and get knockout results.  (I just received two more scores of 33 and 32, which moves our school average to over 32.  Our lowest score is an 18, so don't think that academics comes easily to all our students.)  We compete with the best of the best.  But all of those accolades must be weighed against the greater goods of education which can never be measured: the ability to organize thought logically and convey it rhetorically, to integrate subjects to see the harmony of truth, to realize that the Christian faith frees the student to pursue knowledge - all knowledge, to be inspired to learn for life, to realize the futility of gaining the world but losing one's soul, and above all to see our purpose on this earth as loving our gracious God and loving our neighbor.

Faith and Reason, the pope says, "are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth - in a word, to know himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to know the fullness of truth about themselves."  An education that is based only on reason (or only on faith) will continue to work against the fullness of life that God designs for each person.  And this is why classical Christian education is so important: by pursuing truth, all truth (transcendent and subjective), it liberates students from "wilting" under the burden of knowledge that they aren't equipped to handle.  That is, they will be posed with questions that they are unable to answer, because the assumptions inherent in the curriculum are not able to provide them with the means to do so.  What a risky wager!

the gratuity of beauty

The other day I was on the phone as I arrived at school, and I waited in my car in the parking lot until the conversation was over.  All of the sudden a gold finch (the state bird of Washington!) landed on a shrub just outside my car.  I was so happy.  They are somewhat rare here in Illinois, but as one who hails from the Evergreen State, I was overjoyed at the sight.  It was a gift, a beautiful gift!

I'm currently reading David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, and one of his recurring criticisms of philosophy, especially its practice apart from theology, is its inability to see existence as utter gift, sheer gratuity.  We can explain what something is, but we cannot explain that it is.  What is more breathtaking and beautiful than the Trinity, in which the giving and receiving of love happen eternally and perfectly?  And for us who receive the gratuity of being, that is, every human being who has been called out nothingness into existence, an existence designed for communion with the Trinity (The Father begets the Son eternally in love, and the Son accepts this eternal gift of fellowship and in his reception of the gift gives it back to the Father, and the Spirit is the gift of love that is exchanged, who also simultaneously gives and receives this divine love because he too has his own personhood within the unity of God), what better response could we offer as recipients of this gift than thanks and praise?  What a criticism of philosophy without theology: a pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and even God, yet lacking in thanks and praise.

My wife's Opa (et lux perpetua luceat e[um]) was notorious for bringing fresh flowers home to his wife, her Oma.  Flowers are fleeting "like the grass," but their beauty is unmistakable and completely gratuitous.  To spend money on something that has already begun to die when we buy it sounds absurd, and yet what a noble purchase.  To feed one's soul with gratuitous beauty is to participate in the liturgy of heavens: "Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!"  "We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign." (Rev. 7.12; 11.17)

I conclude with a quote from one of the best theologians of the past century, Hans Urs von Balthasar:

Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.  We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

freedom, truth, and education

From Stratford Caldecott's, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education:

"The modern mistake about freedom...is that freedom has nothing to do with truth.  We imagine that the more choices we have, the freer we are.  In reality, a multitude of choices makes us no freer than we were before unless we have the freedom (that is, the power, the ability) to choose between the right action and the wrong action.  Thus the truth about good and evil is intimately bound up with our freedom.  It is the quality not the quantity of our choices that counts.  A myriad of evil choices is no choice at all.  Aquinas writes: 'Liberty or free will does not essentially consist in the power of choosing between good and evil.  All that is required is the power to choose, without being forced by necessity, one particular good rather than another.  To possess the power to choose evil is a sign not of perfection but of weakness.'"

Freedom and truth go hand in hand.  "A myriad of evil choices is no choice at all."  An education that severs truth from freedom and celebrates the quantity of choices over quality is going to deform students.  Every form of education is based on some set of values, that is, it is implicitly or explicitly based on an understanding (whether well thought out or half-baked) of what people should be like.  An education that is relativistic or skeptical about truth is a deeply moral education.  I wish every parent would ask their principals and teachers, "What does it mean to be free, and how will your class or school help my child be freer?"

"Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?" (Romans 6.16)

The philosophical difference between classical Christian education and public education.

At the classical Christian school where I work, we are constantly looking for new ways to increase enrollment in healthy ways.  We do this by maintaining those students who currently attend, and bringing in new families.  Over the past 2 or 3 years we've improved our retention of families, but one of the challenges we face is getting new families to see the surpassing worth of an education that is not utilitarian and that also costs money.  The current market that my school struggles to reach is the public school families.  There are a few classical schools in the greater western suburbs of Chicago, but our primary "competition" is not these other schools but the public schools. There are hordes of great Christian families who do not think that private education is worth the money or is better than the public schools.  (Caveat: my wife teaches in the public school, I attended public school, I have friends who teach in public schools, ergo, I'm not anti-public schools!)  These aren't irrelevant things to discuss when it comes to talking about public vs. private, but the reason why so many great Christian families don't send their kids to schools like mine is because there is a deeper philosophical shift that has happened that needs to be recognized and exposed.  Don't let words like "philosophical" stop you from reading the rest of this short post.  Let me explain.

Think of the word Truth.  It is a concept that encompasses all of what we accept as being right or correct about anything.  We believe that Truth includes the facts about all things.  Imagine a school that decided to take out Calculus, literature, physical education, or any other subject that belongs to a good education.  Some students might be happy, but many parents and teachers would (or at least should) object to paring down education in this way because it removes a branch of knowledge from a child's education.  Secularization in the West has been going on for hundreds of years (the belief that religion should be avoided because of its divisive effects came about not too long after the Reformation and the wars of religion that followed), and one of the effects of this is that religion has been relegated to the private sphere not the public sphere.  (I've used the term "private" school, and perhaps we should stop using that phrase because it seems to affirm the public and private divide.  Shouldn't all schools be "public" insofar as they exist for the common good of those in the community?)  This has been disastrous for education because it has hindered not only our ability to address morality (see David Hicks, Norms and Nobility for a slightly outdated but not insignificant account of the necessity of moral formation within education) but it has also eliminated the importance of religious knowledge within the broad scope of what we can know.

In the late 1850s, John Henry Newman wrote a book called Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, a book which now goes by the title The Idea of a University and includes some later material.  In this marvelous book, Newman, who was asked to found a Catholic University in Ireland, set out to explain the very purpose of a university.  He explains how theology is a branch of knowledge, and if you take it out then it's similar to taking out Calculus, literature, physical education, or any other subject that belongs to a good education.  Newman believes that theology, which is the study of God's revelation to humankind, ought to be placed in the context of a university in order to balance out the other disciplines.  It belongs in a university because it is here where what he calls the "rivalry of the other studies" occurs.  The liberal arts are a checks and balance among the subjects so that the student learns the "scope and nature" of things that can be known.  Public school education eliminates religion from its curriculum (I'm not saying it needs a class on Christianity, Buddhism, etc., but it would easy to ask a student what her religious community would say on any number of topics that come up in class discussion or literature class), and in doing so offers students a less than full course of knowledge.  I think that this truncated curriculum is lamentable, and it ultimately leads to another serious problem.

What happens to even some of the best Christian students when you hinder clear moral formation and religious knowledge from their education?  To put it simply, some make it through public education with their faith intact and some don't.  We've all seen great Christian families raise kids in the fear and knowledge of God only to have a child resist the faith.  None of us know how our kids will turn out.  But what if our country's public education with its removal of morality and religious knowledge contributes to the secularization of our Christian students and families?  Wouldn't paying for an education that took Christianity and learning seriously be a risk worth taking when it comes to the well-being of your child?  This sounds like a guilt trip, and I don't mean it to be one.  But education is so important, and the cost of not thinking it through could be detrimental.  I bless the families that don't continue at our school.  I love some of them dearly and mourn their departure.  I don't think less of them.  But I've seen some of these dear people leave for the public school for reasons that hurt them in the future.  In the past year I've had two former students email me with serious concerns about their faith.  I was able to talk to one student in person, but the other was out of state and email had to suffice.  If only we could have struggled together for the faith.

I don't have any stats to demonstrate that Christians who attend public school lose their faith more frequently but I do know that the pressure against being a Christian is intense, and many parents and students aren't ready or able to withstand it.  My sisters and I made it through with our faith intact.  My parents and my church were crucial in this process.  And I'm sure that there are students who attended classical Christian schools who have since lost their faith.  I'm not putting forth classical Christian education as a panacea.  But I wish that more parents realized the way that public education participates in secularization and seriously considered a school like mine where my team of teachers live out everyday that fantastic medieval mantra of faith seeking understanding.

Barzun on the lecture

This quote leads me to compare this type of education where students and teachers inhabit the same space and online "education" where "students" read and write away from their "classmates" and "teachers."  The differences between these two approaches expose the reality that what is actually being argued about (or should be argued about) is the very definition of education.  According to Barzun, it is people who convey truth to other people through their very eloquence and personality.  Taken from Barzun's Teacher in America, pp 51-2:

"Now what makes a lecture legitimate and good?  The answer is - a combinations of eloquence and personality.... The lecture room is the place where drama may properly become theater.  This usually means a fluent speaker, no notes, and no shyness about "effects."... The speaker projects himself and the subject.   The "effects" are not laid on, they are the meaningful stress which constitutes, most literally, the truth of the matter.  This meaning - as against fact - is the one thing to be indelibly stamped on the mind, and it is this that the printed book cannot give.  That is why hearers never forgot Huxley lecturing, nor Michelet, nor William James.  Plenty of facts can be conveyed, too - the more highly organized the better, but in the hands of a great lecturer it is feelings and principles that illuminate the soul as does a perfect play or concert."

Origen on Christians in the military and religious freedom

This is taken from George Kalantzis's Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service.  It is an excerpt from Origen of Alexandria's Contra Celsum, of which the best translation is Henry Chadwick's (Cambridge, 1953).  The excerpt is from book 8, section 73, and Origen is responding to Celsus's criticism that Christians take all the benefits of living in Roman society without constructively making it better, specifically by refusing to fight in Rome's wars.

"We would also say this to those who are alien to our faith and ask us to fight for the community and to kill men: that is is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders.  And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests. If, then, this is reasonable, how much more reasonable is it that, while others fight, Christians also should be fighting as priests and worshippers of God, keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed  and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed?  Moreover, we who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths, and disturb the peace are of more help to the emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.  We who offer prayers with righteousness, together with ascetic practices and exercises which teach us to despise pleasures and not to be led by them, are cooperating in the tasks of the community.  Even more do we fight on behalf of the emperor.  And though we do not become fellow-soldiers with him, even if he presses for this, yet we are fighting for him and are composing a special army of piety through our intercessions to God."

This is a remarkable argument for tolerance towards Christians, but it is one that requires a government that believes in prayer and a god who answer prayers.  Rome honored the gods and had civil religion with priests who offered sacrifices and prayers on behalf of the emperor and his people.  It is interesting to think about how our civil religion in America functions: who are our priests? what do we sacrifice? where are our temples?  But this is not the direction I want to take.  Origen's argument is profound, even if our secular age does not have the ability within itself to acknowledge the power of his argument since it requires the belief in prayer that works.  If you want the help of the Christian God, and if the help of the Christian God comes through prayer and piety, then you must have Christians who are pure and holy in order for their prayers to be heard.  The Romans believed that the gods answer the prayers of the righteous.  Asking Christians to violate their laws by requiring them to fight Rome's wars and then expecting them to also pray for divine favor is like asking a good Roman to offer a sacrifice in the wrong way.  Roman sacrifices required that the supplicant perform the proper rituals in their necessary form and order more than that the supplicant maintain personal sincerity.  In other words, the sincerity and righteousness of a person was measured more by their respect of the rituals that honored the gods than that they approach the gods with "a humble and contrite heart."  Christians must be enabled to be Christians, which Origen assumed included nonviolence based on the teachings of Jesus,  in order for them to be "useful" to the government.  

This is not an argument in favor of just war theory, but it does affirm the Christian's responsibility to pray that the government take up a "righteous cause."  We pray for "those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously."  Origen's wording is subtle because he knows that we don't blindly pray for our governments and their success, for it was true then as it is now that not every cause is righteous and neither is every emperor.  We pray that when our governments act, they would do so justly, knowing full well that so often they do not.  Origen's point is that Christians qua Christians do not fight wars, regardless if they are just or not.  As he said before the excerpt above, Christians arm themselves with the armor of God, and "the more pious a man is, the more effective he is in helping the emperors - more so  than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops they can."  Can we even imagine what would happen if all the Christians in the world refused to fight in wars and gathered to pray?  Not being able to do so is, in my opinion, a lack of eschatological imagination that the NT and much (not all) of the Christian tradition requires.  

ordaining versus ordering

On July 13, 2013, my father experienced perhaps the worst call of his professional law enforcement career.  He was the first to respond to an accident at the home of a young couple with three kids.  While mowing his daughter's lawn, the grandfather accidentally backed up and ran over his grandson with a riding lawn mower.  The details are too disturbing to recount here, but it was fatal and tragic.  This family's life is forever changed.

I seem to have an allergic reaction of sorts to tragedy, which is not a virtue or a discipline that I've mastered over time but a kind of default set of emotions that simply come out.  My first response is usually anger.  The worst words I have ever said flow out of the frustration and pain that I feel because I cannot make sense of the tragedy.  Next come the tears and those haunting thoughts: How can that family ever function normally again?  Will the son-in-law have to learn how to love his wife's father again?  What about the daughter?  How can that poor grandfather ever keep going?  What would I do if I were any of these people?  The inability to process this and make any sense of it is debilitating, but I think this inability actually speaks to a deep theological truth that gives me a degree of comfort.  This truth is that evil, in whatever shape it takes (intentional, accidental, systemic, etc.), is incomprehensible, disordered, and chaotic.  It is not able to be sensible in itself.  This chaos, however, is God's enemy, and God is a God of order.

Built in to our awareness of evil in the world is a desire for justice.  When there is a crime and the criminal is caught and punished, we feel satisfied that justice was served.  When the crime is such that there is severe loss of life or well-being, even though the criminal is punished, there is often an emotional remainder.  On the one hand, we feel satisfied that justice was served, but, on the other hand, justice cannot fully replace the loss.  Settlement money in a lawsuit involving a fatality can never fully equal the value of the life lost.  What then do we do with complete accidents?  This accident was evil, but not due to the grandfather's malicious intent.  In light of my inability to make sense of these tragedies, I'm convinced of another way forward.  "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."  As I read this passage while reflecting on this tragedy, I came to the realization that in the face of accidental evil, mourning is the proper response.  Mourning is, perhaps, the only proper response because evil is chaos, and chaos is by nature disorderly and nonsensical.  In fact, we must leave it unexplained and simply mourn with those who mourn; to not do so, by which I mean to insist that it "happened for some reason," results in an anomaly (literally, a wrongly named thing): we end up calling disorder order.  The Old Testament rightly considers anomalies like these immoral because they violate a fundamental biblical truth: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil" (Isa 5.20).  God does not delight in the death of his creatures, and when people attempt to comfort others who are in pain by telling them that all things happen for a reason or that God's plans are bigger than our scenarios they are speaking half truths as best.  What is usually happening unbeknownst to the "comforter" is that they are trying to comfort by falsely reassuring people God did this for a reason, which is to say that God's plan included, and by extension needed, this tragedy to happen.  This is very poor theology.

There is a substantial difference between the belief that God ordains or causes evil for his good and the belief that God creates good out of evil.  Judas remains the betrayer, despite the fact that his betrayal led to Christ's death, which accomplished our redemption.  Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension don't make Judas's actions good.  The inexhaustible mystery of the Triune God is that he is able to create goodness out of evil, bring order out of chaos.  St. Athanasius said that redemption is the continuation of creation.  The very ordering of the (non-evil) chaos in Gen 1 is continued by God's (re-)ordering of the (evil) chaos of the world.  The introduction of sin allows us to unpack this ordering, and the Bible and Christian theology teach us that God often orders by conquering.  That is, some things are fundamentally against God and they cannot be redeemed.  The effects that these anti-God experiences have on us require conquering and healing, not redeeming.  We are in the process of being redeemed, but the evils themselves are not.  God doesn't cause evil for his good, he conquers evil for our good, which is also his good.  I consider this distinction between ordaining evil for good and ordering evil toward good a necessary one in order to affirm the essentials of Scripture and Christian theology: God is completely good; evil is a reality we have brought into the world and it is anti-God; and Christ has conquered, is conquering, and will continue to conquer sin, death, and the Devil.  Christus Victor!  "Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered!"

Lewis's Enjoyment vs. Contemplation

In C. S. Lewis's Suprised by Joy, he recalls an interesting epiphany that encouraged his conversion.  After having "aesthetic experiences," which were caused by ideas (and music, primarily Wagner) he encountered in his teenage years, Lewis set about to reproduce these moments of Joy, as he called them.  These experiences became a kind of measure or standard of his subsequent experiences.  However, Lewis realized that any experience of love, anger, ecstasy, or sadness cannot be enjoyed or contemplated simultaneously.  We experience love only when we have an object at which to direct and attach our love.  The minute we contemplate (he uses the word contemplate) what is actually happening, we momentarily cease enjoying that which we were encountering.  This fact, this human limitation, became an inescapable truth for Lewis, and it changed his pursuit of Joy because he had for years sought to find enjoyment by means of contemplation, which usually ended in disappointment.
We ought to reflect on the effects this anthropological schism has on our human existence.  One reflection Lewis lends in his book is the effects this divide has on vices.  If you contemplate drunkenness, fornication, or lying, they often appear as they really are: shameful, disgusting, and evil.  However, the minute one moves from contemplation to enjoyment, the true realities of these vices fade away and only the object is before us and we often indulge.  This is one inescapable danger of this schism: letting enjoyment override contemplation, that is, making the dialogue between these a monologue.  A second inescapable danger moves in the opposite direction but is formally the same.  By letting contemplation overpower enjoyment, we can only create false impressions, which at best are silly replicas, but at worst are idols.  Turning actual love of someone into a mental fiction.  Or, trying to reproduce a past moment of enjoyment by contemplating it, which leads to disappointment and possibly even the conclusion that no such experiences are possible any more.  How many marriages deteriorate and disintegrate because of this second error? Is there a solution?  This divide is too fresh to me to offer anything that would be remotely helpful. Lewis, at least, viewed his realization of this as ultimately freeing, since he had gone about things the wrong way, and so my initial take away is that of an important warning.

what is human "nature"?

Ignore what seems to our ear the anti-Semitic tone.  Celsus used a (fictitious?) Jew to mount various criticisms against the Christians, so Origen was responding to "Celsus' Jew."

Origen, Contra Celsum II.29
[Celsus' criticism is that] "the prophets say that the one who will come will be a great prince, lord of the whole earth and of all nations and armies."  But it is just like a Jew, I think and consistent with their bitterness, when he reviles Jesus without giving even any plausible argument, saying: "But they did not proclaim a pestilent fellow like him."  Indeed, neither the Jews nor Celsus nor anyone else could establish by argument that he was a pestilent fellow who converted so many men from the flood of evil to live according to nature (κατὰ φύσιν) practising self-control and the other virtues.

It is interesting that Origen says that Jesus converted people "from evil to live according to nature."  Jesus recovers for us and converts us to the "natural" way to live, the truly human way to live.  So is human nature evil?  I find the word "nature" in this last sense troubling, not because I don't believe that humans are wicked and have a bent toward wickedness, but because it is not a dominant term used in the NT to refer to the wicked condition of a humanity and it is not entirely theologically coherent, as I will try to briefly demonstrate below.  The only use of φύσις in the NT that comes close to affirming wickedness as human nature is Eph 2.3: "We also once conducted our lives among these [trespasses and sins] in the desires of our flesh, willing the things of the flesh and of our minds, and we were children of wrath by nature (φύσει) like the rest."  And yet, verse 2 also affirms the presence of the "ruler of the authority of the air, the spirit who presently is working in/among the sons of disobedience."  Paul, assuming he wrote the letter, still doesn't evade the presence of deception among the disobedient.  Adam and Eve rebelled AND were deceived.  This is true of our world too.  Paul uses other language to describe the wicked state of the disobedient, but his lack of "nature" talk when it comes to humanity's wicked bent might be telling.

As David Bentley Hart has said somewhere (I think in his little book, The Doors of the Sea), the East has always rejected original guilt from original sin.  But he is quick to say that this doesn't change the fact that all humans will sin.  The world was altered by the rebellion in the garden, and the result is now that all humans inevitably sin due to a messy complex of problems.  Sin makes us less human, not more so.  Even Henri Blocher, who is quite reformed in his thinking, has argued in his book on original sin that sin has become our quasi-nature.  It is a warped nature in that it has parasitically latched on to our humanity and abused our "good" human nature.  As you can see, like Blocher, I tend to affirm the classic Augustinian view of good and evil, even though I tend to depart from Augustine on original sin.

Do we sin "by nature"?  If by "nature" we mean "easily," then Yes, but we are no longer using nature in the traditional sense of those necessary properties that constitute a certain thing.  If we maintain a traditional sense of this word, then No; we do not sin by nature but παρὰ φύσιν, against or contrary to nature, which is how Paul describes homosexual behavior in Rom 1.  Anyway, I think this is important because it not only reminds us that being human is a good thing, even though humans are sinners.  It allows us to affirm the goodness of God in spite of evil. It also helps us view our life as being renewed in the image of the Son, and it validates the necessity of the virtues in the life of the Christian, which the Fathers championed so well.  Much more could be said on a number of these points, but this will suffice for now.

ethical consistency - the life of Bonhoeffer

Wheaton just completed their 21st annual Theology Conference on April 12 and 13, which was dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. My wife and I gladly attended both evening plenary lectures, the first given by Dr. Stephen Plant on Bonhoeffer's theopolitics and the second by Dr. Charles Marsh on Bonhoeffer's conversion. One question on Thursday night was about the difficulty of reconciling Bonhoeffer's ethical claims about suffering and loving others with his willingness to get involved in the assassination plots of Hitler. As I discussed Plant's answer with another colleague of mine who attended, we were not sure if we found his answer satisfactory. I'll let you find the audio of his lecture on your own as I won't go into his answer here, but this question of consistency has caused me to pause. My question is whether or not a presupposed standard of consistency, which more often than not allows us to identify the inconsistent speck in our brother's eye without noticing or reflecting on the inconsistent log in our own, is a realistic goal. I have always thought that it was a realistic goal, and I certainly am not willing to change my mind yet. However, is consistency something that can even be achieved in the changing world? Eric Metaxas, in his recent biography, has argued that Bonhoeffer's circumstances led him to believe that one cannot simply live by an unchanging set of principles if they want to be obedient to God's call. Bonhoeffer's life highlights the "anxious middle" as Charles Marsh spoke of last night. He was spared from being drafted because he had friends in high places. Many of his confirmands were not as fortunate. What is interesting is that Bonhoeffer still wrote letters of encouragement to his former students who were fighting against the anti-Nazi forces in service of Hitler. Being a conscientous objector, which meant you were weak and traitorous, would have landed these young men in the fast lane to prison, and so some did not resist being drafted. Bonhoeffer tried (and it appears he was quite successful) not to impose on his students the beliefs that were unique to him, which means that he had to be quite aware of himself, a task that is far from easy. And if Plant is right in saying that Bonhoeffer believed he was in some way vicariously taking upon himself the sinful act of assassination and all the deception that came with it, then he was actually sinning so that other would not have to. Bonhoeffer's later years are a display of the life application of Luther's pecca fortiter, sin boldly, which is only successful if the application is matched by a confidence in God as the Justifier; that is, Luther's pecca fortiter only works if you believe in Luther's justification by faith. Bonhoeffer embodies an ethic that resists any extreme position on Christians and politics, whether pacifism or civil responsibility, which is why I am so interested in his life. Maybe consistency is only a virtue for those theologians who fail to put at least one foot in the mess which is the world.

"we have no king but Caesar"

This cry found in John 19.15 has become for me one of the most chilling lines of the passion narratives, for it is here that we see these Jews betray their monotheism - Shema Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD! What causes this betrayal? Perhaps they actually fear what Jesus is capable of doing. If he lives will the bureaucracy of the Temple change? Will the Sadducees be out of a job? Will they lose their wealth? What about the Pharisees and their devotion to the Law? Will Jesus' authority usurp their power with his teachings? Perhaps it was fear combined with the power of the mob. The crowd knows that both Pilate and Herod are puppets to their will. Perhaps their allegiance to Caesar is a sham, and they only tell Herod what he wants to hear. They already tried to persuade him that Jesus was a threat by calling him king of the Jews, the precise title assumed by the Herodians. Whatever their motivation was for chanting "no king but Caesar," it is a betrayal of their monotheism, because even if they are only feigning allegiance to Caesar, their injustice has already violated their covenant with the one true God. I wonder how many Christians have committed this same betrayal. A brief look at the Creed may help remind us of Christianity's indebtedness to the monotheism of Judaism, even though Christianity redefined the nature of this one God in light of God's revelation of the Son and Spirit.

Monotheism is maintained by the first stanza: "We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty; Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen." This is fairly traditional Jewish language. It is possible that they would have put Almighty before Father, but even so this is classic monotheism. It is the second set of affirmations that provides us with elements of redefinition. "And in one Lord, Jesus Christ the only Son of God." We now, with the earliest Christians, ascribe to Jesus the title, Lord, which used to be only appropriately given to God by the Israelites of the OT. It is also the title used by the Caesars: Caesar is Lord, Caesar is divine, whether in a quasi or full sense. The proclamation κύριος Ἰησοῦς, Jesus is Lord, is a rival claim to the power of Caesar; it is a rival claim to any power, authority, kingdom in heaven, on earth, or under the earth that seeks to deceive and destroy the world. Read Phil 2.5-11 in this political light - what does every prostrated creature confess when they hear the name Jesus? κύριος Ἰησοῦς. Read Eph and Col in this light with all the talk of principalities and powers. Think of this if you are a voter. κύριος Ἰησοῦς.

If these Jews were persuaded by fear, the prospect of losing security and power, then let us all think of the ways in which these same things have blinded us to our own idolatry. If the lordship of Jesus would have changed the temple system, the Torah system, and the power structures of the Jewish people, do we not think that his lordship will also challenge every "Christian" system? I recently heard one Republican candidate who is a professing Christian give a speech to a state where he said something like, "We are the 'give us our Bible and guns' people!" Our problem is certainly not that we don't have access to the Bible, it is that nobody reads it. And the problem with guns is similar but with an important difference: we also have access to guns but unlike the Bible we actually use them! Jesus is Lord, not your security in America, not the constitution, not the EU and the Euro, not your "autonomous" will, not __________. We have betrayed Jesus for far more than 30 pieces of silver.

On this Good Friday, as my wife and I participate in the stations of the cross and our Good Friday service, I pray that I will continually renew by baptism, my death into the body of Christ, which is a simple affirmation of the truth that Jesus is Lord, not me.

David Bentley Hart on the Nihilism of the Western Notion of Freedom

"The issue for me is whether, within the moral grammar of modernity, any of these good souls could give an account of his or her virtue. I with, that is, to make a point no conspicuously different from Alasdair MacIntyre's in the first chapter of his After Virue: that is, what an odd bricolage ethics has become in the wake of a morality of the Good. As far as I can tell, homo nihilisticus may often be in several notable respects a far more amiable rogue than homo religiosus, exhibiting a far small propensity for breaking the crockery, destroying sacred statuary, or slaying the nearest available infidel. But, love, let us be true to one another: even when all of this is granted, it would be a willful and culpable blindness for us to refuse to recognize how culturally arid and spiritually impoverished our society has become - which any unprejudiced survey of the artifacts of popular culture will effortlessly confirm. How, after all, should Christians regard the present age when, in America alone, more than 40 million babies have been killed in the womb since the Supreme Court invented the right to abortion, and when there are many who see these deaths not just as tragic necessities, but as blameless consequences of a moral social triumph? When the Carthaginians were prevailed upon to cease sacrificing their babies, at least the place vacated by Baal reminded them that they should seek the divine above themselves; but our culture offers up its babies to "my" freedom of choice, to "me." Surely a Christian must doubt that any other society's moral vision has ever shown itself to be more degenerate."

"Christ and Nothing (No Other God)," in In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments

a brief word from Cardinal Newman

"Those whom Christ saves are they who at once attempt to save themselves, yet despair of saving themselves; who aim to do all, and confess they do nought; who are all love, and all fear; who are the most holy, and yet confess themselves the most sinful; who ever seek to please Him, yet feel they never can; who are full of good works, yet of works of penance. All this seems a contradiction to the natural man, but it is not so to those whom Christ enlightens. They understand in proportion to their illumination, that it is possible to work out their salvation, yet to have it wrought out for them, to fear and tremble at the thought of judgment, yet to rejoice always in the Lord, and hope and pray for His coming."

From his sermon, "The Lapse of Time"

http://www.newmanreader.org/controversies/guides/selection.html

abortion: sex-selection vs. equal opportunity

In the first issue of The Economist for the new year, the Banyan (the journal's column devoted to Asia) wrote a piece on the challenge of sex-selective abortion among Asian countries. In general, it lamented the practice because it targets girls who are not viewed as highly as boys. I'll spare you the details as you can read it for yourself, but what I find so very interesting is that it seems to go without question that sex-selective abortion is wrong. The article does not bother to argue why it is wrong. My guess is that some notion of women's rights is the driving force of the article. In so many ways I am all for women's rights! But that is not the primary reason why sex-selective abortion is wrong. It is an important part, but it is not the ultimate reason. It is wrong because killing the unborn, girl or boy, is wrong. Contrast this method of abortion with the "equal opportunity" abortion policy of western countries where a mother can have an abortion simply because it was an accident, she was not old enough or mature enough to care for baby, she didn't have enough money, etc. Please hear me, I know there are scenarios that are very complicated, and although I still think abortion is wrong on principal, I want to sympathetically acknowledge such occasions. However, most abortions are probably not due to such unique circumstances. Most, I would venture to say, are due to irresponsible and selfishness behavior.

I know a girl who has had two abortions, although I knew her only when she had the second, and it was simply inconvenient to her and her extended family. Her mother told her that she could not bring the baby into her house, where my friend needed to stay for financial reasons. My friend's mother bears her own guilt for making such a requirement, but my friend made an entirely selfish choice. She soon got rid of that boyfriend, who wanted nothing to do with the child whom she aborted, and she found another guy with whom she'll have to be more careful. The "equal opportunity" abortion practice in the West is assumed by many to be a justified practice, something that goes without explaining. (Obviously abortion is still debated, but culturally and politically it is often assumed to be the "human rights" position. Some Republican candidates are pro-life only to tow the party line. And many who are against abortion support many anti-life issues! Another topic for another day.)

The irony is that from the West's perspective sex-selective abortion is assumed to be morally evil while non-selective abortion is assumed to be morally okay. What's more offensive? The overall thoughtlessness that this requires, or the latent hypocrisy that seems so obvious?

The passing of my grandma Stevenson

Early this morning, my dear grandma Stevenson passed away after various medical complications due to her long bout with diabetes and its damaging effects. There are many things that could be said about her, but it's too fresh to say anything at the moment. I will post a comforting poem from the pen of Emily Dickinson about the reality of the resurrection and the need for us all to have our masts retrimmed and our sails redecked. My grandma, who needed to have one of her legs amputated, is one step closer to that renewal.

Adrift! A little boat adrift!

And night is coming down!

Will no one guide a little boat

Unto the nearest town?

So Sailors say - on yesterday -

Just as the dusk was brown

One little boat gave up its strife

And gurgled down and down.

So angels say - on yesterday -

Just as the dawn was red

One little boat - o'erspent with gales -

Retrimmed its masts - redecked its sails -

And shot - exultant on!

How can I understand, unless someone instructs me?

Pope Leo I once said, "A man who has not the most elementary understanding even of the creed itself can have learnt nothing from the sacred texts of the New and Old Testaments." This is quoted in Pelikan's, Acts, in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. The East and West affirm the vital nature of the apostolic witness, as it has been transmitted through the Church's traditions and liturgies, in guiding Christians in their interpretation of Scripture. As Kallistos Ware has said in a CT interview, there are not two sources of authority, Scripture and Tradition; they are inseparably united. I would even suggest that to take away one of these is to try and walk on one leg.

the filioque clause

Two interesting Johannine passages:

John 15.26: But when the Helper comes, whom I will sent to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me."

John 16.7: Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you."

According to Jaroslav Pelikan, who is presumably drawing upon the Orthodox tradition, the sending of the Spirit by the Son is an "economic" reality, while the Spirit's "proceeding" from the Father is an eternal proceeding that does not also flow out of the Son. The East has affirmed the monarchy of the Father as an important element of trinitarian theology. The term "monarchy" probably brings a lot of baggage, but they believe that there is biblical warrant for a unique diversity among the unity of the persons of the Trinity. Jesus himself says in John 14.28, "If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I." In the context of John's gospel, "greater" probably means something more than ontological greatness; I suggest it points to a difference between a greatness that is derivative and a greatness that is non-derivative. This is exactly the kind of difference that the East (and West?) has always affirmed, namely that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father and not the other way around. This similar type of unidirection relationship is then applied to the Spirit's relationship with the Son and the Father. The Spirit proceeds from the Father, and not from the Son. I think this is what the East means by the monarchy of the Father: the Father is the source of both the Son and the Spirit in such a way that maintains their divine unity without eliminated the uniqueness of each relationship. The likes of Gregory of Nazianzus affirmed that John was the first "theologian" because he understood the ultimate genealogy of Jesus, and thus John played a vital role in the trinitarian theology of the 3rd and 4th centuries.

This is a significant case where the Church's reading of Scripture becomes a hermeneutical guide to contemporary biblical interpretation. It is also a reminder that the addition of the filioque clause was, despite the political sins of both sides, an important theological issue: these are not two statements that are essentially saying the same thing.

language and mankind

I intend (key word) to expand on this a bit more soon, but I'll simply give a quote that is at the heart of what I've been reflecting on lately, namely the inability of scientific definitions to adequately explain the varied phenomena of human and natural activity and to actually arrive at the bottom of things. The quote is from Walker Percy's chapter, "The Delta Factor" in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. He is trying to use mankind's innate ability to use and understand language as a starting point to help us towards a theory of man. He starts here not only because he doesn't think that people have spent enough thinking through what happens when people are actually able to communicate (it's more than the formation of sounds when air passes through your mouth, that's physics; it's more than how to put a meaningful sentence together, that's syntax; and it's more than a series of stimuli and responses, that's behavioral analysis), but because the uniqueness of man's use of language is a phenomena about which most people agree. Thus, the quote:

"Start with God and man's immortal soul and you've lost every reader except those who believe in God and man's immortal soul.

Start with B. F. Skinner and man decreed as organism who learns everything he does by operant conditioning and you've lost every reader who knows there is more to it than that and that Skinner has explained nothing. Skinner explains everything about man except for what makes him human, for example, language and his refusal to behave like an organism in an environment."

Personally, I adhere to the first group who begin with "God and man's immortal soul", but I appreciate Percy's desire to find a common ground from which to work and see if we might not come to an appreciation, if not agreement, on the unique status and nature of that species to which we belong. At least, perhaps, we can even agree on what being a human being is not: decreed organisms bound by conditions who respond according to behavioral patterns, etc. For a very interesting literary vignette that runs parallel to this see the beginning of the second chapter of Charles Dickens's Hard Times, where Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher, probes "Girl number twenty" to provide a definition of a horse. I'm grateful to Jon McCord for this wonderful reference.

Barth and theology's task

"Since the Christian life is consciously or unconsciously also a witness, the question of truth concerns not only the community but the Christian. He too is responsible for the quest for truth in this witness. Therefore, every Christian as such is also called to be a theologian...

"Theology is no undertaking that can be blithely surrendered to others by anyone engaged in the ministry of God's Word. It is no hobby of some especially interested and gifted individuals. A community that is awake and conscious of its commission and task in the world will of necessity be a theologically interested community...

"The task theology has to fulfill is continually to stimulate and lead them to face squarely the question of the proper relation of their human speech to the Word of God, which is the origin, object and content of this speech. Theology must give them practice in the right relation to the quest for truth, demonstrating and exemplifying to them the understanding, thought, and discourse proper to it...

NB - "the Word" for Barth is not the same as holy Scripture. The Word refers to God's free self-revelation that climaxes in Christ, the Word who became flesh.