Merry Christmas

Though I doubt anybody else is going to visit this site today, it does not seem fitting that on Christmas Eve, I should let my last word be the rather angry one with which I ended my last post. Merry Christmas, and may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you always.

Heroic Virtue and Infallibility

While agreeing that unless they know something really big that we don’t, the Vatican’s promulgation of the heroic virtue of Pius XII is a stretch (and in poor taste), I cannot help but find fault with this article that came across my facebook news feed this morning. The author accuses the Vatican of tampering with the evidence of the Shoah, not by covering up the pope’s active participation (there was none), but by making Pius out to be a hero. He was perhaps no worse than any other world leader, but he did know early about the Holocaust and never spoke out against it, only taking initiative to see that German Catholics and baptized Jews were not targeted. This author sees this, rightly I think, as evidence of a broad cultural failure. The Shoah was not merely the crime of a few, but was enabled by centuries of anti-Judaism, among other factors. Benedict, the author says, seems to be trying to make it out to be the opposite, and speeches are cited to this effect. Last Saturday’s action, calling Pius a Christian of heroic virtue, fits well in the pattern. If the author had stopped there, I would be in complete agreement with him.

Unfortunately, he goes on to voice suspicion that

But the failure of Pius XII to pass the decisive moral test of the 20th century undercuts this hierarchy, and any meaningful claim to papal infallibility—which is why his failure must be denied at all costs.

This would seem to be true, except that it’s patently false. The author has misunderstood the Catholic teaching on papal infallibility, which is a great deal more modest than its popular representation. Infallibility means two things. In its broader sense, it means only that the church is protected by the Holy Spirit from erring in its doctrine to such an extent that its identity as the body of Christ professing the catholic faith is compromised. It does not mean that it cannot make mistakes on any number of points, even very important ones, at least as I understand it. This notion was present in some form for most of the history of the Catholic Church, and I imagine that most Protestants too believe in something like it.

But we are talking about papal infallibility, which was promulgated by the First Vatican Council in 1870ish. This version of the doctrine holds that when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, that is, in his capacity as the teacher of the church and with an intent that his statement be a definitive articulation of the church’s teaching, he is prevented from erring. The moral stature of the person holding the office is irrelevant. Infallibility is held to be a gift of the Holy Spirit, not an achievement of the Pope. Andonlysuch ex cathedra statements are covered. Did I mention that only statements ex cathedra are covered? There have, by the way, been only two such promulgations, both bearing on the church’s teaching regarding Mary.

While I think this doctrine is conceited beyond belief (I am a liberal Protestant, after all), it should be clear that it has nothing to do with the moral failures of a particular pope, even very severe moral failures. The papacy’s credibility (in a PR sense) may be at issue; its infallibility (in a doctrinal sense) is not. Journalists and others would do well to avoid such sensational claims, or at least take five minutes to read something like the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on infallibility before undermining their own credibility by confusing technical doctrine language with its everyday usage and creating needless hype.

Speaking of technical language, I suspect that “heroic virtue” is also a technical term, and that it might not be as ridiculous to someone who knows the jargon of the Vatican to make such a claim about Pius XII, even given his miserable moral failure. I think that also softens the accusation against the Vatican somewhat, or ought to. I do think that the author is probably right about the trajectory of the Pope’s recent statements on the Holocaust, but again, failure to ask what the words the Vatican is using mean (which could have been remedied with a google search) enables people with more zeal than wisdom to make Benedict and Co. out to be monsters, when they are really just jerks.

And that brings us to the real problem Rome has, which I’ve noted before. The failure is pastoral, not moral. In their world, it makes perfect sense to call Pius XII a man of heroic virtue, because in their lingo, it might even be true. And frankly, this really is an internal matter. But they either don’t understand or don’t care that no matter what the phrase “heroic virtue” means to them, most people outside the walls of the Vatican are outraged hearing the phrase applied to Pius XII. And even I, knowing what they mean (having performed the aforementioned Google search), can’t help feeling sardonic.

I can’t decide whether frenzied journalists or insular prelates annoy me more. God save us from both.

On Secularism: A Rant from a Cultured Despiser

I used to love I Love Lucy. Still do, though I’ve seen pretty much every episode multiple times. And sometimes the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy a show depicting life in the 50s without getting upset over the cultural assumptions of the time just is just a little more than I can muster (no, I have not seen Mad Men). But normally I love it. There is an episode where Lucy and Ricky are traveling to Havana where Ricky will perform and Lucy will meet Ricky’s family. She expresses concern about communicating, since Spanish is hard to learn. Ricky tries to be sympathetic, but still points out that he had to learn English. Lucy responds, “Yeah, but Spanish is a foreign language!” The audience laughs.

Now, while I do think you should learn Spanish, querido lector, I actually want to make an analogy about religion. There’s an interesting post on Salon today about being a Christian in the liberal, secular culture of the parts of New York and other cities that belong on Stuff White People Like. An interesting and worthwhile read. And don’t worry, it’s not about being persecuted. It merely explores the phenomenon of closet Christianity and some of the frustrations that go with it, and it ends with the author wondering whether she ought to be a little more upfront about her faith. Certainly not to the point of being pushy, but simply not letting people get away with the ridiculous and usually unfavorable generalizations people make about religion based on its worse specimens.

The fact is that a lot of people have very understandable reasons for holding conceptions of religion and Christianity that are no less bigoted or prejudicial than the conceptions many people entertain about, say, the GLBT community. Now if it’s just a matter of anger, then I don’t blame them for being mad. I’d worry if they weren’t, in fact. And far be it from me to claim that there’s anything wrong with not being a member of a religious community of one sort or another. What gets me going is the assumption that secularity is the default setting of the human race, that in the absence of the various external factors that have caused people to be religious over the years (ignorance of the causes of natural phenomena, social indoctrination, inability to cope with grief or loss, etc.), people would be secular Europeans.

In 20th century social science, the “secularization hypothesis” was commonplace for much of the century. It held that as these factors were removed, religion would gradually vanish. What the social and human sciences are now having to do is figure out why this hypothesis failed so miserably (which has led to quite the revival of interest in religion; it is now the most popular theme among historians, having just passed things like culture, gender, military/diplomacy, etc).

There are all sorts of reasons for the failure of the hypothesis, and many dissertations and articles about it to keep those who care busy. I would only note the obvious Eurocentrism of it, which should be obvious today in a way it wasn’t early in the last century. I would also note that it fundamentally misunderstands what religions are, which should have been obvious to anyone since Schleiermacher wrote his Speeches in 1799, whether or not one accepts his account. And finally, it misunderstands secularism.

Secularity is not a neutral state entered when people ceased to be religious. It requires a set of assumptions and values no more self-evident than those of any religion. And I would even be so bold to say that it is the least natural setting of humanity (I’m going with this computer metaphor), because whether or not there’s anything out there, humans have a need to worship. And I would submit as evidence of this that every time anyone tries to drive away religion on a large scale, what replaces it starts assuming religious characteristics. Witness the devotion of revolutionary France to liberté, égalité, et fraternité. They even rededicated Notre Dame to the Cult of Reason.

You don’t have to go to church. You don’t have to believe in God. Be as secular as you like. But don’t try to tell me you don’t believe anything. And don’t act like you’re normal and the rest of us are weird. Just as white people are a global oddity, so is secularism. Being an atheist or an agnostic may be the only intellectually honest or otherwise viable option for you, but it comes no more naturally to the human race than speaking English. The more you insist to the contrary, the more religious you’ll sound.

Bad, but not Evil

I’ve said before that I’m no great fan of the current pope, and that hasn’t changed any.  But when I read about people’s reactions to his various speeches in Jordan and Israel in the last week or so, I’m pretty much inclined to say give the man a break, it wasn’t that bad.  In fact, the only real criticism that I think holds any water (bear in mind, I have not read or listened to a single one of his speeches in its entirety, so there might have been something horrible I just haven’t come across) is that it could have been so much better.  I think Daniel Gordis has it right on the New York Times website:

The pope’s mistake was that he assumed the role of diplomat rather than religious leader. There was nothing technically wrong with what he said at Yad Vashem. But in choosing such carefully measured, tepid language, he said nothing that an ordinary diplomat could not have uttered. We heard none of the passion, the fury or the shattered heart that is the hallmark of genuine religious courage and leadership.

Exactly so.  The complaint that he didn’t cite the number six million is stupid, and in my opinion, the claim that he had a responsibility to speak more concretely or contritely is difficult to sustain.  No public figure can be obligated to break down in tears of remorse on significant occasions.  But it sure would have been nice.  He went as a diplomat, when he should have gone as a pastor.  He failed to read his audience.  It’s not a sin, but it is an unfortunately missed opportunity.  And laying aside the hundred of his actual teachings that I think are somewhere on the spectrum between wrong and abhorrent, the Vatican is suffering from a combined pastoral and PR failure.  They’re not big into meeting people where they are these days.  And as long as that keeps up, they will keep stirring up controversies with things that are probably not really wrong, but are incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t share the prevailing Vatican mindset.

Oh well.  Maybe Obama will visit Israel soon.

How my education didn’t fail me

(Update: less cumbersome title)

My facebook homepage turned up this report on the pool of available ministers in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the needs of congregations, and found (unsurprisingly) that they’re rather mismatched. There are more people in the call process than there are churches looking for pastors, more people looking for first calls than churches willing to accept someone on their first call, more candidates preferring larger congregations and churches in cities than large congregations and urban churches in existence, and so forth. It says that

The future leaders of the church will need to be flexible and creative, able to serve at a time of new denominational and religious realties. Among the types of ministerial leaders the PC(USA) will need: church planters; those who can transform older congregations into new ways of being; and those capable of “hospice” ministry, who can guide congregations that won’t survive faithfully through their final days.

It adds that “Particularly needed…will be tentmakers and racial-ethnic leaders, including those with doctoral training (who might be available to teach in seminaries) and proficiency in languages other than English.” Sounds about right, though I would add that churches need to be more willing to embrace the leadership of recent seminary graduates.

I would like to see some similar numbers on the United Methodist Church, which I bet would reveal similar trends, recognizing that the situation is complicated (simplified?) by the appointment system. But most of our churches are small and rural, and can’t afford or can barely afford to pay a full-time pastor. Every seminarian or recent grad knows about how difficult getting a first call is, and I am told that even in some UM conferences, full-time appointments are at a premium. Obviously, that sucks for people who go through seminary, often at great expense, and then find that they can’t make a living in ministry. Academics are in a similar boat. And since most of my friends are either seminarians, young ministers, or budding theologians, I encounter a lot of anxiety about this. And it is not without a sense of loss that I realize that I will not have the sort of career that someone with my talent and training might have been able to count on a generation ago.

That said, the idea of planting a church or revitalizing one kind of appeals to me. Or if I get sent to some tiny church (or being a Methodist, churches) in the middle of nowhere, I’ll preach their sermons, baptize their babies, hold their hand and cry with them in the hospital, and love every minute of it. And if things continue according to plan, I can teach theology in a seminary or religious studies in a college (or worst case scenario, high school Spanish, and maybe French, German, Portuguese, or Latin) to pay the bills.

I was told (actually in the same presentation the triggered my previous post–I swear, it was a great conference!) that my education has failed me. That what I and my peers have learned in college and seminary is too out of touch with the realities of the church to do any good. I believe that, with the exception of the complaint that it has not paid sufficient attention to traditionally marginalized voices, this statement is false, or at least no more true now than it has ever been. Every generation complains that their education failed them. In a sense, it’s education’s job to fail its students. It cannot anticipate what situations the students will face when they arrive in the putative real world. It can give you a knowledge of the texts of one’s tradition, of the width and breadth of ways of reading those texts, and some skills for preaching a sermon or providing pastoral care. But you will never read every important text in seminary, you will never figure out every thing you need to know about people or the world, and you will certainly not have adequately probed the mysteries of God. Perhaps the best that education can do is nothing other than to teach you how to be a student, so that you can start putting the wisdom of your teachers and your own experiences together into some shape all your own, and not just once, but again and again. And in my experience, people who can do that are kick ass ministers. The Latin word for student is disciplus.

I have had perhaps one of the most theoretical educations available. As an M.Div. (and still as a Ph.D. student) I took many more classes in theology, history, and historical-critical readings of the Bible than so called “practical courses,” and I did this at the University of Chicago of all goddamn places. At times even I’ve wondered about the merit of what I’ve been doing. I could have been learning about how to run a church. But the world in which my teachers learned how to pastor a church is giving way to a new one, and it turns out that what the church needs is pastors who are “flexible and creative, able to serve at a time of new denominational and religious realties,” and able to generate some income from another source. And maybe able to preach in Spanish, or teach a theology course.

So who’d have thought that being a bookish polyglot with a fondness for small towns and a talent for taking Christianity apart and putting it back together might make me more or less what my church needs in these times? Quick, somebody cross out my name and send this post to my DCOM!

Jesus and Paul and Stuff

I’m always amazed that one or two people still visit this site most days, given that I almost never bother myself.  But, I’ve got at least three posts half-formed in my head, so stay tuned.

To start off with, I’d like to reflect on something I heard at a conference last week.  A very prominent post-colonial feminist theologian had just given a talk on global Christianity and a theology professor from my own school had given a response, and when questions were invited, a friend and old classmate of mine from M.Div. days asked about the place of faith and justification in post-colonial theology and ministry, and received what I thought was a most inadequate response.  Both the speaker and the respondant noted that Jesus never talked about justification and said very little about faith, focusing his attention instead on marginalization.  They told us that we should base our Christianity on Jesus himself rather than Paul, seeming to be referring sometimes to “the historical Jesus” and sometimes to Jesus as portrayed in the gospels.

They may be right about the relative priority of social justice over justification, and I am willing to grant for the sake of argument that they have read the gospels correctly.  But I am sick of this nonsense I hear all the time that the gospels, particularly the synoptics (and more particularly, those passages which seem to lend the most support to the agenda of whoever is making this statement) are somehow a more authentic witness to Jesus Christ than the rest of the New Testament, with Paul usually being cast as the primary foil.  There are several reasons for this.

First of all, the authentic letters of Paul (by which I mean only those written or dictated by Paul himself) are the earliest artefact of the Christian faith we have.  The earliest of them predates the earliest of the gospels by about 20 years.  Furthermore, a professor of mine has argued that Paul saw himself as something of a living gospel (take a look at the letter to the Galatians, where he may be equating “Jesus Christ…publicly exhibited as crucified” [3:1] with his own presence among them as one in whom God reveals his Son [1:16. In most English translations, you’ll read “to me,” but the Greek permits “in me,” and this might even be less of a stretch] and who bears on his body the marks of Christ [6:17]).  Inasmuch as the gospel of Mark is also publicly displaying Jesus as crucified, it could be read as a replacement for the bodily presence of Paul (I will have to check and see if my professor has published this argument.  I’ll get back to you on that).  Even if you don’t buy this parallel, it does not stretch the imagination at all that the earliest generation or two of Christians did not need written accounts of Jesus’ life, since they had the apostles and other first-hand followers of Jesus among them, and that when the gospels were written, it was something of a replacement for the proclamation of the apostles and co.

Perhaps just as importantly, it is not as though the gospel writers recorded the acts of Jesus in an unbiased way.  They had their own kerygmatic agenda just as Paul did.  It may be an extension of Paul’s proclamation (as I believe is the case with Mark) or a nuancing of it or response to it (Matthew, Luke), or whatever the heck John is doing.  The most that can be said is that since they do whatever they’re doing through the medium of a narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus, they give historical Jesus scholars something to do, who might otherwise be among the formidable ranks of unemployed humanities Ph.Ds.  But even what can be reconstructed from them as “the historical Jesus” cannot be called the “real” Jesus to the exclusion of the Jesus of the proclamation of the New Testament writers (and you can even make that the “Jesuses” of the New Testament writers for all I care), but rather the Jesus that historians are able to reconstruct using the methods of modern historiography, which is required to simply remain agnostic on the points of most importance to most Christians.

Inasmuch as all of these texts consider themselves to be proclamations of the gospel of Jesus Christ (whether they really are, or how good a job they do, is a theological claim, not a historiographical one) and inasmuch as they reveal a certain amount of give-and-take among the various surviving voices in the early church, and inasmuch as it is not a settled question then or now “which Jesus” counts, I do not think it legitimate to speak of a “Christianity of Jesus” and a “Christianity of Paul” and privilege the former.  Neither one of these exists apart from the other in a form accessible to us.

I do not mean this as a charge against liberation theology, which I think can find as many resources in Paul and John as in the synoptic gospels.  Nor do I mean to deny that some sort of hermeneutical center is required in whose light to adjudicate between the texts of the various New Testament authors and whatever else a particular Christian or church holds as authoritative.  But if you are going to be so condescending as to act as though this center is obvious, then I am not really interested in talking to you.

God hates figs

I love my school.  Most of the time anyway.

(Thanks to Katy for the link.)

Addenda

No sooner are these words out than it occurs to me that I should probably offer a couple clarifications, in case anybody happens to read them.

1.) I do not take the hierarchy and those who strictly follow its directives as being equivalent to the Roman Catholic Church, nor consider others not authentically Catholic.  There are many faces of the Catholic church, just as there are of other churches.  A comment on my facebook status perhaps says it best (the thread had turned to crossing oneself after receiving the sacrament): “I’ll agree that there’s something characteristically RC about a bishop and a team of priests on a committee in a Vatican sub-bureau spending several years crafting a rule to forbid a benign liturgical gesture. But there’s something equally RC about laypeople ignoring them. Go to mass, pray, read scripture, feed the poor, hope for the best. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated.”  Progressive Catholics, and Catholics of all sorts, find ways of making Catholicism their own which I think have integrity.  I do think the RCC makes that more difficult than other varieties of Christianity though.  Well, some others.

2.) Benedict has made the revitalization of European Christianity a priority of his papacy, going so far as to take the name of the patron saint of Europe.  I actually support this aim whole-heartedly.  I think that along with addressing poverty, AIDS, and corruption in the developing world, it should be right there at the top of the list.  In fact, we other Christians need the largest and most prominent Christian church to be vibrant and engaged.  Unfortunately, by insisting on positions so out of touch with the lives and beliefs of most Europeans, he is making that more and more unlikely.  Now I am not above Protestant evangelizing in traditionally Catholic parts of Europe where nobody goes to church, and if current trends continue, I may start advocating just that (or doing it myself).  But the RCC has about a million times the evangelistic potential in those places.  This is why I find these various debacles so infuriating.

3.) Various voices in the Vatican and in the upper-echelons of Brazilian catholicism have been back-peddling on the outrage perpetrated by one of their bishops that I railed against here (via Ross Douthat).  Too little, too late, but better than nothing.

Roma Aeterna

I’m currently offending all my catholic friends on facebook with a status that says I’m grateful to Benedict XVI for making me proud to be Protestant.  It was prompted by his remarks about condoms in Cameroon yesterday, which were idiotic, but don’t worry, this post isn’t about that, at least not primarily.  Between the SPX thing, the excommunication thing over the abortion, and now this load of rot about condoms making the AIDS epidemic worse, the RC hierarchy has been batting a thousand (and has now drawn rebukes from the governments of three countries, including the country with the highest population of Catholics on earth.  Pretty impressive, given that they all came with the space of about a month).

I’ve come to realize that I think most liberal Protestants are taking the wrong path with regard to this stuff.  When we look at the various teachings of the RCC, we usually see what we take to be a number of core Christian doctrines, some weird Catholic things, and a bunch of stances on a number of various issues that we either like (capital punishment bad!) or don’t like (condoms bad!).  In this third category, we usually think that anything could be changed without really compromising the first and second categories.  The thing is, I don’t think that this schema fits how most Catholics see the teachings of their church, at least not the hierarchy and those inclined to agree with it.  This isn’t to say that all Catholic teachings are held to be of equal importance (birth control’s not as bad murder, supposedly), but they are all seen as holding together, rooted in an all-encompassing theology, cosmology, and anthropology.

So if I’m having it out with a Catholic friend about the church’s misguided teachings on contraception, for example, I might say that contraception doesn’t hurt anyone, that overpopulation is a significant danger facing the human race, that it would reduce the number of abortions, that it’s not inconsistent with anything in scripture, that even Augustine on his better days thought that procreation was only one purpose of sexuality, etc.  He (I actually do have a specific person in mind) usually responds that even if all these things are true, I am calling into question the church’s broader teaching on sexuality, marriage, human nature, religious authority, etc.  And the fact is, I usually am.  If nothing else, I am challenging the magisterial authority of the bishops to say that such and such a thing is the teaching of the church, whether on a broader or narrower point, and I usually hold any particular point other than the lordship of Christ as open to debate.  My Catholic friend thinks that in saying this, I have implicitly undermined the possibility of Christian communion and made Christianity an individual affair, hence the 9000 varieties of Protestantism.  So we both see each other as sowing the seeds of idolatry, me by assigning to the individual conscience the right to arbitrate what coheres with the lordship of Christ, him by assigning it to a particular group of men.  In fact, both of us would consider this a rather extreme (and somewhat distorted) statement of our positions, and both of us consider the other’s religion to be authentically Christian.  But my point is that even though we see each other as being authentically Christian, I begin to suspect that we don’t actually have enough basic assumptions about the nature of Christianity in common to be able to debate the particulars of condoms or women’s ordination in a way that can hope for any resolution beyond the clarifying of our differences.

And this point serves a broader point, which is that I do not believe that Protestantism is merely a critique of the perceived abuses of medieval or contemporary Catholicism, an opinion I came by in my reading of Friedrich Schleiermacher (§24 of The Christian Faith, pp. 103-108 in the T&T Clark English edition).    I believe that whatever the initial intentions of the Reformers, Protestantism and Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) are distinctive modifications of the Christian communion, which is to say that neither should be defined with reference to the other (which tends to lead to one of them, usually Protestantism, being defined negatively).  I do not buy into the argument that the two need each other because Protestantism needs something to protest and Catholicism needs a voice of protest.  Protestantism has its own positive character (in fact, I wish we did in English what they do in German and sometimes French and Spanish, and call Protestant churches by their original self-identification: Evangelical).  They do need each other though, because Protestants and Catholics are alike members of the body of Christ, and as Paul goes on about at some length in 1 Corinthians, Christ cannot be divided.  But I think if we are clear and honest about this distinction, our discussions might be more productive.

And also, the case of the Brazilian excommunications and the comments about condoms contributing to the AIDS epidemic are utterly reprehensible, I don’t care what larger framework they’re set in.

End of Quarter

Owing to the immenant end of the world quarter at my dear university, posting is probably going to be light for the rest of the week.  See y’all on the other side!  (That’s right, I said y’all.  I’m from Missouri, where we have the option of doing that.)