On Not Apologizing

Part of me wants to find something to like in Jim John Marks's blog, The Life of Meaning. More commonly I despair of it. Maybe the twelve or so years between us adds up to a lot less patience on my part to his lack of patience in the other direction. Or maybe it's his declared lack of interest in discourse.

So we get to the inevitable post of every Orthodox convert blogger I've ever seen, the one where they declare how different Orthodox theology is compared to all that intellectualized western stuff. It is of course terribly easy to make theological potshots at the naive fundagelicals, and to sneer at the Anglicans, who are educated but spongy. But the ancient rivalry with Rome calls out to be defended.

And the usual defense is mounted: an attack on scholasticism. It is not a differentiation I find compelling. Orthodox writers, namely the church fathers, did not avoid the use of rhetoric and argument; they just were not as rigorous about it as Aquinas was. Moreover, the intellectual structures, the umwelt if you have Germanic academic pretentions, is something that Aristotle and the fathers shared; they implicitly worked from the same basis about how the world may be thought about that their medieval European successors started from. Of course what happened in the sciences is that the Baconian system triumphed and the Aristotlean system did not, because the former could withstand the discovery that much of what was assumed about the world happened to be untrue. And thus it became harder to make the same defense in theology.

Protestantism didn't really happen because of bad theology. It happened first because everyone could see that, whatever the theology, the church was terribly corrupt. And it then became clear that that corruption spread back into the theology, and the premodern picture of an infallible theologizing authority fell apart. Looking back, we see likewise eastern churches which were perhaps less corrupt only because the principalities never allowed the church to rival them (I doubt the patriarch of Moscow could have made the tsar stand outside his palace in the snow). But they were corrupt, and they are still corrupt.

Besides all that, though, it's patently obvious that the kind of categorization of the different churches is exactly the kind of intellectualizing and rationalizing that is supposed to be the bugaboo of the Catholics. If you're going to do that, you are obliged to use what works on real things, which is the Baconian empirical method and not this sort of "just so" ecclesiology.

You shouldn't post when you are annoyed

... but that rule would kill off about 92% of the crap posted on religious blogs, so let's blow that off.

I never quite understood what John Beeler saw in Owen White's old blog, and I missed his sign-off message from that where I gather he had some rude things to say about his sojourn in Orthodoxy. So now he has decided to join Arturo Vasquez in the ranks of old cranky Catholic Marxists. Now I found a certain charm in Vasquez's messages about folk religion (calling it "Catholicism" is a stretch). Or perhaps I should say revelation. We intellectualized Anglicans just don't do that kind of thing. But then there's the running Marxist denunciad, helped along by White and a few hangers on. I am continually stupid enough to think that when people make these declarations and leave the comments open, that they are also open to a bit of pushback. When it comes to religion and economics, it seems, this is never the case; the followers of von Mises and of Marx indeed seem to far more fervent in their economic than their religious faith.

So I suppose in retrospect it was really a waste of time to engage either of them. I'm emphatically not an Austrian when it comes to economics; laissez-faire isn't ever going to be tried anyway so that's something of a moot point. Their refusal to acknowledge how economic power translates into political power is obtuse. That said, the Marxists have never manage to convince me either. Partly it's because I think the Marxist theory of classes is defective. Anyone can see, looking at a modern corporation, that ownership is not power; and by and large, the kind of people who can write articulately about Marxist thought are by that very capability rendered unrepresentative of the classes they write to defend. White dismissed this with the insistence that I read some Marxist theorist, which I suppose I eventually will. Around that time was when Vasquez started deleting responses.

We then moved on to a typically overheated denunciation of von Hayek. I've not read him, and I don't care to defend him. But eventually the hyperbole got to me. I don't know when von Hayek started having people shot to "introduce his policies" but people are having trouble counting how high the numbers various communist regimes had executed or starved or worked to death. The slaughter should give anyone pause, especially anyone educated. So when I expressed this, um, reluctance to embrace the revolution, Vasquez sneered:

You’re an Episcopalian, so you really don’t believe in anything, so I think you’re safe when the Revolution comes. Besides, isn’t most of your church Marxist anyway? I don’t see why you are on my blog *** about it. Get your own *** sandbox. Or better yet, get a real religion.

Well, the Anglican way is to sneer back, so let me just say that he passed up the opportunity to proclaim how the members of my bourgeois church would be shot first, I suppose because his Roman snobbery got a hold on the keyboard first. It's amazing how many Catholics are under this delusion that the Episcopalians have some sort of validity envy of the Roman church, when the truth is that we are more likely to hold it in contempt as boorish, irreverent, pagan, backward, crude, tasteless, heretical, and arrogant to boot.

About Mr. White I have less to say. I didn't follow his old blog as to me it read as something akin to performance art, not to mention that I didn't need him to tell me that I didn't want to join an Orthodox church. I found it repellent to agree with him. So now he's started over as an already jaded cultural Catholic, Marxism intact. And while there are a variety of reasons why I don't put up a picture of myself on my blog, Number Two of which is that I do not photograph flatteringly, it gives me pause to go to his front page and be confronted with the sort of visage that, seen in person, would give one the sinking feeling that one was about to be made a participant in a bar fight or some other such recreational violence. It makes me wonder that I, sometimes nicknamed Eeyore as a child, a perpetual pessimist, am made to feel quite chipper about the future of things when I read the two of them.

There's Objective, and then there's Catholic

It has been a long time since I put up a new post here, partly because I have found it more, um, worthwhile (if not profitable) to talk primarily about theology and the Anglican Continuing Crisis, and partly because I hadn't really found much novel to comment on concerning general religious discussion on line. However here we have an amazing tendentious assertion from Hilary White:

But what is much more infrequently (ie. never) mentioned is the reason the Church teaches the things she does. And the reason she remains "intransigent" on things like women's ordination and same-sex marriage. Here's a little secret that we would like journalists to understand better: When a Catholic, from the pope on down to the parish tea-lady, says "the Church teaches..." they mean "it is objectively true that..." In other words, neither the Pope, nor the parish tea lady has any more power to change it than they have the power to change the rate at which gravity makes things fall down.

What is rarely understood is that the Church approaches these things like a scientist approaches an observable phenomenon. The scientist, when looking at something through a telescope or microscope, asks himself "What is this? What does it do? What is it made of?" He wants to know what is the actual, objective truth is about the phenomenon. He observes its characteristics and writes them down. He tests his observations by setting up experiments and repeating the experiments to see if the observations are always the same. He asks a set of questions about it based on axioms, things that are self-evidently true and are impossible to doubt. In the Laws of Rational Thought, an axiom is what you have to start with, to base your investigations on, if you want to understand anything.

[...]

The Church, similarly, when presented with a new thing, cloning and embryonic stem cell research for example, starts by examining it and asking a set of questions based on what we already know. Both the Natural Law and Revelation give us a set of moral axioms to build with.

Well, except not. First of all, most big scientific advances happen when some set of "axioms", which is to say, self-evident and undoubted principles, fail to account for observed phenomena. Looking for truly axiomatic principles in moral teaching is essentially hopeless; we have Nietzsche to thank for that revelation. What we have in Christianity are a basic set of principles which are in arguable, and in that sense are like unto axioms. But the set of the truly inarguable propositions is exceedingly small, perhaps consisting of a single sentence.

And beyond that, there are the metaprinciples upon which official Catholicism relies quite heavily. The chief of these is the assertion that it is possible to work out a systematic morality which gives definite answers. That is not necessarily a proposition that could be defended from scripture. But there are others that quite definitely cannot be derived from scripture, nor from any axiomatic basis which enjoys acceptance as such. Chief among these is the Thomistic reliance on Aristotle, whose approach to natural science has, to be blunt, failed miserably in the face of the Baconian methods we now use.

Catholic moral theology claims to be universal, and one can, I think, argue that scripture does not provide authority for more than a really limited relativism. But White's claims towards objectivity are belied by the reliance upon infallibility. Objective reasoning works when anyone does it, and the one thing that is abundantly clear is that Catholic moral reasoning only works in a Catholic framework, a philosophical structure which is widely criticized even within Christianity. Worse, the infallibility claims imply that it only works when the Roman magisterium uses it. That is the very antithesis of objectivity.

Also, it's manifestly obvious that they do have the "power" to change their teachings, inasmuch as one understands "power" to mean the raw capability to do so. We are given free will after all. And the analogy with science, otherwise flawed, shows in this light exactly where the fault lies. If one is to hold moral principles to have an objective existence in the same manner that scientific laws do, then the process of moral theology would appear to consist of the discovery of these principles in the same manner that we work out the laws of physics or whatever. But the history of science is, after all, the history of older, imperfect formulations being replaced by new and in some sense more accurate formulations. The reality is that we do change the laws of physics, when we find that the ones we have aren't good enough; thus Newtonian mechanics have been modified with the addition of relativistic effects, and on top of that we now have to deal with quantum mechanical rules of behavior. That picture is utterly unlike the Catholic picture of moral reasoning, and indeed the mainstream of Protestant moral theology would say that we do find errors in Catholic formulations that have to be corrected, or that new technologies present us with novel moral situations which may require modification of old rules. The point is that the analogy doesn't bring us to infallibility either; indeed, it leads in the opposite direction.

These issues are why the media pay no attention to these claims and continue to qualify their reports by saying that "the Catholic Church teaches". In the scope in which objectivity has to be established, Catholic moral reasoning is just one of a set of competing explanations, and as their reasoning enjoys no wide consensus, and indeed relies upon loyalty to the organization for its ultimate authority, no objective report would ever identify it as anything but Church teaching.

The M Man Was High

As sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, Time and U.S. News will have something reasonably reverential for Easter, and Newsweek will encourage us to apostasy. Well, this year they've been beaten to the punch: a professor of cognitive psychology at Hebrew U is suggesting that Moses was tripping when he saw the burning bush. Personally, I think James Lileks has the inside track on this one:

I called to say I didn’t believe it, because if Moses was tripping we wouldn’t have ten commandments. We would have three. The first would make sense, more or less; the second, written half an hour later, would command profound respect for lizards who sit on stones and look at you, because they’re freaking incredible when you think about it, and the third would be gibberish.

Actually, I think this is the sort of theory you come up with you are high, and a believer in one's own profundity.

It's utter rot, of course, and anyone who thought about it for five seconds-- or, like Mr. Lileks, was in college about the time I was, and therefore has seen stoned people in action-- can see that it's rot. It's more plausible to figure that somebody in the Jahwist tradition just made the whole thing up. And also of course, it is bouncing all over the news media; I got well over a hundred hits through Google News. Either the critical faculties of the media are completely shot (possibly through excessive use of the same drugs in journalism school), or they're just engaged in agitating to sell papers/pop-up ads. It remains to be seen whether this will settle into the vast mire of anti-religious claptrap which circulates sluggishly on the net. I suspect it is too stupid to make the cut, but then, it's hard to exaggerate how stupid an idea can remain in circulation.

I Learned All I Need to Know About Modern Sexuality at UMCP

Overt at Newsweek they have a column titled "My Turn", and for the January 14th issue it is occupied by an article by one Bonnie Eslinger: Yes To Love, No To Marriage. The subtitle: "I am committed to Jeff for life. I just don't need a piece of paper and a pretty white dress to prove it."

Not surprisingly, this has drawn a lot of dismayed (if not depressed) commentary, as well as some quite cogent observations on the seeming immaturity of the sentiments she expresses. Ironically, from a typical Anglican theology of marriage, she is but one step from marriage in writing the article; all she needs is for her "husband" to make the same commitments publicly.

There is little that one can add to the volume of words already written. She refuses to formalize her relationship, and therefore isn't committed enough. And she sees herself as having no obligation to society at large, for her "rejection" of marriage is in essence a refusal to guarantee to the rest of the world that she will make good on the commitments she says she has made. It is irresistibly tempting to predict the collapse of her commitments (and especially those of her husband, who after all offered to do the right thing) in the face of the difficulties marriages (or arrangements) inevitably face.

But let us go back to 1979, or thereabouts. Because of the vagaries of college scheduling, I ended up taking a session of summer school. It being a transient affair, we who chose to live in the dorms were cast together willy-nilly, and I ended up with this guy who every night brought in his girlfriend for coupling. I suppose it is a symptom of the impersonality of the whole affair that I haven't the slightest recollection of his name, and I'm not entirely sure I ever remembered it. But at any rate, we had something of a standing arrangement wherein I simply didn't come to the room in the evening before a certain hour. Nonetheless I did walk in on them a couple of times when their tryst-- well, "tryst" is way too civilized a word for it: when their copulation was not consummated sufficiently early.

This went on for several weeks, and then one day he announced to me that he planned to have his girlfriend in for the weekend, and that I needed to find somewhere else to sleep while they did this. This struck me as an unreasonable imposition, and when "no" wasn't sufficient, I was surprised to find that the Resident Director didn't share my opinion. I eventually bowed my head to the Spirit of the Age and found someone else who grudgingly let me move in with the for the week or so left in the session.

Thirty years on, it still epitomizes to me the surrealism of the weird mutation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with sexual urges placed on its own level below all else. Beds are for sex, not sleeping; walls and roofs are to keep staring eyes out, not the cold and rain. I wonder whether this fellow ever married his sex partner, and if they did wed, whether they are still married.

In that light, one sentence of Miss Eslinger's proclamation stands out. She is especially dismissive of the symbols of marriage, but then says all too tellingly, "If it's not a wedding, if there's no priest or piece of paper from the state, some people just don't give any weight to your commitment—despite high divorce rates that remind us that such formalities offer no guarantee the relationship will endure." Well, obviously they have even less obligation to play by Miss Eslinger's rules than she has to play by those that society sets forth; they could reasonably hold that Miss Eslinger is really obligated to play by society's rules, and that she will just have to live with the consequences of her defiance. But they could also say, "your love for your partner is limited, because you are unwilling to sacrifice your distaste for marriage as an institution in order to fulfill the commitment you claim to make." It's not paper or the priest or any of the trappings of a wedding that make the wedding, but the vows made before God and man to live in marriage. If one is not willing to make those vows, then others may assume that one's commitment isn't so permanent and so extensive. They will understand that one's commitment to the commitment isn't, well, committed.

Indeed, it is the fact that marriage is so sacred that it is written into societal structure. Society says, "put up, or shut up; make the vows and record them legally, or we will not take you seriously." And society is utterly correct. One's love, if perfected, consents to such bonds; their rejection is evidence of love's imperfection.

If You Can't Beat 'em, Crash 'em

Those who try to follow the Anglican mess probably know that the CaNN servers, which used to support T19 and a (ahem) host of other more conservative sites, started having big problems, and finally failed utterly. Most of the sites they supported have since migrated either to StandFirm or Wordpress, but recovery of the old material was attempted.

Well, it now comes out that this wasn't an accident. They were hacked. Twice, on top of what appears to have been a long term effort to knock them down. And the first attack, they claim, traces back to "an Anglican office".

Further comment seems superfluous.

Our Druidic Past

Remember the Melnyks? Well, for some reason, the matter is back. I'm not sure why bringing up a two year old book is timely, but perhaps it is to get in the following paragraph:

Melnyk’s problems within the Episcopal Church began when he was ‘exposed’ by a conservative Christian website seeking more ammunition for attacking the Episcopal Church’s consecration of a gay priest as Bishop. They accused Melnyk of taking part in rituals celebrating the Divine Feminine. Although he never practised anything but orthodox rites in his church, steadfastly maintained that he was not “in conflict with the Baptismal Covenant and the historical Creeds of the Church,” and had the support of the majority of his parishioners, he felt he had no option but to resign his ministry. ”I was told I could stay if I agreed to sever ties with my friends and never again write about Druidry,” Melnyk said. “But I knew The Apple and the Thorn was on the way, and I would not agree to being silenced.”

Not top put too fine a point on it, but this a misrepresentation to the point of being an outright lie. To recap:

• Melnyk was not initially implicated; nor for that matter was his wife. The incident began when Christianity Today wrote up an anonymous rite on the pages of the Episcopal Church Office of Womens Ministry. The story may have started at IRD< but it was the CT version that got things rolling. In any case, no names were given.


• The Melnyks entered the picture when the rite was traced back to another on-line copy with Ms. Rev. Melnyk's name on it. William Melnyk wasn't immediately implicated by this.


• Mr. Melnyk was found out when various people poking around on the web found a lot of material identifying him as a Druidic priest doing business as "Oakwyse".

What is particularly offensive about the, well, lies about the history of the incident is that it's pathetically easy, even with the failure of the blog archives on the CANN website, to track down the truth about this. Try this GetReligion search, for starters. With the proliferation of blogs and other independent records, it is not almost impossible to make such a controversy permanently fade into the past. Anyone with Google can pull it back readily, even in the face of the many deletions and bad links. It's yet another example of a web post which in effect counts on people not exercising the research power which the net itself makes so readily available.

The Globalization of Dissent

One risk of trying to follow church disputes from blogs is the posturing, but the other risk is not seeing the long view. I offer up Episcopal Dissidents, African Allies: The Anglican Communion and the Globalization of Dissent, a dissertation by Miranda K. Hassett, as something of a corrective. It's quite long, but as a totally secular and scholarly perspective on how this is playing out in the larger communion, it's quite valuable.

Conjugation of Church Nouns

From Huw Raphael's lectionary blog, +Z'ev:

In common usage, eisogesis is one of those irregular nouns. It’s only used in the second person negative:

My book is exegesis.
Your sermon is eisogesis.
Their blog is filled with bloody heresies.

and

These models might come into direct conflict if we see Church as another one of those irregular nouns:

We have church.
You have something, but we’re not sure what.
They have nothing at all.

Paul Zahl on Blogging Ethics

I think Zahl has it all wrong. It's not the lack of real names that creates the ethical problems. Sure, it might be nice to be able to know who to sue (though I wouldn't be adverse to appearing as 'Friskiness T. Gunrunning' if it came to that). But the bigger problems have more to do with the form than they have to do with obvious anonymity.

It's all Rush Limbaugh's fault.

No, seriously. Blogs have a lot in common with Rush's old "rant and take calls" format than they do with online fora or newsgroups. It was his program that established the "dittohead" phenomenon, where Rush postificated and his groupies called in to give "what he said" responses. Blogs are prone to the same sort of behavior, except amplified in the usual way the computers allow.

Successful blogs develop a following, and that following is rather often of like-minded people. And especially if the blogger comes on strong in expressing his positions, it's pretty likely that contrary responses get jumped on by the crowd. The result can be a kind of gang attack. But surprisingly the ethical problems appear when the blogger tries to rein this in, since his forms of control all involve some sort of censorship. Some people are just disruptive, and there's not much that can be done about them except ban them. But almost anyone with a contrary position can be taken as disruptive, because the most harmonious state is where never a constrasting view is heard. And that's where the really pernicious problems lie, because the temptation will be to falsify the history of the discussion by deleting or altering posts. And in religious discussion, there is the further temptation of interpreting contrary views as being immoral not just in their content, but simply in their stating. The expression of dissent is then transformed into bad manners-- and therefore it can be suppressed.

Thus tendency is to turn a blog into a little pool of the like-minded, openly hostile to dissent. And the world of bloggers turns into a bunch of little armed villages.

Bad manners? I don't think ending anonymity is really enough of a protection against that. After all, Dr. Zahl himself has been pilloried at length for "uncharitable" and excessive acts and statements he has made in public under his own name, as for instance when he refers to "the steamroller of what we now call 'revisionism'". It was an absurd statement, but putting his name to it didn't seem to curb his tongue. And conversely, as computers amplify anything else they offer the opportunity for the anonymous to abuse an e-mail address by bombarding it with abuse too.

The Internet Theologian Tells All

Although he isn't Terry Mattingly, the Internet Theologian is very funny-- not to mention full of insights:

The Internet Theologian Explains The Da Vinci Code

"The time has come for some kind of crib sheet for the confused and frightened, a handy, easy-to-use reference guide for identifying some of the key denominations, terms, and concepts in Christianity.This, however, is not that guide."

From Touchstone: "No More Hims of Praise"

(Tip to Wyclif)

According to Anthony Esolen, writing in Touchstone magazine, comments on the hymnal version of the latest trend in liturgy emasculation. It's bad enough in The Hymnal 1982 that there's hardly a male pronoun in the whole thing other than those referring to God. The resulting Bowdlerization is often painfully unpoetic (or at least jarring, to those of us who remember the real words), but at least they aren't heretical.

Well, apparently that wasn't enough. So here we have a familiar hymn as further corrected by some RC hymnodist:

Praise the Lord for grace and favor
To all people in distress,
Praise God, still the same as ever,
Slow to chide and swift to bless.
Alleluia, alleluia! Glorious now God’s faithfulness.

Does that not fill you with holy fervor? No? So what if the grammar is a little, um, tenuous. So what if the awkward chisel marks of political correctness mar the finish. After all, we can do without beauty in liturgy, can't we?

Frankly, I had hoped this disease could be confined to the pages of Enriching Our Worship or other follies of Anglican liturgical revisionism. And kept there, and never approved for permanent use. Or better still, suppressed. What is most striking about the ongoing revision of ECUSA liturgy is the utter denial of the past. I don't buy Peter Toon's attacks on the 1979 BCP for a minute, but the differences between it and subsequent trial liturgies puts 1979 in the bizarre position of arch-conservatism. Structurally 1928 and 1979 are very different; theologically (except for some questionable changes in the ordinal) they are different points on a continuum of emphasis. These new works are emphatically not, to the point where I must reject them.

If we can't say the ancient names of God, we have cut ourselves off from the Church. For the church must be able to tell us something about God, and surely His names would count as a pretty crucial "something". So what we are getting is a reversion to ante-Nicene Christianity-- the bad part, what with Gnostics and various anti-trinitarian heresies. In the Pagels/Ehrmann fantasy world of a Jesus perverted by the church this might make sense, but that world isn't the real world. In this world, when the church is set up as teaching that everything it had to say for the last 1600 years, both morally and theologically, is dubious if not outright in error, there's every reason to turn away from that church, or at least from those who present it that way.

If Jesus calls God "father", and commands us to do the same, who are we to improve upon his morals and his theology? Let Confessing Reader's daughter have the last word: “That’s just stupid.”

Weeds

Discussion of the Diocese of Washington expose in Father Jake's blog has escalated from the original point to commendations of Bishop Chane's supposed courage and a long sermon that begins:

Building is slow, sometimes painful. It requires continued daily effort over time. Ages, centuries.

Destruction is quick. It’s done in no time. It doesn’t cost anything (apart from what’s destroyed).

Courage; yes this is rare in deed. And Bishop Chane is courageous. And no one have stood up to defend and support him.

I don't think what Chane is doing requires any courage, but that's not the point. To do justice to the author's work would require quoting almost all of it, but by the time we get to the end of it, we learn that bullies are destructive, it only takes one, it's all about fear, "political Calvinism" means that "the organization is to serve the Body of Christ", that St. Paul is relevant (but presumably not those passages in 1 Corinthians), that tradition is spent bullying one's neighbors, that we are called to love our brothers and sisters....

Obviously most of this is of the same ilk as a congressman or senator's speech yielding to no one in his defense of motherhood, apple pie, truth, justice, and the American way. It's empty rhetorical calories, or worse, self-congratulation. And just about the only content in this speech is a rather dubious condemnation of Cantuar for not attacking Akinola in his Easter sermon instead of addressing an issue (The Da Vinci Code) which is of more relevance to his own diocese and in my opinion more germane to an Easter sermon anyway.

But let's turn to all this talk of bullying and destruction. As a gardener, I can testify that planting takes minutes and weeding takes forever. The weeds have a different perspective on this, for it takes a weed a while (but not long enough for me!) to grow to seeds, and a second for me to pull it up. And when I turn from my flowers to the moral teachings of the church, it's surely a matter of perspective. It's reasonable to attribute it ALL to destruction. But then, from every life some weeds must be pulled.

Punted by Ponty

Al Kimel of Pontifications fame has asked me to stop commenting in his blog, and it appears he is determined to enforce this, since he has deleted a comment I made in response to someone else's query explaining that I had been asked not to continue.

Back in the ancient days of usenet news, taking back what we said became quickly impossible as the backbone refused to transmit message deletions. Soon enough after that, dejanews and the caching of old news items mean that our words remained available essentially forever, at least for anyone who knows how to search the archives. Therefore, plenty of what I said twenty years ago can be anyone with the wits and desire to find it.

I haven't looked at usenet religion discussion in years, and it seems to me that the real action has moved to blogs and to a lesser extent to fora. Thus, as discussion has moved away from publicly archived sites, erasure of the past has become a problem. It is less so in a forum, because as a rule the maintainers do want to archive traffic and find, as with usenet, that allowing people to erase their posts is an opening for abuses. But blogs are different: they can be erased and edited at will, and therefore they offer all sorts of temptations for erasing the past. I've seen this happen quite a bit: the history of the Russian Orthodox Automomous Church in the USA involves a number of deleted blogs and websites. Much of the pagan rites flap of October 2004 was carried out as the various offenders scurried about deleting their various webpages and blogs, though not fast enough for us "persecutors" to ferret them out.

My last response in Al's blog was deleted. Before that I saw my comments entering a sort of moderation. And in looking back at at the predecessor topic I see that Al also appears to have deleted the somewhat intemperate message with which he closed it. On one level, I'm annoyed, with cause, that I am not being allowed to close out my presence in his blog. It is perhaps not deliberate, but he has created the false impression that I withdrew into my hole, presumably failing to answer the questions which were put to me. But then, websites and blogs are always, in a way, false fronts. We write out our thoughts to the world, and then we take them back, thus editing our countenance for those to come.

The New Tractarians?

(Tip to Serge)

Over on A View From the Sacristy has a post which suggests:

And in that wondering, I can’t help but think on the world of blogging as a new witness and perhaps a new, “Tracts for Our Times.” And within this I don’t speak to Anglicanism at all. I speak to the wonderful web of folks, mainly traditional ‘Anglo-Catholics’ or Anglicans, feisty traditional Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox folks (in no particular order) who have banded together to form an appeal to Holy Tradition and a witness to something ancient and in our modern day, something new that does speak to people’s lives….or least those willing to listen.

I would love to believe this, but alas I think it isn't so and won't really happen. Blogging about controversy seems to create communities of those who reckon agreement unto righteousness, where posturing is more important than taking opposition seriously. Well, perhaps the original tractarians shared the same fault.

But there's also the The Law of the Stupidest Argument and the priciples of Jerks For Jesus, Bullhorns For Everyone, and The Standard Arguments. It's extremely hard to sustain worthwhile discussion in a medium that rewards people who make biting, conventional, and simplistic comebacks over those who make longer, calmer, and more considered responses. Time and again I find myself refraining from commenting because I've spent enough time thinking about something to ensure that the post has rolled off the page and that nobody is going to read what I wrote. Time and again I don't respond because a wave of standard argument quick comebacks have swamped the comments of a post. Time and again I cut my responses off because it's clear that the person on the other end doesn't read what I wrote, but only what one of the stereotypical participants would have said. The same lack of psychological presence that allows flaming also allows the more subtle fault of reducing opponents to cardboard-thin stock characters rather than real, changeable people who hold their own, changeable opinions.

What tends to happen, as a result, is that forums and blogs tend to get locked into a circle of like-minded people who tend to reinforce their common prejudices and opinions, but who are cut off from other communities with dissenting opinions. I think that's one of the biggest differences I see between blogs and the tractarians. The Tracts were written to convince the rest of the church; blog articles tend to be written to reinforce membership in the blogger's subculture. Traditionalists write to other traditionalists; liberals write to other liberals. The communities are disjoint and often as not contemptuous to each other. Therefore I tend to find the writing on both sides disappointing, because it never risks the one thing that would make it a real, living argument: refutation.

What They Have Written, They Have Written

There's a general folk belief among skeptics in the unreliability of biblical texts, reinforced by the spatter of footnotes at the bottom of modern translations, and excised from the KJV versions that older people grew up with. Now in the OT there's more basis for this. There are areas where there is obvious damage to the Hebrew text. But these are not extensive, and they tend to be concentrated in certain passages and books. In the NT the issues are much smaller.

Of late there has been a lot of fuss about Misquoting Jesus, a book by Bart Ehrman that claims that the New Testament has been redacted (accidentally and on purpose) in the direction of supporting Orthodox doctrine against the competition. I haven't read this book, and I'm not sure how well I could really evaluate it, not being a scriptural scholar nor having ready access to the texts which would need to be cited in order to defend such a thesis.

I have managed to find this discussion of textual reliability in general, with some specific discussion of Ehrman's work (based primarily on a previous book, however). The impression I get from the article is that Ehrman's work is based on comparison of texts of different age; thus his conclusions are generally sound, but also largely irrelevant to readers of modern translations. The reason for this is that the translators, in working from the same text, tend to translate from the older (and presumably unchanged) version. Here and there in the crank-odox world one finds those who are fanatical adherents to the "Byzantine" text rather than the Nestle-Aland older versions favored by most modern translations, and this text (as well as the western Textus Receptus) are presumably subject to the errors/changes Ehrman discusses. As the article I cite comments, most of the small amendations pale against the larger surface message of the text, and anyone reading a modern, non-sectarian translation won't even see most of them. The media seem to be making far more out of this book than is justified.

Rick Laribee cites a dissertation which analyzes the variation in a single passage in detail. It should surprise nobody to learn that the analysis shows that almost all the variation involves easily correctable typos and other obvious errors. Indo-European languages such as Greek allow extensive error correction; the distance between meaningful variations of a text is typically quite large, and therefore requires substantial modification to get from one to the other.

There's really no getting past that the scriptural texts do intend to tell the same story which their authors intended to tell.

Kirk Hadaway & Co. on Church Statistics

Read this interview.

My Bible! Mine!

One of the standard arguments one sees used in Orthodox arguments against Protestants is some variation or another of the following:

As if the Bible would or could exist without the Church's authority behind it.

This comes from the blog of Huw Raphael, who is an ex-Anglican-- not that I'm surprised at that. Indeed, one thing that strikes me is how often Anglican converts to Orthodoxy resort to arguing against a theory of scriptural authority which Anglicanism rejects.

See, the bible exists because people wrote it down. In the case of any part of the OT it is laughable to suggest that it was done at the behest of a church which did not yet exist-- at least not in the form of a visible organization. In the NT, the question is at least not utterly rediculous, but it's abundantly clear that the texts were written first and then recognized for their authority, and not the other way around. The New Testament texts were written within the church, but they were not written by the church.

Furthermore, the NT is shot through, from end to end, with the assertion that the church-- by which I mean, anyone or group claiming to speak for Christ-- can be held accountable to scripture. The best one can maintain is that the True Church always passes this test.

The real issue is the naive, hyper-Protestant view that one can interpret scripture outside of any tradition (and thus free of a church). The thing is, Anglicans since Hooker have agreed that this is impossible, so for ex-Anglicans to hang this albatross around their rejected church's neck is disingenious. Spong's error isn't total rejection of tradition. It is his acceptance of the tradition of modernism, and his theses don't hold together at all if that tradition is rejected.

In the bigger picture, anyone who is choosing churches on the basis of correct theology is in fact acting as their own authority. And conversely, Protestantism in the large is precisely the recognition that the Catholic Church departed along the way from the faith-- historic or not-- in ways important enough to justify separation. (And since some of those errors are also held to by Orthodox, similar separation is justified.)

All of this ties into lame ecclesiological disputation anyway. If utter theological obedience to one's church were demanded in Anglican churches, then this conversion would be illegitimate too. The irony, of course, is that Spong was made possible because Anglican churches do just the opposite.

I'm curious as to whether there is a patristic version of the argument, by the way. SO far I've only gotten this as a lay explanation, almost always from converts.

The Punk Strunk

The other week I was in Borders, picking up a copy of Beowulf for my wife (ever stopped to consider that there's a connection between Grendel and Norman Bates?), and I came across a little white book on the new release tables.

Why business people speak like idiots

Within a minute, I knew I had to take this book home with me. It's all about the nonsense that is the usual language of business these days, where people have to say "leverage" instead of, say "use". And speaking of using, on Page 45 there is a neat little chart showing that the readability (using the Flesch score) of CEO letters to shareholders correlates quite nicely with how much trouble the company is in. That's news you can use.

It's interesting that, though they take a passing swipe and grammar and usage pedants, part of their message can be traced right back to Strunk & White. Here's what they say:

The third motive for obscurity is business idiots' relentless attempt to romanticize whatever it is that they do for a living. All of this romanticizing keeps the business world from talking about work and instead allows business idiots to pretend to be secret agents and quarterbacks.

And here's what White wrote:

[He] is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight.

Obviously the standard of adventure has changed with the years. And maybe there's more hope for the message when delivered by Deloitte than by your English teacher.

At any rate, besides recommending this book for the office, I'm looking towards its theological application. Theology is laden with jargon, much of it of highly questionable significance. There's definitely something wrong with saying that God is incomprehensible and then burying this statement in a mound of polysyllabic dogma.

The 2 1/2 Foot Shelf at Notre Dame

Someone was quoting from some anti-Christian nutecase, and my wife happened across this:

Anti-Catholic Printed Material Collection (ANT)
University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA)
Notre Dame, IN 46556

Contents: Anti-Catholic printed material and printed material concerning anti-Catholicism: books, pamphlets, leaflets, periodicals, offprints and printed ephemera.