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.

In the Nature of a Wrench

James Kushiner blogs, over in Mere Comments:

Man in the West does not seem at peace with his biological nature and in many ways seeks to transcend it or frustrate it. He does not seem at peace with, say, the natural fertility of the sexual act.

But man seems to be at peace with the mechanization of himself. Perhaps it is because these changes have generally happened incrementally over time that he has gotten used to them. Many men think they must be good changes and believe that, just like evolution, these steps must be in the direction of evitable progress, a gradual improvement of the species.

Now, comments such as these set off my "liberal arts" detector. Those of us over on the technology end of the academy also talk about "appropriate technology" and the like; what we don't do is make noises of amazement that people seek out and use technology. Maybe it's because, as people who exert what mastery we have over the world, it is hard for us to imagine there is anything remarkable about what we've done ever since we were old enough to pick up tools.

But there's also that nagging matter of scripture. Technology as the fruit of mankind is prophesied at length in the first three chapters of Genesis; the ability to attempt to manage the world about us is one of the fundamental traits of humanity. On that both scripture and the world agree. And a mathematician such as myself sees the will to do nothing as simply a specific case of that management; it is yet an exercise of the will.

That is, in particular, why I find discussions of fertility and its control almost inevitably crippled by incomplete consideration. It is not just with steroids and rubber and the knife that we control fertility; in the larger picture, it is with vaccines and antibiotics and sanitation that we have made the biggest impact. I think that nobody would willing go back to a 17th or 15th century control of fertility through disease and war and famine.

The truth is that, yes, there are plenty of engineers out there who are completely blind to the implications of the devices they design. And unfortunately, there are as many lawmakers, and manufacturers, and writers and counselors who are blind. And there are many whose particular hammer is the universal tool-- engineers who can fix everything with technology, and writers who can fix everything with words.

But there are also plenty of people, all around, who do consider the implications of what they build or advocate. But they sin, and therefore do not think things through well; and the rest of humanity is so very cunning in their ability to pervert whatever the thoughtful people come up with. Thus it seems to me that one's "thoughtful" consideration is easily itself perverted into a sinful self-ratification. Nothing is more ironic than talk of the perils of technology, broadcast worldwide on the internet.

Obviously We're Looking For DIfferent Things

OK, so I have some competition in the how to do church websites department, with Tony Morgan's 10 Easy Ways to Keep Me from Visiting Your Church Because I Visited Your Website" (which I got to from titusonenine. And I notice his advice varies from mine in several significant aspects.

As I remarked earlier, people looking at parish websites do so with a variety of different intents. So, here I might be, heading off to Grainger, IN, and what would I (personally) do? Well, nothing that finds "Grainger Community Church"-- in fact, the very name indicates to me that (besides not being Episcopal) it's not going to do worship as I know it.

Which leads us to some of the points he drags out. A lot of them are common sense web design things, and while I hadn't thought about the "pink and doves" thing, he does have a point with that one. But then we come upon this:

Put a picture of your building on the main page. After all, ministry is all about the buildings. Ah, but buildings are about ministry, and the form of the building says volumes about what's going to happen inside. Everything about GCC's website-- but especially the few pictures of the building-- says "there will be no liturgy inside."

Which brings me to a point. There are three kinds of church visitors: people like me and (I must presume) Mr. Morgan, who are in town already knowing what kind of church they're looking for; people paying their respects (wedding, funeral, etc.) who most of all just need to be able to find the place; and raw seekers who maybe have no idea what they want. I'm not sure exactly what websites are supposed to do for the latter, partly because I haven't been one in any part of my adult life, but partly because it has always seemed to me that different people have sought along different roads.

Looking at websites like that of GCC or (another he mentions in a different post) Crossroads Community Church gives me a message, all right: there's no place for me, because I'm too old to go to rock concerts. And even when I was young enough, I would have used the internet (not available at the time) to exclude "community churches". And why not? Because

-- and this is the kicker --

by then I already knew enough to read all the theological decisions hidden in what people said about church. Ignoring the surface details of whether auditorium music will survive better than congregational hymnody (though I'll bet on the latter), there is theology hidden in the difference between what GCC says it does about church and what St. Paul's Random Episcopal says it does about church. And the funny thing is that protestant websites tend to be about hiding that difference to the degree that only the ecclesiological cognoscenti can discern what a parish is about. I happen to know that "community church" normally means "standard American evangelical theology", but what about the unchurched seeker?

With All Due Respect to Toads

See Joel Achenbach's observation on Judge Roberts and the toads.

Uncle Ed and Jack Spong

So, for some reason over at U.S. News and World Report they feel the need to interview John Spong again. Remarking upon this in titusonenine, one "Ted" says:

Every time I read an interview of Bp. Spong I can’t help but think of my crazy old uncle Ed. Ed was the guy who would sit in the corner at family parties, weddings etc. and talk nonsense - rant and rave etc. He was a bit of curiousity, people would look at old Ed and wonder if he was still sane. But Ed was old and so allowances were made. So it goes with Bp. Spong. Crazy old man that he is, and frankly at this point a bit of a circus-side-show like curiousity. Just ignore him and don’t let him get your dander up. Life is lonely in the “where are they now” file.

Well, I wish. Why can't the media get over this guy? Because he's an easy interview? Because they wish in their heart-of-hearts that he speaks for ECUSA? (He doesn't.)

Well before his elevation, the present Archbishop of Canterbury dissected Spong's idiotic theses. If Cantuar isn't good enough, who is?

Please, Jack Spong: spare us!

The Emerald City: Home of Satan?

If it wasn't enough that Harry Potter was teaching kids to seek out black magic, now we have Amy Welborn ragging on The Wizard of Oz. Here, I think we definitely have run into a problem.

Fictional books and movies which seek to teach about religious belief are uncommon; those that intend to do so for children are quite rare. Much more commonly, it is the virtues that are the subject. So it is, clearly, with this movie. And in the scene with the wizard (which, by the way, is patently supposed to be preposterous) the message about the virtues is simple: you are what you do. Such a simple message, in fact, that Jesus teaches it in the parable of the sheep and the goats. Oh, and about self-reliance.

Ah, there's the rub. The difficulty is in the translation: "Oz the Great and Powerful" is a symbol for God; therefore the movie teaches that God is a humbug. Well, maybe. And maybe not. The symbol is more complex than that, for one thing. After all, their "prayers" to Oz-the-Powerful are answered-- just not in the way that they expected. How God-like! And further along in the movie-- well, once the balloon appears, God-symbolism is completely out the window.

The bigger issue seems to be this: in a secular movie, it's easy enough to teach against virtue, by accident or on purpose. It's easy to teach virtue on purpose. But it's exceedingly hard to teach specifically Christian principles, and next to impossible to direct people to interpret what they are seeing along specifically Christian lines.

With respect to Harry Potter, you have to be pretty thick not to notice that explicitly Christian symbols appear all over the place.

Space Aliens Seize NY Times

Over in her blog Barbara Nicolosi recounts a strange set of interviews by a reporter from the New York Times You can read her account of the interviews here and a follow-up exchange here.

The back-and-forth between the reporter's clueless paranoia and Ms. Nicolosi's sarcastic comebacks is amusing, but also depressing. Earth to NYT: everything is not about political power-- or for that matter, lifestyles of the upper-middle-class Manhattanite.

Another From Waiter Rant

See this entry: Nuc Dimittis