Trinity Catena 2a

Love is the union of a lover, a beloved, and of their mutual love. When we, following scripture, assert "God is love," we confess that God is a plurality in unity; God is love.

***

It is Augustine who observes that God is love (in chapter eight of his wittily titled The Trinity). He doesn't do it as a philosopher, but as a pastor. Even while he is outlining how the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the father, and the intensity of their love is the Spirit of love itself, he reminds that love draws us out. Love requires us and compels us and irresistably changes us. Love is loving; it acts. Loving makes us lovers, bone of its bone, ever more able to see and be what loving requires. Our flaming hearts accept nothing less. And in the center of its unity we strain to glimpse the form itself-–the lover, what is being loved, and love–-and that is God.

The gaze catches so completely that I can only stammer some mystical poetry: a few lines from San Juan de la Cruz's love poem La noche oscura del alma ("Dark Night of the Soul") and from Mechthild of Magdeburg's Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead):

"In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed
Forth unobserved I went,

In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.

That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well,

O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love."

---

"I cannot dance, O Lord,
Unless You lead me.
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me see You dance and sing—-

Then I will leap into Love—-
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
The sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.

There I will stay with You, whirling."

***

Anyway, then--looking out from contemplation--there's something else that this sight of God as love does to us. That God is love itself sets the tone for what Christians mean when they talk about our deepest ideas of unity and community. The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff called the Trinity the communion of life and love. “Solitude is hell,” he said. “No one is an island. We are surrounded by persons, things, and beings on all sides.” The loving community of the Trinity calls us “to maintain relationships of communion with all, giving and receiving.”

Only persons can be in communion. It means that one is in the presence of the other, different from the other but open in a radical mutuality. For there to be true communion there must be direct and immediate relationships: eye to eye, face to face, heart to heart. The result of mutual surrender and reciprocal communion is community. Community results from personal relationships in which each is accepted as he or she is, each opens to the other and gives the best of himself or herself.

We will pick up this theme again.

The Meetup of Divine Intent

Driving in to work this morning, I was listening to a lecture on St. Bonaventure. I have always been fascinated by the mystics of Christian history, and I have read many of their works and summaries of their lives. The problem for me, though, is the explicit Neoplatonism that informs their ideas. The mystic way is not something I would have learned from the lips of the apostles. Its descent into the soul to find God is not the kind of spiritual advice that I read Jesus encouraging his followers to practice. So, as much as I admire these devout men and women of the church, I respectfully believe them misguided with respect to their Biblical theology. And that is no hidden scar.

But this morning I realized that I have come to find myself at the door of a better mystic way. This way is not a ladder of divine ascent. It does not struggle inward to God. Instead, it journeys outward--soul and body together--into the lives of one's neighbors and the needs of our communities. Instead of the cloud of unknowing, the self disappears into the river of God's selfless, overflowing love. One is carried in the eucharistic direction, to be broken and distributed for others. Perhaps there is still the threefold pattern of purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation of the self. Illumination about the people and communities in which one lives. And union with the Spirit as it pours itself kenotically into the world setting apart the name of God, living out the kingdom rule of God, and seeking to do the will of God.

A short introduction to liberation theology

Robert McAfee Brown. Liberation Theology: An Introductory Guide. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press. 1993. 143 pp.

***

What is liberation theology? It is a modern style of theology, an apocalyptic style, that begins with people and, specifically with the poor. It asks questions about now, and applies the gospel concretely to real situations and toward real goals. It says the world, because of the kingship of Christ, should not be the way it is.

Brown identifies four recurring themes in liberation theology.

Compromiso. This word is not a Spanish form of the English word compromise. Quite the opposite. It means commitment of the whole person. And a good test of such commitment, says Brown, is one’s degree of concern for children. Y los unicos privilegiados seran los ninos, “and the only privileged ones will be children.”

Hope. This is the existential dimension that Juergen Moltmann discusses in his Theologie der Hoffnung. This is the attitude resulting from living in the Easter light. This is the possibility that change in every way is not only possible but promised.

God’s Presence. The poor can hope because God is with them and sees them, for he himself did not come as a rich man but as a poor one. And, Jesus spoke of bringing good news to the poor. Jesus tabernacled among us; he labored and lived among us.

Preferential Option for the Poor. Certainly, the gospel is for all people. But the Bible begins with the poor, with widow and orphans. The preferential option points to the kind of change necessary to bring about the justice the lordship of Jesus requires. The question put to any reform must be, “Will this or will it not improve the situation of the poor?” And if so, all of society will benefit.

Someone who wishes to practice liberation theology should do their research. They must open their eyes–-especially if they are privileged. "Criticial thinking without hope is cynicism," said the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova, "but hope without critical thinking is naivety." Seeing requires struggle. The insights of social analysis, economists, and the sciences help. But one cannot stand apart and seek to understanding. In order to open one’s eyes (called conscientization), one must personally cross the gap.

“The commitment being described is not a form of intellectualizing so much as one of experiencing and ‘encountering.’ It is not enough to read books about poverty; commitment means encountering poor people. It is not enough to learn about ‘the root causes of poverty,’ . . . it is a matter of learning about and entering into and making common cause with persons who are being destroyed by these root causes, and seeking for legislative–or more drastic–ways to dispose of the causes. And it is the almost universal witness of those who do so, that in encountering the poor they are somehow encountering God, learning that whoever else God is, God is ‘the God of the poor,’ the one who takes their part, who works with and form them.” (56)

Brown lists three emphases of liberation theology clustered around its call for liberation. All three hang together. This is important: one cannot be over emphasized or considered apart from the rest. (1) Liberation from unjust social structures or “structural evil.” (2) Liberation from the power of fate. Nothing is “the way it is.” Things needn’t remain as they are. (3) Liberation from personal sin and guilt. These all hang together because Jesus, among other things, is the liberator and the gospel is an announcement of the personal and political liberation consequent of his reign. A Christian cannot pray the Lord’s Prayer and not include its second half. There is no theology without ethics; no resurrection without hope.

Brown concludes by calling his reader to some next steps. First, we must consciously form communities of Christians committed to Bible reading and contemporary action. Second comes a commitment to the truth, to speaking the truth. We must be truthful with ourselves, with others, and we must speak the truth to the dominant community. And finally, we must take risks.

“I believe there is an eleventh commandment for Christians: Thou shalt not decide that someone else should become a martyr. . . . Christians must seek to discern the kind of witness that is demanded of them, and then go with it.” (119)

Every Christian must do a hermeneutic of their situation and decide what martyrdom—meaning witness–demands of them. And every church, too, has to do the same. The forces and temptations that buffet the individual will be different than those that afflict a church. “Either we believe in a God of life, or we serve the idols of death.” (Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero)

“A sacrifice from ill-gotten gains is tainted
and the gifts of the wicked win no approval.
The Most High has no pleasure in the offerings of the godless,
nor do countless sacrifices win his forgiveness.
To offer a sacrifice from the possessions of the poor
is like killing a son before his father’s eyes.
Bread is life to the destitute,
and to deprive them of it is murder.
To rob your neighbor of his livlihood is to kill him,
and he who defrauds a worker of his wages sheds blood.”

~ Ecclesiasticus 34.18-22, the passage that “converted” Bartolome de las Casas

Esau McCaulley says his church, the black church in America, has something to say

Yesterday, I finished Esau McCaulley's book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. IVP Academic. 2020. McCaulley's bona fides are beyond question. He has a PhD from St. Andrews. His Doktorvater is N. T. Wright. He teaches New Testament at Wheaton College. He is a priest in the ACNA. He is a black man and a Christian. This is a book McCaulley was born to write. And it is a book with a message: the South got somethin' to say.

These notes are not a book review. Rather, they are a short treatment of some of his ideas. Nevertheless, if you have never read his book, I do recommend it. The faculty and staff of my alma mater, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, read it together. That encouraged me to pick it up; it took five years to find a cheap copy bc I'm a cheapie. Plus, I am very interested in looking at the faith through the eyes of non-white people.

Chapter One: The South got Somethin' to Say

As he grew up, McCaulley found himself caught between two communities in the Black church. One of these was evangelical scholasticism and the academy. The other, social justice and the pulpits. He appreciated the serious scholarship of the former, but its papers and commentarites "displayed little concern for how biblical texts speak to the experiences of Black believers" (12). He also thought they read for a white audience, if they even made it out of the first century. "To me, it was a sign of privilege to imprison Paul and Jesus in the first century (13). But what about the social justice side? Here, scholarship was viewed with suspicion. Getting the exegesis right and whiteness have often gone hand in hegemonic hand. Wasn't exegesis the tool of white churches seeking to baptize slavery in the first place? McCaulley cedes the point but disagrees. Looking at the earliest strate of Black ecclesial leadership, he finds plenty of exegesis--and a thoroughgoing message of liberation and freedom.

As McCaulley argues, God is a liberator. Liberation erupts from God's very character, from out of and to his ontological sabbath shalom.[1] God desires freedom for his people. And his expectation is that his freed people will live lives of holiness, living out their liberation before the world. They participate in God's continual and peaceful call. Any reading of the Bible that says otherwise is in error. Scholarship and justice pick up the liberating cross together in whatever historical situation it is found and partner with one another to discern the mind of Christ for this day.

Handpicking other points of interest

McCaulley goes in for re-examing texts used historically to subdue and subjugate Black Christians. Eschatology is on his mind, the kind of eschatology that bubbles up into every living moment. Eschatology stimulates the church to act for justice and for liberation against the horizon ofeventual and certain shalom. But eschatology is also "not yet." And, in the intervening time, there is mourning.

Speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, McCaulley writes, "To mourn involves being saddened by the state of the world. To mourn is to care. It is an act of rebellion against one's own sins and the sins of the world. . . A theology of mourning never allows us the privilege of apathy. . . Mourning is intuition that things are not right--that more is possible. To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is. Our politicians run on our desires by convincing us that utopia is possible here and they alone can provide it." (65) I do also like his emphasis that this mourning leads to a hope to see elements of the Kingdom of God come to be, its liberation unto justice. And that this involves telling truth. As Luther said, A theologian calls a thing what it is. "Peacemaking is a sign of God's inbreaking kingdom. . . . Through our efforts to bring peace, we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent. . . . Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God's kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish." (Ibid.)

I am caught by this: "For Zecharaiah and Elizabeth, the miracle child is John. For the African American Christian, the miracle is the Black Church born of truly miraculous circumstances and whose witness to Jesus has served as something of a forerunner preparing America to accept a truer and fuller gospel" (84). This fuller gospel is one that, while grounded in respectful and canonically comprehensive exegesis, includes the necessary hermeneutic to place those exegetic results in dialogue with today. Preaching is a public gift of the Black Church.

McCaulley reads with the end in mind. His work is eschatological. He understands the Christian vision of the future--the liberated, risen church--as one that embraces difference: difference of skin, of language, of culture. "These distinct people, cultures, and languages are eschatological everlasting. At the end, we do not find the elimination of difference. Instead the very diversity of cultures is a manifestation of God's glory. . . . Our distinctive cultures represent the means by which we give honor to God. He is honoered through the diversity of tongues singing the same song." (118) Liberation does not lead to the removal of color, thinking of people who claim to not see color. That approach to difference is well-meant, perhaps, but incorrect. "The gospel does not cancel ethnic identities.(113)"

So when McCaully approaches scripture, he considers it in its historical-grammatical context and he considers it eschatologically.[2] In the Easter light, as von Balthasar said. So, he weds the careful tools of the evangelicals with the social energy of the progressives.

Laws of restraint suggest an eschatological purpose

McCaully discusses a way of reading Biblical ethics that I found very helpful. Referencing Jesus's teaching on divorce, McCaully observes that Jesus brings ethics back to creational intent. Let's call this the creational ethic. But, Jesus acknowledges that the law does exist to restrain error. Paul does the same when he says the law is the paidagogos. The law makes pastoral sense of difficult situations. Let's call this pastoral consideration.

Applying this to the slavery question in America. The Bible's teaching around slavery is pastoral consideration. Its teachings limit the worst aspects of slavery. And, as they do their work, they erase the foundation that supports the sinful institution itself. They do this because the creational intent--the deeper ethic--is liberation-unto-freedom. God made all human beings to be his imago in the world. So the limiting effort of the law serves a temporary purpose guided by the deeper and eventually overcoming liberation of eschatological reality, in this case, a free people worshiping God's messiah together.

Scars suffered in the present do not prevent eschatological participation

Finally, there is McCaulley's discussion of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Christ is our reconciler, our liberator to shalom in the Kingdom of God. One would not have thought a eunuch could ever be liberated. Weren't his public wounds permanent? He was not only a a Gentile, but he was permanently impure by the nature of his injury. As McCulley reminds his reader: eunuch's were despised. The man suffered the injustice of castration from the community at large, and "in a culture with strictly defined gender roles, he would be seen as aberrant" (110). But the eunuch is in fact liberated. He "found hope in the shamed Messiah whose resurrection lifts those with imposed indignities to places of honor." And "The eunuch [was always] an image bearer [of God]. Christ showed the eunuch who he truly was." McCaully's point is that blackness, like castration, does not prevent Jesus's liberating act from fully delivering black men and women to wholeness, dignity, and value in the Kingdom of God, to "God's eschatological vision for the reconciliation of all things in his Son." Christ's redemption is a liberating act for all people who for whatever reason suffer indignity and shame. Christ has made a place for them all in the kingdom.

__________

[1] I hope one sees the divine mission underneath this mention of liberation.
[2] cf Theology Along Three Axes

Six ways the Bible contributes to philosophical ethics

Ethical philosopher Dr. Arthur F. Holmes suggests six contributions the Bible makes to philosophical ethics.

1. It gives a theological basis for our [Christian] moral obligation, in terms of our obligation to the will of God, the creator and lawgiver.
2. It gives an account of the relation of morality to God's purposes in creation, our perversion of those purposes through sin and our restoration to righteous living by the grace of God.
3. It teaches us the principles of justice and love which describe God's character and should also characterize us.
4. It reveals the moral law of God, declaring duties in many areas of human life. This is summarized in the Ten Commandments and spelled out by precept and example throughout Scripture.
5. It demonstrates that from love for God and gratitude for his mercies come the motivation and dynamic for moral living.
6. It depicts the ideals and promise of the kingdom of God that Christ came to establish, first in our hearts and lives and eventually throughout the entire world.

Holmes goes on to say that studying philosophical ethics is right for people informed by the Bible because a framework is needed for evaluating and applying its principles that arise and are applied in different times and places. "We can learn to distinguish universal and unchanging principles that transcend cultural and historical differences from case applications in culturaly variable situations." Ethics can lift itself out of "case applications" and construct a useful framework that brings consistency to today's decision making. This too allows for dialogue across the cultures of our time.

__________

Arthur F. Holmes. Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions. Contours of Christian Philosophy. ed. Stephen Evans. 2nd ed. InterVarsity Press. 2007. pp. 16-17.

A letter to my children on dating

July 30, 2019
Dear K and C,

Sometimes there are topics which require time, order, and right circumstance. Because that so rarely happens, I have decided to give this format a try. The topic on my mind is courtship, dating. I want to give you the best foundation for doing this that I can. The reason why is not because I think either of you are making foolish choices in this area. It is because I want you to know that I have something to say about this very important part of your lives. Or, really, that God has good things to say about it which are far more useful and nuanced than the "don't have sex before marriage" monodrone that blares from the churches. Yes, we live in a sex-saturated culture; you know more about sex and sexuality than many adults did a generation ago. Where we stick to the science, we do well, but what we find mostly are consumer attitudes of self-indulgence. So many are adrift and hurt when it comes to love. Perhaps I can save you some trouble.

1.
God is love, and in him we live and move and have our being.

Just a guess, but most bits of advice on dating do not begin with the love of God. Odd, when you think about it. I'm not talking about the existence of God. If you wish to debate about the existence of God, we may as well debate the existence of the people you want to date in the first place. No. We begin together beholding the love of God. You see, everything we talk about--our hopes and questions, our bodies, our emotional and physical needs, the way that we turn from childhood and begin stepping forward into the future with others, the joy and satisfaction of being together with people in love--all of it is a love-gift of God. Not a distant, unknown God. Not an impersonal force. But a God who is involved with us. All the things I just listed, aren't they the topics we care most about? Our God, because he made us, made those things. And our God, because he lived as a human being among us with a family and friends and so on, knows all about them. And our God, because he has promised to renew the world, values those things. Love gets into the details. Love doesn't keep its distance, and anything that does is not love.

This creating-knowing-promising love of God tells us that love is like a good conversation. It may begin in a lonely, scary place; the sexual chaos I mentioned earlier tells us we are a lonely people. The conversation may begin there. But as we give our attention and ourselves to another person, we get to know them. Should they become lifelong friends or a spouse, we will spend our lives enjoying that ever deepening talk. I am fortunate to have a handful of friends whom I have known for years--what a treasure! We see each other after a long absence, and we pick right up where we left off. Cultivate people like that in your life. Make the effort (love makes the effort). And I think you know that my wish when I was looking for a wife was to find someone I loved talking to and would enjoy talking to as much or more twenty years in as twenty minutes. God certainly blessed me there with your mom; talking with her is a highlight of every day. My point here is to say that love doesn't sit still, it moves toward what is beloved, and it doesn't stop at acquaintance but it numbers the hairs of one's head and plays the finest heartstring of the soul. We cannot talk about dating until we see it within the horizon of the love of God.

2.
Everyone is made in the image of God (the imago Dei) and worthy of respect.

The relevant text is Genesis 1.27: "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (NRSV). God is spirit, so this text does not mean that God made people to look like him. That is the way the Greek pagans thought--painting pictures of themselves on the sky and naming them gods and goddesses. The truth is the other way round. Our God communicates. He wants his creation to be ruled by regents who represent him, who speak as and for him, who govern and act as he does. Human beings are meant to represent him to creation. And creation, as it listens and looks to human beings, will know what its creator is like. Human beings are important and valuable, no matter their age, race, class, or sex because they--we--are made in the image of God.

C. S. Lewis talked about the imago Dei when he said, "It is immortals whom we joke with, marry, snub, and exploit." Indeed, it is not immortality but image that should give us pause. It is God's very own.

So, in our relationships with other human beings, we must recognize them as bearers of God's image and treat them accordingly--and they us.

3.
God loves people, so love people

A youth leader of mine once chimed, "You should never date anyone you wouldn't want to marry." All the adults within earshot agreed, and I did too, though I knew little about it. As I aged, I followed their advice, for I knew no better. Now I do. So let me amend this bit of folk wisdom because it is much too serious. It assumes that every date is a potential marriage invitation--which it is not. The world is full of funny, silly, thoughtful, shy, ecstatic, reserved, detailed, slovenly, color-coordinated, rustic, unusual, adorable people. How amazing is that! What riches are all around us. It is stupid to make every conversation ring with the overtones of choral matrimony, and people in real life do not make this mistake. When you begin working, you'll be around all kinds of people for hours and days at a time without the pressure of marriage. So do not be so serious or afraid. Get to know them! Learn how to value and appreciate all kinds of people. Youth is the time of exploration. Stoke your curiosity and meet all sorts of people, men and women. Be curious about them. Even go out with some of them. Your life will be far richer. And you will have an opportunity to practice loving your neighbors in ways small and great.

4.
Practice hospitality.

In 1981-82, a coworker of my dad's started a karate class in his home. His name was Bob, and he had two sons around my age. One was a band kid; the other was a greaser. My dad was at a time in his life where he was trying new things, and he decided he'd try karate. I came along too. We met in Bob's garage. It was filled with mats scattered everywhere on his smooth concrete floor. For the first year, we worked on how to stand properly and throw punches, and we did a lot of kicking. But eventually we started sparring--play fighting. "Today, we are going to begin with some sparring," someone would say. Next you know, you were blocking punches and trying to give as good as you got. Sparring was pretty handy. It proved why standing properly and other points of our training were necessary. There were also skills that could only be taught by sparring. Sparring prepared you for the real world. Think of it like practice.

People practice at anything they wish to do well. Even minor things like keeping good table manners at home, taking a few practice swings with a bat, or writing a rought draft before you start a final paper are forms of practice. Dating is also practice. You spend time with the person you are dating--taking walks, eating lunch, thinking about life, and so on. And, in so doing, you learn a great deal about yourself and them. This practice prepares you for acting well in the communities of your adulthood: in churches and businesses, in taking more of a role in your family, and, yes, for marriage and family life.

Considering hospitality--most people hear the word hospitality and they think of hotels or dinner parties. Both do not equate to what Paul meant when he told the church in Rome to practice hospitality or what Peter meant when he taught Christians to be hospitable without complaining. Hospitality was an attitude of open service and sharing of what one had--even with strangers. It was a virtue highly prized all over the ancient world, Christian and pagan.

The times I've seen it best practiced, it was done by those who planned before the need arose. A pastor in my youth opened his home on Sunday nights to grilled cheese sandwiches and talk. A couple at North Shore in MA always made enough food on Sunday and planned to invite visitors over for lunch. Hospitality is an intentional set of the heart. It puts coffee on and makes sure fresh sheets are on the bed. The people I think best of as I look back through my life are those who welcomed me.

Dating is a form of hospitality. You spend your time and share your table with someone else. You receive them into your circles of friends and family as well as into the inner circles of your stories and hopes and ideas. You may even receive them into your heart. Whether you date the same person or different ones, the opportunity for setting the table is always there, and one should embrace it as a skill that can grow throughout life. Hospitality is a secret to deep and lifelong blessing.

5.
Do not kill.

The commandment not to kill, which sounds a note quite dissonant from hospitality, is ethical shorthand. Though it appears negative, like the other commandments, its meaning is largely positive. Consider a young mom who takes her children out to play at a local park. The sun shines in the blue sky. It is a warm day in late April. Green is the grass, and the kids like to run. "Don't go into the street!" she calls. And a little later, seeing her oldest is swinging very high in the air, she yells, "Do not go so high!" Is this young mom out to spoil their fun? Didn't she bring them to the park in the first place? No and yes: She wants her children to have a great time, but it would be exhausting for her to list everything they can do. More sensible is a short list of what they should not. A few quick boundaries and the rest is open to her kids' imaginations. So it is with the "shall nots" of the commandments. So, how does this help us read the sixth commandment in a way that gives us wisdom about human relationships?

The commandment not to kill releases us to preserve, protect, and value the lives of others--not only with our bodies but with our words and our minds too. It is not enough to refrain from killing our neighbor. By neighbor I refer to Jesus's parable about being a good neighbor and to his summary of the Torah: to love God and to love your neighbor. Our friends are certainly our neighbors. Our enemies are too. We should take pains to keep them safe, valuing their lives as our own. This goes for our hearts as well. We must check our anger and bitterness because murder is but the outward fruit of an inward deed. "We are required faithfully to do what we can to defend the life of our neighbor; to promote whatever is good for him or her, to be vigilant in warding off harm, and should danger come, assist in removing it." (John Calvin)

6.
Tell the truth.

God tells the truth. "He is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). But our human hearts are shade and shadow. We spend a lifetime trying to understand others and ourselves. Part of the practice you take on with dating is learning how to live and tell the truth.

We tell small children that honesty is best, even if it means a little suffering. That is a good conclusion, but honesty can be hard to come by. What can be trusted? Emotions aren't always reliable. As Agatha Christie's great detective Miss Marple said, "One's feelings are not always reliable guides." Our inner selves rise and fall like the waves. C. S. Lewis has good things to say about the oscillating nature of the human inner life in Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. Sometimes you will look hard for the truth but you cannot find it. In such cases, the search has to be enough. This is part of the practice, digging underneath hurt feelings or anger or whatever else to uncover what is really going on and learning how to communicate that clearly to your person, the imago you are with. You learn how to protect and value their life and not just your own. And when your compass gets spun--and it will--ask God for wisdom and go with the truth you have. As my dad used to say, "Live so you can look at yourself in the mirror."

Because we were just talking about the commandment not to kill, I think now about the commandment not to bear false witness. The context of the commandment is the law court; don't lie on the stand and subvert justice. But think about it this way: without justice--without truth in law--society doesn't work. Community fails. People can't live together. It is the same in the microcosm of relationships. If people lie to each other and cannot trust each other, the community they make together is not going to work. On the other hand, if they speak honestly and come to trust each other, an intimacy can be forged that will not break beneath a lifetime's battering.

Be truthful with your time--and theirs

Being in other's lives takes a significant amount of time. It is also hard to tell whether such time will be short or long. Do not overstay. Try not to waste people's time or your own from a refusal to accept the sweet and the bitter of living.

Be truthful with your words--and practice good listening skills

Becoming a good listener might be one of the most important skills a human being can devote themselves to acquiring. I am a horrible listener, to my shame, and sometimes blame bad memory on what is lack of focus or care. But love calls us to attention. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Life Together, "Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for [others] is learning to listen to them." So cherish friends and lovers who want to listen, and take time to listen to them. Good listening is part of hospitality.

As with listening--both that I am terrible at it and that it is such an important part of human maturity, think about the words you use. Do not make promises lightly, if you can help it. And try to use the divine gift of language (λογος) for good and not evil.

Be truthful with your body--and theirs, contra gnosticism.

Human beings have a bad habit of separating our bodies from our minds. Some of us give pride of place to our mental life and treat our body like a braying mule. Others let the body lead. We know we must value both, but the balance is difficult. Like handedness, all of us tend to one over the other, though they come as a pair.

We love with our bodies and our minds. One does not happen without the other. The internet allows us to share our lives in real time with people all over the globe, but it is no substitute for really being there. Words and ideas are not enough. The body wants its part. We shake hands or hug friends. We kiss and caress close family and those we love. Even God who spoke the cosmos into existence, though he is more present everwhere than we are anywhere, became a human being for us. Love moves irresistably toward its beloved. We crave connection. We want to be with others.

Therefore, in a lonely culture like ours, we should not be surprised that sex and sexuality blare from radio and screen. We should not be surprised that sex is used to sell everything, that cultures adopt all kinds of governing rituals around it, that the problems it creates make for the stories of literature and for whole disciplines of counseling and recovery. Sex is how we continue after death. And while we live, our loves move us to intimacy, and intimacy finds its apotheosis in sex. And we should not be surprised the our culture wants to possess the body and ignore the rest. And even the body it desires, and that we are told if not trained to desire, is a customized or idealized body, a body of marketing and advertising, not of life--a lie.

The body, with the mind, should be a keeper and expresser of truth. And what is sex but hospitality! What I am encouraging you to do is to own your whole self and be commited to living truthfully. Tell the truth. Look at the example God gives us. He tells us he loves us, yes, and we see his love most clearly expressed in the crucified body of the dying Jesus. Word and act together speak the same. This is what the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was talking about when he said, "Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed."

7.
Forgiveness.

Is it any surprise that forgiveness is such an important part of being with others? Poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote, "Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die." If this is true of friendship, it is certainly true of marriage. If our lives as disciples of Jesus are characterised by grace, should we expect our relationships to be perfect? Perhaps the story we are telling is a gospel.

8.
Let it Shine.

The gospel of Jesus informs all I have said. The summons of the gospel is the honest summons of the whole world to God's great feast. When we--when you--practice these truths, the light of God's character will shine out from you into the world. You might say that dating in this way is just a specific mode of living the Christian life. And if you say that, you are correct.

I hope you will discover that the foundation sketched above will help you ask and answer particular questions in a wiser way. Wisdom is a small compass by which we can orienteer across wild and unknown landscapes. Perhaps my words will help you as you navigate to remember your creator in the days of your youth. And I hope they will bless you as well.

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Epilogue: Diotima's Ladder

In the Symposium, Socrates tells about a philosopher he met named Diotima. She was very wise, he said, and she described the human quest for beauty as ascending rungs of a ladder (Gen. 28.10ff). At the bottom are beautiful people and things all around us. But what calls us through bodies, things, and ideas, she said, is beauty itself. The philosopher must ascend in contemplation upward, rung by rung, to reach the real end of their desire for beauty, which is the form of beauty itself. Diotma's metaphor, though pagan, well describes God's summon to us as we age through friendship and courtship into marriage and parental maturity. Even as these things shape the steps of our outer lives, our inner life progresses through them inward toward the very origin of the beautiful, the true, and the good, which is the Triune God. Life will make saints of us if we choose. Love will lead us up the ladder by the ancient way of purgation, darkness, illumination, and union. Love will lead us through the veil of things into the joy of the living and ever-flowing love of the Triune persons. There is no gnosticism here, there are no secrets. But, like a secret garden, few care to see the door in the center of their daily living and go in even though every relationship they have points the way, though anyone may put their hand to the gate, though a welcome is posted right above for all to read,

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

Thielicke and the Father's heart

Helmut Thielicke (1908-19086) was a German, Lutheran theologian who helped his nation recover after World War II. He did what Bonhoeffer hoped to do. Thielicke was prolific. He wrote a giant book on ethics, a systematic theology, and many other works, including A Little Exercise for Youth Theologians. Today, I am reading one of his lesser books, I Believe (Ich Glaube. Das Bekenntnis der Christen) Fortress, 1968. And in it, he discusses what it is like to live as one who calls God "Father."

When I deeply love God, my conscience become more delicately adjusted, much more sensitive and responsive. Nor is this any wonder, for now my conduct is no longer determined by whether I should do this or that (my duty, for example), but I do it to please God. At first it is hard for me (even after I have become a Christian!) to work with someone who is disagreeable or whose character is dubious. It irks me to be open to someone like that, to give him a chance, and to speak an encouraging word to him. But now (even thought it still goes against the grain) I remember that Jesus Christ himself died for this man and that God grieves over him and wants to save him. Because I love God, my heart will beat with the Father's heart. Thus, I cannot do otherwise than accept and be "there" for this person with whom my Father does not think himself to good to associate. And when I fail to do this, when I simply cannot manage it, then I do not merely have a sense of moral failure, but rather I am sad because I have grieved God. When you love someone very much, his pain becomes your own pain. This is the reason why there is no more sensitive conscience than that of a person who loves God. It registers every shadow that passes over the heart of God. (6,7)

At first, this sounds no different than any other popular preacher's appeal printed in a thousand middlebrow paperbacks. But there is more to it than devotional good feeling. There is an ethic here. He soundly dismisses the Kantian deontology of müssen and duty. And, in its place, suggests a relational ethic that seems more like the personalism of Buber or Habermas. There isn't enough in this quotation to make it a Christian ethic, unless we give it the benefit of unspoken context. Nevertheless, if one squints a little, if the language is altered here and there, Thielicke could be an Eckhart or a Theresa of Avila. He could be a devoted lowland Beguine. Or, were the language developed and made sophisticated, maybe even an Augustine.

Stanley Hauerwas, Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville Feb 12, 2011

These are notes from a presentation Stanley Hauerwas gave on Sunday afternoon at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Nashville years ago. They are my notes and may not represent Hauwerwas's exact words or intentions. I tend to make notes in the margin. These will be placed in double brackets as relevantly as I can place them.

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I always get the impression, when talking to Dr. Hauerwas, that, as any good Southerner, he'd rather be talking about gardening. Christianity's Family Tree.

Somber time. War for ten years. No one has noticed. War is a moral practice. Drawing on McIntrye. McClindon on the Powers. Begin in some place other than pacifism and just war. We should clarify both of these, but neither change war. War is an economic boom. No one likes it, but no one refrains. We must find a way to tell our stories without war. We must think of a world without war. Pacifists can be as dependent on war as anyone else. Peace goes deeper than pacifism. War is a habit of our imaginations. Why is war so morally compelling--if not beautiful? Here are characteristics of war as a practice: war preserves a moral of hardihood, discipline, risk, valor and its reward. James felt we need an alternative. [[W. James "The moral equivalent of war."]] Some other thing besides was is a sacrificial system--not a sacrifice of life but of our normal unwillingness to kill. The sacrifices of war is a counter-liturgy to Christ's once-and-for-all sacrifice. [[Paul Kahn. Sacred Violence.]] War's practice instantiates the sovereignty of a people.  [[Chris Hedges. War is a force that gives life meaning.]] The battlefield is a pledge of the power of the sovereign to destroy bodies. Demonstrates sovereignty. Death is the power of the monarchy. Grotesque and dark beauty. War is hard to discuss because it has revealed our deepest evils. War dismisses trivia. It makes time noble. Chivalry depended on the sacramentalization of violence. WWI soldiers seeing their violence as participation in the Mass. The US depends on the story of our wars as the ties that bind up and unify our story. WWI made the US into the number-one nation. Violent sacrifice helps nation states endure; "a god who organizes killing" I belong to the flag :: baptism. Sacrifice to honor past sacrifice. Was is a sacrificial system that creates its own culture & justification. [[Statue of Liberty as the American cross?]] We cannot live without it. War also requires moral sacrifice. What leads soldiers to kill is the power of another form of intimacy. The military is the most impressive moral community that we have left in this world. [[Military as a social petri dish.]] Should people kill to defend a society of shoppers? Jargon of war is an attempt to blunt the moral force of murder. Survivor guilt. Were you being courageous enough? Killing creates a world of silence and isolation. No one who hasn't killed can understand. In the early church, soldiers had to perform penance before they could again take the Eucharist. We ask soldiers not to tell us about the meaninglessness of what they've done. The Religion of American Patriotism -- the worship of killing authority. What is really true in a society is what's worth killing and suffering for. We aren't ready to die for Christianity anymore. The Christian alternative to war is worship, not making war just. The church doesn't have a social ethic, it is one. It is the alternative to the sacrifice of war. God forbids sacrifice to any being other than himself. The world no longer needs to make sacrifice -- the sacrifice has already been make. We cannot leave the Eucharist to kill each other. We were created for community, not killing. We seek not to survive but to live in the light of the resurrection.

[Timothy Kimbrough gave a short follow-up talk. I only took one line of notes: "The Book of Common Prayer asks that we pray differently in times of war. That we don't commonly know this is a demonstration that this church does not live as Other."]

[the Q&A]

Is Christianity an honor code?

Democracy killed honor. It is a hierarchy that cannot acknowledge itself. Honor is what limits war. The myth is that the nation state is necessary to keep religious violence at bay. Nonviolence may make the world more violent because it does not wants its peace to be seen as the violence it is. Christians don't do capital punishment because it isn't a punishment that fits the crime but because we don't kill. Memorialization. The nation cannot hear that there is only one God. Why war is a moral necessity for Americans. Pacifists always assume the burden of proof. Nonviolence is parasitic, they say, and exists only because others are willing to kill. How the Civil War works for our understanding. In Augustine, just war is a theory about police functions. If war is a sacrificial system, how can it be limited by just war. A religiously accepted nation state must have . . . [confusion in notes] All who die for country die for humanity. The war became for both sides a ritual that both needed. Gettysburg Address makes sacred ground. Means you, as a nation, are perpetually at war. National bond overcomes the bonds of the Kingdom of God. Realism is used to dismiss pacifism. Democracy requires war. Those who actually fight have no illusions. Pacifists are realists. Christians confuse the sacrifice of war with the sacrifice of Christ. When Christians do not commit to their own sacrifice (Jesus), they abandon the world.

[[Peter Berger, "The Decline of Honor." Nancy Sherman. The Warrior's Ethic. Bill Kavenaugh. Torture & Eucharist and The Myth of Religious Violence. Kant, On Perpetual Peace. Stout, On the Altar of the Nation. Mark Knoll, The Civil War as Theological Crisis.]]

The Jews historically have been the community that exemplified nonviolence. We have to give up temporal power. [[Colonists that do not abandon their home country.]] There is something antithetical in the nation state vis-a-vis Christianity. "Before you are a German, you are a Christian. Stay in New York." [[Message to Bonhoeffer, which he ignored.]] If Christianity is an alternative to war, we are going to have to be as disciplined as the marines. [[Military as a social services agency.]] Who cares about your subjectivity! And how do Christians tell the story of America? I articulate challenges for which I have no response at all. There is a demonic character to war that must be named. It perverts the created order to some awful ends. The comradeship of battle can be quite demonic. You'd like to see that intimacy reproduced in marriages, but it won't happen. // The particular goods war supplies are summed up in killing. The church's "killing" is the Eucharist.

What practices can keep the church from capitulating? [[This is the community to which I will be lost.]] Christian never will their way into faithfulness. God has to make us faithful. 1 Cor 11. Better to go ill than out of boredom. Even our unfaithfulness is a witness to the gospel. "We Methodists." Sacrifice must be a gift, not a mode of control. Serious commitment to nonviolence entails conflict. Implicit assumptions are the sources of our violence. So communication has to occur to keep these assumptions out. Hospitality to the stranger. Bishops are to assure Eucharistic assemblies are hospitable to other Eucharistic assemblies. This is what the word catholic means. The Christian hears the voice of Christ in the stranger. The military is an attractive community to be part of. The church cannot be an idol. We don't offer as morally compelling a life. Think of the moral regard you get for being in the service. We are all dying for that regard. What is means to be a Christian is to have something to do. We don't have to do the same old thing. And people who have something to do are attractive. [[The Bible is not owned by conservatives. Nor is it dismissed by liberals.]] It takes a lifetime to learn how to speak well. Desperateness is you saying you aren't sure that what you are living is true. The Christian narrative is complex. The church is in no hurry. [[Bonhoeffer as martyr?]] Christians martyrs do not seek death. Atonement [theory] is a mistake. You can't isolate it [the atonement?] from the death and life of Christ. If you have a church, you don't need an atonement theory. We are to live as the forgiven in a world of the unforgiven. Moral typography of war.

Romping Around in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics

It behooves anyone wishing to think well to consult chiefly with the most original and influential voices. Aristotle is one of these. Though he lived centuries before the codex, beforen the crucifixion, before Caesar’s crossing, his work was foundational for shaping the Greek mind. He got in early. But he wasn’t just lucky, he was also a polymath—a man whose questions were too loud and of too great a variety for him to ignore. And it did not hurt that he came from money.

The ancient world was as interested in self-help and success as we are today. So it is no surprise that Aristotle wrote three works on ethics, which for him meant not how to live but what is the best way of living. The most influential of these is called the Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter, the Ethics). Since its publication sometime after 335 BC, it has been loved, hated, reviled, annotated, misappropriated, memorized, cut-and-pasted, highlighted, sold, resold, reprinted, retranslated, shipped, and, yes, slowly and silently, in shops and on planes and on boats and in libraries, dorm rooms and kitchens and bedrooms (and bathrooms aplenty) it has been read. And it should be read.

The big ideas of the Ethics are the mean, friendship, and the happy life. But those all presume a certain kind of person. The Ethics requires its protagonist to be a certain kind of human being whom Aristotle calls a good person, e. g. “the good man’s view is the true one.” A good person acts well for the sake of good acting. Such goodness is not necessarily moral, as we understand that word today. Think, rather, rightness or fitness, as in the right thing done or said at the right time. A good person reads the room and considers what they do or say. And, more broadly, a good person knows their place on earth and under heaven. Happiness or εὐδαιμονία is the result, a well-ordered life lived well.

“We ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality and do all we can to live in conformity with the highest that is in us; for even if it is small in bulk, in power, and in preciousness, it far excels all the rest. Indeed, it would seem that this is the true self of the individual, since it is the authoritative and better part of him; so it would be an odd thing if a man chose to live someone else’s life instead of his own.” (1178a)

Simply knowing the what of a thing or the how to of a thing is not enough. Technique and technology cannot deliver the happy life any more than an answer, no matter how correct, truly comprehends its question. Act without understanding is the way of the sophist. Aristotle says, “We do not find people becoming qualified in medicine by reading handbooks.” One must live their life. One must enter in to it, in all its complexity, and by effort and action; by dialog, education, and contemplation; by love, friendship, and association, and with a bit of luck and talent, one discovers what it is to be a human being. No shortcuts.

Now, what is life without friendship? Thus, Aristotle’s chapters nine and ten on the kinds and grounds of friendship have forever been beloved. “Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things,” he says. For “friends are a help both to the young, in keeping them from mistakes, and to the old, in caring for them and doing for them what through frailty they cannot do for themselves; and to those in the prime of life, by enabling them to carry out fine achievements. Between friends there is no need for justice. [So, then,] good men and friends are the same.” (1155a)

It is worth noting that Aristotle encompasses in the word friendship much more than we do today. For us, friendship is an affection between people who are otherwise unrelated. Married people will sometimes call their partner their best friend, true. But we would not call business relationships, local governance, or the bond between parent and child friendship. Aristotle’s friendship has the generality of friendliness without the superficiality of a greeting on the street. It is stronger stuff. It is the “bond that holds communities together.” Nevertheless, Aristotle begins to divide friendship into types almost immediately. What at first he lathered indiscriminately becomes a sorting of the most discriminate sort.

TBC

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Quotations from Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. trans. J. A. K. Thomson. Introduction by Jonathan Barnes. New York: NY. Penguin Classics. 2004.

Working Outline of this Post for Use and (later) Deletion

Introduction
We should read good things, and Aristotle is one of those.
Aristotle wrote on Ethics.
It is going to help us out.

Body
Presumption of a Good Character
The happy life
Friendship and Politics "Right virtues without right social practice is meaningless."
The Mean

Conclusion
Can we be good without others?

Robinson on Conscience in the Churches

A Winter 2018 post in the American Scholar excerpts Marilynne Robinson thinking aloud about conscience. And, in the doing, she puts to words some of the thoughts about how conscience was supposed to work in the early church that have been swimming around in my head. I've long had the suspicion that more needed to be said about conscience, whatever it is. (We are still waiting on the latest brain scan to tell us.) Anyway, here is the relevant portion:

In his letter to the Romans, Paul asks the new congregation, apparently divided by cultural and ethical differences between its pagan and Jewish members, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? It is before his master that he stands or falls, and the Lord will make him stand.” This is advice meant for members of a community of believers, people who accept servanthood as descriptive of their and their fellows’ relationship to God, and who see this relationship as personal in the sense that God loves where he loves and compensates for his servants’ failings by his grace. Ideally they have accepted a particular obedience, with origins in the laws of Moses, exemplified in the life and teachings of Christ. So much might the apostle see, or hope to see, in the early Church. But history tells us that no great effort has ever been required to narrow the circle of those who should be seen as God’s servants, whose errors would be made good by God’s grace and therefore should not be judged. We all know the enormities that have made themselves presentable to the Christian conscience, often enough campaigns of violence against other Christians. Sects and denominations still remember the injuries their ancestors suffered long centuries ago, and can still become indignant at the thought of them. They might also remember injuries they inflicted, if the comforts of identity were not diluted a little by such ventures into honesty.

Here is another thing Paul says in the letter to the Romans, still in the context of his thoughts on tolerance and the authority of conscience: “The faith you have, have as your own conviction before God.” That is, do not judge fellow believers and do not offend them. It may be fair to wonder whether this excellent advice has gone unheeded all these years because faith has tended to be a conviction shown to men, who, if we can trust Paul, are a good deal more fastidious than God.

This to me is a vital plank about how we approach ecclesiology, moving away from a doctrinal line in the sand (always moving and porous for insiders, always firm and impermeable to outsiders) toward a generous tolerance bound not to tolerance for tolerance sake but to God's ability to govern for himself his own people. More later on this.

MacIntyre Chapter Two: Moral Disagreement Today

Chapter Two: Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism

Summary in the First Part

“The hypothesis which I wish to advance,” begins Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal work After Virtue, “is that in the actual world which we inhabit, the language of morality is in . . . a state of grave disorder” (2) Moral grammar still exists, he says, but in Disney-esque imitation. “The language and the appearances of morality persist even though the integral substance [has been] fragmented and . . . destroyed” (5). It is a profound claim, coming as it does after several hundred years of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral thinking. And yet “we are in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it” (Ibid). If he is correct, then no one alive today has lived within a moral system that isn’t an imitation. If he is correct, then the guideposts of our personal and political lives could easily be misaligned or wrong--or evil. MacIntyre has made a big claim, and the believing of it is going to require big proof. But where to begin? MacIntyre chooses to trace the source from its effects.

Modern political discourse--dialogue in the give-and-take of our public square--is difficult for any democracy. It should be difficult. But what we discover in the last half-century are habitual problems that never resolve. They fester like sores on the state. Many call them incurable, but MacIntyre disagrees. And he dissects them as carefully as a scientist.

What he discovers is that these habitual and seemingly interminable debates have three characteristics. First, the arguments are reasonable and legitimate, but their products are of different kinds. Everybody’s logic works, but one talks rights while another talks universality; one talks equality, another, liberty. Second, arguments claim to be impersonal and reasonable and are presented that way. He outlines a relationship here between two kinds of moral appeals: one that depends on the personal context of the appeal and one that is impersonal and a-contextual, and so applies to everyone. The former would be, for example, a request “Do this.” And the context of the request is that I’m your parent or your boss. There is a context that gives force to the request. These habitual arguments sever any connection between the address and the context of the one addressed. Their criteria of acceptance is impersonal. Third, every qualifying debate has a pedigree. Arguments come out of traditions woven from a complex history of dialogue. You can’t simply jettison history for the sake of a solution.

“All those various concepts which inform our moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived.” (10)

Now these three characteristics do not quite mix. The first characteristic is already problematic. The conclusions to competing-yet-valid arguments differ in kind, so how do we judge a victor? Our society has no way of doing so. We are left in a no-man’s-land of unreason. There is only the “clash of antagonistic wills” in a forever screaming match that shouts in public and in the uncertainty of our hearts. The second characteristic of these arguments, when combined with the first, further complicates. The second always appeals to the impersonal and the reasonable. But we’ve just seen that the first has no impersonal and reasonable way of sorting it all out. Therefore, the impersonal thing is just a show, a masquerade of reasonability. MacIntyre wonders why.

“What is it about rational argument which is so important that it is the nearly universal appearance assumed by those who engage in moral conflict? Does not this suggest that the practice of moral argument in our culture expresses at least an aspiration to be or to become rational in this area of our lives?” (9,10)  

Finally, with the third characteristic, we confront pluralism. Pluralism is praised. But what do we mean by pluralism? Is it “an ordered dialogue of intersecting viewpoints” or “an unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments”? He suspects the latter.

And so, having parsed out the elements of the debates that shape our public and private lives, MacIntyre asks how this data squares up with his initial hypothesis and finds that it squares up well. The language of morality has changed. We should be able to map this change and examine some earlier and different moral milieu. It is not going to be easy. The academic curriculum has long divided philosophy from history and treated philosophers like a-historic specimens on a petri dish. We should beware lest we make the same mistake going forward. But can there be a forward?

“You can go no further,” comes a voice. “It is impossible. For moral arguments--all moral arguments--are and always must be irresolvable.” (Here, as best as I can understand, MacIntyre has summoned a foil, much as a speaker will address “some might say” arguments in a speech after an important point has been made.) For now and for all times, for here and for everywhere, moral disagreements have no resolution. There is no going forward. And the voice is right, there is no going forward--not until this objection is defeated. And MacIntyre knows the name of its champion: emotivism.

MacIntrye, After Virtue: Preface and Chapter One

MacIntye, After Virtue: Outline of Chapter Two

MacIntyre Chapter Two: The Outline

The summary of MacIntyre's second chapter has been a beast. I keep reading and re-reading it. But I have finally made some progress. The result is too long to post in one entry. So here is my outline. I will post the first and second parts of the summary of chapter two later.
My Outline

The Nature of Moral Disagreement

I. Present public debates about moral issues seem interminable.
     A. Qualifying debates display three characteristics:
          1. Every argument is valid--but in different ways.
          2. Every argument purports to be an impersonal, rational argument.
               a. Assent is won by two moves:
                    1. The context of the argument supplies the reason for agreement.
                    2. The reason is a-contextual, and so assumes third-party grounds for assent.
          3. Every argument derives from various historical origins
              a. The two if-then statements
               1. IF the language of morality has passed from order to disorder,
                   THEN the meaning of it technical terms will have demonstrably changed.
               2. IF the characteristics of our moral discourse are symptoms of a moral disorder,
                   THEN we should be able to construct a timeline to examine moral arguments
                    at an earlier stage.

The Claims of Emotivism

II. It is always and everywhere the case: moral arguments by nature cannot be resolved.
     A. Emotivism is the current, philosophical representative of this view
          Emotivism is "nothing but" thinking that says agreement on moral questions cannot be secured by any rational method.
          1. It fails because
               a. It cannot define its own variables (in this case "the good") or escape circularity
               b. It is an oversimplification, combining two kinds of expression which define themselves by the way they contrast.
                    1. Expressions of personal preference; meaning is dependent on context.
                    2. Evaluative expressions (which include morals ones); meaning doesn't depend on context.
               c. It is unclear about whether it defines meaning or use.
     B. Intuitionism was the origin of Emotivism
          1. G E. Moore's Principia Ethica claimed that
               a. "Good" is an property instantly identifiable by the intuition and impervious to proof or disproof
               b. A "right" action is one that produces the most good
               c. Friendship and contemplation of the beautiful is the sole justification of human action
          2. Criticisms of Intuitionism
               a. It's three points are inconsistent with and do not require each other
               b. All three are defective

"Moore's followers had behaved as though their disagreements over what is good were being settled by an appeal to an objective and impersonal criterion; but in fact, the stronger and psychologically more adroit will was prevailing" (17).

Coming along after MacIntyre's After Virtue

So I just finished Alasdiar MacIntyre's seminal book of ethics After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007; third edition) for the fourth time. Some chapters I have read many times more. I read this book because I kept hearing about it. It showed up in radio interviews, in monographs, in footnotes, and finally, one day, in my hand when I had the funds available to buy it.

Thankfully, MacIntyre's prose is easy to read. Even when he digs into the weeds of a problem, he has a storyteller's gait. Now, he does assume a lot of background reading in ethical thought. A passing knowledge of Immanuel Kant, early-Enlightenment ideological history, and a willingness not to be scared off by Greek letters is helpful. And it probably wouldn't hurt to be familiar with Aristotle's Ethics. Though these many interlocutors don't have to be kin, it helps if they are not strangers. But a beginner should not despair. MacIntyre is engaging and even eloquent. His enthusiasm will get anyone over the more difficult material. So why, then, the multiple reads? And why blog through this book?

It is because After Virtue plays its melody on at least two staves. The surface of his argument is broadly political. It is a book about the history of debates about ethics since the Enlightenment. But it is also a work of religious interrogation. One feels that what's at stake is ecclesial survival. Somehow MacIntrye has written about the doctrine of the church under the very nose of political philosophy.

In order to try and follow MacIntrye's argument, I'm going to try to summarize, restate, and blog my way through. And, to be honest, I'm not sure why. Why this book? I ask. I don't know. There is just something about it that says now is the time to think about these questions. There is something about it that pushes the boundaries of my own project.

1. The Post-Apocalyptic Beginning

MacIntyre begins with: "Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe." Imagine that all knowledge and culture are consumed and scattered to destruction. And now imagine that, perhaps hundreds of years later, as human beings finally survive and regroup, people begin digging up the forgotten past. Much like the Renaissance discovery of the ancients, bits and pieces that survived would be assembled and examined. And they would be stitched together, though without understanding: pieces of textbooks, notes from experiments, instruments and tables and articles and machines. All of it would be pushed together in order to make sense of it. And so a new science would be born. But not one that understands the old. It may reference it, use its terms or formulas, but everything is inconsistent and bespoke. That, he says, is the state of ethics today.

There was a catastrophe, which he will later say is the Enlightenment project, and ethics was destroyed. Contemporary systems cobble together bits from the past. Their inconsistencies mean they will eventually fail. "We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expression. But we have . . . lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality." (2)

The reason we don't see this moral catastrophe is time. None of us were alive in earlier ages that enjoyed a shared, moral language. We don't know anything but simulacra. And the tools that we use to think with, the tools of science, were invented by the makers of the simulacra. They are not fit to know and describe better alternatives. MacIntyre knows that proving there was such a catastrophe and offering a way of overcoming it is a large order. And "if it is true, we are all already in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it." Nevertheless, he urges his reader to eschew pessimism "in order to survive in these hard times." (5)

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In chapters to come, MacIntyre will offer some proof of the catastrophe--like the heat maps of background radiation leftover from the Big Bang. He will also demonstrate the fragility of the dressings that  supposedly bind our private and public morals.

And here is the second reading. The first reading is to follow him into the examining room of public ethical philosophy. The second, however, is to see his subject not as secular but as sacred. For I find his words most potent there. Something has gone very, very wrong in the church--in all of her parts. There is something that is deeply disjointed and cracked. We are in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it. And I ask myself how are we to survive in these hard times.

Please note that all footnotes are from the paperback third edition of his book. And, also, that his tendency to split sentences and omit commas from introductory phrases is everywhere.

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A Really Bad English Version of the Joint Declaration of German Protestant Churches on the Refugee Crisis

The following is a Google Translate version of a six-point declaration issued and signed September 14, 2015, by the German Protestant churches.

"How precious is your steadfast love, O God, that human children have trust in the shadow of your wings!" (Psalm 36.8)

1. God loves all his creatures and gives them food , livelihood, and housing on this earth. We note with concern that millions of people are denied these good gifts of God by hunger, persecution, oppression, and violence. Many of them are on the run, and stand at the gates of Europe and Germany. To welcome these and to grant them those things that God has allotted to all is a commandment of humanity and, for us, a commandment of Christian responsibility.

2. People are at the center of all efforts. Many people worldwide are on the run. The great challenge for each individual is to do what is just. In desperation and in mortal danger, people go on the run. It is humanitarian duty to do everything possible for people who are obviously in distress, whether at sea or on land. Police must act against inhuman traffickers and mafia-like structures within and outside Europe. Indeed, the largest barrier that stops asylum-seekers is legal access routes to Europe. We therefore call for legal means for Asylum seekers and for an open discussions on immigration law in order to establish new, open immigration routes for people looking for work and a better life.

3. Our society is facing a major challenge, but our forces are large . We are grateful for the diversity of help: from volunteers and professionals, help from the church, civil society, government, and politics. These demonstrate a welcoming culture and display an unprecedented commitment to ensure the rapid and decent reception and accommodation of refugees. We thank all wholeheartedly! With decisiveness we oppose all forms of xenophobia, hatred, or racism and are against everything a misanthropic attitude supports or makes acceptable. Worry and fear of exposure must be taken seriously, but we should not indulge misanthropic moods.

4. As a church, we help to create this society. Therefore, we advocate and practice a welcoming culture. And we make integration a central task of our communities and institutions.

5. With concern we see the background and causes of refugee movements: climate change, wars, persecution, the collapse of states, violence, extreme poverty. And our society does not escape, because we are global. We trade globally. We participate in arms sales. And, last but not least, we are deeply implicated by a lifestyle that uses the earth's resources. It is time to reverse this unjust situation.

6. Here in Germany, we are especially aware of our history. We know what a gift it is to find help and open doors in time of need. Without the aid, which comes from our hearts as well, we would not be in a position today to help others. As church leaders, we wish to commit ourselves with all Europe to act together to fulfill our humanitarian obligations.

In the knowledge that people have found refuge under God's wings, we bring the plight of all people in our prayers to God and ask Him for strength for the tasks that lie ahead.

[signatures]

Make Room for Beauty (Beauty Makes a Man)

Make room for beauty. It is not something we typically do. There are many reasons for this. We all lead busy lives from Tiger cubs on up to the oldest adult. We are distracted. And we are over-advertised. There are too many fireworks, too many explosions. And increasingly it is all simulated.

So I want to address all you men for a moment, whether you are one or are going to be one, and say this: Many voices tell us that manhood has no place for beauty. But is that true? Let's ask a few men:

Listen to Apollo 14 moonwalker Ed Mitchel describing what it is like to see the earth-rise from the moon:

"Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.

Or let's hear from President Teddy Roosevelt, a soldier and a bullfighter among other things, writing from a ranch in the American southwest:

"Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint after-glow of the red sunset filled the west."

And in another place he says, "Wild flowers should be enjoyed unplucked where they grow."

And finally, a word from the nineteenth-century Yosemite explorer and naturalist John Miur:

"All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love."

These men, men who knew risk and hardship, living, working, acting men, are overcome by beauty, and especially the beauty of the natural world.

And with them, I urge you to make room for beauty in your lives. Why?

Because (1) Beauty opens the soul

When we are caught--arrested--by beauty "when lengthening shadows merge into one and a red sunset fills the west," we see things in new ways. Our soul is widened. We suddenly see ourselves, with all of our busy things, as small. We are hushed about ourselves. Humbled.

Simultaneously, we see the horizons of our lives and those of our friends in a new light. Where once was ugliness or hatred or ignorance, we begin to see flowers growing. We approach all in a new way, remembering that "wild flowers should be enjoyed unplucked where they grow."

Why else should we make room for beauty?

Because (2) beauty begets beauty.

You don't go away from beauty unchanged, but altered. Beauty doesn't step into the same man twice. It baptizes our hearts. It leaves our lesser man behind and makes us greater.

It is interesting to me that if you look at any skill or tool or invention that people have made, it grows more beautiful over time. Consider a simple hammer, manufactured and available for a few dollars from a store. We began with flint stones worked and chiseled, but stones nonetheless. Now we have hammers shaped and manufactured from hard-steel and fit for their purpose. It is the smallest example of what is everywhere around us. We take in beauty and we give it back in what we do and make.

Now a final reason we should make room for beauty.

We should make room for beauty because (3) beauty makes room for God.

Again to quote John Miur,

"No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening--still all is Beauty!"

Beauty is not God, but it has often been the doorkeeper to God's house. And if we are honest with ourselves about our hearts and our lives, we crave admittance. The Boy Scout Law and the Scout Oath mention reverence for God for a reason. Could it be because beauty is not unmanly, but, rather, because making room for Beauty--and for God--makes a man.

Could it be because beauty is not unmanly, but, because making room for Beauty--and for God--makes a man.

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Address delivered September 12, 2015, for the Cub Scouts of Pack 125 at Cedars of Lebanon State Park.

Theology as craft

Theology is not who you have read most recently. It is not the newest jewel in your cap of jargon. It is not the recognition that the argument has been better traced by another. It is not understanding of the history of ideas. It is not the playground of the leisure class. Theology does not require your razor wit or applicable metaphor. It is not necessary for it to prove anything, nor does one who needs proof go to it. It does not swell with victory over its enemies, nor is it threatened by them. It fills dogma as a vessel. Yet, dogma does not exhaust it. If one learned the Summa by rote for recitation, would it make one a theologian? Doesn’t the Devil quote the Bible chapter and verse?

I have degrees. What did I learn?

I have spent. What did I buy?

I have read. What did it profit?

I should know better, and yet have so often regressed.

I should be a teacher, but do footnotes teach?

What is theology, then? I deny it as a footnote or a name. I forbid it to be bound hand-and-foot by historical situation. I forbid it to be owned. And so, if not philosophy or taxonomy, it must be something else, something ignored and of little account in modernity. Ah, yes, it is that thing behind the work of self-discipline--that is the way. Theology is rules that engender ways of being. In short, it is a craft.

three scientists

Science, too, stumbles toward religion. The horizon of human imagination and aspiration is just too large and too curious to submit to the narrow confines of a method, measure, rule.

So far I have pointed out the misunderstandings and mischaracterizations that have largely shaped the attitude of religion as it addresses science. Now I would like to survey three voices that come from the other direction; science addressing religion—well, not properly religion, more like faith or ethics. Two of these come from interviews broadcast in 2008 on American Public Media’s radio program “Speaking of Faith.”

The first is "Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth" with author Janna Levin, assistant professor of astrophysics at Columbia University and author of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, among other books.

The second is "Science and Hope" with Templeton Prize winner Dr. George Ellis, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and a Quaker.

The third is an interview between host Dr. Moira Gunn and biologist and author Stewart Kauffman broadcast 6 June, 2008, on the podcast IT Conversations. The context of their discussion is Kauffman's book Reinventing the Sacred, but the subject is really emergence.

The Conversations

The conversation with Janna Levin centers largely around the following points. (1) Truth goes beyond what mathematics can demonstrate; Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. (2) How do we know what is real, when our perception is a point along a phenomenological continuum? We don't see the quantum. Our intuition is based on the neurons that have evolved in this world for our purposes. There are no true things that are unambiguously true, save things like 1+1=2. The rest of it is always something we approach without arriving, glimpsing truth out of the corner of the eye. “Every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that extent, false” (Hegel). (3) How is it that mathematics not only exists, but we can perceive and understand it? (4) Time, determinism, and freedom [16:00], including the existence of free will. I especially like her reminder that we have come through radical changes in worldview since, say, pre-Copernican societies [33:15]. Same for her commitment that existential meaning must be based on truth. Levin is a reductionist, seeing, for example, many of our behaviors as an outgrowth of animal instincts encoded through evolutionary processes. At the same time, she is uncomfortable with this, only too glad to argue for free will in a world of lawful inevitability and subconscious instinct.

George Ellis is a cosmologist and an activist. And in his experience there exists what he calls “deep ethics,”an ethics emerging from the mathematical fabric of the universe. It is there, and no one knows why. As Ellis says, “We haven't got a clue in what way mathematics is embedded there, but it is there in some platonic space waiting to be discovered. We actually haven't got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they're there. We know they're effective. We don't know how they are embedded.” This deep ethic emerges whether one wants it to or not. And it is kenotic in nature: it is selfless, it is humble, it serves others. The proof of its existence is “self-authenticating. There is actually no other way of saying it. It is just something you either see or you don't see. There is no proof. It's something you recognize or you don't recognize.”

Ellis says that science has limits. “Science sees nothing about aesthetics or meaning or metaphysics.” Of course, this language evokes the God of the gaps problem. Ellis says, “It’s not the God of the gaps, it’s the God of the boundaries.”

The point about this is that there are boundaries to what science can handle, boundaries science cannot cross. (Not will not [which is the god of the gaps] but cannot.) And one of these important boundaries is ethics. So let's go back to the ethics. There's a whole lot of people out there trying to say, 'Well, ethics is understood by science through sociobiology.' There's another lot of social scientists saying ethics is understood through sociology and psychology and anthropology, and so on. And they are just profoundly mistaken when they say that, for a whole host of reasons. And perhaps we don't want to get technical about this, but the simple way to see how mistaken they are is to ask the following question to a scientist who says 'Look, science can comprehend ethics.' We can use science as a basis for ethics. 'So fine,' we say. 'Tell us what science says we should do in Iraq today.' Then you get this deafening silence because science is totally unable to say anything about that. The reason is there are no experiments in science to do with what is good and what is bad. There are no scientific units for good and bad. There's no experiment. It's just outside the scope of science, not only now, but forever, never ever will be within the bound of science.

And as for the origin of the universe:

My colleagues are producing theories of what they call creation of the universe out of nothing. But when you probe them, you find they're not producing theories of the creation of the universe out of nothing. They are assuming a huge machinery of quantum field theory and fields and particles and interactions, which generates the universe, not the creation of the universe out of nothing.

And, yet, it had to come from somewhere. “In the end, we run into a metaphysical blank, whether you pursue it scientifically or religiously, and you simply have to give up in wonder and awe and say, ‘I don't know the answer, and it's just marvelous the way things are.’”

Biologist and author Stewart Kauffman studies self-organizing systems, pursuing a cosmological position called emergence, which is growing in scientific popularity. What has to be overcome, Kauffman says, is reductionism, of which he outlines three features: (1) Everything that happens is describeable by natural laws. This means that the universe is (2) fundamentally deterministic. Like a computer, once you know the relevant information, then you can predict everything. And finally (3) reductionism is analytic. It says that knowledge is the product of reducing things to their elemental parts. Reductionism has been very successful, it is true, but not without ethical and existential costs. For the reductionist, the universe is made up of unrelated happenings from which no meaning can be abstracted; bare juxtaposition without explanation or narrative.

For this and other reasons, the adequacy of reducationism is being questioned by some within the scientific community. In its place is a platform called "emergence," which asks questions about the nature of the universe from the perspective of pure and infinite complexity. The result: a universe which cannot be completely explained, now or ever, by the fundamental laws of physics. Two nobel laureates in physics are notable enthusiasts: Phil Anderson, who wrote an article in Science in 1972 entitled "More is Different," and Robert Laughlin, whose latest book is entitled, A Different Universe. Like Anderson and Laufman, Kauffman believes that emergence is not only real and demonstrable, but it is a better platform than reductionism for doing science.

Reductionism doesn't work, he says, because complex things cannot be deduced. Reality is so unplottably chaotic, so infinitely complex, that trying to say "this comes from that" is a fool's errand. You can't simulate the development of complex things. In biology, for example, a physicists cannot explain the coming into existence of the heart. Emergence allows for cause and effect, but it throws its boundaries much larger to encompass the unexplainably complex.

This is the basis for Kauffman's critique of darwinian preadaptation. He asks, "Do you think you could say beforehand all the possible darwinian preadaptations of all the organisms now, or just for humans? Can we know all the adjacent possibles?" The answer is, of course, no. "There just isn't a mathematical framework to even try and do this. How would we know we plotted all the adjacent possibles?" Predictability is impossible. There are just too many variables. The future is just too odd.

So, then, Kauffman outlines four implications from emergence.

1. We cannot do what Newton said we should do. We can't specify the laws and then calculate what is going to happen, because we can't know all the adjacent possibles.

2. We can't make probability statements. We don't know all the adjacent possibles, and so we can't plot a sample that would allow us to come up with a probability statement. Nobel laureate Marie Gilmont says that a law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, but can we really do this? The evolution of the biosphere is beyond prediction and beyond the reach of natural law. What we're left with in the biosphere and up through economics is ceaseless creativity. You don't need a creator for this. Every advance through an adjacent possible reshapes the next adjacent possible. The entire matrix of adjacent possibles changes with every step in a way that cannot be predicted.

3. Reason is an insufficient guide for living our life. We have to reunite narrative, allegory, intuition, emotion, and reason. We have to rethink and understand our integrated humanity, throwing aside the split between the two cultures: science and the arts. Science is no longer the only way to get to the truth. History, art, law--lots of things tell us the truth now, not just the scientific method. We need more than just reductionism to help explain things. We live our lives forward, in the face of mystery, not knowing what is going to happen. What does it mean to be fully human in such a world? Kauffman goes on to talk about religion. He takes to task his reductionist friends, such as Richard Dawkins--Enlightenment atheists. What if you take "god" out of the equation and leave creativity, poses Kauffman, hypostasizing creativity. We have lived with creativity and have invented gods to explain it. Indeed, how many gods have we worshipped in human history? God is our most powerful symbol, but it is rife with abuse. "We can choose to use the word "God" if we want to," he says. But it isn't necessary. Instead, we can use "god," not to mean a creator, but to refer to the creativity that itself characterizes and shapes the universe.

4. We need a global ethic. We are connected to everything, emerging along with the rest of the universe. We are caught up in the natural creativity of the universe: which means, to use a religious word, we are all sacred. We need a shared ethic, a global ethic, an ethic that includes all of life and the planet. The secular West is reduced to fairness for friends, love of family, democracy, and free markets, but this is not a global ethic. We are reduced to consumers. We are commoditized. We need an ethic that will help guide the hetero- or homogeneous civilization that is developing. We need to be reconciled to nature. The notion that nature is there to be used by man, the whole purpose of knowledge from a Baconian view, needs to be thrown off. Instead, we need to embrace nature. So can we use this sense of god, and find meaning in it to orient our lives today? Kauffman thinks we can, and that it is as good as any other model of god, and perhaps better, since there is no theodicy issue.

Grammar

So what to do with the above three examples? I hope they serve to show that not only theologians, but scientists are struggling to make sense of the no man's land that exists between too-tidy reductionism and the Wild West of pure fideism. There seems to be a complete lack of any grammatical rules for passing between one side or the other, any schema that allows statements made by one side to be properly heard and evaluated on the other. No one seems to be able to define what governing power a scientific theory should have in the development of doctrine and vise versa (though things have gone unidirectional for a good while.) Can you just equate the big bang, with all its supporting mathematics etc., and Genesis 1.1? (As, for example, William Lane Craig tries to do in this debate with Peter Atkins.) What happens when they turn the Hadron Collider on early next year in Switzerland and discover the whole brane thing is correct and that the big bang is just a temporal phenomenon in a much larger and more complicated universe? Theology risks too much when it latches such and such a doctrine to today's scientific post--but, for all that, it can't just ignore it. And, if the above three physicists say anything about science, it says that scientists, too, cannot avoid the ethical and, yes, religious implications of their work.

Janna Levin; George Ellis; cosmology; religion and science; ethics; Stuart Kauffman; emergence; complexity; evolution; philosophy of science; probability; freedom; kenosis