A Guy in the Pew

What if Jesus ran for President? Here is the attack ad we would face. Hat tip to Zack at Revolution in Jesus .

Tobais Haller has another great post oday about universalism and relativism: Two of the most common accusations directed these days at The Episcopal Church is that it tends towards a relativistic ethic and a universalist view of salvation. I'm concerned to clarify these terms a bit, for they seem rather vague. I tend, myself, towards absolute moral standards tempered by an ethic based on certain biblical principles elaborated by Jesus and Paul. And I hope for universal salvation, but hope is not belief. That being said, some further clarity is warranted. As to what moral relativism might look like, would this qualify: "I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean." (Romans 14:14 )? I would call that "subjective" — and I suppose one might see subjectivism as a subset of relativism. But I also think that the actors, situation, intent, and so forth have to figure in any moral or ethi...

Martin Marty has a "Sightings" column on the ordination of women. The post focuses less on the merits of the ordination of women than on the argument that Cathoic doctrine is unchangeable: Whether Catholics should change and begin ordination of women is their business, not mine, at least not here and today, though outcomes of Catholic debates do have huge "public religion" consequences. I can only testify to the manifest blessings so many churches, like my own (ELCA), have received during the past half-century from the ministry of women-ordained. My business instead picks up on Egan's closing paragraph, where he argues against Sr. Butler's reversion to and repetition of the claim that Rome does not change. He orthodoxly celebrates the constancy of teachings from Rome. But: "New questions arise, and new horizons open, cultures themselves are transformed, and the fund of human knowledge changes." His article has no room to provide chapter and verse ...

Ruth Gledhill had an interesting post on her blog this weekend about new evidence that the Church ordained women up until the 12th Century--putting in doubt the notion that women priests are contrary to tradition: This morning, on Today , US theologian Professor Gary Macy was explaining his theory that the Church ordained women up until the 12th century and that women had episcopal authority until much later. Earlier this week he sent me his entire paper on the subject. I've also put a couple of extracts below. Macy writes: 'Women in the Middle Ages played a far larger role in the life of the Church than they would in later centuries. In the early Middle Ages, they performed both sacramental and administrative functions that would be reserved to men after the thirteenth century. They celebrated the Mass, distributed communion, read the Gospel, heard confessions and preached. Some abbesses also exercised episcopal power, and indeed, a few were considered bishops. The powerfu...

Another gem from Father Tobias Haller: Scripture is the inspired Word of God, but it is always written in a human tongue. People do not speak God’s language, or have God’s knowledge, so God, when speaking to people through inspiration, must employ the human language of the culture and time of the one inspired, in order to impart any knowledge at all. God always “talks down” to us, and our finite human capacity always limits how well we understand the infinite God, and express that understanding. One cannot put the ocean in a bottle; and new wineskins must be used for new wine. As Jesus himself would later say, “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:12-13) The inspired recipients of God’s word in Genesis believed the sky to consist of a dome, in which the sun, moon, and stars were set, and which had windows to admit the rain stored in the pool of waters above. God, of course, kn...

Well this is a provocative way to restart my blog after a break for work obligations and a long weekend vacation! Ben Myers of the Faith and Theology Blog has a very thoughtful post that argues that the Church should get out of the marriage business, and return our concept of marriage back to its true sacremental roots. I have my doubts, but the post is well worth a read. You really need to read the whole post, but here are some highlights: The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the church: the state authorises a legal union, and then calls upon the church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity. Here, as elsewhere, the church proves itself to be the state’s faithful servant: yes, we will validate state authority with a harmless blessing; yes, we are only too pleased to sanctify the wedding ceremony, and to clothe the social functions of romantic love and family life with a saintly aura. Notice that the church is n...

Scientific American reviews Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2008) a new book by Stuart Kauffman, that argues that God is what emerges from complexity: French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to “imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists.... Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence.” By the early 20th century science undertook to become Laplace’s demon. It cast a wide “causal net” linking effects to causes throughout the past and into the future and sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly: “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, t...

Okay--this has to be one of Father Matthews best videos: a clever explanation of why Jesus ascended by a study of the movie Mary Poppins . Brilliant.

Here is the latest from Trinity Cathedral Media that I blogged about earlier . (Anastasis, by the way, is Greek for Resurrection). The video itslef is about Jesus's descent into Hell. Enjoy

The Rev. Gileas Fraser offers thoughtful piece on gay marriage on BBC Radio this morning: Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Book of Common Prayer was being put together, marriage was said to be for three purposes: First, It was ordained for the procreation of children … Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication .. Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. How do these three concerns relate to the prospect of gay marriage? The third priority insists that marriage is designed to bring human beings into loving and supportive relationships. Surely no one can deny that homosexual men and women are in as much need of loving and supportive relationships as anybody else. And equally deserving of them too. This one seems pretty clear. The second priority relates to the encouragement of monogamy. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself has rig...

The Rev. John Mather, the priest at one of the new "church plants" in the Arizona Diocese, pointed me to this very interesting article in Wired about the religious implicatins of a discovery of alien life: Little green men might shock the secular public. But the Catholic Church would welcome them as brothers. That's what Vatican chief astronomer and papal science adviser Gabriel Funes explained in a recent article in L'Osservatore Romano , the newsletter of the Vatican Observatory ( translated here ). His conclusion might surprise nonbelievers. After all, isn't this the same church that imprisoned Galileo for saying that the Earth revolves around the sun? Doesn't the Bible say that God created man -- not little green men -- in his image? Indeed, many observers assert that aliens would be bad for believers. Jill Tarter , director of the Center for SETI Research, once wrote that finding intelligent other-worldly life "will be inconsistent with the existenc...

James McGrath has a great blog --one that I read and link to often. He has returned the favor by linking back to my own blog, which really makes me a fan. Grin. He has recently answered threee interesting questions on the Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog. I found this post --on why we need to think about God differently--very interesting: I think it is often Biblical scholars who are most aware of how much the Biblical literature (and thus Biblical views of God) is intrinsically linked to ancient cosmologies, worldviews, culture, historical setting, and assumptions of various sorts. (I suspect that is why there is such a strong side interest in science fiction among Biblical scholars). As you point out in your question, there will always be much that we do not know about the past. There will also be much that a North American such as myself can never assume when reading the Bible or thinking about God. The same is true in Western Europe and Australia. The result is that the most promine...

I am quite taken with the writings of John Haught--particularly on how our concepts of God must change to account for evolution. A self-described "religious naturalist" (and great writer!) Chet Raymo, however, makes a good point--Haught's analysis of faith can only get him so far: Why believe in the absence of convincing evidence? Says Haught: "Theology, unlike scientism, wagers that we can contact the deepest truths only by relaxing the will to control and allowing ourselves to be grasped by a deeper dimension of reality than ordinary experience or science can access by itself. The state of allowing ourselves to be grasped and carried away by this dimension of depth is at least part of what theology means by 'faith.'" If this means we have an intuition of a depth to creation that for the moment -- and possibly forever -- eludes scientific explanation, then I would be the last to take issue. Art, poetry, even what we might call the mystical experience, ...

James Woods has a review of Bart Ehrman's new book on the problem of evil in the most recent issue of The New Yo rker. Woods makes a series of arguments about heaven similar to that made by an astute commmentator of this blog: Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all tears from our faces. In her novel “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, “It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world’s suffering—that, theologically speaking, Heaven is “exactly what will be required.” In the end, Heaven, it seems...

Sometimes no comment is need. The following is for real--but borders on self-parody: Christians who believe they might one day be physically swept up to heaven in the Rapture will be able to send e-mails to loved ones left behind on Earth nearly one week after the apocalyptic event takes place, thanks to a new website. YouveBeenLeftBehind.com lets subscribers send an e-mail message to up to 62 people exactly six days after they've disappeared from the face of the Earth, Wired Magazine's Threat Level reports. The website, run by Mark Heard along with four other Christians, dispatches the e-mails when at least three staff members fail to log in for six consecutive days. Its main purpose is to give Christians one final shot at evangelism. "You've Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends for Christ," states the website. The site is predicated on one interpretation of Christian theology that puts the day of Rapture as the b...

One of the bed rocks of modern physics is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle , which holds that it is impossible to determine both the momentum and the location of a particle. To quote wiki, "In quantum mechanics, the position and momentum of particles do not have precise values, but have a probability distribution. There are no states in which a particle has both a definite position and a definite momentum." Critically, this is not a statement that follows from our inability to measure or the accuracy of our current theories. Rather the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a statement about reality, and the conclusion is the result of a mathematical analysis of the quantum mechanical theories. (An important consequence of the principle is that there is a non-zero probability that a given particle could be anywhere in the universe.) I am beginning to believe that there is an uncertainty principle that applies to our Christian faith as well. The traditional sources of our fai...

Anglican priest Doug Chaplin responds to the "problem of evil" meme started by Sam Norton . As you can see, he has chosen a "freedom" theme as one response to the issue that comes close to what I have argued here . Here are some highlights: simply don’t feel these are the right questions, and, interestingly, in the real world of suffering people, I rarely hear those questions asked. In my experience people are more likely to ask “Why am I (is he/she) suffering like this?” (with the clear implication that pain is related in some way to goodness or merit). The other question that seems to emerge is harder to express simply, but revolves around a search for meaning or purpose: “If the world’s like this, what’s the point of it all?” My shortest answer is one I don’t normally articulate, which is “Shit happens”. (You can see why I don’t normally put it in these terms!) I tend to resist rather strongly the notion of a planned purposeful meaning for the many random event...

Ian McEwan has a fascinating two part series in the Guardian on "end time thinking." Part one is here , and part two is here . Here are some interesting points: First, McEwan notes that "end time" thinking is quite pronounced in the United States: Five centuries later, the United States, responsible for more than four-fifths of the world's scientific research and still a land of plenty, can show the world an abundance of opinion polls concerning its religious convictions. The litany will be familiar. Ninety per cent of Americans say they have never doubted the existence of God and are certain they will be called to answer for their sins. Fifty-three per cent are creationists who believe that the cosmos is 6,000 years old, 44 per cent are sure that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the next 50 years. Only 12 per cent believe that life on earth has evolved through natural selection without the intervention of supernatural agency. In genera...

Tobais Haller is consistently posting real gems. His latest post on the relationship of God to creation, and the implications for morality, is no exception. I strongly urge you to read it here . I won't even begin to summarize or even "highlight" Father Haller's argument--it is to rich for even that. Instead, I want to focus on his take on reading the Genesis narratives in a post-Darwin world view. I found this quite insightful: Genesis is not history — certainly not natural history — but sacred story. Much theological thought, even in the post-Darwinian era, and even among non-Fundamentalist thinkers, has been hampered by neglect of this distinction. This does not mean that the story is to be discarded or disregarded; language, which is based on symbols, is essential to communication. The moment we move from things themselves to the names we give them we have stepped into a symbolic world; how much more with larger concepts for which no underlying “thing” can ev...

Father Sam Norton's discussion of the problem of evil that I blogged about earlier this week has turned into a successful meme. Some great minds on the blogosphere are taking on the challenge. Professor James McGrath says the following: Often the issue of theodicy is viewed as finding the best solution to the problem of undeserved suffering that preserves the concept of God we already have. But this assumes that we have received a unified, definitive understanding of God that must be preserved in this way, and anyone who has engaged in academic study of the Bible or religion in general will know that this is not the case. And so unless one has good reason for assuming a particular set of symbols and doctrines relating to God, the best approach is that set forth in the Book of Job: formulate and reformulate a view of God that does justice to the world as you experience, while also acknowledging how limited our understanding of the universe we are a part of really is. If I were th...