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  • Ending the Next Civil War Won't Be That Easy

    Some once part of the U.S. military are, to put it mildly, delusional about a possible internal rebellion:

    At issue is an article in the respected Small Wars Journal titled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A ‘Vision’ of the Future.” It was written by retired Army Col. Kevin Benson of the Army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Jennifer Weber, a Civil War expert at the University of Kansas. It posits an “extremist militia motivated by the goals of the ‘tea party’ movement” seizing control of Darlington, S.C., in 2016, “occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council and placing the mayor under house arrest.” The rebels set up checkpoints on Interstate 95 and Interstate 20 looking for illegal aliens. It’s a cartoonish and needlessly provocative scenario.

    Let’s start with the obvious: the scenario these two armchair experts set forth isn’t a greater threat to the integrity of the United States than John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was.  What came after the election of 1860–the secession of the Southern states and the division of the United States military which had dispatched John Brown–was a different story altogether.

    These two share the same assumption that the militia movement did/does: that all it takes to threaten the end of the United States requires a few fanatics starting something somewhere.  It won’t work for the militia movement and neither will it work for these two.

    The failure of the United States won’t start at the bottom but at the top, as was the case with the Soviet Union.  Our country’s basic driving force is shifting rapidly to a patronage-driven system, where the government as patron hands out goodies and basically creates enough clients to keep it in power.  That’s the critical dynamic we have in this year’s election, a choice between those who want to keep the patronage intact and those who ostensibly don’t.  Up until now the key reason this has worked is because we borrow enough money to prevent the tax increase necessary to fully fund the system.

    Sooner or later the growth of the debt will come to the point where the fact that we’re the world’s reserve currency and can print money without accountability will be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the obligation, at which point the bureaucracy itself–and that includes the military and the states–will be defunded, along with many other recipients of this largesse.  Then we will find out that we are like Geraldo Rivera’s description of the Afghans: our loyalty cannot be bought but can be rented, and that loyalty defaults when the rent is in arrears.  Under these circumstances, and considering our views of life are defined by our zip codes, a national division is highly likely, as was the case in the breakup of the USSR, also the result of national bankruptcy.

    If I were the left, I would start trying to figure out the best way to get the deficit under control, because if you’re power base is the government and the government runs out of money, your power base is gone.  But they are so fixated on expansionist policies they cannot see their own survival is on the table.  So they–and we–will suffer the consequences.

    The people who come out the best in such a situation are those who are ready to pick up the pieces and go on.

  • Why the Romance of Calvinism?

    Fr. Victor Novak’s recent article in VirtueOnline about Calvinism, Catholicism and the Thirty-Nine Articles opens an interesting subject for disparate groups such as Anglicans, Baptists and Pentecostals: why is there so much attraction these days for Calvinism in places where it was either non-existent or not well represented?

    Let’s start with Fr. Novak’s article.  He wants us to believe that the 39 Articles are a Catholic statement of faith.  That’s a stretch; the first century and a half of the Church of England was a lurching between a reinstitution of Roman Catholicism and the imposition of Geneva-inspired Calvinistic Puritanism, with the Elizabethan Settlement in the middle.  The truth is that the Anglican edifice, both theological and ecclesiastical, has elements of both, which has made Anglicanism a composite business or a muddle, depending upon how you look at it.

    Novak is correct on one key point, and one I made many years ago: the whole concept of Anglicanism as a truly Calvinistic, Reformed church was fatally compromised by Article XVI’s allowance for falling after baptism.  That, in turn, eventually opened the door to Wesleyanism, which in turn gave Reformed theology of all kinds its most potent alternative in Protestant Christianity.

    Now, as Novak notes, we have people within Anglicanism advocating consistent (I’ll refrain from calling it strict) Calvinism within Anglican churches.  He’s right that many of the people who have started the new Anglican churches in North America are not “old line Episcopalians”; the church managed to shed many of these in the 1970’s, only to become a revolving door to another generation of orthodox believers.

    Anglicans, however, are not the only Christian group who are seeing a growing advocacy of Calvinism in their ranks.  The Southern Baptists, who admittedly have a composite theology of their own about election and perseverance, are seriously discussing this issue.  And we even see some in Pentecostal circles, traditionally Wesleyan, advocating Calvinism in one form or another.  What’s going on?

    Let me try to suggest two causes for this:

    1. Calvinism is theologically respectable.  The main reason for that is because its main advocates, the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists, are at the top of the heap of Evangelicalism from a socio-economic standpoint.  They have been able to fund the seminaries and produce the most educated ministers, although they’ve been hit with the same revisionist problems the Episcopalians have had.  So they have achieved respectability from both an academic and socio-economic standpoint, and that’s a potent combination.
    2. Calvinism draws sharp boundaries.  Say what you will about Calvinism and its proponents–and I could say a great deal about the latter–it’s a theology with very discernable boundaries.  It draws a sharp line between the elect and the lost, as opposed to the fuzziness of Roman Catholicism on the one side and liberal Christianity on the other.  It also has a simple way to separate the two: God wills a person to one or the other, and that’s it.  It is strong on the necessity of God’s grace to enter eternal life.

    But Calvinism has some grave weaknesses as well:

    1. It eliminates the concept of moral responsibility.  This is a product of its absolute insistence on predestination.  It takes a person’s inability to reach God on his or her own and removes any responsibility from them.
    2. It is intrinsically anti-missional, again because of its fixation with predestination.  The Reformers understood this completely; that’s why it took two centuries to get the modern missions movement under way.  During that time the Roman Catholics were more than making up for their losses in Europe and the Anglicans were praying at Cape Henry and elsewhere to win a new continent for God.  Calvinists complain that others don’t understand their doctrine.  But the real issue is that Calvinistic evangelists like George Whitfield didn’t understand their own!
    3. It is the fastest road to universalism in Christianity.  The reason is simple: if God wants all people to be saved, and God predestinates those who are saved, then God saves everyone.  The current poster child for this process is Rob Bell, but we’ve fought this battle since the days of Charles Finney and earlier.

    I’m not sure why Anglicans and Pentecostals, at once on opposite and the same end of Christianity, would want to ditch their own theological heritages in favour of Calvinism.  (The Southern Baptists have a dissonance problem that would be more easily solved if they took inspiration from the first two).  But we do so at our own peril, and peril of those to whom we are called to preach the Gospel.

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  • A Sea Fight in a Fog: Revisiting the ASCE Controversy about Dynamic Formulae

    With another North American academic year getting under way, it’s time for geotechnical professors and practitioners alike to think about where our industry has been and where it’s headed.  This past summer three of our most eminent people (Garland Likins, Bengt Fellenius and Robert Holtz) came together and wrote an excellent piece for the 2Q 2012 issue of the Pile Driver (the official publication of the Pile Driving Contractors Association) on “Pile Driving Formulas”.  The article is centred on the 1941-2 discussion (that’s putting it politely) in the Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers on a committee report on the subject.

    Last summer I added to my site on Vulcan Iron Works a history of pile dynamics from the Sanders (not Stanton, as the PDCA article states) Formula to the present.  I considered adding a page on this particular topic, but with a website like this where the compensation is minimal, time failed me.  In a sense, the PDCA article fills an important gap in the narrative.  Having said that, I can’t help but think that the authors took some inspiration from what I had posted.  For example, the inventor of the Engineering News formula is not generally referred to as “Arthur Mellen Wellington” and the quote from his work is the same as the one I used, the more “spiritual” part excised.

    In any case, the number of pile driving formulae increased in the first three decades of the last century to the point where, in 1930, the American Society of Civil Engineers appointed a committee to study the issue and recommend a formula.  The timing was interesting.  The following year, the Australian civil engineer David Victor Isaacs published his historic paper which first identified (and developed a method to analyse) wave propagation in precast concrete piles.  Later in the decade the British Building Research Board did their extensive research on wave propagation in piles.  The civil engineering world was taking its first steps to get beyond simple Newtonian impact mechanics in the dynamic analysis of driven piles.

    The Committee finally released its report in 1941.  One recommendation was that static load tests be used in place of dynamic formulae.  This was definitely one way to solve the problem, but static load tests are long and expensive, and neglect the use of the pile hammer as a measuring tool.  Another proposed a refinement of existing dynamic formulae.  At this point the controversy erupted.  From September 1941 to February 1942 the discussion raged in the Society’s proceedings.  It involved many of the “greats” of geotechnical engineering: Karl Terzaghi, Ralph Peck, Arthur Casagrande, Gregory Tschebotarioff, Lazarus White and many others.  As is often the case in the earth sciences, from global warming to earthquake engineering, it sometimes got heated and emotional, with some defending the status quo while others pointing out the inadequacies of dynamic formulae.  The PDCA article does an excellent job in distilling this discussion to its basics.

    While the end result—a “new” dynamic formula was not imposed on the industry—was a satisfactory one for the moment, the discussion revealed a great deal about geotechnical engineering, some of which has changed and some of which has not.

    The first problem was that, for all of their erudition and well-deserved reputation for expertise in the field, many of the commenters were not, for want of a better term, well versed in the ins and outs of things moving, especially as rapidly as takes place during wave propagation in piles.  It is to their credit that the pioneers of this profession were able to transform a profession from a strongly empirical one to one subject to engineering analysis and quantification, and doing so in an environment of complexity and unpredictability as the earth itself.  But the skill set required to do that didn’t always lend itself to the understanding of the phenomena seen in driven piles during driving.  In that respect, the controversy resembled one description of the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century: a “sea fight in a fog”.  While the shortcomings of the dynamic formulae were clear to those who spent time the jobsite time that these men did, the solution for the problem would have to come from somewhere else.

    The second problem was that the computational power needed to analyse the problem was lacking at the time, especially to the practitioners in the field.  Isaacs solved this problem by using a graphical method, a solution seen elsewhere in the profession, but making his method general practice would have involved some kind of instrumentation to verify the results.  On the other hand the BBRB came up with the instrumentation, but their analytical method—a type of d’Alembert solution of the wave equation—was far too complex for practical implementation at the time.  Neither of these methods, even if they had been combined, adequately addressed the soil response to impact, especially along the shaft of the pile.  But in any case the Committee’s inclusion of these methods was not a significant part of their work product, and World War II put a stop to the research.  It’s tempting to think that, without that great and destructive conflict, a workable solution could have been proposed a decade earlier than it was.

    The third problem was the frequently unhelpful role of building codes and standard specifications.  Codes enable owners to insure that their work is done properly.  One way they do this is by specifying methods of verification that are both easy and repeatable to evaluate.  What’s “easy” depends upon the tools of the time, but one of the reasons it has been so difficult to displace the dynamic formulae from geotechnical practice is because they—and especially the Engineering News formula—became deeply embedded in the codes and specifications by which many structures were built.  To take these away required their replacement, and risk averse owners of all kinds were reluctant to do this.

    As the PDCA article rightly notes, the most prescient commenter was Raymond Concrete Pile’s A.E. Cummings, who noted the existence of Isaacs’ and the BBRB’s work on wave propagation in piles.  This is no accident.  Raymond was involved in every aspect of the installation of driven piles, from the design and manufacture of the driving equipment to the load testing of the piles.  They had a more comprehensive view of the issues involved and, being a large organization, had the means to tackle the problem.  Combined with the advent of digital computers, Cummings’ Raymond colleague E.A.L. Smith was able to write the first code suitable for the analysis of piles during impact driving, and the rest, as they say, is history.

    Today of course the analysis of wave propagation in piles, both predictively and inversely, is at the core of pile dynamics.  It’s worth noting, however, that, although there have been many refinements in the methodology and advances in the software used, the basic theory in use is ostensibly the same as it was in the 1970’s.  It’s also worth noting that the use of pile dynamics is still a very specialized business, not only because they involve deep foundations, but also because, as was the case seventy years ago, most geotechnical engineers (except those in research) are not specialists in dynamics or numerical methods, both of which are at the heart of the analysis of piles (and other deep foundations) during impact driving.  Finally, although it’s been a long process to displace the dynamic formulae with wave related methods of analysis in building codes and specifications, it’s unreasonable to say that newer methods will not come along to displace or upgrade them, even in this conservative industry.

    One of these days, significant breaks with current practice will appear to be considered.  Hopefully we won’t go through another “sea fight in a fog” as we did in the 1940’s and make the transition to newer, vetted methods smooth and efficient, for the benefit of both our profession and for those who use the structures we design and build.

  • The Significance of the Literal Meaning of Scripture: An Example from Origen

    One thing that surprises me in Anglican circles is the growing trend to insist on a literal interpretation of the Scriptures.  In the old days Anglicans/Episcopalians used to believe that such hermeneutics was for “them”, a term loaded with educational, ecclesiastical and socio-economic overtones.  After a half century of revisionism, however, a correction is understandable.

    One justification for that correction is an appeal to the Fathers of the Church.  They interpreted things such as the six days literally, shouldn’t we?  Isn’t a return to Patristic Christianity in some form one of the goals of Anglicanism?  Anyone who is familiar with Patristic Biblical interpretation, however, knows that the Fathers were the masters of the sensus plenior, the “fuller sense” of the scriptures, which delved very deeply into typology and allegory.  This type of interpretation was the rule throughout the Middle Ages; the Reformers began the first steps away from it.

    This monograph will look at an example of this, from Origen’s Commentary on John.  I have picked this for the following reasons:

    • The Commentary on John is, to our knowledge, the first explicit and Christian commentary on a book of the Bible.  It’s true that Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem does the verse-by-verse thing, but the commentary is secondary; refuting Marcion was the first goal.  Although Origen wrote this in part to counter the Gnostic Heracleon, his principal aim is to explain the meaning of the gospel on what we would call an expository basis.
    • Origen was Christianity’s first comprehensive Biblical scholar.  One Roman Catholic scholar told me that Christians were not, per se, people of the Book.  Before Marcion that was certainly the case; his heresy goaded Christianity to canonize the books it considered sacred other than those of the Old Testament (and here there was variance with the Jews, Origen and Jerome notwithstanding).  Before that the apostolic tradition sufficed with help from books, most of which were canonical but some of which were not.  Origen for his part, without always saying so, made the Bible the core of our understanding of the faith; it was his greatest legacy.
    • Origen systematized the allegorizing and more-than-literal meaning of the Scripture, and held it as the most important meaning of the text.  That prioritization, with variances, held for many centuries afterwards.  Augustine, for example, would justify this by recourse to the following: “Our fitness comes from God, who himself made us fit to be ministers of a New Covenant, of which the substance is, not a written Law, but a Spirit. For the written Law means Death, but the Spirit gives Life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6) So it makes sense to start at “the beginning” so to speak.

    The specific part of the Commentary that deals with this is the first part of Book X, specifically the first five sections.  In this he is covering John 2:12-25, although following his usual method Origen is wont to get off the subject.  Origen is as alive to the stakes as anyone could be:

    The truth of these matters must lie in that which is seen by the mind. If the discrepancy between the Gospels is not solved, we must give up our trust in the Gospels, as being true and written by a divine spirit, or as records worthy of credence, for both these characters are held to belong to these works… There are many other points on which the careful student of the Gospels will find that their narratives do not agree; and these we shall place before the reader, according to our power, as they occur. The student, staggered at the consideration of these things, will either renounce the attempt to find all the Gospels true, and not venturing to conclude that all our information about our Lord is untrustworthy, will choose at random one of them to be his guide; or he will accept the four, and will consider that their truth is not to be sought for in the outward and material letter. (Commentary in John, X, 2)

    Origen’s immediate problem concerns the time of the Baptism of the Lord.  In addition to dealing with what is now called the “Synoptic Problem” (the Synoptic Gospels being Matthew, Mark and Luke) Origen has to wrestle with how these square with John’s Gospel.  He states the problem as follows:

    Those who accept the four Gospels, and who do not consider that their apparent discrepancy is to be solved anagogically by mystical interpretation, will have to clear up the difficulty, raised above, about the forty days of the temptation, a period for which no room can be found in any way in John’s narrative; and they will also have to tell us when it was that the Lord came to Capernaum. If it was after the six days of the period of His baptism, the sixth being that of the marriage at Cana of Galilee, then it is clear that the temptation never took place, and that He never was at Nazareth, and that John was not yet delivered up. Now, after Capernaum, where He abode not many days, the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and He went up to Jerusalem, where He cast the sheep and oxen out of the temple, and poured out the small change of the bankers. (Commentary in John, X, 2)

    Part of Origen’s problem is that his idea of the “literal” interpretation of the Scripture is too narrow.  In this case, a simple solution is to recognize the nature of John’s narrative as opposed to that of the Synoptics.  The Synoptics directly relate the account of his Baptism followed by the Temptation in the wilderness.  But John’s narrative (specifically 1:29-34) does not directly relate the Baptism of Jesus, but both events surrounding it and John the Baptist’s narrative of those events.  As is often the case with John’s Gospel, it presupposes the Synoptic account.

    In any case this is not the way Origen deals with this or other similar problems.  He proceeds as follows:

    We must, however, try to obtain some notion of the intention of the Evangelists in such matters, and we direct ourselves to this. Suppose there are several men who, by the spirit, see God, and know His words addressed to His saints, and His presence which He vouchsafes to them, appearing to them at chosen times for their advancement. There are several such men, and they are in different places, and the benefits they receive from above vary in shape and character. And let these men report, each of them separately, what he sees in spirit about God and His words, and His appearances to His saints, so that one of them speaks of God’s appearances and words and acts to one righteous man in such a place, and another about other oracles and great works of the Lord, and a third of something else than what the former two have dealt with. And let there be a fourth, doing with regard to some particular matter something of the same kind as these three…He, then, who takes the writings of these men for history, or for a representation of real things by a historical image, and who supposes God to be within certain limits in space, and to be unable to present to several persons in different places several visions of Himself at the same time, or to be making several speeches at the same moment, he will deem it impossible that our four writers are all speaking truth. To him it is impossible that God, who is in certain limits in space, could at the same set time be saying one thing to one man and another to another, and that He should be doing a thing and the opposite thing as well, and, to put it bluntly, that He should be both sitting and standing, should one of the writers represent Him as standing at the time, and making a certain speech in such a place to such a man, while a second writer speaks of Him as sitting. (Commentary in John, X, 3)

    Within the limitations of Origen’s complex prose, this is a pretty straightforward statement of the problem.  His solution to this was quickly forthcoming:

    In the case I have supposed where the historians desire to teach us by an image what they have seen in their mind, their meaning would be found, if the four were wise, to exhibit no disagreement; and we must understand that with the four Evangelists it is not otherwise. They made full use for their purpose of things done by Jesus in the exercise of His wonderful and extraordinary power; they use in the same way His sayings, and in some places they tack on to their writing, with language apparently implying things of sense, things made manifest to them in a purely intellectual way. I do not condemn them if they even sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in the material falsehood. (Commentary in John, X, 4)

    Origen follows this up with examples of literal difficulties that are simpler to solve than the one he started with.  But this doesn’t change two important facts.

    The first is that he was never explicitly condemned by the Church for statements like this.  Origen was pilloried and his works destroyed for many things: his belief in the pre-existence and transmigration of souls (he later refuted the latter), his deep subordinationism of the Son, his universalism which extended to the Devil and so on, but not this.  His interpretive method was taken up by many who came after him, including Jerome, who cribbed Origen before and after he had turned on Origen.

    The second is that he was credible to his own contemporaries, pagan and Christian alike.  To use an Evangelical phrase, Origen was engaged with the culture that surrounded him, in a way which was more meaningful than a lot of what we see today.  His longest extant and complete work was his refutation of the pagan Celsus, an apologetic classic.  He was a spiritual advisor to the mother of the Emperor.  And he won over his “bankroll” Ambrose from Gnosticism.  He did all of this in an era when Christianity was still not a legal religion.  He himself died from the results of his torture under the Emperor Decius, who instigated the first systematic persecution of Christianity.

    Given the aversion of Evangelical and “scientific” atheist alike to this view of Scripture, we should ask why this appealed at the time.  The answer lies in the difference between the way life was looked at then and the way we look at it now.

    Origen’s time was suffused with Platonic and Neoplatonic thought.  At the heart of this was the basic view that the material world around us was a combination of illusory and inferior.  The best reality of the universe was spiritual.  The thought that material falsehoods would point us to spiritual realities was not as shocking to them as it is to us.  When we generally think of Plato, we think of classical Athens and philosophy, but by Origen’s day (and earlier, with the likes of Philo) Hellenic philosophy had been transformed by most into Hellenistic spirituality, with a strong influence from the Hindu and Buddhist East.

    Such an escapist view of life was underscored by the nature of the life they were trying to escape.  First Greece and then Rome had ground down the civilizations and peoples they conquered, subordinating their entire way of life and language to the one the Greeks and Romans were imposing on them.  The Jews were the most vociferous—and, in spite of the tragedies of their revolts, the most successful—in holding things together for themselves, which is one reason why they booted Jesus’ followers from the synagogue.  Origen’s Egypt was a good example of this.  Once a cradle of civilization, by Origen’s time it was a run-down granary for the Roman Empire.  Alexandria, its first city and Origen’s home town, was in Egypt but not of it, populated largely by non-Egyptians (Origen’s father was Greek, but his mother was most likely an Egyptian).

    The impulse to bail out on this world was accelerated by the severe difficulties the Roman Empire experienced after the death of the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180.  Without a really clear system of succession, Rome had managed to get through the first two centuries after Augustus quite well, but after that the power challengers came out of the woodwork and the Empire became a battlefield for competing armies and emperors.  Under these conditions civilization broke down, taxes went up and the government became more rapacious than it was before.  Without real means to redress grievances, the people were forced to suffer passively under this system, and under these conditions the spiritual beyond looked awfully good.

    It’s tempting to say that we are far advanced from this sad state and the necessity of being so escapist.  In a society with as high of an incarceration rate as ours, a regulatory maze that drags the economy down ever so progressively, and a political system as dysfunctional as we have, we should be mindful that things can change very rapidly.  It may not be very fashionable these days to focus on the afterlife—even for Evangelicals—but we should not be so contemptuous of those who have gone before us if the technological civilization we have is largely used to keep us in line and not liberate us.

    In some ways, like Origen, we’ve gotten off of the subject.  Origen’s allegorising and spiritual method of interpretation became the norm in the Church for many years, variations notwithstanding.  The literal meaning of the Bible—irrespective of whether the definition of literal was too narrow or not—took a back seat to the spiritualising lessons that nurtured Christians for more than a millennium.  To ask whether the Fathers took the Scriptures literally really isn’t the key question.  The key question is whether they thought it was important, and the evidence we have demonstrates that it was not.

    Therefore, as I said, we do not lose heart. No, even though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. The light burden of our momentary trouble is preparing for us, in measure transcending thought, a weight of imperishable glory; We, all the while, gazing not on what is seen, but on what is unseen; for what is seen is transient, but what is unseen is imperishable. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

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  • Will We Have to Work in Heaven?

    Every now and then I have stop and protest one thing or another that has become fashionable among Evangelicals.  We’re always told that every good and trendy thing comes from the Throne Room.  But that isn’t really the case, and it makes sense to call some of these things out.  I have friends on Facebook and Twitter who incessantly whine about the bourgeois nature of the faith as practiced by the saints, but endless complaint is not the solution either.  One of these days I’m going to tell them to sell all or shut up as I’ve done with the Episcopalians, but in the meanwhile…some of the things I’ve gone against in the past are:

    1. The unBiblical use of the shofar, in my piece Blowing Your Own Horn.
    2. The endless proclaiming that we’re going to “take the land” in (appropriately enough) If You’re Going to Take the Land, Take It.
    3. The assertion of authority in Evangelical churches.
    4. Prosperity teaching, in My Reply to Glendon Hermanus on the Tithe and the Authority of the Church.
    5. The whole business of “mansions” in heaven in It’s Time to Get Back to Cabins in Heaven.

    The last one is most germane to the present topic.  In a recent tribute to my favourite Catholic priest I mentioned the “Mystic Rose”.  Among other things, that was a quick swat at yet another bit of Pentecostal and Charismatic big talk that’s been going around for a while: the concept that we’re going to be working in heaven.  I think it’s time to call this one out, too.

    First: I am amazed that Evangelical Christians of any kind, dominated as they are in this country by the Scots-Irish, would even dream of such a concept.  The Scots-Irish, as you will recall, came over here so that they would not have to do the work.  They fought the War Between the States trying to make sure this state of affairs was preserved, and even when they lost it they ended up keeping the workload distribution pretty much as it was.  The fact that this is a relatively new concept suggests that it may be an import.  One would think that such seed is falling on rocky soil, but evidently not.

    Second, there is no Biblical sanction for such a concept.  The Scriptures are not very detailed on what our life with God on the other side will be like.  They speak of rewards, crowns, ruling and the like, but none of this suggests work.  The whole idea of ruling is that someone else gets to do the work while you take the credit.  The whole sweep of salvation suggests that God has done all the work in preparing our eternal home with him:

    It was faith that enabled Abraham to obey the Call that he received, and to set out for the place which he was afterwards to obtain as his own; and he set out not knowing where he was going. It was faith that made him go to live as an emigrant in the Promised Land–as in a strange country–living there in tents with Isaac and Jacob, who shared the promise with him. For he was looking for the City with the sure foundations, whose architect and builder is God. (Hebrews 11:8-10)

    (Note for Ray H. Hughes Sr. fans: this was the scripture he used for his famous 1961 sermon, “Heaven, Capital City” where he denounced the idea of cabins in heaven.  But even with that there was no suggestion that we would have to work to build any of them; in fact, Jesus promised that he would go and prepare the place).

    The Heavenly Jerusalem likewise comes down ready at the end of history (cf. Revelation 21:10).  If it’s built and it’s perfect, what can we add to it?  And what would we do in any case?

    What I think is going on here is that people’s view of the relationship of this life with the life to come has changed.  In the past, life was harder, more uncertain and shorter.  People wanted heaven to be what this life wasn’t: long, stable and easy.  Now people find life better, although they’d still rather watch shows about reality than actually live it.  So they look at heaven as an extension of the life they have now.  That’s why these days we get questions about whether there will be such things as pets, golf, etc. in heaven, when what we’ll get will far overshadow the joys of any or all of these things or anything else.

    Evidently the person who first hatched the idea that we would work in heaven really loved their job.  But I’m “old school” enough to still think that heaven needs to be what this life isn’t, and I think the weight of the Scriptures is on my side on this issue.  And I think that, as time rolls on in this country, a generation which is too broke to retire and has bankrupted the country where the eagle flies once a month will think twice before working through the last retirement they’ll have.

    This is probably as good a place as any to introduce the “Mystic Rose”.  I first saw it in Dante’s Paradiso (Cantos XXXI and XXXII), where we are presented with what amounts to a stadium where each of the saints has a seat and God himself is contemplated in the “field” or “yellow” of a rose.  (A yellow more suggests a daisy or sunflower to me, but I digress…)  The whole idea of a stadium in heaven suggests a perpetual football game, which should be enough to make any SEC fan chuck the idea of working in heaven.

    In this interplay of the serious and whimsical, there’s one thing that not working in heaven should suggest: whatever we’re going to do for God, we need to get done while we’re here.  Antoine Arnauld, the great French logician, was a tireless advocate of Jansenism, a very serious form of Christianity.  At one point his associate Pierre Nicole begged Arnauld to take a break from his labours, to which reply came: “Rest, rest, shall I have not all eternity to rest?”

    We shall.  But in the meanwhile…

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  • Women Bishops in the CoE: Cutting the Knot or Tying It?

    I have to confess that I enjoyed the “Ugley Vicar” John Richardson’s exposition on women bishops in the Church of England as it relates to the CoE’s relationship with the state.  I recommend it highly, especially to my American readers, who generally don’t think in terms other than the construct we have.  (And that, sad to say, goes for just about everything in life, including civil marriage…)

    In any case, let me outline the takeaways I got out of this:

    1. In the beginning, the Church in a pagan nation like Rome was pretty much on its own.  As he quotes Thomas Cranmer: “And at that time, forasmuch as the christian people had no sword nor governor amongst them, they were constrained of necessity to take such curates and priests as either they knew themselves to be meet thereunto, or else as were commended unto them by other that were so replete with the Spirit of God, with such knowledge in the profession of Christ, such wisdom, such conversation and counsel, that they ought even of very conscience to give credit unto them, and to accept such as by them were presented…”
    2. The development of a Christian society in Europe led to the development/possibility of the “Christian prince,” who could take a leadership role in the life of the Church.  As noted in Article of Religion 37, “… which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.”
    3. The temporal power held by the Pope necessitated the transfer of the headship of the church from the Pope to the King (or Queen) of England, which led to the situation the Church of England has today.  That wasn’t a universally admired solution at the time (Martin Luther didn’t like it) but in the end neither Luther nor Zwingli nor Calvin nor most of the other Reformers come up with anything much different in practice.

    I’m not really sure what Richardson’s point is about this and women bishops in the CoE, probably became I’m not a participant in some of the more arcane aspects of Anglican canon law.  But I have noted that the above leaves two important questions unanswered:

    1. Why can we have a female “Lady and Governor of the Church” (which is headship) and not have women bishops exercising headship as well?
    2. Why can’t Parliament, if it so chooses, acting under the Queen’s “broad seal” simply shove women bishops (along with gay ones, etc) down the CoE’s throat?

    Given this, Richardson is beginning to have doubts about the Church of England’s basic construct:

    But might it not be time to question the whole enterprise?

    We are, after all, “not under law but under grace” (Rom 6:14). Our being under the ‘law of the land’ regarding the implementation of our theology, then, is an anomaly, brought about by the peculiarities of Anglican history and theology, but hardly intrinsic to the nature of the gospel.

    Moreover, the arrangement under which that operates is increasingly dysfunctional. The Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament clearly thinks it has a right to hold the Church to account regarding its ministry. Would that Committee be equally willing to convey to Parliament the Church’s reproofs and rebukes — for that is what the Henrician settlement would envisage?

    Our difficulty constructing a satisfactory law to cover the present need is perhaps an argument in itself that the whole enterprise is reaching its ‘sell by’ date. Perhaps the opponents of Clause 5(1)c are more right than they realize — perhaps it is time to let grace and goodwill be the rule itself.

    That’s the conclusion that we came to in this country when we passed the First Amendment.  The effort for same didn’t come from just Freemasons, deists and atheists: it came also from dissenting churches who wanted to worship as they felt God had instructed them to.  Things move a little slower in Albion than one would like, but evidently they’re moving.

    The really sad part of this is that we as Americans, having set up this construct and run it successfully for more than two centuries, are unconsciously abandoning it.  From the theonomistic tendencies of some Christian leaders to the reflexive bullying of people and institutions that don’t toe whatever “politically correct” line that’s being pushed from the top, we need to wake up to our own heritage before we lose it for good, and end up with not-so-Christian princes making decisions for our citizens and churches that they have no real right to do.

  • Phoenix Sonshine: Shinin’ In The Light

    (Destiny D-4404-S) 1971

    “Jesus Music” was, by definition, evangelistic. It also tended to be folksy; there were many in the movement who had strong reservations about the use of straight-up rock ‘n roll for Christian music. (There were others who didn’t, but I digress.)

    Phoenix Sonshine epitomised that sound and that message with this evangelistic, folksy album. It gets a little into folk-rock, a livelier sound than, say, The Way. It’s not as well polished as this production.  But the best thing to do with this music is to get saved.

    More information on this album (and its performers) can be found on Waxidermy.

    The songs:

    1. That’s A Start
    2. New Love
    3. Faith
    4. Shinin’ In The Light
    5. Sing A Song Of Jesus
    6. He Died
    7. Love Of Jesus
    8. Lazarus
    9. Broken Wing

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  • The Palm Beach Way of Exclusivity is in the Animal Kingdom, Too

    And  why not?

    Wild bottlenose dolphins bond over their use of tools, with distinct cliques and classes forming over decades as a result of their skills, scientists have found.

    The communities, which have been compared with societies such as the Bullingdon Club in humans, mean the aquatic animals share their knowledge only with those in their own circle, passing it down the family line.

    The findings mean the traits of “inclusive inheritability” and culture are no longer considered exclusive to human beings.

    This is the news that snobs everywhere have waited to hear.  If evolutionists were looking to the fauna for support for egalitarianism and social flattening, well, they’re in trouble again.

    Since the Brits came out with this, the Bullingdon Club analogy probably suits them.  Hopefully the Shiny Sheet will use the B&T, Palm Beach Country Club or the Everglades Club.

    And if feminists would like to crow…

    The study also found the behaviour was stronger in females, who were better at maintaining alliances, noting: “Once sponging behaviour is established, female spongers formed clear cliques.”

    Being a seaside community, the waters off of Palm Beach are a natural habitat for dolphins.  We saw them pass our yacht as we cruised the waters of South Florida and the Bahamas.

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  • The Most Important Minister: My Tribute to Fr. Donald F.X. Connolly

    One question that Christians often ask each other is “What preacher (or minister or priest) had the greatest influence on your life?”  For me that’s never been an easy question to answer, especially in the church I’m in now.  Most people would assume that the church I’ve ended up with produced the most influential one, but for me it’s just not the case.

    I came from a family with deep-seated anti-clerical attitudes.  Like many “traditional” Episcopalians, they tended to regard ministers as another form of hired help, like those at the club and the business.  My father also tended to look at just about all ministers as pompous, mealy-mouthed blowhards, irrespective of denomination.  Given the instinctive “Anglican fudge,” Episcopal ministers didn’t stand much of a chance making an impact on me.

    My mother was rather fond of Robert Appleyard, whose later claim to fame was the first Episcopal Bishop to “legally” ordain women into the priesthood in the now-controversial Diocese of Pittsburgh.  His successor, Hundson Cary, was another matter altogether.  I had fun with the “Bore’s Head” re his initiation of the turn of the year celebration, and he found himself caught between Vestry and ladies’ guild in the founding of the Church Mouse resale shop.

    On the other end (in every sense of the word) are the many Evangelical and Pentecostal pastors and ministers I have had contact with.  My years of working for a denomination set aside, the biggest block about the ministers where I’m at is that Evangelicals of all kinds are primarily focused on the impact of the Gospel on the individual, and that to the exclusion of everything else.  Although that’s important, for someone of my background and temperament that’s just too narrow of a way to view life, something that readers of this blog have probably figured out.  (That also explains many of the difficulties that Evangelicals have in politics, but that’s another post).

    In the middle are my years as a Roman Catholic, and here I’d like to pause and give tribute to the one Catholic priest who has had more impact on me than any other minister I have met: Fr. Donald F.X. Connolly.  Not well-known today, better known forty years ago when I first met him, he made the difference in my life when a difference needed to be made.

    My introduction to him was rather unique, as told here:

    I had started attending the Catholic church in Palm Beach just a few months before that, the same church that Jack Kennedy attended when he visited the family compound there.  My parents weren’t too thrilled with this decision, but I did it anyway.  Moving however required me start attending another parish.  That lasted for a few weeks; they then announced that a new parish was starting less than a kilometre from where we lived, and that we should go there.

    South Florida is well known for fast growth. The major seminary for the Archdiocese of Miami was located in Boynton Beach, so they impressed the use of the seminary’s chapel for the new parish.  (Photo below.)  The church certainly had its own pastor but they also impressed seminary professors to say Mass (some acted like they had forgotten how it was done!)

    I took a low profile going there, because I wasn’t sure what I really wanted to do in Roman Catholicism.  That wasn’t difficult at first because this parish, like most, didn’t have a lot of social interaction amongst the parishioners.  But that changed abruptly one Sunday morning at Mass.

    I came in as usual and sat down towards the back, minding my own business, when someone came from behind the altar and asked me to be the lector for the Mass.  The lector is the person who is reads with the first two appointed selections of the Bible for the Mass (plus the Responsorial Psalm when it isn’t sung.) I was surprised at this but I went on back and met the parish priest.  He asked me, “Have you ever been a lector before?”

    “I’m not even Catholic,” I replied.

    “We’ll take care of that later,” he answered.  So he gave me a crash course in lectoring, we ascended to the altar of God and I lectored my first Mass.  I was instantly a regular lector at the church, which not only involved me in the life of the parish but also did wonders for my public speaking.  Before the year was out I formally converted to Roman Catholicism and began the greatest spiritual adventure of my life.

    Fr. Connolly was St. Thomas More’s first parish priest.  But he was no “ordinary” parish priest: he was also professor of homiletics at St. Vincent de Paul Seminary.  Ordained in 1960, he had also been pastor of several other Catholic churches in the Archdiocese and principal of Monsignor Pace High School in Miami (sadly, one of my school’s athletic rivals).  He was also a radio and television personality, having even appeared on the Tonight Show.  At the time he hosted a call-in program with a Methodist minister in Miami.  He had authored several monographs and edited several books.  The parish was blessed to have a man of his calibre.

    My conversion process was as unusual as the two people involved, as I related here:

    Once my parish priest realised he had his new parish’s first convert on his hands, he spent a little time with me preparing for the event.  (How he found out about me is recounted here.)  When I told him that I had read St. Augustine’s City of God over the summer, he was a little surprised.  That was heavy reading for most converts, but it had been preceded by the Divine Comedy the previous spring, the work which first set forth Roman Catholicism to me in a serious way.  But both of these seminal works turned out to be the bulk of my preparation for conversion.  The parish had no organisation to catechise converts except to make me read a little booklet, and so before Advent I was Roman Catholic.

    Connolly was a no-nonsense kind of priest, refreshing in and of itself.  But along the way—a way that lasted four years—he sowed into my life some very important things.

    The first thing he did was to introduce me to various members of the faculty at the Seminary.  This gave me a broader perspective on many topics, especially Biblical studies.  Connolly is best described as a progressive traditionalist; he demanded fidelity to Roman Catholic teaching, but also knew the importance of serious inquiry and an intellectual challenge.  This preparation has saved me a good deal of grief over the years, especially avoiding painting myself into a corner with a defective Biblical hermeneutic.

    He also encouraged and directed me towards good Catholic reading.  I didn’t need much encouragement for Patristic and Scholastic reading; I spent much of my undergraduate years wading through St. Thomas Aquinas and in the years after that the likes of Origen, Tertullian, Moses Maimonides and more recently Cyril of Jerusalem.  But he introduced me to two much more recent Catholic authors whose impact on my life has been considerable.

    The first was the Jesuit John McKenzie.  His books The Two-Edged Sword and The Power and the Wisdom, on the Old and New Testaments respectively, shaped much of my thinking about the Bible and its meaning, especially the fundamentally revolutionary nature of the New Testament that shows almost every existing church to have come up short of its concept.  It certainly got me past any temptation to make “a business deal with God”, a phrase Connolly used for much of pre-Vatican II Catholicism and one which could explicitly be used to describe prosperity-teaching immersed Evangelicalism.

    The second was one better known to readers of this blog—G.K. Chesterton.  It’s difficult to imagine twentieth century apologetics without this brilliant writer who started as an Anglican and ended up as a Roman Catholic, and his works have given me both joy and ammunition to face Christianity’s opponents.

    Finally he challenged me, a product of a formal and somewhat mechanistic background, to let my humanity come out, which has made life a far more joyful business than it would have been.

    After graduation we lost track of each other.  Unbeknownst to me he suffered a stroke in 1981 and died of a heart attack four years later, gone at 52 well before his time.  In the meanwhile I had struggled through dodging the covenant community experience and leaving Roman Catholicism for good.

    Although I had and still have substantive issues with Roman Catholicism’s concept of itself as a church, choosing and staying in a church can be a complex business.  Much of my problem after college was that the Catholic Church that had produced the experience I had during and immediately following my conversion fell down into routine parish life, especially after I came to Chattanooga.  One day I had a conversation with a colleague at the university who is a Third Order Franciscan.  She noted that the churches in the area lacked the vision to offer for such things as retreat houses and places where a deeper walk with God as a Roman Catholic could be found.  I can’t say absolutely that I would have stayed even with these; I can certainly say it would have been far more likely.

    Such things, I suppose, will be the stuff of long conversations with Fr. Connolly in the Mystic Rose.  He is doubtless not the kind of mentor that Evangelicals normally like to see—especially for men.  But he is the one that God sent at the time, and for his influence and legacy I can only be grateful.  As the Jesuits would say:

    Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam

  • What Happens When Everyone Is Supposed to Believe the Same

    However small, however modest, however tentative this may be, it will perpetually give rise to contests and divisions.  And this quest of a common denominator in contrasting convictions can develop nothing but intellectual cowardice and mediocrity, a weakening of minds and a betrayal of the rights of truth. (Jaques Maritain, True Humanism, Bles, 1938, p. 167)

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