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Rewarding Rebellion, Episcopal Style
The Episcopal Bishop of Western Kansas has a point:
Now I read that the “New” Diocese of Fort Worth passed a $632,466 dollar budget for a part-time bishop, a little over 19 priests and 62 delegates who represent way less than a thousand people, and $200,000 is from the General Convention budget!…
If I, as a Diocesan Bishop, left TEC (which I am not saying I am) with 10 of my churches, could the other 21 get $200,000 to carry on? Since our entire budget for the year was less than $400,000, it would go a long way to let this Diocese be in a better financial position. I am compelled to ask such things because it does not appear that anyone else is and we are about to spend 10’s of millions of dollars on another General Convention to set a budget. Can others apply for general budget funds? I know that we can not.
This kind of thing is a product of the unintended consequences you get when you entrust a “cause” (in this case the radicalisation of a church) to a bureaucracy.
It’s one thing to say that you want a church that is “inclusive” and “caring” and all that. When you resort to worldly (bureaucratic, monetary, etc.) means to achieve that, you’re going to get situations like this all of the time. It’s one of the major Achilles heels of liberalism in all forms; it sounds great until you hire the bureaucrats to carry out the work, and then the result doesn’t look like anything you thought it would. The Obama Administration is about to get a hard lesson along these lines.
KJS has decided to enforce her vision of what a church should be using strong-arm tactics, both ecclesiastical and civil. To make that work you primarily need to use a stick, but you also need to dangle the carrot (the accurate term for this is “money-favouring”.) That’s what she’s doing in Fort Worth, but now she’s inspired the envy of those (such as the Bishop of Western Kansas) who have “stuck with the program” but now find themselves on the short end. It’s like the long-term cell phone customer who asks about this “great deal” only to find out it’s only for new subscribers. (And they wonder why cell phone customers change carriers so frequently…)
A more sensible solution would be to fold the seceeding dioceses into existing ones, either as a whole or on a piecemeal basis. At this point TEC has way too many dioceses and bishops relative to their local churches. But, for legal reasons, KJS can’t (or won’t) do that.
What will happen if she continues this is that everyone else–irrespective of their idea, be they revisionist or orthodox–will become less and less willing to “kick money upstairs.” And that will be an unpleasant result for the power holders at 815.
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Melinda Gates Wants an iPhone: After They’ve Boosted all the Rest…
But Bill is, unsurpisingly, against it:
Microsoft founder head Bill Gates has banned the use of products made by arch-rival Apple from his house, his wife has revealed.
But the blockade could backfire on Gates, 53, after Melinda admitted there are times she feels envious of her friends’ iPhones.
She told Vogue magazine that the couple’s three children Jennifer, 13, Rory, 10 and Phoebe, seven, are not allowed Apple products.
‘There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household,’ she said.
‘But iPods and iPhones are two things we don’t get for our kids.’
Like any forbidden fruit, however, Mrs Gates, 44, admitted that some Apple products do have the power to tempt her.
‘Every now and then I look at my friends and say ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone,’ she admitted.
As my old Texas A&M school hymn says, “After they’ve boosted all the rest/They will come and join the best.”
It’s interesting to note that, back at the start, Gates used Unix as inspiration for DOS. About twenty years later, Steve Jobs used FreeBSD Unix as the base for Mac OS X. Microsoft would go a long way to digging itself out of its security/efficiency hole by using a Unix as a base and developing a “compatibility mode” (like Mac Classic) for its legacy applications. That’s more a “technical/under the hood” type of obsevation (as opposed to the ergonomic and stylistic appeal of things such as iPhones) but Microsoft needs to start somewhere.
Keeping iPhones out of the house will only delay the inevitable…
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Book Review: St. Augustine’s City of God
In the summer of 1972, I was making my transition from being an Episcopalian to a Roman Catholic. That transition is commonly referred to today as “swimming the Tiber,” but at the time I was also making another water crossing that, for me, was also very significant: we sold our home in Palm Beach and, crossing Lake Worth, moved to Boynton Beach. That complicated the conversion process, as I found myself changing parishes twice before dropping anchor at a brand new parish not far from the house.
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.
Over the years I have soaked in many of the Church Fathers, but with recent events it seemed that another look at the City of God was in order. Those recent events include the unceremonious failure of the Evangelical world to “bring America back to God,” either politically or culturally. The City of God, a work which details the interplay between the affairs of man and the purposes of God, was written at a time when a) Christianity was in the ascendant in both respects, and b) the Roman Empire (especially in the West) was in dire straits.
Those dire straits precipitated the writing of the book in the first place. In 410 the Goths under Alaric sacked Rome, the first time this had happened since the Gauls did so during the Republic. Pagans saw this is as a punishment for Rome having abandoned the old pagan gods and embracing Christianity. A Roman official named Marcellinus (who himself was executed before the work was finished) asked Augustine to write a refutation of the pagans’ accusation. The task occupied Augustine until 426.
The City of God is basically in two parts. The first ten books are a direct refutation of the pagan charges. In some ways these are a mirror image of what Christians accuse their secularist counterparts of in this country, but Augustine is aided by the inconsistency of classical paganism itself. Over the centuries it had undergone changes in the structure of its deities, the methods of its worship, and of course the opinions of the philosophers about its own validity. In many ways it is the easiest of Augustine’s tasks. In the process he catalogues religious antiquity and comes back to one point time and time again that bears repeating in our own society—that Roman theatre was basically an adjunct to pagan religion, something to keep in mind when watching Hollywood’s next attempt at cinema with meaning.
It is in the second part where he really spreads his wings and expounds on his greater subject: the whole course of history as the interplay of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man. The dichotomy of the two, and the crisp distinction he makes between the saved and the lost, is one of the hallmarks of Augustine’s theology. However, in the course of describing the interaction of the two cities from the creation to the end, he is not simplistic in his presentation or discussion of he two. The two coexist and commingle in history, and for Augustine it is only at the very end that they will find permanent separation.
One major reason for that is that Augustine, unlike many Evangelicals, does not equate a certain type of state with the City of God. His view of the state is more practical than we see now. Roman history has taught him that the state can be a force for evil (in the days of persecution) or one for good (with the Christian, preferably Nicene emperors from Constantine onward.) But it’s a given for Augustine that the state will be involved in religion, one way or another, and that the Church and its people must deal with it effectively one way or another. It’s tempting to think that we’re past such involvement with our modern secular states, but both the rise of militant secularism and Islamicism should caution us not to be so smug about our age. Augustine lived in an age where the Roman state reached into every corner of life, and given the broad (and broadening) role of the state in our own lives, his view of the state deserves another hearing, at least.
If there’s an institution on earth that deserves being equated with the City of God, for Augustine it’s the Catholic Church. Augustine’s view of both the church and of life in general can be best described as escapist. His descriptions of the brutal tortures that were part and parcel with Late Roman law enforcement, to say nothing of the barbarian invasions that were tearing the Empire apart, certainly buttressed his view of life, which in turn led to his stress on the importance of eternity. To be honest, his view of life—which he stresses in the last book—was and is appealing to me. Evangelical Christianity has traded the “vale of tears” view for triumphalistic theonomy and prosperity teaching, but again given the current trends Evangelicals may find a reversion to a more “Augustinian” view of life—a view that until only recently was strong in some Evangelical circles—more appropriate for the times.
Mentioning the Augustinian view leads us to an important point: his views on predestination. The City of God isn’t his premier exposition on the subject, but he leaves no doubt that it is his idea that God has foreordained everything, from the Fall onward, and that same fall made man incapable of coming back to God on his own. Nevertheless he is reluctant to slide into the fatalism that characterises, say, Islam, or to flatly state that same predestination is actively exclusionary of the lost, as the Reformers did. In one of the most interesting discourses in the City of God, he defends the concept of free will in a theistic context against Cicero’s insistence that free will requires rejecting the whole concept of God. (Today, we have “the fix is in” concept amongst secularists, whose biological determinism rivals the fatalism of any Muslim, so now we have the worst of both worlds.) Discourses such as this illustrate that Augustine moves in a world of Greek philosophy. For all of its weaknesses, Greek philosophy, be it Platonic (Augustine’s preference) or Aristotelian (as is the case with St. Thomas Aquinas or Moses Maimonides) forces theologians to think problems such as causality through, and the Reformation’s greatest loss was to deprive Christianity of the services of such a school of thought. (Augustine’s own description of the Old vs. New Academy in Greece puts Paul’s experience on Mars Hill, and his reaction to it, in a different light.)
The City of God is an exceedingly long work, full of excursi that the ancients loved and the moderns dread. The edition reviewed here is abridged to get the reader past some of these, although in some cases I found myself wanting to explore these further. The translation is a good one, not quite as ponderous as the Victorian ones that one finds online, but it was done before the Roman Catholics got away from the Latin/Septuagint names of Bible books and people, so Protestants may find themselves thrown occasionally by a name which should be familiar.
To journey through this great work—one that has no equal in the Protestant world—once again has been a pleasure. Augustine’s ancient scholarship sometimes falls flat today, but our task is ultimately to come up with a better construct, something that we have been reluctant to do. The City of God is a work that all Christians need to take a good hard look at in a world where, like Augustine’s, so many familiar things are passing away.
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The Significance of Miracles
The world has believed this insignificant group of lowly, unimportant, and uneducated men precisely because the divine character of what happened is more marvellously apparent in the insignificance of such witnesses. What gave power to the preachers who persuaded the world was not the eloquence of the words they uttered, but the miracles of the deeds they did.
Those who had not themselves seen Christ rising from the dead and ascending into heaven with His flesh believed the men who said they had seen the miracle, not merely because those men said so, but also because these men themselves worked miracles. For example, many people were astonished to hear these men, who knew but two languages (and, in some cases, only one) suddenly break forth into so many tongues that everybody in the audience understood. They saw a man who had been lame from earliest infancy now, after forty years, stand upright at a word uttered by these witnesses who spoke in the name of Christ. Pieces of cloth that touched their bodies were found to heal the sick. Uncounted people suffering from various diseases set themselves in line in the streets where the Apostles were to pass and where their shadows would fall upon the sick, and many of these people were at once restored to health. Besides many other marvels wrought in the name of Christ, there were even cases of dead men restored to life. (St Augustine, City of God, XXII, 5)
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The Ultimate Good in Life, the Stoics, and the New Atheists
Look, now, at the great virtue called fortitude. Is not its very function—to bear patiently with misfortune—overwhelming evidence that human life is beset with unhappiness, however wise a man may be? It is beyond my comprehension how the Stoics can boldly argue that such ills are not really ills, meanwhile allowing that, if a philosopher should be tried by them beyond his obligation or duty to bear, he may have no choice but to take the easy way out by committing suicide. So stultifying is Stoic pride that, all evidences to the contrary, these men still pretend to find the ultimate good in this life and to hold that they are themselves the source of their own happiness. Their kind of sage—an astonishingly silly sage, indeed—may go deaf, dumb and blind, may be crippled, wracked with pain, visited with every imaginable affliction, driven at last to take his own life, yet have the colossal impertinence to call such an existence the happy life! Happy life, indeed, which employs death’s aid to end it! If such a life is happy, then I say, live it! (St. Augustine, City of God, XIX, 4)
The Stoics held that the ultimate good was to be found in this life only. This they have in common with the New Atheists. The difference is that the Stoics were…well, stoic, while the New Atheists are inveterate whiners. Perhaps the New Atheists find whatever good there is for them bound up in the process of inflicting their misery on others, so that the rest of us will commit suicide first.
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The City of Man is a Single Community
The city of man, for all of the width of its expansion throughout the world and for all of the depth of its differences in this place and that, is a single community. The simple truth is that the bond of a common nature makes all human beings one. Nevertheless, each individual in this community is driven by his passions to pursue his private purposes. Unfortunately, the objects of these purposes are such that no one person (let alone, the world community) can ever be wholly satisfied. The reason for this is that nothing but Absolute Being can satisfy human nature. The result is that the city of man remains in a chronic condition of civil war. (St. Augustine, City of God, XVIII, 2) -
Galatoire’s on Ash Wednesday, and a Lesson on Prosperity Teaching From Katrina that Needs to be Remembered
I’m reposting this today primarily because the incident at Galatoire’s (a very well known restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans) took place on an Ash Wednesday which is, IMHO, the best day to eat out in the Crescent City. But I also think that the comments on prosperity teaching needs reiteration. Orignally posted on 1 September 2005 (just after Katrina.)
Today we have the sad spectacle of New Orleans, once a grand city in its own right, reduced to a cesspool, both literally and in a human sense as well with armed looters taking control in a scene more reminiscent of Iraq than Arabi. My grandmother, born and raised there at the turn of the last century, hated to return there in the 1960’s and 1970’s to see what it had become; she’s surely turning in her grave at this. But let’s consider something cheerier and more informative that took place just a few years ago.
I was in town with a business associate who was kind enough to take me to Galatoire’s, one of the French Quarter’s finer restaurants. Along with us came his attorney. We sat down and the waiter came to take our order. The attorney gave his order, and the waiter, an old coot in the best Gulf Coast sense of the word, barked back, “You don’t want that.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want that?” the attorney asked, puzzled.
“You don’t want that,” the waiter gruffly replied. “You want that,” he continued, pointing to another item on the menu. The attorney tried to get the waiter to take his order as he had given it, but the waiter refused. The waiter served him what he had recommended and, sure enough, it was good! The attorney was pleased with the result.
Unfortunately, many Christians don’t approach prayer to God the same way the attorney approached ordering at Galatoire’s. Their approach is more like the workers who went offshore to build the platforms, now struggling to get going again. Platforms are generally built from a derrick (construction) barge, complete with a crew who were furnished with all kinds of tools, including hand tools. Most men who work with their hands are particular about the kinds of tools they use, but the purchasing department in New Orleans was looking for a good deal, so they’d order a different kind of tool. Better or worse, it wasn’t what the workers were looking for, so they’d throw these tools over the side into the Gulf and write on the next purchase requisition, “No Substitutions.”
No substitutions…isn’t that what we all too often tell God when we pray? Years of “prosperity” teaching has given the image that God is like a slot machine in the casinos in Biloxi: you pull the handle just right, it comes up all cherries, and you hit the jackpot. The casino analogy is good for other reasons: winning the slot machine up front only whets the appetite of the gambler for more, so he or she keeps feeding the machine money. Since the machines are set up to retain a certain portion for the house, the gambler effectively squanders their initial gain. Or, like the derrick barge workers, they throw what they obtain from God over the side because it doesn’t suit them for one reason or another.
If we think about this a while, this is incredible. How is it that we can know so much more than an omniscient creator God that we can make such absolute demands? “For your father knoweth whereof ye have need, before ye ask of him.” (Mt. 6:8, Tyndale) Or worse yet, know his will and yet try to bend it to our fancy? “When he was come unto us, he took Paul’s girdle, and bound his hands and feet and said: Thus saith the Holy Ghost: So shall the Jews at Jerusalem, bind the man that owneth this girdle, and shall deliver him into the hands of the gentiles. When we heard this, both we and other of the same place, besought him, that he would not go up to Jerusalem.” (Acts 21:11-12) Paul, however, knew both God’s will and the danger he faced: “Then Paul answered, and said: What do ye weeping, and breaking mine heart? I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Iesu. When we could not turn his mind, we ceased saying: The will of the Lord be fulfilled.” (Acts 21:13-14)
The Lord’s will indeed. One of the secrets of successful prayer is synchronising our will with God’s, just as you reading this need to synchronise your computer with the server time. We also need to realise that God’s purposes are greater than ours and more important than ours, which means that we need to align our purpose with His. We also need to understand that eternity was designed to be the ultimate fix of the problems we face in this life, as events such as Hurricane Katrina are brutal reminders of.
It’s going to be a long time before places like Galatoire’s and Commander’s Palace (where my great-grandparents dined) are going to be back in business again. Probably quicker to rise again are the offshore oil fields (where the rejected tools make their watery grave) and the casinos in Biloxi (regrettably.) But in the meanwhile we can seek to be in tune with God’s will and plan for both our life and His plan for the world around us. And then we will receive not only what we ask but what is best for us.
P.S. I did get to dine at Commander’s Palace the following year, shortly after it reopened.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 