Martyr Complex

Do you ever do multiple things on the Internet? I know I do. For example, I will often have an instant messenger and several browser windows open at the same time. A lot of times, I'll be IMing someone and, I dunno, blogging, or reading a movie review, or something at the same time and not respond for 15 seconds. The person will say "Are you busy?" I'll say, "No, I'm just also looking at movie reviews." Then the person will say "Oh, I'll leave you alone then."

OK, what the heck is the deal with that? Do most people give IM their undivided attention? Because it seems like a whole lot of people I chat with get highly offended when they discover that I am using the multitasking capabilities of my OS to, you know, multitask and declare that this conversation is over until I close out the Sudoku and give this fascinating IM conversation about whether Ben Stiller is funnier than Owen Wilson my absolute, undivided attention.

Does this happen to other people?

Sometimes, I'm Not So Lutheran

Lately, I haven't been feeling all that Lutheran. I more or less believe just about everything in the Confessions, but I don't entirely buy into the Lutheran ethos. Just a few things:

1. I don't believe that all of life or all of Scripture falls into some kind of terror/comfort dialectic of feeling guilty, then feeling absolved. I've said this before, and I know people have their strong disagreements with that, but I'm just totally not there. I'm not Martin Luther. I don't have his disposition or conscience. I do not continually feel God breathing down my neck with the fire of judgement for failing to have been good enough to earn his favor. I don't see it everywhere in Scripture, either. I see it some places, mostly the Psalms and Prophets, and I do acknowledge that's a part of human existence, but the Lutheran tendency is to boil all of reality down to this one thing. I don't ever see Paul trying to scare people with the Law. I don't see Jesus do it much, either.

2. I don't look at every time God or Jesus tells someone to do something through this lens of "You must do this absolutely perfectly from the bottom of your soul if you want to earn your salvation." When Lutherans mention that Jesus said to do this or that, they tend immediately add, "But you can't do this perfectly! There's only one person who didn't commit adultery perfectly, and that's Jesus. His righteousness is imputed to YOU!" No one in the Bible ever speaks that way. Paul seems quite comfortable with telling the Corinthians to love each other without reminding them over and over that they can never love each other well enough to earn their salvation.

3. I'm not saying I don't believe in inerrancy. I'm saying that it's ceased to be relevant to me in the last year or so. I don't really care what people mean by inerrancy anymore or whether any of the texts meet that standard. It doesn't seem to affect me much one way or the other. I read the Bible assuming that the people who wrote it basically knew what they were talking about, and that seems to be enough for me. I really, really couldn't give a crap about verbal & plenary inspiration. I don't really care about having any particular theory of inspiration. In a lot of people's eyes, that means I have no logically consistent way to reject Bultmann. My answer is I don't really care. I mean it. I just plain don't care. I somehow am getting a lot out of the New Testament these days without thinking about whether or not the Holy Spirit inspired each individual word of the 4th Edition.

4. I don't buy into "full agreement in all points of doctrine" fellowship because it's never been the reality of the Church, ever. Ever. Including the early days of the LCMS.

What Planet Are They From?

Every so often, someone will tell me that if I really wanted to be married, I'd just pick someone up at the supermarket or a restaurant. Or just accost someone on the way to class and strike up a conversation. Now my former roommate was really good at that. He'd spot a girl and have her in bed within a week. He was amazing at it. But I gotta wonder...how many people who tell me that I'd find true love by bothering some random person while she looks at peas married someone that either they picked up or picked them up in such a way? How many eligible young women are interested in getting picked up by a random guy? I'll bet "not many" is the answer to both questions. But there are apparently lots who like to sleep with strangers. Like my old roommate.

OMG CLIMATE DOOM

So why'd it get so stinking cold last year? That guy suggests elsewhere it's a drop in solar activity. Now a global climate fluctuation like that doesn't say a whole lot, since there are lots and lots of fluctuations in the annual data. The question is whether we'll see more drops, or if this was just a single anomaly.

Authenticity, And No, This Post Isn't About You.

I figure if I keep this rant up on the BHT, I'm going to get kicked, so I'm going to piss and moan about it here. Anyway, if you don't follow, Frank Schaeffer wrote a book in which he breathlessly exposes (and likely exaggerates) all the scandalous, titillating details of his home life to the world. In the world according to Frank, Francis Schaeffer was apparently a big, two-faced hypocrite and his mother was nothing more than a self-righteous nut. Well, maybe they were, I don't know. But I don't think it matters. The public square is not the place to humiliate your parents.

Now some people are really applauding this book. See, Frank's being authentic here. He's sharing his true feelings. He's telling it how he really sees it, and you can't do better than authenticity. Michael Spencer sums it up this way:

Whatever the critics say, at the end of the day, you have to be true to yourself.

I think this statement is completely false, and this way of thinking used by many people as an excuse for absolutely trashing people that care about them, destroying relationships, and hurting people that don't deserve to be hurt. The message here is, "It doesn't matter who you hurt or whose reputation you ruin. It doesn't matter who you humiliate or who you scandalize. Those are merely the necessary sacrifices others need to make in order for you to be authentic."

The idea that being true to yourself is the most important thing in life is also completely self-serving. You have to be true to yourself. The statement tells you to put yourself at the center of the universe and commends you for doing so by calling it "truth." What about being true to people who care about you? What about being true to the good of someone else, even if that means putting a lid on all the vitriol you feel like spewing about other people in order to keep the peace or preserve a relationship? Nope, those things are worthless. They stifle authenticity. If I hate my mom, my first and foremost need is to go out in public and tell everyone everything I hate about her and her most humiliating secrets...assuming that's what I really feel like doing. I'm being true to myself.

In a world where authenticity at all costs is the greatest good, if you hurt someone, the important thing is that you were being authentic when you did it. The corollary to this is that if people are hurt by your words or actions, the problem is with them, not with you. It's their fault for not sufficiently appreciating your authenticity. They should be happy that you are sacrificing their dignity for the sake of your self-actualization, because you are sacrificing them for the greatest good there is: Yourself. Frank Schaeffer's mother is the perfect picture of someone is patently immoral under this idea of goodness. She doesn't appreciate her son's public self-authentication by raking her over the coals and apparently just cries or something stupid like that. As Os Guinness relates,

Several times I saw her reduced to tears in private after his barbs against her. But now in her nineties, with her failing memory, she neither fully knows nor is able to respond to all he has written about her. "If I read it," she said to me about one of Frank's earlier books, "it would probably break my heart."

Maybe people applauding Frank's authenticity and sternly rebuking his critics for stifling this necessary catharsis should send Edith a card. It could read something like this:

Dear Edith,

Stop your whining and crying. What the hell is wrong with you? Don't you realize that Frank is sharing his true feelings with the world? I know he's saying horrible things about you, but you need to realize those are authentic feelings and appreciate the fact that he is being true to himself, even if that means spewing bile about you. You probably deserve it, anyway.

Love,
Everyone

Of course, no one's going to gather together and tell Edith what's wrong with her. They just view a mother's broken heart as necessary collateral damage in the quest for authenticity. No one is asking why, if he really detests so much of what his parents were and did, Frank can't just be authentic about those things with his pastor, wife, or friends (if he has any). No one asks why authenticity is sold for the neat sum of $25.99 (on sale for $17.15 at Amazon) and involves being the center of everyone's attention for a little while. Apparently, the more public, profitable, and self-serving one's authenticity is, the more real it is.

Now I'm not saying this just because. I'm saying it because I've seen people I love and care about nearly destroyed by this same sort of public "authenticity" while the person humiliating them was praised by others for being genuine and true. Of course, that's the most I'll tell you, because I'm not going to use this blog to expose others. That makes me inauthentic and morally inferior to someone like Frank Schaeffer. I'm used to responses to me that assume that because I don't expose myself and others via my writing, I don't have anything titillating to expose and therefore don't understand what it's like to have all these wonderful stories to tell and how much we need to tell them. The fact is, I do understand what it's like to have a family closet full of skeletons. I just don't charge admission and invite the public.

If you're still reading, this is the last thing I'm going to say. It doesn't matter if your old man really did get falling-down drunk and pass out naked in the middle of the floor. It doesn't matter if your contempt for him is genuine, if you authentically feel that his behavior has affected you, or if the guy is really important in the world and you genuinely think other people need to see him like that to know what a hypocrite he is. You don't invite everyone over to see him and expose his shame.

Funny

I sometimes felt this way in seminary.

OK, why do so many hot girls marry such douchebags? I am not a douchebag. I'm even moderately good-looking and have a sense of humor. I don't have much money, but neither do many of these douchebags. I'm kind of abrasive, but in my estimation, a guy who hits a girl, totally disrespects her, or does her cousin is a lot more abrasive than me. Yet, I am still single at 26, while these douchebags have hot wives.

If you are a hot girl, and you married a total douchebag, I would like to know why you passed up guys who weren't total douchebags. What was the rationale? Also, if you know a hot girl married to a douchebag and can relate her explanation, I'd appreciate it.

Edit: Also, if you are a total douchebag who managed to get a hot girl to marry you, please tell us the secrets of your trade.

Christian Dogmatics

Once you wade past the higher critical stuff in the exposition, Forde's section on the atonement in this former textbook of the ELCA is really quite good. I wasn't sure where he was going with his criticism of penal substitution, but when he gets into the main body of the thing, he starts to make more sense. Some of Forde's criticisms of the penal substitution theory are in my opinion quite valid, especially of constructions wherein Jesus makes God merciful or buys God's mercy by dying. That really isn't a biblical idea, and Forde points out the contradiction in saying God sent the Son because of his mercy and saying at the same time that Jesus had to die in order to make God merciful. He criticizes both liberal moral exemplar theories and Western vicarious satisfaction theories for making Jesus the hero of a religious system and de-scandalizing the Cross. Since Forde's big thing is the theology of the cross, his focus is on the Cross as an action of God toward man rather than a transaction between man (represented by Jesus) and God. I don't think I can sum up Forde's treatment with a simple theory, and I think Forde himself would be irritated by any attempt to do so (he hated abstract theories of the atonement). However, I do think that because Forde adopts a higher critical view of the Gospels, he overlooks Jesus drinking the cup of the wrath of God or his own connection of his death with the OT in the institution of the Supper. Anyway, here's a quote I liked:

Jesus has to die, precisely because God proposes to be merciful. God proposes to be merciful concretely and actually in Jesus. God proposes to come to us and say, "Your sins are forgiven." God proposes to open the eyes of the blind, to unstop the ears of the deaf, to make the lame walk, and to preach good news to the poor. We cannot let that happen here. Anyone who intends to carry out such a program must be prepared to die. Where could anyone get the authority to do that? Forgiveness full and free with no strings attached is just as dangerous and criminal here as robbery and sedition. It cannot be allowed. It shatters all order. So he must die, just as the thief and the rebel. But he will not desist. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children...and you would not!" So comes about his sacrifice. He dies at our hand. Even in death he cries, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." And just so it is for us.

And here's a Luther quote from the same work, definitely an odd one:

Even if one wants to retain the word satisfaction and say thereby that Christ has made satisfaction for our sins, nevertheless it is too weak and says too little about the grace of Christ and does not sufficiently honor Christ's suffering. One must give them higher honor because he did not only make satisfaction for sin but also redeemed us from death, the devil, and the power of hell, and guarantees us an eternal kingdom of grace as well as the daily forgiveness of subsequent sins, and so becomes for us (as St. Paul, I Cor 1:1 says) an eternal redemption and sanctification.

Clarifying Myself on Doctrine

I'm not against doctrine in general. I believe that Nicea, Chalcedon, and Augsburg were critical and necessary moments in church history, and basic instruction in basic doctrine is a fundamental part of growing as a Christian. In today's world, the Christian needs to get basic teachings of the Christian faith sorted out so that he's not carried about by every wind of false doctrine. False doctrines blind us to the text and prevent us from seeing what is actually there. If you've fundamentally got justification wrong, you're not going to see the Gospel in the life and work of Jesus. You might not see it anywhere. The problem is that a false doctrine hangs out behind your shoulder, telling you that this or that text can't really mean that and directing your mind elsewhere. The only antidote to false doctrine is orthodox doctrine, and that's why there's no shortcut around catechesis.

However, the point I was making before still stands. The biblical text is not simply a mask for doctrine (moral principles are doctrines as well, folks). If you're reading the text trying to figure out which orthodox doctrine it validates or which good moral principle it illustrates, you're probably reading it wrong. Confessional doctrine is only a starting place for faith and theology, not its goal or its apex. The Bible is not merely a resource for systematic theology or Christian ethics.

For myself, I'm simply past the point where I'm particularly obsessed about doctrine. I know what I believe about the two natures, justification, the Eucharist, and all that. I still hold those things, consider them important, etc. What I'm saying is that orthodox formulations regarding the sacraments are not nearly as important as receiving them. I'm saying that I don't know God any better by reading detailed discussions of divine metaphysics, whether Nicene or Chalcedonian, but by knowing the stories of his activity and life among his people and through his Son.

Alan Creech

Alan Creech is a fellow Lexingtonian and a Catholic blogger. I have been enjoy his blog a lot lately, and you might, too. I enjoy reading him tremendously more than any of the former Protestants who are out there trying to take on the world.

Doctrine

You really can't sum up the life of Jesus with the doctrine of active obedience. That might be part of it, I guess, but his life isn't a mask for a doctrine. I'm at the point in my Christian life now where I really don't want to hear doctrines about Jesus anymore. That doesn't mean I don't believe in them, as I understand the importance of the various orthodox dogmas. However, I feel like the stories in the Gospels themselves are far more important. I find myself more and more dealing with life by mentally referring to a Gospel (or sometimes OT) story than by referring to a doctrinal formulation.

Philosophy

The purpose of philosophy is to create metaphysical systems from which you can prove that the universe really does work the way you've always wished it would.

Why Rambo is Great and the Critics Didn't Get It

I am going to spoil every single thing about the movie, so if you're going to see it and haven't yet, stop reading now. Read on if you don't want to see the most violent movie ever made, but want to know why it was great.

Rambo is basically a set piece expounding on the true brutality of evil and the ability of violence to render ideology, morality, and good intentions completely and utterly meaningless. It tears apart naive pacifism, showing its utter failure to stop violence, indeed making the point that evil and violence are simply part of the world and things that some people must deal with on a daily basis.

In the movie, some missionaries come wanting Rambo to take them up the river into Burma to bring medical and religious supplies to a small village there. They are idealistic--being a ray of sunshine can save a life, and killing is always wrong. Rambo just looks at them. He's been through Vietnam. He's seen the ugly side of America. He's been to prison, and he's seen bureaucrats use POWs for political gain. He's been living a stone's throw from Burma for decades now and knows from up close what's been happening there. The missionaries clearly are living in a fantasy world, one in which his world can't, shouldn't, and doesn't exist, which means they aren't prepared to enter it and just need to go home. But the girl convinces him to take them anyway.

The first taste of the main theme happens when their boat is stopped by pirates, who want their supplies. When they notice a woman on board, they demand that the missionaries hand her over as well. Here is the first clash of worlds--the head missionary, Michael, demands Rambo to tell the pirates he'll give the pirates all the money they have to let them go. Rambo, of course, responds by shooting the pirates, shouting at the protesting missionaries, "They would have raped her fifty times and cut off all our heads. Who are you?" The missionaries don't get it. Evil can't be bought off. Michael disembarks telling Rambo, "I know you think that what you did was right, but killing is always wrong."

One main reason the movie is confusing for critics is that you expect the missionaries to show Rambo the value of altruism, that there is still goodness left in the world, and that trying to be a little ray of sunshine in your small circle and changing a few lives for the better is worth it in the end, even if you can't stop all the war in the universe. But that's not what happens at all. The movie has this brilliant montage of the missionaries treating the sick, examining teeth, and teaching the people from Bible to hope in God. It's really heartwarming. Then the mortar rounds hit the village. Then the troops show up with the .50 caliber mounted machine guns and waste the villagers running across the rice paddies. In the end, every single last villager was dead, and the three surviving missionaries were taking captive. Not a single man, woman, or child the Americans had helped was left alive. All the missionaries' work had come to complete ruin in a few short minutes. All their good intentions were nullified by a hail of gunfire. And to repeat the point, the movie returns the village a couple more times to pan across the rotting corpses and remind you just how dead a dead person actually is. As far as I can tell, the significance of this is completely lost on reviewers. I think this is because most people need to believe that every good deed ultimately means something. But in Rambo, good doesn't defeat evil. Good gets steamrolled.

The movie portrays the demoralizing brutality of death brilliantly. In Rambo, no one dies in a slow-mo scene with violins and choked-out, poignant, memorable last words. A death is never followed by a scene showing how the dead's goodness lives on, how his ultimate sacrifice continues to mean things to the living, or the continuance of his legacy. No one saves someone else by dying--but people are instead killed along with the people they are trying to save. When people in Rambo die, they die quickly, brutally, and then are just gone. A missionary is taken out with a direct mortar hit, and Sarah barely has a moment to scream his name. Another missionary merely looks his captors in the eyes, and is tied to a post and fed to pigs. When people die in John Rambo's world, they're just dead...and they often die for no particular reason other than to instill fear in the living. Rambo refuses to allow the viewer to believe there is a such thing as a meaningful death. Death is just death, and when people die, they're just dead.

Few reviewers understood the line, "Live for nothing, or die for something." Rambo's not giving the audience an aphorism to live life by. He's telling the mercenaries how they're going to have to face a battle if they're going to have any shot at anything resembling winning. In other words, if you're going to enter the war zone, either have a cause to die for or nothing to live for.

I'm going to skip a lot of details to get to the end. Somewhat predictably, Michael kills an enemy soldier. But a pacifist picking up a weapon isn't radical for Hollywood. Michael wasn't finally overcoming internal fears, or putting a weaker person before his ideals. He was just losing control. The horror of the last few days had pushed him beyond his limits, and after seeing one more friend get shot in the back, he snaps. He turns into an animal and bashes in an enemy's head with a rock. He fulfills John Rambo's earlier words, "Push a man far enough, and killing's as easy as breathing."

The death of the military captain is memorable as well for its lack of glamorization. There is no final speech in which he glorifies his cause, curses America, or makes the audience feel guilty for ultimately being no better than him. There is no drawn-out, one-on-one fight. He's running like a coward, and Rambo just steps out from behind a tree and disembowels him without so much as a one-liner. Like his victims, the evil captain dies quickly, brutally, and without fanfare. A quick thrust of the knife is simply the end of him and the end of the battle. It's the end of Rambo's personal war. And now, Rambo can finally go home and face what he's left behind.

An Interesting Blog

This fellow is a biologist. He's also a Christian. I know, I know. Those two labels are as incompatible as astronomer and Christian. The blog is fascinating to me because he actually explains the science without all the asshatted bear-baiting of something like Panda's Thumb. The main thing is that don't go reading this blog thinking you're going to show him a thing or two by repeating something you read on Ken Ham's website. Please don't embarrass yourself in the comments. This guy's been a scientist for 30 years. You might learn something. You might just get pissed off because you see 90% of biology as a lack of faith. I dunno. Check it out.

19th century British colonialists are fascinating in their complete and utter nonchalance toward hunting animals to extinction. For example, by the early 1900's, large-scale hunting by the British had reduced the population of the Indian rhinoceros to a mere 100. If you've read any books from the era, it appears that the thought that you could actually kill all of a particular animal never really crossed their minds, or really anyone else's. For example, if you read King Solomon's Mines (fantastic book), you'll notice that the main character's basic mentality is that every time he sees an elephant, regardless of whether or not he is hunting elephants at that moment, that elephant must die. Also, in the Swiss Family Robinson (smarmy rip-off of Robinson Crusoe), every time they come across a new animal on the island, the first thing they do is kill it. There's definitely an underlying assumption that the normal way of dealing with animals is by killing them, regardless of whether they need meat, bone, or leather at the moment--the idea that they might simply observe an animal, or merely continue on their way, doesn't even cross their minds. Since I'm not well-read enough to know, did anyone in that era ever say, "Now wait a minute. If we make it our goal to kill every single one of these animals that we see, without any regard for their reproduction rate, it's quite possible that they might eventually all be gone. Come on now, that's unwise. How can we hunt elephants if we've killed them all?" Or had no one's consciousness of how the animal kingdom works developed to that point, so everyone just sort of imagined that every animal is infinite supply?

Note: I am not particularly picking on the British here. Judging by the way Americans attempted to hunt the buffalo to extinction, had they colonized the world, they likely would have attempted to kill every single animal as well.

I Miss Evangelicalism

I kind of miss the olden days when I was an evangelical, when I had no knowledge that "Christianity" meant anything other than "evangelicalism." In my world, there were evangelicals, liberals, and Roman Catholics. I miss it because my world was so much bigger. I don't mean my perception of the world or the Church or anything, I mean I just plain knew more people. My actual, physical world of Christians was a lot bigger. The churches I went to were always bigger. Everywhere I went, I was bumping into Christians like me, speaking the same language, and knowing the same authors. I was constantly surrounded by Christians my age of both sexes, and there weren't any significant theological barriers among us. I can't go back to those days, but I miss the days when I thought I was "just Christian" and knew lots of other Christians like me. Life was just easier.

Christian Dogmatics

I read parts of Braaten's sections of Christian Dogmatics. They are, to express it in the language of the layman, poop. What is interesting is how Braaten does not fancy himself a liberal, yet throughout the prolegomena undermines almost any notion of biblical or confessional authority. He allows some vestiges to remain, such as the Resurrection, but it really puts into perspective his complaining about the ELCA's adoption of the homosexual agenda. He is essentially complaining that the camel's tail is in the tent, when he only meant to allow the nose through hindquarters in.

Forde's section on the atonement is a little better so far. Unfortunately, it takes higher critical assumptions about the institution narratives for granted, meaning that he repeats over and over that Jesus didn't understand his death as a sacrifice, when in fact it is the Supper that Jesus casts the disciples (and the reader, and the Church) back into the Torah to discover the true meaning of the Cross. Because of his casual dismissal of the institution narrative and all other sacrificial references as a projection of the later Christian community rather than authentically representing Christ's teaching about himself, he doesn't appear to delve into the OT material the way he should. But so far, I've come across a few worthwhile insights. Unlike Braaten, Forde appears to at least be a theologian of some sort.

No, I Don't Buy It

NT Wright's explanation of what Paul meant by "caught up in the air" is interesting. According to Wright, all Paul's language there is really just colorful metaphor, and everyone's just misinterpreting it. But as I read Wright's interpretation, what we're getting isn't Paul, but what Wright needs Paul to say in order to fit into Wright's total vision of Christian theology. It sounds fishy to me, because this version of Paul sounds a little too 21st century. I suspect that modern reinterpretations of the passages dealing with Christ's return are driven by rationalistic concerns rather than genuine textual discoveries. With geocentric cosmology shattered, with the world known to be far, far bigger than anyone in 60 AD knew, with the millennia after Christ's death slowly racking up, Jesus literally descending on the clouds sounds rather silly, and we don't want to believe that any NT writer said anything silly. Because the uncomfortable fact remains that when premodern people with no concept of galaxies and solar systems, no idea of the Americas, and a real belief in eschatological immanence read the New Testament, the idea that Jesus would in fact return in the same manner in which he departed really did not seem silly at all and needed no demythologizing whatsoever. On that grounds, it is not unreasonable to think that Paul, Luke, Mark et al actually meant what they said instead of burying 21st century theology under postmodern metaphors.

As an aside, this quote is really, really eyebrow-raising:

For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon?

Does NT Wright actually know any dispensationalists? Has he simply got a bee in his bonnet about the US not signing the failed Kyoto Protocol, and blames it on popular American evangelical eschatology? Because the answer to Wright's question is in fact "No, it's not." I'm no dispensationalist, but it appears that American evangelicals are among those things that Wright really doesn't understand much at all (I suspect that most of the modern world is in this category as well).

Theologians...

...are not necessarily authorities on science, politics, international trade, legal questions, culture, or economics. That includes NT Wright.

Mythology Rewriting History

In the post-Vatican II world of the kinder, gentler Catholicism of Dignitatis Humanae, Catholics have this need to show that Rome was always just as kind and gentle as it was under the saintly grandfather figure of John Paul II. One effect of this has been a retelling of the Reformation in terms of the huffy, arrogant, rash Protestants abandoning the Roman communion when they needed to be patient and wait, as the kindly Leo X was doing everything he could to take care of things in the most pastoral, open-minded and even-handed way possible. Death sentences, closed councils, and military subjugation aren't really part of the picture.

Right, where was I?

So I'm teaching a Sunday school class on Gene Veith's Spirituality of the Cross, and one particular girl is bringing her Catholic boyfriend. We got to talking about the Reformation, as is common in Lutheran Sunday Schools, and this fellow said, "My mother told me that Luther was invited to the Council of Trent, but he refused to go." If you know the history, you'd know that Luther died shortly after the council convened, and that the eventual delegation led by Brenz was never heard (not that it would have made any difference). In particular, the confession Brenz wrote (which I am highly interested in reading some day) was not read, although Pedro de Soto eventually wrote against it. If I recall correctly from one of my Confessions classes, they weren't even admitted to the city proper, but were detained in a hamlet in the vicinity, where they were allowed to talk to a delegate who made it quite clear that nothing they said would be presented at the council. Now I have no idea where his mother heard this, but it seems pretty clear that this historical "fact" is a product of this new mythology of the Reformation. It makes me wonder what other "facts" are floating around out there.

Update: An intrepid commenter may have found the source of this particular nugget of disinformation. John Dimascio posts it here. Apparently, once you rise to the level of Internet Apologist, you are imbued with the power to recreate history by the force of your will.

Spineless Brits

So a group of Irishmen in Belfast tarred and feathered a drug dealer because the police in the UK don't do jack crap about crime. The Telegraph article is interesting because it largely bemoans how brutal and inhumane this punishment is, and how vigilante justice betrays Western values or something. It's interesting because the first thing I though when reading it was, "Whoa. Crime is totally out of freaking control if citizens feel they have to go to such extremes to keep their communities safe." When will Brits realize that wringing their hands over the poor, poor criminals is why they're in this mess in the first place?

Theft

Man, theft pisses me off. Because you know what? It's not like I'm rich. And when you take away one of the few nice things I have, it's not like I can just immediately go out and buy a new one. I still haven't replaced all the CDs that some ****** stole when I was in Toledo back in 2002. And it will be a long time before I replace the digital camera that someone lifted out of my office when I accidentally left my door unlocked.

I hate thieves.

The Whole Eucharist

When I was at Ft Wayne, I really enjoyed listening to both Peter and David Scaer talk about the Lord's Supper. What I really appreciated was the way they emphasized the two elements in distinction and received together, bread and wine, body and blood. It was genuinely Lutheran theological reflection, and nothing else really comes close.

The Stupid Economy

Bernanke: Being an idiot hurts the economy.

There isn't much you can do that's economically stupider than loaning lots of money to people with crap credit. I suppose Communism is stupider. Sure, a rate cut is nice, but if lenders quit being stupid with huge sums of money, I don't see how that will help in the long term. Maybe we need some usury laws to come back.

The Rule of Vincent

An "everywhere, always, and by all" that does not include the Apostles themselves is not "everywhere, always, and by all."

Certain folks are prone to forget that.

Quotable

Mary has no power over God, but God, in his love for her and his desire to honor her, chooses to show forth his tenderest, most merciful, and most approachable aspect through her.

When people say things like this, I always wonder why Dr David Scaer doesn't just materialize out of thin air and punch someone in the throat. In fact, I wonder why I didn't get throat-punched just for quoting it. Scaer's biggest beef with Christianity in general is that everyone seems to have a problem with Jesus. They prefer either Paul or Mary, depending on their tradition.

A Neuhaus quote from the same post:

Unlike decisions in the business world, the Church is respectful of “irregularities” that may be hard to separate from the work of the Holy Spirit.

Well yeah. When Scripture is off limits because you have to wait for the tradition to form first, it's really hard to figure out what is the Spirit's work and what isn't.

HT: Wyman.

Lord's Supper

I go after Rome on the Eucharist here.

Rambo

Just saw Rambo last night. Brilliant, brilliant movie, and not for the faint of heart. It's the most violent movie I've seen since 300. I won't spoil the movie, but it's basically about the unspeakably naive meeting the unspeakably cruel.

Random Stuff

I just obtained a free copy of the Braaten/Jenson dogmatics. Yay?

I've never met a cradle Catholic I didn't like.

Holy Online Commentary, Batman

I didn't know that Paul Kretzmann's commentary is online. Granted, it's pretty old school and not really technical, as it's targeted at laymen. Just looking a bit, though, the commentary on John 1 is way, way less stupid than the People's Commentary exegesis of it. The interesting thing about it is that you can't really get more "old perspective on Paul" than Kretzmann. I suspect that New Perspective people are prone to stereotyping the Old Perspective.

Book Tags: My Boring Life

I'm a follower.

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag others if you feel like it, which you don't if you're a pirate.

Recall that the calculus of variations problem with Lagrangian L, discussed in 3.3.1, led to Hamilton's ODE for the associated Hamiltonian H. Since these ODE are also the characteristic equations of the Hamilton-Jacobi PDE, we conjecture there is probably a direct connection between this PDE and the calculus of variations. So if [note: I don't know how to type math in Blogger, so the following is paraphrased] x in R^n and t > 0 are given, we should presumably try to minimize the action of integrating L(w'(s)) from 0 to t with respect to s over functions w: [0,t] -> R^n satisfying w(t) = x.

Walther Isn't One of Them

I used to hate Walther and his overblown rhetoric. After reading Law & Gospel, I came to love him. I may have to read God Grant It at some point. Here's an interesting quote:

Faith and love are related and inseparably connected like a father and his child. Whoever says he is justified through faith before God must prove himself by love before man. Otherwise he is a liar, for faith works through love. -- C. F. W. Walther, *God Grant It!* p. 236

The vertical/horizontal dimensions of faith and works are often lost on those who polemicize against us and, unfortunately too frequently, some of our own. Christian traditions that reject justification by faith alone (and Trent isn't the only occasion of this) tend to argue using the logic that if moral purity doesn't somehow achieve, increase, or preserve your standing before God, then they have no purpose at all and Christians may as well sin as much as their old man desires.

Lutheran idea that we love simply because we are Christians without needing the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell to alternately cajole and scare us into loving, is a rejection of this way of thinking. Christians love one another because that's who we are. That's who Jesus is, and so that's who we are in him. We already have the resurrection and the life in him. What we do is a part of who we are in Christ, not something we do because we need to in order to get or stay on God's good side--no more than a sparrow needs to be told he'll earn God's favor in order to motivate him to sing.

In this time of revisiting why I'm a Lutheran to begin with (I need to do that every so often to avoid becoming completely cynical, and Lent's a good time for that), I remember how simultaneously liberating and challenging the Lutheran doctrine of sanctification is. When you're really trying to be saved by works, or somehow focused on being holy enough to "qualify," you end up getting turned inward and focusing on which specific things you need to do to really be holy. And this inevitably leads to some man-made list of rules and traditions that ultimately become more important that what God has actually said. Different traditions come up with different rules--not eating certain foods on certain days, not drinking alcohol, weird dating rules--but it's all the same at heart.

But once you really "get" this "faith alone" thing that most Protestants confess in word and deny in deed, it opens you up. You can quit caring about all that goofy stuff that you're supposed to do to really be a really good Christian that God will really like, and you can ignore the scowls of the Sanctification Police. If God's not holding a sword over your head, who cares about those guys? You can actually love your neighbor whenever, wherever, and however you meet him. You're free, and at the same time challenged because knowing Christ and his suffering on your behalf opens your eyes to the world around you and just how much there is for you to do.

"Nazis. I hate these guys."

So you don't care about video games, but you might care about this: A while back, a game came out called "Lego Star Wars," in which you played through a video game adaptation of Lucas' movies...except with Lego guys. It was a good game, slightly hilarious, and quite popular. As a follow-up, the next game will be Lego Indiana Jones, in which you play Indy dashing through lost temples and searching for the Holy Grail. Of course, this is a game targeted at a younger audience, so some things have to be toned down. For example, the face melting is less grisly. Here's another good example: They removed the Nazis.

The Indiana Jones movies.

In video game form.

Without Nazis.

I hate this country.

Put the Theodicy Down and Back Away From the Car

I'm not the first Lutheran to point out the similarities between Calvinism and Catholicism. It's an old saw in Lutheran culture that Calvinism is medieval scholasticism with the governing hypotheses tweaked a bit. But odd similarities pop up that have little to do with John Calvin and Gabriel Biel. The particular case that struck me last night was that both Calvinism and Catholicism in their American pop incarnations (Piper-style for the former, Hahn-style for the latter) demand capitulation to certain theodicies with a doctrinal assertion of "There is no spoon."

In the case of Calvinists, it's the obvious presence of evil in the world. How could a good and omnipotent God allow great evil? The "best of all worlds" answer is surprising: He can't. And doesn't. All that stuff that seems so obviously evil is actually God orchestrating things to result in a giant divine paroxysm of self-glorification, thus are really good! So they in some sense deny the existence of evil. "There is no spoon."

In the case of Catholics, it's a little different. How could a good and omnipotent God allow a falsehood become popular for a really really long time? The Catholic answer is similar: He can't. All that stuff that seems so obviously little more than the unchecked fruition of peasant superstition, dictatorial megalomania, spuriously attributed works of obviously gnostic bent, and idle academic speculation is really true after all! So they deny the existence of error. "There is no spoon."

I believe in a God who does allow evil, really evil evil that isn't somehow good in the final analysis. I believe in a God who lets powerful people screw things up in a major way for Christians, and I believe in a God who lets the rest of us screw them up even when the powerful people aren't mucking it all up for us, as in screw up to the point of proudly proclaiming something to be true that is ultimately a load of horse manure. I don't have a great explanation for "why." I just don't buy theodicies.

Blogging self-awareness

Sometimes you want to blog something, but you don't actually want people to respond. But in some sense, you do want people to respond, or at least get it out there, but the anonymity and pseudo-relationships you have with people in the comment boxes just make it all seem inappropriately exhibitionistic. Which means you just keep it to yourself!

Don't e-mail me or leave a comment asking me what's going on unless you know me IRL. I won't answer.

Super Bowl Schadenfreude

Every time this happened, it was like a little ray of sunshine into the darkness of my pathetic life.

I hate Maple 10. I hate it so, so, so, so much. They decided to make the input all stupid and WSYWIG, meaning that not only is it difficult to type, but it's painfully slow as it decides what symbol to put in at your cursor. Copying text can take me up to 20 seconds, and I can no longer copy output and paste it into input.

It sucks. It sucks so, so bad.

CPA vs OSO: I Know Facts

So CPA over at Three Hierarchies has demolished One Salient Oversight's claim that the only realistic way to end abortion is to legalize and indoctrinate the society in anti-procreative sexuality (that's what "sexual health" means). I'll summarize CPA's devastating riposte:

1. Countries with legalized abortion are all over the map when it comes to rates.
2. The Western European nations with abortion rates significantly lower than the US also have a crushingly low birth rate.
3. Sweden, which has effectively implemented OSO's plan without those nasty pro-lifers has had a stagnant abortion rate of about 25% for 23 years...not the year on year drop OSO predicts.
4. The lowest abortion rates are in Southern and Northern Africa, where abortion is illegal.

I'll leave you with this quote:

One Salient Oversight's use of statistic recalls how a drunk uses a lamppost, for support, not illumination.

Read the whole thing here.

Baby Jesus is pissed.

Note for British readers: In normal English, "pissed" means "angry," not "drunk."