Month: July 2013

Modern-Day Golden Calves

Reading Pope Francis’s first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, or “The Light of Faith,” Nathaniel Peters notices “an unexpected word” featured prominently in the text – idolatry. How he unpacks its meaning:

As is characteristic of his evangelical boldness, Francis notes that in the story of the golden calf, “the opposite of faith is shown to be idolatry.” Faith demands a kind of patience. It requires us to abide the hiddenness of the God we long to see. The pope notes Martin Buber’s definition of idolatry, which he in turn took from the rabbi of Kock: “Idolatry is ‘when a face addresses a face which is not a face.’” Idolatry takes place when we refuse to abandon ourselves to God, when we look at a faceless thing that we can grasp instead of the face of God which sometimes remains invisible. The pope writes,

[Idols exist] as a pretext for setting ourselves at the centre of reality and worshiping the work of our own hands. Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life-story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.

Previous Dish on the new encyclical here and here. Update from rabbi reader:

Y’all quote Nathaniel Peters quoting the Pope quoting Martin Buber quoting the “Rabbi of Kock.”  Well, it’s more likely that Dan Savage would quote the Rabbi of Kock, were he to identify himself; Martin Buber almost assuredly quoted the Rabbi of Kotzk, or the “Kokzker Rebbe,” a famous Hasidic teacher who was a spiritual genius, provocative and eccentric.

Maybe Nathaniel, er, Peters has been reading too much of the Dish lately.

Graced With Virtue

Reviewing N.T. Wright’s Virtue Reborn, Will McDavid questions whether virtue can be “learned” in Christianity:

Do we ever change for the better? Become more virtuous? Certainly, but it is always under the sign of struggle, of the Cross. Augustine’s memoir of his life’s journey, Flaubert’s St. Julian, Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, Dostoevsky’s Idiot or Dmitri, Shakespeare’s penitent Lear, the innumerable testimonies of Alcoholics Anonymous – the religious world is full of true examples of positive virtue, but only as the fruit of guilt and grace, suffering and realized limitation and confession and repentance and chest-beating and those rare, incoercible moments of knowing you are known and loved, sinner and righteous, fallen and redeemed.

As the love of Christ is the starting-point, so it is also the end. Virtue itself is good, but virtue development is self-conscious and therefore disingenuous. Like Daphne, it turns still and lifeless the moment you try to grasp it. In practice, focusing on your own ‘character’ tends to undermine the realities of bound wills and spiritual frustrations that must always be the starting points of grace. And though virtue may persist into the new creation, but there is only one that Christ himself says will not be taken away: the “one needful thing” (Lk 10:42) – to know oneself to be justified and loved as sinner by God himself and, God-willing, to “see his face.”

Fundamentalism On Trial

Noting this week’s anniversy of the Scopes trial – often portrayed as a seminal contest between religion and science – Yair Rosenberg points out that key religious authorities supported the pro-evolution side and served as experts for the defense:

[Louis] Ginzberg [who helped Scopes’ defender Clarence Darrow brush up on scripture]  was not the only rabbi to make his mark at the Scopes trial. Herman Rosenwasser, a Hungarian-born Reform rabbi, actually traveled to Dayton for the proceedings. Though uninvited, he so impressed the defense team that the ACLU’s lawyer Arthur Hays delivered the rabbi’s argument–that the Hebrew text of Genesis, properly translated, in fact supported the evolutionary narrative–in court. (You can see Rosenwasser giving Hebrew instruction to the defense attorneys in this photo.)

In fact, Ginzberg and Rosenwasser were only a subset of the religious figures who supported the pro-evolution side of the Scopes case–a group which included liberal theologian Charles Francis Potter, and many of the scientists who submitted written testimony on Scopes’s behalf, like Harvard’s Kirtley Mather. These individuals were systematically scrubbed from depictions like “Inherit the Wind” to give the impression that the trial was a simple showdown between science and faith. But as Louis Ginzberg and his comrades remind us, many religious people have never perceived the two realms to be in conflict.

Faith In Mea Culpas

Stephen Mattson suggests that modern day believers revisit the idea of apology:

Despite vast Biblical support requiring followers of Christ to apologize, historically, Christians have been guilty of using “forgiveness” as a pseudo-weapon to point out the sins of others. Forgive the gays, the abortionists, the liberals, the Communists, and the Muslims! Spiritual leaders have manipulated “Christian forgiveness” into a subtle way of pointing out the faults of those we disagree with. They’re sinners. They’re guilty. They’re ignorant. They’re wrong.  …

Christians mistakenly believe that apologizing discredits everything they’ve ever said. As if saying “we’re sorry” will somehow negate the fact that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. In reality, apologizing promotes honesty, transparency, authenticity, and humility — things all Christians should exhibit throughout their lives. When Christians apologize, it adds integrity and legitimacy to their words and actions.

Quote For The Day

Grapes

“I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a ‘hypaethral book,’ such as Thoreau talked about – a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine – which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes,” – Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community

(Photo by Flickr user tribp.)

The Thinking Faithful

Millman considers the challenges they face:

In my experience, only a very small minority of people in any religious tradition truly affirm that religion’s teachings intellectually, and most of the world’s religions aren’t organized around creedal affirmation anyhow. For the overwhelmingly majority of people, they want to be able to live with their church – to experience life cradled within its arms – not to think with it.

The trouble for the minority who actually care about thinking is that they may also care about that experience of living within a religious tradition and community. Then they have a choice: of learning to “think with” that tradition, and turn the mind away from doubt (which has, I would argue, deleterious consequences for the health of one’s mind); or of becoming the kind of theological liberal who isn’t terribly committed to a particular truth (which has, I would argue, deleterious consequences for one’s ability to truly feel religious experience); or of becoming a secret dissenter (which has, I would argue, deleterious consequences for one’s relationships with one’s fellow communicants); or of becoming a public dissenter (which makes one a trouble-maker with all kinds of deleterious consequences).

A Poem For Sunday

dish_poem3

“Sometimes I walk where the deep water dips,” by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman:

Sometimes I walk where the deep water dips
Against the land. Or on where fancy drives
I walk and muse aloud, like one who strives
To tell his half-shaped thought with stumbling lips,
And view the ocean sea, the ocean ships,
With joyless heart: still but myself I find
And restless phantoms of my restless mind:
Only the moaning of my wandering words,
Only the wailing of the wheeling plover,
And this high rock beneath whose base the sea
Has wormed long caverns, like my tears in me:
And hard like this I stand, and beaten and blind,
This desolate rock with lichens rusted over,
Hoar with salt-sleet and chalking of the birds.

(Photo by A Guy Taking Pictures)

Immortality Is Unnatural

PZ Meyers provides an evolutionary reason for why immortality is “both impossible and undesirable”:

We already have a potent defense against death put in place by evolution: it’s called more death. That sounds contradictory, I know, but that’s the way it works. Every cell replication has a probability of corruption and error, and our defense against that is to constrain every subpopulation of cells and tissues with a limited lifespan …

The undesirability of immortality derives from the proponents’ emphasis on what is good for the individual over what is good for the population. There’s a kind of selfish appeal to perpetuating oneself forever, but from the perspective of a population, such individuals have an analog: they are cancers. That’s exactly what a cancer is: a unit of the organism, a liver cell or skin cell, that has successfully shed the governors on its mortality and achieved immortality…and grows selfishly, at the expense of the organism.