The Dish

McCain loses another key adviser. Does he have any aides who are not neck-deep in lobbying?

Is America a Christian nation? A dialogue.

There will be a monument in Tel Aviv. Can you imagine this happening in an Arab country?

It’s Trinity Sunday so forgive the extended theological discussions. A reader adds:

Forgive me if I get too academic, but I wanted to respond to the ongoing conversation regarding David Brooks essay "Neural Buddhists." As an aspiring theologian finishing a dissertation on the late Canadian Jesuit theologian/philosopher Bernard Lonergan, who addressed many similar issues, I’ve been fascinated by the discussion, both for its richness and its occasional doctrinal errors.

You may want to remind Ross that God does not have a body. This is a common failure of Christians when they begin to think about the Chalcedonian formulation in common sense terms, and it is tantamount to heresy. According to the doctrines Jesus was a divine person with a human nature. His body was part of his humanity, but not his divinity (the glorified body is something else altogether). The failure to make this distinction leads to all manner of theological blunders, especially as it pertains to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist (the subject of my seemingly endless dissertation). Also Ross suggests, "the foundational encounters with God – the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity – are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe." I don’t want to be glib, but how does he know? Unless he’s personally experienced both, such an argument, though I believe well-meant, is simply beside the point.  As far as I know only Moses and Jesus endured the heights of such mystical experience, or what Thomas Aquinas calls the beatific vision.

Which brings me to my desire to echo your point: "It may not be a free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe, but it can be a free-floating sense of one-ness with Christ, and the Trinity, and thereby, at some point, the Universe." Leaving aside the free-floating business, your argument is at the center of Christian theology while Ross is still stuck in the common sense mode of questioning.

Simply put, Jesus, as the incarnation of the logos of God is that wisdom through which the universe is created according to John 1. Therefore any sense of oneness with the universe is, from the Christian perspective, de facto and de fide oneness with Christ. This is not a rehash of Rahner’s "anonymous Christianity" argument – one he makes on substantially different grounds – rather it is the truly orthodox belief that for believers there are no competing truth claims to Christianity, but any claim to an authentic truth participates in the Truth which is the wisdom of God, the Logos, the Christ.

When you throw it back to Ross, you hit on exactly the key issue: "What … is the difference between a personal God and a personal Love Force that is also the power behind all Creation? In a word: Jesus. But what then of the Father and the Holy Spirit? Are non-Christians unable even to sense them – in a different idiom and practice? And could we not have already evolved to understand them in our minds/souls/genes – long before Jesus’ revelation made so many things so much clearer? And if we had not, how could Jesus have even made sense to anyone?" The last question is the most important. Human beings, according to Paul, are not able to say anything about the Truth/Christ except through the Holy Spirit. If we have not already received the gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus is simply unintelligible. But every human being has received the gift of the Holy Spirit from creation as the breath of God that gives the image and likeness of the creator to the created. There are not anonymous Christians, but there may be, as some Lonergan scholars have suggested, anonymous "Spiritans."

Perhaps to further the discussion I’ll leave you with a quote from Lonergan’s article "Mission and the Spirit" [from A Third Collection, ed. F. Crowe (University of Toronto Press). I’m attaching the article for you as well.] in which he distinguishes, amidst some fairly complex terminology, between the mission of the Son and the Spirit (we Christians tend to forget about he latter, to our own detriment). Forgive the length but I think you’ll find it fruitful (the last line is the kicker, italics added).

"The divine secret, kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed (Rom. 16:25), has been conceived as the self-communication of divinity in love. It resides in the sending of the Son, in the gift of the Spirit, in the hope of being united with the Father. Our question has been how to apprehend this economy of grace and salvation in an evolutionary perspective and, more precisely, how it enters into the consciousness of man.

First, I think there is an awareness of a need for redemption. Human progress is a fact. There is a wheel that, as it turns, moves forward. Situations gives rise to new insights; insights to new courses of action; new courses of action to changed situations; changed situations to still further insights, further action, further change in situations. But such progress is only a first approximations to fact, for it is marred and distorted by sin. There is the egoism of individuals, the securer egoism of groups, the overconfident shortsightedness of common sense. So the intelligence of progress is twisted into the objectification of irrational bias. Worse, to simpleminded sins of greed there is added the higher organization of sophistry. One must attend to the facts. One must deal with them as in fact they are and, as they are irrational, obviously the mere dictates of reason are never going to work. So rationalization enters the inner citadel. There is opened a gap between the essential freedom all men have and the effective freedom that in fact they exercise. Impotent in his situation and impotent in his soul man needs and may seek redemption, deliverance, salvation. But when it comes, it comes as the charity that dissolves the hostility and the divisions of past injustice and present hatred; it comes as the hope that withstands psychological, economic, political, social, cultural determinisms; it comes with the faith that can liberate reason from the rationalizations that blinded it.

Secondly, the new order (II Cor. 5:17) comes in the visible mission of the Son. In him is presented: (1) the absolutely supernatural object, for he is God; (2) the object for us, for he is man; (3) for us as to be redeemed, for he dies to rise again. As visible he is the sacrament of man’s encounter with God. As dying and rising, he shows the way to the new creation. As himself God, already he is Emmanuel, God with us.

Thirdly, besides the visible mission of the Son there is the invisible mission of the Spirit. Besides fides ex auditu, there is fides ex infusione. The former mounts up the successive levels of experiencing, understanding, judging, deliberating. The latter descends from the gift of God’s love through religious conversion to moral, and through religious and moral to intellectual conversion.

These three are cumulative. Revulsion from the objective reign of sin and from the subject’s own moral impotence heightens vertical finality. Without the visible mission of the Word, the gift of the Spirit is a being-in-love without a proper object; it remains simply an orientation to mystery that awaits its interpretation. Without the [in]visible mission of the Spirit, the Word enters into his own, but his own receive him not ."

"Today’s GOP spends so much time fretting about how to relive the Reagan heyday, it has failed to do him credit by laying out its own plans for today’s unique challenges. It remains in hock to interest groups, running ads about sanctuary cities as Americans curse over gas prices. In a repeat of 2006, it spends more time trying to scare voters about Democrats than defining itself. It refuses to give up the earmarks that are a symbol of its worn-out reign." – Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal.

A blogger responds to the news of Stage 4 cancer:

As for why this is happening to me in particular, the implicit point of the question is an argument: I deserve better than this. There are two responses. First, I don’t—I have no greater moral claim to be free from unwanted pain and loss than anyone else. Plenty of people more virtuous than I am suffer worse than I have, and some who don’t seem virtuous at all skate through life with surprising ease. Welcome to the world.

Once again, it seems to me that this claim arises from the incredibly unusual experience of a small class of wealthy professionals in the wealthiest parts of the world today. We think we live in a world governed by merit and moral desert. It isn’t so. Luck, fortune, fate, providence—call it what you will, but whatever your preferred label, it has far more to do with the successes of the successful than what any of us deserves. Aristocracies of the past awarded wealth and position based on the accident of birth. Today’s meritocracies award wealth and position based on the accident of being in the right place at the right time. The difference is smaller than we tend to think. Once you understand that, it’s hard to maintain a sense of grievance in the face of even the ugliest medical news. I’ve won more than my share of life’s lotteries. It would seem churlish to rail at the unfairness of losing this one—if indeed I do lose it: which I may not.

Larison describes what it is:

…a good diplomat doesn’t really care whether his opposite number has been persuaded by the virtue of his argument, but is most concerned to know that his opposite number is operating in good faith and will follow through on the bargain that has been reached.  There are things that will be non-negotiable for other regimes, just as there are for our own, and part of the art of diplomacy is to make maximal gains towards that limit of the non-negotiable for your side.  Or you can pretend that diplomacy has something to do with being nice and yielding to your rivals, as I assume Mr. Bush must believe for him to equate it with appeasement, which is almost the exact opposite of what proper diplomacy is.  It doesn’t matter to me that much whether or not Bush was referring to Obama.  I think he was, but that isn’t my concern.  What concerns me is that idea that Mr. Bush’s style of foreign policy can still be presented as self-evidently right and competent in the face of a mountain of evidence that it is neither.

A reader writes:

I am opposed to abortion with every fiber of my being.  But so too am I opposed to torture.  And to the death penalty.  And to unnecessary wars.  And to children going to bed hungry at night and lacking basic healthcare in the wealthiest nation in the world.  And to our elderly lacking the medicines they require. Accordingly, this pro-life voter will proudly join Professor Kmiec in voting for Obama this fall.  He is, after all, the most pro-life of the candidates.

Tallinn, Estonia, 11 am.

Ross chimes in:

Christian theology and Christian ritual are compatible with the universal human ability to experience the sacred through prayer and meditation, but they’re "built on top" of particular encounters and revelations that tend to have little in common with the "transcending boundaries/overflowing with love" experiences that neuroscientists are equipped to measure. Indeed, in both the Old and New Testaments, the foundational encounters with God – the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity – are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe. Instead, whether it’s Moses encountering the burning bush or Job being addressed out of the whirlwind or the disciples encountering the Risen Christ, the encounters with God that shape the Judeo-Christian tradition tend to be extremely personal on the one hand (God has a personality, a voice, even a body; He isn’t just some cosmic soup we can all go swimming in) and extremely terrifying and difficult to comprehend on the other.

All this is clearly true. And yet Christian mysticism also envelops some of the Buddhist insights into peace and ease with nature, as Merton and others came to explore. It may not be a free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe, but it can be a free-floating sense of one-ness with Christ, and the Trinity, and thereby, at some point, the Universe. At some level, the kinds of experiences we are crudely trying to explain are so beyond our categories that insisting on the exclusive validity of one kind of interaction with God seems a little, er, defensive, even narrow. What, to throw the question back to Ross, is the difference between a personal God and a personal Love Force that is also the power behind all Creation? In a word: Jesus. But what then of the Father and the Holy Spirit? Are non-Christians unable even to sense them – in a different idiom and practice? And could we not have already evolved to understand them in our minds/souls/genes – long before Jesus’ revelation made so many things so much clearer? And if we had not, how could Jesus have even made sense to anyone?