01/06/2012

Iran is Filled With People Just Like Us

12/31/2011

What Are you Doing New Year's Eve?

12/03/2011

Confessional Identity

Holding to a confessional identity has two parts: first, the conclusions of a tradition codified in a confessional document, and second, the dispositions, values, and commitments that produced the document. The first of these is fixed, formally, in a concrete document. When the document is first created, it is worded to accommodate the members of the confessional community who are thought to be insiders. The insiders approve the language in the context of all the complex of intramural disagreements that were in play at the time of drafting the document. But almost instantly, the document has two parts as well - the letter of the law, and the way the law is received, applied, and used. For some time, the use of the law can bend and stress the language of the law, but eventually something has to give. The tradition that produced the law is made up of real people. Traditions set trajectories. The trajectory continues and eventually outgrows the snapshot documents that best captured its values and beliefs at one time. When the document can no longer accommodate intramural debates and the community can no longer easily tell who the insiders are, there is a backlash. One side of the backlash then emphasizes the first part of confessional identity - the objective document. Let's call them the objectivists. The other side of the backlash emphasizes the second part of confessional identity - the ethos that produced the document. Let's call them the existentialists.

Who is right? Well, remember that confessional identity consists of both parts - the confession and the ethos that produced the confession. If we agree with the objectivists, then we discount the ability of a tradition to continue to move and shape a community toward a better realization of the implications of its ethos. In addition, confessional fidelity becomes archaeology, and not just archaeology but a kind of time travel - trying to inhabit the thought world that produced a text without being privy to the worldview that shaped the text's construction. When it comes to the Bible, the Holy Spirit bridges that chasm. When it comes to human confessional documents, however, we have no such guarantee. If we agree with the existentialists, we risk being unmoored from our tradition. We risk losing the ability for historical expressions to have authority for us and shape us.

But on the whole, the existentialists are right. Here's why. The word of God is a living and active sword and is empowered by the Holy Spirit to cut us up and re-make us like one of those radish flowers. God's word changes us inherently because of God's power. But confessional documents are attempts at building mirrors of swords. We write confessions to record our best attempt at understanding the scriptures at any given time, but our confessions are snapshots of a community's Holy Spirit powered formation. A confession shines bright for a while because it has the glow left over from the Holy Spirit's work, through the scriptures, on the believing community. But the confession itself has no light source. It is a mirror that fades and gets dingier as time goes by. The scriptures continue to work on the community and people make right and wrong inferences. Sometimes the confessions help to nudge us back to a proper understanding. Parts of the mirror are shinier than others - the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, etc. Those parts are shiny. Other parts grow dingy, however, and it becomes a disco ball, casting uneven light spots in the church. Some people love looking at the disco ball, but it can be a distraction from the larger dance that the Holy Spirit is doing with the church. I know that liberals talk this way too, and so it is hard to hear a conservative warn about traditionalism without suspecting them of giving away the farm. But holding on to a confession for too long before drafting another one is a real easy recipe for the disintegration of a community. It is saying that we once trusted the Spirit-formed community to build a mirror, but that now we are incapable of doing it. An ethos builds a confession, and a confession enforces and produces a certain ethos for a while, but it does this with borrowed power. Eventually, it must have power only by pointing the community towards its real source of power - towards the thing that is changing it. And this might mean that the confession is eventually rendered inadequate - a hindrance to promoting an ethos rather than a preserver of the ethos. Objectivism - confessionalism - then becomes existentialism with a confessional cat's paw.

Of course, there is the possibility that a confessional community can foster the growth of competing world views. Seedlings for these eventual splits might look quite compatible when they are small. But eventually, one side will see the other as an invasive species and a battle erupts to try and identify which plant belongs in the native soil.

My own confessional tradition has some very clearly self-defined objectivists. I agree with them on a lot of things, but I really think our tradition is wrong in a couple of very specific places. I think our confessional snapshots from 1646 are simply wrong about whether children should be welcome at the Lord's Supper. But I think this based upon a lot of other parts of those same confessional documents. I believe that my position on this matter is thus a peculiarly reformed position. The overall ethos that produced the original confession is also producing my desire to see covenant children at the covenant meal.

Objectivists usually sound like they are most committed to a confessional tradition because they seem the most committed to the first part of that tradition, the actual documents drafted by the tradition. But existentialists are committed to following the ethos of the confessional tradition that created those snapshot documents in the first place. You can't have a tradition without an ethos, but you can have a tradition without a snapshot of that ethos. Confessions are useful, intensely so, in helping to catch up a community with itself; to reexamine who the insiders are, to consider whether two rival traditions have emerged, etc. Its usefulness has an expiration date, however, and it needs to pass the baton to a revision of the confession fairly regularly or it risks losing a resemblance to the community it is supposed to be supporting. Far from arguing against the writing of confessions, I think a good existentialist should be for the writing of them early and often. Otherwise, we let things get out of hand.

And that is the way things are in my tradition - the Reformed tradition - and in my denomination - the Presbyterian Church in America - right now. Things are out of hand. Teachers at our own denominational seminary could not be approved for ordination in some of our presbyteries. This is insanity, and someone needs to push back against the objectivists. Someone needs to pull the fire alarm. The wound is now wider than the good-faith subscription band-aid can handle.

What is the Most Important Part of a Church Service?

Seems like an innocent enough question, but people usually use this question as a diagnostic test. If you answer "the Lord's Supper" the assumption is that you're Roman Catholic because all good Protestants should answer "the Sermon." In fact, still to this day, many Protestant churches do not celebrate the Lord's Supper every Sunday, so the sermon is a normal candidate for being the most important part.

But this question is really more about what Sunday worship is. Is it the kind of thing that has a center? Or is it the kind of thing that has a trajectory? I can see a certain logic in saying that the sermon is the center of the service. It is the time when we settle down and hear from God's word. And God's word is certainly central to the Christian life. So, if Sunday worship is a circle, then yes, it makes perfect sense to say that the sermon is the most central part. But if Sunday worship is a story that moves from calling, to repentance, to instruction, and then to peace with God as his table, it makes sense to say that the endpoint is the most important part.

Take Harry Potter, for instance. Is his duel with Voldemort the most important part of the story? I'm not sure about "most important part" but it is definitely the destination of the story - the endpoint. There still awaits a Sabbath rest for God's people and in the scriptures it is described as a "wedding feast of the lamb" - eating with Jesus. And so, as a microcosm of world history, Sunday worship has a very important endpoint - peace and rest in a meal. Back to Harry Potter again, there are many other important parts of the story that make the ending possible - that help it hold together and make sense. The sermon is like that. The endpoint of world history is made possible because God dwells powerfully in world history through his church and through his word. And so every Protestant should be able to lift his or her head high and not be ashamed of thinking very highly of the sermon. At the same time, let's not mistake the importance of the sermon as being some kind of endpoint. The first part of worship is not the pre-game ceremony for the sermon. If anything, the first parts of worship include the sermon; all of these lead to a foretaste of our future rest.

So the next time someone asks what the central part of Christian worship is, realize that another question is being begged - the assumption that a worship service has a "center" rather than a trajectory.

11/30/2011

Young Heart

Sounds like the title of a dragon movie. In this case, it is the name that, in an ornery voice, my autistic son is giving to "Young Life" - a Christian organization for teens that has a weekly group meeting with kids from his high school. I'm making him go. Partly it is to give him some social experience. But a larger part is that I'm thinking it might be good for the neurotypical kids to have him in their lives. I visited his high school for parent teacher conferences one night and the cafeteria had about 50 tables in it with teachers sitting at all of them. You know how many tables were relevant to my son? 2 of them.

On the other hand, his school has a club called "Circle of Friends" and it is led by a really exceptional teacher and it has a good mix of kids like my son and neurotypical kids. I really enjoyed meeting the group a few weekends ago at one of their meetings and it is a good idea. I think this teacher really "gets" our son and that's such a rare thing to find in this world. God bless the 'normal kids' (all girls, incidentally) who are participating in this one.

In the church, we have a special impetus to figure out how to help people find their callings. After all, someone with a capital 'S' does the calling, and the church is dedicated to the caller, and you see where that point is going... In the case of most people, that calling is hard to find. Will a young person pursue medicine? Start a landscaping business? Join the family business? Become a husband or wife? But for people like our son for whom a career or fatherhood is probably not in the cards ... his calling is staring us right in the face. In 1 Cor. 12.

"For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body— Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together."

And that's why my son needs to be smack dab in the middle of a youth group. Yes, for his own sake, but this is his calling. God confounds the strong things in this world with the weak things. Our son is indispensable! If we just hide away the weak we'll never learn whatever it is that God wants us to learn by honoring them, by protecting them, by treating them with special care. So it's a win-win deal here.

And even though he's ornery about "Young Heart" right now, I know that they'll probably have potato chips. And that's all he needs to be happy in this world. And there's a lesson in that somewhere for us too.

Update: 11/30, 7:40 pm - just dropped him off. So far so good.

Update: 11/30, 8:47 pm - just picked him up. Hilarious. When he saw me in the living room of the house where the meeting was held, he said (in front of the parents and other adults waiting there), "There was no food!" The father of the family said "believe me, I live here and I always say the same thing." It will be a good opportunity for that boy to learn some manners... The problem is that he is incapable of suppressing exactly what he's thinking at any given time. Now I'm just waiting to find out what happened from the leader. J himself wouldn't say anything other than that "they sang White Christmas" and "they are Christmassy."

11/26/2011

Enns and the Ditch

I posted this comment on Enn's latest. There's no guarantee it will make it past moderation:

~

“The problem is that, most trained, practicing, scientists have concluded that evolution is true.”

I read the story of the Ph.D. biologist on the Biologos site and he had almost no exposure to the details of evolutionary biology until doing some reading during his career. Just how many people are competent to engage the details of evolutionary biology? I’d be surprised if there are more than a few dozen. Limit it to human evolution and you’ve probably reduced that number further. Most of us with Ph.D.’s are frankly ignorant of most of the details even of our own fields beyond the narrow areas where we did some dissertation work.

What I do know is that there is an inescapable ditch between science and history. The only way to cross that ditch is to have some kind of philosophical or methodological framework for introducing confidence in an assumption of continuity. Only continuity moves from “accumulation of patina” to “this statue is actually old.” And continuity can’t be argued for rationally. This is the basic thrust of Hume’s argument.

Now, I admit this makes those of us who reject human evolution look like the equivalent of conspiracy theorists, the great bugbear of my field where conspiracy historiography is not respected. And I’m sorry that’s the case, but sometimes looking like a nut is unavoidable. The Apostle Paul said X was important and he argued for it on the basis of Y. I don’t see how we can accept X and reject the apostolic case for X, that is, Y. You’re willing to look like a nut to believe discontinuous things in the first century A.D., but not things in the time we want to assign to the miracles of Genesis. Your “miracle filter” is as ad hoc as anything you find in your critics.

Engagement with the details seems important to the questions you’ve been talking about if the details will help us cross that ditch. Follow the scientific details as far as they will take you and you will never, ever penetrate the historical question. Your arbitrariness in labeling miracles and expecting the uniformity of nature here and not there should trouble you.

~ Update: Enns responded:

"You are certainly welcome to your opinion, but I disagree with you in virtually every sentence of your post."

~

Pretty disappointing. Am I just crazy or are my objections not the very ones with which his theory needs to do business? I've set out my strongest response and he considers it an "opinion"?

11/19/2011

Thinking Through Intinction

Intinction is the practice of celebrating communion (aka, Eucharist, Lord's Supper, etc.) by dipping a piece of bread into the wine and then putting the winesoaked bread into the mouth. This is becoming more popular in my own denomination. Hopefully this essay will help in thinking through the practice.

In any kind of important ritual like baptism or the Lord's supper, we want to perform the rite in the proper way. In the Old Testament, through the prophets, God often critiqued both the way in which his people were partaking of the various ceremonies and the heart with which they approached these things. For instance, the temple was in Judah, not Israel, so often God's prophets spoke against Israel's presumption to create a rival altar. We'll leave aside the "heart" issue in this post because we're really asking more about the mechanics of the sacrament. How should we perform it? The mechanics affect the heart, but that's a different post.

We have to figure out which items are so central to the rite that without them, the rite ceases to exist. For instance, it doesn't take a great deal of thought to conclude that at least some amount of water will need to be used in baptism. How do we think through this with regards to the Lord's Supper?



This diagram shows several concentric circles to assist in visualizing what aspects of the rite are central (near point A) and which aspects are more peripheral to the rite (near point E). One of the New Testament texts about the celebration of the eucharist is I Corinthians 11:23-34. The writer, the Apostle Paul, is dealing with a particular church and its celebration of the Lord's Supper. He is writing to tell them to clean up their act - all the rich people are eating together and leaving out the poor, some eat before the others, etc. In other words, they had corrupted the rite - using it to distinguish one group from another. In the process, though, we learn a lot about the rite itself:

I Corinthians 11:20-34: When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, uanother gets drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise vthe church of God and whumiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another—if anyone is hungry, let him eat at home—so that when you come together it will not be for judgment. About the other things I will give directions when I come.

First thing to note - Paul based his instructions about the Lord's Supper on the celebration of the rite that Jesus had along with his disciples on "the night he was betrayed." Thus, we should take the gospel accounts of the Last Supper into consideration too. There are three parallel accounts:

Matthew 26:26-30: "Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, "Take, eat; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, "Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom. And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives."

Mark 14:22-26: And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives."

Luke 22:17-20: And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, "Take this, and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes." And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

Now, taking into account all this biblical data, we see several things that make up the rite. I will list some aspects of the rite without comment and without implying any kind of centrality. I'm sure we could list even more if we tried, but these are the major aspects.

1. Communion has a meal context; all of the action takes place after a meal, sitting around a table.
2. The rite involves some kind of bread
3. The rite involves some kind of wine.
4. The rite involves eating
5. The rite involves drinking
6. The person leading the rite gives thanks twice: once for the bread, once for the wine.
7. Two gospel writers think to mention that Jesus and his disciples sung a hymn after the rite.
8. The bread and wine are distributed to the partakers somehow.
9. The supper, instituted at night, came to be celebrated in corporate worship.
10. There are words spoken - "this is my body, etc."
11. There is an order to the proceedings: take, talk, pray, distribute, eat bread, take, talk, pray, distribute, drink cup

Historically, the church has considered the various aspects identified here to be more or less central to the rite, depending upon the branch of the church. If we think about intinction, it affects a great number of these areas:

First, there is the question of eating and drinking. Obviously, putting a soggy piece of bread into your mouth is not eating and drinking, but does this matter? Second, there is the question of ritually separating the eating and drinking, and separating the distribution and thanksgiving for each element. If it is part of the essence of the rite to eat and drink separately, then intinction makes this impossible. Third, there is the problem of the order of the rite. In Jesus's celebration of the rite, he gives thanks for the element, distributes it, then they eat it. He does this twice, once for bread, once for wine. In intinction, very often a "common cup" is used. That means, the bread is distributed and broken apart so that everyone has a piece of bread. Then, the cup is passed around and the congregation dips the bread into the cup prior to partaking. In that scenario, the pastor can take, pray, then distribute both elements, but this cannot achieve the ordering of take, pray, distribute, consume, take pray, distribute, consume. The consumption is always reserved for the end of the process.

Back to our analogy with Baptism for a moment, we would probably not consider a real baptism to have taken place if someone were doused with sand in the Triune name. Or, at the very least, we would introduce doubts as to whether a real baptism has taken place. This would be pastorally dangerous, and it wouldn't be an improper impulse for the one baptized with sand to wonder if he or she really was baptized.

What could we do to the communion rite to put it into that category - of a celebration where the congregation could legitimately be left wondering if they actually just had communion. Let's go through the aspects of the rite one by one:

1. Communion as a meal.

This is one of the most frequently brushed over aspects of the supper. For example, some churches practice the meal aspect rather strictly. The soft form of this is to take communion while seated in the pews (as opposed to marching everyone up to the front of the church to partake while kneeling), and the harder form is to actually bring plank tables down the center of each aisle and then have everyone gather together around those tables in the aisle for a more meal-like situation. Once church in St. Louis encourages its members to talk during the communion meal because this is more like a meal where people are carrying on polite table conversation. This doesn't really affect the intinction discussion, but it is important to note this aspect of the supper along the way. Intinction is a very pointed question, but the larger issue of how to properly perform the rite of the Lord's Supper is worth considering. If we turn communion into a private act of devotion, say at a rail, where all the elements are distributed by a single 'waiter' to a single eater, then we lose the communal aspects of the meal and we make it that much easier to fall into the problems Paul warns about at Corinth, not discerning the body of believers properly and eating and drinking by ourselves.

2. The kind of bread

This is an interesting discussion and it really all comes down to two questions - what kind of bread did the early church use in its celebration of the Lord's Supper and what kind did Jesus use. This gets into a technical discussion about what "unleavened bread" is in the scriptures. Some think that unleavened means "without yeast" and some think it means "without starter." A starter is a living lump of yeast-dough that you might use to make sourdough bread. Using a starter links the new loaf to the old loaf and it gives a good character to the bread's flavor. One of my favorite pancake places is in Birmingham, AL, and they actually age their batter overnight and allow the yeast to begin imparting a bit of fermentation and character to the batter. When Jesus warns about the leavening of the Pharisees, he might be using an analogy there to break with the old lump and bake bread with fresh yeast - break with the traditions of the Pharisees, in other words. Elsewhere in the scriptures we are "one loaf" but I suppose you could have a loaf of yeastless bread. There's also the problem that in the ancient world (and in our world) it is very hard to do anything without yeast. Yeast is everywhere and every kind of bread has some degree of yeast in it. This doesn't affect intinction, but it is interesting. Personally, I think it is important to use some kind of bread, not a cracker, and the happier bread the better.

3. The kind of wine

This is also an interesting discussion and it is conducted with a lot of passion in America with its peculiar history of prohibition. In fact, "grape juice" was invented in America by a dentist who figured out how to bottle it and stop the fermentation process. Notice I said "stop" the process because as soon as grapes are crushed, fermentation begins as the yeast in the environment goes to work. And as soon as you open a bottle of grape juice, the fermentation begins again. You have to try hard to not make wine when you've crushed some grapes. The only relevance to intinction here is that in studies of disease transmission in the various modes of communion, intinction is the least safe. People's cuticles and the areas under their fingernails are crawling with germs and if the piece of bread is too small you end up dunking the filthiest part of your body into the cup. And so just be sure to use a very strong, fortified wine if intinction is your thing because human fingernails are scary places. As for how central this is to the rite, that's a good question. Jesus used wine, he made wine, and the bible is full of the symbolism of wine's making the heart glad. Grape juice is not wine, it is a precursor. It would be like using grain sheaths instead of bread. Plus, wine is a product of human technology. Both of the elements of communion are the result of human ingenuity - baking bread and making wine are parts of culture that apparently God wants to spread all over the earth. Having bread and wine implies the presence of a whole complex of supporting institutions and it is the fruit of human labor. Wine is important. Is grape juice a "kind" of wine? Because you can't avoid fermentation, I guess so, but here's the "kind" of wine that grape juice is: bad wine. Do you want to have bad wine at a happy meal with the king of creation?

4. Eating and Drinking

This seems to be important. Over and over Paul says things like "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord." The eating and drinking are tied very closely to Jesus's body and blood that serve as the central ritual aspects of the supper. A "Jesus centered" Lord's supper would focus intently on the aspects of the supper that point plainly to the symbolism inherent in the sacrificial aspects of Jesus's work. Paul seems to have in mind that you eat bread and drink wine. Of course, the fact that it never occurred to Paul to dip the bread into the cup and drink/eat all at once doesn't necessarily mean it is wrong, but again, we're trying to figure out which parts of the supper are more central, not necessarily wrong or right (though we have to be open to the idea that there are wrong ways to celebrate the supper, surely). I think we can assume that intinction is not eating and drinking, it is some third thing. It reminds me of the old Anglo-Saxon wine-sop tradition. And so if eating and drinking are central to the rite, then intinction potentially derails the sacrament.

5. The person leading the rite gives thanks twice: once for the bread, once for the wine

Listen intently in your church service to see that God is thanked for each element separately. This is something Jesus did very plainly and Paul repeats. It is hard to know why this is important and how it ritually changes us, but there is something going on here that we should probably not tinker with too much. Certainly, you can do this in an intinction service, and so this point does not really count either way, but it is worth emphasizing that this is important. The Puritans, for instance, were real sticklers on this point, requiring two separate prayers. And this is wise. It isn't always clear why a ritual changes us, and when something is so plainly an important part of the ritual, given by example of Jesus, then it is vital not to do otherwise.

6. Two gospel writers think to mention that Jesus and his disciples sung a hymn after the rite.

Hah, no need to comment here, but it is interesting. After I really noticed this, I stopped telling my kids not to sing at the table. I simply say "we can't sing at the table unless we're all singing the same song." The rite of communion is happy. It should not be penitential. If you don't feel like singing afterwards... If you haven't drunk a little wine... If you don't feel like you just ate dinner with the king of all the world, then something is wrong. Far worse a problem than the "mode" of communion in my denomination is the mood of communion. It'd better be happy and too many Presbyterian churches have morose communion.

7. The bread and wine are distributed to the partakers somehow.

The mode of distribution will of course differ depending upon the size of the crowd, the shape of the room, whether people are sitting or standing, whether the people come to the front, whether the elements are distributed to them, etc. A few comments. When people come to the front, they are continually served by the host. When elements are passed out in the pews, they are serving one another. It gives an opportunity to ritually introduce some table conversation. Often this is done with "the peace of Christ" said to the person as you hand them the tray. So distribution is important and it needs to support the aims of whatever aspects of the supper you think are central. If the meal aspect is central, then distribution needs to not get in the way of that aspect. It's important that the ritual logic of your distribution matches the aims and goals of the ritual itself. With intinction, the only issue here is that you have to figure out how to get each person a piece of bread prior to their getting a cup. Not a real problem.

8. The supper, instituted at night, came to be celebrated in corporate worship.

From very early in the church, the 'breaking of bread' came to be done at the early morning, first-day-of-the-week worship services (Acts 2:42). Jesus instituted the supper at an evening meal and from pretty much then on Christians have done it when they gather (usually in the morning). This shows us that the ritual setting for the supper is more important than the time of day. It is a meal with Jesus and not simply a biological family meal. And when we gather together is usually in a corporate service to strengthen the whole body. This proves to us that the meal has more or less central aspects. Thankfully we don't have to figure that one out - the bible records the deviation from the original event very clearly. But it shows us a pattern for adapting the supper to various contexts.

9. There are words spoken - "this is my body, etc."

Ususally in Christian celebration of the Lord's Supper we repeat these words of Jesus. Often, we do this by quoting from the passage of Paul's letter where he reminds the Corinthian church about the supper. This is central to the rite in most churches - a silent meal would be strange. It probably doesn't make sense to focus on the centrality of the words; that's not something that has ever been in doubt. But the words are in a context and that brings us to the next part - the order in which the words, prayers, distribution, and partaking happen.

10. There is an order to the proceedings: take, talk, pray, distribute, eat bread, take, talk, pray, distribute, drink cup

The order of a ritual is extremely important in its meaning. Think of the ritual of making gumbo. You have to get the roux the color of a copper penny before you can begin adding the other ingredients. It would be hard to get a roux looking right if you're constantly stirring okra around the pot over the butter and flour. In the Lord's Supper the ritual order in both Paul's presentation and in the gospel accounts has Jesus talking about the element, thanking his Father for it, distributing it, and then the crowd consuming it. Then he does this again. Thinking of the best possible intinction order of service possible, we would have this: minister takes element, talks, prays, distributes, minister takes element, talks, prays, distributes, and then consumption is added at the end - both elements are eating/drunk together. This is definitely a different order of the service. And so if ritual order is central to the sacrament's celebration, intinction presents a signficant problem.

Bringing this All Together

If you're thinking through whether intinction is a good idea, then the way to proceed is to look at the list of communion aspects above and try to assign a letter to them from A to E that will help you plot the aspects of the supper onto our centrality chart. The nearer an aspect is to the center of the chart, the more closely you need to hew to the example in scripture in order to do the rite properly. Go ahead, drag the elements around in the chart if you're using a decent browser, I've defaulted them to a random positioning:

(Go ahead, drag these aspects around the chart)

Intinction implies that the order of the ceremony is not in the most central place. It also implies that true eating and drinking are not as central as some other aspects of the rite.

Order in rites is something God takes very seriously. We know this from the book of Leviticus where we see God's taking pains to teach the people the proper way of approaching him through a series of different kinds of sacrifices. And inside of each sacrifice, God does things in a particular order - animals are slaughtered on tables, drained of blood, then the blood is sprinkled here and there and certain parts are put on the altar fire, etc. God shows himself to be the kind of God that when he gives a ritual, he expects it to be performed in a certain order. Or, put more positively, God shows himself to be a teacher wanting to take his students through a particular story over and over, and he wants them to get this story right so they don't get the wrong idea about him. I'm not sure exactly how moving all consumption to the end of the rite of communion changes the story, but my uncertainty about that gives me pause when considering whether or not to depart from the example given by Jesus.

As for eating and drinking, we are not gnostics, as Christians. We believe that our bodies are important and the things we do with them are important and the order in which we do them is important. And so eating with our jaws, and drinking with our lips - these are really meaningful activities. Intinction changes the relationship of the human body to the elements from the original celebration's example. This is not trivial.

It is clear from my comments here, that the way I would assess the centrality of the various aspects of communion leads me to think that intinction is a bad idea. If you do not put "eating and drinking" and "order of proceedings" into the most central place in your consideration of the ritual of the Lord's Supper, then I would recommend a few things: be sure that you do two prayers; this couldn't be clearer from Jesus's example. Also, try very hard to make the celebration as meal-like as possible. Use a good strong wine to avoid any problem with cuticles (yuck) going into the common cup. Be sure that you get as close to the order used by Jesus as possible. Remember, you are making the choice to differ substantially from that order in order to use intinction as a method. May as well do your best to adhere where you can. Use a good strong bread so that the jaws are involved. You can at least have eating even if drinking is harder. To me, the worst of all possible combinations is to have communion at a rail with intinction. You lose the corporate aspect of the prayer and distribution, you lose the meal-like aspects, and you lose eating and drinking. Do it with grape juice and you might as well be inventing a new rite altogether.

What do you think? Is intinction licit? Is it wise? What might be the long-term effects of a liturgical change like introducing intinction into a congregation? What have been the long-term effects of taking wine out of the rite in America?

11/13/2011

Addendum, Fossils, Adam, Theodicy

I presented a summarized version of the previous post to Peter Enns and his response was this:

"Barlow, I will grant you one point. I have been very clear that evolution definitely creates theological problems. But, that doesn’t mean evolution is wrong. It means we have theological changes before us. The question is whether we want to address them."

This is a disappointing response, I think, because it essentially means that Enns is willing to leap before he looks. Even before figuring out how a good God could create, on purpose, a Hobbesian state of nature, he accepts that this is so and decides to treat it as a research problem.

This is probably an oversimplification, but it seems like someone with theological training and a relatively traditional faith would prioritize things differently. Figuring out whether humans actually evolved from something non-human doesn't just entail finding a new way to read the scriptures. That might the first instinct of a biblical scholar, but it is near-sighted. Despite Enns's point about evolution's (in the hands of mainstream Christian scientists) not being an alternative, natural religion, he is radically changing his own faith to accommodate it. How far can Christianity bend before it becomes another religion? I admit that the apostle's creed remains mostly untouched by evolutionary theory, and this is probably why the Vatican has not found it too hard to accept evolution of the human body. But you need original sin to tell the kind of story Enns probably used to tell ... the kind of story most of us Presbyterians tell. I don't know; this whole thing is just sad to me. I don't begrudge almost anyone else for believing in human evolution. I just find it hard to respect the process by which Enns got there. His ducks just aren't in a row. He's thrown out all the ballast and now has to figure out how to land the balloon....

11/12/2011

Yes, Virginia, God Did Make Fossils (at least once)

One of the main problems that Peter Enns has with Al Mohler's position relates to the earth's "appearance of age."

Now, I don't want to come down on any side of how old the earth is or any of that. But there is at least one aspect to Enns's critique of Mohler that deserves some comment. Mohler says that the reason scientists believe in an old earth is because all the evidence points in that direction, and that's fine. In other words, scientists are making accurate measurements of the earth's age. God very recently made an earth that "passes all the tests" that you might apply to an earth to find out how old it is. Enns says that the problem with this position is that the earth doesn't just have the appearance of age, it has the appearance of having gone through the aging process. The earth, Enns writes, "shows evidence of millions upon millions upon millions of years of evolution, judging by the wealth of evidence at hand (e.g., fossils, geological records, human genome)." And if we chalk all this up to to God's having created it to look like it went through those processes, it raises the question "Why would God do such a thing? Why would he load the cosmos with all this evidence and then expect his intelligent creatures, made in his image, to stop short of drawing some conclusions from that evidence?"

In short, Enns encourages Mohler to move away from "ad hoc" arguments. Mohler has a commitment to a young earth based on his understanding of the scriptures, and he is therefore walling off part of his intellectual life from real evidence. He can create an ad hoc argument against any evidence that might purport to be proof of human evolution, an ancient earth, etc. Enns's solution is to go back to the scriptures and see if perhaps there is another way to understand them so that the various parts of human science (biblical hermeneutics, biology, geology, etc.) can be harmonized.

So what about the resurrection, the parting of the Red Sea, and other things decidedly ruled out of court by scientific forms of reasoning? To those, Enns has a ready answer because he apparently believes in the resurrection. He believes in the resurrection, despite scientific bias against any kind of reanimation, because it is a miracle and not, therefore, accessible to scientific scrutiny in the way that the age of the earth is. He writes, elsewhere, "science cannot tell us one way or the other about the resurrection or any other miracle: miracles leave no scientifically verifiable evidence. Miracles can only be accepted by faith, not determined by the kinds of evidence relevant to the sciences."

So, in short, things that the bible claims are miracles are okay to believe because, however improbable, a person of faith has no need to disbelieve them in order to be part of the mainstream of human science. But things that the bible treats as true, but are simply part of a primitive understanding of the cosmos, or are part of a mythological cosmogony, can be safely set aside and interpreted only for their "message" or what they tell us about the human condition.

Well, I'm not sure what kind of God would make fossils, but that's the kind of God Christians have. In Jesus's first public miracle, he does something very simple, but very profound. He makes "good" wine. He has some of the staff at a wedding fill up a bunch of large jugs with water, and he miraculously turns them into wine. After tasting the wine Jesus made, the wedding coordinator turns to the bridegroom and comments that he must be amazingly well off to serve the bad wine first and then bring out the amazing wine once everyone was buzzing and wouldn't be able to distinguish the difference.

What is "good wine?" It is older wine. And every little droplet of wine, if you look at it under a microscope, is going to have a few yeast organisms in their dormant state. Even well filtered wine, which they almost certainly didn't have in first century Palestine, would have been filtered simply by settling the particulates to the bottom and then siphoning off the top. This would no doubt leave lots of evidence of yeast organisms. Wine itself is simply the aged juice of grapes in which all the sugar has been converted to alcohol by the digestive action of the yeast animals.

And so Jesus made fossils, right there on the spot. They weren't very old fossils, relative to a T.Rex tooth, but they were at least 10 year old fossils - dormant yeast floating in a bath of good wine.

This was a miracle, yes, and the bible presents it as a miracle, and so it escapes Enns's filter for what can or can't be falsified by science. But I think it is clear that Enns's miracle filter is ad hoc too. Jesus' making wine from water is a miracle, but God's making something from nothing isn't? How old does something that didn't even exist at t=0 look when it is created and then exists at t=2 seconds?

Many of the commentators on Enns's blog are pointing out that scientists aren't any happier to accept claims about resurrection of the dead (without which Christianity is just an expensive superstition) than they are to accept a young earth. Enns wants to hold onto the resurrection because he is a Christian. But he wants to reject the idea of a young earth and a literal Adam and Even for at least several reasons. It would be unsportsmanlike to try and guess which of the reasons are more important for Enns, but science seems to be a huge one. Apparently, population genomics looks at the current human genome and extrapolates back about how much genetic diversity there must have been in order to get people with the variety they have now. I don't fully understand the claim, but they say that if the human race is just 6000 years old and goes back to just two people, then the rate of mutation would have to have been crazy to have the current genetic diversity in the human genome. And so Enns begins to teach that maybe the Genesis 1-11 stories are just as much myths as the rest of the ancient world's stories are. He never believed the Babylonian myths were true, so why believe the Israelite myths? I totally understand this move, but what Enns gives up is tremendous. Far from a little squabble about the age of the earth, this "solution" to a scientific problem becomes a huge shot in the middle of theology proper. "Theology proper" means the study of God.

Theology is a science too. And it has a venerable tradition of "theodicy" - which is basically trying to defend that God is good. The earth is full of terrible things like the malaria parasite and it is full of lots of suffering. The Christian response has always been to tell a story about the Gospel:

1. God made a good world including people who were in his image; capable of bad, but gloriously capable of not sinning too.
2. We broke the good world
3. God is fixing the world and this will be complete someday.

First of all, a denial of an original couple of humans, Adam and Eve, takes a big chunk out of point one. Suddenly, God created a world of Darwinistic, tooth-and-claw survival. At some point, after life evolved from non-life, and after things began to breathe air, and things began to differentiate into boys and girls instead of simply reproducing by mitosis, and started wearing silly hats, morally accountable beings came into existence. And instead of their being responsible to tend to a good world, they were somehow expected to abandon the ways of the previous generation and start helping each other. Survival of the fittest, a process that literally created them, was now to be abandoned in favor of compassion and charity. The world was broken by design.

This is a different story. I will not say it is a different "gospel" because it would sound like I'm saying Enns isn't a Christian if I put it that way. Enns believes that he is guilty before God of sin and needs Jesus to die and be raised from the dead in order for that problem to be fixed. That's great, and I'm glad for it. But at least at this point in my life, I don't see how I could be that kind of Christian. The story doesn't work for me. God made a terrible world, and then I am somehow supposed to be accountable for not going against the millions of years of forces and principles that created me.

After I read Enns's first book, Incarnation and Inspiration, I felt wounded by a friend. In a good way. I was glad to be hearing these strong critiques of things I had always believed about the bible from a "friend." Someone who was "one of us." But that book sent me on a several weeks course of heavy doubt about a lot of things. It was a miserable experience, but I was glad for it and it gave me a lot of sympathy with those for whom this whole religion business just doesn't hold up. But that subsided, and the more I thought about it, it was the story of the bible that made more sense of life than the alternatives. So much of the certainty that drove Enns's conclusions in that book (the age of the Hebrew language, etc.) I realized were being used in ways that they didn't have to be used. That he was just as much an interpreter/creator of facts as he was criticizing others for being. If there is one thing that postmodern epistemology shows us, in its own playful way, is that facts are made, they are not found. I realized, all at once, that Enns had one of the finest minds of the 19th century, as they say, and that he was repeating a process that is very familiar to anyone who has looked at the history of biblical interpretation.

My training has been in the area of theology. Its conclusions and problems are real for me in a way that the conclusions and problems of population genomics are not. Nor am I a geologist. These are all sciences - theology, geology, population genomics, etc. All of these study something based on evidences. When you're in a math class you have math problems. When you're in a genetics class, you have genetics problems. But theology is more dear to me than those other field because, as a believer in the God of Christianity, I have staked a lot on the idea that there is a good God who loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life and for this world. And far older and truer than the conclusions of a science that didn't even have access to the human genome until The Wonder Years was already cancelled, is the conclusion that it is very hard to exonerate God from blame for the evils of this world unless we first begin with a wonderful world that we humans are to blame for messing up. Remove Adam and Eve and you remove the mother and father of all the living. You remove the root of all human suffering and make it part of the original design. This is a different story. We were made to be slaves to our basest instincts. That's the "way its supposed to be" at least here on this tooth-and-claw darwinian earth. I just don't see how this is going to work. Hick's "soul making theodicy" just doesn't warm my heart, but Enns is going to need something like that.

In the end, remember this. Enns is a very smart Old Testament scholar. That is his training. As someone with training in theology, who is probably not as smart as Enns, let me assure you that his recent conclusions create a lot of theological problems. He is creating much deeper problems than he is solving. Without original sin, we are all guilty only because of our actual sins. This sweeps the leg out from under much of apostolic reasoning. It commits Enns to seeing in Paul's enthusiasm for the Adam story a mere 'playing along with' pharisaical reasoning from myths. Without original sin, the mystery of evil is even more unresolved. We can't say "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good" in quite the same way if God intended to create the Hobbesian state of nature from the get-go.

10/31/2011

Subscription to a Confession

This post is Presbyterian in nature. Sorry, dear non-Presbyterian readers.

The subordinate standards are always on trial in every controversy of religion, and this is the stance of the Westminster confession itself. The PCA is not a strict subscriptionist denomination. In the recent controversies, one man is being tried, in part, for exceptions to the confession that he was granted license for at his ordination. Upon what basis are exceptions granted? By that same basis, then, controversies of religion must be judged. Figuring out whether a minister lines up with the confession requires understanding what the confession says, why it says it, what the minister says, and why he says it. Subscribing to a 365 year old document is hard work. There are multiple horizons to bring together in order to be governed by a confession with integrity.

10/28/2011

For St. Louis Folks

For St. Louis Folks: Resurrection Presbyterian's Speaking of Faith cancelled for tonight, October 28th, in light of World Series Game 7.

10/17/2011

No Guts

I'm sitting in a chair five steps from the famous United Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas. I don't have the guts to go over and say "hello." Part of it is that I don't want to bother him. Part of it is that asking a question of him seems like the kind of act that requires a lot more preliminary work than I have put in so far. I have questions for him, but I suspect the answers are already somewhere in his many books. I hope someday that if a young person sees me somewhere, and they have any desire to speak to me, that they take the opportunity. But I am too polite to presume that this is his approach as well. It was thrilling, however, to hear him speak and say things with such clarity that you almost never hear people say in polite conversation anymore. He spoke like a man fully alive.

10/16/2011

Updates

1. Found a car finally this week. A 1996 that was in really good shape. Also has a non-interference engine. It's kind of embarrassing because it's a Lexus, but it essentially a very well appointed Camry. I'm familiar with that engine too because it is almost identical to the one in our '99 Sienna, peace be upon it.

2. Our church has been sponsoring a series of lectures at a local coffee shop. You can listen to the mp3's here and feel free to join us for future Friday nights. I thought the lecture on Perfectionism is the kind of thing that would helpful to a wide variety of people.

3. Looked at my cheek cells under a microscope with Charlie at the Science Center today:



4. Interesting interview with Mort Zuckerman about Obama.

5. I'm no longer on Facebook, so don't think I unfriended you. I'm not on there, period.

6. Going to meet Stanley Hauerwas on Monday.

7. Hope you guys are all doing well. Holla.

8. This picture is very relaxing. It's my dog, Conan:

Peter Leithart's Baptismal Theology

At the beginning of the transcript of Peter Leithart's examination (page 153 and following of the trial transcript) he gives some insight into how and why he began to rethink some of the normal ways of formulating baptismal theology in the Reformed tradition. He responds (and remember, this is a transcript of someone speaking off the cuff):

I began thinking about baptism partly from thinking about the rites of restoration and entry that exist in the old covenant. Rites of washing for uncleanness that moved a person from a status of unclean to a status of clean. Rites of ordination ... that was what my doctoral dissertation was about. That ordination by the rite gave a new status to Aaron and gave him access to God that he didn’t have prior to the rite. And then started thinking about the nature of rites and ceremonies in that regard and then tried to think through baptism. That gave me a way, I thought, of thinking about the strong statements that New Testament makes about baptism in a way that avoided the implications of some kind of magical properties in the water or in the rite itself but still was able to account for the very strong statements about efficacy of baptism that we find in the New Testament. I wanted to come up with a new way of talking about baptism and think about baptism for my own sake that would make 1 Peter 3 which has already been mentioned seem like a very natural way to talk about baptism. That was my - - that was my intention. Another aspect of it is I do emphasize the importance of the visible church and much of what I say about the effect of baptism or different ways of describing what it means to be a member of the visible church, to be a member of the body of Christ. If the body of Christ is the body of Christ. If it is the family of the father and baptism is the right of entry into that community then it confers a certain status before God a certain relation to Christ that is, that’s consistent with the nature of that community.

I thought this was a very good way to begin his testimony. And so, for those who disagree with Leithart, I think a good first question to you is this: "What are you doing in your thinking and preaching to insure that 1 Peter 3:21-22 sounds like a perfectly normal way of talking about baptism?"

10/15/2011

Relational Ontology

It has been interesting to read through the trial transcript of the Leithart trial. I haven't finished reading it all, so perhaps I've missed it, but one of the things I simply assumed, since people in Peter's presbytery would know him better than most of the internet critics, is that they would home in on the key insight of his theology. In what I read so far, however, I still found the crude "parallel soteriology" allegations that plague most other attempts to understand what Peter is getting at.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the key to Peter's theology is his relational ontology. In other words, we are social beings - our "in relation"-ness is part of our very being. This is why Peter's theology of baptism has the appearance of saying more than a lot of people are comfortable with about the sacrament. A person, prior to church relationship, is different (ontologically, even) from that same person, after being brought into the church. Peter is willing to speak in traditional language when needed, but he pushes back against traditional "inside" vs. "outside" language because that isn't the key power of the sacrament for him - changing someone's insides. A person is a social being. Baptism is a receptor site for the society of the church. Therefore, baptism changes the person - gives them new responsibilities, new relationships with the head of the church.

If we are social beings and social changes result in changes to who we are, then everything else Peter says about baptism follows nicely. I'm not saying he has a deductive theology. But it does seem like he has a philosophical insight about anthropology that can't help but inform his exegesis and other theologizing. If "relational ontology" wasn't on trial, then Peter Leithart's theology wasn't on trial.