Cover Your Ears! Brit Hume, Ann Coulter, And The Cross

Fox News contributor Brit Hume recently said something controversial -- on TV! -- about the nature of Christianity. Perhaps you heard his blasphemous remarks; perhaps you heard his great insult.

And perhaps you didn't.

Well, at least one person did -- Ann Coulter. I know, I know, she's a firebrand. She's a bombshell bomb thrower; a crass ideologue; a political pit bull. But set the caricatures of her aside for a moment and read what she has to say about Christianity, about it being the best deal on the planet. Is she right? Has Ann Coulter presented the gospel in a way that does justice to the "good news"?

You tell me. I'd love to hear what you think of "If You Can Find A Better Deal, Take It!" And I'd like to hear what you think of Mr. Hume's remarks, too. (Coulter quotes him at length.)

Peace.

Bow Your Heads

(I've been away for a few days. 'Tis good to be back.)

George W. Bush, you'll recall, has often been chided for his associations with the "religious right". He has been mocked for admitting during the 2000 presidential campaign that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. He has been ridiculed for revealing that he prays every day that God would guide him to do the right thing; militant Bush critics even believe this revelation is tantamount to the Commander-in-Chief waging a holy war against Islam, all proof that Mr. Bush holds theocratic ambitions.

But darkness descends on the minds of too many men and women, blinded to the overwhelming fact that there is religion aplenty driving those who adhere to liberalism, or who work to transform the world into the image of the Democratic Party. Without question certain "believers" accept the grandiloquent damnations hurled at religious right activism; and without question they shut their minds to religious leftism and other forms of theocratic emanations.

Who is going to stand up to the great and swaggering behemoth which is the Democratic Party as it bowed its head in prayer the other day? Who is going to demand redress of great religious and ideological grievances brought upon Democrats for their unthinking connivance to appear tolerant, devout, and ever so peaceful?

If you have not already done so, please watch this video clip provided for us by HotAir.com of a Muslim imam invoking "god" at the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) Winter Meeting. It is enough to make one's prayer shawl crawl. It is enough to make one daven in disbelief; to genuflect in semi-conscious bewilderment.

Here is a transcript (thanks to Frontpagemag.com) of the whole prayer (the HotAir excerpt is too abridged):

In the name of God the most merciful, the most compassionate. We thank you, God, to bless us among your creations. We thank you, God, to make us as a great nation. We thank you God, to send us your messages through our father Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Muhammad. Through you, God, we unite. So guide us to the right path. The path of the people you bless, not the path of the people you doom. Help us God to liberate and fill this earth with justice and peace and love and equality. And help us to stop the war and violence, and oppression and occupation. Ameen. [Emphasis added]

I am sure we all would agree that it would be wrong for a President of the United States, the Chief Executive of a nation devoted to separation of powers, particularly the separation of Church and State; it would be wrong of that leader to invoke God's "perfect will" in declaring war against a neighbor, all in the name of Christ. Americans recoil at such religious vigor; they expect there to be a "wall of separation" between the State and its many churches.

But I am equally sure that we all must agree -- along with the deconstructionists among us -- that nowhere in the history of America has any founding document called for the erection of a wall between Mosque and State. For it appears, or so it seems, our friends in attendance at the DNC's meeting have no problem sharing the same podium with an imam invoking Allah to guide national affairs; the Mosque is our political friend. All facetiousness aside, we must (must we not?) be perplexed by the sudden Islamophilism of the DNC.

How interesting it is -- or am I wrong about this? -- that the DNC would be of nearly one mind that it is wrong for any leader to seek God's guidance in starting war, and yet it is somehow right for leaders to seek God's guidance in ending war. How interesting it is that the DNC would countenance a prayer by a man asking for exclusive privileges for a certain set of special people, the good people, and that there would be no such privileges on those God has kindly chosen to "doom." And how interesting it is that God should -- with the Democrats' help and Islam's fervent plea -- bring an end to "occupation" and procure "equality" for all.

Ahh, men.



PEACE.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

The Existence Of God: A Letter To Christopher Hitchens

Dear Mr. Hitchens,

You are a man of tremendous talent. I am always amazed not only by your erudite prose (so precise and elegant), but also your wits. You remind me a bit of William F. Buckley Jr.; though he is loathed by many, he is surely not loathed for being dull-witted. You may not like the comparison with a man so thoroughly conservative. But surely you must agree that both of you possess mastery over language; surely you agree that such mastery is desirable in all thinking men and women and secretly envied by most. My envy is not one whit secret: your offhand comments are more substantive than my highest order cogitations. Most men struggle to express what you simply toss off parenthetically. Minds like yours assemble in one sentence what others destroy in whole paragraphs. I thank you for the inspiration.

But I am not always convinced you are as critical as you should be. While I respect that you might describe yourself as a self-interested libertine in a fight against Islamofascists intent on, at best, revoking your license; while I agree with the thrust of this fight and that much of Islam threatens our freedoms; I am not sure I agree with your suggestion that religion in general is a threat to human life and dignity. Your recent comments on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" -- indicative of your thoughts on religion in general -- strike me as passionately spoken and yet intellectually stunted. Permit me to refresh your memory. The reason (partly) for Mr. Matthews' interview with you and Jerry Brown, as you might recall, was the recent lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI in which the Holy Father made the unfortunate decision -- or so you averred -- to quote a crusading emperor's feelings regarding Islam's contributions to the world. You said:

"The fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel, who had said the Koran was wicked because it preached spreading faith by the sword. And I can‘t imagine who advised the pope to do this. The Muslim world is always saying, falsely, that it‘s being attacked by a Crusade, a Zionist conspiracy and all this nonsense. And now you have somebody invoking and reviving the idea of the Crusader period and talking as if only Islam has ever spread its faith by violence.…

"It shows secularism is our only friend. And what we‘re fighting for is the secular enlightenment against all forms of unreason and theocracy…"

What's quite clear in (all) your comments is that you admit Islam and Roman Catholicism are both claiming revelation; such revelations have led to bloodshed and tyrannous coercion: both faiths wield a weapon -- one a sword, another a scimitar. This, I would gather, simply expresses your belief. Am I wrong?

Even if I am fallible here, I am not fallible in describing your belief that secularism is the friend of all thinking humans. Of course, by secularism you must mean those systems of thought and order which are solely derived from unencumbered reason: you await a complete "enlightenment against all forms of unreason." If you're are at all credal, this, I bet, would be your creed.

Now it would not necessarily win me a single polemical point if I mentioned that the secular state of the Soviet Union, a state committed solely to reason and the mechanization of society according to reason's laws, was itself prone to wielding something like a sword. The Soviet sword, however, was a bit more like a hammer and a sickle, where thinking humans were either pounded into submission or sickled down like so many weeds. Furthermore, this reasonable state was heaped in philosophical idealism, in a religious historical determinism which believed such enlightenment was an inevitable fact of temporal forces: the proletariat would and must seize control of their fate. In short, even Soviet reasonableness was clouded by unreason. For it might be the case that to believe solely in the inevitable force of reason is to be as unreasonable as any religious clod in the street. And it might be the case that those, like you, who hold reason rather high, might be forgetting something.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

I hope, Mr. Hitchens, that you will not mind if I share with you an argument that came together in my mind during my sophomore year in college. You see, while I was studying The History of Philosophy, Part II, under the tutelage of my professor, Malcolm Reid, something Dr. Reid said about Immanuel Kant transformed my very soul. It was really a remark made in passing that was then shaped into a question by a classmate, Nathan Stoltzfus. The remark was about Kant's idea of a transcendental ego; the question was whether Kant had unwittingly proven God's existence. I will skip the part about the proof. But I can't skip what fascinated me to no end: the part about the very nature of knowing oneself.

I wonder if you will permit me the following. I wonder if you will accept these simple subject/object propositions: I see a tree; I observe a lemon; I touch this keyboard. For surely these simple propositions are as basic to empiricism and reason as one can find. You and I can even agree to criteria that will give us some reasonable certainty that I am in fact seeing, observing and touching these very things; that such things are indeed there to be seen and touched. But I wonder if you will permit me this proposition: I see I. Or, perhaps I can state it this way: I observe myself. What do you think? Is there a problem with this?

Forgive the didactic nature of my comments here; forgive that I should presume to teach you a thing about basic philosophy, about simple epistemology. But there is a gnawing problem here, one that gnaws at one's guts. And since you believe that religious faith is unreasonable in contrast to secularism, I am left believing that you cannot have possibly chewed on this problem long enough.

Let me pose the problem this way. Can you observe yourself? Of course, we hear people all the time say that they can and do observe themselves. They do not mean they observe themselves in a mirror or portrait; they mean that they observe their own minds with their own minds. They mean a type of mental mirror, a sort of self-reflection. But I ask you, if you can observe yourself, who is doing the observing? If you can examine yourself, who, or what, is doing the examining? Or are you a self observing yourself observing yourself? Can you even do that without reflecting, like so many parallel facing mirrors, ad infinitum?

Surely you see the conundrum. Though we can have things outside of ourselves be objects of our own consciousness, we are not able to make our own consciousness an object of itself. It is not possible for the subject to be its own object; it's not possible for the knower to simultaneously know himself. It is a bit like Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty: one can't measure the position or velocity of a particle without affecting either (and hence one can't be certain of either). Thus, we cannot prove to ourselves that we even have selves: it is not possible to make one's mind an object of scrutiny. How then does each of us even know we have a self?

We know this by extrapolation made in faith. It is faith, not certainty, that is at the bottom of our 'certainty.' I cannot prove to you I exist, because I cannot prove my own existence even to myself. I have to make a leap of faith that I exist, or that my existence and mind and thoughts correspond at all to the reality outside my very being. There is no one who is not faith-full. Faith is the very basis of human epistemology. You can be certain of it.

This, at least to me, is what I got out of Dr. Reid's simple remark about Kant's transcendental ego. And I believe this all proves that no one is free of being religious, or, in your words, unreasoned.

IS THIS FAIR?

I do not know if you really ever forgot, as I implied above, this fact of human consciousness forced on us by reality. I do not know if you have not thought all this through before and have some proper and compelling answer. But I will state that I cannot imagine anyone would not agree that faith inheres in all people; that even the possibility of having souls that can believe or doubt is akin to revelation. I recognize the concomitant anxiety this all portends, for if we all share this fact of faith, we are left a bit at sea: what revelation, if any, is the most truthful? After all, if we cannot prove our own selves to our selves, how can we prove -- or, more interestingly -- disprove, the existence of God?

The battle afoot, Mr. Hitchens, is not really a battle between civilizations or for civilization. Such a battle is superficial and a true distraction. To limit this battle to mere clashes of peoples is to descend into quagmire. What this battle is, is nothing more than the very battle of wisdom, of what is real, true, and actual; about the nature of knowledge and the very cosmos; about the essence of humanity and the nature of God. This is a battle between lies and truth, between heresy and orthodoxy, between Satan and God. It is a battle that has been raging since Eden. And it is all contained in God's first question to Adam and Eve after they fled that lost paradise: Where are you?

Where, oh, where are we indeed. The answer, obviously, cannot come from ourselves.

Peace to you, dear sir.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Christopher Hitchens, Clash of civilizations, God, Faith, Philosophy, Epistemology, Chris Matthews, Hardball, William F. Buckley

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part IV

[Part I of this series begins here.]

I've never known a person not touched by evil, pain, suffering. But I have known many people who have never known joy.

The other day, while I was sitting in a park photographing cedar waxwings (not my photo), an old salt-of-the-earth New Englander asked me a question. He had recently seen a bird, a black bird with red patches on its wings. "I have never seen one before. Do you know what it was?" I cheerfully told him that it was one of my favorites, the red-winged blackbird (not my photo either). I told him all I knew of the bird, and the old man continued on his way. But it was clear that the man, who surely seemed to have his wits about him, had never seen what is utterly a common bird in New England. Since the beginning of this essay (this morning) I have had several visit my feeders just outside the window, and they are always busy flitting about wetlands everywhere. They are remarkably obvious birds, extremely chatty, very active. It is hard to imagine that there are people around who have not seen one of them.

But then again, there are all kinds of things that surprise us, not least of which is that there are people who have never even been loved. This may be too hard for us to entertain even in the most detached, academic way. We do not know how such a fact could ever be possible. But reality is often too much for us, especially when that reality so thoroughly contradicts our experience: There are people who have not been loved for one second of their lives. How could this happen?

Perhaps there is some solace, and a small answer, in the pronouncement that God loves those who are unloved, or even unlovable. But it is not a very convincing sort of solace; we are not convinced that this is enough to restore someone who has never been loved to any sense of self worth. After an encounter with a very sad man on a city street (I was working as a photojournalist at the time), and after a very brief argument with an editor at the newspaper where I worked, I wrote the following poem:

In human interest

I submit the photoshopped images to the news queue
a disfigured head, gigantesque in its distortion
twisted grin his normal straight

brow like the elephant man’s

I pull them up to show you and you
give a face that has sales written all over it

I remember meeting this news feature
before you either saw him as news or
even as a feature:

He was sitting on a bench, where else?
on Main Street near Railroad Ave.
his head twice the size of most
fairground balloons

I wondered whether he had ever been touched

What’s your name? I asked.

Johhhhhnnnyyyy! he replied, Ya gaht aaany mmmonnney?

I emptied my pockets, a few bucks and I handed it to him.
At that instant a cab pulled up to the curb, and Johnny
jumped in. I laughed, but knew I’d be back for more.

I say, I wonder if anyone ever loved him.

You say, you’re too philosophical to be a
journalist.

I say, thank you. Really.

You walk away muttering about your circulation.

***

It seems like a loveless world. Darwin tells us, when we really think about it, that it is all about competition: there is no equality in Darwin's mean streets, there is no rest or peace or promise of uninterrupted comfort anywhere on the face of the earth. We balk at this, or we kick at the portents of atheism in so much Darwin-inspired, dread-saturated, post-modern emptiness. We wonder how a people who demand so much meaning out of life, who expect justice and love and joy, could have evolved from a primordial ooze that is utterly without meaning. How does the desire for purpose evolve from purposelessness; how does the want for love evolve from lovelessness?

Life does not seem fair: the child born with no face (as shown recently on TV); the newborn boy discarded in a garbage pail, now pushed from orphanage to orphanage; those families crammed into railroad cars heading toward gas chambers. I ask how it is that, if we've evolved from nothing, we then don't blame nothing for evil, or how we even see anything as evil at all. Why, if the radical evolutionists are right, why do we even care about suffering, or why would we blame God, if, indeed, there is no God at all? How did we get here, when our starting point was the void? It's as if we fundamentally defy as creatures the very physics of the universe, where it is a law that you can't get more energy out of a thing than what's in it. How is it that humans can demand, inspire or expect more meaning and love than the meaningless, loveless universe from whence they came can ever offer?

***

Did God create death camps? Did God create cigarettes, guns, nuclear bombs, chainsaws, alcohol, crystal meth? Is God responsible for polluted rivers, polluted air? Did He make us fly jets across the Atlantic, scarring the atmosphere; did He make us fly planes into skycrapers, skyscrapers that He built on fill in Lower Manhattan?

If there is a proof for the existence of God I might think it resides here, that humans blame Him for the things they created. One might also find an argument for the existence of God in His apparent absence: if I were God I might hide from humanity too. But there really is nothing hidden about God, as He is evident in every wingbeat of the red-winged blackbird. Heidegger's haunting question might even help us see God even where Heidegger could not: How is that there is anything here at all? What keeps everything from slipping into the abyss of non-being?

For some of us, the question might get us to begging, begging for a miracle. We want intervention (and we want it NOW!) not realizing that the very squirrels and birds and grasses and winds are divine signs. God is at work. Jesus may have impressed His disciples by walking on water. But the miracle is not in the walking, it is in the water; that there is any water at all. Raising the dead is miraculous, no doubt, but not anymore miraculous than that there was any person who lived in the first place. Sadly, we are too dulled, or too fearful, to live in the miraculous. We comfort ourselves in the presence of natural laws, oblivious, mostly, that the predictability of nature is often illusory and, more importantly, that the very laws themselves are miraculous. Breathing is really more of a miracle than Christ's resurrection. In fact, I believe He rose from the dead to prove that very thing, granting us life eternal so that we might breathe forevermore. But we hardly notice the miraculous in the commonplace until the wind is knocked out of us, or when we sense our last inhale will indeed be our very last.

***

We can ask where God is in the midst of suffering, as long as we are asking where we are in the midst of it, too. As we have seen, God has taken the blame for creation, for suffering, for evil; and He has taken the blame for things He did not even create. There should be joy in this news; we should receive this news with dancing and laughter and merriment. But we have even grown used to joy, I am afraid, even when it comes so rarely; good news is old news, and even joy seems tired, boring, predictable. We are too worldly to laugh, to dance in the freedom of forgiveness, to drink deep draughts of holy, redeemed merriment. Holiness, joy, redemption, forgiveness -- these are greeted with a big yawn by the all-knowing sophisticates we think we are. We snicker at the idea of a banquet with a Holy Family, because we know families, and they are all broken and disappointing. Laugh for a while, we say, but before long you'll be at each others' throats, just like so many holidays with our own too-often unholy families. Heaven? bliss? No thanks. That's for those who need such assurances.

***

The Christian message is simple regarding suffering, and it is painful. God loves both the murderer and the murdered, and He knows what it is to be both. He cannot stop being all-knowing, all-present, and thus is always both victim and victimizer. To intervene in world affairs in terms familiar to us, action figures that we think we are, would be for God to have to choose sides. But God is, until time has run out, on all sides: He is a Yankees and Red Sox fan; He roots for Manchester United as fervently as He roots for Arsenal. In short, He cheers on people, not ideologies, except the Gospel itself. He did not root for Hitlerism, but surely He adored Hitler. He did not root for Arafat's hatred, but surely He loved Arafat. He did not love the blood on King David's hands, but surely He loved the hands that were David's. The red-winged blackbird killed by a goshawk in my yard recently, killed right before my eyes, was no less loved by God than the goshawk that carried the dead bird away. After all, had God stopped the hawk from smashing that helpless blackbird into the side of my house, right next to me, would He not have had to bring the whole cosmos to a halt?

The Gospel of Christ declares this: That God loves you more than He loves His own life, and even His own joy. Better to be with you in hell than in heaven without you. Better to crucify the Creator than to stop Creation. Better to bring God to a screeching halt than the hawk in its deadly flight. Better to bring God to the grave than Hitler to annihilation.

Strange, though, how few people point out that Hitler was indeed stopped. No one seems to thank God for that, do they? Perhaps God did intervene -- perfectly, the only way Omniscience can. He KNOWS what He is doing, right? Otherwise, He can't be God. And if He is not God, we are indeed pitiable, and lost.

"Come unto me, all you who labor, and I will give you rest." It is always a good thing to remember that the very first miracle that Jesus performed was to make more wine. Sounds exactly like the sort of message one would expect of a God who cares, who pays attention.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil, The New Yorker

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part III: To Hell With Jesus

[I post this essay with trepidation. It is a long entry in this series on good and evil. But it is a necessary one. That is not where my fear lies. I am afraid that I have gone too far. (Part I of this series begins here.)]

This series began with Pope Benedict XVI praying at Auschwitz. It won't end there, not because I am interested in following the Holy Father to another scene, but because the issue of good and evil has no earthly terminus. We will be asking questions until answers are finally given.

In the February 6, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, in an article called "Forgiveness", author Timothy W. Ryback discusses the Pope's difficult past –– of growing up in Nazi Germany and serving in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi military. But in Ryback's piece one reads the following about then-professor Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) teaching at the University of Tübingen as a young man:

In 1966, when Ratzinger arrived in Tübingen, the university was a center of theological dispute. Students disrupted lectures with cries of "Verflucht sei Jesus!" ("To hell with Jesus!"). Protestant faculty members endorsed flyers denouncing the crucifix as "an expression of sadomasochistic glorification of suffering."

We have already spoken of both human indifference and human culpability regarding suffering and evil. I have argued that humanity is remarkably silent about horrors, except when it comes to horrors and God, and then humanity is quite boisterous about God's alleged weakness, moral turpitude, indifference, or even His non-existence. If there is a God, God is to blame; He's the one who must give account, He is the one who must be judged. God is the source of horrors.

***

I cannot think of a more complex religious image: the Vicar of Christ, the Pope of the Holy Catholic Church, a former Hitler youth and soldier in the Nazi cult, standing at Auschwitz. It is a stillpoint; it is the crux of the matter. Can a sinner be a saint? Are redemption and sanctification possible? Does God love the indifferent and brutal as much as He loves the compassionate and merciful? Does God love the abuser as much as he loves the abused? Are Hitler and Elie Wiesel (a famous Holocaust survivor) loved equally by God?

There is something essentially Christian about Benedict XVI standing within the gates of death. There is something essentially Christian about the very idea of redemption: St. Paul, the outstanding Jew who was a murderer, is the quintessence of the Christian message: all are saved who would be saved. God, as St. Paul says, takes the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; He is a God of gracious irony, proving that grace, love and mercy always trump the rules. My own earthly father taught me this: he taught me that he loved me more than he loved his rules, his reputation, his honor. I was more important than a statute, a commandment. The sheep is more important than the sheepfold; a hole in the fence did not mean that the fence was broken but that a sheep was lost, and in jeopardy. God cares for the lost, He pursues them; and He finds them in order to make them whole. This is what my father taught me, and it is essentially Christ's message to the world.

And yet there is a whole world of people who believe that rules are God; that a lost sheep deserves his or her plight; that the fence should just be fixed to keep only the good sheep in, and the bad sheep out.

Perhaps I am rambling, but I ramble over brambles and thorns to get to one important point, a point that might indeed save one sheep from a disasterous decision, and that point is this: To hell with Jesus indeed!

***

I have said it before and I will say it again: The Christian gospel has it all exactly right. Christianity is separated from all other religions by having, not the valley climb to the summit, but the summit tumble down to the valley. There is no Moses climbing to receive a Word from God in the Gospel story; there is no Muhammad receiving the very words of a radically transcendent God whose message is all about making men better men. The message of Christianity is about a God tumbling to Hell in order to make God a better God. I border on blasphemy, I know, but hear me out.

***

Years ago I was painting a school gymnasium with a college friend when a horse fly, a large nasty bloodthirsty fly with stinging jaws, landed on my friend's leg. My friend was quick to snatch it, and, in the course of looking at it, my friend asked me if the pest was "one of the nasty biting flies". I told him that it was indeed, and that it was cousin to the smaller though no less nasty deer fly. To my horror, my friend pulled the wings off the fly and tossed it to the ground. "Suffer!" he shouted. I quickly walked over and crushed the wingless fly beneath my foot.

Odd that such a moment should have become a defining moment in my life. Earlier that year I had a young man in my dorm (I was an RA for three years) whose father, an atheist, threw out a stiff challenge to the idea of original sin or original culpability. "Why should God be upset with me if I cannot help but be a sinner? I did not ask to be born. How then am I accountable?" It is a great challenge, and I was stumped for months. But when I crushed the fly beneath my foot, I knew I had an answer. And that answer begins with the character of God. Was my friend, the wing-ripping, sardonic and merciless man before me, anything like the God of the universe? Did God delight in abusing that which itself was abusive; did God aim to punish a fly that was just being itself? Would a just God punish a being that had no choice but to be unpleasant?

The clarity with which I divined my way through the problem took the following course. I imagined that I, an outsider to the fly's world yet a being full of love for all flies, descended to the mere existence of a fly. I was, to a perfect match, a horsefly. And to the other flies I spoke:

I know that you do not know exactly what it is you do. But if I were to tell you that you were an awful, nasty creature, what would you say? If I told you that the things you bite, the things from which you draw your life, are injured viciously by you, and that they loathe you, would you care? Trust me when I say this: I am not blaming you. In fact, let me state that you were even made this way. I made you this way. But now I ask you this. What if I were to tell you that you could become something new, wonderful, lovely? What if I told you I could transform you, I could liberate you from this plight? Would you follow? Would you choose to be new, different, lovely, though still in essence who you were created to be? Would you choose to be more lovely than the butterflies if I promised you such wonder? Or would you reject me?

My question to you, dear reader, is this: If I really could transform the flies, if I really could deliver them from their plight and I showed them incontrovertibly that I could, who would be responsible if they refused? If the flies could be completely transformed and yet essentially remained their fully undifferentiated selves, and they refused so great a blessing, who is to blame if they chose to remain nasty biting bugs? Surely not their creator, even if He, indeed, had created them to bite. For now He was offering them a singular gift, a chance to participate in their creation; they were to be co-creators in their new lives. But, and here is a critical point, if they refused their new lives, they would be endorsing their viciousness as wonderful and desirable. In short, if they chose to be nasty and untransformed, they would become the sole creators of who and what they were.

For those who have an understanding of the problem of predestination and free will, we come to another crux, another crossroad. For here we see something amazing. Even if the creator of the flies made them to be vicious, should they refuse his offer, they have become their own creators, setting the creator free. The flies can no longer complain that they were made to be mean by someone else: they have freely made their decision, and they have continued in their evil ways. The flies have chosen, and their NO to the creator is the one thing that is truly their own: It is a wondrous act of free will.

However, should any fly choose to be transformed, should any fly choose to be a co-creator in his (or her) re-creation, that fly would make a startling pronouncement: I had nothing to do with it at all! For the fly, now more glorious than a butterfly, would announce that his choice was not of his making, as the wondrous world in which he lived was not his doing: "You see, I am indeed new, but I had nothing to do with either the option or the choosing. I did not present the choice to myself, it came to me; I did not create the idea of a butterfly, it came from above. My assent is hardly a choice. It is more that I have been chosen, for my creator came to me at a point in time with a wonderful bit of news; I did not come to HIM with the news, but He came to me." In other words, the transformed fly would say that his YES to the creator was not really his; he was predestined to be transformed. For he did not come up with the whole idea in the first place. And, as a result, both the creator and created were set free.

So in short, free will means saying NO; but it has nothing to do with saying YES.

Where does this fit in with the problem of evil? It fits right here: that Christ became a fly, was confronted by the vicious who could not be, on their own, otherwise; they submitted Him to capital punishment for making the cosmos in the first place; He died and descended to Hell, and returned as a transcendent butterfly with POWER. And then He said, "You've killed me. I've suffered. I've taken the blame for starting it all; I have taken your sins upon me and called them my own. And now the whole of sin is buried, hidden away, tossed into the abyss. I am the murderer, and the murdered; I am the rapist and the raped; I am the Nazi and the Jew. I have been all things in all ways in all times; you have punished me and I have succumbed. And now that you are no longer to blame, now what? Will you come to me now? For there is no one left to blame."

***

"Verflucht sei Jesus! To Hell with Jesus!" To Hell indeed. For it is the God that was believed to be vindictive and petty, mean and cold, that we discover in Christ is a different God: He is the God who SUFFERS, who succumbs to the death inherent in even the smallest sin. He would rather be in hell with us than in heaven without us. He has come, He has shown us that He is a different God. "Come unto me, and I will give you rest," He offers to Jew, Gentile, and Nazi alike. And yet, and yet …

There are those who refuse, who resist transformation, healing. And in so doing their NO to God becomes a YES to sorrow, sin, death, and suffering. They freely choose to be sole creators in their sorrow; and they resist the gentle Hand that reaches forward. God does not pull off wings; He does not say "Suffer!" We say it in every moment of resistance to transformation; and in keeping our pitiable sorrows we refuse to have our sins transformed to gems. We, those who protest against such grace, true protestants as we are, are the sadomasochists: it's not the God on the Cross who is sadist, masochist. It's the obdurate who view Him that way who are mired in sadomasochism.

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly a little boy in Nazi Germany who helped the Hitler cult perform even one heinous deed, is that perfect emblem of Christianity: The wise are confounded by the grace of a God who saves -- and transforms -- not only that which is lost, but that which is revolting. Grace abounds in Christianity, from sea to sea, star to sun, earth to hearth, Heart to heart. There is no peace without forgiveness, the forgiveness of God toward man, and man toward God; and, most importantly, man to man, woman to woman, brother to sister and Palestinian to Jew. There will be no end to woe without forgiveness. Mark my words.

Forgiveness always requires that something dies, is buried. And then comes the freedom. It is the gospel, the glad tidings. Glad indeed!

Peace to you.

(Concluding thoughts tomorrow, which begin here.)

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved. (Dedicated to James Saunders.)

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil,
The New Yorker

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part II

In Part I of this series, I spoke of suffering, of evil and death; of the Holocaust. I discussed the problem of evil, that the existence of evil proves that God is weak, mean, or both; and that for many people the best conclusion drawn from the harsh realities of suffering is that there is no God at all.

I added my own thoughts on the problem of evil as classically defined, arguing that the problem ignores the obvious assumption in our definition of God, that God is omniscient. As an omniscient Being, God might know that the only way to eradicate evil and suffering from the cosmos is exactly the way we see events unfolding in our lives: omniscience IS at work in every tragedy and in every joy. In other words, God IS doing something, the very thing an all-wise God can only do; and it looks like Life. And it might very well be the case that God was not silent at all during the Holocaust. His voice may indeed have been quite strong. In fact, I have even heard it suggested that had Hitler not been distracted by the Jews in Germany, Poland, France; had Hitler instead ignored them and turned the German machinery of death, destruction and warfare on his enemies, he would have won World War II and far more than 6,000,000 Jews would have been killed. The suggestion posits a heroic idea, that the Jews were something of a glorious sacrifice that saved us all from Nazi tyranny: the Jews were freedom fighters even in their alleged weakness. It was the Jews who destroyed Hitler. Churchill and Roosevelt had nothing to do with it.

This is not an attempt on my part to palliate the evils of the Holocaust, nor am I trying to cheer up the surviving victims of Germany's death camps. I am making a point that God may have indeed been very much at work in profoundly effective and yet strange ways, which is what one would expect of an omniscient God. Omniscience, in fact, may behave in utterly bizarre and contradictory ways; and it may act in obscurity.

A couple of years ago, I had a bit of a spat with a local shop owner about suffering, God, justice. He followed me out to the sidewalk and, in the heat of debate said, "I've done more for the suffering of starving Africans than God ever has." I must say that I understand the sentiment behind this conceit, but I do not understand the conceit. God appears not to be doing anything most of the time; He does not seem to even care. But one of the real problems associated with evil is not that God doesn't care, it's that there is sweepingly broad empirical evidence that most humans don't care either.

About 15 years ago I received a phone call from an old friend grieving about the sad death of a young mother we both knew. My friend was angry at God, for God had let not only Penny (the dead woman) down, He let lots of others down, too. My friend wondered how God could choose not to heed the prayers of Penny and her son, or the prayers of countless people surrounding that tragedy. Even Penny believed that she would be healed! How could God not honor that? How could He be content with yet another motherless child?

After awhile I shared with my friend something that hit my conscience hard. I said that in all of the time that Penny was living, all 26 years of her life, not once had anyone called me to proclaim how glad they were that Penny existed. No one called to praise Penny's smile, her laughter, her sweet goodness. No one called me to praise God for His wonderful creation which was Penny in all her simple glory. No one called to complain that there was not MORE of Penny everywhere; and no one ever said that God was too kind to us all to have created such a wonderful woman in the first place. And yet, in spite of all this silence, people were now mad that God had taken Penny away. Before, there was no gladness around Penny, but after her death there was nothing but madness. No one praised God yesterday, and yet now people were poised to curse Him today.

My friend agreed, and I believe we were both changed during that phone call.

***

I am reminded of something G. K. Chesterton once said. He imagined a rather randy man complaining to God about women and matrimony. "Explain to me God why I can't be with all women?" the man might have asked. To which God replied, "If it comes to that, explain to me why you can be with even one woman?" Chesterton went further, suggesting that Adam and Eve, given the entire cosmos and yet prevented from having just one thing -- an apple -- might have asked God something similar: "Explain to us why we can keep everything we have if we don't have just one thing? Explain why we can't have the apple, too?" God's reply? "Well, if it comes to that, explain the apple."

I am reminded of all this because we often expect an explanation for something taken from us without ever asking ourselves how we were given the thing to begin with. A man may be mad at God when his son is killed in a car wreck; but was he ever grateful to God that he even had a son who would, eventually, die?

What has come to surprise me about many reactions to death and suffering is that people respond with such surprise. When a child dies of a brain tumor or a woman is raped and murdered, one would think that such a thing had never before happened, judging by many survivors' reactions, particularly their reactions toward God. God is to blame, it seems, even though few people take the responsibility for suffering themselves. Like the shopkeeper who thinks he does more to alleviate sorrow than even God, many forget that they are perhaps the reason there is suffering at all. For surely each of us who has had a child knew about rape, murder, disease, fire, pestilence, earthquake, pedophilia, and car crashes BEFORE we had children; surely there is NO ONE on this planet choosing to have children who did not know about these things. And yet, AND YET, knowing this, knowing that death occurs every day; knowing that there are murderers and rapists and wars and droughts and suicides and divorce and cannibals and cancers, and that we nonetheless still choose to have children; all of this should lead us to one question, and one question only: When it comes to suffering and evil, who among us is NOT to blame?

Please note: I am responsible for every bit of suffering my child experiences in life, every bit. Why? Because I knew beforehand that dreadful things MAY happen; I might even have known that they WILL happen, and yet I (not anyone else) CHOSE to bring a child into this world. I am the source of suffering. If there was at least ONE thing I knew before reproducing a child, it was the simple fact that that child will someday DIE.

Interestingly, as I may be responsible for my child's sorrow, I cannot say that I am responsible for my child's joys. And this for the simple reason that before having a child I had no certainty that joy would come his or her way; but I was indeed certain that death MUST come. Life does not guarantee joy, and there is no proof that it ever did, or ever could, or ever will. But every graveyard is proof that even if there is joy, joy, eventually, falls into the ground. With family planning the only guarantee one has is death.

But since sorrow is one of life's guarantees, we can be glad that joy, should it come, is one of life's infinitely wonderful privileges. After all, there is no joy if one is entitled to it; there is no bliss if bliss is one's guaranteed right. Joy can only come in the form of a surprise or it is not joy. Hence, we take a gamble with every breath and in every birth. We hope, we pray; we throw our chance into the hand of omniscience. Surely we cannot blame God when things go wrong, particularly when we don't "blame" Him when things go remarkably right. But when things do go right, surely we are out there thanking God for the privilege of simple existence.

Well, one can only hope.

More tomorrow. [Part III begins here.]

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part I

Perhaps this will not help at all.

Pope Benedict XVI stood at Auschwitz this past weekend. He entered death chambers. He knelt before the gates of death, and he prayed. And then there was a rainbow.

It is not that the several elements, the prayers and presence of a Pope and a rainbow, are causally connected. It is that we hope they are.

Auschwitz is that geographic point that exists like an oracular black hole. Oracles, as you know, were where pilgrims traveled to hear news from the divine, hopefully good news, though usually not. Auschwitz is like an oracle in reverse: there is nothing proclaimed there, only asked. But no answer comes in that crushing dark, the oppressive silence. Auschwitz is the place of questions, the abyss with no answers. We plead for God, and God hides behind veils of smoke, the smoke of burning bodies. Atop gas chambers, birds sing. God says nothing.

The problem of evil, at least in theology, is framed something like this: If God is all-powerful and all-good, He could or would stop evil. Since there is evil, God is either not all-powerful or all-good. Many philosophers have chosen to dismiss God as not all-powerful, needing God to be at least all-benevolent. Many have rejected the idea of God altogether in light of the facts of evil and suffering. And a few malcontents have chosen to see God as so much badness, a real sadist in the sky.

Those theologians and philosophers who believe that God must be both omnipotent and benevolent often defend Him by noting God's free choice to give humanity free will; as such, He permitted us to make a mess of things. And so we have. Of course, really shrewd thinkers note that if God did in fact design humanity and the cosmos this way He is still responsible for starting the whole thing in the first place. Free will arguments don't really absolve God of apparent culpability.

Pope Benedict XVI, like countless other people before him, stood at Auschwitz and asked, “Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?" Of course, I recognize that the Holy Father is asking the question rhetorically; that he is revealing his humanity, his compassion, and his ability to identify with doubt, sorrow, pain. He is like the Psalmist, or like the prophets before him: How long, O, Lord, will you let our enemies prevail? Even the Christian Savior asked in His darkest hours, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Women huddled in a gas chamber asked the question with perfect lucidity.

If readers will permit, I would like to confront the problem of evil (theodicy) in a few posts here at Contratimes. And the first place I would like to start is with the problem itself. For it strikes me as self-evident that the classic problem, that God can't be either omnipotent or benevolent before the facts of evil, is thoroughly wrong-headed.

Not long ago I called a radio talk program to join in on a conversation about this very problem. The guest was a former professor of mine, Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, and I asked if anyone had considered whether perhaps an omniscient God, one knowing everything in a state of all-wisdom, would KNOW that the only way to overcome evil in the world is to overcome evil exactly the way we see things working out every day. For all any one of us knows, an all-wise God would say to us, "You know, I am destroying evil, I am alleviating suffering; and this is the ONLY way for me to do so. This is omniscience intervening." In other words, omniscience would know exactly how to destroy the evil and suffering that besets all creatures, and that destruction might be what we are witnessing in every breath and in every sunset. There can be no other way. Should God just step in and stop, for instance, Hitler from killing Jews, then a far greater evil may follow. Oddly, the talk show host would have none of this: She wanted to blame God for being weak or malevolent. She could not buy the idea of omniscience. And I believe that she could not buy it because she had never thought of it before.

Peter Kreeft, as would be expected of a philosopher, ran with the question. He added that some have speculated that if Hitler had not committed suicide, for example, and that he was instead arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, we might find ourselves living under the dreaded Nazi flag today. For a person cannot tell how one thing ultimately influences another; one cannot tell what is materially the less evil path in the long run. One can only hope; one can only stand on principles when confronting injustice and evil. But one cannot know, unless one is God, whether one's actions will have an ill or healthy effect on the world. Kreeft's words were engaging, and correct.

Hopefully Dr. Kreeft won't mind if I put his words differently. If it were up to us, our battle with evil might be a bit like administering antibiotics: they appear to work as a victorious solution to infections, but in the long run, antibiotics may in fact have weakened humanity's innate abilities to self-immunize. The infections we beat short-term may have been overcome long-term by themselves had we just waited long enough for the human immune system to evolve. One simply does not know. Nor does doltish humanity know what God's sudden "dramatic" intervention might look like, or what effect it might have.

But the assumption in all theological discussions is that God does indeed know. God is either omniscient or He is not. If He is not, it is awfully hard to call Him God. And if He is omniscient, then one can only conclude that the very reality we are in is the best reality for overcoming sin, evil and suffering. To return to the antibiotic image for a second, it would be wrong for a sceptic to conclude that because there is a battle between cells in a person's body the antibiotics are not working, for the battle is proof that they are. If anyone concludes that an antibiotic that does not work "fast enough" (for whom?) or "well enough" is neither potent nor good, that person should be reminded that there are plenty of measures one can take to instantly and completely eradicate an infection. Killing the patient is one such measure. But good doctors are a bit like God. They are wise to the idea that killing the bad often takes time so as not to kill the good. God could perhaps instantly wipe the earth clean of all evil, but what would be left, and where is the wisdom in that?

And yet there is one more thing that complicates matters, and it is a hard pill to swallow: God is that antibody that loves everyone. In other words, God, who is love as well as justice, and who exists as the only all-wise being, loves the very persons many of us consider evil. This is alarming for many of us, but it is Christianity's truest, boldest and most controversial assertion: God loved the Jews in the gas chambers as much as he loved Hitler outside them; God loves the victimizer as much as any victim. It is almost too difficult to even write, let alone admit into one's reflections on these matters. But it must be true. God cannot HATE what we might hate; His wisdom must not be void of love or justice, nor can His love and justice be void of wisdom. God loved Hitler, and all other disgusting tyrants, as much as He loves any of us. And we know Christ the Shepherd leaves the beloved flock to find the one beloved stray, even if that stray is a rebel. That is the most difficult problem in the eradication of evil: How does God eradicate it without destroying everybody, and everything? How does God purge humanity of evil without destroying the entire body?

Only an omniscient Being has the knowledge, and power, to do that. Or there is no such Being at all.

More tomorrow, I hope. (Part II begins here.)

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
[Related post at WI Catholic can be read here.]

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil

Thawing The Big Chill: More From The Religious Left

If I were pressed as to what defines this website, I would suggest that Contratimes is devoted to pointing out the hypocrisies and contradictions of the Religious Left. This is not this site's exclusive target, but if the entirety of my essays was boiled down, the remaining precipitate would consist mostly of a confrontation with my brothers and sisters on the Left who dwell in the halls of religion.

Somewhere it was said that "As the Church goes, so goes the culture." It is a debatable claim, of course, but it smacks of truth. My conflict with the Religious Left deals almost exclusively with a point which they make constantly: that the Religious Right is intent on creating a theocracy in America. For the sake of argument, I will stipulate that the Left is right, the Religious Right is filled with theocrats. But that is only part of the story, even a small part. For the essence of the story is this: The Religious Left are the real theocrats, expending far more energy shaping America into the image they think most pleases God, and they are blind to their own zeal. THAT is the essence of the story, and it is no doubt the essential goal of this website to make that fact clear. Indeed it is clear that as the Left wing of the Church goes, so goes the culture.

In one of the first Contratimes posts, "The God Of Love," I asked readers' permission to "announce my rejection of Christ. For if Christianity is as the United Church of Christ (UCC) suggests in its recent TV commercial, then I have no interest in being a Christian..." What follows continues in that vein, for I have read the "alternative State of the Union address" given by the National Council of Church's affiliate "Faithful America," and I'll be damned if I do not loathe it. I would ask that you read it. It is an amazing piece of rhetoric. And it pushes me even farther away from the Christ the Left adores.

Please realize that I am not suggesting that I approve of President Bush's speech or that his vision of the Christ is mine. It would be remiss of me to suggest that I even know what Mr. Bush believes about Jesus (the Christ). I know nothing. But I do know that Christ is not a socialist or a capitalist; He is non-partisan, I hope, through and through. If Jesus is indeed God Incarnate, which the Church has asserted for nearly 2,000 years, then it seems reasonable to conclude that He loves both the poor and the rich, equally. He is no "respecter of persons," to quote the King James Version of the Christian Bible. Christ loves all (and confronts all, too).

With that said, please note the grotesque irony of Mr. Vince Isner's citing of the Jewish prophet Micah at the outset of Mr. Isner's alternative State of the Union address: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?" For Mr. Isner offers little mercy to those with whom he disagrees, particularly the President of the United States. And talk about "walking humbly." Read this by Mr. Isner and ask yourself if this is not the most gratuitous self-congratulation you've ever seen:

"As persons of faith and conscience we hold ourselves to a standard that measures more than our economic wealth and military might. We recognize that we are more than consumers, voters in red or blue states, taxpayers, polling numbers, demographics, target markets and all the rest. As human beings living together on this planet we know that we are, as the Judeo-Christian tradition reminds us – our brother's and our sister's keepers."

You see, Mr. Isner is not like them, not like those greed-freaks who only see GDP and net profits. Isner is MORE than a consumer; he is more than a militarist, a taxpayer, a polling number. He is deep, humane, genuine; a caregiver. Of course, a President of the United States ostensibly involved in running a country on secular principles is not really supposed to be interested in the ontological and moral dimensions of Mr. Isner's personality; that's the Church's job. But more importantly, Mr. Isner is convinced, or so his mercy suggests, that President Bush is less than human. Mr Isner is "more."

And then note this:

"We are also the living agents of Micah's prophetic call. So let us examine just how we are doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly."

It seems Mr. Isner believes we should assess the United States of America, its entire government, according to the strictures of a Jewish prophet (whose audience, by the way, was not American at all). Clearly, Americans should submit to the Left's most beloved sacred texts and toss to the wind the separation of Church and State. That, to the Left, is what they mean by "doing justice," I presume.

As for Mr. Isner's explicit statements about American justice, he enlightens us with this:

"Few of us would dare approach the Supreme Court and openly declare, 'My views are better, truer, and more important, than theirs and therefore you should interpret the law in light of me.'

"That is why special interests choose the BACK door when trying to influence the courts. Recently some well-funded and organized fundamentalist groups have used massive media events to help load the open seats on the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative judges sympathetic to their fundamentalist agenda. They even said that those who disagree with them are “against people of faith.”

This speech, I realize, is offered in the name of faith, even in the name of Christ. So let us take seriously what Mr. Isner says about the "back door" and "fundamentalist groups" in his, well, reductionistic and unmerciful look at his fellow citizens. One wonders what planet he is on, for there are all sorts of groups using the back door of the judiciary, leftists and rightists and yes, even "people of faith." Does anyone really believe that the "right to privacy" found in the Constitution justifying the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision walked through the judiciary's front door? Does anyone really think that "special interests" during the Alito hearings were not pounding on the back door of Senators Schumer, Leahy, Kerry and Kennedy's chambers to resist the electorate's will, which elected, through the front door, a President who would appoint justices sympathetic to his convictions? Come, Mr. Isner. Surely you think your ideas are better than others.' How else to explain your "alternative" speech. You don't take us for fools, do you?

And there's this true conundrum:

"People of faith in the United States of America do not march lock step [sic] to the drums of fundamentalism, and we must resist the claims of those who claim to speak for people of faith and conscience everywhere."

Hmm. Does Mr. Isner realize that he has just spoken for people of faith everywhere : "People of faith ... do not march lock step [sic] ..."? Oh, yes, they do, Mr. Isner. They march in lockstep to the drumbeats of the National Council of Churches.

I can't stop myself:

"It is an arrogant dinner guest who seizes the conversation and shouts his proclamation so loudly that nobody else can speak. That is why all who love their faith and their country must work to insure [sic] that everyone has a voice around the national table. It is only through dialogue, the free expression of ideas, and respect for all points of view can justice reach its full height."

So much for respecting the points of view of those with whom you disagree, Mr. Isner. And I guess it's not an act of arrogance for a man of "faith" to presume to draft and deliver an alternative State of the Union address. God forbid that Mr. Bush's views are part of the free expression of ideas.

Alas! I'm snowballing! Read on:

"The world has been shocked and outraged by the revelation that the U.S. has engaged ... in torture of its detainees. ... Yet using 9/11, the White House has tragically adopted a policy that bears little resemblance to the example of Christ."

So Christ is indeed the model for American governance. Unite theocrats everywhere! And now I know why I am not a theocrat, nor am I fit to be in the liberal Christian halls: I am too dumb! I mean, I don't understand this at all:

"Looking at the earth from space, only a degree or two separates shadow from light."

I am glad to know that not only is Mr. Isner humble, merciful and just, he is an astronaut.

And so much for kindness and not sowing seeds of fear:

"Congress' cruel and reckless decision to cut billions from aid programs may seem like a small shift in a massive budget, but that tiny shift is critical to those already on life's margins. The consequences will be real – in the form of more children frozen into lives of poverty, young people succumbing to the fever of despair, unable to afford an education. ... On February 1, the House will have one final chance to vote on what has been called one of the most immoral budgets in American History [sic]. If it passes, millions will suffer needlessly."

Congressmen are "cruel" and "reckless," poised to pass the most "immoral budget" in "American History," (which is a course offered at Mr. Isner's alma mater, I believe).

Lastly, let it be noted that in not one single paragraph of Mr. Isner's lengthy speech is there anything resembling an argument. Not one paragraph! Accusations abound, as do insinuations. But not one conclusion backed by evidence. For shame!

I think my point has been made, and it is not a fun one. The Religious Left is really nothing other than the Democratic Party platform in religious vestments. There is nothing distinctly new here, nor is there anything uniquely Christian. What there is is the use of religion to inform the State, and to silence criticism of the Left's religiously held agenda. It is the citation of Scripture in order to make subjective what should be objective: If God has spoken through Mr. Isner, who can disagree? You see, Mr. Isner claims to want to keep open a national dialogue, but it is mere lip-service. If "God has spoken through the prophets," what else, then, can be said?

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

[Photo: Ice melting from tree branch. Dublin Lake, Dublin, NH.]

The Problem Of Prophets: The Amazing Maze

Recently, prophecy has been wildly popular, or at least wildly prevalent. Pat Robertson suggested that Ariel Sharon was perhaps ill as a result of his misdeeds, with God protecting the land of Israel from being divided. Two days ago, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pronounced that God wanted New Orleans to be "chocolate", and that God was punishing America with hurricanes for its involvement in Iraq.

Following two posts on this topic (here and here), this post is an exploration of prophecy as it plays out in Protestant America, particularly in Protestant Evangelical America. If you are not religiously inclined and yet are interested in the problem - and I think there is a problem - then I welcome you to the discussion. But for the most part this post is written to and for Christians, particularly those who are Evangelical in doctrine, worship and identity.†

First, this observation. Prophecy is not confined to religious conservatives. Leftists augur all the time. Leftists offer dire predictions about the consequences of war, for example, particularly war in Iraq. Leftists deign that 9/11 occurred, not as retribution because of sexual immorality, like some conservatives suggested, but because of greed or imperialism or conservatism in general. Religious leftists, like Jimmy Creech or Gene Robinson, believe that certain leftist ideals are indeed God's ideals. And Karl Marx, the leftist par excellence, predicted with religious devotion that history must culminate in the socialist state.

With that in mind, I would like to take a look at the problem facing the many churches in America who believe A) that the Bible is the final, authoritative revelation of God, and B) that the prophetic voice is alive in the Church.

To begin, let us look at the following articles from Statements of Faith accepted by four well-known Protestant denominations - the United Methodist (UM), The Church of the Nazarene (COTN), The Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA), and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (CCCC). I have highlighted in bold the salient feature I wish to discuss:

UM (1992): The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

COTN: We believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, by which we understand the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, so that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith.

EFCA: (We believe) The Scriptures, both Old & New Testaments, to be the inspired Word of God, without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for the salvation of men, and the Divine and final authority for all Christian faith and life.

CCCC: We believe the Bible consisting of the Old and New Testament, to be the only inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word of God written.

Each of these differs slightly from another, but there is one clear fact: The Bible is deemed final, not only in matters of authority, but in revelation. In short, what each of these hold in common is the belief that Christian revelation is closed, that the canon or scriptures are complete, and that nothing more can be added. In fact, as a warning against adding to the Christian revelation, particularly aimed at those intent on creating cults, this New Testament passage is often invoked by the Faith's defenders: "I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book." (Rev. 22:18)

For my purpose here, I want to solely focus on the CCCC statement that the Bible is the "only inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word of God written."

Now, what follows is an argument I presented (in a formal letter) to a CCCC church about 8 years ago. The reaction I received was interesting: I was called to a meeting with the Church's senior and associate pastors, and the chairman of the elders. It seemed I was a problem. Here is what I asked them, in part and essentially:

"If the canon of scripture is closed, as the CCCC statement of faith suggests, if it is the only inspired, infallible, inerrant, authoritative Word of God written, then why are men and women permitted, in this particular church, to exercise the 'gift of prophecy?'"

Perhaps a little background will help. I was attending a CCCC church wherein periodically a man would stand up in the middle of a church service, raising his voice, booming out something that always began like this: "Oh, my people! I have heard your cries, I have seen your ..." You get the picture. Needless to say, every time this happened, I was freaked out. It seemed so, well, confusing, disorienting, and, more pertinently, subjective. Was this man actually channeling the Spirit of God? Who could tell?

Well, I could, and he was not (and yet, confident as I was, doubts nonetheless assailed me). Most of this man's prophecies were cut-and-pasted regurgitations of well-known biblical passages, drawn largely from the Psalms and Minor Prophets. They were offered in stentorian voice, and were just dripping with emotions, some urgent, some maudlin, some dire and confrontational. My heart literally shook when this guy spoke, and it goes without exaggeration that he confused many people: Was God really speaking? Really?

But this man is not the only sort of prophet in churches. There are others, more subtle, less flamboyant. There's the praise leader that says that God has told her the praise band should do such and such. There's the man at the men's prayer breakfast who announces that God has told him to quit his job. There's the associate pastor that declares that God has told him what NOT to preach when he walks up to the pulpit, with a new, unplanned, extemporaneous message (or is he just concealing that he's unprepared?). There is the teenage convert proclaiming that God told him he would be an evangelist. Each of these people have had something revealed to them, by God, beyond the realm of rational scrutiny. It is all about faith.

Now, I hope you see the problem. For if the prophet, particularly the dramatic, public, flamboyant one who is deemed to be exercising his "spiritual gift", if that prophet is indeed speaking the truth, what is the nature of that truth? Assuming that the man has not just stood up and shouted forth some scripture verse (how is that prophetic?); assuming that God is indeed showing something not before seen, is what the prophet said inerrant? For surely it should be if it is coming from God, just as it should be infallible, authoritative and inspired. If it is not these things, then it can't be from God, for God is believed infallible and inerrant. (Or does God transmit information to us that is not inerrant and infallible through these prophets?)

Similarly, the man who was told by God to get a new job must not be wrong, if he was actually told something by God, right? Let us assume that the man was indeed told by God to take up his home and move; let us grant that the woman who stepped out of the path of a speeding car was in fact told so by God; where does that leave us regarding revelation? Does it not mean that revelation is not closed, it is not over? Indeed, it does.

But most importantly it means that the Bible is not complete. For if a man stands up and declares that "God is mad at America" or that "Prayer moved a hurricane" or that "God wants me to move to Dallas," and I write those things down, I now have another "inspired, infallible, inerrant and authoritative Word of God written." In other words, I now have, as a result of the prophets who have spoken, extra-biblical truth, extra-biblical revelation, which I cannot disregard if God DID in fact show these things to those who have uttered them. Either God spoke to these people or He did not. If He did, if I write their assertions down, then they must be infallible and authoritative, and should be part of the canon, to which I am ADDING something new. If He did not speak to them, then they are not prophets, and they are not hearing God.

This is the Protestant Problem of Prophecy: If anyone declares that God has revealed ANYTHING to him or her, and it is true that God has revealed that thing, if I jot that news down, then that must be an addition to the written word of God.

How does one get out of this maze? Am I wrong for thinking this a maze?

Sadly, when I asked the CCCC leaders these questions, no answer was ever given.

†I am a confirmed Episcopalian on the threshold of disillusionment.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Taking Flights Of Logical Fancy

Sometimes I feel like lifting off, taking flight, beating weary wings toward some distant, anonymous, perhaps even forsaken place. Recently I felt this acute rush of longing while standing before several pieces of art displayed at a New Hampshire gallery. I felt like fleeing not because of the art per se, which was patently awful. I felt like fleeing because of pretensions at intellectual grandeur, particularly the pretensions of philosophical grandeur printed in one featured artist's statement elegantly displayed near his work (which was also dreadful).

I have long speculated on why it is that the art world tends to be filled with liberals, Democrats, socialists, even progressive nihilists. Is it because art is all about "pushing the envelope" and "breaking with convention" and "inventing new rules that are also made to be broken"? Is it about "shattering presuppositions" in search of the "numinous" or the "meaningful"? Or is it that artists as a class need government subsidies, are even dependent on them; and not mere handouts of cash, but subsidies of equality, where grants and honors and exhibitions are awarded solely to acknowledge the equal effort inherent in every artist's work? You know, in an "all-artists-are-trying" sort of way? After all, was this not the very point behind another recent exhibit I attended, "Art as Process", wherein was displayed the "rough drafts" of several artists' work? Surely the subtitle to that exhibit could have easily been, "Artists: Look How They Try."

But perhaps the reason art and liberalism go hand and hand is about philosophy. I've often thought that conservative thinkers were often chided or disregarded because of their dependence on logic, evidence, you know, the components of reason. Conservatives are often berated for lacking compassion, and I believe they are berated thus solely because reason seems so absolute and confining, so limiting in its expectations and demands. Liberals, on the other hand, have always struck me as being more about passion than cogitation; more affective or emotional than hard-headed logicians. Of course, there are exceptions, but by-and-large I believe this to be so. How else to explain a revolutionary's zeal than to appeal to Jean Jacques Rousseau's "passion trumps reason" (what is felt is more important than what is known or thought); or to understand why George W. Bush campaigned as a "compassionate conservative"? Conservatives tend to think toward an answer to a problem, and this, at times, looks like an uncaring luxury in the slow, calculated manner problem-solving demands. In contrast, liberals tend to feel through a problem; they are compelled to act immediately to solve an alleged injustice: Feeling, fervor, motive, intent – these are the benchmarks of liberal activism. These are the signs over their exhibit: We Are Trying. We Mean Well. We Get Things Done. We Are Urgent.

AN ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I stood in silent disbelief as I read the young artist's statement describing his vision and his muse. It did me no good that I was standing, a glass of cabernet sauvignon in hand, in the midst of a whirling, blustering audience so enamored of the whole, well, "process." And it did me no good to see that several pieces, some fetching fairly good sums for a first showing, had already been purchased, red stickers indicating that pieces had quickly found a home.

Here's what the statement said, which began with a quote by "process theologian" Alfred North Whitehead culled from Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage."[sic] The quote first:

"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions."

I beg your pardon for being so academic here. But this is not about being didactic. It is about laughing one's head off, right off one's shoulders. For the quote above is a genuine howler. Don't you see why? It's simple, really. Mr. Whitehead has insisted on using "hard-headed clarity" to show the futility of "hard-headed clarity." Thus, by his own clear argument against clarity, it must be concluded that his observation "issues from sentimental feeling." He himself must be superstitious. And thus, he wallows in a contradiction.

But Whitehead's argument couches something more important, and it is subtle. What Whitehead has done is to give permission to thinkers everywhere to embrace a sort of anti-rationalism, a sort of "reading between the lines" of logic, reason, and argument. In short, he's given them permission to blow off the hard work which the pursuit of logically viable truth and clarity demands.

Now, I know that Whitehead is in part responding to the logical positivists in his milieu, but most readers do not know that, nor is it relevant here. What is relevant is how our young artist understood Whitehead. See if you can make sense of it all:

"I use unrefined materials in imagemaking to depict images and themes in life that range from the common and local to complicated and global. In this manner, I am attempting to metaphorically bridge an unspannable gap between what exists on human scale and that which is distinctly not human, i.e. things which necessarily exist within a global context. A gap in which, as suggested by the quote above from A.N. Whitehead, chance, instinct, intuition and creativity are far more responsive than 'hard-headed clarity' to the 'perplexities of fact' – a commodity too often misinterpreted, misused and corrupted. The interest here is to open up and complicate meaning in a way that does not compromise integrity and does not shy away from presumptions of authority."

Besides it being hard to understand how there is a bridge over an "unspannable gap" between humanity and that which is not humanity, "i.e. things which necessarily exist within a global context" (Lord knows humans don't exist within a global context – Yikes!); one wonders how this statement helps us understand anything other than the artist's flight from reason. To this artist, intuition and feeling and chance are the real forces of creativity. Reason constrains, limits; it is for the hardheaded, and not the softhearted.

This, to me, is a perfect example of the difference between myself, a conservative, and my liberal peers. No doubt my liberal chums would press me to be less intensely logical in reading the artist's statement; that I should see that he is "trying", that his "heart is in the right place", and that he "means well." No doubt they'd also tell me that what was important was not what he wrote, but what he meant, what he intended between the lines.

But there is also this statement by the artist adjacent to the one quoted above:

"My art is a venue [Yikes! again] for a realm of discussion that does not easily find a place in our everyday lives. As people, I think that we need a certain amount of..."

I am sorry, did you say, "As people"? Could we be anything else? Oh, yes, of course. We are that indefinable other thing that lives outside "a global context". Oiks! Help! (This latter artist's piece entitled "Two Birds Talking" sold for $700. It was a pen and ink cartoonish piece, wherein a bird, gripping a branch, speaks to a juvenile bird [apparently]. There are dialogue bubbles. In the final bubble, the senior bird says, and I quote: "You might think we are lying and we may not wholy believe that we are not." Now, for $700, don't you think you might want to have "wholly" spelled correctly? Talk about a venue for discussions! Who needs clarity anyway?!)

WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?

This whole exercise for me is about the difference between philosophies of feeling and those of thinking. For me, the quotes above, and the work associated with them, smack not of creativity, but of laziness and even self-centeredness. The laziness part is revealed in the flight from reason, for reason is hard to master. To the lazy philosopher/artist, impulse, intuition, chance, randomness–these are what constitute creativity. Not planning, not practicing certain skills repeatedly. No, just the easy, hasty and quick burst of creative passion: This is art! This merits appraisal and approval! This trumps using one's head: The use of the Heart!

And it is self-centeredness because it seeks approval for being outside, unique, even insouciant. Instead of the tedium of logical constructions, which are all rules and traditions and practices, artists too often flaunt their improvisational skills without once proving they can do the rather rote skills possessed by the masters. Imagine if Michelangelo's David or the Sistine Chapel were mere whims of intuition! mere impulse! mere improv!

How, then does all this play out politically? Perhaps a quote from Socrates as found in Plato's Apology will suffice. Socrates, you might recall, was on trial for corrupting Athenian youth and allegedly denouncing the gods of the state. In his defense, or apology, Socrates described how he had begun his pursuit of wisdom as a result of divine inspiration: an oracle had spoken to him. And in his pursuit of wisdom, he inquired of wise men – politicians and poets and artisans – in an effort to discern what is real wisdom:

"I went to the poets ... I am ashamed to confess that there is not a person ... who would not have talked better about their poetry than the poets did themselves. So I learnt that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of ... inspiration. ... At last I went to the artisans ... I was sure that they knew many fine things; and I was not mistaken, ... But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; – because they were good workmen, they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom." [emphasis added]

The political implications of Socrates' statements are important.

No wonder he was executed.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes

PS. For you photo enthusiasts out there: the picture of the Blue Heron (above) was taken with a Canon F1, 80-200/2.8 lens (focal length 200mm). Settings were 1/1000th at f8 on Ilford HP5 Plus film. Click on it for a larger view.