Making dead men live

I really don’t intend to channel Fr. Stephen day-by-day. You can subscribe yourself, after all. I don’t even intend to have Orthodox testimonials as a regular feature. That’s a worthy goal, but I bring nothing unique to such efforts.

But for the second day in a row Fr. Stephen has hit it out of the park, contrasting the Orthodox view of salvation to views common today – a theme that “recurs because it is so fundamental to the Christian faith and is at the same time largely unknown in our modern world.” Indeed it is.

Reduced to aphorism, the Orthodox view is that “Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.”

We have a problem that is rooted in the very nature of our existence, not in our behavior. We behave badly because of a prior problem. Good behavior will not correct the problem.

The sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit view that Christ indeed came to make bad men good strikes me as a variety of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

It is the deism that distinguishes the non-Orthodox view at issue today from the view that Christ came to secure the forensic declaration of our righteousness so we could get into heaven. This view I know first-hand to be common among evangelicals, fundamentalists and Calvinists – all of which I arguably have been in the past, though I would have denied being a fundamentalist.

Among the ramifications of the Orthodox view are some interesting comments Fr. Stephen makes about drinkin’ ‘n smokin’ and other fundy taboos.

Mere forgiveness or real change?

Father Stephen posted Wednesday one of his best blogs in weeks, by my lights.

This one captured eloquently a big factor in my embrace of Orthodoxy: salvation as ontological change more than forensic transaction.

There is no denying that grace is a free gift and that it is the true means of our salvation. But what if our problem is not to be primarily understood in legal terms? What if that which needs saving about us is not our guilt before the law of God, but the ravages worked within our heart and life from the presence of sin and death? This is probably the point where many discussions about salvation fall apart. If one person has in mind primarily a forensic salvation (I go to heaven, I don’t go to hell), while the other is thinking primarily in terms of an ontological change (I am corrupted and dying and were I to go to heaven I’d still be corrupted and dying). The debate comes down to a question of whether we need a change of status (forensic) or a change within our very heart.

The italicized parts are Father Stephen’s eloquent expression of what hit me early on the road to Orthodoxy. It’s a lot of what kept me on that road, in fact.

When I was in my Christian boarding school, I was taught that salvation could be broken down into justification, sanctification and glorification – a dim and dumb reflection of the more glorious truth. I now tend to think that justification – in the stark forensic sense of God pronouncing me righteous – is all but meaningless if I don’t cooperate with Him in beginning to become righteous in fact, not in legal fiction. And remarkably enough, it doesn’t feel like some sort of living martyrdom. There’s real, deep joy in the journey.

Unless I do get to work on becoming conformed to His image, becoming a “partaker of the divine nature,” I’d probably storm out of heaven, breaking a few plates or punching a hole in the wall on my way out, after spending my threescore and ten living entirely for myself and then finding out that heaven isn’t about me.

As Father Stephen puts it, “were I to go to heaven I’d still be corrupted and dying.” And I’ll make life a bit more nasty, and Christianity of my sort more distasteful, as I experience corruption and dying here, as poor Antsy McClain experienced one day:

Don’t miss his second (of three) potent points:

The life of grace is central to our existence as Christians and must not become secularized. In a secular understanding, the Church has a role to play in a larger scheme of things (the secular world).

No, the secular world is passing away. The Church is “the larger scheme of things.”

Can you identify the third major point? It’s the one I’ve been slowest making habitual to my thought patterns. I get about half of it, and I’m starting to get the other half. Maybe other people grasp it more readily.

Hard words about the “Overpopulation Myth”

[R]ising consumption today far outstrips the rising headcount as a threat to the planet. And most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population, while most of the remaining population growth is in countries with a very small impact on the planet. By almost any measure you choose, a small proportion of the world’s people take the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of its pollution.

So argues Fred Pearce in his artice The Overpopulation Myth. This has long been my sense of things, though I’ve waffled a bit lately.

I reason thus when waffling: “We can’t have more and more and more of anything else without limits. Why should I think we can have more and more babies?” I suspect that 9 out of 10 of my readers – if I had 10 readers 😉 – would respond “Well, duh!” because the overpopulation myth, be it true or false, is of of truly mythical proportions. What can I say? I just like to think counterhegemonic thoughts sometimes.

Back to Pearce’s most piercing challenge, which amounts to a corollary of the quote above:

Economists predict the world’s economy will grow by 400 per cent by 2050. If this does indeed happen, less than a tenth of that growth will be due to rising human numbers. True, some of those extra poor people might one day become rich. And if they do—and I hope they do—their impact on the planet will be greater. But it is the height of arrogance for us in the rich world to downplay the importance of our own environmental footprint because future generations of poor people might one day have the temerity to get as rich and destructive as us. How dare we?

It puts me in mind of the second emphasis of the good guys and gals over on the Porch. “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

Guantanamo’s pro bono lawyers

There is a kefuffle going on pitting Liz Cheney (I guess she’s a daughter of the former Vice President) and, I believe, Karl Rove, against the Obama Administration (surprise! surprise!) over the issue of attorneys in the administration having represented Guantanamo detainees prisoners (let’s call the thing by its proper name to promote a little clarity).

There’s some play in the joints of the prior paragraph’s description because I’m having trouble getting agitated over this issue and I haven’t followed it closely. But since my day job is as a lawyer, and my profession generally has been condemning the Cheney/Rove side shrilly, I want to register a dissent.

First, you can tell something about a lawyer’s loyalties by seeing what cases they take on pro bono.

The italicized “pro bono” is key. Lawyers indeed (as the profession and the left have lept up to shout) have an obligation to represent unpopular people. Maybe they even have an obligation to represent unpopular causes, which isn’t quite the same thing. Those obligations, however, are limited by the lawyer’s internal compass (e.g., “can I really represent this person or cause effectively when I find them so odious?”) and there’s no obligation to take on all comers pro bono.

As someone noted a few decades ago, “there’s ‘unpopular causes’ and then there’s unpopular ‘unpopular causes.'” “Unpopular causes” can be a term of art for the left’s favorite projects. You’ll not, for instance, find the left praising me for the handful of “issue” cases I’ve handled pro bono. No, those causes are unpopular unpopular causes among those who buy their ink by the barrel.

Second, and arising from the first, self-congratulation for taking on a merely “unpopular cause,” not an unpopular unpopular cause, is idiotic.

That’s muh story and Ah’m stickin’ to it.

We now return to more nomal fare.

“New Atheist” Christopher Hitchens’ Christian Brother, Peter

Tip of the hat to Ross Douthat for his link to Peter Hitchens’ How I found God and peace with my atheist brother.

The article is more interesting, in my estimation, than Douthat’s excerpt, interesting though that is. I was prepared from that excerpt for a manifesto of dubious orthodoxy. What I found instead was a sketch of a pilgrimage from banal atheism to thoughtful Christian faith.

Having never gone through an atheist or agnostic phase myself, I would commit stereotyping if I uttered this, but Hitchens has earned the right to name it:

We were sure that we, and our civilisation, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels and Heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines, the Welfare State, the United Nations and ‘science’, which explained everything that needed to be explained.
The Britain that gave me this self-confidence was an extraordinarily safe place, or at least so it felt to me as a child.

But I can appreciate how “the old unsettling messages” became a wedge that gradually opened his mind and heart:

I no longer avoided churches. I recognised in the great English cathedrals, and in many small parish churches, the old unsettling messages.

One was the inevitability of my own death, the other the undoubted fact that my despised forebears were neither crude nor ignorant, but men and women of great skill and engineering genius, a genius not contradicted or blocked by faith, but enhanced by it.

…

I also knew I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition, and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.

I don’t think the inevitability of my own death was a sufficiently conscious concern of mine until I found Orthodoxy (which coincided, of course, with my aging and the consequent, undeniable physical infirmities), but I was very aware that believers of old were not crude or ignorant and that politics and ambition were inadequate foundations for life.

Peter (I call him that not from faux familiarity, but because the other Hitchens is better known) pulls no punches in identifying the covert locus of much of today’s anti-Christian rage, and the culprit he fingers appears guilty to me:

[I]n recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

But unlike Peter, I think the urge to power has an accomplice: the sort of facile faith that finds science a threat – a faith I once held, knowing no better way to live out devotion to Christ – and whose fear of The Other is expressed in demonization – of which I was mercifully guilty less often than many on the religious right. Facile faith invites facile atheism. Demonization invites counter-demonization. I think Peter may intuit that, as here:

I do not loathe atheists, as Christopher claims to loathe believers. I am not angered by their failure to see what appears obvious to me. I understand that they see differently. I do think that they have reasons for their belief, as I have reasons for mine, which are the real foundations of this argument.

Peter and I diverge stylistically about the utility of arguments over morality:

He [Christopher Hitchens] often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience – which surely cannot be conscience if he is right since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God. If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.

Yet Christopher is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate, and so makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it.

One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers’ assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher’s supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

I do agree with Peter that a binding moral code needs grounding. Maybe there’s a gene for altruism, as the evolutionists recently seem to postulate. But what if I don’t have it, or mine’s mutated or unexpressed? What if I act the sociopath as a result? Society, made up of a majority where the gene is present and expressed, may have the raw power to squash me, but they cannot logically utter any moral condemnation – though they assuredly would do exactly that.

But Christopher Hitchens likely will never appreciate that unless he’s first blindsided by something else – maybe Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th Century Last Judgement (which blindsided Peter) or “the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time” (as Peter notes).

Finally, I really appreciate Peter’s succinct putdown of a stupid, stupid, canard that can only be uttered by somebody who didn’t notice the savagery of pagan Nazis and atheist Communists in the bloodiest damned century the world has ever seen:

Another favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.

This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.

Amen, brother Peter. Only brother James – one of those crude and ignorant folks from 2000 years ago – rivals your brevity (James 4:1-2).

Even when I was a kid, we didn’t go to the farm

Georgetown Porcher Patrick Deeneen asks “what’s wrong with this commercial?”

He wasn’t able to wait very long before volunteering his answer. But before you peek at his answer, let’s try another one. What’s even wronger with this commercial?

Hint: The only medical malpractice case I won for a client involved a small-town doctor who didn’t “palpate” the ribs and abdomen of a traumatized patient (because of revulsion at her obesity, we hypothesized) who was bleeding to death internally from exactly the injuries that a physician trained in trauma would expect. His examination might as well have been a cheery “Hi, Ellen!”

Anyone here use Skype? My daughter-in-law is an immigrant. For 10 years, she only “saw” her grandmother occasionally via Skype. Grandma flew to the U.S. 8 days ago. Guess which my daughter-in-law prefers?

Nothing against Cisco or Skype, but reality is better than virtual reality most of the time.

Meaning as a matter of adjacent data

I recently bought a book of essays by E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and co-author of the perennial Elements of Style. It is, as of now, unread. White reportedly is a fabulous essayist – which these days may seem the equivalent of being first runnerup in the local hula hoop competition since, unnoticed by me, all the cool kids apparently have wandered off to read fiction.

But my preference for nonfiction over fiction finds a little vindication in this book review at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Excerpt:

David Shields’s punchy manifesto in defense of documentary creativity—against what he sees as the novel’s anemic anachronism—takes in a wider sweep of contemporary reality genres, from the memoir and lyric essay to cinéma vérité, karaoke, hip-hop, and Project Runway … The novel of plot and character, by his lights, is an inherently nostalgic form, a Victorian holdover inadequate to the imaginative challenges our zeitgeist poses.

… Shields is a flamboyant aphorist. He has assembled a montage manifesto from 618 epigrams, assertions, and sound bites, ranging in length from three words to one paragraph … we live in an age of “continuous partial attention.” … Ours is an age of opinionated inattentiveness and, as such, an age for which the aphorism is ideal. That instinct underlies Reality Hunger‘s episodic design: The units of thought are so small that you can start the book anywhere. Yet, en masse, Shields’s aphoristic shards create a comprehensive argument against the novel’s superiority and in favor of nonfictional creativity …

…Crucially, Shields has the brio to create convincing bridges among his plunderings.

As in:

“The life span of the fact is shrinking: I don’t think there’s time to save it.”

“Memory: the past rewritten in the direction of feeling.”

“Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning ultimately is a matter of adjacent data.”

“Genre is a minimum-security prison.”

Meaning as “a matter of adjacent data.” I can relate to that. In a sense, it’s the motif of this blog.

Are factories (mostly) obsolete? Cities?

(James Howard Kunstler blogs and podcasts extensively on urban sprawl. One of the biggest of many motivators for suburbia (the automobile and cheap oil being the great facilitators) was that the close proximity of homes and factories in the cities really was pretty awful for the home owners/occupants.

Yet Kunstler spins a vision of a return to walkable cities. It’s a vision I find quite lovely, but with nagging doubts including how can people walk to their factory jobs without recreating the “company town” in the form of a “company neighborhood” and, if people are walking to their factory jobs, aren’t we back to square one: dreadful living conditions due to nearby factories?

I have read one or two of Kunstler’s books in the past year, and have listened to every single podcast, and can’t recall him addressing this. But Allan Carlson has addressed it, at least briefly, in his keynote address I praised yesterday:

While praising the modern “machine” tool, Borsodi condemned the “huge” factory as “a steam-age relic rendered obsolete by the electrical age,” yet sustained in the twentieth century by the regulatory powers of government. As he wrote, “It is the factory, not the machine, which destroys both the natural beauty and the natural wealth of man’s environment; which fills country and city with hideous factories and squalid slums,” and which robs “men, women, and children of their contact with the soil” and “familiarity with the actual making of things.” He added: “Against the family…the factory wages a ruthless war of extermination…. Industrialism seeks to root out individual devotion to the family and the homestead and to replace it with loyalty to the factory.”

So, what was Borsodi’s alternative? The working home, the economically functional home, he said, had to be restored; and this needed to be done in a revived countryside. As he argued, “Man, no matter how often he has tried to urbanize himself, can only live like a normal human being in an essentially rural place of residence.” Setting an example, Borsodi and his family resettled on an abandoned seven-acre homestead near the Ramapo Mountains, north of New York City. Each family, Borsodi insisted, must also begin “an adventure in home production,” rooted in “true organic homesteads.” Gardens, chicken coops, a few cows and pigs, carpentry workshops, small machine shops, loom rooms: all were necessary in real family homes, he said. Careful experiments showed that a homestead equipped with appropriate tools and small-scale machines was more efficient in producing three-quarters of the products that a family home would need.

Oops! Borsodi thought this “working home” alternative to factories needed to be in the countryside!

While I respect the Agrarians, I’m a city boy man. I not only love big cities (at least to walk as a visitor), but I’m getting a bit old to take up organic gardening, woodworking, etc. at any meaningful level.

So I’m still struggling with where cities fit in human-scale living. Am I confusing my personal situation (“the train pulled out of the station and left you …”) with the bigger picture (“… but your descendants aren’t too late”)?

What makes the “environment” worth saving?

Father Andrew Stephen Damick, a bright and well-read young Priest, contrasts conservative and liberal approaches to the “environment” to the Orthodox understanding of “creation” in part 1 of a podcast series titled “This Holy Earth – Ecological Vision In The Cosmic Cathedral.” This is a surprisingly good overview of practical application of an Orthodox mindset, and especially of how the Incarnation changes everything.

Speaking of Faith

A remarkable program airs on Public Radio in much of the country: Speaking of Faith, with Krista Tippett, from American Public Media. Our local NPR affiliate doesn’t carry it, but it is available as a podcast, too, and I’ve been listening for a few years now.

SOF is not where to go for Orthodoxy, large- or small-O. (If you want an orthodox Christian version, subscribe to Mars Hill Audio.) But in a country where public schools shun religion, even as an academic study, thus tacitly marking it off as singularly unimportant (or at least unworthy of study), it is heartening to have a significant public institution that recognizes, as does SOF, that (1) faith matters are important and (2) faith is not confined to organized religions.

I risk misunderstanding if I don’t digress for a moment:

I don’t mean by point 2 to deprecate organized religion. “I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church,” after all. My point is that many ideologies that purport to be secular are in practice part of the same genus as explicit religion. SOF seems to understand that by covering a wide array under its “Faith” umbrella.
I am not a fan of “religion” or “organized religion” in any generic sense, anyway. Ask me about a specific religion and I may have an opinion, but not about religion in general. Or even about “atheism.” (“What God don’t you believe in? … Ugh! Good for you! I don’t believe in that one, either.”)

Beyond the two heartening messages enumerated above, I find much at SOF that allows me empathically to understand common human yearnings that that most religions share. (I note that without intending to imply equivalence of religions in satisfying those yearnings.)

SOF programs range from unbearable (e.g., her show on Voodoo lacked any deep yearning I could relate to) to intriguing to delightful. Even the March 4, 2010 show, where Tippett interviews a guy with a bunch of Just-So Stories about the “Evolution of God” included some thought-provoking moments (sometimes a just-so story sounds plausible).

I should mention that the BBC has podcasts that repeatedly take up religious topics and discuss them at a fairly high level – higher that SOF when tends toward the touchy-feely. But I’m still grateful that SOF is on the American airwaves.