The beheading of Anne Boleyn

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1536 that Anne Boleyn was beheaded for the charge of adultery, only a few years after she had inspired King Henry VIII to create an entirely new church just so that he could marry her.

When she met Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn was an 18-year-old girl who had plenty of admirers. She was beautiful, but she was also smart. She could debate theology and discuss literature.

Henry wanted Anne as a mistress, but she was an extremely ambitious young woman. And so she told the king that she couldn’t give herself to him unless they were married. He was genuinely smitten with this young woman, and he was also desperate for a male heir. So he decided to break with his wife of more than 20 years, and asked the pope for an annulment of his first marriage. The Pope refused, for both political and religious reasons. Henry had spent his life as a devout Catholic, and took very seriously his role as a defender of the faith. But when the Pope stood in the way of his love, Henry declared himself the head of the new Church of England, and granted himself an annulment in his own matrimonial suit.

Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn in 1533. It was only the second time in English history that a king had married for love, and it was possibly the only time in history that a new church has been founded just to facilitate a marriage. And yet, that marriage didn’t last long. He didn’t like that their first child was a girl. The one thing that might have saved Anne would have been a male child. Historians think she may have had several miscarriages or stillborn children, and it is certain that she miscarried in 1536, a stillborn male four months into her pregnancy. A few months later, she was arrested on charges of adultery and was set to be executed. Most historians believe the charges were false.

After her death, portraits of her were destroyed, along with her books and correspondence, and poems and songs she wrote. Her rivals spread rumors and made up stories about her, to defame her reputation in the history books, claiming that she’d been ugly and deformed, with a sixth finger on one hand and a huge hump on her neck. But despite all that, her daughter Elizabeth, the daughter who had so disappointed Henry VIII, grew up to become one of the most influential queens in history.

The ECUSA, part of the “entirely new church” Henry VIII created “just so that he could marry her,” still isn’t letting anything stand in the way of sexual desire.

Hostettler for Senate

I longish essay at Front Porch Republic yesterday wonders “what if William Jennings Bryant …?” The whole thing is worth reading if you’re contrary like me, but knowing that few will, I’ll quote the very, very contemporary Indiana implications — contemporary like Tuesday, May 4:

This brings us to contemporary political application. History can be interesting but so what? Are there any modern-day Bryans? Can we find any candidates who exemplify FPR values? Yes we can. …

John Hostettler of Indiana could be a Feingold counterpart across the aisle if he’s elected to the Senate this year. A genuine Republican maverick, Hostettler is a former six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Like Ron Paul, Hostettler is a constitutionalist on domestic issues and a noninterventionist (anti-imperialist) in foreign affairs. He opposed Clinton’s wars in the Balkans. In 2002, he was one of only six Republican members of the House and one of only three conservative members to vote against the resolution endorsing Bush’s desire to preemptively wage war on Iraq. At the time, he said the intelligence backing the claim of WMDs was “tenuous at best.”

Following his defeat for reelection, in 2006, Congressman Hostettler self-published Nothing for the Nation: Who Got What Out of Iraq. The book is endorsed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who writes, “We waged war because the president wanted to do so for his own reasons. . . . Congress made an unconstitutional delegation of authority to the president and it was the most tragic such delegation ever made. Had we listened to Hostettler at the time, we would not have done it. If we listen to him now, we might save ourselves the pain, regret, and shame from doing it again. For years I have known I was wrong. Now I know why I was wrong. I’m sorry so many had to pay such a dear price for me to learn what I should have known before I took that office.”

Hostettler is a populist who has never taken PAC money, which is quite a contrast with his main opponent in the senatorial primary, former Senator Dan Coats. Coats left the Senate in 1999, was an ambassador for a while, and then cashed in on his “public service” by becoming a lobbyist. He worked for Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Chrysler, and other big corporations in their successful efforts to feed at the public trough. Now he has moved back to Indiana in an effort to regain his Senate seat. Dan Coats is a typical corporate-centrist-establishment Republican à la Bob Dole.

John Hostettler is something quite different. He voted for Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party for president in 2008, not John McCain. There are mavericks and then there are mavericks. If Feingold’s blind spots on some social issues, notably his support for legalized abortion and same-sex “marriage” are too off-putting to overlook, then maybe Hostettler is your man. He is a Bible-believing Christian who is conservative on social morality. He supports traditional marriage and the rights of unborn children. He was the lead sponsor of the Marriage Protection Act that passed the House in 2004 but died in the Senate. Invoking a power of Congress granted by the Constitution, the MPA would have stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to rule on the Defense of Marriage Act. He opposes illegal immigration. He supports Second Amendment rights. He has championed First Amendment religious freedom. He voted against NCLB on federalism grounds. These stances have earned him the support of conservatives like Bay Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, and some portions of the Tea Party movement.

The Republican senatorial primary that pits Hostettler against Coats, and a few other contenders, takes place THIS TUESDAY, May 4. He could use some money now. Hopefully, he will win the primary and be the odds-on favorite to win in November.

I would note that Dan Coats, the slight favorite Tuesday, is a Wheaton College graduate. The last time he ran, that meant something to me. I learned more at Wheaton with a 2.5 GPA than I learned elsewhere with a 3.5+. But evangelicalism is culturally captive, I now see, and I fear that lobbyist Coats is no exception. So come Tuesday, I’m not voting for him, or Marlin Stutzman, but John Hostettler.

Franklin Graham

There is a kerfuffle about Franklin Graham being excluded from some upcoming government-sponsored events because of his criticism of Islam as “evil” (not my scare quotes; I unequivocally believe in evil). For instance, testosterone-crazed Doug Giles rails here against the political correctness of it all.

I doubt not that Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse is a reputable enough charity, but the younger generation Graham, like the younger generation Frank Schaeffer, far surpasses his father in delusions that he has been given a prophet’s mantle, rather than the more modest platform of an evangelist. His mouth too frequently shoots off about matters of which he is ignorant.

He has, for instance, gently calumniated Orthodox Christianity, as in his 2007 Ukraine crusade, with charges of which it is entirely innocent. The gist was that the Orthodox Church, despite its antiquity and grandeur, doesn’t teach a personal relationship with Christ. (I believe, but cannot track down, that he has said much worse of Orthodoxy in the past.)

His comments about Islam are certainly undiplomatic. I’ll leave it to others to debate whether Islam is evil – the kinds of people who get suckered into other debates where the key terms are too equivocal to invite anything more than a shouting match. But on Orthodoxy, Graham is deeply wrong. As is so often the case, Father Stephen Freeman says it better than I:

The salvation into which we are Baptized is a new life – no longer defined by the mere existence of myself as an individual – but rather by the radical freedom of love within the Body of Christ. To accept Christ as our “personal” savior, thus can be translated into its traditional Orthodox form: “Do you unite yourself to Christ?” And this question is more fully expounded when we understand that the Christ to whom we unite ourself is a many-membered body.

Read the whole article.

Singing in the Flame

The Orthodox Church regularly remembers important Biblical people and events that other traditions may overlook. This goes beyond following a prescribed cycle of scripture readings in the liturgy and other services of the Church. It’s even built into the prescribed hymn texts. And in some cases, Protestant Bibles omit whole, wholesome passages.

One example is the Myrrhbearing Women, who figure much more prominently in Orthodoxy than even in “high Church” Protestantism.

Another is the three holy youths in the furnace. At the Vigil of Great and Holy Saturday, we read the account of their praying and singing from the “fiery furnace.”

This passage is sadly omitted from Protestant 66-book Bibles. It is included, if at all, only in the disparagingly-misnamed “Apocrypha,” which in fact are part of Christian Scripture, recognized by Rome and Orthodoxy alike. So until I became Orthodox, I was completely unfamiliar with this treasure. Continue reading “Singing in the Flame” →

Metaphors of the Atonement.

Father Stephen Freeman, whose thought and spirit I greatly appreciate, has this evening posted on Metaphors of the Atonement. I commend it to Orthodox readers especially, but it may be of interest to western Christians (Roman Catholics and Protestants) to see how their characteristic “forensic” understanding differs from the unfamiliar Orthodox view – which I have come to cherish.

This is not some arcane theological backwater, by the way. The differing views of Christ’s atonement and “descent into hades” are quite fundamental differences that ramify extensively through the churches – and individual Christians – who hold them — not just in express doctrinal propositions, but in how the two sides of the Great Schism have come to perceive the world and the place of people in it.

A second difference, not touched on by Father Stephen in this post, is what Wikipedia not unreasonably calls Experience of God (Theoria) vs Scholasticism. Theoria is the Orthodox emphasis; Scholasticism (a term of art, not to be confused with intelligence or intellectual bent) was a post-schism development largely of Thomas Aquinas and his fellow schoolmen in the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church, and which influence Protestant thought as well.

Both are deep differences, which make Orthodoxy worth a look by folks burnt out on the western Church(es) they’ve known, but haunted by Christ.

Replacing Justice Stevens

The world of punditry is full of opinions about filling the seat of Justice John Paul Stevens upon his long-overdue retirement this summer, so important has become the Supreme Court to our polity.

Doug Masson, perhaps half-jokingly, defended what I’d call a moderately activist judiciary. It’s moderate because the activism Doug advocated involved pulling legislative chestnuts out of the fire more than inventing new constitutional “rights”:

What occurred to me only later is what immense responsibility this would place on legislators if they were actually forced to deal with nothing but strict constructionist judges. They’d have to think through the full implications of what they wrote into law without being able to trust that judges would be, well, judicious in how the law was applied …

I’ve read enough legislation and draft legislation in my time to shudder a bit at the thought of judges applying the language absolutely in all situations unless the text specifically instructs them not to regardless of whether doing so makes sense or seems remotely just. That would really up the pressure on legislators to craft legislation meticulously, being sure to describe every caveat and exception.

I agree completely with Doug that lots of legislation is drafted shoddily, but I think that’s partly a consequence of knowing that the Court’s will bail them out.

I’d love to see our legislatures become something other than the Branch of Grand-and-Voter Pleasing Platitudes. Courts legitimately resolve ambiguities in positive law (i.e., legislative enactments), but a law can be unambiguously stupid. Unless there’s no rational purpose to it, judges should enforce it with perhaps a rebuke thrown in for the legislature (e.g., “What in heaven’s name they were thinking when they wrote this is beyond me, but ….”)

I am particularly appalled at the increasingly common disregard of legislators – at all levels, including County Commissioners – to shrug off their oath to uphold the Constitution by saying, in effect, that “constitutionality is for the courts to decide; I think this law will please my constiuents, so to hell with my oath.” (Okay, I exaggerate, but only a little.)

Adam Liptak at the New York Time is one of many noting that Stevens is, formally, the last Protestant on the Supreme Court:

His retirement, which was announced on Friday, makes possible something that would have been unimaginable a generation or two ago — a court without a single member of the nation’s majority religion.

I cannot recall what Protestant allegiance Stevens ever claimed, but were it not so implausible, I’d suspect he was a soul-competency Baptist. As I wrote quoted soon after his announcement:

[I]n four different places in an opinion barely five paragraphs long, Justice Stevens used the word “indoctrination” as a synonym for religious education. Stevens asserted that the voucher program was being used to pay for “the indoctrination of thousands of grammar school children.” He surmised that an educational emergency might provide a motivation for parents to “accept religious indoctrination [of their children] that they otherwise would have avoided.” He decried the fact that “the vast majority” of voucher recipients chose to receive “religious indoctrination at state expense.” And he depicted the voucher program as a governmental choice “to pay for religious indoctrination.”

This is not an unfair summary of Justice Stevens’ hostility to any religion that actually has doctrinal content that adherents think should be preserved and transmitted. I infer that his deprecatory use of “indoctrination” reflects the view that everyone should decide all this stuff for himself or herself – a very, very American approach that has led to countless sects, cults and semi-Christian denominations, not to mention multiply-countless unaffiliated Churches (unaffiliated means you get whatever the Pastor feels like today – kind of like following a blog, except that bloggers, taken with the appropriate grain of salt, are less likely to lead you to delusion and damnation).

See also Ann Coulter’s entertaining take on the last Protestant. (Coulter is like a 15 car pileup – I feel guilty for reading her sometimes, but it’s irresistible. She is quite smart about the law, too.)

I agree with George Will that political experience is not a prerequisite, and I always have shuddered when someone like Oren Hatch is mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee because his colleagues respect him, he could be confirmed fairly easily, and he once upon a time went to law school.

Lastly, I’d say Timothy Egan is right on the facts about Harvard and Yale being disproportionately represented on the Court, but I’d sure hate to see law school diversity become a criterion for nomination. Yeah: Michigan, Chicago, Stanford (Justices O’Connor and Rehnquist, I believe) are top-tier, and I wouldn’t expect a Justice from the top tier of one of those institutions to be appallingly stupid. But I suspect, especially from his title (“Supreme Club”) that Egan is engaged in a little populist posturing at the highly elitist New York Times.