Tag: Fertility

Sunday, 3/3/24

Abysses

The abyss seems a recurring image, but views of it differ decidedly.

1741, Puritan New England

[T]hus it is that natural men are held in the hand of God, over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked, his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out: and they have no interest in any Mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them. In short, they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of; all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted, unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.

Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

1921, Lake Ochrid (Serbia)

In the evening the Stardust begins to sparkle above my head, and I sense the abyss over which my life is dangling. And with a trembling soul I stretch out my hands to You and cry out: O Lord, the terrifying world has enveloped me from every direction, as the sandy desert envelops a small tiny oasis.

I shall not be able to hold out, if You do not brace me with Your strength.

St. Nikolia Velkmirovich, Prayers by the Lake, Prayer LXXVIII

2023, Omaha

[Jordan] Peterson seems to want there to be something more beyond our individual selves and their striving after excellence. He opened the evening with an account of a passage in Tolstoy where that great Russian imagined himself in a dream suspended over an infinite abyss. But then, Tolstoy continued, he looked up: and he saw that stretching above him was a rope, holding him over the abyss and supporting him so that he would not fall. From this Peterson took the lesson that the strength of our support is as great as the danger of our pit.

I think that’s true. But I think it’s true because the “rope” is a person. And not only do I think the rope that supports is a specific person, I think that person is even capable of rescuing us out of the abyss after we have fallen. “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still,” as one great Christian put it.

The question I left with last Thursday is this: I know Peterson thinks there is a rope. But what is that rope? Where does it come from? Who or what is securing it? And why should we trust it?

Jake Meador, What I Saw at the We Who Wrestle with God Tour.

Sundries

On the proliferation of Bibles

A hallmark of the evangelical Protestant project is novelty.  And so, new versions of the Bible came along fairly regularly, describing in ever-plainer and more pedestrian language those truths that were not really misunderstood to begin with.

Terry Cowen

More schisms

New fractures are forming within the American evangelical movement, fractures that do not run along the usual regional, denominational, ethnic, or political lines. Couples, families, friends, and congregations once united in their commitment to Christ are now dividing over seemingly irreconcilable views of the world. In fact, they are not merely dividing but becoming incomprehensible to one another.

Michael Graham with Skyler Flowers, The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism, quoting Tim Dalrymple of Christianity Today.

The reality is that while many in the evangelical movement thought their bonds were primarily (or exclusively) theological or missional, many of those bonds were actually political, cultural, and socioeconomic.

IVF and theocracy

The estimable Ryan T. Anderson has an odd column, ostensibly about the Alabama Supreme Court IVF decision, on the First Things website.

First, he mocks the bafflegab cries of “theocracy!” from progressive columnists who need a topic for today’s scribblings. Then he explains what the Alabama Supreme Court actually did and why it was not at all in opposition to IVF. Then, unable to resist, he explains why IVF is bad:

The media’s manipulations would be risible if IVF weren’t so morally and emotionally fraught. Many couples experiencing infertility ache to start a family. Doctors don’t always impress on them the human costs of IVF. For one birth, doctors might create ten to twenty embryos, transfer several of the “most promising,” freeze the rest, and if more than one implants, abort the others. So the typical IVF cycle results in multiple dead and frozen embryos. And unlike in European nations, there are almost no laws in America regulating how many embryos can be created or destroyed, or how frozen embryonic human beings can be treated. 

To some, this casual disregard is no accident, because IVF itself treats children as products of technical manufacture. It thus fails to respect the equal dignity of human beings in their very origins. Or as some have put it, persons should be begotten, not made. They are to be welcomed as the fruit of an act of marital love. Relating to a child instead as a producer relates to a product is the seed of all the abuses of the IVF industry—the causal creation and destruction of “spares,” the filtering out of “defectives,” the selection for sex (boys) and other specs (eye color), the commodification of (often poor) women’s bodies as incubators. Nor are the fundamental moral concerns about IVF sectarian. While today the Catholic Church most prominently teaches that IVF itself is wrong, the three most prominent moral thinkers who opposed IVF’s introduction in the 1970s and ’80s were non-Catholic: The University of Chicago’s Leon Kass (Jewish), Princeton’s Paul Ramsey (Methodist), and Oxford’s Oliver O’Donovan (Anglican). 

The arguments stand or fall on the merits, not the religious identity (or lack thereof) of those making them ….

All three of Anderson’s points were important, but I’m only quoting his short case against IVF because it needs to be aired from time to time and I haven’t seen anybody doing that for a while.

Tom Holland’s narrative of Christendom

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

I read Dominion before everyone seemed to be talking about it (e.g., Ayan Hirsi Ali cited it when announcing that she now is a Christian), and only recently returned to it (via my Readwise highlights).

Bearing in mind that Holland is a historian, not a theologian or even a believing Christian last I’d heard, it’s a very worthwhile read.

More Tom Holland

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sexual miscellany

Whiling away the hours until the Paschal Vigil tonight, I’ve caught up on a little reading. I mention sex (1) to drive traffic and (2) because there’s a sexual component to two of my three notables. (The third will get a separate posting.)

First, in the spin battles over Obamacare, we have Kate Michelman, abortion activist, lamenting that the Democrats so quickly abandoned insistence on covering “all the medical services women need and deserve.” From her perspective, the Democrats aren’t reliable friends, and “the pro-choice movement must have a powerful political presence independent of the Democratic Party.” She blames the Democrat strategic decision to recruit moderates after the 2004 election, which in fact led to election of several relatively moderate Democrats starting in 2006.

Indeed, it’s got to be a tough time to be a pro-abortion Democrat. There’s got to be – what? one? two? – dissonant voices in the Festive Friends of Feticide chorus that used to do unison soooo much better. Of course, the Republicans can count on Olympia Snow (sadly, Orthodox) and Lincoln Chafee peeling off from the GOP abortion platform at the drop of a hat. And there’s others whose pro-life song is delivered up so tone-deaf that I don’t really trust them to hold if the wind shifts a little. Maybe “tone deaf” is the wrong metaphor, but they don’t sound authentic. They sound like they’re dropping memorized sound bites.

So I feel your pain, Kate – enough so that I won’t call myself Republican today. I’m now roughly 30 years into dreaming of the day when abortion won’t be a partisan issue, but as the parties try to achieve their optimally big tents, that day bodes to be a while coming.

Ironically echoing her distrust of Democrats is Kathleen Parker, a generally conservative columnist at the Washington Post, lamenting Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak’s vote-switch for 30 pieces of silver a rather meaningless Executive Order. The unreliability runs both ways. Someone else dissed Stupak by saying you can’t count on pro-life Democrats. Indeed, party discipline can be pretty compelling. Stupak defends himself against Parker here.

Looking well past the next election – and the next, and the next – is Kasper Melville’s Battle of the Babies in the UK’s New Humanist magazine. The story should be a familiar one for both the triumphalist secularists and the tongue-clucking “hell in a handbasket” religious folks: the devoutly religious are outbreeding secularists by a large enough margin to spell the doom of secularism as any dominant force.

The latest iteration of this “prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books.” Kaufmann is facially neutral, while Melville is a secularist himself. They’re both not too alarmed by the prolific breeders in Anabaptist Amish and Hutterite enclaves, but the Quiverfull “movement” has Melville’s knickers in a knot:

However the success-through-fertility of [Amish and Hutterites] has served as a powerful model for newer variants of fundamentalism with a far more sinister agenda. One such is the Quiverfull movement (The name derives from Psalm 127: “Children are a heritage from the Lord/ Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them”). Kaufmann describes Quiverfull as “backward engineered religion”, an attempt to replicate the successful growth of these historic sects, combined with an ambitious agenda for political power. Under the leadership of the infamous religious conservative Doug Phillips, son of Howard, who was instrumental in the early stirrings of the Religious Right, Quiverfull, a coalition of neo-fundamentalist protestant denominations and communities, dedicated to biblical literalism, deeply patriarchal and morally conservative and separatist in mindset, has a 200-year plan, a “self-conscious strategy for victory through fertility”, as Kaufmann calls it. “They look around and see the low birth rate amongst the secular population, and the success of the sects, and they say, ‘Hey, we can take over here and quickly.’ They think that God should be the family planner. For them contraception is one step toward abortion. There are stories of Quiverfull women who can only have three or four children breaking down and feeling that God has not blessed them.”

Not to worry, Casper: Evangelicals (your “fundamentalists”) cannot maintain anything for 200 years. Someone will get a ThD from Fuller for reinterpreting “happy is the man who has his quiver full.” Nobody gets a doctorate for preserving and transmitting Evangelicalism unaltered. There may still be something called “Evangelicalism” in 200 years, but it’s doubtful that it will look anything like today’s version.

Remember, you heard it here first: Quiverfull is just one of Evangelicalism’s fleeting manias. They remind me of the T-Shirt I heard about: “They say I have Attention Deficit Disorder, but they just don’t underst… Hey! Look! A Chicken!”

Now Muslims are a different matter, though I’ve long been mulling over to the extent to which Islam, too, are inherently incoherent inasmuch as their religion, too, is based on a book susceptible of private interpretation. (They do differ from one another, you know.)

Rod Dreher, looking at Melville’s article (after I’d noted it but before I blogged) passes over the Quiverfull folks and focuses on a common a trait noted by Kauffman:

“I call them ‘endogenous growth sects’. The defining features are that they have strong boundaries to the outside, they try to live segregated from the rest of society, they practice ‘in’ marriage, they have high fertility rates and high retention of members – it’s grow-your-own-fundamentalism. The irony is that in terms of growth this is the most successful model for religion in Western secular societies. This is not true for the developing world, or for the Muslim world, but it is for the West.” The reason why Kaufmann covers both older forms of fundamentalism like the Amish and Hutterites, sects that are not likely to put the fear of God into secularists because they seem so passive, so withdrawn and uninterested in imposing their worldview on the rest of us, alongside more aggressive and self-consciously power-hungry forms of evangelical Christianity and Islamism is because, in his argument, the older sects provide the model of success that is now being followed by the newer ones. To understand them, Kaufmann argues, we need to look at the older forms they are self-consciously aping.

This is what Dreher calls the “Benedict Option” – semi-monastic, consciously counter-cultural. I’ve been wondering, as has Dreher, whether conscious separation, which surely will get us labelled “fundamentalist,” is the only real option in a very seductive society.