Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

Watching the Tiber Go By (Part 2)

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Part 1 is here.

So I swam the Thames and settled down to being married.

Much happened over the next ten years. Jane and I involved ourselves with the daily life at St. Luke’s: we both served on Sundays as chalice bearers, we attended (and, upon occasion led) weekly bible studies, we went on retreats, we made our Cursillos and were subsequently active in the Cursillo community in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Looking back, there were two trends of note during this time. First, the teaching at St. Luke’s moved from the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum towards the Evangelical Protestant end of the spectrum under the influence of such men of God as Frank Lyons, then our associate pastor and now Anglican Bishop of Bolivia, Praveen Bunyan, later rector for a time of St. James Church in Newport Beach, and Ron Jackson, our rector for many years, who has recently been called to a teaching position at Trinity Seminary in England. I learned a great deal from all of them, and owe them all a great debt of gratitude for their teaching, friendship, and wise counsel over the years.

As the teaching became more Evangelical so bit by bit did my own personal understanding of Christianity move away from the Catholicism of my youth, until finally I ran into Calvinism and rebounded. (I’m tempted to say “recoiled”, but I have too many friends and acquaintances who profess some form of Calvinism to put it quite that strongly, and in any event I’ve promised to keep to a positive note in this series of essays.) I say “rebounded” because when I first came seriously to with the tenets of Calvinism I discovered that I simply could not accept them. Accordingly to Calvin and his followers, each human being is either saved or damned from all eternity. The Damned can do nothing to achieve salvation, and the Elect can do nothing to lose their salvation. I found that I simply could not believe this. It’s clear to me that I cannot save myself, that salvation is the gift of Jesus through his death and resurrection…but it’s equally clear to me that I can refuse to receive that gift. A man stranded on a rooftop during a flood might be unable to swim to safety, and yet still (through fear, or underestimating the danger) refuse to be rescued. If he stays on that rooftop, he will surely die…and he can choose to do so. At the same time, it was clear that Calvinism was an intellectually clear and internally consistent statement of Christian faith, a faith that had sustained many Christian communities over the years. From an intellectual point of view, it was a great pity that I couldn’t accept it; but I couldn’t. In the end, the effect of this discovery was that I began reflecting on the intellectual basis for my faith and reconsidering my easy slide away from Anglo-Catholicism.

The second trend was the discovery, through my participation in the larger community and attendance at two or three diocesan conventions, of troubling currents in the teaching of the Episcopal Church in general and the Diocese of Los Angeles in particular. The presenting issue was homosexuality, but it became clear over time that there was more going on: John Shelby Spong, the Bishop of Newark, had, in addition to being a staunch supporter of the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church, had also written books in which he had explicitly denied the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, indeed, all the major points of the Nicene Creed. And yet he was still a bishop, and (so far as I could tell) honored by his colleagues in the House of Bishops. And from what I could tell at diocesan convention, there were many in our diocese that felt the same way.

I spent considerable time wrestling with the issue of homosexuality, but none wrestling with Spong’s open rejection of the Creed. I think now, as I thought then, that if he could not in good conscience uphold the beliefs he had vowed to uphold at his ordination and consecration, then in good conscience he should resign his position and leave the church. And I simply could not understand how such open and explicit apostasy could be so easily tolerated. But I took refuge in the thought that the Dioceses of Los Angeles and Newark were aberrations, and that the true faith, so clearly taught at St. Luke’s, was also taught in the wider Episcopal Church.

Part 3 is here.

Watching the Tiber Go By (Part 1)

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My family were Sunday-and-Christmas Catholics. That is to say, we went to mass on Sundays (unless we were on vacation) and on Christmas day. We didn’t go to mass on any other holy days; we didn’t have prayer cards, scapulars, or rosaries; we went to public school rather than Catholic school; and we never stayed for coffee after the service, assuming that there was coffee after the service. I know there was sometimes, but whether it was a regular thing I can’t say.

Religious observances outside church were confined to prayers at bedtime and grace before dinner. We weren’t tepid about religion, precisely; but for my dad, being Catholic was something you did, not something you talked about. My dad still goes to mass every Sunday, and he still doesn’t talk about it. For my mom, being Catholic was something other people did; she was Methodist, and though she went to mass with dad every Sunday, she followed up by going to the local Methodist church immediately afterward. I suspect that’s why my childhood lacked certain traditionally Catholic markers.

I was born a year after Vatican II began, and although I have vague memories of my elder siblings carrying big heavy missals to mass I don’t recall ever hearing the mass said in Latin. From the time I first began to pay attention, it was all English. Catechism class, or “CCD”, was similar; I suppose my siblings probably remember the pre-Vatican II catechism, but I went through CCD during those heady days when the “Spirit of Vatican II” excused a multitude of well-intentioned experimentation. I don’t know if this explains anything, and I think all of my CCD teachers were doing their best; but as an example, though we were all given rosaries one year we spent less than a class session on how to pray the rosary. I was left with a vague notion that you said an Our Father followed by a bunch of Hail Mary’s, lather, rinse, repeat; nobody ever hinted that there was more to it than that.

I went through First Communion, and later on was duly confirmed; and after that CCD was over and done with, as was any involvement at my local church beyond going to mass on Sunday.

I went through something of a crisis of faith during my high school years; which is to say that I found God to be increasingly inconvenient and thought that I’d be happier if I could be sure He wasn’t really there. That ended my senior year due to some circumstances I won’t go into at the moment; it was that year that I really first made up my mind to follow Christ.

Oddly, that was also the year I started consorting with Protestants. A friend took me to a high school group at the local Episcopal church, and I started attending that regularly; in fact, though it isn’t where we first met, that group is where I first really got to know my wife Jane. Then I went off to college; and rather than attending the small Catholic mass in the school chapel I went to the local parish church and joined the campus InterVarsity Christian Fellowship group. I was active in IVCF all four years of college and grew considerably in my faith; and that whole time I attended mass every Sunday at Our Lady of the Assumption where I never got to know anybody.

After college I went to Stanford for graduate school, and at Stanford, oddly, I actually got in with a group of young Catholic adults at the campus Newman Center. That was probably my most Catholic year to date, and I remember it fondly.

I started dating Jane that year, and after I got my degree I returned to Southern California. I went back to attending my old church every Sunday, where I knew (almost) nobody, and Jane and I joined a young adult group at a Catholic church in Pasadena which we found out about because the folks I knew at Stanford knew some folks in that group. We made many friends there; ironically, the only one we still keep in regular touch with isn’t Roman Catholic (nor was he then).

Do you begin to see a pattern here? Every since I first decided to take my faith seriously, I’d been involved in some kind of Christian community; but except for that one year at Stanford, the community I was in was always completely separate from where I attended mass.

Around this time Jane and I decided to get married; and that raised the question of where we were going to go to church. And that was a big deal, because Jane was Episcopalian and she found mass at St. James to be rather underwhelming. Yes, the service had a lot in common with the service she was used to; but….

But there wasn’t any coffee hour after the service. Or if there was, I didn’t know about it, and I certainly wasn’t able to introduce her to anyone. At her church, St. Luke’s, she knew everybody. And the singing at St. James was subpar by her standards (she was in choir for years), and we never sang more than two verses of any hymn. And some people left the church right after communion, instead of waiting for the closing hymn; and if they did wait for the closing hymn, they were often out the door before it was over. Which given that we never sang more than two versions meant they had to move fast after the priest left the altar.

And besides, I didn’t know anybody.

To me, “church” meant “the Eucharist”; to Jane, “church” meant “the community”. And given that her church had the Eucharist as well, she really couldn’t see leaving St. Luke’s, where she already belonged to the community, to attend St. James, where I didn’t.

We spent a season or two attending both churches every Sunday, and we had both a Catholic and an Episcopal priest at our wedding; but we were married at St. Luke’s, and after the wedding that’s where we went to church. Some months later I was formally received into the Episcopal Church by our local bishop.

Continuing to attend both churches wasn’t a reasonable solution. Jane and I agreed that we needed to pick a church, and stick with it; my parents’ mixed marriage had worked OK, but it certainly hadn’t been optimal.

I figured it like this. St. Luke’s was what used to be called a “high church” anglo-catholic parish, so the service was very similar to the mass I was used to; in fact, in some ways it seemed even more Catholic than I was used to. St. James was still in the throes of Vatican II, but at St. Luke’s even the choir members wore cassocks, and processed into the church preceded by acolytes bearing candles. I learned that, being a branch of Anglicanism the Episcopal Church could still claim the apostolic succession. And Episcopal doctrine, as it was explained to me, appeared to be everything I wanted in a doctrine, and less. Which is to say, so far as it went it agreed pretty well with what I’d always believed; there was simply less of it, and it didn’t go so far. The doctrine of the Eucharist is a case in point. Episcopalians believed, so I was told, in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Prayer Book didn’t define precisely what “Real Presence” meant, and certainly didn’t insist on transubstantiation; but if I wanted to go on thinking about it that way, there was no harm done. The Marian doctrines were similar–some Episcopalians revered Mary, and there was nothing stopping me from doing so…but there was no insistence on it either.

In short, I could join the Episcopal Church without being asked either to renounce any of the beliefs I held dear, or to believe in anything new. I could, it was presented to me, simply transfer my allegiance from one bishop to another. If Jane were to become Catholic, however, she would be asked to believe many things she hadn’t previously been asked to believe; and she’d lose the parish community she was used to. Put that way, the answer seemed clear. I had little to lose but the Pope and, possibly, some doctrines to which I wasn’t particularly attached. What I had to gain was a happy bride.

Part 2 is here.

More on Aristotle

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I found another book on Aristotle; it has this to say about W.D. Ross’s book, the one that presumed I knew a lot more than I do:

Described by a reviewer as “a masterpiece of condensed exposition,” the book is just that, except that the condensation is such as to make the philosophical import of Aristotle almost completely indiscernible in its pages.”

Ouch! But so far as I can tell, he’s right.

The new book is Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation, by Henry B. Veatch. I’ve not yet read much of it, so it will be quite a while before I write anything serious about it.

Doctrine in the Church of England

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As a member in good standing of one of the Anglican Church of Uganda’s parishes here in the United States, and a long time observer of the current unpleasantness which I refer to as the “Anglican Follies”, I’ve been meditating recently on the meaning of the phrase “Anglicanism has always taught that…”. I’ve frequently heard folks on both sides of the Anglican divide use that phrase to justify their position, and so I’ve been wondering what the truth of the matter is. What, in fact, has Anglicanism always taught?

I approached my rector with this question, and he directed me to several books, including this one: Doctrine in the Church of England: The Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922, published in 1938 by the Society for Promoting Church Knowledge (SPCK). (Some editions include 1935 in the subtitle rather than 1922, as that is when the commission finished its deliberations. It’s the same book either way.)

The commission included twenty-five Anglican theologians, including several bishops, a number of university professors, and many priests. Their charter was to sit down together and document the breadth of Anglican theology at that time, which special emphasis on those points of doctrine about which there was a wide variance of opinion. Note that they were not to produce a catechism, or any other kind of normative statement of doctrine; nor were they to determine the extent to which the Church of England was within the bounds of orthodoxy; in short, they were not concerned with what the Church of England ought to teach, but rather with determining what leading divines within the Church of England were actually teaching. Or, rather, what leading divines within the Church of England actually thought, within their inmost selves. The question of what the laity in the church were actually being taught seems not to have been raised.

Given my questions, this was a fascinating book to read; and I suspect I could fill a book with my thoughts and reactions about its contents. For now I’ll settle for following one thread I see running through it. The book grants due reverence, here and there, to scripture and to the historic creeds as being the foundation of Anglican doctrine, and indeed, most of the book is soundly orthodox. The occasional heterdox statement is always clearly the opinion of a small minority of the commissioners. That some were heterodox does not surprise me; it was ever thus. What disturbs me far more are the principles of intellectual discourse on which the book is based. There are numerous statements like this:

It is truly said that to become bitter in controversy is more heretical than to espouse with sincerity and charity the most devastating theological opinions.

This appears to me to be saying that one can hold whatever beliefs one likes within Anglicanism so long as one is both polite and sincere. I suspect that the man who wrote this sentence did not expect this principle to be taken to such extremes as it has been by the reappraisers in our own time; but this is a regular pattern throughout the work. Here and there, for example, concessions are made to those who in good conscience cannot affirm doctrines such as the Virgin Birth or Resurrection of Jesus Christ, although these beliefs are stated clearly in the (supposedly foundational) Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. Given such an operating principle, one that values charity over truth, it seems impossible to me that the truth should ever be arrived at; or sustained in the face of opposition if once discovered. If God is Truth, as scripture says, surely determining and preserving the truth about God is a key role of the Church?

Let’s look at this more deeply. The creeds are to be foundational for Anglicanism, that is, they state truths which all Anglicans should accept. On the commission were some who found that they could not in good conscience accept two points of the creeds, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Jesus. This use of the phrase “in good conscience” surprises me; it seems to me that, as Anglican priests, they should be conscience-bound to accept the foundational doctrine of the Church. Clearly, then, they must be referring to some other principle than moral duty. I imagine that what they are really saying is that the doctrine of the Resurrection is logically inconsistent with the other propositions to which they feel they must assent. Given their presuppositions, principles, and philosophical position, they find they must reject the Resurrection, at least as it has traditionally been understood.

Now, if an Anglican theologian finds that he cannot believe some important tenet of the faith, it is at least intellectually honest of him to admit that fact. I can respect that, and I can respect the sincerity of his belief. But I have two further observations. First, on what moral ground can he be encouraged to go on thinking of himself as an Anglican theologian if he has rejected the foundations of Anglican thought? And yet, this is what the Anglican churches have been doing for at least a century. My second observation is thoroughly practical.

I was a math major in college; I’ve proved more theorems and solved more math problems than you can shake a stick at. Now, the interesting thing about the exercises in math textbooks is that the solutions to some of the problems (usually the odd-numbered ones) are usually in the back of the book. Thus, you may not know how to do the problem, but you can often know where you should end up—and if you do not end up there, you know you made some mistake in your reasoning. The mistake might be subtle or it might be stupid, but there must be one.

It seems to me that an Anglican theologian who finds his conclusions contradicting the creeds is in a similar situation. The Nicene Creed, for example, was the product of a century of dispute among the finest minds in Christendom. If the Bible were a math text, the Creed is the set of answers in the back. It says, if you start reasoning there, you should end up here. And if you don’t, the correct action to take is to check your premises and your reasoning and see where you went wrong. And while you’re figuring out how you can possibly get from here to there, you still hold fast to there as your eventual destination.

What Doctrine in the Church of England has to say about assent to the creeds and other Anglican “formularies” is this:

1. The Christian Church exists on the basis of the Gospel which has been entrusted to it.

2. General acceptance, implicit if not explicit, of the authoritative formularies, doctrinal and liturgical, by which the meaning of the Gospel has been defined, safeguarded, or expressed, may reasonably be expected from members of the Church.

So far, so good.

3. Asset to formularies and the use of liturgical language in public worship should be understood as signifying such general acceptance without implying detailed assent to every phrase of proposition thus employed.

4. Subject to the above, a member of the Church should not be held to be involved in dishonesty merely on the ground that, in spite of some divergence from the tradition of the church, he has assented to formularies or makes use of the Church’s liturgical language in public worship.

Here we must be careful. If, by the above, the commission means that those who are struggling intellectually with some part of the creeds may still say them during Sunday worship and thus accept the truth of the creeds with their will while still failing to understand that truth intellectually, then I can accept these statements. If, by the above, they mean that those who have determined to reject the truth of some part of the creeds altogether may continue to pretend to accept them during Sunday worship, I find I am hard put to call that anything but dishonesty. And yet, given the state the Church is in, it appears that many of the clergy must have taken this principle in this second sense, and have been encouraged to go on about their ministry as though nothing was wrong.

A final thought. As C.S. Lewis points out on several occasions, the danger with trying to make yourself stupider than you are is that you very often succeed. Failing to treat the foundational statements of the faith as foundational strikes me as an example of this principle in action; I suppose the eventual outcome shouldn’t surprise me.

How To Read A Book, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

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I tried reading this book some years ago, and dismissed it as being not especially pertinent to my life. Most of my reading has been either for pleasure or information; since leaving school I’ve rarely tried to study a difficult book so as to get out of it everything that I possibly can. (To be honest, I’m not sure I ever tried to do that in school, either.) As that’s the endeavour Adler and Van Doren mean by the deceptively simple word “read”, their book wasn’t of much use.

But spurred on by the recent Anglican Follies, I’ve embarked this spring on a reading program of some weight, and it soon became clear that I was going to need to work harder if it were to be worth doing. I remember Adler and Van Doren’s book, and found a new copy (I’d gotten rid of my own), and devoured it. For self-study, especially of non-fiction, it’s proven to be extremely useful.

The authors define four levels of reading. The first is simply basic reading, which you’re capable of given that you’re reading these words. The next level is “inspectional reading.” Simply put, the goal of inspectional reading is to find out what a book is about in the least amount of time. You begin by studying the title page, the table of contents, and browsing through the index; you look at each chapter, looking for introductions, conclusions, and summaries; you leaf through the book, reading a page here and a page there; finally, if you have time, you read the book straight through, as fast as possible. The goal isn’t to understand the book in detail; the goal is have a general notion of the author’s message, to determine whether the book is worthy of further effort, and, if it is, to build a foundation for third level, a deeper, analytical reading.

I’ve found inspectional reading on its own to be a remarkably useful tool. I’d always approached non-fiction works like novels; I’d start on the first page, and read through to the end–if I ever got that far. If one’s goal is to be entertained, that’s not unreasonable; but if the goal is to transfer the contents of the book into one’s head, or even simply to determine whether the contents of the book is worth transferring into one’s head, it’s not terribly useful. And a good bit of the work of inspectional reading can be done in ten or fifteen minutes at the bookstore–leading to significant cost savings if the book isn’t worth bringing home.

The third level is analytical reading, a much lengthier, more detailed reading; you begin by outlining the content and end by analyzing each passage. I won’t go into the specifics here, as Adler and Van Doren’s description of analytical reading fills the bulk of the book; I’ll just note that reading Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody analytically (my first effort along these lines) took me several months. On the other hand, I learned a great deal from it.

The fourth level, syntopical reading, is all about reading about a particular topic in multiple books at once. I confess I haven’t read that section of How To Read A Book yet; it hasn’t yet struck me as necessary. I may get there yet.

Anyway, I recommend this book highly. I wish I’d started reading this way years ago. Of course, years ago I didn’t see the need.

The Jesus Tomb

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There’s been a lot of bandwidth wasted over James Cameron’s upcoming documentary about a tomb in Jerusalem that he thinks might have contained the bones of Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, and various family members, including Jesus’ son.

The idea is absurd on the face of it, of course; in some ways, this is just more Da Vinci Code foolishness. Many Christian bloggers have gone out of their way to say so, sometimes using quite strong language. I’d been pondering whether to say something on the subject myself, but Rod Bennett has done a much better job than I’d ever have taken the time to do, and done it in a thoughtful, peaceful, and insightful way. No strong language here, and a number of points we Christians should take to heart. It’s long, but it’s worth it.

Bribing Bloggers

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Joel on Software has a post regarding the corporate wooing of bloggers. It seems that Microsoft has offered a number of bloggers free laptops running their new Vista operating system. The expectation is that these bloggers will review Vista, and no doubt Microsoft is hoping that they’ll review it positively. Whether they review Vista or not, positively or otherwise, the bloggers get to keep the laptops.

In Joel’s view, the real virtue of the blogosphere is its independence. Bloggers write what they write because they want too, not because they are paid. Joel suggests that gifts like this amount to a massive bribe, and causes these bloggers to lose credibility. Worse, it causes all bloggers everywhere to lose credibility, even if the gift is disclosed. Blogger A, in the midst of a positive review, discloses that he has received a free laptop; but Blogger B, who also gives a positive review, does not. Did B receive a laptop as well, and fail to disclose it? Was B bought? How can you tell? Joel’s come to the conclusion that bloggers simply shouldn’t accept such gifts. (I’ll note that Joel was offered one of these laptops, and turned it down.)

Me, I think it’s a matter of scale. As a book reviewer, I occasionally get review copies from one publisher or another. Sometimes I like the book, sometimes I don’t; and my reviews reflect this. I admit, I don’t like giving a negative review for a book I’ve received for free–but long-time readers will be aware that that doesn’t stop me. And because review copies are typically for books I’d not have read otherwise, I’m much more likely to give a negative review than for a book I chose myself. Regardless of how I review the book, no one expects me to return it to the publisher. The cost is simply part of the publicity budget for the book.

I note that a number of pro photographers with blogs, notably Michael Reichman, frequently receive cameras for review; and the fine folks over at Engadget receive a wide variety of gear. But it’s clear from their reviews that they don’t get to keep any of it–if they like something and want one for their very own, they must buy one, as Reichman recently bought one of the new Leica M8 digital rangefinder cameras. Everything goes back to the vendor.

Thinking about it, I think Joel’s on the right track, but he goes a bit too far. I don’t think it’s necessary for bloggers to eschew all gifts; it’d be silly for me to send my review copies back to the publisher, for example. It would be perfectly reasonable for Microsoft to give out free review copies of Vista to appropriate bloggers, just as Simon & Schuster sent Pamela Aidan’s books to me–nobody’s going to stick with an operating system they dislike just because they got it for free. Free laptops, though, strike me as rather over the top–especially when it’s not the laptop that’s being reviewed.

I can see Microsoft’s point–they want to spare the reviewers the pain of installing Vista as an upgrade, and they want to be sure that Vista is running on a system on which it can shine. And it’s really hard to judge an operating system unless you make a real commitment to it and use it for real work, which is psychologically tough to do if you know the machine you’re using is going to go back to Microsoft at the end of the month.

So I don’t feel as strongly about it as Joel does. But he certainly has a point.

Determination Day

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The 4th of July isn’t the day the 13 Colonies won their independence from Britain; it’s the day they declared their independence. On the 4th we celebrate their eventual victory, but more than that we celebrate the resolve, vision, and determination which led to that victory.

Today, September 11th, we remember those thousands of innocent American civilians who died in the brutal attack on the Twin Towers. But 9/11 is more that. It is the day we resolved, as a nation, not to knuckle under to the terrorist threat–and more than that, to stomp it out.

We must not turn 9/11 into a simple day of remembrance. We have not earned that blessing.

We must not lose our determination.