Some Elephants Forget

I have already addressed the ironic history of government attempts to legislate marriage and divorce, so--though tempting--I will not rehash my previous thoughts in their entirety. I would, however, like to share another interesting quote from Foster's Moral Reconstruction which is illustrative of just how far the Republican Party has come in terms of changing its social policies (emphasis added):

The Roberts case revived interest in a constitutional amendment against polygamy and polygamous cohabitation; the later provision would have outlawed living with plural wives married before the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints presumed reversal on polygamy. Over the next few years, many resolutions or bills in behalf of a broad antipolygamy amendment were entered; none ever passed. Frank J. Cannon, son of a high Mormon official who broke with his father and became an anti-Mormon agitator, claimed that in 1900 a representative of the Republican Party reached an agreement with Mormon leaders in which they promised to support William McKinley's reelection in return for the party's pledge to block a constitutional amendment that would give the federal government power over marriage and divorce. Such a deal, if in fact it was made, would surely have applied to an antipolygamy amendment.

Interestingly, contemporary Republicans are running on precisely the opposite platform. This is a particularly intriguing position for Mitt Romney, given the way historical amendments of this nature were specifically designed to discriminate against marriage practices in his faith and to disenfranchise Mormons as a people.

The Wisdom of Peter of Damascus

In his Treasury of Divine Knowledge, Peter of Damascus presents a more perfect way of reading the Scripture by reminding us that true hermeneutics is moral rather than theoretical and that understanding and application are so paradoxically intertwined as to never be possible in isolation:

For this reason the fathers say that we ought to search the Scriptures assiduously, in humility and with the counsel of experienced men, learning not merely theoretically but by putting into practice what we read; and that we ought not to inquire at all about what is passed over in silence by Holy Scripture...For the Lord commands that we should search the Scriptures above all by means of bodily and moral actions, and in this way find eternal life.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 4)

After spending days parsing my thoughts on Jenson, Hart, and Hart on Jenson, all that remains is to share with you the memorable wisdom David Bentley Hart imparted:

Well, theology is a particularly savage business (at least when it is done right), and one that it is never too early to discourage one's children from entering.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 3)

As is inevitably the case when the conversation turns to classical descriptors for God (e.g. impassible, immutable, eternal), the question of whether or not true faith was corrupted by the evil of Hellenistic philosophy arises. It is a the common calumny of almost every contemporary Protestant theologian that at some point during its development, Christian doctrine sold its soul to "Hellenism." During the course of his discussion of this belief, in which he gladly embraces the early Christian conversation with Platonism as "the special work of the Holy Spirit," Hart uses an illuminating term to characterize this Protestant understanding of God: "Teutonism." There seems to be a common delusion among Protestant scholars--and I encountered this most recently in Paul Hinlicky's Divine Complexity--that if they can only reject the corrupting influences of Hellenism, they will automatically return to an authentic Biblical (sometimes termed "Semetic") worldview. What Hart deftly points out with this term is that this new brand of thinking is not some genuinely detached return to unblemished biblical thought (which incidentally arose in a Hellenistic context); it is deeply dependent on another extrabiblical philosophical paradigm, German Idealism. It was German historical and systematic theologians who reconstructed an early Christian narrative in which a simple faith gradually gave way to a philosophical one, who declared that this acquiescence was fundamentally unsound, and who devised a philosophically "independent" theology of God in response. (It is strange that this had never occurred to me before, especially given how much time I spend thinking about the Restorationist delusion that they were reconstruction authentic biblical Christianity rather than formulating a new Baconian Christianity.)

Without declaring either "Hellenism" or "Teutonism" superior (though it ought to be obvious from my previous posts where I fall), it seems that Hart's disposition toward philosophical "intrusion" into one's worldview is the only honest one. We must be aware of, admit, and embrace our philosophical heritage rather than laboring under the pretense that we attempt theology in a void.

The Perilous Life of Southpaws

Most, I assume, are familiar with the statistic that floats around out there in the popular consciousness that (depending on who you hear it from) 2,500 left-handed people die every year from using products designed specifically for right-handed people. Whether you choose to believe that or not, the travails of the left-handed are real and serious, moreso than I ever realized. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that left-handed people are more susceptible to dyslexia, schizophrenia, and ADHD, and that is only the short list:

Left-handedness appears to be associated with a greater risk for a number of psychiatric and developmental disorders. While lefties make up about 10% of the overall population, about 20% of people with schizophrenia are lefties, for example. Links between left-handedness and dyslexia, ADHD and some mood disorders have also been reported in research studies.

What is scarier still, especially for me, is that those of us who are cross-dominant, what the article calls "mixed-handed," represent only 1% of the population but a disproportionately high percentage of those suffering from serious psychological disorders. (Please, no one tell Occupiers that I am part of the 1%.)

Setting aside, reluctantly, the impulse of every left-handed or cross-dominant person to read this article and go on a paranoid journey of self-diagnosis, the studies cited in the Wall Street Journal offer a number of interesting areas for further thought. The first is in the suggestion that handedness may actually have more to do with environment (particularly the pre-natal environment) than genetics. This undermines the default excuse, fed to me as a child, that some people are just born left-handed or that it makes someone "special." In fact, only about 25% of the matter of handedness is decided by genetics. In reality, left-handedness is more likely to be the result of a hostile pre-natal environment. "Babies born to older mothers or at a lower birth weight are more likely to be lefties, for example. And mothers who were exposed to unusually high levels of stress during pregnancy are more likely to give birth to a left-handed child." Far from being "special," a more honest rhetoric might describe southpaws as "defective" (not that "special" hasn't already become societies euphemism for that anyway). Being left-handed is less a pleasant genetic rarity like being born with hazel eyes and more like being born with a lazy eye (or, in the case of us poor, unfortunate cross-dominants, being born cross-eyed).

Related to this, and more nearly related to my earlier point about personality theories, the relationship between handedness and mental disorders speaks to the actual relevance of brain lateralization. As has long been suspected, left-handed people show a greater tendency toward right-brain dominance, with some 30% of left-handed people being either right-brain dominant or "distributed." It is this deviation from the standard pattern of lateralization which many scientists believe may contribute to higher incidences of schizophrenia and other disorders, in addition to more mundane problems like difficulty in school (which may explain why left-handed people are paid 10% less than their right-handed colleagues).

This is obviously not intended to endorse some kind of fatalism about left-handedness or mixed-handedness. The article points out that many highly successful people have been left-handed, including six of the last twelve United States presidents. These facts should, however, affect the way that we understand handedness and, as the article specifically suggests, should make parents of left-handed or cross-dominant children more aware of potential risk factors associated with being left-handed.

Goodbye, Harry Morgan

At the ripe old age of 96, actor Harry Morgan died today. Most, including myself, knew Morgan as Col. Sherman Potter from M*A*S*H, though he could be found as a supporting character in countless films and television shows.

It happens that last night I was watching an episode of M*A*S*H which centered on Morgan, whose character was struggling to deal with the loss of the last of his old friends to death. Through the course of the episode, we walk with him through anger and grief and finally joy in what still lives on. It strikes me how apropos it was that I should have watched this particularly fitting episode. There is an especially poingant scene, long one of my favorites from the series, in the middle where Morgan takes a young, tattered, and bruised little Korean refugee onto his lap and begins to speak to him about life. The moment represents one of those rare gems in film narrative that has all the genuine complexity of real life: the old man imparting his wisdom to a child, the absurdity of the surroundings, the faint noise of human drama linger just beneath the surface, and the irony that we know Morgan's wisdom will never reach the boy not, as expected, because children never listen but because the boy speaks no English. Nevertheless, Morgan offers his wisdom to the child and to viewers, and there is in it the appropriate voice of mourning and of hope that should accompany us in the face of death. In that wry, folksy style that characterized all his performances, he shows the boy a picture of himself as a youth and explains, "Yep, life is a kind of now you see it, now you don't proposition. It was all in front of me then, though, like it is now for you. You're off to kind of a rough start, but I bet you've got some glorious times ahead of you."



Harry Morgan, you will be missed but not forgotten.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 2)

It is so rare that I disagree with David Bentley Hart, and when I feel compelled to do so it is always with the utmost trepidation. Nevertheless--in spite of the fact that, as Stanley Hauerwas put it, "The sheer delight that David Bentley's turns of phrase invite tempts me to agree with anything he writes--almost"--in reading his endorsement of Robert Jenson's Christology, which stresses the inseparability of the Son and Jesus, I wonder if Hart does not go too far.

Jesus is not an avatar of the Logos, a mask the Son assumes in a transient or extrinsic fashion, or a part he plays in some grand cosmic charade. When God becomes man, this is the man he becomes--and there can be no other. That is why it is silly to ask the questions that bad theologians, or casual catechists, or well-meaning Sunday School teachers have sometimes felt moved to ask: whether the Son might have been incarnate as someone else-as a Viking, or a Nigerian, or a woman, or simply another first-century Jew. The Logos, when he divests himself of his divine glory, is this man: between this finite historical individual and the eternal and infinite Son of God, there is no caesura. Jesus is not a manifestation of the Son, but the Son in his only true human form.

I certainly sympathize with Hart's general point, that the person of Jesus was not a triviality in the divine plan. There is no person of Jesus apart from the Incarnate Word (and, as far as both Jenson and Hart are concerned, no Word apart from its incarnation in Jesus). I even agree with the rejection of trivial musings like "could Jesus have been a Viking" or the more common "could he have been a she"--though this is more because I think they are unproductive than fundamentally unsound.

Where I find myself forced to dissent, however, is in tying every particular of Jesus to the eternal Son. Hart seems to insist that the Son could not have come as a different ethnicity or a different gender not for pragmatic reasons but for essential ones. This leads to other trivial (but I imagine damning) questions, like "if Jesus were an inch taller, would he cease to be divine" or "if he were balding" (instead of having a full head of flowing chestnut hair, as we all know he had) "would he no longer be the Son?" There is of course a sense in which it is true that the Son became incarnate as he did, the way he did, because that was the perfect time and the perfect manifestation for the perfect purpose of God. At the same time, to tie those contingent realities to the eternality of the Son seems to contradict Hart's normally strong rejection of any limitation or finitude in God.

Perhaps he wouldn't disagree with this (though there is nothing in the above quote to make me think he wouldn't), but I would think it safer to say that the Son could have come in any way he chose but, being perfectly obedient to the will of the Father, chose freely to come as he did, when he did, for the purpose he did. That does not, I think, mean that I believe Jesus was merely an "avatar of the Logos."