Ross Douthat is a Genius.

Seriously. You'll not hear me say that very often about anyone, but in this case I think it's justified. The ouster of Metropolitan Jonah has all the makings of a brilliant story. A high level church official, the highest actually, has been implicated in a cover up of a rape by a deranged priest. There is sex, alcohol, religion, and scandal, but all anyone can seem to talk about is an article Douthat wrote about the statistical decline of the Episcopal Church. Small newspapers in smaller midwestern towns are giving each other high fives at the downfall of the nominal Christian. Episcopal bishops repudiate the criticisms, Episcopal parishioners echo them, and Episcopal priests try to temper them. Meanwhile, emergent, missional, politically leftist, and every stripe of hipster Christian have launched an Occupy the Blogosphere movement to protest the caricature. How did Douthat do it? It has been outrageous, and I am clearly by no means immune. (I've even caught myself arguing in the comments of other articles with people clearly too riled to think straight.)

Considering how heated the discourse has become, a few clarifications and disclaimers seem to be retrospectively in order on my part.

The liberal-conservative continuum is a useful but not flawless tool for discussing contemporary Christianity. I endeavor to be very careful with the labels I use in describing Christian groups. A historical perspective has afforded me a wonderfully rich taxonomy with which to precisely categorize various manifestations of the faith as they have appeared repeatedly throughout history, and I am convinced that it is safe to talk about a "liberal" wing of Christianity and a "conservative" one that dominate the scene in the American religious landscape. Now there are important qualifiers there. First, only America is in view here. Talking about liberal and conservative Christianity in Africa would conjure completely different images if not, more likely, be entirely nonsensical. Second, liberal and conservative Christianity dominate but do not constitute the American religious landscape. There are many groups, some significant theologically and some powerful within small segments of society, that fall into neither group neatly. Any kind of binary system of categorizing Christianity will necessarily fall short. (Sorry, Byron Williams.)

Ambiguity is the mother of conflict. Much of the tension that has arisen in the wake of Douthat's article has been a result of uncertainty about just what is meant by "liberal Christianity." Some of this has been on the part of self-styled liberals misreading what is being said in an effort to serve their own agendas. Much of it has been on the part of conservatives who are so busy rejoicing in their arguments that they do not take the time to clarify them fully. Even Douthat is somewhat at fault. It has been rightly pointed out that liberal Christianity can and does thrive in ways beyond what can be measured by attendance in the Episcopal Church. Douthat, however, is very careful to limit his criticisms to institutional bodies that have embraced liberal Christianity. Thus, saying that the "spiritual but not religious" demographic (who are often embracing the label "liberal Christians") yet grows is not to debunk Douthat but to confirm him. They are leaving the liberal churches because they have nothing left to offer. Additionally, many have complained that certain liberal church groups are continuing to grow, churches that cling to the traditional core of Christian doctrine but play free-and-loose with traditional Christian forms. Again, however, Douthat makes very sure to define liberal Christianity as theological liberalism, the marginalization (if not obliteration) of all theology and dogma in favor of left-wing social and political causes. Cf. Burklo. Churches that keep the faith and update the practice are the kind of liberal churches Douthat wants. Which leads me to...

The decline of liberal Christianity is nothing to be happy about. Douthat is careful not to gloat over the predicted demise of the Episcopal Church, and other conservative Christians should follow suit. The conservative church has always existed in order to temper the unbridled pursuit of progress as its own end, to sustain the truths which might be (and in many cases have been) discarded when they become inconvenient, and to continue the stress on holiness which has characterized God's relationship with His people from its earliest recorded moments. What the conservative church needs to realize is that the liberal church has an important function as well. It prevents the rest of the church from embracing the fallacy that something must be done a certain way because it has always been done a certain way. It keeps the faith fresh, timely, and growing. And, perhaps most importantly, the liberal church has historically stressed social ethics as a counterpoint to the conservative church's stress on personal ethics. Conservatives rightly have a problem with vulgarity, sexual libertinism, divorce, and substance abuse. Liberals rightly have a problem with war, poverty, oppression, and disease.

The two groups or, more appropriately, the two impulses within Christianity serve each other through their constructive tension. It is only when that tension becomes conflict that we see the kind of partisan infighting which is quickly coming to define every aspect of American life. So conservatives, put away the fireworks. The demise of a powerful liberal branch is among the worst possible outcomes for American Christianity. And liberals, there's no reason to equate Douthat with sexists and racists. His article has the same purpose that my responses to Burklo did: to encourage the liberal branch of Christianity to recover "a religious reason for its own existence" and "consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world." Because I want a strong, vibrant, liberal voice among institutional churches. Otherwise, the Southern Baptist Convention gets to set the tone of the message, and I'm not ready for that.

That'll Teach You to Play by the Rules, Penn State

The verdict is in, the dust has settled, and, guess what, people are outraged. And why shouldn't they be? After all, the recent sanctions handed down by the NCAA are just one more in a string of knee-jerk reactions from the public on the final great unifying force for Americans, sex abuse scandals.

The punishment begins with a sixty million dollar fine. This and this alone seems like an appropriate punishment, and the number could have been much higher. That sum, equal to only one year of Penn State football revenue, will come exclusively from the athletics fund and will be used exclusively to fund sex abuse charities across the country. There is a logical connection here between the sexual abuse which was, to some extent, permitted by some members of the institution and the consequence for that complicity. From there, the NCAA added a loss of athletic scholarships and a four year post season ban, which is non-sensical but expected. Perhaps it may have some value as a deterrent, assuming, of course, that there are institutions out there who actually care more about the integrity of their football program than about pedophiles in their midst as so many fast-tongued commentators are implying about Penn State.

The real source of unrest, both mine and the Penn State community's, is the nullification of fourteen years of wins. The NCAA, in their inscrutable wisdom, decided that they would begin with the first abuse allegation and just erase the history of Penn State football from then until the present. Explain to me, who does that serve? Certainly not the victims, unlike the sixty million dollars about to flood abuse charities. And who does it punish? Not Sandusky, who has the tender affection of his fellow prisoners to look forward to as punishment. Not anyone in the administration who may have been complicit, since they have all been indicted, forced out, or fired.

It actually is pretty obvious who the revision of history is meant to penalize. None other than Joe Paterno, who, in losing those wins, has forever lost his place as the winningest coach in major college football. If you'll pardon the indelicacy, I'd like to congratulate the NCAA on coming as close as imaginable to literally using their authority to beat a dead horse. For my part, I agree with the Paterno family, that JoePa continues to be presumed guilty until proven innocent:

The point of due process is to protect against this sort of reflexive action. Joe Paterno was never interviewed by the University or the Freeh Group. His counsel has not been able to interview key witnesses as they are represented by counsel related to ongoing litigation. We have had no access to the records reviewed by the Freeh group. The NCAA never contacted our family or our legal counsel. And the fact that several parties have pending trials that could produce evidence and testimony relevant to this matter has been totally discounted.

Unfortunately all of these facts have been ignored by the NCAA, the Freeh Group and the University.

But let's say that Paterno is every bit as guilty as the most rabid conspiracy theorist believes him to be. You tear down his statue. You un-paint his halo. You--which is to say, Nike, Brown, the Big Ten, and so many more--blot out his name. Now you re-write history just to strip him of his records. What is this obsession with punishing the dead? He's dead! Dead and buried. It makes it very difficult to take all this self-righteous scapegoating very seriously when the scapegoat has already been slaughtered. The fact that an organization the magnitude of the NCAA has felt the need to jump on the bandwagon and actively repudiate Joe Paterno in the sternest way it knows how shows just how little courage and conviction remains in the world.

Stripping Penn State of those wins serves no purpose, except to satisfy the obligatory indignation of the corporations and the masses to whom they peddle their wares. It certainly doesn't actually bother the dearly departed Paterno (though it seems a trifle cruel to his entirely innocent family who have to suffer through the public flogging of his corpse). Instead, it sends a message to past and future players of Penn State, that their efforts on the field, the victories they achieve by the sweat of their brow, the brutality they subject their bodies to, are all in the hands of a fickle overlord who, at any moment, may wave a wand and erase them. "This is not a football related issue. We didn't cheat at football and they shouldn't take our wins," observed a Penn State freshman. That simple, off-the-cuff logic has all the rational force necessary to overturn the NCAA calculated decision.

Nevermind that football doesn't really matter. Nevermind the pious but empty cries for "justice" that thinly mask bloodlust. The principle at stake here is fairness and a rational ordering of society. This ruling proudly announces the message that you can do everything right, play by all the rules (as the players did), and you can still be punished. Punished for someone else's crime. Punished to satiate a media fueled public outrage. Punished retroactively and without recourse to appeal. That, to me, is a greater catalyst for evil than leniency. After all, if they can come for you anyway, why be good to begin with?

Harding in the Olympics

I came across this exciting tidbit in the Arkansas Times:

[Janet] Cherobon-Bawcom, a former runner at Harding University, qualified for the 2012 London Olympics in the 10K race last month. A native of Kenya, she started running at age 20 when she was told it could help her get a scholarship. She will be Harding's first Olympic athlete. After becoming a naturalized citizen in 2011, Cherobon-Bawcom was able to represent Team USA in championships and now will represent the nation at the 2012 Olympics. See her in the 10,000-meter race at 3:25 p.m. Aug. 3.

This could be better than watching Tank Daniels play in Super Bowl XLII.

And now for something completely different...

I'm not one for simply reblogging from other sites, typically. This short article, however, tickled me so thoroughly and will provide such a welcome relief from yet another protracted multi-part, one-sided argument that I can't help but share it:

Hipster Christians, I'm going to help you out. I see you are grasping at something, trying to find the ironic Church of your dreams, where men can grow beards of foolish proportions and women can dress like their grannies' grannies, a place where scarves are worn in every unfashionable fashion imaginable, a place where people do shots and eat hummus at community gatherings, enjoy rooms filled with a fog of incense and prefer to read books that pre-date industrialisation.

I would like to direct your attention to "The Orthodox Church."

With this teaser having whet your appetite, I'll direct you to the rest of this charming post on the original site.

Answering Allison: Pacifism and Hyperbole

As part of my research for the Anarchy in May series, I was lured in by the title of Dale Allison’s The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination. Hoping to have my moral imagination inspired, I cracked the spine only to find that I still feel more invigorated by the old familiar text of Matthew 5 than by Allison’s exposition of its meaning. More than anything, his attempt to take to task the pacifist interpretation of the command to “resist not the evildoer” stirred the polemicist in me, unsurprisingly. In fact, quite contrary to the very limited homiletics training I had many years ago, I managed a list of five distinct problems with his critique that can be answered with relative ease.

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Allison's fifth and final argument, the last, desperate refuge of every uncomfortable exegete, is to claim hyperbole and then lean back in his armchair puffing his pipe and thumbing his monocle sinisterly.* Before launching into the "even if I'm wrong, I'm right" portion of his argument, he concludes, "It is, furthermore, even possible that the pictures offer impractical advice. If, after being struck on the right cheek with a back-handed insult from an enemy's right hand, one were literally to turn the other cheek, the slapper would either have to switch hands to give a back-handed insult or use a fist. And if one were to give away one's undergarment as well as one's overgarment, the result would be nudity. The very strangeness of these images warns that we may have here exaggeration or hyperbole." Admittedly, the advice Jesus gives here, and frankly just about everywhere else, is impractical by almost ever standard of pragmatism. Unfortunately, Allison had not yet realized, though he would on the very next page, that "the Sermon on the Mount does no promote utilitarianism." Jesus is concerned ultimately with what is right not with what is practical.

Hyperbole is that delightful hammerspace into which scholars like to cram all the teachings of Jesus and the apostles, particularly those on discipleship, which are unsettling. They then, of course, turn around and laud how revolutionary the Gospel is, but they apparently only want it to upset things they think need upsetting and in ways they think need upsetting. The Sermon on the Mount is the worst offender in hyperbolic language. Giving to everyone who asks of you. Being better to maim yourself than to sin. Going into a closet to pray. Not letting our right hand know what our left is giving in alms. (The only alms we like to give secretly are to politicians.) Not judging others for sins which we are presently committing. Can you imagine a world where people actually did those things? Me either, but it has more to do with the inability of my imagination to overcome human frailty than it does with the absurdity of the suggestions. Allison's suggestions aren't even the most shameful attempts at hyperbolically arguing for hyperbole I've witness. I was personally present when Sean Hannity--responding to a question about speaking at historically pacifist Harding University--said to a student, "If someone broke into your house and was raping your wife, are you telling me you wouldn't stop him" (paraphrase), Hannity apparently confusing what a university freshman would do if transported into a horror film with what is morally upright and commanded by Christ. The appeals, whether they be to nakedness or to home invasion and rape, all fall along the same lines. I admit that hyperbole is a legitimate rhetorical tool, one which was available to the biblical authors and figures and one which they likely made use of, but I am skeptical about painting every radical command with the nullifying label "hyperbole" as an expedient so we can all sleep easier at night.

The truth is, there seem to be very good biblical examples of Christ and early Christians taking these commands very seriously. After all, when someone begs a coin of Peter in the temple, he is forced to confess that he has no money--mirroring perhaps the radical poverty and charity of his teacher. More on point, Paul apparently had no problem being naked for Jesus, impractical though it may have been to labor, to toil, to lose sleep, to thirst, to go without food, and to endure the cold naked. He even thought nothing of becoming the scum of the earth, blessing when he was reviled, entreating when he was slandered, and enduring all manner of persecution. It could be, just possibly, that Paul took seriously the teaching and, more importantly, the example of Christ himself who, in the words of Peter, "when he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly." And what is more radical, more impractical, more difficult to believe: that someone might be naked for Christ or that someone might die for him? The problem with painting this particular text as somehow invalidatingly hyperbolic is that there are too many biblical examples of it being lived out in a very literal way.

All of this without mention of Allison's most ridiculous point of all. The idea that turning the other cheek literally is logistically problematic is far and away that worst possible argument that could ever be made against pacifism. If you'll pardon the hyperbole.

*I don't actually know what Dale Allison looks like, but I suspect he doesn't smoke a pipe or wear a monocle or do anything remotely sinister...Or does he?

The Song of the Summer

I don't typically go in for Top 40 music, but this song (shockingly) hit the spot. I'm not sure what it is:



Incidentally, to all those who have, for whatever inexplicable reason, visited The Itinerant Mind, thank you. The Blogger edition just passed the ten thousand pageview mark, with the much newer Wordpress edition sliding past one thousand at almost the same time.

Answering Allison: Pacifism and the Unforgiving Servant

As part of my research for the Anarchy in May series, I was lured in by the title of Dale Allison’s The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination. Hoping to have my moral imagination inspired, I cracked the spine only to find that I still feel more invigorated by the old familiar text of Matthew 5 than by Allison’s exposition of its meaning. More than anything, his attempt to take to task the pacifist interpretation of the command to “resist not the evildoer” stirred the polemicist in me, unsurprisingly. In fact, quite contrary to the very limited homiletics training I had many years ago, I managed a list of five distinct problems with his critique that can be answered with relative ease.

____________________________________________________________

The fourth error in Allison's argument, his exegesis of the parable of the unforgiving servant, is intended to augment the third, but for the sake of keeping my comments brief I will treat it here separately. Picking up in the omitted portion of the previous quote, "But what does one do if others are being insulted or injured? Although this is a crucial question to which Matthew returns no explicit answer, in the parable in 18:23-25 a king, out of mercy, releases a servant from debt. But when that servant mistreats another, the king intervenes with punishment. In this story the king lets himself suffer wrong; but when it is another who suffers, mercy gives way to justice. Could it be that a similar sort of distinction should be read into 5:38-42?" The answer is, unequivocally, no. Why? Because that implication isn't even present in the parable. It has been devised by Allison as a possible exemption from the ethical strictures of the Sermon on the Mount and then superimposed onto an unrelated parable.

It is simple enough to discern the correct intent of Jesus' parable of the unforgiving servant, primarily because Jesus explains it at the end. Allison's mistake can be understood (and, yes, forgiven) when one considers that the idea of a king being personally forgiving and institutionally violent fits very nicely with his other justification for ignoring the "resist not the evildoer" command. Still, Allison makes a fatal flaw by identifying the king with a human agent when Jesus himself says that the king figures "the heavenly Father" who "will do [likewise] to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." The figure which represents the questioner, in this case Peter, is the unforgiving servant. If there is a figure whose behavior is an analog to Christians' it is the servant and not the king--lest our egos run away with us.

More than just being a gross exegetical failure, Allison's reading of the text as a tacit approval of institutional violence to correct injustice misses entirely the point which Jesus is making to Peter. When Peter asks how often to forgive, Jesus gives him an astronomical number and, just in case Peter thinks he's exaggerating, he follows up with a parable explaining the consequences of not forgiving. Quite in line with Christian pacifism, God is the only agent authorized by the parable to decide when "mercy gives way to justice." Human agents are expected to forgive because God has forgiven then and to expect the Father to remove that mercy if they are unwilling to emulate it. The suggestion that the parable might decide when Christians should be allowed to punish instead of forgive not only misunderstands the clear purpose of the story, it directly contradicts it. A more careless reading hardly seems possible.