Thought for 03.29.11

A bishop is called to guard the faith, a theologian to explore it. The tasks are not mutually exclusive, and it might well be said that one who has thoroughly explored a territory may be its best guardian.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
(a thought not unrelated to another.)

The Church Times on the Covenant

The Church Times of London has produced a very good and helpful (imho) document discussing the relative merits and weaknesses of the Anglican Covenant. It offers many sides of the debate, from thoughtful people across the spectrum, or at least the visible wavelengths.

(It is a fairly slow download, so be patient. I had trouble reaching it in Firefox and so bowed the knee to Gates and switched to Internet Explorer just for this.)

The last section is an "annotated" Covenant that looks vaguely Talmudic, which appeals to me!

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

No New Revelation

When addressing controverted subjects, we are called to look back on the Scriptural text for guidance in dealing with things about which those texts are themselves silent. The issue is not, "What would they have said?" on a topic about which they did not speak; but rather, "What do we say based on what those texts say about other things, using natural reason and knowledge gained since their writing to interpret old texts for new principles."

This is not about any new revelation. As one important story from rabbinic history shows: Revelation is now closed, but interpretation is open -- even a voice from heaven, even from God, cannot contravene the findings of the living interpretative community because, "It [i.e., the Law] is not in heaven" -- that is, God has given the Scripture to the people of God and it is up to us to wrestle with it.

People may well disagree about the outcomes of the wrestling match. And the question, "What Would Jesus Do?" is not entirely out of place, but has to be asked by positing Jesus not of his time, but as he is with us in our time -- as I believe he is, in his church, through his Spirit, which is now engaged in addressing challenges he did not address in those earlier days. There is no new revelation, but there is always new understanding.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

A Sacramental Angle

Marriage is not just for the couple. Their relationship, like the bread of the Eucharist, is blessed and broken open, given, taken, and feeds a multitude.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Let their deaths not have been in vain

Friday the 25th of March will be the 100th anniversary of one of the most terrible and tragic events in New York history, the deadly fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Most of those who perished in the fire, or leaped to their deaths rather than burn, were young immigrant women making a paltry wage in conditions best described as poor; 146 died in the flames and smoke, or on the pavement below. Witnesses at the time were helpless to do anything more than listen to the distant screams and the dull, repeated thuds of the falling bodies as they struck the street. It is a horror that led to changed laws governing safety, and spurred the growth of the labor movement.

In the midst of the tragedies of today, it is good to remember those of the past. In the face of injustices and inequalities, and the exploitation of workers in substandard circumstances at home and abroad, it is even better to do something positive, and to be well-informed about those who make the goods we purchase, who grow the food we eat, who care for us and those we love.

Let us do justice, love mercy, walk with God in our sisters and brothers, for as we do to the least of them we do to the greatest of all.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The Kheel Center at Cornell University has a superb online exhibit and resources about the tragedy.

The Way

C S Lewis once observed that those who have been most effective in this world are those whose hearts were set on the next. There is a destinationalism, an unrealized eschatology, at the heart of our yearning for God, to whom our earthly quest Godward is always and must be asymptotic. God forbid we should put our craft in the place of God. (As Lewis also reminds us, God has forbidden it!)

Anglicanism as it has been at its most effective in this world will never appeal to those who want an object rather than a process, who want final answers instead of follow-up questions, arrival instead of journey, the bonds rather than the affection. As with the Christian faith itself, our particular take in Anglicanism is a Way. Efforts to fix it in static forms rob it of its vitality, its life.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Through Lent with Images

Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts has opened a Lenten gallery "Word and Example" and one of my "rapid icons" (a technique I use in teaching iconography as a means to seeing what is to express what might be) forms what might be called "the last Word."

The icon is called, "The widow waits for justice." She is the widow who persists in knocking at the judge's door, and will not give up until her righteous claims are recognized and met.

The model for this icon is the African-American actor Ruth Attaway. I had the pleasure of working with her many years ago when I designed the lighting and took the company and production photographs for the Theatre Off Park production of Harlem poet Owen Dodson's The Confession Stone — a powerful retelling of the story of Christ through the lens of the African-American culture and tradition. Ruth, whom some may recall from her role as housekeeper to Chance (Peter Sellers) in Being There, played Mary Magdalene at the age of 86, still keeping witness, still waiting to join her Lord and God. Her fierce characterization struck me as so suitable as the subject of this icon, written late last year. Ruth died some years back, in a fire in her apartment building in Harlem. She too has joined her Lord and God, and if she waits for justice, it is the justice we all await, tempered with the mercy of God.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Asking the questions

Mark Vernon's Guardian column has a great catchline at the head, and while the article as a whole doesn't quite live up to the pugnacity and poignancy of the slug, it is well worth reading. The catchline or slug is,

Why do we have such an unbalanced attitude to doubt, demanding certainty where there is none, and pretending to doubt what everyone knows?

This got me thinking about the level of certainty with which some approach the question of same-sex marriage: they are completely sure it is ruled out by Scripture, in spite of the fact that the evidence is indirect and circumstantial (that is, the Scripture does not rule out SSM in so many words, unlike, for instance Sifra on Aharei Mot in the Jewish tradition); and yet they take a very chary attitude towards the evidence of the experience of those who live in or witness the evident virtues of such longstanding relationships, and dismiss it as if living "experience" were somehow less reliable than their just-possible interpretation of ancient documents, venerable though that interpretation may be.

One can sense this tension in the papers and responses that grew out of the House of Bishops Theology Committee blue-ribbon panel of theologians and scholars, recently published in the Anglican Theological Review. I've just finished reading them and am allowing them to percolate before saying any more in detail, but I did sense, in the "traditionalist" papers and responses a growing awareness of this dissonance between ideology and reality.

The question is, in reference to Vernon's catchline, How long are people expected to submit to an unverifiable requirement when the experience of their own lives and of those closest to them casts more and more doubt on its veracity?

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thought for 03.02.11

The most important "stable family" in human history was not a biological nuclear family. There was no room for them in the inn; hence the stable.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Defining Moment

Over at what calls itself the Anglican Mainstream, Andrew Carey reflects on the impossibility of same-sex marriage based on the fact that "The essential nature of marriage as complementary union of a man and a woman, and the stable nature of marriage for children remain appealing." Marriage, by definition, is thus and so.

Andrew is smart enough to recognize this is not entirely true. He even raises the obvious counter-argument: "We are constantly being told that marriage has come in many forms over centuries and millennia and that if it has changed in the past, why can’t it change now?"

Unfortunately, rather than make a cogent response, he merely points out that while such an argument may gain traction outside the church, there enough people in the church who find the old notion "appealing" to be able to communicate this to the larger society, and argue passionately in defense of the ideal.

Andrew's "definitional" approach is a classical example of begging the question. It reminds me of the thwarted efforts of word-purists to resist the changes in meanings of words (based on their actual usage). It is as impossible a task as Canute trying to stop the tide. Reality will always win over false idealism. Andrew, welcome to the real world.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

h/t The Lead

The Covenant as Fruitcake

I was at a meeting of my diocese's Covenant Task Force last week. We are working on educational resources to inform the parishes and members about the proposed Anglican Covenant. The topic of other covenants came up, especially the Lambeth Quad and the one based on the Marks of Mission. I noted that they are both there in the proposed draft, and the following image occurred to me:

The elements of the Chicago Lambeth Quadrilateral and the Marks of Mission, and bits of Scripture and dollops of assorted Anglican Premises have been folded into the batter of the Anglican Communion Covenant like so many raisins, candied citrons, cherries, and whatever those semi-gelatinous green things are, go to form part of the conglomerate of Fruitcake.

It has long been observed that few people actually eat Fruitcake, and yet this does not prevent its seasonal appearance as a "gift-giving opportunity." Someone once wrote that his family used fruitcakes towards building a fallout shelter in the basement. (Remember fallout shelters?) So people keep giving them to each other, in spite of not actually eating them. And it would be considered rude to refuse one, or, once the habit has commenced and taken root, suddenly to stop giving them. They serve as tokens of affection or respect, rather than as food.

It strikes me that the Covenant has become a Fruitcake. We are being urged to adopt it and accept it, in spite of the fact that it offers little in the way of novelty towards solving any of the current or possible future woes of the Communion. It confers no powers on any bodies or individuals they don't already have, though it lays out patterns by which recommendations can be made to those bodies or individuals that might lead them to take actions they could well take without the recommendations. It imposes no mandatory restraint on anyone beyond a call to self-restraint, with the possible consequence of changes in relationships -- which changes, some of real consequence, also have happened and could happen without the Covenant being adopted.

In short, the Covenant is a Fruitcake: we can smile nicely and say thank you, and put it in the cellar with all the other fruitcakes (many a well-meaning scheme or resolution of General Convention or Lambeth or the United Nations); we can refuse it with an equally polite smile, and watch faces fall and lips quiver at this implicit rejection of affection. For Fruitcake it is: a token of habitual affection; and little more.

I continue to be torn between these options, and am grateful for the time remaining before the virtual postal worker struggles up the walk with the burden of the 6-lb. confection, and General Convention is forced to say either, "Why, how nice!" or "Return to Sender" or something in between.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thought for 03.01.11

Tradition is often little more than the Zeitgeist of the past.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

no surprise here...

My Political Views
I am a left social libertarian
Left: 4.33, Libertarian: 6.47

Political Spectrum Quiz
My Culture War Stance
Score: -8.18

Jesus' Love

It would never cross his mind to hate us even when we failed to mind his cross.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Taking a Constitutional

I am happy to see that a group of diocesan chancellors has issued a response to the claims of the ACI and South Carolina that Title IV grants unconstitutional powers to the Presiding Bishop. I am also pleased to see that even as a legal amateur I anticipated a number of the arguments in defense of the authority of the PB that appear in this paper. The strangest of these claims by the ACI and SC is that the Presiding Bishop requires permission to exercise tasks assigned to her in the Constitution and Canons, based on the restriction of bishops’ exercise of their office to the diocese for which they are consecrated. The present paper defends the PB’s right, and indeed duty, to carry out these responsibilities, and there is no indication that permission is needed to do something mandated by law.

Good work. (Note, the link to the paper in the Episcopal New Service release is incorrect. Use this one.)

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Of Fallacy and Falsehood

One of the things I have found so unsatisfactory in discussions on sexuality is the fallaciousness that makes up so much of the argument from the conservative perspective. I am not saying that the conclusions the conservatives reach are necessarily false — but that their arguments often are not really arguments. That is, they may begin with true premises and reach true conclusions, but the mode of getting from one to the other is not properly formed, and fails to prove what it intends to prove. One can, after all, reach a true conclusion by faulty means — but proof of the truth of a conclusion must rest on a train of what Hooker called “demonstrative reason.”

Let me give a simple example of a fallacious argument with a true conclusion. Let us for the sake of simplicity accept A and B as true. (It is admitted that a cat can lose a leg or two and still be a cat!)

A: Cats have four legs.
B: Augusta has four legs.
C: Augusta is a cat.

I hope you can see the problem with this syllogism. C is quite true (you can see from the photo!) but it does not follow from A and B by legitimate logic. It happens to be true, but not because of the argument! The proper syllogism, reaching a true conclusion if both A and B are true would be:

A: Cats have four legs.
B: Augusta is a cat.
C: Augusta has four legs.

So the problem with logical fallacies isn’t that they might not express a truth from time to time — much like Alice’s stopped clock which is right twice a day.* The problem is that a fallacious argument doesn’t actually prove anything, does not establish a truth by reasonable means.

There are, of course, literally dozens of logical fallacies — and you can find helpful summaries of them, with all their fancy Latin names, on any number of web-sites simply by searching for the terms logical and fallacy. Those who have followed the debates and discussions on sexuality will no doubt see how often certain of these fallacies are employed.

Perhaps the principal fallacy is the one that assumes the conclusion as a premise: “Same-sex marriage is impossible because marriage requires a man and a woman.” This may simply be a prevailing weakness of being a “reasserter” — some of whom become quite defensive when asked to do more than simply to reassert, and to demonstrate the truth of their premises as well as their conclusions.

Also common are the twin fallacies of reliance upon length of time a belief is held, or the number of persons who hold it. Neither, of course, proves something to be true; the antiquity or popularity of a tradition may simply show just how wrong people can be, once a truly reasonable examination of the premise or conclusion is undertaken.

The reason I raise this is that I long for a decent argument, but often find myself caught up either in a Monty Python-like cycle of mere contradiction, or facing a tangle of assorted logical fallacies.

Nor, of course, does simply noting the fallaciousness of an argument disprove the truth of a proposition; the problem is that argument requires more than a simple train of assertion and contradiction, but engagement with the substance of the premises to test their soundness. This is to say nothing of the occasional actual falsehood, or distortion of the facts either by carefully ignoring any evidence that doesn’t agree with the premise, or amplifying the evidence that goes beyond what is warranted. That is another difficulty entirely.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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*Update: the famed clock is described in one of the "Difficulties" Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) prepared for The Rectory Umbrella, a miscellany of short occasional pieces and drawings. It is, of course, exactly the sort of clock that Alice would have. I believe it can be seen in Tenniel's illustrations of her entry into Looking Glass House, on the chimney piece. The LGH version has a very snarky expression, no doubt very satisfied with itself at its precise accuracy twice a day. The advantage, of course, to Alice, is that between them she has the ability to be sure of the time precisely four times a day. How to do that? In LC's example, the clock says 8:00, and all you need do is "keep your eye fixed on your clock, and the very moment it is right it will be eight o'clock." To further protests, he advises, "That'll do... the more you argue the farther you get from the point, so it will be as well to stop." Which indeed sounds familiar.

Post 800: From yesterday's sermon

What are the grapes or grain
that you could leave untouched
for others to be nourished by?
Perhaps it is the wheat and grapes you leave behind
that go to make
the bread and wine that will become
the Body and the Blood of God.

What extra miles have you trod down,
or coats or cloaks provided —
and has your cheek once felt
the sting of an unearned slap,
and yet you’ve not returned it
with a blow or protest?

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thought for 02.20.11

Why is it so often the case that people who offer the challenge, “Where in the Bible does it say X?” are conservative Christians who should know perfectly well where in the Bible it says X but apparently don’t know, and who when shown where in the Bible it says X immediately try to explain it away is irrelevant, immaterial, and unimportant?

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Forests, Trees, and Finding the Way

Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, Jennifer Wright Knust. HarperOne 2011.

Jennifer Wright Knust’s Unprotected Texts does not explore a great deal of new ground, but the ground it explores it covers with considerable thoroughness, in a few cases with more than is needed. Writing from both her expertise as a biblical scholar and her life experience, Knust sets out to demonstrate that the Bible neither is nor should be a simple answer book for complex moral issues involving sexuality. Her primary method is to document the considerable concrete inconsistencies in the biblical text, as well as the seeming lack of discomfort the text evinces when particular biblical personalities stray from the purported strait and narrow.

She is much more successful, persuasive, and on firmer ground, with the former approach than the latter. The Bible is inconsistent or unclear on a number of topics related to sexuality, and while it shouldn’t take a scholar to point that out, it is helpful for one to do so, in particular to the extent Knust does. The second approach is far less useful — as is evident from a number of reviews written from a more conservative perspective than mine. That Rahab the harlot or Ruth the Moabite are lauded as persons will not be seen as an endorsement either of harlotry or premarital sex by anyone disposed to see these actions as sinful. Nor does the Scripture appear to endorse the actions themselves — or particularly to condemn them for that matter. This supports Knust’s larger case that we will not find easy answers to questions such as, “Is premarital sex immoral?” in a neat table on page 732 of a floppy Bible, next to the one for Biblical Weights and Measures. (Knust herself offers a number of tables that lay out biblical inconsistencies with great clarity.) But for a modern audience already well-settled in the cozy myth of a “biblical teaching on sexuality” more will be required than Knust offers to unsettle them and remove the scales from their eyes. It will take a brow of flint to confront the obdurate mind-set that looks but doesn’t see, hears but does not understand.

In spite of the weight of scholarship, insufficient as it might be in the long run, the book is a fairly easy read; it is divided and subdivided into fairly short sections with catchy subheadings. As the argument is not so much cumulative as a mosaic of individual elements, each of which highlights the central premise, the book is easily picked up or set down at leisure.

Although I resonate with Knust’s overall argument, I take some exception to a few of her particular readings. For example, when Paul counsels the Corinthians (1 Cor 6) not to be joined with prostitutes, I do not think Paul’s use of the word member is in reference to the sexual organ of an individual man. (The English member used for the male sexual organ is a relic of Victorian squeamishness, and a confusing word choice still with us in the NRSV, where member has another primary meaning; a better translation would be “meat” or “flesh” as in the KJV. The “member” of which Paul speaks is a different word entirely.) I must also note that transliteration of Hebrew is inconsistent, and in one case in error.

To the general reader, however, the greatest disappointment will be the last full chapter before the short conclusion. It includes an exhaustive, and somewhat exhausting, exploration of everything you ever wanted to know about circumcision, and much you didn’t want to know; and knowing, wonder why it is of help to know it. As such it seems to be at a remove from the primary concerns of the book. And in spite of the rousing coda which follows it, this long chapter comes as a bit of a letdown.

Still, Knust has some important things to say, and they are well worth hearing. It is unfortunate that much of what she says will fail to persuade those more comfortable with simple answers to complex questions. There is a difference between not seeing the forest for the trees and not seeing the trees for the forest — in this case, the “forest” as the largely unfounded belief that there is a “biblical teaching on sexuality,” which blinds most people to the actual complexity and richness of the biblical text. Knust’s book highlights these complexities, but not to the extent or with the clarity to shatter the myth once and for all. Some will insist — in spite of the detailed evidence Knust lays out — that there is still some clearly discernible sex ethic to be found in Scripture.

And to some extent, there is — just not the one they think. Knust is not claiming that there is no help from Scripture when it comes to sex. What she affirms is that the Bible will not give us easy or specific answers to the questions now being asked of it. It is not, as she suggests in her concluding chapter, about physical perfection but faithfulness. It is about treating the Bible not as a mere answer book but as a rich history and revelation, from which guidance will be gained only by an approach that engages with it as it is, finding the way through the forest by minding every tree and discerning every path. And the same goes for life itself, doesn’t it?

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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This review is part of the TLC Book Tour for this volume.

Thought for 2.16.11

I believe the proposed Anglican Covenant is more problematical in the things it might lead us not to do than in the things that might be done to us.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
ps Blame (or credit) Mimi, who brought this thought to mind in the comment thread below.