He-Man Jesus

Traditionally, the church has understood Jesus to have been "unlovely" based on certain passages in Isaiah, etc. Nevertheless, to me, it does seem plausible that he would have had muscle mass sufficient to meet the demands of his occupation--that of a carpenter (or stone mason, as some have hypothesized). That may indeed be plausible, but this is ridiculous. This is from Purgatorio (see sidebar for link).

A Dose of Dorothy Sayers

"A society in which consumption must be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand."

Dorothy Sayers
Source: Creed or Chaos, Sophia Press, 1949, 1974, pg. 64
(you can find more quoatations on wealth and poverty here)

Regardless of how extreme one may consider Sayers' view in this quotation, it should at least make him consider how his light is spent.

Real scientists are poetic

I found this article through Arts and Letters Daily (see the sidebar for link). It's a great reminder that even scientists--with all the precise and seemingly exhaustive (but flattened) language they use to describe reality--still must resort to metaphor. Man still--even in this scientific age--must use symbols to try to grasp his world.

From the article:
"I love analogies most of all, my most reliable masters who know in particular all secrets of nature," Kepler wrote in 1604. "We have to look at them especially in geometry, when, though by means of very absurd designations, they unify infinitely many cases in the middle between two extremes, and place the total essence of a thing splendidly before the eyes."

Inspiration and Incarnation

I am putting together a theology curriculum for my new job. I found a review by Susan Wise Bauer on Peter Enn's book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. I have not read the book, but Wise Bauer's review of it causes me to believe that it would be a helpful resource for biblical study. Here's an excerpt from her piece on Enns' book:

[The] God who spoke to man through Christ also speaks to man through Scripture, and in much the same way: he enters into our world and uses our own cultural patterns to reveal himself. We cannot insist that there is a separate, ahistorical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible that somehow triumphs over all contemporary thought and custom. This, Enns writes, is a modern version of the ancient Docetic heresy, which held that Christ only seemed human. "What some ancient Christians were saying about Christ," he writes, "… is similar to the mistake that other Christians have made (and continue to make) about Scripture: it comes from God, and the marks of its humanity are only apparent, to be explained away.

To insist on an "a-historical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible" is--as Wise Bauer says of Enns book--to fall prey to the Docetist impulse (a brand of Gnosticism particularly influential in the early church) and fail to see the fundamental nature of the Incarnation not only to the Christian faith but also to all of reality and knowing.

Leithart on Why Evangelical's Can't Write

The most recent edition of Credenda Agenda is chiefly about Flannery O'Connor. An article that struck me the most was Peter Leithart's Why Evangelical's Can't Write. His thesis:

Here is a thesis, which I offer in a gleeful fit of reductionism: Modern Protestants can't write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics. Protestants need not give up our Protestantism to do this, as there are abundant sacramental resources within our own tradition. But contemporary Protestants do need to give up the instinctive anti-sacramentalism that infects so much of Protestantism, especially American Protestantism.

The reference above to Marburg is there because Leithart opens his article with the 1529 Colloquy at Marburg where Zwinglians and Lutherans met to debate and come to an agreement on Luther's doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist. After agreeing to fourteen of the fifteen propositions put forth by Luther, the Zwinglians--once they were home, after the colloquy--took up the cudgels once again for the Eucharist as mere memorial and the Lutherans once again fought back with their real presence position.

Leithart's argument for why evangelicals can't write goes back to this historical occasion. When the Zwinglians and Lutherans finally parted ways for good at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, the Protestant mind would forever be influenced by the rift:

Marburg is important not so much for what it achieved but as a symbol of what it failed to achieve. It provides a symbolic marker not only for the parting of the ways between Lutheran and Zwinglian, but also, for Zwinglians, the final parting of the ways between symbol and reality. J. P. Singh Uberoi claimed that "Spirit, word and sign had finally parted company at Marburg in 1529. For centuries, Christian sacramental theology had held symbol and reality together in an unsteady tension, but that alliance was ruptured by the Zwinglian view of the real presence. For Zwingli, "myth or ritual . . . was no longer literally and symbolically real and true." In short, "Zwingli was the chief architect of the new schism and . . . Europe and the world followed Zwingli in the event."
For many post-Marburg Protestants, literal truth is over here, while symbols drift off in another direction. At best, they live in adjoining rooms; at worst, in widely separated neighborhoods, and they definitely inhabit different academic departments.

More reflections on a culture's twilight years.

I thought I would add this post due to the arguments (10 non-scriptural arguments against same-sex marriage) Anthony Esolen has been developing at Mere Comments.

As far as I can discern, the strongest argument against same-sex marriage (SSM) seeks to deal with the assumptions of the SSM position--namely, that our bodies matter little and what is really essential is the "heart" i.e. what a person feels, thinks, etc. apart from what they do. Of course, what one does has largely to do with the limits placed upon them by their bodies. But in a society where gender--i.e. the body--is downplayed to make room for pure choice (choice in the abstract divorced from the body), bodily limits matter little.

I just ran into Harvey Mansfield, a long-time professor of government at Harvard, on the web. I am sure his views are controversial, but I am interested in reading more of his works. Here's an excerpt from a June 2006 article he wrote for Imprimis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College:

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), an earlier and more fundamental book than [Betty] Friedan's, had argued that women were not different from men by nature, but only by history. It was a history of oppression by men that kept women from being as aggressive and assertive as men are. With the title of her book, Beauvoir implies that men live a better life than women, that manliness is better than femininity. Since women are perfectly capable of manliness, that quality should no longer be named for one sex. Beauvoir renamed it “transcendence,” a gender-neutral term. The gender-neutral society was born and manliness as the quality of a sex was demoted to masculinity, a title that signifies such homely features as the hair on your chest and your face.

Thus feminism, in its eagerness to claim manliness for women, destroyed femininity. We began to see gangster movies with lovely actresses playing the role of hit men. Some feminists denounced the manly passion for competition and war, but in doing so they had to be careful not to imply that women are unsuited for business or for the military. Since the Sixties, we have become used to seeing women in men's occupations. Yet the gender-neutral society created by today's feminism is not in fact as neutral as it claims. Despite its dislike of the word manliness, it is on the whole friendly to the quality, now under a new name, more neutral and prosaic, such as “leadership.” On the one hand, the world seems to have been feminized, yet on the other hand, it is still a man's world, and in a strange way even more so, because both sexes are now engaged in employments that reward the manly qualities of aggression and assertiveness.

With the push for a gender-neutral society, not only is masculinity and femininity diminished, or "destroyed" as Mansfield says, but language is abused and loses its ability to carry meaning. Just look at how vague and un-concrete the words transcendence and leadership are. They are attached to nothing in our concrete experience. They're abstractions and their popularity today--or at least leadership's popularity--reveals just how threatening the particular is to our culture. Particulars--such as bodies--ostensibly restrict freedom. Notice Mansfield suggests that when the "more neutral and prosaic" term leadership was preferred over manliness, a shift in society began. But this shift was not merely about gender differences, it was a shift in language and imagination. So maybe we should say that when a language begins to lose its particular-ness, the loss of a collective meaning is not far behind--nor is all sorts of confusion--especially, the confusion of male and female.

The Evolution of a Worshipper

I found this cartoon at Texanglican's blog. It's a simple, yet apt, illustration of the change many have undergone in their discipleship. There are more at cartoonchurch.com.

More from Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments has added to his "non-scriptural arguments against homosexual marriage." His #5 is especially compelling. I once had a professor at the University of Dallas make the comment that those of us living in a post-Freudian age can no longer enjoy deep friendships among people of the same sex. The reason? Freud's musings have pathologized all such friendships. One cannot have a friendship such as the one David had with Jonathan in the Old Testament without a suspicious eye immediately darting their way. Esolen's thoughts are similar:

If homosexuality is at the least not publicly condoned, then that may clear away sufficient ground for men to forge the emotionally fulfilling friendships that they once enjoyed in the past. Such friendships have been at the base of many a cultural renaissance [...]. But the point is that the prohibition is public, and helps constitute the meaning, to oneself and to others, of one’s attachment to a member of the same sex. Not so long ago, it was conceivable to suppose that two men might share an apartment merely as close friends; if Oscar and Felix of The Odd Couple did the same thing now, homosexuality would be the first thing to cross your mind, whether you support the homosexual agenda or reject it [...].

The effect upon boys is devastating; it is hard for women to understand it. Their own friendships come easily, and in general are not based upon shared conquest, physical or intellectual. It is simply an anthropological fact that male friendship is essential for the full development of the boy’s intellect: the history of every society reveals it. But now the boys suffer under a terrible pincers attack. The sexual revolution causes them to rouse themselves to interest, or to pretend to interest, in girls long before they or the girls are emotionally or intellectually ready for it; and now the condonement of homosexuality prevents them from publicly preferring the company of their own sex.

Flu besets badminton 'birdies'

As one who was introduced to the smashing game of Badminton in college --I took it twice for P.E. credit--I believe this to be important news.

Here's an excerpt:

Chinese geese have been destroyed by the millions to prevent the spread of the disease, and that has left a shortage of the fine feathers used to make shuttlecocks.
Only the thickest, heaviest goose feathers from northern China are used to make premium shuttlecocks and sometimes as few as two feathers per goose make the final cut.
But now, shuttlecock makers are having to settle for substandard feathers -- and that's leaving players a little ruffled.
The sport's devotees in Southern California say the latest projectiles -- also called birdies -- just aren't the same.