How Can I Miss A Chance To Post A Bonhoeffer Reference?

Rep. Brandon Gill: "We particularly need the left to tone down the rhetoric ... somebody is gonna listen and believe they are the next Dietrich Bonhoeffer and act on that and that's what we're seeing here." pic.twitter.com/vtZgBKTgfC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2026

Bonhoeffer died in prison, because he was part of a conspiracy to murder Hitler.

Is Rep. Gill comparing Trump to Hitler?

When You Don't Know The Subject, You Can Conclude Anything About It

The New Yorker attempts to review American ecclesiastical history:

The historic European Protestant traditions that were the forebears of the American church placed great emphasis on learning and on doctrine, but the result was a faith that tended to be aristocratic and élitist. Revivalism democratized Christianity. It elevated a new class of spiritual leaders—people who could hold a crowd in their thrall. They preached that salvation was open to all and exhorted congregants to forge their own moral destinies. Sutton argues that the effect of this movement was a distinctly American faith, one in which “the ideals of political democracy and religious democracy went hand in hand.”

Well, yeah. Maybe .But the Church of Rome started out far more democratically, too. Augustine converted to Christianity, and later was pressed into service as a bishop by the people. There were no “ideals of political democracy and religious democracy” in Europe, and especially in the Roman Empire, except among the first century Christians (Paul’s house churches put family and their slaves on equal grounds, at least for worship; and Luke describes early believers gathering together (apart from Paul’s influence), and holding everything in common, make and female. As Paul told the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Radical stuff even today. The Roman church took on the character of feudal Europe after Constantine, which is why the Desert Fathers fled to the desert: Christianity was becoming too worldly, i.e., too much like the world.  And feudal Europe owed a lot to the Roman Empire. French, Spanish and Italian are variants of Latin. Piccadilly Circus is from the Latin word for “circle.” The British admired the Romans so much they treated Latin as a “better” language than their own for over 100 years, because Willie the Shake had “little Latin and less Greek.” Bishops became “princes of the church” in order to stand equal to the feudal nobles, and the Bishop of Rome for some time held power over the monarchs of Europe, a power that began seriously ebbing with Henry VIII, a power Rome fought with Elizabeth I to recover. The church was very much of the world at that point. (Henry taking all their property in England to dole out to his dukes and earls and barons like the feudal lord he was didn’t help matters with Rome very much.)

Monks founded the great universities of Europe to keep literacy alive so the religious could read the scriptures and the works of the church fathers. Literacy was not widespread until about the time of Gutenberg (who needed it until then?), so education was, of course, connected to the church. The European churches that were not just the Anglican Church brought those traditions with them. In the 19th century German settlers in St. Louis, a city already dominated by the Roman Church (I spent a weekend in a retreat in a former Catholic seminary, built to house priests-in-training. The hallways were so wide I joked I could drive my MG Midget down them, and turn it around at either end. It was a much bigger facility than the seminary I would attend for four years.). Those settlers built a seminary, an orphanage, a hospital, and a mental health facility, all within a few years of their arrival. And all are still operating, over 100 years later. The break with that tradition is very American, but hardly a defining feature of American Baptists. One of my oldest friends grew up in the Baptist church and attended a Baptist seminary. I still remember his father talking about Baptist preachers he knew with doctorates. He spoke as if he expected his son to ascend to such lofty heights. Most of the pastors I know at the largest Baptist churches are referred to as “Doctor” (never “Reverend.” Too Catholic.)

Sorry to digress so long, and get so far from my point. The point is simply that the American church is distinct from the European model in some ways; but those differences stem from historical circumstances. Too many Americans assume they grow from “corrections” we made as “free men” (which never means quite the same as “free people”). For example, some denominations accept women as pastors, priests, or part of the church judicatory (bishops; Conference Ministers; titles vary). Others resolutely refuse to. Some accept LGBTQ+ as members and clergy. Some refuse to accept them into the latter category, some refuse to accept them at all. Why? Culture, primarily. The members start with culture, and then interpret scripture, traditions, teachings, as it suits them.

Same as it ever was.

But considering how many denominations in American Christianity are rooted in European culture (starting with the divide between Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches), and how many denominations in America are rebranded European denominations, starting with the Methodist Episcopal Church. John Wesley was an Episcopal priest, and the church still has bishops (an episcopate). The Lutheran church has bishops, too, though the ELCA is a merger of Lutherans and German Evangelicals, the latter itself a forced merger out of Prussia of the Lutheran and Reformed denominations in that country. The even more uniquely American Lutherans are the Missouri Synod, who broke from the rest of the Lutherans in America over questions of purity, and the Wisconsin Synod, who broke with the Lutherans and the MO Synod over the same questions.

That’s probably a more American distinction in churches, as they fight within themselves, and merge with other churches to survive (creating the ELCA or the United Methodists (a merger with the United Brethren), or even my church, the UCC.

I’ll stop now, but that’s the point. There is no one distinct American church, and dividing it on who has a theological education in the pulpit, and who doesn’t, is a mug’s game. Congregational churches were once (circa 17th century) divided between the men on the side with the pulpit, and the women and children on the other, every Sunday morning (I pastored a German Evangelical church (originally) where some members were old enough to remember the same divisions there, earlier in the 20th century). The men listened intently to the sermon, and later corrected the pastor on anything they considered apostasy, or error.  The first universities in America were founded by Congregationalists. You’ve probably heard of them.

It’s true there was (is still?) a Cumberland Presbyterian denomination, which didn’t require its pastors to be trained by a seminary, a distinction from other Presbyterian churches (or was before the merger of the “north” and “south” denominations, split by the civil war and not rejoining for 100 years or so afterwards.) The merger prompted a splinter group, the “Continuing Presbyterian Church (the north was too liberal; I don’t know why. This was long before “gay” meant anything but “happy,” so that wasn’t it.), and now I know of at least one “Evangelical Presbyterian Church. And they didn’t merge with an old German Lutheran/Reformed denomination. What education level they require of their pastors, if any, I don’t know. The Cumberland branch started because Presbyterians were heading west through the Gap and needed pastors. But if pastors weren’t following, they were going to raise up their own. Distinct American egalitarianism? Or hard necessity? Two conditions that often appear alike, and I’ve found circumstances drive decision making far more than ideals do. At least in the final analysis.

Mark Noll, a historian of religion, argues that revivalism in America brought vitality to the church but left it intellectually impoverished—a “scandal of the evangelical mind.” Nevertheless, the revivalists got their results. Religious adherence surged in the nineteenth century; by the twentieth, the majority of Americans belonged to a church.

When in the 20th century? In 1906 only 41% of Americans claimed church membership. 

As you can see from the chart, that number rose slowly until the 1940's.  Church membership exploded in the years after WWII, which is why the Boomers think everyone in America always went to church. The boom in churches was hardly because of revivalism or people passing out in worship. Middle America was not getting dressed up on Sunday to have ecstatic experiences. This was the age of Peter Marshall and Norman Vincent Peale; the age when TIME magazine declared Reinhold Niebuhr America’s theologian, and people knew what they meant. It was also the time, as Harvey Cox was pointing out at Harvard Divinity School, of the genesis of the Pentecostal movement, the “holy rollers” returned from the Second Great Awakening. Professor Cox, a Baptist himself, would argue that of such would be the future of Christianity in America. Except for a few TV preachers in the ‘70’s, though, who disappeared in scandal and sinking ratings, Pentecostals never really overcame their working class roots. This is America: we still prefer a distinction between labor and man, between first class and steerage. Even if we can’t afford first class ourselves.

I can tell you as a pastor at the end of the 20th century that most church rolls listed members who hadn’t been near the building in decades; if they were still alive. Claiming church membership from the mid-forties on had as much to do with business connections and social status as anything else. When I was younger and just out of law school, my father approved of me returning to a church because I’d make business contacts there, as he had done at my age. He was being practical, not baldly mercantile. Church had many purposes at the time. It has fewer of them now.

There were “revivals” in the Baptist churches where I grew up; usually week long events that didn’t involve glossalalia or passing out in divine ecstasy (the parts of that which don’t show up in Acts make their appearance in the lives of the saints, so, again, not peculiarly American, nor Protestant). I went with my Baptist friend (it was his church), and took notes like an anthropologist in New Guinea. The most emotional part was the altar call. I went to a Billy Graham revival in a stadium with a church group, for reasons I can’t remember, but mostly curiosity. It was the closest I came to feeling drawn to the altar during the call. But I wasn’t ecstatic, and I didn’t go.

The New Yorker article jumps to a quick summary of the birth and rise of fundamentalism, without noticing, as Martin Marty did decades back, that it is an international phenomenon largely in reaction against modernity and “the other.” That lacunae is important, because, well, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself:

It’s inarguable, however, that Donald Trump’s ascendance has nourished a darker, more volatile version of the phenomenon. Tapping into the lineage of white evangelicalism, with its charismatic leaders, anti-intellectualism, and political militancy, the maga movement has placed a nostalgia for a Christian past at the center of a grievance-based politics.

Barton’s pseudo-scholarship furnished Christian nationalists with valuable ammunition, but the movement needed foot soldiers. In 2012, an eighteen-year-old named Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA, a nonprofit organization meant to promote fiscal conservatism among young people. Kirk had been a Christian since childhood, but he was initially circumspect about his faith, arguing that religious conservatives had erred by imposing their beliefs “through government policy.” In 2019, however, Kirk met Rob McCoy, a pastor who challenged Kirk to more aggressively bring his Christian world view into the public arena. The following year, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Kirk lauded President Trump for understanding “the seven mountains of cultural influence”—an evangelical vision, dating to the nineteen-seventies, that calls on believers to influence the realms of family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Kirk embraced the idea himself, building a media empire and organizing a grassroots army to turn out Trump voters during the 2024 election. Last year, after a gunman shot and killed Kirk at a campus event in Utah, his wife, Erika, a former Miss Arizona who started her own ministry organization and a faith-based clothing company, vowed to carry on her husband’s legacy, “fighting the good fight for our country.”

We can ignore the “pseudo-scholarship” discussion for our purposes. What’s missing in this brief history of the rise of fundamentalism as "the unequivocal winner in America’s religious economy,” is the base reason for that rise. It wasn’t evolution in the ‘20’s (presented as the cause of fundamentalism in the first place. It actually had more to do with theology than Darwin) that made people accept it in the last decades of the 20th century; it was racism. The civil rights movement of the ‘60’s didn’t, as Dr. King stated, bring American churches to embrace desegregation. Church in America (except, ironically, among some Pentecostal churches when Cox was writing about them), was, and still is, the most segregated hour in America. King publicly lamented the refusal of white Christian churches to support his movement. There’s a reason white people still quote King’s Washington speech, but don’t know his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” And it’s the same reason they don’t remember why King was in D.C. to give that speech. Racism and classism go hand in hand in America. And it was racism that drove people out of “liberal” churches far more than it was the “embrace” of Darwin or science, at all. Pastors who could preach about evolution, didn’t dare preach about race in America. They still can’t.

Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump are both bluntly racist in ways Jesse Helms and George Wallace never were; and yet that goes unmentioned in the New Yorker article. We still can’t have an honest discussion about race, because it’s so polarizing all discussion ceases. It’s still the elephant in the American room we can’t admit is there. Ironically, the article mentions Jerry Falwell as an architect of the rise to cultural dominance of fundamentalism, without commenting on what a known racist he was.  Can’t clutter the discussion with such inconvenient truths.

Although only about two-thirds of Americans now identify as Christians—compared with just under ninety per cent in the nineteen-nineties—a recent Pew Research Center survey concluded that the erosion in belief has likely levelled off. New data from Gallup show a surge of religiosity among young men. It seems possible that Christianity is once again on the upswing in America.

If James Talarico is a harbinger, it’s probably of a more “liberal” Xianity, or at least one more counter to the religious culture fundamentalism created.  That goes a long way to explaining Dan Patrick’s concern, which I think leaves the mere political and jumps into the theological.

The sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued that, historically, the most popular religious bodies tend to exert a countervailing force on the culture at large. They demand sacrifice from their adherents but also promise temporal and eternal rewards. Expecting churches that preach a distant, unresponsive God to be attractive to new believers is akin, Finke and Stark write, to believing that soccer fans would buy tickets to matches with “players who, for lack of a ball, just stand around.” In this way, they explain the extraordinary rise of evangelicalism.

Well, that’s certainly borne out by history, although the RC isn’t going anywhere, and it would appear “liberal” church ideas might yet have their day. Certainly the Church of Meaning and Belonging starts out as the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging, but honestly, it can’t stay that way for long. Ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Or any sociologist of religion; or any ecclesiastical historian.

Part of the problem with this discussion is that fundamentalism has defined the popular notion of Christianity, but it has hardly supplanted other Christian churches.  Fundamentalism was largely popular from the 80's until the 2020's because it was espoused by TV evangelists first, and so became the image of Christianity in America (if it's on TeeVee, it must be true!).  And then journalists picked it up as normative, supplanting more traditional Protestantism and Catholicism.  But the ascent of Pope Francis and then Pope Leo shows something else is happening in the Roman church (which never, despite Opus Dei, accepted fundamentalism as a replacement for tradition).  And while some churches broke away from traditional "mainline" churches over "liberal" teachings (like accepting LGBTQ+, etc.), most of those churches found life no better outside the denomination than in it.  I've also seen many congregations close because no one was left there but the elderly.  The popular explanation for that, echoed in the New Yorker article, is that those congregations were too "liberal," i.e., not fundamentalist enough.  The realiy is something else entirely.  I pastored two congregations where I, in middle age, was one of the youngest people in the church.  And I was too young and "liberal," in the sense of different from the majority, for those congregations.  Both wanted to "grow," but both understood that to be necessary merely to survive.  They wanted, in other words, to be social clubs and hire a new director who would recruit new members.  But they didn't want to accept new members, especially younger members.  They wanted everything to stay the way it was, but new people to come and fill their coffers and make them feel a bit less alone and alienated.  But they were alone, and alientating, because they wanted to keep control of the ship (not an errant metaphor,  The nave of the church is the hold of a ship, the timbers of the roof (in most Protestant architecture, anyway, the beams of the ship upturned.  I did a whole sermon on this in one of my churches.)  In the church I grew up in, my parents' generation ran things, and there were a few "old people," in their '60's, maybe one or two in their early '70's.  Those people left the church operations to the "younger people," like my parents.  I was encouraged to be responsible for church governance when I was confirmed, so the church would pass to the next generation.  That encouragement faded at some point, as my generation stopped going to church, and returned only to raise their children there.  But by then, the "old guard" had settled in, and nothing was allowed to change without their agreement.  It could be small things, like how the church was decorated for Xmas; or big things, like what hymns should be sung every Sunday morning.  I had one church member insist to me that returning the denomination name on the sign to the one that no longer existed, but had in the 1950's, would bring people flooding back to the sanctuary.  No one but her remembered that denomination, and since it was "E&R," Evangelical and Reformed, it would have been very confusing in the present age.  Outsiders would have expected a very different church from the one they would find there.  The elderly members wondered why no new members joined, why young people stayed away; but they didn't want to know what the reason was.

Those congregations have "died."  Not because the elderly passed on, but because the congregation shrank so much, it couldn't stay open.  I knew people my age and younger who wouldn't come to "my" church because no one else there was younger than their parents.  The few who were, were not really welcomed in, and had no children for their children to associate with, as I did when I was young.

Demographics is killing the church much faster than theology.  My grandfather's died at 68.  My father lived to be 90.  People who knew they'd be dead before 70 tended to let go of the world, and leave it to others.  People who live longer and healthier, tend to think they should still be both active and "in charge," and there the real problem lies.  Would they attend a church with James Talarico as their pastor (he's a seminary student at Ausin Presbyterian Seminary)?  Probably not.  Would their grandchildren?  Maybe.

The issues, you see, are more granular and particular than they appear to be from 30,000 feet.  Is Xian fundamentalism still culturally powerful?  You might as well ask if Islamic fundamentalism is (I told you it was an international matter).  Was the latter ever the whole of Islam?  Was it ever the whole of Christianity?

Where you start determines where you end up.  Especially if you don't pay attention to the people you're talking about; or over.

“The infirm glory of the positive hour” — T.S. Eliot

I’m reading one of Kurt Vonnegut’s last books (I’m too lazy to do the full bibliography, so further affiant sayeth nought), A Man Without A Country. In it Vonnegut declares himself a humanist, by which among other things he means:

…if  Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.

I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.

Despite this caveat, Vonnegut confesses that he’s given up on the human race. He had, he wrote, no hope for them anymore. I used to feel that way, or thought I did. (That attitude amused my wife when we were dating, through high school and college. She knew me better than that. She has always been the wiser of the two of us.) I now see, confronting Vonnegut in my ‘70’s rather than the 1970’s (when I read just about everything he wrote), that I don’t agree with him at all. And it’s fundamentally because I consider myself a Christian, rather than a humanist (although I’m more a Christian existentialist, and I know Sartre said existentialism is a humanism. So I’m not so much at odds with Vonnegut, as simply mildly disagreeing with him.)

I don’t mean I profess the charlatan Xianity of the preachers who praise Trump. I mean the Christianity of Julian of Norwich:

With this bare word 'sin" our Lord brought to my mind the whole extent of all that is not good, and the shameful scorn and the utter humiliation that he bore for us in this life, and his dying, and all the pains and sufferings of his creatures, both in body and spirit--for we are all to some extent brought to nothing and shall be brought to nothing as our master Jesus was, until we are fully purged: that is to say until our mortal flesh is brought completely to nothing, and all those of our inward feelings which are not truly good. Have me insight into these things, along with all pains that ever were and ever shall be; and compared with these I realize that Christ's Passion was the greatest pain and went beyond them all. And all this was shown in a flash, an quickly changed into comfort; for our good Lord did not want the soul to be afraid at this ugly sight.

....And because of the tender love which our Lord feels for all who shall be saved, he supports us willingly and sweetly, meaning this: 'It is true that sin is the cause of all this suffering, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

and the martyrs of El Salvador and of Saint Oscar Romero, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and St. Francis of Assisi, of the Beatitudes of Luke (Vonnegut champions the Beatitudes of Matthew, and in the RSV, but I stand on the even more radical Lukan version,  in the Scholar’s Version translation). These Beatitudes:

"Congratulations, you poor! God's domain belongs to you!

“Congratulations, you hungry! You will have a feast.

“Congratulations, you who weep now! You will laugh.”

“Damn you rich! You already have your consolation!

“Damn you who are well-fed now! You will know hunger.

“Damn you who laugh now! You will learn to weep and grieve.”

Luke 6:20-26, SV (Interestingly, when I googled to get the scripture numbers, the first item for “Luke beatitudes” that came up directed me to only verses 20-23; the blessings, but not the curses. Jesus continues to make us uncomfortable, I guess.)

I don’t mean to condemn humanism, but Vonnegut’s is a paltry and selfish vision, especially up against the vision of Julian; or even the Beatitudes he professes to find so important. Vonnegut aligns himself with Einstein and Mark Twain, both of whom, he claims, gave up on humanity at the end of their lives, too . Neither were notably religious men (Einstein was Jewish; I don’t know if Twain claimed to be Xian, or how he felt about it). It’s not that being religious or Xian is a “Get Out Of Despair Jail Free” card.  Nor is it a false, or fantasy, consolation. But while I read Vonnegut when I was young and impressionable, and while I saw the absolute worst in people directed at me just because of the role I assumed (and I don’t mean being a lawyer. Judges, clients, other lawyers, were saints and Sunday School teachers compared to the people who turned against me in the churches, the ones I pastored and the one I attended after losing my second church). While, as I say, I saw that vitriol directed at me for the entire (short, but too long) period I was daily among professing Christians who knew me solely because of that confession, I still came out the other side (years later, granted) convinced that Julian’s vision was right. And that there is a moral arc of the universe, and it does bend toward justice. I am as secure in it as I am in my love for my wife and my daughter (and that they love me, which I can only understand as love being a kind of divine madness.

I don’t despair, in other words. I cannot despair. I’ve seen too much and learned too much to believe it’s all going to smash now because I’m here to see it. I read the accounts of settlers in the 19th century on horseback in the dark in wilderness where I now ride on well lit roads to stores, or use this phone in my hands to have the world’s goods delivered to my door, and I think what they faced, and they didn’t despair. I think of what the Native Americans and African Americans and any non-white people in this country went through, still go through, and I don’t see a bitter end, I see a struggle that has to be championed, a fight that will succeed if we don’t yield. And so few of us want to yield. As Auden wrote in World War II, “Maps can point to places/where life is evil now.” These places were in America in the ‘60’s, and they are here again now. Auden meant evil being done by governments, intentionally. So yes, here, now. Those maps are also places where more people are resisting, fighting back; more of us, many, many more of us, are repulsed by the evil; and that why I don’t despair. Vonnegut worried, almost 25 years ago, that we were making the planet unlivable. I grew up on that fear. It started as the environmental movement in the ‘70’s, a full 50 years before Vonnegut wrote his conviction that there was no hope. The movement that in short order convinced Congress to create the EPA, and passed the Clean Water Act. Trump wants to abolish all that, but he can’t erase it, and the pushback to stop polluting the planet and make it more livable will go on. Hell,  I remember when we set a river on fire. “The Lord can make you tumble/The Lord can make you turn./The Lord can make overflow./The Lord can’t make you burn.” 🔥—Randy Newman

In the ‘70’s the message was despair: there was no hope, and we were done for. Do you remember the simplest things? The scene in “Mad Men” where the Drapers go on a picnic, and finished shake off their blanket and leave their trash to blow across the grass? That was normal in the early ‘60’s. It isn’t normal now. A great deal that was normal, still isn’t normal now. And what seems abnormally normal, is not going to last, is already fading even as it arouses opposition to eradicate it, to not allow it to be the norm again.

Little things are important, especially in the view that all the big things are lost and falling to ruin. In Matthew’s parable of the sheep and the goats, he tells the sheep how they fed him when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, visited when he was sick or in jail. “Lord,” they very reasonably ask, “when did we see you?” Whenever you did that for anyone, Jesus replies, you did it for me. Whenever. For anyone. What does the Lord require of you? Only that much. When Jesus later tells his disciples, also in Matthew, to make disciples of all people, it’s in the context of Isaiah’s holy mountain. Teaching people to be like the sheep will create the holy mountain where everyone wants to live, because life is so good there, and the reason why so simple, so easy to follow.

So: do we despair because the world has not figured it all out yet? This nation was born in racism. When Jefferson said “All men are created equal,” he clearly meant some men (humans) and not others. We finally stopped portraying the Natives as “savages” (Jefferson’s term, in the Declaration) in our entertainment late in the 20th century. It took longer to stop portraying black males that way (consider the example of our current president only 30 years ago). We’re moving far too slowly for justice; but we’re moving that way nonetheless. Do we despair because we aren’t there yet?

Well, you can, but I’m not going to.

I can’t give up, and I can’t explain why in any other terms except that I believe. Not in fairies at the bottom of the garden, or in the better angels of our nature. I believe in the strength and endurance of human love and goodness; and I believe there is a moral arc to the universe. And after 70 years, I find those beliefs unshakable, because I also believe in the confession of the first chapter of Genesis: that creation is good, and that that means “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

I can’t make you believe that. I can’t talk you into my belief. I can only stand by it and offer it as my contribution to the conversation. In Candide, Voltaire concludes that we must all tend to our own garden. He means we can’t live the life of others, and we can’t make them live life as we see fit. Dorothy Day, by the way, would agree. And I think Walker Percy and Thomas Merton would agree, too. As well as the Desert Fathers. You can find my references to them in the search function of this blog. Of course, just by writing that novel, Voltaire was trying to interfere in our lives; or at least just give us some advice. Much as Jonathan Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal.” Advice is not really interference, though; it’s not telling you what to do like so many “THOU SHALT NOTS!” It’s more about pointing out the ultimate reality of the situation, because the destitute will have their condition alleviated; and the rich have already had their reward. Too bad they didn’t do more for the destitute when they could have, because the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice.

Of that I am as sure as I am sure I am virtually at your elbow, as you read.

And Extremely Not Racist!

Candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, conflating all Chinese students with Communist Party members (most aren't) and suggesting Texas is subsidizing them (it's the other way around). pic.twitter.com/eXhKJBQP9m

— Eric Fish (@ericfish85) January 6, 2022

And extremely missing the point of everything Bonhoeffer wrote:

In many ways this is the perfect tweet of the Trump Christian Right. It combines hysterical deranged commentary with product placement. Par for the course. https://t.co/muMjApcXuh

— David French (@DavidAFrench) January 6, 2022

(No, not Mr. French; and you have to click through to find out what he’s talking about).

LOL https://t.co/LqdZ7J7dGx

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) January 6, 2022

Wait, Jesus doesn’t appear in the “Old Testament”?

[long argument about whether being prophecied counts as appearing omitted]

— SatanicBeanbagHat (@Popehat) January 6, 2022

No, don’t go there. I was just starting to like you.

pic.twitter.com/Hqk1Bo8ch1

— Gerkinov (@gerkinov) January 6, 2022

Much better.

Viral story of attempted "child luring" turns out to be parents offering their own son a ride https://t.co/2YZO55kXbw

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) January 6, 2022

There was a British sitcom (some time ago now, I realize), “Outnumbered,” about a family with young children. One episode, at a gift shop, the father tries to get Ben (his young son) to leave. Ben refuses to the point the father picks him up and carries him out, with Ben shouting: “My name’s not Ben! Stranger danger!” The people in the shop just look perplexed. Never thought I’d see it in real life.

Pelosi holds a moment of silence in the House to commemorate January 6 pic.twitter.com/tl9jgvN3o6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 6, 2022

Appropriare.

Nancy Pelosi just introduced, as part of the Jan 6 remembrance.... a song by Lin Manuel Miranda performed by the cast of Hamilton

— Arthur Delaney 🇺🇸 (@ArthurDelaneyHP) January 6, 2022

Not appropriate.

Quite the image

via @cspan https://t.co/WeWiIskZb4

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) January 6, 2022

Weirdly appropriate.

Anybody who thinks Dick Fcking Cheney is “on the side of democracy” is beyond all hope. The torture guy. Read his minority report from the Iran Contra committee.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) January 6, 2022

"The enemy of my enemy...." but, yeah.

And the final word goes to the Junior Senator from Texas:

Man who read Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor to stop people from getting health insurance has thoughts on Political Theater.

News at 11. https://t.co/r8fnzsu8Z4

— YS (@ReallyActivist) January 6, 2022

Touché.

Christmas Eve 2021: Morning Praise

 O God, open my lips,/and my mouth will declare your praise.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.

Antiphon:  No ear has heard, no eye has seen any other good act like this for those who trust.

Psalm 51

Have mercy, tender God,

forget that I defied you.

Wash away my sin,

cleanse me from my guilt.

I know my evil well,

it stares me in the face,

evil done to you alone

before your very eyes.

How right your condemnation!

Your verdict clearly just!

You see me for what I am,

a sinner before my birth.

You love those centered in truth;

teach me your hidden wisdom.

Wash me with fresh water,

wash me bright as snow.

Fill me with happy songs,

let the bones you bruised now dance.

Shut my eyes on my sin,

make my guilt disappear.

Creator, reshape my heart,

God, steady my spirit.

Do not cast me aside

stripped of your holy spirit.

Save me, bring back my joy,

support me, strenghten my will.

Then I will teach your way

and sinners will turn to you.

Help me, stop my tears,

and I will sing your goodness.

Lord, give me words

and I will shout your praise.

When I offer a holocaust,

the gift does not please you.

So I offer my shattered spirit;

a changed heart you welcome.

In your love make Zion lovely,

rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.

Then sacrifice will please you,

young bulls upon your altar.

[silent reflection]

Psalm 24

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,

    the world, and all who live in it;

for he founded it on the seas

    and established it on the waters.

Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord?

    Who may stand in his holy place?

The one who has clean hands and a pure heart,

    who does not trust in an idol

    or swear by a false god.

They will receive blessing from the Lord

    and vindication from God their Savior.

Such is the generation of those who seek him,

    who seek your face, God of Jacob.

Lift up your heads, you gates;

    be lifted up, you ancient doors,

    that the King of glory may come in.

Who is this King of glory?

    The Lord strong and mighty,

    the Lord mighty in battle.

Lift up your heads, you gates;

    lift them up, you ancient doors,

    that the King of glory may come in.

Who is he, this King of glory?

    The Lord Almighty—

    he is the King of glory.

[silent reflection]

Psalm 92

How good to thank you, Lord

to praise your name, Most High,

to sing your love at dawn,

your faithfulness at dusk

with sound of lyre and harp,

with music of the lute.

For your work brings delight,

your deeds invite song.

I marvel at what you do.

Lord, how deep your thought!

Fools do no grasp this

nor the senseless understand.

Scoundrels spring up like grass,

flourish and quickly wither.

You, Lord, stand firm for ever.

See your your enemies perish,

scattered to the winds,

while you give me brute strength

pouring rich oil upon me.

I have faced my enemies,

heard them plot against me.

The just grow tall like palm trees,

majestic like the cedars of Lebanon.

They are planted in the temple's courts

and flourish in God's house,

green and heavy with fruit

even in old age.

Proclaim that God is just,

my rock without a fault.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.

Antiphon:  No ear has heard, no eye has seen any other good act like this for those who trust.

Reading                                                                                      Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Of course you can't help thinking of my being in prison over Christmas, and it is bound to throw a shadow over the few hours of happiness which still await you in these times. All I can do to help is to assure you that I know you will keep it in the same spirit as I do, for we are agreed on how Christmas ought to be kept.  How could it be otherwise when my attitude to Christmas is a heritage I owe to you? I need not tell you how much I long to be released and to see you all again.  But for years you have given us such lovely Christmases, that our grateful memories are strong enough to cast their rays over a darker one.  In times like these we learn as never before what it means to possess a past and a spiritual heritage untrammeled by the changes and chances of the present.  A spiritual heritage reaching back for centuries is a wonderful support and comfort in face of all temporary stresses and strains. I believe that the man who is aware of such reserves of power need not be ashamed of the tender feelings evoked by the memory of a rich and noble past, for such feelings belong in  my opinion to the better and nobler part of humankind.  They will not overwhelm those who hold fast to values of which no one can deprive them.

For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell.  I daresay it will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to man, that God should come down to the very place which men usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn--these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else. For the prisoner the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense. And that faith gives the prisoner a part in the communion of saints, a fellowship transcending the bounds of time and space and reducing the months to confinement here to insignificance.

On Christmas Eve I shall be thinking of you all very much, and I want you to believe that I too shall have a few hours of real joy and that I am not allowing my troubles to get the better of me....

It will certainly be a quiet Christmas for everybody, and the children will look back on it for long afterwards.  But for the first time, perhaps, many will learn the true meaning of Christmas.

Letter to his parents, December 17, 1943

[silent reflection]

Benedictus Antiphon

God of hosts, bring us back; let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.

BENEDICTUS

Praise the Lord, the God of Israel,

who shepherds the people and sets them free.

God raises from David's house

a child with power to save.

Through the holy prophets

God promised in ages past

to save us from enemy hands,

from the grip of all who hate us.

The Lord favored our ancestors

recalling the sacred covenant,

the pledge to our ancestor Abraham,

to free us from our enemies,

so we might worship without fear

and be holy and just all our days.

And you, child, will be called

Prophet of the Most High,

for you will come to prepare

a pathway for the Lord

by teaching the people salvation

through forgiveness of their sin.

Out of God's deepest mercy

a dawn will come from on hight,

light for those shadowed by death,

a guide for our feet on the way to peace.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

[Repeat Benedictus antiphon]

Our Father....

Source of mercy, the life and death of your Son are our hope of salvation.  Pour the refreshing waters of your love over us.  Cleanse our hearts, forgive our failings, and renew our zeal for you as we continue in our conversion throughout our lives.  We ask this through Christ our Savior and your Holy Spirit.  Amen.

May God bless us and keep us. May God smile upon us and be gracious to us. May God look upon us kindly, and give us peace. Amen.

Let us bless God/and give thanks.

"What Life Have You....?"

via @NYTOpinion. This is a brilliantly on-point piece by ⁦⁦@michelleinbklyn⁩. Lonely, disconnected Americans, unmoored from community, family or even faith, are ripe for authoritarian leaders such as #Trump. Must read. https://t.co/9fmveoWooy

— howardfineman (@howardfineman) July 20, 2021

I haven't read this column, but I don't feel like I have to. And I don't slight the thesis by saying we continue to "discover" problems that have been "discovered" before. By "before" I don't mean by Socrates or the early Church; I mean within the last 50 years.

When I was in seminary the problem du jour (complete with solution, else why have a problem?  Problems must always have possible solutions, otherwise they are not problems, you're just bitching.) was community. It was already cliche, it seems, although it was new to me at the time.  But I discussed the matter with pastors long in the pulpit, and they assured me it was just the newest, and already fading, "solution" to our problems.

So I set it aside, to examine it more critically later.  But I never doubted there was something to it.  We are, after all, social animals.  We had our spate of "loner" heroes, the Dirty Harry's (only a notable version of the extreme example), in American popular culture, the brave individuals (Davey Crockett, whose legend is almost purely the invention of Walt Disney.  Almost everything you think you know about the historical person is from Disney's TV show, not history.) who alone shaped America (and yet we despise Ayn Rand?  Yeah, she was a barmpot, but her ideas were quintessentially 20th century American).  Now our heroes are "family," or make a family, a community, of themselves; and their concerns are other people, not abstract concepts like "evil" and "justice."  There's a reason groups of heroes (Avengers; soon "the Eternals," etc.) are all the rage in blockbuster movies.  Even "Black Widow" was about family (of a sort), not about the singular exploits of the titular character.  This is not to argue for "progress" so much as change. We got tired of Dirty Harry standing alone.  The nadir of that thinking was reached with Margaret Thatcher:

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours." 

That's really no better nor insightful than Brian Kilmeade's recent declaration about government:

"That's not their (the government's) job. It's not their job to protect anybody."

One is left wondering, in the first case, what families living together in social groups are if not society; and in the second case, just what government is for, if not to protect its citizens.  We can argue about whether or not it is our duty to take care of ourselves first, and our neighbors only secondarily, later. The pendulum, for want of a better metaphor, has swung towards community.

Frankly, 'twas ever thus:

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

The "I" there is Alexis de Tocqueville, who probably needs no further introduction. Be honest:  if you don't see Donald Trump outlined in those lines, you are trying not to.  And yet we eagerly set Trump apart as an aberration, as a product of "pathological narcissism," and so as "other" to the American character. But what if he is, in this sense, quintessentially American?  What then?  What if that is the source of his appeal in this country, but not elsewhere in the world?  Indeed, in what other country or culture could he exist?

But note Tocqueville is not describing the American character; he is describing the character of despotism.  And despotism, in Tocqueville's description, arises primarily from the desert of the denial of society (which puts Thatcher's comments in the proper perspective, IMHO).  The springs in that desert are when strangers actually help each other just because they are fellow humans.  The false stories coming out of the Superdome in New Orleans after Katrina were of anarchy and, well, despotism.  The true stories were of the instant community that sprang up there as human beings reduced to common conditions worked to help each other until help could come.  After Hurricane Harvey the idea was floated that a memorial should be erected in Houston, in the form of two men in a bass boat helping strangers escape their flooded houses.  The source for that image was the "Cajun Navy" of individuals who came from Louisiana to help people in Texas.  If that isn't society, what is?

We need community.  "What life have we," Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, "if we have not life together?"  Even the famous ascetics of the fourth century who fled to the deserts to find God alone in their cells lived in community with each other.  They weren't misanthropes escaping humanity; they were seeking their own humanity.  Anchorites like Julian of Norwich filled a particular niche in medieval Europe, when the church (building and people) was truly the centerpoint of social life.  The anchorite was "dead," living in a cell so placed that she (it was usually women) could participate in the Mass, and also communicate with the parishioners, giving spiritual counseling from the perspectie of one whose life was devoted to seeking God.  They were not in isolation, they were in the heart of their communities.  And their responsibility was to others, not to themselves.  The church members supported them materially, as they supported the members spiritually.

Now stop and add this to the mix:

How evangelicals gradually replaced Jesus Christ with right-wing ideology https://t.co/8a6HpSRWPk

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 20, 2021

True reform of the evangelical political machine will never happen, however, as long as the current evangelical leadership holds the reins. Understand that the leaders who have recently been fighting for control of the Southern Baptist Convention are no different than Jerry Falwell Sr. or Pat Robertson in the past, or Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham today. These new evangelicals feel the need to be more discreet about their homophobia and anti-equality agenda. Perhaps they will even reject Trump now that he's no longer president, but do not expect them to show up at the next Pride rally or Black Lives Matter march. The problem here is that this relationship between the evangelical leadership and the Republican Party has become what Christians call a covenant.

More than a little church history needs to added to this, including the fact the Pentecostal church (an "evangelical" church under the broadest reach of the term) began as a multi-racial and even multi-cultural (remember that term?) church where all were one in the Spirit.  The Southern Baptist Convention, on the other hand, began life as the Baptists loyal to the Confederacy and what it stood for, including slavery.  Not that they are unique in that; the Presbyterian denomination I grew up in was the "southern" branch of a larger denomination, broken again by secession of the southern states.  When they rejoined in my adolescence, a distaff group broke off, insisting the "northern" church was "too liberal."  I took that as theologically liberal at the time; it never occurred to me to question if it had anything to do with racism.  But given the "genetic" nature of institutions, I have to ask the question now.  Where your institution begins has a great deal to do with how it continues.

Which is a digressive way of saying that the "evangelical leadership" that is beholden to American politics didn't begin with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  They were no more sui generis than Donald Trump.  I don't remember too many denominations, north or south, evangelical or mainstream, that were all that supportive of Dr. King and his movement, or who escaped censure in his famous Letter.  We have not recently fallen from an ideal and shining past perfection.  Not by a long shot.

Over the last 70 years, Christian theology has been steadily replaced, within the evangelical world, by Republican or "conservative" ideology. I noticed this in my time at an evangelical seminary and during my years in ministry, whenever political discussion would go beyond abortion and gay rights. When the conversation turned towards gun rights, immigration, taxing the wealthy, education or health care, the tenets of Christian theology disappeared behind Republican talking points.

The evangelical political message was that the Bible should be used in politics to attack certain people, but never to question oneself. That's how you get people to donate: Make the enemy clearly visible and easily definable. That's why the Bible is almost never used in politics as a justification for serving the poor, welcoming the foreigner, healing the sick or promoting equality. That agenda is not likely to motivate donations from wealthy white heterosexual men. Therefore, over time the evangelical message became that "American" and "Republican" were more important labels than "Christian" — or that they were effectively the same thing.

True; but it's always been easy to use Christianity as a tool of power.  As Leonard Bernstein wrote for his "Mass:"

God made us the boss!

God gave us the cross!

We turned it into a sword!

To spread the word of the Lord!

We use His holy decrees,

To do whatever we please!

And it was good, brother!

(and it was good, brother!)

And it was goddamned good!

That was in 1971 (when the work premiered).  Falwell wouldn't found the Moral Majority until the '80's.  He opposed integration and civil rights, founding a "segregation academy" in 1966.  But most of us know him for Liberty University (founded in '71, too) and the Moral Majority. Bernstein was writing about history; but it might as well be the present day.  Same as it ever was, in other words.

Before Falwell, it was "In God We Trust" (actually dates back to the 19th century, but it reached the coinage in the 1950's) and adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.  Precious little in the slogan or the altered Pledge that leads one to "serving the poor, welcoming the foreigner, healing the sick or promoting equality."  That should be the focus; but when the purpose is temporal power, that focus is alway, even necessarily, lost.

Evangelical leaders have focused their agenda on protecting things they feel entitled to, while focusing the attention of their followers on what they define as the enemies of God. That fear of God's enemies has allowed billions of dollars of donations to flow into the hands of religious hypocrites. They have convinced millions of Christians that the enemies of God are people who live south of the border, who are coming for their guns, their jobs, their property, their health insurance, their taxes and even their families. Trump tapped masterfully into the fear planted by evangelical leaders in the hearts of their followers. In the end, millions of Christians have abandoned their faith for a narrow-minded political ideology.

True Christian theology commands quite the opposite. A person of faith is not driven by fear, but by love. Grace is extended to the foreigner, forgiveness is offered to the prisoner, health care is offered to the sick, food is offered to the hungry and equality is offered to all.

The whole point of loving your enemy, of turning the other cheek, is that it is an expression of faith in God, and expression as concrete as the widow's when she fed Elijah:

After a while the stream dried up, for there had been no rain in the land. Then the word of the Lord came to him: “Go now to Zarephath, a village of Sidon, and stay there; I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ He went off to Zarephath, and when he reached the entrance to the village, he saw a widow gathering sticks. He called to her, ‘Please bring me a little water in a pitcher to drink.’ As she went to fetch it, he called after her, ‘Bring me, please, a piece of bread as well.’ But she answered, “As the Lord your God lives, I have no food baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a flask. I am just gathering two or three sticks to go and cook it for my son and myself before we die.’ ‘Have no fear,’ Elijah said, ‘go and do as you have said. But first make me a small cake from what you have and bring it out to me, and after that make something for your son and yourself. For this is the word of the Lord the God of Israel: The jar of flour will not give out, nor the flask of oil fail, until the Lord sends rain on the land.’ She went and did as Elijah had said, and there was food for him and for her family for a long time. The jar of flour did not give out, nor did the flask of oil, as the word of the Lord foretold through Elijah. 1 Kings 17:7-16 (REB)

Faith in God, which is simply to say trust in God, is only made concrete when you extend your trust out to others.  It is not manifest when you store up wealth for yourself and pride yourself on what God has given you.  There is a theology of scarcity, and a theology of the basilea tou theou.  To say one is right, and one is wrong, is to already draw a line and push people to the other side.  But the basiliea tou theou invites everyone in; that's the only way it's the "kingdom of God."  Perhaps it's better to say one theology is wise, and one is not.  Wisdom is always the harder way; and those who try that way always learn humility is necessary just to say on the right path. If you emphasize humility you can't put yourself apart from, or above, others. 

That could certainly be the basis of a healing community.

I Go Pogo

.@JohnKasich, @Sen_JoeManchin is no Bonhoeffer, he's no MLK and he's no Sharansky. He's the exemplar of America's broken political system.

Your perspective is disappointing but not surprising. https://t.co/9ytLjmCx4u

— Reed Galen (@reedgalen) June 8, 2021

The problem with these myriad arguments that it's all about Joe Manchin is that:

a) it makes Joe Manchin happy; and

b) it's not just Joe Manchin.  He's what former Sen. Claire McCaskill calls the "heat shield" for at least 10 other Democratic senators who don't disagree with Manchin, but don't want to be on TeeVee agreeing with Manchin.

Yes, we probably should get rid of the filibuster.  But no, the reason we can't is not Joe Manchin.  It's because of the Senate.  And really, denouncing Joe Manchin just makes him happy that you mention his name.  I mean, he's the Senator from West Virginia:  when else are you going to pay attention to him?

Watch the video at that link above.  Sad but true.  If you convince Manchin to vote against the rule, there are a number of Democrats who won't vote against it.  Besides, the next time the Democrats are in the minority, it may be the filibuster that "saves democracy."

The problem, as ever, has less to do with the institutions, than with the people who send the Senators and Representatives up there.  (I do love the cri de couer that "Then we're not a democracy!" in that clip.  No, we aren't.  Not a direct democracy, not a British parliament style democracy.  I thought everybody knew that from high school civics.)  As ever, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

"Man the master, ingenious past all measure..."

So Diarmid McCullough (I have his book around here somewhere; now I have to read it) followed up his book on Christian church history with a six-part BBC series (this may be old news, it was new to me on Easter Sunday) where he explores all that history in an entertaining and very BBC style.  In the last episode he reaches the 20th and 21st centuries, and despite the Crusades and the Inquisition and the absolute acceptance and approval of poverty that marked the Church in the Middle Ages (except for the priesthood, which is why Francis was so dangerous and almost a minor figure in that history), despite even the record of the Church in World War II (both the Pope and the church in Germany, which was covered without one mention of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; then again, he covered the Enlightenment without one reference to Jonathan Swift, but a lot of attention to Voltaire.  Much as I love Candide, Voltaire is not fit to untie Swift's shoe laces), what most disturbed McCullough were the questions of Spinoza (who was Jewish, for what that's worth; I note it because there was no mention of the other great Jewish thinker in matters religious in the 20th century, Martin Buber).  If you're only vaguely familiar with Spinoza, don't feel left out.  I encountered him gaining my minor in philosophy almost 50 years ago, and have barely heard anything about him since; nor was I taught he was a seminal thinker in European thought.  Interesting, but more of a Berkely than a Locke or a Hume.  McCullough, on the other hand, thought him more important than Descartes, despite the fact Descartes cemented the idea of soul v. body into modern thought (nothing but an echo of Plato, actually; still, Hellenistic thought is still alive and well.  That will be an issue for us before long.)

Spinoza troubled McCullough's quasi-Christian soul (he is the son of five generations of Anglican priests; it rubbed off, but not enough to make him faithful.  That's okay; I know that feeling well.), and by World War I and World War II.  Like Voltaire over the Lisbon earthquake, McCullough identifies with the Lost Generation (he never mentioned a one of them, though) and the failure of faith of people like Elie Wiesel.  Let's not be rude and point out they had reasons for despair that McCullough, only slightly older than yours truly, has never known.

That rankled me, a bit; not because I would have McCullough a true son of the church (as if there is such a thing), but because the intellectual dishonesty is a burr under my epistemological saddle, a pea under my intellectual mattress.  It bugs me, and prompts me to consider why McCullough is so sure a God who doesn't intervene as he sees fit (even to stop the Holocaust) is not a God worthy of our attention today, much less our devotion.

Consider the history.  The Greeks gave up on their pantheon at some point.  There are whole genres of fiction based on the idea that gods need worshippers in order to remain god-like.  Neal Gaiman got a novel and a TV series out of the concept, which he basically cribbed from ST:OS ("Who Mourns for Adonais?").  It pops up all over the place in popular culture, as if we were all anthropological dilettantes and knew this is how "primitive cultures" created "gods".  They gave up becasue they gods they worshipped stopped doing anything for them.  But to look at the literature, it's hard to see what they ever did for the Greeks.

"Oedipus Rex" is my favorite touchstone/punching bag for this idea.  Consider Oedipus:  damned by the gods because he doesn't know who he is; but how is he to know?  Hearing a passing party guest say he's going to kill his father and sleep with his mother, he flees his home and parents and goes out into the great world.  Beware the Jabberwock, my son!  But rather than find a beast with eyes of flame burbling in the woods, he encounters an imperious stranger in a chariot who tells the wanderer to get out of the way!  Oedipus, full of the piss and vinegar of youth, refuses, and ends up killing the man and his servants.  He also answers the Sphinx's riddle (childishly easy, when you know the answer, like all riddles are) and is given the kingdom as his reward.

But then the gods punish the kingdom, without telling them why.  Creon goes to Delphi to get the word from the oracle, and the word from Apollo's priest is that Thebes harbor's the murderer of Laius, the former king who went out one day and never came back.  So punishment first, verdict and reason whenever.  It's up to Thebes to know, or to figure it out.  By the time they do, of course, it turns out Oedipus is the son of Laius, not the mother and father who raised him, and the former wife of Laius, now Oedipus' wife and mother of their four children, is his mother, too.  (Which makes the kids his children and step-siblings, all at once).  Oedipus is punished for his sins, which the Greeks consider justice; even if it is cruel and implacable and Oedipus sinned without knowledge of his transgressions.  When he does find out he gouges out his own eyes and goes in to exile; but all too late.  Then the brothers grow up, fight over the throne, and end up dead on the battle field, leaving Uncle Creon as king.  But he angers the gods by refusing the burial of the brother who attacked Thebes for the throne, and walls up his neice and daughter-in-law Antigone in a tomb for defying his no-burial order.  Seems the gods jealously seek possession of the dead as their right, and don't appreciate the living being in places meant for the dead.  Thebes is not punished this time, but Creon is; and maybe Thebes, too, because at the end of the play Creon is not fit to rule a group of toddlers at play.

And this the Greeks consider justice; justice dealt out justly by the gods.  It's not even inscrutable justice.  It's just....just.

Now consider the situation of Job, a man blameless and upright, yet he loses everything but his life and his wife, and he silences her with a rebuke that keeps her quiet for the rest of his story.  Why is Job suffering?  We know it's because of a bet between God and Satan (no, not really that one; that's Christianity, this is Hebraism).  Job doesn't know that, and neither do his friends.  They all try to make sense of it, trying to comfort Job but also telling him God is just and Job deserved it.  Job refuses to accept that argument, and in fine Hebraic form the argument goes round and round (I'm not being racist or vindictive there.  Midrash is centuries of argument between scholars across time about almost every word in their holy scriptures.  It's good for you, to argue rather than just accept what it said.)  Job insists God will show up and vindicate Job.

And then God does show up, and tells everyone they're full of blue mud, because God is creator (the imagery here provoked some of the finest illustrations William Blake ever turned out) and God is speaking only to creatures.  None of them can defend themselves before God (the idea of God in a court of law defending God's actions is one that shows up again and again in the preaching of the prophets, who alone in Scripture claim to speak for God.  Let that one sink in for a bit.), and when God is through pointing out how thoroughly they are NOT God, God restores Job's fortunes more than he had before, including more children.

And where is the justice in that?

Honestly, to set Job against Oedipus Rex or Antigone is to make Sophocles slink away and find a shadow to pull over himself.  The Greeks were pikers on this and so many other subjects (morality, community, social structure) that the Hebrews had an absolute genius for.  And yet, Christianity was born in a Greek speaking world, midwifed by people trained in Greek philosophy as much as Hebraic traditions, and we've been thinking like Greeks ever since.  So where the Hebrews never thought God owed them a damned thing except guidance in how to live this crazy thing called life (and not the guidance of how to be healthy, wealthy, and wise; just how to be a just and fair society), we think the gods owe us an explanation and a reason to worship them (as if worship was for the gods; well, it was for the Greek gods, petty egotists that they all were) and should pay off when we pour them out a libation or invoke their name or build them a fine temple.  That's the Greek idea, and it's the basis for our idea that God hasn't done anything for us lately, or didn't do anything for Lisbon in the 18th century, or hasn't stopped us from turning the 20th century into a horror show of violence even though we took all the credit just before that for being "civilized."

As if.

But where is God to protect us from ourselves?  We aren't Oedipus, born cursed and unable to find it out until far too late.  But neither are we Job, accepting good from God and so open to recognizing we must accept bad, too.  We aren't nearly that mature.  We've made life easy and we want it to stay that way.  When it doesn't we do what Donald Trump does, and we look for somebody to blame.  God is the easiest respository of our anger, and so we create clay idols and smash them and say "There!  We're done with God!"  As if God were the idol of our affections and product of our hands, and now just as appropriately the object of our ire and anger.  It's a short step from there to "God was never a good idea, anyway!"  Which sounds really petulant, when you think about it for a minute.

"God?  Never knew him.  Never knew him at all."

Sound familiar?  But now I sound like a Baptist preacher from my youth, thinking he has been clever in coming up with a trap we can't escape from, and now we have to admit God is real (and maybe good, but that's not as important) and get back in line with the rest of East Texas religious society.  No, that argument won't do, either.  This is not an argument for proving God is irrefutable.  This is an argument for being intellectually consistent and honest in your faith; or lack thereof.  If God is a complete failure, the question must be asked:  "whose God?"  The God of Mike Pompeo, the God who "saves" those who believe as Pompeo does?  That's a concept of the God of Abraham, but is it the concept of Christianity, as McCullough addresses it?  Is there a singular concept of the Christian God?  Is it essential to that concept that God be concerned with "eternal salvation," with whether the immortal soul rises to heaven or descends into hell?  Is it essential to that concept that the followers of Christ concern themselves first and foremost with the last and least among us, with making themselves last of all and servant of all?  Is it essential to that concept that God wants us to live in this world, and benefit from it and care for each other?  Or is it essential to that concept that we chase power and temporal reward (the prosperity gospel, which McCullough does touch on)?  Is it essential to that concept that we understand the wisdom of the power of powerlessness (is the cross a triumph of will?  or of sacrifice?)?  Or is it essential to the Christian concept of God that the church be a power in the world, and when it isn't, the world has no need of Christianity?

McCullough is wise enough to point out that Christianity is only 2000 years old; against the backdrop of some 150,000 years of human civilization, that isn't a lot of time yet.  Christianity is not old; it is an infant.  But must Christianity be tied to all the ancient concepts in order to remain Christianity?  Lose too many of them and we're left only with the "prosperity gospel," which is as temporal and anti-Christian a "gospel" as I can imagine.  Retain too many of them, and Christianity becomes a museum of dead things, a mausoleum preserving a defunct past.  We have two holdovers Christianity has to get beyond, at least in the West (the church in Africa, from what McCullough presents, doesn't have these problems, at least; or not as much as the West does):  one is the Constantinian model of the church which has been with us since the 4th century.  The other is the Greek idea (even theology is a practice rooted in Hellenistic thinking; Judaism has no theologians) of gods as benefactors and punishers on a scale we find inscrutable but ultimately understandable.  Thebes did house the murderer of Laius, Creon did offend the gods by his decree that Polynices be left on the battlefield for the animals to pick at.  But the punishment of the gods is capricious and all out of order to the offense (why was Thebes responsible for what Oedipus had done, when no one in Thebes knew of the crime?).  At least when Israel strays, it strays as a nation, and God gives them plenty of information about what's wrong before, in the magnificent vision of Ezekiel, he leaves the Temple in Jerusalem and mounts his throne-chariot as a symbol of his status as Creator, not regional deity bound to a building.  There is a great deal more authority, moral and temporal, in the vision of the Hebrew Scriptures than is allowed in the concept of the God of Abraham as an almagation of the Greek pantheon.  The first thing Christianity could do, would be to recover a bit more of that, and to reconsider how much of Greek rationalism we still need in the world; and certainly consider, from the  Hellenistic as well as the purely Jesus of Nazareth point of view, how much more humility we need in the world.

Thinking Again About Christ and Culture

This is a very interesting presentation (which I am directed to via Thought Criminal.  Gratias.) that makes me want to re-read Christ and Culture (always a good thing to do).  It reminds me, too, of what one of my seminary professors said:  that Richard was the better scholar than Reinhold.  Of course, Reinhold was more concerned with the world and politics, Richard was always more concerned with the thorny issues of Christian ethics; that they had different strengths does not indicate a profound weakness in the work of either of them.  But it is a starting point to note what a scholar Richard was, because one problem non-scholars have with scholarship is the results the latter produces.

This passage in the article struck me.  It's near the end, but it's clear Niebuhr is not clarifying things enough for Winters:

One of the ways our contemporary culture is accommodated is with a false sense of identification between Christ and someone whose cause we wish to champion. This is most easily identified when someone highlights one part of the Scripture but ignores other parts. The church-of-culture school has been very prominent among theologians calling for radical change in the church's teachings on human sexuality, in which justice is grabbed and upheld while concupiscence is ignored:

"They take some fragment of the complex New Testament story and interpretation, call this the essential characteristic of Jesus, elaborate upon it, and thus reconstruct their own mythical figure of the Lord. Some choose the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel, some the Sermon on the Mount, some the announcement of the kingdom, as the key to Christology. It is always something that seems to agree with the interests or needs of their time. The point of contact they seek to find with their hearers dominates the whole sermon; and in many instances the resultant portrait of Christ is little more than the personification of an abstraction." (p. 109)

Jesus becomes the liberator from patriarchy, or from homophobia or from some other sin from which it is right to wish to be liberated, but somehow the asceticism and the self-abnegation that are so obviously at the heart of the Gospel, which also has to do with liberation from sin, these are never discussed.

Before leaving this group, Niebuhr notes one way in which they are much like the radical Christians described yesterday. Law tends to overwhelm grace:

"Like their radical counterparts, the Christ-of-culture believers incline to the side of law in dealing with the polarity of law and grace. By obedience to the laws of God and of reason, speculative and practical, men are able, they seem to think, to achieve the high destiny of knowers of the Truth and citizens of the Kingdom. The divine action of grace is ancillary to the human enterprise; and sometimes it seems as if God, the forgiveness of sins, even prayers of thanksgiving, are all means to an end, and a human end at that."

"And a human end at that." Ouch.

I admit that this chapter was the most difficult to read. Many people whom I admire and most of my friends would be ranged among the Christ-of-culture school and among them many are more complicated than Niebuhr's characterization would allow. I find myself inclining to this school when focusing on politics even while I find myself lodging elsewhere when considering the life of the church.

And, that is part of the takeaway we will examine at week's end: none of these positions is definitively right or wrong, and all are somehow necessary for the life of the church and true witness to Christ, even while all have temptations and limitations that obscure that witness and impair the life of the church.

Niebuhr is very careful in his work to remain "outside" the subject he writes about; to examine objectively (as much as one can) the four responses to Christ by culture that he identifies.  He doesn't, in other words, draw a conclusion that declares on stance superior to the others.  And that kind of refusal to settle is disturbing to most people.  I find it true to the Gospels myself.  It follows from the parables which, in my reading, have been distorted into "earthly tales with a heavenly meaning."  Most of the parables are irreconcilable paradox, not clever allegories where the shepherd is God or the coin or the pearl is the basiliea tou theou, or the prodigal is us (then who is the elder son?).  I see it all as the teachings of wisdom, but wisdom that comes from God, not from insight; from revelation, not discovery.  I think settling on one standard to which all must conform is actually a form of idolatry, of putting your comfort before, and in the place of, God.  "The peace of God, it is no peace; but strife sown in the sod."  So this part of the article is, for me, "difficult to read":

Jesus becomes the liberator from patriarchy, or from homophobia or from some other sin from which it is right to wish to be liberated, but somehow the asceticism and the self-abnegation that are so obviously at the heart of the Gospel, which also has to do with liberation from sin, these are never discussed.

Yes, by my standards, making Jesus the "liberators from patriarchy, or from homophobia or from some other since from which it is right to be liberated" is making Jesus an idol, again.  But the problem is not with confusing Christ with local culture (the analysis via Niebuhr here is "Christ of culture," so Winters is on the mark there), but of confusing church culture (especially, in this case, Roman Catholic doctrine) with something that stands apart from the culture of "Christ of culture."  All Winters is doing is swapping one culture for another, but insisting his culture is not culture at all, but the true teachings of Christ.  Which, of course, is where all the problems always start.

Can you step away from that?  Kierkegaard would say you can't; and I agree with the melancholy Dane on that point.  But you have to be aware of it.  To me, the true standard of Christianity is not "the asceticism and the self-abnegation that are so obviously the heart of the Gospel," because having examined the Gospels, I don't find those things so obvious at all. I was raised to believe they were, to understand they were.  I read Bonhoeffer's compelling statement "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die," and thought it profoundly true and counted myself wise for realizing it when so many around me so obviously didn't.  Then again, I didn't die, literally or figuratively, even when I felt myself so called by Christ that I entered the ministry (and then left again, let's never leave that out).  And I slowly realized, as Bonhoeffer himself did, that those words were the statement of a young man who understood far less than he had imagined he did when those words, with deep conviction, were written down.  Indeed, it took me a long time to realize the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth were not about self-abnegation but about humility; were not about giving up power, but about the power of powerlessness; were not about liberation from sin, but about foolishness and wisdom.  Most importantly, were not about escaping sin or being aware of sin or constantly asking forgiveness of sins (how profoundly self-centered is that?), but about living the best life possible by being last of all and servant of all.  Which is about as against culture as one can be.  But it's not a posture against culture because Christ is against culture; rather, it is against culture because the world insists culture is the standard that must be upheld, and God shows us (but does not insist upon; where does free will go in these conversations?  In and out like a trained bird, apparently) how we should then live.

That conclusion doesn't allow me to escape Neibuhr's analysis, however.  It does mean, in fact, I need to read his book again.

The Cost of Discipleship

A Christian group of Bonhoeffer scholars calls for the end of Trump’s presidency. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian executed for being part of a plot to assassinate Hitler, and his legacy has been claimed by evangelicals all along the political spectrum. https://t.co/IxChpG7uyC

— Ruth Graham (@publicroad) January 17, 2020

I post this to direct you to the statement from the Bonhoeffer Society, and the article by Jim Wallis. It is a fine response from an evangelical to the "Evangelicals for Trump."

December 23

"Christmas Trees"

Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,

restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.

Against wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.

--Geoffrey Hill

Argle-Bargle with a Soupçon of sheer nonsense

I'm detecting a theme....

First, most Biblical scholars understand "miracle" as an act which is in violation of natural law (the generic type, not the Thomistic type).  Second, "magic" has distinct gradations of form and definition according to anthropology, the science of human culture (and precious little of those definitions have anything to do with Harry Potter).  So this kind of discussion is possible with the terms of science and scholarship, but this is the internet, we don' need no book-larnin'!

Then again, this article starts with a quote from Douglas Adams, which I am too lazy to try to copy 'n' paste here.  Sure, he was a Brit with a glib tongue and a gift for the sardonic, but beyond that? Please.

Why do so many Christians believe in miracles? Former Evangelical minister, John Loftus—now author of skeptical books and founder of the website, Debunking Christianity—asked me to address this question as part of an upcoming anthology, The Case Against Miracles.

So our source is a contributor to a volume by another former evangelical, which means neither of you probably have any formal training in these subjects at all.  Nothing wrong with a lack of education, but what makes you an authority?  You were asked to write something for a book?  The subject touches on anthropology, cultural studies, several fields of the humanities. What you got, again? Douglas Adams?

One obvious answer is that Christians believe because our ancestors did. Handed-down religious beliefs are remarkably powerful and change-resistant, and Christian belief in miracles dates all the way back to the beginnings of Jesus worship. In fact, it dates back even further, back into the beginnings of the Hebrew religion and the earlier religions of the Ancient Near East from which the Hebrew stories and beliefs emerged.

Yes, and the definition of them offered by Biblical scholars (those who, like Bultmann, were interested in "demythologizing" Christianity, and those who are avowed atheists) is not the one you are going to use in a minute.  That one you pull out of thin air, crafted entirely to support your conclusions. I'd bounce that in a Freshman English essay in a heartbeat, but this is the intertoobs, so we move on.

Christianity was born at a time in history when every religion included a belief in magic or miracles. Miraculous healings, natural “signs and wonders,” good things magically happening to good people and (even more satisfying) bad people magically getting what they deserve . . .

Yes, in the New Testament they are called "dunamis" (which my computer, ironically, wants to re-write as "dynamos") or "acts of power."  John calls them "semeia," or "signs."  These things matter, but let's not clutter up your ignorance with knowledge, eh?  (Actually, I know some evangelicals who would know this much, so....).  Not so sure about the "bad people magically getting what they deserve," outside the she-bears eating the children for mocking Elijah, but maybe Ms. Taricot knows something about the scriptures I don't.

Belief in all of these was the norm, along with the conviction that we humans can draw magic to ourselves by attracting the attention of supernatural beings, engaging in certain rituals, eating or drinking special foods, touching objects with talismanic powers, and more. What would have been truly miraculous would have been the emergence of Christian texts and traditions that didn’t include magical thinking.

That would have been a real wonder.

No, the wonder is that you think you're a cultural anthropologist and an historian of the ancient Near East; or of all human culture, for that matter.  The Greek philosophers make reference to the gods, but never anything about special foods or rituals beyond pouring out libations, and Greek literature doesn't have much to say about drawing the attention of the gods, except generally you don't want to. But hey, I've only read some Plato and some Aristotle and a few plays; what do I know?

You can tell from the language I just used, that I see the Christian belief in miracles as a subset of humanity’s broader belief in magic. Christians for centuries have claimed that what they call miracles are somehow different than magic. They have claimed this, typically, while believing in other kinds of magic. The Bible writers and Church fathers were no exception. The Bible and the traditional Christian worldview include all manner of supernatural beings with special powers. In the Bible itself, this includes disembodied spirits, angels, devils, unicorns, dragons, seers, human sorcerers and witches, enchanted animals, and a whole pantheon of deities.

Unicorns?  In the Bible?  I must have the wrong translation.  Balaam's ass is, apparently, the "enchanted animal."  Or maybe the she-bears.  A "whole pantheon of deities"?  Doesn't that violate the radical monotheism of the Hebrews?

Many modern fundamentalists, at least in their own minds, continue to inhabit this wonderland. They believe that an invisible ethereal plane underlies the physical world, and that our lives are part of a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil which spills from the otherworldly plane into this one. Magic, for them, still exists. On the website, Got Answers, one believer tried to clarify the difference between magic and miracles. His answer reflects the thinking of many other Bible believers:

“Basically, magic and miracles differ in their source: magic has either a human or demonic source, but miracles are a supernatural work of God. . . . “Magic is an attempt to circumvent God in the acquisition of knowledge or power. . . . “Miracles and magic sometimes look the same, but their goals are different. Magic and illusion distract the eye from reality, while miracles draw the eye to reality. Miracles reveal; magic hides. Miracles are an expression of creative power; magic uses what already exists. Miracles are a gift; magic is a studied skill. Miracles do not glorify men; magic seeks to be noticed and bring glory to the magician. Jesus was not a magician. He was the Son of God, known for His many miracles.”

Got that? Miracles are the magical stuff done by the Christian God or his proxies. Magic is the magical stuff done by the competition. The latter is bad, bad, bad, because it might trick you into worshiping someone or something else. And it’s real! The Occult. The Dark Arts. Keep your kids away from Harry Potter.

Well, that's it then:  a comment on a website speaks for all persons similarly situated.  Because of course it does.  You know, Disney went with that "magical" belief and fired James Gunn from the third "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie, and stuck with their decision because to go back on it would be just....well, just something.  Maybe an indication Disney shouldn't pay attention to a few comments on the internet.  I'm not sure basing your argument on some comment on the internet is exactly sound argument.  Again, I'd bounce a Freshman English essay for such lousy reasoning and research.

For those of us who don’t believe that any supernatural stuff is done by either the Christian god or any other gods for that matter—the distinction is little more than a cloud of smoke from an illusionist’s mist-making machine. It is just one of the many tedious ways that Christianity claims to be different—not a religion but a relationship, not man-made like all the others, not polytheistic like Hinduism, not antiquated like the fairy tales of Pagan Europe, and definitely not a bundle of superstitious woo like New Age wonders involving crystals and incantations. I find Christian exceptionalism of this sort—philosophers call it special pleading—to be narcissistic and irksome, and I’m going to use the terms miracle and magic interchangeably.

Oooh, "special pleading"!  Are you going to talk about "logical fallacies" next?  People who don't understand logic or reasoning love to talk about "logical fallacies" and throw around terms like "special pleading."  I don't know anybody who uses that term except first year philosophy students, or somebody in an Intro. Philosophy course.  As for the first sentence, can I introduce you to Rudolf Bultmann, or even Karl Rahner?  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, maybe?  Shubert Ogden?  I can think of a raft of modern theologians and even philosophers of religion who would take exception to your slip-shod generalization in just that sentence.

But I digress. It is true that specific Christian beliefs about miracles and magic are products of a specific handed-down tradition, kept alive by the architecture of the Church and the flow of history. But Christians are not alone in their miracle belief. Nearly 8 in 10 Americans say they believe in miracles, including almost 20 percent of nonbelievers.

I'm guessing "architecture" there is a metaphor, since architecture reflecting stories of miracles are not handed down but are still standing across Europe, although there aren't too many of them here in America, especially among Protestants like evangelicals.  "Flow of history"?  What are you now, a student of Hegel and Yeats?

The fact is, most all of us find ourselves attracted to magic, even if we are firmly convinced it isn’t real. People flock by the thousands to marvel at tricks performed by illusionists. Viewers flock by the millions to watch movies about super-villains and superheroes with superpowers. Young Adult fiction is dominated by genres like fantasy and science fiction and even paranormal romance. We humans love us some magic!

So, to answer the question, Why do Christians believe in miracles? we really have to ask—Why do we all love magic so much, child and adult, skeptic and believer alike? Why does magic so delight and call to us that it emerges in a myriad of different forms when we are given the freedom to build worlds from the unconstrained raw material of the human imagination? And what are the habits of mind that make us so prone not only to create magical stories but to believe the ones that have been handed down by our parents, and their parents, and their parents before them all the way back into the shadowy mists of pre-history?

Because we like ducks?  (You'll have to go read the Douglas Adams quote now to get that; and yes, it's as much a product of chop-logic as it seems to be.)  Then again, the article promises to explain why Christians believe in miracles, so apparently the answer is, we all do?

I mean, that's it?

"These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand."