Even the Devils Believe

I just got back from a great lunch with the Rev. Scott Wells, of Boy in the Bands fame. Getting to meet so many bloggers and others folks I've known online for years is one of my favorite parts of traveling, and this summer in DC should be unusually good in that regard. (Lee, we've still got to go out for a beer. )

In other news from around the Internet, NYT and everyone else is reporting that California's Supreme Court has overturned a ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. California has been particularly odd because no one branch of government seemed to want to take ownership of this issue. Justice Marvin Baxter, writing for the dissenting faction of the court, said that the court should have deferred to the legislature, but in vetoing a previous measure that would have made same-sex marriage legal, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the legislature should defer to the courts! Thankfully, only four short years after San Francisco began granting marriage licenses against the law, this ban is gone.

Finally, I wanted to share that as of this morning, I've applied to graduate school. A few months ago, a Roman Catholic blog I read shared news of this master's program in ecumenical theology at the Ukrainian Catholic University. It's a distance program and includes some real heavyweights of Faith and Order ecumenism. One former general secretary of the World Council of Churches is among the faculty, and Lubomyr Cardinal Husar and Archbishop ANTONY of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the US are backing the effort.

So please keep me in your prayers on that front. I should know in a month or so whether I've been accepted, and I look forward to the opportunity to do some theologizing with other students from Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, and Protestant backgrounds.

Thinking Anglicans is reporting that nearly half of the women clergy in England have signed a forceful statement of support for the consecration of women bishops — provided further "flying bishop" hedges not be attached:

We believe that it should be possible for women to be consecrated as bishops, but not at any price. The price of legal “safeguards” for those opposed is simply too high, diminishing not just the women concerned, but the catholicity, integrity and mission of the episcopate and of the Church as a whole. We cannot countenance any proposal that would, once again, enshrine and formalise discrimination against women in legislation. With great regret, we would be prepared to wait longer, rather than see further damage done to the Church of England by passing discriminatory laws. In this, we support the recent principled stand taken by the Archbishop and Bishops of the Church in Wales.

It seems to me that trying to concoct messy schemes of episcopal visitors is a non-starter if the C of E is going to begin consecrating women bishops. Female priests are already a bridge too far for conservative Anglo-Catholics, because hopes of corporate reunion with Rome are basically over. So there is already tremendous tension there. Trying to craft schemes to keep everyone happy just denies these deep differences — and, from a pro-WO perspective, denies that female bishops are in fact bishops for the whole Church instead of just a slice of it.

There is a corollary to this in the Independent Catholic world. As I have written before, when we try to argue on the basis of Dominus Iesus or other documents that our orders should be considered valid under Roman canon law, we've essentially abandoned our strongly argued case for women priests and bishops, who have contributed strongly and increasingly to passing on the apostolic faith in our movement, through teaching and the laying on of hands. In Rome's opinion, no man could receive the apostolic priesthood or the episcopate through a woman's hands, rendering all those arguments about validity pointless. We should be willing to stand on our own merits, not play canonical games with Roman documents.

Difficult though it may be to admit it, on either side, this does seem to be a communion-breaking issue. I applaud my sister priests who wrote this statement, and hope the Church of England joins those catholic churches around the world that teach that women can be ordained to episcopate — rather than crafting a hedge that leaves its teaching open to interpretation.

I guess you could say I'm (temporarily) a member of the Washington punditocracy as of Saturday — we got in to DC that evening and got the car unloaded. It's been raining since Sunday morning, but both of us enjoy rainy cities for the most part.

I should resume posting — and get caught up on email and other stuff — in the next few days, but I did want to give a shout out St Sebastian's, Baltimore, with whom I celebrated Pentecost Sunday yesterday. After a really tough week moving out of our apartment, which is the home we've lived in the longest in our married life, it was nice for me to "come home" to a really welcoming church community on Sunday. I hope to join them for after-Mass dinner soon at the wonderfully-named "Ale Mary's"!

That's the question Alexis asks in this post.

I've been blogging just about every weekday since 2002, with two or three breaks of a month or more — first about language, especially Slavic languages and literary translation from Russian to English, later including computational linguistics. During my last year of college, starting during a senior year seminar on religion and politics, I started blogging about Christian faith and public theology. This blog began after a hiatus when I started seminary.

The "why" has obviously evolved, but the two big reasons have remained the same. First, I love the relatively free exchange of ideas involved in this medium, where arguments get challenged in the comments, resources for growth are offered, and far less of it is restricted by the kind of credentialing and posturing that goes on in other contexts. That results in a lot of nonsense on the Internet, but it also means ideas can be challenged by a wider array of people, who bring amateur understanding of topics into conversation with experiences that don't often make it into the kinds of texts I read outside the blogosphere.

Second, I love having a forum to share interesting stuff I come across. That was what got me into blogging in the first place — I loved being able to share neat stuff about translation and linguistics with other folks who appreciated that. Now it's liturgical geekery and interesting theology — but the possibility to find folks who are as fascinated by this stuff as I am and can both appreciate the stuff I dig up and teach me new stuff is wonderful.

As for the rules, they're ever-evolving, but the basic principle I try to hold on to is finding a balance between the free exchange of ideas I mentioned above and being charitable to all involved. I never want this place to be a brutal free-for-all where syllogisms are more important than real justice, but I've also seen over the years just how fruitful it can be to provide a place where meaningful conversation can occur between folks who don't often sit down at the same table. That can be uncomfortable, but the results are pretty great — from the dialogues on liberal and conservative Christianity several years ago between this blog's predecessor and Wesley Blog to the kind of discussions we have here now.

So that's why I do this. It's personally enriching, good for my spiritual life, sometimes a very effective ministry, helps my writing… The two and a half years this blog has been going is the longest I've been at this without a long hiatus — so thus far, it's been good!

Recently bls reposted this article by Fr Tobias Haller, BSG, about the central dogmas of Christian faith that are violated by certain arguments against women's ordination. I was very taken with the argument when he posted it but had forgotten where I heard it until bls reposted it.

The topic of WO has since come up a few more times in the blogosphere, and I keep coming back to Fr Haller's article as an exemplar of the kind of theological reflection needed to ground the religious experience of Christians formed and nurtured by the sacramental and teaching ministry of women in the wider Tradition. This is the central insight of Fr Haller's post, which deserves a second (and third, and fourth) look:

Which brings us to the serious doctrine this position contradicts. For it is taught that what is not assumed (by Christ in the Incarnation) is not redeemed. And Christ assumed the whole of human nature. Otherwise how could women be saved? Christ assumed the totality of human nature when he became incarnate, and as the Chalcedonian Definition affirms, he received that totality of human nature solely from his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. And she was, obviously, a woman.

The second-last sentence is what I find breathtaking, in conjunction with an insight Fr Haller brings out in his Hooker-esque paragraph at the end of the post: Eve received all of her humanity from out of Adam — which would have easily shored up theological sexism (often referred to as complementarianism by proponents) were it not for the fact that Christ received all of his humanity from his mother, Mary. This provides tremendous resources for fleshing out a theological anthropology that takes more from Galatians 3 ("In Christ…neither male nor female") than from the deeply flawed reading of one of the creation accounts in Genesis, which seeks to enforce a rigid complementarianism.

Though not all anti-WO advocates seem aware of it, those who practice women's ordination do engage in theological reflection on the subject and are not merely buffeted by the winds of secular culture. Given that this is so, it's incumbent upon those very anti-WO advocates to begin to reflect on the experience of those hundreds of thousands of Christians who believe the sacraments they have received at the hands of women are efficacious. Experience alone is never, ever normative for Christians — but active ignorance of compelling religious experience is often an indicator of sickness in the Body of Christ. In my view, that is happening with the issue of women's ordination and has been for decades since it entered widespread practice.

We are in the midst of packing up most of the stuff in our house (basically everything except furniture). We move temporarily to a friend's apartment on Monday and then up to DC next Saturday. It's nothing for Sue — she moved a great deal when she was a kid — but I am bummed to see our longest period in one dwelling broken. I'm not a big fan of moving, especially not twice in one summer.

One thing we're all going to miss is the shared courtyard in our apartment building. Tomato and Mahler will not be able to go outside anymore, and we'll miss out on all the other people and animals who shared that space with us. Here is a photo of Jack, one of the cats who lives on the second floor, balancing on his balcony:

You can see his sibling behind the screen in the window. (I'm not sure what his/her name is.) As for our cats, well, these are the kind of acrobatics they are capable of:

Now I'm back to packing. Have a great weekend, everyone!

In the last four months, my state has exonerated three former death row inmates — that's not a commutation of their sentences but outright exonerations. The state could no longer make a meaningful case against them in court. Charges against the third, Bo Jones, will be dropped today. The case has fallen apart in the wake of allegations that a central witness in the case was coached by detectives. Jones has been in prison since 2006 when his previous conviction was overturned, waiting to be tried again.

The long list of such exonerations casts serious doubt on the death penalty in North Carolina, and other states have similar lists. They are a litany of predominantly poor African-American men, many of them with untreated mental health issues. If three deeply flawed cases have come to light in just the last four months, how many more people sit on death row who are innocent, or were improperly tried, or did not play quite the central role in their crimes that prosecutors suggested at trial?

People of Faith Against the Death Penalty is calling for a suspension of executions until the state can begin to answer some of these questions. We cannot keep executing people on death row when there are grave, grave deficiencies in the system.

LutherPunk offers some thoughts on the announcement of full communion between the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America:

Here’s the thing: I don’t see the point. Unless we are re-incorporating ourselves into another a new structure that actually does away with the distinctions of Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, whatever, then there is still division. And maybe division isn’t so bad. I have this gut feeling that the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus wasn’t referring to organizational identity.

I want to pick up his refrain here: "Maybe division isn't so bad." Not because disunity is a good thing — neither of us is saying that. But we place an awful lot of emphasis on institutional unity as a panacea, when the reality is that we Christians would find reasons for disunity even if we were all in the same big institutional sandbox. Disunity in the Body of Christ simply will not be resolved before the eschaton. Because its chief components are fallible human beings. So institutional disunity is only bad, IMO, when it fosters our own innate sinfulness rather than calling it into question.

My problem about the kind of fiat ecumenism that is popular among denominations (and, I suspect, one of LP's concerns, too) is that it seems to call the smallest number of people possible into the deepest possible conversation. So a handful of denominational mucky-mucks get pretty intimate with the theology, practice, and common life of another church — and it mostly stops there. This is unfortunate, because mostly what is needed is for the maximum number of people to get just a little better acquainted with traditions they don't currently understand. That would be a more auspicious first step toward Christian unity — but it's not really on the radar of denominational higher-ups. (This ties into Lee's point about activism and the churches, incidentally.)

I think the top-down ecumenism of the last fifty years has brought the whole Christian world some real gains. For one thing, I suspect we are all less terrified that if we sit down at the same table, we'll end up losing "market share" to our partners in conversation. There is a will to stay in conversation with one another and live with the risks that entails. But we need to start consolidating those gains by getting actual communities connected. Beyond worshiping together now and again and sitting down to a meal afterward, I don't honestly know what that would look like. It seems to me that's where we desperately need some theological reflection and analysis of past ecumenical experience. The concordats and commissions are not really moving us forward on this point.

Dwight asks about the books that have been formative for us in our faith journey. He points to some really good ones (and some geeky ones that only an expert in early 20th century liberal Protestantism would read!).

I mentioned a few in this response to Daisy's question about Roman Catholic writers in a post from this weekend. Those tend toward the devotional side of things but have been very important nonetheless.

One of the very first theological works I ever read was Dorothee Soelle's To Work and to Love: A Theology of Creation. Soelle was an incredible, progressive theologian, but because she was writing primarily from a European standpoint, I think she was better able to see the dangers of too intense a skepticism on the part of liberal Christians. So she links up some incredible insights into how Christian progressives can work for justice on feminist issues, for example, and yet take the tradition seriously, too. Her book Theology for Skeptics: Reflections on God is great, too.

I only gave Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited a brief mention in my comment this weekend, but it was always hugely important for me. If someone asked me for a brief summary of what Christianity is all about, I'd point to this book before any other.

The book that started giving me a sense for what we mean when we talk about "God" and what implications Christian Trinitiarianism has for morals, religious practice, justice concerns, and so on was Kathryn Tanner's Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology. I hope Tanner writes a longer system — her short system leaves too many details unexplored. Her later, more applied book Economy of Grace is very, very good and builds on insights from the short system.

It may make him blush, but John Plummer's The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement was enormously important for me as a seminarian. Many folks in the biggest churches of the Independent movement can lose a sense for what the rest of the movement is up to. I had very little experience with our common life outside of the specific jurisdiction I was in at the time, and John's book opened me up to lots of other perspectives on what Independent Catholicism might mean.

Finally, Ministry and Imagination, written by Urban T. Holmes, Anglican priest and sometime dean of the seminary at the University of the South (Sewanee), confirmed in me the conviction that there was nothing frightening about doing ministry in the fertile middle-ground between extremes. He also lays out a vision for the priesthood that helped me transition from my largely role-based understanding of the ministry, having grown up Protestant, to a ministry focused more intensely on drawing an experience of God into the world.

Dwight didn't cast this question as a meme exactly, but I am curious about what books have been formative for others. So I thought I might tag Derek, Jane, and Young Fogey to answer the same question — and everyone else is invited to share as well!

It turns out the bishop's cats have decided to put me on trial for heresy because I posted some dog pictures during Friday cat blogging last week.

Your prayers are appreciated during this trying time!